To the Sea Page 23

  And Dorcha knew that, if this was the land she and her descendants could settle in peace, their new home needed to be far from other settlements and the curious eyes of strangers. On a cold winter’s morning, through a white mist which clung to their skin and the bow of their boat, they saw the tiny cove that we now call Driving Sound. They had found their home. Not on the shore of the open ocean where currents and drifts from the north might wander, seeking out their prey, but tucked away in a wide bay with the wild waters of what would later be named the Southern Ocean at its neck. Dorcha and Douglas were free settlers and so claimed a large tract of empty land from Governor Sorell. There was so much empty land, the governor was giving it away.

  They were the first white settlers in this part of Van Diemen’s Land. Their survival relied on them living peaceably with the local natives and being almost entirely self-sufficient. They lived on what the sea and the land could provide. It was Dorcha and Douglas who began the construction of Rosetta, named after Dorcha’s beloved sister in Rome. It became a prosperous farm for many generations and has been our home since that time.

  It was as Dorcha had hoped and prayed. Connery and his people were silent in this unknown land. And, until my grandmother Getha returned to Ireland with her Irish husband, my family had lived six generations of health and happinesses here at Rosetta after so many lifetimes of hardship and endless wandering. Rosetta has been our refuge.

  I don’t know who Connery was but his blood runs through my veins. I am at home in the sea in a way other people cannot understand. I can swim distances others say are impossible. I do not feel the iciness of the water. I can dive to depths that others cannot. I fade when I am too long on land. I am at peace out in the deep water far from land. Zoe is my daughter and she, too, unlike my other children, has Connery’s blood.

  My life has been a strange mixture of the old and the new worlds. I have never heard the calling such as Ornice described, but I feel a gentle but persistent pull to the sea. It tugs at my being, and I want to obey. It is more pleasurable than not and I would not give it up even if I could. It has been a familiar, sometimes disruptive, ripple running through me my whole life, but it is a part of me I cherish. It is a voice I can almost hear, but when I try and focus on its words, it eludes me. Always just out of reach.

  I have never clearly heard Connery or his people but I feel his presence. It is all around me and inside me. It is me. As a young woman, I would often sit out on Table Rock and strain to hear the voice more clearly. On one occasion as a young girl, I followed it far from land and almost lost myself entirely. I knew then that I had to discipline myself. My grandmother and mother both died while I was trying to master this part of my life. I was left to fend for myself and I fear I have made mistakes. Mistakes I have passed on to Zoe. I hope what Zoe feels is not destructive, not the strong pull away from this world which tore my mother’s life from her slowly over the years, but rather the seductive voice of the lover and teacher that Ornice knew. I am closest to that voice when I am alone in the sea far from land. I know what Zoe is looking for and what a joy that search is. It calls to her more persistently as she becomes a woman. I know she has followed it on occasion and it has made her restless this past year. I thought I had taught her how to hear the call, even be aroused by the thrill of it, but not to go to it.

  This far south, so far from Mayo, the call is never more than an enticing lure. Beckoning but not demanding. It can be ignored. Or it can be heard and tucked away in a quiet warm place in one’s life. John and the children have kept my feet safely on land. I have often thought that if my father had lived, my mother would have been protected by his love as I have been by John’s, and as Getha was by Tom’s. Zoe has no one to dim the strength of the call.

  I want my daughter to come back to me, but I do not know how to call her.

  Maybe Zoe is the one who has finally returned to the sea.

  Tony

  TONY STOPPED ON THE LANDING WHERE THE STAIRCASE SPLIT INTO TWO directions. He was headed to John Kennett’s studio at the back of the sprawling house. But he stopped and looked out across the expanse of Norfolk Bay. Eva’s story flowed beneath the bay’s shimmering surface. He was glad that Narelle hadn’t been with him to hear the story. He leaned his forehead against the warm glass of the landing window and closed his eyes. His head was aching again. He rarely got headaches but he had had one off and on for the past couple of days. It was unlike him not to just sleep even the most persistent headache off but he hadn’t been sleeping enough lately to heal himself. He was tired. He felt an empty nausea rising inside him. A blue darkness descended behind his eyelids. The sound of the house shifted around him as his ears filled with a thick underwater silence. He didn’t know how long he stood leaning against the window but the sun had moved lower in the sky when he eventually opened his eyes into the dim afternoon light. He had calmed and his headache had eased. His limbs were relaxed and his tiredness had backed away. He felt altered but nothing had changed. Zoe was still gone.

  ‘Mr Kennett.’

  John Kennett was standing at an easel in his studio. He was deep in concentration as he jabbed at the canvas with a brush.

  Like all the rooms in this house, the studio was large and bright. John Kennett was not just a painter. There was a thick twisted log on a plinth just inside the doorway next to Tony. The base of the plinth was inches deep in wood shavings and a selection of fine woodworking chisels and other tools lay carelessly on the floor next to the shavings.

  There were also three incomplete stone sculptures sitting on a high wooden bench along the back wall of the studio. Two of them appeared to be trees of some fantastical design and the third was either an abstract piece or in the very early stages of its metamorphosis.

  But today, John Kennett was painting. Tony couldn’t see the small canvas he was working on from the doorway. If the other paintings hanging and leaning on the walls were any indication, it would be a landscape or a seascape. Tony didn’t know if they were any good but if art was supposed to move you or touch your soul in some way, John Kennett’s paintings were not art. They were well executed in that Tony recognised the wooden bridge across the Carlton River on the Connelly’s Marsh Road, Mount Wellington looming out of a pre-dawn purple darkness and the boatsheds at Rosetta. But there was no movement. Not on the canvases or in his soul.

  ‘Please don’t feel you have to say anything, Detective,’ said John, putting down his brush and wiping his hands on a cloth. ‘I know they’re not very good, but that’s not why I paint. I enjoy it even if the end product is a long way short of what I wish I could execute.’

  Hanging on the wall opposite the window was a large canvas unlike the others. It was a blurry landscape in greys and greens. The little white houses in the dark valleys suggested somewhere wet and cold and dark. Tony realised that this painting was not a landscape; it was a skyscape. The land was incidental. Three-quarters of the canvas was a grey turbulent sky. A sky to shelter from. It was not one of John Kennett’s works. This was art. Tony could not look away from it.

  ‘That is a very fine work by a young man no longer with us,’ said John. ‘I aspire to capture something of Tim’s genius in my own work but I am realistic. Even so, I keep it here as a reminder both of the man and of what can be done with paint and canvas. I know my paintings are parodies of the real thing but we all have to have something just for ourselves, don’t we, Detective?’

  Tony was instantly aware that he had nothing. He played the guitar but not well and not all that often. He didn’t surf like some of his mates. He ran most days but not because he especially enjoyed it. He liked being fit and his work hours were too erratic to rely on getting to a gym or playing in a team. He didn’t create anything. He had nothing that he did just for himself, just for the pure joy of doing. John Kennett’s paintings and sculptures might not be great art but Tony envied him the experience of creating them from himself.

  ‘Mr Kennett,’ he said, ‘I wonder if I might have
just a few minutes of your time.’

  ‘Certainly,’ replied John. He led Tony over to an old leather couch in front of the huge windows. Both men sat down and were momentarily absorbed by the impeccable view in front of them.

  ‘I’ve spent some time with your wife today and I want to clarify some of the information she has given me.’

  ‘Information?’

  ‘Mrs Kennett has told me a story. A story which she believes explains Zoe’s disappearance,’ said Tony, watching John’s face closely. It remained impassive.

  ‘I see.’

  ‘And I would like to know whether you share your wife’s beliefs.’

  ‘Does it matter?’ John sat further back against the high back of the couch and looked at the blue green day deepening into afternoon outside the window.

  Tony assumed this was a rhetorical question and did not respond.

  ‘If I said that I did, would it change your investigation?’

  ‘No, it wouldn’t, but I’m keen to know who in this family, and potentially anybody outside it, believes that Zoe has not drowned but is safe in the ocean after four days.’

  John sighed. He was reluctant to talk. Tony was used to that.

  ‘Do you understand what I’m asking you, Mr Kennett?’

  ‘Yes, I understand. But it’s a difficult question to answer.’

  Tony waited.

  ‘I can’t tell you what my other children know or believe,’ said John. ‘Sadie must have some garbled version of bits of the story in her head but what she makes of it, I really couldn’t say. The other children have been told nothing. As to what I believe, that is the hardest question of all. I accept that my wife and Zoe are different from any other people I’ve ever known.’

  He paused for long minutes. It was an easy silence and Tony let it stand.

  ‘But I’m afraid for Zoe and I fear she’s gone. I’ll say the word. I fear she is dead. She has never gone away like this before and, while this has been a difficult year for her, I don’t believe she would leave us willingly. I want her found and I want to know what has happened.’

  ‘Difficult?’

  ‘Zoe went to Ireland earlier this year with Eva for a holiday and she came back changed. My wife did not tell me much but Mayo and the Atlantic affected Zoe strongly. She returned restless. She spent a lot more time by herself. Eva told me not to worry and I accepted her counsel. Perhaps I should have been more alert to what was going on.’

  ‘Have you ever seen Zoe do any of the things suggested in the story?’ asked Tony into the dimming room.

  ‘No,’ said John.

  ‘Do you believe your wife’s story?’

  As long minutes ticked by, Tony knew that John had finished. But he could also tell there was a lot more John wanted to say. And one day maybe he would. Maybe he had to know for certain that Zoe was dead before he could speak of her life.

  ‘Do you believe my wife’s story, Detective?’

  Tony couldn’t answer that question.

  John reached out and placed his hand on Tony’s arm. Neither man spoke. Tony didn’t know how much time passed before he eventually stood up and left the studio.

  John

  NOT LONG AFTER JOHN AND EVA’S ENGAGEMENT WAS ANNOUNCED, Branna became ill again. Now that she was part of his family and not a patient, John realised the terrible impact her illness had on them all, especially Eva. As Branna slipped deeper into the blackness of her mania, Eva tried to follow her to provide comfort and a lifeline back to the real world. She spent most of her time with her mother, even sleeping next to Branna on a fold-up bed.

  In May, after Branna had attempted an overdose while Eva was sleeping, Tom bit the bullet he had been avoiding for weeks and accompanied his comatose daughter to the hospital. Peter was her treating psychiatrist and he was blunt in his prognosis to John. Branna was severely depressed and had responded only minimally to a huge number of electroshock treatments. She was suicidal and delusional and Peter was unsure whether she could ever expect to return to her family home and the care of her father.

  ‘She wants to be dead, John,’ said Peter one day when Eva was with Branna and John and Peter were sitting in the nurses’ station.

  ‘We’ve done everything we can and a lot of it. I’m worried about giving her any more ECT. She soars between hysteria and catatonia even when she’s heavily medicated. It’s such a struggle for her just to stay alive.’

  ‘So she’s still suicidal?’ asked John.

  ‘Between us, John,’ said Peter, looking at his friend sadly, ‘I think she’s always suicidal, but sometimes she can fake a belief in living enough to satisfy her father and keep us psychs at bay. I think it’s only a matter of time before she’s successful with one of her attempts. Tom and Eva cannot watch her twenty-four hours a day and when Eva gets married and leaves, Tom is going to be way out of his depth. It’s time to put her in an institution.’

  He looked at the floor as he said these last words. ‘She’s never going to get better. She is broken in ways none of us understand.’ There was a long silence and then Peter said almost in a whisper, ‘Maybe it’s time to stop saving her.’

  John relayed the gist of the first part of this conversation to Eva but she was too devoted to her mother to hear or understand. Tom was the same. No institution. Ever. Branna would come home to her father and her daughter when she was no longer critically ill and they would care for her. After Eva got married, Tom would care for her. He was her father. He would not abandon her. John did not repeat Peter’s last words to Tom. While John understood the compassion of his friend’s words, he knew that Tom would not.

  It was in this environment that Tom became hard-line about the wedding and the church. The discussions about where to marry went on for months and John and Eva twice had to push out the proposed date of their wedding as a compromise could not be reached. John could not become a Catholic quickly and Tom would never consent to Eva converting to what he called ‘the oppressor’s faith’. In the end, getting married in the garden of the Sandy Bay Road house became the obvious solution. By the time both families had accepted the inevitability of the arrangements, John and Eva were past caring.

  Eventually, on a cold evening in August, Eva and John were married. They married at high tide, a particular requirement of Branna’s which John chose not to question, in the ornate summer house in the garden of the Sandy Bay Road house. It was a freezing cold night. The lawn was covered in a white frost and a fine mist hung low over the Derwent, blocking out the lights of the eastern shore. A full moon shimmered in the black starry sky. The river made no sound in the stillness. Eva wore a white cloak trimmed with white fur over her elegant beaded dress. Her blonde hair was braided loosely and woven with pearls with her preternaturally beautiful face framed in white fur. The three bridesmaids, old friends of Eva’s from school who John had never met, wore similar cloaks and John’s groomsmen had thick black fur collars and lapels on their old-fashioned morning suit jackets. They also wore top hats which John found a little amusing but also touching as apparently all the men in Tom’s family wore top hats at their weddings and it was another part of Eva’s life that John could embrace.

  Eva and her bridesmaids carried small bouquets of winter berries and deep green conifer sprays, and the groomsmen’s drab suits were brightened by red and orange berries and green in their buttonholes. Peter had laughed as he was getting dressed that he felt like a character from an Evelyn Waugh novel but John’s brother Andy said he felt more like one of Robin Hood’s merry men in his forest foliage and an outdoor ceremony under the bare winter trees.

  Each of the eighty guests held a candle during the ceremony and throughout the garden there were tall flaming torches which provided some warmth as well as a flickering light in the cold still darkness. The service was brief and to the point. No hymns, no prayers, no reference to any gods; nothing to complicate the simplicity of John and Eva marrying each other at last.

  After the ceremony, the new Mr and Mrs K
ennett led the guests, still carrying their candles, through the long garden in a straggly chattering line, around the front of the house to the huge ballroom which took up one side of the grand old house. They entered the ballroom through the wide French doors off the sandstone verandah and, inside, the warm room was decorated with bare tree branches, branches of red holly berries and deep orange rowan berries and arbores of conifers hanging with pine cones. The room was lit by candles and original candelabras overhead and there was a roaring fire in the huge marble fireplace. The room was filled with the pine and berry fragrances of a snowy forest from the other side of the world. Tom and Branna stood under a pine arbour at the doorway into the ballroom welcoming everyone and John felt he was stepping into another world and another time as he crossed the threshold of his new life.

  It was a wedding completely unlike anything John had ever experienced. As they walked into the ballroom, Andy leaned into John and said, ‘Out of the forest and into fairyland, Theseus.’ If Oberon and Titania had walked towards him through the arbour, John wouldn’t have been surprised.

  The reception was a bit of a blur to John but he remembered good food, warm spicy wine, a touching speech from Tom, Andy making everyone laugh and cheer with his baby brother speech, loving telegrams from Ireland and people dancing to wild jigs and slow mournful ballads played by the Irish musicians. Branna was there in body if not in mind and Eva was dazzling. His own parents were dancing and laughing with other guests.

  As he danced to the plaintive music with Eva, all John could think about was that at last he would get to be with her. He had honoured his promise to Tom and done nothing more than kiss Eva. He had restrained his hands from going anywhere other than around her waist or shoulders, and his kisses, while not entirely chaste, had always been under control. His hands and mouth had never felt the softness of her flesh but now that he was her husband, he could at last give his body and his heart the freedom they craved.