Playing With Water (14 page)

We spoke about the station garden. One day over there, when I showed David where the red geraniums had begun to bloom he bent down and felt them. I described the rest and we walked along as he felt the edges that lead up to the rail crossing with his cane. I showed him the new white steel railing the Railway people erected when I asked. It is to stop the boys riding their bikes over the garden for the pleasure of a leaping bump.

We were talking about vandals because recently David fell on a log on the bike path walking to Bulli. The fence protecting the dune plantings has been burnt in a big bonfire on the beach. Other logs were left strewn about on the path. Now he doesn’t walk on the path, he walks on the edge of the road, which is unpaved and full of its own surprises.

I rode away, more thoughtful than when I set off, leaving him to his music and books.

I would have liked to take David a loaf of the bread, but, although full of the right sourdough flavour, it’s a rock. I am going to chew my way through it, just so as not to waste the work. The bread will be alright soaked in water, squeezed out and mixed with sliced ripe tomatoes, basil and olive oil for panzanella. Patricia’s right, this is the only time I’ll do it.

Why is it that there is so much pleasure in all this bricolage? Barbara and her soap and furniture polish, me with the bread. The tracklements I love to make. The pickled oranges, the salted lemons and now the lemon chutney I’m about to make. I think it’s really a form of play. It has a deep ancient connection to creativity. To change one thing into another is to make a person happy. There are some people who can barely take a look at a thing without having an impulse to change it into another. It may be that gardening is part of this impulse. Nothing is the same once a person has
begun a garden. And nothing beats planting and sowing for helping allay depression. It’s up there with swimming with dolphins, and is a lot easier to implement.

Have you seen a mouse spider? I was standing beside Terry, who was about to bend to turn on his tap to rinse off a bunch of onions he had pulled for me, along with some silver beet, when he said, ‘Have you ever seen a spider this big?’ I hadn’t. He said, ‘It looks like a mouse. Maybe it is a mouse spider.’ And truly it did look like a mouse, a sort of eerie, benign mouse, as if a spider went to a party in a mask, just for fun. It must be spider season, because there are several daddy-long-leg spiders indoors. My mother said that spiders are lucky, but I think that was to stop her children being afraid.

A letter came last week from Adelaide. It was from Ian North, who had just rung to invite me to Lake Mungo. We did a desert trip to Lake Salvador and covered three thousand kilometres in two weeks. Madness. We howled with laughter, collapsed on motel beds or swags, helpless, suffocating, drowning in laughter. He drew in my writing book. First a tree on a dry creek’s bank.

‘See,’ he said, ‘draw it as it grows—from the roots.’ He draws those fine accurate lines like Ruskin. He drew a dingo running and then the kettle on some flaming
sticks. While he drew, the kettle’s carved wooden handle caught fire. The drawing had distracted him so he let it burn.

His letter says:

Whales! We two [Mirna, his wife, and he] saw two large ones, blowing and wallowing about five hundred metres off Moana yesterday.

I was (predictably?) moved to see so many people staring out to sea. I felt a jolt of something like religiosity. Before sighting the animals I asked an Aussie couple in their sixties if they had seen anything yet. ‘No,’ they replied. I said: ‘It’s good to see so many people interested.’ ‘Yes,’ said the man, ‘Mary was just saying that a moment ago. There is still a little bit of hope,’ he added. ‘Yes, exactly,’ I said, and we parted the best of friends…

A letter also came from Betty, my neighbour at Leura, on holiday at a shack at Valla Beach. (Bill, her 85-year-old husband, wrote last week that he was reading her
War and Peace.
)

This afternoon, we sat for a while on a high headland [Betty wrote]. A calm sea sent low curling rollers towards the beach in rows of white frills. One day last week we were sheltering among the dunes, eating sandy sandwiches. The wind was strong and the sea
wild, beating the shore with thumping great waves—the pounding heart of the ocean. An old fisherman hailed us. He wore a close-fitting beanie, knitted in broad bands of blue and white, the exact colours of foam and sea. The fine ivory sand was a perfect mount for such a picture.

And yesterday it was different again, no wind at all. We walked for an hour northwards, sloshing along in the water, watching sea hawks circling high overhead. No other creature at all to be seen anywhere. We sat on a rotten sea-soaked log and peeled oranges and prayed aloud for my brother Vincent in hospital emergency, a double by-pass. We walked back noting the strange patterns in the sky—fine white shreds, as if the frayed ends of a silk tassel were brush-stroking the indigo sky. And again, whilst still on sky scenes and such—each early waking morning I lie in bed and look out through the arch formed by two giant old paperbarks and know it’s time for the birds to commence wheeling over the distant sky towards the dark mountains, out to sea and around again, over and over. They keep it up for ages and remind me of Bill out in the kitchen stirring the porridge. Do not give up on your book. Remember we are all clowns.

This letter is written by a woman married to the same man for fifty years.

It’s pouring and I must go to town and teach. A pink foxglove has bloomed overnight, and beside it a taller hollyhock is in bud. The garden is drenched. A few drops of water ran down one of the wooden crosses that hold the railing on the deck and stained it like a sudden blush. It is warm. The rose on the green steel arch Jack and I assembled two years ago has bloomed. It is Albertine. No rose blooms more than this, but it is not remontant, so this flush is the only one until next spring. Would you plant a rose that blooms only once a year? I suppose it depends on how big your plot is.

I am waiting for the port-wine magnolias for the front pots to be delivered, along with half-a-dozen small pelargoniums, which I knew only as geraniums. I read an article in
Gardens Illustrated
on pelargoniums. The photographs of the tiny flowers were beautiful.

The magazine says that there are about two hundred and fifty species of pelargoniums, succulents, evergreen perennials and shrubs commonly (but incorrectly) known as geraniums:

But the species themselves, many of which grow in the wild in South Africa, are not often seen in cultivation. Since the seventeenth century, when the first pelargoniums appeared in Europe from South Africa, debate has raged over their relationship to the
geranium. The fact is, however, that although they are part of the same family
(Geraniaceae)
, geraniums and pelargoniums are two distinct genera.

Now I am mad to have some.

While I wait, I’d like the owl to come too. I still remember the thrill as it flew down from the
Ailanthus
tree. What brought it and what will bring it back?

Yesterday I got out of bed, where I’d been for thirty-six hours. Diana, her friend Jon, who like her is a tapestry artist, and Margaret O’Hara came to lunch. Not having been shopping for a week, I opened the freezer to find something to cook and luckily an ox tongue fell out on my foot. This struck me as the reverse of Homer’s saying, ‘An ox stood on his tongue.’ I boiled it and, with a jar of pickled oranges and some mashed potatoes and salad, it made a main course. Ian was intrigued by the oranges, which, as Diana said, are a type of Elizabethan dish, so I showed him the recipe in a book. He copied it out. These oranges keep a long time. That jar had been in the pantry for three years and was still good, even perhaps better than earlier.

After lunch we walked around the garden. One day, Diana says, she will come and draw one or two of the big pink poppies. Often last summer, as we sat at the
table at dusk, having a drink after a swim, she would comment that the white
Datura
in bloom would be a wonderful flower to draw. (Yes, they did finally grow.) This summer I will make sure to ask her to draw all three. The
Datura
flower crumples by dawn the next day, as if it had bad news overnight. It falls into a white slump but even then would make a good drawing.

Drawing dead flowers reminds me of Keats’ death mask. I have just finished reading a biography of him by Andrew Motion. The death mask brings Keats to us, as if asleep. If only, I kept thinking as I read, he had never gone near a doctor he would have lived a little longer. And then, if Keats had practised medicine, as he’d been trained, he’d have done the same harm to others.

The lives of dead artists are intriguing. Shelley and his small boat. There is a drawing of Shelley’s boat on the cover of a book I’ve been given. It is Mary Oliver’s
Winter Hours.
I don’t remember a book that gave me more pleasure. As I kept reading, I was thinking, oh God, oh God, I am going to read this one hundred times. She teaches so much. Her stillness, her detail, her profound attention to the natural world.

I was thinking when I looked at the picture of the small yacht drawn by Shelley’s friend and sailing companion, Edward Williams, that this friend, drawing that vessel, drew his own coffin.

He and Shelley were sailing the
Don Juan
from Lerici to Livorno, Italy, when a storm came up. The captain of a passing boat, seeing he said ‘that they could not long contend with such tremendous waves’, offered to take them on board. A shrill voice, which is supposed to have been Shelley’s, was distinctly heard to say, ‘No.’ The waves were running mountains high—a tremendous surf dashed over the boat which, to the rejected captain’s astonishment, was still crowded with sail.

‘If you will not come on board, for God’s sake reef your sails or you are sold,’ cried the sailor through a speaking trumpet. One of the gentlemen (Williams, it is believed) was seen to make an effort to lower the sails, but his companion seized him by the arm, as if in anger.

So it was that Shelley and Williams sailed down into the Gulf of Spezia, ten miles west of Viaggio, under full sail. We are left with a mystery. Was it Shelley, impetuous to get home to Mary, who had just had a miscarriage, or perhaps resenting anybody trying to prevent him sailing in the manner he wished to, who refused help? Or is it all a tale told later, exaggerated or untrue? I can’t imagine a sailor, for instance, using such words through a megaphone, during a storm.

Ten days later, when the bodies were washed up, Shelley was identifiable by his nankeen trousers, white
silk socks and his friend Hunt’s copy of Keats’ poems doubled back in his jacket pocket. This is a true story. This part we know. He went down with his compatriot’s poems in his pocket. Who will I have in my pocket when I go down?

Later. I have been out planting tomato and basil seedlings. My friend Paula, on the telephone from Mornington, said when I explained why I was puffing when I answered the phone, ‘Oh, this is the right time, you know. Tomatoes and basil are supposed to go in by Melbourne Cup Day.’

The plants are those rejects from the nursery—Grosse Lisse, Roma and Apollo Improved, along with basil self-sown from Terry’s plot. A punnet of lettuce went in also. Vegetables are much more difficult to grow than flowers. A great meticulousness is needed and I don’t have it. But having been given the seedlings, it seemed wrong not to use them. None of the parsley or coriander have come up yet. I go out and stare at the ground, pulling up seedlings of impatiens to make room.

As I ran to answer Paula’s call, I dropped the hose which slumped onto the back deck and quickly filled half the kitchen with water while I spoke, my back turned. So now the floor is uniformly clean. I remember a friend saying years ago that he would like to have a house that could be hosed out. He could see
no reason why one couldn’t be so designed, but, as yet, as far as I know, there never has been such a one. It would only need cement floors done on a slope with cement edging instead of skirting boards.

The first gardenia is out. It is now here in a sliver of a glass vase beside me. Smelling strongly. This summer I hope to have hundreds of gardenias. Months ago I planted twenty along the side path in the gaps between the blocks that form the diamond shapes. I meant to have all the same kind to give a uniformity to the edging. But I have never managed uniformity in anything. (This book is an example of that, as it was meant to be only about plants and building a garden.) When I ordered the gardenias, Denis had two kinds that he sent and then, there not being enough to finish off the path, and finding it hard to get others the same, I accepted different kinds and shrugged with another bit of uniformity lost.

A grey pigeon is drinking from one of the bird bowls. And now that it has flown away, a small wind ruffles the silver reflections of the sky in the water. A bee has disappeared inside the throat of an apricot nasturtium. There is no moment when something is not happening in the garden. Snails, worms, stink bugs clinging to the cumquat leaves, poppies bursting out silently when I am never looking. I have always wanted to watch a poppy burst.

No, I wasn’t surprised

when I hauled her in

gleaming rose and emerald,

opalescent in the net.

She smiled at me and that I see now

is why I would risk everything

for the mermaid.

For weeks I’d been trying to catch

one or more of her kind

out there with the flap of the sails,

the slap of the prow on the waves.

I knew the weather was right—

there are some things experience tells—

you can’t have been fishing so long

without an inkling of how to catch

a deck full of scales. The miracle of it.

Her smile and her elegant tail

hitting the deck in a rhythm

as strong as a poem.

Her hair wasn’t seaweed at all

though it did have a green bow

tying a clump behind one of her ears.

On a breast an oyster had settled

a natural beautiful brooch

which I wouldn’t have dreamt of disturbing.

Why did I want the mermaid so badly

having given up most of the trappings?

I wanted her

as a horse wants to run.

To some I know she’s a myth

they’ve never seen her

and what they don’t see they don’t

believe

yet, like radio, the mermaid exists

sleekly ravishing, gasping and smiling

knowing that I’d write this

and then let her go

watching her swim away

in her own muse the water.