Avenue of Eternal Peace Read Online Free PDF

neck as hard as he could, squeezed the acupuncture point between thumb and forefinger that’s supposed to induce sleep, and, trying to summon Australian sheep milling realistically through a shearing run, managed only cartoon blobs of wool. On the bedside table lay the photocopies of Hsu Chien Lung’s articles. The disappearing man. Wally had flicked through the greyed pages of oldfashioned print and wondered why he admired their elegance so. In one gesture they pointed a mystery and hinted a solution, although the site of that solution had receded. Was his attachment to those old papers purely a road not taken, that he had sentimentally rediscovered as need dictated? He cursed with an insomniac’s impotency—and returned on the ferris wheel to the bottom. Where was he? And why?
    There had been relics, a black leather-bound Mandarin bible, printed Shanghai 1898, a silver pipe that the children fancied smelled of opium, big black placards with gold characters meaning longevity. There were photographs of the white house with black tiles and turned up eaves, a woman with a plait in a white pinafore, swarthy converts in tight round caps assembled in a courtyard. There was the brusque memoir, a gathering of stock anecdotes, that Grandpa Frith had awkwardly typed for posterity. There was the fact that Wally’s father got cross whenever China was mentioned.
    Most beautifully there was The Hut in the hills that family legend whispered had been built by Grandpa in memory of his first wife, Retta. Wally never knew that real grandmother, but he knew The Hut, a cottage of tin and wood and stone where he used to go for holidays as a boy. The soil and climate made exotic things grow there: a Nepali deodar with a cave inside, a spreading lime with leaves of see-through tissue, mountainous rhododendrons, liquidambar, crepe myrtle, peonies, red toadstools with white spots, persistent bamboo.
    Viewed from the bottom road the landscape arranged itself in descending terraces and framed The Hut with lofty trees, some European, some native, some oriental, shaded, half-hidden, with an illusion of great distance; revealing, as Grandpa had planned, the Chinese proportions of a roof that yearned upwards with curving iron eaves. It was Grandpa’s shrine, or apology, where Wally the child had been happiest, in summer, sitting out on the latticed veranda surrounded by the rattling leaves of the great magnolia whose masses of wide open flower moons made the air divine ether.
    Visits to The Hut were special, planned from afar. His parents had settled interstate out of Grandpa’s reach. Then they would drive hundreds of miles to stay with Grandpa and Patsy in The Hut, and everyone always said the time was far too short, until afterwards in the car Wally’s father and mother said they could not have stayed a day longer. Patsy was a divorced woman when Grandpa married her, of Scottish stock, staunch, forthright, likeable. She had a daughter from her first husband and a tribe of relatives, and bore two more Frith children. With his high moral tone and medical man’s common sense, Grandpa fixed up the mess to his perfect satisfaction by making the second, immediate family the one that absorbed his interest and life. Wally’s family was left out.
    Family never meant much to Wally. His father’s childhood had been broken by Retta’s death and ever after his father’s relationship with the old man was strained by unexplored resentments and stubborn independence. Jerry, Wally’s father, was utterly unsentimental where family was concerned; and Wally’s self-sufficient mother was of the same breed.
    Against that background, the ritual pilgrimages to visit Grandpa Frith were steeped for Wally in momentous alienness. In the fabulous leafy old world of The Hut the boy found much. Grandpa teased him with oriental mysteries, the white mane shining, gaunt limbs on the chair arms, bones stuck under clothes, eyes