Eucalyptus (20 page)

For almost two years they remained lovers. Without warning, on an ordinary Saturday afternoon, he fell and died in the street. He wasn't even overweight. Georgina could not tell them—her father, anyone in the town—they were lovers. In public she could not even show her grief. ‘And the earth levelled over him.' He was buried in the garden, there in the shadow of hawthorn.

Day after day Georgina wanted to shriek.

Over his grave she planted flowers, their fine roots reaching down into his body. Every day Georgina wore them on her bosom, red fuchsias, and placed some in a vase by her bed.

These strong colours she could proudly show in public; and in time she seemed to grow better.

• 26 •
Platyphylla

SLOWLY THEY
began leaving the Fuchsia Gum.

The careful way he told the solicitor's story suggested it had actually happened, and Ellen saw Georgina Bell as a woman pale in disabled browns, and her elongated nose, a chalk dipped in red ink, and wondered how after that a woman could possibly rearrange herself. There was also the father in his considerable vertical dignity. She had a rush of questions to ask.

Alongside, this man now and then brushed against her hip and shoulder—he probably wasn't even aware of it.

She saw into the distance he had a gentle side; yet there was nothing gentle in the way he was finishing the stories abruptly, at the very moment she wanted to know more. It matched her present situation, which could only be described as suspended, unsatisfied. This apparent gentleness of his might have been little more than a necessary politeness, a stepping back a few paces. After all, here he was most days in among the trees with her, a woman; the two of them, nobody else around.

She wanted to talk to him.

‘We have more smiles today. What is it?'

Holding the smile, though it felt more like a frown, she met his eye.

The Fuchsia Gum had been planted outside Ellen's window as an ‘ornamental'. For the first time he was strolling with her on the gravel past the front door. At any moment her father could appear around the corner—with Mr Cave. It was enough for Ellen to become riddled with a sort of reckless gaiety. ‘That's where I sleep,' she said.

She wasn't sure whether he'd heard. All his attention seemed to be taken suddenly by a rather plain Red Mallee (
E. socialis
).

It was almost maddening he was now spending so much time with her, in and out of trees, without her knowing exactly why. To Ellen he felt like a perpetual warm wind which exerted a steady pleasant sort of pressure over different parts of her body, pressing her dress against the hollows; and the way too he easily changed the subject was like the wind, the way it simply shifted direction, at the same time constantly surrounding her.

Still in the vicinity of low-height eucalypts he went on to mention, in a thoughtful voice, how in an outer suburb of Hobart an actuary with a well-known insurance company needed a stepladder to woo a widow who passed by his house every day, to and from work. To attract her attention, the story went, he set about pruning his enormous front hedge and umbrella pine into truly amazing animal shapes, the way certain tropical birds go to exhausting lengths to build and decorate elaborate nests or perform strenuous somersaults against the sky. The lengths to which a male will go to catch the eye of the difficult-to-please female, he was saying.

The trouble was that a display of an obsession in the form of romantic hedge-cutting attracted the wrong sort of people, said he. From all parts of Hobart, and the mainland of Australia, and the work-ethic states of Asia they came by the bus-load: people with cameras. But the widow, how did she respond?

Ellen couldn't help smiling at his incredulous tone, but she was preoccupied by too many questions; and there and then she decided that instead of strolling on through the trees until he decided to leave,
branching off
in that way of his—in the same abrupt way he finished his stories—she would turn on her heel, and return to the house. ‘I'll have to be getting back.'

Not intending to hurry she crossed the gravel drive. In the distance she saw her father and the unmistakable larger figure of Mr Cave near the windbreak, Mr Cave appearing suddenly to pause and turn back and point up; reaching the front door Ellen was struck by a fit of helpless hiccupping, which would have appeared from behind only as weeping.

The single White Gum stood back from the hidden bend, near the swimming place Ellen imagined was her secret. There behind the thumping great River Reds it offered a flash of porcelain whiteness, like a curtain parting, revealing a woman's generous bare legs.

Ellen had stayed in her room all morning. She heard the murmurings of her father and Mr Cave. By week's end he would be finished naming the last few trees. Ellen noticed her father avoided her face. It had been an arduous trial for him too. And now before him was the prospect of an empty house.

Ellen heard the door slam as her father and the almost-there suitor set out.

She changed from a dress into shirt and trousers, and back again into another dress. In between she gazed into the mirror. She saw herself in different shoes. There was never enough light in her bedroom! Still, this body glowing with a pale completeness she accepted.

It always surprised her that whenever she went out among the trees he managed to find her. It was as if he had many hands. Would he come from the left or right, or from behind? She never knew. At any moment he could drop down in front of her from one of the trees, like Errol Flynn or Tarzan.

It was now long past the hour she normally left the house. Shadows had begun their fold-out from the other side of trees. The cotton of her dress felt warm all over, as if freshly ironed.

Ellen strode towards the river, into the concentration of her father's trees. Near the swimming place she slowed. This man who was interested enough to find her day after day: to think that yesterday she'd simply turned her back and walked away. What would he make of that? What if now he never bothered appearing again—-what then?

The water was clear, the furry sticks and stones along the bottom appeared magnified. Patterned by the overarching branches the hot light tattooed her arms, and as Ellen entered the water she imagined her face dappled tortoiseshell too. She felt a spreading liquid affinity with the flow of nature. It was a truth found easily in a river. The river-flow gently pushed against her, a patient pressure that would always prevail, a true insistence, and Ellen splashed and drifted and splashed again, idly thinking of him, happy at the thought that what she was allowing could hardly be wrong.

Ellen's body made a startling appearance among the trees. It was pale and all-over soft, whereas the trunks surrounding her were nothing but hard. The warm handful of hair between her legs and the rest of her softness was how animals, such as rabbits, can be seen against rocks.

Facing the sun Ellen felt herself peeled open, at least to the eye. Idly she touched her hair to see if it had dried. Later she twisted to inspect her heel. Ellen had nothing else to do, so she stayed.

Surrounded on all sides by immovable grey trunks she couldn't remember where exactly she'd left her clothes.

It was then she heard footsteps. He seemed to be treading on all the discarded strips of bark he could find. Ellen turned and faced him. Aware of her nakedness she was not fully conscious of her speckled beauty.

At arm's length he stopped.

She wanted him immediately to begin another story, perhaps thinking it would cover her nakedness, even though he was looking slightly away. Over one arm she noticed her yellow dress and other things.

‘I remember once…' Changing his mind he turned.

His hand simply came forward and for the first time touched her cheek, and moved up to her clammy hair.

‘Why did you run away yesterday?'

Ellen shook her head, and apparently raised her arm too; for without warning his head went down, and gave a gentle animal
bite
on her arm, enough to leave a mark.

‘I could have been talking too much,' he frowned. ‘I may have got carried away.'

As he began dressing her from the top down, one item at a time, leaving her half-dressed while holding up her remaining underclothes, Ellen felt a tremble of concentration, and didn't care if he noticed. She looked down at his ears and neck.

She raised her arms for him to lower the dress.

Concentrating on the large buttons he squatted in front of her. And Ellen began feeling soft and warm, ready too. Briefly she considered the woman he called Georgina, the one in the constricted cabin, the warm chicken pressed against her thigh.

Behind them rustled the river, endless silk over pebbles.

There are always children lost in a forest. A single foot is struck by an arrow, bitten by a snake, or the heel is bruised, the slipper falls off. Certain boots are endowed with magical striding properties. Every beautiful princess has an evil stepmother. Well illustrated is the woman with three breasts, one for each man in her life.

‘In a white flat-roofed house in Drummoyne,' he was saying, giving up on the buttons and looking around for her shoes, ‘lived an international authority on aerodynamics, with three tall daughters. His name was along the lines of Shaw-Gibson, DFG. A man with a moustache: he should have been knighted. Young men used to troop around to his house, not so much to see his daughters but to try lifting the small meteorite he had displayed on his sideboard.

‘Would you prefer him or Mr Clem Sackler who had the dandruff? Clem Sackler was a small man with ginger eyebrows who lived alone in a terrace house in Darlinghurst. Well, not exactly alone.'

Ellen had decided not to help him in any way at all. Her nakedness had made her supreme.

‘In Australia after the war, when men and women wore hats, it was also the custom to have a large aviary in the backyard filled with small birds, and if not an aviary then a cage on the back porch containing a deafening parrot. In time this custom—which raises all sorts of questions—was replaced by an obsession with tropical fish in tanks, and for a brief moment it was all the rage to have an angora rabbit in the backyard.

‘Clem Sackler had canaries. At any given time dozens of the little things fluttered and trilled in cages in different rooms of his house. Some days they could be heard from the footpath. As soon as he arrived home from his job at the railways he set about replenishing their food and water, and at intervals let selected ones out for exercise. That was Clem Sackler's life.'

After abruptly examining one of Ellen's toes he continued.

‘As a breeder, Sackler had a small reputation among connoisseurs. For years he had been trying to breed a white canary. All his hopes rested on a pampered hyperactive male, grey with streaks of buff. In the layers of his feathers Sackler saw a flash of white. The other canaries were green or yellow, and shared cages in the front sleep-out, where louvres opened onto the frangipani, and in the kitchen more cages were stacked on top of each other, like small skyscrapers. He must have had fifty or sixty birds.

‘The grey male occupied a large cage with its own mirror in Sackler's upstairs bedroom.'

As he traced his finger along her foot, Ellen began smiling almost happily. The thought of the many little birds.

‘One evening in summer, Sackler came home dog-tired. As always he went upstairs and opened the cage for the grey bird to have its vital exercise. Then he lay down on his bed and gazed up at the ceiling. It needed a coat of paint. The whole place was falling down. He ran his tongue over the front of his teeth. Briefly he whistled a few notes out of tune, a habit from living with so many canaries. As he lay there in the heat he saw how his life, at least the last ten years, had been subdivided into too many small units—the many different little birds—which were impersonal, concerned only with food and chirping among themselves. His life appeared to have a pattern. In fact, it had no single focus.

‘It was a revelation to the “canariologist”.

‘He got up and raised the window. He must have been half asleep. No sooner had he felt the breeze than he gave a hoarse cry and slammed the window shut—but too late. Flying around the room his grey canary had darted at the opportunity and, grazed by the slamming window, escaped.

‘From the balcony there was no sign of the bird. Sackler ran downstairs and hurried up and down the street, squinting up at the gutters and under cars, and into the small front yards—concreted and taken up with old motorbikes, in that part of Sydney.

‘Over the next few days he walked the streets, knocking on doors, searching the most likely places. He left a note in the window of the fly-blown delicatessen where he bought his cigarettes. After a week of this he began to wonder if he knew anything at all about the habits of the canary. He began to accept its loss. It had probably been taken by a cat.'

He yawned. Ellen saw the broad expanse of jaw. He could have slept at her feet there and then. She almost reached out and touched his hair. But he continued the very sad story of the breeder of canaries.

‘One Friday evening Mr Clem Sackler was walking home from Kings Cross. It was dark. Not far from his street a few terrace houses had their lights on; people were sitting at tables, moving about. One window was partly obscured by a tree. At first he thought the rapid movement was a fruit-bat—they're all around East Sydney, Darlinghurst—but this movement had been inside the white room. A woman was seated at a piano and, as she began playing, the same fluttering blur appeared again, careering around to the music, before gently landing on the woman's shoulder. Sackler went to the window. He couldn't believe his eyes.