Homesickness (15 page)

Out of decency Doug had invited the Kaddoks, but they weren't much help. As soon as a full view of the house had appeared Kaddok had rammed his tripod into the marshy lawn of the foreground and Gwen had to steer him along the paths which were overgrown. Already he had tripped over an ornate hitching post. Faint traces of a superb piece of English landscape gardening could still be perceived, like an old wreck in low tide.

It was Kaddok's idea to shoot the house from various angles and he kept chattering and tripping over the borders. ‘How many rooms would she have? Multi-windowed Georgian, I suppose?' Gwen shaded her eyes and searched.

‘Aye? Only one? That figures,' Kaddok told her; and as he reloaded and puff-cleaned the camera eye he rattled on about some medieval window tax, and how the nobles got around it by bricking up their windows. ‘The old aristocracy mightn't be as stupid as they look,' he shouted.

It hadn't been Doug's idea in the first place. Any old building, even the tallest and most revered cathedrals, left him cold: seen one, seen ‘em all. He'd clomped around them stone-faced. Nothing ever happened. They were old walls. It was an obligation though. He'd be the first to admit, if you were in England you had to see them. For one thing you'd get people asking back home. It was the first thing they asked.

He checked the guidebook. It was recommended all right, there in black-and-white.

Around the back they wandered among a collection of baroque bird baths and solariums, randomly placed—there must have been a hundred or more—and wild roses roughly the size of prize cabbages (Chelsea Flower Show, '27), arbours, and false gates frozen on oxidised hinges, slatted wooden garden seats, and stone benches stippled with moss held layers of rotting leaves. Overall it was distinguished and calm. The ground was soft underfoot, mulch and moss. Doug kept sinking into heaps of dead leaves. Towards the bottom of this garden they heard voices, and as they ducked under a tilting pergola, Mrs Cathcart who had good eyesight squeezed Doug's arm. The length of a cricket pitch away, no more, a party of nudists played badminton and leapfrog. Others sat in deckchairs or played draughts alongside a graciously stagnant pool—the ornamental cherub in the middle spat out green fluid as if it was being sick. The nudists mostly late in years were red-faced, heavy in frame, and seemed to be quite oblivious of the politics of the world. Doug had lifted his binoculars but was pulled sharply back—yanked—by his wife, and they beat a retreat back to London, she holding an expression even more grim and determined.

Yet they were curiously satisfied. Even this had been an experience. It was something to tell people about; that was the thing about travel.

At the hotel Violet had gone out somewhere with Sasha and by late afternoon had not returned. Putting the cigarette in his mouth, balancing four Brandy 'n Dry cans in his big hands, Garry managed to knock on door number
XIV
. He walked straight in.

‘How's it going, Sheila? Good on you. Say, this is a view-and-a-half you've got here.' He moved back from the window and ripped open one of the cans. ‘Where do you keep the glasses?' He cleared a space on the bedside table. ‘That was a real bombshell the other day, eh? What do you reckon? Who would have thought we were'—pressing his stomach with his hand he gave a belch—‘related? That's what I call a real bloody coincidence.'

Blinking, bumping into the edges of things, Sheila didn't know where to sit, let alone where to look or what to say. Now he leaned back on both elbows, daks bulging at the balls. The first four buttons of his shirt were undone: a canyon, Simpson Desert in colour. She could only balance at the other end near the pillow. These rooms were small. She wore no shoes.

He raised his glass.

‘Yep, I got the shock of my life.'

‘I was surprised,' Sheila admitted, distant. ‘It is an interesting little snippet, isn't it?'

He slapped his chest.

‘The odds must have been a thousand to one. It's something to write home about.'

‘Oh, I have,' Sheila said.

‘Yeah, I'm a sucker for postcards,' Garry said. He sat up to pour another two drinks. ‘Jesus, Sheila! Hang on a sec. You've got thousands of the buggers here. You're not intending to send all them?'

For added effect he held his mouth open and bulged his eyes. Sheila couldn't help smiling. Here she could tell someone about herself.

‘People have come to expect it of me. I'm always travelling. When there's no postcard I think they must begin to worry. And there are their little ones: the children like them.'

‘Always on the go? Come off it.'

‘No, I like to be moving. When I get back from this I'll join another tour. I have my eye on Persia next.'

‘You're kidding!'

‘I don't stay home much, not any more. My uncle calls me Perpetual Motion.'

Garry slapped his knee.

‘Ha, ha. That's a good one. He sounds a card.'

‘Uncle Milton,' Sheila frowned. ‘He is a card.'

Garry sat up. ‘How many times, frinstance, have you been here?'

‘England?'

Sheila shrugged.

It began to worry Garry. ‘But listen, you haven't told me why. I mean why are you always on the go?'

Days were brown and dry in the wooden house; the tin roof and windmill creaked together in the heat; floating kah-kah of the crows, close and far off; and in the distance, low hills, paddocks and shimmer,

‘I don't know, I must be used to it now; I prefer it. I like a group and mixing. There's the sights and the interesting people you meet. I like being with people.'

Her glass leaned as she looked at her ankles. Sheila had smooth straight legs.

‘That's right, your family are on the land.'

She nodded.

Suddenly Garry laughed. He shook his head. ‘I've known some funny sheilas in my time.'

‘Oh my uncle always says that.'

‘Ah we're related all right. No worries. Sheila. You're as nutty as a bloody fruitcake.'

Her shoulders gave a jump.

‘I don't know why I should tell you this.'

Moving beside her he slowly filled her glass.

‘We're celebrating. Drink up.'

And leaning across to casually stub out his cigarette his arm brushed against her. He kissed her cheek.

‘There,' he said kindly. He patted her knee. ‘Give us a look at you. Show me with the specs off. I'll see how related we look. Jeepers! That's incredible. Listen, I'm not kidding. Have you ever considered contact lenses? What's up?'

She seemed to be trembling.

But Atlas took her glasses. He looked round the room. ‘Jesus, these are like milk bottles.'

Sheila remained looking at the floor.

‘Get a load of this. They don't suit me, that's for sure.' Groping his way back, he called out: ‘Sheila?' (Silly bugger.) ‘Sheila, don't leave me. Sheila! You're hiding,' he whined. ‘Where are you?'

As he advanced like Leon Kaddok she looked up ready to smile. She had decided. He deliberately bumped into a chair and tripped over the bed.

True: without the twin reflecting discs she was fresh-faced, long, a dish.

Now less than a yard away and squinting, hands outstretched and fluttering, a conductor asking for quiet, he whined again, ‘Sheila? You're hiding. Where are you?'

Her specs balanced on his nose: all for her. Crossing her legs she leaned back laughing.

Then he touched her, ‘Ahhhhhh!' and she let out a cry as his hands searched her shoulders, her arched throat, and as she fell back and squirmed, ran over her breasts, one at a time, slowing down, suddenly breaking a button.

‘Ah-haaaa! Got you…'

He sat down and took off the glasses.

Sheila returned to her embarrassed self, fidgeting next to him. She smoothed her skirt.

‘Hey, don't put ‘em back. You look all right like that. I told you you did. Anyway, that's what I think.'

‘I never know what,' Sheila confessed.

She went to the mirror and tried with glasses and without, turning her head left and right, and frowned. ‘It could be these frames…' But she suddenly turned: ‘Ugly face!'

But after studying the Tantric miniature above the bed Garry had reclined and picked up some of her postcards. At least a certain familiarity had grown between them.

Sheila had her glasses back on.

‘All the grog's gone?' he asked, though he already knew. He looked at his watch. ‘Christ, I should go.'

She was blinking so much Atlas almost missed the smile. He was moving fast anyway. ‘Eggs and bacon, gin and tonic—thick and thin. That's us, Sheil. What do you reckon?' At the door he gave her the brotherly slap: whack! Small out-of-the-way museums often contain a wealth of bits and pieces, bric-a-brac, well worth the detour. An amateur has happened upon some object, or the broad subject, and before long his nose develops into a classifying mania (that pale Dane with the
catalogue raisonné
of sardine tin labels; what's his name?). And sheds are tacked onto garages; annexes onto houses; disused warehouses, odeons and empty churches are seized and converted. The overwhelming desire is to be definitive, and to corner the subject. Even without achieving this, results can be impressive: a lifetime's work, one man's preoccupation, arrayed. It cannot be ignored. And what had seemed like junk in the early days in turn becomes valuable, sought after by others. Almost inevitably these collectors acquire an inflated idea of their collection's worth, a kind of blindness. A small town, a city, or the collector's distraught widow is ‘left' the entire collection and the attendant problems of housing, preservation, lighting, insurance and security, for these donors invariably insert the clause, ‘said items to remain intact, under the one roof, for the benefit of one and all' (the Patrick Hill collection, in New Orleans, of shovels and spades. There is a moustache museum in Prague). More often than not a poorly painted sign on the edge of a town points to these museums, and the custodian is a man without a tie, interrupted from his lunch or sleep.

In the guidebook, the Corrugated Iron Museum seemed like a colloquialism for the building itself, its shape, colour and size; and who could tell what interesting things were arranged inside? In fact, when at last they found it in the hinterland of east Yorkshire, it had the appearance of a familiar
shed
, low and long, traditionally unpainted, its roof and walls of galvanised iron. It stood astride a moor, both in silhouette: the moor like a grey sandhill a half mile back, and the single sick snow gum,
Eucalyptus pauciflora
, near the front doors, which were also of corrugated iron, seemed to have been planted there for shade; CLICK! Kaddok took that picture. Built appropriately from corrugated iron the one-and-a-half-million-dollar (
dollars
?) museum housed a superb collection of corrugated iron: history of, uses, abuses. Many items were steeped in unusual history or possessed special significance. Admission was by silver coin.

‘Mr Cecil Lang,' the spokesman explained, a young man in an open-necked shirt and straight-combed hair. ‘Mr Cecil Lang spent his early years in the goldfields of hum, Western Australia. Made his fortune; where, incidentally he became good friends with Herbert Hoover, there as an engineer.'

‘What, the American president?' Hofmann asked.

Kaddok of course knew. ‘He was in Kalgoorlie in the early 1900s.'

‘That's something,' Ken Hofmann told his wife. ‘I didn't know that.'

But Louisa, her arms folded, was glancing at Borelli.

‘Hoover was there twice,' Kaddok added, ‘for long periods.'

They stood at the end of a long room as functional and as atmospheric as a shearing shed. It had plain iron walls. On rough tables, scattered, as if waiting to be classified, various objects were illuminated by beams of natural light, and from a distance most of the things also appeared to be grey. A few other people were sauntering around the end tables.

The conductor waved his hand.

‘Cecil Lang was rather influenced by the hum, pioneering landscape down there. Out on the Nullarbor Plain, and so forth. Are you Australians? Then you would understand. He always said—you'll excuse me—it put muscles in his shit. Ha, ha. Yes, he said that.'

Glancing at Mrs Cathcart he reddened. He'd sunburn easily.

‘He was another Rhodes, a plain man but a dynamo personality. He created this Trust, a kind of monument, hum. The site he chose personally. It is slightly out of the way, perhaps inconvenient, but that is part of the point. It's like Australia. I'm his grandson.'

‘What's your name?'

‘Wayne.'

‘Go on, Wayne,' said Mrs Cathcart.

‘So, I say, what impressed Cecil Lang was the rough-and-ready, the getting of things done. Such a practical, plain life purged him. He was extremely impressed, terribly impressed. The museum is a memorial to that, ah hum, quality of life.'