To the Sea Page 25

  After lunch, Eva went swimming. John knew better than to try and talk her out of it. He watched from the verandah as Eva dived from the jetty and was immediately lost in the spiking swell and blur of rain. He would try not to worry. He lit the fire in the lounge room, put a Nina Simone record on the stereo, prepared a casserole for their dinner and later cleaned up the kitchen while he waited. When he had completed his chores, he sat in his favourite armchair in the lounge room and tried to read. He felt he lived much of his life letting Eva go and waiting for her to return.

  John knew she’d be gone for hours. Sometimes she’d be gone for a whole day, but today she’d promised him that she would return before dark. He didn’t know where she went, for she couldn’t swim or stay in this water for hours, but he was past questioning her or trying to stop her. His questions drove her into her silence and if he made her stay with him as he had in the early days, she became sullen and withdrawn. She would pace along the verandah, looking out at the water or talking to herself in her own language, like a wild animal caged and yearning for its natural habitat. They were both trapped in her misery.

  So he would wait for her and dry her off in front of the fire when she returned and then she would be completely present, alive and charged as if with an electric current. John’s own excitement built through the late afternoon as he anticipated her return and the closeness between them that would follow.

  It was getting dark and Eva hadn’t returned. The rain had eased up but the wind had risen. John walked out onto the verandah. The light was deep grey and the waves on the beach and against the jetty were coming in from all directions. He’d been telling himself all afternoon not to worry, but Eva had been gone for hours. He couldn’t go after her. He had no idea where she might be and his sailing skills were not up to the weather or the water. He put on his parka and walked down to the dunes. There was a fine spray blowing across the jetty. He couldn’t see more than fifty yards out into the water. But he stood and waited.

  As he was buffeted by the wind and the light faded into night, he wondered at the stories he told himself about his wife’s behaviour. He didn’t believe Eva was out swimming. He was certain she went somewhere. Months ago he had come up with the idea that she was around in the next bay in some sort of shelter where she liked to go to get away by herself. He had even checked the boatsheds once, thinking he would find her in one of them enjoying the peace and aloneness of her life before John had filled it. He leaned against a jetty post and emptied his mind. Not thinking about Eva was less painful.

  And then sometime later, in the deeper darkness of evening, Eva climbed up the ladder of the jetty. Her swimsuit was hanging in her hand. She was sparkling white in the dark. She ran to him and threw herself into his arms, covering his face with kisses and grabbing his hair painfully. John thought of taking his parka off and wrapping it around Eva but her skin was not cold.

  Later that night, in front of the fire, as they sipped Benedictine from huge brandy balloons and ate pastel-coloured sugar almonds, Eva told John Ornice’s story. She told it in its entirety, the way her mother and grandmother had told her. She told it in English for John, even though she said Ornice lost her voice in this modern language. For it was her story, Eva told him, and he must know it.

  The following week was a struggle for John. Eva was once again the girl he had known in the early days and months of their marriage. She was talkative and energetic and loving. But her manner disturbed John. He would have felt easier if she’d returned to her more familiar distracted self. John knew that Eva’s new engaging openness with him was a result of the secret she’d shared with him. Now that he knew, Eva could relax. The curtain which so often descended between them had been lifted and thrown away. But now that John knew that the curtain was woven of this strange and horrible secret, he wished it back. He needed something between himself and this new honest relationship Eva thought now existed.

  John couldn’t be honest in return. His wife believed herself to be something outside his understanding. And he had lied to her with his silence and feigned belief. He couldn’t imagine what it would do to Eva if he told her that he didn’t believe her. He had so nearly scoffed at her story before he stopped and considered the precarious position he was now in. Now it was his turn to be distracted. He was unable to look Eva directly in the eye, unable to share the secret of his disbelief with her. Their marriage was upside down and John didn’t know how to right it.

  John was terrified by Ornice’s story. No; not the story itself, but Eva’s belief in it. Now he knew for certain that he had reason to fear for his wife. For her sanity. For their marriage. For everything.

  He thought about every response he could give her. And in the end, unable to decide, he gave nothing.

  Eva’s story was just one step in the changes awaiting John. Just two weeks later, Tom said that he wouldn’t be returning from Ireland. Eva was now a married woman and didn’t need him. He missed his homeland and his sons.

  The house on Sandy Bay Road he would leave to John and Eva. The ownership of Rosetta had been finalised after Branna’s death. It was Eva’s. It would pass from mother to daughter in perpetuity as it had for the past hundred and fifty years. If Eva had more than one daughter, Eva would know which one it should go to. Lawyers had it covered. Tom would take a few pieces of furniture and his books. The rest was to stay.

  He was leaving in nine days and he wanted the three of them to spend his last weekend in Tasmania down at Rosetta. He wanted to talk to John. John didn’t want to listen to what Tom had to say, but it seemed all the plans had been made and John just had to play his part.

  John feared that Tom, too, had a story to tell.

  Tom’s Story

  I CAME TO TASMANIA IN 1916. TO HIDE. WHEN THE EASTER RISING started in Dublin, I ignored my father’s instruction to stay at my school and away from the city centre. I tucked my Mauser into my belt and ran to the fight.

  The British would later say 240 of their men were killed or wounded at the Mount Street Bridge on the Grand Canal. I was one of the rebels there doing the killing and wounding and it felt like more to me. But when we knew we could not win, I ran through the acrid smoke, thick with the stink of cordite and failure, back towards my father’s townhouse. On the way, I ran into two British soldiers in a laneway. They tried to arrest me but, while one was distracted by a nearby explosion, I shot them both. I kept running. One of them lived.

  I could not stay in Dublin. My father smuggled me home to Mayo before the British had time to find me and hang me. And one week after I’d arrived home, I was sailing first class on a boat to Australia. Wealth was my best hiding place. The British couldn’t see past it or through it. My father had a cousin in Tasmania and I was to go there until it was safe for me to return.

  My father’s cousin was a farmer. He had two hundred acres in the Coal Valley not far from Richmond. He met me at the docks and took me back to his farm, Mayo. The land was so strange to me. Already I missed the softness of the Irish countryside and the wide flat boglands of home. Here the seasons were out of kilter, the stars were scattered in unfamiliar formations across the night sky and the silver trees and yellow hills on either side of the Derwent River left me homesick and confused. And I was still under the shadow of the Union Jack. I began to grasp the power of the Empire and the magnitude of our struggle. The Irish fight for independence from such might suddenly seemed reckless and doomed.

  I was enrolled in the new St Virgil’s College as a boarder, but it was hard to go back to being a schoolboy. I’d killed men and watched good men die. I couldn’t rouse genuine concern for the stiffness of my shirt collar or the neatness of my written script. The Brothers tried to knock the rebel Irish out of me while leaving my Catholic faith intact. They could never have done either but we battled on in our respective roles as we all knew we must.

  I made one close friend at St Virgil’s and he’s my friend still. Gerard O’Meara was a Tasmanian boy and he took me to him as soon as I
arrived. Gerard’s father worked with the O’Day family who owned a fleet of boats and ferries that operated out of the Hobart port. He got us both weekend jobs working on the ferries and I earned a small income, pocket money really, and got to see more of the town from the banks of its busy river. Gerard and I both worked the cross-river ferries, shovelling coal and loading and unloading, during the busy school holidays. During the long summer holidays of 1916–17, I was working mostly on the Kangaroo. She was a 110-foot steam ferry. Everyone called her Old Double Guts because she was a double-hulled catamaran. I’ve never seen an uglier boat in my life but she was reliable and hard-working. I came to love her over the three years I worked on her. We sailed between the Number Two wharf in Hobart across to Bellerive Quay. Before the floating bridge was built thirty years later, ferries were the only way across the river. We were busy all day right up until our last sailing just before sunset.

  On a bright December morning, a girl who looked about my age was getting ready to board. She had a horse with her and four tea chests. She was a vision to me. Her white hair was tied back loosely in a single plait down her back but there were long wisps flying all around her enchanting face. I’d never seen anyone like her. Her wide blue eyes were slanted like a Chinaman’s and she had pale freckles scattered across her nose. She was struggling with the big grey mare in her charge. The girl was wearing a stylish lilac dress and matching pale lilac lace-up ankle boots. Her broad-brimmed lilac hat had come off in the struggle with the horse and was hanging loosely down her back on a long ribbon.

  That horse didn’t want to get on a boat. The girl was trying to lead it across the short gangplank but it wouldn’t budge. But the girl was as stubborn as the beast and more than one passer-by was watching the struggle between the two. I had my money on the girl.

  It was my job to load the ferry but I found myself just standing on the deck looking at her. She looked down and saw me.

  ‘Good view?’

  ‘Grand.’

  ‘Are you not employed to assist paying passengers?’ she called to me as she continued to wrestle with the fidgety mare.

  ‘You look like you’ve got it all in hand,’ says I, full a clever. ‘But don’t worry about those chests. I’ll get those.’

  I jumped up and walked across the gangplank and went to clamp the tea chests and drag them on board.

  ‘What I really need is a man to assist with this horse,’ she says. ‘Perhaps you could go and find one for me.’

  ‘I reckon I’m man enough for you and your horse.’

  I was standing so close to her as I took the reins from her hands that I could smell her sweet girl smell. She was even more beautiful up close. Her cheeks were flushed pink from her struggle with the mare. Her lips were full and a dark bruised pink. She tilted her head on the side to regard me.

  ‘We’ll know the truth of that claim when my horse is safely unloaded in Bellerive,’ she said. And with that she walked into the central cabin area.

  That horse took me fifteen minutes to load. She kicked and reared and roared her fury all the way across the river. She was just as hard to get off as she’d been to get on board. But eventually, I had her standing calmly on the Bellerive Quay. The girl took the reins from me.

  She started to walk away from me towards an older man who was waiting for her.

  ‘It seems I’m man enough,’ I called out to her, way too loud. The man looked over at me and started heading my way. She held up her hand to him and he stopped his advance. She walked back to me.

  ‘You’re some kind of man, that’s certain,’ she said. ‘Do you have a name?’

  ‘Tom Maguire from County Mayo,’ I said, smiling and looking straight at her. There was no other way to take her in.

  ‘Getha Sharpe.’

  ‘Getha? You’re Irish?’

  ‘No, I’m Australian, you silly boy,’ she laughed. ‘Do I sound Irish?’

  ‘No, but Getha is an Irish name. And a strange name for you, I’d say.’

  ‘Well, it’s my name and you’re welcome to use it. I like the way you say it. It’s meant to be said by an Irishman.’

  My heart leapt in my chest.

  ‘Are you coming back?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course I’m coming back. I live in Hobart and I’m sailing back on the turnaround. I just have to hand over the horse and the chests to our man.’

  She walked over to the man and they talked for a few minutes. He began loading the chests into the back of a wagon and he tied the reins of the now placid horse to the wagon. Getha hugged him and returned to catch the ferry back across the river.

  She put her hand, in its small cream glove, out for me to hold as she walked across the gangplank. She didn’t need my hand but she took it. I thought I would burst with happiness. I was busy all the way back on that crossing and didn’t see her again until she was disembarking in Hobart.

  ‘So Getha Sharpe, can I call on you?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m not sure how I feel about a ferry boy calling on me.’ She wasn’t smiling but I could hear the laugh in her voice.

  ‘I’m much more than a ferry boy,’ says I. ‘There’s a whole other side to me you haven’t yet seen.’

  ‘I’m counting on that, Tom Maguire,’ she said. ‘My family will be down at Nutgrove beach next Sunday for a picnic lunch and swimming. Why don’t you join us? One o’clock?’

  ‘I’ll be there.’

  She walked off along the quay and, as I watched her disappear into the bustling crowd, I thought, so this is what it feels like to fall in love. So much lighter than loving a country.

  I took the day off work that next Sunday and spent the afternoon with Getha and her family at Nutgrove beach. And I spent as much time as I could with her, and her family as that was the way of those times, over the next two years. Getha was a student at St Mary’s Convent school which was just around the corner from St Virgil’s. Our sister school. I took every chance I could to spend time with her after school as she walked into town to catch the tram home or sitting with her deep in the overgrown gardens of St David’s park, holding hands and kissing those perfect lips whenever I could.

  Getha was nothing like the well-mannered convent girls I’d known in Dublin or Mayo. She was quick to laugh and she was never still. Even in a crowded street, she couldn’t amble along. She would skip and dart and drive her mother mad with her unladylike antics. When we were on the beach or the sandy roads in Garnet Point, she would lift her skirts and run like a colt. From our first meeting, it was all I could do to keep up with Getha Sharpe.

  There were not enough hours in the day for me to enjoy her. If I wasn’t with her, I was thinking about her during dull school lessons and while shovelling coal on the Kangaroo or dreaming of her in my dormitory bed.

  Her parents were pleased to find out I was from a good Catholic family. They kept a close eye on their wild, spirited daughter, and a closer one on me I suspect, but they encouraged our friendship and then our courtship. Getha had two elder brothers who were off fighting for the Empire. Frank had been at Gallipoli and then in Palestine and Edward was fighting in France. Her elder sister, Marguerite, was on a troop ship as a nurse bringing home wounded soldiers.

  When I graduated from St Virgil’s, I commenced taking Law at the University of Tasmania; another grand sandstone building straight from London up on the Queen’s Domain. My father wanted me to stay in Tasmania until the war ended, away from the impending conscription and a vengeful British government. I feared I would have to stay here forever.

  After two years of courting Getha, and certain that I’d found the only love I would ever know, I asked her father for her hand in marriage. She and I were both nineteen and her father worried we were too young. He was reluctant to lose his daughter at such a young age. Getha’s mother Meara was upset too. She said many times that Getha could not return to Ireland with me. She insisted that if marriage was to be contemplated, we must make our married life in Tasmania.

  But I was marrying G
etha, not her mother. I intended to return to Ireland with Getha but I promised Mrs Sharpe the opposite.

  She had pain enough to bear. That year, 1918, was hard for Getha’s family and I wouldn’t add to their hardships. Edward had been killed in France and Frank was in a military hospital in Egypt. My dishonesty, I told myself, was a kindness to a grieving mother. Getha’s father agreed to our marrying at the end of the war. I was easy about waiting what could only be a few more months at most. My father had communicated with Mr Sharpe and both families were looking forward to a wedding as soon as the guns stopped. My father wanted me to stay in Tasmania and Mrs Sharpe took comfort from his words.

  Getha and I were married in December 1918.

  I was desperate to return to Ireland. Getha knew my role in the Easter Rising and my need to get back and fight for my country’s freedom. I had no secrets from her but she wasn’t keen to sail to another war. Her beloved brother, Edward, was dead and her eldest brother Frank had sustained serious head injuries and the rest of his life was to be a battle with dark moods and the drink. Marguerite had stayed in Belgium nursing. War had been cruel to Getha’s family.

  Getha was reluctant to leave her mother, but she was my wife and she said that she would return to Ireland with me for a time. She was excited by what she felt sure would be an adventure and it would not be for long. Like her mother, she was adamant she could not live there forever, and that she must live close to Rosetta and raise our children there. On this she made me promise. It was a promise made in the heat of love and youth, a promise I never intended to keep. Getha would love Ireland, my brothers and sisters and our property, Kindea. My parents would embrace her into our family as a daughter. She would forget about Tasmania.