Dorothy Eden (31 page)

And who would doubt that, for Mrs Massingham, when she arrived at last, had the whole-hearted admiration of Emmy and Minnie. She wasn’t impressively beautiful, as they had been told, but she looked so graceful in her cool sprigged muslin and large leghorn hat tied beneath her chin with green ribbons. Her face was so delicately pale, her large sensitive eyes so gentle, it would have been very surprising if her husband wasn’t crazy about her. The firmness of her chin was not apparent at first, at least not when she was smiling with genuine warmth at the row of doleful young women.

She knew who they were. She spoke to each by her name. Emmy Dawson, the freckle-faced cockney born within sound of Bow Bells, had been taught needlework in the orphanage in which she had lived for fifteen of her twenty years. She could have become apprenticed to a milliner and worked soul-destroying hours for her food and lodging. But something had stirred in her blood, she said. She didn’t think God had put her on earth to live such a dull life.

Minnie Higgins spoke with a good accent. Her father had been a schoolmaster who had died of consumption. So had her mother and one of her sisters. Another sister was governess to the children of one of the new cotton magnates in Manchester. She was comfortable and happy although she thought the family vulgar. Minnie had wanted a similar position, but her appearance had been against her. She was short and squat with rounded shoulders, her growth stunted by rickets as a child. She knew no man would be likely to want her, she was too ugly. So she had created her own enormous adventure by coming to Australia. She had mild eyes and a pleasant smile, and her accomplishments were impressive. She could speak French, draw moderately well, play the piano, and had a good knowledge of literature.

She was really far too accomplished for the humble post of nursery governess, but if she settled down happily at Yarrabee and they all liked her, and the next baby was a girl, she could become a permanent member of the household.

As for Emmy Dawson, she was too good to lose. Since Phoebe, Mrs Massingham’s personal maid, was walking out with a blacksmith, and likely to be married soon, Minnie could take over her duties, and also do the household sewing and mending, and make baby clothes, and shirts and trousers for Kit. It would be a most convenient arrangement.

For those who would not be going to Yarrabee Mrs Massingham had suggestions for suitable positions where they would be given an opportunity to live honest lives. She had all their names written down in a little leather-bound book.

She would not be losing sight of them, she assured the anxious homesick young women. She had organized a system whereby either she or one of her helpers kept in touch with them and gave them advice, money, or shelter as deserved.

Any of them genuinely desirous of living a respectable life would be given the opportunity. But she did not accept backsliding.

She drove back to Yarrabee at a spanking pace, Minnie and Emmy in the back of the buggy clutching their boxes and their bonnets and admiring their mistress’s straight back and her expert handling of the reins.

So what people said of Mrs Massingham was all true. She was beautiful and generous and kind—and ever so slightly alarming.

On her second day at her new post, Minnie Higgins asked permission to speak to Eugenia. Was it true that she was expected to include the housekeeper’s child in the morning lessons?

‘She just came in and sat down, Mrs Massingham,’ Minnie said nervously. ‘She said she wanted to learn her alphabet and that she and Master Kit always did everything together. She seems a very forward child, if you’ll excuse me saying so.’

‘Yes, she’s a bright child,’ Eugenia agreed. ‘I overlooked speaking to you about her. I had thought we would get Master Kit established in his routine first, but if Rosie is so eager to learn she had better begin at once. It certainly wouldn’t be fair to deny the child an education. Anyway, it’s better for Kit to have company. They’re foster brother and sister, and they’re devoted to one another.’

The sooner Kit’s own brother or sister was born, the better, Eugenia thought.

But did it matter, really? Gilbert said it didn’t. He was quite diverted by the children’s attachment to one another. He was very modern in his thoughts. He wanted equality in so far as it was practicable. It was certainly practicable that his son have a playmate.

Until he went away to school, Eugenia decided privately. And until Rosie was old enough to wear a cap and apron. She herself was certain that equality among the classes would never work.

Some months later, on a mid-summer morning in the comparative coolness of her darkened sitting-room, Eugenia wrote to Sarah.

‘The baby is a girl, and I am delighted. So, I think, is Gilbert, although I suspect that he would have preferred another son. However, there is plenty of time for that, and in the meantime I am taking the greatest pleasure in my new daughter. We have decided to call her Adelaide which is a name I have always admired. She has Gilbert’s reddish hair and I think she will be very pretty. She is also a strong baby, much stronger than either Christopher or Victoria, so I do not feel as anxious about her as I did about the other two. She has taken to the bottle immediately, and in her three short weeks of life she has thrived.

‘Now you can picture Yarrabee as a family home, with Kit in the schoolroom and Baby in the nursery. The schoolroom is reigned over by Miss Higgins, or Higgie as Kit calls her, a plain little creature who looks like a pleasant frog. Ellen is in the nursery, very important now she has the new baby, and Phoebe having left me to be married, I have an immigrant called Emmy Dawson who sews exquisitely and who is learning to be a good personal maid. Of course we still have our treasure, Mrs Jarvis, who takes such a genuine pride in the house, and her little girl Rose who is as sharp as a needle. She will be given small household duties as soon as she is old enough, to keep her out of mischief. I fear she is already jealous of the new baby, or jealous of the interest Kit takes in it. You may say this is remarkable for such a young child, but Rose has always had an elderly face, and she also regards Kit as her brother, and no one else’s. A curious situation.

‘But I do enjoy having the house full of children’s voices. It is no longer lonely…’

The heat was bad this summer. Even Gilbert admitted that he had not experienced such a long period of extreme temperatures. He had boasted that the wells at Yarrabee would never run dry, but they were coming perilously near to it.

Eugenia’s garden had to be sacrificed. She could hardly bear to look at the wilting shrivelling plants. Her early morning and late evening walks were given up. For one thing, it was too hot even at those hours. The heat, close and suffocating, lasted all night, and turned to a furnace at mid-day. Sometimes a strong wind blew dust, the precious topsoil from the paddocks, through every smallest crevice. All the windows had to be kept tightly shut, and even then the filter of red powder hung in the air.

The hardy Australian shrubs, the thorn bushes and spinifex and the gum trees, haggard and stark against the burning sky, survived. So did the lizards and the flies, and the noisy shouting birds, the parrots, the kookaburras, the crows. Although one day a small cloud of tiny green parrots, gasping and dying, settled in the wattle tree like shrivelling green figs.

Kit caught one of them and it died in his hot hand. He was extremely distressed. He had not known that birds died.

The great danger was a bush fire. Gilbert watched every day for the significant stain of smoke on the heat-blanched horizon.

This was still only a threat. A reality was the way the bunches of grapes on the vines were shrivelling. When the wells were dangerously low Gilbert organized a clumsy but continual conveyance system from the lake by means of buckets and bullock waggons. The lake, too, was in danger of drying up, the remaining water brackish, and crowded with water-birds who were forced farther and farther from the reedy shores.

Eugenia wanted to beg an occasional bucket of water for her white climbing rose, but did not dare. The greedy vines demanded every drop.

She felt as limp as her drooping roses. Even Gilbert lost his look of ruddy health, and grew almost emaciated, his blue eyes blazing in his deeply sun-burned face. There was no longer water for bathing. A few cupfuls in a china basin had to suffice. The baby, fretful with the heat, had a damp sponge squeezed over her body at intervals. Eugenia contrived a meagre toilette in the same way but Gilbert, frantically preserving every drop of water for his vines, fell into his bed at nights lean, sweaty, exhausted. His wife was the last thing in his mind.

Lying in the warm darkness in her own room, listening to the everlasting hoarse harping of the cicadas. Eugenia conjured up in her mind all the cool green things she could remember. Streams trickling over mossy stones, rain on a summer garden, cool flagstones beneath bare feet, the smell of roses when the dew still lay on them…

Sometimes, the power of her imagination failed, and she could think of nothing but her discomfort. She was being dried up, parched, made prematurely old, a prisoner in this old old land that was lying waiting outside for the brief darkness to be over so that it could smoulder and burn again in the triumphant sun.

Then abruptly the rain came, streaming out of the low clouds in a waterfall, creating lakes in every hollow, running over the sunbaked earth too quickly for absorption so that every creek was swollen to a miniature river, and the river itself bursting its banks.

Sheep and cattle, weakened by starvation, were swept into the rising floods and drowned. Kangaroos, wallabies, dingoes, foxes, shared the horrible grey odorous debris along the banks of the receding river. But the earth was growing green again, the immaculate blue days suggested a serenity that was profoundly welcome if no longer believable.

There would be no vintage, Gilbert reported bleakly.

His vines had survived, but not their harvest. The grapes hung in shrivelled rotting bunches. News drifted through that every vigneron in the Hunter River valley had suffered a similar disaster. Some had sufficient means to carry on. Others intended abandoning such a precarious way of life, either turning their land holdings to ordinary farms, or giving up altogether and returning to town life.

One family was actually planning to catch the next ship to England. When Eugenia heard of this a wild hope leapt within her. She dared to speak of it only in the most devious way.

Gilbert was so haggard, so remote, so sunk in his disappointment that ordinary conversation was almost impossible.

The night after he had made his announcement about the ruined harvest, he had not come upstairs until dawn, and then only to wash and change his clothes. Eugenia thought he must have sat up drinking alone, or perhaps with Tom Sloan. But he showed no signs of having been drinking when he did come up in the early dawn. He saw her in the doorway and apologized for disturbing her.

‘Where have you been?’ she asked.

‘Talking. Discussing ways and means.’

‘But not all night!’

‘Seems like it.’ He was busy at the wardrobe, looking for a clean shirt, fingering his growth of beard. ‘We didn’t realize until we saw it getting daylight. Young Jemmie cried. A big lad like that. He had been looking forward to his first vintage.’

Miserably, Eugenia was aware that she also should have cried. That might have been one way of getting closer to a husband who had grown too remote.

‘Aren’t you going to rest now?’

‘No time. Don’t worry yourself, love. Go back to sleep.’

But she was wide awake, tense, puzzled by something in his manner. There was something subtly different about him. She realized what it was. His look of strain had gone. He was gaunt and hollow-cheeked but strangely relaxed. And this, after a night sitting up, talking. Some remarkable conclusions must have been reached.

She couldn’t help saying, ‘Gilbert, this profession is too hazardous. Wouldn’t it be wiser to turn to something else. Before you get deeper into debt—’ She faltered, not quite able to meet his gaze.

‘Is there anything you want you haven’t got?’

‘No, no, I have too much. But your debt to Mrs Ashburton—when will it be paid?’

‘This is hardly the time to remind me of that. Mrs Ashburton certainly didn’t. Indeed, she has already offered me a further loan.’

‘And you’ve accepted?’

‘Of course I have,’ he said in surprise. ‘How can I let myself be beaten at this stage? You don’t seem to understand.’

‘I only understand that it’s all so intensely worrying. Next year it will happen again. We’ll go through these weeks and months of anxiety. I don’t think I can stand it. I haven’t the temperament.’

‘That’s only because you have no liking for wine or wine making.’ Now he was indulgent. She hated his indulgent manner. ‘But you must try to have patience with it Go back to bed and get some sleep.’

Mrs Ashburton was smugly pleased about the turn of events. She liked to be indispensable, even if the reason was only her fortune. But such an unpleasant necessity as money must not come between her and dear Eugenia. She was growing more devoted day by day to the children, Gilbert and Eugenia, Yarrabee. She would like very much to be little Adelaide’s godmother. She adored that baby. So vigorous and demanding, so like her father with her imperious blue eyes.

‘I wish I could live to see her grow up. I’ll make a prediction that she’ll leave her brother miles behind.’

‘I should hope not,’ said Eugenia. ‘And of course you will live to see her grow up.’

Mrs Ashburton shook her head. She was growing untidy in her clothes, her cap was always awry, her grey locks straggling.

‘I think not. My legs swell. Philip Noakes tells me I’m dropsical.’

‘You drink too much wine.’

Mrs Ashburton chuckled, not at herself and her self-indulgence, but at Eugenia.

‘You’re getting to be a real Australian, my dear. I believe you’ll make your mark on this country. And on your husband, in spite of himself.’

‘What do you mean, in spite of himself?’ The uneasiness and unhappiness touched her again as she remembered Gilbert’s strange manner that morning.