A Grand Passion

by Anne De Lisle

  It was fun, a game, some of the happiest times of my life, but it was not so funny when the shadows grew long, the sun dipped under the horizon, and I was sent to bed. Especially not if I was Last One Awake.

  Seeing as I’m the only one in Baddow House tonight, being LOA is clearly my inescapable fate.

  But there’s Topsy in the garden, and there are houses further along Queen Street. In these houses, I tell myself, there are TVs going, babies crying, people arguing, laughing, parents reading bedtime stories to their children. I draw comfort from this. So many beating hearts, so much pulsing, living flesh only a stone’s throw away. With the windows open, sometimes I hear distant traffic, even a siren or two. These are good, wholesome thoughts.

  I try not to remember Ian’s brother, Bruce. Intrepid Bruce. Forward scout of the Vietnam War Bruce, for whom the bullets of the Vietcong held no fear, saying that no way could he sleep alone between these four walls. Outside, he declared, wrapped in a swag on the grass, he’d be fine. But not inside. Never inside. Bleak, uncomforting words.

  I’m certainly not about to do the swag thing. I consider bringing Topsy inside, then dismiss the idea when I remember the time a friend told me she’d been woken up by her dog in the bedroom barking furiously at an empty corner of the room. She could see nothing and no one, but the dog persisted, hackles up, growling at the bare wall for ages. I wonder if Edgar had dogs …

  Bearded Edgar with a stockwhip in his hand.

  But these are bad, bad thoughts. I shove them away, annoyed with my head for straying down such dangerous paths.

  I form a plan to go to bed really early. Eight p.m. isn’t a fraction as scary as midnight, the witching hour. Maybe if I get to sleep early enough …

  At quarter to eight I hop in the car and check into a motel.

  This scene is repeated the second time I’m left alone. But on the third time, I make it.

  CHAPTER 13

  SCREAMS IN THE PARK

  I’M PRETTY COCKY ABOUT my courage. Ian has never slept here a night on his own. I delight in teasing him, and when Delia and Bruce visit for Ian’s birthday in November Delia and I threaten to go to a motel so that the brothers have to face a night in the Ghost House without our protection. Not that I really believe Ian is so easily frightened. He’s probably just making me feel better about my own stupid cowardice by pretending to be the same.

  But one evening, about a week after Bruce and Delia have gone, we are upstairs. It’s just on dusk. We’re mucking around, as we do. Ian has chased me up the stairs, I’ve outrun him and I’m laughing at him for being so slow.

  ‘Maybe,’ he says, ‘but at least I’m stronger.’

  ‘Prove it,’ I challenge.

  We are like a pair of ten year olds; daring each other, chasing each other and, now, wrestling like a couple of idiots. Ian pretends to be overpowered. I playfully punch him. ‘Edgar!’ he calls out, ‘ouch! Maria! Help me Edgar!’

  I go very still and, in my best theatrical voice, intone, ‘Don’t … invoke them.’

  At these words Ian freezes, but only for a split second – then, to my astonishment, he’s downstairs and out of the front door.

  I follow him.

  ‘I can’t believe you just said that,’ he says. He is standing on the garden path in the twilight, taking deep breaths.

  ‘It was only a joke.’

  ‘Maybe, but it struck a nerve. It was chilling. Evocative. Don’t say anything like that again.’

  ‘Okay,’ I agree, ‘but don’t you shout for Edgar and Maria again like that.’

  ‘Done.’

  We’re both smiling now, but I am more aware than I’ve ever been that Ian is just as easily spooked as me.

  In so many ways we are amazingly alike. We find the same things funny, the same things scary. History fascinates us. We are both capable of immaturity: it’s fun to muck around, to play games, to laugh. We both have the potential to annoy, yet our ways don’t annoy each other. We love nothing better than being together and tag after each other all day: he follows me to the washing-line, when I go to the bathroom I see the shadow of the toes of his boots outside the door. He might be there to chat, or he might be lurking in silence to pounce when I emerge.

  We both have a love of the Gurkhas: mine bequeathed to me from my father who knew his Gurkha men were matchless, Ian’s from his days as a teenager when he witnessed a visiting company of Gurkhas participate in a military parade. His fascination became total: he admired them beyond anything, dreamed of becoming a Gurkha officer one day.

  In fact I joke that he only pursued me for my connection to the Gurkhas, that he’s fulfilling his fantasy to chase the daughter of the commander of a Gurkha regiment.

  Teasing happens regularly between us. But best of all is working together on the house, which is our grand passion. It’s our common goal, our common dream, to build our Lochinvar.

  Pud has been lured back to replaster the living room. It’s the biggest room in the house and also the most damaged. It is, after all, site of the Big Crack. We’re still in awe of Pud, still living in fear of him leaving for other, more important jobs. Every morning when he arrives, whoever spots his ute first will rush in and tell the other, ‘Pud’s here!’ Sighs of relief all round.

  We attempt to ply Pud with cups of tea and home-baked biscuits, we hope to bribe him, to sweeten him and tempt him into seeing this as a cushy job, but he never accepts, just sets up his ladders and trestles and gets to work.

  First he scrapes out the cracks till they’re gaping and huge, like a surgeon excising an infected wound. After that he mixes up wheelbarrows of magic ‘mud’, a secret mix that can expand and contract but hopefully will never crack. Then he climbs the trestles with his buckets and special tools and creates seamless smooth walls for us. We are speechless with gratitude.

  When Pud has finished, Cyril and I move in. There are two fireplaces in the living room that have been vandalised in the past, and Cyril’s first job is to rebuild their mantels and surrounds. They end up a Frankenstein’s creation of old and new parts, but so cunningly fashioned by Cyril that it’s impossible to tell that they’ve ever been tampered with.

  He re-hangs the bi-fold cedar doors that divide the living room in half. These doors have been missing from Baddow House for years, taken down so that the room would be one huge open space. We’re told that John Hastings, who owned Baddow House in the nineteen-seventies, located them on a garage in Maryborough, cut to size and painted white. Thanks to John’s detective work, we’ve been able to restore these magnificent panelled doors that are some three metres tall and made of glorious, aged, red cedar.

  Cyril attaches a few centimetres of wood to their bases to make them full height again. When the doors are sanded and re-oiled, you can barely tell they’ve been altered. But it’s a nightmare to rehang them. They are incredibly heavy and sag on their hinges, scraping the floor. So Cyril goes into his routine again: adjusting and rehanging. It takes all day. Without Cyril’s inexhaustible patience it would never have happened, but by dusk we have perfectly hung, smooth-swinging doors that respond to the touch of a fingertip.

  The next day he moves on to the windows, while I get on with Cedar Duty. There are nine large windows in the living room with varying numbers of panes. Some need puttying, most have no counterweights, and a few are totally rotten and need replacing.

  It takes days. Summer has hit hard and it’s hot work. Cyril and I boil. People often say to me, ‘you must feel the heat, being from England.’ I nod bravely, never pointing out my years in Malaya. An English background seems a good excuse to complain and sweat and generally not cope with summer. But often I think of Maria Aldridge in all her corsets and layers. No ceiling fans for Maria, and I doubt they had punkah wallahs in Australia. If she could survive in all her finery, surely I can in my shorts and singlet.

  The night I finish the cedar in the living room, I retire to bed with sore hands. I’m exhausted from my day’s work, from trying to get the la
yers of muck off our precious wood. My arms ache, my hands ache, but most of all my fingers hurt where the nails have begun to split vertically. Bits of skin that have been covered since birth are now exposed. I’ve tried wearing gloves, but can’t sand properly in them. I’ve tried clipping my nails almost out of existence, and have now resorted to putting Bandaids round each fingertip.

  I flex my fattened fingers. Standards of beauty, I decide, are inversely proportional to scale of renovation. My hands are not only bizarrely Bandaided, but ingrained with fireplace blacking and tung oil. My hair is untrimmed and lank, my face has forgotten what make-up feels like, I’m too busy to walk regularly, and am eating too many biscuits with Cyril so have gained weight.

  Ian, amazingly, says he likes me best this way, looking salt-of-the-earth, dedicated and wholesome. I’m not sure whether it’s my altered appearance he’s attracted to, or whether the concept of the ‘good, hard-working woman’ excites him. I suspect the latter, because I catch disturbing glimpses of fondness on his face as I work. The harder I slave, the fonder his face.

  Benji returns and transforms the living room with ‘Sweet Butterscotch’ which, in reality, is more of an old mellow yellow. I’d always known the living room would be a shade of yellow. It faces north-west and gets loads of natural light through the nine tall windows. We’re thrilled with the result. The cedar glows every afternoon when the sun moves round, and the air turns soft, warm and amber.

  We hire a professional to sand the floors, which are grey and parched from years of neglect and from the days of the vandals, smashed windows and rain beating in. The wood is crows ash, a timber native to northern New South Wales and southern Queensland, and comes up beautifully with a proper sanding and a couple of coats of tung oil. It turns golden, like the walls. The entire room pulses with living colour. I want to spin around in there, to drink it in, to eat it. I can hardly bear to put furniture in the room. I kiss the walls, kiss away Esse’s tears.

  More and more I think about starting to write again. As I work on Cedar Duty, or walk Topsy in the park, or deal with toads, or water the garden, my mind is constantly nudging at the hibernating writer in me. There’s a fresh bubble of excitement as I go about my duties, because I know I’m going to do it again: I know I’m going to rediscover the pleasure of writing.

  I have no idea why it has taken me so long to feel able to do this, but I do know that, for me, it is impossible to write when the will is not there. It can’t be forced; it just has to happen. And when it happens, it’s like being seized by something you can’t control – something more powerful than self demands you push aside everything else and write till your hand nearly drops off. I realise I must battle to keep this burgeoning drive at bay until the house is finished. Gather thoughts by all means, but keep a lid on them. If I let myself commit thoughts to paper, I’ll be lost, unable to stop.

  Through all these plans tumbling in my head, I’m very much aware that I can’t yet return to fiction. I want to. I try hard to steer my creative urges fiction-wards. I ask myself, which century? Perhaps the Civil War this time. Cromwell’s day. It’s a period that’s always interested me. But it’s no good. Much as I try, my brain refuses to do as it’s asked. There are words blossoming inside me that demand to be put down on paper, but all of these words centre on the present, on Ian and myself and what we are doing. I feel an inescapable urge to tell our story.

  Ian and Baddow House are responsible for this, for restoring my sense of stability, firming up the quicksand I’ve been flailing in for the last several years. Quotes about suffering for your art, about tortured artists and so on sound like rubbish to me. I defy any person to successfully create when they’re upside down, inside out, their eyes being pecked out by the crows. Struggle and oppression crowd the head, strangle inspiration, stunt creativity. Depression, I’m told, can manifest symptoms akin to dementia. I imagine this is because it takes up so much space in the head. Space which is finite. Clear out the muddle, banish the black dog, as Churchill termed it, and there is room to move, room to create, to imagine, to soar.

  I want to soar again. I remember those first heady days, years ago now, when I discovered I could write. I remember exploring the sheer joy of writing, of wrangling words into sentences that pleased, satisfied, delighted. The astonishment and thrill of publication, and also the utterly humbling knowledge that someone, somewhere, deemed my words worthy of translation into other languages.

  I know it’s going to be hard to curb the drive in me but I must channel my creative energy into the house. I’m determined to complete this task and do it well. I’m determined to do a job worthy of Edgar’s dream, of Esse’s passion. Nothing must distract me.

  The next time Ian and Georgie are both away, my new found confidence gets a battering. It’s around midnight and I’m half awake, though I don’t know why. My eyes are shut, as they always are at night, asleep or awake. Why open them and risk seeing something you don’t want to see? If shadows are going to hover over me, or orbs are going to float round the room, I’d rather not know, thank you very much.

  I hear a noise. It’s a creak, a tweak, a footstep. I snap fully awake: a quivering sweating mass of fear. Though I’m pretty sure the noise was downstairs, which is marginally better than in our bedroom, I have no idea what to do.

  If the verandahs were built, I’d be out there. But short of leaping seven metres to the ground, I’m inside, on my own, with a noise. I start to think of my father as I often do when I’m feeling spooked. If there is another side, another world, a Hereafter, then he’s in it. And where he is, there can’t be bad things.

  I’m considering sneaking a hand to the phone on my bedside table to ring Ian and bleat my predicament. Not that he can do much, at nearly two hundred kilometres away. Besides, my hand wants to stay right where it is: under the blanket.

  I hear something else: a tap, a light knock. Its downstairs, and, I’m beginning to suspect, outside. There it is again, louder this time. Outside. Definitely outside.

  Relief melts my bones and every trace of paralysis is banished in an instant. Intruders! Burglars! Hah! No problemo! I leap out of bed and grab Ian’s torch.

  At the bedroom window, I listen, torch turned off but fingers at the ready, posed to hit the on button.

  I can hear talking, whispering, girlish giggling. Kids, I think, and open my mouth to tell them to naff off. But something stops me. The girlish whispers are distant, floating up from the perimeter of the garden. Below my bedroom window the voices are male and there are several of them.

  Apprehension creeps over me again. My euphoria at the realisation I am dealing with the living not the dead has blinded me to the possible dangers which are, of course, far greater than those of any lurking ghosts.

  I decide to reveal my presence but not my gender. I flick on the torch and flash it round the garden. All whispering stops. I whistle for Topsy, knowing she won’t come, but let them think a guard dog is a possibility.

  There’s a sudden awesome thud and clatter, as if a heavy missile they’ve thrown at the house has bounced off the exterior wall. Then I hear running footsteps. My torch picks up three male figures fleeing the scene.

  I hang around for ages, going from window to window, but see and hear nothing more. How stupid we are to be scared of ghosts when our fellow humans are so much more of a genuine threat. It’s never occurred to me before just how isolated we are, surrounded by the park. Windows could be smashed, screams could be screamed, and no one would hear.

  There was no one to hear George Furber scream when a morticing axe struck him.

  Furber was the first white man to settle at the head of navigation on the Wide Bay River. He arrived in 1847, a year before our Edgar Aldridge. He set up a trading post with a plan to ship out the wool clip from the Burnett region and to ship in supplies for the distant squatters. It didn’t take him long to upset the Aborigines.

  With a lack of European labour, he pressed a few of the local Aborigines into working
for him. But Furber was a hard taskmaster, and apparently he didn’t keep his promises. Out fencing a section of his land one day, he received the axe in the back of his head.

  The wound was deep, ‘glancing off the bone and slicing the skin from the back of his head and neck’, according to one account. Furber knew he would die if he didn’t reach help fast. So he bound up his head as tightly as he could, mounted his horse and rode the one hundred and fifty miles to the nearest doctor at Ipswich, west of Brisbane. Remarkably he survived this hideous journey, arriving in just three days with a nasty, infected wound. That he survived at all must be testament to his physical condition, determination and resilience.

  After his recovery, Furber returned to Wide Bay. The settlement rapidly expanded and his business prospered. By 1851, four years after his arrival, there were forty-seven homes, ten more partially built and two hundred and ninety-nine settlers. There were five inns, several wool stores and a general store.

  George Furber might have been remembered as the father of all Maryborough but, sadly, history records that the axe incident heightened Furber’s loathing and distrust of the Aborigines to the point of insanity. He never left his home without a loaded pistol in his pocket, and is thought to have shot and killed three Aborigines in his time on the river. But eight years after his axe injury it was all over for George Furber, speared to death on the banks of Tinana Creek. His grave is in the park, just a short walk from Baddow House.