Fire Fire (7 page)

The children ranged through the bush stamping on mounds and listening. Helmut just smiled.

‘Just chop down some saplings and bend them into a ball and weave them with broom and then grow witches hut over it and no one will ever find it.'

The children poked witches huts with broomsticks.

Helmut smiled from his Secret Spot. The trick was if you made no mark you could not be found and your Secret Spot could be anywhere. But he was giving himself ideas and dreamed of building—really building—a hidden teepee, a hut, a refuge.

They rarely had visitors and weren't very good at the social graces. Once the Jehovah's Witnesses made it through the clay cutting and the overgrown bush track to knock a little nervously at the door, staring at the huge ruined fascia lying half buried in the garden between the two houses, reading the flaking Romanesque letters: ‘omen's Temperance Institute'. Helmut and the younger kids gathered at the door. He was the oldest one home. He waited, silent. They knocked again.

‘Who's that trip-trapping over my bridge?' he called out firmly.

They didn't answer. He didn't open the door and they left.

The house was a remote castle, well fortified with sundry discomforts, overeager, almost canine, hospitality and bad table manners. Relatives from overseas usually visited for an hour or during daylight. Sibylla and Grog, however, came to stay. They had been friends of Acantia and Pa when the Houdinis lived in Germany, long ago.

When Sibylla and Grog arrived, everything changed. They got Beate's house and the first thing they did was ban the kids from wandering in. This was the first sign of an inveterate unfriendliness. Grog frowned all the time and Sibylla smiled all the time, even when she was being unfriendly. The main house's toilet broke down.

However, Sibylla befriended Ursula after a while and together they built a garden. It had rows of herbs and vegetables and Rapunzel lettuces. It was out of sight and earshot of the house.

Sibylla, smiling all the while, told Ursula that Acantia knew nothing about the harmony of the spheres and surrendering to true destiny. Sibylla was a good gardener but clearly did not know Acantia very well.

Sibylla and Grog were leaving: the kombi was piled up with their stuff and they had airplane tickets. The day before there had been much shouting behind closed doors and the children had slunk off into the bush until it was over. Now Pa and Acantia were silent and Grog was very cold to them. The same day, Acantia rushed down to the garden and ripped everything up. She trampled the seed beds like a rhinoceros stamping out a fire. Ursula was enraged beyond caution. Acantia said that if Ursula wasn't careful she would turn out just like Sibylla.

Ursula said she hoped so. At least Sibylla knew how to be gentle and smile and build a garden.

Beate told Ursula a few years later that Sibylla had tried to swap Grog for Pa. Ursula wished then that she had helped Acantia to destroy the garden. She was so burdened by her former loyalty to Sibylla that she pretended to herself that sabotage had been her purpose all along.

Count Antonio Ugolini was the second friend of the Houdinis. When Count Ugolini came no one saw him as anything other than he seemed: a dispossessed multi-millionaire aristocrat with a yacht and a Stradivarius.

He appeared one day, calm and quiet, stepping out of his car and through the kitchen window into the house as if there was nothing strange at all about that. The door had been ripped off its hinges and nailed shut since the day Sibylla and Grog left, and the window was also still broken. Acantia was acutely embarrassed but struck by his breeding and aplomb. She had everything repaired before his next visit. From then on Count Ugolini called on them periodically, sat in apparent exhaustion in the
pride of the house
, the beautiful polished wood auditorium, and spoke quietly of his noble lineage and his suffering at the hands of his depraved family. Apart from the Stradivarius, he also loved collectable musicians.

He was a short, stocky man with a languid, suffering air. He had a lot of black bristles and big ears. He had a glutinous, honeyed voice. He claimed to be the heir to parts of Italy and Hungary, past and present, but was on the run from a senile father who refused to die and was trying to obliterate his gifted and mistreated son. Count Ugolini played violin, talked casually about the Stradivarius (stolen back from the long list of robbers who had stolen it from his great grandfather), was an artist and a sensitive soul who, more by luck than inherent resilience, had thus far escaped with his life.

Acantia loved Count Ugolini. Count Ugolini appeared to despise her, which increased her conviction of his superiority. Count Ugolini loved Pa. He even, late one night on his yacht, made a pass at him. Pa didn't notice and relayed the incident under the heading of jolly fellows having fun in a manly way. Many years later, when the house burned down, Count Ugolini sent Pa a mini-grand piano as a present.

Acantia and Pa, having known the count for some time, trusted him as if they knew every recess of his soul. They wanted their children to spend time with such a powerful, cultured and gifted individual.

‘I am like the Conte de Monte Cristo,' Count Ugolini said. His long white fingers curled and uncurled around his fat knee. Ursula stared at his hands. They were much whiter and softer than her own. Her hands were brown and grimy. Where the cow's teat bedded in the firm muscle between her thumb and forefinger her skin was pink and honey gold. But over the backs of her palms and along each finger stretched a caul of ingrown dirt. She stared at her fingernails and cuticles and felt her calluses with each of her thumbs. For a moment she looked like Struwelpeter. She popped her thumbs out. Her thumbs were possibly cleaner than all the rest of her, pressed daily deep into the milk-slicked udder. The princesses bathed in milk, she thought, looking with casual affection at them. She glanced back to the Count's thumbs, fascinated by their bloodlessness. The Count continued in his modulated, sweet voice:

‘I am exiled to a terrible prison, but I too have found great treasure.' He bent the beam of his eye down to Acantia and Pa, taking in the whole family in soft, misty focus. Pa was trying to look literary. Acantia was looking dreamy, even beautiful. The Count paused, facing the open door, watching Helmut, Siegfried and Lilo chasing each other outside. He sighed.

‘You are most fortunate. Precious, precious children. I will never have a family. Too dangerous.'

Acantia wrung her hands in genuine distress.

‘No! No. Don't say that. Things change. Let me read your palm for you!'

His hands shrank from Acantia's touch, disappearing into themselves. His closed hands looked like punched pieces of dough.

Ursula disliked the Count then, out of loyalty to Acantia.

Ursula was eleven and she wondered what Acantia had that Count Ugolini would shrink from her.

Aborigines were the pitiful losers of the great race. As were the Italians, Balts, Greeks and Asians. Getting Australia was a race.

White Northern Europeans won it, proving that they were faster, smarter and more evolved than those who came later. This win gave them the right to do what they liked. When Ursula said that then the Aborigines really won, Acantia said they were passive not active inheritors of the land and so not in the race at all, in fact more like ethereal beings who suffered for being on a higher spiritual plane but in a much lower human form. Later Acantia found out that the Chinese discovered Australia years before the Europeans and didn't bother colonising it or messing with Aboriginal culture and she went quiet on the great race. But she couldn't get away from talking about Aborigines. Ursula came to accept that being Australian meant she was connected to and defined by these unseen fellows, Australians too but as shadowy and elusive as angels or dreams.

Underneath, Acantia despised white Australians, hated and feared more recent immigrant Australians, and was repelled by every Aborigine she saw. Nonetheless she yearned for something in her idea of tribal life and for one summer made the children form totems, improve javelin skills and get almost all over tans.

She threw in the whole notion of being Australian when a Saturday
Age
rode into Whispers on the back of a lettuce.

‘Can you believe it! They have sunk so low. They've become materialistic. They want a different flag, and
land rights
!' Tribal life was over. She made the children become Spartans.

‘Australia has no depth, no history,' she said, to get back at the Aborigines. ‘That's why it has no art, no music and no literature. Young, silly, weak, corrupt. Look at this talk about letting in the Vietnamese. How will it ever get Culture with such a mish-mash?'

In the early years at Whispers, school started at 6.00 am with Instrument Practice. Then Animal Husbandry. Then there was a break for Breakfast and Song, then Home Skills (cleaning up ready for classes). At 8.45 some Physical Education and Eurhythmy, then at 9.00, The Three Rs. Acantia could do long multiplication and long division in her head and had beautiful penmanship. Both had elements of magic and secret powers. The children were enthralled.

At 10.45 they broke for some more Physical Education (usually a sprint up to the top dam and back, then some stretches). Then on alternate days they had History and Culture, or Science classes. Pa taught them European History, German Language and Culture; Acantia taught them the British Empire and Sums. Acantia took Science. Then they had lunch, and were free to paint, draw, sculpt, play with the microscopes, make music or musical instruments or garden until whenever they liked. Any time after 3.30 they were free either to continue whatever they had got engrossed in, or to run off into the bush or wherever and read or play. On clear summer nights they did Astronomy and Stellar Navigation. Other than the early start and caring for the animals in midwinter, Ursula loved all of it.

Occasionally Acantia checked up on what their contemporaries would be learning, and taught them those things too. But she had a tendency to ridicule anything that was foreign to her, and Ursula grew up with the impression that sets and calculus were a bit silly and Australian history negligible. New ideas and anything to do with politics were met with derision.