Elianne (12 page)

‘Crikey, they’re in good nick, aren’t they?’

‘Yes, I was pretty surprised, I must say.’ She picked up the last several books, ‘you should take a look yourself, Al,’ she said, closing the trunk, ‘see if there’s anything in there you want.’

Alan glanced down at the collection clutched to his chest: all were novels and all bore French titles.

‘Like a manual on harvesters or something?’ he replied.

Kate laughed and they headed back to the car. He halted briefly at the boot, waiting for her to open it, but she didn’t, she opened the rear door instead.

‘Just dump them on the back seat,’ she said, ‘I’ve got other stuff in the boot.’

‘Rightio.’

As she drove back to The Big House, Kate was tempted to tell Alan of her find. Despite his youth, she knew that if she were to tell anyone, it would be Alan. She’d always joked that her little brother was the ‘strong silent type’, but in truth he was. Al’s the strongest of the three of us, she thought. He doesn’t hurt as easily as Neil and he doesn’t lose his temper like me, he just closes off. The truth wouldn’t shatter him as it would Neil, and he’d never tell a soul. But then, she asked herself, what is the truth?

Already the secret was a burden that Kate longed to share, but she knew that to shoulder her brother with the same burden at this stage would be unfair. It would be unfair not only to Alan, but also to Ellie and to Big Jim. I must keep an open mind, she told herself. I must make no judgement and draw no conclusion until I’ve read all of Ellie’s writings and know the whole truth. She would take the ledgers to Sydney and study them over the ensuing weeks.

The family luncheon was festive, Hilda having insisted upon the serving of champagne.

‘If we are to lose our daughter for close to another whole year,’ she’d said to her husband, ‘then we must toast her departure in a manner befitting the occasion.’

Kate had told her mother that she would not attempt to return home during the three term breaks allowed. ‘We get little more than a week off, Marmee, maybe two at the outside – it would be too disruptive. And I intend to study.’

‘Very well, dear.’ Hilda, disappointed but stoic, had decided to drown her sorrows. ‘What must be, must be,’ she’d said, and demanded champagne.

Stan had readily agreed, although he intended to stick to beer himself, and Max had set out on ice two bottles of Dom Perignon. There was an ample supply left over from Christmas and New Year celebrations.

Being a strictly family affair, they dined as they usually did in the pleasantly airy breakfast room, the ceiling fan alleviating the heat of midday, but despite the homely surrounds Cook had gone to some pains to provide a special luncheon. Knowing Kate’s penchant for fish, she’d baked an extremely large and extremely fresh barramundi that she’d had Max fetch directly from the fishermen’s wharf at Bundaberg Port that very morning. As she sailed stoutly in from the kitchen with the giant platter bearing its giant fish, she was given the customary round of applause. Cook always enjoyed making an entrance.

Kate looked about at her family, at her two brothers dishing themselves hefty portions of the various salads Ivy had set out on the table, at her father pouring her mother a second glass of champagne, at her grandfather studying with avid interest the way Cook was so expertly filleting the baked fish. Such an ordinary, domestic scene, she thought, yet she felt in some way divorced from it. Something comfortable was missing, and she wondered whether perhaps she might live to regret having discovered Ellie’s ‘scribblings’.

Plates were passed along to Cook, who served the portions of fish, after which she departed with the platter, now bearing the barramundi’s denuded backbone and head, its one visible eye glaring malevolently. When she was safely out of sight, Kate leant in to her grandfather.

‘Watch you don’t cop a bone,’ she whispered.

Bartholomew smiled his thanks for the reminder. No one would dare mention such a possibility in Cook’s presence, but the occasional bone had been known to make an appearance, so he sifted through his fish with care.

Max’s morning trip to the wharfs had resulted in more than a large barramundi: he’d also returned with the mail, which he’d collected from the post office on his way back through town.

‘I had a Christmas card from Julia this morning,’ Stan announced as he helped himself to the potato salad, ‘she obviously didn’t realise she’d forgotten the airmail sticker. Typical.’ Stan’s younger sister, Julia, lived in Canada with her schoolteacher husband and family. ‘She sends her love to everyone. Father actually received a letter, didn’t you?’ he added in a rare address to Bartholomew, who for the most part was invisible to his son.

Bartholomew nodded. He’d been delighted to hear from his daughter. Her letter had been very affectionate and chatty and he’d gained a great deal of pleasure from it. Already, he was halfway through writing a response in his painstaking spidery hand.

‘Julia’s once-a-year duty,’ Stan said dismissively. ‘I don’t know why she bothers. It’s a case of out of sight out of mind on both sides of the Pacific; we all know that.’

Kate found her father’s comment shockingly insensitive. The light of pleasure in Bartholomew’s eyes at the mention of his daughter’s letter had been plainly evident. She glanced at her grandfather, expecting to see hurt, but there was none. Stanley’s words had had no effect whatsoever. Impervious to insult, Bartholomew simply continued to sift through his fish. The father was equally capable of ignoring the son, Kate was glad to note.

Stanley Durham had always been dismissive of his sister for deserting Queensland and her roots, which Kate considered most unfair. It was hardly Julia’s fault that she’d fallen in love with a Canadian. She had met her aunt on only one occasion, and Julia had seemed to her extremely kind.

‘Look after my father for me, Kate,’ Julia had said, ‘I can tell that he loves you.’

Julia had come back to Elianne three years previously upon the news of her mother’s death, her first visit in nearly twenty years. She had been too late for Mary’s funeral, but she had stayed for a fortnight, hoping to be of some comfort to her father, whose stroke had quickly followed the death of his wife.

‘I only wish I could stay longer,’ she’d said, ‘but with three children back home, I’m needed. The tyranny of distance, I’m afraid. Australia is so very far away.’

She’d parted with an enigmatic comment, which at the time Kate had presumed was intended to amuse.

‘I leave you with Stan the Man, my dear,’ Julia had said as she’d hugged her niece warmly, ‘or is it Big Jim? Sometimes I have trouble telling the difference.’

Now, with the topic of her aunt raised and Ellie’s words still swirling in her brain, Kate recalled Julia’s remark and found herself reading more into it than she knew she should. Surely it had been made in jest, with perhaps a touch of sibling archness, but it seemed somehow to take on a deeper significance . . .

Stop it! She chastised herself. Stop fantasising: you’re being ridiculous. Stop thinking about the ledgers, for God’s sake. Put them out of your mind!

But it wasn’t that easy. Throughout lunch, Big Jim featured several times in Stanley Durham’s conversation, as Big Jim so often did, and on each occasion his name was mentioned, Kate’s mind rebelled. What would you say if I told you your hero was a blackbirder, Dad? Gazing across the table at her father, always so opinionated, his confidence bordering on arrogance, his beliefs inviolable, her mind continued involuntarily to fire questions. Hey Stan the Man, what would you say if I told you Big Jim killed a person in cold blood? What would you say if I told you his wife considered him a monster . . .? Stop it, she told herself, stop it!

‘You’ve been rather quiet over lunch, darling.’

They were well into Cook’s famous mulberry pie when Hilda voiced her concern to her daughter. Kate hadn’t been her usual talkative self. ‘Is everything all right?’

‘Of course it is, Marmee. I’m sorry, I’ve been a bit distracted. Just thinking of what lies ahead, lining up new digs, uni and all that.’

‘Yes, I sensed you were miles away. Well, I should think that’s understandable,’ Hilda patted her daughter’s hand in a vague gesture of sympathy, ‘half of you is probably already in Sydney.’

‘That’s right.’ How she wished she were. Kate couldn’t wait. She longed for the distraction of the big city, and of Jeremy and the discovery of sex. She needed to be away from Elianne and all she loved there. She needed to distance herself.

It was a long drive, roughly six hundred and fifty miles, but she loved every minute of it. She took the Pacific Highway, which followed the coast for the most part, breaking her trip with an overnight stay as she had promised her father she would.

‘No non-stop driving, do you hear me?’ Stan had ordered. ‘Regular breaks now and then, and two overnight stays, Brisbane first and then Ballina or Coffs Harbour would probably be your best bet.’

‘Yes, Dad.’

She actually made only one overnight stop, Newcastle, far further south only several hours’ drive from Sydney, so it was barely lunchtime when she pulled up outside the little two-storey terrace in Glebe.

Jeremy had been looking out for her through the front living-room window of the house, which he shared with two other third-year Arts students. She’d rung him from Newcastle, and as he saw the brand-new gun-metal grey Holden with its gleaming white roof cruising down Cowper Street, he stepped outside.

Picking up the ‘witches’ hats’ he’d placed earlier to reserve a parking spot, he dumped them on the pavement and waved her in ostentatiously like an over-officious traffic policeman. The witches’ hats had been stolen from a council road-works crew a year earlier and were put to illegal use on a regular basis.

He watched as she climbed from the car. The day was hot; she was wearing a light cotton dress with narrow straps and she slung her bag over a bare shoulder with easy grace. God she’s gorgeous, he thought, and God I’ve missed her. He’d missed her bold, green-eyed beauty and the way she moved her long, tanned limbs so freely, like a healthy young animal. He’d missed too her fierce intelligence, the heated debates and passionate discussions that could last half the night over glasses of cheap red wine. Jeremy had had any number of girlfriends, he was popular with the opposite sex, but he’d never had anyone quite like Kate. Kate Durham was everything a man could want in a woman. In fact, he thought, if I didn’t know myself better I might swear I was falling in love.

‘Pretty swish,’ he said, running his fingers over the bonnet of the Holden as she circled the car to join him, ‘Christmas or birthday present?’

‘Eighteenth birthday. I’m a big girl now.’

‘How very generous of sugar-cane-king daddy.’

Kate laughed. Jeremy’s digs at her wealthy background were simply a part of the nonchalant image he chose to adopt and bore no malice or envy. Jeremy himself hardly came from an impoverished family. His father was a dermatologist. ‘Rooms in Macquarie Street,’ he would say with humorous disdain, ‘so bourgeois – nowhere near the drama of a sugar cane empire.’

As she walked into his arms, Kate was aware of the familiar thrill he aroused in her. Neither tall, nor heavily built, he stood barely an inch or so taller than she did, but he was strong and fit, and through his thin cotton ‘Ban the Bomb’ T-shirt she could feel the lean muscularity of his body.

They kissed greedily, drinking their fill of each other, uninhibited by the elderly couple passing by, who tut-tutted and muttered something about the indecent behaviour of the young these days.

‘University students, I’ll bet,’ the man said.

‘Miss me?’ she asked as they parted, both a little breathless.

‘Nope. How about you?’

‘Didn’t spare a thought,’ she said, and they kissed again.

Jeremy collected up the witches’ hats, which were always stowed in the living room by the front door, available for instant use.

‘Leave your gear, we’ll get it later,’ he said, raking back his unruly sun-bleached hair in a gesture that was typical. ‘Come inside and have a coffee. I’ve got some really great news.’ He seemed instantly fired up and excited. ‘I can’t wait to tell you. You’re going to just love it!’

Kate locked the car. His mood change was so characteristic that she felt a rush of affection. Jeremy was such a mercurial mix, boyishly enthusiastic one minute, playing the hardened cynic the next, and the next passionately advocating one of his causes. He was perhaps typical of the ‘renegade’ Arts student rebelling against a middle-class background, but she respected him for the many stances he took. Some of the more conservative male students considered him pretentious, with his overly long hair and slogan T-shirts, or in winter his signal duffle coat and desert boots, but he wasn’t. Jeremy was far too intelligent to be a poseur: Jeremy was making a statement.

Kate followed him inside. Every aspect of Jeremy Venecourt intrigued her, not least of all his sex appeal. He was simply magnetic. In fact she was willing to concede that, like many of the female students, she had the most incredible crush on ‘Venner’, as he was generally known.

The crush had been more or less instantaneous on both sides. They’d noticed each other around the university campus, both were difficult to ignore, but first- and second-year students rarely mingled. Then they’d met at a party where he’d sought her out, and after a half an hour in each other’s company, Venner had made his odd request.

‘I want you to call me Jeremy,’ he’d said, piercingly blue eyes meeting hers with deadly intent.

‘Why? Everyone else calls you Venner.’

‘That’s why I’d like you to call me Jeremy.’

‘But why?’ she’d insisted.

‘Because you’re different.’

She’d smiled. ‘All right, Jeremy,’ she’d said playfully, calling his bluff. She’d assumed it was a line he’d used in the past, but it was a winning one, she had to admit.

Venner had never once used the line before, and he’d wondered at that moment why the thought had never occurred to him – it was clearly a winner. Then he’d realised. Of course. He’d never
wanted
a girl to call him Jeremy before. He did now.