by Murray Bail
Before setting out, each suitor was invited into the house—into the parlour, no less—for a cup of tea. Holland could sit back and examine them. In a real sense the test began there and then. Coming forward to serve them was the prize herself, more speckled, certainly more beautiful than they remembered or had ever imagined, allowing a glimpse of cleavage and a shadow of what appeared to be faint consternation.
From the day her father made his decision on the marriage question she hardly knew what to say to him, or anyone. No ancient grandmother, wise mother or interested sisters were at hand to help. It hardly mattered that the eucalyptus test would sort out the contestants, wheat from the chaff and all that, a process simultaneously healthy and unhealthy, as her father put it. ‘Only a man with golden hair, a golden-haired boy out of the ordinary, is going to name all these trees—someone like your old father here,’ he had said to her.
The early suitors were all locals. At the sight of some she couldn’t help laughing, until her father said, ‘That’ll do now!’
One was a retired shearer, old enough to be her grandfather—no teeth. The town’s one and only part-time plumber put on a virtuoso display of relaxation on the floral sofa, stretching out his legs and calling for another cup of tea, only to step out the front door and fail to identify the very first tree he pointed to, the Black Peppermint, which is as common as rain. Even Holland gave a small laugh. Many who managed to reach eighty or more without a stumble were knocked out by a common roadside gum; lack of concentration, according to Holland. Another one who knew timber but not trees was young Kevin who had lost his arm working for a sawmill. Surprising how many failed to spot the single Ironbark intruder in the windbreak.
Needless to say there were men who tried to bluff, or laugh their way through, or devise delaying tactics. Such ruses which can be seen as extensions of character had served them in the past. The sore loser became angry when he lost! Others offered money. Why not? It was the full world on display, in miniature. One or two tried to enter via the side door, as it were: ‘Isn’t there some other way we could arrange this? Can’t we sit down and discuss it? What I know about gum trees would fit on the head of a pin, but I do know I’d be a good man for your daughter.’ The bank manager sent his short-sighted son. A dark stranger from another town claimed a photographic memory: accordingly the first eucalypt he had never seen before finished him. Silence was generally ingrained; only a few never stopped talking. Now and then Ellen in her room could hear a loud voice from a sloping paddock. Performers from a passing circus had heard the story of the beautiful daughter and argued for too long about drawing lots. One of the nattiest of the dangerous commercial travellers put his name forward; Holland went into town and talked him out of it.
Evidently the very idea of a test to win a man’s daughter was either nerve-racking or else altogether too strange: suitors were known to have drunk seven schooners an hour before. A country jockey fronted up accompanied by his strapper who mentioned to Ellen the jockey was already married. ‘I’ll have to take a squiz at a leaf,’ said another one. For that I’ll need a ladder.’ At the sight of these men dolled up for the occasion in a new shirt and haircut Ellen felt a faint shift into sadness, the flutter of a white bird in a cage; others came as they were; some stank. A procession; all sizes.
Ellen didn’t really like the look of any of them.
These were men willing to bypass the traditional words, whispers and hesitancies, the cajoling and the hopeful jokes and the clumsy shoulder-stroking, the incredible attentiveness which will sap a man’s energy, deliberate absentmindedness as well, which form a mosaic of necessary slowness… It allows the woman to choose the man, while giving the man the illusion it is he who has taken her. Whereas—outside the yellowish town these suitors who had arrived to line up for the test could, in a sense, reach the same goal with their backs turned, reciting facts. It wasn’t even necessary to look in her direction (the schoolteacher was the exception—his downfall).
‘Yessiree, these country types,’ Holland complained, ‘they give the impression they know the land inside out, but ask them and they can’t tell you the names of ordinary things in front of them. We can be talking here about a eucalypt that’s as common as the flies.’
It began to occur to Ellen that the degree of difficulty was so extreme only a few men on earth could name all the eucalypts; aside from her father, that is, in his dark coat. This might go on for years, with no result. And she began to relax, prematurely.
The trouble was the degree of difficulty activated one of the laws of curiosity: as each man who stepped forward failed, and the flood of suitors reduced to a trickle, the unattainability of the prize increased Ellen’s desirability still further.
Holland and his daughter were apparently oblivious to this. Now that the matrimonial question was more or less settled their visits to town resumed, where Ellen was immediately looked at and discussed with fresh calculation.
It was summer. The trunks of trees were hot. In the river, where smooth stones lay under water like pears suspended in syrup, Ellen kicked and floated, and examined her arms as she dangled her legs from the bridge.
Then a New Zealander burst through the air, striding up the drive to present himself. He had an intense moustache. His hair too was as dark as Dunedin. Before each eucalypt he stroked the moustache, and began to annoy Holland by laughing to himself as he struggled to name one of the more obscure species.
‘By God, though, he knows his eucalypts,’ Holland said with respect. ‘And he doesn’t even live here. He’s a funny one. I caught him yesterday praying by the gate, just before he was about to start.’
By the third day the New Zealander had passed the halfway stage.
It was enough for Holland to chew thoughtfully on his toast, while Ellen could hardly swallow, imagining what it would be like living every day with such a man. And she felt strange knowing word of her plight had reached people in another country. Her father couldn’t stop shaking his head at how a man on the South Island had managed to become an expert on eucalypts; a real mystery to him. Eucalypts were native to Australia and nowhere else. He would have been amazed if more than fifty different eucalypts had been transplanted in the whole of New Zealand. On the morning of the fourth day Holland was on the point of asking a few questions when the man came up against, and was defeated by, one of the many Stringybarks, a scraggy looking E. youmanii, which could easily fool a professional botanist, and he left with a relieved nod, for the first time looking into Ellen’s face.
The story of Holland and his beautiful daughter had crossed the Tasman; it travelled too up the centre of Australia, along the Stuart Highway, filling up with petrol on the way. It spread out from the highway, left and right, like the trunk and branches on a tree. As a consequence, a smiling Chinaman knocked on the door, all the way from Darwin. To Holland he gave a slight bow and said he was a merchant of fruit and vegetables.
Everything he touched made him happy. He had what are called ‘eyes as sweet as sugar’. When Ellen poured him tea he smiled, ‘Nice hand you have.’ Ellen decided he would live to a great age. (A vague feeling, rather than a physiological fact: that an energetic brain can drag the body along for a few extra yards. Long are the lives of the philosophers.)
At the same time, Ellen wondered if this happy man had experienced envy or jealousy, the confusions of loneliness—the usual mess—not to mention anything more serious, such as sudden gusts of despair.
There he was now under the guise of oriental cheerfulness sifting through his taxonomy of botanical names and fitting them to a general appearance of a tree. Naturally he was stronger on the subtropical species from the Darwin area. Taking things more cautiously than the Kiwi, now and then standing back to say, ‘Ahhhh…’ at an especially graceful specimen, such as the Flooded Gum which formed an accidental triangle with the Silver Gimlet and the double-trunked Red Mallee (E. socialis), and constantly blowing on a red handkerchief for good luck, he hardly faltered, but smile
d a little longer at difficult-to-recognise foliage.
Nine days later he was still smiling. And his mouth began to remind Holland of his own father.
‘Who’d want someone grinning like that around the house all day?’ he said to Ellen. ‘Don’t worry, he’s going to come a gutser, I can feel it. I don’t know how he’s got this far. How old would you say he was? I can’t make him out.’
It finally took a eucalypt from the southern tip of Tasmania that doesn’t look like a eucalypt at all.
The Chinaman actually tripped over it.
The Varnished Gum (E. vernicosa) is more like a shrub or a creeper. It barely comes up to a man’s knees. Buds and fruits are in threes; the varnished leaves.
The suitors were reduced to those with a professional knowledge of the subject. The idea of winning the hand of a man’s daughter by naming all his trees, and the chances of any one man succeeding, were discussed in staffrooms throughout the country. When a year passed, then almost another, and with still no winner, the difficulty of the test itself rather than the prize became more and more the attraction. These specialists in botany and forestry were like those great champions in the Olympics who preserve their strength and exert psychological pressure on their rivals by waiting until the bar has been raised to an extreme height before even bothering to compete.
Ellen watched as her father in his shabby coat greeted them. Aside from tree-worshippers and the red-haired tree-surgeon from Brisbane there were the watertable specialists, national-tree zealots, the eucalyptus oil patent-penders, and a world authority on barks who had visited the property before, leading a delegation.
‘You wouldn’t want one of them,’ her father conceded. ‘All the experts I know have their heads in the sand, one way or another. They’ve worked themselves into a corner. And look at you! You’re a princess, too good for most men, at least the ones I’ve come across. There’s got to be one somewhere who fits the bill. Nobody’s perfect, I know that. But you seem to have lost interest. What’s your opinion? This is taking up a lot more time than I thought. Is there anyone you’ve met who’s caught your eye, even for a split second? I can see I’m going to go to the grave without being any the wiser.’
Ellen had gone pleasantly distant. One arm went gradually cold.
Really, what sort of man could go and name all the trees? Her father, of course; he, though, was different. The sheer number of names shifting about in English and Latin would occupy vital space in a person, space that could be used for other, more natural things, the way an unsuccessful dealer in farm machinery allows the accumulation of rusty trade-ins to encroach on the front, side and backyards of his weatherboard house.
‘Our man is going to come from one of the cities,’ her father predicted. ‘That’s my gut feeling.’
Listening to her father and more or less daydreaming Ellen was unable to picture such an all-knowing person, let alone whether anything about him would interest her. And isolated in the bluestone homestead, surrounded by the trees in question, she felt anyway the answer all seemed faraway. The problem was always over the next hill. It encouraged the casual, fatalistic manner.
Holland received a letter.
‘Hello, it says here Mister Roy Cave is throwing his hat into the ring. He’s got his secretary to type it. I’ve heard about him. He’s got quite a name in the eucalyptus world. He’s from Adelaide,’ he told Ellen. ‘People used to joke he had personally inspected every single eucalypt in the state of South Australia. Adelaide, the city of eucalypts. So they say. He grew up with the gum trees. Are you listening? Says here he’s taking his annual holidays. Would it be convenient, etc? He’s booked into the pub. He means business! We’re going to have him breathing down our necks for weeks.’
The father moved to the window and with hands clasped behind his back adopted a father’s pose of gazing over his park-like property, which represented his daughter’s prospects. It included delicate curves, pale brown grasses, liquid flow and heat.
‘Are you getting tired of this?’ he suddenly turned. ‘God knows what’s going to happen. With your mother and me the unexpected took over completely. It was an awkward business at the time, the whole thing was very awkward. On the bright side we came through; I’m still here; and with you.’
• 6 •
Maculata
THE BEAUTY of this tree…lies in the smooth, clean-looking bark. This is shed in irregular patches, leaving small dimples—hence Spotted Gum—and as the bark surface ages it changes colour from cream to blue-grey, pink or red, giving a mottled appearance. The trunk is generally erect and symmetrical.
The flowers are borne in rather large, compound inflorescences, whilst the fruits are ovoid, with short necks and deeply enclosed valves.
And so on and so forth.
The juvenile leaves may be a foot long with the petiole entering above the base. The adult leaves are lanceolate, falcate, almost equally green on both sides.
In conversation Mr Cave employed with lip-smacking relish the terms ‘petiole’, ‘inflorescences’, ‘falcate’ and ‘lanceolate’, and he was also comfortable with ‘sessile’, ‘fusiform’ and ‘concolorous’. Holland who had never bothered with the technicalities sometimes wondered what on earth Mr Cave was talking about.
Spotted Gums occur mainly on rather heavy soils, especially clay loams derived from shales, where the species is often associated with Grey Box (E. moluccana) and ironbarks.
The species was first described in 1844 by J. D. Hooker, the botanist on the exploration ship Erebus. His early writings were on the flora of Tasmania. Hooker, one of those fact-embracing Victorians, prodigious in his appetite for classification and verification—a friend and supporter of Darwin. There was so much to do, so much to record. He could scarcely sit still for his studio photograph: the mutton-chop whiskers, hand of the worn-out wife resting on his shoulder. He was afraid of dying too soon. For Hooker, the naming and classifying of things lay at the heart of understanding the world; at least it offered that illusion. He died at ninety-four. Another example—entirely at random—of a hyperactive mind signalling the body along? Where did he, as they say, find the time? Joseph Hooker’s The Flora of British India alone is seven volumes.
He succeeded his father as Director of Kew Gardens, London. And like his father before him his own name was given a descriptive prefix, denoting a higher classification: Joseph Dalton Hooker was made a Sir; for services to trees.
Mr Cave had visited Kew some time before he arrived at Holland’s. It goes without saying that he made a beeline for the eucalypts, ignoring the representative trees and shrubs and ferns from every country under the sun (‘the oaks are thought to be holy trees in Lithuania’), the way a man in a great museum hurries past the rows of patiently begging masterpieces just to see one particular oil in an obscure corner—a tunnel vision virtually impossible to practise in a zoo.
Mr Cave had assumed like any reasonable person that among the many eucalypts at Kew there would be a Spotted Gum planted in homage to their man who first described it. He also assumed it would be in a prominent position. But, no: of the two and only two eucalypts he managed to find after numerous directions one was a struggling Snow Gum (E. pauciflora), verging on the dispirited, and the other, outside the ladies’ lavatories with the louvres, a Cider Gum (E. gunnii). True, E. gunnii was also first described by Joseph Hooker; but the Spotted Gum is more beautiful than the Cider Gum. Connoisseurs claim it is the most eye-catching eucalypt of them all.
Mr Cave checked the identifying label for accuracy, and although he didn’t want to be seen loitering around the lavatories paced about in front of the tree.
The eucalypt looked out of place, perfunctory, ignored. A vagina-like slit had opened up in the lower trunk, as if in patriotic protest at its transportation and isolation. Women kept coming and going. Some were pretty, with children. Mr Cave kept pacing and standing back from the gum tree, unable to leave.
At this point in the story he sat down on a bench and
twiddled his thumbs. He didn’t know what else to do in England. Anyone seeing him would think he was being rueful.
Vagueness was not something he normally felt; vaguely then he became conscious of a woman near the tree. She’d been glancing this way and that in a strange manner. She was slightly plump and wore a scarf over her head. Then leaving her child in its pram she hurried back and in the one movement dropped an envelope into the slit of the tree.
At least that’s what he thought he saw. On the bench he’d been thinking his years were measured in strokes of trees, and some were angled, a few stunted. The intervals were rhythmic, almost musical. His history was stuffed with trees. Now he was staring at the solitary E. gunnii which by rights should have been a maculata.
He was half-deciding whether to get up and take another look or merely wander away, for it was time, when a young gardener appeared. He lowered his wheelbarrow and in full view thrust his arm up to his elbow into the vagina-slit of the Cider Gum—something he wouldn’t want to try in Australia. Mr Cave watched as he opened the envelope. Shoving it in his back pocket he immediately took it out again. With a sigh he looked around smiling, when he noticed Cave.
The private scene in two parts Mr Cave had witnessed would stay with him for the rest of his life. It was perhaps prompted by the surrounding green, brighter than any lawn. The shadows formed spikes and lattice. They were unusually dark. And the necessary eagerness, first of the woman, which then activated the eagerness of the younger gardener. The man’s muddy boots. The interval between their actions; the difference in their years. Pink patterned scarf.
And, for all that, not knowing what was written on the note, who they were; the open-endedness of it all, like the late afternoon itself.
