by Lloyd Jones
My mother laughed and Mr Windly said it was good to hear her laugh again. Then he said, ‘You know, Marie, you can visit again. You can come here any time you like. And Harry.’
My mother looked out the big window, for the moment smiling at something distant or an idea that had just slipped into her thoughts.
‘Good. It’s done,’ said Mr Windly.
‘I can’t drive, Dave.’
‘So what’s the problem? I’ll teach you.’
My father had concealed things from my mother. He had always pretended things were more complicated than they actually were. Mr Windly showed her things. The big one was showing her how to drive. To start with she gripped the wheel of Mr Windly’s Austin Cambridge. I think she thought that if she loosened her grip the car would wrestle out of control. Soon she relaxed. Soon she was driving on her own. The car was the key. It enabled her to get out in the world and, importantly, escape that tight space occupied by my father and Mr Reardon. No one had said it was that easy. ‘Fancy that,’ she’d say, and that look of pleasant discovery was to remain with her. Foot down, nurse the gear shift, raise the foot and press down on the accelerator. Give and take—that was something that even a piece of machinery could understand.
It was that simple. From that afternoon on, my mother’s life took a turn for the better. My father moved out the following winter. He and Mr Reardon moved to another flat. Eventually they would move to Queensland. By then, however, it wasn’t so much a shock as a slight shifting of boundaries. Our own lives were undergoing subtle changes too. We were spending more time at Mr Windly’s. Most evenings we drove up there. Mum would make dinner. I would have a round of snooker with Mr Windly. One night he said to me, ‘Why don’t you stop calling me Mr Windly? I think we know one another well enough now for you to call me Dave.’ Then one night we stayed over. After that it just felt natural.
going to war for mrs austen
My wife would love us to be friends with the Laurensons—or for that matter, the Kerrs. It’s a package deal, since we cannot befriend the Laurensons without the Kerrs or vice versa. Right now Jude is standing at the window. Since I came into the kitchen she has supplied me with a blow-by-blow account of the shovels and picks and backpacks shoved in the back of the Laurensons’ Pajero. And now, for my information, she says, ‘There go the plants. Tea-trees by the look of things.’ Then she gives the saplings their Maori pronunciation—Kanuka. She releases the word slowly as if it is a new taste she is unsure about. But native saplings is the essential point, here.
This is something the Laurensons and Kerrs get together to do at weekends. They climb the hilltops around here and put up with the gorse clawing at their arms and legs to plant natives. Ross Laurenson has told me all about the colonising instincts of pines. How on windy days the pine seed is carried aloft to the native stands. From there, it is an amazingly short time until they gobble up the goodness of the earth and lay waste to entire hillsides.
I don’t know what it was exactly but after that conversation with Ross, I just knew we would never be good friends. It was nothing he actually said—for the most part it made sense. But while Ross did most of the talking I just looked at him and thought, ‘We’re not ever going to be friends. Not good friends.’ And that’s fine. You can’t be good friends with everyone in the universe.
Lately, however, Jude has been particularly anxious to know what I may have said to Ross that has left us without an invitation to join the Laurensons and Kerrs. She mines me for details. Specifically she would like to know what I said to Ross about pine trees. Was I in any way disagreeable? Tetchy? Look, my point is simply this. If she wants to plant natives why does she need the Laurensons and Kerrs to hold her hand? And, for that matter, I would say to Jude to just look at the Laurensons. Sometimes they go off by themselves in their oilskin parkas and canvas knapsacks. They leave the house, holding hands, to ringbark a pine tree that has given itself away above the bush line. It’s an honourable thing to do and I’m glad someone’s doing it.
I don’t know why I’m smirking; I don’t mean to.
‘We all stand to benefit,’ says my wife humourlessly from her place at the window. She says, ‘I admire what they are doing. If only more people were to follow their example.’
I throw the newspaper onto the table which means I’m gone. I have things to do. We’ve talked about the Laurensons and the Kerrs for long enough.
But before I disappear, Jude would like me to answer something.
She says, ‘Before you run away …’ and of course I hate it when she puts it like that—before I run away. What would I be running away from? ‘Before you run away,’ she repeats, ‘I want you to answer me this. Can you please tell me what we believe in? I’d be interested to know.’ Her shoulders kind of pop forward. ‘I want to hear it from you. From your lips,’ she says, which is to say that one of my long silences will not save me. Not today.
I start by reminding her who we voted for in the last election and the election before that. But Jude shakes her head. I’m way offcourse. She didn’t mean that. What she meant is, ‘What do we stand for?’
After some thought I offer ‘Liberty. Justice?’ And Jude gives short shrift to that. She wants me to be serious for once in my life. Just for this once, can we please have a serious discussion?
‘Please, Tom?’ she asks.
But here’s the awful truth of it. I don’t honestly know what else to say, which, in the end, is exactly what I tell her. I can’t be more honest than that and in a perverse way I think it was the correct answer.
At first she doesn’t reply. She just goes on standing there; her elbows are close to her body, she’s thinking long and hard about what I just said. Possibly too hard, more than it deserves really. It’s not until she lifts her glance off the floor that I see the tears—these are real tears by the way. I know because Jude isn’t beyond the odd pantomime from time to time. But not today, not this moment. Those are real tears. I smile back at her. ‘Jude, this is ridiculous. Crazy.’ I hold out my arms and Jude buries her face against my shoulder. We rock like that for a while and I whisper, ‘It’s all right. Really, it’s all right.’ And it is, because through her cotton bathrobe I feel her begin to respond and, after that, we go into the bedroom.
But later, among the tangled bedsheets, she wants to know if there is anything, anything at all, that I would be prepared to die for. Would I have gone and fought in Spain? Korea? Vietnam? And moving on, what would have to happen, politically, for me to join a human wall to stop the motorcade of the Pope? The American Secretary of State? Our Prime Minister?
I answered ‘no’ to the first questions and Jude, after hesitating, eventually said, ‘I’m with you.’
I wish we could talk about something else. It’s Saturday morning. I just wish we could laugh occasionally.
‘You see, that’s my point,’ she says. ‘We just don’t care enough. It’s a worry. I am seriously worried … about us.’
‘All right then. Okay,’ I say. ‘We’ll talk about it.’
But first I get out of bed to go to the kitchen to make us some coffee.
On my return Jude has switched on the bedside radio. Troops are parachuting in to the day-old sovereign state of Slovenia. There are reports of government troops surrendering to civilians armed with hunting rifles.
Jude is sitting up in bed with her arms folded around her. Her lower lip is drawn. You’d think she had relatives there—in the farmhouse that the newsreader has just described as being ‘callously bombed’.
The thing I am trying to remember is whether she still takes sugar. Jude has an erratic pact with various diets. Sometimes she takes her coffee black, no sugar. Other times it is white, one sugar, two sugars.
I should have taken a punt but instead I make the mistake of asking.
‘People are dying, you fuck.’ She doesn’t actually say this. Of course not. No. No. No. But it’s what she is thinking. If only the guns were across the street, aimed at the house. Our
lives would be so much more meaningful. That’s for sure. We’d be out the back window, across the lawn and over the fence before the first howitzer blasted the brick side of the house. Instead there we are on this Saturday morning, unsure how to spend the rest of the day.
The news bulletin finishes with Elsie Harrow-Smith, who turns one hundred today. In silence now we listen to a young, fumbling reporter’s demands to know why it is that she is still alive. Not in so many words, of course.
The wind has got up and we lie in that dark bedroom listening to the ghosts creak about in the ceiling. As the first drops pitter-patter on the roof Jude worries that the Laurensons and Kerrs will get caught in the rain. I remind her that they have oilskins. Furthermore, rain is the best time to plant a sapling.
‘Ross Laurenson told you that, did he?’
‘No. Your grandmother, as a matter of fact.’
This is her house. The original Austen homestead. Harold and Mrs Austen (I feel uncomfortable calling her anything else) lived their entire married life in this house and spent much of their time developing the gardens out the back.
Jude’s grandparents kept separate bedrooms. We have taken over Harold’s old room. The only thing in the room left of Harold’s is an old mounted photograph taken of himself and Mrs Austen in Peru. You can see in the photo of Harold the slouching confidence of those used to having their way. He was dead by the time I arrived in the picture but Jude has memories of a pipe jammed in the side of his mouth, of his pianist’s hands carefully arranged at the top of the steering wheel of an old silver Bentley and terriers jumping around the back-seat upholstery—on their way for a walk over the golf course or along the riverbank.
In the photograph, Harold has uncharacteristically given up the foreground to Mrs Austen, who holds a number of cuttings from an alpine plant.
Jude says the photograph was taken in 1947 and that they tramped three days to get to the location in the photo.
Another silence.
Then she says, ‘Did you know that was the only time Harold allowed her to plant something of her own in the garden?’
I didn’t know and, frankly, I find it hard to believe. My first contact with Mrs Austen did not start out well. I had only been back home a month and was probably too sure of my ability to impress. Mrs Austen had asked what I had been doing in America. I told her about the postgraduate courses in American literature and Mrs Austen said, ‘So you’ve come back to plant a flag, have you?’ Then she said, ‘I don’t detect any accent.’ She had peered at the region of my mouth as if bits of foreign emphasis might be found on my teeth. She was pretty frightening. I find it hard to believe that she would have allowed herself to be trampled over by anyone, let alone pipe-smoking Harold.
‘She hated Harold’s roses,’ Jude is saying now. ‘She couldn’t stand them. She said they reminded her of those silly brightly coloured paper rosettes worn by the party faithful and English football fans. She wanted to rip them out.’
‘She didn’t, of course,’ I point out, and if this is an obvious thing to say it is only to remind Jude that the roses’ survival would appear to undermine what she is saying about her grandmother. It is true about roses being Harold’s life, his work. Harold’s popular Growing Roses for All New Zealanders was into its eleventh edition one year after his death. I suppose the thing I’m asking here is—can love for the man survive his work being loathed?
‘Well if you must know, Harold was a bit of a self-centred pig, actually,’ says Jude, rolling her legs off the bed. She throws on my shirt. I watch her retrieve the photograph from the wall. She still has a beautiful arse. As she climbs back into bed with the photo she gives me a questioning look. ‘What?’ she asks.
‘Nothing. I’m allowed to smile, aren’t I?’
For the time being Harold and Mrs Austen lie on the sheets between us, and Jude resumes the story. Some of it is new but most of what she says I’ve heard before. All the same I am encouraging and attentive. I’m just happy not to be bogged down in Slovenia or obliged to go over what I may or may not have said to Ross Laurenson about the pines.
There is Harold’s failure to win employment as a plant explorer for a famous London nursery, his journey out to China in search of the rare Chinese pear tree, his ill-health and gradual recovery thanks to the selflessness of a New Zealand missionary family in Hubei Province, and Harold’s ultimate arrival in New Zealand, where he meets Mrs Austen in the reference section of the Wellington Public Library. The rest of it I know already—the purchase of this property and its transformation into the magnificent garden and showplace for Harold’s roses and plants from the world over.
Then she says—‘You realise it wasn’t just the roses? She hated everything about Harold’s garden.’
‘Now I am surprised.’
‘Well, it’s the truth. The absolute truth,’ she says, and for a brief moment we find ourselves looking down at the photograph of Harold and Mrs Austen for confirmation. ‘You see,’ she says, ‘Gran loved Harold and loathed his garden. Hated it.’
Against my better judgment I put in a word for Harold. As I say, I never met the man. But there is the irrefutable fact of his garden, which was much photographed and celebrated.
I remind her, ‘It was written up I don’t know how many times.’
‘That’s not the point. That’s not even what I am talking about.’ She picks up the photo and places it on the floor beside the bed. Apparently I just have no idea.
‘Come on then, I want to show you.’
‘Show me what?’
‘The garden.’
‘I know the garden. It’s the same garden as the one I woke up to this morning.’
‘But I want to show you,’ she says.
She jumps up from the bed. There’s no way I can just continue to lie there. I am going to have to get up and go outside to be shown. As I reach down to gather up my jeans, she says, ‘For god’s sakes, Tom. Who’s to see?’
She’s right. The gardens have been cleverly screened by hedges. So we wander through the house to our overgrown garden. It is no longer true or fair to Harold to describe it as his garden. Even when Mrs Austen was around, the garden had started to run to wilderness. In the last year of her life Mrs Austen found eccentric jobs for me. She made me use Harold’s old wooden tennis racquet to bat away the cicadas. She did not like the cicadas to land on her. So she would stand behind the screen door at the back and pass out Harold’s tennis racquet, complaining, ‘I can’t go out there while the cicadas are terrorising. Harold, of course, would have used gas.’
It really is too cold to be out here without clothes.
‘Take a good look,’ Jude is saying.
The paths are nearly grown over. I remember a time I walked along them with Mrs Austen on my arm. By then she had decided that she could tolerate me. I remember walking beneath huge pink flowers encased in a prickly armour, on the end of thick green stalks. Something Harold had smuggled back from Madagascar. Desert flowers pierced the cracks in the path and rockeries. Black ground covers were used to sweat the soil and a misty spray from irrigation hoses managed to fool the tropical flowers.
‘They looted everywhere,’ says Jude. ‘Mountains. River gardens the world over. They didn’t know any better.’
Looting. There she goes again—a touch extravagant. I remind her of Harold’s credentials and accolades.
‘This is not my description. This is Gran describing her and Harold’s activities, not me. I’m not saying. She is. I remember her saying it—they just threw everything into the rucksack. Whatever their greedy eyes fell upon. She considered the garden to be the result of piracy but Harold bound her to it. Even after he died.’
Jude wanders out to the start of the path. The gardens, as I say, are protected by tall thick hedges.
‘Come on,’ Jude says. ‘Come and look at this.’
Then she makes a big sweep with her arm as if we have just broken into the tyrant’s palace and are seeing hoarded treasures for the f
irst time.
‘Do you know what she called it? “A gaudy wallpaper of nations and national costumes”.’
Jude says even her grandmother had found it confusing. She says Harold kept the garden the way other people keep a photograph album. In her final years Mrs Austen would stand on the back porch and struggle to make sense of it all. Smells and views got mixed up with the wrong continents. The garden had its roots in a maddening jumble of arguments and barely remembered itineraries.
‘You know something, Tom? You know what I’m going to do?’ Jude’s not looking at me. It’s a rhetorical question. ‘Yes,’ she says. Then, a second time, ‘Yes’ and a look of wicked delight lands on her face. She bustles by me. She’s headed for the shed. I love it when she gets into one of these moods. Jude is really a lot of fun. It’s the bloody Laurensons and the Kerrs that bring out this unwelcomed earnestness in her. She’s so much better than that.
I venture up the path and stop. I can hear things being turned over in there. A moment later she comes to the door in Harold’s old green parka. She has found a pitchfork and a cleaver-like tool that would be useful to beat back some gorse. I realise I’m thinking of the Laurensons and Kerrs.
She throws the pitchfork into the first garden bed. And—oh, I see what she is up to now. At the same time I’m not sure about this. I am not comfortable at all. And really I would much rather we talked about this thing some more but even as Jude raises the cleaver, I am struck dumb. It’s only when she brings the cleaver down and breaks the back of a rose bush that I cry out—‘Jesus.’
‘It’s all for Gran,’ she laughs. But I can see that even she is a little shaken by what she has just done. She pulls some hair from her face and moves to the next rose bush, and then the next, talking as she goes—‘I really don’t know why it has taken me so long. I told you she hated roses. Couldn’t stand rosettes.’
The cleaver is brought down. Another bush drops from view and Jude leans on the handle. ‘The thing is, Tom, she couldn’t tell Harold. Can you understand that? Tom?’