‘Ham omelette,’ he said gravely. ‘Madame will be pleased to enjoy game soup. Bread and butter. Irish coffee. Chocolates. The staff have hay, raw rabbit and potatoes. Put a spud on the floor, Phryne, for Wom.’
Phryne got up and extracted a potato from the net hung high on a rafter, and placed it solemnly beside her. Vic said hurriedly, ‘Not behind you! Put it in front of you!’
But it was too late. Something as stocky and as strong as a tank rumbled out from under the bunk at a fast trot and went straight through Phryne as though she wasn’t there. Wom had smelt his favourite food and was not to be deflected by a mere human in his path. Phryne went down, trodden underpaw, laughing helplessly. Then, before she could gather herself together again, she was flattened for a second time by the return journey. Wom, spud held firmly in strong jaws, retired under the bunk to eat in privacy.
‘Sorry, Phryne. Are you all right?’ asked Vic, observing her shoulders to be shaking. ‘He didn’t hurt you, did he?’ Vic was reassured by Phryne’s laughter. ‘Wombats go directly for their target. Nothing bothers them, and they are very strong. If you are in the way you get mowed down like grass.’
‘What if there was a wall in the way?’ Phryne asked, feeling her thighs for bruises.
Vic laughed. ‘Wouldn’t make any difference. He’d just barge through it. I can tell I will be busy making doors when he’s bigger.’
‘What if they can’t break through? If the barrier is a rock, say, or a tree?’
‘They’ll dig under, they can dig like badgers. The one thing they won’t do is turn aside.’
‘He’s faster than he was before.’ Phryne decided that she had sustained no lasting damage.
‘It’s night. He’s nocturnal. He only came out in the light because he loves those daisy roots. But he dotes on potatoes. Can’t imagine why, because he would definitely not find them in the wild. I found out one day when I was making soup. I used to keep the spuds in a sack. Once he’d had a taste of the peel he went directly to the sack, bit straight through double hessian, and demolished pounds of them before I rescued the rest and hung them on a rafter. He hasn’t tried to get them there.’
‘Lucky he hasn’t noticed them, or he’d have demolished the house. That smells good.’
‘Dinner is served,’ said Vic, helping Phryne to her feet and pulling out a chair at the table. ‘
Bon appetit
.’
Charles Freeman found the livery stable, and a man who smelt disagreeably of horses informed him that a pack-train was going to Talbotville on the morrow, starting at five am. Charles felt faint. What an hour! The man eyed him cynically.
‘Yair, we can hire you a neddy. You a good rider?’
Charles had ridden extensively in the park and considered himself a master of the equestrian arts. He drew himself up. ‘Yes, I am a good rider,’ he snapped.
‘Well, we got just the moke for yer.’ The man spat, perilously close to Charles’s highly polished shoes. ‘You got any riding gear?’
‘Only what I’m wearing.’
The stableman surveyed Charles. Quiet grey suit as worn, white shirt wilting at the collar, city shoes. He grunted. ‘Better get on over to the store and get some moleskins and a pair of boots. You can’t ride in that.’
‘I shall ride as I please.’ Charles flounced out of the stable. Impudent hayseed! These clothes were very fashionable and had sufficed for riding with the best people. He had not thought that the bush had such nice tastes.
Now he must order that awful woman to wake him early enough to join the packhorse train, since this looked to be the only way he was going to get to Talbotville. And he had to get to Talbotville because he had to find Vic.
‘Now, shall we talk?’ asked Phryne, breathing in the bracing scent of coffee and brandy, undefiled with the condensed milk Vic had poured into his. She looked at him. The long hair was corn-coloured and fell down over his shoulders to his chest. His beard was, Phryne knew, soft; not the bedsprings she had previously been close to, worn by young artists in search of
Bohemia. His eyes were calm, but they glowed.
‘Yes. What shall we talk about first?’ ‘The legal angle. Your father has left you his house and his money. He has left the business to Charles. What do you want to do about the inheritance?’
‘I don’t want it,’ he said, faintly surprised that she had to ask. ‘I don’t want any of it. I don’t want to see my mother again, and I don’t really want to see Charles again, either, though I wish him well. There must be some sort of legal way I can refuse the bequest.’
‘You really don’t want it? It’s a lot of money.’
‘What would I do with a lot of money?’ he asked, smiling.
‘I am an immeasurably wealthy man. If I had to go back to Melbourne I would never recover from my poverty.’
‘You are sure?’
‘Yes, I am sure.’
‘Good. I have this paper that a lawyer friend drew up for me. It repudiates the inheritance. But . . .’
‘Where do I sign?’
‘Not so fast. If you sign it, you will have no further claim on your father’s estate. What if you get sick, can’t stay here? What if you break a leg or something, miscalculating Wom’s trajectory?’
‘Misses Anne and Jo will look after me, and then I’ll come back here. I will die here,’ he said quietly. ‘I will never go back. Have you got a pen?’
Phryne supplied her own fountain-pen and watched him sign his full name, Victor Ernest Freeman. She signed underneath as a witness. Vic opened the cupboard and showed Phryne a savings-book. She read the balance and swore.
‘Gold?’
‘Gold. I don’t need money. That’s why I haven’t panned for years. I built it up, bit by bit, until I had enough, then I let it be. Someone else might come after me and make the same discovery. I do not want to plunder the place. Well, that’s my inheritance gone, thank God. More coffee?’
Phryne folded the paper and put it in her suitcase.
‘Well, I have done what I came to do. Your mother hired me to find you and I found you. She was in a flap about the house and the money and you have solved that at one stroke of the pen. Now I can leave.’
‘But not just now.’
‘No. Not just now.’
Silence fell. The fire crackled. Mack the dog chased rabbits in his sleep, paws twitching. Outside it was black night. Phryne noticed that two things she had expected to see were missing.
‘No clock, and no gun,’ she commented.
‘I hate clocks. They tick. Other things make noises in their time and need, but clocks mechanically beat the seconds to death. No clocks. I don’t need one, anyway. I had a gun when I came here. I told you that, didn’t I? When the noise in my head stopped, I didn’t need it any more. I broke it, and threw it away. I was a soldier and had to carry a gun, once. Now I am a free man I will never carry a gun again. I snare my rabbits with wire slip-nooses; they’re killed instantly. And rabbits are the only things that I intend to kill.’
‘I am concerned,’ began Phryne, reaching a hand out of her wrappings to the man opposite her, ‘I am concerned that by coming here I have broken your peace. And I am very concerned by the thought that if I make love with you, dear Vic, I will smash your solitude to pieces. You have lived without women all this time and felt no lack of them. Is it a good idea to waken all those sleeping desires? Won’t you burn, once I am gone? For I shall go,’ she added. ‘I could not live here. The silence unsettles me. I like cities.’
He thought about it, stroking her hand very gently.
‘I have burned,’ he agreed. ‘There was a girl in France, a real Mademoiselle from Armentiéres, and a nurse in England. I have not lost . . . my manhood. I would rather bear the pain, Phryne, than never to have known you at all.’
‘You are sure?’ she asked, and he nodded.
‘I am sure.’
She stripped off the red flannel woollies, retaining her rug, and curled up in the bunk, watching him undress. A broad chest and wide shoulders were revealed as the checked shirt was peeled off; narrow waist and strong, thick thighs as the moleskins dropped. He moved with assurance as he threw back the coverings and climbed into his bed, and Phryne slid down between him and the wall and encircled him in her white arms.
He was uncertain at first, perhaps remembering other flesh, perhaps afraid of hurting her. They grew warmer and closer, coffee-flavoured breaths mingled. Long hair tickled her face as his beard scratched and his mouth found the right place.
If she cried out in ecstasy, pinned pleasurably as prey under a lion’s paw, the golden hair about her face, who but the mountains was there to hear her?
But you found the bush was dismal and a land
of no delight.
Banjo Paterson
‘In Defence of the Bush’
Charles bumped painfully on the ridge-like back of a mean, fly-bitten, grey stallion, which, he was convinced, the stableman had allotted him out of pure envy. The beast was two-paced, with a bone-shattering trot, a habit of biting at its rider’s foot if it got the chance, and with a mouth as hard as boiled leather, almost impossible to control. Fortunately, it liked other horses almost as much as it hated humans, and was pleased to walk along behind the packhorse train, trying to wipe Charles off against passing rocks in absentminded malice. The landscape did not please him. It was all so uncontrolled. No one had planted all these trees and all that thick understorey scrub; it had just been allowed to grow wherever it liked. The track was hardly encouraging either. It was disagreeably stony and uneven, and his mount, Charles saw with pleasure, was having a certain difficulty in negotiating it. He wished that the creature would break several legs.
The pack-train, tethered loosely nose to tail, left traces as they passed; fresh dung that steamed. Charles wrinkled his nose. Animals were so . . . animalistic. He was convinced that at Talbotville he would be lucky to find a hotel, and very lucky indeed if dinner did not consist of tough steak with two fried eggs.
His mount stumbled, and he swore as he dragged at its head. Before he left the city, he had had a pleasant, romantic view of the bush: out there somewhere, brave women and strong men. Now he was convinced that he hated every line Banjo Paterson had ever written, and determined that once he had concluded his task he would never, never come back.
Phryne woke, warm and assuaged, with the conviction that her hair had turned gold overnight. She tugged at a tress of it, eliciting a sleepy murmur from the man next to her under the rabbit skins, and remembered that she had seduced a hermit. Her recollections of the night were extremely agreeable, and
she closed her eyes and snuggled into Vic’s embrace.
‘Mmm?’ he murmured interrogatively. ‘Phryne,’ he concluded, identifying her to his satisfaction. ‘Oh Phryne, my dear.’
Phryne decided that although it was morning, at least morning enough to distinguish black hair from gold, and although this was a tough country, requiring all its citizens to be up and doing, she did not need to be up and doing anything just yet.
She was drowsing into sleep again when the man beside her convulsed and swore.
‘Damn! Sorry, Phryne, that was Mack. He wakes me up like that if he thinks I’ve overslept.’
‘Wakes you how?’ She was interested in what part of Vic Mack had evidently bitten.
‘He pushes his great wet cold nose in my ear. I’ll just let him out.’
‘I’ll go out, too, if I can find my boots.’
She found the boots, donned them with difficulty—they had dried into unfootlike shapes—and pulled on her woollies and the rug. Sun flooded into the little house as Vic opened the door. Mack bounced out into the clearing, barked at a flying parrot, which surely could not have been black, and trotted off to the springs for a drink. Phryne joined him, and splashed her face with water so nearly gelid that she was stunned with cold.
‘Snow water,’ commented Vic, bare-chested in the thin sunlight. ‘You’ve brought summer with you,’ he said delightedly, and splashed enthusiastically, washing his face and chest.
Phryne, who had retreated out of the way of this exuberant hygiene, watched him in awe. Ice-water ran off him, almost steaming. His hair and beard shone in the bright light. He was a giant from the beginning of the world.
She pulled herself together. He was a perfectly ordinary hermit in moleskins that had seen better days, and his colouring had come from some remote Scandinavian ancestor.
He was, nonetheless, very impressive.
The forest exhaled, breathing fern and water scents. An eagle, ranging out from the cliffs, circled effortlessly overhead. Phryne went to sit down on the step, lighting a gasper and smoking luxuriously. The sun struck silver from the dewy grass, in which Mack rolled, making swathes of green where he had flattened the turf. Paradise, Phryne thought, blowing smoke rings. Paradise. It was only as she was called in to breakfast by the scent of buttered toast that she remembered that paradise always had a resident snake.
Charles had reached Talbotville about dusk, after following what seemed to be innumerable ridges, all marked carelessly with the occasional sock or cairn to suggest that there were tracks in the trackless hills. He was very tired, sore, bruised in his person by the badly maintained saddle and the unaccustomed exercise. There was, as he feared, only one hotel, if it could be dignified with such a name, and the stone-faced woman who served him dinner did indeed offer only steak and eggs. He ate it, because he was hungry. The packhorse train had been greeted by two frumpy women, a stout party in a suit with watch-chain, and a gaggle of uninteresting townsfolk and several dirty children. He sat in the public bar after mangling his way through the steak, as there was nowhere else to sit, and
listened to the conversation of the stockmen.