Summer at Mount Hope (17 page)

‘I would have looked after you. I'd walk over broken bottles to make you all right, Phoeba.'

‘You'd cut your feet.'

‘I'd wear my boots.' Phoeba laughed and Henrietta held her hand to her tear-stained cheek.

‘I've come to a decision, Henri.'

‘What about?'

‘My future. I will not marry your lovely brother, much as I like him. I will be a vigneron. I will be free and I won't compromise. I am going to live this life the way I want.'

‘Oh, you're awake?' said a light, refined voice and Mrs Over-ton, soft and ethereal, floated in looking just like someone notable from
Madame Weigel's Journal of Fashion
. The sleeves of her dress were slim, tight over her wrists and covering half her hand. She was fine-boned, her neck long enough for a stand-up collar and three bar brooches. The lace was cotton, finely ruched, and she smelled sweet.

‘Dr Mueller says you can go home,' she said, looking at Henrietta.

Henrietta bobbed. ‘My name is Henrietta May Pearson. That's Phoeba.'

Mrs Overton glanced at Phoeba but her raw face and blue, swollen eyes were too confronting, so she said instead to Henrietta, ‘You have a beautiful complexion, dear. I've always admired auburn hair and brown eyes.'

Henrietta patted the plait coiled on her head. ‘Thanks.'

‘I'm ready to go home, thank you Mrs Overton,' said Phoeba.

She continued to stare at Henrietta, now perplexed. ‘But how will she get there, dear?'

‘Your stock overseer, Mr Titterton, has arranged for us to have Angela, the cook's horse,' said Phoeba.

Mrs Overton's fine brow creased, just a little, and she said, ‘That isn't suitable at all. What will the cook do for a horse?' and wafted out, the two girls quite forgotten and her mind on something else.

‘She's been at the laudanum,' said Henrietta.

‘What day is it, Henri?'

‘Thursday the 25th, but it's 1904. You've been here ten years,' she joked.

‘It feels like forever.'

‘It does,' said Henrietta, ‘but you're right now and we'll look after each other much better in future.'

Friday, January 26, 1894

F
irst thing Friday morning the lazy-eyed maid placed Phoeba's skirt on the end of the bed, neatly folded undergarments on top. She headed for the bathroom, saying, ‘You don't wear corsets or petticoats, I see.' Emerging from the bathroom with the commode pot, a grey towel draped over it, she saw Phoeba reaching for her clothes. ‘What? Not having a bath?'

‘I had a bath yesterday.'

‘I'll tell Polly not to bother with the bucket of hot water then.' At the door she paused. ‘Mrs Overton has a bath in warm water every day, all over, completely in it.'

‘We'd all have one if we had a maid to bring us hot water and soap our toes,' Phoeba said.

The upstairs hall at Overton was as wide as Phoeba's bedroom at Mount Hope. Making her way cautiously to the stairs, she ran into Mr Overton holding a looking glass almost the same as her father's. When he saw her he stopped.

‘Christ,' he bellowed, ‘you've got a nasty rash on your face.' His suit was made of something fine with a soft furry sheen, like velvet. With a lurch Phoeba realised it was platypus. She knew she should have said, Thank you for looking after me, but instead she said, ‘It's better than being dead.'

‘Here,' said Mr Overton, ‘come and see this.'

Phoeba paused. She could say, ‘Don't tell me what to do you cruel rude old drunk' – but that would be cruel and rude. She sighed. It wasn't going to be easy to live your life exactly as you felt.

She followed him into a room, a rich man's study with dark green walls and deep red rugs. There were mounted guns over the mantelpiece, crystal decanters and Huon pine pipe-holders on the lowboy, and papers scrawled with figures almost covered the polished mahogany desk. In one corner stood a solid, carved four-poster bed with a red silk counterpane.

‘Come on,' he said, standing against the wide, white-blue sky.

Mr Guston Overton had a shiny red face and whisky seemed to soak through the deep pores of his ruddy complexion. No wonder Mrs Overton kept a separate bed, thought Phoeba.

She negotiated the slight decline of the floorboards towards the balcony rail, feeling a little unsteady. Beyond the large, neat garden and its ornate gates the dirt road led across the plain to the narrow pass in the outcrop. ‘I never get tired of looking at it, knowing it's all mine,' said Mr Overton. ‘It's a world-class view. Bet you've never seen one like it?'

‘I have. I've seen it from the other side and it's better. The plains stretch on and on and you can feel your insignificance, your place in the great world.' He didn't appear to have heard her.

‘I only own half the outcrop now,' he said, regretfully. He'd sold the land he once owned on the other side of the outcrop, thinking it was useless. Hadley's father ruined his section, but Phoeba's father made excellent use of his sloping terrain. ‘I sometimes see people up on the cliff, sometimes horses,' said Mr Overton, grinning and exposing his tobacco-stained teeth to her. ‘I have a telescope for bank managers and blacks,' he continued, ‘although the boundary rider says he's run them all off or shot the ones who wouldn't behave.'

‘Shot them?' said Phoeba.

‘Yes,' he said. ‘There are hundreds of them out there in the wilds.' He handed her the looking glass. ‘Have a look.'

‘But that's so … surely the blacks are just people living as best they can, as we all should be able to.'

‘You know nothing of life, girl; you don't know what you're talking about.'

‘But I do,' she said. ‘I know the value of life. I know what's important. Looking after the land is important. Friends and family, freedom, and being fair to those less fortunate.'

He must be deaf, she thought as he ignored her words and walked slowly back into his office, leaning to open the door.

‘Please thank Mrs Overton and the maids for taking care of me,' Phoeba called, but he waved his hand about his ear as though moving a moth away.

Wondering where she should go, she trained the looking glass on a wool truck rolling down from the shearing shed to the sheep wash. She picked out Hadley's long thin frame and focused on him.

He was standing on a narrow wooden bridge that bordered a steaming pond, poking at clumps of wool floating like scum on a steaming soup in the hot pond. There were Chinamen in the water up to their chests and wearing tar-lined barrels as they moved and stirred the grease and dirt from the wool. Smoke from a fire heating a great water tub clouded the air and Hadley smacked at the cinders wafting onto his clothes.

‘Gracious,' said Phoeba, ‘what a job.' She imagined standing over that hot pond, the steam pumping the stench of sheep dirt and ammonia up her nose. He was struggling to lever the sodden wool onto the floor to drain; it kept slipping from the long stick back into the hot, acrid pond. The Chinamen chattered and the carts of wool kept rumbling down from the shed on small, metal tracks, slamming up against each other.

Then, because he was Hadley, he lost his footing. Phoeba watching in horror as his legs circled in the air like a ragdoll's and he slapped onto the wet bridge. He lowered his forehead onto the filthy slime-iced boards.

Phoeba put her hand to her heart for her clumsy friend and smiled, but her face felt like it was coated in hot tar too.

‘You've no idea how happy I am to see you in one piece.'

She jumped. It was Rudolph Steel, in a suit of pale linen with tufts of wool caught in his shirt buttons. He stepped very close to her and took her hands in his, turned them over. His touch was firm but delicate.

‘Hadley said you'd mend,' he said. She could see each of his lashes and remembered his eyes, close to hers, when she was ill.

‘Hadley and I have been friends since childhood,' she blurted. It seemed urgent that Rudolph Steel know she wasn't Hadley's
paramour
.

Steel inspected her scabbed cheek, running his fingers lightly over its tight, red flesh. It was like being sprinkled with falling wattle dust.

‘I don't think your face will disfigure.'

‘I don't care if it does, really,' she shrugged. ‘Anyway, it's not as if I'm looking for a husband, Mr Steel.'

‘Call me Rudolph.' He smiled and led her down the staircase and out onto the front veranda where her father's sulky waited, mended and oiled. The coach-painters had decorated the dashboard and body with gold swirls and loops and there were even fine lines tapering to the end of the shafts. Steel's dark Holstein was tethered to its back and Angela, a shiny, slim mare with terrific forelegs – short, strong cannons and straight rear quarters – waited in a harness that shone dark and lustrous. Phoeba felt suddenly apprehensive. She stopped, flooded by images of the road racing beneath her, of the gravel rising to slap her. It would take courage to drive again. She wished she had Spot to take her home.

‘You drive,' said Rudolph, ‘get your nerve up again. Your sister was back behind the reins in no time.' And he took her hands and tugged her gently towards the sulky.

She heard steel wheel rims whirring and the sound of splintering wood.

‘I'll be next to you.'

He pointed to the small iron step, but her feet wouldn't move. Then she was airborne, scooped up and placed on the seat, as if she were a child. He climbed in next to her, untied the reins and she found them in her hands. The horse seemed a massive beast, all muscle at the end of two flimsy strips of leather. But Rudolph Steel wrapped his hands around hers, pressed them firmly to the reins and then let go, holding the backrest behind her and pretending to be absorbed by the shorn rams that shuffled across the plains. He smelled hot – smelled of saddle wax and freshly shorn wool.

‘Off we go,' he said and pressed his elbow to the small of her back.

She flipped the reins lightly and Angela walked easily along the road. The sulky felt sloppy beneath her, as if it wasn't attached to anything, but the further they went, the more she relaxed.

‘They say you're a bank man but I think you're very kind.'

‘ “They” say I'm a bank man, do “they?”'

‘ “They” do.'

‘Let them say it but I'll tell you the truth. I'm part owner of Overton. I don't throw people off their land. I try to manage it so that they can be saved.'

‘But you'd still be part owner if you were from the bank.'

‘I invest. I try to help people in strife through a bad time. Droughts end. Shearers behave if they're paid correctly. There'll be plenty of money to be made from sheep in the future.'

‘You invest in other people's misfortune and turn that into a fortune for yourself.' She didn't mean to sound so confronting but she couldn't think of anything else to say. The last thing she wanted him to think was that she was silly, like Lilith. But in his presence, she did feel silly – and girlish.

‘You could see it like that,' he said, ‘but I prefer to see it as an investment in the future of the rural industry. The drought has done a lot of damage in places. And there is mismanagement.' He looked sideways at the thistles, the Salvation Jane spreading through the Crupps' feed crop. ‘Some are worse than others.'

‘I know,' she apologised, ‘the thistles …'

‘And,' said Rudolph, ‘some people prefer a partner to the bank.'

‘How many pastoralists and farmers have you saved?'

‘None of your business,' said Rudolph, grinning at her.

She felt as if she had been punctured by something pleasantly rude. Her arms wanted to reach out of their own accord and wrap around his nice, big shoulders and she wanted to drive on for hours with him, to never get out of the sulky. She could feel the pressure of his arm along the backrest enveloping her and there was a shimmer from his fingers as they rested near her own. This was something to tell Henrietta. Aunt Margaret should know about it too. This felt like being alive.

They turned at the intersection and passed the Harvester still sitting by the dam, dented but shiny.

‘Did the itinerants ruin your new Sunshine?' she asked, trying not to grin. She didn't know why she was grinning.

‘Not completely,' he sighed, and for a moment, just a second, his hand cupped her arm and there wasn't enough air in her lungs.

‘An engineer is coming to fix it and then we'll get on with the harvest.' Again, she felt his hand at her arm as he gestured to their small feed crop. ‘We'll do yours to start with,' he said. ‘It'll only take a day.'

She almost said, ‘That'll upset the itinerants,' but she couldn't. The idea that she might spend a whole day with him was too pleasant.

‘Do you save English farms?'

‘No. I've just had four years there but I was born and raised here.'

‘What brought you back again?'

‘Unfettered liberty, or the illusion of it. It's a long story.' He said it lightly but she saw something in his expression that told her that it was sad. ‘I disembarked in Broome, a wonderful place, and hiked my way down here.'

‘So, you're a bit of a swaggie.'

‘There's a lot to be said for the life of a swagman, the freedom and camaraderie, the way they look after each other. All you need is a swag, a billy and a pocket knife and you can please yourself.'

‘I've decided to do whatever I like now instead of trying to please everybody.'

‘You can never please everyone,' said Rudolph, ruefully. ‘I've tried but I ended up displeased myself.'

She smiled, but it made her face hurt. She held it with her hand.

Spot whinnied to her from his paddock. His soft chest was pressed against the gate and she saw he'd lost weight.