‘Come out on the verandah with me.’
Frances led the way through the glass-fronted doors. The house had been built on high ground. With their backs to the sea, they could see Mount Gang Gang rising like a dark cloud over the town.
She pointed. ‘There’s no mist today. You can see it from here.’
Sure enough, he could see the line of forest crowning the distant summit. His first feeling was one of disappointment. Awareness of the Cloud Forest, he now knew, had been a major feature of the family’s history since the time, over a hundred years before, when his grandfather had first discovered it. Their father had come all the way from Europe because of it. And now by chance — or so it seemed — Frances and himself had come here, too. In that sense the Cloud Forest had made a profound impact on all their lives.
Now he stared at it with all the concentration he could muster and wondered what the excitement had been about. All he could see was a line of distant vegetation, dark against a luminescent sky. It didn’t seem significant enough to have had so powerful an impact upon them all.
‘What’s so special about it?’
‘There are herbs and plants there you won’t find down here.’
‘Is that all?’
‘What did you expect?’
Arthur said, ‘Dad spoke of it as though it were a special place. Magical, almost. A forest, yes, but a lot more than that.’
‘It is,’ Frances said. ‘It’s an idea, really.’
‘That’s exactly what he said.’
‘He was right. It’s a place that remains while everything else is going mad around it. A reassurance. That’s how it affects me anyway. As long as places like the Cloud Forest exist, I feel that things can’t be truly bad. Perhaps that’s what makes it important, because it represents hope, for ourselves and for the world.’ She shrugged self-consciously. ‘Bella always told me I go on too much.’
‘Bella …’ Arthur said indulgently; they both knew what Bella was like. ‘I asked her about it.’
‘I daresay she wasn’t very interested.’
The Bellas of the world weren’t, as a rule.
There, for some years, they left it.
Once Arthur had found out what lay behind the idea of the Cloud Forest he lost interest in it; not in theory, but in practice.
‘I’ll get up there, one of these days …’
But he never did. Instead, he worked hard to build up his business and his own place in the society of which he had become a part. The Goorapilly Service Station and Workshop soon earned a reputation for quality service at fair prices, and Arthur’s affairs prospered. He became one of the town’s most influential citizens: quite a feat for someone who had not been born there, or even in the State.
Perhaps it was not so surprising; he was wise, patient and discreet. It wasn’t his style to run for council but within a few years his advice was being sought by a wide range of people, young and old, who dropped in to see him as he sat on his verandah in the evenings, a table with a glass upon it convenient to his elbow. They could talk to him about anything and know that their business would not be spread around the town. He was sensible and knew what he was talking about, but it was his nature that really made the difference: an astute man, as well as a well-informed one. There weren’t many who could say as much.
Frances also got on with her own life. With time on her hands after Jock’s death, she decided to start a craft stall at the flea market that was held every weekend under the trees which shaded the creek on the edge of town. She scoured the shoreline for pieces of driftwood. She explored the lower slopes of the mountain for herbs and plants from which she prepared lotions and remedies. She hunted out bits and pieces of fallen timber and leaves that she fashioned into table decorations. She knew she would make next to nothing out of it but she enjoyed doing it and that was reason enough.
To begin with she managed by herself but her eyes had always given her problems and eventually she roped in a friend to help her: Betty Ngaro, who lived in the settlement on the other side of the creek with her boyfriend Tommy George and John Munda, her three-year-old adopted nephew.
As for the Cloud Forest … On a day-to-day basis, it meant nothing much to either of them. Frances never climbed beyond the lower slopes of the mountain; Arthur never went there at all. Both would have said that its unspoiled existence was important to them but, as their father had said, it was the idea rather than the reality of the Cloud Forest that mattered to them.
Both their parents were dead by now. Despite all their domestic dramas, Linda and Charlie had stayed together for thirty-eight years until, when Charlie was seventy-four, a stroke slammed him to the ground as he was leaving Randwick with near on a thousand dollars in his pocket. It was a shame it happened when it did — the best day he’d had in months — but maybe that was the problem, the excitement too much for the old fellow.
With Charlie stone-dead, everyone expected Linda to leave the cliff house. She had moaned about it nonstop since she’d bought it, yet now, when at last she had the chance to get rid of it, she refused to go. Arthur, down in Sydney for the funeral, tried to talk her into moving somewhere warmer and drier, better suited to a seventy-year-old woman half crippled with rheumatism, but Linda wouldn’t have a bar of it. She stuck heels and toes into the rock and swore she would never move from the place where she now claimed she and Charlie had been so happy together. She would stay put, she declared, for life.
With the kids gone, she became a bit of a recluse. No one knew exactly when she died; what was sure was that she’d been dead at least a week by the time the local newsagent, noticing her absence, took the trouble to walk up to the isolated house where he found Linda Mandale dead on the living-room floor.
The loss of their parents saddened Frances and Arthur but they had grown apart from the old people a long time ago and the bereavement did not disrupt their lives. Then, in 1997, something happened that did.
Bella’s daughter Jacqui had been born four years before, in 1993. Her arrival had not affected her parents’ lives one bit. They had always loved to party and had seen no reason to change their ways simply because they now had a child. They were still having a rip-roaring time on Jacqui’s fourth birthday when, with both of them aboard and Jacqui in the care of friends ashore, Brett, half-cut as he was every weekend, flipped his speedboat at high speed in a calm sea and wiped out the pair of them.
Easy come, easy go, as Bella herself might have said.
The accident nevertheless created a problem that had to be sorted out by their friends and relations: what was to be done with Jacqui?
Frances came up with the answer. She was as different from Bella as it was possible to be: far more vulnerable yet with a core of steel running through her. It was Frances, for all her gentleness, who had talked Arthur into coming to Goorapilly. Now she got him to agree to their niece doing the same.
At that stage in his life Arthur seemed to have all the makings of a bachelor. He knew nothing about young children nor had any inclination to learn yet, with Jacqui an orphan at the age of four and Frances dropping words in his ear about family and responsibility, he did not hesitate.
They contacted the authorities, went through all the rigmarole beloved of bureaucrats, and before either of them knew it found themselves with a child in their lives.
Frances had envisaged Jacqui staying with her but Arthur would have none of it. He pointed out that Frances was as blind as a bat; a four-year-old would be too much for her. Besides, she lived outside the town; it was important that the child make friends as soon as possible and she would be more likely to do that in Gallipoli Street than out in the bush.
‘The bush?’ Frances said. ‘Two kilometres. Not even that.’
‘It’ll make it all the easier for you to look after her while I’m at work.’
Frances was willing to fight him about it; she fancied the idea of having a girl to raise.
‘Why’s it so important to you? No man wants a little kid under his feet every day.’
It seemed Arthur did. They argued about it but Arthur would not give way and Frances came to realise that her brother was lonely. By having Jacqui stay with him he would have not only the child, but Frances too.
‘I should have realised it from the first,’ Frances told herself.
So that, eventually, was how they left it: Jacqui would stay in town with Arthur while Frances would come in every day to look after the pair of them. That way they would both have her, and were content.