1956, Melbourne, Australia

By Ian McFarlane

In that other country of the past, where things are done differently, I married an ingenuous girl with smile dimples, big hazel eyes, and hair the color of a raven’s wing. She was trusting and forgiving and laughed at most of my jokes. We were very young - too young, some people said - and unused to adult ways.

Our first weeks of married life had the deliciously innocent flavor of children discovering sin. We laughed a lot and chased each other, leaping over chairs, bouncing off walls and hiding in closets. Eventually, we would collapse onto the bed, tangled like tiger cubs and gasping with laughter until tears filled our eyes. Then, with surprisingly erotic self-consciousness, we would begin to make love. Almost forty years on we are still together, although nowadays we are disinclined to leap over chairs.

We were married in a time when most people observed the conventions of courtship and engagement. During our year of courtship before engagement we discovered some beautifully rambling public gardens. One vague Sunday afternoon, when it seemed as if the entire world had gone somewhere else, leaving us to explore the gardens completely by ourselves, we found a secluded courtyard, protected by formal hedges and flowering shrubs. In the centre was an elegant sundial with a bronze face, Roman numerals, and a quotation. Holding hands, our heads touched as we leaned forward together to read the words.

From that moment on the sundial belonged to us, and its corner of the gardens became our sacred site. We would visit whenever we could, feeling miffed on the rare occasion someone else had the cheek to show up. Time and circumstance took us away. Far away. To the other side of Australia, and then to the other side of the world. Always remembering the sundial and imagining it appearing one day in a garden of our own.

But as the years passed, and we raised four children, increasingly preoccupied by staying afloat on the white waters of life, the sundial receded into the past, like a half-forgotten dream. From time to time, when browsing in garden nurseries, we would come across one that looked almost like the original, but the words would be wrong. For all I know our quotation was a sundial cliché, but it seemed to have vanished forever.

Then one day, quite by accident, when helping some friends look for a terracotta pot, we remembered it again. In a crowded corner of the garden nursery, full of gnomes, bird baths, and semi-naked nymphs holding water jugs, I glimpsed a section of elegant stone column, topped by a bronze sundial, and what appeared to be Roman numerals. Was there anything written on it? And if there was, would it be the right words?

These questions pursued me through a terracotta maze of bric-a-brac, until - balanced precariously between a bird bath and a tangle of ferns that seemed to be reaching for me - I was able to make out some words on the sundial’s face.

But I couldn’t read them without standing on the other side, and that seemed impossible without causing mayhem among the water nymphs. I would have to revive a neglected skill, acquired at school while standing in front of a teacher’s desk, and refined during the course of a public service career: the useful art of reading an upside down text. I steadied myself, adjusted my bifocals, and read the quotation. It was ours.

My wife had wandered further on, and in an effort to attract her attention without shouting, I fell into the fernery, which appeared to be occupied by a komodo dragon. Clutching a robust water nymph for support, I managed to disguise my stumble as an attempt to read the price tag on the sun dial base. I shouldn’t have looked. I checked the contents of my wallet, immediately noticing a depressingly large discrepancy, and remembered the parlous state of our credit card. So I brushed myself down as casually as possible, sighed, and moved away.

Later that afternoon, having a glass of wine with our youngest daughter, she inquired casually if I had seen anything interesting at the nursery - perhaps a sundial with a particular quotation? Mystified, I turned to my wife, who under cross examination broke down and confessed. She had mentioned the episode to our family, who revealed the existence of a secret birthday fund. Although my birthday was still some time away, the money could be used now if required.

Throwing aside my wine, I dashed back to the nursery, consumed by fears that our sundial had been snapped up by someone with a gold credit card and was being loaded into the cavernous boot of a late model Mercedes. But there it was, still surrounded by an army of gnomes and water nymphs. It’s now safely at home in our garden, with its own small courtyard of pebbles, shells, and stepping stones. And there’s not a gnome or a nymph in sight.

You can tell the time with enough accuracy to satisfy most people, except perhaps a garden party of nuclear scientists, and read the quotation without having to look at it upside down. It says, just as it did 50 years ago: “Be as true to each other as this dial is to the sun.”

Ian McFarlane is a writer and book reviewer who lives near Bermagui on the far south coast of NSW, Australia. The Sundial is included in his most recent book, Evening at Murunna Point, a collection of stories, essays and poems, concerning life, love and literature, seen through the crippling experience of clinical depression.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Tuesday, April 24th, 2007 | Email This Post

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