Jarulan by the River

by Lily Woodhouse

  The family stood around the three edges of the table, hands clasped, eyes closed, and the prayer was as earnest as any Rufina had heard. Mary prayed with them in the same language. Eddie did not. His pipe was re-lit, his bread ignored.

  Balancing her bread on her knee, Rufina dug in her pocket and pulled out her purse. At the bank in Wellington she had changed her money from Australian pounds to New Zealand, and she took three twenty-pound notes from her purse now, handing them to him. Quite a sum. There was a tremor in his fingers and his eyes, old-man rheumy with sudden tears.

  ‘Don’t spend it on grog,’ Rufina wanted to say, as she knew Matthew would have. ‘Don’t waste it on women,’ though surely his seducing days were over.

  ‘Eddie,’ as gently as she could, ‘some of the money is to get Mary’s tooth fixed, a little of it is to buy a new axe, and the rest is to improve the comforts of the house.’

  He shook his head. ‘I’ll do with it as I like.’

  He seemed to have taken a new lease of energy, the tears gone to be replaced with bitterness and irritation. How similar alcoholics were. Her father had been the same. While a baby will cry overfed and push away its bottle — Louisa’s spawn, and Evie’s, Rufina had observed it — the sot will rage to suck more of his, even though it makes him mad and sick.

  He was muttering under his breath — she thought she heard the Anglo-Saxon swear word — and gazing at the money in his hand. He held still long enough for her to pluck free one twenty-pound note and stride across to the family. Mary was hooting with laughter, and the children close to her too, her mouth open, and Rufina could see a crust of bread inserted into the good side and left to dissolve there, since the infection would be too far advanced to allow easy chewing. One end curled under her chin like a preposterous tusk.

  ‘Here. For the dentist and a new axe. Whatever else you could use it for. I’ve given Eddie forty pounds.’

  At her back, Eddie took quickly to his feet and she saw him pass swiftly behind the range, heading for the road as fast as could, limping in his ill-fitting boots. Some of the children ran after him, the one called Gracie swinging on his hand.

  ‘Missus?’ Mary had removed the crust and taken hold of Rufina’s arm. ‘Give us another twenty. The same as Eddie. For clothes and that, for the bairns.’

  Irving had come to stand beside his stepmother and the other children were looking for Rufina’s response. The moment stretched out, all of them looking at the money in Mary’s worn hand, until Rufina again dug in her pocket and pulled out her purse, which was now almost empty.

  The grandson borrowed a horse and cart from a family next door, the cart of heavy pit-sawn timber and iron wheels, the horse scarcely broken in and jittery. Mary and the children came down to the road to say goodbye, Mary holding her cheek and jawing on. She had been talking for almost the whole time it took for the horse and cart to be secured — a full two hours. Rufina had heard the neighbouring men and women and Irving talking and laughing in their language at the back of the house. And the horse took a while to catch after that. Several times she had considered just walking off, not brave enough to call to them not to worry, she would make her own way back. But that would have been rude, and it wasn’t raining, at least.

  And now the means of transport was here, Irving holding the horse’s head and gesturing for her to climb up; for the high step she had to ease the skirt of her costume. Mary was still talking, ‘You see, Mrs Fenchurch, I’ve longed all these years to meet Eddie’s Australian family. Such stories he tells the children, early in the drinking, mind you, not when he’s far gone. He had one of them, what do you call ’ems, those little bears, for a pet.’

  Rufina nodded and swung herself up to the seat, a memory stirring of the koala Evie had let free that long-ago night. She’d seen her doing it. She’d seen her under the trees and Matthew hadn’t believed her. It still rankled.

  ‘Such stories of the farm he tells, of the animals, his father and you.’

  Does she not know that he and I had not met before today, Rufina wondered. She took her place on the bench seat and straightened her jacket. Back to the hotel. A stiff Scotch.

  ‘If you’re glad of him you could send for Eddie — and me. Give us a chance too.’

  Rufina kept her eyes on the road ahead, Irving folding the reins back now and coming up to sit beside her.

  ‘Which hotel is it, Missus?’ Mary reached to take hold of Rufina’s hem, fingering the tweed.

  ‘I forget the name,’ which of course she had not. There would be no reciprocal visit, though she supposed that there were not so many hotels that Mary could not go from one to the other without finding her.

  *

  As they drove away a skylark lifted from a furrowed cornfield adjoining the house and flew above their heads, then another and another, and their song brought an engulfing wave of nostalgia for Europe, more intense than Rufina had ever experienced in all the years of living in Australia. It was because the climate of this place, or at least now in the early winter, the lushness, the rain, reminded her of the years at boarding school in England. It was not different enough, even with the weirdness of the smell of sulphur, the white plumes rising from the ground, the crowds of Maori people she had passed through in the town, the different twang to the tongues of the British. She longed for Jarulan. It was like no other place on earth. It was home because it was like nowhere else.

  ‘The little birds, the skylarks,’ she said. ‘What do you call them here?’

  Irving shook his head. ‘No idea. I think they came over in cages, got set free.’

  At the bend in the road she turned to wave at the family on the roadside, but they had already gone, melted away up to the cottage and the forest, or wherever they spent their working hours.

  ‘Do the children go to school?’ She had the uncomfortable sense that he thought she was prying, her voice rising clear around them with the sanctimonious tones of the missionary’s wife, the health official.

  ‘Aye. The native school. Sometimes I help there when I’m not away shearing. But today is Saturday.’

  He spoke so quietly she could barely hear him above the rumble of the wheels. Had he said ‘aye’ or something else? Curious if it was the old English word persisting here. It had gone from Australia.

  As the bush closed over them, the sun slid out from behind a cloud and disappeared behind another so quickly that the shadows jumped towards them, three dimensional, clawing, before the gloom descended again. Then they were in a green tunnel, dripping and cool, a blaze of light showing at the end where the road separated, in one direction the marae, and the other along the lakefront towards Rotorua.

  A small figure came out of the light towards them. Gracie, and she had been crying. Her brother spoke to her in Maori, soothingly, and she sprang up into the cart, slipping behind Rufina to stand holding the back of the seat.

  ‘You can’t be worrying about your father,’ Rufina told her. ‘He is addicted to the drink. Do you understand that?’

  There was silence from the girl then and also from her brother, though he darted his eyes at her.

  Reprimandedly, thought Rufina. At the corner they had some trouble with the horse, who would not at first take the turn. There was no whip, and Irving was compelled to climb down and take hold of her head again, and walk beside her a short distance.

  ‘When will I meet your wife-to-be, Irving?’ she asked him. ‘Before we leave?’

  There was a pause, long enough for her to believe he hadn’t heard her, and she began again on the question, breaking off when he answered, ‘No. We’ll leave it.’

  ‘He hasn’t got a wife!’ exclaimed the child behind her. ‘He hasn’t even got a girlfriend.’

  ‘You don’t know everything, Gracie,’ came the mild careless tone.

  *

  When they drew up before the wide verandah of her hotel Rufina could see two gentlemen on the cane settees, the same men who were there this morning. One of them had no legs and the o
ther a drongo, a patch in his skull. Great War veterans by the look of them, permanent residents in the hotel, in the corner shadows with their uniformed nurse. The man with no legs caught Gracie’s eye and held out a brand new penny. The child leapt from the dray to the dirt road, up the steps and along the boards, all grins.

  Rufina watching, felt uncomfortable. All over the world children are given pennies, but this was different. The man was talking to Grace, nodding, as if he was encouraging her to do something, paying her for a service, and a second or two later her voice broke into song. By its cadence and lilt, not a Maori song, something modern. ‘Won’t You Come Home, Bill Bailey’. As she sang she grew more confident, louder, the words reaching the dray. ‘I’ll do the cooking, darling, I’ll pay the rent, I know I’ve done you wrong.’

  The man was transported, grinning, the nurse too; the other man staring with his big blue eyes.

  ‘Bring the girl too,’ said Rufina. ‘If she would like to come.’

  He was startled. ‘Gracie?’

  ‘Yes, why not? Give her a chance in life. Better than this.’ She had half a mind to call her back from her singing. ‘Promise me you’ll bring her.’

  ‘Won’t be that easy. Pa is fond of her. So is Mary. So are lots of people.’

  ‘Bring her, or don’t come yourself. Riches, Irving. Don’t forget. You’ll inherit it. The only direct male issue. The only Fenchurch.’

  ‘No. I have a brother, away working.’

  ‘You’re the one I want.’ She wrote the address of her hotel in Wellington on a page torn from a notebook, not waiting for an answer. ‘I’ll wait for you for a week from today. And if you haven’t come I’ll leave some money and instructions for you at the hotel. All right? You and Gracie and your wife.’

  He nodded.

  It was arranged, then. As arranged as it ever would be.

  3.

  THE BATH HOUSE WAS A SHORT WALK AWAY FROM THE HOTEL, through a formal garden with willows, scraggy daisies and Phoenix palms. After her long, stiffening tramp the day before, Rufina had not slept well; the room had been stuffy and cold and now she drooped a little as she went along. The vision of a Tudor house lifting from the sward startled her — enough to lift her attention from her shabby shoes traversing the muddy paving around the pond.

  Or what the English called Tudor. Europe had old houses the same — plaster and wood framing. To see it in this country, gabled, gleaming in the grey morning light, was at least as bizarre as anything else she had seen on her holiday. The little towns that tried so hard to be English and failed. The geography squeezed together, typographies of volcanic plateaus and meadows and coast so closely aligned as not to seem real. The stronger presence of the indigenous.

  It was her opinion that New Zealand would never be as white as Australia was, as easy. There was a sense of displacement in almost everything here, more acute, for the sake of trying so hard to mimic that older country and failing. And fancy introducing the rabbit. The English colonies were so stupid. Yesterday, from the train window, just out of somewhere with an unpronounceable name beginning with T, she’d seen an entire hillside lift brown and white flashing tufts, departing at the rumble of the rail. If she’d had her rifle she could have cut a swathe through them.

  Sulphurous fumes rose undisturbed in long tendrils from the geyser beyond the rickety fence. A peacock and his hens strutted through, feathers motley, sparse in places — maybe the sulphur affected them, gave them the mange. The unhusbanded Jarulan peacocks were splendid specimens in comparison — if one must be made, although any comparison to Australia had not proved useful so far.

  She passed a group of seven or eight children, mixed brown and white, two of the girls rosebuds with ribbons, a pale little fellow in a sailor suit, and a highly energetic laughing Maori boy with three just like him. They all played together on a long swing shaped like a wooden boat, set on poles above a square of asphalt. The older boys, two Maori and two white, stood at either end to power it, bending at the knees and leaning forwards and backwards in unison. On the bench seats the younger ones squealed and screamed, whooping, healthy, delighted. It was idyllic, she supposed, proof of the stories she had heard about how the races abided together — until she noticed the mothers looking on, the Europeans sparsely grouped and the Maori mothers all together. There was a distance between them, a mutual suspicion, as one would expect. Wouldn’t one expect that?

  Overhead rain clouds spread horizon to horizon, forming a solid pearly cap.

  *

  The private bathroom contained a perplexing array of hoses and ancient pipes, with peeling signs exhorting users not to touch or turn on, but to wait for the attendant. The concrete bath was ready for her, small and square, lapping at the rim, designed so that a person had only to go down a series of steps to be submerged up to her neck in cloudy, demonic, stinking water. As she undressed, her nerve failed her — did she really want to immerse herself? Greasy, like a pan of fat. A slick shifting on the surface, a gleam through the steam. ‘Living waters’ they called it. Alive with what? The place had certainly seen better days — it was not as clean as she would have liked. There were chipped tiles and an underlying smell of mould; in the corridor there had been a mound of dirty towels.

  Do it. You’re here. Get in.

  She picked her way down the slimy steps and found the seat, barely visible, easing herself down onto its pocked surface. And yes, it was a gift from deep in the provisioning earth, a delight to lie back in the pungent, cushioning heat and let the ice melt from her bones and the smell lessen its assault on her nostrils, to empty her mind, or try to.

  Rest. A few seconds of thinking of nothing but the water and the heat and the white tiles and red-lettered signs. DO NOT TURN. DO NOT TOUCH.

  But the troubling fantasy returned, as she knew it would, just as she knew she must school herself out of it, this ridiculous childish game: her old darling lying beside her, shifting his legs in the water, relaxed, their fingers interlinked on the floor of the bath.

  ‘I’ve seen Eddie. He’s in a bad way,’ she told him.

  ‘Inevitable.’

  ‘Why did he turn out that way?’

  ‘Bad blood.’

  ‘Whose? Yours?’

  He shrugged and so did Rufina. Bad blood. She wondered again if there had been a convict. She’d never asked, since it would have been the height of rudeness. There were so few conversations about the past in Australia. No one harked back to anything; the future was all. The past was either too painful or had never happened.

  ‘I’ve asked his son to come back to Jarulan.’

  ‘The Maori?’ He let go of her hand.

  ‘Yes, he’s Maori. What of it?’

  ‘He’ll find it difficult. How can he know how to run a farm that size? And he’s Maori.’

  ‘So you said. Only part.’

  ‘Can you think of what people will say?’

  ‘Variations on the theme of what they’ve said about me.’

  ‘You think the men will accept him giving them orders?’

  ‘How can they not? They’re all sorts themselves, aren’t they?’

  ‘Not as a boss. Never as a boss. Why did you invite the girl?’

  ‘She’s necessary. She will displace Evie’s brat. We need a daughter in the house. A granddaughter.’

  ‘I see,’ said Matthew after a pause, during which she made the observation that he looked just as he had done soon after they married. A little plumper and happier than he had been when they first met. Content, genially having it all his own way. A softness about him, all because she loved him. She had worked that change in him — how surprising that she could make a man feel like that. Happy, fulfilled. In charge. It was lucky that she had realised early in her marriage that she wasn’t the adventuring type at all, that to have a kind husband and a home in this most beautiful place was enough. There was the work on the farm and all the beloved horses, and the few friends in the district that had accepted her. She had read the ent
irety of the first Mrs Fenchurch’s library and added as many books of her own. She’d learned taxidermy until she could preserve her kills as well as, and sometimes better than, Matthew. And tennis. She had never played before she came to Jarulan. In Louisa there was a willing opponent, who as the years went by spent less and less time in Sydney until she had completely retired from her marriage to her childhood home, settled into the nursery wing as if it was her own private hotel, scarcely lifting a finger. But Rufina hadn’t minded, not really, not until the last six months when she took her time about dying. The expense. The trips to the hospital in Lismore. The endless calls for the local doctor when there was nothing that could be done.

  ‘Do you know,’ she remarked to Matthew now, ‘this is the first real holiday I’ve had in twenty-three years, apart from the visit made to my old employer when he came out of Trial Bay. And Sydney of course, to visit Louisa. That is, when she wasn’t imposing on us at Jarulan.’