This is how it seemed: she was looking at the girl’s back. As she straightened, the girl moved, swivelling her body and lifting it, at least lifting her arms, which she placed like a shy gift around Laura’s neck. The surprise of this gesture was compounded by a sudden certainty that drenched Laura’s senses. It was in the odour displaced by the girl’s movement, the rich, sweet smell of afterbirth. She knew if she looked down – and she could not, with her head in the girl’s soft clasp – the girl’s legs would have been streaming, blood running between her toes, between the folds of the dress beneath the little, shivering body.
Laura jammed her eyes shut, to stop the frightening tears. It was only two, three seconds, and when she opened them it was to the still figure of Cress, one hand on the door knob, the other clutching a handkerchief, her fingers – squeezing, unsqueezing – the only things that moved. Her eyes, like the girl’s, like the young body limp against Laura’s, were unafraid.
He was aware of his own fast movement. But not of any direction or sense of destination. Just leaves whipping, trees signposting maybe, or maybe not – along the road, to the forest. He had stopped sobbing but was aware that strange sounds were coming up from his throat, a kind of low keening that oddly threw up an image of Angela’s music. An opera by – he didn’t know. He didn’t know, he didn’t know. But the very thought, the very image was the first thing to make sense in hours, a kind of message. Angela. He turned, and ran back towards the road, towards the hills, towards the place where music had always meant refuge.
Laura was aware that Cress was speaking, but the words took some seconds to penetrate. It was enough, for those seconds, to absorb her presence here, to fight off her own alarm. Then the words got through: a baby, found this morning, under someone’s window in Archer Street.
Laura kept her hands calm on the girl, whose body had stiffened, shrunk against her. A baby, Laura said.
Only a few hours old. Cress had taken a step inside. Her face was expressionless, but her hair had come loose from its pins, falling around her ears, giving her the appearance, Laura thought, of someone slightly unhinged. It was on the news. She seemed to be addressing what she said to the girl.
No one spoke. Outside, a thousand birds called to each other, question, answer, question, question. I’m looking for Kieran, Cress said evenly to the girl. Have you seen him? I know he’s a friend of yours. Perhaps a good friend.
The girl tightened her grip on Laura’s neck. Laura said, He’s not here, Cress. Wondering at the old woman’s steady, searching eyes. It’s only Abby. Who might need some help.
Is Kieran with the baby? Cress’s tone might have been gentle, but her eyes belied it. They were like flint. Who knows about the baby? Does your father know? Does Kieran?
In the space in front of her, between the girl and Cress, Laura saw flashes of Kieran’s face. The way he looked, standing in the dark, looking back at her. His face. His untrammelled eyes. And knew suddenly what Cress was getting at, what she was really asking. Cress – she began.
Did Kieran give you that dress? The eyes still hard, harder. Did Kieran–
Abby pulled her arms from Laura’s neck and turned to Cress. Laura watched as meaning dawned on the girl. As something between confusion and determination crept into her face. Abby looked into Cress’s eyes without flinching. No, she said. The word a stone thrown into a pool. She shook her head slowly. No, she said again. No no no.
Kieran reached the driveway and paid no heed to the noise his boots made or how visible he might be. He took long strides, looking around as if the trees might be urging him: Quickly! faster! hurry! He slowed as he reached the stripped rose bushes; they looked to him just right this way, they fitted with the way the rest of his world looked: thin, dry, lifeless. His heart slowed its crazy pace and the electric current jabbing his hands and feet eased off. For the first time he thought about the things that had happened, and what he’d done.
For there was the fact of Cress’s car, parked at the side of the drive. He blinked at it, registering its presence, as well as the notion of Cress, here, at Angela’s. So, he thought. So. But got no further because now he was at the door and pushing it open and almost falling through into the open space, into the surprise of not just Cress, but Laura – and in the middle of the picture, Abby. She looked fine, just like herself, except for the blood stains on the long white dress she was wearing. Somewhere in his head recognition struck but all he cared about was finding her. He walked straight to her and put his palm to her cheek. She smiled her little smile. Abby, he said, and began, for the second time that day, to cry.
Friday, a week later
They sat together in Cress’s lounge room, balancing cups. Laura leaned towards him and said, You know, Kieran, you’re very good at being a friend. He looked around the room, unsure what was required. Laura went on: To Abby, to Angela. He looked back at her. She said, A real friend. He wasn’t sure if she was saying something or asking something.
Then Cress came in with more tea saying, All I’ve got left is vanilla, and Fergus arriving behind her. Fergus was wearing a shirt that was a bit like Abby’s flower dresses. He slumped into the armchair and said, There’ll be no formal charges.
Kieran watched everyone’s faces. Cress stood like a statue with the tea tray in her hands. There won’t, she said. Making sure. Fergus lifted his eyebrows. Not against Kieran.
He watched the faces turn towards him. The weapon was plastic, Fergus said, with a small grin. Besides, the victim is being questioned himself. Abby says he hits her. Often.
Cress sat down heavily then and lifted her cup. She said quietly, The baby’s father?
Some young creep she met at church. He’s hightailed it. What with all the media.
But Kieran was only half-hearing. Abby’s very sad, he said. About the baby. There was the noise of Cress’s spoon against the side of her cup, stirring, stirring. Laura sipped her tea and said, She’s such a tiny baby. Such tiny lungs.
And Abby’s a baby herself. It was Cress, leaning forward over her cup, holding it with her fingertips. Her eyes on the brown-flecked carpet. So young.
She’s seventeen, Fergus said, and Kieran stared at him. Seventeen. Was that a good thing? He had no idea. If and when the baby’s well enough, Fergus went on, she wants to take her home. When they find her a home.
Do you think that’s a good plan? Cress’s eyes still on the carpet so that Kieran was forced to look down, to see what she was seeing. It was just the same brown flecks.
It’s Abby’s plan, Fergus said firmly. It’s what she wants.
In the afternoon, in the quiet of her own almost-empty house, Laura pulled out Sylvie’s envelope again. She opened the newsletter headed Origins. Supporting People Separated by Adoption. There was a Sydney telephone number. She pressed it into her phone. When it answered, she said, My brother was adopted out at birth, in 1952. I’d like some help to find him.
Saturday
The gallery space was all glass and steel and highly polished wood. Angela’s work on the walls, framed and titled, was startling in its new context, professional, important. Laura and Fergus walked slowly through each room, and Laura felt her first flush of pride for what her mother had achieved, for the woman who clearly was, as the poster said, a botanical artist with a gift for evoking human emotion.
They watched as people clutched opening night drinks and drifted through. The older style botanical pieces were selling first. Investors, Fergus said. Kieran’s painting, marked Not for Sale, was on a wall separate to the others. I Go Looking for Signs of Contentment. It had been hung near a series of three the gallery had been storing for months for the exhibition: again the riotous foliage, the jungly colours, but among them human faces, eyes closed and mouths mute. He hurts me with his easy separateness. Laura picked up the accompanying brochure, Notes for an Exhibition – Angela Lindquist,
and tucked it into Fergus’s back pocket.
She was relieved when the formalities were over and they could slip away. When they reached the car she put her hands to his face. She was right, she said, all those years ago. In the end you cling to what makes you feel you’re alive. She had one more week. Suddenly, it didn’t seem enough. I’d like to take a piece of that. Her finger on the soft skin behind his ear. She thought of her precious grafts at home in Umbria, the bound tree flesh. Or a slice from your palm, to graft onto mine. They drove slowly down the coast road towards their hotel at Coolum, the car silent with unspoken thoughts and a million solitary stars.
Cress made some chamomile tea and sat down beside Kieran on the lounge. She was glad, after all, that they’d decided against the long drive to Noosa. They were both exhausted; it was nearly six-thirty but felt much later. Even so she didn’t immediately prod Kieran to have his shower. Instead, she sipped her tea and played with his tangle of hair while he watched the end of ‘Whiz Kids’. His fingers twitched and jumped on the notebook in front of him as he watched the teams hesitate over their answers. In the ad break he turned and looked at her, expectantly. She smiled at him. He said, Celestial. They should have got that. Another word for heavenly.
It’s a good word, isn’t it? he was saying now. Celestial? He turned back to the screen. It makes me see stars.
Minutes later, after the program had finished and Kieran had wandered off, Cress was imagining a huge sky punch-drunk with light. She closed her eyes. A bride was dancing alone beneath it in a dress that was the exact colour of moonlight. She let herself remember it: the euphoria of love. In those early days with Ed, she felt filled up, as if a great emptiness inside her had puffed up like wind in a sail. She felt full, abundant; for the first time in her life she felt enough.
Cress leaned back in her chair, registering noises: Kieran humming as he undressed for his shower, the low rumble of the plumbing as he turned on the taps. Even now she could feel the scalloped hem of the dress lap gently against her calves as she swayed, dreamy, her arms crossed over her chest, over a double string of ivory coloured beads. She lifted her teacup to her lips but now, rather than chamomile, she tasted what she knew must be the flavour of pearls. It was smooth and dusky on her tongue: creamy, perfect, old pearls. She held the cup against her cheek. Then her eyes snapped open. Well, she thought. And smiled. I haven’t thought about Angela for hours and hours.
Tuesday
The table was in the hallway near the stairs. It was the wrong place for it. She’d known that since Fergus carried it in, wrapped in a dusty drop sheet, surprising her. She’d sat down on the steps and closed her eyes as he’d directed, then opened them. The tiny kitchen table was no longer pocked and burned, its turned legs scuffed and chipped. It had been restored, she thought, in exactly the right way. Not back to the original: it could never again be new. Fergus had not tried to erase all the knife and heat marks. Had not stripped the table of its past. Somehow, she realised, admiring the deep honey of the newly oiled pine, the simple lines, he had made it more itself. It was, she thought, the most beautiful thing in the house.
That was why she hadn’t moved it. It had become a place to put things, items for perusal, and she would sit on the stairs, chin on knees, looking, thinking.
In the past few days there had been seeds, the broken candlestick, a covered button from some old dress or blouse of Angela’s, the shard of glass. Her airline ticket home. Just days before she’d added the shattered cup, the three pieces curled together like leaves.
She went to the table now and picked up the pieces of china and glass, laying them carefully in her palm. She walked carefully so that nothing fell. Outside the sun was withdrawing, leaving this side of the hill to its own colours, unbleached greens and browns and blues that might never have been boiled in the noon heat.
As she walked around to the side of the house she automatically checked for new growth on the roses. She’d been doing that every day, though she knew it was too early. She was waiting for the candy stripe, sure it would be Kieran’s favourite when it bloomed. She imagined him taking some to Abby, a fistful of pink and white. He would beam as he shoved them in a jam jar. Pink! she heard him say, pink for girls.
At the edge of the herb garden she knelt and picked each chipped and broken piece from her palm and laid them on the grass. She looked around for the spade. It was where she had left it, shoved into the soil near the pots of rosemary and thyme she hadn’t bothered to plant. Francesca’s mother’s saying went round in her head: Rosemary in the front garden, she’d told Laura, her battered English further obscured by a missing tooth, means woman in charge of house. She’d nodded sagely, handing her a pot, her chin almost touching her chest. Is true. Laura hadn’t thought of that in years.
The sun had dipped behind the trees. Over her shoulder a catbird whined, a mewling baby in the bush. Behind it another bird, unrecognisable, and another, a low twilight lament. Laura breathed the damp rich air of trees and grass and salt breeze settling into night all round her. Arched her back and filled her lungs with it, then breathed out and picked up the spade. The soil gave easily, brown-black and perfect, she thought, for grafting. She pressed the first piece of china into its place.
This novel has been nurtured by many hands, but none stronger or surer than Mary-Rose MacColl’s. I thank her for her insight, her patience, her love and courage through three years of workshopping.
I also thank Sandra Hogan, Krissy Kneen, Annie Edwards, Jo Clifford, Anita Houghton and Zoe Houghton for their friendship and fine readers’ eyes; Jill Rowbotham, Anna Krien and Julie MacCormack for their endless encouragement, and the women at Sisters Inside for keeping it all real. And, of course, my family, for holding me up.
I am deeply grateful to Judith Lukin-Amundsen for her advice and professional care of this novel that dates back to early drafts, to Fiona Inglis, and to Madonna Duffy and Rob Cullinan at UQP, whose support and warmth have made me brave.
First published 2009 University of Queensland Press
PO Box 6042, St Lucia, Queensland 4067 Australia
This edition published 2011
www.uqp.com.au
© Kristina Olsson 2009
This book is copyright. Except for private study, research, criticism or reviews, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.
Ebook produced by Read How You Want
Typeset by Post Pre-press Group, Brisbane
Design: Ri Liu
Photograph: Hamed Saber
Cataloguing-in-Publication Data available from the National Library of Australia
www.nla.gov.au
The china garden / Kristina Olsson
ISBN (pbk) 9780702239106
ISBN (pdf) 9780702237461
ISBN (epub) 9780702247149
ISBN (kindle) 9780702247156
The China Garden Page 25