Rosewood Dreaming 3

Part 2

THE FENCELESS FOOT OF A DREAM


Chapter 7


VISITING 'AUNT' LILY


Sunday afternoons were special. Jeannie had more energy, and sometimes she would tell the girls: ‘Put on your red shorts and we’ll go and see Aunt Lily.’

Jeannie was proud of the shorts. She had made them herself on the old Singer treadle sewing-machine. There were four pairs, identical except for the white ric-rac initial on each pocket. The girls’ haircuts were identical too, bobbed with a fringe cut straight across the forehead, pudding-bowl fashion. ‘No mistaking a Vance,’ people said in their town. ‘Those girls are alike as peas in a pod.’

Only Anna, overhearing the predictable observation, would squirm with resentment. She wanted to be different. But on Sunday afternoons she would put on the uniform of red shorts with the white ric-rac A on the pocket and trudge off in the ragged file behind her mother’s floral skirt, billowing about the faded canvas stroller, with the baby propped up on cushions, riding like a princess. It went without saying that they would turn left at Rosewood’s front gate, and walk up the road, not down. If you turned right and walked down the hill from Rosewood, you reached the small farm owned by the Fermors, with whom the Vances were somehow not yet on visiting terms, although Miss Fermor had once appeared, dragging a recalcitrant cow on a halter, to gruffly request the services of Jack Vance’s bull.

Plumes of soft dust rose beside the stroller wheels. Cicadas and pungent, hot molasses grass blurred Anna’s senses. Tassels of pink Natal grass pastel-smudged the road’s soft verges. White ants’ nests like tumours bulged from trunks of wayside trees.

Anna would never have dared walk the stretch of road to Aunt Lily’s alone. You never knew who or what you might meet on the way. Most of the people who lived along that road were considered odd by the townsfolk, with the sole exception of Uncle Ted and Aunt Lily. Beyond their farm, where the road became two wheeltracks and then petered out, lived other families who kept to themselves and clung to outlandish beliefs, not allowing their children to be immunised when the health authorities visited the school, and shunning the town as if it might contaminate them.

Nobody knew how they survived, but somehow they did for the most part, though Anna remembered one boy, Jake, suddenly dying of tetanus. One day he wasn’t on the school bus and neither were his brothers and sisters, because Jake had choked to death, the neighbours’ children said. Jake never wore shoes, his family couldn’t afford them. He had caught tetanus and died after stepping on a rusty nail, because he had not been immunised.
 
The most recent arrivals on the neighbourhood’s periphery were some immigrants from Germany, but so far nobody had had a chance to size them up. In other parts of the district there were rumoured to be Russians, who might as well have been Martians for all anyone had seen of them.
Fifty yards from Rosewood’s front gate, Jeannie’s little cavalcade would straggle past the patch of wilderness, once a farm, known as 'Old Sam Payne’s'.

Old Sam had drunk himself to death despite Jeannie’s ministrations. Sometimes she had sent Anna and Nettie, the second-eldest, to deliver baked custard and apple pie in small enamel dishes, wrapped in tea-towels with corners knotted for carrying. The girls would drop the dishes on the top step and flee. Old Sam was a metho drinker. They had only ever seen him in the distance lurching off to town, and once beside the road stone drunk, so lifeless-looking that they had presumed him dead, and ran helter-skelter to tell Jack.
 
Now Old Tom Browne lived in the cottage, plagued, it was said, by the same demon. While Jack maintained that Old Tom hit the bottle, Jeannie contended his affliction was loneliness, and invited him every year for Christmas dinner. Anna thought Jeannie was right. Old Tom, spruced up in a threadbare suit, had the loneliest, most haunted eyes Anna had ever seen. Although the property continued to bear Old Sam’s name like some kind of stigma, both he and Old Tom were merely caretakers for an anonymous owner.

Farther up the road, across the culvert that forded the Rosewood creek, they passed the entrance to the farm where Ruby’s children lived with their father. Until her early death from cancer, Ruby had made a point of calling briefly at Rosewood on trips to town, persuading her husband to detour up the bumpy drive in their old farm truck, so that she could deliver baskets of fruit to Jeannie, and have an excuse to exchange a few words with her friend.

Ruby’s radiant smile was a legend, all kinds of people warmed to it, even sceptical shopkeepers voting her normal on the strength of it, in spite of the weirdos and dingbats she rubbed shoulders with. It was ironic, a bloody shame, that Ruby had fallen prey to disease, while all those crackpots and loonies surrounding her carried on scot-free.

Ruby, her daughters Linda and Rose, and all the women of their sect had long, lustrous hair which they were not allowed to cut. They were also forbidden by their religious beliefs to wear make-up or jewellery or trousers, so, as if to compensate, they dressed in colourful cotton frocks with flowing skirts and cinched-in waists, reminding Anna of orchids and hibiscus. Books and newspapers and radio were banished from their houses. Those things were of Satan, according to Linda, Ruby’s daughter. Linda liked to confide in Anna, especially on tabu topics, finding her an ideal repository for her latest theories and speculations, spiced with garbled hearsay about scandals that had been hushed up. Linda knew that Anna would never tattle to her sisters or Jeannie, besides which she was gratifyingly impressed by such disclosures.

The entrance to Linda’s family’s farm was marked by a weeping fig tree, shading wheeltracks running parallel to a wire fence overgrown with creepers: morning glory, deadly nightshade, Dutchman’s pipe, sky flowers. Jeannie’s footsteps didn’t turn in there any more. It was eerie without Ruby and her rich laughter, and in any case Ruby’s husband was rumoured to be spending his nights with another woman, or, more precisely, a girl almost as young as his daughters.
 
Beyond Ruby’s place lay a long stretch of road encased in sleeves of green bushland, opening at the end to two farmhouses, one at the foot of a scrub-covered mountain, the other on its lower flank, where the land had been cleared for pineapples. The house on the flats was slab-built, pewter with age, surrounded by a flaxen sea of Rhodes and blady grass, dotted with the tortured skeletons of ringbarked trees.

The house belonged to Lily’s husband’s folks, whose family had pioneered the land around the mountain. The old couple had lived there sixty years or more, and Jeannie took the children to their house on visits sometimes. The old man would show them the stockwhips he made as a hobby, and let them feed crusts of bread to the  horse he still rode. There was a bench outside the door with a tin washbasin and a cake of Sunlight soap, and a slab-built lean-to with a cold-water shower. Two threadbare towels hung on a line between bush-lemon trees.

More often, however, Jeannie and the girls would follow the red track beside the rows of pineapples to the new farmhouse on the mountainside. ‘Aunt’ Lily was not really an aunt, but this was a convenient way to address good neighbours. ‘Uncle’ Ted was her husband, though their three sons did not qualify as cousins. The shy Vance girls regarded them as aliens.

Jeannie’s visits to Aunt Lily’s were a feminine affair. Lily possessed skills Jeannie both admired and envied. Apart from being able to bake feather-light sponges and yeast buns, a feat which Jeannie, lumbered with a dinosaur of a wood stove, could never hope to emulate, Lily was a clever seamstress, so when Jeannie occasionally splurged on a couple of dress-lengths for herself or the girls, Lily would sometimes sew for her. Pins puckering compressed lips, tape-measure dangling from her neck, she’d cut and tack, adjusting measurements.

Later, over cups of tea, Jeannie and Lily conversed in code. ‘When they opened her up,’ Aunt Lily might venture cryptically, ‘they found it was too late.’ Too late for what? Anna was burning to ask. She never seemed to get the gist of these tantalising disclosures. ‘Keith always was a bit of an old ram, you know,’ Jeannie might offer meaningly, while Lily would rejoin with, ‘They say she was only sixteen at the time.’ Then, noticing Anna edging closer, the women would snap their mouths shut like purses.

Anna could decipher only fragments of these conversations, although she realised they had to do with marriages and pregnancies, births and infidelities and women’s private ailments. One day, on the eve of the first formal dance she was allowed to attend, she would stand gazing into Aunt Lily’s cheval mirror, holding her breath as Lily pinned in the sides of a coral satin evening gown that Anna’s city cousin had outgrown, but for now Anna felt shut out of the women’s world.

Despite having so many sisters, she thought it was lonely being a child. None of them could keep secrets either, you had to be careful what you told them. They would blab everything to Jeannie, hoping to gain her approval. Anna's attitude to her sisters was ambivalent at best. She didn't want to share her private world with them. Besides, they were too young to understand. But, resentful of the way she excluded them, it was hardly surprising that they sometimes ganged up on her. Anna was more interested in the world of adults than the world of children.

Walking home from a visit to Aunt Lily one day, she asked Jeannie: ‘What did Lily do before she was married?’
 
‘Hush,’ said Jeannie. ‘Mind your own business.’

‘But what?’ Anna persisted. ‘Why won’t you tell me?’

‘She worked as a barmaid at the Strand Hotel.’

Anna recalled the smell, boozy and stale, that issued from beer-gardens and bars along the township’s main street. She couldn’t really imagine homely-featured, competent Aunt Lily, with her level gaze and short, crimped hair and severe red lipstick, behind the bar, serving those awful, leery men. Aunt Lily seemed too respectable to be found in such company, even if that had been her job. Jeannie for her part had worked in Byles for Styles Drapery.

Anna wondered what the future held for herself and her sisters. She already detested the idea of serving behind a counter, never mind what kind. But that was what the local girls usually did when they left school, or else they just stayed home, helping in the house or on the farm, waiting for a bridegroom to appear. Anna resolved that it wouldn’t happen to her, though how to avoid such a fate was for the time being a question she could not answer.

During the pineapple season, Lily and Ted would stop at the entrance to Rosewood in their old, rust-red truck to leave cases of fruit on the gatepost. Pineapple juice dripping from her elbows, Anna would sometimes try to catch a glimpse of Aunt Lily’s teenage son, riding past to freedom on his bicycle.


Chapter 8
      
 
FRANGIPANI AND QUISQUALIS


Seeking new ways to occupy her mind, Anna would sometimes play with the idea of linking plants with people. She started with her grandfather, whose spirit seemed to speak through plants, although the profusion of Rosewood's garden was only part of the story. But certain lines and forms and colours -- palms, bougainvillaea, crimson hibiscus -- seemed to please him more than others. The palms corresponded to an instinctive sense that her grandfather was somehow remote and inaccessible. The tall, straight-backed Royal palms, Cocos palms and bangalows could not be climbed, their arched and bristled fronds swayed far above her head. They called to mind timeless, idyllic, tropical places, while at the same time standing aloof.

It disappointed her that hibiscus and bougainvillaea, so dear to Old Vance’s heart, were scentless in spite of their voluptuous appearance, although he didn’t seem to mind the lack of fragrance, and the colours gladdened his eye. Reflected in the lenses of his spectacles, vivid, silky-soft hibiscus and gaudy, papery bougainvillaea tinted the glass rose and flame. Bougainvillaea resisted familiarity too, being spiked with awesome-looking thorns to deter trespassers. When Jack had once suggested that certain overgrown bougainvillaea thickets should be cleared, Old Vance was adamant that they should not.

Personally, Anna loved frangipani and quisqualis. She used to sit crosslegged under the flowering frangipani, pentacles of blossom stuck in her hair, pretending to be a child of the islands, a creature of nature, footloose and free.  She loved the frangipani's simplicity of form, the clean lines, the texture of the petals rich and smooth, pristine yet sensitive, and easily bruised.

The individual flowers were perfect in their clarity. At night when Anna made small forays into darkness to sit on the lawn at the side of the house and look up at the sky, she could see the nearer stars of frangipani faintly in the dusk, and smell their presence warmly on the languid air. In the dim mantle of the house’s meagre light they loomed like misty constellations, slightly out of focus, their perfume close and palpable and lovely, like Polynesian melodies about the warm night sea.

She noticed the way the frangipani blossoms grew in clusters like nosegays, yet each flower and bud was separate and distinct, the shapely emerald leaves an ideal foil for the ivory and gold. But they could not survive in vases; they were not for cutting. If you touched an individual flower it would fall, and if you broke off the thick stem of a flower-head or even a single bud, a leaf, the tree would bleed profusely with sticky white sap, which clouded water in a vase and stained your hands and clothes.

Frangipani flowers were only for the tree. Away from the tree they lasted less than a day. They dropped from their stalks and the flawless creamy surfaces turned brown as old banana skin. The water in which the stems had stood was soured and slimy to the touch. Nevertheless for Anna the frangipani flowers on their primitive tree, with its stiffly-angled limbs and naively-contoured leaves and petals, became an icon of her childhood, inseparable from its shape and textures, colours and fragrances. It pained her only that the richly simple frangipani, which looked more robust than roses, lilies, garden flowers, were in fact more delicate than they appeared, and, dislodged from the tree by the slightest touch, so ephemeral.

Quisqualis elicited a different response, more diffuse and elusive. The front stairs had become in effect Anna's private entrance, as they led to what had once been the front veranda and was by now closed in to serve as bedrooms for the girls. The door opened into the room Anna shared with Nettie, and over an arch of rusty wire above the stairs quisqualis ran riot. The leafy tunnel was at its most fragrant in spring, when the dusky rose-coloured clusters appeared in their nest of leaves, and Anna could hide in their shade with a book, dreaming about the future, embarked on reveries of romance and travel to distant, mysterious lands. Quisqualis evoked an aura of unasked and unanswered questions, like its name: it conjured up a tantalisingly unknowable destiny.
 
* * *
               
Jack and Jeannie did not share Old Vance’s feeling for Rosewood, Anna sensed, although Jack would one day inherit it as a tenuous legacy. For Jack, long after arriving at Rosewood, home still meant fragrant citrus groves and vineyards somewhere on the Parramatta River, dreamlike on a distant shore across a gulf of time and space.

Harry's forebear, George Vance, had received his ticket of leave in the young colony of New South Wales, becoming a respected orchardist and civic leader. George's grandson, Harry, and great-grandson, Jack, had spent much of their early lives on his bountiful estates. In the course of Jack’s journeys and displacements with Old Vance, the early imprint of those groves and vines had become overlaid by mingled impressions of other places he had begun to love and then relinquished for his father’s sake. Throughout his life, Jack sought out plants for their  haunting fragrances: stephanotis, jasmine, scented lilies, honeysuckle. White gardenias, too delicate to withstand the scorching sun at Rosewood.

Jack was by nature nostalgic, a dreamer (though in a different way from Harry, his father), in retreat from the harsher realities he encountered in life. The education, music tuition, acceptance by his peers he craved in his youth had eluded him. Perhaps he failed to perceive the warrior in Jeannie, a woman struggling against the odds to govern her fate, or perhaps he valued in her certain qualities he felt he lacked.

Later, as an art student, resuming her childhood game of linking plants with people, Anna would visualise Jack in an image inspired by Chagall’s paintings, as a bridegroom crowned with a wreath of orange-blossom. For reasons she could not explain, she felt that this somehow came close to Jack’s essence, capturing an almost virginal quality, the imagined bitter-sweet fragrance of the orange-blossom wistfully evoking Jack’s delicacy of spirit.

Jeannie, by contrast, seemed to have a special affinity with the medusa-like poincianas, generous with shade in summer, harbouring snakes in their scarlet canopies, scattering loose petals on the ground like drops of blood.


Chapter 9

RACHEL'S TOMB


All of Jeannie’s upbringing had taught her to guard her tongue. Growing up in a household fraught with unexplained tensions and undercurrents, she had come to believe that it was unacceptable to ask questions, and downright dangerous to speak one’s private thoughts aloud.

She would not have known how to begin to tell anyone about herself and Jimmy, and in any case, Jack must never know, because she sensed that the story of her first, and, she secretly  believed, her only love, had the power to hurt him. Strange to think that the living could be hurt by the dead. Stranger still to wonder if the living might become jealous of them. Although her love for Jimmy had coincided with the war, which had ended more than a decade ago, those feelings were ingrained in her, a private article of faith that could never be truly outgrown or outlived.

While Jimmy had been serving in North Africa and Syria, Jeannie entered a limbo of suspense that brought with it a dull ache of uncertainty, the sense that unknown forces controlled her destiny. It was the beginning of a habit of mind that was to afflict her like a chronic illness, so firmly did it take hold and shadow her through life. The irregular arrival of cryptic messages or parcels from Jimmy brought a sudden surge of hope, until she realised that the burgundy cloth embroidered in peacocks and gold arabesques must have left Damascus months before and, like all the other messages and tokens he had sent was, by the time it reached her, no longer proof of survival.

There had been gifts despatched from every staging-post: gaudy cushion-covers from Cairo; foreign coins in a purple suede pouch. The keepsake that meant most to her was a New Testament from Jerusalem with Rachel’s tomb on its tooled leather cover. The compulsory Religious Instruction lessons of her schooldays finally had some point: Rachel the matriarch, sister of Leah, wife of Jacob, mother of Benjamin and Joseph, whose tomb was marked by a wind-gnarled olive tree, by the roadside not far from Jerusalem. Jimmy had perhaps passed that way... Jeannie’s fingertip traced the small, smooth dome of the wayside shrine, the twisted olive-bole growing beside it. Touching them, she felt a kind of stillness, almost peace. Rachel waiting at the well for Jacob ... Jeannie, waiting ...

Inside the cover was a dried leaf, faded to khaki, on which Jeannie had inked the inscription: ‘Received 7th June 1940’, and on a separate slip of paper the information that the leaf had been sent from Capetown; plucked on the way to the Middle East. Now, years later, it nestled in the book intact, under the domed image of the tomb, the olive tree. Some irrational sixth sense had prompted Jeannie not to consign the little leather-bound volume to her mother’s old cabin trunk under the house. Instead, she kept it tucked away in the recesses of her silky-oak wardrobe, along with her Doctor’s Book and other indispensable items.

In Jimmy’s absence, life on the surface continued its flow, establishing rhythms that carried her along, but at the same time Jeannie was looking inward, trying to imagine him and his fate. She had been only seventeen when he enlisted. He was one of the first wave of volunteers to join up late in 1939. He was twenty-four. None of them could have had any idea how long the war would last, but they all hoped optimistically that Hitler would soon be routed and that they would be free to come home. It didn’t do to think about death, defeat, duration. It would be an adventure, as Gallipoli was to have been.

On the one hand, Jimmy wanted to do his bit; on the other, he didn’t want to miss out on the escapade of a lifetime. It was understood that he and Jeannie would be married, but when he enlisted she was barely out of convent school. By the time the war ended, maybe in a year or so, he would have had time to see a bit of the world and she would have had time to grow up. She was a sweet kid and he adored her, but she was still so young.

When Jimmy was posted overseas Jeannie felt a claw of ice at her throat. She had seen him off on the train after his last leave, flanked by the gentle, maidenly Misses Tremain, his elder sisters. The dazzling blue eyes, the tanned face, lean but dimpled when he smiled, the lock of dark hair falling forward onto his forehead were framed for a few moments in the window of a carriage, surrounded by other faces craning for a last glimpse of families and friends, then there was only a flurry of slouch hats thrust out of windows waving, the wail of a whistle, the train gathering speed.

While he was away Jeannie had spun an imaginary life for him, at the same time weaving safety nets in her mind and heart which she knew, even as she strove and prayed for his deliverance, could never be proof against bullets and bombs. Nevertheless she clung to the hope that the Old Testament God she had been taught to believe in would smite Jimmy’s enemies and somehow arrange for him to be spared.

It seemed a strange and lonely way to live. Jimmy’s reality was all but incomprehensible to her, and what she was capable of imagining was, she realised, probably unreal. Even though she feared her vigilance could do little good, she was afraid to stop thinking of him and praying for him, in case something happened when her guard was down and her thoughts were not reaching out to protect him.

As the months passed, Jeannie’s images of Jimmy blurred into a composite of the remembered, the actual and the imaginary. She hated that. She wanted to touch, to feel ... the warmth of breath on her cheek, fingers callused from farm work stroking her hand. Not this enshrining of the subject, as if he were already dead. She’d walk on the beach on windy days when the gulls’ cries eddied in gusts of sea-breeze and talk to him aloud, visualising him there in the cold sun and moving air.

Will you come back? she had asked him on his final leave, knowing that it was the wrong question but craving reassurance, however false. Do my best, cobber, how’s that? The lopsided grin, the quick, brotherly kiss.

As the second year of separation dragged itself to a close and threw Jimmy into the ruck of battle after battle, and as incomplete reports filtered back of Tobruk, the Rats, the victory, Jeannie began to feel afraid for different reasons. If he had survived all that, wouldn’t he have changed? Of course, he must. The distance between them, which had been measured in terms of years rather than experience, seemed somehow to have widened and deepened to a chasm. How could she begin to understand or imagine his life now? What did war do to men? Did it turn them into wild beasts? Living ghosts? Did the hungry ghosts of dead mates and old battles shadow them through life? What would it be like living with that? Could a man like Jimmy ever get used to living a humdrum life after years as a soldier? She could no longer predict her future with Jimmy. There were too many unknowns and unanswered questions. At the same time, she flinched from contemplating her future without him.

Meanwhile he kept sending letters and tokens, signs that he cared, that she mattered to him, as if to encourage her to shake off a creeping sense of foreboding that was blighting her life. Jeannie was no Cassandra, but it seemed she had access to a form of telaesthesia which brought her no joy. Even before the Misses Tremain appeared before her, trembling at the news they bore, Jeannie knew. Despite her rational mind’s denials, she had known all along.
               
* * *

Jeannie never learned what became of her letters to Jimmy. Perhaps they were buried in desert sand or covered in gore in a hasty evacuation. But Jimmy’s letters to Jeannie became part of a ritual sacrifice when she agreed to marry Jack, and turned the flimsy witnesses to a former love, a forfeited life, into a small, heart-wrenching funeral pyre. Fifty years later, after Jack’s death, Jeannie was stricken with regret for the lost letters and the photograph of Jimmy in uniform. But she found that she could still remember certain passages word for word, so many times had she read them, hearing his voice speaking in her head:

            …This is another world, kid, often hellish, sometimes beautiful. Sandstorms, flies, days when you play cards, swap yarns, wait for signs of movement from the other side. Stars at night, and bleeding cold, and flares from behind the enemy lines. Tomorrow we advance. There’s been a tank battle and we’ve broken through. I can’t say where, it’s against the rules. How’s life in the home town? Seems so far away, like looking down the wrong end of a telescope. But you are near, I feel that clearly, even without your photo, which is getting very smudged with sand and my fingerprints, and dog-eared. Loving you, as always.      J.
               
* * *

Several years after Jimmy’s death, when Jeannie married Jack Vance, the son of a newcomer to the district, she kept quiet about her personal loss, having realised that Jack had been unspeakably wounded in the same war. Jack’s war wound was the fact that he had not been accepted for active service. He had been born with a malformed hand, rendering him unfit for combat.
 
On Anzac Days Jack became morose and withdrawn. He had no service medals to pin on his chest, no yarns to swap with his mates after the memorial service, no part in the camaraderie, and no share in the glory they could afford to be so off-hand about. Never mind that his age might have disqualified him anyway, he had been burning to prove his worth in the front lines, not at the rear in the Volunteer Defence Corps. Where was the honour in that? It didn't seem to occur to him that it was not so much that he'd wanted to fight as the fact that he was excluded again from proving himself to his peers. They neither accepted nor rejected him. They simply failed to notice his existence. But it was easier to sublimate these private inadequacies in the communal sense of loss and sacrifice brought to the surface by commemorating deeds in wartime.
         
That was why Jeannie, before her wedding, had burned Jimmy’s letters and the photograph of him in uniform, so Jack could never see them, never be reminded. In a way, it was also out of loyalty to Jimmy, so that no stranger’s eye could invade his privacy. The tiny heap of bone-white ash, finer than desert sand, reminded her of a cremation, but no fire could reduce to ash the feelings of the living. And Jimmy, killed in action, remained present in her consciousness, a phoenix of deep longing that refused to die.