A Charm of Powerful Trouble by Joanne Horniman Page B

they were rich, maybe try to write or paint, if they took themselves seriously enough. But her family had money, didn't they? That house . . . and they were lawyers, weren't they? Her father and her brother, at least. There was family money. Maybe she didn't have to do anything.’
    â€˜She looked after my father,’ said Emma. ‘She brought him up when his mother died.’
    â€˜There you go, then.’
    â€˜But apart from looking after him, what did she do - you know - to fill in her days?’
    Flora rolled over onto her stomach and regarded Emma with amusement. ‘She lived,’ she said.

    Emma had almost forgotten that there was an upstairs to go to. The dark staircase reminded her sometimes, but she came to almost regard it as a decoration, something that had no real purpose.
    As she wandered from the house one afternoon she discovered something that was like another room, it was so self-contained and private. In the middle of the paddock at the back of the house was a large circular clump of trees like a small forest. Emma pushed her way inside, first broaching a wall of pungent lantana that scratched at her arms and face, reminding her of the bramble hedge that surrounded the castle of the Sleeping Beauty. The lantana gave way to trees with tall trunks that made a canopy overhead excluding the sunlight; under them were vines and ferns and countless small plants. At the centre of this room of trees was the beauty - a great tree with a buttressed trunk and branches reaching out to the sky.
    Emma returned later with her sketchbook and drew this tree, which she saw as a great muscled human torso, sinewy and strong. She looked up at it, and sketched, and looked up, and sketched, and put down her book to wrap her arms part way around its trunk and breathe in the smell of it. She thought and didn't think of Frank's naked back, the movement of his muscles as he worked in the garden. Those were dangerous thoughts and she both refused and welcomed them, and she put all her suppressed feelings into her drawings of the tree. They became almost human portraits.

    With the rough drawings spread out beside her on the verandah, Emma tried to make a final picture. Her crayon rasped softy and swiftly across the paper. In the garden a spangled drongo glittered. Em sat back in her chair, a hairbrush in her lap.
    â€˜I see you've found your father's forest,’ she said. There was absolutely no weight in her voice at all, no inflexion to help Emma discern her feelings about what she said.
    Emma didn't look up; the crayon flashed a confident line down the curve of the trunk. ‘Tell me about it,’ she said. Emma knew then that she was right, that the clump of trees she'd found was a kind of room where she could discover things.
    â€˜It wasn't always a forest. It was just that fig tree at first,’ said Aunt Em, her voice airy and detached, as if this was ancient history. ‘The one you're drawing. That was all that was there. It was all that they left when they cleared the land. Sam and I used to walk up there and sit in the shade. But when he was - oh, only about nine or ten - he saw that there were seedlings coming up beneath it.’
    Now Aunt Em's face was puckered with the pleasure of remembering, her eyes narrowed. ‘And he said to me, "Auntie, these little plants must be from seeds the birds have dropped after they've eaten fruit from the trees in the hills." And he said we should make a fence round the fig so the cattle couldn't eat the seedlings.
    â€˜So that's what we got his father to do - Sam wanted the fence put some way out from the fig to allow the trees room to spread. He pestered and pestered me to get him books about plants.’ Em laughed with pride. ‘He was such a clever boy He learned how to identify them by looking at the leaves and so on. And he went into the hills where the scrub hadn't been cleared and brought back seeds himself, from trees he found there,