Jarulan by the River

by Lily Woodhouse

  There was a rustle at their feet and a small green carpet snake emerged from the fallen leaves and slid along the brick edging of the flowerbed, still visible through the long grass. Rufina did not scream or have the vapours, which pleased him.

  ‘We have snakes in Germany, too, you know,’ she told him calmly, ‘not that I have ever seen one.’

  But she was stepping away from it, rapidly, and he found that he had caught her up in his arms, that he was kissing her sweetly on that smooth white cheek.

  ‘The answer is yes,’ she said simply, ‘and as soon as it can be arranged.’

  He kissed her again, less demurely than before, her blonde lashes flicking for an instant like insect wings against his lowering mouth. She wore the same dull blue dress as always; he supposed it was a kind of uniform. The bones of a corset ridged under his hand. After they were married, even before, she wouldn’t dress like this. He wanted her in soft colours; he’d buy her a riding outfit of her own, better than Louisa’s.

  ‘We’ll tell everyone in good time. But there are a few things I have to sort out first.’

  He tried to kiss her a third time but she was nodding, giggling suddenly, girlish. ‘A snake! Who would have thought a snake would come? It is like something in a story.’ She bent away to pick up the book he’d dropped a moment before, and patted it. ‘We could read about it in here.’

  Matthew read the name, D.H. Lawrence, and he thought he remembered it from Min’s library, but couldn’t be sure. Sons and Lovers. He looked from the book to his future wife and felt out of his depth. She seemed to be amused by something that excluded him.

  ‘How? What are you talking about?’

  ‘Symbolism. The snake. If one were to appear in a book, then it would be an omen, would it not? A sign of something to come for us, something already on its way, good or bad.’

  ‘There are snakes by the hundred here. There’s no getting away from them.’ He didn’t like this turn, this superstition. That’s what had got Min in the end. Only just tolerable that she wouldn’t give up her religion, riding most Sundays all the way to Saint Kevin’s in Bangalow, that she’d won on that one; much worse that she periodically surrounded herself with ghosts and terrors, a cycle that tightened and sped as she got older. He regarded Rufina now, who was looking at him challengingly, but with a soft smile on her young mouth.

  ‘I’m not afraid of anything.’

  He pointed behind her then, into the long grass, pretending he could see the snake again, or a different, more deadly one; he couldn’t resist the tease. She was instantly alarmed, clinging to him and looking earnestly around, which made him laugh, and she as well, that lovely big laugh, and they kissed again, properly this time, lip to lip, before they walked out of the garden. All the way she held tight to his arm, back to the wider path to the front of the house, facing the river. In silence they crossed the white carriageway and stood at the top of the stairs, looking down between the avenue of statues to the water running at the bottom, fast and silvery. He could sense her looking at it all with a new understanding, that it would be hers.

  A gaggle of children emerged from the trees on the bank, mid-flight, dropping down between two of the statues and going on down the stairs. Thin, black-haired, scruffy, knobbly-kneed — some of the Tyrells. They had with them a small koala bear, a rope tied around its neck, and a girl much too small was half-dragging, half-carrying it, another child, older, holding the rope and tugging on it.

  ‘Oh, the poor thing!’ Rufina had left his side, hurrying down the stairs calling out, ‘Children! Children, please stop!’

  By the time Matthew joined them — she could run like the dickens in that heavy old dress! — she was holding her arms out for the bear, bracing herself on the flight of steps to take its weight.

  ‘No!’ he said. ‘It’ll scratch you.’

  People were stupid about koala bears; they’d even stopped the Abbos eating them. He had a display in the parlour vitrine — a whole family, a baby on its mother’s back. Rufina would not have seen it yet. It was a treat in store, to show her all that. She might like him to add this one to the collection.

  ‘Do they have very small brains? Look — see how he’s looking at me, how he turns his head. He is staring all around! Can we keep it, Mr Fenchurch?’

  Her first request. He wouldn’t dream of denying it.

  ‘Matthew,’ he said, gently.

  ‘It’s our bear,’ said the boy with the rope. ‘We caught ’im!’

  ‘On my land. Go on. Get.’

  He took the bear off the girl, who immediately began weeping and wailing, streaming snot and tears. The Tyrells. What a trial they were generally.

  ‘You don’t mind us shootin’ the rabbits now, do ya?’ the boy tried.

  One of the sisters came to put her arm around the weeping girl. They stared at him with hatred while the bear clung to him, its claws sharp through his shirt. Rufina was murmuring to it in German, endearments he supposed, while she stroked its ears.

  ‘We already got one tied to a tree at home. It’s got a rope so it can climb up and down,’ said one of the older boys. ‘It’s lonely. It’s dying of loneliness so we got it a mate. Give it back, Mister.’

  ‘It hardly knows what is going on!’ Rufina said. ‘Look at the poor thing. Its slow, trusting eyes. Liebling.’

  ‘Off you go,’ he said sternly to the Tyrells. ‘And don’t be cutting through here. You’re trespassing.’

  ‘What have you done with our Evie?’ dared the girl doing the comforting. ‘Ma wants to see her.’

  Matthew pretended he hadn’t heard. He turned, the bear clinging, the particular smell of eucalyptus and piss and clean dry dirt coming off it, and the fur of its ears tickling the underside of his chin as he bent over it for the climb. Rufina was following him, asking him where the koala would live and what they would feed it and how long he expected it to survive. He felt the Tyrell children melt away at his back, his misgivings with them.

  ‘I’ll take care of it,’ Rufina said when they reached the top of the stairs, slipping her hand around his upper arm. ‘I would love to have the care of it, Mr Fenchurch.’

  ‘Matthew,’ he said again. He would have liked to kiss her again but his arms were full of koala.

  ‘There’s a few tricks. Its food and so on. Otherwise they die pretty quick.’

  ‘But nothing to be afraid of?’ She gave his arm a little playful squeeze as they turned towards the kitchen, the yard.

  ‘We’ll tie it to a gum round the back. Like the kids said — it has to be able to climb a tree for the leaves. That’s all it eats.’

  ‘I’m not afraid of anything, you know.’ She had an arch tone he’d never heard before. ‘Not even Evie.’

  His step faltered a little, but he went on, rounding the fountain to the path that led to the yard gate. The bear was heavier than he’d anticipated. Rufina kept pace with him, not saying anything more, and he knew she wouldn’t. It seemed that she had let him know that she knew, and that she wasn’t afraid of the situation, that she could deal with it. He glanced at her profile, hoping that he was right, that her old-fashioned sensibility would forbid her from discussing it with him.

  ‘Ask Nance for an old kero tin,’ he said. ‘We’ll stick him in there overnight.’

  18.

  IT WAS ENCOURAGING HOW EASY IT WAS TO STAY HIDDEN. The room she had chosen was tucked away in a dark corner under the little-used west-wing staircase, with an upside-down staircase ceiling and door set almost invisibly into the dark panelling. Evie couldn’t guess what the strange little room had been used for, or when. It was sparsely furnished with an ottoman, a tall, narrow chest of drawers and a spindly wooden chair. There was evidence it had once held a heavy piece of furniture, because there were scrapes on the polished floor from when it had been moved away. A pale square on the streaky wall showed where a painting had once hung, and another larger shape cast by something Evie fancied might have been an upright piano.

  It se
emed that her midnight thefts of food and candles from the kitchen had gone unnoticed. She was very careful in what she took, even though Nan was probably harried enough to not keep a close eye on all the supplies. On Evie’s return from the river, nearly two months ago now, she had hurried down a twisting corridor until her hand came to rest on the tarnished handle of a door she didn’t recall ever seeing before. She took her ignorance of the room as a good sign. There was a single window, which retained shabby green curtains printed over with ducks on the wing, and gave out onto a small yard once occupied by the gardener — a potting shed, a brick wall studded with hooks which held his clobber — rakes, shovels and spades, and a giant pair of hedge clippers, the blades rusted to the colour of the bricks. A ragged tarpaulin extended from the shed roof, meant to protect the gardener from the rain. He had been an old man, Evie remembered, a pensioner who had worked as hard as any of the stockmen or rabbitos half his age.

  There was also a water butt, the contents of which, as far as she could tell, were untainted and pure. On rough shelves were sacks of fertiliser, tins of thallium to poison rats, wooden seedling trays, and a high bench was set beside the shed. She kept the curtains closed but the window onto the yard open, just a crack, so that, should anyone come looking for her, or into the room for any reason at all, she could fling it open, run and hide. One day she’d hefted sacks of old mulch and grass seed to conceal a place under the bench.

  The door had no lock, so she’d pushed the ottoman against it, to give her warning if someone should try to come in, though what she would do really, she didn’t know. Already she was bigger, less agile, boredom and loneliness combining to make her more clumsy and leaden than she really was. On one of her nocturnal excursions she went out to Rufina’s old room in the servants’ quarters and collected an armful of books, but reading was a struggle, since she had never really gone to school, only for a few days here and there after the teacher from the Clunes Public School came to find out why the Tyrell children weren’t attending. She liked the title of one, The House of Mirth. Mirth meant laughter, she was sure, though it wasn’t a word you heard often.

  She wondered about the lady that wrote the long story, Edith someone, and whether she sat in a room like this, all alone and thinking too much, and in the end had to escape into a world that wasn’t real. Did she struggle to come back from it? You could go mad thinking of so many words and then writing them down. Evie resolved to stay in the real world while she read, and she persisted with her attempts for a full week, but the story eluded her. No sooner did she feel she had caught hold of it, sounding out word after word in a laborious, headachy chain, than it drifted away again. It was like being underwater and struggling to breathe, the only relief afforded by closing the book firmly and going to the window to stare at the triangle of sky left uncovered by the tarpaulin.

  Eventually the books formed themselves into a kind of stool underneath the window, where she could sit to watch the crack of light between the drapes play itself across the floor and far wall throughout the day.

  The dog she’d tied up on her return, but someone had been letting it off because it had found her and would come into the gardener’s yard to snuffle at the window. It seemed to know not to bark and Evie would fling the window up, lean out and cuddle it while it stood on its hind legs, whimpering and licking. She wished it was a magic dog from a tale, a sentient creature able to see that she was half-starved and so run to fetch a loaf of bread and some hard-boiled eggs. She wished it could tell her if anyone wondered where she was, if Ma had come up to the house for the wages, if she’d talked to Nan and raised an alarm. She wished the dog could tell her if Fenchurch had run around searching for her, that he was distraught when he heard that the last place she was seen was the river. Face pressed into the ruff of white and black fur, she breathed in the sweet smell of liberty, of grass and cool winter winds, envying the dog and forgetting for a moment that she was kept prisoner by her own design and could walk free at any moment.

  Let them all think she had drownded!

  She would stay hidden for as long as she had to. ‘Twenty-one rooms and none of them closed off!’ Nan liked to say, over and over, though this end of the house as good as. No one went farther than the morning room at the mouth of the corridor, and that was mostly and rarely only Nan to sit and mope with one of Min’s shawls pressed to her mouth. It was the room she had led them to after Louisa’s fall, as if she thought her employer was still there to comfort and advise her, sad old goose.

  This wing had once been Edmond’s domain. Evie remembered guests staying for weeks on end, cronies from neighbouring estates and further afield, toff layabouts like himself. They had mucked about in boats, played tennis and croquet, gone hunting dingoes and possums and wallabies and anything else that moved, leaving them where they’d shot them, or in quivering mounds of feather and fur, and talked and laughed in loud voices. Young men and sometimes a handful of women, stuffed to the craw with wealth and freedom.

  More than once she and her sister Teresa had snuck away across the snake field and along the riverbank to spy on them drinking and boasting while they lay about in the shade above the jetty. One afternoon they had been spotted, and Evie worked out that she must have been about nine or ten at the time, because Mrs Fenchurch had been there, the only woman among the young men. She and Teresa had watched her accept a chair and a glass of something light green poured from a tall jug; something that Teresa said had grog in it. They’d watched old Min mag and sing along with the best of them, before going up to the house to get out of the heat. While she was alive, Eddie could do no wrong.

  On that day Teresa was only thirteen, long skinny legs out the bottom of her outgrown dress, little titties pushing at the too-small bodice. After Min went inside, the young men had called them over to tell them they were the most beautiful girls in the land and that one day they’d return to have the best of them, and they’d all laughed. Evie had not understood what they meant, but Teresa had blushed and taken fright, grabbing Evie’s hand and dragging her away, running as fast as they could. They’d gone around the house to look at the fountain, which played in those days, until a long-gone maid had opened a bedroom window and sent them home.

  Evie had always remembered those young men. Some of them had been quite handsome, with expensive clothes and good teeth. And she had believed they would come back and one of them would fall in love with her and take her away from here, though he never did, because they never came back after Edmond went away to New Zealand.

  While she lay on the ottoman, fighting hunger and enduring bouts of despair, she would think about how Fenchurch didn’t like Eddie, how it was no secret he was happy to see the back of him. He didn’t like his son gallivanting about, taking more than one Grand Tour of Europe, twice visiting Min’s family in America, and making an extravagant voyage to the South Sea Islands. One spring Evie’s brother Jimmy was helping with the bobby calves, and he told Evie he’d seen Fenchurch grab Eddie by the collar and give him a shake, that he’d heard him shout at him to do some work, to involve himself in the farm goings-on, to mend his ways and make use of himself.

  Eddie never did, just blithely came and went from the house, always with an entourage. On washdays she and Ma would hear him playing the piano and singing, all the latest tunes. Sometimes his mother joined him in a duet, and they were perfect together on the close harmonies, as if they were one creature singing with two mouths, male and female. The mother kept close to him even after she died, sending him away with a fortune from beyond the grave and Nan said was right to, because if he had stayed he and Matthew would have destroyed each other. She and her husband had made their choice, one son each, and Llew would inherit the farm. But now Llew was dead and Evie would rescue the situation with a new son. A better son, properly of the country, since both parents were born here, with the river in their blood. Edmond had too much American in him and Llew too much of the adventurer. It was fated. The farm would go to her son.


  Her son!

  Hours would pass in daydreaming, in picturing this son as a handsome young man, striding about the farm and issuing orders, riding a tall shining horse, and Evie meanwhile kept like a queen by Fenchurch, because she’d given him the perfect heir. She dreamed how it would be to hold the little lad in her arms after he was born and how Fenchurch would fall in love with her properly because of him. She would have horses and jewels and cakes and sweets, she would have pretty clothes and a maid and a gold ring on her finger. The fantasies kept her content, especially the ones that involved food — she was so hungry, so hungry — and helped to fight down any rising panic.

  Carefully she listened for approaching footsteps amid the sounds of the day, and often through the night, her young body restive from lack of exercise and the new, gnawing hunger that came with the baby. ‘They take what they need,’ Ma would always say, when there wasn’t enough in the pot for her and she gave it to the children, even though they could see she was out at the front of her dress. Ma said in Ireland she had seen babies born from women who were skin and bone, babies that lived.

  Don’t worry, kiddies, it’ll take what it needs.

  She tried not to worry now, concentrating instead on every sound, every bird and insect, the lowing of cattle in the home paddock, the chug of Llew’s tractor driven by one of the farmhands, the ringing axe from the woodpile, footsteps above her in the nursery. There was another sound that seemed to come from within the room itself, a beat like a pulse. It wasn’t there all the time, but sometimes when it was, Evie wondered if it was her own heart beating loud enough for her to hear it. Hand on heart she timed its rhythm with the sound; it would slip in and out of keeping, and the independent beat felt strangely companionable.

  One day she went around the walls, pressing her ear to them, convinced a large animal had come into the abandoned part of the house and taken up residence in one of the adjoining rooms. The sound grew louder at the empty chest of drawers, the top drawer of which was locked. Out the window she went to fetch one of the gardener’s tools, the hammer he used for building his seedling trays. She tapped and banged, stopping to listen for any approaching footsteps, dreaming of a few coins, a few pounds even. A gold pin. Something of worth, worth keeping. Or a tin of biscuits, still edible. A sweet.