‘Plenty of practice,’ Tamara said.
‘You’ve got that right.’
‘Must have been embarrassing for the bridegroom, though. Surely he would have been furious?’
‘He may have been relieved. Nobody ever talked about such things. Then as now it was a criminal offence but I’ve always suspected he was more attracted to men than women.’
‘Which wouldn’t have suited Emma.’
‘Only one man ever suited her. She helped him in good times and bad. She was the lodestar that drew him on from the day she met him until the end. In a very real sense she made him the legend their son William made sure he became. For his own benefit but that was William, after all. Nevertheless he did it.’
‘How romantic!’ Tamara said. ‘Pity nobody thinks like that any more.’
‘Of course they do. There’s romance everywhere, if you dig deep enough. It’s just a question of finding it.’
‘Or of wanting it,’ Tamara said. ‘I’ve got Derwent to run. I don’t have time for romance.’
‘Running Derwent, for you, is one of the most romantic things you could do. Talking of which, there’s a new agricultural show opening tomorrow. They’re calling it Agfest.’
‘How did you hear about it?’
‘There was a write-up in The Examiner. Might be worth a look, if you’ve got the time.’
‘Where is it?’
‘Symmons Plains, just outside Launceston. Give you a chance to see what’s going on in the industry. Never hurts to keep an eye on the competition.’
‘You going?’
‘These things are about the future. I’m the past.’ A glint of wickedness in Bec’s smile. ‘I’m a stay-at-home babe these days. Why not, when I’ve got you to run around for me?’
‘Perhaps I should have a look, at that. Never know your luck. Maybe I’ll fall in love with a prize ram.’
Grant saw her first.
She was in the auction tent, watching the rams coming under the hammer and wondering whether to put in a bid, when he spoke. Eleven years since they’d seen each other yet she knew his voice at once. She turned, smile like a cresting wave, and it was yesterday revisited with her standing outside Derwent’s door and watching the battered ute driving away down the twisting road and out of her life.
Next thing they were hugging, she feeling the hard length of his body against hers.
‘Where have you been all this time?’
‘Around.’
The same laugh lines around the eyes, the same generous smile.
I’d have picked him out in a crowd, she thought.
She checked him out again and saw that in one respect he had indeed changed, or seemingly so, and she thanked God for it. The eyes she remembered as clouded by the residue of horror were clear now.
Grant Venables had never described his experiences in Vietnam, yet his silence had spoken for him. Looking at him now she thought he had found a measure of peace. It would never be absolute. Some experiences were beyond the power of human will to erase, but at least it looked as though he had worked out a way of living with his past.
She was glad for him and for herself; they went back such a long way and there had been teenage days when she had believed herself in love with him.
It was the briefest of conversations; he had to meet a stock agent and was already late but they agreed they would catch up with each other in an hour’s time at the refreshments tent.
She watched him walk away through the crowd, a tall man with strong shoulders squared, trademark Akubra on the back of his head, and was at once back in the days when she had been adrift in the dangerous seas separating the child and the adult. Then Grant Venables had been a beacon to guide her through the storm.
There was a ram she fancied; she outbid the opposition, arranged delivery with the stock agent and headed for the refreshments tent through the dawdling crowd.
Grant hadn’t arrived so she grabbed one of the outside tables and sat enjoying the sunshine, letting her mind travel back over the years.
Grant’s father had worked as a carpenter at Derwent all his life and Tamara had seen Grant around the place as long as she could remember. He had seemed remote, a citizen of the foreign country called adulthood. He had been a presence, like his father and the sheep and the spreading acres that she had accepted without understanding were the family’s kingdom.
She’d had an only child’s life. Brother David was seventeen years older than she was, almost another generation, and she had grown up solitary but self-sufficient. Loneliness – if that was what it was – had not been a problem but a feature of her life that she accepted without query or resentment.
She wandered far in that childhood world, exploring the nooks and crannies of her developing life. Early on she knew she was in tune with the land, its mystery and the singing that underlay the silence.
Her mother had left home when Tamara was six. Gone off with a man, the servants said.
She couldn’t understand that. Dad was a man, wasn’t he? What did she need another one for?
It was a question that remained unanswered, like most of her questions. Father and brother left her to her own devices; only Grandma Bec encouraged her developing excitement in life and her world. Bec had shared her joy over the tiny fossils she discovered in the weathered limestone crags that stood like sentinels about Derwent’s higher ground, and from the first had given her enough rope to hang a dozen inquisitive children.
By the time she was twelve Tamara had begun using her school holidays to explore the complications of many of the creek beds and billabongs spread across Derwent’s vast acreage. She lay in her sleeping bag at night, listening to the water and the calling of owls. She walked through a land whose deceptive emptiness was crowded with the shadows and beings of the past. She examined the shell middens along the shores of lakes; in harmony with its ancient inhabitants breathed the air of the Kutikina Cave, unpicked the intricacies of gum nut and leaf. She walked with the Parlevar people who had known that high country before the latest Ice Age, thousands of years before outsiders came to breathe the air and disrupt the stillness of the land that some said had been dreamt into being at the creation of the world. She sensed the footprints of Moinee, child of the sun and moon, who in Aboriginal myth had created the first man; she knew herself one with all this ancient land whose emptiness and silence unfettered her spirit from the day-by-day dealings of her life.
She also knew that if she went back far enough her roots lay in the soil of England, the faraway country her ancestor had left one hundred and fifty-two years before.
‘We are the living and the past,’ she told Bec and herself.
‘The living and the dead, more like,’ Bec said. ‘Quite a feat.’
But Tamara was serious. ‘Not the dead. They are still alive because they are in us. I feel their presence; I hear their voices. All of us are one.’
‘And with the future?’ Grandma Bec teased her.
Tamara was certain. ‘With the future also. That is what eternity means.’
‘Have you told your father how you feel?’
‘Dad wouldn’t understand.’ And was certain of that also.
Grant pitched up in a burst of watery sunshine. They went into the refreshments tent and came back with a couple of hamburgers, coffee in cardboard containers. They sat at the same outside table. They munched and slurped coffee.
‘Cardboard flavoured but least it’s hot,’ Grant said.
His face was more lined than she remembered. Unsurprising; it was eleven years, after all, and given Grant’s background some at least would have been problem years.
‘The burgers are a bit like cardboard too,’ Tamara said.
‘Enlivened by the saving grace of tomato sauce,’ Grant said.
‘What have you been doing with yourself?’ she said.
‘I’ve got a sheep run up on the plateau.’
‘Whereabouts?’
‘Past Quamby Bluff, about an hour’s
drive from here. Why don’t you drive over and take a look while you’re in the district?’
‘You say that to all the girls?’
He grinned, crumpling the burger wrapper in his big hand. ‘As many as will listen.’
She felt the tiniest quiver. ‘I might drop by. If I’ve got time.’
‘I look forward to it.’ He nodded and stood up. ‘I must get moving.’
‘What’s its name?’
‘Ringarooma,’ he said.
‘Isn’t that a place in the north?’
‘I knew someone from there,’ he said.
Again she watched him walk away through the crowd.
If, she had said, but already she knew she would go. Eleven years of nothing; even before that there had been nothing between them that mattered. She’d fancied him, no doubt about that, sixteen years old with her body a seething swamp of hormones, but nothing had come of it. He could have taken advantage of her any time he liked – she had wanted him to – but he never had and his temper, after he came back from Vietnam, had made him as prickly as a bramble bush.
When his father died she had watched him drive down the hill and had believed that was the end of it but now, out of the blue, he was back, and she had no doubt there had been a measure of reconnection.
Oh yes, she would go.
She had intended to drive back to Derwent that evening but now she checked into the hotel.
‘One night,’ she told the receptionist.
That would be enough. A quick look at Ringarooma and Grant’s mob of sheep and she’d be on her way. With Grandma Bec’s birthday bash two days away she had no choice anyway.
That night she lay in bed and told herself it was just as well.
Grant didn’t drive straight home but stopped at the Carrick Inn for a couple of beers while he tried to work things out.
Bumping into Tamara Penrose had been a shock and he needed time to think how he felt. He sat at the bar, savouring the wet of the beer warming his throat as it went down, following it up with a shot of Johnny Walker, and remembered her as she had been after he came home from Vietnam.
That had been a dark time.
He had been there with the battalion for twelve months. A year and a lifetime: a book with horror inscribed on every page. And not just for the time he’d been there; it was a nightmare that still had the power to paint his nights with blood and his days with a paralysing disbelief in his own worth and that of all humanity.
Images that would not die.
American soldiers stripped and strung up in trees, their skins ripped off, prey to flies and the fires of hell.
The endless fear of the metallic crick as a bouncing betty, triggered by one misstep, flung itself out of the earth to rip the bellies from men in an explosion that continued to resonate weeks and months afterwards.
Haunted jungle paths where every shadow was an enemy.
Peasant women reduced to carbon, their children roasted by napalm, their screams lost in the roar of flames.
Day by day; night by night.
Only one person had offered him the promise of peace, of knowing that despite the evidence of his eyes not all the peoples of the earth were devil-spawned.
Annie Phuong was a Vietnamese nurse, young, devoted to her work. She was brave and beautiful and Grant Venables was in love with her from the moment he first saw her. She had been laughing, raven hair shining, drawing his eyes after her as she wove her scooter through the hot sunlight of a Saigon street.
He saw her, loved her but did not yet know her or speak to her. That came later, by chance, at a party on the roof of the Continental Hotel, the booze flowing, the laughter as brittle as sticks, while the distant flashes of artillery patterned the night sky above the delta.
They talked, they clicked, they shared a meal of prawns and spring rolls at a roadside stall in a side street off Tu-Do Street. Whenever he was in Saigon he saw her. They became lovers.
She was a nurse dedicated to helping the sick, caring nothing for their politics.
‘People are people,’ she said. ‘Some nice, some not so nice. Just people. When they need help, I help.’
She was a light shining in his darkness.
The light was snuffed out when some of the people to whom she had dedicated her life intercepted her on a side road outside Saigon and burnt her to death. She was twenty-three.
He went berserk when he heard.
When he arrived back in Tassie he planned to put it all behind him but from the first that had been a vain hope. Life had become a dark valley between high cliffs shutting out the light.
Once again he had met up with Tamara Penrose. She was fourteen by then, an almost-but-not-quite woman who had not learnt to hide her feelings. Her eyes were unveiled when she watched him.
She was a child; he took no notice. Two years later, after his father’s death, she was sixteen. Still young but no longer a child, her eyes still watching him. She was a looker too. He was tempted; for the first time since Annie there was someone who interested him, but he did nothing about it, knowing with a resigned despair that he was soiled beyond redemption.
It was Tamara and his feelings for Tamara that made him see he could not go on as he was. Ever since the trauma of returning home to abuse from a brainless mob that had waited long hours to ambush them – he had knocked the daylights out of a couple of them, whom he’d later heard boasting about it in a pub – he had been unable to settle back into civilian life.
His feelings for Tamara Penrose, tentative though they were, had somehow made his situation seem even more hopeless than it had been before. He had felt himself being shredded by his past and had known if he didn’t move on he would destroy himself. Others too, perhaps.
So he had gone, not knowing where, down a hundred roads and across a hundred paddocks and through towns he knew and others he didn’t, taking work where he could find it, staying a while before moving on, sleeping rough as often as not, drinking a lot, looking for what he did not know and not finding it.
He tried the mainland for a spell but that was no good either. The island drew him back yet going away had steadied him in a way he had not expected and did not understand. He stayed longer in places and eventually built enough cash and self-confidence to lease an acreage up in the mountains where he ran sheep.
Physically he had steadied but emotionally he was still a mess. He’d had a number of short-term relationships but the anguish of Annie’s terrible death continued to haunt him. The women were frightened of him; he could see it in their eyes. He was frightened of himself, and it was never long before they walked out or were told to go.
For a year he had lived alone but now the shock of seeing Tamara again had unbalanced him; that must have been the reason he had invited the woman he had fled from eleven years before to step across the barrier he had erected to shelter him from the past.
He went out, got into his ute and drove up the winding road to the plateau. He went into the old cottage he’d renovated as a condition of obtaining the lease. He lit the lamp in the small parlour and poured himself a final drink.
He was no nearer an answer than when he’d left Carrick.
Maybe she won’t come, he thought. That would solve the problem very easily.
He slept. In the morning he shrugged on a singlet and shirt and went out to check his sheep.
Tamara had told herself it would be madness to take up with Grant, a complication in her life she didn’t need. She stood under the shower, the hot water hammering down, and told herself she would drive back down the highway to Derwent and put Grant Venables out of her mind once and for all.
She was determined about it yet when she pulled out of the car park she turned right and not left, heading north and then west to Quamby Bluff and whatever might lie beyond.
A social visit: where was the harm in that? Yet: ‘You are a fool,’ she told herself.
The road was steep, winding, with towering eucalypts on either side, but when she got there
the property wasn’t hard to find, lying a short way off the road with the name Ringarooma on the gate. She drove in and parked beside the little house. She waited but no one came. It was high up here. She opened the car door and went to look at the view.
Five minutes later Grant came. He climbed out of the cab of his ute, face glowing in the fresh air, and came over to her. ‘Glad you made it,’ he said. ‘Fancy some breakfast?’
‘And coffee?’ she said.
‘Of course.’
‘Sounds great.’
They went into the cottage together.
While she looked around he rustled up ham steaks, eggs and mushrooms, a loaf of bread on the side, and in no time they were sitting down at the little wooden table, the coffee pot convenient between them, and tucking in.
Tamara was pleased to find Grant did not believe in conversation while they were eating but later, when they sat back after clearing their plates, they were soon making up for lost time.
Talking about what they had done since they had last met. Something of her travels abroad and his before he came to settle – if settle he had – on the plateau. The excitement and beauty and knowledge of other lands but never a word of Aladdin Warboys or of Annie Phuong, so the stories they told each other were full of holes. It didn’t matter; what had never really started eleven years before had never really ended, either.
Tamara had read it somewhere: how you travelled far in search of something that you eventually found at home.
‘Stay a while longer,’ Grant said. ‘There’s some pretty impressive country around here. I could show you round.’
‘I would like that but I can’t,’ Tamara said. ‘It’s my grandmother’s birthday the day after tomorrow. Her eighty-fifth. I have to be there. You could come, if you like. I know she’d be glad to see you.’
He shook his head. ‘I’m not much for going back.’
Then what had they been doing for the last hour? But she said nothing of that.
‘See you later,’ she said and drove down the hill and home, knowing her world had changed.
Cars and utes were parked everywhere; the booze was flowing like Niagara Falls. So far no one had fallen down but there was plenty of time and Bec suspected there’d be some interesting driving when the guests began to head back down the hill.
Land of Golden Wattle Page 10