“Treacle!” she said triumphantly.
Dane had been very ill after finding a tin of treacle in Mrs. Smith’s pantry and eating the lot. He admitted the thrust, but countered. “I’m still here, so it can’t be all that poisonous.”
“That’s only because you vomited. If you hadn’t vomited, you’d be dead.”
This was inarguable. He and his sister were much of a height, so he tucked his arm companionably through hers and they sauntered away across the lawn toward their cubbyhouse, which their uncles had erected as instructed amid the down-drooping branches of a pepper tree. Danger from bees had led to much adult opposition to this site, but the children were proven right. The bees dwelled with them amicably. For, said the children, pepper trees were the nicest of all trees, very private. They had such a dry, fragrant smell, and the grapelike clusters of tiny pink globules they bore crumbled into crisp, pungent pink flakes when crushed in the hand.
“They’re so different from each other, Dane and Justine, yet they get along so well together,” said Meggie. “It never ceases to amaze me. I don’t think I’ve ever seen them quarrel, though how Dane avoids quarreling with some one as determined and stubborn as Justine, I don’t understand.”
But Fee had something else on her mind. “Lord, he’s the living image of his father,” she said, watching Dane duck under the lowest fronds of the pepper tree and disappear from sight.
Meggie felt herself go cold, a reflex response which years of hearing people say this had not scotched. It was just her own guilt, of course. People always meant Luke. Why not? There were basic similarities between Luke O’Neill and Ralph de Bricassart. But try as she would, she could never be quite natural when Dane’s likeness to his father was commented upon.
She drew a carefully casual breath. “Do you think so, Mum?” she asked, nonchalantly swinging her foot. “I can never see it myself. Dane is nothing like Luke in nature or attitude to life.”
Fee laughed. It came out as a snort, but it was a genuine laugh. Grown pallid with age and encroaching cataracts, her eyes rested on Meggie’s startled face, grim and ironic. “Do you take me for a fool, Meggie? I don’t mean Luke O’Neill. I mean Dane is the living image of Ralph de Bricassart.”
Lead. Her foot was made of lead. It dropped to the Spanish tiles, her leaden body sagged, the lead heart within her breast struggled against its vast weight to beat. Beat, damn you, beat! You’ve got to go on beating for my son!
“Why, Mum!” Her voice was leaden, too. “Why, Mum, what an extraordinary thing to say! Father Ralph de Bricassart?”
“How many people of that name do you know? Luke O’Neil never bred that boy; he’s Ralph de Bricassart’s son. I knew it the minute I took him out of you at his birth.”
“Then—why haven’t you said something? Why wait until he’s seven years old to make such an insane and unfounded accusation?”
Fee stretched her legs out, crossed them daintily at the ankles. “I’m getting old at last, Meggie. And things don’t hurt as much anymore. What a blessing old age can be! It’s so good to see Drogheda coming back, I feel better within myself because of it. For the first time in years I feel like talking.”
“Well, I must say when you decide to talk you really know how to pick your subject! Mum, you have absolutely no right to say such a thing. It isn’t true!” said Meggie desperately, not sure if her mother was bent on torture or commiseration.
Suddenly Fee’s hand came out, rested on Meggie’s knee, and she was smiling—not bitterly or contemptuously, but with a curious sympathy. “Don’t lie to me, Meggie. Lie to anyone else under the sun, but don’t lie to me. Nothing will ever convince me Luke O’Neill fathered that boy. I’m not a fool, I have eyes. There’s no Luke in him, there never was because there couldn’t be. He’s the image of the priest. Look at his hands, the way his hair grows in a widow’s peak, the shape of his face, the eyebrows, the mouth. Even how he moves. Ralph de Bricassart, Meggie, Ralph de Bricassart.”
Meggie gave in, the enormity of her relief showing in the way she sat, loosely now, relaxed. “The distance in his eyes. That’s what I notice myself most of all. Is it so obvious? Does everyone know, Mum?”
“Of course not,” said Fee positively. “People don’t look any further than the color of the eyes, the shape of the nose, the general build. Like enough to Luke’s. I knew because I’d been watching you and Ralph de Bricassart for years. All he had to do was crook his little finger and you’d have gone running, so a fig for your ‘it’s against the laws of the Church’ when it comes to divorce. You were panting to break a far more serious law of the Church than the one about divorce. Shameless, Meggie, that’s what you were. Shameless!” A hint of hardness crept into her voice. “But he was a stubborn man. His heart was set on being a perfect priest; you came a very bad second. Oh, idiocy! It didn’t do him any good, did it? It was only a matter of time before something happened.”
Around the corner of the veranda someone dropped a hammer, and let fly with a string of curses; Fee winced, shuddered. “Dear heaven, I’ll be glad when they’re done with the screening!” She got back to the subject. “Did you think you fooled me when you wouldn’t have Ralph de Bricassart to marry you to Luke? I knew. You wanted him as the bridegroom, not as the officiating cleric. Then when he came to Drogheda before he left for Athens and you weren’t here, I knew sooner or later he’d have to go and find you. He wandered around the place as lost as a little boy at the Sydney Royal Easter Show. Marrying Luke was the smartest move you made, Meggie. As long as he knew you were pining for him Ralph didn’t want you, but the minute you became somebody else’s he exhibited all the classical signs of the dog in the manger. Of course he’d convinced himself that his attachment to you was as pure as the driven snow, but the fact remained that he needed you. You were necessary to him in a way no other woman ever had been, or I suspect ever will be. Strange,” said Fee with real puzzlement. “I always wondered what on earth he saw in you, but I suppose mothers are always a little blind about their daughters until they’re too old to be jealous of youth. You are about Justine, the same as I was about you.”
She leaned back in her chair, rocking slightly, her eyes half closed, but she watched Meggie like a scientist his specimen.
“Whatever it was he saw in you,” she went on, “he saw it the first time he met you, and it never left off enchanting him. The hardest thing he had to face was your growing up, but he faced it that time he came to find you gone, married. Poor Ralph! He had no choice but to look for you. And he did find you, didn’t he? I knew it when you came home, before Dane was born. Once you had Ralph de Bricassart it wasn’t necessary to stay any longer with Luke.”
“Yes,” sighed Meggie, “Ralph found me. But it didn’t solve anything for us, did it? I knew he would never be willing to give up his God. It was for that reason I was determined to have the only part of him I ever could. His child. Dane.”
“It’s like listening to an echo,” Fee said, laughing her rusty laugh. “You might be me, saying that.”
“Frank?”
The chair scraped; Fee got up, paced the tiles, came back and stared hard at her daughter. “Well, well! Tit for tat, eh, Meggie? How long have you known?”
“Since I was a little girl. Since the time Frank ran away.”
“His father was married already. He was a lot older than me, an important politician. If I told you his name, you’d recognize it. There are streets named for him all over New Zealand, a town or two probably. But for the purpose, I’ll call him Pakeha. It’s Maori for ‘white man,’ but it’ll do. He’s dead now, of course. I have a trace of Maori blood in me, but Frank’s father was half Maori. It showed in Frank because he got it from both of us. Oh, but I loved that man! Perhaps it was the call of our blood, I don’t know. He was handsome. A big man with a mop of black hair and the most brilliant, laughing black eyes. He was everything Paddy wasn’t—cultured, sophisticated, very charming. I loved him to the point of madness. And I thought I’d n
ever love anyone else; I wallowed in that delusion so long I left it too late, too late!” Her voice broke. She turned to look at the garden. “I have a lot to answer for, Meggie, believe me.”
“So that’s why you loved Frank more than the rest of us,” Meggie said.
“I thought I did, because he was Pakeha’s son and the rest belonged to Paddy,” She sat down, made a queer, mournful noise. “So history does repeat itself. I had a quiet laugh when I saw Dane, I tell you.”
“Mum, you’re an extraordinary woman!”
“Am I?” The chair creaked; she leaned forward. “Let me whisper you a little secret, Meggie. Extraordinary or merely ordinary, I’m a very unhappy woman. For one reason or another I’ve been unhappy since the day I met Pakeha. Mostly my own fault. I loved him, but what he did to me shouldn’t happen to any woman. And there was Frank…. I kept hanging on to Frank, and ignoring the rest of you. Ignoring Paddy, who was the best thing ever happened to me. Only I didn’t see it. I was too busy comparing him with Pakeha. Oh, I was grateful to him, and I couldn’t help but see what a fine man he was….” She shrugged. “Well, all that’s past. What I wanted to say was that it’s wrong, Meggie. You know that, don’t you?”
“No, I don’t. The way I see it, the Church is wrong, expecting to take that from her priests as well.”
“Funny, how we always infer the Church is feminine. You stole a woman’s man, Meggie, just as I did.”
“Ralph had absolutely no allegiance to any woman, except to me. The Church isn’t a woman, Mum. It’s a thing, an institution.”
“Don’t bother trying to justify yourself to me. I know all the answers. I thought as you do myself, at the time. Divorce was out of the question for him. He was one of the first people of his race to attain political greatness; he had to choose between me and his people. What man could resist a chance like that to be noble? Just as your Ralph chose the Church, didn’t he? So I thought, I don’t care. I’ll take what I can get of him, I’ll have his child to love at least.”
But suddenly Meggie was too busy hating her mother to be able to pity her, too busy resenting the inference that she herself had made just as big a mess of things. So she said, “Except that I far outdid you in subtlety, Mum. My son has a name no one can take from him, even including Luke.”
Fee’s breath hissed between her teeth. “Nasty! Oh, you’re deceptive, Meggie! Butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth, would it? Well, my father bought my husband to give Frank a name and get rid of me: I’ll bet you never knew that! How did you know?”
“That’s my business.”
“You’re going to pay, Meggie. Believe me, you’re going to pay. You won’t get away with it any more than I did. I lost Frank in the worst way a mother could; I can’t even see him and I long to…. You wait! You’ll lose Dane, too.”
“Not if I can help it. You lost Frank because he couldn’t pull in tandem with Daddy. I made sure Dane had no daddy to harness him. I’ll harness him instead, to Drogheda. Why do you think I’m making a stockman out of him already? He’ll be safe on Drogheda.”
“Was Daddy? Was Stuart? Nowhere is safe. And you won’t keep Dane here if he wants to go. Daddy didn’t harness Frank. That was it. Frank couldn’t be harnessed. And if you think you, a woman, can harness Ralph de Bricassart’s son, you’ve got another think coming. It stands to reason, doesn’t it? If neither of us could hold the father, how can we hope to hold the son?”
“The only way I can lose Dane is if you open your mouth, Mum. And I’m warning you, I’d kill you first.”
“Don’t bother, I’m not worth swinging for. Your secret’s safe with me; I’m just an interested onlooker. Yes indeed, that’s all I am. An onlooker.”
“Oh, Mum! What could possibly have made you like this? Why like this, so unwilling to give?”
Fee sighed. “Events which took place years before you were even born,” she said pathetically.
But Meggie shook her fist vehemently. “Oh, no, you don’t! After what you’ve just told me? You’re not going to get away with flogging that dead horse to me ever again! Rubbish, rubbish, rubbish! Do you hear me, Mum? You’ve wallowed in it for most of your life, like a fly in syrup!”
Fee smiled broadly, genuinely pleased. “I used to think having a daughter wasn’t nearly as important as having sons, but I was wrong. I enjoy you, Meggie, in a way I can never enjoy my sons. A daughter’s an equal. Sons aren’t, you know. They’re just defenseless dolls we set up to knock down at our leisure.”
Meggie stared. “You’re remorseless. Tell me, then, where do we go wrong?”
“In being born,” said Fee.
Men were returning home in thousands upon thousands, shedding their khaki uniforms and slouch hats for civvies. And the Labor government, still in office, took a long, hard look at the great properties of the western plains, some of the bigger stations closer in. It wasn’t right that so much land should belong to one family, when men who had done their bit for Australia needed room for their belongings and the country needed more intensive working of its land. Six million people to fill an area as big as the United States of America, but a mere handful of those six million holding vast tracts in a handful of names. The biggest properties would have to be subdivided, yield up some of their acreages to the war veterans.
Bugela went from 150,000 acres to 70,000; two returned soldiers got 40,000 acres each off Martin King. Rudna Hunish had 120,000 acres, therefore Ross MacQueen lost 60,000 acres and two more returned soldiers were endowed. So it went. Of course the government compensated the graziers, though at lower figures than the open market would have given. And it hurt. Oh, it hurt. No amount of argument prevailed with Canberra; properties as large as Bugela and Rudna Hunish would be partitioned. It was self-evident no man needed so much, since the Gilly district had many thriving stations of less than 50,000 acres.
What hurt the most was the knowledge that this time it seemed the returned soldiers would persevere. After the First World War most of the big stations had gone through the same partial resumption, but it had been poorly done, the fledgling graziers without training or experience; gradually the squatters bought their filched acres back at rock-bottom prices from discouraged veterans. This time the government was prepared to train and educate the new settlers at its own expense.
Almost all the squatters were avid members of the Country Party, and on principle loathed a Labor government, identifying it with blue-collar workers in industrial cities, trade unions and feckless Marxist intellectuals. The unkindest cut of all was to find that the Clearys, who were known Labor voters, were not to see a single acre pared from the formidable bulk of Drogheda. Since the Catholic Church owned it, naturally it was subdivision-exempt. The howl was heard in Canberra, but ignored. It came very hard to the squatters, who always thought of themselves as the most powerful lobby group in the nation, to find that he who wields the Canberra whip does pretty much as he likes. Australia was heavily federal, its state governments virtually powerless.
Thus, like a giant in a Lilliputian world, Drogheda carried on, all quarter of a million acres of it.
The rain came and went, sometimes adequate, sometimes too much, sometimes too little, but not, thank God, ever another drought like the great one. Gradually the number of sheep built up and the quality of the wool improved over pre-drought times, no mean feat. Breeding was the “in” thing. People talked of Haddon Rig near Warren, started actively competing with its owner, Max Falkiner, for the top ram and ewe prizes at the Royal Easter Show in Sydney. And the price of wool began to creep up, then skyrocketed. Europe, the United States and Japan were hungry for every bit of fine wool Australia could produce. Other countries yielded coarser wools for heavy fabrics, carpets, felts; but only the long, silky fibers from Australian merinos could make a woolen textile so fine it slipped through the fingers like softest lawn. And that sort of wool reached its peak out on the black-soil plains of north-west New South Wales and southwest Queensland.
It was as if af
ter all the years of tribulation, a just reward had arrived. Drogheda’s profits soared out of all imagination. Millions of pounds every year. Fee sat at her desk radiating contentment, Bob put another two stockmen on the books. If it hadn’t been for the rabbits, pastoral conditions would have been ideal, but the rabbits were as much of a blight as ever.
On the homestead life was suddenly very pleasant. The wire screening had excluded flies from all Drogheda interiors; now that it was up and everyone had grown used to its appearance, they wondered how they had ever survived without it. For there were multiple compensations for the look of it, like being able to eat al fresco on the veranda when it was very hot, under the tapping leaves of the wistaria vine.
The frogs loved the screening, too. Little fellows they were, green with a delicate overlay of glossy gold. On suckered feet they crept up the outside of the mesh to stare motionless at the diners, very solemn and dignified. Suddenly one would leap, grab at a moth almost bigger than itself, and settle back into inertia with two-thirds of the moth flapping madly out of its overladen mouth. It amused Dane and Justine to time how long it took a frog to swallow a big moth completely, staring gravely through the wire and every ten minutes getting a little more moth down. The insect lasted a long time, and would often still be kicking when the final piece of wingtip was engulfed.
“Erckle! What a fate!” chuckled Dane. “Fancy half of you still being alive while the other half of you is busy being digested.”
Avid reading—that Drogheda passion—had given the two O’Neill children excellent vocabularies at an early age. They were intelligent, alert and interested in everything. Life was particularly pleasant for them. They had their thoroughbred ponies, increasing in size as they did; they endured their correspondence lessons at Mrs. Smith’s green kitchen table; they played in the pepper tree cubbyhouse; they had pet cats, pet dogs, even a pet goanna, which walked beautifully on a leash and answered to its name. Their favorite pet was a miniature pink pig, as intelligent as any dog, called Iggle-Piggle.
The Thorn Birds Page 48