Absolution Creek

by Nicole Alexander

  ‘This is –’

  ‘Extraordinary? Yes it is. Consider the providence of that drawing, Madeleine: where and when it was sketched, and by whom. Now look closely at the work. It’s damn good.’

  Jude turned towards the two charcoal sketches hanging on the wall behind her. Both drawings depicted four young men fishing by the Banyan River and displayed all the hallmarks of raw talent. ‘It’s amazing what you can discover once you start looking,’ her mother said pointedly. ‘I can only assume that you don’t think your grand­father is good enough to warrant a retrospective.’

  ‘I never said that.’

  ‘Then perhaps it would be easier if you stopped thinking like a businesswoman and started behaving like a granddaughter. I am well aware that there are few historical documents available to us, however even you can’t dispute the importance of those First World War sketches. In the early stages of his career Father appears to have been ambivalent towards his talent. He doesn’t seem to have made notes or kept rough outlines of works-in-progress, and we know he didn’t always sign his drawings, which makes your sourcing of them extremely difficult. There isn’t even a single sketchbook to be found.’ Jude turned back to her daughter. ‘What intrigues me is the gap in his work. We have sketches from the war and then nothing until the first landscape dated 1935. Are there more paintings from this lost period or did he simply stop creating, and if so why?’ Jude lit another cigarette, inhaling deeply. ‘At least we now have something to work with, a starting point.’

  Madeleine reluctantly agreed.

  ‘We’ve had our differences, Maddy. I guess all mothers and daughters do at times, and I am well aware that you believe I did the wrong thing selling your grandfather’s paintings all those years ago. And maybe I did. But, Maddy, please don’t allow your ill feeling to hinder the chances of staging this retrospective. What if there are more of his drawings?’ She pointed at the sketch Madeleine still held. ‘More sketches from the war, more works drawn before he enlisted. Do you honestly believe he just woke up one morning and decided to paint forty masterpieces in the last twenty-five years of his life?’

  ‘Well, I –’

  ‘Who knows what other pieces could be floating around the world? Who knows how many sketches and paintings sit hidden in attics, hang unheralded on walls, or for that matter were buried in the mud of the Somme? This is your family history too, Maddy, and I’m asking you to use your contacts and your knowledge to make this retrospective happen. I wanted you to be involved not only because you’re his granddaughter and understand the art world, but also because we both know that you would benefit professionally if the retrospective goes ahead. But if you keep delaying it I will have no choice but to hand it over to somebody else.’ Jude took the sketch from Madeleine and slipped it between the pages of the sketchpad. ‘In the end, the retrospective is about honouring a great man, not you and me arguing over our differences.’

  Madeleine had never liked ultimatums, and she made a point of telling her mother just that. She had, after all, agreed to visit Sunset Ridge with a view to soaking up the environment that inspired her grandfather, yet still Jude couldn’t help but lecture her. Last night’s conversation had quickly degenerated, leaving Jude to retreat to her bedroom with a bottle of wine, while Madeleine fell asleep on the couch. The high point of the evening was when Jude handed Madeleine a rusty key and tersely informed her that it belonged to a tin trunk in the Sunset Ridge schoolroom – a trunk containing items that had belonged to Madeleine’s father, Ashley, and had not been touched since his death twenty years earlier. George’s wife, Rachael, was intent on clearing out the schoolroom and Jude wanted Madeleine to sort through and dispose of the items in the trunk. ‘I don’t want Rachael touching those things,’ Jude had said stiffly. ‘It’s a family matter.’

  The car rattled over the corrugations in the road. The final few kilometres were punctuated by stockless paddocks and desolate cultivations. The drought was biting hard across eastern Australia but apparently George was still managing. The road to the homestead veered through red ridges and uninviting stubby scrub that merged with dry-leafed trees. George’s wish of thinning out the dense bushland had not eventuated. Instead, the money was put towards pushing saplings in a far paddock for sheep feed. The result was a narrow track that seemed at constant battle with the scrub lining either side. The rental car bumped over the rough road, wound past a fallen-down crutching shed and hit the straight track and open gateway that led to the homestead. The sixty-acre house block had been systematically cleared a hundred years ago, and the area remained virtually treeless except for three stands of Box trees that sat halfway between the work shed, stables and house dam. Beyond the house paddock to the south-east was a shearing shed and the Banyan River, which had been dry for nearly two years.

  Outside the homestead Madeleine stared bleakly at the fan of red dirt extending from the house. The surrounding paddock was devoid of grass. Spirals of dust lifted into the air. A crow cried out soullessly. The sickly stench of something dead floated on the hot breeze. Clutching a suitcase, overnight bag and laptop, she passed through a wrought-iron gate and a sage-green colour-bond fence, gravel crunching underfoot. She did a double-take at these improvements and walked up the back path. The low bougainvillea hedge no longer bordered the front of the house, and the meat-house was gone, replaced with a square slab of cement upon which was arranged a table and four chairs. Madeleine came to a stop at a pale brick wall with two oval windows.

  For a moment she thought she was at the wrong house. The brickwork was new, the windows sheltered by fixed green blinds that gave the appearance of sleepy eyelids. For nearly eighty years a bull-nosed veranda had skirted the Harrow family home and the gauze-enclosed porch had remained a welcoming sight with its scattered timber chairs and numerous potted rubber plants. Madeleine recalled sitting on the veranda with her father many years ago, and it seemed to her that with the renovation of the front porch that particular memory, one of her fondest, had been diluted. Where once she could picture old squatter’s chairs and her father’s dusty boots sitting inside the back door, there was now only a brick wall.

  At the new back door, made of shiny inlaid wood, Madeleine dumped her belongings in order to turn the brass doorknob. It refused to budge. She knocked once, twice, three times as the wind picked up and grit whirled about the building, spraying her bare legs in an arching sting. Her beloved father had died in 1980 and his passing made her both angry at the world and scared for the future. Disbelief at her grandfather’s legacy being sold to keep the property afloat was not the only reason for her dislike of Sunset Ridge. Her father had given up his own career to work the property after Jude had inherited it, and eventually the land had taken him.

  ‘Hello? Anyone home?’

  The steady hum of airconditioning carried through the late-morning air.

  ‘I thought I heard someone. You must be Madeleine. George said you’d be coming. He and the missus are in town for a luncheon.’

  The croaky voice belonged to a woman aged somewhere in her sixties. She stood at the corner of the house with an overflowing laundry basket on her hip and a dead chicken in her hand. Her hair was grey and cropped short, and her face was lined. ‘I’m Sonia, the housekeeper.’

  ‘Hi.’ Madeleine’s gaze fell to the bird. Blood dripped from its neck.

  ‘You’ll have to lug all that around to the back, I’m afraid. The missus had the front veranda enclosed and now the lock’s gone on the door.’

  ‘Gone?’ Madeleine repeated as she walked around the house in pursuit of the housekeeper, her belongings burning the muscles in her arms with their combined weight.

  ‘Busted,’ Sonia emphasised over her shoulder. ‘That’s what happens when you get that type of fancy stuff freighted out here. Once it’s broke, there ain’t no one to fix it.’

  The walk along the length of the homestead revealed grass and scraggly clumps
of saltbush and flowering plumbago. The house was saved from the worst of the westerly sun by a row of trees outside the garden fence, however part of the ancient bougain­villea hedge had disappeared, leaving the house to suffer the brunt of the weather. The side veranda had been enclosed with cream-painted timber to keep the dust out and although this side of the house was now a bland wall, it held three evenly spaced windows along its length.

  At the rear of the house Madeleine noticed a new but empty terraced flower bed at the back of the garden, and a new gazebo with a beige cane table and chairs. The lawn was amazingly green for late February during a roaring drought, yet the garden seemed sparse. She noticed that a number of trees and another hedge were gone from the back of the garden, and with their removal the garden fence had been brought forward twenty metres. For the first time Madeleine could see the house paddock fence glimmer in the midday sun. Beyond lay dense woody timber through which the road wound back to civilisation.

  ‘They’ve made it smaller,’ Sonia explained, as if reading Madeleine’s mind. They crossed an expanse of sandstone pavers sheltered by sail-like cloths attached from the house’s awning. The sails extended outwards and were secured by three tall aluminium posts. ‘They’ve been carting dam water in one of the thousand-litre fire-fighting units to keep some of the flowers and shrubs going, while the bore water keeps the lawn alive.’

  ‘So, most of those trees at the back of the garden died?’

  ‘Nine in all and a good part of the hedge,’ Sonia explained. ‘Anything that wasn’t a native. George dragged them away with the dozer and then repositioned the fence.’

  The Sunset Ridge garden had always been secure and cosy, sheltered and shaded by the thick-girthed trees and hedges. Now the homestead felt exposed and Madeleine realised that she wasn’t sure if this was due to the drought-forced changes or her mixed feelings about returning to her childhood home.

  Sonia dumped the chicken on the ground. ‘Dogs got it,’ she explained, nodding towards the mangled bird. ‘Follow me.’

  Side-stepping the dead chicken, Madeleine followed the older woman onto the gauzed rear veranda, pleased that at least one of the original verandas had been kept intact. In the entrance hallway the tongue-and-groove walls were now a blinding white, and three black wrought-iron chandeliers swung in the breeze from ducted airconditioning. That was an improvement. She could already feel her sweaty shirt drying. At her old bedroom door Madeleine sat the suitcase on the floor.

  ‘Oh no, sorry, girl, but that’s the nursery now.’

  Madeleine opened the door. Pale blue and white wallpaper had been replaced by mint-green paint. A sense of loss seeped through her as she imagined Rachael clearing out her personal things. ‘I didn’t know that Rachael was pregnant.’

  ‘She’s not,’ Sonia answered. ‘Here you go. The two other spare rooms are being painted at the moment, so this one is being used as a bit of a –’

  ‘But this is Grandfather’s room.’

  Sonia stood in the open door. ‘Yes, it is. You haven’t been home for a while, have you? Well, I only arrived myself about twelve months ago. Anyway, your mother’s room is now a guest bathroom.’ Sonia adjusted the laundry basket on her hip. ‘And although your grandfather’s room is being used for storage, it’s the only free space we’ve got. Sorry, love.’

  Madeleine raised a smile. ‘No problem.’ She dumped the suitcase and bag on the timber floor, and laid the laptop on the single bed in the middle of the room. The room smelled musty. Cardboard boxes competed with suitcases, a shoe-filled plastic milk crate, a warped hockey stick and an old blackboard. Madeleine recognised the board immediately: it had hung in the schoolroom. Madeleine and George were the fourth generation to enjoy early marks and mail-delivered lessons courtesy of the Correspondence School – until they were twelve and fourteen. Then their father had died and their world changed. Their mother had leased Sunset Ridge and relocated the family to Brisbane, abandoning the property to others until George was of an age to take over the management of it. For a moment Madeleine found herself reliving those awful days when their world had been turned upside down. She’d forgotten how difficult it was for her to be back in her old home, a feeling made worse by the fact that she no longer had her bedroom to escape to.

  Sonia stood at her shoulder. ‘I cleared a space in the wardrobe and I dusted down the desk.’

  Madeleine thanked her. ‘Are you from the Banyan district?’

  ‘I’ve been back and forth. I lost my last job because of the drought. Machinery dealerships don’t need bookkeepers once they go bust.’

  ‘You’re a bit over-qualified for this job.’

  ‘Maybe,’ she sniffed. ‘Anyway, George is a good lad.’ The omission of Rachael’s name was obvious. ‘Personally, I wasn’t ever into arty stuff, but your grandfather was a good man. I vaguely recall meeting him.’ Sonia squinted in thought.

  ‘You’re lucky. I never knew him.’

  ‘Oh, I was a wee thing then, I probably wouldn’t have been much older than ten. He had a soft smile and kind eyes.’

  ‘Like George.’

  ‘Well then,’ Sonia patted her arm, ‘you did know your grand­father; you see him in your brother.’

  After Sonia left, Madeleine sat on the lumpy bed. The room was all browns and beige and felt strangely empty. She could not recall it ever being used for guests – and that was exactly how she felt: a guest in her childhood home. Through the window, the old schoolhouse and attached governess quarters were visible within the garden, their white walls glary with sunlight. Madeleine drew the curtains against the heat and slumped back on the bed, breathing deeply as she took in her surroundings. As throughout the house, the walls were the original tongue-and-groove timber, and an old-fashioned manhole was cut into a corner of the ten-foot ceiling. She felt strange: this was the first time she had looked at the homestead through the eyes of David Harrow, the artist. It was hardly a place for inspiration. In winter the land was bitingly cold and lifeless. In summer a string of southerly busters could be relied on to destroy any chance of rain from the north, which is exactly what had happened for a good number of years. Yet as a child Madeleine shared an affinity with the land. She had breathed in its heady scents, raced George on horseback through the tangled scrub along the river and camped happily by its sandy banks. The two of them had grown strong under an endless sky, within the arms of the land that surrounded them. Then their father had committed suicide. He was buried in the Harrow family cemetery on Sunset Ridge. The day they left the property Madeleine didn’t look back.

  So why had she agreed to Jude’s suggestion of a property visit? Perhaps it was simply to placate her mother; perhaps the bitterness Madeleine had held over the years regarding Jude’s thoughtless disposal of David Harrow’s artworks and legacy was beginning to wane. In truth it was an anger compounded by her father’s death and Jude’s reaction to it. As a teenager Madeleine learned quickly that suicide was appalling.

  Madeleine ran her hand across the chenille bedcover. She was looking forward to catching up with her brother away from the usual Christmas gathering in Brisbane. And having seen the documentation from the Australian War Memorial, her interest in her grandfather and a possible exhibition had been revitalised.

  Hanging on the wall above the roll-top desk was a black-and-white photograph of her grandfather and his two older brothers, her great-uncles Thaddeus and Luther, in army uniforms. Despite the typically unsmiling expressions, they looked relaxed and proud of their slouch hats and rising-sun insignias. The great-uncles stood protectively on either side of her grandfather, and Madeleine wondered what Thaddeus and Luther would think of their younger brother’s artistic legacy if they were alive today. The boys were similar: wide of eye with broad foreheads, they had defined chins and generous lips. David, only sixteen at the time, appeared slighter than his brothers with a face rounded by remnants of baby fat and a dimpled cheek. Lut
her, of stockier build, had a slightly cleft chin, an attribute that accentuated his hard-featured handsomeness. Thaddeus, taller by a good few inches, looked distinctly unimpressed. There was something of a haughty demeanour about him, and even if she had not known it, Madeleine would have guessed he was the eldest. The least attractive in her mind, Thaddeus nonetheless would have stood out in a crowd today.

  Next to their picture was a faded map of Australia that noted the regimental colours of the Australian Imperial Force from 1914 to 1919, and tucked into the edge of the frame was a postcard depicting a cathedral. The card slipped free easily and Madeleine flipped it over to read the place name, Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Saint-Omer. Although the card was blank Madeleine knew that the three Harrow brothers had fought on the Western Front. She had placed an advertisement in one of France’s leading art magazines several months ago requesting any information about David Harrow’s works that might be housed in French galleries, and it had proved to be a dead end, but an idea now began to take shape in her mind. ‘A long shot,’ Madeleine mumbled, but as she stared at the photograph again she made a decision: she would advertise in one or two of the local French papers to enquire if anyone had sketches by her grandfather in their homes. Tapping the postcard on her palm, Madeleine thought more about the Harrow boys: she knew that the two youngest were under-age when they enlisted, and she couldn’t help but wonder why their parents had let them go. In the meantime, she had a postcard and a place name. If she was serious about fulfilling her mother’s wish, Saint-Omer was as good a place as any to start.

  Acknowledgements

  My inspiration for Absolution Creek stemmed from a story my grandfather told my father in the 1940s. In the late 1800s a child was found wandering across the Garah Plains, an area some fifty kilometres to the south-east of where we live. Whether the child wandered from a campsite or fell from the rear of a dray was never established. At a time when roads were mere tracks, the bush scrubby and remote, and travelling arduous, such an incident is not difficult to believe.