For the first time she realised she was really still a bride. Not so surprising; she’d had little chance to be anything else. They hadn’t been married that long before he left and you couldn’t count the years he’d been away. They’d written regularly but letters weren’t the same and she saw that as a married woman she had it all to learn. That might have scared her but she knew she’d made a fair job of running Derwent in his absence and that gave her confidence she’d be able to handle this problem too, given time.
Jonathan made much of the boy, which she took as a hopeful sign. Giles was three years old. The two men, as Bec called them, were strangers to each other but Bec sensed a kind of groping affection in the way Jonathan tried to get on terms with his son.
He didn’t get much encouragement. Giles was a wilful child; growing up in a house full of women he had learnt he could get away with a lot and resented this stranger who had moved into spaces he thought of as his own.
Bec believed, or at least hoped, that Giles would get used to this strange dad, in time. She hoped she would get used to him too.
There were good days when he was as she remembered, friendly and loving and kind, but there were terrible days too. One day she found him in tears and did not know whether to comfort him or pretend she had seen nothing. Instinct led her to put her arms around him, he weeping and shaking as she held him. And held him, keeping him safe from the chasm into which she was afraid he might plunge. If that happened, she thought, he would be lost forever.
‘I will save you,’ she told him. ‘I will make you whole.’
If she could.
There were other days when it was like having a stranger in the house. He was given to moods when he went off somewhere into the bush. He said he needed the silence after all the violent years but Bec thought he was trying to find the world he had known before the war. She wanted to tell him it couldn’t be done. The land hadn’t changed – the grass still blew in the wind, the rains still came and the sun, the ewes dropped their lambs on schedule – but the man had. The pre-war Jonathan wasn’t there any more. The war had changed him.
Bec never said this. She never told him about how hard it had been for her, having to deal with Bessie, then learning to run Derwent and handle the men and all the other problems she’d had. He never talked about the war but she’d read things in the papers and heard from the wives of other diggers who’d come back and wondered how any of them had remained sane, the things they’d been through.
One day he gave her two wild orchids he’d found in moist ground by a creek.
‘Why, they’re lovely,’ she said.
Holding them she could have wept for the shy beauty of the flowers and for the man who expressed his love so tenderly.
Jonathan still went walkabout from time to time but his eyes were clearer and Bec dared hope he had learnt to accept the skin of the man he had become. When he came home she had taken it for granted that he would be running the estate but at first it hadn’t worked out like that. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to but that he did not seem to know what he had to do. He drifted through the days, aimless and disconnected, while Bec got on with things.
The farm managers, one called Isaac Slack in particular, didn’t like it. They had put up with her while the war was on but hadn’t bargained on doing so when it was over. It unsettled them and she was scared their commitment to their work and even to Derwent might suffer accordingly.
She spoke to them about it. ‘It’s going to take time for him to get over the war but he’ll come right eventually. In the meantime we’ll just have to hold the fort for him. As soon as he’s fit he’ll be taking over.’ She laughed, trying to win them. ‘You can bet your socks on that. I’m for the easy life, me.’
They laughed with her, Isaac half-heartedly, and for the time all was well.
She was right too. The months stretched out and little by little things became easier. At long last, after Jonathan had been back a little over twelve months, he began to pick up the reins again.
The years passed. Australia sold a hundred million quids’ worth of wool to Britain (those darn futures again) which was great for the industry and for Derwent. In Brisbane, returning diggers started a war of their own, belting the daylights out of a parade of Bolsheviks. The Prince of Wales skipped in, visited lots of places and six months later skipped out again. In Western Australia, a woman called Cowan became the first woman MP. Women’s dresses climbed higher in the skirt and lower in the neck, causing pleasure to some and outrage to others. Tasmania declared itself broke.
‘How is that possible when Britain bought all that wool from us?’ Bec asked.
‘God knows.’
In 1927, two weeks after Giles’s twelfth birthday, Bec had a miscarriage.
She had never thought she could feel so bad.
She had been visiting friends in Hobart when things started to go wrong, so they’d rushed her to the hospital. The way it worked out, it was just as well.
The physical pain was bad enough although not as bad as when Giles had been born. She always remembered that as a terrible time: out of her depth, the big house like a gaol with Grandma Bessie the gaoler in chief, her own mother nowhere to be seen and her husband fighting overseas in the terrible war that seemed none of his business.
It had been very bad yet in one way the present situation was worse. There was still pain but she found the damage to the spirit harder to bear; it lasted longer and left her feeling diminished.
‘I feel so guilty,’ she told the nurse but the nurse was brisk by nature and had heard this sort of nonsense from patients before.
‘You shouldn’t,’ the nurse said. ‘These things happen.’
Which might have been meant to provide consolation but did not.
While Bec was in the city Jonathan had a visitor. He was a big bloke, well dressed. In a chauffeur-driven motor car, all very grand, he drove up the hill to Derwent’s massive front door and asked to see Jonathan.
‘May I know what this is in connection with?’ said Mrs Harrington.
She spoke severely; this was a sad house for news of the miscarriage had just arrived, phoned through from the Hobart hospital.
‘Tell him his old mate Basil Merton is here and wants to give him the best deal he’ll ever get in this world or the next.’ His words, like his voice and body, seemed too big even for a house the size of Derwent.
‘We were in the war together. You can say Jumbo Webley sends his regards too.’
Mrs Harrington conveyed the message to Jonathan. In the depths of gloom over the baby, he couldn’t remember either Basil Merton or Jumbo Webley but there were many blanks in his memories of those days, of the people he’d known who’d lived or died.
‘I suppose I’d better see him.’
He knew him when he saw him, two men who by a series of miracles had somehow survived the slaughter of Pozières.
Basil started chucking names about: people they had known, men who’d walked away and others who had not.
‘We’ve seen some terrible things, you and me,’ Basil said.
Jonathan nodded. No one doubted the terror but he had never wanted to revisit the blood and steel of those days, the ghosts of landscapes people said had been so delightful in the lost days before the war.
‘We reckoned the world owed us,’ said Basil Merton, ‘after all we’d been through. You remember how we said we were going to make ourselves rich when the war was over?’
‘Vaguely.’
Jonathan couldn’t remember discussing it with Merton but it was the way a lot of men had talked at that time, words as bold as brass providing an antidote for fear, so perhaps he had. At the moment he was too sad to care what he’d said on that blood-soaked field. ‘So how can I help you now?’
‘More a question of how I can help you,’ Merton said. ‘Of how I am going to make you even richer than you are already.’
When Bec, sore of heart, sore in body, brought her empty arms home from the hospita
l Jonathan told her about his new friend.
‘You say you don’t remember him?’
‘Not very well. Conditions like they were, lots of men couldn’t remember their own names.’
‘You’re saying he’s a stockbroker, got you to invest in some of the shares he recommended?’
‘Just a taster, no more. See if he knows what he’s talking about.’
‘Hmm…’
She didn’t like it but supposed a bit of a flutter, if that was all it was, would do no harm. It would be nice if he won; if not, it wouldn’t be too serious and she knew better than anyone how Jonathan, even so long after the war, still needed to boost his self-esteem.
‘It’s as if he blames himself for having survived the war,’ she told her friend Mrs Roberts.
‘Seven years after it ended,’ Mrs Roberts said. ‘But I’ve read somewhere thoughts like that can last as long as life itself.’
The thought seemed to gratify her; everyone had their problems and Mrs Roberts clearly doubted whether Jonathan Penrose, one of the richest men in Tasmania, could be more afflicted than the thousands who were less well off.
Of the five shares Basil Merton had recommended, two rose slightly but the other three went roaring up. Within the month their prices had doubled, then trebled.
Jonathan couldn’t wait to get to the papers every morning; every morning he was rendered breathless by his sagacity in buying the shares he had.
Two months later Merton phoned. ‘I think we should get out now.’
‘But –’
‘They’ve peaked.’
Those shares had become like old friends and Jonathan was sad to sell. He was even tempted to ignore Basil’s advice and hang on but did not and a week later he was over the moon; the price of all three runaway stocks had come crashing down as quickly as they had gone up.
Once again Jonathan congratulated himself.
‘I think this fellow is a genius,’ he told Bec. ‘And I suppose you could say I’m not such a fool myself.’
Bec, preoccupied with Derwent’s affairs, gave him little attention.
‘Yes, dear,’ she said.
On Basil’s advice Jonathan invested again, a little more this time, and made again. Slowly the sums he put into his share portfolio grew. So did the profits. Admittedly they were only paper profits because now Basil was counselling him to hang on, but they were there, weren’t they? Any time he chose to sell he could.
Months passed.
The profits were good, then remarkable, then mind-boggling, because it was June 1929 and the market was surging like a tidal wave and he was riding it, exultation in every heartbeat.
Basil was as excited as he was. ‘We’re heading for the big time. Give it everything you’ve got.’
Jonathan obeyed. Better: he gave it more than he’d got, much more. But who cared? It was a mad world, offering unlimited rewards to the brave.
Bec was concerned, then uneasy, then alarmed. ‘Get out now! Get out while you can!’
Jonathan took no notice. For the first time since the war, he felt as he had as a young man: free, alive, one with his destiny. Once again where a man should be, in charge.
Up and up went his shares. Up and up. Now the whole world was in on the act. Up and up. A hiccup in September but optimism soon shook that off. Up again. Up.
He pledged his personal assets to the bank – he had plenty of those now, not like it had been in the years before the war – and would have pledged Derwent itself had the trust deed permitted it. He tried to get his co-trustee’s approval but Maurice Miller was having none of it. Undeterred, he raised an overdraft on the strength of his being the trust’s major beneficiary, bought more shares with the money.
At the end of October Wall Street crashed. Panic swept the markets of the world.
Face grey, sickness cramping his stomach, Jonathan found himself looking at catastrophe. Careless of pride, close to weeping, he pleaded with Basil Merton.
‘Sell! Sell everything!’
Basil laughed, if you could call it a laugh. ‘Chance would be a fine thing.’ He was in as bad a state as Jonathan, possibly worse. ‘A lot of our stocks, we’ll be lucky to get back twenty per cent what we paid for them.’
‘And the rest?’
‘For the rest there are no buyers at all.’
‘It’ll go up again soon, won’t it?’
Silence gave the answer.
‘But what do we do?’
Like a small child crying for its mother.
‘Pray, if you’ve got the mind,’ Basil said. ‘Or you could always try blowing your brains out.’
In the meantime Jonathan had Bec to face and the reproachful shades of all those who had held Derwent before him.
To say nothing of the bank.
‘An unhappy business altogether,’ said Hamish Archer, rubbing his hands.
Not so long ago the bank manager, king of grovellers, would have come close to kneeling whenever Mrs Rebecca Penrose deigned to enter the premises of the Tasmanian Bank. No longer. Now it was all business with not a grovel in sight.
‘I must tell you,’ Hamish Archer said, ‘I did everything in my power to dissuade Mr Penrose from making further investment with the market so high. A correction, I told him, was bound to come. But he was not to be dissuaded. Regrettable, Mrs Penrose. Most regrettable.’
His Hibernian Rs might have cracked walnuts.
‘I have no doubt you did what you could,’ said Bec. ‘That is not the issue. What I need is your advice; how do we extricate ourselves from this hole?’
The crash had given Hamish Archer a power he had never expected and he relished every minute of it. ‘The market is in a verra sorry state, Mrs Penrose. My directors have nae expectation that stocks will rise any time soon. On the contrary, they foresee further falls, probably extending over several months. Even longer, perhaps.’ Mr Archer shook his head sadly. ‘I fear those who willna be guided have to face the consequences.’
He might have been John Knox letting rip about the monstrous regiment of women.
Bec could have slapped the manager’s self-righteous face but restrained herself. ‘And your advice, Mr Archer?’
‘To pay back what you owe.’ He took up a piece of paper. ‘One hundred and three thousand, nine hundred and three pounds, Mrs Penrose. With interest accumulating every day.’
‘You hold the share scrip relating to my husband’s investments –’
‘Worthless, I regret to say. At this time.’
‘But you cannot touch Derwent itself because of the trust.’
‘That is true.’
‘So what is the position, legally speaking?’
‘I think we may safely leave that to the lawyers. Hmm?’ He gave a bank manager’s laugh, dust-dry and uncompromising. ‘Not our field of expertise, hmm? My advice is the same as I am giving others in your situation. Your husband should repay what he owes, Mrs Penrose. As quickly as he can. Lest worse befalls, hmm?’
The implied threat of bankruptcy could hardly have been clearer. What that would do to Jonathan’s fragile psyche Bec dared not imagine.
Dear God, she thought as her car trundled down Macquarie Street. What do I do now?
She phoned Maurice Miller and gave him the bad news.
‘I see no help for it,’ she said. ‘I daren’t risk damaging my husband more than he’s damaged already. I think the trust will have to sell off some assets.’
‘The way the stock market is, it won’t be easy,’ Maurice said.
‘I was thinking more of land. Specifically, the land we own along the Murrumbidgee.’
‘I’ll make enquiries,’ Maurice said. ‘Get back to you as soon as I can.’ Lemaire Forrest had found the market crash and developing depression a gift from the god in whom he did not believe. He had sold out before the crash so hadn’t lost a penny, while the business opportunities arising from those with less foresight were vast.
Hedley Crabbe came to see him. He flicked dust off a fasti
dious cuff and looked around him with distaste. ‘Why don’t you get this place tidied up a little? And a coat of paint wouldn’t hurt.’
‘Because I choose not to,’ Forrest said. ‘You said you had some information for me?’
‘Some years ago we talked about an estate in Tasmania called Derwent.’
Lemaire Forrest was not a man who forgot things. ‘In 1916 when the owner died. What about it?’
‘They’ve put some irrigated land on the market.’
‘Irrigated land is always worth having. Check it out. Perhaps we can put in a bid.’
It had been a day of almost continuous rain. Rivulets of water created gullies in the rocky soil as they tumbled down the hill. Bec stood at the living room window and watched Maurice Miller’s motor car negotiating the steep track up to the house.
Five minutes later the maid came to announce Mr Miller’s arrival.
‘Thank you, Ivy.’
Bec went to greet him, hand outstretched.
‘Come in, Maurice. Ivy. I think we’d like some coffee. Unless you’d prefer whisky?’
Times might be hard but hospitality still had a claim.
‘Coffee will be fine.’ He stretched his hands to the fire. ‘Midsummer? It feels more like the winter.’
She watched him. ‘What brings you here in this foul weather?’
‘I tried to phone but the lines are down. We’ve had an offer for the Murrumbidgee land,’ he said.
‘A good one?’
‘Not good at all, I’m afraid. I tried to push up the price but they weren’t interested. You could hang on and hope for a better offer but with the world as it is… At least it’s cash.’
‘How much?’
‘Enough to put us in funds for a while. The best we can hope for, the times as they are. Did you see in the paper how many people are out of work?’
‘And factories and businesses closing every day,’ Bec said. ‘It makes you wonder what the world is coming to.’
‘Perhaps the wool price will recover,’ Maurice said.
‘Do you think it will?’
‘Not for a while.’
‘That land is worth twice what they’re offering.’
‘It’s a buyer’s market. It’s worth what we can get for it.’
Land of Golden Wattle Page 37