‘That’s enough, Lena.’
‘Helena,’ the girl said under her breath.
‘Irving is not in the kitchen. He is your employer, or very soon will be. That is, if you don’t go away to Sydney. And surely you will very soon. Go on your way. Join your mother.’
Lena adopted the stricken expression she assumed whenever Rufina mentioned Evie.
Rufina was breathless suddenly, overheated, and the low slipper chair scooped her up again. If she were alone she would also remove the combinations. The legs that stretched before her were patched by the sun, the lower shins brown, her thighs and knees luminous white, like Ma’s and Nance’s. The unwilling comparison came to mind while Lena was asking, ‘What’s wrong with you? Are you sick?’
She supposed she could say that she was. If Irving really was in the kitchen then she could ask Lena to send him up.
And then what? Spring her trap?
She understood suddenly what she had to do. Send Lena away with no instructions at all. Dress as simply as she always did and go downstairs. If Irving really had taken it into his head to make scones, those dull, lifeless, stodgy cakes of which the English-speaking world was bafflingly fond, then she would join in the fun. Five o’clock. Hours until sundown, until their drink in the belvedere when she would have him all to herself.
12.
AFTER DUSTING THE BEDROOM HELENA HURRIED DOWNSTAIRS to set the table in the cool of the eastern verandah ready for Irving’s scones. Nan told her what a good girl she was, arriving on that side of the house all giggly with Ma, while Bill and Jellicoe fetched the spindly chairs from the morning room and set them round. When Irving brought the scones out, piled high on a plate with lots of butter and jam, he smiled at her too, and Helena didn’t think she’d ever been as happy as she was then, the six of them sitting around with the rain falling loud and warm on the roof. The men had beer with their scones, which were very good, high and fluffy and the same golden brown as the beer, and she and Nan and Ma sipped hot tea. When Irving gave her a sip from his glass she put her lips exactly where his had been, like a kiss, and the thought made her blush.
Jell brought Irving’s guitar out from Eddie’s wing and the men sang songs she’d never heard before, with gentle harmonies twisting in and out from under the tune. With every song, as soon as she thought she had the hang of it, Ma would join in, and Helena wished she wouldn’t, because the music really was much nicer to listen to with just the men and not Ma’s old quavery voice singing high in Irish, which she said sounded a bit like Maori, not that anyone else agreed with her.
The enclosing rain seemed to go with the singing, slinging heavy and deep into the parched soil of the garden, while Irving’s honeyed voice filled her from the toes up, until her whole body felt as though it had become part of him, and she let her head rest against his shoulder, which was actually quite difficult to do since it was his strumming arm. When he shifted her off with a gentle nudge, just the merest shift of a muscle under her ear, she didn’t mind. It was enough to sit so close as to sense a vibration in her chest when he sang the deepest notes, and to see the delight in Ma’s trilling eyes as she sang her yowling soprano. Bill knew more songs than any of them, even Irving, who had not only the ones he’d learned from Eddie but the Maori songs as well. Bill had the Maori songs, but also Aussie ballads about convicts and deserts and lost love, sad and lonely, his old face furrowed when he sang them. He had few teeth and a broken nose; Irving would surely never look like that, even when he was Bill’s age.
‘How old are you, Bill?’ she asked in a gap, after he’d taken the guitar from Irving and was twisting the pegs to retune, and Nan looked at her in alarm as if she’d said something wrong, but she hadn’t — it was the way she’d said it, slow and sleepy — so she sat up straight and said in her normal voice, ‘Bill?’
He didn’t answer, played a few chords and Irving sang a line of something and stopped, because it can’t have been the song Bill was thinking of. Ma had taken up Bill’s tobacco pouch left on the table and was rolling herself a fag.
‘Bill?’ Helena said again. ‘Don’t you know? Our Blacks never know how old they are either.’
‘I’m forty-two, Carp Eye.’
He thought she had fish eyes. He looked cross.
‘Put some jam on a scone for me.’ Irving didn’t want her to worry about being ugly, but Bill was talking over the top of him, ‘What do you mean, “our Blacks”?’
Helena couldn’t think of why he was asking the question. Ma interceded for her. ‘Well. You must be their Blacks in New Zealand even though you’re more a brown colour, aren’t you, and our Blacks here are — ’
The doors of the morning room flew open and Rufina appeared, and Helena wondered if she was not the only one who accepted, just in that instant, that Rufina had been there for some time listening, hidden by the curtain, since the music stopped.
‘Hello, everyone.’
Her hair was still damp from the bath and her lips were smeared with rouge that Helena hadn’t known she possessed; at least she had never worn it when the old man was alive. Instead of one of the fine dresses she’d been trying on upstairs she wore an old house dress in faded blue cotton with lilac flowers. It fitted her closely, showing off her arms and small breasts. There was a freedom in having small ones, thought Helena. If I was to wear a dress like that I’d look … like a cow in full milk — that’s what Nan had said, when they’d gone to Lismore to buy her a chemisette. And Helena had stared glumly at herself in the mirror and thought how, if the Roof was her real mother, then she could have been built like her, not a bosomy Fenchurch.
Evie’s body she had no recollection of, but that Ma had told her she looked a bit like Bridgie without the burns, all thin and birdie. Instead of that Helena had to be a cow in full milk, with carp eyes.
The men were all staring at Rufina, even Jellicoe. She smelt flowery, fresh and clean, with an underlying cloying smell, like pollen. Scent gone dark with age from the old bottle on the dressing table. Cut glass with a little puffer to spray it on your throat. Worth. Helena took another sniff.
‘That perfume you’ve got is on the turn, I reckon.’ She knew she shouldn’t have said it but it was true. A bit like kero, that perfume. Irving was wrinkling his nose.
‘Another cup from the sideboard, Lena,’ Rufina snapped and took Helena’s chair the moment she rose.
The golden time of songs and scones was over then. Helena went through the morning room and down the long corridors to the kitchen, fetched a thick white cup and was halfway back along the hall, almost under the wedge-tailed eagle which had listed sideways over the winter and still hadn’t been straightened, when she realised she had the wrong sort. From the sideboard, Rufina had said, because she would be Lady Muck even today. Curse her.
From out on the verandah came the thin sound of Rufina singing, in German, and either Irving or Bill on the guitar was doing his best to keep up.
The joy that had fizzed in Helena’s heart ebbed away completely, draining into her stomach and leaving a closed, sad feeling, as though her ribs were drawing closer together. Her head felt heavy on her neck and she wanted more than anything to run as fast as she could out to the table and kick Rufina hard in the ankles or slap her cheek, but instead she turned and went back to the dining room at the eastern end of the corridor and knelt before the sideboard where the bone china was kept.
It was always hard making a choice, each cup different from the other, perched on its matching saucer and side plate. The interior of the dark cupboard was a blazing garden, with gold rims, rings of sunlight suspended above brilliant blossoms. She stretched out her hand and made a selection: lilacs on blue, the same colour as the flowers on Rufina’s dress, wanting now to please her — and why was that? As she stood with the setting carefully balanced in her hand she realised that if she were to go to the window and lift aside the nets over the narrow side pane, she would be able to look along the verandah to where they all sat and watch them for
a moment without being observed herself.
There they were, much as she’d left them, except the guitar sat motionless in Irving’s lap, silent as a lump of wood. Ma and Nance were gazing at Rufina attentively, and it took Helena a moment to realise, because the sound did not carry this far, that she was still singing to them in her thin high voice. Her mouth formed around the words in a peculiar strenuous way, and her hand extended in an encompassing gesture. A day came back to Helena from when she was small, maybe seven or eight, and the three of them — she and her father and Rufina — had taken the launch up the river to Lismore. Rufina had sat in the stern singing at the top of her voice, the wind whipping her hair and hauling the words from her mouth, and then suddenly she and Dad were having one of their rare arguments. Sing in English, he’d said through gritted teeth, shaking her arm, and Helena had been frightened.
Irving had begun to strum the guitar again and Jell was standing to sing with better effect, so Helena left the window and hurried back to them with the cup and saucer, only to be sent to the kitchen for more hot water for the teapot, and only after she’d done that did she notice that there were not enough chairs for her to return to the group properly so she stood behind Irving, letting her hands rest lightly on his shoulders and laughing at all his jokes, without letting her gaze settle for an instant on Rufina’s face. She knew without looking that it would be a blue fury and all because he liked her better than he liked Rufina, and this was because they were blood and Rufina was not, and because they were the workers of this world and the same things drove them to anger or laughter. Rufina was the nob on the outside.
From the folds of her skirt Ma produced the old corked linctus bottle which she always kept filled with brandy, and dashed some out into Nance’s cup and then her own. The old ladies were loving every minute; it was so new and different to be there on the verandah all together, eating scones cooked by a man — by Irving! They sang songs from the war — ‘Wish Me Luck as You Wave Me Goodbye!’ and ‘Pack Up Your Troubles’ — and from before the war — ‘Won’t you come home, Bill Bailey, won’t you come home?’ and ‘Paper Doll’ — and Helena sang as loudly as she ever had and the parts the men sang all different from the other were so heavenly it made her want to weep with joy. Once or twice she caught Jell staring at her in delight and saw that her high feeling was infectious, returned. He came in quick with his remarks and rejoinders.
‘You’ve got the same mouth as Irving,’ he told her. ‘The same shape of chin. Look at that, Bill, what do you reckon?’ and Bill had lifted his eyebrows, smiled a bit but shook his head as if he was embarrassed, and started straight in on another song, a Maori one with a chorus she could learn quickly — ‘Hi-nay eh hi-nay eh.’
When the light left the pearly grey sky it flung a high brilliant rainbow across the west, a farewell streamer like a ship leaving port. A fitting close for the end of the best day in her life, she considered. Everything would be different now. She could feel it.
‘How beautiful,’ said Irving, pointing, because he wasn’t as used to rainbows as she was.
‘They’re everywhere here, all summer, when the rains come,’ Rufina told him. ‘And lightning and thunder.’ She took it as her cue to go indoors, slapping her arms at the rise of mosquitoes. ‘We won’t be needing supper, Nance — all those scones!’ and she made a gesture low down, as if to say the scones were weighing heavily on her stomach.
Had she eaten even one? Helena couldn’t recall.
Close to Irving, the Roof bent and said very quietly, so that her words only just rose above the sound of the rain, ‘And I’ll see you in the belvedere in a little while,’ and then tousled his hair. Irving reared back. Perhaps he was vain about his hair. It always had a perfect curl, a wave, rising above his high brow.
Rufina dropped her hand. He looked as if he might be angry with her. When she reached for him again, to smooth it down, he wouldn’t allow it. ‘Don’t!’
An ugly red blush spread over Rufina’s face and neck, and she hurried off towards the morning room, muttering at Helena as she passed, ‘Time to close the house up now.’
How wonderful it was that they all ignored her, fetching more beer from the stores and a bottle of Dad’s wine from the cellar, and singing and talking until midnight. Before she went to bed Jell gave her a kiss on the cheek and she thought she might have blushed too, but not with shame as Rufina had done. As she slipped past Ma and Nance snoring on the morning room sofa she giggled to herself and was still beaming as she climbed into her bed in the room under the stairs. Even more precious than Jell’s shy kiss was Irving’s ‘Goodnight, cous’. She had only nodded in reply; there had still been no explanation of their relationship but it was in the open now that they were family. She was allowed to love him. They were blood. She was more connected to him than Rufina would ever be.
13.
HE CAME TO HER. SHE HEARD HIS FOOTSTEPS, A LITTLE drunk and unsteady, pass her bedroom and go up the stairs to the belvedere. She heard his ascent halt as soon as his head would have reached floor level, when he would have been able to tell the high room was in darkness, that the little lamp that sat on the sea chest between the chairs was not lit. Rufina pictured him looking along the floorboards and turning to come back down. At the bedroom door the footsteps paused — she saw the glow of the candle he carried — and she called his name softly. After a moment his shadow moved away, his nerve failing him.
His nerve! She remembered a dinner party conversation in Sydney, a German collector one of the guests. He had a story about Napoleon’s ‘nerve’, how it had been removed from his corpse on Saint Helena, sprinkled with sulphate and put in a box, and at varying stages of desiccation had passed from owner to owner. Frau Schneider and the other women had tittered behind their hands and Herr Schneider had looked outraged that such a topic would be discussed. Rufina recalled feeling nauseous. And she was filthy-minded to recall it now; perhaps the beer she’d shared with Irving had had a greater effect than she’d thought.
A bitter taste filled her mouth. Her heart thumped. A mosquito had bitten her on the palm of one hand. It pulsed and flared; she rubbed it on the linen sheet, made it worse. It was appalling, what she had suggested. What kind of monster had she grown into?
Still, once something was begun it must be finished. It could never be the same between them again. He knew she wanted him and could only ever be either disgusted or afraid, unless she helped him. The way he had looked at her up at the memorial — the shock and sadness in his beautiful eyes, brown but flecked with green. The Fenchurch showing through. Until that moment he had liked her. What was she to do?
The answer seemed to rise up from the earth, seep into her own bones from the lost bones of all the women who forever had, for reasons of marriage or birth, had to take similar action. It would be no different here from in Europe or anywhere — dynastic families would preserve themselves, do what they had to do, no matter how immoral.
If she had him to herself it would be easier. She should have stayed firm on sending Bill and Jellicoe away, the old beetle-brow and his prematurely work-worn sharp-faced boy, whom she had observed was growing sweet on Lena. And that wouldn’t be bad, would it? It could dovetail nicely, a youthful love affair to draw any prying eyes away from her own arrangement. Begin as you mean to go on. Gleich beim Ziel anfangen. She would.
A nightjar called dolefully from the garden while the rain kept up its steady beat. The river would be rising. For a moment or two thoughts drifted to the stock on the low fields, and whether the hands had moved them higher.
Oh, but she wanted him. She pictured herself flying along the dark corridor and through the old nursery wing, down the back stairs above Lena’s room to Eddie’s apartments. Irving’s now, but too often shared with Bill and Jellicoe, who would doubtless be there asleep on the bed or cast on various ottomans and sofas in the bigger room. The gentlemen’s club. That is how it must have appeared in Eddie’s day, with the naked statues, the potted ferns and palms, so
me as high as the vaulted ceiling, the heavy wall hangings and drapes, the pukkah fans. Now it was spartan, by comparison. She could swoop down, as quietly as a moth, peep in and see if there were other bodies around him, as she had the first night when they all slept on the front verandah. And if the others were not there, if they were sleeping elsewhere, then what? She would go to him, draw him to her, let him discover what she really was.
She would never have the nerve. The impulse left her feeling hopeless, lost — but only for a minute, until the same deep certainty welled as before. Her course was right. She would have him but not tonight. It would happen. It was fated but not yet. The mere fact that he had climbed the stairs to the belvedere, that he had stood for a moment breathing into the dark of her room, meant that he was thinking about her. He was concerned enough for her happiness after her distressing exit from the party, such as it was, to come in search of her. And he would again. All she had to do was wait.
14.
HE WOKE IN THE MORNING TO RAISED VOICES, RUFINA AND A man’s, and went out the French doors of his sitting room and around to the front of the house. It was the swaggie he’d met on the road yesterday. One of the men from the river, the one who had insulted him. Rufina had dressed hurriedly, her old trousers and a shirt buttoned wrong, her hair unbrushed, as if she’d seen them from the window of her bedroom and hurried down.
As Irving drew level the swaggie said, ‘You keep late hours, mate.’ His jacket was soaked, the rest of him rumpled and dirty. An uncomfortable night, then. Irving resolved to pretend not to recognise him. ‘It was that cove who invited me.’ The man nodded towards Irving. ‘Said we could have a bed.’
‘Not me. You’ve got me mixed up with someone else. Another Abo.’
Sarcasm and anger. Rufina picked it up and looked sideways at him and he saw the blue rings of exhaustion under her eyes. Old Mary at home would say ‘peaky’. Pale under the light burnish from the sun. A sleepless night examining her conscience. He hoped so.
Jarulan by the River Page 29
