The Watcher in the Garden (19 page)

When he reached his father the old man had raised himself off the engine on one arm while the other clutched his chest. He was alternately wheezing and coughing, but he stopped long enough to say, “I'm crook, boy. This time I'm real crook.”

“Why didn't you stay up at the house if you were that crook? Why did you have to come right down here, for Christ's sake? You got no sense at all.” Terry's voice was rough and totally without sympathy, but he pulled his father upright, put one arm over his shoulder and grasped him, none too gently, round the waist.

“You're killing me,” said his father. “I got this awful pain just where you're holding me.” But he clutched his son's broad shoulder and turned towards the house.

“I got to get you back, haven't I? Want me to carry you?”

Mrs. Nicholson descended on them in a rush, having run all the way down the hill. “What's the matter? What's happened to your father?”

Terry looked at her over the top of his father's small grey head. “How should I know? He reckons he's crook. Says he's got a pain.” He spoke as if the whole thing might have been a put up job—some game his father was playing against them. Yet even as he spoke he recognized that his father was in real pain.

“I have, too,” said the old man, suddenly finding the energy to sound indignant. “Had it all morning, but I could be dead for all you'd notice.”

“I knew it,” said Mrs. Nicholson triumphantly. “I knew he was bad. Anyone could see it was more than just the smoking.” And she thrust her hand under the arm that still clutched his chest. “Come on. We got to get you back to the house.”

He groaned, coughed once more, and then, supported on both sides, began a tottering progress up the hill to the house. His wheezing increased alarmingly, but they only had to stop once while he coughed. Once inside the back door, Terry began to steer him towards his bed, but Mrs. Nicholson said, “What do you think you're doing? You go and get the car out. He's going to the doctor.”

“He's not that bad.” It was not that he did not believe it. He simply preferred it not to be so.

Mr. Nicholson moaned plaintively and they heard him whisper, “He'd rather I died in me bed. He don't care what happens to his old dad.” But before he had finished speaking Terry was gone, banging the door behind him.

They took him to the doctor and the doctor told them he had pneumonia and ordered him to hospital. When Terry and his mother returned to the house his mother said, “It's the work he has to do—in his state. Always down there fiddling about with those old cars. It's too much. If he'd got his garage this'd never have happened.” She looked at her son across the kitchen table and slowly picked up her cup of tea.

Terry said nothing. Across the table, above the teapot and the sugar bowl, his gaze met his mother's and held, her dark eyes and his cold blue ones, naked through the sparse yellow lashes, and a still, controlled current passed between them, and perhaps a message was passed as well, but no further word was spoken.

The bout of pneumonia was no worse than others he had had before, but it kept him in hospital for rather longer than they expected. And the longer he remained the more Terry's determination to get even hardened. Now that he could believe there was a positive need for action the tangled skein in his thoughts, the abrasive element, vanished. The way seemed clear again, the means as simple as he had thought. He went unobtrusively about the garden again and paid a visit to the new look-out. And he summoned Joe for a consultation.

When it was finished Terry knew a lot more about the bridge than he had before. Careful details began to put flesh on the bones of his plans. On his way to or from the hospital he paid several visits to the hardware shop. Even then the plans might have been stillborn, for he found a certain satisfaction just in making them and he might have simply gone on making plans only for the pleasure of it—except for Mrs. Nicholson.

She shared her son's conviction—indeed, she had passed it on to him—that Fate had been unusually, abnormally, hard on the Nicholsons and that society owed them more than a little. Mr. Nicholson's ill health, Terry's failure to find a job, her own constant effort to make the money stretch far enough was all due to the callous behaviour of “them.” One should fight ones' own battles, and so she told Terry.

“We need that bit o' land, Terry,” she said one day. “Your dad'll never be well as things are. We got to have it somehow.”

He only nodded and left the house. The latent feelings within him were beginning to be latent no longer. When he thought of his father now he was astonished to discover that he had actually begun to feel sorry for him. What his mother had said had been the green light. Mr. Lovett might have called it a trigger. But it had been released in a way that was new to him. And now he proposed to act. His mother and justice were both on his side. He summoned Joe again, and this time when Joe went away he went with a rather white face and eyes that no longer met the eyes of other people.

In the second week of Rupert's activities the weather began to change—almost imperceptibly at first but more noticeably as the days went on. On the first day the only indication was the very thin film of cloud that slowly began to spread over the bright blue of the sky. It was so thin that the sunshine was hardly dimmed—only a little of the brightness had gone from the day. There was no wind. On the second day the film of cloud was slightly thicker, and Catherine, settling herself out of sight behind the hide that Rupert had erected, said, “There's less sunlight today. Will it make photographing more difficult?” Rupert said that actually it was rather better, so the still-insubstantial veil of cloud was regarded with approval and forgotten.

Rupert was satisfied with the work they were doing, but he wanted to investigate every place that Catherine had marked out for him. So each day they went farther afield. Sometimes the distance that separated them from the town was not very great, but the business of negotiating the many ridges and gorges that made up the district took them by long and circuitous routes. Often the places Catherine had marked out were at the bottom of gorges, where the water was. Sometimes it was by a cliff edge where it was possible to photograph the big, straggling nest of a wedge-tailed eagle. Generally speaking, the birds of prey took them high and the little birds took them down into the gullies. Either way it seemed inevitably to require much travelling.

As the cloud cover thickened the temperature grew warmer. There was no wind, and a gathering stillness was everywhere. Up to now Catherine had been as happy, as contented, as she had ever been in her life. But as the days grew quieter an increasing restlessness took hold of her. At first she hardly noticed it. There was only the intermittent feeling that if they waited too long in one place for one particular bird they were wasting time and should be trying to photograph some rather more accommodating bird. Now and then she would say, “Rupert, do you think we had better move on? I know the bird came once, when I found this place, but will it come again? Perhaps I frightened it away.”

Rupert remained unaffected by the weather or anything else. Catherine had done her job well for him and he was finding rather more material than he had expected. He was never in a hurry and was always prepared to wait indefinitely for some elusive bird. He was satisfied with the progress he had made. The light was still adequate for his pictures and he did not even notice that the weather was undergoing a subtle but quite definite change.

But Catherine noticed it, and the uneasiness in her grew. The days were too warm. The sky for too long had been veiled by this formless but enveloping cloud that seemed to have come from nowhere and to be going nowhere. It just hung there, not in the nature of normal clouds. And for day after day there was no wind at all. There was a strange stillness about that increased as the time passed. All the bush sounds were muted. Insects stopped humming, birds that chattered and sang constantly remained silent, even the running water in the bottom of the gullies seemed to flow more quietly. Only the noises made by men—the hammering, the sawing, the various combustion engines and the everlasting highway roar continued as before. And because there were so few other noises they seemed louder by comparison. She could feel a tingling inside her and she had the strange feeling that everywhere about her as they went deep into the bush there was a tingling too. The hush about her was not the hush of sleep, of rest. It was the hushed tension of waiting. The whole bush, the birds that flew silently, the brown butterflies that sat, poised on a leaf, the trees that held their branches steady over the steep slopes, all were waiting for something to happen. And as time went on, Catherine found herself waiting also.

She was glad when they got home every night. At home all was normal. They were always made welcome when they returned and Diana hung, breathless, on their descriptions of the day's work. Mr. Hartley came and went as his business took him, Mrs. Hartley pursued her normal course, with shopping, golf, bridge and bouts of cooking. Diana without urgency continued to read the Positions Vacant in the newspapers. There was noise and chat and no sense at all of anything being out of the ordinary. Increasingly it was good to come home.

Then one day Catherine knew that it had invaded the house. No one else seemed to have noticed anything out of the ordinary, but before she went to bed on that particular night she felt again the profound but unspecified apprehension that she now felt constantly out there in the bush. That first night she slept eventually because there was no reason for feeling as she did, and in the end she convinced herself it was only over-stimulated imagination. Even if it was not the best of reasons it allowed her to sleep. The second night more specific pictures came into her mind. This was not the vague unease of the daytime. This was something clearer and more definite. The pictures were of Mr. Lovett and his garden and, somewhere in the background, of Terry and a cloudy vision of the thin strands of the bridge. And in her mind's eye she saw the strands looped over the gully beneath, swinging, frail as a cobweb between the concrete pylons. Pictures only, and no clear thoughts came into her mind at this time. But she told herself that as soon as Rupert's job was finished she would go and tell Mr. Lovett all about it as she had promised.

They were going to a new place next day, where Catherine had previously seen a flock of little lorikeets feeding off one big, flowering eucalypt. It was down near the big gorge that was encompassed by Mr. Lovett's look-out, but farther south, and the dirt road to the nearest point was long and tortuous. They planned to get there as soon after daylight as they could, when birds and animals are most hungry, and to remain there all day if necessary.

It was still too dark when they left the car to know what sort of a day it was going to be. They had a longish walk and there was no time to waste. On these days of great stillness and opaque skies it was not easy to calculate exactly when daylight would come. It was unusually warm as they set off. The air was soft, languid and heavy. Humidity down in those deep gorges where they were going would be very high and unpleasant. So far, however, there was little noticeable change from the past week—just a creeping intensification of what had gone before. They climbed down the narrowing path and Rupert, still oblivious of all things except his own object, was in excellent spirits. Sometimes he sang, sometimes he whistled, and sometimes he conversed with Catherine over his shoulder. Because everything was going well Rupert showed no sign of impatience or irritation. It seemed that nothing could disturb his good spirits. Yet Catherine was careful there should be no hitch in their plans. She had never kept him waiting again, and when sandwiches were needed they were always ready. So that he should not be disturbed she put everything else, every worry, every fear, behind her, and she managed to match his unbounded good cheer with a quiet happiness of her own.

They reached the bottom of the gully and now Catherine led him downstream, following the hurrying water until they came to a widening of the creek bed, where the water spread out, lost its impetus and gently lapped a small patch of grass, behind which, against the steep slope of the gully, towered one single white-trunked eucalypt. High above, the branches were all in blossom and among the blossoms they could hear already the chattering of small parrots. Broken blossoms and twigs kept tumbling down on to the grass.

“Will it do?” said Catherine.

“Perfect,” said Rupert in a whisper, and began to prepare for his usual long vigil. It was not possible to erect a hide, but the grassy patch was surrounded with undergrowth and he set himself up behind the thickest bush he could find and Catherine, as usual, settled herself comfortably and unobtrusively while he did so. Her part was over for the day, and in a way, this was the time she liked best, when the birds regained confidence, became used to their presence and behaved as if they were not there at all. At first Rupert had been apologetic that once she had guided him to the places where he took his photographs there was little for her to do but wait, sometimes, as now, all day. But even when it had not been necessary for them to take the car, where she could have walked back and let him follow when he was ready, he found that she preferred to stay.

“It's not necessary for you to wait,” he had said more than once. “I can find my way back from here. It's so boring for you, just sitting there.”

But she had always said she liked watching the birds and would prefer to stay with him. Now, when they had come so far, it was not possible for her to return, even if she had wanted to.

She did not want to, though as the days had gone by and this surreptitious thickening of the cloud cover had persisted, she had found the peace she had formerly felt somehow leaching away as the cloud developed. She tried to recapture it, willing herself to relax, telling herself that as Rupert did not feel it too, it must be all her imagination. She sat now down near the water where the grass was longer and leaned against a boulder. From here she could see both up and down the gorge. The steep and rocky slopes towered over her on either side and it would be some time yet before the sun was high enough, if it intended to shine at all today, to penetrate this deep cleft in the land. But downstream, where it was possible to see the flat-topped hills still with the deep blue haze of the gullies dividing them, the light was brighter, though even there the sun did not shine. She looked upstream. The sides of the gorge seemed to reach into the sky, almost overhanging the narrow cleft through which the water ran. Across the gap between them crows, currawongs and sometimes a magpie flew, and the crows cawed in the desolate way that crows do, as if there were no hope in the world anywhere. Here and there a towering bastion of rock jutted out into the empty space and on one of them, with a sudden thud of her heart, she saw the new look-out. Now that her attention was attracted and held she found that she could see the old look-out with its stone parapet just behind it. Behind the look-out would be the garden, reaching up the slope, its tall trees quiet in this silent early morning. And somewhere among them would be Mr. Lovett. But from here she could not see the garden.