Eucalyptus by Murray Bail

the tree. She’d been glancing this way and that in a strange manner. She was slightly plump and wore a scarf over her head. Then leaving her child in its pram she hurried back and in the one movement dropped an envelope into the slit of the tree.
    At least that’s what he thought he saw. On the bench he’d been thinking his years were measured in strokes of trees, and some were angled, a few stunted. The intervals were rhythmic, almost musical. His history was stuffed with trees. Now he was staring at the solitary E. gunnii which by rights should have been a maculata .
    He was half-deciding whether to get up and take another look or merely wander away, for it was time, when a young gardener appeared. He lowered his wheelbarrow and in full view thrust his arm up to his elbow into the vagina-slit of the Cider Gum—something he wouldn’t want to try in Australia. Mr Cave watched as he opened the envelope. Shoving it in his back pocket he immediately took it out again. With a sigh he looked around smiling, when he noticed Cave.
    The private scene in two parts Mr Cave had witnessed would stay with him for the rest of his life. It was perhaps prompted by the surrounding green, brighter than any lawn. The shadows formed spikes and lattice. They were unusually dark. And the necessary eagerness, first of the woman, which then activated the eagerness of the younger gardener. The man’s muddy boots. The interval between their actions; the difference in their years. Pink patterned scarf.
    And, for all that, not knowing what was written on the note, who they were; the open-endedness of it all, like the late afternoon itself.
    Not long after that Mr Cave decided in his deliberate way he would win the hand of Holland’s speckled daughter.

• 7 •

Regnans
    â€˜ TALL TIMBER ’—a term used locally by the Sprunt sisters in unison to render male flesh abstract. Seated on the sofa reserved for suitors, Mr Cave protruded from a bed of blushing roses, shoulders almost coming up to Ellen’s. It is hard to imagine a more unsuitable name than Cave for someone so straight and tall. Accordingly, people forgot about his first name, Roy, and tacked on Mister in front. ‘Cave’ implies the horizontal, whereas this man was vertical—a telegraph pole fashioned from a tree.
    What interested Ellen was his hair. At first she thought it was as black as a crow. Then she remembered the pair of shoes she’d liked in Sydney, small and glossy blue-black, parted like Mr Cave’s hair to one side, which is why she looked upon him favourably.
    He was almost old enough to be Ellen’s father; yet where her father’s face had become a reddish terrain of boulders, ravines, flood plains and spinifex, Mr Cave’s face was magically smooth. It didn’t generate any lines, not even when he talked. The black hair can be set in context: apparently it was part and parcel, a healthy by-product, of self-possession. The only lines on his person came from the crisp safari suit, a khaki construct of paramilitary lines, like a jacket sketched in pencil, pointing up to his face where, except for his carefully combed part, there were no lines.
    Those vertical lines from the unfortunate safari suit helped make him appear taller than he actually was.
    Talking to Mr Cave, Holland nodded more than usual; at the same time he offered a grain of patience—unusual for him—which grew into a canny watchfulness. It wasn’t that Holland was showing respect; hardly. In the world of eucalypts everyone knew about Mr Cave, but then they knew all about Holland and his trees too.
    In Mr Cave’s Adelaide, the distinction between city and country, as proposed by the Greeks, was blurred. The country penetrates the city almost to the town hall steps, depositing gum trees on the way, along with vast rectangles of dry grass. As a consequence, Adelaide people may be said to possess a certain physical clarity of