the place. Solid gold, believe me. Not a thing wrong that a bit of cutting and pruning won’t fix.” He laughed. “Not to mention a modern appliance or two, eh? though there’s people paying me to find them old stoves and pull-chain toilets, there’s people phoning from Melbourne for places like—”
“Yes, I know. That’s why I’m curious.”
“Distress sale,” he said with voluptuous sorrow. “Old codger lived here all his life.” He intimated a pensioner’s woes: fixed income, land revaluations, rising rates, the remortgaging trap. “Familiar story, eh? And then the interest rates the last straw. Terribly sad.” Shit, he was going to blow it. Overdoing it, Sonny Jim. She was looking at a point beyond his left shoulder so intently that he turned around, spooked, half expecting to see the old bloke he’d just invented.
“Who’s that man?” she asked.
“What? Where? Oh …” There was a man across the road, in shadow, who stared at the two of them on the slightly sagging verandah. “Neighbour, I suppose. Bloke from across the road.” Very likely, Mr Watson thought, some bloke who objected to a hippie moving in, well maybe not a hippie exactly, but not a Volvo owner either, and you would have to call her a hippie type with that mane of brown curls and that strange arrangement of black tights under a longish gauzy skirt and those very long earrings apparently made out of bike chains and that black stretch top. Not unattractive, if you went for that sort of thing which Mr Watson didn’t, well maybe on occasion if you could slip in and out without complications, but you hardly ever could with her type.
“The thing is,” he said smoothly, “the old man told me himself it was really beyond him now. He told me: ‘Just sell it to someone who loves it, that’s all I ask.’” He saw her uncertainty and her desire for the house, he followed the quick dart of her eyes across the road to the silent watcher, back to the verandah and the jasmine, across the road again. “Those were his very words,” Mr Watson said. “His very words. Sell it to someone who loves it.”
“But what about him? What will he do?”
“Ah,” Mr Watson said modestly. “Well, actually …”
“Is that him over there?”
“Of course it’s not him. I told you, the owner’s old, much older, a pensioner. As a matter of fact …” He became expansive, his chest rising to fill the lift of his imagination. He spoke of going beyond and above the call of, etcetera, he evoked hearts of gold and a nursing home and knowing the right people and jumping waiting lists — “Contacts, you know, another client, you scratch my back I’ll scratch yours kind of thing” — and, in short, taking care of everything exactly as the old man had wished.
“Well,” Laura said. “I’ll take it, then. I know Jilly will love it.”
“You won’t regret it, Mrs White,” Mr Watson beamed; and then boisterously, recklessly: “It’s a steal. Believe me, a real steal.”
Jilly hated it, but was resigned. “Honestly, Mum! ‘You’d think we were freaks or something, the way people stare around here. And there’s not another kid for miles around who’s over the age of ten.”
“Think of all the babysitting money you can earn.”
“Squalling brats every Saturday night? Yuck!” Jilly pined moodily for the fast pack of thirteen-year-olds she’d run with in Sydney. “Brisbane is the pits,” she said.
Laura grinned. “Yeah, I know. That’s what I thought when I was your age. It grows on you though.”
Jilly rolled up her eyes. “Spare me,” she said.
You learn a lot about a man from the garden he creates, Laura thought. You could fall in love with the creator of a garden. There was half an acre — well, it was hectares now, but she’d never learned to think metric — it was large anyway for a city lot but what enchanted her was the way the former owner had made it seem infinite. She knew how it was done in a garden; technically, she knew; but there still seemed to be sleight of hand or magic involved. She knew it was done with boundaries — high walls or lush plantings — that blocked out a sense of external scale and drew the eye upward; and she knew that within the enclosed space, a clever gardener never used rectangular beds but created outdoor “rooms” with different moods and personalities, rooms that flowed naturally from one to another like nooks along a rainforest path. Everything was curves, sinuous loops, unexpected little circular oases of lawn that slithered into S-bend banks of passionfruit or massed orchids.
There was a place where she loved to sit. It was not large, but it seemed so, a grotto-like space that imparted a sense of absolute seclusion and tranquillity. Around a small pond rose a curve of bamboo on one side, a bank of tree ferns matted with climbers on the other, so that only water and green enclosure and sky could be seen. Birds called and their calls bounced about, odd and haunting, among the hollow bamboo canes. The slightest breeze made the canes click softly against one another: klik klik. The house, the street, the neighbours might have been miles away. If it weren’t for the wooden bench and the watcher, Laura could have believed herself deep in the rainforest.
The watcher. He nestled into grasses at the muddy edge of the pond, leaning out like Narcissus towards the waterlilies. How could she account for him in a Brisbane suburb? A gargoyle that might have been filched from some French cathedral, he stared at his own mordant reflection with a wicked grin. Or was it a grimace? The mouth of someone being tortured, perhaps? Instantly she nicknamed him Caliban.
But where had Caliban come from? He weighed a ton. She tried, but there was no lifting him. Cast iron, she thought. But imagine a Brisbane pensioner with such tastes, and where would he have had the casting done? A vision came to her of the old man caged in his nursing home: how he must grieve for his garden. The gargoyle eyes, bulging like a fly’s, watched her from the gnarled head. Intruder, the eyes accused.
A house is suffused with the presence of its former owner, Laura thought. For a time, one felt like a trespasser. She must write to the displaced gardener, thank him, tell him what a sorcerer he was. Dear Mr Prospero …
“I think it’s creepy,” Jilly said sulkily. What was she supposed to do with herself in Brisbane, watch the waterlilies grow? “And there’s a man who drives past and stares at me when I’m waiting at the bus stop for school. It gives me the creeps.”
“It’s just because we’re new here, that’s all.”
“Well, no one stares at you in Sydney just because you’re new. And this is the only house in the whole street without a pool.”
“We’ve got the most beautiful pool in Brisbane.”
“That muddy puddle,” Jilly sniffed scornfully.
“It’s so peaceful, don’t you find it peaceful here?”
“Who wants peaceful? I want excitement, Mum.”
Laura said carefully, neutrally: “Would you rather go back and live with your father in Sydney?”
“I dunno,” Jilly kicked at the gargoyle and screwed up her face. “Anyway, Dad’s not in Sydney, he’s back in New York right now. His secretary said.”
“Oh.”
“I could go if I want. Dad’d send a ticket.”
“Yes, I suppose.” The bamboo canes clicked softly, the gargoyle leered. Laura stared at the eyes reflected in the water. Full fathom Jive your father lies … She managed to keep her voice even. “Is that what you’d like to do?”
“I dunno. S’pose I’ll give it a bit longer before I make up my mind.”
“Thanks, Jilly.” Laura hugged her, but Jilly stiffened and drew back.
Two letters arrived. One was junk mail, a garden catalogue addressed to Mr Voss or Occupant. The other, for Laurence Voss, was a letter.
Laura phoned