Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living (Picador 40th) Read online

I hold Mary tight. The ramp is pulled up and the train sounds a deep chuff – it is about to leave. Folly’s halter is stiff in my hand. It is new; Mary has plaited it from baling twine. She pulls away from me and runs back to our compartment, blowing me kisses over her shoulder.

  ‘Write,’ she calls out. ‘Write to me with all of your results!’

  The door slams. I step back and look up into the windows of the train. The men wave at me from the windows of the dairy car. Mr Baker whistles through his orange whiskers. Mr Plattfuss wags a mocking finger at Folly, the startling silk of Mr Ohno’s tie concertinas as he bows. Then a jolt and they all tumble sideways into each other as the train lurches off.

  A rumble of steam, and the final carriage glides past. It slips away like a curtain and reveals the other side of the street where Robert is standing with his bags and cases. He is wearing a blue suit I have never seen before and squinting into the sun.

  The folly cow won’t budge. She watches the rear of the train snaking off up the street and lets out a long wet moo. Robert strides across the tracks. There is the sound of flyscreen doors banging shut as people go back about their business.

  ‘You got out of the other side.’

  ‘Yes. I got out of the other side.’ He reaches for Folly’s halter.

  ‘You should have told me about the cow, Jean. What am I going to do with an old scrub cow?’

  ‘She’s not for you. She’s for me – from Mary.’

  Robert’s face is red. Droplets of sweat glisten in his eyebrows. The suit must be hot.

  Robert ties Folly to a fence behind the hardware store and carries our bags inside. I wait for him on the verandah – trying to breathe slowly and drain the heat that has risen to my face. My grey suit feels too tight and too showy. Women come and go from shop to shop, many tailed by little children. A group has gathered in front of the pharmacy several doors down. The women make a loose circle of nodding heads. They laugh loudly. I look away. A small child tumbles from the footpath onto the street. The women gather around him cooing and scolding.

  The church is on a side street and the ceremony is quick. The priest’s collar is too tight and he switches the Bible from hand to hand as he tugs at it. He aims his words into the hot air above our heads; I feel almost as if I can see them, coasting over the empty pews and floating down to the floor. Robert takes my hand – for the ring – but the priest pulls him up.

  ‘Don’t bother, Mr Pettergree, on a day like today she’ll have fingers like sausages. Do it later, when it cools down.’

  Stan Hercules is waiting outside to take our photograph for the Wycheproof Ensign. And then Muriel, the priest’s sister, is saying welcome to Wycheproof, Mrs Pettergree, and telling me about the dramatic society and the CWA and the Younger Set and tennis and how she won the Ladies’ Nail Driving Competition at the Berriwillock Floral Ball until, finally, I am sitting in the back seat of Mr Ivers’ car looking at my husband’s neck, so red, in front of me.

  ‘I expect we’ll see you in town soon, Mrs Pettergree,’ Muriel shouts through the window, but she has to jump back quickly as we are off; Mr Ivers is keen to get away.

  Our farm is on the Avoca River and Mr Ivers is our closest neighbour. He has maintained the land since the last farmer and his family walked off with only their suitcases and tickets on a ship to New Zealand – ‘regular rain, proper English soils’. I wonder what Mr Ivers thinks about the farm being taken up by a scientist and agricultural expert rather than an ordinary farmer.

  The car has been sitting in the sun and I feel like I am being baked alive but the men don’t remove their coats. Robert quizzes Ivers about local yields. We skirt around the tiny mountain and take the Boort Road out through the paddocks. A few miles on we branch off down a narrower track and Ivers turns and smiles at me shyly.

  ‘This is it then,’ he says.

  I smile back, dabbing at the sweat on my cheeks. At the start of a long driveway gum trees stand in a clump like monuments. Robert gets out to open the gate. The trunk of the nearest tree is as thick as the bodies of several men. At head height it splits into three separate prongs. Its delicate purple bark hangs in strips, a golden flesh shining underneath.

  ‘How old are these trees?’ I ask Mr Ivers.

  ‘Not sure, missus. A hundred maybe, two hundred.’

  As the car pulls away I imagine us inching up the paper on Robert’s hand-drawn map. Inching towards the ‘J’ for Jean. Robert reaches back and touches my arm when we pull up in front of the house as if to counteract any disappointment I might be feeling. But I like the plainness of the house. It is not unlike the cottage in the orchard – solidly square with two small windows each side of the door. The paint has faded from white to oily grey.

  Ivers says that his wife Elsie has cleaned and aired for us and that he has moved most of the furniture back from where it was stored in the shed. He says there is even an old piano.

  I imagine myself describing the house in a letter to my aunt – although we no longer write. ‘I have left my position on the Better Farming Train to marry an English Scientist. We have a farm in the Mallee with a small cottage.’ I would need to say something about a cat. In letters to my aunt I always included a reference to cats. ‘I have recently rescued a stray cat, been feeding a cat for a friend, had to borrow a cat for mousing, was kept awake by a cat, or saw an especially large or beautifully patterned cat in my travels.’

  Robert steps up onto the verandah, opens the front door and disappears inside. His boots reverberate on the floorboards. Ivers is leaning against the car, half looking at me. He has taken off his coat and I can see he is a careful man – belt and braces. I’m not ready to go into the house, although I know this is what I’m expected to do – to follow Robert. Instead I walk under an old peppercorn and along the side path to the backyard – bare dirt with a few mulgas. The house has a sloping broom brush verandah that dips low over the back door like a messy fringe. A slack wire fence holds in the wheat.

  I am struck by the quietness. For the past year I have been surrounded by the noises of the train: birds, animals, men, machines. Now there is just the company of plants. I understand a little why the wheat men who visited the train were so stunned by the colourful cacophony of it.

  I walk over to the fence that holds the wheat in. I look back at the house and then at the wheat again. The wheat looks smooth, almost like water. It is ‘in boot’ – just up to my thighs. I am unbearably hot and I feel like it might be cooler amongst the wheat. I part the wires and step through the fence. The first few steps are satisfying. I feel like I’m getting somewhere and there is the sound of the wheat snapping and the warm mealy smell of it. But I haven’t gone far when the stems start to bunch around my legs. Shards pierce my stockings. My suit is oddly twisted around me. The horizon seesaws sharply in the distance. I am stumbling. The wheat crackles around me. I call out weakly in the direction of the house. A flash of check shirt hurries along the side path. Then Mr Ivers ducks between the wires. He lifts me easily and carries me back to the house, curling his boot around the front door to open it. Robert is in the hallway, carrying a box of pots and pans.

  Ivers laughs good-naturedly. ‘Heatstroke. Your missus was in a spot of bother, Pettergree. Oh, and I’m afraid I’ve just carried her over the threshold.’

  Robert smiles weakly and nods towards the bedroom where I am put to rest on the dusty mattress.

  I sleep a little while Robert unpacks and sees to the delivery of Folly. Later, over a cold supper, he says there are no suitable paddocks for her and he expects she will be stupid enough to trample the crops. Stupid enough is plainly meant for me.

  ‘I was just going for a walk. I thought I’d walk along the creek, only I couldn’t find it for the wheat.’

  Robert opens his notebook. His hands shake slightly as he jots down some figures. ‘This isn’t a demonstration plot or a wagonload, Jean – this is the real thing.’

  I find my walk. I find the narrow river. It is little more than
a creek. I lead Folly there each day after Robert leaves the house and sit and sew on the steep banks. Folly is restless. She likes my sewing basket and clumps down to push it about with her big flat face. I am embroidering a handkerchief for Mary – Folly in the wheat. I only have an egg-yolk yellow so the wheat looks wrong, but it would be impossible to capture the true russety hue of it in thread.

  Sometimes I walk down the driveway back to the thick sugar gum at the gate. The ledge in between the three prongs holds me snugly. Ant trails curve around the trunks. If I look up for long enough I can see where the ends of the very furthest branches spike the sky.

  Bill Ivers’ wife, Elsie, is a broad-shouldered woman with a large face in two parts. The under hat area of her forehead is very white and smooth, while the skin below it is red and boiled-looking from the sun. Elsie has made several visits bringing cakes and eggs. She leads the children over on an old Clydesdale. All boys, they increase evenly in size and age between withers and rump. Off the horse they are attracted to one another like magnets, tumbling and wrestling in a constant whirl of activity that turns their small faces steaming pink.

  On her first visit she arrives with a fruitcake, carrying it on a plate while leading the horse. I make tea while she sniffs suspiciously around the kitchen and snorts at the wheat heads Robert has pinned out for dissection on the table.

  ‘I wouldn’t be letting my husband bring dirty muck like that inside.’

  ‘It’s science, Mrs Ivers. It’s important work.’

  ‘Still dirty though, ain’t it? And you’d better be calling me Elsie.’

  We take two kitchen chairs out under the broom brush and watch the boys fight each other with mulga branches.

  ‘They’re a trial, Jean, both men and boys, but I’m sure you’ll find that out soon enough.’ She looks at me side-on, at the space I take up in my dress.

  Elsie’s mother minds the boys the first time she takes me in to town. Elsie wears her best dress, a white number with broad pink and orange stripes, a bit like a winter sheet. She drives very slowly with her hat pulled low over her brow. We have only just turned onto the main road when the car narrowly misses a brown snake surfing, head up, for the shade of the roadside gums.

  I would have liked to explore the town alone but Elsie ushers me from shop to shop. My gaze is drawn to the train tracks in front of the post office and I am tempted to find the place I first got down and stand awhile, but Elsie would think it odd.

  There is everything in Wycheproof that you could need; several banks, the handsome post office fit for a city square, a greengrocer’s, a butcher, a pharmacy and haberdashery, a newsagent, garages and two general stores. With the train tracks in the centre and the wide dark verandahs, it is not possible to see people on one side of the street from the other. Many of the businesses are replicated, sometimes in exactly the same position on each side. Elsie crossed the street with me so we could at least walk past all of the shops, but she told me that many people in the town only shopped on one side depending on the hotel of their menfolk – Commercial or Terminus.

  At my request we visit the Free Library in the Mechanics’ Institute. It is only a few shelves in a curtained-off corner behind the pool table but there is a full-time librarian – Miss Iris Pfundt. Miss Pfundt is well turned out but there is something dried-up and scratchy about her. Her powder blue skirt suit sits stiffly on her sharp frame and she smells of stale hair spray. She gives me a membership card and shows me the five different categories of books: Detective, Light Love, Wild West, Children’s and Heavy. Heavy is Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and Froude’s History of England. I ask if there is any science. Miss Pfundt shakes her head without moving her tight yellow curls and snorts.

  ‘I hope you’re not going to be like the high school girls – hard to please with all those modern plays and poetry. I’m very particular. We only have nice books here. I throw away anything dirty.’

  The membership card requires Robert’s signature so I tell her I’ll be back.

  Last call is the butcher. The woman in front of us at the counter asks for the cheap mince and slowly counts out her pennies. She is flanked by a large daughter who stares glumly at her scuffed tennis shoes.

  The butcher works behind a green flywire screen and hands the packages through a flap. He passes the mince through to the young woman. ‘Cheer up, Olive, it’s not the end of the world.’ He winks at her mother. ‘Boy troubles, no doubt.’

  Elsie pushes to the front and leans in close to the screen to place her order.

  The butcher smiles at her playfully, tosses his tongs in the air and snaps them together as he catches them. ‘The best cuts for the lovely Mrs Ivers,’ he calls teasingly to an apprentice in the back room.

  I pretend to read the chalkboard which lists the prices and the butchery slogan: Hommelfhof Brothers’ Family Butchers – Where Honest Dealing Creates Good Feeling. Good feeling indeed. Elsie smoothes her stripey dress around her hips and opens her dusty purse.

  ‘Wasted on the farm, you are, Mrs Ivers. We should see you in town more often. And your new little neighbour too,’ he says, cutting me a glance.

  — 8 —

  THE EXPERIMENTAL KITCHEN

  Sister Crock wasn’t wholly against men. ‘In kitchen design’, she said, ‘they have their uses. Being apt to come up with good ideas about using wheels, inclined planes, pivoting storage walls, pulleys and electric light.’

  She didn’t want me to leave the train. It meant getting another girl from the Emily McPherson College of Domestic Science, sifting through the marriage fodder until she found someone with a calling.

  ‘How can you leave?’ she said. ‘How can you go somewhere so flat? You deserve better.’

  Sister Crock thought flatness meant dullness. She was wrong. It isn’t dull and it isn’t even flat. Not in winter. All summer the wheat makes a false horizon; it camouflages the real angle of the land. But in winter it isn’t flat at all. It swerves and undulates for miles. There are sharp rises in the middle of paddocks, hills around fence posts, steep mounds edging dams.

  And I have my calling. I can’t spell it out. I can’t say exactly what it is that I want, but I know what I don’t want. I don’t want to teach something I haven’t lived. I don’t want to be always with women. I don’t want evenings in the common room playing bridge and crazy euchre. I don’t want to be like Sister Crock, spectating and directing life from the outer – I want a chance to feel it and taste it for myself.

  From the kitchen I can see Robert working the ground with the cultivator. He’s experimenting with the stubble – working out how long to leave it between each treatment. Every time he goes over the same piece of ground it’s called a pass. It makes me think of flying. That he’s just passing over the place – taking a look, storing up the picture in his mind like someone out sightseeing.

  For the first month Robert left the house every day just after dawn. He measured and recorded all of the farm’s soils and crops. At lunchtime he brought in wheat samples that were either remarkably good or remarkably bad. He spread them out on the kitchen table and drew sketches of them in his notebook. I found the sample plants unnerving – most of them are thin and feeble-stalked with flailing arms like the skeletons of children. The sampling and recording continued for several weeks until the kitchen floor was covered with plants pinned to sheets of newspaper and stacked loosely in groups: Rust Evident; Excessively Short Straw; Weak Tillering; Poor Stem Extension at Peeping; Immature Head. It was difficult for me to start my own work with the kitchen so full and the dead plants high around my ankles.

  When at last they were cleared away I set up the experimental kitchen – checking the timers, temperature gauges, scales and measuring apparatus. Everything must be rigidly standardised. When I pull the test loaves from the oven for the final assessment of crumb structure, crust colour and loaf volume, the only variable must be Robert’s flour. My involvement must be rendered invisible by the strict adherence to procedure. It is a
n enormous responsibility. All of Robert’s paddock science will come together in this kitchen in ten test loaves a year.

  But after lunch each day, when I sit facing Robert at the kitchen table, instead of familiarising myself with the electric proving cabinet, something else happens. I can’t describe how it starts – maybe our breathing lengthens or shortens slightly so it falls together? Or maybe one of us might move a little so that the angles of our bodies are somehow shifted? I might be looking out of the window, showing the side of my neck, some collarbone, when he places his hand heavily on my shoulder. The feeling, when it rises, is so intense, the need for each other so urgent, nothing is fast enough. The table is pushed out of the way, clothes shed, sometimes ripped, bodies held with force. Then we are coupling hurriedly wherever we might fall. In front of the pantry, against the sink, even on the table, my hair in a puddle of lukewarm tea. On days when Robert is clearly tired from carting water and we have barely even talked I always think it might not happen, but it is enough for me just to brush my hand against his wrist as I remove his plate. Then he stands abruptly and grips my waist. His Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows hard. I am still standing, still holding the plate, when he pushes my dress aside and takes my nipple into his mouth.

  Odd thoughts break through during the lovemaking. I think it is because of the kitchen. A small part of my mind can’t seem to let go of the fact that we are in the kitchen. One day as we are coupled in front of the oven, moving rhythmically, sinuously together, I am suddenly back in elementary housewifery with Mrs Vera Cornthwaite introducing a lesson on ‘The Removal of Loose Dirt’.

  ‘What about fixed dirt, Mrs Cornthwaite?’ a girl asked enthusiastically from the back of the class.

  ‘One must learn to crawl before one can walk, dear,’ Mrs Cornthwaite replied. ‘Fixed dirt is covered in advanced housewifery. You’ll have to wait until second year.’

  Another time when we are joined side by side, my head jammed underneath his chin, his hand gripping my buttocks, drawing out their rise and fall, I notice the sharp red-white divide of his forearm where he folds his shirtsleeve. In the sun, out of the sun. In. Out. And I’m thinking of a lecture on homemaking and how to welcome a guest.