The Scent of Eucalyptus
Barbara Hanrahan, artist and novelist, was fifty-two years of age when she died in 1991. She studied at the Central School of Art in London during the sixties, and for many years divided her time between London and Adelaide, the city where she grew up and where many of her novels are set. She has had many one-woman exhibitions and her art is held in the Australian National Gallery as well as most state galleries. The Scent of Eucalyptus, her first book, was published in 1973. Her last book, Michael and Me and the Sun, was published in 1992. She is the author of fifteen books, including two collections of stories and the novels The Albatross Muff (1977), Where the Queens all Strayed (1978), The Peach Groves (1979), The Frangipani Gardens (1980), Annie Magdalene (1985), Flawless Jade (1989) and Good Night, Mr Moon (1992).
OTHER BOOKS BY BARBARA HANRAHAN
Sea-green
The Albatross Muff
Where the Queens all Strayed
The Peach Groves
The Frangipani Gardens
Dove
Kewpie Doll
Annie Magdalene
Dream People
A Chelsea Girl
Flawless Jade
Good Night, Mr Moon
Iris in Her Garden
Michael and Me and the Sun
To
IRIS PEARL GOODRIDGE
See with what simplicity
This Nymph begins her golden days!
In the green Grass she loves to lie,
And there with her fair Aspect tames
The Wilder flow’rs, and gives them names:
But only with the Roses plays;
And them does tell
What Colour best becomes them, and what Smell.
Andrew Marvell
ONE
My mother hedged about my birth: said she found me in a rose. And I believed her — saw myself pink and perfect as a rubber dolly, added some modest gauze, even a little crown. Of course I went too far — tried to make it perfect; cheated with shears and a criss-cross net — no thorns or suckers, gall or fly or chafer.
My mother lied — that rose-birth wasn’t true. I was born the same as any other. Stripped of any past pretensions to wisdom, I entered the world; lay naked before strangers who meant nothing to me, but to whom I, by my very helplessness, meant a lot.
I was offered as a sop to strangers — a sop for hoarded (but unacknowledged) disappointments. I was a prize, presented on an off-chance, that for an instant deceived — tricked them into thinking that real life bore some resemblance to the thing they thought was life: a wan pretence fabricated by newspapers and politicians; made safe by shops that sold lounge suites and latest season’s costumes on hire-purchase, bearable by wireless jingles and long-range forecasts.
That paltry thing they were offered bound insidiously — in a moment that became all future time. It fastened closely — yet never completely. It erased with cheap comforts the original world — yet never entirely. In the end it dissolved — but always too late. They were left free when there was nothing to be free for; bled so empty there was nothing left them, but to dissolve as well.
I was born in Adelaide in September, with a birthmark on my neck and an excitement mark on my left cheek. The birthmark was arrested, and faded to a pale snarl. The excitement mark was more wily, escaped detection, and was left to flicker on and off — a perpetual warning of something yet to come.
I had a father, but he died. Three months after that I was in a hospital too. I tricked them — lived; came home to five.
Three of them were important — graved themselves for ever. Two became objects on a mantelpiece.
My great-grandfather left a bell that he rang in a last illness — a bell of brass rimmed with fruit like apples, and leaves the poet called acanthus. He left a purse that opened to reveal empty pockets and a silver clasp, a compass with a querulous face, a china inkwell painted with a China-rose, a penknife. And a photograph of himself sitting in the sun, and a name — I called him Little White Puppy, because of his hair — because I couldn’t say ‘Papa’.
My great-grandmother betrayed herself with less: a bleached cameo carved with someone who could have been her, a tray-cloth sprigged with iron-mould and satin-stitch poppies, a photograph of herself with spectacles, stockings in folds, slippers with pompons.
(How is it that the bell, the purse, the compass, the inkwell, the knife and cameo and tray-cloth should live on? Why is it that their owners should be preserved so perfect in their endings on the green album page — like odourless flowers from an ancient wedding, a dead favourite’s curl, butterflies behind glass, silver-paper pictures: he, in the sun; she, in blank spectacles before sweet peas? And how did a baker become just a bell? Why the spinster an iron-mould speck? Once he was twenty-seven and had a name — George Henry Nobes, and he married her, and she was Elizabeth Davis — his Stella, his Beatrice, his Lesbia. And she was twenty-one, and it was 1889.)
My great-grandfather was born in Cornwall — came to Australia as a boy in one of the last sailing-ships; as an old man signed his name in the register under the gumtree at Glenelg. My great-grandfather was a baker who was too generous: gave countless Depression loaves on credit, went into liquidation. Always helpful, he ushered in his end: held the gate for them when they came to put out the fire in the shed — the ladder hit him on the head, and he died at eighty-four.
My great-grandmother, that Stella of the speckled mould, was born at Houghton in the Adelaide Hills. Her father was an adventurer who died seeking El Dorado at Alice Springs. Her mother was Welsh. She had three sisters and a brother: Poll and Mill and Annie and Jack. Some of them were people I knew.
There was a sepia picture of Poll with an ostrich feather bonnet and a studio palm-tree. I remembered her in a simpler setting — visiting us from the hills, a shrunken lady, her sisters dead, bringing country eggs and honey with a comb. I walked down the path with her and she pulled up my sock by the agapanthus — and there was lovely warmth I didn’t know was sensual, and I felt dizzy.
Poll married Will from the jam factory. They lived at Houghton in a house with a balcony and the scent of eucalyptus all about. I saw a spaniel and a lavatory starred with ash and a centipede surprised me from a tree. I saw Jack, who was a bachelor I had to kiss, and a little strange, but harmless — just toy tanks in a bedroom. Mill was a brittle ghost who got engaged but broke it off and straddled a Colombo rickshaw. Annie was but a name. Elizabeth was my great-grandmother.
She went, vanished utterly — leaving behind four children that do not exist.
Once I clasped the creased fingers of one of them and walked to a cemetery. We crossed a railway line and tramped on parklands between cows. Murmuring voices, flickers of pink from the willows meant lovers were about.
I wanted to stop, but she pulled me on to a strange landscape where Jesus and all His angels and the Lamb of God faced convolvulus and waist-high grass. The fight was almost over — but the lovely angel smiled, flourished her Turk’s-cap lily. And there were rusting tin leaves and china garlands and glassy domes.
When we reached the baker and his Stella, they were further from us than ever. There were no eyes to see, no ears to hear, not even a mouth — just silence, and the child who was my grandmother looked sad. We turned away (she couldn’t look sad for ever), and marched on past the dead tended with watering-cans and lonely fingers. And there was another plot and other sterile hopes and expectations. But it hurt more this time, for it was my father. And we celebrated him with loose-petalled roses. And the poet that lived on dangerously said things about heedless marble.
I stood before the slab that bore his name — and it was my name. I gazed at the letters and they were grimed with dirt (the railway was very near). The willows were too — and was he ever a lover, ever my father? But I swept away abstraction — made it bearable and related him to me. For by being my father he lived a life — didn’t he? He did that anyway — didn’t he? But died.
And the uneasy poet quoted raindrops and milky skies — for it was September then, when I was born. An Australian September — therefore the spring. And the poet let him have it too. For the rains and skies were there for him as well — one year later at his death.
TWO
As a child and ever after, the minute, hidden facets of things intrigued me. I was for ever walking with my head bent, looking at the ground. I saw an ant picking its way across the earth, the moss at the base of the wall, the wings of the bee in the hyssop. I watched the shadow-play the rose leaves made on the fence. I saw the ant run under a leaf, over a stone, past seed-pods into a hole. I peered into the clipped stems of the valerian and saw greenness. I saw bulbs slit by greener spears. I saw the red geranium turn black and clenched dots turned mauve and into lilacs. And the ant came out of its hole, clambered over a pebble, a needle of grass — was lost amongst the ivy.
I came inside, and found the dust that lay under the mat, the stale hair in the brush, the soap’s awful underside like a sweating sore. I watched a shadow garden of pot-plants bloom on the wall, the bubbles that danced in the saucepan. I saw the pleated linings of mushrooms, tomatoes ruffled by stars, carrots hung with tassels. I forgot the mould that flecked the lemon, maggots in the bin, dead flowers that smelt of ponds.
I came closer to the three who were important: to the grandmother, and saw the hair in her nostril, the dirt between her toes, dye spots in her scalp; to the great-aunt, and her parting was thick with scurf, she had wax-buds in her ear, a sour handkerchief up her sleeve. And my mother tried not to cry: face all crumpled, eyes gone blurry, ugly mouth square. I watched unmoved.
My grandmother was rooted in her garden, with cheeks ripped by thorns, mud-bruised legs, skirts always caught on a brier. The great-aunt reigned in the house: she flapped her arms and bread-crumbs and the tablecloth cut the air; she hurled knives and the apostle spoons to a silver streak. The mother tended us all: with snail-curls and lavender setting-lotion, and a needle flying on over endless wefts and warps — on and on.
My mother was elusive. I did not possess her. The grandmother and great-aunt were always there, but when I awoke she was gone: came home with the street lights, and then I didn’t know her. I met a stranger at the tram stop, and I couldn’t kiss her cheek. She wasn’t the same. Not my mother: smiling through a veil of spots and smelling like violets, with hair made Hot Chestnut, and eyes gone little with black, and a coral smile. Her heels were high, her leather toes so pointed, and she pounced in a fox-trimmed coat. (I wanted her as the other, when I felt her up against me in the bed and saw her face all small without the make-up, and shiny from dry-skin cream. And I saw the dots she let me squeeze beside her mouth, and knew the mole was there upon her back, but hidden by the nightie. She almost had no breasts, they were so small, and she was ashamed, and when the other person went out they were stuffed with handkerchiefs — I watched her put them in. Her hair was so fine she put it up every night, and under the net were rows of bobby-pin curls. I could even see a bit of pale scalp, and that made it better — she was even more mine. She was gentle like a Chinese or a quiet mouse.) When she put on the Hot Chestnut and the waves and the tortoise-shell combs and the side-bow when it came in fashion, it was different. She was almost like a princess — someone else’s mother, and I did not know her then.
For reasons I could not comprehend the princess slept beside me in the brass bed and led me to the lavatory at night. She was my mother. I linked her with the Little Mermaid and the Snow Queen. Strange ladies in trams compared her to Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind, or said the pair of us resembled the Duchess of Kent and dear little Princess Alex.
My mother was complicated. She had personalities nesting one inside the other like Chinese boxes. She hid her innate romanticism and its attendant vices — timidity, tremulousness, sensitivity — under the swathes of her veil; stamped them with her heels, smothered them in her fox-trimmed coat. But still they flourished — sliced her onion disguise.
At fourteen she put away the navy tunic, the blazer, the striped tie and left the school where she learned to say ‘Bonjour, monsieur,’ and ‘Comprenez-vous français?’ and wrote the prize-winning essay bound in grosgrain ribbon. It was the Depression, and she began work at a hairdresser’s in the Arcade, answering the telephone for two shillings and sixpence. A few weeks later she showed the Staff Manager at one of the big Rundle Street stores the drawings she had made. She became an artist.
By day she drew cork-soled sandals, tiger-striped lounge suites, wirelesses like Aztec temples. At night she became Rambling Rose and competed with the Tommy Tadpoles, Broom Witches, Star Maidens, and Happy Jacks of Adelaide for lilac, blue, and pink certificates for stories and poems and drawings in the Sunday Mail’s Children’s Page.
She grew older. She sewed puff-sleeved peasant blouses, monogrammed chiffon and feather-bordered scarves. She had a favourite evening frock with a fishtail train and décolleté back. Her hem was weighed down with pennies; she tucked handkerchiefs inside her front. She read Ella Wheeler Wilcox, collected for her Glory Box, bought coffee-coloured underwear, pinned a gardenia to her wrist at tea-dances.
She met my father at a dance in the King’s Ballroom. His name was Maurice, but they called him Bob. He looked like Tyrone Power. He looked charming, and he was — ‘But moody,’ they said. Different from the others, he was a gentleman — pronounced cock: ‘coh’. He read a newspaper in a corner all night; watched her; took her home.
They were married at Holy Trinity on North Terrace, just past the railway bridge.
For a while they lived with Grandfather Hanrahan in Dew Street. But he got drunk; accused my mother of steaming his letters. He locked the letter-box and my mother pried with a pin: broke it. There was a row and they left.
My mother longed for security. My father strained from the tameness of marriage — from the sameness and mediocrity of the machine-shop at Holdens.
While she was giving birth to me at St. Ives, he found the thirty pounds she had hidden in the wardrobe to pay the bill: took it, and bought drinks for Jock Beresford and Fred Juncken and all the others whose names are forgotten. He got drunk and wrecked a billiard saloon; she had to pay for the damage and see the Sergeant at the Thebarton Police Station. He carried me into the bar of the Hotel Gambier in Light Square, and she found us there — him: the bookmaker, with her navy bag round his neck, taking bets on me: the prize. He told my grandmother at her own front door that she was no plum. ‘It all comes from marrying a Catholic,’ they said.