Joan Makes History by Kate Grenville

Author:Kate Grenville
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction/Historical
ISBN: 9780702254567
Publisher: University of Queensland Press
Published: 2008-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

I left Duncan not on a night of moon while stockmen snored and dreamed of wild exploits, but among quinces in syrup and bottled peas like pearls. Duncan and I had come to the Show to look at the cattle for professional reasons, and we had stayed for the sheepdogs, marvelling with everyone else while small men in hats clucked and whistled to their dogs and made them perform absurd feats with sheep. I found myself becoming anxious, watching so much obedience, such intelligence, packed into the parcel of a mere dog.

It was all new to me, and intriguing: those dogs, and the huge-uddered milkers rolling their gigantic eyes at us, and the enormous hairy tassels of bulls, and the small skilful men and women who moved quietly among them with shovels of dung and bales of hay. So by the time we reached the Agricultural Hall I was in a trance of strangeness, and after so many months seeing only the same few people day after day, I was as if hypnotised by such an extravagance of strange faces, such an excess of other people’s eyes flickering across mine as we jostled past. So many souls, so many stories, were whipping me up to madness.

I paused in the crush before a display of bottled edibles: serrated carrots, diamonds of sliced pale beans, onions and purple cabbage and peas all packed like jewels in their gleaming jars, no longer food as much as a tribute to ingenuity.

I paused to wonder, and when I looked around I saw that Duncan had continued to move on, past the displays of pointless labour, and in a moment his tweed shoulders had disappeared behind a cluster of flowered hats. A few steps would have taken me back to him: he would have turned, taken my hand, made some small joke about losing me, might have suggested a pot of tea and scones in the refreshment tent. But those few simple steps did not occur to me. Without quite planning, without anything as deliberate as choice, moving by a kind of gravity, I found that I had stepped sideways, into a narrow tunnel that led to the back of a display of apples and pears, arranged so as to represent the main thoroughfares of Mudgee. It was the impulse of a moment, and the shuffle and buzz of the crowd was instantly muffled by a roof of fruit, the glare of lights was darkened and I was alone. I knew that if I did not make the choice of moving back out into the lights, I could remain alone here, and not be found.

Some decisions are over in the wink of an eye and others spin themselves out into a whole tale of their own. I had not made any decision yet, but when I found a fruit box to sit on in this dim sloping space, and discovered that when I sat on it I could see out through a chink in the display

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