by David Malouf
But life, mere life as he called it, was too little for Uncle Haro, and Miss Minchin’s version of it enraged him. Miss Minchin drew the line at his demented angels and he drew his at her suffering saints.
‘What about you, Frank?’ Uncle Haro demanded. ‘Are you another of Miss Minchin’s headless martyrs?’
Frank Harland shook his head but looked uncomfortable.
‘Good,’ said Uncle Haro, ‘I’m glad to hear it. I’d begun to think you were another of these creeping Jesuses. We’ve got enough of those to stretch from here to Burke. Iron Knob couldn’t keep up with the demand for nails –’
‘I don’t mean,’ Harland said abruptly, and seemed surprised to hear his own voice, ‘that that isn’t part of it. Suffering, I mean. People do suffer, it’s terrible. Only it’s not all.’
‘And who is responsible for it?’ Uncle Haro insisted.
‘Responsible?’
‘That’s what I asked.’
Harland shuffled and turned red. ‘Well, we must be, mustn’t we?’
Uncle Haro’s eyebrows went up. ‘And our creator?’
He put a good deal of spit into the word.
‘Oh, well, he’s moved on,’ said Frank Harland simply. He seemed relieved that the question had taken so easy a turn. ‘I mean, the creator doesn’t go on brooding over one work forever. He does what he can and moves on. To the next thing. He lets it go. Find its own way.’
‘New works you mean, new worlds? Funny idea of a creator. Is that your idea then? Of some sort of – excuse me – irresponsible artist?’
‘The creator is responsible for what he makes, not for what others make of it. We can’t rely on the one who created us’ – Frank Harland swallowed hard and seemed to be speaking of something deeply painful – ‘but we can’t blame him neither. We make our own lives. We’re the ones who have made the world.’
‘You let God off pretty lightly,’ Uncle Haro said, ‘and put all the blame on us. That’s a nice bit of theology. I don’t let him off so lightly.’ You could see that Uncle Haro’s magisterial eye was on something beyond Frank Harland, and that the angels he spoke of, ambiguous in sex, deeply tormented, all howls and hollering, would be the only kind possible for the creator he had in mind.
‘Well you see,’ said Frank Harland, ‘whatever the realities – of what we see around us I mean – the cruelties, the horrors – I think we were meant to be happy.’
He offered this as some sort of answer, it seemed, to Uncle Haro and Miss Minchin both. Having got it out, he blushed and observed his plate. There was a long pause. There had been, at the end, a fire in his voice that commanded respect.
‘Good on you, Frank!’ my father said too loud. He looked round for congratulations. His man had finally justified him.
Uncle Haro glared. ‘Do you really mean it? Just – happy?’
Frank Harland’s whole face was contorted. He must have hoped it was over. He was torn now between a wish to say no more and a painful desire not to be misunderstood. ‘Not just,’ he said low. ‘Because it’s so difficult, you know. What’s asked of us would have to be hard, wouldn’t it? And that’s the hardest thing of all, to be happy. The strongest. Suffering couldn’t be it. Suffering’s too – easy.’
‘Huh!’ Uncle Haro looked at Frank Harland as if he had said something astonishing, and disappointing, but it flummoxed him just the same.
‘Huh!’ he said again, and Aunt Ollie laughed outright.
‘Here Haro,’ she said, ‘have some more pudding,’ and she piled his plate with it before he could wave his hand in the air to ward her off.
[3]
Frank Harland was often at the house after that first time. He liked to sit with Aunt Ollie and Della in the kitchen and was there sometimes when I came in from school. He made no difference is what I thought. He knew the language because it was his own and was included in the patterns that unfolded out of Della’s hands, or Aunt Ollie’s, as I had been. We sat round the table, drank tea, ate buttered scones or biscuits, said nothing, and everything was as before.
To my other aunts these occasions were incomprehensible. They found Frank Harland a comic figure and could not imagine what anyone saw in him. In the way they had of giving nicknames to people they wanted to mock in open company they called him Ollie’s Iceman, a phrase that never failed to send them into fits of laughter and raised a tight smile even from my grandmother. Ollie’s Iceman. Like Della’s – because he was such a block of ice.
Sometimes he brought his work things – paper, charcoal, inks – and while Della and Aunt Ollie banged about in their usual way he did sketches or made quick studies in line and wash.
It was an odd business. He muttered to himself as he worked, let out sudden chuckles that might have been approval of a line or a row of dots, or hissed with disgust, or cried out, or crowed or snarled, and if he glanced up and caught my eye would look apologetic. He was ashamed before such a young person to reveal his own childishness.
As for the works themselves, they were so little what I expected that he might have been engaged with quite different events in another room. I felt I had missed something – and that the most important thing of all.
‘Well,’ he would say, observing my disappointment, ‘it’s just a sketch really, an idea. There’s a lot more I could do. What I wanted to catch, you see, was –’ But he stopped there, looked miserably at what he had done and gave up. I felt sorry for him. He was surprised when people were puzzled by his work. He expected them to see just what he saw.
Della also looked. She was fond of the fellow and hated to see him made a fool of; but one glance at the sort of stuff he did and you knew right off, there was nothing to be done; he could not be saved.
Aunt Ollie refused to look at all. ‘You finished for a bit, Frank? These scones aren’t worth tuppence if you don’t eat ’em warm.’
When he did complete his portrait of Aunt Ollie, and it was produced at last and seen, the consensus was that it was awful. Even my father hummed and looked embarrassed. ‘It’s very good, Frank,’ was all he could find to say. ‘You’ve made Ollie very – strong.’ (‘Like a wrestler,’ Aunt Roo whispered.)
It was an opinion that appeared to please the man. ‘Yairs,’ he said very slowly, and grinned.
‘Well it is different,’ said Aunt Connie.
It was Uncle Haro who surprised us all. He asked for a special showing and was in such a bad temper afterwards that we all knew he had been struck. He thought enough of Harland’s talent, it seemed, to feel threatened. It made even my grandmother give the thing a second look.
‘Oh, it’s me all right,’ Aunt Ollie admitted when pressed, though she had barely looked at the portrait. ‘It’s the real me,’ and she laughed for her own awkwardness and rock-like solidity. ‘He’s caught me to a tee. I never said I was a beauty.’
My opinion, which no one asked for, was that the painting spoke for some special understanding between Frank and Aunt Ollie, and I wondered what it could be.
‘Do you reckon Frank’s in love?’ I asked Aunt Roo in one of our moments together. She was usually receptive to notions of romance.
‘That Frank Harland? For heaven’s sake, sweetie, he’s so wrapped up in himself he wouldn’t know a chair leg if he fell right over it, let ’lone a woman. You’re not much of a matchmaker, love, if you think there’s anything in that.’
It would have surprised them to hear it, but my further view was that my younger aunts were jealous. They had reason to be. Compared with Aunt Ollie, whose presence was monumental, they were lightweights. They did nothing in the house that was of use. Their sole contribution was to its weather.
A kind of friction would disturb the air, electrical vibrations that set everyone’s nerves on edge. A plate might get broken in the kitchen, or I would knock over a bottle of ink while I was doing my homework at the dining-room table and ruin a
good velvet cloth. Or my grandmother, who had a temper but kept it under control, would suddenly snap back at my Aunt Connie and there would be streams of tears. On days like that, of pent-up tension, when everything you touched gave off sparks, the atmosphere could usually be traced back to one or other of ‘the aunts’.
Aunt Roo was stagestruck. She had in her room, with its Spanish shawl across the window and its vase stuck with peacock feathers, all open eyes, a stack of leather hat-boxes, more than a dozen in all, and two vast travelling-trunks of solid hide that were crammed with costumes – relics, you might have thought, of a long life on the boards: straight, cross-breasted evening gowns from a twenties comedy, others of them beaded or with bursts of pin-holed sequins at the waist; gypsy skirts with ruffles; Ruritanian coronation gowns in scarlet or Prussian blue, all trimmed with ermine; crinolines, riding habits, Edwardian morning-gowns with leg-o’-mutton sleeves, ivory fans, fur muffs, boas, rhinestone tiaras, ropes of pearls; floppy panamas trimmed with velvet ribbons and flat or peaked or Dogelike saddle-shaped toques.
They were all make-believe. My Aunt Roo had never uttered a word on the public stage. Her mother wouldn’t have allowed it – or that was the easy answer she gave herself. Instead, she had made her real life theatrical, and had, for the past twenty-five years, played out in spirit, and in costume if she felt she could risk it, the various characters she might have excelled at but whose lines had never passed her lips. Clothes were her passion. She was forever running up something new for herself that would create a ‘brilliant effect’. She would call me out to the closed-in verandah that was her sewing room to give an opinion, or tackle me at the gate as I came in from school, before I could change and slip off, as I usually did, to the kitchen.
‘Look kitten, I want to show you something I’ve just made. It’s pretty, Phil, you’ll like it, and I need you to advise me. I need a man’s opinion. You’ve got an eye, pet. You’ve inherited that from our side. Come and look. It won’t take a minute.’
Or she would hang about on the landing while I was still on my second cup in the kitchen, singing to herself and waiting to trap me as I came out. I thought of it as a trap.
‘Here, love, a surprise,’ she would offer, ‘I found them in a drawer.’ It was a little bag of shiny buttons, some of them regimental, others from firemen’s uniforms. ‘I could sew them onto a jacket for you, you’d look smart. Come on, kitten, and we’ll see what we can do. Honestly, I don’t know how you can sit so long in that gloomy old kitchen. Your Aunt Ollie and poor Della haven’t got a word to say between them. I suppose it’s the cakes, is that it? The best way to a man’s heart, they say. But what about your old Aunt Roo? I’ve been stuck up here all day without a living soul to breathe a word to. You’re a tonic, pet – no, really, you are! You understand things.’
I shrank from something, some view of myself that I couldn’t accept, but was fascinated just the same.
She was never still.
‘When I was little,’ she said, ‘your Grandpa used to say I had ants in my pants. Poor pet, he’s so innocent! But it’s true, I’ve got to be doing something. I can’t stand all these strong, silent types we’ve got around here – always leaning on bloody invisible axe-handles, even when they’re supposed to be bank managers or dentists, and with no talk and no imagination and no wish to get anywhere.’
She herself was full of talk, and between bursts of the machine in which she guided the needle expertly between middle finger and index, would give me good evidence of what it was to have an imagination. Her own was as vivid as the colours she preferred, ‘to wake them all up – those axemen!’ She sewed at all times of the day, and sometimes late at night, and the whine of her treadle-machine – whirring, stopping, whirring off again at a panicky breakneck speed – is one of the sounds I associate still with the wide, silent spaces of that house. I thought of it as a kind of demonic bicycle that was screwed into the ground and never ‘got anywhere’, and saw her in the same light when on Sunday evenings after tea she seated herself at the pianola in the downstairs sitting room, and with her dark hair blazing, pounded her feet, worked her shoulders, and produced waves of mechanical sound that shook all the glasses in the cabinet and the drops of my grandmother’s lustres. Her feet pedalled, her knees rose and fell, her hands gripped the edge of the ebony seat, and music came welling and cascading out of the solid furniture as from an object possessed.
She was not quite forty in the year my grandfather died and still had one or two suitors. She dressed young, affecting a whole series of ingénue roles and voices that she had picked up from the pictures, and was fiercely jealous of my grandmother, whom she blamed not only for her failure to have a career but for having drawn away, with her assured and sensual beauty, the young men she had brought home; if not deliberately – and she knew her mother well enough to believe it was deliberate – then at least unconsciously, out of habit, since she could not bear to have a man in the room, if he was in any way attractive, who was not morally in her power.
Aunt Roo had developed her style because it was one her mother could no longer pretend to. It was essentially girlish. But the promise of youthful lightness, and an empty-headed appeal to male vanity, impressed less in the end than what her mother offered – offered, that is, in the slight lassitude she suggested by the lowering of her lids and the placing of a hand, palm outward, in an elegant yawn; both gestures emphasising her best points, eyes and mouth, and evoking an image of her body’s easy inclination to the horizontal. All this was second nature in my grandmother, but Aunt Roo saw malice – a cruel demonstration that mere youth, even when it was the real thing, had no weight where men were concerned, and in the rivalry between them gave the younger woman no advantage.
It was a lesson she had failed to learn. Having adopted a younger style, she had been unable to give it up, and since she was all style, no other version of herself had emerged to replace it. She failed with the very men she wanted to attract, and gathered around her a crowd of ‘interesting fellers’ who were much too young for her and were themselves theatrical. With these young men she went on picnics to Terranora Lakes or the Natural Arch, and on rainy days they gathered in Grandma’s sitting room and sang (the young men) with their arms round one another’s shoulders, while Aunt Roo worked the pianola. But as well as the interesting fellers there was always, in a corner, some other dull fellow who was being kept in reserve, one of the axemen, and it was clear that he, or someone like him, was the one she would eventually accept.
My grandfather was fond of his ‘little girl’ (it was perhaps to please him that she had first developed her style, and for him that she kept it up), and it was Aunt Roo he had in mind when he told my mother in some moment of shameful incontinence: ‘Don’t let the girls see.’ He wanted, in her eyes, to be what he had been when she was a child and he had taken her to dancing lessons: the most handsome man she had ever known.
It was, I thought later, from my grandfather that Aunt Roo had inherited her theatricality. He was certainly the only one who accepted it in all its forms.
For it had its shameful side. Aunt Roo was an inveterate liar. Nothing about her, not even the drawers full of odd treasures like the firemen’s buttons, not even her ‘costumes’, was quite so fascinating to me as the whoppers she told – always with her eyes wide open in the utter frankness of their china blue.
What astonished me was the boldness with which she challenged disbelief. Her lies didn’t make sense. They were so calculated, so outrageous in the freedoms they claimed from the actual, as to create a dimension of their own in which mere questions of accuracy and all moral questions of right and wrong were of no significance. Aunt Roo in full flight – possessed by one of her fantastic untruths – was her real self at last, the self that narrow notions of respectability, or her mother’s jealousy or powerful proximity, had denied.
She paid for it of course, this attempt to turn the facts of her life into gaudy
fiction. She suffered from hysteria, she made scenes. The simplest of them were mere temper tantrums; the worst were fits of passionate and helpless weeping. I was impressed by both, but the weeping fits scared me. In that house of established forms and silence they were brutal speakings-out that broke all the rules, named all the unnameables, gathered into their storm of sobbing so much real pain and anger and hopelessness that I was genuinely frightened, as I had never been by the merely physical manifestations of my grandfather’s illness.
The first of these fits occurred on a still, close night soon after we arrived.
We had gone to bed early, but no one I think was asleep. I lay out in the moonlight with even the top sheet cast off and sweated, waiting for the breeze that would not come and listening for the first stirrings of the sea that lay flat and oily under the moon. My body was evacuated of all energy. My blood had stopped beating. I turned and turned, trying new places on the pillow for my head and new, cool places on the sheet for my limbs. Finally I took the pillow and, as small children do, settled it between my thighs. I began to drop off.
It was then, out of the first drowsiness of sleep, that I heard it: a regular moaning. I connected it at first with sounds I had heard from my parents’ room, which could still disturb me though I knew by now that they were safe. But this was different. It seemed to come from under the floorboards of the house itself, as if some animal had crawled in there, woken after long months and found itself trapped. The sound rose and accelerated. I heard the swishing of bare feet in the corridor – Aunt Ollie. Then another, slippered pair – my grandmother. I began to get out of bed. There were lights. Then the screaming began.
These occasions affected each member of the household in a different way.
My Aunt Ollie was full of compassion, and my vision of her, when I too went at last to see what it was about, is of a motherly figure, herself in tears, embracing and protecting a child. She rocked Aunt Roo, and murmured and soothed and tried to stop the ugly mouth from letting out the ugly, accusing sounds.