Orphaned Leaves

by Christopher Holt

  Brandt notices that when Milo is embarrassed, he talks too quickly, skating through the words.

  “Peggy is English too, just like Alan. She was widowed in the war and now she works in Tumut as a librarian. I told her I’d be coming up, and hoped to bring you and Alan. So, will you come?”

  “Of course, we’ll both need to spruce up a bit too.”

  “Use my bathrooms. Now let’s see. The roads will be all mud, so we’ll take the Rolls. It doesn’t slide about like the Buick.”

  “We could take my Land Rover.”

  “Thanks, but there’s more room in mine.”

  Ten minutes later, Brandt and Alan are outside as Milo brings around the Rolls.

  “I’m looking forwards to meeting your Peggy,” says Brandt as they go in.

  “I think you’ll like her,” says Milo. “Mind you, Peggy’s pretty down to earth. You might say she’s a woman of ruthless honesty.”

  *

  The bush exudes a cool dankness as they drive along a slippery, wet road, which, for Brandt, evokes the desolation of the 1945 death marches. The SS drivers often made a point of deliberately driving the vehicle through puddles so as to splash the prisoners from head to foot. He cannot remember a single instance when he objected and wishes he could, but, of course, he had never objected. Trying to remember just one mitigating example is like straining his eyes to look for a single star on the blackest night and finding nothing. Brandt closes his eyes for some brief oblivion, but Milo’s voice cuts in.

  “Hey, Alan take a look at this.” He drives across a reverberating timber bridge and pulls the car over to one side. The Tumut River is roaring in full spate and whole trees are sweeping downstream in a brown torrent. “Now, I’ll tell you something. The river isn’t always an angry bull like this, usually it’s as docile as a puppy; never too docile, mind. On a normal sunny day, there’s nothing like coming down here with a nicely inflated rubber dingy and shooting downstream like a bullet. I think we should give it a go in early autumn. Or, better still, we could go down the Murrumbidgee; yes, on second thoughts, that would be better – the Murrumbidgee’s got some rapids. That’s right, we’ll do the Murrumbidgee. What say you, Alan?”

  “That’ll be good,” says Alan in a subdued voice, and seconds later he adds, this time more brightly, “thank you, Milo. I look forward to it.”

  *

  As they enter Tumut, horses lift their wet muzzles from the water troughs outside the pubs and some people turn to stare at the Rolls Royce. Brandt can see that the town is more rural than Cooma and lacks its international flavour as the centre of the Snowy Mountains Scheme, and whereas Cooma is a recreational honey pot for the European workers, Tumut, thank God, is not.

  Milo drives straight to the garage, not for petrol, but to have the car hosed down. All three get out. Milo goes off to the washroom and Brandt fetches the long black rubber hosepipe.

  “I can wash the car,” says Alan. “Remember how I used to do the Buick? You told me to start from the top.”

  “It’s all yours,” says Brandt handing him the nozzle. “I’ll go and turn on the water.”

  After quite some time Milo returns from the washroom and joins them.

  “Do you want me to check the tyres, Milo?” asks Alan.

  “I think they’ll be right, but I’m obliged to you all the same,” says Milo as he strides off towards a flower stall.

  “Milo looks a bit different,” says Alan. “His hair is combed back – it looks a bit oily. His shoes are as shiny as yours and he’s put a tie on. I thought he looked pretty smart when we left Tumbledown, but look at him now.”

  “He’s trying to look his best – to please a lady. All gentlemen do that. You’ll do it yourself one day. Steady with that hose.”

  *

  The beautiful car eases over the curb without a bump as Milo parks on the ‘nature strip’, though why Australians give it that name is a mystery to Brandt. After all, it’s just a tired stretch of over-mown lawn.

  Peggy’s house is a high bungalow with monstrous gables and a green corrugated-iron roof. Its front has a bull-nose veranda, from which a riot of wisteria vines and kiwi fruit are vying with each other to dismember the drainpipes and guttering. A sedate golden retriever ambles out from under the house and goes straight to Milo, who stoops to rub it behind the ears. When Brandt and Alan go to pat the dog, his tail sways in unhurried amiability.

  “He’s called Chaucer,” says Milo. Hearing his name, Chaucer wags his tail with more fervour.

  A slim woman opens the front door, slides back the fly screen and glances at her tiny gold watch. “As always, right on time,” calls Peggy Moore.

  Brandt is impressed. Peggy must be in her late forties, yet she rushes down the steps like a young girl to kiss Milo, and greet Brandt and Alan.

  “Peggy, I want to introduce my neighbour and friend Otto Brandt, and his adopted son, Alan,” says Milo.

  If there is one thing the SS hierarchy had instilled into Brandt’s persona, it was a Prussian formality – which, in this case, only stops short of him clicking his heels – but he bows his head stiffly to Peggy and kisses her outstretched hand. At Island Bend, Brandt’s excessive courtesy to women is as well known, as is his shyness in their company.

  But if Alan is also nervous about meeting ‘Mrs Moore’, he looks reassured by the kindness he sees in her huge brown eyes and the total attention she gives him whenever he speaks. The same cannot be said about her effect on the tongue-tied Otto Brandt, who is not reassured in the least.

  Over tea and scones, and homemade youngberry jam, Peggy questions Brandt about his past. The defensive Brandt offers a plausible summary of his life, and the circumstances that have brought him first into Milo’s world and now into her own. He ends by shifting the conversation onto Peggy herself and asks her how she came to be working as a librarian in Tumut.

  “I started in the best place of all. In fact, I was very lucky. Back in 1931 I was selling books in Blackwells in Oxford when one of the regular customers suggested I apply to be an assistant at the London Library in St James’s Square – so I did just that and I got the job. It is such a wonderful library, you would love it,” she says, turning to Alan. “In those days lots of famous writers came there to work: Virginia Wolfe, Bernard Shaw and T.S. Eliot.” Her eyes mist over. “Oh, dear God, it was a lovely place to go to every day; it was only a block or two from Sothebys, and Bond Sreet and Regent Street, and just down from the Ritz Hotel.” She smiles at Alan. “The job wasn’t all honey and spices though. I found I was relegated to a little backroom with a brass notice on the door that read ‘Orphaned Leaves’.”

  Alan is hanging on every word. “Orphaned leaves?” he asks, “You mean like leaves off a tree?”

  “Where else might you find leaves, Alan?” Peggy glances at a Penguin paperback on the sideboard.

  “Oh, I know, Mrs Moore, you mean a book. The pages are called leaves.”

  Brandt and Milo are silent; the conversation between Peggy and Alan is claiming their full attention. Brandt has never seen the boy so animated.

  “Yes, Alan, but what happens if a leaf is missing?”

  “You have to go and find it.”

  “Exactly, but suppose the library has more than a million books, some of them in different languages and many of them hundreds of years old.”

  “You’d never find them.”

  “If you looked hard enough, you’d usually find them and that was my job. Every time someone in the library found a page on its own it was called an orphaned leaf and I had to work out where it belonged.”

  “And then you stuck it back?”

  “No, because binding was someone else’s job. I didn’t have those particular talents. Sometimes, I spent nearly a week to locate the volume it came from. In the London Library they had boxes full of orphaned leaves, some of them written in Middle
English from the fourteenth century, and it was my task to bring them home so to speak. I was amazed how even the most torn and stained pages could eventually be repaired and restored.”

  “I expect you miss your old job now,” says Brandt.

  “At the London Library? Yes, I do, but then I’m not just interested in books; I am also intrigued by people. Their lives are also full of orphaned leaves.” She turns back to the boy. “So where are yours, Alan? Can we help you to find them and put them back where they belong? And you, yourself, Otto, there must be so many gaps in your history. Even for you, dear Milo, whom I think I know so well, why on earth do you insist on driving your father’s old Rolls Royce around the bush when you should have a proper jeep? There are quite a few orphaned leaves to discover there, I’m sure.”

  Brandt is alarmed at the way Peggy is leading the conversation and it is a load off his mind when she suggests that Milo takes them for a tour around Tumut while she cooks supper.

  Moments after they drive off, Milo starts laughing. “Peggy can make all the suggestions she likes, but I’m not taking you blokes on some sissy tour of Tumut. We’re going flying.”

  Brandt blanches because he remembers the warning from Tom Henty: never go flying with Milo Hudson-Beck.

  When they arrive at the Tumut Aero Club, Milo drives straight towards the last of a line of private hangars, where he keeps a little green plane, which looks as if it was acquired from a war surplus depot. The cockpit smells of old leather, and Milo and Alan manage to fit into the tiny dual controlled area at the front, while Brandt has to scrunch behind them.

  “The seat is very loose here,” he says. “Is it OK, Milo?”

  “Not a worry; the bolts have worn loose because I have to take out the back when I’m crop dusting. She’ll be right.” Alan leans forwards to examine the steering and the joystick. “I wouldn’t touch anything there, Alan,” says Milo, “Not yet, anyway. Here we go.”

  They taxi along the grassy, bumpy airstrip until the shuddering plane struggles into the air, and Alan gasps as they barely clear the tree tops. Minutes later he stares in disbelief as the wing tips almost brush the rocky sides of a mountain gorge teeming with waterfalls from all the rain. He squints through his spectacles as the sunlight reflects sharply on banks of wet quartz. Brandt holds onto his straps, his attention solely on Alan, who is tightly gripping both sides of his seat, but then the passengers relax as the plane banks away from the mountains, and soars over the green and sodden slopes of the western ranges.

  “I think we’ll let you be the pilot for a bit, Alan,” says Milo. “It’s easy; look, give me your hand. Now that’s it on the steering. Do you see that little pointer outside? That’s a dipper. Hand on the stick. Eyes on the dipper. You’ve gotta keep it level. That’s it, mate, steady now.”

  To Brandt, the boy seems more confident at the controls than when he was a mere passenger.

  “Look at him!” shouts Milo. “Alan’s a natural pilot. I bet you’re proud of him, Otto.”

  “I am,” says Brandt through his teeth. At four thousand feet, he realises for the first time in many years that he has someone to be proud of – and it feels good.

  Milo taps the boy’s wrist. “I’ll take over for a bit now, if you don’t mind, Alan.”

  The plane banks once more, then cuts a wide arc in the open sky, but, just as his passengers think they are turning homeward, Milo starts to laugh. “Now both you blokes come from the Northern Hemisphere, so it must seem a bit odd for you being always upside down. I’m going to make you feel more at home. Steady on.”

  Alan cries out in shock as the aircraft lurches, yaws, then banks out, while Brandt grasps the boy’s shoulder as the plane spins upside down with the ground rushing over their heads the grey sky wide open at their feet. “Steady as we go,” shouts Milo as he eases the joystick flat and the plane obediently resumes its natural alignment. “Now, one last time on the big dipper; hold on, here we go.”

  *

  “Milo, you didn’t. How could you?” says Peggy the moment Alan goes outside to explore the garden with Chaucer. “He’s just a boy, he’s never been in an aeroplane before. Look how white he is; it’s a mercy he wasn’t sick.”

  “Just a spin turn, Peggy. That’s all it was, and the little bloke loved it. He even wants to become a pilot himself one day.”

  Brandt comes to Milo’s defence. “I am sure that no harm was done, Peggy. Alan will remember it as an adventure.” Brandt sounds much more confident than he feels. He wonders if he shouldn’t have remonstrated with Milo and nipped it in the bud, but then, despite Henty’s early warning, how could he have been really prepared for Milo’s unbelievable aerobatics?

  Peggy turns to Brandt. “Of course, I don’t know you very well, Otto. Milo tells me you’re a very intelligent man, but I think you have a lot to learn about bringing up a son. You’ve just got to put Alan first before… going off and playing Biggles. Bringing up a son is important, much more important than joining Milo in his wild escapades in the bush or blasting tunnels or looking for gold. Oh no! Something’s burning,” and she races off to the kitchen.

  *

  A few days later, Brandt and Milo are out on their common fence line settling their new ‘alpine gate’ onto its hinges.

  “I definitely don’t want Alan to go to school in Cooma,” says Brandt. “There’s some snobbery among the Snowy Scheme employees and so-called ‘professionals’ like me are viewed differently from waged labourers. I’m afraid Alan might be bullied.”

  “That’s the last thing Alan needs on his plate,” agrees Milo.

  But there is something else that Brandt hasn’t mentioned. He has found out that the Cooma schools are bulging with the children of newly arrived families from Eastern Europe, and there is a possibility that, at some future parents’ event, he might be recognised.

  “Tumut is the only alternative,” says Brandt, “but that means I would have to drive Alan there and back every day, which means three or more hours in the Land Rover when I should be working.”

  “The trouble is that there’s no bus service out this far,” says Milo. “Most of the farm kids around here have to board in Tumut.”

  “I can’t do that to Alan. He’d be terrified of the idea. I think he’d even run away. I’ve promised the boy he will never go to any boarding institution again.”

  “Quite right,” says Milo. “But what about private boarding, in a proper home – just on schooldays?”

  “With strangers? No, I can’t do that to him either. He’s still only getting to know me.”

  *

  Late next Sunday, Milo and Peggy turn up together at Garigo. “Sorry about coming around at this time of night, Otto. I know it’s all very sudden. I’ve got to get Peggy back to Tumut, but first she wants to tell you her idea.”

  “Is Alan still up?” asks Peggy.

  “No,” says Brandt. “We listened to Pick-a-Box on the radio, then he had his bath and I sent him off to bed.” He takes Peggy’s light coat and both their hats, and ushers them into the front room.

  When they are seated, Peggy begins at once. “This was originally Milo’s idea, which is why he took you and Alan up to Tumut in the first place. He wanted you both to meet me and to see where I live. From now on, I shall be spending every weekend with Milo at Tumbledown, so why not let Alan board with me on school days during the week? He’ll come home to you on Friday evenings and go back to Tumut on Sunday night, and you’ll still have him throughout the school holidays.”

  Brandt’s mind is racing as he tries to see the plan from Alan’s point of view. All that promising to be his dad and now the boy might be palmed off to someone he hardly knows. Brandt sits upright on the sofa. “That’s a very gracious offer, Peggy – it could solve a big problem – but I would have to put it to Alan first.”

  “That goes without saying,” she says, “but from my point o
f view, I would just love to have him with me for weekdays, cook his meals and help him with his school work. He’s bound to make friends, and after school he can bring them around to my house for tea and cake; all boys like cake.”

  “There’s something I need to tell you about Alan,” says Brandt lowering his voice. “If we were to do this, you would be taking on more than you think.”

  Although Alan is asleep in his room well down the hallway Brandt still gets up and closes the door. “I suppose Milo has told you something of Alan’s history and what they did to him at that mission. It still affects him, sometimes he shouts so loudly in his sleep that he wakes himself up. When he first came here, he used to wet his bed every night and then in the morning he tried to hide the sheets because he thought I was going to thrash him with a leather strap like the brothers used to do. Plus, no matter how clean he is, you’ll find he is forever washing himself. There’s more too: he cannot cope with being in dark places, so I have to keep a small night light on in his bedroom. And then there’s his reaction to Catholic priests. It still comes as a shock to me. If we are ever driving in Cooma and he sees a priest going about his business, he ducks down like a terrified rabbit. He also has long periods when he needs to be alone. Alan will often sit alone in the bush for a whole hour or so, just staring at the trees and sometimes talking to himself.”

  Peggy doesn’t look surprised at all. “I’d be amazed if Alan wasn’t traumatised after what he went through. Please, Otto, please let him stay with me – if he wants to, that is. I’ll take the greatest care of him, I promise. Do trust me.”

  *

  Next morning Brandt tells Alan about Peggy’s offer. “It’s only a suggestion just to help you with your schooling. I’m your dad, this is your home, and we’ll always catch up at weekends and school holidays. How do you feel about staying with Mrs Moore? Would you consider it?”

  Alan frowns, then “Yes, I would,” he says, “but…” He wipes his eyes with a sleeve and his head drops. “I’m sorry, I…”