A Few Days in the Country by Elizabeth Harrower

Author:Elizabeth Harrower
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2015-09-18T16:00:00+00:00

7

The Beautiful Climate

The Shaws went down to the cottage on Scotland Island every weekend for two years. Hector Shaw bought the place from some hotelkeeper he knew, never having so much as hinted at his intention till the contract was signed. Then he announced to his wife and daughter the name of a certain house, his ownership of it, its location, and the fact that they would all go down every Friday night to put it in order.

It was about an hour’s drive from Sydney. At the Church Point wharf they would park the car, lock it up, and wait for the ferry to take them across to the island.

Five or six families made a living locally, tinkering with boats and fishing, but most of the houses round about were weekenders, like the Shaws’ place. Usually these cottages were sold complete with a strip of waterfront and a jetty. In the Shaws’ case the jetty was a long spindly affair of grey wooden palings on rickety stilts, with a perpendicular ladder that had to be climbed getting in and out of the boat. Some of the others were handsome constructions equipped with special flags and lights to summon the ferryman when it was time to return to civilisation.

As Mr Shaw had foretold, they were constantly occupied putting the house in order, but now and then he would buy some green prawns, collect the lines from the spare-bedroom cupboard, and take his family into the middle of the bay to fish. While he made it obligatory to assume that this was a treat, he performed every action with his customary air of silent, smouldering violence, as if to punish misdemeanours, alarming his wife and daughter greatly.

Mrs Shaw put on her big straw sunhat, tied it solemnly under her chin, and went behind him down the seventy rough rock steps from the house. She said nothing. The glare from the water gave her a migraine. Since a day years before when she was a schoolgirl learning to swim and had almost drowned, she had had a horror of deep water. Her husband knew it. He was a difficult man, for what reason no one had been able to discover, least of all Hector Shaw himself.

Del followed her mother down the steep bushy track, not speaking, her nerves raw, her soundless protests battering the air about her. She did not want to go; nor, of course, could she stay when her absence would be used against her mother.

They were not free. Either the hostage, or the one over whom a hostage was held, they seemed destined to play forever if they meant to preserve the peace. And peace had to be preserved. Everything had always been subordinated to this task. As a child, Del had been taught that happiness was nothing but the absence of unpleasantness. For all she knew, it was true. Unpleasantness, she knew, could be extremely disagreeable. She knew that what was irrational had to be borne, and she knew she and her mother longed for peace and quiet—since she had been told so often.

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