The House At Salvation Creek

by Susan Duncan

  We camp like holiday-makers, turning out the lights and sitting on the floor with firelight dancing on the walls, playing music until late. I am not entirely at ease, but nor do I feel like a trespasser.

  Chip Chop, my trollopy little Jack Russell, is already familiar with the house. When I travelled, as I still do occasionally, on assignments for The Australian Women's Weekly, Bob and Barbara took care of her, making sure she didn't rampage through the bush as though it was her own private game park. On our first night up the hill, she leaps straight onto the sofa and falls asleep in a cushioned corner with a loud, ecstatic sigh.

  A few weeks after the new tenants, John and Therese, lug the last of their clothes and all of their computer equipment up the steps, they call to ask if we would like to join them for dinner. We have seen them on the water in their tinny, but aside from a quick nod or a wave at a smiley bald-headed bloke and a skinny little woman with laughing blue eyes, there's been little contact.

  On the night we get together, John barbecues a whole duck to serve with pieces of lime and chili. When he unwraps it from the foil at the table, none of us says a word. It is cinder black, and shrivelled to the size of a large potato.

  'Wonderful,' we all trill after a minute or two, trying to find small bits that are still edible. Because we do not know each other well enough yet to understand if the truth might offend or hurt.

  'Hottest blooming barbecue I've ever known,' John says eventually.

  'What did you expect? Bob's a combustion engineer!' I explain.

  'Ah!'

  John is a shiny-headed . . . what? Renaissance man best describes him. Lawyer, writer, businessman, sailor and who knows what else? He came to Pittwater on holidays as a child and never forgot it. One day, he is not sure why, he decided he would like to return.

  Therese is deeply Irish even though she's lived in Australia for more than thirty years. She is a social worker, unafraid of the seamier moments in people's lives. Once, she brought down the wrath of her board of directors when she let a homeless man sleep on a bench in the garden of the community centre where she was boss. 'It's bridge day,' they screamed at her, implying that the sight of a shambling alcoholic in need of a bath and clean trousers would be too confronting for the well-dressed women who played cards there every Wednesday.

  'This is a community centre,' she replied, unmoved. She fetched him fresh clothes, made fifty phone calls until she found a place for him to sleep, then cleaned up the mess he had left behind. Her compassion should have shamed her colleagues, but all they felt was sullied.

  'Pound for weight, she's stronger than any woman I've ever seen,' says Bob with approval. He has watched her carry a case of wine up the hill, slim as a teenager, barely more than five feet tall. His tone is rich with respect.

  I am at ease that first time we return to Tarrangaua on the occasion that becomes known as 'the night of the black duck'. I am a guest, which I am familiar with. But Bob feels strangely disoriented. 'I keep wanting to check the oven and fill the wine glasses,' he whispers. 'And John's sitting where I always sit!'

  And it is the moment I finally understand that the Tin Shed will never be home to him.

  ***

  A year later, Bob makes one of his endless trips along Lover's Lane to get a tool from his shed at Tarrangaua and something inside me gives way.

  'Should we give your house a go for a while?' I ask him. The rental lease is due to expire. We expect John and Therese to move on. Even though he has the chance to leap in with a loud yes, he holds back.

  'It wouldn't bother you?'

  'No. Not anymore.' And I hope it is true.

  We tell John and Therese our plans over a dinner of slow-roasted pork with crackling rubbed with preserved lemon, fennel seeds, garlic and sea salt.

  'Don't worry,' they say gaily, when we apologise if it's going to cause any inconvenience. 'We'll just move into the Tin Shed.' And we swap houses. It's as easy as that.

  A week before moving day, I pile cookware, crockery, cutlery, serving dishes, glassware and bowls into the wheelbarrow and push each load along the rough bush path we call Lover's Lane. It runs behind the Tin Shed to Tarrangaua. According to local legend a doctor who ran a home for mentally disabled men fell in love with Dorothea Mackellar and cut the path from his house to hers. It was an unrequited love, from all accounts. Only a single, isolated sandstone chimney remains of his dwelling, and the tangled residue of a once ordered cottage garden: wisteria, two magnolias, hydrangeas. Plants that survived the firestorm of 1994. Tougher, in the end, than the house.

  Bob cleared the pathway in the days not long after Barbara died and I began cooking for the two of us. Most evenings, he walked slowly along the track, bottle of wine in hand, shoulders hunched, his weathered face creased more deeply, it seemed to me, than just a year earlier.

  At first, our dinners were awkward. We were wary. Not of each other, but of saying something thoughtless. It took the passing of time to dull the raw edges and, oddly, the familiarity of routine – oddly because I used to loathe predictability and lived for excitement. I am old enough now, though, to look back regretfully at so much effort wasted on worthless pursuits. I cannot help wishing I'd directed my energy more profoundly and less recklessly when I had it in abundance.

  The wheelbarrow hits a gnarled and hard root of a spotted gum. I take a deep breath. Grunt. And bounce over it. Every day, stronger and stronger. Chemo is more like a bad dream from another lifetime.

  Bob's shed is dusty, thick with spider webs and tools flung on benches. Bare floorboards, some of them sinking. Grimy windows and gaps between the timber. It is chaos.

  'Where's all this stuff going to fit?' he moans as I unload another wheelbarrow load of kitchen equipment.

  'What about the cupboards in the hallway? They're huge.'

  'That's where I keep my old business files.'

  'Oh.'

  It makes me suddenly unsure, forces me to question whether what we are doing will be for the best. We are not beginning in a new house, we are picking up the past. In a different way, of course, but it's unshakable. There is the indelible print of another woman's life and it will always be there.

  Barbara and Bob had the bed made for them in Australian cedar. They found the bedside tables on a jaunt through country Victoria. Bob and his son carried up the huge cedar chest of drawers from the boat on a stinking summer day. Eighty-eight steps. Will Bob drift back in time when he pulls a pair of socks from the drawers, when he lays a book down on the bedside table before turning out the light? Will I feel I have moved in with a ghost?

  My head spins. I have made so many moves in too few years. The Tin Shed is perfect. Why change the order of things? Because Bob needs his shed, I reply to myself silently. Because going up and down the hill five times a day will get more and more exhausting. Because home is where Bob is and the rest is just building material. Because to resent Bob's past is childish and irrational. We all have pasts. My own is not particularly noble. And Barbara was a friend. To be reminded of her is a good thing. She was a fine woman with impeccable instincts. And because Tarrangaua is old and, like old people, it needs tenderness to keep sparkling.

  'I'll only take half the hallway cupboards, then,' I tell Bob firmly.

  Bob nods. A good relationship, he tells me from time to time, is built on many things. Trust is the baseline, with the ability to compromise not far behind. To win every round in a relationship can sometimes mean losing the marriage.

  We swap houses on a fine day in late spring 2003 with the help of Bob's mates, six sunny-faced blokes from an engineering factory in Mona Vale.

  'Not the kind of move you need a barge for,' Bob explains. 'Next door, really.'

  Next door and up a mountain, I think to myself. But I say nothing. And there's Bob's old white ute, freckled with rust. No matter how heavy the load, it just gets gruntier. The blokes still have to carry sofas, beds, sideboards, tables and chairs down the steps from the Tin Shed, across the rutted slipway of
the Lovett Bay boatshed and along a dirt waterside pathway to the bottom of the sandstone track. Nothing is light. My father always told me to buy stuff to last. 'You buy it once,' he advised, 'and you have it forever.'

  But I was young then, and the idea of keeping something forever was unthinkable. What did forever mean, anyway? So I bought my share of new and trendy. Through the years, I've kept the timeless pieces and flicked the fashion fads. Should've listened to him when I had the chance. Although he was a realist about the usefulness of parental wisdom: 'You've got to make your own mistakes. Only way anyone ever learns.' His face, as he said it, was always full of sad resignation, as though he'd made a million of his own mistakes and wished he could save me from the ones he understood were ahead, but knew he couldn't.

  At the waterfront, the blokes tightly strap the first load into the back of the ute. It's a 35-degree incline and the track is rough as hell.

  'Would've been a cinch if we'd left all the furniture where it was,' Bob says.

  'Yeah, but it's your house. If I don't have my own stuff around me, I will feel like a guest.'

  'Fair enough.'

  The ute goes uphill frontways over red kangaroo grass that grows down the middle of the track like a mohawk haircut. There's no turning circle at the house and Bob treasures his lawn, so he reverses down. It's like driving backwards into the stratosphere. All you can see in the rear-vision mirror is an empty lapis lazuli sky. Bob stares into the side mirrors to get his bearings but it's still tricky. Too far to the left and he plunges into a deep drainage channel. Too far to the right and he careens into knotty bush. Lose concentration and he'll end up in the bay.

  By late afternoon, Bob looks haggard. He's done about thirty trips. There's an ominous thunk under the bonnet of the old ute, but it never falters. Nor does Bob. He's going home and he's happy.

  'Those blokes are buggered,' I tell Bob when it is all, finally, done. The smiles are gone. The boys sit, shoulders hunched forward, arms wrapped around bony knees, heads hanging in exhaustion. Except for one. The fitness fanatic.

  'Going for a run,' he says. 'To have a look around the bush.'

  We groan, tell him to settle. He ignores us and takes off, tall, skinny and indefatigable.

  'Bloody glad you didn't want the pianola moved,' says Troy, trying to grin but too tired to pull it off.

  'I'll get tea and cake on the go.'

  'A beer might go down a bit better,' he replies, forlornly.

  ***

  On our first evening at Tarrangaua, we sit on the verandah as the sky segues from blue to pearly pink. There's a bottle of champagne on the table but it stays unopened. Five scruffy kookaburras line up on the rails, looking for dinner. They fly away in disgust when we ignore them. Two king parrots, a male and female, land in an explosion of red and green, like performers in a medieval play. The white cockatoos, louder than banshees, salt the bush on the other side of Lovett Bay. At dusk, two brown wallabies with rusty chests edge their way cautiously onto the lawn, wide-eyed and beguiling.

  'Not bad for openers,' I say to Bob, reaching for his hand.

  'It only gets better,' he replies with a smile.

  Then we head down the hill to Stef and Bella's for dinner. 'Too hard to cook after a move,' Bella had insisted. 'I'll take care of food for all of you.'

  John and Therese are already there. Their bed is made, they tell us, and they are looking forward to another chapter in Pittwater living. 'Not as far to come to dinner now,' John says to Bella. 'Easier to get home, too.'

  'I love Pittwater,' I mutter later, when we're stumbling up the hill, exhausted and slightly pizzled. 'It's family without the baggage, and they're always there.'

  'Yeah. They're great neighbours, great friends. But nothing beats family.'

  ***

  Early the next morning, not long after the kookaburras and cockatoos shatter the dawn quiet, I walk down the hallway past a photograph of Bob and Barbara where their heads are touching and Bob's dark eyes are almost closed. Her blue eyes are filled with laughter.

  'Well, he's back,' I tell the photograph. 'And I'm here too. Hope that's ok.'

  I am full of bravado but despite Bob's careful courtesies, sleeping, dressing, reading and resting feel like trespassing in another person's inner sanctum. Vaguely voyeuristic. For a long while, I hesitate to open bedside drawers even though I know – because I have cleaned them – that they are empty of the remnants of another life. Only indifferent flotsam remains – cedar balls to ward off moths and silverfish, fragrant paper lining cupboards. But it is impossible, now and then, to hold back the guilt of still living when Barbara does not.

  In the kitchen, I fill the kettle. Through the window, Lovett Bay ripples with light. Same tawny bay. Same orange escarpment. Same empty sky. Yet utterly different. Up here on this high, rough hill where there are no houses close by, the physical world embraces tightly. No wonder Mackellar made Tarrangaua her refuge and retreat.

  3

  I EXPECT, OVER TIME, to find a way to live comfortably with Barbara's ghost in Tarrangaua. But I do not expect to move in with two lingering spirits, if that doesn't sound too theatrical – certainly that is how it feels. I don't mean to suggest that each night the hallways are full of ghostly traffic. Although Barbara, pragmatic, analytical, unemotional even, was convinced she once saw the ghost of Mackellar on the hillside, clothed in russet brown, her face hidden under the brim of a wide straw hat. And sad, so sad. It is simply the pervasive sense of the past.

  Not long after I put away my pots and pans and books, I find myself intrigued, as Barbara was, by Mackellar and her life, far beyond reading a poem or two. As I grow older, I have begun to wonder if it is our neglect of the past that sometimes invites calamity. When I sit at the table near the kitchen door with tea and cake, I wonder if Mackellar followed similar rituals. I am curious about a few old brick footings in the bush. What were they part of? How did the concrete garden seat, with 1938 stamped on it, come to be here? Did Mackellar bring it? Old houses awaken curiosity, and this one is so rich with history. What was life like when Mackellar lived here? How would Pittwater have looked before electric lights, speedboats and garbage barge collection days? Who lived around here when she did? How did she spend her time?

  Barbara's imprint, too, is all around. She collected Australian pottery from the twenties, thirties and forties – Remued, Campbell, Bendigo, Diana, McHugh – in blues, browns and greens. A frog, too, fat and emerald. He is quite rare, I am told, because he was manufactured to be used as a doorstop and most of them, naturally, shattered.

  At first the vases look dark and ugly and I leave them on shelves only because they are part of Barbara's life. Gradually, though, I begin looking beyond the murky browns and muddied greens, to the subtle celebration of the Australian landscape. Vases decorated with slim gum leaves. Bowls with possums and koalas, gumnuts and kangaroos, most of them clumsily worked and some so badly fired they leak when you fill them with water for flowers. But they represent the beginning of a shift from a nation that admired Royal Doulton and Wedgwood, which is probably what appealed most to Barbara. She was deeply passionate about all things Australian and after a while, to my eye, the clumsiness transforms into a pleasing naivety.

  One particular type of plate, known as 'Give Us Our Daily Bread', eluded her. It is oval-shaped with a slightly raised lip to prevent the bread from slipping off. It was primarily made by two companies, Bendigo and Lithgow Pottery. The most prized, though, is from Lithgow Pottery because this business, which began in 1880 as an adjunct to the Lithgow Valley Colliery Co, operated for just seventeen years. Anything intact is rare and sought-after, but especially the 'Daily Bread' plate.

  'If we can find a plate at the right price, it will close the circle,' Bob says, knowing, even as he says it, that it will make no tangible difference, but nevertheless mean a lot. It becomes a routine for us to wander through antique shops when we drive through small country towns. Looking for Barbara's plate.

  One da
y we are filling in time at Nundle, an old goldmining town south east of Tamworth in New South Wales, wandering through a hodge-podge of used and new in a wonderfully eclectic shop. 'Look, threepences and sixpences,' I say, pointing to a cabinet full of them. 'Need a few more for the Christmas puddings. Think they must get swallowed. Or something.' As we go to the counter to pay for them, Bob asks, more out of habit than hope, if there is a Lithgow 'Daily Bread' plate anywhere.

  'Yes. Just one,' says the owner. He walks to a tall cabinet, pulls a chair to stand on, reaches for a dusty plate on top.

  'Can't be a real one,' Bob whispers. 'It's got to be a mistake.'

  But the plate is genuine. It is marked Lithgow, with a simple drawing of a kangaroo. And the price is fair.

  'Where did you get it?' Bob asks.

  'From my mother. She was a dealer, but she could never bear to sell anything, so she really didn't do too well. You're the first people who have ever walked in and asked for Lithgow pottery. It's been sitting there for years.'

  When we're in the car, Barbara's plate cushioned in yards of bubble wrap, Bob shakes his head. 'You just never know, do you? You never have the slightest idea of what you might stumble across unless you ask the question.'

  ***

  Whenever we return from even just a few days away, I am struck by the differences between living up the hill and down the hill. Before I lived in Tarrangaua – even before I knew Bob and Barbara – I would look up from the tinny as I passed on seagull grey days when rain fell in a mist so light it clung like sweat to your skin, and it looked almost ghostly, even a little forbidding, penned behind spotted gums with trunks as smooth as prison bars. Tarrangaua is such an aloof building, a house that sets the tone instead of embracing yours, as though it has a force or will of its own. Brogues feel more appropriate than thongs, tweeds preferable to sarongs. I fight hard in the first few months not to succumb to its subtle pressure to dress (and behave?) more decorously than in my usual jeans and scruffy T-shirts.

  After a while, the deep verandah, which casts a veil-like shadow over windows and doors, becomes my favourite place. I am drawn to it even on cold days. It is wondrous to sit there, watching life. Birds, people, dogs, boats, bait fish in boiling pools, the quicksilver glitter of jumping fish. Clouds scudding, light changing. And the bay: flicked by the wind, mill pond smooth, frosted sometimes, or glassy in the thin evening light of late autumn. I have learned to read even the lightest winds by watching the water darken where air, no stronger than a breath, passes over it. Then, at sunset, golden slabs of light pour in and the veil is lifted.