She didn’t talk much when she was using oil paints, he said. He watched Cress as she began to move down the garden edge, kneeling occasionally on her cushion, plucking at weeds and grass. She was concentrating, digging for roots. Then: She was quiet, she said.
Kieran didn’t know if it was a question or not. He was looking at the plump leaves of a basil plant but he was seeing Angela, her face closed up in concentration, her lips slightly open but nothing coming from them, no words, not for hours. Or so it seemed.
He remembered the relief when she finally put the brush down and suggested a cup of tea. He heard himself say to Cress’s back: Sometimes.
But he’d loved the quietness then. Into it had swum all the night sounds he was happy in, a sea of them. He would sit quite still and pretend he was at the bottom of the ocean, listening; the sounds were waves around and through him. The wind became the movement of the tide, the call of night birds was the song of whales and dolphins. Crickets and geckos clacked softly: the conversations of fish, of rays, of anemones. At these times Angela’s music would be played very low, and that too had its underwater rhythms, an orchestral soundtrack to the waltz of fish, the sway of seagrass.
You would have been good company for her, Cress was saying. Kieran looked from the basil to the low clumps of marjoram and parsley, all coral-like, and then to his grandmother. She was pressing weeds into the bucket, strands of runner grass. He felt an odd sensation, as if he really had been submerged and had finally surfaced. He tilted his head, as if he was clearing his ears. Then meaning struck. The things Cress had said. About Angela, and him. All the things she knew.
In the rose garden Laura cut and pruned and dug. Some of the plants looked beyond her help: thick and woody, with long hard thorns hooked like the nails on an old woman’s toes. Almost grudgingly, she had decided to prune the roses for Angela, who had loved them. All through Laura’s childhood, though, they were merely a menace; painful to collide with, unsuitable for hide-and-seek. An errant ball could scatter petals and provoke punishment. Another reason to flee to the yard next door: her own was rose-encrusted. She hated them.
But now they were a memorial to Angela, or would be one. She would need all of her skills to bring them back. Some still sprouted gaunt blooms, gallant against the neglect and the heat of a dry, early summer. She snipped them off, the morning sun hard on her back, feeling deftness and sureness return to her hands. Realising the week’s events had robbed her of just that: confidence, certainty.
From behind her, from the other side of the house, came the sharp sounds of wood being cut and planed and nailed. When Fergus had arrived she’d offered to help him, but he’d glanced around the rooms and waved her away. You’ve got enough on your hands, he said.
For the first hour or more it felt odd: she felt like she barely knew him, and here he was, working away on her back verandah as if they were old friends. But the feeling faded as her hands moved around the roses. It was a familiar pattern, after all; the distant sounds of someone working as she crouched among plants or dug saplings into soil. She thought of Alvaro and the Fiorentina, of the work she’d left, all the other trees they fought to keep alive.
Who cares about these trees? Francesca had asked once, at the beginning. The orchard was just a small rag of land then, and the ancient house untouched. If they’ve nearly died out, there’s a reason. Wouldn’t you think?
But Laura had just come back from the old Gastone estate, where she’d found a reference in a farm catalogue to the Fico Rondinino San Sepolcro, a fig she’d been hunting for years. Her skin was alive with the possibility of finding one. You care about your grandmother, don’t you? she’d replied, filling a bucket with water for the new seedlings. Same thing.
Alvaro had winked at her as he cleaned his knives. Francesca is a modern woman, Laura. In his provincial accent it sounded like ‘Lara’. She cares only about her hairdo and her shoes.
Now Laura pulled up an image of the old Fiorentina brooding over the remote hillside and the potato field. She thought of the food it had provided, the shade, the firewood from its dropped branches. For how many generations? She had guessed its age at about one hundred but it could easily be more. It might be a great-great-grandmother, still storing her memories of seasons and children, of wars and weddings, of all the families that had left for the cities and later, for new lands. Leaving the trees and taking their memories, their knowledge and their recipes with them.
She stood and wiped sweat from her face with the sleeve of her shirt. The water bottle beside her was empty, so she went back to the house to refill it, still thinking about the pear, and about the graft Alvaro was tending now in the orchard. She had resisted the temptation to ring and ask about it, not wanting to insult him. Trust me, he’d said to her when they’d first planted together, and she had. Did.
At the sink she looked up through the open window at Fergus bent to some task at the other end of the deck. She filled a tall glass with water and took it to him, but he was planing a piece of wood and didn’t hear her approach. She stood there, holding the glass; his shoulders and arms looked glazed in the heat. His skin was deep brown – as if it had been painted, she thought, one coat after another. She looked away and put the glass down. Skin like that didn’t burn, not really, it just gained another coat, another layer. She felt her own skin stinging from too much sun and turned to leave, but he realised she was beside him and stopped. He thanked her for the water and as he drank she said, Why would you do this, Fergus? Waving her hand around. All this?
He handed back the empty glass. Shrugged. Bohemian lawyer taking pity, he said.
She looked at him, the calm green eyes. He might have been talking about the house, or about the will, about her family or his. The world. He waited, watching her, but she had no more questions. Only nodded, her lips forming a half-smile. Then he turned from her and went back to his work.
She took the empty glass to the kitchen and went to the front steps to survey her work. The roses were bare wood now, bony urchins, pared back and stark. The cutting would seem harsh to someone who didn’t know them, or didn’t understand what was required. Still, she had to admit now to a sneaking feeling of triumph, a juvenile pleasure in getting her own back. It’s for your own good, she said aloud to the plants. And turned inside again.
Cress sat at the bench in the kitchen, tying up sprigs of herbs for the monthly produce stall at the church. Rosemary, sage, bay leaf, thyme. Veronica had a knack for choosing the right moment to ask, usually after she’d helped Cress with a job at St Barnabas, or as she pressed one of her husband’s old shirts into her hands for Kieran. At any rate, Cress had never refused to bring something, tomatoes straight from the vine, a couple of plump eggplants, pumpkins. But later she would chastise herself. It wasn’t the time or the gift but the obligatory two visits to the church, one to deliver and one to help at the stall. She would try, every third Wednesday of the month, to make both trips short, nipping in to do her bit and leaving before any more was required.
Today, though, she was enjoying the job of snipping the herbs and inhaling the homeliness of them. The memory of soups with bouquet garni, her mother’s sage stuffing. But it was the smell of rosemary, clean and spiky between her fingers, that took her back, quite suddenly, to the moment it all came home to her, the moment she finally realised where Kieran was going at night, what the music meant. That the person he was visiting was Angela.
A winter evening, and a leg of lamb in the oven. She’d rubbed it with salt and garlic and left it to roast. It was dusk: the first crickets chimed, and from the kitchen she could hear the insistent sound of television advertisements: Kieran was waiting for the ‘Quiz’. The lamb was in the oven because it was Monday. Monday roasts – something to look forward to after the weekend, she’d reasoned when Ed was alive and Shelley was young. It was a tradition that died with Ed, but she’d renewed it when Kieran came to stay. It had be
en his favourite meal for a while, roast lamb and potatoes. Or perhaps he’d just said it was; within months it had been replaced by sausages. It was as if, she thought now, he’d been easing her into living with him, humouring her, not the other way round.
Still, she went on cooking lamb on Mondays. That night – two, three years ago? – she’d wandered out of the kitchen and slumped down beside Kieran, weary from the garden. It had been a winter of no rain and empty dams; she’d spent hours on her feet, hand-watering, coaxing things to stay alive. It was some minutes into the show; the host had introduced the contestants and announced the topic – art history and practice – when Cress remembered the rosemary. Kieran had barely blinked as she levered herself out of her armchair and scuttled from the room. When she returned, the sharp aroma of rosemary was still on her fingers – later she’d found a broken sprig on her woollen sleeve – and Kieran was glued to the screen. He was, she thought, oblivious to her presence or absence.
It had all seemed normal at first. There was nothing out of the ordinary in Kieran’s absorption, in his dogged entry of words in his notebook, his contained pleasure in knowing things, in beating a contestant to an answer. Then she realised he was answering all the questions. Quietly, without fanfare. Recording each answer on the page in front of him, not to remind himself, as he usually did, of the new knowledge, or because he’d got it wrong. That night he was recording the answers like trophies, because he’d got them right.
Cress had switched her attention then to the television screen. The questions ranged across centuries of art. The answers were words like tympanum, surrealism, gouache, Pissarro, plein air, Streeton, Ochre. She sat watching and listening until the end of the show. Kieran knew that ‘a picture or decoration produced by inlaying small pieces of coloured glass, stone or tile’ was a mosaic. That ‘a mixture of water-colour pigment and water’ was a wash. Chinese White, he murmured to a question about a pigment made from zinc oxide. The contestants looked flummoxed – then relieved. It was the last question. As the credits came up Kieran had put down his pen. For once it wasn’t the show he wanted to talk about. He took an exaggerated breath through his nose. Lamb roast, he’d said, and smiled.
Now, bent there over bouquet garni, rubbing rosemary between her fingers, her head kept repeating the refrain: rosemary for remembrance, rosemary for remembrance. She wished it away. Wished, as she frequently did, that she had talked to Kieran there and then, that night, about Angela. About his night-time walks, the hours he spent with her, what they talked about. What Angela did. What Angela said. And more than anything: why?
But at the time there had been no possibility of such a conversation. Her first reaction – apart from mild shock – had been a kind of grief, a sense of loss. Kieran was hers. Hers in ways that transcended her role as grandmother and his as grandson. She had always felt a sense of guardianship, she realised that day, from the moment she guided his body from his mother’s, wiped the blood and vernix from his head, and finally, almost reluctantly, snipped the cord.
He was a whole month early. Ed’s funeral barely over, the flowers still alive and the sympathy cards propped on the sideboard. Vince, Shelley’s husband, had gone back to Brisbane. She and Shelley, heavily pregnant, were still locked in that cocoon of emotional safety that keeps bereaved people together in a house, unwilling to leave. She and her brothers had felt that way after her father died; they’d sat drinking tea and cocoa and talking on the verandah of the old house for a whole week before someone, Joe perhaps, said he had to go back to Sydney, he had to go back to work. It had been the same after Ed. In odd moments – boiling the kettle, bringing in the wash – she recognised it, this cocoon of false contentment. But it meant that she could stay calm when, just days after Vince left, Shelley’s upset stomach turned gradually into hard contractions and then into a terrifyingly rapid delivery on Cress’s bedroom floor. She had never seen a baby born so fast.
But he’d breathed straight away and whimpered and turned pink so she’d wrapped him in a soft towel and handed him to Shelley. It’s all right darling, she’d whispered, as if what had happened was against the rules, and secret. He’s fine. And they’d both sat there on the floor and wept and laughed and stroked him, and Cress had found herself remembering every tiny detail to tell Ed.
That had been thirty years ago. She’d never been able to discern the point at which she and Kieran had formed this particular reliance on each other, the symbiosis that allowed them to be absolutely themselves when they were together, without the constraints or expectations of being a grandmother or a grandson. They were able to just be. And that was the loss she feared most when she’d realised, that night, who was sharing him. This true sense of the person she was. That’s what he had given her.
She arranged the herbs into little netting bags, tied the tops with ribbon. Now, she thought, there were no ready ways of sorting it out, of labelling that fear, pinning it down. She remembered standing there in the kitchen on the night of Iris’s call, her hand still on the phone as if to prevent it from telling her more. But what else was there to know? She was too old, too old. What’s past is past, she thought. Angela is dead. And Kieran – her grandson’s face, open, inscrutable, flashed before her – no longer needed to walk the hills at night.
Laura tried to concentrate on the shoe boxes. The first layer of papers reminded her that she did, after all, know something of her mother’s habits. Angela didn’t hoard so much as keep good records and good stocks, as small insurances against penury perhaps, against disaster. There were bottles of buttons, even though she didn’t sew, pages of scribbled recipes, though she didn’t cook much. If Laura had needed new school shoes or a blouse or a book, Angela would pull out the jar of coins she had slowly accumulated for just such a purpose. Other bills were paid from the same source. Bit by bit, taking everything into account: this was how Angela had done things. She’d kept receipts and old bus timetables, the label from an azalea plant, catalogues from an art supply shop in Brisbane. A Christmas card from a craft shop up the coast. A library card. The miscellany of an ordinary life.
Laura felt her throat constrict. She pursed her lips, blinked. They were small, small things but they were the world, as big as art, as substantial as the paintings propped in the shed, encrypted with meaning. She rubbed her fingers over a receipt for a woollen cardigan, size 12, $29.99. Softly – as if the bones of Angela’s shoulders were there beneath the words, woollen cardigan, her ribs, her elbows and wrists.
Towards the bottom of the box, two receipts, both handwritten; one for two canvases, three feet by two, and one for firewood. Neatly folded twice. And another piece of paper. It was different in size and texture, thin and old, like the airmail paper she’d used years ago to write letters home. She unfolded it carefully. Angela’s handwriting: it had barely changed in fifty years. Faded now, but still legible, still able to reach across the air and the years and squeeze her heart. It might be a sponge, her heart, mopping up, heavy. In her hands now was a page of song lyrics, several stanzas. Laura read them, biting her lip as recognition dawned. Some say love, it is a hunger ... The words to a Bette Midler song. The Rose.
Sometimes, Kieran felt that everything he was and everything he had were not quite enough and never would be. It was a feeling he didn’t understand, but he knew it was only around when Abby was. Before Abby, he hadn’t known about longing. How it coated everything, layered everything with the possibility of sadness, of disappointment. He’d never really coveted anything. Never wanted anything so much that it made him feel like this.
He sat on top of the monkey bars, trying not to look around, to look for her, and thought about the word covet, and how it made him feel he was doing something secret. He’d looked it up as soon as he heard it on ‘Whiz Kids’: desire eagerly, the dictionary said, usually what belongs to another. That had confused him; he didn’t think Abby belonged to anyone. But he did know that since Angela had gone, the word had come ba
ck to him and he realised she was, in fact, a kind of secret, and it was his secret. So, he thought now, hooking his legs over a bar and letting his torso drop and swing, in that way Abby did, really, belong to him.
He swung back and forward twice, then folded his body up and over and climbed back down. Dared to look around: the park was still empty. He mooched over to the tap for a drink. Sometimes, the most familiar things made him unbearably jealous. The other people he saw in her street, anything connected to her. He hated this feeling; he wanted to be rid of it, to empty himself out. He would wander around the town or his own garden wishing he had the still, unmoving life of a picket fence, the calmness of a lemon tree. But then he would be taken by surprise, as he was now, as he leaned over the tap and let it run, by the blazing beauty of something, like this pool of water beneath the tap, all the sky’s limitless knowledge reflected there, the potential of it. He stared into the pool and loved that word. Felt it pulsing from the edges of the water trapped there in the dip. It was all muddy brownness and shapes, but they were the shapes of colours, blue, red. It was everything he wanted to see there.
He looked up, blinking through new eyes. Walked out of the park towards the esplanade, stopping to examine the rough sandstone blocks in an old wall, the faded green like an old man’s eyes, the lilac. He’d walked past this wall a thousand times but it was, he saw now, beautiful. He stared at fabrics on men’s shirts, the paisleys and checks, finding them intricate and clever, and the astounding curve of a woman’s upper arm as she reached to touch something, a leaf perhaps. He ran his hand over and around the railing on the post office stairs, its metal shiny with age and use. It was all, without doubt, beautiful. He wanted to say this to Abby. He wanted to turn and find her there, at his shoulder, to say, Look. To see it all, all that he felt, reflected in her eyes.
The China Garden Page 18