Eucalyptus (22 page)

Made jagged by the wind Ellen began having restless, irrational thoughts. Now he was gone. What had got into her? As she kept thinking she frowned. Turning towards him naked that day at the river she had felt an extreme, open simplicity. It was also trust in him. In a sense she had already given herself; hardly could be seen as a stranger now.

Waiting at the places where they usually met she immediately knew he wouldn't be there. She went further afield, wandering, tree to tree.

Eucalypts, selfish trees, give precious little shelter. On one of those days Ellen was a long way from the house, and perhaps wishing the dripping gums had the umbrella qualities of oaks, or ordinary plane trees, or even gloomy Teutonic pines, became wet through, forgetting to button up her stockman's coat. It was true that with her hair plastered across her forehead and ears, and having just hurried a zigzag course, water still running down her face, she felt at the centre of a possibly sad drama; she wore a determined, set expression. Why else remove her wet dress and place it on the mysterious nail in the trunk of her tree? Without thinking, she'd come across the
E. maidenii
—and there was the nail. Hanging to dry, the dress repeated a collapsed version of herself.

At least the weather brought a halt to Mr Cave's implacable march. Out of habit, though, he still arrived in the morning, stamping his muddy boots on the verandah, he and Holland. Each gripping a mug of tea they contemplated the dirty weather.

Only the far triangular paddock remained, of mostly stringybarks, containing at its point closest to town the one and only Ghost Gum. The ornamentals lining the drive up to the house he was leaving to last. Apparently the idea was to name the last forty eucalypts in a sort of triumphant sweep up to the front door. Mr Cave told Holland he needed another day, two at the most.

Ellen heard this over and above the rain on the iron roof as she brushed past on the verandah, without a dress under her waterproof, and almost stumbled.

Everybody but Ellen could see Mr Cave was about to win her hand. Incredibly, she had again concentrated all her thoughts and energies elsewhere, in another person out there somewhere, quite a compelling invisible man, perhaps hoping that by turning her head in the opposite direction the industrial advance of Mr Cave would somehow veer off and go away. There was little her father, or anybody else, could do to save her now.

When the weather cleared she went up into the tower and searched in all directions for any movement, any sign of him. Familiar things had shifted positions, others had left bits of themselves strewn on the ground, breaking the line of a fence, or else stood up at strange angles. Here and there hollows normally filled with shadow glittered with water; a landscape after a battle.

So trees produced oxygen in the form of words. Ellen could hear his voice. Stories with foreign settings came closer to home. They came back to her. It was due to sheets of water lying around, and the bedraggled eucalypts begging for attention.

Between stories Ellen had allowed him to reach out and help her quite unnecessarily over a fallen tree or rocks.

The River Peppermint (
E. elata
), it has more botanical names applied to it than any other eucalypt. ‘In one of the harbourside haciendas in Vaucluse lived a small bright-eyed woman in gold sandals who had been married and divorced so many times she had trouble remembering her current name. Other women liked her, and yet she was never happy. One day for no apparent reason a muscular man with a star tattooed on one shoulder and wearing nothing but boots, shorts and navy singlet dumped a load of wet yellow sand in her drive and—would you believe?—ambled up to the front door for a receipt. She was still in her dressing-gown, her hair a mess. It took a minute or two to sort out the confusion, only for it to be replaced as they remained looking at one another by an altogether different, deeper confusion which she recognized…'

As for the slender Steedman's Mallet (
E. steedmanii
) from the west, naturally Ellen anticipated something about larrikin jockeys or drovers; instead he brought up the sad case of the postman in Botany (a suburb of Sydney) who found the job of delivering mail
beneath him
, Ellen smiled, and performed his duties with such reluctance he was transferred to smaller and smaller country towns until he ended up in this very town just over the khaki river, where his sister served at the counter and he could occasionally be heard moving about or clearing his throat inside the office.

Trees with the most shameless histrionic common names, such as the Lemon Scented, Silver Princess, the various Yellow Jackets and the Wallangarra White dropping leaves in the dam, to mention four, wandered in and out of view which became memory. And Ellen felt his words circling closer; quite insistent, really.

There's a place called Corunna in north-west Spain, he had said. A place of rocks—geological delirium. Corunna is known for just two things: foul weather, it never stops raining, and its lighthouse built of granite in the Dark Ages. Local families call it ‘the Tower of Caramel'. In this tower, the story goes, was housed a miraculous mirror that could reflect anything that happened anywhere in the world. The women of Corunna went to the mirror to see where their men were at any given moment, their hardships and dangers at sea, as well as births, deaths and marriages.

One Sunday a local man in a black suit went up to check on the woman he was meant to marry. Instead he found a young foreign woman with a strong jaw and broad hips consulting the mirror—at the suggestion of the local tourist office—to discover the whereabouts of her always exuberant girlfriend who had neglected to leave a forwarding address. The Spaniard was about to go when he saw clearly in the mirror his fiancée in the arms of the mayor's son! Beside the bed was a carafe of wine. As he stared his fiancée moved to be on top of the other one. The Spaniard turned to the startled Australian. ‘I'll kill them! Now!' He really meant it.

The no-nonsense Australian woman saw nothing in the mirror, not even a sign of her cheerful friend, and placed a soothing hand on his arm.

She was from Geelong. She was always leaving or coming back, as if she was attached to a very long length of elastic. First it was Bali. After that, India. She went to London and came back. South America was on her list. She went back to Europe, doing it on trains, using London as a base, before feeling the tug of home. On her return she would at once begin planning her next move.

To cut a long story short, he said, the young woman from Geelong and the Spaniard left the tower together, and were seen enjoying themselves in one of the cafés. She stayed on in Corunna. He came to her room. The dark sea that kept trying to squeeze in through the window and into her room, and the sounds of the seabirds and the foreign words outside, while inside this man with the blueish face gave her such solemn attention, his eyes and hands never stopping, combined with the energy of her youth to produce a sympathetic intensity—he had said—an intense spreading softness she had never experienced before.

In the room with him she measured her smooth good health and saw her life laid out ahead, sunlit, obeying the laws of perspective. Nevertheless, after a week she became restless again. In a mass of good-natured smiles she announced it was time for her to be leaving; the man showed his surprise by shouting at her. But she had decided, though when she looked back from the bus at his receding figure she felt confused and blew her nose.

In London at the most unexpected moments she saw the room in Corunna, which seemed from a distance to be jammed in at an angle among the black rocks. She kept seeing him across the room and close up. It was their room. He had a long face and hairs on his shoulders: she liked his solemn expression. She could feel his mouth and hear his voice.

A person meets thousands of different people across a lifetime, a woman thousands of different men, of all shades, and many more if she constantly passes through different parts of the world. Even so, of the many different people a person on average meets it is rare for one to fit almost immediately in harmony and general interest. For all the choices available the odds are enormous. The miracle is there to be grasped. Perhaps in unconscious recognition of this she had tugged both his ears early one morning in a rush of gaiety which he extended by making a great show of rolling on the floor in agony.

In London she realised she should never have left. At strange important moments a person is given one and only one chance; and that had been one.

It was raining in Corunna. She hurried along the streets and tried the cafés. All the men could do was shrug. She gave descriptions of him. All morning she sat with a hot chocolate at their usual table. On the third day she went up to the mirror in the tower to find his whereabouts. There was nothing. The mirror was black.

As she turned to go she had a glimpse of herself—a figure almost like her, from behind. Remaining still she saw herself in the mirror fifteen, twenty years down the track. Alone, quite muscular in the legs, she was holding a heavy shopping bag with a bunch of celery sticking out: near her was a thin tree, not very tall, with dark green, somewhat patchy leaves.

Ellen made her way down from the tower.

There had been no sign of him. She realised she wasn't even sure of his name. What then about the near future? Too terrible to even think about: it was rushing towards her. On the other hand she didn't want her life to be a vast empty paddock.

In her room she felt as restless as the woman from Geelong, in his story.

She scribbled a note. ‘We must talk. I am your unhappy daughter.' She shoved it under her father's door.

• 30 •
Papuana

CONSIDER THE
burden of being the first white woman born in New Guinea. Its debilitating effects can hardly be imagined by those luckily born looking like everybody else. Beginning as an incandescent child on the plantation, growing up there, to the boarding school in Brisbane, the various careers and romances after that, until marriage to the smartly dressed Italian, the faintly mental load she carried about can be likened to those of any number of island women condemned to spending their lives with a wide load of firewood or green bananas balanced on their heads.

If she was in Brisbane, she would be known by many people.

Large (seriously enormous), she took refuge in caftans and sunny florals, and wide-diameter earrings which swung and jangled whenever she moved. Her hair had gone from bottle-blonde to muddy-grey. For some reason, white skin does not belong in the tropics. Heat and humidity had battered her face and arms, though she had a lovely small smile. In Brisbane she ran a jewellery shop in one of the city malls. With no warning, and just when she had turned fifty, the husband left her for another woman. At around the same time the first of the melanomas were diagnosed on her cheek and neck. To their son, who had his own problems, what with a small family as well as his own retail business in a nearby mall, she gave instructions and made him promise—she had him swear on a Bible—that after her death he was to spread her ashes over the garden of her ex-husband, whom she hated.

A ghost story for another time.

• 31 •
Patellaris

HER FATHER
had warned her about men. Did that include
fathers
?

Otherwise, men were known to be weak and evasive. A man could not be relied upon, not really; they were always somewhere else. And men were constantly trying to convince. It was as if that was their purpose for being on earth. Ellen had her face to the swirling wallpaper. They told stories, spoke with tongues as smooth as you like, and with the one thing in mind—still, it invariably alerted something pleasant in her. Always wanting to convince.

As for fathers, what about her own—the man now moving about in the other room?

Women he once described as ‘little engines'. Speaking generally, that is; with just a touch of the usual exasperation. Visualising heat, pipes and vibrations was easier than trying to understand them. Ellen had noticed that with women in town her father assumed an indifferent, often blunt manner, which they even found attractive.

In his room Holland was squatting over the plaques he'd had engraved for outdoor display, the names of all the eucalypts under the sun, sorting through them on the floor. Ellen came in, and when he didn't say anything she sat down.

It took a few minutes to become accustomed to the air in her father's room. And as always Ellen looked around with curiosity: at the absence of true softness, of colour—no mirror in the room. Instead, she followed the haphazard brownness of bits of equipment, instruments, machinery parts, the rain gauge spilling pencils; heavy coats, spare boots, the pioneer's camp stretcher; ledgers, papers, cigarette-rolling machine; suitcase, and the shotgun in the corner he said was ready loaded to keep the young bucks away; calendar showing the colossal Red Gum taking up an entire footpath in Adelaide—a gift at the beginning of the year, from Mr Cave.

The room presented a silent untidy harmony similar to a hillside of fallen trees. And yet it was
cavelike
. Ellen respected its differences, signs of her father's scattered self; a sort of random, long-established individuality.

‘Talk about havoc,' he was now saying, ‘complete mayhem. Any number of trees have been skittled. It'll never be the same.'

‘Dams are full, and I couldn't get near the river.'