Memoirs of Many in One

by Patrick White

  The men of action are of greater interest. They always are in the beginning. Professional males. In their laundered shirts, shoulder tabs, caps stiffly peaked. None of your denim pretends. The ambulance men are both reddish gingery freckled. I smell the after-shave from jaws freshly glazed.

  ‘What is your name?’

  ‘Tom.’

  They are both Toms.

  I stroke an arm from the smooth biceps through the gingery fuzz down as far as the wedding ring. They are both, we are all, ringed.

  The after-shaved professionals are briefly replaced by the sweaty police carrying Saint Bernadette down from the mountains on the stretcher improvised out of saplings and an overcoat. We were all praying.

  I try to remember a prayer, and fail, as the after-shaves, the Toms, lift me from the bed where the professional stretcher has been resting.

  A nurse is hovering over me. It is the chinless one who gave me the injection. She is wearing a little cape for the journey and clutching a board with some papers bulldogged to it. Nurse Elvers, I seem to remember hearing.

  ‘Where are they taking us, Nurse?’

  ‘To St Damien’s.’ Her voice has acquired overtones of holiness.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You are sick. And your family specially asked for St Damien’s.’

  ‘They’re not Catholic.’

  ‘No, but it’s handy for visits.’

  In the ambulance Elvers has seated herself beside my stretcher, clutching her board of bulldogged papers. Her bony knees almost touch her chin.

  ‘What have you done with mine?’ I ask.

  ‘Your what?’

  ‘The papers on my writing table.’

  ‘But there was nothing on them. Except a line. A red line.’

  ‘That’s right. Patrick might want to see it. All is grist. He doesn’t let a shopping list slip through his net.’

  ‘Patrick Who?’

  ‘The writer. Haven’t you heard of him?’

  ‘Never!’

  ‘He’d appreciate that. He’s sick of writers. Of me – if he weren’t so polite. He’s sick of himself. Literature, as they call it, is a millstone round his neck.’

  We are stopping and starting, bumping over many bridges.

  ‘What is your other name, Elvers?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Names are important. I can never have enough of them myself. A freshly acquired name gives me a fresh leave of life.’

  ‘If you must know – my name is Ilma.’

  ‘Why “Ilma”?’

  ‘My mother was in service when she started her pregnancy. She fainted while waiting at table – handing the Brussels sprouts – at a ladies’ luncheon – in the Eastern Suburbs. When they revived her, and got her up from amongst the sprouts, she told her employer, “I’m not ill, ma’am. Only a slight nausea. I’ll be all right in a jiffy.” But they sacked her, afraid it might happen again. “ … not ill, ma’am, not ill … ” She heard herself as she went home on the tram. Like a clock ticking in her ears. That’s how she came to call me “Ilma”.’

  The ambulance was swirling recklessly.

  ‘Don’t know why I’m telling you this.’

  ‘It passes the time.’

  ‘That’s right. We’re nearly there.’

  ‘And then you decided to nurse the mad.’

  ‘Don’t say that. I call it “deranged” – and between ourselves, who isn’t?’

  Ilma Elvers and I were enjoying a cosy giggle as we drew up outside Admission.

  The last I saw of real life was Ilma’s non-chin before Sister Philomena officially sedated me.

  Notes

  prana: life force

  komboloyi: a string of beads derived from the Roman rosary. Regrettably referred to by Anglo Saxons as ‘worry beads’

  Neptune’s Cave: late-night restaurant patronised by theatre people

  Madács: Hungarian epic poet

  Arany: Hungarian epic poet

  Epilogue

  ‘We’d better face her.’

  ‘Give her time to settle in.’

  I accept her daughter’s decision.

  ‘They’ll send for us if there’s a genuine crisis. You know Mother. Her life has been a series of crises.’

  She didn’t have to tell me.

  Some way back Hilda had started to fossick for the papers. The house was stuffed with them. Under the eaves in what has been referred to as the priest hole. Crammed into drawers, so full they refused at first to open. Under the mattress. In old mouldy suitcases. Each batch with its attendant smell, from oppressive perfume to disgusting stench.

  Often I found myself wishing: if only a fire … But I knew I would never escape Alex. If her papers went up in smoke, her life was mine historically, personally, and if I cared to admit, creatively.

  During this period of waiting for what we used to refer to as the End, I spent most of my time at the house on the Park, while keeping as far away from Hilda as I possibly could. She was not herself. She was overcome by uncharacteristic lethargy or downright sloth.

  ‘One day I’ll get down to cleaning up. But not yet. There doesn’t seem any point till a person dies and the will is read. At least we’ve got her papers together. We know she is leaving you those. She always expected you would do the right thing by her literary remains. As Hal and I do too. You are so discreet.’

  Curious how others pin their expectations on those they have known all their lives without knowing. Only Alex really knew, because she might have created me, and I her. We were both remote from her almost non-existent son Hal, and her actual daughter Hilda. Or so we thought.

  It was only later that I got to know the real Hilda. Perhaps Alex had known all the time and bequeathed Hilda, along with the papers recording our actual and created lives as a kick in the pants, or monstrous joke.

  The call from the hospital blasted the house apart. We should come if we wanted to pay our last respects to Mrs Alex Gray. She seemed to be expecting us.

  It was an evening of drizzle interspersed with sunshine, neither cold nor warm, clammy rather, like a sweaty sheet in the aftermath of a nightmare.

  Hilda roused herself and rang for a taxi.

  The cab slid alongside the fence, the driver tooting. The man was neither young nor old, firmly fleshed of thigh and arm, wearing dark glasses, a cynical expression, and Digger’s hat.

  I gave our destination as St Damien’s.

  We slid along, past houses and gardens which in all these years I hadn’t bothered to people, and on the other side, railings, railings.

  The driver was vibrating with suppressed questions. Finally, ‘Where I picked you up – isn’t that the home of the actress?’

  ‘Yes. Or was … she’s very ill.’

  ‘Never saw ’er act. Any’ow, on stage.’

  I had no desire to encourage him, Hilda even less.

  Such a short distance, we were there almost as soon as we started. Relatives were leaving and arriving, carry-all in hand, or else a bunch of drooping flowers. Only we were empty-handed.

  As I paid the fare, the driver swivelled in his seat and looked full at me, the cynical smile, Digger’s hat and dark glasses.

  ‘Good luck. And kind regards to Princess Thingummy, the actress.’

  I saw that most of his teeth had broken off from the pink plastic gums. His grin was positively ferocious.

  He drove off as we went inside.

  At the duty desk where Hilda inquired, ‘Mrs Alex Gray – her daughter and a close friend,’ the Sister smiled, was it knowingly? ‘Oh yes, she’s expecting you.’ Expectation at every turn made it unnerving.

  The Sister led us down the corridor, our clattering footsteps more substantial than our bodies.

  Silence broken by distant laughter, coughing, and at times, the sound of someone fetching up the dregs of a lifetime.

  We were led into quite a large room where three elderly moribund women were lying.

  Out of deference to our relationship with on
e of the three, the Sister drew curtains around the bed, providing a degree of privacy.

  ‘Mrs Gray, dear,’ the Sister spoke loud, ‘your daughter and’, emphasising it, ‘friend.’

  She smiled and left us to deal with the situation.

  Alex did not look at us. ‘Where have all the nuns gone?’

  ‘I noticed one on the way in.’

  I offered this fatuous remark as we drew up chairs either side of the bed.

  ‘But there ought to be lots,’ she mused in a faint, colourless voice one could scarcely hear.

  ‘Nuns – Valkyries – bats with blood dripping from their jaws – as they flew overhead – in the days when I was a prospective Saint.’

  Hilda was agonising on the brutal hospital chair.

  Alex did not seem or did not want to notice us.

  The sockets had shrunk, around eyes which those expecting the convention of an Oriental Greek had never believed in. The blue had grown foggy with age and illness.

  ‘Yes,’ she murmured, ‘I was nuts about nuns. Not so much for monks or priests.’

  It was a relief to be curtained off from the world. The three of us sat in what amounted to a translucent cell. At the centre this ancient creature, the darkened arms like writhing mangrove branches ending in twig claws, on one of which a wedding ring shone. Far more distressing the head, shrunk to a black skull, from which the eyes looked out at what one could not be sure.

  She seemed to be on again about the nuns. ‘My darling Bernadette … Today there’s too much jumping over the wall.’

  Hilda could no longer contain herself. ‘I’m sure every one of the young women caring for the patients in this hospital is as dedicated as any nun. And with nuns you run into mysticism. I wouldn’t want a mystic counting my pills.’

  The skull had not taken in any of this. The gnarled body made an effort and raised itself against the pillows.

  I would have liked to help, but was struck powerless. I was hypnotised by what I saw as the moment when the last of human frailty makes contact with the supernatural.

  ‘Is it this – then …?’ she whispered, whether in horror, or ecstasy.

  The black skull fell back against the pillows, a trickle of garnet-coloured blood escaping from one corner of the mouth.

  Hilda jumped up, her chair shrieking on the floor, as she tore aside one wall of the cell. ‘Nurse – Sister, come please,’ she shouted down the corridor.

  As her cry reverberated, many figures seemed rushing at once. I followed Hilda, who retreated, hunched, retching, a handkerchief pressed to her mouth as though to staunch the life blood welling up in resistance to her mother’s death.

  Suspended in evening sunlight, we sat in a little room to one side of the desk. Voices of children from a park below. A blow-fly desperately dashing itself against the upper pane of a half-open window. We did not speak to each other. Neither of us had the strength to release the blowie. I don’t know how long we were there. It was pointless to look at a watch.

  When someone came squelching down the corridor in what sounded like sandshoes. This time it was a real nun. She wore a muslin veil tied at the back of her head and the impersonal smile of one sure of her vocation.

  The smile was directed at us. ‘Would you like to see her?’ she asked.

  How could she be so sure the dead woman was ours? But certainty was her trademark.

  Hilda stood up. ‘No, thank you – Sister. I’d rather remember my mother as I knew her.’

  Certainty at this moment was not in Hilda’s line. Her mouth made it obvious that her memories would be bitter ones.

  She stamped across the springy carpet, and down the stairs.

  As I almost caught her up, she hissed back over her shoulder. ‘They send a nun to lead you to the body, to con you into coughing up money for the Church, on top of the hospital bills.’ She was rigid to breaking point. ‘Well it doesn’t work where I’m concerned. I know too much to be taken in.’

  One evening months later as we sat at the kitchen table, mopping up after our boiled eggs, Hilda said, ‘I have a plan.’

  The way she stabbed the shell with her spoon made me apprehensive.

  ‘I’ve been thinking it would be a good idea if we visited some of those places which played a part in her life – like Smyrna, Alexandria, Nisos. It might lay a few ghosts and help you in sorting out Mother’s papers. Anyway, think it over, Patrick.’

  In the weeks following the funeral and discussions with trustees, Hilda would collect me from my flat and return me there at night after a day spent at the house. But the last couple of weeks this routine had been broken. She packed a suitcase for me, closed the flat, and I moved to the house. Whether I approved or not, the arrangement had an air of permanence.

  Tonight she said, ‘Go upstairs – you must be tired – and I’ll bring you your camomile.’

  I did as I was told. She had aired and cleaned her mother’s room. I should have been comfortable if the vast bed were not also the arena where Alex had spent so much of her life wrestling with the saints and demons wished into her at birth. Sensing their presence early on, I suppose I had encouraged her to cultivate them as an extension of my own creations.

  Like most practically conceived tours, Hilda’s plan for a return to those parts where her family had originated, and which had left their mark on her mother, did not work out too smoothly. I was too old, she too unrelenting. We were constantly losing our possessions, becoming separated from our baggage, missing air, rail, and boat connections, suffering from the customary indispositions like diarrhoea and indigestion. Almost everywhere Hilda found the sheets damp. Almost never was the plumbing adequate, or hot water forthcoming, even after she had made a scene to impress the management.

  Nor were the ghosts laid. They still haunted the island of Nisos, where Aliki wrote her history of Bouboulina after settling in Metropolitan Greece at the end of the Second World War and the German Occupation. I met Cassianí the nun on a damp mountain track at dusk outside the church of Ayia Ekaterini. She hurried past, but I recognised her face surrounded by the dark kerchief. If I did not meet the monk Onouphrios I caught a whiff of his fanella at the entrance to the church. I distinctly heard the gunshot from at least one of the island’s suicides.

  I did not mention any of this to Hilda. She was too busy carrying on her feud with the management over plumbing, hot water, and laundry at the hotel where we were staying at the little port.

  One evening she said, as we wrestled with our muscular brizoles, ‘I shall be glad when we leave for Italy. Italians are far more civilised than Greeks. And there won’t be any family connections. We can enjoy ourselves looking at great art and eating deliciously cooked pasta.’

  Such was her certainty she patted the back of my hand.

  Italy … From the start we realised she was full of menace for those in no way connected with her. As we strolled one evening beside the Bay of Naples, a bikie rode alongside the kerb and grabbed the shoulder bag of a man walking a few yards ahead. The owner hung on to his bag and was dragged face down along the gritty pavement. The unsuccessful thief at last made off leaving his victim lying stunned, his pulped face scarcely human, more like a juicy nectarine ground almost beyond recognition on the floor of a truck on its way from the market.

  Hilda hurried me away from what she decided was none of our business.

  Again, in Rome, while exploring the Corso, a man dropped dead at our feet, following gunfire from behind the grille of one of those scruffy palazzi. Hilda reacted as in Naples, but on this occasion I could hardly accept it was none of our business. I distinctly heard the anarchic laughter of Alex Gray from behind the palazzo grille.

  Italy was obviously full of lawlessness and corruption, waiting to erupt in revolution, as a boil will swell and finally burst from its own pus.

  Hilda said, ‘The north will be more temperate,’ adding in spite of her principles, ‘there’s a measure of sanctity about the holy places of the north – Padua, Arezzo, Assi
si.’ She sighed. ‘I long to see Assisi.’ Then as though in an outburst against her defection from the rational norm, ‘You can’t expect sanctity in Rome, where one is asked to accept a whore’s bed as the high altar of St Peter’s.’

  We had reached our hotel and she pushed me inside, afraid, I felt, we might be struck dead for her blasphemy in this holy city.

  We were driven in the tourist bus to Assisi on a day of cold and drizzle. Hilda kept smiling at me, wistfully, which emphasised the little wrinkles in her face. It was as though she saw the journey as a pilgrimage, while at the same time asking forgiveness for a foolish lapse. I neither encouraged nor judged her. It was one of the days when I was thoroughly fed up with Hilda. I understood the mother’s attitude to her daughter.

  We arrived, and were plunged head first into the Basilica of San Francesco. It was easy to detach ourselves from our fellow tourists and the guide we had been allotted for the tour. Hilda strolled slowly letting it be seen that she appreciated Great Art. Nobody witnessing her performance would guess that she disapproved of the religious mythology which had inspired the paintings and frescoes. We were doing nicely when a Franciscan took up with us. He was probably there to keep an eye on suspicious characters intent on mutilation or theft. At first put out by our gratuitous guide, Hilda was finally charmed. Our Franciscan was most urbane, with cheeks polished to a high gloss, and intelligent eyes (if one hadn’t been charmed, they might have appeared contemptuous). He spoke fluent English with a strong French accent. His even teeth bit crisply into every phrase he entered, as he pointed out works of art and memorabilia.

  When we were finished and he led us out into a garden, Hilda turned to him like any citizen of Buffalo, ‘Thank you’, she said, ‘for a truly great experience.’

  The Franciscan might have winced if she had not followed it up with a smile which could have been disclaiming total innocence.

  The sodden garden was disappointing. Not a bird in sight. They must have been shot by the Italian hunting classes. After the airlessness of the basilica it was shivery in the Saint’s drizzled garden.

  ‘And now’, says the charmed Hilda to our charismatic guide, ‘there is Santa Chiara. Can you point her out, and tell us how we get there?’