Corroboree (5 page)

Eyre felt much more cheerful now, and spread out the blanket on top of the crisp, curled-up bark from the
surrounding gum-trees. He hummed to himself the chorus from ‘Country Ribbons'.

‘
In her hair were country ribbons, tied in bows of pink and white
…' and uncorked the bottle of Madeira and took a mouthful straight from the neck to warm himself up.

Over his right shoulder, the moon had risen over the distant undulating peaks of the Mount Lofty Range, and Mount Lofty itself, the mountain the Aborigines called Yureidla. The dogs over at the new flour mill began to yip and howl again; but probably because there were dingoes around, hunting for Mr Cairns's poultry.

He thought of the morning he had first seen Charlotte, seven months ago, when her father had brought her down to the wharf to watch the unloading of pumping machinery from England. It had been a bright, busy day, with a fresh wind blowing across the mouth of the harbour; and Eyre had been supervising the loading of a ripe-smelling cargo of raw wool, bound for Yorkshire, with the stub of a pencil stuck behind one ear, and his scruffiest britches on.

His fellow clerk Christopher Willis had nudged him, and said, ‘What do you think of that, then, Eyre, for a prize ornament?'

Eyre had raised one hand to shield his eyes from the sun; and had stared at Charlotte in complete fascination. She was small, white-skinned, and angelically pretty, with blonde curls straying out from the brim of her high straw bonnet. At first she had appeared almost too doll-like to be true, especially the way in which she was standing so demurely beside her father in her pink fringed shawl; but when she turned and looked towards Eyre he saw that she had a mouth that was pouty and self-willed and a little petulant; the mouth of a spoiled little rich girl who needed taming as well as courting. The sort of girl who could benefit from being put over a chap's knee, and spanked.

‘Well, well,' Eyre had remarked, and grinned across the wharf at her and winked.

‘That's not for you, Master Walker,' Christopher had
chided him. ‘That's Lathrop Lindsay's only and unsullied daughter; and he's keeping her in virginal isolation until royalty comes to Adelaide, or at the very least a duke; or an eligible governor, not like poor old George Gawler.'

‘She scarcely looks real, does she?' Eyre had murmured. ‘And by all the stars, look, she's smiling at me.'

‘Scowling, more like, if she takes after papa,' Christopher had told him. ‘Lathrop Lindsay's temper is one of the hazards that they warn settlers about, before they embark from Portsmouth; that, and the heat, and the death-adders, and the tubercular fever.'

‘No, no, she's definitely smiling at me,' Eyre had insisted, and had ostentatiously doffed his hat, and bowed.

‘Who's that impudent ruffian?' he had heard Lathrop demanding, in a voice like a blaring trumpet. ‘You! Yes,
you
, you scoundrel! Be off with you before I have you thrashed!'

Eyre hadn't seen Charlotte for several weeks after that; although he had bicycled out several times to Waikerie Lodge, where the Lindsays lived, and sat on the wroughtiron seat across the road in the hope of catching a glimpse of her, occasionally smoking one of his brandy-flavoured cheroots, or eating an apple.

That was why it had been such a stroke of good fortune when Lathrop's senior manager, a morose man called Snipps, had visited the offices of the South Australian Company where Eyre was working, and had asked if Mr Lindsay could be expeditiously assisted with a cargo of wheat, which was lying at the dockside without a merchantman to take it. Eyre had immediately arranged for a Bristol ship which was already half-loaded with wool to be unloaded again, and for Mr Lindsay's cargo to be taken in preference; and at a preferential rate. The irate sheep-owner whose wool it was hadn't discovered that his cargo was still in the warehouse at Port Adelaide until the ship was already halfway across the Great Australian Bight; but
Eyre had been able to mollify him with the promise of the very next ship, and a case of good whisky.

Most important for Eyre, however, had been an invitation two weeks later to a garden-party at Waikerie Lodge, in gratitude for his assistance. There, on the green sunlit lawns, where peacocks clustered, he had been introduced formally to Lathrop; and to Mrs Lindsay, and at last to Charlotte. He and Charlotte had said nothing very much as Lathrop had brought them together; but there had been an exchange of looks between them, his challenging, hers provocative; and Eyre had known at once that they could be lovers.

Later, munching one of Mrs McMurtry's teacakes, Eyre had spoken for a while to Lathrop of shipping costs; and how those who knew friendly clerks in the South Australian Company could save themselves considerable amounts of money, especially if the bills of lading showed that cargoes weren't quite as weighty as one might have imagined them to be. And Lathrop (who hadn't once recognised Eyre as the ‘impudent ruffian' from the wharf) gave him a sober and watery-eyed look that meant business.

From then on, Eyre had been a regular visitor at Waikerie Lodge, either on business or on social calls; and he and Charlotte had been drawn together like two dark solar bodies, feeling the tug of each other's sexual gravity and being unable and unwilling to resist it.

Eyre looked at his watch again. On the inside of the lid was engraved a crucifix, and the words ‘
Time flies, death urges, knells call, heaven invites, hell threatens,
' and then ‘Henry L. Walker, 1811'. The watch was the only gift that his father had given him when he had decided to emigrate to Australia; and he both treasured it and resented it; but it told the time with perfect accuracy, and now it was eleven minutes past ten.

He heard a low call. Yanluga, skirting around the garden. Then he heard the back gate creak open, and the swishing of skirts on the grass. Before he knew it, Charlotte
was there, in her shawl and her blue ruffled dress, pale-faced and smelling of lily-of-the-valley. Her blonde curls shone in the moonlight, and her eyes glistened with emotion. Eyre held out his arms to her, and she came to him, in a last quick rustle of silk; and then they were holding each other close, closer than ever before.

‘Oh, Eyre,' she said. ‘I'm so sorry about what happened. If only I had known that father was coming back so soon.'

He kissed her forehead, and then her eyes, and then her lips. ‘Shush now; it wasn't your fault. If anybody's to blame, it's me, for upsetting your family so.'

‘Hold me tight,' she begged him. ‘I'm so frightened that father won't allow us to see each other again.'

‘He can't do that.'

Charlotte shook her head. ‘He can; and if he's really angry, he will.'

‘Yanluga says he suffers from
ngraldi.
'

‘
Ngraldi?
' asked Charlotte. She rested her face against his lapels, and held him tight around the waist, as if she were afraid that he might suddenly become lighter than air, and bob up into the night sky like a gas balloon. Eyre stroked the parting of her hair, and grunted with amusement.

‘What's
ngraldi?
' she asked.

‘Rage. I just like the sound of it. There's your father, getting into a
ngraldi
again.'

‘But you've upset him terribly. He couldn't talk about anything else at dinner, except how you'd besmirched my reputation.'

Eyre kissed her again; right on her pouting mouth. ‘Don't you worry about your father. He'll calm down, I'm sure of it; especially when he remembers how much money I'm saving him every month on shipping costs.'

‘I don't know. He had a partner once, Thomas Weir, and even though he lost thousands of pounds, he refused to take Thomas Weir back, once they'd argued. He's so set in his ways; and he always believes he's so
right.
'

Eyre said, ‘Sit down. I've brought a blanket. And some
Madeira wine, too, if you can manage to drink it out of the bottle. I couldn't work out a way of carrying glasses on my bicycle.'

Charlotte spread her skirt and sat down on the rug under the stringy-bark gums. She looked like a fantasy, in the unreal light of that cold and uncompromising moon; and the gums around her shone an unearthly blue-white, as if they were frightened spirits of the night, the slaves of Koobooboodgery.

Eyre flipped up his coat-tails and sat down close to her, taking her hands between his.

‘It's so good to see you,' he said. ‘This afternoon, I began to be worried that I might never set eyes on you again.'

Charlotte said, ‘Dear Eyre. But it isn't going to be easy. Father doesn't go away again until just before Christmas, when he usually travels to Melbourne.'

‘Surely he won't stay angry for as long as that.'

‘Eyre, he wants me to marry into the aristocracy.'

‘Of course he does. Every father in Adelaide wants to see his daughter married to a man who's wealthy, or famous, or well-bred; or all three. But the truth is that there aren't very many of those to be had. Some of those fathers will have to accept the fact that if their daughters are going to be married at all, they will have to put up with clerks for husbands, or farmers, or dingo-hunters, if they're not too quick off the mark.'

‘Father said he would gladly see you hung,' Charlotte told him. She kissed him again, and he felt the softness of her cheek, and the disturbing lasciviousness of her lips. She was a girl of such contrasts: of such pretty mannerisms but such provoking sensuality; of bright and brittle intelligence but stunning directness; polite but candid; teasing but thoughtful; flirtatious but brimming with deeply felt emotions. Sometimes she was a woman who had not yet outgrown the coquettishness of girlhood; at other times she was an innocent girl whose life was slowly nudging out into the heady stream of sexual maturity, like a boat on the Torrens River. She was trembling on the cusp of
nineteen; and tonight she was probably more desirable than she would ever be again; sugar-candy and butterflies and claws. She knew how captivating she was; and yet she had not yet learned to use her attraction cruelly, or cynically, simply for the pleasure of seeing some poor beau dance on a string.

Eyre kissed her in return; much more forcefully, much more urgently. Their tongues wriggled together, until Eyre's tongue-tip penetrated Charlotte's slightly opened teeth, and probed inside her mouth, tasting the sweetness of it.

They parted for a few moments. Charlotte lay back on the blanket and stared up at him, without saying anything. Her mouth was still moist with their shared saliva, and she made no attempt to wipe it away.

Eyre said, ‘Yanluga told me something today. I don't know how true it was; whether he was just trying to be nice to me.'

‘Yanluga thinks the world of you. You're the only white man who has ever treated him with any respect. Men like my father don't think anything of the blackfellows; they don't even believe that they're human. Father's always striking Yanluga with his riding-crop. Once he made him pick up a coin that he had dropped, and then stepped on his fingers, just to hear him howl. He says they're like babies, the blackfellows, it's good for them to howl.'

Eyre was silent for a moment. Then he said, ‘Yanluga told me you'd quite care to marry me, if you could.'

Charlotte slowly smiled.

‘Is it true?' Eyre asked her.

She nodded. ‘But he wasn't supposed to tell you. I shall whip him myself when I get back to the house.'

Eyre said, ‘I want to marry you, too. And if that sounds like a proposal, well, I suppose it is. I very much like the sound of “Mrs Charlotte Walker.” '

Charlotte said, ‘Father won't allow it, you know. He won't even let you come near the house.'

‘Can't your mother intervene?'

‘She's tried. Poor dear mother. She was trying all evening to persuade father what a wonderful upright person you were; but he wasn't listening. He doesn't
want
to listen. He never thinks of my happiness, that's why. All he can think about is being the father-in-law to some English baron; or some famous explorer; or something that will give him glory.'

Eyre looked down at her, and stroked her cheek, and then her neck. ‘What can we do, then?' he whispered.

‘We could wait until I'm twenty-one; although he can make it difficult for me even then, because of my inheritance. Or you could go off and do some magnificent deed, and be knighted for it.'

‘What magnificent deed could a clerk do?' asked Eyre. ‘Fill in three thousand bills of lading in a week? Write up a record number of ledgers? And even if I
could
think of something magnificent to do, how are we to manage in the meantime, with a love that can't even be admitted in daylight?'

Charlotte reached up and held the hand that was stroking her cheek. She kissed his fingers, and then she said, ‘We can manage. We must manage. But you mustn't be shocked.'

‘Shocked?' he asked her.

She put her fingertip up to her pursed lips. ‘Sssh,' she said; and then she reached down and unlaced the ribbon that held the bodice of her pale blue dress.

Eyre said, ‘Charlotte?' but she shushed him again, and slowly drew out the criss-cross ribbon until her bodice was open to the waist. Then, eyes dreamily half-closed, she took his hand and slid it underneath the white silk lining until it was cupping her warm bare breast.

She whispered, ‘You mustn't be shocked, or then I will shock myself. I love you, Eyre; I want you to touch me. I want you to love me just as much in return. Sometimes I tease you but I want you. I have dreams about you, dreams about kissing you; dreams that make me wake up feeling hot, and confused.'

Slowly, fascinated, he caressed her nipple between finger and thumb until he could feel it crinkle tight. Charlotte let her head drop back on to the blanket, her eyes completely closed now, her breath coming quick and harsh from between her parted lips.