by Susan Duncan
In the next package there is a leather-bound book with a brass clasp, dated 1900. But it is not a diary. It is filled with quotes from Voltaire, HG Wells, de Montaigne, Rosetti, Vernon Lee, Rebecca West and St Catherine of Sienna. Quotes carefully copied because the words struck some inner chord with a sheltered, privileged fifteen-year-old girl who dreamed of being a writer herself one day. I think back to the calendar Dorothea Mackellar made for Dr Fraser in 1927. It, too, was full of wise words from famous thinkers. What was she searching for? I wonder. A creed? Understanding of the human spirit? A way of making sense of the world? Or simply meaning?
I unwrap two diaries for 1910 and 1911. 'Collins Handy Diary', written in gold type on an oxblood cover, small enough to fit in the palm of a hand or a small handbag. Inside, the ink is blotchy, the writing cramped. The entries are mundane: 'Morning sunny . . . Town shopping (a very little) . . . Dentist. Long and beastly . . .' And on 30 December 1911: 'Clairvoyant'. So her habit of seeking esoteric direction began when she was in her twenties.
There's a loose piece of paper, speckled with dried mildew. Black ink has faded to brown:
A RECIPE FOR SPICED COTTAGE CHEESE CUSTARD
2 cups milk
3 eggs
3 tablespoons sugar
1¼ cups sieved cottage cheese
¼ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon grated lemon rind
½ teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon vanilla
cooked or canned apricot halves – drained
[¼ cup sugar extra, not listed in original recipe]
Heat milk in top of double boiler. Beat two eggs and one egg yolk, add quarter cup of sugar, cottage cheese, salt, lemon rind, cinnamon and vanilla. Stir to blend. Slowly add hot milk stirring constantly. Place two to three apricot halves in bottom of six, buttered custard cups. Pour custard over them. Place in a shallow pan of hot water and bake in a slow oven for 40 minutes or until custard is almost set and lightly brown. Beat remaining egg white till stiff and add remaining sugar, a dessertspoon at a time. Beat until stiff. Top each custard with meringue. Brown in oven or under griller. Serve warm or cold.
Late in the afternoon, in another box under the name of Marion Mackellar, Dorothea's mother, I find an invitation to a dance and a handful of receipts for clothing and riding gear for her son, Keith, who was killed in the Boer War. It is the thought of a mother hoarding scraps of paper for no reason other than that they were a frail link with her dead son that undoes me. I close the boxes and return them to the counter.
16
SHARON IS ILL.
'They tell me I have breast cancer,' she says, surprise and disbelief on her face. 'I feel quite angry. I thought as I'd made it this far I'd escaped that whole dreadful cancer business and something far more civilised would probably get me.'
It's late afternoon. There's a vase of lavender on a side table. I squish some silver leaves in my hands and the scent floats through the room. The perfume is supposed to quieten anxiety, but not today.
'What have you been told?' I ask, sitting in one of the armchairs opposite her.
'I have to take some tablets. A form of chemotherapy.'
'Not much fun. No, no fun at all. But not impossible.'
'I thought you'd understand about it, because you've been through it. Or I wouldn't have mentioned it.'
'And here I am, Sharon, eight years later. You'll be fine. Treatments today are amazing.'
She smiles. 'I felt quite frightened for a moment, but I'm past that now.'
'Might have to make you a few delicious little dishes to keep your strength up. Fancy a light chicken stew made with mushrooms, pancetta and leeks?'
'Sounds lovely,' she says. 'Will be you making any of those little lemon cakes . . .?'
I laugh. 'As many as you like.'
Instead, I make butter, coconut and almond cupcakes, to give her variety. I drop them in the next day. For the first time since I have known her, she is still in her nightie at lunchtime.
'How're you feeling?'
'Not bad. Not bad.'
'Need help with anything?'
'Oh no, thank you. I'm a bit slow today because I found a red-bellied black snake in my living room this morning. Gave me a terrible fright. It's gone now. One of the gardeners got rid of it. But I'm still recovering. Haven't got around to my shower or dressing yet.'
'Your number's not up, then, Sharon. The snake didn't get you. You've got a long way to go yet.'
And she smiles. Then laughs. 'I think the snake was more frightened than I was!'
'You are so, so tough, Sharon. You'll wear this thing down.'
A week later she politely tells me that the almond cakes were lovely but there's nothing as light and luscious as the little lemon cakes.
***
The year flies so fast, and I am no closer to discovering who designed the house. Life intervenes. How can I rush when the sun peels back the gloom of a winter day? How can I ignore the pleasure of standing quite still as that great golden orb sinks over the hills that cradle Salvation Creek? A thin crust of light etches the landscape then drifts into a yellow sky. And just before black enfolds the evening, the bay is flecked with silver. Satin smooth, alive and mysterious, it anchors and restores.
One night I cook a feast of lamb ragout on a bed of silken eggplant puree. For dessert, I slow-cook cubes of pumpkin with water, lemon juice and sugar until it is sweetly tender. It's piled in a glass bowl and sprinkled with chopped walnuts. I'll serve it with double cream.
'Out of the big Turkish cookbook or the little one?' Bob asks, looking at his plate, which is like an abstract painting, splattered with green and red slices of capsicum and tomato on a smooth caramel-coloured background.
There was a moment, in an Istanbul bookshop, when my lust for a cookbook filled with large glossy pictures of Turkish food irked him. Mostly, it's his habit to turn away when I am seduced by what he sees as inessentials and he lets me decide for myself whether to splurge or not. But this day – almost at the end of our holiday – he gets angry and storms into the street. I have bought one Turkish cookbook already. He cannot see the point of two, and it is expensive because it's in English and we are in Turkey. I was going to put it back on the shelf, even though it's the only book I've found that describes how to cook a whole baby goat, but instead I buy it – and two other paperbacks – because I don't give in to pressure anymore.
'The little one,' I reply, string-lipped with the memory.
'You ever going to cook that goat?'
'One day. Maybe.'
'I could rig a spit. If you wanted.'
'I'll think about it.' And I smile so he knows I understand. He grins back. We both know I will never cook a whole baby goat.
'Would have been interesting, though, to check out that archaeological site.'
Halfway through our Turkish holiday, we climbed onto a bus for an eight-hour trip south to the turquoise coast. Bizarrely, there was a lanky, freckle-faced Australian wearing well-pressed desert fatigues in the seat in front of us, so raj he would have been at home in an Agatha Christie mystery. Turned out he was an archaeologist specialising in ancient coins.
'Off to a dig in Syria,' he told us. 'Filling in for another bloke who's sick.'
Ever since I was a sunburned country kid with spindle legs and copper hair, I've wanted to go on an archaeological dig. I have no idea why. Maybe I've just always loved treasure hunts.
'We could go with him,' I suggested to Bob quietly but enthusiastically, when the archaeologist drifted into sleep. 'Wouldn't it be fascinating? A dig! The stuff of dreams. When he wakes up shall I ask him if there's room for a couple of willing helpers for a week?'
'We'll see what happens.' Which meant no way.
'Why not?'
'Let's stick to the plan,' he said.
I didn't argue. We're a team. Give and take. He reached across and lifted my arm, tucking it under his. Then he held my hand in a firm warm grip and closed his eyes. Beside us, the bleak high
country rolled past.
Bob doesn't look up from his dinner. 'Thirty to forty degrees in the desert every day. Can get a bit stressful when it's that hot and there's no escape.' No escape for me, he means. He would have handled it easily. He probably even wanted to go.
'Yeah, but sometimes you've got to have a go, even if the whole thing turns turkey.'
***
Already, warmer weather fingers its way down the hills to the bay. The old uncle who came to live with us for two years and stayed until he died told me over and over to live in the present, not the future, because you get to the future soon enough. I was a little kid then who didn't want to wear steel tips on the heels and toes of my shoes because they clattered when I walked around the classroom. I pretended to believe him, hoping he'd let me skip the tips, but he put them on anyway. Shoes lasted twice as long after he'd doctored them, which was the last thing I wanted them to do.
He was a frugal man, my Uncle Ted. My mother said he was the kind of bloke who still had the first penny he'd ever earned. But when money was short, he always came good with a few hundred pounds or so, until my parents staggered over the lean times and frolicked back into plenty.
Like the old bloke in the corner milk bar, he was right about time. Now that I am well and truly in my fifties, it rockets. Which seems odd because my own pace has slowed considerably. I cannot help noticing that my ankles take a moment or two to lose their stiffness in the morning, and occasionally I find myself dreaming about a project then pulling back: 'You're too old for that,' I hear an inner voice admonish. And I am struck by a wave of nausea that can only be fear. Not of death, or so I like to think, because I faced it years ago and it is absurd to fear what cannot be escaped. No, it's fear of a diminishing future and, mostly, of quitting this physical world. Even I can't pretend that I am only halfway through my life. I am almost on the brink of the final third. Then I think of my mother. I cannot withdraw from challenges because it heralds the beginning of lying down. Instead, I think of Jeanne and Sharon, of Ann and PD James, who is still writing books at eighty-eight! So many challenges ahead, so little time. I wriggle out of the suit of despair. Live for the day. I am strong.
***
Bob and I walk down the steps to the waterfront. It's take-mother-shopping day.
'Why can I be kind to Sharon without any effort and my mood turns black before I even walk out the door to see my mother?' I ask Bob.
'Family. Goes way back.'
Is that all it is? It cannot be memories of childish hurts, surely. To hold on to them at my age would be . . . well, childish. And yet when I scrabble through the past, I am niggled by unease. My mother competed with me. She fired arrows with frightening precision that wiped me out for days at a time. She coveted my life, she told me one strange day when she was unwell and thought she might die. How could you covet your own child's life? Was her own life so mired I was her only way out? Yes. But I've always known that and what does it matter?
'One day, I will ask her a single question. And perhaps I will understand it all,' I tell Bob.
He looks at me hard. 'Some questions,' he says slowly, 'are better left unasked.'
I smile as I walk down the pathway to the boat, flicking aside cobwebs as frail as necklaces. Bob is the only person I know who is wise enough not to ask what the question would be. Some questions, I also know, can open vaults that should never be disturbed.
A small spider scuttles down my shirt front. I squish it, an instinctive reaction. I loathe spiders. Is all loathing based on fear? There's a muddy brown mark on my shirt. Dirty already, and I'm not even in the tinny yet.
Michael walks down the jetty at the boatshed, all skin, bone and flowing blond hair. A cigarette hangs out of his mouth. We wave. He jumps lightly into his tinny, sits and grabs the tiller. Then there's an almighty yelp. A split second later, in what looks like a single motion, he lands back on the dock.
A diamond python raises its head above the gunnel, looks around casually then slithers silently onto the pontoon to bake in the morning sun.
'Jesus!' says Michael when we come to have a look. 'Never moved so fast in all my life. Scared the shit out of me.'
When I settle my mother in the car for our shopping trip, it is on the tip of my tongue to query odd moments in my childhood. Then I look across at her. The smudged lipstick on her teeth, a spill on her jacket that she hasn't noticed. Sacrilegious slip-ups for a very vain woman. She is too vulnerable, too easy a target. I let the moment pass. And I always will.
The snake quickly becomes a boatshed mascot. It lingers, coiled, on the pontoon, rocked by the water. Sleepy and full, its stomach distended. A rat maybe. The boys step around it to do their work. It stays for three days, through an entire beautifully sunny weekend. 'Saw a lot of boats slide alongside the pontoon to tie up,' says Michael later. 'Then quick as a flash, off they went. Most peaceful weekend I've had since we bought the boatshed.'
***
When someone does the wrong thing in our little community, it doesn't take long before we all know about it. The word flies around faster than baitfish and for a while a grey gloom seeps into our lives.
One day Bob and I are told someone is suing a man whose only sin was to volunteer to run a community event. During the weekend of the event, a terrible windstorm rampaged through Pittwater, lifting roofs, felling trees and smashing tinnies until they lay flat on the bottom of the seabed. Items loaned for the event were damaged beyond repair, but only a single person decided to sue. The word goes around the bays. Dismay hangs heavy in our hearts, like someone has hammered so hard that our belief in ourselves has cracked wide open.
'It isn't right,' everyone says, shocked. 'Good communities look after each other.'
We send emails of support to the hapless volunteer, who is distraught. Will he lose his home? Where will it all end?
One day when there's a huge crowd at The Point early on a Friday evening, the person at the heart of the trouble gets off the ferry. People stand back to let him walk along the pontoon and jetty. As he passes, they whisper:
'Arsehole. Arsehole. Arsehole,' in a breathless chant that ripples through the crowd as he moves along.
A few weeks later, we hear the lawsuit has been dropped.
***
Obea is dead. The big, boofy labrador with Rhett Butler charm and a noble profile will no longer pad through the bays sniffing out a party or a barbecue, breathing so heavily and humanly he made our hearts thump until we realised it was only Obea, not a primeval boojum following us in the dark on the back track. His tail will no longer thump enthusiastically at the sight of us as though we had never done, and never could do, any wrong. He will no longer lean heavily against our legs, looking up into our eyes in silent thanks for a chop or sausage. Obea is dead. A chapter in Lovett Bay history has gently but firmly closed.
Obea was here when it all began, this new life of mine. A golden head as big as a football swimming across the bay to say hello no matter how choppy the water, how fierce the wind. He sometimes stole a sandwich or two out of one of the boatshed boys' packs, but no-one minded. He charmed us all. Oh, how he charmed us. Such a powerful dog and, for so long, invincible. Or that's how it seemed. But there's no cheating death. His liver, Ray the Vet said, was worn out. It is not a bad thing, though, to die with your head cradled in a loving lap, to die knowing you finally found where you belonged.
'How old do you think he was?' asks Tanya, who runs her own real estate agency now. We are at The Point, passing through to our boats.
I think back. 'Maybe twelve?'
'He turned up on my deck the day my mother died,' she says. 'Sat there for three days, being beautiful and charming. The way my mother once was. I know this is going to sound weird, but I felt Obea knew she'd died and he was helping me through my grief. He stayed until the funeral was over. Then he went home to Gill and Ric, as though he'd done his duty.'
'Yeah. That sounds like Obea.'
17
AROUND PITTWATER, P
EOPLE DREAM of boats and sailing, of endless voyages across comforting seas to remote shimmering coves in a lush paradise where the natives are very, very friendly. The search, of course, is for freedom, finding a life beyond the suffocating reach of bureaucracy, not a pretty white beach with a bending palm tree.
Occasionally, sailors with faraway places in their eyes need crew. Big Dave tackles Bob when we're passing through The Point one night 'Want to come to Hobart?' he asks. 'Jackie and I are taking Intrepid to the Wooden Boat Festival in Hobart, in February. Then circumnavigating Tasmania.'
Intrepid 11 is a pointy-nosed 52-foot crayfishing boat from Western Australia that Dave and his wife bought a couple of years ago. Built from jarrah, a Western Australian hardwood, it's part of Big Dave's plan for when he walks away from his highly stressed cop's life. Jackie, who makes the best wontons on Pittwater, was emphatically against the boat. 'I don't like it, Dave, I don't like it. It's too big. I don't feel comfortable on such a big boat,' she insisted.
Big Dave won her over with promises of fridges, sofas and double bunks. A large gas stove and even an oven. Two bathrooms, one ensuite. 'A fantastic boat,' he whispered seductively, 'smooth as silk. Think of us gliding along the Hawkesbury, stopping for oysters. Or prawns. The back deck is meant for champagne, Jackie. Oysters and bubbles. Can't get better than that!'
Her complaints about scrubbing decks, hulls and windows on every day off from her work as a midwife dissolved in a flash of graceful moments on the gunmetal waters of the giant river. Big Dave never mentioned the open seas, though. He saved that for a couple of years later.
When I return from the mailbox with a fistful of letters, Bob's eyes have a new, mirror-sharp gleam in them. 'What do you reckon?' Big Dave asks Bob, beer in hand, rocking back on his heels. 'Need a couple of blokes on board who know what they're doing. The boat's comfy for six. That'd be ideal.' Bob looks at me.
'We'll think about it,' he tells Big Dave. 'Go home and have a talk. Let you know.'