Me, Myself and Lord Byron

by Julietta Jameson

  Arriving in Jakarta minutes after midnight, 1 January 2005, the dark streets around Jalan Jaksa, the city’s backpacker strip where my hotel was, were overtaken by a cavalry of tandem motorbike riders blowing plastic horns. I heard them as mournful, not celebratory. I knew it was over with the man. The sadness of the realisation completely obliterated any nervousness I might have had regarding the horror I was about to witness. Thousands had died. My heart had been broken again. I was not the first human to let romance rule my sense of perspective.

  But I was nothing if not hopeful. On New Year’s Day, I met up with the American photographer who was on the assignment with me and we made our way to the airport. We were in the check-in queue when I heard the voice first. ‘Steven, how you doing?’ it said to the photographer.

  ‘Jim, long time,’ Steven replied. I turned around to look at Jim.

  ‘Wasn’t the last time Sierra Leone?’ this international journalist, Jim, said. I fell for him on the spot.

  Tall, geeky, bespectacled yet manly, with gravitas to him I longed to have myself, he became my focus for the entire week I was amid the rubble, bodies, mud, death and chaos. I did my job. But my infatuation kept me detached from it.

  When I came back, I told the man I’d met somebody. That felt good, but sad also. I took the good and left the sad somewhere; I knew not the exact spot. Jim had not the faintest idea it was him whom I had met but I felt sure that one day … I kept the dream up, emailing him with bright, witty, look-at-me tap dances and put him front and centre of my visualisations. And he was … polite, not particularly revealing in his communications, but communicative.

  I was drinking a bottle of wine a night then. I could not resist buying some expensive drop on the way home from work. It had to be expensive and my glassware was too. I did not even cast a glance at any of the whys and wherefores of it. But I would come home, cook a big dinner for myself, eat till I was stuffed, drink my wine out of my expensive glass, and send application after application to Geneva, the seat of the United Nations, for gigs with its various branches: UNHCR, WHO, UNICEF … I covered the alphabet in acronyms. I applied for other jobs at NGOs such as the Red Cross, most of them headquartered in Geneva, believing all my problems would be solved if I could only find a worthy engagement.

  Then in February 2005, I had not got so much as a ‘your application has been unsuccessful’ back from all my job correspondence when the first episode of the TV show LOST aired in Australia. I sat down with my vino to watch. In the first two minutes there was a shot of a dead body wedged in the top of a palm tree. That was the thing about self-medication. Sometimes I got it wrong. Instead of the numbing effect I was hoping to get from the television and wine combo, that new show suddenly had Aceh belting back at me. All the uncontrollability, the helplessness, the unfairness of it, the deep, unreachable sadness of the tsunami aftermath, this crashed over me like the water that had caused it. But it was of course the uncontrollability, the helplessness, the deep sadness within myself that caught up to me then. Unexpectedly, irrevocably, I was reduced to a flood of grief. Then a chasm seemed to open up in the middle of the water. It felt like it sucked me further down than the bottom, into some subterranean void.

  I almost lost consciousness. It was impossible to breathe. But the next day, I stopped drinking for the first time.

  When I was approached not long after to start a magazine for young women, I fell hook, line and sinker for the image of myself as a big shot editor. When they mentioned the pay, the post-tsunami need to do something meaningful with my life and help people went out the window. Sort of. I allowed myself to be convinced that doing a magazine for young women could be my equivalent of working for an NGO. I could make a difference to the ideas- and inspiration-starved. I would be more use here than writing press releases for a charity. Young affluent Western women were as much in need of rescue—a different, bourgeois kind of rescue, but who was I to judge?

  I was uneasy about it initially. I’d been doing a course on manifesting my heart’s desire. I’d been visualising myself living in Bangkok, the hub of South-East Asian media, shacked up with an important, rugged international type (read, Jim, who lived in the Big Mango), spending my days fighting the good fight for the UNHCR and my evenings penning an expat epic, the likes of which would not have been seen since Graham Greene’s body of work. Editing a chick mag in Sydney was about as far removed from that as my short fair looks are from Angelina Jolie’s lithe darkness.

  But perhaps this was a stepping-stone to that destiny? Who was I to fight that which the universe intended? Someone told me my unease with the offer was fear of success. I had sweated throughout the initial interview, so heavily that a torrent ran down my back, and it was the middle of winter. I was glad I was wearing black.

  I found myself agreeing to the magazine project. And six months into it, when I had to sack someone, I started drinking again. I worked hard on the magazine by day, then would go home and drink a bottle of red wine before crying myself to sleep. I would get up early, go to the gym, work a long day like a mad woman … and repeat.

  Cut to me standing in a big designer office presenting mock-ups to a potential advertiser, a man wearing a nice suit. Things at the magazine were as normal, that is, borderline tolerable, until the man said, ‘I love how Paris touches herself’, as if it was a perfectly fine observation to make in front of me.

  You have four choices at a time like this. You can roll with it. You can buy into it. You can go into meltdown. Choice four is that voice inside your head which guides you away, saying, This is not who you really are. This is not who you really are. And you can listen to that voice, pull out and move on.

  The cover of the mock-up did feature a picture of Paris Hilton, dancing with her hand poised artfully over the area in which her pubic hair would have been were she not a publicly proven fan of the Brazilian. And I hated myself for being there. This was not why I had become a journalist. As soon as you inject a situation with the intensity of passion I felt at that moment, you can bet your life the universe is going to move. Move it did.

  It left me jobless. Cashed up—thank you—as a result of my danger money, highly paid contract being paid out, but jobless. And wondering how life came to this, how a person with the prospects I had, the dreams I had, the chances I had, ended up like this. I might have been cashed up, but I was also humiliated. Embarrassed, ashamed, full of self-loathing at my failure and oh so humiliated. There’d been a massive hoopla of publicity about me taking on that magazine. I was a published author working for a then-reputable feature magazine. I was a journalist with a not-too-shabby reputation of her own, who had only months before been on assignment in Banda Aceh.

  But now it had ended. Somehow, we’d got to the point where what I had set out to do was not what they wanted. The result was predictable. I should have seen it coming. On the Sunday after that first issue came out, I got back from the beach to find the CEO had sent me a text message, calling me into the office for a meeting. At that meeting he told me that he was bringing in an editor-in-chief above me. I wasn’t sacked, just superseded.

  I cried. Cried and cried and cried. ‘You knew who I was when you hired me,’ I implored between sobs. ‘You came after me when I said no. This is not fair. You knew who you were getting!’ I whined as snot streamed. I actually don’t think the poor man did know who he was getting. Because I don’t think I did. We came to an arrangement. I listened to that voice inside my head. I did not go back to that magazine.

  A week later I was reading another magazine that had a feature on Italy in it. Not twenty minutes later, I was at a travel agent and buying a ticket to Rome. It was on that trip that I first tried my hand at travel writing, and it was on that trip that my love of Italy was forged—and my reconnection to Byron began.

  4

  Lac Leman

  My very chains and I grew friends,

  So much a long communion tends

  To make up what we are:–even I

&n
bsp; Regain’d my freedom with a sigh.

  The Prisoner of Chillon

  It was in Geneva that Lord Byron met fellow poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and his partner, the great Gothic novelist Mary Wollstonecraft who would become Mary Shelley. He also met Mary’s half-sister, Claire Clairmont. The triumvirate of the deeply thoughtful Shelley, intellectual Mary and brilliant Lord Byron became one of the greatest legions of English literature, the union of three extraordinary young minds, bonded in ideals, cemented in tragedy. Claire, not a literary type, would shape Lord Byron’s life in a different, though equally profound way. Lord Byron already had Ada, not yet two, to Annabella when he impregnated Claire that summer in Geneva.

  Claire gets a bum rap from historians and biographers. She’s mostly painted as a groupie, someone Byron got lumped with because of her relationship to Shelley, and because she bore him a child, and because she would climb the steep rise from the Shelleys’ Geneva abode on the lake’s edge to reach the bed of Lord Byron in Villa Diodati. Lord Byron himself was disdainful, saying that due to the effort she went to he could not possibly play ‘the stoic’. But one biographer, Fiona McCarthy, in my favourite book about the poet, Byron: Life and Legend, puts forward the theory that Claire, above any, loved him unconditionally; letters from her to him clearly illustrate how ready she was to call him on his stuff, his attitudes to women, and his attitudes to anyone he might consider competition.

  Whatever the case, from their union came Allegra, with whom I share the birthday 12 January—a feisty, funny little thing whose, in the end, sad story would tell much of Byron’s character. Parenthood is a fount of truths from the soul.

  Lord Byron would never see Ada, ‘sole daughter of my house and heart’ as he wrote about her, again. Hardly all Annabella’s fault, given he would spend the rest of his life on the Continent, but Ada was not the only female being wrenched from his life by his estranged wife. Annabella was hard at work on the poet’s half-sister Augusta, preying on her guilt and bullying her into an allegiance against Lord Byron. Few blows would have as strong an impact as the withdrawal of these female relations from his life.

  I can’t help but wonder about the impact his absence had on them.

  There were lilacs in bloom everywhere in Geneva. They drooped heavily with fat formations of tiny dark purple, mauve and white flowers that scented the air intoxicatingly. Extraordinarily lush wisteria and the flowering tree we knew as the snowball tree at my childhood home, but which is actually called viburnum, spilled over fences and fell like confetti across pavements. Our garden contained a couple of those bushes, and us Jameson kids would pull off the soft, white, green-tinged flowers in handfuls and throw them at each other.

  Those old-fashioned flowers—wisteria, lilac, viburnum—always took me back to one of those rare times in my childhood when my dad was home.

  I had a strawberry-pink little dress with a full skirt and pale-pink Jiffy slippers with pink bows secured on the front of them with gold binding. We used to get Jiffy slippers for Christmas quite regularly, Erin and I, for a while there. One sunny morning I was having a good hair day, my long blonde curls yet to be butchered into an edgy 1970s dolly cut, an ugly mullet-like hairdo, severe at best and not for a child in single digits of age with a look that went to the tomboy side of female. I lost innocence with that haircut. I was, to be frank, freckly, tubby and not particularly cute. My blonde ringlets were all I had.

  But still ringlet-mopped, I was at the front door with my dad, greeting some visitor. The visitor smiled at me in my pink dress and Jiffy slippers and complimented me. Smiling, my dad looked down at me and said, ‘My sugarplum fairy.’ It was the only time I could recall him saying anything of the kind. A beam of light pulsed through me. I went down to the lilac bush, which set off my dress and slippers rather well, I thought, and acted out long scenes with me as that mythical little sprite. I remember it so well because it was such a rare thing.

  My dad’s name was Ernest, named after his dad, but he went by his middle name, Bryan. He was a man’s man, a somewhat deliberately styled Hemingway-type character who spear fished, went on safari and wore a shark’s tooth around his neck. He smoked a pipe, drank hard and wrote. He was a journalist and he was the smartest guy I have possibly ever known, with more diverse interests than most people even attempt to ponder. He was funny and charismatic. But the suburbs weren’t for him and he was a terrible dad. He’d come home from whatever jaunt he’d been on and insult neighbours, upset Mum and attempt to discipline his fast-growing-up youngest son who was used to him not being around. He’d mortify his oldest daughter with his all-out-there sexual energy, which he didn’t mind exercising on any women who came across his path, including her friends or her brothers’ girlfriends. He was this massive, unwieldy, unfettered, unorthodox being who should not have had six children.

  He would not, could not pause his life for children. It was beyond him. The party would not be sacrificed for parenthood. Neither would the story. When on a news yarn, nothing else mattered, especially not his children. There were times when Erin and I, on weekends staying with him, would be in the car while he listened to confronting interviews on his tape recorder. Devil worshippers, seedy underworld characters, you name it, we’d be privy to it. Or we’d be in the bar when he met with dodgy contacts. Or told to wait in the car while he shored up some lead or another in a weird part of town.

  But his priorities made themselves clearest to me when he used me as bait in his plan to get the goods on someone he suspected of child molestation. Stranger still, the person he suspected was a close family friend of his second wife. The way he compartmentalised his relationships, was able to distance himself and objectify people he should have had strong emotional bonds to, characterised his parental style.

  For a few years after our parents divorced in the early to mid-1970s, Erin and I would go on holiday with him and his second wife at a beach house in Flinders on the Mornington Peninsula. Sometimes Damien, the second oldest boy of my family, would be there, with his guitar and harmonica, living the hippie ideal as he was, travelling with theatre groups and carving out a good career for himself as an actor and stage director.

  And sometimes others would be there.

  After a long, alcohol-fuelled dinner in the big dine-in kitchen at the friend’s beach house, Erin, then twelve, and I were on our way to bed when Dad suggested I sleep in the living room on the mattresses on the floor with an overnight guest, this female family friend. Strangely, this was agreed to.

  The lights went out around the house, and in the darkness the family friend offered me a cigarette. I told her I didn’t smoke. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘All kids your age smoke.’ I was ten. I didn’t.

  We were in sleeping bags. ‘It’s getting cold,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah,’ I answered, not feeling cold at all but on edge. Timid. I never felt timid.

  ‘We should join our sleeping bags together, then you won’t get cold.’

  She got out of her sleeping bag and so I got out of mine and she pushed the mattresses together then zipped the two sleeping bags together. We entered them, and I lay there uncertain.

  The door was thrust open. The lights jammed on. My father, eyes blazing, chest puffed, stood accusing the woman. Things I recall him saying, then: he’d been listening the whole time, molest …

  ‘She said she was cold. The girl said she was cold,’ the woman protested.

  His relationship with my mother was combative. Based on that, I had long ago decided that if there was an opportunity to get some points against him, to get them. ‘I said I was cold,’ I concurred, even though I hadn’t. I just wanted to contradict him.

  I saw the look on his face: anger at my lack of willingness to stand as co-accuser, and then a kind of defeat. I had won. Against the master of mind games, I had won. The woman left the room and I was left alone in that double sleeping bag, in the dark. And after a lot of yelling in the kitchen, the woman left. But no one came to talk to me. Nothing was said. Th
at was not what we did.

  For me, however, what needed to be said had already been articulated by the whole sorry episode. I already had the belief that my needs didn’t matter; my dad’s astonishing display was ample proof of that being bang on the money.

  I took a room in a guesthouse in the Geneva suburb of Cologny where green, flower-dotted fields of plump ponies and more of those happy cows nuzzled up to the professionally tended gardens surrounding the bespoke mansions of ambassadors and old-school stars, the likes of Roger Moore, Petula Clark and Charles Aznavour. Lord Byron’s residence during his summer in Switzerland was one of those mansions, a grand place that today radiates a welcoming grace. It was in this splendid, warm house of light stone with Greco-Roman columns holding up a huge, airy, sunny front terrace that Byron became firm friends with the Shelley posse and it was in this house that they amused themselves by trading horror stories, one of which would become Mary Wollstonecraft’s classic Gothic novel, Frankenstein. Those on the Shelley trail might wish for something a tad more forbidding than the happy welcome of Villa Diodati.

  I was not one of those. I decided it was my favourite house in the Cologny neighbourhood before I even realised it was what it was. I was walking in what I thought was its general direction, along a winding road lined with magnificent home after magnificent home, some behind high clipped hedges or stone walls that spilled over with fleshy roses in full fragrant bloom, others barely visible through artfully planted gardens of majestic trees. I came around a bend and saw this unhidden beauty, a low stone fence demarking her patch, blowsy rhododendrons dancing about her, the evening sun caressing her from across Lake Geneva. I saw the sign noting that the third canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage had been written here. My heart skipped.