Jarulan by the River

by Lily Woodhouse

  23.

  HIGH ON THE RIVER ROAD, RIFLE SLUNG OVER HER SHOULDER, Rufina paused to look down at the house, where very likely a baby was squalling. Even in a schloss the size of Jarulan the infant cry seemed to have a propensity for penetrating walls and carrying from floor to floor. It was a little like living in a nursing home, the two babies born only a day apart, almost exactly, one fat and round due to his mother’s indolence, the other premature, tiny and frail, since for the entire gestation her mother had played at being a fugitive. Despite this disadvantage, or perhaps because of it, Evie’s baby had a peasant determination lurking in its Irish eyes. Louisa’s child, as Nance had it, might very well have been more affected by the accident than they’d thought. Its — his — eyes were certainly duller; it was slower to do the things people expected of babies. Rufina really couldn’t care less.

  Matthew was too lenient — bad enough he didn’t encourage his daughter to return to her husband, worse that he carried on his first wife’s habit of extending all sorts of largesse to the Tyrells. It would have to stop. The house would be divested of Evie and her bastard as soon as possible. And Louisa and her children would be encouraged to return to Sydney and Mr Arkenstall, to her rightful place. Christmas had come and gone, then all of January, while they waited for Louisa’s baby to be strong enough to travel. Ridiculous. The child was robust, as far as Rufina could tell, wailing and crying far more than the other, though it surely had less call to.

  A cuckoo — or at least, she thought it was a cuckoo — alighted on the low fence around the memorial, singing for all it was worth but plaintively, reflecting her mood. Only six weeks into her marriage and these morning rides were already a pattern, a way of filling in the lonely first hours of the day. After the wedding, Matthew had not altered his habit, still rising at dawn and going to the kitchen for an early cup of tea, then riding out onto the farm until midmorning when he returned for breakfast. At first Rufina went with him, but he seemed uncomfortable having his young wife hanging about while he gave his orders, and so did some of the men, shuffling about, not meeting her eye.

  Not wanting to be left alone in the bed — and she did so enjoy their bed! — Rufina would rise at the same time. This morning they had been joined in the kitchen by mad Evie, who was helping Nance prepare Louisa’s substantial breakfast, which she took upstairs, wallowing among her pillows. Evie had glowered at Rufina before sending Matthew a simpering little smile, of which he was oblivious, standing with his back to her while he drank his tea. The maid’s baby lay in a box set on the end of the table — no, it had been a drawer, pulled from a chest. Rufina hadn’t been able to help herself; she’d tweaked at the blanket to uncover a little of the face, wrinkled as an old man’s, and scalded looking, as if its mother had left it out in the sun. It had looked up at Rufina with a challenging glint in its watery eye, an expression as unnerving as its mother’s, so she had rejoined her husband, knocking back the scalding tea as quickly as he did before accompanying him out to the yard.

  As she went she thought about how the men’s clothes she wore had once been Llew’s, as was the rifle she collected from the locked cupboard and the dog from the kennels to follow her. Whatever it was that the dead son left behind came with her now, and even Matthew, bidding her farewell as she rode out high on Boss, had more of the father about him than the lover, an indulgent pride lighting his face. How lucky she was, given the situation. She would make the best of it.

  The bird sat still on the memorial fence and a single, easy shot brought it down. The kill was hardly sporting, since the creature was motionless and so close that the bullet made rather a mess, though Matthew would mend it. Dismounting, she went to examine it more closely.

  What a lovely bird it was, a wedge shape to its striped tail similar to the one that belonged to the giant eagle in the hallway. Of course, it was much smaller, only a couple of feet long, and in comparison to so many of the birds she was shooting and learning about, dull feathered. The trilling song, or what she’d heard of it, made up for it, being almost pretty. It seemed Creation had decided that in this place the gaudier the bird, the more alarming the cry; how many times had she been startled or set off into fits of laughter by the screams and chortles in the trees.

  From her saddlebag she took the new field guide Matthew had given her — he had given her so much! — and confirmed from the coloured picture. A fan-tailed cuckoo, with his nutmeg breast and yellow ring around his eye. A perfect specimen for a vitrine in the front parlour. Or to be displayed on the white mantelpiece of their spacious bedroom, that room hard won from Louisa who had been moved, protesting, to a smaller one in the nursery wing.

  Ha!

  A dream broke — she had dreamed it last night — a kind of nightmare. She had walked down one of Jarulan’s endless corridors, one she didn’t recognise, and it seemed a baby cried from behind each of the closed doors. Doubtless one or two really did howl and her dreaming brain had drawn the sound in. Travelling ahead of her was a toy tractor, emitting tiny puffs of steam and the occasional trail of sparks, with yellow wheels that rumbled along the wooden floorboards just as Nance’s tea trolley did. It disappeared into the gloom at the far end, where a soft light began to glow. Following along behind it, she had come into a vast decaying room, with tall ragged-curtained windows and a rotting piano. At the keys sat a young man in uniform, singing and playing, by his height and colouring a Fenchurch, bony hands spread on the yellow keys. He nodded once in a friendly manner at her entrance, before shifting his attention to a tall vitrine at Rufina’s elbow. It contained no birds or koalas or snakes but a woman in a white nightgown, tied at her arms and legs with strips of silk to an old, patched leather chair. She was moving her shoulders and waggling her sweat-slicked head to the music and was obviously insane.

  Evie, gagged, her eyes rolling furiously as Rufina drew near her glass cage. Or was it Evie? Her face shifted and changed to another woman’s face, not as familiar, then back again, nightmarishly contorted.

  Now, in the rapidly increasing heat of the early morning, Rufina shivered a little. What happened after that? She remembered no more but recalled that she hadn’t been frightened, only curious about how Evie had got in there and whether she could get out again without breaking the glass. The soldier had been Llew, perhaps, but she had confused him with the remittance son gone native in New Zealand, who was the musician. She knew because the parlour piano stool was stuffed with sheet music. Eddie Fenchurch was inscribed in a florid hand in each right-hand corner.

  She would not give the dream another thought. Frau Schneider was an avid aficionado of the new psychoanalyst Carl Jung, and put great store by dreams, even those best not remembered or talked about if one wanted to remain within the bounds of decency. If she was here, perhaps Rufina would tell her a little of it, and her old employer would tell her what it meant. Their nightly dreams had enlivened many of their dull days; life was certainly more eventful with Louisa, at least since they had come north.

  Under her hand the cuckoo was soft and glossy, and although it was not a brightly painted creature — a rosella or parrot, the type of bird she preferred to shoot — it was a beauty, heavy and still warm. While she stood looking at its markings, listening to the river rush below the low cliff and the rowdy morning cries in the trees, Boss tossed his head wildly and before she could stop him cantered away down the hill towards home.

  Something had spooked him, as they said here, though it was not a country for ghosts. The fatherland was full of them. If Australia was a country for birds, then Germany was a land of disappointed and vengeful spectres, otherworldly Prussian princes, landless kings and centuries of peasants worked to the bone. Not here. Here there was sunshine and prehistoric lizards, and an openhearted man who had offered her all he had. This was her chance and she had taken it.

  ‘Boss!’

  He was already out of sight between the trees.

  ‘Come back, Boss!’ louder this time and with a whistle to follow, but t
he hooves clattered on, heedless. Apparently he had obeyed Llew always, adoring him, fawning like a dog; in time she would win his heart just as she had won her husband’s.

  On the other side of the monument was a vantage point of the river road. After a few minutes she saw the horse appear, tail and mane streaming, and any irritation she had at his disappearance melted away. He was a fine animal, worth every penny Llew had paid for him — the price had broken some kind of record, Matthew had told her. Boss’s beauty had her forgive him, love him all the more, even though she would now have to carry the bird home with the rifle heavy on her back and Llew’s shirt sticking to her skin.

  Halfway down the hill a group of wallabies gathered under some eucalypts, the dew-laden grass around them steaming in the sun. They looked up as she passed and she wondered at their fearlessness. One of them could have taken a bullet, one at least, and she would have lifted her rifle to her eye if Boss was here to help carry the quarry home. In imitation of a rifle shot she clapped her hands smartly together and the animals lolloped a short distance into denser bush. From among the trees they watched her, still, gentle, infinitely patient. She felt their eyes on her as she passed and had a sense of them keeping pace with her as the trees closed over her head, all the way to the bottom of the hill where she turned in at the lion gates. It was as if they were making sure she was leaving them.

  As she went along she resolved again to write to her mother, even though it was by no means sure that a letter would get through. Her mother knew nothing of the marriage, and Rufina didn’t know where to begin to describe it. Perhaps she could start by telling her how invitations were declined by several of the guests, most hurtfully by Jean and her husband: there was apparently neither the time nor the money to attend, an excuse that wore thin after Matthew offered the means. Jean had written privately, apologising.

  It would be better to begin with the wedding itself, conducted in a dull little brick Anglican church in Lismore, since Matthew had taken against the Clunes priest who had informed him of Llew’s death. She could describe in detail the wedding guests, because there were only five: Louisa, who had had to have a new dress hurriedly made for the occasion, now that she was too plump for the clothes they’d brought from Sydney; Nance, whose doleful demeanour would better have suited a funeral; the head stockman and his wife; and the scowling servant girl Evie, who was not invited but came anyway, bringing her baby, which caterwauled and grizzled through most of the service. A circus. Not the wedding her mother would have imagined for her only daughter.

  Rufina had a vision of her mother weeping with disappointment, unable to comprehend the depth of distrust and fear that surrounded the nuptials of her only child. She would understand that the occasion should have been an event, a celebration — the second marriage of a wealthy landowner — but perhaps it would have escaped her that because he was marrying a German it was not. People stayed away from the service, though they came to gawp afterwards, some of them with hate-filled eyes, others merely curious. A German bride half his age; look how she has two legs, look how she approximates a human being!

  Rufina kicked a stone along the driveway, thinking bitterly that actually she had no idea what they thought, since none of them spoke directly to her, and if they had spoken to Matthew it was polite, deferential. He had never told her otherwise.

  You would not weep if you could see this, Mutti! How would it be to show her the fields, the bush, the formal gardens being slowly restored, the playing fountain? Her fields, her gardens, her fountain! Flora would smile, she would announce that it was to be expected, that a rich husband was Rufina’s due, and that after the war was over and Germany claimed Britain’s colonies and dominions, and Germans came to Australia in their thousands, then Rufina’s life would feel normal again. She would be one the same as many instead of a freak, a resented outsider. They would have German servants in the house — a house that, after all, was built with German labour and skill, a German overseer to make the farm more efficient.

  It was a happy fantasy — and it was only a fantasy, even if it was unpatriotic to admit it. Any fool could see Germany was losing the war, despite the Australian propensity to exaggerate Britain’s victories. It was as if no one at home had thought to look first at a map and count the number of countries painted red for the British Empire, as if no one had thought to count the potential soldiers in those countries, the combined armies of millions that Germany had no chance of vanquishing.

  It was best not to think about any of it, but to look forward to Matthew coming in for breakfast and perhaps a kiss and a tender word from him. First she would check that Boss had returned himself to the stables.

  Still carrying the cuckoo by its scaly feet, she came along the carriageway on the river side of the house, looking up at the gables and taking note of the host of small repairs the house needed — the rotten window sashes, the crumbling disused chimneys. It was Matthew who had told her the house was built by Germans before he was born, when his own father was a lad. Perhaps she could have guessed if he hadn’t told her. It had an indefinable familiar quality, soothing, kind, accepting; a solid, pervasive German essence that overwhelmed the Australian stone and English design. All these years the house had been waiting for her, perhaps. They were a united force. There would be changes and all to the good. Eventually she would cease to betray her origins as much as the house had and become truly Australian. She would concentrate on erasing her accent, on forgetting she was German at all. What favours did it do her?

  Nosebag on and one of the Aboriginal grooms rubbing him down, Boss was outside the stable and beside him stood Matthew’s Flora. The groom glanced at Rufina once, his gaze travelling briefly to the dangling bird before returning to Boss, clicking at him, murmuring softly in his own language. It seemed that the groom didn’t want Rufina to talk to him, that he was shutting her out, or as if he was obeying an order not to speak to her. Quietly, for a moment or two, she watched the long, steady brush strokes moving over her horse’s gleaming, shivering flanks, and thought what an Australian picture it made — the graceful black servant in his faded, thin clothes and the piece of magnificent breeding that was Boss.

  ‘Wonderful horse, isn’t he, Albert?’ she said. Albert looked at her then and nodded, his gaze shifting to the bird and his eyes filling with sadness.

  As she made her way inside, Rufina considered that it was just as well Matthew had come back early because he’d know what to do with the cuckoo, which was beginning to smell, though it had been dead for less than an hour. As she went across the yard to the back door, flies followed in a steady stream, like bridesmaids after a bride, thought Rufina; and she wondered if she would have seen the analogy if her own wedding had been less of a disappointment, a wedding with no bridesmaids, though there may have been a fly or two.

  In the cool of the hall, the flyscreen door slamming behind her, she lifted the bird to examine it again, the buzzing retinue only slightly diminished. She could see the tarnished eye and a clear liquor coming from the bullet hole, greasing the feathers. She supposed it had left behind no fledglings, that the Australian cuckoo behaved as any in Europe, laying its eggs in other birds’ nests and compelling them to do all the work. A clever ancestral idea — how did it first evolve? Perhaps one mother bird did it by mistake and from thence forward her sisters realised it was a good way of having babies without having to tend them, but how did she pass the skill to her daughters?

  The library door stood open and a snuffling, snivelling sound reached her as she came down the corridor. Underneath it ran a low urgent tone, which she recognised as Matthew’s. She laid the dead bird on the hall table and leaned against the wall to listen.

  In the years to come Rufina would sometimes pass an uncomfortable hour or two wondering how her life would have been if Boss hadn’t run for home and so compelled her to return to the house early. Or if she had behaved with integrity and turned away, since she was eavesdropping, prying into a conversation that was not her
s. If she had moved on, taken the bird to the trophy room or gone up to the belvedere, she would never have known the truth of Helena’s paternity. Or what Evie believed to be the truth of it.

  ‘This has got to stop,’ Matthew was saying urgently, softly. ‘If you keep trying to corner me like this I will send you away.’

  ‘Away where?’ came the wheedling tone, husky with crying. ‘And what about your own Helena?’

  ‘Not mine. Yours.’

  ‘She’s yours.’

  ‘There’s nothing to prove it. I don’t believe you in any case, Evie. You can’t stay here. Do you understand?’

  The crying intensified, strangely as contagious as laughter, and Rufina struggled against it, though her tears were not for Evie but for herself. She had been monstrously tricked. Her mind raced through scenarios, flicking them over like picture cards in a pack: her husband in bed with his mistress — an Australian version of the European tradition, the droigt du seigneur — and surely not as tender as he was with her, surely not! She imagined Matthew hiding the girl away for the duration of her pregnancy and his pretence that he had no idea where she was.

  One morning out riding they’d crossed at the top of the Tyrell run and met with one of the brothers who had rudely asked, without greeting, if there was news of his sister. He had directed the question at Rufina, though it was meant for her husband. Matthew had shaken his head and ridden on.

  She would never forgive him. She would go directly upstairs and move her things to another room. She would leave the cuckoo stinking on the table outside the library — and if he didn’t understand that Metapher then he was more of a peasant than she thought. What does a male cuckoo do? Take even less responsibility than his gadabout wife?