‘I wish I were anywhere but here.’
I thought she would faint. ‘Then you should not be here,’ I said curtly. ‘You had better go.’
‘I would never forgive myself.’ She took out a handkerchief and dabbed her lips. ‘How do you feel?’
‘Wonderful.’
‘How could you?’
‘It’s the madness in my family.’
She started to laugh, but I tapped her shoulder and pointed to the inner-communicating door. Behind the glass panel the shadow of a head and shoulders had appeared.
I think if there was madness in anyone’s family, it was in his. He spoke with an almost wild contempt. ‘Take off your pants. Get up there. Do this. Do that.’ There was no anaesthetic of any kind. He strapped my ankles to his contraption and began. ‘Stop that noise. Don’t tell me it hurts. Of course it hurts. You were willing enough to have the fun, weren’t you? Oh, yes! But now you’re groaning because it hurts. Hurts! You women. You make me sick, the whole rotten lot of you. There’s only one sure way to avoid pregnancy, but oh no, you haven’t the decency for that …’
When he unstrapped me, and I got down, he didn’t look at me, but turned to wash his hands and said in the same venomous tone, ‘Don’t come back here if anything goes wrong. Go to a public hospital. And mention no names.’
In the waiting room Olive whispered, ‘Was it terrible?’
She was wide-eyed, and appeared impressed. ‘No,’ I said angrily, ‘it was perfectly all right.’
‘When I saw him I thought …’
‘He was quite all right. He was very nice, very kind.’
‘You’ve got mascara all over your cheeks.’
I turned my back to her and removed the mascara with spittle on a handkerchief. We went in silence down the narrow stairs into Charing Cross Road, from where we took a taxi to Olive’s flat. I didn’t feel in the least faint or ill, but having been told to rest for a few days, I lay on the sofa.
‘I bet I know what he used,’ I said in my ‘tough’ voice. ‘One of those wire pot cleaners.’
Olive gave a cry and clapped both hands to her ears.
I stayed in her flat, bleeding, for four days. Given her real fear, it was good of her to have me there. When she went out, which she often did, I grew melancholy, but in her presence I was talkative and blithe.
‘With what money I have left,’ I said one day, ‘I think I’ll go to a dressmaking school, the best in London, for as long as it takes to become a real professional. Then I’ll get a job, and save up until I have enough money to go back to Sydney and work there.’
She nodded approvingly. ‘Yes. Go back.’
‘What about you?’
She shook her head.
‘Why not?’
‘I like to live in a country of importance.’
In the mornings, in a rusty-black dressing gown, she would put on her spectacles and worry over various newspapers and periodicals. This was in the second year—or was it the first?—of the Spanish Civil War. ‘While you’re reading that bit,’ I would say, ‘give me the clothes bit.’
One morning she said, ‘How can you care so much about clothes, Nora, when all this is happening?’
‘Professional interest.’
‘More like sheer gloating.’
‘Can’t I care about that and clothes.’
‘Not about this and so much about clothes.’
‘I didn’t know you were a political woman.’
‘This isn’t political. It is simply,’ she said impressively, ‘human caring. But in fact,’ she added in a lesser tone, ‘I happen to be a communist.’
‘Really? Lots of people seem to be, nowadays. One is always reading about it. It seems to be quite the thing. But I couldn’t, I simply couldn’t. Whenever I think of communism I see something grey.’
‘That’s what you once said about the books I used to read.’
‘Grey and flat. Wool, probably, with no weave showing, and a bit bunchy where the sleeves are set in.’
She laughed, but was cross. ‘You do it on purpose.’
Again she surprised me; of course I did it on purpose. ‘Oh, come on, Ol,’ I said. She hated being called Ol. ‘Give me the clothes bit.’
She gave it to me with fastidious fingers. ‘You’re hopelessly frivolous.’
‘You sound like Grace.’
‘Grace?’ She raised her face from her newspaper. ‘Your sister,’ she said reflectively. ‘How is Grace?’
‘Trying to be religious.’
‘That’s interesting. What form does it take?’
‘Just a sort of churchy Anglican. What’s interesting about that?’
‘I have a theory that the Protestant tradition in Australia is so tepid that most Australian Protestants lapse into a sort of pantheism. Don’t you agree?’
‘I might,’ I said, ‘if I knew what pantheism was.’
In my tone was an echo (I heard it with dismay) of the old growled-out question ‘Who does she think she is?’
The third day, Saturday, Olive went to one of her meetings. I was dozing when I heard the sound of tennis in the square. At first I thought the thud of balls must be the remnant of a dream, but when I opened my eyes it still persisted. I went to the window and saw through the trees those moving fragments of white. I shut the window, went back to the sofa, and put a cushion over my head. But I could hear it still.
On the next day, after telling Olive that the bleeding had quite stopped, I returned to my lodgings in Torrington Square. The bleeding had increased, in fact, to the point where I feared involvement for Olive. In a few days there was a flooded bed, a partial confession to a furious and disgusted landlady, and a spoilt mattress to be paid for. Years later I learned from women’s gossip that there must have been a fragment of placenta left behind, but at the time I had no idea what was causing it. My mother had thought it indecent to speak of such matters, and in our physiology lessons at school our teacher had given the impression that the body from waist to groin was occupied only by a neatly drawn pelvic girdle, though organs abounded elsewhere. As for my adult knowledge of the reproductive organs, being gained mostly from sensation, it was woefully simplistic and imprecise.
Though very frightened in that room in Torrington Square, I was prepared to die rather than submit myself to medical examination. I mean that quite literally: I was prepared to die. But the bleeding stopped at last, and never again did I have any sexual contact, of any kind, with anyone.
This long restraint was variously interpreted by the people who knew of it or guessed it, the two most common explanations being that I was frigid or an unconscious Lesbian. I was not frigid, and I worked with too many Lesbians for any such tendency on my part to have remained unconscious. No, it was simply, at first, that I was frightened, and for that reason avoided the temptation of masculine contact. This gave me habits of stiffness and reticence which in turn deflected the overtures which by that time I may have met. At first it mattered, and then it stopped mattering. ‘Compare us,’ Hilda used to say. ‘All my experience, and all your lack of it. Yet here we are, both old, and what difference has it made, after all?’
By the time I recovered from the abortion I did not have much money left. The first dressmaking academy in which I enrolled proved to be the wrong one, useful only as a source of the gossip that led me to the right one. At the second academy I paid my fees for a year, and then moved to a small room in Maida Vale. Olive pulled a face when she saw it.
‘Not very salubrious.’
‘Do communists care?’
‘This one does.’
‘But it’s clean. I cleaned it myself. So by salubrious you must mean respectable.’
‘I suppose I do. I got a bit of a shock when I saw those women on the ground floor. Not that I don’t pity women like that.’
‘Olive, you bewilder me.’
‘Why, Nora?’
‘You might never have left home.’
‘It’s interesting that you sa
y that. I feel that in myself.’ She set one hand on her chest. ‘Some block, some point beyond which I can’t develop. Do try to explain what you mean.’
But I could not then express my feeling that she had brought with her the contradictions of our home society—its rawness and weak gentility, its innocence and deep deceptions—and had merely given them a slightly different form.
‘I think,’ she said, looking earnestly at some point beyond my head, ‘that I need to lose myself, sink myself.’
‘You also need to stop wearing tan shoes with a puce dress.’
‘I want to be simple, utterly simple. Like water.’
‘No chance. You’ll never be simple, and neither shall I. We both had to start disguising ourselves too early.’
She looked at me, half-frowning, half-laughing. ‘You know, Nora, you’re very intelligent.’
‘I know. Isn’t it a pity I’m so stupid?’
Of course, I underestimated Olive. If she did not arrive at simplicity in her person, she did so in her later books, whereas I never have, in anything. The different courses on which our lives were already set began to be apparent in those first weeks in London. Her seriousness was a challenge that goaded me to flippancy, and from my flippancy, she, in her turn, defended herself by a seriousness which became at each of our meetings more flat and assertive. She herself disliked it.
‘I didn’t mean to put it like that. I’m talking like an earnest school girl. But I just can’t think how else to put it.’
And nor could I think how else to put it but by my brazen levity. I remarked one day that if our characters could have been combined we may have made between us one good person. But Olive stared at me, and slowly shook her head.
‘Not in my sense of the word good.’
But we remained friends in spite of these clashes, and when she had a success with her third novel, and went to live in France, I felt very much alone. And yet, in many ways, I was glad to be alone. I had entered once more on a period of waiting. A number of the artists from Bomera, from both the first and the last lot, had drifted to London, and occasionally I would encounter one of them, and we would talk of the harbour, the sun, and the cicadas in the plane trees in Macleay Street.
‘I’m going back for certain,’ I would say. ‘But I have to wait until I’ve finished this course and can save some money.’
Whenever I met them, the talk was always of who was going and who was staying. The declaration of one man I often repeated later, and the words he used passed into my vocabulary.
‘If you stay more than five years you become a pommiefied Aussie, than which there is no more pitiful creature on God’s earth. Unless it’s an aussiefied Pom, and that’s how you feel when you try to go back.’
But for some the issues were simpler and more physical. England was a nasty dank little country, they said, where the people were unfriendly, the sky was low, and life was a misery for all but the rich.
Certainly, for me at that time, the air of London seemed mysteriously inimical to friendship. I made casual acquaintances of a couple who lived in the same house, but when I moved to a room on the other side of the canal, a cold attic in Westbourne Terrace Road, I saw them no more. I worked very hard at classes, and again made a few acquaintances in the house. I kept moving from house to house in the same area, first to Warwick Crescent, which I liked because it was on the canal, and then to Warwick Avenue, which I liked because it wasn’t, and then to various other places, but always in that same little part of London. Every time I moved, I made new acquaintances in the house, and stopped seeing the last lot. And either at classes or in the houses, I would find a lesser Lewie.
With him, I would walk in parks, go to pubs, and shop on Saturdays. Of our Saturday shopping we always made a little treat. The Portobello Road was just another market then, and we would buy baskets of cress, tomatoes from the Canary Islands, Australian butter and cheese cheaper than at home, second-hand books, and sometimes, at the stalls past the eel tanks, an old dress buckle, some beads or a belt. On Sundays we usually caught Greenline coaches into the country, but if it were raining, or the east wind blew, I used to stay in bed the whole of Sunday and read the books I had bought in the Portobello Road.
I had conceived a gloomy passion for ancient history, and since one thing leads to another, I soon knew what pantheism was. I wrote to Olive and told her so. In her reply she told me she was no longer a communist (‘You were right about that grey coat’) and that she had met an Austrian doctor of philosophy and was going to live with him in Vienna. I wrote and asked if that would make her simple, and she replied that she thought it very likely.
‘He is very serious. You would laugh at him, or perhaps not. In any case, he has amplified my life as no one else has done. I see now how mechanical my life was, and my writing as well.’
Our correspondence started to peter out about a year later, when she wrote that she had great difficulty in replying to my letters. I am not sure to this day whether that note of helplessness was invoked by her expanding powers, my persistent levity, or by some change in her character or circumstances unimaginable by me. When I remember her shaking her head and saying, ‘Not in my sense of the word good,’ I feel I am close to an answer, but still it evades me, and it is still with a tantalizing sense of mystery that I read the affectionate inscriptions in the novels she has never failed to send me. Those inscriptions, and my few lines of thanks, have been our only correspondence for more than thirty years.
In bed on those cold Sundays I also read what David Snow, the most lasting of my Lewies, called ‘the great big beautiful classics.’ I also found them beautiful. My money ran out long before my course was finished, but by that time I was taking private orders, and although through too much reading and sewing my health suffered and my eyesight deteriorated, I was proud to be keeping myself above the hunger line. I had the curious feeling that this period of hard work and privation had been lying in wait for me for a long time, and to meet it at last, and survive it by my own efforts, gave me intense satisfaction.
Included in this general satisfaction was a particular triumph. Cutting, for which I had so little natural aptitude, had become my greatest skill. I knew I could never acquire the flexible wrist, the ease and certainty that dazzled me in one of my teachers. I had started too late for that. But my awareness of this handicap made me compensate for it in other ways, so that at the end of my course I was able to get a job in a good small place in Grafton Street.
I wrote to Ida Mayo that it was now simply a matter of saving enough money to set me up on my return. ‘In about three years,’ I said.
‘Perhaps it will be you who employs me,’ she wrote back. ‘Now wouldn’t that be a turn-up for the books?’
From Grafton Street I moved to one of the big dressmakers. He paid me badly, but I liked working on such celebrated clothes, and I loved the mounting excitement before a showing. Here, at last, I lost interest in my own clothes, and accepted the suit for my uniform. I was thirty-eight. To people who commented on my youthful appearance, I would reply that I was the type that collapses overnight, but I never believed it, not for a moment.
I had lost my distaste for London. The Georgian terraces that had formerly seemed repellently chilly I now saw as formal and peaceful. I never lived in one of them. It was always my luck to find accommodation in houses of a later date, usually Victorian. But these too were spacious and solid. I never once lived in an ill-proportioned room.
When at last I moved out of the little area near the canal where I had shuttled about so much, it was again to a Victorian house. I crossed the Harrow Road to Holland Park, where I found a big room with a kitchen and bath. My liking for London had not affected my deeper attachment to Sydney, and because I meant to return as soon as was practicable, I took the place furnished. But I couldn’t resist buying my own curtains, of soft blue velveteen, and a beautifully faded Persian rug. When the room next to mine became vacant I made a sudden decision. I rented it and went i
nto business for myself.
All my acquaintances, David Snow in particular, advised me to put up my plate. Brass was the only kind possible. It was expensive, but would serve for my Sydney business as well. I shall never forget my first sight of it after it was put up.
NORA PORTEOUS—DRESSMAKER
‘I have come a long roundabout way,’ I remarked to David, ‘to find out who I am.’
He was always quick to catch my moods. He put a consoling arm across my shoulders. ‘We should open champagne.’
From the start I had plenty of customers, and even though I worked so slowly (another penalty for my late beginning), and was diffident about charging enough, I was still able to save money as well as spending several short holidays in Normandy or Paris. Here Colin Porteous’s French grammar books showed their profit and loss: I could read the French newspapers, but could not make myself understood by the French people.
On each return to London I would appreciate afresh the solidity and weight of its buildings, interspersed by the massy billows or the complex tracery of its trees. But between me and London, as between me and the people I called my friends (even David Snow) lay the distance created by my intentions: I was going home.
When I spoke of David as ‘one of my Lewies’, I meant in his relationship with me. He was not like Lewie in character. His habit of thought was steadier, he was less flippant, and, I think, less intense.
‘Why do you want to go back?’ he asked me once.
‘Sydney, that part of it, is the only place where I’ve ever felt at home.’
‘Won’t it have changed?’
‘Very little, Ida Mayo says.’
‘But what about you? You will have changed.’
‘I suppose so,’ I said vaguely. I didn’t want to talk about it, did not want to admit to impediments.
‘Some people are homeless wherever they live,’ he said. ‘You are. And so am I.’
‘But you are an Englishman in your own country.’
‘I am homeless on this earth,’ he said with a smile. ‘And so are you. Once you admit it, you know, you’ll find it has advantages. The thing is to admit it, and relax, and not be forever straining forward.’
Tirra Lirra by the River Page 10