The Submerged Cathedral Page 14

  As she lit the first taper she knew it was not for her parents. She did think of them then, buried together in the Blue Mountains ground, pine needles falling over the gravestone. The engraved name of her father beneath her mother’s, each weathered shallow over the years.

  In the cathedral a choir practised somewhere above them, the voices swelling the building into a vast construction of sound. She thought of her father singing in church in the mountains, whistling bird noises under his breath to amuse his children when the hymn mentioned birds singing to the Lord.

  Here she could make out no words, not even French ones, only a layering of chimed sounds. Something about it here – the building, the hunchback story, the choir of human voices – made her want to cry.

  She lit the second taper, the one for herself, and pushed it into the sand.

  She gathered her coat around her and turned to leave Duncan to the architecture. But Duncan knew the candles were about something else, some other memory not meant for him. He touched her hand as she went to pass him. He leaned in towards her.

  His eyes were clear there in the dark church, looking into hers. ‘I’m not stupid, Jocelyn.’ And he let go her hand.

  Small, anxious dogs on vein-thin leashes trotted through the city. Sitting on one of the green metal chairs under the trees at the Luxembourg Gardens she watched a tall dark woman with a white terrier. All the women in Paris were tall, all the women’s shoes unscuffed, all the dogs’ hair washed and combed.

  She thought of Alf, wondering if he was still alive, still where she’d left him in the vet’s secretary’s yard. She thought of him sleeping in the sun, and of Sandra lavishing her child’s love on the bewildered old dog, who until her arrival was accustomed to no more attention than an idle nudge with a foot while Jocelyn worked on her proofreading before the fire, or the tinny sound of his food bowl landing on the laundry floor.

  The woman bent down and unleashed the terrier, then straightened and looked around to choose a seat for herself. The dog stopped too, polite, dainty, then suddenly scuffled its back feet twice in the dirt and bolted beyond the trees towards the pond. The woman folded her long body into a seat and took a book from her handbag.

  Sandra used to try to teach tricks to Alf under the pine trees in the lower garden, with pocketfuls of biscuit or bread. Alf sat obedient but uninterested, staring only at the pocket on the front of her purple-chequered dress while she chattered away at him, trying to coax him to roll over, or lift his paw. Eventually, when he hadn’t moved except to waver a little as he flopped to the ground and let his tongue loll pinkly out, Sandra would shout something at him and fling the biscuit on the ground, then stomp off, leaving him content and snuffling in the dirt. Once she washed him, cornering him between the laundry tub and the copper, and lathering him up with Lux flakes. After an initial struggle, his toenails skidding in circles over the wet cement floor, he had surrendered, shivering and shaking himself until Sandra was soaked through. Then they had both gone to sit in the sun on the front lawn, an air of exhausted truce between them. The house was filled with Alf’s clean-sheets perfume for days afterward.

  Duncan did not ask any more about the letters she wrote monthly, never getting a reply. The first time he asked, she said, ‘They’re to my niece.’

  But he stood in front of her, so she met his eye and held up the page: Dear Sandra. ‘I’m sorry,’ Duncan had said. He waited then.

  Slowly, placing the paper back on the desk in front of her, she said, ‘I think you should know that this is not going to change.’ She paused, swallowed. ‘If you’re waiting for something about me to be different, I don’t think it will.’

  He stood still there in the little hotel room with his hands in his pockets, watching the toe of his brown shoe, lifting and lowering it in tiny movements. After a moment he whispered, ‘I’m going out.’

  When he left the room she sat staring at her blue words on paper. Jocelyn was not sure that Sandra even received the letters, that Ellen was even still at the Kensington house. But the letters were never returned, and she kept writing.

  Now she pulled the plant books from her suitcase and read, and sketched from memory the pleached lime trees of the Tuileries Gardens.

  Once she had written, Dear Martin. But her pen stopped, and she had gently pulled the page from the writing pad, folded it, and dropped it into a wastepaper basket. The sound of the paper hitting the tin like something ending.

  Over this first year the bones of her garden begin to form, its spine and limbs and walls and rooms solidifying in the earth. She walks and drives the country around the monastery, collecting seed, visiting nurseries and plants-men and tree farms. Never talking much: a woman in a green truck, heaving the vehicle up and down bush tracks and highways. But mostly the truck only moves back and forth in tracks across her own land.

  A September torrential rainstorm destroys a month’s work in a day, washing all the topsoil from the terrace near the abbey, the earth slumped through the broken retaining wall like lava, and all the plants drowned. She goes about her rescue, picking them from the earth, repotting them, hospitalising them in a makeshift glasshouse while she repairs, remakes the stone wall.

  Repetition is everywhere in this work. In the mistakes and their solutions, the moving towards some understanding, then its undoing, the trying again. In the seasons turning and fading and returning.

  At night, her designs become studies in the perpendicular; and around the perimeter of the dam she constructs duckboards and plants sedges, the Gymnoschoenus sphaerocephalus.

  Duncan had often talked, as he drove from one site to the next, about terracing, about the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Diodorus, he said, wrote that the gardens were built high above the palace, in tiers like a theatre. The galleries were first covered over with beams of stone sixteen feet long and four feet wide. The roofs placed over the beams had a layer of reeds, huge quantities of them, in a kind of bitumen, and over that they put two courses of brick and cement, and then the third layer was a covering of soil deep enough for the roots of the largest trees.

  Duncan liked to give these small lectures, these offerings of knowledge. She tried to picture the structures, the measurements. ‘You’ll have to draw it for me, I don’t understand,’ she said, more interested in the mythology than the mathematics. She thought of Nebuchadnezzar’s grieving Persian wife, homesick for the meadows of her mountains, and his building instead for her these gardens in the air. The story of a man with room in his imagination for such a gift.

  Once at Pittwater, after Martin had pinned a swatch of bubble weed to the verandah beam over the step, he had held her, laughing and wriggling under its drips, until she kissed him. That bubble weed stayed there for months, at first smelling rotten, then drying to a hard, blue-green tassel. At first they would kiss whenever one of them noticed it there. Later, as it shrank, they would notice it, but remarked upon it less and less. By the morning she left for the mountains, it had gone.

  Her body aches all over with this work of imprinting herself on the land.

  In the passing of the days and nights she occasionally steps inside the abbey again, to rest her head on the pew. In the coolness of that empty space she sometimes wonders, Is a garden always a gift?

  Jocelyn takes the map of the property and lays a new layer of tracing paper over the previous one. Draws in pencil what she has done since the last version: the stands of eucalypts and the grass-trees, the grevilleas now hip-height around the abbey, coming into spindly flower. Over time, on sheet after sheet of paper like this, she maps in the paths, the new beds, the benches and the stones, follows the contours of the land with her pen, with pencils and watercolours. Eventually, the drawings plaster the walls. In the evenings she stays in here, drawing and reading. Sometimes she falls asleep in the old vinyl chair, the radiator’s heat on her face waking her hours later.

  She adds to her catalogues of plants. Grasses: lomandra, pennesetum, poa. Groundcovers: prostrate Goodenia ovata, brachysc
ome, Viola hederacea; shade trees: ficus, lillypilly, the West Australian willow myrtle. The particular pleasure of classification, of the Latin names, of their retrieval from memory, of their repetition. Grevillea sericea, Grevillea mucronulata, Grevillea buxifolia.

  Is this prayer? These invocations that, spoken aloud, alone, summon some potential, some instinctive, butted-at meaning?

  Thirty-Three

  IN ARLES, CAFÉS everywhere claimed Van Gogh, his landscapes and sunflowers. The hotel foyer smelled strongly of cheese, and Jocelyn had to concentrate hard in order to disguise the fact that its stench turned her stomach. She laughed about the cheese with Duncan. ‘Philistine,’ he hissed into her ear, his accent exaggerated, ridiculous, his arm light around her waist. Sometimes she felt herself loosening, could feel Duncan feeling it.

  In the market herbs were heaped in great piles, vats of olives shone. She walked with his large hand covering hers. It was 1970, she was in France, a good man said he loved her. She heard music hissing from radios, songs about love, about boys and girls.

  Australia was long ago. She was somebody else now.

  Duncan told her the story of a virtuous young nun, Roseline, who was setting the table for her sisters’ dinner when she fell into a religious ecstasy. The mother superior came and scolded Roseline for abandoning her work and threw up her hands in anger at her story. Then the mother turned to see a flock of angels hovering over the table, setting out the meal and preparing for the nuns’ dinner … Marc Chagall had made a mosaic, Le Repas des Anges, the meal of the angels, in a tiny chapel in Haute-Provence. Duncan would take her to see it, the chapel and its garden. Another of his offerings of Europe.

  In the centre of the chapel was a glass case in which lay the fully clothed body of a very small nun. Jocelyn took a breath and stared in at St Roseline.

  Roseline’s habit was white and new-looking. Her flesh, if that was what it could be called, blackened and paper-thin. The body was tiny, more the size of a ten-year-old than a woman, and the feet protruding from the long skirt were misshapen and flipper-like. A typewritten notice next to the case said that the body of St Roseline had been exhumed 200 years after her burial, and to the astonishment of all, was almost perfectly preserved – especially the eyes, which were as lifelike as the day she died.

  Louis XIV had heard the crazed legend about a dead woman’s eyes and sent his physician to ascertain the truth, to see whether these were indeed the real eyes of a cadaver. In his zeal the physician pierced the left eye with a stilette. He was convinced, but the eye lost its brilliance from that moment.

  The creature’s eyelids were closed now. The teeth protruded. Duncan nudged her, ‘Come and see the remaining eye.’ At the far end of the chapel in a gold reliquary was a coin-sized faded ball, under glass.

  The week before, in that square in Arles, Duncan had asked her to marry him. The square had begun to blur, and she’d closed her eyes, but saw only Martin’s face. She had felt suddenly dead tired, wished for nothing but to lie down on the stones and sleep. And then she knew that if she did, Duncan would sit by her on the cobblestones until she woke. She had opened her eyes, and felt her mouth smile, and heard her voice. ‘Yes.’

  Now at Chagall’s mosaic, with its dusty angels floating above a table set with flowers and fruit, Jocelyn could not concentrate, kept thinking of the stilette and the eyeball; of the taking apart of Roseline’s body. Making a saint out of a girl who only fainted into sleep on flagstones.

  In the cloister garden of an abandoned abbey, drinking tea from a thermos, Duncan had told her about the tradition of the cloister, the enclosed courtyard from Roman times. From where they sat the view was framed and dissected by the stone columns. In the centre was nothing but the bones of a collapsed box hedge, and the only view beyond was sky. The circular path for walking and prayer and contemplation. Around and around, Duncan had said, just the sky and the stone and your god.

  Now, here, nothing in her garden is as it seems. She observes the spaces all through the day, and yet each day she finds she has been tricked. She has her designs, her drawings, wants to move through them like a reader through a book. But once outside, in among the weeds and the soil and the air, she’s undone by the very earth; the angle of the rise is different from her measurements, or a marshy spot appears out of nowhere.

  Or, as today, the soil is not soil, but three inches down turns to solid stone struck by her frail spade. She’d need a jackhammer at least to dig here. So the bed takes a different turn, following the contour of this plate of stone, now revealed by the spade to take up half the space she had allotted for the bed. Each afternoon the drawing from the day before is redrawn. The bulb of rock now needs something to balance it in the opposite corner. So she cuts a path, in an echo of its curve, plants it with the pennesetum grasses, their ball-gown skirts and long dusky flowers on bowed stalks yet another repeat of the arc.

  Each time she sets out with a plan the space rejects it, pushing her elsewhere. And each time she must wait for the meaning to uncover itself. She begins to feel that working here is a kind of apprenticeship, some mastery only possible to learn by doing, allowing herself to be led by the place and some formless faith.

  She looks down on the cloister every morning as she dresses. A divided square, half-yellow with morning sun, half-shadowed. At its centre one diseased and leggy rose, a sunken path of stone, a mat of tangled weeds. In the evenings she sits on a bench by the kitchen door, staring at this space without seeing, her head full of jobs for the next day ahead. To dig over the fourth bed in the physic garden out behind the infirmary. Collect the truckload of manure from the neighbouring property’s cattle yards. In her bed at night she hears the desperate moans of the cows newly separated from their calves.

  She stands, leaves the cloister for the kitchen to make some dinner. The vegetable garden has grown into a place of quick victories. At first it was constantly ransacked by the possums, wallabies, foxes, rabbits, birds, but the new fence, set two feet beneath the ground and taller than she is, now tends to keep most of them at bay.

  She takes her plate of food back outside, this time to the front stairs, and sits to watch the sun fall behind the ridge, in that half-hour of yellow and pinking sky before dark. Across the old dried-out lawns she can see galahs nibbling the grass, and then the dark swatch of the dam, and sometimes in the distance again the line of grazing kangaroos, those moving fence posts in the gloom.

  She begins planting flowers for the sacristan’s cutting garden, that gentlest part of monastic life abandoned here in the raw country. Along the fence line she plants melaleuca, and myrtle, and willow-leaf hakea. And falling into sleep she thinks of flannel flowers and orchid and grevillea and the native birdflower, and the purple climbing tassel flower, and of Eden.

  Underneath her sleep always it is her own old Eden that shadows the edges of this grand plan, rising into consciousness, sinking away, shifting and reshaping.

  Thirty-Four

  IN GRANADA JOCELYN sat drinking her coffee and watching the early market unfolding around them. The butcher slapping lumps of pork and beef into trays, and the cured meats, the strong Iberian ham. Next to him the fruit boy reading a comic behind his stacks of apples. Across from there the fishmonger, filling trays with silver fish that caught the light.

  Duncan was still giving her his Europe, but everywhere she was reminded of Martin.

  At the Alhambra she and Duncan had strolled the gardens of the summer palace. These gardens were all hard surfaces and straight lines, the planting all symmetry and knife-edges, but against the hardness, everywhere, was water. Shallow, low-moving and quiet, channels of it running along the sides of footpaths, cut in steps through staircases, sliding down the tunnelled-out centre of stone banisters. Or spraying in delicate arcs over the absolute stillness of the deep rectangular pools. Until now she had never thought about the functions of water in this way, its life, the pulse it gave to stone and symmetry.

  Afterwards they climbed from the ga
rdens, up the winding staircase in the dark with the other tourists. The only light came from occasional vertical strip-holes in the plastered stone. Then Jocelyn was cold at the top of the parapet, looking away towards the snow on the mountains. Far below them the city spread whitely. She understood oasis now, the idea of green in a pale desert. Duncan was at the other side of the parapet in the shade, watching down through an ancient, intricately serrated Moorish arch at the tiny buildings of Granada. At the next frilled window space, a boy about eight years old leaned out over the stone of the window’s sill. It came up to his waist, and he stretched out over it. His mother began to walk towards him, quiet but nervous, watching her son silhouetted against the white hill and the pale sky, framed in the window. The boy glanced back at her, saw her anxiety, and then purposely stood on his toes, leaning at the wall with his lips. The stone city dizzying so far below. He pushed himself still forward, angled, tilting, inching his hips further out over the parapet. Jocelyn’s mouth dried. The boy’s mother called out to him, her voice strained. Duncan moved closer, Jocelyn saw, close enough perhaps to make a clutch at a trouser leg, watching the boy’s toes now only just touching the dusty ground. She imagined the child’s view, all that swinging sky and white stone. The mother called out again, but now she seemed rooted to the ground, her black shoes on the pale stone, the pleats of her navy skirt shifting a little in a slow-motion breeze. Her face was white.

  Then the boy suddenly thrust his hips and lurched himself forward – Oh God, Jocelyn heard her own voice.

  The moment swayed, nauseating.

  The boy flipped violently backwards, landing with a stumble on the stone floor.

  He looked around, grinned at Duncan, then Jocelyn, and around at the other tourists who did not see him. It had all happened in the space of several slow seconds.