Eucalyptus (24 page)

Seated now on Ellen's bed, he talked about this and that. He took her temperature and asked her to poke out her tongue.

When he first arrived in town, he said, it was very much as it was today. After the war there were two or three extra widows, that was all. One of them, Mrs Jessie Cork, had a dream. It was about the house he was having built. She came to the hotel early one morning in her dressing-gown and banged on his door. In her dream Jessie Cork saw he should move the house. It was luckier on the other side of the hill, which is why she had come straight around to tell him. ‘This can be the trouble with dreams,' the doctor said to Ellen. Adding, ‘Have you been getting a proper night's sleep?' One of the first things a doctor learns is to bite his tongue, he said. After a brief delay the house was finished. Not long after, when he was called out on an emergency, there was a fire at the place and the house with all his belongings burned to the ground.

If she wasn't any better, the doctor said to Holland, he'd return in the morning.

Since there was nothing in particular the matter with her, Ellen decided to remain in bed.

• 33 •
Abbreviata

THIS RECENT
report from Santiago under the heading, NO SECOND CHANCE:

A Chilean policeman who escaped death last year when a robber's bullet ricocheted off a pen in his breast pocket died when a tree fell on his squad car. Hector Zapata Cuevas was crushed when a giant eucalyptus crashed onto the car during a storm.—Reuters.

On the other hand, he mentioned in passing, eucalypts have made plenty of contributions to the progress and well-being of the human race. Overall the influence of the eucalypt has been positive. Aside from the many railway sleepers opening up drowsy continents, and telegraph poles (
E. diversicolor
) which have played their part in transmitting urgent business as well as intimate personal messages, there is quite a catalogue of wagon axles fashioned from iron-bark, piles cut for bridges and jetties which are still standing, and for grey shearing sheds (which have produced the wool which has produced the clothing which has…), along with pulpits for delivering His Word throughout the New World—hard on the heels of the demand for billiard tables; sideboards too of Jarrah, believe it or not, for holding the numbing qualities of Australian sherry and brandy, the same-grained timber chosen for hundreds of piano lids—and the varieties of pleasure they must have encouraged; sturdy carved legs and bedheads have supported the mattresses and pillows and whispered words for the procreation of tribes of imaginative, tolerant humans—of course those legs could tell a few secrets, he had smiled. Whole forests of Jarrah from Western Australia have been tongue-and-grooved into ballroom dancing floors all over the place, so many stories there with a beginning, a middle and end; other forests continue to be consumed for fine-paper making (for printing works of an artistic, philosophical or medical nature); flagpoles and crutches have been made from straight-grained eucalypts; honey comes from these trees; a Mr Ramel in Victoria gave the men in Havana a fright in the 1860s by patenting
eucalyptus cigars
made from the leaves of gum trees; speaking of patents still pending there are the various eucalyptus oils in their authoritative bottles and jars which claim—it's there in black-and-white—to cure or ease a remarkable number of serious ailments, everything from the common cold to—.

• 34 •
Illaquens

DAY AFTER
day Ellen lay gradually fading.

Lying exceptionally still, she emptied herself of every pictorial thought, especially of the near future, and began to float in a drift of pure helplessness, the pillows and cotton sheets as soft as clouds. Then a crow outside would break into its harsh lament, a sound she had grown up alongside, accordingly grown deaf to, though here nagging her in the coarsest way imaginable about her precise position on a dry part of the earth.

In this way Ellen lost track of time, of whole days.

As though she were already dead, Mr Cave crept about and spoke in loud whispers, holding his hat in both hands, as it were. Out of respect and bewilderment in general he slowed down to a crawl the naming of the last remaining trees. Holland anyway could spare only an hour or two with him, not wanting to leave his one and only daughter. Never had Ellen looked so pale; a pale speckled beauty, indenting the pillows.

For all her hopes of drift Ellen kept returning to him, and the way he spoke, how easily she had wandered with him, one eucalypt to the next.

‘These trees,' he had remarked early on, ‘could be fitted with nameplates the way they do it in zoos and the Botanical Gardens. Easy to read at two paces! Can withstand all weathers!' He stood before a slender Spinning Gum (
E. perriniana
) in direct line with the Salmon Gum near the front gate. ‘What do you think?'

‘That's making something serious out of something that isn't necessarily,' Ellen had said, too hastily.

Now in her room she followed the broad movement of daylight beginning along the ceiling, angling down the blue walls and across the floor where it left her shoes behind dark and misshapen, and late afternoon climbing most of the papered wall, until it dissolved, and all faded grey. Even there, in her room, a eucalypt intruded: through the windows which opened onto the verandah, a shimmer of Fuchsia Gum leaves patterned her sheets into lace and shivered the brushes and little jars and bowls on her dressing-table.

The way the stories began in a time-worn way had relaxed her. It was his way. ‘There was an old woman who lived at the foot of a dark mountain…' ‘The quality of miracles has declined over the years…' ‘Late in the evening of the 11th…' ‘There was once a man who…' These old arrangements of words caused Ellen to smile secretly and return to the trees, at which point she grew thoughtful and began to frown another version of day replaced by evening and night.

Remaining motionless Ellen tried to decipher a shape to the stories; she even followed the contours of the plantation, somehow taking an aerial view of the stories, as if that would reveal a hidden pattern.

Many were about daughters; or women almost requiring a man for themselves. A woman finds a man and something unfortunate happens. It doesn't last. There were certainly more stories about women than men, she could see. It wasn't necessary to count them up. A daughter can never become a separate woman, not really. Fathers had strong and impassive positions in the world of stories, too. Many of his stories concerned a father, or how he'd clean forgotten his daughter, thereby introducing a note of real sadness. Why had he been telling her this? The women seemed to be searching or waiting for something else, something almost indefinable but extra nevertheless, such as a solution somewhere else or with someone, she at once saw and recognised. These were women who followed the idea of hope. It seemed to be their
greatest obedience
. Ellen couldn't help respecting them. These women, one by one, moved about with a form of lightness, and obeyed their ideas of truth to feelings. Ellen usually liked the women he happened to talk about. Under the Spinning Gum he had his hands in his pockets as he turned to face her. ‘Off the coast of Victoria,' he shielded his eyes, ‘was a wife of a lighthouse keeper who became addicted to kite-flying. She was young and had no children. For weeks at a time she saw nobody else. Supplies such as flour, tea and sugar were hauled up to the lighthouse window in a wicker basket, from a small dark boat. Her husband was a much older man who could go for weeks on end without saying a word. She flew the kite from the rocks at the base of the lighthouse, where she was happiest. One day her husband looked down and shouted at her and she got such a fright she let go of the kite, which was in the shape of a woman's unhappy face. It flew up into the sky and became entangled in the mast of a passing ship. The captain was a young man with a fresh beard. It was his first command…

‘What is it you are laughing at?' He too began to laugh, the day he placed his hand on her hip.

As Ellen faded she became frail at the edges, at times curiously elongated, a mile long, and still in her bed she gathered the stories which naturally included him from different angles. He made no reference to general knowledge, except to say on one occasion it was ‘probably over-rated'. It was little more than a good memory, as he put it.

And yet to tell the stories it was necessary for him to know the names of many eucalypts; only by lying still in bed did Ellen realise. The Victoria Spring Mallee had forced a bulge in the southern fence;
E. prominens
, according to him. A small town—I forget where, exactly—known for its wild rose honey and its small women with dark eyebrows, where the keyholes to the houses are shaped as hearts…' Story followed story, in and out of the trees—these unpleasant, unhelpful trees. In Sparkle Street in Blacktown (the local mayors in Sydney's outer suburbs often like to give demonstrations of their skills in nomenclature) a man tattooed his three daughters. One he had tattooed with a thistle, another a rose, and the eldest, a small telephone…
E. melanoleuca
. Elsewhere, there was the travelling salesman who became a wholesaler of eggs, married to the skinny shrew of a wife who bore him nothing but freckled children, and broke plates during the slightest disagreement.

It was not always necessary to tell a story, although Ellen preferred them. On account of its thickish leaves the Grey Gum of southern Queensland is called Leather Jacket. This was enough for him to say the bikies who sit astride their heavy machines are the modern, necessary equivalent to medieval knights on horseback. Bikies too stagger under the weight of protective gear, the helmet and visor, their boots resting on stirrups. The machines they handle and accelerate away in small groups are powerful, draped in leather and chains; a large motorbike is a version of a sturdy horse in all its power and heat underneath. At this point Ellen could have asked about the small snick below his eye, the History of a Scar; there was a story written there: but he had already moved onto the next tree.

So restful, so vague, sifting through like this. It was at a half-conscious level, just below the brighter waking surface; paddling in the shallows of her private river, as it were.

At intervals her father and others came into her room, casting shadows. She was almost grateful to have his rough hand around hers. The roughness of his hand made her feel softer still. Her hand felt like a small bird held in his.

At mid-morning, Mr Cave's voice broke though louder than usual, announcing victory. Apparently he wanted to come straight into her room to celebrate. What would he have done then?

Ellen closed her eyes, and turned to the wall.

• 35 •
Rameliana

IN THE
early 1920s a young Frenchman from Lyons was sent by his father-in-law on a business trip to Australia. He left behind a young wife and their daughter barely six months old.

The prospect appeared before him as a long and rare adventure. The undulating shape of Australia in the blue of the southern ocean beckoned in all its mysterious emptiness. He had never met anyone who'd actually been there. Cuba and Tahiti, yes, but not Australia. The closest was a Russian emigré tennis coach he'd met socially who claimed to have seen the gigantic straw-coloured outline fluctuating before him during a recent heart attack.

And now here he was about to go there himself!

In many respects he was an ideal choice. He was thin, dark-eyed, with restless fingers. He had so much curiosity he was something of a dreamer; and like many Frenchmen he had a surprising affinity for
déserts
, the purity of emptiness, and so on, which he expressed in transports of volubility faintly embarrassing to his father-in-law. For all the Sahara-looking emptiness, and its rather thin population, Australia has, as we now know, considerable tree-cover, plenty of shade, what with all those eucalypts wherever you look, as well as acacias, even in what are called deserts. Not knowing what to expect he included in his luggage a water bottle and crystals for purifying water.

As he farewelled his wife, who wept while waving the loose hand of their yawning daughter, his father-in-law repeated last-minute instructions.

He was to photograph Aboriginals in their natural state, focusing in particular on their cuisine, and the initiation and marriage ceremonies, which apparently hark back to the Stone Age, and while he was at it collect as many of their myths and legends as possible. The father-in-law was planning an ethnographical museum on the outskirts of Paris, where the various myths told by the Aboriginal people could be put into some sort of order, alongside images of their daily lives, all under the one roof.

The voyage was smooth and the young Frenchman stepped ashore at Brisbane. Soon after he set out for the interior.

His letters to his wife spoke of a toothache and his loneliness, and the difficulty of actually finding any natives living as in the Stone Age. He expressed love for her in ways appropriate to a young Frenchman, and scribbled little messages to their daughter, although of course she was too young to read, let alone write. For his father-in-law he neatly transcribed a few myths and legends he'd heard, including one about how the crow became black (it had originally been white), and offered some tentative jottings for an Aboriginal dictionary.

After about six months the first group of photographic plates arrived: the further he travelled from the coast the fewer items of clothing the Aboriginals wore—but because they still had on skirts and trousers they were not much use for the museum. In subsequent photographs these were replaced by views of stony outcrops and gorges, all sharply shadowed, tracks petering out to nowhere, creekbeds with dark birds, a cliff split asunder by the white trunk of a eucalypt; and the next batch shifted still further to one-horse towns, good-natured barmaids, and filthy bore-diggers south of Darwin drinking tea from dented mugs. Although there was nothing like this in all of France the father-in-law felt compelled to remind his agent of the mission, upon which the hopes of the proposed museum depended.