‘No. Duchesses can live anywhere they like.’
‘And so they can, but way out in the country in a place near Nullabri? Have you heard of Nullabri? No? Well, it would be an unusual – not impossible, of course – but an unusual place to find a family of aristocrats. But please continue to think of me as you do. I like being your duchess, Angel, and I will be your duchess for as long as you want.’
‘Is your sister better, now?’
‘Only a slight improvement, my darling.’
‘I hope she never gets better. I hope you’ll have to stay here forever.’
‘O, Angel – that was a very strange thing to say. Sad.’
‘I’m sorry but I meant it. Why is she sick? What made her sick?’
Winifred was silent for a moment and then said, with a smile, ‘There is a story to tell – but I think you like stories, Angel.’
‘O, yes, please.’
‘Then shall we stroll into the gully and find a green place?’
And in a green place by the creek sitting on mosscushioned rocks, Winifred Varnham told Angel Martin the story of the Duchess of Nullabri and her family.
‘We were an unusual family in that place, the farm. We didn’t really fit in with the neighbours and the town but everyone was always kind. Father was very religious and prayed a lot – he was not a very good farmer. We had chickens of course and a few Jersey cows. He tried to grow cotton but it was a failure. He told Heather – my younger sister – and me that of course it was God’s will that the cotton didn’t grow and he was to grow medicinal herbs instead. But even though the herbs flourished, Father told us that such a use for God’s soil was not worth the effort, so he put the tools away, went to where the cows were and prayed. Still, the herbs managed to look after themselves and grew like a jungle all over the place. Our father wasn’t really too keen about the work required for farming or indeed anything needing physical effort.
‘Father experimented with medicinal teas. He’d bought a book about herbals from a second-hand shop in town. The herbs grew so well and it was something he could do that did not take too much time from his God. He sold his teas as remedies and cures for all sorts of complaints, but he once made the butcher’s wife very sick. “Too much Echinacea” was all he said, staring at the sky as though it was God’s fault and I remember thinking how strange it all was. We were very poor.’
‘Did you have a mother, Miss Varnham?’
‘Poor Mother. Like a caged bird longing to fly, but she managed to look after the livestock and keep our house decent enough and there was always food on the table. Not ordinary country food, Angel. She liked to make curries and spicy vegetables. She had a hundred recipes for cheap mince. She taught herself to make pasta like an Italian. Mother taught me what she knew and allowed me to cook from when I was very young. Heather had little appetite, poor thing, and didn’t care much what she was served and Father tried to strengthen her with herbal tea, but she seemed to be no better after drinking them. Worse, if anything.’
‘Did your father make teas for you, too?’
‘Yes, but I did not like the taste at all. Little brown bowls of it that I only pretended to drink. Father was never particularly interested in me anyway and didn’t care – it was always Heather.’
‘Thank goodness you didn’t drink the stuff, it might have made you sick, too,’ said Angel.
‘Yes, Angel, I think you’re right. Thank goodness indeed.
‘There was a musical society in the town and Mother secretly joined. She confessed to me, but I don’t think my sister knew. Because of the distance our mother and most of the members had to travel the musical society met during the day and I remember Mother making all sorts of excuses to go to town. She would say that Missus So-and-So was ill and needed help or the So-and-So family needed advice or she was learning to make cakes at the Country Women’s Association, but Father discovered the truth and he was furious, Angel, and even more furious when he saw her in the machinery shed in make-up and costume. There was once a terrible scene. Mother had come home from a rehearsal of The Mikado – do you know it? A comic opera by Gilbert and Sullivan. Have you heard of it?’
‘No.’
‘Heather and I had never seen Mother so happy and she sang the songs for us and we danced around but Father said Mother was becoming hysterical and so he made her a Valerian tea to calm her. Whether it was a reaction to the herb, or Father used too much of it, she was dead in her bed by the morning. It was a terrible shock. I know how you must have felt, Angel, when your own mother died – it is a terrible thing to lose a mother. Father grieved in a most violent way. He went to the furthest end of the cow paddock and prayed for a very long time – day and night he prayed. He came to the house only to eat and comfort Heather but my sister’s problems worsened. She said she couldn’t hear very well and she thought she was losing her sight – O, Angel, am I boring you?’
‘No! No. What happened next?’ Another death. Different. Angel was certainly not bored.
‘Well, you see, Father was not himself at all – praying in the paddock with a circle of Jersey cows around him nudging him for the grain bucket. He could not be moved. I thought he must have been quite mad from the grief. I called a doctor from town and after he had examined Father some men came in a van and put Mother in the back and Father in the front.
‘Father had to go away for a very long time and I was left with the farm and Heather and your poor duchess was not happy and was not quite sure what to do, Angel.’
‘How old were you, Miss Varnham?’
‘Very much older than you, Angel, but still young at heart, dear.’
‘You must have been very frightened.’
‘There was so much to do, darling, I can’t remember how I felt. In the end I was advised to sell the farm and move out and one day, as I searched for anything that might be worth something, I found, tucked right at the back of the old machinery shed, a trunk full to the lid, Angel, full of coloured cloth. The trunk was crammed with cloth, ribbons and wigs and braids trimmed with gold and silver Mother had been given or bought or taken. My poor mother had saved it all. There were yards and yards of cloth of all colours. Treasures. I think she must have saved it all to keep her sane. She must have secretly draped the cloth over her country dresses and pretended the back of the machinery shed was a theatre. Can you imagine her dancing and singing alone behind a shed full of rusted metal? It made me weep for ages but I learned to sew the cloth and as you can see I am still using it – there was so much of it. Can you sew, Angel?’
‘A little bit. I made a bag for the tram fares.’
‘I will teach you. However, when I came out of the shed, I looked up at the sky and an enormous flock of galahs flew over as though they were being chased and seemed to be saying goodbye and I saw it as a sign. I packed everything I wanted to keep and an agent sold the farm for a good price to a city family who wanted to raise a few more cows. A good price, Angel. It was more than I could have imagined and I was able to leave the farm with enough to admit Heather to the sanitarium and pay for my own accommodation. And there you have it. Years have passed since Father’s teas – so many years – and here I am close to Heather, who imagines she’s lost the use of a different body part each year. The sanitarium was most intrigued when she was admitted.’
‘O, that was so sad, Miss Varnham. It was a wonderful story. But why did you come here to Missus Potts’s place when you could afford something better? Is it because it’s close to the sanitarium?’
‘You know, Angel, I’m not sure. Something drew me to it. It’s reasonably priced. It’s not very nice here but somehow I feel comfortable. In a way it reminds me of the farmhouse. However, there are some very strange people in this place, aren’t there?’ She adjusted the pencil in her bun. ‘For example, I’m very fond of Barnaby Grange but he is a little strange, don’t you think?’
‘O, ye
s, I do, but I wouldn’t want anyone here to be any different. I think the world is full of people not right in the head and so far, I love them all. I always knew I wasn’t the only one.’
‘Not Missus Potts, surely?’
‘Well, maybe not her.’
‘Angel Martin!’ screamed Missus Potts so loud the gully birds knew it was time to clean themselves, make their nests neat and tidy with hospital corners and cover their nestlings with their wings. ‘Where are you, girl? There are things to do!’
Summer
It was not unusual for small fires to start in the gully when the days were very hot. It was not unusual to see tiny columns of smoke curling as though someone was secretly smoking behind a rock. Missus Potts had a printed fire drill stuck to the back of the plate cupboard. The notices should, by law, have been stuck behind the doors of the boarders’ broom cupboards but there was only the one. It ordered residents to pack a bag with essentials and to have plenty of wet sacking and buckets ready in case a fire did break out and came close to houses, but the fire-drill notice behind the plate cupboard was hard to read through egg and gravy stains.
‘Those spot fires can turn ugly,’ said Missus Potts, who knew ugly and could spell it backwards. ‘So what you do if you see one is you go down with wet sacks and buckets of water before it gets bad. I saw smoke this morning. Three of the casuals are already down there.’
‘Then we too must act, now!’ said Winifred Varnham. Winifred, Barnaby and Angel each took a bucket and sack from the fence behind the laundry. Music, Colour and Numbers (with sketchpad and pencil) stood in a line ready for orders and one might say they were just a little excited. Although Angel had taken part in fire drills at her school, which also backed onto the gully, and Winifred Varnham had seen fires, but not on their farm, which was, in the worst of the summer heat, flat and bare and dry as a Sao biscuit.
‘No disrespect, Miss Varnham, but you can’t go trailing around spot fires in the gully like the Queen of Sheba in those clothes.’
‘I’ll look after her, Missus Potts. It’s probably dead bracken burning. I know where to go – it’s not very far.’
‘Six hundred,’ said Barnaby Grange.
‘Approximately …?’ said Winifred.
‘I think he means yards,’ said Angel.
‘O, for God’s sake, just go then! Look out for bits of glass – anything that might start a fire. Why aren’t you at school, Angel?’
‘It’s Saturday.’
‘What about yesterday! It wasn’t Saturday yesterday.’
‘I’m thinking of giving it up – school, I mean.’
‘You’re not right, girl, not right at all. You have to go to school. You’ll be scarred for life!’
‘I think, Missus Potts,’ said Miss Varnham, ‘that Angel is an extremely clever – even brilliant – girl and you should not be worried about her at all.’
Barnaby Grange nodded seven times. Exactly.
‘Worried! You think I’m worried, Miss Varnham, about headmasters and truant officers at the door and probably the police next and a know-it-all brat not right in the head with her music and not paying board and the doctor not paid and nothing done on time and a tub full of sheets not wrung? Worried? No disrespect to you, Miss Varnham, but this is a respected house with a name! And—’
‘O, do be still, Missus Potts. We will go with our buckets to the gully and fill them at the creek and douse the fire that threatens your grand establishment and we won’t ask a penny for our efforts.’ And the three, in single file, grandly, Angel with her nose in the air because she could not resist doing so, marched down into the gully towards the creek and the curl of smoke that was by then no more than a thread that seemed to be putting itself out.
Angel Martin had always thought of the gully as her own – exclusively, her own domain. Silly of course. Even at her age she thought it was silly and very quickly was delighted to be strolling through the trees and along the creek bed with the Duchess of Nullabri. At first, Barnaby Grange had not been so keen. Missus Potts had warned of snakes and spiders and he was not used to that kind of thing, but there were occasions after Angel had described the beauty of it all that he thought he should visit the green place. So on that day, he plucked up the courage to accompany his friends, with care, with trouser legs taped firmly at the bottoms, wearing thick socks and shoes, and of course carrying his pad and pencil and helped them search for spot fires.
Winifred Varnham wore bright yellow with gold trim because she thought the colours would be easily seen – if the worst came to the worst – even through smoke.
Angel led the way to the place where the bracken and the berry bushes grew, south of the creek. A slight breeze moved through the trees, resplendent in their summer greens, and the birds, knowing their places in the order of things, perched and preened and chatted and were unworried and content.
‘I can smell tobacco,’ Winifred Varnham said suddenly. ‘Can you smell tobacco, Angel?’
‘I can smell something.’
‘Mother used to smoke. She used to roll her own and smoke while Father was praying. I never liked the smell of it.’
Barnaby Grange said not a word and busily sketched a gum tree, in his way. There were fractions and an attractive equation at the top that made it look like a Christmas tree with a star.
Near the source of the smoky smell – not far from the south end of the creek – a man, a tramp, lay asleep with his arms crossed over his scrawny chest, his legs stretched out and crossed and his head on a swag against the trunk of a blue gum. He was dressed in a rag of a shirt and was wearing trousers held up by a thin rope. There was a hole cut from the side of his left shoe to let a bunion breathe. An eye snapped open when the Duchess of Nullabri stood over him, all yellow and gold and disapproving but somehow so glorious. The second eye followed.
‘You’ll do,’ he said.
‘What on earth do you mean, you stupid man?’
‘Having a dream, me darling.’
‘How dare you. Was that you smoking and causing people to suspect infernos? How dare you!’
‘I put the butt under a rock. You can’t be too careful. You think I don’t know about gully fires? And who are you?’ Not moving an inch but with his eyes on Angel. ‘And who’s that bloke with his head buried in paper – O, never mind him. Bit off, is he?’
‘I am Angel Martin and my friends are Miss Varnham and Barnaby Grange. What’s your name?’
‘Harry Potts.’ The tramp, so thin he looked like a child’s stick drawing, eased himself up to a sitting position. ‘And Harry Potts be very pleased to meet you all. You wouldn’t happen to have a chunk of bread and dripping on you or anything else? A bit peckish, not too fussy,’ the tramp said with a grin of tobacco-dyed teeth.
‘No! We certainly do not. Who in their right mind would carry bread and dripping in this heat, you silly man?’
‘There’s someone with your name who owns a boarding house up there,’ Angel pointed. ‘If you stand over here you can just see the fence …’
‘I know what that fence looks like, girlie. I built it.’
‘Funny, having the same name, Mister Potts. There’s honeysuckle growing over the fence now.’
The Duchess of Nullabri, silently glowing yellow and gold and looking regal despite the damp patches under her arms that had formed themselves into maps of small islands, stared down at Harry Potts and Harry Potts, not sure what was to come, stared back.
‘Are you and Missus Potts related in some way?’
‘Suppose you could say that and if you did say that you be closer than you think.’
‘You have a great many buttons missing, Mister Potts – I would have thought a man related to Missus Potts could afford buttons. Have you by any chance been away for some time?’
‘I be in Queensland for a time, you might say, Missus—’
‘M
iss!’
‘Sorry, love. Sugar cane, bananas, timber mill, whatever be enough for a feed.’
‘So – and forgive me if I intrude, Mister Potts – but you haven’t been logging in Brazil? Making a great deal of money floating tree trunks down the Amazon?’
‘Is that what she tells you? The answer be no. How is the old bagger, anyways?’
‘I imagine she is much the same as when you disappeared,’ said Winifred. She had so many questions she would have liked to ask but was hesitant to do so. She would have liked to ask, for example, how he had become a worthless tramp and why he’d decided to return from Queensland to the bottom of Duffy Street and sit under a tree in a gully near the house where his wife resided, but on first and second thoughts the intrusion into his life would be too rude. Of course it would.
‘How is it, Mister Potts, that you appear to have struck rock bottom and come back from Queensland to the bottom of Duffy Street and lie like a tramp under a blue gum when your wife and a house are no more than thirty minutes away?’ There!
‘I be plucking up the courage to see her again.’
‘Surely, Mister Potts, you’re not afraid of your wife?’
‘Got the scars to prove it – stitches.’ And Mister Potts pointed a skinny finger to an area behind his left ear.
‘I’ll look after you, Mister Potts. I’m not scared of anything,’ said Angel, despite her opinion of Mister Potts’s skinny finger.
‘I’ll be right here a day or two, girlie. I be liking it down here in the gully but if you can bring me a bite to eat I be grateful.’
‘But how on earth did you become a penniless tra— wanderer, Mister Potts?’
‘It’s the horses, Miss. Queensland horses – lame and crippled from the teeth down. They only ran them for me. There be odds and evens but for me – mostly odds.’
‘That’s disgraceful, Mister Potts! No wonder your wife assaulted you,’ said Winifred Varnham. ‘Speaking of odds, where on earth is Mister Grange? Angel, where is Mister Grange?’
The Aunts’ House Page 13