The House on the Hill Page 9

  After a short flight, we landed in Casablanca. Instead of finding the city imbued with the romance of Bogart and Bergman, it was noisy, ugly and soulless. Over the next few days we moved on to Rabat, Meknes and the wonders of ancient Fez, following a well-worn tourist trail. On a sharp, clean day, and after a bone-shaking drive along winding dirt roads through high-mountain passes, with tea stops in mud huts in desolate country, I said, ‘Such a bleak landscape. Nothing could ever grow here.’

  ‘You’re wrong,’ said one of the Alans from the back seat. ‘Once these barren mountains were covered in forests. They’ve been worn down and out by goats and people over millennia.’ Bob disagreed from the front seat. An enthusiastic debate ping-ponged. Every so often a lone tree appeared, clinging precariously to an almost vertical mountainside. ‘See!’ Alan said, pointing, feeling vindicated. ‘Evidence of the struggle to regenerate.’

  Finally, our four-wheel drive came to a halt outside the village of Amassine. It could go no further. Inside the walls, roads and pathways were donkey-cart wide. We’d just stepped back one thousand years. Hoisting our bags on our backs, we began walking to our accommodation.

  ‘It’s not exactly throbbing with life, is it?’ Bob said, looking around. The streets were deserted. ‘You’d have to love rugs to come here,’ he added in a tone that hinted he’d never understand my passion. A couple of kids, a girl and a boy, under the age of ten, materialised out of nowhere. Smooth-skinned and beautiful with huge brown eyes framed by lashes that touched their eyebrows, they smiled widely, revealing a mouth full of decayed and missing teeth.

  ‘So sad,’ I muttered to our guide.

  He shrugged. ‘We have tried to help. The imam is against toothbrushes.’

  ‘And that’s the end of it?’ I said in disbelief.

  ‘That is the end of it.’

  We stayed in a large rendered house with a warren of rooms that spread out on different levels. It belonged to the tall, thin, gently mannered headman of the weaving cooperative and had been modified to suit dedicated, rug-loving tourists who travelled from all over the world to meet the weavers. Not only did we have a squat toilet when most of the villagers used the open fields to perform their more basic ablutions, the house also had a hamam powered by bottled gas.

  By day, we met the weavers, nimble-fingered, cheerful women who shared their dirt floor living space with orphaned lambs, roosters and bossy hens. In the evening, we sat on benches on a narrow balcony and ate various meats, spices and grains cooked by men. Mopping the juices with tough flatbread. At night, we slept on rugs on the floor, covered by rugs, with more rugs hung as room dividers. It was raw and real. To me, worth a thousand visits to the Vatican.

  At the end of a cold but sunny day spent walking along beautiful valleys thickly carpeted with purple wild orchids and blue hyacinths, Bob and I sat naked in the candlelight of the hamam. The warmth and humid cosiness eased our aches and pains. Better than a large, restorative cognac, we agreed as we washed each other’s backs with bowls of stingingly hot water and, feeling deeply soporific, sat on small timber stools to idly debate how long we’d survive in this kind of primitive settlement where there were no supermarkets, no doctors, no dentists, not even a chemist where a pack of basic painkillers could be purchased to ease a nagging headache. A place where, all year, chill winds funnelled down from the barren peaks of the High Atlas; where, in winter, snow fell thickly and a bundle of firewood to supply a meagre, transitory heat cost more than a pinch of the precious saffron grown in a nearby village.

  ‘The squat loo,’ I murmured. ‘It’s agony going down and getting up. I feel like someone’s sticking red-hot screwdrivers through my knee joints. Not sure I could take it for too long.’

  ‘You’d get used to it,’ Bob replied, tipping another pitcher of exquisitely hot water down my back.

  Not in a million years, I thought. But I immediately regretted disclosing the deteriorating condition of my knees. The impulse to hide, deny and even fib to preserve an illusion of youth was still instinctive. Sitting naked with just one breast and a long, ugly scar after a bout with breast cancer that even candlelight failed to soften, I was fully aware Bob had seen, experienced and understood the worst of me and in me. But somehow adding bad knees to the ailment list of the aging felt like inflicting yet another potentially mortal wound to the relationship.

  So I lied. ‘Yeah. ’Course I’d get used to it.’

  By the time we stepped into the frigid starstruck Moroccan night in our pyjamas, ready to dash upstairs to our bed, we’d concluded that the choice between living sustainably and just plain unbearably was going to be eternally tricky, even impossible for we pampered Westerners.

  The next day, we moved on from our quiet rug weavers to chaotic Marrakech. We stayed in a luscious riad run by a sophisticated French woman. Our room had a large ensuite, flushing loo, a shower and thick white bathrobes hanging behind the door. The sheets were heavy cotton. A cool, blue pool of water shivered in the shaded central courtyard. Every morning we ate flaky pastries and fresh fruit on a rooftop. Dodged and weaved through thick crowds and noisy motorbikes to lunch on the perimeter of the throbbing maidan, where snake charmers, storytellers, monkeys in frilly red dresses and tasselled hats, henna tattooists, food vendors and whirling dancers performed as they have for thousands of years. Dined on ten-course dinners in restaurants as old as the city. It was vibrant and exotic but somehow, after the simplicity and frugality of our rug weavers’ village, the excess niggled. Where was the balance, I wondered, between too little and too much? Hadn’t I just been told somewhere in Italy (or read somewhere), that when Galileo pointed out the absurdity of calling jewels and gold precious and soil base, that if soil was as scarce as jewels a prince would spend a cartload of gold to have enough soil to sow an orange seed? That poor man was convicted of heresy when he should have been granted a sainthood for common sense. But I asked myself, not for the first time, should we all be trying harder to live more sustainably on an overburdened planet?

  It was high summer when we returned to Rome. We farewelled the Alans x 2 over an extravagant, six-hour dinner at the home of a couple of their charming expatriate friends. Bleary-eyed the following morning, we fended off gypsies at the railway station and bought train tickets to Venice. We arrived tired, hot and hungry in the middle of the afternoon, unsure whether the woman who held the keys to our apartment would be waiting to meet us, or not. Like most things Italian, emailed directions were enthusiastic but confusing and I’d received no reply to my queries.

  I will never forget the moment we emerged from the station. I burst into tears. Felt a wave of homesickness that made my knees buckle. Water. Boats. Seagulls. ‘This will be Pittwater one day,’ I said to Bob in a voice broken by emotion. ‘Different but the same. As long as no one is ever allowed to touch the great lung of the Ku-ring-gai National Park.’

  A few water taxis, all long-nosed with gleaming timber, sparkling chrome and cushiony white vinyl seats, were tied to bollards. We headed straight for them.

  ‘Not quite the same as our shabby old pink water taxis,’ Bob said, ‘but they will have to do.’

  We leapt on board and sat back, feeling like Grace Kelly and Cary Grant. The driver began to tell us boat rules. We held up our hands to halt him, said we were good with boats – he needn’t worry we’d do anything stupid. He stowed our bags, we showed him the piece of paper with the name of the piazza where we were to meet our contact and set off. The tears kept coming. Venice was overwhelming. Nothing, not even the water and boat link with our Pittwater life, could have prepared me for it. It delivered what big-city travel rarely did for me anymore: inspiration.

  There was the usual confusion but eventually we found our contact, received the keys, opened a heroic old door to the entrance and puffed up twelve half-flights of decadently wide, beautiful marble steps to our attic apartment. It was glorious. Old beams, views of a canal, a good kitchen, a weird little hip bath no adult could possibly use but in Venice
– it was perfect anyway. We parked our bags and took off exploring. Ate pastry here, drank a coffee there. Later, a cocktail while around us a band played and people – American tourists, I suspect – danced with Broadway skill and kept us spellbound. Wine with dinner. Afterwards, we negotiated the stairs slowly, tipsily, to the peace and quiet of our own space. We stood side by side at a window, gazing at the tiled rooftops of Venice spread before us.

  In the morning, Bob set off to find coffee and more pastries, and returned to present breakfast in bed with an Italian flourish. Two days later, the American holiday season began and the weight of so many visitors must have sunk the waterlogged island further into the sea. I also received word from the publishers that my book needed more work and the deadline loomed. I opened the windows to the sights and smells – occasionally putrid – of Venice, and worked solidly for the rest of the week.

  Work made me feel like a local, added a depth that went beyond a simple holiday. I ran out at lunchtime for melon and prosciutto, fresh mozzarella, the first peaches of the season. Prepared lunch in the kitchen, sat at the table to eat. Bob explored the maritime museum, investigated restaurants to take me to dinner, took boat trips to other islands. It was a lonelier time for him, but he didn’t complain. Then it was all over. The work. Our two months away from Pittwater. I’d seen Venice at last. I yearned for nothing more from travel. We returned to Rome to catch our flight home.

  Looking back, I sometimes wonder if the juxtaposition of the excess of Rome and the Vatican (vow of poverty?) and the simple frugality of Amassine was the unwitting catalyst for what turned out to be radical reform for us. And even though we were ignorant of the fact, we’d already half-committed to set life-changing events in motion. Or maybe it was more basic than that. Perhaps we were searching for manageable challenges to sidestep the uncomfortable, even disquieting sense of becoming increasingly irrelevant as younger minds shaped the ground of the future. More and more, it felt as though my feet were sinking into the quicksand of the past, where none of the old reference points held true. Overnight, it seemed, I’d crossed an invisible border. Woken in a world so changed that every nuance, skill and truth I’d busted a gut trying to learn and understand was suddenly worthless. No one cared what I thought. No one was interested in what I’d spent a lifetime discovering. No one even wanted to seat me at a table with a view. Only my oldest friends were willing to put up with me. Even more alarming, I was less and less curious when once I’d been a shameless stickybeak eager to learn.

  To be on the cusp of sixty was so infuriatingly humbling, it was tempting to radiate disgruntlement purely as a defence mechanism. I consoled myself with the thought that, with nothing to lose, I didn’t have to give a damn anymore. The key to freedom and clarity. But some days, I simply asked: ‘Is there a twelve-year-old lurking anywhere who can explain how this works? Or even a five-year-old?’

  9

  SYDNEY WAS A COLD, JET-LAGGED SHOCK. It took me nearly a month to overcome the nausea and empty-headedness brought on by too many time zones in the space of too little time. I tried to remember how I’d coped when I went on overseas assignments and vaulted straight from the airport to my desk. Recalled a horror, sleepless flight from the Philippines, after peering into the vast wardrobes of Imelda Marcos and the death room of Ferdinand following their fall from power in 1986. All that theft and corruption and he ended up in a bare cubicle on a single bed with an oxygen tank alongside. A man screamed and ranted through the night flight, hallucinating or about to run amok with a machete, who could tell? None of us slept a wink. We all sat quiet as mice, afraid even a sudden movement might launch him into a violent spiral that could bring down the plane. At my desk just before 7 am, I was so wiped out I couldn’t even speak coherently. I always bounced back in a few days, though. The resilience of youth. But I was no longer young and, at this end of my life, even an hour of feeling off-colour felt like a waste of precious time.

  When I called my mother to say we were home, she didn’t miss a beat: ‘Where have you been? I’ve been frantic.’

  I ignored her. ‘Picnic or restaurant?’

  ‘Picnic!’

  And we settled into our routines without further comment.

  ‘Spending winter in Cooktown might be a bit radical,’ I said, one cold night after our return from the heat of the European summer, ‘but if we could find somewhere warmer within easy reach of Pittwater, maybe we should give the idea some serious thought.’

  We were sitting in a small room we called the Snug. Lined with books and housing Bob’s late wife’s early Australian pottery collection, it boasted the television and an insanely comfortable armchair with plenty of room to put your feet up and accommodate the dog. It was Sunday night. The heating was on high. Chippy and me, pressed up against a wall of soft cushions, were cuddled under a rug. She was twelve years old now, with a snout more grey than tan, signs of glaucoma and the beginnings of arthritis in her legs. She, too, felt the cold more keenly.

  ‘A winter bolthole,’ Bob mused, his feet encased in sheepskin boots and raised on a footstool. I’d expected him to poo-poo the idea again, but he reached for the spiral notebook he kept handy and drew a line down the middle of the page. ‘In an ideal world, what would you like?’

  I didn’t even have to think: ‘Flat land. Enough for a good garden. Power attached. Town water or a permanent water supply.’ Bob added north-facing. No more than a four-hour drive from Pittwater, we agreed, or it would entail a flight – difficult to organise with the dog. And there was the issue of my mother. We needed to be within reasonable reach in case of emergencies.

  In the background, architectural guru Kevin McCloud (that man has a lot to answer for) was wrapping up a program on a young couple that had gone out on a mind-boggling financial limb to build a dream house, risking every hard-earned penny, even bankruptcy. At the end of the program, the couple revealed an anonymous benefactor had essentially saved them from debtors’ prison.

  Madness, we said, shaking our heads and sanctimoniously telling ourselves we’d never take unreasonable risks. At some point, we nodded to each other, they should’ve stepped back from the dream and been content with what was realistically feasible. But sitting in judgment from the safety of your sitting room is easy. In truth, none of us knows what follies we’re capable of committing until we’re put to the test. Our heads filled with plans that neither of us thought for a moment might be beyond us. Not so different, then, to the foolish dreamers we’d scorned.

  ‘It would be an investment, too,’ I said dreamily. ‘Holidays are like standing next to an open fire and chucking in your cash. Nothing to show for it when you’re home except a few mementoes there’s not enough space for anyway. We’ll be spending money wisely.’

  A search began for five to twenty gently undulating acres with power and water connected on an easy access (bitumen road), north-facing site. A pre-existing house would be great, but if the land was suitable, we were prepared to build from scratch. With careful planning, we might eventually live off-grid. A minuscule contribution to the planet, but every little bit helped. Why not investigate Wingham, we said?

  The town was built around a huge grassed square sporting a de Havilland Vampire fighter plane from the Korean War, and a great log to remind locals of the days when timber was the main game. The still-working post office was built in 1884, the courthouse (defunct) in 1934, and the police station (also defunct) in 1909. You could always get a park in the main street (except during funerals). A wonderful fruit and vegetable shop called Granty’s featured local organic produce. There was also a butcher shop, a few bakeries and a selection of excellent coffee shops that ranged from traditional old country town (crustless cheese and tomato sandwiches cut into precise quarters) to slick new-age (walnut, fig and blue cheese salad) and hippy organic. A chemist, newsagent, clothing shops, shoe shop, op shops, white goods store, knick-knack shop, homewares store, rural produce stores and a pump and irrigation specialist ensured you could buy everyt
hing from a coffee pot to a tractor without leaving town. A large supermarket took care of the basic necessities. By the standards of our remote Moroccan village, Isabella Street was the equivalent of the Champs Élysées. The countryside, which we’d explored earlier, was stunning. Flourishing. Green. Gentle. Rugged. Creeks. Rivers. And within a short drive, beaches and a clean blue ocean.

  Choosing the Wingham area had the added advantage of knowing a few people, and it had a sleepy Old World charm. Big business had bypassed it in favour of nearby Taree, a regional centre with a greater population density. We also knew that if weather patterns remained true, we could expect warm, sunny, dry winter days balanced by clear, cold nights. The pace was also idyllic.

  ‘You need to keep your eyes open,’ Michael told me early in our Killabakh stay. ‘’Cause if someone waves and you ignore them, your name goes on a list.’ List? ‘Yeah, you’re a snob.’ Oh. ‘Or you need new specs …’

  At the much deeper and possibly unacknowledged heart of the decision was a desire to avoid the trap of dissolving into a convenient but unchallenging future until we, too, reached the day when being ‘well looked after’ summed up our daily existence.

  For the next few weeks, I trawled the Wingham real estate websites without much success. Properties were either too big, too small, badly sited (for us), too far from town (in the best of all worlds, we’d stipulated a maximum of ten minutes from the heart of Wingham) or too close to town. We were heartened by prices, though. They were well within our budget, probably as a result of the Global Financial Crisis, as it was now labelled. While I wasn’t keen to profit from someone else’s problems, the alternative was to stay home and do nothing.