Jarulan by the River Read online

  CONTENTS

  Part I: 1917

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Part II

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Part III: 1939

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Part IV: 2013

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  About the Author

  Copyright

  PART I

  1917

  1.

  THE IDEA CAME TO MATTHEW FENCHURCH IN THE EARLY hours of the day after the clergyman’s visit, soon after he woke in the high narrow bed in the room directly off the second landing, not the wide room he had shared with his wife but the one he had moved to when she was ill and dying. Even now, after all these years, he would wake with Min lying beside him. So closely was she here that when his eyes opened it was to the dark feather of hair high in the nape of her white neck, to the warmth of her back curled against his stomach, his knees nestled into the back of hers. Then she was gone.

  Min was gone, and so was Llew. Gone forever.

  He searched around the room wildly, sitting bolt upright and struggling for the breath to hold off his grief, sharply anew all over again, casting himself away from himself, desperate for comfort, to hook onto something, anything, a snared memory, no matter how banal.

  Yes. Those faded curtains with the red fleur de lis had hung downstairs in the breakfast room throughout his childhood, where they had concealed the bellpull to bring the maid, the sounding of which was a favourite task of the children. The chest of drawers had stood in the room belonging to a long-dead unmarried aunt, a cousin of his father’s. And this narrow bed with a tall carved Karri headboard was bought new for his son from a furniture maker in Casino. It was Llew’s bed — as much as anything belongs to a boy growing up in his father’s house, a house built by his grandfather — other than his clothes, his toys, his horse, his dog and his certain inheritance. Llew’s future in the only grand mansion for a radius of a hundred miles, set around by three thousand acres, the finest estate of the Byron Shire in northern New South Wales. Jarulan. It would have been Llew’s.

  Min and Llew gone now, and the other son, Eddie, good as. Banished.

  He would build a memorial to the son lost in the war. He would go directly to Lismore, today, to the stonemason.

  A splinter of grey light came in under the blind and fell across a bare arm. It belonged to him, Matthew realised, the arm. His own arm, with the muscles and cords showing hard and dry like an old codger’s. Was he? Old? All these deaths had made him old and he wasn’t sixty yet. People used to remark on it, how youthful he was. Still working long days on the farm, still strong. They wouldn’t now.

  He shifted on the pillow, his nose coming to rest in a patch of mildew foul enough to have him rear up in his bed. On the mat beside him lay a damp pyjama jacket cast off in the night, twisted like a tortured man.

  Out in the yard a dog started barking. He deafened his ears to it, lay down, slept again like a drunk and woke at noon to a white crease of burning sky between blind and sill. It was bloody stupid to be lying in bed at this hour. The bloody dog was still barking, on and on. He knew which dog it was.

  Drive you out of your mind.

  Now. Get up.

  He swung his legs out and stood. Nan and the hands would expect him to stay hidden away but he would not. He would go out and about, get on with it in the heat of the day. Nothing would change.

  But his legs wobbled a bit as if he’d been days in bed — had he? — taking him to the window where he could look out to the acres that lay to the south, the paddocks and bush and curve of the brown, flat river, away to the southwest, more soothing than the nearer view of the home paddocks. Dusty clover cowered under masses of seeding paspalum. Just the conditions for staggers. Some of the herd would come down with it — the staggers. Another bloody inevitability, everything was. Llew going away, poor damned Eddie adrift in the world.

  Below the window the kitchen roof and those of the outhouses: the storeroom, washhouse and mudroom, the last being one of Min’s least extravagant additions to the already vast house. The rear border of the yard was formed by the servants’ accommodation, a row of empty small rooms that shared a central wall with the stables on the other side. Matthew couldn’t see anybody about and nor did he expect to. Long ago the hands would have been across to get the horses and, depending on what they were doing, to get the other dogs. He lifted his eyes towards the orchard, to the cluster of buildings behind which the stockmen, rabbito and groom had their accommodation. He couldn’t see them from here. How many of them were hanging about doing nothing, taking advantage of his illness? He’d never been able to keep a good manager.

  Nance would be up and about, the only house staff left. The last one.

  Sometimes when he woke early he saw her out there in the yard, risen hours before him, filling a bucket at the pump or sweeping the back verandah, or beating rugs. Earning her keep.

  The dog hadn’t shut up for a second. He lifted his gaze again, searched for it on the other side of the squat, brick creamery. There was the row of concrete kennels set in a semicircle in the long grass under the laden plum trees, the carved Roman numerals above the door, from this distance illegible. At the end of his chain the culprit howled. Matthew could see only a part of him, the quivering tail and hind legs, yelling his stupid arse off. Sun glistered the long grass; the low, brown river was bronze through the foliage.

  If Min was alive she’d be sending for the priest. He would come from the town on his red horse; he would have them on their knees, they would pray. If Min was still alive she’d be at her little desk in the morning room writing the letters, one to each surviving sibling, whom fate and nature had spread far and wide never to live here again, where they’d grown up, in this echoing, empty house. Twenty-one rooms on two floors. And Llew dead. A gaping, burning, loneliness.

  Now. Go down to the dog.

  Still in his pyjama pants he went unsteadily down the two flights of stairs, the deep well swooping and reeling around him. He was still half asleep, he wasn’t properly awake; it was the effect of the sleeping draught Nance had made him take. There was a pressing around him of voices, of bodies, the sound of a dry hand scuffing on the banister behind him, a thread of music echoing from Eddie’s wing, a shred of Min’s laughter from the kitchen. It was the moment of despair at the window that had drawn them in, brought them close. He didn’t want them close. They were dead and gone.

  The back door opened to the light and the dog barking still, like a lunatic.

  Who’s the bloody lunatic?

  The mudroom, with one small dusty window and smelling of old oilcloth and leather. A row of cracked and mildewed boo
ts below the hanging coats. A milk can with a hole in it, somehow migrated over from the creamery. A half-finished native cat, the skin stretched over a wooden skeleton, sat on a shelf, head lolling and eyeless. A beetle had made a nest in one of its ears. One of his first attempts, one of the many he’d given up on. A quoll. He’d go out and get another one. Do it better this time. Every animal was different and you had to learn it, like people. How to read the best way for them to stand. How to position them.

  At the back of the room in a locked cupboard were the guns. His eye lit on the walnut stock of Llew’s hunting rifle, which seemed the most logical one to use in the circumstances. His dog. His gun. The dog was no use. Never had been. Should have got rid of him already, but Llew had made a pet of it and promised to train him properly when he came back from France. It was cruel — too much time on the chain. The girl who came to work in the house sometimes let him off, petted and fed him treats. Matthew had seen her at it and forbore to say anything. It was an appealing dog, he supposed, especially to a woman, with its fluffy white ears and begging face. Australian shepherd, prettier than the heelers.

  Cool and heavy across his shoulder, the rifle weighed his left foot over the ringing boards of the verandah and out across the carriageway where the river gravel was sharp under his bare feet, past the empty creamery and hay barn to the first of the kennels. He could smell the oils in the gun, the spirit used to clean the barrel. Llew would have done that. A flash of his hands, the dirty rag, the whistling he kept up — just as clever that way as Eddie, but with twice his common sense.

  No point in wondering what had set the dog off all those hours ago. Could have been a wallaby. Or a rabbit, one of the hundred bloody thousand rabbits. Or maybe one of the plague of peacocks stalking by, a descendant of the fecund pair introduced by Min. Or maybe one of the hands going across from the accommodation out to work. Maybe Albert, the young whip-like Black who strangely looked a little like Llew from a distance, a long loping figure you’d see across the fields, and if the dust was lifting or mist off the river it was easy to mistake him, to let your heart rise.

  The dogs, his dogs, had heard him coming and were watching him, knowing better than to bark or they’d feel the edge of his boot. Llew’s dog barked on, but quieter, whimpering and whining.

  At the first kennel was the puppy, a blue bitchie, the pick of a neighbour’s litter. She cowered away into the dark of her house and he wondered if she should have the bullet, too. A good dog had more gumption. When he bent to look in, he could see the whites of her eyes. Some cockies thought it was a mark of intelligence; Matthew never had. Nervy breed, excitable. But nerves could plague any living creature, man or beast. Min, for example.

  A fresh wind rustled the plum leaves and he straightened again to feel it on his skin. It had rained lightly during the night and there was still some residual sense of it in the air, but it promised as hot as it had been for months. The rains hadn’t come. Late summer just south of the state line and winter in Europe. The last letter had talked of the cold, of icy mud, of how running blood would freeze in the snow. The censor had cut whole chunks with scissors.

  Plums had dropped into the grass — and he remembered then his bare feet, and the long grass, and the likelihood of snakes. But the dogs would keep them away.

  Yes. He needn’t worry. He stooped for a plum and bit into it, the juice so prodigious it ran down his chin, the surprising beard he wiped it from. How had he grown a beard? Had he been in bed that long?

  When Min was here, she and Nance and the maids would gather the fruit and spend days in the stifling kitchen, preserving. A memory of his wife broke — early in her pregnancy with the second child, or was it the third? — running from the kitchen where she had insisted on helping. ‘I get so bored just sitting about, Mattie,’ her refrain in those days, ‘I get so lonely when I hear them laughing in the kitchen!’ and she had run to the river, divesting herself of the shapeless frock she had worn then for her condition but retained later for the climate, and submerged herself in the brackish water. He had stood at the river’s edge, imploring her to come out, to behave herself as he thought she should, the lady of the house, but she had splashed and laughed as if it was all just a game, or worse, as if she was losing her mind. Why else would she want the stifling kitchen? Why else would she throw off her clothes when there was a chance she could be seen? When finally she emerged, a long thin leech had attached itself to her buttock, which she only discovered when she went upstairs to dress, wrapped in the sheet that Nance had come running with, and so for the second time that day her shrieks had brought him from his work. This time he found her laughing hysterically, giggling even while he made her lie curled on her side around their unborn child so that he could hold a taper to the fattening, swelling leech. Immediately it had shrivelled and fallen off.

  The year? Eighteen ninety-eight or -nine. Before the new century. What had happened then, that day? After he fixed the leech?

  He couldn’t remember. He knew what should have happened: the door closed on the comings and goings in the many-roomed house, his young excitable wife in his arms, the release of his concern and love for her, his entry into her wild pleasure brought on by her escapade to the river, by the heat, by her blooming pregnancy. Instead, as was his habit in those days, he gave way to rage, mute and cold and transporting, allowing it to bear him away down the stairs and out to the haymaking.

  ‘Damn fool!’ He said it aloud and laid the gun against the bitchie’s kennel, muzzle pointing to the sky. Better to lead the shepherd away, around the side of the disused creamery, where the others wouldn’t hear. But of course they’d hear. And smell. The dogs would have smelt even his murderous intention.

  Had they, though? Standing square and pensive outside their houses, dark ears pricked, the painted dingo faces were turned towards him.

  Llew’s dog was a different breed. Good dog, so the story went. But it’s not what we’re used to, Matthew had told him; stick with what you know, lad, your grandfather’s heeler bloodline down through the sixty years they’d worked the farm. But Llew had not wanted the familiar. He wanted the new and different, the unknown dog, the unknown war. He’d talked his father into seeding the farm with paspalum and kikuyu; he’d got rid of the separator and sent the milk to the factory at Byron Bay. The largest in the world! — so they bragged. After the miles it was forced to travel in the heat it was good only for cheese. Llew, Llew, Llew. What else did you want? The river frontage, where you extended the jetty, built sheds and stables and bought a small coaster, going into trade as the Lismore population grew. And the new tractor to replace the one they already had, which Matthew preferred, with its spark arrester on the chimney and woodbox at the rear. An unfriendly, temperamental machine more stupid than a bullock. Llew’s was a high red monster that terrified dog and beast with its roaring engine and cost a fortune to bring all the way from Ballarat. Cat’s pyjamas, high in the steel saddle, towing the harvester last summer. A year ago, nearly. Almost exactly. The lad had been starting to take over the farm.

  A bolt of fury rose without warning from his stomach into his throat, half-choking him. New dog, new tractor, new war. Any fool could see what would have happened if Llew had come back from France, how he and his son would have battled it out over every innovation. Farming was in his blood all right, but the boy took too many risks. Anything new he wanted to try. He followed a neighbour’s lead in planting out a paddock with pineapples, and did it again after the first crop failed. Talked about wanting to try arrowroot, jute, have a go at bringing back coffee. He went visiting the Chinks up river to glean information on the growing of tobacco. Talking loudly at the saleyard or dances or anywhere they could be overheard, he and the other youngsters around and about would announce that dairy farming could never be long term, how the soil would be soon exhausted.

  How they would have argued and the son would have won in the end, eventually. The young always do have their own way, even if it is only by outliving thei
r fathers.

  And what was the father’s way? He would go on the same as he’d always done. Nothing needed to change. Not now. Not unless he wanted it to.

  The shepherd had her pointed face turned towards him too, quiet now, one black patch over her left eye, the rest of her face white as clean bone. She lay across the threshold of her house, the morning breeze ruffling the fine floating hairs of her coat. Too pretty to be a hard worker, too pretty by half. Ugly old Jingo, next along, stood at attention. Daylight showed through one ear, battered and torn, the tail with a permanent kink from where a steel-rimmed cartwheel had run over it, his eyes going milky in the sun. Blue muzzle more white than roan, starting to slow down.

  There’s an idea. Line the jingbang lot up, young and old, and shoot them to buggery.

  ‘Mr Fenchurch?’

  One of them had learned to talk. The pup. If she had a voice it’d be like that, wispy, whiney, insubordinate.

  Irish.

  ‘Mr Fenchurch?’

  There it was again and there was a light touch on his shoulder.

  ‘Shall I start your washing? You haven’t put your things out. Nan sent me to find you.’

  This girl was favoured by Nan then, if she used the pet name, what the children had called her when they were growing up. The laundry girl, one of the Tyrells. The girl who let the dog off. Such blue, blue eyes, almost violet, and wild black hair. Irish face as white and bony and all-seeing as the shepherd’s.