The Submerged Cathedral Page 13

  Once Jocelyn had walked past Ellen’s Kensington house. She waited at the corner for an hour to see if she could see them going in or leaving. She begged Ellen by telephone to see her. I just want to know you are all right. Ellen finally agreed, and she entered the tea shop in Sloane Square looking like a woman from a Harrods catalogue. Her hair shone in a dark bob and her skin was clear and smooth.

  They had been to Italy, she explained, on holidays.

  ‘Thomas loves Florence. We go as often as possible.’ She said it like a declaration of something.

  ‘How’s Sandra?’

  Ellen looked her in the eye. ‘She’s very well, thank you. She’s fine.’ She relented then, taking a picture from her handbag and passing it across the table. Sandra, her baby face now slimmed and elongated like her mother’s, stood in a party dress in front of an oak mantelpiece. Smiling like Ellen used to as a child, half-genuine, half only for the photograph. Sandra’s arms and legs were long and slender. Jocelyn searched her face for clues, finding nothing beyond the shining surface of the photographic paper.

  ‘She looks tall,’ was all she said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Ellen.

  Jocelyn said nothing of her early London months, the nights curled in a narrow bed crying with homesickness; she did not speak about walking the perimeters of London’s parks.

  At the end they hugged, briefly, Jocelyn wanting to hold on a second longer but letting go at Ellen’s first slight movement.

  ‘It doesn’t happen any more. In case you worry,’ Ellen said.

  Jocelyn nodded, said, ‘Okay.’

  Then only just stopped herself from asking if Ellen had heard anything of Martin.

  Instead, she watched Ellen’s elegant back walking away up the Kings Road, ashamed that she could not decipher the truth from her own sister’s words. And ashamed, too, that now she could see that Ellen was well and Sandra, apparently, safe, and that she herself was left standing in a London street, the thing she feared most was that old weed of loneliness unfurling itself once again.

  Soon after this day Jocelyn started work with Duncan, sometimes in the Cotswolds cottage, sometimes at his flat in Knightsbridge, then travelling through England and Europe. Then she began to have dinner with him too, in cheap candle-lit restaurants with jazz music playing in a bar nearby.

  Here in the monastery’s library she sets up her things. Drags the suitcase full of drawings and sketches, the dried leaves of plants, the photographs, articles, coloured paper swatches, and opens it on the large reading table. These wisps of her garden she has brought back, having carried them across Europe all these years.

  She clears the shelves and sets out each folder, magazine, leaf. Crayons and calculators and rulers and strings and plumb lines. Covers the walls with the photographs and the drawings.

  Last, she lifts out the book, Botanica Australis.

  In her shifting of the old library books and her own boxes, she does not see the pastel drawing in a stack against the wall, of a Pittwater headland falling into a flat sea.

  During the first days she moves meditatively through the buildings – the hallways, the bathrooms, the studies and offices and scullery and the flywired meat house with the smell of old mutton still hanging about it. In the dormitory she moves from bed to bed, trying to imagine the men who lay there at night. Did they keep one another awake? Did they sometimes climb secretly into each other’s arms, from loneliness, from love?

  Trying to imagine how these Irishmen could fathom a monastery at all, in a raw country like this one. Until she drove up the track that first time, she’d expected stone walls and gardens. Not this slight weatherboard collection of sheds and clapboard farmhouse expanded room by room, verandah by covered verandah. The cloister, even: a spindly thing of narrow wooden posts, a concrete path, a hot little square of dusty grass and a half-dead rosebush in place of Europe’s colonnades and parterres.

  The cloister quadrangle is flanked by four narrow buildings. The first, which faces out to the drive and beyond it the paddocks, the dam and the ridge in the distance, contains the library, scriptorium, the abbot’s offices and sitting rooms. Along the rear of the building, all the flimsy flywire doors open to the cement path of the cloister. Opposite these doors across the cloister are the dormitories and bathrooms. On the left, nearest the abbey, is the infirmary building; on the right, the kitchen, laundry and refectory.

  In a room next to the laundry she comes across a tall locked cabinet. Eventually finding its small key on the ring the estate agent gave her, she opens it and then takes a sudden step back. A gun. Surely they could not have meant to leave it. She stares, then takes down the rifle, holding it carefully away from her body. The cold metal and the smooth wood, its bony lines. She puts it back, locks the door carefully.

  She walks the spaces, marking the beginnings of a possible garden with her footsteps. On the bare dirt between the abbey and the infirmary, the physic garden. Beside it, across this wide sweep of thistle, could be a sacristan’s cutting garden. Picking her way through the thistles, she reaches a waist-high wooden gate and a dark, swollen hedge of dying box – beyond the gate, behind the hedge, she knows, lies the cemetery. She does not enter there, keeps walking, at a distance from the dormitory, through the lame fruit trees of what must once have been an orchard.

  Outside the kitchen and refectory are the remains of a basic vegetable garden. Further off, scattered around are the chook yards, a bore-water pump, a woodshed.

  As she walks her eye falls on contours, spaces, verticals and horizontals. In her head a path forms, between the functional and the contemplative, meanderings and pauses offering places to rest, or transitions from one quiet way of being to another. At the front, from the porch, she stares across the dead lawn towards the paddocks and imagines shallow terraces; the murky dam becomes a pool, the merging of her garden into bush.

  Each afternoon she walks a different part of the land.

  She climbs the stony ridge, boots slipping. She grasps hold of whip-thin saplings to support her as she clambers through the mentholated air.

  On this, the fifth day, approaching the ridge, she can see from the paddock a bald area among the trees. Scanning about, she looks for, eventually finds, a slight but distinct path trodden between the spotted gums and the lichened rocks, through the ragged bush. Soon she is walking through the pale trunks of the eucalypts, and the air vibrates with insects. Past a ledge of rock, and there –

  The breath is sucked from her lungs.

  Rusted iron fence, two feet by four. Under the lean of the trees the earth is scuffed with pale grasses and fallen bark. Jocelyn sifts flies away with one hand, standing on this crackling earth under a bleached sky, with the fingers of her other hand curled over the rails of a child’s grave.

  The fence is barely visible against the verticals of scrub and vine and sapling. She sinks to her knees on the rotting eucalypt leaves and the dry rags of bark, and holds the rusted bars of the fence with both her hands.

  It is dusk when she makes her way back through the bush, climbing down the ridge. The change from bush to paddock has softened in this light, a tonal shift. Then her eye is caught by something moving, and she makes out a crooked line of kangaroos, there must be a dozen of them, soft grey forms in the falling dark, moving in their threaded ballet of slow loops across the flat.

  Over that first summer with Duncan she had seen England’s parks and gardens. It was 1967, but at Hampton Court, Sissinghurst, Kew, at others with forgettable names and famous designers, the centuries rolled back. Mannerist, romantic, classical, twentieth century. Capability Brown, Robinson, Jekyll. Duncan spoke of the epochs and monarchs of British garden design, the fashions leaping back and forth across the Channel, across Europe. The long-abandoned giochi d’acqua, the absurdly intricate, hydraulically operated stone-and-water puppet-shows that had sixteenth-century stone birds singing, dragons gyrating, stone hermits opening cave doors and gliding out to greet the garden visitor. The endless water chains,
grottoes stuccoed with stalactites of shell and sparkling grit. The ramps, fountains, terraces, balustrades, overlooking panoramas of shifted, moulded, planted, shaped land. The centuries of erasure and reconstruction of thousands on thousands of acres, the construction, destruction, draining of lakes, diverting of rivers, the strewing of intricate parterres and knot gardens and mosaic and stone, and the madness of topiary in every form.

  The Temple of Apollo loomed out of the sodden English air in a Wiltshire garden, its classical white stone a pale swatch against the green, the green. They had been travelling for weeks and despite her detailed note-taking she was tired of the classical allusions and the sumptuousness of all this artifice. And on another lush terrace tumbling with hundred-year-old creepers, she felt guiltily homesick for something raw and dry. She had a surge of compassion for Australia’s arid little postage stamps, the People’s Parks of innumerable rural towns. Squat oblongs of fifty square feet between the railway track and the highway, half a dozen mangy pencil pines, hopeful patches of scuffed buffalo grass. Always one fat wooden seat, angled too far backwards for comfort, set into solid cement block legs, and positioned with almost a surveyor’s precision in the centre of the park, lacking shade in the sweltering summer or any cornered relief from winter winds. The endless shreds and shaved corners of land through small towns in the rural districts. Hinkley Reserve. Herb Greedy Park. The Alice Ford Memorial Playground. All grandly named and cursively signposted in fading green on bleached tin, little shin-high drystone walls delineating these paltry half-green spaces, thoroughfares, sidings, bus-shelters. The parks and gardens of country New South Wales.

  In the evenings, alone in her hotel room, for the first time since she came to this country she began to draw images of plants from home.

  Thirty

  UP AT THE ridge she collects seeds, takes cuttings and runners from the scrub. In a month there are lines of small potted seedlings outside the woodshed. Rows of black pots with tiny green shoots emerging.

  She has marked out, walking, where the new paths will be, from one space to the next, curving through the sacristan’s garden and towards the abbey, meeting the straight lines between the grids of herb gardens, the vegetable plot, the physic garden, joining another arc out to the cemetery, a larger sweep down to the dam, through the paddock grasses to become a track up to the ridge. And from each one trail smaller paths, tributaries to smaller spaces, where a bench might be, a lemon-scented myrtle, a place for thinking. Winding back on themselves, parting and meeting, coming to rest at the one open corner of the cloister quadrangle.

  Back in the library she writes, scribbles down what she has observed each day.

  The potted seedlings grow taller, tougher, their stems matchstick-, then pencil-thick. These first months she spends weeding and turning soil, too, and watching the lie of the land.

  And collecting stone, for the paths. For texture, for delineation, for colour. For wall and stair and paving. For drainage. For seating. For pond-lining and terracing, for enclosure and for spatial release. For transition, reflection. For stitching her imagination in basalt into the side of this wide yellow dish of a valley.

  Thirty-One

  SHE AND DUNCAN once spent two hours among the mummies at the British Museum. It was warm outside, and she had wanted to go to a park, to sit on grass in the sun. It had been so long since the sun shone with any warmth that she only wanted to be outside.

  In Green Park the deckchairs had been full of people lying with their eyes closed, offering themselves to the sun. Some of the younger women pushed their blouses off their shoulders, showing the straps of their underwear, and had taken off their shoes and stockings. When she first saw English people baring their winter skin in public like this she had thought their desperation pathetic. Now, after four summers here, she wanted to join them, to strip off the layers of her clothes and just lie there on the grass, listening to the sounds of the city beyond the green acres of lawns, and waiting for summer.

  But instead they had got off the tube at Holborn and climbed the shallow stone stairs to the Museum.

  In the gloom of the Egyptian section the mummies lay, in various states of unwrap. The room was cold, and Jocelyn buttoned her cardigan to the neck. Duncan stared at the silver and turquoise jewellery next to the tiny coffin of a young woman. ‘Look how small they must have been,’ he murmured, holding up his own large hand, marvelling at the tiny Egyptian fingers.

  Opposite, in a glass case, were the mummified bodies of animals. A cat sat neatly upright, its small triangular face a perfectly sewn linen replica, dark eyes and nose coloured with dye. The cylinder of its body was long and tightly wrapped, and some of the outer cloth had been removed to show the intricate, decorative pattern of the woven webbing beneath. Next to the cat were two falcons. On another shelf, less recognisable in their wrapped bulk, a small baboon and a baby crocodile.

  As Duncan stood reading the tiny plaques stuffed full of words, Jocelyn wandered among the glass cases, among the preserving jars and all this painted decay.

  Ellen’s baby had been disposed of somewhere in Australia’s Blue Mountains. Jocelyn found herself wondering whether that small body was wrapped before they threw it away. Alone, or with others? Buried or burnt?

  She stared through the spotless glass panes at the lit gold and the turquoise, the body’s arms folded across the heart. It had been possible, then, somewhere, for death to give rise to art.

  She plants two hundred eucalypt seedlings along the track entering the property from the road. Her back aches, it takes her three days to dig the holes alone.

  She wheelbarrows the tiny plants from the truck, cannot believe they will survive the wallabies and kangaroos, or the frosts that still come sometimes despite the summer. She spends nights cutting hessian for the tree guards, days with a sledgehammer banging in the posts. At the end of a week, she stands at the top of the track and can see her work: an avenue of small sackcloth shrines.

  Back at the Gloucestershire farm, while Duncan worked in the garden she sat at the typewriter watching him move back and forth beyond the window. When he dozed inside on the warm afternoons, Jocelyn sat on the wooden bench with one foot tucked beneath her like a child, a lone sandal abandoned on the warm stone of the terrace, and began weaving a halting mosaic with shells over the large table.

  She had collected them from the gritty beaches in England’s north on a trip with Duncan and, memory echoing, kept them by the back door in a bucket.

  When Duncan was not there she picked the shells from the shallow sloping pile one by one, examining, turning over, running her fingertips across the cornets of them, then placing them gently, instinctively.

  When he came out she would uncurl herself and stand, leaving the shells flotsammed over the table, and go inside. But Duncan liked to eat on the terrace, and without mentioning it, they began to dine carefully around the shells, putting plates and glasses in the remaining spaces on the tabletop.

  By this time they were lovers. She had asked him once, gently, lying in bed, ‘Why do you want to be with me?’

  His face had coloured. He said nothing, and then: ‘I told you, I’m not good with words.’ Holding her hand and stroking it, looking at the ceiling. She could see the leaves of the plane tree at the window, and she pictured the hedgerows beyond the garden, the tiny birds darting. She could think of no reason to argue.

  The table was almost covered after a fortnight, swirling colours and shapes rising up in ridges and dunes. After each day’s work Jocelyn would sit, head bent with her black hair curving from under the pale blue headband, brow creased, chewing her lip, occasionally leaning back to gauge the shape. Then her hand would hover, picking out pieces of the wrong colour or a somehow unsatisfactory shape, and tossing them without looking back into the green bucket at her side.

  Home from a London job, Duncan watched through the kitchen window at her complete unawareness of his presence. Once he had sat down next to her and picked up a shell himself, looking
for a space to put it. But she had turned her head suddenly, and then he saw that this was not meant for him to share.

  Now he took her a cup of tea, putting the cup down in a space on the table, not asking what she was doing, trying to force his confusion away. But all he saw was the smallness of this landscape of lifeless little shells. She lifted her head and smiled, took the tea cup and nested it in both hands at her chest, turned back to her mosaic. But she had seen his face – and finally she recognised it, his embarrassment. She slowly put down the tea cup and, still without looking at him, bent down and lifted the bucket. Extended her right arm into an arc, leaned forward and guided the shells across the table into the bucket. Duncan watched the shapes dissolve and the colours mix, and half wanted to cry out, ‘Stop.’ But he didn’t, and he felt something like relief as he turned into the house away from the suddenly dank afternoon air.

  Before this, before she had shovelled the little dry creatures away from his gaze, she had answered him one night, ‘It’s not for anything,’ staring into the fire after dinner. ‘It’s for me.’

  Each day she works on the path up the ridge to the grave, setting down stone for the steps. In this working rhythm she becomes all senses, all touch, the composted air so rich and dank sometimes she is nauseated. And the swinging rhythm of the shovel into soil and the pickaxe into stone, the shifting layers of the bush and its hisses and flammable air, all merge into an alchemical, moving mosaic.

  Thirty-Two

  IN NOTRE DAME she lit two candles. Then paused. ‘For my parents,’ she told Duncan. She felt his eyes on her, his head turned from where he had been standing, craning his neck to look up at the cathedral’s ceiling.