The Biographer's Lover

by Ruby J Murray

  Dust motes floated in the columns of light. The paintings around me were luminous. The sketchbooks waited in their stacks, piled up towards the cavernous ceiling. Behind them, the enormous triptychs shifted colour, bent space.

  I imagined Edna in here, day after day, perfecting her line, climbing the ladders to build her life’s work, not caring if it was never seen.

  Percy called me that night.

  ‘Dad said he saw your car outside Mum’s studio today,’ he said.

  ‘I was finalising the contract with Victoria. We were starting the cataloguing.’

  ‘So you’re not going to write about me?’

  ‘Your mum was a really great artist, Percy. And no-one knows her work.’

  ‘Look, if you do this, I won’t have the time to talk to you about Mum.’ His voice seemed full of what sounded like real regret. ‘This is Vicky’s project, not mine. Not Dad’s. Vicky will tell you about it, but I’d appreciate you leaving Dad out of it too. He doesn’t want to take part. Too painful.’

  ‘I’d love to talk about this in person, if we could just meet –’

  ‘I’m very busy, training. So many journos want a piece of me.’

  ‘That’s not –’

  ‘I have a game to win. I wish you all the best, you know? Say hi to your mum from me.’ He hung up.

  I tried to call back, but it went straight through to his answering machine.

  Music played before the beep to leave a message: the Toreador’s march from Bizet’s Carmen. The song sung by the bullfighter Escamillo as he pursues the beautiful matchmaker, Carmen, who spurns him. In the closing act, while Escamillo defeats a bull, Carmen is stabbed to death by her lover on the other side of the stage.

  It’s also the team song for the Geelong Cats.

  Put facts side by side and they seem to be related, they seem to mean something more than they do alone. In film, they call it the ‘Kuleshov’ effect, after the Russian who made a film montage in the 1920s by editing together a still image of a man’s face alternating with other, random images.

  Man’s face. Bowl of soup. Man’s face. Dead five-year-old girl in coffin. Man’s face. Lady reclining on couch, breasts half bared under silky white robe. Man’s face.

  Audiences raved about the man’s expressions, about how he could so perfectly express reactions to the images he had just seen. But the man’s face didn’t change. It was the same still, the same fact.

  Humans tell stories automatically. Even when we don’t know we’re doing it.

  I spent the rest of the week cataloguing. On Saturday, I drove down to Geelong to meet Victoria at Margaret’s house. I wanted to poke around the place more, get a feeling for the home Edna had grown up in. Victoria wanted to give me the first round of letters. The plan was that, afterwards, we would catch the ferry together across to the opposite peninsula, so that she could have a look at where I had reached with the cataloguing.

  As Victoria looked through her handbag for the key to Margaret’s house, I told her I had spoken to Percy. I didn’t mention his offer, only that he didn’t want to be involved in the project anymore.

  Victoria sighed. ‘I know. I was going to tell you about it on the ferry later. But don’t worry. We won’t need him. Or Dad. It’s all in my head.’

  ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘Of course. It’s no big deal. They’ll come around eventually. Percy always thinks he knows what’s best.’

  ‘What about John, your adopted brother. Would he be helpful?’

  ‘I doubt it. I’ve left him so many messages. Nothing. To be honest, I hardly remember him at all – I was five when he left for France. I’ll give you his number – you can try if you really want. But I don’t think we need to go into Mum’s time in France. It was only a year. I have some other ideas. I think we should focus on the war aspects.’

  The stuffy air inside the house collapsed over us as she opened the front door. The rooms that had been so crowded at the wake were almost completely empty. Darker patches of carpet stood out where furniture had been removed from Margaret’s house, blushes of actual red against the faded pink. The walls were naked.

  I was only just beginning the process of finding out who Edna was, and it was already difficult for me to imagine her living here. She seemed too large for the small worker’s cottage, the low ceilings and the grates on the windows.

  ‘Look at how much they got done!’ exclaimed Victoria. ‘That’s the wonderful thing about Whitedales. There are so many of them. Breed like rabbits, that’s what my Grandma Nel says. Not like the Cranmers. We have to do everything ourselves. Just me and Dad and Percy. Do you have any siblings?’

  ‘Nope. Only child of only children. I’m it.’

  In what might have been a bedroom, Victoria dragged a chair over to a closet, climbed on to its seat and began to pull at the doors on the highest cupboard. They were stuck. She tugged, forcing them.

  ‘I could have sworn I put the boxes with Gran’s letters up here,’ she said. ‘I know I did, for safekeeping. I even put my name on them.’

  The emptiness extended from room to room.

  We walked two doors down to Jennifer Whitedale’s house. The façade of each of the Whitedale houses looked exactly the same: dark bluestone, narrow cast-iron fences.

  ‘You always knew who was getting along by whether or not they had a hole in their back fence,’ said Victoria, swinging open Jennifer’s front gate.

  Jennifer, when she opened the door, was dressed as brightly as she had been at the funeral: pink shell suit, white runners, purple lipstick. Behind her, I saw that the house was crowded too, the walls covered in frames. A faux Tiffany lampshade hung from the ceiling, casting blocks of colour in the winter light.

  ‘Victoria! What a surprise! This is wonderful. Come in, come in.’

  ‘I can’t now, Jennifer. I was just wondering: did you see what happened to that big box of letters in Gran’s house, the stuff we put aside for the biography? Do you have it?’

  I noted how Victoria called it a ‘biography’ instead of a monograph, her haughty tone.

  ‘Your dad took them away to look after for you,’ said Jennifer. ‘He was worried someone would throw them out by accident.’

  I felt Victoria twitch in annoyance beside me.

  ‘Dad came over to help?’

  ‘I know! It was so sweet of him.’

  Victoria walked me back to my car, apologising for wasting my time.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I assured her. ‘We could always stop by your dad’s house and pick the letters up on the way to the studio. Do you want to call him, see if he’s home?’

  I was already inside the Falcon. She bent down to lean against the door, as if she was keeping it closed against me. ‘You know what,’ she said, ‘why don’t we call today a wash. We don’t need to get on the ferry now. It’ll take ages. I’ll go grab the letters off Dad and leave them in Mum’s studio for you to get started on.’

  I protested, saying that it would be best to get through as much of the cataloguing as we could.

  ‘No, no, no,’ she said. ‘I can tell you’ve had a big week in the studio. This is your weekend. You need a break. Call me tomorrow night and we can organise for next week instead.’

  She rustled in her handbag, brought out a slim manila folder.

  ‘Here, I made some preliminary notes. Names and dates. Have a look.’

  When I got home, I spread the contents of the manila folder Victoria had given me out over my narrow kitchen table.

  There was hardly anything on the timeline. Dates of birth. A few trips – to Papua New Guinea, to Alice Springs; the year Edna went to France, 1969, to connect Imelda’s adopted son John with his biological mother, Celine Delacroix. A few exhibitions.

  Then graduations: Percy and Victoria graduating from primary school, then secondary school.

  The year Max retired from being the CEO of Black Swan Industries and moved to the board.

  Percy joining the Cats.

  Vic
toria graduating from university in Sydney with a Masters of Business.

  When I called Victoria on Sunday evening, I got her answering machine, upbeat and crisp: You’ve called Victoria Cranmer, please leave a message …

  She didn’t call me back until the following night.

  ‘Look,’ she said, ‘I’ve had quite a good idea. I’m moving everything but the big paintings over to my place in Geelong. I have a huge back shed, and it’ll be much more convenient for both of us. That way you don’t have to drive back and forth all the time. Sorrento, Geelong and Melbourne. It doesn’t make sense for you to loop the bay constantly.’

  I felt a lurch. I wanted to stay in Edna’s studio, with its huge windows and shifting light, where it felt as if she was standing next to me, watching.

  ‘Working out of your mum’s studio is fine. It’s great. And everything’s organised, everything’s in order. We’ll lose a whole week of work.’

  ‘It’s already happening,’ she told me firmly. ‘Trust me. This will be easier. In every way. I booked the movers yesterday, and they started taking things today. You begin the interviews this week, and everything will be done before you know it.’

  ‘Interviews with who?’

  ‘Talk to the Whitedales, talk to Jennifer and the rest. Jennifer is basically the same age as Mum – she’ll remember lots. Then, next weekend, everything will be ready for us to start the cataloguing again, properly this time, at my house. I’ll do some pre-sorting.’

  ‘Is your shed big enough? For the triptychs too?’

  ‘I’m going to leave those in Mum’s studio. The shed is big enough but they’re just too annoying to move. Everything else will be fine in the shed. It’s not actually a shed – it’s an old stables, and Mum even used it as a studio for a while in the ’50s, before they bought the Sorrento house. Wait till you see it.’ Victoria hung up.

  I paced the bare kitchen, worrying. It was nearly winter. The rain beat against the tin roof. I ate three-bean mix from a can, sautéed with onions, on toast. I ate a lot of three-bean mix back then.

  EDNA: A LIFE

  Edna was eight years old when Imelda left to begin the nurses’ training program at the Geelong Kitchener Memorial Hospital. Despite the fact that the hospital was within walking distance of Dent Street, it was hard for the sisters to find time together once Imelda began her training.

  By 1937, the long fight for nurses to be allowed into hospitals had been won, quite literally. All trainee nurses ‘lived in’ at the Kitchener Memorial, working eleven hours a day, six days a week. The early nurses are now remembered as transitory angels of mercy, but the reality of their world was much harsher – boils and death, rum hospitals and riots.

  Trainee nurses only got one day off a fortnight. On her day off, Imelda did not go home to West Geelong. Instead she went to the house of Nel and Pop Cranmer, the owners of the Black Swan Carpets factory, where she looked after Nel Cranmer’s ailing mother, Lucinda, giving her live-in nurse some free time.

  Inside ‘the fancy house’, as Imelda called it in her letters to Edna, the wealthy and aristocratic socialite Nel came to see Imelda as a poor daughter figure, to be guided and supported. The mother of just one son, Nel found solace in Imelda’s company.

  Imelda’s connection to the fancy family in the white house overlooking the beaches made Edna jealous. Nel remembers her gardeners catching Edna as she lurked in the bushes at the house, trying to catch a glimpse of Imelda or the Cranmer son, Max. Nel was amused instead of annoyed – she brought Edna into the grand house for tea and biscuits, then sent the girl home again.

  Young Edna saw Imelda’s decision to continue working on her day off as a betrayal, but for Imelda, the money earned from that day at the Cranmers was crucial; as a trainee nurse, she made barely enough to survive. Nursing was not a profession: it was a calling, and the women who nursed behaved accordingly. Asked in the late 1920s whether their wages should be increased, the women of the Australian Trained Nurses’ Association said no. In 1931, when working hours went up to ninety-six hours a fortnight, the nurses themselves nominated to decrease salaries by five to ten pounds per year. Imelda continued in this tradition, forcing herself to stick to a gruelling schedule, her personal sacrifices somehow connected to a higher purpose.

  Unable to see each other regularly, the sisters began exchanging letters and drawings, leaving folded paper packages in locations around Geelong. The letters became Edna’s obsession. She found writing hard, so instead she often resorted to drawing for Imelda, burying each image under a rock out the front of the Geelong Kitchener Memorial or between the tight slats of the back gate at the Cranmers’ house on Eastern Beach.

  When the drawings were returned, ‘marked’ by Imelda, who gave her pointers and tips, praise and direction, Edna would slip them into the pages of the sketchbooks along with Imelda’s precious letters, cutting and pasting together a place of shared memory.

  If Imelda was censoring her experiences at the hospital for her younger sister, there is no evidence of it in the fragments Edna selected for her sketchbooks. In one letter fragment Edna pasted into a sketchbook in late 1938, Imelda even describes the transfusion process. As a child Edna was fascinated with the body – a site at once real and imaginary, containing all of the contradictions she would continue to paint throughout her career.

  Imelda opened up a world beneath the surface of the skin, a place both fragile and resilient. She also represented female courage and adventure, modelling an austerity and toughness that Edna idolised. In another letter, she transcribes a few lines of a Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem about Florence Nightingale for her little sister:

  Lo! In that house of misery

  A lady with a lamp I see

  Pass through the glimmering gloom,

  And flit from room to room.

  The Biographer

  I called Anna-Marie and told her that I didn’t think Percy would be involved in the project at all.

  ‘Oh well,’ she said. I could hear the disappointment in her voice. ‘But everything else is on track?’

  I stood with my back against the bluestone wall of my front hall, looking at the threadbare carpet. ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Sure. Short monograph. In and out.’

  ‘I know you’re ready to do something bigger,’ Anna-Marie said, ‘but choose the right thing, okay? And think about the sports biography idea. There’s going to be money in that over the next decade, especially if Sydney gets the Olympics. If you like this whole process, let’s start having a look at people. Do you like tennis? Fitzy? He could work. Or someone in racing?’

  I began calling the Whitedale aunts and organising interviews.

  It turned out that Edna’s life would take me into hundreds of homes over the years.

  It started with the homes she’d lived in and moved through, the houses of her family and close friends, the homes of people who knew her once, or for a while, but then I kept on walking, into other homes in ever-widening circles. It has never really stopped. The homes where book clubs were held, where I sat on upholstered chairs and ate the dry sand of Arnott’s Assorted Biscuits. The homes of people who thought they might have found one of her paintings in the attic, or hanging forgotten in a dark hallway. Then the homes of rich collectors, huge houses with driveways that swooped, and entry halls of white marble and soft carpet.

  I was a nervous guest at first. So I wore business clothes, jackets with fake shoulders stitched into them, things that gave me edges.

  The first home was Jennifer’s. Sliding onto the Falcon’s soft leather seat on a winter morning, I turned the key in the ignition and felt the comfort of the engine stirring into life. I roared over the span of the West Gate Bridge. When they built it in the 1970s, there was an accident, a portion of the span collapsing, dozens died. The broken pieces were made into memorials in the engineering campus at Monash University, to remind the students of consequences. I’ve never seen the pieces myself – it was a story Dad used to repeat whenever we crossed t
he bridge on our way to away games at the MCG. I always think about that when I travel over it now: how complicated it is to keep things in the air.

  That Monday, as I headed to Jennifer’s, cars were streaming in towards Melbourne, commuters. I was one of the only people going the wrong way, out of the city, into the hinterlands. My getaway car was running in reverse, over and over, taking me back to Geelong. I could see the distant hump of the You Yangs, waiting to watch me go home again.

  When I got to Dent Street in West Geelong, Jennifer was sitting on the front step of her house, smoking a cigarette.

  ‘You caught me!’ She beamed. ‘Don’t tell my kids, okay?’

  ‘I promise,’ I said. ‘Not a word.’

  ‘You smoke?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘I only just took it up again,’ she said. ‘It’s great. Some days I think I never should have quit. So, you ready? I have the albums all set up in the back.’

  Jennifer’s home smelled of cooked meat, lightly wrung out, and the menthol smoke that had drifted back in through the open door. Going down her crowded front hall, with its bright collections of colours and shapes, paintings and pictures, I caught glimpses of bedrooms piled high with boxes – she had become her family’s storage unit. The nest was not empty, just abandoned.

  ‘How many kids do you have?’

  ‘Five boys. A handful. But boys are easier than girls. Margy always said that about Edna and Imelda – she worried about them constantly, all the time. You don’t have to worry so much with boys.’

  The kitchen table was too big for the space, the chairs pushed in tight. I tried to imagine five boys squished around it, the chaos and the heat of them. Stacks of photo albums were piled high on the table’s surface, the sharp edges of images poking out from their pages.

  ‘What other things did Margaret worry about?’

  ‘The usual stuff. They were too ambitious, her girls, never satisfied. Partly Margy’s fault, and she admitted that later. Because she was foreign, French. I think it was a form of self-defence, making them feel different. But by the time Margy realised she could be at home here in Australia, it was too late. Those girls saw themselves as a cut above, you know.’