A Grand Passion

by Anne De Lisle

  Ann is fun-loving and happy, naughty but nice. She’s a female version of Ian, though she’s far, far prettier. Her visit gives us a huge injection of confidence. She oohs and aahs at the devastated splendour of the house, is suitably shocked by the Big Crack and suitably excited at the prospect of the restoration.

  We tell her about our ghosts, about Esse’s tears and the many sightings of a woman on the stairs. When her eyes grow round, we’re quick to assure her that we haven’t seen anything. Yet. We don’t confess that, once our contract was signed and unconditional, the previous owners told us of the woman on the stairs, and that it is ‘only a matter of time’ before we, too, will see her.

  Ann and her husband Ted live in a town called Miles, four hours drive west in the sort of territory I consider the Outback, but that Ian insists is not the real Outback at all.

  I love visiting Miles. It looks like the Australia I learned about in geography classes at school but failed to discover when I moved out from England and found myself in the lush, green hills of Montville. Miles is set in flat, dry, sparsely treed country. There are cattle properties and wheat properties, scattered evidence of human settlement on wide, wide horizons.

  The sky at Miles is astonishingly blue and at night the stars are brighter and more numerous than I’ve ever seen in my life. The first time I stayed at Miles, Ted took me out under the stars to show me the Southern Cross. I’d seen it before, of course, but not like this. For every star I’m used to, there seems to be another hundred. The entire night sky is a living, glittering mass. I could live at Miles … if it weren’t for Baddow House.

  We venture into Maryborough with Ann.

  The main street, Kent Street, is dominated by the magnificent City Hall built in 1908. A brass cannon sits at the entrance. This is the Time Cannon, once used for accurate time-keeping. Every day at one pm the cannon was fired, reputed to be audible more than twenty miles away. It must have been startling to unsuspecting passers-by.

  The shops in the old streets of town are sparsely tenanted. We’re told this is because Station Square, an air-conditioned shopping plaza, opened only three years before. Half the stores in town moved into it.

  It’s a shame: the old streets are beautiful. Row upon row of lovely old shops with ornate façades built in an era when the town was wealthy, labour was cheap, and pride in the blossoming colony ran high. But some businesses have doggedly remained. There’s the department store, Dimmey’s, looking like a relic from the nineteen-fifties, with merchandise spread on tables, a few slow moving ceiling fans stirring the humid air. There’s a sprinkling of cafés and bakeries, a couple of shoe shops, a chemist, newsagent, framing gallery and a jewellery shop or two.

  There is also St Paul’s Anglican Church, with an enormous belltower built by Edgar Aldridge in memory of his beloved Maria. The tower is brick with decorative cement facings and battlements. It is twenty-seven metres high and houses nine bells, all cast in England. The bells were shipped out on the Eastminster in 1888 which, though arriving and delivering her cargo safely, was lost in a cyclone on her voyage home. The largest bell weighs one thousand and sixty-seven kilos, the smallest two hundred and ninety-five. All nine are inscribed: ‘To the Glory of God and to the Memory of Mrs Aldridge, 1886’. To this day, the nine bells peal out in Maria’s honour on the anniversary of her death. That this falls on St Patrick’s Day must be a matter of confusion for any unsuspecting Catholics in town.

  So much grandeur, so much history, so much potential. I fantasise about buying all the shops in town and renovating the lot of them. But with Baddow House to bleed us dry this is clearly not going to happen.

  There is a corner store called The Inconvenience Store, evidence that wit is alive and well in Maryborough. We pass a butcher’s shop advertising roo, emu, crocodile, goat, camel and buffalo. Not for the fainthearted or semi-vegetarian me. There is, of course, a pub on almost every corner, with rows of private little rooms upstairs; standard architecture for a town that was once a thriving port teeming with lusty, thirsty sailors.

  We can’t get enough of Wharf Street. We pass the Criterion Hotel, a three-storey pub, rebuilt after a fire in 1878. It’s a stunning monument to the architecture of that era, loaded with iron lacework and elaborate Victorian touches. We discover that it now houses a popular nightclub and that every Friday and Saturday night, its patrons disgorge at closing time, to rampage loudly and destructively along our precious Wharf Street, targeting the delicate, rusting lacework of the verandah of our favourite, the Customs House Hotel.

  The Customs House Hotel is a long two-storey brick building, with battered iron lacework decorating the verandahs upstairs and down. It is seriously run-down, there are holes in the rusting gutters and bits of rotten boards droop from the upstairs verandah. But this is part of the charm: a façade entirely unspoilt by over-eager renovators. This building is supposedly haunted too, which makes us feel a tug of the kindred spirit kind, but also an iota of jealousy. We are the official Ghost House after all, and we don’t want any pretenders to our title.

  We learn that the hotel has a tunnel to the river, used in the nineteenth century to float kegs of beer and other fare up to the cellars. An ingenious saving of man power. But today’s proprietor of the hotel tells us that, though their tunnel was built for purposes of convenience and storage, it soon degenerated into an opium den and illegal gaming hell, along with many other cellars in town.

  We read early newspaper reports of the stifling heat in the opium dens, and the ‘stenches as thick as a main sewer mingled with opium fumes’. Opium was still a legal substance in those days, so the police could do little to close these places down, unless they could prove gambling or serious health concerns.

  The Gympie gold rush played its part in Maryborough’s turbulent, prosperous past. Though the fickle goldfields made some men rich, many others were ruined. A far more reliable source of income was to milk the miners. Plenty of traders in Maryborough did just that, making a fortune supplying the miners with the tools of their hopeful trade, food, tents and every other necessity.

  What a hot-bed of hard drinking, opium smoking, brothel-patronising vice our town was in its frontier days. But in George Loyau’s book, The History of Maryborough, published in 1897, he writes that by the 1880s ‘the orgies, revelries and devilries of ancient times’ were a thing of the past.

  Clearly Maryborough was moving on to a golden age of trade, expansion, respectability and prosperity. The town became a centre for the fledgling wool, timber and sugar industries of Queensland. The port grew busier and larger with every passing year, until the jetties extended for more than two kilometres.

  There was timber, wool, sugar and cotton to export, and there were people to import. More than twenty thousand new immigrants first touched Australian soil in Maryborough. They trudged up Wharf Street, laden with children and worldly belongings, to be processed at the Customs House.

  Today, Muddy Waters Café occupies the only scrap of remaining one hundred and fifty year old timber wharf and we quickly realise we have discovered our favourite eating place. The food is great and it’s a perfect spot to watch the river slug by and imagine those early bustling days.

  After sustaining cups of tea and friands, Ann, Ian and I wander back to the top of Wharf Street. On the corner of Richmond and Wharf streets, we find the Maryborough Heritage Centre. Here, the three of us examine grainy pictures of immigrant ships and lists of passengers, recognising some contemporary Maryborough names amongst the new arrivals. We discover that the author of Mary Poppins, P.L. Travers, was born in Maryborough. That Maryborough was once one of the busiest ports in Australia, second only to Sydney, and that back in the eighteen-fifties, when Queensland was on the cusp of becoming independent from New South Wales, it was a toss up between Maryborough and Brisbane to be declared capital of the new state.

  We flick through leaflets and buy a couple of little books on Maryborough’s glorious past.

  Ian can be guaranteed to get ch
atting with strangers every time he’s let out of the house. Today is no exception. He’s gossiping with the lady behind the counter.

  ‘Baddow House, you say?’

  ‘Yes,’ he tells her, ‘we moved in about a week ago. Splendid old home. Amazing no one has brought it up to scratch before.’

  ‘People were afraid,’ she says to him, and I fancy I see her eyes dart about nervously. ‘I went there once, years ago now. Took my mother …’ she shakes her head, as if the memory is too painful.

  ‘Back when it was a museum?’ suggests Ian. Though I don’t know why he’s encouraging her.

  She nods. ‘There’s a room,’ she says.

  ‘Yes,’ I can’t help joining in at this, ‘there are several.’

  My sarcasm is lost.

  ‘To the left after the entrance. A big room.’

  ‘That would be the dining room,’ I say.

  She nods. ‘That’d be it. Well, could we set foot in that room? Never,’ she says, ‘something terrible happened in there, and that’s a fact.’

  ‘What sort of something terrible?’ Ian asks.

  ‘I couldn’t tell you,’ she says, ‘but there’s no one and nothing’d make me go in there.’

  Great. I’d been rather proud of our grand dining room, with its lofty ceilings, magnificent cedar fireplace and deep bay window. I had exciting plans for it. Now I’m going to be scared of it.

  ‘You can’t take any notice of that sort of talk,’ says Ann bracingly.

  We’re strolling back to the car, heading home. Though she’s far too young to be my mother, Ann manages to make me feel all mothered, nurtured and cared for. It’s a universal thing with Ann. In Miles she’s known throughout the community as ‘Mummy’.

  ‘I know,’ I say. ‘It’s superstitious garbage but sometimes, when you’re alone in those cavernous rooms, it’s hard to remember.’

  She presses my arm. ‘In time it’ll get easier. You’ll paint the walls, you’ll make it your own home and, when that’s done, you’ll laugh at all this Ghost House stuff.’

  Ann has to return to Miles and her Ted. Ian’s business commitments in Montville are screaming for attention. Apart from the tenancies and shops that need attending to, he is up to his neck in his ‘Rangeview’ project in Maleny, close by Montville. This is thirty hectares of an old dairy farm that Ian is developing, with the intention of on-selling for housing. The success of Rangeview is really important if we are to be able to handle the expected costs of renovating. But it’s going to mean three days and two nights away each week. The moment the Deal is to become a reality looms. I need a stay of execution and invite Scott Bain, an old friend from Montville, to stay.

  Ian and I have known Scott for years. Scott isn’t fanciful, Scott doesn’t believe in ghosts. I can remember a time when Scott house-sat for some ghost-believing friends in Montville. He stayed in their ‘haunted’ house for weeks while they were in England. He scoffed at their ghostly claims. He is the man for the job.

  Ian farewells us, and I sleep really soundly, knowing that only a wall separates Scott the Unbeliever from me. We joke together during the day, do a bit of gardening, eat lunch at Muddy Waters, laugh at the nerves of a tradesman’s apprentice who refuses to come into the house.

  I’m more relaxed than I have been since we arrived. Increasingly, I realise that Ian and I set each others’ fears off. My wild colonial boy, I call him, and he loves it; loves to think he’s an untamed adventurer: flouting rules, running risks, dodging danger with aplomb yet loyal and chivalrous to the end. And he is all of these things, but he’s also as imaginative and fanciful as I am.

  I’m pleased with my diagnosis, because a problem identified and acknowledged, is a problem on its way to being solved. Together we will kick this ghost thing and, in the meantime, I have Scott.

  Scott is small, neat and dapper. An absolute gentleman, with the quaint and perfect manners of another age. He has a fierce wit and a fountain of amusing trivia stored in his smart little head. He seems to be related to half the population of Queensland and knows everything about everyone. A veritable oracle when it comes to Queensland history, gossip and lore. Scott is also a keen and expert gardener; he inspires me hugely.

  So while Ian is away, we begin to plan the garden. Maryborough sits on a latitude of twenty-five degrees south, more tropical than I’ve become used to, and I can’t grow a lot of my favourite plants from Montville which, being slightly south of Maryborough and high in the hills, has a cooler climate. But many of the trees and shrubs of my childhood in Malaya thrive here.

  My father was a Gurkha officer in the British Army, in the days when the Gurkhas were always stationed in the ‘Far East’. Life was a nomadic existence between Malaya, Singapore, Hong Kong and Brunei. A tropical, exotic childhood of privilege and recreation. We swam, holidayed in the cool, jungle-covered highlands and, at home, played mah-jong and tennis and enjoyed the garden that we didn’t have to tend with our own pale hands.

  I’m determined my hands will toil long and hard over Baddow’s garden. Frangipanis, bougainvilleas, allamandas, gardenias. Our garden will take me back to my lush, rich, scented, bright and tropical childhood. If only we can find enough water.

  The river is tidal and salty. We’re told that drilling a bore will probably result in water too salty for the garden, that our chances of finding fresh water are slim. I remember that Elizabeth from Mavisbank is an accomplished diviner and the day Scott leaves I invite her up to wield her rod.

  I’m a bit sceptical but fascinated nevertheless. Elizabeth strolls about the garden with a forked piece of willow clasped in her gentle fingers. Every now and again she stops, the willow twisting as though tugged down by unseen hands. ‘You have plenty of fresh water here,’ she says, and strolls on, locating numerous possible sites.

  How does she know the water is fresh? I ask. ‘I’ve never divined salt water,’ she says, ‘only fresh. Why, I don’t know, that’s just the way it works.’ At one stage she holds out the willow to me and says, ‘Here, you have a go.’

  I laugh, go all coy and shake my head.

  ‘Go on,’ Elizabeth urges.

  So I do. And weirdly I feel a strange tugging when I pass over certain parts of the garden. I try to grip the willow so it can’t move, but some invisible force outdoes me and the stick turns, almost burning my skin. ‘Keep it,’ she says, ‘show Ian when he’s back. I have plenty more willow.’

  Now, I’m not going to say that all of a sudden I can find water with the wave of my special wand, but there is no doubt in my mind that something turned that stick in my hands.

  Later that day Ian returns and, when he hears the story, gets excited and has a go. He walks up and down for hours with no movement whatsoever in the magic willow. He’s disappointed, jealous of my new talent. I’m secretly quite pleased that he can’t do it. It makes me feel gifted and special. I grow very smug, but we decide not to take on the expensive risk of drilling for water until we have finished our renovations.

  Scott’s scepticism has rubbed off on me. It’s only two weeks since Ian started his runs down to Montville but I know I’m getting braver. However, in an act of cowardly procrastination, the next time Ian goes away, I invite my sister-in-law, Delia, to stay. Delia is married to Ian’s younger brother Bruce. They live at Gympie which, at only an hour’s drive south, makes them geographically our closest relations. I’ve only known Bruce and Delia for a couple of years, from the time Ian grew bold enough to start introducing me to his extended family, but Delia and I have clicked since our first meeting. Reliable and straightforward, she has my trust as well as my liking.

  Though Delia has lived in Australia for more than thirty years, she was born and raised a Scot. Perhaps it’s the Celtic blood in her veins, but Delia has been known to ‘sense’ things. I want her company, but I don’t want her sensing anything at Baddow.

  It’s the first night of her visit and we are curled up in the living room, which is a bizarre juxtaposition of Ian’s and
my favourite antique furniture, big squishy sofas and jagged, gaping chasms in the devastated walls, so open we can feel the wind whipping through the cracks.

  Delia is dark haired and petite, small enough to make me, at a respectable one hundred and seventy centimetres (five foot seven), feel like I’ve evolved from a different species. She’s conservative-looking in her glasses and neat clothes, and she’s pretty: a cute little librarian. We’re sipping wine by the light of the dim chandelier, cosy together in our draughty luxury. The company and wine make me reckless. I know I’m mad. I know I will regret it later, but the morbid fascination is just too magnetic to resist. I press Delia to tell me about her ‘sensing’ moments.

  She tells me of a house she and Bruce once lived in. Unbeknownst to them, a young man had committed suicide in the house some years before. Hanged himself. Sometimes, especially when she was home alone, she would glimpse the figure of a young man standing in the doorway of one of the bedrooms, out of the corner of her eye. Only much later, when she learned of the suicide, did she connect the tragedy with what she was seeing. Her sightings were occasionally confirmed by visitors who would ask who was the young male guest in the bedroom at the end of the corridor.

  Listening to her, I get that goosebumpy feeling. Stories like this always leave me excited, but scared. I believe Delia totally, I know she’d never make up something like this, yet I can’t quite believe in ghosts. Clearly she saw something but I tell myself there’s got to be another explanation. Just as Neanderthal Man might have run screaming from a solar eclipse believing it was the end of his world, we don’t yet understand why people sometimes see things that aren’t really there. That’s my theory, anyway, and I’d rather not budge from it.