There were times I felt guilty about my longing to see her smile and be happy, for I knew it could only come if she dwelt less on Papa, and to wish for that seemed a disloyalty to him. Yet with or without my wishing it, Mama was putting off her grief.
Once new furniture had been built, light and limed or painted white, Mama set about establishing a salon in our house that swiftly became the only gathering place for the few people of any elegance or wit. It was a court, and she its queen. It was not hard to establish herself in this way, for Mama’s skills in entertaining were formidable, having been instilled in her in a country where there were a thousand rigid rituals and archaic standards to be observed in even the smallest encounters. And of course there was her beauty and her charm. Naturally I did not attend the salons, but I was able to peep down the stairs, and occasionally a guest would be invited back in the daytime for tea, and I would be presented to them.
Then one day, during such a tea when a neighbour had come to call, Mama glanced out a window and the blood ebbed from her cheeks. Mama had the habit of seeing her thoughts more than the world, but her appearance was so altered that I glanced out the window too, half expecting to see nothing. But I saw passing a group of the tall, graceful, shadow-dark folk who were the natural and nomadic inhabitants of this land.
‘They have no sense of private property,’ I heard the neighbour observe tolerantly. ‘They think it odd or funny that we imagine we can own bits of the earth.’ I had heard this said before of the velvet people, and could not help but admire their philosophy. If one thought of it, the notion of owning land was no less absurd than the idea of owning a portion of the air.
These were wild velvet folk outside our window, clad only in their warm brown skin and loincloths. One never saw them like this in Dusty Town, as I had named it to myself. I watched the liquid grace of their walk and the light, strong way their feet grasped the parched earth; this close, I seemed to hear a music rising up from the land at their passing. I was so enthralled by this phenomenon that I forgot why I had looked out the window until I heard the neighbour ask Mama if she was unwell. I turned back and saw that she was still staring out at the velvet people with such a bottomless terror in her eyes that my heart began to pound.
‘What is it?’ I begged, coming to sit by her and take her hand, as the neighbour took an uncertain step away.
‘Mama!’ I shook her a little when she did not seem to hear me.
She shuddered and put a slender white hand to her throat and whispered, ‘It cannot be. Not here at the end of the earth . . .’
‘Mama?’ I cried, growing really frightened. She turned to look at me and I wished I had not spoken, for here was all the grief I had thought was gone. Then she clutched me to her, holding me so tightly that I could not breathe, and whispered fiercely that she would keep me safe. I struggled to disengage her hands and felt my cheeks flame at the thought of the neighbour observing what must seem to him a sudden fit of madness.
Somehow he was got rid of and Mama went to her bed, forbidding anyone to enter her room. I hovered about her door, frightened and confused by her relapse into grief and possessive terror. When night and a slight coolness came without any sign of her emerging, I went onto the verandah, ignoring the warning of a servant that I would be eaten alive by insects. I did not bother to explain that they did not bite me as they did others, but only troubled me with their irritating whine. It was the same with Mama, and I supposed our blood was too cool or strange for them.
I looked up at the black night and the hard diamond shimmer of stars and tried to fathom what had happened. It seemed to me impossible that Mama could be so upset by the sight of a group of velvet folk, for we had seen many of them since our arrival. Was it the fact that they had been unclothed? Those we saw in town wore the cast-off clothes of the clay people, either by choice or because it was forced upon them by rustic prudishness. It was even possible that Mama had not yet seen the wild velvet people, for I saw them most often in the early mornings when I sat upon the verandah. But no, I could not believe my sophisticated Mama would be troubled by their nakedness, for all her belief in the importance of clothes. It was so obviously the correct attire for them, a symbolic acceptance of the relentless sun and heat.
Was it perhaps the neighbour’s remark about the attitude of the velvet people to the possession of land that had scoured Mama? She had a deed to the land upon which our house sat, and for many acres about it, but no, he had spoken as he had after he had seen the look on Mama’s face.
What had she said? Not here at the end of the earth. The words had rung with incredulity, suggesting that she had seen something she did not expect to see. I remembered how she had then clutched wildly at me and vowed to keep me safe, exactly as she had done during the period of nightmares before she had gone on her quest. The queer notion came to me that Mama had brought us to the end of the earth to keep me safe, only to be reminded by the velvet nomads that we had not escaped.
Mama kept to her room for one week and then a second began. On the thirteenth day of her retreat, I turned eleven. I had looked forward to the day because it seemed the first step out of childhood and that much closer to twenty, which Mama had always said was the age at which one truly became a woman. Papa had laughed at this when Mama said it once in his hearing, saying she was mistaken. One legally became a woman at eighteen. I thought the moment of maturity was not so easy to fix. Some girls were women at fifteen and others still immature at one and twenty.
‘Among my people a girl becomes a woman at twenty,’ Mama told him almost coolly, and to my surprise there was pain in her eyes. That flash of pain and her coolness had fixed the memory in my mind.
Sitting on the verandah, waiting for the sun to set on my eleventh birthday, it occurred to me that this memory was the only one I had of Mama speaking of her people – her people, I thought, not her family.
And suddenly she was there beside me, standing on the porch in glowing white like a radiant ghost, her eyes fixed on a stand of silver-trunked trees grouped on what was sometimes, for a brief period, a lawn, the same trees around which the velvet people had looped two weeks before. The trees were native to this country and the only thing about which Mama had expressed unqualified approval, saying there was power in them. It was true, there was something about them that attracted the eye. I was about to rise when I noticed that Mama’s feet were bare. I gaped at her small perfect toes, struck by the realisation that I had never seen her feet naked before. It seemed a sign of something but I did not know what. I stood up and waited for her to speak.
Mama did not look at me, but when she took my hand, hers felt cool instead of feverishly hot as it had been when I had helped her to her room. I saw with tremendous relief that her expression in the dim light of dusk was tranquil. Whatever storm had seized her had blown away.
‘We must have a ball,’ she said in a dreamy voice. ‘That is how things are managed where I was born.’
I stared at her, arrested by the notion that she was about to speak of her childhood, but she only went on staring at the trees. The next day, she began to make preparations for what was to be the most lavish ball the country had ever beheld.
‘A ball is like a summoning spell,’ she told our mesmerised housekeeper. ‘It must be carefully designed and composed. It must be so magnificent that no person will fail to hear of it or dare decline our invitation.’
The ball was to be held two months hence, in autumn, and everyone of consequence among the clay folk sent an acceptance when they received the thick invitation cards individually embossed with dark red roses by an artist hired to perform the task. None of the velvet people was invited, and when I asked Mama why, she said only that it was of no concern of theirs. As the day approached, supplies began to arrive by ship as well as chefs to cook them and footmen and maids to help guests from carriages, take coats, offer champagne and serve food. Fresh ingredients were brought from all over the country and exotic flowers shipped from nearby island
s and kept in the cellar with the rare wines and ports Mama had brought with us.
I did all that I was told. I held open doors and helped to place things and to polish crystal and silverware. Mama even allowed me to help design the flower arrangements and to iron her evening gloves and kerchief, but knowing that I was not to attend, some part of me was inattentive to the preparations. It was this part that now pondered the velvet people. Since my mother’s strange behaviour the day the neighbour had called, I had become more aware of them, and I often found myself watching them closely. Indeed, my early mornings were now focused on the moment when a tribe of them would pass by the house every few days, always in those cool hours before dawn. I watched them often enough to be sure that they always took exactly the same route across the paddocks and around obstacles. It even seemed to me they trod in exactly the same places each day. It was as if the strange, exquisite music their feet drew from the land depended upon their treading the same steps, as if any deviation would alter the music. I became convinced that they walked by the house not to go anywhere or to accomplish anything save to practise the making of music, which the clay people utterly ignored.
In Dusty Town, I noted the confused, lumbering movements of the velvet men clad in the ungainly attire of the clay folk, whose steps drew no music from the land. Was it the clothes they wore that stopped them from finding the music, or an inability to find music that made them don the clothes and ape the ways of the clay people? Perhaps in building their great untidy settlement, the clay folk had made it impossible for the velvet people, who had once passed over this place, to walk where they used to walk, so that the music had been irrevocably broken. I had noticed that the same velvet people passed our house, though sometimes there were a few extra people, or one or two fewer. Perhaps the impossibility of walking their own ancient songlines had destroyed those velvet people whose song paths had been built over, trapping them within Dusty Town to wither like leaves caught in a grate. In any case, they seemed to me as different from the wild velvet people as a separate race.
One morning when we had come to the wharves very early so that Mama could supervise the unloading of some hundred-year-old eggs to be served at the ball, I elected to stay in the carriage. I had been sitting for a time, wondering at the fact that even now, when there was no one in the street, the dust hung suspended in the air. A wind blew up. I was startled because I had never known a breeze to blow here, and had supposed that there was something about the shape of the hills surrounding the town on three sides, and the closed nature of the harbour, that prevented the wind from entering. I turned to look in the direction from which it was blowing, and was astonished to see a group of wild velvet men and women and a few children walking down the centre of the street. I could see them quite clearly because the wind had blown a clear passage for them through the haze of dust. Then I heard the sound of music. It was more hesitant than at any other time I had heard it, with unusual dissonances, and the velvet people moved very slowly, almost carefully, though no less gracefully than usual. Listening to the music they were making, I felt instinctively that the discordances I heard were not mistakes but part of the music, and that it was being delicately and intricately shaped around the obstructions that were the clay people’s buildings. It reminded me of trying to play a piece on a piano that had several broken keys, so that you must quickly find alternate keys. It was as if these wild velvet people were striving to create a music that would encompass the obstructions and barriers thrown up by the clay people.
I had never seen nomadic velvet people in the town before, and I wondered if this walk was an attempt to heal the people who had once made music here, by creating new lines of song that might be walked. Two young velvet women appeared in a street ahead of the walkers, clad in the slovenly cast-off shifts of the clay folk. One walked a little ahead of the other, inclining her head as if to listen to something she could barely hear, and the second came behind her, plucking at her dress fretfully. Both stopped and gaped at the sight of the wild velvet people, and after a moment the first girl kicked off her shoes impatiently. Her face was trans-figured by wonder but the other girl merely stared at her in stupid amazement.
The song walkers arrived at the intersection where I sat, and as I looked at them, the oldest of the velvet men looked up and met my gaze, without breaking his slow stride or interrupting the song. He showed no surprise to find me sitting there watching, which gave me the queer feeling that he had known all along that I was there and could see him and the others. The look he gave me was long and searching, as if my face were a book he was reading, then his eyes widened and he smiled, a startling crescent moon of white. He took several swift steps towards me and then away, which gave a peculiar thrilling trill to the song he was walking, and made the other walkers look at him. I held my breath, for it seemed to me that I had just been woven into their music.
The velvet man smiled at me, and pointed to my feet. I looked down at them, clad in their neat, white leather, buttoned boots, and noted the stain of red on them though I had not taken a single step. I thought of the velvet girl who had taken off her shoes, and wondered what I would hear if I took off my boots and stockings and stood barefoot in the dust. But when I looked up, the man and the other velvet people had vanished, and even as I watched, the wind erased their path and whirled away, leaving only the hot, sticky red stillness.
Mama came out then, and I forgot what I had seen in the business of getting the crates of black, gelid eggs into the back of the carriage.
Preparations for the ball had swallowed weeks of time, but suddenly the day dawned and I was watching Mama’s maid lace her into her boned petticoat and make up her face, then a hairdresser spend an hour brushing and pinning and winding her mass of pale yellow hair into a delicate tower of tiny curls and ringlets around sprigs of violets and fastening it with amethyst combs. Last, the dress was held out and Mama slipped her arms into its short lace sleeves. It was made of watered silk and silk chiffon in twenty shades of violet, layered like the petals of a vast flower, and as the hundreds of tiny buttons were fastened all down the back of the gown, another maid powdered Mama’s bare white shoulders and long swan’s neck, and slipped on her jewel-encrusted slippers. Mama permitted me to spray a mist of exotic scent on each slim wrist and on the little pulse that beat in the hollow at the base of her throat and then she let me help her on with her long gloves. Two maids fastened the thirty buttons on each, and she announced that she was ready.
‘Oh madam, you look like a princess!’ said the youngest maid, then blushed red as a beet as the others shushed her, but Mama only smiled. Then she dismissed all of them.
When we were alone, she looked into my eyes and said very seriously, ‘It matters, how you look and how you move, Willow. Never forget that. There is a power in such things that can be harnessed to transform a girl into a princess.’
I nodded, for these had been my own thoughts about the song walkers I had seen a few days earlier in the town. I was tempted to speak of their music but held my tongue, remembering how the sight of the velvet people had thrown Mama into despair.
The night of the ball passed swiftly for me, for of course I did not attend. I watched the guests arriving from the top of the stairs, admiring their clothes and imagining lives and personalities for the ones I did not know, but once they passed into the main rooms I could see nothing. I fell asleep listening to the muted music, and dreamed of turning and turning to it in a full-length gown.
I woke early, eagerly, and I was not disappointed for, as we breakfasted, Mama told me a thousand tales of the night. That it had been a dazzling success was no surprise to me, yet Mama seemed elated, almost as if she had doubted it.
One week after the ball, Ernst came to call. He was a tall and handsome man with a bristling black beard and splendid large eyes that shone like black pearls dipped in oil. He was so like Papa at first glance that my mouth dropped open foolishly when he was shown into the parlour. When I said so to Mama af
ter he had departed, too shocked to guard my tongue, Mama merely smiled and reminded me tranquilly that he had come to the ball. She said this with such satisfaction that one might have supposed the sole reason for the ball had been the luring of him to it.
Ernst was gentle and courteous in his manner with me from the first, and as the weeks passed he visited many times, becoming more warm and less formal, until at last I realised that he was courting me as well as Mama. I understood this all of a sudden, and rather later than I ought to have done, when Ernst observed one day to Mama with almost startled pleasure that, in appearance, I could be his own daughter. I am tall and lean and dark like Papa was, but instead of explaining this, Mama only smiled with a sort of pleased satisfaction, as if a difficult puzzle had been solved.
‘Will you marry Mama?’ I asked one evening. I had been given some watered wine to try which had made me bold and a little giddy. It was too soon for such a question, of course, for the cadences of courtship are slow and ornate, though far less slow, I came to discover, because Mama was a widow and not a maiden. Instead of being annoyed or affronted by my pert question, Ernst laughed and did not report my indiscretion to Mama, which made me like him even more. They wed a month later. Only then did I learn that Ernst had two wards, both the children of a distant cousin, who had come under his protection when their parents had died in a fire. Like Mama and me they came from abroad, though they had been here for several years.
The younger was a plump boy called Reynaldo and the older a tall, very handsome, long-faced and rather gloomy boy called Silk. They came to live with us, though Silk was mostly away at school, and when at home, he spent time with various friends or with his nose buried in his books. I loved reading too, and spent a good portion of my time in our library, which doubled in size after Ernst married Mama and became my stepfather. I should have liked to be friends with Silk, for it seemed to me that we shared a common love, and I had never had a friend, but he was like a closed door to me, and in time, I ceased to wonder what might lie behind it.