by Peter Temple
‘A wall, Mac,’ Stan said. ‘A drystone wall. Twenty metres of wall. Know anything about drystone walls?’
‘Been a while,’ I said. When I was sixteen my father and I built two hundred metres of drystone wall on a property called Arcadia near Wagga. In my mind I saw a man and a boy and a pile of stones in the burning day, and heard my father say: Stone you need’s at the bottom of the bloody pile. That’s the way nature works. In bloody opposition to man.
‘So where d’ya want ’em?’ the driver said. He was a fat, sad-looking man in overalls and a baseball cap with ‘Toyota’ across the front.
Stan scratched his head. ‘Well, I suppose they can go just here.’
‘Want my advice?’ I said.
‘Quick,’ Stan said.
‘What’s the line of the wall?’
‘North-south,’ David said. He pointed. ‘In line with that post.’
‘Take it slow and tip ’em out down the line,’ I said to the driver. ‘You don’t want any piles. Do that?’
‘At the limit of the technology,’ the man said. We got out of the way and he went into action.
‘The right stone,’ I said. ‘Finding it’s the problem. Much easier if they’re spread out.’
‘What about the footing?’ said Stan.
‘How high’s the wall supposed to be?’
‘Not high,’ said David. ‘Metre and half.’
‘High enough,’ I said. ‘Needs a trench about half a metre deep, metre and a quarter wide. Then you taper the wall to about fifty centimetres at the top. Put a bit of cement in the bottom layers. Purists don’t like that.’
‘Purists be buggered,’ Stan said. ‘Get the machinery, lad.’
I got gloves out of the Land Rover, put on boots. David ripped the footing in half an hour. We shovelled out the earth, hard work, and then we got the strings up. I showed Stan how to arrange the bottom rocks, then David and I carried and Stan laid. It was punishing work, moving heavy objects not created with human hands in mind.
‘Wanted to give the women a surprise,’ Stan said. ‘Gone to Melbourne. To shop. What kind of bloody activity is that?’
‘I could learn to shop,’ I said. ‘Can’t be that hard.’
I was glad to be there, glad that there was somewhere I could be, glad to be doing something that prevented me from thinking about Ned. I desperately didn’t want to think about Ned.
We stopped when the light was almost gone, cold biting the face.
‘I think I see a drink in your future,’ Stan said, patting my shoulder. ‘Thought metal was the area of expertise. Now you turn out to know a bit about stone.’
We sat in Stan’s office next to the low whitewashed brick house he had built in the lee of the hill. A fire was burning in a Ned Kelly drum stove. David drank his beer and went off to feed the chooks. Stan took two more bottles of Boag out of the small fridge in the corner and opened them.
‘Something on your mind,’ he said.
I drank some beer out of the glass mug and looked at a botanical print on the wall. ‘Heard a story about Ned today,’ I said.
‘Yes.’ He was lighting his pipe with a big kitchen match.
I told him what Marcia had said.
Stan blew out smoke, drank beer, put the mug and pipe down. He didn’t show any sign of shock.
‘Ned. Drugs. Sex with teenage girls.’ He looked at me over the big hairy knuckles of his clasped hands. ‘Go to my grave not believing it.’
‘Who’d invent something like that?’ I said.
‘You believe it?’
‘Rather not think about it. Wouldn’t have had to think about if I hadn’t gone poking about.’
‘What poking about?’
I told him about Ned’s visit to Kinross Hall, how my questioning of Marcia Carrier had led to her finding of Daryl Hopman’s report.
‘Just her word for it, then,’ Stan said. ‘Could be trying to shift the blame from the doctor to Ned.’
‘Then why mention the doctor at all?’
We sat in silence, Stan generating smoke. For a moment I had been going to tell him about the other things that haunted me: the skeleton in the mine shaft, Melanie Pavitt naked in Colson’s Road, Ned’s visit to Ian Barbie in Footscray. But Daryl Hopman’s report offered an explanation for all of them that was too chilling to speak about.
‘Better get moving,’ I said, getting up. ‘Boy’s at home without food.’
‘Boys find food,’ Stan said. He walked to the vehicle with me. When I’d started it, he said: ‘Learned a lot about men in the war. Scoundrels and saints, met ’em both. Don’t believe this about Ned, so it’s not going to change anything.’
We looked at each other, united in our desire to hold on to the Ned we knew.
‘Another thing, Mac,’ said Stan.
I could barely see his face.
‘Ned was like a brother to your father. Something like this, he would have known. See you tomorrow.’
As I drove away, I thought perhaps my father did know. Perhaps that was what he wanted to tell me on the night he shot himself.
We’d put in five hours in the grounds of Harkness Park- me, Stan Harrop, Lew and Flannery-before Francis Keany’s Discovery murmured down the driveway. What we were trying to do was uncover paths, using a large-scale plan Stan and I had drawn from exploration and aerial photographs and the old photographs I’d found.
‘They’re bloody there,’ Stan said. ‘Get the paths, we’ve got the garden.’
It was hard going: the place was one big muddy thicket. The elms in particular had embarked on world conquest, sending out armies of suckers, densely colonising large areas. Some of the suckers were mature trees, now spawning empires of their own.
‘Dutch elm disease might be the answer,’ Stan said. ‘Nature’s way of saying fuck off.’
Stan had assembled us at 8.30. We were armed with two chainsaws and a new thing, a brushcutter with a circular chainsaw blade. Flannery liked the idea very much.
‘Tremble, jungle,’ he said.
I said, ‘The point is, Flannery, we apply the technology with some purpose in mind. We don’t apply it simply because we like laying waste to large areas of nature and seeing big things fall over.’
‘Wimp,’ said Flannery.
Stan went for a long walk through the muddy paddocks around the house. We were on smoko, sitting on Flannery’s ute, when he came back. ‘Major thing,’ he said, hitching his buttocks onto the tray, ‘major thing is, gardens like this, they’re designed for vistas. Looking from the house and the garden, looking at the house and the garden. But if the bloody vista’s gone, all brick-veneer slums crowding it, you can’t see what the designer saw.’
‘So you got it worked out,’ Flannery said. He was eating a pie. A viscous fluid the colour of liquid fertiliser was leaking down his unshaven chin. This and the Geelong beanie pulled down to a centimetre above his eyebrows gave him a particularly fetching appearance.
‘More or less,’ Stan said. At that moment, Francis Keany’s vehicle came into view.
Francis got out, the picture of an English country gentleman. He nodded to the peasants and said to Stan: ‘Good morning, Stan. So what do we now know? Enough research to write an entry in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Paid by the hour. Photographs taken from a great height. At a cost of about five dollars a metre. Charged both going up and coming down, as far as I can tell. So what do we now know about this garden?’
Francis had clearly been working on his opening lines during the drive from Melbourne.
Stan was patting pockets for his pipe. ‘Not much,’ he said, sadly.
Francis’s face went tight. He pursed his full lips, lifted his chin and slowly turned his face away from us until he was in full profile. This was a mistake. Stan had a clipping of a magazine article in which Francis’s profile was described as that of a Roman senator on a coin.
‘What Roman senator do you think that magazine twat had in mind?’ Stan said in a musing tone. ‘Pompus? Was th
ere a Priapus? What about Fartus?’
Francis came back into full face. He blinked several times, willing himself to remain composed. ‘In a few minutes,’ he said, voice edging on the tremulous, ‘Mr and Mrs Karsh are going to drive. Through that gate. I’d like to have something to tell them. If that’s at all possible.’ Pause. ‘Stan.’
Stan found the battered and blackened object resembling a piece of root rescued from a bonfire. He applied a yellow plastic lighter with an awesome flame. Smoke gathered around him until he looked like a smouldering scarecrow. Francis took two paces backwards to get away and was starting to speak when a black Mercedes station wagon with tinted windows nosed around the corner of the drive.
‘Oh shit,’ he said.
The car stopped next to Francis’s Discovery. The front doors opened. The driver was a tall woman, thirties, lightly tanned, sleek dark hair to her shoulders, minimal make-up. She was wearing a camelhair donkey jacket, thin cream sweater, jeans and walking boots. The passenger was in his late fifties, stocky, pale, small features, dark suit, tired eyes. He ran fingers the colour of chicken sausages through his thick grey hair and loosened his striped tie.
‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘Why isn’t it snowing?’
Francis coughed. ‘Leon,’ he said. ‘Anne. Good to see you. Filthy weather, I’m afraid. I’d like to introduce Stan Harrop. He’s one of my associates with a special knowledge…’
Leon Karsh ignored this and came around to shake hands with all of us, starting with Flannery. ‘Leon Karsh. Thanks for your help here.’ Soft voice, unusual accent, upper-class English over something else. When he got to Stan, he said, ‘My wife tells me you were responsible for Faraway in Bowral. I knew the family. Wonderful garden.’
‘Responsible, no,’ Stan said. ‘I was the maintenance man.’
Leon Karsh smiled. ‘Excellent maintenance, then.’
‘Thank you,’ Stan said.
‘What I’m trying to do here, Leon,’ Francis said, ‘is to recapture the essence of the original garden without necessarily being constrained by the more obvious limitations of the original designer’s vision. To do that…’
‘What limitations are those?’ said Stan.
Francis gave him a look, a laser beam of hatred. ‘To the trained eye,’ he said, ‘it’s obvious that the absence of a central axis…’
‘To the trained eye,’ Stan said, ‘there is a central axis. Mac, explain. I’ve got to get these expensive craftsmen back to work.’
It was amazing to me that Stan had managed to work for other people for so long. I fetched the plan and the copies of the photographs from the truck and laid them out on the tray. Anne Karsh was at my left elbow, Leon Karsh at my right. I could feel Francis behind me, trying to see over my shoulder. Anne smelled faintly of rosemary and cinnamon, a clean smell.
I said, ‘The garden was designed around 1885 by an Englishman called Robert Barton Graham for the Peverell family. The Peverell brothers were on the Ballarat goldfields until they realised there was more money in supplying timber and then flour to the miners. They built a mill on the creek here in 1868 and the house later. It was in the family till the 1950s. Lots of them are buried down the road here, next to the church.’
I found the right photograph. ‘This is dated December 1937. Two gardeners clipping a low circular hedge. It’s box. If you look carefully, you can see there’s a circle of hedge inside another circle. Paths run to the centre. A cross of paths.’
Anne Karsh leant forward to look at the photograph. ‘A sort of double mandala,’ she said. ‘One path’s wider than the others.’ A breast touched my arm.
‘Exactly,’ Francis said. ‘Mac has been very useful…’
‘The luck here is the sundial,’ I said, pointing at the photograph. ‘It tells us this picture was taken looking north.’
‘That’s important,’ Francis said. ‘Obviously…’
‘It also tells us the time of day,’ I said. ‘It’s late afternoon. This dark at the top left of the photograph-we couldn’t work that out. That’s because we assumed that the wide path would be the key to the long sightline. You can see the path runs north-south, and that puts the house behind the photographer.’
‘It’s the shadow of the house,’ Anne Karsh said, the pleasure of discovery in her voice. ‘That’s the big chimney.’
I said, ‘That’s right. It made Stan think that perhaps the long axis of garden ran across the front of the house.’
‘Odd thing to do, isn’t it?’ Leon Karsh said. ‘Not that I know anything about garden design.’
‘You have an instinct for form, Leon,’ Francis said. ‘It’s a gift.’
‘It is odd,’ I said, ‘and unlikely, according to Stan. Then we got the aerial photographs.’
‘I insisted on aerial photography,’ Francis said. ‘One of the most valuable tools in the armoury of the garden restoration architect.’
‘Tools in an armoury, Francis?’ Anne Karsh said. Stan was going to like her.
I unrolled the big enlargement. ‘Here’s the house. Here’s the creek. Here’s the old mill. Now, from the length of the house shadow in the old photograph…’
‘You can pinpoint the sundial,’ Anne Karsh said, pointing. She had strong hands, no rings. ‘God, it’s just jungle.’
‘We’ve found it,’ I said. ‘Box and yew trees now. Something else puzzled us.’ I pointed to a large area, bare in comparison with the rest of the garden, to the right of the house.
‘Not a natural shape,’ Anne Karsh said. She bent over the photograph and her hair swung like a silk curtain and touched my cheek. I flicked a glance at her. I wished I’d shaved.
‘Not at all natural, Anne,’ Francis said. ‘Very perceptive of you.’
‘No-one had mentioned,’ I said, that the original house burned to the ground in 1904.’
‘The shape of a house,’ Leon Karsh said. ‘You fellows have done well.’
‘Thank you, Leon,’ Francis said, modestly.
‘The mark of the house still shows because, for some reason, they didn’t finally demolish the ruins until the late 1940s,’ I said. ‘They built the new house as a replica of the old one, but it was too late to change the main axis of the garden. You’ll also have to live with it.’
‘A pleasure,’ Anne Karsh said. I didn’t look at her. I wanted to.
‘Stan’s worked out the focal point of the main axis,’ I said. ‘The main sightline leads the eye to the church steeple in Brixton. You can’t see it now because of those pines planted about forty years ago. Stan found out that while Graham was working on the garden, he also designed the church. Colonel Peverell paid for it.’
‘One cheque satisfied both man and God,’ Leon Karsh said. ‘In that order. Things don’t change much.’
‘So,’ Francis said, ‘you can now appreciate the enorm… the magnitude of my task here.’
‘Can we see what’s happened so far?’ Leon Karsh said to me. I looked at Francis. He was not a pleased person.
‘Go ahead, Mac,’ he said. ‘I have planning to do.’ He turned to Anne Karsh. ‘My dear, you have no idea-the logistics of a project like this resemble fighting the Gulf War.’
The Karshes put on gumboots and I showed them what we’d found so far, including paths, a sunken tennis court and a pond that was gravity-fed through a stone aqueduct from a spring on the hillside behind the house.
‘Where does the water go from here?’ Anne Karsh said.
‘Haven’t got to that yet,’ I said. ‘Probably channelled down to join the creek above the pond that feeds the millrace.’
‘There’s a millrace?’ She checked herself, delighted. ‘Well, since there’s a mill, I suppose there is.’
‘In good shape,’ I said. ‘Locals say the mill produced flour until World War II. The creek’s dammed down there to create a millpond. You open a sluicegate to let water into the headrace.’
‘I’d like to see that,’ Anne Karsh said.
‘Next time,’ Leon Karsh said. �
�The architect should be here. Should have been here before us.’ He turned his weary eyes on me. ‘So you’re a landscape gardener?’
‘No.’
Leon looked at me. Not a glance. A look. In his eyes you could see instinct and intelligence. I was being evaluated. God knows what he saw in my eyes. Attraction to his wife perhaps.
‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m a blacksmith. I work for Stan when things are slow. Which is quite often.’
‘But you haven’t always been a blacksmith.’
‘Leon,’ Anne said, ‘you’re prying.’
‘That’s right,’ Leon said. ‘I’m prying. My whole life is spent prying.’
‘I’ve done a few things.’
‘And you’re not easily pried. We’ll need an estate manager here when we’re finished. You might be interested.’
‘Bit too independent these days,’ I said. ‘But that might change. I’ll show you what’s left of the walled garden on the way back.’
The architect was waiting at the house, a thin middle-aged man, wispy chicken-feather beard, dressed for an Atlantic crossing in an open boat. With him was a clone, cloned smaller, presumably the assistant architect. In my days among the rich, I’d observed that nothing they paid for came in ones: not lawyers, not gardeners, not architects, not whores. Even their women came with a mother or a sister or a friend, usually fat, often ugly, always resentful.
I excused myself to rejoin the labourers, to go back to my place. Leon shook my hand. Anne said, ‘I’d like to see the mill some time if that can be arranged.’
‘Any time you want to see it, it’s down there,’ I said. ‘It’s your mill.’
‘Mac,’ Leon said, ‘I’ll tell Francis to build in the time for showing Anne the mill. Keep her away from the dangerous places. These old buildings, everything’s rotten.’
‘Any time,’ I said.
I found Flannery and Lew on their hands and knees looking for a path. ‘Glad to see you’re safe,’ Flannery said. ‘Thought you’d slipped over onto the managerial side. Notice that woman’s mouth? Very powerful. Suck the grips off your handlebars. She give you an indication of anything?’