Fifthly, two miniatures on ivory of John Macarthur and Elizabeth Macarthur. A gentleman and his lady wife had to have their portraits done on ivory, and the entire lack of ivory in New South Wales, or anyone with the skills to paint on it, did not deter Mr Macarthur. His idea was for sketches to be made here by Mr Bullen and sent to someone Mr Macarthur had heard of in Mayfair, who would translate them into ivory. The portraits are therefore at best approximate, but the point was not to record a likeness. It was to have a pair of costly portraits to hang in the parlour, even if some visitors were not quite sure exactly who was depicted.
Mr Macarthur sat sideways to be drawn, everything about him always slant, guarded, sly, evasive. There is his arrogant thrust-out chin, his pugnacious lower lip, the haughty set of his head. He would have thought of that as aristocratic bearing, never guessing that the portrait revealed all the worst aspects of his nature.
For myself, I was happy to look Mr Bullen in the eye and was content with what he drew. But Mr Macarthur found fault. I was too plain, my expression too forthright. The chin too square, the eyes a little skewiff, the mouth smiling too much, or in the next sketch not smiling enough. Poor Mr Bullen scratched and rubbed, and tried again, and then again, until the paper was worn into holes and he had to take another sheet. By the time Mr Macarthur was satisfied that the sketch was what he wished his wife to look like, I was pretty sure no one would recognise me in this dainty person, all curls and dimples.
Yet these are the Macarthurs who will travel into the future. People will say, how resolute and commanding he was! And oh, what a charming and lovely wife he had—look, you can see it in the picture!
My first impulse was to burn the lot. But now I have a better idea than a bonfire. I will create one more document, one that will show all these others to be the heroic work of fiction that they are. What I am writing here are the pungent true words I was never able to write.
Late on this spring afternoon, the sweet time of long shadows that I love best, I feel an excitement, a breathlessness, at the scandalous pleasure of what I am embarking on. Thank God I outlived him. I think of that with a skip of the heart. How shocked people would be, or make out to be, if they knew. But I walk out into the sweet dusk and tell myself: not dead yet. Not dead, and free, at last, to speak.
I WAS NOT AN ORPHAN
When baby sister Grace died I was five years old, too young to know the word. Dead. I barely understood what a sister was, still hoped this new creature in the house, this squalling red bully, was only temporary.
Mother was still puffy-eyed from burying her when Father took the same distemper and was gone. It had to be explained to me, they thought they were explaining. With the angels. In a better place.
– No, I screamed, seeing the box on the trestles in the parlour, but how can he breathe, get him out!
At the service I kept twisting around, waiting for Father to come in the door and sit down with us. Mother liked to tell the story, laughing in a bitter way, about me twisting and wriggling, running to the door, looking down the lane calling out for him. No one could quieten you, she’d say. Father! Father! you shouted till Mr Bond had to take you out. I could not bear it, the noise of you, and of course I wanted him to come up the lane too, every time you called Father! it was a knife in my heart.
Before that was the feeling that the day could last as long as I wished, and none of it needed to be spent indoors. There was the feeling of fields, and animals busy about their own lives, and the way those lives were bound intimately to mine. When my hands were big enough I learned to milk the cow. It is almost the only memory I have of Father, the smell of his tweed, his big warm self beside me, taking my hands in his and putting them on the teats, wrapping my fingers around their damp softness. I felt him chuckle with pleasure when I got the knack of the little movement that made the milk hiss against the inside of the pail.
Being the relict of Richard Veale of Lodgeworthy Farm did not become Mother. She was broken by widowhood, or perhaps she had never been more than a reed leaning on her husband. She shrivelled, took to her bed, went into glum silent abstractions by the fire, punctuated with sighs that made me tiptoe away, frightened of this adult despair.
I heard her one morning, speaking under the window, softly, but the words floated up.
– I cannot even look forward to a son to take his place, she said, the his meaning Father’s.
Mr Kingdon rumbled in reply, too rumbly for me to make out the words.
– The best I can hope for might be a son-in-law, if she can manage it, she said, the she being me.
Mr Kingdon must have tried to offer some kind of irritating comfort, in which a reverend like him was well practised, because there was a sharp edge when she answered.
– Well, sir, I can pray, and I can live in hope and expectation. But for the time being it is just me and a wilful girl with no looks and no portion either.
I had been leaning up at the windowsill, listening in an idle way, not much concerned whether they saw me, but at that I sank down out of sight and crouched against the wall, making myself shrink to the smallest volume. A wilful girl. That word, wilful, gave me a picture of myself I did not quite recognise. I knew I was a child full of sparks. Knew I had a temper and a quick wit, a quick tongue, and got into enough trouble for them. That was the person I was. But now I knew that you called that wilful. And being wilful—I heard it in my mother’s tone—was something that made you unattractive, unpleasant, unlikeable.
I was hot with a sudden shame for being wilful, as well as for having no looks and no portion, ashamed that no one would want me. Ashamed for my mother too, in speaking that way of her daughter. I could smell the dust in the curtains and feel the cold draft from the crack where the skirting did not quite meet the floor. That smell and the feel of a narrow draft still fill me with the same terrible knowledge that came to me, hearing her words: I was not an orphan, but might as well be, for all I had a parent to look out for me.
FLOCKING AND FOLLOWING
The farm was entailed and, with Father gone, my second cousin John Veale got it. He did not hustle us out, exactly, but he sent us a cart full of empty chests and boxes, all the rope we’d need to bind them with, and a few bags of sawdust for the crockery.
We were made welcome at Grandfather’s place—Mother’s childhood home—but he was an old man set in his ways. Our crockery was never fished out of the sawdust, the chests were committed to the barn without being opened, only a box of clothes for each of us, so it was Grandfather’s sheets we slept in and Grandfather’s dishes we ate off. Mother had a small dower, the one I later had, enough that she did not have to beg Grandfather for a pair of boots for me or a new bonnet for herself. But it was pin money. And from Grandfather originally, so that too was from his charitable hand.
I yearned for Lodgeworthy. Soon after we went to Grandfather’s, Mother and I passed it and I ran to the gate, my hand on the latch I knew so well. Mother had to seize me by the wrist and pull me away. Had to explain that if I raised that latch and walked in as I had done a thousand times before, I would be something called a trespasser. That was like being a thief. The only way I could enter the place now was to be invited. I could have no rights there, only a guest’s temporary privilege.
I stood at the gate, with Mother’s hand tight around my wrist, shouting. I remember, wilful girl that I was, wrenching away from Mother, with her calling Elizabeth! Elizabeth! after me, and running up the front path and lifting my hand to knock at the door. But I had never approached that door as a blank indifferent panel of wood, never had to knock to make it open, and the strangeness of the look of it now, and the picture of John Veale’s pale unfriendly wife opening it, made me draw back my hand.