by Murray Bail
At this revelation she lay with her eyes open, and mixed up with it was a clear view of the man from different angles, near trees. And all the time she concentrated on the cigarette glow in the dark, although it too began to fade. When it completely faded the man was gone—from the property, from being near her. All along it had been ridiculous, and she began blinking in fury.
Still she kept seeing his face and hearing the voice although she wanted perhaps to banish him. She didn’t expect ever to see him again. She didn’t feel like seeing anyone.
Pale and distant Ellen receded further into the depths of the sheets and pillows, and her beauty spots and their narcotic history of imprinting into the minds of men and fumbling their tongues—these legendary spots now came forward and seemed out of harmony with the rest of her face, and even other parts, such as her throat and tapering hands, as if the spots were too many and too dark.
The women from town and the surrounding properties could see the father was doing everything wrong; he didn’t know what was going on. And he was taking too much notice of their doctor who could only think of liquids. But if anyone whispered that it was high time Ellen was moved to the nearest half-decent town, or over the mountains to Sydney, Ellen facing the wall firmly shook her head, ‘I am not…’
It was the most unusual illness Holland had seen in his daughter; it was hardly an illness at all. She hadn’t vomited once, for example. If it was a sickness it was some sort of sleeping or semi-speechless sickness. Day after day she was more or less motionless, and spoke only a few words. It was all very well letting people in to sit down and try telling stories. He’d listened to a few himself, and when he turned and saw his daughter had fallen asleep he smiled; such a disappointed, severe sort of sleep.
Holland opened Ellen’s room onto the verandah.
For a while he stood there; he normally looked at Ellen and spoke.
Halfway towards the first paddock was a familiar tree: with its weeping habit, its melancholy shiver of leaves on the droop, its cladding of callous ironbark, it always seemed resigned to waiting for the worst—for it to be all over—like a hyena in Africa.
When Ellen raised her head to look at her father she too became caught in the tree’s gaze.
‘Feeling better?’ he turned. ‘Good’—before she could answer.
Now he made an exaggerated search in the pockets of the old dark coat for matches, which Ellen wanted to say were already in one hand.
‘Mr Cave’s still here, you know,’ he said at last. ‘As he sees it, there’s no reason for him to go, none whatever. He’s a very patient fellow, a methodical one.’ Her father blew out smoke. ‘If we had any spare cash we could put him on as gardener. He sure does know his way around the eucalyptus world.’
Any other time Ellen might have laughed.
‘He can’t stand around twiddling his thumbs forever,’ he added.
In the silence that followed, Holland felt the approach of something, a slowing down and a coming together: almost enough to brush the general awkwardness aside. The small sky-blue room, his daughter’s world, existed in equilibrium with the park-like arrangement of trees and the swaying mat-coloured grass outside. Ellen almost felt it too. Whatever it was may have flowed slowly from her. If nothing else the uncertain idea she had of herself had diminished, her resistance gone: water spreading in all directions onto a flood plain. It was not possible to spend the rest of her life in bed, not her best years.
Later when her father came with tea on a tray and went to close the verandah doors Ellen spoke, ‘I’ll see Mr Cave first thing in the morning, tell him.’
She turned to the wall and held both warm breasts in her hands. So finally amazed was she at her immovable father she couldn’t imagine talking to him—what to say? In his old coat he looked thinner, she had noticed, which only illustrated his stubbornness. Then she began to feel sorry for him, her father, sorry for his stubbornness, which was how she closed her eyes in the dark.
‘Now, you might be wondering…’
Ellen thought she was dreaming.
If she opened her eyes the voice would go away.
His voice had come in from nothing, no warning, no ‘Good evening’ or anything.
‘Are you asleep?’
She had her eyes open, still facing the wall. The voice was very close. Now she was aware of every familiar scrape and blur.
To think that he could just stroll in! The surprise was physical, a surge. Where had he been? Why? He shouldn’t come near her at all. In the middle of the night he was in the room.
He had let himself in from the verandah.
She wanted him to go, she wanted him to stay.
On the verge of saying it, and sending him away, she shifted a little, but didn’t turn.
‘Why are you here?’
Although it was dark the angles of the room converged towards him, and he displayed impressive sangfroid, the first requirement for Officer Material.
‘I am going to switch on the lamp,’ said Ellen.
If he was found smiling she would ask him to leave. But she had never before seen him away from sunlight and a tree, in her room.
All this was forgotten anyway when the light showed him in an old leather jacket, and accordingly pale, and holding for her a miserable bunch of yellow buds from one of the trees. These demonstrated only too clearly how the eucalypt was named: the reproductive organs ‘well covered’.
‘They’re nice,’ said Ellen. ‘They’re beautiful.’
It hardly mattered that they were taken from the pessimistic tree a short distance away, E. crebra. In her hand as flowers they became one with her, flowing both in and outwards; Ellen felt a firmness within warmth, her rounded warmth faintly functional.
As he watched a mysterious superiority stole over this woman sitting up in bed, before subsiding: a brief reminder.
Passing a hand across her face Ellen wondered about her appearance.
‘What a wreck,’ she said, and slid beneath the blankets, covering herself again.
Now that he was back and actually in her room—his head above and bent towards her—she settled to hear his voice; but almost immediately Ellen met a thinning stain of hopelessness, a reminder of her position, her patient father and Mr Cave waiting in the other rooms. Tomorrow morning wasn’t far away; and it was the end.
‘I have something to tell you.’
First, the flowers; and now one of his stories—as if anything he said could solve anything. Ellen made a slight turn towards the wall. What could he say? He hadn’t done enough. Mr Cave had done more, much more. According to her father, he had done all that was required. In his own way Mr Cave was a remarkable fellow, her father had said. It was too late.
‘Move over,’ he whispered.
Ignoring the story-teller’s chair which had been placed beside the bed precisely for that purpose he took off his boots, and stretched out beside her.
‘There’s no point…’ Ellen spoke slowly.
For a moment he contemplated a spot on the opposite wall. When her father did this it was as if looking for a place to nail up one of his agricultural calendars.
‘The most important events of my life,’ he began, ‘have taken place in parks, gardens, light forests…’
The stories he had told over different parts of the property Ellen all along had assumed were dreamed up on the spot for her benefit, which accounted for her curious possessive interest as she had listened. None of them relied on the usual ‘I this, I that’ which all adds up to ‘I am’. And now, when it was necessary to tell the story of all stories, a story specifically to save her—somehow—for how was that possible now?—he was launching into personal reminiscence, just like everybody else. It wasn’t going to save her. Obviously he had no idea of her position.
On the other hand, it might begin to answer some of the many questions about him she’d been wanting to ask.
It also allowed her from the pillow and the warmth of her bed to survey his face from
an angle, his jaw moving as he carefully chose his words, which was the way her father absently chewed a steak, especially lately. She suddenly wanted to twist his nose, or at least his ear. Pleasant lines had established around his eyes and mouth. His jaw was almost too strong, as if it had been broken.
As it happened he too felt the disadvantage of having himself at the centre of the narrative and, allowing the opening line to remain as an explanatory remark or a clue, continued without the insistent I, and spoke quite comfortably about a man who grew up with a difficult stepfather, because his mother who rode horses for ribbons ran off with another man, an American engineer, whose specialty was damming rivers in south-east Asia, although Ellen could see it was really about him, his story, and so offered some sort of hope.
This stepfather had a limp from a riding accident. In fact, the leg was as crooked as a young gum tree. It didn’t stop him swimming right through winter, which is why he chose to live in a humid block of flats behind Bondi.
He was an unhappy man, slightly deaf, and would turn on the boy, knocking him about, while they lived by the sea—a stepfather in black, very clear watery eyes, in need of a crutch or a stick, he’s right out of a fable, the stranger went on to say, beside her.
So the boy grew up among sudden arm movements and shouting, and always there the white light of Bondi. No wonder he turned to botany, quiet, orderly, green; geology would have been quieter still, solid and stationary.
One night a woman moved in with his stepfather; and he was told he could no longer stay. He didn’t wait for morning. And soon after he dropped out of his studies.
He was away from Sydney for so long his friends thought he was dead. Several times he himself wondered if he was alive. Beginning in the easy countries above the equator he ended up in difficult countries below the equator. Many things he saw for the first time, and would never see again. So many things happened to him that wouldn’t have otherwise happened. It was as he had hoped; he was asking for experience. He saw it as giving texture. But it was too deliberate. Yes, there was no doubt about that. Travelling in trains: now there’s a life subdivided horizontally into a fleeting length of intervals, marked as it happens by Grey Ironbark or Tallowwood, axed from northern New South Wales. Twice he became lost in forests, in Borneo, somewhere in Poland. He saw an elephant give birth. That was in a teak forest. At Kew Gardens he pushed a wheelbarrow. Did you know there are only two eucalypts at Kew? There was also the sympathetic wife of the world’s authority on orchids, the scarf around her head.
At this the man beside her frowned before looking down, ‘This man’s had a rich and varied life…’
It was not Ellen’s idea of experience; she was not interested in experience, as such. As always though the steady rise and fall of his voice became soothing and she concentrated on that.
After x-number of years he returned to Sydney.
On the second day on a visit to Bondi he saved a man from drowning, he said. The rescuer himself got into difficulties. On the beach he lay exhausted beside the saved man who was covered in seaweed and blue in the face. A small crowd had gathered.
Listening carefully Ellen pictured the beach she knew well; none of this was going to save her.
Mr Lonsdale, who had been rescued, was a quiet man, the stranger went on. ‘No, I shouldn’t have been out there…’ he said, coughing up sea water. He was in his late sixties and still wearing his watch. ‘I don’t want to be a nuisance.’
Mr Lonsdale had a small business, and after asking some questions invited his rescuer to his factory at Redfern the following day. For years it had been turning out things like letters from the alphabet and numerals of different sizes and colours from specially strengthened plastic. These were used in shop displays, used-car yards and kindergartens. The factory also produced a range of directional words, such as ENTER and ONE WAY, and on that first day the visitor was shown a small order of plastic exhortations—DARKNESS, REPENT! and so forth—ready for delivery to a group of churches in Fiji. But everything about the dusty office and the factory floor where once carpet slippers had been made suggested Mr Lonsdale had lost enthusiasm; and this proved to be, for after showing the younger man around he offered him a job.
Circumstances had produced trust of a powerful kind. It was as if they had become mildly tangled up in each other’s legs. The older man was always drowning. He had no family to save him. He had hollow cheeks, very noticeable. Often they went to the races together, Rosehill, Randwick. It wasn’t always necessary for them to talk.
Early on, the new arrival saw a way to broaden the firm’s products. To him, aluminium represented the future. Its lightness and durability, its neutrality; a thing that can change its shape.
Here the story-teller paused.
At any other time the word aluminium would have been enough to send Ellen to sleep, as she had simply done with the other men who had taken their place by her bed; but she lay very still, wide awake. And she waited for him to continue. Looking straight ahead, as if she belonged to him, he casually went in under her blankets and found one of her small hands protecting a breast.
‘Oh!’ That was her reaction. ‘You’re cold.’ It was like a block of ice with arms, this man lying beside her.
He was preparing for something; he held her hand; and, as he did, she felt her warmth overwhelm his coldness. These were Ellen’s thoughts in rapid succession, and beauty began its rush back into her face.
After experimenting and researching etching processes and testing different lettering, part of the factory was converted to handle the new material, aluminium, he went on, still holding Ellen’s hand, and soon orders trickled in for things like numerals for the backs of seats in sports stadiums and concert halls. But future growth pointed more towards the identification and naming of things. With the growth in higher education and leisure time there has been a corresponding emphasis on facts, almost an obsession. We are not comfortable if a thing we have seen isn’t attached to a name. An object can hardly be said to exist until it has a name, even an approximate name.
It must seem a little odd, he said, that this man in question whose instincts were towards being the naturalist—what with his studies in botany, and his years in various forests, and Kew—should become a missionary hawking the wonders of aluminium! And yet one could be of use to the other. Nameplates where words are etched into a coloured aluminium base perform well outdoors; easy to read, much cheaper than brass.
It wasn’t difficult to convince the Botanic Gardens in Sydney, where the white-on-brown botanical names can now be seen in all weathers at the foot of just about every shrub and tree. And before long a steady demand came from other gardens in other states; zoos and national parks followed. Mr Lonsdale who used to make jokes about this alien substance in his factory was naturally pleased. He was good, a good man, she felt him nodding again.
At that moment Ellen heard what sounded like her father’s steps near the door, and in haste she glanced up at the supposed stranger lying beside her; but either he hadn’t heard or didn’t care, for he continued talking normally—if anything, he seemed to be talking louder. With her mind partly on the door Ellen didn’t quite register the words that followed.
A large order had come in from a new customer in western New South Wales, he had been saying. And when this order was completed he decided to deliver it personally. He could meet this new customer. It would mean travelling and staying overnight.
‘Do you like train travel?’ He squeezed Ellen’s hand, to have her attention. ‘Very soothing. It must be what it’s like being read to in bed. It must be all those sleepers.’
At any rate—he returned to the story with the same loudness—we have the accidental entrepreneur seated comfortably in the carriage, which incidentally featured on the outside a fluted strip of aluminium along its full length. Safely in the luggage car was the wooden crate stacked with small panels of printed aluminium, a complete world contained in words and flat metal, packed in newspaper to avoid
damage. The train began moving and he once more took out the order and ran his eye down the long list of names in the grazier’s hand, one in caps, the other lowercase; more than five hundred names, in all. He knew he looked tired and untidy, but didn’t care.
When he opened his eyes he found the two women opposite, both with grey hair, staring at him. In strange old crepe dresses they were like a couple of witches; he offered them an apple, cheese and biscuits, which they ate, leaving him nothing.
‘The Sprunt sisters,’ Ellen murmured, still distracted.
As they neared their destination the older one tapped him on the knee, ‘On a property outside our town lives a young woman with her father, the most beautiful woman you’re ever likely to see.’
The other one chimed in, ‘The father keeps the key to her bedroom dangling around his neck like a gaoler.’
‘Begin at the river,’ the older sister advised, ‘don’t go near the house. She’ll be somewhere in among the trees.’
And that was the last he saw of them.
On the railway platform he was too busy organising transport of the heavy crate to think about anyone’s daughter, even if she was beautiful. This delivery was going to take longer than he thought. He began to wonder if it had been such a good idea after all. At the front gate of the property he met a Chinese man hurrying out, who nodded politely. But waiting at the door the man of the house welcomed him. ‘Together we unpacked the names on the verandah.’
Even then Ellen could think only of her father and Mr Cave in the passage, and the true hopelessness of her situation, even though he was on the bed beside her, holding her hand.
‘I remember you came out with the tea, looking very unhappy. I’d even say you looked bad-tempered, which may have been why your father didn’t introduce me. Besides, we were busy with all those stacks of metal plates, ticking off the tree names I’d printed.’
