A Waltz for Matilda

by Jackie French

  What now? The crowd had been too thick to find Mr Gotobed and the others, and anyhow, she doubted they cared what happened to her. They’d been heading to the meeting, and so they’d brought her here. Probably her father wasn’t even inside.

  How far away was Moura? She could just start walking till she found it. But the road ran in two directions. She might head in the wrong direction, and maybe there were other roads out of town too.

  She was just so tired. For a moment she allowed herself to dream that when she woke she would be back with Aunt Ann bustling about and giving orders, a dust cloth in one hand and a jar of her home-made lavender polish in the other, telling her to polish the sideboard once a day for a week, once a week for a month, once a month for a year …

  Something creaked along the road. Matilda opened her eyes. Mr Ah Ching walked toward her, pulling an empty cart along the road.

  She blinked, and suddenly it wasn’t Ah Ching, but another man, a few years younger, though still with Ah Ching’s pigtail and black pants and top. But this man’s feet were bare.

  He was a stranger, but in a funny way he was the most familiar thing in this long day. A Chinese man and a vegetable cart coming toward her in the darkness. Without thinking she stood and bowed, her head down, and said, ‘Qing An.’

  The man looked up, seeing her for the first time. The rattle of cart wheels stopped. He spoke rapidly, so fast that she couldn’t tell if any of his words were ones she knew.

  He stopped, then spoke more hesitantly. ‘You speak Chinee, missee?’

  ‘No, I’m sorry. A … a friend taught me a few words. I don’t really know what they mean.’ Somehow she had the feeling that the man in front of her understood her English, despite his halting speech. ‘You don’t know Mr Ah Ching, do you?’

  She felt embarrassed as soon as she said it. There were lots of Chinese people in Australia. She had a vague feeling they’d been here just about as long as the English and Irish. Why should he know Mr Ah Ching?

  ‘Sorry, missee.’ He stood there, as though considering her. ‘You need help?’

  Was it so obvious? She stood up uncertainly, brushing crumbs off her skirt. ‘I need to find my father, Mr Jim O’Halloran.’

  He looked around the empty street. Yells and cheers came from inside the hall, even louder now. She had a feeling that more spirituous liquor was being drunk in there than Aunt Ann had ever dreamed of. ‘Mr O’Halloran of Moura?’

  ‘You know it! How do I get there? Is it far away?’

  He seemed to come to a decision. ‘You get in cart.’

  ‘You’ll take me there?’

  He neither shook his head nor nodded. ‘You get in cart.’

  She hesitated. What if Aunt Ann was right? What if he was going to kidnap her and sell her as a slave? No one knew she was here. No one would even look for her. She would just vanish in the darkness.

  Laughter erupted behind her. Two men lurched out of the hall, each carrying a stone jug. The stench of old sweat and spirituous liquor grew stronger. ‘Hey, lassie,’ called one of them. ‘All alone?’

  Suddenly the risk of being kidnapped by a white slaver felt less likely to harm her than sitting here unprotected in the darkness.

  She stepped toward the cart.

  Chapter 7

  She ran through the smoky lanes, lost. Somewhere in those faceless houses were Mum, Aunt Ann, Tommy, her father too. She only had to find them.

  No, she wasn’t lost. They were lost. She was asleep in bed. Soon Mum would wake her to go down to the factory. Matilda pulled the sheet over her head. She’d just sleep a little longer.

  She woke, abruptly. It was a blanket, not a sheet … no, not even a blanket, just a hessian sack. At least it looked fairly clean. She was still in the vegetable cart, her head on her bundle. The warmth was sunlight, not a bed. The world smelled of fresh soil and — cabbage?

  Flies clustered at her eyes as soon as she opened them, hunting for moisture. She rubbed them away and felt the grittiness of dust. She sat up and looked around.

  The sun was just rising, washing its light across the land. She was in a garden, or rather a farm, vegetables all around her. Cabbages, carrot tops, pumpkins curled among the flat leaves of other vegetables she couldn’t recognise, some with silver-purple flowers, a shock of lushness among the grey of dirt and clumps of grass. Hens scratched in the dirt behind a rough branch fence.

  Beyond the vegetables flowed a shallow river, wide as a city block, winding through broad flats of bright white sand. Light glinted on a thin channel of water, curling through the sand and then through dirt, till it reached the garden.

  She turned her head and saw a hut the size of a carriage house, with bark walls and a bark roof. Beyond the hut two men, both dressed in black, bent over the vegetable beds, each hacking at the soil with some sort of long-handled tool.

  One of them was the man she had met last night. What magic did they have to create such greenery in a dead land like this?

  She shifted uneasily. She needed to use a chamber pot. Now. Should she go into the hut and try to find one? But you couldn’t just use a stranger’s chamber pot, especially a man’s.

  Maybe she could squat unnoticed among the cabbages. She slid down from the cart, and waited for the men to look at her. But they seemed intent on their work. She crouched down among the tallest cabbages, straightening her skirt when she’d finished, and scuffled over the wet patch with her shoe.

  One of the men looked up. She flushed, glad he hadn’t looked a few seconds earlier. (Or had he been watching out of the corner of his eye, carefully looking the other way to give her privacy?)

  He said something to the other man then stepped over to her, still holding his hoe.

  ‘Qing An.’ She hoped it was still the right thing to say, early in the morning when you’d just squatted among someone’s cabbages. ‘Please. We go to Moura? Find my father?’

  He nodded. ‘Too far last night. I take now.’

  He vanished into the hut, reappearing seconds later without his hoe, holding a china jug in one hand, and a blue and white plate in the other. He held them out, making drinking motions.

  She took the jug cautiously and tasted it. Weak tea. She drank it gratefully, then handed the jug back and took the plate. There were flat white things on it, looking a bit like shiny fishcakes, but when she bit into one of them it was more like a dumpling, filled with something dark and sweet.

  The first mouthful was almost disgusting; the second not bad. By the time she had finished the first dumpling she had decided she liked them. By the last mouthful, she knew they were even better than Aunt Ann’s apple pie. She looked at the man hopefully, but he didn’t offer her any more. He gestured to her to sit down on one of the blocks of wood by the hut instead.

  Again she had the feeling he understood a lot more English than he was prepared to speak. Somehow he seemed a lot less foreign than the men on the wagon yesterday. ‘Excuse me, sir, what is your name?’

  He looked at her without expression. ‘Doo Lee.’

  She bowed, in the way Ah Ching had showed her. ‘I’m pleased to meet you, Mr Lee. My name is Matilda O’Halloran.’

  He blinked, as though once again she had done something unexpected. ‘Mr Doo. Not Mr Lee.’

  She bowed again. It felt a bit silly, but it was the only way she knew to be polite.

  He gestured to the seat again. She sat. The two men began to fill the cart. They pulled up cabbages by their roots, slicing the stems off with long curved knives, and made bunches of beetroot, radishes, onions and carrots tied with their stems. At last they lugged what looked like a sack of potatoes out of the shed, and a net full of half a dozen strange round fruit, each bigger than a football.

  She felt awkward sitting there, not helping. But they moved so expertly she guessed she’d be in the way.

  At last Mr Doo gestured for her to get onto the cart too. She shook her head. ‘I can walk. I was just tired last night.’

  It wouldn’t be fair,
she thought, for him to have to lug me as well as the vegetables.

  Again he neither nodded nor shook his head, just looked at her consideringly before getting between the shafts of the cart and beginning to pull.

  She trudged after him, expecting him to head for the dusty track that led to the hut. But instead he pulled the cart between the vegetables, then across the hard ground toward the river, hauling the cart’s giant wheels through the sand banks with the ease of long practice. He stopped at the water’s edge to roll up his trousers. Once again he gestured for her to get into the cart.

  This time she obeyed, trying to find a perch on top of the cabbages. She could swim a bit. Aunt Ann had taught her how to dog paddle in the cove by the cottage very early in the day, when there’d be no men around to stare.

  But the water in the river looked deeper now she was close to it and, even if it was shallow, she couldn’t lift her skirts up in front of a stranger, much less a man and a Chinaman. She wasn’t even wearing any stockings.

  The cart wheels splashed through the water. The river was shallow at first, up to Mr Doo’s ankles, then abruptly it grew deeper, so he was wading almost waist-deep. The water rose up to the edges of the cart and across the wood beneath Matilda’s bottom.

  Matilda crouched, trying not to unbalance the cart as well as to keep herself dry. She wished she’d thought to take off her shoes. She had expected the water to be hot, flowing between the sun-warmed sand, but instead the chill almost numbed her toes through her shoes. She reached down and gathered some of the water in her hands, and tried to wash her face and neck and arms while not upsetting the cabbages. The air around her was already hot, the sun a yellow fire beating down on her, quickly sucking away the river’s chill.

  Mr Doo gave a grunt of effort, pulling the wheels through the sand and water up into the shallows. He stood puffing on the bank, the water dripping off his clothes and down his legs. He glanced at Matilda. ‘Road long. This way short.’

  Matilda nodded. Somehow his lack of speech made her feel she had to be silent too.

  She scrambled out of the cart. Her shoes squelched as she trudged across the sand. She’d have to fill them with newspaper tonight or they’d dry hard and out of shape. Or maybe … maybe her father would buy her new shoes straight away. Proper young lady’s shoes, white, with buckles instead of laces …

  They crossed a paddock now, so flat it was hardly higher than the river, then trudged up a hill, dotted with grey rocks. All at once one of the rocks moved, and she saw it was a sheep. Or was it? Weren’t sheep all white and fluffy? It looked much bigger than the sheep in Aunt Ann’s book or the animals she had seen out of the train. Maybe this was another animal altogether.

  The animal stared at her. ‘Baaa,’ it said, then bent to pull at the tough grass.

  ‘Sheep?’ she asked.

  ‘Sheep,’ said Mr Doo.

  ‘Moura sheep?’ she asked hopefully.

  But Mr Doo shook his head. ‘Moura long way. This Drinkwater,’ he said.

  The train had stopped at Drinkwater. She was pretty sure Mr Doo had headed in the other direction from the station. Drinkwater must be enormous, she thought, looking round. That man and those boys owned all this.

  But it was ugly. Not the river behind them, slinking through the sand, but this land of dust and tussock. Even the scattered trees seemed to have been leached of colour, and the bald hills were squashed and featureless. Why would you want to live here if you were rich?

  Please don’t let Moura be like this, she thought. If Moura was a long way away then maybe the country was different, greener, with grass and proper trees.

  They walked on, the heavy-woolled sheep gazing at them curiously, but making no move to either approach or flee.

  The hill was steeper than it had looked. Now at the top Matilda looked around. More dusty ground, with a few trees scattered across it like raisins in Aunt Ann’s fruit scones, and about a mile away a cluster of buildings around what looked like a large house surrounded by green trees — real green, not the dusty green of gum trees.

  The roof of the house gleamed silver in the sunlight. That must be Mr Drinkwater’s home, where the two boys from yesterday lived too.

  Was this how farmers lived out here? The buildings looked substantial, almost like a village, the greenery soft and welcoming. It wasn’t what she had imagined a farm would be like: the cottage with the pigs and cows and roses. But you could be comfortable in a big house like that, sheltered by its trees.

  Mr Doo was already pulling his cart down the hill. She hurried after him, the wet edges of her skirt flapping around her ankles. At least she’d dry soon in this heat. She brushed the flies away again.

  The buildings grew nearer. Now she could see men working on some sort of structure, heaving up tree trunks to make a framework. A big black smudge spread across the ground nearby, with half-burnt timbers in a heap.

  Was that where the shearing shed had burned down? They were near enough now to hear the shouts of the men as they passed a roof beam up, but none of them even bothered to look their way.

  Suddenly she realised what she must look like; just another figure in black, next to the black-garbed Chinaman. She didn’t know whether to be glad or sorry. Sorry she didn’t look like a pretty girl; but glad not to attract the notice of strange men.

  The cart bumped its way toward the buildings. The nearest looked like cottages made of slabs of wood, with wooden shingles on the roof, and front terraces paved with stones, each with a stone fireplace. Lines of washing hung out the front. A dog barked somewhere, then hushed as its owner yelled at it to be quiet.

  A road ran from cottage to cottage, as though this farm was almost a village. It was easier going on the road. They passed a long, low building made of uneven stones, with a roof of corrugated iron and blocks of wood as rough seats out the front, and a fireplace marked out by rocks. Further along another stone building had a small wooden structure next to it, then a fenced paddock, where two brown-eyed cows munched hay from a trough. A dairy, thought Matilda. Behind the cow’s paddock were fruit trees, or she supposed they were, for she could see lemons on one of them. The rest were covered in blossom — white, pink, red — an incredible burst of colour in this land of dust.

  Now they were close a hedge of shrubs hid the main house from the road and smaller buildings. Suddenly the hedge stopped. Matilda stopped too and stared.

  A wide, gravelled courtyard stretched in front of the most wonderful house she had ever seen. It too was made of stone, grey as the dust in the paddocks, two storeys, with wide high windows and many chimneys. The ground floor was sheltered by a wide verandah, with a purple-flowered vine growing up the poles and big cane chairs with cushions. A white cockatoo in a cage peered out at her.

  ‘Scratch cocky,’ it ordered.

  She almost moved to obey, but Mr Doo stopped her. ‘Not go to house, missee. Over here,’ he said.

  She turned, and saw where he was heading: another low stone building, with a wide open window. ‘Farm shop. Sell vegetables here,’ said Mr Doo. He hesitated. ‘You wait in garden.’ He waved his hand toward the trees.

  She understood. Whoever he was going to sell vegetables to might wonder why a white girl was with a Chinese man. It would be easier for both of them if no one noticed.

  She nodded, and slipped into the green shade of the trees, then stared again at the big house, wishing she could sneak up to the windows and peer inside.

  Green velvet curtains with gold tassels … a friend of Aunt Ann’s had curtains like that. The gravel courtyard was so smooth it must have been raked this morning. Smoke wafted from a big chimney at the back — the kitchen chimney, she supposed, for the air above the other four chimneys was clear.

  Someone called on the other side of the garden. She pressed back into the shade, hoping her dark dress would help keep her hidden. Mr Drinkwater had last seen her with the men in the cart and, while he hadn’t exactly forbidden her to set foot on his farm, she didn’t wan
t to be seen, not with wet boots and muddy hem, her dress stained not just with soot, but with the mud from the cart. Her plaits must look like a birch broom in a fit. She ran her fingers over her head, trying to push the straggles behind her ears.

  Another voice called, a girl’s, and then the first again. It sounded young and male. The younger brother, Bertram? She hadn’t heard him speak the day before. The girl must be Cousin Florence. She tiptoed closer, then peered out from behind a tree.

  It was almost a secret garden, surrounded on three sides by shrubs and on the fourth by the stone wall of another farm building.

  A massive tree spread dark green skirts over startlingly green grass. Cousin Florence sat on a swing hung from one of the branches.

  She wore white again today. It looked better here against the green than it had by the dusty railway siding. Her straw hat trailed blue ribbons, and her hair was freshly curled.

  ‘Push me! Come on, Cousin Bertie.’

  The boy laughed. He wore much the same clothes as he had the day before, pale trousers, neatly ironed, a white shirt, though with no necktie today, and no hat either, here in the shade. He grasped the swing’s seat and gave it a push.

  That wasn’t much of a push, thought Matilda scornfully. But Florence squealed anyway, lifting her legs in a show of ruffled pantaloons, white shoes, a froth of petticoats.

  ‘Not so high!’ she called.

  ‘Scaredy cat!’ He pushed the swing again.

  ‘I’m not! Oh, I can see the river.’

  ‘We’ll take the rowboat out later, when it’s cooler.’

  ‘It’s never cool here.’

  He pushed again. ‘It is on the river. I’ll ask Papa if we can have a picnic.’

  The girl wrinkled her nose. ‘Mama will say “ants”.’

  ‘Not on the sand.’

  ‘Mama won’t sit on sand. I don’t like it either.’

  He laughed again. ‘Townie! We’ll take blankets to sit on, and cushions. Or the men can carry chairs down.’

  ‘I’m not a townie.’ She shrieked as he pushed the swing again. ‘All right, I am a townie. So are you!’