sycamore

The driveway is long, slanted across the property, steep, the bitumen patched. Treacherous stone stairs from the letterbox cross the drive half way up to the house. My sister’s new house. Off a muddy lane hidden in the bush not far from the Emerald golf course.

The house is magnificent, architect-designed, built in the thirties, genteel. The drive curls around to the back door under what the floor plan calls the port cochere, the coachman’s entrance. I enter the vestibule, get hit by a musty reek. The place has been unoccupied, unheated, for a week.

The passageway runs the width of the place, not the length, to the right the kitchen, maid’s room, to the left the bedrooms. Straight ahead is the huge living room, French doors to a pillored verandah looking across the valley. Behind the house, separate, up wooden stairs, is the studio, a large, dark-panelled room, two huge windows with the best view on the property, northeast.

My sister and brother-in-law are inside, my niece and her partner too. My son and his partner arrive, then my nephew’s partner. The ducted heating drives out the must. We open doors, cupboards, everything oddly angled; this is its charm—it’s no box.

My sister will turn the house into a masterpiece, as it once was. But I know from the tremor in her voice the garden frightens her.

I wander down a garden path. The previous occupants have let the garden go; more likely it overwhelmed them. New vegie boxes in the back corner attest to an attempt to make a go of it. Hidden paths dense with moss disappear under azalea hedges. English ivy, the scourge of native flora, insinuates itself across every surface. A team of gardeners would need a year to tame it.

My nephew’s partner encounters a neighbour on her ramble through the wilderness. He says the house has changed hands four times in eight years, twice owned by gay couples. I suspect the garden got the better of them all. Or the damp.

This will be my sister and brother-in-law’s greatest challenge. I wish them luck.

Rock on.