Authors: Maris Morton
Clio stood in the doorway, her black eyes enormous. ‘Going out?’
‘I’ve arranged with Cec to go to the reserve.’
Clio’s eyes were filling with tears. ‘It doesn’t matter about me, then, does it. Nobody wonders whether
I
might like to go to the reserve.’
God! Mary thought. What was this game she was playing. ‘I’m sorry, Clio, but if you truly would like to go I’m sure that would be fine with Cec. The three of us could fit into his ute quite easily.’
‘I’ll have to see how I feel after dinner. What are you making?’
‘For dinner? I haven’t decided. There’s pea soup, thick as pease porridge now, and some ham. Or there’s always fish in the freezer.’
Clio sighed, but there was no misery in it this time. ‘Pease porridge and ham. I haven’t had it in … years and years. Can you glaze the ham?’
The ham was a big piece on the bone bought for shearers’ sandwiches. ‘Yes, I can do that. Mustard and marmalade glaze all right?’
‘Yes, that sounds fine. And we can have fish tonight.’
Mary parked the vacuum cleaner and fetched the chair. Now she had to find things to do in the kitchen, something she hadn’t been planning. She wiped up the breakfast dishes and put them away, hanging the tea towel over the plate rack to dry. ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’
‘Mm? If you’re having one.’
Mary dragged the kettle onto the hotplate and assembled cups and saucers. There was a fine pale-blue lustre cup and saucer she liked using, and another set enamelled with little Japanese figures taking tea.
‘More of Ellen’s things?’ Clio said. ‘I’ll have the blue cup, thanks.’
When they were waiting for the tea to cool, and Mary was trying to think of something to talk about, Clio broke the silence.
‘I’m surprised Janet’s letting Cec go out with you.’
‘Are you?’ She recalled Janet’s odd manner this morning. ‘Could she stop him?’
Clio’s facial muscles moved in an expression that could have been amusement. ‘No, you’re probably right. He does love his wildflowers, and I imagine Janet has to wash her work clothes or her hair or something on Saturdays. Clean the house.’ She reached for her cup and tested the temperature of the tea. ‘They might have their funny little ways, but I think that on the whole Cec and Janet have a happy marriage.’
Mary interpreted this as a warning. ‘I wasn’t nursing any ambitions to lure Cec away from Janet.’
‘I never thought you were! I’m sorry if you thought I was saying that. All marriages are different …’
Mary nodded.
‘You must be wondering why Paul and I … why Paul and I …’
Mary glanced at Clio, who was scrutinising the contents of her teacup. ‘It’s none of my business.’
‘True. But you must be wondering all the same.’ Clio placed her cup on the corner of the stove and looked up at her. ‘Well, we started out all right. He couldn’t get enough of me in those days. Like a fool’ — she made a self-deprecating downturn of the mouth — ‘like a perfect idiot, I thought if a man lusted after you, it meant he loved you. Of course, I understand now that it’s some mysterious pheromone thing that turns the man on, nothing to do with anything else but sex. Probably, in some peculiar way, I reminded him of Ellen.’ She sighed.
‘He’d always been quiet, but I used to think
still waters run
deep
, and I waited with passionate eagerness for him to reveal those magical depths. In the end, of course, I realised that there were no hidden depths. There’s nothing there.’ She kept her gaze fixed on Mary’s face, as if to read her reaction. ‘That was the first major disillusionment.’
Clio took up her cup again and sipped her tea. Mary offered her a chocolate biscuit, but Clio shook her head. This looked like developing into a lengthy session. Mary sat down, her back to the window, and watched Clio’s face while she listened to her words.
‘I thought he was impressed by my music, but I got that wrong, too. If pretending to like music was what it took to get me, then he’d pretend, but once we were married he didn’t have to put on a show any more. That must have been a huge relief.
‘Then, of course, I was terribly busy here on Downe. I was pregnant, a lot of the time. I told you about Allegra …’ Mary nodded; the dead baby girl. ‘I had the idea that if I made a real effort to get everything right, he’d learn to love me. If I became as capable as Ellen. So I taught myself to do all those things.’ She gestured towards the pantry, with its rows of preserves. ‘I even won prizes in the Glendenup Show.’ She was shaking her head slowly, as if amazed at her own folly. ‘It was like … like a search for some kind of meaning. What was life for, if my beautiful husband didn’t even want to know me? Me, I mean. The person I am inside.’
Mary was embarrassed by Clio’s candour, but she was interested in the marriage.
‘Am I boring you?’ Clio asked abruptly.
‘No, Clio. Not at all. Go on.’
Clio settled deeper into the chair. She was looking thin and tired, her hair tangled at the back from the pillow. ‘Then he killed David.’ Mary waited in silence, remembering what Janet had told her about the accident. ‘Everybody agreed it was an accident. As if a man would deliberately kill his own son.’
Tears were welling in those black eyes, and she swiped at them, smudging the moisture down her cheek. Mary passed her a tissue from the box on the dresser and she dabbed at her eyes.
‘Of course he didn’t do it on purpose, he couldn’t have. I kept telling myself that. But David was dead, my beautiful little boy, and somehow his death killed something in me, inside me, as if it was me he’d killed, and I could never manage to … to love Paul, not the way I had before, not after that.’ She lifted her head and stared past Mary, out through the window, and sat without speaking, her lips held tight.
Then she went on with her story. ‘It was Janet who came and told me. It was a weekend, lambing time, and she’d been driving down the race with Cec, behind Paul, to see the new lambs. She saw it happen. She’d gone back and phoned from her place, and the ambulance was on its way, and the nurse from Eticup. But she’d seen David, and there was no doubt he was dead. His neck was broken. I never saw him till the undertaker had tidied him up.’ She shifted her gaze to Mary. ‘David was … David was a lovely little boy. He’d just turned eight when he was killed. He used to get me to help him practise his reading, he loved the Dr Seuss books, and was just starting on Roald Dahl. He always wanted to read for himself. I made sure he had the books he liked. Martin never wanted to read, he’d rather be outside.’ She drew a deep breath. ‘David looked a lot like my father, the same luxuriant curls. He used to dance — jig around, really — when I played little tunes for him. He laughed. He wanted to learn the piano, but there wasn’t a teacher around here.’ Clio looked at Mary with sudden intensity. ‘He was such a happy child, the only thing on Downe that belonged to me. The only living thing.’ Clio’s gaze lost its focus, then she said, with flat finality, ‘I still had my viola then.’
A viola? This was the first Mary had heard about this. She knew vaguely that a viola was like a larger violin but had no idea what one sounded like. ‘What happened to it?’
Clio ignored the question. ‘David was a special little boy. Martin was always Paul’s boy, always tearing about the place. If one of them was going to be killed in an accident, it ought to have been Martin. Paul thought he was wonderful. David liked to stay around the house, listening to me practise. Paul thought he was a sissy. Joking, but he meant it.’ She sat silently for a moment. ‘Paul didn’t like David any more than he liked me.’
The picture Clio was painting was too awful to be true. ‘Why did you stay, then, Clio?’
Clio was quiet before she answered. ‘I thought about leaving. I thought about it a lot, but there were many reasons to stay that seemed compelling at the time. I’d invested a tremendous effort transforming myself into the perfect farm wife, and by then I didn’t know any other role. That was one reason. Then the stud was starting to do really well, and I thought I was entitled to a share in that, since some of it was due to my hard work.’ Her face suddenly looked ancient. ‘I remembered my mother saying
you’ve made your bed and now you must lie in it
. I’d made a mistake, letting myself be carried away by Paul’s courtship, and I felt bound to stand by my commitment. It sounds stupid now, doesn’t it. Terribly old-fashioned.’ She’d taken a fresh tissue from the box and, after dabbing the residue of tears from her cheeks was folding and pleating it in her lap. ‘And, in the end, I really had nowhere else to go. My mother was dead, my father married to a young wife, with a new family. My sister was in England, also married with a family. None of them would have wanted to take me in. I had no friends anywhere but here. And I had no money.’
She looked so downcast that Mary was moved to sympathy. ‘There isn’t an easy answer, is there?’
‘No. No, there isn’t. We can only do what seems best at the time. I’ve never lived on my own and the thought of doing it then, demoralised as I was, was … terrifying. Absolutely terrifying.’
Mary was eager to end these revelations, but in her present mood Clio would be likely to take any change of subject as a rebuff. So she asked gently, ‘How do you feel now, Clio? Are you thinking of leaving?’ It was an impertinent question, but if she wasn’t planning to leave, Clio would have to be an idiot.
‘Leaving?’ Clio’s mouth stretched slowly into a grin, absolutely without mirth. ‘Oh yes, Mary. I know I should have gone years ago, but I’m getting ready to leave now. I’ve left it far too long.’
A
LONE AGAIN
in the kitchen
,
Mary wondered how she’d have acted, in Clio’s shoes. Her own upbringing had been utterly different, moving from place to place as her father’s career had dictated. As an army wife, Mary’s mother had needed to be independent, and Mary had followed her example when she’d married Roy. His frequent absences had given her the opportunity to pursue her own interests, to work when she wanted to, and to study subjects that fascinated her. She’d had different expectations of marriage, and more confidence in her ability to live independently than Clio had.
But at least she was beginning to discover answers to some of the questions that had intrigued her.
With Clio’s gift of gloom lying so heavily on her, it took a real effort to bring a smile to her face when she heard Cec approaching the back door.
T
HE RESERVE
was alive with sunshine and the scent of honey. Clio had decided not to come with them, after all, and Cec and Mary walked along the sandy firebreak as they had before. The red leschenaultias were still lying like pools of fresh blood on the grey soil, and further on their heavenly blue cousins spread in a wave through the taller shrubs, forming something like the carpet of bluebells Mary had seen once in an English wood. Here, though, these taller plants weren’t stately oaks or beeches, but prickly leafed shrubs displaying just as many flowers as the smaller plants. Two weeks had made a difference: now an abundance of colours was weaving a luxuriant tapestry stretching as far as she could see.
Cec went ahead, in case of snakes. Mary walked with a deliberately heavy tread, crunching the scattering of leaf litter.
‘
Acacia drummondii
,’ Cec said, bending to a dwarf wattle just coming into bright golden flower. ‘Grevillea, mallee … you won’t remember their proper names. See these spider orchids?’ He stooped again to touch the long, fine petals, white shading to burgundy, radiating from a centre shaped like a tiny fringed slipper. Near them were greenish flowers so dainty they could be easily overlooked. ‘Those are bird orchids,’ Cec said. ‘
Pterostylis
barbata
. There might be some donkey orchids, too.’
He strode off into the scrub. Mary trailed after him and found him crouching over a clump of strappy leaves. ‘Thought they’d be out.’ The yellow and brown flowers he was indicating had two petals that stood up like a donkey’s ears, two narrow ones hanging down that suggested the animal’s long nose.
Suddenly Cec was alert, remaining on his haunches and indicating for Mary to be still. He was listening, his face alight with pleasure. In a minute, he pointed. Mary had no idea what she was looking for.
‘Blue. See that bright blue? It’s a male Splendid Fairy-wren. See him now? There’s his mate, see? You have to be quick, they’re like lightning.’
Mary focused on the high-pitched twittering. What a colour! The female’s plumage was much more subdued, with only a shading of blue on her wings and tail. As Mary watched, more of the duller birds appeared, flitting in and out of the dappled shadows; then, in a crescendo of trilling, they were gone.
Every step led to another colour, another design of flower, a differently shaped leaf, a dazzle of complexity. Cec was almost humming with enthusiasm; or was that subliminal buzz coming from the myriad insects that were busy feeding from all these flowers?
When Mary got back to the homestead, she was still elated. It was hard to imagine the kind of mind that would bulldoze acre after acre of that natural garden, simply to grow wheat or graze sheep. Surely there were enough places with fewer beautiful things growing on them that could have been cleared without the vandalism? But, as Cec had said, you couldn’t rewrite history, and it was no good grieving over things that couldn’t be changed. At least the reserve was still there, in all its glory.
M
ARY REGARDED HER SUNDAY BREAKFASTS
as a treat. This morning she browned two thick slices of the ham, without the glaze, and topped them with two perfectly poached eggs from Garth’s hens, dusted with paprika and garlic salt. While she was eating she browsed through Ellen’s diaries, being careful not to sully their pages with greasy finger marks or crumbs.
She was reading about Ben, the fourteen-year-old orphan boy the Hazlitts had brought with them from England. The sleepout she was using was the one they’d provided for Ben. Then later, when Ben had grown, they’d built separate quarters for him. That would be where Angus was living now. She wondered about the boy-turned-man: had Edgar paid him enough so that he could move away if he’d wanted to? Or had they kept him on short commons, with room and board as his recompense and only enough cash for tobacco, maybe, or a horse of his own and an occasional weekend among the fleshpots of Eticup? Had he been happy here or desperately lonely?