A gentlemanly young man had come to stay at Gladwish House. de Moles had lived there always, and Miss Diosma was the only one left. She was an invalid, a Christian lady, who did good deeds from her bed of pain. The young man was a distant relative from Home. A thorough Englishman — but delicate — he’d been sent to Miss de Mole for a rest cure. The Gully mamas peeped at him. He wore tan shoes like Lord Randolph Churchill, and a soft-fronted shirt. Also a scarf with flowing ends, and his hair was a trifle long. But he might be a Tennyson, a Paderewski — he was always reading a book. And Gladwish House guaranteed class and his accent was English, refined. There’d be cash, for sure, and the Gully mamas asked him to tea, but he was eccentric, he never went. Poor young man, perhaps he was shy. He just read his books; he was seen walking with old Lizzie Potter, who brewed up messes of herbs.
It was this young man who saw Doll, and started to be her friend. They met each day, and he admired her drawings and read her poems from a limp-covered book. He was so clever, but he had chosen her, and Doll’s fingers held the pencil that shaded in apple trees, but her mind made a picture of a wedding. But then he saw Ella — she took him away as she’d taken Father from Mother. She was only a little girl but the man loved her so much he did magic, and in the end he outdid himself: one day he disappeared.
He was cured, the Gully said. He’d gone back to England, and the mamas sighed (what a catch he’d have been) as they started to forget him. Doll prayed she’d find him again, but Ella didn’t give him a thought.
She was a child, but she was also a woman. Doll was all those years older, but she’d never be a woman like that. Ella could make you feel strange. She stared when she talked, as if the words had a secret meaning. Her skin was so white and soft you wanted to pinch her, punch her to see if she would bruise. Kiss-curls fell over her brow, you saw the tip of her tongue. But she was innocent, a child, she didn’t know what she was doing — but she was a rare one for boys from the start. Father’s voice trembled when he caught her creeping in after dark (it seemed Father hated Ella now), but Mother wouldn’t let him go near her, it was Mother who gave her the thrashing. But she grew too big for them. She was always wandering, she loved riding home on the hay cart and she’d come in with burrs in the fringes of her shawl and her eyes moony, her mouth sore from kissing. She was disgusting, and what happened served her right. For, while Doll grew older and plainer and smaller, Ella grew bigger till she couldn’t hide it. Out of all her sweethearts she chose Dick Mundy — she said it was his baby (it had to be someone’s, and Dick was the only one fool enough to face Father’s wrath). Mother was dying, she was spitting up blood, but the row was dreadful, they wouldn’t keep their voices down. Mixed with the screaming was the smell of incense plant from the hall. Musky perfume drifted from the plant’s rusty plumes, as Ella screamed again that Father only minded because he hadn’t had her himself.
And the years went by and death claimed them one by one: Mother and Father, Dick Mundy and Ella. Flower Hill became the Frangipani Gardens; surely the time was right for Doll to be herself — to paint out the pictures in her head, do anything she wanted … but she couldn’t. She was like someone embalmed. She’d worn her disguise so long, so well, that her real self was lost beneath it. She couldn’t stop pretending; she was possessed by a monstrous habit.
It was like being a sleepwalker — she made her fantastic pictures at night, in a dream. When she locked the door on them and went away with the lamp, she was Miss Strawbridge again, Gully water-colourist, meek and mild.
Mother and Father had preferred her that way, and she couldn’t disappoint them now. For, dead, they ruled her more strictly than they ever had alive. Now, she looked in the mirror and could only see with their eyes. She heard their deadly voices speaking for her: Homely … not a scrap of imagination … doesn’t feel a thing. And, wincing, she screwed up the hateful red hair tighter, she stabbed in the pins with a queer sort of joy. She was a dutiful daughter, doing it for them: dressing so dully, painting so timid. She would show them the extent of her recklessness as she pretended away her life.
Doll could only see herself lovely when she went to the secret room. Once there, facing another canvas, she stopped being in control of what she did. She took up her brushes and let feeling guide her, as she painted a goddess with confetti-dot freckles and bonfire hair.
And she did Father as he’d been in the beginning — jolly and splendid as he showed her the view from the summit. And Mother was a lady with smiling eyes and the lines round her mouth smoothed away. And Ella was an angel-child with hair to her waist, who didn’t have anything to do with the butcher-boy, the stable-boy or Dick Mundy. And though the young man in the orchard would be another person now, Doll saw him as he’d been then, and went on praying he’d return.
But night only lasted for a little while. Daytime came, and life was wearisome, you grew tired of water-colours and novels.
The years kept passing and 1914 was a drought year — all these volunteers went off to the war. Doll joined the Wattle League Sewing Circle, she bought war bonds like everyone else. In the daytime a stranger was suspicious (a stranger was always a German), but at night Father said his Wunderkind, the Englishman murmured poems in his gentleman’s voice.
And now it is a day turning into dusk, and Doll is coming down the crazy-paved path. It is summer, and the roses look nice, but you tire of perpetual glare … Yes, in summer Doll was always uneasy, for summer was always a cheat. You felt drowsy, bewitched by the heat; you felt queer, somehow excited, as the shivers of heat teased you; you felt anything might happen — but it never did. The light just grew brighter, the sky arched higher, till, just when you thought it safely far away, the blueness swooped, it fell upon you, and the sky was an upside-down teacup and you were caught inside — you hit at the shiny blue porcelain hardness, but you couldn’t escape (sometimes Doll hated summer — in summer you could be taken with an awful melancholy; you woke from dreaming with a stale taste in your mouth). And, as well as the sky, there were weeds. In winter you could look through the window and think of them as grass — all those different greens waving silky and velvet and soft; but in summer the green turned a pale shade, creamy, and you were threatened by a host of shimmering tassels and plumes. Kangaroo-grass had queer purplish danglers; wild honeysuckle, with its terrible sad scent of weddings was everywhere …
And Doll is leaning on the gate, now, thinking about summer; it is dusk (day is done with, but she can’t see yet with her night-time eye: she is still Miss Strawbridge), and suddenly she sees the man by the coprosma hedge. He is lying in the grass she hates, showing her his poor shattered face. He is hideous, a sure dead man, lying bleeding beside the hedge. He’d dragged himself there, and Doll can’t bear to see him. She runs back up the path to her snug Queen Anne retreat.
He was a man and they’d treated him so cruel. For it was a time when sausage dogs were poisoned and you changed your name from Schmidt to Smith, and he was someone who’d appeared in the Gully from nowhere — unkempt, unknown; he was always slinking about, he haunted the orchards, he’d been seen by the creek. He was a stranger, a sure German, his fate was sealed when he opened his mouth. For he talked funny, foreign; he wasn’t Australian: he had it coming to him. But Doll pitied him, just as she pitied the blowfly she swatted from the wall, the turkey that made her Christmas dinner. His face was awful, his eye wept blood, but he saw her, his eye beseeched her.
In that in-between time — not day, not night — Doll was given a chance to escape Miss Strawbridge. She could be as bold and brave and unconforming as Ella as she tended him — but she couldn’t. He was a monster, he suffered. The only thing to do was to pretend he didn’t exist. Doll sat inside Sorrento and shivered. She sat on and on in the dark, too scared to light the lamp (if he couldn’t see her, she wasn’t there). In the morning when she nerved herself to look, he was gone. The grass was stained and slippery from his blood.
It had
happened years ago, but she couldn’t forget — she still felt the guilt. Even though she’d been right in shutting her door. For he turned into Cockroach. His bleeding eye turned glassy and he was the devil, they said — the good Gully people who judged, who knew, who lunged at him with their sticks. Someone had to serve as a scapegoat. In time of war, Cockroach had done for the Hun; now he was perfect for dirty old man.
Every town had one, and no child was safe. What Cockroach did was whispered everywhere — but who started the whisper, no one knew. It was true, though, for there was a little boy once … One day it would happen again.
Who were his parents, where was his past? Sometimes he hardly remembered; it seemed he’d always been alone. Childhood — what was that? Surely he had more in common with little-many-legs, the spider, residing on his mother’s back; a vestment of life, guarded, transported, snugly-housed. Beginnings — and he was the bird inside its fortress of shell, the worm tenanted in its earthy chamber, the moth waiting to issue from its silken shirt.
He’d been a small sleeper, yes, but instead of nesting among moss and leaves, he liked to curl up on the drawing room carpet. But there’d been so many drawing rooms, so many carpets, for Mama kept travelling for her health. There was always a new spa; each new carpet had a different pattern: cabbage roses, fern fronds, squiggles, a great expanse of fiery red.
The red was what Charlie remembered most, for the red was there when Papa came back. His spurs were cruelly silver against it; his soldier’s coat, buttoned with brassy suns, was red, too — his coat and the carpet clashed. And Charlie had been appointed Mama’s protector, he’d served her all those years, but he couldn’t save her now. Her back was stiff, so protesting, as the stranger’s arm wrapped round it.
But you always remembered it wrong. Papa was a soldier but when he came back from India he wasn’t a great war-lord. He was a disappointment (his coat wasn’t red); he was a shrivelled man in black, with trembling hands. He was as much an invalid as Mama, but he didn’t want Vichy or Wiesbaden. It must be England for Papa — the place you’d started from: a land where the sky cried easily, often; where home was a house covered in creeper like a beard, and the drawing room was cluttered with brass bowls from Benares, and the carpets were sad and smoky as the sky.
Home was dreary. Though it had captured Charlie, though he woke feeling miserable each morning, it didn’t exist. It wasn’t true that Mama sat up in bed drinking tea — and beside her was this lump in the bed, a man … But it was awful, shameful, and he’d been a soldier, he had a little stick and Charlie felt its whacks when he didn’t keep to the rules. For life was different, now; there was a rule for everything, and Mama had turned into a stranger. She clutched Papa’s arm; they were two invalids together. Their sick eyes grudged you your leap at the sky, your swift-footed flight down the drive.
Charlie’s Europe had meant palm trees and sun; cathedrals and palaces and all these statues. There were princes on horseback, warriors with perfect bodies, fat cherubim, countless Christs. Europe was a world of men, while England meant sickly old women. Mama was one, Papa was another as he dragged himself round the damp garden. Even the hedge birds sounded mournful; every day it seemed to rain more.
But across the Channel there’d been cities — Paris, Rome, Vienna — and each day meant a hundred new faces; meant the statues and waltz music and whipped cream melting into bitter black coffee. Remember, remember … and it was Easter in Austria and Mama wore a pearl dog-collar and a dress with hieroglyphic embroidery and Jesus had died. But he rose from the grave, and the church was all gold, there was a smell of St Joseph lilies, almond blossom was everywhere, and you came away with a blessing twig. For in churches in Austria, when Charlie was a boy, there was a custom at Easter time of taking a twig home from the church decorations as a personal blessing.
But in England the church was dismal. Though it had a fretted Gothic spire, you knelt on a threadbare cushion and the priest had a dripping nose. There was no wonder, no mystery, only this comic with his weeping nostrils. Papa’s hands trembled as he turned the pages of his prayerbook, and Charlie felt lost in a forest of nerves. His body was screaming, it was tormented by worry, for Jesus had died and in England you must mourn Him all year. Dampness and greyness kept Him dead forever; Charlie longed for the sun to shine, for Mama to be herself again — an invalid, but interesting, with kohl-rimmed eyes and fashionable clothes. And it was Easter, but you went home from church empty-handed. Charlie kept to the rules and ate luncheon with his elbows in and felt so alone; felt such longing for a blessing twig, an almond branch.
And then he was up in his room and the miracle happened. It was a curious feeling; there was a silence that told him he was remarkable, but he was giddy, he seemed to be moving at sickening speed. And he fell and fell till perhaps he was doornail dead, but no, he was on the Riviera where the air smelled of violets and Mama wore an orange blossom crown. And then he felt an itching in his sleeve; then he opened his eyes, and there fell into his hand a twig similar to that blessing twig he’d so much desired.
He kept the twig in his underwear drawer. He waited for other manifestations; he had the wonders planned in his mind. He longed for more proof of his difference, he waited for some voice that would tell him what to do — and nothing happened. He was filled with a terrible hate, he only wanted to die and he tried to throw himself from the window and the hedge birds were jeering as they pulled him back; they jeered worse when he scattered vests in his search for his blessing twig.
It was gone and then there was darkness, but no more miracles; then he was ill for several years. He recovered to nod gravely, to walk stooped. They were three old people living together.
Life was quiet; Charlie supposed he was content. But Doctor was a nosey parker. He listened in to Charlie’s heartbeat and said: ‘If you want to keep him, you must send him away.’ Mama thought of Cousin Diosma.
There was confusion and crying as he boarded ship, but after a while it was peaceful. Though the waves kept bucking and crockery broke, Charlie’s heart beat calmer, he felt better. Day after day passed away imperceptibly and he sensed a difference of climate, of time. The evenings were shorter, it grew hot. In the heat of the tropics, Charlie came alive again. He kept being improved, even though it was cold in Australia when he landed and winter in Fern Gully, where Cousin Diosma lived, seemed as damp as winter in England.
Poor coz lay like a mummy on her sick bed; she was such an invalid that she made Charlie feel in the pink of health. Colonial society was refreshing, for nothing mattered, nobody nagged. Charlie had ceased being colourless. He’d lashed out on russet shoes in London; he’d grown his hair on the voyage out. He felt like a poet as it started to be spring — as the wattle bloomed and revealed itself to be mimosa (there’d been mimosa blossom at Nice), and the sky turned a heavenly blue.
In the Gully, Charles Roche had admirers. The mamas were always inviting him to tea, and there was an artistic girl he’d met in the orchard, and an old lady who knew that a day would arrive when medical knowledge would remove all disease; when old age would be life’s single door of retreat.
It would be accomplished with vegetable remedies — Lizzie Potter spoke with passion. She looked so wild she made Charlie flinch; no wonder the Gully thought her mad.
But she was wonderful, she was the strongest person Charlie had known. She was an old woman who dressed like a gipsy and lived in a tin hut, and he had never met anyone better. She was a great teacher and Charlie was honoured to know her, and he saw that Fern Gully wasn’t so tolerant, after all. Lizzie was too big for it, too strange. When Charlie walked beside her, the Gully mamas looked at him askance, and (it was ridiculous — they were so ordinary, so nice) Charlie felt a twinge of fear. Their voices were soft as they bade him their usual good mornings. But Lizzie walked with him: their eyes were hard as they skidded off her. For a moment their eyes held a look that made you feel those placid Gully matrons
could do murder.
Lizzie, with her rag-bag clothes and outlandish ideas, was a threat to an ordered existence. Charlie walked with her every day, and she showed him the Gully’s secrets: the idiot boy yoked to his chain, the meths drinker in his humpy of bags. She led him up all these trim garden paths, and who’d believe that so many back parlours should shelter such a variety of affliction? Addled brains, crippled body, the life that had gone on too long, were hidden away with the twin poodles on the mantel, the wax flowers under glass. The Gully was Christian, caring, and an oddity mustn’t be allowed to disturb a nice person’s day. Sometimes at evening when the light turned tactful, you were allowed a stroll with your keeper. But by day, by dint of being unfortunate, you must be kept out of sight.
Despite being dosed with Lizzie’s medicines, they stayed just the same. But the herb doctoress seemed to like them as they were; she must show them to Charlie as if they were precious. And he was an Englishman, highborn, but he stood before them and felt lowly. Stripped of all pretending, they were terrible but beautiful, and — it was absurd, it didn’t make sense — Charlie was English with smart shoes and a fashionable slouch but they made him ashamed, he wanted to beg pardon for his frivolous life.
And Lizzie lent him books of botanic remedies, she confided her cures. Charlie learned that raspberry leaves were invaluable for summer complaint of children, that white pond lily was useful in disease of the bowels. She showed him wild honeysuckle flowers and sarsaparilla root and the small fern that was a sure remedy in a case of incipient consumption.
It was while he was hunting ferns that he saw the child. She was perfect, with her ringlets and snowy pinafore. And then he saw her by the creek with the freckly girl who drew. This time she wore red — such a red dress it was, and she smiled as if she knew him. She was the purest thing in the world, and she strayed into his dreaming. She overshadowed everyone else: the unfortunates and Lizzie and Diosma; even Mama in her hieroglyphic gown.
The Frangipani Gardens Page 13