The Biographer's Lover

by Ruby J Murray

  I pulled the ladder up behind me and slept on pilled flannel sheets in a bed so thick with memories that I dreamed of hot tarmac and high expectations, dope smoke and longing.

  In the morning, on the edge of sleep, I thought for a moment that I was waking up to the morning after I left Joe, three years before. I felt the balloon of emptiness and calm expanding in my chest. The hope that I was starting over.

  But then I really woke up. The space under the sloping roof was full of bags, but three years had passed.

  I called Anna-Marie to give her my new number.

  ‘And how’s it all going?’ she asked.

  ‘We’re getting there. We’re going to start talking to agents and galleries soon.’

  ‘Sounds like she should be paying you secretarial wages too.’

  ‘Actually, it’s funny you say that …’

  I told her about the new agreement.

  Anna-Marie sighed, a soft plosion rushing through the wires. ‘That’s a bad idea,’ she said. ‘You know I think that’s a bad idea. Do something that gives you leverage. We’re in a recession. No-one’s publishing that sort of thing. Be smart, for god’s sake.’

  I didn’t listen. It was my biography now.

  I told anyone else who asked over the following weeks that it made more sense for me to be living down in Geelong while I did the archival research and worked on the paintings with Victoria; whenever I wasn’t in Victoria’s back shed, I needed to be in the historical society.

  I rode the ferry between the headlands, from the Bellarine to the Mornington, the Mornington to the Bellarine. Moving back to Geelong was like stepping behind a veil – no friends called or visited. For my entire life, Geelong had been trying to lure Melburnians to our side of the bay with the promise of seaside strolls and ice-creams in the sun. But Melbourne took one look at the crime rate and the mercury being dumped into the bay from the superphosphate plant and headed straight down the other peninsula instead, to empty their wallets in Sorrento and Rye.

  EDNA: A LIFE

  The preparations for the soaring triptychs that Edna painted in the 1970s and 1980s after her retreat from the art world really began decades earlier, in the microcosm of the Matthew Flinders Girls’ School in 1942.

  At school, Edna began to focus on scenes repeating over time, layered sketches of bodies as they moved through the rooms, perched on narrow chairs in otherwise empty classrooms, sat hunched at tiny desks.

  The Matthew Flinders Girls’ School was housed in what had recently been an elementary school. A state school with a patina of the private when Edna enrolled, it was opened by idealists. The school’s founders wanted to give the working-class girls of Geelong a taste of the world of the Hermitage, the private school overlooking the bay from Newtown, the first girls school in Australia to have uniforms, whose proper young ladies came from the white-lattice houses on top of the hill or from the cove of Eastern Beach.

  In the echoing classrooms of the Girls’ School, Edna attended cooking, art, and domestic science classes while the new faculty scrabbled for pots, pans and textbooks and tried to persuade the daughters of the factory workers that they would grow up and become ladies too, if they cooked enough.

  Over and over on the same page, often through necessity due to paper shortages, Edna practised shifting perspective. In one self-portrait sketch, she is a giant, crushing pencils in her huge fists, while around her other versions of herself, skinny and weak, bend to pull up invisible stockings, or try to pin their hair back in mirrors set at uncomfortable angles.

  It is clear from the positioning of the girls on many of the pages that Edna had come across a set of reproductions of Degas’ dancers series, or at least Norman Lindsay’s sketches and paintings of the Ballet Russe. Lindsay was romantic, however, and Degas was cruel. ‘I have perhaps too often considered woman as an animal,’ he once wrote. ‘Women can never forgive me; they hate me, they can feel that I am disarming them. I show them without their coquetry, in the state of animals cleaning themselves.’

  The physicality of the girls around her did not disgust Edna – it fascinated her. From the broken bodies of the birds she’d picked up to sketch in the tidal estuaries of Swan Bay as a child to the alchemy of blood and bone in Imelda’s letters from the training hospital, Edna saw bodies and minds as intimately connected.

  Edna’s classmates did not always welcome her constant, fixed attention, especially when her sketches were unflattering, as they frequently were. Her experiences with her peers were mixed. Fifty years later, a former schoolmate described her as: ‘One of those young girls who is a little too much.’

  In the beginning, at least, the Matthew Flinders Girls’ School gave Edna access to materials she would have been hard pressed to find in the world outside, where war rationing and thrift was beginning to close in again. A Geelong Advertiser article from 1942 reports the long list of arts and crafts displayed by the girls at an open day: wool spinning, raffia, quilting, dying.

  Regardless of the opportunities the school provided her, however, Edna was bitter about her time there. She wanted to be grown up and independent, like Imelda. Frank and Margaret, sensing their daughter’s restlessness, insisted that she stay on at school until the official leaving age of fourteen. She grew increasingly aloof, investing all of her emotional energy into letters to her sister. Her aunts remember Edna constantly writing and sketching, sending endless packages despite receiving few in return.

  Most of the letters between the sisters are lost or held under embargo. Letters from Imelda to her Whitedale cousins have survived, however, including those to Jennifer Whitedale. In these letters, instead of her passionate, difficult self, the Imelda on the page after her departure for Europe is a cipher; the good Aussie girl, a Nightingale making the best of a long, hard winter. A recurring theme in the letters home is Imelda’s growing friendship in London with the French volunteer Celine Delacroix.

  Imelda met the tall, glamorous Celine through the Voluntary Aid Detachment nursing corps. Celine had no medical training. When war was declared, she had been working as a secretary for the French fashion house Serge Bastian in London. The fashion house’s production facilities were requisitioned to make uniforms, and finding herself out of a job, Celine enrolled in the VAD. Both women ended up at the same Australian war hospital on London’s outskirts and moved into a small flat together.

  In her letters, Imelda writes often of her friend’s superb skills with patients despite her lack of training, of her level-headedness as the bombs screamed down over the city.

  Edna’s jealousy over Imelda’s new best friend can be seen in her early attempts at cartooning in the sketchbooks: Celine is drawn in heavy black lines, all breasts and pout, a croissant hanging over her upper lip like a moustache. Imelda, on the other hand, is always sketched as a kind of hero. Imelda, trying to teach Celine how to care for patients while Celine is open-mouthed and silly-looking. Imelda rolling her eyes while Celine stumbles over a bucket in the middle of a roughly sketched ward. Imelda standing on top of a pile of rubble, the sky full of black swans.

  The Biographer

  Grand Final day dawned windy in Geelong. Mum left in the morning wrapped in blue and white, off to watch the broadcast of the game from Melbourne on the screens at Kardinia Park.

  I went out for a walk. The streets were deserted. Wet Cats flags hung limp from front fences. Shops were shuttered.

  Back home again, I watched the match on TV. With the commentary turned off, I could hear the screams and cries coming from across the street, across the whole city, as Geelong fell further and further behind the West Coast Eagles.

  Percy raced across the screen like a white bird in flight, gums bared around his black mouthguard. It didn’t matter what he did, though. Geelong lost.

  Victoria came over to my house after the final. We went to the pub down the road, ordered pints, and listened to the old men and women abusing the Cats.

  Bloody handbags. Played like girls. First time the fla
g goes out of state. Faggots.

  The television above the bar showed the fans milling at Kardinia Park, waiting for the players to arrive home on the buses from Melbourne. Then they cut to a shot of Percy, on his knees in the wet grass of the MCG, sobbing.

  ‘I can’t be there,’ said Victoria, staring up at the screen. ‘It’s terrible. Then they’ll all go get so drunk they can’t walk.’

  ‘How’s your Dad taking it?’

  ‘Devastated. If he could cry he probably would. I think this is the end for Percy. He’s getting too old for the team, and this will destroy him. I don’t even know what he’ll do next.’

  I thought: he doesn’t have to do anything. He doesn’t have to work if he doesn’t want to. Neither do you. I watched her hands around the pint. Her nails were painted blue and white, the team colours. They seemed vulnerable to me, childish. Not Victoria’s normal, polished self.

  ‘I’ve been meaning to remind you,’ I said, wanting to change the subject. ‘Did you ever ask your Dad about those cheques? The ones to JW?’

  ‘They were for John, to help him pay for uni and stuff,’ said Victoria.

  ‘It’s a lot of money for uni.’

  ‘Well, he didn’t have any family or anything until his biological mum reached out to him again.’

  ‘They kept on giving it to him up until last year.’

  ‘It was instead of an inheritance, you know. To help him get a leg up. Actually, I’ve been meaning to ask something too,’ she said. ‘Is everything okay?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The moving back here. If you ever need anything extra, I can see how much time this is taking. Just say.’ She looked at me shrewdly.

  A feeling came out of nowhere: she was searching for a way to start edging me out. A way to take over the biography herself.

  ‘Everything’s fine,’ I told her.

  ‘That’s good. We might even sell the thing to a really major publisher.’

  ‘I’m going to try,’ I said. ‘But it’s a long shot. I think a small, independent place is more likely to be interested. You know that, right?’

  ‘That’s why we have to push on all fronts. Without Mum’s work being out there, the biography won’t be as big. Without the biography, her work won’t get as much attention.’

  ‘I could also apply for arts funding,’ I said. The feeling of a moment before had passed. I was just tipsy, I told myself. ‘Someone told me a while ago about a program that sends you to France. I could go visit the village where she lived with Percy that year.’

  Am I misremembering Victoria’s alarm, the flicker of her jealousy? The present can leak into the past.

  ‘Leave the French stuff,’ she said sharply. ‘We don’t even have any work from then, and that’s the point, right? When you sell the biography, this is going to be big. We’ll make it big.’

  Victoria claims she gave me money that afternoon. I know she did not. To be poor is to be a full-time accountant. Just like Edna, I have my weekly ledgers, the carefully entered pages of credits and debits, the greying subtraction soup. They refuse to change.

  But Victoria’s truth is not the truth of facts; it is the truth of emotion.

  To her, I am the succubus who came disguised as a saviour in the dark night, and left before dawn, full of stolen blood. I offered her beautiful things, and she pumped me full of cash and success. In her mind, I always intended to take, and to take.

  And it is true that I did take money later – a tiny per diem – when she insisted, and I had to. What she got back was so much more than she could have imagined would be possible. I changed her life; I changed all of their lives.

  I walked home from the pub. The whole city was in angry mourning. The streets were empty; the blue and white stripes spray-painted on the shop windows would be scraped off tomorrow; the signs would disappear. In the eerie stillness distant noises were loud. A door slammed. Someone yelled.

  At home, I climbed the ladder to my room, pulled it up behind me. The evening was settling outside. I heard Mum come home and turn on the post-game commentary.

  Hours later, in the darkness, I woke to the sound of breaking glass.

  Stumbling out of bed, I went to the narrow window cut into the roof. The street below me was bathed in orange light. Four huge bodies stood over my Ford Falcon with cricket bats. The bats swung up, came down on the passenger-side windows. By the time I got down the ladder to the front door, a car’s doors were slamming. I ran out and stood there on the pavement. Still in my pyjamas. Saw the Cats sticker on the BMW’s back windshield as it screamed away, the woman riding the bowling ball, her white breasts sickly under the streetlamps. Percy’s car.

  I walked around the Falcon. It was battered, crushed. Broken glass glittered in the gutter like diamonds. On the driver’s side, before they took to it with the cricket bats, someone had spray-painted: SLUTMOBILE.

  EDNA: A LIFE

  While Edna sweltered in the classrooms of the Girls’ School during the summer of 1942, beyond its walls Geelong was a city of young men.

  Boys in uniform came in from their training camps, got drunk, and rolled barrels of beer down Moorabool Street, straight through the windows of the pharmacy at the bottom of the hill so that they could steal snacks and drink from the soda fountains. They danced in the shards of glass and spilt beer. Recruiters’ stations sprang up on street corners. Enlistment posters were plastered across the walls of pubs and post offices.

  Australia has promised Britain 5000 more men: will you keep that promise?

  Would you stand by while a bushfire raged?

  The city’s public buildings grew unwieldy wooden carapaces, bomb shelters narrowing the streets. And through the great hubbub of the summer nights sauntered the Americans, their pockets bulging with cigarettes and lollies. Roughly one million in a population of just seven million, the Americans – smooth, hulking – were far better fed and watered than their sinewy Australian counterparts in the AIF.

  Overpaid, oversexed and over here went a common catchphrase at the time. The American servicemen were trouble. Newspapers vigilantly reported the number of Australian women dating them, statistics rigorously gathered by concerned citizens who sat on street corners and counted couples. Opinion pieces bemoaned good girls gone wild on lust and threatened by STDs. As alcohol was thought to make women dangerously sexually immoral, mixed-gender drinking in hotels was banned in 1942, a law that would not be overturned until 1963.

  Melbourne’s ‘Brownout Strangler’ confirmed the American threat. In May of 1942, Private Eddie Leonski of the 52nd Battalion murdered three women – Ivy Violet McLeod, Gladys Hosking and Pauline Thompson – in the dim streets surrounding the US force’s Albert Park barracks. Afterwards, he told the police it was the sound of their singing that he’d wanted, that he’d strangled the women for their voices.

  The tensions between the Australians and the American servicemen escalated into all-out rioting in the final months of the year. The battles of Melbourne and Brisbane saw thousands of soldiers brawling on the streets, hundreds hospitalised, and clashes continued to spark across the continent for months – in Townsville, Rockhampton, Mount Isa; in Bondi, Fremantle and Perth.

  And in the middle of it all, Edna began her search for models.

  Sketches of young men and boys in their bathing suits from November 1942 show that Edna was often at the sea bath on Eastern Beach. Edna was thirteen; many of the servicemen she sketched were only a few years older than her, getting ready to leave for the front. Her lines are quick and loose: she would have had the sketchbook open on her lap as she sat a demure distance from the boys.

  Soon, though, Edna seems to have approached the boys in uniform lounging together on the sloping grass above the sea baths, smoking cigarettes. Her portraits are detailed, faces and hands. For the first time in her life, she tore pages out of her precious sketchbooks, presumably giving them away as keepsakes to send home to distant families and sweethearts.

  And then,
around Christmas 1942, Edna began sketching the soldiers inside the bathing huts at Eastern Beach. Unlike the sketches she made for the servicemen to send home, those she drew inside the hut were for herself: unromantic, simple, sometimes stark; Edna worked her way through various experiments and exercises. She had always drawn her male cousins: in the street, around the table, fighting, playing, but never still. But at Eastern Beach she had models who would wait for her, rather than the other way around, and she was delighted.

  In one image – this time of an Australian serviceman that she would much later work into an oil – the young man stands in a shaft of afternoon sun. Shirtless, with his uniform on the ground beside him, he is beautiful and proud. Behind him in the shed, mundane stacks of gardening tools lean against the wall in the crosshatched gloom. Metal forks, trowels, blunt shovels – the objects seem as if they’re in the image by chance, but it’s unlikely that a beach hut would have contained so many gardening instruments meant, after all, for grass and soil, not sand and water. More likely, Edna deliberately composed the background of the image to show the boy’s frailty, to contrast with his smooth young skin.

  The scorching summer months that Edna spent sketching the soldiers in the changing huts at Eastern Beach were pivotal to her development as an artist and her experience of the war. They were also disastrous. Edna wanted to draw nudes – and a few of the soldiers obliged.

  Eastern Beach was a bustling place, teeming with Geelong society and Edna’s chattering peers, who watched as Edna approached the men in uniform – jealously at first, and then with disgust as Edna pushed her luck even further, approaching African American servicemen to see if they would model for her too.