Elianne (7 page)

‘You won’t have to stand by and watch it you know,’ Kate said as the two of them climbed out of the car. ‘You could plan a trip into Bundy on that saddest of days.’

‘It would not ease the pain, Kate,’ Hilda said a little tartly; sometimes her daughter’s practicality was annoying. ‘I would know it was happening.’

They walked up the front steps together. The old home, so similar in design to The Big House, was a Queenslander built on stilts and surrounded by wide verandahs, but the living area was restricted to one floor only with storage space beneath. Indeed, Stanley Durham in having The Big House designed along the lines of the original had been true to his promise: ‘the same only bigger’.

‘To think she brought up three children here,’ Hilda said, running her fingers reverently over panelled surfaces and carved wooden fixtures. ‘Married so young, half-French as she was and new to the country, how foreign it must all have seemed . . .’

Kate had prepared herself for a running diatribe about Grandmother Ellie and the past.

‘And oh, the tragedies she suffered,’ Hilda continued. ‘Well, they both did of course: they shared the heartache. Losing two sons in the Great War, just imagine the pain.’ She floated through to the next room like a wraith, her hand trailing over surfaces as if making contact with another life.

Kate couldn’t romanticise the house herself. Pretty as the detail and the fixtures were, the house now empty and unlived-in was just a house. How interesting, she thought as she followed her mother, that the rooms are so much smaller than I remember from my childhood visits.

‘It was their great love that gave them the strength to carry on.’ Hilda suddenly stopped floating and they came to a halt in the main drawing room. ‘Throughout all of their trials, Big Jim and Ellie always had each other.’

Kate couldn’t help but register the note of regret in her mother’s voice. Why? she wondered. What did her mother regret?

‘Ellie lived the whole of her married life in this house,’ Hilda said. ‘The early days in particular must have been so very happy.’ She remembered how happy she’d been in the early days of her own marriage. But things had changed when they’d moved into The Big House. That was when the babies had arrived and Stan had become unfaithful. Nothing serious, just dalliances, only two, and neither had lasted long. She’d supposed that many men with children needed dalliances in order to keep them distracted from the mundane aspects of parenthood. But she’d been so shockingly disillusioned. How she’d longed for a great love like Ellie’s and Big Jim’s, a love without dalliances, a love where fidelity was sacred.

‘Are you all right, Marmee?’ Kate asked, concerned. Her mother’s silence was puzzling, and she looked worryingly sad.

‘Of course I’m all right, my darling.’ Hilda painted on a bright smile, ‘just saying goodbye to the past.’ My own or Ellie’s? she wondered momentarily. ‘That’s always a little affecting.’ She looked about the drawing room. ‘Despite her share of tragedy, Grandmother Ellie was very happy here. She told me so. I remember the occasion well. She was sitting over there, on the little pink sofa that used to live by the window,’ Hilda’s voice took on a distant quality, ‘and she told me that the isolation hadn’t bothered her at all. She told me that she hadn’t minded in the least being marooned out here in the middle of nowhere.’

Kate had the sudden feeling that her mother was referring more to herself than she was to Grandmother Ellie. Did
Hilda
feel marooned out here in the middle of nowhere? When she was first married she may well have done, Kate thought, for isolation would have remained very much a governing factor in the forties. Was that why she drank?

Hilda snapped out of her pensive mood. ‘The women were so terribly alone in those early days,’ she said, and once again she was on the move, gliding off towards the dining room.

Kate followed in silence.

‘It’s different for you modern young things,’ she continued with an airy wave of her hand. ‘You have your independence with the roads as they are and your very own cars.’

Kate didn’t state the obvious. Her mother was only forty-four. She could learn to drive if she wished. Independence was hers for the asking. But Hilda Durham refused any form of driving tuition. She was accustomed to being chauffeured and preferred things that way, even though it made her reliant upon others.

They wandered around the house for a further fifteen minutes, Hilda chatty and animated, refusing to give in to another maudlin bout.

‘Well I suppose that’s it,’ she said finally. ‘I do believe we’ve successfully farewelled the past, wouldn’t you agree?’

‘Yes, I would.’

They walked down the front stairs to the car.

‘There’s a trunk load of Grandmother Ellie’s old books under the house,’ Hilda said. ‘They’ll need to be cleared out of course and donated to some charity or other. Would you like to look through them before I have Max take them into town?’

‘Yes, I would.’

‘Half of them are in French, so you’re the only one who’d be able to understand them anyway,’ she said with a light laugh. At school Kate’s language of choice had been French, and like the rest of her subjects her matriculation results had been excellent. ‘Goodness knows what we’ll do with that particular lot,’ Hilda added as she climbed into the passenger seat, ‘I suppose Max will simply have to find a French charity.’

‘I’ll come back tomorrow and go through them.’ Kate started up the engine. ‘There might well be some I’d like to keep, particularly among the French editions.’

As they drove off, Hilda gazed back at the old house. ‘Yes,’ she said her mood again pensive and her voice distant, ‘I remember Grandmother Ellie loved her books. They were very precious to her. She was always reading. Perhaps it was her form of escape.’

Once again, Kate sensed that her mother wasn’t really talking about Grandmother Ellie.

The following morning, rather than walking as she would normally have done without the need to chauffeur her mother, Kate drove to the old house once again. It would save her carrying home any of the books she might choose to keep, and they could simply stay in the boot of the car ready for the following day when she would set off on her drive to Sydney.

She discovered the trunk sitting in a protected corner in the storage area beneath the house, surrounded by a number of empty packing cases. It was not locked and she opened it without any difficulty.

She’d expected that after twelve years, damp might have set in and that the books might be mouldy, but they certainly were not. The trunk was airtight and the books had been packed with great care, wads of folded tissue paper resting between each layer as if protecting items of the most delicate crystal. Kate found the degree of care taken touching. Following Ellie’s death, the trunk would have been packed upon Big Jim’s orders, he could possibly even have packed it himself, although that was doubtful, she thought, for he’d been over ninety when Ellie had died. But either way, the intention was obvious. Big Jim had wished to preserve his wife’s precious books in respect for her memory.

Kneeling on the ground, Kate lifted the books from the trunk one by one and placed them on the tissue paper that she’d spread out beside her. There were publications in both English and French, and she made a separate pile of each. It was the French editions she was most interested in for they were harder to come by.

Despite the gloom beneath the house, enough light shone through the wooden lattice work for her to read the authors and titles with ease. Balzac, Dumas, Hugo, collections of poetry by Voltaire and Baudelaire . . . Grandmother Ellie certainly enjoyed her French classics, Kate thought. There were several de Maupassant and Zola, and then moving into the twentieth century, Colette, André Gide . . . There were also French translations of other great European writers: a copy of Tolstoy’s
Anna Karenina
and Dostoevsky’s
Crime and Punishment.

Kate was fascinated. The fact that her great-grandmother had been an eclectic reader as well as an avid one came as no particular surprise, but the condition of the books did. Some were admittedly more worn than others, but considering their age, most were in a pristine state. She checked the publication dates and discovered that many were much later editions than she would have expected. Some had been published in the 1930s and even the late 1940s, when her great-grandmother would have been elderly.

Again, Kate found the fact touching. Big Jim had obviously gone to a great deal of trouble and expense to import French editions for his wife throughout their marriage. Yet Ellie was bilingual. She could just as easily have read the English translations that were readily available in Australia. Big Jim’s gesture seemed to Kate an act of genuine love.

There were two books that did show definite wear and tear, however, one an English edition, the other French. Charlotte Brontë’s
Jane Eyre
and Victor Hugo’s
Notre-Dame de Paris
were decidedly dilapidated. Old favourites perhaps? Kate opened the flyleaf of both. Inside was inscribed
Elianne Desmarais.
Old favourites, indeed, she thought. Ellie must have brought them with her from the New Hebrides. No doubt they symbolised the dual cultures she’d inherited from her English mother and French father.

There were no more books as such left in the trunk, but sitting in the bottom was further material that looked like business accounts. They were ledgers, at least a dozen of them. She lifted one out and opened it, expecting to see some form of book-keeping, but the ledger’s columns, normally reserved for figures, were ignored. The page was instead covered in the written word, and the written word was French. She squinted in the gloom. She could just make out a date at the top.
10 juillet 1895

Kate took the ledger outside into the sunlight. She sat on the front step and read the first paragraph slowly, translating as she went.

Today there was such excitement. Our steam locomotive engine, which Jim acquired from the government, has finally arrived. It is a Neilson A10 locomotive, or so he informs me. Apparently the government has moved on to more sophisticated models. I have never seen Jim so enthused. He says it will change our lives and I am quite sure it will, but for my part I find it a rather messy thing, belching steam as it does, and noisy too. I shall miss the Clydesdales hauling the trucks along the tracks, such beautiful creatures. But of course we must move with these modern times . . .

Grandmother Ellie’s diaries, Kate thought. Oh my God, the ledgers are Grandmother Ellie’s diaries. She couldn’t wait to tell her mother. She would translate them for her, read them out loud, and Hilda would hear Grandmother Ellie’s voice, she’d hear the voice of the young Ellie about whom she’d always fantasised.

Kate was thrilled by the prospect. This would give a reality to her mother’s preoccupation with the past. No longer would Hilda Durham need to disappear into her fantasy world: she could experience the real thing.

She returned to the trunk, gathered up all the ledgers and brought them outside. The diaries would need to be sorted through for they were obviously not in sequential order.

Spreading them out on the front steps, she checked the dates – where she could find them for many entries were undated – then she placed the ledgers in sequence and looked at her watch. It was a good hour or so before lunch would be served at The Big House. She couldn’t resist.

13 avril 1888

Once again Kate read slowly, translating each word with care.

I write this in the empty ledgers that Jim is happy to supply. He thinks that my scribbling will keep me happy, distract me from the loneliness of my surrounds, and I can only pray that he proves right. My scribbles will of course remain in French. There is no one in the household acquainted with the language and I intend to be honest. I must. Otherwise this exercise will be fruitless. Only truth can provide the escape I need . . .

My father sold me to James Durham. Papa denies this of course, but I know it to be true. I openly accused him . . .

‘Don’t be ridiculous, child.’ André Desmarais scoffed at his daughter’s accusation. In fact he did more than scoff, he threw back his huge bearded head and laughed out loud. ‘What a fanciful creature you are,
ma petite
. James Durham loves you. He’s loved you from the moment he first met you, he told me so. He’s simply been waiting for you to come of age. And he’s a wealthy man – he will make a great match, you couldn’t do better for yourself.’

‘I am to interpret that as a denial, I presume?’

‘Of course you are.’ In the light of her coldness, André realised he could not afford to be glib. ‘Now you listen to me, Elianne, I am agreeing to this marriage for your own good. James Durham can offer you a life of privilege in Australia, a life no prospective suitor from around these parts could provide. It is your future I am thinking of. Why otherwise would I deprive myself of my only child? With your mother now gone who will look after me in my declining years?’

‘A noble sacrifice indeed, Papa,’ her tone remained icy. ‘So no money is changing hands?’

‘Not one sou, I swear it.’

Elianne knew better than to push the matter any further; her father would continue to deny a transaction was taking place, and perhaps he wasn’t even lying. Perhaps no money was changing hands, at least not in the physical sense. But she wondered just how much of the considerable financial debt he owed James Durham might be dropped upon his agreement to her marriage.

‘Very well,’ she said with a disdainful shrug, ‘if you are happy for your daughter to wed such a man, who am I to disobey your wishes? I don’t care either way personally, but I warn you, you are the one who will bear the shame.’

For all her disdain, Elianne did care, but she was not about to share the fact with her father. The truth was she found James Durham attractive, despite her aversion to his rumoured background. Furthermore, his offer of marriage held definite appeal, for since the death of her beloved mother, Beatrice, life on the coconut plantation had become intolerable. These days, her father kept open house for his raucous drunken gambling companions, rough men employed by the Compagnie Calédonienne des Nouvelle Hébrides to oversee the company’s extensive interests in the islands. The men would invariably stay overnight, and no longer were they accommodated in the nearby guesthouse as they had been in Beatrice’s time, if indeed they’d been invited at all. Rather, they would stay in the main house. A comfortable sprawling bungalow, the main house had a number of guest rooms, and Elianne was forced to endure the men’s company at close quarters. She detested the way they ogled her. But she detested far more the way her father allowed it. Her father actually appeared proud that his friends lusted after his daughter.