Yet, of course, she was right; it was a bribe. Blatant and barefaced. The ultimate corruption. A lease of their child in return for title to the land.
On the hillside, looking out over the creek and adjoining land, William also felt emotionally expended. He had given the impression he’d left them alone so they could make their decision, but the truth was he felt a need to escape from the stress he had generated.
He had not realised it would be so difficult, and now he had to accept the possibility that he had failed. He had a strange intuition that Stefan might agree to his plan, while his daughter would be the one to prove inflexible. Whatever the outcome, he had no arguments left. If the answer was no, he must admit defeat. He, who could debate and filibuster for hours in public forums, had no more words to say. He had, he supposed, the inner consolation, if that was the word, of knowing he had tried his best.
Walking among the vines, he noticed they had already been pruned back for the winter and spring growth. From his quick study of the subject on the train journey, he realised this was good, meticulous viticulture. He examined the grafts and pruned stalks from the main vines, and evidence of the soil tilled by hand. It must take all hours of the day. He wondered about irrigation, and came to the small stone well. Alongside it was Stefan’s primitive watering apparatus, with its buckets and yoke, like pictures he had seen of Chinese coolies in their paddy fields. As he studied it, one part of his mind absorbed its details, while the other was becoming more and more certain, as the time passed and there was no sign of them, that he would have to return home defeated.
Elizabeth cleared the dishes from the table, stacking them in the kitchen, as if the act of tidying up might help clarify her mind. But why was this necessary? Surely there could be no question. They wanted him home. She went out to where Stefan still sat at the table.
‘I’ll tell father to go to Tanunda and send his telegraph. He’s to make the arrangements for Heinrich to come back home.’
‘I was thinking about school,’ Stefan said.
‘He’ll attend the local school.’
‘The only one near enough for him to attend is the Lutheran. They teach in German.’
Elizabeth stared at him. It had never occurred to her. ‘But you want him home?’
‘Of course I do. But your clever, persuasive father has got me very mixed up. I keep hearing what he said, that perhaps Heinrich one day wants a profession, and hasn’t the education for it. I’ve even been thinking about Eva-Maria — the stones, and being called German bastards and dirty names.’
‘Then stop it, because that’ll never happen to Heinrich,’ Elizabeth said determinedly. ‘It has nothing whatever to do with this.’
‘Perhaps. Perhaps not. If we told him, when he was twenty years old, that he could have been educated at the best colleges in the east and gone to university, and that we rejected it — I wonder what would he think of us?’
‘We wouldn’t be stupid enough to tell him such a thing.’
‘But if he knew? How do you think he would feel?’
‘That’s an unfair question, Stefan.’
‘It’s one I’ve been asking myself. I don’t know the answer. So I have to ask you.’
‘Oh God,’ she said unhappily, and saw the tall figure of her father returning to the house. She had the feeling — and thought it must be her imagination — that he was dejected. His shoulders appeared slumped, and his stride, usually so brisk, seemed sluggish.
Stefan saw him and said, ‘So, before he gets here, choose.’
‘I can’t.’
‘An hour ago, we wouldn’t have considered this. Now we’re not sure. It means he’s won, doesn’t it?’
‘No,’ she said vehemently, ‘I won’t accept that.’
‘Then say no. Tell him. And tonight, and next week, and next year, we’ll think about this and always wonder if we did right.’ He was silent for a moment, then added, ‘And I’ll ask myself if I denied my son something he might have valued, because of my dislike of your father.’
They watched him approach.
‘I’m sorry,’ Elizabeth said quietly, ‘but because of the way you feel about him, you’re the one who has to decide.’
Before he could reply, her father had joined them. He stood at the verandah steps, looking up at them. Elizabeth suddenly realised it was not her imagination. His dejection was palpable. He was about to admit defeat.
‘Stefan …’ But she was already too late.
‘Send him home to us …’ Stefan began, and she saw her father’s dismay and felt her own ambivalence, but then realised he had not finished, ‘… at Christmas. And each long school holiday. And if we ever feel we were mistaken, we have the right to change our minds. Do you hear?’
‘I hear,’ William Patterson said.
‘If his grandmother dies, then he comes back. Although I don’t know her, I respect my wife’s opinion of her. I trust her to shape his character. I don’t trust you.’ She saw her father flinch.
‘Is that acceptable?’ Stefan asked him.
My God, thought Elizabeth, how our lives weave and change. My father a supplicant to a man he once threatened to have arrested, and all because my mother has finally found someone to love. All this because of one small boy.
She stood and watched, waiting for her father’s answer. ‘It’s acceptable,’ he said.
William felt morose and withdrawn all the way back to Adelaide. His driver, after some initial attempts at conversation, accepted the lack of response and lapsed into silence. Whatever it was that had taken place at the vineyard, the Senator was in a dark mood and not at all his usual self.
A suite was booked for William at the hotel in North Terrace.
He told the manager he would be remaining for several more days. He asked for a telegraph form, wrote a brief message to Edith, and requested it be taken at once to the central office. She would receive it the following morning. He ordered dinner and a drink to be sent to his room, and went upstairs to wait for it.
His success gave him no sense of triumph. Not even relief. He had a letter to write, and sat down at the desk in his sitting room, to try to put into words his disturbed state of mind and feeling of disquiet and self-disgust for the only person who might understand.
Hannah recognised his handwriting the instant she opened the mailbox. She took the letter to the secluded back garden, and sat down to read it.
My dearest,
There are several things that will detain me for a few days and since the official period of mourning for the death of Queen Victoria ends next week, and the Federal Parliament is to be opened by the Duke of York in Melbourne, it seems logical to travel directly there. It should be a grand occasion. I am told they are determined to outshine Sydney in glitter and ostentation, and that ten thousand electric light globes adorn the Great Exhibition Building and its main cupola, and it is to be the most dazzling set of illuminations ever seen in the southern hemisphere.
I have made arrangements for a suite at the Windsor Hotel, and also reserved an adjoining room in your name. I don’t know if this is wise, or if you will agree to join me. I do know I badly need you, and were there some means of transporting you here to Adelaide tonight, I would certainly beg you to come.
Elizabeth and Stefan have agreed to let Henry stay with us.
It’s done, and I have sent a telegram to Edith to inform her. I have to tell you — and there is nobody else I could tell, or wish to — that today was one of the worst days of my life. I felt ashamed of what I was doing. I began to wonder if I was doing this for Editb, or for Henry’s future, or just to assuage my guilty conscience. I suspect the latter.
I think you can gather, my love, that tonight I am not very proud of myself. You will no doubt say, ‘You wanted custody of your grandson, and you got it.’ Perhaps so. But I got it by using emotional blackmail against my twenty-two-year-old daughter. You would have been ashamed of me. I was like some threadbare and second-rate troubadour, using all his theatrical tricks.
Or worse, a shabby politician practising his trade of deception and hypocrisy.
I felt angry at my squalid tactics. I was about to give up, when, to my surprise, Stefan agreed. He managed to make quite clear what he thought of me, and I took it meekly, as beggars must when their pleas are granted and their empty bowls are filled.
It’s done, and Edith will be relieved and happy, but I shall not sleep well. Thankfully I can end by telling you this comes with all my love, and know that in a day of deceits and half lies, that that at least is true.
Hannah sat holding the letter long after she had finished reading it. He had not often had occasion to write to her in the past, and certainly never a letter like this. She felt his remorse and pleading in every line. As for Melbourne, she knew it may not be wise, but there could be no question.
She would be there to meet him.
Mrs Forbes sometimes found it hard to believe this was the same nervous, timid woman for whom she had come to be housekeeper over twelve years ago. It had been a strange house, a most unhappy place, and if she and her husband had not been well paid, he as coach driver and in charge of the gardens as well, they would have sought other positions. She had felt sorry for Miss Lizzie; it was a wretched atmosphere for a girl to grow up in, her parents detesting each other, the girl able to make little real contact with her pale shadow of a mother, clearly preferring her father’s company. He, while indulging her every whim, was too seldom there. Too frequently engaged in business matters, or else spending time at the house in Paddington, which she and her husband knew all about — the house of the slim good -looking woman who had once been a dancer, and whose name was Hannah Lockwood. There was not much Mr and Mrs Forbes did not know, but they were loyal, and while they speculated in the privacy of their own sitting room on the suicide attempt, Mrs Forbes made it clear she would not tolerate gossip in the servants’ quarters, and that any idle talk would lead to instant dismissal.
‘The doctor said she had a dizzy spell. And since Dr Fairfax is the leading physician in Sydney, we can assume he knows what he’s talking about. So if any reporters pester you, you all know what happened.’
The staff had stood firm, whatever they may have wondered, and Mrs Forbes had assembled them in-front of the house several months later to welcome their mistress home from hospital. That had been a mistake. Edith Patterson had seemed frightened, almost terrified at the reception, wanting only to be taken from the ambulance in a stretcher, and upstairs via the small private lift which had been installed for her during her absence. There a newly purchased wheelchair was waiting. She had rarely been seen outside her bedroom in the first few weeks. Half of the top floor had been reconstructed, converting spare rooms to create a private suite for her, including a small sitting room and her own bathroom. It seemed to Mrs Forbes that her employer would spend much of her future time hiding up there.
Then Miss Lizzie had brought the children for the long-awaited visit, and everything had changed. The house, the people in it, and most of all Edith Patterson, had been transformed.
Even now she could hear Henry chattering to his grandmother, her replies to him, and then the sounds of their laughter. It seemed as if they had an inexhaustible fund of things to say to each other, and secrets they shared, more like friends than a small boy and his middle-aged grandma. She doted on the child, that was obvious to them all, but it was the boy’s response that was astonishing. Each morning when he woke, his first stop was her room, where he sat on the foot of her bed and talked, until it was time for him to go down to breakfast, leaving the trained nurse to bathe and dress his grandmother. When he came home from a walk, he would immediately go looking for her to relate what he had seen; describing the ducks in the park, or a kookaburra that had swooped and captured a worm in front of his eyes, or how the bellbirds made him think of the chimes of the clock in her room, or else the latest escapade of the dalmatian pup whom they had named Polly. It seemed sometimes as if he went on these walks only to garner such minutiae of news to bring home to her.
It was strange how little he seemed to miss his parents, or his brother Carl, or baby sister Maria. Mrs Forbes wondered how Miss Lizzie and her husband felt about that, and how the Senator had been able to persuade them to part with him. There had been such tension during the time of his journey to South Australia, and almost unbearable anxiety when the telegram came and she had brought it into the drawing room. Henry had been playing with building blocks on the floor, while Mrs Patterson sat in her wheelchair reading the newspaper. She had seen the distinctive envelope, and her hands had trembled so much that she had been unable to open it.
‘Please,’ she had said, and Mrs Forbes tore it open. ‘Read it to me.’ Her face had been almost bloodless, her eyes distraught, ready for misery.
He stays, was all the message said. She had read the words out, and heard the long sigh of relief that was like a prayer answered. Mrs Forbes was also thankful. If Henry’s presence meant extra work for the staff, she knew they would not complain. None of them would wish a return to the bleak days of the past. Least of all the housekeeper herself, who so well remembered working in that unhappy atmosphere of rigid silence. To her, the laughter of grandmother and grandson was an extraordinary gift, in a house that had known so little of it for so long.
Hymns were sung, and the Archbishop prayed for the Almighty to endow the new King Edward with might and main, with the wisdom and longevity of his mother, and with an abundance of divine gifts. The Duke of York, wearing the uniform of an Admiral of the British Fleet, then declared the Commonwealth’s first Parliament open in the name of His Majesty, after which the massive Exhibition Hall was filled with a fanfare of trumpets.
Hannah stood among the invited guests, as they looked down on the pageantry. Below her were the immaculate uniforms of the military escort, guarding the frock-coated and top-hatred elected. Barton and his cabinet occupied the place of honour, and around them were the members of the Protectionist party, then George Reid and his Free Trade opposition, as well as sixteen members of the Labor Party, who would have the balance of power. On the outskirts, as if placed there to show their lack of real authority, were the thirty-six members of the Senate. It was not difficult to pick out William’s tall figure as they took the oath of allegiance.
It was true, as he predicted, that Melbourne was determined to show Sydney the real meaning of imperial grandeur. Huge processions, concerts, fireworks, the glitter of the electric globes on the parapets and domes of the Exhibition buildings, all these, the newspapers proclaimed, had shown the rest of the country — in particular the harbour city to the north — the style with which Federation should be celebrated. Each day brought vast crowds in their thousands to admire the displays, to cheer the Duke and his Duchess, and to confirm Victorian opinion that it had been a wise choice to select Melbourne as the current seat of the Federal Parliament, until a permanent site was found. That, under the agreement between the States, would be in New South Wales, but not within a hundred miles of Sydney.
STILL TOO CLOSE, the Melbourne Age thundered, while the Sydney journals made snide comments on the tawdry arches and cheap tin pot decorations of the southern city.
‘We’re still a bunch of states in search of a national identity,’ William said, in the privacy of their compartment as he and Hannah took a train home after the Senate adjourned. ‘We can’t agree where to build Parliament House, we still play “God Save the King” because no one can compose our own anthem, and we haven’t even got a damn flag yet.’
The Union Jack was used on ceremonial occasions, while a nation-wide contest had been launched to select the design of a new flag. All those considered worthy would then be forwarded to London for the approval or rejection of the British Government. William thought it was a disgrace, and had said so, publicly and often loudly. He repeatedly voiced an opinion, not universally popular, that the purpose of Federation was to create a new and independent country, and that while it may keep its allegiances with Britain, h
e asked why the Commonwealth of Australia should have the anthem and the flag of another nation.
It was an attitude already making him a subject of concern to those on the conservative wing of his own party.
Stefan heard it first, a distant noise like an angry bumble-bee; then came the sound of a horse whinnying, cattle towing, and a series of dogs barking. The noise was moving closer. Elizabeth was painting the new extension to the side verandah, and she turned to listen, wondering what it might be. Sigrid came running, hand in hand with Carl and carrying Maria, and they all stood and watched with amazement as what seemed to be a gleaming metal chariot chugged along the dirt track towards the vineyard.
Elizabeth had seen many horseless carriages in Sydney, but the sight of one here, sturdy and bouncing on its four-wheeled frame, its driver clad in a dustcoat and wearing goggles, was almost bizarre. Their newly purchased cow clearly thought so, looking up from the lush grass by the creek where she was tethered, giving vent to a plaintive bellow. It was answered by a bray from the car horn. A pony in the field on the far side of the creek galloped off in terror. Carl, clinging to Sigrid’s hand, began to cry.
Stefan picked him up, laughing, and said, ‘Look, it’s only a motor carriage. Just like Uncle Gerhardt’s cart, only this has an engine instead of a horse.’
Carl was not reassured. He clung desperately to his father, and looked away from the beast as it approached. In front of the house, the driver switched off the engine and all was quiet. While Carl sneaked a look, feeling distinctly braver now all the loud noise had stopped, the man removed his goggles and dustcoat to reveal that beneath it he was wearing a formal suit, winged collar and tie. Elizabeth dared not look at Stefan, in case she got the giggles.
‘Mr and Mrs Muller?’ he asked, producing a document case and climbing down to meet them.
Stefan found his hand being vigorously shaken.
‘Harpur — of Henderson, Hanlon, Potts and Harpur.’ He turned to shake Elizabeth’s hand with equal vigour. ‘Solicitors, of North Terrace, Adelaide.’
A Bitter Harvest Page 19