Peter Temple: An Iron Rose

Francis Keany was waiting for us in front of the dilapidated mansion called Harkness Park, sitting in his warm Discovery, smoking a panatella and listening to La Traviata on eight speakers. When the window slid down, the warmth and the aromatic Cuban smoke and the music floated out to us where we stood in the cold and the rain and the mud.

‘Boys,’ he said. ‘You know I don’t like to wait around when you’re on my time.’

Stan Harrop cleared his nose and spat, a sound like a blow dart being fired. The missile hit the right front hubcap. ‘We’re not on your fucking time, Frankie,’ he said. ‘We’re here to look at a job. Don’t like it, off we fuck.’

Francis’s eyes narrowed. Then self-interest clicked in and he cocked his head and smiled, the smile that had won many a society matron’s heart. And the rest, so the word went. ‘You’re absolutely right, Stan,’ he said. ‘I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me show you the magnitude of the task.’

He got out of the vehicle, put a Barbour hat on his sleek head to complete his Barbour outfit, and led us down the driveway and into the wilderness. We couldn’t get far: this was a garden gone feral. Francis started down what was once a path and was now a dripping tunnel that narrowed rapidly. He wrestled with branches for a few metres, gradually losing confidence. Finally, faced with an impassable thicket, he gave up. We reversed out, Lew in front, then me, then Flannery, then Stan, then Francis.

Francis pushed his way past us and tried another matted and sodden avenue. A few metres in, he missed an overgrown step, fell forward and disappeared into a dank mass of vegetation. His shriek hung in the cold air, wild enough to send hundreds of birds thrumming skywards.

We all stopped. Stan began to roll a cigarette one-handed as we waited for Francis to emerge. ‘Hurt yourself?’ he said, no trace of sympathy in his voice, as the wet figure struggled upright, cursing.

‘Course I fucking hurt myself,’ Francis said, each word a small, distinct explosion. ‘Look at this shit on my trousers.’

‘On?’ Stan said. ‘We know there’s a shit in your trousers. What are we looking for here, Frankie? Don’t have to hack my way with a bloody machete to see it’s a jungle.’

Francis was examining the slime on his palms, mouth pursed in disgust. ‘My clients want it restored,’ he said. ‘I was trying to show you the enormity of the task.’

‘Enormity? That’s not the word you want, Frankie,’ Stan said. He was a pedant about language. ‘Try enormousness. And if they want it bloody restored, what do they want it bloody restored to ?’

‘ I don’t know,’ Francis snarled. ‘Don’t fucking care. Its former fucking glory. That’s your department.’

‘Francis Keany doesn’t know and doesn’t fucking care. You should put that on your business cards.’

Stan took pleasure in giving Francis this kind of needle. The only reason Francis tolerated it was because without Stan he wouldn’t be able to take on jobs like this. Francis had started out as a florist and conned his way into the garden design trade. He apparently wasn’t too bad at doing little squares of box with lollipops in the middle and iceberg roses lashed to dark-green trellis. But then one of his satisfied society matrons commissioned him to do a four-acre garden from scratch near Mount Macedon. Francis panicked: you couldn’t fill four acres with little squares of Buxus sempervirens. You couldn’t copy another big garden. People would notice. And then, somehow, he heard about Stan Harrop.

Stan had started work at twelve as a garden boy at Sefton Hall in the south of England. Four years later, he lied about his age and went off to war. When he came back, five years on, he was all of twenty-one, sergeant’s stripes on his arm, the ribbon of the Military Cross on his chest, and a long bayonet scar on his right forearm. It was twenty years before he left Sefton Hall again, this time to catch the P amp;O liner to Sydney to be head gardener on an estate outside Mittagong. Over the next twenty years, he ran four other big gardens. Then he bought fifty acres with a round hill on it down the road from Ned Lowey and started a nursery. That was where Francis Keany found him. It was the luckiest day of Francis’s life. And for Ned and Flannery, and later for me, it meant fairly regular work at a decent rate of pay.

‘There’s a little clear bit over there,’ Lew said. We followed him through a grove of plane trees into a clearing. For some reason, rocky soil perhaps, nothing had grown here. You could at least see some way into the jungle. Overgrown shrubs were everywhere. Mature deciduous trees-oaks, ashes, elms, planes, maples, birches-stood in deep drifts of rotting leaves. To the left, what might once have been a tapestry hedge of yew and privet and holly was a great impenetrable green barricade. Rampant, strangling holly had spread everywhere, gleaming like wet plastic. All trace of the garden’s form, of its design, had been obliterated by years of unchecked growth.

‘These clients of yours,’ Stan said, ‘they understand the magnitude of what they’re getting into here? Financially speaking.’

‘Leon Karsh,’ Francis said. ‘Food. Hotels. Travel. Leon and Anne Karsh.’

Stan looked at me. ‘Food. Hotels. Travel. How do you suggest we approach this thing, Mac?’

I said, ‘Food. Hotels. Travel. From the air. We approach it from the air. Aerial photography.’

‘My feelings exactly,’ Stan said. ‘Francis…?’

‘Aerial photographs?’ Francis said. ‘Are you mad? Can you imagine the expense? Why don’t you just poke around and…’

‘Aerial photographs,’ said Stan. ‘Aerial photographs and other research. Paid by the hour. Or we fuck off.’

You could see Francis’s fists clench in the Barbour’s roomy pockets. ‘Of course,’ he said through his capped teeth. ‘Whatever it takes.’ Pause. ‘Stan.’

Before we left, we went down the road and looked at the derelict three-storey bluestone flour mill on the creek at the bottom of the Karsh property. Flannery went off to look at the millrace pond. He was obsessed by machinery, the older the better. When he came back, he had a look of wonder on his face, the face of a naughty thirty-five-year-old boy. ‘Sluicegate’ll still work,’ he said. ‘Someone’s been greasing it.’

The wind had come up and, while we looked at the building, a slate tile came off the roof and sailed down into the poplar thicket along the creek.

‘Dangerous place to be, down the creek,’ Flannery said.

We drove back via the country cemetery where we’d buried Ned. It was a windblown acre of lopsided headstones and rain-eroded paths on a hillside above a weatherboard Presbyterian church. Sheep grazed in the paddock next door, freezing at the sight of the dog.

‘I’ll just pop this on,’ Stan said. He’d made a wreath out of ivy and holly for Ned’s grave. He hadn’t come to the funeral. ‘I can’t, Mac,’ he’d said on the phone. ‘I can’t go to funerals. Don’t know what it is. Something from the war. Ned knew. He’ll understand. Explain to the boy, will you?’

We all got out, into the clean, biting wind. This was my third visit to the place. My father’s grave was here too. You could see for miles, settled country, cleared, big round hills with necklaces of sheep, roads marked by avenues of bare poplars. Ned’s grave was a bit of new ploughing in the cemetery. Two magpies flew up angrily at our approach, disturbed at the rewarding task of picking over the rich new soil for worms.

Stan put the wreath on the mound. ‘Sleep well, old son,’ he said. ‘We’re all better for knowing you.’

I walked around to my father’s grave. It needed weeding and the silver paint in the incised inscription was peeling. Colin MacArthur Faraday, 1928–1992, it said. Under the date, a single line, Ned’s choice: A free and generous spirit come to rest.