by Jem Poster
Her companion was almost as thin, but evidently not as frail. He held his head as high as his burden allowed, walking with grim concentration, his eyes fixed fiercely on the track ahead of him. As the two of them drew level with us I called out a greeting, but they pressed on without so much as a glance in our direction.
Our actions are not always entirely explicable, even in retrospect, but I can see clearly enough how one unsatisfactory encounter with the indigenous people of the region might have stirred memories of another. I cried out, I remember, then started forward and stumbled after the couple, tugging the bracelet from my breeches pocket as I went. I can’t imagine what they must have thought of me as I fell in alongside them, jabbering excitably, thrusting the thing towards them. Had they seen it before? Did they know the girl it belonged to? Could they get it back to her? Would they take it anyway? As I stopped to draw breath I saw the man shake his head from side to side, slowly but emphatically, his tangled locks sweeping the sides of his gaunt face. He might have been answering any or all of my questions but his eyes steadfastly avoided mine, and I interpreted the gesture more generally as a refusal to have anything at all to do with me. Disconcerted, I stepped back and rejoined Eleanor.
‘I had an idea they might know her,’ I said. ‘The girl who owned the bracelet.’
‘It’s not impossible. But look at them, Charles. They’ve cares enough of their own.’ She stared down the track, following the couple’s painful progress for a moment before turning back to me. ‘Let me see it,’ she said.
I held out the bracelet in the palm of my hand. ‘It’s beautiful,’ she murmured, taking it up between her finger and thumb and examining it closely. ‘So delicately made.’
‘She didn’t want to part with it. We forced her.’
‘You told me. Bullen threatened her. Threatened them all.’
I was watching the movements of a thickset grey lizard as it hunted among the stones at the far side of the track. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but the fault was mine. If I hadn’t wanted it—’
‘You saw the beauty in it.’ She draped the bracelet across the back of her hand so that the spines fanned out as they had against the dark skin of the girl’s wrist. Something in that subtle collocation startled and moved me, bringing the words to my lips before I had time to consider them. ‘Will you have it?’ I asked.
The stillness was so profound that I could hear the tiny snap of the lizard’s jaws as it took its prey. ‘No,’ she said after a moment. ‘No, I can’t.’ My expression must have betrayed me for she reached out and touched my forearm like a mother comforting a disappointed child. ‘I mean,’ she said gently, ‘that it doesn’t belong to you, and can’t belong to me.’ She held up the bracelet so that the yellow feathers trembled and glowed in the sunlight. ‘We’ll leave it here.’
‘Do you think she’ll find it?’
She shrugged. ‘What’s important,’ she said, ‘is that we don’t keep it.’ She bent one of the fresh eucalyptus shoots towards her and slipped the bracelet over the tip, easing it down until it hung close against the blackened bark of the trunk. ‘You’ll travel more lightly without it.’
‘I shall be going back almost empty-handed. My uncle’s letter asks how the collection is progressing. I’m steeling myself to report the truth – that the sum of my endeavours is a few dozen insignificant specimens, most of them taken within shouting distance of my host’s front door. I set out with grander designs.’
‘If you stayed on, you could organise another expedition.’
‘I’ve no stomach for it. The fact is, Nell, that I’m coming round to your position on the matter – the grasping, the killing. It seems to me that I’ve done enough damage.’
‘But I don’t want you to leave. Not just yet.’
The ponies were jostling one another, tetchy and restless, eager to be moving. ‘I must,’ I said. ‘I want to get back to England. I have plans for my estate.’
‘Then take me with you,’ she said, the colour rising to her cheeks.
I felt my own face grow hot and my heart quicken. ‘You know I can’t do that, Nell. You must see how such a course of action would compromise us, you as well as me.’
‘Not if we travelled as man and wife.’
Her phrasing was sufficiently ambiguous to leave open in my mind the possibility that she was suggesting some kind of subterfuge. She must have read the uncertainty in my eyes, because she stepped forward and took me by the wrist, looking intently into my face. ‘I mean,’ she said, with careful emphasis, ‘that we might be married.’
I stood speechless, listening to the wind whispering among the black branches overhead. She leaned close, so close that I felt the touch of her breath against my throat as she spoke. ‘Mightn’t we?’
Sheer madness, I thought, beginning to tremble the way I’d trembled out there on the cliff face that evening as I jigged and spun at the rope’s end above unfathomable space; but her gaze was so clear and sane and the pressure of her hand on my wrist so tenderly compelling that it was not, in the end, unduly difficult to give her the answer I hardly dared believe she wanted.
30
Eleanor was in favour of broaching the subject with her father on our return to the villa that evening, but I held out for a more cautious approach. Nothing of our intention, I insisted, was to be revealed to Vane, either directly or indirectly, while I remained in the house as his guest. It was apparent to me that Eleanor was unconvinced by my arguments, but she complied with my wishes.
Early next morning I rode into the city and paid a month’s rental on a set of rooms in a small but reasonably well-appointed boarding-house within easy walking distance of the harbour. I had intended to be back at the villa in good time for lunch, but my mount was slow and fractious, and by the time I entered the dining-room Vane and Eleanor were half-way through their meal.
‘There’s soup in the tureen,’ said Vane, scarcely troubling to glance up. I helped myself and sat down beside Eleanor. As I picked up my napkin she reached out and placed her hand on my wrist – just for the barest instant, but I could see from her father’s expression that neither the gesture nor its significance had been lost on him. I should have preferred to leave my announcement until the end of the meal, but it was clear that I now had no choice in the matter.
‘I’ve been to arrange my accommodation,’ I said. ‘I shall be living in lodgings in the city for the next few weeks.’
‘You’ll get a berth easily enough,’ said Vane. ‘I doubt whether you’ll need to stay as long as that.’
‘The fact is that I may need to stay a little longer. Longer, that is to say, than I would if it were simply a matter of booking myself on the first available passage. There’s something else – I mean, I don’t intend to leave at once because—’
It was absurd. A man of middle years and some sophistication, and I was blushing like a schoolboy, mumbling my words, searching hopelessly for the elegant phrases I’d prepared during the morning’s ride. ‘Because what?’ snapped Vane. ‘Because you want to wed my daughter?’
I nodded, simultaneously relieved and humiliated by his intervention. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I should like to ask for Eleanor’s hand in marriage.’
‘I’m not a fool,’ he said. ‘Do you think I couldn’t see what was going on under my own nose?’
I leaned back in my chair and drew a deep breath, steadying myself. ‘There was no intention of deceiving you,’ I said quietly.
Vane grunted. ‘Eat your soup,’ he said, ‘before it gets cold.’
‘And your answer?’
In the stillness that followed I could hear the servants’ voices rising from the scullery; slopped water, the clank of an iron vessel. ‘You have my permission,’ he said at last. He pushed away his plate, flung down his napkin and, without another word, stalked out of the room.
Once away from the villa, I quickly established a healthy regimen: a brisk walk to the harbour each morning upon rising and then, after breakfast, a longer excursion
, sometimes through the bustling thoroughfares of the city but more often to a quiet spot on the shoreline where I would sit and gaze at the ocean, lulled by the sound of the breaking waves. In the afternoons I would retreat to my rooms to read or write.
Eleanor was almost constantly in my thoughts, but in a distant, rarefied way, as though she were a figure from a half-remembered dream. My future wife, I would think, repeating the phrase to myself like a charm in the hope of calling her before me in slightly more substantial form, but the girl herself – the moving, breathing creature – seemed always out of reach. The letters I sent her reflected something of my perplexity: detailed but reticent, solicitous but without warmth.
I had been in the city for more than a week before I heard from her. Her letter, which I took to have been supervised or even dictated, informed me simply that she and her father would call on me at eleven o’clock the following morning to discuss the wedding. I tore the envelope apart in the hope that she might have slipped some small note into its recesses, but there was nothing to be found.
They arrived punctually, Vane rapping on the front door with his cane as the clock in the hallway chimed the hour. It had struck me that our discussion might be more agreeably conducted in the open air than in the confined space of my dingy sitting room and Vane fell in at once with my suggestion that we should stroll down to Farm Cove, though he showed no sign of wanting to initiate conversation. Eleanor walked between us, talking nervously and almost incessantly about nothing in particular, and it wasn’t until we were within sight of the shore that her father turned to the matter in hand.
‘I’m not planning a grand celebration,’ he said bluntly. ‘Aside from the Merivales, you know none of our neighbours, and it’s a little late in the day to be making introductions. In any case, Eleanor has expressed her own preference for a modest affair.’
‘I shall be grateful for whatever you see fit to arrange.’
He raised his hand in a brusque, dismissive gesture. ‘A dozen or so families from the neighbourhood will be invited back to the villa for luncheon after the ceremony. I’ll have trestles and an awning set up on the terrace, and there’ll be no shortage of food or drink, but that’s as far as it goes. I’ve no doubt you’ll be marking the occasion in your own fashion on your return to England.’
‘I’m sure,’ I said, more truthfully than he might have supposed, ‘that I shall be unable to better your own arrangements.’
There were other matters, all of an essentially practical nature and requiring little more than my acquiescence. Eleanor seemed subdued, staring at the ground in silence until her father brought up the question of best man. ‘I’ve sounded young Merivale on the subject,’ he said. ‘I know he’d be glad to do it.’
I sensed Eleanor’s agitation even before she spoke. ‘You had no right,’ she said.‘That was Charles’s business, not yours.’
‘I’d thought of it myself,’ I said quickly. ‘I’m delighted to have the matter so neatly resolved. I shall write to him this evening.’
‘Then I’ll take that as settled,’ said Vane.
Eleanor stepped up close, taking me by the elbow. ‘I should like a word with Charles,’ she said, leaning across me to address her father. ‘A word in private.’
Vane glared at her but she was already walking me away from him, towards the shoreline. ‘It’s out of the question,’ she said, barely waiting to get beyond her father’s hearing. ‘What are you thinking of?’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘You can’t ask William to be your best man,’ she said. ‘Don’t you see? You’d be rubbing salt into an open wound.’
‘He’s entitled to refuse.’
‘William’s too much of a gentleman for that. If you ask him, he’ll feel honour-bound to accept.’
She continued to press her case but I held out, citing both the wisdom of humouring her father and the absence of any other candidate. ‘Besides,’ I said, ‘if your father has put the idea into his head, I might well give offence to both parties by failing to follow up.’
There was a long pause. ‘You may be right,’ she said at last.
‘Thank you, Nell.’ I drew away, anxious to rejoin Vane, but she called me back.
‘Not yet,’ she said, and then, so softly I could hardly make out the words: ‘I’ve something more to say.’ She gazed out over the foreshore to where a flock of small waders dipped and scuttled at the water’s edge. ‘That business with my father,’ she murmured. ‘It went on for years.’
I knew that she was giving me the opportunity to release myself from our hastily framed compact and felt obscurely touched by the gesture. I should have liked to take her hand but refrained, inhibited by Vane’s presence at our backs.
‘You must forget the past,’ I said. ‘You’re about to begin a new life. A new life in a new world.’
She shook her head. ‘We carry our past with us,’ she said. ‘I have my hopes for the future, but I don’t expect to forget.’
I glanced over my shoulder. ‘Your father’s waiting,’ I said.
‘Do you hear what I’m saying, Charles?’ She reached out and gripped my sleeve, shaking my arm vigorously as though to rouse me. ‘Do you understand?’
The birds rose and wheeled as one, their wings flickering against the rippled shine of the water. ‘We can talk about it later,’ I said. I turned, breaking her hold, and began to make my way back to where Vane stood stiff as a statue in the midday glare.
In the event, Merivale carried out his duties throughout the ceremony and the succeeding festivities in such exemplary fashion that I found myself wondering, as the luncheon drew to a close, whether Eleanor might not have exaggerated the extent of his interest in her; but as we rose from the table I saw him look towards her with an expression so unguardedly tender and desperate that it seemed impossible she should not be pierced to the heart by it. I glanced sideways, half fearful of surprising her in some small act of betrayal, but she was listening with rapt attention to her neighbour, her slender neck and shoulders twisted away from us, and it was my own heart that smarted for the young man and his wrecked hopes. I took him by the arm and walked him down the slope of the lawn towards the citrus grove.
‘Eleanor has told me,’ I said gently, ‘that your own feelings for her—’
‘My feelings are of no account. But I should like you to know, in case you have any doubts on the matter, that the indiscretions were all mine. Nell gave me no reason to suppose that my clumsy pursuit of her would ever be rewarded. On the contrary, she made it plain that I was wasting my time. But she was never cold, Redbourne, never unkind – though perhaps it would have been better for me if she had been.’
‘You must feel free to write to her – to write to us. And should you ever find yourself in England …’
He shook his head, as though the possibility were too remote to be entertained. ‘I like you, Redbourne,’ he said. ‘I like you very much indeed, and I don’t mind telling you that I had some notion when we first met that we should come to know one another a good deal better in due course. I believed, to be frank, that you were the man my sister had been waiting for, and nothing’ – he came to a halt and looked back up the slope to where Esther and Mrs Merivale stood talking together in the shade of the awning – ‘would have given me greater pleasure than to have welcomed you into our own family.’
Was there mischief in that little speech? Nothing deliberate, I thought, scanning Merivale’s open features, but I found myself profoundly unsettled by his words. I had voyaged to the far side of the world, ostensibly in the service of science but actually, as recent reflection on the matter had made increasingly clear to me, in quest of a wife. Not an unworthy venture in itself, of course; but what gave me pause at that moment was the thought that I had travelled all that distance only to snatch at the first opportunity that presented itself. What other vistas might have opened up before me if I had waited longer or explored more widely? And what had determined my choice? A wil
d song, the meeting of eyes across a shadowed drawing-room, a few small kindnesses offered at a time when my spirits had been at their lowest ebb and my judgement clouded – were these adequate foundations for a marriage?
‘Thank you, Merivale,’ I said. ‘And thank you, too, for standing alongside me today. A lesser man would have refused.’
‘I considered it an honour. But you mustn’t imagine that my duties have been entirely easy for me.’
‘All the more credit to you for discharging them so ably.’
‘Ably enough, no doubt, but not as gladly as I could have wished.’
‘You’re a young man,’ I said consolingly, ‘and, if I may say so, an extremely eligible one. My mother used to say that weddings are like troubles – they never come singly. Allow me to hope that the next will be your own.’
He gave me a wan smile. ‘I’ve never wanted anyone but Nell,’ he said simply. And then, turning abruptly away: ‘Perhaps we should rejoin the others.’
As we walked back up the slope Eleanor came hurrying towards us, half stumbling on the cumbersome folds of her gown. ‘You can have no idea,’ she laughed as she joined us, ‘how much I’m looking forward to wearing my everyday clothes again.’ She wriggled her shoulders, playfully suggesting the irksomeness of the gown’s heavy fabric, and threw back her head, exposing the long line of her throat.
It wasn’t a wanton gesture – indeed, there was a kind of innocence about it – but neither was it a ladylike one. And though I was stirred by it, my pulse quickening as I gazed, I felt it, and her words too, as a subtle affront. ‘Mrs Redbourne,’ I murmured, half jocular, half chiding, as I grasped her arm and drew her to my side. I felt her lithe body stiffen against me.
Merivale shifted uneasily, tugging at his cuffs. ‘We’re in for a storm,’ he said, nodding towards the darkening horizon. ‘It’s a blessing it didn’t blow up an hour earlier.’
There was a huddle of guests in front of the veranda, all waiting, I surmised, to bid us farewell, but as we approached the terrace Esther and her mother stepped briskly forward to intercept us. ‘I’m sorry,’ said Mrs Merivale, reaching for Eleanor’s hand, ‘that we’ve made so little of our last opportunity to speak with you before you leave. The truth is, my dear, that the right words seem so hard to find. It’s the happiest of occasions, of course, but you’ll forgive me – and I hope Mr Redbourne will forgive me too – for telling you that I’ve shed tears at the thought of your going, and that I’ve no doubt I’ll shed more when you’re gone.’ Even as she spoke, her eyes brimmed, and Eleanor, with a quick, impulsive movement drew her close and held her.
