Summer at Mount Hope (7 page)

‘And so, you see, machines can't do everything, we still need people,' Marius said, as if that settled the matter. But Phoeba wanted the conversation to continue – after all, Lilith was just getting warmed up. ‘You only need half as many people,' said Phoeba, provocatively.

‘Yes. That's the point,' he said.

‘Could you pass me the potatoes, please Marius?' said Lilith. Her eyes were brimming with jealousy and there was a desperate ring in her voice.

Robert pulled his napkin from his collar. ‘Come, Marius,' he said, ‘we'll find a better bottle in my cellar, something more subtle.'

Phoeba felt a slight dread: Lilith wouldn't like this.

‘Hand me the potatoes,' snapped Lilith.

Phoeba handed her the potatoes.

‘Robert, you haven't carved!' cried Maude, but Marius had discarded his serviette.

‘Ouch,' yelled Lilith and the precious potato dish lid clattered onto the silver saltcellar and bounced onto the butter dish, knocking the pert rose handle from its top and leaving a pale shallow crater. For a moment there was silence. Lilith blew on her fingertips and said in her most wounded voice, ‘Phoeba! The dish was so hot!'

Robert chucked his napkin at her and it landed on her head, covering her face. ‘You dropped it.'

Lilith whipped the serviette down and wrapped it around her scalded hand.

Marius gazed at her hurt, pretty face.

‘It was just so heavy …' she said, shakily.

Tears welled in Maude's eyes and she said weakly, ‘That was my mother's tureen, Phoeba.'

But Phoeba didn't care. Marius Overton was completely captured by her irritating little sister: he was staring at her as if he had finally found something to interest him.

At that moment, Aunt Margaret appeared in the doorway, her green eyes twinkling brilliantly and her fingers black with sketching charcoal. ‘Oh good, you haven't started.'

‘It's just ended in ruins,' said Maude, her face flushing red and sweat beading her top lip. She bustled from the room waving a serviette at her crimson throat.

Aunt Margaret plonked down in Maude's seat and held her empty wineglass out to Marius.

He hesitated, transfixed by her startling appearance. The full glare of the midday sun was catching the greying hairs on both her chin and her top lip.

‘You'd have to be the rich squatter,' said Aunt Margaret, returning the scrutiny. ‘I'm the poor aunt.' She wiggled her glass and Marius poured the last of the wine into it. Robert went for more. Eventually they ate.

Aunt Margaret held court for the entire meal conducting a healthy discussion on the introduction of rabbits and the overgrazing of livestock which caused erosion, on the drought, on selective breeding and the eventual extinction of some breeds of common farm animals. From which she moved seamlessly to votes for women and, finally, the artists' colony at Esperance.

Lilith recovered. She smiled, she laughed, she said, ‘How interesting' a lot. Marius, in between trying Robert's wine, was totally engaged by her. When he left at somewhere around four o'clock, he had the distinct impression that the Crupps were a generous lot with quite advanced notions and that their youngest daughter, Lilith, was a charming, bright girl.

Phoeba felt peaceful, as if she had finally finished a game of Patience without cheating. It wasn't until she was in bed that night that she thought of Hadley and realised she hadn't seen him for three days.

Henrietta had spent that afternoon chopping kindling for the copper. She'd already chopped the day's wood, but when her mother's guest, Mr Titterton, after his tea and pikelets, had stood at the mantelpiece reading Shakespeare sonnets – ‘When forty winters shall besiege thy brow, And dig deep trenches in thy beauty's field …' – Henrietta had left.

She rested a pine log on its end on the chopping stump, eyed the spot between two knots where the grain curved, then swung the axe to split the log into two neat halves, which tumbled to rest at her boots. She split her halves again and again until she had a wheelbarrow full of sweet, pale woodchips with some medium-sized branches and a couple of good logs piled carefully on top of the kindling. Leaning against her axe, she caught sight of her brother, a figure in the distance, a man in shirtsleeves shepherding a small flock of confused rams through a dry paddock: strange, she thought he had moved them just yesterday. Life without Hadley would be tolerable when he went to Overton. She would ride with Phoeba to see him and there would be no more collars to starch or shirts to iron.

Taking off her felt hat, she wiped her forehead with her sleeve and set out across the yard towards the laundry with the wheelbarrow.

At the parlour window she caught a glimpse of her mother as she fell towards Mr Titterton, who caught her in his arms. Fainted again, thought Henrietta, those corsets – but then Mr Titterton lowered his head and opened his mouth and the Widow Pearson's bonnet tipped back. They were kissing, clamped together at the mouth, a corpse's teeth rubbing against her mother's. Henrietta's heart thudded and she felt like she had been dancing too long in a tin shed in summer. The wheelbarrow handles twisted in her hands and the barrow skewed and crashed, spilling her carefully balanced wood across the dirt. She plopped down on the wood box, removed her hat again and fanned her cheeks as they flushed red.

‘Erk,' she said.

She gathered up her wood and went to the washhouse. And as the serviettes and sheets swirled in the boiling copper, Henrietta worried. What would she do if they got married? Surely they wouldn't. Should she tell Hadley?

By the time the towels, smalls and finally the handkerchiefs were on the line, Henrietta had decided not to tell her younger brother. It would ruin his start at Overton and he already seemed preoccupied enough by that. But if old Mr Tit did marry their mother, what would become of her and Hadley? She would talk to Phoeba about it all. Phoeba would know what to do.

Thursday, January 4, 1894

T
hursday was cheese day, so Phoeba milked Maggie early. Lilith, who didn't do cheese, took charge of the mending and fancy-stitching. She preferred less taxing duties on the whole – replenishing vases, plumping cushions and filling the kerosene lamps every day.

Aunt Margaret took herself to the vegetable garden with her sketchpad and when Phoeba arrived in the kitchen to make the cheese she found her mother there, soaking the dry fruit to make a plum cake.

‘Why are you making such a rich cake in the middle of summer, Mother?'

‘It's good for the digestion, everyone knows that.'

‘There's no point making wedding cake for me.'

‘The vicar may call,' said Maude, her voice rising. ‘We need something to feed him.'

‘The vicar doesn't need feeding,' said Phoeba and she dumped the milk bucket on the table.

Robert wandered through from the vineyard where he had been blotting dew from the berries with cotton rags. He picked up his newspaper, said, ‘It's going to be 103 degrees by midday,' and went to the front veranda. Spot stood against the fence, his ears forward, watching small groups of surly, straggling people – more itinerants from Geelong, Robert supposed – move up the lane. They paused at the signpost then wandered towards Mount Hope and through the yard, a grubby lot, grimy and tattered, with their blackened camp gear slung over their backs. Robert watched the parade: the kids with boils and their mothers with green teeth; the men with beards stiff with matted knots.

‘Campin' at the outcrop,' said the leader flatly. He was a small bearded man with ruptured blemishes all over his face. ‘

After harvest work, are you?' said Robert in his most friendly tone. He couldn't say that he didn't want them to camp there – because he knew if he did, they'd burn his house or crop.

The leader glanced back at the grapevines and spat on the ground near Maude's stressed petunias.

‘You're not interested in grapes?' Robert asked.

‘Fruit?' He shook his head. ‘Grain is what we know.'

‘Good luck to you,' said Robert. Here was a group that wouldn't like Marius's new Sunshine harvester.

The itinerants moved on leaving Robert with a sense of repulsion. Swaggies were the dispossessed, he knew, the downon-their-luck and the unemployed. Itinerants were a different kettle of fish. Stray vagrants, sundowners, rogues, gypsies and ratbags – probably, he thought, without irony, from convict stock. He would make sure the door was latched last thing at night, and keep his Collector handy.

Aunt Margaret saw them straggle through the yard and wondered if they'd sit for her. Then she dismissed the idea – they would ask for money.

Phoeba dropped the last thick curd into a cloth-lined vat, put its lid on, then placed a small, smooth rock on it to weigh it down. The kitchen reeked of rancid whey. She was putting the last of her cheese under the tank-stand when she saw the group halfway up the outcrop.

She cleared away her ladles, sieves and squares of muslin, washed down the table and removed her apron. It felt 103 degrees already, and she splashed cold water over her face, neck, arms and wrists in the washhouse before disappearing to the cellar to sit, flapping her skirts up and down, with her feet in a bucket of well-water. What she wanted to do was ride Spot to the foreshore, drape her skirt and blouse over a tea-tree and wade out into the green, salty water. Spot would stand up to his belly, his withers quivering and his tail in the air while Phoeba sank down to the peaceful sea world. But this was one of the sharpest ways the depression had affected them – swaggies now camped on their beach, fished and swam in their bay. So they couldn't swim there anymore. She thought of Hadley again. Loyal, sincere Hadley, ten years old and sombrely shepherding his mother and big sister to church for his father's funeral, then crying all through the service, his shoulders leaping about as she stared at them. It was strange not to have seen him for days.

Henrietta drove up at dusk, one foot resting on the dash and the reins loose in her hands. The dust behind her obliterated any sign of Spot, the rooster or the ducks as she tore through the gate and wrenched the brake lever and leapt to the ground before the Hampden had fully come to rest.

A cloud of dust wafted over to the grapes and Robert called, ‘Damned larrikin.'

‘Nice evening, isn't it Mr Crupp?' said Henrietta coming towards the house, her long strides stretching the hem of her skirt and her shoulders swaying. Her blouse was pulled from her skirt at the back. She pointed up to the outcrop and said to Phoeba, ‘They're turning the lights on in Geelong tonight.'

Phoeba was relieved. Hadley mustn't have mentioned the refusal to his sister.

Up on the outcrop a blue mist hung in the tree canopy above the campfires. Henrietta removed her battered hat. She had excellent hair, thick and auburn and the envy of many women who craved bouffant waves to support their enormous hats. But Henrietta wound it in a plaited coil around her head, like the base of a colander.

It was Maude who asked a series of questions about Hadley – why hadn't they seen him? He was packing for his new job and organising the flock, his sister explained. When was he going to Overton? Sunday after church. How long would he be at Overton? Until the end of season, of course. Was he entering the ploughing match this year? Certainly, Hadley always entered the ploughing match. He was, Henrietta said proudly, the neatest ploughman in the district.

‘So dependable,' said Maude, tightening her eyes at Phoeba. The girls could go to the outcrop, she agreed, if they promised not to go near the camps, and they must take candles and matches or they'd surely turn their ankles in the dark and miss the entire season, as if they had a full diary of balls to look forward to. ‘And,' she warned, ‘be careful of those new electric lights – they cause fires.'

Phoeba and Henrietta climbed the track as the shadows faded and the view dulled. Mosquitoes sang in the hot silence and the sound of the evening express travelled up to them, its carriage windows faint orange boxes gliding through the dusk. Above them, clouds curled over the rocks, unfurling, long fingers that reached out and pooled together over the bay. Rods of silver pierced them making puddles of sparkling mercury on the dark water and the small lanterns on sailing ships winked.

They branched off the shortcut track along the path towards the spring, climbing through air that was thick with the stink of wood smoke.

‘Swaggies,' said Henrietta, assuredly, but Phoeba was beginning to wonder about the scruffy men who had passed through her yard that afternoon.

Suddenly the smell of the air changed and Henrietta stopped. A chill ran through Phoeba. The atmosphere was eerie, stale, as though something vile had fled a split second before and left a foul curling wake. Human odour, human waste, burning tobacco. Phoeba and Henrietta reached for each other and turned to go but it was too late. The camp leader – the ragged man with skin dulled with black spots – slipped from a branch and landed behind them. Two more men crawled from behind boulders and women and children, wielding small branches, crept from the bush enclosing them, holding them with their gaze.

‘Look what we have here,' said the ragged man as the circle closed in.

The skin on Phoeba's neck tingled. Henrietta's grip tightened on her hand.

‘We've only come to look at the lights,' said Phoeba in her strongest voice. She stepped in front of Henrietta and could feel her friend's short, shallow breath on the back of her hair.

‘What lights?' snarled the itinerant flicking his eyes to the trees. The skin on his cheekbones was raw with festering black pimples – Barcoo rot. The man was starving.

A scruffy, dull-eyed youth rushed from behind and knocked Henrietta's hat sideways on her head. The children laughed and waved the sticks they carried. Phoeba pressed against Henrietta and they stood back to back with their arms linked.