【荆棘鸟】第三章 02

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 Built of butter-yellow sandstone blocks hand hewn in quarries¹ five hundred miles eastward², the house had two stories and was constructed on austerely³ Georgian lines, with large, many-paned windows and a wide, iron-pillared veranda⁴ running all the way around its bottom story. Gracing the sides of every window were black wooden shutters⁵, not merely ornamental⁶ but useful; in the heat of summer they were pulled closed to keep the interior cool.

  Though it was autumn now and the spindling vine was green, in spring the wistaria which had been planted the day the house was finished fifty years before was a solid mass of lilac plumes⁷, rioting all over the outer walls and the veranda roof. Several acres of meticulously⁸ scythed⁹ lawn surrounded the house, strewn with formal gardens even now full of color from roses, wall- flowers, dahlias and marigolds. A stand of magnificent ghost gums with pallid¹⁰ white trunks and drifting thin leaves hanging seventy feet above the ground shaded the house from the pitiless sun, their branches wreathed in brilliant magenta¹¹ where bougainvillea vines grew intertwined with them. Even those indispensable Outback monstrosities the water tanks were thickly clothed in hardy¹² native vines, roses and wistaria, and thus managed to look more decorative¹³ than functional¹⁴. Thanks to the late Michael Carson's passion for Drogheda homestead, he had been lavish¹⁵ in the matter of water tanks; rumor¹⁶ had it Drogheda could afford to keep its lawns green and its flower beds blooming though no rain fell in ten years. As one approached down the Home Paddock the house and its ghost gums took the eye first, but then one was aware of many other yellow sandstone houses of one story behind it and to each side, interlocking with the main structure by means of roofed ramps¹⁷ smothered¹⁸ in creepers. A wide gravel¹⁹ driveway succeeded the wheel ruts of the track, curving to a circular parking area at one side of the big house, but also continuing beyond it and out of sight down to where the real business of Drogheda lay: the stockyards, the shearing²⁰ shed, the barns. Privately²¹ Father Ralph preferred the giant pepper trees which shaded all these outbuildings and their attendant activities to the ghost gums of the main house. Pepper trees were dense²² with pale green fronds²³ and alive with the sound of bees, just the right lazy sort of foliage²⁴ for an Outback station.

 

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