Secrets of the Sea Read online

  Basil’s last years were dispiriting. His romanticism of himself was quite vast, but fragile at the same time. A self-appointed remittance man, he had deliberately washed up in a place where there was nobody who understood him or how he spoke, save for an ex-journalist in the nearby town. So when his grey eyes that once had seen for ever started to fail him, he took refuge in gin–which he drank with a token dash of tonic–and in his ships. In the bottle, as Harry Ford put it to Alex on more than one occasion, as well as a lot of other things. “Best present your father ever gave you–to die young. Or have I told you that?”

  “Several times.”

  Ten days after the log-truck barrelled into their car, Alex’s parents were buried in the lawn beneath the Oyster Bay pine. There was no one to tend the farm. Several months later, the chief stock inspector came on a police launch from Hobart to inspect for disease and parasites. The old white-footed piebald was still in the triangular paddock next to the house, its ribs like the contours of a shipwreck, but pleased to see people; as were the cats. The chickens had been eaten and four cows in Rough Run were so wild they had to be shot. Alex learned these details only on his return.

  Alex would have needed to live in Wellington Point a year to soak up the goodwill that his new circumstances created, but within a fortnight his godmother, a midwife who had met his father aboard the Strathaird, scooped him off to Sydney. Stranded on the mainland, he spent two terms at a school in Vaucluse. At the start of the following Easter term, his uncle in the north of England paid for Alex to attend a similar establishment in Sedbergh famed for its austerity–“You’ll like the motto,” he joked. “Hardness is the nurse of men.”

  He arrived in Sedbergh at night, dressed in his father’s National Service trench coat, leather buttons done up against the cold. Only next morning did he see that he had come to a place surrounded by high fells. Where the stone walls ended, grass paths led up to long open ridges from where Alex looked down on a landscape a little like Tasmania: mountainous, close-knit and monarchist, with some farmers still travelling about in horse and cart.

  At the time of his arrival, these hills belonged to West Riding, a district of Yorkshire. By the end of the year, to the tremendous indignation of his uncle, they were claimed for the new county of Cumbria. It gave Alex a strange but definite relief to move among a rural population that was itself having to forge an unfamiliar identity and adjust to shifted boundaries.

  The school was less austere than its motto suggested. It encouraged pupils to get out and engage with their surroundings. On Sundays after chapel, Alex could take a sandwich lunch and, as long as he did not use a wheeled vehicle, he might go anywhere he liked. Over the next four years, he climbed Winder many times and walked the banks of the Lune, and ran ten-mile cross-country runs. His abiding memory was the smell of sheep shit and the sound of curlews in spring, a sonorous bubbling absolutely lovely cry that echoed all round the fells. He never forgot, either, the friendliness of the people. Caught out in a downpour on Firbank Fell, he was ushered into a low-ceilinged house by a farmer who, noting his drenched blue jersey, introduced Alex to his family as “one of them scholar lads” and a month later invited him to his daughter’s wedding. But although outwardly very friendly, Cumbrians shared with Tasmanians a resistance to outsiders. They might welcome him into their homes and dry his clothes before a peat fire, but no matter how passionately he immersed himself in their landscape, no matter how often he bathed the perspiration from his face in the Rawthey or hunted for fossils and dippers and otter trails, to the locals he would always be an off-comer. Someone from off.

  Off began fifteen miles from Sedbergh. Tasmania was very off. One or two of the masters had the habit of confusing it with Tanzania.

  In Hart House, a forbidding grey stone building on the south side of the cricket pitch, Alex caught his first English flu–deeper, darker and wetter than anything he could remember. On the windowsill in his dormitory, the thermometer recorded minus twenty-one.

  It was at Sedbergh, too, that Alex discovered the authors whom he would study again and more at university: Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Samuel Johnson. But he was not convinced of a deeper purpose other than to study and to smile and–after a rain-soaked afternoon on the rugger pitch–to strip off his mud-caked shorts and brown shirt. His time at the school served to intensify a sense he already had of running about a playing field that was parallel to the rest of the world. He might wave at others, and they might see him, but he was never able to reach out and tackle them–however far he stretched, whatever name he was called. This sense, almost of weightlessness, could not wholly be put down to the sudden loss of his parents or to the fact that he arrived at Sedbergh a term late and took longer than others in his year to adapt to the school’s idiosyncratic rituals and language; or even to the arbitrary shedding of his first name at the request of a jocular housemaster. It had to do as well with where he was from.

  An Australian educated in England, Alex found himself trapped between suppressing emotion and trumpeting it. Prone to fits of impatience, he rarely cried when he hurt himself. He held his breath until he fainted rather than kick out or lose physical control. In scrums and skirmishes, other boys left him alone. Wary of a swallowed-up pain that seemed at odds with the soft-spoken orphan from Down Under.

  He went up to Oxford on a scholarship endowed for Tasmanian students. At Merton, when not working hard, he clowned and had girlfriends and gambled and got drunk. But he could never find an intimate circle, the one, two or three friends with whom he might be himself. Somehow it eluded him.

  On coming down from Oxford, he was offered an apprenticeship in the broom factory by his uncle. Alex declined. Perhaps hoping to master his reticence, he trained to be a teacher, and was halfway through his course when he abandoned it. He was then twenty-three.

  Those he left behind in England were not persuaded that Alex’s temperament was suited to live alone behind a stock-fence. The view prevailed that he would soon be back, once he had sorted out certain things. “He’s gone to Australia really to learn about England,” was how one Merton friend explained his behaviour to Sarah (who wrote Alex an irritated postcard, wondering what to do with his stuff. Keep it, he wrote back. Maybe send me my trench coat). On others, it had never dawned that Alex could be Australian: “He’s living there? In Van Diemen’s Land? Isn’t that where people were packed off who’d done something awful?” But 14,000 miles away, pride and enjoyment in his farm took Alex unawares. In a way that he had not anticipated, it exhilarated him to watch his animals grow fat and healthy above the barley, the blood on the frost at lambing time, and to lay a fresh drive of white gravel that emphasised anyone walking up it.

  Even so, his passage into countryman had not been smooth. Unmonitored by Ray Grogan, his tenant Bill Molson had raped the land, flogged it to death. Nor had he made any effort to maintain the buildings. The property was so lamentably run down that a farmer up the road, Jack Fysshe, warned Alex that only a mad rabbit would take it on. “Don’t do it, mate, it’s not worth the candle,” Fysshe said, bumping into Alex outside Talbot’s. “But I’m there if you need me. And if you do decide to do it, I had a thing going with your Dad. We used to rent a combine harvester together, three of us.” The third was Tom Pidd, who farmed towards Bicheno. “Really, we liked your Dad. A useless farmer, but a nice man. If you want my advice, sell your farm–if you can get any money for it–and go back to Putney, England. But if I can be of any help, ring and I’ll be there.”

  Alex was slightly surprised when, back a month, none of these neighbours had appeared to help him. They just had not turned up.

  During his first days home, as he began to think of it, farming was as baffling to him as the pink and green lists at Sedbergh. Twelve years since he had last ridden a tractor or a horse. After five weeks, he decided to call on Fysshe.

  The farmer was hardly more encouraging than before. “Now you’re back–I couldn’t say this when Bill was alive–well, the fact of the
matter is he wasn’t fair to the land, he took the top right off it. I used to look at your farm and think: When I buy it–which I’m inevitably going to have to do–I shall make an offer for nothing, considering the fortune I’ll have to spend on fertiliser.”

  Eventually, after two or three years, the two of them worked out an arrangement to share a semi-trailer for ewes, but Alex would never scold Jack Fysshe for his generosity.

  On Fysshe’s advice, Alex spread a load of phosphates on the paddocks and hired a young man out of school to help him repair the fences. On the fifth day, Joe Hollows failed to show up.

  “Par for the course,” said Fysshe. “Workmen are hard to keep round here.”

  His own ineffectualness brought Alex closer to his parents. He understood how local traders could have fleeced them with such depressing regularity and cheerfulness. The severest case was a builder he contracted to repair the shearing shed, who ordered an excessive quantity of sandstone, only to abscond with half of it to build himself a house in Marion Bay.

  And Alex made plenty of mistakes of his own.

  He first thought to plant flax for tanning, but it did not take. Nor did the cash crops that he sowed the following year. A storm blew the oats down. Rust got into the spring barley and the seeds failed to germinate. Misled by climate conditions that were warmer here than in the Central Highlands, he had sowed too late. So in his second year home he started running cattle and sheep.

  Alex bought Corriedale and Poleworth as his father had–another mistake, since they were not ideal for wool. Two years on, he was in the process of changing the flock, using merinos from the stud in Triabunna.

  Thirty paddocks stretched away down the hill. “I move a mob every two days to a different paddock. That way the grass grows back quickly.”

  “How many sheep do you have?” asked Merridy.

  “Three thousand all up. Plus thirty cows and a bull.” The herd of Aberdeen Angus was self-replacing, and caused him the least headache. He sold the calves straight off the cow, keeping five. If there were one or two dry cows, he sold those. He was shortly to get rid of the bull after three years–“Otherwise he’ll be going over his daughters.”

  The ride had loosened Merridy’s hair. She unpinned it, threw back her head. “Are you a good farmer?” with the tortoiseshell comb in her mouth. She had met few farmers.

  Alex laughed. “Good? No. Tell the truth, I was thinking of chucking it in.”

  “You mustn’t do that,” she said involuntarily.

  “I don’t know, Merridy. Farming’s hard. It takes everything out of you.”

  “Everything? Surely not.”

  “Well, maybe more than I’m prepared to give. It’s a lot of uneducated people, mainly families, trying to live off the land. It’s not treated as a business, but it is. And I’m not a businessman. I depend on the goodwill of the bank to survive–utterly.”

  “I don’t care. You can’t sell this,” nodding at the view.

  He was surprised at her vehemence, and pleased. “Perhaps I won’t have to,” and tossed away the pine needle with which he had dug clean his fingernails. “It could be I’ve just hit my straps.” Three days after he first encountered Merridy, Alex had secured a contract to sell barley to Cascades brewery. “As of next year, I might even stand to break even.”

  She pretended to finish mending her hair, but she was admiring his competence. She had guessed that he was hard-working, and that he was strong because he was running this farm all by himself. What she had not appreciated was that he was dying to stay alive. He had no help, and yet help was what he needed.

  Alex whistled to Flash, and they rode to where he had knocked down the scrub and burned it; where he had banked and drained the marsh; and where in rough winds the south end still overflowed with salt water.

  The hills west of the marsh ran up to Masterman’s Tier and paddocks of rich volcanic soil; beyond was all sags and tussocks where the sheep hid themselves. In four years, he had taught himself to be a tolerable counter. When his rams went missing he took a bottle of cold tea and stalked through the kangaroo grass that grew thick as the hair on Flash’s back, and down through gullies of red ochre which the Oyster Bay tribe had patted into their faces and hair.

  Love made him expansive and articulate. They cantered to the summit of Treasure Hill where in the 1920s a travelling cattle-buyer was discovered dead beside the track. Alex did not know the whole story, but the man was reputed to have been carrying a satchel of gold. To Rough Run, where his first summer back Alex bumped into a seal in the ripened corn. “At full moon, the old fur seals come over from the Isle des Foques to die.” He described for her a still winter evening, a grizzled leopard seal and its bellow on being disturbed. And on to Barn Hill, where his father had put up a Cumbrian bank-barn. “He was walking here one clear day, nothing in the sky, when he heard a terrific wind and was struck on the elbow by a hard black object. I’ve still got the meteorite.” Alex paused to unwind a strand of wool caught on a wire. “Lucky it didn’t take his arm off.”

  It was past noon when they galloped back to the homestead. In the field above the house a sheep licked at the umbilical cord of a lamb as it nuzzled to suck its mother’s engorged teats.

  Merridy swivelled in her stock saddle. “Lambs in March?”

  “You can have lambs throughout the year–as long as there’s a bit of green feed for the ewes.”

  Alex watched her fascination rather than the drama enacted on the grass. For him, the lamb’s birth was not convincing any more than his parents’ car accident had been. But Merridy convinced. As if she had fallen to earth and caused a gale and burned the grass all around.

  “Let’s have some tucker.”

  They ate in the kitchen, sandwiches that he had prepared with leftover chicken from his dinner the night before. Half an hour later, he shut the fly-screen behind them, and after checking his dog–gulping at a bone beneath the table–resumed the tour.

  The land absorbed Alex’s energies, but had he the money he planned to renovate the farm buildings. Beyond a sagging fence stood the convict-built shearers’ quarters, put up in the 1870s by an old lag called Fazerlacky who had exchanged his wife for a pair of boots. The shingles on the roof were kept in by wooden staples. Several were adrift and the sky, glimpsed in blue splinters, reminded Alex of yet another thing he had to fix. “The shearers have been complaining that the possums piss in their faces.”

  To the rear of the building lay the shearing shed. Shears in leather cases and an old turkey-stone, originally the property, it was said, of Wellington Point Sam who could drink a bottle of beer standing on his head and who never sharpened his shears in the open air in case the wind scraped the edge off them.

  The lime had drained from the bricks, giving to the exterior a dejected look, but inside it smelled of sweat and dung and wool from the June shearing.

  He guided her between stalls carved from thin beams of Oyster Bay pine–and back out again into the open, where meanwhile a warm wind had blown up, a northerly that bowed the macrocarpa on Rossall Hill and skittered through the farmyard. It was answered by the shriek of agonised machinery.

  She said, to help: “That sounds crook.”

  What grated and gnashed was the green-painted windmill.

  “It’s been crook since I can remember.”

  According to the angle of the wind, the blades worked intermittently–as now–blurring the field behind into a circle of widening ripples.

  He followed her gaze. Propped up against the windmill, a ramshackle ladder led to a narrow viewing platform protected on three sides by a rail, and on the fourth by two strands of wire.

  “You can see Oyster Bay from up there,” he said.

  “Can I look?”

  “Here. Let me go first.” He took hold of the rungs and the ladder all but toppled from the sky.

  Alex’s voice climbed ahead of him, explaining the windmill’s provenance. His father had bought it on the recommendation of an Anglo-Argent
ine whom he had met in Hobart, and had it shipped from an estanciain Entre Ríos. Two rungs below, Merridy did not catch every word but she gathered that Alex had haggled with its innards since he was a boy.

  She hauled herself after him onto the platform and he lifted up a wire for her to crawl under.

  The platform had the narrow shape of a ship’s bridge and was large enough, just, for the two of them to stand side by side. The motion of the wind made it vibrate. She licked from her mouth a strand of dark hair, and held on to the rail.

  Then as abruptly as it had blown up the wind dropped. The blades creaked to a halt and shuddered and with one last grumble fell silent.

  She turned her head. Wanting a sudden look at him. Over his shoulder through watery eyes she made out a bright smudge. On the vane in an orange marker, her name.

  “Alex. What’s that doing there?”

  “I wrote it,” he said, bashful.

  “What does it mean?”

  He took her hand. She saw that his nails were clean. “I love you.”

  She withdrew her hand. “Please don’t say that.”

  “Why, have too many men said it to you?”

  She looked down. The platform had shrunk to the size of a newspaper.

  “Have you said it?” he wanted to know.

  “Yes. I have.”

  “Lots of times?”

  “No. Not very often.”

  “Last time was when?”

  “When I was five.”

  She twisted away before he could see the consternation on her face. Leaning against the rail, she breathed in. The air smelled as if cleaned in rainwater. It had the stillness of something that had cried itself out.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right.” Then: “It’s not you who should be sorry. It has nothing to do with you.” Whatever it was.

  Subdued, Alex followed her gaze to the scrub that led in one direction to low hills of wattle where Tethera had bitten a snake and been bitten and died, and in the other to shimmery fields over the top of which Oyster Bay unravelled in a turquoise thread.