On the trembling edge of pain, his mind winced away. It was better not to think, and he was happy enough now, so why bother about the past? Nothing could change it. Live for today, he thought, and if you can, work towards a better future. But where God came into that philosophy was something of a mystery.
It was on the way back that Mary Maddox brought up the matter of the books. ‘Lew says you could do with something to read. I’ll sort out a few novels for you and let you have them before I go back to Melbourne.’
Her directness threw him a little, forcing a stammer to his thanks.
‘It’s all right,’ she smiled, ‘I’m a keen reader myself.’
He caught Ned’s louring glance and for a moment regretted mentioning the subject to anyone. If Mary noticed it, she pretended not to, and a moment later was talking about organizing a picnic in the hills for the following day. It was a public holiday and likely to be one of the last fine days of autumn, and she was determined they should all make the best of it. Her father shook his head; he did not want to go trailing miles into the hills, to be faced by crowds of city-dwellers. His wife nodded her agreement, but thought it a good idea for the younger ones.
‘I’ll fix some food, if you want to get yourselves off.’
Liam glanced at Ned, who was being unusually reticent. Lewis chided him, saying that all he ever did was go into town to drink in bars. A day in the hills would be good for him. Ned’s scowl deepened.
Lewis turned to the others. ‘Billy will come, I know – what about Arnie, and you, Bert?’
Arnie was keen, but Murphy and Bert and little Nobby all had things to do, apparently. As though he was bestowing a favour, instead of the other way around, Ned eventually allowed himself to be persuaded. Mary teased him unmercifully, and for a while Liam thought he would back out, but on Monday morning, he was ready and waiting in his smartest coat and breeches.
In boots and divided skirt, Mary looked good, Liam thought; and so it seemed did Ned, who contrived to keep his horse close to hers most of the way. Liam’s mount did not take kindly to being kept at the back, but he had no intention of spoiling Ned’s pitch: the matter of the books was bad enough.
As ever when he left the farm, Lewis was in his element, and with an interested listener was keen to identify the various species of shrubs and trees along the way. All along the gullies, edging every meandering creek, were the tree ferns, their delicate fronds filtering the sunlight, making dappled patterns across the tracks. It was green and fresh, alive with the fluttering of bright cockatoos and tinkling bell-birds, and the sudden sharp patter of rain-showers on shimmering leaves. And when the rain stopped, as it did within minutes, the aromatic scent of the gums permeated the air, delicate and invigorating, like new green wine.
Liam started to talk about his first weeks in Australia, the journey, the logging camps, how he had come to the Maddox farm. Lewis was keen to hear what Liam had seen and done, but it transpired that logging was an activity he deplored. The native Australian species, he declared with conviction, would soon be extinct unless it was stopped.
‘And all that will be left,’ he added derisively, ‘will be the precious exotics imported by gardeners for their wealthy and ignorant clients!’
Casting his eyes over the dense woodland which surrounded them, Liam doubted it. Knowing from experience how many thousands of acres there must be in this small part of Victoria, he guessed it would take an army a lifetime to clear the Dandenong ranges. But he kept the thought to himself.
Meanwhile, despite objections from Lewis, Mary set out their picnic in a clearing near Belgrave. The severed trunks, her brother declared, looked like amputated elephant’s feet, and he would not eat his food amongst such carnage. They all laughed, but he took his share back into the forest, joining them only as the little party pressed on towards the settlement.
Beside tracks and roads which ran off into the trees, Liam spied campers in tents, and slab-sided huts with bark roofs. By contrast, there were imposing mansions too, but the little town was constructed mainly of weatherboard and corrugated iron. To his amazement, there was also a narrow-gauge railway running to Emerald and Gembrook.
With the eagerness of a child, Arnie leapt at Mary’s suggestion of taking a trip on the train. The horses were tethered in the shade, their fares paid, and they clambered aboard. Tiny carriages, open to the elements, rattled behind a miniature locomotive which chugged and skidded up seemingly impossible gradients and around tight, snaking bends. City folk, out to enjoy a fine holiday weekend, exclaimed over unspoiled beauty, while Liam was intrigued by the feats of engineering necessary to drive the line through.
Conscious of the shortening afternoon, they travelled only as far as Emerald, returning by the next train. Even so, the sun was well down in the sky by the time they unhitched the horses. Abandoning the scenic route on Ned’s advice, they took the longer but safer road home, arriving just after dark. Mrs Maddox was anxious enough to give them a scolding, but her daughter was unrepentant. She had had a wonderful day, she said, and in that, Liam knew, she spoke for them all.
Liam got his books, Mary’s selection first, because she was returning to the hospital in Melbourne. With her departure and the evidence of her gift on his shelf, Ned’s comments became more than usually caustic. Liam ignored him, burying his head in a fat, well-read edition of Dickens’ Bleak House. Before he had finished that, Lewis came over to the bunkhouse with a dozen or so others, covering a wide range of subjects from the flora and fauna of Australia to biographies of eminent explorers and empire-builders.
In a few weeks Liam had gone through the life of Captain James Cook, a Yorkshireman like himself, and a fairly recent assessment of the wool trade, with its opposite pole in Bradford. He remembered that his mother’s father had been a wool merchant, and that set off a stream of unwelcome associations. After that, glancing at the novels, he skipped Wuthering Heights and its companion volume, Jane Eyre, and settled for something less emotional.
What he could not avoid, however, were his own memories. As the fine weather began to break, they became increasingly more insistent. Watching bronze and yellow beech leaves scatter across Mrs Maddox’s garden, it came to him that in England it would be spring, and instead of fading marigolds and fuschias, his mother’s garden would be dancing with daffodils. He thought of that mass of golden flowers along the ramparts, and the Minster’s towers gleaming against a bright blue sky, and felt an unexpected lump come to his throat. In that moment he would have given almost anything to see York again, to be able to walk beside its broad, slow-moving river and watch the barges unloading along the staiths. Not that he wanted to leave Australia, Liam told himself, simply that he would have liked to reassure himself that York was still there, unchanged. From where he stood, it might well have disappeared forever.
Moved by a sense of guilt, a few days later he sat down to write to his brother, fulfilling a promise made so long ago that it had been forgotten for months. The letter said little about his journey out, concentrating instead upon his present good fortune, and the excellence of his employers.
‘I seem to have been accepted here,’ he added in closing, ‘and intend to stay for as long as they’ll have me. I’m saving hard, though, because I want a place of my own one day.’
That was true. Except to the library, Liam did not often go into town, preferring to busy himself in the tack room, polishing saddles or repairing broken bits of harness. On one particularly cold, wet Saturday, however, when the others had gone off on their usual jaunt, he settled down on his bunk to read. Crossing the yard, Mrs Maddox looked in with some surprise. It was far too cold, she said, to be sitting there; if he wanted to, he could come inside.
In the warm kitchen, surrounded by the comforting smell of cakes and new baked bread, the murmur of women’s voices lulled him into reverie. Staring into the fire, he was soon drifting pleasantly, at home in the cottage on a winter’s afternoon, his mother rolling out pastry, her wedding ring clicking
rhythmically against a hollow earthenware rolling-pin.
Comfort and an awareness of affection enveloped him, he was warm and happy and there would be scones and home-made jam for tea. As his mother brushed past to check the oven, she ruffled his hair and told him to move, his long legs were in the way...
‘Billy, will you move – I want to get to the fire.’
Laughter brought him back with a start. Ella, the buxom girl who helped in the house, was nudging his feet; Mrs Maddox was chuckling as she rolled fresh pastry. Panic-stricken for a moment, Liam stared from one to the other, feeling like a child amongst strangers, whose mother has suddenly abandoned him. Like a child he wanted to cry, was horribly afraid that he might, and with his chest hard and tight with disappointment, left them abruptly.
He heard Ella’s sudden: ‘Well!’ followed by a nervous giggle, and footsteps which halted as he slammed the door. Drenched by rain as he crossed the yard, Liam gave vent to tears he could not control, all the more violent because they had been restrained for so long. But before he had reached the shelter of the bunkroom, grief had turned again to fury, to that same impotent rage which had so consumed him a year ago.
Regardless of wet clothes, he lay on his bed, staring at nothing, while the rain drummed with steady monotony on the corrugated roof. It grew dark, but no sense of urgency possessed him; Ned and the others would not be back much before midnight. He was startled when the door opened and a solitary figure entered, shrouded by a cape. A woman’s voice uttered a muffled exclamation, set something down with a clatter and proceeded to light a lamp.
‘Here,’ Mrs Maddox announced. ‘It’s some dinner I’ve brought you. Get it eaten now before Ewan catches me. I’ve tried to keep it warm, thinking you was coming in for it – ’
He took the tray, for a moment too astonished even to thank her. She stood at the foot of his bunk in the long room, regarding him with tense concern. Liam could not meet that gaze. Mumbling his thanks, he began to eat, amazed at his own hunger.
‘Homesick, are you? Only natural — I was myself for a long time. But it catches you unexpected...’ When he did not reply, she sighed with a touch of exasperation, just as his own mother did sometimes. With a sharp click of her tongue, Mrs Maddox added: ‘Don’t say much, do you? Might do some good if you did. Ah well, you know where I am if you want to talk – and it will go no further.’
Liam believed her, but did not know what to say. ‘Thank you,’ was all he could manage. Ridiculously moved by her kindness, nevertheless he wished she would leave him alone. As though sensing it, she turned to go.
‘Don’t forget now.’
He did not forget, but gratitude at that time seemed no more than an additional burden he could do without. A small part of him wanted to be mothered and comforted, but his own image of manhood mocked it. There was, too, the deeper fear of what he might say once he began to talk. Embarrassment made him gruff with Mrs Maddox for a while after that, but she did not seem to notice and treated him no differently. He was, however, glad of the drier weather which kept all of them busy.
The Dandenong Journal came to them once a week, and Melbourne newspapers were brought whenever Lewis or his sister Mary came home. Towards the end of July, the rumours of impending war in Europe grew stronger, setting the whole area agog with excitement. It was all anyone talked about, and the eagerness to get into town to find out more, was suddenly stronger than the allure of bars and female company. If Europe erupted, the consensus of opinion was that Britain would not stay out of it, and if Britain stepped in, then so would Australia. Older, and with two sons of fighting age, Ewan Maddox tried to quash the jingoism at his table. His wife was openly anxious, but the men were obsessed by the topic and would not leave it alone.
Liam was surprised by the evidence of conflicting passions amongst men he thought he knew well. Old Murphy, whom he had imagined to be as Australian as the outback, gave vent to such invective against England that Liam was almost convinced his list of injustices were personal instead of two generations old. Ned, on the other hand, who could claim a similar inheritance through his Tyneside Irish grandparents, thought Murphy was a silly old fool and said so. Nursing his own secret connections with both England and her other island, Liam simply listened while the argument threatened to come to blows. Enraged by the three who were against him, Murphy suddenly forgot his age and would have taken them all on. He danced like a wizened old gnome while Arnie, whose strength was greater than his intellect, held him back.
It seemed that only Arnie and Liam were neutral, the former because he did not understand what it was all about, and the latter because his own future was more important to him than somebody else’s past.
There were plenty like him, but on his trips into town it seemed there was always a fight going on somewhere, and it was not always a matter of national prejudice. The Irish, who were numerous and loved a good argument anyway, were the most noticeable; but there were also well-settled Englishmen who professed no love for the mother country which had either kicked them out or provided so little they’d felt obliged to leave. For them, Australia should stay out of the coming conflict. Their opinions were not popular with the overtly patriotic youngsters who had been brought up on a scholastic diet of Empire and militarism and absolute allegiance to the monarchy.
Liam tried very hard to stay out of it. If a direct opinion was demanded, all he would say was that it would never come to war, and they were all being premature. That did not endear him, and more often than not provoked a bit of sniping from Ned, who accused him of being ‘bloody clever’. When they were on their own, however, he pressed Liam for an answer.
‘So what if it does come to it, Billy, what will you do?’
‘Look, leave me alone, will you?’ Liam snapped back, exasperated beyond endurance. ‘I’ve just bloody well got here, for heaven’s sake, I’ve no intentions of dashing back at the first trumpet-call!’
Ned was aghast, ‘Well, of all the…’ He broke off, letting whatever insult had sprung to mind die before it reached his lips. ‘You want to be careful who you say that to, mate – them as don’t know you might get the wrong idea.’
Liam dropped the harness he was working on and stood up, his fists clenched. ‘All right, spit it out! You think because I’m not waving a flag and backing you up, I’m some sort of coward!’
‘No! No, honest, I don’t. But you being English and that, I can’t figure you out. I’d’ve thought you’d be dead keen!’
‘Well, I’m not. For a start, I like it here. I came here to settle, to make something of myself by my own efforts. I’m not rushing to throw all that away. And another thing – I’ve got a lot of respect for Ewan Maddox. He didn’t have to take me on, but he did, and he kept his word. How’s he going to manage if everybody takes off together? Have you thought of that?’
‘Same as everybody else, I suppose.’
‘And what about your grand ideas?’
‘They’ll just have to wait,’ came the quick reply. ‘Do you think I could sit here, stashing my pay every week, while other blokes go off to do the fighting? Not me, mate! Not me.’
That stirred uncomfortable considerations. Lighting a cigarette, Liam went outside. He handed the packet to Ned, who lit up with a certain grim satisfaction.
‘I won’t pretend I don’t know what you mean,’ Liam said slowly. ‘I’ve got a young brother at home, who said he was going to join up...’
That night, remembering the last words they had exchanged on the towpath, he wondered where Robin was now, and what he was doing. He thought of Georgina, too, resurrecting the photograph his brother had taken before that precious world fell apart. She was happy and smiling then: did she smile like that now? He loved her still, knew with absolute certainty that he always would. With a whole year and thirteen thousand miles between them, his feelings for her had not altered one whit; he recalled little things she said, the times they had spent alone together. And it still hurt to look at her captured image.
Ned had no need to be jealous over Mary Maddox. Liam just wished he could tell him so.
A few days later, as he returned chilled and hungry from mending fences on the far border of the property, Mrs Maddox called out from the kitchen that he had a letter waiting. Having had Georgina on his mind for days, he hoped it might be from her, that she might have been given his address from Robin’s letter and written something, anything, to suggest that she understood what had driven him away, missed him, might once have loved him too...
But the letter was from his brother, written from a town with a French name on the island of Jersey. Robin had indeed done as he had threatened that day, and having joined the 2nd Battalion the Green Howards, was now quartered in the Channel Islands. And having a wonderful time, Liam thought as he read the first page, wondering also how much longer the holiday would last. According to Robin, army life was just the ticket; and he seemed as excited at the prospect of war as most of the youth in Dandenong. Liam shook his head.
But just as Liam had glossed over the agonies of his trip out to Australia, so did his brother skip the immediate aftermath of Liam’s departure, except to say that everyone had been upset, their mother especially. He went on to say that Edward had resisted the idea of Robin joining up, right to the moment he went, although his mother had reluctantly given her assent, and that was all he needed.
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