The Strays

I

THIS IS HOW I RECALL IT.

1930: My mother and I paused on the brick path and she straightened my uniform—a navy blue tunic dress with a starched white collar, a blue felt hat and white gloves. I clutched my toy dog, the one upon whom I had heaped all my guilty love since my mother told me I didn't appreciate the things she bought for me. She took my hand, and we continued up the path to the third-grade classroom. It was still early, and the summer sun had not risen beyond the roof of the school building. The path and garden were in shade, the leaves of camellia bushes freshly varnished by the morning, and blackbirds turned the soil, pausing, listening, scratching again in darts. They froze as we passed and flicked their yellow eyes toward us.

And then we entered the classroom, and there was Eva, the smallest child in the room, with her dark bob and brown eyes beneath a heavy fringe. She was kneeling with several other children on the carpet beside a wooden doll's house. On one hand she had a threadbare velveteen hand puppet in the shape of a dog. She smiled at me, and the teacher, Miss Butterworth, pushed me forward.

"Lily, this is Eva, and Christopher, and Phyllis. Children, this is Lily. She's going to be joining our class this year, so make her welcome."

"Hello, Lily," said Eva.

"Make room for Lily," Miss Butterworth said. "What are you playing? Dolls houses?"

Eva shuffled over and patted the carpet beside her.

"We're playing Deadybones the Wolf," she said.

"Oh. I see," said Miss Butterworth, raising her eyebrows.

I glanced back at my mother. She was taking a seat awkwardly on a child-sized wooden chair along with the other mothers. She nodded to me and turned to the woman next to her.

"Which one is your mother?" I asked Eva as I sat down beside her.

"None of them. She's gone home. But you can see my sisters at recess. Have you got any sisters?"

I had to admit that I did not.

After a while, I was drawn back to the comfort of my mother, and retreated for a moment to her familiarity in the midst of all this newness. She lifted me onto her lap, still talking. I listened to the whispers of the women while I sat, pinching the skin on the back of her hand as I had done since I was a baby. They were talking about Eva, saying that she was the daughter of Evan Trentham, the artist, that her mother was "old money." I pictured a woman made out of dirty pound notes and tarnished pennies.

Miss Butterworth approached the seated women and told them that it was time for them to leave. My mother stood, and I slid from her lap. I began to cry, and she hushed me and then squeezed me tightly for a second. Eva got up and came over to me, holding out her hand, and I put my hand in hers, still sniffling, and went back with her to the game.

At recess I met Eva's two sisters, who came to find her on the quadrangle, where children were jumping rope, playing hopscotch or marbles, and the older ones were starting a game of British Bulldogs. Her older sister was called Beatrice, or Bea for short, her younger, Heloise. It was obvious that Beatrice and Eva were sisters. Their faces were free of the roundness that conceals the future shape of most children's faces. They were fine boned, but did not seem delicate or cosseted. Their arms and legs were brown from the sun, and their hair was dark and, in Bea's case, tangled. There were scratches on their shins, and Bea had a scab on her knee as big as a gobstopper. Heloise was different. She was a serious little girl with milky skin, copper hair, and an uncertain, freckled face. It was her very first day of school, not just at a new school as I was, and she would not join in the game of British Bulldogs.

"You've got big teeth," she said to me.

She sat down cross-legged on the asphalt and ran her hands over its gritty surface. Bea took Eva and me by a hand each and ran with us across the quadrangle at the call of "bullrush" so that we would not be scared of the boys who were the bulldogs. When I looked back at Heloise, she was absorbed in a secret game of her own. Her lips were moving, and she was pecking at the loose gravel with the beak of her thumb and fingers.

At the end of the day my mother returned to collect me, and I clasped myself to the front of her dress, burrowing into the laundry soap and porridge smell of her. I glanced around to see whether Eva's mother had arrived, but Eva was standing beside a tall man who was speaking to Miss Butterworth. Eva waved to me, and I ran over.

"Is that your dad?" I whispered.

"No. It's Patrick," she replied without further explanation.

"I'm sorry, but her parents are busy," the man was saying.

As we left the classroom, Eva waved and called out, "See you tomorrow." I waved back, the next school day suddenly a gift held out to me, then turned to my mother's hand around my own, pulling me homeward.

Eva's mother collected her the next afternoon and spoke briefly to my mother. I remember Helena as pale and long and light, like a taper, swathed in floaty cream fabric and with her dark hair set like ladies in magazines. She smelled of cigarettes and a heavy floral perfume, not the kitchen and laundry scents exuded by my mother.

A few days later I was sitting with Eva and Heloise on the slippery leather seat in the back of their Morris while Bea sat in the front and Helena drove, her face in profile with its flawless skin and rouged cheek, her bouncy hair visible over the seat. Her hand on the wheel was adorned with an emerald ring, and her perfume filled the cabin. We drove out of Box Hill and into the fields and orchards that lingered at the edge of the main streets in those days, until we reached a high gate. Helena sprang out to open it, leaving the motor running, and we crunched onto the gravel driveway and over the threshold. Bea was leaning into the backseat clapping hands with Eva—Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack, all dressed in black, black, black, with silver buttons, buttons, buttons, all down her back, back, back—while I gazed out the window at the garden and the house coming into view around the bend.

That garden. I still wander in dreams between the pale gray pillars of the lemon-scented gums, the eucalyptus citriodoras, towering out of mist, gigantic, as they appeared to me as a child in that magical place. Perhaps Eva showed me the house first, but in my memory we went straight to the garden, and she led me around its open spaces and secret nooks, trailed by a silent Heloise. The garden had a formal section in front of the house, but it had gone more or less to ruin. The hedges were twiggy, and the rose bushes stuck out their arms in all directions. The rest of the garden was wild, with banks of hydrangeas and scarlet geraniums and a huge tussock of sacred bamboo into which the girls had carved a warren of narrow paths like a crazed hedge maze with no center. There was an old train carriage in the back corner of the garden, its walls and floor plumped and buckled by damp. It was called the seed train because it had been a seed and tool shed when Helena's uncle had lived in the house. It still contained the skeletons of rakes and picks, their once-bright blades blistered with rust. Mice and spiders lurked behind ancient bags of bulbs and garden fertilizer. The sisters had their headquarters in a disused chook shed, and a secret den in the hollowed-out bowl of earth beneath the boughs of a casuarina. At the rear of the garden there was a high gate that Eva called the switchgate. It led out to a dirt lane that backed on to orchards.

"We can't go out there because we'll be locked out," Eva told me.

"Why?"

"You can go out but then you can't get back in. That's how it works."

"How do you get back in, then?"

"You have to walk all the way around to the front gate. It's a long way. Except I can't reach the handle so we need Bea to go with us, and she never wants to."

I stood back as Eva opened the latch, for fear that the switchgate would somehow suck me out.

Eva took me up to her bedroom on the house's second story, shutting the door against Heloise. She began to change out of her school uniform, flinging the discarded clothes onto the floor. When she was stripped to her singlet and knickers, she opened her wardrobe and roughed the hanging garments about, making the wooden hangers clack together and thunk against the back of the wardrobe.

"Do you want to change too?" she asked.

"I don't have any other clothes."

"You can wear mine if you like. You can pick whatever you want."

Glancing back at Eva, I chose a straight smock dress in apricot cotton. She chose a green gingham dress with puffed sleeves. I felt that we were now linked in some important way.

Eva opened the bedroom door.

"Good, she's gone." She took my hand and led me to the top of the staircase. "Watch this," she said. She clambered onto the banister and when she was in position, facing backward with one small leg over each side of the rail, holding on with both arms, she grinned at me and slid fast to the bottom of the stairs.

The Trenthams' house had been in Helena's family for three generations. Its charm was of the ramshackle kind, tacked together over years and across architectural periods so that it resembled those European churches with one Gothic wing and one Renaissance. The main building was of timber, but there was a bluestone former laundry and storehouse, now a vast kitchen; a cellar, cold and smelling of mildewed root vegetables; a sunroom and an attic that, through a dormer window, accessed a small platform between gables of the roof, fenced by a low wrought-iron railing, from where the surrounding paddocks and the roofs and gardens of neighboring properties could be surveyed. Eva took me proudly to this crow's nest balcony, where we played ship's captains, peering through a brass telescope at the upper windows of distant houses. We clambered up the slate gables and peeled off the blooms of lichen that flattened themselves against the stone, collecting them within the pages of an atlas that the sisters consulted as their book of sea charts.

Part of the thrill of this perch above the ground-dwelling world of adults, this small fenced plot the sisters had requisitioned from the crows and pigeons and made their own, was its hint of danger. I knew my mother would never allow me to be up there if she knew, and each time we scrambled up the slope of the roof to sit astride the apex was, for me, a mild rebellion against her interminable loving scrutiny. At the Trenthams' we were left gloriously alone to ride the rooftops or circumnavigate the garden as we desired.

On that first afternoon, Eva took me to meet her father in his studio, a large room on the ground floor of the house. The door was ajar, and Eva pushed it open and walked in without knocking.

Evan Trentham resembled the pictures of fearsome bushrangers I had seen in books. He was tall and lanky with a red forest of a beard that parted in a grin when he saw his daughter.

"Chook, chook chookie!" he crowed horribly, setting down a long-handled brush and hoisting her into the air with his stringy arms, which were pale like Heloise's and covered in ginger hair.

Evan Trentham was put together from mismatched stuff. The sinews were too short for the long bones. The tendons behind his ankles and the bald stones of his knees stuck out, hard as the catgut on a tennis racquet. He was like a rubber band stretched tight and close to snapping. He wore blue work pants cut off at the knee and a white undershirt that was yellow beneath the armpits. He was pain stained and sweat smelling.

The room itself was cluttered with paint tins, brushes and books, and reeked of tobacco and turpentine. There was a green chaise longue behind the door, its horsehair stuffing erupting through a hole. A huge half-finished painting stood against the back wall.

Eva giggled as her father nuzzled her with his beard.

"Scratcheeeee," she squealed.

Evan held out his hand to me, shifting Eva onto his hip. "Who's this, then?" he asked. "Mrs. Tiggywinkle?"

I was too scared to move, and did not hold out my hand.

"Don't be silly, Dadda," said Eva. "It's Lily."

"Pleased to meet you, Lily Tiggywinkle," he said a little more soberly. "Any friend of Eva's is a friend of mine. Do you like barley sugar?"

I nodded, mute, and he offered me a tin of yellow barley sugars melted together around a teaspoon. I hesitated.

He passed the tin to Eva. "Show her how it's done, chookabiddy."

Eva dug around in the tin with the spoon and then prized the barley sugar off with her teeth, showing me how it stuck in the roof of her mouth.

Cautious of germs, I took the tin and dug out a small lump, pulling it off the spoon, wet with Eva's spit, with my fingers.

"Will you play Billygoat Gruff with us?" Eva asked her father.

"Not now, chook, still working." Evan put her down and turned back to his canvas.

Eva stamped her foot and went and sat on the chaise longue. I followed her.

I remember staring up at the giant painting Evan was working on. It was one of his now-iconic desert scenes, filled with figures intertwined in an obscenity of postures against the scorching earth. My eyes darted between blues and ochres until I made out the terrible images of policemen in uniform bent over one another, some with mouths wide open. One policeman was tilting a barrel of liquid into the mouth of another. The barrel had a hose attached to it at the top, and it led across the canvas to the back of an outdoor dunny. My throat grew tight. I wanted to look away but I could not.

Eva nudged me and pushed a book toward me, open on a black-and-white reproduction of an artwork. I looked down at the tortured image and asked, "Did he paint that too?"

Across the room, Evan laughed. "A man called Hieronymus Bosch painted it. Isn't that a wonderful name? Don't you wish you were called Hieronymus Bosch? He painted it a very long time ago. I'm just pilfering from him. Bosch in the bush, I like to call it."

"What's pilfering?" I asked.

"Stealing," said Evan.

I didn't know what he meant, only that the book gave me the same rotten feeling in my stomach as Evan's painting.

"Are you hungry?" asked Eva. I nodded. She stood up and led me to the kitchen in the guts of the house, where two fireplaces sat side by side.

Down one end of the room was a great island bench with a wooden slab top. Copper pots hung above it from a metal frame. The sink was a deep marble trough, almost as big as a bath. The other end of the room was dominated by a vast kitchen table. Eva led me to the scullery, poking through the bread bin and the icebox. There was the nose of a loaf surrounded by crumbs, but little else. She spread the crust of bread with jam, and we took turns tearing off tough bites with our teeth.

When it was gone, Eva pushed open the screen door and I followed her to the rear of the house, where there was a flat area of grass backed by curved garden beds so that it formed a large half-moon. To one side of this clearing was an old enamel bathtub, up on stilts above a cast-iron brazier.

On clear evenings to come, Evan would fill the bathtub with water and heat it over a fire for himself or for us to bathe in. Sitting in that bath, breathing in the smells of the garden and the woodsmoke wafting from beneath the tub, still seems to me something close to heaven. After the bath, we would run around the garden, towels held out as wings, circling the fading coals of the bath-fire like huge pink moths.

It was a relief to be back in the bliss of the garden, to leave the feeling of Evan's studio behind. Helena was there in the clearing with the man who had collected Eva from school that first day—Patrick. She was propped up on one elbow on a wooden sun bed. He was sitting on the ground, leaning against the sun bed at the level of Helena's shins. There was something endearing about Patrick; his eyes were pale blue and kind, crinkling up when he smiled. He had broad shoulders and big hands. Though he didn't seem old, his hair was graying and stuck out around his face.

Eva wandered over to Patrick and her mother, who both picked up glasses from the grass and sipped from them—tall glasses covered in beads of moisture and filled with clear liquid, chunks of ice and slices of lemon.

"I'm hungry," said Eva.

"Well, don't look at me," Helena replied. "Go and find some food."

"There is none."

"Oh, piffle. Ask Beatrice to boil you an egg."

For the first time I glimpsed the underside of Eva's home life, and was glad to know that when I went home that night my tea would be ready, and the custard that my mother had made in the cool of the morning would be waiting under a muslin cloth.