Rosewood Dreaming 7

Part 3


THE LIGHTHOUSE;
THE DARK HOUSE

"Beauty will save the world." (Dostoevsky)


Chapter 18


I


JACK'S STORY
Bilambil, New South Wales, circa 1920

Jack's room in the farmhouse at Bilambil, on the New South Wales border with Queensland, occupied a closed-in corner of the front veranda. Facing east, it caught the first rays of the sun rising out of the sea, and at dusk, before the lamps were lit, he would sit on the edge of his narrow bed to watch the moon or stars appear. These were rituals he observed as faithfully as any young acolyte of Zoroaster, and as fervently.

At such times, he would sometimes focus his thoughts tentatively on what the future might have in store for him. It was difficult to picture any life other than the one he had so far known, literally following in his father's footsteps as he went about his work on the banana plantation, having little contact with other adolescents since his schooling had been curtailed at the end of primary school.

The Vances were members of a small farming community, and there were no opportunities to pursue any other trade. Their contact with the outside world was limited to the newspapers that arrived, already out of date, on the mail packet from Sydney, and the family correspondence that accompanied them. Telephone, wireless, libraries, and any kind of tuition beyond elementary schooling in a slab-built hut, were yet to reach this pocket of settlement.

At night, Jack lay in his narrow bed and gazed at the moon through his window, or at the stars in the moonless sky, and pondered his solitary state. Before lying down he would rest his elbows on the sill and lean out to catch a glimpse of the lighthouse at Byron Bay, a source of radiance marking the outer limits of his isolation.

He would feel simultaneously insignificant and exhilarated at such moments, a tiny speck of consciousness taking its bearings from intense points of light, watching the vast expanse of darkness between, that put him in mind of an immense transparent vessel filled to the brim with sea, a fathomless, unknown dimension of transcendent possibilities.
He drew inspiration from the seemingly limitless expanse of the nocturnal sea and sky, bringing him intimations of the metaphysical in all creation. It was a kind of proof to him that there was a divinity, a higher power unifying heaven and earth and living beings.

The image of the lighthouse and the night sky crystallised his understanding of divine creation. Only a higher being could create such splendours: night made radiant with constellations, where ships imperilled by the darkness and the vagaries of the ocean were guided to safety by a merciful beacon.
 
*  *  *

When Jack found time to write his memoirs, he was an old man. Every detail of his youth was vivid in his mind, yet he omitted all reference to the people who loomed largest in his reminiscences as the idols and companions of his early life. His unselfish, unassuming nature and his courtesy, not to mention force of habit, prompted him to give centre-stage, as always, to Harry Vance, his father, a man who, wittingly or not, bent others to his will, obsessed with visions he could not articulate.
 
It was perhaps also characteristic of Jack’s generation that History, as he saw it, should take precedence over inner history, the public transcend the personal. In any case, his innate reticence prevailed: his inner life was something he did not care to record. In his scrupulous account of external events that had shaped the Vances' lives, Jack concealed far more than he revealed.


II


GRIGORY
"Rydalmere", The Dawson Valley,
Central Queensland, 1929


Jack, a young man with gaunt limbs and wistful, deep-blue eyes, pauses on his way to bed to say good night to Grigory, the lodger. Grigory is also a young man, his eyes dark and intense, his hair prematurely greying at the temples. The eyes of  Jack, the farmer’s son, take in the circle of lamplight on the dining-table, Grigory’s open exercise book, the English novel, the dictionary. Grigory, the reader and writer, glances up at Jack, who works the land, standing outside the circle of light, his hands, the good one and the maimed one, hanging at his sides. In an accented voice, the seated man speaks to the standing one. ‘I think I’ll read a little longer, Jack, before I put out the light. Good night.’

The lodger is a Russian émigré, posted to the one-roomed local bush school during the postwar shortage of teachers. He is hungry for knowledge, for the authority language and learning confer; eager to make up for the wasted years of civil war, chaos, cruelty that still seem too barbaric to be real. He sits like this every night, reading, often with his lips moving, sometimes making notes in his exercise book. Goaded by a desire to make up for lost time, he permits himself little sleep. And for as long as he stays awake, the spectres can be kept at bay.

Jack, a gangly youth at the end of his teenage years, regards the Russian schoolteacher with wonder bordering on awe. Jack is shy, lame-tongued, with a misshapen hand that puts him at a disadvantage even for farm work, but he loves learning as one loves the seemingly unattainable, and feels uncouth, unschooled beside this dark, inscrutable stranger. Jack senses things about Grigory he cannot articulate. The events of Grigory’s life are something beyond the scope of Jack’s imagining, but he feels the impact of their passing as those on the periphery of an earthquake feel the tremors, without being able to account for them. Dazzled by the light of Grigory's superior learning, he does not notice the darkness that engulfs his spirit.

Grigory, his inner world violated by his experience of civil war, does not really perceive Jack nor recognise his hunger. For Grigory, Jack will always be a shadow, standing just beyond the yellow circle of lamplight like an unfulfilled destiny. Coming from a culture of silence, Jack has no adequate means of bridging the gap, and the Russian schoolteacher chooses not to speak. Neither seems aware of their common denominator of enforced displacement.
 
Grigory is more open and responsive to Elspeth, Jack’s younger sister. Her softness and the whiteness of the muslin frock she wears on Sundays are like the phantom of a vanished happiness. She represents the antithesis of all the gruesome scenes he cannot expunge from memory. He holds her image like a talisman before his mind’s eye, to still the crazy oscillations of events he cannot bear to contemplate. Elspeth represents what might have been.

*  *  *

Harry Vance had transplanted his family from Sydney to Tyalgum, in the foothills of Mount Warning, when Jack was still a boy, interrupting his son's schooling, to work the banana plantation he was bent on establishing there. To the end of his life, Jack would harbour regret for the loss of the Parramatta orchard that had been his first home, and for the book-learning he had been denied, overlaid by more recent pangs of nostalgia for places he had sought to identify with and been forced to leave. His sense of belonging was to be, at best, precarious, something not of place or time, which he sensed might be found in books and poetry and music. But for the most part, his personal desert seemed devoid of such life-giving wells, and he could never bring himself to ask his father for what struck him as undreamt-of luxuries. In the struggle for existence, the physical took precedence.
   
The raw new selection in the mountain's shadow had been a desolate place, walled in by subtropical jungle harbouring fauna that shrieked its hostility, proclaiming its otherness in frightening ways. ‘Don’t go!’ boomed the rainforest pigeon, and even the familiar kookaburras seemed cruelly derisory. The roots of the strangler fig were a medusa waiting to sap Jack's strength. The banana plantation seemed at times a green dungeon, a vine-constricted hell.
 
*  *  *
 
As a sixteen-year-old boy, Grigory had been forced to witness the torture and death of his father, a well-to-do provincial merchant, who was slaughtered in front of his family as an example to the bourgeoisie by renegade partisans rampaging under the Bolshevik banner. Some weeks later, equally shocking atrocities had been committed in the provincial town by Tsarist White Guards, avenging themselves on suspected Red sympathisers. Next had come roving bands of Greens, leaving their trail of anarchic destruction. Nothing had remained of Grigory’s small, secure world in the wake of its self-styled liberators, except the reek of smoke and charred lives, the sounds of carnage, the stench of fear.

While the world as Grigory had known it was being torn asunder, Jack, in another hemisphere, was battling rainforest and isolation. While Grigory was fleeing for his life with his mother and sister, frantically seeking an exit from the obscenity of civil war, Jack was being buried alive in his own green abyss.

News of the Russian Revolution had glanced off the foothills of Mount Warning. Even the Great War had scarcely touched their world. Jack’s father was past the age when men were expected to enlist, and Jack was nowhere near it. A neighbour’s son had left for the battlefields of Europe, proudly wearing the khaki uniform and plumes of the cavalry. He had been killed in action at Gallipoli, a name that seemed to be on everyone’s lips. While stories of valour and sacrifice could not fail to make an impression on Jack, his own life remained as lonely as ever, and his personal tribulations seemed more real. Yet it would never have occurred to him to doubt or defy his father. Jack believed blindly in Harry and followed him like a loyal disciple.
 
In Old Vance’s forays northward into undeveloped territory, Miriam Kaufmann and her daughter Aimee had been parted. When Jack was struck down by rheumatic fever, depriving his father of his only permanent helper and forcing the family to return to Sydney, to give Jack a chance to recover and attend  school, mother and daughter were reunited.

For Aimee, it was a reprieve from purgatory to return to the house with the harbour views, its terraced garden seemingly overflowing with flowers and fragrance and music. Being back with Miriam again, in the lap of what now seemed sheer luxury, offered her a glimpse of paradise, a breath of heavenly peace and ease, after the rigours of life on the farm at Tyalgum, and the terror induced by isolation, powerlessness, the unknown. But even Harry Vance had bitten off more than he could chew at Tyalgum. Perhaps the hostile spirits Jack heard all around spoke also to Harry, for he had consented to return to Sydney without a hint of his characteristic stubbornness.
 
But Harry's itchy feet inevitably got the better of him, although in this case his departure from Sydney was made acrimonious by the fact that he had been cheated by his business partner there. Whatever the impetus for change, it came down to the fact that Aimee and Jack and Elspeth were uprooted once again.

Harry, unlike his wife and children, had not lost his enthusiasm for the  country south of the Queensland border. The Tyalgum selection having been sold, he bought another parcel of land at Bilambil, a happier choice as far as his family was concerned, because of its views of the sea and a lighter, more lyrical genius locii. It felt more benevolent, somehow, and they soon settled in. There was already a house on the land, and the panoramic vistas of the sea and the hinterland compensated for the lack of amenities. They could all breathe freely here. The sense of constriction induced by their first farm at Tyalgum had been left behind.

* * *
 
After the Civil War, Grigory had managed to leave Russia with his mother and sister by fleeing east to the Pacific and boarding a ship bound for Australia. Along with other refugee families they disembarked at Brisbane, the first port of call, wondering what fresh traumas awaited them. At about the same time Old Vance had become restless again and, prompted by pestilence sweeping the border plantations, moved north to central Queensland, to grow cotton and sorghum and breed sheep in the Dawson Valley. Grigory, whose wealthy father had hired private tutors for his son and had him taught several foreign languages, including English, was subsequently posted to the same destination as a first-year teacher with the Department of Public Instruction.

Grigory lodged with the Vances at their farm, "Rydalmere", for two years, never suspecting how significant his presence was for Jack, who would remember his Russian contemporary as epitomising qualities and accomplishments he longed for in himself. ‘Ah, my God,’ he would sigh deep in his soul, ‘why have you forsaken me? What have I done to be cast into the shadows? Why have you seen fit to deny me the light of song and of learning?’ But God gave no sign that he could hear Jack pleading to be allowed into the light, and so Jack continued to perceive Grigory as his own longed-for antithesis: a young man of letters and learning, cultivated and imbued with worldly knowledge far beyond what rural Queensland could offer. Inspired by his example, Jack began to do what little was in his power, slowly and patiently acquiring his own small library, hoarding his meagre allowance from Old Vance until he could afford a set of encyclopaedia and then, one volume at a time, some of the classics of world literature, which he obtained by mail order.

Although Grigory represented a sombre reminder of what was missing from Jack’s life, there were carefree times as well with his own contemporaries in the district: dances, amateur concerts, tennis parties, hayrides, picnics on the river bank. During his twenties and early thirties Jack’s social life was like a progressive barn dance, the partners changing before he had time to get to know them better, or any closer acquaintance could develop. Everybody he knew seemed content to follow familiar rhythms, established patterns, well-known steps.

The threat of invasion by Japan somehow changed all that. Young men who left the land to fight the war did not want to return to a farming life if they managed to come back at all, preferring to seek better-paid work in the towns. The whiff of change in the air was pretext enough for Old Vance, and after the war he was on the move again, on what was to be the final leg of his push into new surroundings, to farm a coastal property farther north.

There, the local townspeople observed that Jack Vance kept to himself. He was an agreeable chap, but no one really knew him. The more perspicacious sensed something curiously unfulfilled about him, a vaguely haunted look about the eyes, although his demeanour was characteristically patient, calm, deliberate, even cheerful. They could nevertheless sense there was something missing from his life, as if he hadn’t quite found his own place in the world, hadn’t made his mark. Jack was his father’s vassal, bringing the old man’s dream to pass, building a small, shaky, self-styled empire in the bush where Old Vance’s word was law.

But although Harry Vance commandeered Jack’s loyalty and obedience, his son was never Vance enough to please him entirely, for Jack bore a stronger resemblance to his mother’s side of the family. The un-Vance-like wistfulness, the unappeased hunger for poetry, were qualities he shared with Miriam, his maternal grandmother. Aimee Vance’s mother, whom Jack remembered clearly, was the daughter of a prosperous London Jewish family. Her husband’s business ambitions had brought her to the colonies.
 
As a child, Jack had heard Miriam sing at recitals of arias and popular classics in Sydney, in aid of various charities. It was considered not quite genteel to sing for a living, although Miriam loved music above all else. This was her lasting gift to Jack, the music he imbibed in early childhood and thirsted for all his life.

The legacy of Sydney was different for each of the Vances. Intermittent as Miriam Kaufmann’s involvement in Jack’s upbringing may have been, her heritage was in his blood, a shadow-ancestry, setting him apart from the Vances subtly and inexplicably. He had fleeting intimations of this intangible inheritance, elusive as the sound of a bow drawn teasingly across taut strings in a high room somewhere out of sight. There were thresholds of awareness Jack longed to step across, but just as he approached them, they seemed to disappear.

Nothing of Jack's spiritual hunger found its way into his memoirs.  True to the conditioning of his generation, he was careful to keep his private torments to himself, to avoid the pitfall of indulging in any expression of discontent, and to count his blessings.


III


An excerpt from Jack's memoirs, 1988
 
The new venture meant more scrub-felling, but trees of a much smaller girth called brigalow, hence the term ‘brigalow country’, which in our case denoted deep rich red soil. It was also sometimes called ‘scrub turkey’ or ‘bottle tree’ country. The early settlers had turkey on their menu in abundance, as the initial crops of maize were an attraction, and after eating their fill the turkeys would quite often perch on the closest strong branch of a tree, where the settler could sometimes bring down a dozen birds in a single shot-gun charge. Throughout the scrub they built huge turkey-nest mounds where they laid their eggs, which hatched with the heat generated in the mounds.
The bottle tree also grew in among scrub, and sometimes reached great size and mass. Under the thick rough bark, the main trunk was very moist and palatable to cattle, and was therefore the means of saving livestock in later droughts. The brigalow was felled, and when dry, burnt off. Cotton seed was then planted in the ‘scrub burn’ by ‘walking stick’ hand planter, which could with adjustment plant a variety of seeds. However, in our case the venture was a disappointment, due to several factors: the cost of harvesting by hand among the tree-stumps; early cotton plant varieties of poor quality; no control over a pest called boll weevil; and the bushes dropping their crop before maturity due to heatwave or lack of rain.
So by the third season my father had commenced dairying. Rhodes grass was the main grass sown, and proved an excellent fodder for cattle and horses on the deep red soils of that area. The sight of a Rhodes grass paddock in seed, as high as the fence posts, waving gently in the breeze, is impressive. Only one disadvantage: riding a horse at a canter, you have to trust the horse to see the bottle tree holes, as they leave an enormous cavity on account of not having hard roots.

Life on our property, 'Rydalmere', was better than we had dared hope for, with plentiful supplies of good quality sub-artesian water, plus dams. We acquired the next door property, netted the whole area, and bred a flock of Merino sheep crossed with Dorset Horn rams.

*  *  *

The Dixalea Telephone Exchange for the local area – about a dozen subscribers – was housed in our home for many years. Tennis and cricket were played regularly, and our tennis court, surfaced with clay from the gully, was one of the best in the district.

When the farm was sold... we moved to 'Rosewood', near the seaside town where I met and married my wife, and raised our family...


Chapter 19


A STAR FELL FROM HEAVEN
Rosewood, 1956


‘You’d only make a fool of yourself again, like you did at the last School of Arts concert.’ Jeannie’s voice was flat, precluding argument. Anna  strained her ears to hear Jack’s reply, but it followed a distressingly familiar pattern: ‘... always know how to hurt a man ...  can’t win.’
‘And as for those ladies in the choir...  that brazen hussy, Bella Baines...’

Anna caught a different undertone in this remark. So it wasn’t because Jack would make a fool of himself that Jeannie wanted to stop him from singing. Jeannie was jealous and afraid. Jack’s face was flushed, his Adam’s apple working. He swallowed hard and voiced disjointed protests. ‘... said I had a fine voice ... only needed training ... too late now.’ Anna heard his boots on the back stairs as he stumped away, while Jeannie clattered at the sink and banged pots on the stove.

Anna knew that Jack would never make a fool of himself when he sang. At such times, the hesitation that characterised his speech disappeared in the fluency of melody. Jack’s resonant baritone and his songs were part of the fabric of Anna’s childhood. She remembered Jack pacing the veranda with her when she was very small and sleepless, singing softly as he looked out at the stars. Nestled like a bird against his chest, she would feel the sounds vibrating where her head rested. The words and music flowed through her, enveloping her in a caul of harmony. He often sang about a tree, and it was as if the tree was singing, the voice of the wood inhabiting him.

   I think that I shall never see
   a poem lovely as a tree,
   a tree whose hungry mouth is pressed
   against the earth’s sweet flowing breast,
   a tree that looks at God all day
   and lifts its leafy arms to pray...

The grown-up Anna, hearing a cello played, was reminded of Jack’s song about trees, the spirit of the tree, its heartwood making him an instrument. The cello’s wooden torso, too, became the tree’s soulcase, housing its mellow, arboreal voice like a living body.

Jack sang many other songs, of places far away, and other times. Another hemisphere. He loved the voice of Josef Schmidt, the Jewish tenor. It struck a plangent chord in his own sublimated history. One of his favourite songs, which Anna grew to love as well, was Schmidt’s recording of ‘A Star Fell from Heaven’, which was often broadcast on the ABC.

Jack sensed that he lived in a culture where the kind of nostalgia innate to him was regarded with contempt, so that he could never feel completely at home in it. Although he could not articulate this feeling, except by singing other people’s songs, he knew that it was present in some of the music of Europe, a subversive emotion opening apertures to the past, which so many of his countrymen seemed anxious to forget, or to preserve only selectively.
 
Driving his battered old Bedford ute, Jack would frequently return home after dark, having delivered milk or eggs or cream to customers in town, and Anna, listening for his return, would hear his voice approaching, singing, effortlessly scaling the rise above the laboured chugging of the motor.

Now, hearing the abrasive edge on Jeannie’s voice, Anna felt pain for her father. It hurt her chest. She could not have put a name to it, but it was something akin to pity mixed with sympathy, while at the same time she felt mortified on Jack’s account. It made her chafe at life’s petty injustices.

Anna was becoming increasingly aware that there was a secret aspect to her father’s life, a shadow side, in no way sinister, but strictly private, and therefore provocative, intriguing. It was somehow connected to strange objects in his closet: something like an apron adorned with braid and metallic decorations. And a sash to wear across your chest, the kind you’d see on governors or dukes and duchesses. Anna longed to try them on, but didn’t dare. There were also a great many 78 r.p.m. gramophone records with names like Verdi, Mozart, Beethoven: music that could not be heard at Rosewood, in the absence of a gramophone. Song reduced to flat black discs of silence. Only Jack knew what pleasures they contained.

Other clues to Jack’s inner world lay hidden in the pigeon-holes of the huge old roll-top walnut desk: fragments of verse he had written, letters addressed to him in faded ink at places whose names belonged to the time before Anna, before Jeannie and Rosewood. The envelopes had stamps on them you never saw any more. Squatting on the desk inside the poky corner room they called the office, a younger Anna had long since furtively removed the stamps for her collection, a fact that Jack did not appear to have noticed.

At the same time as she chafed for Jack’s constricted lot, Anna felt a passionate sympathy for Jeannie, whose life had become an unrelenting grind through no fault of her own or Jack’s. She wondered at the unremitting hardship of her parents’ lives. There seemed to be no way for them but to survive and endure and toil. But why were they so powerless, she asked herself.

Jeannie had her secrets too, Anna knew instinctively, but she couldn’t tolerate Jack’s secret life. Anna would hear her more and more often, attacking the part of his life that Jack did not share with her. There was a scene apparently connected with the resplendent apron. ‘You’ll have to give it up. We can’t afford the dues.’ Again and again she lashed out at the inner life that was Jack’s alone, until he began to respond with petulance and silence.

But Anna’s musings were interrupted on this particular occasion by Nettie’s screams of  Snake! Snake! A tiger snake had got in through the open louvres of the boxed-in veranda. Jeannie went into action with mechanical efficiency.

Snatching the carving knife and the kettle of boiling water, she strode towards the source of the panic. ‘Keep back!’ she hissed at the children. From a safe distance they watched, wide-eyed, as she emptied the contents of the kettle over the intruder, which writhed and thrashed grotesquely but was too confused to strike back. Then with cool judgement and expert timing Jeannie closed in for the kill, deftly severing her victim’s head. Anna looked down sickly at the blood and steam.

*  *  *

In the event, Jack did not take part in the School of Arts concert.

It occurred to Anna then that Jack could never please or satisfy Jeannie. She wanted something that Jack could not be, or did not have, although Anna had no idea what that might be. Quite often Jeannie’s patience would snap and she would upbraid Jack as if to punish him. Jack would be wounded by her attacks, not understanding why. And Jeannie would feel resentful because Jack had failed her again, always without realising, or meaning to. What counted for Jeannie were results, and what had poor Jack to show for himself? It wasn’t really part of her credo that a thing might be worth doing for its own sake, so she couldn’t quite comprehend what music meant to Jack, or that even an amateur concert in the local School of Arts could give him a glimpse of a world he longed to be part of.

Jack was always at the periphery of the source of light, it seemed, and didn’t claim much more for himself than that, but Jeannie could not see the point. All light or no light was closer to her understanding of things, whereas Jack was more at home in twilight.

Clearly, Jeannie could not offer Jack the recognition he craved. Her own sense of deprivation blinded her to his need for appreciation and fulfilment. Trapped in her own fears, stung by the scorpion jealousy, not so much of Bella Baines as the freedom she seemed to flaunt and enjoy, Jeannie had all but lost sight of the spectres of her own mother and father in the background: the good-looking, devil-may-care, philandering father who had caused her mother so much gall, and so much pain.

Sometimes she would glance at the framed, hand-tinted wedding portrait on the wall: Jeannie a radiant bride in her mid-twenties, smiling from clouds of lace and tulle, a white-gloved Jack in his late thirties proudly standing beside her, with Jack’s mother and sister Elspeth, in powder-blue as matron of honour, flanking the bride and groom. Old Vance was the only one seated, positioned in front of Jack at an angle to the camera, so that he seemed in command, even on his son’s wedding day.

And who was this stranger called Jeannie? God, to think she’d once been the toast of the one-horse town, as far as looks were concerned! A smile to die for ('a smahl t' dah fur!') the G.I.'s used to tell her, in their quaint Southern accents. It didn’t bear thinking about now. And there was her own Dad, smiling his slightly sardonic smile women found so attractive.
 
More and more often, Jeannie failed to remember that it was partly because he was so different from her rakish though adored father that she had consented to marry Jack.


Chapter 20


A SPIDER-WEB


Without conscious intent, Jeannie presented disparate images to the world: the demonic creature who beheaded snakes and slashed at lantana with the same grim gusto; the woman confronting a bulldozer with arms outstretched in an attempt to save the old bluegum at the Rosewood school bus-stop; one of the furies shrilly pursuing a hangdog Jack; an infinitely gentle madonna, her tired, careworn face alight, gazing down at the newborn infant cradled in her arms; the weary farmer’s wife falling asleep over a serialised romance, her seductively distorting lens on a different kind of world. Jeannie was all of these and more.

People who'd lived in the town during the Pacific war remembered another Jeannie, flying along on her pushbike, or skimming around the beachside rink on her roller-skates. She was the envy of other girls whenever she appeared on the beach, her perfect figure set off by a classic black one-piece swimsuit, the long, sleek mane of chestnut hair that she was so proud of clasped at the nape of her neck.

She could have had any G.I. or officer she wanted, and there were certainly plenty to choose from, after America entered the war. They passed through the town in their thousands, en route for New Guinea and other points north, filling the enormous army camps set up in the hinterland, and crowding into the local picture-theatre every night. Milk-bars and cafes sprang up to cater for the trade, and girls like Jeannie were never short of admirers. But no, she was waiting for Jimmy's return, and that was that.

Curiously, when Jeannie was in distress, two people Anna thought of as her guardian spirits had a way of appearing at Rosewood. Their arrival at times of crisis seemed too uncanny to be mere coincidence. They would be there when she needed comforting, although on the face of it their need was greater than hers. Michael and Hetty, orphans in their thirties, had inherited their parents’ dairy, one of the oldest in the district. Michael’s shyness was so acute that it rendered him almost inarticulate, and when he did manage to utter a word he would blush like a turkey gobbler.
 
Hetty’s face was like the sun, round and ruddy and beaming. Anna thought Hetty’s heart was like the sun too, you could almost see it glow through her shapeless cotton frocks. Her arms were pink and doughy-looking, like a rag doll’s. When she spoke, it was difficult to understand the words, although Hetty knew exactly what she wished to say. She was a sunflower who could disperse Jeannie’s darkest aura, even though she was trapped too, her generous heart locked in a body that swelled like yeast, afflicted by a malevolent spell that mocked her attempts at speech.

There was a mutual, wordless exchange of warmth between Jeannie and the two awkward siblings. Watching her serve them mugs of tea and slabs of boiled fruit cake, Anna felt an outsider. She realised that in some peculiar way, Michael and Hetty understood Jeannie as Jack and Old Vance could not. If the townspeople no longer knew what to make of her, this was irrelevant. (Jeannie shunned the town these days. What was the point of gazing in shop windows if you couldn’t buy anything?)

Although there were some exceptions, it seemed. Like funny old Mister Guy Osborne, who had arrived one day to fetch a calf, in time to observe Jeannie wrestling with a gate in which the herd bull had caught his horns. Going in his laconic way to lend a hand, Mr Osborne had taken Anna aback as she loped along after him by saying, ‘She’s got such grit, your mother, young lady, and I do so admire grit in a woman…’

Anna was in awe of her mother, too. She would drive herself and others like a relentless machine, but when the mechanism began to make warning sounds, portending a breakdown, everyone would take fright and head for cover. Even in her times of need, she could be destructive. What kept Jeannie going? Not even she could ever be sure. Her capacity to love, and to hate. Fear, and often nameless fear, although some names were real  enough: illness and accident, fire, drought, cyclone. Poverty. The constant fear of insufficient means, more children, mouths to feed. Fear of not being able to keep struggling, keep going. Rosewood was a spider-web, and fear was at its hub.

It was amazing, Jeannie often reflected, how she managed to keep feeding them all. There may have been accounts as long as your arm at every grocer’s shop in town, not to mention the butcher and baker, the stock-food agent, those patient tradespeople who, along with the Vances, waited for that elusive ‘good season’ that never seemed to come. Jeannie had entirely given up going to town on shopping trips, wincing at the thought of having to ask for further credit and sending Jack instead with lists of provisions required.
The indignity of poverty had made her a virtual recluse.

But Jeannie was a magician in the kitchen and nobody went hungry at Rosewood. As long as she had flour and sugar, a pinch or two of spice, a handful of dried fruit and her old, stained, Country Women’s Association recipe book, she could work miracles. On winter evenings Anna and her siblings salivated expectantly as she dished up steamed puddings cooked in a sauce of golden syrup, and poured thick yellow custard over each serving.

Yet no matter how many daily battles Jeannie won, there were still demons she was powerless to exorcise. Emotional abuse in childhood cast long, ominous shadows. Against all better instincts, the abused became abuser. Late in her life, Jeannie was able to sum up her childhood in two sentences: There had been too much emotional trauma. There had been too little laughter. But behind those characteristically blunt, matter-of-fact statements lay a world of unexplained cruelty, a lifetime of bewilderment.

Had her parents been sadists, or insensitive, or just ordinary people, doing what they thought was right? Jeannie didn’t know any more, and there was no chance of ever getting to the bottom of it now. Besides, she had learned to devastating effect that withholding approval was a kind of power.