82 / COLLEEN MCCULLOUGH
She sighed and shut the spinet, dusting the gold off her fingers. "There's nothing to tell, nothing at all. Come on, help me move these things into the middle of the room, so Daddy can pack them." The voyage was a nightmare. Before the Wahine was out of Wel- lington harbor they were all seasick, and they continued to be sea- sick all the way across twelve hundred miles of gale-stirred, wintry seas. Paddy took the boys up on deck and kept them there in spite of the bitter wind and constant spray, only going below to see his women and baby when some kind soul volunteered to keep an eye on his four miserable, retching boys. Much though he yearned for fresh air, Frank had elected to remain below to guard the women. The cabin was tiny, stifling and reeked of oil, for it was below the water line and toward the bow, where the ship's motion was most violent. Some hours out of Wellington Frank and Meggie became con- vinced their mother was going to die; the doctor, summoned from first class by a very worried steward, shook his head over her pessimistically. "Just as well it's only a short voyage," he said, instructing his nurse to find milk for the baby. Between bouts of retching Frank and Meggie managed to bottle- feed Hal, who didn't take to it kindly. Fee had stopped trying to vomit and had sunk into a kind of coma, from which they could not rouse her. The steward helped Frank put her in the top bunk, where the air was a little less stale, and holding a towel to his mouth to stem the watery bile he still brought up, Frank perched himself on the edge beside her, stroking the matted yellow hair back from her brow. Hour after hour he stuck to his post in spite of his own sickness; every time Paddy came in he was with his mother, stroking her hair, while Meggie huddled on a lower berth with Hal, a towel to her mouth. Three hours out of Sydney the seas dropped to a THE THORN BIRDS / 83
glassy calm and fog stole in furtively from the far Antarctic, wrap- ping itself about the old ship. Meggie, reviving a little, imagined it bellowed regularly in pain now the terrible buffeting was over. They inched through the gluey greyness as stealthily as a hunted thing until that deep, monotonous bawl sounded again from somewhere on the superstructure, a lost and lonely, indescribably sad noise. Then all around them the air was filled with mournful bellows as they slipped through ghostly smoking water into the harbor. Meggie never forgot the sound of foghorns, her first introduction to Aus- tralia. Paddy carried Fee off the Wahine in his arms, Frank following with the baby, Meggie with a case, each of the boys stumbling wearily under some kind of burden. They had come into Pyrmont, a meaningless name, on a foggy winter morning at the end of Au- gust, 1921. An enormous line of taxis waited outside the iron shed on the wharf; Meggie gaped round-eyed, for she had never seen so many cars in one place at one time. Somehow Paddy packed them all into a single cab, its driver volunteering to take them to the People's Palace. "That's the place for youse, mate," he told Paddy. "It's a hotel for the workingman run by the Sallies." The streets were thronged with cars seeming to rush in all direc- tions; there were very few horses. They stared raptly out of the taxi windows at the tall brick buildings, the narrow winding streets, the rapidity with which crowds of people seemed to merge and dissolve in some strange urban ritual. Wellington had awed them, but Sydney made Wellington look like a small country town. While Fee rested in one of the myriad rooms of the warren the Salvation Army fondly called the People's Palace, Paddy went off to Central Railway Station to see when they could get a train for Gillanbone. Quite recovered, the boys clamored to go with him, for they had been told it was not very far, and that the way was