Dorothy Eden (21 page)

‘But I won’t have the boy yelling the roof down,’ he said. ‘Shouldn’t you feed him more often? He looks half-starved.’

So Eugenia had to face her secret worry. Her breasts had never grown large and overflowing with milk. In the last day or two the baby had tugged at them with such comical anger that she had suspected he was getting far too little sustenance. Bess Kelly must be right.

‘Perhaps I could try him on a little cow’s milk,’ she suggested.

‘He doesn’t want cow’s milk, he wants a foster mother.’ Eugenia didn’t care for the critical look in Gilbert’s eyes as he studied the slender outline of her breasts. ‘Give him to Mrs Jarvis.’

‘Mrs Jarvis has her own baby,’ Eugenia said stiffly.

‘And milk enough for two. You only have to look at her. Do it, my love. I’ll speak to her myself.’

So that was how it was that the two babies lay side by side in their baskets on the verandah on the warm afternoons, and shared the same milk. The pleasure of seeing Christopher thriving at last made Eugenia overcome her resentment.

If she couldn’t feed him she could make an exquisite christening robe for him, and have the greatest pleasure and pride in carrying him up the aisle of the church on his christening day.

The occasion was something to write to Sarah about.

‘We had scarcely got over Christmas when this much more important day arrived. Doctor and Mrs Noakes had come to us for Christmas. Poor Marion could scarcely be dragged away from the nursery, she loves babies so passionately. Gilbert wanted Philip to be one of the godparents, and Mrs Bourke has asked to be one. Gilbert was highly delighted because of the honour bestowed, and I because I am genuinely fond of Mrs Bourke. She is rather shy, rather plain, and, I think, as homesick as I sometimes am. Also, she does not appear to be in the best of health and finds the climate trying.

‘The christening was a rather grand occasion, since both the Governor and Mrs Bourke were there, and two of the Governor’s aides, and other prominent people with whom we have become acquainted in Parramatta. (I do not suppose they would be prominent in a city say the size of Worcester, but here the butcher, the baker, the candlestickmaker, are all prominent, and are just as good, if
dull,
people!) Dear Bess Kelly could not come. She is expecting another baby herself. And others of our Sydney friends such as the Wentworths were not there because Gilbert did not want me to have too large a house party. I have been rather feeble since Christopher’s birth, but am now recovering rapidly.

‘The church was filled with all our servants, including a rather hangdog row of ticket-of-leave men. I cannot describe my bursting feeling of pride when I walked out, carrying Christopher in his long christening robe, and all the servants bobbed, or touched their foreheads.

‘The only person of our household missing was Mrs Jarvis who had remained at home to prepare the luncheon which we gave to twenty people. Gilbert toasted his son with his best wine. He is laying down a claret this vintage which is to be kept until Christopher’s coming of age or his marriage, whichever happens first. I fear that Mrs Ashburton, as has been her habit lately, got a little tipsy.

‘But I do not blame her. There has not been any news about her son since he left to cross the Blue Mountains and explore the interior nine months ago. People are beginning to fear that he is lost. It really looks as if Mrs Ashburton’s home will be permanently at Yarrabee, but I have grown accustomed to her now. I believe I would miss her if she left. And Gilbert is so much in her debt.

‘But he has now planted many more new vines, and we hope to be able to repay Mrs Ashburton after the following year’s vintage.

‘My dear waspish Peabody was as pleased as could be when the visitors admired his garden. It is quite miraculous the way it has developed. The first roses have been in bloom, the lily pond has been dug, though not yet filled with water as that has to be piped from the well, the honeysuckle has already climbed several feet up the verandah posts. This has taken away the glaring newness of the house, and it is really beginning to look most attractive, its white façade against the green vines growing up the hillside. Peabody has made a trellis of nice crooked knotty stakes, and the climbing roses will be a picture next year. I have chosen white, they are like snow-flakes and will look so cool. Needless to say, the native shrubs have grown with abandon and are surprisingly pretty, the scarlet bottle-brush, the heavenly blue jacaranda, the myrtle which has a kind of peach blossom flower, frangipani with its honey sweetness, and the scarlet poinsettia.

‘I am determined that Yarrabee shall be as famous for its garden as for its wine…’

Eugenia did not include in her letter the last two events of that day. When the visitors had left Gilbert came to her when she was resting in their bedroom.

He opened his bureau drawer, took out a small dark green leather box, pressed the catch, and the lid sprang open to reveal an immense diamond and topaz brooch. At least to Eugenia, used to modest pieces of jewellery, it looked immense.

‘It’s for you, my darling. I kept it until everyone had gone.’ Then he couldn’t contain his pleasure and excitement. ‘Take it out. Look at it. Put it on.’

Eugenia’s fingers hung reluctantly over the box.

‘It looks—so expensive!’

‘Well, it wasn’t exactly nothing, but on the other hand it was a great bargain. I happened to meet a man who had been an apprentice jeweller in Hatton Garden. He set it from some stones I bought. It is meant to be a rose, do you see? I know they are your favourite flower.’

The apprentice would have been a convict, of course. She owed her first real piece of jewellery, just as she owed her house, to convicts.

Oh, for goodness’ sake, you silly creature, stop being so imprisoned in that old obsession, she told herself, and in the desire to overcome her scruples she flung her arms round Gilbert in an extravagant gesture.

His face went soft with delight. ‘You like it, then? I meant to have it for you when Christopher was born, but to be honest I hadn’t enough cash and I knew you would want to know whether Mrs Ashburton had been at the bottom of it.’

She laughed, although with faint wryness.

‘Do I have such bad manners?’

‘You! My little paragon!’ He kissed her, though gently—he was getting intuitive, she thought—then pinned the brooch to the ruffles of lace at her neck.

‘Now you have something to wear besides your pearls,’ he said with satisfaction.

As inevitably as night followed day, Gilbert turned to her in bed that night.

She had been so long in recovering from the birth of the baby that he had exercised a patience for which she knew she should be grateful. She also knew that she should have gone gladly into his arms. If she could not do that she could at least perform her wifely duty acquiescently.

But surely there was more to marriage than this—shouldn’t there be love talk, longing satisfied, an intimacy so close that even this act was a pleasure?

Was she just being a romantic?

Or was she one of those cold pure women unable to feel desire?

She slipped out of bed, put on a wrap, and went out to the balcony. These summer nights were beautiful, the air warm, the moon shining over the quiet landscape. The cicadas kept up their eternal song, but she had grown so used to it now that she scarcely heard it. She would have liked to hear the soft ‘who-who-oo’ of an English owl, but failing that she did have the scent of roses.

She looked back into the dark room, to the long shape in the bed, and her eyes filled with tears. How ungrateful she was not to be happy, to expect something more, something she couldn’t define. An intense inexpressible longing.

But she had her baby. Whatever was the matter with her?

I
T WAS VINTAGE AGAIN,
but lacking completely the gaiety and effervescence of the previous year. The harvest was poor. It was gathered in two days. Fortunately there were sufficient black grapes for Gilbert to lay down five dozen bottles of claret for Christopher’s coming of age. He labelled the bottles Yarrabee Christopher 1831 and then had to turn his attention to the sweet sauterne that bored him and which he marketed as quickly as possible.

Next year would be a bumper one.

Vignerons, Eugenia had discovered, lived on optimism.

But thanks to Mrs Ashburton’s generosity no pinch was felt at Yarrabee.

Soon after the new year the tragic news had come that Godfrey Ashburton, dying of starvation, had staggered into the little town of Adelaide on the south coast of Australia twelve hundred miles away. But the time his poor skeleton had been identified and the news had reached his mother, he had been buried for several weeks.

Mrs Ashburton had shut herself in her room for two days, then had emerged suffering, she said vigorously, not so much from grief as boredom.

She had scarcely known Godfrey since he had run away to sea at the age of sixteen. He had been an incorrigible adventurer, a stranger, and what she had known of him during the last year in Sydney she hadn’t cared for.

Eugenia and Gilbert and the darling baby were her family now. That was what God had decided and she was happy to accept the direction of a higher will than her own.

She would observe custom by wearing partial mourning, black touched with a little lilac, but she saw no reason for not accompanying Gilbert and Eugenia to the soirée at Government House next week. It did no one any good to sit at home brooding.

The soirée was a surprisingly fashionable affair. There were two ladies recently arrived from England, and Eugenia found it ironic to realize that now she was one of the colonials, listening eagerly to news of the latest fashions. To her satisfaction, she found that her own gown of white silk with green velvet ribbons was quite passable. She cared for clothes, and did not intend to grow dull and dowdy simply because London and Paris were so far away. Also, she hardly thought the two new arrivals had the best taste. Surely the Bond Street shops were not selling quite such a plethora of ribbons and bows nor those exaggeratedly full leg-of-mutton sleeves.

She caught the humorous gleam in Mrs Bourke’s eye, and found that that lady was having precisely similar thoughts.

‘You have probably observed, Mrs Massingham, that this is going to be a wonderful country for the flamboyant. What do you think the reason for it? A compensation for being so far from civilization?’

‘Or that it attracts people who prefer to be big frogs in little puddles?’ Eugenia murmured.

‘That is a wicked remark,’ Mrs Bourke said enjoyably. ‘It is probably true. But I think, too, that one feels very small in such vast spaces. So, like all those gaudy parakeets, we have to put on brighter colours to be noticed.’

Mrs Bourke herself wore the most modest of grey silk gowns. She looked tired and pale, and Eugenia noticed that she frequently sat down to rest a few minutes before moving among her guests again. Her husband, who was tall and lean and looked handsome in evening dress, was engaged in talking to the men. He was interested, to the exclusion of everything else, in the welfare of the country, and thought time spent in paying compliments to women was wasted if he could be furthering the colony’s affairs.

Eugenia caught snatches of conversation, about grants of land, increased grain production, the growing importance of the wool industry, the necessity for a steady flow of a good hard-working type of immigrant, with the essential leavening, of course, of upper-class settlers. One didn’t want the country to be run by a hotchpotch collection of freed convicts and squatters. Major Bourke, more liberal than some of his predecessors, did not have an arrogant contempt for the small man or the freed convict. He might have occasionally remembered that his friend William Wentworth’s mother had been a convict, although that, in face of Wentworth’s growing affluence, seemed more like myth than reality.

Mrs Bourke tapped her husband on the arm with her fan, and murmured that this was a time for pleasure, not business. He should mingle more with his guests. And look, there were some late arrivals who must be welcomed. Did Eugenia know them? They were a young couple who had obtained a grant of land some miles distant. Nice people, but the wife hadn’t a lot of poise. Look at her now, in a great state because of the lateness of their arrival.

But it appeared that Mr and Mrs Newman had an excellent reason for their lateness.

Wasn’t it a ghastly thing, young Robert Wardell, a close friend of William Wentworth, had been murdered by three convicts? His body had been found concealed under bushes, and later the convicts had been found hiding in the scrubby uncleared land that formed part of young Mr Newman’s grant. Dingoes barking constantly had drawn the troopers to the spot.

Young Mrs Newman was blonde with baby-blue eyes. She clung first to Mrs Bourke, then to Eugenia, saying wasn’t this a dreadful country for women. What with convicts and snakes and those great repulsive lizards she never took an easy breath.

‘How can you look so calm, Mrs Massingham? Aren’t you ever afraid?’

The murdered body flung into the bush, the ragged shadows with the eerily hopeless eyes creeping silently away, the barking dogs… The eternal nightmare…

‘One gets used to it,’ Eugenia said. ‘One has to. It really isn’t that bad, Mrs Newman, although I admit I felt as you did a year ago. What a pretty gown you are wearing. Is it part of your trousseau?’

The girl smiled ruefully. ‘It was the latest style when I left England, but now I suppose it is old-fashioned. Isn’t it exasperating that we are always to be behindhand in everything?’

It was wiser to embark on trivial talk about fashions in gowns and bonnets than to dwell on the loneliness of beginning life in a small farmhouse miles from civilization.

‘You must come and visit us at Yarrabee,’ Eugenia said. She was suddenly ashamed of her own comfort compared with this young woman’s isolation, but when Mrs Newman said, ‘It’s no matter, I can endure it for my husband’s sake. I could endure anything for him,’ Eugenia lost her sympathy and felt nothing but envy. The two young things must be very much in love.