‘Thanks again,’ he told the bloke, who’d taken a whole fiver off them for the privilege, so what was his problem?
‘Evie?’ said Helena.
Irving had a sinking feeling, as soon as he heard the name. Was Helena about to come loose like Rufina had? The woman’s feet were shoved into a dirty old holey pair of sandshoes, her bare white legs with long black hairs. A scarecrow in her old frock she was, with her short cropped curly hair and too-wide eyes.
Then there were tears and embraces and Reg was inviting them all up to the little house, the women ahead of them walking two abreast. Irving could hear Helena running on with how she knew who Evie was from all the hours she’d spent, from the time she was a little girl, staring at a little snapshot of her mother stuck to her bedroom wall. She gave a report on Ma’s health, and Nan, and the rest of the family, and how Rufina was about to go back to Germany, and who Irving was — ‘Eddie’s son!’ marvelled Evie, turning to look at him. ‘Look at that! Of course, you are!’
By the time they reached the lowest ridge and the dirt path to the house, Helena was panting from talking so much, and it seemed the first flush of their reunion was fading already. She fired questions — where were you, why did you never write, why didn’t you let us know where you were? Evie rolled a cigarette and looked like she was about to turn on the taps any minute so the men walked away, following Reg around the house, while he told them how he had built the place from flotsam and jetsam in the river washed down from the Nepean, and how the water tank came off a ship that went aground further up the coast. Inside slumped a black coal range, a lopsided wooden sink plumbed to the sump, a sagging divan, a table and chairs, the woman’s clothes lying around, bread rising in a bowl. The windows looked out over the river.
It was bliss, and Irving thought of how he’d rather have this than all the faded grandeur of his grandfather’s house. It would be simpler. How did Reg get hold of the land? There was so much of it in this country. Did he take it off the Aborigines or had they already been shot and destroyed? Their fate weighed heavily on him again, as it had done so many times since he arrived in Sydney. Or was this a part of Australia they hadn’t lived in? Maybe land like this, uncleared, remote — maybe the government just let you have it. What it would be like to have some, further along the river towards the coast! Or a whole tiny island. To live off fish, plant a few potatoes.
While he dreamed, Bill started up, telling Reg about the journeys he’d made around Australia, the places he’d worked and characters he’d met, and Irving didn’t try to listen because he’d heard most of the stories before. Instead, he gazed out the window above the sink, which faced south towards Sydney, their planned destination, not that you could see it from here. In another fortnight they were due back at Jarulan. How Mattie would have grown. Six months old when they left and already nearly crawling.
The wind had swung around to the south and a bank of rain clouds lifted behind the opposite range. The biggest thunderhead, the shape of it, was Tarawera with his flat top, the way a child would draw it. It was as if the ghost of his childhood mountain rose behind these ancient, foreign maunga, the cloud imitating a crest less than a hundred years old since the lava last rose and caught fire, since the volcano covered and changed the land around it. The land here had been the same forever, it felt like, the forest and timeless hills.
Behind him, Bill and the bloke who only hours ago could hardly look at them were encouraging Jell to hightail it back to the beach to fetch beer bottles kept cooling in the shallows, tied to a rock. Irving watched the lad, hovering at the door anxious about his young wife, who was still with her mother, though the screeching and wailing had stopped. Had it? He cocked his head to catch the sound — the men close by and the eternal surrounding racket of insect and bird. And here Helena, saying something emphatic. Like Nan said, she’d come into herself since their marriage. Plumper and more confident as Rufina has grown less so, thin and anxious and hiding away with the baby. He wished she wasn’t taking Mattie with her to Germany, he wished she wouldn’t keep shutting him out. He was back in her bed again of course; she couldn’t resist. And in the mornings he got Mattie from his cot and brought him into their bed and it was perfect.
In the end they all went down to the beach, the women as well, who held hands all the way down the track. When they got to the muddy shore, Jell took Helena’s other hand and the three of them stood there, linked, looking out across the water. Bill and Reg clambered out onto the low flat rock and brought up the dripping bottles, their yellow labels peeling off, and opened them one from the other, handing them around. The boat needed tidying up, the fish cleaning, and there wouldn’t be much time to get it all done before rain came; Tarawera had melted away, re-formed, vast across the darkening sky. They worked quickly, standing the bottles in the gritty mud between drinks.
Evie and Helena didn’t help much, except for rewinding a handline each while they perched on the edge of the boat. Irving heard the words hat shop and the Cross and how, after Reg came into the picture, there was lots of shifting around up and down the coast, getting work where they could. Hard times before they found this place. No more children, though she would have been young enough. She was about Rufina’s age, roundabout.
Up at the house again they played cards, by the light of a kerosene lamp lit for the rainy gloom, and by the time he and Evie cooked the fish and potatoes that filled everyone’s bellies the plans had changed. They were to make their way back up north again tomorrow, with Evie. Go home early. Give Ma the surprise of her life.
‘And you?’ Bill asked Reg.
‘Not me. Busy here.’
‘Not that busy,’ Evie retorted. There was a house cow, a handful of chooks, his boat. A still. The drink was a fiery spirit made out of rhubarb. ‘How will I get back again?’
‘Rufina,’ Helena gathered dirty plates. ‘Rufina will pay for the train or a boat.’
Evie caught Helena’s eye and cackled. ‘Pay me to go away again, more like!’
Helena shrugged and murmured something Irving didn’t catch.
‘A baby?’ Evie. She looked delighted. Malicious. ‘Who’s the father?’
Helena avoided his eye. Why would she respond, since she’s off the wrong side of the blanket herself? Some misguided loyalty to Rufina.
‘I am.’ The words came to his mouth but he couldn’t voice them because of Reg. If he knew Irving had fathered a child with a white woman, his employer, of their convoluted relationship, then who knew what he’d do? His acceptance of them was skin deep. The gin had made him garrulous. He was in Casino when they closed the railway in ’32 after the riot. He skited about getting away, making this enviable life for himself and Evie on the river.
But wouldn’t it be lonely here? With nightfall there was the soft glimmer of a light a mile or two off, a couple across the body of water. Neighbours, then. Distant ones.
No, Irving wouldn’t want this life. If it wasn’t for Mattie he’d sell Jarulan, now that he owned it on paper, and go home. He’d buy a farm in the Bay of Plenty with the money, grow sheep and sweetcorn, peaches and strawberries, run Jersey and Friesian cattle, pigs that live outside, what he understood. Sure, he was young enough to learn how to farm polar bears in Alaska if he had to. But he didn’t have to, did he?
Out of her poor reserves Evie tried to find them blankets and something to cushion their heads on the floor. He’d sleep in the Chevy, Irving decided. It was not too cold a night, just wet. By the time he got to the car his head was streaming, his shoulders damp, his mood dark.
Bugger it all. What was wrong with him? He was not usually this out of sorts. He was drunk. That’s what it was. He opened the cab, climbed in. Some nights on this trip they’d slept in the open back, where they would all have turns travelling during the day and choking in the dust. Once, as they rattled and shook on a rough mountain road, a kangaroo jumped clean over the top of them. That was a story to remember for Mattie. And how one night they were woken by a litt
le tribe of hopping rats clustered around the remains of a bird they’d cooked the night before, squeaking and barking. Helena said they were bandicoots and that Rufina had a display of them in the front parlour — had he seen it? He had, the morning he rescued the bat, the bat that flew away back to his friends after a night camping out in the fountain.
Lying across the bench seat, he tried to make himself comfortable. Rain drummed on the roof, a sound he normally found comforting, but he was racked with guilt — that all too familiar buffer against sleep unless, ironically, he was lying beside the cause of it. When Rufina and he were up and dressed and going around their daily business on the farm or the house or dealing with sales agents or crops or stock or the men or whatever, she knew to keep her distance; she didn’t lay claim to him. It was almost as if she ignored him. But at night, in their bed — her bed it was, really, even after all this time — it was a different story. Too different. All out of balance. All wrong. She hardly had a kind word for him in the daylight hours.
How she laughed when he told her, since she’d asked, about other women and there were none except a girl in Sydney, a loose girl, and he’d felt sick afterwards. He hadn’t explained how close he’d come to taking orders, that he still tried to live the life of a good Christian, even though these days he never went to church. Couldn’t stand the way they sang here.
Alone in the truck, the wind howling, his body was betraying him, tempting him to sin. He tried to think of something else, anything else, but his exhausted mind gave him Rufina again, standing with a letter in her hand a week before he left for his holiday. She had translated it, read aloud how much the old lady was looking forward to her arrival in Berlin. She’d fetched the atlas from the library to show him where the city was, watching him closely for his reaction, for the moment he understood just how far away she would be.
In the letter, Rufina’s mother made no mention of Mattie and that was because, as Rufina explained to him, she had no notion of his existence. She would tell her, but face to face, and carefully.
‘Why is that?’ he’d asked. ‘He is her grandson.’
Rufina had pressed her pretty lips together, not answered. He knew why.
‘I will have to pick my moment to tell her, to explain how he came about.’
‘Where will he stay, then? Where will he sleep?’
‘I will have to find someone to care for him, close enough for me to pay him visits.’
‘A stranger? Leave him here with me and Helena and Nan.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. It’s nothing to do with you.’
He had flung off, out onto the land, worked past nightfall and kept away from her for the next three days or so — or was it that long? He always went back, didn’t he, stealing up the stairs long after the lamps were extinguished, all the lamps except the ones she set burning in her window. Modesty lamps, she called them, which could only be a joke.
Bill woke him after sun-up, banging on the roof of the truck and telling him to come up for breakfast. Achy from his long uncomfortable night and weighed with some of its gloom, his spirits lightened only slowly. First there was the rejuvenating freshly washed sky and then the lapping full tide that he and Bill dunked themselves in. And then the good breakfast of eggs and bacon and Helena’s infectious excitement about making the long journey north in the company of her mother, restored to her at last, to say nothing of his own delight at the prospect of seeing his son again, very soon.
2.
IT TURNED OUT THAT THE FIRST MRS FENCHURCH HAD COME from a family of grave robbers and antiquarians — wealthy Americans who had bought great chunks of ancient Europe and lugged them back to California to decorate their gardens, or sent them to Australia for Min to decorate hers. Aphrodite and Hera were thousands of years old and fetched a very good price. A man from the Sydney museum had made the long journey north to inspect them. He examined the others closely and paid good money for Diana and the Virgin too. At first Rufina had worried if he was giving them their true value but in the end didn’t let it overly concern her. The main issue was to raise enough money for her journey and sojourn in Europe. It would be very expensive, even after the passage was paid for. There were shipboard costs and train fares and everything that one needed travelling with a baby, quite apart from a nanny. She had placed an advertisement in a Berlin newspaper months ago now and had had no replies.
A week before Irving’s return from his tour, a dealer from Brisbane was due. Rufina had been sorting and cleaning since Irving left, sitting Mattie on a rug nearby with his favourite toy, the little red tractor that Matthew’s grandsons had quarrelled over all those years ago. Furniture, paintings, specimens from the trophy room — anything of value that she didn’t want to keep, she hauled into the hall. The rolltop desk from the morning room, the ugly Victorian settee, the portrait of the original Fenchurch rich from cedar and beef. Albert helped her shift some of it, the heavier pieces, but Nance was useless. She didn’t understand what Rufina was doing, even though she’d had it explained to her a hundred times, usually over the top of Mattie’s wailing. The baby had been out of sorts since Irving left.
‘I have been thinking of building a new house for Mattie and me, further towards the mountains away from the river.’
Nance stood at the far end of the hall, a patch of hot sun dancing with dust around her legs. The library door was open, two parallel scrapes on the floorboards showing where the heavy teak desk chair had been dragged out.
‘When I come back from Germany I will look into it. We don’t need this big house. It’s falling down around our ears.’
‘There’s going to be another war.’ Sullen. ‘Everybody says so.’
‘Not one that will touch us down here. Do you really think the colonies will go through that all over again? Let England fight her own wars.’
Nance said nothing, though Rufina could read her mind: it’s your lot that are causing it. Again.
‘Whatever happens, it will be over quickly, faster than the last one. They won’t let it drag on and on like before. Box up that Royal Albert tea set from the dining room, will you? The bloke can take it away no matter what he’ll give me for it.’ It had been Min’s. ‘And the silver candlesticks. The ones the swaggies left behind.’
It still rankled. Nance hadn’t moved.
‘We don’t need these things anymore, don’t you see? After I’m gone, close off the top floors. You won’t need to go up there at all.’
‘When are you coming back?’
‘In September, four months. I’ve already told you.’ If she hadn’t let Lena go with the others she could have got her to look after Mattie while she finished in the trophy room. There were animals extinct and possibly of great value, including a paradise parrot she shot herself in 1926. She should have shown them to the museum curator a fortnight ago but she wasn’t ready to part with them then. How quickly she was moving on.
‘Shall we go to look at the koalas, Mattie?’ She picked him up and carried him down the hall and into the front room. Dust furred the vitrines and the curtains had been left open through the summer enough to fade the carpet. She had hardly been in here for months. Since Mattie was born she had lost interest in it for reasons she found curious. Birth and renewal, was it? Enough of the old, the dead, the preserved beyond the natural span.
‘See the koalas?’
The baby pointed towards the display, as if he had understood what she’d said and already recognised them. When she drew closer he gurgled and smiled, singing to himself as he often did when he was happy, a little three-note tune.
‘And see the bat?’ she asked him. ‘Your father gave me that.’
It was a distortion of the truth. She had gone to the fountain soon after he put it there and found it newly dead, as she knew it would be, and knew also that if Irving had known it had died he would be saddened. He would believe he had failed the little bat, which he had tried to save; so very carefully she had picked it up with gloves and treated it the way M
atthew had taught her, and hidden it among the koala family. It hung upside down among the paper eucalypt leaves at the back of the display, wings folded and eyes closed.
While Mattie sat on the floor banging and rolling his tractor, she went around the room with a list. Since the war, tastes had changed, she knew, but she would do her best to interest the dealer. The less rare animals, the wallabies and kangaroos, crows and cockatoos, might have a worth attached to them just for the skill in preservation. A large vitrine set against the partition held a collection of birds, including the cuckoo she shot soon after she and Matthew were married. At least it didn’t leave any starving young, she thought, surprising herself. On the day she shot it she didn’t worry about that, as far as she could remember. She opened the case to stroke the small feathered head with its yellow-ringed eye.
A solution to her problem occurred to her, as if it had risen from the bird itself. She would not take Mattie with her at all, not expose him to any possible peril at sea or on land. Storms, rampant shipboard diseases spreading faster than bushfire, just as the Spanish flu had after the last war — none of that for Mattie. And yes, she would protect him also from this new predicted war, not that she believed it could ever happen.
Dear cuckoo, you have the right idea. She lifted it out, remembering Matthew’s lesson in how to set the wings as if there was life in them, not too close to the body and a tension in them, as if the bird at any minute could take flight. And I will. I will leave and take Mattie with me as far as Sydney, where I will place him with a kind woman and go to Europe alone. Safer there than with Irving at Jarulan, because she could not trust him. She’d seen the hungry, adoring way he looked at Mattie, how his youth — and yes, his race — made him love the boy more than could be good for either of them. Certainly his devotion alarmed her. He could get it into his head to take the baby back to New Zealand, to the bosom of his peculiar family. The thought of Mattie in the slab and tin hut made her shiver.
Jarulan by the River Page 36