Rosewood Dreaming 5

Part 2

THE FENCELESS FOOT OF A DREAM


Chapter 13


AN ENIGMATIC MAN


The year Old Vance turned eighty-eight and Anna turned eleven, they had a joint birthday celebration. Together they blew out the symbolic candles and cut the cake Jeannie had baked.

Was her grandfather ever lonely, Anna wondered. Nobody knew. He was isolated in that he was disinclined to communicate his thoughts and feelings to Jack and Jeannie or his grandchildren. He observed, reflected, and his faded blue eyes glinted, austerely or kindly, behind his gold-rimmed spectacles, but mostly he refrained from comment.

He had had time to become reconciled to Aimee’s absence, although in the early stages of bereavement he had appeared morose and unshaven. Anna, who continued her practice of shadowing him when the opportunity arose, had followed him unnoticed several times to the springs at the end of the run, where he would gather arum lilies that grew wild there, for Aimee’s grave. Anna, still under the spell of Jack’s angels, wasn't sure what the lilies were for, but seeing her grandfather’s pensive face, knew they were somehow connected with Aimee. Now Rosewood was his sole concern, and he seemed to find more than solace in that.

Before his voyage to Tahiti, Old Vance had been a vicarious traveller who sought and found adventure in the writings of others. He found it fitting that his favourite, Robert Louis Stevenson, had ended his days in the South Seas, ‘under a wide and starry sky’. Old Vance thrilled to the poetry he detected in the souls of such men, and took them as exemplars, his spiritual guides.

He had little time for religion in the conventional Christian sense, although at times he observed the outward forms. His were more inchoate gods, and he a pantheist at heart, if not in practice, who could grasp intuitively the totemic significance of plants and other living creatures in a clearer way than he perceived his fellow beings, apart from those select few he recognised as kindred spirits, like Gauguin and Stevenson, the inspirational figures of his youth. Old Vance sometimes sighed for the fact that he was gifted neither at writing nor painting. He could make things with his hands, but it was the kind of handiwork that would never find its way into galleries or onto library shelves. His creations -- the garden at Rosewood, the remodelling of the house -- were vulnerable to time and change, more so than most things people made, and all too easily effaced.
 
Although the name ‘Old Vance’ stuck when he moved north to Queensland, in Sydney he had been known as Harry Hope Vance, which carried different connotations. Jeannie privately thought of him as Old Harry, one step removed from Lucifer. When he did feel inclined to talk, it tended to be about things remote in time and place from Rosewood. When he was in the mood, he liked to tell his grandchildren stories from his family’s history, which they absorbed eagerly, never suspecting that Old Vance’s version could possibly contradict the facts. They were not to know that when the truth proved unpalatable, he had no compunction about altering it a little.

This was certainly the case with the story of his ancestor, George Vance, convicted felon, whose death sentence had been commuted to transportation for life to the colony of New South Wales. All that was reliably known was that George had committed a crime against his employer. However, the version preferred by Harry, his grandson, had it that the incident had been a misunderstanding: an altercation provoked by the employer, culminating in assault, as a witness at the court of appeal had testified. George Vance had been wronged and that was why he was given his ticket of leave so soon after arriving in New South Wales. The truth had been both more complicated and more compromising, but after numerous retellings of Harry Vance's apocryphal version, the latter prevailed, at least officially.

Anna had once plucked up the courage to corner Jeannie with the question: 'What did George Vance do in Devon?' Jeannie, a wicked gleam in her eye, answered in one terse word: 'Arson.' Anna was silenced by what she assumed was the gravity of the offence, and waited impatiently for a chance to look up the word in the school dictionary. So George Vance had been an arsonist, as well as an orchardist. How very strange. But how had Jeannie found out? 

What Old Vance chose to conceal was greater than what he revealed, restricting himself to a careful repertoire of tales that exposed little or nothing of his private world. While he sometimes gave the impression that many voices in him clamoured to be heard, he had clamped their mouths shut resolutely. The silence about him was unnatural, that of a man with much on his mind. Even Jeannie’s antennae, her probing green eyes, could not penetrate his defences. Her instincts told her that here was a man caught between fires, fleeing the ghosts of his grandfather’s fetters, chafed by his own puritanical streak and longing to cast it all off and go troppo, but inhibited by his own sober nature and habits.

It struck Jeannie as ironic that Jack’s father should know more than he cared to tell of Vance family history, whereas she, hungry for details of her own ancestry, was unable to locate anyone who knew anything about it. Old Vance, replete with unshared knowledge, had battened the hatch on it, releasing only censored and edited versions of selected events. Maybe that was why he liked canaries, Jeannie reflected cynically. They didn’t ask questions and they didn’t talk back.

In a blue cage in his room, Old Vance kept a series of handsome golden whistlers. When one bird came to the end of his short lifespan, he was soon replaced by another, as the old man missed the captive’s trilling bursts of melody. The Emperor and his nightingale, thought Anna. When the Vances went on rare picnics to the seaside, encumbered with travel-rugs, hampers of food and thermoses of tea, Old Vance would collect cuttle-fish for his canary, and shell-grit for the floor of its cage.

The old man’s other regular companion was the wireless, the Australian Broadcasting Commission’s national network. He and Jack would listen to the seven o’clock news before dinner was served. Nobody was allowed to speak while the news was being broadcast. The spirit-lamp suspended over the dining-table illumined the scene, its glowing mantle attracting moths and other nocturnal winged insects, which batted their soft bodies against the heated glass. Apart from them, nobody dared move. The ABC was the Voice of the Prophet and sometimes Mister Menzies, whom Old Vance in his later years somewhat resembled. It was like being in church and having to wait until the end of a long prayer before you could sigh with relief and say Amen and wriggle and squirm again, Anna thought.

The wireless was really everybody’s friend, but in different ways. Jeannie would arrange her chores so that she could be in the house while the daily episode of the serial,  ‘Blue Hills’, was on the air. Although she would sniff to herself and think what staid, uneventful lives some people led, she hated to miss an episode. Bovine Hilda and her clan were better company than none. She was even more thankful for kindergarten of the air, which kept the youngest Vances out of her hair for part of the morning.

Jack would try to catch the last of the breakfast programme after the morning’s milking, to hear the popular songs and arias which invariably brightened his day, while Anna waited impatiently from the moment she got off the school bus, counting the minutes until five o’clock and the hour-long broadcast called The Argonauts' Club, with its thrilling aura of adventures in store. The Argonauts' Pledge was an incantation she fervently believed in: Before the sun and the night and the blue sea, I vow to stand faithfully by all that is brave and beautiful; to seek adventure, and having discovered aught of wonder, or delight; of merriment or loveliness, to share it freely with my comrades…"  Every day she embarked for an hour on adventures far from the farm, bound for the enchanting unknown, under a mythical banner.

Sustained by his own private dream, Old Vance seemed set to go on for ever. Besides, at Rosewood there was plenty to keep him occupied, especially now that farmhands had been dispensed with. He lent a hand in the dairy morning and evening, and threw himself into orgies of fencing, gardening and carpentry. Under the house, in the corners partially protected from the weather by outside tankstands, he had constructed sets of makeshift shelves where he stored his tools, and a work-bench. He could do wonders with wood, he loved the feel of it in his hands, its aroma, even though the materials he more often resorted to at Rosewood were masonite and fibrolite.

He would set out his carpenter’s horses, spirit-level and yardstick, sharpen the saws on the grindstone, then lay out his chisel and mallet, drill, screwdriver, rasp, sandpaper, putty. Hammer and nails. Adze, lathe. It was an infinitely satisfying ritual. Apart from the dolls’ cradles and rocking-horses he made for Anna and her sisters, he had transformed the shell of the farmhouse little by little into something more functional to serve the needs of its occupants. The emphasis was undoubtedly on function at the expense of charm, but it had been a matter of necessity.

Accordingly, in the early years of Jack’s and Jeannie’s marriage, Old Vance converted all the wide, sunny verandas into ugly fibro lozenges with tinted, pebble-glass louvres, to provide bedrooms for the children. A poky bathroom lined with masonite painted lime-green, whose sole tap issued cold, rust-stained bore-water, occupied one corner. Of course, neither Jeannie nor Aimee had been consulted about the changes. It had simply never occurred to Old Vance to take their wishes into account. Nor did he seem troubled by the irony of his own situation: a surpassingly ugly dwelling fashioned by one who worshipped beauty.

When it was time to rest, he would retire to the den he had built for himself by closing in one end of the veranda that ran the width of the house. There, ensconced in his squatter’s chair near the open casement windows, overlooking the front garden with its rosebeds and borders of lilies enclosed by a white-painted fence – another piece of his handiwork – he could snooze, write letters or read, immersing himself in the delights of Yates Garden Guides and rose catalogues mailed from Langbeckers’ Nurseries in Bundaberg, absorbed as a child with a book of fairytales.

Contemplating the cornucopia of his garden: the graceful palms and poincianas, gaudy bougainvillaea, sumptuous tropical fruit of various kinds, Old Vance felt rich beyond the imaginings of those who looked at him and saw a plain-living, simple man.

What ultimately counted for him was to feel the spirit of Rosewood enveloping him while he fashioned things out of wood and toiled to adorn his estate, and then repose in his squatter’s chair, at one with his own creation. It often occurred to him that people who made things didn’t have time to feel lonely. Anna thought her grandfather was different from other old people, who liked to relive the past. Unlike her mother and father, who did not strike her as being at peace with themselves, Old Vance seemed to live almost entirely in the present, and to like it there.


Chapter 14


STEMPELS’ FARM


A family from Germany had leased the farm beyond the end of the red dirt road, past Uncle Ted’s and Aunt Lily’s, farther around the mountain than Anna had ever ventured. She met Herr and Frau Stempel for the first time one wet morning while she was waiting for the school bus with her sisters, under the massive bluegum a hundred yards from Rosewood’s front gate.

A dilapidated farm vehicle came nosing through the teeming rain, drew level with the children and stopped. There were a man and a woman in  front, and children’s faces peeping out from the canvas canopy at the back. Anna recognised the new kids at school, Freddy and Greta from Germany, whose names and identities overlapped in her mind with those of Hansel and Gretel. She tried to banish the thought that the most likely contender for the role of wicked stepmother was Miss Fermor from down the hill. Now, Frau Stempel’s kindly, round face and thick-lensed glasses reassured Anna that she meant well. ‘You vant to komm mit us? Ve go to Schule.’

Like her grandfather, whose imagination had been captivated by Tahiti and Gauguin’s seductive imagery, Anna was entranced by the unfamiliar. She hesitated only momentarily. ‘Yes please,’ she said. Her three younger sisters were less trusting. Huddled together under an umbrella, they looked on, a wordless chorus of alarm and disapproval, as Anna clambered in next to Frau Stempel and bounced off into the curtains of rain.

Frau Stempel’s heavily-accented conversation burbled with chuckles and goodwill. ‘You komm und visit me,’ she told Anna in parting. ‘Komm fur Kaffee und Kuchen.’
One Saturday afternoon Anna slipped off unnoticed and made her way to Stempels’ house. There were many farms in between, owned by members of the district’s pioneering clan. Some of them she knew, but others lay outside familiar territory. The Stempels lived in the last farmhouse on the mountain’s eastern flank. Ducking through barbed-wire fences and cutting across patches of cultivation, Anna arrived, panting and dishevelled, at the Stempels' kitchen door.

Frau Stempel chirped a welcome. ‘Komm, komm, I make Apfelkuchen.’

Her kitchen was spotless, fragrant with yeast and cinnamon and coffee smells. There was a cuckoo clock on the wall, as well as framed images of villages in Germany with mountains and snow and fir trees, and family photographs from another world, another era.

The kitchen window looked eastward to the distant bay, a wide-open, intense eye the colour of Reckitt’s blue or morning glory, and the miniature white buildings of the township straggling over the headlands. Someone had planted a grove of pine trees on the slope behind the house. They murmured in the breeze like gentle echoes of a distant Europe.

Frau Stempel explained that they had lost their home because they came from the East, which had fallen to the Communists after the war. Herr Stempel had been a schoolmaster before the war, and had taught himself English while a prisoner of the British. She herself had done forced labour in factories. Gentle, scholarly Herr Stempel and beaming, energetic Frau Stempel didn’t fit the stereotype of The Enemy that seemed to lurk in the psyche of Anna’s parents’ generation. On the contrary, they somehow made Anna feel safe. The Stempels were different from the Vances, they moved in the aura of another world, but as far as Anna was concerned this made them irresistible, apart from which they welcomed her, encouraging her visits.

At their house she would drink in the fragrant, inviting aromas of the kitchen, savouring the combination of warmth and order, and the way they turned familiar words upon their tongues and made them strange; the way strange words became familiar as she heard them used. Mutti. Pappi. It slowly dawned on her that the greatest difference between the Vances and the Stempels was the way people talked to each other, or rather, the fact that they talked to each other. It was the first time she had been treated as someone other than a child. The Stempels talked to each other as if it were the natural thing to do, including Anna in their conversations.

The Vances talked to each other if they were obliged to do so, and only with visible reluctance would Jeannie respond to Anna’s frequent questions, deflecting them with stock retorts like 'Ask no questions and you’ll be told no lies.' Silence between people had come to seem normal, until now. Listening to the Stempels chatting amiably around the table, she began to feel cheated. ‘They hoard their words like misers!’ she thought, visualising mealtimes at Rosewood. Not just mealtimes. All times. Anna assumed that everyone at Rosewood was doing the same as her: the less she spoke, the more she thought. But what were they thinking?
   
She was struck by the way each family created its own distinctive aura. The Stempel household had an air of cheerful rectitude, a sense of everything being purposeful yet cosy. It was a reassuring place to be.

Rosewood was different. At Rosewood there seemed to be treacherous undercurrents these days, too many things that could not be talked about, alarming tensions in the air like the charged atmosphere before thunderstorms.There were family squalls from time to time, between Old Vance and Jeannie, Jack and Jeannie, but even though these cleared the air, the relief did not last long. Anna had the sense of discord building toward greater conflict.

Perhaps you didn’t notice private problems in places where you were only a visitor, but there was certainly more laughter in the Stempel house, thanks to Frau Stempel’s sunny nature and Herr Stempel’s ironic sense of humour. His wry comments often made Anna smile. Somehow, in spite of having been uprooted and transplanted, the Stempels had brought their own ambience with them, and this continued to sustain them in their new surroundings.

Such dramas as Anna witnessed tended to centre on Fritzi, Frau Stempel’s dachshund, who could not resist the temptation to gnaw a slipper or worry a newly-planted pawpaw tree. Then Frau Stempel would pursue him, no longer good-natured, wielding the vernacular along with her broom. ‘Du kleiner Shtinker!’ she would shriek, momentarily red-faced and furious.

Yet Anna somehow formed the impression that the Stempels’ domestic dramas were less scary than those at Rosewood. She wondered if Frau Stempel ever threatened to run away from her husband and children, as Jeannie sometimes did these days, but she thought not. The Stempel children didn’t seem fazed by anything, they never wore that look of mute misery that Anna sometimes saw on her sisters’ faces after one of Jeannie’s hysterical outbursts. And somehow she felt sure they were never beaten as a punishment, either, or because their parents needed to give vent to blind rage and frustration. She had heard the reasonable tones the Stempels adopted when explaining to Greta and Freddie why things should be or not be a certain way. Jeannie and Jack never had time to explain, and Jeannie, harassed and unhappy, had no qualms about dishing out blows, which she found more efficacious than words.
 
Jack didn’t know Anna visited the Stempels. When he realised where she was spending her Saturday afternoons his face darkened. ‘You are not to set foot on that farm,’ he said. Anna thought it must have had something to do with the war, although she didn’t dare ask.

Jeannie was different. She didn’t forbid Anna to go. Instead, she waited avidly to hear the smallest detail, but whenever Anna asked her mother to accompany her to the Stempels, Jeannie would shake her head, regretfully.


Chapter 15


INVISIBLE PERSEPHONE


Apart from the Stempels, Jeannie also declined to venture down the road to visit another neighbour, Miss Fermor, always claiming she was too busy, although she encouraged Anna to take the younger girls on excursions to Fermors’ farm as soon as they were old enough to be shepherded safely on such outings. It got them out of Jeannie’s hair for a while, this being the main reason for her reluctance to join them.

There was something uncompromising about Miss Fermor's manner and appearance. Her calves, forearms and face, tanned cinnamon and nutmeg, were dehydrated like an empty wineskin, except for large, full lips glossed with saliva: ‘Scotch ointment’, as she called it, advocating it as a cure-all for cuts and bumps and grazes.

Her habitual attire was a faded, button-through print frock and dirty sandshoes. Anna wondered if Miss Fermor’s breasts, hidden under her serviceable cotton dress, were as brown and wrinkled as her face and arms. A floppy old felt hat covered her springy, iron-grey hair with wiry strands of white through it. From a distance, the hat gave her a slightly comical appearance, like a lop-eared rabbit.
As if to contradict that impression, Miss Fermor had a penetrating tenor voice and a vigorous, athletic way of striding about.

Her farm was small, so that the whole of it could be seen from the road, but productive out of proportion to its size. To Anna, accustomed to mango trees and frangipani, bougainvillaea and poincianas, Miss Fermor’s garden was a whimsical, fantastic place, full of curious and unfamiliar specimens: weird gourds of exotic shapes and colours, marrows, zucchini and many kinds of beans, snaking and curling over trellises. Rare varieties of fruit, like those on display at the annual agricultural show, diffused their feminine, musky fragrances of granadilla, lai-chi, pomegranate, amidst the masculinity of gourds and aubergines.
 
Miss Fermor evoked thoughts of Demeter, wizened crone-goddess of the harvest, whom Anna, with her insatiable appetite for stories, had read about. But Miss Fermor’s garden seemed somehow incomplete, lacking as it did any hint of a Persephone. And anyway the image was as difficult to reconcile with Miss Fermor’s manner and appearance as her first name, which had astonished Anna the first time she heard it. ‘Antoinette’. Miss Fermor barked it gruffly. Antoinette? Persephone?

Anna fantasised about this possibility. She imagined Demeter’s daughter appearing like a vision, a white magnolia tree among the vines and trellises of beans, but it was just a dream, she knew, it couldn’t happen really. There was another story that seemed closer to reality, about an old village woman in a poor country, who strangled infant girls in their cradles so that they would be spared the misery of a woman’s life. It was a shocking story that had won Jeannie’s unqualified approval. Locked inside Miss Fermor were incipient madness, rage, something dangerous and bitter, like a wild creature in a cage. Anna had glimpsed the same destructive forces at work in Jeannie, but she didn’t want to think about that.

The contrast between soft, petalled beauty and gauntness was evident also in her surroundings. Beyond the garden pressing close to the house were paddocks of dead trees, which had been ringbarked and then left to stand, grotesque and lifeless, yet threatening in their immensity. Clouds moving past them created an illusion that they were tilting, falling in slow motion.

Instead of the radiant Persephone of Anna’s fancy, the plain, sparsely-furnished farmhouse harboured Miss Fermor’s ailing husband, who, palsied, ugly, huddled in darkness, was as dependent as a child on her, being almost blind and physically helpless, prey to a debilitating disease. The Fermors, apart from the fact that he was an invalid, seemed not much different from elderly bachelor brothers and spinster sisters who worked some of the family farms in the district. It was this resemblance that made Anna think of Antoinette Fermor as  Miss, never Mrs. Besides, she seemed too forcefully her own person to be someone’s ‘missus’.

* * *

One morning, visibly distressed, Miss Fermor climbed the hill to the Vances, the tears still dripping from her dried-out cheeks. Mr Fermor had died an hour before, and she needed to use the phone.

Soon after that, visits to the Fermor house ceased because of some obscure misunderstanding. Sometimes when the Vance children walked along the road, Miss Fermor would yell abuse at them. They became afraid of seeing her among the twisted trees. Then she sold her farm. The buyer was her sister, Miss Ladd, who hailed from a place called Dingo or Banana (nobody seemed certain which), so there was a continuity of sorts, although the Vances never got to know the Ladds.

They could be seen working on the farm, the two of them. Again it was really Mrs and not Miss. She was an ample woman who wore print frocks and large floral aprons edged with bias binding. Her abundant hair was worn in a bun or coiled in braids at the nape of her neck. The second Ladd was her son, said to be mentally retarded. He was perpetually smiling, which combined with a squint to give a quizzical expression halfway between good nature and grimace. The Ladds cut down many of the ring-barked trees to make more room for pasture.

Miss Fermor seemed simply to vanish. She vanished so completely that Anna tried to find ways to account for it. She heard Miss Fermor’s raucous squawking coming from the sky on days when flocks of black cockatoos flew over, almost sinister in their unhurried flight, with sharp, serrated wings and at close quarters, predatory profiles and cynical, unbirdlike eyes. Miss Fermor might easily have been one of them.
 
And if they happened to pause, and settle on the few remaining dead trees in Miss Fermor’s paddock, Anna would take it as a sign that she was alive and well and free, still able to recognise her former home.