by Murray Bail
On a very hot day Ellen splashed in…came up with both hands sweeping hair back from her eyes. For a while she lay on her back, eyes closed; and in the pale combination of flesh and water, which can both be taken to the lips or penetrated by a hand, three dark areas beckoned.
When she stood in the shallows her breasts swung a little.
On both sides the fat gums appeared as an entourage of sturdy older women, raising their skirts above their knees, about to wade into the water.
Squatting, Ellen began pissing.
Young Molloy was behind a tree. To see better he took the squatting position too. A fly began crawling towards his nose. Eventually he lowered his eyes—to contemplate the future?
Accelerating away with legs splayed around the engine, increasingly slit-eyed, watery, he began yelling out at what had been granted to him. Without much warning he felt it all slip on the dirt from under him, the engine spun, and he yawned as he was met in the face by the barbed wire, which tore off most of his nose.
As owner of the fence Holland was an early visitor.
‘He sure was feeling pretty sorry for himself,’ Holland told Ellen. ‘Both parents were there, no hard feelings about our fence. They are just pleased to still have him. It’s all they could talk about. I suppose he’s still alive, but it’s not going to be much of a life. Milking cows is all he’ll be good for.’
He lost the sight of one eye, quickly followed by the other.
Ellen had been told about his healthy good looks. It was said in town he had a wild streak.
‘I don’t want to see you ever getting on the back of a motorbike,’ Holland was saying.
One morning outside the Commercial Hotel, Ellen laughed—a sound no one in town had heard before. A tall waterfall from Africa or the Andes could have been transposed onto their dusty old street.
Apparently her father had said something dry. Looking across at him as he trudged Ellen laughed, and when he gave his two-stage smile, known elsewhere as a muddy smile, she tilted her throat and laughed all the more.
A daughter openly mocking a father: other women saw the power of her adult beauty overflowing as gaiety.
Everybody was proud of her; to think that such a beauty in all its rarity was living in their parts.
Conventionally strong men lost their tongues. At the sight of her, some were inflicted with a sort of paralysis. All they could do when Ellen came into town was stand about grinning and gaping. To get around this the lads speeding past the property made it a practice to sound their horns, and filtered by the river and the trunks of hundreds of eucalypts it reached the house like the faint bellowing of sexually mournful steers.
Of course there were some who boldly marched up and spoke to her. First they had to get past her father. And he was more like a tennis coach than a father, never letting his girl out of his sight. If a gangly young man appeared to bump into them and opened his mouth to say something, or if Holland came out onto the street to find his daughter in the sunlight half-listening to a man, or several of them, he stood beside her with an expression of concentrated shrewdness. Among them he was the expert. After all, she was his daughter; he knew her better than anyone.
The trouble was he was not impressed with any of them. There was something wrong with each and every one, if not in the way they spoke, in the way they looked; one of them held his smile too wide, with another it was the size of thumbs. By far the worst were those who exhibited a certain truculent ease. They literally bulged with familiarity, their hair combed like paddocks for sowing.
They were just beginning, like the country itself; Holland didn’t know what to say to them.
His daughter, she had no idea what men took and discarded, how they went about it. Without thinking, Holland had hired a man from town to help grub out some trees, a contentedly married man, known to be reliable—until Holland caught him leaning on his shovel, doing nothing but watching Ellen. Later, he saw him offering her a cigarette. Holland felt as if he himself was being violated. She had always been at his side, had grown alongside him—an extension of himself.
Cars and trucks slowed down approaching the gate; for you never know your luck. Suitors came from all directions. If one knocked on the front door asking for his daughter, Holland was factually polite. One of them galloped up no hands on a horse! Noticing her curious smile Holland pointed out the idiot had been drinking.
In winter she liked to spend entire mornings in the tower where it was warm and she could feed the birds. From there the scale of her father’s achievement could be seen; though when she took off her clothes and felt like an orchid, the all-over warmth opening the petals of her body, she became conscious of her nakedness mocking the laborious placement into all corners of the different species of trees. Other times she sat in her blue room brushing her lovely hair, which reminded Holland of her mother. She made her own clothes. She did sewing and general tidying and could be heard humming in the kitchen. The same small books were read over again. For all her beauty she ate noisily.
In gentle replay of when he had first arrived in the district, invitations were received from the same big houses, and in these houses the tables, the walls, the English clocks and their chimes, the pattern of plates, the side of lamb and boiled potatoes had remained the same. The hesitant young women in florals from Holland’s day were larger, looser figures, mothers now with altogether different concerns. And attention this time was directed not really at Holland but his daughter who sat with a straight back, alongside (for instance) a broad-shouldered son clearing his throat in a new shirt. Ellen assumed a distant expression, as if she was obeying the obligations of her father.
Afterwards the man of the house, knowing Holland’s interest, would sometimes toss the keys to the son to drive everybody around the property, while Holland sat in the back and identified each eucalypt in the headlights.
‘She’s a gem, that one of yours,’ the grazier would concede, meaning Holland’s daughter.
Loudly, as well as quietly or through emissaries, it was pointed out a marriage would deliver impressive agricultural synergies, guaranteed to leave a smile on the face of everybody at the table. Holland gave the impression of weighing up each proposition in his hands. With these men he’d look thoughtful and make sucking sounds with his teeth while nodding or offering another cigarette, which is the way they themselves would have handled it, visually.
A certain restlessness entered Ellen’s beauty.
The town women and women in the surrounding homesteads looked on and waited. One of the things Holland had learnt from his many years observing trees was don’t rush, there is natural speed. And Ellen, she seemed more comfortable with the careless faces of seasonal workers, the filthy motor mechanics, and the afternoon drinkers; at least with them she looked on, bemused.
Holland said to his daughter, ‘I want you to promise me something: keep away from the commercial travellers. You’ve seen them in town with their Windsor knots and their fancy cigarette-lighters. A few have come to the door here, as you well know, thinking we’d buy ribbons and strips of cloth. They carry samples of jewellery and medicines in special suitcases. That little bloke who’s been here—moustache—he sells hair oils, soaps and whatnot. I’m told what they do now is spread out a printed catalogue, where you put your finger on something that takes your fancy, and it gets delivered later. I’d say that was very clever.’
These were older men who had built dusty careers out of hearing the sounds of their own voices. They worked on commission. They knew when to advance, when to draw back. Holland had seen how the sturdy town women became lovely and childlike under their words. Could they spin a story! As an example, Holland pointed to the coloured curtains he himself had bought from one of these persistent silver-tongues, which had faded after one summer. Yet these natty men had an easy generosity. Later, that same peddler of shonky curtains who specialised in puns and perpetual dirty jokes had volunteered to pick up from a faraway town and deliver to Holland a scarce sam
ple of Silver Princess, of the vaguely musical name, E. symphyomyrtus, which Holland then managed after much difficulty to breed in a gully.
‘Beware,’ Holland told his daughter, ‘beware of any man who deliberately tells a story. You’re going to come across men like that. Know what I’m saying?’ He wanted to take her hands until they hurt. ‘I want you to listen to me. There’s no real reason for you to be going into town. But leaving that aside: it’s worth asking, when a man starts concocting a story in front of you. Why is he telling it? What does he want?’
The idea that Holland’s daughter was like the princess locked in the tower of a damp castle was of course false. After all, she was living on a property in western New South Wales. There was plenty of space to move about in. Yet it did seem she had been removed from view—unless she had decided herself to step back. Even if this was partly true—imaginations had taken off running—the slightest suggestion of trapped beauty produces a deeper resonance than plain beauty. It could only add to her desirability; and was Holland’s blindspot.
Fellow arborists, politicians, soil-erosion specialists, farmers’ delegations, even the occasional tourist who had once been welcomed, were now discouraged. Holland could no longer be sure whether their interest was in the trees or his daughter. A friendly neighbour and son arriving unannounced as they do in the country districts would be received politely; that was about all. If the lanky son was lucky he’d glimpse Ellen’s face at a window, as if under water.
Sometimes Ellen was seen across the river among the trees, sliced into verticals: that is, fragments of coloured cloth. Whenever she did step out in her dainty shoes and appear on the main street her beauty was startling—flesh, contoured and speckled.
Holland was conscious of people waiting for him. Each day he woke to a sparkling morning, knowing his trees were arranged outside in their remarkable variety, only to find his daughter-question in all its imprecision still there before him. He was being forced to think about something he hadn’t wanted to think about; he wanted to return to thinking about the usual other things. The subject, or rather the situation, wouldn’t go away.
The butcher’s wife wasn’t much help. It became awkward having his cup of tea with her, now joined by her friend next door, the rhythmically nodding postmistress.
‘Let the poor girl make up her own mind. How old is she? She knows more about these things than you do. What do you know? A few facts and figures about gum trees. And what use are all your trees now, tell me that? You’ll just have to close your eyes with Ellen and hope for the best.’
Time and landscape were forever porous; prescribing a narrow radius for a daughter over undulating ground could never last, not exactly.
Holland decided to take Ellen to Sydney; she was nineteen.
In the big city he imagined she would blend in amongst the criss-crossing movements, the congested numbers.
In fact, everything about her was even more noticeable in Sydney, her beauty given greater contrast by the healthy downright ordinariness of the crowd-majority. As well, he soon realised there was a greater concentration of men; so many formidable men with experienced manners; he was constantly noticing a man or groups of city men running their eyes over his daughter, who appeared completely oblivious.
They stayed in Bondi. Ellen’s idea was to go to the beach every day. She wanted to be alone. To his surprise she moved about with ease in other parts of the city, as if the dream-like distances that existed between things on their property meant nothing to her. She got him to buy her a pair of fancy sunglasses. He had always bought all Ellen’s clothes, including underclothes. There was always something he felt she should be wearing. When she raced out in the morning and returned in the evening she appeared, to her father, tall and shining.
Although he said very little he was irritable. When he sat in the foyer or out on the footpath his nose felt too big. There was nothing much to do. He kept looking at his hands. A golden age when men stained their fingers tribally with nicotine. What these red-brown hands had produced—eucalypts, demonstrating diversity—did not seem necessary in the city. And so on and on he fretted; waiting for his daughter. This happened to be their last trip together.
He had always been a poor sleeper. She remembered as a child he had told her about special ways of getting to sleep, ways which relied entirely on a numbing visual sameness, which he exaggerated while he was shaving, to make her laugh. Now the light showed under his door, and she could hear her father creaking about at all hours.
Finally, he emerged from the office and entered her bedroom.
They spoke for some time; Ellen wept.
The same day Holland’s decision became known. It was simple enough. The man who correctly named every eucalypt on the property would win the hand of his daughter, Ellen.
At first there was a kind of milky silence; people couldn’t believe their ears. By the time it appeared as a story in the papers, young hopefuls and others not so young were already preparing themselves.
• 5 •
Marginata
A BRIEF word about the town; we’ll keep it short, in homage to the main street.
It was small and yellowish. Anywhere else it would be called a ‘village’. It could even be a ‘hamlet’: there was no church.
Otherwise it was a town that had only one of everything: hotel, bank, post office, picture theatre, a few shops displaying buckets, bolts of cloth, agricultural products and canvas awnings reaching down to the gutters in summer. It had one blonde, one man with one arm (El Alamein), one thief, one woman who could have been a witch. There was one person who wanted to be liked by everyone, one who always had the last word, one who felt trapped by marriage.
Tibooburra, further west, is known for the pile of hot boulders at the end of its one and only main street. Other towns achieve distinction with unavoidable monuments, such as merino rams or pineapples forty times their normal height, or the hand-lettered boast on the outskirts that this town has recorded the hottest temperature in Australia, or is the tidiest in the state—therefore, to be avoided; Mossman, in northern Queensland, has a sugar train most days hissing and pissing along its main street. This one—the yellowish town—has a dogleg throwing out the line of the street, so unexpected and yet in harmony with the outstretched verandahs it endowed the otherwise ordinary town with mass-reproduction qualities.
Most of Ellen’s suitors lived in the town or the nearby countryside, and the town became a staging-post for the second wave, quietly determined optimists from other parts, including distant cities, the way Zanzibar in the last century was used by perspiring, single-minded British explorers setting forth into the interior.
The town filtered the suitors. Some didn’t get beyond the hotel. Men made their way to the town out of sexual curiosity, casual plunderers who fancied their chances: after all, they could spot at a glance a Blue Gum, a Yellow Box, even the stunted calycogona, and quote its ridiculous nickname, Gooseberry Mallee. But they received a shock when actually confronted with the bewildering fact of so many eucalypts in the one spot, so many obscure species, and the stories of early failure of those who had gone before them, including well-qualified timber-cutters and the despondent local schoolteacher.
After a while these men drifted away without even seeing the speckled prize. One chap in a wool suit stepped off the train from Yass, made his way out to Holland’s property, patting all the dogs on the way, took one look at the expanse of trees from the gate, turned around and went straight back home. More calculating ones who had not underestimated the test began by swotting up on the vast subject, their noses in inadequate botanical books.
Take Jarrah (E. marginata). Is there anyone not baffled by Jarrah—its hardness, its degree of difficulty? There is civil disobedience in its nature. Still, it should be admitted material difficulties can deepen the beauty of timber. The impulse is always to pick up and admire a piece of Jarrah—stroke it like a cat. Is it possible to say a piece of timber is ‘proud’? Unlike t
hose that split at the slightest blow: that is, the skinny shivering pine, the spineless acacia? Jarrah had quite a name for endurance under the ground and under water. Streets were paved with it in Mediterranean Sydney and Marvellous Melbourne, the wood long outlasting the men who cut it into lengths, not to mention the loyal floorboards in ballrooms and grand hotels.
Handsome tree, straight and tall, it won’t cultivate in plantations. (Cussedness, again.) Holland once had a stepfather called Jarraby, known to be proud, stubborn.
Away from Western Australia few people would know a Jarrah tree, even if they bumped into one.
Now it happened that the local schoolteacher was the early favourite to win Ellen’s hand because he possessed the double qualification of an education and a real affinity for wood; carving heavy bowls for sensitive fruits such as peaches and grapes had become his solitary pastime. Sure enough, by lunchtime on the first day he had correctly named eighty-seven eucalypts, and was doing it well when he went blank at the fatly handsome Jarrah up against the fence behind the house.
‘Take your time,’ Holland said, and cleared his throat. ‘No use going like a rat up a drainpipe,’ he wanted to say.
He liked the young teacher. And there was no need to rush. As always it is fatal to panic. From the densities of Sydney the young teacher had been transferred to the country, a difficult lesson in drabness. Several times he had seen Ellen on the main street. Late afternoons and Sundays he walked along the dirt road, past the Salmon Gum, hoping she might emerge. And the property itself, all those broad acres of river frontage, big old homestead, barely came into the teacher’s equation at all.
On the point of saying ‘Jarrah!’ one eye became entangled in the foliage of the Karri (E. diversicolor) nearby.
‘That’s too bad,’ Holland stubbed his cigarette. ‘That’s a shame. I had you down as a real chance.’