Eucalyptus (9 page)

At least that's what he thought he saw. On the bench he'd been thinking his years were measured in strokes of trees, and some were angled, a few stunted. The intervals were rhythmic, almost musical. His history was stuffed with trees. Now he was staring at the solitary
E. gunnii
which by rights should have been a
maculata
.

He was half-deciding whether to get up and take another look or merely wander away, for it was time, when a young gardener appeared. He lowered his wheelbarrow and in full view thrust his arm up to his elbow into the vagina-slit of the Cider Gum—something he wouldn't want to try in Australia. Mr Cave watched as he opened the envelope. Shoving it in his back pocket he immediately took it out again. With a sigh he looked around smiling, when he noticed Cave.

The private scene in two parts Mr Cave had witnessed would stay with him for the rest of his life. It was perhaps prompted by the surrounding green, brighter than any lawn. The shadows formed spikes and lattice. They were unusually dark. And the necessary eagerness, first of the woman, which then activated the eagerness of the younger gardener. The man's muddy boots. The interval between their actions; the difference in their years. Pink patterned scarf.

And, for all that, not knowing what was written on the note, who they were; the open-endedness of it all, like the late afternoon itself.

Not long after that Mr Cave decided in his deliberate way he would win the hand of Holland's speckled daughter.

• 7 •
Regnans

‘
TALL TIMBER
'—a term used locally by the Sprunt sisters in unison to render male flesh abstract. Seated on the sofa reserved for suitors, Mr Cave protruded from a bed of blushing roses, shoulders almost coming up to Ellen's. It is hard to imagine a more unsuitable name than Cave for someone so straight and tall. Accordingly, people forgot about his first name, Roy, and tacked on Mister in front. ‘Cave' implies the horizontal, whereas this man was vertical—a telegraph pole fashioned from a tree.

What interested Ellen was his hair. At first she thought it was as black as a crow. Then she remembered the pair of shoes she'd liked in Sydney, small and glossy blue-black, parted like Mr Cave's hair to one side, which is why she looked upon him favourably.

He was almost old enough to be Ellen's father; yet where her father's face had become a reddish terrain of boulders, ravines, flood plains and spinifex, Mr Cave's face was magically smooth. It didn't generate any lines, not even when he talked. The black hair can be set in context: apparently it was part and parcel, a healthy by-product, of self-possession. The only lines on his person came from the crisp safari suit, a khaki construct of paramilitary lines, like a jacket sketched in pencil, pointing up to his face where, except for his carefully combed part, there were no lines.

Those vertical lines from the unfortunate safari suit helped make him appear taller than he actually was.

Talking to Mr Cave, Holland nodded more than usual; at the same time he offered a grain of patience—unusual for him—which grew into a canny watchfulness. It wasn't that Holland was showing respect; hardly. In the world of eucalypts everyone knew about Mr Cave, but then they knew all about Holland and his trees too.

In Mr Cave's Adelaide, the distinction between city and country, as proposed by the Greeks, was blurred. The country penetrates the city almost to the town hall steps, depositing gum trees on the way, along with vast rectangles of dry grass. As a consequence, Adelaide people may be said to possess a certain physical clarity of country people, at the same time a blurriness within and careful faces from crossing daily the boundaries between city and country, and back again.

Meanwhile, Ellen wanted to reach out and touch the blackness of Mr Cave's hair. So much so she had to hold back a laugh.

‘How are your teeth?' her father shouted. ‘Try one of my daughter's rock-cakes!'

Food as a therapeutic offering between strangers has never been satisfactorily explained. Here is an ordinary-looking action which goes far deeper than mere hospitality. By producing food and presenting in full view a portion to a stranger, a woman is offering an extension of herself; it can be enjoyed, but is not flesh. All he, the stranger, is allowed is a morsel representing the woman. A fragment is all. She remains the giver, but at one remove.

This use of food as a medium—giving while denying—and without a bitter aftertaste—has harsh origins, rather obviously among the nomads. Food as an interceptor, as a
deflector
! It may be said to continue to this day as a protection in married life.

And Mr Cave was now demonstrating the deeply held process by accepting one of Ellen's slightly burnt rock-cakes matter-of-factly, not quite acknowledging her, like the peevish date-eaters of
Arabia deserta
. Then removing any crumbs from his creases and pleats he placed them one by one on his tongue.

‘I'm nothing more than an amateur,' Holland reminded their visitor. ‘And an amateurish one at that.'

They were talking about others in their field.

‘Did you ever come across…' Mr Cave began click-clicking his ballpoint—the frustration. ‘His name was, what's his name? It was the name of an English town.'

Ellen smiled. She liked him for saying that.

Straining to remember the surname of the man whose specialty was said to be the Northern Territory species her father screwed his face up like a dog while, equally determined, their black-haired visitor sat still, his face smooth in concentration more like an elbow.

‘You don't mean Hungerford?'

‘No, he's in grapes. And this one passed away. A tractor rolled over him. You must have exchanged letters during your researches.'

‘I haven't kept up with the experts for years,' said Holland. ‘Once I got this place up and running I didn't need any experts.' Holland gave a laugh. ‘These days they're more inclined to make contact with me, I'm now the receiver of letters. I've had them writing to me from overseas as if I have all the answers.'

It was after ten-thirty and Mr Cave hadn't made a move. He showed no sign of nerves. On the verandah he stretched his long legs out on one of the planters' chairs. Without yet bothering to identify a single tree he already was making it look easy.

Ellen couldn't remember the last time her father had talked to anyone on the verandah for more than three minutes, aside from herself. ‘I'm the encyclopaedia around here!' he once said in a kind of triumphant good humour. Her father was a man who didn't have any close friends, she noticed. Yet there he was leaning against the verandah post, a reminder to Ellen that she would always associate cigarette smoke with him and the texture of his clothing.

Mr Cave was smoking too.

‘Eucalypts dominate the streetscapes of Adelaide, more than any other city. The things are everywhere.' (A sure sign of confidence: to call eucalypts ‘things'.) ‘We had a
fasciculosa
and a
cosmophylla
growing in the backyard, the next-door neighbours had the finest Candlebark Gum you'd ever be likely to see, and there was a quite outstanding
megacarpa
on the footpath. You see what I'm saying? At school we were taught to recognise different timbers by their grain, and we'd be hit and hit hard with a polished wooden ruler if we missed one. I had the methodical mind drummed into me. At school, to fill in time, did you chuck gumnuts at each other? There were eucalypts in the school yard;
cladocalyx
, if I'm not mistaken. We had eucalypts coming out of our ears.'

‘I don't know exactly what happened to me,' Holland said more or less in reply. ‘I came here and I planted one, then I planted another. Other parts of the property needed a tree. I kept going. At a certain point I had passed a threshold; I couldn't go back or leave the plantings as they were. By then the whole situation became…what do you say? An end in itself. Everything about eucalypts was interesting. Before the trees I didn't have a clue about anything much. The eucalypts gave me an interest.'

‘They grow on you,' Mr Cave went extra-passive at his joke. ‘Something else happened to me, I think this had a bearing.' He looked out over the trees. ‘My mother had subscription tickets to the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. Always the same two seats. Remember the way regulars used to have their names stencilled on church pews? And always sitting in front of us was a Miss Dora Heron, a woman in mauve, who never opened her mouth. To keep everybody's germs at bay she kept dabbing eucalyptus oil onto her hanky from a little jar throughout the concert, whatever was playing. Those seated around her, myself, my mother, couldn't escape the fumes. On top of everything else, no wonder eucalypts took a deep grip on me.' Mr Cave shifted in his seat. ‘Mind you, it's given me a life of sorts.' He began nodding. ‘Everything is a comparison,' he said for no apparent reason.

Ellen had been standing by the window. It was odd how two men repeatedly put down blocks of matter and left it at that. In tone and steadiness they were tarpaulined trucks with heavy loads, now and then changing down a gear, rather than light and sprightly birds, hopping from one bit of colour to another.

Mr Cave stood up. ‘Let's look at a few of these things of yours,' he said with ominous casualness.

And Holland let go of the bevelled verandah post as Mr Cave made his way over to the Black Peppermint which had snookered the town's part-time plumber, so commonplace to Roy Cave he hardly gave it a glance, then onto the Blue Gum which can be seen on the dry hills of Algeria, South Africa and California, and the Silvertop Stringybark by the gate which opened the long narrow paddock alongside the house, sloping up to the treeline. There, eucalypts were dotted about in apparent randomness, in every direction.

To Ellen, Mr Cave appeared to be strolling ahead with her father in tow—an optical illusion which increased over distance. So tall was the suitor that her father looked like an old jumps-jockey hurrying after the owner or trainer for instructions. In fact, Holland was giving the instructions as he ticked off each tree identified.

If a species presented any difficulty Mr Cave said, ‘What is it we have
here
?'

Otherwise, he sauntered, one paddock at a time, one tree followed by the next, methodical, very methodical. It was altogether shocking in its steadiness; he was always going forward. Continuing the display of relaxation he often paused between trees to talk about something entirely different.

By one-thirty he decided he was finished for the day.

Tall trees breed even taller stories. There was once a woman called Thistle. If a man touched her on any part his skin turned blue, a permanent blue, so people would see he had touched Thistle. One day Ellen would be told about a man in Scotland (Highlands?) who would never talk to anyone under six feet tall. Her father, not so long ago, had read out a story in the morning newspaper about a sixty-three-year-old woman in Brazil who had been X-rayed after complaining of stomach pains and was found to be carrying the skeleton of a foetus conceived outside her womb up to fifteen years earlier. Imagine a man on a property in western New South Wales setting out single-handedly to plant every known eucalypt, the property and the man's life transformed to that purpose. Ellen one day overheard the postmistress, ‘She made a necklace out of lavatory chains. She was very clever.' A man drowned himself in the River Murray at Mildura by weighing himself down with German dictionaries and German encyclopaedias. Another man, just retired, and not so long ago, swam the entire length of the Murray—from its source to its mouth—suffering severe cramps and getting snagged and sunburnt in the process, pleased in the end to have done something no one else had done, let alone (his words) ‘even dreamed of'. All the people in one small town—it would have to be Eastern Europe—were deaf, except one. What happened then was—‘According to my mother,' Ellen was told by the small woman in town, ‘I was conceived under a gum tree.' She had eyes set close to her nose like glove buttons. In Iceland a young man leaving home for America spent the night before his departure counting all the wrinkles on his grandmother's face. Do you believe in ghosts? There was the story of the brave woman who put on secret trousers and became a ‘man' for an hour. Stories of everlasting depth are told at night. What about the lady who saved the town of Coventry by riding through the streets naked on a white horse? It has to be a story because the horse is white. Man falls in love with a
river
. Young man in perfect health spends a night with a woman and leaves a tooth behind.

The tallest trees have the tiniest seeds. ‘Great oaks from little acorns grow.' Obviously the Europeans who produced that maxim could not have seen the larger eucalypts. A monarch such as
E. regnans
, which shakes the earth when it falls and provides enough timber to build a three-bedroom house, grows from a seed scarcely larger than the following full stop.

In the days when timber-workers in Victoria and Tasmania were photographed measuring the girth of gigantic trees it was subsequently announced—it was repeatedly trumpeted abroad, the way a film star's vital statistics were once made public—that
Eucalyptus regnans
, better known as Mountain Ash, was the tallest tree in the world, just as Salzburg is said to have the highest suicide rate in the world, surpassing anything the United States had to offer. After the most rigorous measurements possible were taken in the congested forests at least two Mountain Ash were found to be over 100 metres high; one reportedly came in at 140 metres.