Jarulan by the River

by Lily Woodhouse

  Turning away from the fountain, Matthew was suddenly intent on the open window above their heads. So deep in thought had she been that she’d not at first heard the sound until it came again. The thin wail of a newborn. Such an expression washed over the grandfather’s face — pride, amazement, love — that Rufina was struck by furious jealousy. Perhaps she would bear a child then. Just one. Then he would look at her with that same naked intensity. The expression vanished, to be replaced by his usual laconic half-smile, one corner of his pale mouth lifting higher than the other.

  The temperature of the day had leapt again. Rufina laid a hand on the fountain rim and pulled it away immediately, her palm scorched. Heat and exhaustion had addled her brains. The water offered no relief; it felt warm enough to bathe in — and she almost suggested that they do so, a swift fantasy of frolicking in the wet sprays and plumes, herself modestly cloaked by freakish long hair.

  ‘Let’s go inside.’ Matthew drew her to him, an arm around her waist, and they fell into step around the back of the house, past the stables and servants’ quarters to the yard. As they went he explained that now the child had come he would set off on the business waiting since yesterday morning. Since it was midday already he would camp the night with the stockmen he had sent to round up cattle out on the far northern boundary.

  ‘Don’t you want to see the baby?’ Rufina asked.

  ‘Nan’ll bring it down if it’s fit to be looked at.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t it be?’

  ‘Why? Well … because of the fall.’ He had led her inside and they were momentarily blinded by the sudden dark. Until their eyes adjusted he stayed close, the occluded shapes around them forming into the rising banisters of the main staircase, the pedestal table, the dresser outside the dining room.

  ‘What do you think the fall could have done to the baby?’ she persisted, but Matthew shrugged and wouldn’t speculate, taking his leave of her to fetch his swag from upstairs. Rufina followed him and he made a joke of it, suddenly goofy, running ahead to hide in the doorway and jump out at her, then trying to keep her from entering his bedroom, the only one to open off the first landing.

  ‘Who is there to see us?’ she asked.

  ‘You’d be surprised. Some of Min’s antics were the talk of Clunes before I knew myself — ’ He broke off, as if he’d said more than he’d meant to or was it her too-avid curiosity? He glanced at her, and away, and she saw for the first time the room that he slept in.

  It was a boy’s room — the narrow bed, the tall chest of drawers, the mess of clothes discarded on the floor. There were no paintings, no books, no ornaments of any kind; an ill-fitting flyscreen lifted and banged with the hot wind. A campsite inside his own house. It was endearing, perhaps a little eccentric since he was so rich. Rufina caressed his cheek as she went past him on her way to the window. Below was the sloping roof of the verandah, the kitchen roof, the yard and servants’ quarters, beyond the stables and accommodation. The overseer’s view.

  ‘Have you always slept here?’ she asked but knew immediately that he had heard her inquisitorial tone — oh, she did not mean it! — and that he would not answer her.

  He shook his head and she thought perhaps he was growing impatient, that he wanted to set about gathering his few things to roll into the blue blanket tossed on the bed, so she passed out onto the landing again and waited until he emerged, wondering if he would kiss her goodbye.

  The smile he bestowed on her was as good as a kiss, as sweet.

  ‘See you tomorrow,’ he said and the dark well at the foot of the stairs swallowed him up.

  The baby was crying again, this time more strongly, and Rufina was tempted to climb the last flight of stairs and go along the corridor to Louisa’s room — she would shortly be thinking of it as her own room. But she was not curious enough. It was the cry itself, summoning, insistent. It was the remote chance the child could resemble its grandfather and therefore any child she might bear herself.

  No. She would stay away. Louisa could take it into her head to order her to brush her tangled hair, or worse, to give her a sponge-bath. The sooner Louisa returned to Sydney the better; then the memory of Rufina as servant would fade. She was not that, never was, and never would be again. She would be … what? Stepmother! How amusing! Ha! It would be as well, once Louisa had recovered from the birth, to have a discussion about how to proceed. For the most part they had got along, provided Rufina stayed within the boundaries. Now the boundaries had shifted; they waited to be redefined. There had been a letter from Jean to Matthew and herself, conveying good wishes, but anxious and strained. One paragraph, Matthew was certain, was dictated by Jean’s husband, something about how they were counting on their inheritance to get them out of a hole. How dare he even think about Matthew dying? She would write back to them assuring them of his excellent health.

  Downstairs to the kitchen where Bridget had left a pan of water boiling on the stove. There was more than enough to make a pot of coffee before she went along to the morning room. The sun had moved away from that side of the house; it was marginally cooler, though airless, the heavy drapes drawn. She opened them and the light poured through, illuminating the dust on the mantle, setting the dome around the platypus gleaming so that it almost looked alive. Sipping her coffee — she would have been better to have chosen a cool drink, her face dripped in the steam — she stood at the writing desk. There was a small dust-free square, reflecting a piece of light from the window, as if an object had sat there once but had now been removed. A clock, perhaps, an ornament, pinched by one of the servants.

  A piece of paper protruded between the rolltop and the edge and tore a little as she pulled it free. It was a letter, unfinished, full of mis-spellings.

  ‘Dear Eddie,’ it began, ‘I do not want to be the berer of bad news but your farther has decided to marray again to a german yonger than your sisters.’

  There was a line crossed out and the paper held to the window did not give up the deletion, but was doubtless a version of some of what followed.

  ‘I am verry worried. You shoud write to him and give him advise. It is not wise. She is almost thirty years yonger. Think of your mother and what she would say. The german has no mony. She is murrying him for his — ’

  And then the letter broke off as if the writer had been called away midword, or had been surprised by someone and so had pulled the roller down and hidden the letter away.

  22.

  EVIE AND NAN ATE LOUISE CAKE WITH BRIDGIE, THE ONLY one apart from Nan to know Evie’s whereabouts. When Evie had first stood before her, weeks ago now, thin but big-bellied in an old dress of Min’s found by Nan in the attic, a tiny smile had formed on the mobile side of Bridgie’s mouth. She hadn’t exclaimed, or run to embrace her, but then she was never one for cuddles or affection. Ma would say, ‘Her poor skin hurts her. Don’t you be pulling her around.’

  Now, staring blankly at Nan, though with a surrounding air of gratitude, Bridgie picked off bits of the jammy shortbread and crumbly coconut and inserted them into the pocket at the side of her mouth, concentrating, chewing sideways. Bridgie’s pouch, Ma called it, who held also that the long-ago accident had affected Bridgie’s mind as much as it had her body; that the terror of the fire had burned away any stores of astonishment or alarm for the rest of her natural life.

  Evie ate five pieces of louise cake, one after the other, her heart thudding. Only an hour before she had nearly been caught by Matthew as she came carefully down the corridor towards the kitchen. There had been a clattering of feet on the stairs above, and she had only enough time to lumber with her big belly to a hiding place behind the library door. She wished she hadn’t bothered. She wished she’d carried on her merry way and met him at the bottom of the stairs, stood in front of him and made him face facts. He wasn’t alone, he was with Rufina, and they were dressed for riding — Evie had caught a back view of the German in a white full-sleeved blouse trimmed with lace, men’s moleskins and leather boots. It was
an incongruous outfit, but had something modern and brave about it.

  How Evie hated her. After Nan had told her about their engagement, Evie had cried for hours and hours and she’d felt like crying again at the sight of the hussy showing off her tall, slender body, with Matthew’s arm around her narrow waist. It wasn’t until after she watched them from the window riding out — Rufina on Llew’s horse with Llew’s traitorous dog following behind — that she deemed it safe to hurry across the entrance hall, past the dining room and out to the kitchen. Fury burned in her stomach, all around the poor baby; she could feel the poor thing boiling inside her like a spud in a pot. Nan’s sweet cake and tea helped the anger melt away, though now, back in the dark close room, she wondered if she’d eaten too much of it. She felt sick.

  ‘It’s nobody’s business but your own,’ Nan kept saying. ‘You keep as quiet as a mouse.’

  And so she did, creeping down to her room at the mouth of Eddie’s wing soon after the noise started, once they’d worked out it wasn’t a crow screeching from the garden, or a bellowing distant cow going down with the staggers, and Nan had flown up the stairs on her vein-popping legs, as fast as Evie had ever seen her. Miss Louisa was having her baby.

  Nan had put some things around Evie’s room. A little clock she called a traveller, which Min had apparently taken with her on her holidays away from Jarulan to Sydney and America. A clock that had seen the world. A folded old towel, raggy enough to have been in use when Matthew was a baby. A soft white shawl for the baby when he came, as old as the towel but in better order. A cream enamel water jug with a chipped rim, and a scratched old glass. A tin of shortbread. A couple of bananas going black. A pretty chemise, all pintucks and embroidery, like the one she had stolen for her mother but in better order.

  It wasn’t a drum at all. It was a heart. Boom-boom. Boom-boom. She got heavily to her feet and took the two or three steps to the chest of drawers to lay her ear against it, though she knew already that it came from the top drawer, which was locked. She had told Nan about it, finally, that morning, how she’d searched for an insect, an animal trapped in the wall, how she was frightened that she was beginning to imagine things.

  ‘I think you are!’ Nan had said, but Evie had registered the alarm in her green eyes and how she looked towards the chest with something like fear and hurried off to look after Louisa, leaving Evie all on her own.

  It was when she finally succeeded in wrenching it open that the first pain came and with it the urge to bear down, though from what she remembered of Ma that was supposed to come later. Her waters broke with it and Evie found herself squatting in the puddle, the drawer flung open above her head. It was too early; she’d worked out the weeks with Nan. Not yet, little one, not yet.

  But the pains came quickly, one after another with only two minutes or so between them, so that any attempts to reach the narrow bed and the comfort she hoped it would offer her were stymied. She stayed where she was, determined not to cry out. The traveller showed her it was half past one in the afternoon, an observation she made with the clear untrammelled part of her brain, as intently as if she had walked away from her body to where the clock sat beside the ottoman on the dusty floor.

  But she was brought back to herself with another pain, so intense it felt as though she would be rendered in two by it, and she couldn’t help this time but cry out, lifting her arms to embrace the warm wood of the chest of drawers, as if it was a friend and attendant.

  How could Ma have borne this so many times? She always said she forgot how much it hurt, but how could she? Ma said that she prayed to Saint Margaret and that the saint helped her every time. Festooned in pearls and murmuring encouragement, Saint Margaret would appear nearby. Inevitably, she had the dragon at her feet, dead of having a cross shoved down his scaly throat. But Evie did not believe, not like Ma did. You had to have been born in Ireland for the saints, not in this place where a saint had never been born or was likely to be. In any case, Evie would not cry out for a woman who’d ended her life with her head off. Was that why she wore the pearls — to hide the ghastly cut in her neck?

  It was animals she felt gathered around now, the animals that surrounded the grand house, creatures wild and farmed, the warm-blooded females and even the red-bellied black snakes, all the live young they must labour to spawn, and in her turn Evie felt herself spread out to meet them. The pigs labouring in their sty. The mother kangaroo giving birth to a twiglet so tiny she must barely feel it emerge, or at least only enough to stop her jumping about. How many joeys fall off and die? Maybe they only get born while the females are at rest during the heat of the day. And she had a sudden vision of herself among a golden-hued, gentle-eyed assembly under the shadowy river gums, the eternal rush of water, the spicy smell of crushed tussock and grass around them, the wail of a solitary black cockatoo from above — but it was herself crying out, the vision vanished and the well-travelled clock proving only a minute or two had passed.

  There was something wrong. It was going too fast. Was it because it was too early? Even Ma had warning enough with Malachy, the tenth of thirteen, when she got caught short in Lismore. A kind passer-by had taken her to the hospital when she would have preferred the convent. Oh, if only Ma were here right now …

  Evie would go to her. Perhaps the pains would stop for long enough to climb out the window and run the two miles across the farm. So clearly did she imagine herself running away, away from the pain and fear, that she could feel the long grass of the snake field flicking against her bare legs. She saw a jacky lizard motionless on a rock with his orange mouth wide open, and a little further on a yellow honeyeater sitting on the fence post at the boundary, calling chickup chickup chickup …

  And then there was nothing but the closed lids of her eyes, a desperate hanging on in the darkness, all her attention on getting the hot air into her lungs, until there was a final pain that braced her, a slither and fall, an emptiness. The infant lay on the floor between her feet, the same bloodless hue as the pulsing blue cord, but pinkening as she picked her up — a girl! A girl when she’d wanted a boy. The surge of disappointment was short-lived — she had all her limbs, skinny but perfectly formed. Evie held her close, licking at the tiny nostrils and fretting for a moment that the mouth wasn’t opening properly, that she’d somehow come out like Bridgie, even though Bridgie was born perfectly normal. But look, the mouth was opening in a perfect oval, a comical yawn, as if life was already proving wearying. Wriggling away from the wet part of the floor, Evie rested against the tallboy with the drawer hanging open over her head like an awning.

  The eyes that never left hers were his: the same shape, promising the same lack of colour, the strands of slick downy hair on her head almost transparent. The tiny, sticky hand, unfurling and closing again, had the fan shape of his nails, the broad dimension of his palm. No one could ever doubt who the father was. No one would question it. She would give her an English name to go with the Fenchurch. A glamorous name. After the precious stone in the earring she lost. The sparkling light, the drop of blood. Rubies are valuable and precious. This is the ruby returned a hundredfold. Ruby is a grand name. Grand enough to inherit a fortune, even though she’s a girl.

  Or Helen. It was a name she’d heard. An English name. Nothing Irish or Catholic or anything to get in the way. Ethel. Or Helena? One afternoon, snooping through the house when everyone was out, she’d found herself standing before Louisa’s dressing table. There was a beautiful jar, cut glass, with a white perfumed cream inside it. She’d dabbed some on and breathed in the essences that masked the lanolin. Helena said the label and another name beginning with R that she struggled with and now couldn’t remember. Rubi something. Almost Ruby. Ruby as a middle name then, Helena Ruby Fenchurch, who would grow up here beloved of her father, who would not be able to resist her. She would be tall and creamy like Louisa, rich, well fed, go to school.

  In the meantime Rufina would get bored and go away, or have a fatal accident.

  Env
eloped in pleasant dreams of Rufina thrown by Boss headfirst into a termite mound, or slipping from the bank to be submerged in a ravening flood, or bitten to death by a brown snake, or drained lifeless by colonies of leeches, Evie spent her first hours as a mother. When Helena cried she put her to her breast, and the visions of Rufina fled for a moment, to be replaced by musings on what Ma would say when she saw the little one, and Nan. They wouldn’t be able to help but love her, for her daintiness, her pale fragility, her pale skin, her likeness to Matthew. She had his flat mouth, his chin, his wide brow. Evie would stay at the big house, with a proper room, and bring the baby up. It was inevitable that Matthew would not be able to resist the child since the loss of his own son. Here was his Helena, his natural daughter, who would drive Rufina away, if nothing else did.

  When Bridgie snuck in around five o’clock, having been sent downstairs to boil water for Louisa, she showed no surprise at finding her sister calm and collected and the room in disarray, with puddles and the top drawer hanging open at a dangerous angle over her head, Evie’s baby already born while Louisa still laboured on upstairs. She showed no surprise at all. Neither did she show any amazement at the drawer’s content — a full layette, finely worked and spotlessly clean, that would perfectly fit her little niece.

  ‘Where did it all come from?’ she asked her sister, who only said quietly in reply, ‘It’s stopped now. The noise. It must have been my own heart beating.’

  There was the business of the afterbirth, and they weren’t sure all of it had come away, but they did the best they could, remembering from Ma how you had to put it back together, the shape it should take. Then Bridgie helped Evie back to bed, set the room in order, and fetched a basin of warm water from the kitchen to bathe the baby. Now the little one was tucked up safe on a pillow laid in the same beseeching drawer in the way Ma had taught her with the three babies that had come after Malachy, swaddled tight. Bridgie lay beside her sister, holding her hand — bother the rest of them upstairs — because she could sense Evie needed the comfort.