by David Brooks
Sophia. Sophia Panatopoulos. And when Sophia asked this scrawny girl, this strange, bent child, who had sobbed so long then fallen asleep on her lap – so deeply and so heavily and so much as if she had never had such a place to sleep before that Sophia could not help but take her home to feed her up, to try to get her over whatever it was that was breaking her – the girl said her name was Sim, just Sim, as if that were all, or enough, as if she were a thing, a wisp, a whim of nature.
Part 3
9
The Mountains and the Plain
(1895–1902)
Angus Fisher Anderson met Katherine McKenzie on Bronte Beach on the sixth of January 1895. It was, as he found occasion to inform her that day and to marvel at later, the Feast of Epiphany. She had come down from the Blue Mountains – where it was unbearably hot and still and the inescapable drumming of the cicadas had threatened to stretch her mind to snapping-point – hoping to paint in a different atmosphere, with a sea-breeze to keep the mind free. In the late afternoon, when the heat of the Sydney day had begun to ease a little, she had set up her easel beside a large rock on the grassy slope above the sand and the scattered crowd of bathers and picnickers and perambulators, but had been growing increasingly exasperated with a small but swelling group at the south end, near the rocks, spoiling as it did the easy and random distribution that had first caught her eye with its natural, spontaneous balance. After a time, her concentration disrupted, she asked an elderly couple who had been sitting on a shaded bench close by, watching her and showing no signs of moving, whether they would mind keeping an eye on her things while she walked a little. And she went down to see.
It was an evangelist of sorts, although as far as she could tell an evangelist more concerned with ecclesiastical bureaucracy than hell-fire and the saving of souls or the glorious spirit of the gospels. He was talking about a new church for Australia – at first she thought it was the New Church of Australia – which did not yet exist, and which this gentleman appeared to have come up with all on his own. If it could be made to exist, he claimed, it was a Church – one could tell from the way he spoke it that the word began with a capital letter – which might break away from what he called the leaden, retardative grip of the Churches of Europe, with their antiquated and repressive ideas and administrations, and conduct the Work of the Lord in ways more suited to the needs and climate and temperaments of the Australian Colonies and the great new nation they were shortly and most certainly about to form. The idea, she could see, had its virtues, if he did express it in words that showed a certain lack of experience of the very colonies he was talking about, but perhaps this was not his principal drawing-card, since the small crowd, predominantly of women and young girls, seemed to have gathered as much to bear witness to the young man’s stature and striking handsomeness. For he must have been at least six feet two inches tall, with broad shoulders, slim but muscular thighs, a crop of wild black hair and a pair of burning black eyes that, with his bright, rolled shirtsleeves and generous black cravat, loose and drifting about with the breeze, made him seem strangely on fire, albeit with a peculiar, dark flame. All he needed was a generous, shovel-shaped beard and he would look like an artist’s archetype of The Australian Explorer, or else the late lamented Ned Kelly.
She found herself – mischievously, as if she would test his concentration, or perhaps it was to demonstrate something to the rest of the crowd – catching his eye and holding it as he spoke, and for all his continuing dedication to his subject he must also have watched her, moving away again before he had finished, resuming her work at her easel, for twenty minutes later, the small crowd disbanded, he made his way up the gravel path slowly but nonetheless almost directly to her, like a fish hooked and being drawn in slowly, on an invisible line.
For fear that he wouldn’t, it was she who spoke first. Attachments even then were sometimes easier and more spontaneous than history suggests – particularly, let us say, between a young man who had only recently come out to New South Wales, on his own, and a young woman almost exactly his age, who had yet to move permanently back home to the country four years after leaving boarding school, and who was still officially staying with friends, becoming a painter in development of a talent that friends and family alike had always known she had but which the latter, uncomfortable with it at the best of times, found easier to appreciate at a distance. An unpredictable and unsettling talent, coming from nowhere one could readily see in her otherwise even and optimistic, sometimes almost radiant disposition.
‘Angus Anderson!’ she exclaimed. ‘But surely Angus is a Scottish name, and your accent isn’t Scottish!’
‘Scots, if I might respectfully correct you. And no, I am not Scots, but one of my grandfathers was. I’ve got his name only because I’ve got two elder brothers, and they got the names of the other, William and Otto, from William Otto Freeland, né Friedland I believe. There was a bit of Hanover in the family also, a long way back.’
They talked, for almost an hour until the wind picked up, threatening to overturn the easel and ruin her painting. He then helped her carry her things the short distance back to the Edwards’, with whom she was staying. By the time he left her at the gate, with an abrupt exchange of addresses and an awkward handshake, it was with the clear if also tacit agreement that they would somehow see one another again, if not in Sydney before she left again for the mountains, then up there in Katoomba where she could show him the great cliffs, the immense valley, the rainforest gullies she had just begun to tell him about.
It was a long walk home to his lodgings in Darlinghurst. He stopped at sunset in a small Greek café – rather surprised to find such a thing in the antipodes – and ate ravenously, surprised at how good the food was and how hungry he had been. The evening was a hot and humid one, and well advanced by the time he arrived at his cramped, close room. No breeze was possible when he tried to arrange it, through the one small window opening not, as it might at least have done on such a night, onto the stars but almost directly onto the brick wall of the building next door. The attraction between them – for he was daring to think it so – having been so strong, it was perhaps not surprising that in the restless darkness that followed, her eyes and voice and sometimes words played so much on his mind, or that by the next morning they had become, or brought about, something very like a decision. And she herself could not truthfully have claimed great surprise – although she attempted to show it – when at much the same hour as she had first seen him the day before, she encountered him again on the beach where she herself had gone, with a similar alacrity, to finish her painting.
The conversation of the afternoon before continued as if it had never been interrupted, although could be a little longer now, since the wind held off and he was not – as she put it – soap-boxing. She told him more about the Blue Mountains, and asked him about the mountains of Wales, which he had visited not long before he had left for Australia. He told her about the heights, the mist, the ruggedness and solitude, the lonely fortifications, the dry-stone walls of the crofts, the things that they suggested to and about the spirit. She told him of her dreams as a painter, her excitement at the new schools and developments, but of her reservations too, her conviction that there was so much further to go, and that what she called the inner shape of the Australian landscape, and the Australian light, would themselves show the way if enough could be made to happen that could change our eyes. And it could be made to happen, of that she was convinced, with the right techniques, the right corrective lenses. The Blue Mountains, she said, were called so because of the way the light changed as it passed through just such a lens: the billions of tiny droplets of oil released by the eucalypts that covered the range. It was a thing, a phenomenon, of the place.
These crowds, she said, gesturing down onto the broad crescent of sand where it was promising to be another hot summer day and the beach was rapidly filling with parasols and picnic baskets and perambulating groups – these individuals and small group
s moving about in their various ways over the sand, the grassy areas, the headland – these were not people, or people only, at least not as she was trying to paint them, but areas of colour, emotion, form, energy, and had to be reduced to these things, freed from the harder outlines of their inherited beings, before becoming, somehow (she did not yet know how, but was sure it might happen) new beings, with a greater sense of their harmony and interaction with the forms about them. Glimpsing this, or rather catching at it, sensing excitedly some application to his own preoccupations, he told her of the way, within his very first weeks in the country, he had begun to feel something similar – that it was not a place to be taught, but to be learnt from, although people perhaps first had to be taught how to learn – and that its brooding heat, the strange quietness of the bush about the place where he had first stayed (it was on the other side of the harbour, in Mosman) had seemed to precipitate a crisis that had begun, he thought, in the weeks of staring at the ocean on the journey out, its enormity, the absolute indifference that had made the first glimpse of Western Australia something more, a promise, some kind of challenge, to a new beginning. And of how he had taken leave from that place and from the Church he had come out to serve, and for months had been working in isolation on a new dream, a new vision. By the time dusk caught up with them they had walked more than once the entire length of the long path that divided the beach from the grassy slopes above it, and had been sitting on a wooden bench within sight of the abandoned easel, under one of the giant Moreton Bay figs longer than either could have said. They made a hasty agreement when they realised the time, and packed up her easel and case again and walked again to the Edwards’ gate, to meet once more two days later, for tea in the City. It would be her last day in Sydney, and she had not yet visited the Domain, which she tried to do every time, nor gone for a walk to Mrs Macquarie’s Chair.
They met, and ate, and walked a great deal about the City headlands in the late afternoon and on into the dusk, and then into the strong early moonlight. It was a warm, silver evening, and many couples like themselves, and numerous solitary walkers, were out enjoying the breeze from the harbour and the scents of the dark foliage. The huge trees offered deep shadow. Wide lawns disappeared into darkness. Eventually, their talk becoming quieter, more intimate, they found themselves sitting on the coat that he had spread, then lying back on the grass, their fingers at first touching tentatively, as if of their own volition, beneath or beyond the conversation, separately, and then their hands, their lips, in the new darkness under the huge boughs, becoming unexpectedly and intensely affectionate, as perhaps could be expected to happen to two young people of just over twenty-two more confused and lonely than either of them, keeping up the appearances they seemed to feel they had to, would ever admit by daylight. When at last they separated, when they were able – when it had finished, the blind heat of it, shocking them suddenly with the chill in the night air, the emptiness of the gardens – it was as much with fright and embarrassment as with wonder, in the sudden desertion of words, the need, as quickly as possible, to be away.
It was with some urgency, too, barely disguising her almost abject terror, that she wrote to him from Mount Apex some three months later – it was not the first letter between them – when denial had succumbed to a surreptitious medical opinion, to ask him to come up to visit her in order, and this was the part that she did not say, that she could see him, face to face, and know his reaction when she told him she was going to have his child.
The outcome was not quite what she had anticipated. Shock she had expected, certainly, and very probably dismay, but she had also dared hope for some acquiescence, particularly from someone supposedly so principled as he. She had not expected argument, or that he would return so abruptly to Sydney – to think, as he put it – leaving nothing resolved, nor any promise that he would try to do so. But he did think, and did make plans. Although he had certainly intended to find work in Australia, he had not intended to do so immediately, but rather to stay in Sydney only a little while longer before visiting Melbourne. He had not thought to be committed so soon. Even once Katherine had appeared, had happened – even once he had begun to dream, as he had readily admitted he had – he had thought that there would be time, to decide whether it was time, after all. Now, instead, he applied for a position at a boys’ school in Parramatta. In his letter of application he said that he was soon to be married, having accepted that there was no other possibility. It clearly shocked him again then, when he returned to Mount Apex the following Saturday, to find that she too had come to a decision, but of an opposite nature. He was evidently not ready for marriage, she said, and her painting, which mattered to her more than he might have thought, might just survive an unexpected child, but would surely not withstand a reluctant husband as well. It might be easier for friends and family to accept an illegitimate child as a product of her own mad, artistic temperament – for I am mad, she said, I now think I am mad – than she herself could accept the ignominy of a late, desperate and unannounced marriage. Perhaps too, though she did not say it, if ever they were to come together for a thing so permanent as marriage, it were better if he came after a longer time, and as much as possible of his own free will. Far from the horror with which he had at first reacted, he now found himself begging her for what he had himself initially refused.
In time – a few weeks regaining at least in his own mind a measure of confidence and control – he came to accept her position, almost as a test he might impose upon himself. It was perhaps for this reason, rather than as an attempt to persuade, that he brought her the ring: a rich, dark ruby set in filigreed gold, as a kind of surety, a proof to himself as much as to her that the feelings he had spoken of existed. But she greeted it only with fury, took it from him on the bush track where they stood this time, since certain conversations were impossible where she was staying, and flung it into the creek below them, without apology even when, a week later, they might each have said they had resolved the matter, that they had reconciled.
It was a stalemate of sorts that lasted until the pregnancy -and Katherine’s stubbornness – could no longer be disguised. Reassured as they seemed to be by the thought that the father had wanted to marry, and that the decision not to do so had been Katherine’s own, her friends in Mount Apex, Mrs Randall and her daughter Sarah, were more accepting than she had dared imagine. They found a cottage nearby that Angus could rent for her, where she could paint and he could visit if he wished to. He in his own turn was appointed to the position at Parramatta, somewhat closer to the Blue Mountains than Sydney, and found himself not only able but wanting to visit whenever he could. And in his comings and goings that winter, walks on the cliff paths, long evenings by the fire, the decoration of the cottage and preparations for the child, a deeper bond was formed that grew out of and even depended upon their separateness. Both, by the time Mary was born, had come to long for that event, as something that might give them themselves again.
***
Perhaps it is possible to love too much. Certainly there were times when he feared so, and would blame himself. Legs that can barely walk as yet can hardly sustain such a burden as an adult heart might place on them. Yet for this time in his life, perhaps the only time, Angus gave himself over to loving openly, without stint – or at least to the feeling of doing so, for he was forced all the more by it to live two lives, keeping any possible knowledge of his life in the mountains separate from what now seemed the smaller and harder world of the boys’ school and the plain. It was known at the school that he had close friends in the mountains, that was all; and that he would go there every second weekend almost without fail, and sometimes between, and spend each holiday there. The headmaster, the only one who might have remembered, never alluded to the marriage plans Angus had mentioned in his application, perhaps assuming that Angus had experienced some disappointment, or some radical change of heart.
He would arrive at Mount Apex on the Friday evening, walking down from
the train past the grand tourist hotel and the few shops that had gathered around the station, along the three increasingly dimly lit streets to where a dozen or so workers’ cottages straggled down Neild Street on the edge of the village. Always, with his briefcase, he would carry some small gift, often two. And for the first hour would play with Mary while Katherine prepared a meal. Then, the baby fed and sleeping and the late meal over, Katherine would take him with a lamp out to the small shed in the garden that in daylight looked out over the great valley to the blue, blue ridges southward, to show him what she had been painting. The work had intensified since he had met her, although he knew that this had little to do with him, almost everything to do with the child; she taught him to see that a child could alter the landscape, the mood and nature and substance and composition of a tree, the fall of shadow, even when, as was usually the case, there was no child there. And they would talk about the painting, and his own work both at the school and the other, that he tried to keep up through reading and the writing-down of ideas, the seeking out of like-minded people – until, as if the talk were a set of streets or passageways that they had sometimes to feel their way down, they had found themselves again. And then at last she would take him to her bed, and her own darkness, and with the rhythms of the child’s wakings, they would wake, and sleep, and wake.
