The letter was dated October 23rd, 1926, and had been written to ‘My Darling’ by ‘forever your Edward’. But he wasn’t ‘forever her Edward’ because, according to the letter, he would not be seeing My Darling again. He wrote that he could deceive his wife no longer, and while it broke his heart ‘nevermore to see, hear and hold My Darling’, he felt he had no alternative. There was not only his wife to consider, a good woman who had done nothing to deserve his disloyalty, but there were also his three children, and his ageing mother. My Darling must have doubted his sincerity, given where she had kept the letter and the lines of the poem she had highlighted, but Sylvie had no doubts. She thought ‘forever your Edward’ came across as a self-justifying, self-pitying cheat. She guessed that My Darling was not his first indiscretion, nor would she be his last. In fact, he was probably dismissing My Darling not to make amends with his family, but to make way for My Darling’s replacement. But he would have been found out, of that, Sylvie was sure. And he would have ended up paying for his lies and deceits.
A single letter, and she had become psychologist, priest and storyteller all at once. A single letter, and she was captivated. She had always been drawn to letters — not just the pleasures of receiving them, but the concept of letter-writing, that very particular intimate, secret, and enduring communication. And she thrilled to the covertness of letters, like someone whispering in your ear, your ear and no one else’s.
As exciting as that first letter had been, it would have gone no further if she and Leonard had not decided to replace the flooring in the kitchen. She was pregnant again, and reading Virginia Woolf. (It was more auspicious, she thought, to read a female author during pregnancy, although perhaps better to have chosen one with children.) The plan was to finish the flooring well before the baby arrived. The old lino was the same grey-green monotony that covered so many floors in the 1940s and 1950s. The new lino was very striking: a black background with bright rectangles in primary colours, forming interlocking squares — striking and, compared with other kitchen floors she’d seen, rather daring. The work began with the removal of the old flooring. The underlay comprised the usual newspapers, not from the 1940s or 1950s, but the 1930s.
During the short period, just a couple of hours, before the papers were removed, Sylvie crouched down and read the floor. The top layer was mustardy with age, and stained with mysterious splotches, but the lower sheets were well preserved. She was shuffling through the pages, reading headlines and paragraphs, when she spied some handwriting, almost completely covered by a page of newsprint. She moved the newspaper aside to reveal a letter written on blue onion-skin paper. She scanned the contents, then knowing the floorer would soon be returning, quickly lifted and stacked all the sheets of newspaper. She found several more letters: some, like the first, written on blue onion-skin paper, others covering both sides of high-quality, no-longer-white parchment, but if she held the pages up to the light, she could still make out the watermark. By the time the floorer returned to remove the underlay, she had completed the job: old papers arranged in neat stacks for him to take to the incinerator, while she took possession of the letters.
She lost the baby, and began her letter collection. And she did not stop, not even with the pregnancy that produced the miracle of Andrew — the George Eliot pregnancy, and another female author like Virginia Woolf without children. (As were the Brontës and Jane Austen and Emily Dickinson. Someone with the education and the ability should investigate this disturbing pattern, Sylvie thought.) As her son grew, so did her collection. Now, after nearly thirty years, she had over two hundred letters, all in English except the single Russian letter with the 1951 stamp of the happy lemon-pickers. For the first time she wished she had not collected that letter, or rather, had not shown it to Leonard. Her letters, a subtle larceny that did no one any harm, were her own business.
Posted on the wall in her room was a quote from the poet Byron: Letter writing is the only device for combining solitude with good company. The observation greatly appealed to her, even more so with her extension: Reading a letter is the only device for combining solitude with good company. So what was she now doing, traipsing up to her room with this girl in tow?
She stopped on the narrow stair: she couldn’t go through with it. She twisted around and looked down at Galina. Her expression must have said it all, for Galina reached up and placed her hand on the bare skin of her wrist. ‘Perhaps another time,’ the girl said. She turned and led the way back down the stairs into the body of the house, and Sylvie followed, the print of Galina’s hand sparking on her skin.
An understanding had passed between them.
To fill in time they lingered in the sitting room, the everyday room that housed the TV and stereo, and, on a circular side-table, an array of photos. Sylvie, her heart still pounding, attempted to restore herself. ‘We’re so happy you’re here,’ she said, pleased to hear the warm, motherly tone in her voice. ‘Andrew has told us all about you.’
Again, Galina wondered what exactly Andrew had told them, and then decided it really didn’t matter. She turned her attention to the photos. They showed Andrew as a baby, as a toddler, as a schoolboy, as a youth; they showed him as the man he was today; they showed him against a backdrop of different places and different interests. Andrew liked the beach; Andrew liked animals; Andrew liked the company of his parents. There were photos of people Galina assumed were the grandparents, and photos of Leonard and Sylvie with friends, photos with Andrew, and several of the two of them alone. The largest photo in the display was a framed portrait of Sylvie and Leonard on their wedding day, the petite bride in a patterned white satiny gown with a long train, and Leonard in formal clothes, looking like a Hollywood movie star.
‘What a handsome couple,’ Galina said, holding up the photo. She smiled. ‘You still are.’
Sylvie gazed at the familiar picture, and it occurred to her, for the first time, how deceptive photos can be. They capture just a moment, a snapshot, in what are usually complex and on-going situations. And even the moment itself is distorted for the camera: Turn this way, tilt your head, clasp your hands, say cheese. Not that this picture actually lied — she had been happy, and it had been a happy day. But the girl in the picture had anticipated a future very different from that which had eventuated.
8
A GOOD MARRIAGE
It was the autumn of 1955 when Sylvie Stirling met Leonard Morrow in the menswear department of the Myer Emporium. Sylvie was nineteen years old and employed at the busy Revlon counter. (Her preference had been for the book department, but the personnel manager had said it would be a waste of a pretty face, and assigned her to cosmetics instead.) Leonard, six years her senior, was about to buy a controlling share in the library-supplies company where he’d been working for the past four years. There was a meeting scheduled for the following day when the deal would be finalised, and to mark the occasion Leonard had decided to buy a new tie. He was oscillating between a maroon check and a blue stripe when Sylvie returned from her lunch break. She walked past him, slowed down, and without thinking, turned back and offered to help.
She took both ties, and standing on tiptoe, draped first one then the other around his neck. Her fingers grazed his skin, that sensitive spot just above the collar, and bliss bombs bolted down his spine. When she decided on the maroon — it was the more attractive pattern, she said, and it also complemented his colouring — all he could do was nod. It was only as she turned to leave that he managed to find his voice. ‘Would you meet me? After work? For a drink? Or tea, if you’d prefer?’
Sylvie had never before approached a strange man, and she certainly had never shoplifted one — the term she always used when describing their first meeting. In the normal run of her life, she presented as a nicely brought-up middle-class girl. She was a loving sister to Maggie, a devoted daughter to her warm, sweet-tempered mother, and a patient one with her hard-to-please, impatient father. She wa
s popular, she was pretty, and while she was cleverer than girls were expected to be in the 1950s, she was adept at dampening down her intelligence. Presenting a calm and cheerful disposition, despite her difficult father, despite the disappointments of life, despite her fears of A-bombs and H-bombs, Sylvie Stirling was in all respects a young lady. So she was even more surprised than Leonard when she approached him in the Myer menswear department.
‘Let me help you,’ she said.
Leonard heard the words and took in the speaker. She was small, elfin, in fact, with fair hair tied in a ponytail, and the largest, bluest eyes he had ever seen. Luck, having shunned him for the first twenty years of his life, had been his constant companion since moving from Perth to Melbourne. Friends, a great job, and now this bombshell of a girl.
Their courtship began that very evening. He took her to the ladies’ lounge of a hotel of which even the strictest parents of a well-brought-up girl would approve, and over a Pimms for her and a beer for him, they started to get to know each other.
Her parents were from New Zealand; they had moved to Australia when she, the younger of two sisters, was six.
Leonard was the younger of two brothers; his parents had moved from England to Perth the year before he was born. Then, four years ago, he’d crossed the continent to Melbourne.
‘Both of us are Melbourne immigrants,’ he said.
Sylvie wouldn’t have cared if Leonard were from outer space, she was already smitten. He was large and good-looking, with thick hair and a lush moustache — rather like Clark Gable, she thought. A businessman who wrote poetry, he was a man of practicality as well as passion. She’d been denied the stimulation of university study, she’d been denied the excitement of an independent career, but everything about Leonard Morrow struck her as stimulating and exciting.
Sylvie fell in love with Leonard innocently, romantically and very quickly. He seemed so grown-up, so worldly. And he was a great reader — not of fiction, but of biographies and poetry. She loved to hear him talk about famous people: their work, their love affairs, their bad behaviour. Most extraordinary of all, this businessman-poet wrote poems especially for her, a quartet of sonnets he presented as a gift on their eight-week anniversary: ‘First Meeting’, ‘First Date’, ‘Falling in Love’, ‘Our Future’.
She felt herself changing under his influence. He loosened her up, opened her to new possibilities, gave her the courage not simply to question accepted modes of behaviour but actually to challenge them. On their third date, he took her to see Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief. When they stood for the national anthem, she reached for his hand; she’d never been so brazen, nor so subversive. (Was it treason to be physical with a man during the national anthem?) She sidled closer to him until the entire length of her body was touching his; a florid tingling zigzagged through her until the last note of ‘God Save the Queen’ faded to silence.
If she was like this after just two weeks of knowing him, a future with Leonard Morrow promised a life beyond anything she had ever hoped for. She couldn’t believe her luck.
Nor could Leonard. He’d had plenty of girlfriends before her, though nothing serious. He wasn’t a natural at intimacy; it was not something of which he’d had much experience, and certainly not within his own family. Indeed, there was little he had learned from his family — the perfectly adequate family, he would admit — that would assist him in the future he aspired to. His parents, along with his older brother, Freddy, had migrated to Perth in search of a better life. And from their point of view, they had found it. It was Perth-born Leonard, the only member of the Morrow family to be a true Australian, who was the odd one out.
Leonard and his older brother could not have been more different. Freddy was athletic and outgoing, the ideal Aussie lad. He left school at fourteen and started work at Morrow & Sons, Electrics, first as his father’s apprentice, and later his partner. As Perth grew from a town to a city, Morrow & Sons was much in demand. Freddy married a Perth girl, they bought a house in the same suburb as the Morrow parents, they had three Perth children spaced two years apart. Freddy and Perth were made for each other.
No such congenial coupling occurred for Leonard. He failed to develop any interest in sport, a serious blight in a sports-mad nation. He grew into a boy with abundant desire, but confined by Perth-sized opportunity. His nerves lay exposed, and were always threatening to expose him. He couldn’t explain why he was so sensitive, but over the years he learned the art of self-protection — not through fight or flight, but through disguise and camouflage.
By the age of ten and enrolled in fourth grade, he was a fully fledged actor in a life of his own crafting, and while it was an effort, mostly he managed. Terrence, his best friend and soulmate, made it easier. Terrence, whose dreams like his own stretched beyond Perth, understood him and watched out for him. During weekends and holidays the two of them played endless games of make-believe. They would travel to faraway countries, to other planets, even other galaxies. And they crafted their own private utopia, an existence without parents, without brothers and sisters, without school, and most of all without Perth. In Perth, Terrence was Terry, and he was Len or Lenny; in the life they wanted, Terrence would be Terrence, and he would be Leonard or Leo, a name that would sit very nicely on the cover of the books he planned to write one day.
He and Terrence discovered biographies around the time they started high school. These books led them into the bohemia of Paris and London, Bloomsbury and Montmartre. Nothing was out of bounds in these places, indeed, outrageous behaviour was expected. Unfortunately, Leonard was too self-conscious to embrace the Perth version of bohemia, should it even exist, though he would have been happy if it were to reach out and embrace him first. Terrence had other ideas. He wanted to be an actor, and he needed Experience. He was willing to try anything, and Leonard, in time and with a little persuasion, would have joined him. But he was denied the opportunity. Suddenly, Terrence was leaving Perth, he would be living in Melbourne. His father had a new job. The two boys swore eternal friendship. ‘I’ll come to Melbourne as soon as I can,’ Leonard promised. ‘And in the meantime we’ll write.’ The boys hugged each other — not the done thing, but in such distressing circumstances they didn’t care.
At first they exchanged letters almost daily, then weekly, then monthly. Before the first year had passed, apart from the occasional postcard, the correspondence had petered out. But not Leonard’s desire to join Terrence in Melbourne.
By his late teens, the writer he had long aspired to be had undergone refinement. Now he wanted to be a poet — not a Banjo Patterson balladeer, but a poet in the tradition of the nineteenth-century English romantics: Keats, Shelley, and Wordsworth. A poet and perhaps a filmmaker. Or a choreographer of Hollywood musicals. Or maybe an actor like Terrence.
Of all the poetry he read, it was Wordsworth’s The Prelude, the early sections in particular, that best captured who he wanted to be. He longed for solitary walks through the English woods and fields; he dreamed of the delights of being a young poet in Cambridge surrounded by like-minded friends. The Prelude brought him respite from his ill-fitting life.
Who knows the individual hour in which
His habits were first sown, even as a seed?
Who that shall point as with a wand and say
‘This portion of the river of my mind
Came from yon fountain’?
At times of confusion, or irritation, or dissatisfaction, Leonard would recite these lines, convinced that one day being a misfit in Perth would either make sense to him or cease to matter. It would help if he knew exactly what it was he wanted. If asked — and now that Terrence was gone, no one did ask — he would say he wanted LIFE and he wanted FREEDOM, and yes, writ large. But as to the content of that life and the expression of that freedom, he could not say.
His first job on leaving school was not the electrical apprenticeship at Morrow & Sons h
is father had argued for, but an usher at Perth’s Capitol Theatre. He managed to convince his parents that this was a short, albeit indulgent detour on his journey towards a proper job. He believed it himself; if not, he would not have found the strength to oppose his father. He loved the job, not for the ushering but for the films and musical theatre he saw for free. And he liked the nightlife, the streets after dark, and the days to do whatever he fancied. He burrowed into the poetry shelves at the State Library, discovering passionate and anguished Europeans — Rilke, Rimbaud and Baudelaire, and the New Yorkers, Robert Lowell and Frank O’Hara. These poets revealed the life he wanted, la vie passionelle, peopled with poets and painters, actors and intellectuals, blacks and Jews.
In Perth, to refer to someone as an intellectual would be as insulting as calling them a fairy. As for knowing blacks or Jews, this was the sort of not-quite-respectable notion he could toy with only in the privacy of his mind. And New York? It was no more likely than the moon, or at least not yet. He felt himself to be in training for the real life to come. He read a little fiction, he read a lot of poetry, he devoured an enormous number of biographies, and he wrote poems. He liked to walk and daydream, he loved films and Hollywood musicals, and he harboured vaguely defined ambitions to be a proper poet.
He was twenty-one, and the author of a collection of poetry in manuscript, when he packed up his possessions and crossed the country to begin a new life in Melbourne. It had all happened so quickly that for the first year in his new home he kept wondering how he had managed it; but as work and friends took up more of his time, he decided just to be grateful he had. Terrence was long gone, to London or the Côte d’Azur, or somewhere equally exotic; but with his life filling fast, Leonard did not miss him. Four years later, his collection of poetry had been put in a drawer, he was about to become the managing director of his own company, and he met Sylvie Stirling.
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