There were some days, like this one, when she allowed herself the fear-tinged joy of perusing her special possessions. Always it was a day when she was sure of her time; when Kieran was at the workshop or with a friend, and she was back from St Barnabas early. When she knew she was utterly alone. It may in fact have been that very certainty, that there was no one in the world who would knock on her door, that prompted the melancholy she sat with, there in front of her things. She didn’t know. She was aware only of the peculiar curdling of misery and pleasure as she regarded the items arranged on the low table that was usually Kieran’s domain. The place where he leaned with his paper and pens and harvested facts from the mouths of television presenters and, writing them, made them his own.
They were lined up in no particular order, but each item on the table was, of course, particular. Perhaps it was merely her gaze, resting on them one by one, that gave each its luminescence. One of the reasons for getting them out was just that: to reassure herself that no one else could bestow this quality on them, that she alone was their rightful guardian. If not owner.
She leaned forward, moved the tiny Lladro statue a fraction to the right with thumb and forefinger. The porcelain child, a girl with fervent hands, might be praying for her. Cress touched the cool oval face with her thumb, as if she was its maker. Then sat back. Breathed deeply in the quiet.
The gilt-edged teacup. Two silver spoons, one engraved with a crest; a rare glass thimble. A brooch inlaid with opal that reminded her of her mother. And a postcard of an angel watching two small children cross a rickety bridge. She pulled the postcard from the pages of the Bible that held it, propped it against the cup and looked at the face of the angel. The faces of the children. Once, this picture had given her comfort and reassurance. No, she corrected herself, she would have taken comfort, allowed it, her heart and body responding to the picture with an upsurge of joy. The way a crying baby might respond when a beloved toy is waved before him, smiling through his tears.
Today, the picture didn’t prompt happiness, but something slipped and opened inside Cress that was usually fastened shut. In the place where early memory was stored, she felt something give. She rarely allowed herself to dwell on her youthful devotion to the church and the Lord, worried perhaps that the shreds that were left of it would flee under the scrutiny. But just as they had fifty or sixty years ago, the angel, the feeling of being watched over, made her feel safe. Yes, she thought, recognising it instantly, that was the exact feeling. Back then she’d felt safer at church than anywhere else, safer even than she felt with her own mother, or with her friends, or in her own bed.
She picked up the postcard and held it to her nose, inhaling the faint mustiness of the Bible, long untouched. Now the feeling brought an image: of walking into the church, pausing, taking a deep breath. Faith, she realised now, had a smell. Not the candles and incense of some churches. For her it was bleached pine and old leather, songbooks, Bibles. The scrubbed air of wooden buildings and cleanliness. It was the smell of virtue. In those days the church and its people seemed to her a well of virtue. She had only to go to the well to be infused with goodness. A sense, at least, that you had good on your side. She leaned back in the chair, breathed a deep breath, the postcard resting on her chest.
Around her the room was dimmed by evening shadow. Her eyes were heavy; she closed them briefly, opened them, closed them again. Slept. Until a sudden noise at the back of the house startled her; she looked up and around, pushed herself up. Every precious thing was still assembled in front of her. She gathered them carefully in her arms. The noise was not repeated, not followed by anything else, but she knew how quietly Kieran moved, how he could be absent and then suddenly, wholly present, standing at her elbow. She hurried to her room with the hoard and then out again. But when she opened the back door to thickening twilight there was no one there.
The desk was long and wide, broad planks of recycled timber with knots and gouges and slips of old paint in its grooves. Despite the piles of paper and files, Laura could see the grain of the wood and the care that had been taken with its preservation, the careful cutting and joining. Old warehouse floor, Fergus said, rubbing his finger over nail holes. Hoop pine. In the late afternoon light each mark and imperfection seemed a natural part of the design, deliberate. Laura spread her palm over the honey-coloured wood. Then looked up. You made it, she said, because his tone was more than proprietary. It was something she recognised but couldn’t place. A while ago, he said, and turned to a bench along the back wall. Tea?
Here in his office, in context, his accent was different. Perhaps his surroundings diluted it. The sun streaming in through high windows, hot air flicked around by a ticking overhead fan, the surfboard propped in the corner. The sound of the sea across the road. A ripple of confusion ran through her as she looked around: surfboard, wetsuit, numerous pieces of sculpture. On one wall an enormous dot painting in brilliant shades of green and pink and yellow. Then Fergus himself: younger than she’d imagined, a bit dishevelled, pale hair matted by the surf. She breathed in: sea air, salt. It didn’t even smell like a lawyer’s office. But there was the untidy cram of legal books on a shelf above the desk, the law school diploma above it, the mess of papers and files.
Fergus turned back to the desk and pushed one of the files across to her. It was a plain manila folder tied with pink legal tape and labelled ‘Lindquist’ and ‘Belshannon and Martin, Lawyers’. Despite the occasion her first impulse was to laugh. She slapped a hand to her mouth. Fergus tipped water over teabags; she stared at his back, the loose cotton shirt, his shoulders. The fan calibrated the seconds, tick, tick. He put a mug in front of her and raised his eyebrows, smiling. You’re tired, he said.
But she already liked him, the way he spoke, his kind eyes, so she didn’t try to explain the hysteria bubbling in her throat, the down-the-rabbit-hole oddness of sitting here with him and this file, the urge to walk out the door and get straight back on a plane. Instead she sat down opposite him at a low coffee table near the window and sipped her tea and laughed again and said: Tell me how my mother came to entrust her affairs to you.
Moving, Kieran discovered, was what he needed to do. It altered everything, even the noise in his head. And when he began to walk around, he found a hundred things that needed his attention. Unwashed brushes. Hardened lumps of paint in upended lids, pink and creamy white. Palette knives, thick with paint and stuck to the newspaper they rested on. There were books out of place, a window left open, ants circling the sugar. He fell on each small chore with a grim relish.
Dusk came down before he was ready. He needed more time, to clean up properly, to coax the paint from each single hair of each brush, to restore order. Keeping things in order was his job. Angela liked everything to be in its place here. It was different in the house, where things were left where she dropped them and frequently lost. But down here she was unsettled by mess, by things left undone. So he worked until the light was gone and everything was reduced to shapes. Until it all retreated, the cupboards, the jars, the canvases, shrinking back and away. Dimness disguised the jobs he hadn’t done, all the work still waiting, but he wasn’t fooled by the dark. He knew what he had to do, how she liked it. He hesitated, and glanced up at his own reflection in the window. Gave himself permission to go on.
He turned to the canvases. His immediate impulse was to begin with those in front of him, the ones she’d been working on the last few times he was here. But something halted his hands as he moved towards them. The ones on the easels would, of course, have to stay where they were. He couldn’t move them or even touch them. Several other smaller watercolours were spread on her workbench. They looked unfinished, there was too much white space, and one of them, a spray of orchids, seemed not just incomplete but unbalanced. All of these needed Angela’s hands, not his. He wouldn’t touch them either.
In the middle of the room he paused again. He stared up at the ceiling, searching. Some
thing was missing. Just then a nightbird called; an owl perhaps, he wasn’t sure. But there was something in the flat note it sounded, over and over, that made him realise what he had missed. The music.
The stereo stood squat and black and ordinary in the corner, the racks of records beside it. For the first time he noticed the lid was open, and as he approached it he thought how Angela would disapprove. But it was worse than that: the record that was still on the turntable. She never, ever left records out. They were all stowed carefully in their plastic sleeves and covers and put away, and the lid lowered. It was the dust up there, she said.
He bent to retrieve it. But even before he read the label his heart began to thump with the words Cress had been saying to him, he could see them picked out on that brown-flecked carpet at home, words like dead and funeral and gone, and when he held the record up to the fading light and read Rachmaninov he understood, briefly, that Angela wasn’t coming back. In the arc of time between his last night here with her and now, the music hadn’t been changed, or put away. Somehow the recognition of the two went together; together they made this silence.
He looked around. The light from the two side lamps was thin, and all he could see suddenly was how empty the place was. Angela was just one person, one body, but she had filled up this big space. Even the corners, even the air. As if there were several people here. That was the thing: when he’d been here with her, he realised, they were more than two people. There was this other living thing in the air between them, this lovely, comfortable, happy thing. That’s what you lost when someone died, he saw. You lost more than the person: you lost this other life too, the life that was in the air between you. It didn’t seem fair.
He looked down. The Rachmaninov was still in his hands. He stared at it, the way the black surface reflected its own light. See, he wanted to say to her, I told you. About blackness and shadows and light. He wiped the record carefully with his sleeve, and checked it for dust. Then he replaced it on the turntable, turned the switch, lowered the needle. Something lively to finish off with. Yes, he thought, turning up the volume. The music soared into the spaces, into all the corners and gaps, across every surface. Across his own skin, the skin of the room. He began to feel much better.
Paul. At least, that was the name on the document, the name Angela gave him. No middle name – perhaps there wasn’t time, or permission, or need. Just Paul Hughes. Dropped into Laura’s lap like an explosive device with a timed detonator. ‘My son, born 1952. Adopted out.’
Laura felt her bones crack with the weight of the words, a crush in her body: it was as if her brain had processed the information but her body received it. My son. She sat opposite Fergus with the page in her hand and said it aloud. Her world broken, and re-made, in those two words.
Fergus had tried to cushion them. This is information, he’d said as she untied the pink string, that Angela wanted to give you in person. He pursed his lips. She thought she had time. But by then the folder was open and Laura’s eyes were all over the page and she was reading the words over as if they were written in another language. ‘My son.’
Fergus leaned over the low table, his hands in his lap. He was speaking – she thought he was – she could hear his voice and the kindness in it, but nothing beyond that. She could think only: Angela, Angela. As if her mother was there in the room, resurrected as a mystery, a woman unknown to her and suddenly foreign. Laura looked up sharply at Fergus. His face was stricken. She said: A son? Then: Born to Angela and August – she quickly calculated – not two years before me.
Fergus pursed his lips and nodded. There’s a box of things for you, he said, indicating a safe on the other side of the room. And, of course, papers to sign. Laura glanced up and saw for the first time that the walls behind him were covered with artwork, landscapes, portraits, photographs. She thought she recognised one of Angela’s among them, some kind of native flowers in a rough bunch, but wasn’t sure.
But she did recognise the small case as soon as Fergus pulled it from the safe. It was instant: she looked at it and knew the texture of the reinforced cardboard and the maroon pattern embossed there, the battered corners; could anticipate the schoolroom smells beneath its lid: copy books and pencils and erasers, lunches in waxed paper. And though the lock that fastened it was unfamiliar, she knew when the lid was lifted she would see her name, large letters in black ink: Laura Lindquist. Fergus put the case on the table in front of her and a dozen different emotions rose to greet it. Chief of which was surprise: it had been her first school bag, which meant Angela had kept it for nearly fifty years.
Fergus went on: It sounds complex, I know. But the legal part is pretty straightforward. The house and the rest of it are yours, except for a couple of minor bequests. One to a young man, Kieran Doherty. One to the local art society. She’s made those quite clear–
Laura sighed. She was suddenly very tired. It’s not the legal stuff, Fergus, or the house or the probate. That’s easy. With all due respect.
There’s no issue of inheritance for – he stopped. There has been no contact. What you do with it, the house, this information, is up to you. It’s yours. That’s it.
But even then she knew that wasn’t it at all. She looked past him to the window and the paling sky. Summoning reason, locating words and faces. Hers, his. She knew she would have to look for them both, this new Angela, this Paul. But it had taken her this time to see, she realised – and a journey across the planet, from winter to summer, dimness to light – that she would have to look not just for them but for herself. Now that there was a Paul in her blood, as well as an unfamiliar Angela, she had no definite idea who Laura was.
From up on the headland Kieran watched the last of the fishing boats cross the bar, moving towards a fading horizon. He loved these boats, the half-moon shape of them, the light on their masts, their grace and speed. He wondered what it would be like to spend the whole night out there on the sea. Black water and nets, slicks of oily light. The smell of diesel and fish. He liked to imagine because he knew he would never go: the decks of boats were far too small for him. Too open. There were some things, like boats, and dancing, that he was happy to experience only in his head. They were safe there, intact, as he was. He sat and watched waves explode against the rock shelf like white fireworks. Breathed in the salt, the suggestion of rain.
When the grass felt damp he stood and looked back to where darkness had gathered around the banksias, back towards the empty curve of Broken Beach and its paths. Abby wouldn’t come now, he supposed. Would never leave the house after dark. He would love to ask her why, to explain there was nothing to fear. But that would be saying too much, he knew that. Would be telling her how much he knew.
He turned back to the sea, grey now as whale skin. Wished for once that the sun was rising, rather than setting, wished the day was ahead, so there would still be a chance Abby would come. Waiting for her in the early dawn, he could watch the fishing boats come home again in the light, shavings of new colour spilled around them. He loved that pale part of the day. The world looked different to him – benign, he thought, pleased. He wished it lasted longer. Later, when the sun had pulled itself out of the ocean, things were too clear, the colours more vulgar. The world was no longer his. It was as if the sun was another person, intruding.
But now the day was over, and she wouldn’t come. Never mind, he would console himself with sound, the music in the sea. It was something he did now, especially at night. It still surprised him, the comfort of it; he closed his eyes and listened. Some nights it might be just a line, a fragment of Emmy Lou or Rogers but there were times when all he could hear was Mahler because Angela played it so much, turning it up, asking him what he thought, telling him to remember it. Symphony No 9. Now he sat there on the headland, under platters of stars, as Mahler rose and soared and crashed around him. Sometimes Angela’s voice was there too, and he tried to feel what she urged him to feel – that he was in
the midst of purity. Not beauty, she had said, it’s nothing so easy. This is pure. It had taken him a while, but as he lay there listening to the sea, thinking about Abby, he knew he was beginning to understand.
Wednesday
In the mornings, if he was awake before Cress, Kieran sat in the lounge room and watched old episodes of ‘Whiz Kids’ on the video machine. He’d been taping it for ages, each episode layered on top of the others on the same tape. He liked the idea of that, believing each new show, rather than obliterating the one before, made another layer of knowledge, adding to some kind of rich brew stored magically there on that ordinary black plastic cassette.
The tape was one of his most guarded possessions; he kept it under his bed between viewings so that it wasn’t used by mistake to record ‘The Bill’ or ‘Gardening Australia’, which Cress was addicted to. Just to make sure, he’d painted a big ‘K’ on the spine with Whiteout.
One of the exciting things about putting the tape on these mornings was that he never knew exactly what he was going to see. There was room for three half-hour quiz shows, and he recorded each day’s randomly – at the beginning of the tape or part way through – so there were always bits of various past shows still on it, like secrets. He loved that, the random reminders of things he knew, or had forgotten he knew. He was like a collector of rare shells, or postcards, these mornings, laying out his precious collection piece by piece, absently fingering each one fondly, pleasantly surprised at his hoard. His sparkling array of facts.
The China Garden Page 3