by Susan Green
‘Goodbye, wife.’
‘Goodbye, husband.’
It seemed very sweet.
At night, when Gerald fell asleep after we’d made love, I’d often stay awake and watch him. Sometimes he would whimper in his dreams, but when I stroked his cheek and whispered to him, he’d lie calm, inclined slightly towards me, almost smiling. He was beautiful then. This is not sentimental twaddle. I’m not saying he regained his innocence or looked like the little boy he once was or, even more revolting, the child within; he looked like the man he was at his best, a man who was purposeful, intelligent, possessed of a kind of passionate integrity. Even – and here I am thinking of a Roman portrait bust of a young patrician I once saw in the Vatican Museum – nobility.
At his worst, Gerald was a monster of bullying, destructive arrogance. At his worst, he was my husband.
Oh, dear. I think I’m going to cry.
It’s interesting, to say the least, to read your own small walk-on part in someone else’s life. The ludicrously titled Stranger in Paradise: The Art and Times of Gerald Grady, by Vanessa Anderson, came out in 2003, and of course I bought a copy. The first thing I did was turn to the index.
Adair, Liza 98–99. A whole marriage in just two pages. I also found myself cross-referenced under Marriages, (1) Liza Adair. The same two pages. I suppose there would have been more if I’d cooperated with the lovely Vanessa, but I chose not to. I regretted it later but only slightly. I couldn’t be bothered turning myself inside out for a stranger.
I assume he felt the same, for from his recollections I appear as a vague, sketchy image. Art student, adopted daughter of the prominent portraitist Dame Edith Vaile, during the marriage worked as an illustrator, later textiles designer, interior decorator and co-owner of the iconic Victoria’s in the King’s Road . . .
By the time Vanessa was doing her research, almost all of Gerald’s old confreres were dead, except for a few nonagenarians like Neil Offren. Here’s what he said:
Liza was very young, a girl art student, extremely good-looking and quite talented in her own way. I wasn’t surprised when the marriage failed. She just wasn’t able to be a real companion – certainly not an intellectual equal . . . it’s no wonder he got bored.
Thank you, Neil. You were always jealous, weren’t you? You wanted Gerald all to yourself. And so this is your revenge, served very cold. You pretend to be so balanced – how I love that smirking tribute to my talent! – but I could have told Vanessa how, stinking of beer and that awful pipe, you kept one eye on my husband and the other, lecherously and full of hatred, on me. Oh yes. I knew your dirty little secret. You wanted to undress me; you’d have loved to put your hands and mouth on me and, finally, in your own delightful phrase, ‘do the nasty’.
Clever Vanessa winkled out two or three more people to comment on my youth and beauty; she reproduced one of the two portraits, both titled The Artist’s Wife, which are held in public collections, and described them as lyrical and tender. From somewhere she got a blurry photograph of us together with Judith on some God-awful stony English beach. I am summery, despite the gale, in a cotton skirt, espadrilles and off-the-shoulder blouse; Gerald has on a tweed overcoat.
I assume the photograph didn’t come from Rob or Judith, for little Vanessa, tunnelling mole-like through Gerald’s life, was forced to make a mountain out of their refusal to be interviewed. She described the break with them as ‘one of the many ruptures that punctuated his stormy relational life’.
In summing me up, she wrote (a wonderfully nebulous phrase), by all accounts the marriage was bound to fail. There was the age gap, but also Grady’s single-minded devotion to the evolution of his artistic destiny, which was, at times, destructive to his personal relationships and even his own happiness.
Happiness. It seems there was precious little of it. I am grateful to Vanessa for her tunnelling and winkling, for I learned more about this man who’d been my husband from Stranger in Paradise than I ever learned from him. Gerald was always vague about his background. He said he didn’t remember his childhood.
‘You must remember something.’
‘Not really.’
‘Where did you live? What did your father do?’
‘We lived on a farm. My parents died when I was young. I was brought up by relatives.’
‘Just like me. I was an orphan too. And adopted by the aunts . . .’
‘I don’t think it was quite like that.’
‘Well, don’t you remember the relatives? Who were they?’
‘Can’t you see I don’t want to talk about it?’
‘Were you very unhappy, darling?’
‘Yes.’
‘Poor Gerald. Let’s be happy together, then.’
Gerald told me his father was a farmer but, according to Vanessa, Des Grady was in fact an itinerant shearer, working the sheds from Queensland to New South Wales and back to Victoria. When he was visiting a friend in Ballarat he met Peggy Kelty. Vanessa reproduced their wedding photograph in the book. Des is black Irish, tall, muscular, smiling; a charmer, a ladies’ man. Peggy is tall also, with an oval face, light eyes and long fair hair. A lovely couple.
She stayed in her hometown while Des went shearing. He’d return for a few months each year, during which time he’d impregnate Peggy, terrify his kids and argue with anyone who crossed his path. Gerald always said he was orphaned and brought up by relatives, but the truth was that one day Peggy simply left him and one of his brothers in St Saviour’s Boys’ Home. He was there for seven years. Probably he was abused, or so Vanessa speculates. Luckily for him, one of the priests saw talent in the boy and enrolled him at the Ballarat School of Mines to learn commercial art. Lettering was his forte, and from time to time throughout his life, even when he had no need of money, he’d do odd jobs of signwriting. His first job was in a cardboard box factory, designing the labels. As far as Vanessa could discover, he was never reunited with his parents and maintained only sporadic contact with his siblings.
The rest of story I knew: his distinguished war in New Guinea and the Philippines; his classes with George Bell; his years as one of the rehab students – the ‘Army Greatcoats’ I worshipped from afar – at the Gallery School; his work as an art teacher in private schools.
That was where I came in, Vanessa. The rest of it everyone knows: the break with figurative art; the years in the United States; the second wife; the return to Australia and triumphant shows in 1968 and ’69; the next wife; international fame and a house in Tuscany; the new partner; the final years spent between Florence and Sydney . . .
In his last photographs, he still looks like a Roman, but inflexible, bitter and harsh, one of the nastier senators, all the nobility and idealism of youth soured and turned to arrogance. But where does this detail fit in? In his last years, he was helpful to a series of young art students, both male and female. He gave them materials, studio space, money, connections. He never laid a finger on any of them. One of them was quoted as saying, He didn’t want anything in return. I think he just liked to warm himself on the fires of youth.
Poor Gerald! Through me – or, rather, through us – he tried to right the old, old wrongs. He tried to have happiness, all the happiness he’d missed out on in that crowded little house in Ballarat and in St Saviour’s and during the long years of lonely work, study and unrelieved effort. He tried to have a wife and even – despite the fearful pram – a child. A family. But he didn’t know how it was done.
I remember Gerald’s face as he slept.
I remember thinking that Alec was a compassionate fool when he spoke so kindly of Nina. ‘We didn’t bring out the best in each other,’ he said.
I see.
LETTING THEM GO
Prints and frames and mount board walked out of the shop all morning, but after lunch it was only the odd browser and no sales. Paula sat listening to the classical station, to Brahms and the radio announcer’s unhurried ramblings, but then it turned harsh and atonal with disturbing strings.
When Dave called by mid-afternoon to bring her a coffee, he said, ‘Are you listening to this crap? It sounds like they’re torturing kittens.’
‘Philistine,’ she said, trying not to smile in advance at the silly old joke.
‘Phyllis Stein? Who’s she?’
After Dave left, she began to play her audio book, The Wings of the Dove by Henry James. She had a vague memory of enjoying The Portrait of a Lady at school but now the endless gradations of feeling and response made the pace agonisingly slow. Just get on with it, she thought.
She tried knitting. She’d found fifteen balls of blue wool in the furthest reaches of the linen cupboard and had the idea of making squares for a patchwork rug. Bushfires, earthquakes, floods – there were always victims, and they always needed comfort.
It was only when she began to cast on that she realised. This was Sue’s chemo project. The counsellor had said it would be a good idea for her to make something while she was hooked up to the machine and so Paula bought the pattern and the needles and the wool.
‘Bugger that for a joke,’ Sue had said.
Paula’s fingers tingled unpleasantly at the touch of the yarn, and she bundled it quickly back into the carry bag. She’d give it to the Lifeline shop.
Dave picked her up at closing time, and when they got home, the lack of tension in the house was palpable.
‘This has been a good move, hasn’t it?’ she said.
‘What?’
‘Letting it all go.’
‘What do you mean? I haven’t given up.’
Oh, for God’s sake! All she was trying to say was that this was good. No shop, no Kids & Co. No burdens of failure and betrayal. ‘I know that, Dave.’
‘I’m not living off you.’
Why was he still so touchy? ‘As if that would matter, anyway.’
‘Well, it does.’
Suddenly he was back to dark and negative, as if it was some old tape playing . . . No, an old record, scratched and wobbly, circa 1975, the year Dave came to manhood in West Footscray and struggled out from under his big, angry father’s grip to get an education and a career. It was a track she knew well. She tried to nudge the needle off the vinyl.
‘Bliss liked it when you came with me last night.’
‘Probably didn’t know who I was.’
‘Of course she did. She held your hand, she called you darling.’
‘“David, darling.”’ Dave did a passable imitation of Bliss’s creamy tones. ‘I’ll bet she still thinks I’m a philistine.’
‘Oh, Dave, she only ever used the word once and then apologised. She knows you’re not. And she was always so grateful for the time you spent with Dad.’
Dave came on the scene about the same time that Alec became ill. He was still working as a press photographer but he managed to fit in a visit or two each week. They talked, they pored over old photographs; Dave even set up the projector for slide shows. The problem, thought Paula, was that Bliss simply didn’t get him. She’d never had a man like him in her life, so she interpreted his directness as crudity. An expert at self-mockery herself, somehow she’d never been able to pick up on Dave’s particularly Australian brand.
‘I think your David is what they call a diamond in the rough,’ is what Bliss had said, and then, ‘You have to admit, Paula, that you’re an odd match.’
And you and Dad aren’t? Paula had thought.
‘I know, I know,’ said Dave. ‘She just . . . you know, she always holds her mouth that certain way when she says my name. I’m not good enough for you, Paula.’
‘She doesn’t think that.’
‘It’s okay, I agree with her. I’m actually really fond of the old girl. She’s always had more time for me than my own mother, that’s for sure.’
Oh no. Let’s get away from that particular can of worms. ‘I think I’d better ring Tom this week,’ she said at random.
Dave snorted.
‘What?’
‘Well, he’s never going to pay his own way.’
Still brooding on the kept man motif? ‘Oh, Dave. Tom’s just . . .’ When Tom was in a good mood, he could light up the room. Walking down the street, heads turned. Perhaps Tom just being Tom was enough for Roly.
‘Sorry, love,’ said Dave. ‘I know he’s your brother.’
She could see the effort on his face. In his whole body. He was trying to pull himself up, out. Trying so hard. Into her mind popped seabirds struggling free of the black, slick water of an oil spill. Dave the penguin, Paula the tireless wildlife volunteer. She burst out laughing.
‘What’s funny, love?’
‘You. Me. The pair of us.’
He wasn’t offended. He laughed too, and caught both her hands in his. ‘I suppose we are,’ he said.
DANCING WITH THE STARS
‘Darling Paula! You’ve caught me out, haven’t you? This is what I do when I’m left alone.’
Ivana’s been popped into hospital overnight – they had to operate on an ingrown toenail – and I’m sitting watching the television with a glass of white wine in my hand. I can see she’s surprised. As am I. To feel alert, amused and fully alive – rather than slumped and slurring – is astonishing. It would be up and down, the doctor had predicted, this road, the road to the sea, and with no signs to warn of the steep inclines, the S-bends, the dips and the crests. This is a crest. A cocky’s crest, a family crest, all swirls and flourishes and rampant beasties. I laugh, so light-hearted I could take off and fly. Is it the drugs, the wine or just life?
Paula matches her tone to mine. ‘Caught you doing what?’
I angle my cheek for a kiss. ‘Watching this rot. Dancing with the Stars. Have you ever seen it?’
‘No.’
‘The most extraordinary costumes. Look at that. I wonder how it stays up. Or on, for that matter.’
‘I believe they use double-sided adhesive tape.’
I look at her and smile. ‘That takes away a bit of the magic, darling.’ I press the off button and the dancers disappear.
‘You’re looking very well.’
‘I feel well, darling. I find I feel better later in the day. Perhaps I’m like those flowers that come out in the evening. Do you know the ones I mean? They’re pink and yellow. Mother called them “Naughty Ladies”. And how are you? How was today?’
‘Very quiet. It’s the weather. No-one’s out.’
‘And so David is still driving?’
‘Yes. Yes, he is.’
But what a comedown, I think. From running your own business to driving a truck for your brother-in-law. I must have made a little moue, for she continues, ‘He’s much happier, Bliss. We both are.’
‘Of course you are. I’m sorry, darling.’ I feel happy too, and mischievous (odd how they go together, don’t you think?), and unexpectedly genuinely fond of the He-Beast. ‘You’re such a wife.’
It’s on the tip of my tongue to say ‘and I hope he appreciates you’, but I keep it there. Of course he does. He adores you, he worships the ground you walk upon, and it breaks his heart, the poor stupid clod, that he does not know how to make you happy. I could tell him. David, darling, I could say, if you were happy, she would be happy. It works that way for her. There you are, mired in the muck of your shortcomings and failures, not realising – fool that you are – that they don’t matter and they never have.
‘I’ve been thinking about marriage, you see,’ I tell her. ‘Marriages. Me and your father, Anne and Matthew. You and Tony. You and David . . . is it fifteen years?’
‘Nearly eighteen if you count the time we lived together.’
‘Yes, that bothered your father very much. He was very conservative in some ways. He liked David, you know, from the start. I didn’t, but then I was never a good judge of character. He wasn’t my style, but that’s neither here nor there, is it? I wasn’t marrying him – you were. All the women absolutely raved about Sean Connery but I preferred Roger Moore.’
‘What?’
‘James Bond, dar
ling. Hirsute and rugged never did it for me. Though Tony was rather dishy, wasn’t he?’
‘Handsome? Yes.’
‘And such a prick. But good in bed?’
‘Bliss! Yes, if you must know.’
‘And what about David?’
‘Yes.’ Paula laughs uncomfortably. ‘If you must know.’
‘I’ve had three husbands –’
‘Three? You told me two.’
‘Did I? One of them must have slipped my mind. A few engagements, too. The triumph of hope over experience, someone once said, but if I’d given up after the first debacle, there wouldn’t have been your father, would there? Or you children. Darling Paula, if I believed in God I would thank Him, Her or It for you. For all of you. Without you I would never have learned anything. I’d have been selfish and wicked to the end of my days.’
‘Oh, Bliss!’
I reach for her with a hand that’s veined and blotched and swollen at the joints. Paula’s is veined now too, with the freckles turning to age spots. Oh, my young hand; my gloves, my lacquered nails, my rings, my cigarette in its holder. My hand in hers. Oh, I remember. Warm, pink and pliant as a starfish, impulsively in mine.
‘You will help me, won’t you?’ I’d said to her, sotto voce, drawing her away from the other children. ‘I’ve never done this before.’
‘Of course I will.’
‘Bless you, darling.’ Hands clasped, a pact, a promise. Oh, faithful heart . . . Your crest, a spaniel, quartered, in a heart, un coeur doux, ventriculated . . .
Stop it, Bliss, I tell myself. Be serious. This has been coming for a while; for months we’ve been edging closer and closer to this conversation. Time to take the plunge. Now.
‘Though I was wicked, wasn’t I? A wicked stepmother.’
‘No,’ says Paula. ‘Never.’
She shakes her head and her hair falls over her eyes. Brush it away, darling. I need to see you. I need to see if you know something I don’t.
‘But I was, according to Caroline. And Tom, too. He hates me, I know he does. It didn’t used to be that way, but something happened. Even Anne, little Anne . . . I made so many mistakes, darling; I thought loving you was enough but there was so much damage. I failed you.’