‘Mrs Sinclair is fat.’
‘No wonder I love you,’ Cat said. She looked at what she had been told was a cricket oval and at the boys scampering this way and that. ‘Tell me about this game. One side is in until it’s out and then the other side is in until it’s out? That is supposed to mean something?’
‘I’ll explain later,’ Mungo said. He clapped. ‘Well hit, sir!’
Philip went in and scored fifteen runs before he was out. In and out… Who could make sense of it?
‘Well done, dear,’ Cat said, hoping she’d said the right thing, and when the match was over they all went off to the marquee and had tea.
Later Philip announced he’d had three cream buns.
‘Shame on you,’ Cat said. ‘Keep that up and you’ll be fat.’
‘Like you are, Grandma?’
‘Your grandmother is not fat,’ Mungo said. ‘She is a fine figure of a woman.’
Philip inspected her. He knew he was on the edge of what was permitted but risked it anyway. ‘Maybe a bit fat, Grandma? Just a bit?’
‘What cheek!’ Cat said. ‘Off with you now before I tan your bottom.’
‘Yes, Grandma.’
They watched him run to join his friends.
‘Compliments flying,’ Cat said. ‘A bit fat indeed! What next?’ But was smiling as she said it; over the years the child had grown close to her heart.
‘I’ll give you another one,’ Mungo said. ‘You are a splendid-looking woman, clad and unclad, and I lust after you daily.’
He had spoken more clearly than was wise and Cat was paralysed with embarrassment. Had Mrs Sinclair heard? She daren’t look.
‘Shhh!’ she said.
The years rolled by and in 1898 Laura surprised them all over again by giving birth to a second daughter.
What a difference. Eight-year-old Myrtle was growing up exactly as Cat had feared, a replica of her mother, but Kitty was a joy. She was a baby, as far as her true nature was concerned a nothing, really, yet Cat maintained as soon as she saw her that here was a kindred spirit.
Not that her daughter-in-law wanted Cat and Kitty to get too close.
‘She’s afraid I may contaminate her,’ Cat said.
‘You’ve eaten tougher women than Laura for breakfast,’ Mungo said.
‘And shall do again,’ she agreed. ‘If needs be.’
It was very simple. She ignored Laura’s scowls and visited regularly. She was always careful to acknowledge Myrtle but spent more time holding Kitty and talking to her.
Laura complained to her husband.
‘What can I do?’ Edmund said. ‘She owns this house.’
‘Doesn’t mean I have to put up with her stealing my child,’ Laura said, but lacked the firepower to shoot down her mother-in-law.
Edward lived with his parents in Launceston so Cat saw him only occasionally but, mellower than she used to be, continued to derive great joy from Philip, aged sixteen and a sixth former at the school from which his father had been expelled eighteen years before, and the infant Kitty, whom Cat was delighted to see had the same brilliant blue eyes and black hair as herself.
In 1899 Philip was school captain and captain of the cricket eleven. There was no doubt which Mungo thought more important but Cat did not care one way or the other. What mattered to her was that Philip had turned out better than she had dared hope.
‘I love him as though he were my own,’ she said to Mungo. ‘Is that wicked of me?’
Mungo knew what she was really asking. Am I wicked to love him better than my son?
‘In every way that matters he is your own. You have helped create him, make him what he is.’
Her eyes searched his face. ‘As Dr Morgan did for me?’
‘Exactly. So let’s hear no more talk about wickedness. He is a fine young man and I love him too.’
They held hands and were happy and proud and for the first time for a long time Cat felt tears pricking the back of her eyes. ‘He is a fine young man, isn’t he?
‘He is indeed.’
Three months later came one of the worst days of her life.
SIXTY-NINE
Joanne
I took it for granted the call was from Colin.
‘I’ll get cooking,’ I said as I picked up the phone.
But it was not from Colin.
‘Wiranto. I need to see you urgently.’
‘Can’t it wait?’
‘No. I regret. It cannot.’
‘What’s it about?’
‘I’ll tell you when I see you.’
I surrendered to the inevitable. ‘You’d better come over, then.’
‘As quickly as I can,’ he said and hung up.
Damn and blast. I tipped Chivas into my glass, screwed the cap back on the bottle and took a nerve-calming swallow. What the hell was Wiranto playing at, coming around at this time of night?
The phone rang. This time I was more circumspect.
‘Hello?’
‘Thank goodness I’ve got hold of you,’ Averil said.
‘Aren’t you ever going to China? I thought you’d be tit-deep in Shaanxi mud by now.’
‘They keep on putting it off. Listen, this guy Wiranto. It seemed odd to me, his turning up the way he did. So I phoned Jakarta, spoke to someone I know in the Department of Antiquities.’
‘Wiranto phoned not ten minutes ago. He’s coming to see me.’
‘No he’s not. I’ve just spoken to him. He’s in the Antiquities Department, sure enough, but he’s an administrator. He’s never left Jakarta. I don’t know who your guy is but he is certainly not Dr Wiranto.’
A bomb blast might have had the same effect.
‘He’s on his way right now, for God’s sake!’
‘Phone the police,’ Averil said.
‘But –’
Panic: or not far away.
‘Do it!’ Averil was shouting over the phone. ‘Do it now!’
She hung up. I stared at the dead phone in my hand. I felt the world had been tipped upside down. If Wiranto was not Wiranto… I couldn’t get my head around it.
And Averil had hung up. Get a grip, I told myself. Of course she had hung up. To clear the line. So I could get help. Help? I stared around the room, no longer my friendly refuge. My brain skittered like a mouse trying to find its hole.
The police… Averil had said to phone the police. That was right. Ring 000. Tell them someone was trying to break in. Tell them anything. Just get them here! The only trouble was, living way out in the sticks, by the time the cops got here it might be too late. .
Where had Wiranto been when he phoned? I had no idea. How long would it take him to get here? I had no idea.
Get away, I told myself. That’s what you must do. Get away and hide. Hide where? Doesn’t matter where. You’ve got a car, haven’t you? Get in the damn car and drive, for God’s sake! Grab your mobile and ring the police from down the road. Just go!
I snatched up the phone, grabbed my purse. Keys. Where the hell were the bloody keys? A minute passed while I looked this way and that. There. I grabbed them. How long since Wiranto had phoned? Who knew? Who cared? Get moving!
Stumbling in my haste, I made for the door. My hand was reaching for the latch when I heard the crunch of tyres.
Too late.
I shrank back as though I could somehow hide inside myself. A rabbit trapped in the beam of speeding headlights: I knew how it felt.
A car door slammed. Footsteps crunched on stone. A knock on the door.
Where to hide now? There was nowhere to hide.
I was no longer thinking; fatalism had taken over. What was to be would be. I went and opened the door.
Wiranto, or whatever his true name was, was standing there.
‘Dr Fletcher,’ he said genially. ‘May I come in?’
SEVENTY
Cat
It was November 1899. Like his grandmother, Philip had fire in his belly. He was nearly eighteen and anxious to make his mark in the world. Cat had her eye
on him as her possible successor but understood his need to live a little before settling down.
‘Live a little or perhaps a lot,’ she said to Mungo. ‘As we did.’
They shared reminiscent smiles.
‘We certainly made the fur fly,’ Mungo said.
Days to look back on with pleasure and not a little pride.
‘Arthur Dunstable never got over the loss of Antares,’ Cat said. ‘Sometimes I feel guilty about that.’
It was easier to find forgiveness now her old enemy was dead. He had died penniless too.
‘Serve him right,’ Mungo said. ‘He would have seen you hanged if he could. In any case it wasn’t in him to make a success of anything. Antares was merely an excuse.’
Which was true.
‘Philip has spoken to me,’ Mungo said. ‘He wants to go soldiering in South Africa.’
‘He’s under age,’ Cat said.
‘He’s seventeen. When you were that age you had already set out to see the world.’
‘If you call a convict transport seeing the world.’
‘You did all right out of it,’ he said.
She locked her fingers in his. ‘I did very well.’
‘Will you let him go or not?’
‘I dislike the idea but I think I’ll say yes. He’s big and strong and it’ll give him a chance to stretch his wings.’
Philip was with the first Tasmanians to travel to South Africa to take part in what people were calling the Second Boer War. Seconded to the Lancashire Fusiliers he was one of those chosen to mount a night-time assault in thick mist on a hill called Spion Kop. And there in hand-to-hand fighting Private Philip Mortimer, who had been in the war less than a month, was killed.
The news came at the end of January in the form of an overseas cable.
It was as though the universe had fallen in ruins about her. Cat held the cablegram in her hand. So much hope. So much joy and excitement. All gone. All…
Her legs gave way. She crumpled to the floor and lay unmoving, arms wrapped about her body. She would have wept but could not. Now the bright future was dark.
Later, lying in the darkness of night as well as the darkness of her soul, she turned to Mungo. ‘It is my fault. I killed him.’
‘You did not. You freed him to do what he wanted to do. Philip understood the risks.’
‘I should not have done it.’
‘No point talking like that. Should and should not have all gone down the river. What you did you did in good faith.’
‘Then my judgement was wrong.’
She could have hated him for not joining her in her need to punish herself. But he would not, nor would he be silenced.
‘You made the best call you could. You did not force him to go. You did not want him to go but you gave him the freedom to choose. No one anywhere in the world is right all the time but that is no reason for you to blame yourself. Philip was a young man who chose to go to war and war killed him. It was a tragedy but that was the risk he took. We all respect his memory but we must move on. You most of all.’
She knew he was right but for the moment could not bring herself to accept it. She lay stiffly in his arms and for the first time hated life. The following day, alone in the library, she poured out her anguish in the notebook that she had started to write in tandem with the journal. Why she had started it she was not sure; perhaps out of a need to record thoughts and feelings that were too private for the journal that she already suspected might be read by many after her death.
Life, in the end, had the last say. It took months and Philip’s death was a wound that would never heal but in time the pain grew more bearable. Once again she began to think about the future: although how much future either of them could expect was open to question. Mungo was seventy-seven, an old man, and his hair was white. Cat, ten years younger, was still able to deny the realities of age but even she was no longer up to galloping hell for leather about the countryside as she had once.
SEVENTY-ONE
Tasmania was a colony no longer but a state of the newborn nation Australia. Once the flag-waving and speeches were done, Catherine turned with new vigour to thoughts of her own legacy. Who would take over the businesses when the time came for her to relinquish control? Philip, in whom she had placed so many hopes, was dead; she had no faith in Edmund and Laura was completely unsuitable. Justin was committed to his ever-expanding railway empire and Sarah, secure within the arms of her family and home, did not want to know.
‘I shall have to bring in an outsider,’ she told Mungo. ‘At least until Kitty is old enough to take charge.’
Her faith in her granddaughter was strong but three-yearold Kitty could not reasonably be expected to take authority for another fifteen years. By which time Cat, assuming she was still alive, would be eighty-three.
‘An outsider it is,’ she said. ‘There is no other choice.’
And what about the crown? She decided that too would be entrusted to Kitty.
She continued to write up her journal, recording many of the events of her life. She wrote a detailed account of her childhood in England, a less detailed account of the things that had happened since her arrival in Australia. She mentioned the pirating of the treasure ship Antares, but only as an outsider might have recorded it. She made no mention of the raid on Arthur Dunstable’s house or the crown of Muar.
The years passed.
Mungo’s eightieth birthday on 21 February 1903 had been and gone, marked by a brilliant late-summer day and a family get-together at Cat’s Kingdom. The whole clan came, with Sarah and Justin and their son Edward taking the train from Launceston and Edmund, Laura and Myrtle on their best behaviour for once. Fiveyear-old Kitty was as always belle of the ball, at least as far as Cat was concerned.
‘Why did Laura name her Kitty?’ Mungo asked before the party. ‘That’s another form of Catherine, isn’t it?’
‘Probably hoping I’ll leave her some money.’
‘Such cynicism,’ Mungo said.
‘It’s the truth.’
Cat was sorry Mungo had no children of his own to join in but he didn’t seem to care. It was a happy time.
Two days after the party Mungo decided to pay a visit to Jackson’s Landing. A resident manager had been running the station for some years but Mungo still visited from time to time to keep an eye on things. Or so he claimed.
‘An excuse to get away from me,’ Cat said.
‘That’s what it is,’ he said. ‘Scary woman like you, who would blame me?’
Cat, smiling, remembered their first meeting at Dr Morgan’s dinner party and her terror and how drawn she had been to him. Love at first sight, she thought. People said there was no such thing but that was what it had been, no doubt about it.
Mungo had suggested that Cat should come to the Landing with him. She would have liked that but the timing could not have been worse. Mount Victoria’s pyritic smelter was having problems; there were questions about the construction of a further shaft at Mount Haggard. Both involved considerable expense. They were decisions that could not be delayed and no one to make them but herself.
‘I’ll come with you next time, I promise.’
‘If there is a next time.’
But Mungo was sturdy with plenty of energy despite his age and was smiling as he said it.
‘I should be so lucky,’ she said but stood waving and smiling as he trotted away; there had been talk that something called a Panhard motor carriage had been imported into Sydney but neither the Tasmanian roads nor Mungo Jackson’s temperament were suited to such novel contraptions. Besides, the Panhard was French which as far as Mungo was concerned was disincentive enough.
At lunch time he phoned. The telephone had been connected to Cat’s Kingdom eighteen months earlier and to Jackson’s Landing six months after that. It was crackly; sometimes you couldn’t hear the person you were speaking to very well and sometimes, without warning, the line would cut out altogether but for all its defects it was a
vast improvement on the old days.
Mungo’s voice was full of life.
‘Of course I’m not tired. After all the rain we’ve had the grazing is as good as I’ve seen it. The cattle are in good shape too.’
‘When are you coming back?’
‘I thought I’d stay a couple of days. Poke about a bit. Come back Thursday, if that’s all right.’
‘The sooner the better,’ Cat said. ‘I’ll get Mrs Rigwood to cook something special for tea. How do you fancy salmon?’
‘Sounds good.’
There were a few squawks on the line, a hollow echo and silence. Oh well. Cat put the phone down and went back to work.
Later that evening she went for a walk but did not go far; the weather was hot and still, the air heavy; towards evening a sulky wind got up from the south and by nightfall was blowing strongly. Cat went to bed at her usual time. She was normally a good sleeper but that night she couldn’t settle. She dozed and woke to hear the booming of the wind and dozed again. Suddenly, at half-past one, she came to with a start and knew she would not sleep again. She lay for a few minutes listening to the creaking of the house then went into the kitchen to make herself a cup of tea. The kitchen window faced south and through the glass she saw a faint rosy glow. She went to the door and walked out, teacup in hand. All the southern sky was red, with flickering highlights that came and went.
Cat’s heart stood still. Tasmania had a history of bush fires. There had been a terrible one a few years back with six dead. Nothing since but no one in Tasmania was in any doubt about their lethal potential. She stood, the tea cooling in her hand, and stared at the sky, so pretty if you didn’t know, so menacing if you did. She thought of phoning but at half-past one in the morning she didn’t think the exchange would be open. Besides, Mungo – surely? – would be fast asleep. She couldn’t go back indoors; she would be unable to breathe if she did that.
She walked to the cliff edge. Far below there was a surge of white amid the darkness as the rollers crashed one by one against the land. To the east the stars shone as pure as diamonds above the horizon but as soon as she turned back to the house the red sky renewed its menace. The flickering light was the more threatening for being silent and Cat was afraid for her man and for herself. Afraid because the danger was real and because she was helpless. The distant flames burnt away her peace and she hated herself because there was nothing she could do. She went in and sat down with a book in her hand but did not read.
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