The Submerged Cathedral (13 page)

Over that first summer with Duncan she had seen England's parks and gardens. It was 1967, but at Hampton Court, Sissinghurst, Kew, at others with forgettable names and famous designers, the centuries rolled back. Mannerist, romantic, classical, twentieth century. Capability Brown, Robinson, Jekyll. Duncan spoke of the epochs and monarchs of British garden design, the fashions leaping back and forth across the Channel, across Europe. The long-abandoned
giochi d'acqua
, the absurdly intricate, hydraulically operated stone-and-water puppet-shows that had sixteenth-century stone birds singing, dragons gyrating, stone hermits opening cave doors and gliding out to greet the garden visitor. The endless water chains, grottoes stuccoed with stalactites of shell and sparkling grit. The ramps, fountains, terraces, balustrades, overlooking panoramas of shifted, moulded, planted, shaped land. The centuries of erasure and reconstruction of thousands on thousands of acres, the construction, destruction, draining of lakes, diverting of rivers, the strewing of intricate parterres and knot gardens and mosaic and stone, and the madness of topiary in every form.

The Temple of Apollo loomed out of the sodden English air in a Wiltshire garden, its classical white stone a pale swatch against the green, the green. They had been travelling for weeks and despite her detailed note-taking
she was tired of the classical allusions and the sumptuousness of all this artifice. And on another lush terrace tumbling with hundred-year-old creepers, she felt guiltily homesick for something raw and dry. She had a surge of compassion for Australia's arid little postage stamps, the People's Parks of innumerable rural towns. Squat oblongs of fifty square feet between the railway track and the highway, half a dozen mangy pencil pines, hopeful patches of scuffed buffalo grass. Always one fat wooden seat, angled too far backwards for comfort, set into solid cement block legs, and positioned with almost a surveyor's precision in the centre of the park, lacking shade in the sweltering summer or any cornered relief from winter winds. The endless shreds and shaved corners of land through small towns in the rural districts. Hinkley Reserve. Herb Greedy Park. The Alice Ford Memorial Playground. All grandly named and cursively signposted in fading green on bleached tin, little shin-high drystone walls delineating these paltry half-green spaces, thoroughfares, sidings, bus-shelters. The parks and gardens of country New South Wales.

In the evenings, alone in her hotel room, for the first time since she came to this country she began to draw images of plants from home.

U
P AT THE
ridge she collects seeds, takes cuttings and runners from the scrub. In a month there are lines of small potted seedlings outside the woodshed. Rows of black pots with tiny green shoots emerging.

She has marked out, walking, where the new paths will be, from one space to the next, curving through the sacristan's garden and towards the abbey, meeting the straight lines between the grids of herb gardens, the vegetable plot, the physic garden, joining another arc out to the cemetery, a larger sweep down to the dam, through the paddock grasses to become a track up to the ridge. And from each one trail smaller paths, tributaries to smaller spaces, where a bench might be, a lemon-scented myrtle, a place for thinking. Winding back on themselves, parting and meeting, coming to rest at the one open corner of the cloister quadrangle.

Back in the library she writes, scribbles down what she has observed each day.

The potted seedlings grow taller, tougher, their stems matchstick-, then pencil-thick. These first months she spends weeding and turning soil, too, and watching the lie of the land.

And collecting stone, for the paths. For texture, for delineation, for colour. For wall and stair and paving. For drainage. For seating. For pond-lining and terracing, for enclosure and for spatial release. For transition, reflection. For stitching her imagination in basalt into the side of this wide yellow dish of a valley.

S
HE AND
D
UNCAN
once spent two hours among the mummies at the British Museum. It was warm outside, and she had wanted to go to a park, to sit on grass in the sun. It had been so long since the sun shone with any warmth that she only wanted to be outside.

In Green Park the deckchairs had been full of people lying with their eyes closed, offering themselves to the sun. Some of the younger women pushed their blouses off their shoulders, showing the straps of their underwear, and had taken off their shoes and stockings. When she first saw English people baring their winter skin in public like this she had thought their desperation pathetic. Now, after four summers here, she wanted to join them, to strip off the layers of her clothes and just lie there on the grass, listening to the sounds of the city beyond the green acres of lawns, and waiting for summer.

But instead they had got off the tube at Holborn and climbed the shallow stone stairs to the Museum.

In the gloom of the Egyptian section the mummies lay, in various states of unwrap. The room was cold, and Jocelyn buttoned her cardigan to the neck. Duncan stared at the silver and turquoise jewellery next to the tiny coffin of a young woman. ‘Look how small they must have been,' he murmured, holding up his own large hand, marvelling at the tiny Egyptian fingers.

Opposite, in a glass case, were the mummified bodies of animals. A cat sat neatly upright, its small triangular face a perfectly sewn linen replica, dark eyes and nose coloured with dye. The cylinder of its body was long and tightly wrapped, and some of the outer cloth had been removed to show the intricate, decorative pattern of the woven webbing beneath. Next to the cat were two falcons. On another shelf, less recognisable in their wrapped bulk, a small baboon and a baby crocodile.

As Duncan stood reading the tiny plaques stuffed full of words, Jocelyn wandered among the glass cases, among the preserving jars and all this painted decay.

Ellen's baby had been disposed of somewhere in Australia's Blue Mountains. Jocelyn found herself wondering whether that small body was wrapped before they threw it away. Alone, or with others? Buried or burnt?

She stared through the spotless glass panes at the lit
gold and the turquoise, the body's arms folded across the heart. It had been possible, then, somewhere, for death to give rise to art.

 

She plants two hundred eucalypt seedlings along the track entering the property from the road. Her back aches, it takes her three days to dig the holes alone.

She wheelbarrows the tiny plants from the truck, cannot believe they will survive the wallabies and kangaroos, or the frosts that still come sometimes despite the summer. She spends nights cutting hessian for the tree guards, days with a sledgehammer banging in the posts. At the end of a week, she stands at the top of the track and can see her work: an avenue of small sackcloth shrines.

 

Back at the Gloucestershire farm, while Duncan worked in the garden she sat at the typewriter watching him move back and forth beyond the window. When he dozed inside on the warm afternoons, Jocelyn sat on the wooden bench with one foot tucked beneath her like a child, a lone sandal abandoned on the warm stone of the terrace, and began weaving a halting mosaic with shells over the large table.

She had collected them from the gritty beaches in England's north on a trip with Duncan and, memory echoing, kept them by the back door in a bucket.

When Duncan was not there she picked the shells from the shallow sloping pile one by one, examining, turning over, running her fingertips across the cornets of them, then placing them gently, instinctively.

When he came out she would uncurl herself and stand, leaving the shells flotsammed over the table, and go inside. But Duncan liked to eat on the terrace, and without mentioning it, they began to dine carefully around the shells, putting plates and glasses in the remaining spaces on the tabletop.

By this time they were lovers. She had asked him once, gently, lying in bed, ‘Why do you want to be with me?'

His face had coloured. He said nothing, and then: ‘I told you, I'm not good with words.' Holding her hand and stroking it, looking at the ceiling. She could see the leaves of the plane tree at the window, and she pictured the hedgerows beyond the garden, the tiny birds darting. She could think of no reason to argue.

The table was almost covered after a fortnight, swirling colours and shapes rising up in ridges and dunes. After each day's work Jocelyn would sit, head bent with her black hair curving from under the pale blue headband, brow creased, chewing her lip, occasionally leaning back
to gauge the shape. Then her hand would hover, picking out pieces of the wrong colour or a somehow unsatisfactory shape, and tossing them without looking back into the green bucket at her side.

Home from a London job, Duncan watched through the kitchen window at her complete unawareness of his presence. Once he had sat down next to her and picked up a shell himself, looking for a space to put it. But she had turned her head suddenly, and then he saw that this was not meant for him to share.

Now he took her a cup of tea, putting the cup down in a space on the table, not asking what she was doing, trying to force his confusion away. But all he saw was the smallness of this landscape of lifeless little shells. She lifted her head and smiled, took the tea cup and nested it in both hands at her chest, turned back to her mosaic. But she had seen his face – and finally she recognised it, his embarrassment. She slowly put down the tea cup and, still without looking at him, bent down and lifted the bucket. Extended her right arm into an arc, leaned forward and guided the shells across the table into the bucket. Duncan watched the shapes dissolve and the colours mix, and half wanted to cry out, ‘Stop.' But he didn't, and he felt something like relief as he turned into the house away from the suddenly dank afternoon air.

Before this, before she had shovelled the little dry creatures away from his gaze, she had answered him one night, ‘It's not
for
anything,' staring into the fire after dinner. ‘It's for me.'

 

Each day she works on the path up the ridge to the grave, setting down stone for the steps. In this working rhythm she becomes all senses, all touch, the composted air so rich and dank sometimes she is nauseated. And the swinging rhythm of the shovel into soil and the pickaxe into stone, the shifting layers of the bush and its hisses and flammable air, all merge into an alchemical, moving mosaic.

I
N
N
OTRE
D
AME
she lit two candles. Then paused. ‘For my parents,' she told Duncan. She felt his eyes on her, his head turned from where he had been standing, craning his neck to look up at the cathedral's ceiling.

As she lit the first taper she knew it was not for her parents. She did think of them then, buried together in the Blue Mountains ground, pine needles falling over the gravestone. The engraved name of her father beneath her mother's, each weathered shallow over the years.

In the cathedral a choir practised somewhere above them, the voices swelling the building into a vast construction of sound. She thought of her father singing in church in the mountains, whistling bird noises under his breath to amuse his children when the hymn mentioned birds singing to the Lord.

Here she could make out no words, not even French ones, only a layering of chimed sounds. Something about it here – the building, the hunchback story, the choir of human voices – made her want to cry.

She lit the second taper, the one for herself, and pushed it into the sand.

She gathered her coat around her and turned to leave Duncan to the architecture. But Duncan knew the candles were about something else, some other memory not meant for him. He touched her hand as she went to pass him. He leaned in towards her.

His eyes were clear there in the dark church, looking into hers. ‘I'm not stupid, Jocelyn.' And he let go her hand.

 

Small, anxious dogs on vein-thin leashes trotted through the city. Sitting on one of the green metal chairs under the trees at the Luxembourg Gardens she watched a tall dark woman with a white terrier. All the women in Paris were tall, all the women's shoes unscuffed, all the dogs' hair washed and combed.

She thought of Alf, wondering if he was still alive, still where she'd left him in the vet's secretary's yard. She thought of him sleeping in the sun, and of Sandra lavishing her child's love on the bewildered old dog, who until her arrival was accustomed to no more attention than an
idle nudge with a foot while Jocelyn worked on her proofreading before the fire, or the tinny sound of his food bowl landing on the laundry floor.

The woman bent down and unleashed the terrier, then straightened and looked around to choose a seat for herself. The dog stopped too, polite, dainty, then suddenly scuffled its back feet twice in the dirt and bolted beyond the trees towards the pond. The woman folded her long body into a seat and took a book from her handbag.

Sandra used to try to teach tricks to Alf under the pine trees in the lower garden, with pocketfuls of biscuit or bread. Alf sat obedient but uninterested, staring only at the pocket on the front of her purple-chequered dress while she chattered away at him, trying to coax him to roll over, or lift his paw. Eventually, when he hadn't moved except to waver a little as he flopped to the ground and let his tongue loll pinkly out, Sandra would shout something at him and fling the biscuit on the ground, then stomp off, leaving him content and snuffling in the dirt. Once she washed him, cornering him between the laundry tub and the copper, and lathering him up with Lux flakes. After an initial struggle, his toenails skidding in circles over the wet cement floor, he had surrendered, shivering and shaking himself until Sandra was soaked through. Then they had both gone to sit in
the sun on the front lawn, an air of exhausted truce between them. The house was filled with Alf's clean-sheets perfume for days afterward.

 

Duncan did not ask any more about the letters she wrote monthly, never getting a reply. The first time he asked, she said, ‘They're to my niece.'

But he stood in front of her, so she met his eye and held up the page:
Dear Sandra
. ‘I'm sorry,' Duncan had said. He waited then.

Slowly, placing the paper back on the desk in front of her, she said, ‘I think you should know that this is not going to change.' She paused, swallowed. ‘If you're waiting for something about me to be different, I don't think it will.'

He stood still there in the little hotel room with his hands in his pockets, watching the toe of his brown shoe, lifting and lowering it in tiny movements. After a moment he whispered, ‘I'm going out.'

When he left the room she sat staring at her blue words on paper. Jocelyn was not sure that Sandra even received the letters, that Ellen was even still at the Kensington house. But the letters were never returned, and she kept writing.

Now she pulled the plant books from her suitcase and
read, and sketched from memory the pleached lime trees of the Tuileries Gardens.

Once she had written,
Dear Martin
. But her pen stopped, and she had gently pulled the page from the writing pad, folded it, and dropped it into a wastepaper basket. The sound of the paper hitting the tin like something ending.

 

Over this first year the bones of her garden begin to form, its spine and limbs and walls and rooms solidifying in the earth. She walks and drives the country around the monastery, collecting seed, visiting nurseries and plants-men and tree farms. Never talking much: a woman in a green truck, heaving the vehicle up and down bush tracks and highways. But mostly the truck only moves back and forth in tracks across her own land.

A September torrential rainstorm destroys a month's work in a day, washing all the topsoil from the terrace near the abbey, the earth slumped through the broken retaining wall like lava, and all the plants drowned. She goes about her rescue, picking them from the earth, repotting them, hospitalising them in a makeshift glasshouse while she repairs, remakes the stone wall.

Repetition is everywhere in this work. In the mistakes and their solutions, the moving towards some
understanding, then its undoing, the trying again. In the seasons turning and fading and returning.

At night, her designs become studies in the perpendicular; and around the perimeter of the dam she constructs duckboards and plants sedges, the
Gymnoschoenus sphaerocephalus
.

Duncan had often talked, as he drove from one site to the next, about terracing, about the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Diodorus, he said, wrote that the gardens were built high above the palace, in tiers like a theatre. The galleries were first covered over with beams of stone sixteen feet long and four feet wide. The roofs placed over the beams had a layer of reeds, huge quantities of them, in a kind of bitumen, and over that they put two courses of brick and cement, and then the third layer was a covering of soil deep enough for the roots of the largest trees.

Duncan liked to give these small lectures, these offerings of knowledge. She tried to picture the structures, the measurements. ‘You'll have to draw it for me, I don't understand,' she said, more interested in the mythology than the mathematics. She thought of Nebuchadnezzar's grieving Persian wife, homesick for the meadows of her mountains, and his building instead for her these gardens in the air. The story of a man with room in his imagination for such a gift.

Once at Pittwater, after Martin had pinned a swatch of bubble weed to the verandah beam over the step, he had held her, laughing and wriggling under its drips, until she kissed him. That bubble weed stayed there for months, at first smelling rotten, then drying to a hard, blue-green tassel. At first they would kiss whenever one of them noticed it there. Later, as it shrank, they would notice it, but remarked upon it less and less. By the morning she left for the mountains, it had gone.

 

Her body aches all over with this work of imprinting herself on the land.

In the passing of the days and nights she occasionally steps inside the abbey again, to rest her head on the pew. In the coolness of that empty space she sometimes wonders,
Is a garden always a gift?

 

Jocelyn takes the map of the property and lays a new layer of tracing paper over the previous one. Draws in pencil what she has done since the last version: the stands of eucalypts and the grass-trees, the grevilleas now hip-height around the abbey, coming into spindly flower. Over time, on sheet after sheet of paper like this, she maps in the paths, the new beds, the benches and the stones, follows
the contours of the land with her pen, with pencils and watercolours. Eventually, the drawings plaster the walls. In the evenings she stays in here, drawing and reading. Sometimes she falls asleep in the old vinyl chair, the radiator's heat on her face waking her hours later.

She adds to her catalogues of plants. Grasses: lomandra, pennesetum, poa. Groundcovers: prostrate
Goodenia ovata
, brachyscome,
Viola hederacea
; shade trees: ficus, lillypilly, the West Australian willow myrtle. The particular pleasure of classification, of the Latin names, of their retrieval from memory, of their repetition.
Grevillea sericea
,
Grevillea mucronulata
,
Grevillea buxifolia
.

Is this prayer? These invocations that, spoken aloud, alone, summon some potential, some instinctive, butted-at meaning?