Rosewood Dreaming 4

PART 2

THE FENCELESS FOOT OF A DREAM


Chapter 10


THE CABIN TRUNK


One Sunday morning while the girls were at Sunday School and Jack was still in town, Jeannie was seized by an impulse to open her mother’s old cabin trunk. Stored under the house so as to be out of the way, it contained as yet undeciphered clues to some of the painful episodes of her own childhood.

Her mother, Sybille Hudson, had brought the trunk with her on the ship from England when, aged twenty-five, she embarked on the long voyage to Australia. This was before the Great War, when such partings from home and family could easily extend to a lifetime, as in fact Sybille Hudson’s had done. Jeannie was so apprehensive about what the trunk might prove to contain, as if her mother might rise from it in person to castigate her, that she had refrained from opening it since her marriage to Jack.

Indeed, she had hoped that it may not be necessary ever to open it, that starting a new life as Jack’s wife would lay some of the ghosts, but they had a way of creeping back unappeased, so that she now felt compelled to confront them.
There were many unasked and unanswered questions about Jeannie’s mother. Questions she had never dared give voice to, because she sensed strongly that they would provoke aggrieved outbursts, or tight-lipped silence strained to breaking-point. Jeannie’s mother had remained an enigma to her daughter, a woman wearing the hair-shirt of foreignness and an ill-matched marriage with grim fortitude.

She never explained, for instance, why she had left England, what had prompted her to come all the way to Australia. More significantly, she never spoke of her family, childhood, youth. There seemed to be no lore to pass on, no sense of a clan, of belonging. Yet this absence was palpable: there was a nagging sense of something lacking, or suppressed.
 
The woman who had dreamed of returning to England, knowing she never would, bequeathed old letters from relatives, written before the unbroken silence that had somehow ensued since the time of her marriage to ‘that upstart colonial’. They were in the trunk with miscellaneous personal chattels: photographs, an astrakhan overcoat and ostrich-feather boa such as one wouldn’t wear in an Australian country town, a beaded cloche, a pair of pre-war dancing pumps, a Bible. Jeannie clung to the hope that, locked in the letters of those long dead, may lie cryptic answers to her questions.

There had been no room upstairs for the trunk, as at first there were only the two bedrooms that formed the core of the house, surrounded by verandas exposed to the weather, with one corner walled off as a kitchen. Jeannie’s and Jack’s poky bedroom, separated by a thin layer of boards from Jack’s parents’ room, was occupied by an ugly metal-frame bed, lacking the usual adornments of brass or glass ornaments, but softened in summer by a cloud of white mosquito net.

Under the house below the bedrooms was the original living-room, later used as sleeping-quarters by a series of farmhands, beginning with Simple George and ending with Lost Johnny. Planks had been laid to form a floor, and there were sash windows and four doors in the corrugated-iron walls, but the surrounding area, shaded by the verandas above, was bare earth. When the Vances first moved in, chaff bags split along the seams and stitched together with twine formed rough curtains against heat and wind, dust and rain. Before long, Old Vance’s transforming hand had replaced these with bougainvillaea, sky flowers, quisqualis and pothos, which overran wire trellises to close the gaps between the stumps, turning the space beneath the house into a dim, mysterious cavern.

Jeannie’s cabin-trunk, painted Nile green with black bands, so that it blended with the shadows of vines and trellises, squatted on the ground against a wall of the downstairs living-room. Since it was metal, they had assumed no harm could come to it under the house, so Jeannie had continued to postpone disturbing it.

Until now, when her longing to touch something that had belonged to her mother overrode her instinct to avoid pain. She had an irrational need to finger the letters with English stamps, her only tangible reference to people and places no-one had seen fit to tell her about. She wanted to reread the addresses, with a sense of wonder that the names on them contained something or someone of hers. Coventry, Sheffield, Halifax, York. What was it a relative had written after the second world war, in response to news of Sybille Hudson’s death?

Quickened by anticipation, Jeannie’s cotton skirt and bare calves flashed down the stairs and into the shade cast by the tankstand. Although she had an almost photographic memory, she wanted to verify once more what she had read, so long ago it now seemed, in a life that had vanished with marriage to Jack.
                You ask many questions about Great-Aunt Sybille. I wish I had answers. My father told me once about his favourite aunt who had gone to Australia. He was a youth of sixteen… corresponded… the letters stopped… family made enquiries… Aunt Sybille had left Sydney for… some sheep station… couldn’t tell where… always wondered what happened to her… unsuitable marriage we gathered… such a pity you didn’t write sooner… Father knew why she went to Australia… her life in England… he died close on two years ago now… sadly missed…

Since receiving that tantalising letter, Jeannie had had no word from her mother’s kinsfolk. But the apparent dearth of answers could not stop the questions from plaguing her. Sybille Hudson had never known the comfort that comes from a sense of belonging. Both Jeannie’s parents, in fact, had been no strangers to alienation, their lives locked in an incomprehensible cycle of lovelessness. The pride that kept them alienated from their families had not brought them closer to each other. As for Jeannie herself, she couldn’t be sure where she belonged either. Jack was one thing, maybe she loved him, love was a difficult thing to define... Jack was one thing, Rosewood was decidedly another.

* * *
               
When Jack returned from collecting the girls after Sunday School they found Jeannie sitting in the dirt, streaks of it on her cheeks, a vacant expression on her face, beside the open chest. Inside were unrecognisable particles of matter, as if a grave had been exhumed to disclose the work of worms. Mixed with the shreds of clothing and paper were traces of worked earth that marked the unmistakable presence of termites. They must have infiltrated the trunk by crawling up under the lid, as the shell of it was perfectly intact. The slender thread that might have led from a dark place to the light was gone.

Jack and the girls stood gazing down at Jeannie’s pallid, tear-stained face, then Jack cleared his throat and said, ‘Anna, there’s a good girl, go and put on the kettle for some tea …’


Chapter 11


LOST JOHNNY


Around the same time as Jeannie discovered the loss of her tenuous links with her mother, Johnny went missing.

Johnny was the latest in a series of farmhands employed by Old Vance. He had been brought to their notice by the vicar, a skeletal personage of over ninety who reminded Anna of a praying mantis. Johnny had come from the far west of the state to work at the coastal dairy, and many years after these events Anna would still wonder why: what could he have done, to be sent away to so distant a place? Only the desperate were willing to work on dairy farms.

Bands of volunteers searched the lantana thickets, probed the disused wells and combed the ti-tree swamps. The first night after his disappearance, Jack had searched the pipeline road that led to the weir, his COO-EE ringing plaintively under faint stars, as lost and disconsolate as the cries of dingoes and curlews.

Each day after that for several days, search-parties of men assembled at the farm to sift the scrub for evidence, but found nothing. A black tracker was called in, but not even he could find any trace, Johnny’s tracks having been erased by the bands of well-meaning searchers.

Jeannie brewed tea and made sandwiches and baked scones for the volunteers until her head throbbed and her back ached. Johnny’s disappearance cast a shadow over everyone at Rosewood. There were growing suspicions, not discussed openly by the Vances, that he had met with foul play. But who could have done such a thing?

Johnny’s disappearance filled Anna with unspeakable dismay. She could not escape the feeling that she was somehow to blame. It didn't make sense to Anna that she should be the one to feel guilty, but she couldn’t help it. She was afraid of what the adults would say about the way Johnny had behaved. She was afraid of Johnny, too. She didn’t want him to come back to Rosewood. But wishing for his disappearance only increased her shame and confusion. It wasn't fair, but nobody else seemed to realise that.

Meanwhile, Johnny’s father arrived from the far west, expecting to bury his son, whose fate was the subject of rife speculation among the local townspeople: snakebite, foul play, accident, suicide... Johnny had taken a shotgun with him.

He had last been seen on the Sunday afternoon, when he took Anna and Nettie down into the bush at the bottom of the house paddock to cut saplings for a wigwam. He had been promising for ages to build a wigwam for the girls, so they set off in high spirits, skipping and capering beside him as they headed down the slope to the ti-tree scrub.
Anna’s attention was on Johnny’s hands as he wielded the freshly-honed axe to chop through the papery cream and white outer layers of bark, the thin flesh-coloured tissue of inner membrane they protected, then the tough, resistant fibres at the core. She loved the layered bark of ti-trees, its complexity intrigued her.

Johnny’s hands were freckled on the backs, with reddish hairs. She thought they looked like paws, part of an animal. His eyes sometimes reminded her of an animal’s, too, very strange and green and light, with big black pupils. He often seemed embarrassed with the Vance girls, blushing easily in their presence.

Once he had bought them sweets, and Anna, climbing onto his lap in front of the family at the dinner-table, had put her arms around his neck to kiss him. Jeannie’s reaction had been scandalised. ‘Never do that again!’

Then it had been Anna’s turn to blush and feel embarrassed. She hadn’t realised she was doing anything wrong, but Jeannie wouldn’t explain. Anna regarded Johnny as a sort of distant relative. After all he lived with them, though of course downstairs, but all his meals were taken upstairs with the family. Surely kissing him was the same as kissing relatives, which you were expected to do when they gave you presents... All the same, she heeded Jeannie for once, and never kissed Johnny again.
               
* * *
 
On the second day after Johnny disappeared, a big, balding, paunchy police inspector in a white shirt and tie took Anna aside and questioned her, so that she felt trapped and threatened again, as Johnny had made her feel.

Five days after his disappearance, Johnny was found hiding under the vicar’s house, amid rumours that the search would be called off. Accompanied by his father, he made a brief reappearance at Rosewood, before going back out west.
Anna witnessed the awkward exchange of handshakes in the milking-shed, and noticed Johnny’s crimson face, but he seemed not to see her. She felt, without being able to put her feelings into words, that she was the victim of a monstrous injustice, a hideous joke, because Johnny was safe after all,  protected by the vicar, his father, Anna’s parents. There had even been a special church service to give thanks for his deliverance. But how safe was she?

She was glad she had lied to the police inspector. He was part of the conspiracy. She remembered the way he’d bent over her and turned his cold eyes on her and said: ‘Did he, er, touch you anywhere?’ making her feel unclean.

Nor could she bring herself to talk about Johnny with her younger sister, who seemed unaffected by what had happened. That Sunday afternoon in the ti-tree scrub, he had sent Nettie to the dairy on the pretext of fetching water, leaving him alone with Anna. When Nettie returned and couldn’t find them, Johnny pretended it was a game, silencing Anna by clamping his hand over her mouth and refusing to answer the other child's calls. Only the note of rising panic in Nettie's voice had ended it.

Anna could not forget the claustrophobic sensation of Johnny’s sweaty, rank-smelling palm creeping across her mouth and nostrils, pressing closer, so that she wanted to scream in terror, while his other hand, unseen, was fumbling with his clothes, with hers. She was convinced that her sister’s unwitting intrusion had saved her life, distracting Johnny long enough for Anna to wriggle free, to run blindly through the tattered maze of paperbarks, gulping their scent of wild honey, with Nettie calling after her, 'Wait for me, Anna, wait for me…'

The constriction the encounter seemed to have left in her chest and throat hurt her when she breathed. It cut her off from childhood, from the safe world she had known. The garden no intruder entered had become a savage place, where predators could pose as friends, while grown-ups pretended not to see. Jeannie was preoccupied: a new infant, a toddler, a man’s share of the farm work, in addition to keeping house, cooking, cleaning, chopping wood, and washing by hand for eight people, left her no time to register Anna's altered state.

The following summer, when bushfires threatened the farmhouse, Anna was reminded of the search-parties that had gone in search of Johnny. Men wearing hoods of split grain-sacks to protect their heads, carrying wet bran and pollard bags to beat the flames, loomed and disappeared in the smoke like members of a ghostly order, rekindling her feelings of aloneness and precariousness.

Nothing was quite as it seemed, and perhaps nowhere was really safe. Behind benevolent facades lurked strangers who could behave like wolves. Like Johnny. Unlike Red Riding-Hood, whose woodcutter father had sprung to her rescue, Anna felt herself at the mercy of predators she could not name. But the queerest thing of all was the shameful secret she shared with Johnny, so that she feared she could never really dissociate herself from him. At the same time she tried to imagine how people would react if she told them. What she perceived as the gravity of the offence conferred on her the unexpected power to shock them if she chose. So even as the trauma isolated her, it also marked her out and made her feel important, and as time passed, instead of diminishing, the stigma loomed larger, like her shadow.


Chapter 12

   
LONELY SOULS


Artificial light was a luxury known only sparingly at Rosewood. By night, the sounds that carried from the darkness to the darkened house were lonely sounds, inhuman sounds that walled the heart in isolation: the plangent, disembodied wailings of curlews, bloodcurdlingly eerie and disconsolate, and on winter nights the dingoes howling into frosty stillness, their hunger elemental, unappeased. Lost souls. The distant whistle of a train towards the dawn, and tempering the chill sense of the alien, the chink of cow-bells in the house-paddock. In summer, mosquito nets were suffocating, claustrophobic, shrouds beyond which nameless monsters lurked invisibly.

There was no instant, electric light to dispel the terror of the night, the long and lonely vigil of the child who waits for day. The kerosene lamps were extinguished at bed-time as they were considered a fire-hazard. The hollow cupped by hills with the mound at its centre where Rosewood stood was submerged in darkness. In the absence of light, the presence of colour was denied. Old Vance’s garden became a ghost of its daytime self, declaring its identity in more subtle ways, in wafts of fragrance, exhalations of roses, frangipani, jasmine. Nights were a time of essences, incorporeal presences, spirits without substance. Anna felt too vulnerable to sleep, while at the same time she was captivated in a scary way by this nocturnal world, where only thoughts and sounds had form, and secret senses came into play.

Night could be a time of fear for animals, too. If a calf was born early, before its mother was brought in to the relative safety of the house paddock, it would likely as not be found with its throat torn out by dingoes. Even the strong became more vulnerable when darkness fell. There had once been a prize bull called Gamboge, the envy of the district and the pride of the Rosewood herd. Gored by a renegade rival beast who’d broken the fence to attack him, Gamboge died an agonising death, trapped in the muddy quagmire of the springs. He had seemingly fled there to escape his horned assailant or to cool his wounds. Attempts to haul him out with the help of a rope attached to the Clydesdale mare had been in vain, and Gamboge had bellowed all night long, a piteous cry for help, until Old Vance put him out of his misery with a bullet in the morning.
   
By night, the Rosewood women would lie awake, separated from each other by what seemed infinities of darkness, nursing their dreams and fears and loneliness. Aimee Vance, Jeannie Vance, Anna, staring into darkness while the men and younger children slept. The prayer Anna had learned from Aimee seemed to accentuate the sense of precariousness synonymous with Rosewood nights:

               Now I lay me down to sleep,
               I pray the Lord my soul to keep;
               If I should die before I wake,
               I pray the Lord my soul to take.

In fact, the Lord had taken Aimee Vance’s soul one night while Anna was sleeping. As Jack clumsily explained, his eyelids red and puffy from weeping, the angels had come down from heaven in the night and taken her back with them, so that Anna imagined her grandmother, wearing a long, white nightdress, her frizzy hair loose as a cloud on her shoulders, flanked by the wings of archangels, for whom the sea-green glass of the farmhouse louvres parted miraculously as the heavenly host made their ascent. She imagined angels sitting on the tankstand at night, waiting for the next soul to depart.

Jeannie, who had a disconcerting way of intercepting other people's unspoken thoughts, was heard to observe that if pigs might fly, then flying foxes might well turn into angels.

Wanting to know more about Aimee Vance, whose death had seemed so mysterious at the time, many years later Anna wrote to Jeannie, who replied: The third question (about Aimee’s recurring bouts of illness) is a bit difficult. Apparently she had been frail most of her life, I know she had a floating kidney – whatever that is – and high blood pressure, plus very bad eyesight. She always looked so frail and I often wondered how she produced children – she was so tiny around the waist and hips. I really cannot remember anything else, except at the end her kidneys failed completely. Our winter is here, 5 degrees this morning...

Jeannie had added a postscript: P.S. I think Aimee Vance deserved a medal for following old Harry’s whims, for he was always obeyed, his word was law as the head of the family. That last move to Rosewood – when she had at last found the surrounds she loved and the friends she loved at Rydalmere – was I think the hardest for her to bear, especially at her age and in frail health. Really it was like a bush camp, only one tap, no bath, no sink, dirt floor and bags stitched together and hung up to keep out the wind. I guess it was all in the name of Love – but what a challenge – no wonder I told your grandfather he ought to give it back to the Kooris – for this is what I moved into when I married your father – all water under the bridge – come to think of it my own mother followed Dad and worked as a housekeeper on the various stations… What a culture shock after Suburbia Sheffield. Climate alone would have been hard to bear...

Anna remembered Aimee’s delicate ways, her air of unobtrusive refinement; her rosewood veneer sideboard, its drawers filled with finely-embroidered linen, lacy tea-cloths, beaded jug-covers, its lower compartments stacked with tea-sets and cake-plates for serving afternoon teas, the niches on either side of the tarnished mirror occupied by marble figurines of a shepherd-boy and shepherd-girl.

The homecoming Aimee Kaufmann silently longed for was never to be: the return from the wilds to the house of her youth, where windows and mirrors channelled the light from the harbour, and music hovered in the air from morning to night, mingling with the fragrances of the garden to create a charmed atmosphere. The nursery of her childhood had been enveloped in warmth from her nanny, her music-loving, extravagantly costumed mother, and the admiring guests who frequented the Kaufmann mansion.

Anna could only fantasise about her grandmother's childhood in Sydney, but everyone at Rosewood had heard stories of Rydalmere, the Vances’ previous property, which they had also built up from scratch, though with more success, it seemed, than Rosewood.

The Vances of Rydalmere had led more active social lives than they did after moving to Rosewood. They had their own tennis court, and hosted tennis parties and afternoon teas galore. Harry had installed a generator, so there was electricity and music from a gramophone. Before Aimee’s only daughter, Elspeth, had married a wool-classer and left the district, there was a more feminine presence to soften the raw edge of rural living. Elspeth and her friends from other properties would fill the house and its generous verandas with girlish voices and laughter.

It must have been difficult for Aimee to forgive Old Harry for taking her to a place so devoid of comfort as Rosewood had been. Nor did she ever make friends to replace the ones from the Rydalmere days. It was too late for her to start afresh. But like her son, Jack, who so resembled her, she was never heard to complain. No wonder Jeannie thought of her as practically a saint, or at least some kind of martyr, although the analogy was somehow never extended to include Jack.

Of her grandmother’s person, Anna retained an image of the abundant, crinkly, iron-grey hair drawn back and fastened in coils and knots by numerous hairpins; an elongated, sensitive face and translucent aqua eyes behind round-lensed, gold-rimmed spectacles, ladylike frocks that skimmed the ankles, feet in high-heeled, lace-up shoes. Her clothes, somehow too good for Rosewood, were also a vestige of that former life.
 
The only time Anna had seen her grandmother lose her composure was after a nightmare. Aimee had been distraught for a whole morning, repeating ‘Those men! The way they made me ride those horses! How I wish they hadn’t made me ride those horses!’

Perhaps it was as token compensation for enforced displacement that Aimee obsessively hoarded issues of an English magazine called Woman and Home. While Jeannie would spirit each copy away, avid for serialised romances, Aimee prized them for the home-decorating feature, which always presented variations on the same theme: a room decked out in chintz to tone with the paintwork, accompanied by advice about colour schemes, soft furnishings, and other secrets of the home-maker’s art.

Despite Aimee’s wistful desires to the contrary, the house at Rosewood remained rough and raw, gawky, out-at-elbows, ramshackle. It defied attempts, sporadic and half-hearted as these were, to make it more genteel. It was always somehow the wrong house for that, never really Aimee’s nor Jeannie’s idea of what a home should be. In fact, Jeannie had long since reached the point where Rosewood represented the antithesis of her domestic ideal: not only the house, but the emotional minefield it harboured so blandly.  Its only glory was its setting, which Old Vance’s inspiration and will had transformed from native bushland, lovely as that had been, into something gaudier and more exotic. The rosewood veneer sideboard seemed out of place in such surroundings, symbolising the more gracious way of life Aimee had known in Sydney, and representing something Jeannie and Jack, caught up in a struggle for survival, could no longer aspire to or hope to accomplish.

Anna found it strange that Jeannie, who had lived for some years in the house with Aimee Vance, had finally known so little about her, and seemingly remembered even less.

Assuming that her mother would be more forthcoming about her own life, Anna ventured to ask in a subsequent letter what had kept Jeannie going during the gruelling years at Rosewood, but received no reply. Survival for Jeannie had been dearly bought, and there was much that wouldn’t bear reliving.

Looking back, both Jeannie and Anna would see a way of life that had contracted to vanishing point, whereas in Anna’s childhood, Rosewood’s days and nights expanded to encompass the world, extending forward to eternity. The nights had seemed a wilderness of formless fears to be traversed, lying in wait like ordeals in a fairytale, to test endurance.

By day the aspect changed completely. Where there had been a shadowy no-man’s-land there was a sea of vegetation: stands of ironbark, stringybark and bloodwood, thickets of lantana and wild passionfruit. A world of plant life that could swallow you and leave no trace, although there were also fence-lines and the creek, a windmill, outhouses, landmarks to stop you getting lost. There was the Polynesian fantasy of the old man’s garden: scarlet trees, cicada heat of summer, fragrant shade.

But this was still a landscape where the European presence sat uneasily, its tenure precarious, the marks of passage easily erased. Yet even as the latecomers left death on the land in the form of ringbarked trees, grotesque and threatening, there remained secluded, untouched places along the creek, a leafy corridor of aromatic shade and purling water coming to rest in the placid lagoon, with its palette-shaped leaves and sky-blue waterlilies, pairs of wild duck and geese, white herons and spoonbills.

There were pockets of bushland so undisturbed as to seem alien, where even a child could feel a trespasser, sensing that here the ancient spirits of the land still held sway. Details of vegetation, landforms, crowded Anna’s days,  vanishing so alarmingly at night that her heart knocked at her ribs for reassurance, and her mouth became too dry to pray. Rosewood’s nights and days, alternately familiar, strange, challenged her imagination but eluded definition. She couldn't even begin to imagine what life must be like in a city, surrounded by people and lights that stayed on until dawn. Her spirit was being shaped by wilderness and isolation, and tensions in her family that were never given names.