‘It’s against the law, you know,’ says Stella. She means wearing army drag when you aren’t in the army. She also means that the coat has a deep significance for Nina, who took her wartime duties seriously.
‘Fuck the law,’ says Allegra.
‘If You Please,’ says Stella primly. Poor Stella. In this day and age of straight hair, she has had most of hers burnt off by an overzealous hairdresser who must have thought the curlier the hair, the more lotion required to straighten it. She has had to resort to wearing a turban day and night. Rumpton and Rudge call her The Begum.
‘Well, I don’t care,’ says Allegra.
Sizzling with discontent, Stella gets on with mopping the kitchen floor. Then the drum and bell collection makes its announcing noises at the front door.
It is too late for Allegra to change costumes. I play the butler. ‘Hey!’ I call when I open the door. ‘There’s a sod in a suit out here!’
I’d been expecting a sod with a beard, but it is none other than Denzil Rumpton, the incredibly good-looking son of Gloom Bottom, the one who put his mother into a health farm after his birth. He is known to the cognoscenti as Gregory Impeccable. Ex Melbourne Gram. He’s crackers about Allegra, but his face drops when he sees what she is wearing. ‘Aren’t you ready yet?’ he asks hopefully. ‘I’m ready,’ says Allegra.
‘But … But … It isn’t fancy dress, Allegra. I can’t take you looking like that!’
Our mother rests on her mop and evokes her Family Tree. ‘Allegra,’ she says grandly, ‘is related to the Queen Mother.’ Meaning, I suppose, that Allegra can wear anything she likes. Oddly, this does not lead Denzil into the wilderness. He attributes Prince Charles’s jug ears to the Bowes-Lyons.
‘Fuck!’ shrieks Allegra when things look like developing into a family tree–lopping contest. ‘Are you taking me, Denzil, or aren’t you? If you don’t take me, I’ll storm the dining hall.’
Stella, tribal in her wrath, brandishes her mop as Denzil and Allegra sweep out, furious with each other.
‘Fu!’ says Eli, who cannot yet pronounce his K’s.
That is not where the evening ends. Allegra and Denzil have had such a fight by the time they reach Trinity, Denzil won’t take her in. True to her word, Allegra storms the dining hall in his wake and is about to fling off her VAD coat in full view of the assembled company when she suddenly realises she’s forgotten to put a blouse on under it.
Our front door bursts open and in sweeps Allegra, laughing her head off. In hot pursuit, Denzil. Stella is lying on the couch in the parlour with her hat off and her teeth out. She is wearing her nightie. The family dachshund, Puglia, wakes up, excited. Backs up the nightie. Wags her tail.
Allegra fails to make it to her first important engagement as a Feminist. Denzil doesn’t understand.
It is 1966. Allegra cries in her sleep. When I ask what the matter is, she tells me of the many, many wrongs and I realise I am ignorant.
No vote, No voice, No choice! says the placard she bears to the Kew Town Hall, where she goes to boo the Liberals.
How, she asks, is it possible for the government of Australia to draft into the army, for the purpose of fighting a foreign war, young men who do not have the vote?
Why, she asks, does it take the government a week and two ministers to decide that Australians can see, unexpurgated, a BBC documentary on Vietnam?
Why is it that Australian conscripts have died in defence of a corrupt Vietnamese regime?
‘But there is no front!’ she screams when someone says the Americans are winning. And there is no front. Johnson names Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Cong as his targets, but it is the futile war of sledgehammer and ant. America is flexing its military muscles for the benefit of the Russians and Chinese. What are Australians doing there? And what are Australians doing here?
At last, a woman has made it onto a jury in the state of Victoria. And how did the papers report it? They said she was wearing a bright red suit and sunglasses. They said she actually asked some relevant questions. Could this be the first step in the evolution of a female brain?
While conscripts die abroad, margarine is at war with butter in Australia. While you can fight and die in a trumped-up war at eighteen years of age, you cannot, at any age, see, unexpurgated, four of the feature films at the Melbourne Film Festival.
How is it that section 127 of the Australian Constitution excludes Aborigines from the census? And from the vote? Irony of ironies, Aborigines have to go to war to get the vote! How come they pay tax if they are not represented?
And if Asians are considered fit to study here, why are they not considered fit to live here?
In 1966, the only country with stricter censorship laws than Australia is Catholic Ireland.
In Australia you can’t read Lady Chatterley’s Lover or The CarpetBaggers unless you buy them under the counter in a brown paper bag from certain shady establishments. One of these belongs to the daughters of the dump caretaker, Bridget Kelly. In Maggie and Kelly Kelly’s second-hand and salvage shop, which comes into being in the March of this strenuous year just a grenade’s throw from our house, banned books aren’t the only things you can buy.
You can also buy that substance no one can spell yet, or pronounce, marijuana.
You can smell Maggie and Kelly’s Pantechnicon a block away. Incense, beeswax candles and sandalwood soap are sold here. You can hear it a block away, too. Donovan keeps singing: He’s the universal soldier and he really is to blame./His orders come from far away no more./They come from here and there and you and me/And brothers, can’t you see,/This is not the way to put the end to war. Between stanzas Indian bells and wind chimes tinkle and clang. Some of the wind chimes are made by Maggie Kelly from bits and pieces collected for her by Bridget from the dump. Caftans and buffalo-hide thongs are sold here. Large Op and Pop Art posters. Army, navy and air force surplus. Old badges. Hinges. Bicycle reflectors and clips for trouser cuffs. Second-hand books. Vases. Windscreen wipers. LPs. And much, much more, upstairs.
The floor is covered with sea grass matting, which very soon gets tatty from the traffic. The goods are set out in tubs, or hung from the ceiling, or draped around the walls. Hovering between occident and orient, the blonde shop assistants, Rapunzels in caftans, smoke dope, cut their toenails behind the counter and occasionally make a sale.
Maggie Kelly, though eighteen, is too young to own a second-hand dealer’s licence, so the licence for the shop, which bears its name in comely art nouveau writing (though I say so myself) on the window, is held by the redoubtable Bridget.
Maggie Kelly might be too young to hold a second-hand dealer’s licence and too young to vote, but she is not too young to be a mother.
She came by her baby from a schoolfriend, Johnny Green, who wrote himself into the Book of Man just before writing himself off in a stolen panel van at a place where the proposed Tullamarine Freeway will, in due course, run. He is missed sentimentally by Maggie, who peers out of her hair constantly in order to find his features in her baby, Chantal.
Bridget Kelly thinks Johnny Green is better off dead.
Maggie Kelly is not alone in looking surreptitiously for evidence of the other side in her baby. Eli, of course, has blue, blue eyes, ‘gold standard blue’, and he is blond. But he is also a stern, gruff baby, given to ordering everyone around. I have no idea where that comes from. Too efficient to learn how to speak until absolutely necessary, Eli cries out, ‘Fu!’ and makes frantic finger movements at whatever it is he wants to be provided with. Ignoring his requests results in loud, prolonged complaint. Chantal Kelly, twice his size, is his mortal enemy. This is a shame, as the legal proprietor of Maggie and Kelly’s Pantechnicon is the only mortal, enemy or friend, kind enough to offer me remunerative employ.
Eli is a big baby, Chantal is bigger. He is a loud baby, she is louder.
She walked when she was ten months old; Eli seems set to sit on his bottom for the rest of his life. While she is framing sentences of intricate vocabul
ary, he sticks with his one word, ‘Fu!’
Yet we know what he means: we are not to ignore his manhood at any cost.
We don’t come across many of his sex during waking hours. It tends to be women who come to rummage among the bits and pieces in the Pantechnicon. Eli is saving himself for the day when.
Dadda.
Has just walked into the shop.
‘Sibella!’ he says, as if we were old friends. Eli, sitting on the counter with Stella’s recently discarded turban in his hands, stares. Dadda crouches and levels his luscious blues with Eli’s gold standards. Eli puts Stella’s hat on Dadda’s head. Dadda puts the hat on Eli’s head. Eli to Dadda. Dadda to Eli. Eli, who rarely laughs, laughs. Dadda laughs. Comrades. It’s enough to make you sick.
Dadda has been overseas again and has come back to Melbourne this time, rather than Sydney. Yesterday, his picture was all over the papers. He has sold a painting to the Tate. Beside him in the photos, the featherless Brolga in fur, calling herself his agent.
I say nothing, determined to stick by Allegra’s rule of giving bastards a wide berth.
‘He’s a very handsome fellow, Sibella. Ye-es,’ says Dadda.
Dadda has been talking to our mother. He tried to give her some money, but she wouldn’t take it. Allegra will have nothing to do with him.
‘Would you take the money, Sibella?’ he asks. ‘I don’t want you girls and the baby to suffer just because your parents don’t get on.’
‘It isn’t that, Dadda. If you’re happy with her, that’s your business. But we don’t want to be pensioned off. We don’t want to hear what you’re doing without us, either. It would be better if you kept it to yourself.’
‘But I don’t want to have hurt you.’
‘I suppose murderers don’t want to have committed murder, either, Dadda. But there’s no going back.’
‘That isn’t a fair comparison, Sibella.’
‘Why did you marry our mother if you didn’t love her?’
‘I did love your mother. She was unusual, pretty, kind. She tried very hard for me. I appreciate it. I owe your mother a great deal, but equally, I owe a lot to Viva.’
‘Not equally!’
‘She has done a lot for me.’
‘You’re her trophy.’
‘Isobel!’
‘You are, Dadda. She’s triumphant at your side.’
‘I knew her first, Sibella, before I knew your mother.’
‘Why didn’t you marry her, then?’
‘There are many things that could happen that don’t. I might equally say to you, why didn’t you marry the father of your son?’
‘He was married already.’
‘There, you see, there are reasons for everything.’ Having cleared that one up, he adopts an air of quiet confidentiality. ‘I was in love when I was your age, too.’
‘I don’t want to hear.’
But he leans forward on the counter, bends under my hung head and looks me in the eye. ‘In Paris when I was nineteen.’
‘I’ll block my ears if you tell me,’ I say, but he holds my wrists firmly and continues looking me in the eye.
‘When your mother and I met, Sibella, I wasn’t the only one with another story. Your mother was wearing an engagement ring when I met her. She’s still wearing it. I had neither the right nor the inclination to stop her wearing it. She called you Isobel. Perhaps it wasn’t after your Motte grandmother at all, perhaps it was for the daughter she might have had with this man. Your mother lived another life in her head. It was a life I couldn’t share.’
‘Maybe you didn’t want to share it.’
‘No. I couldn’t share it. It was your mother’s way of coping.’
‘Your mother, your mother. Why don’t you call her by her name?’
Dadda lets go my wrists. He puts his hands in his pockets and then slowly turns around, looking upwards at a wind chime. ‘You can’t make people over again. They’re only there once. I tried to love Stella partly because she was sweet and partly because I thought she’d been through an experience similar to my own, and we could comfort each other. It didn’t work. We married without knowing each other. Our family backgrounds, our beliefs, just weren’t compatible.’
‘Well, what good’s Viva Laurington to you?’
‘She knows about me. She wants to know.’
‘She’s so horrible and heartless.’
‘That’s how you feel,’ he says. ‘She knows art. I’m afraid your mother … Stella, doesn’t. I’ve looked for other things in myself, but art seems to be all I have.’
‘God! What about us?’
‘You and art, then. You and Eli and Allegra and art.’
‘But you can’t have us and her.’
‘Then all I have is art.’
He does not look me in the eye again, but caresses Eli’s head, then kisses it and kisses me and then he is gone. He has left behind a teapot on the counter. It is a strange teapot, brown, with two spouts. Inside, a cellophane butterfly on a wire spring and a lump of money.
NINE
Respect: the Odyssey of the Walnut Table
UNCLE GARTH USED to lilt his way through The Windhover when I was small and on the hottest of those hot summer days, I would shiver when he came to ‘blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,/Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion’. I could never explain to myself the power of vermilion, how it was greater, warmer, more marvellous than gold, how it released me from oppression and made of my uncle’s voice a sound striving to lose itself in the universe. This word, this thought, vermilion, must be the Resurrection. The drunken body of Garth would not redeem him, but his passionate voice, though it resounded in numb isolation, afforded him his glimpse of paradise. I seemed to find God when I listened to him reciting Hopkins, and God was profound. We were not made in God’s image, but could only catch flashes of something infinitely more beautiful than we could comprehend.
God was beyond me, and I knew on earth we’d got it wrong. From childhood upwards I found I could not walk into a religious place without feeling defrauded and ashamed. In adulthood, although I could feel the sincerity of the people who believed, I was horrified by the stupidity of belief itself. Churches made me feel self-conscious, sermons made me angry. There was no genuine comfort in the world, no grace. It was all just an outpouring of rote-learned words for the occasion. Catholicism, with its plaster representations of divinity, was laughable. Protestantism was parsimony carried over into everyday life.
Where was the essence in religion? We could name its component parts, but inevitably, in the naming, we besmirched that which it is beyond our power to describe. Was the human race, by its make-up, then, condemned to an eternal naming of the parts? In personality, I, like my father, wavered towards those who believe that to search for the essence of things is a waste of time; such activity leads to infinite regression, anything might be called an essence, so it seems the human lot to be stuck with naming things and demonstrating how they work as things. I began my life as a painter immersed in this mental set. It was a bleak one – works of Dadda’s, such as his refrigerator chapel, demonstrated that meaning was easily lost or subverted and suggested that it might be more honest to worship fridges than to worship God.
There was something in Dadda’s work too difficult for me when I was a young painter; while his outlook was bleak, it was mocking rather than angry. I felt I belonged among people who were more passionate than Dadda; I felt that if I did belong among those people, Dadda would be stung. He would be sorry. So it was with my generation, we turned against images, and we turned in anger – you want images, we’ll give you images was how it started – and we gave them American hegemony, blood, ugliness, effluence and greed; we gave them sex and guns and lies. In time, we would deny the image altogether and, with us, the image would take from, or sink through, the canvas, leaving only its minimal representation.
In time, we would learn that minimalism is not a virtue in itself, that there are times in history w
hen simplification increases the power of statement, and times when it is merely trite. On the way to that understanding, however, our search would lead us to an altered understanding of religion. We would expose ourselves to Eastern orthodoxies. Unfortunately, we would do it from a position of affluence and, in time, we would make connivers of gurus, and gurus of connivers.
So we exposed emptiness: an emptiness in which our own footsteps would come back to us. And if we had read history we would have known it was not the first time a generation had found itself in a sepulchral cul-de-sac.
Notwithstanding my experiences as a painter, I still find churches either grandiose or banal. However, there is one Lady Chapel, attached to a college in Melbourne, in which the concept of grace seems to have been deeply understood by its creator. Pews adzed from heavy beams lie horizontal in a mothering space. The atmosphere is steeped in motherhood, apprehended as a holy idea.
I came on this place when I had no one to turn to, when I was lonely, sick and unhappy. I am not religious, yet I know the context of being is immeasurably larger than the self. I know we are contained. Before I was in this Lady Chapel I had never incanted a prayer that gave me comfort. But in there, instead of dogma, I found symbols, guides to a way of thinking, to choosing hope, even when in despair – and I remembered Uncle Garth reciting Hopkins, ‘Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee.’ For Hopkins, Christ’s mother symbolised the life force. ‘Wild air, world-mothering,’ he called her. And in her, ‘God’s infinity/Dwindled to infancy.’
Mad Meg Page 14