The White Earth (5 page)

And then, at the end of the hall, in the right-hand corner of the west wing, he came to one last open door. This room was all white, and shone with an ethereal glow from arched windows hung with billowing gauze. It felt almost empty, with only a small, single bed in the corner. And sitting before one of the windows, in a winged wicker chair, was a slim, dark-haired girl, her legs drawn up beneath her and her face turned away as she studied the pages of a book. John froze. It was only Elizabeth, and yet she seemed no more real than the room around her, a painting or a statue in perfect repose.

Then she sensed him and turned, her brow creased at the interruption.
You shouldn’t be up here
, she said.
Go away
.

John stood there, a million things to say in his head, but none of them emerging. The crease turned to a frown, and she seemed ten years older than him, not two.

Go away, I said.

And John went, his face burning, fleeing down the hall.

How had she done that, frightened him so, when he was not afraid of anything? And how was it possible that they would be together one day when he couldn’t even speak in her presence? But he had recovered by the time he was back outside. She’d caught him off guard, nervous about breaking the rules, that was all. Their mutual destiny was many years off yet, there was plenty of time, and he would show her soon enough, when he was older.

But the memory of that afternoon remained. And from then on, whenever he thought of Elizabeth, he would see her in that abstracted pose, framed by light, lost in her thoughts, and seemingly unaware that a boy named John McIvor, her husband to be, even existed.

Chapter Four

I
T WAS A WEEK SINCE THE MOVE,AND WILLIAM HAD NOT YET SEEN his uncle.

‘Don’t bother him,’ his mother sighed in response to William’s questions, rubbing her head, a familiar sign that she had a migraine. She was still only halfway through the unpacking, working at it in irritable fits and bursts. ‘When he wants you, he’ll call you. Go outside and play.’

William did not go outside. It was too cold. Bitter sheets of cloud crept continuously across the sky, high and rainless. So he stayed inside and explored his new home, searching through the hallways with a growing dread in his heart, and the smell of age and rot in his nostrils.

As bad as the House looked from the outside, the interior was worse. It was a dim tangle of cramped rooms, narrow passageways and dead ends. It did not feel like anyone’s home; instead, it reminded William of a derelict hotel. He finally concluded that there had once been four separate apartments on the lower floor, an old subdivision that had broken down into a labyrinth. There was no centre to it, no core of warmth, like a single living room or kitchen. Instead, there were four kitchens, all of them small and dark, and three of them unusable. There were four of everything, in fact, a maze of bedrooms and bathrooms and sitting rooms that could have housed a dozen people and more. All they housed now, however, was rubbish. William had to pick his way amidst tattered furniture, leaning cupboards, mouldering boxes of clothes and decaying heaps of newspapers. Everything seemed shabby and cheap. The walls were thin fibro, stained with age and punctured with gaping holes, the carpets were worn bare, and the linoleum in the kitchens had curled up at the corners.

And yet he could see that it had not always been this way — here and there he found indications that larger, richer rooms had pre-dated the apartments. Beneath the peeling linoleum lay wide wooden boards with a smouldering red grain. In other places the fibro had fallen away to reveal dark panelling that gleamed dully. In some corners were the remains of giant stone fireplaces, the mantelpieces stripped away and the hearths bricked in. The windows too, despite being either painted over or hidden away behind wardrobes, still boasted tall, arched frames. But it was the ceilings which really spoke of the scale on which the House had been originally designed. Sagging and dilapidated those ceilings might be, lost in cobwebs, but they still soared high above everything else, ornately plastered, making the little rooms seem absurdly narrow and tall. Often the apartment walls did not even reach all the way up to them. Sad wires dangled down, ending in naked light bulbs; but the mountings from which they had hung were solid, and at one time, surely, they must have borne chandeliers.

Day by day, William mapped out the House. It was shaped like a giant H, as seen from above, with the east and west wings forming the vertical strokes. The front doors looked south, positioned in the middle of the horizontal bar. Behind them was the shrunken version of the original entrance hall, dominated by a once-grand staircase fashioned from a deep red wood that was now scuffed and splintered. The stairs doubled back on themselves, and at the halfway landing a partition had been thrown up, an ugly white barrier made of fibro, pierced only by a small door that was securely bolted and padlocked. This door marked a limit on William’s explorations, for the upper floor was forbidden to him. It was forbidden to everyone, Mrs Griffith had warned tersely, pointing out the way the ground-floor ceilings bulged and hung low. Condemned as unsafe, especially for little boys. There were other staircases, William found, in each of the wings, narrow flights that climbed straight up. But these too were blocked off.

William and his mother occupied the rear apartment in the east wing, and William suspected that this whole section of the House had been abandoned for some time. The air was stale with mould, and there were marks on the carpet where large boxes and cupboards and other, unidentifiable items had obviously lain for years. Even with their familiar furniture installed, the place still felt gloomy and cold to William. His mother set out the couch and the television in the living room, and plugged in the little electric heater she had brought from home; but the warm air simply rose to the ceilings high above, and the deep chill of the House remained. William’s own room was in the back corner of the apartment. It was narrow and high and dark, and its windows looked out on a jungle of ivy and bushes.

Mrs Griffith was quartered in the same wing, in the front apartment, and her private rooms were strictly out of bounds to William. However, as her apartment had the only kitchen with a functioning stove, it was here that hot meals were prepared.

Attached to Mrs Griffith’s kitchen was a dining room where William and his mother and the housekeeper ate their dinners. William’s uncle was never in attendance. His territory, apparently, was the west wing, but in fact the old man had not emerged from his office since the day of William’s arrival. Day after day, the door was shut fast. His work, William was told, must not be disturbed. But did that mean he would stay in there forever? Did he even sleep in there? For although William had tentatively explored the western apartments, and had come across several bedrooms, none of them showed any signs of habitation.

He was sure of one thing, however — he was the first child to have lived in the House for years. There were no toys anywhere, nothing bright or for fun. And when he ventured outside into the cold, the garden was no better. Thorny weeds clinging to him, he wandered down the remains of formal pathways. He peered into the pool. The bottom was cracked open and naked earth showed through, a foundation for the long grasses and bushes that smothered the concrete. The wooden diving board was rotting on its springs. At the rear of the House, William found a gravel parking lot. It held his mother’s car, a rusting horse trailer on flat tyres, and an old farm utility. Attached to the back wall of the main building was an annexe that must have been the original kitchen, and a path led from it to the staff cottages, which were lined up outside the garden wall. None of these roofless, crumbling structures were habitable now, except for one which held firewood. And beyond the cottages were only more grass and trees and scrub rolling away under the bleak sky.

There were circumstances in which William might have found his surroundings enticing. If he’d had a friend to explore with him, perhaps, or if he had been visiting for a weekend. But he was alone, and this was no visit, so the act of discovery seemed hollow. He crept around the dark rooms, noting everything silently, but feeling no urge to delve into the boxes or to dig through the piles of old equipment he came across. None of it was his, or had any relation to him. It would be trespassing. And though he guessed that the outbuildings would be crawling with rats and mice, he couldn’t imagine going out there at night with a torch to chase them. At night the blackness outside seemed unbreakable. And inside, the House was at its worst. Many of the rooms had no lights. Even when they did, to navigate between them meant braving the shadows that waited in the hallways and corners, and in whole suites that lay deserted. And it was at night that the cold sank in deepest, as if flowing from the walls.

William piled on jumpers, pulled a beanie down over his ears, and slept under layers of blankets, but still never felt the sort of warmth he remembered from his bed at home. Other comforts were missing, too. The television reception was bad, fogging all the shows with static. The showers leaked only a dribble of water. And mealtimes were cheerless, especially dinner. Breakfast and lunch weren’t so bad — William and his mother had their refrigerator from home, and could at least make toast or sandwiches in their own kitchen. But each evening they were forced to gather with Mrs Griffith, the three of them zig-zagging in from their respective corners to meet in her dining room. It was a long, narrow chamber containing a large table which reached almost to the walls, barely leaving space for a mixed collection of chairs. There was a sideboard at one end, laden with yellowing china and decorated with plastic flowers. The tablecloth was plastic as well, a creamy white, upon which salt and pepper shakers and bottles of sauce sat always in the one spot, leaving faint grimy circles when lifted.

Each night the housekeeper served out four meals. She would place the fourth on a tray, and then, with much muttering, shuffle off laboriously towards the office to deliver it. Upon her return she would sit, dour and silent, at one end of the table. She dined as if she was still living alone, gazing ahead fixedly. William and his mother faced each other over the middle of the table. They barely spoke, not in Mrs Griffith’s inhibiting presence, and there was only the clink of cutlery as they worked their way through the roasts and stews that were the housekeeper’s standard fare. They were not hearty meals, always on the verge of going cold, the vegetables pale and drained of colour. Dessert usually consisted of tinned fruit and custard. And when dinner was done, the old woman’s muttering would begin again as she retrieved the tray from the office, then cleared the table and finally disappeared back into her kitchen. At first, William’s mother had offered to help. She could wash up, she suggested, or she could cook, or maybe William could deliver the tray, to save the housekeeper the long walk. Mrs Griffith refused her with a glare. It was her job, she insisted, and her kitchen. She had been cooking for John McIvor for over twenty years, and wasn’t going to stop now.

To William it was plain that the housekeeper considered them unwelcome guests. Maybe she even hated them. So was this what their new life was going to be like, hidden away in a musty apartment, with an angry old woman standing between them and something as simple as cooking their own dinner? Was that what the death of his father really meant? William watched his mother uneasily as the first week crept by, waiting for her to say something about their future. But she never did. Her moods swung between the short temper of her headaches and a drowsy apathy. The state of the House, the meanness of their reception, nothing seemed to register with her. Perhaps she had exhausted her reserves just to get herself and her son installed. But occasionally William would catch a certain expression on her face, as she studied the desolation around her. In those moments she looked suddenly appalled, as if a mask had slipped and she had seen the truth.

‘Mum,’ he asked in one of those instants, ‘are we staying here forever?’

Denial immediately clouded her eyes. ‘Why? What’s wrong with it?’

William could only stare around at the walls in answer.

‘Where else would we go?’ she pressed, her voice rising to an edge, defensive and frantic all at once.‘Where’s the money going to come from?’

‘I don’t know…’

‘I’ve done all I can, Will. You just have to make the best of it. There are things you don’t understand, and I don’t want you ruining them.’

‘What things?’

‘It all depends on your uncle.’

His uncle — the greatest mystery of all. The old man’s presence hung over everything, but he remained hidden, heeded and obeyed but never seen. At times, roaming the hallways, William could hear his voice within the office, loud and hectoring, as if he was talking on the phone. At other times there was the sound of a typewriter clacking furiously in there, or a different, unidentifiable noise, like a machine rolling and rattling. There was a radio too, usually turned up loud, but not playing music, only news reports or talkback, the voices indistinct. William asked his mother if it was really such hard work, running a property like Kuran Station. She only shook her head. ‘He has a manager for that. Your uncle does other things now. You’re not really old enough to explain.’

Even so, William found himself loitering near the office, striving to hear what was happening inside, dreading that the door might open and his uncle emerge in a rage, but hoping for it as well, if only to solve the enigma. But why, he wondered, did he envisage his uncle in a rage? He had seen him only the once, after the fire, and the old man had said nothing harsh that day, done nothing cruel. He had offered his House to a homeless mother and her child, surely an act of kindness. But still William guessed that the tall, limping figure would be a man of anger. Maybe it was just the hammer of the typewriter keys. Or perhaps it was the tone in his mother’s voice when she spoke of his uncle, or the way the housekeeper doggedly went about the duties of serving him. There was no kindness suggested in any of these things. And so William wondered if he really wanted to meet him, or might it be better that the old man remained a ghost, a brooding captain of an ancient ship, whom the passengers never saw.