‘Meriel!’
The woman’s voice was penetrating and unmistakably English; a voice to be obliged – obeyed even. Yet no one hurried forward to do so. The big colonial house slumbered on in the sun. The cockatoos fed uninterrupted amongst the cumquats. Mulvany continued to rake the gravel of the carriage drive, and Meriel herself remained conspicuously absent. Her mother frowned and tightened her grip on the verandah rail. She was a woman of generous frontage; a shade too generous possibly for the straining silk net of her afternoon dress, and the lace on her bosom rose impressively like a great cresting wave as she filled her lungs for a second assault on the peace of her own garden.
‘Meriel! Me-ri-el! Where is the graceless child?’ She hadn’t been addressing the wiry little man on the drive. Not especially. But the sight of him scratching away at the gravel with such an irritating show of indifference was more, she found, than she could countenance.
‘Mulvany – I’m talking to you, Mulvany!’ she added sharply. ‘So would you be so good as to stop what you are doing and tell me where on earth Miss Meriel has got to?’
For a terrifying moment she thought that he was actually going to ignore her. But eventually, and to her immense relief, he’d spoken. ‘Dunno,’ he said economically, without looking up or in any way interrupting the steady rhythm of his work. And Lord in heaven, what could one do with him? What could one do with any of them in this damnable godforsaken country!
Harriet Llewellen had never enjoyed any degree of success with her Australian servants. She hadn’t the nerve for it; and to Mulvany’s disappointment she concluded the interview then and there without any kind of a fight, blundering back into the house and slamming the screen door behind her.
As it happened, her younger daughter Meriel had been sitting under the verandah more or less directly beneath her all the time, in the open latticed area that protected the house from white ants, snakes and carriage dust. It had always been a favourite haunt of Meriel’s, this sandy no-man’s-land beneath the house. As a child she’d regularly crept in amongst the old sunblinds and cluttered garden equipment to escape the frequent domestic crises of her mother’s household, or to collect the coloured parrot feathers the cats left behind. More recently it had come in handy for illegal cigarettes, or for eavesdropping on her brother’s verandah spooning sessions with his fiancée – and of course it was and always would be the best of places for glooms and fantasies and generally being alone.
In December 1903, Meriel Llewellen had just turned seventeen – and if she could have seen herself then as Mulvany had seen her when he came in for the rake, with her strong little arms clasped around slim, black-stockinged knees, she might have been surprised at the quality of her own appeal. Her sister Vicky was the pretty one. Everybody said so; and for her own part Meriel had never totally forgiven providence for failing to make her a boy.
She was too short ever to make a beauty. Her brown hair was too thick and straight; ‘Straight as pump water,’ Vicky said, and she’d acquired an inadvertently glowing complexion that would have driven any aspiring Gibson Girl to the brink of suicide. Worse, the features she’d exposed so recklessly to sunlight were strong rather than delicate, with a horrifying tendency to grimace – and worse still, her eyes were quite incapable of reproducing the demure expression that was so widely held to be the essence of good breeding. They were also brown, unfashionably so; and even now in the face of the direst possible developments, through scowls and angry tears, they still shone with a raw vitality that nothing could diminish.
It wasn’t so much the beastly boredom of a drawing room tea that had driven Meriel to earth beneath the verandah that afternoon, nor even the attendant horrors of hairpins and collar stiffeners and all that they implied. It was the reason for the tea party that she objected to; the necessity of entertaining some ridiculous shipping agent person from Brisbane – with at the root of it all, her father’s cruel instruction to up sticks and follow him across the Pacific to Chile. To leave Australia, for heaven’s sake, without so much as a backward glance! If it had been the Mater who was asking, Meriel would have refused point blank – locked herself up in her bedroom, taken off into the bush, dived overboard from the moving ship; anything to stay in Queensland! But it was her father; it was Da who was asking her to abandon her freedom, her lovely horses, everything she treasured; and Meriel was incapable of refusing Da anything.
Robert Llewellen had always been an Olympian in his daughter’s eyes. As a consultant mining engineer with the North Borneo Trading Company, he’d first set eyes on Queensland early in 1891; and having once grasped the financial possibilities of the expanding Ipswich coalfields, had sat down in his hotel room to dash off an amazing and now famous telegram to his family back home in England. Meriel still had it, proudly pasted into the front of her scrapbook:
HAVE FOUND GODS OWN COUNTRY STOP SELL UP AND JOIN ME STOP LETTER FOLLOWING RL
By the time the rest of his family reached Queensland, Da had not only established himself as Senior Engineering Manager to the important Swanbank and Dinmore collieries, but had purchased a substantial property two miles outside Ipswich. It had stables and horses with twelve acres of grazing – everything, in Meriel’s opinion, that anyone could want! The mines produced bituminous and cannel coal in highly satisfactory quantities, the four Llewellen children attended the Ipswich Grammar schools as day boarders, and for some years life continued to revolve around the dynamic personality of Da himself. Meriel’s memories of the years before Australia had been full of shadowy comings and goings (mostly Da’s). But looking back on her childhood, it seemed to her that her father had always been at the centre of everything that was exciting and fun to do.
She could see his tanned face laughing at her, demanding her approval through so many sunlit adventures – winning, always winning at polo, swimming clear across the Brisbane river in shirt and breeches, driving the wagonette himself faster by far than Mulvany would have dared – riding fast, talking fast, giving orders and commanding love. He was so mature, she thought, so confident; everything that the Mater wasn’t. He held his daughter’s world in the palm of his hand, and she adored him.
Then one day a cable had arrived from England to announce the death of Da’s own mother, their old French Grandmère, to summon him to London to wind up her estate. He’d be away, he told them all, for at least a year; and Meriel quite believed that her heart would break.
The night before Da was due to leave, the Mater had begged her to turn her hair up and wear her white Indian muslin down to dinner.
‘Just to show how grown-up and normally feminine you can be when you try, dear’.
But Meriel refused, because she wanted Da to remember her as she liked to be, with her hair loose about her shoulders, with a short skirt, and a back that was straighter by far than Vicky’s for all her starch and stiffening. He’d been in high good humour over that last dinner; full of travel plans and business opportunities, oblivious to his wife’s reproachful gaze or his younger daughter’s unusual silence at the far end of the table.
As soon as the meal was over, and despite the others’ objections, Meriel had boldly taken his hand to drag him outside to smoke his after-dinner cigarette with her on the front steps. She’d rehearsed this private conversation with her Da a dozen times since the appearance of the fateful cable. But somehow there’d always been good reasons for delaying, for putting the thing off for one more day; and now that she had him to herself at last, now that it was almost too late, she had felt lost for words.
For a little while they’d sat in silence, listening to the cicadas and breathing in the heavy atmosphere of the garden. The aromas of baked earth, eucalypts and peppercorns mingled and blended most beautifully with the stronger scent of Da’s Egyptian cigarette. Every now and again an exotic whiff of frangipani drifted across to them from the shrub border, and high above them the stars sparkled seductively. Some people confessed to feeling humbled by the constellations and the vastnesses of time and space that they represented. But not Meriel. Glancing up at the Southern Cross, she saw a pretty diamond circlet on a black velvet cushion; all very well and pretty in its place, but of no practical use in helping her to make him change his mind.
‘Incredibly beautiful, isn’t it?’ Da sighed, blowing a thin stream of smoke into the air.
‘Then how can you bear to leave it?’ she burst out. ‘Why must you go to England, when Harry says that Uncle Vincent could easily manage things over there by himself.’
Da smiled the slow, teasing smile that always so disarmed her. ‘Which only goes to show how much young Harry still has to learn,’ he said lightly. ‘As an executor it really is my business to be on hand to see about Grandmère’s property, and to whisper words of wisdom in your Uncle’s shell-like ear.’
‘Oh do please be serious, Da, and tell me why you have to stay away so long, if that’s all there is to do.’
‘But it isn’t all, my seraph. Your grandmother’s affairs are a deal more complicated than you kids seem to imagine. Besides, I have other business to attend to while I’m over there.’ He shifted his long legs on the verandah steps, staring out into the starshine. Meriel could see the glowing tip of his cigarette reflected like a tiny flame in the depths of his dark eyes. For an instant a hideous, disloyal suspicion flashed into her mind; a suspicion concerning Da and other women, before she did the thing she always did when a thought frightened her, and thrust it out of mind.
‘What other business do you have then?’ she demanded.
‘Well if you must know, Meriel,’ Da said in an altered tone, ‘I’m thinking of sounding out one or two people on the subject of a new overseas appointment. It’s high time we made another move.’
‘A move? You don’t mean from Australia? You can’t!’ Everything in her rushed forward to reject the idea. But Da wouldn’t let her.
‘Possibly, very possibly,’ he continued. ‘Because if I’m any judge, there’ll be more labour problems and less profit in coal under this grand new Commonwealth of ours; and if something better turns up elsewhere, I’d be a fool not to consider it.
‘Don’t worry Meriellie,’ he added, seeing the desolation in her face ‘Whatever happens, we won’t be going back to England; and before you know it I’ll be here again with the prettiest London party frocks that you girls can imagine.’ And he leant forward to give her a moustachy kiss.
The party frocks hadn’t materialised, which came to Meriel as no surprise – and the first news they’d received of Da on his arrival in London, was in the form of a cable announcing his appointment as Administrator of the Schneider Mining Company, south of Valparaiso in central Chile. SELL UP AND JOIN ME THERE. The message was all too familiar, as had been Harriet’s reaction.
‘Too cruel!’ she wailed, ‘too cruel to be borne!’ as she prepared to plunge her household into chaos and confusion.
From her position undrneath the verandah, Meriel could hear her mother plaintively calling the maid to fetch the Dovers Powders for her latest nervous headache. Outside on the drive, Mulvany’s rake swished on victoriously through the gravel – to be followed by another sound she recognised; the uneven crunching rhythm of horses’ hooves. Peering through the latticework, Meriel watched her elder brother, Harry, trotting towards the house with a man that she supposed must be the shipping agent, riding on a chestnut horse.
‘Prime!’ It was her latest word. In a flash she’d scrambled to her feet, all thoughts of leaving Australia forgotten in a surge of wild excitement. He was the primest thing, he really was! She had to see him closer.
A gravelled tributary of the drive passed down beside the house; and Meriel had only to duck out beneath the legs of the rainwater tank to intercept the horses. The unknown rider had dismounted. He walked with a loose graceful stride, his muscles rippling visibly in the sunlight. ‘Prime – oh prime!’ Meriel had always believed implicitly in love at first sight, and now achieved it. If anyone had asked her, she’d willingly have given a whole year of life for a ride on the shipping agent’s prime chestnut thoroughbred.
She’d always worshipped horses; ‘Dead nuts on them,’ as Harry put it. When they’d first come to Ipswich, Da had given her a tubby little Shetland Pony; and Meriel had been riding ever since. At ten she graduated to Harry’s polo pony. After Da had left for England, she’d been allowed to exercise his Irish hack, Kildare.
But never in her life, she told herself, had she seen anything as fine as this horse – never!
Meriel perched on the gate into the stable yard to watch the stallion submit to the rigours of Mulvany’s grooming – hoof-pick, curry-comb, both brushes; the ritual never varied. The little groom worked steadily until he was satisfied that the polish on the horse’s silken flanks could not be improved.
‘Flamin’ beauty ain’t ’e, Miss?’ he asked with his back to the gate.
‘Gorgeous, Mully! And I’ll lead take him in, if you don’t mind, while you get on with Pinto.’ Jumping down, she almost snatched the reins from Mulvany’s hands to lead the big horse to his box.
He stepped out so lightly across the yard behind her, that it was hard, well next thing to impossible, Meriel thought, not to wonder how he’d ride?
She was still with him in the loose box, still wondering, when Mulvany brought the pinto in. Then no sooner did she hear the yard gate click behind him, than she was on the chestnut’s back. ‘After all, it can’t do any harm,’ she told herself, ‘just to see how it feels.’
It felt too good for words, with one’s skirts pulled to sit astride the abbreviated English saddle in a simply outré posture that would drive the Mater to distraction. The horse turned his head to view the lightweight on his back with luminous, enquiring eyes.
‘He’s bored, he wants to go!’ thought Meriel, dismounting to shorten the stirrups.
The stallion walked on like a dream, so smooth and beautifully contained. But as she nudged him up to a trot, she felt him pull to try her strength, and something combative in Meriel, rose to the challenge.
The paddock was too small, of course it was, to give any decent horse a chance to show his paces. ‘And it really isn’t fair to hold you back, my beauty?’ she said aloud. ‘You’re dying to put on some pace, I know you are, it’s simply obvious.’
Beyond the final straggling homesteads of the town, the land was still uncultivated; a dusty scrub of gums and brigalow acacias, gently undulating and first class for riding. Meriel’s only concern as she rode out towards it was whether she was strong enough to keep the bit back from the stallion’s teeth. He knew his own strength all right, had known it all along; and at the first kick of her heel, responded like a bullet from a rifle, leaping forward from a sitting trot into a thundering full gallop. Thrown back in the saddle, she clung like a jockey, filled with a wild elation as the hot wind rushed to meet her. They were no longer separate, she and the horse – leaping fallen logs together, brushing yellow blossoms from the wattle on the trail as they flew on towards the distant hills; and when at last they slowed down to a canter, a sitting trot and finally a walk, Meriel felt as if she’d conquered more than just a horse.
Dismounting at the edge of a broad drove trail, she led the chestnut to a patch of dappled shade, and sat on a nearby stump to watch him forage for red grass. Above them the sky was a bright uncompromising blue. A pair of fluting magpies swooped between the gums; and in the distance Meriel could the bellowing of cattle moving down the long trail from the Darling Downs. As the sun beat down on them through the thin canopy she called to mind, too late, where she’d left her hat on a bundle of bamboo canes underneath the house. Her face tomorrow would be red as a boiled lobster’s. The day after that her nose would peel. But Meriel didn’t care.
‘Because if I can manage you, my beauty, I can manage anything,’ she told the horse, ‘Even Chile if I have to!’ A pale diamond-shaped leaf fluttered down to her from the gums, and she caught it in one hand. She felt invincible – queen of the world!
They stayed to see the cattle pass; urged forward constantly by yapping cattle dogs and the pistol cracks of stockwhips on either flank.
‘Steady down the lead there!’ a drover bawled hoarsely from Meriel’s side of the track, and she peered through the dust to watch him ride towards her.
‘Never look a strange man in the face if he approaches.’ That’s what her mother always cautioned. ‘Look preoccupied, dear, and keep your eyes averted. A lady generally only has herself to blame if she is spoken to.’
Not that most of them were worth a second glance in Meriel’s opinion. ‘Men are lucky dogs who get away with forty thousand exciting things that we girls are forbidden.’ That’s what she thought, and what she’d written on the subject in her sister Vicky’s Confession Book, before the silly thing had torn the page out.
She knew in theory what she wanted in a husband, naturally; all girls did – and Meriel had long ago constructed a mental effigy of the man she’d one day marry, drawn largely from her mother’s novelettes and the Girls’ Realm annuals her Aunt Alice sent from England. He would be splendid – tall and strong, brave but gentle; fresh-faced with calm blue eyes, a square determined jaw and wavy golden hair. He’d wear a Norfolk suit, or a Guard’s uniform with scarlet tunic and red-striped breeches. He’d be called Vincey, Travers, Carstairs, or something of the sort – and would of course be English.
Up until that moment there’d been nothing underneath the splendid Carstairs’s close-fitting uniform but a calico and sawdust dummy. But as the cattle drover loomed towards her through the dust, in Meriel’s imagination the image of her ideal husband started twitching into life. ‘He’s out there somewhere at this very moment, sleeping, waking, breathing, moving, just like this man is,’ she thought, and felt a thrill of pleasure stab her though the ribs.
‘G’day, Miss,’ the drover said, swiping at the flies. ‘You Miss Llewellen?’
‘Well what if I am?’ Meriel had just realised that in this posture her bloomers must be clearly visible beneath the starched hem of Vicky’s old reach-me-down pinny, which put her at a disadvantage.
‘Only that yer kid brother’s back there doin’ ’is block,’ he told her, pointing behind him down the drove and grinning all over his bearded face. ‘Says you’ve done a bunk with some bloke’s ’orse, and yer Ma’s gone off ‘er top.’
She found Gareth within a matter of minutes, whistling loudly and brandishing her missing hat. ‘You’ll really catch it this time,’ he called out cheerily, and she knew that he was right.
Mully met them at the end of the drive with his own hat pushed well to the back of his head. A sure sign of trouble. On the verandah Harriet stood with folded arms and a face like thunder; the shipping agent at her side, with Vicky behind her whaleboned to the ears and smiling her prettiest smile.
‘Oh well, it’s been worth it!’ Meriel thought dismounting.
She walked the chestnut to the foot of the front steps; and in the wake of her flat sand-shoes a series of defiant scuff marks scarred the surface of Mulvany’s gravel.