Dorothy Eden (46 page)

None of these faithful attendants on the sick man knew about his most recent visit to the isolated bedroom beyond the kitchen.

It was mid-afternoon and Molly had not expected to see him. She sprang up agitatedly from the armchair where she had been taking a brief rest.

‘What are you doing here at this time of day?’

His eyes had the quizzical look she loved.

‘It seems a perfectly good time of day to me. A good time to say thank you.’

‘For what?’ she cried.

‘Don’t look so forbidding. Can’t I thank you civilly for all these years? I don’t believe I’ve ever had the decency to do so before.’

She couldn’t hide the desolation in her eyes.

‘You won’t be coming again.’ It was a statement, not a question.

He evaded answering. ‘There no time like the present for paying a compliment.’

She flung herself into his arms, her own flung tightly round him. She was not crying, although her deep hard breaths sounded like sobs.

‘Bless you, Molly. I’ll never know what I would have done without you.’

‘Nor me without you.’

He raised her face that now showed its marks of age so clearly.

‘You’re a strange creature. Have you never wanted anything more?’

‘Only your child. And then I would have had to leave Yarrabee. So, no, love, I’ve never wanted anything more.’

‘Your daughter has my son. That’s something.’

‘I never encouraged it!’

‘No, but it pleased you. To tell the truth, it pleased me, too. It’s a kind of permanence for us, in its way. If anyone wants permanence. Molly, don’t turn your head away. I’m not dying, you know. Me! I’m as strong as an old man kangaroo.’ He gave her his straight aggressive look. ‘Do you think I’m dying?’

She made herself sustain his gaze without flinching.

‘I only remember that you once asked me if I’d die for you. Well, I still would. Gladly.’

His face tightened. He pushed her away roughly.

‘Get on with you. I’ll do my own dying. When the time comes. And that’s a long way off. And Molly—’

‘Yes, love?’

‘It’s true I won’t be coming again.’

She looked up in anguish. He rubbed his hand over his eyes.

‘I believe I was too optimistic when I thought I could keep two women happy. It wasn’t the simple thing I thought it was. I couldn’t go to Eugenia after you. That was the trouble. And it seems she minded. And never said so.’

‘Has she said so now?’

‘Of course she hasn’t. Eugenia! She’s much too subtle. I have to guess what she’s thinking. I haven’t been trying very hard for a long time.’

‘Gilbert, you’re a good man!’ Molly cried, as she had once before.

He smiled faintly.

‘What a wonderful direct uncomplicated nature you have. If Eugenia had one like that—but then I wouldn’t find her so fascinating. I have to make amends a little, Molly. Can you understand?’

She nodded. She understood all too well.

This was a familiar situation, being the one on the outside, the one with nothing…

Eugenia looked into Philip Noakes’ face and winced away from the compassion in it.

‘How long?’ she managed to say.

‘Six months. Nine. Perhaps a year. He’s such a devil of a fighter.’

‘Let him have one more vintage,’ she begged, her throat aching.

‘We’ll see. But don’t pray for it, Eugenia. Don’t try to keep him alive. It wouldn’t be kind.’

‘What a blessing you didn’t go to England, Eugenia,’ said Marion. Marion with her yellow face, like seamed pigskin, her tragic eyes.

‘I know. How can I help him now? He won’t give in, you know. He’ll pretend until the end.’

‘I’d say be with him as much as you can. For all his ranting and roaring, he’s just as much in love with you now as he was the day you arrived. I’ll never forget that day. He couldn’t wait to sight your ship coming through the heads. He was out with a telescope from dawn.’

Eugenia’s face had twisted in pain.

‘I wish you were speaking the truth. But you’re not. Gilbert hasn’t loved me for a long time.’

‘I don’t believe it!’ Marion exclaimed. ‘He worships the ground you walk on. You only have to see his eyes following you.’

‘Oh, he admires me,’ Eugenia admitted. ‘I am a sort of perfect doll woman. At the beginning I didn’t know how to be a satisfactory wife. I was young and much too virginal. Then—something happened—and Gilbert didn’t care for me in that way any more.’

‘Couldn’t you have overcome it?’ Marion asked softly.

‘Could you?’ Now Eugenia had to finish her bleak confession. ‘With a husband who suddenly preferred separate bedrooms, who only came to you from duty or necessity or courtesy, or whatever word he liked to use, who was relieved when he was told that there mustn’t be another child, because that gave him an excuse to stay away! Could you have overcome that situation? I couldn’t. It froze me, inside. I could never go where I was not wanted,’ she added miserably.

Marion, not wanting Eugenia to read her thoughts, lowered her eyes. Gilbert Massingham, the sensual devil! Who had he been visiting secretly? She supposed that this was the inevitable way a marriage of this kind must turn out.

Yet it was far from being unsuccessful, so long as Gilbert found his satisfaction elsewhere and Eugenia hadn’t any volcanoes of passion beneath her coolness.

Marion, looking into those beautiful haunted eyes, was, all at once, not so sure about Eugenia’s legendary coolness. What was the mysterious happening which she insisted had turned Gilbert from her? Surely it couldn’t have been that old gossip about the Irish artist. But that hadn’t been a real scandal. Or had it? Had Eugenia, with her morbidly acute sensitivity, been pining away for years with a guilty conscience ?

‘I lost him,’ Eugenia was confessing sadly. ‘And it was my own fault.’

‘Lost him be damned.’ Marion had picked up too much colonial coarseness in her language. ‘He’s always loved you. There are plenty of ways to love. Why don’t you try showing him yours? It isn’t too late.’

But how did one express that long-held-back emotion to a man who was permanently angry? Gilbert’s blue eyes burned with bitter resentment against the fate that he wouldn’t admit. He could not endure sympathetic looks or thoughtfulness for his growing weakness. He insisted on supervising work in the vineyard and swore without apology at anyone who tried to prevent him. He even swore at Jem, accusing him of neglect in the cellar. Jem hadn’t turned the bottles in the bins frequently enough, or kept records up to date. He went about declaring that if he were not there Yarrabee would fall to pieces. But thank God that day had not yet come.

‘It’s God he’s angry with, not me,’ Jem said to a bitterly weeping Adelaide.

‘So am I,’ Adelaide sobbed. ‘I’ve stopped saying my prayers.’

‘Now, love. You must say them for the master.’

Even with Eugenia, Gilbert had moments of intense irritability, although he constantly wanted her company.

‘Why don’t you answer me back when I’m rude? Why must you be so saintly?’

‘I’ll be far from saintly if I find you getting up in the middle of the night again to look for frost.’

‘But surely you’ve been the wife of a vigneron long enough to realize the danger of frost at this time of year.’

‘I only realize that if there is one Jem and Tom will attend to it. From tonight you’re coming back into our bed.’

He gave her a quick look.

‘You said our bed.’

‘So I did, and so it is. Or have you forgotten?’

He shook his head slowly.

‘No. But I’m afraid I’ll keep you awake, Genia. I haven’t slept very well lately.’

‘Neither have I. We can talk.’

That was the beginning of another phase in their lives, the whispered confidences that came easily in the dark.

‘I’ve wondered lately—was I too clumsy with you at the beginning, Genia?’

The question gave Eugenia an almost overpowering compulsion to confess her long-kept secret. She had to bite her tongue to stop herself easing her conscience at the expense of destroying Gilbert’s treasured image of her.

‘I know sensitive women don’t much care for that side of marriage,’ Gilbert went on, misinterpreting her silence. ‘But I was a strong tough fellow in those days. I had to be, to manage the convicts.’

‘It was the convicts who were always on my mind. Especially after that terrible experience on our wedding night.’ She could make this confession safely. ‘I think I was the victim of my upbringing. It was perfectly suitable for a young lady in England, but in this country I needed much more practical knowledge and much less refinement.’

His arm lay heavily across her breast.

‘It was your refinement I wanted. Haven’t you realized that yet?’ He began to swear quietly to himself. ‘I’ll get over this damned crippled back. It won’t beat me.’

All night, after that conversation, he held her in his arms. Whether he was aware of her completely loving compliant body she didn’t know, but she thought it was the most poignantly beautiful night she had ever spent.

In the late spring Adelaide and Jem were married. They had wanted a quiet ceremony at Yarrabee, but Gilbert was having none of that. People would think he disapproved of Jem as a son-in-law. Besides Addie was his favourite child. She should have a church wedding and he, naturally, would walk up the aisle and give her away. Proudly.

Kit wrote a long letter setting out all his reasons for not coming. It would be an impossible journey over crude roads with deserts to be crossed, rivers forded, and Rosie was expecting a child.

But Kit was an explorer, Adelaide said disappointedly. And Rosie was not someone to be afraid of a long hard journey, even if she was pregnant.

It was Lucy who thought she guessed the real reason for Kit failing to come. He had been told that Papa was dying, and he had a horror of death. He had once related to Lucy how he had been taken by Ellen to kiss the cold cheek of his baby sister Victoria after she was dead. Ever since then he had been haunted in his sleep by candle-coloured faces and half-closed eyes.

‘What a rotten coward he is,’ Adelaide declared unsympathetically. ‘He runs away from everything. Oh, I do pray Jem and I have a son for Papa to see. So he’ll know Yarrabee is safe.’

‘Then you will have to hurry,’ Lucy said sadly.

The wedding, if poignant, was a happy one. Eugenia was able to write to Sarah,

‘I do believe I am going to grow fond of my new son. He has a very appealing gentleness, in spite of his strong appearance, and Addie adores him to distraction. Gilbert tells me that if he has not all the polish I could desire he has the necessary qualities to be a success in this country. They are rather different qualities from those required in England, physical strength being one of them, and a doggedness of character another. I could go on, but I know you would prefer to hear about the wedding.

‘It was very quiet, and only a dozen or so friends came out to Yarrabee afterwards. My poor Gilbert did what was required of him perfectly, but to see him walking up the aisle, so thin, his fine straight shoulders beginning to be stooped, his hair almost grey, was anguish to me—I could hear one or two weeping, and I hoped it was only for the reason that some women always weep at a wedding.

‘Anyway, my dear one had his wish, and gave Addie into the arms of the man whom he wanted to be her husband. Now, I foresee that we will have discussions about wine at dinner every night. It will be like the old days of Mrs Ashburton.

‘Lucy, of course, attended her sister as bridesmaid, and looked very charming. I am glad that she is becoming so wrapped up in the garden. It gives her an occupation and, as I once knew myself when I was a young and homesick bride, a great interest. She has asked if a potting shed could not be built so that she and Obadiah can raise their own seedlings. I am only worried that she does not ruin her pretty hands…’

Somehow the letter was filled up and dispatched. It was becoming increasingly difficult to write even to so beloved a correspondent as Sarah. Thoughts flew out of her head. She was always listening. Gilbert would be calling for her to go out on to the verandah. Or his slow steps would be coming in from his latest tour of the vineyard, and she would need to see if he required anything.

Christmas came and went. One day, after a long lapse, Eugenia had the notion to walk down to the creek and look at the small grave. She found that the crude cross had fallen over. It lay beside the almost flattened mound of the grave, its lettering only faintly visible. PRUDENCE.

Had her parents long ago forgotten her? Eugenia scratched at the earth and succeeded in putting the cross erect. Three black swans swam on the shallow water, their red feet a strange gaiety beneath their sombre plumage. It was very hot. The pale trunks of the gum trees shimmered, their leaves were black against the heat-blanched sky. Eugenia opened her parasol. Gilbert would scold her if he saw her without it.

One morning a week later Gilbert said quite quietly, ‘I believe I’ll have a day in bed. I’m tired.’

Eugenia agreed with brisk cheerfulness.

‘What a good idea. Ellen will bring your breakfast up.’

‘Tell Molly to.’

Molly?

Once, two or three months ago, Ellen, distressed and embarrassed, had begun to say something about Mrs Jarvis, but Eugenia had stopped her.

‘Not servants’ hall gossip at a time like this, please.’

And Ellen had flung her apron over her head and blundered out of the room She had been quite upset. But Eugenia had forgotten the episode until this moment when she heard that intimate unmistakable note in Gilbert’s voice. His guard was relaxed by weakness and a sleepless night.

The truth struck her like a blow.

She paced up and down her sitting-room, struggling with her emotions. Anger about the deceit, and a furious impatience with herself for being so easily deceived, and so naïve as to imagine that a man like Gilbert who had always looked admiringly at Mrs Jarvis, would not one day go further than admiration. All the time in her own house, this had been going on! It was humiliating, mortifying, unforgivable. She was astonished by the strength of her jealousy. She had lived for twenty years with her own guilt, but Gilbert could have felt no guilt whatever about his behaviour. From the beginning he must have accepted the bizarre situation as eminently satisfactory and so begun the long deception.