In April of 1943 the front page of The Geelong Advertiser ran an article on the corrupting influence of American servicemen. The article doesn’t mention Edna by name, but it does describe ‘young girls from the Girls’ School lured into the sheds at Eastern Beach’. The journalist writes passionately of ‘the absolute necessity of protecting our girls from the Negro servicemen stationed in the district, whose race endows them with a natural heightened interest’.
A week after the article came out, Edna was expelled from the Girls’ School.
By the 1990s, none of Edna’s schoolfriends remembered who turned Edna’s sketchbook over to the school authorities. From that day on, however, Edna would guard her sketchbooks fiercely, never letting them out of her sight. ‘I do not see painting as a moral issue,’ she wrote to her daughter, Victoria, later in life. ‘It is a straightforward matter of seeing, and attempting to understand, not for someone else, but for yourself. I see, I paint, I see, I paint, that is all. That is all there is.’
Edna maintained at the time – and for the rest of her life – that there had been nothing sexual in her encounters with the servicemen in the sheds. As she described it, she was not sexually interested in any man before Max Cranmer. She ‘never wanted a man like that’, or children, until much later in life. The sketches themselves back her up. Her fascination was purely human; she was drawn to the movement of their bodies, broken with the knowledge that they were about to die in places she had never been for reasons she could often not understand.
At home on Dent Street, just as at school, no-one believed Edna when she said she had not been physically involved with the soldiers in her sketchbooks. Frank Whitedale’s fury on the day of Edna’s expulsion from the Girls’ School became legend on the Whitedales’ street in West Geelong.
Frank locked Edna in the house for weeks, and then only let her out under supervision, while Margaret held worried conferences around the kitchen tables in the homes of the other Whitedale wives, trying to work out ‘what to do about Edna’. Edna’s cousins remembered the ‘scandal’ decades later. Frank was spiralling into despair, and Margaret and Frank were fighting constantly.
Life in Geelong became terrible for Edna.
In the sketchbooks from the time Edna spent locked up in the house on Dent Street, she began to draw herself obsessively in each uniform of the women’s services. The sketch with the most decoration from those pages features Edna in the WAAF uniform, rows of medals attached to her chest.
When she was finally allowed to leave the house unsupervised, over a month later, Edna went straight to the recruitment booths on Moorabool Street. To join the WAAF, Edna needed to be twenty, a lie beyond her abilities. Instead, she joined the Land Army. A smudge over her birth date rolled her a year and a half into the future; a year that would be filled with hot banana plantations, rows of fruit trees stretching out into the blue distance, and then, finally, the wide red stations of the centre.
The Biographer
In the morning, as we stood over the broken car, Mum told me that West Coast supporters had come through and trashed things all over town.
I called Percy as soon as Mum left for work. The Toreador march played out.
‘I saw your car pulling away,’ I said onto his answer machine. ‘I know it was you, you fucking arsehole. Why did you do that? You have twenty-four hours, or I’m going to Victoria, then I’m going to the police.’
I hung up the phone.
By lunchtime, there was an envelope in the letterbox. A cheque from Percy, and a note that said: I’m really sorry. It wasn’t me. My mates borrowed my car. I complained about you. But I truly didn’t know they were going to do that. Please don’t tell Victoria. You have to believe me.
The amount on the cheque was much more than I needed to repair the windows. It was guilt money – hush money – and it could carry me through months of living on the cheap at Mum’s house.
I should be able to remember the feelings I had that morning – the fury, the confusion, some edgy tang of fear – but I can’t. I chose to believe Percy. Again I chose not to tell Victoria, not to make a fuss. And I’ve let years of other memories cover that day up: memories of Percy arriving in his car to take a screaming Immy for an outing in the long days of my exhaustion as a new mother; of Percy standing and clapping on the edge of Immy’s football games; of Percy defending me against Victoria’s scorn.
So I can’t bring back what I felt as I stood in the front yard, holding the cheque, staring at the cardboard effigy of Percy in the lawn across the street.
Someone had scribbled all over his broken nose, his pixellated eyes. FAG.
In the Geelong Historical Society, I sat for days with scraps of the past growing around me.
The Cranmers were everywhere: on land deeds, in the minutes of city council meetings, on the board of every museum, thanked and applauded in newspaper articles and in the donors list to county fairs and the children’s homes.
And despite the Whitedales’ reputation, and what the family had told me about their hardscrabble past, I only found a line on them: four Whitedales arrested for brawling in 1923, in the pages of a Police Gazette.
The Police Gazettes drew me in. Each entry in the heavy book open on my knees was a litany of pettiness and misery. Houses broken wide open, bedrooms ransacked for the single, precious piece of home that people had brought with them over months of oceans; wives abandoned and brothers murdered, and then, of course, the dead babies. Dead babies on every page, wrapped in newspaper under park benches, discarded at public toilets, found floating in Corio Bay or the brown waters of the Yarra, hidden between the struts of the sea baths at Eastern Beach and left for the tide to rise and sweep away.
After painstaking weeks of debate, Victoria and I had assembled a ‘catalogue’ out of Edna’s paintings: the final cut of works that we’d take to galleries. I had chosen a framer, and had spent days standing in the small shopfront, selecting every frame, every mount.
By night-time, at home, I was exhausted. I tried to work on the manuscript too, but I couldn’t focus – my head full of images and prices. Instead, Mum and I sat together, slumped in front of the television.
When I was a kid, we sat at the kitchen table for meals because it was the right thing to do, and ate fast, in silence. But in 1992, as winter turned to spring, Mum came home from her shifts wrecked. The nurses were in the middle of a union battle. And for the first time in my life, Mum felt old to me.
Instead of our rushed, silent dinners at the table, we ate in front of the television. We watched game shows, each of us with a single glass of red wine from the bladder Mum kept on top of the fridge. Blankety Blanks re-runs. Wheel of Fortune. Twinkling lights and gaps we had to fill. Women were darlings, and the announcer wore a snappy suit. The name of the game changed – Family Feud, Supermarket Search; we were obsessed with the things we could amass: cars and water purifiers and blenders and fans of cash – but the announcer always emerged from the middle of the set, skipping down the stairs, swinging his microphone, his receding hairline catching the light.
Before the question was even out of his mouth, Mum would jump in with the answer, then look at me, raising a superior eyebrow as the contestants scrambled over one another.
At first I didn’t mind it, the drift to the living room, the routine of it, but as the weeks ground on, her smug answers became infuriating. Even worse than the gloating responses was her anxiety when she didn’t know the answer. Then she would sit, desperately racking her brain for the name of the winning horse in the 1984 Melbourne Cup or the first Australian football player elected to public office.
When the game shows were done, she channel surfed, waiting impatiently through Hindu extremists rioting in India, food supplies being sent to Somalia, the election of a smooth-faced American president. Mum became obsessed with the separation of the Prince and Princess of Wales. The British prime minister holding forth in parliament on the fact that Diana would never be queen. Shots of Princess Di e
ntering and exiting cars and restaurants, holding a hand in front of her face, waving the photographers away.
‘That’s wrong,’ said my mother, shaking her head. ‘Look at her. That poor girl.’
To avoid the television, I began to slip out of the house after doing the dishes each night. I paced the Esplanade in the evening light, my breath pluming in the chilly air. Rain flooded the gutters, broke the banks of the creeks and rivers, flowed to the sea.
Across the bay, the small flames on top of the smoke stacks of the superphosphate plant flickered in the darkening sky.
After the first few weeks I started taking random turns, walking the long streets, peering into the lit-up windows of Geelong, where suburban dramas played themselves out around dinner tables or huddled over flickering screens. I liked to wander through the drifting scents of my neighbours’ evenings – lamb chops, stews, roasting potatoes. When the wind changed, the tang of fresh eucalyptus came over the water from where the woodchip mill thrummed late into the night.
Then came the evening in early October. It wasn’t raining, for once. My feet took me to Dent Street. I stood for a long time, looking at the row of Whitedale cottages. It had been months, but the FOR SALE sign still flapped out the front of Margaret Whitedale’s house. I imagined Edna in the front room of her childhood home, the windows cracked open to let the fumes out, painting into the night.
On the way home, I looped the block. I walked straight past the bushy red heads of the bottlebrush. It took me half a house to stop, look back over my shoulder.
The tree was just outside the light thrown by the street lamp. A wind picked up off the bay, rushing across the water and whipping through the flat suburban streets. The bottlebrush shook, rich red stamen wavering in and out of the circle of streetlight.
Even before I traced the faded numbers on the letterbox, I knew where I was: Number 27. How many paintings had I found of that house in Edna’s collection in that first week of cataloguing? Twenty? More?
The windows of the house from Edna’s paintings were dark. Its exterior walls had been repainted a pale spearmint. Streaks of rust marred the corners of the walls where stormwater had run off the roof and left tracks across the green. The yard was empty – no flowers anymore, no careful garden. Silvery native grasses had pushed up through the patchy lawn in the last rains. Two faded canvas chairs were arranged on the narrow front verandah.
The cracked concrete driveway was empty. A Beware of the Dog sign with a faded cartoon of a slathering pit bull hung on the closed gate, but nothing barked as I put my hand gingerly into the letterbox and drew out a stack of marketing mail from JB Hi-Fi, Myer and Coles supermarket addressed to a woman: Laetitia Walters.
I slipped the Coles catalogue into the deep pocket of my parka, and put the rest of the mail back.
When I returned to number 27 in the bright, gusty light of the following afternoon, a faded yellow Ford was parked in the driveway, a shiny GO CATS 1992 sticker slapped to the bumper. Two toddler seats were strapped in the back. I opened the gate slowly, waiting for the barking dog.
I knocked, and a woman around my own age opened the door. Her dark hair was pulled back in a neat ponytail. She left the flyscreen closed between us. Even through the fine mesh, she looked exhausted – fatigue leaving papery lines on her skin.
‘Can I help you?’ she asked.
‘I’m sorry to disturb,’ I said. ‘This is a bit out of the blue. I’m a researcher. I’m looking into the work of a local artist and I came across some old paintings of your house. You have a moment?’
‘It’s not a great time,’ she said. The high-pitched screams of children playing filtered down the hall.
‘These are the paintings.’ I waved a paper envelope at her that I’d put together that morning containing photographs and an introductory letter from me. ‘Any help at all would be so wonderful.’
‘Is he famous?’
‘She. Edna Cranmer. She may well be soon,’ I said, smiling.
The woman considered. Then she smiled.
‘My mum was an artist too,’ she said. ‘Maybe they knew each other.’
‘It’s likely, if Edna was painting your house so much.’
‘This is my parents’ place. Okay. Want a cuppa? We can come out for a sec, I guess.’
‘Sure, I’d love that.’
‘Dad,’ she yelled over her shoulder. ‘There’s a woman here about some art.’ She retreated down the dim hall.
Mr Edward Walters was elderly but graceful. Tall, slim, his stomach pressing against a polo shirt that was tucked tightly into the top of his pants, which were carefully pressed, a crisp line running from his belt to his leather shoes. He opened the flyscreen door, introduced himself and shook my hand firmly.
We both sat down in the folding canvas chairs on the verandah while I explained the project, and who Edna was.
‘Do you or your wife know her?’
‘Wife’s dead,’ said Mr Walters, matter of fact. ‘Six years.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘She was an angel. Best woman in the world.’
‘But Edna Cranmer, did you know her? Or maybe your wife did?’
‘Doesn’t ring a bell, love.’
‘She grew up literally a block away, on Dent Street. Her maiden name was Whitedale – the Whitedales still live there, the rest of them. You’re sure you don’t know them?’
‘I don’t get involved in the neighbourhood. That was the wife’s job.’
The daughter returned, carrying a tray with three teacups balanced on it – a cheap willow pattern with two Chinese lovers running over a bridge. My mother had the same set; she’d bought it in an op-shop. Every English-descended household on the continent had it. Mr Walters’ daughter offered her father a cup, then put the tray on the low wooden table. There were only two chairs; she leaned against the verandah’s support pillar, and held a hand out to look at Edna’s paintings.
‘You gonna leave those kids out back alone?’ asked her father.
‘They’ll be fine, Dad.’ She flipped through the images. ‘My mum was pretty talented. Laetitia Walters. You know her too?’
‘I’m sorry, I don’t.’
‘Exhibited with the local group – the Contemporary Arts Society. Fell out with them, in the ’70s. You even know why, Dad?’ Her father grunted. She stuffed the photos back into the envelope, passed them to him.
‘Edna was involved with the CAS,’ I told them. ‘She taught there. Maybe they were friends?’
Out the back, there was a sharp scream, the sound of the game breaking into tears.
‘Annie! Get out there!’ snapped Mr Walters.
His daughter shot a look of fury at him, but she put her teacup down on the rickety table. As she left, she tried to slam the flyscreen door closed behind her, but it resisted, sighing slowly back into place instead.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I said. ‘Should I come back later?’
‘No, it’s fine. Annie’s got too many kids right now. That’s her problem. Let’s have a look.’
I lay the photos out on the table next to Annie’s cooling cup of tea.
He gave a small grunt of surprise. ‘Would you look at that. Well, it’s definitely our place, isn’t it.’
‘It is.’
‘She’s not half bad. You think these are worth anything?’
‘I honestly don’t know.’
His hands were creased and sprinkled with liver spots. They shook as they hovered over the photographs. Instead of picking the photos up, he put his hands in the pockets of his pressed trousers.
‘Cranmers, you said. Are they the ones that used to run the carpet factory? What was the name of their place?’
A small nub of disappointment formed in my chest. He really didn’t know who Edna was. But then I didn’t know every person on the block growing up, either.
‘Black Swan.’
‘That’s the one. The carpets. No, I can’t help you.’
‘Maybe …’
; ‘I’m sorry. Whatever weird obsession your girl had with this house, I don’t know anything about it. Maybe she knew my wife at the CAS. Maybe that was it.’
‘You’ll call me if you think of anything?’ I wrote my number on the back of one of the photographs.
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘You leave your cup on the tray there. Annie will grab it. I’ll keep those photos though, if you don’t mind.’
After that, my walks began to take me past number 27 every night. I would pause on the pavement, look over at the windows lit by the flickering glow of the television. I wondered what Edna had thought as she’d stood across from the house in the 1970s and 1980s, sketching it over and over, taking the sketches back to her studio on the other side of the peninsula and turning them into paintings that didn’t look like her other paintings, that were mismatched, ugly, closed. Why she’d loved it so much – and so strangely.
And I wondered, pacing the empty Esplanade, why it was so hard for me to sit in the same room as my mother.
Years later, after Mum died in 2010, I found a Tupperware container of her meatloaf in the freezer. She made it with a special spice mix, which she ground in a heavy stone pestle. It would fill the house, tangy and rich. How many times did she cook it for me? Hundreds, certainly. But there is a number – and it is finite.
Was she happy? Until Immy was born, I thought she was not, and her unhappiness terrified me. But then I remember that she could build things, knock holes in walls without worrying, that she moved forward in a way I have not been able to. And I think that maybe I was wrong, during all those years, and that my mother was fine.
I took that last meal of hers home with me when I had finished cleaning out her house, and put it in my own freezer, and for months I kept it there.
I would open the freezer door and stare at its dark orange crystals through the plastic. I would imagine eating it, the last piece of comfort food in the world. Immy was sixteen when my mother died. I imagined sharing it with Immy, saying: your grandmother cooked you this. I never did, of course. He was too old. It would have grossed him out. I threw it away one night, a year later, scared that it had gone bad, that it would be simply ice, the membranes destroyed.
The Biographer's Lover Page 11