The Frangipani Gardens

by Barbara Hanrahan

  Then the crocodile was one again; Brother Wells moved away, and the seniors were a disappointment. Most of them were weak specimens, lanky and pale, with blood as thin as an old wife’s third cuppa.

  Only in the very last row was there a group who seemed up to scratch. There were four of them: they had swagger and down at heel boots. They kept laughing and digging each other in the ribs; one of them aimed a spit bomb at Swells’s back.

  The spitter was a capital fellow, a picture of bright sauciness and beaming mischief. His eyes were round and blue; his nose was a miniature dumpling. His blond hair curled over his forehead like the ruffled plumes of a cockatoo.

  And the funny thing was, that the blond boy was staring at him — or so Tom thought at first. Then he realised that the look went past him, and knew it was meant for Lou.

  And now the boy had fallen out of line. None of the Brothers noticed. The crocodile kept advancing, till it rounded a bend in the road.

  But the boy was left behind, and Lou had stepped forward to meet him. Gran cackled sourly about young love from her chair. Her old eyes were greedy, they ruined something beautiful.

  He was a country boy, but the country he came from was different to Lou’s. Instead of a lagoon there were ranges, though you couldn’t compare them to the Hills. Up north, there were no hedges of monthly roses, no Sunday School picnic bosky dells. His ranges were savage; they sprang at the sky like arrested waves, forever on the verge of breaking. They were ancient and fissured, wrinkled and whorled; their colour was what you noticed most. In summer the dominant shade was camel’s hump dun; autumn and winter lent traces of green; spring meant the reds and purples of wild hops and Salvation Jane.

  Summer was the season Garnet liked best. He used to sit on the verandah and stare at the changing sky and listen to the faint screech of the windmill and see — but not see — the stark corrugations of the iron shed beside it, and the dusty road. There was a pepper tree, too, and — behind everything — the shaggy pelt of the rise. You had to strain your eyes to catch it — that fiddly pattern of porcupine-grass, that constant wag and quiver.

  The windmill sometimes fell silent, as if stunned by the heat. Sometimes he’d go round the back, step into the wiry sea of weed and walk to the cemetery. It was quicker to take the road, but he liked coming upon it through the grasses.

  There were rusted tin leaves and china roses; several stunted trees, a few humped bushes. There was a clump of aloes by the explorer’s grave. There were stars of lichen and:

  Death little warning to me gave,

  But quickly called me to my grave;

  Oh, haste to Christ, make no delay,

  For no one knows his dying day.

  And it was true, for Minnie his mother was there. Pretty Minnie Lloyd, who liked new dresses and had chosen the fanciful ‘Garnet’. She’d hated the town; hated the flies and the grasshoppers that threw themselves into the hot wind. She’d sat on the verandah, flapping the palm-leaf fan. He put his head in her lap and the moon was a nugget of gold, tipping the earth.

  In the cemetery, too, were lizards and bull-ants and gleaming pieces of quartz. And the explorer had seen the British flag placed in the centre of Australia, he’d tramped to the shores of the Indian Ocean, then come here to die. The headstone mentioned pluck and endurance and loyalty, and Mother repeated the words softly. Garnet must never forget the explorer’s example. He must become a man she might be proud of.

  At evening the sky was mild. It looked the way you were taught to paint it in water-colour — pale and watery blue in the dip of the hills, merging to darker blue above. Then it changed to a pearly mauve; then everything was bathed with amber light. The ranges turned velvety, the earth was pink, and galahs flew over his head.

  It was cooler at dusk — the terrible oven heat had crept away. But stones still felt warm under your hand: the warmth of the day had sunk into them …

  It was a mining town and Dad had come to make his fortune. To begin with, there were boarding-houses and a butcher, a baker, a pub and a general store. It couldn’t match the copper mania of last century’s sixties, but there was a feeling of prosperity and gladness. The place was alive with the hum of machinery, the sounds of hammers and drills. Donkey teams carried the ore to the rail-head where it went on to the port. There were bullock teams, too; sometimes ore from mines further north was brought down on camel-back by turbaned Afghans.

  Garnet was born in the house built of native pine. Minnie was happy enough at first. She tended the little garden walled with corrugated iron. There was a grapevine and a fig tree and an oleander. The verandah roof was supported by saplings, grass came up between the slates of the kitchen floor, but she sang as she polished the shiny black stove and coaxed the ivy geraniums to grow.

  The geraniums flourished, they screened the verandah with a leafy curtain, but it was water that beat them in the end. The ore was still coming out, but they had to put in bigger pumps. What with the cost of pumping added to that of everything else, it wasn’t worth it. There were plenty of mines closer in, untroubled by water, that could sell at half the cost.

  People just drifted away. They pulled most of the mine buildings down and sold off the machinery. The shaft caved in; only the slag heap was left.

  A few stayed on. The police sergeant who’d worn a coat with silver buttons, even on the hottest day, took it off and turned into a lay-about in a singlet who swore there was gold in the creek. And there was a Chinese gardener who grew vegetables there, too — he mostly worked at night, carting buckets of water, crooning to keep evil spirits away. But even he gave up over summer. Then, each day was a scorcher, a regular brickfielder, and Minnie used to swat at flies and cry. Maybe she went a bit mad — she dragged about in her petticoat and Dad grumbled that the place was a pig-sty, and the kid’s howling would drive him bananas. Yes, Dad went mad, too — the ranges had got him. He wouldn’t leave: he was waiting for the mining revival. And he joined forces with the policeman, he raved about seams of gold. He went down to the creek each day with his pan, and dredged up a phial of gold specks. But he had sense enough to take over the store; he went in every week to the town near the railway and came back with provisions in the buggy. He scratched a living of sorts. He had his regulars, and wanderers were always passing through, and they started up a sanatorium for consumptives, and there were always artists come to set up their easels in spring.

  Life wasn’t too bad. Dad drank, but the empty bottles caught your eye — upended, stuck in the earth as an edging to the geraniums. Minnie pulled herself together when summer was over. She’d pin on her cameo and walk with Garnet to the explorer’s grave, and there’d be fuchsia streaks in the sky, and though she had wrinkles and rough hands she reckoned it had been worth it — for Minnie was a Catholic: marrying Dad had been a sin.

  Sometimes she went to the city to see her family. Garnet went once, too. It was so dreary it seemed like Sunday, with a smell of moth balls and a carpet patterned with swirling leaves. Minnie had all these brothers and sisters — Garnet had all these uncles and aunts. And the Madonna on the wall stepped off a cloud, and they clicked their tongues because he didn’t go to Mass. They wheeled in a tea-trolley with a squeak, but the cake had little seeds that stuck in his teeth and his cup made a terrible wobble in its saucer and he slopped tea and knew they saw. They were tutting and staring with quizzing-glass eyes, and there was a cocky that shouted Cocky got a cold and Where’s Minnie? And they said didn’t he take after his father; they said he was a regular Lloyd.

  But some of them came up after she died. They cleared their throats and made their offer. It was their duty, they said; Minnie would have wished it. His father nodded his head: he turned into a Yes-man who gave Garnet away.

  And they said God took special care of the motherless, that a day would come when He would wipe away all tears. And they sent him to Fern Gully College and at holidays there was the house f
ull of relatives with lookalike faces. Someone had been to Egypt, and there was a collection of miniature mummies in the drawing room. Also crazy-work vases and a clock trapped inside a glass dome. Its tick was melancholy, muffled, and Cocky still cried Where’s Minnie? and Garnet hated his life. But it was easiest to keep smiling, to play joker in the pack. On the surface he was carefree and smiling; inwardly he longed for his past.

  Yet Minnie faded paler and paler. He forgot the crinkly lines round her eyes and the summer sweat beads along her lip. He couldn’t hear her voice anymore; he didn’t remember her smell. It was queer — he knew the sprigged pattern of her Sunday dress by heart, but he couldn’t recall her at all.

  But Dad stayed a real man. He had a prickly face and a crease between his eyes, and when he came back from the pub his breath was innocent, it smelled like scented cachous. He had stains in the armpits of his work shirts, and that last day he’d sat on the verandah with his traitor’s head bowed, and the leaves of the pepper tree were silver in the sun — they tossed and shrugged, they waved and beckoned.

  Garnet stayed homesick for his own country. He longed for a summer that would burn the fake gentility, the cheap politesse, away. He was tired of living cramped, he wanted to feel a big emotion. The country he’d left wouldn’t leave him alone; nostalgia was at him all the time.

  One day he’d set off, start walking and never look back. He’d be an explorer and find his father and the ranges again. The hot wind would blow off any last trace of city smallness. He’d sleep beneath a curdled navy sky, speared with the Southern Cross; wake when the first touch of yellow crept into the day and the flies started on their daft tizzy. Everything would be there, just the same: skeleton bushes, spiked and needled and pinned; spinning slats of the windmill, dusty road. The range rising up like a flat cardboard cut-out; the roots of fallen trees stretching skyward like stranded meteors.

  He told Lou some of it, and she, in turn, told of Ella and coming with Tom to Aunt Doll. In some ways, their lives were similar. They both had dead mothers; they’d both been torn from their beginnings. (He assumed Ella to have been as virtuous as Minnie; he took it for granted that Lou yearned for the lagoon.)

  But Garnet was going back. His father was waiting, with welcoming arms stretched wide. He’d saved for years to give his lad an education, even though he lamented daily they were far apart. He was a pillar of the community, splendid in his male pride; once he’d been an explorer. Garnet’s dad had been misled by mirages; he’d done battle with crocodiles and furtive blacks, eaten kangaroo mice and drunk the queer fluid that flowed from the bottle tree … and in the end he’d got there: he’d marched doggedly to the centre of the continent and planted the Union Jack … Yes, Garnet was lucky, he had a hero father and ‘Mother’ meant not flesh and blood but a gentle ghost.

  He was a romantic, who carried a withered rose in his pocket because it had been worn in Lou’s hair. He sighed and said he’d thought of her constantly since that waltz at the Fig Leaf Ball. He’d dressed up as Pierrot for a prank, yet it wasn’t merely the sheer devilry of breaking bounds, of escaping Our Lady and Our Lord and all the other holy monsters, that had led him there. More than anything, he’d been propelled to the Palais by fate — without doubt, they’d been destined to meet. As soon as he’d seen her, he’d known they were perfectly suited. And they danced and it was bliss, but Brother Wells was a masquerader, too, and his eyes were suspicious, and the car was starting back for the Hills, so Pierrot had to slip away … He looked at Lou with moony eyes and swore he’d known he’d find her again.

  But he was male, which was something disgusting. You should fasten the window, stuff the chimney, cover up the keyhole so one didn’t get in.

  (Lou had been learning a lesson. Girlie had taught her well.)

  She tried to hate him, but she couldn’t. Indeed, listening to his moonshine proved a tonic: Lou was strengthened enough to shake off the phantoms that kept plaguing her head. She let him take her hand and they left the road and sat in someone’s orchard. Apples had fallen in the grass, the sun poured down, and about them was a smell of ripeness.

  Nothing made sense, but Lou didn’t care. For so long she’d felt herself the dupe of some novel conjurer’s trick. Her head had been mazed with hateful whispers; she’d imagined that inside her dwelt another person — a stranger who’d claimed her mind. It was like being joined to an evil twin, who smiled and sneered, even as you felt like weeping. The simplest things had appeared complex; corruption was everywhere.

  And now, in the orchard, everything changed. He said they would always be together. For no good reason she believed him.

  12

  The Duke and Duchess were in New Zealand, now, seeing hot springs and boiling mud. The Prince of Wales Feathers geyser was specially soaped for the occasion; school children did poi dances and grouped to form the White Rose of York. The Duke had donned mufti for the tour, and showed a preference for splendidly-cut tweeds and a felt hat with the brim turned down. There was crowd hysteria in Christchurch and an epidemic of fainting fits in Dunedin. Some people waved the stars and stripes because the Dominion’s stock of Union Jacks had been exhausted.

  And in Sydney the landing stage at Farm Cove was being decorated with flags and streamers, palm trees and plants; while in Adelaide finishing touches were being given to a red gum casket, embellished with carvings of eucalyptus leaves and wattle, which would contain the city’s loyal address.

  They were nearly here — but Lou didn’t feel much interest. Without meaning to, she’d stopped caring about royalty. She felt the same about filmstars. John Barrymore was coming to West’s as Don Juan, but she didn’t give it a thought.

  Every day Lou met Garnet at the back of the College. It was their secret place. You crossed a plank bridge, and by the creek were lemon trees tangled in creeper. She waited amongst stinkweed and fennel till he came running down the slope. The trees seemed to crouch and twist; Jap ivy had turned them into a series of leafy chambers. He spread out his blazer for her to sit on. They were alone with shimmering green shadow play all round them, and the rush of the creek so near. He picked flowers and threaded them in her hair. Frogs made a creaking noise; midges rose in dotted clouds.

  Nothing could hurt them, not even Girlie. Lou hadn’t been to see her since she’d met him. It was Tom Mundy who went up through the orchard each day, now.

  Lou stopped thinking of Garnet to worry over Tom’s set face and miserable eyes. He’d nodded mechanically when she asked if he really wanted to start at the College.

  Then, one morning, instead of Tom going to the model nursery, Girlie came to Sorrento. She had a dead fox round her neck and a velours vagabond hat on her head. ‘My dear, how I’ve missed you,’ she said and her sweet voice was steely (how could Lou have ever thought she’d escape?). Girlie wondered if she’d forgotten that it was today they’d arranged to take Tom to Adelaide to be outfitted for school.

  He looked so lost standing beside her — he was only eight years old. Lou couldn’t let him go off with Girlie alone. She pulled on her coat and followed them down the path.

  The Dodge was outside the gate. Boy would drive them in, Girlie explained to Aunt Doll, and they’d come back on the afternoon charabanc. It would be dark by the time they returned to the Gully. Would she be agreeable to Tom and Lou staying at The Frangipani Gardens overnight?

  Lou sat close to Tom in the back of the car and the old bewildered feeling crept upon her. The Hills had ceased being friendly; she couldn’t remember Garnet’s face. A change had come and, though the grass was still green and the leaves of the apple trees were a goldeny-bronze, all the colour seemed drained from the day. Winter had slunk up unseasonably like a cunning grey wolf. The greyness had got into everything. The sky was a dirty white; the landscape was tinged with gloom. The cottage gardens they passed looked merely pathetic, part of a flimsy toy world. The Hills were famous as South Australia’s best bit of
England, the Tourist Bureau ran a bus through daily, but the camellias and azaleas, the hawthorns and birches, didn’t add up to much. They were swamped by the menace of an ancient sombre world. The gum trees pressed forward, and Girlie and Boy, Lou and Tom — they were toys, too, as the tourer skidded, then rounded another hairpin bend towards Adelaide.

  Only Girlie was spunky enough to stand up to the day. Her scent smelled spicy; her mouth was a shiny gash. She was gay, and so supremely confident.

  And now they were in the city, but Boy didn’t drop them in Rundle Street, which meant all the big shops. Girlie smiled into her foxy collar, her eyes sparkled from under her vagabond brim, as she told him which way to go. It was a surprise, she said, a special treat, but they only ended up in the parklands.

  Boy drove away and Girlie led them towards an artistic fence. Part of the parklands was enclosed, and you paid your money to the man in uniform and he let you through the gate. There were Jap bamboos in tubs, but where were they? It was a compact spot with plenty of room for the glass cases in their wooden frames. The demonstration enclosure occupied a central position and — like the cases — was quite escape-proof.

  It was the Snake Park, and you looked through wire netting and the snake trainer stepped forward in highheeled boots. All round him were his charges — python and rattler and tiger; whip and carpet and diamond. For a moment everything was still: you shuddered, for danger waited, poised. The adder raised its head to strike, the cobra writhed closer. The rattlesnakes, instead of hissing, coiled tight about an awful sound. It was dry and cold; it sounded faster and faster.