The Midnight Dress(28)

Florence was badly disoriented by the train trip. She had been so long in that little back room that she was disturbed by all the vast and empty spaces; the moon riding beside her window; the appearance and disappearance of small wild towns, knocked together, barely standing; the rivers, huge and sandy and half-empty.

Her knees nearly clean gave way at the grand entrance to the house, where the floor was inlaid with golden birds. The dark furniture crowded, everywhere mirrors reflected her, and a carpet of flowers danced beneath her feet. Gold thread, acres of it, was stitched into everything. There was a coat stand with a brass lion’s head, even though no one wore coats.

Up north everyone was half-dressed. No one buttoned up their shirts, men didn’t wear jackets, even the towns were half-clothed: canvas where shop front walls should be, no tar on the roads, planks erected over mud puddles. Lillian Baker herself sat in the high-backed lilac-covered chair in the corner of the kitchen in just her petticoat and silk dressing gown, angrily waving a bamboo fan.

No, there was no large wedding. Florence wore a simple dress she’d made herself: ivory silk crepe, hand-tatted lace, but very plain. She wore no veil. It was a tea-gown really, that’s what you would call it if you saw it now.

Lillian Baker never forgave my mother with her brown-spotted face and her calm quiet ways. When she spoke it was to admonish her. What had she arranged for the evening meal? Well, no wonder Jonathan was just skin and bones. How had she got to be twenty-three, yes, twenty-three, and not know the first thing about keeping a house, how to keep it clean, how to keep down the insects, how to keep track of the silver – she should be counting it or having the head girl count it at the least – and knowing which bedrooms should be turned out and on which day, the mattresses beat and the pillows hung out in the sun? Just look at the picture frames, they were dull as ditch water. Florence should be supervising such things but instead she just didn’t seem to notice.

‘You’ve got your head in the clouds,’ said Lillian Baker. ‘And look at your hair, you don’t wear it with so much as a single curl. You look like a girl just out of boarding school.’

Now all Florence knew of the outside world was Enoggera. She had imagined the North might be much the same, only perhaps a little larger. There would be the forest, which Jonathan had described to her in detail: very green and tranquil and she’d be able to look out over fields dotted with cattle. But it was not like this at all. The land he took her to was close. It breathed right up against her skin. The cane was taller than two men and all night long it sighed in susurrations, she couldn’t walk without her feet being swallowed up in mud, everything clung, everything was damp, it rained and rained and when it didn’t rain her hands swelled in the heat. The mountain was not tranquil, it leant and twisted and was wild.

‘And why are you always disappearing, the two of you, like children, when now you have a house and land to run?’ was what Lillian Baker shouted from her lilac-covered chair.

At every opportunity Jonathan took Florence’s hand and guided her across the house yard, across the back paddock, toward the place he called the hill. She tucked up her skirt and followed him.

‘You mustn’t be afraid,’ he said.

He showed her the track that starts in the open scrub right beside the fence, and leads all the way to the gully and the first of the strangler figs. He helped her over the rocks, the roots, down into the gully and back out again by the rock that’s shaped like a boat. There were steps there, not man-made steps, but a series of rocks seemingly placed by the mountain itself. He taught her how to look for the stand of ancient rose gums when the track disappeared. Oh, the skin of those trees. He taught her how she must listen for the falls.

He took a fallen sassafras flower and placed it behind her ear.

The house, it was not really a house, a cabin, a hut you might call it, but still their place among the trees. He had built during the dry, all the while writing to her to describe his progress. The place was cut from one single turpentine, put up roughly, it was true, and in time it turned a greyish colour. He made it the way the settlers had made their first homes: dovetail joints, laying bark against the uprights, leaving spaces for windows. These windows he later fitted with coloured casements from beneath the old house, amber, pink, green, blue. The first roof was made of fern leaves, but later he dragged up iron, one piece at a time. You could say it was a labour of love. It always leant a little.

They lay there together in that hut, Rose. Florence watched the sky above the falls while he unbound her hair. He recited poems, the well-known ones, and some of his own. He shouted at the edge of the gorge, shouted over the roar of the water, LOVE, LOVE, LOVE, to make her laugh. Then evening came and they would have to make the climb back down. They would tumble into the kitchen, breathless, glowing, face-to-face with Lillian Baker scowling in her corner and the tea ruined on the table.

‘Fools,’ she said to them one night, when they arrived home in the twilight. ‘You up there traipsing about like gypsies when down here the war has come.’

‘War?’ said Jonathan.

He picked up the newspaper from the table, fire-vine flowers raining from his shirtsleeves, and in less than a month he would be gone.

Rose cuts the pattern as Edie makes it. The old woman marks the paper – certain lines, arrows, a circle, letters, her very own hieroglyphics – across the face of a man walking on the moon, the prime minister Harold Holt lost at sea. When all the pieces are cut, Rose looks at the pile and bites her bottom lip. She has no idea how it will all fit together.