My mother. It must have been. I am near weeping myself, coming away from the overgrown fountain and knowing now the shape of the house, how it rises above me while I walk to where the kitchen was, which is where I would find the old lady who fussed and petted, a reliable source of food and treats. This is where the yard was, where my pups played and the wash was hung, where my stout childish legs would carry me past the servants’ quarters to the stable, where I would find my father and another man. Albert. His name breaks in, pushes down through the years. His dark, kind face, much darker than my father’s, his thin arms lifting me to sit astride whichever horse I chose. Why have these memories lain dormant for so long? It’s as if my father purposely rid me of them by never talking to me about this place, by making me part of another family and letting our New Zealand lives overwhelm our Australian past. There are so many questions I would like to ask him.
‘Here.’ It’s the girl with the phone, which she’s holding out to me. ‘Could you do me a favour?’
She has to teach me — I have no idea — but I manage well enough, once she tells me to start filming, which isn’t until after she’s retrieved from her capacious bag a carved gourd with a long loop of string attached to holes drilled in either side. It’s a poi awhiowhio, she tells me, a traditional instrument I have never seen before, once used to call birds. In the centre of the grassy space, I think almost exactly underneath the spot where the wedge-tailed eagle once hung, she begins to spin the gourd, allowing the motion to follow through into her whole body, spinning and whirling while a high whistling chattering music fills the air around us, a choir of ghosts. Rena watches and listens, fascinated. I pan over her to my son and his wife coming back from the river, to the back view of my other grandson slouched on the wide verandah steps, to the itchy, scratchy dog attending to his fleas in the grassed-over yard, where generations of farm dogs did the same.
‘Koro!’ says Rena. ‘You’re supposed to be filming Mackenzie!’
Obediently I return the single eye to our new friend, spinning and leaping, the summoning satellite above her head, and Rena running to join her. The poi calls in a party on the breeze — a distant guitar, deep voices, singing, my father and his friends sitting for one last time on the wide verandah. The gourd’s high fluting notes are my mother’s German song, the same one that the tui copied at the window of the Rotorua bathhouse, the very same she sang to them all on the night of their little party.
Evie’s cracked old voice is the creaking of the flax string, the telling of the tale in the rising wind around us.
Rena follows the dance, mirroring Mackenzie’s squared lunging stance as she balances the pull of the flying poi and the weaving of her arms as she swaps the tether from hand to hand. They are the gatherers of my past, these dancers in the dusk, this clever young woman and my little girl. Leaping and laughing down long-vanished corridors, they show the once-restless ghosts of Jarulan who we are these days, we Fenchurches and our friends, and how the world has come to embrace us.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lily Woodhouse is the pseudonym of an award-winning author who has now written a sweeping family saga. She divides her time between Australia and New Zealand.
COPYRIGHT
HarperCollinsPublishers
First published in Australia in 2017
by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia Pty Limited
ABN 36 009 913 517
harpercollins.com.au
Copyright © Lily Woodhouse 2017
The right of Lily Woodhouse to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.
This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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ISBN: 978 1 4607 5313 2 (paperback)
ISBN: 978 1 4607 0778 4 (ebook : epub)
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
Creator: Woodhouse, Lily, author.
Title: Jarulan by the river / Lily Woodhouse.
Subjects: Families — Fiction.
New South Wales — Fiction.
Cover design by HarperCollins Design Studio
Cover images: House by Paul Earl; Lake by Aaron Irwin/ EyeEm/ Getty Images; all other images by shutterstock.com
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