A Darker Music (20 page)

‘So do I,’ Mary reminded her.

‘How dare he! How
dare
he!’

19

O
N MONDAY, JUST AS THE DAY
was giving way to evening, Mary heard someone at the back door. For a moment she dreaded seeing Angus.

Under the halo of the verandah light, Garth was standing there, holding a newborn lamb in his arms. The image was spoilt when the lamb gave a piercing bleat and kicked with all four legs in a spirited bid for freedom.

‘First of the orphans,’ Garth said, grinning with paternal pride.

‘So?’ She knew him well enough by now to tease him. ‘I’m not a ewe.’

‘Aw, Mary. Don’t be like that.’ He brushed his cheek on the lamb’s curly head. The lamb bunted him back with more vigour than affection and bleated again, a cry shrill with urgency. ‘He’s hungry. Thought you might want to see what we do with these little beggars. You could give us a hand with them — the Missus used to help out.’ He paused, an awkward moment. ‘She’s not …’

‘No, she’s not up to it this year, I don’t think.’ She smiled at the image of Clio in her nightgown feeding a lamb. ‘I don’t mind giving you a hand.’

She picked up a torch and followed Garth through the dusk to his house. Gloria was busy in the kitchen peeling vegetables, with Gayleen at the end of the table doing homework. The lamb announced their arrival with another bleat, loud in the confined space.

Gary came into the kitchen, face shining. ‘You got one?’ He reached up to fondle the little animal.

‘He’s hungry,’ Garth said. ‘You get the bottle.’ Garth turned to Mary. ‘First one’s always a bit of a scramble.’ He was keeping a watchful eye on the boy as he mixed milk powder with warm water and stretched a rubber teat over the neck of the bottle. ‘Test the temperature,’ he reminded his son. ‘If you can’t feel it, either hot or cold, it’s about right. If it’s too hot or too cool the poor thing’ll get the runs.’

‘Can’t afford to lose any of these little fellas,’ Gloria said. ‘Could be worth a fortune when he grows up. Hold the bottle up against your cheek, Gary, if you’re not sure. Or if you want to make really sure, you can always have a suck of it.’

Gary gave her a look of revulsion and nonchalantly shook a few drops of milk onto the inside of his wrist. Then, mindful of the consequences of a mistake, he held the bottle for a few seconds pressed to his cheek. For confirmation, he thrust the bottle at his mother.

‘Should be fine,’ she said. ‘Now get him out of my kitchen, if you want any tea tonight.’

The lamb-feeding party moved out into the laundry. ‘Squirt a bit of milk on its nose,’ his father said. Gary took hold of the lamb’s head and held it steady; the lamb opened its mouth and took the teat, not sure for an instant what to do with it. But instinct cut in, and it set up a rhythmic sucking, bending its front legs and bunting its nose against the bottle and Gary’s hand, its skinny little tail waggling for all it was worth.

‘That’s it,’ Garth said. ‘He’ll be right now. Mind you keep the end of the bottle up, Gazza, don’t want him getting a tummyful of air.’ Mary and Garth leant against the laundry tubs, watching. Gary was totally absorbed in his task, as was the lamb. ‘Sometimes they won’t take the bottle,’ Garth said.

‘So they just … die?’

‘They just die.’

‘What happened to this one’s mother?’

‘One of the old ewes, had some good lambs. This one managed to get a feed of colostrum before she was cold. Angus brought them up in the ute.’ He flicked a glance at her. ‘What have you done to old Angus, Mary?’

‘Angus?’ She recalled Saturday’s scene. ‘I think Angus misunderstood something,’ she said carefully, ‘and now he’s embarrassed.’

That was enough for Garth; he didn’t want to know the details. ‘Whatever it was, he’s real dirty on you. Won’t have a bar of you.’

Mary smiled. That suited her very well.

B
Y THURSDAY,
there were three orphan lambs living in an improvised shelter inside Garth’s chicken yard. Until school holidays started in another week, Mary had been roped in to help with the daytime feeds. The lambs now understood where their food was coming from and took to the bottles without any preliminaries. Mary was surprised by their strength, both in sucking and in bunting the bottle. The little creatures’ muzzles were masked with froth, their tails like whirligigs; their rich, milky smell mingled with the clean scent of hay. Each lamb had a bright plastic tag weighing down one ear.

‘What are the tags for?’ Mary asked.

‘We have to know whose babies they are,’ Garth told her. ‘Any of these might turn out to be champions.’

Warm froth and lamb dribble were running over Mary’s hand. The lamb’s sucking was losing its urgency, its eyes glazing. With her free hand, she stroked its tiny back. The tight curls of baby wool formed little circles all over the warm, wrinkled skin; its sides were moving in and out with each quick breath like bellows. There was no fat on it yet, just skin covering a bony frame, and appetite. ‘Are any of these likely to end up in the wether shed?’

‘Could do,’ Garth said. ‘They’re all from top ewes. Only the ram lambs, naturally.’ He remembered something. ‘Hey, Mary! Cec was saying that bale that’s been up in Perth since last year’s going to be sold any minute now. Have they’ — he nodded in the direction of the homestead, where Paul and Martin would be finishing their dinner — ‘said anything?’

‘No. I had an idea a bale from here already fetched a record price? Have I got that wrong?’

‘Sort of. There was a news report that it was expected to break the record. That was after they ran all the tests and found out it was exactly what Cec said it was — bloody great stuff. The agents decided to sell it by tender, and that takes a while, so we don’t know yet what it’ll fetch. Could be as much as a million.’

Mary was staggered. ‘A million dollars!’

Garth smiled at her response. ‘A few years back a bale fetched more than that. Not ours, but; from over east. That one was thirteen-point-three microns, as I recall.’

‘A million dollars for one bale …’ Mary was trying to calculate what this meant in real terms. ‘So how many bales do you sell every year?’

‘Around eighty. Most of them aren’t anywhere near that quality, though. And the Southdowns …’ He shook his head. ‘Hardly worth shearing the buggers.’

‘But you sell those as fat lambs, don’t you?’

‘Sure. That’s what they’re for. Southdown rams over cull Merino ewes. Southdown rams are prepotent. That means all the lambs are meaty little Southdowns, no matter who their mothers were.’

Mary was getting all this straight. ‘So the really top-class wool only comes from the wethers in the sheds?’

‘That’s right.’

‘And it was Ellen who designed the system?’

‘So they tell me.’

‘Then she must have been quite a woman. I can see why it’s worth looking after the orphans, if they’ve got the potential to earn that kind of money.’

‘Come on, Mary! Even if they were ordinary sheep, you wouldn’t stand by and let the poor little buggers die, would you? You’d have to have a heart of stone.’

Mary had no answer to that. She held out her hands, sticky with lamb spit and milk. ‘I need to clean up. Just call me when you need me again.’

‘The kids can cope over the weekend. But thanks.’

On her way back to the homestead, Mary was still trying to do sums in her head. A million dollars for one bale! She tried to think of things for Downe that the money could buy: some beautiful paintings, good carpets instead of the threadbare ones throughout the house, a repaint, new beds, a tumble dryer … Maybe Paul didn’t know how to spend his money to create a comfortable place to live. There were people who had no notion of it; she’d worked for them before. Then she remembered that Paul had another life up in Perth. Maybe when he was up there, he was more generous with his money.

L
ATE IN THE AFTERNOON,
Mary went in to check on Clio and found her lying quietly against her pillows. She smiled at Mary. ‘Sorry I wasn’t feeling sociable this afternoon,’ she said. ‘I was sleepy.’ She pushed herself up higher in the bed, and Mary went over to straighten the bedcovers and adjust the pillows. ‘I was going through my things this morning and I came across something I thought you might like.’ She indicated the shelving unit opposite the bed with a languid hand. ‘Over there, on the third shelf.’

‘Here?’ There was only one thing out of place, and Mary picked up a folded paper.

‘That’s it.’ Clio stretched out her hand, and Mary passed the sheets to her. ‘It’s a song you might like. It was written in the seventeenth century by Henry Purcell. If you read the words you’ll see that nothing has changed. Love hurt in those days, too.’ She held the sheet up and started to sing in a weak, croaky voice.
‘I attempt from love’s sickness to fly … in vain. Since I am myself my
own fever, Since I am myself my own fever and pain …
Sorry about the voice.’ She held the music out, and Mary had little choice but to take it. ‘I’m afraid my own experiences of being in love were every bit as painful. Even my love affair with the viola.’

Mary was puzzled by this strange mood of Clio’s, but she had seemed weaker over the past few days, and the last thing Mary wanted was for Clio to spend the weekend drowning in self-pity. ‘My own venture into romance wasn’t all that ecstatic either,’ she said quietly. ‘But I think it’s important to make the distinction between romantic love — being in love — and the other kinds, like love of family, work and so on.’

Clio was watching her with interest. ‘It’s the falling-in-love kind that’s the monster,’ she agreed. ‘The one the poets go on about. The one that every young girl craves with all her heart.’

‘Yes, well … I suspect that’s the one that’s ruled by our hormones.’

‘But at the time it’s … it’s irresistible, isn’t it?’

Mary remembered the dizzy way she’d felt when she and Roy were getting to know each other, and during the first years of their marriage. ‘Absolutely! You haven’t got a chance.’

Clio leant forward to take the pages from Mary again. ‘Listen to this … no, I won’t try to sing it this time …
For love has more
power and less mercy than Fate, to make us seek ruin … and love those
that hate.
’

Mary considered those words. Purcell had evidently been having a hard time with his love life, and his pain came through loud and clear. She gave Clio a smile. ‘I’ll have to think about it.’ ‘Play it tonight. It’s a lovely melody. You can have that copy; take it with you when you go.’

W
ITH THE
G
RAYSON KIDS
home for the weekend, Mary’s help with the lamb feeding wasn’t needed, but she went to give them a hand now and then anyway. It was satisfying to see the little animals growing stronger by the day. The boys showed her how to mix the formula, and by the time Monday came Mary felt like a fully qualified lamb nanny. She also knew the boys much better.

On the Saturday afternoon, Mary rode Gary’s bike to the reserve to check on the wildflowers. It was a lovely day and hardly worth the bother of getting the ute out of the hangar. She was nervous, anyway, about driving the unfamiliar vehicle.

Riding along the track was pleasure enough on its own. The sky overhead was like a porcelain dome, the air brushing her cheeks bearing the scent of honey and flowers, the only sound a faint creaking somewhere in the bike’s mechanism, the hiss of her tyres on the sand, and distant birdsong.

The lambs’ blood leschenaultia was still making its gory splashes on the ground, and all the other colours were more varied and intense than they’d been even on her last visit with Cec, with hardly a bush that wasn’t showing some colour. She’d studied the books Cec had loaned her and could recognise many of the plants, all with curious and brilliant flowers, and foliage that ranged from almost non-existent through toothed and needle-like to leathery; from grey through olive, brownish, reddish, gold and green. Mary stood looking at the ocean of colour, fixing the sight in her memory. In a few short weeks, she’d be leaving Downe. When her senses were sated, she made her way back to where she’d parked the bike.

Being away from Clio even for an hour had let her step back from the empathy that was developing between them. She didn’t want Clio to become dependent on her. She liked her too much, she realised, to want to make her own inevitable departure even tougher for the invalid to cope with. Some nights, she lay awake worrying about how Clio was going to manage when she’d left, now that she didn’t seem to be recovering from her illness. But Alyssa would be here by then, she told herself. While she knew nothing about the girl, she hoped that Alyssa was a kind and compassionate young woman who would take good care of Clio.

20

C
LIO WAS GOING THROUGH THE BOOKS AND PAPERS
stored in the shelving unit in her room, obeying a compulsion rather like the urge to spring clean.

Sorting through the dusty papers wasn’t easy one-handed. There were letters and postcards from her sister Penny, one or two notes from her father from decades ago that had enclosed photos of his new family; letters from some of her friends and fellow students. She’d kept the correspondence up for a few years, but inevitably it had petered out in the face of the different lives they were all leading. She’d been busy, too, having babies and learning to be a farmer’s wife.

This one, though. The creamy paper was covered with beautiful handwriting. The creases in the pages were almost worn through from handling, but it had been years now since she’d looked at them. She settled in the chair to read them again.

My dear Clio,
Tallis had written. This was the letter that had come with the Bach suites. He hadn’t come to the wedding — that would have been too hard, and she hadn’t invited him — but he’d sent the things here so they were waiting for her when she and Paul arrived back from their honeymoon.

You must know that my best wishes are with you at every moment
of your new life. I’m so sorry I had to disappoint you.

I am sending you these transcriptions of the Bach suites so that
if you find yourself isolated from the world of music you will still
have the means of creating some very satisfying sounds on your own.
Although you have heard these pieces played on the cello, on the viola
they can be warmer, and livelier. These suites are playful, because
once you’ve learnt the pattern of sounds he’s set up and think you
can anticipate what’s coming next, he takes off in another direction
entirely, and you can almost hear him chuckle.