No one could accuse Stella of lacking style. When in full throat over the Marjories, she could point to a thousand ways in which she was superior. Marjorie Rumpton, for instance, had had a little trip to a health farm after the birth of her second child, Denzil. A health farm was not a place where you’d find a Motte. How could you farm health, anyway? And Denzil? Marjorie Rudge was worse; she had a fake fur coat.
And so Stella kept her head above her circumstances. And at Rumpton and Rudge’s, between bouts with doctors’ wives and petit fours for morning tea, she picked up those many visitors given to treading the path to our front door.
Those who carried Aunt Nina’s seal of approval called Stella Bunny. They knew her from her past and had rediscovered her ‘doing’ for Rumpton and Rudge. When they rapped on the front door, something out the back would invariably topple. They belonged to the valiant cake-bearing brigade known in our family as the Upright and Faithful. They asserted themselves over the cracked parlours of their poorer friends, their robust bottoms taking the sprung sofas in a patrician spirit, accompanied by the clumsy lunge of limbs. They were bossy, cheer-choked women and our mother went to great pains to please them. She was frequently and ostentatiously extravagant. She had been known to boast of owing a dressmaker two hundred pounds. That made them shriek, ‘Oh, Bunny!’ as she dolloped on the double cream to hide the cracks in plates. From her chest of treasures, she hauled the heavy damask cloths, the serviettes with silver rings, the English tea things. The house would smell of ironing. Glutinous puddles of starch would attract mosquitoes in the laundry. When she bothered, she had a way with flowers, so that any weed in her hands took on its own eccentric character. She mixed fennel with roses, bunched heads of lantana with belladonna lilies; in autumn she ripped trailers from the grapevine. Anything she dipped into a vase was immediate, flamboyant and arresting. While their eyes were on the ‘dandelions, Bunny, how clever!’ she’d zip the continental biscuits under their noses: and, lest they notice the pot holes in the floor, she’d turn a teaspoon over and ask if they could read the hallmark, she being too short-sighted.
The jolly, optimistic friends did not call often, however, their social calendars only offering a set amount of time for visiting the fallen.
Though afflicted with pathological goodness somewhat less seriously than Aunt Nina, Stella was also a sufferer. There weren’t many eye doctors in Melbourne in the late fifties and early sixties, so Rumpton and Rudge saw a goodly swipe of Melbourne’s population, from society queens to charity cases and everyone, irrespective of class, gravitated towards our mother, whose manner was irresistible, and whose solutions to their problems were unique.
One night a defecting diplomat turned up in my bed. Just as well I wasn’t also in the bed when the press came, was the only opinion my mother cared to venture on the topic after the fuss died down. One morning we awoke to find all the chairs in the sitting room coralled around a hat and under the hat we recognised the lady who took the change at the ladies’ room in Myer. When we turned up our noses we were told to be grateful for our lumpy kapok mattresses and other people’s overcoats, which sometimes served as blankets on our beds.
She was kind to them irrespective of race, colour, creed, class or politics. Up the path they would come, waddling in gratitude, with enough Women’s Weeklies to keep hellfire stoked and glowing for the foreseeable future stuffed under their armpits. But although she was good at crisis solutions, she fell down on follow-up. Sometimes we had to hide below the windowsill, our mother saying ‘Ssh, ssh, they’ll hear you,’ when we were being quiet as mice and she was making noises out of guiltiness. Up the path they’d tramp, just wanting to call in and say thanks, weighed down by ovaries swollen to the size of boulders with their troubles. She’d leave a glass of water casually on the verandah for them and pretend to be out, sitting in the kitchen with the blinds drawn. Up the path they would prance, when she’d successfully paired them off with the men of their choice, to skite and bellow in the sitting room, while she wielded damask cloths, Doulton china and sterling serviette rings just to let them know that she, Stella Motte, hadn’t crawled out of the woodwork yesterday. She had a middle name – Clare. It stood for Castle.
One thing she was not without was relatives. These would brave any tangle and meet any circumstance at chin level to visit Bun. Many an attempt was made by the wife of a brigadeer or surgeon to appreciate the things ‘that fellow Bun was married to’ worried the art galleries with. Mottes, Gilchrists, Bloomfields, Beauchamps and Taylors, too, came calling, and not just on the distaff side. Men whose bellies dipped between their thighs had been known to teeter on the low mahogany chairs and allow their rumps to be tormented by a jiggered spring for hours, eating cake with Bun.
Then there were those guests you didn’t really expect. The Indian with the copperhead snake in the Coke bottle, who tried to levitate the tantalus but couldn’t even get the stoppers out of the decanters. There followed a night of poltergeist activity in which our mother kept appearing, probably by mistake but bathed in light, in the middle of our bedroom. The presence of a Yugoslavian boy, on parole from a boys’ farm, who broke into the next-door neighbours’ and stole their phone money, resulted in the appearance of a cassocked priest on our doorstep and a gentleman bringing up the rear with a pair of handcuffs. The gentleman sat in the parlour opening and closing the handcuffs in anticipation while the priest tried to jolly the boy’s whereabouts out of Stella. But she would not budge. What’s more, she served them lapsang souchong tea, which she knew they’d hate, till the gentleman had put the handcuffs away and promised on no account to use them. Then she called the boy to come down from the ceiling over our heads, where he’d been hiding among the rat traps, and give himself up.
In 1960 she bagged an Italian, a genuine Northerner from Ancona. And that was when we started to learn our father’s language, because Aldo was an Italian tutor without a clientele. He set up shop in our parlour on Thursdays, and we weren’t his only pupils. Other unfortunates, enlisted by treacherous mothers as they waited for eye drops, had to troop in, too, on Thursday afternoons to read the adventures of Il piccolo Lord Fauntleroy for forty-five minutes straight.
‘Il piccolo lord va in vaccanza,’ reads the new girl. Her name is Checkie Laurington and she has fuzzy blonde hair. She is two years older than Allegra and she takes these lessons seriously. Aldo prefers Allegra to her, which makes her say things like, ‘If Allegra settled down, we could actually get Lord Fauntleroy onto il treno.’ Checkie Laurington’s real name is Cecilia and she thinks that means she’s Italian. She is almost the worst person we have ever met. But there is someone worse. Her mother.
Checkie goes to a grammar school several suburbs away from here, so why is it compulsory for her to learn Italian at our house? Could it be because it is compulsory for Mrs Laurington to scud up to the kerb outside in her Daimler in order to pick Checkie up and take her home? Mrs Laurington is an art dealer: Henri darling, which is what she calls our father, paints.
We don’t learn much Italian on Thursday afternoons, because our mother doesn’t come home from work till five-thirty; Aldo’s lessons start at four and Mrs Laurington arrives to pick Checkie up at ten past. She streaks through the house saying she’s early, but running like a woman who’s late for a bus. Out the back, the studio door creaks open and we don’t see any more of her till five twenty-nine, twenty-nine minutes after Aldo’s gone and we’ve been sitting round while the other poor unfortunates go home and Checkie practises her phonetics. It’s tiring. It means a lot of trips to the toilet for Allegra and me. But all that flushing doesn’t yield results. All we know is that at five fifteen Mrs Laurington starts to shriek with laughter, great shuddering gales of it. Hee-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo, Hee-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo. At five twenty, she’s going ha-ha, ha-ha and gasping for breath, and at five twenty-two we can hear the clasp on her handbag snap, which probably means she’s putting on her lips.
Now Dadda is opening the door for her. Now she is singing,
‘Byeee, Henri,’ and Dadda is giving one of his double-meaning laughs. Now she is strolling through into the sitting room, saying, ‘Come on, darling,’ to neat and tidy fuzz-haired Checkie, and Dadda is looking away, back into his studio, his hand on the inside doorknob, his lovely profile framed in the door, the shapely nose, the lips with their extra upturning kink in either corner. He turns back, waves with two fingers, closes himself inside. ‘Bye-ee, girls,’ says awful Mrs Laurington and Checkie says exactly the same thing in the same way.
Our mother will be home in a few minutes’ time. Mrs Laurington always drives the Daimler in the opposite direction from the one our mother takes. Checkie doesn’t even look out the windows, just sits there poring over Il piccolo Lord Fauntleroy. She is learning to be her mother.
Anyway, we don’t eat sausages. Only poor people eat ground-up meat. Proud people eat lamb chops. Allegra opens the fridge and slaps four chops on the griller and I start hoeing into the spuds with a knife. ‘Bloody old brolga,’ says Allegra as our mother is driving the key into the front door lock.
Brolga was a good description, but Viva Laurington was more in the plucked line than the feathered. Many people found in her something to adore. Allegra and I knew it couldn’t possibly have been her charm; more than likely it was her husband Harry’s cash.
Her appearances at our home began soon after our mother had removed a fly’s wing from her right eye in the course of her professional duties. When she found out that Stella was married to Darling Henri, she still had the fly wing in her eye and it just about took flight. We were there at the surgery watching. It was Rudge’s afternoon and he had been letting us try the big long lens glasses they use to make people’s prescriptions with. Allegra was wearing them and I was being Rudge and putting the lenses in. ‘Henri Coretti!’ The Brolga trumpeted. We never knew our father’s name could elicit such throes.
In our neighbourhood the father was not a figure to inspire respect and awe. There were many houses like ours where fatherly activity was at a low ebb. Not far from where we lived, however, just a matter of blocks, fathers wore shirts and caught buses to work. It seemed the right sort of thing to do. That type of father had desirable surroundings to go with him.
Heretofore we had spent our lives trying to bring Dadda into line. When I raised the topic of his failure to reform with Aunt Nina, she thought it might be because the full impact of the word nice had not leapt the ethnic barrier to land with the right force in the right quarter of his mind. His foreignness was to be forgiven, tolerated and understood, by all means, but Aunt Nina considered it important that we should strive to acquaint him with the Right and the Proper, since he, through no fault of his own, might never have had these virtues revealed to him.
Allegra’s eyes bulged to blimp size down the avenue of lenses. Here was our father receiving an honourable mention from a total stranger whose voice had plummeted an octave from the usual key in which conversations with our mother were held. ‘And are these his children?’ she demanded. The lenses rattled in the holders as Allegra tried to bring her into view.
At this stage Rudge put his head around the corner, from where he’d been talking to his stockbroker on the phone, and suggested that Allegra and I should pop out and buy some cakes. We were suddenly aware that this Mrs Laurington was someone important. At Rumpton and Rudge’s, cakes were got up for bishops and millionaires. Within seconds the words ‘art dealer’ and ‘gallery’ were mentioned and an invitation to come and meet the shriek-inducer in person had been made and accepted.
Be it said that the name Laurington produced spasms of hastily prepared grace in several circles in Melbourne. Spontaneous ladders formed in shop girls’ stockings when Rolls Royce Lauringtons nipped in to buy knick-knacks. When boards of directors were lacking a member, Lauringtons were rung. There were musical Lauringtons, medical Lauringtons, theological Lauringtons, legal and artistic Lauringtons.
To appease her threatened family gods, when Allegra and I arrived back in the surgery with beetroot and onion sandwiches dripping redly from white paper bags, our mother recited the diverting history of Euphrosyne’s father, the surgeon from Edinburgh. His famous Advice to Eleven Daughters served as a model for colonial upbringing for many a long and weary year. Our mother ended with her favourite quote from it: ‘By all means show them Christian charity, for God has sent them among us for a reason, but never marry a madman.’
The winged eyeball smiled mysteriously. ‘You disobedient child, you,’ she ventured snidely from the side of her mouth.
Why was Dadda such a difficulty? There was a drawer in my rib cage, beneath my heart, which contained my bits of Dadda in it. His dislike for new shoes, his smell, his shapeliness.
And then there was the photo of a bedroom he’d stuck behind our toilet door. It was bizarre; beside the single bed, resplendent under a sunburst cover, was a bombshell crowned with a laurel wreath. On the other side of the bed, arrowless, a statue of Saint Sebastian stood bleeding. Above, in an ornate golden frame, replete with curlicues and a white porcelain dove, was a painting of the bedroom’s owner, depicted as a leper being kissed by Saint Francis of Assisi.
Whose bedroom was it, I wanted to know. And my father replied, ‘D’Annunzio’s.’ And who was D’Annunzio, I asked. ‘The so-called “Hero of Fiume”.’ And where was Fiume? ‘Yugoslavia, where the boy who pinched the phone money came from.’ And why was he a hero? ‘Because after the First World War he invaded that city and made himself a kind of emperor there for a year or so. He was also a great Italian poet.’
‘But you’ve put the photo in our dunny.’
‘Where it belongs, Sibella.’ Sibella was his special name for me. ‘D’Annunzio ripped the trees out of his garden and planted bombs and flagpoles there instead.’
In my Dadda drawer was also La Strada, my first Italian film. We sat together in a dank green cinema, Dadda and me, as if at the bottom of an old impressed tin tea caddy, two tokens from a Cornflakes packet, surrounded by dark Italian men. He guarded my chair with the curve of his arm. Dadda had seen the film before. ‘Her name is Gelsomina,’ he said. He used a baby voice when he spoke to me, as if he were reading me a children’s story. ‘Her mother sells her to a man called Zampanò because the family is very poor. Zampanò does a strongman act for a living. He and Gelsomina join up with a circus where there is a tightrope walker who is also a clown. Zampanò is very rough with Gelsomina, and the clown, who is gentle, wants her to run away with him. Zampanò and the clown fight over Gelsomina and get the sack from the circus. Gelsomina could have stayed at the circus if she wanted, but instead, she goes with Zampanò.’
‘Why?’
‘She is a simple girl, and poor, Sibella. It is hard for her to make a choice. Also, it’s strange, but she loves Zampanò. She probably feels he needs her and maybe he does. Some of us don’t choose the people we love, it just happens – we get hooked.’
‘Is that why people tell fairy tales, Dadda? To cover up what really happens?’
‘Well, I suppose it is, Sibella, when you think about it that way. Ye-es,’ he said in a sing-song way he used for addressing children. Sometimes he would say it to Mrs Laurington and my heart would lurch.
I was surprised. La Strada offered no snow-covered alps, no speckled trout, which was what my mother had told me when I asked about Italy. But there was something wonderful about it all the same: the incomparable Giulietta Masina. For weeks Giulietta/Gelsomina was my crush, my obsession. I wanted to change my name; I wanted to wear a bowler hat and take a trumpet to school, but alas, there was not a trumpet nor a bowler hat to be had in Melbourne. The best Bridget Kelly could do was an airforce cap and bugle. I couldn’t get the bugle to play. No matter what I did, no music, not a parp let alone the wan and wonderful mystery of La Strada, would flow from it. I was desolate. At school everyone laughed at me, yet La Strada was my secret life; I wanted it to become real and thought if I willed it hard enough, it would. I wanted them to see it, just to see it, to see me b
e that astonishing urchin and to enter the story with me.
La Strada made me hanker for more of Italy, but apart from Aldo and Dadda’s Uncle Nicola we weren’t to get much. Uncle Nicola only put in rare appearances at our house and, apart from him, Dadda only seemed to know one Italian. His name was Ben.
Ben was an old bloke who was supposed to do repairs for us every now and again, but he wasn’t much good at repairing. Generally he just came and sat in the sun on Dadda’s studio step and talked away, a little old saucepan on the boil, while Dadda made art inside. On one of his hands Ben had only three fingers. He’d smoke with the cigarette between his second and third fingers. The nicotine stains reached right up his arm. He’d smoke and prattle, smoke and prattle, until a semicircle of shoed-out butts surrounded his feet and he was ready to go home. We knew where he lived – down a skinny bitumen lane lined with palings behind a row of tomato plants in a dwelling with three walls, the fourth being a tarpaulin, like the curtain on a stage. He had a tortoiseshell cat, but we never knew her name. When he saw us, Ben would flick his three fingers in a little wave and nod.
Our mother was given tickets to the Dante Alighieri Society once, by someone visiting the surgery. Dadda wouldn’t come. It seemed he hated the Dante Alighieris. ‘But it’s Dante,’ our mother protested, wide-eyed, ‘Dante.’
Mad Meg Page 6