Jarulan by the River

by Lily Woodhouse

When she was in her early twenties, she was fascinated, wanted to know as much as Nance would tell her. It was as if she had to imagine that first marriage — even at its most intimate — before she could settle into her own. Thank God that obsession had burned itself out early so that she could enjoy Matthew properly for all the time that he was hers. She’d grown up, grown out of it, and she and Matthew had shared this room too, spent hours here.

  As she came in from the hall she imagined opening the panelled door and seeing him in his chair by the window, the light falling on an open ledger or record book or newspaper, the green glow of the lampshade, his loving smile — and felt choked with missing him.

  She went in, pulled open the curtain so that the light danced on the dust, and started on making up the wages. There were so few men left. Even the rabbito had gone, a man who had seemed to have grown out of the ground here. Matthew had told her the man was the rabbito’s son, born at Jarulan, been there for longer than he had. The rabbits had got out of control, of course, thousands of the beggars, even with the swaggies and their wives passing through and putting them in their pots.

  Making up the slips took no time at all, entering each amount in the book. Lena, being family, was unpaid. Three hands, the cook, hired labour when she needed it. The two Aboriginal stockmen drawing half the pay of the whites but the same tobacco allowance. And Nance and Bill. They would come to her if they needed some cash, otherwise she kept it all for them on scrip. At the end of the heavy green ledger, four pages in, was Irving’s page. He had his own entry, hidden, in case someone came snooping after she’d gone. Arkenstall might. He had taken an unhealthy interest in the farm’s accounts when Louisa was alive. Less so since she’d died.

  Small beer, the expenditure on Irving. More an investment in the future. Clothes, saddles, the new rifle. The furniture and piano, although strictly speaking those items were for the house, likewise the curtains and carpets. He received it all with ease and grace, with no anxiety about what he should give her in return. The day she gave him the stallion he hadn’t stopped smiling, even while he ate. She could let herself think about him for hours, just think of his handsome face, the peace and kindness of him. Is that what it was? A kind of purity of spirit. Purity! She was reluctant to use that word about any man. He must have done bad things, said cruel words, but she couldn’t imagine it.

  A shadow fell across her arm and the columns of the ledger, without definition. A shoulder, an extended arm, the peak of a hat — she spun in her chair, knowing there would be no one there.

  Matthew? But it wasn’t. She hadn’t been playing that silly game, bringing him close to talk to, playing imaginary friends like a child. Sometimes he would come unbidden, she would hear his voice, feel him close, but mostly he stayed firmly on the other side, gone like the gentleman he was. Uncomplicated, decent. Silent on many things in life, but not as silent as he was now, abandoning her to this new presence. There was a smell in the room of petrol fumes and the sea. Frangipani. The smell of a city to the south, of Sydney. She felt as though she was waiting for him to speak. A sudden beam of too-hot light found its way through the leaves of a close tree, slanting across the figures and melting the shadow away.

  If it was there in the first place. The smell was gone. The room smelt as it had before, of paper and dust. Of old pipe smoke. Of Matthew.

  ‘Am I missing you so much I’m inventing other men for company?’

  He didn’t answer.

  Tucking the payslips into her pocket she stood to lift the heavy ledger back to a low shelf, ashamed of herself. Flowers and petrol fumes. Haunted houses had ghosts that were seen by more than one person. There was Nance’s story about the woman in white on the belvedere stairs, the noises in the house. Had they become a tragically demented gaggle of lonely females, imagining it all — the distant laughter of a young man, the rolling of small hard wheels on the floorboards? Min had heard things here, voices and music, part of her madness.

  Irving’s presence in the house would dispel the ghosts, make them go away. How fanciful you are, Rufe. She opened a window, let in some light. The sun would move away from this side of the building soon and the room would cool down.

  Ghost stories. She’d never really liked them. But didn’t most ghost stories tell of spirits that were rooted in one place, that didn’t follow you around? They stayed in their own houses and on their own ships. They came out of the walls, not the heart. The ghosts, if they were here, had nothing to do with her. When she was a child she heard the story of the hunting lodge near Grunewald lake, not far from her grandfather’s house, where the ghost of a murdered nobleman ran eternally down a flight of stairs, fleeing for his life, even though the staircase had been bricked up for centuries. He only ran down the stairs, nowhere else. Or the story of die Weisse Frau, who slew her two children with a golden needle, pushing it deep into their skulls, so that she could have the man she lusted after, and now paced from one Hohenzollern castle to another, from Bisingen to Berlin and back again, forever racked with guilt.

  Outside. She couldn’t bear to draw the curtains. She hurried from the room and went outside to find the old peahen she’d noticed yesterday hanging around down by the river landing with a broken leg and a wounded side. A dog must have got to it, or a quoll. It was bloody buggered, as Matthew would say, if he was here. She’d get her rifle and shoot it.

  10.

  HE HADN’T EXPECTED THE LAND TO BE SO BEAUTIFUL. IT was like his own country and it wasn’t — the green, the rolling hills, but everything brighter, bigger, louder, a giant’s country. There was a wide stream, shallow and bubbling, that ran at the northern edge of the pastureland before the terrain changed to climb the foothills of the Nimbins. Somewhere towards the hazy west, the creek would connect with the river that turned back on itself to run past the house. It all looked so good, so rich, the land, until you realised there wasn’t enough cattle to cover it, considering the acreage. Three thousand acres, didn’t she say? And she’d told him that the soil was already finished, that the farm couldn’t support any more than she ran, even with prices holding steady. It was because a century ago it had been covered in forest, and after the clearing the soil was fertile for a while, but would not revive even with lashings of phosphate.

  She’d told him that the first evening he’d spent with her in that strange attic room. There had been a few evenings up there over the three weeks since he’d arrived. They’d sit up there together and she mostly listened, got him to talk, told him this and that about the farm — the new machines his grandfather had invested in just before the crash, the new crops and lucerne. Nothing about herself. Nothing about her life before the war, before she came here and married his grandfather. Maybe she hadn’t had much of a life, before that. Often they sat in relative silence, like real families do, people who’ve known each other forever, just sitting and looking out over their land.

  He got off the horse, pulled off his boots and walked into the streaming pebbles. The light running over his feet reminded him of that room, not really an attic at all. Weren’t they usually dark? This one was bright and clear. Watery with all the glass. She had a fancy name for it — belvedere. Often after they’d thrown down whatever muck that got put in front of them, Rufina would pour two fingers of Scotch into two glasses and lead the way up the long flights of stairs, along the third floor corridor and up the rickety steps to the high room, rain or shine. They would sit in the two chairs at the far end. Usually, in his limited experience, women only sat in silence if they were unhappy. Rufina was more like a man in this instance, thoughtful, quiet, though usually in one of the soft cotton dresses she put on when she changed out of her trousers and shirt and boots, after she took off the smeary old hat she wore jammed over her hair when she was outside. There had been no sign of the woollen walking costume and posh umbrella she had in Rotorua. No need for them. No rain and too blimmin’ hot.

  Boots slung over his saddle, he followed the fence-line above the creek. It was in good shap
e, recently attended to, so he left the roll of wire and pliers in the saddlebag. Long grass as high as his shoulder hummed with loud insects and probably hid snakes; he knew enough to keep to the track. If he was at home with grass like this he might fling himself down to lie among the tall green spears and watch the shifting sky, sleep for an hour or so. Not here. Rufina had gone on about snakes, how careful you had to be, what to do if one got you. One got his grandfather; those eyes the colour of rain had misted up when she told him. It was almost as if she blamed herself, but she didn’t go into details.

  That’s it. Tears. Her eyes were the colour of tears.

  His breath caught in his throat. Why was he thinking about her in that way, as if he was sweet on her? The other night, when he’d finished up his Scotch, he’d told her he was going downstairs to fetch another one.

  ‘Why don’t you keep a bottle up here?’ he’d asked her, even though he didn’t particularly like it.

  ‘Only one drink a night,’ she said sharply, like an old woman stuck in her ways. He’d gone downstairs, found the bottle and taken it down to his quarters. Eddie’s wing, they still called it. Where his father had first started drinking, in vast interconnected rooms and high ceilings festooned with roses, spider webs and bare-bum cherubs. Where lots of people had got drunk at the parties he held. When Bill and the others helped him get rid of the Bacchus statue, they’d found dozens of champagne corks that long-ago idle revellers had posted through a hole in the plinth. There had been pieces of broken champagne slippers thick with dust under the rotting furniture.

  Jell was there, in the largest room, lolling his thin limbs on the couch. On the broad sill under the long window sat Bill, whittling a bird from a piece of wood in his big hands. On the table there was a heel of bread and a chunk of cheese, apples from the safe, some bottles of beer. Jell and Bill lived here pretty much most of the time, not over at the quarters like they were supposed to. Rufina didn’t know and she wouldn’t like it. That was the best characteristic of the house: you could get away with anything. People kept to their own parts. Mostly it was a place he didn’t want to be. He liked it better outside. There were rooms he hadn’t been into yet himself, like the big one at the front downstairs, for which Rufina carried a key. The trophy room, she called it. Trophies for what?

  He and Bill had drunk half the bottle of Scotch, smoked cigarettes, mucked about on the piano, had a laugh. There was a letter from banished Joe, which Irving read aloud for Jell since he couldn’t.

  A bird screamed from a tree by the water, startling the daylights out of him, bringing him back. He had to get used to it. A white cockatoo — he knew them. In a tree that wasn’t a gum, with smaller softer leaves. A splash of colour higher up — a flock of lorikeets. He would learn them all, trees and birds, as well as he knew them at home — rimu, kauri, puriri, karaka, piwakawaka, tui; his heart lurched. He would learn the Australian names off the Aboriginal stockman, Albert, who would know the old names for them, not whatever daft, dull little English names they’d been given. Or German. Did the Germans do that too, go around renaming the world? He supposed they did. They were white, weren’t they? It was a white man’s occupation, to make things theirs.

  The heat was increasing as the morning wore on, and it felt as if it rose from the earth rather than came from above. Even the birds were drowsier when it got to midday and his horse hung his head in thirst. He took him back down to the creek, let him drink before riding back to the house.

  As soon as Jarulan came into view he felt himself observed and rode with his gaze on the distant high windows of the belvedere. There were shadows, three of them, framed in individual panes — two adults and a child — too high and too far away to see their faces and their outlines eclipsed by the shifting sun, which rose and fell with the motion of the horse. Who were they? As far as he knew there were no children in the house. Rufina must have visitors. On the drive out from Lismore he’d asked the carter, ‘Are there neighbours?’

  ‘Only the Tyrells,’ came the answer, ‘and there’s no love lost between them and the Fenchurches. Since the war.’

  He supposed he meant, since the Tyrell men went away to be killed never to return. And Rufina was a Kraut and her lot all to blame.

  ‘There’s another story,’ the carter had told Bill and Joe and Irving, while they shared the cab of the truck for the journey. ‘Wrong side of the blanket and all that. More than once, over the years.’

  He didn’t elaborate and Irving didn’t press him, since he wasn’t that interested then. Now he was. Gossip worse than a woman, his father had scolded when he found out Irving had talked about Eddie’s drunkenness on the farms he worked on, had gossiped with the womenfolk who posted his pay cheque home from the more remote farms. He blushed now, thinking about it. He had gossiped, all right. Enjoyed the attention. The women were curious about his family, because he was half-caste. Some of them were downright nosy when they found out about Eddie and what he was. On the closer farms the old man had played at dances and people would tell him what they thought. A live wire! Sings like an angel! A real card! But there are two sides to every card, he would think.

  At the belvedere window the figures had moved to stand together, the child in the woman’s arms, and he felt obscurely that he was the focus of their attention. Why would he be when the view was so vast, with mountains, plains, fields, forest and river? They could be looking anywhere but at him, sweaty and hot under his felt hat, which showed how porangi the Aussies were — a felt hat in a climate like this. Too hot by bloody far. He’d get himself a straw one.

  The horse didn’t like this approach to the house and Irving thought he could see why. From this angle it seemed to lean away from you, vertigo induced by the walls sitting off-centre to the rise of the land, like a stone held in the bend of a slingshot. There was a tension, the threat of rebound. A piece of the belvedere roof had been rebuilt, re-slated, mended. It looked almost as if there had been a fire up there.

  He got down to open the last gate and heard horse’s hooves — a light cantering — and there was Rufina on her mare. Had she been watching for him too? Had it been her up there in the attic? But she wouldn’t have had time to get here, down the stairs and saddle up and everything — unless the horse was ready waiting. She had recently washed her face; it was damp and streaky. Or had she been crying for some reason? He couldn’t imagine it. She wasn’t the sort for crying. The skin was papery and red around her eyes, as though she’d been rubbing them. She rode up, through the gate as he opened it, her battered hat pushed high on her forehead. She was a golden colour from the sun, a soft gold.

  ‘Come with me,’ she said. ‘I want to show you the memorial.’

  ‘Memorial?’

  She didn’t seem to be able to look at him directly, those red eyes glancing away from his as soon as they met them. She passed by, too close; the horse almost trod his feet.

  ‘The one we can see from up there.’ She pointed towards the belvedere.

  ‘I’ve seen it. Rode past it.’

  ‘I want you to see it properly.’

  ‘I don’t go much on memorials.’ Some towns he’d passed through, here and at home, the memorial was the main thing, the only thing, a lump of granite in the main street, usually within falling distance of the pub doors. He’d seen fathers and brothers in varying states of inebriation at all hours, women sober, laying wreaths. Mostly silent. Too much, too quiet grief. They didn’t let the tears come, didn’t let them flow freely.

  He and Rufina rode on, two abreast.

  ‘This one you’ll like.’

  ‘Will I?’

  ‘Your grandfather built it.’

  ‘With his own hands?’ He tried to keep the sarcasm out of his voice. People like her said that — she grew, he built, he made — when they meant he’d paid other people to do it. Rufina smiled gently and looked away towards the river road, and he had the uncomfortable feeling she was flirting with him, the angle of her head coquettish — but her voice, w
hen it came, was hard.

  ‘No, of course not. He designed it. The column and so on.’

  At the lion gates he leaned down to lift the catch, feeling her eyes on him again. He could feel her drinking him in.

  ‘You would be good at polo.’ When Irving didn’t respond she continued, ‘A sport played on horseback with sticks and — ’

  ‘I know. I’ve seen it.’ And he had, once, on a rich farm in the Waikato. He would like to play it himself. He’d thought that when he’d watched it. Now he wondered if he’d be rich enough one day to have a polo field, one of his own. A cap and red jacket, a shining precise mallet.

  The cicadas were deafening, too loud, as if they were inside his head. At the foot of the hill the temperature surged in the unearthly way it did here, cranking up five degrees in ten minutes. Sweat ran to sting his eyes; up ahead the blurred view of a sign, ‘Memorial Hill’, hand-painted, pointing away from the lower road.

  ‘This is new, where the road goes flat beside the water; they built it just before the crash — Hing Ye and his brothers, the tobacco farmers.’ She gestured to the next farm, down river. ‘It used to go up the hill. This road.’

  ‘You’re not friendly with him? This Hing Ye?’ She’d never mentioned him before.

  She shrugged. ‘Not particularly.’

  It was because she was German, he supposed. Her isolation. Wouldn’t she feel a kindred spirit with them? At home the Chinese kept to themselves. Perhaps they did the same wherever they went.

  They began the climb, letting the horses take their own pace. It was too hot to be riding out now. Midday. No cover. He wondered again what it would have been like, this land, before they cut all the bush. Sparse shade flickered further up, promising some relief — there was never enough of it here. And she was feeling it too. Wide semicircles of dampened cloth marked the sides of her shirt.

  ‘I’m changing his name,’ he said. ‘I don’t like it.’

  ‘Kaiser. That’s his name.’