by JH Fletcher
Brenda came to another bend, even tighter, her wheel shuddering as Charlie’s foot forced it to its limit. Occasionally the steering chain snapped on these bends but not this time. They entered another straight and Charlie eased the wheel again.
‘I’ll tell ’im I’ll take ’is bloody job,’ he told the silent ranks of trees. ‘I’ll tell ’im next time we’re passin’.’
The red and green leaves stirred in the wind. Do what you like, they said. Don’t bother us about it.
The decision did nothing to lighten his spirits; it was more like a threat, filling his future with darkness.
Charlie Armstrong working for the Grenvilles … Was it really possible?
That night he sat in the golden lamplight of the saloon. Elsie was patching one of his shirts; Sarah was busy in the galley. He watched as his daughter, sitting on the saloon deck, introduced a friend into the rituals of regal society. A portrait of Queen Victoria, cut from a magazine, was propped on a cushion, as on a throne. The friend was a doll, fashioned from a twist of cloth pinched from the store.
‘This is how you curtsy. Down! Get down on the floor! At once!’ Alex clipped the doll’s ear to make sure it obeyed. The world of make-believe.
Beyond the saloon windows lay the darkness and the river, and the trees’ black shadows tossing their manes against a starry sky. The world of reality.
Think for Alex, Charlie told himself. Never mind what you want. Think for her.
‘I’m gunna take the job,’ he told Sarah when they got into bed that night. ‘Like you said, regular pay’s not to be sneezed at.’
‘Don’t pin it on me,’ she warned him. ‘It’s your decision. Right?’
CHAPTER 38
Charlie said nothing to old man Tomkins down at Goolwa, nor to any of the people he met along the river. Plenty of time for that, he told himself. They’ll hear soon enough, without me telling them.
Each day was like a last day. Stop here, for the last time. Chat to the people who had gathered in answer to Brenda’s whistle, for the last time. A farewell poop as the paddles churned the water and Brenda pushed out into the current. For the last time.
In one sense it wasn’t true. He’d be doing it all again, many times. The same paddle steamer, the same people, the same goods. Even the same words. Nothing would be different.
Yet everything would be different and both he and the selectors would know it. Because he would have crossed the line. He would no longer be as they were, a battler doing what it took to make a quid. He’d be a bloke who worked for a boss, who was answerable to a boss. And to a Grenville, at that. Titan’s owner. The ructions over Titan’s rates had happened years ago, but memories were long on the Murray. There’d be those who’d think Charlie had sold out when they heard about what he’d done. No longer one of us. One of them.
Luke was still away with his mate Josh. Next week both children would be back at school. Alone in the wheelhouse, Charlie felt the sky pressing more heavily upon him with every day that passed.
It was evening when they arrived at Eagle on the Hill and dark by the time they’d tied up. Alex wanted to go ashore at once but Charlie said no way, she’d have to wait until morning. Watch those pouts, now. But Charlie wasn’t going to barge in on his new boss at this time of night. Except they hadn’t been there ten minutes, hadn’t even had time to scrub the grease off their hands, when bully-boy Baxter came scowling down the slope from the house. If Alex’s expression had been scary, check out this bloke, who clearly thought he was a cut above carrying messages to someone like Charlie Armstrong. His boots clattered on the deck.
Charlie met him before he’d gone a yard. ‘Who said you could come on board?’
‘You’re wanted up at the ’ouse.’
Heat rose in Charlie’s chest. ‘Right.’
Baxter looked at him, clearly expecting him to jump. But Charlie did not move, though his thoughts and stomach churned.
‘You comin’ or aren’t you?’ Baxter was not a patient man, or had perhaps been conditioned to obey the boss.
‘You gave me the message,’ Charlie told him. ‘That’s all you need to know.’ And stared him down.
‘Suit yourself, mate. But don’ blame me if you’re not popular.’ And he pushed off up the slope into the darkness.
On the ridge the lights of the big house shone, a golden judgment upon the man standing on the paddle steamer’s deck, with grease on his hands and singlet, who presumed to have his own view of the world and himself. For a minute Charlie’s unquiet eyes looked up at those lights. ‘Gimme a break,’ he said aloud. ‘I haven’t even said I’d work for you yet.’ He turned and went back into the saloon.
Charlie followed his morning routine meticulously. He fired the boiler and made sure the fuel boxes were full. He dived into the river, thrashing and splashing and taking his time about it, while the cold water set the blood pulsing through his body. A flight of ducks planed in to settle on the river, but at the last moment had second thoughts and swerved away over the trees. Freedom … Out then, and a good rub down before getting ready for his visit to Eagle on the Hill.
‘Make sure you keep steam up,’ he told Sarah.
He dolled himself up in his best white shirt, his suit, as black as a funeral, his bow tie. Sarah watched as he spat on his boots and rubbed them with a cloth.
‘You look like you’re goin’ to a weddin’,’ she said.
‘Right.’
‘Or a dance.’
‘Right.’
‘Plannin’ to dance with the boss, are we?’
He pulled on his boots and tied the laces. ‘Want to come with me?’
‘Whatever for?’
‘Might be your last chance to pay a social visit.’
Neither of them was happy about things. Sarah saw that Charlie was trying to make things as easy for her as he could. She shook her head.
‘No, Charlie. Thanks for suggestin’ it, but it’s not like they invited me, is it? You’re goin’ on business. I’d be in the way. Maybe I’ll have another chance, one of these days.’
‘I wouldn’t bet on it.’
‘I’ve lived thirty-five years without seeing inside; I daresay I can manage a bit longer. But I dunno why you’re tartin’ yourself up. He’s not hirin’ you for your clothes, I know that much.’
‘I want him to see I’m as good a man as he is.’
‘But you won’t be, not if you work for him. How can you be as good as him if you have to jump when he says so?’
‘D’you want Alex to have her chance or not?’
A squabble to carry up with the slope with him. While Alex, with not a care in the world, ran ahead as though she owned the place.
Make up your mind, he told himself. Rufus takes it for granted you’ll say yes. You’d be crazy not to. Make up your mind.
In the end it wasn’t hard. Rufus kept him waiting half an hour. Then Mrs Trask led him to the office where he’d seen the typing machine.
Rufus was standing with his back to the window, the set of his shoulders signalling anger. He did not ask Charlie to sit down.
‘I expected you last night.’
It was not a question; Charlie did not answer it.
‘Did you get my message?’
‘I did.’
‘And chose to ignore it?’
‘Your bloke Baxter said you wanted to see me. He didn’t say when. It was late. I was tired, dirty. I thought it would be best —’
‘When you know me better you’ll understand I don’t pay my men to think.’
Ice could not have been colder, but Charlie was not to be bullied. ‘You’re not payin’ me to do anythin’ at the moment.’
‘You’ll also find I expect my orders to be obeyed at once.’
‘Then maybe the message shoulda bin more clearly worded.’
Colour flared along Rufus’s cheekbones; he did not appreciate inferiors trading words with him.
Children’s voices echoed excitedly from somewhere within the hou
se. Rufus cocked his head and dredged a smile from somewhere. ‘Your daughter enjoys her visits here.’
‘She does.’
‘You needn’t worry. She’ll still be welcome to visit my son, even when you’re working for me. Tell me, have you given any more thought to what I said about her education?’
‘I’ve thought about nuthun else. It’s a great opportunity for her, there’s no denying.’ Yet Charlie spoke without enthusiasm.
Baxter staring, one hired hand to another. You comin’ or aren’t you?
You’ll find I expect my orders to be obeyed at once.
Rufus said, ‘I spoke in haste. I’m sorry. But I have a busy day ahead of me.’
Charlie flashed a glance at him and surprised the look of calculation in Rufus’s eyes. Rufus had not spoken in haste. This was the man he was. He was not sorry at all, but would say whatever was needed to win Charlie round. Agree to work for him and Charlie would be bound, a prisoner of his subordinate status and Alex’s education. Suddenly he’d reached a new, and final, decision.
He heard himself say, ‘I reckon I’ll carry on as I am. I appreciate the offer but —’
Rufus stared. ‘Let me be sure I understand you. You are turning me down? Education for your daughter, a good price for your boat, a regular income … You’re saying no to all of this?’
‘It’s a great opportunity, I know that —’
‘Which will not come again. Men say I make a good friend but a bad enemy. Is that really what you want: to have me as an enemy?’
It was the worst thing Rufus could have said. His words freed Charlie from doubt.
‘That’s up to you. I don’ want it, no, but if I have to I reckon I can live with it.’
Enmity slashed the air between them. ‘Don’t be too sure of that.’
And Charlie shrugged, turning away.
‘You’re forgetting something,’ Rufus said.
Charlie looked back questioningly at him.
‘Take your brat with you!’
CHAPTER 39
Sarah hadn’t wanted to wait on Brenda with only Elsie for company while Charlie and Alex were up at the house, so she’d decided to visit her parents.
That horrible man Baxter was hanging about. She was not afraid of him, exactly, but could do without the unpleasantness that would certainly follow if he decided she was trespassing. Instead of walking across Eagle on the Hill land to reach the Keach property — the logical way of going — she asked Elsie to help her put the dinghy in the water. ‘Make sure you keep steam up,’ she reminded her.
Sarah rowed downriver until she reached the landing at her parents’ place. She tied the painter to a convenient branch and went ashore.
The two properties shared a common boundary, but in all other ways were a hundred miles apart.
At Eagle on the Hill every blade of grass knew its place. The vines were trained along the terraces, each leader secured neatly to its trellis. There was not a weed to be seen, as though nature itself had been pinned and pruned, dragooned into service for the Grenvilles’ greater profit.
The Keach place was nothing like that. The vines struggled along, like their owners — although who owned what in this jungle of weeds and half-cleared land it was impossible to say.
The house was in no better state. A broken window had been patched with cardboard, while a branch hung low overhead. One day a storm would bring it crashing, but that was not a prospect urgent enough to inspire her father to action, and Sarah knew that the branch would remain where it was until disaster struck. At some time Harold had tacked a shack-like extension onto the main building, itself little more than a shack. This, too, had never been finished and now stood hang-dog, apologising for its incompleteness, with planks missing from its walls where they’d been taken for firewood. The wooden steps to the verandah that her father had begun several years before had never been completed. What was there was already half rotted, with one step missing altogether. Sarah stepped cautiously around it and crossed the quaking planks to the open door.
Sarah stuck her nose in.
‘Anyone at home?’
Silence. The interior smelt stale.
She walked around the verandah to the back, where she found her parents sitting on a couple of rough chairs, nailed together from sawn planks, their eyes resting on the tangled land with a glass jug, half empty, standing on the floor between them.
It was several weeks since she had last seen them, but it was clear that nothing had changed, that nothing would ever change. This was the way they were.
‘How ya goin’?’
They looked blearily up at her and Sarah saw that at ten o’clock in the morning they were already drunk. Nothing new in that. One of her mother’s eyes was swollen, her cheekbone bruised. So that, too, hadn’t changed; with Harold Keach booze and fists had always gone together.
‘Charlie with you?’ her mother asked.
‘He’s up at the big house.’
She had told them on a previous visit how Alex had struck up a friendship with the Grenville kid after she’d hoicked him out of the river.
‘Hoity-toity,’ her mother said. ‘Soon you won’t want to know people like us.’
‘Rufus Grenville wants Charlie to go and work for him,’ Sarah said.
Her father was now a ruin of a man, all blood-cracked eyeballs and sewer breath. He lifted the jug to his lips and took a mouthful. ‘Bastard sellin’ out, is he?’
‘Of course not.’
‘That why you come? To show us how high and mighty you are?’ He was working himself into a state. ‘Rattin’ on your own kind, your own family what reared you?’
‘Don’ be like that,’ her mother said.
‘Shut your mouth!’ he told her. And took another drink, liquor spilling from his mouth. ‘You want me to shut it for you, I’m game.’
With her father in this mood, there was no point in staying. Sarah said, ‘I’ll be goin’, then. I just dropped in to see how you were.’
‘Not fancy enough for her ladyship,’ Keach said.
‘Don’ be like that,’ her mother said again.
So Sarah escaped. Rowing back along the river, she thought about the ramshackle house and ramshackle people she had just left. Her parents were alone, now that Arthur had joined a group of fishermen at Murray Mouth. Like Sarah, he had been eager to get away, to make his own life. These days ten minutes of her parents’ company were more than enough, yet Harold and Belinda were still family and their claim could not be denied. Not that they’d ever asked for help, but that time was surely coming, with the neglected vines producing barely enough to keep them in the grog that seemed to be their only sustenance. One of these days they would fall ill, or the tree branch would come through the roof, or the house would collapse. And then what? Sarah couldn’t leave them to rot, yet the idea of having them aboard Brenda was unthinkable.
She came alongside the paddle steamer, tied up to the stern and climbed aboard. She looked around the deck. This was their home, their life. No Eagle on the Hill, perhaps, but their own.
Elsie was there to greet her.
Sarah went into the stokehold to check the firebox and the pressure gauges on the boiler. The heat hit her like a fist. All was in order. She went back to the saloon. She was restless, wondering how Charlie’s talk with Rufus Grenville was going.
She looked through the window at the big house and saw her husband running down the slope as though the devil were after him. She smiled, thinking he was playing some kind of game, then frowned, then stared in disbelief. Because this was clearly no game. Charlie was running flat out, dragging Alex by one arm behind him. Sarah’s heart stood still as she looked at what had to be catastrophe.
A clatter of boots as Charlie came aboard, still running. Alex was in tears, her face white with shock, while blood was running down Charlie’s face. His suit jacket was ripped half off his back and his shirt … Forget the shirt.
Whatever Sarah had imagined, the reality was ten times
worse.
‘What on earth —?’
‘I’ll tell ya later. Let’s get outta here.’
There was an explosion of movement. Elsie, pursued by a volley of orders, raced to cast off. Charlie sped up the ladder to the wheelhouse. Sarah ran to the engine. Thank goodness they’d kept the steam up.
All the while questions thundered in her head. What was going on? She stared out of the window of the engine room and saw Baxter bounding down the steps from the house.
Her eyes narrowed. She couldn’t believe what she was seeing. He was carrying … It couldn’t be. It was.
Baxter was carrying a rifle.
He jumped the last few steps, stumbled, then recovered. Running even faster, he hurtled down the slope.
Sarah screeched more orders. ‘Alex! Elsie! Stay in the saloon! Down on the floor! Quickly! Don’t look out the window!’
Body shaking, she stood ready to open the valves and put the engine into gear. And still stood, waiting for Charlie’s signal. Come on!
Baxter must be halfway down the slope by now. More than halfway. She was itching to look but dared not move. Come on, Charlie! Baxter would be stopping, he would be loading, aiming.
Somewhere Elsie was blubbering.
For Heaven’s sake be quiet! Somehow Sarah bit back the words.
Come on, Charl —
The bell rang. She opened the valves, engaged the gear.
Come on!
The paddles were turning. So slowly. Any second she would hear Baxter’s boots on the deck. The hull was trembling as the engine came to life. The first swash, swash of the paddles sounded. She felt she was about to explode, like an overstrained boiler. At first she didn’t dare look out of the window, but when she did, she saw the bank sliding past, a gap opening between the hull and the land.
The paddles were turning more quickly now. The gap was wider. Too wide for anyone to jump.
Yet they were still not safe, if Baxter used the gun. Sarah waited, eyes screwed tight.