It was another hour through green fields and stands of palms and camphor and mango trees, under a railway bridge and across a stream to the little town, which was really just a deserted sloping main street with a couple of pubs and a line of shops behind a verandah. At the bottom of the hill, on Rufina’s instructions, he turned into a side street where the policeman’s little wooden house stood beside the courthouse. He waited while she went onto the porch to knock at the door.
Easter Sunday and the policeman was not at home. Rufina banged and knocked and rang the bell. Irving admiring her determination — and then the aplomb with which she returned to the car, still in her dressing gown, her feet shoved into work boots.
‘Well. What now?’ he asked her.
She didn’t answer him.
‘Ruwhenua?’
‘What does it mean, that name?’
He shrugged. Likely she’d be offended if he told her. He wanted a wash, food, a sleep, but he wanted Boss more. The motor was still turning over and the petrol gauge was low. Rummaging in the glovebox, Rufina came up with a pencil stub and a scrap of paper. She wrote a note for the bobby, asking him to call at Jarulan as soon as was convenient since there had been a robbery, and went to put it in the slot in the station door.
It was when she turned to come back that he saw it, how a gust of wind blew the embroidered satin of her robe close to her body. The sickness, the sudden changes in mood — it made sense now. When she slipped in beside him he laid a hand on her belly, cupping the child.
His child.
She met his eye and he saw a wildness there before she frowned and tried to remove his hand, caressing now up and over where he imagined the baby’s head to lie, its tiny hands and feet.
She pushed him away. ‘What if someone saw?’
‘I’m not ashamed.’
‘Irving — it can’t be like that.’
‘Like what?’
‘I will have to go away.’
‘I could take you back to New Zealand.’ He could, he saw suddenly that he could. He could make sure that his child was born among his own people, that Rufina would be properly looked after. No one would judge them, or if they did, it would be short-lived. He imagined his sisters and aunts cradling the baby, a fine-boned and fair-haired girl. He’d call her Grace after his favourite sister.
‘Don’t be silly.’ She had her head turned towards the police station. ‘How strange that we should have this conversation here.’
She was doing it on purpose, making statements that he found perplexing. He was tired of it. ‘What do you mean?’
‘It’ll be illegitimate, won’t it? Have you got a cigarette?’
He patted his pockets. ‘Must’ve smoked them all last night.’ He remembered handing them round, seeing the tin disappear.
‘I haven’t been smoking much lately,’ Rufina said. ‘They don’t seem to agree with me these days. Cigarettes and cream and …’
She ran on with a list, her mouth moving, but a flat bed truck went rattling by and drowned out her words. He nodded, hoping it was the right response. His mind was still on the other thing she’d said. Illegitimate.
‘There, you see? I knew you’d be horrified.’
What was she talking about now?
‘Are you?’
‘I’d like to go back to Jarulan now. We’re not going to find them, Rufina.’ He had a vision of himself returning to where he’d lain in the grass, how he could wake up all over again to an ordinary day working on the farm with Boss, having his dogs around.
‘No, we have to go on. They will be travelling slowly — we could easily find them.’
‘You’re not dressed.’ He was grasping at straws.
‘I couldn’t care less. I am a woman wronged. By thieves, I mean, not by you.’
She had no idea how deeply she’d wounded him by putting the thieves and him in one breath. He felt himself retreat from her, a simmering unease. All through the long fruitless afternoon he was quiet, but not so much that she could pounce on him and ask him what was wrong. At one point he reached for her hand, overwhelmed by it all — the coming child, the theft — but she contrived not to let him take it. ‘It won’t be like that, Irving,’ she said. He puzzled over her meaning. Did she mean that it would not be close and loving, that he would not be able to be a proper father? His own father had had no clue of how to provide for the growing number of hungry mouths that came after Irving, but was always there for a pat on the head or a song or a joke, and he made peg dolls for the girls. He remembered his friend the vicar and his cheerful wife, and their theological discussions. It would be apparent now and then that she knew more than her husband and that the vicar admired her for it. He thought of the uncles and aunts, of Hohepa and Auntie Tui, of his cousin Mack and loving wife, Ngaire, all the couples he knew. Not all of them were happy, not all the time, but at least they had solid ground to stand on and air to breathe.
It was long after nightfall by the time they returned to Jarulan and his heart was leaden and feet aching, due to a ten-mile walk he’d done near Byron Bay with the jerry can after the engine spluttered and died. ‘Told you it was low,’ he’d said, the surf roaring in his ears, and they’d come close to an argument, Rufina denying he’d said any such thing.
Nan had left them a plate each of meat and salad under a cloth on a tray and he took his down to Eddie’s wing, which Bill and Jellicoe had returned to its pre-party arrangement. When he came in they looked up drowsily from their beds.
‘No luck?’
‘None at all,’ he said, and he meant it.
18.
THE BELVEDERE WAS BEST IN THE WINTER. IN SUMMER IT COULD be too hot, airless, but for the past few months it had been a perfect place to spend sunny afternoons. The pregnancy made her serene, bovine, unconcerned with the general business of the farm. Irving and the head stockman could worry about that now, not her. Until her size forbade it, she rode out most mornings for the exercise and also to supervise her own project, the building of a second barn for the piggery, big enough to hold a hundred breeding sows. On her return she was as careful as she could be going up the steep belvedere steps — the climb was exercise as well.
In the autumn she had had Bill carry up the sewing machine — the belvedere had the clearest light in the whole of Jarulan — so that she could make herself various tent-shaped dresses in muted colours as well as clothes for the baby. When she tired of that she would write to her mother, whose letters had increased in frequency and anxiety. There was to be another war, there was talk of expansion to the east, everything was outlandishly expensive and she and her sister were struggling. Rufina sent money but it wasn’t enough. Her mother made repeated demands to see her again, just once more, before she died. ‘If there is to be another war you must come as soon as you can.’
Rufina rested her return letter on top of her stomach. On the near horizon rose the memorial, surrounded by trees so whipped by the wind they looked as though they were dancing the Charleston, and the memorial itself a tall, stern chaperone watching and observing. Taking up the pen again she described the scene to her mother — light-hearted, jokey, almost a children’s story. ‘You write a lot about the natural world,’ her mother had observed a couple of years ago, ‘but since your husband died I worry that you are not seeing enough of other people. You must guard against becoming isolated.’
‘Isolation here has a different meaning to one that you would understand,’ Rufina wrote in reply. Since then she had been able to fill pages with the party, the burglary, how some of their belongings had been recovered, and how delighted Matthew’s grandson was to have his horse back. More ink was expended on the burglary than the party; how Irving had been right all along because the thieves had gone inland, to Casino, to the Happy Valley there, on the way trying to flog the loot before the law caught up with them. It had been a good lesson for young Irving, she told her mother, who would detect nothing other than a maternal attitude: until the theft, Matthew’s grandson was
altogether too trusting.
Heavily, she got up and went to the bellpull, newly installed in the northwestern corner of the room, a cable threaded down walls and through floors three storeys down to the kitchen. Two sharp tugs meant tea, three meant coffee and four meant come up and see what it was that Rufina required. A single pull signified nothing because of the risk it might not be heard, let alone heeded. There was never any sense in growing impatient but she had got into the habit of ringing, waiting a few seconds, then ringing again in case Helena or Nance hadn’t counted correctly.
Helena was the usual respondent and here she was, her eyes as usual straying to Rufina’s stomach rather than her face. Rufina turned the letter she had been writing upside down.
‘Where is Irving?’
Helena shrugged, panting from her hurried climb. She had lipstick on again, had worn it most days since the party.
‘Have you seen him today?’
A nod. ‘Early. Him and Bill are out on the southern boundary.’
‘Send him up as soon as he comes in. And could you bring me a jug of water and some fruit, an apple or something. No. A banana.’
Another nod and a pause, still staring. ‘Not long now. Has it gone quiet? Ma says they go quiet for a few days before, building up a head of steam.’
‘Does she, indeed?’ Rufina didn’t like to think of it, the agonies she would have to endure. Louisa’s caterwauling still rang in her memory. She preferred to think about Evie, who did it alone and apparently easily when scarcely more than a child.
‘Shall I ask Ma to come for you when the time comes?’ the girl asked. ‘Nan thinks you should. Your age and everything. Since you won’t go to the hospital.’
‘Really? And what else does Nance say?’
There was a pause and Rufina watched the broad slow face, the brain behind it calculating the worth of an honest reply. Eventually she shrugged. Again.
‘Off you go. Don’t forget. Irving, as soon as he comes in.’
After the last of Helena’s footsteps sounded on the belvedere stairs Rufina turned the letter to her mother face up and read her last sentence.
‘I will come to you as soon as I can, I promise.’
Should she scratch it out or make a fair copy and omit it? This was a new and unpleasant sensation, to be pulled in different directions at once. In order to keep the child secret he would have to remain here while she went to Berlin for the shortest time possible. Or she could take him with her and leave him with a nanny at a hotel or safe place close enough to be able to slip away to visit him without her mother noticing.
The child would be a secret in Germany but not here. Too many people knew of her condition — the hands, the Tyrells, the staff. And who knew who else. There had been no return invitations since the party. Which suits me, she thought. Why would I parade myself? The child will be accepted eventually by everyone; it will take time, but with influence and determination it would happen. There was room in this country for tolerance, a respect for the idea of acceptance. The willing blind-eye of the colonies bled of old-world moral definition.
It occurred to her that her mother may have a secret too, with all this talk of death and last meetings. From her dress pocket she pulled the tiny green diary she had bought on a trip to Lismore early in the year: Collins King’s Own 1938, barely two inches long, small enough to always carry with her. Irving had been going through the papers in the library, she knew. This tiny ledger she did not let out of her sight, even though she had employed a kind of code that Irving might not be able to decipher. The nights he spent with her were marked with a tiny star, the day the baby quickened with a B, there were lists of possible names and the calculated date of arrival. All going well, the baby would come in November. Logically, then, she could travel the following March or April when he was around six months old. Strong enough to travel, or to leave behind.
She picked up her pen and resumed, ‘I will come in the spring.’ The more she wrote it down, the more it was likely to come true.
*
Irving came in late, very late, long after she had rung the bell for her evening meal, dined, bathed and gone to bed. He appeared barefoot at the door, his arms crossed over his chest, and even though his face was in shadow she could see that he was unhappy. She was the cause of it, what she had done. A small part of her wished she could return them to the early days, when she could believe she made him glad, made him forget his conscience, when they were simply a man and a woman together.
‘Irving?’
Barely above a whisper and he didn’t hear her. His hearing was worse. Early the other morning when she had come to sit with him on the low fountain wall before he went out to work, Sirius had kept up an irritating low moaning grizzle for the entire time it took her to smoke two cigarettes. If a dog behaved like that around Matthew it got a bloody kick in the arse. Irving, she realised, had not been able to hear it. But then, even if he had been able to, he most likely would not have punished the animal. And he was in a particularly good mood, it being the first day that the new milking machine was to arrive, a development that he was more fascinated by than she was. They’d had to let the women go, two generations that had hand milked the cows for more years than Rufina could count. She’d felt sorry for them as she watched them trail away with their belongings loaded onto carts and vans. All the dairy farms had machines now, since the electricity had come in.
‘Irving?’ Louder. She wouldn’t say no to a cigarette now, having found this late in pregnancy that her relish of them had returned. The packet was downstairs. She lifted a hand towards him, formulating a plea to go and fetch them for her — but Irving seemed to see it as a dismissal and turned to go.
‘Irving?’ Nearly shouting. The baby startled, shooting out an arm or a leg. ‘Irving?’ Shrieking now, sitting up, but his footsteps led away down the corridor. She could go after him, just as she did the day of their very first time together. There was a familiarity in the pattern, almost a dreary comfort, but she would not. She would not run after him this time, like a beetle scurrying down the long passage, a beetle weighed off-centre by a giant egg case. A beetle of the kind where the female is voracious and preys upon the male. For a second or two she was amused by the idea, and then just as dismayed and chilled by the memory of that first time, how she tricked Irving into taking her to bed. If he had stayed with her tonight, then perhaps she could have found the strength to confess to him that it was on one level a charade, because she had known, once the wave of terror had receded, that the swaggie woman wasn’t really Evie, whom she hadn’t seen for many years.
But once she had taken that course, once she had behaved as if she was really quite delusionary, a terrible plan had formed in her mind. She could pretend to be so; she could make it very necessary for Irving to fulfil her expectations. No need to go so far as to scream and run about naked and tear her hair, but to make sure they could be alone very soon, so that she could caress him, bill and coo, allow him to believe that the momentary madness had altered her character. It was a great mistake ordering him to be hers the way that she had. Demanding him. From the beginning, she thought, I should have been kinder, sweeter — the girlish self that I never was.
The night was cold. She should have asked Jellicoe or Helena to set the fire in the fireplace. The bellpull beckoned, and she would have used it but the clock told her it was ten o’clock. Too late. They would be in bed. More than a fire, she wanted Irving’s warm arms around her. She would ask him, during their embrace — if we had met as strangers, if I had never been married to your grandfather, would you still have liked me?
The bigger question was whether he liked her at all. A boy, a country lad, and this was all her own doing.
Go to sleep. She had always been good at willing herself to sleep to escape from any distress or guilty conscience or concern, able to close her eyes and summon the dark tide to sweep her out. But tonight the baby was wriggling and kicking, witness to his mother’s solitude and his father�
��s affront, and took hours to settle. His movements were fluid and rhythmic, almost as if he was dancing. Eventually she gave up willing him to be still and paid close attention to each leap and stretch, imagining she was watching him from a darkened theatre, a tiny, beloved figure spinning in the light.
19.
ON THE NIGHT HIS SON WAS BORN IRVING DREAMED HE WAS asleep in Rufina’s room. In the dream he was in bed alone, just as he was in reality in Eddie’s wing, since Bill and Jellicoe were away overnighting on the northern reaches of the farm. He dreamed he woke to the strongest sense that his little sister Gracie was in the house and calling to him from across the corridor, the modern bathroom with the flushing toilet. But when he got there it wasn’t that room, it was another with a cracked old leather chair, an old blind at the window and a medicine cabinet on the wall. There was a woman in an old-fashioned white gown standing with her back to him reading, and when he came in she spun so quickly and ran into his arms that he had no chance to see her face. She smelt of river water, and she was soft and old, and he thought she could have been the woman he’d seen in the painting he had found turned to the wall on the day they started clearing out Eddie’s wing before he moved in. His grandmother, filling him with her love.
When he woke he was comforted by the dream, and hungry. Since Helena was moonstruck over Jellicoe and Nan was upstairs with Rufina, there had been no tea for him when he came in ravenous from tending to the springer cows, brought closer to the house to have their calves, and some of them already with milk fever. The stockmen knew how to treat it with tinctures of aconite and belladonna; some of them blamed the new machine. He wasn’t going to get involved in all of that but took their advice on the treatment, the washing down, the medicine. There were hundreds of them and it took most of the day. All he’d been able to find was a scrap of ham, a sausage on the turn and a chunk of hard cheese.
Celebration now. Food. If she was the ghost the women talked about then they had nothing to worry about. It was only a flash of a dream, inconsequential, but enough to tell him that everything was going to be all right. He lit a lamp to go along the corridors to the kitchen, anticipating porridge, or eggs, a cup of tea.
Jarulan by the River Page 34