THE LAND was on a hillside, reached by a lane where half-a-dozen old elms had gone feral, produced hundreds of suckers that formed an undisciplined hedgerow.
I got out in the near-dark to open the gate, a vicious thing of twisted pipes and rusted wire that resented being unlatched and fought back as I dragged it through long grass.
Corin drove through and parked inside an open hayshed, a roof held up by massive eucalypt trunks. Beyond that was an old stone and brick barn, a long building with a loft door at one end. I closed the gate and walked down the track to join her, breathing out little ghosts of steam.
‘Welcome to Nightmarch Hill,’ said Corin, opening the vehicle’s back door. She was in her work clothes. ‘Named for Phar Lap’s brother.’
‘He’d be as well known as Elvis’s brother,’ I said.
‘Elvis had a brother?’
‘No.’
‘Well, Phar Lap did.’ She handed me a plastic crate of food. ‘Nightmarch. A man called Crossley bought the whole hill after he won twenty thousand pounds on him in the Epsom Handicap in 1929. It’s all broken up now but this bit kept the name. Don’t know why. The house is on the property next door. Dump the stuff at the door. I’ll get the generator going.’
She went around the side of the barn. I had everything at the side door of the barn when a diesel engine began to thump. Corin came back and opened the door, went in and switched on lights.
It was one large space with a brick-paved floor, a makeshift kitchen at one end, a collection of old chairs around a drum stove, a Ned Kelly, at the other, and a long table with benches on either side in the middle. Next to the table, a wide, sturdy ladder went up to a hole in the wooden ceiling. Three new French windows and a door had been knocked into the north wall.
‘The bathroom’s through the kitchen,’ said Corin. ‘You’ll be pleased to know there is one, complete with Scandinavian composting toilet.’
She’d been strained on the trip, arriving three-quarters of an hour late to pick me up, taking four long calls and making two in the ninety-minute drive. At one point, she said to a caller in a calm voice, ‘David, I understand your concerns but I assure you that I’ll meet the deadline.’ Pause. ‘Yes, the start has been slow.’ Pause. ‘No, I cannot bring them in over the weekend.’ Pause. ‘I’m sorry your client won’t be impressed.’ Pause. ‘No, I did not give any commitments on progress. My commitment is to a finishing date, that’s not going to be broken.’ Long pause. ‘David, for fuck’s sake, the job’ll be done on time if I have to build the fucking walls myself and lay the turf by fucking moonlight.’
‘Sorry about that,’ she’d said to me. ‘Losing control. Two big jobs and three smaller ones on the go. Been flat out for weeks, six days a week. I promised myself this afternoon off, got on the road at seven this morning to do it.’
Now she said, ‘The bedrooms are upstairs. Well, put it this way, upstairs is where you sleep.’
I carried my bottles of wine and the food crate down the room and put it on the kitchen counter.
‘There’s a bit of light left,’ she said. ‘Come and look at the vineyard.’
We went out of the north wall door onto a terrace. The day had been clear and to our left there was still a glow in the sky, like a fire burning on a long front, far away. Close-planted rows of small leafless vines began a few metres from the barn, ran down the slope away from us towards a dense line of bare trees. The sound of water moving came up the hill.
‘There’s a winter creek down there,’ said Corin. ‘Some years it runs well into summer. You can swim in the pools.’
I hadn’t stood next to her before. She was tall, straight-backed and I could see her profile against the light. She looked at me, I looked away, caught.
‘I picked grapes when I was a kid,’ I said. ‘The rows were further apart. And the vines.’
‘You’re an observant student,’ she said. ‘What my brother is attempting to do here has nothing to do with conventional viticultural practice. It has to do with viticultural stupidity. He found shiraz vines with the smallest fruit in the world and planted them close together. The idea is to put them under stress. Benign stress, they call it. Then you only allow the vines to produce small amounts of fruit. And, by hand, you pluck off half the leaves. With me to this point?’
‘No. Then what happens?’
‘If the theory’s correct and your site aspect’s perfect and the soils are right and the temperatures are optimal and the rainfall is what you need, and the birds haven’t eaten all your mini-berries, then you get small amounts of highly-concentrated fruit. You crush it and let it ferment with the wild yeasts. That’s like sending your precious children out to play with wild dogs.’
‘I’m beginning to see the charm of this,’ I said.
She looked at me and smiled, nodded.
We stood in silence, looking out on a world leaving our sight, just touching, feeling through the fabrics that enclosed us that we were touching.
Suddenly, it was dark, black, the far line of fire gone, extinguished, the world constricted, stopping where the tongues of light from the windows ended. No sound but the generator’s pulse and the moving water, winter water, urgent, going somewhere, irritated by banks and rocks and roots and trailing branches.
‘A fire and a drink,’ Corin said, all the tightness gone from her voice. ‘A cross-trained person like you could light the fire. It’s stacked, I do it before I leave. Obsessive-compulsive.’
We went inside. I knelt, scratched a kitchen match, put it to the Ned Kelly. It sniffed at the flame, drew breath, exploded, sucked oxygen out of the room.
‘First fire, then drink, then art,’ she said. ‘That’s evolution. In shorthand. I’ve brought this frozen stew thing. Make no claims for it, emergency rations, meat and veg. I cook a huge amount of it so that I can forget about cooking. Come home and be a vegetable.’
She fetched a red cast-iron pot, put it on the Kelly. I opened a bottle of white and we sat in the old armchairs, deep in the sag, generator thumping softly, fire making throaty noises, both comforting sounds.
‘Seeing you on television, that was awful,’ she said. ‘I wanted to ring but I couldn’t bring myself to. Have they found…’
‘No, not yet.’
‘The job, it seemed to have gone beyond mediation.’
‘Well beyond, into the wild blue yonder, in fact. I don’t want any more jobs like that. I’m better at dealing with hundred-kilogram men trying to strangle me. That’s straightforward, not a lot of ambiguity.’
‘You have a turn of phrase for a man of action,’ Corin said.
‘I read a lot, books on propagation, soil structure, that sort of thing. Tell me why you’re in a position to take your students away for the weekend.’
‘Why?’
‘Why you aren’t married to some restaurant designer.’
She laughed. ‘Married to the job, that’s why. The moving of the earth, the transforming of nature.’
I waited.
‘I had a long relationship, I hate that bloody word, I had an affair with a married man that went on for seven years. Hard to believe anyone can be that stupid.’ She got up and lifted the lid on the pot, stirred the contents. ‘He was always on the verge of leaving his wife and kids. It was just months away, just some final thing that had to be done. In the school holidays, his wife and kids would go to the house on the Peninsula and I’d see him every day except weekends. I think it was those times that kept me in a state of stupidity. It was like being married to him.’
She sat down again, drank wine, met my eyes. ‘You don’t want to hear this kind of stuff,’ she said. ‘Let’s talk football.’
‘What happened?’
‘I’ll give you the closing scene,’ she said. ‘We sometimes went out to dinner with another couple, she was a friend of Don’s, that was his name, Don. I think he’d slept with her in the distant past. The guy was also a married man, also an architect. One night, we ate in a hotel in Collins Street, it was always hotel restaurants for some reason, less likely to bump into people you knew, I suppose. The other couple had had a fight before they got there, the air was crackling. The guy got smashed in about half an hour, Don was keeping pace with him. Then the woman just got up and left.’
Corin paused for breath. ‘I don’t know why I’m telling you this,’ she said. ‘It must be the mediator in you.’
‘Go on. The woman left.’
‘Yes. More drink, they were both pissed. And then, and this is it, the bloke took out his wallet and showed Don a picture of his kids. He was misty with pride and love. And Don, he got misty too and he took out his wallet and found a picture of his kids. They sat there looking at the pictures of each other’s families. Two proud family men. I had an overdue moment of blinding clarity, got up and left and I never, never saw him again. Put the phone down on him twenty times, wouldn’t open the door to him. That was that.’
‘Then you married the job?’
She smiled. ‘I had a few toyboys first, dabbled in boytoys, but they’re ultimately unsatisfying. Now I’m happy just rearranging things. The surface of the earth. Your turn. What happened to you?’
I thought about it, tried to sum it up. ‘I had an army marriage first. It lasted fifteen months, of which I was home for about fifteen minutes, not all that time at once. Then when I was a cop, I married an accountant, I met her when she did my tax return. I was home a bit more for that marriage but not much and I wasn’t wonderful fun when I was.’
It was her turn to wait. ‘So?’ she said.
‘She met someone she liked, a bloke with a normal job, likes to go to the movies, listen to music, read. He runs a paint shop in Doncaster, sells paint. Divorced. His wife went off with a house painter. Also a tax client of hers.’
‘And you hate the bastard.’
‘No. Well, I did for about five minutes after she told me. Four minutes. Three. Then the beeper went and I had to say, sorry, I’ve got to go to Werribee to talk some whacko out of murdering his whole family. That took most of the night and then we all had a few drinks, had a beer breakfast, and she’d gone when I got home.’
‘To the paint man?’
‘Yes. I see her sometimes. I’ve been to their house. They invited me before Christmas. To a barbecue, mostly accountants and house painters. She’s happy. He’s got time for her, talks to her like a friend, asks her what she thinks. You can see how they are together. No jagged edges.’
I finished the wine, got up and poured more into the glasses. ‘Walking away from me, I can’t fault that decision,’ I said. ‘The me I was then, anyway. I’m a different me now, a mellow and relaxed person in a stress-free occupation.’
That amused her. I was an admirer of her smile. And to provoke it was heaven.
We sat in silence for a while, looking at each other, smiling. Then we got on to other subjects, laughed, drank more wine, ate her delicious stew. It was after eleven when Corin said, ‘My bedtime. We who work with the earth go to bed early. And tomorrow we prune. Savagely.’
‘I’ll just sit here for a bit,’ I said. ‘I’m too mellow and relaxed to move. Is there a torch? I’ll put the generator off. I’ve done that.’
‘I don’t doubt it.’ She found a torch, put it on the table, went to the bathroom, came back face shining. ‘When you get to the top of the ladder,’ she said, ‘there’s a landing. Your room’s straight ahead. Spartan. But you’d know about spartan.’
‘I’m trying to forget about spartan,’ I said. ‘Goodnight.’
She touched my shoulder, her hand lingered for a moment, I could smell her perfume, then she left, walked up the ladder as if it were a staircase.
I drank a last glass of red wine, took the torch and went out to the generator. It shut down reluctantly, in the manner of diesel engines, thumped, thumped and gave a last few thumps, and all was still, black and still, no sound but the rushing sibilance of the creek. For a while, I stood outside the barn, in the dark, part of the quiet, listening.
Inside, the big room was warm, warmth that went up your cuffs, down your collar, the only light coming from the stove, a soft yellow light. I missed Corin, hated the idea that she’d left me, didn’t want to go to bed, poured another half-glass of wine, put a last log on, sat down by the fire, thought about how I didn’t want to go back to the city, ever.
I didn’t hear her over the crackling in the stove. She came on bare feet, down the ladder and across the space behind me, walked around in front of me, a tall woman in a white shift, pulled it over her head, warm light on her breasts, on her belly. She knelt astride me, took my head in both hands, kissed me, drew my head to her chest, buried my face in her warmth, in her skin, in the smell of her, took my hand and pressed it on her.
Later, lying in Corin’s bed, up in the old hayloft, still the lingering scent of dry hay, my head on her breasts, I said, ‘This is a bit of an adventure for me. Just being alone with an attractive woman. Well, any woman really.’
‘I feel betrayed. I was told that mediators took vows of abstinence. That’s why I felt so safe inviting you for the weekend.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Those are gladiators. It’s to save their strength for the combat.’
‘Oh shit,’ she said.
‘It’s all right. Mediators only proceed by consensus. They’re bound by the oath of consensus.’
‘That sounds like something from school history. In 1202, Magnus IV broke the Oath of Consensus and invaded Sangria.’