CHAPTER 5
SWEET MORNING
WE WAKE TO A glorious sunny day. Ian has had a slightly better night than my few hours of thin dozing, but we’re both too excited to feel hung-over or jaded and there is work to do so we spring out of bed. We have four people booked for two days to help us clean and we know they won’t be late. There is a fresh skip in our step this morning. We have survived the night. If we can do it once, we can do it again – and again and again.
As soon as we’ve had a cup of tea, we dash into Andy’s Foodstore, which is open all hours, and return with a boot-load of powerful light globes. Ian is soon up the stepladder replacing and discarding what last night seemed like five or ten watters, if you can buy such things. Tonight we’ll have the comfort of normal levels of brightness. Just as Ian is fitting the final globe, two cars pull up outside and we know the hard work is about to start.
Darren and Diane run a cleaning business in Maryborough and have bought along two others to help: Diane’s aunt, Nola, and Nola’s husband, Cyril. There are greetings, handshakes, expressions of gratitude that they are willing to work on a Saturday, then the six of us commence the big clean up.
We scrub walls and fireplaces, wash chandeliers, kitchen cupboards, floors, doors, skirting boards, windows and every other available surface. Of course, our efforts are a Bandaid: with total renovation to face, the house is soon going to get worse than dirty, but we need to get the caked-on grime and stale, musty odours out if we are to live here during the renovation.
It’s amazing how fast you can get things done with so many helpers. Twelve busy hands are cutting through this seemingly insurmountable task at a cracking rate. The first morning, we attack the living room. Darren and Diane are doing tricky, professional stuff up on ladders. Ian, Cyril and Nola concentrate on the finer details: skirting boards, doors, mantelpieces and chandeliers. I’m doing windows, dragging the extension ladder from one end of the room to the other as I go.
We’ve decided I’ll just do the inside of the glass at this stage, which makes the job much easier, though the inside is a hundred times dirtier than the outside which has had the benefit of an occasional wash by the weather. I’m almost needing a garden trowel to shovel off the muck and suspect the glass is wearing the grime of decades. It takes several cleans of each window to get through the accumulated black grime, but I’m loving the satisfaction of making the glass sparkle then throwing open the windows to let in the first fresh air these rooms have enjoyed for years.
‘We’re going to need a general handyman,’ says Ian, halfway through the morning. ‘Someone who can fix all those little problems, not part of the main overhaul. Someone patient. Someone who understands old houses.’
Ian, although strong in the arm and always willing to work till he’s the last man standing, knows he lacks the patience, skill and finesse to carry out these sorts of jobs.
‘Sounds like you’re describing Cyril,’ says Darren.
‘Cyril’s a perfectionist,’ adds Nola.
Ian and I beam at Cyril. Cyril, we already know, was once in the Air Force. Retired now, he has the sort of time on his hands we might need.
‘There’s just one problem,’ says Nola, glancing at her husband.
Cyril looks down from the chandelier he’s meticulously attending to, ‘I only work for family,’ he says, with an apologetic shake of the head, and returns to rubbing each and every dusty crystal till they are all glinting and gleaming.
Only family. We are disappointed. We’ve watched Cyril at work for hours. He’s methodical, careful, with gentle hands and a keen eye. We know he’s fascinated by the old house, drawn to it, as we are. We press him, but he will not bend his rules.
We work on, dragging our equipment from room to room, upstairs and down, stopping for tea breaks, returning to work, stopping, returning, but always chatting. It’s wonderful to feel the house growing cleaner. It still looks an absolute fright, and will until the walls are repaired and painted, but it’s beginning to smell fresh and the clouds of dust in the air have diminished.
On the second day we are all in the dining room, chatting as we work. I’m up my ladder doing more windows. Darren and Diane are also on ladders, balancing buckets on trestles, looking frighteningly like the main act of a Chinese circus as they wipe down our walls. Cyril is at the fireplace, caressing the ornate woodwork with a soft cloth and a touch of oil. Ian and Nola are crouched doing skirting boards. I don’t like being up my ladder much. There have been a few wobbling incidents this morning that have challenged my nerves. I’ve got my eye on Ian’s crouching-at-the-skirting-boards job. I know I’m better at crouching than Ian, whose chunky build seems to get in the way of useful flexibility, and am just about to ask him to swap jobs when I hear him ask Nola if she’s always lived in Maryborough.
Nola shakes her head. ‘We were in Mackay before we came here.’
‘Hot up there,’ remarks Ian.
‘We’ve lived all over really,’ she says, ‘but originally I’m from Mundubbera.’
‘A Mundubbera girl?’ There’s a grain of surprise in Ian’s voice. ‘Small world. My mother grew up in Mundubbera.’
‘Oh,’ says Nola, ‘what was her name?’
‘You wouldn’t have known her,’ he says, dunking his sponge back in the bucket. ‘She’d have been a good forty years older than you. She left Mundubbera when she was married, but her maiden name was Bloxsome.’
Nola laughs. ‘Bloxsome? My sister’s niece is married to a Bloxsome. Richard Bloxsome. She’s his second wife.’
‘Richard Bloxsome is my first cousin,’ says Ian, and Ian and I both shoot looks at Cyril. ‘Guess that makes us family, eh, Cyril?’
Cyril shakes his head in disbelief, smiling. None of us can quite believe the coincidence, but all are delighted by it. Ian and I have found ourselves an ally who time will prove we could not have done without.
Early in the week we have to drive back to Montville to supervise the removal of my furniture. I don’t want to go. Already I’m experiencing a huge, tugging wrench at the thought of leaving Baddow. Ian is keeping his house in Montville, along with most of his furniture, seeing as he’ll need somewhere to stay when he’s down there once a week. But I’ve sold my house, so everything I own will be migrating to Maryborough. Of course I have to go.
It’s a massive few days. My house is built on three awkward levels, some of the steps are steep and narrow with tight corners, which means that larger items of furniture have to be trussed up and lowered over the balcony. Half way through the process, the men realise they can drive their truck right up to the base of the balcony, and everything – cushions, paintings, mirrors, boxes crammed with my existence thus far – gets hurled over the railings and caught by strong hands below. I can’t watch. I spend the day lugging clothes and pot plants out of the back door, filling my little car and Ian’s ute.
We drive in convoy up to Baddow, unload and stay one night, then drive back again because the removalists slightly underestimated the quantity of my belongings and a second journey is necessary. Then it’s down to Montville for a third time, to clean my empty house before, finally, the move is done. I’m ill with exhaustion, the final journey north is a blur punctuated with constant stops to take in caffeine.
But back at Baddow my flagging spirits soar. Every particle of me recognises this as Home, as the place I want to be for ever. The house is a pile of furniture, boxes and strewn clothes, but I know there’s no hurry. I can sift and sort in my own good time. With so many rooms, for now we can shove all the mess into places we don’t need to use.
Furniture is not the only late addition to Baddow. Topsy, Ian’s solid old cattle dog, comes north to live. We’ve avoided bringing her until now, concerned that all the mucking around back and forth might unsettle her. Topsy is nervy, distrustful of people, grumpy, greedy and lovable. She hides at the first hint of danger, at any sudden noise – the crack of a whip, the slam of a door – yet is fearless when it comes to killin
g snakes. A coward with killer instinct, Topsy’s psyche is too complex to fathom. But today, jumping out of Ian’s ute, taking a first sniff at her new home, she seems both excited and content.
Days tick by. The nights aren’t great, but they are better than the first one. There is still much accompanying each other upstairs after dark, shared bathroom visits, and plenty of leaving lights on everywhere. However the lights are now dazzling and, with our furniture in place, the echoing emptiness that was once so disturbing is no more.
But I still can’t conceive of even considering thinking about being here alone.
We don’t mention the Deal, but Ian postpones going away so he can help me with settling in. I’m unspeakably grateful.
My night fear is a strange contradiction to the way I feel about the house at other times. It is anathema to the warm envelopment I sense whenever I step inside Baddow’s walls, a mystery that something I love so much should have the power to frighten me, but it does. Every day, when dusk falls, there’s an unwelcome shift. Colours fade, shadows deepen and the birds in the garden grow quiet. It’s all too easy to imagine the rustle of a long skirt on the step, or the tap of a booted foot on the staircase.
I know I’m a victim of my overactive imagination, and yearn for the security of commonsense, to have been born with a steady, plodding head, incapable of such flights of foolish fancy. Perhaps one day surgeons will be able to lobotomise that part of a person’s brain. A quick hit with a laser and zap: reality rules.
Then Ian admits he couldn’t face a night on his own either just yet, which makes me feel a bit less foolish, seeing as Ian is far more of a risk-lover than me. But his confession has the unfortunate side-effect of giving credibility to my fears, of feeding them, of making them real and legitimate. If Ian is afraid, I reason, there must be good cause.
So, for now, there is no Deal. We are babes in the same wood and must stick together.
During the day, however, I’m content in my pottering, unpacking and sorting. We’re having bright clear weather, the rooms are awash with more sunlight than they’ve known in decades, and I throw open every window in the house to let the fresh spring air pour through.
Already I’m planning colour schemes and running to the paint shop in town for colour charts and tester pots. But I must be patient. Our first real job is the underpinning of the subsided north-western end of the house. We’ve had quotes, booked workers, and are now awaiting their arrival. In the meantime, there’s a sense of kicking our heels, of biding our time. There’s not much we can do before the underpinning, which will cause some movement to the house and probably create a few more cracks. But we can explore, discover and plan. And perhaps plenty of planning time is good: we are less likely to make mistakes.
We grow increasingly conscious that in Baddow House we have taken on more than a family home. It’s a unique and vital part of Maryborough’s history, the home of Maryborough’s ‘Founding Father’. We want to get it right, to do the job better than well. We want to give the house the restoration it deserves, to return its appearance to that which Edgar Aldridge desired and so meticulously planned for.
I feel deeply drawn to Edgar and Maria Aldridge. Perhaps because their dream has become my dream. Edgar succeeded in creating something astonishing in his time and I wonder what drove him. Perhaps it was ambition: the desire to own the grandest house in town and show all the other pretenders who was the real king of the heap in this blossoming corner of the new colony. Aldridge’s Castle. I’m sure this name was facetiously coined, and can only speculate on the spirit of competition, the envy, that must have existed in a time and place where a poor man, with enough hard work and acumen, could make his fortune fast.
But I wonder if it was all one-upmanship with Edgar. There’s a tale that Baddow House was modelled on a house in his childhood village of Little Baddow in Essex, England. A house he admired and hankered after and, when fortune permitted, built for himself. When you look at the six fireplaces he installed in this, his new, sub-tropical home, you get a sense of just how deep his pangs of home sickness must have been.
We begin to encounter wildlife.
The back door is seriously ill-fitting and leaves a gap of about fifteen centimetres to the ground. This doesn’t keep out much of anything smaller than a wild pig.
The cane toad menace begins.
Now, I’m not a complete wimp who’s going to jump onto a chair and scream at the sight of anything that scurries, hops or crawls, but I don’t like cane toads.
I’ve read that if you touch them they can squirt enough poison in your eyes to blind you for life. When my children were little, their favourite bedtime stories were such things as Dangerous Australians, The Unexplained, Weird and Wonderful Facts, Ripley’s Believe It or Not. My brain is still a font of how-you-are-most-likely-to-die trivia. Ask me which dinosaur had the longest claws, I can tell you. Ask me how many millilitres of poison a Taipan can drip down its fangs in a five second penetration, I can tell you. Believe me, I know about cane toads.
If Ian’s around when a toad ventures under the door, I yell for him to do the deed. If not, I fetch the dustpan and brush, scoop the toad up and pin it down with the flat end of the brush, shut my eyes and bolt outside. Then I lob it as far as my best throwing arm can lob a toad. As I don’t find concussed toads littering the lawn each morning, I imagine they cope well with this airborne experience. That, cat-like, they spread their limbs, land lightly and make good their escape.
But of course they return – why, we don’t know, but come they do. Light as a cat. Cunning as a cat. They hide under shrubs, wait till I’m gone, then hop in again. The evidence is clear in their droppings that I have to clean off the kitchen floor every morning. Luckily there is another door that separates the kitchen from the rest of the house. This door fits flush to the floor and we close it every night to keep the toads at bay. This door becomes known as the ‘Toad Door’.
I’m really surprised that we don’t have a serious rodent problem. If ever you saw a house likely to be teeming with rats and mice, it would be our house. There is the fifteen centimetre gap under the back door for starters. Then there are the gaps in the floorboards, the gaps between floorboards and skirting boards and, of course, there are the cracks in the walls. If I can get my arms through these cracks, they are not going to keep rats out.
But we don’t see rats or mice. We don’t hear any, and we don’t find any droppings. I’m delighted, but amazed and confused. Perhaps they are scared of the ghosts.
One morning, sitting in the kitchen, we hear scraping sounds from the ceiling overhead. Ian says, ‘there’s your answer’.
‘Pythons,’ I whisper.
‘Only one, I expect,’ says Ian.
And of course I know about snakes. I know they are territorial. But my bedtime-story-gleaned scientific knowledge is at odds with the suspicion that no one python could consume the number of rodents that surely must want to populate our house. I imagine colonies of writhing coils above our heads. The only pity is that they don’t devour the cane toads.
Before the end of the first week Ian goes into town on an errand. It’s my first time in the house totally alone and, though it’s broad daylight, I’m not one hundred per cent comfortable. I try to be. I wander about; I go upstairs, then down again. I hang out of windows and look at the brightness of the day.
I try to exude confidence, to give out a proprietorial this is my home and isn’t it all just wonderful sort of air. It’s not working. I want to go outside. I want to escape to the safety of the great outdoors where birds are tweeting and grass is growing and clouds are scudding across the sky. The stillness of the house is almost crushing. It’s the silence of the mausoleum; thick, thick walls keeping out the pulse of life. I want music, I want noise, any noise. I go into the airy, sunny living room, sit on one of the sofas and plonk my feet on the coffee table. ‘Hello,’ I say out loud. First sign of madness, talking to yourself. Or so we always said at school. ‘Hello,’ I
say again. I’m not sure who I’m talking to, but suddenly it seems like precisely the thing to be doing. ‘If you can hear me,’ I say, ‘listen well, because this is important.’
I pause for effect, waiting for any listeners to gather, to tune in. I’m very aware of the lunacy of my behaviour, but have no intention of stopping. ‘I love this house,’ I say. ‘If you want to stay here, I understand, because you love this house too.’ I’m searching for the right words, wanting my words to have the desired impact. ‘I don’t mind at all if you stay,’ I say, which is not strictly true, ‘in fact, I welcome you. But there are conditions.’ I pause again, making myself believe my words. If I don’t believe them, how can I expect anyone – or any thing else – to? Sincerity is essential. ‘My conditions are these: I never ever want to see you. And I never ever want to hear you. Abide by my terms and we can all be happy.’
I leave the room feeling somewhat foolish but very much better.
CHAPTER 6
DODGING THE DEAL
IAN’S SISTER ANN ARRIVES to stay. It’s brilliant to have someone else in the house which still seems far too big and echoey for the two of us. Ann doesn’t mind braving the splintering floorboards with her bare feet, or eating in a kitchen that has been condemned. Nor does she mind having no curtains and being woken at dawn by a laser of sunlight slicing into her eyes.
I’m very excited to welcome Ann to Baddow. I pretty up her room as best I can. There’s no disguising the cracks in the walls, which are awesome in this corner of the house, but I unpack and wash sheets and a bed cover. Though it’s the first week of September, a time when the garden should be a riot of spring colour, there’s not much flowering in our neglected beds. I find a meagre few freesias – poor, drab specimens, but their scent is sweet and I pick them all for the mantelpiece in Ann’s bedroom. Ann is wonderful. With Ann there is no sense whatsoever of pessimism about our relationship. She loves our new house, she loves us and she loves what we are doing.
A Grand Passion Page 5