Salt Creek (26 page)

Fred proposed a walk in the afternoon, to show Charles the things that had changed. Skipper brought down a kangaroo while we stood watching. A small mob was passing through (they'd become a rarity and we'd stopped to wonder at the sight) and when Skipper struck one lagging behind they became a ball of rolling fur. A second later she was panting and grinning over the kangaroo. She was useless as a working dog – only put her near a flock of sheep and she scattered them for miles – but a wonderful hunter. Try as we might to keep her and the natives' dogs apart, we could not. They would find each other. Papa had taken more than one of her puppies – tall, fast, variegated hounds – to the natives by way of making connections, and they prized them for their speed and strength.

One thing that was sad: it was a female kangaroo and in its pouch we found a baby still living. It was a sweet thing, its head part deer, part puppy, and with the longest back feet: a ridiculous creature. I found a soft old cloth – one of the baby blankets – and made it a nest by the stove where it sat trembling while on the other side of the oven door its mother roasted. Fred carried it about after that, tucked in his shirt, feeding it cow's milk mixed with warm water, and the next day it began lolloping behind him like a dog. Skipper stalked it with her eyes and whined until Fred shouted at her, which hurt her feelings and made her sulk. The creature became the sun to us; we orbited around the strangeness of it and in this way she drew us together.

In the week that followed Charles busied himself: chopping wood and attending to the house cows and riding out with Fred to feed the sheep or move them. He sometimes found time to work on his drawings in the kitchen while I was cooking. I stopped to make us both a cup of tea and while we were together I had a strange sensation inside watching his brown hands and arms and face and neck where the collar buttons were left undone and wondered how different his skin might be where it had been hidden from light, as mine was. Sometimes we talked and sometimes we didn't and it was fine either way.

We rowed to the peninsula one day, not talking of anything profound while crossing, just of the things of town life that I remembered and missed: school and company and dancing and nice clothes, books, and buildings made of stone, my grandparents, a place and a time where nature did not seem constantly to be conspiring against us. It was as if I were pretending to be someone else, the words I was saying and the things they represented no part of my life and not likely to be. Perhaps this was how Addie felt: a great separation between words and actions and thoughts and feelings. Charles was quiet for the most part, just letting me pretend. We arrived on the opposite shore. I rowed hard at it and leapt onto the sand before the boat could slide back and held it steady until Charles was clear too.

The weather changed while we were on the sea beach. The wind blew from the south and the waves thrashed the shore and I thought of Papa's dead sheep in the deep, draggled and grey, plunging in the water and taken down by the weight of their wool or eaten by sharks. But I suppose the ship was their coffin. The air was sickly yellow, as if the clouds overhead were the water's surface seen from below. I was beneath water once and opened my eyes and looked towards the skin that separated water from air and it had appeared so. I couldn't help shivering.

‘Are you cold?' Charles said.

‘Cold? It's not so bad. I've grown used to it.'

He took my hand – ‘You're near frozen' – and rubbed it and took off his jacket and made me put it on, standing before me to do up the buttons. He was slow and his fingers were not as neat as I had seen them at other times. It smelled like him, of wood smoke and a little of sweat. It was warm. It was what I imagine being held by him might feel like. It was soft at the collar against my cheek, a worn velvet, rougher elsewhere, the colour of tobacco.

He pulled the collar up at the back. ‘There.' He put his hands to my arms and rubbed up and down. I couldn't help liking the sensation.

‘Thank you.'

‘I'll need it when I go. I have no other.'

‘It's as well I have one then.' Charles stepped back. I spoke so hatefully sometimes that it startled me as it did him. But I knew where all my feelings could lead. I could not stop myself inclining towards Charles but I couldn't help hating myself for it, and him for that too, and for having thought so much of him when he wasn't there and for imagining – knowing – what it would be like after he left. I dreaded it. What was to become of me, what was to become of me, what was to become of me? This was the pulse of me. What did Charles's pulse tell him? Draw, paint, travel? I didn't know.

Tull and Papa returned the next day. It was Fred who spent most time with Tull, and I thought missed him most when he was gone until I saw him greeted by Addie that afternoon.

She flew at him. ‘You're back. It's been so dull without you.'

Tull held up his hands to fend her off and stepped back, but he was grinning. ‘Addie,' he said.

She smacked his arm – lightly. That she touched him at all seemed strange, but there was the smile they held too and something about the space that smile created that was theirs alone. Fred frowned at the sight and went stamping out into the rain to help Papa. Charles looked from them to me.

‘Addie,' I said. ‘Could you fetch another packet of tea from the storehouse?'

‘Why?' she said.

‘Because I asked.'

‘Tull can help then.'

So they went together when I had meant to separate them.

It took some minutes for Addie to crash back through the door, in better spirits now. ‘That's the last of it,' she said. She tipped it into the canister.

Papa came to the door, grim as he always was after he'd been at Tinlinyara. He scraped the mud from his boots and kicked them off and came inside and his clothes began to steam before the fire, sending out a strong smell of damp wool and mud.

‘Papa,' I said.

‘Yes?'

‘Charles Bagshott is here – for a week or two.'

‘Charles Bagshott? Whatever for? Where is he then?'

‘Here, sir,' Charles said, coming through the hall door with a bundle of papers. ‘My father thought you might like these. News. Some from England.'

Papa took them. ‘I thank you for them.'

‘I hope I may stay. Hester said—'

‘Yes, yes, of course.' But it was evident from the way he dropped the papers to the table that his mind was elsewhere.

Fred chose that moment to come into the room, the baby kangaroo behind him.

Papa frowned. ‘Where did you come by that?'

‘Skip killed its mother.'

‘You should have let her kill it too. It won't end well.' The kangaroo chose that moment to rub its nose with a paw – it was the sweetest thing – and Fred scooped it up. Papa couldn't resist any more than we could. ‘Well, you have been busy taking in strays. I suppose you may try, if you have the time.'

‘Hear that?' Fred said to the kangaroo. ‘It's life for you,' and sat it on his lap and began tipping sips of milk from a tea-spoon into its mouth.

‘Papa,' I said, since he seemed to be taking things quite well. ‘Stores are running low. The tea's nearly finished, and the sugar, and—'

Papa shut his eyes and kept them shut. ‘Some more tea if you please, Hester.'

I drained the teapot and began making a fresh pot.

‘But never mind. I'm sure we can do without for a while, until it's convenient.' I refilled his tea-cup. ‘Here, Papa, and some letters that came while you were gone.'

He opened his eyes again and gathered himself, opening the letters: one he threw into the fire, another he put aside, a third he read, his eye slowing more than once and returning to read a particular section. ‘Well, I hope I know my duty,' he said when he'd finished it.

‘What, Papa?'

‘Reverend Taplin asking something of me. I'll need to go to Milang for stores in any case. Tull can come with me, I think.'

‘He's just come home,' Addie burst out. ‘Fred should go.'

‘I'm sure he won't mind,' Papa said. ‘A few days' rest first. And now to wash, I think. I'm feeling rather—' and he fluttered his hands at his side in some gesture of discomfort.

Charles was taken aback that evening by the sight of Tull reading by the fire and Addie nearby playing a soft tune on the pianoforte and singing a song of her own invention. ‘He is quite at home then,' he murmured to me.

‘He's lived here for years. He was when you visited.'

‘I thought it was temporary.'

‘You know Papa. “All men are created equal”.'

‘He was quieter then I suppose. I didn't notice him so much when there were so many of you.'

‘He's almost family to us. We don't think of it.'

‘If you saw the way they were treated elsewhere— What's he reading?'

‘Darwin's new book, I think.'

‘Good God. I'm glad Father's not here to see it.'

‘Yes.'

Addie's manner and Charles's words made me see Tull afresh. He was very tall now, and wider only at shoulder and deeper only through his chest. His trousers were held up with an old belt and they and his shirts, although clean, were patched – and when outside he carried over his shoulder a reed bag. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, the way his self stood in relief against his shabby clothing, I saw how he moved, every step like the beginning of a dance, slow but with contained power and above that, above all, with a grace that was particular to him. Now it seemed obvious and made me uncomfortable to think so. If I could see this in dispassion what might it be like for Addie? If she felt towards Tull as I tried not to towards Charles – and now this did not seem ridiculous, but inevitable and unstoppable – things could only go ill for her. Tull made me fearful on Addie's account and I resolved to speak to her about keeping a proper distance.

Papa and Tull were home for only three days and after they left we had the joy of Addie short-tempered once more. Charles wished to do some sketches of the peninsula and since it was a calm day, and with the lure of escaping Addie, we rowed across once more, pelicans bobbing away on either side. I tied the boat to a scrubby bush.

‘You must see this, Charles. You'll be amazed and then if you still want to you can do your drawing I suppose.'

I followed the path along the edge of the lagoon. We came to an opening between high sandy bluffs and I scrambled up, ahead of Charles, clutching snaking roots in one hand and my skirt in the other ‘Come on, town boy. Keep up. You are grown soft.'

‘And you are grown outspoken.'

‘Am I?' I stopped and looked back at Charles who was still below me.

‘Not really. Or only a little more than you already were.'

‘Oh no. It's what I say to Addie and now I have become it too. We won't be fit for town.'

‘You'll be fine. I like it. You are—'

‘Please, do not say unusual. There is nothing worse than to be unusual. Whatever would Grandmama say?'

‘She is not here, so what does it matter?'

‘But I plan to go back, to take Addie or she'll never be fit for town life. I should do it now, but I don't know how.' We had reached the top of the hill and the wind and the roar of the ocean were around us.

‘Does Mr Finch approve?'

‘He doesn't know, and you mustn't say it to him. You mustn't.'

‘No. I won't, if that's what you want.'

‘There's no money to get us there, but I will find a way.'

‘Don't think of it now. There will come a time, I'm sure.'

‘That's what Mrs Robinson, Mrs Martin now, from the Travellers Rest, said to me once. And Mama. People say these things but don't tell me how.'

The path sloped down and widened and the wind dropped and the sun fell on us. It was sheltered and warmer in here and white flowers were opening on the bushes around us as they did at the end of winter. Small bees dithered and the sound sent me after all this time to our garden in Adelaide, to its daisies and roses and the jacaranda that had been coming on so well when we left, that Papa had said would one day be a climbing tree, if not for his own children then for his grandchildren. People would look over the fence and gaze in for the pleasure of the colours and the scents. Once I saw someone with their face buried in the white lilac and when I commented on the sweetness of the scent the woman lifted her head and I saw that she had been weeping. ‘Sorry, Miss,' she said. ‘It reminds me so much of home that I couldn't help meself.' Well, I knew what she meant now, except it was the sound of the bees for me, and the thought of all we had lost, Mama included, but I would not cry. I looked back. Charles was ambling along, looking about with curiosity, as if everything, all of life and not just this moment, was the most wonderful adventure and had been put in his way for his pleasure alone. How comfortable the world was for him; how well he fitted inside it.