Eucalyptus (25 page)

While the Frenchman's wife waited and slowly became more silent the daughter grew tall into her teens; sometimes she would study her face in the mirror for possible signs of her far-distant father.

As for the wife, she feared he would no longer recognise her when he returned.

In less than a year he had stopped sending photographs. He explained he was moving about in difficult country, ‘extended wilderness of sand and hardwood', as he put it. Over long periods there were no letters at all. The letters that did arrive to his wife were on grubby paper, written in blunt pencil. Both she and her father wondered what was going on. He seemed to have been swallowed by the desert.

Then at last—after more than fifteen years had passed—he wrote to say he was returning home. He had sent his luggage ahead, saying he would follow.

There was much relief and excitement in France. The now elderly father-in-law was on hand to supervise the unpacking of the trunks. There was the camera, its tripod and cape. Grimly he noticed the boxes of unused photographic plates. From other trunks he unwrapped a few boomerangs, as well as an authentic woomera and a bark painting. There was personal clothing, and a pipe, which his wife took into their bedroom. There was a bow tie and a shaving mug. Some books. A fine coating of red dust over everything, which left little pyramids on the carpet, suggested they had been a long time in storage.

As the wife waited for him to make his appearance she suffered a series of small illnesses, like the aftershocks of a strong earthquake. Fifteen years of waiting had been hard; she had lived more the life of a widow than a wife. And now he would be returning as a different man; even his skin would not have the smoothness she remembered. She kept returning to their marriage photograph to check his appearance. And she constantly examined herself in the mirror and tried on shoes and old dresses.

The daughter too was interested in her father's return. She was doing well at school. To her, he was a stranger, simultaneously close yet distant, with precious little form or shape; a ghost.

In their different ways they waited.

Again months passed, and more.

Years later when she was finely wrinkled (as if someone had draped a net over her face) and her daughter had moved to a job in Brussels, she discovered her young husband had died at a place near Cloncurry—and also that she was very rich.

He had wandered off the beaten path; moved away from his original aims.

In Australia he was constantly embarrassed. In his travels into the interior, then back to the coast and the cities, he encountered people who were invariably
types
, difficult types, insistent types.

He went everywhere with a dictionary in his pocket. So many strangers welcomed him into their shacks and tents with open arms.

In Sydney at a boarding house for men, near the harbour, he met a bearded man who made a powerful impression. Here was a man who had committed a mistake, something about a daughter—refused to give details—and could no longer look himself in the face. For more than thirty years he had successfully avoided all mirrors. He stayed mostly indoors, and even refused to see his daughter in case he saw something of himself in her. Needless to say, he could no longer be sure of what he now looked like. While his clothes were exceptionally neat his face was a congestion of lines which moved like the spokes of an umbrella when he talked. Whatever the merits in what he was attempting it had a degree of philosophical difficulty that demanded respect.

The more the young Frenchman was diverted from his mission on behalf of the ethnographical museum the more flimsy did his presence seem. He had no difficulty in seeing the shadows of photography as a form of chemical theft.

The actual earth, the flora and fauna, simply had more substance.

What happened to him became legend itself. In his second year, alone in the backblocks of western Queensland, he happened to stub his foot on a jutting rock. The rock glittered, and when he found others he said something aloud in French. He could not believe what he saw. On the site now is an enormous silver mine, illuminated at night, working around the clock every day. Such accidental discoveries were still possible then in the New World.

His unexpected death a few days before returning to France was just as casual, accidental too.

All along his widow had lived with her own precious silver deposit, a photograph, smaller than her hand, of him standing beside her larger father in serge; it was then he moved from the tree and turned to Ellen, shielding his eyes, she now remembered.

• 36 •
Baileyana

ALTHOUGH SHE
wandered over the many different surfaces of her room, where her eyes had rested many times before, Ellen never tired of it. All was muted and soft, a comfort. The air of worn familiarity offered important soothing qualities, it seemed.

Yet Ellen tossed and slid about throughout light and dark, from one end of herself to its opposite.

She was both calm and agitated; suffered extended lassitude; in the next breath, restlessness. There has to be a stout medical term for this up and down and contradictory sliding-across condition.

Although she lay in bed she remained unrested. Although she welcomed the sun and its warmth, as well as the many faint sounds of the outside world, she would suddenly from her pillows picture a tree, and feel a hatred of trees, of all her father's trees. She never wanted to see another sprig of drooping khaki leaves ever again. She could no longer face the world. How could she go on living on the property?

In this mood Ellen went back over her clothes, tried on her shoes. She went back to the almost bare shops in Sydney, where the thin women in black had served with their noses tilted. Then she had a sudden mad impulse to give all her good clothes away, including the cream dress with white buttons and her red shoes. At night she woke up talking or at least with her mouth wide open, while during the day she remained in bed with scarcely a word. Her temperature rose, she went into decline. It was simply beyond her strength to halt the decline, which sometimes imitated a physical movement, such as slowly sliding off the end of the bed, into nothing; nor, at that stage, did she care.

A man drowning in a bucket was a terrible dream she had (and what could that possibly represent?).

Until her illness, her father out of some unspoken tact had never entered her room; and now he was sitting at the end of the bed for hours at a stretch, or else popping his head around the door to see if she was all right.

Some afternoons she opened her eyes to find several men seated beside her bed, watching her.

The old doctor in his linen jacket was a regular; Ellen saw how his face, marbled by the morning light, looked unhappily out of time and place. Reading her temperature, and asking the same questions, he tapped a fingernail on his teeth. He sat there a good hour or more. Ellen liked it when he began humming.

Ha! To cheer her up her father enquired in his finest wheedling voice, ‘I don't suppose a man is allowed to have a smoke?' And by the time she could begin to nod, let alone imply a memory-laden smile, the match had flared—there's a deeply geological sound.

Meanwhile, Mr Cave moved in with his brown suitcase, hat and hair brushes to one of the spare rooms. He was in the house all day, clearing his throat. Part of the family, more or less, he felt comfortable with his rights. He was patient.

Still, he was beginning to wonder if this drama had anything to do with him. After all, the naming of more than five hundred trees was not as easy as it looked. (Dozens had been spirited away from the most obscure corners of Australia.) And as the number of successfully ticked-off names accumulated, the dark cluster of shifting-about names took on an almighty weight and height, like a library about to keel over. He could feel it himself. Once past the halfway mark the greater would be his public fall! Ellen's future too depended on his success or failure; she would have been on edge, obviously. It could have affected her health.

On the last day he had stumbled. As he made his way with Holland up the gravel drive, naming each tree, left and right, a monarch counting up his loyal subjects, he saw ahead the front door, which represented victory with all its associations of ownership, warmth and entry: perhaps that was it. For Mr Cave wandered. He had a hybrid stringy-bark in his mouth and on the tip of his tongue, but did a double-take on the leaves—to this day he doesn't know why—and correctly switched to the tree known for its fifteen different vernacular names,
E. dealbata
. Holland saw how close he had come to falling.

In the kitchen munching on a biscuit Mr Cave asked if Ellen's illness could possibly be related to him. Holland spoke sharply, ‘I don't think so. Nothing is one.'

So Mr Cave waited, anxious to help. Knocking on her door, for example, and bringing in tea on a tray could be seen as an example of his good intentions.

It is not normal for a body to remain horizontal; beyond a certain length of time it attracts concern. Death and burial (‘laid to rest') are seen as the natural horizontal states, which is surely why the calculated falsity of perpendicular deaths, such as hangings, crucifixions, burnings at the stake, etc. produce such indelible shock.

News of Ellen's continuing horizontality had a procession of concerned citizens calling and depositing homemade jams, boiled fruitcakes and flowers, and plenty of homespun advice. Few of them had been inside the dark homestead before.

Every morning the doctor arrived, but still he couldn't give a name to the illness.

The Sprunt sisters took the opportunity of looking around Ellen's room, and taking in the darkened lounge room, and the butcher's wife began bossing Holland about in the kitchen, until he told her to clear out. Otherwise Holland didn't know what to do. The postmistress sent a steady stream of cards, while Mrs Brain from the hotel dropped in two bottles of Adelaide stout. Someone else left a new calendar—another Ghost Gum, with sheep and the usual slack fencing.

In the town the only question asked of Holland concerned his daughter. Women admired Ellen; no difficulty there. They wanted her back on her feet. To have such a beauty in the district somehow reflected favourably on them.

To Mr Cave a woman lying in bed during daylight represented a complete mass of confusion and mystery.

Sometimes he and Holland sat by the bed together. Ellen showed no inclination to talk, turning slightly away when Mr Cave came forward with some extra-special eucalyptus oil, said to cure everything under the sun.

All Mr Cave could offer was patience, which is a variety of kindness.

One morning a pause stretched into an awkward two hours or more, no sign of Holland, so Mr Cave idly picked up the weeping milkmaid from the bedside table. He nodded thoughtfully, ‘Made in good old Austria…'

With blunt persistent fingers he tried turning the key. ‘Don't…' Ellen whispered.

There was a loud snapping sound: this man had broken the wind-up mechanism. And Ellen wept.

From then on Ellen's decline became steeper. No one could do anything. She herself was a ribbon floating down from a height to the earth where it would rest, possibly forever. In her weakness Ellen felt a dangerous contentment.

She was losing her beauty.

The doctor now wondered whether to call in a distinguished colleague, unless he had migrated to America.

The butcher's wife returned this time with other women and, with Mr Cave looking on, urged Holland to send the patient straightaway to Sydney. At this Ellen shook her head almost violently, and closed her eyes.

It was one of those illnesses without a name. She could only be brought back to life by a story.

• 37 •
Approximans

A CHAIR
was placed beside the bed for men to sit and tell their stories.

The advantage of this was that from the story-teller's chair they could roam with their eyes unhindered all over Ellen's speckled face, which in normal circumstances reduced the strongest men to mumblers and shufflers.

Too old to do much about feminine beauty the doctor began by telling Ellen about some of his more curious surgical cases. It was as though he was talking to himself, not really addressing her, and Ellen too drifted off. After he left, Ellen almost fell to the floor as she went to close the French windows. Normally before returning to bed she would look at herself in the mirror, perhaps run a brush through her hair; but she went straight back and faced the wall.

The young locals no doubt at the insistence of their mothers sat in the chair and rattled off anecdotes about pig-shooting, and snakes of impossible length and ferocity they'd come across. Exaggerations, they have a useful part in the telling process. At least Trevor Traill launched into the adventures of his great-uncle, born so far inland he joined the merchant navy the day he turned sixteen, and went around the world. The family congregated when he returned. The first thing he did on staggering ashore, according to family legend, was to go down on his knees and
kiss a pig
.

It was the same with the very decent schoolteacher. He came in on tiptoe and read to her from a British history book, and when asked if she wanted more of the same tomorrow she appeared to shake her head.