Playing With Water (19 page)

Daily now, there is a bunch of sweet peas, roses and stocks on the table by my bed. It is the first thing I notice when I wake. It is said that hearing is the last thing to go when we are dying. I think smell must be close behind. It would be worth playing music and having good scents and words for the dying, even if they seem to be far away and on the first part of the journey.

I have never believed the unconscious can’t hear. Rolling people in a coma over and having a chat with someone else while doing it, about the dance, the matron, the boyfriend or other gossip, has always seemed to me a big mistake. It seems so rude to act as if no one else is there. I suppose I have done it, but I can only remember being upset when I saw it happening, as
we two in our white aprons, pink frocks and white ice-cream-cone starched hats washed and turned somebody who seemed so departed from their presence.

Sophia is watering the garden and herself with the hose. Her mother, Cathy, is under the
Ailanthus
tree, reading, and her father is in here on a couch. He is reading his Uncle Tucker’s diary of a walk in Botswana.

After the walk, Tucker and his son, Angus, went hunting buffalo with a local hunter. There are camp-fire agreements between the people, the government and the hunters in Botswana. The people get the meat and a fee; the hunter, who takes the visitors around, looks after them and provides everything, also gets a fee; and the visitor gets the horns. I’m not sure what the government gets, but I am sure it is something.

Every society has taboo topics, which spring from ideology full of denial of facts. Hunting fills this role. One day, perhaps, a person will be able to say that hunting increases habitat without being considered an unthinking, callous wretch.

While I don’t really wish to go hunting myself, I don’t feel superior, much as I’d like to, when my brother tells me he’s shot an old buffalo bull. A breeding pair of wild ducks have about eighteen offspring annually. Left to nature, without increase in habitat, all these but the fittest two will die.

Ages ago I poisoned Belle Story. An English rose with pink cupped flowers named after a nurse, it stood in a sunny part of my garden at Leura. It flowered a long time and profusely too. One day I gave it too rich a mixture of Thrive and it died within days. I’ve had to have a plague of cats poisoned once, and this rose and the cats are hard to forget among a few other matters.

When I lived in Adelaide I started feeding two or three feral cats because I felt sorry for them. Soon there were ten or more. There is a service there, and I suppose in other places, that will come and catch wild cats and have them humanely put to death. With so many cats I thought this was the kindest thing to do, so I called. But the man couldn’t catch the cats. One fled inside the house, ran through a roasting pan of cool fat, and then slid around with us chasing it as it skidded through the bathroom, the bedroom and kitchen and out the back door. That was when the cat-catcher said there was only one thing left to do, and that was to poison them.

Today, with Philippa’s book,
Old Roses and English Roses
by David Austin, open beside me, I saw a picture of Belle Story and began remembering. In both cases, I had upset a balance.

To try and move on from dead cats and poisoned roses, I read the book more carefully. English roses are
bred to be repeat-flowering with some of the best attributes of Old Roses, Modern Hybrid Teas and Floribundas. ‘They combine the unique character and beauty of Old Roses with their more graceful shrubby growth, and the ability to flower for a long time, both at Christmas and again in autumn,’ Austin declares. English roses are really new Old Roses. They also have a stronger scent than Old Roses, if that can be believed. Possibly this is because they have always been bred from fragrant roses.

Here the Claire rose now has more than two dozen blooms. The wind is scattering the petals like pink feathers on the wooden deck. The book says the shrub grows to about four feet by three feet. Yet this bush, planted eighteen months ago, is well over four metres tall.

On the front fence the Ophelia rose is blooming and so is one called Honour. What is really needed is about three more planted on the street side to make a really big tangle of cream and white abundance. Now that there are more shrubs outside the gate, and more lavender planted to fill gaps to make a good hedge, I think it’s fairly safe to put more roses there.

Outside the small town of Peel, which has no shops, post office or any facilities at all, there is a derelict house. Ruth, Barbara and I stopped there one day and took cuttings from a rose. After various mishaps, the
cuttings came here. They had been out of water for four days. Stuck into dirt in a greengrocer’s white plastic box, they have grown leaves. I put one of these outside the gate, near the neighbours’ fence, hoping it will grow into the wild big bush which was at Peel. Some of these roses may be rare, perhaps the only one left in the world. I planted another cutting, which has leaves now, into the back garden to take its chances.

Then, just when I thought

for me it was all over,

I fell in love with dirt.

Mr Right at last.

Wife of Dirt.

I slaved over him,

fed, shaved and was ravished,

year in year out. Not just Spring

and Summer when he can escape

his wife, but other seasons too.

Camellias are our winter quilt

and in autumn, I know he’s true

when his face is striped in shadows

of the trees.

At last, a faithful lover

solemn, silent, majesterial,

profound and mysterious

all the things I like in a man.

I’ve always been a bolter

but this time

I’ll go to my grave with him.

P
icking gardenias and squashing snails at dawn, I saw how high snails can climb. Out the front, the burgundy hollyhock is two-and-a-half metres tall and has only just escaped the snails. In the lemon tree by the shed, the snails climb taller than my head. It must be the long rains. Now the taller gardenias are out, the creamier ones that turn yellow as they age. Twice as big as the others, their pale petals spread like wings. If this book doesn’t smell good, it won’t be my fault.

Yesterday Diana and I went to lunch at her friend Liz’s at Mount Kembla. We walked around the new vegetable garden Liz has made next to her enormous new studio, which is fifty metres long. They say every man loves a shed and so do some women. On the farm at Peel, Barbara and Ruth were always being asked by men, ‘But what will you do with the shed?’ It got filled fast. Friends store things there. Barbara has her honey
extractor there, and all those other things that go in sheds. But no cars, trucks or tractors.

I am about to make mayonnaise and am waiting for the eggs to reach room temperature. Last time the eggs were cold, and I didn’t know that was the reason the mayonnaise wouldn’t thicken. I made four lots. All failures. The mayonnaise is to go on a chicken salad which Peri taught me how to make. She used to serve it in her bistro, Scoffs, which is now the Macleay Street Bistro in Potts Point. I gave the recipe in my book
The Waterlily,
but forgot the fried onions. Peri made hundreds of gallons of that salad. I am making it because friends are coming to lunch. All you do is cut up some cooked chicken with the skin removed. Fry three onions for one medium-sized chicken. Add two tablespoons of mild curry powder and cook a minute. Cool and add a cup or two of mango chutney. Stir this into a cup or two of mayonnaise, then mix in the chicken. Serve on a platter on a bed of lettuce with parsley, salt and pepper sprinkled on top. You can use takeaway chicken if you are in a hurry, but not the stuffing. Or use a boiled chicken, as it is more luscious, cooled in the jelly.

I love days when you can get into your bathers when you get out of bed. Pity I didn’t today, as I could have
and meant to. I went out to bring in a bucket for kitchen scraps and saw a drooping branch tip on the biggest lemon tree. Stink beetles had sucked it dry. I took a bucket of water and knocked them off into it. Then I saw a big lemon had dropped and, when kneeling down to pick it up, saw hundreds of snails on the underside of the lower fence railing. I half-filled a bucket with them and then tore out the weed
Tradescantia.
In my favourite white pyjamas, I had the bit between my teeth. I wonder if it was the fact I was wearing these that made the work feel slightly forbidden and therefore more appealing? It added a frisson. All the time I was on my knees, tearing out the weeds, I thought of Barbara Ker-Wilson and her habit of painting in good clothes.

Now all I must do is work out how to kill the bucket of snails. I watched Stefano de Pieri on television as he cooked a snail and pasta dish, using a box of snails a woman had gathered and cleaned by feeding them flour and bran for a few days. When I told Hugh you can eat garden snails, he, like his father before him, doubted me. I once had a bet with his father that the snails we ate at a local French restaurant in Hyde Park, Adelaide, were not imported but gathered from a garden. I won that bet. When Hugh heard the story he decided to cook himself some snails, but they made him ill. He didn’t know you must fast them. Now my pyjamas have black knees.

I’d like a dozen more white hydrangeas. Looking at the shady corner where the new clivias, tree begonias and Happy Plants (dracaenas) have gone in, I saw that the two pink hydrangeas I planted last week would be better if they were white. The orange clivia flowers bloom in winter and all this greenery could do with something to light it up—hydrangeas, like white candles in the shade.

Ghilly rang. When she finishes work in Melbourne, she’s bringing her girls to have a few days with Jack, who will come as soon as school is ended. She might bring some more jacarandas for the station, if there’s room with the bikes in her station wagon. All but two of the jacarandas she gave me have survived. One small one got hit by the poison the council used to kill weeds near the fence. The other was too small, I think, to survive. But it is true that smaller trees do better as a rule than larger ones in transplanting. The poison also killed the willows in the drain, but I have planted more.

I must go over and move the Lilly Pilly, which is planted too close to the platform, so that people don’t slip on the fruit. Also, those ficus trees need to be moved to allow them to grow to their full thirty-metre width. I heard a garden expert on radio once saying that she often has to move plants three or four times, until she finds the right position. That was a comfort.

I rode to Bulli and ordered the Christmas tree. Caro, my daughter, is coming earlier than planned. She lost a week in the rush that is December. The mat is covered with presents to be wrapped and there is nothing among them that looks suitable for anybody. Tomorrow, I will get on the telephone. I rebuilt this house using the
Yellow Pages
and maybe Christmas can be done the same way. There are no gift shops for ten kilometres and a hard ride. Sounds like the Highwayman.

Yesterday David and I swam in the sea pool. He had not known it was there. We paced out the length and breadth to start. Seventy metres long, thirty wide. The pool had two swimmers in it as we went down the wide steps to enter. Then a class from the high school came and began a game of water polo at one end. We were swimming the length along the wall, when suddenly David veered out diagonally. I was unable to make him hear, as he’d taken out his hearing aid. So he entered the water polo game. We laughed later. The world has another geometry when I am with him.

I borrowed David’s Akubra hat, as I had left in a hurry to go to his house wearing my yellow bike helmet, but decided not to ride as I was taking a piece of long white plumbing pipe with me. I was halfway down the street when I realised I must have looked like a medieval
jouster. The piping is like those David uses as a gauge when he mows. He said he’d like more. When I held the piping up before him, he did not know what it was, so I still don’t know how it helps him to mow. Perhaps it has a glow in the sun against the green lawn.

Today I went to swim in the pool, but it was empty as it was being cleaned. Suddenly there dawned the possibility of David going swimming alone (as he now says he will) and him not knowing there’s no water. Yet the day is cooler and windy, so I think he won’t want to swim.

Daphne, Terry’s wife, and I have Mr Pooterish conversations about rubbish bins. Today, she said, ‘Kate, our bin was taken out last night. I got up (Terry was dead to the world) and brought it in. I thought it was you. Marion’s was out too. But yours wasn’t. Now I think it must have been Ron coming home from a meeting of Neighbourhood Watch at the school.’

‘No, it wasn’t me. I only put my bin out early on Tuesdays because I have been teaching. But now I’m not teaching until January I might take yours in, but wouldn’t put it out because I know you’re afraid of vandals.’

I walked inside and thought, this is what life comes to. Forget the life of the mind, or growing a line of jacaranda, it all comes down to rubbish bins.

I keep thinking of a glimpse I caught of a lyrebird’s tail. Perhaps it’s because yesterday I had a long talk to Peri, who is on her farm. Peacocks were screaming in the background. We could not believe our luck the day we saw a lyrebird. We had taken a wrong turn and saw a glimpse of the curving tail, like a musical instrument, disappearing in the bush. A flurry and it was gone, like a bird diving into a river. It was as if the lyrebird entered the car and came back with us.

One of David’s big magnolia flowers is beside me in a square whisky bottle, looking like some famous drawing I have seen somewhere. Not Leonardo. But like him. Not Holbein (the Elder, not the Younger) either, but that sort of drawing.

Diana said she would come and draw the white
Datura
lilies last summer. The first
Datura
lily is out in a pot on the back deck, so I will remind her. There are two pots of white petunias and two of
Daturas,
which wilt quickly. So far, most nights we have a small rain.

When I began the garden, I initially intended to plant a
Magnolia grandiflora
where the Hills hoist clothes line was dug out. But Peri explained that it would shade everything, so I put in the
Magnolia stellata
instead. The fig tree down at the end of the garden has twenty figs, and sometimes I wonder if I ought to have put a
grandiflora
there. The breathtaking sight of David’s
magnolia shows that one tree, well planted, is better than half a dozen smaller trees.

The
Gordonia
tree at my gate will soon grow too big and shade the whole front. So I offered it to David. He has dug a hole as big as one of those old rubbish bins behind his shed and put the soil into the bin and then replaced it in the hole so nobody can fall in. Today, he is coming to take the
Gordonia
to his garden in my old wheelbarrow. I can’t help thinking, this will be interesting. Little does he know the condition of the barrow. Though if the board forming the base moves, he will find out soon enough. I suppose the flat tyre’s a giveaway. In fact, apart from the handles, which are still attached, there is nothing I see now that is as it once was. My new one has been borrowed and not yet returned.

Dolphins, a pod of about twenty, frolicked, going north, as I rode home after buying the turkey and ham at Corrimal this afternoon. It was three o’clock.

‘Dolphins!’ I crowed to a man. ‘Five of them.’

‘No, more like twenty,’ he said.

‘I hardly ever seen dolphins here,’ I answered. Then he told me, ‘They come past here almost every afternoon.’ The way a dolphin swims seems to imply happiness. Such loping ease, it lifts the spirit to watch.

As I was pulling snails from the lemon tree, I remembered another bet I won (besides the bet the
snails were from the garden). I’ve won a few bets over the years. This one was, ‘I didn’t kiss the waitress.’

‘Oh, yes, you did!’ I said to my husband, when he asked the day after a lunch why I had given such a large tip.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘since you kissed the waitress and gave me your wallet to pay for everybody, I didn’t want to seem resentful, so I dealt it out plentifully.’

‘I did not kiss the waitress,’ he stated. So the bet was made. A day or so later, he remembered. But so sure that he had not, he bet me a thousand dollars. That was a lot of money then. I still think it is. In the end I relented and said I’d buy a pair of Pierre Cardin shoes instead and he could keep the change. I have a feeling he is still kissing waitresses, but I bet he doesn’t bet his new wife that he hasn’t.

On happiness: a chair in the garden; a table in the shade. Is it possible for a married woman to tell a friend that she is happy? Does a woman sitting in her garden annoy a husband? Who do I blame that I don’t sit in the iron chair under the big tree reading? Wherever I look when I walk out the back door I see work. Work is like the poor, it will always be with you. Bending down this morning on this beautiful day, dew on the grass, trying
to pull wet weeds, slurping tea into the saucer and onto my dressing-gown, I wondered why it is I could not simply sit down and take a good look. Does happiness lie in weeding? The moments when one can forget the self? As you weed, all you see are more weeds farther in, under the camellia, around the hydrangeas, weeds creeping up through the straw mulch and eager as a hungry rabbit, farther and farther in you go until, drenched in dew and tea, you back out and stand in the sun, suddenly aware of yourself. But for a few moments you have been without self-consciousness.

You remember that your friend is coming, you are going to town with her, you must dress. Inside the front gate I see that the two box plants are now too big and block the view, making the garden even smaller than it is. They must be put down the back in the shade, where there are still gaps. It will be a big job. Retreating inside, I think that I was happy walking around in a slightly tormented way, seeing what must be done. Is happiness simply planning? I want to live in the moment. But I think my nature is against it. My brother doesn’t like his wife to sit in a rocking chair on the verandah. I saw that when I dragged chairs out one day so we could drink tea and talk. His daughter said, ‘Dad won’t like this.’ Perhaps it’s genetic, this greed to improve things. Or perhaps it’s universal. Yet happiness was with me in those moments this morning when I stood looking at
the lemon tree weighed down with fruit. Looking up at the pure blue sky can seem a balm, a gift. My friend Anthea, who has less in this world than most, says that every morning as she drinks her first cup of tea she gives thanks and says to somebody, she doesn’t know who, ‘Thank you for this tea and this lovely warm bed.’ Sometimes I think melancholy can be an addiction. A certain wistfulness can permeate every hour. I wonder if it is, in fact, a form of happiness, as the person who has this sadness clings to it against all evidence, while all around there is abundance, stacks of grace, like paddocks in summer. I spent years like that. Here, my work is to learn to live with vulnerability, nose to nose with the world, unprotected by melancholy, not letting the weeds give me anything but the pleasure of the dignity of work. And to sit, from time to time, in the garden with nothing in my hand or head but pleasure.