Summer at Mount Hope

by Rosalie Ham

  Good luck,

  Always your favourite Aunt, Margaret Robertson,

  Artist and Treasurer, FWPL.

  PS. Women can rule monarchies so why can’t they vote?’

  Mrs Flynn raised herself from her counter and put her hands on her hips. ‘You stopped arsting ages ago,’ she smiled, ‘but here it is.’ She passed the peach parer across the counter.

  Unfortunately, Maude found it would not do apples.

  Thursday, February 22, 1894

  The Overton sale was a disappointment. Most of the good machinery was not for sale and no one in the area had any need for three-furrow ploughs or a damaged Sunshine stripper. The sheep had already been sold along with the cattle and the pigs, and there was a surplus of horses so the draught horse team was split up and sold to various neighbours – Mr Titterton took the two Hadley had always used for ploughing. Robert looked longingly at the huge, docile beasts but Maude reminded him that there would probably be grandchildren before long and a new room would be required. No one needed a team of twenty oxen either, and the blacksmith’s bellows were left. Nor had anyone the time or money to make use of stained walnut platform rockers, folding carpet chairs, oyster knives or oil landscapes of the Colchester Downs. But Maude did pick up an apple parer that also cored and sliced for two shillings. New, they cost two and six.

  Mrs Flynn bought two draught horses, the harness and the flat-top wagon. She loaded the Overton washing machine and mangler, a sewing machine, a very modern kerosene refrigerator, a mechanical butter churn and Patent Milk Sterilizer, a Silicated Carbon filter to make fresh water, a coffee grinder and roaster, a counter milkshake machine, the chickens and a canary cage complete with fittings and tethered a milking cow behind before setting off home.

  ‘Bay View is going ahead, if you arst me,’ she said.

  The new farmers at the Jessops’ place bought the second milking cow and some strangers from a far-flung district bought candle lanterns and lamp fittings, maids’ aprons and soup ladles, sausage machines, turnip cutters, chaff makers, portable forges, tyre bending machines and Forest Devils. No one needed julep strainers or canopy bedsteads.

  Phoeba strolled around with her arm looped through Hadley’s and Hadley walked inches taller. She flinched, though, when they encountered the people who had taken over the Jessops’ farm as they loaded their wagon and Hadley introduced Phoeba as his fiancée. The formal finality of the title, the implications of it jolted her. But she dismissed the reaction. This was ‘nerves’. They would be all right, she and Hadley and Henrietta; they would muddle along together. Anyway, a brilliant satisfying life would always be rendered meaningless with death, just as a less than satisfying life of compromise would. In the long run it needn’t matter. It could all end the same way, no matter what. It was then that the light of reason came to her: she would simply make the best of it.

  At the height of these nihilistic thoughts, she turned and saw Rudolph in the stables, leaning against the door with his legs crossed in his moles and knee-high boots, and his lovely vicuna coat. He was studying her with a look that seemed to hold affection, regret and sadness. Whipping her arm from Hadley’s she felt as if she was outside herself, watching another Phoeba walk towards him. He tilted his face away, as if in pain, and raised his palm: Stop. He even began to walk away but Phoeba followed.

  ‘How are you?’ She couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  He didn’t answer her, just picked at a bit of paint flaking from the shaft of an ancient trap.

  ‘I’m going to New South Wales,’ she offered.

  ‘So I hear.’ He rubbed the paint between his thumb and middle finger and let it fall to the ground, then he reached out and she stepped into his arms. She would have stayed there, entwined, for a fortnight – forever – but he untangled himself and walked away without another backwards glance. She sank to a stack of chaff bags behind rows of looped harnesses, reins, stirrups and saddle blankets, put her head in her hands and cried, a wrenching silent cry that stretched her jaw and hurt her ribs.

  What had she done?

  She had seized an opportunity because she had to. She was marrying her friend. She was making him the ‘right person’ – and Henrietta would be there too. She was making a life.

  She was being silly. And it was the right thing to do. The hours in the days would be hers while he was out working. But she would help him with his sheep. In spring he would bring the baby orphans, hungry and bleating to her, and she would wrap her arms around their tiny, rough curls and feed them and send them wobbling on their thick snowy legs. And one day they would return to take over Elm Grove … or Mount Hope. At the end of her life she would be able to say, ‘I did the best I could, I did the right thing.’ At the end of her life, she’d be back here, one way or another.

  Her shuddering eased. She gathered herself and peeped out. Marius passed leading a pair of horses that dragged a dray. It was stacked with candelabra three feet tall, floor-to-ceiling gilt mirrors, glass cabinets still packed with crockery, Huon pine hatstands and a bath – a large, heavy, claw-footed thing that would take up most of the Mount Hope washhouse. Lilith was perched on the edge of the dray like a model in a furniture advertisement. Mount Hope would be a crowded museum for the relics of lost fortunes and dashed expectations.

  Saturday, February 24, 1894

  On the eve of her wedding, Phoeba packed her favourite things into her new carpetbag – a wedding gift from her parents – and when the sun sank and a cool shadow crept over the warm brown paddocks she went to Spot. She crawled onto his back and lay with her cheek on the wobbly ridge of his mane with her arms around his neck.

  ‘One day, Spot my dearest friend, when Hadley has his first pay cheque, I’ll come and get you. I’ll grow an apple tree that will be exclusively yours. You will have your own dam and you can eat breakfast in my kitchen every day if you like.’ She slid from the pungent comfort of her horse and looked deep into his bottomless elliptical pupil. ‘I will come back, Spot.’ He rested his cheek on hers, like a suitcase on her shoulder. ‘I love you, Spotty,’ she said.

  She walked up though the vines, tears falling from her chin like raindrops from a leaf, her fingers running over bunches of the pale green grapes. Spot stood with his brisket pressed against the fence and his lovely ears pricked forward. Her sister and brotherin-law watched from the wicker couch.

  At tea, Lilith complained.

  ‘I have to do everything at Overton, Mother. I’ve only got the laundress. We’re only using the parlour and one bedroom.’

  ‘And the kitchen,’ said Marius, piling his plate with shepherd’s pie and bottled beetroot.

  ‘You’ve made your bed, Lilith. Lie in it,’ said Phoeba, wondering what they would do when the preserves ran out.

  ‘I may not be able to come to your big day tomorrow, Phoeba,’ said Lilith, huffily.

  ‘What a shame,’ said Phoeba, sarcastically. ‘And pass me the pie, Marius, unless you’re going to take all of it for yourself.’

  ‘He can have my share,’ said Lilith, quietly. ‘I’m unwell.’

  ‘So much has changed for you,’ said Maude, dropping a pat of butter onto the mashed potato, ‘of course you’re tired.’

  ‘Scarlet fever, is it?’ asked Robert, flippantly.

  ‘We have news,’ said Marius looking nervously smug.

  Maude’s hand froze, the butter lid in her fingers. Lilith assumed her stricken expression.

  ‘Mummy, I think I’m … I could be expecting.’

  ‘Already?’ yelled Robert, his mouth full of half-chewed bread.

  Maude glared at Marius.

  ‘We’ll have to get a barouche, Dad,’ said Lilith, and pouted.

  ‘We should make enough to buy a nice little wagonette in the next year or so,’ said Robert, pointing his knife at Marius, ‘don’t you think?’

  Lilith rested her hand on her tummy. ‘We’ll need something by September: the baby will be here by then.’

  Phoeba watched
her mother turn ashen. The butter lid fell from her fingers and clattered onto the table. Lilith and Marius must have known, she thought.

  ‘September,’ she repeated, pointedly. Barely seven months after the wedding day.

  Robert whipped his napkin from his collar, threw it at Marius and took the wine jug from him.

  ‘I’ll have the relish, Marius,’ said Phoeba.

  Sunday, February 25, 1894

  The fourth Sunday in February was an unseasonably flat day. There was an icy tint in the air and the bay was as still as a bowl of whey.

  Marius arrived early with Lilith, who wore a Canton silk crepe shawl and a fur busby with a matching muff.

  ‘You’ll be nice and warm,’ said her mother.

  ‘It’s last season’s but no one will know,’ she said. ‘Mrs Over-ton didn’t take them with her.’

  Marius took a bridle from the shed and went to Spot. ‘Come on, you old mule,’ he said affectionately, ‘let’s get you harnessed.’

  Spot swivelled one ear and leaned away from Marius as he stepped towards the horse with the bit ready in his hand. Spot turned his head away, shifting his weight and raising his front hoof. He let it fall onto Marius’s boot then shifted his weight back again. A searing pain exploded in Marius foot. He froze, silent with pain and dread before the sharp edge of the horseshoe bit. A fragile bone in the top of his foot started to bend. In desperation he pushed against Spot’s thick, warm shoulder, but found himself too weak and watery from pain to budge the horse. Then the thin metatarsal in the crown of Marius’s foot cracked and Spot twisted, turning his head, pricking his ears towards the empty lane and screwing his hoof down on Marius’s shattered foot.

  Phoeba heard the scream as she dressed and there was quite a ruckus as her brother-in-law was helped to the bed in the front room. They left him with a jug of wine, a bottle of Maude’s headache powder and Lilith sitting at his side fanning his bent and purple foot.

  Phoeba wore her blue frock, wound her bun tight, looked at her reflection in the dressing table mirror for the last time before the wedding and said, ‘Fetching, even with a tomato on your head.’

  She closed the door to her room – Lilith’s and Marius’s room now – and found her father waiting at the sulky in his small suit and silly bowler hat. Her mother wore the family pearls and her brown taffeta frock strained at the seams. Robert would have to drive Maude everywhere now – and how on earth would they manage to milk the goat, make bread and cheeses, clean out the guttering, fill the copper, harvest the orchard, grow the vegetables and slaughter the chickens?

  At Elm Grove, Hadley’s withered mother tied his necktie and breathed, ‘My baby boy.’ He looked fine in his suit and he turned his soft eyes down to her; they were blue like the middle of the sky at noon.

  ‘I am getting married, Mother,’ he said.

  ‘Are you sure?’ she asked, clinging to him.

  ‘You’ve asked me three times and yes, I want to marry Phoeba Crupp.’

  ‘Why? You’re too inexperienced to know what you want.’

  ‘You have betrayed me,’ he said, his anger rising. ‘The farm was mine and we could have all stayed here. Now Mr Titterton wants it and Henrietta and I, and Phoeba, are cast aside.’

  ‘No,’ she whispered, ‘I did it for you, for a guiding hand. Mr Titterton has means, he will build the new house …’

  He gently took her hands from his shoulders.

  Phoeba drove to the church squeezed between her parents, a rug over their knees and gloved fingers over their ears. It was cold for February, even though the sun was full and bright. Her teeth chattered, her porridge churned in her stomach, her feet were sweating in their boots and she felt disappointed when Spot trotted straight through the intersection without even a sideways glance at the dam. For the first time, the vicar’s horse was tethered in the shade.

  Spot pulled up as usual under the peppercorns next to the Hampden. Hadley wasn’t waiting, so Robert helped Maude from the sulky. The sulky, unburdened of her bulk, sprang and rocked.

  The walk across the yard to the door went far too quickly. Inside, the church was dusty. Cobwebs laced the pews and the floor was scattered with straw from the birds’ nests on the beams. Sparrows darted overhead.

  Hadley’s face lit up when he saw her at the end of the aisle. Henrietta, her cheeks rosy from the chilly drive, beamed at Phoeba and waved. She and Hadley wore gum flowers on their breasts and together, Hadley and Henrietta took one long step to the altar.

  Hadley’s hands were stiff in his tight leather gloves, his striped worsted trousers pressed lovingly to a razor crease by Henrietta and his wool coat steamed until it was shiny. He assumed his serious expression and a fond, caring feeling swamped Phoeba and she wondered when he had changed. Why hadn’t she noticed? He had ‘filled out’, as her mother would say, his ranginess had thickened to firm, strong limbs and a long, deep back.

  She had strong desire just to go home. She had always done what everyone expected, and even in defying them by marrying Hadley, she was doing as everyone expected.

  But Hadley had cantered up Mount Hope Lane on his tall brown mare, come to her as he had as a freckly ten-year-old, then a peach-faced adolescent, then a sensitive youth. And now, as a gentle, strawberry-haired man, he had rescued her.

  She raised her bouquet of gum flowers, wrenched her arm from her father’s grasp and went alone to stand between Hadley and Henrietta.

  Like Lilith’s, this was not a moving ceremony. When the vicar said, ‘Keep thee only unto him, so long as ye both shall live,’ Phoeba looked into Hadley’s sincere face and said, ‘I will’ as if she’d just been asked to feed the chickens on her way past the coop. Hadley mispronounced her name as ‘Phoebe’ and struggled with his vows because his mouth was very dry. Just as he was about to place the ring on her finger a bird flew in and splattered Mrs Titterton’s green bonnet with bird dirt. She squeaked. The plain gold ring slipped from Hadley’s slickly gloved fingers and fell to the floor with a small ping. Proceedings halted while the two Pearsons searched on their hands and knees between the pews. Henrietta found it, wedged against a knee-rest with dry flies, grain seeds and dusty fluff, and Hadley and Phoeba became man and wife in the eyes of God and the law.

  Mrs Flynn cried, ‘Whacko!’ and threw bruised geranium petals at Hadley. They settled on his shoulders and in his hair.

  In the churchyard, lit by silver sunshine through the white clouds, Henrietta passed Hadley a cylindrical leather case with a small flourish and he presented his wedding gift to his new wife. It was a pair of binoculars. He pecked her on the lips then – but not for the first time. He had kissed her just like that once before, but she was twelve at the time and he was ten.

  There seemed to be a general sigh in the air, a sort of resigned acceptance, as they made their way to the siding. Robert dropped in to Mrs Flynn’s and collected his newspapers.

  Mrs Titterton and Maude, her face as stunned as a barn owl under a gas lamp, stood at either end of the siding, separated by their husbands and children, all looking south to Geelong and the noon train like luckless punters watching the starting flag for the last race.

  Phoeba and her new husband and sister-in-law didn’t speak, didn’t meet even let their eyes meet. The silence hung between them.

  Maude pulled her shawl close and said, ‘I suppose the coming autumn will be wretched and bring no rain with it.’

  ‘Rain is the last thing we need for the grapes,’ muttered Robert, and no one attempted to speak again, so Robert opened his newspaper: RABBITS REACH PLAGUE PROPORTIONS IN NEW SOUTH WALES. ONE HUNDRED RABBITS TO EVERY ACRE. When the train appeared – a steaming monster rolling out of the horizon – Phoeba felt a burden leave her. ‘The future,’ she said, but at once a dread descended and she hoped with all her heart that the choices she had made would be bearable.

  The others shrugged, tidied their lapels, rubbed their cold hands. Maude pulled her shawl tighter again and Mrs Titterton teetered in her slight heels.
Mr Titterton held her. Robert cleared his throat and Phoeba waited for him to insist she stay, to say he’d send Marius and Lilith to Melbourne, anything – but he just clutched Phoeba’s hand, squeezing it until it hurt, and said, his voice cracking, ‘Well, old thing, you’ll write, won’t you?’

  She removed her hand.

  The train sounded its long, loud whistle and suddenly Maude sobbed, ‘I shall miss you, Phoeba,’ as if it had only just occurred to her.

  The smell of burning coal, steam and engine oil engulfed them. Smoke clouded the noisy black engine, the wheels went thunk and the brakes screeched.

  No one saw Mrs Titterton crumble, but in the din, as the train exhaled and shuddered, Henrietta heard her mother’s little squeak and turned. She was hidden behind Mr Titterton but as she buckled towards the edge of the platform Henrietta shouted and lunged, knocking her stepfather aside. The train lurched to a standstill and the doors were flung open just as she pulled at her mother, wrenching her so that she flipped over. She landed on her side on the platform, her small head bouncing once on a rough sleeper. There was a sound, like something snapping inside a cushion and Mrs Titterton lay on her side, flailing her tiny arms like an up-turned beetle, her skin turning purple. She stared up at her husband and reached out with her pleated, maroon fingers, but no sound came from her mouth.

  ‘Shit,’ said Robert.

  ‘Help me, that’s what she’s saying,’ said Mr Titterton standing perfectly still.

  ‘No,’ said Hadley, kneeling. ‘Mother no.’

  A small patch of blood grew on her bodice, just above her waist, and there, poking through the torn, green material of her new dress, was a snapped steel corset stay. It was rusty, the pink material of her corset perished and brown around it.