Eucalyptus (18 page)

• 23 •
Racemosa

A FINE
example of the Flooded Gum (
E. rudis
) can be seen at the Botanic Gardens in Sydney, thirty paces back from the bookshop. It certainly has a towering grandeur.
Magnificent
comes to mind. Of course it does.
Magnificent
is to be avoided at all costs, above all in describing a work of art, such as a Cézanne (the painter of pines), or the vulgarities of an opera house, or even the physique of a brown boxer (‘magnificent specimen'), let alone the natural majesty of a gum tree. It really is a puffed-up term, a sign of impotence in the person poised with the pen, striving to convey…better for all concerned if it was returned for use alongside
magnify
, and left at that.

In girth and habitat the Flooded Gum is similar to the River Red Gum, preferring watercourses and swampy ground; and yet it has been successfully cultivated in sandy Algeria.
Rudis
apparently refers to the rough bark; either that or its timber—good for nothing but firewood.

Its upper branches are smooth and grey. Buds are larger with a bluntly conic operculum; adult leaves are petiolate.

Holland's example was at right angles to the bridge, and next in line stood a pale Scribbly Gum, this one called
E. racemosa
.

So absorbed had Ellen become in the slowly told stories of the stranger, so much a part of her day now, she took little notice of the eucalypts behind the stories; she allowed the world, which was his and far beyond, to come to her. His roundabout way of telling one story after another depended on imagination and a breadth of experience, and meant he was spending hours with her and her alone, revealing a little of himself at a time—only to disappear whenever he felt like it, sometimes with just a brief wave. To be then left surrounded by nothing but grey trunks, and a near-absence of anything stirring, added a scratchy, unsatisfied quality to the silence.

Eucalypts are notorious for giving off an inhospitable, unsympathetic air.

On this Friday morning she put on a dress faded to butter colour and felt loose and free; so much so she ruffled her beauty with a look of determined impatience. And she felt so aware of her own self within the sleeveless dress she flowed forward in a kind of bonelessness, so it felt.

Out in the open there was precious little focus. At least the stranger could be relied upon to make one of his appearances; he was a shape to anticipate, separate from the trees.

The voice was familiar—searching, faint gravel. If he read to her, she would fall asleep.

This time he was unexpectedly personal.

‘They're interesting,' he eyed her below the throat, ‘they suit you very well.'

They were large white buttons below the V, only two. She'd taken them from an old coat and sewn them on herself.

‘My father went that way,' she said, ‘so I came this way. I feel I'm deceiving him.'

‘I don't see why.' Frowning, he gave the cable of the rickety bridge a firm rattle.

Ellen was aware she had stepped away from what he originally said, leaving before him nothing but fresh air, when he had actually shown an interest in her. She turned to the formation of evenly spaced trunks between them and the house.

‘It's my favourite lot of trees. What is yours?' Before he could answer she said softly, ‘Have you been in there? I saw once a photo of a rubber plantation in Malaya…'

He held a finger up. Eagles floating down from the great Mountain Ash veered away, and other dark birds joined the sky.

Now Ellen heard too: men's voices, boots crunching on strips of bark.

He pulled her into a space under the bridge, where they squatted, still holding her wrist, which she allowed.

She felt the smile in his voice, ‘Now you really are deceiving your father. What if he finds you here now?'

‘Shhhh,' she said.

Through a gap in the floor of the bridge she watched her father and Mr Cave coming into view, disappearing, reappearing, voices rising and falling too.

Ellen had been taking little notice of Mr Cave's progress; somehow she managed to put it at the back of her mind. But now seeing it at close quarters she was shocked. As she watched he moved steadily through the trees and named the entire plantation in about forty minutes. Evidently her father had become resigned. As Mr Cave identified a tree he ticked it off like a tally clerk in some sort of homemade catalogue raisonné, with a black cover. Already they resembled a father trudging with son-in-law.

‘He's like a machine,' she said faintly.

She wanted to rest her head. It was the hopelessness—almost a spreading stain—she had forgotten about; it now filled her throat again, churning her stomach. She didn't know what to do. She went limp the way a woman is said to go limp on the verge of rape. Yet Mr Cave was not at all a bad man! Squashed under the bridge she became aware her wrist was still being held, a severe way of taking her pulse. At least he, this man, seemed to be neutral.

‘This is terrible…' was all she could say.

The stranger let go of her wrist, and looked at the two men standing on the river bank to the right. It allowed Ellen to study the side of his face, his ear, and neck all very close.

‘My father,' Ellen whispered more to herself, ‘in the old coat. My father has…' Everybody for miles around knew about her father's marriage arrangement, though this man beside her had shown no sign of it.

At that stage Mr Cave had named over three-quarters of all the eucalypts; there could be only a few more days left. Fewer than a hundred trees remained, if that. Everybody else had fallen by the wayside. If Mr Cave wanted to he could have gone on and finished that very afternoon, except he seemed to enjoy walking around the paddocks with her father, talking and exchanging information, and not always about trees. Ellen saw all this before her; and now her father had become subdued.

To think that another man existed who also knew all there was to know about this vast and complex subject.

And Ellen suddenly wanted to march straight up and scream at her father, as if that would help. If only she was in Sydney. There she could disappear.

Just then his cigarette smoke reached them under the bridge. It contained the essence of him, her father; crumpled, warm, a stubborn presence, even to the silver furrows ploughed in his hair.

As for the stranger, he could hardly be relied upon. He took an interest, then appeared not to. He drew attention to the squat tree facing them,
E. racemosa
.

‘Something's bound to turn up,' he said.

Meanwhile, a prosaic photographer of trees (as other photographers aim for the nude, third-world walls, waifs in the melodramatic darkened drawing-rooms, the aesthetics of famine and/or war, high fashion, mountains from various angles) on assignment for an international publisher had passed through Holland's property, after gaining his permission, and in a highly efficient process which had all the oblivious casualness of nature itself, had identified each and every eucalypt and taken a photograph of each of them. Working to a deadline it had taken several weeks. Wherever he happened to be setting up his camera the others were on the opposite side of the property. Then lugging his tripod like a theodolite he simply loaded up and drove out the front gate, not having a clue about the prize—there for the taking if only he knew about it—or if he had known was not interested, and was never seen again. Not even Ellen who had taken an instant dislike to his dark knotted beard and the boots and the khaki shorts knew what he had achieved.

• 24 •
Barberi

AT BREAKFAST
Holland sat in his rough coat prepared once more to step out.

Through the window: eucalypts here and there down to the flat alongside the river, its course marked by a greater congestion of green. To the left was part of the ornamental drive of evenly spaced, same-height eucalypts; remember how it went from the road to the front door.

It was late. Within easy reach of the prize Mr Cave could afford to take his time.

Clouds had filled the sky and pressed down over the land, a promise of longed-for rain. As a consequence, the air and parts of the earth were grey. The mood at the table was sombre, shadowy. It was probably exaggerated—aggravated, we can say—by the charcoal-grey brick of the house and the extra darkness cast by the deep verandahs.

Ellen felt grey. She hadn't slept.

She wondered if it was her own tiredness which made her father just then look…not exactly elderly, decidedly worn and settled. His ears had grown larger. And bits of his chin missed while shaving suggested somehow a lack of judgment in all other things.

‘I want you to drink that. Otherwise I'm not pouring the tea.'

At breakfast Ellen had been producing orange juice, if not for a longer life, to make him feel better.

Her father reached out for the glass. ‘In the opinion of Mr Cave, it was an act of madness and ignorance to plant eucalypts along the drive. He knows of at least three properties where it led a passing bushfire straight up to the house. And the whole lot went up in smoke. It could happen here, he said. What would we do then?'

He reached out and touched Ellen's elbow.

‘The first thing our friend, Mr Cave, would do would be take the chainsaw to them. But nothing inside this house is of much value, except you. And without you'—he held her lovely elbow—‘this here place would be an empty shell.'

As Ellen remained beside him they became silent. She watched as he fiddled with his empty cup. He may have been on the point of saying something more when he looked up, ‘Hello, here is the man himself. Look at him, in his own way he's a remarkable chap.'

Ellen hurriedly left the room. She didn't answer when her father called out, and again when he set out with Mr Cave. For a while her blue pillow became a comfort.

She glanced at herself in the mirror: all she was doing these days was frown. With a hurried carelessness she changed into an old shirt of her father's, boots and olive trousers. Outside, she strode as usual towards the river, but abruptly slowed, hardly walking at all, looking down at the ground. A lazy greyness stole over her.

She felt like a neat house about to be occupied. And she actually laughed.

Long past the suspension bridge Ellen found herself in a semi-enclosed area she had visited only once, many years before, with her father on one of his planting expeditions. This was the far northern end where the river took an eastern turn; at its furthermost point Holland had planted the solitary Ghost Gum, which could some days be seen from the town. To Ellen's right the hill sloped down towards the river, both in perpetual shadow. Here on the tapering flat were many rare eucalypts now fully grown, a secret abundance, mostly from the Northern Territory and flowering in a mass of gaudy asterisks. Even Ellen paused and gazed about.

It had been the graveyard of the less prepared suitors; Mr Cave though would have reeled off their names for her (in their evocative common parlance: Pumpkin Gum, Yellow Jacket, Barber's Gum, Kakadu Woollybutt, Manna Gum, Gympie Messmate, Bastard Tallowwood, and so on); except Ellen never wanted to hear the name of another eucalypt again.

Across her path was a long mulga snake, seeking warmth, which Ellen stepped around.

Why she had wandered so far from the house she couldn't say. It hadn't exactly been conscious. At last she stopped at a delicate mallee sprouting thin trunks, more like thin branches shoved into the ground.

If he now comes to me, where I am standing here, she decided, he must be following me. Aside from anything else it would show the
lengths
he would go to for her. And she wanted to see him.

Most of his stories, she began to realise, were about daughters and marriage; and these stories, she saw, she thought, were more and more directed at her.

It was enough for her not to think about the inevitable advance of Mr Cave.

The workman's shirt and slacks verging on the drab failed to neutralise her speckled beauty. If anything they made it still more startling. In fact, anyone coming upon her would conclude that if she was inconsolable it was to do with her beauty.

She immediately noticed his hair wet and he had evidently dried himself with his shirt.

‘I am here,' she called out.

For a good ten minutes they sat, almost touching at several points, without saying anything. Such ease of familiarity calmed her. It also turned her thoughts directly to him. Now when he began talking he was almost as indecisive as the Barber's Gum sprouting all over the place, behind them; he took his cue from it, his words slowly circling and searching, to enter her, and nobody else.

There was talk of a story (‘Did you ever happen to hear…?') from Mauritania, of all places, a vast desert country of medieval habits where, it is said, no building is more than two storeys high. In a stony part of this country, near some low mountains, a young long-haired woman was held captive by
an ogre
. He was a violent perspiring figure, easily angered. He lived in a stone hut with stone furniture; it also had stone windows. The young woman thought constantly of ways to escape. Obviously the best chance was at night, but the ogre had thought of that and slept with her hair in his teeth. She began to despair, though she never lost her beauty. One moonless night a thief got in, and carefully began removing her hair one by one from the monster's teeth. It took all night. Just as it became light he removed the last hair and they made their escape; and as they ran over the stony ground the young thief saw before him the pale beauty he had only heard rumours of, and she in her happiness at being free turned and saw her rescuer, the thief, for the first time.