In the evening, Merridy came to where Alex sat in the living room.
She reached for his hand. “How’s that sunspot?” turning it over and inspecting the back of it. “You should let Dr Musgrove take a look.” Then: “Listen, Alex, I’ve been thinking. Maybe I can kick in.”
“You?” moving his stare from the fire. He needed spectacles now, and orange flames licked his lens where she expected to meet his eye. “How?”
She had her father’s inheritance, she reminded him. “Take it.”
“I can’t, Merridy,” in a dismal voice.
“Oh, don’t be so proud, Alex. I want to help.”
“How much is it?”
She told him. And glimpsed behind the reflected firelight the painful modesty of the sum.
“No, Merridy. That’s for you. I’ll have a word with my agent. He’s lent money to Jack before. I’m certain he’ll let me borrow off him.”
Nonetheless, from this moment she cast about for a way to support her husband.
Alice had been a tolerable cleaner, but her broom rarely troubled anything suspended on a wall. A week after Alex dispensed with Alice’s services, Merridy was dusting the mantelpiece in the living room when she observed a cobweb trailing from Lear’s cockatoo. The discovery motivated her to take a damp cloth and sponge down each and every picture in the house.
So she washed the samplers in the corridor, the Ackermann of Merton College gardens, the foxed print of Sedbergh chapel, until she progressed to her own pencil drawing in the spare bedroom. She wiped the glass frame–and for the first time in many years found herself rereading her childish handwriting.
Plans of a sieve, series 6. General arrangement. Dimensions: 64ft 3 inches diameter; depth 7ft 6 inches; draft: 6ft.
She was tidying the angle of the frame when the urge overwhelmed her to leave the room, get out of the house.
Merridy walked down to Moulting Lagoon. It was seven weeks after her encounter with the chandler and nothing had happened. Her period had come three weeks later, since when she had tucked him away.
Where the lagoon fed into the river was a picnic spot with a wooden hut and the old jetty from which Alex’s father had dived and fished. The lagoon was a part of his property, a part of his life, that Alex was not remotely interested in, and so Merridy had made it hers. She had taken to going there more and more.
Put put put. She was sitting at the end of the jetty when coming up the river was a speedboat with a buoyant-looking face at the wheel. She thought for a heart-stopping moment: What am I going to do?
But it was not the chandler.
She watched the boat approach. There was something odd about the man who threw out the line. He was dressed in a black rubber suit, so he must have been skin-diving.
He stepped onto the deck of yellowed planks, each board scratched and bouncing underfoot, and tied the rope with a dripping hand. Under his wetsuit, it was impossible to gauge how old he was.
Out in the river, something large came to the surface and slurped. For a second, he forgot all about Merridy. “Oh look, oh look,” to himself, “a Fizzgiggious Fish.”
“…who always walked about upon Stilts because he had no legs.”
The man turned, surprised, and the smile on his face broadened. “Hey!”
He sat down heavily beside her. He had an accent like Alex’s, only more pronounced. A Pom for sure.
“I’ve always liked the look of this place. Yours, I suppose?”
“My husband’s.”
“Do you know what, if it were mine, I would do here?” kicking out his rubber legs and contemplating the slightly hairy toes that protruded.
“What would you do?” She was perfectly open, utterly unprepared.
“To my eye, I think it’s crying out for oysters.”
“I’m just brewing a cup of tea. Would you like one? I’ve only one cup.”
“Don’t you worry, madam. I’ll take it out of the kettle!”
“Don’t be silly.”
She lifted the kettle off the Primus stove and poured. They settled down, sipping from the same cup, passing it back and forth.
“What makes you say oysters?” she said.
“Well, it’s sheltered, the right size. You’ve got the ocean and the river. Best of all, it’s undisturbed. I’ve been past here many a time and I’ve never seen anyone near here.”
“Why is your boat called the Lobster? Do you fish for them?”
“I used to, in another life, but it keeps me in mind of a French poet, mad as a hatter, who used to walk a lobster on a lead up the Champs-Elysées. Someone asked him what the fuck…and he said: ‘It doesn’t bark and it knows the secrets of the sea.’ Rather charming. But what you need right here in this ideal spit is to farm oysters.”
“What would one have to do to make an oyster?”
“Not much. A female oyster spawns forty million eggs. The sea does the rest. You need a vessel, low flung, something you can stick things on. As for the tackle, I’ve got a mucker who’s getting out of scallops in Triabunna and would sell his stuff. I was with him two days ago and he said to me: ‘How in God’s name can I get rid of all this?’ He’s moving into mussels and throwing out ropes, floats, scallop lanterns, everything you need. I’ll ring him tonight, if you like. It’s not going to be expensive, and I could collect it in my van and drop it off next time I’m passing.”
She looked at him long and hard. This man who had come up out of the sea with a solution. Because in the last seven weeks she had nursed the bubbling hope that an unknown person might have given her a last chance. But it had not happened.
“You could have had his boat, too,” he said, handing her back her cup, “except that someone smashed into it. The thing is, you should get it properly made. Design it yourself and it’s all yours.”
She flew back to the house on eagle’s wings. It was so obvious, what he suggested. She had been staring at it ever since her second visit to the farm when she climbed the ladder to the windmill. The view down to Oyster Bay was something that she never tired of, whatever its moods or hers. Why should it not contain her future?
That evening Alex came home from drenching the sheep and saw her face. “What?”
“I’ve decided what to do with Dad’s inheritance.”
He implored her: “Please don’t say you’re going to open a B & B?”
She worried that the man in the boat would forget, but a fortnight later there it all was, in a heap inside the shed. Together with a note in a waterproof folded envelope: “Dear Madam, wishing you all the luck in the world. If you would be kind enough to send a cheque to this man…” Signed: “Joseph Silkleigh.”
She sent off the cheque to Triabunna. She would love to have been able to say thank you. But she never saw Mr Silkleigh again, this strange-looking, slightly scholarly deus ex aqua who had seeded in her an idea.
CHAPTER NINE
SHE SPENT A DAY at an oyster farm outside St Helen’s, led around by a skinny, introverted man with thinning white hair that the wind blew about, and a patch over his right eye. He had skewered his eyeball when clearing boobyalla on a block near Wellington Point. Les Gatenby knew right enough where she lived. He had started his farm twenty years ago and was happy to lend Merridy all his papers and books–most of which originated in British Columbia, where they had been harvesting Pacific oysters since before the Second World War.
Over the following months, Merridy read everything that she could about oysters. In a way that she never managed to feel when researching into IVF, she had the impression of picking up the degree she had left off. Not since her first term at uni had she experienced such a longing to study, such an elating sense of purpose.
Her confidence returned. Once it grew warm, she moved into Alex’s old workshop. He had transferred his office to the post room, a brick building behind the shearing shed. Years had passed since he had occasion to hide himself away among his father’s ship collection.
She tidied away the tools
onto the shelves, next to the bottles. She took down her father’s engineering manuals and spread them on the worktable. And over the following days designed an aluminium catamaran: ten metres long with a big, broad beam and pointed bow, a crane to hold the lanterns, a cabin to keep out the weather, and gutters to make it easier for her to clean the deck.
The naval architect in Launceston to whom she showed her plans was approving. “This one will take on anything.”
“That’s the idea.”
For economy, he would shave out the gutters and cabin. Otherwise, he kept faithfully to her drawings. A month later, his design was ready.
Spending half of her father’s inheritance, Merridy commissioned a boat yard in Launceston to build the boat; not Hobart, which was identified in her mind with her last despairing fling.
She named her the Zemmery Fidd.
“Where the Oblong Oysters grow,” she explained to Alex.
The boat was the main expense. Thanks to Mr Silkleigh she already had tackle. Next to sort out was the lease. The Department of Sea and Fisheries was encouraging. For $2,500 a year, she bought a thirty-year lease from the Crown.
If Alex had misgivings, he suppressed them. It was obvious that his wife’s mind was set. Long ago, he had given a promise to her mother. And it took the edge off his worries to support her in a venture about which she felt more and more involved. Merridy’s oyster farm would be, as she put it to Tildy, her baby.
The Zemmery Fidd was already being built in a shipyard on the Tamar when she arranged the construction of a new shed on the banks of Moulting Lagoon. She looked at seeding her own oysters, but Gatenby warned: “You’ll need alarms and water controls and temperature gauges–plus you’ll have to work seven days a week.” Seedlings were dirt cheap anyway. For an investment of $2,000 she bought 8,000 dozen, two months old, from Shellfish Culture in Bicheno, and spent a weekend rolling them in plastic mesh. Then stapled the ends and floated them temporarily from the jetty in scallop lanterns.
The lanterns were partitioned, with individual trays at different levels, and compactable. They reminded Merridy of her brother’s Slinky.
One noon, hauling them up, she heard a shout. “That’s a sheila doing that!” Men from the power company, down having their lunch. She waved back, chuffed. Oysters was a blokey industry, like salmon. Not too many sheilas doing handlings.
Everything on the river was done by hand, the labour back-breaking. Initially, she wore baggy men’s clothes, but in her second season Merridy found a New Zealand firm to make her a pair of bright green overalls. “I want to feel flattered.”
Not that tighter overalls made her feel especially feminine. She felt dirty and ugly and different. And in a way she was different. She changed physically. Around her chest and shoulders she grew bulkier from lifting the ten-kilo lanterns. She found it hard to squeeze into her old clothes.
Regulations forbade Merridy to work on her own, so she employed an assistant, Jason, an absent-minded bass guitarist from Cranbrook who accompanied her on the Zemmery Fidd.
The oysters required handling every couple of months. She and Jason hoisted them from the river and sieved them and progressively stored the seedlings in larger meshes until they were ready for the sea. Then they were packed back into the lanterns and loaded onto the boat and relocated to Oyster Bay, where they put on a spurt of growth. At thirty months her first oysters were ready to sell.
Sometimes she imagined Mr Silkleigh coming back up the creek. Merridy would like to have told him about where his suggestion had led. To have shared just a fraction of her exasperation. But he never did reappear. Nor was there anyone she could hire as a consultant–save for Les Gatenby, and he very soon became her competitor. She had to learn by herself.
To begin with, she felt that she was holding the whole project together with nothing stronger than wire. The shed had no electric power. Her first job every morning was to light a fire.
She had no idea how to tie knots. The octopuses were adept at unpicking her ropes, until she met a cray-fisherman in Coles Bay who taught her a slip knot that he called a Grinner. “Just tie this one on everything.”
She could not tell the wind direction; it might be blowing on her face and she would not know whether it was a south-easterly or northerly, or what it was.
She knew nothing about tides. That before a sudden change of weather the tide sometimes failed to go out; and sometimes it went out and did not come back in for a couple of days.
“And I never ever seem to have enough gear,” she complained to Alex. It was not simply that if she left anything out, a float or a rope, thieves would take it. The oysters grew so fast that she found herself lacking the equipment to put them back in the water.
A lot of the equipment she made herself. She cut out the mesh and folded it into baskets. She unearthed a sewing machine that had belonged to Alex’s mother and stitched up the ends of sacks. Life on the jetty improved in the second year when she bought a small generator from the Macdonalds.
There was a dirt track to the shed, but only people who had lost their way ever travelled down it. Because of its location, no one liked to come in to Oblong Oysters. If the outboard engines packed up, she piled them into the flat tray of her Toyota and drove to Gravelly Beach Marine on the Tamar.
Then there were the storms that blasted through and tore up her lines, plunging the lanterns to the bottom. The banks in Hobart and Launceston that told her to go away–“because we don’t have any data on your industry”. The daunting paperwork that she was required to submit to the Department of Sea and Fisheries.
“Don’t you love these abbreviations, especially if you don’t read the first paragraph and go skimming. What do you think a tassqap is?”
Alex could not recall it from the Scrabble dictionary. “A native sea slug?”
“A Tasmanian Shellfish Quality Assurance Programme.”
Like this, it was nearly two years after Merridy registered her business before she made her first sale. To a wholesaler in Victoria chosen with a pin from an old Melbourne telephone directory.
“No worries, send me two hundred dozen.”
Merridy was so particular that it took her all day to pack eight bags. Soon she would be able to pack two hundred dozen oysters in an hour. Not that Anton seemed overly impressed by the stuff she was sending.
They had done business for five months when he telephoned to cancel an order: “We’ve had to throw out your last shipment.”
“Why?”
“It smelled.”
“What of?”
“I don’t know, a customer didn’t like the smell.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means we’re not paying for it,” with an offsider’s laugh.
“But, Anton, I’ve got the POD with your signature. Why wait two weeks to tell me?”
“Sorry, Mrs Dove. If you don’t like what I’m saying, feel free to go elsewhere.”
“Well, I don’t like it.”
One thousand one hundred dollars down the drain. Another six weeks before she found a new wholesaler, this time through Les Gatenby.
That throughout this period Merridy kept her head above water was chiefly thanks to Alex, who knew about the pitfalls of trespassing into new and unknown territory when you are fired up with passion but have zero expertise. With her husband’s support, the goad of her father’s memory and the painstaking stewardship of her inheritance, Merridy built up the oyster farm. Until four years after the launch of the Zemmery Fidd, Alex discovered a curly-headed young woman in the kitchen ironing his shirts.
He continued down the corridor to his old workroom.
Merridy sat on a swivel chair behind a large new desk, writing. Pinned to a corkboard was a mud-map showing the distribution of her lanterns. Otherwise, the same view through the window onto the edge of the lawn and the Oyster Bay pine. The same fleet of ships on the shelves. And her Gory Box in the corner.
He coughed. “Isn’t that Alice’s daughter?�
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“It is.” She signed her name and handed the rectangular piece of paper to Alex.
“What’s this?”
“Just read.”
He dug his spectacles out of his shirt pocket and put them on. A cheque. Enormous. Made out to P. A. Dove.
“What’s this for?”
“A tractor.”
TIDY TOWN MEETING. “Keep Australia Beautiful”. Snowy Dingle, Tidy Town Judge, Tasmania, will talk about gorse eradication and how to get rid of crack willow in your waterways. Town Hall, Sunday March 7th, 10 a.m. onwards. Information from Tildy Grogan.
Merridy suspended her oysters in the sea for their last six months. In the centre of the bay, she laid out seven long lines, made from 600 metres of polypropylene rope. At a man’s depth below the surface, she tied the scallop lanterns full of oysters. She floated them with the oysters evenly spaced apart. She had inherited her meticulousness from her father, her stubbornness from her mother.
She had chosen Pacific over natives because of the latter’s higher mortality rate. The hole through which she repeatedly had scanned the southern horizon for a fugitive pea-green sail was bored, she learned, by a ferocious little parasite that attached itself to the top of the native shell and killed it, exactly as it had killed off the flat native oysters of England. Pacifics were not susceptible to so many predators. Only if they touched the bottom of the bay.
“If they get to touch bottom, then the whole world comes. It’s like a biology lesson,” she explained to Alex.
Not just octopus and stingrays and dough-boy scallops galore, but skates and sea urchins and–worst of all–starfish. From now on, scarcely a summer went by without her grizzling to Alex about the starfish. They were like flies, vomiting stomach juices onto the young oyster and breaking down the shell so that the starfish could suck it up.
Protective of her oysters, she regarded Moulting Lagoon as their natural home, but during her fifth season a natural disaster startled Merridy into a realisation that she could not have been more mistaken: the lagoon was holding them back.
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