The Fern Tattoo

by David Brooks

  ‘So why tell me, now, when you wouldn’t tell others?’

  ‘I can’t marry a man who doesn’t know who I am, or was. The others – Paul – might not have been able to keep it to themselves. I wasn’t ready to be known. At university it was too early, with my father, and too raw, and there was also a kind of thrill in the subterfuge. And when I came back there were different reasons for keeping to myself. In Berlin I had a relationship. It did not work out well and was very painful for me. For a time I thought I did not want, ever, to open up like that again. I didn’t think I could trust anyone again.’

  ‘But you trust me?’

  ‘Perhaps. We’ll see. It’s a hard thing to do, to trust a person. Not just for yourself, but for them too. Sometimes I think to be trusted implicitly is an imposition, a burden. It is like saying “Do not grow”.’

  Daniel did not think, at this point, to question the reasons she had given for her pseudonym. If some part of him remained unconvinced, he chose to let the matter be. There were precedents aplenty for choosing a professional name to protect one’s private life, or to make up for an inauspicious given name, and perhaps in time he would himself be grateful she had done so. Even the great Nellie Melba had taken a name not her own. For the time being the potential embarrassment to the Moderator of the Church of Australia, who condoned neither dancing nor singing, let alone opera, seemed reason enough. And he had to admit, the air about Margaret of things still not known was a part of his fascination. Even physically, at their most intimate, her aloofness, her slight separateness enthralled him: the faint, silver chill about the surface of her immaculate skin, which made the very seeing, the very touching, a secret, treasured thing.

  But everything is the reading of signs. What might have been seen as a diffidence, reserve, may also have been the caution of someone who is and is not herself; and her resignation at last, her decision to marry – the relief, the apparent joy of it – a function of the tiredness, after all. When Daniel thought about Berlin, as of course he did, he told himself that as with so many other things about his future wife, he would learn about it in time if it were important enough, not thinking yet that there are levels of importance, that many things – so many things, and some of them the most important – stay secret, are almost never spoken.

  15

  Ghosts

  (1929–1957)

  I

  The Opera House

  Only three weeks after their wedding, and at the very moment when, according to the papers, so many were about to lose everything, Daniel and Margaret found themselves inheritors of a small but very useful fortune. He was twenty-eight, she just on twenty-three. It was October 1929. Martin Freeman had died of a massive coronary which some speculated had been brought on by news of the stock-market crash, but which was just as likely to have been precipitated by the rumour, on the back page of the same newspaper, that Don Bradman, that ‘run-scoring machine’, was thinking about leaving Martin’s beloved St George, the cricket club he himself still played for as a veteran. His creditors were to receive a good proportion of the money, but with luck there would be enough left over for the couple to set themselves up with.

  They might have bought a place immediately, but there was the Centennial Park house to be disposed of. Indeed, they might have lived in the Centennial Park house and not bought another at all, were it not for Margaret’s susceptibility to ghosts – a thing she had already explained as inherited from her psychic mother – and the persistent presence of Daniel’s mother, whom Daniel himself could never see, but whom Margaret encountered too often for comfort, moving across the far side of the darkened bedroom, or in the kitchen late at night, or at the end of the downstairs hallway near the room where she had died so suddenly – it was mid-sentence in a letter she was writing to the Annandale Orphan School to accompany a volume of Grimm fairy tales that she was sending them – when an aneurism had ruptured in her brain. Some other kind of death she might have managed, Margaret told Daniel more than once, but that one – an explosion in the head – she did not need. And yet, through some freak of communal procrastination, the fairy tales, when the house at last was sold, were still sitting on the bookshelf barely six feet from the desk where Maddy Freeman had expired.

  It had taken two years, but now, at last, they were able to buy a house in Strathfield. It was in the part they called the Golden Mile and, with four bedrooms, separate lounge and dining, a sun-room, a study, and a broad verandah on three sides, was far too large for them. Officially they had chosen it because they would need the space for entertaining, for his study, her music room, a guest bedroom for friends. The first time they had walked through, when they had so quickly and easily made up their minds, they had each filled it immediately with voices, music, people moving easily from room to room. And unofficially – at least so it had been in Daniel’s mind, though they had never spoken openly about it – it had also been because there would be children, a family life. But there were never children. Apart from the occasional party, and there weren’t many, the house was only ever filled – if you can ever say that a space is filled by something that is itself so yearning – by the sounds of opera: night after night on the gramophone, and day after day for long stretches of time – stretches of time with long stretches between them – by the voice of Lilian Grey, alone in the music-room, practising.

  There was, in any case, always going to be another house, of Daniel’s own design, a bush house, high on a hill somewhere overlooking the sea. Before the recession became the Great Depression, and what was left of the small fortune became so much smaller. Before the Depression became the War.

  And an opera house, another one, the real one, or rather the dream of it. Impossible, implausible, coming and going with Margaret’s own singing, the rhythms of the relationship, the self-destructive disillusionment that made her career so difficult – but always there, a preoccupation, sometimes almost an obsession; and, yes, something to buoy her, something to keep them afloat. He had seen it in his mind’s eye more than once; although that was also part of the problem, the seeing it consistently, the holding it together long enough to get it on paper. One time, the clearest view, he was in a lighthouse when it came upon him like a vision as particular and dazzling as the prism he was looking at. Another time there was a fleeting moment of exhilaration deep in the bush, where there had been nothing to work with, so he had to leave it there like an actual site, made of fire-black branches, leaf-fall, gleaming light, every step back – through the scrub, into the dinghy, down the river to the shack – a step away from it. Mostly though he saw it while she was singing, or sometimes, most hauntingly, on the verge of sleep, remembering the same. But when he might have wanted it again, might have tried to resurrect it, things had changed, his mind had changed.

  It had begun, this dream of an opera house, with her first major role, as Donna Anna in Don Giovanni – although earlier perhaps there had been inklings, as he lay on the lawn outside the Conservatorium knowing nothing of her yet, thinking of the vision Debbs had been pressing him for. But as she sang Donna Anna on the first night, in the North Sydney Hall, the whole place, small as it was, leaned in, and moulded itself about the song, or maybe it was that the singing – the song itself – moulded the place about it as a fire carves out its space in the darkness, that wavering room of shadow. Then, when the performance was over and the lights came up, the hall shrank back again into its original tawdriness, admitting its failure. A box. A box only. A large, tawdry, suburban box with seats. When it could have been so much more. For years after that, in moments of idle speculation or frustration with the mundanity of other work, and sometimes in sudden inspiration, he worked at it, or at parts of it, seeing now one feature, now another, never able quite to make it cohere, never quite recalling, when he most needed it, the precise harmonic structure he had seen, the particular formula of arch and air – Gaudiesque, yes, but it was something more, so complex and yet so graceful, a matter of ferns, and the abrupt angl
es of eucalypts where Gaudi had fruit and flowers – that could hold it all tightly and logically in place.

  Three times he tried to bring it together, to force his mind across the gaps: once before the war, and once during it when it seemed he must, at the worst time, just to keep some sense alive, and then – much later, in 1954, when the government called for designs for a building on Bennelong Point, looking out over the Harbour – on the Hawkesbury, at Cliftons, having watched for three visits the careful construction and preparation of a Satin bird’s bower. The first time, not quite convinced himself, he showed the designs to Paul, but Paul was unable to envision it, could talk only of its impracticalities – there were lengthy staircases the public would never willingly climb; there was tiered seating that curved so steeply upward and then inward that the audience, at the upper levels, would have to strap themselves in, or at least wear out their calves and their thighs bracing themselves against gravity, let alone vertigo; there were precipitous boxes and balconies, suspended against nature, that no one would sit in or under, high walls of glass and a towering, transparent ceiling that would make daytime performances virtually impossible and distract, at night, with the shining of the moon and stars; there was something else, too – Paul called it a kind of uncertainty – in the places where the solidity of the marble staircases gave way to the sudden apparent rooflessness: Was it all to appear perpetually incomplete, or already partly in ruins? But that was it, Daniel argued, or would have, had he realised in time, and not thirty-five years later, watching the waves hang precipitously in the air before plunging onto the sand, the city agog with the Queen’s visit and the opening of Utzon’s masterpiece: to have a form that cohered, yet contained its own incompleteness, its own ruin, when people all along had thought that to contain an emptiness, to build a tight mind-shell around it, was enough. It wasn’t. It could never be. Reality was not like that. A form that loved it, that celebrated it, that tried to capture it, could never be like that. After a whole civilisation of defiance, of trying to resist, of trying to be something other, there was, here, now, this chance.

  II

  The Fern Tattoo

  It was the drinking that provoked it, or seemed to. That provoked it, or released it. Though in truth the drinking was a fairly recent thing and he could not tell whether it was the drinking that was the release or whether that had itself been touched off by something prior. For there was always something prior. So much so – the world, some weeks, seemed mined, booby-trapped with possible things prior – that even the thing prior would seem, in the wide-awake silence of three or four a.m. (for she, the storm having passed, would sleep at last, while he tried to quell the storm now raging within him), not a cause in itself, but caused.

  This evening, for example, coming home late after finishing a job that had been preoccupying him for a fortnight, he found the door open and so knew she was at home, though she did not answer his greeting. No ominous sign in itself but there was a pall in the house, an actual pall, of cigarette smoke and spilt wine, and things in disarray, cutlery on the kitchen floor, an empty wine-bottle on the dining-room table, a movement from Mahler’s fourth finished and clicking about on the turntable. He found her where by now he had learnt to expect her, out on the back verandah, a bottle of wine, a half-filled ash-tray and a half-empty packet of Cravens on the low table beside her, and a cigarette smouldering in her right hand as she stared out into the dark, seemingly not noticing his arrival – certainly not responding to it.

  ‘Hello,’ he said, expecting and receiving no answer. ‘Mind if I join you?’

  A shrug told him to please himself.

  He went back into the kitchen and got a glass, returned, poured each of them some wine – her glass was empty – and drew up a chair, excruciatingly loud over the verandah boards.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ For clearly there was something.

  ‘Nothing.’ She drew on her cigarette, took a sip of wine, as did he, and they both stared out into the dark yard, for one, two minutes of silence.

  ‘What would you care, anyway?’

  ‘I care, darling.’ Softly. ‘You know I care.’

  ‘Do I? Why am I such a mess then? Why am I getting nowhere?’

  ‘Nowhere? What do you mean? You are getting excellent roles …’

  ‘There are no excellent roles, not in this country.’

  But she was in no mood to talk, at least not yet. She rose, a little unsteadily – she had been drinking more than he thought – and stood before him, looking at him with what was without doubt supposed to be a disdainful glare, but which seemed somehow to have lost its train of thought, as though she were not quite sure what she was looking at, or why.

  When she went inside he sat for a while trying to work out what might have caused this particular turn and where it might be going. It was the second in a week – the third, if you stretched the week to eight days. They could be about various things – money, her career, his placing his work before her (which he could never see that he did: to him it seemed the direct opposite), the horror of people’s behaviour to one another. Should he press her, to try to find the trigger, the immediate cause? Or should he let it lie? If he were able to find the cause, that cause would inevitably evaporate in front of him. He would try to argue her around rationally, present her reasons, encouragements, counter-arguments to the arguments and discouragements she presented to him – he had thrown himself upon these rocks for years, could not stop himself – but her frame of mind was more often than not beyond reasoning; and yet, paradoxically, were he not to argue, not to reason, not to try to talk her out of it – try to block, that way, the path she was travelling down – she would accuse him of not caring, or failing to support her, of having never cared, of having always failed.

  She came out again. Perhaps the intention had been that he would follow her inside. And instead of taking her seat stood at the verandah-rail, looking at the dark lawn somewhere in the middle distance. And then, almost as if the conversation had never been interrupted, albeit in a half-tone – she might have been speaking to herself -

  ‘You are no bloody help.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘No bloody help. What bloody help have you ever been?’ The tone full now. The voice almost too loud. Testing. Trying to find the right pitch.

  ‘I don’t understand. What’s wrong? Tell me.’

  ‘Hah. What’s wrong. What’s right would be a better question.’

  ‘I still don’t understand. You’re going to have to explain to me.’

  ‘My career. My life. That’s what’s wrong. All bloody wrong. All pointless.’

  ‘What is it? Has something happened?’

  ‘No. That’s just it. Nothing has happened. Nothing has ever happened.’

  ‘But it’s been picking up. Getting better all the time. The new role, Madame Butterfly …’

  ‘New role. A scrap. Picking up scraps. Nothing ever but scraps.’

  ‘If that’s it, you’ve been getting some of the best scraps around.’

  ‘The best around here is nothing. I sit around here all day. Nothing. Trapped.’

  ‘Trapped? Sit around here? What about the teaching? The job?’

  ‘That’s it. A job. A bloody job. All that training and I come back for a bloody job.’

  ‘You didn’t have to come back.’

  ‘What choice did I have? And what money? This place sucked me back. Like a vacuum. A vacuum. And then I get married on top of it. To you …’

  ‘You were happy enough at the time.’

  ‘Happy? Was I?’

  ‘Presumably. Why else would you do it? You certainly said you were happy. Did a good imitation.’

  ‘You said it, a role. Acting.’

  ‘Nobody forced you.’

  ‘Hah. That’s a joke. Nobody forced me.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m lost here. Who forced you? How did they do it?’

  ‘Everybody. You.’

  ‘Me? How on earth –�
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  ‘Yes, you, with your bloody insistence.’

  ‘You seemed to want it, at the time.’

  ‘Want it? Of course I did. I was trapped. You were supposed to be the way out. Fine bloody way.’

  ‘Trapped? Way out? What do you mean?’

  ‘Yes, trapped. And instead of the way out it’s just a further trap. Huh! That’s nice. Touché!’