A Room Made of Leaves

by Kate Grenville

  SLY MAGIC

  When I arrived at his hut the next week there was a strange spindly contraption on the table. I thought it was a machine to spin or skein, and said so before I stopped to consider.

  He laughed, that strange half-swallowed laugh of his.

  – My word, Mrs Macarthur, he said, the Astronomer Royal himself would be hard put to it to recognise this. I call it an orrery, though its relation to any orrery I have ever seen is tenuous.

  When he smiled, his features fell naturally into the shape of good humour, creasing around his eyes and mouth in lines worn by frequent amusement. Mr Dawes might be called His Holiness behind his back, but he was no sobersides.

  – I cannot wonder at you not recognising this, Mrs Macarthur, he said, it being such an inept contrivance, but it is supposed to show our solar system, this ball in the centre the sun you see, this one here the Earth.

  He turned the handle at the side and the planets jerked around, each at a different speed. It was a sly magic, that the mechanism caused all the planets to travel around their different paths, some slow, some fast, but all impelled by the same single action.

  – Oh yes, now I see. Spinning indeed!

  I could hear my anger at myself, that I might have lost my chance, that he would dismiss me as nothing more than a silly bored woman. But he ignored my mortification and embarked on an explanation. Not of what the orrery was for—that was so familiar to him that it was of no interest—but of how he had made it. The carpenter had given him an offcut for the central capstan and the planets, he explained, and he had gone to various acquaintances until at last Lieutenant Bradley of the navy had been able to supply him with the wire for holding each planet at the right distance from the capstan. The result was that this antipodean variety of orrery was a strange spidery affair of crooked wires and not-very-round carved wooden planets trembling on their extremities.

  He invited me to try, holding the base steady while I turned the handle, our heads close together watching the miniature planets travel around their tiny sun.

  – You could imagine yourself God, I said, and humankind down here, thinking ourselves to be choosing, when we are not choosing at all.

  Remembered too late that he was a friend of the reverend, and might not take kindly to a woman telling him she imagined herself God.

  – You are speaking my thought exactly, Mrs Macarthur, he said. Making it, I had to remind myself that even His Holiness the Lieutenant cannot walk on the water out there.

  It was an agreeable surprise that Mr Dawes knew he was an object of ironic amusement. He promised to be better company than Tench, for all Tench’s rehearsed wit. Sharing that amusement with him, years dropped away from me. I was twenty-four, a mature woman, but was again the girl I had been with Bridie: flightier, livelier, expansive with confidence, laughing fearlessly over nothing in a world not yet shrunken.

  THE ONLY QUESTION

  What astronomy taught was perverse: that what might appear to be true was not. My feet, which seemed to be so solidly planted on the earthen floor of Mr Dawes’ hut, were in fact dangling from it, feet and hut and continent and oceans all being whirled around at a tremendous speed through some kind of nothing.

  The idea was so absurd that I spoke without thinking.

  – But how do they know?

  Then heard how childish the words sounded and wanted them unsaid. But Mr Dawes seemed delighted.

  – Well done, Mrs Macarthur, he said. You have asked the only question that matters.

  Was he mocking me? He saw my uncertainty. I watched him pick his way among words to find the ones that would most closely resemble what was in his mind.

  – We decide what we think we know, he said. From such evidence as we have. In the absence of more evidence, we can do no other. But we must be humble. You know, to question that evidence and know it to be partial. Most particularly to be humble about the conclusions we draw. Not to be too sure.

  He seemed to doubt his own words, was staring away as if to find better ones. But they were exactly the words for a truth I realised I had always known, without knowing I knew it: that the world, and my own part in it, was a surface that might be enjoyed, but should never be quite believed.

  Before I could learn the most fundamental fact about the heavenly bodies, it seemed that I needed to understand some even more fundamental fact, and behind that was something more fundamental still. But Mr Dawes was a patient teacher. What was a baffling set of words one week became straightforward the next, beads strung along a filament of understanding. I began to see that bafflement was not a reason to despair. On the contrary, bafflement was the beginning of wisdom.

  When we came to the end of what I could follow of astronomy, we turned to botany. In the settlement, the names given to the local plants made them an inferior second-hand copy of the familiar. Native cherries, wild spinach, Botany Bay parsley. Now I was learning to see them, not for what they failed to be, but for what they were in themselves. The trees, although misshapen compared to an oak, and giving but poor shade on a hot day, had their own good reasons for being the way they were. Mr Dawes showed me how the shining hard leaves cleverly hung edge-on to the sun so as to retain as much moisture as possible. Explained why the trees had no seasonal yellowing and falling of leaves.

  – The leaves are too hard-won from this poor soil to waste, he said. They have learned how to stay alive in hardship.

  Through his eyes I came to recognise the trees as having a vigour and variety that no oak had ever had. Once I stopped expecting them to be like the trees of my childhood, I could recognise the delicacy and grace in the way their shining leaves played with the sunlight and their crowns tossed and coiled in the breeze. Yes, the soft pale bark of one—neatly layered, like leaves of paper stacked page on page—was strange enough to seem impossible, or creation’s joke, but Mr Dawes showed me that there was a reason for that too: the piled pages resisted attack by fire or flood.

  I loved to peer at these leaves, that bark, through Mr Dawes’ fat lens, where they sprang into view as an entire secret landscape, a bright crisp-edged world hidden inside the one I inhabited. I came to see that, if a person had learned even a smattering of botany, her days could never be empty. Wherever she might be, there would always be plants bowing and nodding and holding themselves up for her to understand.

  Not since those far-off lessons with Mr Kingdon had I known the pleasure of straining to comprehend. And oh, the pleasure of being praised for comprehending at last! The first time I managed to class and order a plant without help from Mr Dawes I was ridiculously proud of myself. So much that I was capable of, that I might never have guessed I could achieve!

  – Thank you, Mr Dawes, I said. For pulling me and pushing me. To do more than I believed I could, and see more than I ever dreamed of.

  I felt my throat closing and could not go on.

  – Well, Mrs Macarthur, he said. You are a most apt and eager pupil, and I can only say that if I have opened any, let us say, doors for you, that gives me the greatest pleasure.

  The poor bit of wordplay saved us both.

  WATERTIGHT

  One afternoon, as I made my way down the familiar track, I saw that Mr Dawes had visitors, a group of native women and their children, with one or two men, sitting around a fire outside the hut, Mr Dawes among them. I hesitated, but one of the children saw me and called over to the adults, so all faces turned to me and I had no choice but to continue down the hill. Mr Dawes got up and came to meet me.

  – Allow me to introduce my friends of the Sydney people, he said.

  He went around the circle like any gentleman in a drawing room.

  – Werong. Milbah. Patyegarang. Baringaroo. Daringa.

  Each name was a burry blur of sound to me but he saw my difficulty, repeating each name and making me say it after him until I had it. Once you made the little effort to hear them properly, the names were as straightforward as James or Mary Ann.

  Then he said a sentence
I did not understand, but I caught my own name in the middle of it: Mrs Macarthur. Through the ears of the people listening, I heard it as if for the first time, a set of sounds considerably more complicated than Werong or Daringa.

  The men, strong, upright, enclosed, acknowledged me by a look somewhere to the side of me. They were not unfriendly, but they were not especially welcoming either. They cared nothing for chat, for social smiles, for cheerful prattle. They were not concerned to take an interest or put anyone at their ease. There was a weighty power about them, an authority that seemed to come not from the weapons that lay beside them, but from some assured world of knowledge they lived within. They reminded me of no one more than my grandfather, that man heavy with his faith, who lived always under the shadow of eternity.

  The women did not exactly look at me, either, but there was a sense that I was greeted. They had found my attempts to say their names hugely amusing, that was obvious, while my own came easily to them. They spoke to each other and laughed, very clearly about me, but there was a subtle shifting of bodies that felt like an invitation to sit beside them on the clean dust. I was pleased to accept, but was unused to it and awkward, my legs and skirt tangling so that becoming a part of the group was something of a business.

  Beyond their names and mine, exchanged between us as a token of all we might have liked to say, we fell back on the language of the body. I found myself paying attention to Mr Dawes’ visitors in a new way, as if my skin, rather than my ears, was listening to them.

  Daringa showed me her baby, wrapped in that soft powdery bark that looked so much like paper. Admiration of a baby is one of those things for which no language is needed. I peeped at the child’s face in among its strange but effective blanket, stroked a cheek, said the praises that are usual to please a mother.

  Daringa laid the child gently down on the ground and unwrapped her so I could further admire. The babe lay solemnly staring, her fists gesturing, her thighs strong, the woman already in the making. Daringa’s long shiny fingers smoothed the baby’s body as if the feel of that soft skin was an irresistible pleasure. She was a queen to this princess, her hands firm and sure, authority and love together.

  No one ever talked about our sable sisters. And yet Daringa, a mother like myself, alive with love for her child, dandling her babe as I had dandled mine, the babe chuckling up at her just as Edward, for all his sickliness, had chuckled up at me—Daringa was surely as much a sister to me as any woman I had known.

  But this was the woman whose people, I had been solemnly assured, ate their babes. The conviction passed from mouth to mouth, and no one ever asked, How do you know? A few guesses could become an entire story that, once in place, was as watertight as a barrel. Falsehood could travel around the world in a barrel like that, and down into the future, without ever springing a leak.

  When the women talked to each other and to Mr Dawes, their speech was a rounded liquid flow of words with none of the jerkiness of English, and with a different cadence, the words starting firm and easing away as if not to insist. It was hard to imagine a scolding in such a tongue. Mr Dawes’ questions were slow and laborious. Still, the women understood and replied. He had a little blue notebook and a pencil, and made jottings as they spoke, but although he was clearly trying to learn the language, what was happening remained a conversation.

  When the baby had been sufficiently admired and wrapped again in her shawl of bark, and Mr Dawes had written down enough words, the women got up, called to the children, and slowly made their way around the slope of the headland towards the next cove. The men were already gone, so quietly I had not seen them walk away. From my own society I guessed that they believed men had business with each other, and women were not part of that.

  – As you saw, my friends here are good enough to be sharing some of their language with me, Mr Dawes said. Most remarkably, the language is inflected! Exactly as Greek is!

  Inflected, I thought. What in heaven’s name is inflected? And why might it be so remarkable?

  – You think you will remember the words as you hear them, Mr Dawes said. But you will forget. Or you will think you heard something easier, something that seems familiar.

  He riffled through the pages of the notebook, so eager for me to see everything at once that I saw nothing.

  – Slow, Mr Dawes, I said. Let me look!

  Some pages were headed with a letter of the alphabet and ruled up in two columns containing pairs of words: Karingal—Hard, difficult to break. Karamanye—the stomach ache. Korrokoitbe—to swallow. On other pages there was a verb, and below was the mostly empty shell of its parts. To see—Naa. I see—Ngia Ni. Thou see’st. He sees. We see. Ye see. They see.

  – I thought it would be no more difficult a matter than filling the blanks, he said. Such was my presumption. Now my method, if you can call it that, is different. You see here, an exchange between myself and the child Patyegarang. Transcribed as I heard it. What I said, what she said. So that I might take in the living body of the language rather than a fingernail or earlobe, and hope for understanding to come in its own time.

  Patyegarang had been part of the circle of women, a child on the threshold of womanhood. He told me that, in spite of every obvious difference, she reminded him of his younger sister.

  – Patyegarang has my sister’s quickness of mind, he said. And her bright humour, her curiosity. I feel almost as if I have Anne’s company here, when I speak with Patyegarang.

  He pressed his lips together in a grimace of regret.

  – My sister would make a good astronomer, he said. But she will have to marry.

  I had nothing to console him with. I knew the scant possibilities of happiness for a woman who would make a good astronomer, but whose acquaintance with the stars would never go beyond walking out into her yard and looking up only until the husband and children in the house needed her.

  PARTICULAR FOLK

  Mr Dawes did not call his visitors natives, much less sable brethren. He told me that to call one of these people a native was like calling an Englishman a European: accurate only in an offensively general way. The particular folk who sat down with him were mostly Gadigal, he told me. Beyond the next cove were the Wangal. Across the water were the Cameraygal. Inland at the head of the river, at the place we called Parramatta, were the Burramattagal.

  – You can hear that the suffix, gal, must have the meaning of a particular tribe, or people, he said.

  He smiled.

  – You see, not such a great difficulty. And what a lovely word it is, Parramatta, and one with a very particular meaning: the Place of Eels.

  Parramatta. I had heard the word, and said it, dozens of times, without thinking. It was nothing more than the native name for the place. Now I would never have the word in my mind without thinking of what it meant. It was more than a set of agreeable sounds. It told you about the place, and in telling you that, it told you which people belonged to its intimate life, and which did not.

  THE ECHO OF THE MUSIC

  One afternoon, leaving Mrs Brown and Hannaford at the top of the ridge as usual, I made my way down the track and approached the hut. I could hear music from within and pictured Mr Dawes happily singing to himself, enjoying his privacy, and thought to come back another time. But as I hesitated the singing ended and I heard his voice speaking in the Gadigal tongue, and a light voice answering. I knocked on the door and heard Mr Dawes call to me to come in, come in! He was sitting on the chair, pencil in hand, with the notebook on the table in front of him. Patyegarang was standing by the fire, and a little boy—her brother, I thought, though I had never managed to catch his name—was sitting beside her, toasting a morsel of bread on the end of a stick.

  – I have been trying to teach Patye here that fine old tune of Greensleeves, Mr Dawes said. And she was trying to teach me one of hers, but the difficulty is mutual.

  He sang: Greensleeves was my delight, Greensleeves my heart of gold. This was a song I knew better than I knew any music
in the world, one that my father had sung, sitting at the end of my bed, his weight warm beside my feet, his big gnarled hand resting on my shoulder, the wind outside and the quiet jangle of the sheep’s bells as they shifted in the fold. It was the most familiar song in the world, but watching this girl, for whom it must be so strange, I heard it as if for the first time: a series of sounds high and low, some extended, some brief, swelling like a gesture towards resolution.

  As Mr Dawes sang, his voice thin but true, his features became soft around the music. He watched the girl as he sang, making a connection between them along that unravelling thread of sound. But when he was finished, no amount of coaxing from him could get her to copy him. Was she embarrassed, I wondered. Or puzzled?

  When she lifted her head and began to sing, I could follow the first sounds: high, strainingly high, then plunging down to an insistent chanting monotone with a deep thread of pulse through it. I groped for a tune, strained to find a rhythm, then simply gave myself up to its power. It was not music in the way that Foote’s Minuet or God Save the King were music. But it was music, because it came from the place all music must come from: inchoate yet disciplined, public and yet utterly personal, a language that spoke without any need for effort of understanding, a gift from one person to another.

  She stood foursquare on to us, and when she was finished she stood watching the echo of the music on our faces. Around us the sounds of the world resumed: the cry of the gulls, the murmur of the trees shifting in the breeze, the chip and chop of the waves against the rocks at the foot of the headland.

  – Thank you, Patye, Mr Dawes said. That was a gift we will not forget.

  He smiled at the child and she smiled back, but then her eyes shifted to me. I smiled and nodded my appreciation of her song, but it was not praise she wanted. The little boy had toasted the bread and eaten it, and was now watching me too.