by David Malouf
Something in the little pink sweet had bewitched me – that is how I saw it, and that, I knew, was how Grandpa would understand it. My perceiving it may even have come through him.
I recalled what my grandmother had said. How easy it was to make a mistake and be in need of – forgiveness, was it? Grandpa had been weakened by my betrayal. What I saw in him as silliness was a lack of sureness that had come with my doubt.
My grandmother’s beauty was a powerful legend that continued to convince people of the present fact. All three of my aunts saw themselves in the light of it. As an ugly duckling in the case of my Aunt Ollie, who had always thought of herself as her mother’s shame, and in the case of the younger ones, ‘the girls’ as they were called, as timid but not always passive rivals. Their mother, in the early days, had quite simply stolen their men.
Aunt Ollie in fact was not an ugly duckling and never had been, but she had no confidence in her beauty, and I suspect my grandmother from the beginning may have implanted the notion of plainness in her as a way of making certain, once the other children began to arrive, that she would always be there to nurse them. Aunt Ollie had taken this as being the point of her lack of charm. She was to devote herself to the family. That, rather than marriage or children of her own, was to be her fate. She accepted it cheerfully, and so far as one could tell, entirely without question. She had mothered each of her brothers and sisters, and was, when it came to my turn to be mothered, a large, pale, fair creature, as soft as a cloud and with arms that were always powdered with flour.
Her province was the kitchen. With its big central table of scrubbed pine, its marble slab for pastry, its chopping blocks, knife drawers, canisters, and the rack on the wall where all Aunt Ollie’s saucepans and frying pans were hung, it was a place of continuous messy activity and perfect order. Sacks of potatoes and onions were stacked in an alcove; jars of melon and lemon jam, marmalade, mango chutney, tomato relish, all carefully dated and labelled, glowed on pantry shelves. The salt-box was of wood and had a thistle motif. There were two stoves. One was modern and enamelled, its legs set in tins of dessicated ants. The other was a range for baking. Very low and black, it was housed in a corrugated-iron recess and fed from a pile of stove-lengths that Uncle Gil would cut – if he was in the mood for it and could be trusted with an axe.
Aunt Ollie’s kitchen had its own routine, to which only the privileged were admitted. I spent long hours there on Sunday mornings and in the afternoons after school, watching the miracles Aunt Ollie could whip up in her theatre of sieves and whisks and earthenware bowls of eight different sizes, licking the sugared white off egg-beaters, scraping out bowls, and being told, when I enquired what went into some favourite dish, ‘Oh, a little bit of this and a little bit of that,’ which was Aunt Ollie’s only recipe for a dozen kinds of biscuits, and for wholemeal, pumpkin and marmite scones, treacle tarts, sago plum-puddings boiled in a basin with a clip-over lid, and the two kinds of dumpling that went into the various soups and stews for which Della, wielding a little bone-handled knife or an ancient cleaver, did the donkey-work of peeling and dicing vegetables.
Della was a shapeless girl of Aunt Ollie’s age – that is, over forty – with hair so wispy that she might have been balding and odd stumps of teeth. She came from a farm across the border and had been part of my grandmother’s household for nearly thirty years.
She and Aunt Ollie were a pair. Aunt Ollie, in her modest view of herself, saw Della as a kind of twin, closer and more like her than her flashy sisters. Della cut up vegetables, washed pots, pans and dishes, which gave her nails in the puffy fingers a horn-like texture, dealt with butcher-boys, bottle-os, icemen and grocers’ assistants, fed the fowls that were kept at the bottom of the yard with soaked bread and scraps, and, with her skirt hiked up and a pail of sloshy water before her, scrubbed each morning, before the rest of us were up, the worn tiles of the kitchen, the back steps and all the boards of the verandah. She spoke only to her chooks and in a toothless, incomprehensible gabble to the iceman.
She had an understanding with this wiry, red-headed fellow that allowed her to be rough with him.
‘Gawn yew!’ she would say in a burst of sudden hilarity, and give him a shove that might have overbalanced him altogether, he was so stringy-looking in his shorts and singlet, if there hadn’t been the compensatory weight of the ice.
The occasion would leave them both chuckling and shaking their heads as they moved off in opposite directions; the block having been lowered by then into its chest, and beginning to melt, and the iceman, the lighter for the encounter, bouncing a little on his toes.
It was the iceblock that occupied the centre of this daily drama. Glittering there at the end of hooked claws and leaving a wet trail all the way from the gate, with a puddle where the two figures had crossed beside the mint patch halfway up, it gathered to itself whatever heat these meetings contained, so that it might have been the iceman’s foxy attempts to catch her hand, or Della’s feelings when she turned things over in her little cubbyhole by the stairs, that reduced the great block to liquid, and some understanding between them that the relationship would continue, but not necessarily develop, that created that void in the ice-chest that had each morning to be filled.
Communications between Della and Aunt Ollie were also silent. Words did crop up in them, as monosyllabic requests or directives, but they were not essential. The real dialogue was that set of exchanges by which vegetables, the same ones each day, and chuck-chops and steak, became stews, broths and thick winter soups, and whisks, sieves, bowls, ladles passed from Della’s hands to Aunt Ollie’s and on through a complicated process of beating and churning and patting and pricking till the dishes were produced that we would later consume at my grandmother’s table; after which, they went back into Della’s hands to be washed, dried, restored to brightness and hung again on the kitchen wall.
These utensils, clean and in place by eight o’clock in the evening, when Della closed the kitchen door and retired to her room to listen to the serials on the mantle radio we had given her, were the elements of a lifelong discourse that could for the moment be dropped but would be taken up again in the morning when all these things would come down from their hooks and be gathered back again into the world of use. Even Della and Aunt Ollie’s quarrels had no words. They could be guessed at only by the higher level of noise they produced when Della went to work with her hacker, or by the banging down harder than usual of an iron pot.
In the afternoon sometimes, when I came in from school, Della would be plucking and drawing a couple of chooks at the tap in the yard, one foot on the coping round the drain. From inside the house came the heavy chords of the piano where Aunt Roo, in one of her ‘moods’, was playing gloomy things like Handel’s ‘Largo’ or Chopin’s ‘Funeral March’ – ‘them dirges’, as Della called them. ‘We had a feller at Mullumbimby once used to play like that, but he ’ad an excuse – ’e’d come back from the war – the first war – with only one arm. But you should of ’eard ’im, you’d never of guessed. ’E ’ad one sleeve tucked up with a safety-pin and bandages all round his face – ’e couldn’ talk except through them – an’ he used to sit in ’is room and play, just like that. Dirges. Classical. And sort of moan. It gave me the creeps. I left in the end, I couldn’ stand it. Still, ’e ’ad an excuse, poor devil.’ Aunt Roo, she implied, had none.
‘Is it true,’ I asked, ‘that she ran off once and played with a dance band?’
Della made a face. ‘Who?’ She jerked her head towards the music. ‘Lady Muck?’ She seldom referred to Aunt Roo by name.
‘That’s what she told me.’
Della considered. ‘Well I never ’eard of it.’ She returned to feeling about in the chook and pulling out innards. ‘Could be one of her – stories.’
She refused to meet my eye. She had great loyalty to ‘the family’ and feared perhaps that what she had said was already a betrayal. ‘S
till,’ she said, ‘there’s plenty goes on here I don’t hear about. Not interested. Got too much work.’
It was understood that when I entered Aunt Ollie’s kitchen I too would accept the rules of the place. ‘A little bit of this and a little bit of that’ might be the longest sentence uttered on those close afternoons, with the steam hissing out under saucepan lids, Della’s discoloured chopper making its rat-a-tat-a-tat and a late storm brewing in the windowpanes, though I was never aware of a gap. The passing of a bowl into my hands to be licked clean and transferred to the sink, or the offer of a long spiral of apple peel, so perfectly removed that it could be held a moment in the round shape of the uncut apple – these were clear statements, in a fullness of communication that was affectionate on all sides: Aunt Ollie and Della for one another, both of them for me, and I for the two heavy, silent women, so different, so much alike.
Later, when we were assembled at the dinner table, I would continue to feel the strong order that Aunt Ollie and Della had established during our kitchen hours. Since few words were passed at my grandmother’s table once grace had been said – conversation was dangerous in that tense, unstable household – we were entirely occupied with Aunt Ollie’s soups, stews and puddings. No wonder Frank Harland, when he did come to lunch at last, in the same worn army shirt but with a bit of blue cloth tucked into the collar and yellow socks to his boots, was so awkward and boiled-looking – not at all the artist my aunts had hoped for. My father insisted on his going up to see Grandpa, who surprised us all by talking for three full minutes about the National Gallery in London. Frank Harland nodded a few times and said ‘Aha’ but without much conviction – he seemed out of his depth. But was delighted to see his picture on the wall of my parents’ bedroom. It might, on this occasion, have been the frame that impressed him.
My aunts giggled, and my grandmother, deciding in her cut-and-dried way that this streaky fellow with the lines in his cheeks, the dirty fingernails and the apology for a cravat, was another of my father’s lame ducks, a bohemian sponger, simply pretended he was not there and left it to Aunt Ollie to offer him second servings of peas and sweet potato or a spoonful of mint sauce.
Frank Harland was never the only guest at dinner. One of our regular visitors was a retired doctor, ‘Uncle’ Haro, who had been a friend of my grandmother’s since the early days and whom she still consulted – in the professional sense, that is, though she also consulted him once or twice a week by telephone. I would hear her laughter from the office. It sounded odd. So light and girlish.
They had jokes together, my grandmother and Uncle Haro, that were not explained. I would catch them laughing silently to one another across the table, in the sure knowledge that they were the cleverest people present, but often as if they were also the youngest and had just shared a pre-dinner prank. In the afternoon they retired to my grandmother’s office and played honeymoon bridge.
Uncle Haro smelled of tobacco and was shaggy, all shoulders and big hands, and gruffly, deliberately uncouth. It surprised me that my grandmother, with her fine ways, put up with him. He scattered tobacco when he filled his pipe; he disturbed all the knives and forks when he sat down to eat, pushing them off to the side to make a space for himself; and all through grace he huffed, and his chair, on its thin bentwood legs, would scrape and creak. Sometimes, in the evening, he would bring out his violin case and slip from its yellowing sleeve (which was made of an old swami silk petticoat) a half-sized fiddle that was meant for a child. Removing his jacket and pushing up his expanding silver armbands, he would tuck the little instrument under his chin, where it rested on a ruby velvet pad, and play Irish jigs or classical pieces like Mendelssohn’s ‘Spring Song’ or ‘Träumerei’ or, in defiance of our other regular guest, Miss Minchin, a lady whose brother was a Lutheran minister, a few frenzied bars of the ‘Devil’s Trill’.
Uncle Haro had privileges in the house. They derived from my grandmother, and I saw that Aunt Roo, at least, resented them. She treated Uncle Haro in an offhand manner, or she ignored him altogether, but I guessed there was a time, years back, when she might have climbed on his knee and played up to him. It was from Uncle Haro that I got this sense of a past when things had been different between them. He spoke to Aunt Roo with unusual softness, and when he arrived once with a big bunch of gardenias – ‘For the house, for the house!’ – he gave her one, and she crinkled her nose and immediately gave it back. He made a clown’s face of exaggerated grief.
He was a joker, Uncle Haro. On one occasion he brought a little plaster turd that he lay on the bottom step of the verandah and had everyone running about in circles looking for the dog and wondering how it had ever got in. Della was scandalised. It upset her strict notion of things. He was supposed to be a gentleman. But what surprised me was that everyone else, including my grandmother, thought it hilarious.
In Uncle Haro’s presence my grandmother was a different person. She unbent and became easy, not only in herself but also towards the rest of us – which was why everyone had laughed so much, had felt free to, at Uncle Haro’s turd. She softened and glowed, as if she had drunk wine or been made sleepy by an invisible fire. I wondered that the others did not notice. I guessed they were used to it.
The first day Frank Harland came Uncle Haro asked him about angels. He claimed, as a medical man, to have seen several of them. They were all declared crazy by their families of course, and were kept locked up, or had been hidden away in institutions, and they did nothing but scream the moment you came near them; but you could tell they were angels by their extreme sensitivity to touch, in fact to all the senses, and by the extreme beauty of their expressions when they were calm. By their muteness too, and the fact that they had no sex (my grandmother did not protest but was not quite pleased at this turn in the description), or shared the characteristics of both.
Frank Harland was disconcerted. Yes, he did believe such things could be. He had never seen an angel of any kind himself but his father had seen a ghost lady once, in a yellow frock.
Uncle Haro was not interested in ghosts. Only angels. And in big green mud-crabs, one of which, I recall, he set loose under the table from a gunnysack.
I felt sorry for Frank Harland when Uncle Haro questioned him about the angels. He had set his eyebrows at me once – they were thick and black like Mr Menzies, in contrast to his snow-white hair – and in the same gruff, insistent voice fired off a whole series of questions about ‘sexual matters’. Something in the way he pressed Frank Harland reminded me of the occasion and I blushed, but it was Aunt Ollie who spoke up. Firmly, and with an assurance that took me by surprise.
‘Don’t worry, Frank,’ she said, ‘he doesn’t mean any of this. He’s a joker. He likes teasing people. Now give over, Haro! Mr Harland isn’t used to it.’ For all her softness she could be fierce in the defence of her chicks.
‘You’re wrong there, Ollie, quite wrong, I mean every word of it. Frank knows that, don’t you Frank? We are talking about life. Not your tidy bits of it but the whole thing. Is that right, Frank? And I tell you, I saw a little girl once, about twelve years old’ – I felt that Uncle Haro was looking right at me – ‘who had been tied to a bed for as long as anyone could remember and had never done anything but butt her head at the bars of her cot and moan and scream and throw things. Her parents were distracted – I was treating the mother, there was nothing I could do for the child. One day when I was there the noise suddenly stopped and when I came to her the little thing was as calm as could be. Still with one eye set lower than the other and a warped lip and blackened teeth, but so calm that she was – well, I could see immediately what it was and would have given anything to know what her silence was trying to tell us, what tidings, what gospel she had. I say a little girl but that is only in a manner of speaking. Because her mother called her that. Claire she was called. At that point she was beginning to mature, she was getting a beard, and it was clear that she was a male – or rather
both, it hardly matters really, one way or the other.’
Uncle Haro pushed his lower lip out and defied scepticism. His heavy tweed jacket with its leather buttons and the big hand with its solid-gold signet ring gave such substance to his story, and to the subject of it, that I longed to ask where the little girl lived and would have gone any distance to see her. Frank Harland too believed. I saw it. Were they making fools of us?
‘Don’t listen,’ Aunt Ollie insisted. ‘He’s always talking nonsense – he makes these things up just to embarrass people. And you pretending all the time’ – Uncle Haro was all smiles – ‘to be a man of science! Have another piece of pudding, Frank, and you too, Phil. Help yourself to custard.’
When Uncle Haro wasn’t teasing Frank Harland his favourite victim was Miss Minchin. She had done missionary work with the aborigines and had seen a child taken by a crocodile once off a tartan blanket, while they were having tea on a lawn. She recounted this tragedy, and others, in a small flat rather mannish voice and with so little emotion that she might have had a little machine tucked away under the scarf at her throat to save her the trouble of telling her stories herself, they were so unremarkable. One of her former colleagues had been decapitated by the Japanese. That was in Borneo. Another was eaten by headhunters in the Sepik.
My aunts listened to these wonders without blinking, they had been hearing them for years; and Aunt Roo must have wondered at times if Miss Minchin wasn’t trying to outdo her in the creation of whoppers. But Miss Minchin was incapable of untruth. Life, thank you very much, was quite enough. You didn’t need imagination.