The Frangipani Gardens Page 4

  For the shop was too good to stay out of bounds. In the dark Lou rose from bed and, as Tom slept on, crept down the stairs and drew back the shop door’s bolt. The moon shone in at the window, though she didn’t need its light: she knew her way by heart, she saw the lovely things clearly in her head. The smells guided her, too. The hot damp scent of flannel, the farmyard odour of corduroy … and velvet smelled aristocratic; cotton was a prim old maid.

  Sometimes Lou just stayed in Dress Materials, smelling and thinking of home. The tea-tree round the lagoon would soon be thick with blossom; as well as ducks, there’d be swarms of bees … And she thought of that last morning, waiting on the platform for the train — how Ella’s man with the moustache had come up, embarrassed, and given her the five pound note … But, mostly, she thought of Tom and how much they hated him; and tried to think what she should do. But there didn’t seem to be a solution — thinking could make you too sad … And now here was the drawer that held sequins and shoe-horn paillettes.

  Lou inspected laces and veilings by moonlight; she fingered pure silk hose in shades of Pongee and Nude. In the dark shop she felt happy. She stopped thinking of Tom; about what would happen after Christmas.

  And then she got bold — no one would ever know. She went back to Lingerie and chose the Bon Ton corselette and the Royal Worcester for schoolgirls. In the fitting room she switched on the light (it was like magic, so much nicer than an oil lamp) and took off her nightgown.

  The Bon Ton had six suspenders and ribbon shoulder-straps; the Worcester was a tight fit … but boneless, an elastic gore over the hips …

  Then Lou felt the hand. It was slithering — first round her schoolgirl waist and then further down. Then, in the mirror, Fish stood behind her. He’d left off his specs and his eyes looked blind; his face was red and somehow blurred. He kept smiling as she hit it.

  And she felt cold, but she was sweating, she started to cry. Though Fish was strangely unconcerned. He was a gentleman assistant again, who tutted over the Bon Ton that lay on the floor. It was as if another’s hand had done it — he didn’t seem to remember.

  Christmas for some meant the juvenile panto at the Theatre Royal with its Radiant Ballet of nine; others chose Mother Goose at the Majestic or Puss in Boots at the Prince of Wales. You could celebrate the season by patronizing Perry’s Circus, where Captain Bailey exhibited his posing dogs and Captain Monzalo, the fearless, his tigers and lions. Or view the heroes and bushrangers at the Royal Waxworks and Palace of Wonders, or motor to Victor Harbour to holiday at Coo-ee or Linga Longa.

  Lou pulled a limp cracker with Alfred, and pretended to like her first taste of bubbly, and dodged Fish’s questing nostrils. Tom was allowed to pick his turkey bones in peace — Tom was off to the Protestant Boys’ Refuge: Tom’s fate was settled, he didn’t exist. But Lou remained a problem, to be discussed as if she wasn’t at table.

  Fish thought what was wrong with Lou was green sickness. Girls got it round puberty, he said daringly, savouring the wicked word. It was indicated by a deathly pallor and great lassitude. The spirits were low, the appetite poor, though the body might remain as plump as ever. The disease was a lingering one, and often led on to consumption.

  While he helped himself to more brandy sauce, Vi had her say. ‘Piffle,’ she said, ‘there’s nothing the matter with the girl.’ It was Vi who was on the sick list, not Lou. Vi had nervous repression, neuralgia, headache, backache, fidgets and periods of peculiar depression. All that was wrong with Lou was laziness. She took after her mother, she was the living image. Well, the girl would be set to work soon. She was an ungrateful minx. Probably all Lou had was constipation. She needed her bowels manipulated; she ought to eat dates and stewed figs.

  And Alfred — what did he say? That it was the big soft woman she missed — Ella, with the dirt between her toes and the musky smell of her body? … The tops of her arms were white and wobbly as blancmange, and in summer she always went freckly; in summer, Ella’s body reminded you of a milky pudding sprinkled with nutmeg. She worried about the lines round her eyes, and the way her neck was dotted like orange peel. But she was lovely. Running round in her petticoat, the strap done up with the little gold safety pin, her big stomach sticking out. Only she died. Did Alfred remember her at all?

  It was hot. After the table was cleared, they went to their rooms for a lie-down. By the coast, summer was different. You could escape the sun in the scrub. The papery rustle of gum leaves was comforting. Leaves and fringes of fallen blossom crusted the earth; there was a dry spicy smell. And Tom always found the orchids — mosquito orchid, onion orchid — in the swamp; it stayed damp there, even in summer. High above your head, the sky was pale, the sun was hazed — the sun had turned into a silkworm’s gauzy cocoon. By the coast it tried to trick you, but you escaped it. Beneath the latticed gum leaves, crouched in the cool swamp, or high on the cliff, running through spear-grass. On the cliff you were brave, you leapt at the sky and dared cowardy-custard sun to get you. And there was always the sea — streaming in silvery beads from your body, crowning you with weed … Tom liked the sort you could pop, and the queer jellyfish blobs, the rainbow shells …

  Lou must have slept, for when she woke the room was dark. Night had switched places with day; teatime must be over and she had a nasty taste in her mouth, her head felt full of lemonade bubbles. Dreaming, the old things had felt so near, Ella had been the same as always — in the dream it had been all right to hate her. But now Lou felt choked with an awful melancholy, an unbearable guilt.

  It was hot in the room. The waxen heads looked worse than ever; surely those hourglass torsos had advanced while she slept? And then the door opened and of course it was Fish. Lou was dreaming again, and now nightmare began as he sat on the bed.

  ‘Little girl,’ he said, his voice wobbly with love, his eyes savaging her body. ‘Pretty pussy,’ he said, wheedling, and he was the dirty old man who offered the young girl two shillings to go up the lane, and increased it to four when she refused. But he was an academic with a look of scholarly benevolence, he read and read. (Why didn’t Lou come and read up his Manual of Wisdom, every married person and those about to marry should have one, you got it from the Central Rubber Co. by sending just threepence in stamps?) ‘Be nice to me, girlie,’ Fish pleaded. His coat pockets were cut on the slant to the shape of half-moons, braid edged the revers of his waistcoat. ‘Please,’ said Fish, and then the nostrils jerked back, the hands let Lou go, for Tom was screaming in the old awful way.

  Tom’s voice — calling the queer words, keening the secret language — drove Fish from the room. There was just a dent in the bed and the stink of bay-rum to prove he’d been there.

  And now Alfred was hitting Tom quiet. He fell back on the bed and Vi said the beast had wet it. The bastard had taken a fit, anything could have happened. He was the child of a dissolute woman; anyone might be his father. Well, he was going. It would be happy new year, 1927. They’d be rid of him as soon as the holiday was over.

  The door shut behind them, and Tom lay in that strange stupor that always came after, and Lou smoothed his hair and wiped up the sweat with her hanky. Tom’s fit might have been a signal to the sky, for without warning it started to rain. Soon a steady downpour had set in that lasted for hours. Then the wind began — a south-easterly that blew in fitful gusts.

  The little room at the top of the Bon Marché seemed like a boat that tossed on a stormy sea. Lou and Tom stayed safe, while outside the window, in a night world turned suddenly cold, roofs blew away from houses and trees fell down. The big hoarding next to the Star Picture Pavilion blew over, the electric lights went out at Henley Beach. Verandahs flew away and telephone posts lay in recumbent positions. People crossed themselves, for God was about. Beans and tomato plants were uprooted; peaches and plums were shaken from trees.

  All through the night the storm raged on. Next morning, as church bells rang, one of Alfred’s prize pl
ate glass windows was shattered. Vi and he rushed about with dustpans, squabbling as they swept up slivers.

  Lou and Tom mostly stayed in the room. Tom read his encyclopedia that told about birds; Lou lay on the bed thinking. After a while she knew what to do. But they couldn’t leave yet — as well as being Boxing Day it was Sunday, there weren’t any trams.

  That night Lou didn’t sleep, she was too excited. She woke Tom early, and they crept down the stairs and out the side door with their suitcase. At the tram stop she checked the address again — it was written on the flyleaf of Tom’s book.

  Granpa was dead, but Aunt Doll must live in his house. How did you get to Fern Gully?

  3

  When a fit came, a great bird swooped from the beetling cliff: the osprey sped straight as an arrow, like a falling meteor it dropped on the sea. And Tom was that fish it snatched in its gripping talons … the fit took him, he was borne from one element into another; he was carried high to be rent piecemeal in a vast sky corral.

  But a fit wasn’t like that, the doctor said.

  But Tom was a reader, he knew. In The Modern Physician — after the fold-out man that went from skin to muscle to bone, and the giant insects that walked through your hair — it was featured as Falling Sickness. It started with pains and tinglings, and then the feeling of a ball rising in the throat. You could choose your variety: Petit mal, Grand mal, Jacksonian … but the doctor shook his head at Ella and said Tom was feigning. ‘It is hysterics,’ said Doctor. ‘The boy is egotistical and craving for sympathy.’

  Maybe. Perhaps it was like that at first. For, to begin with, it had merely been a game. It had been easy to make one happen. After the ball in the throat there were rainbow lights before your eyes, then blackness. Then Tom fell down and his legs did a grasshopper dance. Though he was careful, he flung himself neatly (he’d never be the awful warning who fell in the fire to be fatally burned). And he stayed comely (there was no saliva froth).

  But then the birds started swooping. They got off the pages of the encyclopedia — all sorts: overseas as well as local. The osprey fell on the fish; the raven that presided in gloomy majesty — he made Tom his habitation, too.

  For, one day Tom let himself fall but, fallen, he stopped pretending. Suddenly the fit was real, the bird was upon him. It seemed like all birds, every bird … with the condor’s great wings and the nightjar’s gaping beak, the frogmouth’s large yellow eye. A bird of hideous aspect flew at Tom, and in his ears was the owl’s ‘boobook’, the eagle’s piercing cry. But it was Tom. His mouth came open and he spoke, he sang birdlike in the Bible’s tongues. And now a paradise bird hung over him: Tom was the centre of a shower of gleaming gold. And then the bird of paradise divided; now Tom’s body was pecked all over by the tiny beaks of humming-birds, straight and sharp as needles. They were little marvels. They rose like midget bolts into the sky, flashed upward, sideways, forth and back.

  And afterwards he slept for a time, and when he woke he only remembered faintly. It frightened him, he’d wet the bed, but it was also wonderful — what if it never happened again? For Tom didn’t know when the birds would take him. It wasn’t something you could summon with a blue pill at evening or a teaspoonful of Carlsbad salts in the morning. But it made him afraid, it might be a punishment. Ella had a hat trimmed with egret plumes. The encyclopedia said there were few more harrowing sights than an egret rookery after the depredations of the plume-hunters.

  Tom thought of these things as they made for Fern Gully. Even as the tram moved along Hyde Park Road, and the Bon Marché was left further behind, the Gully had become a real place. Granpa’s copperplate with the fierce black downstroke had been fleshed out by the conductor’s rambling tongue. Fern Gully was up in the Hills, where the south-easterly that blew all last night on the city had come from. You didn’t reach it by train, but must travel by charabanc.

  Tom and Lou had seen the Hills already. If you stood outside the Bon Marché and looked across the road, you saw them up the end of the street. They were mauvish, mottled with navy; they looked as if they might be made of papier mâché. They meant the hill country of the Mount Lofty Ranges that Ella had run from.

  Ella had hated the Hills, but she couldn’t stop remembering them. Up there grew peaches and apricots, apples and quinces and pears. As well as stringybarks and wattle there were the dwellings of fashionable society — houses that resembled snug castles, with battlemented towers and old English gables, bow windows and sentinel oaks. In the Hills, too, were waterfalls and strawberries and mineral treasures; also jam factories, market-gardens and model nurseries.

  When Ella had been a girl, the drive to the Gully often meant the box-seat of a lumbering coach and four. She’d looked down as the River Torrens was crossed, and seen the road begin to zigzag as it climbed. Tom and Lou went the same way, now; they saw the same things, as they travelled by motor charabanc with pneumatic tyres.

  All those zigzags were enough to try the nerves of a timid traveller, but when they reached the summit of the road and looked back, the view provided ample repayment. The Adelaide plains and the waters of Yorke Peninsula lay spread below them like a map.

  There were few other passengers. Just a family that alighted in the main street of one of the quiet country villages they passed through; and several maiden ladies of the virtuous sort you didn’t really notice; and an old gentleman who sat beside Tom, and appeared to be asleep.

  It was wonderful speeding along, savouring the rapid movement through the keen morning air. As they descended, they caught glimpses of water winding through trees. It gleamed polished silver in the sun; it turned purplish as it snaked among shadows.

  Yet it seemed to Lou that by travelling to Ella’s beginnings she was sealing off her future. She was only fifteen, but nothing could happen to her now. It would be country life forever, hills in the place of sea, with her smooth body growing wrinkled — and no one to notice, to care.

  And though the landscape was stirring, it wasn’t the one you were meant to see. The guide-book’s Little England was as much a fantasy as that sunset land surveyed by a smiling koala on the patriotic biscuit tin’s lid: ivy buds and monthly roses were camouflaged by countless gum trees. And Ella’s hating voice had promised green velvet hills. The ones Lou saw now were bleached to the colour of straw.

  The rhododendron hedges were dusty. How could you be sure the mansion existed when you couldn’t see past the bend in the drive?

  But Flower Hill was real, and undoubtedly a house with style … and Aunt Doll must be rich … and one of Ella’s childhood stories was romantic — about an orchard sloping down to a creek. It was Ella’s favourite place, and she never knew if he was somewhere near, furtively watching. For Ella was only a little girl, but there was this man and, truly, he loved her.

  Lou believed her; she had the soft look in her eyes that let you know she was really recalling. But then, being Ella, she had to start fibbing. She reckoned the man could make mysterious flowers appear — on the grass, in the creek. Ella fished out the violets before they could drown; next time there were roses dripping with dew in her path.

  He was a dandy-looking fellow, quite top-drawer; he was always lurking behind tree trunks. When she ran, he ran too, always keeping to a certain distance. Did she hear him say it, or was it merely the wind in the trees? ‘Don’t run, don’t pant,’ the man said, ‘it’s only your sweetheart behind you.’

  But nothing happened. He didn’t wait for her to grow up. One day in the orchard he whispered goodbye, and there wasn’t even time for violets or roses. Doll kept calling that she was to come in to tea. Mama’s spy, Doll, had to ruin that last time.

  What a pity Ella hadn’t run off with him, instead of Dad …

  ‘All that was wrong with your father,’ Ella had said, ‘was that he was too much of a country bumpkin for Papa’s taste.’ Dad wore his hat on the back of his head; his sleeves were too short, he
had a habit of scratching his wrists. ‘But your dad was a good man,’ Ella would say. He was a teetotaller, a great talker on platforms.

  Which was all right, but unromantic. And didn’t account for Alf being a seven month baby.

  Now the road divided, and one way was Cudlee Creek, the other Fern Gully. All round them were precipitous hills, timbered to the top, with outcrops of rugged crags and in many places a dense undergrowth of gorse. The sun chased them as they drove along, jumping out every so often to surprise them. Suddenly bits of landscape would be lit with gold, in sharp contrast to the shadowy crags.

  When they reached the Gully, the town presented a neat and clean appearance. There were several handsome dwellings. By the Post Office was a pebble-dash obelisk that commemorated a local hero who’d died in the Boer War. By the Anglican church a bronze Great War soldier leaned on his rifle.

  The charabanc stopped, and the gentleman next to Tom woke with a start. He was a villainous-looking old fellow, grizzly-bearded, with a pale crumpled face and eyes that didn’t match — one being boss, the other squinty. The large eye stared at Tom unseeing, like the glass eye of a china poodle, but the little one seemed full of fire — the little eye flicked all over you: Tom felt strange.

  Lou distrusted the man straight away. Under the glassy eye forked an angry red scar — something horrid must have happened to him once. And he had a funny smell and wore a droopy hat, green with age … yet his threadbare cloak was elegant and flapping. Oh, but he was ugly. He would have done for the Phantom of the Opera. Lou shivered, and the little eye appeared to know her feelings: it snapped at her fiercely.