by David Malouf
The Front Verandah is the place as well where travellers appear and show their wares, men who go from door to door (or did then) with sample-cases containing sheets, towels, pillowslips, ‘longeray’ and lines of wholesale grocery. I remember one or two of these fellows for their loud suits and moustaches and their jokey good-humour, or because they would try to ingratiate themselves with the little master of the house by shaking out a stick of Wrigley’s chewing-gum, which I regularly, of course, refused. But when I summon up the Front Verandah, my mother’s ladies refuse, individually, to appear; they fade into one another in a single hum. Only as I recall them from later occasions, and in other places, do they settle out and become unique characters and stories:
Mrs Robbie, my Aunt Frances’s inseparable friend, inseparable herself from a huge clasp handbag in which she appears to be carrying all her household possessions.
The cast of Mrs Robbie’s face is downward, as if she were under the influence of an exceptional response to the forces of gravity; or perhaps it is just the burden of her life with ‘Robbie’. Her cheeks sag; she has heavy bags under her beadlike eyes, and above them a drooping fold instead of a lid. Her ear lobes are elongated under the weight of antique earrings. Her clothes, which are in tones of brown, are at least two decades out of date. They are composed entirely of tattered shawls and she wears what I see as a string of mothballs round her neck.
Mrs Lewis, who talks – once she gets going you can’t get a word in edgeways. She’s a real ear-basher. Mrs Lewis likes to knit while she talks, and I am fascinated by the correspondence between the endless clatter of her needles and her false teeth, which she appears to have synchronised to the one rhythm. Most ladies use two needles; Mrs Lewis needs three. One purl, one plain, the needles go, but fast – clackclackclack. ‘I said,’ ‘she said,’ says Mrs Lewis, producing woolly rigmaroles.
Maisie – minxlike. No longer quite young, she has modelled herself on Mrs Simpson. Slim, spruce, tanned, she wears neat little suits with flashes on the lapels, white collars, false bow-ties in pillar-box red and navy, and she paints her legs rather than wear stockings, though you can hardly tell. She is full of quick come-backs and has been something in vaudeville. She knows the show people who appear weekly at the Cremorne, and has the air, still, of being able to tap up a storm or be sawn in two, if required, by a gentleman in tails. She is a tough nut and has once, no doubt, been fast, but she has slowed down in my mother’s company and is lady enough in our house never to light up.
But all this is as I come to know them later. Early on they are indistinguishable, just visitors. If, from my end of the verandah, I glance up from playing with one of my toy cars, they are a cloud of whispers and talc, barely held down, they are so volatile, by their earrings, the clasps on their handbags, their bones, the bones in their corsets, their engagement- and wedding-rings, and the buckles on their patent-leather shoes. When I look back steadily only one woman is there, and she is a stranger.
She is, perhaps, twenty-six or seven, tall, dark, heavy, none too clean; what my mother, with her English eye for distinctions, calls ‘common’. She has just fallen down in the street and been brought in until she feels well enough to go on. She is flopped in one of our squatter’s chairs with her dirty stockinged feet up on the arms, and my mother is giving her a cup of tea – in a cup and saucer from our breakfast set – while Cassie goes down to my grandmother’s for Auntie Olga.
The woman is pregnant but I don’t see that. What impresses me about the woman is not her interesting condition but the interesting condition of her being there at all – the unlikeliness of her having got into the house by anything but extraordinary means. She has lit up an Ardath and is smoking. Nobody smokes in our house; certainly no lady has ever done so. Once settled with her feet up she seems so much at home that I wonder if she will ever move. (And in fact in my memory she never does. She goes on sitting there for ever.) It is her looking so settled in a place where she should never have been that strikes me, and makes her, in retrospect, the only possessor, the permanent occupant, of that particular chair. She is the only person I can actually see there.
I suppose she must have left eventually. I do not recall it. What I recall is that when my Auntie Olga of the V.A.D.s arrived, and found her smoking, she was delivered a fearful lecture on the dangers of nicotine to unborn infants and told to stub the thing out immediately.
She does, fiercely, on the arm of the chair, and at the same time she utters a word I have never heard outside the schoolyard or in the remotest corners of under-the-house. It is a word that twenty years later will be commonplace; but back there it punches such a hole in the clear fabric of things that I might have looked right through it into the future and seen a whole new generation, a different world.
She has stumbled into the wrong decade, this young woman – that too constitutes her ‘interesting condition’. She is a ghost of the future. No wonder my mother looks appalled.
But there she is, tall, dark, heavy, none too clean and pregnant; making the canvas sag with her weight. And there she remains, an obstacle I have to step around for ever after, occupying our Front Verandah as solidly, as inevitably, as the chair she has made her own.
The Front Verandah ends at an invisible barrier which we children are forbidden to pass. Beyond, at the point where you can see along the side verandah into her room, it becomes Cassie’s Verandah.
I am powerfully attracted. If there is something in Cassie’s room, I reason, that my parents want to keep from me, it can only have to do with her ambiguous position among us. Cassie is close but she is not family. She comes from outside and has a family of her own, two sisters, both married, and a father from Harrisville who comes to visit her twice each year, a tall fellow, very spare and straight, with a moustache like the man on the Sloane’s Liniment bottle. I have had occasion to observe and note his strangeness.
He has a little silver-handled pocket-knife, and I sat and watched him once, settled in his shirtsleeves on our back porch, with his boot-heels on the verandah rails and his chair tilted back in a manner that I knew would damage the legs, peel an apple and slice it into quarters, then into even thinner pieces which one by one he shook salt on and slowly chewed. When he saw me observing him, he paused, considered for a moment, then held out a slice.
I had never seen anyone eat an apple with salt before. It was a custom utterly foreign to me – outlandish. So that is what it means, I thought, to be not family.
Cassie works for us. When people ask me ‘Is Cassie your maid?’ I vigorously deny it. We never refer to her as that. My grandmother calls Della, the big dim-witted, one-toothed girl who slaves in her kitchen behind the shop, ‘the maid’. It isn’t nice. Cassie cooks and cleans for us and is paid twenty-two and six a week, plus board. She is my mother’s help and confidante and her ally against the aunts. She eats her meals with us and loves us as her own, but is anomalous. She has her own room, her own life, which we are forbidden to enter or even to look into from a distance, and a gentleman friend, Cassie’s Jack, a forty-five year-old veteran of Gallipoli and the Somme who is Dublin-born and does odd jobs for the nuns up at St Mary’s. (One day in the near future they will marry. Cassie will leave us, and then, after yet another of my father’s renovations, come back to live on her verandah in a little two-roomed, self-contained flat.)
Cassie’s Room belongs to the life she lives apart from us, across clear boundaries that begin and end at seven o’clock at night and seven the following morning, and other, less clear but equally inviolable, that begin at some point, far to the left along the Front Verandah, where you might get a look into her room. I test the point continually. Can I see? Now can I? It is easy to let a little car, once its wheels have been wound up, go whizzing, all of its own accord, too far along the floorboards, and find the barrier is merely notional and can be crossed.
I cross it. Determined to get to the source of at least one mystery, I go further. In a moment of extravagant bravado I break into Cas
sie’s Room – I am maybe four years old and it is not difficult, the door is wide open – and am deeply disappointed. It smells different, that is true, but I cannot isolate the source of the smell. If there is something forbidden here I can’t lay my hands on it. There is no mystery. After poking about for a bit I find a jar of Pond’s cold cream. I remove the lid, sniff, use a finger: a honey smell. And since Cassie is associated in my mind with things to eat, I sit cross-legged on the floor, and in a ritual the simplest savage would understand, set myself solemnly, steadily, to swallow the stuff to the last sickly dollop.
My sister and I have no room of our own in this earlier house. We sleep in home-made cots on the verandah beyond our parents’ bedroom window, where we are in easy reach.
The verandah is closed on that side by a fernery, or, as I see it, opens on that side into it. Diagonal slats of unpainted timber gone grey with age are hung with stag horns, elk horns, orchids that sprout from fleshy knobs, and shaggy wire baskets of hare’s foot and maidenhair. The ground is all sword-ferns round a pond with three opulent goldfish. Behind it is a kind of grotto made of pinkish-grey concrete, a dozen scaly branches of which, eaten raw in places, droop and tangle like the arms, half-petrified, half-rotting, of a stranded sea monster.
The Fernery scares me. Being taken out of the house each night and set to sleep beside it is like being put down at the edge of a rain-forest. Those stag horns, huge blunt-nosed decapitations, those hairy fern-stalks with flesh-pale coils at the end, go too far back to the primordial damp and breath of things. If I step out there, I think, in my sleep for instance, sleep-walking, I will get time-lost, I will turn back into some smooth or hairy green thing with dirt in my fists.
I fiercely resent our sleeping arrangements. I have the strong sense, when we are put to bed out there, however much hugging and kissing we are allowed, and last trips to the bathroom, and last drinks of water, that we are being abandoned, shut out, not only from the continuing life of the house, which goes on well past the boundary of our seven o’clock bedtime (for my parents play bridge in the evening, and over a late supper of savoury biscuits and cake exchange what I take to be the real news of the day), but from the house itself, that secure enclosure.
A verandah is not part of the house. Even a child knows this. It is what allows travelling salesmen, with one foot on the step to heave their cases over the threshold and show their wares with no embarrassment on either side, no sense of privacy violated. It has allowed my mother, with her strict notion of the forms, to bring a perfect stranger in off the street and settle her (for ever as it happens) in one of our squatter’s chairs. Verandahs are no-man’s-land, border zones that keep contact with the house and its activities on one face but are open on the other to the street, the night and all the vast, unknown areas beyond.
I reject my cot and refuse to stay there. I become a night wanderer, a rebel nomad trailing my blanket through the house to my favourite camping places: behind the Hall Door (where I can squinny through a crack and watch the card-play, and overhear – what? what?); between wireless and wall in the Piano Room. Though when I wake in the morning I am always outside again, at the edge of the Fernery, behind the bars of my cot.
Perhaps it is this daily experience of being cast out and then let in again that has made the house and all its rooms so precious to me. Each morning I step across the threshold and there it is, a world recovered, restored.
3
THE MAIN DOOR of the house, beyond the Front Verandah, is of stained cedar, with brass locks and door knob and lights of a milky-blue jellyfish colour. It is kept permanently open with a stopper, an outsized frog.
To the right, down a hallway with a Persian runner, is the bedroom where my parents sleep. Their door too is always open, it being a convention in these houses that nothing is seen or heard that is not meant to be. The convention soon becomes a habit. Air circulates from room to room through a maze of interconnecting spaces; every breath can be heard, every creak of a bed-post or spring; you sleep, in the humid summer nights, outside the sheet and with as little clothing as decency allows; and yet privacy is perfectly preserved. A training in perception has as much to do with what is ignored and passed over as with what is observed. You see what you are meant to see. You hear when you are called.
Beyond our parents’ room is the spare room where visitors are put, and where in the early afternoon, like most ladies, our mother takes her nap, sometimes with my sister and me beside her.
On the other side of the Hall, opening immediately off it through an archway with pierced slats in the spandrels and occupying the whole of that half of the house, is our Front Room, a big high-ceilinged room with hexagonal silk lampshades fringed with gold, sash windows at knee heights that are heavily curtained and stuck with paint, and stained panelling to the plate rack, beyond which, like the rest of the interior, it is tongue-and-groove.
On the wall opposite my parents’ bed is a framed picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, a real oil painting so thickly varnished that its medium seems like the coagulated darkness of another world, which the Jesus figure, with hollow cheeks and a pained but forgiving expression, pushes through into the faint light of this one. The wall at that point, in a miraculous way that defies mere geography, is open to another order of reality and an atmosphere so heavy that it might be difficult to breathe. Just looking into the frame makes you breathless. Any illumination in there comes from the Sacred Heart itself, a metal object, perfectly symmetrical, radiant with some sort of extraterrestrial magnetism and proclaiming its brand name in incandescent gold.
The picture dominates the room. Not because of its luminosity, which is intense, or the power of its subject (however bizarre it may be to have a metal heart glowing out of your rib cage, and to be pointing to it with a burning finger), or because of Our Lord’s grave expression (‘a yard and a half of misery’, my mother would call it – it is just the sort of face my sister and I could never get away with), but because the painting, like Jesus himself, is an intrusion.
A wedding present from my father’s family, it is the source of deep resentment. My mother is a non-Catholic. It was only with the greatest reluctance that she signed us over, before we were born, to the Church. The Sorrowful Witness has been spirited into our parents’ bedroom by my grandmother, as a kind of celestial superintendent or voyeur. He gazes perpetually down over the foot of the bed out of His other world; not disapproving but head-on-side-regretful, and with the light streaming out of that heart-shaped appliance like a torchbeam that will never be turned off.
Though it has no door, and the knee-high window to our verandah is always raised, we have learned early, my sister and I, that this room is not to be trespassed upon. Its thresholds are magic barriers.
The drawers of our mother’s dressing-table are full of temptations to small hands, and all its crystal is breakable. She keeps her private treasures here in a marvellous tangle of chains, ribbons, hairpieces, silver-mesh evening bags, and in several boxes, none of them locked. One is of ivory. It contains her family heirlooms, a seal of my grandfather’s and Grandma’s Victorian jewellery. Another has compartments for a little set of scales and a jar of dried-up aqua fortis. These come from the days when our mother, as a carefree girl of nineteen or twenty, went gold-buying with a married sister, all through the country towns of Southern Queensland in an open Hup. Yet another, a cigar box, is stacked with the Christmas and birthday cards (too many) of our father’s courtship.
On one side of the dressing-table is my mother’s cut-crystal dressing-table set – stoppered scent bottle and atomiser, two heavy bowls, one diamond-shaped for jewellery, the round one for dusky powder and puff – and on the other the spirit lamp she keeps burning in memory of her departed parents. It shows a real light, a milky glow, unlike the garish painted one of the Sacred Heart, and she tends it, pouring in the methylated spirits, trimming the wick, with a piety that might, if I understood, tell me a good deal about what she most deeply believes. (When we
left Edmondstone Street she gave up the little lamp – we didn’t take the Sacred Heart to the new house either – and my mother, I thought, was changed. She seemed freed at last of a whole troop of ghosts, including the ghost of England, that in our first house had kept her constrained. But by then, of course, the whole world had changed. The war was over, the old pieties were dying; we had entered a new and freer age.)
It strikes me now that that house was not simply the house of my own childhood, as I have so far presented it, but a house of children. Even my parents are more like older children playing Mothers and Fathers than real adults: she the dutiful daughter and keeper of the flame, he his mother’s boy, still referring to my grandmother’s house as ‘down home’, and still in thrall, for all his male assurance, to that small, soft, demanding woman who two or three times a week sends up his favourite dishes, the old-country cabbage-rolls and sweet things my mother does not cook. He lives with us but Grandma’s is his address. She still insists that the postman leave his letters there, and he collects them on his way from work.
A decade later my mother will become a power in her own right, a business woman of extraordinary daring and flair; but in the days of the Sacred Heart and the little spirit lamp she is in the shadows, and I see now that she must often have raged inwardly with a sense of herself as powerfully unused, with energies she could not express in the polite round of social duties she was limited to, shopping expeditions to the Sales, morning tea at department stores with the Girls. Perhaps it is for this reason that she seems, in retrospect, childishly wilful at times, and spoiled, and why my father, though essentially a strong man, is so soft with her. I see them, in their big bed with the rounded shell-like ends, and under the gaze of the Sorrowful Watcher, as child conspirators, snatching what freedom they can from the grown-ups. Though there were occasions as well when my father’s loyalties went the other way and he sided (we could feel it in the aggrieved silences with which my mother filled the house; she was a great sulker) with my grandmother and the league of aunts.