Silver Wattle (48 page)

I sat down next to her and perched Emilie on my knee. ‘But not before you are past your prime years,’ I said. ‘Your time is now.’

I remembered the performances I had seen Klara play: the Grieg, Tchaikovsky and Beethoven concertos. My magnificent sister. I thought about Philip saying that he could not love me unless he gave me up. I did not want to be separated from Klara, my brother-in-law and my nieces, but I knew I could never be at peace with myself if I let Klara sacrifice herself because of me. If I was going to convince her to follow her dream, I would have to prove that I was strong enough to live without her—for a while at least.

A few days later, I was eating breakfast on the veranda when the maid brought me the newspaper. I could not bring myself to read the news any more, knowing that a few months ago the headlines had shouted the story of the film executive who had heroically lost his life defending his wife against an attacker. I reached to push the newspaper aside and as I did my eye fell to an advertisement on the back page:

There was a drawing of a house with gables and an L-shaped veranda. The Blue Mountains. I closed my eyes and remembered looking out to the Jamieson Valley from the bridal suite of the Hydro Majestic Hotel. For a moment, it felt as if Freddy was still with me, breakfasting beside me. Instead of the pain such memories usually caused, my fingers and toes tingled. I opened my eyes and tore out the advertisement. I hoped it was still for sale.

My father was fond of the saying ‘He who is hopeless is capable of anything.’ I bought the cottage without inspecting it, simply because my heart told me to do so.

‘You’re buying a house that you’ve never seen in a town that you’ve never visited?’ Robert asked, astonished. ‘Why?’

‘I don’t know,’ I told him. ‘I only know that I must go.’

My family and the Swans were in turmoil because of my decision but Klara understood.

‘I don’t want you to be away from me,’ she told me one day when we were pushing the twins’ pram around the garden, ‘but I understand why you need to go. You are not running away. You are leaving to find something. To discover what your next step in life has to be.’

No one would ever understand me better than Klara.

‘You’ll telephone every week and write every day, won’t you?’ Uncle Ota made me promise, once he and Rajana had resigned themselves to the fact that all arguments about why I should not live alone in the mountains had been exhausted and that my mind was made up.

The cottage did not have a telephone and I did not intend to install one, but the township and the post office were only half an hour away on foot or a few minutes by car.

I arrived in the mountains in late February. My trip took longer than usual because of the bushfires. Springwood was gritty with smoke and the vegetation at the sides of the road looked dry and brittle from the rainless summer.

‘If the wind changes direction the fires could sweep over Katoomba in a matter of hours,’ the policeman at Springwood warned me when I asked for directions. But I was not afraid. I was not afraid of anything any more. The days since Freddy’s death had dragged on, slow, tedious. Perhaps a bushfire would stir me into motion again.

A while later, as the sun was softening, I pulled the car up outside the cottage. The exterior of the house was much like the drawing I had seen in the newspaper and, although due for some fresh paint, it was in good repair. The garden needed tending because the flowers in the beds had shrivelled in the heat and no longer resembled anything but dried sticks. I had no idea what the interior of the house would be like except that it had three bedrooms, a small attic and a single-storey kitchen out the back.

It was with some curiosity and a lot of trepidation that I ventured down the path to the front door. There was a brass plate with the cottage’s name engraved on it:
Silver Wattle
. A tingle ran down my spine when I read it. It was strange that neither the advertisement nor the real estate agent had mentioned the cottage had a name. It was the flower Uncle Ota and Ranjana had sent us to put on Mother’s grave. But the cottage’s name did not make me sad. It made me feel that Mother was with me.

I took out my key and opened the door. Like most cottages of its style, the front door opened straight into the sitting room where the first things that caught my eye were the brick fireplace and the built-in bookshelves. The polished jarrah floors and the cream wallpaper with a green vine motif gave the room a serene feeling, which complemented the view of the valley.

I inspected the rest of the cottage. It was compact with no more space than I needed: a small kitchen with an enamel stove and shining white sink; an icebox in the hall; a narrow dining room that could take five people at most. Aunt Josephine, who hated waste but loved simple elegance, would have adored it. It was not furnished, but the previous owner had left behind an armoire in the main bedroom that must have been too heavy to move. I ran my fingers over the carved roses then turned to inspect the room’s wainscoting. I was lucky the house was as charming as the advertisement described because I could have easily been cheated.

I was suddenly tired. I had brought with me only the necessities and would have to buy a bed and a table and chairs. But that could wait. I spread the travelling blanket from the car on the floor and lay down on it with my purse as my pillow. The setting sun sent fiery pink beams of light about the room. The house was quiet except for a faint rustling in the ceiling. Despite my spartan bed, I closed my eyes and slept better than I had in months.

‘You’re not afraid here on your own?’ the grocer asked when he made his delivery a few days later. ‘You’re the last house in the street and the one furthest from the other neighbours. I know Mrs Tupper at number six. I could ask her to look in on you.’

‘Thank you,’ I told him. ‘But I am all right.’

I liked my neighbours and the people in the town. They were curious about me but did not intrude. When they saw Silver Wattle Cottage was occupied they brought me cakes and biscuits but did not ask me any questions.

I wrote away for catalogues to view furniture and unpacked the few books I had brought with me to put on the shelves. My hand fell on the script for
The Emerald Valley
. Why had I kept it, I wondered. That film would never be made now that Freddy was gone.

At night, I would close my eyes and listen to the wind in the trees. Every so often I heard the rustling in the ceiling that I had noticed during my first night in the house. I wondered if I had rats under the roof but the bags of flour and sugar in the kitchen cupboard were not raided.

When the weather turned cooler, I walked every day, beginning with short strolls along the cliffs or on the outskirts of the town to admire the gardens. Then I began to take the established tracks into the valleys. The fresh air and the massive tree ferns, cascading waterfalls, rippling creeks and the towering turpentines with their gnarled roots reawakened my love of nature. I took my father’s camera out of its box and began photographing everything: the trees, the shrubs, the ferns, grasses, tiny mosses and fungi. I used my father’s camera rather than my own because it made me feel that I was showing him the Australian bush the same way he had taken me exploring in the forests around Doksy. Although I was aware I was breaking the rules of walking in groups of three and telling someone where I was going, my fascination with the landscape and the bellbirds and robins I found along my way lured me further off the tracks. My walks and photography comforted me.

But one day, after I had spent an hour photographing a lyrebird near a cascade, I turned and saw a solitary rock jutting out in front of me. The shape of it reminded me of the way Milosh had stuck out his chin when he tried to kill me. My heart beat faster and I was overcome by anger. I walked furiously along a creek for an hour. By the time my adrenaline was spent, the sun had faded and I just made it back to Katoomba before darkness fell. My walks with Klara in the bush near Thirroul had given me some skill in reading landforms but I was aware that the Blue Mountains had ensnared more than one dreamy walker. I considered finding a walking companion, perhaps a woman from the town, but dreaded the thought of another human intruding on the soothing sounds of water and birdsong. Instead I bought a compass and marked my trail with a pile of rocks at significant trees.

I set up a darkroom in the laundry shed and sent the pictures of my journeys to Uncle Ota.

‘Your landscapes are stunning,’ he wrote back. ‘Your work has grown in depth. I can’t believe you aren’t using your professional camera.’

Klara updated me on the twins and family life in her letters. ‘Uncle Ota showed me the beautiful photographs you took,’ she said. ‘But remember, the rock formations you so lovingly capture cannot replace intimacy with human beings.’

As I became more adventurous in my walks it was apparent that a dress was not the most suitable attire for scrambling through scrub and over slippery rocks. I approached the local dressmaker to sew me some pairs of loose trousers. Women had been wearing trousers to play sports for some years but they were still frowned upon socially. Coco Chanel had tried to make them acceptable for day and evening wear with little success.

‘I suppose you are enamoured of all those Hollywood film stars too,’ said the dressmaker, looking over her pince-nez. ‘Everyone wants to be a “modern gal” these days. You are the fourth young lady this week who has asked me to make trousers for her.’

We both looked out the shop window in the direction of the King’s Cinema. I had not seen a picture since Freddy’s death. I could not bear the thought of sitting in the dark by myself.

Once my trousers were ready I set out early one morning for a walk. The valley was alive with flowers—boronias, drumsticks, waratahs, wattles and eucalypt blossoms. I wanted to photograph them. I had been walking for about an hour when I heard voices up ahead and came across three women sitting on a rock.

‘Goodness gracious, are you lost too?’ the eldest of them asked me. She was a plump woman of medium height with straight brown hair tucked into a bun at the nape of her neck. A drop of sweat trickled down her cheek and she took a lace handkerchief from her pocket to dab at it. The other two women were younger and slimmer, but their straight brown hair and button noses told me they were related.

‘Where are you trying to get to?’ I asked them.

‘We want to walk the Federal Pass,’ the first woman said. She took out her map and showed it to me. The Federal Pass was a well-known track that wound along the foot of the cliffs. I had walked it many times to photograph the rainforest. The women were only slightly off course but they had panicked and become disoriented. I glanced at their equipment. Each had a light rucksack, a water canister and sturdy shoes. They were not complete novices.

‘You are not so far from the track,’ I said. ‘I can walk with you, if you don’t mind me stopping to take photographs.’

The women rallied. ‘Not at all,’ they said. The first woman, who introduced herself as Grace Milson and her daughters as Heather Cotswold and Sophie Milson, told me that the Sydney Bushwalkers Club was not running anything that week in the mountains and the other clubs the women had approached did not accept female members. ‘We only have a week in the mountains and we wanted to walk. It’s so beautiful.’

We headed off in the direction of the track. I was surprised at myself for offering to guide them rather than just showing them how to correct their course. I thought I had grown wearisome of human company. Yet something about the women was refreshingly frank.

We came to an upward turn in the path where there was a ten-foot-high waratah standing up like a red-crowned queen amongst the green foliage. Her blood-red colour would be lost in the photograph but not her majesty. Drained of colour she would appear more mysterious.

‘It’s glorious,’ said Sophie.

‘Waratah is an Aboriginal word for “red-flowering tree”,’ I told the women. ‘The botanical name,
Telopea
, means “seen from afar” and
speciosissima
means “most showy”.’ I was surprised at how much I had picked up from Ranjana’s interest in botany and was flattered to see that the women were impressed.

They sat on a rock while I set up my shots. I was struck by their self-control. I had been concerned that they would chatter while I was concentrating and start asking me questions about whether I had lived in the mountains all my life or if I was married. It was a relief to find that once we were back on the trail none of them asked me anything personal, although they were fascinated by my photography.

‘Do you pick your subjects instinctively or is there a lot of deliberation?’ Heather asked me.

Although I gave them little information about myself, the women were open about their own lives. Before we had walked another half hour I had learned that Grace’s husband was an orchard farmer in Dural and that she had lost two sons in the war and Heather had lost her husband. Sophie was not married and worked as a teacher.

Despite several photograph stops, we made good time on the track and stopped by a rock shelter to rest. Quite often on my walks I would come across a cave or an overhang decorated with the faded stencils of Aboriginal art. Since the white settlers had crossed the mountains the Aboriginal population had declined and there were only a few tribes left. Yet when I photographed the plant or animal life near a waterhole my skin often tingled and I sensed that ancient ghosts were watching me.

‘I’ve always liked artists,’ Grace said to me while Heather sketched the ferns into a notebook and Sophie gazed out at the view. ‘They make us stop and think. You know, when we passed those wombat burrows, you spoke with such interest about those creatures and their habits that I felt swept up by your passion. My brother has a farm and shoots them. He says the cattle break their legs in their burrows, but you pointed out that wombats eat the grass the cattle don’t and so stop those grasses taking over paddocks. Surely there must be a way to live in better harmony with our land and native animals?’