The Missing Heir

by Kylie Tennant

  ‘You are a little money-spinner,’ my mother exclaimed joyfully when I won a prize in some competition that a teacher had demanded I enter. I started a bank account when I won a money prize but the catch was that the Parent borrowed it and never gave it back. He wanted to pay the electric light bill. ‘I will give you eight per cent,’ he said. ‘You won’t get that at the bank.’ Of course I never saw either my money again or the eight per cent. I think he really resented the idea of my having any money of my own. If there was money a man should have it. So next time I won some money I took my mother and my friend Mary Shepherd to see a play and presented them both with chocolates. It was the first stage play I had seen. Mary went on to become quite a light in theatrical management. She organised tours in South Africa and was in a film company. ‘How do you manage to count the money?’ I asked her when she was treasurer of the Elizabethan Theatre. We had shared the back seat for years copying each other’s mistakes in arithmetic. ‘I have a computer,’ she replied.

  Mary’s many talents were hampered by her habit of marrying. She married three times while I only married once. I regarded her with respect — the triumph of optimism over experience. Mary was the kind of girl who was kissed behind the back-drop by the English mistress’s handsome brother who had come to help with the scenery, while I was worrying whether the stage make-up would disguise a new constellation of spots which had come out on my face. My mother, when I was in Upper School, had wrapped me in rigid corsets at Grandma’s behest. Mary tapped them unbelievingly. ‘Old Ironsides,’ she said. ‘You’ll have to get out of that armour.’ I did so, refusing to wear the ghastly garments. I always wished that I could be as dashing as Mary but knew I was hopelessly unattractive. Only my mother told me I was pretty and she would tell you anything. But I was the star of the singing class with a deep contralto bellow. My singing voice was never trained. It was enormous. I could range from A in bass to G in treble. I couldn’t do it now.

  ‘Come and sing,’ mother always would plead. We would stand around the piano and sing anything from Carmen to Gilbert and Sullivan or musical comedy. Singing straight through the score. As so many Australians do, we sang because it was traditional to do so in our family to provide entertainment. We danced because we were expected to do so.

  When I married I was astounded that my husband and brother-in-law neither sang nor danced. My mother-in-law only got the chance to sing in church. She had once sung in a choir. When she went to sea her piano had been sold. I pleaded with Johnny, my brother-in-law, to buy her another. ‘Only get borer in it,’ John said. ‘Oh, it’s too late now,’ she murmured. But I seem to remember that in the book my husband wrote about his childhood she still had a piano.

  My mother always had a piano. She had been trained as an organist but there were not too many jobs going, nor too many churches with a big pipe organ. If you thought of mother as an unemployed musician you might get the picture of her domesticity more fairly.

  Mother’s idea of money was that it was ‘supply’. ‘Divine Love,’ she would repeat, ‘always has met and always will meet every human need.’ She loved new furniture, clothes and ornaments. Reproached when she bought them, later these objects of furniture were, because of their good quality, almost irreplaceable. She did not see why my father had to be so scared of spending money. ‘It is only fear,’ she would observe. ‘It is very hard to declare the Truth about him.’ To my father any sum of money not to be spent on himself was sacred and to be hidden away like the Holy Grail, or breed mysteriously as the mystic marriage of Stocks and Shares.

  He would come home with news of some company in which he had bought shares or become a director. This would make his fortune. But it never did. I have never invested a penny, thanks to his example. When he gave me some shares once I gave half of them to my sister. I didn’t want the damn things. What money I spent I earned.

  ‘Got anything to read?’ my father would say, having finished his nightly row with my mother. When we moved to Hillside he had discovered my library subscription. If I had anything I would give it to him and he would retire to smoke and read. I looked up from my homework at this request on one occasion. ‘There’s a book some of the girls at school lent me,’ I said indifferently. ‘It isn’t very good.’ I had discovered a group whispering in the corner of the playground and with my detestable curiosity had demanded what the book was about. They giggled at the idea of lending it to me and I threw it into my satchel. I had lent them my complete set of Edgar Rice Burroughs from time to time.

  ‘What sort of a book is it?’ said my father, looking his gift horse in the mouth.

  ‘It’s a thing called The Blue Lagoon. Not bad but not good. Just medium tripe.’ He retired with it.

  There was a terrible uproar at school the morning I took the book back. Our headmistress — bless her heart, honest church-woman that she was — assembled in her study all those who had read this disgusting piece of pornography. ‘Who now has this filth in her possession?’ Who but Kylie Tennant, that despised swot?

  ‘You can’t touch pitch without being tarred, girls,’ the headmistress said in the course of her reprimand. It vastly surprised her that Kylie Tennant should have been among those affected by this smut. I was vastly surprised to hear that I — and the Parent — had been tainted. I had been ploughing through Havelock Ellis in the city library on Saturday morning.

  I took my imposition and detention with the rest. I did not tell the Parent he had just touched pitch and been tarred.

  My most formidable aunt was always reporting how well her niece Junie was doing at high school and was always backing up the Parent to have me moved from Brighton College. My mother finally went along to interview Miss Musson and announce that she was taking me away and sending me to high school. The headmistress riposted with an offer to waive the fees for my schooling. Mother and the Parent were very gratified and the Parent — as he now didn’t need to pay for me — graciously allowed me to stay at Brighton College. My dread that the other girls would find out was pitiable. Imagine not having your fees paid! I was covered with shame. They already abused me as ‘a teacher’s pet’. I was very lucky in my teachers. But if the girls ever found out that I was a ‘scholarship girl’, my life would not be worth living.

  I worked harder than ever. My inability to understand the simplest set of figures was a handicap but I came out dux of the school even so. I tied with Dawn, who was competent at all studies, with Jean only just behind us by a mark or so. We were, the teachers agreed, a vintage year. We were also a year younger than any other girls being sent for the public examination.

  Teachers sometimes sent me home from school with bronchitis, boils or some other illness. They didn’t want me to spread it. I had chicken-pox while I was sitting for the intermediate examination for which we had to travel to the city and sit at Fort Street. My friend Mary reported to the headmistress that I had chicken-pox but was blistered for even suggesting it. I suppose my face looked little worse than usual as I had arrived at a stage of acute acne.

  When I was sitting for the leaving exam my glands swelled in what was thought to be mumps and a kind of panic in the staffroom brought offers from those devoted women to come to my home and coach me. However, I got through with first class honours in English, honours in botany and As in other subjects. I was either third or fifth in the state, I’ve forgotten which. But I failed as usual in Latin and mathematics, which spoilt any hope of an exhibition to the university. The mump swellings went down so probably Mother’s thinking ‘the right thought’ had its way.

  I have already reported that Grandma, as a young woman, had been cured of some ‘error’ by Christian Science. This resulted in us all being taught to avoid doctors who encouraged mortal man to rely on material remedies. You had to be seriously ill before the hushed suggestion of a doctor was made. We usually got well, anyway.

  Later in life I was accustomed to putting up with any serious illness and people saying later: ‘But why didn’t you go to a
doctor?’ It took too long to explain.

  I remember taking my children to Luna Park and sitting there while they whirled on roundabouts. I was finishing a book review which I wanted to get off before I went to hospital next day for an operation on a rare tumour under my ear. It had been swelling up and going down for months. I thought: ‘Won’t it be wonderful. A hospital! Imagine having nothing to do.’ A German doctor who had only seen one other one discovered this rare tumour.

  An artist who had come up to sketch me for Meanjin had also discovered it: ‘You have a very unsymmetrical face,’ he observed.

  ‘Criminals often have unsymmetrical faces,’ I told him. ‘Maybe it’s just criminal tendencies.’

  I had had a septic jaw some years before — untreated. Or the tumour may have been the result of hitting my head on the car door. When I got into this hospital a young doctor came around to examine me and take some blood. ‘Have you ever read Silas Marner?’ he asked, wishing to start a literary conversation with the novelist.

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ I said, baring my fangs in my dog smile. ‘Let me guess. Silas Marner was the last novel you read, and you read that at school?’ Since then, he admitted, he had had to read textbooks. He was new and he couldn’t find a vein or get any blood out of me. Presently one of my arms was looking like a ploughed field. ‘Try the other arm,’ I suggested. He did, with no result. ‘I’ll get the sister,’ he said desperately. ‘No,’ I advised. ‘You could do that if you hadn’t started here this week. Now calm down! Take a deep breath. Walk over and look out the window, then try it.’ He followed my instructions and came back. ‘I’ve got it,’ he yelled. ‘I’ve done it.’ Dracula was nothing to that boy.

  A week after the operation he and another doctor came in smiling with the nurse to announce that I could get up in a wheel-chair for half an hour. ‘I have news for you, boys,’ I said. ‘I have been walking since the day after the operation. Yesterday I walked over to that headland with the interesting graveyard.’

  ‘Forget about the wheel-chair, nurse,’ Dracula said, laughing. Later I met the two doctors over at a shop in the grounds where I was buying a detective story to read. They shook their heads at me. When I was about to go out of the hospital the nurse dashed in anxiously: ‘The doctors want to see you.’ I walked up to their office and put my head round the door: ‘Yes, what is it?’ I asked.

  ‘We just wanted to say goodbye,’ they told me sunnily, shaking my hand.

  Having been ripped up by doctors many times and with many doctor friends, I am on the best of terms with all those who have had an intimate view of my interior. I like doctors. I throw all pills down the sink unless I am too weak to crawl to the sink. Then I take them until I am stronger. In hospital I swallow no pain killers or sleeping tablets. Instead I recite poetry to myself — yards of it. I am thankful to Christian Science for a training in childhood that makes me ignore pain, often unwisely. I was always surprised that my husband was accident-prone and swelled up when he was bitten. His family had been accustomed to calling in doctors and he thought my mother was saintly but funny. His sense of humour — although he loved her dearly — was aroused. Once when the car developed an alarming knock and was towed to a garage he murmured: ‘I must call Cassie to think the right thought.’ Cassie was the children’s name for my mother.

  On the phone my mother said firmly: ‘There is nothing wrong with the car, Bobby dear.’ She was thinking ‘the right thought’, having become a practitioner, which is the highest you can get in the Christian Scientist field, and was then second reader of her church.

  ‘There is nothing wrong with the car,’ Roddy told me with bitter irony. It turned out there was nothing wrong with the car. We had just had it serviced and the mechanic had drained all the oil out of the gear box and forgotten to replace the oil.

  I once went home with a howling attack of flu. My mother, standing at the foot of the bed, announced: ‘There is nothing wrong with you. It is just an illusion.’ I got so mad and such a rush of adrenalin through my body that I jumped out of bed snarling. I was completely cured.

  I have also been cured of bronchitis by going to see a very good film. Forget it.

  4. How to Smash Up a Career

  In my last years at school, Mother had taken up the pipe organ again and was practising on her old teacher’s organ at the Presbyterian church. I would walk over after school — I was a prodigious walker and walked over a mile home to lunch and then the same distance back in the afternoon — and would pick Mother up when she finished her organ practice; reading history while the fine organ thundered. I associate certain books with Bach.

  My sister was more interested in sport. I was a duffer at tennis. I was not only left-handed; my father refused to pay for a racquet, saying I could use his which was far too heavy for me. I played centre for the netball team and my speed and ferocity led many an opposing school team to mutter under its collective breath. But I only excelled at taking long walks by myself and swimming underwater; then my outsize lungs caused people to peer anxiously for my body. My sister was a runner and later a golfer. After we left school she took me out once on the golf links, but I insisted on taking the dog and as it was wet I walked bare-foot. She never took me again but she and my father could have interminable conversations about golf. It is strange that with absolutely the same upbringing my sister was a model of middle-class efficiency and practicality, later an office-worker at a firm manufacturing radios with a string of young men who admired her. She could have been an artist but was trained instead to work computers (‘no money in art’).

  In the hiatus between my schooling and my expected entry into office work (expected by my father, that is) I was somehow inveigled into the Presbyterian choir by Miss Bryant, my mother’s organ teacher. She had to sit me in the middle of the contraltos beside an old lady who sang a firm contralto because if I sat near the sopranos I sang soprano and if I sat near the bass I sang bass. I think she was relieved when I left. But I learnt some pleasant oratorios.

  Also I had time to turn my attention to improving my status. When I was at school nothing seemed to be of such interest to my schoolfellows as boys. The only boys I knew were cousins — numerous cousins — but these didn’t count. I was made to feel inferior. So in the holidays after I left school I acquired a tall, pleasant boy for my own. He was a Roman Catholic from a large family. His mother had the same feeling of doubt about a Presbyterian choir singer that my family had about tall athletic youths of his particular faith. But we ignored them. He was a yachtsman, a rower, a runner, a cricketer. It broke his heart that the day he made a century I hadn’t bothered to turn up for the match. I was at home reading Mark Twain. He went off to Perth clutching an enormous cricket bat when his family, who all worked in banks, moved there en masse. I met him many years later when I was on a lecture tour and he was just as pleasant-natured and handsome as he had been at seventeen. Dear lad! With a wife and family and good position in his chosen bank, always being promoted because he was so likeable, I don’t suppose he ever once questioned his life. I never stopped questioning mine.

  ‘What a secretary she would have made for some man,’ the Parent exclaimed woefully some years later, ‘if she would only keep a job.’

  He meant a job in a city office with clacking typewriters and a hierarchy of persons all in little pigeonholes of responsibility, all sitting day after day in the same place, all moving up one hole of power the older they became.

  After we moved to Hillside my Aunt Beryl died, leaving Brian, Berry and Lasca on whom my grandmother seized, claiming she had been left the children in my aunt’s will. This meant my mother had to devote herself even more closely to the Rosedale entourage to ‘help with the children’.

  When my father was offered the managership of the Newcastle works my mother refused to go. ‘If you want to live under a cloud of smoke in that filthy place you are welcome but don’t expect me to do so. He turned down this big promotion and felt a grievance but was really reliev
ed. He liked living at Manly; surfing, playing tennis, watching the football now he didn’t play. He did not like his life pattern disturbed. Instead he took on a kind of roving commission and drove all over the state as an inspector. He liked meeting new people; he was a great yarner, very shrewd in business dealings; he liked being out of the office using his own judgement.

  At the time I joined the ABC as the least and lowest of its hirelings it was still the Australian Broadcasting Company allied to Farmers, a big merchandising store, which had set up a radio station on its roof. I had just turned sixteen and was paid twenty-five shillings, working from nine till six. This Broadcasting Company of which good Uncle Stan was a director was about to become the Australian Broadcasting Commission. The Parent had not even asked me if I would like to work there. He merely told me I was starting on Monday. (‘You’ve got to have influence.’)

  The position which Uncle Stan had found for me was as assistant to the Hello Man, Mr Cochrane, a large stout balding man with a moustache whom Uncle Stanley had found behind a counter at Farmers, from which he rose to floor-walker. He ran the Children’s Hour of 2FC. Mr Cochrane, I surmise, much resented having me thrust upon him and set me to answering his mail, sending out postcards of his imposing walrus face. As I had never learnt to type I taught myself somehow on the worst typewriter in the office. I was in a state of panic unequalled since that far day when I had entered the public school at Manly and found the doors and windows shut. My only friend was Jimmy the office boy who jeered at a small admirer of the Hello Man who had descended from the train and scooped up some earth from the Hello Man’s birthplace, sending it to him in an envelope. ‘Pity it wasn’t a brick,’ Jimmy said.