Jack Rivers and Me was published in mid-1981 to generally admiring reviews. It was called ‘a type of Australian Under Milk Wood’ and praised for its ‘great vitality and assurance’ as well as Radley’s ‘highly individual talent’. Beatrice edited its sequel, My Blue-Checker Corker and Me, which she considered much better written, though she declined to work on the third in the series, Good Mates!, saying she was too old.
Paul Radley looked set to stay in the pantheon of young Australian writers for some time. He was named Young Australian of the Year in 1982 and won a writers’ fellowship to St Andrews University in Scotland. However, Good Mates! did not sell well and he published no more; it was assumed that he had exhausted this seam of working-class Australian life and his success had been a flash in the pan.
In March 1996, four years after Beatrice’s death, Paul Radley, then thirty-three, caused a sensation by announcing that he had not written one word of Jack Rivers and Me or the other two novels published under his name. They had all been the work of his great-uncle Jack Radley. Why he confessed at this particular time has never been clear, but he said that living with the deception had been eating away at him for years. Two months later, Jack Radley explained that he had compiled the manuscripts from material used in his own unpublished short stories; his great-nephew’s contribution had been to tape conversations in pubs and elsewhere.13 When Beatrice’s pages of corrections, suggestions and changes arrived, Jack Radley had read them out while Paul amended the manuscript. Anything more difficult than a simple change of word, any rewriting or changing of tone Jack Radley did himself.
A frustrated writer for much of his life, Jack Radley said he had entered Jack Rivers and Me for the Vogel Award as a protest against age discrimination, with the $10 000 prize an added inducement. He said that he and his great-nephew had signed a legal agreement giving Jack the right to write and publish books using Paul’s name. The scheme fell apart when the two men quarrelled: when the story broke, Jack Radley said he and his great-nephew had not spoken for six years.
Could Beatrice have guessed that Paul Radley was a fraud? According to Jack Radley she had met Paul only twice, when he came down from Newcastle to visit her at Folly Point. On both occasions he was very much accompanied by Jack and said hardly a word for himself. When Beatrice asked him what books he had read, he mentioned Steinbeck’s The Pearl and Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, but that was all, whereas Jack Radley spoke with enthusiasm of his own reading – Joyce, Dickens, Shakespeare, Jane Austen – and he and Beatrice had a long and pleasant discussion about books while Paul remained silent. As Beatrice saw the Radleys to the door, she looked sharply from one to the other and said, ‘So writing runs in the family, does it?’14
Beatrice was no fool. She had known and worked with writers for more than forty years. Presented with a totally inarticulate author who didn’t appear to have any pride of ownership in his words and a much older, better read and watchful minder on whom the author seemed dependent even for literary opinions, she must have thought something strange was going on. Her comment that ‘writing runs in the family’ – if she was quoted accurately – seems to confirm that she had her suspicions.
But if Beatrice did suspect that Paul Radley had not written those books, she did not say so to Patrick Gallagher or to anyone else, which again is what one would expect from her. She was an editor, employed to straighten out a manuscript for publication: it was not her place to make any comments about putative authorship. Weighing up the evidence – Beatrice’s shrewdness, her knowledge of authors and writing, her professional discretion, her view of her role – it is quite likely that about Paul Radley, as about so much else in her life, Beatrice knew what the story was, but wasn’t saying.
The Final Chapter
‘I’m trudging along with more jobs to do than I can comfortably manage,’ wrote Beatrice happily to Hal Porter on 12 June 1983. She had recently joined the judging panel of the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards – ‘Quite fun, really, if time permitted,’ she told Porter – and was preparing an anthology of Australian verse, commissioned by Mead and Beckett in association with Nelson. The collection was to cover Australian poetry from the earliest days of European settlement to the present, with suitable illustrations. Beatrice chose the poems and wrote the introduction. She enjoyed the job, although as usual she agonised over her choices and the order of poems, asking Douglas Stewart for his advice. The Illustrated Treasury of Australian Verse was published in 1984 and was generally well received, though Beatrice was criticised for failing to include any Aboriginal works.1
In July 1982 she received an unexpected offer: Richard Walsh invited her to write her memoirs for Angus and Robertson. She must have been struck by the irony of being invited back to A&R by the man who had dismissed her, and not as an editor but as an author. She toyed with the idea but finally said no, though the gracious tone of her reply suggests that she was flattered to be asked. ‘The project would need qualities I don’t believe I have,’ she wrote. ‘Perhaps my critical sense has squashed any creative ability I have; but I don’t think I’m a good enough writer – not good enough, anyway, to satisfy myself.’2
Keeping busy was something of a solace; it stopped Beatrice thinking about the past. A significant piece had fallen out of her world with the death of Dick Jeune in 1976. As much in thrall to Beatrice at the age of eighty-nine as when he had first met her forty years before, Dick had seemed as indestructible as the farmhouse in Tizzana Road, though he grew deafer and more irritable with every passing year. For a long time he had conducted a guerrilla war with the local church, whose road-way went across a corner of the property, and the locals believed that his complaints to the council about the state of the roads had irritated them so much that they laid down a stretch of tarred road – the only one in the immediate vicinity – outside his house.
Beatrice often came to see him on weekends, as she had done for so many years, though visits to Sackville were becoming a mixed blessing. The area was now a popular weekend retreat, with the quiet of the Hawkesbury shattered by the whine of speedboats towing waterskiers. Dick Jeune had declared war on the lot of them, threatening to hurl empty beer bottles from the verandah as his enemies zipped along the river.
In the early 1970s Dick began to slow down, and heart trouble and chronic nephritis forced him into hospital with increasing frequency. On 7 July 1976 he died of pneumonia in Mosman District Hospital. Beatrice made the final arrangements for him. Considering how long he had been part of her life, she seems to have known surprisingly little about him. Giving his full name as Edmund Lawson Jeune on his death certificate, Beatrice nevertheless wrote ‘unknown’ against questions about his marriage and whether he had children. Like many gentlemen of his era, Edmund Lawson Jeune had evidently kept many things about his life to himself.
After Dick Jeune died the house at Sackville remained empty, for Beatrice no longer had the heart to go up there often. Then one afternoon about two months after Dick’s death, local residents noticed thick black smoke coming from that part of Tizzana Road. By the time anyone got there, fire had completely destroyed Beatrice’s house. Gone were valuable books and paintings, including works by Percy and Norman Lindsay, with, it is said, the drawing that showed a young Beatrice in nothing but an elaborate headdress. Nobody ever knew exactly how the fire started. Beatrice was convinced it was the work of waterskiers, revenge for Dick’s vendetta; some local residents thought it was arson to cover robbery, others heard that behind the house some young boys had lit a campfire that burned out of control.
Beatrice was devastated. The house and its contents had not been insured: even if they had been, some things were irreplaceable. She had lost not just books and paintings she had loved, but with Dick Jeune and the house had gone almost her last remaining link to Frederick Bridges and her marriage. She was forced to sell the property for land value alone. Beatrice could hardly be described as sentimental, but this double blow left her depressed for a
long time.3
The ranks of her friends and colleagues were beginning to thin. In June 1983 she wrote to Hal Porter about ‘several sadnesses’, including the death of her nephew John in a drowning accident and Colin Simpson’s death from liver cancer in February. ‘You spoke of your once pretty playgirls falling off the twig; and no doubt anyone is liable at any moment …’ she told him.4
Friends were worth so much, and after years of friendship there was no point in changing them. Beatrice’s friendship with Hal Porter had survived even a 1977 trip they made to Tasmania during which Porter deserted her to look up old haunts and friends, leaving her alone in a Hobart motel room to smoke, read Thomas Hardy and seethe. In the 1982 Queen’s Birthday honours Porter was awarded an AM, the same honour Beatrice had been given nearly eighteen months earlier, and she sympathised – without too much irony – that it hadn’t been the knighthood he wanted. But she was greatly worried and concerned when in July that year Porter, who now lived in Ballarat, was arrested and tried for shoplifting and was released on a $140 bond. Beatrice heard of this not from him but from a Sydney newspaper and immediately sent a telegram of love and support, offering to put him up for a few days in Sydney if he needed it.
On 24 July 1983 Hal Porter was crossing a street in Ballarat on his way to visit a friend when a car driven by a drunken driver knocked him down. He suffered massive brain damage and for more than a year remained in a coma in Ballarat hospitals. After fourteen months without regaining consciousness, he died on 29 September 1984 at the age of seventy-three. A couple of years before, Beatrice had written to him: ‘There’s no one like you, my dear, and you’ll always be precious to me.’5 For more than forty years Beatrice had been his loyal and loving friend; to her he was irreplaceable.
Xavier Herbert also died that year. Though he and Beatrice had not been in regular contact for some years, Beatrice had always been fond of him, in spite of constant temptation to the contrary. A more personal – and more devastating – loss came in mid-1985 with the death of Douglas Stewart. After he and Beatrice had left Angus and Robertson in the early 1970s they remained close, and she had been grateful for his help with The Illustrated Treasury of Australian Verse the year before. She had always greatly valued his advice. ‘It was so marvellous to be able to ring him up and say, “Doug, what do you think about this?”’ she said in a radio interview after his death, ‘and he could always give you a completely sane, unprejudiced judgement based on taste and knowledge.’6 At least once she had returned the compliment, writing a short profile of him for an Independent Theatre performance of Ned Kelly: ‘His interests are fishing and poetry, both noble sports.’
After Stewart’s death, Beatrice became friendlier with his wife Margaret and daughter Meg. ‘Mum and I used to joke because we didn’t think she was very keen on us,’ said Meg Stewart. ‘She was always very nice to us, of course, but Dad was the one. I remember after he died she had us over for lunch and seemed to be quite happy because she could have a conversation about current books with me … she would ring up and say how much she missed him.’7 Beatrice never stopped missing Douglas Stewart.
As she gradually worked less during the 1980s, Beatrice turned her attention to her house and garden. For her, however, gardening largely meant doing a little light weeding in a large and becoming hat; after a while she tired of this and employed a gardener. She decided to have a spiral stairway added to the outside of the house, leading to the flat roof, so guests could enjoy the wonderful view over Middle Harbour. It was an attractive idea but Peter Bridges, who thought Beatrice could be cavalier about the estate, pointed out that having people stand on a flat roof would cause problems. Beatrice went ahead and sure enough the roof, punctured by the stiletto-heeled shoes of her guests, leaked during rain and had to be fixed. The incident did not increase warmth of feeling between Peter and Beatrice.
Though Beatrice could be thoughtless about such matters, in other ways she was anything but casual. As she aged, keeping up appearances was more important than ever. When Anthony Barker visited her unexpectedly one day, she was distressed. ‘I haven’t even got my lipstick on,’ she told him. ‘You don’t realise how important these things are to women of my generation.’ She was still swift to correct bad grammar or usage – one of her pet hates was ‘hopefully’ used to mean ‘with any luck’ – and she stuck to her gentlewoman’s manners, never wearing scent (which she refused to call ‘perfume’) in the mornings, or white in the evenings. She cooked a proper meal – meat and vegetables – every evening and set the table for dinner with fresh napkins and candles, even when she was eating by herself. None of her friends could ever imagine Beatrice having fish and chips in front of the television set. To a younger generation her insistence on good form was sometimes quaint, like something out of a novel by Ivy Compton-Burnett, one of Beatrice’s favourite writers.
She and John Broadbent continued to see each other, though their relationship gradually changed. When he became involved with another woman she was upset – she wasn’t used to rivals – though one or two of her friends were less than sympathetic. As she had more or less taken him for granted, they thought she had only herself to blame. Beatrice steeled herself to behave beautifully, making a point of inviting the other woman to lunch and speaking to her in her native French (she came from Belgium). But once Beatrice forgot herself and snapped at the woman, who told John. He accused Beatrice of being indiscreet, and the fact that she had let her guard down, had compromised her own standards of behaviour, upset Beatrice as much as did Broadbent’s criticism.
Beatrice had learned to drive in her forties and used to take Aunt Enid for drives, chatting as they bowled merrily along Military Road. It can safely be said that the attention to detail that was so much a part of Beatrice’s profession never extended to driving. Once she stopped outside her house to collect something, got out and forgot to put the handbrake on. The car rolled down the steep hill towards the harbour, hit another car and came to a halt, a side panel severely dented. Before the police came Beatrice had the presence of mind to say to the car’s owner, her neighbour, ‘You, I am sure, will be a gentleman about this.’ It says something for Beatrice’s charm that he was. On another occasion she started her car, bent down to retrieve a torch from the back seat and panicked when the car moved. She failed to stop it and it travelled out of the garage. Before it came to a halt on the other side of the road, Beatrice had fractured her sternum, probably against the steering wheel. Her niece Anne pleaded with the police to take away Beatrice’s licence, but they only laughed. To the huge relief of her family, Beatrice eventually got rid of her car.
Until she turned eighty Beatrice had been fairly healthy, despite emphysema due to heavy smoking, but on 17 April 1989, after attending a party at the University of Sydney to celebrate Southerly’s fiftieth anniversary, her leg gave way when she was getting ready for bed and she fell heavily to the floor. As she lay on the upstairs bedroom carpet she realised her left femur was broken. It was about ten o’clock, the house was dark and quiet and she was alone. The telephone was downstairs and on the other side of the house.
Nobody who cared about Beatrice likes to think of what happened next. Exerting every bit of her courage and self-control, in excruciating pain, she dragged herself slowly across the bedroom floor and down the semicircular carpeted staircase, stopping to rest after every effort. The night must have seemed like an eternity. Seven hours later, at five in the morning, she managed to get to the hall phone and telephoned a neighbour, who let himself into the house and called an ambulance.
That fall was a coup de vieux for Beatrice: she was suddenly an old woman. She endured a series of operations and stays in hospital, becoming weaker and shakier. She never spoke of the pain she was in, only regretting that she was left with one leg two or three inches shorter than the other and had to wear a built-up shoe. ‘I think I’ll start wearing clothes like Edith Sitwell,’ she told Anthony Barker crisply. ‘Long, flowing dresses down to the ground and i
nteresting hats.’
But she had iron determination and every intention of continuing to do exactly as she wished for as long as possible. She smuggled cigarettes into hospital and continued to smoke even when she had to use an oxygen mask for her emphysema; a horrified doctor took away her cigarettes before she caused an explosion. She kept whisky in the hospital locker, telling her visitors that what the hospital staff didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them. They weren’t always so blind: a Scottish nurses’ aide told her severely that he could smell the water of Scotland in her room. Her supplies were confiscated and she was lectured like a naughty little girl, but she managed to con people into bringing her more.
Beatrice never liked visitors when she was at her lowest in hospital; only old friends and family were allowed to see her. She didn’t always welcome them, either. Once her brother John, who was also very ill, came to see her and found her propped up in bed with books all over the blankets, a table set up beside her and nurses fussing around. She was reading for the Miles Franklin Award. ‘Wait a while, will you, darling?’ she said to her brother. ‘I’m busy.’ Having been familiar with Beatrice’s imperious manner since she was about two years old John refused to accept this, and they quarrelled.
Between spells in hospital Beatrice returned to Folly Point, determined to look after herself at home. But it was a struggle and she grew increasingly depressed. ‘What do you think I should do?’ she asked Anthony Barker in January 1990. ‘Give up and die or battle on?’ It was said half jokingly, but she worried about being able to continue living alone. What she needed, she decided, was a larger house with a garden, one without stairs but with high ceilings and some grandeur. ‘It doesn’t matter if it isn’t in a fashionable suburb,’ she said. ‘Neutral Bay or Mosman will do.’ Nobody had the heart to tell her that those suburbs hadn’t been unfashionable or cheap for nearly forty years.
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