‘You want your husband to get the top spot, we need to find some way to make him stand out, you know? Have his name up there in lights, so the folks in New Jersey will say: that’s him. That’s our guy.’
An intoxicating thought.
‘So how do we do it?’
We. Because that was what Tommy was implying, wasn’t it? To get Hector appointed CEO would require a team effort. Tommy Mendoza was pushing his own canoe, as they all were, and obviously thought Hector had the potential to be a winner. It was clear, too, that he saw Charlotte as being the power behind the throne.
‘I think I should tell you, Charlotte—you don’t mind my using your given name?—that we might be interested in making an offer for your mom’s property, if you can talk her into selling.’
She’d been right all along; it was Noamunga that interested him.
‘What you read in the paper is correct; we do have a rig working off the west coast, and if we strike oil, as the geologists expect, we’ll need a place to bring the pipeline ashore. Given the weather and the seas you get in that part of the world, we’ll want the pipeline to be as short as we can make it. You know the area better than I do, so you know your mom’s property is the only place we can run the line ashore and set up the storage tanks and the other paraphernalia we need. I’m a great believer in getting things organised ahead of time, so I’d like to have the infrastructure in place before we hit paydirt rather than have a well and nowhere to take the oil.
‘Frankly, what I hear, you’re the only person who may be able to talk your mom into doing a deal with us. If you do that, and we dress it up as something Hector organised, he’ll be a shoo-in for the top job. Otherwise there are no guarantees, Charlotte. None. So, what you got to do is talk her into it, Charlotte. Then we’ll all be on a winner, okay?’
‘Why are you doing this?’
‘I do him a favour, he gets the top spot, he’ll owe me, right? Maybe one day he’ll be in a position to do something for me. It’s the way the world works, Charlotte.’
‘Will the authorities allow it? I mean, an oil terminal on a stretch of pristine coastline …’
‘The state government will be too busy counting its royalties to worry about that. Believe me, they’ll love it.’
‘And if you don’t find oil?’
‘Our loss. But they think there’s an eighty per cent chance we will. Them’s good odds, Charlotte. I’m willing to run with it.’
‘What sort of price are you thinking of for Mum’s place?’
‘Like Jersey says, we’re in the business of making money, not giving it away. But I think you’ll find it a not ungenerous offer.’ He looked at his watch and stood up. ‘Gotta be moving. It’s been good to have this chat. Let’s hope something worthwhile comes of it.’
She walked with him to the door. They shook hands.
He said, ‘It’s been an honour to meet you, ma’am. A real honour. It’s not often I have the pleasure of coming across a lady as clear thinking as yourself. You have a word with your mom. You’ve got a way with you, I knew it as soon as I set eyes on you, and I can tell you, Charlotte, when it comes to people I’m not often wrong. You talk to your mom, tell her how you care so much that it’s giving you sleepless nights with her so far away and no one able to help if there’s an emergency. I’m confident, Charlotte, that you can get her to see how much better off you would all be if only she were to move somewhere closer to you. Let her know what a weight it would take off your mind if she did that. I’m sure you’ll be able to win her over. And don’t worry about the money. My experience is, when the project’s right, money can always be found. And this chat we’ve just had: keep it under your hat, okay?’
So it had been just business, after all. Charlotte stood at the door, watching him drive away. She was unsure whether she was glad or sorry things had worked out as they had, but knew that she had to move heaven and earth to talk Mother into selling up and moving to Launceston.
Because that, after all, was her first concern. Doing what was best for Mother.
She’d phone her today. Invite herself to lunch on Saturday.
She walked back into the house, told Maria to bring her a pot of fresh coffee, and sat looking through the window at the river with the sunlight glinting on its surface. She thought of the early days of her life and how, step by step, she had managed to get to the position she now held: wife of the man who, thanks mainly to her, was poised on the edge of becoming the next CEO of Trident Oil Australia.
Provided she could talk Mother round. She picked up the phone.
CHAPTER 13
Marina lifted the phone. ‘Hullo?’
‘Mother?’
Talk of the devil; she’d been thinking of Charlotte only minutes before.
‘How are you, dear?’
‘I’m fine. I hope you are, too.’
‘I am also fine. Thank you.’
She had no doubt why Charlotte was phoning. Sure enough …
‘I’m glad to hear it. Especially since Tamsyn tells me you discharged yourself from hospital and came home.’
Oh dear. She should have told her. Now, caught out, she felt bad about it. Time for the whitest of white lies.
‘I tried to get you a couple of times but there was no answer.’
‘Maria was here. I wonder why she didn’t pick up the phone.’
Charlotte didn’t believe her. And who could blame her? Best course: say nothing. Marina waited.
‘I thought I’d drive over and see you on Saturday, if that’s okay?’
Goodness. Tamsyn Sunday and now Charlotte the day before. Such popularity … It might make a woman thoughtful, suspicious of plots. A woman like Marina, for instance.
‘That will be splendid, dear. When would you expect to get here?’
‘About eleven? If you feel up to it.’
‘Of course I’m up to it. I’ll organise some lunch for us.’
Maybe salmon, if she could find any.
She’d have been quite happy to chat a little but Charlotte, having delivered her message, had a charity do to attend.
‘Such a bore. But Hector likes me to do these things …’
Marina sometimes thought Charlotte would be doing her helpless-little-wifey act on her deathbed. No matter; they could chat on Saturday.
She rang off.
Two daughters in a row, she thought. They must be really concerned about her health. More than she was, certainly. No doubt they would try to talk her into moving, for her own good. Good luck with that, she thought.
Sitting there, seeing the play of the flames reflecting off the ceiling and walls, enclosed and secure in the fire’s heat, Marina thought back to the early days and the forest monsters that had haunted her childish dreams, their wicked eyes peering around the edges of her being. Lying in her chair, she closed her eyes, hearing again the conversation of the windblown leaves of the trees overhanging the old house, if you could call it a house, where the memory of Jethro Fairbrother, ancestor and convict, lingered like a stain upon the air. She remembered the supple movement of platypuses delving for tiny food particles along the shallow waters of the local creeks, the flash and glitter of trout as they rose to the surface to feed. She heard the blackbird singing, the whoop-whoop of the kookaburra, the liquid voice of the water. She smelt the richness of foliage after rain, the harsh cold odour of snow, and had a sudden yearning to see once again the landscape where she’d been born.
She thought about that, eyes still shut, then nodded her head vigorously. While there was still time she would return for a final visit to the forests of her youth. She would follow the narrow road winding steeply uphill to the place where she had spent her early years and discovered for the first time the joys of life and of love.
1938
CHAPTER 14
Marina was just shy of her eighteenth birthday when she first came to Noamunga and the land that had been in the Trevelyan family since the first title had been issued in 1856. Fishing Plac
e: that was what Jory told her the name meant in the language of the old people. The landscape thereabouts was very different from where she’d grown up, in the limestone country and spectacular cave systems of Mole Creek, with the timber-clad ridge of the Western Tiers range, snow-covered in winter, standing proudly against the southern sky. At night the snow had shone like polished silver under the moon, while the silence flowed like water to submerge the land. Only the wind spoke, and the voices of the trees.
Marina’s great-grandfather, whom people knew—without ever mentioning the fact, so degrading to his descendants—had been transported in his youth, had worked as a labourer on one of the large properties that had later been subdivided, so Jethro Fairbrother had found himself the owner of five hundred acres of scrub, marshland and forest, on which he had built a timber shack, little more than a shed, where in due course he had brought a bride and subsequently raised a brood of snot-nosed brats, some of whom had survived and some, in the way of nature, had not. Somehow the family had got by, scratching a bare living in a green world, where the soaring architecture of trees defined the limits of what was possible.
The railway came through in 1890 and life became easier, cut timber being transported in bulkhead flat wagons to the paper mill at Burnie, but the family drifted off, little by little, so that by the time the old man died the only ones remaining were his widow and his first son, whom they had called Colin.
Colin was for the land and the land, it seemed, was for Colin because the forest seemed to thrive even as more and more timber went off to be turned to paper at the Burnie mill. He also succeeded in draining the swampy areas along the valley bottom, something his father had failed to do.
Colin was different from Jethro in another way. Jethro had had no time for religion of any sort, but Colin, influenced perhaps by his mother, was devout and even preached, on occasion, at the Methodist church. He gave his sons, when they came, the names of Old Testament prophets, because he believed not only in God but in the power of prophecy. Therefore, Isaiah followed Jeremiah and was followed in his turn by Malachi, with daughters Huldah and Miriam fitted in somewhere in between.
Jeremiah spent his life embarrassed by his name, passing himself off to friends and acquaintances as Jerry, permitting neither his wife nor his family to use his given name. They continued to attend the Methodist church that had meant so much to his father, but in his heart Jerry worshipped the green woods in which his life had been set. He read what he could find about the druids and sacred oak trees complete with mistletoe and persuaded, or directed, his wife Ida to share his sense of wonder at the immensity of the old-growth forest as well as the new plantation timber with which he carpeted the cleared areas of his land. But Ida had a deep-rooted suspicion of what she thought might be idolatry. For the sake of domestic harmony she pretended to share Jerry’s views, but in her heart she did not believe, and more and more, as the years passed, the only god or idol that she worshipped came out of a bottle.
Ida the soak, neighbours called her—because the sparse settlement of Mole Creek, with the muddy, rutted tracks that were the only roads, had with the passage of time become a village, with neighbours and horses and its own store, butcher and hotel—where for many years, thanks to an odd clause in the title deeds, alcohol could not be served. Of course, other ways to quench a thirst had soon been found by those, including Ida, who were determined to do so, and there were always sharp-faced blokes from the city willing, for a price, to sell whatever booze the customer wanted from the boots of their cars.
Into this family, the sozzled mother and tree-worshipping father, Marina—named ironically by her father as being from the sea which at that time neither he nor his wife had seen—was born on 1 July 1920.
On a fine spring evening, two months after her seventeenth birthday, Marina Fairbrother met Jory Trevelyan at a dance organised in the village hall by the CWA.
‘Not seen you here before,’ she said.
Which was strange, since Mole Creek was still small enough for most people to know everyone else, even those who came in from the bush.
‘Never been here before,’ he said.
He had to shout a little, over the racket the band was making. He was a tall man, a year or two older than she was, with a smell of other places about him, and black hair over a hatchet-shaped face. His blue eyes watched distances unimaginable to a forest dweller.
‘What you doing, then?’
‘Hoping to buy a drink. Seeing there’s nothing doing at the hotel.’
‘You won’t get nuthin’ here, either,’ Marina said. ‘The committee’s all Methodists.’
‘Don’t matter,’ he said. ‘Thought it would be nice, that’s all.’
‘Know where you can get one,’ she said. ‘If you’re desperate, like.’
Though why she should offer to help this stranger she could not have said. Perhaps because he was tall, with black hair and far-seeing blue eyes, or maybe because he’d spoken to her rather than to any of the other girls sitting like dolls around the edges of the dance floor. Sitting and waiting for some bloke to invite them to dance. She was used to waiting, sometimes unavailingly, yet tonight, for no apparent reason, this black-haired man had chosen her.
Although he didn’t seem to know what to do with her now he had her.
‘D’you dance?’ she asked.
‘Bit of a clodhopper,’ he said. ‘Still, we’ll give it a whirl. If you like.’
She thought it was a funny way to invite a girl to dance with him but she stood anyway, holding out her arms, which might have been tiger snakes, the cautious way he took them.
Still, they managed, sort of. She felt the eyes of other girls watching them, some envious; others, their beaus tightly leashed, more willing to snigger as Marina and the tall man stumbled their way around the dance floor. Marina Fairbrother was willing to trample them all—envious or not, sniggering or not—beneath her uncertainly dancing feet because she felt her skin responding to her partner’s skin, his heat mingling with hers, his blue eyes and her brown ones exchanging silent messages as they danced under the yellow lights, washed by the sea of music that lifted them step by step and brought them, gently and harmoniously, to the shore.
He fetched a lemon drink for her, a coffee for himself. They did not dance again but sat and watched the dancers or each other, while a storm rattled the roof of the hall, competing with the noise of the band and the crescendo of laughter from those determined to be jolly, whatever the cost.
They didn’t say much and Marina thought it strange that she should not know the name of the man who had danced with her, or what he was doing in Mole Creek, or with her, either.
‘What do people call you?’ she asked.
‘They call me lots of things,’ he said, and laughed. ‘Some good, some bad. But you can’t please everyone, I suppose.’
‘You must have a name?’ she said, unwilling to be deflected by laughter.
‘Jory,’ he said. ‘Jory Trevelyan.’
‘Jory?’ she repeated, as though tasting it. ‘That’s a strange name. I’ve never known anyone called that before.’
‘It’s a Cornish name.’ As though that could explain its strangeness. ‘It means farmer.’
‘Is that what you do? Farm?’
‘No.’
Which was more confusing than ever.
* * *
‘You’re not from hereabouts, are you?’ the girl said. ‘What you doing in Mole Creek?’
‘Mum’s cousin is married to the butcher here. Mr Rogers.’
‘Rascal Rogers?’ She laughed. ‘Everyone round here knows Rascal Rogers.’
‘Why d’you call him that?’
‘Because everybody knows he puts weights on his scales. But he’s the only butcher for miles around, so we got to go to him, if we want meat.’
‘I never met him before,’ Jory said. If his words were stiff it was only because he feared this outspoken girl might think he was as false in what he said as the butcher’
s scales. ‘We’re over on the west coast. Mum’s sick. She couldn’t get here herself so she sent me instead. While there’s still time.’
‘Still time? You’re not dying, are you?’
‘No. But Mum is. She wanted me to catch up with her cousin. Stand in for her, like.’
‘A proxy, sort of.’
It made him nervous, this plain-speaking girl using words he wouldn’t prod with a ten-foot pole.
‘Somen like that,’ he said.
‘What’s your dad do?’
‘Not a lot.’
‘And you?’
‘This and that. A fisherman, mostly. A few cows. Sheep.’
‘You got land, then?’
‘No shortage of land,’ he said. ‘No shortage of the sea, either. King tides, sea comes up close to the house. And the wind’ll blow your hair off, give it a chance.’
‘You don’t grow trees, then? Not like round here?’
‘Grow trees?’ He laughed: it was the best of jokes. ‘People say you couldn’t grow old around our place. Never mind trees.’
The band tootled on, and the smell of flesh grew stronger, and the ladies’ perfumes, sweeter than flowers, grew stronger still in the stuffy hall.
Afterwards they walked out, side by side, into the darkness. Eyes would have watched them; minds would have drawn conclusions, but she did not seem to care. There were owls calling. Somewhere a cow bawled. The green of the forest was concealed within the moonless night but its presence pressed upon them, with the scent of rain-wet trees, so different from what they’d left in the lighted hall.
‘I’ll walk you home,’ he said. ‘If that’s all right with you.’
Marina laughed. ‘I live just under the mountain. Long way to walk. Besides, there’s the cart to take home.’
There indeed was a cart, a wooden contraption that had seen better days, upon which Marina laid a proprietorial hand. The sides of the cart were splintered where it had collided with the trunks of trees. There was a tethered horse, too, munching grass in the darkness.
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