BEV NEL

Sylvia Oates' room

Our Living Room

I’m sitting at our dining table, which extends diagonally into the room. This room has a vaulted ceiling which slants from twelve feet high on my far left, or east wall, to eight feet high on my right, or west wall. Behind me is a table full of books and knitting. Beside me is a gooseneck lamp. On the table are bamboo mats and a gardenia with shiny leaves and one fragrant flower. There are three chairs around the table, one with a rounded back with spindles, the other two squarish, also with spindles, and painted a bright turquoise that has crackled. Windows to the west and north form a little nook and then the west wall continues with a sliding glass door, which opens onto a balcony.

Straight ahead is the south wall with a big window. In that sunny corner towers a seven-foot avocado tree, which grew from a pit I found sprouting in the compost bin. The south wall is dominated by a large oil painting of a forest clearing. In the southeast corner, a television set is towered over by a gigantic philodendron (“Monstera”) on the top shelf, reaching up into the vaulted ceiling. On the shelf just below, a splendid piece of branching coral stretches almost the width of the shelf.

On the east wall, another large painting hangs over a bookshelf. It depicts my mother and dad’s wedding reception in India in 1940. It shows my grandparents’ garden with a canvas wall as backdrop, servants in turbans, huge umbrellas for shade, a long red carpet on the grass leading to the cake under a striped awning. My mother is barely visible in a froth of white, my father is in uniform, my grandfather confers with the minister, a pith helmet lies under a canvas chair.

Have I mentioned the plants? They are everywhere! A wall to my left, painted a dark rusty red forms a backdrop for a fig tree on a low table. From the top of that wall a spider plant shoulders aside a tiger’s paw begonia and cascades over two watercolour portraits in black frames. The window sill in the west nook hosts several bleeding heart vines which have gone mad, climbing around the zebra and giraffe masks my daughter brought home from Africa, and waltzing around the window!

Below the painting of the clearing (54 x 60”) is a sweet little vignette composed of my father’s chair and my mother’s chair, both badly in need of re-upholstery, facing toward each other either side of a semi-circular table (handpainted by a local artist) supporting a flaming poinsettia in a red foil pot. The chairs each have a cushion with a spiral pattern. To the right of this group stands a square pillar lamp 5 feet tall made of crushed rice paper and lit from within. This is immediately to the left of the avocado. In front of the lamp and to the left of the avocado stands a small wooden table from India, with carved panels for a base and an octagonal top inlaid with ivory and brass and encircled with a border of carved leaves and flowers.

Moving around the room to the left, the lower shelves below the Monstera, the coral and the TV, contain electronic gadgetry (a DVD player, a VCR, and a small digital TV box), and below that, a zafu. My beautiful classical guitar hangs just to the left of this shelf unit – so rarely played these days.

Left of that (we are now on the east wall, the high 12-foot wall) – I’ve already told you about the painting, but below that is another important part of the room. And that is the bookcase that my partner Jerry built for me three Christmases ago. It holds plants of course: another Tiger’s Paw, and an Alocasia x amazonica (Elephant’s Ear) and a music system. On the next shelf is a bamboo box full of CD’s, a stack of artbooks, a stack of New Yorkers and a dozen VHS tapes held up by an ebony elephant. Next shelf; a basket of wool that I spun myself, in skeins dyed with indigo and onion skins, dating back to before my daughter was born, and a stack of large format books: Bird Songs, A Tent with a View, African Children, A Sacred Balance, Mountains of the Middle Kingdom, The Serpent and the Rainbow. The bottom shelf holds a tub of children’s toys for when our neighbours’ children come for a play date.

Jutting into the room from the east wall, against the book case hidden from our view behind the dark rust wall, is the couch: pastel stripes, the slightly ragged seat cushions covered with a pale coral crocheted throw. In front of the couch is the coffee table, that Jerry reclaimed by sanding the wood and painting the frame a glossy black.

What else can I tell you? The wall-to-wall carpet is the colour of pale sand. Through the patio doors I can see the bare twigs of the grape vine on the balcony. Beyond that a cloud-filled sky (we’re on the fourth floor) and wheeling seagulls.