Thornwood House

by Anna Romer

  Yet it was beautiful. Wrought-iron lacework fringed the eaves, and etched glass panels framed the front door. The stairs were wide and welcoming, and huge leadlight windows winked red and blue and amber in the sun, enticing me closer.

  As I walked along the crooked brick path, dandelion heads popped against my legs and I had the curious sensation of sliding backwards in time. I felt a glimmer of that childish Christmas-morning feeling, bubbling with a mixture of anticipation and longing.

  Climbing the stairs, I went along the verandah to the front door and took out the key. As I jammed it in the lock, I noticed my fingers were trembling. The door crunched open, and the smell of mildew enveloped me. Drawing on my dwindling reserve of courage, I swept aside the cobwebs and went in.

  A narrow entryway led into a massive lounge room. The high ceiling was strung with spiderwebs, many of them still inhabited. Sunbeams struggled through the grimy windows, splashing eerie streaks of light across a threadbare Persian rug. Around the rug’s perimeter, the floorboards were dull with dust and littered with dead insects and dry leaves, and big drifty balls of what looked like cat hair.

  The furniture was mostly antique, but colonial rather than overstuffed English parlour, and would have looked at home in our Albert Park house. There were blackwood sideboards with curvy legs, leadlight china cabinets, and immense leather armchairs which, despite their mantle of dust, made me want to curl immediately among their generous cushions and lose myself in a good book.

  An ornate fretwork archway opened into an airy kitchen. Above the sink was a panelled window that cast oblongs of golden light across the floorboards. The cupboards were wood, and there was a square table with chairs arranged precisely around it. At the sink I twisted on a tap, cupped my hand under the flow. Sniffed the water, took a careful sip. It was cool and sweet.

  I peered out the window, saw the curve of an old corrugated iron water tank mostly covered by creepers. Beyond it was a jungle of fruit trees and grevillea. Another brick path forged through banks of out-of-control nasturtiums then disappeared beneath a dense overhang of shadowy trees.

  ‘Nice backyard,’ I said, as Bronwyn clattered into the kitchen.

  She joined me at the window and we stood looking out. The Albert Park house had a cramped concrete courtyard where even weeds struggled to take hold. Slivers of Port Phillip Bay had compensated for the indignity of living in a rundown old renovator, but I hadn’t realised until now how much I’d been craving the sight of some greenery.

  Off the kitchen I found a huge bathroom, complete with roomy old clawfoot tub. Dried flowers littered the floor beneath the window, where sprays of wild jasmine poked their tendrils through a broken pane. I caught Bronwyn’s eye in the vanity mirror.

  ‘It needs work – cleaning, a few repairs. But it’s a lovely old house, isn’t it?’

  Bronwyn scowled, elbowing past me. Mystified, I followed her back out to the lounge room. A narrow hallway branched off into another wing of the house. An ancient carpet runner sank beneath my shoes, and along one wall hung a line of black and white photos. I paused to study them: stark images of windswept trees, a tiny weatherboard chapel, and what looked to be an old schoolhouse. Bronwyn made a bored sound and stomped off.

  I found her clattering around in the first bedroom. The room was sparsely furnished – a bed, a dressing table, a colossal wardrobe. Bronwyn was fussing about as if in search of hidden treasure – sliding open the dressing table drawers, sticking her head into the wardrobe as though expecting an enchanted doorway to appear in the back panel.

  ‘What are you looking for?’

  She glared at me and hurried back into the hall without a word. I was puzzled. For a girl who’d been so eager to get here, she was acting as if she couldn’t wait to leave.

  The next two rooms were the same – sparse decor, simply furnished. The smallest bedroom overlooking the front garden had a bay window inbuilt with a day seat.

  ‘Oh, how lovely,’ I said, turning to Bronwyn. ‘It’d be great with comfy cushions, you could sit here and read. Just look at that view!’

  ‘I won’t be sitting there,’ Bronwyn pointed out, ‘because I won’t be living here. If anyone sits there to read, it’ll be the people who buy the place off us.’ Before I could reply, she’d turned on her heel and stalked off.

  I stared after her, baffled. For weeks, she’d chattered non-stop about Thornwood, bubbling over with eagerness to see it, even nagging me to move up here . . . which was out of the question, because our lives were too deeply entrenched in Melbourne. The nagging had finally stopped, and I assumed she’d resigned herself to the fact we’d be selling the old place . . . but clearly I was wrong.

  I looked around, seeing the house through Bronwyn’s eyes: A spacious old mansion with lots of secret nooks and crannies, big airy rooms, and a wonderful garden to explore. More intriguingly, her father had probably spent much time here as a boy. It was easy to see why Thornwood might appeal to her . . . but could she really want to live here?

  I followed her along the hall, down another passageway lit by more tall windows. At the end of the passage we found a fourth bedroom. It was more cluttered than the other rooms, full of personal belongings, as if someone was still living there.

  An antique sleigh bed was pushed against the far wall, its mattress sunken, its head and footboards woolly with dust. Opposite crouched a wardrobe with curved doors, and near the window sat an old-fashioned dressing table backed by an oval mirror. My reflection rippled in the glass as I approached. On top of the dresser was a collection of objects: brush and comb, a dusty little book that on closer inspection turned out to be an old Bible; cufflinks in a dish – once opulent, now dull with tarnish, forgotten.

  I was about to turn away when a framed photograph on the wall near the window caught my eye. It was a portrait of a man standing in the rose arbour in the front garden. The roses had been in bloom when the picture was taken – large dark-hearted flowers that seemed too heavy for the leafy brackets they sprouted from.

  The photo was rectangular, the size of a paperback, and sat crookedly inside its silver frame. Its edges were ragged, as though they’d been cut hastily with a pair of scissors. A little brown huntsman had made its home in a corner of the frame, and a couple of ancient fly carcasses dangled from the base like pom-poms.

  I peered closer. The man had to be Tony’s grandfather, though there was no way of knowing for certain. He was nothing like Tony . . . and yet I had the oddest feeling I’d seen him before – which was impossible, because Tony had never even spoken about his family history, let alone produced any photo albums for us to pore over. Even so, there was something about the intense eyes, the stern fullness of his mouth, the strikingly handsome face, that rang a chord with me . . . as if somewhere, a long time ago, I’d known him –

  ‘Mum?’

  ‘Hmmm?’

  ‘Can we go now?’

  I tore my attention from the photo and looked around. Bronwyn stood at the end of the bed, carving her initials in the dust.

  ‘Honey, we just got here.’

  ‘I don’t care. I want to go.’

  ‘But you haven’t even poked about in the garden.’

  ‘It’s just old trees and stuff. Bor-ing.’

  I sighed. ‘Bronny, we travelled all this way . . . You were so looking forward to exploring the old house. Why do you want to leave all of a sudden?’

  ‘What’s the point in exploring? We’re only going to sell it, so someone else can live here.’

  ‘Oh, Bron,’ I said, crossing to put my arm around her shoulders. ‘We’ve talked about all this before. We can’t move up here. What about our life in Melbourne? What about your friends, and school . . . and my work contacts? We’d be crazy to give all that away to come and live in an old house in the middle of nowhere – ’

  Bronwyn shrugged me off and stalked to the door. As she disappeared back into the passageway I heard her mutter, ‘Whatever.’

  After locking the h
ouse, I went down the stairs and along the brick path. The grass was thigh-high and thick with weeds, but it smelled of sunlight and the seed heads were alive with butterflies.

  I detoured over to the rose arbour. It looked ancient, buckled in parts and eaten by rust in others, with gnarled remnants of vine still clinging to its wrought-iron supports. I recalled the man in the photo. Tony’s grandfather. He’d been standing in this very archway, where I now stood, his face and shoulders dappled by sunlight, his dark eyes fixed on the photographer. Again I caught myself wondering why he seemed familiar. Perhaps he bore a fleeting resemblance to Tony, after all – ?

  A horn blared, nipping short my musings.

  Back at the car I found Bronwyn already belted up in the passenger seat. She was glowering through the window, arms crossed, cheeks hot-pink, sweat blistering her hairline. I could tell an argument was brewing, possibly a tantrum.

  I looked back at the house.

  It hovered in the blazing afternoon light, a pale island in a sea of gently rippling grass, ghostly and silent. It seemed anchored to another time, a solitary remnant of an era that had long ago ceased to exist. Even the insects buzzing in the grass and the crows cawing mournfully overhead seemed to belong to a place that wasn’t quite real.

  If anyone had asked me to put into words what I was feeling at that moment, I’d have been unable to say. I tried to recall another instance when my arms had rippled with tingles, when the same delicious stillness of heart had rendered me incapable of speech . . . but in truth, I’d never before felt such a sense of belonging.

  I wanted to run back along the brick pathway, hurry through the clumps of dandelion and seeding weed-heads, through the bobbing swarms of bees and butterflies, and fling myself back into the old house’s shadowy embrace. I was itching to roll up my sleeves and start clearing cobwebs and dust, spend the afternoon fossicking among the treasures that I knew must be hidden within those forgotten nooks and cubbyholes. I wanted to lose myself in the labyrinth of rooms, get covered in ancient dust, soak up memories that weren’t mine . . . and only surface once my desire to know the place more intimately had been satisfied. I was already fantasising about the renovation: who I’d call, what jobs I could do myself –

  Bronwyn honked the horn again. ‘Hurry up, Mum.’

  My pleasure-glow winked out. Reality crashed back. I had job contacts in Melbourne that I’d spent a decade developing; Bronwyn had school. Not to mention our various networks of friends, and the comfortable monotony of our city environment. Moving to another state, to a remote old house, making a clean break and starting our lives over . . . Well, even the idea of it was intimidating.

  I flopped into the driver’s seat and slammed the door. Dug the key into the ignition. The motor rumbled, then idled quietly while I sat rock-still, frowning at the windscreen.

  Aunt Morag had always insisted she had restless blood. That was why we never stayed long in any one place. She’d earned a modest living as an artist’s model, which allowed her the freedom to relocate whenever the whim took her . . . which was often. When I was a child, we lived in a never-ending succession of basements, warehouses, ramshackle shacks on the outskirts of dusty suburbs; tiny, musty apartments, or stately old mansions fallen to disrepair and rented for a song. We even spent a year in a sculptor’s studio, bedding down among an assortment of plaster busts and huge blocks of powdery marble, surrounded by treelike flower arrangements and podiums topped with plastic-enshrouded clay. We stayed until Aunty and the sculptor had a falling out, and then we moved on.

  It wasn’t until my teens that I learned the truth about my aunt’s restless blood. After an overheard phone-call, the dots had joined. My mother was a drug addict who pestered Morag for money. Our frequent moves from place to place, it seemed, were less about Aunt Morag’s arty whims, and more about avoiding her sister-in-law’s teary confrontations.

  When Morag died a few weeks shy of my seventeenth birthday, I fell into the only pattern I knew. I began to drift from place to place, making temporary homes in shared houses, squats, dubious one-room rentals. I slept on couches, bunked down on floors and, for several weeks one summer, even camped on a leafy inner city rooftop.

  When I met Tony, all that changed. He took a mortgage on the old bluestone terrace in Albert Park, and then Bronwyn came along. For the first time in my life I had a real anchor, a family; a reason to settle in one place long enough to discover that I liked it. Not just liked it; needed it –

  ‘Mum?’ Bronwyn was peering across at me. Sweat beaded her brow, tendrils of hair clung to her face. ‘We’d better get going.’

  I made a show of glancing at my wrist, although my watch was lying at the bottom of my tote with a broken strap. ‘There’s plenty of time,’ I told her. ‘Why the hurry?’

  ‘I’m not in a hurry. I’m just bored.’

  I searched her profile, worried by the wall of resistance she was putting up, wondering how much of it had to do with Tony.

  ‘You’re allowed to speak about your father,’ I ventured. ‘You know – ask questions, that sort of thing. I won’t mind.’

  A sigh from the seat beside me. ‘Mum, I’m all right.’

  ‘If you ever want to – ’ Talk, I’d been about to say. If you ever want to talk about him, I’m here. But then I noticed her hunched shoulders, her fingers curled into protective fists, the pallor of her face – and decided I’d said enough.

  Gravel popped under the tyres as we swung a U-turn and eased down the access road in a cloud of red dust. To our left, the garden receded into a forest of eucalypt saplings. On the right the hill dropped steeply away, plunging into a bowl-like valley where gumtrees cast long shadows across the paddocks. Sheltering in the patchy shade were white specks, probably cattle.

  The valley vanished as the road was engulfed on either side by tall ironbarks and thickets of bottlebrush and acacia and prickly hedges of blackthorn. As the way grew dark, my thoughts returned to Aunt Morag: her pudgy, waxy face framed by a fuzz of henna-red hair, her twinkling hazel eyes that somehow outshone the diamond ring she wore on her small freckled hand. She’d been always on the move, chattering nonstop, rushing through life like a purple-clad tornado.

  Aunt Morag had believed that the human heart was a sort of barometer. Only rather than measuring atmospheric pressure, it allowed a person to more easily navigate their life’s convoluted path. ‘You’ll get that ache,’ she used to say, tapping her fingers in the hollow of my bony ten-year-old ribcage, ‘a sort of tightness in the middle of your chest, just behind your breastbone. Don’t go fobbing it off as indigestion, my girl – it’s your internal barometer warning you that you’re about to make a dingo’s breakfast out of your life.’

  I stepped on the brake pedal and killed the ignition. Keeping my eyes on the track ahead, I groped around inside myself. Sure enough, I had the symptoms: An ache in my chest. An edgy throb of foreboding. A shortness of breath as I realised that something special was about to slip through my fingers. My barometer reading was loud and clear: You want this, so go for it. But how could I violate the resolutions I’d made in Melbourne? Rather than consigning Tony to the ancient history basket and moving on with my life, I was seriously considering thrusting myself – and my daughter – into a past that even Tony had fled.

  And yet . . .

  In my mind I saw the back bedroom with its rosewood dresser and sunken sleigh bed, and the photograph in its dusty silver frame. The man in the picture regarded me from the rose arbour, his expression seductive, his dark eyes commanding, almost hypnotic, as if willing me back to him –

  ‘I’ve made a decision.’

  Bronwyn’s head snapped towards me, a frown puckering her forehead. In that instant she looked uncannily like her father. Of course, she was fair-haired while he was dark, but the high cheekbones, the wide-spaced sapphire eyes, the bony features that made her so striking to look at, were all distinctively his.

  I gave a little cough, strangely nervous. ‘What if we were to mov
e here . . . ?’

  ‘Move here?’ Bronwyn echoed incredulously.

  I saw hope flit into her eyes, but it was quickly hidden. I realised she’d been protecting herself, and my heart wrenched. I stole a look in the rear-view mirror. Somewhere behind us, the old homestead slumbered in its timeless sea of grass. I imagined unpacking my boxes in its cavernous lounge room, crowding the empty spaces with my own belongings. I pictured myself waking in the darkest hour of the night, listening to the old house creak and sigh around me. I remembered the taste of rainwater from the kitchen tap, surprisingly cold and sweet. The giant bathtub, the jasmine poking through the broken window. The sun-drenched rooms with their elegant hand-carved furniture, the stillness that lay over the place like a gently held breath . . . and – dreamlike in its intensity – the image of a dark-haired man smiling from an old black and white photograph.

  A powerful yearning gripped me.

  I looked at my daughter. ‘The old house might take ages to sell,’ I reasoned. ‘It needs painting and heaps of repairs. If we moved in we could clean it up ourselves, make it exactly how we want. We do need a home, after all . . . and think of all that country air – no more traffic fumes or nosy neighbours, no more peak-hour holdups. We’d have room to breathe here, it’d be like a fresh start, a whole new life . . .’

  Bronwyn stared at me wide-eyed. ‘Really, Mum? You want us to live here?’

  Tingles went up my spine. I nodded.

  Bronwyn let out a shriek of unrestrained joy. Suddenly she was in my arms, all pointy elbows and skinny shoulders and giggles, hugging me tighter than she had in years.