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A Grand Passion

Page 18

by Anne De Lisle


  We discover that the original balustrading is shorter than modern building regulations demand if your verandah floor is more than one metre from the ground.

  I’m all for nice high balustrading, especially upstairs. I hate heights and never lean against balcony railings. The height solution seems simple. The original lacework was screwed directly onto the verandah floorboards. We need an extra fifteen centimetres. We will sit our new lacework on a wooden bar fifteen centimetres from the floor, in the fashion of many verandahs in Queensland.

  The EPA are appalled. We are not allowed to do this. The original lacework was attached directly to the floorboards with no bar. Direct attachment it must be.

  We point out that this is illegal as it contravenes modern building regulations.

  Heritage will not budge.

  ‘We can’t break the law,’ we say.

  Heritage consider the problem and tell us to gain our extra height by stringing taut wire from post to post above the lacework. Now it’s our turn to be appalled. This is an 1883 house! Stretched wire above the lacework is totally out of keeping. We are determined to refuse. We do refuse.

  But Ian and I have been at this game for a while now. We grow cunning. For some reason, the EPA’s written demand to use taut wire instead of the wooden bar, only refers to the downstairs verandah. Have they forgotten we have an upstairs?

  If downstairs is the only issue, we have a solution. We build a garden wall around the perimeter of the house, creating a raised flower bed, thereby lifting the ground level to less than a metre from the verandah floor. Our balustrading can now be any height. Indeed we don’t even need balustrading for these new levels. We attach the replica of the too-short original to the floorboards.

  Everyone is happy.

  We put the upstairs lacework on the bar.

  I am happy.

  CHAPTER 19

  FLOODS, RAIN AND THE GATHERING STORM

  THE ROOF HAS TO BE replaced. It’s a complex roof with different levels, several peaks, separate hip sections over the upstairs bay windows and – horror of horrors – a major box gutter that runs across the centre of the roof, dividing it into two broad gables. A box gutter is deadly but unavoidable when the shape of your roof doesn’t allow all the rain to run outwards. Half of the rain that falls on our roof runs into the centre then travels along the box gutter until it reaches a gutter on an outer eave where it can finally enter a downpipe and escape.

  Box gutters fill with leaves and trap water. They corrode, erode and leak. There is no way that we can avoid a box gutter on the new roof. Our hearts sink.

  We’ve been told we might get another five years out of the roof, but we’d be mad not to replace it now, before the scaffolding is taken down from the verandah restoration. Scaffolding costs are horrific. You pay a huge sum of money to have your scaffolding erected and another huge sum to have it dismantled at the end of the job. So, though it’s tempting to say sod the roof, we’re sick of renovating; if there’s another five years in it, let’s do it later, we know that if we don’t do the roof now, we will have to pay a second round of erecting and dismantling fees to the scaffolder down the track.

  But wait, there’s more: each and every day the scaffolding surrounds your house, you also pay a huge sum. Just for it to be there. Scaffolding rent. This makes us very impatient to get the roof finished. Our roofer, Wayne, likes to work alone. He’s comfortable working solo and can get things done his own way in his own good time. But we dream of a team of ten showing up and finishing it all in a few short hours. The days drag excruciatingly. Every day that passes makes our scaffolding bill look more and more like the national defence budget.

  But slowly new roof begins to replace old. With shouts of warning, battered, rusty red sheets of iron are frisbeed to the ground. We all duck and dodge, knowing we could lose our heads from a badly aimed sheet. Topsy lies low.

  The new box gutter is stainless steel, never to rust; the new roof is powder-coated dark grey, never to be repainted.

  It’s summer and too hot to stand on the roof. We worry that Wayne’s feet will get scorched through the melting soles of his shoes. Greg gingerly scales the scaffolding to help paint the flashing at the base of the chimney stacks. Even with a thick towel folded beneath his backside, he can’t sit on the heat of the roof. But he refuses to give up, refuses to let us down. He comes back very late every afternoon when the sun’s rays are weak and low, ties himself to a chimney, and works on.

  Our second Christmas approaches and everyone stops for a couple of weeks. Ian and I are nearly insane about the cost of the scaffolding, but mercifully the scaffolder grants us a half-price discount in scaffolding rent for the holiday period when no one will be working on the house. No one except us and Greg, because Mike has made a brilliant but unwelcome suggestion.

  He advises us to paint the rafters and batons of the verandah roof over Christmas, so it will be done before the verandah roofing iron goes on. ‘Otherwise you’ll never avoid slopping paint all over the iron.’ Great. Just how we wanted to spend our Christmas.

  Greg paints rafters and we paint batons until we are painting in our dreams at night.

  Ian’s children come up for Christmas and we stop. They haven’t been up for a while, and a seed of worry has been growing in both of us, that the more they realise how close their father and I have become, the less keen they are on our relationship. We know that more than anything they want Ian to be happy, but it’s hard for them to acknowledge that he might have deep feelings for a woman who is not their mother. They need to believe that their parents’ relationship was unique. Any evidence that challenges this, they don’t want to see.

  Annabel and Georgie are both back from Europe, so all four are able to be here. My three, who take it in turns to spend Christmas with me and their father, are with their father this year.

  Ian and I hope to have a fun and productive time during which fears and doubts are allayed, and everyone feels as relaxed as they did in earlier days.

  My pleasure in seeing Georgie back from England is wholehearted. I’ve really missed her and I believe we slip back into our old ways without any trouble, which in turn helps the others to feel at home. Like last Christmas, she and I are chief chefs again, and now that we have put an air conditioner in the kitchen and two ceiling fans in the dining room, everything is much more comfortable.

  We all eat, loll about, open parcels and drink champagne. Ian buys me a statue of Beethoven for the dining room. I give him a cedar shelf for the office. It’s so easy to find presents for each other with this house to fill. Ian’s girls and I have raided Sussan’s as usual, so there are pyjamas, slippers and dressing gowns for the women of the house. David has new golf clubs. They leave on Boxing Day.

  Ian and I think it’s gone well, which is a great relief, seeing as we hope to tackle the delicate marriage issue before too long. Some parents might choose to stand up and tell their adult children outright when and how they intend to re-marry. Some might decisively point out how it is possible to both remember and cherish the past, while looking to the future and moving on. But neither Ian nor I want to upset anyone’s sensibilities.

  Right from the beginning of our relationship, we’ve taken the tactful path to try to make it as easy as possible for all concerned to adjust. We don’t cuddle and carry on in front of the children, nor do we talk openly about our feelings for each other.

  We’ve crept on eggshells.

  Perhaps this has been our mistake. Perhaps they would have a better understanding of how much we mean to one another if we had been more openly demonstrative. Perhaps we’ve given the impression that we don’t feel close to each other at all, that we are inhabiting Baddow as a couple of middle-aged companions who’ve long since lost the ability or need to love.

  But Ian and I are new at this. There are no classes to tell us how to handle our specific situation. Even if there were, every family, every personality is different. No doubt plenty of others looking in on our
situation would itch to tell us what we should and shouldn’t be doing. But it is not an easy thing for Ian to look his children in the eye and tell them what they don’t want to hear.

  It’s a confusing time, muddling along, hoping for the best. There is only one thing in all the confusion of which Ian and I are dead certain. Stumbling and erroneous we might be, but we have done the best we knew how to do in the circumstances.

  My children come up on 27 December. It’s the twenty-fifth anniversary of my arrival in Australia, which calls for further feasting. Unfortunately there are more roof batons to paint. It’s hard to work at such a Bacchanalian time of year, but we rouse ourselves and find extra paint brushes for all hands.

  It’s scorching outside, wielding our brushes, and the paint is doing its best to dry on the bristles and solidify in the tins. We work hard and fast, Ian and I well aware that if we don’t get it done while my children are here, there will be so much more for us to do later. It’s a massive relief when the final brushstrokes are complete.

  Elizabeth has spent the last two months in East Timor doing voluntary hospital work. Having her safely home is yet another reason to celebrate. As a parent, I wish my daughter would sit safely by my side and not feel driven to do adventurous things. But as a human being I am grateful, and admire her desire to make a difference, to be a useful member of the human race.

  Elizabeth is not a doctor, she is not a nurse, but so desperate are the hospitals in East Timor, they will take anyone and have them do anything. Elizabeth’s legendary lack of sqeamishness stood her in good stead as untrained, untutored, she was left to stitch women up after childbirth in a land of no anaesthetics, dodging legs and feet trying to kick her in the head as she wielded her needle and thread, going about the bloody, painful task. She assisted in amputations, again undertaken with no anaesthesia, and she watched children die, witnessing the distress of broken parents.

  The convent adjacent to the hospital gave her sleeping accommodation in her own small cell, and in her spare time she entertained the orphans in the care of the nuns. She still sends presents to her orphans and the nuns.

  Elizabeth’s safe return home seems a far more relevant cause for celebration than our belated Christmas or the twenty-fifth anniversary of my arrival in Australia.

  We create a wonderful feast on my anniversary night. Our toasts are many and varied. Again I’m bursting with gratitude for my children’s good-natured acceptance of this new life at Baddow with Ian. I try to express my gratitude to them, to let them know how easy they have made the transition for me. Friends who have done the step-family thing tell me that boys are usually more accepting of change than girls. As long as they’ve decent food in front of them. As long as they’ve the familiar comforts of life, boys will be happy. It’s us females, apparently, who tend to be the complex little horrors. So perhaps I should be extra grateful to Elizabeth.

  Robert was never going to mind. Robert, who’ll take to the streets and march for any cause he believes in, who defends the underdog and despises injustice to the extent that Elizabeth and I have to take care in his presence not to make catty remarks along the lines of: Check out the colour of that woman’s hair … or wasn’t Orlando Bloom appalling in Kingdom of Heaven? Such comments are likely to trigger a for God’s sake, you two, don’t be so unkind. They’re doing the best they can.

  I could join a polygamous cult, grow a second head, turn into an alien, and Robert would nod and say, ‘that’s fine, Mum, you must have your reasons.’

  Andrew would be much the same. Non-judgemental. Accepting. Perhaps, as Andrew usually has his head in a book, he wouldn’t even notice.

  Yes, I can see that if any of the children were going to have trouble accepting change in my life, it wouldn’t have been the boys. But Elizabeth has been fine. Better than fine. She’s effusive, delighted. ‘When are you guys going to get married?’ she keeps asking me.

  Holidays over, children go and Ian and I are back on full scaffolding rent again. The roof is still not done, the situation infuriatingly out of our control. We can press and cajole till we’re blue in the face, but we can’t make it happen any faster. Greg introduces us to a capable young man willing to help with the roof, but we are told that he can’t be put on, as insurance won’t cover him. The scaffolding is starting to look like a permanent fixture.

  The first night Ian is away after Christmas, rain is forecast. I’m not too worried, as I’ve been assured things are secured at the end of every working day, either with bits of new roof or tarpaulins.

  I’m woken from deep sleep by a cracking thunderstorm. I barely have time to wonder if the roof is all right before the ceiling of our bedroom turns into Niagara Falls.

  I flick on the lights and scramble for buckets, towels and mops. It’s hopeless. There are far too many cascades to be contained in the few buckets I can find. I run to Robert’s bedroom and tip out piles of his belongings that are stored in old solid plastic toy boxes. I make rows of my buckets and boxes and throw every towel in the house onto the floor in between them. I turn off the lights when I realise water is pouring down through light fittings and over the wall switches. I can’t get the bedroom torch to work, and stumble down the black stairwell to fetch another.

  The water is coming down in an area about two metres by two metres, right at one end of the box gutter. I realise the new section of guttering is failing us and fume at the builder and roofer who have left it that way.

  Early in the new year Pud comes to fill the exterior cracks with his magic mud and Benji begins to paint the walls. They start on the chimney stacks up in the stratosphere and work their way down until they’re doing the columns that fill the bear traps.

  Benji uses a special paint, Rock Coat, with a stretchy quality, so that if fine cracks appear in the plaster, the elasticity in the paint allows it to expand like skin, without tearing.

  Watching Pud at work on the sixteen columns, I decide his is more than a trade; more than a craft. Pud is making art of our home. He finds a chunk of broken old verandah column amongst the rubble in the garden and cuts a template from the profile of its moulded edge. Then, one by one, he coats our ugly, grey columns with plaster. Adding layers, building their shape, using his template to mould the plaster of the bulky upper part to match the originals. It’s the sort of job that could easily end up looking like a melting ice-cream cone, but his work is flawless. It takes a full day to create each column.

  At last the roof is finished and the scaffolders come to remove the Meccano set from the house. It’s a wonderful moment, both to see an end to the bills and to see the house revealed with its magnificent verandahs.

  In yet another indignity, the murdered poinciana tree is nudged by the scaffolders’ truck as they leave, and loses a great chunk of bark. Ian rushes over to inspect the damage but is heartened to glimpse green wood deep within this new wound. Evidence that the tree is not quite dead. He goes into a renewed frenzy of mulching, watering and hugging.

  ‘Perhaps next spring,’ I say.

  By the time Pud and Benji have finished their work, we’ve been at the verandahs for almost seven months. It’s been a massive feat to fit them around such a large, uneven, bulging, bowing house, where no measurement was level, no angle true. Mike tells us they have taken three thousand man hours, used two and a half kilometres of steel reinforcing, three kilometres of bearers, joists and rafters, four kilometres of decking, four hundred powder-coated balustrade panels, twenty thousand hand-driven nails and five hundred bolts. Amongst other things.

  We have to oil the verandah decking. Ian and I research this carefully. We don’t want to have to redo the four kilometres again. Ever. Sikkens Cetol decking oil is the advice of the experts, but we flinch when we’re told how often we have to apply it.

  ‘Surely there is something more permanent on the market?’ we plead.

  Debbie from Earles Paints in Maryborough shakes her head. ‘Three coats now and you do it again in six to twelve months. That should g
et you a couple of years.’

  It’s a pig of a job. Greg cuts in with a paint brush round the edges. I do the main part with a mop. It’s back-breaking, hand-blistering, monotonous and hateful – and the oil rots the plastic nodules that attach the sponge to the mop. I have to buy about ten new sponges for each floor of the verandah. At one stage, sick of rotting mops, I fling it all aside, grab the sponge in my bare hands and finish off on my hands and knees. It’s a month before the colour fades from my fingers.

  But it’s amazing to stroll around the verandahs when we are finished. Verandahs that have not been intact for more than sixty-five years. At first we pad around in bare feet and yell at Topsy if she dares to close in on our pristine, richly glowing boards. But gradually we grow more careless: shoes are worn, dogs are permitted, furniture is arranged and, lastly, huge terracotta pots are shoved into place upstairs and down.

  Ian lugs countless sacks of potting mix that weigh as much as I do, up the internal staircase. I want to plant bougainvillea in giant terracotta pots upstairs so it can clamber over the balustrading. I visualise a riot of cascading colour all around the upper level. I visualise the hanging gardens of Babylon.

  ‘You might get sick of these things,’ warns Ian. ‘Remember how thorny they are.’

  ‘I won’t,’ I promise, and swear to keep them trained, pruned and perfectly under control.

  Ian shrugs. ‘If you’re sure.’ And lugs more sacks of potting mix upstairs.

  The upper verandah is a wonder. We look out over the park on two sides, the river on another. We are as high as the tree canopy surrounding us, and catch the slightest puff of breeze.

  But we are too busy to dally over our breezy view for long. We are desperate to move on and get the kitchen done, because a momentous event is occurring in October, just six months away.

 

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