by Jem Poster
I turned away, faintly embarrassed, and addressed myself to Esther. ‘I’m glad to have met you, Miss Merivale, and to have heard you play. I shall treasure the memory of your impromptu recital.’
She took the compliment as a lady should, modestly but without embarrassment, her fine features irradiated by a smile of unmistakable warmth. ‘I wish,’ she said softly, ‘that we’d had time to get to know one another better.’ She clasped my hand briefly in her own, then leaned over to Eleanor as Mrs Merivale drew away. ‘Goodbye, Nell,’ she said. ‘I hope you’ll send us news of your life in England.’
‘She has promised,’ said Merivale. ‘Hold her to it, Redbourne. And’ – he turned quickly on his heel before the words were out – ‘look after her.’ He hurried towards the waiting carriage, his mother and sister following at a gentler pace. I stood staring after them, listening to the hollow sound of the awning as it flapped and billowed in the rising wind.
31
Vane had insisted that we remain at the villa until the morning of our sailing, but there were no concessions to our new status. My old room had been made up as before and I spent my wedding night alone, listening, between spells of troubled sleep, to the noise of the rain and the buffeting wind.
Those last two days in the house were lived in a strange state of suspension. Eleanor seemed gloomily abstracted, moving like a ghost from room to room or staring out from the veranda across the sodden lawn; and though Vane spent much of the time shut away in his study, leaving us largely to ourselves, our conversations were awkward and inconsequential. I drank more tea and coffee than was good for me and passed the hours between meals listlessly scanning the pages of Vane’s farming magazines.
On the second afternoon Eleanor and I walked down to the barn to oversee the packing of her sculpture and her little cache of treasures. The rain had eased off over the preceding hour or so, but as we picked our way between the dripping shrubs it began again with renewed force, and by the time we ducked into the doorway we were wet through.
The two servants were manoeuvring the blanket-chest down the loft ladder as we entered, and neither acknowledged our presence until they had set it safely on the ground.
‘That’s everything from up above, Miss Eleanor,’ said the older man as he straightened up. ‘It’s all in here, and well padded.’
‘Thank you, Norwood. And there’s that too.’ She indicated the sculpture, scarcely advanced, I noticed with surprise, since I had last seen it.
‘We’ve brought down a couple of old blankets,’ said Norwood. ‘We’ll wrap it in those before we crate it up.’ He crossed over to the figure and ran his hand over the smooth surface of the shoulders. ‘It’s a nice piece of work,’ he said.
I saw the younger man smirk. Eleanor brushed past him and began to climb the ladder. ‘I’m going to have one last look,’ she said, glancing back at me as she hauled herself on to the platform. ‘I shall be down in a minute.’
My specimens were still where I had left them, ranged on the shelves of the battered dresser over against the far wall. While the men roped the blankets around Eleanor’s sculpture, I picked out a few of the more beautiful skins, laying them on the dresser’s dusty surface for closer inspection – lory and lorikeets, a spinebill, the kingfisher, the chestnut teal. I took up the teal and turned it in my hands, twisting its eyeless head this way and that to catch the muted light, but the iridescence was gone and the dense breast-feathers, which I had once fancifully thought of as bearing the impress of Eleanor’s fingers, were stiff and damp.
By the time Eleanor rejoined me, I was more than ready to leave and she, for her part, seemed close to tears, her face rigid with strain. ‘It’s all in hand,’ I said. ‘There’s no need to stay.’
As we reached the doorway, Norwood looked up. ‘What about the birds, Miss Eleanor? Are those to be packed too?’
Eleanor glanced sideways at me. I hesitated.
‘Charles?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Get rid of them.’ I turned up my collar and stepped out into the rain.
We rose in darkness next morning, and were on the road by daybreak. Vane had seated himself beside Eleanor, obliging me to sit on the opposite side of the carriage, and I spent much of the journey staring out of the streaming window, trying to avoid his gaze. He had assured me that we should be in good time, but the road had been damaged by the heavy rains, and our progress was frustratingly slow. At several points on our journey we came to a place where the rainwater, pouring in a torrent from the slopes above, had scoured a broad groove through the sandy surface, and on each occasion I held my breath, listening to the rush and swirl beneath us as we eased forward into the flood.
We reached the quayside with barely twenty minutes to spare. Vane took matters in hand at once, leaping out to collar a passing porter before I had so much as risen from my seat. While he supervised the unloading of our luggage, I paced restlessly up and down, anxious to be on board but inhibited by a sense of occasion: this was no ordinary parting, and a casual farewell, I thought, was out of the question.
Vane evidently held no such view. Turning back to us as the last of our bags was handed down, he simply gripped me by the hand and wished me well, then took Eleanor briefly in his arms. ‘Write to me when time allows,’ he said, as he stepped back to let us go. His voice was flat, his handsome face as blank as the grey sky above us. Eleanor gazed into his eyes for a long moment; then she lowered her head and turned away.
Once aboard, we made our way to the stern. Despite the driving rain, the deck was crowded, and though my own height gave me a good view of the well-wishers gathered on the quayside, Eleanor was unable to see beyond the massed bodies of our fellow passengers.
‘I have to see him,’ she said breathlessly, bobbing and weaving, searching for a gap, a vantage-point. ‘I have to wave him goodbye.’
‘We’ve said our goodbyes, Nell.’
‘Don’t you understand? It’s for ever.’ She ducked down and began to force her way through the crowd, moving erratically but with savage determination. I lost sight of her for a moment and then she reappeared, close to the rail, just as the ship’s engines shuddered into life. I saw her scanning the quayside, her head thrust forward; and then her hand went up.
Vane had placed himself so close to the edge of the wharf that I was unable to see him from my own position until the ship drew away. The quayside crowd had begun, almost as one, to wave and shout, but Vane was standing starkly upright, a little apart from all that noise and agitation. He stared after us for a long minute and then, raising one hand in brusque salute, turned and was lost to view among the waving arms, the flourished hats and handkerchiefs.
It was clear that we were in for a rough spell. As we approached the mouth of the cove, the wind stiffened, sending the rain slantwise across the running deck, and I felt the steamer lift and lurch on the swell. The passengers began to make their way below, bracing themselves against the unfamiliar movement. I assumed that Eleanor would rejoin me but she remained at the rail as the deck cleared, gazing out over the white foam of our wake, apparently oblivious to the pelting rain. Something in her huddled posture and air of dark absorption troubled me, and I made my way towards her, moving as quickly as conditions allowed and calling her name as I went. She gave no sign of having heard.
‘You’ll be drenched to the bone,’ I said, drawing up behind her.
She was silent, straining forward as the wharf blurred and dwindled behind the shifting veils of rain. I reached out and touched her shoulder. ‘Come now, Nell,’ I said. ‘We should go below.’
She twisted towards me, her hands still gripping the rail, her gaze hard and angry. ‘I’ll come when I’m ready,’ she said.
‘When you’re ready? What do you mean by that?’
‘I mean exactly what I say.’
Ill-tempered little minx, I thought, with a dull flush of anger; a pert, cross-grained piece, and spoiled goods into the bargain. ‘Do as you please,’ I said, ‘but I’ve no i
ntention of catching my death on your account.’
As I turned my back on her the foghorn vented a long, mournful blast, a sustained note that seemed to pass through the planking and up into my shivering body; and as the sound died away, a cry went up from behind me as if in answer – a human cry, but so wild and raw that I felt my skin crawl. I stopped in my tracks and whipped round.
Eleanor had started after me and stood with her feet splayed on the tilting deck, her head thrown back, howling at the sky. Her mouth was wide, drawn down at the corners so that the sinews of her neck stood out; the skin around her eyes was creased and puckered like that of an old woman. I stepped forward and took her in my arms in a helpless confusion of pity and embarrassment, trying simultaneously to assuage her unfathomable grief and to shield her from the curious stares of the few passengers still up on deck. I remember thinking, holding her stiffly to my breast and rocking her distractedly to and fro, that I had fooled myself into marriage: the visions I had seen in the soft light of my sick-room – the loving companion, the ministering priestess – had been nothing more than the projections of my own longing.
Little by little her weeping subsided and her breathing grew more regular, and after a while she eased herself back against my cradling arms, lifting her face to mine. Her ruined face, I thought, coldly appraising the blotched skin and swollen eyelids; but as my mind framed the words she reached up and touched my own face, pressing her hand gently against the line of my jaw as though to communicate, through the flesh, matters too vast or too complex to be entrusted to language. And then, as her gaze steadied and locked with mine, I saw it all suddenly clear for an instant, knowing that what I held was the irreducible sum of things – squalor and splendour, vision and nightmare; the pathos, the pettiness and the doomed, undeniable beauty; the wise adept and the broken child. I drew her close again, feeling the delicate trembling of her body through the folds of my coat.
She took a deep, shuddering breath; then she pulled away and swung herself lightly round to stand at my side.
‘I’m ready now,’ she said.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
A number of individuals have helped, in a variety of ways, during the writing of this novel. Particular thanks are due to Luigi Bonomi, Richard Griffiths, Stephanie Hale, Beth Hanley, Kathryn Heyman, Richard Johnstone, Keiren Phelan, Martin Thomas, Mark Tredinnick, Carole Welch, Gilly Withey and Tim Woods.
I’m also grateful to the President and Fellows of Kellogg College, Oxford, for a period of sabbatical leave in 2002; to Southern Arts and the Senate Research Fund of the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, for financial assistance with visits to Australia in 2002 and 2004 respectively; and to Arts Council England for one of their Writers’ Awards in 2003.
INTERNATIONAL ACCLAIM FOR
RIFLING PARADISE
“Immediately gripping… An epic tale whose figures in a landscape encapsulate a turning point in history.”
—Times Literary Supplement
“Creepy and confronting… Captures the atmosphere of the bush, the beauty of our birds, and the harshness of colonial life.”
—Independent Weekly
“A terrifying journey into the dark recesses of the human soul… His evocation of the native flora and fauna is inspiring.”
—Mail on Sunday
“A stylish, assured, and thoughtful narrative.”
—The Guardian
“A narrative so vivid that you can almost smell the eucalyptus… Full of intrigue, emotion and individual realization.”
—Morning Star
