Tirra Lirra by the River (20 page)

I am more on my guard than ever, almost suspecting by now a posthumous stratagem of Grace’s to convert me at last to her
strenuous ways. ‘I am quite certain,’ I say, ‘that it looks much better without beds of any kind at all.’

But Betty agrees at once. ‘I think so, too. It’s like a little wild park, isn’t it? This mound here, what you called the hilly country, this was her compost heap. It’s all tumbled down now, but it was quite elaborate, with a louvred shelter and everything. Peter had the structure taken away, and he said something to Jack about having the ground levelled out.’

‘Not in my lifetime.’ The mound is covered with nasturtium leaves, some as big as small plates, though not one flower is visible. I bend and pick a bunch of the smaller leaves. ‘I am very fond of these in a sandwich, with a little cottage cheese.’

‘She did work hard here,’ says Betty in rather a wistful voice.

‘I can see that she did. And in those two back rooms as well.’

‘They were the last things she did. She was so strong-willed.’

‘Always. And so busy.’

‘Yes, always.’

‘I intend to make those two back rooms my quarters.’

‘They were hers. She slept on that verandah.’

‘What, in that glass box?’

‘Winter and summer.’

‘But the moonlight!’

‘There are dark green blinds. Perhaps she drew them. I don’t know.’

Betty now seems sad and troubled. We turn from the hillock and retrace our steps down the path. I am watching my feet, because the stone here is uneven. ‘Was she happy?’ I ask.

Betty, walking beside me with her arms folded, gives the question her consideration. I sit on the white iron seat under the mango tree, and in imitation of some remembered gesture, raise my bouquet of green leaves with a flourish to my nose.

‘No,’ replies Betty.

Beside me on the ground is a shallow earthenware dish.
Betty picks it up and goes to fill it at the nearby tap. ‘No,’ she says again, as she comes back and sets it down.

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t know, Nora.’

‘Did she know?’

Betty shrugs, makes a doubtful mouth. ‘She once said she did.’

‘What did she say?’

‘That for the whole of her life, she had tried to have faith, and that for the whole of her life, she had only opinions.’

I point to the dish. Unwilling to allow that Grace has touched my heart at last, I speak curtly. ‘Is that for the birds?’

‘Yes. Jack fills it when he thinks of it.’

‘I suppose the bird books are with the compost books.’

Betty gives a sort of giggle. ‘There wasn’t one she couldn’t name.’

But the course of forgiveness is evidently not easy to reverse. I cannot help but think of Grace, grim and patient under the weight of her bucket of waste, walking down the garden path on her mission of salvage and temporary renewal, an object of mockery, good-natured or otherwise, by those lacking her intensity. I rise from my seat.

‘This shade is too cold. I must go in and dress.’

‘Did Gordon Rainbow say you could dress?’

‘He didn’t say I couldn’t.’

We set out for the house, Betty adapting her steps to mine. ‘At least she found plenty to do,’ I say.

‘So will you find plenty to do, Nora.’

‘Shall I? Just at the moment I can’t think what.’

‘Your sewing. Oh, I know you can’t do that fine work any more. But you’re so clever and artistic, you can’t give up your lovely sewing.’

But she is wrong. Although I am growing stronger every
day, and although my hands, blessed by sunshine and Doctor Rainbow’s care, are more pliant than for years, I shall never sew again. During truces in my war with Gary Winston Montgomery Wilmot (which I shall win), Lyn Wilmot, so that I may advise her, cuts out dresses for her daughters on my kitchen table, and the first time she did so I knew, by my revulsion at the sound of her scissors in the cloth, that I would never sew again.

I have reduced my quarters to the kitchen, the bathroom, and Grace’s two back rooms, and unless circumstances drive me elsewhere, none of the other rooms will be opened except for professional inspection for pests. To guard against the sloth of old age, I am careful to bring to my household tasks the perseverance and discipline I once brought to my trade. Such tasks are very soon finished, and there are no other demands on my time.

Jack Cust has taught me how to use Grace’s music apparatus, and from her records I usually select something by Mozart. Who was it who said even monkeys like Mozart? I read a little, and I watch on television a documentary program on other parts of this continent—deserts, rainforests, tropical reefs, and mountains indented with snow—and realize with a quiet musing wonder, but with no discontent, that this shadow is all I shall ever see of them. To familiar places in London, seen on the same small screen, I respond with a detached interest that begins to contain a touch of incredulity.

‘Once upon a time, a woman whose name is of no consequence passed that place …’

At the hours stipulated by the water board, I hose Grace’s remarkable garden, but am careful to preserve my amateur attitude towards it, and when I bury my fruit and vegetable leavings instead of putting them out with the garbage, I address to Grace this warning:

‘This is absolutely as far as I intend to go.’

As Betty predicted, the garden has faded from that first stained-glass intensity with which it glowed to greet me, but it is still far greener than the land about it, and night confers on it another kind of richness. I sleep in Grace’s glass room, and whenever I rise to draw the blinds against the moonlight, I am enthralled by the brilliance of the scene, the soft yet sharp delineation of the grass, the nasturtium leaves like floating silvery discs, and the weight and mystery of the black shadows. From my elevated look-out I see a low-flying bat cross the grass, drawing nearer and nearer its own shadow until both bat and shadow fly into the denser shadow of the mango tree. The shadow of the mango tree absorbs everything within its margin but the white iron seat, which stands glimmering all night, its arms held ready, like the ghost of a seat in a city park.

Not only bats drink from the earthenware dish under the mango tree. In the daytime I sit on the white seat and watch the birds. One little flock, brown and grey, with yellow beaks, comes so close that I am able to observe in detail the suavity and direction of their plumage. ‘They are beyond compare,’ I think. But in ten minutes or so, they begin to bore me.

Though I like to go in the Custs’ car to the library and the supermarket, I resist their suggestions (without knowing why) of drives to ‘beauty spots’. Doctor Rainbow, when he comes to see me, often sits for a while in the glass room. At first I felt we were on the verge of unusual questions, but this tension soon relaxed of its own accord, and now he simply sits, and talks of trivial things, and then gets up and goes on his way.

But one day he said, ‘You should go out more.’

‘Where to?’

‘Isn’t there anywhere you would like to go?’

To please him, I shut my eyes and pretend to think. I see cool brown water, and I open my eyes and say with surprise, ‘I should like to see the river.’

‘Then walk to the river. It’s not far.’

That night I spread Mrs Partridge’s celestial embroidery under the light, examine it for the last time, then wrap it in brown paper and secure it with adhesive tape. The next day I take my stick and set out. If Mrs Partridge cannot be disturbed, I shall leave it with her companion.

But though certain I am walking in the right direction, I get lost among all the modern houses. Why, the very conformation of the old paddocks has gone. And when at last I come to Mrs Partridge’s house, I am not sure that it is indeed hers. Was it so brown, so dark, so low among bamboos? And where is the river that ran behind it? Beyond this house there are only roofs. When I knock, some creature, bird or lizard, bursts startlingly through the bamboo, then the resonance of my knock sinks into silence.

Still, I will walk by the river.

But nor can I find the river. And from whom can I ask directions? Two women, standing with folded arms talking on a driveway, go into the house just as I am about to hail them. And everyone else is in cars. These cars, so continuously and swiftly passing, change me from a walker to a pedestrian. I am the only pedestrian in all these streets.

I turn back the way I came, and as I make my way past fences and fancy letter-boxes, carports and garages, paved terraces and blue swimming pools, I must frequently swerve to avoid the huge dusty leaves, from monsteras and umbrella trees and the like, that hang over footpaths. How relieved I am to turn a corner and see, at the end of the next block, ‘the big white corner house with the poinciana trees’.

‘Gordon Rainbow should have told you,’ says Betty Cust, ‘that nowadays the river is accessible only in a few places.’

‘Houses all along,’ says Jack. ‘Waterfrontages. Cost a fortune.’

The house I thought was Mrs Partridge’s had belonged to
somebody else, but had been bought by developers and was about to be demolished. Shaking my head in bafflement, I laugh, and proffer the wrapped embroidery to Betty Cust.

‘Please,
you
return it.’

They bring a tray of tea to the verandah, and as we drink it I describe in exaggerated terms the blows dealt to me by the monsteras.

‘In my day,’ I say, ‘plants in these parts were not so tropical.’

‘Everybody grows those things now,’ says Jack. ‘We grow them ourselves.’

And indeed, at the other end of the verandah, I can see the dark leaves climbing one behind the other, casting on the timber a shadow perforated by tear-shaped fragments of sunlight.

‘Only natural,’ says Jack. ‘And eucalyptus, too. And tea-trees. Everybody grows them now.’

‘Remember the things the old people grew,’ says Betty.

‘Mum’s flowers,’ says Jack. ‘Larkspurs, hollyhocks.’

‘Candytuft,’ muses Betty, ‘columbines, pinks …’

‘I reckon the old people fought the place,’ says Jack. ‘They fought it.’

Well, it is too late now for me to learn not to fight it. The short walk home seems long and dusty. I see myself, as if from above, walking headlong and wildly plying my stick. It is with strong feelings of relief and finality that I reach my own domain. Goodbye, woman who used to walk, girl who used to walk. I shut another door.

The period of waiting I have now entered on resembles the first of all because once again I am waiting without panic, and with leisure at my disposal. I have had a letter from Olive. She is coming home soon to see her mother, and her mother’s companion having told her that I am here, she proposes also to see me.
‘That is,’
she writes,
‘if you wish me to
.’ I take down her last novel and look at her photograph on the back of the jacket.
How fine she looks, how stately and authoritative. No doubt I shall still annoy her. ‘
Yes, do come
,’ I reply. ‘
We shall sit and quarrel under my mango tree
.’

I write a weekly letter to Hilda and Liza, and receive their replies with pleasure, but it is useless to deny that an awareness of permanent severance keeps our letters in a low key, and imbues them slightly with tiredness. They, at least, have each kept one of their former audience of three, and poor Fred, wherever he is, no doubt finds hearers for his tales of persecution. I find myself thinking that we were all great story-tellers at number six. Yes, all of us, meeting in passages or assembling in each other’s quarters or in the square, were busily collating, and presenting to ourselves and the other three, the truthful fictions of our lives.

I am often lonely for that audience, and yet, if it were possible to return and regain it, I would not go. An audience, especially so sympathetic an audience, imposes restrictions I now wish to do without.

‘What do you do with yourself all day long?’ asks Lyn Wilmot, as I show her how to set in a sleeve.

‘If you can do that,’ she says, showing an inclination to prod me in the arm, ‘couldn’t you make something?’

But I have made things, concocted things, all my life. Perhaps I shall do so again (and indeed there are times when I do prefigure some small hand-made object), but at present my concern is to find things. My globe of memory is in free spin, with no obscure side, and although at times in its swelling and spinning it offers the queer suggestion that imagination is only memory at one, or two, or twenty, removes, my interest now is in repudiating, or in trying to repudiate, those removes, even if it ends by my finding something only as small as a stone lying on pale grass.

I believe I have found the river—the real river I disregarded
on my first walks and failed to find on my last—because never before have I seen its scoured-out creeks nor known that the shadows of its brown water are lavender at evening. And one day, rising on stairs, fourteen broad planks, I see from above the two discs of a straw boater, a man’s shoulders, trousered legs. Coming closer, knees rising, left-right, left-right. At arms’s length now, hat tilts back, face is raised, arms fly out, gather me in. And out of that flurry, a child’s shriek, rising.

‘Hold me tight!’

But still, his face is as static as the face in his photograph.

I am almost angry that there continues to flash on my memory that old chimera, the step of a horse, the nod of a plume, and that always, always, it is accompanied for a second by a choking chaos of grief. But one evening, when I have sat too long under the mango tree, and I turn my head and see the first whiff of darkness extend along the grass and deepen the pockets of foliage, I remember a black cloth. A black dress, dropped over my head from above. It passes over my aching eyes, my swollen mouth, and is arranged on my shoulders by someone whose waist is at a level with my eyes. I stare at the buckle of her belt, mother-of-pearl, until it dissolves in wetness and flashes with long stars, pink and sea-green stars. The same wetness diffuses the darkening grass of Grace’s garden, and then out of a moment of groping, of intense confusion, comes the step of a horse, the nod of a plume, come the plumed heads of the curbed horses at my father’s funeral.