Dorothy Eden (13 page)

But it had all been of no use at all. For as soon as he lay beside her and touched her the walls began to close in. She was suffocating. She wanted to scream. The darkness was black and terrifying, and when she felt the weight of his body, and his now-familiar wine-smelling breath in her face, the nightmare of the previous night began all over again. Except that this time, instead of the melancholy howls of a man driven to lunacy, the sound she heard was a sick child crying. And the grave under the willows was open and black…

She was over-tired, over-strained. The tremendous events in her life, the heat, the inevitable homesickness, that dreadful experience last night, followed too quickly by her initiation into marriage, had created a mental state that must surely pass. It was not essential that she should enjoy her husband’s caresses, but at least they did not need to induce this revulsion in her.

She would get over it. She must.

There was no one she could talk to. She could only sit at her familiar writing desk, taken out of its packing case and placed at the window in the little sitting-room, and write to Sarah.

But what could she tell Sarah, so far away and a spinster.

‘All my belongings are now unpacked, and seeing my familiar things about me has made me weep a little from homesickness. We have put the turkey rug in my sitting-room, together with my desk, and the low chair with the tapestry back that you worked. My piano is in the drawing-room, which is a large light handsome room.

‘I have hung your water-colour of Lichfield Court over the mantelpiece, and I spend a great deal of time looking at it, and thinking of you within those dear walls. Yarrabee is going to be a fine place, too, but I cannot be expected to love it yet! There is so much still to be done inside, and the windows open on to a veritable wilderness. I close my eyes and dream of smooth lawns and tinkling fountains, and open them to the acres of coarse brown grass and blinding sunlight.

‘Everything gets green in the spring, I am told, so that is when I will have the lawns laid down. Gilbert has allowed me to have one of his workmen as a gardener. Peabody, who is nearly sixty, and whose weather-beaten appearance makes him look more (he is like a crooked stick, with lizard eyes), says he has been a gardener all his life. He hints at grand employers in England, before he got washed up on these shores—and one hesitates to ask
how
he got washed up. But he is an admirable worker, if a little gloomy in temperament, and insists on calling me “my lady”. Already we have made great progress in planning the garden. The rosebeds have been dug, and left to lie fallow. The cuttings must be planted early in the winter, Peabody tells us.

‘Winter! It seems unimaginable in this oven-like heat. In a month it will be vintage, and after that Gilbert wants to begin entertaining, so I have simply a thousand things to do, including engaging satisfactory staff.

‘Jane King who came to me from Mrs Ashburton has too nervous a disposition, I have discovered. She admires the house, but is finding the country lonely. Mrs Jarvis, on the other hand, is proving excellent. She is a very good plain cook, and, more important, a good organiser. Already I find I turn to her for advice. She has what Nurse would have called an old head on young shoulders.

‘But she is a widow, and it would not surprise me, if she married again, even though she will be burdened with a fatherless child. Then I suppose Gilbert and I would lose her…’

Eugenia laid down her pen, thinking how ironic it was that after her reluctance to engage Mrs Jarvis, she was now afraid of the day when she might leave Yarrabee,

She read through the pages of neat upright writing, a little scrawled here and there when all the things she had to pour out to Sarah had run away with her.

Yet the matters that weighed on her most—her new and entirely irrational fear of the dark, the long nights when she kept waking to find herself listening for any unfamiliar sound, her reluctance to retire to bed, and the way she kept Jane with her until the girl was dropping asleep on her feet then, although she dreaded to be alone, her catch of apprehension when she heard her husband’s footsteps on the stairs… These were things she could not put down in a letter, nor even tell Sarah, if she were here in the room with her.

They were foolish nervous fancies of which she was thoroughly ashamed.

Once during their love-making Gilbert had asked her if he hurt her, for she had seemed to wince from him.

She had quickly buried her face in his shoulder, whispering no, she loved him, of course.

She had added afterwards, when he was almost asleep, that the night was full of strange noises that alarmed her. If he were ever away she would keep the candle burning all night.

‘Good gracious, you are a strange creature!’ His voice was indulgent, although it held a tinge of impatience. She had roused him on the edge of sleep and he was tired.

So she didn’t go on to confess that she still thought of that miserable convict. Sometimes a bearded desperate face came into her dreams.

She had so much to do and yet so little. She could decide where to hang pictures, where to put furniture, give orders as to what food should be prepared, but she must not actually do these things herself. She had servants, Gilbert pointed out. Make them work, keep them out of mischief. He didn’t wish her to soil her hands with anything at all. She must occupy herself as she had done at Lichfield Court. With her music, her embroidery, her water-colours, a morning walk before the sun got too hot. He also encouraged her to drive the buggy. He wanted her to pay calls in Parramatta, though there were few enough people to constitute the kind of society she had been used to.

However, the Governor and his wife spent the greater part of the year at Government House, a plain two-storeyed building, the first of its kind to be built in the colony in 1799. Apart from them there were other people whom it was desirable to meet, politicians, bankers, merchants, sheep station holders who called themselves the aristocracy and who came to town for ceremonial occasions.

These were the potential customers for Gilbert’s wine. Cultivating them was a necessity, if not always a pleasure.

It would be better, Eugenia thought, when vintage was over. As the days grew shorter and the nights chilly enough to light a fire, they could spend companionable evenings together, she stitching at her embroidery, and Gilbert doing his accounts which had to be neglected in the busy season. Then, she told herself, it would be like being at home in England.

Now she scarcely saw her husband. He was up at daybreak and off outdoors, often not to make another appearance until dinner at night. He apologized for not always joining her for the midday meal. He was too hot and sweaty, he said, he would offend her. He preferred to eat a cold lunch with the men in the fields. This was how he had been used to living. He could not change his working schedule for a wife. But he could bath and change in the evening, and eat in the dining-room in a civilized manner. And there were always Sundays.

Sarah would be interested in their Sundays.

‘We go to church in Parramatta for the morning service,’ Eugenia wrote. ‘Gilbert and I drive in the buggy, the house servants, Mrs Jarvis, Jane, and a young girl Phoebe, whose parents have a bakers’ shop in Paramatta, follow in the dray, driven by Tom Sloan, Gilbert’s overseer. Murphy and Peabody also ride in this vehicle.

‘The rest have to travel the distance on foot. Gilbert says this keeps them out of mischief since the Sabbath is regarded as far as possible as a holiday. And, of course, as I have told you previously, all these men are convicts on ticket-of-leave and it is an obligation on our part to see that they attend divine service.

‘They put on their Sunday best, such as it is, and some of them actually seem to enjoy the service. If their lusty singing is anything although to be truthful not all are sad, some are low and cunning, to go by. But I confess I can never get used to their poor sad faces, and one at least has a look of boyish innocence. But all of them are too thin, and show signs of their past ordeal. Gilbert does not care for me to show curiosity about them, and indeed has asked me not to go near their living quarters. So all I see of them is this weekly attendance at church, and only God knows whether the minister’s words make any impression on them.

‘We come home from church to a cold collation set out by Yella, who really is the most ill-favoured human being I have ever seen, and how my poor Gilbert survived when she did the cooking is beyond me. I, or Mrs Jarvis, have always to hastily inspect the table, and set knives and forks to rights. I imagine Yella wonders what barbarian instruments they are.

‘After our meal Gilbert dozes in his chair on the verandah, and I read or stroll in what will one day, with hard work and faith, be my garden. I have one great hardship, and that is that there is so little to read. Would you send me a set of Miss Austen’s novels, as these will always bear re-reading, and anything else that you think I would enjoy re-reading a dozen times. Otherwise, I have only a treatise by a Mr James Busby on the cultivation of vines and the making of wine, and the Bible. I have long ago exhausted all I brought with me…’

Eugenia found the new maid, Phoebe, willing but quite ignorant of such refinements as polishing furniture and silver, brushing carpets, and making beds correctly. She was a clumsy girl, and made a constant clatter. At Lichfield Court, she would not have lasted a week. But this was Australia where one had to be less critical or one would find oneself servantless. Besides, poor child, she was almost as ignorant as Yella. Eugenia had found her one day tracing the scrolled flowers and garlands on the French bed with the tip of a none-too-clean finger.

‘Have you never seen anything like that, Phoebe?’

‘Oh, no, mum, where would I have the chance?’

‘Ma’am, Phoebe, not mum.’

‘Yes, mum, you’ve told me that. I can’t get me tongue round ma’am, that’s the truth.’

‘You must try. It isn’t very difficult. And don’t waste time in here. You haven’t begun on the stairs yet.’

There was so much dust. Windows had to be open to allow a current of air to circulate, and with the air came the red dust that lifted off the dry earth in small whirlwinds and deposited itself on floors, furniture, windowsills. It even settled on one’s tongue, with a gritty taste, and irritated one’s eyes. Indoors, Eugenia kept her hair covered with a light muslin cap, and outdoors she wore her large floppy garden hat tied beneath her chin with ribbons. This kept the dust out of her hair, but Gilbert, who was less careful, came in at night with his own hair powdered with the clinging stuff. He washed it when he washed the grime and perspiration off himself before coming down to dinner, and then it clung to his head in a neat dark red cap that made him, Eugenia said amusedly, look villainous.

This irritation of dust would go with the first autumn rains, he told Eugenia. But he was privately enjoying it, because it was part of the excitement of the ripening grapes and the approach of vintage. His blue eyes had a clear compelling sparkle, he could scarcely sit down for five minutes to rest, he had to be watching over his vines. Even at night he would go outdoors to see that the stars were shining, and that the fine weather would last. Nothing, Eugenia was convinced, was more permanent than the iron band of heat round the earth. But Gilbert had stories about hailstorms, and great gusts of wind that could strip the fruit from the vines in one destructive hour.

Or a marauding herd of kangaroos might trample through the vineyard. Or the worst scourge of the summer, a bush fire, great tongues of flame flung from tree to tree, might blacken and desolate the countryside.

She was sure she could never be in love with this last month of tension before harvest in the way Gilbert was. She could hear his laugh, with its undercurrent of excitement, all over the house. He talked a great deal, he made jokes to the maids, he asked her to play to him on the piano after dinner, and then got up restlessly and left the room before she had played more than a few bars. He had a quick temper, as Eugenia discovered the day he lost it over a trifling episode with Mrs Jarvis.

Yella had disappeared. She had been absent a whole day, and when, the following morning, there was still no sign of her, Mrs Jarvis had sent for one of the convicts who had been seen, at times, in conversation with the black woman. He was a scrawny little Irishman from County Down, inclined to melancholy.

When he came to the kitchen door, he had looked such a poor wizened unhappy creature that Mrs Jarvis had spontaneously asked him in to the kitchen and offered him a glass of milk.

Unfortunately the master had walked in just as the wretched man was half through his glass of milk. He had gone up and dashed it out of the man’s hands on to the floor, and ordered him out of the house.

Then he had turned on Mrs Jarvis.

Eugenia, in the linen room which was just across the courtyard, could not help hearing the commotion.

‘And what, Mrs Jarvis, do you think you are doing, giving hospitality to a man like that in my house?’

‘I only wanted to ask him about Yella, sir.’ Mrs Jarvis was clearly distressed. ‘Mr Sloan said she used to talk to him—’

‘And the nourishment was to encourage him to talk more?’

‘Oh, no, sir, it’s only that he looked half starved.’

‘Are you suggesting I starve my servants?’

‘He only looked so miserable, sir. He reminded me of my poor husband, to tell the truth.’

‘He’s a felon.’

‘So was my husband. So was I, according to the law. But we’re still human beings.’

‘And haven’t I treated you like one? Reid—you see, I am actually human enough to remember his name—will be treated properly if he works properly. If it’s his nature to look sick and miserable, that I can’t help. But understand—’ there was a sharp rap on the table, ‘—I won’t have these men in the kitchen of my house. If I catch one of them here again he’ll be flogged, and you’ll be able to thank yourself for his punishment. Well?’

Poor Mrs Jarvis must by this time be in tears, Eugenia thought. But her answer came steadily, ‘If these are your orders, sir, they will be obeyed. I was only wanting to enquire about Yella, in the first place.’