Читать книгу The Country of Our Dreams - Mary O'Connell - Страница 20

Walking down Brook St in the winter dark, Hilary heard the party well before she saw it. A satisfying sound of people - laughing and talking, the clinking of glass, as in movies and ads. Adult cocktail party sounds. Not the roar of bellicose youth or the scream of drunken girls – but the sound of an old Cointreau ad. When alcohol meant, or at least was presented as sophisticated, European, rich. Not the semi tragic or was it semi-comic blear and smear of the Coogee Bay Hotel. But of course this would be a party of the beautiful people. With Claudia in charge, Lolly’s party would have to be a social success. An adult success. However much all the adult children of the family might dread it.

And then the faerie lights came into view, wreathing the balcony of Claudia and Lolly’s large flat, framing the shadowy drinkers, and smokers, whose conversation had floated up the street to her. She did not recognise any of the shadows on the balcony and for a moment she thought, idiotically, am I at the right place? There was always that anxious moment before a party – the fear of annihilation. The fear of transformation.

It was another party, lit also by faerie light, which had brought the Ryan family into her life. Another dark and tree-adorned Sydney street, but that one had been soft and perfumed with summer, and wilder. For there the great Moreton Bay tree roots rose up under old pavements, so that she had scurried like Alice in a heaving unstable landscape. A landscape inhabited mainly by the very rich, whose walls were covered with a riotous fecundity of star jasmine, crimson bougainvillea, fragrant honeysuckle.

Magical night. Parsley Bay, Sydney Harbour. Water and trees – trees old and luscious – humans young and fresh. They had finished their last university exams, and a celebratory party in a Sydney mansion seemed, well, normal. Hilary’s friend Athena Vassilios had paid for her studies by working as a nanny for a filthy rich family in the Eastern Suburbs. The family had offered the use of their home, and garden, for her end of degree party. No-one thought it was particularly kind or generous of them. Partying up in a millionaire’s mansion was just part of the expanding universe they all believed in.

Outside in the street, where the great trees yearned to escape, Hilary had paused to appreciate her own arrival. Like all the stories, like all the paintings – a beautiful young woman in a lovely dress stands before an arched door. The door slightly ajar, her hand reaches out, perhaps a little tentatively, to press it open. Inside you can see glimpses of a walled garden, roses climbing, an earthly Paradise.

So she had stood, Hilary Barton, in Parsley Bay, in Sydney’s privileged East. A child of the South, of the despised Shire, knowing she had made it. And also wondering, have I got the right address?

She had slipped through the arched door and into a soft treed world, behind the trees a large house ablaze with light – enchanted from the very start. Something made her choose not to go straight into the house, where the sounds of Nirvana were beating out. Chose not to enter the world that way, not to be greeted or known or introduced, pinned down, but to move silently around the side to find the gardens.

And found not just sloping lawns and gardens but the sea, the great harbour, a vast glittering mass of water and little faerie boats down beyond the gardens, all lit by a rising yellow moon. It took her breath away. There were other people there already, of course, people were scattered all over the garden. Candles and lights, cunningly placed, lit up their forms, created shadows. But still, at least in her memory, the garden and the sea offered a great sense of solitude and space.

Hilary had gone instinctively towards the water. Somewhere a man was singing a strange song, something between a cry and a chant, in an unknown language. She turned a corner of the rocky garden path and found him there, with his raven black hair, hunched low and protective over his song, sung in a faerie tongue. He had looked up, initially not pleased with the intrusion. But then at the sight of her – the girl in the beautiful dress – Vianney Ryan had smiled.