The House on the Hill Read online

  About the Book

  The third memoir from the author of bestsellers Salvation Creek and The House at Salvation Creek.

  In The House on the Hill, Susan Duncan reaches an age where there’s no point in sweating long-term ramifications. There aren’t any. This new understanding delivers an unexpected bonus – the emotional freedom and moral clarity to admit to hidden and often fiendish facts of ageing and, ultimately, to find ways to embrace them.

  This, in turn, unleashes an overwhelming desire to confront her intractable 95-year-old mother with the dreadful secrets of the past before it is too late, no matter the consequences. It is the not-knowing, she says, that does untold damage.

  Interwoven with stories from the land – building a sustainable eco-house on the mid-coast of New South Wales with her engineer husband, Bob, and grappling with white-eyed roans, dogs, bawling cattle markets, droughts and flooding rains, not to mention blunt-speaking locals – this is a book about a mother and daughter coming to terms, however uneasy, with the awful forces that shaped their relationship.

  As the inconstancies of age slow her down, Susan Duncan writes with honesty about discovery and forgiveness, and what it takes to rework shrinking boundaries into a new and rich life.

  CONTENTS

  COVER

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  EPILOGUE

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO BY SUSAN DUNCAN

  COPYRIGHT NOTICE

  For Bob, who brings light to the darkest corners

  PROLOGUE

  ONCE I BELIEVED there could be no other place for me than a cream-coloured house on a high, rough hill overlooking the tawny-green waters of Lovett Bay. It was there, amongst spotted gums so thick and tall they blanked the sky, that I found love and peace, and a sustainable joy at a time of life when I was certain the best was behind me. His name was Bob. Not Robert. Just Bob. His mother, he told me, only called him Robert when he was in trouble.

  But now there is a house on a high, quiet hill that overlooks the thin blue lines of distant mountains and the emerald slopes of the Manning Valley. It is shaped like a butterfly with wings that flare out from a lean, flat body and hovers alone in a sea of green grass, as though poised for flight. Although as a friend once remarked, ‘If there’s ever a gale strong enough to shift that house, we’re all doomed.’

  The house, sharp-edged, glassy with solid brick walls for substance, is reached by turning off bitumen onto a rough dirt road that crosses a small floodway and winds through cattle country. If there’s been steady, heavy rain, the kind that puts smiles on farmers’ faces and straightens their cricked backs for a day or two, there’s a shallow run-off from the gullies that is easily forded in even a small car. But when storms gather high in the ranges and rain pelts down in sheets like corrugated iron, the trickle swells into a deep, churning torrent the colour of stewed tea, and you are stuck on one side or the other. Mostly, the floodwaters recede within a few hours. Only occasionally does it take a day or two before a depth indicator, pummelled by time into tipsiness, shows the water level is low enough for a four-wheel drive to make it safely across. So it’s wise to check the weather forecasts regularly but not to trust them entirely. A sudden summer tempest can erupt out of nothing and nowhere, and then it becomes a matter of waiting out the deluge.

  At certain times of the year, the road is ruched with flowering kangaroo grass. It turns soft pink in the evening light and bends and sways in even a lazy puff of air so it seems as if the land is rippling like sunstruck water. In mid-summer, blady grass has delicate, feathery blooms, which give a pale white sheen to the countryside at dawn, like a light dusting of snow. Just looking at it cools you down when the mercury is thrusting upwards of thirty-five degrees and the air is so dead still that even the welcome swallows give up their acrobatics and go off somewhere to wait out the heat.

  Beyond the floodway, the road is rutted and rocky. In some areas, heavy rain has washed away the surface to form sharp little gullies that can ambush careless drivers and send cars skidding off course. I’ve been caught once or twice and now travel carefully and slowly. So slowly, a neighbour says, that when she sees me coming she rushes so she doesn’t get stuck on my tail and made late for work.

  The greatest threat, though, is a moment too long spent gazing at calves frolicking in a lush paddock or black ducks flying or, once, a wayward jabiru picking its way around the edge of a dam. Or swerving to miss witless plovers, or craning backwards to marvel at a pheasant on a fence post, her broad speckled wings spread wide to dry after a sudden downpour. Or noticing a hungry kookaburra scanning for dinner from a powerline. Or dodging water hens, blue-black with lipstick-red helmets, in a rush to find a deeper dam. Or gazing at flocks of flashy rosellas. Or peering skywards to see if the clouds are fat with the promise of rain or fluffy nothingness, showy but without substance. Or following the colourful arch of a rainbow, chasing the pot of gold like an excited child. Or feeling limbs go pleasurably loose when a coppery sunset brushes the hills with shiny light. Or a full moon dusts the crests with silver.

  Out here, where the broad and deep Manning River runs like a pulsing vein from the north-eastern slopes of the Great Dividing Range to a magnificent double delta that ends in the Tasman Sea, there’s none of the eyeball-skewering white glare of the outback. Light glows yellow and warm, softening harsh edges, easing the noon flatness. The land has the smell and texture of fecundity, too. Fresh-cut lucerne or rye. Eucalyptus. The stewy aroma of cattle. Very early in the morning, the unripe scent of dew. They follow you to town, those smells. On a hot day, when cow shit clings to the undercarriages of farm vehicles, the supermarket car park is as fragrant as a sale yard on market day. A nauseating stench to some, sweet perfume to others.

  This property with the butterfly house is called Benbulla, and it climbs in three increasingly steep crests to a neck-straining point near the sky. The distance from the bitumen to the farm gate is two-point-four kilometres through open farmland and stringy ribbons of eucalypts that peel off to the sides in dark gullies or rise blue in the distance. A few isolated homes nestle on low-lying crests. Built from timber, brick or corrugated iron, they reflect changing times and fortunes, the gradual carving up of once impressive properties into smaller lots of one hundred acres or so.

  Along the way there’s an old dairy shed, tilted northwards as though it’s been given a great shove, brought almost to its knees. A vine, perhaps a choko, holds it barely upright. Chokos were planted everywhere during the Great Depression, which is when the shed looks as though it was built. Four corner posts, peeled tree trunks, support a rusted corrugated roof. Panels missing here and there, lifted by the wind perhaps, or rotted to brown powder and now part of the earth. Rough-hewn timber for fence rails. It’s a museum piece, a slice of rural history that
stands within a sealed-off enclosure, as though someone cares deeply about the memories stored inside and wants to preserve them. Farmers, I discovered, can be a sentimental lot, although threats to livestock, pasture or livelihood are mostly dealt with swiftly and cleanly. Wild dogs. Weeds. Theft. They’re all fair game.

  After a while, we give the hills names: the Bottom Hill, the Home Hill and the Great Hill. From the peak of the Great Hill, a pair of wedge-tailed eagles often appear like great winged warriors, and way below, damp watercourses bind a gently rolling landscape of rivers, creeks, dams and culverts with velvety green seams. In the blurry distance, rounded, flattish and cone-shaped hills, like hard silicone breasts, surge in long swathes, shaded violet and blue. On a tempestuous day you can see weather coming, and it takes only a split second to judge whether the washing on the line will escape a drenching or not.

  It is an odd feeling, finding myself back in the heart of farming country. Even though I was born a rural kid, my memories of those early days living in a migrant camp near the Albury–Wodonga border aren’t always fond. At the age of five, after a day at school, I trudged home along lonely roads, dodging swooping magpies and breaking into a run if cattle, curious beasts, followed me for the length of a paddock. All summer I trod warily, a skittish child, watching for deadly snakes while my skin burned and peeled and freckles grew big as coins. In winter, when the sky was the colour of tin and the ground frosted white, my hands turned blue and my feet went numb with cold. Almost every day, my mother warned of the dangers of strangers in cars on those long stretches of desolate roads. ‘If they offer you a lolly, run,’ she said. But she never said where.

  Even with the hazy gold patina that nostalgia applies to most recollections, while I knew no different, as a child I didn’t love country life. Not a bit. Some deep and appealing imprint of a wide, brown land and open skies must have secretly lodged in my DNA, though, because there have been times when I’ve returned from extended stints living in foreign countries when just the smell of eucalyptus or the first drops of rain on dry earth stirred a slurry of emotion. Tears.

  I wonder now whether we are drawn to the world of our youth as we age? If that is why, for no particular reason, one landscape triggers relief and another anxiety. Or perhaps our needs are different from one decade to the next. Perhaps it is as simple as that.

  1

  THE GREAT SHIFT FROM SALTWATER BAYS to grassy paddocks, from boats to tractors, began innocently enough with a phone call at the tail end of 2007. A bloke called Michael Baker was on a make-or-break mission to save the family brickworks. If his tall red chimneys kept gushing black smoke into the blue skies around Wingham, he told Bob, one day there’d be a knock at his door and he’d be ordered to clean up or close down. Five generations turned to dust on the back of a stranger’s signature. Even the thought must have felt like a sharp pain. ‘We need a new kiln. Can you help us?’ he asked.

  Bob was 63 years old, a civil engineer who specialised in combustion. I was 55, a journalist turned author. We were both technically retired. No mortgages, no dependents, enough resources to see us comfortably through – provided we didn’t go mad or fall for one of those scams aimed at people looking for an easy windfall. Old people, mostly. Desperate. In our separate ways, we’d always lived prudently, understanding cash was a tool that gave us choices but that nothing saved us in the end. In other words, we weren’t giant risk-takers, although we were always willing to have a go if the odds weren’t stacked against us.

  ‘From what I understand,’ Bob said, ‘the brickworks are already operating leanly and finding the money for a new kiln will be tough. I might spend a year busting my gut on a design that will end up in the bottom drawer forever.’

  There were other issues: the future of bricks in a new high-tech, quick-fix, temporary world was anybody’s guess. Family members were bitterly divided about the long-term benefits when piled against the short-term investment. Wingham, a small town on the mid-north coast, was three and a half hours north of Pittwater if the traffic behaved – a significant drive. After a while, Bob returned Michael’s call. The answer, with regret, was no.

  With barely a tremor, we immersed ourselves in summer on Pittwater. There were great shifts, though, from those first uncertain days when I fell on to the isolated shores of Lovett Bay, wrecked by grief and searching for a place to belong. Not sure whether I’d made a catastrophic or brilliant decision to buy a tin shed, cut off from the city life I was used to, the throngs and bright lights and the illusion of being relevant in the bigger scheme of things. A purchase further complicated by the fact that it was separated from the bustle by a great body of water I came to call ‘the moat’, and accessible only by boat. As it turned out, it was the finest decision I’d ever made. Sometimes risks turn into gifts, if you’re lucky. And I was.

  In those early days, I threw myself into offshore living with an almost manic energy. The Woody Point Yacht Club twilight sailing races. Elvina Bay fire shed fundraiser dinners. Fishing from the shore at the foot of the front yard. A fire blazing in an old washing machine drum to cook the catch. Kayaking at dawn. Walking amongst wallabies, lyrebirds, brush turkeys, black cockatoos. Snakes. Listening. Seeing. Peeling off worn-out layers. Emerging renewed. Values redefined.

  ‘I’ll never leave Pittwater,’ I used to insist. ‘I love the wildness, the water and the huge throbbing heart of the community with a passion I can barely express.’ Those who had long known the gypsy that lurked in my flibbertigibbet soul would raise a sceptical eyebrow so I would feel forced to add, ‘When I finally leave here, it will be in a body bag.’ I could not, on any level, imagine an existence outside our life on Pittwater.

  We lived in a beautiful, bagged brick house built as a summer residence for the poet Dorothea Mackellar. Made grandiose by muscular columns that ran the full length of a ballroom-sized verandah, it was a pleasing, subtle balance of timber, stone, brick and panes of wavy glass, laid out in exquisite proportions. It had weathered time with grace and strength for nearly one hundred years, surviving bushfires, and in the words of the poet, droughts and flooding rain. Once remote and as mysterious as Mackellar, it still intrigues and remains an iconic presence on the western foreshores. Although when you eat and sleep, clean, cook, chase away spiders and, occasionally, a snake; mow the lawn, rake leaves and repair small fissures in stone retaining walls, it is those ordinary chores that define life, not the history or glamour or fame of the past.

  Each day we woke to views of ancient escarpments, a waterfall that drizzled in drought, turned torrential during storms; sand flats that at low tide glowed golden in the evening light and at high tide pulsed with fish, stingrays, jellyfish, cormorants, a pair of majestic sea eagles and, once or twice, carpets of starfish like earthbound constellations.

  It was a second marriage for both of us at a time when we were experienced enough to understand that passion might power a relationship at first, but it was how we handled the aftermath that mattered most. ‘Are you happy?’ It was a question I asked regularly in the insecure early days.

  ‘Very. Are you?’

  A different question came later when the sparkle had faded and we’d begun the inevitable slide into familiarity and routine: ‘Any regrets?’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘So why do you ask?’

  ‘You could have married a much younger woman with two healthy breasts and a libido with twenty years to run before conking out.’

  A pause. Quite long. Finally: ‘Sex is the tiniest component of a marriage. If it’s all you’ve got, you’re in trouble.’

  ‘Component? Once an engineer, always an engineer, eh?’ Attempting lightness, backing off. Tense shoulders relaxing. Managing a grin. But it’s not easy, this growing old. Like youth, you have to be halfway through it before you get an unnerving glimmer of what it entails. Not that it matters. From the first bawling moment out of the womb, you’re fully committed.

  There were endless days of gently
cutting through water that whispered sweetly under the hull all the way home. The musky smell and taste of salt. Rare nights, too, when phosphorescence exploded out of black depths, a blizzard of green light, sparkling and weird. And always at the end of any excursion, the character-building climb to the house, panting up a weathered sandstone pathway, which dipped on one side, as if being beckoned by the green waters of the bay. Fighting through cobwebs that sprang up in even a short absence. Breathless at the top. Occasionally, a late-night cognac on the verandah, slumped in our wicker chairs, soaking in the tranquillity.

  When the season was wet enough with grass too moist and leaves too green to catch alight, Bob built a small fire in the heat-cracked stone fireplace on the lawn. We’d pull up chairs, fluff old cushions, whack them under our rumps and cook a chop or two. Sip our wine, stare into the flames and talk late into the night. Just the two of us. Although sometimes we wouldn’t say much.

  Seasons, measured by those unwavering offshore rituals – twilight racing and fire shed dinners – were a gentle, rocking calendar with the flurry of Christmas anchoring the end of one year and signposting the beginning of another. All this wrapped in the warmth and security of knowing we lived amongst good (mostly) people in a wonderful (mostly) community made up of fishermen, shipwrights, artists, architects, layabouts, writers, journalists, photographers, musicians, cooks, chefs, builders, electricians, city commuters and work-at-home freelancers. An eclectic, passionate, stimulating and generous-spirited lot. Mostly.