Paper Daisies (5 page)

Ben

‘
B
loody savage! Get your hands off me!' Cos bellows, with not the slightest irony, drunk off his head, as I drag him up the steps of the club – to lock him in our room.

‘Mr Wilberry.' The doorman nods to me, unseeing as the doorman of the Sydney Union Club necessarily is. It's nothing to him that Mr Wilberry is wrestling Mr Thompson up the hall and up the stairs, for this is a gentlemen's establishment and I'm sure these walls and a long succession of doormen have seen far worse. But it's no less embarrassing to have this one witness this particular spectacle. It was probably him who received the messenger lad from the pub over at the Rocks, too, and had the butler quietly find me in the library downstairs, to whisper in my ear,
Mr Thompson is in need of your urgent assistance at the rear of the Australia Hotel, sir
,
the discreet means of informing me that I had better rescue Cos from the brothel located there – before he caused any more damage to that establishment, or to himself. He is that drunk. Well, he has been hard at it since lunchtime; didn't bother to wait for me to get back from making my enquiries at the university before getting stuck right in. He ordered a Bordeaux with his breakfast, apparently, and then took off.

It took me almost an hour to find him, down a back lane between Cumberland and Gloucester Streets. Although Cos and I spent six long years at school here in Parramatta, I don't know Sydney very well at all these days and I've never known its brothels, but the publican at the Australia was most helpful in directing me to where old matey was corralled in a little terrace down that lane, and when I got to him he was well into picking a fight with the police sergeant holding him there.
New South Welshman can't play cricket
,
he was slurring and swaying, and giving his best impersonation of
Homo idiotus.
Fortunately, the police sergeant, who'd been drinking at that same pub, was reasonably schnigged himself, and quite good humoured:
I'm sure he's a fine fella when he's himself but he's frightening the ladies – you gotta take him home
. Home is precisely where I should have left him, isn't it, and for good – for one day our names and my relative sobriety will not get us out of trouble.

‘Do you have to carry on the way you do?' I mutter to him pointlessly as I shove him in the door of our room. Couldn't stuff a pipe, let alone walk, though he's attempting both at the same time.

He falls onto the bed, my bed, spilling his tobacco pouch across it and moaning, ‘I'm bored, Wilby. You leave me alone all day. In Sydney. It stinks here.'

‘What, unlike you?' I shouldn't speak to him at all when he's in this state.

‘I want to go home,' he moans some more. ‘There are no women in this room. Where's Susie? I hate this place. I hate clubs. Savages!'

‘Shut up, Cos. Please,' I ask him, as pointlessly. And promise him: ‘I'll book you a passage home tomorrow – first thing.'

‘No! I'm not going back on that ship, God's bollocks, no, I am not,' he says, and before I can say
I'll see about booking you onto a saga of trains then
, he gives me his best old matey look, full of sincerity; pathos. ‘I won't leave you alone, Wilber. I don't want you to be lonely and sad. I love you.'

And I'm glad he does. When he's sober, I am glad he is here. Grateful. I don't know how I'd be faring without him.

‘Can you get me drink?' he asks, trying to prop himself up on an elbow; failing. ‘Just one more?'

‘No.' Prudent to leave him now; he'll talk himself to sleep. Eventually. He won't be so bad as this when we're on the road. Out of Sydney. When we head west after Christmas. Out into the fresh air. Countryside. Greater distance between pubs. Our train out to Bathurst can't come too soon; perhaps I'd better get us out of here quicker, though, find somewhere to stop in the mountains on the way through: restorative climate, and coral ferns, scribbly gums …

‘Please?'

I lock the door.

He shouts for the entire club to hear: ‘But I love you, Wilby!'

Someone chuckles from behind another closed door, calling out, ‘Half your luck!' and I return downstairs to the library, to the books and papers spread in disarray across the desk there, just as I left them – the records I've borrowed from the Wildflower Society, and the unexpected abundance of material from the elderly but enthusiastic curator at the Botanic Gardens. I should tidy it all up now, in consideration of the other guests.

I pick up the old and faded Wildflower Society illustration of
Xeranthemum coronoria
that
I was looking at before I was interrupted. Stare at it under the lamp as though it might show me something different from the last time I looked at it. It's not what I am looking for; it's not what Mama described. The bloom is possibly the right shape and formation, and its location is near enough, recorded as Canowindra-Cowra, somewhere in the central western districts of this colony, but its stipes are fleshy, its foliage glabrous, smooth and strappy, and it's the wrong colour – yellow and cream, and distinctly bicolour. It's definitely not red. It's been incorrectly named, too – it's not
coronoria
. It's most probably
bracteatum.
I could write a small narrative for it in the margin: ‘this specimen was discovered by an amateur botanist-solicitor, and fancifully sketched by his mistress one stolen week away in the woods'. Half the botanical record wouldn't be with us if not for enthusiasts such as them. But I doubt this one is even indigenous. It looks most like
a European strawflower, or a cultivar escaped from someone's garden bed
.
Or it doesn't exist at all.

Like red native daisies, perhaps: I've never heard of such a thing, apart from
bracteatum
cultivars, and even they are more orange than red. But then I've not seen much of central New South Wales, have I. Only Bathurst really, and only once, during school, rugby against St Stanislaus, midwinter, didn't know where I was …

Ben, go to bed yourself
, I hear Mama say, and with her voice comes that disorienting rush of grief.

I pour myself a port instead, my vision blurs, and I look into the bloom I'm not looking for again. Astounded that she is gone.

New Year's Eve

This world is the will to power—and nothing besides!

And you yourselves are also this will to power—and nothing besides!

Thus Spake Zarathustra

Berylda

T
he label on the bottle is so very slightly crooked. The label on this bottle of Jicky perfume. This little something splashy from Grace Brothers I had to buy for myself. This bottle of Sydney from some other elsewhere called the Rue de la Paix. This scent of away I had to have. The velvet box. The satin lining. It cost almost a pound. Nineteen shillings nine pence for a stupid, stinking bottle of –

A thud against the wall now, from my sister's room; my mirror shudders with it, and the bedsprings stop wheezing for a moment.

What is Uncle Alec doing to her in there? I think I might know, but I can't believe it. And yet I do. He is molesting Greta. He is raping my sister. I know little about sexual connexion; too little, apart from the anatomical mechanics of it lately gleaned from a book; suggestions of it strewn through a handful of metaphysical poems; boys sniggering at the back of the lecture hall, at Marvell, at Donne. I put it all together now, and I am paralysed. No, this can't be.

I keep staring at my bottle of Jicky. You'd think Monsieur Guerlain might have had his label stuck on with a little more care, for the price.

‘Please. No.' Greta's whisper slips under the door between us and the wheezing of the springs resumes.

My results came this morning, in the mail. One credit, in Literature, two distinctions, Latin and Physics, and I have won the Biology prize. Unexpectedly. I have exceeded my hopes. I am accepted into the School of Medicine:
one of twenty-five fortunate candidates
. I am congratulated by the board.
Is this why he attacks my sister now, in this way? Is this some sort of revenge?

I hear him grunt, again. Louder. Does he mean for me to hear him? Animal, rough, cruel. And there is something in Greta's small, quiet cry, something striving for stillness, that makes me hear also that this is not the first time he has done this to her.

Oh God.

What can I do? What must I do? I want to slam through this door between our rooms and into him, scratch his face to shreds for what he does. For every evil he has committed against us. And now this. Oh, my sister. But I cannot move. I am petrified. I am so frightened of him, of what he does here, and of my own confusion. I cannot quite absorb –

‘Right,' I hear Uncle Alec say now.
Right.
A favourite word of his, when he has made his point, and now, I can only suppose, a signifier that he has satisfactorily completed this degradation of my sister, this ultimate humiliation of all the humiliations he inflicts upon her.
Right.
It's half-question, as if he were a bored and weary country physician feigning interest in some persistent case of dyspeptic hypochondria, when he is in fact District Surgeon of Bathurst Hospital.

‘Be in the drawing room and presentable by seven thirty,' he commands her, raising his voice just enough to command this of me too. He is so sure that I am listening, I can hear the smile in his voice; I can see the sour moue of his lips. He murmurs something then about the Gebhardts, a chuckle with it, lightly snide: ‘Damnable Germans – always five minutes early for dinner. Mustn't be caught unready, must we?'

‘Hm.' Greta's assent is barely a whimper beneath the clip of his footsteps. I hear her snuffle and whimper again. He has hurt her; he so often does. But this hurt is the worst of them. I can hear it loudest of all: a soft groan as she moves, I imagine she is curling around it, onto her side. Why don't I rush through the door to her: why do I continue to wait? Staring into my pocket watch, its hands too quick and too slow and too gold across the blank white face. I am stunned with my own guilt – at my inaction. At my every delay.

Staring into my copy of
The Dawn
on the edge of my dressing table
,
these thirty-six pages of elsewhere, hand-me-down cast-offs from Flo, December's covers flopped open to a page of advertisements: P.D. Corsets. The
GRAND PRIX
of feminine constrictions of straight-front style,
avoid inferior imitations.
The sixteen-inch pinch of the illustrated waist pinches at me, though I've seen it a thousand times. How can a premier women's publication
conscience this obscene condonation of slavery in their journal? Because there would be no publication at all without it. Buy Holbrooks Worcestershire sauce, while we're here. The best you can afford from Connery the Expert Hatter. Pinch your sixteen inches' worth of lies however you can get them. What good are feminist ideals to me here? Now. It is as if Flo and all the colours of hope have disappeared.

I stand up and stare out of the window. Our every breath is a bargain, and yet each one is as unstoppable as the last. I am breathing. The river snakes along indifferent at the edge of the road beyond our garden here, and I breathe. The turrets of the hospital remain indifferent sentinels at the edge of the town behind us, at the edge of the bush, at the edge of each breath. And the hills all around us are as blue as corpses. Chloroformed.

‘Ryldy? Ryl, are you there?'

‘Yes, I'm here, Gret. Of course I am.'

I rush to her now. How do I ever conscience not being here all the time, every moment, every breath, for her? And yet I lingered in Sydney with Flo that full fortnight longer than I had to, making excuse after excuse to myself to avoid coming home. What did I bring Gret for it all? What did I get her at the bargain tables? A parasol, which she adores, a sweet and womanly broderie anglaise parasol, but it's just a stupid, pretty thing. I am so ashamed that I have failed my sister in this way. I have failed to protect her. How have I failed so despicably?

We turn the handle of the door as one, my darling sister and I. Five years, it's been. Here. Five years he has subjected her to his constant contempt. And now this new attack. This progress of his violence. Her eyes are wild and wounded, her voice trapped in the aching sinews of her throat. Five years. How many more? Before …

I do what?

I hold her to me. ‘Gret – Greta – tell me. Tell me what he has done.'

Ben

‘
I
t's getting on,' Cos complains. ‘Do you have to climb
every
mountain you see?'

I ignore him and push on, up towards the homestead ahead of us at the top of the hill, more heap of dirt than mountain. I want to look back over the floodplain from there. I don't remember Bathurst being this interesting to look at, geographically; but then, that school rugby trip was over a decade ago, I was seventeen: it was all mud and scrummages and possibly a mild concussion.

‘Yes, you must,' Cos mutters. Then he sighs, in that extravagant way of his, and stops on the road. ‘I'm having a pipe – right here, Wilber. And then I'm returning to the pub.'

I shake my head at his predictability, and tell him as I do daily now: ‘I will forgive you should you decide to go home.'

‘Couldn't possibly do that.' He calls after me: ‘Someone must bear witness to your descent into madness.'

‘Ascent.' I correct him and keep on. And I smile to myself: he is concerned for
my
health? So much for the country air having any effect on his temperament. But I remain glad he chooses daily to remain with me, not least because he can make me smile. If complaining were a sporting event, he'd be the champion of the world. He's been hard at it from the moment we got on that steamer from Brisbane, over two weeks ago now: the air was too cool, the sea too choppy, the food terrible. All this way and not even a decent match on at the Sydney Cricket Ground to compensate, and who could ever want to live in that city anyway? A boil on a bloom, he called it, and sketched it in wrung-out mood the day after his near arrest: the view from the club, from Bligh Street, back towards Circular Quay, a crowd of chimneys disgorging their filth of fast money and even faster smog – bursting out of the centre of a flannel flower. He really is an exceptional artist, in any mood; the sharpest eye I know. Stopping the past two days in Katoomba, he kept to the hotel while I made my explorations of the Jamison Gorge and the Three Sisters, and when I returned he'd made a drawing of the button grass I'd collected earlier from some falls at nearby Leura – such exquisite accuracy, such life in all he captures on a page, and he made that drawing for me without my even asking.

Most accurately, though, Cosmo Thompson is a lazy bugger; always has been. Look at him: lying down there in the grass on the verge above the road. He's a potbellied wallaby stretched out in the last of the sun, smoking his pipe and reading his little book of Nietzsche, his new philosophical fascination, gospel according to Zarathustra, whoever he is. Cos is at his most content half-grogged and freshly serviced.

There is smoke coming from a rear chimney of this homestead ahead, I see; I imagine a family inside it, contentedly dressing for church, for this New Year's Eve. It's a grand-looking house, though not all that large. Bluestone and iron lace and roses climbing about the verandahs, set high behind a white picket fence. I look south, back towards the town, Bathurst, though there is no view of it from here, not much for the untrained eye to see at all but the occasional clump of stubborn and stunted prickly wattle, a distant stand of candlebark: the wind must surely belt across this place, across the marshes of the wide river flat of the Macquarie below, and right up to this homestead. Isolate, like the town itself, it's as suddenly here as not, amongst these cleared hills of tussocky wire grass that tumble out from the forests of the Great Divide.

I follow the fence line round towards what appears to be a cherry orchard, just over the leeside of the hill. Now, that is something delightful, I suppose, in a chocolate box kind of way. Cherries, roses, bluestone and iron lace atop a grassy knoll, with this great blue sky arcing over all.

I'm about to call out to Cos, tell him that he should come up and have his pipe here. Or rather, we could make a raid on the orchard. There must be at least twenty trees and they are heavy about their business, I can see even from here. But then, just beyond the last of them, on the fore edge of a dam, I think I see something of far greater interest to me. No, it couldn't be – the silvery sheen of the foliage, the scatter of white blooms. A drift of
Helichrysum elatum
?
That favourite native of Mama's garden at Indooroopilly. Here? In the ranges of mid New South Wales? Surely it's too cold here for them; the spring frosts would be too harsh; I think it even snows. Of course I am imagining I see Mama's
elatum
here. This is only an hallucination, a trick of my grief. I am mad: daisies on the brain.

I am reminded that Professor Jepson will have received my letter by now, informing him that I must delay my return to Melbourne and the work I am commissioned to continue with for the Agricultural Board, and most directly for Dubois, as I wish to undertake a period of personal field study, on
Helichrysum
,
and I don't how long I'll be.
I shall inform you of my progress –
that's what you say to the Dean of Natural Sciences, isn't it.
Ally or not, Wilberry or not, grief-mad or not, I might well lose my job for this one; it's not the first time I've wandered off. Dubois will want my head on a platter. I can hear him going on:
Daisies? What is this outrage for? What is the use of native
Helichrysum
but to give bloat to the cattle?
I'd better return with some fairly incredible daisies then, hadn't I.

Plenty of daisies in the world. Ninety-four genera of aster on this continent alone, of which there are
many, many hundreds of species, and of which
Helichrysum
is but one of twelve suborders, with many, many varieties in each of them, and I've looked at so many daisies over the past few weeks, a cornucopia of
Compositae
, so many illustrations and interpretations of Mama's humble and beloved
elatum
, too, no wonder I'm seeing a mirage of one now.

And it is getting on, isn't it. We should go back to the hotel. Get a good night's sleep. We're going out to Manildra in the morning, then on to Mama's old property, for what it's worth. I have not found a single red daisy in any of the literature at my disposal: nothing in
Flora Australiensis
, nothing in the crate-load of chief colonial botanist's records, no hint in any scrap of enthusiastic scribble; no forgotten glimpse retrieved from any of my experience, either, and I've seen a few daisies in the field throughout my not insubstantial rambles, from the northernmost tip of Queensland, to the southwest foot of West Australia, and as far southeast again across to Bruny Island. But we have to go and have a look. I do, anyway. Mama said it bloomed in January, so if it's there along Mandajery Creek, I'll find it. The creek in its entirety is about seventy-five miles long, a week's exploration; perhaps two. Perhaps what I'm looking for is not of
Helichrysum
at all but of rare
Helipterum
or
Xeranthemum
,
and never recorded before; or perhaps a new subtribe altogether. Something to discover, in a part of the country I've never studied before. And therefore not very mad at all for this botanist to be going after. Not just some glimpse of Mama's last dream, spoken through an opium haze.

A few steps further on, though, as the pickets give way to post and rail, I'm sure it's Mama's common subtropical
elatum
I see here by this dam in subtemperate Bathurst. Dappled by the branches of a pretty spectacular old melaleuca, too. Like a corner of her garden has somehow … I blink but they remain: the familiar habit of the stipes, straight and woody tough and yet so supple they sway with the breeze. The blooms float; tiny angels. Unmistakeable. It must be
elatum.
Or some cooler climate species very near to it, and one I've never heard of. I'll just hop over the fence for a closer –

No, perhaps I will not.

A great unchained staghound bounds out through the orchard, decidedly against this idea.