Summer at Mount Hope (6 page)

Wednesday, January 3, 1894

P
hoeba rose extra early the next morning to enjoy the solitude while she could. She mixed her bread dough, rolled and kneaded it and then dropped it into tins and left the loaves to rise. She was turning her attention to the growling kettle when her father came walking down from the outcrop with his looking glass in his hand. In the kitchen, he cut a slice of bread and threw it onto the stove, then scraped dripping from the jug and spread it evenly on the warming bread, watching the flecked fat melt into the dough. He cleared his throat to speak: they never spoke in the mornings.

‘Now, Phoeba, what about this fiancé of yours? Of course, your mother and I want you to be happy—'

‘Good,' she cut across him, ‘then I'll do whatever is going to make me happiest.' Robert said nothing and the subject was dropped. It was Wednesday, either Henrietta or Hadley would call in on their way from Overton with the hamper. Phoeba wondered if it would be Hadley.

‘I think I'll take Spot for a ride today,' she said. She wanted to see Henrietta but dreaded it at the same time. Did she know? Would they all still be friends?

‘Marius Overton is delivering the new horse at lunchtime,' said Robert.

‘Marius Overton is coming here?'

‘Yes.' He picked up his warm bread and dripping and said, ‘now don't make a fuss,' but Phoeba had gone and the wake of her fleeing nightie lifted the edges of the curtains and even shifted the three remaining strands of hair Robert scraped across his shiny forehead.

Phoeba knew what must happen. Marius Overton must stay for lunch. Phoeba burst into her mother's room and prodded the mound under the cotton counterpane.

‘Mother, get up.'

Her mother didn't move.

‘Marius Overton is on his way with a new horse.'

The counterpane rippled and Maude's plump legs fell over the edge of the bed as her arm shot straight up in the air. ‘Hand me my corset.'

Beside her, Lilith rolled over and raised her tousled head. ‘I'll need to borrow your blouse, Phoeba.'

‘You don't need my blouse, Lilith. Just bat your lashes.' And she headed in to her own room. ‘Upsy-daisy.'

‘You know I have not been blessed with a morning temperament,' said Aunt Margaret, wriggling deeper into the mattress.

‘If you stopped anointing yourself with sherry you'd be blessed enough to paint sunrises. Now come Aunt, the squattocracy is visiting – the one Lilith's got her eye on. We need to be at our best if we want to unload her.' If she could just make that happen, thought Phoeba, the pressure would be off and life would be perfect.

Lilith ran into the room, grabbed Phoeba's new blouse from the wardrobe and ran out calling, ‘The wands, Phoeba, put them on!'

Margaret pushed back the bed sheet. ‘I didn't know Lilith could run.'

Robert milked the goat, left the bucket in the cool under the tank-stand, chopped some wood, liberated the chooks and then sat on the veranda with his newspaper and looking glass while the house rumbled with thrupping skirts, yelled instructions – ‘Phoeba. We cannot serve rabbit!' – and doors snapping open and slamming.

He watched a group of swaggies jump down from the livestock trucks on the nine o'clocker and straggle up the lane towards him, and he nodded to the dusty men as they passed though his yard humping their swags. Shearers. They didn't ask for bread or tea and they were neater than itinerant workers, but not as neat as the fallen city men, the depression victims, the dispossessed bankers and factory workers, the shopkeepers and merchants. At least they would eat a few rabbits.

Maude called, ready for her final armouring, and Robert took himself inside to the bedroom where she waited, her large, cotton bottom hovering in front of the mirror and her whalebone corset in place. He took the laces, Maude placed her forearm under her very long, round breasts, lifted them and positioned a curved horsehair bustpad underneath. ‘Right,' she inhaled. Robert pulled, pulled again and then tied the laces firmly. His wife turned to him, her high cleavage forced up from the satin and bone contraption like pink porridge.

‘You must ask Marius Overton to stay for lunch,' she said.

‘Must I? You only want to boast to old pigwidgeon Pearson.' But he held her long, chocolate brown serge frock patiently while Maude dived under the hem and manoeuvred it down over her now firm form.

‘The ploughing match is on Saturday and the dance is coming up,' she said, forcing her arms into the dress's narrow forearms. ‘We don't want wallflowers.'

‘Certainly not,' said Robert, thinking of the available men in the district – dozens of farmers, at least sixty shearers and rouseabouts at Overton, not to mention stockmen and yardmen, swaggies and sundowners, boundary riders and city guests.

Maude dragged the last yards of gathered cloth down over her hips and twisted them about until they sat neatly where her waist had once been. She turned again and Robert adjusted his eyeglasses to button her frock at the back. But his fingers were too coarse to manage the small, cloth-covered buttons.

‘Get Phoeba to do this,' he said at last. ‘I'm too old.'

She bustled out, a rustling cloud of brown ruches and tucks, calling back to him, ‘and clear out the dining room.'

Phoeba pulled her sister's corset strings. Lilith's face went red and the veins in her neck stood out. She leaned her torso sideways, reaching over her hip to her knee.

‘One more,' she gasped.

‘Lilith, you'll faint into your salad.'

‘One more!'

The one thing Phoeba knew was that the day would only go well for everyone if Lilith was happy – she pulled once more.

By eleven she had a roast cooling in the meat safe and the smell of her hot damper was taunting the itinerants all the way up on the outcrop. She took creamy goat's cheese and a jar of blackberry jam from the cellar and went to raid the vegetable patch, where she came across Aunt Margaret propped against the mesh fence with sketchpad and pencil, studying a caterpillar on a lettuce leaf.

‘Are you coming to lunch?' asked Phoeba, noting her aunt's grubby skirt and fingers.

‘I'm progressing from landscapes,' said Margaret. ‘I'm tackling nature.'

‘Well don't let nature tackle my lettuces. Close the gate when you leave or we'll be eating fat fricassee rabbit with no carrots for the pot.'

Everyone was ready for Marius Overton by noon. Hopefully, thought Phoeba unkindly, Aunt Margaret would forget.

He rode down from the outcrop an hour later than expected on a tall gold and brown Arab. It was a majestic, lively horse with a sweet, dished face and flared nostrils. Trailing it, pulling against its lead, was the new horse; a short, ordinary hack – grey, a gelding. In the dam paddock Spot lowered his ears and walked to the far fence were he stood, dejected, with his nose against a tree trunk.

Phoeba put the carrots onto the hottest part of the stove, tied a thin black ribbon around her trim clerical collar, removed her apron and shepherded her mother and Lilith – both resembling rainbow lorikeets – to the backyard where they gathered around the new horse. Robert patted the grey horse's cheek: it swung its head away. He ran his hand down its shoulder to its thigh and hock, lifted a rear hoof. ‘Ah ha, something's up.'

The horse wrenched its hoof free. Marius lifted it and dislodged a dirt clod with his penknife.

‘Hello,' said Lilith in her sweetest voice, and swung her shoulders like a schoolgirl.

‘Hello,' he said, warmly. He was pretty, rather than handsome, Phoeba decided. His face was brown but not wind-worn; his smart white moleskins were clean, almost new, and his riding coat was black linen. He tipped his boater – a city hat – to Maude and to Phoeba. ‘Ladies.'

Lilith just stared at him, dumbstruck. Phoeba asked what the horse's name was.

‘Centaur.'

‘What does that mean?' asked Lilith, full of wonder.

‘In Greek mythology, it's a wild creature with the head, arms and torso of a man joined to the body of a horse,' Marius explained, his gaze lingering on Lilith.

‘How clever,' she said, and fluttered her eyelashes.

‘How are your sheep this year, Mr Overton?' asked Maude in her most interested tone.

‘Call me Marius,' he said, with another tip of his hat, ‘and my sheep are thin and in need of a haircut.'

Maude laughed a little too forcefully and Lilith nodded sombrely. ‘That's because it's been dry.'

‘My word it has,' said Marius, nodding with approval of her understanding.

‘Which is very good for Dad's grapes,' Lilith responded, seizing the opportunity to sound knowledgeable herself. ‘Dad's got a bottle of last year's vintage especially for you to try.'

‘I have?' Robert was confused.

‘His wine is marvellous,' said Maude, who never drank it. ‘You must stay for lunch.' She clasped her hands, her arms framing her large, lacy bosom and glared at Robert to support the invitation.

‘You can show him your vines, Dad,' said Phoeba, helpfully.

Marius jumped at the chance. It would be nice to look around the place again, he said, as he'd hardly been there since his father sold it to the Crupps fourteen years ago and, he confessed, he was intrigued by the grapes.

‘Last year we had the dust storm, of course, ruined half the vines,' Robert began, as he led the visitor away. ‘The year before there was an early frost and of course, the birds …'

Phoeba congratulated herself on how well everything was going and the three women hurried back to the kitchen.

The dining room, on the north side of the house, was hot and overflowing. Maude had brought everything – including her mother's sideboard and lounge suite, velvet drapes and matching ottomans – from their large home in Geelong and squeezed it into Mount Hope. On top of which the dining room was usually Robert's study, with his viticulture books and magazines, his correspondence, his dead and smelly tobacco pipes, used matches and dried twigs and leaves. All this Maude had stuffed under Phoeba's bed before she set the table with her mother's best service – pink gilt-edged Oxford including cheese and salad plates, a sauce tureen and gravy boat, a butter dish and a set of vegetable dishes with button roses on the lids for handles. The cutlery was silver and Maude laid it out to its full glory including butter knives, condiment sets and pickle forks.

When Robert's tour was over, Phoeba peeped through to the dining room to study the guest, sitting at the cluttered table and surrounded by Aunt Margaret's lush landscapes. There was no doubt Marius was a squatter: he dabbed his forehead with a serviette, talked to her father with an important air and quoted information he'd read about the internal combustion engine. ‘It signals the certain demise of the steam engine,' he declared.

Where had he buried the fact that he hadn't been able to save his wife and unborn baby, Phoeba wondered. All she could see was a touch of the cavalier about him, but she pictured him holding Agnes as the light faded from her eyes and her body went limp, the poor child wedged lifeless somewhere in her. At some stage, thought Phoeba, he must have gone for a ride, far away, and bawled like a baby.

‘Where is your aunt?' said Maude, scooping boiled potatoes into the Oxford tureen Phoeba held.

‘She doesn't need to be here,' said Lilith from the porch where she stood catching a breath of the breeze. Suddenly, she primped her hair, wrenched her corset to push her breasts up, grabbed the potatoes from Phoeba and went to the dining room, where she set the steaming bowl on the table and sat opposite Marius, in Maude's seat. She placed one finger under her chin and listened intelligently to her father, who was asking about the new harvester at Overton.

‘Well,' said Marius, making a steeple with his fingers, ‘it will solve any labour problems forever.'

‘Yes,' said Lilith, nodding gravely.

‘Not that anyone has any shortage of labour at the moment,' said Phoeba, arriving with the beans.

‘We get at least three beggars here a week,' added Lilith, brightly, but Marius hadn't time to respond because Maude arrived with carrots asking, ‘Are you ready to harvest, Marius?'

Lilith started ladling carrots onto his plate.

‘Yes,' he said, watching the pile of carrots grow, ‘we've got a McKay Sunshine harvester on order, a new reaper-thresher. It winnows as it goes and then spurts out grain when it's full. We'll have our crop stripped and bagged in no time – when the thing gets here, that is.'

‘So you're doing the thresher team out of a job?' said Phoeba.

‘Well, of course, we still need stackers and chaff cutters.' Marius stared at her, startled.

‘And,' said Robert, ‘we'll need people for the grapes, by Jove.'

Lilith flicked her serviette loudly, but Marius still didn't look her way so she said, louder again, ‘Perhaps old Captain Swing's men will storm over and ruin your new Sunshine.'

He looked at her, perplexed. ‘Captain Swing?'

‘Pipe down, Lilith,' said Robert.

‘No,' said Phoeba, ‘do explain it, Lilith. Marius is interested.'

Maude winced. She hated anyone mentioning Robert's convict past.

‘Well,' said Lilith, leaning towards Marius, ‘my grandfather was part of the Captain Swing riots and they were transported from Europe to Van Diemen's Land years ago for attacking threshing machines.'

‘There's no such thing as Captain Swing anymore,' interrupted Robert and stuck his nose into his wine glass. ‘What do you think of this drop?'

Marius sipped. ‘It's strong, especially at the back of the throat.'

‘Yes,' said Robert, ‘a noticeable flavour.'

‘They destroyed machinery and burned crops,' continued Lilith, defiantly, her voice rising.

‘Why?' asked Marius, but Lilith didn't know why. She looked anxiously at Phoeba who said immediately, ‘Because some were being replaced by the machine and those left had to work to the demands of the machine.'