Mr Lee looked from daughter to mother, and back. He was new to the school, Laura remembered as she nudged fallen leaves and small branches in this neglected part of the cemetery. But Angela had surprised them both. Admiral Lindquist, she said evenly, died some years ago. Laura misses him very much. And so do I. But the medals, I’m afraid, were donated to the War Memorial.
Angela had taken her leave then, and Laura had returned to class. Mr Lee had watched her but not mentioned the Admiral. At home that afternoon she’d expected a tirade, but her mother was in the shed and didn’t emerge. And Angela never spoke of it again.
Now she stood looking down at a small headstone with a simple inscription: August Arne Lindquist, husband and father. Accidentally killed May 16, 1955. This was what she’d come for. But she wasn’t prepared for the glass jar and dead flowers at the grave’s foot. She bent to brush leaves from the grass to busy herself – knowing Angela must have been here in the weeks before she died, seeing that she must have come regularly over all those years, with flowers and a cloth to wipe the headstone and gardening gloves to clear the grave of weeds and leaves.
She sat on the kerbstone of the path and wrapped her arms around her knees. She’d always known what had happened to her father, the flesh-and-blood Swedish immigrant in the photo on the shelf. Impossible not to: alone in the house most afternoons after school, she would amuse herself with imaginary fathers and furtive searches for the real one. So she thought the stash of papers she’d found one day in a wardrobe – newspaper clippings, a funeral notice, an old passport – was tantamount to buried treasure, and crucial to the mystery of her mother’s sadness, her detachment.
Whenever she’d asked, Angela had been brief and unemotional about August: A train accident, was all she’d said, a derailment. You were too young to know. But the clippings in the wardrobe hid a bigger truth: Driver killed in northern train derailment, one was headed. Track to blame: union leader, read another. At the bottom of this piece her mother’s name and her own. She remembered the shock she felt, not at the word driver but in seeing her name; it was as if she had been brought into being by tragedy and some linotype machine. She and her mother made real on a black-and-white page of newspaper. A smaller, black-rimmed cutting announced the funeral details of August Arne Lindquist on May 20, 1955.
She leaned her chin on her knees and thought of Angela at this grave with her gloves and her cloth and her flowers. Why had she never brought her daughter here, ever? Another secret. And why had she, Laura, never thought to ask about the grave, even as a child? Perhaps, she allowed now, because reality would have destroyed the fantasy. Perhaps because her father belonged in that shadowy time before her own memory began, a time that belonged to Angela. Angela here, working around the grave with her gloves and her flowers and her grief. A grief – another one – she’d held tightly to herself, unwilling – or unable? – to share with her daughter even its symbolic site, this very simple grave.
She looked up. The sun had begun its slide westwards, had lost its sting. She pushed herself up, brushed off her skirt. Smiled down at the headstone, as if August could see her. In Europe, in her father’s birthplace, graves were well cared for and never forgotten. Before she flew home, this time, she would make arrangements. They wouldn’t need much. Just some weeding once a month, she thought. And flowers on their birthdays.
Late that afternoon, before dinner, Kieran and Cress sat together to watch ‘The Millennium Quiz’. Kieran crouched with pencil poised, concentrating gravely as contestants weighed up answers, chose prizes from numbered boxes on the wall. Cress’s mind kept drifting from the questions to the wedding dress. For the first time she thought about its place here with her other things, its connection to them. Because surely there was one. She briefly recalled the moment she had first unwrapped it. Her hands had been all over it, imprinting it with her intentions. But even then there was the feeling that the dress had intentions of its own. That her hands had not found it by chance.
That was the key. The existence of everything she had was pre-ordained, each piece was meant to be here; but she was chosen just as much as each item was. They chose her. She knew this. The reminder of it sent a warm flush of well-being through her. A smile kinked the skin around her lips, and broadened as Kieran rattled off the correct answer – thylacine – to the decisive last question on the ‘Quiz’. Without turning he said, Thylacine is a good word.
The theme music for the show came up. Cress touched Kieran’s shoulder. Time for a shower, she said. No reply. And put the kettle on while you’re up.
Kieran put down his pen. Okay, he said. Then he turned to her, his eyes alight. But first, you have to pick the right box. She raised her eyebrows. Ready? he pressed. She nodded. So. Which one do you want, the one with the teacup on the front, or the one with the new car?
Cress collected her features into seriousness. They’re the only boxes? she asked him.
Yeah.
Well, then. Let’s see. I guess I’ll take the car.
Kieran took a long breath and let it out. That’s a shame, Cress, he said.
Why?
Because the only thing in that box is a new car.
Oh. Cress, momentarily caught up in the game, was visualising a shiny new hatchback rotating on the set of ‘The Millennium Quiz’, a willowy model beside it. That’s all? So what’s behind the cup?
Kieran eased up off the floor, beaming at her. Lifetime happiness, he said.
Cress looked at her grandson’s open face. Unreadable. His smile, his wide eyes gave no clue about what was behind them, what made him, what kind of kink had given him this way of looking, the extraordinary but unpredictable memory, while stripping away his abilities to pass any school exams at all. She smiled back at him.
We’ll try again next week, he said brightly, and walked off to the kitchen, whistling.
Two things had happened after Laura returned from the cemetery. She’d poured a glass of wine and wandered the rooms, thinking about the boy Kieran, about the painting Angela had bequeathed him. I Go Looking for Signs of Contentment. In the parlour she stopped at the bookshelves, looking at what was left to be packed. In the next second there was a sudden, mad flapping of wings. She swung round, wine glass in one hand, the other on her chest. It was a bird, trapped in the house.
She didn’t know what kind, perhaps a honeyeater, and it hurled itself against the closed windows, smacking into the ceiling, blind in its fury and terror. Laura dropped the glass and crouched, terrified too, appalled at this tiny creature puffed up – it seemed huge, malicious. Somewhere in her besieged head she knew she should catch it, just grab it, take it outside and let it go. But could not. Was gripped by something close to horror. Finally, legs cramping, she stood and quickly ran to the glass doors onto the deck. Slid them open. Within seconds the bird had sensed its freedom and thrown itself through the opening, disappearing as if into a vortex. But she was left trembling, her breathing shallow, her heart a trapped bird flapping in her chest.
She looked down at the glass and the spilt wine. The glass was intact but for one triangular chip, and she picked it up between forefinger and thumb, wondering at the fear that had seized her. Ridiculous, she thought. Just a small bird. She stood, holding the broken glass up to the fading sun. That was when she saw the girl. She thought it was a girl. A slight figure disappearing between trees, bare legs in baggy shorts, thin. She ran to the door and opened it, shouting Hey! but of course, she was gone.
Laura stared at the space where the figure had been; the trees had swallowed it up. There had been the flash of movement, a swing of blonde hair – the colour, she knew instantly, of Kate’s when she was young. She turned from the door, frowned down at the glass in her hand. How much wine had she drunk? For a moment it seemed possible she’d hallucinated the girl, that the angle of the sun and the trees had formulated a vision. She went to the kitchen, put
the shard of glass aside, and boiled the kettle for tea.
For hours afterwards she chided herself, not for her reaction to the bird and the girl, imaginary or not, but for her stupidity. She’d just begun to let herself be lulled into a feeling of ease and belonging, in the house, in the landscape. The girl and the bird had come, together, to remind her she was secondary, that there were other beings, other forces. And that, as the daughter of Angela and August, she had been born into the cold vacuum left by a missing child.
Kieran’s hands were deep in the foamy dishwater. He dunked and rubbed the big dinner plates, tilting them to clean their backs. Then held them high to let them drip. He hummed a song that often came to him when he stood at the sink: Are you going to Scarborough Fair/Parsley sage rosemary and thyme ... It seemed to suit the rhythm of washing, the time of day. He had to hum because he didn’t know the words, apart from those first few, which he loved. Rosemary and thyme, particularly lemon thyme, were his favourite herbs. Cress would often pull a sprig of one or the other from his pockets when she turned them out in the laundry on wash day. If it was rosemary he’d find it tucked back in. It was one of her favourites too.
He saw a shadow pass slowly outside, and knew that Cress must be walking in the garden. She’d gone through the back door – the back door, right there – and he hadn’t noticed her, hadn’t heard her. He shook his head at this realisation. It was amazing. He let the word go zig-zagging through his head while he scrubbed the frypan, a-maz-ing. Somehow it led seamlessly back to his song, and as he finished drying he sang, tuneless and happy: Are you going to Scarborough Fair/Amazing sage, rosemary and thyme ... He hung his tea-towel over the bench to dry and went in to clean his teeth.
It would be barely six in the morning in London. Laura imagined the phone ringing in an empty flat, and felt a wave of selfishness, hoping Kate was home from her shift and that the phone would wake her. But Kate’s voice down the line was lively. I thought you might call, she said.
Laura didn’t wait. You don’t have to answer this, she began, but – she heard Kate’s muffled laugh – but ... have I been a good mother?
God, Mum...
No, I want you to tell me. Because maybe I haven’t made enough effort, or – There was a pause, perhaps it was the delay in the line. Then Kate said, Or? Laura hesitated. Or maybe ... I don’t know. Maybe I’ve passed on a knack for sadness.
She heard Kate breathe and knew, over thousands of kilometres, that she was smiling. For that moment all distance was gone; she wanted to touch her daughter’s face, hug her, smell the rosemary-thyme scent of her hair. Read her eyes.
You’re a cracker, Laura, Kate said. It was a phrase a man had once used about her, very regrettably, in Kate’s earshot, and she had used it ruthlessly since. Laura sighed. Listen, she said, and stopped.
Don’t worry, Mum, Kate said. I’m all right. She paused, then: We’re all right.
Outside, Cress breathed the salt and pepper air of her night garden. She moved along a narrow path through the disorder of spinach leaves and chilli bushes, past the reaching vines of passionfruit and jasmine, the tiny fists of new tomatoes. A lone cricket chimed from the fig tree near the fence. Behind her there was the burr of voices from the television, the soft clack of dishes in the sink.
She was thinking, as she bent to pluck dead leaves from lettuces, These are my reasons for being, these voices, this air, these things growing. She would like to have said it aloud, to someone who would nod, and know. She would like to have said, Listen, and tilted her head and whispered, that sound you think you’re imagining, that sound of salt falling through air. That is the sea.
But she was alone, so instead she held out her hands as if she could feel it, the salt, and the air that rode above the ocean, rolling and pushing up the headland, and then she pressed her palms against her face. It was a gesture Kieran used to make as a child, trying to capture dew.
Cress’s fingers moved like a moth across her cheeks, across her lips. She felt obliged, at that moment, to acknowledge something, happiness perhaps, or luck, as she stood there in her garden beneath an ungovernable sky. Knowing life as that – ungovernable, unmanageable – she could admit to gratitude. But also, as the moths traced the line of her lips and chin, there was an old yearning – it was as much a part of her as her skin – for the things (unlike her spinach, her herbs) she couldn’t bring into being.
Tuesday
Kieran watched Cress carefully after the funeral. Everything seemed to be fine, but she was very quiet, he noticed, as if she was waiting, as if there was something in the air she didn’t want to miss. What? He found himself paying close attention to things too. The movements of animals, the moon. He listened carefully: to the waves for instance, the air at midday, the weather report on the radio. Cress always turned the news on at seven, morning and night. He began to listen in as well, especially to the weather, surreptitiously watching it – and Cress – for signs.
On Tuesday, satisfied the day held a temperature range of 19-30 degrees and no other mischief or message, he followed Cress from the kitchen after she’d switched off the radio. She was headed for the back door, and as she stopped to pick up gardening gloves and hat, he asked, mildly, what kind of painting she liked. Oils, watercolours?
They’d never had much in the way of paintings in the house. He’d noticed that ages ago. Mainly there were photos, baby photos of him, a wedding photo of his parents and another of his mother at school, the sepia face of his grandfather in a slouch hat and uniform – the face looked sort of startled, Kieran always thought, and very young. That photo was particularly interesting to him; it was different from the others, as if it was a different grandfather. As if there’d been two of him – the one Cress talked about, and this other, much younger, soldier grandfather.
It puzzled him, but he loved the photo anyway, and loved all the others too; the faces beaming out, optimistic, hoping for the best from all this. He thought they were smiling out at some invisible pair of eyes, some future face, his. Even as the camera clicked they were looking out at him from lives they’d already lived. For some reason he found this comforting, as if each person was multiplied into many. He would let himself think, sometimes, that they were with him in the room. He would imagine voices for them, things they might say.
So he hadn’t noticed the lack of paintings until he met Angela. The photos began to look different then. He would stand in front of them and try to imagine the faces constructed in layers of paint. He would follow the crevices and clouds of shadow, thinking about brush strokes. And because it was Angela’s hand he saw with the brush, he imagined the photos as they might be if she’d painted them. Wondered if the colours would be the same, the eyes. He imagined her painting his dead grandfather, the browns of the uniform, that look on his face – a kind of bewilderment. Is that how she would have seen him? Right now, standing there at the back door, he wished more than anything that he could ask her that. Would his grandfather look bewildered through layers of oil paint? Would he have looked different if Angela had painted him, yet another version of himself?
Cress was talking. Yes, I like some oil painting, she was saying, wriggling her fingers into her gloves. And charcoals. Your mother was quite good with charcoal at school. She was looking at him, waiting, and playing with the brim of her hat.
Angela liked everything. He looked at Cress’s forearms above the gloves, the bones, the speckled skin. Again he thought of brush strokes, the way Angela might paint them. There was a word she used – stipple. Yes. Cress’s pale forearms would be stippled with a colour like tan, or – he thought of the rows of paint tubes – like bark. She was very good at watercolour, he said.
Cress nodded. Those flowers, she said, clamping the hat on, pushing hair back behind her ears. If you could paint like that you wouldn’t need a garden. She opened the door and they both walked out into the sun.
; You would, Cress, Kieran said as they both surveyed the beds and trellises, all rampant growth. It was November, the magnolia by the back door was in flower, and beyond the garden gate a poinciana was pushing its first orange blooms through its skirts of leaves. The air seemed full of nectar. You’re very good at gardens. Cress looked across and smiled at him, then picked up a bucket and her old red cushion. He followed her as she strode down the path.
Halfway along she paused and leaned over to examine a tomato plant. Look, she said. The tiny yellow flowers had been thieved since the day before, snipped clean off. She looked around for culprits. Birds, probably. He could see her thinking, her eyes flicking around the garden. She was a bit bird-like herself. Without looking at him she said: Did you like Angela’s paintings? as if she was talking to the garden bed. Kieran stood near her, hands in pockets. The tops of the nearest parsley, he noticed, were missing too.
He thought about the question while Cress moved around, nudging leaves with one finger, peering beneath them. Occasionally she stopped, still as a statue, staring. Only her hand would move, slow at first and then with a sudden strike, closing around a small grasshopper. A grim smile, and she would brush it from her glove, muttering softly. Kieran felt a pang for the tiny creatures. She used good colours, he said.
Cress nodded, crouched to pull weeds from the edging. He thought they were pretty, these weeds. The little mauve flowers seemed to be grinning. Cress must have agreed. Cheeky blasted things, she said, tugging at their fleshy roots, tossing them into the bucket. Kieran looked at them. Most things had a kind of beauty, Angela had told him, depending on how you looked at them.
The China Garden Page 17