by David Malouf
On top of the piano, left and right, the jardinières, existing less in their own metal form, for all the bronze glow they give off from constant polishing, than in the volume they displace in my head; which is different in each case, since what they contain is different.
The one on the right contains needles, buttons, button-cards, reels of cotton in various colours, more cards with rows of press-studs and hooks and eyes, and a couple of bobbins. It is my mother’s slapdash version of a sewing-basket.
On two or three afternoons a week, when she can’t put it off, she and Cassie sit here darning socks, mending rips in our play clothes and sewing buttons on the flies of my father’s work trousers.
My mother is a hopeless seamstress. I see her struggling with the thick flannel, making a botch as usual; tearing threads with her teeth, using her thumb to push down an untidy mound of muddled stitches, sighing, tossing the thing on to the finished pile to take up a sock. Cassie meanwhile will be reading aloud. They take it in turns to read, chapter by chapter, from my mother’s favourite books, the ones she read in her youth, and I come to know several novels in this fashion: David Copperfield, which has provided me with my name (it isn’t family – it comes from literature), John Halifax, Gentleman, The Channings, The Manxman, Jane Eyre.
Not every afternoon was spent like this. The weather was mostly good and we were active outdoors children for the most part, eager to play on so long as we could see a ball against the rapidly falling dark, and only reluctantly answering the call to come in and get washed for tea. There were days after school when we mucked about under the house, exploring, testing ourselves against the darkness down there, pushing ourselves to the limits of our young courage to outrageous dares; other days when we picked teams and played rounders in the yard, or Donkey, branding one another with a bald tennis ball, or if girls were in the majority, Statues, in which we froze, when time stopped, in unbalanced attitudes. But when I think back to that time it is in the Piano Room that I find myself most fully present and absorbed; letting the words fall into my ear that most clearly ‘tell me things’.
Time back there has a different consistency; we move through it at a different pace. And nothing brings it back to my senses with such rich immediacy as those long afternoons when a needle drawn back and forth through heavy flannel is the real measure of it, a steady crossing and recrossing, or words out of those voluminous novels as they fall into the room in the differing voices of those two women: my mother’s English voice with its slight London accent, Cassie’s Australian one of the farmgirl from Harrisville, crossing and recrossing to give their own texture to things. If time seems different it is because we measure it, back there, by other coefficients, have different images for it, experience it in bodies whose blood is richer (which is why we are susceptible to boils), and sluggish with other and heavier food. (Or is this a child’s view of time, like the child’s view of space, in which everything appears larger than it was?) Either way, I think of those afternoons, between the end of school and six o’clock teatime, as endless, their hours so densely packed with experience and events that time appears viscous. It rolls rather than flows, meeting a perceptible resistance, as those Victorian sentences, in their difficult unfolding, seem always to hold back from conclusion, suspending you, impatient for the end but breathlessly subdued, in the stream of your own attention, so that you grow light-headed and wide-eyed drowsy, as if the mere effort of listening had laid a spell on your limbs. You wake after an hour to find you have passed whole years of someone else’s life – in England, in another century, and now, abruptly, it is half-past five by the hall clock in this one. Quickly the book is closed and put on top of the Piano, with a thread to mark our place. Our father is expected. The sound of his truck is like the arrival of Zeus in a thunderclap. The whole day immediately changes, its light, the pace of things. Needles, cards, cotton-reels – all the paraphernalia of female occupations – are bundled anyhow into the right-hand jardinière, and my mother, released, flies out to meet him. She is utterly transformed.
The other jardinière, the one on the left, is perhaps my favourite object in the house. A deep mystery hovers about it, and if anyone were to remind me that it is in fact indistinguishable from the other I would deny it.
The right-hand jardinière is utterly mundane. Anyone can see that. The left-hand one is transfigured by its contents. I would know it blindfold. I would be drawn to it infallibly by the heat of my own passionate fingerprints.
It is the place in our house where a thing is put (and searched for) when there is nowhere else for it to go, a general repository of the half-lost, the half-found, the useless-for-the-time-being-but-not-quite-rejected, and all those bits and pieces, and odd things and marvels that have no formal category.
‘Put it in the Brass Jardinière,’ my mother tells me when I come to her with some small object she has no use for, something indefinable, impossible, but which she doesn’t want to disappoint me by refusing.
‘Have a look in the Brass Jardinière,’ she suggests when the impossible is just what I cannot do without.
On rainy afternoons when we have to stay in, or when they want, quite simply, to get rid of me, I am sent off to look in the jardinière for something no one expects me to find there, though I never complain or give up hope.
The Brass Jardinière is the measure of my belief in the world’s infinite plenitude, its capacity to reproduce itself in a multitude of forms. It never fails me. It is such a pleasure, such a blossoming of the spirit, just to climb onto the piano seat, reach up and get your arms around the thing, lift it carefully down, and then, in pretty much the same spot where Our Burglar emptied the contents of the cash box, upend it on the lino; or, better still, to reach in and empty it in promiscuous handfuls ‘and to see what is there’.
Everything is there: everything odd. One baby’s bootee a little rusty with age, the top off a Schaeffer fountain-pen, one cup from a doll’s tea-set without the saucer; the gold chain off an evening bag, one grey kid glove without a button, half a diamanté clasp, the slice of mother-of-pearl that is one side of a penknife handle; odd earrings and collar-studs – all things that have been put there over the years in the hope that the other half will turn up and make a pair. The spirit of accidental separation hovers over the jardinière, but in so far as it is itself part of a pair, it speaks for completeness, for final restitution.
I lay all the objects out in their kinds, then check for the hundredth time that no mistake has been made. It is a game that is never finished, since who knows, next time some change may have occurred – not in the objects themselves but in the relationship between them. Deeply serious, it is a game that demands all my concentration. I am playing God.
I try to memorise what the jardinière contains, to keep all this rubbish in my head, so that if, in poking about the house, or under it, or out in the backyard, I should come across ‘the other one’, I can restore both objects to use. I refuse to accept that this mortuary of lost couples is really the end. I dedicate myself. I imagine going through life with the jardinière invisibly in my arms, a heavy burden; which is why I have begun the long business of committing its contents to memory. This is a secret. But the real secret is the source of my commitment. As a smaller child than I am now I had an invisible friend, a lost twin of my own. I cling to the jardinière in the belief that one day we too may be united: that he (or is it I?) will be found.
5
IT IS A forest under here. Regularly spaced, the stumps have grey, galvanised-iron caps and are painted with creosote to keep off white ants.
Seen from the washtubs, it slopes steeply upwards towards the Front Verandah; but you can also see it another way: as existing in a perspective in which the distance from first stump to last isn’t at all commensurate with the house above but is to be judged by the tallness of the stumps behind you and their littleness far off. It might be miles. It is a forest that stretches for miles, as dark as anything in Grimm and belonging to the ge
ography of the body’s hot experience of it rather than to Australia or South Brisbane. It is its own place.
Reason tells me that it can only be the same length as our hall. But reason has nothing to do with it. The coefficients of measurement are in each case different, as a room filled with sunlight has different measurements from the same room in the dark.
The forest under the house is measured by the time it takes, on hands and knees, to crawl from your father’s toolshed to the place, far up under the Front Verandah, where the floorboards are so close to the earth that you can barely squeeze in. By that and the expanding darkness in your lungs that is partly breathlessness, partly fear, and partly the terrible downward pressure of the house itself, all its rooms of furniture, on the air above you, and what it takes to keep it hanging there by an act of will.
The whole space is closed in with vertical slats, painted nigger-brown on the outside and black within. Old bed frames with rusty springs are stacked against one wall, and later the cast-iron from our Front Verandah. Cinders have been spread over the topsoil, but if you scratch a little you find earth. It is black, rather. And if you scratch further you come upon debris, bits of broken china, bent forks, old tin pannikins, encrusted nails and pins, which suggest that habituation here might go back centuries. History tells us, of course, that it does not (we discount the abos), but I don’t believe it. History belongs to the world of light. The debris under the cinders, under the thin topsoil of under-the-house, bears the same relation to history as the dark of our stump forest to the lighted rooms above. They belong to different dimensions.
Against the slats of the back wall stand washing tubs, with a washboard bleached white with suds and a mangle. To the left, in an open space by the kitchen stairs, is a round stone fireplace, much blackened, with a copper, and on the wall beside it a long dribble of powdery blue where the blue-bag is hung. Here, every Monday morning, Mrs Allen hefts steaming sheets from boiler to washtubs on a three-foot stick.
Opposite, back under the house, is our father’s toolshed. It has a lattice door with a padlock, a concrete floor, and all round it at waist-level against the slab walls are benches. Screwed to one of them is a vice where in our own version of Chinese torture we experiment with fingerjoints and thumbs. Saws hang from nails. There are secateurs, clippers, wire-cutters, a reaping hook and, laid diagonally across one whole wall, a scythe. Chisels and screwdrivers, all graded by size, are in open trays, and smaller trays contain nails, hinges, wall-hooks, curtain rings. Our father is a neat workman and the whole place can be read at a glance.
There is also a book, the biggest I have ever seen. Nearly twelve inches thick and impossible to lift, it might, we think, be a guide to torture instruments, but is known as the Chinese Dictionary.
My sister and I are devoted to it. We spend long hours while my father files away at metal, or saws planks with one foot up on the trestle, seeking clues to how it might be deciphered or made use of. Earlier on we had great hopes of it; but they have faded as we discover that learning to read, in this case, has been no help at all. It refuses to open itself to us, and in so far as it has no boards, no title page, and the earliest pages are missing, we cannot even be sure that it is a dictionary, or even that it is Chinese, and our father cannot enlighten us. He is minding the book for a friend, who went off ages ago and has not come back.
From his toolroom, with the aid of a retired ship’s carpenter called Pop or Old Jack, my father built the caravan we go away in at weekends, and since there is always one thing or another to be renovated or rebuilt, Old Jack is as permanent a figure under the house as Cassie is above. He is a smooth-skinned, nut-brown little fellow of seventy, perfectly bald and with a drooping nose, at the end of which there is always a rounding, opaque drop. He has perfected the art of planing a length of timber so that his clean sweep with the plane includes a sweep, as well, of his rolled sleeve across his nose, at the precise moment when the drop has gathered to a fullness and is about to fall.
Old Jack is an ancient mariner who knows no compulsion to confess. Closed, uncommunicative, but full of cryptic mutterings, he refuses to answer my questions about the ships he has been on – clipper-ships they might be, back in another century – or where he comes from or where he lives. If he has stories locked up in him he keeps them to himself. He barely speaks, even to my father. His only words are swear words, which down here have none of the shocking quality they might have upstairs. He directs them, as if this were the one language they could be expected to understand, to strayed hammers, snapped blades, nails that bend or go in crooked and planks with knots in them. Perhaps, I think, he has never discovered a tongue for addressing children, as we have never discovered a reading key for the Chinese dictionary. We are as cut off from him as if we belonged to another species. Baby whales.
Down here is the underside of things: the great wedge of air on which the house floats, ever darkness; the stumps of a forest of which the house, with its many rooms, forms the branches; a place whose dimensions are measured, not in ordinary feet and inches, but in heartbeats, or the number of seconds you can endure the sticky-soft lash of cobwebs against your mouth, or the weight of your body, at kneecap and palm, on crunchy cinders. It does not fit. The way a shadow may be bigger or smaller than the object that is casting it. There is room for error here, for movement, for escape. So you crawl down here when the ordinary feet and inches of the house, its fixed times and rules, will not fit. Or when you won’t. There are no clocks down here. There is not even language. They have not yet been invented. To come down here, up under the floorboards and the life of rooms, is to enter a dream space, dark, full of terrors that lurk behind tree-trunks in the thickest forest, hob-goblins, old gods, but full as well of the freedom and mystery of a time before houses – the old-new, gloomy-glad world where hammers and nails and planks of wood are inhabited by spirits that listen and respond, and where bodies, with no awareness of space or time, expand, contract, float, lapse into dreaming.
In bed at night, at the very edge of sleep, you feel that there may after all be a balance to things: that the underdark outside matches now, but perfectly, the dark within …
6
BUT I SEE now that I have passed over something, the Front Room. I have allowed it, in the otherwise orderly progress of my description, to be displaced by the more attractive and interesting Piano Room; and that is appropriate perhaps, since that is how things also stood in our life. The Front Room is a dead room. Nothing happens there. We never enter it. And there is something odd in this, since of all the rooms in the house it is the most accessible, the most immediately visible.
It opens directly off the Hall, through an archway springing from square wooden pedestals on each of which, perfectly reflecting one another as in a mirror, stand double figures in burnished spelter, an elongated youth, barefoot and naked, but saved from immodesty by the fortuitous play of his companion’s garments, and a female figure, equally graceful, who might be his twin. She runs beside him in a short tunic that clings to her breasts like wet silk and plays round her lower body like flame.
The youth’s hair is shoulder-length and wild. He would pass, decades later, for an idealised surfie. The girl’s is waist-length and falls in tresses loosely tangled. On narrow feet of an extraordinary refinement they are making their way out of a thicket of life-sized vineleaves, all veined and serrated, which as they wind upward with corkscrew tendrils produce electric lamps, two to a branch in russet gold.
These figures, classical in inspiration but playfully decadent in form, are not purely decorative – if they were they would be indecent – and their presence has nothing to do with the shedding of a merely physical light. They are admonitory, and I know them at a glance. With their parted lips and soft, lovesick eyes, they do not look harried, but they have their back to the Front Room and are fleeing. They can only be Adam and Eve under the angel’s sword. Interpreted thus, they confirm my vision of the room as a place of forbidden delights, a pleasure
garden that is denied even to my parents, since they too never venture there.
Carefully composed and grandly furnished, with a Genoa-velvet lounge suite, sideboards with barley-sugar legs and little glass-topped occasional tables, its three sash windows hung with curtains of a dusky-pink colour, with ropes and tassels of gold, our Front Room is a show place.
Beside each of the three Genoa-velvet lounge-chairs is a smoker’s stand, polished brass with a cut-glass bowl. In one, the column is plain but the tray is embossed at the rim with lilies; the others, a pair, have plain trays but the columns are liquorice-twists. On the bow-fronted sideboard, which matches a dining-table and chairs, is an array of glassware, all Webb and Corbett crystal: a whisky set with straight-sided glasses and a square decanter, a sherry set with stemmed glasses and a decanter like a giant teardrop, and a silver cocktail-shaker with swizzle sticks whose tops represent the suits in a pack of cards. All these objects, the three smoker’s stands, the drinking sets, the cocktail-shaker, are wedding presents; their display is obligatory. But they are also clues I decide, after long thought, to what our Front Room has been set up for and why we are forbidden to go there.
My parents do not smoke or drink, and my mother, though a passionate and daring bridge-player, who will go no trumps on nothing, is dead set against all forms of gambling.
Our Front Room is a warning, richly put, against easy pleasures and the dangers of ‘the social life’. The instruments of smoking and drinking are made visible, displayed and kept in a state of awful glitter; but only to demonstrate their attractiveness, and to show how firmly, in this house, they are resisted.
I don’t believe I ever saw my parents take into that room anyone they valued as a friend or genuinely respected. Business acquaintances who expected to be offered liquor might be sat there for a time, as in the lounge of a theatre. All the lights would be lit, including the red lamps of warning at the entrance, and we would come in our pyjamas and slippers to see whoever it was, uncomfortably ensconced in one of the armchairs and sipping an inch of Brown Muscat or Tawny Port. Only Cassie had the freedom of the place, and even she never faced it unless armed with a carton full of dusters. Once a week, all the carpets, chairs and curtains were beaten, the smokers’ stands brought up with Brasso, and the crystal glasses polished with a cloth. Then the lights were put out and we turned our backs on it.
