Memoirs of Many in One

by Patrick White

  My little daughter smiles sourly, as though knowing it all from the very beginning. Hilda won’t forgive; cats do, through indifference to fate.

  Upstairs I sink down on the bed, on the Arachova blanket Aliki sent to remind us of other times. I listen to the pricking of insects like the stitching of peasant blankets, warm cold pine-needles, and the rustle of birds as they revolve with the terracotta seed-dish suspended from a bough of the eucalypt closest to the window.

  I am dreaming, I suppose. After we escaped from Smyrna, there was very little to keep us warm, unless each other. Mamma drew me down beside her under the Turkish rug Mrs Bogdarly had given us out of charity. All else burnt in the fire which swept us towards the Quay. The buttons of the officer carrying me ground into my cheeks. The French were kind but their teeth expected reparation. I was glad to be returned to Mamma, to huddle with her on the deck of the destroyer, along with our basket, and Smaragda, her kerchief smelling of smoke and its last laundering on Asian soil.

  Uncles and cousins came to look at us in Egypt. They lent us the empty house at Schutz. Mamma said furniture was unimportant if we had our lives. Smaragda seemed to have disappeared with her sweetly laundered kerchief. She was, it appeared, preparing to die anyway. So Mamma and I huddled together for company and warmth under Mrs Bogdarly’s Turkish rug. Mamma said the Jews had been through it already also the Armenians now it is the Greeks’ turn not the rich ones the uncles and cousins whose furniture we might damage. We might have frozen if it hadn’t been for Mrs Bogdarly, who gave us in addition to the rug the little table with the brazier underneath so that we were able to sit on the floor our feet stretched out towards the coals and warmth. I missed our dear Smaragda Papa I don’t remember much he had been taken up said Mamma by some of his Samos relatives and the Alexandrian bridge-players.

  I hear the gate. I hear the doorbell bruising my sleep then Hilda opening the front door. It will be Patrick coming as promised. You can rely on Patrick even when you don’t much want him. It was Hilda’s idea, better anyway than Falkenberg and the straitjacket he might prescribe, I can get round Patrick.

  I must allow Hilda time to give the real account of her troubles to her confidant. I must make the most of my beauty. I love the smell of make-up. People have often told me I am an actress by instinct, not realising I am that by profession. Sometimes I surprise strangers, even relatives, by performing my monologues Dolly Formosa and the Happy Few. Patrick is less surprised than others because he too is a performer. Yes, I am less inclined to expose myself to Patrick. Hilary used to say Patrick and I have the same eyes. My eyes have always taken strangers by surprise. The ignorant don’t expect a blue-eyed Greek.

  Some old woman who thought she knew me, some Gray cousin, told me years ago, ‘You are your own worst enemy.’ I told her back, ‘And you are a boring, meddling, self-satisfied, Australian Protestant bitch.’ Of course she hated me ever after. People don’t dare to be told the truth about themselves.

  On the afternoon of Patrick’s visit, all hibiscus trumpets and gold spangles, I decide to wear a sari I had bought – Delhi? Lahore? No, it was given me by the man whose BO was scented over with sandalwood. One of Magda’s lovers, her Gazelle she called him. She could never forgive me the sari she considered hers by rights. Poor Magda was a silly old cunt. It infuriated Hilary when I called his mother a cunt, but how could I help it when her cunt was the most functional part of her body – and her mind. It had also brought forth her son, who was one of my major disasters.

  Lovers who marry young are often quickly turned into an indeterminate sex where they remain until it is decided who is husband, who wife. The afternoon of Patrick’s visit the glass shows me up. In spite of the lovely film of sari, the pale lipstick, the black liner framing the shameful un-Greek blue of my eyes, I can see the grains of powder trembling on the hairs of the moustache, feel the more-than-down on my forearms, details of the disguise Hilary had forced on me as part of a pre-meditated revenge.

  It was like that the day we caught up with each other in a back room of the seamy Macleay Street hotel. (It was registered as ‘private’.) Actually it was Patrick who had run Hilary to earth, then left us to work out what we expected of each other. I could feel my moustache trembling with rage, Hilary sitting smooth and silky in front of an exercise book. ‘What do you think you are doing?’ I asked. ‘Writing my memoirs.’ ‘Was there any need to walk out on us to do it?’ ‘I couldn’t stand any more of that barrack of a house.’ ‘When I made the house so nice for you.’ ‘You made the house …? A stage for your performances!’

  Hilda starts calling from the foot of the stairs, ‘Aren’t you coming down, Mother?’

  ‘I was lying down – dozing. I thought you’d come up and wake me when I was wanted.’

  ‘But you’ve been awake for ages. We could hear you moving about.’

  You can’t put anything across little Hilda.

  ‘I had to get dressed, hadn’t I? And give you and Patrick time to share your secrets. I’m sure there are plenty of those.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be paranoid, darling!’

  I can’t postpone it any longer. One last look at myself in the glass. I am Alex once more. Even Hilary would approve if he were to come in through the glass doors, into the living room, and throw down his hat like the man I had always been looking for, untainted by Papa’s bridge game, or the mœurs of Magda’s male seraglio. I am so excited I trip on the lowest stair and am propelled through the hall into the living room.

  Hilda and Patrick look so shocked I might have been drinking.

  ‘What do you think … of doing?’ Hilda mumbles over her thinned-out lips.

  ‘I thought of asking Patrick to take me into the Park this divine day …’

  Patrick is looking his primmest in a buttoned-up raincoat. Though he has been in the house some time he has not thought of parking his umbrella.

  Hilda says, ‘You’d better put on a coat at least.’

  I could have cried. ‘But I want to share my sari with people. All those poor wretches who escape to the Park from their slums.’ I burble, when normally it is my daughter who blubbers. ‘You always crab me!’

  Patrick tries to mend the situation. ‘There’s no need, darl, to come unstuck. We all love you.’

  Hilda has gone out of the room, she returns with a coat. ‘You’ll have to wear something, Mother, on a day like this.’

  She hands the coat to Patrick, who begins to get me into it. Hilda could never bear to touch me. (I’ve changed your sheets too often – as though I could help it.) If I had been Danny – she groomed his coat, bathed his eyes, massaged his legs after he developed arthritis. A dog was a different matter. If ever I ask my daughter to rub my chest or back, I encounter, not a soft daughterly hand, but a hard little wincing knuckle or fist.

  Patrick is doing up the tarnished buttons of what was Hilary’s army great-coat. H. had kept it as a nostalgic gesture to the masochistic self I so despised. For me the coat still had in it the sand H. brought back when on leave from the Western Desert, and the stiffness of glassy, desert winters. He would throw it off, strip entirely, before we fell on the bed to perform the acts of what we both believed to be love.

  I hate those buttons. I still bear scars from the first (clothed) embrace of the returning soldier.

  Patrick murmurs, ‘There!’ and pats my stomach with what he understands as tenderness.

  ‘Have a good walk.’ Hilda throws open the door to bring me down to what she understands as earth.

  She may have been right. The hibiscus has shed its spangles, the trumpets are wilted phalluses.

  I hear myself whimpering as we wind down the pebbled path. Patrick restrains me whenever I threaten to fall.

  ‘Nobody understands what I am.’

  ‘Oh, come on, you’re too full of self-pity, Alex.’

  ‘They don’t – or do – but don’t. They don’t understand that I’m frail. My husband doesn’t – my children – you, Patrick. Perhaps only my M
amma – the Bouboulina who gave in to her weak daughter when she mistook lust for love, but understood too well my struggle to create two little resistant babies. Oh, hell, yes!’

  We stumble on, silent, against rain and wind.

  The Park is empty. None of the characters with whom I would have shared my lovely sari. I would have danced for them to sitar and cymbal. I would have offered them that part of myself which is full of joy in life. Not the gross grey swollen travesty of a human being who in the present circumstances fills the whole park, trampling in dog-shit, trailing the hem of Hilary’s coat in mud.

  ‘Far too many dogs, Patrick.’

  ‘Too many people in need of consolation.’

  He can be an old bore.

  ‘Oh yes! We know that! That’s why Hilary got himself Danny. He imagined he needed consolation for our marriage. He became involved with a cocker spaniel – the maddest of all breeds. I wonder whether he saw it as the alter ego of his wife. Could have been. He got himself a male cocker.’

  The weather is growing dirtier. Near the stone bridge, Patrick has to help me through the bog which develops during excessive rain. In the branches of the twisted willow, which Jews from the Junction tear to pieces at Succoth to build their tabernacles on identical unit balconies, perches a family of dejected mynas. They should have been humming birds. I almost abandon the army coat to induce humming birds to appear. I would have danced, though clogged with mud to the ankles.

  Instead, Patrick drags me across the bridge. I think I heard him mutter, ‘You asked for it, didn’t you!’ Perhaps our friendship lasts because he recognises a fellow masochist, and here we are linked in this desolate park, where the clouds might still split open on patches of Tiepolo blue, but don’t.

  It is not one of those days. It is a day for memories bogged down in mud and recrimination.

  ‘Let’s get home as quickly as possible,’ I beg, ‘to a cup of tea.’

  ‘You wanted to come.’

  ‘Have you, of all people, never found you were wrong?’

  He doesn’t answer, but drags me on through increasing bog. Dark threads of blood dangle from the nostrils of the ficus, the hairs from its armpits sway in the wind.

  We plod.

  And arrive.

  Hilda sits us down to strong Indian tea (always gives me indigestion) and crumpets oozing butter from every pore. But first she rids me of my muddy shoes. She has brought a chipped enamel basin from which Danny used to drink. She bathes my feet, my ankles in particular. Is Hilda after all a saint in disguise?

  Some of the crumpet butter drips into the basin. It spreads like gold coins on the surface of the water.

  Hilda my daughter is really the nanny my mother didn’t engage for me, and Patrick, a little unwanted brother.

  I cannot prevent myself weeping. The tears spread amongst the gold coins in Danny’s enamel drinking basin.

  Hilda asks, ‘Why cry when it’s what you wanted and did – wasn’t it!’

  ‘Yes, I know. I shot Danny.’

  ‘You did it of your own free will.’

  I bowed my head to my knees. ‘He was old, and smelly. Everyone old and smelly deserves …’

  ‘Do they, though?’

  An unfair thrust.

  I try to conjure up the picture of myself in earlier days walking Danny through the Park’s pine plantation, snuffing up the scent of needles and resin, waiting for him to lift a leg. Instead I can only see him lying, tongue protruding, chin flattened on the concrete floor, eyes like rotten periwinkles rimmed with scarlet.

  ‘Hilary never forgave me. Bad enough to banish his smelly old dog to the coal bunker. I mean, you couldn’t have had him in the house. I mean, could you?’

  They are both silent in the presence of my evocation.

  Then Patrick says, ‘He forgave to some extent. Hilary came back, didn’t he? To live with his family. He understood that smells are inevitable.’

  ‘He came back. Oh God, YES!’

  Hilda grabs the basin, slopping some of the water on the moth-eaten Afghan rug. She carries the basin away, always slopping, over the Bokhara, the Baluch. Her shoulders express all.

  ‘Yes,’ I am shouting. ‘No need to tell me. But you’ll both accuse me for ever. When it was I who bore the worst of it. It was I who found him hanging by the cord in the coal bunker where his dog had lived out the last of his life. Hilary – so beautiful in the beginning – as you, Patrick, know.’

  It is darkening outside amongst the hibiscus and the eucalypts.

  ‘So now, leave me, both of you.’

  ‘I don’t know what you are talking about.’

  It is Hilda speaking on her return.

  But Patrick goes.

  I am possessed by this doomed wish to telephone somebody who will understand, not Mamma, that would be too much to hope, Nadya Bogdarly – perhaps, who gave us the rug which kept us warm as refugees, and the table with the brazier underneath, towards which we stretched our toes during those Alexandrian winters.

  There was a wall telephone at the Bogdarlys. In moments of crisis one almost wrung the handle off. Many the cris de cœur Nadya’s telephone listened to, as well as love whispers, and some raspberries.

  During the war, Hilary away in the W.D., I would lunch at Nadya’s every other day. She kept open house for her less affluent or less generous relatives, those vast sisters, and British staff officers who had got through their allowances too quickly. Élie Bogdarly was senile by then. Nadya, who started vast like the sisters, had shrunk. Her face was mapped with the rivers of Mesopotamia, Tigris and Euphrates, picked out, it seemed, in their actual silt (Nadya suffered from blackheads).

  The day I remember in particular nobody had favoured Nadya’s table except one of its most regular patrons, Colonel Cyril Ogdon-Bloodworth. Nadya’s unreliable bladder had forced her to leave the room for a moment. Élie was banging on the table with his spoon. I tried to quieten him, ‘Don’t worry, Élie. Your mummy will be back to give you your second helping.’ Mohammed the saffragi, nobody, would have dared help the master of the house to his moussaka in his wife’s absence. The Colonel sat drumming on the table, eyeing the enormous dish of moussaka, probably wondering whether he could put away a second helping before tucking into the riz à l’ Impératrice which invariably followed at the Bogdarlys.

  Élie hammered and hammered with his spoon, on his face the persecuted expression of the senile.

  After wresting his stomach into a fresh position the Colonel broke into a confidential mutter, ‘Last night in a taxi between the Union and the Cecil, a girl – or perhaps it was a woman – the light could have been flattering to her – this person Magda Demisomething actually sucked me off. Most extraordinary – or wasn’t it? Wouldn’t know this Magda, would you?’

  ‘I ought to.’

  ‘What a war brings out in people!’ He heaved and rumbled and broke into the giggles. ‘Shocking isn’t it?’

  At this point Nadya returned. ‘Terrible, yes, we have all been through it – several in a lifetime.’

  By now I had caught the Colonel’s giggles. The image of my mother-in-law and Colonel Bloodworth’s shuddering thighs in the musty confines of an Egyptian taxi was more than I could take.

  ‘Quiet, Daddy! Mummy will give you your second helping.’ The map of Nadya’s face, the whole Mesopotamian basin, had broken up for the tragedy of war, the tragedy of life and her husband-child. ‘Terrible, terrible!’ she moaned.

  The Colonel rocked, racked by his giggles, and I more disgracefully by mine.

  Colonel Ogdon-Bloodworth’s hard war ended by his falling off a roof at Mazarita after a surfeit of pigeons and rice and several litres of rough red, followed by chasers of Bolonaki whisky from a Johnny Walker bottle.

  The Park is no longer visible. I am left stranded in this darkened room during one of the intervals in my life’s play.

  ‘What is it, Mother?’ Hilda asks.

  ‘Nothing – everything. The Bogdarlys in particular, Nadya was my fr
iend. Colonel What’s-It could I suppose, be one of the many roles one plays.’

  ‘I think you’d better go to bed and sleep it off.’

  ‘Oh, but you know I never sleep – or no, you wouldn’t. I only dream.’

  Her hard, matter-of-fact body refuses to accept the truth. It shores me up as we mount the stairs, up, up, to another stage of purgatory.

  I lie there for hours, years, as I knew I would, turning and turning. Remembering scenes from the past. The room fills with branches of smoke, concealing none of us from the flames, the figures, which have burst out all along the Prokymaia. If I could touch our old Smaragda’s crumpled face it might act as a talisman, when the uproar died I could hear the voice at least amongst the furniture of this nightbound room.

  ‘Lord save thy people and bless their inheritance. Lord save … and … bless …’

  Old voices, ancient words – the prayers of those who, like Smaragda, are scarcely in need of them. Their own goodness is their salvation. Who, of all these peasant women, trailing from shrine to shrine, worshipping the worm-eaten faces of Panayia and saints, in a golden haze of candlelight, could have played as I had, the role of Magda Demirjian crouched between Cyril Bloodworth’s shuddering thighs? But do I want absolution from the sins I have committed – perpetuated? That is a difficult one to answer.

  ‘What is it?’ Hilda’s voice from across the landing.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You sounded as though you were being murdered.’

  ‘I was praying.’

  She appears by my bed holding a torch. She had plaited her hair for the night. The plaits hang either side of her face in two little nondescript rats’ tails.

  ‘Oh well,’ she says, ‘that’s something I would not understand. I’m a rationalist, as you know.’

  ‘You’re entitled, darling, to your own form of mumbo-jumbo.’

  ‘Then you admit …?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know! Leave me. However they torment me I must find out whether the lives I have lived amount to anything. I have always been searching, however squalid the circumstances, Onouphrios, for instance …’