DOWN THE LINE

Banshee Christmas by Cunningham Thomson

Gethsemane’s garden was particularly lush that summer because of regular and unseasonable rains. She was rather pleased with the geraniums from cuttings, the cosmos from seeds and the huge bending poppies that simply sprang up everywhere among the native trees and in the veggey patches. Her husband George did the grunt work of tilling the soil, putting in the stakes, pruning back wild branches, keeping the weeds under control and trimming the edges. He later admitted that it was mainly while weeding that he would recall the emotional messiness of that Christmas Eve. He said the weeding seemed to dredge it up but there was a positive side in that the same weeding's physical side helped to make calmer sense of it - he admitted that sometimes he had to pull at some weeds quite ferociously.

       George was not given to self-revelation but not the grunting male either. He had been an inventor - small machines doing little garden jobs such as irrigation in a variety of ways for different plants. So he was not uninteresting, just careful when he spoke, and slowish with it. He would speak in full sentences which were balanced and often quite illuminating in sense if you cared to think. Generally with George he believed that it was better in than out and he would say it that way; amid the elegance he could be a tad vulgar at times.

       George was stolid and dependable, occasionally given to insights into human nature but stated in a way that sounded as if he was all right but you weren't. He had one on Christmas Eve when Amelia, the artist, visited to do Qui Jong with his wife, Gethsemane in their huge and overgrown garden. It was summed up for him in The Wisdom of Solomon, the bit about leaving “tokens of our joyfulness in every place”. But I get ahead.

       Gethsemane and George had been together nearly 35 years. Her sister Marguerite often came to stay to see their mother who lived with them. This Christmas she arrived a couple of days before and was enjoying the garden, the ambience, the ducks and the birdsong early in the morning, all very different from her city life, a nice change.
Marguerite and Gethsemane had a fine sister relationship, getting on very well in the face of some small difficulties in the caring for their old mother. Sandrine did the bulk of the caring and administering of her estate and seeing to little shopping visits and the like; Marguerite said to George that this would be her fifteenth visit this year, some of which times had been for nearly a week. Obviously, she could not because of living circumstances do as much on-the-spot caring for mother, but her efforts in giving up her weekends after a week’s stressful work for a big city council, then the getting to and from airports, all counted hugely in the caring stakes.

       Gethsemane enjoyed her sister’s visits, especially because she took considerable weight off her in terms of looking after their mother, and she enjoyed discussing the situation and her feelings about it with her.

       Anyway, on this particular Xmas Eve morning, Amelia arrived all cheery and pleasant and ready for oriental exercising …