The Unforgiving Shore Read online

“I did, yes,” he said in a choked voice.

  “Self-sacrificing…” She shook her head negatively, emphatically, but with sadness.

  It obviously hurt that Sophie, the only person now who knew the secret definitively, was able to identify instantly what she regarded as his fault. “My mother was, as she saw it, rejected,” he said in a low voice.

  “You know, Paul, John’s belief that a pregnant Ellen would have unhesitatingly claimed that John was your father if that was so, wasn’t an unreasonable view for a man to have.”

  He began some sort of a defence of himself: “We’re not talking about the generality of ‘a man’ here, with macho male attitudes. Marchmont completely misread Ellen. He just didn’t understand. She believed she had been rejected. The pregnancy was something that came along afterwards. She simply wasn’t the kind of woman to cry and say, ‘Never mind if you don’t love me. I’m having your baby so you better marry me or give me a decent allowance’. Marchmont ought to have understood what she was like. Actually, she believed that he wouldn’t have married her anyway whether there was a child or not. All that would have happened, Ellen thought, was he would take the child away from her, by sending it away to expensive schools in Sydney or more likely England. Getting money for herself never came into it.”

  “Well, wasn’t that selfish on her part? What a different life you’d have had.”

  “How would you feel about losing your son? And it would be loss. I’d be thousands of miles away from her in Australia or abroad. Yes, it was a selfish position but as a woman, can’t you see how much against the grain it would be?”

  “I can see that, Paul, but mothers make sacrifices for their children.”

  Sophie thought that they would probably always see this from different points of view.

  *

  A group of about thirty mourners, Mirabilly hands, Paul Travis and Sophie Ryland, were gathered in the shade of the gum trees beside the old cemetery on the Hill. It was fiercely hot and still and the air seemed to quiver. Beyond them were the worn and slumping gravestones and one new empty burial plot, strewn around with flowers; beside it, a polished coffin.

  An Anglican minister from Darwin, bare-headed, swayed in the full glare facing them. He spoke of John Marchmont, whom he had never met, with distant awe.

  It was a surprise to Paul and the Marchmont family that John had expressed a wish in his will to be buried at Mirabilly, alongside Ellen Colbert. No, it was more than a surprise to Paul; it was a shock. He told Sophie it made him think again about what he knew of his mother’s story. Perhaps her feelings of inferiority were too hasty. Was it all a misunderstanding? This was a conundrum of human behaviour which he supposed he would turn over in his mind all his life at times when he thought of his mother.

  As they stood near the grave, with ripples of heat rising off the parched grass, he remembered Ted Travis’s funeral and how shocked and angry he had been with Ted at the graveside, a man whom he had since remembered with forgiving love. Perhaps his present negative feelings for John Marchmont would change.

  Paul had been more open with Sophie after Marchmont’s death. He admitted that he had foreseen the conflict over the Gudijingi mine, an investment he would probably never have made otherwise. He had even invited the conflict, knowing that if he had not been behind it, Marchmont might well have reached a cool and sensible compromise with the Aborigine Trustees. He could never have foreseen that the conflict would bring about Marchmont’s death, but that fact cast a deep shadow.

  Now, he had told Sophie, he had at least a sense of closure, shadowed as it was.

  The headstones were similar plain white marble, Ellen’s now graying with the years, engraved only with names and dates, but Paul said to Sophie that he thought he could see the words ‘King of Mirabilly’ on one, and ‘Queen of Mirabilly’ on the other.

  *

  A year later, Sophie and Paul Travis were married in Townsville. It was a quiet wedding on a sunny day at the registry office, a fitting conclusion to what they could both look back on as a long and fraught courtship. Paul wondered whether he could ever have concluded the courtship with marriage if Marchmont had lived.

  At the ceremony there were just five young friends of Paul’s, two girlfriends of Sophie’s from New York and Emma Rainham. Afterwards, they sailed on Paul’s yacht for about an hour and came back to dinner at the Yacht Club.

  Marchmont’s company settled the lawsuit, as they agreed. The stone at the Big House was returned to its place in the cave and Sophie saw its disturbing beauty, in its natural place, for the first time.

  It was an irony that Marchmont left a large part of his estate to Sophie, whom he seemed to treat as the son he never had. In this oblique way, Paul became close to the inheritance he never had. But it was the missing middle of a life, which Marchmont could have given him, that he often pondered about; experiences that would have made him a different man. What might have been had to be dismissed as fantasy, but he fantasized: a degree from a British university, perhaps even Oxbridge, or one of the Ivy League colleges in the USA in law or history, a career as a civil servant or a politician or an academic…

  Sophie and Paul decided to live in Sydney and visit Mirabilly when they could. Paul said he felt a sense of being home when he was there, sleeping in the same bedroom as his mother, the room where in all probability he had been conceived, but he never visited that place near the company store where the Juduba flows.