The House At Salvation Creek

by Susan Duncan

  There's a crowd at the shed by the time we arrive on an early spring evening. Bob lets me off at the ferry wharf then swerves to park three deep along the jetty. He jumps from boat to boat, arms held out for balance. Sometimes he pretends he's about to fall, but he's showing off. He's not nearly as nonchalant at the end of the night, though, after a few glasses of wine. Still, if he falls, it's a soft landing into glistening black water – unless it's a really low tide. It's always wise to check.

  When Bob has tied up the boat, we wander along the jetty. Wheelbarrows are lined up along one side, one per house, for residents to cart their shopping home. It's the day after a full moon, the air is thin and crisp. Kids run helter-skelter in the silver light, barefoot despite the stony ground. We adults are more languid and stand in groups, touching base. Which is part of what makes us such a strong community.

  'What's on the menu?' we ask Stewart and Fleury.

  'Slow-roasted lamb shoulder. Chicken in spices. A salad of some kind,' Stewart replies, handing us both a glass of wine.

  'Better than the Ritz!'

  'The view is certainly ahead of the Ritz,' he says, looking around.

  Through the casuarinas, Elvina Bay is black marble smooth. Yachts rest on their moorings, the fire brigade tinny amongst them. It's a good solid boat, bought with donated funds, although none of us ever wants to see it used.

  Someone calls out to the kids. 'Dinner's on. Come and get it. Now!'

  Not one child slows down, but they somehow get fed anyway.

  'Bit light on desserts tonight,' I say when we sit down. 'Should have made an effort. Getting lazy.'

  'I used to make bread and butter puddings all the time. Never did much good in the judging,' says Jenny. 'Then one of the Alans gave me second prize. Told me I was such a trier everyone felt sorry for me.'

  'Bit hard to stuff up bread and butter pudding, isn't it?'

  'Not for me,' she says, laughing. 'I'm probably the only person around Pittwater – male or female – that isn't a star chef.'

  'Ever think of leaving here?' I ask, because she has raised her son alone since he was born and water access living can wear you out.

  'Once or twice. On a grim day when I'm too tired to think straight. But then I look around. Everyone here is family. If my son's not at home, I know he's around somewhere and in good hands, with plenty to do. He's nearly ten years old, and perhaps it will change as he gets older. But I hope not.'

  She sighs and rests her knife and fork on her plate, hesitating before she speaks again. 'I don't know if this makes sense, but living amongst community instead of within the narrow confines of family has made my son aware of a bigger world from the time he was born. He accepts that people are different. And all that matters is kindness and compassion.'

  'Good start in life,' I reply.

  'The best.'

  ***

  I have more or less forgotten the architect debate until Jeanne sends me an email that is typically succinct: 'There's a talk by Zeny Edwards about Hardy Wilson at Eryldene this Saturday. You should be there.'

  'Do you want to come?' I ask Bob.

  'Interesting house. Hardy Wilson designed it. Went there with Barbara once, not long after we moved into Tarrangaua. Yeah, I'll come.'

  'I'll ask Esther, too. Try and get her out and about.' When I call her, though, she's busy.

  'There's a classical music concert in the main room,' she says. 'I'm looking forward to it.'

  When I tell Bob, he nods with relief. 'Might be a good idea to keep Esther and Jeanne on different social circuits,' he says. 'Esther likes you to herself.'

  Eryldene was built in the Sydney suburb of Gordon in 1913 for linguist and camellia expert Professor EG Waterhouse. The two men recognised a kindred spirit in each other from the moment they met and the relationship between Wilson and the professor, both newly married to Scottish wives, developed into a strong and enduring friendship – an unusual result for Wilson, who typically complained about and ultimately fell out with many of his clients. According to Zeny Edwards, Eryldene became one of the most photographed and publicised properties of the 1920s and 1930s. Wilson and his partners, Stacey Neave and John Berry, designed seven new features for the house over a 23-year-period, including the Tea House, Wilson's oriental-inspired pièce de résistance.

  On the allotted day, we park the car and walk along an ordinary suburban street to a woman sitting at a table selling tickets. As Bob pays, I stand and stare at the house and cannot help feeling disappointed. The verandah is almost decorative, as though no-one was ever intended to sit on it in the cool of a summer evening to hear a kookaburra's last hurrah. The double columns framing the front door are slim, delicate almost, whereas at Tarrangaua they are solid and massive.

  'Think those heritage blokes might be right,' I suggest, but Bob doesn't reply.

  We wander through dining rooms, sitting rooms, bedrooms where the scale, again, is small. Bob studies window ledges, flagstones, the verandah. The key, he says, is almost always in the detail. But although there are similarities everywhere, nothing is intrinsic. The back door leads to a flagstone courtyard but it's circled by Grecian columns and lacks the simplicity of Tarrangaua's. Beyond, the garden sprawls. Gum trees soar nakedly to a crown of hangdog foliage against a pure blue sky. Camellias in pots and in the ground bloom in swathes of red, white, pink. Citrus trees bend with bright globes of fruit: oranges, cumquats. The colours all fight each other. Two dogs bark, backwards and forwards, like they're having a conversation.

  'Jeanne!' I call out, waving across the lawn. She's part of a group near the Tea House. Black orthotic shoes, black trousers, a pale green round-necked shirt, a soft green sweater around her shoulders – unmistakably Jeanne. We wander over.

  'This is Zeny,' Jeanne says, introducing us to a quietly beautiful woman, all style and perfect skin, with eyes that don't miss a nuance.

  'We have your book,' I say, shaking her hand. She nods.

  'We're here on a mission,' I add. Her eyebrows go up but she doesn't say anything. 'We live at Tarrangaua, in Lovett Bay, the home Hardy Wilson is supposed to have built for Dorothea Mackellar. We're trying to establish whether it's his design or not.'

  'It isn't,' Zeny says flatly and firmly.

  'Why not?'

  She is nonplussed by the question, hesitates for a moment.

  'Have you ever seen it?' I ask.

  'No, but if it were his design, I would know. There's nothing in the archives. It isn't his house.'

  'Maybe, maybe not. I'd like to know for sure. Some people,' I add, 'think the Queensland architect Robin Dods may have had a hand in it, but he died before she bought the land.'

  'It took a long time to do property deals in the twenties. Maybe he did a rough plan before he died. You could ask Robert Riddel. He's doing a thesis on Dods. You'll find him in Brisbane,' Zeny says.

  'Thanks. I'll chase him up.'

  'What do you think?' Zeny asks, turning towards a tall woman standing next to her. She has tinted reddish-brown hair, wears well-cut trousers, a finely knitted sweater with a string of pearls, plain brown shoes. She looks like a sensible, no-nonsense woman.

  'This is Margaret McCredie,' Zeny adds. 'Margaret is one of Hardy Wilson's granddaughters.'

  I glance at Jeanne. She looks smug, a half-smile lifting the corners of her mouth. 'See what happens when you get out and about?' she whispers. It's a dig. She's been after me to join the Garden History Society for months. So far, I've resisted. Societies of any kind have never been a passion.

  'I'd love to come and have a chat, if you have the time,' I say to Marg. We exchange telephone numbers, set a date. 'Do you think Hardy Wilson designed Tarrangaua?' I add.

  'No.'

  'Why not?' I ask again. And she cannot give me an answer.

  A few weeks later, Margaret McCredie leads me along her hallway and opens the door to a spare bedroom. She points to a camphorwood chest with brass hinges pushed against the wall.

  'Everything that
is left is in the chest,' she says, turning the lock with a key. 'There's not much, I'm afraid. He sold or bequeathed most of his work at various times throughout his life. I inherited a sideboard. With a bullet hole. Dad was playing with Grandpa's gun and it went off! I have a sofa, too, that we kids would lie on during the day if we were unwell. A few other things but not much.

  'When he remarried after my grandmother died in 1939, I think Dad felt that a few bits and pieces which should have come to him never did. Hope you discover what you're looking for,' she adds, pulling the door closed behind her.

  I lift the lid of the carved brown chest. I am hunting and my old journalistic instincts click in, my stomach fluttering with the excitement. But I have no idea what to expect.

  There are magazines, scrolls, notebooks with silk moire covers and leather spines, blank sheets of tea-stained paper, photos of furniture, old press clippings of his published essays. Bryant & May's Redhead matches lie in a cigar box, alongside tweezers, a box of Benson drawing pins made in Belgium, and measuring calipers. There's a beautifully stitched leather pouch with sky blue silk lining: 'American Express Travel Department'. It is empty.

  Books – Chinese legends, Chinese painters, Japanese painters – an Australian House and Garden magazine dated 1986 which features a story on Purulia. Notebooks filled with neat writing, the pages hand-numbered. There is nothing about a house on a high, rough hill, though.

  A telegram expresses deepest sympathy at Wilson's death. '. . . A splendid man', says a condolence letter, 'kind and gentle. A big man in every sense of the word.' His obituary is small and discreet. 'Tribute to Architect', it is headed, and it is barely a few paragraphs. By the time he died of pneumonia, Wilson had lost his status and was even regarded by some as irredeemably eccentric.

  'What was he like, your grandfather?' I ask Margaret when the lid is closed on the camphorwood box.

  'My memories are vague. I was eleven years old when he died. I remember one thing quite vividly, though. When I stayed with him, I was expected to say goodnight, standing in front of where he sat in his armchair, with my hands clasped together and raised to chest height. "Good night, Grandpa," I had to say. Then I bowed my head as though I'd been raised in the East. And he'd nod silently while I rushed away to bed.'

  When Wilson's son Lachlan married and began practising as a physician in Launceston, in north west Tasmania, Wilson offered to design the young couple a new home at 15 Lord Street. 'My mother, Jean, took one look at the Chinese upturned eaves and decided conservative Launceston wasn't ready for them. Nor for the blinding Chinese red pillars at the front door. Although she liked the idea of the green shutters, sadly, we couldn't afford them. They cost a fortune, apparently, in those post-war days.

  'She also wanted to be able to walk from the living room into the garden and Grandpa's plan didn't allow for that. I was too young to understand family politics but I believe there was a cooling-off period between my parents and Grandpa. "My plan's not good enough for you . . ." or words to that effect. Grandpa felt they should have been falling over backwards to have him design a house, that they should love it as it was. That's the kind of man he was.'

  'I'd like to show you our house,' I say as I pack up my notebook and tape recorder to leave. 'Would you come over the water to us one day?'

  'Love to! I've always been curious about Tarrangaua.'

  'Find anything interesting?' Bob asks when I get home.

  'Kind of weird, going through all his stuff. Got a clearer picture of the bloke, though, especially from reading some of his notebooks. He was into quality, that's for sure. Everything he owned was the best money could buy. But no, I'm no closer to solving the mystery. Might chase up that fella in Queensland, the one Zeny suggested. Visit Pia at the same time.'

  'Wait till the end of the sailing season. Be good to go after the Woody Point Annual General Meeting. More time then.'

  ***

  Woody Point Yacht Club is a club with no clubhouse and very few rules. Except that any race protest must be accompanied by a slab of beer when you lodge it with the current commodore, and all funds remaining at the end of the season must be spent at the Annual General Meeting knees-up, which is traditionally held at the Lovett Bay boatshed where we dance on sloping concrete and dodge the metal boat-cradle tracks.

  George Bennett told me the tracks came from the old Pitt Street tram lines when the tram service was abolished in 1957 to make way for a new public transport system based on buses. 'They were perfect to slide the boat cradle along in my new boatshed in Lovett Bay.'

  'You built the original boatshed?' I asked him, surprised, because I didn't think it was more than thirty years old.

  'Took me three years to get the plans through council.'

  'Nothing changes, does it?'

  'Not much.'

  Every year, one or two people come a cropper at the AGM party on those tram lines. It's a badge of honour, really, to take home a few scars.

  If you don't want to dance dodging tram lines, you can fish from the jetty. Or sit by a washing machine drum with a fire roaring inside. Or hang out on the lawn and look up at the stars. Or climb into your tinny and rock with the tide, a glass of wine in your hand – tied to the jetty so you don't end up bobbing towards the Pacific Ocean.

  The new season twilight sailing series begins with daylight saving. Every Wednesday, we all emerge from our houses at five o'clock as though we're in some kind of trance: Jack, Stef, Bob, Mick, John. There is a dreamlike quality to the scene, I sometimes think, as we climb into tinnies and motor slowly through the moorings to our boats. Like we're on a silent, almost sacred mission.

  Jack sails his much-loved family boat, Birrah Lee. He gathers his boys in the cockpit, wide-brimmed straw hats tied under their chins like African field workers, and sails with louche serenity, engaged, as he mostly is, in the physical world.

  Stef's boat is a fast Farr 37 called Kookaburra 11. It has two sofas and a fridge. Glasses, plates, cutlery and bathrobes, too. 'If it gets too blowy,' Bella warns him, 'I will go below, put on my terry towelling robe, climb in between my four hundred thread count sheets and read a book.'

  'But, Bella, you look like a queen when you ride in the cockpit with us.'

  'Flatterer!' she says. 'But it won't work.'

  I have seen her, though, wrapped in wet-weather gear, wind and rain blowing her red hair flat. Seduced. I've seen her in the robe, too.

  We hoist our mainsails while we're still on the mooring, almost in unison. They unfurl like butterflies emerging from a chrysalis. When the headsail is set free and fills with air until it is as gently rounded as a woman's breast, the engine is switched off and we glide soundlessly, except for the murmur, like whispering lovers, of water parting under the keel. On summer evenings not long before the sun leaves the bays, water explodes with heavenly light and white sails fill with gold until they look like falling angels.

  Each year the club grows bigger. When I first started sailing, we thought it a busy night if thirty medium-size boats gathered politely at the start line, skippers and crew with drinks in hand, main sheets loosely held, sails reefed safely if the winds were strong. Now, at least sixty yachts jockey for a prime start each Wednesday, so huge, some of them, they are like tankers alongside the smaller boats. It is frightening and for a while I want to withdraw from the fray.

  'It does you good,' Bob insists every week.

  'I'm an amateur. If we get into strife I won't know what to do. I'll be a liability.'

  'You won't learn if you stay home.'

  Nick and Ann sail regularly. Nick is ex-British navy, expert and unflappable, always polite and proper. Ann is quietly capable and sees problems before they happen. They sailed from England to Australia with their two small boys and are our core crew. Others come and go – fair-weather sailors, we call them with affection.

  About the third race into the season, it's a foul, blustery evening. The wind is cold and erratic, blowing first from one direction and then another
. The fleet is a crowd at sixty-three yachts. The start is a frantic melee of tacking boats, shouting skippers and, occasionally, bad temper.

  'This used to be a race for gentlemen,' yells one of the oldest members. He's sailing a cosy Jubilee and trying to fend off a pugnacious 'big shitter' bullying to push him out of a well-judged start.

  'They come to escape the rat race in the bigger clubs and bring all their bad habits with them,' Bob says, shaking his head.

  I let off the mainsail to slow the boat. We have two minutes to start time. We won the series once and now carry a handicap that ensures we'll never win again – another club rule.

  'Need to tie a bucket on your keel,' I yell as John glides past in KA2. Therese pops her head out of the forward hatch, waves.

  'You look good from the back!' Stef calls when we pass him.

  'You look good from the back,' we yell when he passes us.

  On the home stretch but before the third and final marker, the wind drops to about ten knots.

  'Where's that big shitter?' Bob asks, bending to look under the sail. 'Ah fuck!'

  He suddenly tacks the boat. A yellow hull cuts in front of us, ignoring sailing racing rules in what it probably believes is a show of balls but in reality is ignorant, dangerous thuggery. It's so quick, Nick, Ann and I don't have time to cross to the other side. Our bums drag in the water as the boat heels. Nick grabs Ann's leg, I grab her arm. She's flat against the lifelines. Nick and I hold on to our ropes for support as water floods over the side. There's another boat on a collision course in front of us. Bob tacks again. Quick as a flash, we're back on the dry side. Nick and I pull Ann to safety.

  'Jesus!'

  'Do they know they were in the wrong?' I shout angrily. 'We were on starboard!'