“No,” I said.
“No?” She looked at me with her intense eyes.
“I would want to do the same,” I said.
“And why would you go?”
I could only say perhaps to remember; perhaps to feel again what it had been like so long before.
She seemed pleased with this. “Yes,” she said. “Yes.” But her expression clouded and she said, as if to herself, “I have put it off long enough. Now it has become necessary to me.”
She met my eye and I became unaccountably confused, as if I had eavesdropped. But then the others came in: Uncle John wearing his Harris-tweed jacket, carrying his wide-brimmed hat, mur-muring still that it was preposterous; and Judith glancing at me in a way at once curious yet detached.
“Fifteen minutes for your breakfast,” said Grandmother Warden.
Behind her the wide black stove was open at the top, casting an aureole about her slight body. I had finished now and went outside into the morning. The sun had struck narrowly into the valley through a gap to the north-east. Although the valley walls were in shadow, the creek was in sunshine. Birds were diving from the forest to catch insects, darting through sunlight, then soaring back to shadows. As they dived, the sun momentarily brightened their bodies, so that the valley was full of flashing wings and choir-like singing.
We left before six, Grandmother Warden next to Uncle John, Judith and I in the back, well apart in our corners.
I remember this journey with particular clarity; not only because of its ending, but because I felt all day that, led by this aged woman, we were thrusting time aside, going back to the beginnings of my mother’s family. Perhaps my grandmother anticipated this sort of reaction from me; perhaps this was another reason for her taking me. And yet I knew little enough of the family history, except the story of the wreck. The Schomberg had struck a rock off Curdie’s River, but the passengers had been saved. Grandmother Warden and Great-aunt Elizabeth and various brothers and sisters had been with their parents. But when the family had continued the journey in a passing ship, Grandmother Warden had gone the other way to Warrnarnbool.
This fact I had always accepted unquestioningly, but I see now it was an extraordinary division, especially in a Victorian family, and one placed in such circumstances. Great-aunt Elizabeth I had known well. She had been a maiden lady a year or two older than Grandmother Warden, a gentle, absent-minded soul whom I had never once heard mention her sister, or even the Schomberg.
In low gear we rose out of the valley, the sky filling the windscreen, the engine no doubt sounding like an aeroplane to those waking below. Grandmother Warden wore a motoring veil, though veils had long since become unnecessary, and she sat well back in her seat as if braced for shock.
She motored only three or four times a year, then always to Colac to shop and to see her solicitor, and in December to buy Christmas presents. I fancy she disapproved of the ease with which Colac could be reached by car: once it had taken her two days on horseback during winter. Again, she had sent Uncle John to the doctor there, as a boy, with the written description of an illness which had struck two of the younger children. And from that, as the practice was, the doctor had diagnosed. Uncle John had had prescriptions made up and had ridden back, down through the forest, across the range, into the valley. But the illness had been meningitis and one of the children was already dead. So she disapproved, I believe, of the ease with which one could go to Corac now.
Out of the gate we went and up the range, the sea far down through the rear window and the forest ahead.
“There,” said Grandmother Warden, “is the old bullock road— and a good road it was—cut by LaTrobe and Roadknight right to the lighthouse.”
It was a rutted track on the hills, impossibly inclined to the sea. Our valley was below us on the other side with Phillips’s place coming into view, its smoke unwavering, its cows black-and-white toys. Uncle John changed to second gear, but every now and then he grunted impatiently and changed back to low. For three miles we clung to the edge of the valley, rising slowly into the colder air. Then we turned along the ridge, climbing still, but no longer steeply. And there we entered the forest. It looked more than usually impenetrable, more than usually mysterious. Although it was summer, the air was chill and moist and a mist rose off the treetops, far up where the sun touched them. The noise of our engine startled crimson lories into flight along the forest edge.
“After a few more miles,” said Uncle John, “it’s downhill all the way, but twisty, Mater. I hope it doesn’t upset you.”
“And why should it upset me? Why should it ?” Grandmother Warden accompanied this with taps on the floor with her stick. Nobody answered her.
Beyond Laver’s Hill we swung left and right, mile on mile down the western side of the range, Grandmother Warden sitting bolt upright, one hand still on her stick, never taking her eyes from the road; Judith occasionally glancing at me in a curious yet indifferent way. I was beginning to feel clammy and nauseated, my stomach moving loosely inside me. I leant back in the corner, my eyes closed, until I heard Uncle John say, “We’re down, Mater, and there’s the Gellibrand.”
“Ah, poor Mr Gellibrand,” said Grandmother Warden vaguely.
I opened my eyes and saw a broad stream, dark-looking, flowing under low hills. The sunshine of the higher country was gone and the sky was overcast.
“He was very obstinate, they say,” said Uncle John.
Who was he?” asked Judith.
“A Tasmanian gentleman,” said Grandmother Warden. He and Mr Hesse explored in the Otways twenty years before we arrived Mr Allan, from this side of the range, found poor Mr Gellibrand’s remains up this river many years later.”
“Someone else’s remains, I think, Mater.”
“Perhaps. At all events, it was a sad happening.”
He ignored his guide,” Uncle John persisted, “followed the Barwon into the forest, and that’s the last they heard of either of them. I doubt if they reached this side of the range.”
“Perhaps not,” said Grandmother Warden testily. “I only say it was sad; very sad.”
“Of course,” Uncle John conceded.
Judith smiled faintly, but, catching my eye, was serious again.
The Gellibrand ran parallel to the coast, seeking outlet through a line of low hills. The sea was yet invisible, but from its direction streamed broken cloud, driven by the wind. The forest and ranges were gone and the atmosphere was of winter rather than summer. Spindrift hung over a rolling, dreary country where growth was stunted and bent by the wind. We were not far from what we called “the shipwreck country”. The Loch Ard lay there and the Red Jacket and the Newfield and, more important to us than all of these, the Schoenberg.
I looked at Grandmother Warden’s straight back. Clearly she had no intention of letting the sea daunt her, any more than it had daunted her then. When we came in sight of it, still some hundreds of yards away, she lifted her veil, like a knight lifting his visor. “John, I should like to stop for lunch where poor Dr Carmichael and his family were lost.”
“Where Dr Carmichael and his family were lost”, as if this chapter of history had occurred a week before.
“It will be blowing a gale out there, Mater.”
“We can sit in the car.”
“Very well,” said Uncle John. “Very well.”
So we took a track through heath and low scrub until the sea lay less than fifty yards away, its range of sound overpowering the noise of the car, its spray blowing on our windows. We pulled up beside the Loch Ard Gorge and parked in wind that rocked the car on its springs.
I stepped outside and began wiping the windows, my clothes lashing about me. Through half-closed eyes I could see the lines of waves careering towards the cliffs. Their sounds had long been familiar to me: the background roar, the long-drawn sighs, the tearing sounds as of giant sheets of calico being torn across. I could see the incredibly narrow entrance of the gorge, with its torrents of white water pou
ring back off the rocks and, farther in, the crescent of protected beach.
When I got back into the car Grandmother Warden was staring seawards while the others ate their lunch.
“There’s nothing to see of the ship, John?”
“It was lost nearly fifty years ago, Mater.”
“Of course,” she said.
She was looking at the waves with pursed lips, as if assessing an adversary. “There was no chance to swim?”
“It was a sea like this and they were thrown against the cliffs—except the two young people.”
He began to go over the main events of the wreck: the captain’s uncertainty of his whereabouts; the ship striking the reef; the miracle which brought Tom Pearce, then Eva Carmichael through the entrance when all the rest were dead.
When he had finished, Grandmother Warden said, “God be with them.” She stared for a long time at the waves and then, as if embarrassed, said, “Children, go and stretch your legs.”
We stepped into the turmoil of noise and spray, Judith walking ahead to leave me in no doubt she was master. She bent into the wind, going towards the entrance of the gorge, her plait streaming behind her, on until she reached the brink of the headland above the sea. Standing there at the edge she looked back at me tauntingly. In the same moment the wind ballooned her skirt and her feet moved on the rock. She swayed precariously, then, as if blown inland, came running back, her face white. I followed her down the track to the gorge out of sight of the car. She burst into tears.
“How can I face her ?” she said.
“Face who?” I asked.
“Oh, you are a fool!” she cried, immediately recovering herself.
She turned away and dried her eyes, and we went back to the car. Its windows were so misted again with salt that the others could have seen nothing, nor did they say a word; but on the way to Port Campbell and beyond, Judith sat sullenly in her corner.
All along the coast we paused wherever wrecks had occurred. At these places Uncle John would mention the name of the ship and Grandmother Warden would refer to it as if the calamity had occurred only a few weeks before.
Because of these delays it was almost three o’clock before we neared our destination. When we came to the wide, dark estuary of Curdie’s River, Grandmother Warden stopped us and had me clean the windows again.
We crossed the long bridge to the western side, where Peterborough huddled under the wind, its roofs rusted, its windows blurred, its plants succumbed to the sea. Old though its few houses looked to me, to Grandmother Warden they were new. There had been blacks, she said, watching from the shore, ready to take what they could get when the baggage was washed onto the beach; but otherwise no one, not a house, not a white man closer than Dr Curdie up the river.
We drove to a headland twenty or thirty feet above the sea. Below, through a sandy beach, the river had its outlet. Directly off the river mouth, perhaps three hundred yards out, two rocks, or two protrusions of the one rock, rose four or five feet above the sea, mushroom-shaped, the only part of an underlying reef standing clear of broken water. Over this reef the waves broke with cracking sounds audible above the general roar.
“The Schomberg Rock,” said Uncle John.
“Yes,” said Grandmother Warden quietly. She ran the window down and looked out from it. “There was a sandbar running towards the shore?”
“It was washed out many years ago,” said Uncle John. “And the ship?”
“She’s under ten feet of sand.”
“Oh dear,” she said; and again, “Oh dear.”
We sat there saying nothing, awed to see this aged woman looking again on the cliffs and this sea and the dreary hinterland. Out there she had stood on the deck of a lost ship as the bows pounded the rocks and the forbidding new land rose and fell beyond the rail.
The open window was on the lee side of the car, and from this Grandmother Warden continued to stare, her cheeks pinkened. Uncle John said, “I think we could leave your grandmother alone.”
Since she did not demur, we stepped out into the wind. Uncle ohn contented himself with walking up and down the headland, his clothes flapping about him, but Judith began descending to the beach. I followed her in the tremendous din of waves.
It is easy in retrospect to see the significance to Grandmother Warden of the day’s remaining incident—a trivial enough incident, comical even. The waves were driving far up the sand, and spume was blowing the full length of the beach; nevertheless, Judith took off her shoes and began to walk in the water. Gradually she put ten or twelve feet between us until she was a foot deep, the backwash curling against her legs.
I treated this exhibition with indifference. Behind us the car still overlooked the beach and Uncle John still walked up and down the road. I was looking towards him when a wave larger than the rest washed over my shoes. At the same time I saw Judith thrown to her hands and knees.
My first impulse was to laugh, but the receding water rolled over her as if she had been a piece of wood. I ran down and helped her to her feet. This, I suppose, would have been enough; in fact, I thought she hardly needed help. But on an impulse, and thinking I was observed and should play the part of a man, and being at the same time struck by the next wave, I picked her up bodily and ran through the drag of water, both of us drenched and Judith kicking wildly.
When I set her down I thought she would hit me. It had been her second humiliation for the day, and this, I suppose, was catastrophic. She shouted that she could look after herself very well, and started back to the car. I walked half-despondent, half-amused after her. It was raining, but the rain could scarcely have wet us more.
When we reached the car Grandmother Warden was expostulating angrily and Uncle John was attempting to calm her. She was not angry because our clothes were soaked, or because she had thought Judith was in danger; in fact, I had little idea what had upset her.
“The girl was quite capable of looking after herself,” she said to me.
I said bewilderedly that I was sorry.
Judith glared at me from her corner of the car, and Grandmother Warden craned round and fixed her falcon gaze on me. “I’m sorry,” I kept saying.
“Good lord!” exclaimed Uncle John. “The boy only did what any man might have done in the circumstances.”
“Let us go home,” said Grandmother Warden, ignoring him.
And so the “pilgrimage” ended, and I felt myself the cause of its ruination. We drove most of the way home in silence, keenly aware that Grandmother Warden was displeased.
At dusk, when we reached the valley, she went into the house on Judith’s arm, walking very slowly. She said suddenly to Judith and me, “Before you go to bed, children, I should like you to come to my room.”
Her voice was no longer angry; only tired.
Judith went to the bedroom before me, to give Grandmother Warden her tea. She was in bedraggled clothes still, her plait streaked with salt. Grandmother Warden was lying against pillows in the great blackwood bed my grandfather had built, lying to one side of it as if, even after fifty years, she expected her husband to return.
I could never come into this room without feeling that even now my grandfather still lived. He had made the furniture, and on the walls were photographs of him: one as a young man in the uniform of an officer of the Blackball Line; another, twenty-five or thirty years later, when he had grown a beard and life in the new country had reflected in his eyes, and a last one of him working on the frame of the Warden Vale house.
In the lamplight I had the impression that Grandmother Warden’s long accumulation of years had in a few hours overtaken her. Although she was sitting up, a bed-jacket round her shoulders, her hair in two steel-grey plaits, she looked older by a generation than she had looked that same morning.
She said vaguely, “I have something to tell you.” Then she lapsed into silence, looking beyond us. Under its glass dome on the mantel her year-clock rotated left and right, left and right, silently.
“You knew Elizabeth,” she said all at once. She did not say, “Great-aunt Elizabeth”, simply “Elizabeth”. Then she stopped again, her lips moving silently.
Her next words at first seemed inconsequential, as if her mind had wandered to other happenings. “I could not expect her forgiveness,” she said, “but I could have sought it. He was promised to her, you see? And all that voyage I tried to take him. And I did take him. You understand?” she said, looking at us sharply. “You understand?”
Neither of us knew what to answer. As if she had mustered concentration again she said resonantly, You understand?” Judith could only say, “Perhaps you should sleep, Grandma.” For my part I felt aware suddenly of my lack of years. Why was this being said to us? If it had to be said, why not to our parents? I concentrated in embarrassment on the clock’s slow rotations. “We were all on the sand by the mouth of the river,” she said. “That was the last time the family was together. I used to think if I went back, I might feel near them all. But I never went; not until today.”
I saw that she had moved infinitely far from us, back to the beach with the surf behind her and the Schoenberg rolling against the reef and the blacks waiting along the cliff tops; and men and women, absurdly attired in London clothes, standing on the edge of that overpowering country.
And then, as if to shed light on the day’s happenings, she said, “He carried me from the little boat and set me on the sand. And then we went away together, with nothing, to start our lives. And I was eighteen.”
When we heard this, I looked away from her. I heard Judith say unsteadily, “You are tired.” She looked at me, and I went out and asked Uncle John to come. Then I walked about outside, along the creek.
That was our last Christmas at Warden Vale. Grandmother Warden died the next winter. It was a severe winter, the creek running a banker for weeks on end, the cloud descending into the valley. We went there several times, my mother taking her turn at the bedside. Grandmother Warden was in her room all day by then and her mind was seldom unclouded. She died in the August.
Best Australian Short Stories Page 22