by Susan Green
Betty is, obviously, the heroine of these tales. There were no other little girls or boys in her adventure-land, and the adults, I must say, were terribly lax. They would leave gates and doors open, let go of Betty’s hand at the zoo or at the circus, near boats and milk carts and even an unmanned hot-air balloon. Betty always got home safely, thanks to a cast of clever animals. Perhaps Mother’s motif, really, was the carelessness of adults.
I gave all my Betties to Anne for Maura, but I don’t think they ever reached her. Anne preferred Meg and Mog, Miffy and Spot with their bright colours and modern, simple design. The Betty Browns are longish stories, and when you read them aloud you realise how wordy they are. The pictures are the thing. Each book has ten colour plates, and there are intricate black-and-white illustrations on every page. Betty Brown is in every picture. She’s wide-eyed and full of wonder at the world. In a perpetual state of bliss. Betty Brown is me.
How like an angel came I down!
How bright are all things here!
Am I repeating myself? Sorry, but that’s what old people do. I learned that poem by heart in 1937. Children don’t learn to recite any more, Anna-Mae tells me, and learning by rote is considered cruel. And yet how wonderful to find this lodged like a diamond in my memory. It’s called ‘Wonder’, and was written by Thomas Traherne. You can find it in The Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse, which is a battered blue cloth-bound anthology with a mould patch on the back, and tissue-thin pages that have gone wavy from damp, and my mother’s name, Minette Edith Parsons, written in firm, upright, back-handed script on the flyleaf with the date, 1917. Or you can google it.
After Mother died, I went to live in Elsternwick with Aunt Emu and Miss Minnie because I had no family to go to. Daddy was a Scot, and all his people were over there. And Mother’s family? I didn’t know until after she died that when Mother told her parents she wanted to marry Mac Adair, they said that if she did, they would never see her again. He was twenty-four years older than her. That was, apparently, a problem. Insoluble.
Her parents kept their word, and she hid herself away in our little cottage at the foot of the ranges. She kept hens, a vegetable garden, fruit trees. She baked bread and cakes, made jam. She smocked my beautiful little dresses, made knickers and playsuits on her Singer treadle machine. The photographs of me, with thistledown hair and dark, dark eyes, peeping out from behind a tree fern or a pumpkin, are all images I saw later in her books. She made for me a perfect world, an enchanted orchard.
When I emerged from that orchard, I was a girl with no skin, no nails, no hard words with which to protect myself. People spoke of me (I have a bit part in several autobiographies and memoirs) as a gazelle, a deer, a swan. Don’t misunderstand me. I was as vain as the next girl, and I liked the attention. But those creatures, you see, are all vegetarians. My parents, for all their love, fitted me only to be prey.
Oh, all right! Won’t you indulge me, just this once? Drama is a hard habit to break, and besides, life is awfully dull when it’s naked and truthful. Like a woman’s face without make-up. I’ve always thought it odd that one speaks of a liar as ‘bare-faced’. Wouldn’t you think that a naked face is the truthful one? It’s certainly the vulnerable one, and perhaps that is all I am trying to say. That my childhood – you see how careful I am not to blame? – left me vulnerable.
Vulnerable to what, you ask? Oh, darling! To everything.
ANNE AND MAURA VISIT
‘Where first?’ Anne said to Maura as they rode up the escalator from the station. ‘I quite like the Laura Ashley shop.’
Maura had insisted they take the train from Castlemaine, and when it came down to it, it wasn’t such a bad idea. The trip was only an hour and a half, and the Landcruiser was always such a pain to get into poky city parking spaces. Besides, there were factory outlet stores right next to Southern Cross and these days, what with the economy, there were always sales.
‘They’ve got lovely bed linen. Wouldn’t you like a new doona cover? And then there’s undies for you and how about we start looking for something for Sandi’s wedding?’
Maura didn’t answer.
‘Well, what do you think?’
‘I’ve got undies. I’ve got a doona cover. I don’t need anything for the wedding.’
‘You do so need undies.’ Anne was determined to keep the mood light and she put a laugh in her voice. Starbucks was on the corner and she wondered about having a coffee first but Maura stalked right past and she had to hurry to catch up with her. ‘And, Maura, the wedding’s going to be very formal, you know what Sandi’s like, and I won’t have you looking –’ Maura halted so suddenly that Anne smacked into her. ‘Darling! What?’
‘I hate these places. Herds of fat losers wandering around, eating and shopping, eating and shopping. It’s disgusting.’
‘Oh, Maura, come on.’
‘You think it’s all a joke, don’t you? You think I’ll just get over it. Well, I won’t. Do you know that for every three bags of groceries each Australian household buys, one gets thrown away?’
‘Yes, I did know that, Maura, because you’ve told me before. But it doesn’t happen in our household because I’m careful about waste and always have been. Besides, that’s got nothing to do with the fact that you need new undies and an outfit for your cousin’s wedding.’
‘I don’t need either.’
‘How about we have a coffee?’ She turned. ‘Look, there’s a Starbucks.’
‘Starbucks? No, thank you,’ Maura answered in a cold, precise little voice.
Suddenly, surprising herself almost as much as Maura, Anne said, ‘Go. Just go. Wait in the railway station for Paula.’ She could have stopped there, but she didn’t. ‘Here’s five bucks. Buy yourself an organic juice. Better still, give it to a homeless person. I don’t care. I want to get a few things and I want to get them without you looking down your nose at me every step of the way. Okay?’
Maura said nothing.
‘You’ve got your mobile. Text me when Paula turns up.’
Half an hour later, Anne sat down with a clutch of plastic carry bags, a latte and a muffin. If Maura had been a different kind of daughter, they’d be having this coffee together. They’d be talking about clothes and boyfriends and Sandi’s boofhead fiancé, and Maura would even be asking for her advice . . .
But oh no, Maura knew it all and didn’t mind shoving it down your throat. She’d been named after Matty’s mother but she had none of her qualities. Maureen was sweet and generous; family was everything to her. Not that she was a pushover. From the first, Anne had seen how she had Albie and the boys wrapped around her little finger.
‘Men like to think they’re in charge, so let them think that, I say.’ The conspiratorial smile in the kitchen over the dishes. ‘But it’s us women who run the show.’
All that Anne knew about children, family and marriage, she’d learned from Maureen.
Matty was no use. Look on the bright side, he kept telling her. This recent phase – green, anti-consumer, vegetarian – might be frustrating, but at least it wasn’t sex and drugs. Maura was not wagging school, piercing her navel or giving boys head jobs in the toilets.
Small mercies. Anne thought of other daughters. Perfect shiny girls who were awarded scholarships to private schools, or raised thousands for charity, or blitzed the state-wide music examinations. Did they enjoy shopping with their mothers?
Outside, a stream of people flowed towards the stadium, took the steps towards Spencer Street, stepped one by one onto the escalators and descended to the station. Anne ate the sweet, crumbly muffin, sipped the coffee. Such busyness out there, she thought, soothed. The food and drink brought her a momentary space of bliss and comfort and she relaxed against the padded back of the banquette. Now she could see the swooping iron spans and arches of the roof. St Pancras, she thought. Liverpool Street, King’s Cross.
A couple of suited businessmen walked past, smoking, and the old pang of need ambushed her. She’d given u
p five or six years ago, and now it was just the odd one or two at parties or out with girlfriends. How was it that Dad was the one who got lung cancer when Bliss was the smoker? It was Liverpool Street, wasn’t it, where Bliss chain-smoked as they sat in the cold till midnight to board the sleeper to Cornwall? The conductor had woken them in time to see St Michael’s Mount in the dawn, but Penzance was wet and dreary, and Bliss had made another of her snap decisions – not that Anne cared, she couldn’t have cared less – and after morning tea, they’d hopped on a train to Bath.
A mother and daughter flopped down onto the banquette next to her, and Anne shifted over slightly. They were loud and animated, filling the space with their talk and laughter. Like Maura, the girl was tall and skinny, and like her was wearing cut-off jeans with tights, clunky boots and a floral top. It must be a new look. Anne had thought it was just Maura and her scavenging. Not even buying from the op shop now. The top was made from old Ikea curtains, for heaven’s sake! The boots were her brother’s and the jeans had been in lost property at the pool for months. Making a point, as usual, about materialism, consumerism, capitalism. Anne wished that Maura could put it aside, just for once, just for today.
She’d been better with Andy and Jake, with their footy and their cricket, their big feet and bottomless appetites. Even their days of hulking, grunting non-communication were easy: easy because they were male and she had never really expected to understand her sons. Maura had foiled her at every turn since birth. She was never a cuddler. She weaned herself at six months.
‘My sons.’ How she loved saying it, even now, even though they’d left home, with Jake just moved to Sydney and Andy with some kind of industrial design internship in Belgium. Friends were always ready to gush about the double edge of pride and loss she must feel.
‘You must miss them. But at least you’ve still got Maura.’
Well, there was little in the way of consolation from Maura. Of course, Anne loved her – but with mothers and daughters it was all so much more complicated. Not that Anne ever thought about her own mother. She tried to live in the present and mostly she succeeded; her memories were like the family photo album, full of holiday snaps, birthdays and Christmases. She could scarcely remember her mother, anyway. It had been Beatie at first, and then Bliss.
Anne looked at her watch and then at the stream of shoppers. There had been lots of shopping with Bliss. Melbourne still maintained a dress code in those days – if not quite hat, gloves, matching bag and shoes, it was ‘dressed up’, or at least smart. Smoothing her skirt and adjusting her lace-trimmed little socks on the tram, walking with Bliss into Georges and Buckley’s and the string of little boutiques at the top of Collins Street. Later, at Pellegrini’s, a coffee for Bliss and for Anne a granita (watermelon-coloured, sweet, gritty with ice crystals), and sometimes lunch at the restaurant down the back with its cool pink travertine floor and Italian waiters, like elderly uncles, who would slip Savoiardi biscuits and sugar lumps into her hand while Bliss lingered over espresso and crème caramel.
Maura’s text came with a brief tinkling sound and she stood up. Her shoulders were aching and she looked with distaste at the bulging carry bags. The dress she’d bought was all wrong – clingy and too short. What had she been thinking? She felt bloated, with a pain under her rib cage, and almost sick at the thought of lunch on top of that muffin. All the way down the escalator, she struggled to breathe.
‘How are you, Anne?’
Paula was drooping and sad-faced as usual and Anne felt the familiar surge of irritation. She offered her face for a kiss. She gave a brilliant smile.
‘Never better.’
ALL THINGS BRIGHT
Yesterday after lunch the pain was so bad that Sunny called Stella, who got quite angry and said it wasn’t good enough and told someone to get the doctor. Who gave me an injection and I slept. And slept and slept. Now it’s dawn. Everything is quiet and calm – the calm before the storm of meds and trays – and I can lie uninterrupted and think about my dream.
I was in the flat. Nothing unusual there; I often dream about rooms and houses. Houses I’ve lived in, decorated or sketched, and others that seem just as real and sometimes even more so. They range the real-estate spectrum from hovel to mansion, and occasionally there’s a lovely and impossibly complex palace like the ones I visited in France with Judith and Rob. Sometimes there are rooms or whole wings that are abandoned, vandalised or even derelict and open to the skies with crows circling above. My old friend Miles Orchard used to interpret readers’ dreams for My Journal – he made up the horoscopes as well – and one day he confessed that he actually based his column on the theories of Carl Jung. Fancy that. So I know that the hovel was my poor self, the ruined wing was my damaged self, the palace was my ideal self. My last home was my real self. Perhaps.
I remember when I first realised the flat was home. I’d been out shopping, and when I opened the door the smell of it hit me. It was, to be exact, Jolie Madame, gardenia soap, Vittoria Arabica dark roast and Howard’s beeswax furniture polish. All very specific, all unchanged for years. All my own. So very Bliss! That’s what people would say. Like the collection of Victorian paperweights, the seashells, the ruby glassware.
Actually, it didn’t matter any more. I could use any bloody soap, any polish, whatever took my fancy. I no longer had to keep up. There was no fluffy girl journalist asking me to share my secret style file with the reader. No photographers, no before and after, no double page spread in House & Garden of Bliss Henderson in her new home.
Not mine at all now.
In this dream, I am back in the flat, floating from room to room. The parquet floors are shining as if they’ve just been waxed, and the whole place looks freshly painted. It is very neat, very clean, very calm. Very empty. Where are my things? Where are the pictures, the Regency secretaire, the paperweights on the windowsill?
‘Don’t worry, Bliss,’ says Anna-Mae. ‘The children have them.’
‘That’s all right then,’ I reply, slumping with relief. ‘Have you got a fag?’
‘Good morning, ladies!’ says Stella, and up roll the blinds with a snap. There’s a good blast of stale cigarette with the meds before the trolley comes around.
Do all nurses smoke? No, just most, and I’d like to tell them, just between us, that the mints don’t do a thing. When I visited Beatie at the old folks’ home, two or three staff were always outside the laundry with mugs and packets of fags. After one especially gruelling visit, when Beatie and I both cried and there wasn’t a damned thing I could do for her except perhaps a spot of Tontine therapy, I spoke to them on the way out.
‘Could you spare a cigarette?’ I said. ‘I feel like hell.’
They smiled and laughed and somebody brought out a pack of Escorts. One of them, Paul, a lovely young Maltese man, brushed the ash off my lapels and gave me a blessing when I left.
The world’s become very harsh to smokers. How carefree they were, those smoking days! How cheap the cigarettes, and what wonderful names. Piccadilly, Gold Bond and Buckingham; Viceroy, Parliament and Diplomat. Don’t they simply reek of class? If you were in a more democratic mood, you could walk a mile for a Camel or light up a Lucky Strike, but for sheer stunning glamour, there was nothing like a box of Sobranie Cocktails done up deliciously like sweeties with their little gold tips, in sugared almond colours, pastel pink and blue and green. Do they still make them? Would anyone smoke them if they did?
Alec never smoked. Or drank much, for that matter. I’d alternate Silk Cut and Johnnie Walker while he sipped iced tea. Not that he was a crank – it was his digestion. Heartburn, mainly. We never worried much about such things in those days.
Alec died of lung cancer. Did I already tell you that? You’d think that would stop me in my tracks, but I kept smoking until I was over sixty, when the doctor told me to give up, and I did. Just like that. Then I had to give up the other things too.
The illusion that I was whole. The illusion that my body, that u
seful, graceful warhorse-packhorse-racehorse, tirelessly doing my bidding and shaping itself to my will, had somehow escaped time. I’d never been one for aches and pains. Friends would complain – God! the dreary litany of arthritis, osteoporosis and the rest – while I leaned back with my fag du jour and thought, smugly, Not me.
But it was me. It’s true what they say, that what you don’t know can’t hurt you. I went to the clinic for a tetanus shot after a bite from my neighbour’s Burmese and found that my old doctor had died. It was eight years since I’d had an appointment. Urgent questions. ‘Cholesterol? Blood pressure? Mammogram?’ I hadn’t realised what dangers lurked, unknown, gathering force with each birthday. I thought I felt well, and wasn’t that a mistake? I was a time bomb going tick, tick, tick. So. It began. The names were neither classy nor democratic; they were scarcely even allusive. What can you make of Aldomet and Lasix and Warfarin and Slow-K? I began to feel unwell. I began to have angina and atrial fibrillation. It was, as they say, the beginning of the end. Which, naturally, I ignored.
Breakfast. I have it in bed now, but when I first came here, I would get up every morning. Someone would help me shower and dress, someone else would attend to my legs, and then Ivana and I would walk together to the dining room. The ladies at our table – Ivy and Betty, Dot and Denise – were quite a crew; I used to get a kick out of imagining we were girls of twelve or thirteen at boarding school, full of giggles and secrets.
It wasn’t that long ago, but the memory of them has faded as if it never really took root. Ivy comes to my room occasionally, but Betty is dead and Dot’s dementia got the better of her so she’s been locked away. I don’t know where Denise is. She used to be on the stage; she’d burst into song at the drop of a hat. Perhaps one enchanted evening she simply pretended her way out of here.