Summer at Mount Hope (31 page)

‘Just wait,' said Henrietta, working her bare feet into the mud and sinking up to her calves at the water's edge. ‘Wait until we're in New South Wales, Phoeba, then you won't be in such a mood!'

‘No,' she said, half-heartedly, and Hadley put his arm around her, tugging her closer to him. She must get used to Hadley's arm, she thought; she knew she would learn to like it and wondered if her mother had said the same thing to herself.

‘We will be there soon,' he said, as if he was promising her a garden paradise with cauldrons of gold.

He could barely contain his anticipation. Phoeba, all to himself, all night. He longed to kiss her properly and he smiled when he imagined her standing at the stove when he came in late from work. She would put a plate of lovely food in front of him – oxtail stew with rice or her steak and kidney pie with homemade tomato sauce – and they would read the paper by the fire before going to bed, together. Someone to hold.

Lilith stayed resolutely at Overton, swanning about the mansion, humming and dancing with Marius in the ballroom, playing two-fingered tunes on the grand piano, drinking sparkling wine from the cellar and making eggs and toast for breakfast and dinner, and salad for tea. Marius prepared for the clearing sale and rode to Mount Hope almost every day. Phoeba studied him from the veranda, watched him trailing Robert up and down the vines parting leaves and peering closely at the ripening grapes.

Once, she lined him up through the sights at the end of the Collector, trained the gun on him as he walked – but pulled the barrel to the sky before she squeezed the trigger. The gun would only graze him anyway, at that distance, or maim him.

In the evenings, Phoeba, Robert and Maude ate in complete silence. Maude seemed to be in some kind of torpor and Robert was generally slightly drunk. It took every bit of what concentration he had to manage his food. After a week of icy meals, Maude took to her bed completely and would not come out.

‘It's all so wretched,' she mumbled from under her blankets.

In the end, Robert was forced to ask Phoeba to make bread, pointing to his belt buckle, pulled in one extra notch, and imploring her with sodden eyes. She wondered if he had thought to save any money for her wedding – suddenly realising that she might make it through the event without a wedding cake. She almost laughed.

‘Please,' he begged.

‘Lilith won't make bread,' she sniffed triumphantly, dragging the flour bin from the pantry.

‘I'm sure I'll grow to like salad with almonds,' said her father and sat at the table to watch.

Her mother staggered down from her darkened room and said, her voice croaky and strained, ‘Please, Phoeba, please drive to Flynn's and send to Lassetters for Codeine powder. The veins in my head are shooting with hot acid and I fear they will burst.'

She wanted to say no. She wanted to say, you have betrayed me, you can suffer. She wanted to make them say, ‘Stay, you can run the vines.' If they said that, then she would look after them forever.

She went to the stables, bridled her slow, black horse, rode to the shop and collected the papers. She still missed Freckle.

The
Geelong Advertiser
headlines read:
‘NEW VINEYARD AT WAURN PONDS
. The farmers and quarrymen at the community of Waurn Ponds, which was badly affected by phylloxera in the 1870s, are buoyed by plans to establish fifteen acres of vineyards which promises to become the Victorian Halle aux Vins …'

‘The place is going ahead, be vineyards everywhere soon,' said Mrs Flynn and handed Phoeba a picture postcard.

‘I'll grow vines in New South Wales,' said Phoeba. The postcard was a reproduction of a van Dyke painting of the lavishly dressed child groom, Prince William of Orange, and his opulently coutured child bride, Princess Mary Stuart. William's reluctant fingers bent warily to hold three of Mary's succulently unused fingers and the timid couple gazed uncertainly at Phoeba. Aunt Margaret had rubberstamped the happy couple with the Fairfield Women's Progressive League emblem and wrote, ‘Can't attend your marriage, busy with my true calling – first exhibition.

Good luck,

Always your favourite Aunt, Margaret Robertson,

Artist and Treasurer, FWPL.

PS. Women can rule monarchies so why can't they vote?'

Mrs Flynn raised herself from her counter and put her hands on her hips. ‘You stopped arsting ages ago,' she smiled, ‘but here it is.' She passed the peach parer across the counter.

Unfortunately, Maude found it would not do apples.

Thursday, February 22, 1894

T
he Overton sale was a disappointment. Most of the good machinery was not for sale and no one in the area had any need for three-furrow ploughs or a damaged Sunshine stripper. The sheep had already been sold along with the cattle and the pigs, and there was a surplus of horses so the draught horse team was split up and sold to various neighbours – Mr Titterton took the two Hadley had always used for ploughing. Robert looked longingly at the huge, docile beasts but Maude reminded him that there would probably be grandchildren before long and a new room would be required. No one needed a team of twenty oxen either, and the blacksmith's bellows were left. Nor had anyone the time or money to make use of stained walnut platform rockers, folding carpet chairs, oyster knives or oil landscapes of the Colchester Downs. But Maude did pick up an apple parer that also cored and sliced for two shillings. New, they cost two and six.

Mrs Flynn bought two draught horses, the harness and the flat-top wagon. She loaded the Overton washing machine and mangler, a sewing machine, a very modern kerosene refrigerator, a mechanical butter churn and Patent Milk Sterilizer, a Silicated Carbon filter to make fresh water, a coffee grinder and roaster, a counter milkshake machine, the chickens and a canary cage complete with fittings and tethered a milking cow behind before setting off home.

‘Bay View is going ahead, if you arst me,' she said.

The new farmers at the Jessops' place bought the second milking cow and some strangers from a far-flung district bought candle lanterns and lamp fittings, maids' aprons and soup ladles, sausage machines, turnip cutters, chaff makers, portable forges, tyre bending machines and Forest Devils. No one needed julep strainers or canopy bedsteads.

Phoeba strolled around with her arm looped through Hadley's and Hadley walked inches taller. She flinched, though, when they encountered the people who had taken over the Jessops' farm as they loaded their wagon and Hadley introduced Phoeba as his fiancée. The formal finality of the title, the implications of it jolted her. But she dismissed the reaction. This was ‘nerves'. They would be all right, she and Hadley and Henrietta; they would muddle along together. Anyway, a brilliant satisfying life would always be rendered meaningless with death, just as a less than satisfying life of compromise would. In the long run it needn't matter. It could all end the same way, no matter what. It was then that the light of reason came to her: she would simply make the best of it.

At the height of these nihilistic thoughts, she turned and saw Rudolph in the stables, leaning against the door with his legs crossed in his moles and knee-high boots, and his lovely vicuna coat. He was studying her with a look that seemed to hold affection, regret and sadness. Whipping her arm from Hadley's she felt as if she was outside herself, watching another Phoeba walk towards him. He tilted his face away, as if in pain, and raised his palm: Stop. He even began to walk away but Phoeba followed.

‘How are you?' She couldn't think of anything else to say.

He didn't answer her, just picked at a bit of paint flaking from the shaft of an ancient trap.

‘I'm going to New South Wales,' she offered.

‘So I hear.' He rubbed the paint between his thumb and middle finger and let it fall to the ground, then he reached out and she stepped into his arms. She would have stayed there, entwined, for a fortnight – forever – but he untangled himself and walked away without another backwards glance. She sank to a stack of chaff bags behind rows of looped harnesses, reins, stirrups and saddle blankets, put her head in her hands and cried, a wrenching silent cry that stretched her jaw and hurt her ribs.

What had she done?

She had seized an opportunity because she had to. She was marrying her friend. She was making him the ‘right person' – and Henrietta would be there too. She was making a life.

She was being silly. And it was the right thing to do. The hours in the days would be hers while he was out working. But she would help him with his sheep. In spring he would bring the baby orphans, hungry and bleating to her, and she would wrap her arms around their tiny, rough curls and feed them and send them wobbling on their thick snowy legs. And one day they would return to take over Elm Grove … or Mount Hope. At the end of her life she would be able to say, ‘I did the best I could, I did the right thing.' At the end of her life, she'd be back here, one way or another.

Her shuddering eased. She gathered herself and peeped out. Marius passed leading a pair of horses that dragged a dray. It was stacked with candelabra three feet tall, floor-to-ceiling gilt mirrors, glass cabinets still packed with crockery, Huon pine hatstands and a bath – a large, heavy, claw-footed thing that would take up most of the Mount Hope washhouse. Lilith was perched on the edge of the dray like a model in a furniture advertisement. Mount Hope would be a crowded museum for the relics of lost fortunes and dashed expectations.

Saturday, February 24, 1894

O
n the eve of her wedding, Phoeba packed her favourite things into her new carpetbag – a wedding gift from her parents – and when the sun sank and a cool shadow crept over the warm brown paddocks she went to Spot. She crawled onto his back and lay with her cheek on the wobbly ridge of his mane with her arms around his neck.

‘One day, Spot my dearest friend, when Hadley has his first pay cheque, I'll come and get you. I'll grow an apple tree that will be exclusively yours. You will have your own dam and you can eat breakfast in my kitchen every day if you like.' She slid from the pungent comfort of her horse and looked deep into his bottomless elliptical pupil. ‘I will come back, Spot.' He rested his cheek on hers, like a suitcase on her shoulder. ‘I love you, Spotty,' she said.

She walked up though the vines, tears falling from her chin like raindrops from a leaf, her fingers running over bunches of the pale green grapes. Spot stood with his brisket pressed against the fence and his lovely ears pricked forward. Her sister and brotherin-law watched from the wicker couch.

At tea, Lilith complained.

‘I have to do everything at Overton, Mother. I've only got the laundress. We're only using the parlour and one bedroom.'

‘And the kitchen,' said Marius, piling his plate with shepherd's pie and bottled beetroot.

‘You've made your bed, Lilith. Lie in it,' said Phoeba, wondering what they would do when the preserves ran out.

‘I may not be able to come to your big day tomorrow, Phoeba,' said Lilith, huffily.

‘What a shame,' said Phoeba, sarcastically. ‘And pass me the pie, Marius, unless you're going to take all of it for yourself.'

‘He can have my share,' said Lilith, quietly. ‘I'm unwell.'

‘So much has changed for you,' said Maude, dropping a pat of butter onto the mashed potato, ‘of course you're tired.'

‘Scarlet fever, is it?' asked Robert, flippantly.

‘We have news,' said Marius looking nervously smug.

Maude's hand froze, the butter lid in her fingers. Lilith assumed her stricken expression.

‘Mummy, I think I'm … I could be expecting.'

‘Already?' yelled Robert, his mouth full of half-chewed bread.

Maude glared at Marius.

‘We'll have to get a barouche, Dad,' said Lilith, and pouted.

‘We should make enough to buy a nice little wagonette in the next year or so,' said Robert, pointing his knife at Marius, ‘don't you think?'

Lilith rested her hand on her tummy. ‘We'll need something by September: the baby will be here by then.'

Phoeba watched her mother turn ashen. The butter lid fell from her fingers and clattered onto the table. Lilith and Marius must have known, she thought.

‘September,' she repeated, pointedly. Barely seven months after the wedding day.

Robert whipped his napkin from his collar, threw it at Marius and took the wine jug from him.

‘I'll have the relish, Marius,' said Phoeba.

Sunday, February 25, 1894

T
he fourth Sunday in February was an unseasonably flat day. There was an icy tint in the air and the bay was as still as a bowl of whey.

Marius arrived early with Lilith, who wore a Canton silk crepe shawl and a fur busby with a matching muff.

‘You'll be nice and warm,' said her mother.

‘It's last season's but no one will know,' she said. ‘Mrs Over-ton didn't take them with her.'

Marius took a bridle from the shed and went to Spot. ‘Come on, you old mule,' he said affectionately, ‘let's get you harnessed.'

Spot swivelled one ear and leaned away from Marius as he stepped towards the horse with the bit ready in his hand. Spot turned his head away, shifting his weight and raising his front hoof. He let it fall onto Marius's boot then shifted his weight back again. A searing pain exploded in Marius foot. He froze, silent with pain and dread before the sharp edge of the horseshoe bit. A fragile bone in the top of his foot started to bend. In desperation he pushed against Spot's thick, warm shoulder, but found himself too weak and watery from pain to budge the horse. Then the thin metatarsal in the crown of Marius's foot cracked and Spot twisted, turning his head, pricking his ears towards the empty lane and screwing his hoof down on Marius's shattered foot.