Rosewood Dreaming 9 Part 2

Part 4


LANTANA


It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness. (Lev Tolstoy)
 

Chapter 22 (2)

 
MIDNIGHT ORCHARD


You could lose yourself in the nights at Rosewood. Only Jeannie with her cat’s eyes could easily find the way. But other people Anna knew had disappeared into the night, been swallowed up by it, never to re-emerge. Aimee Vance, her grandmother, for instance, had been lost to darkness. And Johnny, except that the thought of him keeps coming back to spook her. Anna sometimes imagines his baleful eyes watching her while she sleeps, and wants to scream at the phantom to leave her in peace.

Now she is alarmed for her friend Linda, who lives on a neighbouring farm. What if Linda too should vanish into the night, not snatched by a mysterious illness as her mother, Ruby, had been, but by a demon lover known to Anna only through Linda’s descriptions, who disappears before dawn, like a vampire, and is never seen by light of day. All Anna’s nightmares are waking ones. They keep her awake until almost daybreak. When she knows the light is coming, she feels safe enough to sleep.

Lying awake at night, Anna imagines wakeful Linda, who has told her so many details of her nocturnal trysts that Anna has no difficulty picturing the scene. She can imagine Linda lying in her bed upstairs in the dark farmhouse, listening to the tick of the clock in the next room, counting off the minutes and hours; the house sighing rhythmically with its freight of dreamers, their peaceful breathing, so that it seems the walls are alive, expanding and contracting gently.

Linda lying still so as not to disturb her sister, asleep in the adjacent bed, though she has only to raise herself on one elbow and look through the uncurtained window to see the distant scatter of lights straggling round the bay and up over the headland where the little township lies; the intervening farmhouses marooned in darkness, with here and there a glint of moonlit metal roof or galvanised iron shed. Electricity is just a few miles and half a generation away.

Linda’s family’s farm covers a foothill of the mountain, where the earth is a rich shade of henna, and the well-drained, eastward-facing slopes are ideal for growing pawpaws and bananas, passionfruit and mangoes. Rough domes of mango trees glisten darkly now with the waxing moon, the banana grove stirs in a light sea-breeze, its broad, coarse-grained leaves rustling with a faint, brittle, lacquery sound evocative of the East and the Pacific.

Step by step in her imagination, Linda rehearses what is to follow. The first move is always the most difficult, the most momentous: swinging her legs over the side of the bed. Pausing to check that nobody is awake, that the sound of their breathing is still undisturbed and regular, until her feet touch the bare floorboards. The soundless transition to the back door, holding her breath. Did anyone notice that she had left it not quite closed? Nobody bothers to lock up here, on any of the farms, and on Linda’s there are not even dogs, thank goodness.

She heard the Vance dogs barking half an hour before. That means he is on his way. Close. Down the back stairs like a moth she flits, a pale shadow moving across the grass past the mango trees in her nightgown, up behind the house where there are no spying eyes, no windows, through the heavy trellises of passionfruit vines to the banana plantation, where her gaze seeks and finds him, a slim dark form gliding between the smooth columns of trunks.

It had started several months before, at fellowship meetings. Eye-contact which mesmerised her, put her in a kind of trance. Then there had been a weekend camp at the beach with other families of their sect, including Richard’s. He had persuaded her to meet him secretly one night, under the casuarinas far along the deserted beach. Linda was the loveliest girl he had ever seen, he could not keep his mind off her.

Now her days drag on too long, in a fever of waiting for night to fall, these moments of shuddering contact with earth, the quick little sighs so unlike those of sleepers, a fiery star lodged deep in her flesh, shafts of its light coursing up through her veins, leaving warmth and lassitude as they ebb, the gratified limpness of limbs outspread, until she feels the grass dampened with dew, remembers the clock and her empty bed...

People would say this was a sin if they found out, but Linda knows she can’t help it now. The first time, on the beach, she had felt fear, repugnance, pain, yet at the same time it hadn’t seemed quite real. She had watched what was happening with disbelieving eyes, as if some other person with her name and face were the initiate.

But now ... it seems these are the moments she lives for, the only moments when she feels alive. She craves the danger as much as the mindless sweetness, the little frisson of horror as Richard swoops on her like a monstrous bat, a flying fox with wings outspread, inclining his head to feast on her flesh. She adores the spectacle of his obsession, the knowledge that he can’t help it either. She sits impatiently through dull days at school, bored by all other forms of knowledge except the secret she shares with him.

She has to be careful. Richard is married to a member of their sect, and Linda cannot really understand why he keeps returning to her orchard instead of his pretty blonde wife’s bed. Of course, he has an excuse for not being home, on account of the bulldozer he owns. He is quite often out on contract work, and it is easy enough to tell his wife he’ll sleep in his truck near the dozer, just to make sure it is safe. But Linda doesn’t ask questions, even of herself, in case it should hasten the end.

Nobody takes any special notice of her at home. Linda and Rose have simply been part of the work team since Ruby’s death, expected to help in the house and on the farm when they aren’t at school. The only person Linda can confide in is Anna from the neighbouring farm, who is only thirteen, two years younger than Linda.

Anna listens, wide-eyed, mesmerised, to Linda’s accounts of her nights in the orchard. She is astounded by Linda’s daring (What if someone found out?); not having grasped the nature of addiction, of sheer craving, the taste of forbidden ecstasy on Linda’s lips.

Anna is also struck by Linda’s beauty. She moves in the same kind of aura as the islanders in a film Anna has seen about the mutiny on the ‘Bounty’. She thinks of her friend as a Royal Polynesian, because of her sun-tinged skin, sleek dark waterfall of hair, her dreamy eyes like water in the shade of trees, full lips, vivid clothes. Linda likes to wear floral prints in shades of fuschia and violet, vermilion and crimson. In contrast to the intensely feminine impression of her frocks and skirts, her pretty blouses trimmed with lace, she always goes barefoot. She sometimes carries her shoes in her hand, but Anna has never once seen her wearing them. Because of this, Linda has broad, dusty, Polynesian feet, and walks with an easy, unhurried gait, swinging her hips like an island dancer.

It is dangerous to look as beautiful as Linda. But then, Anna thinks, you needn’t be beautiful. Just unprotected. Or too trusting. Or simply unsuspecting. In her mind she equates Richard with Johnny, and fears for her friend. Recognising Richard in the street one day, Anna watches him with covert fascination. There is a reptilian quality about him, a sinuous, dark sleekness like a tiger snake. How can Linda let him touch her, she wonders, and what will become of Linda?


Chapter 23

 
THE CALF


Only its head and neck protrude from the mouth of the bran-sack. It is a pretty creature with a coat the colour of cocoa and a small white star in the centre of its forehead. The rounded skull-bone of the brow is reminiscent of a baby’s or a young child’s. The coat has a healthy gleam to it where individual hairs catch the light. The eyes, their pupils dilated by fear and uncertainty, are large and shining with a deep bluish, translucent cast, such as one sees on the eyes of humans and animals when they are very young. The ears stick out like parts of a propeller, the wet pink nostrils inhale anxiously, trying to detect signs of what is happening. A few strands of milky saliva dangle from the whiskery chin. The week-old calf is going to Guy Osborne.

Guy pays regular visits to Rosewood, buying up the newborn calves at bargain rates. He owns a large, prosperous dairy farther out of town, where the calves are fed by foster-mothers and fattened for sale to the abbatoir.

Anna shrinks from contemplating this mild-eyed creature’s eventual fate. Even now it doesn’t struggle, bellow or protest, but lies passively at the man’s feet behind his farm utility, while he fishes out his wallet to pay Jack the usual paltry few shillings.

None of the Vances ever becomes aware of the fact that at such times Guy Osborne’s thoughts are more on Jeannie than on calves. He is her unsuspected and ardent admirer. ‘A fine woman,’ he mutters to himself, half in sorrow, as he turns into Rosewood’s rutted drive. And as he leaves with yet another superfluous calf in a sack, having caught a glimpse of Jeannie or perhaps a greeting, his chin retreats, turtle-like, into his collar, as he ponders the unattainable and echoes his earlier phrase: ‘Yes indeed, a sterling woman … and may heaven help her… lumbered with that bunch of no-hopers. If she were mine it would be a different story, my word it would!’

Jack meanwhile waits to be paid, passive, mild-eyed like the calf. He wouldn’t dream of trying to raise the price. At Rosewood, calves are a liability, not an asset. Their mothers’ milk is needed to sell to customers in town, and the powdered formula you can buy for hand-feeding poddy calves is unthinkably expensive, so Guy Osborne is welcome to them.

Watching such transactions, Anna can’t help feeling that this is a form of exploitation, humiliating to Jack, who can’t name his price. Surely the lovely chocolate-coloured calf with the white star is worth more than a few lousy shillings. But now Jack is meekly accepting payment, pocketing it, and Mr. Osborne is hoisting the sack into the back of his utility. As he drives away, Anna watches the calf’s eyes recede from her, indigo, uncomprehending.

Gazing after Guy Osborne’s dust-cloud trailing down the hill, Anna can recall carefree times when she and Nettie were very young. They were assigned pet calves named after them, and given tin basins of bran and pollard to hold in the doorway of the old dairy, where the newly-weaned calves would nuzzle and butt and feed, while the little girls, shoulder to shoulder, would squeal with excited delight.
 
Frosty mornings, when the cold air clouded breath, transformed the cows to horned fairytale beasts, exhaling milky puffs of smoke. She and Nettie, dressed in overalls, would play in a huge chaff-box near the chaff-cutter, a machine with a wheel as tall as a man, which was turned by a handle, and had a wooden chute attached to feed in elephant grass or cow-cane. As the wheel turned, a blade like a guillotine would chop the fodder into chaff.

Jeannie, wearing dungarees with a red plaid flannelette shirt and knee-high rubber boots, her long chestnut-coloured hair pinned up, would carry a tray from the house with steaming tea in enamel mugs and creamy oatmeal porridge, which they would eat with brown sugar melting on it, Old Vance, Jack, Jeannie and the two girls around a makeshift table, sitting on milking stools in the dairy near the half-full, open-mouthed sacks of meal and bran, the air around them warmed by cows’ hot flanks.

It is no use getting sentimental over the animals now, Anna sees. They have to take their chances too, like everyone at Rosewood. She tries to recall the Old Testament stories she has heard at Sunday School about calves and sacrificial beasts, wondering if they have anything to do with the Vances’ lives at Rosewood.

Jeannie expressed it more simply. Things were going haywire, she said. Meanwhile Old Vance, oblivious of the fate of people and animals alike, was beside himself at discovering termites in the house-stumps, and was preoccupied with how to do battle with this threat from within, which seemed to strike at the very heart of his dream.


Chapter 24
 

LANTANA


Jeannie, aged forty, had never felt at such a low ebb. ‘Battle-weary’ was a word that came readily to mind. ‘Jimmy, you have no idea,’ she’d think to herself before she lost the thread. ‘The walking wounded,’ was another apt phrase, she would muse with an ironic twist to her lips, as she gazed unseeingly through the kitchen louvres. There were days when she could not remember what she’d set out to do two minutes before, so chronically exhausted was she. And she had developed a phobia about being trapped. The dingoes howling on winter nights echoed her isolation and sense of foreboding. She hated the present, rejected the past and lived in terror of the future.

Night was no longer a place of refuge, and too often it failed to deliver even the oblivion of sleep. The veins in her legs swelled ominously, and throbbed and ached, so that rest brought little ease. Now when she lay awake at night, Jeannie would stare into the darkness, her mind sucked into a long black tunnel that showed no chink of light at the end.

‘The future’, she would begin bleakly, trying to give form and sense to the word. The future was a comfort, even a luxury, for some. For her it was like looking down the barrel of a gun. Not even for her children could she visualise a future. Rosewood couldn’t feed them all, so she hoped somebody would. Girls. Daughters. It was no secret that women on the land gave birth in the hope of sons.

Well, the last infant had been a son, so she had finally done her duty. But this time she had vowed to herself that Jack would never touch her again. There were already too many lives to provide for. What if there were to be more girl-babies? Why had it been her lot to bear so many daughters? She hated her own gender, which enslaved her worse than Jack’s did him. It was all very well to be a man, even a poor one burdened with debt. Nobody could colonise your body at least. She felt anguish for the cows that groaned in labour. They couldn’t pay a vet to ease their plight when calvings went wrong.

She looked at her daughters with alarm, digust: their female bodies, destined to share the same fate as her own. She wished she had the power to put them all out of their misery. Given time, she thought she might. She just hadn’t quite worked up the will yet. Such were Jeannie’s thoughts as she iced a birthday cake, or spread meringue on top of the Heavenly Tart that was her culinary piece de resistance.

Her thoughts were really her only luxury, she reflected bitterly, the only thing she owned. You could get away with murder in your thoughts, you could be or do anything you pleased. If it weren’t for all the mundane interruptions. Who would ever know? Did God actually care? She might be selective about how and when to use her lacerating tongue, which she had honed to a devastating weapon, but experience had taught her that it could serve her best only when her aim was judged coolly and unerringly. Her thoughts, which nobody could pry into, remained unbridled.

Torn between what she might have wished to be and what she was becoming, she would catch glimpses of another woman who inhabited her, gone before she could grasp their significance. This other Jeannie would have led quite a different life, had she not been hunted into hiding by disapproving parents, punitive attitudes that had poisoned her mind against her own true identity. Jeannie visualised her unexplored self as a Pandora’s box, confining and concealing a host of possibilities. There was no telling what might happen if she ever dared lift the lid, but she was too distracted and exhausted even to try. Somehow it had always been like this, even in childhood, when the stringencies of the Great Depression had left their mark. There had always been austerity, anxiety, a sense of waiting for her 'real' life to begin, by which she understood a choice made freely, not dictated by contingency. If Jeannie experienced nostalgia, it was for the unattainable future, whereas Jack’s heart belonged to the past.

The child in her had grown up feeling somehow unworthy, unable to accept the way she was, because those who mattered were lavish with their criticism, parsimonious with praise. As a pupil at St. Ursula’s convent school, Jeannie used to daydream about being good at something. Not just good. Brilliant. She thought that if she could excel, it might bring love and admiration. It had not occurred to her, as it had to Jack with his love of music, that some things were worth doing for their own sake. Results were what counted. Patience was not in her nature.

Jeannie’s criteria of success appeared to discount the fact that, against the odds, she had furnished the only comfort and well-being her children had known. At the same time, her spirit rebelled against a life sentence of what she called do-mess-ticity. During the Rosewood years, she increasingly resented what she had become: Jeannie Vance, lifegiver. Strange that so often this should make her bitter. It was the cost, she supposed, not the fact. So much energy lavished, squandered... the constant attrition.

She had long since lost patience with certain points of conventional wisdom that had sustained her parents’ generation, such as the one about being strengthened by the difficulties and blows one encountered in life. ‘Sweet are the uses of adversity my foot!’ she would snort, recalling a line of the Bard often quoted at her as a child. ‘What a load of tommy rot!’ Anyone who claimed that it did one good to battle against the odds was talking through their hat and needed their head examined. Those who extolled the virtues of the little Aussie battler had obviously never been subjected to the indignities of actually being one.

She could think of a hundred better uses for her energy than exhausting it on mere survival. Was there never going to be any to spare for nobler pursuits? She wouldn’t mind having the leisure and luxury one day to find out what those were. But insidious notions she would try to banish lay in ambush for Jeannie, creeping into her consciousness when her guard was down. What if religion should turn out to be just a glorified coping strategy, compounded with superstition? What if there were just the void? The abyss without a safety-net? What would be the point of all this struggle and personal anguish then? What if it were all for nothing? Meaningless?

The hollowness Jeannie had found at the core of her world was something she was at pains to communicate bluntly to others. Confronting Anna with her incessant questions over the ironing basket one day, Jeannie withered the eager expression on Anna’s face by saying: ‘Look, I think it’s about time you realised that what you are looking for doesn’t exist.’ Anna had not even tried to articulate what she was looking for, but she knew that it was a feeling, a state bound up with stories and art. She didn’t know what to call it, or how to experience it at first hand. She was sure artists lived in some kind of inspired state, a world where imagination had the power to transform, but how could she aspire to such things? Against Jeannie’s conviction Anna’s uncertainty had no words, no defence. Instead the women faced each other like fighting cocks, until Anna retreated sullenly, mutiny kindled in her heart.

* * *

How different her own life was from that of the wives of some of the district’s more prosperous businessmen, Jeannie would sometimes reflect with a grim little smile. The ladies of one particular clique would gather at a certain beer-garden of a Saturday afternoon, always impeccably dressed and groomed, their faces powdered, lipsticked and rouged, tapering fingernails glossed with enamel, escorted by similarly well-heeled gents, to sip their beer and inhale luxuriously on their Viscount cigarettes. No doubt their conversations were as worldly as their general demeanour. Their dress-code in the cooler months included mandatory twin-sets with cardigans worn nonchalantly over the shoulders, and tailored skirts, alternating with smart slacks and elegant blouses in summer. They were above criticism, although ladies weren’t supposed to imbibe, because of their self-assurance and air of sophistication. The local Lana Turners and Betty Grables. Even in so small a community, they represented a race apart. Their children would, of course, be sent to better schools, as boarders, perpetuating the social divide between themselves and the less privileged.
 
In Jack’s case, the capacity for sweetness outweighed the bitter. Although he would sometimes evince frank envy at others’ success or good fortune, he nevertheless on such occasions seemed devoid of rancour. ‘Some chaps have all the luck,’ he would say mildly, and tramp off to buy himself yet another casket ticket on his next trip to town. Never a drinking man, he had no aspiration to become one of the regulars at the town’s busy watering-places. His artistic leanings inclined him to other pursuits, even farther beyond his grasp than a place at the bar.
 
Jeannie did not appear to share Jack’s capacity to accept others’ better fortune with equanimity. Observing her mother and trying to make sense of her own impressions, Anna thought that in some perverse way, Jeannie derived comfort from other people’s woes, insofar as they confirmed a deeply pessimistic streak in her, reminding her of youthful disappointments. But while others’ misfortunes might afford her confirmation, Jeannie was nonetheless quick to help neighbours in distress in practical ways, doing their laundry for them and taking them home-cooked meals when they were sick, redoubling her generosity as if to make amends for private, wayward thoughts. Unless it was one of her own brood in trouble, in which case the solace was often heavily tempered with censure.

During the Rosewood years, Jeannie rejected what she had become. She felt so burnt out by the time she turned forty that she had begun to have hallucinations. In her more lucid moments she would mentally share a joke or two with Jimmy, who, with the changes in her circumstances, she now regarded as a comrade in arms against a common enemy, rather than a youthful icon of lost love. ‘Well, my dear departed friend, I’ve earned my stripes,’ she’d think aloud. ‘If you ever feel like a stretch in hell’s front line, we can swap places. And yarns, I daresay.’

In some confused, instinctive way she perceived her children as part of the torment, and because they bound her to a way of life that had taken her over, entrapped her, she lashed out at them in her bleakest moments. At such times, the horizon closed in on her and became a wall of ti-tree scrub, a peeling palisade, while hostile thickets of lantana lay in ambush for her, so that she could not see beyond her own despair.

Then, maddened by the pit her mind had fallen into, she would rise like bile to confront her demons, blindly and vengefully. Seizing a scythe, she would massacre the lantana creeping towards the back of the house, encroaching on the flimsy perimeter of ferns and palms and poincianas, slashing at the thicket looming to the house’s height, blocking out the sunlight from the clothesline, until her arms were scratched and bleeding and she was drenched with sweat and flecked with leaf-mould.

The rank smell of bruised vegetation rose in the heat, a miasma, but Jeannie’s monstrous adversary was a hydra. It made so little visible difference to the tangled mass, you’d think it could only intensify her sense of futility and frustration, but instead, drained of violent energy, she would collapse in a kind of apathetic, baffled stupor. The mundane objects that enslaved her - the axe and block for splitting firewood, the cast-iron stove, the concrete washtubs, the heavy, clumsy spirit-iron - had been put to flight for a brief space, vanquished by sheer rage.

Anna and her sisters, feeling pity, fear, alarm at their mother’s frenzy and inevitable defeat, could not comprehend that each blow struck was really a victory: a blow dealt to the woodpile, the stove, the metal bars of her bed. Instinct and desperation had helped Jeannie to find a release that would enable her to survive and keep her wits intact a little longer. And deflect her hands from her children’s throats.

Anna saw it as an act of wasted valour, but she also sensed the deep currents of destruction that seethed in Jeannie and could scarcely be contained. Jeannie’s ferocity could turn unpredictably against herself, Jack or the children. Her attacks on the lantana reminded Anna of a trapped dingo gnawing its own paw. She was simultaneously fascinated and repelled by Jeannie’s feral, death-or-freedom quality. Red was Jeannie’s favourite colour: red for life, blood, danger, anger. Red for summer poincianas, Jeannie’s favourite tree.