Mad Meg

by Sally Morrison

  I couldn’t eat the lunch Reg bought for us in Queenscliff at Mietta’s. However, the old hotel, lovingly restored to opulence, full of light and air and respect for things well done, conjured up visions of Euphrosyne breaking a long journey here, or simply coming to have some time at the sea, and for a while I felt better and downed a couple of glasses of white wine.

  We arrived at the beach house at about three in the afternoon. Just as I had heard, the beach front had very little to recommend it; a smear of sand and pebble kept the tilting greenish sea with its scrolling straps of kelp from a low sea wall, then there was some unkempt grass, a straggle of road and a spruce hedge, behind which the house disclosed itself.

  What I had heard about the house was correct, too. It was of unambiguous lines, the work of a person or persons with a highly developed sense of proportion. White painted weatherboard, large without seeming so, it sat on flat ground, an elegant iron roof sweeping down from the ridge to create a deep, shaded verandah around all that could be seen from the front. There were three large, white, wooden sun lounges in the verandah’s shade. I had to say I liked it, it was Harryish, and in spite of his evasion of the truth, I wanted to think well of Harry. Inside it was as he had said, furnished and carpeted all in white, the bathroom pristine with its immaculate old ball and claw, the bedrooms featuring beds so soft they might have illustrated ‘The Princess and the Pea’, their taffeta-covered eiderdowns just like Nina’s, only white. It was an interior upon which anyone might impress their story without feeling blotted out. Perhaps Harry’s mother had collected rare stories as well as rare plants.

  The artist-in-residence, an Englishman called Jack Ives, was stretching canvases on the lawn. He stood up to greet us, holding out his hand. He was a smallish man though well built, a bit self-conscious, freckly faced with thinning red hair. Reg had said he took himself far too seriously, which made me think he was probably a very good and very committed painter and Reg, who confessed to being more self-indulgent than anyone else he knew, felt threatened.

  ‘How’re you going to get that inside?’ asked Reg, probably thinking that the ‘Pom’ wouldn’t have thought out the practicalities of stretching a large canvas out of doors. But he had thought of them. There was a converted stable at the back of the house with a large number of floor-to-ceiling racks, and Reg’s blood probably curdled further when he saw that there were a great many large paintings hanging on them.

  And they were superb paintings, superb. Reg probably didn’t like it at all when I couldn’t stop myself from saying so.

  Jack Ives was addressing all the academic concerns we had given thought to at Figments and Mad Meg, and yet he was an expressive painter. All else aside, the Siècle Trust, The Brolga and Checkie and whatever might be the truth concerning them, here was a brilliant painter. A wizard with a powerful, sweeping arm; a creator; a destroyer.

  And a man of few words, very few. He excused himself and continued working. Reg and I sat on the sun lounges and drank more wine. He’d brought me half-a-dozen good reds and half-a-dozen good whites. He’d also brought food and blankets and the sort of painting materials he knew I liked. I was touched. Reg didn’t have to take an interest in me, but it was his care, as much as anything else, that brought me through this most difficult time of my life.

  After Reg went Jack Ives left me alone, sitting on the verandah, pleasantly numb around the lips and cheekbones from drinking. Harry’s mother’s Australian native garden was planted in an odd, almost military fashion inside the spruce hedge. I could see the grevilleas and the raised rectangle of ground that was probably Leslie Hallett’s grave. This grave had found its way into some of Jack Ives’s paintings as a white geometric shape which excluded and repelled the living forms around it.

  I was curious to see the work again and stole, barefooted, around the back of the house to take another peep. He was squatting on the ground, still absorbed in his task and oblivious of me. I stood, glass in hand, on a mat of flattened golden grass, in an angle of shade where I wouldn’t be seen.

  Though the landscapes were expressively painted, both vibrant and alive, it seemed to me he was painting the self as observer, the blank, mechanical, impersonal self, the orderer. These paintings acknowledged the existence of the human machine, like the calipers that turned Arnie Russell into the gold standard of love. It had certainly been an automatic, sexually driven interaction. There was an inveterate philistine wrapped up in that Gold Standard. I’d fallen for him in the way Granpa might have fallen for a cow.

  Jack Ives’s calipers imposed the rules of observation on the human aesthete, rules both painter and viewer shared. As a painter, he seemed to be up very high, using a brush with a very long handle and a very wide sweep, so while he was the inventor of these pictures, he did not invent the rules by which they were pictures. In those he was a participant.

  As I made my way back to the verandah through the slants of afternoon light, I began to think about Link and laughed at myself. I hadn’t exactly started a love affair with him, but he’d been there through the worst of Allegra’s suicide. When I finally started sleeping at night, he’d stayed with me, slept in the same bed and consoled me when I fell from sleep into horrible awakenings. It was several months now, and he was talking of getting a girlfriend, so I had better stop my deluded mind from wandering. Link was beautiful, but it was I who needed him, not he who needed me.

  I couldn’t guess what Eli thought about it all. He’d just said, ‘Don’t hurt Link, Mum. He’s only young.’

  I was feeling cut off from Eli. I wondered if I knew him or understood him at all. We had the problem of David between us now, and it seemed insurmountable. I was at a complete loss to know what his feelings for David consisted of. Was it a man-to-man thing? A father–son thing? I couldn’t guess.

  I hated myself because I did not even long for Eli anymore, as I had when he was a small child and the dearest of all people to me. I know now that I was feeling as Allegra had felt, as though I had run out of life, convinced, absolutely certain, I had run out of life. Those brilliant paintings around the back of the house represented everything I myself had ever attempted in art; I’d never paint as well as that. No. I would stick around a little longer, until everything was in order and my mother and Nin and Eli would be catered for, and then: I could see only good resulting from my death.

  But before I died I would go and peer more closely at the rare Australiana, find Leslie Hallett’s grave and sift the dirt that lay over it through my fingers.

  I was about to swing myself off the sun lounge and do just that when something totally unexpected happened. The Brolga came to pay Jack Ives a visit.

  The Daimler slid up over drying fronds of spruce recently cut from the hedge. My first impulse was to go inside and lock myself in, but I fought it and stayed where I was, making myself virtually the first thing she saw. Jack Ives was still around the back of the house.

  She sat there for a while, eyeing me, her hand on the knob of the car radio which was spewing out news. Then, with precision, she clicked the radio off, swung from her seat and opened the car door in the same movement, put her handbag on the roof of the car and shut the door with care, still watching me.

  She did not avoid me but crossed in front of her car, came over to me and sat on the end of the sun lounge. I was turning away from her, that stake in my chest starting to do its horrible work all over again.

  ‘May I have a drink with you, Isobel?’ she asked. I didn’t move but she got up, skirted the lounge, took up the glass from which Reg had been drinking, poured herself some wine and sat facing me so I couldn’t avoid her.

  ‘I didn’t know you’d be here,’ she said, managing sincerity. ‘Had I known, I would have left you in peace. I’m just down here to organise some transport for Jack’s paintings. We’ll be showing him at the Trust next week. Are you able to talk to me?’

  I nodded.

  ‘You’ve been to see Harry.’

  I nodded.

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nbsp; ‘He told me.’ She sipped, holding me in a gaze that seemed to have much more to do with the person behind it than with me. She was going to tell me the truth and she wasn’t afraid. She was dressed in white, the saint of the charlatans. She had dressed to match the house. All kinds of accusations coursed through me, only to jam like logs in a river. I was in great pain.

  Meeting my eye only occasionally, she said, ‘It’s quite strange I should find myself sitting here talking to you on this lovely, deep verandah of Harry’s mother’s house. I might have lived an entirely different life, but I was always attracted by this kind of poise.’

  Poise! I thought. Then, Poison! ‘Thank God it’s you and not your sister, Isobel. Henry’s dead. I’m not good at grief.’ The log jam was making me curl forwards in my desire to attack, but I could not sit up; there was a heavy slab of grief preventing me.

  ‘You look uncomfortable.’ But she made no effort to relieve me, no kindly gesture, she might as well have been preparing to tell her life’s story to the sun lounge.

  ‘I’ve come a long way from my beginnings, Isobel. Do you know that?’

  Finding myself unable to speak, I shook my head.

  ‘Do you want to know?’

  I nodded again.

  ‘Tell me if you want me to stop.’ How could I tell her? My voice box was jammed.

  She stood up and stretched, running a hand over the small of her back. I felt like saying, ‘You’ve seen Gone with the Wind too many times.’

  ‘I’m a timber feller’s daughter,’ she said, not knowing, nor even inclined to read what was in my mind. Turning towards me, she leant against the verandah post, dressed in white, certainly, but blocking the light, her shadow long and attenuated – like a brolga’s, I thought grimly. As she settled into her story, I felt she’d lied about not knowing I was here. She must have known – Harry would have told her. Perhaps, all the same, her original sincerity was meant, though whether for her own sake or mine I couldn’t tell. She would have thought it all out, what she would tell and what she would not – perhaps she would tell it all.

  ‘East of Melbourne there’s a group of little towns,’ she went on. It was not a spur-of-the-moment story; she’d spent a long time composing it. There began a hot, live pain in my viscera, better than the seizure in my chest, at least.

  ‘They used to call them the timber towns. They’re really quite picturesque to drive through. Very green. Very green because they’re very wet – in winter, anyway. They’re in a mountain ash forest. I don’t really know who lives there these days, but I like to drive through sometimes in the Daimler and to look out and to say, “Aren’t these picturesque little villages?” as if I knew nothing about them. Sometimes I go to a certain pub up there and I might have a drink with the men in the bar. If they know who I am, they don’t acknowledge me.

  ‘Last time I went I had a conversation with a young man, a Koori, not a full blood. A nice, garrulous young man – a little bit drunk – who told me he wanted to write, to write poetry. He’d given up working with the Department of Conservation, Forest and Lands, even though he said these days they planted as much timber as they felled and there weren’t, strictly speaking, any straight timber fellers anymore; people these days were trained. They had more skills, they planted as many trees as they culled and knew how to work the modern machinery, designed to reduce damage to forests. Still, this young man didn’t want to work with his brawn anymore. He’d had enough of it; he wanted to work with his brain.

  ‘We were sitting at the bar, and on the other side of me was an old man, well, ostensibly old, though I know for a fact he’s no older than me. I went to school with this old-looking man.’

  I couldn’t feel any sense in what she was saying. I could see a seagull raking through Dadda on Leslie Hallett’s grave, and thought maybe a goodly proportion of Dadda was seagull by now. And ant, perhaps, and cruel little curled-up clover seeds.

  ‘He didn’t recognise me and I didn’t enlighten him, and not only because at an alcove table behind us there was a woman who’d been to school with us, too. A toothless antique with a shopping trolley full of port.’

  Then I began to register The Brolga as an elderly woman. Her hair, once dark brown, was now predominantly grey; there was virtually no colour left in her once-blue eyes, her slimness, which had made her look so chic, had become thinness. Her legs were so skinny that her pantihose was bagging a bit at one of the ankles. She caught me staring. ‘Seventy next birthday,’ she said, and with a shock I realised that Dadda, too, would have been seventy and, though I felt like a child in her presence, I myself was now middle-aged and had seen the faces of my friends take on their kinder, older lineaments as well.

  She continued. ‘The old man laughed at the young one’s saying he wanted to work with his brains, but it wasn’t necessarily cruel laughter.

  ‘When we were children there was a horrific fire through the area. About twenty locals were killed. Those of us who were lucky enough to make it in time were protected by sheltering in a dugout, which is a series of underground passages cut in a zigzag into a hill. Over the entrance you hang a blanket that dangles in a trough of water. The blanket takes the water up, as an oil wick takes up oil. Where there are great, out-of-control fires there is usually wind, and the idea of the blanket is to filter out smoke, because most people die of smoke inhalation in fires.

  ‘Now, those who have never been in a raging fire cannot know that it travels as fast or faster than a speeding car, so people on foot are done for. The reason why my old schoolfellow was laughing was that the state government in its wisdom has seen fit to bulldoze the dugouts in the timber towns and replace them with an emergency plan. People now are required to congregate in local school halls, some of which are weatherboard and raised off the ground, and none of which has been built with any particular regard to protecting them from fire.

  ‘You can imagine the heat of a fire in tall timber – well, you can’t imagine it – it’s a lethal heat, attended by smoke overhead. How are people to be rescued from above-ground buildings? They would be better off sitting inside a hill. But, as the old man pointed out, this country is full of experts and academics who know better than anyone else. They have even dispensed with fire trails cut through timber to allow easy access to spot-fires. I suppose you would call it desk or computer forestry.

  ‘The reason I tell you this is to point out that people in timber towns are still regarded with contempt, as if no wisdom resided there among them.

  ‘I grew up in that atmosphere. My mother was a minister’s daughter. After my father came back from the First World War he left an unviable soldier settlement in the Mallee for a logging job.

  ‘He became a tree feller, but really he wasn’t robust enough for that kind of life and he started drinking, believing his fortunes had fallen so far he’d never be able to pull himself out of the mess.

  ‘There was another problem with my father. I was born during the war while he was away on active service in the navy. It seems he doubted that I was his child. I don’t know what grounds he had for doing so, and I shall never know myself whether he was or was not my father.

  ‘Tree felling took its toll on him physically. He was often injured: strained muscles, split hands, that kind of thing, so he spent quite a large amount of time at home. And then came the timber strike in 1929, when he couldn’t have worked even if he’d wanted to.

  ‘I was eleven when my father went on strike. They were out for months and things were very hard indeed in towns such as the one where we lived. There was not enough food, and people like my mother walked to richer towns to beg for it.

  ‘There was no food, but somewhere or other there was drink, because as things got worse my father and several other men alleviated their misery with alcohol. You’ve no idea how it was to be in a family with a father who drank. The families where the men didn’t drink either looked down on us or pitied us. There is a kind of respectability among those people; they’re intensely prac
tical and very knowledgeable about the bush. Men who are suited to the life have no need to drink. So you can understand it when I say that we, who had neither brawn nor practicality nor stoicism, were the lowest of the low.

  ‘We lived in what you could only call a shack. Outside it was unpainted weatherboard with a tin roof, and inside there were four rooms, all unlined. My little brother and I slept in the same bed. Sometimes it snowed in winter. The bedclothes were never adequate, nor were the clothes we wore in the day.

  ‘My father, having no work to do, became vindictive and began to use me to reproach my mother with adultery. He destroyed her spirit by degrees. You think I’m a cold woman, Isobel, but I’ve felt things. When I was a child, I felt my body was full of worms. I hated the way we lived. I would lie in bed at night with my life tying itself in knots in my stomach. I was physically cold, I was afraid, I couldn’t sleep. My nights were an endurance of dark hours.

  ‘My father was genuinely not well enough to go to work during the Depression. All the same, he would have to queue up with the trainloads of unemployed men who would arrive in our town and huddle round the boiler in the sawmill from about five in the morning onwards, hoping for work. A boss would come, choose the ones who looked fit and send the others packing back to Melbourne or wherever else they might have come from. For rejected locals it was very demoralising.

  ‘Then my mother got a job, through a friend, in a Melbourne clothing factory. She’d be up before dawn to catch the train and never home before eight at night. I think her plan was to take Leslie and me to Melbourne to live, but she had to establish herself first.

  ‘Her marriage was over, but in those days it was ridiculously difficult to get a divorce. Anyway, her long absences during the day had bad repercussions for me. My father began to get interested in me physically. I won’t go into the sordid details, which are better forgotten anyway, but suffice it to say, my first experience of sex was with him, and when I was fifteen he made me pregnant. I didn’t know how to tell my mother, or even what to tell her. All I knew was that if your periods stopped it could mean you were pregnant. I couldn’t even picture my insides. I was very ignorant. Anyway, I told my mother as best I could. She was appalled, but had the sense and intelligence not to blame me in any way, and to take me up to Melbourne immediately and help me get an abortion. It cost us every bit of money we had, including some her friends at work had collected for her, and all of my father’s she could lay her hands on in the house. She only had enough left for fares.