Finally, halfway through June, power is restored. It’s quite a Biblical moment. ‘Let there be light!’ says Calvin, and flicks a switch. After three months of creeping round with torches through the long, dark evenings, it is extraordinary to see warm, golden light flood the house.
I’ve read that suicides are more common in parts of the world where inhabitants are subjected to lengthy periods of darkness. Sweden, for example, so far from the equator they get a good twenty hours of darkness in winter months, has really grim suicide rates. Not that I’m suggesting Ian and I have suffered greatly from our lack of light, but when the power is restored, we skip about like spring lambs. We can’t get enough of it and are really wasteful, having the lights on in all the rooms of the house every evening for days.
At last I can wind up all the extension cords, give the floors a good wash, turn on the computer, check approximately five hundred emails, and warm us with a fan heater while we watch TV.
Benji returns to paint. Everyone is aware of the pressure of Mother’s arrival and Benji works like a fiend, abandoning other customers. ‘Mother Mary is the priority,’ he says. It’s a phrase often echoed at this time.
Ian and I spread out all the new window frames on the verandah and paint them before installation. When they are in, they are too stiff to be locked properly. Cyril comes to the rescue yet again, dismantling them, shaving bits off and refitting them with careful, patient hands.
Ian has saved the old facia boards that were pulled down with the gutters when the roof of the house was removed. He has discovered that they are seasoned red cedar. Parts are rotten, but enough survives for Cyril to make open shelves for the kitchen and a mantelpiece to fit around the cook top that has Ian whooping with delight.
Everyone thinks I’m mad when I produce pale pink cut glass knobs for the doors and drawers. But all later agree that they’re great. I know I’m being patronised but let it go. There is no comment from the team when I produce the pink toaster. I think they’re pretending not to have noticed.
We are in our new kitchen. I can hardly believe it. Suddenly there is space and more space, cupboards, shelves, an oven, a big, deep sink, clean broad bench tops, natural light and a table and chairs.
Ian attaches his ‘wine gun’ to the wall above the cedar mantelpiece. At a glance you’d swear it was an old rifle and suspect Ian of being a mad keen gun enthusiast. But this is actually a bottle of wine.
The story goes after the Second World War ended, a digger bought the bottle as a souvenir in Italy before he came home to Australia. He never opened and drank his prize and, after he died, his widow sold it to a second-hand dealer. It looks like a gun, feels like a gun, but is made of glass. If you tip it back and forth you can hear the liquid gurgle and see the cork in the nozzle.
Ian is an even more obsessed collector than I am, but our collections blend well. You need a few anvils, dingo traps, copper urns and old pots and pans hanging around the place to dilute the mass of pretty china I can’t live without. So our new kitchen is an eclectic mix of rose-patterned teapots and branding irons, delicate plates and dented pewter tankards, camp ovens and boomerangs.
It’s the same when you wander the rest of the house. You’ll see a bowl of fresh roses alongside a stuffed crocodile; a pair of bronze, claymore-clutching, kilt-wearing Scotsmen sharing space with etched ruby glass goblets; a ‘blunderbuss’, kukris and empty shell cases alongside antique hand-painted vases.
Though in the living room, where the bi-fold cedar doors can divide the space in two, Ian has claimed one half of the room and I’ve claimed the other. There is a noticeable lift in colour in my half, which I fill with fresh flowers and flowering pots of orchids – lilies and begonias when they are in season – and a noticeable concentration of more manly items in Ian’s half.
‘Rikki-Tikki-Tavi’ takes pride of place. Rikki-Tikki-Tavi is a stuffed mongoose fighting a cobra that I picked up in a junk shop in Brisbane. Ian’s favourite story as a boy was Kipling’s Rikki-Tikki-Tavi. This eponymous mongoose lives in the garden of an English family in India. When a cobra slithers in to threaten the little English boy, Rikki-Tikki-Tavi pounces, bravely fighting and killing the cobra, saving the lives of the child and his family.
Taxidermy is not my thing. I am decidedly unkeen when Ian suggests putting a stag’s head in the dining room. The idea of eating with a beheaded head stuck on the wall beside me seems revolting. But when I see Rikki-Tikki-Tavi for sale, I know I can bear it for the excitement it will give Ian. Especially if Rikki-Tikki-Tavi is confined to Ian’s end of the living room: the ‘Gentlemen’s Room’, which looks increasingly like the port and cigars region of the house.
Collecting, arranging and re-arranging our belongings is an immensely satisfying and entertaining pastime, but we must stop. We only have a month till Mother’s arrival, and need to set our sights on the garden.
A massive stack of aged mellow bricks sits waiting. They are the remnants of an old industrial kiln, found by a piece of great good fortune following a long, frustrating hunt for something to pave the path and patio around the kitchen.
We also find Charlie.
Charlie was born a cockney but has lived in Australia for more than thirty years. He is small and sparsely built, wiry, energetic and blessed with a keen, creative eye. We know our paths, walls and patio will have perfect curves and proportions.
Charlie knows Mother Mary is coming. He’s ready and waiting to start paving the moment he gets the go ahead.
Charlie rivals Cyril for tea-drinking capacity and christens me Lady Coronary, for the number of biscuits I produce and ply them with. During tea breaks, Charlie fascinates us with tales of life behind bars. Not that Charlie’s ever been locked up himself, but his wife, Rae, is head of the education program at the local gaol; the Maryborough Correctional Centre, to be more correct. It’s located a few kilometres out of town and houses some three hundred prisoners, including some real nutters by the sound of things. Charlie has worked there occasionally too. He’s run art classes and landscaping classes for the prisoners. He’s even been savaged by a police dog during a training exercise in the prison yard. This earns him such nicknames as ‘Biscuit’ and ‘Chum’ amongst the gaolbirds.
Charlie lives up to expectation. We soon have a patio, paths and low curved walls of warm aged bricks. It transforms the garden.
Finally I can plant my waiting collection of flowers and shrubs. I have gardenias and camellias for the raised garden bed along the eastern wall. In front of them I cram dozens of annuals: snapdragons, petunias and stocks, to fill the gaps until my shrubs grow fat enough to fill the beds. Along the hot north-western wall I put lavender and roses, daisies, verbena, cosmos, forget-me-nots, and allamanda and climbing roses to creep over the verandah columns.
They’ll need my tender loving care for a while until they get their roots down a bit, then should be able to withstand the gruelling summer heat.
Through all of this Ian and I, with Greg’s help, start laying turf on our barren lawn. It’s hot heavy work but the reward is instant, like laying a beautiful carpet over a wreck of a floor.
Ian drives out to the local turf farm and collects one batch at a time on the tray of his ute while Greg and I ready the bare soil with water and fertiliser. When Ian returns, the three of us heave the pieces of turf into position. All are cut to a size and weight that can be lifted one at a time. It’s back-breaking work – my arms are jelly within the first half hour – but it’s oh so exciting to see the garden transform. We work at a rate of about a hundred and fifty square metres a day. It takes ten days spread over almost three weeks.
The clock is ticking. It’s only a couple of weeks before Mother is due. But on a day when Ian is in Montville, Charlie and I get a bit carried away and use our leftover bricks to create a big circular bed in the middle of the back lawn. We dig up a recently planted pink bauhinia tree from the perimeter of the garden, and drag it up the hill to the centre of our circle. I make a mental note to kee
p Ian and his poisonous spray kit away. I don’t want my bauhinia sharing the fate of Ian’s poinciana, which is still sitting leafless and forlorn out at the front of the house. I fill the rest of the circle in with snapdragons, dianthus and pansies until it is jammed full and a rainbow of colour.
Charlie and I stand back, muddy, sweaty and liberally coated with fertiliser, delighted with our efforts and hoping Ian will approve this latest addition.
He does.
Now that we have our paradise found, Ian decides it would be a real treat to view things from the air. There is a little airstrip in Maryborough, a flying club and a few light planes which can be hired out. Flying has been one of the loves of Ian’s life. Though he hasn’t piloted a plane for almost thirty years, one of the highlights of his adventurous youth was being at the controls of a tiny piece of winged aluminium and hurtling through the stratosphere.
Me, I’m not so keen. Flying has never featured as a favourite thing to do, more a necessary evil to bear. There are two factors at play here: one, I’ve never quite got over the tendency to airsickness that made me such a trial to my sister when we were young; two, I think it’s pretty scary, zooming along eight thousand metres above the ground. I’m not keen on boats either. Terra firma is where I like to be. Two feet firmly planted, thank you.
The smaller the plane the more I hate it. The smaller the plane the more you get tossed about, the more you feel every unexpected twitch of the atmosphere. Vulnerability inversely proportional to size of plane: this is my unshakable belief.
Ian presses and cajoles. ‘You’ll love it when you’re up there. The jacarandas are in full bloom, it’s going to look amazing.’
‘I don’t know,’ I say, ‘perhaps next year.’
‘Why next year?’ says Do-It-Right-Now Man.
‘Well it would be really bad to die when my mother is due. Just think how disappointed she’d be.’
‘For God’s sake, don’t be such an idiot. You’re not going to die. We’ll go on a clear day, not a breath of wind.’
I recount several cases of small planes going down on clear days. These are the sort of statistics I store up to use on occasions such as this.
Ian presses and presses. ‘When you see the house your nerves will disappear. I promise.’
‘I do remember,’ I reluctantly concede, ‘that when I went snorkelling in shark-infested waters off Heron Island, I did forget all about the sharks once I saw how beautiful the reef was.’
‘There you go,’ he says. ‘It’ll be the same.’
‘Maybe.’
But he’s already reaching for the phone, booking Roy Gibson, a local pilot for the next day. ‘It’ll be a four-seater,’ he tells me, ‘because I’d like to take Bob Harper, the photographer, with us. Wouldn’t it be great to have some aerial shots done with a proper camera? After seeing the house, we’ll fly over the wood chip mill, then have a look at Fraser Island, before coming back.’
‘Can I sleep on it?’
‘Sure you can. With Bob coming, I’ve told Roy we need the four-seater whether you join us or not.’
I wake in the morning with a knot of dread in my belly. Ian is bouncing with cheerfulness. ‘I’m so glad you’re doing this, that we can share the experience. And I’m really proud of you,’ he adds, with an arm round my shoulders, ‘because I know you don’t find these things easy.’
Thus, it seems, I am committed.
I don’t feel too bad at the airport. The day is clear as promised, not a breath of wind, not another plane in sight, no flocks of birds or bats, and the land around Maryborough is totally flat. No mountains or canyons or other natural features likely to cause up or down draughts. I tell myself it will be no worse than a cable car ride, and it is only for an hour. How bad can one hour be?
We find Roy in the hangar, tinkering with the plane. ‘Is that our plane?’ I whisper to Ian.
‘A Cessna 172,’ he says with barely suppressed excitement.
The plane is the size of a mosquito. I can’t believe four people are going to fit inside. And I can’t believe its engine, assuming it has one, will have the power to lift four people off the ground.
Bob, our photographer, approaches with a cheery wave. He explains that he’ll have to be in the front with Roy to get clear vision for the photos. ‘You’d better sit behind me, Anne, because I have to push my seat right back for the camera angle. Ian can sit behind Roy where there’ll be more leg room.’
Ian says that he doesn’t mind the lack of space. A leg room debate commences.
‘You’ll like it better behind Roy,’ Ian tells me. ‘Bob’s side of the plane doesn’t have a door, just a doorway.’
End of debate. I scramble in behind Roy’s seat. Then Ian gets in and the plane nearly topples sideways. He puts an arm round me, grinning. ‘You’ll love it once we’re up there, I swear. And don’t worry, Roy tells me the plane has just had its one hundred hour check.’
Sitting in the belly of the mosquito, I get a sense of the surreal. I can’t believe I’m doing this, therefore I’m not. I’m not here at all. It’s a dream, and soon I will wake in our beautiful king-size bed, stretch, yawn and contemplate the day.
The propeller hums into life. The mosquito vibrates. We taxi across the tarmac.
A cable car ride, I tell myself, and it will be over soon.
Within ten seconds of take-off, I know I’m in trouble. A tight band of fear constricts me. Every muscle and sinew clenches into total rigidity. Ian’s arm maintains its circle of my shoulders. The wind through the open doorway, roars loudly enough to drown out conversation. Ian smiles and points, occasionally shouting in my ear when he spots a landmark.
I realise I can’t bear it, won’t be able to bear it, but I am trapped so have no choice but to bear it.
Ian is shouting and pointing. ‘The house …’ I hear, but can’t look. Roy is circling our home so that Bob can get unobstructed photos through the opening. There is no way my eyes can travel in that direction, the sight of Bob hanging out into space is more than I can handle.
The circling gets tighter, lower. The plane gives a bit of a lurch. To my horror I feel tears spring to my eyes. Ian has spotted them and squeezes my shoulders. I’m now sobbing but, as Bob and Roy have their backs to us, I’m hoping to get away with it undiscovered. I struggle to regain control, taking deep breaths, gripping the one and only wall of the plane as though my life depends on it.
I know I’m ruining Ian’s flight, but had no idea it would be this awful, this unmanageable. I lean towards Ian’s ear. ‘I don’t want to go to Fraser Island,’ I say, the only words I utter for the duration of the flight. He nods.
I start to feel ill. I’m not sure if it is pure motion sickness, or whether it is compounded by terror-induced nausea. I try closing my eyes, but feel worse. The best is to stare straight ahead.
We are almost at the woodchip mill. Bob has been booked to photograph this also. Roy circles the mill, Bob clicking away. The circling is ghastly, the plane tilted at an angle so unnatural I feel as though the merest puff of wind could flip us over. Round and round we go. I’m clutching the wall, leaning into it, staring straight ahead. Roy’s eyes are on Bob’s activities most of the time. Watch where you’re going! I want to shout. Not that the traffic is heavy. We don’t see another plane the whole time we’re airborne.
All the way back to Maryborough, I’m rigid, fighting nausea. By the time we make our approach to the airstrip I think I’m going to be sick into the hat on my lap. I take deep breaths. We touch down neatly. Roy is a skilled pilot. We taxi to the hangar, hop out. I’m stiff all over, muscles pulled from my neck to my calves. I shake hands with Roy and Bob, murmur my thanks, and tell Ian I’ll meet him by the car. In the privacy of the far side of the car, I drop to my knees and vomit onto the grass.
Ian is really nice to me for the rest of the day. He grovels and waits on me hand and foot. My nausea doesn’t clear till the following morning.
CHAPTER 23
MOTHER MARY
– AND MARRIAGE
WE DECIDE TO HAVE A party before Mother arrives, to thank everyone who has been involved in our project over the two years. She is due on Saturday 1 October, so we arrange the party for the preceding Sunday. This will give me five clear days after the party to clean the house, arrange flowers, perfect her bedroom, polish the silver, prune the upstairs bougainvillea that’s thornily growing at an alarming rate, fill the fridge with wholesome food, bake a cake and anything else I can think of to make me look like a domestic goddess.
The day before the party, Georgie and Tom surprise us with an overnight visit. After dinner, when Georgie and I clear the plates from the dining table and take them to the kitchen, there is a hushed, urgent conversation occurring in the dining room. Georgie and I are oblivious, rinsing plates, deciding what to have for pudding, but, out of our sight, leaning forward across the table, Tom is asking Ian for Georgie’s hand in marriage.
It is the most exciting news in our extended family for ages. Seldom do you see a pair who, from first glance, you can tell are perfectly matched. Georgie and Tom are peas in a pod. Their wedding is set for the following May.
The next morning we have to drag our thoughts away from Tom and Georgie and apply ourselves to the serious task of getting organised for the party. I have treated myself to the services of a caterer from town so there’s no cooking to do, but there’s still plenty awaiting my attention: flowers to arrange, furniture to dust, floors to sweep, cushions to plump, a bar to set up on the lawn. Finally I tether a big fat pink ribbon from pillar to pillar across the top of the verandah steps.
There is Mike and his team, all the other tradespeople who have been involved: plumbers, bricklayers, roofer, concreters; Marian, the architect, and her team; a National Trust representative; Peter, from Olds Engineering, who has just completed the Queen’s new carriage wheels; Brian White, the joiner; taciturn Brad of the kitchen; and Charlie, Greg, Cyril, Benji and Calvin, along with all the spouses and girlfriends. There is the Mayoress and the press; Trevor, without whom we would never have found the house; Jan and Barry Christiansen, who’ve driven the four hours from Toowoomba; and there is our guest of honour, Margaret Jacobson, great-niece of Mr Hugh Biddles. Margaret is going to cut the ribbon.
A Grand Passion Page 22