Jarulan by the River

by Lily Woodhouse

  He prayed all the way back, asking God to help him with the bigger problem. It was wrong, what she’d asked him to do. So wrong. Sinful.

  Half a mile up the Tyrells’ road he felt God answer him, tell him everything would be all right. Not to worry, it was in His hands. He relaxed a little, tried to enjoy the ride. This afternoon the men were taking him around the herds before the drafting, teaching him some ropes. Scones first.

  Before the Jarulan gate on the southern boundary he turned off, taking the fences all the way to the stables, where he was very glad there was no sign of Rufina or her horse.

  11.

  ‘THE PARTIES WE HAD WHEN MIN WAS ALIVE!’ AN HOUR later, as she rounded the corner of the house Rufina heard Nance’s voice carry clear in the still, thundery air.

  Too hot. If only there was a breeze. But then if there was it could blow searing, unwelcome, making her even more uncomfortable. She longed for a bath, felt herself festering, sweaty and hateful. What had she done? Why didn’t it rain? If only the clouds would break.

  ‘Everyone in the district here for Christmas and Easter. Those were the days. Never minded the work for it, not then, not me.’

  It wasn’t until she climbed the low steps of the verandah that she saw at the far end Nance and Ma Tyrell, clearly recovered from her illness. They sat in the shade cast by the washing, side by side on the battered wooden bench seat below the kitchen window, faded hems lifted above their misshapen knees.

  ‘No one comes here now,’ Ma Tyrell was saying, ‘not since the German came. And now the blimmin’ Maoris!’

  Rufina let her boots ring louder on the hollow boards, driving in her heel. A party! Would she dare to throw one? You’re on then, you old cow! We’ll do it. The first entertaining since Matt died. Show themselves off. No more hiding away. This is how we live.

  ‘Good afternoon, ladies.’

  They were sitting there, doing bloody nothing at all as if it was their birthright. Rufina put her hands on her hips and glared at the state of the place. Rubbish around, a pile of broken plates, a bucket of rank water steaming with new-hatched mosquitoes, the forty-gallon drum incinerator burning with what smelt like old boots, tainting the washing. Dog dirt, a rusted pan.

  ‘Mrs Fenchurch!’ The Tyrell woman was all smiles, as if she thought Rufina would stop to yack, when she wouldn’t, because the notion of a party had taken hold. How would it be to clean the place up and invite everyone, the Chinese tobacco farmers further down river, who somehow managed to hold on to their land in the face of all the fervent clamour about Australia for the White Man, the snobby Bracewells from the farm to the north, and the distant Davies from the west? The Tyrells. There could be beer and food for the hands, for all of them, all shades of the rainbow. Show them all how this is the new order, how things were going to be, everyone getting along and playing nicely, like good children.

  ‘Don’t be so arrogant,’ came Matthew’s voice, a whisper in her ear.

  When the screen door banged shut behind her she stood for a moment in the cool of the hall, taking off her hat, lifting her hair up from her damp neck, pulling her blouse away from her sticky chest. The action gave her Irving’s face when she made her proposal, how he had lifted one hand to his heart and stared at her.

  With horror. Disgust, even.

  There. It was named. What she thought she saw.

  A mirror. She needed to look at herself, really look at herself. Was she so ugly? She needed a bath, a frock, cologne. There were dresses, many, some hanging so long unattended that they were half-eaten away by insects. She would find one still whole, or near enough, and make herself beautiful. She could be beautiful, people told her so often, when she was younger. She could do this. She could make him see her as a woman, still young, not a widow approaching middle age.

  Not his grandfather’s widow. Not related to him at all.

  Back out to the verandah. ‘Where’s Lena? I want her to boil some water for my bath.’

  The two old women were bending to feed a fat waddling cockatoo crusts of stale bread. Grey scaly feet clipped the peeling boards, the bright yellow crest bobbed and waved, the old women cooed.

  Further evidence of Nance’s decline then, since it would likely poop on the sheets. She used always to chase them away.

  ‘Nance? Where’s Lena?’

  ‘Haven’t a clue.’

  Fury rose again. A day of it, one passion after another, leaving her dull and headachy. The nearest sheet offered itself for a vicious yank, streaking its fine patina of mildew. How long had they hung there, anyway? A week? More?

  In the kitchen she hefted pots to the stove and stuffed the firebox with enough coal to set it roaring. No point in asking Nance for help, to lug the steaming buckets up to the bathroom as servants had done countless times in the hundred years since the house was built. Electricity had been promised for years from Lismore, but still even the town itself was poorly supplied. Bloody Australians! You could guarantee that even after the devastation of the war German houses of this ilk had hot running water. Couldn’t you guarantee that?

  On her third trip up the first flight of stairs she heard laughter beyond the screen door. Irving returned, jovial, teasing Nance and Ma. Too happy. Had he even thought about her proposal in the hour or two that has passed since she made it? She would know his laugh from the other side of any closed door. Recognisable for its open joy. As if it had never been used to signify spite or assume superiority.

  But he’s no saint, she thought. No man is. And she didn’t want him to see her lugging her buckets all hot and sweaty. She hurried up into the shadow of the stairwell, Ma Tyrell’s raspy squawk following as far as the landing, explosive on a word that sounded very like ‘scones!’

  The bath was perfect, tepid, all she needed in this heat, in the modern bathroom she had put in ten years ago, with a copper bath almost long enough to be able to stretch her legs in. The single tap with cold water filtered along pipes from the river. Luxury. Black and white tiles, red and blue ornamental glass in the window; the only unpleasant note struck by the often-problematical flush toilet that stank even with the lid closed. And the frequent unwanted guests.

  There were several now: a stationary long brown stick insect glued to the wall beside the brass cistern, a spider web in the links of the chain, flies circling and a mantis praying in a dusty corner, yellow and green, about two inches long, its little paws rubbing together, the red-eyed head swivelling. As long as it stayed there she didn’t mind, because it was beautiful in a horrifying way, a line of glittery dots on its wings lit up by a shaft of thundery light. Wings meant it could fly, which meant it could dive for the bath and struggle against her skin, which was crawling now at the thought.

  The open window offered more solace; a sliver of bright rainbow ribboned a black cloud, swollen and sagging.

  Rain, any minute. Since Irving came it had been unseasonably dry, as if the summer rains were holding themselves off to let him go out and about and get his bearings. Matthew used to say that if the summer rains were late then there would be flooding; that it was inevitable that the river would rise. The third year of their marriage the water came so high that it lapped at the chin of the Virgin Mary at the top of the river stairs, much as the bathwater did at her own, and completely swamped Aphrodite, Hera, Hebe, Athena, Venus and Fortuna.

  The praying mantis scurried up the pipe, legs clattering on the lead, before going more slowly along the wooden sill and making a seeming arbitrary decision to stop and wave its antennae at the rain, which was blowing in now. At long last. Weighty as birds’ feet drops plunked on the second floor verandah roof. The dusty balustrade speckled. If more people lived in the house then the bathroom window would have to be curtained for decency, but no one ever came up here to stroll the periphery. The second floor was private, vast, hers alone.

  It’s mine in which to do what I like with whom I like.

  The soap, French, a long-ago gift from Matthew. Think of Matthew. No, think of t
he soap. Lavender. A pale mauve. Slippery. How very odd it was that until she verbalised her plan to Irving she had not given a thought to how she would with any decency continue with the comfort of her imaginary conversations. The prospect of the real one had cancelled consideration of the fantasy. What if she had said, ‘I am going to seduce your grandson. It’s my last chance, do you see? I am not too old to have a child. And he will be like you. You can’t begrudge me that.’

  There was his frown and wide-eyed look of horror before the light in them changed to narrow judgement of her.

  ‘Go away, Matthew.’ She said it aloud, lifting her streaming foot to lie against the chill of the cold tap.

  A peacock screamed from the garden — they were multiplying again; she would set Irving the job of dispatching some of them, with his new rifle. She’d popped off half a dozen when she went to get the lame peahen and could have shot more. Why had Min introduced birds that make such a noise when she was already surrounded by native species dinning in her head? A flock of lorikeets came to shelter from the rain, screeching and muttering, and the mantis remained at his post, looking out, unconcerned for his safety. A bird could so easily poke its head in and eat him.

  But weren’t lorikeets nectar eaters? Seeds and flowers, no diet of small life? The mantis could know that too, the instinct planted deep in his rotating head. The crowd of bright birds that fluttered below his vantage point could be benign, without the smell of predators, whatever that would be. A chemical hint in the air dimly perceived by the dumb creature that tells of a diet of his own kind? The insect was male, she supposed, since the females were bigger, swelling after the rains with huge egg cases affixed to their segmented abdomens. Repulsive. She preferred the dried-out-seeming stick insects, like the one sliding now on the damp wall, its grip loosened.

  It hadn’t been horror on Irving’s face. It had been fear. The realisation hit harder than the earlier idea, clenching deep in her stomach and setting her legs tingling. He was frightened of her, when she never meant to frighten anyone ever, especially not him.

  No. Be honest. You frighten Lena on purpose, you’ve trained her to obey you from the time she was a child, as antidote to Matthew’s excesses. That is, if they were excesses, the clothes and holidays, not what any man of means would do for a child he acknowledged as his own.

  Rufina defended herself to her conscience — if Lena had been different, more attractive, cleverer, likeable, then I might have treated her less cruelly. It was never my fault. Her foot returned to the bath and her attention to the mantis. He’d gone. Did he take his chances and fly out into the realm of likely predators? She could only think about the insect for a second before her mind returned to Lena and how there would come a time, probably soon, when she would have to make it up to her, to compensate for past wrongs. She could see that now. Irving would work it out, see who she really was.

  She’d seen him looking at Lena, his blood calling out to hers. The same blood. He’d probably figured it out already. Perhaps he even made a habit of it, looking for connections, being part of a new world where that new way of thinking was taking hold since the war. No man was better than any other, regardless of race or creed or class. Or legitimacy. Had that changed too? Even though Evie had tricked Matthew, lured him. He was never that kind of man, the sort that went running after peasants.

  You never heard that word here, peasants, although that surely is what the Tyrells were. Irish peasants, transplanted.

  Footsteps clipped along the corridor, stopping outside the bathroom, or were they closer to her bedroom directly across the hall? Her pretty, restful, anticipatory bedroom, with a fresh white mosquito net over the new bedspread; slipper chair and two-seater couch by the fireplace re-upholstered in pale green leather. Was it Lena looking for her? She had exclaimed over the improvements, much as she had over the new bathroom when she was a child, installed in the small room once used to corral Min during her fits of insanity.

  Rufina waited for Lena’s voice, whispery, unsure, to call out. Or for a knock on the door. She pictureed the pimply sad face in its agony of indecision and took pity.

  ‘I’m in here. You’re too late to help. Go away. It’s all right.’

  Silence. The footsteps crossed the hall to the bathroom door.

  ‘Hello?’

  The doorknob shifted a quarter and returned to its previous position.

  ‘Lena?’

  ‘No, it’s me.’

  Rufina didn’t recognise the voice. Quiet, female, emphatic. Not Lena, or Nance. The bathwater was cold. ‘Hello?’ The door opened a little. ‘No. Don’t come in. I’m in the bath.’

  Silence again, but after a moment the footsteps led away, only this time, Rufina could swear, there were two sets continuing along the corridor towards the belvedere steps. An adult and a child, was it, two light steps sounding between each heavier one?

  Shedding water, she scrambled out, grabbing a towel for modesty — though with regard to whom, exactly? — and flung the door open, slipping on wet feet onto the polished floor of the hall.

  ‘Hello?’ She tucked the towel more firmly around her chest. ‘Hello?’ Ma Tyrell was it, putting on a voice, taking liberties of the kind she might take when she thought Rufina was out of the way, bringing one of her many grandchildren to see the grand house, to see the shining belvedere?

  ‘Ma? Is that you?’

  No one overhead on the hollow floor of the belvedere: she would be able to hear them from here. And how would the poor old nag have made it up the open stairs by now? She would be in plain view.

  Just as she was about to turn back into the bathroom there were footsteps in her room across the hall and a shadow rose and fell across her feet.

  ‘Rufe?’

  So Lena was here all the time, playing tricks. She had a feather duster.

  ‘How long have you been in there?’

  ‘Not long. You told me to do the dusting, remember? Before you went up to the memorial.’

  Irving must have told her that’s where they went. What else had he told her?

  ‘Did you try the bathroom door?’

  ‘No, Rufe, I didn’t.’

  Rufe. That was Matthew’s name for her. Rufe, who now put a roof over his by-blow’s head. ‘Don’t call me Rufe.’

  Waving the feather duster, Lena grinned, showing her bad teeth, and looked Rufina up and down, ‘Will you be wanting your clothes, Ma’am?’ She turned back into the bedroom.

  Rufina found herself following, as if she had thought for a moment that the girl was going to lay them out for her on the bed, as she herself had done for Louisa and her employer before that.

  But Lena strode to the far end of the room, opened the screen on the window and held out her duster to shake it vigorously onto the verandah. A small cloud of dust puffed against the rain, falling steadily beyond the balustrade, streaming silver against the murky green of the river hill. Multitudes of shrieking lorikeets took to the air, alarmed by the headless shivering feathered thing.

  ‘Silly birdies,’ Lena chided. ‘I won’t hurt you.’

  There was something different about her. Rufina, inspecting underwear in her duchesse drawer, repositioned her towel and straightened to examine Lena more closely just as the girl knocked a modesty lamp flying, one of the set sent as a gift by Rufina’s mother. It landed on its side, seeping kerosene onto the floorboards.

  ‘Darn it.’ Lena picked it up and stared first at the small oily puddle and then at her duster, as if she could somehow clean it up with that. A smudge of white dust frosted her nose. Dusting powder from the worn pink puff that sat on top of a ceramic jar beside Rufina’s hairbrush? But that had been empty for years, since before Matthew died. She’d only kept the pretty pot to fill a gap on her dressing table.

  ‘What have you got on your face?’

  Surprised, Lena wiped at herself and examined the results.

  ‘Flour. Irving is making scones.’

  ‘Scones?’

  ‘Yes. He
came back hungry from his ride and wanted to do some baking. Nance doesn’t mind.’

  Rufina pulled on her combinations, soft cotton striped with rayon, a miraculous absence of buttons and domes. They would be the best thing to wear under a silk dress, even though they added another full layer, which could be unbearable in this temperature. She wouldn’t bother with a bodice.

  Scones. Is that what Lena said? What on earth …?

  ‘You misheard him, obviously. Irving would not make scones.’

  The wardrobe gave up three dresses, one after another. Pink, green and yellow, the palest of shades, fashionable a decade ago. Low waisted, sleeveless. Against Rufina’s tanned forearm the yellow silk was creamy, perfect — but sickly against her white shoulders. Closer to the mirror, she scrutinised her appearance. The sun had marked her throat, a V that dipped below her collarbone. And she’d lost weight since she last wore it. Perhaps the dress wouldn’t gape so if she was to do it up properly — the first button came away in her hand.

  A squeaking noise — Lena was on her hands and knees scrubbing at the oil, spreading it with a questionable rag produced from her pocket which could have been her handkerchief.

  ‘Don’t worry about that. The floor is stained anyway. Off you go.’ She was distracting her from her own task. Off with the yellow dress, on with the pink, which was nibbled here and there, a hole in the seed-pearly shoulder. She should have given it a firm shake; could she feel something crawling across her back? She tore it off, hearing the fabric give.

  Lena got to her feet, ungainly. ‘Scones won’t be ready for a while yet. He couldn’t put them straight in because you’d left the fire roaring.’ She took a step closer. What are you dressing up for?’

  ‘No reason. Just seeing if they still …’ She didn’t bother finishing her sentence.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m thinking we — I should say, I — will hold a party.’ The girl had made her blush, damn her.

  ‘A party?’ Scathing. ‘Who would come?’ Lena had caught herself in the mirror and moved closer, though she surely had no cause to. She giggled, ‘Look! There’s more flour up here!’ and rubbed at her greasy hairline. A falling shower veiled her face. ‘He’s so funny! He sprinkled flour all over me for a joke — just kidding around, you know.’