Eucalyptus

by Murray Bail

  • 24 •

  Barberi

  AT BREAKFAST Holland sat in his rough coat prepared once more to step out.

  Through the window: eucalypts here and there down to the flat alongside the river, its course marked by a greater congestion of green. To the left was part of the ornamental drive of evenly spaced, same-height eucalypts; remember how it went from the road to the front door.

  It was late. Within easy reach of the prize Mr Cave could afford to take his time.

  Clouds had filled the sky and pressed down over the land, a promise of longed-for rain. As a consequence, the air and parts of the earth were grey. The mood at the table was sombre, shadowy. It was probably exaggerated—aggravated, we can say—by the charcoal-grey brick of the house and the extra darkness cast by the deep verandahs.

  Ellen felt grey. She hadn’t slept.

  She wondered if it was her own tiredness which made her father just then look…not exactly elderly, decidedly worn and settled. His ears had grown larger. And bits of his chin missed while shaving suggested somehow a lack of judgment in all other things.

  ‘I want you to drink that. Otherwise I’m not pouring the tea.’

  At breakfast Ellen had been producing orange juice, if not for a longer life, to make him feel better.

  Her father reached out for the glass. ‘In the opinion of Mr Cave, it was an act of madness and ignorance to plant eucalypts along the drive. He knows of at least three properties where it led a passing bushfire straight up to the house. And the whole lot went up in smoke. It could happen here, he said. What would we do then?’

  He reached out and touched Ellen’s elbow.

  ‘The first thing our friend, Mr Cave, would do would be take the chainsaw to them. But nothing inside this house is of much value, except you. And without you’—he held her lovely elbow—‘this here place would be an empty shell.’

  As Ellen remained beside him they became silent. She watched as he fiddled with his empty cup. He may have been on the point of saying something more when he looked up, ‘Hello, here is the man himself. Look at him, in his own way he’s a remarkable chap.’

  Ellen hurriedly left the room. She didn’t answer when her father called out, and again when he set out with Mr Cave. For a while her blue pillow became a comfort.

  She glanced at herself in the mirror: all she was doing these days was frown. With a hurried carelessness she changed into an old shirt of her father’s, boots and olive trousers. Outside, she strode as usual towards the river, but abruptly slowed, hardly walking at all, looking down at the ground. A lazy greyness stole over her.

  She felt like a neat house about to be occupied. And she actually laughed.

  Long past the suspension bridge Ellen found herself in a semi-enclosed area she had visited only once, many years before, with her father on one of his planting expeditions. This was the far northern end where the river took an eastern turn; at its furthermost point Holland had planted the solitary Ghost Gum, which could some days be seen from the town. To Ellen’s right the hill sloped down towards the river, both in perpetual shadow. Here on the tapering flat were many rare eucalypts now fully grown, a secret abundance, mostly from the Northern Territory and flowering in a mass of gaudy asterisks. Even Ellen paused and gazed about.

  It had been the graveyard of the less prepared suitors; Mr Cave though would have reeled off their names for her (in their evocative common parlance: Pumpkin Gum, Yellow Jacket, Barber’s Gum, Kakadu Woollybutt, Manna Gum, Gympie Messmate, Bastard Tallowwood, and so on); except Ellen never wanted to hear the name of another eucalypt again.

  Across her path was a long mulga snake, seeking warmth, which Ellen stepped around.

  Why she had wandered so far from the house she couldn’t say. It hadn’t exactly been conscious. At last she stopped at a delicate mallee sprouting thin trunks, more like thin branches shoved into the ground.

  If he now comes to me, where I am standing here, she decided, he must be following me. Aside from anything else it would show the lengths he would go to for her. And she wanted to see him.

  Most of his stories, she began to realise, were about daughters and marriage; and these stories, she saw, she thought, were more and more directed at her.

  It was enough for her not to think about the inevitable advance of Mr Cave.

  The workman’s shirt and slacks verging on the drab failed to neutralise her speckled beauty. If anything they made it still more startling. In fact, anyone coming upon her would conclude that if she was inconsolable it was to do with her beauty.

  She immediately noticed his hair wet and he had evidently dried himself with his shirt.

  ‘I am here,’ she called out.

  For a good ten minutes they sat, almost touching at several points, without saying anything. Such ease of familiarity calmed her. It also turned her thoughts directly to him. Now when he began talking he was almost as indecisive as the Barber’s Gum sprouting all over the place, behind them; he took his cue from it, his words slowly circling and searching, to enter her, and nobody else.

  There was talk of a story (‘Did you ever happen to hear…?’) from Mauritania, of all places, a vast desert country of medieval habits where, it is said, no building is more than two storeys high. In a stony part of this country, near some low mountains, a young long-haired woman was held captive by an ogre. He was a violent perspiring figure, easily angered. He lived in a stone hut with stone furniture; it also had stone windows. The young woman thought constantly of ways to escape. Obviously the best chance was at night, but the ogre had thought of that and slept with her hair in his teeth. She began to despair, though she never lost her beauty. One moonless night a thief got in, and carefully began removing her hair one by one from the monster’s teeth. It took all night. Just as it became light he removed the last hair and they made their escape; and as they ran over the stony ground the young thief saw before him the pale beauty he had only heard rumours of, and she in her happiness at being free turned and saw her rescuer, the thief, for the first time.

  Ellen had listened without moving.

  Expecting him to go on or at least glance at her, Ellen found instead he was looking straight ahead, as if avoiding her.

  Still on the subject he went on, choosing his words, like the thief removing the filaments of hair, carefully enough for Ellen to sit up and notice.

  The relationship between a woman and her hairdresser, he began by pointing out, is intimate. It is said that women tell their hairdressers things they wouldn’t dream of telling their husbands.

  To exaggerate his bewilderment he gave a discreet cough.

  Seated at the mirror a woman puts herself in the hands of the hairdresser, very often a male. It is an occasion, almost ceremonial; it is concentrated, partly sombre. The woman is robed. Hair is the only changeable part of the face. And it is hair that frames—and makes distinctive—the various concepts of feminine beauty. Shorn of hair a woman is reduced to essentials: hence, the all-too-appropriate symbolism of a woman having her head shorn before being paraded for sleeping with the enemy.

  At the hairdresser a woman sees herself in the mirror at different stages of exposure. Behind her, at each stage, remains the hairdresser. First, the woman is washed and rinsed back to plainness; it is what she all along suspected. From there she follows with a critical-hopeful eye her transformation. The hairdresser becomes accustomed to tears. Even when the woman is satisfied with the result, she is also dissatisfied knowing her new appearance has been acquired, based as it is on illusion, an artful adjustment in the cutting, or an expansion in mid-air, as it were. Every woman has a firm opinion on the hair of others. Hair is power. In history as certain women gain in ascendancy, so too their hairdressers.

  ‘Shoes and your hair. You can forget all that’s in between,’ a greying woman behind sunglasses told Ellen on a bus in Sydney.

  On that long street to the city, Oxford Street, Ellen had once tried a salon decorated in silver paint and candelabra while h
er father wandered up and down outside; and now she was hearing this man seated beside her, telling about a grazier’s daughter visiting Sydney, a story of how power was transferred from the hairdresser to an innocent woman.

  Her name was Catherine. She was from one of those old Riverina families, roots going way back. Fine homestead. The property was on the Murrumbidgee River, and the paddocks held so many sheep they looked, from certain angles, permed. Catherine’s parents were separated, at least geographically; the mother who was still remembered as a flapper in Sydney society was naturally bored out of her mind in the Riverina and spent most of the year in Sydney, where she had an apartment in the Spanish style, at Elizabeth Bay. There she concentrated on charity work, light luncheons, improving her golf handicap, not always in that order. Every year in February, Sydney’s month of lassitude and perspiration, she went to Europe. She had a grim, sun-battered beauty; large sums were regularly invested in clothes and cosmetics; she had some good jewellery in bank vaults.

  At eighteen Catherine was taken by her father on regular trips to Sydney, and left there with her mother. It had been the mother’s idea: the thought of her daughter vegetating in the country, surrounded by bleating sheep and the croaking of crows, and the blundering advances of the local yokels, was really too much to bear. Sydney would get her off horses and into cocktail dresses, even with those shoulders.

  On the very first of these visits—for the yearling sales—Catherine’s mother took one look at her, and phoned Maurice of Double Bay to have her daughter’s hair fixed. And that became the routine whenever Catherine set foot in town.

  It was difficult for a normal woman to gain entry to Maurice’s, let alone at a day’s notice. A woman had to be somebody, or look as if she were the ghost of somebody, or show a strong chance one day of being a somebody (via marriage, money or divorce).

  Some women were too terrified to step inside Maurice’s. Although he never smiled, he pulled an incredible number of faces, feminine in their intensities, mostly in the vicinity of grimaces, which were then multiplied by the glitzy mirrors. He also had a loud voice. His most common phrase was, And what is this?’ Sometimes he would give a woman’s hair a withering flick with his fingertips. He had a row of five assistants which he supervised by clapping and rushing past and pointing, like a chess grandmaster in a demonstration match against a row of young hopefuls, and there was always one of them ready to pour him another Turkish coffee in the same tiny cup.

  Such public tyranny would not of course have been tolerated if his eye was unreliable. Women though grew still when he stood behind and held their hair in the palm of his hands, as if weighing gold, then with a grimace made a rapid decision, cut here or curl or colour. ‘OK?’ In his hands angry-looking women, angry to the point of ugly, were softened towards a regal ‘looking-down’ appearance, depending a lot on age and amount of hair to play with. Others he made into what appeared to be splendid galleons, and to young blondes he supplied, via hair, the lightness and mobility of skiffs. For all his histrionic severity Maurice listened and offered sympathy whenever the subject turned to a problem more personal than hair. From all over the eastern suburbs—suburbs with names like Vaucluse, Bellevue Hill, Point Piper—women headed for his salon next to the Swiss shoe and handbag shop in Double Bay, and some were known to double-park in the middle of the street, anything not to be late for an appointment.

  Catherine knew none of this.

  She was a plain thing, who looked as if she was sitting outside under a tree.

  Her mother clearly was a special client of Maurice’s. With a grand gesture he entrusted the washing of Catherine’s hair to his most promising apprentice, not much older than Catherine, who was single-mindedly pioneering the return to Sydney of long, shaved sideburns. His name was Tony Blacktin. He also swept the floors. As he spoke, Catherine looked at him in the mirror. He began by loudly imitating Maurice, which came out automatically as a sort of careless bluntness. Catherine sat quietly. He was perhaps unsuitable for a career in hairdressing. And Blacktin: where did that name come from?

  Unexpectedly he asked Catherine, ‘I’ve been thinking of trying a moustache. What do you think?’ Before she could answer he said, ‘The boss’d give me the sack.’

  He went on, ‘I was born in Sheffield. How about you?’

  Encouraged by the softness of Catherine’s attention he told things about his family. His mother was allergic to peaches, and was always late. The father used to grind his teeth, ‘You’re going to be late for your own funeral!’ He tried selling ice-cream from a van in Liverpool, but shot through from the wife and kids, and was last heard of playing a piano in a nightclub somewhere in Burma. Another Blacktin—a certain Cyril—was supposed to be brainy. He was a scientist who always sent his latest book around, wrapped in a brown paper bag.

  He was still rattling away like this as Catherine leaned back and closed her eyes. Hot water flowed over her skull. Strong fingers encouraged the rinsing of her heavy wet hair.

  Almost immediately, the fingers in her hair hesitated; and Catherine realised he had stopped talking.

  She had just come in from the country, and hadn’t even had time to change her dress.

  The apprentice hairdresser was gazing into the rinsing basin, pressed against her neck. Dust rinsing to lazy brown river water swirled into the basin where it rose to the level of dam water, pale brown as if translucent in sunlight, and the water in the basin was warm and dam-shaped too. A residue of pale sand settled at the bottom.

  Such country-brown water never made an appearance in the urban environment; certainly not in the salon at Double Bay. To the young apprentice who also swept the floor it spoke of space, summer paddocks, isolated trees. Moving his hands in the muddy water he expected to come up against a yabby or a gumleaf.

  More and more images of swaying grass and dryness presented themselves through the country water which flowed from her through her hair. He thought she still had her eyes closed, as all women did. He kept his hand on her wet head; he could have stayed there all day. She had always been friendly to him.

  As for Catherine she found him amusing. He was different. Some might find his face a bit bumpy and side-burned; but in the mirror Catherine saw an attractive faltering firmness. It became a habit whenever she visited Sydney to go straight to the salon, where Tony could hardly wait to wash and rinse her hair.

  To make an appointment Catherine now posted the family’s embossed cards and asked for Mr Blacktin.

  He hardly knew whether he had fallen for her, or the river, or the idea of the brown country that flowed through her hair. After some hesitation she began going out with him for small meals and afterwards to a bar where he told more stories of his family and travels, as well as stories he’d heard from others; he even made some up: anything to amuse her, to keep her attention. And because of the intervals between visits, Catherine found she was looking forward to seeing him and hearing his voice almost as much as the city itself. Besides, she hardly knew anyone else in Sydney.

  After about a year, the story goes, Catherine sat in the chair once more and said to him, ‘I want it all short, cut it as short as you can.’

  Either she expected him to follow her in every way, or she wanted to cut the amount of country dust in her hair; a side benefit might have been to give her mother a cautionary jolt.

  Now Blacktin was forbidden by Maurice to be a cutter that honour was reserved for poets wielding tiny scissors after years of arduous training—and as Maurice strode by on one of his supervisory sweeps he saw his apprentice, elbows splayed and tongue protruding like a man painting a white line between bricks, and took in at a glance Catherine’s completely altered appearance and the heaps of pale brown hair at the foot of her chair. Tony was so busy he didn’t notice Maurice standing behind him or in the mirror. Catherine did; and the way she met his eyes calmly made him move on, without saying a word.

  Maurice was a subtle man. From a distance he remained looking at the pair for several
minutes, Catherine and his apprentice sporting the absurd sideburns.

  They were happy together. Anticipation coloured their intimacy. It was at a far deeper level than the usual intimacy enjoyed by hairdressers, he saw. They were young, and he envied their innocence. Nevertheless, he went into his tiny office and, after briefly looking at his hands, telephoned Catherine’s mother, strengthening the already useful loyalty between them.

  • 25 •

  Forrestiana

  A SHORT tree, ornamental.

  In Western Australia people grow them in gardens for the splash of Maranello-red flowers.

  Short enough for it to be damned in some circles as a shrub.

  Some years ago…in a town not far from Melbourne, its name similar to the one that stonkered Sherlock Holmes, a thin woman with a pointy nose lived with her father, the town’s solicitor.

  Her name was Georgina Bell.

  In her early thirties, Georgina travelled for the first and only time to Europe. These were the days when Australians fled from their empty country in bulging P&O liners—similar in sensation to the driving horizontality of trains, except on sloppy deep liquid.

  A strange thing happened on the ship.

  At Port Said, where the heat suddenly became stationary, she stepped onto land. There she became channelled, compressed, sleeve-tugged and urgently shouted at by hundreds of beggars, hawkers, hangers-on and children in torn shirts; it was absolute bedlam. In amongst it all one brown face stood out and stared at her.

  He followed her into the bazaar. But there the noise and the smells, these people who wouldn’t leave her alone—it was all too much. Returning to the ship she went to her cabin and tried to rest in the heat. Almost immediately she sat up to find the same man seated by her bunk. His eyes were fixed on her. He had slightly moist, fleshy lips, a faint aroma of cloves.