This House of Grief

by Helen Garner

  PRAISE FOR HELEN GARNER AND THIS HOUSE OF GRIEF

  ‘This House of Grief has all the trademark Helen Garner touches: harrowing scenes recorded without restraint or censorship; touching observations of characters’ weaknesses; wry moments of humour. And also customary with Garner’s work, her words, and the boys’ fate, will haunt us long after we’ve turned the last page.’

  GUARDIAN

  ‘A gripping account of a murder trial in which few of the participants act and react in ways we might predict. It’s an examination not just of what happened, but also of what we prefer to believe and what we cannot face believing.’

  JULIAN BARNES

  ‘Helen Garner is an invaluable guide into harrowing territory and offers powerful and unforgettable insights. This House of Grief, in its restraint and control, bears comparison with In Cold Blood.’

  KATE ATKINSON

  ‘As involving, heart-rending and unsettling a read as you could possibly find, a true-life account of three deaths and a trial that leaves you with a profound sense of unease as its drama unfolds, and disturbing questions about how we judge guilt and innocence…Garner writes simply about the proceedings, but with immense control and many taut, haunting asides. Under her scrutiny, the plain, unglamorous cast in the courtroom begins to take on the heft of Homeric figures.’

  THE TIMES

  ‘No one can invoke the theatre of the law the way Helen Garner does. It isn’t just her acute mind for human psychology or her shimmering gift for metaphor, the masterly economy and dramatic poise with which she shapes the material. There is something compulsive and sheer in her desire to bear witness to the darkest deeds of the heart, to experience the ordeal of justice as it brings them to the light. The twists and turns of this true-crime story are, in Garner’s hands, more engrossing and dramatic than any thriller.’

  AGE

  ‘A book that preys on the mind—its themes are enormous, classical and highly contemporary.’

  NZ HERALD

  ‘This House of Grief is a book that harrows the soul with fear and wonder. It is a breathless, blinding roller-coaster of a book, full of doubt and nightmare and rank impressionism as Garner dramatises, with the masterliness of a great portraitist who is also a wizard of narrative, the different faces and phases where no one can win except a justice so blind and so austere that an eye is taken for every eye lost—The book is some kind of masterpiece and Garner creates, moment by moment, with a breathtaking suspension of judgment, the whirlwind that blows across every corner of this story like a hard rain that comes with the force of a desolation, sparing nothing—This House of Grief is a magnificent book about the majesty of the law and the terrible matter of the human heart. It has at its centre a feeling of the engulfing powers of love and hate and the way any heart unlucky enough may kill the thing it loves and drown in an eternity of grief.’

  AUSTRALIAN

  ‘A brilliant, poetic work of jurisprudence…Another beauty of Garner’s writing is her exceptional lyricism. Garner’s spare, clean style flowers into magnificent poetry.’

  AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

  ‘This House of Grief exposes the deeply complex rivers of emotion that run through us all. Garner has a talent for scrutinising those aspects of life that most of us would rather turn away from and illuminating those truths for all to understand.’

  HOOPLA

  ‘Compassionate and dispassionate in equal measure, Helen Garner takes us into the courtroom and shows a melting-pot of venality. She writes with a profound understanding of human vulnerability, and of the subtle workings of love, memory and remorse.’

  ECONOMIST

  ‘What makes Helen Garner’s book so impressive is the high degree of objectivity with which, in spite of her personal sympathy, she reports on something that eludes all objective treatment…This book, the story it tells and the sad ode it sings to the law stay with the reader for a long time.’

  FRANKFURTER ALLGEMEINE ZEITUNG

  ‘[Garner] has turned a courtroom drama into something deeply human.’

  AUSTRALIAN WOMEN’S WEEKLY

  ALSO BY HELEN GARNER

  FICTION

  Monkey Grip (1977)

  Honour and Other People’s Children (1980)

  The Children’s Bach (1984)

  Postcards from Surfers (1985)

  Cosmo Cosmolino (1992)

  The Spare Room (2008)

  NON-FICTION

  The First Stone (1995)

  True Stories (1996)

  The Feel of Steel (2001)

  Joe Cinque’s Consolation (2004)

  FILM SCRIPTS

  The Last Days of Chez Nous (1992)

  Two Friends (1992)

  HELEN GARNER was born in Geelong in 1942. Her award-winning books include novels, stories, screenplays and works of non-fiction.

  textpublishing.com.au

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House

  22 William Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  Copyright © Helen Garner 2014

  The moral right of Helen Garner to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published in Australia by The Text Publishing Company, 2014

  This edition published 2016

  Cover and page design by W. H. Chong

  typeset by J&M Typesetters

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

  Author: Garner, Helen, 1942- author.

  Title: This house of grief / by Helen Garner.

  ISBN: 9781925240689 (paperback)

  ISBN: 9781921961434 (ebook)

  Subjects: Farquharson, Robert, 1969-

  Gambino, Cindy.

  Filicide—Australia.

  Children—Crimes against—Australia.

  Custody of children—Australia.

  Mothers of murder victims—Australia.

  Murder—Australia.

  Dewey Number: 364.15230994

  To the Victorian Supreme Court:

  ‘this treasury of pain, this house of power and grief’

  DEZSÖ KOSZTOLÁNYI: KORNÉL ESTI

  CONTENTS

  PRAISE

  OTHER BOOKS BY HELEN GARNER

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPH

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  ‘
Are you going to the Farquharson hearing? I’ve got two reactions to this. He can’t possibly have done it. But there’s no other explanation.’

  LAWYER WALKING PAST THE SUPREME COURT OF VICTORIA, 16 NOVEMBER 2007

  …

  ‘There is no explanation of the death of children that is acceptable.’

  LEON WIESELTIER: KADDISH

  …

  ‘…life is lived on two levels of thought and act: one in our awareness and the other only inferable, from dreams, slips of the tongue, and inexplicable behaviour.’

  JANET MALCOLM: THE PURLOINED CLINIC

  CHAPTER 1

  Once there was a hard-working bloke who lived in a small Victorian country town with his wife and their three young sons. They battled along on his cleaner’s wage, slowly building themselves a bigger house. One day, out of the blue, his wife told him that she was no longer in love with him. She did not want to go on with the marriage. She asked him to move out. The kids would live with her, she said, and he could see them whenever he liked. She urged him to take anything he wanted from the house. The only thing she asked for, and got, was the newer of their two cars.

  The sad husband picked up his pillow and went to live with his widowed father, several streets away. Before long his wife was seen keeping company with the concreter they had hired to pour the slab for the new house. The tradesman was a born-again Christian with several kids and his own broken marriage. Soon the separated wife began to accompany him to his church. Next, the husband spotted the concreter driving around town in the car that he had slaved to buy.

  Up to this point you could tell the story as a country-and-western song, a rueful tale of love betrayed, a little bit whiny, a little bit sweet.

  But ten months later, just after dark on a September evening in 2005, while the discarded husband was driving his sons back to their mother from a Father’s Day outing, his old white Commodore swerved off the highway, barely five minutes from home, and plunged into a dam. He freed himself from the car and swam to the bank. The car sank to the bottom, and all the children drowned.

  …

  I saw it on the TV news. Night. Low foliage. Water, misty and black. Blurred lights, a chopper. Men in hi-vis and helmets. Something very bad here. Something frightful.

  Oh Lord, let this be an accident.

  …

  Anyone can see the place where the children died. You drive south-west out of Melbourne on the Princes Highway, the road that encircles the continent. You bypass Geelong, resist the call of the Surf Coast turn-off, and keep going inland in the direction of Colac, on the great volcanic plain that stretches across southwestern Victoria.

  In August 2006, after a magistrate at a Geelong hearing had committed Robert Farquharson to stand trial on three charges of murder, I headed out that way one Sunday morning, with an old friend to keep me company. Her husband had recently left her. Her hair was dyed a defiant red, but she had that racked look, hollow with sadness. We were women in our sixties. Each of us had found it in herself to endure—but also to inflict—the pain and humiliation of divorce.

  It was a spring day. We passed Geelong and were soon flying along between paddocks yellow with capeweed, their fence lines marked by the occasional windbreak of dark cypresses. Across the huge sky sailed flat-bottomed clouds of brilliant white. My companion and I had spent years of our childhoods in this region. We were familiar with its melancholy beauty, the grand, smooth sweeps of its terrain. Rolling west along the two-lane highway, we opened the windows and let the air stream through.

  Four or five kilometres short of Winchelsea we spotted ahead of us the long, leisurely rise of a railway overpass. Was this the place? Talk ceased. We cruised up the man-made hill. From the top we looked down and saw, ahead and to the right of the road, a body of tan water in a paddock—not the business-like square of a farm dam but oval-shaped, feminine, like an elongated tear drop, thinly fringed with small trees. Its southern bank lay parallel with the northern edge of the highway, twenty or thirty metres from the bitumen. I had imagined the trajectory of Farquharson’s car as a simple drift off the left side of the highway; but to plunge into this body of water on the wrong side of the road, the car would have had to veer over the centre white line and cut across the east-bound lane with its oncoming traffic. As we sped down the Winchelsea side of the overpass, forcing ourselves to keep glancing to the right, we saw little white crosses, three of them, knee-deep in grass between the road and the fence. We flew past, as if we did not have the right to stop.

  We had a vague idea that six thousand people lived in Winchelsea, but a sign at the entrance to the township gave its population as 1180, and by the time we had rolled down the dip to the bluestone bridge that spanned the Winchelsea River, then up the other side and past a row of shops and a primary school, the outer limits of the town were already in view. In a place this size, everyone would know your business.

  A mile or so beyond the township, we turned down a side road and found a grassy spot where we could eat our sandwiches. We felt awkward, almost guilty. Why had we come? We spoke in low voices, avoiding each other’s eye, staring out over the sunny paddocks.

  Do you think the story he told the police could be true—that he had a coughing fit and blacked out at the wheel? There is such a thing. It’s called cough syncope. The ex-wife swore at the committal hearing that he loved his boys. So? Since when has loving someone meant you would never want to kill them? She said it was a tragic accident—that he wouldn’t have hurt a hair on their heads. His whole family is backing him. In court he had a sister on either side and an ironed hanky in his hand. Even the ex-wife’s family said they didn’t blame him. But wasn’t there weird police evidence? The tracks his car had left? And didn’t he bolt? Yes. He left the kids in the sinking car, and hitched a ride to his ex-wife’s place. He looked massive in the photos—is he a big bloke? No, he was small and stumpy. With puffy eyes. Did you see him close up at the committal? Yes, he held the door open for me. Did he smile at you? He tried to. Maybe he’s a psychopath—isn’t that how they get to you? By being charming? He didn’t look charming. He looked terrible. Wretched. What—you felt sorry for him? Well…I don’t know about sorry. I don’t know what I was expecting, but he was ordinary. A man.

  The cemetery, on the outskirts of Winchelsea, was a couple of acres of wide, sloping ground, open to the sky. Nobody else was around. We wandered up and down the rows. No Farquharsons. Perhaps the family came from another town? But as we plodded up the path to the car, I glanced past a clump of shrubbery and saw a tall headstone of polished granite that bore a long surname and three medallion-shaped photos. We approached with reluctant steps.

  Some AFL fan had poked into the dirt beside the grave an Essendon pinwheel on a wand. Its curly plastic blades whizzed merrily. In the upper corners of the headstone were etched the Essendon Football Club insignia and a golden Bob the Builder. The little boys faced the world with frank good cheer, their fair hair neatly clipped, their eyes bright. Jai, Tyler, Bailey. Much loved and cherished children of Robert and Cindy…In God’s hands till we meet again. I studied it with a sort of dread. Often, in the seven years to come, I would regret that I had not simply blessed them that day and walked away. In the mown grass sprouted hundreds of tiny pink flowers. We picked handfuls and laid them on the grave, but the breeze kept blowing them awa
y. Every twig, every pebble we tried to weight them with was too light to resist the steady rushing of the spring wind.

  …

  A year passed between the committal hearing and the trial. When Farquharson’s name came up in conversation, people shuddered. Tears would spring to women’s eyes. Everyone had a view. The coughing fit story provoked incredulity and scorn. The general feeling was that a man like Farquharson could not tolerate the loss of control he experienced when his wife ended the marriage. Again and again people came up with this explanation. Yes, that must have been it—he couldn’t stand to lose control of his family. Either that, or he was evil. Pure evil. I don’t get these guys, said a feminist lawyer. Okay, so the wife dumps them. Men don’t have biological clocks. Why can’t they just find a new girlfriend and have more kids? Why do they have to kill everyone? Whether he did it on purpose or not, said an older woman, a Christian, how is he going to atone? Countless men declared in anger and distress that it couldn’t possibly have been an accident; that a loving father would never leave the car and swim away. He would fight to save his kids, and, if he failed, he would go to the bottom with them. Rare were the ones who, after making such a declaration, paused and added in a lower voice, ‘At least, that’s what I hope I’d do.’

  When I said I wanted to write about the trial, people looked at me in silence, with an expression I could not read.

  …

  On 20 August 2007, two years after his car went into the dam, Robert Farquharson’s trial opened in the Supreme Court of Victoria. As a freelance journalist and curious citizen, I had spent many days, solitary and absorbed, in the courtrooms of that nineteenth-century pile in central Melbourne, with its dome and its paved inner yards and its handsome facade along William and Lonsdale Streets. I knew my way around it and how to conduct myself inside its formal spaces, but I could never approach its street entrance without a surge of adrenalin and a secret feeling of awe.