Land of Golden Wattle

by J. H. Fletcher

  ‘Let us mark the spot,’ she said.

  They looked at one another, knowing this was a mystical moment. Ephraim raised the hatchet and struck one of the trees. And the sound rang out. Several times he struck it, white chips falling, the white scar in the tree’s trunk, like the sound, a statement of their intent.

  This is ours.

  And would be forever: for them and their children and on down the generations. Here it would begin.

  The thought was so holy that Emma bowed her head in homage to her vision.

  Covered in dust and glowing with the ardour of the visionary landscape with which they had fallen in love, Emma and her husband made their way back down the hill together.

  Into the future.

  1982

  Tamara tossed and turned until beyond the bedroom window the stars grew pale. She gave up trying to sleep. She got out of bed and went to the window, feeling the breeze cool on her naked body, and watched as the first flush of the dawn fires appeared in the eastern sky.

  On cue came the harsh cackle of a kookaburra from the stringy-bark trees down the slope and she remembered the legend an old Aboriginal stockman had told her when she was a child, how the bird had been created by the sky spirit to waken the sleeping world to the wonders of the dawn.

  ‘Too late, bird. I beat you to it today.’

  She slung on a robe, grabbed a towel and went out of the house and across to the pool that Grandma Bessie had had made a hundred years before by diverting the spring. Bessie’s Mere she had named it, but Bec would have none of that and had changed the name as soon as the old lady had died.

  ‘She-devil’s Water,’ she declared. ‘Credit where credit’s due. That’s what she was and that’s what we’ll call it.’

  She-devil’s Water it had become, if only to the family.

  The pool by whatever name was overhung by trees and the water was cold enough to make you jump. Tamara got in the only way she dared, leaping straight in and no messing about. The cold stole her breath and her body was a forest of goose bumps. She flailed about gasping and was out again within the minute, rubbing herself until her skin was red and glowing. She put on her robe and turned towards the house in time to see Jaeger, binoculars around his neck, slipping around the side of the house.

  A battle column of tanks had nothing on Tamara as she marched up the slope and into the house where she found Jaeger, not a care in the world, smiling gently to himself as he went through the motions of scanning a newspaper.

  ‘I ever catch you doing that again I’ll ram those binoculars up your arse!’

  Such a lady when she got going, but that was nothing for a woman who two years earlier had threatened her then boyfriend with a branding iron when he raised his fist to her.

  Jaeger put down the paper, taking his time about it. ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

  ‘I saw you!’

  ‘Getting our knickers in a knot, are we? No need. I can assure you the view was nothing special.’

  Tamara slapped him so hard she almost took his head off his shoulders. ‘Then you won’t want to look at it again, will you?’

  And stormed out, leaving him staring after her, hand to his flaming cheek.

  ‘I shouldn’t have done that,’ Tamara said when she told Bec about it later.

  ‘At least it wasn’t a branding iron,’ Bec said.

  ‘The nerve of the man! Surely Dad can’t really be thinking of getting him involved with Derwent?’

  ‘I’ve given up trying to out-guess your father,’ Bec said. ‘Quite frankly I would put nothing past him. What I do know is we have to make sure he doesn’t get away with it.’

  ‘How do we do that?’

  But Bec, as was so often the case where Derwent was concerned, was away with the fairies.

  ‘I have been part of this property ever since the day Emma and her husband first climbed this hill and named it Emma’s Lookout.’

  ‘You weren’t even born,’ Tamara said.

  ‘Of course not. But I know it just the same, as surely as if I’d been in the carriage with them.’ She stared challengingly at her granddaughter: old woman’s face, young woman’s eyes. ‘You said yourself the dead are not dead but with us always, that they have as much a claim on us as the living. That is true. And I’ll tell you something else. I shall not sit idly by while my son throws away your heritage on someone outside the family. I’m not sure he can, anyway. It’s a family trust and they aren’t family.’

  ‘They will be if he marries her.’

  ‘Somehow we must prevent that. If we don’t we shall be betraying them all: Emma and Ephraim and Richard and my own dear Jonathan, all down the generations. Even Grandma Bessie Penrose.’ She laughed. ‘I could have murdered her willingly but Derwent is as much hers as the rest of them. They created it, nurtured it and passed it down to us. Never think of us as Derwent’s owners but rather its custodians. We hold it for the future: your children and your grandchildren. I am not going to let them down.’

  ‘How do you plan to stop him? If Dad has made up his mind –’

  ‘We shall change it back for him.’ Bec gave Tamara a slow smile: Miss Crafty herself. ‘I think as hospitable hosts it is our duty to make our guests as welcome as we can.’

  ‘Find out what they’re up to, you mean?’

  ‘I extend the open hand of friendship and you suggest I could have an ulterior motive?’ Bec said. ‘I am shocked you should think such a thing. Shocked, I tell you.’

  ‘You mean it’s war,’ Tamara said.

  ‘You’d better believe it.’

  Coffee on the deck, smiling like two friends, while a kookaburra blew its bugle from a tree down the hill.

  ‘Tell me about yourself,’ Bec said.

  ‘What do you want to know?’ Raine wondered.

  ‘Anything you care to tell me.’

  Open-hearted smile; opaque and cautious eyes. ‘There’s nothing to tell.’

  ‘I am sure you underestimate yourself.’

  ‘I am a very ordinary woman.’

  ‘Maybe you should let me be the judge of that.’

  ‘I hate talking about myself.’

  Bec changed tack. ‘Good-looking boy, your son.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Takes after his mother.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Jaeger Lardner. I take it Lardner is his father’s name?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Breaking rocks would have been easier.

  ‘And his father? Your husband?’

  ‘My ex-husband, you mean? That was a painful period in my life. So painful…’ An apologetic smile as she fought the sorrow of a bitter past. ‘Forgive me, but I really don’t like talking about it.’ Raine drained her cup. ‘Beautiful place you’ve got here.’

  And the bitch is planning to get her hands on it, Bec thought. And reluctant to talk about her past. She’s hiding something, I can smell it a mile away. Something shameful, if she doesn’t want us to know about it.

  How do I find out what it is?

  1938–1981

  Raine Armitage was brought up rough, knowing survival was what mattered: only that.

  She was fifteen when one of her mum’s mates put the word on her: a fat man with brown hair greased back and wet lips.

  ‘How much you gunna give me?’ she said.

  ‘A quid?’

  ‘Make it five.’

  It was messy and painful, no fun at all, but he seemed to like it, groaning and sweating, like a deflated paper bag afterwards.

  Raine reckoned she should have charged him double. He came back twice more, the third time said he’d only give her a quid.

  ‘Used goods,’ he said. ‘That’s all you’re worth.’

  ‘All right,’ she said, mild as you like.

  She checked out his wallet when he was in the dunny and helped herself to twenty quid. She also found some business cards. He’d told her his name was Alf White. It wasn’t. It was Andrew Black. There
were two Andrew Blacks in the phone book. The first one turned out to be a widower, old as Methuselah by the sound of him. The other was a woman, said her husband was at work.

  ‘I’m having his baby,’ said Raine untruthfully. ‘Ask him what he’s gunna do about it.’

  And hung up. That would fix the bastard.

  The episode made her see that her present course was leading her to Nowhereville. She went to night classes to improve her English. She studied tarted-up women in the street, observing how they dressed and walked and held themselves.

  By the time Raine was eighteen she wore the best gear she could afford and spoke like she’d just strolled out of Kirribilli House. Her tutor helped her find a job at a legal firm in the city. Nothing supercharged – office girl and part-time telephonist – but it was a start.

  She decided she needed a rich man.

  Steve Lucas owned three fishing boats working out of Wollongong’s Belmore Basin. A bloke with barnacles on his chest and fists the size of crayfish pots, he had dough coming out of his ears. He was also a man who took what he wanted from life, which Raine reckoned made two of them.

  Felix Lardner was different. For a kick-off he was Swiss. His family owned a furniture-making business with factories in Hamburg and Milan as well as Zurich. The company was listed on the European bourses and he was in Australia to check out business opportunities. That was how she’d met him, through the law firm where she was working.

  Felix told her he had a married sister and younger brother, news that did not interest Raine at all. He also said his family owned a chateau overlooking Lake Zurich, which was interesting, and that they were not just well off but rich. That interested her a lot.

  Steve or Felix? Play her cards right, Raine thought, she could have either of them.

  Felix took her to classy restaurants which Steve did not. He sent her flowers which did wonders for her ego. Steve didn’t do that either but his hands rang bells she hadn’t known she had. Felix treated her like a vase too precious to be touched. Raine wasn’t a vase; she was a woman with blood in her veins and as itchy as hell.

  Perhaps that was what led to her lowering her guard when Steve Lucas came on to her. She let him drive her to a place he knew, a quiet place with trees and no people. What a fool. A nail-biting three weeks while she waited and then catastrophe.

  She ran to Steve in a hurry but the bastard didn’t want to know. Baby or no baby, Raine was on her own.

  She could get rid of it, of course, but Raine had another idea. Play her cards right and she might end up owning a chateau.

  She managed to get Felix into bed with her. Several repeat performances later Raine gave him the sad news.

  He stared at her, confused. ‘Up the spout?’

  ‘Pregnant,’ she said.

  His reaction, unlike his lovemaking, was all she could have wished.

  ‘We shall get married,’ he said.

  ‘That would be best.’

  ‘I shall write to my mother –’

  ‘No time for that,’ Raine said.

  It was a church wedding; he told her his family, mother in particular, was staunchly Catholic. Raine didn’t care one way or the other. The ceremony was supposed to open the gateway to lifelong bliss, to say nothing of lifelong riches, but two weeks later a firestorm arrived in the form of Felix’s mother. Grey hair scragged back, grim mouth and determined body, she would learn later there were those in Zurich who called Ilse Lardner the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Ilse was furious the wedding had taken place behind her back. She was furious it had taken place at all.

  Raine hoped his mother’s ranting would stir Felix to put the woman in her place, but found there was no chance of that. Felix had never stood up to his mother in his life. It was not a wife Felix wanted but a second mother. It was a grisly thought. A crybaby had never been on her shopping list but that was what she’d got.

  When Ilse put her wise to the financial situation she realised things were even worse than she’d feared.

  ‘My son does not control the family finances; nor do I. Everything is owned by a series of family trusts. I am sorry if that disappoints you.’

  It certainly did. But Raine worked for a firm of lawyers, which gave her some idea what her mother-in-law was on about.

  ‘Who are the trustees?’

  ‘Doctor Heinzmann, the family advocate, is one. I am another. If you need money you have only to ask me.’

  Her smile was as sweet as a gallows and Raine imagined a future in which she would have to plead with Ilse Lardner for money, with no doubt a dusty answer for her pains.

  No way will I do that, Raine thought, but what she was going to do about it she didn’t know.

  They flew to Switzerland first class. Raine was delighted. She knew that given the choice Ilse would have pitched her into the hold with the rest of the baggage but the family’s reputation was at stake and that was all-important to Ilse Lardner.

  It was a lesson Raine would not forget.

  She had a son. At Ilse Lardner’s urgings she named him Jaeger, after the founder of the business. Ilse monopolised the child but Raine remained Miss Unpopularity 1959.

  The family was big on the church, as Felix had said. There was a picture of the pope in the dining room and another of the Sacred Heart. Raine attended mass every week, as dutiful as a nun, while she tried to hide her boredom.

  For many tedious months she did what she could to win her mother-in-law over but had no luck; Ilse was steel plate all through.

  Jaeger was five when Raine decided she could take no more of it.

  A small thing triggered it.

  Ilse was away for a couple of days and Raine talked Felix into taking her to a new club, the Blue Domino, which had opened in the Rosengasse. That by itself was a miracle: Felix was the original scaredy-cat where his mother was concerned and was fussed that Ilse wouldn’t have approved.

  How right he was. The club was packed with students and the air was thick with marijuana fumes. People were dancing on the tables while a black pianist, sweat pouring from his face, pounded the keys with be-ringed fingers and screamed what he presumably thought was a song.

  To make matters worse Raine was dressed for the occasion. A shiny gold tunic revealed far more than it covered, with the neckline halfway to her navel and the skirt so short it was barely there at all. Gold and red glass spangles reflected the light in a hundred glittering points. Raine was lit up like a Christmas tree and at five foot eight stood out in the crowd like the towers of the Grossmünster Church.

  ‘I would like the world to see more of me,’ she had told Felix once.

  Now was its chance. No, Ilse would certainly not have approved. Thank the good Lord she would never know about it.

  Felix had thought things could get no worse but they did. The next thing he knew, Raine had clambered on to a tabletop, one maniac among a hundred others, twisting and shaking with the best of them. Her hair had come down; her revealing tunic more revealing still.

  Dear God, Felix thought. Now he had seen everything. The trouble was, so had everyone else.

  Even now he had not plumbed the depths of horror because at that moment came the flare and crackle of a flashgun as a camera gulped down every detail of the display.

  It was too much. Surely the Lardner name stood for something in this town? He fought his way through the mob and put his hand on the photographer’s arm.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘What does it look like?’

  The flashgun crackled as he took another shot.

  ‘I tell you, there are times this job can be an absolute pleasure. Just look at the knockers on that one.’

  Again the flashgun blazed.

  ‘You’re talking about my wife.’

  ‘Well, aren’t you the lucky one.’ He was a young man with brawny arms and a know-all face. ‘And who might you be?’

  ‘My name is Felix Lardner and –’

  ‘Hang about,’ the young man said. ‘Did
you say Felix Lardner? Ilse Lardner’s boy?’

  Felix nodded significantly. ‘Exactly.’

  It was understandable the man should be alarmed. The problem was he didn’t seem alarmed at all.

  ‘You telling me that doll is daughter-in-law to the Creature from the Black Lagoon?’

  He slanted another look at Raine still spinning away, hair flying and –

  Never mind the rest of it.

  Before Felix could move he had raised his camera and taken another shot.

  ‘That one’s going to be doll of the day on page one,’ he said appreciatively. ‘Tits and all.’

  ‘What do you mean, page one?’ Felix said, horror creaking in his voice.

  ‘I’m with Der Anblick,’ the photographer said. ‘Mind you, they’ll probably sell the shots overseas as well.’

  Ilse Lardner came storming into the chateau, brandishing a copy of Der Anblick like a battleaxe about her head. The pics were indeed on page one and revealed enough to raise the most tolerant eyebrows. To make matters worse, the paper had attached a name to them. These were not candid camera shots of an anonymous young woman at an unnamed location but of the daughter-in-law of tycoon Ilse Lardner partying at the Blue Domino in Rosengasse, in the Old Town district of the city.

  The paper’s masthead proclaimed The Truth Will Be Revealed.

  Now it had. Small wonder Ilse confronted Raine in executioner mode.

  ‘You did this deliberately.’

  The funny thing was she hadn’t. She smiled but said nothing.

  ‘You have brought shame on this family,’ Ilse said.

  ‘It is terrible,’ Raine agreed. ‘Quite terrible.’

  ‘It will take years to regain our reputation.’

  ‘You can repair the damage very quickly,’ Raine said. ‘Provided you act straightaway.’

  ‘You do not know what you are talking about.’

  ‘Make sure everyone knows you have disowned me,’ Raine said. ‘Then people will blame me for what happened and not you.’

  ‘And how do we do that?’

  ‘Let Felix divorce me. I shan’t fight it. When I am back in Australia people will soon forget.’