After the funeral I received condolence letters from a handful of my father’s acquaintances, all of whom found different ways to say the same thing. Here’s one: ‘As a young man he was wonderful fun and a great journalist and we admired him very much. It’s a shame that he seemed to drift away from all that later on.’ And another: ‘In the early days of the South Pacific Post, Ted was an excellent boss and a very good friend. I didn’t have much to do with him in recent years, but I’ll always remember him.’
At lunch my mother tried to talk to Debra about how terrible Ted had been and I saw the way Debra’s mouth tightened out of loyalty to my dad. At the other end of the table, the old friend of my father sat next to eleven-year-old Dan and told him stories of his grandfather and what a fine man he’d been. I listened in, my throat tightening in gratitude.
Next there was the job of cleaning out my father’s flat. Not much was left of what Debra and I used to call ‘Lord Ted’ – the ebullient Lord of the Manor, dispensing hospitality and generosity, his wallet initially full and then happily emptying. The expensive paintings which used to line the Gallery – the hallway of our Canberra house – were all long gone. The furniture had been reduced by a series of relocations to ever smaller accommodation. I saved his personal papers and a few New Guinea artefacts – some spears and ceremonial walking sticks and three side-tables, each carved from a slice of log. I encouraged Robyn to take the paintings she’d particularly liked. A second-hand dealer came and offered $400 for the rest. Robyn and I accepted.
At home, I packed the papers away. A good proportion of the collection consisted of letters from my mother. One was her reply to a condolence letter my father had sent following Mr Phillipps’ death, in which she described her second husband’s funeral:
Dear Teddy. My sincere thanks for your letter of sympathy. The whole business has been a terrible shock, he was such a superbly fit man, neither smoked nor drank, played first-class sport; one would have thought he would outlive us all. I must say the support of all our friends has been my greatest comfort. I have just written my 183rd thank you! I must say that the longer I knew him, the more I appreciated his fine qualities. The end of him is, indeed, the end of my life.
She signed off with the hope that my father was happy and well, and then attached an article from the university staff newsletter detailing Mr Phillipps’ professional achievements plus the order of service from the funeral, showing the participation of the university’s Deputy Vice-Chancellor.
It’s uncertain how happy and well my father felt after receiving her ‘thanks’, the whole thing a coded way of saying ‘Why, oh why, didn’t you die instead of him?’
I flipped through the rest of her letters to my father. They were nearly all about money and her deep unhappiness about the settlement she was given at the time of their divorce. In several different letters, written over many years, she insisted that Mr Phillipps had no share of the hobbit hole house. For my father to give extra funds to her, she argued, would not be giving money to him. She detailed her loans and the low value of her assets. In other letters, again sent over a number of years, she detailed her thrift: ‘I never go to a restaurant, I never have my hair done.’
About a decade and a half after the divorce, she was still writing to Ted:
I do feel very bitter, there is no doubt I got a raw deal out of our twenty-seven years, I know you say I haven’t, but who is the one living in a superb house with cars and another house bringing in rent, and even after that, money invested to give you income? I didn’t even manage to save a penny of the rather poor wages I got for standing untold hours in the newsagency . . . please don’t do what you did last time and ignore my appeal, I really need help from the only person that I feel able, and indeed should be able, to go to.
It was unclear whether my father had sent money, just as it was unclear whether she was right or wrong about the poor deal she’d been given. All I could see was that Ted had covered the typed note in angry doodles.
As I looked at the pile of begging letters, I started to turn around some shards of memory. In particular: my mother’s strange present-giving. Her gifts to me on the occasion of Christmas and my birthday formed part of my arsenal of stories when playing Who’s Got the Weirdest Parents?. Her birthday presents were parsimonious bordering on the hilarious. One year she rang and asked what I’d like for my birthday; I suggested a picnic set, having in mind one of those wicker baskets, with a set of plastic plates, cups and cutlery, all held in place with fake-leather straps. They were relatively cheap and easy to buy. A week later, the postman delivered my gift. My mother had somehow located a secondhand Globite school suitcase, scuffed and stained, into which she’d placed four used plastic plates, all of them heavily knife-scored, a handful of old metal cutlery, thrown in loose, and four chipped china mugs.
For years I’d told the story as a bit of fun, a tale of a tightwad mother with short arms and long pockets. Now, with her letters to my father spread out before me, I saw the picnic basket in less comic terms. It was a cry of rage, really; her way of expressing how tough she was doing it and her anger towards the child who’d sprung from such a financially ruinous union. As suitcases go, that Globite really did represent baggage.
After my father’s death, I’d been in contact with his relatives in England, sending them details of his funeral service. It reminded me that I still knew nothing of the family on my mother’s side. For over twenty years I’d known her accent was a fake and her childhood was an invention. I’d told the truth to my children – I didn’t want them thinking they came from ‘posh stock’ – and yet I’d cautioned them about ever saying anything to her. What was the point in challenging her fabulous fantasy of being an only child born to English aristocrats? All the same, it would be worth five minutes of my time to find out a little more.
By the early 2000s genealogy websites were becoming popular on the internet. All those years before, when my aunt had revealed the truth about my mother’s family, she’d told me the names of my mother’s two sisters: Bertha and Molly. I also, of course, knew my mother’s maiden name: Sudall. With this information in hand, I logged onto a genealogy website. It was Christmas time and my mother had accepted an invitation to mark the occasion with us. She would arrive in a few days’ time, trilling her upper-class tones: what fun to know more of the truth before she arrived, even while realising I’d never do anything with the information.
I typed in the names and within about a minute had surprised myself by finding the Sudall family tree. The three daughters were there, alongside their parents: Harold and Annie. Detailed information would be harder to find, but here were the basics. My son Joe, now eight years old, was walking past my bedroom as I typed. I gestured him in, showing him the outline and the names. He smiled. It was the same evil smile that he’d given, four years earlier, when he’d hidden the Vegemite toast.
‘We should print out the family tree,’ he said. He was using hand movements, showing the sheet coming out of the printer. ‘Then we could laminate it.’ More hand gestures. ‘Then use it as the place-mat for Christmas lunch.’ He mimed showing my mother to her seat and pointing to her place-mat: ‘Good news, Nanna Anna, we’ve found your family.’
I ignored this gloriously wicked idea, while enjoying his disruptive spirit. I did, however, print off the details of my mother’s clandestine family. One day, when I could be bothered, I’d dedicate myself to the task of finding the truth. Could it be there was more to my mother’s story than the desire to escape her social class? Was there something else about her parents that made her want to reinvent herself?
I had an urge to find out. Then again, I also had an urge to leave the whole thing alone. When you have a thorn in your foot, is it better to try to get it out, rooting around with a needle, causing all sorts of pain, or should you just leave it alone, hoping it will be expelled over time? As I mucked around on the internet I realised I didn’t have an answer to that.
Chapter Twelve
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br /> My mother had become increasingly fearful of crime so, eight years after her move to Noosa, she sold her house and bought a block of land, a few kilometres away, inside a ‘gated community’ – a development with about forty blocks inside a perimeter fence. She had her budget-conscious Armidale builder – the one who’d built both Doriath and her first Noosa house – construct a new place to her design. The concept was eccentric. It was a standard rectangular house into which a large swimming pool had been plonked, right in the middle of things, with nothing but a low glass fence separating the water from the formal sitting room and dining room. It looked as odd as it sounds: there was the pool, a metre of tiling, the low glass fence and then carpeting, upon which was arranged a collection of immensely formal pieces of furniture, including grandfather clocks, early Victorian chairs and a French-polished dining-room table. It was as if a Florida beach house had been picked up by a tornado then crash-landed into the middle of an eighteenth-century English mansion.
Nearly all the rooms overlooked the pool, the main exception being a cosy study, which featured a built-in bookshelf and tiny chairs occupied by the teddy bears. The room was a memorial to Mr Phillipps: the bears they’d shared, seated in the usual semicircle, ready to watch the television; his collection of model cars in a display cabinet; and then his books, filling every wall – hardback editions of Tolkien, CS Lewis and, yes, Samuel Pepys.
I would visit once or twice a year – mostly for just a day or two, and always on my own, in order to save the children and Debra further pain. The bears and the library were at the centre of life in the house. If we were leaving to go to the shops, my mother would stand at the door of the study and speak to the bears. ‘Richard and I are about to go out. So will you fellows please look after everything?’
Last thing at night, she’d give me the task of preparing the bears for sleep, just as she’d done in the last house, requiring me to move around the circle of stuffed toys, placing a small blanket over each furry lap. I was then required to say, ‘Goodnight, fellows,’ before closing the door.
The bears, the books and the furniture became a fresh source of anxiety for my mother: what would happen to them after she was gone? She asked me to pledge that I would never sell the house or the furniture. Her belief was that, following her death, Debra and I would move to Noosa and live among her things. She seemed especially distraught at the idea that her various collections might be broken up, and fearful that her friends might somehow get in and steal items they had previously admired. I’m sure she’d never read Zorba the Greek, but she seemed to be channelling the macabre scene in which the villagers, like black crows, strip clean the house of the newly dead widow:
Old women, men, children went rushing through the doors, jumped through the open windows, over the fences and off the balcony, each carrying whatever he had been able to snatch . . . poor old Uncle Anagnosti went about shouting, begging the people to stop, waving his stick at them.
Her preoccupation with mortality was not limited to her possessions. Around this time she also made arrangements with the local funeral director and cemetery, reserving a plot for herself. I realise this is not uncommon. Less common: she also purchased a gravestone. She had it engraved with her name and then installed in the local Noosa cemetery. As soon as it was erected, she sent me a photo: a photo of her completed grave. There was the headstone, with her name on it, and also in place the granite slab which completed the job. If you walked past in Noosa Cemetery, you’d assume she was already dead and buried.
I feel I should include a copy of the receipt, since I’m sure you’ll think I’m making all this up.
Admittedly, the gravestone was a bit light on information: there was no date or place of birth, both of which she wanted to keep secret, nor a date of death, which was hardly surprising since it had yet to occur. There was, however, a standard poetic verse: Weep not for me though I am gone.
To go with the grave, she purchased an American coffin. It cost $6900 and she had it delivered to her home. The coffin was placed upright in the back of her garage, still in its cardboard box, with the name of the model printed on the side: ‘The Batesville Golden Pearl Casket’. It had been imported from the United States to match her special requirements: that the coffin be made of stainless steel so that her body would last as long as possible; and that it be extra-wide so that the teddies could be arranged on either side of her.
‘They argue among themselves,’ she’d often say during our phone calls, ‘about who will be the closest to me in the coffin.’
My mother’s neighbours had become worried about her and rang me. She’d developed what they considered an odd friendship with an unlikely man. He was about thirty years her junior. They would go to dinner each night at a local pub, the sort of establishment she would have previously labelled ‘dirty’ and ‘common’. They would drink and eat. She would pay.
I rang my mother and explained everyone’s concern.
‘It doesn’t seem right, Mum. I think you should be careful.’
‘He takes me walking. I’m lonely and he takes me walking.’
She’d always liked male attention, the thrill of turning heads when she walked into a room, and perhaps this was her last hurrah. I commenced a long series of heated conversations with my mother, asking her about this man. Who was he? What was he up to?
‘Mum, all your friends are worried. It really is a bit weird. I’m worried about you. I’d like you to say you’ll stop seeing him. Can you promise me that you’ll stop seeing him?’
‘Yes,’ my mother would say, ‘I’ll stop seeing him.’
The next night, someone would call me to say she was back with him, usually in the local pub.
My calls became longer, louder, more frustrating. I would stand in my bedroom at home, shouting into the phone.
‘You are in danger. Don’t you understand? Mum, you promised me . . .’
One moment she would seem to agree with me. Then a minute later she would be talking about how she wanted to catch up with him again straight away. I would bellow some more, frustrated that I couldn’t get through to her. Maybe she was right to ignore me; maybe the man was just being friendly.
The neighbour, though, was sufficiently worried to contact the police. A young constable went to the house and, although he couldn’t do anything official, warned the man he was being watched. It made no difference. A few weeks on, it was New Year’s Eve. The police were called again. This time my mother had been found unconscious, lying on the pavement some distance from the house. She was treated by ambulance officers and carried home. A young police officer, Jason, called me and said they suspected she may have been drugged. They’d found the man inside the house, watching television.
Jason went to visit my mother a week later. He rang me to describe the conversation. He’d talked to my mother about his suspicions. He told her he thought it possible the man was trying to prove they were in a relationship so that, later on, he could demand a share of her assets. My mother said, ‘Yes, but Jason, I’m lonely.’ Jason told her about his own early years, when he’d found it difficult to find a girlfriend: ‘I was lonely too, Anna, so I understand what that feels like.’
Listening to this, I had to keep reminding myself I was talking to a member of the Queensland Police Force, once thought to be the toughest, most venal in the country. I said to him, ‘Jason, it’s very kind of you to spend so much time with my mother and talk to her so personally about yourself.’
He replied, ‘Richard, it’s no trouble at all. It’s just modern policing.’
Jason put the frighteners on the man, but really there was not much he could do since my mother refused to make a complaint. My mother and I had further distressing phone calls, in which she again promised to cut off contact with the man. Sometimes within hours of her promises, I would be called by concerned locals at the pub reporting their arrival.
Then my mother fell on some paving. An ambulance was called. She was taken to hospital. Once
there, she had a number of tests. She had a serious infection. And, they said, signs of dementia. Suddenly her behaviour made sense. I felt instantly guilty about our phone calls and the way I’d shouted at her for continually reneging on the promises she’d made. All through those long telephone conversations she hadn’t really been able to comprehend what I was saying; certainly not enough to retain it. I felt a real beast.
The hospital refused to release her until I’d found a nursing home, which, with the help of one of my mother’s friends, I did: a pleasant place with wide verandas and gardens in which she could walk. I flew up to help move her in. She seemed quite happy about it, perhaps even relieved. Living at home, while feeling her mind give way, must have made her more anxious than she’d been letting on.
Once in the nursing home, her chequebook was no longer in her possession. Almost immediately, the man lost interest, whether due to the chequebook’s incapacitation or my mother’s, I couldn’t say. He visited twice and then never again. He made a last effort to claim possession of her car, which had been left at the local mechanic’s, but the mechanic sent him on his way.
On holidays, I would fly up to Noosa and visit the nursing home. It consisted of lodges set amid well-maintained gardens. There was a walkway which took you to a large aviary, also a hall where they held Friday afternoon drinks. Residents had separate rooms, each with an en-suite bathroom, surrounding a shared dining room. This communal area could, admittedly, be a little confronting. There were so many people in a state of decline. One day I saw an old man jack-knifed into a chair with a built-in tray. He was bent forward, his nose about two inches from the tray as if his spine could no longer hold him upright. I walked a little closer, feeling heartbroken at this image of collapsed, folded-in humanity. Closer still I realised he was bent over just so he could read the tiny type of the Guardian Weekly, spread out on his tray. I cautioned myself against making assumptions.
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