The House on the Hill

by Susan Duncan

  ‘She didn’t even wake up,’ I said to Bob later. ‘She didn’t realise she was almost on fire.’

  Despite awesome crystal nights, my excursions, faithful fold-up dunny in hand, were becoming increasingly challenging. The ground was wet with dew. The cold bit through my pyjamas. I found myself setting up the mobile ensuite closer and closer to camp, but I still crawled back into bed with dew-soaked pyjama legs and chattering teeth. In the morning, instead of sliding my feet into the cosy, lamb’s wool luxury of Ugg boots, they were sticky with dampness. The tent, too, smelled dank, and every night thick rivulets of moisture trickled onto the ground sheet where they formed small pools. ‘It’s just condensation,’ Bob said, as though it was a minor issue. But damp is damp. It tainted everything it touched. Bob chopped wood and got the fire roaring while I hunkered down, waiting like royalty for my first steaming cuppa of the day and a plate of hot buttered toast. Both smelled of smoke and tasted, ever so slightly, of charcoal. I waited until the sun burned off the long white ribbons of fog that knotted the valleys before finally throwing back the covers and bracing for the morning chores. Cleaning the tent, shaking out our bedding, hanging it in the sun on ropes strung between gum trees to dry out, rinsing dirty clothes and wiping down chopping boards and the plastic cloths on the kitchen tables. Easy, mundane stuff compared to the hard physical and mental yakka Bob put in from dawn till dusk.

  One particularly cold, starry night, despite layers of clothing, the leopard dressing gown and a roaring campfire, my back felt frozen.

  ‘I’m going to bed,’ I said. ‘It’s just too bloody cold to stay up.’ Bob nodded without saying a word. He hit the button to illuminate his watch face. It was not quite eight o’clock. I unzipped the tent door, peeled off the layers and, in a shivering rush, pulled on a pair of thick flannel pyjamas. Then I climbed under a feather doona and an arctic-weight sleeping bag. I added a mohair blanket across my feet and pulled the pillows tight under my neck to hold back draughts. A few minutes later, Bob came in and handed me a hot water bottle. Chippy gave her fluffy bed a short go, then opted for the feathery warmth in the crook of my knees.

  ‘We’d better get a proper shed built,’ Bob said. ‘Or I don’t think I’ll be seeing much of you here over winter.’

  ‘Sorry. Cold makes me miserable.’

  ‘You’ve got to dress for it,’ he said, standing there in four layers, including a heavy woollen jacket, collar raised, with thermals under his jeans and his feet snugly encased in sheepskin boots.

  I pointed at the pile of clothing thrown down at the foot of the bed. ‘Couldn’t move if I added any more,’ I said, hoping I didn’t sound as whingy as I felt. ‘What kind of a shed?’ I added, sparking up a bit.

  ‘Big enough for a tractor and a workshop, as well as my office, with a bathroom and a flushing loo.’ I was so smitten by the gloriously decadent idea of an interior flushing loo instead of my current al fresco dunny stool, the word tractor bypassed me completely.

  ‘Will it cost a fortune?’ I asked.

  ‘Nah, it’s all part of the infrastructure.’

  Infrastructure, as it turned out, was a big word that encompassed a massive amount of mind-bending detail and the skills of a clairvoyant. Look at an open spread of landscape, reshape it, fill it and make sure it worked on a human and practical scale. For us, it meant moving fences, building new fences, erecting new gates, shifting old gates, building new cattle grids, choosing the perfect spot for the septic, the water tanks, the solar panels and, ultimately, the exact location and angle of the new house. Measurements were critical. There were rules for every kind of construction – from the distance between star pickets in a fence to the length and depth of the transpiration pit for the septic. A whole new vocabulary emerged. Purlins. Girts. Bar chairs (nothing to do with cocktails). Joists. Columns. Fly bracing (nothing to do with insects with bad backs). Wind bracing. Tek screws. Holding down bolts. Screeds (nothing to do with writing). Helicopters (nothing to do with flight). Top hats (nothing to do with fashion). C sections (nothing to do with surgery). Portal base joints. Base plates. Trusses (nothing to do with roasting chickens). Mullions. It was like a boys-only foreign language. Bob, who shied at even attempting one or two words of French, Spanish or German when we travelled, spoke it fluently.

  I retreated to the tent with the dog. I knew I was not up to coping in what was essentially an alien environment. Some days I dozed despite the roar of Norm’s machinery. Some days I just sat in my camp chair. Still. Content. Engaged in country. Some days, even though I was about as competent in a building environment as a bandicoot with a hammer, I felt an irrational resentment at being excluded from so much of the decision-making process. Some days I felt as though we’d been attacked by a mind-altering virus that manifested in dangerous recklessness. Some days I felt furious about the whole project and wanted to scream out loud: ‘Let’s quit now before it’s too late!’ Some days – quite a few – I felt too old to begin again. But there were just enough days when I felt what we were doing was brilliant. And so we strode on.

  While we waited for council approval on the house plans, we discussed the fine details with Russell and Carolyn in their shopfront office: blinds open to the street, bare floorboards, doors lying flat on trellises for desktops, chairs on wheels, sleek Apple computers with cordless mouses (mice?). A wall lined with plywood bookshelves slotted together in a complicated but clever series of notches and locks. Not a nail in sight. Some architectural books but mostly product listings in large folders. Tiles. Paints. Wood oils. Fittings. Many more. Out the back, a slapdash kitchen with a state-of-the-art coffee machine. All very casual and utilitarian. But with a cutting-edge style, too.

  I came to understand that when I veered off on a personal mission (brick floors in the kitchen please, showers without screens please, an outside fireplace please), the conversation immediately shifted to tedious infrastructure details: Stainless steel versus copper nails. New wood or recycled. Industrial ply or marine ply. Mixer taps or one hot and one cold tap. Aluminium window frames. Or timber.

  I drifted off, although occasionally, as though waking from a dream, I made a comment out of the blue: ‘I don’t want a bar of retro. You probably weren’t even born when I lived through those burnt orange and mission brown years. Orange still gives me a headache. While we’re on the subject of colour, I’m not fond of pink, either. And bright red makes me feel cross.’ Once, during one of my drift-offs, Chippy went missing. After calling ourselves hoarse –Pittwater dogs have no idea about roads and traffic – Bob found her next door, at the rear of a fast-food shop, with her snout buried deep in a pile of old fat. She looked triumphant. Bob picked her up and carried her back inside. She stank like stale chips.

  Seeing my distress, Carolyn kindly suggested a coffee and guided me down the street to a café where the cake was very good. Being wonderfully diplomatic, she gently tried to dispel my quibbles about colour at least: ‘Strong colours are fine but they’re best used as accents instead of features. We’re thinking shades of grey for the house. Or maybe green. Colours that blend with the landscape.’

  ‘Grey is good,’ I said quickly. ‘Green can look a bit mouldy in the wrong light.’

  Carolyn looked at me askance: ‘We would never, ever, suggest a mouldy green, Susan. Trust me. Never.’

  I smiled openly, as though we were sisters under the skin instead of two women separated by the great cultural divide of age. I couldn’t help wondering if I’d been as sure of myself in my early thirties. I was living in New York City then, writing primarily for the Australian Women’s Weekly and riddled by gnawing doubts and dread that one day someone would see straight through the bravado and discover the shallow, insecure, hard scrabbler I knew myself to be. If I’d had any chutzpah at all, it came from the knowledge that I was somehow functioning successfully in arguably the toughest city in the world.

  While I was searching for signs of hesitation in the firm-voiced, confident young woman opposite, it occurred t
o me that I was being ridiculous. But houses are inextricably tied with powerful emotions. From the moment the front door is opened they shout who we are and the kind of forces that formed us from childhood. While I have long stopped worrying about what people think of me or my (ratty) clothes, I found myself getting absurdly twitchy about some details.

  ‘Floorboards should run at opposite angles to mark the separation of rooms,’ I said. ‘Bricks are better laid two-by-two or even three-by-three, but definitely not one-by-one …’ And on and on I babbled. Every so often, I would remind myself I was a woman who’d looked down a long dark corridor of diminishing possibilities when a doctor explained the pea-sized lump in my right breast might be a killer. I knew better about what mattered and what seemed to be important for a brief moment in time. But a sort of silent hysteria gets a grip of your psyche. It’s to do with expense, I think, and the fear that you’re putting yourself at risk for a project you may well end up loathing. In the mix, too, was the worry that I would be judged by some indefinable standard my mother would refer to as breeding and found lacking in every department.

  A while later, Carolyn called to say she’d arranged a meeting with a local builder. ‘He’s a perfectionist,’ Carolyn said. ‘He sweats over every detail. He built our house five years ago. One of the tradies hammered a single nail out of alignment on the deck. Still drives him mad. We’ve become quite fond of that nail, though.’

  I thought of Amassine and handwoven rugs strewn on the ground in that magical bowl of a valley where purple orchids and midnight-blue hyacinths grew wild. They’d been transported on the backs of donkeys, along with two large tureens of saffron soup and tough flat bread for our lunch, so we could better appreciate the way the natural dyes, textures and designs breathed in harmony with the landscape. Although there were some rugs that roared and splattered like a Jackson Pollock painting. Who knew what was going through a weaver’s mind as she painstakingly tied one small, tight knot after another and created an artwork that fiercely bucked tradition? In the end, I understood it was the subtle changes in dye lots, the momentary waver in a knot or design – the lack of perfection, even that single much-loved nail out of alignment – that humanised a task and was integral to the beauty.

  ‘Only God is perfect,’ said the head of the weaver’s cooperative, a tall, gentle man with a talent for business.

  So I told Carolyn: ‘Perfection can be cold-hearted.’

  ‘Not in buildings,’ she responded quickly, firmly. ‘You want the doors to close properly, don’t you? The windows to shut tightly? The corners to be square? The floorboards to keep out draughts?’ I must have looked sad, because she added: ‘Every piece of timber has a personality. So does every brick. But trust me, it all has to fit together perfectly.’

  After a while, I realised that every time I raised even a small quibble, Bob addressed the problem immediately. Happy wife, happy life, as Norm would say. But it was much more than that. We were a team. We did the big things together. Underlying the partnership was unfailing support. Like a piece of music, when the left hand grew weak, the right grew strong. When the right became exhausted, the left picked up the tune and carried on. ‘We complement each other,’ Bob had said in the very early days of our relationship. I liked the premise even though I had no idea, then, how deeply that creed could and would run.

  There was one blindingly shattering wake-up call when I stood stock-still in the hallway at Tarrangaua and stared closely at the Bahtiyari rugs. Red and orange. I rushed around the house, throwing open doors, looking at details I’d long stopped seeing. Red and orange jumped out from every corner.

  20

  ‘WHAT’S YOUR FAVOURITE COLOUR?’ I asked my mother when we next met.

  ‘Red!’ she said without hesitation. I thought about her room: red leather chairs, red afghans on the bed, red feather boa, red dresses in the wardrobe.

  ‘Yeah. Well, there are many shades of red, of course. Bright red just doesn’t do it for me,’ I said.

  ‘I’d stay away from most reds if I were you. Not your colour at all.’

  A memory popped into my mind: in the early weeks of my first job I’d blown a two weeks’ pay cheque on a very expensive new red pants suit and my father reacted badly. My mother took me aside and explained: ‘Your father thinks only women with loose morals wear red.’

  The following day, I exchanged the suit for a white one. He nodded when I showed it to him, but he didn’t say a word. At the time I thought he’d objected only to the colour, but now I think he’d seen stirrings of my mother’s extravagant personality emerging in me and it rattled him badly.

  Across the restaurant table I could see my mother was feeling angry and unsettled. ‘I should never have let you sell the Wallacia house from under me,’ she said. ‘I was happy there.’

  I pounced quickly: ‘Firstly, I didn’t sell it from under you, as you well know. Secondly, you’d had two falls and broken both wrists. Thirdly, it was only a matter of time before you had another fall that would have killed you. And if another fall didn’t kill you, one day you’d reverse down that Everest of a driveway and end up in the Nepean River. Drowned.’

  Esther refused to listen. ‘It was a beautiful house. I had friends there. That new young couple who’d moved in next door were wonderful to me. I had Pat and Ilmar, too. And a beautiful garden.’

  ‘The garden was a weed-infested wilderness. And Pat and Ilmar were nearly as old as you. If you’d stayed there, you would have been dead years ago.’

  ‘I’d have been happily dead, though.’

  There was nowhere to go with that, so I shut up.

  After a while, she spoke again. ‘At least I don’t have to worry about you anymore.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked, puzzled.

  ‘Well, you’ve got Bob now. You’re in good hands.’

  ‘You’ve never worried about me. It’s always been about you, not me,’ I said, stung into biting back.

  ‘Hah! You’ll never know,’ she said, fiddling with her rings.

  I realised with a shock that since her heart attack I’d routinely gouged into my worst memories. A trick to divert my attention from the increasingly frail, fearful, desperate version of a woman before me who was still my mother? A way to avoid acknowledging her awful vulnerabilities, because to do so would break my heart and I might never again be able to step over her threshold? Yes. But deep down, too, I clung righteously to the irrefutable fact that she’d failed to protect me.

  ‘The only times I’ve ever known you to be generous were when there was something in it for you,’ I said. I expected her to rise in fury.

  ‘Maybe,’ was all she had to say with a tired shrug. The fight gone out of her. To me, in the mood I was in that day, her response was as good as a confession, an affirmation of the selfish character I believed her to be. I held on to it like a prize.

  It wasn’t until much later that I thought about what my mother must have seen when she looked at me after my first husband and brother died and before Bob brought order to my life: a scatty, erratic woman who drank too much, made disastrous choices romantically and was headed for self-destruction. Who once, very drunk, shook loose a handful of pills before climbing into a tinny with the intent of roaring off into oblivion forever. A friend saved me. A friend and the fact that I was too drunk to untie the boat. No wonder my mother worried.

  And yet, when my father died I’d expected her to march on bravely, competently, independently. This, a woman who didn’t even know how to pay the electricity bill. No wonder her life was a toxic blend of a vivid imagination, play-acting and outright fantasy fuelled by pills and booze and endless disappointments. I was painfully aware there was a very strong chance I could easily have gone the same way. She must have seen signposts and the danger as clearly as a white flag waving from a battle zone. But by now I had the red means.

  ‘I get it. If I died, who would look after you?’ I said. She gave me a look that once reduced my brother and me to quivering
messes. I smiled sweetly so she’d realise she’d wasted the effort.

  ‘Oh, think what you like,’ she snapped. ‘But understand this: a mother worries about her children from the day they’re conceived. You’d know that, if you’d given me grandchildren.’

  Bile rose in my throat. I swallowed it down.

  ‘I’m only joking. I never wanted grandchildren,’ she added quickly, trying to gain back neutral ground.

  ‘Yeah. I remember. What was it you always said? You’re on your own. Don’t expect me to look after any kids.’ I’d never been so close to revealing the past. It is only a matter of time now, I thought.

  ‘Tell me about your schooldays,’ I said one day when the silence between us went on for far too long.

  ‘Why?’ she asked suspiciously, smelling a trap where there wasn’t one.

  ‘If you died tomorrow, I’d know very little about you before I was born. I’d regret that.’ I grinned, added: ‘I think.’

  She took the bait. ‘We kids walked to school at South Warrandyte. Five miles.’ I raised my eyebrows. ‘Alright. Maybe four and a bit. Country tracks. Hardly saw a soul.’

  ‘Did you excel?’

  She wiggled her head, jiggled her shoulders in a coy and self-deprecating way. ‘Essays were my favourite subject. I used to write one a week and they’d always be read out in class.’ She preened a little.

  ‘Topics?’ I asked, to keep her going and off the subject of staff shortages at the Village.

  ‘Oh, anything. Once I wrote a whole story around a flower. It was quite good, as I recall.’ She went on to say the teacher, Mr Hamilton, told her she was smart enough to get a scholarship to Fintona, an exclusive girls’ school. His daughter was Esther’s best friend and already booked in the following year. Esther wanted to try for that scholarship more than anything else in her life. ‘But Dad said we couldn’t afford the books, let alone the uniform, so I stayed where I was.’