Paper Daisies (36 page)

Berylda

‘
Y
ou'll get housemaid's knee doing that,' Greta chides me as she returns from town with supplies and the last of the mail.

‘Oh well.' I shrug. I am scrubbing the boards in the study, as I have scrubbed the boards of every room of this house, taking the brush into every groove, ridding the timbers of every trace of him. All around the walls I've been, and into each corner of bookshelf, drawer, windowsill, skirting board. Some self-imposed punishment, I suppose, of me, and of him: by his total removal. Every last hair, sliver of fingernail, flake of skin, every ex-libris label torn out from every book and burned: gone. The monster is no longer here, unless I allow it. And I don't. It's taken me almost three weeks, I am being so fanatical about it, and why shouldn't I be? It's so very nearly done. I have stopped listening for his footsteps up the hall, the squeak of the boards, the snap of a command. Almost.

‘Big news today,' Greta drops the
Bathurst Free Press
on the floor in front of me. ‘Queen Victoria is dead.'

‘Oh?' I sit back on my heels and stare at the newsprint.

‘Black armbands all around town. Mrs Wardell and Mrs Hatfield standing on the street dabbing hankies. I'm not sure what that sort of mourning is all about,' says Gret. ‘Bit of a show, isn't it? All that public weeping. I mean, she was eighty-one, wasn't she? What do people expect? That she'd really turn into a thousand statues and live forever?'

‘Probably ten thousand statues. The end of an era,' I say vaguely, still staring at the paper. An old queen has passed peacefully away in her bed, a million lives from here, taking nothing with her but her soul, if such things as souls exist. Just another human, when it's all said and done. Oh well. But when I look up at Gret again, she is positively vibrant: her soul fills every scrubbed clean space around me. My sister has returned to me and she is never disappearing again. She's so alive, so here, she's even thrown out all of her old paint tubes and pencil stubs – drawers and boxes full of them, I never knew she hoarded so many, stuffed into her chiffonier, as if each one held a wish that couldn't be discarded, until now.

‘Mr McLean up at the grocers was funny,' she chatters on. ‘He said we can get on with being Australians now without feeling guilty, you know, about Federation. Isn't that a strange thing to say? But Buckley was even funnier in his reply – he said now, when our boys win Olympic championship medals for swimming, they'll be ours and not belong to Britain. He said that's all Federation is about for the man on the street.' She imitates his gravel rasp: ‘Wavin' flags.'

For boys winning medals, and boys going off to war. That's right: they are all Australians now, under the one flag – when the squabbling has ceased as to what flag that'll be. We don't seem old enough to be a country somehow, grown up enough; but then I remember Mrs Wheeler's story of the French and German miners wrecking her front saloon over Alsace in the seventies, and wonder what country ever is grown up. The postcard I received from Clive last week, hoping my holidays are going well as he rides out from Cape Town, says they are all just boys. I feel so old; older than nations. I close my eyes for a moment and see Clive galloping across the veld, and I pray that he is surviving all the bullets and camp-life diseases and everything else that pursuing Boers for a dead queen has to offer. I pray that he comes home safely, not too scarred by murder, to find a nice girl, as if my prayers mean anything much.

‘Oh, and Flo sent a telegram – see.' Gret flashes the crumpled telegram at me from under an armful of parcels from Milford's stationers in town, and I smile at her and the telegram both. My sister is buying up enough paint and paper and card to last us through some sort of Armageddon, replacing one form of hoarding with another, and not sparing any expense. We will need the proceeds from this house to pay for it all. Or some substantial royalty from the illustrations she has been asked to complete for a serial collection of bush fairytales. That incorrigible Cosmo Thompson came through, after all, with a recommendation to an editor, someone called Felix Craft, somehow associated with
The Worker
magazine out of Brisbane. The only monsters she'll ever have to consider now will be the bunyips she will create in pen and ink – fabulous.

I take the telegram from her and some glimpse of my own happiness flits through me with the words:

Arrive on morning train. Get to Katoomba 10.45 FRI 25 JAN
.

That's the day after tomorrow. This is our last night in this house, this hated house, Bellevue. Tomorrow we're going home, to Echo Point. For all Alec Howell's meticulousness, he never amended his will on Libby's death, and so, as wills go, it remained in favour of wife, Elisabeth Flora Pemberton Howell, and after her her heirs, in order of the eldest male child first, and so on down the line to me and to Gret. An oversight or perhaps there simply was no one else to leave it all to? Whatever the case, while the estate is being examined for probate, the solicitor has found no bar to us moving back into our mountain home. Tomorrow. And I couldn't think of a better person to share our first new full day there with than Flo McFee. I'm so glad she's been able to get away, to spend some holiday time with me, to meet my sister. But fear follows any sense of joy, for what Flo might see in me, for what I have done. Do I wear some mark of it on me somehow? How can I go about in the world as the murderer I am?

‘I saw Ben in Durham Street, too, on his way to the bank. He said he'd come and take Jack when he was finished there. I said that would be all right.'

Gret clomps away across the entrance hall with her parcels, leaving me to my thoughts of Ben, the fear and joy I find in him. I stand up and face the daisies, his daisies that Greta placed in the brass vase on the plinth by the drawing room doors for all to see as they called to pay their respects, though for all I remember of those two days between death and burial it might only have been Mrs Weston who came to the house, holding me under her wing. And Ben, always somewhere beside me. And these daisies, my one answered prayer:
Please help us
,
I asked them in the night; my desperate prayer to the shadow of a stranger, the small half of a wishbone held tight. Twenty-four days ago.
Their drabness is crisp-dried now, their flowers sepia-scorched, and they only grow more lovely to me. They are dead but alive, these
Helichrysum elatum
, and I will carry them with me always, work them firmly into the hole where my hatred used to lie. I touch their feathery petals now, or rays as I have learned they are properly called, and they are papery indeed, fragile but strong, and I cherish them as I have cherished nothing else. They don't call them everlastings for nothing, do they?

I turn and look out of the open front door now, to look for him, but I see only the northern hills, and the smoke cloud smudged above them from this summer's bushfires. The blazes have cut a path of destruction across Tambaroora from the west this year, heading for Sofala, taking tobacco plantations and joss houses and poppies with them. And Tiger Sam, too, who stayed at the farm to try to protect his crop. Dr Ah Ling and his young niece escaped along the Mudgee Road towards Hargraves, and Buckley heard they've since got on a boat back to Shanghai. I see them out on the waves of the blue hills somewhere, a little lacquer-haired girl quietly playing peg dolls beneath paper sails. I am cleaning my heart, I tell the hills, I tell her, I tell Ah Ling, I am cleaning my heart. I am reconstructing it with paper daisies, and with gratitude. And I will succeed. Eventually.

I touch the pendant at my neck: my mother's pendant of beryl, which my father had made for her from his prospect at Ophir, wishing for me. I look at it in my hand: it is home, there in my hand. The rough-cut stone barely polished, the inferior rose gold – it's not as beautiful as I remembered it. It's far, far more beautiful. It looks like Papa had a go at making the piece himself, it is so amateurishly wrought, the loops of the scalloped edge uneven and the casing oddly bowed down one side. Absolutely worthless but to us, to me. I clutch it to my throat with the reverberating shock that it was ever denied us. Why? Why did you take it from me, Alec Howell? Why did he shut it up in a safe deposit box at the Australasia Bank? All of Mother's and Aunt Libby's trinkets – hair combs, paste jewels, a string of pearls with a broken clasp – kept from us. The questions I will never escape no matter how many other things I might stuff into my mind to ward them off.

How is such a monster made? How is a monster measured? Such questions might drive me perhaps to consider investigating psychiatry one day as an area of study. When he is far enough away. When he is merely bones and the headstone is so overgrown I cannot read his name. But the mind surely is a strange beast, isn't it? Mine as strange as anyone's. Not least that I mourned without pretence at his funeral. I overheard Justice Wardell and J.C. Dunning discussing him outside in the churchyard, the one telling the other that there was no chance the Free Traders would have chosen him as their candidate anyway. He'd made quite a terrible hash of his Federation speech, saying some pompous thing about fixed grain and wool prices being part of a socialist plot to destroy the Commonwealth economy, insulting every farmer there, hardening their resolve to vote for the Protectionists – who are indeed now in bed with the Labor Party on the issues. God forbid. The sadness of it overwhelmed me; the pointlessness: to work so hard and for it to come to nothing. To be so endlessly, insatiably in want. And ultimately unwanted. Hated. The response to the
Notice of Death
cable sent to Barnstaple via London, to the father's address, was swift and brief, a reply from, presumably, a brother:
With regret, we inform you that we have no interest in this matter.
As if he had ceased to be long ago. Even at the hospital his absence has barely been felt. A locum has come out from Sydney to take over as surgeon until a permanent replacement is found. While my sister appears to have tossed him out with a box of old paint tubes. Life goes on. Life goes round and round.

‘Miss.' Buckley tips his hat as he passes on his way across the front garden with a barrow full of tools to move onto the dray at the gate. He still won't look me in the eye. I suppose he maintains that I should have let him hang for us. Or perhaps he sees the monster in me. But every time he avoids meeting my gaze, a dread falls over me: I can't continue with Ben: I can't allow him to love this monster.

Prince begins to bark, bounding around manically from the stables, and leaping back and forth either side of the path, as if all four legs are being pulled hither and thither by rubber bands. I can't help smiling at that: Prince hasn't so much as growled since the master left the premises. He is such a happy hound today. Wonderfully silly, bouncing hound.

Greta yells up the east hallway, yelling at the top of her lungs because she can: ‘Well, that'll be Ben now!' And I can't help laughing to myself, and a little out aloud, at the fact of that. Perhaps this bush fairytale won't end precisely as Greta planned it for me; but maybe, given time, it will come close.

I see the afternoon light in his hair first, sunshine spilling out from under his Huckleberry hat, his loping strides taking the rise of the hill as if he owns it, because he rightfully should, and darkness is blasted from me. A thankfulness that sparks and soars. In every practical sense, he has been invaluable to us over these past few weeks, accompanying us to the solicitors' office to attend to the probate application and all the necessities of the circumstances, using the Wilberry name to expedite things; using his own cash to provide generous payments to Mary and Lucy, to send them off with equally generous references, for I cannot bear to have others too near. Shielding me in every public situation, and there haven't been too many of those, as I have preferred to scrub boards alone. And now here he is walking up to the house, on his way to take Jack, on his way to Manildra to look for another flower, his mother's flower at Mandagery Creek, after which he will return to Melbourne, because he must return to his work.

And I don't want him to go. I want to run to him, across this field between us and into his arms. But still I can't. My knees are locked. I am not yet ready, not yet so unchained. I am not far enough away from here; I am not yet truly home.

‘You look a bit lost,' he says, smiling up the path at me, smiling at the washerwoman splotches on my skirt, my rolled sleeves, my headscarf. I'm sure I've never looked more an actual gypsy.

‘I am,' I admit to him. ‘But not for too much longer, I hope.'

I stand on the top step of the verandah, to meet him eye to eye. I hold his necessary, sunshine face in my hands, to invite him to kiss me, for the first time since we came together rushing with strange fever in a stable loft, and when his lips touch mine now, his gentleness, his fearlessness breathes new faith into me. The quiet power held in his shoulders, the salt taste of his cheek, the softness of his beard on my skin; we kiss for the first time all over again. I love him. He replenishes me. He heals me. But I have so much healing yet to do. A life I must spend restoring life, every moment, for the one I took.

Can I dare to believe that this life begins for me, for us, here inside this kiss?

Ben

T
his will not be the last time I kiss Berylda Jones at her door; nor the last time we say farewell.

‘Will you stay with me when you bring Jack back to Echo Point?' she asks me, whispering against my ear. ‘Will you love me then?'

‘Yes.' And I will ask her to marry me then, too, when I have worked out how I might move to Sydney, and when. As much as I would grab at any chance of getting out from under Dubois, I owe Professor Jepson the completion of my main work, with the Board of Agriculture, and the expansion of the department into that field. Perhaps a year; might take as long to pack up my potting shed of a house. And a few excuses contrived to come up to explore the New South Wales botanical record in the interim. The curator at the Gardens must be due for retirement, elderly fellow – perhaps I'll drop in and have a word to him. I tell Berylda: ‘I will love you every second until then and forever beyond it.'

‘How long do you think you'll be at Manildra?' she asks me, although I've already told her. She asks everything two or three times as though testing the veracity of this weird place we move through.

‘A week at the most,' I tell her. ‘I've really got to get back to Melbourne.' And I'm not sure why I'm going out to Mandagery Creek now. A week is not nearly long enough for a decent exploration, by the time I get there, et cetera – I don't expect to find anything. I suppose I'm only going to honour that promise to Mama. If I move to Sydney, there'll be plenty of other opportunities to come out here to look for mythical red daisies, though I suspect with all manner of confidence that Mama might have decided I've already found what she wanted me to look for. I tell Berylda: ‘I'll try to stay two nights in the mountains with you. At least.'

She kisses me again, and I'd better go, or I might be compelled to love her right now. Just the feel of her hands on my face is a reawakening I don't know that I can step away from. But I have to; it's too soon for that, today. And not here. There is no love of this kind to be found in this house.

‘Enjoy your going home,' I say as I step down from her.

She smiles: ‘Oh I think I will. I will make every effort to.'

And I leave her for the stables, to go and saddle up Jack. I take him out across Glynarthen, stretch him out to the distant candlebarks, and he'd be happy to keep on going but I've got to get my swag from the hotel. I'm not setting out until the morning, either – it'll be a full day's ride tomorrow, and I'm looking forward to it. It'll be good to get out of the fishbowl of Bathurst. For all that it is a pretty town, even the parks, with their tightly set conifers and their iron lace fences, are claustrophobic here. Brass dirges play in every bandstand of every town for the old queen.

The publican of the Royal catches me round at the stables at the back of the hotel: ‘Some mail turned up for you. Something from Melbourne. Just put it under your door.'

‘Righteo – thank you.' I go up to the room, thinking it will be a note from Professor Jepson – a happy receipt of the
beryldii
specimen I sent him a fortnight ago, along with a firm assurance of my impending return and much improved spirits.

But it's not from Jepson. It's mail originally addressed to me at the university, sent on, possibly by Gregham, and I recognise the hand as soon as I open it: Pater's blunt, thick strokes of the pen. I imagine it will inform me that he has commenced the fight over Mama's estate, to attempt to disinherit me, but it doesn't say that at all. He tells me:

Dear Son,

It is no good to either of us that we remain on such bad terms.

I was too harsh in what I said to you before you left Brisbane last. I am a harsh man but I do not want to drive you away. Your Mother would not want that. You are no coward. You have a different streak of stubbornness from mine but you are no less an unyielding bastard.

I hope to see you at Jericho on your winter break, if you were thinking of coming home then as you usually do. If not, you know where to find me. I would like to know you better.

Your Father

John Wilberry

Now
that's
extraordinary. I wonder first if there is some ulterior motive: does he need something from me? Something from Mama's estate? No, possibly not. As difficult as the new Commonwealth arrangements might make things for Queensland cattle and cane farmers with the price of labour increasing and the protection of tariffs decreasing, Pater, like the Thompsons, only stands to win: buying up cheaply the land of those battlers who'll be forced to the wall. He'll make a killing. And one day it will all be mine, it only occurs to me now as I stand here. I don't even know how much land we have as it is. I don't know what to do with that thought, or with Pater's olive branch. What would I do with fifteen thousand shorthorn? Turn them loose? It's not a conversation I can ever have with him: cattle just don't belong on that land, and somehow I don't quite belong to John Wilberry, either. Then again, grief does work some baffling wonders on us, doesn't it?

I fold the letter away into my satchel, in the front pocket, something to think about later, and as I do I see the one I received from Cos last week, sticking out of the top of my notebook, reread a few times now to test its own revelation of wonder. He tells me of his gladness at re-ensconcement at the Swamp, and that it appears his balls were in fine working order all along as Susie is pregnant again. He's thinking of moving them to the West Indies, to Barbados, where his grandfather has some cane investments that need the occasional Thompson signature, and where he and Susie can be themselves in a shack on the beach, where it's not so out of the ordinary to have brown-skinned babies, and where they also have cricket – all year round. Could be the most sensible thing that Cos has ever done. I hope he gets off his lazy arse and does it. I'd like to get drunk with him in Barbados one day.

But now, the brass funeral march starts moving along the street outside the pub, and I have to get out of here, I realise. I can't wait until tomorrow. I have to get out, into the air. I grab my swag from my luggage and Jack from the stable and I am gone. I'll find somewhere to camp along the way. It's a beautiful afternoon. The sky is blue, huge, still, warm.

I head west, out along the Mitchell stock road, and on the edge of this side of the town the great hulking edifice of Bathurst Gaol imposes itself over the road like the last bastion of the law before the wilderness. Not for the first time I wonder if the felons in there are the least of those amongst us. Not for the first time I wonder if I shouldn't be in there myself for my part in the murder of Alec Howell.

Before I recall that in killing him Berylda did the only thing she could, however wrong the Crimes Act might deem it. She stopped him. Someone had to. In the absence, in the silence of the law, she did the just thing, the courageous and self-sacrificing thing, and she pays, every moment, for having done so. She pays as no hanging judge or executioner ever would.

I feel her sadness as I ride towards the lowering sun, feel the weight of that conscience she carries with her. I will never be able to relieve her of it, as much as I might want to, but one day she might see it as I do: a part of her, no less vital than any other. No one is sinless, spotless. Just as in nature there is always a blemish: a knot, an asymmetry, a fissure, the line of a frown between the brows – the shapes of difficulties overcome, of struggles worth fighting for, and won. All perfections in themselves. Striving to be who you are.

Who is she? She is perfect, in every way, to me.