by David Brooks
Valerie had been astounded, soon after Elizabeth died, to be approached by one of the town councillors, a lawyer, not as she feared to be told that she must now leave, but to inform her at once of Elizabeth’s legacy – all she had had, the largest part of which comprised, untouched, the trust money Valerie herself had brought from Hoburn – and of the council’s hope that she would stay on as the Mechanics’ Institute’s librarian. A special meeting of its Board had voted, if she accepted, not only to offer her the same small consideration they had given Elizabeth, but to do what they could to raise sufficient to cover the cost of a correspondence course in librarianship – other subjects, if she wished – and such trips to Sydney or elsewhere as might be necessary to complete it.
And so she had stayed. One of the older men, who truly did read, and who had been slow to accept one so young, but who having done so became steadfast, told her after some months that although he had thought of it as Miss Farrow’s library, he had come at last to see it as hers, and that Miss Farrow had merely prepared it for her – that it seemed, now, to be blossoming in her hands, if libraries could blossom.
It was true. If the library had once been Elizabeth’s it was now, and increasingly, Valerie’s own. More and more she could feel it, like a solid but also an abstract forest, growing up around her. The ceilings were high, and in the second year, to accommodate the new acquisitions, she had had the bookshelves extended all the way up. For a time they remained empty, these upper levels, but somehow, by donation, from the small budget, or from her own purchases, the books kept accumulating. She would look up and realise that another branch was growing, and think of the thousands of leaves, the ghosts of the trees that the paper had come from, the smell of the books that sometimes as she came in from the heat or the dust or the chill wind outside would whelm over her, like the scent of the humus on a rainforest floor. Vast and yet intimate, apparently deserted and yet full of creatures, secret trails, secret passages of the mind. She would stay late at night, reading by the pot-bellied stove she had installed, and more and more as each month passed might have seemed, could anyone have seen her (but at night there was no one), utterly quiet, utterly still, her eyes barely moving over the pages, and yet at the same time – invisibly, secretly – never so exhilarated, so wild.
***
She had changed, she knew it, since Fryer, and since Elizabeth’s death. She would look out from herself into the mirror, and be intrigued by the composure, what Elizabeth would have called the taste, the sudden beauty. Most of all at how little it showed of what teemed beneath. It became in time an art for her, this balance, this thin dividing line, this maintaining, for all those of the library who seemed to need her so, of the calm and consistent being who signed out, received, shelved, repaired, ordered – as if the books were a flock and she its watchful shepherdess, as if, in her hands, they would never smoulder or explode.
She, on the other hand, would sometimes almost do so, and have to leave the library temporarily in another’s care – there were often helpers – or with a note pinned to the thick wooden door, and walk out for miles, sometimes to the southern end of the town where she could stand, before turning back, in the quiet of the late sunset by the river at the edge of Baxter’s sawmill, and sometimes in the mill yard itself, for the smell of it, amongst the short and the long and the square and the planked trees, listening for the ghosts of the rainforest. Or else she would go to the beaches and along them to the north, to feel the salt spray on her face.
On other days, pressed by a different mood, she would walk over to the western edge of town and seek out one of the tracks that led, after a few partly cleared fields in which she would come across the occasional ram’s or ewe’s head picked clean, to the beginnings of the forest itself in the perpetual shadow of the great escarpment. And would want there, on the hot days or the warm, wet, steaming ones, to let out her hair and take off her clothes, to lie down and move on the ground as if she wanted to enter it, or perform some small outrage on the grass. Out of frustration perhaps, and anger, at finding herself so deftly imprisoned amongst the men who were too old or too young and the women who were too kindly and too closed. And perhaps also out of grief.
It was, in any case, out of grief or perhaps out of the desire to be rid of it that in her sixth year in Nara, almost twelve months after Elizabeth had died, she took the train to Tarren Bridge to stay for two nights at the Three Ways Hotel. From there, starting out early on the middle day with a young man she had paid to take her in the hotel’s Model T truck, she went up to see Mrs Goodleigh at The Bend, not even knowing if she were still alive, though in fact she found her very much so – she had grown indeed so alarmingly larger that the old weatherboard store seemed to creak and bend with her walking – and talked for well over an hour with her while the young man waited outside under the shade of the big pine trees, smoking cigarettes. And so heard, that way, what had happened, and some other things that Mrs Goodleigh had never quite seen how to tell a fourteen-year-old. ‘I don’t know how much you know,’ she began, ‘but if it’s to see your father that you’ve come then you mightn’t want to go over there, since the place is empty a good ten years now. He left for the War, soon after you disappeared, and never came back. Not that that means he’s dead, mind, but if he’s still alive he never came back here.’
He had asked her to look after the child (such delicacy she had, for such a large, coarse woman, to say ‘the child’) while he went, thinking like so many others that it would all be over in a month or so, and if he didn’t come back – this seemed the remotest possibility – to take the baby to the convent if she couldn’t keep her herself. She didn’t know how he knew about the convent, but perhaps he had been asking about. And then, with the swag he had made up for himself, his exhausted white shirt covering his tattooed arms, walked off down the dirt road toward Tarren Bridge, to catch the train for Sydney.
She hadn’t waited, Mrs Goodleigh, at least not long. She would have liked to, but there was a choice, or rather none. She had her own children to feed, one of them near-enough to new-born itself, and her own husband gone, and this bent infant was so sickly, seemed so unlikely to survive in such a place, and she couldn’t face a death on her hands. Just breastfeeding it, she joked, with things as large as hers would have been a danger to its life. She had left the two boys with Thelma Myne at the logging camp and got Jack Myne to take her down to the railway. And in Sydney had somehow found her way to the convent, all the time not knowing whether the child would die in her arms before she got there. Later she had sat a long time at Central Station, waiting for the midnight mail train, and had been back at the Crossroads next day. And in the end she had been right: he didn’t come back; neither of them – Joe Tryde or her own Joe Goodleigh – came back. ‘You did right,’ Mrs Goodleigh said after all this, ‘in case you ever wonder, which you probably do. You did right. It’s maybe all for the best, all of it. The War made a horrible mess of things, God knows, but it also cleaned up some. We survived. Let’s hope that little tyke did too …’
Eventually, for what had become a whole complex of reasons, and although she feared that it might only strengthen the cage, Valerie chose the course in Sydney.
At thirty-one, Tony Wu, seven years out of Shanghai, would have said he had practised his art on all possible kinds: sailors, butchers, street vendors, garbagemen, soldiers, prostitutes, boxers, draymen, gamblers, pimps, studs, dancers, thieves, the occasional bored housewife, or nurse from the hospital, or city politician – even, once, a beautiful lady from Vaucluse, who had him tattoo down her lower spine a large and remarkable tulip, so that, on nights of particular daring, at cocktail parties or society balls, she might wear such dresses as threatened to expose its scarlet head or even some small portion of its leaves or stem, which he had done in the deepest green available. But never anyone like this silent, owl-eyed creature with her white, bookish skin and tightly wound red hair, who looked as though she had drifted from the surface of an ancient
wall during the last hours of darkness and been stranded by the morning at his door. For that is how, coming back with his sweet pork dumplings from Bao Lu’s, he had found her – examining intently, almost with reverence, the photographs of heavily tattooed torsos displayed in one of the two long window-cases outside. And, as he thought, had immediately scared her away with a comment, intended as a joke, at the doubtful propriety of rich ladies staring at half-naked men, that had somehow – so strangely and instantaneously had his mouth dried and his throat constricted when she looked up at him, her large eyes blinking the once and once only, as if to swallow and dismiss him – come out the wrong way.
She had left, in any case – fled, as he thought of it, as a frightened bird might – without speaking, leaving him standing with his still-steaming dumplings, his keys dangling from his hand. And for an hour or more as the day got under way and even again that evening and at sporadic points in the days following, he had rehearsed the scene, changing the words, shifting the emphasis this way and that – the English language was always like this – fruitlessly, as though such a woman would ever come back to a door such as his – as if, he soon came to think, a woman like that had ever really existed, and was not some stray piece of a forgotten dream, thrown up by the incalculable weather of dreams. Dreams, for him, having all gone askew, taking such strange forms since he had landed in this place, amongst these unfathomable ghosts.
But she did return, several weeks later, with a request that bore no apparent relation to their earlier encounter – that might even at the time have been already in her mind. As indeed it had, for several minutes, by the time the tall, greatcoated Chinese man had startled her out of her reverie with a comment that she did not catch, and then his sudden nervous laugh, and she had not had time to wait to find out but had had to hasten off for the Nara train, which she was then in danger of missing.
A fern.
‘A fern? Leaf? A piece of plant?’
‘No. The fern itself. The whole fern, but small. Many fronds,’ and she drew out of her purse a folded drawing, in pencil, to show him.
‘Fronds?’
‘Yes, leaves, like these, small branches. But small, it only has to be small … Here –’ and she scrabbled at her right sleeve, its buttons, pulling up the fabric to show him, the wrist-veins blue through the immaculate alabaster of the inner arm, then turning it, slightly, to indicate a place: ‘To go here.’
‘The whole fern? With roots? Not cut?’
‘Yes. Not cut. The whole plant, with roots, so that it might grow … though I don’t want to see the roots necessarily … Can you do it?’
He knew that at this point he could not, but would, somehow, to make sure this astonishing ghost came back.
‘Can you bring me this fern, some of it?’ he asked, the drawing giving him only the beginnings – ‘and then I will work out a design, to show you.’
‘That will be difficult: I leave tomorrow.’ And then, thinking, ‘Let me try. Are you here this afternoon? Late? I could bring you some then.’ For she had remembered the fernery at the Botanic Gardens at the bottom of Macquarie Street.
The next day, having brought him a small, stolen specimen the evening before, she came back, by arrangement, to see what he had done. She was delighted. His drawing was exquisite, intricate, given the small space she proposed, and with exactly the distinctive fineness, the clear, sharp edges, as on Chinese porcelain, that had attracted her in his window display. Although it was Sunday and she imagined it a great presumption to ask, she did, and stayed several hours while he worked, leaving on the four-thirty train with the first fronds raw and moist on her hot arm.
And he, who had drawn thirteen pictures to arrive at the one which so pleased her, and who had stayed up half the night doing so, had now touched her, stretched the young skin of her inner arm, inserted the needle three hundred times, the merest fraction of an inch, watching the ink vein out as its tiny filaments took root, wiping away the small spots of blood and the excess pigment, praying all the while to the strange spirits of this place that she would be pleased, that she would come back. Not knowing how pleased. Not knowing what had begun.
She came back, almost a month to the day, wanting another fern, and to tell him about cycads. And came back again, month after month while her course in librarianship continued, and thereafter almost as regularly, for she made the time out of holidays, out of the need to visit library suppliers, out of the need to shop for books. Once, on her first true holiday, she stayed out in Abbotsford with a relative of a friend, and came in several times on the tram. Once, having arranged a substitute at the library, she managed almost a month over Christmas, in a small flat she had rented high over the beach at Tamarama, and would come in to the dark, cramped shop on the lane off Layton Street twice a week. It was all he could manage, he told her, given the volume of his other work, although in truth it was as much the intensity of the concentration and the ambiguous pleasure of it, that was sometimes almost ecstasy, and the fear that the work might end all the sooner if he did not so carefully pace it.
He had worked on all kinds of designs in the fifteen years since leaving his apprenticeship with Lin Ch’ou, from the word Mother, in its manifold forms, to the names of ships, and lovers, to ships’ prows, mermaids, naked women, dragons, eagles, flags. But never anything like the ideas she brought to him, of tall trees and clinging vines, forest spaces, cabbage palms, burrawangs, finches, tiny rock lizards. As if she had sensed, that first day at the long window, a range and depth in him – a possibility – that he had not known he possessed, or had, in herself, enough power of vision to coax from him what was needed. Bringing him plants, drawings, books, instructing him to go to this place or that, to look – she now directed him, he sometimes thought, like a chancellor from the royal court might have directed one of the artisans working on the Forbidden City, or the statues in the Zhou Gardens, or as the stern Ice Goddess directed Xi Zheng in his Thousand Tasks, and it was never quite clear whether what took form was the artisan’s masterpiece or that of the chancellor whose instrument the artisan was.
Working on her arm at first, thickening the ferns about a space left clear (‘With spaces left,’ she had said, ‘for things to come after.’ ‘Spaces?’ he had asked – ‘like mist, in valleys, seen from the side of a mountain?’ ‘Yes,’ she had answered, having never seen it that way, but understanding immediately, ‘like mist, small clouds of mist.’), he then, session by slow session, advanced toward the shoulder, moving gradually into the inner arm, with vines, strange plants she would bring or send him to the Botanic Gardens to see. And then moved to the other arm, starting several inches above the wrist again, since she wanted nothing of this to be seen, moving eventually to the back, where tall trees were to stand, leaving much space open, much to be developed, a blue-print of an exotic forest he himself had never seen – which seemed, at first, a thing out of pure imagination – though he came, as the sessions progressed, increasingly to believe in.
Each time, after the initial discussion and agreements, she would sit or lie there in silence, baring such parts of her body as were necessary as if they were not really her own, treating the softest, smoothest skin, the rarest jade, as if it were so much stretched canvas, or a strange, rich soil for a garden she was impatient to see bloom. For hours at a time his meticulous, repetitive puncturing, his slow, concentrated breathing, hers, the most intense absorption on the one part, a kind of trance on the other; having given him her instructions, unable then to physically move away, she seemed to leave him, so that he might continue his work alone and in peace, and go off to some place deep within herself. Inch by inch, he came to know those parts of her body upon which he worked as surely she could never have known them herself, and yet still, after the one, then the two hundred hours, knew almost nothing of her. Even, sometimes, glancing up – as would happen, by accident or through some sense or magnetism operating beyond consciousness – would encounter her eyes, like some bird’s or serpent’s, w
atching him, attent, piercing, as if the mind behind them were of some other order entirely, and he as foreign to it as it was incomprehensible to him.
It became so that his months leaned towards these sessions. As each new visit approached, a pressure would mount within him, an anxious anticipation, that left him stunned, when she had gone, to discover that what had stretched almost intolerably so many of the days before it, so that it had seemed they would never be over, had itself passed so quickly in an irrecoverable dream, and he was an outcast again from this strange paradise she had had him make and, in the making, enter. Sometimes, left with another need, another pressure that had come with the relieving of the first, he would seek out one of his earlier clients, a woman who had helped him before, and use her urgently, and find as often as not that that had been a feint, a mistaken signal of the body – that it had not identified or satisfied the need at all. He would think, occasionally, or dream, that the forest was a thing of its own, a separate being that had begun to enfold them both, and was not surprised to find eventually the ink from these sessions only reluctantly quitting his hands, leaving here the ghost of a cycad-leaf – the tiny thorn at its tip – or there the minuscule, uncurling end of a new frond of elkhorn – or perhaps it was the nip of a possum, to which he had just foolishly, unknowingly, offered a fresh, fat grape, the place taking on a life of its own, the undergrowth almost perceptibly deepening, the foliage thickening during the weeks he had not seen her, where he could have sworn his own work had finished.