Jarulan by the River

by Lily Woodhouse

  Into the day and on with the work. There was the ride down to the river to see how much she’d shifted in the rain, cattle to move to dry land depending, the pigs to see to, a tiny bat to check on. He stood and went out, Bill and Jell coming along with him.

  16.

  JUST BEFORE NOON ON EASTER SATURDAY, NANCE, IRVING, BILL and Bridgie were setting up trestle tables under the trees near the fountain and Helena had been despatched to the river to collect stones to weigh the corners of the cloths. Nance had no clue that the idea for the party, and therefore all this extra work, had come from her very own gob the day Rufina overheard her and Ma on the kitchen porch. She didn’t remember the conversation but then, these days, she didn’t remember much at all, being dog-tired most of the time without a thought in her head. And the bells — how had they confused in her mind, the large bronze dinner bell and the smaller breakfast dingdong with the Chinese pattern, as well as the rows of bells on the kitchen wall to summon a non-existent maid. The other day the nursery bell was going off as if a kid was swinging on the pull with its bum on fire, and it wasn’t until she had struggled up as far as the first landing that she remembered there were no children in the house. None at all. So she must have either imagined it or the house was playing up again, as it did. As it would always do. Rufina was the only one still bothered by it — the soldier who came to see her, and the whistling, whirring noise that rose from out on the carriageway. Not a bird anyone knew — but then some were mimics. Lyrebirds would pick things up and sing them back to you, even the noise of a tractor. Nance thought maybe it was a beautiful lyrebird singing; she hadn’t seen one for years and it had only started to call after Irving arrived.

  Irving, busy spreading a trestle on the uneven ground, had the look of a man who had seen a ghost. In the past few weeks he’d grown more serious, hollow-eyed, spending most of his time working. The A Model Ford had had its mouth open for days, the tractor had had an overhaul, as had the muck spreader and the chaff-cutter, and lately he’d been coming in from the barn with bruised and oily hands wanting to help with the cooking. What a love he was. Nance considered that Eddie must love the bones of him and couldn’t for the life of her see how he could have borne it for him to go so far away. So very far away.

  Helena returned with her apron bulging with stones just as Rufina came from the house with a canteen of the third-best cutlery. This was to be the party for the staff and hands. The toffs, as far as the German had worked out who they were, would be gathered inside.

  ‘Ophelia are you, then?’ Rufina stopped to look at her. ‘With your pockets full of rocks.’

  ‘Who?’ Helena, glowered.

  ‘There is a willow grows aslant a brook,’ Rufina began, like a poem. ‘Something, something … her clothes spread wide and mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up … Till that her garments, heavy with their drink, pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay to muddy death.’

  Helena turned her back on them, offended, and who wouldn’t be, thought Nance. Show off.

  As she moved around the tables Helena slapped her cargo down one to each corner. Clouds of fine silt puffed on impact.

  ‘Didn’t you wash them first?’ Nance demanded, sounding more snippy than she felt, and Rufina giggled in that new girlish way she had, taking one end of an old door to lie on the trestle for the last table.

  Irving hadn’t listened to the poem, or couldn’t. A breeze blew strong enough to take Rufina’s words away from him — but he sent the girl a sympathetic glance. Anyone could see Helena was out of sorts.

  ‘You look pretty,’ he told her. ‘You’ve got …’ and he tapped his own mouth.

  And she did. Lots, like a movie star. Deep red. She must have put it on when she was down at the river. Two whole hours till the guests were due but the lass must have thought she wouldn’t get another chance. Now she was pulling the metal tube from the pocket of her dress and holding it out to demonstrate the little button on the side that you pushed up to make the lipstick protrude. Like a dog’s thing, thought Nance.

  ‘It’s the fashion,’ Helena said.

  ‘Where did you get it from?’ Rufina’s hands were on her hips, which Nance had learned to recognise as a bad sign.

  ‘Jell got it for me. When he went into town with Irving to get the ice.’

  ‘Suits you.’ Irving grinned at Jellicoe, who was blushing.

  ‘It looks cheap!’ Rufina was almost shouting. ‘Take it off before everybody gets here.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘Leave her alone.’ Irving laid a hand on Rufina’s arm. She glared at it for a moment, as if it was an unwelcome spider, then spun on her heel and stamped inside, leaving the others to continue preparations without her.

  With the bang of the screen door behind her, Rufina dismissed from her mind irksome Lena and her stupid lipstick and the misplaced tenderness from Irving that would have been better directed at herself. He was only being careful, which was their arrangement. It had all been secret until now, but not for much longer. How could it be?

  She set off towards Eddie’s wing, where weeks ago she had decided the main party would be held; it was the natural setting because that’s what it was before: the site of many gatherings at Jarulan. Since Irving had made it his he hadn’t cluttered it up with belongings, so it was easy to make it welcoming. How lucky I am, she thought, that he isn’t naturally acquisitive, though I could have made him so with all my gifts.

  Down the main corridor and through the door under the staircase and down the long south wing to the reception room, where two long tables were set beneath the tall leadlight windows. Food had already been laid out underneath organdie cloths. Too early. It could spoil, the sponge cakes and bacon-and-egg pie, the sliced ham and tomatoes, the curried eggs and jellies. There were slices and biscuits, Swiss rolls, tarts and meringues, and, slumped on a platter, the alarming dish Nance called a beef shape, made of mince and onions and steamed for hours with generous amounts of red food colouring. It looked like clotted blood.

  Rufina wanted to lift it away, slip out the side door and feed it to the dogs before the guests got here — but the trick today was to keep Nance happy. She and the girls had been labouring in the kitchen for days and Irving too, who had a talent, it transpired, for baking. She would far rather he had spent the time here, in this room with Bill and Jell, practising up dance songs. Piano and guitars waited for them on one side of the dance floor, which had been polished for the occasion, rugs pulled away. Chairs were set around to invite conversation. Against the far wall the cut-crystal punch bowl glittered, still empty, to be filled later with a mixture of rum, ginger beer and pineapple juice. Irving had made a special visit to Lismore to collect the ice. And lipstick, it turned out.

  Club sandwiches hid under a damp cloth. Two could be extracted without destroying the pattern and after that a cream puff found its way to her hungry mouth. She sat for a moment on the settee to enjoy it, to imagine how it would be with everyone here. Irving said even the ice merchant knew about the party, that his daughter was coming along with her beau, who was a stockman for the Bracewells, and that he’d met up with Hing Ye, the closest of the tobacco farmers, who was looking forward to it. It was only the day before yesterday that the Davies, who farmed to the west, had sent word they would attend with their entire household. What a lark! She licked her fingers.

  But the cream seemed to be on the turn already, though the day was cool and the puff was on a shaded part of the table. Or was it just that cream disagreed with her now? Nausea gripped her so violently that her head shot through with pain, a stabbing throb to the temples — and she stood, unsteadily, sure she was going to lose the pastry and the cream and the milky coffee she drank for breakfast. If anyone should walk in now it would be obvious that not only had she pilfered the party food — though she paid for it all, it was hers anyway, really — but that she was going to have a child. She remembered Louisa doing this, and various friends of Frau Schneider’s, being taken suddenly il
l in just this way and having to lie down. So far, in her experience, lying down made it worse. Better to remain upright.

  The sickness ebbed a little, allowing her to take the corridor through the south wing past the scruffy little room that was now Helena’s and once was Evie’s hideaway. The door was standing a little ajar, the tatty curtain billowing; the window had been left open. She went in to close it, noting how tidy the room was, how carefully Matthew’s daughter kept her few things. Pinned to the wall beside the bed was a tiny sepia photograph, a corner lifting in the breeze. Rufina pulled it away to peer closely — Evie, looking like a flapper in beads and waistless frock, with a woman in a leopard-skin costume. ‘Dulcie D and me’ on the back in pencil. So she fell into bad company in Sydney, then, as suspected. Rufina would put the photo back where it was, only the drawing pin had dropped under the bed and it would make her feel sick again to bend over and look for it.

  On the dresser there was a silver hairbrush engraved with the initials H.T. and nicely polished, except for a gouged bar against the second letter, as if someone had tried to turn the T into an F. How pathetic. Rufina would not allow it, had never even entertained the idea. Lena Tyrell, beginning and end. She picked up the brush and turned it in her hand, seeing her own soft reflection slip along the surface — and the face of a man standing behind her holding a sheaf of music.

  The pain in her head again and her own heartbeat so loud that she could hear it as she swivelled to face him. To face no one. The man had gone, a man shorter than her, a man with black hair and sad eyes. Not the soldier, who was tall — but a short man, a glimpse of him, a fantasy, caused by a patch of oily polish on the brush back not properly rubbed away. There was no one there. Close the window.

  But it was closed already, firmly latched, the curtains hanging slack, framing the view of the gardener’s shed.

  She hadn’t imagined it. The window had been open. It must have slid shut very quietly, of its own accord. As she stood there, her skin prickling, a flash of colour in the shed caught her eye and after a moment the swaggies’ woman appeared with an open tin of shellac, stick protruding as if she had been stirring it. Oblivious to Rufina standing at the window she passed by and out towards the rabbito’s hut. Home improvements then. Yesterday one of the men had been fixing the floor.

  Once, a few weeks ago even, Rufina would have thrown the window open and demanded to know what she thought she was doing, helping herself to Jarulan’s stores. The impulse was there but slower, less commanding, only rising to the surface of her mind after the woman had disappeared. Was this pregnancy too? The hunger and sickness, the weakened wrath? And she, who had always been a vigilant observer of every shift and change around her, was so much less so that it could only be another symptom. The swaggie woman must have closed the window while Rufina gazed at the hairbrush. A trick of light, a refraction in the curved silver had picked up her face at the window and Rufina had only imagined it as a man’s.

  Her heart was racing again. As she went towards the door she put her hand on her chest — steadying, loud, banging away in her ears.

  ‘What are you doing to me, my darling?’ she asked the unborn child. ‘And what am I doing wasting time in here?’

  Another interesting development lent by the condition — fleeting bouts of vitality; she took the stairs two at a time and ran lightly along to the bedroom to dress. Her muscles and sinews felt liquid, youthful, as if she could run clear out across the farm and be carried by her own fuel for miles.

  In the wardrobe hung the dress she had bought from the drapers in Lismore, not as well cut or fashionable as she would have liked but lovely enough, in rose-coloured watered silk with a sweetheart neckline, generously ruched at the waist and falling to midcalf. The draper had assured her it was the only one of its kind, understanding her concern that a guest could arrive identically dressed. Not many in the district would be able to afford it, Rufina knew, and besides, she had spent so much on Irving it was time for a treat for herself.

  To fill the intervening hour or so before she had to get ready, she lay on the bed with an impenetrable book that once belonged to the first Mrs Fenchurch. The Europeans by an American called Henry James. Concentration eluded her. Only intermittently was she drawn into the lives of the European cousins visiting America, their nineteenth-century manners and concerns. She found herself thinking again and again that a German in Australia would be far more interesting and that he should have written about that, and each time the thought occurred it was immediately overwhelmed by the reality of her predicament, of Irving and the baby. It was all she should be thinking about, really, of what to do, of what plans to make. Should she go away for the necessary time and return babe in arms and announce to everyone that he was adopted, that she took him from a foundling home? If the child’s pale antecedents — herself and Irving’s Fenchurch line — overwhelmed the coloured then they would believe her. ‘I have no child of my own,’ she could remind them all. ‘I needed one.’

  Or the other extreme course of action: she and Irving could marry. Be open about it all. Show themselves as modern and liberal, as trail blazers. To marry one’s late husband’s grandson should be no more shocking than marrying his brother or son, and that was not without precedent. Hamlet, so recently in her mind in the garden, had a mother who married his uncle. I am closer in age to Irving than I was to Matthew, she told herself. We share no common ancestor. We are not related. We share no blood. We have done no wrong.

  On what she was beginning to think of as Irving’s side of the bed lay a Bible. Another gift, but she didn’t like it lying beside the bed and she would tell him so. He had gone to fetch it the other night, after she had told him how she had never read it herself and he was astonished by this, could not think why that would be, and it was easier to pretend to atheism than to admit to Catholicism. Her family had not possessed a Bible; the only two at her English boarding school belonged to the visiting priest and Mother Superior. Protestants were profligate with them, the reading of them in their own language, the quoting from them, the making of their own interpretations.

  Irving had hurried down to Eddie’s wing, returning with his copy to lie beside her again, holding the book in his beautiful hands and reading from what he said was the Song of Solomon. She had never heard of it, and now all she could remember was ‘Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine,’ though he had read more than that, a few verses, until she deflected him from it with her own kisses.

  She reached across to pick it up and leafed through, finding the story of the bride dreaming of searching for her groom, of how she would lie with his left hand under her head and embraced by his right. ‘I am sick of love,’ she says, meaning sick with love, surely, and Rufina envied her. There were passages she didn’t understand, or suspected were obscene — ‘My beloved put his hand by the hole of the door, and my bowels were moved for him.’ She laughed aloud, read further on: ‘I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine: he feedeth among the lilies.’ Irving fed among the lilies, that was for certain, here at Jarulan, she thought. She wouldn’t have it any other way. She would shower him with lilies.

  The books of the New Testament, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, rapidly flicked through, offered nothing of interest until she let her eyes rest for a moment at the name of the first apostle. Matthew. It didn’t move her, staring at the name there in black and white. Her own Matthew was as far away from her as he could be, gathered into Heaven or whirling through space or disappeared into a non-existent afterlife, whatever was true. A scrap of paper protruded at Saint Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians. Irving had used a pencil to score a deep line beside the first verse of a chapter. She read with a sinking heart, the overwhelming nausea returning: ‘It is commonly reported that there is fornication among you, and such fornication as is not so much as named among the Gentiles, that one should have his father’s wife. And ye are puffed up, and have not rather mourned, that he hath done this deed m
ight be taken away from you.’

  The words ‘his father’s wife’ were underlined so heavily they almost obscured the words below. ‘Ye are puffed up.’ What did that mean? Angry or arrogant? And he ‘might be taken away from you’.

  And so he could be. Taken away by his own conscience. Blown away in a puff of sudden mourning for his innocence. She often thought, when she saw him riding out, he could ride away and not come back.

  She put the Bible back, rolled off the bed and went out of the French windows to the balcony. Innocence be damned. He’d told her last year in Rotorua that he had a woman, a girl he wanted to marry. As a boy he’d gone out working at only twelve or thirteen, out into the shearing gangs and grubbing gangs and farms and hills to fend for himself. And how innocent could any young man be with all that male company, let alone with a father like Eddie?

  A towel draped over the railing. She picked it up and gave it a sharp crack to dislodge any insect travellers. The years here had taught her not to assume anything left lying about wasn’t newly inhabited. A cloud of tiny moths flew giddily into the early afternoon sun, blundering about before careering downwards. As she folded the towel, a soft crepuscular weight dropped to her bare foot and scuttled away before she had time to properly see what it was. A cockroach maybe, black and glossy. Or a redback or a funnel web. But she wasn’t bitten, and she let herself feel as lucky and grateful as Irving should feel himself. His God wasn’t watching him, no one was judging them, not even Nance, who was spared the stripping of their bed and soaking of the evidential sheets by Rufina herself, who had made it into a kindness extended to the old servant to save her the effort.

  Inside again she dressed slowly, choosing a string of jet beads to lie against her breast bone and pearls for her ears. Afterwards she sat at the dressing table and brushed her hair until it shone.