After her return from Zurich Bec had told Tamara they would do what they had to do – they would carry on – but Tamara had the idea it wouldn’t hurt if she nudged things along a little.
She spoke to Grant about it and early one morning, after her ritual plunge in the pond Bec still insisted on calling She-Devil’s Water, Tamara came to see her grandmother in her bedroom. Her hair was still wet, a towel was hung around her neck and she was carrying a tray of coffee and what Bec called Tamara’s significant smile.
Bec was still in bed.
‘You,’ Tamara said, ‘are getting lazy in your old age.’
‘At least I am still breathing,’ said Bec.
‘And hopefully will be for many years yet,’ Tamara said.
She poured coffee for them both and sat on the edge of the bed while they drank together and Bec gave her a succession of bird-like glances.
‘You are up to something,’ she said.
‘I am?’
‘It’s written all over your face.’
‘I would never win playing poker with you,’ Tamara said. ‘You’re going to have to manage without me for a couple of days. Grant and I are off to Sydney for a spell.’
‘This is business. We’re going to see a man about a dog.’
Bec drank, studying her granddaughter over the rim of her cup. ‘The man being your father?’
‘And the dog being Derwent.’
‘Be careful with him. He can be awkward if you drive him into a corner.’
‘He’s my dad, Grandma. You think I don’t know that?’
‘No doubt you’ll tell me what this is all about when you get back.’
‘No doubt we will.’
Giles lived in the penthouse on the top floor of a block overlooking Manly beach.
A maid let them in. ‘He says he’ll be with you directly.’
Tamara looked around the flat appraisingly.
‘Pricey,’ she said.
‘All very mod, too,’ Grant said. ‘A bit different from Derwent. Nice view, though. Plenty of bunnies on the beach.’
‘That’ll please him,’ Tamara said.
Giles came into the room and he was not alone.
‘This is a pleasant surprise,’ Raine said.
Tamara gave an ambiguous smile. ‘We want to talk to you about Derwent’s future,’ she said.
‘That subject is very close to our hearts,’ Raine said.
‘I am sure.’
‘We are simple graziers,’ Grant said. ‘We know nothing of these things.’
‘I am sure we can get a lawyer to draw up a suitable agreement,’ Giles said.
‘Which is why we decided to obtain legal advice before we came here,’ Tamara said. She gestured at the dining table, all plate glass and chrome, standing in the window bay. ‘Shall we sit down?’
Giles and Raine looked uncertainly at her, then at each other, but did as she had suggested.
‘And what earth-shaking discoveries have you made?’ Giles said.
His tone made it clear how much he resented being put on the spot by his daughter. But she had never been one who knew her place.
Grant sat facing them across the table. Shoulders squared, he stared at them both in turn, as uncompromising as a front-row rugby forward. ‘Before we go into that, maybe you should tell us what your thoughts are,’ he said.
‘I would have said that was a matter for the family to discuss,’ Raine said. ‘In private.’
‘I can assure you we have no objection to your being present,’ Tamara told her. ‘And Grant is a most important member of the family.’
Grant gave Raine the full benefit of his slaughterhouse smile. ‘Tamara and I are husband and wife, after all.’
‘I have told you what I intend to do,’ Giles said. ‘As trustee and principal beneficiary of the trust I have the right to realise assets as I choose. I can also have the deed amended to include new beneficiaries.’
‘Meaning Raine and Jaeger?’
‘Meaning whomever I choose.’
‘You see,’ Tamara said, ‘there is a problem about that. You can’t.’
‘Can’t?’ Both Giles and Raine sat up straight. ‘It is my property,’ Giles said. ‘I can do what I like with it.’
Tamara was shaking her head. ‘No. It is not your property, Dad. It belongs to the trust. And Raine and Jaeger aren’t family members. So our advice is they can’t be beneficiaries.’
‘I intend to adopt Jaeger,’ Giles said.
‘I don’t think so. Both Jaeger’s parents are living. For the court to approve an adoption, they’d both have to give their consent. Tell me,’ she said to Raine, ‘how do you fancy your chances of getting your husband to agree to that?’
‘It would be embarrassing if the whole affair came out in court,’ Grant said.
‘Are you threatening us?’ said Giles, reaching for the bridle of his high horse.
But it seemed the horse was unwilling to gallop.
‘Certainly not,’ Grant said. ‘But a well-publicised law case involving such a high profile property…’
‘And such a high profile family,’ said Tamara.
‘Difficult to see how the whole sordid mess could be kept out of the papers,’ Grant said.
‘So embarrassing,’ Tamara said. She smiled at Raine. ‘And you a married woman.’ She turned to Giles. ‘We suggest you resign as trustee. You will retain your interest as a beneficiary, your distribution to be ten thousand dollars a month. Naturally, if you want to fight this in court, the offer is withdrawn.’
‘And bear in mind we’re doing it to protect you,’ Grant said.
‘How d’you work that out?’
‘It lessens the danger of Raine putting poison in your coffee,’ Tamara said.
‘I shall sell up the entire estate and you will get nothing,’ Giles said. ‘How do you like that idea, eh?’
‘I doubt the courts will go for it,’ Tamara said. ‘But you can always try.’
Giles glared at Tamara. ‘How can you talk to me like this? I am your father!’
‘You should have remembered that years ago,’ Tamara said.
‘How did it go?’ Bec said.
‘We got him to see our point of view,’ Tamara said.
‘And so?’
‘He will resign as trustee and I shall take his place. He has agreed not to interfere and as a beneficiary he’ll get ten grand a month.’
‘He was taking almost that anyway,’ Bec said.
‘Now it’s official.’
‘And limited to that amount. What happens to Raine?’
‘Who cares?’
‘It makes me sad to think of your father being lonely in his old age.’
‘No danger of that. With ten grand coming in every month, I don’t see Raine going far.’
Bec seemed to have lost her appetite. She’d always been handy with the knives and forks but recently food hadn’t interested her and she had an uncomfortable, bloated feeling as though she’d been stuffing herself for weeks. On top of it all she was finding it increasingly hard to drag herself out of bed in the mornings.
‘You are getting old,’ she told herself. ‘What else can you expect?’
Yet she’d been getting old for years and had never felt like this before.
She hated the idea of calling in the doctor. She’d known Doc Walker a long time but still resented the idea of being poked and prodded by a man she barely knew outside his surgery. But eventually it got too uncomfortable to ignore.
‘Perhaps he can give me a tonic,’ she said.
It was August when she phoned. The doctor came and gave her the once-over. He sent her for a succession of tests which she took, making sure Tamara knew nothing of what was going on.
The whole nonsense infuriated her. ‘Such a waste of time,’ she said.
The doctor did not give her a tonic but sent her for a full examination in Hobart with a Dr Valerie Shinbone.
Bec thought it a remarkably suitable name for a doctor, and said so.
‘Not really,’ Doctor Walker said. ‘She’s a gynaecologist.’
‘You think there’s something wrong with me?’
‘I think it would be a good idea to have a look.’ He gave Bec a professional smile. ‘That way we’ll know for sure there’s nothing to worry about.’
So to Hobart Bec went and had the examination and listened to what Dr Shinbone had to say about things before heading home.
Well, she thought, getting to be a hundred might prove more of a problem than I’d thought.
Tamara pounced on her as she came through the door. ‘Well?’
‘Stop fussing, girl. She told me I had the heart of a twenty-five-year-old.’
‘I am surprised she had an opinion on your heart at all, seeing she’s not a cardiologist.’
Bec might have guessed Tamara would check.
They walked into the drawing room. Through the big windows Bec could see Derwent’s lands glowing golden in the evening light. They sat down in easy chairs and looked at each other.
‘I looked her up,’ Tamara said. ‘Dr Shinbone is a gynae-oncologist.’
‘Yeah well,’ Bec said.
‘It’s cancer, isn’t it?’
Straight questions deserved straight answers but Bec still chewed over it before coming out with the truth. ‘Talking about it somehow makes it more real. Foolishness, of course. Very well. Yes, cancer it is. Ovarian cancer, she tells me. But it’s really of no consequence,’ she said brightly. ‘My ovaries are past their use-by date anyway, wouldn’t you say?’
Tamara was not deceived. ‘Did she give you a prognosis?’
‘Three months,’ Bec said. ‘Six tops.’
Tamara’s hand tightened on the arm of her chair. ‘Did she talk about an operation?’
‘At my age she says my body wouldn’t stand it.’
‘So what does she suggest?’
Ever since her discussion with Dr Shinbone Bec had been fighting shock. Now she mustered her courage and poured it into her smile, making it radiant. ‘Something along the lines of putting my affairs in order and having palliative care available when the need arises.’
‘And that’s it?’ Bec saw that Tamara was willing to go to war with the fortunately absent Dr Shinbone. ‘She’s saying there’s nothing she can do? Nothing?’
‘That’s about the size of it.’
‘You’ll get a second opinion, of course.’
‘I’ve had all the tests and there is no doubt about it. And Doc Walker says that in her field Valerie Shinbone is the best in Australia. I don’t plan on being messed about more than I’ve been already so the answer, Tamara, is no. No second opinions.’
Tamara still wanted to fight. ‘There must be something you can do.’
‘I told you. I shall put my affairs in order –’
‘Of course there is. Lots of things. I’ll do them too, or as many as I can. If I could I would walk every inch of Derwent land and say hurroo to each tree and blade of grass. If I were up to it I’d climb Blackman’s Head and say see you later to the eagles. That would be the way I’d do it, given the choice. They’ve been around a lot longer than I have.’
‘I doubt they’d thank you for it.’
‘I couldn’t manage it anyway, not now. You die by inches and don’t even realise it. I did climb it once, you know.’
‘You told me.’
‘I daresay I did. A dozen times, probably.’
Tamara smiled. ‘Something like that.’
‘There are one or two other things I’d like to see sorted too. As Derwent’s trustee you should be thinking of having a child to continue the line.’
‘How old-fashioned of you!’
‘Old, I grant you, but there’s nothing old-fashioned about wanting to see the future settled. It’s the women of this family who’ve made this place what it is. Women like us. That’s how things have been ever since Emma’s day. Because of her, Lady Arthur persuaded her husband to issue what may well have been the last free land grant in the colony. Without Emma there would have been no Derwent. Without Alice and Bessie and Jane there would have been no you or me. The women of this family have always been the movers and shakers.’
‘Like you,’ Tamara said.
‘I’ve kept the flame burning,’ Bec said. ‘I think I can say that.’
‘If you hadn’t gone to Switzerland Dad would have married that ghastly woman and her son would be busy turning Derwent into a golf course right now.’
‘Let’s not forget the wind farm,’ Bec said.
‘Bye bye, eagles,’ Tamara said.
‘Glory be to God for dappled things. A poet said that. But Jaeger isn’t the sort to let a few eagles stand between him and a profit.’ Bec took her granddaughter’s hands in hers. ‘Now it’s time to pass the torch to you. You’ve been managing the place for a good while anyway but there’s a big difference between being a manager and a custodian.
‘Derwent is our heritage – yours, mine and the future generations. Of course it needs to be managed but whoever’s in charge has to be someone who understands the significance of the past. Because the past is the present, and the future.’
‘What does the custodian do?’
‘Provide an heir whenever you’re ready. Cherish the land. Derwent is our burden, perhaps, but also our grail. It is up to each generation to keep it safe and eventually pass it on down the line. That has to be the way of it. Each of us is here for such a little time but the land endures.’
The land endures…
How true that was. You could be sure of the land but it was a different story where humans were concerned.
Bec wondered how things worked out on the other side of the threshold. Would her spirit remain nearby or would it simply evaporate? Would she meet up with the past that had been her present for most of her life? Was there, could there be, a reunion of the dead, or did people become insensate ectoplasm borne on the wind, travelling perhaps into the darkness beyond the stars?
The Venerable Bede had described life as a sparrow that flies into a lighted hall before leaving again, with no one able to say whence it came or where it went.
Was that how things were?
She would like to know, if it was permitted, to learn the answers to all the questions.
In the meantime she would say goodbye to the things that had been important to her. All the dappled things.
Three months, Dr Shinbone had said. Six tops. She would not wait for the inevitable conclusion, drugged and choking for one last breath on a sweat-stained bed. What was the point of that?
She could see them waiting in the shadows. Emma and Alice and Bessie and – yes! – Maria and Jane and her own mother. Even Rose Penrose was there, in the parade of past faces, for without her there would have been no Jonathan. Now, finally, there was Tamara, the latest incarnation of all those who had gone before. In her Bec’s hopes and the family’s future would be borne: a feather, as Hildegard of Bingen had described herself in the twelfth century, borne upon the breath of God.
The grail, as she had said. And this grail too was holy.
When the day came she would know. She would have chosen to lie at Jonathan’s side. Since that was impossible she had always told herself she would drive to the Gimbaloo valley hidden between its basalt cliffs. With the last of her strength she would drag herself down the creek until she reached the lip of the fall. She would look down at the canopy of the trees far below then, with Jonathan waiting, she would launch herself into whatever lay ahead.
That was what she had always intended but now she had a different idea. Something that would not involve her bones cluttering up the forest.
A better way to handle things and bring her closer to Jonathan too.
She sorted her affairs. She checked her will, wrote a number of letters – to the bank and the lawyers, to Tamara and a handful of friends – and left them where they would easily be found. She filled up the petrol tank and drove to the coast.
She left the keys in the ignition. She opened up the shed, dragged out the old rubber dinghy and pumped it up. It wasn’t easy and by the time she’d finished she felt she’d run a mile.
‘I’ll never make a water baby,’ she’d told herself once. Well, it was never too late to learn.
She put the oars in the dinghy and pushed it out. It was hard to get in – old age was such a degrading business – but she managed it eventually. The oars were also a problem but she managed them too. A hundred yards offshore the current took over and carried her further out. She managed to lose one of the oars but that didn’t matter now. Nothing mattered now.
The dinghy rocked as she stood up.
‘Time to visit the mermaids,’ she said.
Maybe, who knew, she might become one herself?
She stepped over the side.
The empty dinghy bobbed and drifted slowly on.
Tamara stood at the bedroom’s open window, staring out at the vastness of the land and feeling the breeze cool on her naked body.
The pre-dawn light shone silver in the eastern sky. Below the house the valley lay in shadow but once the sun rose the hills on either side would be bathed in the glory of the golden wattle. From the stringybark trees lining the access road a kookaburra’s strident voice summoned the morning.
‘She was so keen on our having a child,’ she said. ‘A pity she missed the news, but maybe, wherever she is, she knows now.’
‘I never believed she’d do it,’ Grant said.
‘It was exactly what I thought she’d do. She was a woman who lived her own life, made her own decisions. Giving herself to death was her way of giving herself to life. She often told me that she saw our ancestors – that the so-called dead had as much claim on us as the so-called living. I believe that myself.’
‘Right or wrong, she knows now,’ Grant said. ‘So where do we go from here?’
‘Onwards and upwards. I want to put up a memorial to her, a granite one to stand up to the weather, and stick it up near the shack. After that we’ll be busy enough. We have an estate to run. If we intend to make it the best property in Tasmania as well as the biggest we’d better get on with it.’
‘Is that what you think?’ said Grant.
She turned and looked at him lying on the bed. He was as naked as she was. God, she thought, how beautiful he was.
‘Maybe in a little while,’ she said.
She walked towards her husband and the future.