Metro Winds (13 page)

Winter, when it came, was only a little better, for all seasons were but variations of summer in this land. But at least there were cool breezes and occasionally dew beaded the morning grass. I took to rising very early, just before sunrise, in that hour when the air would smell clean and fresh and damp and there might be a few veils of violet cloud in the peach-gold sky. All the birds sang at that hour, though later in the day only a few cried out, sounding harsh and exhausted.

Best of all I liked the thunderstorms, which were elemental and thrilling, knives of light slashing through the blackness, with great cracks of sound. Then rain would begin to fall. I loved the intoxicating scent given off by the parched earth when the first drops fell, but, like everything in this new land, there was no gentleness in the rain. It did not fall, save for the first spattering, but hammered the earth so hard that, setting off in it, one felt it might be possible to drown standing up. There was a dry streambed that ran by the house and after rain it would suddenly and for a short time become a churning torrent. Once I saw a horse floating in it the morning after a storm, bloated monstrously by death. That violent rain fell only briefly, and then, as if to punish me for the pleasure I took in storms, the heat would always draw a haze of sweaty steam from the earth to sheen the skin and clog the air.

Mama was no more enamoured of the heat than I, and she would often express disgust over how things were done or, more often than not, left undone in it. From time to time I saw her staring at the clay people with incredulity. She became ferociously determined that nothing in our household or our behaviour would be permitted to deviate from what was proper.

But even as I struggled to be formal in a country that lacked any idea of formality or any reason for it, I could not help wondering why Mama had brought us here. Lying on my bed under a canopy of netting to keep out the insects, it came to me one day that, before deciding upon our removal, Mama had been on a quest. Yet what had she sought, that she had found it here? Unless she had truly sought the end of the earth. If that were true, she did not show any particular love for the end of the earth nor its inhabitants. But she smiled often and serenely here, though at her thoughts I fancied more than anything in our surroundings. Even so, her smiles gladdened me after the sombre years of mourning. Perhaps she had brought us here simply to force herself to give away all our dark, smotheringly hot mourning attire, and might therefore cease to grieve. We had come from a place where there were clothes for every eventuality and behaviours to match each garment so that one could not exist without the other. But here, the heat slashed away the connection between fashion and form, though the clay people had tried to cobble together a fashion that allowed for the heat. Descended as many of them were from the middle and servant class of our own land, their notions of good taste were intolerable to Mama.

A few weeks after settling ourselves and our possessions in the new place, Mama said that we must shop for a wardrobe. This was not an indulgence but an absolute necessary, for even the lightest of the clothes we had brought with us were too heavy and ornate for the heat and for the rough simplicity of the society about us.

I enjoyed the shopping expeditions simply because it seemed as if our lives were curving back to some approximation of normality. But the clothing offered to us, even the finest of it, was appalling and the cloth available was unsuitable for anything but the plainest house gowns. My mother ended up sending abroad for a dressmaker and a seamstress as well as a cobbler, who brought with them at her command silk and lace, pearl buttons and other rare and costly fabrics. But she made a point of buying cottons and linens and wool locally, for she said it would not do to alienate the town entirely. It surprised me to hear her speak of local traders as if their feelings mattered, but then I remembered that she had always had the best of everything at home because she had wooed the underlings as much as their masters, knowing who did the true work.

Before Papa died, we had shopped often for gowns and hats and new shoes for this or that occasion, but having spent the last years in black and grey and purple, it was a heady experience to be permitted to think of colour again. Even Mama seemed nearly elated as she chose blues in all shades to complement her lavender eyes and flaxen hair, while I was directed to pale primrose, cream and delicate light greens. I was permitted one moss-green gown, which I adored because it seemed a dramatic adult colour. The endless fittings, which could have been a trial in the sullen heat, were pleasurable because Mama laughed and talked with the designers and cutters in a gay, charming, effortless manner she had not exhibited since Papa's death. Only very occasionally did she fall silent in that preoccupied way that told me she was thinking of Papa. But to my relief, her mouth drooped only for a short time before she began to speak of some new bonnet she had seen, or the settee she was having designed for the large formal parlour.

There were times I felt guilty about my longing to see her smile and be happy, for I knew it could only come if she dwelt less on Papa, and to wish for that seemed a disloyalty to him. Yet with or without my wishing it, Mama was putting off her grief.

Once new furniture had been built, light and limed or painted white, Mama set about establishing a salon in our house that swiftly became the only gathering place for the few people of any elegance or wit. It was a court, and she its queen. It was not hard to establish herself in this way, for Mama's skills in entertaining were formidable, having been instilled in her in a country where there were a thousand rigid rituals and archaic standards to be observed in even the smallest encounters. And of course there was her beauty and her charm. Naturally I did not attend the salons, but I was able to peep down the stairs, and occasionally a guest would be invited back in the daytime for tea, and I would be presented to them.

Then one day, during such a tea when a neighbour had come to call, Mama glanced out a window and the blood ebbed from her cheeks. Mama had the habit of seeing her thoughts more than the world, but her appearance was so altered that I glanced out the window too, half expecting to see nothing. But I saw passing a group of the tall, graceful, shadow-dark folk who were the natural and nomadic inhabitants of this land.

‘They have no sense of private property,' I heard the neighbour observe tolerantly. ‘They think it odd or funny that we imagine we can own bits of the earth.' I had heard this said before of the velvet people, and could not help but admire their philosophy. If one thought of it, the notion of owning land was no less absurd than the idea of owning a portion of the air.

These were wild velvet folk outside our window, clad only in their warm brown skin and loincloths. One never saw them like this in Dusty Town, as I had named it to myself. I watched the liquid grace of their walk and the light, strong way their feet grasped the parched earth; this close, I seemed to hear a music rising up from the land at their passing. I was so enthralled by this phenomenon that I forgot why I had looked out the window until I heard the neighbour ask Mama if she was unwell. I turned back and saw that she was still staring out at the velvet people with such a bottomless terror in her eyes that my heart began to pound.

‘What is it?' I begged, coming to sit by her and take her hand, as the neighbour took an uncertain step away.

‘Mama!' I shook her a little when she did not seem to hear me.

She shuddered and put a slender white hand to her throat and whispered, ‘It cannot be. Not here at the end of the earth . . .'

‘Mama?' I cried, growing really frightened. She turned to look at me and I wished I had not spoken, for here was all the grief I had thought was gone. Then she clutched me to her, holding me so tightly that I could not breathe, and whispered fiercely that she would keep me safe. I struggled to disengage her hands and felt my cheeks flame at the thought of the neighbour observing what must seem to him a sudden fit of madness.

Somehow he was got rid of and Mama went to her bed, forbidding anyone to enter her room. I hovered about her door, frightened and confused by her relapse into grief and possessive terror. When night and a slight coolness came without any sign of her emerging, I went onto the verandah, ignoring the warning of a servant that I would be eaten alive by insects. I did not bother to explain that they did not bite me as they did others, but only troubled me with their irritating whine. It was the same with Mama, and I supposed our blood was too cool or strange for them.

I looked up at the black night and the hard diamond shimmer of stars and tried to fathom what had happened. It seemed to me impossible that Mama could be so upset by the sight of a group of velvet folk, for we had seen many of them since our arrival. Was it the fact that they had been unclothed? Those we saw in town wore the cast-off clothes of the clay people, either by choice or because it was forced upon them by rustic prudishness. It was even possible that Mama had not yet seen the wild velvet people, for I saw them most often in the early mornings when I sat upon the verandah. But no, I could not believe my sophisticated Mama would be troubled by their nakedness, for all her belief in the importance of clothes. It was so obviously the correct attire for them, a symbolic acceptance of the relentless sun and heat.

Was it perhaps the neighbour's remark about the attitude of the velvet people to the possession of land that had scoured Mama? She had a deed to the land upon which our house sat, and for many acres about it, but no, he had spoken as he had after he had seen the look on Mama's face.

What had she said?
Not here at the end of the earth.
The words had rung with incredulity, suggesting that she had seen something she did not expect to see. I remembered how she had then clutched wildly at me and vowed to keep me safe, exactly as she had done during the period of nightmares before she had gone on her quest. The queer notion came to me that Mama had brought us to the end of the earth to keep me safe, only to be reminded by the velvet nomads that we had not escaped.

Mama kept to her room for one week and then a second began. On the thirteenth day of her retreat, I turned eleven. I had looked forward to the day because it seemed the first step out of childhood and that much closer to twenty, which Mama had always said was the age at which one truly became a woman. Papa had laughed at this when Mama said it once in his hearing, saying she was mistaken. One legally became a woman at eighteen. I thought the moment of maturity was not so easy to fix. Some girls were women at fifteen and others still immature at one and twenty.

‘Among my people a girl becomes a woman at twenty,' Mama told him almost coolly, and to my surprise there was pain in her eyes. That flash of pain and her coolness had fixed the memory in my mind.

Sitting on the verandah, waiting for the sun to set on my eleventh birthday, it occurred to me that this memory was the only one I had of Mama speaking of her people – her people, I thought, not her family.

And suddenly she was there beside me, standing on the porch in glowing white like a radiant ghost, her eyes fixed on a stand of silver-trunked trees grouped on what was sometimes, for a brief period, a lawn, the same trees around which the velvet people had looped two weeks before. The trees were native to this country and the only thing about which Mama had expressed unqualified approval, saying there was power in them. It was true, there was something about them that attracted the eye. I was about to rise when I noticed that Mama's feet were bare. I gaped at her small perfect toes, struck by the realisation that I had never seen her feet naked before. It seemed a sign of something but I did not know what. I stood up and waited for her to speak.

Mama did not look at me, but when she took my hand, hers felt cool instead of feverishly hot as it had been when I had helped her to her room. I saw with tremendous relief that her expression in the dim light of dusk was tranquil. Whatever storm had seized her had blown away.

‘We must have a ball,' she said in a dreamy voice. ‘That is how things are managed where I was born.'

I stared at her, arrested by the notion that she was about to speak of her childhood, but she only went on staring at the trees. The next day, she began to make preparations for what was to be the most lavish ball the country had ever beheld.

‘A ball is like a summoning spell,' she told our mesmerised housekeeper. ‘It must be carefully designed and composed. It must be so magnificent that no person will fail to hear of it or dare decline our invitation.'

The ball was to be held two months hence, in autumn, and everyone of consequence among the clay folk sent an acceptance when they received the thick invitation cards individually embossed with dark red roses by an artist hired to perform the task. None of the velvet people was invited, and when I asked Mama why, she said only that it was of no concern of theirs. As the day approached, supplies began to arrive by ship as well as chefs to cook them and footmen and maids to help guests from carriages, take coats, offer champagne and serve food. Fresh ingredients were brought from all over the country and exotic flowers shipped from nearby islands and kept in the cellar with the rare wines and ports Mama had brought with us.

I did all that I was told. I held open doors and helped to place things and to polish crystal and silverware. Mama even allowed me to help design the flower arrangements and to iron her evening gloves and kerchief, but knowing that I was not to attend, some part of me was inattentive to the preparations. It was this part that now pondered the velvet people. Since my mother's strange behaviour the day the neighbour had called, I had become more aware of them, and I often found myself watching them closely. Indeed, my early mornings were now focused on the moment when a tribe of them would pass by the house every few days, always in those cool hours before dawn. I watched them often enough to be sure that they always took exactly the same route across the paddocks and around obstacles. It even seemed to me they trod in exactly the same places each day. It was as if the strange, exquisite music their feet drew from the land depended upon their treading the same steps, as if any deviation would alter the music. I became convinced that they walked by the house not to go anywhere or to accomplish anything save to practise the making of music, which the clay people utterly ignored.