After Jock’s death, Frances had a month or two of grieving, shut away behind the screened windows of the big verandahed house. Harley, mercifully, had moved out long before and, if he did nothing to make Frances’s life easier, at least he did nothing to cause her any additional grief, either.
That came later.
Slowly, she dragged herself back into the world. When she was ready, she phoned Arthur, who was working for a big garage in Sydney. She told him that the Goorapilly service station and workshop was on the market and suggested he buy it.
‘It’s a bit run-down, but there’s plenty of scope if you’re willing to put your back into it. I think it would be right up your street, if you like the idea of working for yourself.’
It was what Arthur had always wanted. The timing was right, too, because Arthur had also suffered a bereavement. He had fallen in love with a local girl, an energetic, beautiful creature as bright as the sea she loved. Winter and summer she swam, regardless of the weather. She went out one day and never came back. Her body was never found, which in some ways made her death even more difficult to bear. Arthur, a hard-loving man, was devastated. He used to stand at the window of the cliff house, staring out at the sea that had killed his girl. Never a talker, he became more silent than ever.
Then Frances’s suggestion, and he jumped at it.
Alone among the family, Arthur was of a scholarly disposition. With a different background he would probably have been a lawyer; as it was, because he enjoyed mucking about with engines and getting grease on his hands, he became apprenticed to a garage, where he learnt to mend trucks and cars and read whenever he had a spare moment. The idea of being his own boss appealed to him; it would give him the chance to decide how much time he needed for fixing trucks and how much he could give to reading.
Of course, there was one snag.
‘What do I use for money?’
The house had been promised to Harley long before Frances came on the scene but Jock had taken care of her financially.
‘I can help you out there,’ she told him.
Arthur came north, gave the service station a look-over, had a chat with various people in the town, dropped in to see the bank manager and then went back to Frances.
‘It needs a fair bit spent on it. Some of the equipment has to be replaced and there are one or two other things I want to buy.’
‘How much are we talking about?’
He fetched a pencil and paper and scratched away for a few minutes before giving her a figure.
‘Go for it,’ she said.
So Arthur bought the Goorapilly service station for a little less than the asking price and headed north.
The day before he left, with his mother doing her stint down at the milk bar, Arthur had what turned out to be his last conversation with his father. It was eleven o’clock in the morning but already, as had become habitual in recent years, Charlie had a skinful and was in maudlin mood.
He rabbited on, about life in France and some woman called Babette who he seemed to think had been badly treated; about someone else who’d died in a Broome cyclone; about the years, meandering and inconsequential, when he had mooched through life in the cliff house.
‘Don’t seem to have done much, do I? Never mind, boy; I’ve enjoyed myself, and that’s what counts, eh?’
It was then, raking through the tousled memories of an aimless life, that Charlie mentioned the Cloud Forest.
‘That’s what brought me to this country in the first place, you know …’
It was the first Arthur had heard of it.
‘The Cloud Forest,’ he repeated. ‘What’s that?’
Charlie told him about the band of temperate forest on top of a mountain, or maybe mountains, far away in the tropics of North Queensland.
‘You came to Australia because of a forest?’
‘It was the idea of it, see? That was what was important. Kept your grandfather going in the trenches. Until he died, of course. Where d’you say you was going?’ Blinking at him owlishly through a smear of booze and cigarette smoke.
‘Goorapilly.’
Charlie tried to focus his scattered wits. ‘I reckon that might be the very place.’
It was hard to make out what the old man, increasingly incoherent, was talking about.
‘You never went there?’ Arthur asked. ‘After coming all the way from Europe?’
‘Nah.’ Charlie was dismissive of one more failure in a life that had consisted of little else.
‘Why not?’
‘Didn’t want to.’
Arthur couldn’t come to grips with it at all.
‘The idea of it,’ he repeated, wondering. ‘What sort of idea?’
While Charlie, slopping Scotch into and around his glass, sagging and mumbling on the very brink of unconsciousness, was beyond talking of ideas, or metaphysics of any kind.
‘Maybe I’ll go and take a look at it,’ Arthur suggested, as much to keep the old boy quiet as anything.
‘Up to you, my boy.’ Slurp. ‘Up to you.’
And passed out, leaving Arthur wondering.
On his way north, Arthur stopped off at the Gold Coast to catch up with Bella. His baby sister; some baby: she’d been a tearaway from birth.
She’d been nineteen when she’d married Lyle Nabbs. You’d have been hard pushed to find anyone less suited to Bella than Lyle, but Bella had been another one in love with love and had listened neither to her own doubts nor anyone else’s.
Lyle had been Mr Prim, as straight as a ruler, who had fallen in love with the very flamboyance that his own life lacked. He had told himself that loving Bella would make up for any differences in temperament and, like most wishful thinkers, he’d been wrong.
It hadn’t taken Bella long to become unhappy with her staid husband. She’d hung in there for eighteen months and had then met Brett Gaddy, a car salesman with fire in his belly and bubbles in his head, someone who viewed life much as she did. Six months later she’d walked out on Lyle, shacked up with Brett until the divorce came through, then moved with him to the Gold Coast and settled down to the pleasures of a razzle-dazzle life.
Bella fetched Arthur from the airport. A vision of red and gold, bosom and bum out to here; lacquered, golden hair forming a halo around her head, for all the world like a diminutive Cloud Forest itself. Arthur asked if she knew anything about this place up in the north that their father had told him about.
‘Cloud Forest?’ Bella said. ‘I reckon he did say something to me once. Can’t say I paid much attention, mind.’
‘You’ve never been there?’
She laughed, lips wide, as brassy as the rest of her. ‘Reckon I’m gunna waste my life checking out a bunch of trees?’
So Arthur was no wiser by the time he reached Goorapilly. He was a stubborn man when he wanted to be; having failed with one sister, he asked the other one about the Cloud Forest instead. This time he had better luck.