Stars Over the Southern Ocean

by J. H. Fletcher

  ‘If I had it, I’d give it to you. Not lend; give. But I haven’t got it.’

  ‘If you put Noamunga on the market …?’

  It was true; she could sell the place; it must be worth something. And then what? Lose her precious home, the way of life that was so important to her, end up with a bundle of cash she didn’t want and didn’t need? And do what? Buy a poky flat in Hobart; give the rest of the money to the children? To Gregory, to throw away on his next futile project? To Tamsyn, so she could buy another helicopter? So that Charlotte and her husband could buy a holiday home somewhere? And for this she should give up all that was precious in her life?

  Yes, because the family, surely, was what mattered.

  No, because if she did what they wanted, she would die. She had no doubt about that.

  Was she the one being selfish, or were they?

  ‘Ask Charlotte. She’s got money.’

  ‘I already did.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I just told you. She said to ask you.’

  ‘Let me think about it,’ she said.

  ‘What’s there to think about? You’ll either do it or you won’t. But I need to know, all right? I need to know very soon,’ he said. And hung up on her.

  Slowly Marina replaced the receiver.

  Outside the house, the night was alive with sound. The wind, howling; the repetitive thunder of the breaking seas; the building creaking, sturdy in its defiance of the elements. To live without the violent symphony of the sea would be to sacrifice everything she held dear in life. And the family? What about her children? Was she really saying the children mattered less than Noamunga?

  She couldn’t bear it. Mongrel of a day or not, she had to move, to get out, to breathe.

  She dragged on her heavy coat and boots. Her boots crunched on the shingle. She looked up. Overhead, a reel of stars shone between ragged cloud. She went down the sloping beach. She stood so close to the sudsy surf that it almost reached her feet.

  Give up this and she would give up all she held dear. This was her place. They’d get it anyway when she was dead, which the doctors seemed to think would be soon. Was it too much to ask that they should let her live out what remained of her life in the place she loved?

  Marina was poleaxed by the impossibility of making a choice. By the fact that she must make a choice.

  She went back indoors. Beyond the walls of the old house, the tempest continued to roar.

  On Thursday Marina drove into Boulders to buy the food she needed for her guests.

  She’d thought originally of preparing a spicy paella, enough for both meals, using prawns fresh from the sea, but in the end decided on roast duck for Tamsyn, which she knew was one of her favourites, and a fillet of salmon for Charlotte.

  She called first on Bill Philpott the butcher and picked up a brace of wild birds already plucked, with the shotgun pellets still in them. Wild duck were tougher than those bred for the pot, but the flavour was vastly superior, and after marinating them overnight in a mixture of red wine and rosemary they’d be tender enough.

  With the duck in a carrier bag swinging from one arm she crossed the road to what passed itself off as the local supermarket, where she took care in selecting the finest fillet of salmon in the shop. She also bought carrots, celery and green beans, which she planned to cook in garlic and serve with home-grown potatoes.

  Nobody for months, now two guests on the trot. Like running a cafe, she thought. Home cooking à la Noamunga.

  Her final purchases were two bunches of fresh flowers and a homemade ginger cheesecake, one she especially liked; its astrin-gency would be particularly welcome after the richness of the duck.

  Decrepit, was she? Unfit to live alone in the place she loved? She’d show them.

  CHAPTER 28

  On Friday evening the forecast was bad, with rain squalls and strong winds expected from Burnie to Stanley and all down the west coast.

  Just my luck, Charlotte thought.

  She was planning to leave at six the following morning. Regardless of the weather, that should be early enough to get her to Noamunga in good time for lunch.

  She’d been hoping to have a chat with Hector about what she was planning to say to Mother the following day. Tommy Mendoza had left Charlotte in no doubt how important it was that she should talk Mother into selling Noamunga to Trident but Marina was one of the stubbornest women breathing and Charlotte knew she’d have a hard job bringing her round. Hector’s thoughts would have been useful but Hector—wouldn’t you know it?—was tied up in a succession of late meetings, so she’d have to manage on her own.

  Instead of working out a strategy with her husband she found herself dozing in front of the fire, her mind drifting. More asleep than awake, she saw a series of images: things that had happened in the past; dreams she’d had; hopes for the future. All of them combining to create the woman she now was.

  She was seven years old.

  Mum had just told her she’d be having a brother or sister very soon and Charlotte wasn’t sure what she thought about that.

  A brother or sister might be all right to play with, she supposed, but she wouldn’t have Mum to herself anymore and that she didn’t fancy at all. It would mean sharing, and she hated that.

  She felt the same as she had when she’d been very small, when the man had come back. The man. Mum had told her she must call him Dad but inside herself she never had. She’d been only three when he came home yet she still remembered the horror she’d felt when she saw him for the first time. There’d been other men, other mums and kids, all waving and laughing, memories that somehow got themselves tangled with water sloshing about and a ship with two funnels and laughter and people kissing and they’d looked all right. Why couldn’t this Dad have been one of them? But he hadn’t been. He was the ugliest man she’d ever seen, and the idea of calling him anything, of admitting he was there at all, had frightened her.

  She didn’t remember much else but finding out she was supposed to share Mum—her Mum—with this horrible man had made her hate him.

  She’d got used to him in the end, but now Mum telling her about a brother or sister had brought the memories back.

  Mum had thought she’d be excited; she wasn’t. She was prepared to hate whatever it was long before she saw it. It. Nobody seemed to know whether it would be a girl or a boy, so calling it that was okay, but that wasn’t why Charlotte used the word. She didn’t want a brother or sister; she didn’t, she didn’t, she didn’t, and the only thing she could think to do about it was to pretend it wasn’t going to be there at all.

  Perhaps it was because the news had upset her so much that she had started dreaming about the big house.

  It had been very clear in her dream. Dozing, she returned to the images that had affected her so powerfully when she was a child. She saw again the enormous building with dirty windows reaching high to a ceiling half-hidden in shadows. Huge cobwebs were massed in the corners and Charlotte remembered how, in her childish dream, she had tried to clean the windows, scrubbing at them frantically with a long-handled broom that she pushed as high as she could reach. She did everything she could to get rid of the webs but they kept coming back, however hard she scrubbed away at them, and that was horrible because she knew that behind the dirty glass was a beautiful view that the grime prevented her from seeing: a line of hills, a valley between them with a winding river flanked by forest, the water shining in the sunlight.

  Again she remembered the mixed wonder and horror of that dream. She had wanted that beautiful place more than anything and still did: the big house, its shining windows clean of dirt at last, letting her look down at the river as it wound through the peaceful valley towards the sea.

  But there had been something else in the dream: a man, tall and stern, standing by a closed gate in a high wall. She knew the man was there to stop her reaching that lovely place and that her only way of getting past him was by pretending to be different from the person she really wa
s. She had to be nice to him, to smile and call him sir, because then he would open the gate and let her pass through into the beautiful land beyond.

  The dream taught her what she had to be and do, if that lovely place were ever to be hers.

  There had been other images, too, that she had first seen many years before and that now flowed through her dozing mind.

  When she’d been twelve she’d palled up with Isobel Redmond, two years older than she was.

  Isobel had long red hair. The teachers made her tie it back when she was in school, as she was sometimes—people said the Redmonds were a wild mob, tin fossickers from up in the hills some place, not too fussy about helping themselves to other people’s money—but for the rest of the time she let it hang loose about her face so that it flew like a flag in the wind.

  Charlotte thought Isobel was beautiful.

  Isobel put up with Charlotte’s adoration, on some occasions even letting her follow her around. In return Isobel taught Charlotte a few things about life: how it didn’t pay to let people know what you were really like; that the only point of living was to grab as much for yourself as you could and not be too fussy how you did it, to suck up to the people who mattered and never, never, never let anyone know what you really thought about things.

  Because Charlotte was in love with Isobel Redmond—for a few months, anyway—she soaked up all Isobel’s advice, good and bad.

  Why? Because she wanted Isobel to love her, too. That was really all she’d ever wanted, to be loved and admired by everyone. It wasn’t that much to ask, surely? Yet maybe it was, because she had the nasty feeling that nobody did. She wasn’t even sure she liked herself that much. It was a bad feeling, which made it all the more important that other people—her mother and sister most of all—should think well of her. Yet somehow she never believed they did. A hundred times she told herself it was nonsense, yet the feeling never went away. While, little by little, resentment grew.

  With an early start in the morning, Charlotte was early to bed. She thought she would go to sleep straight away but didn’t. Instead she lay thinking of how she and Hector had got together so many years before and all the things that had happened since.

  It was 1968 and the Beatles and the Stones were kings. Everyone Charlotte knew had become citizens of the world of pop. Everyone, that was, apart from Hector Ballantyne, who was as stiff as a starched shirt and proud of it.

  Twenty-six-year-old Charlotte had been around the traps a few times—who hadn’t, by the time they’d reached her age?—but she hadn’t found the man she was looking for.

  Hector was a lecturer in chemical engineering at the university. He was super-efficient. He had no sense of humour, was not a party animal and in general terms was no fun at all—as miserable as a week of wet Sundays, one of Charlotte’s friends had said—but Charlotte had seen something in him that others had missed. Hector, she decided, had potential. All he needed was a clued-up woman with the ability to steer him in the right direction.

  A woman like Charlotte, for instance.

  She went out of her way to make much of him, the no-account woman overawed by the brilliant man; she told him he was wasted in his present job with its limited potential. Through an advertisement in the Mercury she found him an opportunity with the Australian subsidiary of a major American oil company, a very different type of job from the one he had at the university, an opening that she told him had the potential to offer him a future of influence and wealth, a challenge that she knew his talents would be more than capable of overcoming.

  He told her she was a foolish girl. He said she was talking nonsense; even in the earliest days of their relationship he’d talked down to her. He said that working for an oil company was not his scene at all, that they would never even look at an academic for such a position. She agreed he was probably right but asked him, to please her, to put in an application anyway, if only to put her foolish thoughts to rest.

  She talked him into doing it. To his amazement, but not at all to hers, he got the job. She had led him by the nose ever since, assisting him higher and higher on the corporate ladder.

  Now, twenty-plus years later and with—thankfully—no kids to show for it, they were in sight of the big one and she had no intention of letting either of them miss out, if she had to carry him to the CEO’s chair herself.

  Tommy Mendoza had shown her the way to do it. The following morning she would be setting out on a crusade. She would talk Mother into selling Noamunga to Trident Oil or strangle her in the process.

  She saw no reason to explain to Marina why it mattered so much to Hector’s career that she should do so.

  CHAPTER 29

  Men are different, Charlotte thought. If they only knew the things women did for them. Because this latest effort to promote Hector’s career had truly plumbed the depths.

  It was all very well for Tommy Mendoza—another man!—to tell her he had every faith, but he had no idea of the problem she had in dealing with a woman as stubborn as her mother.

  Marina had laid on a nice lunch. The salmon, baked with a herb dressing and served with minted early potatoes, had been a success, which was more than could be said of the rest of the day.

  The problems had started well before she reached Noamunga. There had been an accident outside Burnie, a chemical spill from an overturned tanker that had closed the road for an hour. Then, shortly before Charlotte had reached Boulders, a downpour had flooded the road and reduced visibility to a few yards, turning the descent from the Wombat Ridge into a nightmare that ceased only when she braked to a halt outside Noamunga where, of course, the surf was running like an express train, the air was full of salt and the crying of gulls and, after a journey of nonstop rain, the sun—wouldn’t you know it?—was shining out of a blue and almost cloudless sky.

  Marina was waiting, her face one big smile. Marina, who was supposed to be more or less at death’s door, looked as fit as a dozen fiddles.

  ‘Good journey?’ Marina said.

  Gritted teeth were the only answer. ‘I’m here, anyway.’

  ‘And it’s lovely to see you. Come in. Lunch is almost ready.’

  No flicker of concern about her being an hour and a half later than she’d said. That—surely?—might have rung a few alarm bells but no. I was right, Charlotte thought. She really doesn’t care about anyone but herself.

  She stood and looked around before going indoors. Nothing had changed; nothing would ever change. Noamunga, anchored securely to the rock on which it stood, still managed to look like a bit of flotsam washed in by the tide, and she remembered how as a schoolgirl she had been ashamed to invite friends back to a home that was not only as remote as the South Pole but that in some ways was more like a gypsy caravan than a real house, repeatedly soaked by the froth and spillage of the waves. The sort of place where people stayed when they couldn’t afford anything better.

  The idea that it should be a suitable place for Marina to spend her last days, an old woman whom the doctors seemed to think was close to death, was ridiculous. She must be made to move, for her own sake.

  Full of purpose, Charlotte marched into the dark and dingy house where she had grown up.

  The salmon, garlanded by a handful of prawns, was delicious, the minted potatoes newer than new.

  ‘You bought these in Boulders?’ Charlotte made no attempt to hide her amazement.

  ‘No, dear. I dug them out of the ground this morning.’

  Charlotte saw that her mother was sending her a message; she was saying that if she was capable of growing her own potatoes, she was capable of looking after herself in this dreadful place to which it seemed she was determined, inexplicably, to cling.

  A limpet to a rock, Charlotte thought. Well, I’m not having it. How can I look after her properly in a place like this?

  Short of kidnap, it was hard to see how Mum could be forced to move if she remained determined to stay, but surely logic and reason must prevail eventually?

  Charlot
te was a great believer in logic and reason when they could be harnessed to justify whatever it was she wanted to do, but she knew, Mum’s nature being what it was, that it was essential to come at the problem from the right direction. She remembered Tommy Mendoza’s advice. She said:

  ‘I haven’t been sleeping well.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that, dear. I’ve a ginger cheesecake, if you fancy a slice. Mrs Hickmot makes them and they are very good.’

  ‘You know why, don’t you?’

  ‘I’ve read of cases where after a few years of marriage the husband doesn’t pay his wife the attention she deserves—’

  ‘Hector has nothing to do with it.’ Charlotte’s teeth gritted in earnest, now.

  ‘In that case I have no idea why. I’m sorry to hear it, of course, dear, but I’m sure you’re going to tell me.’ The brightest of smiles. ‘Maybe you should speak to the doctor about it?’

  ‘Mother, I am worried about you. We are all worried about you. I lie awake at night, thinking of all the things that can go wrong—’

  ‘That is kind of you, dear, but there is nothing to go wrong and nothing for any of you to worry about. I shall live until I die, like everybody does. I have my memories; I am never lonely; I have a wonderful life. Every day I tell myself how lucky I am to be able to go on living in the place I love and to be surrounded by the love of my children. I am truly happy. What more could anybody ask?’

  Charlotte was vexed; it seemed impossible to break through the wall of Mother’s complacency. Maybe a threat would work where reason had not.

  ‘What happens when the pain gets too much to bear?’

  ‘The man who took over when Doctor Burgess retired—Archie Venables—knows the situation. He’s told me when that time comes, as no doubt it will, he’ll prescribe some powerful painkillers which will help.’

  Archie Venables sounded too casual for Charlotte, who preferred a degree of formality when it came to doctors. ‘You sure he knows what he’s doing?’