The Man on the Headland Read online

  We were passing through the jungle behind the dunes and just then my horse shied and started to run, jarring my finger against the pommel. I could hardly hold her and after I reached home my finger swelled and swelled until I was wearing my teeth down grinding them with the pain. “A jealous ghost,” I told Roddy.

  “You and your ghosts!”

  While I was in hospital overnight at Port Macquarie to have the finger cut open, Ernie called to borrow a book. Often people called to see me and made friends with my husband instead. Ernie and Roddy shared meals and books for years after that. Ernie said later that Dimandead might have licked him if it hadn’t been for the books. The wind might be coming across the open paddocks nearly lifting the roof off Clara’s house and flinging rain at it like insults, the seas would be roaring to lift the cliff, the radio battery would be flat. Ernie would go to bed and read, and let Dimandead do its worst.

  Now, instead of going past our house, he would come in, shaking his waterproof at the back door, yelling “Anyone at home?” sure of his welcome, the books in his knapsack. In die next ten years he read his way steadily through our library. Fiction did not interest him as much as history and biography, but he read all Dickens, Tolstoy, and Balzac, as well as Roddy’s collection of Polar and African explorers. If I were away he might stay overnight, playing chess with Roddy, sharing a bottle of wine. We did not realize he never went to the hotel because he could not afford to “shout”. He was not too proud to wear Roddy’s old coats, but he was too proud to accept a drink and not return it.

  Roddy was a good cook and I had my own special dishes. We had one Christmas dinner together when I cooked a duck with red burgundy and we ate it looking down the blue water on the back veranda. Later at Diamond Head Ernie and Roddy shot a hare and jugged it in wine, but they didn’t let it stand long. I was a little jealous of the easy way they had with each other. “Ernie, you old devil,” Roddy would cry over the chessboard, “it’s checkmate.”

  “No, it isn’t,” Ernie would tell him. “But if you move that piece you’ll spoil the game.” They wouldn’t let me play chess with them. I was too impatient.

  Dimandead always tried for a man’s weak point. Ernie’s weak point was that he had to eat. He was too self-sufficient to be lonely by himself at Dimandead and if he knew people called him “the mad hermit” it amused him. He was the most sociable of men. And he liked to smoke. Once he walked all the way from Dimandead, because the weather was too wicked to bring the horse out, and found that the storekeeper had sold his tobacco ration, thinking he wouldn’t be able to get in. Ernie offered to fight him. For once he accepted cigarettes from me. The shopkeeper said he thought no man alive would cross the plains in that downpour. Ernie simmered down after a hot meal in our kitchen. But he had a dislike of shopkeepers, probably inherited from his father, who carted stores. When he spoke about shopkeepers his usual sense of humour was not in it.

  He would come in and throw off his waterproof. “What’s the news, Ernie?” I would ask, rushing round the kitchen waiting for the bell to ring. A meal had to be on the table when it rang. Ernie would begin on the weather. He analysed it, discussed its ailments as a man studying an opponent would size up his chances in the next round. We did not realize, surrounded by friends, neighbours and occupations, that Ernie often stayed in bed with what he called “rheumatism”. He probably had, for all his strength, the slow menace of cancer that he refused to acknowledge. Coming into town for “a bit of meat for the dogs” took him away from the threat and savagery of Dimandead. What it told him with the boom of cliffs beating his life away was that it was utterly regardless of human life.

  It galled Ernie, worse than the unearthly presence of Dimandead, that the townspeople, including his relations, looked on him as a failure. He was living on pumpkin and damper so that the dogs could have meat, and he was determined, at this time, to make a success of farming at Dimandead and show them all. Once he grew a wonderful crop of strawberries in the beds he had built in careful imitation of the Macgregors. I forgot what ate the strawberries, but I know the wallabies ate the tomatoes. Another year he had great golden bananas and the flying-foxes came over in clouds and tore them off the trees. Ernie waxed very humorous over the fact that no animal except man seemed to care for pumpkins. “Always got the pumpkins to fall back on.” He would accept meat I kept for the dogs, but you wouldn’t dare to offer him money. I always kept food for Ernie to take away with him.

  Everyone in Laurieton knew that Ernie was no farmer. He wouldn’t shoot the red kangaroos but encouraged them to breed up at Dimandead. The silly coots, he remarked, were always hopping out on the plain where people would shoot them. He didn’t even mind the vixen stealing a fowl. She had young cubs, Ernie knew—“probably needed it more than I did”. He had a rooster, he said, that could fight off hawks, and in time he might have him trained to fight off foxes. He even felt guilty about shooting an old goanna that was stealing eggs, but probably judged it a snakelike beast. One time he couldn’t stay the night with us because he had to get back to the cow. She was going to calve and was uneasy without him, galloping out to meet him when he came back, lowing after him if he went out of her sight.

  In his bedroom he had trouble with the swallows. They built a nest over his bed and he had to spread newspaper on himself as he lay there. He swore the mother wouldn’t go out unless he was around to look after the young ones. “Reckons I’m some kind of a baby-sitter.” One year he vowed he would trick them. He was fed up with the way they imposed on him. He kept the door and window shut so they couldn’t get in. But he forgot and left the window open a crack while he went into town. When he came back the nest was built. “Must have had every swallow for miles in helping them. You could hear them saying to each other, Taster, boys, or ole Ernie’ll be back before we get it finished.‘“ They knew he wouldn’t have the heart to break it down once it was there. He wouldn’t shift his bed, but he fitted a triangular piece of three-ply in the corner over his bed for protection.

  Ernie would for a time lose heart when cattle broke in and ate his orange crop. He worked like a madman, then he would give up work and curse. There were years of drought when there was no water and years of sodden wet when nothing grew.

  Ernie, for all that he was slightly built, was very strong. He could run at great speed. George-with-one-arm had died, but his son Harry still kept the farm on the Moorland road. Other sons had gone to the city and prospered as suburban business-men. Ernie rode over infrequently to see Harry and on one of these visits Harry and some neighbours were trying to rope a steer. They would throw the lasso over the beast’s horns and the beast would shake it off. Ernie began to grow impatient. He was smoking his pipe and glancing at the sun.

  “Hey, do you want him then?” he called.

  “Of course we want him. We just can’t catch him.”

  Ernie dived at the steer with that lightning swiftness which had made him a danger to snakes when he was a child. He caught the steer by the tail and the steer promptly leapt the fence with Ernie sailing after it.

  “He’ll be killed.”

  “No, he’s all right.”

  The steer and Ernie crashed off through the bush and twenty minutes later they heard, “Ahoy!” through the timber.

  “That’s Ernie,” they said.

  “Well, do you still want him?” he shouted. Ernie had not lost his pipe clenched between his teeth. “Come on then,” he called. “If he gets his wind he’ll drag me all the way to Dimandead.”

  “He must be physically fit,” one of the men said.

  “It’s the bullock that was fit,” Ernie retorted. “He was doing all the pulling. I just went along.”

  And all the time Ernie and Dimandead struggled round by round—Dimandead to starve Ernie, and Ernie, hanging on as he had hung on to the bullock’s tail.

  He would visit his niece Dot when he came into town and I think Dot, too, kept something for “the dogs” and saw that Ernie had more than pumpkin and dampe
r. The baby girl put steel “butterflies” to set his curls and murmured fretfully because they were too short. The womenfolk advised him to buy blue for his washing because it was going to be in short supply.

  “Buy blue,” Ernie chuckled, coming into my kitchen. “They told me to buy blue.” Only the cow looked over his fence when he boiled the linen in a copper in the yard and she didn’t care what colour the sheets were.

  Ernie was now interested in bees. He brought us treacle tins of the dark fragrant melaleuca honey, refusing payment. Later he decided it was a shame to take the honey from the bees. They needed it themselves.

  Chapter VIII

  WHEN I had gone off to the city—my next book was to be about jails and criminals—the people of Laurieton were not even surprised that Peg Slocombe and Roddy still rode and swam and surfed together. Nothing we did, they felt, could surprise them any more. They even felt rather pleased at owning me when they heard I had spent a week in jail.

  But it caused a tremendous sensation when we joined those who had been accustomed to say, “Of course, you haven’t any children, have you? Ah well, if you’d got a family you wouldn’t have time for anything else.”

  The baby, before its birth, was known as “the jinx”, but after it was born we were careful to point out that its name, Benison, meant “a blessing”. It was a nuggety baby girl with black eyes, very tiny but broad and strong. “That child,” Selina Slocombe said impressively, “has been here before”.

  You would see the Rodd family out rowing with the big yellow Persian cat sitting up in the prow, its whiskers blowing, and the baby on its mother’s lap, enjoying the outing. Mother and child could be met on top of the mountain with the school straggling up the cliffs in front and behind. The baby rode in a linen saddle on my hip, undoubtedly cultivating its later passion for horses. It was a merry little baby, but it refused to sleep and its father and mother were exhausted by its demands for action. It had strong, beautiful hands and could be kept quiet if you gave it a paper to tear up, but if it was bored it shouted at you indignandy.

  The struggle of the Rodds to rear their offspring was as good as a serial for the town and people waited impatiently for the next instalment. Girls who had left school and were not very good at lessons had always looked forward to working at the school residence. Roddy would come over and say, “Jean is leaving. She’s a good little girl. It’s just that she hasn’t had a decent home.” After little Jean had broken any ornaments and learnt to sweep under the furniture and was becoming useful, the hotel would offer her a job. Every girl wanted to work at the hotel. So I would start again. One girl had reported that “Mrs Rodd does nothing but lie all day reading”. That was when I was writing a history and studying the land laws; but after the baby came nobody saw me lying down.

  We had sold our horses before the baby’s arrival to a neighbour who had long desired them. Betty the mare was happy with a foal and so was Creamy. They hardly recognized me.

  I now had a white Saanen goat and its kid and struggled morning and night to extract milk from that goat because the baby spat out cow’s milk. The goat would wait its chance until I had the billy full of milk, then it would give a sudden twist on its halter and kick the billy over.

  Roddy formed the habit of sending the baby and its mother to live in a cottage some miles up the coast where one could lie in bed and see the phosphorescent ruffles of the surf break against the beach all the miles to the lighthouse at Port Macquarie. In that way he got some sleep. But after we had been cut off by flooded roads several times I refused to go to Green Hills for what he termed “a rest”. We were both exhausted by coping with the baby, and the townspeople marvelled because they never had any trouble with theirs.

  I was walking round the lake one morning looking for mushrooms with the baby sleeping peacefully—it always slept peacefully if it was moving—in its linen saddle on my hip. Albert Metcalfe met me and asked, with the gentle manner ail the Metcalfes had, how the baby was getting on.

  “It doesn’t grow and I’m worried about it,” I told him. “Do you think Ernie would let me go out to Diamond Head for a few weeks ? The trouble is I wouldn’t go unless Ernie would let me pay him. So I don’t like to ask him.”

  At this time we had more money than we had ever had, in spite of my paying income tax in England and another income tax in Australia. There was even a steady demand for Lost Haven at the local store. I would wheel the baby’s pram over full of copies with the ginger cat sitting on top. Getting the author to provide autographed copies was a little perquisite of the local shop, though I got no royalty on these.

  “Why wouldn’t Ernie let you pay him?” Albert said indignantly. It was just one more proof what a stuck-up snob his young brother was. “He’s only battling like the rest of us.” He promised to have a word with Ernie, and Roddy had a word with him, too. So Ernie came in in the sulky to take me and the baby to Dimandead. The baby shouted approvingly when she saw the horse as though she knew what it was. The ginger cat came. If anyone regarded our going as improper Ernie was likely to pay as much attention as I did.

  Ernie had papered the little room off the veranda with clean newspaper. The baby played naked in the beach ripples and grew fat and strong. She slept under the shadow of the trees where now the rutile mine has gouged out an eroded quarry to pave its roads. She slept all night in the little room papered with newspaper.

  Roddy came out in the town taxi at the week-end with rare foods to find a brown and jolly little baby. After that you couldn’t keep us away from Dimandead. Terry Ewen, the taxi-owner, was eloquent about the track. “I tell you, my boy, a man must be hard up for a crust to drive over it. Stumps, corrugations, pot-holes, streams clear and muddy —the lot! It has them all. Nothing that the human mind can conceive is missing from that goddam road.” Terry only took us there out of friendship. It humiliated him to be bogged to the axles in liquid mud and to see Ernie come jogging to the rescue, standing up in the cart like a charioteer, with a shovel and two six-foot lehgths of board to put under the wheels.

  To save Terry’s taxi from breaking up altogether I bought the fish-truck from Len Shoesmith. It was so high off the ground it could pass right over stumps. The men of the town could not understand why I drove the truck. Roddy never wished to do so. He learnt to drive some years later when our son arrived. It lowered a man’s pride, men who wanted to borrow my truck thought, to have to ask a woman. Whenever their own trucks broke down they came to ask the loan of the Erskine, knowing I wouldn’t refuse a milkman or baker who had to get through flooded roads.

  We would pack the cat, Didger, and the baby and the baby’s gear and the swimming costumes and food, the chessboard and the typewriter, in the truck and if we bogged in sight of Dimandead it was a case of, “Go for Ernie”.

  Ernie always pretended to be exasperated at the stupidity of truck- and car-owners. “I knew how it would be,” he would begin, leaping out of the cart and seizing his shovel. “People enjoy getting bogged just so’s I can dig them out. They make a habit of it. Do it on purpose. The other night I hear a car revving out on the plain and I’m ijjut enough to take a hurricane lamp and go to see what’s up, Two women—“he waved his eyebrows like a distracted moth—”two women in one of these undersized cars like the runt of the litter. Now why would they be wanting to cross the plains in the dark? Took me an hour and a half to dig them out. Next time I hear someone mucking about miles from anywhere I’m going to go to bed in a hurry and put the light out.” But he wouldn’t have.

  Sometimes I tried to be clever and cut a new track avoiding the bogholes of the “beach road”. “I might have known it,” Ernie would lament. “I wouldn’t even take the horse through there.”

  Ernie swore that if there was ever a real “made” road to Dimandead he would buy himself a motor-scooter. He was seventy-five before he bought the motor-scooter and the road was loose gravel and dangerous, but he rode it just the same.

  We loved Ernie and Dimandead equally, but we
knew we rather overflowed his house. Even Didger would stretch out on the hearth among the dogs, monopolizing the fire.

  “I know,” I said, struck by an inspiration when we were all getting in each other’s way in Ernie’s kitchen, “How would it be if Ernie sold us a piece of land he didn’t want and we put up a shack on it? Then when we came out Ernie would still have this place to himself.”

  Roddy looked inquiringly at Ernie, who narrowed his eyes as he did when he was thinking.

  “I know just the place,” he said. “Over by the creek. Remember when you rode through with Len Shoesmith that time, and I showed you the short cut? I’ve always thought I’d like to build a house there. It’s sheltered from the wind and it gets the sun.”

  We all set off across the paddocks to look at it, the baby riding on Ernie’s shoulder and the cat and dogs bounding ahead. The corner paddock sloped down to the stream that ran from what had once been the lake and was now a mere pond. Around it was a growth of huge and beautiful paperbarks and she-oaks. Ernie mentioned later that the first Pullen house had stood here, and we found in the thick scrub higher on the slope four stumps that had once held up the house. But there was no other trace. Dimandead had covered and obliterated them all. The great white paperbarks were in flower, sending down a shower of pale stamens on Ernie’s beard as he looked up to see his bees at work. The heavy honey-scent had attracted flutterings of white butterflies. At least they seemed white but their underwings were gold and scarlet and blue and black. Small yellow beetles tumbled in the flowers, Benison found a low curved bough and adopted it as her “horse tree” for riding.

  “If you don’t let us pay for it the deal’s off,” I told Ernie.

  “Right. It’ll cost you five pounds.”

  I told him he was out of his mind. We would have a surveyor come out and measure the paddock and say what was a fair price. The surveyor had some difficulty getting there in his jeep, but he and his assistant drove in white pegs where they were promptly lost in the undergrowth and said the land was worth sixty-five pounds. So I went to the office of the solicitor who visited Laurieton once a week and instructed him to draw up the necessary documents. When Ernie came into town to change his books he was dumbfounded. “It’s far too much,” he insisted. He walked over to the solicitor and ordered him to make the price five pounds. This went on for some weeks, with me holding out for sixty-five pounds and Ernie insisting on five. “I’m selling the land and I’ve got a right to say what I’m selling it for.”