Dorothy Eden (42 page)

‘Supposing I told you it was Rosie.’

‘Rosie Jarvis?’

‘There’s only one Rosie, Mamma.’

‘Then I would say that you are teasing your mother, which isn’t a very polite thing to do. Besides, Rosie is your sister, virtually, and you haven’t seen her for five years.’

‘If she’s my sister, why doesn’t she live at Yarrabee?’

‘Now, Kit, don’t be tiresome. You know why Rosie was sent away. And your father and I absolutely forbid any tree-climbing episodes at this ball.’

Kit had his father’s way of throwing back his head and laughing. But none of his father’s look of strength and determination. He was very slender with a narrow fair-skinned face and a sulky mouth. He looked younger than he was. The quick temper and wilfulness that had been his failings as a child had not left him. He also had a tendency towards being a dandy, which his father scorned. The boy would have to grow up and have that knocked out of him.

‘You forget, Mamma, that Rosie is of age, too. She’s not likely to want to shin up trees now.’

‘I hope not, but I also have no intention of finding out. Rosie is happily settled at Darling Downs.’

‘How do you know, Mamma? Have you ever enquired?’

‘She writes regularly to her mother, who informs me. Now, can we get back to the business in hand? I would like a little seriousness.’

‘Did you think I wasn’t being serious?’

‘I could scarcely believe that you were. Unless you meant Rosie to help her mother and Ellen. Even that wouldn’t be suitable since she hasn’t been trained as a maid.’

‘My God, Mamma, that must be exactly the way Queen Victoria speaks. As if servants aren’t human beings.’

‘Kit, I won’t have you swearing like that. And I don’t know why the Queen is being brought into this conversation. We may be a long way from England, but we still have conventions. One is that I do not ask my housekeeper’s daughter to a ball. Now, where have we got to with our list, Lucy? How many people will need to stay the night? That’s an important factor. I don’t think we can manage too many extra beds, with the house guests we will have already.’

‘Who wants a bed?’ said Kit. ‘The party won’t be over until daylight.’

‘It will be for the older people. Lucy dear, place a tick against the names of those who will require to stay the night. Write clearly because Papa will want to see the list.’

There was another anxiety. Gilbert’s eyes were growing weak. Their brilliant blue was fading slightly but remorselessly, almost as if at last the sun was draining their colour. That annoying sore on his hand had not healed, and two others had appeared on his forearm, nasty hard blanched spots that were just as obstinate as the first one. The doctor had given them a name, now. They were skin cancers, he said. Troublesome, but not serious. They appeared on skins that had been exposed too much to the sun.

Gilbert kept them hidden from Eugenia, but allowed Mrs Jarvis to apply ointments. She had had a great deal of practical experience of illness, he explained, when Eugenia came unexpectedly upon the dressing operation on the verandah outside Mrs Jarvis’s room.

Mrs Jarvis nodded, saying nothing. But she looked troubled, Eugenia thought. She was a curious woman, so calm, always keeping her own counsel. They had lived together for over twenty years, and except for occasions of great stress, they had kept their mistress and maid status. Eugenia was perfectly certain Mrs Jarvis would not have had it any other way. She knew what was right and what was wrong. So much for Kit and his talk of equality.

But perhaps, as a recognition of Mrs Jarvis’s long service and loyalty, she should have invited Rosie to the ball. No. The thought was dismissed instantly. It would be an embarrassing situation for everybody, for Rosie herself most of all.

Anyway, Kit had only been teasing. He liked to hint that his mother was too much of a
grande dame.
He was going through the rebellious stage. He would be as conventional as anyone when he was a little older.

A dressmaker came from Parramatta to make Adelaide’s and Lucy’s dresses. Much to Adelaide’s disgust, she was to wear white satin with a blue sash. She would have liked something much more dashing, like striped taffeta with a very low bodice. Lucy’s dress was identical, except that the sash was pink. Mamma had been adamant about this. She said that she and her favourite sister, Sarah, had been dressed alike for their first ball. The effect had been charming.

But that was
years
ago, Adelaide complained, and begged the dressmaker to cut her bodice much lower. She was seventeen. She utterly refused to look like a little girl.

Lucy, it seemed, preferred to look a child. She even protested about having her hair up for the first time. It made her look much too grown-up. She would be expected to converse like an adult, and she simply didn’t know how to. She never knew what to say to anybody.

‘Then it’s time you learnt,’ Adelaide said. ‘I can tell you this, men don’t care for girls who can’t open their mouths. They find them inexpressibly dull. No wonder your passion for George Fitzroy wasn’t returned. Of course, you’re so pretty, you might just manage, but you’ll have to smile and look pleasant. As for me, if I were not vivacious absolutely no one would look at me.’

This was scarcely the truth, for Adelaide was handsome in a breezy way that might well become flamboyant. Although the Misses Chisholm had loyally hushed up the scandal of the wine episode, it had somehow got about and the red-headed Miss Massingham of Yarrabee was getting a reputation for being fast. She had a man’s taste for wine, it was said. Both she and her brother knew altogether too much about the drinking of it. Kit had had to be assisted home from a night out in Parramatta often enough. But that was hushed up, too. The knowledge would distress his mother too much. It was a good thing for her sake that her youngest daughter was so quiet and good.

‘Who are you going to talk to especially?’ Lucy asked Adelaide.

‘I don’t know. Certainly not all those eligible young men Mamma is asking. Actually, I prefer older men.’

‘Older? How much older?’

‘Well—about thirty, I suppose.’

‘But they would all be married!’

‘Not all,’ said Adelaide carelessly. Then she changed the subject abruptly by wondering if Kit had been serious when he had talked about Rosie.

‘But he couldn’t be. She was only a sort of elder sister to him.’

‘Yes,’ said Lucy uneasily. It must have been nearly a year since Kit had stopped forcing her to post his letters for him. The amusement seemed to have fallen flat. This did not mean, however, that he was not still communicating with Rosie.

‘I don’t believe he’s interested in girls at all,’ Adelaide decided. ‘He really has nothing in his head except going off on an exploration trip. I believe if Papa doesn’t allow him to, he’ll go, anyway.’

‘Surely he wouldn’t,’ Lucy said, shocked.

‘Lucy, you are a milksop. Are you meekly going to obey Mamma and Papa all your life ? If you are you’ll never be a person. I mean, a real person.’

‘Oh, Addie, how can you say that? I’m sure Mamma never disobeyed her parents.’

Adelaide brushed her hair vigorously before saying thoughtfully,
‘Is
Mamma a real person? Sometimes I think she isn’t. She always looks beautiful, she never gets in a rage, she does everything properly. You’d never find her making blots on a letter, for instance. Or getting her needlework grubby. Or saying the wrong thing to somebody. Or being caught with her hair falling down or her dress mussed up. She’s really too perfect to be real. That’s what Kit says, anyway.’

‘I don’t,’ said Lucy indignantly. ‘Neither does Papa.’

‘Papa?’ Adelaide gave her a sidelong look. ‘I wonder. Oh, I know he adores her. But when I’m married I don’t intend having separate rooms. My husband is going to share my bed. All the time, until we’re grandparents and great-grandparents. It won’t bother us getting old.’

‘Mamma and Papa aren’t old,’ Lucy said confusedly.

‘That’s what I mean, stupid.’

As it happened, something apart from Kit’s and Adelaide’s exasperating behaviour nearly wrecked the ball. Tremendous news arrived. Gold had been discovered at Bathurst. The Noakes, travelling from Sydney, were full of the news. Everyone was leaving the city. The roads were choked with bullock waggons, drays, every kind of transport. Shops and businesses were being abandoned as their owners joined in the hysterical rush to the goldfields. There were nuggets as large as ostrich eggs, it was rumoured. A man could get rich in a day.

Parramatta was swept by the same fever. Labourers were dropping their tools and begging any kind of a ride, or, failing that, walking on their two feet, a knapsack on their back, in the direction of the Blue Mountains.

Mr Wentworth’s voice was heard from Sydney. ‘The discovery of gold,’ he said, ‘must precipitate us from a colony into a nation.’

Even old men were joining in the mad rush. But not so at Yarrabee. Gilbert said, ‘Our gold is here.’ He was speaking to his vineyard labourers who had been ordered to gather in the courtyard. He stood on a chair in order to dominate them. Any threatened danger to his vineyard still aroused intense feelings in him. His eyes glittered his voice rang with authority and conviction. He was a burly figure, his hair and side whiskers sprinkled with grey, his skin an ochre colour that had lost its healthy red. Few of his workmen would defy his quick temper, his hardness. One at least remembered the savage pain of the lash on his bare back. But he was a fair man, a good employer, so they listened to him in spite of their restless excitement. Gold. One listener, at least, had the fever shining in his eyes. The boss’s son, no less.

‘This year,’ Gilbert said in his strong confident voice, ‘the prospects for a good vintage have never been better. With luck it will be a record one. We have had no severe frosts, favourable weather at pruning time, sufficient rain since. There’s no sign of blight. With luck there won’t be a hailstorm. The sun is filling the grapes with sweetness. I make a prediction that the claret and burgundy laid down this year will be drunk with pleasure twenty and thirty years hence. Let others have their creeks and their pans of dirt. This’—he waved his arm towards the terraces of green vines—‘is our goldfield. To every man who stays with me until after vintage I promise a bonus of a half-year’s pay. Gold sovereigns in his hand rather than a panful of yellow dirt that may turn out to be nothing but clay. I don’t ask you to make up your minds now. Think it over. Talk about it. But I want each man who decides to stay to come to me at nine o’clock tomorrow morning, and sign his name in the wage book. And after that I expect him to keep his word, as I will keep mine. So there it is, lads. Yarrabee and a good vintage. Or a lot of thirsty work for no wages on a goldfield that may turn out to be a myth.’

‘Did I get them?’ Gilbert said to Molly afterwards.

‘I don’t know. You should have. The older ones, I think, but I’m not so sure about the younger ones.’

‘No. I’d have been the same myself at that age if I hadn’t had my head full of viticulture. That was my gold fever. I hope to heaven Kit doesn’t get it into his head to rush off. Anything to escape a day’s work, that boy. He was born lazy. Or Eugenia and I made him so. Did he have life made too easy?’ Gilbert sighed. He was tired again. His impassioned appeal had drained him of energy. He was just past fifty. Too young to be so tired.

‘Anyway, he can hardly go off with this ball in the offing, can he?’

‘No, love, no,’ Molly said soothingly.

‘I just wish he’d be more enthusiastic about what I’ve made for him. Yarrabee. It is something, isn’t it, Molly?’

‘It is something.’

‘Yes. Well, I expect all parents try to run the world for their children. I wonder what a son of ours would have been like.’

‘Crazy like you, I expect.’

‘Loyal to the very soul,’ Gilbert murmured, his mouth against hers.

Eugenia hadn’t heard the appeal, but she listened sympathetically to Gilbert’s account of it, and said that she was sure he must have convinced the men. A half-year’s wages as a bonus was extremely generous. Could he afford it?

‘I anticipate being able to do so. I also anticipate doing something else.’

‘Not my trip home at last!’

He looked disappointed that she had guessed his surprise.

‘I know I have promised it to you often enough. But this time it is really going to happen. I’m buying a passage to England for you and the girls.’

‘The girls, too!’ Eugenia was daring to be excited.

‘Isn’t that what you want? To present them at Court? I’m snobbish enough to quite like the idea myself. Mind you, I’ll miss Addie, and I don’t expect you to keep her away too long or turn her into a fashionable useless creature. Lucy may be best suited by an English husband. But Addie I want back.’

‘Gilbert, I may write to Sarah about this?’

He smiled. The brief rare tenderness that she so much longed for showed momentarily in his eyes.

‘If you trust me to keep my word.’

‘I believe I do this time.’ Spontaneously Eugenia went to kiss him.

‘Are you so glad to get away from us all?’ he grumbled.

‘It’s only the sun, Gilbert. I have always hated that glaring sun and the dust. And the constant anxiety about the vineyard.’

‘And your husband sometimes, too. He gets included with the worst of Australia.’

‘No. No, you are wrong about that.’

He looked at her quizzically, and she said unhappily,

‘You have been wrong about that for a long time.’

He stared at her, not believing her quiet obstinate words. Or was it that he didn’t want to believe them, for he dropped his eyes, and said a shade too heartily,

‘Well, I am glad not to be too much of an outcast.’

‘Outcast? I thought that was me. Or should I say misfit,’

He had to look at her again, puzzled.

‘Outcast! Misfit! I don’t know what you’re talking about. You know you have been the wife I wanted. I’ve told you so often enough.’

‘But not the wife I wanted to be.’

‘And what was that?’ He was humouring her now, but the strange uneasiness lay just beneath his jolly manner.