by Rosalie Ham
Robert told her to pipe down and poured everyone wine.
They sat around the kitchen table. Marius and Lilith, so familiar for two people married only three days; Maude, bewildered, fussing to cover the tension she didn’t understand; Robert, his expression pragmatic. But Phoeba could see he was timorous, like an accountant with a bag of murderer’s money to invest. She kept her eyes on him as she sat between her friends. In this room, she knew, the truth of her fate circled closer and closer.
Lilith put her hand on her abdomen and raised her head. ‘We have nowhere …’ she declared, and looked to her mother. ‘We have been … we will come home.’
Immediately, Maude reached out for Lilith, her handkerchief in her hand. ‘Of course you will.’
‘No,’ said Phoeba, ‘you got what you wanted, Lilith, and now you can live with your husband in Toorak.’
‘What would I do there? How would I make a living?’ asked Marius, his empty hands raised in despair.
‘Anyway,’ said Lilith, ‘we can’t live there until his mother dies apparently. She lives on marzipan and sherry so that won’t be—’
‘Lilith, dear,’ said Marius. He looked at Phoeba. ‘I can do a lot with the grapes. I’ll have money to plant more acreage and improve—’
‘No!’ cried Phoeba, leaping up, ‘Dad promised me! I will be a vigneron! You can stay in the manager’s house at Overton as long as you like – Rudolph said you could.’
Marius placed a hand on his wife’s shoulder. ‘We won’t stay over there as a banker’s caretakers, as chattels.’
‘But the farm is to be Phoeba’s,’ declared Henrietta, uncertain.
‘Quite right,’ said Hadley.
‘If I thought anyone would put stinking, fly-blown sheep on my good vineyard soil, even when I’m dead and buried a hundred years …’ Robert shook his head.
‘Sheep do feed the nation,’ said Phoeba huffily, and Robert stared at her. Tears started to fall from her eyes and she felt her knees shaking. Hadley gave her his handkerchief.
‘This is nonsense. We are not throwing you out, Phoeba,’ said Lilith slapping the table and taking control. ‘You can stay, we’ll fix up Dad’s room in the shed, and you’ll have your cherished privacy. And you can help with any babies.’
Phoeba twisted the big, white handkerchief in her fingers.
‘You’ve taken a bribe, Dad.’
‘And you’re being uncharacteristically hysterical, Phoeba,’ he replied, but without meeting her gaze.
‘You brought me here,’ she said, ‘and I am happy here. You said that I could have Mount Hope. I planted those vines with you and I nurtured them. You have betrayed me for Marius’s money and I thought, Dad, that you were better than that.’ He seemed to grow smaller under her words. She knew it was because inside, the truth was withering him. And she was pleased.
If she stayed, she thought, she’d have Henrietta at least. But was that friendship enough to compensate for a life of servitude to a sister she couldn’t bear and her demanding infants, to her drunk father and her bossy, empty mother on a farm she was no longer entitled to? A farm that was given to her idiot sister and her failed husband? Her sister, as she realised terribly, as the head of the house?
‘I’ll go to the city,’ she said, shakily. ‘I’ll live with Aunt Margaret, somewhere.’
‘Well there’s a solution,’ said Lilith, sarcastically. ‘You can apply for a job in a corset factory along with a thousand other people who can at least sew.’
‘And sixpence is as much as you’ll get in those sweat shops, standing on your feet fifteen hours, sewing all day in a back room,’ said Robert, unhelpfully.
‘I could be a governess.’
‘Governesses are slaves to squatters. You’ll have to go miles from home and anyway,’ said Robert, ‘there are not many squatters alive that are rich enough to pay a governess these days.’
Marius flinched.
Maude said, ‘Your family needs you here, Phoeba, and you know you would rather be home than anywhere.’
‘Not as everybody’s servant! I’ll end up looking after Lilith and her children, then you two in your old age and Marius would get my vines. I’d sooner get paid and be independent.’
‘There’s no work in the cities,’ said Marius. ‘There is nothing for anyone there. You’re better off here where there’s food, shelter, friends and at least it’s healthy.’
She looked pleadingly to her father. ‘What happened to being your cornerstone?’ she asked – but he turned his moist eyes away and held his hand up. He could do nothing.
She couldn’t, wouldn’t be a spinster, a companion relying on handouts from her own property with none of her opinions heeded and no say in anything.
She looked from Hadley to Henrietta, all three of them lost together dispossessed. ‘I’ll go away to the Murray with Hadley.’
Hadley and Henrietta nodded, once, as one.
‘Perfect,’ said Lilith. ‘That’s settled then.’
‘Solves everything,’ said Marius.
‘You hate sheep,’ Robert howled. ‘You have a brother-in-law here who will look after you.’
‘No!’ cried Maude. ‘You can’t go to the wilderness.’
‘But marriage is natural,’ said Hadley, crossing his arms. ‘I’ve heard you say so a hundred times, Mrs Crupp.’ Phoeba knew, in her heart, that she hadn’t actually meant she would marry Hadley, but that was what Hadley expected. And in the face of everything else it seemed a small and irrelevant thing. What had Rudolph said: ‘anyone’ is the right person if you want them to be. ‘Well, all right, she thought. Henrietta reached over and took Phoeba’s hand and Hadley scratched his moustache to hide his quivering chin.
‘And, Mother,’ said Phoeba, feeling nasty, ‘it is an opportunity to be seized … isn’t that what you did?’
They sat on a log under the peppercorn tree, Hadley in the middle, where the swing used to be before it was removed. Phoeba and Henrietta had pushed Hadley too high, trying to get the swing to loop around the branch, but he flew off landing badly and shattering his arm.
‘I love you Phoeba, always have, no matter what.’
‘He has,’ nodded Henrietta, ‘ever since you saved him from Mrs Flynn’s goose.’
‘It was a gander,’ protested Hadley.
‘You’re good for me, Phoeba, and I know I can bring a calmness to you. It’s sort of a fate.’
‘But Hadley,’ said Phoeba, ‘there’s fate and there’s being different. And you don’t know any other girls; there are no other girls around, you’re used to us. And, Rudolph and I have—’
‘Don’t,’ said Henrietta and jumped up, waving as if she was deflecting attacking magpies. Then she stopped. ‘Don’t. It’s not really important, is it Hadley?’
Hadley shook his head.
‘So then, what about me?’ asked Henrietta. ‘Will I be left here, alone? Will I lose you both, do mother’s bidding and cook for old corpse teeth?’
‘Henrietta could come with us,’ said Phoeba taking Hadley’s hand.
‘Mr Titterton would love me to go; he says I’m disrespectful,’ said Henrietta, smiling wickedly. ‘It wouldn’t seem right if I had to help old corpse tooth with the birthing ewes instead of Hadley.’
‘Yes,’ said Phoeba, feebly, thinking she would have to help in New South Wales, feed the whining orphans plodding lightly on their thick snowy legs.
‘We’ve all been passed over, dispossessed,’ said Hadley.
‘No,’ said Phoeba, ‘your home is still yours, Hadley. Your accession has merely been postponed.’
Later she sat on her bed looking at the photograph from the ploughing match, Hadley between herself and Henrietta. Hadley would bring her cups of tea when she was poorly, would bury her when she was dead. And she had lived … loved, even so briefly. Bother her disappointed mother and father! They could struggle without her … and she smiled, knowing Lilith would have to do the washing, the ironing, the milking, the cooking – the cari
ng for everyone else.
There was a quiet knock at the door and it pushed open, tentatively. Her father stood there, half-hidden. He didn’t look at her, his pillow under his arm as he stared down at his slippers. ‘You are a good friend to me, Phoeba, my only one, and I am sorry, very sorry you feel betrayed, but you have not been cast out. This is still your home and always will be. If you marry Hadley, you will betray yourself by not being honest with yourself. Now, you can stay and help—’
‘No! Mother settled for less, didn’t make the best of it and is disappointed. I will make the best of it. And you have a son-inlaw with money for grapes to prove a point to her.’
‘You should learn by our mistakes.’
‘I have learned.’
‘Have you, Phoeba? Aren’t you disappointing yourself now? The grapes will see you right, in the end.’
Mrs Titterton was propped upright on her bed when Hadley decided to tell her the news. Several pillows, judiciously placed under each arm to steady her brittle, birdlike ribs, prevented her from crumbling sideways. With Henrietta firmly at his side, Hadley stood up very straight and declared, ‘Phoeba Crupp has agreed to marry me. Her father has given us his blessing.’
‘He has,’ said Henrietta, ‘and we’re all going to New South Wales.’
‘Excellent,’ said Mr Titterton, slapping Hadley on the shoulder. ‘We’ll travel to see you there, won’t we dear?’
His wife was silent, her small eyes flicking from Henrietta, to Hadley to her husband, trying to process the sentences. She thought she had heard them say they were all going to New South Wales. Her feet in their tight pointy slippers turned blue and her heart struggled under its lacy sternum.
‘I am seeing yellow stars,’ she breathed.
Mr Titterton pushed another pinch of snuff into her small hard nostrils, replacing the tin of Menthol Snuff next to his carved Russian wood denture box.
‘We will have grandchildren,’ said Mr Titterton proudly, but his wife screwed her pointy little face and squeaked, ‘They’ll be in New South Wales.’
‘With me,’ said Henrietta, nodding her head and rubbing her hands.
Wednesday, February 14, 1894
Wednesday was not an ordinary day for anyone. Robert patrolled his grapes then took Maude a cup of tea.
‘A very tepid effort,’ she said and put it aside.
‘You’ll have to make do. I am all you have now,’ said Robert.
‘Make do, make do,’ hissed Maude, and pulled the sheet up again.
Phoeba milked her goat and left the milk on the chopping block with the day’s firewood. If they wanted fresh bread for tea, Maude could make it but they would need a fire. Her father could chop the kindling.
She rode Spot to the very top of the outcrop and while he dozed in the shade, swishing flies with his tail, Phoeba watched Overton through the looking glass.
Mid-morning, Rudolph rode away with the boundary rider, the two figures vanishing into the endless plain. Above them in the white-blue heavens, two eagles hung in the breeze. Phoeba lay back over a warm boulder and turned her thoughts to her new life in New South Wales. But her childhood interrupted. She turned her years over and over in her mind, searching. How had it come to this? But she couldn’t find anything to explain why her father broke his promise and betrayed her in favour of Lilith.
Her hours with Rudolph took over, but she nudged him from her mind.
‘Come, Spot,’ she said, sitting up. ‘Our new family is waiting.’
At the bay, while Spot paddled, Hadley spread a map of New South Wales at the edge of the muddy shore and they hunched over it on their knees. Their home would be a very small dot on the railway line fifty miles from the Murray River.
‘Good,’ said Phoeba, ‘the town’s small but there will be shops and people, perhaps even a doctor.’ And there was a thin blue line snaking past the town. It had to be a flowing creek, not just wet-weather water, since there were people and sheep. She would grow vines.
‘And only three or four days by train from here,’ said Henrietta.
They splashed on the salty shore, threw shells at the water, and planned. There was insufficient time to organise a civil service, as Phoeba had hoped. She would settle for holy matrimony.
New South Wales was rushing at her like a fallen log in a treacherous current of the Murray River, but Henrietta would be there to help her. She squared her shoulders and looked to the future. She would not close the gate to life; she would live it. She might even have children, if everything was agreeable.
Thursday, February 15, 1894
Life passed almost as it always had. Phoeba got up, milked her goat, fed her horse, then did as little as she could around Mount Hope. This forced her mother to venture into the backyard for water and to the clothes line. Sometimes swaggies passed asking for tea and sugar, inquiring when the grapes would be ready to harvest. But Robert and Marius thought it would be weeks yet, so their campfires burned on the beach at night. And every day, Phoeba found her wedding planned around her.
Maude stood over the vicar with her round arms wrapped under her bosom and her lips pursed. Robert was at her side. The vicar agreed to set the wedding for the fourth Sunday in February, just two weeks away, eight weeks into the new year.
‘So rushed …’ he said.
‘Not really,’ said Hadley, happily. ‘I’ve known since I was ten and Phoeba’s been thinking about it since New Year’s Eve.’
‘It’s all so very modern,’ complained the vicar. ‘Why does no one have nice matrimonial services with celebrations and generous wedding breakfasts these days?’
‘Because they’re a waste,’ snapped Phoeba. ‘We’ll end up married no matter how much food is eaten.’
When Marius and Lilith visited, Phoeba fled with Spot, and each afternoon she rode to meet Hadley and Henrietta at the bay. Hadley mentioned Rudolph Steel only once: it was during their last week at Bay View.
‘Steel has installed an unemployed gardener from Geelong in the manager’s house as caretaker and the homestead has been boarded up. He says he’s going to England for a while.’
Hadley watched his fiancée for signs of regret, defiance, a broken heart. She thrummed with life and vitality but it was morose, and she rattled with a suppressed anger. She was more guarded than he’d ever seen.
‘Your father has done what he has done—’
‘For the grapes, so he says, but he’s also done it for Lilith, and for himself. He’s done nothing for me.’
‘Just wait,’ said Henrietta, working her bare feet into the mud and sinking up to her calves at the water’s edge. ‘Wait until we’re in New South Wales, Phoeba, then you won’t be in such a mood!’
‘No,’ she said, half-heartedly, and Hadley put his arm around her, tugging her closer to him. She must get used to Hadley’s arm, she thought; she knew she would learn to like it and wondered if her mother had said the same thing to herself.
‘We will be there soon,’ he said, as if he was promising her a garden paradise with cauldrons of gold.
He could barely contain his anticipation. Phoeba, all to himself, all night. He longed to kiss her properly and he smiled when he imagined her standing at the stove when he came in late from work. She would put a plate of lovely food in front of him – oxtail stew with rice or her steak and kidney pie with homemade tomato sauce – and they would read the paper by the fire before going to bed, together. Someone to hold.
Lilith stayed resolutely at Overton, swanning about the mansion, humming and dancing with Marius in the ballroom, playing two-fingered tunes on the grand piano, drinking sparkling wine from the cellar and making eggs and toast for breakfast and dinner, and salad for tea. Marius prepared for the clearing sale and rode to Mount Hope almost every day. Phoeba studied him from the veranda, watched him trailing Robert up and down the vines parting leaves and peering closely at the ripening grapes.
Once, she lined him up through the sights at the end of the Collector, trained the gun on him
as he walked – but pulled the barrel to the sky before she squeezed the trigger. The gun would only graze him anyway, at that distance, or maim him.
In the evenings, Phoeba, Robert and Maude ate in complete silence. Maude seemed to be in some kind of torpor and Robert was generally slightly drunk. It took every bit of what concentration he had to manage his food. After a week of icy meals, Maude took to her bed completely and would not come out.
‘It’s all so wretched,’ she mumbled from under her blankets.
In the end, Robert was forced to ask Phoeba to make bread, pointing to his belt buckle, pulled in one extra notch, and imploring her with sodden eyes. She wondered if he had thought to save any money for her wedding – suddenly realising that she might make it through the event without a wedding cake. She almost laughed.
‘Please,’ he begged.
‘Lilith won’t make bread,’ she sniffed triumphantly, dragging the flour bin from the pantry.
‘I’m sure I’ll grow to like salad with almonds,’ said her father and sat at the table to watch.
Her mother staggered down from her darkened room and said, her voice croaky and strained, ‘Please, Phoeba, please drive to Flynn’s and send to Lassetters for Codeine powder. The veins in my head are shooting with hot acid and I fear they will burst.’
She wanted to say no. She wanted to say, you have betrayed me, you can suffer. She wanted to make them say, ‘Stay, you can run the vines.’ If they said that, then she would look after them forever.
She went to the stables, bridled her slow, black horse, rode to the shop and collected the papers. She still missed Freckle.
The Geelong Advertiser headlines read: ‘NEW VINEYARD AT WAURN PONDS. The farmers and quarrymen at the community of Waurn Ponds, which was badly affected by phylloxera in the 1870s, are buoyed by plans to establish fifteen acres of vineyards which promises to become the Victorian Halle aux Vins …’
‘The place is going ahead, be vineyards everywhere soon,’ said Mrs Flynn and handed Phoeba a picture postcard.
‘I’ll grow vines in New South Wales,’ said Phoeba. The postcard was a reproduction of a van Dyke painting of the lavishly dressed child groom, Prince William of Orange, and his opulently coutured child bride, Princess Mary Stuart. William’s reluctant fingers bent warily to hold three of Mary’s succulently unused fingers and the timid couple gazed uncertainly at Phoeba. Aunt Margaret had rubberstamped the happy couple with the Fairfield Women’s Progressive League emblem and wrote, ‘Can’t attend your marriage, busy with my true calling – first exhibition.