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Good Reading : October 2007
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was the port at which gold, mined from twenty-eight-miles-distant Mt Morgan, ‘the most prolific gold mine which the world has known’ he had often heard his father boasting, his voice booming from behind the bar over the swing doors to the oak-panelled hall where he and Richard played – words he didn’t understand, except to realise vaguely that that gold had been the source of his father’s fortune, was exchanged for furniture, tools, horses, fashionable clothes from the south … His mother’s voice interrupted his dreaming. ‘Harry.’ Her voice was quiet, stern-sounding. He looked up at her. She stood in the doorway of the hotel, dressed in dense polished cotton whose severity was only softened by a frill of lace at the throat. Below the green hem of her dress he could see she had on her silk-ankled lisle stockings and good leather shoes: a sure indication she was going somewhere important. ‘Harry.’ Her voice was softer. She held out her ar ms. He skipped up and ran to her. She caught him up and hugged him, tightly, so he began to be frightened. But then she loosened her arms, and he wrapped his legs around her corseted waist so she couldn’t drop him. He could hear her breathing quickly, as if she had been running. He stared at her face, level with his. Her eyelids were long and smooth and pale; above them were thin curved brows which gleamed gold in sunlight; her lashes were fine and straight, like her hair, which was pulled now into a firm bun. But the eyes weren’t smiling, as they usually were when they looked at him.They were sad, the blue irises shiny, the rest crazed with red lines; and underneath them were smudges of blue and green, as if she’d touched his watercolour powders and then rubbed beneath her eyes. ‘We’re going to go on a holiday, Harry. On a train.You like trains, don’t you?’ He nodded, staring at her still-sad eyes. ‘I’ve packed your things. But you’ll need to have a bath now.You understand? Instead of tomorrow. It will be a very long train ride, and you want to be nice and clean and wear your best clothes. Richard’s having one too. All right?’ He didn’t like baths. He had slipped once and bruised his hip, stepping into the cold, green-enamelled tub in the cold, concrete-floored scullery. He hated baths in winter, when he’d stand, shivering, too big to sit down in the tub now, while his mother soaped his body and his hair, then scooped lukewarm water over him with a jug. But it was spring now, and hot in the sun, and he could tell from his mother’s face that she was in no mood for argument. He nodded, solemnly. ‘Good boy.’ He was rewarded with a swift smile of relief. He began to wriggle, down out of her ar ms – but she stopped him. She jerked him back up, so his face was level with hers again. And he saw the smile was gone and that her eyes were wide and, he thought suddenly, fright- ening again. ‘But Harry.This holiday … I don’t want you to tell anyone about it.You understand? It’s a secret.We can talk all about it on the train, but just now it’s a secret. All right? Don’t – say – a word.’ Her voice had dropped to a whisper. Again, he nodded.Then she let him down, took his hand, and led him into the cool, panelled hall of the hotel, past the ornate oak staircase leading to the bedrooms on the first floor, past the frosted-glass swing doors leading to the public bar with its pianola and billiard table, past the oiled dark door leading to the dining room, through the white- enamelled swing doors leading to the kitchen, and through an open doorway to the scullery, at the very back of the hotel. After they left that day, he never saw the hotel again. * Rosalind stood quietly in the hallway. Upstairs in the boys’ room two suit- cases rested fatly together.They were brown leather, scuffed on the reinforced corners, with tarnished brass clips: the only thing she and Stuart had arrived with when they’d stepped from the coach onto the rust-coloured rock of Mt Morgan ten years before.When they’d arrived with eyes glittery with excitement, despite the hot, dusty coach whose wooden wheels and worn-out springs had bruised their bottoms and bounced their shoulders against each other, despite predictions that the mine was used up, that the gold there was exhausted … The boys, Richard and Harry, had been born in Mt Morgan. Born into a family who had arrived with nothing except two suitcases, and within five years had made enough money to buy a hotel in Rockhampton outright.This hotel:The Rising Sun. Rosalind was waiting for the kitchen maid. Ellen. Rosalind was waiting for the picnic hamper which she had ordered made up. And for Ellen to bring it to her. She had smuggled the boys in their good clothes down the stairs and out to the riverbank, to the shelter of the huge fig trees – if she narrowed her eyes through the front door to the river, she’d be able to catch a flicker of seven-year-old Richard’s white sailor’s hat or, if she listened, Harry’s flute of a voice probably still piping about the schooner which had ‘But Harry. This holiday ... I don’t want you to tell anyone about it. You understand? It’s a secret. We can talk all about it on the train, but just now it’s a secret. All right? Don’t — say — a word.’ OCTOBER 2007 ı goodreading 51
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