Jarulan by the River Page 9

‘Up, Blackie.’ Jean flicked the reins and felt at her back the sulky rise a little as Tom leapt down.

  He came around and took hold of the old horse and spoke to her in the same tones his grandfather had, warm and gentle.

  With the resumed movement, Louisa’s children quietened and went the rest of the way attentive to the road ahead for a possible glimpse of their mother. There was none, though when they reached the crest of the hill they could see that dust hung above it and Louisa’s shouts could still be heard a distance away. Boss would be able to outrun old Flora easily. Catastrophic scenes unfolded in Jean’s mind, one after the other like concertinaed postcards of the Capuchin crypt that Louisa had sent from Rome on her last European holiday. Instead of the catacomb of arranged dried-out monks, Jean saw images of her sister broken. Or miscarrying. And the same mildewy brown.

  The visions felt suddenly wicked, like an indulgence remembered from her childhood, or even the years before her marriage. Louisa had been the most overbearing sister imaginable, quick to snatch, scratch and pinch, and always behind their mother’s back. Even in those days there had been a terrible, guilty pleasure in imagining her suddenly taken ill and confined to bed, or breaking a leg or arm so as not to be able to run about with the rest of them, with Jean and Edmond and Llew and the older Tyrells. It never happened. Louisa maintained rude health until she went away to boarding school in Armidale. Of course, now they were grown, she wanted no harm to come to her sister. It was just that the disastrous pictures flooded into her mind, a habit she’d got into up north on the plantation.

  Floods and fires, fires and floods.

  You won’t do it now. There’s no point to it. Or end to it, once you start.

  The shower petered out and the sun was suddenly hot. As soon as they reached the site, Cedric leapt from the back of the sulky and he and Tom began running around and around the memorial, leaping over the puddles that lay in the road after yesterday’s deluge, especially where it was churned up around the monument. Jean clambered down from the sulky with the little girls. The stonemason and his boy nodded in greeting and laboured on, and Jean took her time to walk about, to quietly look at what was left of Llew. Australia could one day be covered in memorials not so different from this, one in every town, at every crossroad. Monuments to the youthful dead, never to be forgotten.

  Her father had certainly chosen a beautiful spot — there was the elevated view of Jarulan, the fields and bush, the river on the other side and distant hills to the north, so that the memorial surveyed all of which Llew would have been lord. Beyond the house and the Tyrells’ small run the valley opened out to the east. From the globe at the top of the memorial, if you were to somehow climb up, there might be a distant glimmer of the sea in the east. How wonderful her father had done this, she thought now, how unlike him, really, to even think of it. She loved him for it.

  Still holding Lorna and Clara’s hands, she approached the first stone face. ‘The Fallen’, it read, with a list below: a Pidcock, a Williams, two Smiths, two Braes, a Lidcomb, three Robinsons, with rank and battalion. There was room left to add more names, a cold stony space waiting for the worst. Where would they come from? How could there have already been so many from so few families?

  And where was Llew? Where was his name?

  Tears welled. Something of her grief must have passed through her and into the two small clasped hands, because the girls were both looking up at her with melancholic faces.

  ‘Is Uncle Llew’s dead body under there?’ asked Lorna.

  Jean shook her head, swallowed, and tried to get hold of herself.

  ‘Is that really his grave?’

  ‘No. It’s to help us all remember him. A memorial to him.’

  ‘Where is his deaded body?’ Lorna’s upturned face was a small version of Louisa’s, but kinder, more curious.

  ‘In France.’

  ‘France.’ The child repeated the word, wonderingly. France. Where the war was. ‘Have you been in France?’

  ‘No, but your mother has. And so had your grandmother.’

  Min had travelled there from San Francisco at the end of last century, a wealthy young American absorbing it all, the art, the literature, language, the cuisine. It was where she had met Matthew, on his only tour. Once upon a time France had been stories at Min’s knee, stories of a country Jean had imagined she might one day visit. Now it was the resting place of her favourite brother.

  On the next face he stood alone, named for both his grandfathers.

  Pte Llewellyn Mungo Dominic Fenchurch.

  41st Battalion of 11th Infantry Brigade

  Died of wounds. Aged 20

  Fell December 1916

  There was a gap left to fill in the date, another detail the War Office had still not provided. The empty space was awful; it was the mass grave, the unknown place. Or had they buried him properly? Who knew?

  Western Front, Armentieres, France

  This side of the memorial the ground was as yet unpaved. Picking her way between the puddles, Lorna went up close and reached as high as she could to touch the bottom of the F of Front. ‘Does that say France?’

  ‘No, darling. But it is an F. Clever girl.’

  Clara was lifting her arms to be picked up, so Jean put her daughter on her hip and went around to the third tablet set into the column.

  The Unknown

  It was terrible, more than the listed names, more than seeing Llew’s, because it was unexpected, because of the deaths hidden behind the dumb, blank face, the women and children left behind, the aching, deadening loss. How could the world ever be the same again? A heavy stone dropped from her heart into her belly, and she felt the baby shift, low down, a flickering above her groin.

  ‘Mumma?’

  Clara rode higher on her arm and pushed her face into her mother’s, the blur of her blue eyes up close before she kissed her, wetly, on the cheek.

  ‘In France they eat frogs’ legs,’ Jean told them, ‘and speak a language called French.’

  There was still no sign of her father or Louisa, so she took the children closer to the trees, getting them to listen for the waterfall concealed below the cliff. She pointed out birds and flowers and a candlenut tree, telling them how the pioneers would cut the tops off the hard, brown nuts, float a wick in the oil and use them for candles.

  ‘Can we do that, Mumma?’

  She pointed how they could see the belvedere from here, the lovely room they’d climbed to that morning. Half an hour passed and she was thinking of perhaps finding a sandwich for all of them from the picnic when she heard a horse approaching, a single set of hooves, and Matthew, hatless, was riding up in the same direction they had come from, up the hill from the gates. The boys ran to see him as he crested the hill, waving and shouting, but he ignored them, rounding the monument to pull up close to Jean. Too close. Clara was used to horses but Lorna startled and clung.

  ‘Louisa fell. I took her back to the house along the low road, through Tyrells’.’

  Lorna set up a wailing then, louder than before, and Cedric, white-faced, ran away towards the sulky before changing his mind and hieing away down the hill.

  It was affecting, their display, since Jean suspected they were mostly left in the care of the nanny. It seemed they genuinely loved their mother, and so she did her sister too, of course, despite her worst imaginings. Why then did she feel nothing? Only a numbness. Trust Louisa. On this morning of all mornings. If she had not insisted on wearing her finery and riding rather than driving, then it would have passed very differently. Their father would have said a few words. Perhaps they would have prayed together, not that they were a family for praying, since the opposing religions had cancelled each other out and left them with nothing. Jean had the sensation of falling, dropping fast down a long, shining tunnel with no hand holds, no comforting words on the slide to despair.

  The stonemason was standing, arching his back, and when he saw her haste he helped her, handing the children up to the sulky.
Matthew waited for Jean to set off, following along behind.

  ‘Mumma will be all right,’ she whispered to Lorna, pulling her close. And she would be, she knew. Of course she would be.

  Halfway down the hill was a clear view between the trees of the carriageway — and there, riding for all she was worth, was Rufina, her skirt blowing back to show her strong, white legs gripping the sides of the horse, small clouds of the dampened dust lifting in her wake. As she drew closer and then away to take the curve of the drive, Jean saw that she rode Boss, who seemed at this distance no worse for his escapade. Horse and rider emerged between the stone lions and turned right, taking the road to Clunes.

  She was riding for the doctor, Jean realised, since there were no telephones in the district. Ahead the road widened for a few feet and Matthew took the chance to slip past.

  ‘I’ll see you there,’ he said, giving Flora a nudge and going quickly down the slope, not turning in at the gate as Jean expected but going on, at a gallop now, to catch up to Louisa’s maid, whose hair had come loose and was streaming behind her, licking at the air like a pale flame, or the petals of a flower.

  It stood to reason Matthew would go in her stead and send the maid back, thought Jean. There was little he could do — Nan would need help and that Evie girl seemed pretty hopeless. Jean thought she remembered her from before she went away to begin her married life — one of the smallest ones, only six or seven years old then.

  ‘Hurry up, Blackie.’

  The old horse was dawdling, watching Flora and Boss disappear, and Jean could have sworn she heard her sigh.

  ‘Home, Blackie,’ Jean said, to reassure her that they wouldn’t be going after them, flicking the reins again.

  From behind her there came a soft chuckle.

  ‘Funny old horse.’

  Tom. Dear Tommy, who in the hurry to get the sulky turned around and the little girls either side on the bench seat, and Cedric running off on his own in his slippery city shoes, she had almost forgotten. Solid, dependable, honest. How lucky she was to have a son like him. She had not got to the bottom of the business about the toy tractor. Perhaps Cedric had made him a promise he didn’t keep to let him play with it and Tom had been suffering the betrayal. He wasn’t a child given to stories and invention. ‘Balm to my soul,’ she’d said of him from the time he was born, or a few weeks old, when his clear, pragmatic, intelligent eyes showed her who he was. ‘Balm to my soul,’ she would say as a kind of refrain when she nursed him, until one evening her husband had snapped, ‘Oh all right!’ being, as she had learned, a man who allowed the many difficulties of his life to overwhelm the pleasures.

  Tom was down again, pulling on the horse, and then trotting along beside her, else she should stall again.

  ‘You drive,’ Jean said to him, and he climbed nimbly up to take the reins while she lifted Lorna to her lap.

  ‘Nan will be looking after Mumma and she has Evie to help,’ she told the child, who was still whimpering and calling for her mother. From the other side of Tom came Clara’s arm, hooking firmly around her brother’s slender waist.

  ‘Up up, Blackie,’ he said, and Blackie finally got the message and hurried herself along.

  15.

  HE CAME TO RIDE BESIDE HER. SHE KNEW WITHOUT TURNING to see, as soon as she heard the flying hooves, that it was Matthew Fenchurch.

  ‘I’ll go,’ he told her, passing now. ‘You go back to the house.’

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ she answered and saw that he was pleased, or at least he didn’t suggest otherwise, and she felt Boss surge under her to overtake the older, slower horse.

  ‘Verlangsamen! ’

  Matthew heard the German word and noticed how easily she controlled the horse. There was skill and learning there, an innate understanding of the animal, but he was reluctant to ask any of the questions that rose in his mind. Her nationality made him uneasy; it would be wise not to allow her to talk about her past.

  But admiration had gilded his eye and Rufina saw it, just as she had in Mrs Arkenstall’s room, and saw too how quickly he closed it off. She supposed he was preoccupied by the condition of his daughter, who had been carried in and laid across the settee in the morning room. Nance had looked into Louisa’s eyes and pronounced that she was concussed but that there were no bones broken, and Matthew had taken that as a signal he could go and fetch the other daughter and the grandchildren from the memorial. It was only after he’d gone that they’d noticed the blood.

  ‘Go for Doctor Becker,’ Nance had said to the Irish maid, who had responded tardily to Nance’s call and received a scolding, though she would have had worse if Rufina had told Nance the full story, how her hair had been pulled and her dress torn. She had felt abased by the girl, who had sulked by the morning-room door, her high colour faded. Pointedly, Rufina had turned away from her to the window, through which she had seen Boss, unchastened, tethered in the yard.

  ‘I’ll go,’ she’d said. ‘I can ride.’

  And couldn’t she? It was a long time since she had ridden her father’s premier horses, and even though her previous employers had stabled more inferior steeds in Centennial Park for the purposes of fresh air and exercise, Rufina had never been invited to ride them. Boss chafed now against galloping behind Flora, just as he must have done on the ride out.

  The road straightened to run towards Clunes across the plain so Rufina brought him to ride two abreast. Where the road ran closest to the river the way lay under water and Boss delighted in thundering through the ponds, sending up great surges of water. Mr Fenchurch was intent on the road, not glancing at her, and they went at such a pace and noise there was no chance of talk. She could have told him her mother’s name was Flora, the same as his horse, and that she hadn’t heard from her for months — almost a year — but why would that interest him? She would rather ask about the strange trees they passed, the palms and broad-leafed shrubs that broke the monotony of the gums, to ask about the bright birds sheltering high in the boughs. The surrounding country was as much the same as the hinterlands of Sydney perhaps, as much the same as it was different, in the way a field in Schleswig-Holstein might differ from one in France. There was less evidence of drought, the hills green from the recent rain. On a flat rock at the river’s edge a bearded lizard separated itself from its dripping surroundings, a comical jointed leg and toes held out towards them as they thundered past. It was an ancient creature, from before the Bible, from before Adam and Eve.

  At the outskirts of Clunes the rain started in earnest, straight down in the warm, windless air, dampening even the fires of the blacksmith, which smoked and blackened. Here was Saint Peter’s, the wooden Anglican church, the general store with its sagging verandah, the little butcher, the two-storey hotel and finally the doctor’s house, with its brass plaque and night-bell. Lightly, fluidly, Matthew dismounted with the ease of a man who’d spent his whole life around horses, like Rufina’s own father, who had refused for too long to see the changes coming, an eccentric crank who kept up his once-successful Berlin horse and cartage business in the face of irrevocable change, who spent too long and too much at the gaming tables.

  The doctor was not to be roused. The house had no fence or gate to prevent people rounding it to what must be the doctor’s living quarters, so Matthew was free to go and investigate, rainwater falling with a sudden gush from the back of his hat as he pushed it higher on his brow.

  Boss trembled a little and whined at Matthew’s disappearance and Rufina soothed him. The doctor’s house had an overgrown garden of white flowers, daisies and others, taller, coarser, more primitive, that Rufina had no name for. It was one of the most frustrating things about this country, how plants, animals, valleys and mountains would hold on to a savage anonymity, even with two languages to apply. It was at once primeval and brand new, unformed. Hadn’t some of the earlier explorers been German? What name would they have given these flowers? The petals were as thick as flannel.

  Doctor Becker, read the p
laque. A woman came from the house next door and called from the shelter of the porch, ‘He’s gone away!’

  Rufina nodded, unwilling to reply or ask where he had gone, for fear that the woman would hear her accent. Becker was a German name. He had more likely been taken away.

  Matthew reappeared and mounted Flora, shaking his head.

  ‘Is that you, Mr Fenchurch?’ asked the doctor’s neighbour, and she explained to him what had happened, and Rufina’s suspicions were confirmed. Poor Doctor Becker, whoever he was, taken to Trial Bay Gaol.

  ‘I didn’t know him,’ Matthew told her as they rode out of town. ‘He’s new. He’s not the doctor that attended my wife. Old Doctor Mahoney died a year or so ago.’

  ‘I would have thought doctors were in short supply,’ Rufina said. ‘How could it matter if the doctor is German? We have the best doctors in the world. You were lucky to have him in such a backwater.’

  Matthew gave her a funny look, a tight little smile, before he rode ahead for a while. The warm rain was starting again, but what did it matter, since she was soaked to the skin. Rufina revelled in it. What a strange pleasure. She felt it slip through her hair, thick on her scalp, like oil. Further along, Matthew was waiting for her.

  ‘It could be dangerous for you to go back to Sydney,’ he said as soon as she drew level, not looking at her.

  ‘Dangerous? How? The war is dangerous. The war is not here.’

  ‘There is a lot of anti-German feeling.’

  ‘Do you think I am unaware of that?’ She thought of her employer alone in Sydney, frightened to go out, of how the women clung together with their men taken from them.

  ‘If Louisa can spare you then you should stay at Jarulan, hidden away.’

  He met her eyes again and Rufina saw his intent suddenly and it alarmed her. It hadn’t been there before. His expression was kind, though; she could see by the way his mouth had set that he had been a man given to laughter, though not so much in recent times, perhaps since his wife died. The sun-bleached blue of his eyes was strange — though you did see men with eyes like that here. Penetrating, lucent and somehow ruthless. He could be thirty years her senior, in his fifties, or not; the men here often looked older than they were.