Читать книгу The Styx - Patricia Holland - Страница 30

Winter turns to summer without a thought for spring.

The jasmine mocked my father for at least nine months every year, twelve in a good season. My mother planted three different jasmine varieties all over the place, everywhere, in the 1980s as soon as she moved in, and even now when she’s not here, bodily at least, he has no option but to remember her.

She taught me the proper names for each variety. Some aren’t real jasmines, but they smell the same-ish. Jasminium polyanthum, or Pink Jasmine, flowers in winter. It wraps itself tightly through the lattice on every verandah on all four sides right around the house.

Then, when it has a rest, Trachelospermum jasminoides—she called it Starry Starry Night and Day Jasmine—takes over for the hotter times. Until it flowers, you don’t realise it’s there. It’s just a general green, cooling the house, day in, day out, intertwined with the Pink Jasmine, but is much more steadfast, refusing to die down even if my father turns off the sprinkler system. Mum set it up so that in the hotter months, every hour, the sprinklers around under the eaves mist for three minutes, air-conditioning the entire homestead.

Then there’s the third jasmine variety, Cestrum nocturnum. It’s not a real jasmine, but Mum and me, we adopted it as part of the jasmine family because we loved it so. Virtually every night after the worst cold weather, and in high summer, and lots of other times of the year, Cestrum nocturnum, or—Mum’s name for it—Nighty-Night Jasmine, visits on dusk to wish me goodnight, flooding the house and garden, insisting on acknowledgement.

It must choke him, to breathe her in, in every breeze wafting through the house. He must gag on her scent hitting the back of his throat when the air is heavy and still. For me, Cestrum smells like the end of cold nights. Even in summer, it smells like the sweetest spring.

At the end of October—it was after Mum had left, and just after I turned six—Mrs Stephens rang my father regarding my starting school in Term One, the next year.

“If we start Sophie on the first day with all the others, she will feel much more a part of her class,” Mrs Stephens said.

It was simple. I was one of her students now, so I now needed to attend school. And she wasn’t leaving it to chance that my father was on task. She’s a bit like my mother. There is no stopping her when she’s on a mission, and she even sent the local priest, Father Ryan, out to congratulate my father on supporting me so strongly in my education.

“You are a credit to your grandfather,” Father Ryan told my father.

“When our gift from God, Mrs Stephens, told me you were sending Sophie to school next January, I literally fell to my knees and cried,” Father Ryan said.

“Though the mills of God grind slowly,

they grind for one and all;

With such patience He stands waiting,

with your actions you stand tall.”

That’s almost sort of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Father Ryan’s ability to misquote was legendary. He would never let the real words, or even the real sentiment, stand in his way.

“And I have uniforms for her,” he went on without a breath, “courtesy of Mrs Stephens of course.” Father Ryan would be a good didgeridoo player. He can breathe in with his nose, as his words are tumbling out of his mouth.

At that stage I wasn’t sure if I really wanted to go to school. The unknown sours our thoughts, but with any whiff that my father was being “managed” by Father Ryan, my mood couldn’t help but freshen. You have to admit it was a cute tactic, and for me it made me feel so very much less alone.