‘Just her word for it, then,’ Stan said. ‘Could be trying to shift the blame from the doctor to Ned.’
‘Then why mention the doctor at all?’
We sat in silence, Stan generating smoke. For a moment I had been going to tell him about the other things that haunted me: the skeleton in the mine shaft, Melanie Pavitt naked in Colson’s Road, Ned’s visit to Ian Barbie in Footscray. But Daryl Hopman’s report offered an explanation for all of them that was too chilling to speak about.
‘Better get moving,’ I said, getting up. ‘Boy’s at home without food.’
‘Boys find food,’ Stan said. He walked to the vehicle with me. When I’d started it, he said: ‘Learned a lot about men in the war. Scoundrels and saints, met ’em both. Don’t believe this about Ned, so it’s not going to change anything.’
We looked at each other, united in our desire to hold on to the Ned we knew.
‘Another thing, Mac,’ said Stan.
I could barely see his face.
‘Ned was like a brother to your father. Something like this, he would have known. See you tomorrow.’
As I drove away, I thought perhaps my father did know. Perhaps that was what he wanted to tell me on the night he shot himself.
We’d put in five hours in the grounds of Harkness Park- me, Stan Harrop, Lew and Flannery-before Francis Keany’s Discovery murmured down the driveway. What we were trying to do was uncover paths, using a large-scale plan Stan and I had drawn from exploration and aerial photographs and the old photographs I’d found.
‘They’re bloody there,’ Stan said. ‘Get the paths, we’ve got the garden.’
It was hard going: the place was one big muddy thicket. The elms in particular had embarked on world conquest, sending out armies of suckers, densely colonising large areas. Some of the suckers were mature trees, now spawning empires of their own.
‘Dutch elm disease might be the answer,’ Stan said. ‘Nature’s way of saying fuck off.’
Stan had assembled us at 8.30. We were armed with two chainsaws and a new thing, a brushcutter with a circular chainsaw blade. Flannery liked the idea very much.
‘Tremble, jungle,’ he said.
I said, ‘The point is, Flannery, we apply the technology with some purpose in mind. We don’t apply it simply because we like laying waste to large areas of nature and seeing big things fall over.’
‘Wimp,’ said Flannery.
Stan went for a long walk through the muddy paddocks around the house. We were on smoko, sitting on Flannery’s ute, when he came back. ‘Major thing,’ he said, hitching his buttocks onto the tray, ‘major thing is, gardens like this, they’re designed for vistas. Looking from the house and the garden, looking at the house and the garden. But if the bloody vista’s gone, all brick-veneer slums crowding it, you can’t see what the designer saw.’
‘So you got it worked out,’ Flannery said. He was eating a pie. A viscous fluid the colour of liquid fertiliser was leaking down his unshaven chin. This and the Geelong beanie pulled down to a centimetre above his eyebrows gave him a particularly fetching appearance.
‘More or less,’ Stan said. At that moment, Francis Keany’s vehicle came into view.
Francis got out, the picture of an English country gentleman. He nodded to the peasants and said to Stan: ‘Good morning, Stan. So what do we now know? Enough research to write an entry in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Paid by the hour. Photographs taken from a great height. At a cost of about five dollars a metre. Charged both going up and coming down, as far as I can tell. So what do we now know about this garden?’
Francis had clearly been working on his opening lines during the drive from Melbourne.
Stan was patting pockets for his pipe. ‘Not much,’ he said, sadly.
Francis’s face went tight. He pursed his full lips, lifted his chin and slowly turned his face away from us until he was in full profile. This was a mistake. Stan had a clipping of a magazine article in which Francis’s profile was described as that of a Roman senator on a coin.
‘What Roman senator do you think that magazine twat had in mind?’ Stan said in a musing tone. ‘Pompus? Was there a Priapus? What about Fartus?’
Francis came back into full face. He blinked several times, willing himself to remain composed. ‘In a few minutes,’ he said, voice edging on the tremulous, ‘Mr and Mrs Karsh are going to drive. Through that gate. I’d like to have something to tell them. If that’s at all possible.’ Pause. ‘Stan.’
Stan found the battered and blackened object resembling a piece of root rescued from a bonfire. He applied a yellow plastic lighter with an awesome flame. Smoke gathered around him until he looked like a smouldering scarecrow. Francis took two paces backwards to get away and was starting to speak when a black Mercedes station wagon with tinted windows nosed around the corner of the drive.
‘Oh shit,’ he said.
The car stopped next to Francis’s Discovery. The front doors opened. The driver was a tall woman, thirties, lightly tanned, sleek dark hair to her shoulders, minimal make-up. She was wearing a camelhair donkey jacket, thin cream sweater, jeans and walking boots. The passenger was in his late fifties, stocky, pale, small features, dark suit, tired eyes. He ran fingers the colour of chicken sausages through his thick grey hair and loosened his striped tie.
‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘Why isn’t it snowing?’
Francis coughed. ‘Leon,’ he said. ‘Anne. Good to see you. Filthy weather, I’m afraid. I’d like to introduce Stan Harrop. He’s one of my associates with a special knowledge…’
Leon Karsh ignored this and came around to shake hands with all of us, starting with Flannery. ‘Leon Karsh. Thanks for your help here.’ Soft voice, unusual accent, upper-class English over something else. When he got to Stan, he said, ‘My wife tells me you were responsible for Faraway in Bowral. I knew the family. Wonderful garden.’
‘Responsible, no,’ Stan said. ‘I was the maintenance man.’
Leon Karsh smiled. ‘Excellent maintenance, then.’
‘Thank you,’ Stan said.
‘What I’m trying to do here, Leon,’ Francis said, ‘is to recapture the essence of the original garden without necessarily being constrained by the more obvious limitations of the original designer’s vision. To do that…’
‘What limitations are those?’ said Stan.
Francis gave him a look, a laser beam of hatred. ‘To the trained eye,’ he said, ‘it’s obvious that the absence of a central axis…’
‘To the trained eye,’ Stan said, ‘there is a central axis. Mac, explain. I’ve got to get these expensive craftsmen back to work.’
It was amazing to me that Stan had managed to work for other people for so long. I fetched the plan and the copies of the photographs from the truck and laid them out on the tray. Anne Karsh was at my left elbow, Leon Karsh at my right. I could feel Francis behind me, trying to see over my shoulder. Anne smelled faintly of rosemary and cinnamon, a clean smell.
I said, ‘The garden was designed around 1885 by an Englishman called Robert Barton Graham for the Peverell family. The Peverell brothers were on the Ballarat goldfields until they realised there was more money in supplying timber and then flour to the miners. They built a mill on the creek here in 1868 and the house later. It was in the family till the 1950s. Lots of them are buried down the road here, next to the church.’
I found the right photograph. ‘This is dated December 1937. Two gardeners clipping a low circular hedge. It’s box. If you look carefully, you can see there’s a circle of hedge inside another circle. Paths run to the centre. A cross of paths.’
Anne Karsh leant forward to look at the photograph. ‘A sort of double mandala,’ she said. ‘One path’s wider than the others.’ A breast touched my arm.
‘Exactly,’ Francis said. ‘Mac has been very useful…’
‘The luck here is the sundial,’ I said, pointing at the photograph. ‘It tells us this picture was taken looking north.’
‘That’s important,’ Francis said. ‘Obviously…’
‘It also tells us the time of day,’ I said. ‘It’s late afternoon. This dark at the top left of the photograph-we couldn’t work that out. That’s because we assumed that the wide path would be the key to the long sightline. You can see the path runs north-south, and that puts the house behind the photographer.’
‘It’s the shadow of the house,’ Anne Karsh said, the pleasure of discovery in her voice. ‘That’s the big chimney.’