by Murray Bail
Her father came into the house with a windswept, baffled look.
‘He’s good, he’s more than good. It’s because his mother’s gone soft in the head. She doesn’t remember him. He’s been cast adrift. He’s got nothing else to live for. That’s all I can think of.’
And he began nodding, ‘Mister Roy Cave is an interesting man in more ways than one.’
Poor man, a bachelor. Ellen tried imagining the mother.
‘Remember me pointing out—many times—that stunted-looking mallee at the back of the dam—the one I thought was finished but came good? Mount Imlay Mallee: it’s one of the rarest eucalypts. It took me years to get hold of it, and even longer to get it to grow. Very few people except you and I have ever seen one with their own eyes. So, as we came towards it, I thought, This’ll stop him in his tracks, and I’ll have to find another good man for my daughter. But no, he reeled off the proper name, imlayensis, in the middle of talking about his mother’s furniture. I felt like saying, “Hey, hold your horses!” He wasn’t interested in examining the tree closely. I find that pretty strange. By the way, we could see you hanging out the washing. Guess what? Next he tells me—mentions in passing, if you know what I mean—that our Jarrah is a subspecies. It’s called marginata—I knew that—but goes by the secondary name thalassica’.
Holland began laughing in admiration.
‘All these eucalypts in the one spot—this’d have to be paradise for him.’
But whenever the topic turned to eucalypts it went in one ear and out Ellen’s other. And—besides—absorbed in her own thoughts and confusions just then she didn’t understand what her father was implying.
The realisation that Mr Cave had well and truly passed the halfway mark struck her on the fifth day. From the tower she saw the two figures traversing a distant paddock. One tall, the other at his elbow untidily familiar.
And she saw—realised—the number of paddocks already accounted for, their combined acreage, containing hundreds of eucalypts. Even as she looked the man identified another one, then moved onto the next, and another one. This man was steadily advancing, not rushing. Nothing would stop him!
She couldn’t think straight.
As she scrambled down the steps and reached the hall she bumped into the walls, and opened and closed doors.
She sat down and stood up.
In her bedroom she sat down again. She didn’t know what to do, where to go.
How did this happen? she wanted to know. And why hadn’t she seen it before? She kept asking, What can I do? None of the suitors had been taken seriously; as far as her father was concerned, they were all idiots. It would be like him to concoct such a test believing there wasn’t a man on earth who could win.
In the bathroom she turned the taps on full blast, something her father never allowed. Already she saw him being friendly, more than friendly, with Mr Cave. It was mutual respect. Apparently they had a lot in common, the trees for one, and now her. And yet Mr Cave was nothing like her father, not at all.
There was no one else. Mr Cave was so sure of himself he took it easy. By two o’clock he was usually back at his hotel. And on the first weekend he was proposing to take a rest.
Ellen began scribbling letters to her father. Most she tore up, or pasted into her journal. Some Ellen posted, even when she could hear him moving about in his room. The first addressed to him she propped against his teacup at breakfast, when all the man wanted to do was read the paper.
‘What’s this then?’ Holland tried holding the pages at arm’s length. ‘You used to have such good handwriting. I can’t read a word of this.’
‘I want you to read it.’
This way he would have to come to terms with what she was feeling; though as she sat there all she felt was confusion.
‘I feel like moving away,’ she said.
‘What good would that do?’ He was squinting at her writing. ‘Anyway you wouldn’t leave your poor old father alone in this dark old house—just me and the trees? Who would I talk to at night?’
‘I don’t know what to do.’
After the third or fourth letter he pushed his chair back.
‘You’re saying the same thing, over and over. Now listen to me. All right, so you don’t like the way it’s turning out. It’s not 100 per cent perfect, I know that. But has it been a mistake? I don’t know. I’m apologising. I don’t want a girl moping around as if it’s the end of the world. But what is it you want? I’d say you don’t know yourself. Am I right? This Mr Cave—Roy—you hardly know the man—he’s not so bad. Anyway, I thought you took to him. At least you didn’t screw your nose up. Have you spoken to him? I have been—a lot. I think there’s a lot going on there. For starters, he’s a decent man; I think you would agree. He’s a neat man, not a mess. He certainly knows a hell of a lot about trees.’
‘I’ve noticed.’
Her father put his hand on her shoulder. ‘All we can do is wait and see.’
Once outside she headed towards the river. ‘Where are you off to?’—her father’s voice. She didn’t know what was happening to her. As she walked quickly and entered the trees she stopped and in the stillness couldn’t help touching, if only for a moment, the nearest of the evenly spaced trunks. Eucalypts which were the cause of it all also gave a moment’s pause.
• 9 •
Maidenii
HERE IS the tree Holland had given his daughter for her birthday. She was thirteen.
She’d come into his room early in undisguised anticipation; Holland couldn’t help admiring her excitement. To extend the moment he did the cruel fatherly thing of frowning in feigned surprise, as if he didn’t know what day it was. Then as doubts troubled Ellen’s face he pointed to the wardrobe.
No amount of blue ribbon around the terracotta pot or explaining the exactness of the botanical name could disguise her disappointment. Instead of a gift she felt a loss. It was as if he was giving himself a present, and a very ordinary one. What could she do with a tree? Not even the ceremony of planting it together, on the northern slope facing the town, made her happier.
The years passed ordinarily enough. Gradually she had become less satisfied; she didn’t know why. By the time the suitors began arriving in their trucks, cars, motorcycles, by train or on foot, Ellen returned to the lovely habit of wandering or simply being among the many different eucalypts. It was there one morning she remembered her tree, E. maidenii, and after several hours she located it at the far end of the property, where the soil was moist and rather heavy a long way from the house.
Standing back Ellen smiled at what she saw.
It had grown as she had: slender, straight, pale. It was subtle in its limb-parting beauty; Ellen considered it female.
On impulse she felt like taking a broom and cleaning up the usual mess on the ground, sweeping the earth around the tree. Of all the eucalypts on the property this one belonged to her. And she wanted it to stand out, swept clean—the way a small-town war memorial is washed with soap and water.
At that moment, Ellen noticed a large rusty nail hammered into the trunk. It could only have been her father—who else? It gave a strange feeling. Not so much as if a nail had been driven into her; rather, vague surprise at seeing a steel object embedded in the softness of Nature. On the surrounding ground were no other human signs, no coil of fencing wire, or perforated beer can, or fading cigarette pack, shotgun cartridge near the rabbit holes.
The nail, at that moment, remained without a purpose.
It was a day humming with heat. Facing the tree, the way she faced a long mirror, she took her breasts, and lifted them gently from the pull of the earth. Vaguely she wanted to kiss herself. If the reddish earth, the dead leaves, dry twigs and grass, the ants and the remote and prickly eucalypts had not been uninviting, so unsympathetic, she would have undressed; taken everything off and faced the general warmth and wide-openness. She was that age.
E. maidenii is related to Tasmania and the Southern Blue Gums (E. globul
us); very vigorous trees.
The trunk has a short stocking of greyish bark at the base, the upper bark smooth, spotted. Its juvenile foliage is conspicuous and attractive in the undergrowth.
• 10 •
Torquata
STILL THE landscape intrudes (not for much longer). An unpainted shearing shed floating on its shadow in a paddock, moored to the homestead by the slack line of a fence. It almost goes without saying the land is laced with wire. The straight line is immediately sharply human.
Oceans of swaying grasses—golden in summer, as mentioned before. It’s often written that our crops and grasses sway and slap about like great oceans over the rounded earth; other times, a light breeze can curve the more sparsely planted stems to resemble golden hairs on a sailor’s arm. Across a paddock in the afternoon: eucalypts repeated here and there on the ground by folding out at right angles, compressed as ink stains or thumb prints on a blotter. And always the scattered apparently random arrangements in Nature. It is this casual inevitability—the slant of the fallen tree breaking the verticals of others—that allows the eye to rest.
Ellen preferred the area around the old bridge, where the serene geometry of the eucalypts faintly raised the possibility she too was elegant—it was something like elegance; and the rustle of the nearby river in curve was a comfort, an alternative, as well.
Now that she had located her own tree she would occasionally visit it, around the other side of the hill.
Early one afternoon there she heard voices, men’s, when none were expected. According to the rules laid down by Holland, a suitor could begin and end his test at any point on the property, and Mr Cave had suggested they switch to the bottom end for a change. Birds in advance began exploding from branches, some calling out warning, a rabbit, another, did their zigzag which attracts the gun, and a wallaby, rising, falling, close to Ellen.
She remained behind the pale tree when it would have been better to step out.
From halfway across the continent this man called Mr Cave was now advancing steadily towards her, to take her away. He was the one. The eucalypts here were congested. That didn’t stop him. Without altering his voice he identified each and every species in passing, Holland murmuring assent, until they were standing quite close.
On this day Mr Cave wore a collar and tie, and a sweat patch had spread on his back into the shape of Papua New Guinea, while Holland’s face was pale red, a coralfish passing through trees. They were talking about snakes, sizes of, where seen, how almost stepped on, etc. Snake stories vary only in length from man to man.
‘They get into your sleeping bag for warmth,’ said Cave. ‘That’s been known to happen.’
‘As well as all the eucalypts, we’ve got the most venomous snakes!’
‘So I’m told.’
They were around the other side of the tree. It was too late for Ellen to step out and surprise them.
‘Sea snakes, I hope I never come across one of them. Soap Mallee, and the tall one is kirtoni. Now that’s what I call a eucalypt. That could go on a postcard tomorrow. Maidenii, am I right? Always a favourite of mine.’
Her father’s shadow nodded.
‘And you’d have to travel a long way to see a better specimen, if I do say so myself.’
At this moment, almost forgetting her position, Ellen looked on at the casual surface-manner of men. These two were now searching around inside their trousers, and Mr Cave’s hand, the nearest, came out in full view with a soft thing, its lidded eye surveying Ellen; they began pissing, Mr Cave, her father, against the trunk.
All she could decide and so remain puzzled by was how their behaviour was indifferently at odds to hers. Side by side they remained looking down at themselves, and up at the trees. To Ellen it somehow followed on from the way Mr Cave fanned out across the landscape like a cone or searchlight, consuming all before him; and before long he would be consuming her.
Hiding behind the trunk Ellen felt weakened. She also felt irritated. As they finished, she could hear one of them breathing.
Now awaiting discovery Ellen shut her eyes; though it was not to be, not yet.
• 11 •
Nubilis
ANOTHER SUITOR with impressive credentials stepped forward only to be told to stand aside until Mr Cave was finished.
He had a ginger beard, and his name was Swingle. Working behind a desk at the Botanic Gardens in Melbourne he had been dismissed for taking unauthorized field trips; for his ambition was to discover an unknown eucalypt species, even a subspecies, in order to have it named after him, the way others have left a trace of themselves in the names of butterflies, roses, ferns—and of course eucalypts. If Miss Mary Merrick of the Royal Botanic Gardens in Sydney was rewarded for her long years in the library with E. merrickiae, better known as the Goblet Mallee, why couldn’t he? A certain Mr H. S. Bloxsome had a species named after him because it happened to be found on his property in south-eastern Queensland….
Swingle’s simple quest for immortality had taken him into remote and difficult terrain. On one of these solitary trips he had broken an arm. Recently on a ledge in the Grampians he had trodden on and destroyed the only remaining plant of an unknown dwarf eucalypt with extremely narrow leaves. He did it, and he didn’t know it.
Curiously he was a modest man. And as his life dream became less and less likely Swingle became, as they say, merely philosophical—that is rueful, not embittered.
The scientific naming of trees doesn’t follow a pattern. In some respects it has an attractive, amateur randomness just like the distribution of the trees themselves. Some names are descriptive of bark, leaves and so on; towns and mountain ranges close to a eucalypt’s habitat become lengthened and latinised; explorers and a few tree-interested politicians have left their mark; many professional and amateur plant collectors, and a few water colour artists, are honoured. The Rev. E. N. McKie, a Presbyterian minister at Guyra, was one enthusiast, specialising in stringy barks—McKie’s Stringybark (E. mckieand).
Very often it is the common name that is instantly evocative: Leather Jacket, Weeping Gum, Ghost Gum, Coolibah to name some.
How did E. nubilis get its name? A curious one. Nubilis means ‘marriageable’.
• 12 •
Baxteri
THE STORY is not at all uncommon or unusual.
It was told to Ellen by a man she met only days before (so, a virtual stranger), who had a circuitous story-telling manner, as if he was making it up, and what is more he told it under a tree where the crows were making their din; he also added bits of factual information she had no way of verifying, which seemed to have little bearing on the main thing being said. For all these distractions Ellen found the story powerful for what it may have represented, in other words, for what it didn’t say exactly.
A young man, he said, travelled from Great Britain to Bombay where he booked into the most famous hotel in India, the Taj Mahal, which had been designed by his great-grandfather at the end of the last century. He wanted to see with his own eyes whether it had been tragically positioned in relation to the sea. It faces, or appears to, the Gateway of India, and the sea there is as brown every day of the year as the people who stand gazing at it. In his family the story was told how their great-grandfather designed the hotel down to the door knobs and the depth of the skirting boards, and defended each and every detail of the design as if his life depended on it. Somehow he managed to retain the incredibly extravagant staircase and the domineering dome that seemed to have no other function than to make this hotel look like an opera house or the stock exchange. A large part of an architect’s genius is in the winning of the argument. Satisfied, the architect left by boat on home leave.
No one knows what happened to him in London. Something happened. Inevitably, there was talk of a woman.
Instead of four months he stayed away eighteen months. When he returned to Bombay his great project was almost completed. He took one look at it and found the local builders had positioned the hu
ge building back to front: it was not facing the sea! The story then, as handed down, was that he literally tore his hair out and, in an act of protest and unimaginable disappointment, threw himself from the top of the semi-circular staircase, and died.
The architect’s great-grandson introduced himself to the hotel’s management. Although they would neither confirm nor deny the rumour surrounding the architect’s death he was given a room overlooking the sea, at a generous discount. He ventured out onto the streets. About his own career he was undecided. For a few days he was ill. Otherwise his visit was…inconclusive.
We now pick up the trail on our own doorstep. Instead of returning to Great Britain the young man flew to Sydney, and after spending a few days on the beach made his way to Bathurst.
Bathurst? The coldest country town in New South Wales? He was however an historically minded person; he personified Englishness. And Bathurst was the westernmost point reached by Charles Darwin in eighteen-hundred-something. There’s a plaque that says this in the municipal gardens.
So there he is in Bathurst, our traveller from Britain.
It is at Bathurst or, rather, on the outskirts, that the story develops a sudden twist. On the second day he was wandering along the river when he came across two brown snakes—one shedding its skin. He killed the wrong one, and was turned into a woman. That’s apparently what happened.
When last heard of he was living in Seattle—or was it San Francisco?—as a woman.
The court building in Bathurst is so extravagant it looks out of place. In the early days, designs for the colony’s civic buildings came from Whitehall. It is said that Bathurst was sent by mistake plans for a court building in an Indian city, while the Indian city received the more modest court building which would have done for Bathurst.