A Grand Passion

by Anne De Lisle

  Today is a wanting-to-yell day, and the cats’ claw is bearing the brunt of my frustration.

  We’re still cutting a swathe through it when the new pup, Lottie, barks and we look up to see a man walking toward us across the lawn.

  Lottie has come from Charlotte Plains, sister-in-law Robyn’s sheep station out west. ‘Real Outback,’ Ian tells me. Robyn is married to Ian’s elder brother, Reid, and we recently visited their property near Cunnamulla. I’m just so grateful to Robyn for giving us Lottie. Lottie is a beautiful black kelpie, all slender, lithe and slippery. My children call her ‘the eel’. Lottie is sensitive and gentle, but she’s brave. She plays outside in thunderstorms, and she barks lustily at strangers.

  Unfortunately, when Lottie barks, Topsy figures there’s danger at hand and lies low or stays close. She’s under Ian’s legs now as the stranger approaches across the lawn. I notice he’s holding a camera.

  We stop work to greet him. He apologises for interrupting us and explains that his mother, who suffered from dementia, died in the garden here several years ago. He hopes to take photos of the site.

  I remember the white cross we saw on the pathway that first day with Trevor. I gesture in that direction. ‘We found a cross out there on the path,’ I say. ‘Are you sure you are in the right place?’

  ‘Yes, it was here, just here,’ he tells me and points to where we are standing. ‘At the time it didn’t seem right to put a cross in your garden, so we put it outside in the park where she had been wandering.’

  We assure him he can take as many photos as he likes.

  ‘It was a very distressing time,’ he continues, ‘we think she must have seen the lights of the house and tried to get up there but, as you know, it’s been such a jungle here. She was dead for a week before she was found. It was the hottest week of the year.’

  I’m stunned that a body could lie here undiscovered by the inhabitants of the house. Especially if it was so hot.

  Later, when the man has taken his photos and gone, we sit on the grass and talk about it. I discover that Ian knew, but kept it from me, thinking I might be upset.

  I am, a bit. No one likes to think of dead bodies being discovered in their garden, but mostly I’m distressed because it reminds me of my father, who died of Alzheimer’s disease. He had some wandering episodes too, although he was always found pretty much straightaway. Dementia patients can be great escape artists.

  It’s a common misconception that Alzheimer’s sufferers become confused but docile and ‘vegetable-like’. Nothing could have been further from the truth in my father’s case. He was restless, agitated, paced the house all day and wouldn’t sleep at night. That he didn’t escape more often is only due to my mother’s vigilance.

  At twice the size of my mother, he wasn’t easy to manage; to dress, to feed, to bath, to contain. Mother was determined to keep him at home. His doctor prescribed daunting quantities of sedatives and sleeping pills. Nothing seemed to work; his metabolism demolishing whatever he was given.

  Nothing slowed him: storming from room to room, up and down the stairs, wrenching taps, flooding the house, uprooting plants, turning furniture upside down. Mother tried hiring a night nurse so that she could lock herself in another room and get some sleep at night. But he would batter the door down to find her.

  At the Alzheimer’s respite centre in Stratford, other patients were terrified of him. He was an incongruous sight among the frail, elderly ladies shuffling along corridors with their Zimmer frames: a powerful man, former Boxing Captain of Sandhurst, well over six feet tall, built like a rugby forward, four times their body weight, bearing down on them with a look of fierce determination on his face.

  Given Mother’s insistence that she could keep looking after him at home, the doctor made her take down all the kukris and military swords displayed on the walls of their house. ‘I’m not suggesting he would,’ said the doctor, ‘but you never know.’

  When at last he died and I stood before the congregation at his funeral, I recited some words of Shakespeare’s that, to me, summed up those final years my mother and father had together.

  Let me not to the marriage of true minds

  Admit impediments. Love is not love

  Which alters when it alteration finds,

  Or bends with the remover to remove

  O no! It is an ever-fixed mark

  That looks on tempests and is never shaken …

  I sit on the lawn, all covered in sweat and cats’ claw debris. My father would have loved this house. I can almost hear him saying, ‘Don’t clear all that garden up before I get there, leave some for me to do.’ How he would have enjoyed tackling this jungle with his kukri.

  A kukri is the hefty curved knife carried by all Gurkha soldiers, famous for inspiring great fear into enemy hearts. With Father a Gurkha officer, Jane and I grew up on Gurkha legends and lore. The one I liked best was that once a Gurkha has unsheathed his kukri, it cannot then be resheathed before first drawing blood.

  Father bequeathed a titanic respect for the Gurkha people to us.

  Ian gave me a kukri a couple of years ago; a good, sharp, working kukri that I have, until now, propped up on the mantelpiece in the living room. I fetch it and use it to clear cats’ claw where the old lady died. The only blood it will draw today is that of the cats’ claw.

  Georgie rings. I feel awkward, tongue-tied. It’s some months since the day Ian revealed his children’s feelings about me, and this is the first contact I’ve had with any of them since. Perhaps I should have been the one to call, to extend the olive branch, but have felt neither the ability nor the desire. So much easier to stick my head in the sand, pretend that everything’s normal. I think Georgie is brave to be the one. We’re stilted at first, though gradually warm up. But even then, there’s a morass of unease just below the surface. I tell her I don’t understand what’s happened, why there’s been such a negative shift. Georgie admits she would have hated to be on the receiving end as I was. We decide it would be productive to get together for a good talk. Just the two of us.

  When Ian is next away, Georgie drives up to Maryborough through hammering rain and arrives exhausted. It’s a three-hour drive from Brisbane and she couldn’t leave till after work. I’m touched that she is willing to go to so much trouble to see me and feel a little more optimistic.

  I pour her a glass of wine, and we curl up on sofas in the living room as we’ve done so often before, and talk. I tell her I realise how easy it is to say things about people when you don’t think your words will get back to them.

  ‘But don’t you think it is better that you do know how we feel about you?’ she asks.

  I don’t, actually. I think blissful ignorance would have been preferable, but I just sip my drink and say, ‘Perhaps.’

  My anger is long gone, I just want every trace of conflict and hurt to evaporate, and I want to release Ian from the purgatory he’s currently in so that we can move forward. ‘But I was very surprised to discover you all felt that way’, I reiterate. ‘I honestly believed we were really happy together.’

  There’s a moment of silence. We swig our wine.

  I say, ‘If you were fifteen years old, I’d skirt about the issues, strive for tact, but you are twenty-eight next month, old enough for me to be honest.’

  She nods.

  I take a breath. ‘Okay. Don’t you remember how you and I used to talk about your mother?’ This I have to ask, because I believe the accusation that she was unable to discuss her mother when I was around to be so completely misplaced. I repeat a few of the stories about her mother that Georgie and I shared in her time at Baddow before she went overseas. Childhood anecdotes: mother and daughter hysterical with laughter when a boulder slipped down a rockface and clipped the wheel of their car; Jenny’s tears when Dinie, the eldest, first started boarding school; Jenny chastising Georgie for speeding. The who-looks-like-whom games she and I would play: you’ve got your Dad’s feet, your Mum’s smile, I’d say. She’
s got your Dad’s smile, your Mum’s nose, he’s got your Dad’s everything. Laughter. Especially the chin. Wear your sunglasses, Georgie, I’d tell her. Because you have your Dad’s eyes. Cover them up and you’ll look just like your Mum. It was fun, a game of laughter and happy memories. There were confidences too. Deep confidences.

  ‘Yes, I do remember,’ she admits, ‘but there were times I felt uncomfortable.’

  ‘I never minded talking about your mother, you know. It’s never been a problem for me at all. Just because a person is no longer living, I don’t expect their time on earth to be wiped from conversation or thought.’

  I remind myself not to use the death of my father as an analogy. I hate this – hate feeling that I must try not to mention him. So, with a silent apology to Father, I pluck another loss from my memory, and go on to describe a lesson I learned on the importance of talking freely about people who have died from a friend who had lost her husband. She told me that sometimes people would cross the road when they saw her coming, because they didn’t know what to say to her or how to behave around her. Should they offer condolences, or should they not mention the subject at all?

  What she wanted was for people to include her husband’s name in normal conversation, as they would have done when he was alive. She told me I was the only person she felt truly at ease with in those early days, because I seemed to suffer no discomfort when talking about him. That I had managed this was quite inadvertent, but I have never forgotten her words. Perhaps it is one of the reasons Ian and I grew so comfortable together so quickly.

  I then go on to remind Georgie how much I like her mother’s sisters who have both visited us at Baddow, and how her mother’s niece has been befriended by my sister in England. I’m trying to show how our families have meshed, but don’t press it, because I believe she has conceded an inch and I don’t want to push things.

  She asks me if I need to speak to David, Dinie or Annabel as well.

  ‘If they are happy to have you representing them all, then no,’ I say. ‘But if any of them feel they want to talk to me individually, I’m happy to listen.’

  So, with Georgie as ambassador for all four, and me representing me, we press forward. I try not to feel outnumbered. We drink a bit more then touch on the why don’t I go out and get a job issue. I’m not so bothered by this any more. My indignation has dissolved. I can see it was a statement made through ignorance of just what has been going on here at Baddow. Georgie tells me that Ian has made clear to them how busy the renovations have kept me.

  I wonder whether to try and explain to her the anguish of not being able to write for so long, and how the renovation of Baddow House was first my excuse for not writing and then my cure. I decide against it, doubtful that my own private agonies are relevant. Besides, we’re making progress, starting to unwind, and I’m loath to drift from the true purpose of our conversation.

  We press on. Georgie explains that they are happy about their father and me being together; it’s the idea of marriage that upsets them all. ‘We don’t want Dad to have to be alone,’ she says, ‘and we realise we’re lucky. We realise you could have been worse, you could have been one of those gushing sorts of women. We just don’t want you to get married. We don’t ever want there to be another Mrs Russell.’

  As I’ve never had an intimate discussion with her brother or sisters, I feel bound to ask if it is just she who feels this way, or whether it is all four of them.

  ‘All of us,’ she says. ‘We all feel the same.’

  I’m not doing so well at understanding this. I suspect there are a few cells missing in the willing to sacrifice all for the good of others part of my brain. Sometimes I want to yell, You have your Tom, you are about to make your happy future together. Why should your father and I be deprived of ours? But I never do. This is the immature, impetuous, unkind me bubbling to the surface, and I don’t like it.

  Astrology is not my thing. It’s a bit like ghost stories. You tell yourself, surely sane people don’t really believe in all that? But it’s fascinating and alluring nevertheless. A friend once told me that as an Aries I am likely to be childish and impatient. Aries people, apparently, stamp their feet and carry on when they don’t get what they want. Some of the worst tyrants of the world, including Hitler, have shared my star sign. It’s a sobering thought. I’d rather have been born quiet, sweet and patient, but forewarned is forearmed. Knowing that I might be programmed to exercise those ugly ‘me first’ traits, I must endeavour to ward them off before they surface.

  I try to explain that the fact of our being older doesn’t make our wants and feelings, our desire to make a commitment to each other, any less than a couple of her own age.

  She perks up at this point and tells me that, though there has been no official proposal or announcement yet, she and boyfriend Tom have started looking at engagement rings.

  I ask her if it has ever occurred to her that her father and I might have done that sort of thing.

  She looks surprised. ‘No,’ she says, shaking her head.

  It’s tempting to ask how she’d feel if Tom’s relatives told her they didn’t ever want to see her as Tom’s wife. Would she step down graciously, or would she fly in their face and marry him anyway?

  But I don’t, of course. I just feel pressed down by sadness, and by my sense of grief over our lost friendship. In the months she spent at Baddow, Georgie grew to mean a great deal to me. She entered my life when I most needed a friend, and when that friendship was offered I soaked it up, blossomed with it. I can’t understand how something that felt so genuine can just … evaporate.

  We talk for hours, and matters do improve. Though I’m conscious the entire time of the oceans of damage that still need to be healed, it’s hard not to slip back into our old ways of just plain enjoying being together. As long as we steer clear of Ian, relationships and marriage, we find ourselves laughing and joking. That Georgie and I have had a kindred spirit thing happening from the start is obvious to me. Equally obvious to me is that our relationship is only challenged by two things: the fear of her mother’s memory being pushed aside, and by the threat of her losing an ounce of Ian.

  Later, I point out to her that she only seems to develop negative feelings toward me when she’s away from me. Together we have fun. Apart she has time to dwell on the fact that her father is away from her old home, up in Maryborough with Another Woman. She agrees that it’s the case.

  ‘We’ll just have to see more of each other then, won’t we?’

  She laughs.

  As the older one, I know I ought to be the wiser. I’m not at all sure that I am, but I do know that Georgie needs to believe that nothing is going to undermine her relationship with her father. Nor is anything going to cheapen her father’s memories of her mother.

  I suggest Muddy Waters Café for lunch the next day. Muddy Waters is usually a success.

  Georgie returns to Brisbane the following afternoon. We hug and kiss and her parting words are, ‘I think I can get used to the idea, just give me a bit of warning before it happens. About a month.’

  ‘No problem,’ I call, waving her off.

  We wait a year.

  CHAPTER 21

  CROCODILES IN THE PARK

  ‘WE NEED TO CLEAR THE jungle between the house and the river,’ Ian announces one morning over breakfast. ‘Now is a good time, before we’re busy rebuilding the kitchen.’

  My heart sinks. I suspected this was coming. Though I know that the end result will be a welcome transformation, I am very much dreading the back-breaking labour that will be involved. But there is no delaying Ian when Ian is on a mission. ‘All right,’ I sigh resignedly. ‘When do we start?’

  This particular jungle is the Sleeping Beauty forest we struggled through that very first day almost two years ago with Trevor when we were trying to sneak glimpses of the house.

  There are perhaps three okay trees we can leave, but the rest is a tangle of overgrown leucaena (grown in some places as ca
ttle fodder but should be banned from the face of the universe as far as I’m concerned), various scrubby, shrubby noxious weeds and the inevitable cats’ claw.

  Leucaena grows straight up like a tree, with fluffy foliage on top. On its own, we’d be able to thread our way amongst it and dodge the prickly shrubs, but the whole area is trussed up tight with decades of growth of cats’ claw. Think of a ball of string and then multiply it over a couple of football pitches.

  Stage one of Ian’s plan is a detailed reconnaissance. We squeeze into the jungle, crawling and clambering, reconfirming what we already know – that this job is going to be a nightmare. I’ve stupidly not worn long pants and my legs are getting scratched. I want to go back and change, but am loath to be thought a wimp. Especially as Ian and the dogs are coping so brilliantly. Ian, also in shorts, strides ahead with great sense of purpose. I imagine the thick hairs on his legs offer the sort of protection my bald legs are without. The dogs frolic and pounce on scraps of life that call this jungle home. Everyone is happy and hairy except me.

  But to my surprise and relief, we happen upon an unexpected path and suddenly the going gets much easier. We can at least move freely while we take our mental notes. Ian leads the way over grass, sticks and scrubby weeds that have been nicely flattened down. It gives us a chance to catch our breath, inspect our wounds and be sure of our direction. We carry on for some ten minutes when Ian suddenly stops dead. ‘Go back,’ he says.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Just do it.’

  I hear the alarm in his voice that he’s trying to conceal. I retreat. He gives me a head start, then follows, whistling the dogs and throwing worried looks over his shoulder as he goes.

  ‘What did you see?’ I call back.