Just Relations

by Rodney Hall

  – Well, she persisted, laughing once more and now avoiding his lips so that he laughed too. Well, in that case why did you want the gelignite? You never told me.

  – For the Golden Fleece of course, he replied surprised. I did tell you, that’s what I’ve been telling you about all this time. I found it in Mr McAloon’s diary. I know where the Golden Fleece is. Right in the middle of Whitey’s Fall. Right under our noses.

  – How are you going to get hold of it? Her mind filled with fantasies of wealth.

  – I’m going to blow it up.

  – …?

  – Close it for good. This is our mountain Viv. Us Whitey’s Fallers have done everything here. There’s no one needs anything they haven’t got, except Tony and me: the rest are too old. What would happen? Golden Fleece’d finish the place off. Once word got round they’d be here in their thousands.

  Naked, he needed nothing. She knew then that she wanted to be part of his world, that the finest thing imaginable would be to blow up a gold mine and bury it. She thought back to her German lover, how greedily he would have shown off in a Lamborghini and hung a hand-wrought chain round his pale muscular neck. Bill Swan had thought of this one thing worthwhile doing, that she wanted to do. Vivien closed her eyes as they joined, nothing in her mind, no memories, no fantasies, no fears; herself and Billy. That was all. She looked again and the sun filled her head.

  They lay listening to the mountain. And somewhere, faint, true, the planet delicately throbbing unravelled its harmony. Bill Swan recognized it. He dared not speak or the spell would be broken. Gold, ringing with the spirit of the people who first thought of it. Far down below the disguise of everyday soil, caverns of the precious metal gave tongue to the least shift of earth’s crust. They listened to the priceless bells.

  In the heat of the morning they walked into town, together.

  BOOK THREE

  Seven Figures Without Landscape

  One – The Maker of Circles

  Suppose there’d been a chance to bring you to Mr Ian McTaggart’s garden before everything changed, what then? Here you had to stand absolutely still to learn what you could. So much the place offered, and so unlike any other garden. But it would depend on how sharply you see and hear, as well as how sharply you almost-hear, how much you’d pick up by doing nothing but remaining alert.

  Mr McTaggart’s garden formed a circle, huge cool and rich in perfumes; perpetually muttering water could be heard and the music from a profusion of birds among the leaves. When he was at the centre, the plants in order of kind made concentric circles around him. And because the plants in each circle were a stage larger than those they encircled, the waves of what he grew widened around him, swelled and loomed, blossomed and fruited in a crescendo of height and splendour till they extended to include the surrounding bush, the continent, the whole earth. While at their tender heart squatted the most aged man of Whitey’s Fall working among the mushrooms in his shirt sleeves with dark patches of sweat under the arms, or weeding beds where frail spikes of dill were encouraged into the sun, soon to move on to the circle of lettuces, to water the capsicums or listen to the potatoes, fondle the nipples of young Brussels sprouts, sing to his tomatoes and in turn be fingered by bean plants, breathless among passionfruit, fumbling along his emotions out where the fruit trees grew or the nut trees beyond. Circle on circle the garden burgeoned, the accumulated bounty of five continents.

  Mr McTaggart’s notion of family followed a similar pattern. He could see how the generations welled in overlapping circles, even from himself. But of course he was not the source: no, you must look a long way back toward the centre of the circle. For a start there was his mother and her clan. As a boy he’d worn the MacDonald tartan, his grandfather on his mother’s side having been a MacDonald of the Isles as was his grandmother; the Murrays of Tullibardine could say what they liked, no clan was older or nobler than the MacDonalds. And then of course on his father’s side the Ross clan and the McTaggarts had married with the O’Neills who could trace their family back to Hugh O’Donnell, Earl of Tyrone, who came as near as damn-it to freeing Ireland totally from the English invaders (after the battle of Yellow Ford and the arrival of the Spanish fleet at Kinsale anything could have happened, liberty was in reach). The age-old struggle against authority, the refusal to knuckle under.

  He liked to hoard things too. His house was stuffed full of bric-a-brac, even to a drawerful of mysterious letters stamped with official seals and never opened, which had come to him as the oldest man, some recently, many passed on by Paddy McAloon’s widow when Paddy died and which he’d had from Tom Whitey before him. Certain of these letters were addressed to the Progress Association, an ugliness unheard of in these parts; others to the Postmaster though their post office was no longer in operation; and one was addressed with a despairing wide-shot to The Citizens. They were reliquaries for the mystery.

  Mr Ian McTaggart need only close his eyes to be back in the days of horsedrawn ploughs, hearing the clonking churchbell like a giant lost cow, the sweet festive family gatherings with drunken men weeping affectionately and hanging on to each other, the ladies laughing fit to burst, the bleating of sheep, and a brass band practising with the hall doors open so the uncles inside could be watched puffing proudly and tapping their feet, frowning at the task of squeezing out a work of art, undoing their collar studs, whispering hang it! and sorry! if they missed the beat. Such days, and so fresh in the memory being carried about the garden: a cosmos of sounds and emotions whirling harmlessly between the Brussels sprouts and the Jerusalem artichokes.

  You wouldn’t get much idea of Mr McTaggart, seeing him in his garden stooped over the herbs, drugged with their whispers of dreary Aeolian music, nor even in the process of making his marvellous way among the rows and paths with the ease of a builder of labyrinths not willing to believe he does something other people don’t do. But you might at least guess that for most of the day, crouched among plants, Mr McTaggart could scent well-being in the air, his fingers working the soil, his pet budgerigar perched on his head like a single brilliant blue thought emerging.

  From time to time his crippled wife called to him from the house to summon him back from eternity. She called, her thin voice habitually carrying over the complexities of his maze of living things, with some single piece of homely information or other: it’s eleven o’clock, it’s eight o’clock, perhaps we’ll have a drop of rain, my but it’s a sticky hot day, I shall be ready with tea soon love, Olive just dropped in to say goodday, those damn parrots are back again this year I see, have you got your hat on the sun’s a killer, five-and-twenty to two, you haven’t seen my spectacles I suppose, a body gets tired easy these days, I’d be wearing a scarf in this cold wind if I was you love, bread’s come, I shall cook up that roast tonight I think, are you alright?

  Because of her deafness, Mrs McTaggart could never hear whether or not he answered, but she kept calling when the spirit took her, knowing he needed her, calling into the sunny rainy windy silence.

  For his part he did need her, it was true, and whatever she called out became part of his dream. While his fingers intuitively ministered to the needs of his circles of plants, he dreamed. There was a funeral and himself saying the words that needed to be said, while somebody’s child in the coffin waited to be put away, but as he stood in the dream saying the burial words, he was dreaming within the dream, dreaming he’d got his knee in the small of a man’s back, yes, he had him down on the ground, himself a strong young fellow kneeling his full weight there and sawing away at some minor thing with a knife, an ear could it be? while the victim bled and howled and had to be hit; yet even as he sawed at the human ear to get it off the head, he was dreaming within this dream too; of standing on the mountain, watching a building which had been built to withstand that one constant wind, when it dropped for the first time ever, like a prop knocked away, so the building sagged to one side and collapsed; and yet, even while he watched this building fall in the dream ins
ide the dream of cutting off the ear inside the dream of speaking burial words for the unknown child, he was dreaming of the mountain itself no longer there, gouged out by giant machines, and to be seen only in certain lights as a mountain of stilled air.

  – Those lads came back, called Mrs McTaggart. Came back in George Swan’s truck this morning with young Lance’s leg broke and bringing a tale about a road. You wouldn’t believe it, a new road love. What does it mean?

  For the joy of where he was, the budgerigar began twittering. The oldest man, as if he had listened to her and was letting the bird answer for him, stood up, shaded his eyes against the light, looked towards the house (or beyond, to the mountain?) and ambled along a hidden path to another circle of his heaven.

  Two – The Violinist

  My great-aunt Annie always was a plain woman and a sensible one. She said she had no patience with the past, no not in any shape or form, no patience whatsoever with it. You take my word, young Vivi, she used to tell me, if you waste time trying to relive times you never lived properly in the first place, you’ll never have time to live today either. I always thought this the best advice I was ever given. Live for the wonder of living, she’d say on other occasions. Or else she’d say live for the wonder of the world about you. Or don’t let a moment escape if you can help it, you won’t get it back, not that one, phut gone, and once gone gone forever. And stand on your own two feet my girl, she’d instruct me wagging a finger. Don’t you let anybody go living your life for you, you fool yourself if you think you can live through others. I’ve only got one regret, she’d say, and that doesn’t matter now either.

  Outside her livingroom window I could watch the English rain pelting against the street, people running for cover, and a portly gentleman sauntering along beneath his varnished umbrella with a beadcurtain of raindrops swaying down about him, a maharajah on an elephant. Peonies grew in my great-aunt’s tiny garden, big voluptuous bushes that sprouted blots of vulgar taste against the housefront. Aunt Annie cradled the flowers as they died. I would come in one afternoon to find her on her usual chair with the machine-lace drapes a veil behind her head, and in her cupped hands one huge pad of crimson light. The peonie rested there as if it knew about her. See how the tips go brown poor darling, she’d croon. Like a heart of feathers and old stale sunshine. Then I’d look out past her in embarrassment and notice the rows of squat terracehouses and I knew her house was no different and I’d feel sorry for the world, being afraid of going home into the wrong front door. When the Lord created the peonie, she’d say, he had a message for mankind. She’d press the bright withered lips against her own.

  Do you want anything at the shop Auntie? I’d ask. Lord love us the darling never forgets me, she’d answer. And that was the way we were, Aunt Annie and me. Of course she’d swindle me, she’d sidetrack me with tall stories, she’d trick me into feeling sorry for something I hadn’t done, she’d bribe me with affection into taking her side in any dispute, she’d bulldoze me into thinking what she was thinking, but next minute out would come some favourite saying: stand on your own two feet my girl, you can’t live your life through anybody else. That’s for sure, she’d add just for the comfort of being right as usual.

  There she’d be in the front room with the clock ticking tunefully, surrounded by the frail possessions proper to a lady of refinement. Her huge fingers closing with exquisite care on some glass object, she’d appraise it and replace it. She’d sigh with pleasure, her arm a megalithic carving among the demure Dresden faces and filigree knick-knacks. Bundled massively into the flimsiest silks or nylons, guipure lace sleeves, tulle skirts, muslin bodices, she carried loads of flowers on her bosom, in her hair, clutched in her handbag, for tuppence she’d tuck a lily in her belt for a trip to the baker, or a crocus behind her ear to cheer up the Court of Petty Sessions when she went to hear the dramas, just for a fig she’d wear an arum lily in her hat too if it suited her. Whatever she could conveniently steal she would wear. The neighbours planted wallflowers and Auntie took up the wallflower in her own way, her hand cruising through the privet hedge, fingers nipping off a choice bloom. The stationmaster tried out pansies in his windowbox and lo and behold Aunt Annie had a pansy on her collar the very first morning those all-purple ones were out, the ones she liked best. The geraniums at the dentist’s suffered annual losses in spite of being tucked away behind two fences and a brick wall. The parish church itself had to countenance Auntie turning up devoutly sporting a daffodil or two exactly matching those outside the vestry. Even the policeman’s alsatians could not deter Auntie from sampling his irises.

  When Mrs Pye down the street accosted Auntie, I was seven or eight and clinging on, dying with shame as Auntie answered, What rose? yesterday morning you say? yesterday? no no, I can’t be bothered remembering, the past is the past Mrs Pye, all gone and buried, I’ve no time at all for the past, but are you fond of roses then my dear? just hold on here, don’t move, I’ll slip back home, I’ve just the thing for you, a little beauty, wait here Vivi, talk to Mrs Pye and don’t pick your nose or suck your thumb darling. Sure enough she came back, glowing with excitement, with the pleasure of gift-bearing. Here you are then, she declared and handed Mrs Pye the prize Prince de Bulgarie she’d taken from her garden twenty-four hours earlier, I’ll bet you couldn’t match a blossom like that! Not since yesterday I couldn’t, Mrs Pye whined spitefully. Never mind, said Auntie, but don’t ask me how it’s done, that’s somebody else’s secret, I’m sure I couldn’t say, they just seem to come up like that of their own accord. Then she recollected something and I felt her hand harden horribly about my own. Now Vivien my duck you expect me to buy you a nice cream bun at the shops I dare say well we must be getting along then have you anything to say to Mrs Pye before we go? Surely you’re going to say good morning Mrs Pye I hope you like Auntie’s rose? Yes? There’s a good girl. We have to teach them, Mrs Pye, they don’t learn by themselves do they? Bye-bye and do have a sniff of the scent, lovely, I hope you’re pleased with it… any time!

  I have only one memory of my mother and this was the sight of half her back, it’s to do with the way she sat at the table I suppose, as if she had her plate in her lap and ate with her back half-turned to me and my father. Perhaps she had something wrong with her face. Perhaps she hated us, shutting us out of her life. I don’t know. This was one reason I wanted to talk to Aunt Annie about our family, because she’d known them all so well. There were no shadowy figures in Auntie’s life. What was great-uncle Joe like, Auntie? I asked her sometimes when I looked at his photo on the mantelpiece surrounded by a minuet of porcelain pompadours and backed up by the gilt clock with its square bevel glass door. Old Joe, she’d answer, also gazing at her husband in half-hearted black and white, just like his photo he was. But what was he like to know? I asked. Now that I don’t remember rightly, was her stock reply. But I knew she did remember. She was only pretending, because she could be so definite about it.

  The only other photograph on display was a brownish one of herself standing beside an ant-hill taller than she was, holding an earthworm six foot long and draped across both outstretched arms. That’s in Australia, she said. That’s in Whitey’s Fall where I come from. That’s a worm and that there’s an ant-hill behind me. This was the vision of Australia I grew up with. If anyone asked me what it would be like, I could describe it perfectly.

  I didn’t spend all my time with my great-aunt. Indeed, not enough of it to my way of thinking. I lived with my father in a procession of flats. We never occupied anywhere long enough for me to get a grip on it as home. Perhaps this is why Aunt Annie’s house (always the same, with the same smells and the same things in it, the same routines) is what I associate with the settled aspect of the word home. I helped my father set up house from the earliest times I can recall: looking over the cold new place with its worn furniture and dingy walls, wrinkling my nose at its dead air, and hearing my father speak of his resignation to an unjust destiny by asking me where we should put
this and what could be done with that? I arranged everything, divided the knives forks and spoons, hung cups on hooks, brightened the bedrooms with our own coverlets, stripped curtains from windows and put up Your Mother’s curtains, trying them for length, placed the gay vermilion tablets of Lifebuoy soap on basin and bath, plugged in our wireless and made it sing; the wardrobes stood open and naked to the world so I filled them with our clothes (while my father sat shaking his head at the magnitude of the task of unpacking) and closed their doors. My parents’ wedding photograph was placed on a prominent sill. Grief had never been part of this photo for me. I didn’t know my mother. I had a rich history of childhood griefs but none to be called up by this picture. I thought it was funny. My mother looked stupid in the unbelievable fashions of 1930. Also the men in penguin suits. Even the ground covered with dead leaves outside the church. Through all our moves, this comic familiar wedding group had always perched some place prominent and mildly ludicrous.

  Thinking back a long way I have a clear memory of waking once during the night and actually saying to myself – The war is on, I will remember this. I was no more than four perhaps. Later I woke again seeing my room floodlit, a golden glow blazed and fluttered against the walls.

  – It’s Peace! I whispered, recognizing. So I was not surprised when neighbours began banging at the door and shouting. I lay there hearing Daddy in the front room stirring. He coughed a horrible thick cough so that he might be choking on phlegm; and then thud, bumping into the walls, staggering out to answer the callers. What had gone wrong? While I held my breath to hear better, he barged into my room, snatched me up in his arms, blankets trailing and tripping him; ran, joggling and hurting. Outside, the cold air grabbing at my feet, I could afford to wake so I opened my eyes and found them filled with a sky of flames. Then a large black hand swooped across my sight and blinded me so that only the familiar smell of my father’s skin saved me crying out in alarm. Out across the yard we went, with neighbours plucking at my train of bedclothes, out over the threshold a giant bridegroom and with his fire-blinded bride in his arms; fragments of blazing wood pattered on the ground as we ran. Once he removed his hand so he could brush a red-hot ember from my pyjama-sleeve and, unafraid, I had seen everything including two lumps of timber rushing like comets overhead plus the bakery roaring with flames. Flames circled the silhouette of my father’s head; and when he turned to look back they filled his open mouth, then as he glanced my way I even saw a tiny flame in each of his terrified eyes.