Salvation Creek

by Susan Duncan

  There are little new potatoes, green beans, baby carrots and a salad of bitter leaves – bitter greens are good for the liver. Barbara's liver is under assault from chemotherapy and so is mine. Every little bit helps. There is no dessert. Just crisp fresh apples, pink skinned and voluptuous, and a hunk of pale yellow cheddar cheese. Ok, so cheese is not good for the liver. But it's wonderful for the spirit. Balance is what life is all about, right? Yeah, right.

  I do not know what to expect of Barbara. Have never caught even a fleeting glimpse of her. She and Bob live high above the ramshackle waterfront neighbourhood and the path from their house to their dock does not pass my home.

  When the lunch is organised, I wander onto the deck where the table is set. The day is warm enough for a T-shirt. Soon, the sun will swing around and make it feel like summer. But the light arrives late in the morning and fades early. Thin. Brittle. Watery. It's undeniably still winter.

  Bob and Barbara appear from the front of the boatshed about fifteen minutes early, walking slowly. Bob's arm around Barbara's waist. She is talking and her words float through the day. I cannot make them out and do not want to. There is an intense intimacy about the two of them. A grimy little grub of envy is born and quickly slain. I turn into the house and pull the sliding door behind me gently, so the noise won't intrude on them. But I have seen that Barbara walks slowly, stopping often as though to catch her breath. Using conversation to camouflage her little rests. By the time they reach the front door, they are perfectly punctual.

  'I'm Barbara.'

  She holds out a long, slim hand and smiles, looking directly at me. Her face is long and thin, her eyes are the kind that can be said to sparkle.

  'Come on in. It's really lovely to meet you,' I say, standing aside for her to pass.

  She comes in a few feet and looks around the room, and then she walks slowly to the sofa, easing herself carefully onto it. As though a jerky movement might hurt too much. She sniffs the meaty, garlicky air.

  'Lamb?'

  'Yeah, is that ok for you?'

  'Yes. Thank you.'

  Bob is dressed up. A T-shirt with a collar.He plonks a couple of bottles of wine on the counter, a red and white, both very good, and sinks shyly into silence.

  I rush around, filling in the empty spaces with action. Opening the white wine, peering into the oven although the covered pot can tell me nothing, hauling down wineglasses from the shelf.

  'Can you pour the wine please, Bob?'

  I lift the lid on saucepans, check under the damp tea towel to make sure the salad hasn't suddenly gone limp and curse the impulse that made me hold back from inviting a couple of extra people over to relieve the pressure of discovering a comfort zone with strangers.

  Then I fall back on the old journo's technique of asking questions to settle my nerves and their shyness:'So! How long have you two lived here?'

  Bob begins to answer. A pair of king parrots, red and emerald green, male and female, take up positions on the rail outside, like an audience in fancy dress. He struggles for the right words, his face rubbery with a quick succession of expressions.

  Barbara slides smoothly in. Bob watches the parrots as Barbara weaves her tale. 'First glimpses are often last glimpses,' she says.

  I do not understand her and must look confused.

  'How often in life do we see something that catches our attention for a moment but is never seen nor thought about again?'

  'Yes,' I say. Because it seems expected. But I have no idea where it is all leading. I move to sit on the sofa opposite her, to concentrate better.

  She is quiet for a little while, as though gathering thoughts and energy for the story she is about to begin. Her face is pale and her hair golden with coppery highlights. Her hands rest in her lap. Elegantly crossed. Looking back, I cannot remember what she was wearing that day. Perhaps because her eyes, the colour of curaçao, make the rest of her seem drab. She could hide nothing behind those eyes.Had nothing to hide. Until later, when she tried to hide the pain.

  Bob leaves his position watching the parrots and sits beside her. He takes tiny, regular sips of his wine.

  'How long ago did you come here?' I ask.

  'That first glimpse? January 28, 1993. We didn't move here until later, though.'

  'You remember the exact day!'

  'Oh yes. I'll tell you why in a moment.

  'We were bushwalking, Bob and I, along a section of the North Lovett Bay fire trail. Trying to find the public wharf,' Barbara begins.

  'The trail had become indistinct and eroded, with archways of evil lantana ready to spike unwary bushwalkers so we never found the ferry wharf and decided to retrace our steps.'

  Bob's eyebrows soar, dip and weave with his wife's words.Then his chin sinks lower into his chest. He has heard this story before, probably quite often. But he lets it run. He likes hearing his wife's voice. Perhaps he knows she has very little time left to get everything said.

  As they turned, she explains, they looked down to the water, velvety and green. Barely visible through swathes of pink flowering lantana and dense bush, Barbara saw the rear of a large old home.

  'It was the roof I saw at first. Old terracotta tiles covered with lichen. And three chimneys. There was a rigid symmetry to the lines of the house and the cream coloured bagged walls were unusual. I felt, I confess, a hint of mystery.'

  'Go on,' I interrupt, getting up. 'I've just got to get lunch ready or it will spoil.'

  'Don't worry. The story can wait until we're all sitting down.

  Bob? Could I have some water, please?'

  In the kitchen, I hand Bob a water glass and begin piling vegetables on a platter.

  'Will you carve?' I ask, after Barbara has her water.

  'Love to,' Bob replies.

  I pass him a knife and fork, and put the lamb on a large carving dish.Then I tip the clear jus from the pot into a warm gravy boat, grab plates from the warmer drawer of the oven and start loading the table with everything we need.

  'Lunch is ready,' I tell Barbara. 'Do you want to come to the table now?'

  Bob leaves the lamb and goes to Barbara, helping her get up from the sofa with subtlety. As though it is more about gallantry than giving physical support. When she is seated, he comes back to the kitchen to help.

  'Watch out for Scruff Bucket, the kookaburra,' I call to Barbara. 'He's partial to lamb and the bloody magpies will eat the nose off your face if it looks tempting enough.'

  Bob thoughtlessly pulls off a sliver of caramelised meat from the top of the leg of lamb and chews it happily. Then he realises what he's done and looks at me apologetically.

  'Sorry. Hope you don't mind. Forgot I wasn't at home.'

  I reach for a knife, slice off the textured and richly flavoured bit of meat around the knuckle. Pass it to him. His face lights up. He pops the meat into his mouth, and licks his fingers loudly. Then looks horrified again.

  'Sorry. Done it again. Keep forgetting where I am.'

  I laugh. 'I don't care if you pick up the whole leg and eat it with your fingers.'

  He moves off with the lamb. It seems mad, but I could swear he gives a little skip.

  I pick up the salad bowl. The salad, purplish radicchio and thinly sliced red onion vibrant against the white bowl, resting on the yellow-green leaves from the heart of a cos lettuce. I'd thought about throwing in the jarring red of a ripe tomato. Held back at the last minute. A lifetime of overdoing. Time to learn a little restraint. Maybe. Hopefully.

  'So you've seen the back of the house. What then?' I ask Barbara when we're all sitting down.

  Bob lays slices of lamb out on a plate as carefully as if he was arranging flowers. Adds vegetables, passes it to Barbara. All small portions. Like a child's. He does the same for me, but the portions are larger. When his own plate is ready, he sits down, raises his glass.

  'To new neighbours,' I toast.

  'I can drink to that,' Bob says.

  We all clink glasses and it feels oddly fest
ive.

  Barbara moves the food around her plate. Not eating much.

  When there's half an inch of wine left in her glass Bob tries to pour more but she waves him away.

  'So go on with your story,' I say. 'You've just seen the roof and the bagged walls.'

  'Oh yes, that's right. Well. I looked at the building and said to Bob, what a lovely looking old house.'

  She spears a little meat. Chews it slowly.

  'What did Bob say?' I butt in.

  Bob looks up from his food. 'Damp in winter. Faces south.

  Escarpment to the rear. Cold. No way.'

  'So you were looking for a place to buy as you walked the tracks around here?' I ask.

  'Uh-huh,' Barbara says. 'We'd lived in Mt Eliza in Victoria for most of our lives. Bob wanted a change. I did too. But we weren't looking for anything offshore.'

  'What we wanted to do was escape the kids,' Bob says, interrupting with a grin.

  Barbara looks at him. They smile at each other.

  'Our family had grown up and they were all doing well,' Barbara says, softening his jokey explanation. 'They didn't need us any more and we felt it was time to lead our own lives. But Bob was right about the house that day. With the escarpment hard up against the back of the building it had to be cold and damp.'

  So they retraced their steps, she says, without even a backward glance and never thought about the house again.

  'But that doesn't explain –'

  'Just give me a little time,' Barbara says, laughing at my impatience.

  'Sorry, ok. I'm always in a rush to get to the ending.'

  'In September 1993, we rented a house at Newport on the northern beaches and started searching for a home around Pittwater in earnest,' she continues. 'Our criteria was low maintenance, two bedrooms, no swimming pool, plenty of parking. We wanted a home to use essentially as a base for travelling. Which we'd been promising ourselves we'd do for years.

  'But you know how it is, first there's babies, then Bob was establishing his business, then the babies grow into teenagers and you become the taxi driver.You seem to run around frantically and it feels like it's never going to end and then one day, you look up from washing the dishes and think I've done my job as a mother, now it's time for us.

  'After a couple of months of looking at houses from one end of Pittwater to the other, we'd found nothing in our price range and we were getting desperate. So Bob and I decided to contact a local offshore real estate agent to see what was available in boat-access-only homes.'

  On a balmy afternoon in November 1993, Barbara looked at eight boat-access-only properties on Scotland Island and the western foreshores of Pittwater.

  'There were a couple of possibles on the south side of Lovett Bay,' she says. 'But it was a disappointing day. Nothing came close to the house of our dreams.'

  Late in the afternoon, Barbara climbed wearily into the real estate agent's boat to go home. There were a whole lot of brochures on the floor of the boat and she picked them up, glancing at one picture of a rather beautiful house with a long, columned verandah. The house was called Tarrangaua. Built, according to the leaflet, for Dorothea Mackellar, an icon of Australian poetry who wrote 'My Country', a poem that sums up every Australian's nostalgia for a wild, untamed landscape.

  'The real estate agent was just as tired as I was,' Barbara says.

  'But I wanted to see the house. Just out of curiosity. It was way beyond our price range. But it would be an interesting end to the day and I'd tell Bob all about it.'

  Barbara walked slowly up the sandstone steps, about eighty or so, she estimated. Out of breath, she climbed the last few steps up to the verandah and then paused. The beauty of the house and the environment was almost shocking. She put her hand on the wide, smooth balustrade at the top of the steps and looked and looked. The view across Lovett Bay and east along Pittwater towards Clareville was simply spectacular. Then she turned and faced the house.

  'Time seemed to stand still,' she says.

  We have stopped eating, Bob and I. Barbara's food, too, lies barely touched.

  'Then I stepped forward and opened the front doors, eight panes of glass in each door. They swung into a long sitting room with polished wooden floors and beams in the ceiling. I felt that glow of reaching one's place. Do you know what I mean? That warmth that runs through you when you walk into a space and feel serenity?'

  'As though you've found where you belong?' I suggest.

  'Exactly!' she says, smiling. 'Perhaps that's how you felt when you bought this house?'

  'That's another story,' I say. 'Let's finish this one first.'

  She laughs a little and sips her water.

  'When Bob returned from a business trip the following evening, I told him I had found three houses.Two were within our price range. One was a dream. I thought he would dismiss the dream immediately. It was the early nineties, not long after the stock market crash, and we were in the middle of the worst recession since the Depression in the thirties. But he was curious, I think, perhaps because he could see how I'd been entranced. So he came with me to see them all, including the dream.'

  The property on Scotland Island was basically a pull down and rebuild option, but it was a lovely piece of land with wonderful views of Pittwater. The other house was on the north facing side of Lovett Bay.

  'But Bob looked at it closely and felt it had been built too poorly. It was one of those houses that was just a bit too good to demolish but not good enough to live with.'

  And then there was Tarrangaua, with its graceful verandah and echo of a more innocent era.

  'Exactly, to the dollar, double our budget,' Barbara says.

  Bob climbed the stairway behind his wife, pausing every now and then to look across Lovett Bay. Neither of them said much, not even when they reached the house. Barbara let Bob enter the house first to wander alone for a while, through the rooms and into the back courtyard where an old rock retaining wall sprouted rock orchids and ferns. After a while, she followed her husband inside and found him standing in a small room at the eastern end of the house.

  'I could see that, like me, he felt comfortable. As though he was home,' Barbara says.

  He looked through the armies of spotted gums, some of them shedding their salmon pink bark to reveal smooth, lime green trunks.Then he turned to his wife and slipped an arm around her shoulders.

  'I always thought Shangri-La would be to be able to sit in your office and look out your window at your boat,' he said to her.

  'There was a smile on his lips. A faraway look in his eyes,' Barbara says. 'I knew then that he loved the house – not just because it was set well beyond the neighbours and surrounded by ragged bushland, but because of the atmosphere it created. There was order – but also wildness. Simplicity – but with an overriding formality.'

  Bob says: 'I found out later that the house is always referred to as Pittwater's jewel in the crown. And in a strange way, it is. Not because it's the biggest or grandest house, but because it has such . . . such presence.Yes, that's the word. Presence.'

  'But it was twice our budget and I didn't know how we could find a way to buy it,' Barbara adds.

  When she voiced her misgivings, Bob just smiled. 'Let me worry about that,' he told her. And the business of buying the house on the high, rough hill began.

  The story seems finished. The sun, by now, is hard on my back, like a warm blanket, but it shines in Barbara's eyes. I'm about to go inside to get her a hat but she continues talking and I sink back into my seat. Bob refills my wineglass and his own. Barbara waves him away from her glass.

  'There were two quite strange coincidences before we took possession of the house,' she says. 'First, we realised the house was the lovely old home that we had seen from the rear on our bushwalk the previous January.

  'Second, the contract of sale was to have been exchanged in late December but we had business commitments and a daughter's wedding in Melbourne, so we asked if the date of exchange could take plac
e on January 26. Tarrangaua was of national importance and Australia Day seemed appropriate. But it was a public holiday so the date was moved to January 28, 1994.

  'I didn't realise the significance of the date until a couple of years later when I was throwing out some old work diaries. I was amazed to discover I'd noted the bushwalk on January 28, 1993. So we took possession of this wonderful old house a year to the day from that first glimpse.'

  Barbara looks around the table at us. The story, it seems, is ended. But we are all silent for a little longer.

  'Are you happy, living there? Was it the right move?' I ask her after a while.

  'These have been the best years of my life,' she says.

  And because her life is visibly running out, there is nothing more to say. Bob reaches for her hand across the table and holds it tightly. Barbara smiles at him in a way that closes other people out, then gently withdraws her hand.

  Lunch drifts along again and we exchange information about ourselves. Bob is fifty-six years old, they have four children, love sailing, and Barbara is passionate about bush regeneration, which is why she hates that evil lantana. Bush regeneration is big on Pittwater, she tells me. It means clearing out introduced and often invasive species and giving the original Australian bush a chance to regrow.

  'It's a skill even enthusiastic bush regenerators don't always understand,' she says. 'The Australian bush is so fragile, so easily trashed. People rush in and get it all wrong and do more damage than good.'

  'Actually, Barbara, I don't know much about the bush and native plants.'

  'Not many Australians do.'

  She smiles wryly, and then looks me straight in the eye. 'Why don't you learn about it? This is the best place in the world to start.'

  I shrug, non-committal. I grew up with gardens proudly filled with plants from around the world, the kind that give you lots of cut flowers for vases and a big, colourful, perfumed spring show. To me, the Australian bush can be lacklustre, even downright unfriendly. It's full of scratchy plants that spike and lacerate and it's always dry and crackly with dead branches and spindly, struggling plants. There's usually an ants' nest right where you decide to sit down, and spiders, snakes and leeches. Magnificent in a wild way but there's not much that's lush and inviting about it at all. It's not the kind of place you'd want to wander into with a book and a blanket for a lazy afternoon. Ok in its place, in other words, but not in your backyard.