Hotel Ambrose

Chapter 7.2

The house was called Black William. It had been built in the depths of the depression of the 1840s, by a sheep farmer who had taken advantage of the crash to purchase a vast swathe of land to Melbourne's southeast. He had then sought his fortune in the Ballarat goldfields, failed to find it, and returned to Black William. A year later he was discovered hanging from the rafters in his study. If there was a story behind the name it had died with him.

Behind the house the ground sloped steeply away into bushland, beyond which lay a brown river. To the native people the river was called Birrarrung – the "place of mists and shadows", and they had avoided this part of it, for it was said to be home to a bunyip – a water demon.

The current owners of Black William had emigrated from England after the Great War. They had bought the house using the last of the fortune of their sugar merchant ancestors, which had been substantially reduced by more recent ancestors, who had exhibited less interest in sugar than gambling. Their only son had been born there and had grown up within its walls.

The boy who had once almost drowned at the seaside was now eight years old and could swim. Nevertheless, he wasn't meant to be down at the river. His mother forbade him from going anywhere near it.

There was something about the river. The bushland thereabouts was dark, impenetrable, and swampy, and the mud could suck the shoes right off your feet. Mosquitoes descended in clouds at dusk. Pipes jutted out into the river from the factories on the other side – there was a factory that made film for cameras, a brewery, a sawmill, and a place where wool was processed. Upstream there was only bushland. He sometimes dreamed of paddling a boat upstream – as far as he could, until the river became a stream, then a creek, then a rivulet, and finally vanished into rock.

He had spent the afternoon down by the river, returning up the scrubby slope as the light began to fade, sneaking in through the back door that led into the kitchen. The kitchen was deserted. He could see the crouching shape of an oven in the dark, pans hanging like bats from the ceiling. A cook and several servants had once lived at the house; now there were only two maids and the big kitchen was no longer used. The smaller kitchen in the residence of the groundskeeper (also gone) sufficed these days. The maid who did the cooking was an ancient half-caste called Juno, who had served the previous owners and those before them.

Juno held a similar fascination for James as the river did. She had heavy black shoes with buckles on them and spindly legs below enormous hips. She told stories of how her father had been an admiral in the Royal Navy, and her mother an Aboriginal princess who had owned three hundred slaves, and how in anguish over their forbidden love they had thrown themselves into the river and perished. James would only discover later that Aborigines neither had princesses nor kept slaves, and he would go on to wonder whether there was any truth to the other things she had told him. Sometimes Juno's dark eyes would glitter at him as if they shared some great secret.

He left the kitchen and passed through six dark and empty rooms, then a dim hallway. Voices were coming from a nearby room. James crept up the stairs at the end of the hallway. At the top he opened the first door on his left and went inside and shut the door behind him. The light from the window showed a bed, a chest of drawers, a desk. There was a pen and an open exercise book on the desk, and on a shelf above it,a black bible and a jaundiced pot-plant. An alarm clock sat on the bedside table. James picked it up and put it to his ear.

A bell rang in the hallway below. James started at the sound, hurriedly putting the clock back on the table. He went back downstairs.

In the dining room was a long table with a candelabrum in the centre. His mother was seated alone at one end of the table. Her face was still beautiful, in a hard way, like a diamond. Her hair was pulled back tight over her head. She wore an ill-fitting dark green gown; her skin in the V of the neck seemed very white against it. "Sit," she said.

James sat.

She looked at him expressionlessly for a moment. James watched his hands.

"Your father will be here soon. He's smoking with his new friend." Her voice changed when she said friend. There was a long silence, in which the boy watched his hands and his mother watched him.

The door opened. Two men came in. They had been talking loudly, but when they entered the room they quieted. They gave each other sneaking looks, like schoolboys do.

"Evening dear," the older man said, crossing to James's mother and kissing her on the cheek. He was twenty years older than her, but his cheeks were red and his hands soft-looking, his hair thick and luxuriant. He had big watery eyes that blinked too often and roved about without lingering.

"Hello James," he said to the boy, smiling broadly.

"Hello Sir."

The friend wore an extravagantly puffy necktie and an ugly gold wristwatch. His face was handsomely empty. He was sixteen or seventeen. Sometimes he grinned across the table at James's father, who grinned back, though it was unclear what the joke was.

Juno and the other maid silently served dinner.

"Erroll must return to Melbourne tonight dear," James's father said to his wife. "He has enjoyed his stay thoroughly." Another glance, another grin.

James's mother nodded slightly. Her lips were thin and white and stayed pressed together.

Throughout dinner the man and his friend babbled, while James and his mother sat very silent and still. The maids came and went.

Later, James's father took Erroll out to the road to see him off.

That night the boy stopped in the stairwell on the way up to bed to peer out through a tall window into the moonlit court, to where the two men were saying goodbye beside the car.