Rosewood Dreaming 2

Part 2

THE FENCELESS FOOT OF A DREAM


Chapter 4


IMAGINING ROSEWOOD


Where have we come from?
.......What are we?
..............Where are we going?
                (Paul Gauguin)      
    
         

It was perhaps something of George Vance’s spirit that unconsciously sustained his grandson, Harry, germinating in a more exotic, wilful, florid way when he came into contact with the tropics. Rare photographs of Harry showed a mild-mannered, respectable small landowner, innocuously bespectacled, wearing a shady hat of fine-quality straw and freshly-pressed, lightweight suit. Despite the conventional attire, Harry Vance only allowed himself to be photographed outdoors, flanked by his beloved palms or against a backdrop of tropical brilliance, rendered colourless and amorphous by monochrome Box Brownie film. Such images in black and white or sepia gave no indication of the passions and tenacity below the surface, sparks in Old Vance that set ablaze the bougainvillaea, poinciana and hibiscus that lent their colour to his days.
 
Harry Hope Vance had had a great deal going for him in Sydney. The Vances moved in the best colonial circles, thanks to their prosperity and their regular and public philanthropic gestures. Harry’s marriage to Aimee Kaufmann, while it had raised some eyebrows on account of her being Jewish, had served to consolidate his financial security.
 
But there was a headstrong streak in the man, it seemed, and like his brother, Benjamin, he had soon manifested an alarming desire to branch out on his own in ways that the family couldn’t comprehend or fully approve of. In response to some demon within, he had spurned Sydney and ‘gone bush’, causing the less intrepid to shake their heads over him, and predict he’d regret it. The other side of the coin was that, being the youngest of a dozen siblings, he could hardly hope to come into any kind of inheritance. He was a proud man, and felt his life would be better spent taking his chances on his own than hanging around waiting for what others deigned to dispense. And he was a young man who relished a challenge. His detractors would eat their doubts one day, he would think to himself, squaring his jaw.

Even more puzzling to the prudent souls in Sydney had been the way he’d no sooner build up a property he had acquired as virgin bush than he’d be on the move again, uprooting Aimee and the children, seemingly for no good reason. Reflecting his marked preference for warm climates, each move took him farther north, parallel with the coast, until he had crossed the border into Queensland, where the pattern continued. By his early sixties he had come to rest on the Tropic of Capricorn, a sufficient distance from Parramatta to deter kinsfolk from keeping tabs on him.

He had first seen the run-down farm he later renamed Rosewood in a good season, when the creek was running, filling a lagoon covered in blue water-lilies and clamorous with waterfowl. At the other end of the run, natural springs greened the surrounding acres. And having fallen in love with the swathe of tropical wilderness at first sight, he soon made it the focus of his lifelong dream of creating a garden, a place he would never want to leave.

Old Vance loved the earth, the goodness in it; its rich, dry summer scent, its rain-perfumes. He loved the secrets it contained, the life in seeds, the life in rain. He loved the feel of it on his hands, the way it yielded to his spade. Gently he would fill the sockets when he planted trees, settling their roots with infinite solicitude, pressing the earth as lightly as a sigh to seal the cavity, then standing awhile, communing with the young sapling or slender seedling, before almost tiptoeing away.

In an inspired burst of energy he had tried to translate the dream of his youth, using plants as his pigments, the straggling acres of earth as his canvas, sinking a bore to obtain enough water to bring the miracle to pass. Under the tropical sun he dug and planted and watered and dreamed.

Some years after purchasing Rosewood, he could see his vision taking shape. Palanquins of young poincianas cradled the ramshackle farmhouse, bougainvillaea rioted around the shed, daubing the rusty tin roof with brilliant plumes of vermilion, carmine and cyclamen. Crimson double hibiscus at the foot of the back stairs caught his eye every time he entered or left the house, making his lips curve in a small, involuntary smile. Quisqualis vines climbed over a wire archway to canopy the little-used front stairs.

While there was perhaps an incongruous, untropical touch in the rows of lilies lining the rutted drive, the roses in sumptuous shades of ruby and pomegranate that flourished in spite of the heat, these had been planted for Aimee, whose taste was more traditional. The Pacific theme reasserted itself in the palms around the periphery, which gave no shade but created the illusion of warding off wilderness.

For all that he had fallen in love with the land at first sight, Harry Hope Vance was not content to leave it as he found it. Contemplating his handiwork, what did he see: the haphazard reality or the mirror of his dream -- a pocketful of paradise, a place of earthly bliss? His idea of heaven was a deck-chair in the shade, the canvas striped in colours of the tropics, where he could doze under his old straw hat, or watch the lorikeets wheeling through the trees, or listen to the fluting calls and warbling of magpies, fanned by ferny poincianas stirring with each breath of breeze. Paul Gauguin had described a similar state in one of his letters ‘home’ from Tahiti: ‘Here, near my house, in complete silence, I dream of violent harmonies in the fragrances of nature which intoxicate me.’ Harry Hope Vance, spinner of dreams, had no great difficulty persuading himself that his life had finally coincided with his vision. In the encounter with Rosewood, his spirit had seemingly recognised its domain.

Coming into contact with the works of Paul Gauguin as an art student some years later, Anna found herself thinking of Harry Vance and his garden, its vivid palette so reminiscent of the painter’s. Except that her grandfather, she thought, had not seemed troubled by the questions that had vexed Gauguin in Tahiti: ‘Where have we come from? What are we? Where are we going?’ Harry Vance made a point of discarding whatever threatened to impinge on his vision. He seemed to possess a rare ability to fully inhabit the present.

While clues to his origins arrived sporadically in the form of letters and infrequent visitors from the south, it was only the most dedicated elderly spinster and bachelor cousins who made the long journey from Parramatta, prompted by clannish sentiments mingled with curiosity. As the oldest surviving member of a patriarchal family (Benjamin, having opted to live in Africa, did not count), Old Vance’s status called for some form of acknowledgement. Reflecting the Sydney visitors' impression of the Vances'  material circumstances, parcels of cast-off clothing for Jeannie and the girls would sometimes arrive in the wake of such visits.

There was, as few people sensed, a hidden side to Harry Vance, which had little to do with the daytime brilliance of bougainvillaea, but sought expression in night-blooming plants. His favourite was the pitaya, the fragile, exotic ‘moonlight’ cactus, whose deep ivory calyxes, alight with moongold stamens, drew him out of doors to watch them opening in dusk. He would be up in time to see them closing with the sun’s first rays.

Moved by invisible forces, needing neither sun nor water, the delicate, pale trumpets were an enigma, like Harry Vance, who savoured the secret of their presence like a lover. Seeing their discoloured, wilted tatters by day, drooping from the gangly, spiked snake-arms of the giant cactus on its rough pergola, only the initiated could imagine their transformation by moonlight. Then, the flowers opening to the moon seemed almost to be made of it, luminous, exotic, elusive as the stuff of dreams...
 
Like dreams, they lasted only for one night. This was their lifespan, their only chance to attract  bats and nocturnal insects to their luminous, scented lamps, or lure the morning's first half-drowsy bees, to perform the cross-species rite of love that would perpetuate their presence in the world, through pollenation…

What Old Vance was, finally, was known to himself, a private man, indulgent only with his grandchildren. He neither saw friends nor received regular social visits, maintaining a distanced contact with the world through correspondence, which meant he could control and mediate what he deemed fit for others to know. If his heart had ever been the scene of a battle between hedonism and puritanism, the ravages did not show. His demeanour was decorous to the point of primness.

His lack of social life did not strike Rosewood folk as strange. Besides, everyone seemed to know that the Vances liked to keep to themselves. Old Vance left Rosewood only on rare visits to the bank, or to exchange his library books at the School of Arts lending library in the township. On Saturdays, along with the week’s stock of reading, he would bring back ices coloured lurid shades of red and green, half melted in spite of the dry-ice and thick newspaper wrapping, as a treat for Anna and her sisters.

As for where he was going, as far as Old Vance was concerned he had arrived. ‘All that I have left to do is carve my tomb out there, in the silence, and amidst the flowers.’ Gauguin’s letter to a friend was echoed in Old Vance’s heart, half a century later, on the opposite rim of the Pacific. Like Gauguin, Old Vance believed in his earthly paradise, created in his imagination and brought into being by his hands. He understood that only a free spirit can achieve such things; and that such labour liberates.

Unlike Paul Gauguin’s paintings, peopled with Tahitians, the sole occupants of Old Vance’s garden were himself and his family. Other presences were no longer visible. The people whose paradise it had once been had melted away, vanished, leaving only a question in the air that seemed to pass unnoticed: Whose land? Whose paradise? Any uneasiness the unwitting usurpers may have felt lay so far below the threshold of consciousness that the question was never framed.
 
In his instinctive pursuit of an obscure and private destiny, Old Vance had behaved like a driven man, until he located Rosewood, the place his inner eye identified as the one he had been seeking. Who can explain the chemistry that attracts person to place? There were other farms on the market during those early postwar years that were not only more beautiful in aspect, but also more likely to prosper in diligent, caring hands. The Vances, flush with the proceeds from the sale of their previous property, had been well able to afford any one of them. But it was Rosewood that captivated Harry's imagination, blinding him to its shortcomings, so that he acted rashly, like a man possessed. Jack and Jeannie and Anna and the other grandchildren to come were not so much heirs to the old man's passion, as hostages to what some would call his folly.


Chapter 5

 
DREAM-CATCHER


For Jeannie nights are another country, whether she sleeps or lies awake. Usually she is so exhausted, she sinks onto a raft of sleep and drifts away in the darkness until a child’s cry jolts her into alertness. Sometimes in the mornings she wakes with a sense of disorientation, wondering where she has been, where she is, before goading herself into routine activity, lighting the stove, brewing the five-thirty tea before setting off for the dairy, to lend a hand for an hour or so before the children wake.

On the occasional sleepless nights when she feels leaden with pregnancy or too full of fears to fall asleep, she lets her mind trespass in places it is forbidden to enter by day. Oblivious of the scuttling and crunching of huge bush cockroaches in the kitchen, where she leaves sticky jars uncapped as traps, and deaf to Jack snoring beside her, in the dark she picks at old sores: her parents’ marriage, her mother’s bitterness, wild accusations late at night when her father was staying with them on leave from the far-western sheep-stations he managed. She understands now that his alleged betrayals had probably not been the figments of her mother's imagination he had made them out to be. And, although she would cut out her tongue before admitting it to a living soul, she can no longer believe that her mother's death was entirely accidental. No, he had almost certainly driven her to it. Jeannie has never forgiven her father for his hasty remarriage so soon after his wife's death, to a woman her mother would surely have described as the town trollop, in one of those desperate outposts at the end of the line.

Even now, the implications rankle so much she cannot face them calmly. Four houses, her father had owned: four cottages by the sea. And what had become of them? Not even one had been set aside for Jeannie. Hadn't he paused to consider what a difference it might have made to his daughter to have a roof of her own, so as not to be at the mercy of strangers? Or, for that matter, Harry Hope Vance with his deluded blueprint for Eden… The absence of relatives in her life exacerbated her isolation: there had never been any mention of grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins... her mother, being English, a foreigner, never really at home in this country. Why did her parents' discordant voices continue to battle it out in her head? Invading the dry silences, they left her no place to retreat… In her flight from disquieting spectres, oscillating compass-points would spin her thoughts to Jimmy’s enlistment, abandoning her, Jeannie, who plainly adored him, to go to his death in a place that was unreal to her, it was so far away...

Lying in darkness, besieged by breathing and incoherent dream-noises, Jeannie feels curiously lucid and detached from them all. Sometimes she lets her restless mind stray from room to room, upstairs and down, pausing at each of the sleepers in turn, imagining she can spy on their dreams. Under the house in a room with walls of corrugated iron sleeps Johnny, the new farmhand from a small western town, a nervous, furtive-looking young man. What does Johnny have on his mind? Guilty thoughts? Dark secrets? Jeannie would x-ray them with her catlike gaze no liar could face, and shed light on the hidden side of awkward, laconic Johnny...

Outside Johnny’s room against the wall stands her mother’s cabin-trunk, another nest of undeciphered secrets. The pores on Jeannie’s arms rise in gooseflesh at the thought. The cabin-trunk, with its hoard of cryptic letters and personal chattels, draws her like a magnet, yet she resists opening it as if postponing fate. Since moving to the farm after marrying Jack she has tried to make a new life, and the cabin-trunk contains keys to a past she is half afraid to unlock. In her imaginary nocturnal prowlings, she tiptoes resolutely past it.

Emerging, in her musings, from the gloom underneath the house, her  mind’s eye takes in the rainwater tanks on their spindle-shanks, gleaming pewter in starlight. There are a few Jersey cows near the garden fence, bells chinking peacefully as they crop and munch the kikuyu.

In the next room Old Vance lies in his wide, carved wooden bed, travelling back to his youth, the Pacific, Tahiti, Moorea, Papeete, a lost paradise his spirit still longs to inhabit, despite his protestations to the contrary. Waking or sleeping, somewhere at the back of his mind the same vision shimmers. It is a vision of grace that cannot be defiled, a heavenly place on earth whose people remain as innocent as the flora and fauna of their islands, their beauty ennobled by purity of spirit. Old Vance believes the Garden of Eden was, and still is, somewhere in Polynesia.
 
Aimee Vance suffers from nightmares. She rises from the pillows breathless, wide-eyed: ‘They’re making me ride the horses again. I don’t want to go, but the men are so cruel, they always wait for me with whips and horses.’ Old Vance’s heaven in the tropics is Aimee’s hell, a bottomless pit of bad dreams, cut off from the Sydney milieu of her youth, where she had grown up in a house by the harbour, replete with garden flowers, music, comforts and refinements missing from her married life. Aimee does not want to die in this alien place, which seems to her utterly hostile and desolate, yet each day she edges towards the brink, terrified and alone with the sense of her frailty in the face of her fate.
 
Jeannie feels worlds away from the Vances, who are so different from her folk. And yet her children, sleeping with cheeks flushed, often with thumbs in their mouths, are Vances... Invisible presences, Jeannie’s ghosts, wait to make their claims, filling the spaces in the sleeping household with unassuaged longings. These are her own kin, though scarcely reassuring for that... Adrift in her personal space, she gives a guilty start if a sudden sound breaks her reverie. Sometimes the first cock-crow makes her realise the night is about to give way to day. She hears Jack snoring beside her then, too exhausted to register dreams.

Suspended in night’s no-time, Jeannie is able to look at her own life from different angles, and wonder at its conundrums as if she were reading a story. But in the morning, such intuitions as night has cast up seem remote, disconnected from waking, working life; elusive figments of nocturnal fancy.

The visions in broad daylight, on the top step with a mug of tea, are more reassuring, homely and substantial, satisfying… Jeannie can digest them and relive them secretly for hours afterwards, as she busies herself externally with household chores.


Chapter 6


THE VISITANTS


Sunday mornings are Jeannie’s time, when she can listen to the voices in her head, or better still the silences. Without Sunday mornings she thinks she would go round the bend. On Saturday nights she goes to bed heavy, but  Sunday mornings she wakes up feeling lighter, almost carefree.

She urges the girls to dress for Sunday School as they are finishing breakfast. The ugly flocked-nylon hand-me-downs are hanging in readiness, hats taken out of their dark recess in the silky-oak wardrobe for the two older girls, socks, shoes... quickly, quickly, go! The unspoken words loud in her head. She can’t wait to get Jack and the girls out of her hair.

Jack would be gone for an hour or two, the time it took to drive into the sleepy 1950s township, buy a newspaper and petrol, perhaps have a yarn with a fellow farmer, then drive back. Jack would stay long enough for a leisurely cup of tea and a browse through the Sunday paper, before making a second, quick trip to collect the girls, who would ride through the town in the back of the old-fashioned ute like kewpie dolls, looking incongruous in their Sunday best. For a whole hour, maybe two, Jeannie can have the house to herself, except for Old Vance dozing in his squatter’s chair, and the baby, also sleeping at this time of day,  who is Jeannie’s stock excuse for not attending church. The house seems emptier since Aimee Vance’s recent death, and although Jeannie was never in conflict with Aimee, she feels a guilty relief at the extra space.

Before the farm utility is out of sight, she is sitting on the top step, dappled with shade from the lacquery, dense leaves of the mango tree, elbows resting on drawn-up knees, hands clutching a mug of tea, letting her tense mind off the leash to roam at random. She likes to leave her fancy free, it is the closest she ever comes to a holiday, not having to make decisions or impose her will...
 
Above her, glassy-surfaced leaves vibrate in a breath of breeze, emitting a faint rattle like dry pods containing seeds. A crimson double hibiscus thrusts its soft, voluptuous face between the railings near her feet. A bird cries sharply, a rain-oracle, a koel.

Sometimes the presence of Ruby, who was her dearest friend, fills the space so powerfully that Jeannie hears the familiar swish of skirts, rich peals of laughter, deep and throaty like a pigeon, and feels enveloped by Ruby’s warmth, her wistfulness. She recalls their last conversation, that evening in the hospital: ‘Jeannie, I’m fearful for my girls. What will become of Linda and Rose...?’ And falling into the stillness and sunlight, Jeannie hears her own voice. ‘I’ll take care of them till you get better. You can’t leave us Ruby, we need you.’

Vivacious, dark-eyed Ruby with her ready laughter, who had been Jeannie’s nearest neighbour as well as friend, would vanish in the shadows of the trees, the way she had vanished another Sunday, overnight. Jeannie would feel the warmth recede, leaving her mind suspended and numbed.

Such visitants as Ruby who came unbidden often caused her pain, but she could not deny them. Her will gave way. They needed reassurance that they hadn’t been forgotten, and so they came at night when it was quiet and still, or on Sunday mornings when they would find her alone.

This morning was so strangely calm, she thought that nobody would come. Perhaps she would just sip her tea and bask in the leaf-stencilled sun. But then she senses a field of force, a darkness that is more than shade underneath the tankstand at the foot of the stairs. ‘Jimmy,’ she says softly. ‘I know it’s you. Please stay.’ She knows that Jimmy will have nothing more to say. She remembers their exchange on his final leave in 1940, before he left for the Middle East: Will you come back? She had blurted it out. And his carefully casual reply: Do my best, cobber. How’s that? But he hadn’t come back, except as this invisible presence conjured by her longing. Jeannie had waited like other women, blindfolded by distance, haunted by premonitions of loss.

Now she can sense his presence as a sightless person can, and it is enough. She is afraid of what she would see, were he to be made visible, although while waiting out the war she had wished only to see him. But ever since the day his sisters came to her with ashen faces, she has been grateful for the presence that remains unseen. She could not have borne to see how he died. Later the Misses Tremain, Jimmy’s sisters, had given her the rising sun insignia from his slouch hat, and one of their few photographs. She appreciated the gesture. They had thought the world of him.
‘Jimmy I am cooped up in this trap. Help me to get out, before I lose my mind. I can’t live this kind of life, it's tearing me to pieces…’

But even as the impulse forms, she feels him slipping out of range, across the farmland he had known and worked, not far from where she now lives, towards a destination she cannot imagine. A chill hollowness has taken his place. He must have heard the droning of the motor on the hill, the threat of Jack’s intrusion.

When the rusty rattletrap pulls up under the mango trees, Jeannie is safely at work behind the kitchen louvres, seeking refuge in ritual, stoking the wood stove to cook the Sunday joint, peeling potatoes, making a convincing show of industry. There is the heavy tread of a man’s farm boots on the stairs, a pungent whiff of sweat as he brushes past her on his way to the living-room. ‘Get us a cup of tea, love, and I’ll just sit down for a spell with the paper.’

‘Yes, you do that,’ comes her own voice, calm, neutral, impassive. ‘You could do with a bit of a breather, it’s hot out.’ So many years of her life swallowed up, she reflects as she measures out tea-leaves, and only an hour or so a week to salvage something for herself.