The Frangipani Gardens Read online

  The Frangipani Gardens

  Born in Adelaide in 1939, Barbara Hanrahan was a celebrated artist, printmaker and writer. Her first book, a semi-autobiographical account of her childhood, The Scent of Eucalyptus, was published in 1973 to rave reviews. It was followed by another twelve novels and two short-story collections. Her last book, Good Night, Mr Moon, was published in 1992, the year after her death. The Barbara Hanrahan Fellowship for South Australian writers was established to honour her memory and contribution to Australian literature.

  By the same author

  The Scent of Eucalyptus

  Sea-Green

  The Albatross Muff

  Where the Queens All Strayed

  The Peach Groves

  Dove

  Kewpie Doll

  Annie Magdalene

  Dream People

  A Chelsea Girl

  Flawless Jade

  Iris in her Garden

  Michael and Me and the Sun

  Good Night, Mr Moon

  To Reece Nobes

  Wilt thou go with me sweet maid

  Say maiden wilt thou go with me

  Through the valley depths of shade

  Of night and dark obscurity

  Where the path hath lost its way

  Where the sun forgets the day

  Where there’s nor life nor light to see

  Sweet maiden wilt thou go with me

  John Clare

  Part One

  Boy and Girlie

  And Granma said ‘You are the descendant of an Irish race of kings.’ You must remember it when you didn’t fancy the white of your egg, when it was Betsy Brown pudding for tea; when Mama looked worse and it was your fault: wasting disease they called it and, at the last, foam came out of her mouth, the doctor looked weary as he wiped it away. And Papa was a wild man, crying; he was only a child, younger than you — throwing himself on the bed, grasping her cold hand. But he hated you. It was you who did it — killed her. You were too big as a baby, Boy O’Brien. Coming out, you tore her; you rent her private places.

  They took her away and Papa didn’t talk to you. Papa worked in the shop, selling the little packets of seeds. Nothing was better than looking at those packets — you had a secret garden all your own. You shuffled them; held them to your ear and rattled. Who’d imagine that those bullet-hard seeds could sprout stems and petals and sticky pollen dots.

  A lady came twice a week to do artistic floral arrangement. Leaves fell like green rain over the floor, and the stems of hydrangeas were scraped, roses were banged, dahlias scalded. This lady did magic — scraping and banging, slitting and pricking. Almond blossom lasted if you immersed it in sugar water; beech branches were preserved in glycerine. Some flowers had wire stems … for a dead baby you could have a pillow of freesias. Mama had a snowdrop cross.

  And God was Love, but St Stephen was the first martyr — they dragged him outside the city; angrily, they aimed their rocks. And St Peter died upside down; St Lawrence frizzled on the gridiron. Granma opened her book and horrors emerged, they waited to get you at night. But your ancestor was Brian Boru; there were three lions on your crest; ‘The strong hand uppermost’ was your motto.

  Girlie was always the favourite. She was ugly, a dwarf, they ought to sell her to the circus. She’d been a baby who lived in cotton-wool, and had slipped from Mama’s body so easy. One minute Mama sat down to drink a cup of tea, next minute Girlie emerged. It was a story put in the newspaper: about Girlie’s tiny perfection. She was one of the little people, a fairy baby given on a whim. At her birth Mama heard sweet music like melodeons and fifes. But it was only a story. Girlie was small, certainly, but she’d never do as a rival to the Cincinnati speck of humanity.

  In the beginning they weren’t Girlie and Boy. She was Kathleen, he was Pat; it was Adelaide, but they owned proper Irish names, bestowed with a holy water sprinkle. But Mama died and then Mass stopped — you weren’t anything then.

  Girlie always wheedled a cuddle. She was older than Boy, but she was treated as little sister. She was a drawing room charmer, dimpled and lisping, but when she had you alone she’d pinch, and: Do this, she’d say, do that. Or she’d start off on her mocking silvery laugh, and the thing that meant most lost its flavour. What did he want with those seed packets? It was unnatural … constantly fiddling with them — a great boy like that.

  He grew careful. Nothing should betray him again. He kept away from the florist’s shop with its moist secret smells. Feeling made you vulnerable, so Boy gave it up. Courage, lad. As you strengthen the body, so will the mind become strong. Go in for games, take lots of exercise and a cold bath each morning. You will live to laugh at your fears yet.

  He turned into a scholar, someone who lived through his mind. He had an athlete’s body, he used the dumb bells daily, but he didn’t see the strong brown limbs or the boxer’s chest. A mind was the main thing, Boy’s was wonderfully rational. The lovely finality of history — all those dates that heralded all those countless endings — was what he liked best. Dates and death and war — that was history for Boy. The true heir by blood. Direct and perpetual antagonists. Mortal wounds, treasonous intrigues … history was real.

  But up the top of the house, sitting like a witch in a grotto, was Granma. Papa kept her hidden away. She had ringlets and rouged cheeks; she had two mouths, because her lipstick had slipped. And her chamber pot was always in view, though she stank of cachous as much as piddle, for she constantly sucked on something sweet. ‘Try one, Boy,’ she’d command, proffering a crumpled paper bag. And you were helpless, you couldn’t refuse, but must crunch at sickly sweetness as she looked you over. Old half-wit — belching and farting in her basket chair, ruining Boy’s neat rule of not feeling.

  Granma was a back number who should have died years ago. Boy would have allowed her that first Mayoral Ball in the Town Hall in ’66 that she reminisced of constantly (imagine, a crinolined Gran dancing the merry polka under crystal chandeliers), then wiped her out. She would have stayed Eily Casey then, and none of those O’Briens would have existed — Mama would never have died.

  Though Granma had been an evil harbinger from the start. She thrived on blight and misfortune … Gran, back in those penniless County Cork days: carrying buckets of mulch suspended from a yoke across her infant shoulders, then going home to memorize miracles and the stations of the cross, and make a start on that legendary sampler in silks that proclaimed ‘Look at this, and you may see what care my parents took of me’. Was it true? — little Eily plying her needle, a junior Penelope awaiting her royal husband, while outside the pigs scrimmaged and Dadda’s arm had turned septic, he could not work: there was only cabbage for tea — really?

  But the famine was true. The year 1847, and over sixty years later there was someone still alive to scare Boy with an eyewitness account.

  And the spring of the previous year had been unpromising enough. Hail and sleet fell in March, and in Belfast there was snow as late as the first week in April. But when the summer came it made amends. The weather in June was of tropical heat; vegetation sprang up with rapidity and a splendid harvest was anticipated. But at the end of the month the weather broke; there were copious downfalls of rain, the air was electrical and disturbed. There was much lightning, accompanied by thunder, and after that intense cold. Yet still the potato crop flourished; all over the country were fields of waving green. Then, in the early days of August, a strange portent was seen simultaneously in several parts of Ireland. A fog, which some described as white and others as yellow, was seen to rise from the ground. It was dry and emitted a disagreeable odour; it bore the blight
within its accursed bosom. The work of destruction was swift. That night the fresh green potato leaves were mottled with dark spots such as would come from a drop of acid; by morning they were bleached and withered and stinking. Throughout the whole country the entire crop was destroyed, almost to the last potato.

  And you didn’t want to listen, but Granma made you. Her cracked voice held you — you were in the grip of death, back there with Eily. Wringing your hands and wailing bitterly, wandering the highroad, grasping at anything that promised sustenance.

  Even if Boy stopped up his ears, even if he ran from the room, her voice could still find him. At night it soundlessly whispered, it made him see: the dry tongue, shrunk to half its size and brown in the centre; the thin bloodless lips, coated with sores … discoloured sodden skin, putrid smell, and Eily out there alone, dodging fever hospitals and coffin ships. And it didn’t matter that the nuns saved her from the gutter, for now Eily had turned into Mama — and it was Boy who did it: fighting for life, he put her in the way of dying. And then St Lawrence was there, but changed from the gentle-faced man in the ray of light holding the palm branch. He wasn’t saying that the sick and poor were the treasures of the Church, now. His skin peeled off in layers, he shrieked as the flames leapt higher. And Boy was asleep, but he was crying. For it was the fire Gran said would get them because Papa hadn’t taught them religion. For he was feeling. He felt the flames. And the gallant Wolfe’s mortal wound, the Black Hole growing stuffier, the pillow coming down on the Princes in the Tower. Feeling was awful. History was ruined.

  School was a prison, but home was worse. This creature had come to work for Papa. She was a girl, she made you think of a snake. It was the way she stood — sinuous. Which meant characterized by or abounding in turns, curves … deviating from the right, morally crooked. Boy looked the word up in the dictionary and used it against her. ‘Sinuous,’ he muttered when he saw her. The word was a defence, a charm.

  Pearl was a mystery, she was Church of Christ. Which meant you drank lemonade and didn’t jig or wear lippy. But she had a habit of moistening her lips with her tongue — Pearl’s tongue was shiny and pink; she was always smoothing her dress, settling her hips. She was skinny, sway-backed; but she had this little stick-out stomach. She flaunted it at Boy. She was pale, neutraltinted, with a thin rat mouth, pointed teeth. She had these eyes, though — china-blue, shadowy underneath. Her eyes were dreamy in her dry pale face. They pretended not to see you; Pearl’s eyes skitted away when she talked. But she was always watching through the window when Boy came home from school.

  Pearl served behind the counter, she arranged the shop window, her fingers did wonders with wire and twine, scissors and tape as she bound and probed and cut. She made wedding bouquets and buttonholes, shoulder sprays and posies, and you never guessed at the false stalks, the cunning stitches, the cruel silver wires that snaked through those stems. She was a dab at flowers for condolence, last tributes of affection and esteem. Gates of heaven, harps, flags and cushions were superbly worked in mass blooms.

  As a bonus she got on with Gran. Oddly, the old girl liked her. They jabbered together about their different Jesuses, sometimes Pearl sang — hymns that sounded like love songs. Despite most of their words being gloomy, she crooned them happily enough. Blood was outpouring, the glorious western sun was sinking, shades were deepening, the path was thorny, but Pearl was marching, marching, ever onward marching where the saints had trod.

  Then one day she asked Boy to help her fetch vases from the storeroom. Her eyes entreated him, and the door closed behind them, and somehow she had him. Boy was on the floor with the bag of silver sand and the watering can with the bent spout. He would never forget. Her slippery Italian-cloth apron, the greasy smell of her hair. He despised her, but those were his hands on her body — feeling, finding: the liver-coloured birthmark, the crimped pattern of knicker elastic, the tiny breasts under her singlet. She had her eyes shut, her mouth hung open as if to shout Alleluia. Her mouth was a wet snail, her tongue felt slimy, like the stems of decaying flowers. Pearl — who marched onward, who fain would mount and penetrate the skies — had turned into an upside-down beetle, scrambling, waving her legs. Boy lay above her and stopped being excited. For he would crush her, kill her as dead as Mama. Oh God. And then he was strong, he fought her, slid off her, and knew: Never again.

  Pearl hated him after that. Inside her mouth her tongue hissed poison, her teeth wanted to tear him apart. Her eyes saw through Boy, now, as her fingers did what someone else’s had done long ago — scalded the stems of dahlias, burned the ends of poppies, stripped the rose of all its thorns.

  Then everything changed. The shop was sold, for Papa had bought an estate at Fern Gully, in the Adelaide Hills, that would do for a model nursery. The Frangipani Gardens would specialize in exotics.

  And Pearl got married. She chose a Pommy with skin the colour of milk. Jim Reed had sandy hair and eyelashes so pale you hardly saw them.

  He was one of the fellows who worked in Papa’s garden. Boy dodged him, for Pearl would have told about that time in the storeroom. Yet had she? — perhaps not, for Jim smiled at Boy and they started talking, and it seemed that they were friends. But how could Jim bear it with Pearl? Boy couldn’t understand. Not even when Jim confided that it was hard in a strange country, and a new chum had to seize his chances.

  For a while Pearl’s songs brightened up. It was ‘Hail, happy day! …’ and ‘Jerusalem the golden …’ as she pushed Gran about in a Bath-chair, to drink in the tonic Hills air.

  Jim stopped feeling the wedded bliss first. Boy and he began taking long walks away from the nursery.

  Boy had never been happier. He went to a Catholic school, now; he felt as if he belonged. And it was cheering to have a friend, to be men together. With Jim he felt another person. Indeed, Jim couldn’t abide the ‘Boy’; to Jim, he was Pat.

  But at school his grades got lower; he was the oldest in his class. Instead of working, he dreamed … of the way Jim’s eyes wrinkled to mere slits when he smiled, of the sandy hairs on his arm. Of that other life he’d lived across the sea, in a world Boy couldn’t imagine. Sometimes a pinched look came on Jim’s face when he reminisced. He was back home again, he hadn’t escaped after all. Sometimes, then, he’d gather a few flowers for Pearl. Good old wifey; her tongue was sharp, but she’d saved quite a nest egg.

  And then in Sarajevo the Archduke died, and men started marching away. All that year Pearl watched Boy and Jim with narrow eyes — her eyes had a cunning look as she and Granma cackled together.

  Jim Reed began talking about the Tommies, the Aussies, the Froggies, the Belgies, the Pork and Cheese.

  One day he told Boy he was going. Over there. Britain’s foes must learn that Britain’s sons were men of bulldog breed.

  Boy sailed, too. He was old enough — just, to be as much a soldier as Jim. No one could stop him donning khaki: no one tried. On Boy’s last day at school, instead of being written off as a dullard, he was celebrated as a hero. The headmaster shook his hand and bade a speedy and safe return.

  You felt strange at Suez when you saw the troop-ship Ballarat leave for Australia with the first batch of wounded from Gallipoli. But a thrill passed through you at the sight of the ancient monuments. And the mode of tilling the earth was the same as in the days of Christ.

  Boy was happy, even though Reveille was at four o’clock daily. For being with Jim was so natural. There was nothing soppy, they didn’t talk much. Only once, Jim spoke of after the war. How they’d go back to the Hills — but deeper in, far from Fern Gully; how they’d have some land of their own. Boy would grow flowers, maybe they’d have a cow.

  Then it was March, and training was over. They reached Marseilles and somewhere north was a battle line, but they didn’t think of it yet. The train pulled out of the station, and it was La Belle France, with the trees clothing themselves in new season’s raiment and the hedges sparkl
ing with dew.

  The landscape changed as they drew further north, and on the third night of their journey they ran into a severe snowstorm. They had left the genial south behind and found, instead, a country where winter held sway.

  War meant mostly mud and carrying rations in the dark along duckboards. Nightly, Boy made the pilgrimage along Wine Avenue and Paradise Alley. The guns were always at it, the aeroplanes went over like hawks. Boy thought a lot about noises. How shells shrieked, and machine gun bullets spat. But thinking could get on your nerves. The trenches were uncanny, it was a queer old war. But it was honour and glory. Remember: One day mud will fly, and we shall be after the Kaiser’s pet dog in Berlin — if he has escaped the sausage machine.

  It was Hell, of course, but they came out of it. Now they were marching towards the push on the Somme, and for a while they halted beside fine growing crops of wheat. And Boy and Jim went across the big field that was a patriotic blaze of poppies and daisies and cornflowers, and sat on the bank of a stream. They were away from the war; they were covered by a bush. Boy and Jim didn’t want a house with walls that might come tumbling down — no, for them there was the bush with its wallpaper of green and these little creamy blossoms, and past that sky-blue. And Boy wanted to talk about big things, he started to, but Jim joked the terrible emptiness — all the lost dead ever-after time that would come later — away, and they fell to playing like schoolboys, to rest themselves from the war. They jumped and took turns at leapfrog and Boy tore his shirt trying to throw Jim at wrestling. By dinnertime they were tired, but then the order came to fall in. They sang as they marched through the village. They sang ‘’Goodbyee, don’t cryee, don’t sighee, wipe the tear, baby dear, from your eyee’. That was the favourite song.

  Then the landscape was a huge quagmire. For all the world it looked as if some gigantic plough had churned things upside down. And you had cramp and trench-foot and your boots got sucked away by the mud; and then it was that Sunday — you were advancing. Is that what it was, did you guess what you were doing? — when you came to the slope and it was daylight, and the enemy gunners and snipers used their weapons with deadly effect. Yes, the sniping qualities of the enemy proved fearful, but Boy gripped his rifle and ran through the hail — it was easy, like dodging the drops of a shower. And he lay in a shell-hole and now it was night, and a great fire was burning low through the misty darkness. It was a nightmare, with the wounded groaning round him and Boy had seen it happen — the large gap cut in the lines of our advancing troops, as the military report would tell it. And Jim was among them: Jim fell, he died. And Boy was alone, alive, and he didn’t care anything about Liberty or Honour of the Homeland. He forgot even Jim, he only remembered Granma and the terrible Irish tales … All over the country iron boilers were set up in which Indian meal stirabout was boiled, and round them on the roadside there daily moaned and shrieked and fought and scuffled crowds of gaunt cadaverous creatures.