‘I thought you were rather aloof, you know,’ she said to me later, when we’d got to know each other better. She underlined ‘aloof’ exactly the way I would. ‘Were you?’ What an odd question. I liked it. I said I supposed I had been a bit. Now I’ve met her mother, I think haughtiness runs in the family, although in Yvonne it’s been savagely beaten back to a kind of resigned dignity. ‘I didn’t think you were unpleasant,’ she added, ‘in fact, I thought you were lovely.’ (I apologise for writing that, but it is what she later said.) ‘But aloof.’
After a while we went out onto the balcony under the overhanging trees with views over to the college Aunty Eva had wanted to send me to all those years ago (the same college Yvonne M.’s sons went to) and across houses and streets I’d known and belonged to throughout my childhood. Yet in front of me, across the wooden table, framed by those streets and houses and waterscapes, was the mother who had always just been a story in my head. And so we began to ask each other questions, like friends of friends, in a way, discovering each other on a train journey.
‘Are you married, Robert?’ she asked me, looking hopeful. I hate that question. ‘No, I’m not,’ I said, and I knew Yvonne could see grandchildren going up in smoke. ‘But I was once,’ I said, and I knew she could see them taking wispy form again. ‘But we had no children,’ I said, perhaps a little too forcefully. Up in smoke again. ‘Do you think you might get married again one day?’ ‘No, I don’t think so.’ A pause now I was clearly expected to fill in. ‘I think,’ I said—let’s not rush this—‘I’m moving in a different direction.’ ‘Ah,’ said Yvonne, disappointed but none the wiser. I went on to explain I lived with a friend called Peter and had done for quite a few years, although I was staying at the moment in Melbourne with two lesbian friends. (‘You’re not!’ she cried, aghast.) I thought I’d dropped enough clues for anyone to pick up, but I was wrong. I thought: ‘Skip it.’
Yvonne sketched in her life—her two sons, two husbands, her life now looking after Mother—alluded to the fine stock I came from, asked about Jean and Tom and whether life had worked out well for me (but could see it had), and then said: ‘You know, I thought you’d feel bitter.’ Bitter? This was unexpected. I had no idea what she might mean. Why would I feel bitter? ‘I thought you might feel I’d abandoned you, I thought you might say, Look, why did you give me away? I thought: what if you don’t like me?’ She looked so tiny then, like a little sparrow.
I didn’t feel bitter, bitterness was beside the point, apart from the fact that I now knew Yvonne was in my terms (not hers) blameless. Yet, curiously enough, she’d hit on a root word in my shaky construction of myself, the very word a few years before a psychiatrist had made use of over and over again until it had lost its power: abandoned. And it was true, the word was subtly linked with the day at the unmarried mothers’ home in Strathfield when my mother had ‘let me go’, and with the mysterious story Tom had told me when I was very small—how could he possibly have known? he swore he didn’t know my father’s name—about my father dying in an air-crash, abandoning me doubly. And then with all the other abandonings and deaths and castings-off, until the day in the psychiatrist’s room (only the fourth visit, I hasten to add) when the word had exploded into three syllables signifying nothing.
I did ask Yvonne a little about my father on that first day. I was curious, but there was little she could tell me or felt moved to tell me quite so soon. He was no Hungarian count, however, that much was clear. Nor, in case Aunty Moat is peering at these lines through her bifocals, was he an Aborigine.
We spent several hours together out on Yvonne M.’s balcony in the sun, talking. As we parted, I felt a rush of affection, of thankfulness to this woman for being what she was, of completeness at last—no, not completeness, but completion, of weaving two parts together to make a whole. You must think me a dry old stick not to speak of love and joy and souls united. I’m sorry. Tumult, yes, but love and joy and the uniting of souls do not burst from the sky, at least, in my experience, for the child. We started, speaking at least for myself, with affection and—this may also sound cold to you, but it wasn’t—avid attention. We started, in other words, with deep, generous liking and thankfulness that the silence had been broken.
In all those years someone must surely have said something. The silence cannot have been absolute. One of Yvonne’s sisters, perhaps, at a sentimental moment, to another of her sisters, if not to their formidable mother, a handsome woman, hair combed tightly back, who dominates every family photograph I’ve seen by simply being there. (She has that slightly arrogant ‘Oh, really?’ look I have myself and when we eventually met she looked at me and said: ‘You are mine.’ A little late in the day, I might say.)
Actually, someone has said something. A sister has rung Yvonne and sent her a photograph. Quite out of the blue. I’m looking at it now. It’s in a small folder with Paxton’s Prints written on it (black and white ninepence, sepia one shilling). It’s a tiny, square photograph and it moves me deeply. My mother Yvonne is sitting on a bench in a garden at the girls’ home near Strathfield where we were taken from the hospital, holding me low in her arms. I am about to be taken from her. She knows this, but doesn’t know when. She’s looking at the camera with an expression of grave resignation and wounded wisdom, as if she’d just watched a ship sail away forever with someone on it she loved. I, of course, am lying back enjoying the sun.
Yvonne has no memory of any photograph being taken, or, for that matter, of any visitors at all. When the photograph arrived in the mail from her sister she was very distressed. She showed it to me a few days later in a café in Kings Cross and we both just sat in silence for about five minutes staring at it. When I looked up I caught just an echo of the bitter dignity of the photograph on Yvonne’s small-boned face. But we mustn’t grow maudlin—the fish is sweet, we’re enjoying each other’s company in a quiet, undemonstrative sort of way, and so I take another snapshot from Paxton’s yellowing folder, this time of grandmama and her seven children, and I start to make jokes about who’s the best-looking. Grandmama, of course, has the air of some duchess from Mitteleuropa, completely ruthless with the peasants.
I found she wasn’t nearly as fearsome as she looked, by the way, when I eventually met her. She was seeing no one, being in her mid-nineties and frailer than she’d like to be, but she agreed to see me for afternoon tea. It was like an audience and I flew up from Melbourne specially. I was so yellow at the time with some disease that I couldn’t stand in the check-in queue long enough to check in and almost missed the plane, but I knew I had to go. Perhaps she thought I was always yellow. At any rate she gave no sign of minding. When Yvonne ushered me into the dining-room where she was sitting, in the house she’d lived in for over seventy years—the house my mother had grown up in and come home to from Strathfield without me—she greeted me warmly and we recognised each other. It was a strange moment, as you can imagine. Here I was turning up again, almost half a century after she’d given instructions I should be taken away and never spoken of again.
You’d think it would be an occasion for exchanging profundities, wouldn’t you, but it wasn’t. The profundities were all at the level of feelings, not words. We talked about this and that: her health, how the district had changed (half the population no longer seemed to speak English), about Yvonne in front of her as if she wasn’t there—how good she was, what a wonderful daughter … Of course she was a wonderful daughter—she spent half her life, week about with a brother, living with her mother and looking after her like a district nurse. Yvonne brought out sausage-rolls and cakes and I felt even yellower.
Yes, we recognised each other. I looked at this clear-eyed matriarch, with her fine skin and knowing smile and mind that missed nothing, and she looked at me, and we knew we belonged. She felt, I’m sure, not a twinge of guilt for what had happened, she seemed serenely confident that she’d simply done what had had to be done. It was a matter of breeding. (She, too, by the way, has French blood. She’s a
Bullivant and to this day likes to pronounce the name without the ‘t’. The French pronounce it without the ‘n’ as well.) She seemed curious and pleased to note I’d turned out, on the whole, rather well, but in no need of intimacy or attachment. When I got into the taxi an hour and a half later, I felt sure she expected the silence to wash back quietly over me again.
Can you imagine what it felt like, going into that dark house with its heavy furniture and family photographs on polished surfaces (photographs pretending I didn’t exist), my own mother welcoming me at the front door? It seemed a stern and righteous house to me, a house of good people, a bastion of principles, the sort of house children might be strapped in. Almost as if I’d known, I’ve grown up with a taste for houses with French windows, skylights, verandahs (back, front, side)—I love the orangerie effect.
It was into this sturdy bungalow, I now know, in Sydney’s higgledy-piggledy, dreary mid-west that Yvonne my mother was born. Nowadays it’s scarred with tasteless blocks of flats with aluminium window-frames and drive-in fast-food outlets. People have moved in with their own unrelated histories and little interest in what was there before. There are mosques on the horizon. But when Yvonne was born in the mid-twenties, Campsie was still a red-roofed middle-class suburb at the edge of the city sprawl, there were even paddocks behind the houses with horses and cows in them, paddocks you could fly kites in. Here Yvonne and her six brothers and sisters went to school (you could see it from the window), here she joined the Music Society, dancing in the chorus-line of the odd Sunday night show—The Pirates of Penzance, perhaps, or it might have been The Maid of the Mountains. She’d wanted as a girl (she’s still petite) to be a ballet dancer and gone to Estelle Anderson’s studio in Rowe Street in the city, but, naturally, it had come to nothing. Just a few years later and just a few miles across the city, I wanted to become a dancer, too, as if Yvonne had given up in Campsie and passed the desire on to me in Lane Cove. I’d just seen The Red Shoes and insisted that Jean and Tom send me to dancing classes. This should have alerted them to the fact that there was something strange about me from the start, but they sent me anyway, Jean, I think, with some misgivings, Tom in his usual spirit of letting me follow my inclinations. My classes didn’t lead to anything, either.
It was an idyllic life, Yvonne now thinks, looking back. I asked her very recently what it was like, living there, in that house, at that time. ‘Well, it was like David Malouf,’ she said, to my considerable surprise, I admit. She was thinking, I suppose, of 12 Edmondstone Street. It must have been a tribal life they led, by my lights, with the sort of tribal pleasures I’ve never really known, nor for that matter wanted. Still, I shouldn’t feel supercilious towards them, to Yvonne they were obviously real enough.
One Melbourne Cup day just before the war, with his bets all written out, Yvonne’s father suddenly died. In some ways you might say that’s when Yvonne’s step faltered, although Yvonne herself would probably not say that. She’d loved her father rather too much—I can tell that even now when she talks about him to me, trying to convey to me his goodness. A fearful thing, goodness of the suburban kind. I have no faith in it, but Yvonne does, having been schooled in it. Her father was an imposing-looking, upright man, with his own leather business in his backyard (the cavernous workshop is still there, hot and musty, a mausoleum). He was religiously inclined, a Mason, and was dead against any noise from the children when they were playing in the front yard. It seems to have been a bit of a family obsession, this horror of noise, of undisciplined speech, of rumour and bruiting abroad. Good music was another matter altogether. He loved his wind-up gramophone.
Yvonne was grief-stricken when her father died. Some pillar had crumbled, not to be replaced. In her anguish she refused to go back to school. ‘Mother hit the roof.’ I can imagine. Mother still hits the roof and she’s nearly a hundred. A severely beautiful woman (overshadowingly beautiful, Yvonne says)—just a touch of lipstick when she stepped out in one of her ballgowns from the Strand Arcade and the merest hint of vaseline on eyebrows and eyelashes—her wrath must have been impressive. But Yvonne could be stubborn too (‘cheeky’, she calls it), slight though she was and only fifth in line. She did not go back to school, she went to business college for a year and did, as she puts it, very well. Needless to say, there was no question of a university education in those good old pre-war days, a right Yvonne’s grandchildren take for granted. The Dessaixs were what was called ‘comfortably off’: the children ate well (although only the older children could have an apple each), were properly clothed, wore shoes and lived in a solid house with a neat front garden and beds of potatoes, rhubarb, peas and tomatoes out the back. This was more than could be said for all the children in the district, some of whom walked to school in cracked bare feet. Yet apparently none of Yvonne’s family aspired to a university education.
With the older boys away at the war, Yvonne began to live the kind of life I suppose many middle-class young women were leading. She went to work as a secretary at Verey’s, a tailoring business in King Street in the city. Verey’s had a military contract and young servicemen would drop in to have wings or stripes sewn on or some adjustment made to their uniform. At sixteen years of age, beautiful in quite a dusky, Mediterranean sort of way, Yvonne was engaged to be married to a young man we might call Gordon who worked with her at Verey’s. Gordon gave her a ring he’d bought at Saunders the jewellers one Friday night. Mother hit the roof again, Yvonne tried to pull the ring off her finger and couldn’t get it off, Gordon’s mother hit the roof … but the war was on and allowances seem to have been made. Gordon was soon sent to New Guinea, leaving Yvonne to her duties at Verey’s and at home. It’s a familiar story, but with a twist—myself.
Now, Yvonne, as she recalls it, led a relatively carefree life during the war. Or at least a blameless life, according to the mores of the tribe. She might go on a ferry-ride to Manly with a young man or group of friends, or sit in a city park with sandwiches, she might go ice-skating or play tennis or go to a live show at a theatre like the Minerva in Kings Cross (we both love a good show) with the girls from the office. A couple of men on leave might join them. Much scurrying about with shampoos, lipstick, shoe-polish. Kings Cross, just a mile or so away from Verey’s on a ridge to the east, was seething with God knows what during the war, but none of it seems to have touched Yvonne: the raucous world of winebars, sly grog shops, maisons de passe and illicit pleasures of an even more outlandish kind—Yvonne seems hardly to have been aware it was there. It simply did not lure her, as it might have lured me. Fifty years later, when we met at Kings Cross station to walk to a café and chat, I said to her, waving an arm at the soaring hotel towers and the mess of underpasses and overpasses: ‘It’s probably changed a lot since you were last here.’ ‘Well, yes, it has,’ she said, looking at me rather than at Kings Cross. ‘When were you here last?’ I said (conversation doesn’t always flow just because you’re related). ‘In 1943,’ she said, unaware this was unusual. She’s lived in and around the city all her life.
On weekends Yvonne would go horse-riding with friends in the bush north of the city. Occasionally they might camp overnight, but there was no thought of any Goings On, she assures me. Literally no thought. If some of the older members of the group took advantage of the situation, Yvonne was protected from knowing about it. She tells me that as a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old girl from a good background, she had no sexual knowledge, or sense of lack of knowledge, at all. Not even curiosity. Curiosity, after all, has to be fed. Sex, she tells me, was not spoken of at home, at work or on outings. ‘You see, Robert,’ she said to me once when we were talking about those Maloufian days, ‘I was a sitting duck.’ Masculinity, which she clearly did find desirable, meant something very particular to Yvonne, it now seems. It meant what she calls ‘being a gentleman’. It meant being like her brothers. This cannot have been a wholly bad thing. Nor wholly good, of course, which is why I’m awkwardly here to tell this tale.
I am a disgr
ace, you see. In later years I disgraced myself often enough, not unexpectedly, and I disgraced my wife, I think now, by being rather too interested in an unmentionable religion and not quite interested enough in men—she instinctively knew early on that manly men are drawn to men and men’s things, not to women, except to woo and bed them. (Many Australian men are simply neutered, afraid to be drawn in any direction. Some of them neuter their wives as well and have a good go at neutering their children. This is not a disgrace.) But I was born a disgrace.
Even after we’d met, and Yvonne was telling me about her life both before and after I was born, she said to me, quite unconscious of what she was saying: ‘By having you I disgraced the family name.’ I was a bit put out. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘it must’ve been a dreadful shock to Mother … the war was on and the boys were gone and so forth … I still feel that sense of guilt … the disgrace of it has remained.’ The remedy for disgrace in that family has been a suffocating blanket of silence. (Not only in that family, needless to say: my affectionate mother-in-law, for some odd reason, likes to refer to me gently with outsiders as her adopted son, as if the truth—that I am her daughter’s ex-husband—were somehow too shameful to mention directly. And although I’ve lived with Peter now for some twelve years, his family, with the exception of his mother and two aunts, simply see a blank space where I am standing. All good people, of course, according to their lights.)
One day in 1943, a day so ordinary my mother can’t remember it clearly, an airman on leave dropped into Verey’s to have a coloured patch sewn on, got talking to the rather refined-looking manager’s secretary (sometimes she’d act as telephonist—it was a small business) and they agreed to meet after work. He may have suggested coffee at Repin’s just up the street, if he’d wanted to impress with something Continental, or in a slightly more urbane mood they may have walked across to Rowe Street and had a pot of tea in one of those small places with blue-and-white checked table-cloths and modernist prints on the walls. For a hundred yards or so in Rowe Street, amongst the shops displaying craft objects, the tea-rooms with pots of geraniums on the window-sill and signs beside doorways reading: Drama Society: up two flights, you could almost be in England.
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