by Susan Duncan
I am used to boats now. Going along at a sedate ten knots, checking out the world. Jellyfish a week ago, bigger than a football. Hordes of them floating just under the surface in orange blobs, legs hanging down like fat pantaloons, tops like fringed lampshades. An alien invasion from the bottom of the sea, silent and mysterious. Passing tinnies slowed, heads hung over the side for a closer look.
'Saw a lot of these jellyfish when I was a kid,' said Tanya as we held each other's tinnies to stop them drifting apart. 'They haven't been around for years.'
'Wonder what's brought them back?'
'Dunno. You Woody Pointing?'
'Wouldn't miss it. Bob's been overhauling the sail system. I refused to do more than three tacks up the course and three down. Meant it as a joke. Now he's put in a new self-tacking headsail. Serves me right. It's pretty good, though. All I have to do is get the drinks sorted.'
'Nice job.'
'Yeah, but we don't go as fast. Think he misses that. He's got a new sail that he reckons will speed us up in light winds. A Code Zero. Calls it the secret weapon. Not sure what he means.'
Tanya, an accomplished sailor who grew up in Lovett Bay, raised an eyebrow. 'Within the rules?'
'When would Bob break the rules? Bend them maybe, but never break them.'
In the city, I make a million turns into one-way streets that point me in the wrong direction. I can see the formal columns of the Mitchell Library but it constantly hovers just out reach. I'm about to give up in frustration when a parking station looms directly ahead. I need a rest anyway. Traffic sucks you dry.
I dash into the Art Gallery to go to the loo, then slow down. What's the rush? I'm catching rush fever from everyone around me. Outside again, I wander slowly along Sydney's streets, seeing it as a tourist would. The Botanic Gardens. There's a mass planting of dianella in front of an old stone cottage, tiny purple flowers dripping from delicate stems like loosely strung pearls. At home it grows scrappily but it does grow, which means wallabies don't eat it. I file the knowledge away.
Sydney's watery beauty glistens. How come I've never noticed a bronze of a very ugly boar, Il Porcellino, outside Sydney Hospital? (It was donated by an Italian noblewoman, Marchesa Fiaschi Torrigiani, in memory of her father, in 1968. Her intention was for passers-by to donate a coin to the hospital and rub its nose for luck, as they do in Florence.) I tramped these streets when I worked as a journalist and I never bothered to look around. Always the job. Always the story. Always a rush. Always a deadline.
The library is hot, the stale air chewy. Brown leather-topped tables wide enough to hold a slew of books are arranged in military lines. Stained glass windows of medieval men and white horses surround the room, the name of the benefactor writ large underneath. Buying immortality? It's all very organised, civilised. Quiet. Easy to feel like an interloper in an intellectual morass.
At boarding school we had two libraries, one for the juniors and one for the seniors. They were annexes off the sitting rooms where we gathered in our black velvet dinner jackets and civi-clothes (non-uniform) for half an hour before dinner and then again after dinner until it was time for bed and lights out. Like everyone else, I devoured Georgette Heyer's Regency romances and dreamed I'd be rescued from the tower (we really did have a tower that rose above the senior library) by a handsome lord. Shy and unsure new girls were told the tower was haunted. Even senior students weren't entirely convinced there wasn't a lost spirit bedded in there for eternity. The tower was always locked, which added to the myth. And when the wind wailed on a freezing winter night like unspeakable grief, few of us slept soundly.
At school, when you wanted to borrow a book, you wrote your name and the title of the book on a page with neatly ruled columns. But when I go to the counter to ask for books on the alleged architect of Tarrangaua, Hardy Wilson, I am asked for my number.
'What number?'
'Are you registered to use the library?'
'No,' I reply, but I want to mutter darkly about paying taxes and democratic rights. A monumental hot flush surges from my toes. Sweat breaks out on my top lip, under my eyes. Stress. Does it every time.
'It's easy to register,' the attendant says, taking pity on me. She points at a bank of computers near the doorway. 'Fill in your details over there and come back with a number. In the meantime, give me a list of what you're looking for.'
I hand her a scrappy piece of paper with a whole lot of cryptic codes involving letters, backward slashes and dots in all sorts of funny combinations – MAVSM410675. Q728.370994410 – plonked together with no meaning. I got them by phoning the library and asking for anything on Hardy Wilson. They seem to make perfect sense to the attendant I speak to.
The computer doesn't want to know me. It rejects every whack on the Enter key. It's hard not to feel like a dunce. An impatient line forms behind me. Nothing works. I finally turn and ask for help, mewling pathetically about being a techno moron. The guy behind me can't get my details over the line either. I feel slightly better but not much. This is supposed to be a pleasure jaunt to satisfy my curiosity, but it's more like being slowly strangled by bureaucracy.
There's a different woman behind the counter when I return without my number. She sighs darkly and follows me back to the machine. 'No number, no books,' she says. 'Name?'
I spell it out for her.
'Address? . . . No, no, you can't do post office boxes. You need a street address. What's the street number?'
'There are no streets. And no numbers.'
It's on the tip of my tongue to add that we manage quite well without numbers, but I hold back. She gives me a funny sideways glance. I can see her thinking nutter. I do my best to look like a conservative, sensible, middle-aged woman, not a semiferal in worn-out boat shoes and ratty jeans. The hot flush isn't helping.
'We're at Pittwater, boat access only,' I explain.
'Ah, where on Pittwater? Scotland Island?' Her face is suddenly all smiley, like we're old buddies.
'No, Lovett Bay. Just around the corner from Scotland Island.'
'Got some friends who live on Scotland Island. They love the lifestyle. Wouldn't like it myself. Not in winter.' She taps more keys and hits the Enter key a few times. Then she writes out a number.
'There you go.' We beam at each other.
'Thank you. What was the problem?'
'Someone else with the same name as you, from the same suburb but with a different phone number.'
How bizarre.
The first book comes in a vibrant Chinese red box. Building Purulia. It's a specially bound edition with tipped-in selenium toned photographs, printed on thick, textured creamy paper with ripped edges. It's so redolent with self-importance, I feel I should be wearing white gloves to touch it. Then I read it is not an original edition. It was printed by the Guild of Craft Bookbinders in 1982 as an example of their work. WHW is embossed heavily on the cover. The price of the book, $135, is written in pencil.
WHW. William Hardy Wilson. He was known as William until he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Association of Architects for designing a modern Moresque-style building. The building, in fact, had been designed by another William Wilson in a style Hardy Wilson loathed. He couldn't stand the confusion any longer and was just as upset, too, at being credited with what he considered lousy taste. He called himself Hardy Wilson from that moment.
Building Purulia is an essay about building his first home at 16 Fox Valley Road, Warrawee, where he lived with his wife, Margaret. She was twenty-eight when they married. Everyone probably thought she was on her way to shameful spinsterhood, but perhaps she was having too good a time to settle down. Or maybe she just had the nerve to wait for true love.
Hardy Wilson wanted Purulia, which he began in 1916, to be a masterpiece. Then he 'reckoned the cost'. He couldn't settle on a 'theme'. He worried it would be a 'hotchpotch'. 'In the office', he wrote, 'designs presented no difficulties. When I came to design for myself, there were endless doubts and anxieties.' A little unchar
itably, I wonder if it's because spending other people's money is effortless. When it's your own, you remember how long it took to accumulate.
From his essay, I learn that Hardy Wilson never drove a car; that he believed 'confessions are never dull provided they are truthful'. He also described Sydney as 'where the ugliest buildings are received with the same tolerance as the beautiful'. Here I am, one hundred years later, in full agreement with him. Underneath a compressed, twenty-first century world, driven by racing technology and an information boom, very little has really changed.
Purulia, I also discover, is named after a house in Tasmania. The word, which has no meaning, is said to sound like the cooing of pigeons, which appealed to Wilson. But it's not an original name, and I feel slightly disappointed: a failing of the imagination in a man who is supposed to be endlessly creative seems odd.
Flipping through a biography by Zeny Edwards (William Hardy Wilson: Artist, Architect, Orientalist, Visionary, The Watermark Press) I learn that his design goals at Purulia were simplicity, elegance and a practicality that allowed for 'servantless living'. He even insisted on making the kitchen a pleasant room, 'equal in value to the other principal rooms'. It was revolutionary thinking. Good on him. The kitchen is the most important room in a house. Being able to stand at a sink, or where you do the chopping, and look out a window at a beautiful garden or view makes the food taste better.
In New York, where I lived for a while in a tiny apartment, the kitchen was the size of a small cupboard, without even a window. A depressing little hole where I never cooked a meal worth remembering. To ease the barrenness, I'd line up water glasses on the counter and fill them with parsley. It didn't help much. To get a bigger kitchen at an affordable rent I moved off Manhattan. It was worth it. I still remember making Christmas puddings and being thrilled it was so cold and snowy that I could hang them outside the kitchen window until they were to be eaten. Not like in Australia, where Christmas means laidback summer holidays, weeks of simmering heat, bodies smelling of coconuts and personal insect repellent. Pinpricks of sweat on tanned arms and legs, making us glow.
When Purulia was completed, instead of accolades Hardy Wilson was reviled for creating a house so disgracefully plain it would inevitably drag down property prices in the neighbourhood. He was unrepentant. It took the creation of a carefully planned, wildly colourful and highly scented garden to soften his critics. Those who were 'loudest in their invective, come and lean upon the garden wall. Some laugh, others admire, and all resentment has flown'.
Wilson encouraged plants to spill and roam. He planted lemon-scented thyme to crush underfoot and enclosed the front garden and rear terrace with a circle of citrus trees. In an era of trimmed hedges, neat lawns and English-style flower gardens, his approach was new and exciting.
During their time at Purulia, he and Margaret had a son, Lachlan, their only child. So now I know there is at least one descendant. Maybe Lachlan is still alive. It's feasible. He'd be in his early nineties. There must be grandchildren, too. Someone might remember something useful. All I have to do is find him or her.
I stare at a picture of Wilson's house for a long time: the steps leading to the front door, windows with twelve panes, a steeply pitched tiled roof. Echoes of Tarrangaua? I close the books, gather my pen and notes. If I leave any later, I'll hit peak-hour traffic. The thought curdles my mind. All I want is escape. Back to Pittwater, peace and first-hand air.
I turn the corner into Macquarie Street. A man I thought had damaged me forever is walking towards me. At first I think it's an illusion, but it is definitely him. Tricked up in his fancy clothes and talking on his mobile. My instinct is to bolt. Run away and hide in a corner until the danger has passed. But why? What danger? Then he looks up and sees me.
'How's it going?' he asks breezily, a smile on his face, as though it's been a day or two since we last met.
'Good. Yeah, it's all good. What about you?' I reply.
'Bought a couple of racehorses. Can you believe that? I'm in the racing game now.'
I smile.'Well, one way or another, you've had a stake in a lot of racehorses for a lot of years. Every time you put a bet on one.'
He grins. I don't tell him most people go broke when they fall in love with racing. He'll work that out for himself.
And then we have nothing to say to each other. We stand for a moment, awkwardly. Stripped of the godly robes of infatuation, I see him for the ordinary man he is. Around us, people race along the pavement, heads down, briefcases clutched so tightly their knuckles are white.
Probably because he can think of nothing else, he asks if I'd like to have lunch sometime. I decline politely. He reels with astonishment. Was I such a pushover so long ago that saying no to him was unthinkable? Of course I was.
'But I'll take you somewhere wonderful! You love good food.'
It has suddenly become a contest, a question of power. 'Don't have much time for restaurants anymore,' I reply. 'Find them claustrophobic. Rather cook a sausage on the barbecue at home and watch the day shut down behind the hills.'
'You can do that anytime.'
'Yeah, but you know what? Most restaurants are the same. And every sunset is a new experience. Anyway, I'd rather cook for myself.'
He looks at me as though I've gone mad. 'Why would you want to do that?'
'Maybe because I'm menopausal,' I say, suddenly impatient to be gone.
And he's off in a flash, like I've got a highly contagious disease. I stride away, lighter than air.
***
I tell Bob about bumping into the ex-lover. He doesn't look up from his newspaper.
'He looked dashing,' I say, trying to goad a response from him.
'Who?' he says, still not listening. He grabs a pencil, fills in a number on a Sudoku puzzle.
'Oh, no-one.' I go into the kitchen to chop vegetables for dinner. All that pain and anguish . . . so much of it, I thought I would die. What's the strange glitch in us that dumps reason at the time we need it most? And here I am, with only a few years flown, shaking my head at the absurdity of it all.
A couple of days later, an artist friend, Katie, calls. 'I've done a series of linocuts of Pittwater scenes. Would you let me have an exhibition of them at your home?'
Katie is an exuberant country girl from Temora in central eastern New South Wales. She and her husband Alex, a quiet, shy Englishman, are friends of Stewart and Fleury and visit Pittwater often to escape the deadly dullness of civil servant living in Canberra. Although nothing around Katie stays dull for long. She is full of passion, talks at a thousand miles an hour and doesn't know the meaning of 'go slow'. In the beginning, it was exhausting to be around her for long. Then I stopped trying to keep up and let her run alone, which is when I learned the secrets of her. A single-minded focus under the easy charm. An instinctive spirit of adventure. A good-time girl who is unafraid of the cold hard slog it takes to succeed. Kind, too, and loyal.
Alex is a curious mix. He sets up centre-stage for Katie and then withdraws. I often see him in a corner, observing, saying nothing. At a party but somehow never quite in the middle of it. Until he picks up his mandolin. His eyes close, his fingers pluck, and he riffles the strings in quiet improvisation. Turns out he has a deep and abiding passion for the sixties rock band The Grateful Dead – which seems weird because he looks like he belongs in the village church choir.
Alex was at the helm of Stewart's slim little Soling, Leda, when it took a sudden knock, spun and T-boned the commodore's precious antique wooden boat in a Woody Point twilight race. The commodore loved that yacht nearly as much as he did his bad-tempered blue heeler, Badger. The bingle made Katie and Alex famous around Pittwater, but only for a moment. There've been quite a few more T-bones in the twilight series since then.
Katie plays guitar. Together, their singalongs on Stewart and Fleury's moonstruck deck at boisterous post-Woody Point parties kept Towlers Bay rocking into the early hours of the morning. We sang lustily, mostly English, Irish and
Australian folk songs. Never thought I'd get a thrill from thumping out the monotonous refrain of 'Botany Bay'. Maybe Pittwater has knotted me firmly to this sunburnt country when once home could just as well have been anywhere.
Not long before Alex takes a sabbatical and he and Katie move to Western Australia where the light is fierce and the landscape awash with dense, cartoon colour, Fleury calls to say that Katie has been diagnosed with one of the very rotten cancers. How is it possible? Katie has always been unstoppable. She competed in the double-handed yacht race around Britain and Ireland in the smallest boat in the fleet. At Pittwater, she kayaks around the bays in the rosy-pink light of dawn with her curly-haired spaniel, Holly. Sketchbook in front of her, watercolours in a tin, camera close by. Katie is always the last to fade off to bed, the first to see the sunrise.
'Guess she's a new member of the club, then,' I finally say to Fleury. Because once you have cancer, the world spins differently.
Typically, after diagnosis, surgery and treatment, Katie plunges into work. Now she's put together a solo exhibition.
'When do you want to hold it?' I ask her.
'How about over the Easter holidays?'
'I'll talk to Bob but I'm sure it will be fine. Mind if we turn it into a fundraiser for the Elvina Bay Fire Brigade as well?'
'Great idea. I'll donate a print for a raffle.'
Bob calls Roy, who organises the fire brigade, to help out in shifts during the four-day show. The freezer is filled with cakes and slices. A friend with a small vineyard in the Hunter Valley sells us a heap of wine at cost price.
Katie trucks her prints, packed snugly in the back of a small station wagon, 4000 kilometres across the blistering desert of the Nullarbor, through the brittle red heart of New South Wales and into the blue of Sydney. No-one even tries to tell her the trip is madness. Katie is not going to slow down for a vicious little tumour with a will of its own. In what seems like a flick of time, Katie calls from Mona Vale to tell us she's made it across the desert.