Jarulan by the River

by Lily Woodhouse

  At the far end of the room was Matthew’s wing chair, with its sea chest for a table, whisky glass and ashtray. The window before it gave a perfect distant aspect of the memorial on the near west horizon, the groves of candlenut trees and gums and she-oaks on either side of it, and in the northwest the bush running down the slope towards the house, a glint from the bend in the river.

  Once when Nan had come up to the belvedere to clean and dust, to collect away the smeary glass and empty the ashtray, she hadn’t been aware that Fenchurch was sitting there, gazing out. It had given her a fright, coming upon him motionless in his chair, silent as stone, his pipe grown cold.

  The chair was again occupied. There was a long exhalation, a sigh, the shadowy crown of a dark head. A familiar, thin white hand came to lie on the armrest.

  ‘Evie?’

  There was no answer and perhaps that was because Evie was not the first name to come to her mind, but another, an impossibility. Heart in her mouth, she hurried the rest of the distance to the chair — it was empty. Of course it was empty, the cushion dented for Fenchurch’s head, the translucent, chalky print of his lips on the glass.

  She gazed for a moment at the view of the monument, the glinting red jewel in its crown, the woven wrought iron of the cupola, but it offered no comfort. She could only remind herself that she had never been one for wild imaginings, which had been Min’s one failing, her sickness. Nance had never been persuaded of any of her feys and stories, which disappointed and enraged Min. There was always a stage of Min’s recovery when she had regarded Nan as a travelling companion who had abandoned her before the journey’s end. Who had betrayed her.

  Really? You really won’t come with me?

  The whiff of French perfume. A soft hand in the small of her back.

  She was wasting time — to hell with the clearing away and the breakfast dishes! Down the belvedere stairs she went and along the corridor, opening every door on the wing and tiptoeing past Louisa’s, glancing in to see her asleep now in the high soft bed, her breakfast digesting, book cast aside.

  The door immediately opposite led to the room they had kept Min safe in when the furies took her. There was nothing in there to damage herself on, no high point to invite a hanging, and the window nailed shut, barred over.

  Nance had not been in there for six years, not once, and she remembered, as she turned the key in the lock, that she had once confided that piece of information to Evie before she sent the girl up to give it a sweep out. Is this where she was hiding? But surely she wouldn’t choose this room, since it was a long way from the kitchen and the outside dunny, and Rufina was up and down to Louisa and might hear something and surprise her. Evie would have chosen a place with an escape route.

  The door was locked, rather than unlocked — someone had been here since Evie, then. She turned the key again and went in. There was the tattered chair and the brown blind over the window, showing twinkles of daylight where the fabric had perished. There were the streaked walls, the thin mattress on the floor. And here was the face pressed close to hers, distorted with laughter and now with tears. The arms locked so tight Nance could hardly breathe, the close smell, the sweet perfume overwhelmed through long, stinking hours waiting in the hot airless room, while the poor love ranted and raved, threatened suicide, made wild schemes to leave Jarulan for a life worth living in Paris, Rome, New York. Even Sydney! A life worth living, Nan!

  It was those fancies more than any other that drove Fenchurch into bringing her here, into having the dulling medicine administered in spoonfuls from the brown bottle, chlorodine and ether, into tying her to the chair. Once she’d got as far as Lismore before he caught up with her, obliging Eddie into taking her down in his boyhood sailboat and going the rest of the way by road. Fenchurch brought her back with enormous difficulty, after a violent scene at the wharf that kept tongues wagging for months.

  And it wasn’t as if she hadn’t had long months — years sometimes — with none of those episodes puncturing her usual calm and kindness. And it wasn’t as if Fenchurch kept her prisoner at any other time. Once a year she would go alone to Sydney to visit Louisa, to Queensland to Jean, and each time Nance would pray that the sickness didn’t come upon her while she was on ship or train, away from those who would care for her.

  She sank down on the battered chair for a minute. Just for a minute, then she’d go on. If Min was here, the real, true Min, the loving heart, she would want Evie cared for. Years ago there was another girl, one of the milkers, who’d got into trouble with a farmhand who took off the moment the girl’s condition was known. Min had given her money to get away after him, to try her luck. The milker had been an older girl, older than Evie, of a more pragmatic nature and may have prospered from Min’s generosity, who knew?

  Evie must not on any account be sent away.

  There was a softening in the room then, a change in the light, Min smiling, because Nance had finally found the right solution.

  Locking the door after her, she went down the corridor to the top landing, crossing the wide carpet to the door that led to the nursery wing. There was scarcely any point searching those rooms, since they were so fully occupied by the Sydney nanny and children. The door stood open — and here was the nanny herself herding Lorna and Gordon ahead of her, sunbonnets tied firmly under their chins. Under Gordon’s arm was a red toy tractor with yellow wheels, and the driver was a tiny wooden koala bear made perfectly to scale. Proprietarily as they passed, Lorna reached to stroke the walnut-sized head and looked up at Nance with a proud little smile.

  ‘Out we go!’ said the nanny to the children. ‘Before it gets too hot!’ She had a little smear of cream and sugar crystals at the corner of her whiskery mouth. ‘Down to the garden!’

  And the children scooted off at her bidding, across the landing and down the stairs, Lorna having now plucked the koala free to wave him above her head. Gordon raced ahead, whooping, the tractor riding the banister beside him, the wheels perfectly fitting the carved grooves all the way down to the bottom. The back door banged and they were gone. Gordon was just nearly three years old and the Sydney nanny hadn’t shifted.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘They know not to go further than the fountain — can’t get enough of it now.’

  The fountain. That had been a carry-on the afternoon Fenchurch and Rufina spent scrubbing the stone figures. The German had come to ask for scrubbing brushes and buckets, sugar soap and a blunt knife, and then Fenchurch had got into the act as well, both of them splattered and filthy by the end of it. Their laughter had rung out, there were splashings and unnerving shrieks, and later Rufina’s voice droning on, not quite audible from the front parlour, where Nan had been dusting. She had been explaining something about the figures, whom they were supposed to represent. At the curtains, drawn to protect the furniture from the sun, Nan had peeked through and seen how they stood easily together, with his arm draped over her shoulders. Then the children came clamouring down the stairs having seen them from an upstairs window. One of them was shouting gleefully, ‘Grandpa’s playing with ’Fina in the fountain!’

  ‘He got the thing going from the dam,’ said the Sydney nanny. ‘Waste of water if you ask me, even if it does go round and round.’

  She was off a farm west of Mudgee, and you wouldn’t do it there. A fountain!

  ‘He did it for the German. Are they courting?’

  Courting! Nance’s heart skipped a beat, which brought on a rush of heat and a wave of nausea, which had been happening more and more since … Since when? Since around the time that Evie had come to live at Jarulan and upset the natural balance.

  Sydney Nanny, for all her airs, was a dull lump of clay with squinty brown eyes and freckles, a big bosom and wide bottom. Solid. Presbyterian. If he’d had to take his pick from the staff then he might have been better to choose her, instead of dallying with one and settling for another.

  ‘The children. They’re getting away from you.’ Nance gestured towards the
stairs.

  The nanny departed and Nance went on to collect cups and plates from the nursery where everything was in disarray — clothes, books and toys. The nanny did not tidy; she did not think it part of her duties. Nance made a few piles of things, though it made no difference, then picked up the carelessly stacked tray and went down the corridor, jangling. At the top of the stairs she stopped to rearrange the sliding china, balancing the tray on the railing.

  Someone was standing at the foot of the belvedere stairs, looking down the long extent of the east wing. A dark-haired woman in white — Evie, in her nightgown? — but by the time Nan had arrested the sliding china and looked properly, the figure had vanished. The sun was slanting in from one of the high belvedere windows, angling down the open stairwell to light up a cupboard set almost invisibly into the dark panelling.

  Tray set on the floor with a clatter — oh that uncomfortable bend! — Nan flew as quickly as her legs would carry her to the end of the corridor and yanked the cupboard open.

  It was empty. Or at first glance it was. And smaller than she remembered. It could not possibly have concealed Evie, or if so, at great discomfort. A five-year-old child would be cramped. Tucked against one side there was a rolled-up length of cartridge paper: on investigation a yellowed map of the night sky. That’s right — old man Fenchurch had been an amateur astronomer, as much as his son was taxidermist, and the cupboard was once used to store his telescopes and charts, to keep them away from dust and insects.

  Nan’s knees felt weak, the joints gone stewy; she perched on the stairs, the cupboard open beside her.

  In the farthest corner, just out of reach, was a shimmering gleam of cream silk, an oblong fuzzed with blue-grey mildew. A beetle scuttered dry-legged as she reached in, angling her body for the stretch; she grasped it and pulled it out. A silk chemise, finely worked, with pintucks and Belgian lace, and very old, thought Nan, a relic of the first Mrs Fenchurch and used to dust the stargazing equipment. Or perhaps was intended for that and never used. Despite the mildew, Nan could tell that the chemise had been carefully laundered and folded, and attempts had been made to shift a mud stain that resembled the imprint of shoe or boot.

  She slipped it into her apron pocket; she’d give it a go, try to shift the mould. It would fit Evie, after the baby came. She would be showing by now.

  ‘I will find you, missy. You know that.’ She’d said it aloud, her voice startling in the still, quiet air, as alarming almost as the vision had been. Ladies in white nightgowns! When Min was sick it was musicians. She saw them everywhere, and sometimes surrounded by people with Saint Vitus Dance, all wildly convulsing to a drumbeat.

  Can’t you see them, Nan?

  Hauling herself to her feet, she clunked down the belvedere steps and along the corridor to the landing, where she collected the tray and went downstairs, resolutely not thinking of the vision. Musicians. She wouldn’t go straight to the kitchen. On the chiffonier outside the morning room she deposited the tray and turned back towards Eddie’s wing.

  Eddie’s wing. She still thought of the ground floor west wing as that. It was where he had taken up a suite of rooms when he came home from boarding school so that the two of them could sit in private and enjoy one another’s company. Not only did they like to sing and play the piano, they were both yarn spinners of the first water, never letting the truth get in the way of a good story, competing with one another for the most arresting metaphor, the least expected and most surprising ending. Nance had sat with them many an evening, mending or sewing, as a willing captive audience. If the muse wasn’t with either of them, then one would read aloud from a favourite book. Eddie had wanted to be a writer, and no wonder, with a mother like Min who indulged all his fantasies. Perhaps, right now in New Zealand he was bent over a growing pile of papers that would one day become a book to be read all over the world.

  Imagine that, Min!

  The door to Eddie’s wing stood ajar and, beyond, all was in deep gloom, every door onto the corridor firmly closed. Dimly, at the far end, was a wide room with ceiling-to-floor windows heavily curtained. In Eddie’s day they had always stood open. Sofas and ottomans were arranged as they were then, with low tables. There was the sprung dance floor, surrounded by a forest of long dead, spider-webbed parlour palms, inhabited by a smaller version of Venus than the one that stood outside. Or was it Aphrodite? Nan had no idea. The figure was bare-breasted and blind-eyed, dusty hair piled on top of her head in stone curls that looked like the open ends of pastry horns. It looked ridiculous, though not as much as the other figure, a round rolling man, fat bellied and laughing, a bunch of grapes carved from the stone to cover his private parts. The God of Wine. Bacchus. Another gift from Min.

  It had never come easily to Nance to criticise her beloved, but could it be that she had wanted Eddie to turn out bad? One indulgence after another, and most of them foolish. The day the boy left he had streamed tears of farewell to his mother and dread of his furious father, driving wet-faced away in a newly purchased Buick, the first in the district. Nance’s heart ached. How would it be to see him again? They said New Zealand was not that far away, though it seemed so to Nance, who had never been as far as Sydney to the south or Brisbane to the north. If life from now on really was going to be at Rufina’s beck and call, then perhaps she should go and seek Eddie out. Across an ocean wider than the thick rug, more sparkling than this smeary dance floor, which had a piano in one corner and room for a band. Coils of dust hung in plumes from the heavy red curtains, pillows of it filled Aphrodite’s upturned breasts.

  Sneezing, Nance groped for the rope pull and opened them. There was a skittering of bugs and blind flying moths, a tearing of spider webs and rotten cloth far above her head.

  Five years since the room had been lit up, and five years in this climate was a long time. The room had got away on her. It should have been cleared out, closed up. A white foamy fungus attacked a velvet settee; heavy rain had sneaked through a leadlight high up, streaking the wall and floor with green. Aphrodite’s pastry horns hoarded a colony of beetles, Bacchus was patched with mildew.

  ‘Evie?’ tried Nance, then louder, ‘E-vie?’

  The upright piano was wonky, one leg rotten and partially collapsed, the lid standing open. She let a finger rest on one of the laden, swollen yellow keys and a soft note sounded deep in the box; a gecko ran out from a hole in the side.

  Eddie had wanted a grand piano; it was one of the few things Min had denied him. At sixteen, on his return from school, he had brought a man from Brisbane to teach him how to play jazz. The man was Italian, a dandy, a little older than Nance. She had caught him looking at her with something not far off pity — but it hadn’t stopped him trying to lure her into his small sloping-roofed room under the western-wing stairs, where he would lie on the ottoman playing his piano accordion. Against her better judgement Nance had gone there once to find the Italian less interested in her than in trading jovial insults with the old gardener through the open window.

  What a long time ago that was now. Almost ten years. The Italian had asked her, ‘And where are you from, Nancy?’ and he had seemed so exotic and handsome she could not bear to answer, ‘Bangalow.’ She had said nothing at all, and so he had kissed her for her innocence — at thirty-six! — and tried to undo her stays, but she had stopped him. It had been a very hot day, she remembered, perhaps ninety degrees and he had been perspiring heavily, his sweat slicking her arms and the front of her dress. When he saw her revulsion — and she was repulsed by it — he had done a strange thing.

  ‘You see here, Nancy!’ — and he’d mimed taking his heart from his chest, before unlocking the top drawer of a Karri tallboy and dropping the heart inside. ‘There it will stay until you decide to love me!’ and he had swallowed the little key. Nan had wondered what it could do to his insides. It was only a tiny key, but pointy enough to puncture his guts.

  He seemed to suffer no ill effects. Soon after, he and Eddie had had a drunken row and the Italia
n departed for who knew where, leaving his heart locked in the drawer.

  Eddie’s wing was past saving. The German might have ideas of what to do. A small hope flared that the German might be modern enough to want to see the whole house demolished and a new one put in its place, with fewer rooms, easier to clean. Brick or wood, single storey. Nan was not sentimental. In fact, she almost hated Jarulan, despite having spent most of her life here. Most mornings she woke desolate to the work ahead. She left the party room, closing the door firmly after her.

  The door to the Italian’s room under the stairs was locked, or so it seemed at first, until Nan bent her eye to the handle to see the door had no lock at all, so she pushed again, harder, and this time there was the squeak and scrape of a piece of furniture laid across the other side, and with it the sound of a window being thrown up, of a panicked scrabble and then a cry of pain as if the escapee had injured herself.

  20.

  EVIE WANTED TO GET OUT, TO RUN AWAY FROM THE THUDDING drawer, away from the footsteps real or imagined that passed up and down the stairs above her head and round about, the tuneless whistling from the corridor outside that had started up after her return from the bush, and now she would run away from Nan who was inside the room, her arms closing around her chest and half-lifting, half-dragging her back to the ottoman, skewed now across the floor with the door open behind it.

  ‘Skin and bone, skin and bone,’ Nan was saying, and Evie saw that the old girl’s eyes had filled with tears, that Nan was sympathetic to her predicament, that everything would be all right.

  ‘What did you think you were doing?’ she asked. Evie drew breath to tell her the piece of lore learned from her mother, ‘Babies take what they need,’ but Nan was telling her to hush, stroking her forehead and asking if she was well enough to walk down to the kitchen where there would be some left-over breakfast waiting, or if not, she would cook some just for her and that she needn’t worry, that Fenchurch wouldn’t send her away because his attention was taken now by the German, his future wife. After the long months of waiting, the solitary incubation of his child, Evie felt nothing at this news. She’d known the night she set the koala free and looked up to see Rufina framed like the Holy Virgin with the light behind her. The new clothes and softened hair spoke of the attention of a man, who could only have been Fenchurch. Who else was there?