What Lies Buried

by John Bishop

PART FOUR

  PROBING THE PAST

  Fantasy and Nostalgia

  Tuesday 11th September 1990

  Making the coffee and preparing a trolley left Max no scope for further eavesdropping. At one stage he heard raised voices; when he returned to the family room, he could sense the relief at his arrival. Caroline commented on the wonderful aroma. Judith acted the good hostess, pouring the coffee and offering biscuits. All of them made small talk, obviously keen to establish some semblance of civilised harmony. Max felt it an inappropriate time to resume his niggling behaviour, but he did draw Caroline’s attention to a stack of folders on the desk. ‘There’s nothing confidential; feel free to browse. Some of it’s a bit messy; draft chapters and stuff. I need to do some sorting. The best of the assignments from school are in there somewhere—they’re definitely sources for the history. And some of your grandfather’s memoirs—bits we might use.’

  Caroline nodded. ‘I spent one winter working my way through Grandad’s stories.’

  ‘I did the same,’ Judith said. She returned to the desk with her coffee, and opened a folder.

  After more small talk, Max retired to the kitchen, leaving the women alone again. Silence descended. Caroline peered into the trophy cabinet, searching for a topic to keep them away from dangerous ground.

  ‘I see you won the show jumping. The best I could do was third.’

  Judith remained seated, elbows on the desk, chin resting on clasped hands. There was the hint of a sigh. ‘I grew up surrounded by your trophies and photos. I used to have this fantasy; I’d go somewhere to a competition and tie for first place with an older woman. After the presentation, somebody would tell me the other winner was my sister; and I’d run after you and catch you as you were leaving the show ground.’

  ‘A tearful reunion, you brought home the prodigal daughter, and we all lived happily ever after.’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘I started riding the year my mother left. I had a Shetland pony. That’s her.’ Judith did not turn to look. Caroline pressed on. ‘I groomed her so often it’s a wonder all her hair didn’t fall out. Then I’d ride her, and pretend I was at the Show. I had a fantasy too. We were good at fantasy. I’d name the subject and my mother would make up a story. Sometimes she’d act out the parts... I’m sorry, I’m rambling.’

  ‘So what was your fantasy?’ Judith swivelled around and rose from the chair.

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Please. I told you mine.’

  Now they were side by side, gazing into the cabinet, which contained so much of their lives. Caroline was fiddling with the brooch pinned to her dress—a large, distinctive piece, a broad cut garnet set in some sort of filigree, no longer fashionable but very beautiful. ‘I would be riding in the Grand Parade, and I’d see a lady in the stand waving and smiling. She’d be looking straight at me, and she’d nod to confirm I was the one she was waving to. And I’d know who she was.’

  ‘Was that hers?’

  Unaware she’d been touching the brooch, Caroline glanced down. ‘I found it after she left. It had fallen behind her dressing table. I kept it hidden for thirteen years.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Who knows? There’s nothing else I want from this house.’

  ‘Did you ever try to find her?’

  ‘Of course. I employed a private investigator. He didn’t unearth much. Mother inherited Weatherlee in 1943 after her parents were killed in a car accident. In 1945 she sold up and left; late in the year, a passport was issued in her name. End of trail!’

  ‘I know the feeling. I tried to trace Mama’s family.’

  ‘I still wake in the night and find myself wondering where my mother is. If she’s still alive she’s 72.’

  From the moment she’d started fiddling with the brooch, Caroline’s mood had changed. Minutes ago, Judith was feeling anger and frustration; there’d been a sharp edge to every exchange. Now she felt sympathy. A woman lying awake wondering about her mother was an image of loneliness. The door hadn’t fully opened, but the possibility was there.

  ‘Do you live alone?’

  ‘Yes. A nice gay man comes with me to functions. It avoids complications. I’ve learnt self sufficiency.’

  ‘Like Rachel.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘She used to say, “Value people but don’t need them!” ’

  ‘What do you think she meant?’

  ‘I think she meant you mustn’t become too dependent, because people... go away.’

  Their eyes met. Caroline felt a need to change tack before Judith began probing again.

  ‘If there are things you need to do, I can browse through the folders.’

  A Stirring of the Senses

  Sunday 7th January 1945

  Walter rinsed his brush in gum turpentine, wiped it on a rag, and put it to soak in a jar of soapy water. He found it impossible to concentrate while distracted by the activity in the house-garden. Emily, Caroline and Rachel had created a production line to wash some of the dogs. Wet cotton dresses clinging to the two adult women emphasised a problem. Try though he might to convince himself his feelings for Rachel were like those he might have for a sister, he knew it was a lie. There was a time when Emily’s figure was equally slim. Even now her movements had the elegance that went with her natural aptitude for sport, but since Caroline’s birth little else had remained unchanged.

  Like other country kids, Walter had grown up knowing families living an hour’s drive down the back road to nowhere. There was probably nobody in the district he didn’t know something about from personal experience or family conversations.

  I hear the Crawleys have done so well with those porkers they’re getting out of sheep altogether.

  Yeah, well it’s the trend isn’t it.

  What, pigs?

  No, specialising.

  Oh? Yeah. Yeah, there’s not many left who could call themselves mixed farmers.

  If you ask me, some aren’t farming at all. Weatherlee’s starting to look like a used truck yard.

  How’s young Emily doing? I feel for that poor kid. Too nice to be a Johnson.

  Takes all kinds.

  More’s the pity.

  Walter and Emily had been born within a few months of each other, so it was inevitable they would meet at school and at social functions as they grew up. Even before the age when the differences between girls and boys became of interest, they’d developed a rapport neither family understood. As they progressed through their teenage years it became common knowledge that they were “going steady”. It was good to have a friend to share the trials of adolescence: the first gauche attempts at ballroom dancing, and other activities that, for the less fortunate, gave rise to agonies of embarrassment from disasters such as stepping on the treasured satin shoes of a dance partner, or being told the girl you’d worked up the courage to ask to the school ball had already agreed to go with your worst enemy. They made an attractive couple—he the handsome comic-strip heart-throb, she the bright-eyed brunette from an advertisement for permanent waving. When they became engaged at the school graduation, and married at the age of nineteen, nobody expressed surprise. They remained content to be together, to share a bed, and to become parents. After the difficulties of Caroline’s birth, they’d joined battle with Emily’s demons, holding them at bay, until the day an olive-skinned European beauty was found in a sheep truck and handed over to the local JP.

  Seeing him at the window, Caroline held up a wet puppy. Emily and Rachel turned and, almost as one, struck a pose to display their soaked condition. It was a rare moment. He smiled and adopted a scandalised posture. He wished he could share the laughter.

  Lunch was taken on the verandah to save the dog-washing team from having to strip off and shower. In the heat of January, they had agreed to forgo the usual Sunday roast. Walter had given himself the rare luxury of a day off, and devoted some of his morning to preparing salads. While they ate, Emily announced she and Caroline
would go to Weatherlee for the afternoon. ‘I want to check how far they’ve got with the fences— while the contractor isn’t there to look surly.’

  ‘Then I will do washing up,’ Rachel said. ‘Walter has done enough, I think. He is good with the salads, yes?’

  ‘With the salads, he’s an absolute marvel,’ Emily said.

  Walter spent the next couple of hours on a tractor, making his routine Sunday check of the back paddocks and perimeter fences. When he returned to his painting, Rachel was sitting on the couch listening to the wireless. As he entered, she quickly switched it off. He thought the look she gave him suggested she felt guilty. ‘It is helping my English,’ she said.

  ‘Good idea. What were you listening to?’

  ‘A news broadcast.’

  ‘How goes the war?’

  ‘Better it sounds. I am still learning things from last year. Paris was recovered.’

  ‘That was months ago. Must have been about the time you got here.’

  ‘I had no wireless. Only sometimes saw a newspaper.’

  ‘Paris was important to you?’

  She became fidgety and stood up. ‘There were good people in France.’

  ‘It must have been as well you spoke the language.’

  ‘Please. These are things too soon to talk about.’

  ‘That’s all right by me. But if somebody in authority starts to get nosy–‘

  ‘I thought you were authority here.’

  ‘I’m the very lowest level of authority in this country. A Justice of the Peace. I’m only that because there’s nobody older and better qualified who hasn’t gone to war.’

  ‘They kept you here for this, I think.’

  ‘No. And this is something I’d prefer not to talk about.’

  ‘It was not to pry.’

  ‘Forget it.’

  Walter returned to his painting. For a minute or more, Rachel said nothing. Then she moved closer to him. Standing at his shoulder she looked out at the scene and at his canvas.

  ‘I’ve barely started,’ he said.

  ‘Already, though, there is balance in the composition. It begins well. I am happy you decide to leave out that tree.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  She watched him at work before she spoke again. ‘There is no way to forget. I think maybe I should try to talk a little. To you only at first. When I am ready. Is this all right?’

  ‘Of course.’

  She turned and left the room. The aroma of her stayed with him. His heart was beating uncomfortably.

  Sources of History

  Friday 7th April 1989

  EDITED TRANSCRIPT OF INTERVIEW CONDUCTED FOR YEAR 11 ORAL HISTORY ASSIGNMENT BY NORMAN BRYSON ON 7.4.1989

  THE INTERVIEWER’S QUESTIONS AND SOME EXTRANEOUS DISCUSSION AND REPETITION HAVE BEEN EDITED OUT OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, WHICH IS OTHERWISE VERBATIM AND HAS BEEN APPROVED BY THE INTERVIEWEE.

  ASSIGNMENT: Conduct an interview to obtain information about the change of ownership of a property in the Shire of Kalawonta.

  INTERVIEWEE: Mr Stanley John Fleming. DATE OF BIRTH: 22.7.1900

  SCOPE OF INTERVIEW: Sale of Weatherlee - Charlesworth to Johnson - 1917

  ‘1917 it was. I was 17. I still remember the sale because it was a real big event. On the day of the auction, all the locals turned out to see what happened. There were plenty of onlookers, but only two bidders. My dad said if it hadn’t been a mortgagee sale the property would’ve been withdrawn instead of getting knocked down cheap. Barry Johnson was a city-based haulage contractor with no experience on the land. Within a month, he’d moved into Weatherlee with his two sons and their families.

  ‘The Johnsons were city people. Newcomers. And the way of their coming didn’t help. Jerry Charlesworth was Arajinna’s first loss in the Great War. I was 15 at the time. It gets to you when a bloke you still remember as a “big boy” at school stops a bullet somewhere in France. They said the death unbalanced his father. I remember my old man saying Jerry’s dad had been a pretty level-headed bloke. Next we hear he’s borrowed a lot of money and started some crazy new farming ventures. Within two years he was bankrupt and the Bank was selling Weatherlee.

  ‘It wasn’t long before the gossips came up with stories about Barry Johnson’s financial success being based on standover tactics and sabotaging his competitors’ vehicles. It was exciting stuff for a teenager. There were some pretty colourful rumours about his reasons for buying a country property away from prying city eyes—suggestions some of the vehicles arriving in the dead of night weren’t his, stories about perfectly good rigs being dumped in the big gully running through Weatherlee’s back paddock. Of course, at night out here, a big truck changing down to come up Two View could be heard for miles.

  ‘One thing I’m sure wasn’t rumour was that Barry Johnson got drunk when he went into town, and was real bad news. Picked fights with anybody in sight and had a thing about foreigners. If anybody a bit different came into a bar he’d start shouting, “Jews, Chinks and Abos”. He was a real scary bugger, and his sons were chips off the old block. The oldest, Bert, had a wife and two young sons. He managed the haulage business, and spent a lot of time away from Arajinna, which made the rest of us real happy. The other boy, Maurie, had a young wife who turned out to be pregnant. Emily was the second new baby in the district that spring. Walter Blake had been born a couple of months earlier.

  ‘Both the Johnson boys were in their twenties, which caused a bit of flak as well. Lads from Kalawonta had signed up in droves. It became a local thing; you know, “one in all in!” Their regiment had a pretty bad war. Jerry Charlesworth is one of the Arajinna boys whose names you’ll find on the Cenotaph. The word was Barry Johnson had said his sons couldn’t go because they were operating a reserved business*. One of them being exempted might have been okay. Two exemptions didn’t sit well. But when one of the locals made a comment in earshot of Barry Johnson the big bloke got stroppy and went on about “one rule for battlers and another rule for silvertails”. Everyone knew he was having a dig at Richard Blake. Young Dick was a promising surgeon and he’d stayed home to continue his training. The locals had no argument about Richard, and they would have gone along with one of Barry’s boys staying at home to help with the trucking business, but not both of them.

  ‘Surprisingly, the Johnsons developed into competent farmers. One thing Barry did right was to employ young Pat Charlesworth to teach Maurie the ropes and get him started. For about six months Pat lived in the quarters his dad had built for the itinerants—shearers and the like. Bit of a comedown for a Charlesworth, but these things happen.

  ‘When Pat finished at Weatherlee and made the rounds of the farms to say good-bye, you couldn’t get him to talk much about the Johnsons. But years later, well away from Arajinna, he told a drinking mate that Barry Johnson was the scariest bloke he’d ever met, and he’d never want to cross the bugger!

  ‘So there you have it. History of the Johnsons... well, how they came to own Weatherlee, anyway.’