The Biographer's Lover

by Ruby J Murray

  The only completed oil Edna produced during the months that she waited to hear back from the selection committee is Max Sleeping, 1967. In the painting – which is now in the family’s private collection – Max is naked on the bed under the soft glow of an oil lamp set up on the bedside table. His arms are thrown back over his head, the square line of his chin still youthful and clear. His legs, splayed, look powerful even in their brokenness, the angle bent, his knees open and inviting the viewer up across his lit thighs to the silk of his pubis. The window to the room is half open, and outside in the darkness of the night what look like sharp white gulls are in flight over the bay. Closer inspection of the painting reveals that they are not gulls, but shard-like wimples, women floating down the street beneath them, the skirts of their outfits dragging along in the darkness behind them. In the hazy reflection of the window, a few lines suggest the painter, cramped in the corner of the tiny room, looking out at her husband and the flying gulls of the nurses’ wimples in the hot coastal night.

  The board did not choose Edna the second time round, either. They chose Ken McFadyen, a set designer at the Australian Broadcasting Commission, who flew to Vietnam in August of 1967.

  The Biographer

  Who gets to decide what counts as causal?

  I left Leslie’s office and took the stairs down to the second floor. I paused in the doorway of a lecture hall where Joe and I had once fucked on the floor. So much of the story depends on where you stop telling it. If the story of our relationship had stopped there, it would have been a success. A couple of years of longing and loving.

  As I drove home to Geelong, I thought of the Whitedales as I had first seen them, sitting shoulder to shoulder in the church, the way Percy had held his sister, the way Max had threatened the journalist.

  I thought of Victoria and myself sitting on the steps of her back shed in Geelong; Victoria with a glass of wine in her hand at the end of the day, gesturing at the fading bay below us, describing the beauty of her parents’ bond, how their unquestioning support had always inspired her.

  It was as if Victoria and I were both working on the same painting, both with our hands on the brush. Each piece of the past I found formed a drip of paint, then a spill, running fissures through the picture Victoria wanted: her parents weren’t the people she thought they were.

  Had Max really asked the committee not to consider Edna for the position of official war artist to Vietnam? It was possible. Or Nel could have done it for him. She’d blocked Edna’s career before. Regardless, the trip to France, I was becoming sure, had been a trial separation from Max. And now Edna’s marching in the 1980s hinted that late in life she had become politicised, even if she had kept it to herself, angry at the havoc war had played in her life. Was Max violent? Was that why Edna had marched with WAR? Had he hurt her? It didn’t seem possible, the man with his crippled legs. But I knew that men weren’t always how they appeared. That my big, scary-looking veteran father had been gentle and kind. That my husband, meek, milky middle-class Joe, was not.

  Still, I had no proof. Just a fuzzy photo that hardly even looked like Edna, the cautions of a woman who refused to talk to me, a missing year, and a name: Celine Delacroix.

  The news that Edna Cranmer was going to be part of the national Australia Remembers campaign had filtered through the art world over the months of March and April, thanks to some relentless pushing from Victoria and myself. Slowly, people were beginning to contact us. The director of the Geelong Art Gallery was the first to suggest an entire exhibition of Edna’s work, to correspond with the launch of the campaign and the touring show in 1994.

  Despite the fact that I was working out of her back shed, I still hadn’t seen Victoria in person since before we’d got the news about the campaign. I arrived after she left for work and left before she got home. We communicated via notes stuck to the pin board.

  Then came the day of the meeting with the Geelong Art Gallery. I waited for Victoria in the small bowl of park that faces the train station, so that we could walk in together, a united front. I sat on the steps of the war memorial inside the park, tucked in next to the gallery. My stomach pinched. For days, a feeling like indigestion had been building inside me.

  Victoria strode towards me across the gravel paths, bright and happy. She wore a sharp dove-grey business suit and carried a brand-new portfolio of prints – images I had chosen for the meeting: the American soldiers raining cigarettes down from the train at Geelong station, soldiers lounging on the grass behind the baths at Eastern Beach. She sat down next to me on the steps.

  ‘Victoria,’ I said. ‘We need to talk.’

  I showed her the print from the microfilm of Edna climbing into the police van with her hands shackled behind her.

  ‘You’re still on about this? What are you trying to do?’ she asked, her voice breaking with frustration. ‘I’ve never seen this photo before. It doesn’t even look like her.’

  ‘It’s her, Victoria. Look at the name. Imelda Delacroix. Imelda. And Delacroix, for John’s biological mother. Don’t you think that’s strange?’

  ‘Why are you pushing this?’

  ‘I’m only trying to understand who Edna was, what was motivating her.’

  ‘You think I don’t know who she was?’

  We fought. The same fight. Victoria said she didn’t see the problem, that there was no surety and that even if it was Edna it had probably been a mistake, mistakes happen all the time. Edna had gone to the Anzac Day march, as she did every year, and had been caught up in the protest, in the wrong place at the wrong time. She pointed out how I’d told her that the reporter herself had said that she was nearly arrested just for being there. Why not Edna?

  ‘Look, the arrest is one thing. And it is a problem, because it will look weird for the Department of Veterans’ Affairs if it’s true –’ I began saying, but Victoria interrupted me.

  ‘Which it’s not.’

  ‘Okay, but then there’s other things too.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Did your dad block Edna going to Vietnam?’ I stared into her face, trying to discover a flicker of guilt or knowledge. All I saw was outrage.

  ‘This is mad.’

  ‘Did he get in contact with the War Memorial selection committee and say she was unfit for the posting?’

  ‘No! And who cares if he did? She probably was, anyway. She had us!’

  ‘Do you think it was a trial separation, the trip to France? These are all the things I can’t ask you about, that we don’t talk about.’

  Victoria sat with her head in her hands. ‘I can’t believe it,’ she said into her laced fingers. ‘Is this what you’re really going to write about? Dad didn’t have anything to do with Mum not going to Vietnam. Mum didn’t get in because she was a woman, and she wasn’t the right sort of artist. Dad paid for that trip to France, Dad supported her. Why would he pay for it if it was a break-up? Why would she come home again afterwards?’

  ‘I don’t know what I’ll write yet. But I don’t want to lie, Victoria.’

  ‘I’m telling you everything. I’m telling you the truth: they had a strong, amazing marriage. They were soulmates. But you don’t want to hear it. You’re one of those women, aren’t you? Because you had a shit marriage – and it didn’t work out – you see shit marriages everywhere. Theirs lasted. That’s what you’re not seeing.’

  ‘Victoria –’

  ‘Look, leave it. This has been a mistake. Dad was right.’

  She got up and walked away, the wind pressing her clothes against her lean body.

  It began to rain. The cool change had arrived.

  I didn’t want to go home to Mum that night, to the pulse of the television and the small space under the roof where my teenage ghost was smoking joints and picking her pimples and tarting herself up.

  Instead I drove to Queenscliff and caught the ferry to Sorrento, to Edna’s studio. Alone on the deck, the speed and the lowering light made me feel as if I was free, escap
ing the peninsula behind me, with its complicated web of factories and families. By the time I arrived in the back streets above the beach at Sorrento, it was growing dark, and the Falcon’s headlights picked up the grey tea-tree shrubs, throwing shadows in their salty branches.

  I parked on the narrow street outside Edna’s studio. Somewhere below me, Max would be making dinner, walking on his sticks around the lonely house. The surf was up; the boom of the breakers on the shore was a soft, constant pressure; a distant storm was forcing its way in through the headlands.

  I stood in the darkness, inhaling the smell of turpentine and salt. It was cooler in the studio than it was outside.

  When I flicked on the light, the riot of the paint-splattered floor jumped out at me. The coffee cup I had left on the table next to the door still stood in the exact same place. The huge, shrouded triptychs leaned against the back wall: Bomana, Nurses, Poppies. The Number 27 paintings of Mr Walters’ house in Geelong were stored along with the other paintings Victoria didn’t like in the metal racks. I turned on the bar heater.

  Each unanswered question jostled for my attention in the still studio.

  I went to the stack of sketchbooks that Victoria had left behind when she moved our source materials over to her house in Geelong. These were the ‘unimportant’ sketchbooks. There was Max, on the very first page, sleeping, dating from sometime in the early 1980s. His tousled head against a pillow. It was a hasty sketch, the only one of him in the whole sketchbook. Made with fatigued hands. It was full of love, and pain; Edna could see he had aged.

  On the next page, a man with swan’s wings, running down a roughly rendered road that could have been the Whitedales’ stretch of cottages. Was that her father?

  And then the house at number 27. Over and over, for pages, with colour swatches daubed next to panels. So much time spent on them, to make something so bloated and dull. None of the sketches made sense side by side, none of them fit in with what Edna was really doing those years, giving fake names, climbing into police vans, presumably bailing herself out of jail.

  I opened all the drawers of the cabinets, rustled aimlessly through the piles of papers and loose swatches of colour, the ephemera of Edna’s life: the ledger books and balled-up scraps of rubber, sticks of charcoal wrapped in wax paper that spilled dust when I touched them, loose elastics, scratched Ray-Bans, a single gold hoop earring, battered tins of pencils, her annotated exhibition catalogues from the Geelong Gallery, the NGV, school photographs of Percy and Victoria in their chocolate brown and light-blue uniforms, their hair blown out into silky, 1970s feathers.

  That night, I slept on the trestle bed in Edna’s studio and woke in the thin dawn light, looking up at the shrouded, half-empty racks. The evening was closing in again as I caught the ferry back between the headlands. Mum had left for her night shift by the time I got home.

  There was a note from her on the ladder up to my room.

  You have messages again.

  I pressed the red light on the answering machine.

  First Victoria’s voice: ‘Well,’ she said. ‘Mum did it, so you know.’

  She went on to tell me that the Department of Veterans’ Affairs had called her that morning. They were going to use more than just an image or two for their pamphlets: Edna was going to be featured as a key artist in the campaign. They were licensing one of Edna’s paintings for a medallion for former Land Army women, the figure of a woman kneeling in uniform in a field of peas, back straight, spade like a lance planted in the dirt beside her. They wanted to include four of Edna’s paintings in their travelling exhibition, Women in War. Beginning in 1994, Edna would cross the country for two years, from Sydney to Bendigo, Melbourne to Perth. And they were licensing the image of Imelda holding John for a medal for Australian VADs, too. Victoria said that she would take over trying to contact John, that Percy had a lead.

  ‘Honestly,’ she said on the tape, and then there was a long pause. ‘Honestly, I don’t know where we stand now. I appreciate your help, but this isn’t working out, is it? I know you feel it too.’

  The beep sounded.

  The second message on my mother’s machine was a stranger’s voice, deep and floating.

  ‘This is John Whitedale,’ it said. ‘I’m sorry to call so late.’

  EDNA: A LIFE

  In 1968 John’s biological mother, Celine, reached out to Margaret Whitedale to ask for contact with John. Despite the fact that John was an adult and there was no longer any reason for Margaret to protect him from the instability she feared Celine might represent, Margaret did not tell him that his mother was seeking contact. Looking to Europe, she might have felt that France was a country in turmoil once more, riots bringing the streets of Paris to a standstill. But over a period of six months, Celine sent persistent letters. In the end, Margaret relented.

  When Margaret went to Edna and Max in late 1968 with the story of Celine’s correspondence, the timing must have been difficult for them. During the years that John used Max’s beach shack in Sorrento as a base while he travelled around the country working on construction crews, both Edna and Max finally began to feel as if he was part of their family. But once John found out that his birth mother had been in touch, he wanted to travel back to France to meet her. Max and Edna immediately offered to pay for him to do so.

  If Margaret was scared that John would leave and not come back, she did not share her feelings with her friends and family. Publicly, she was very supportive of John going to France even though it must have felt, in some ways, as if she was about to lose another child.

  The decision that Edna would join John for a while in France came about more slowly than her offer to pay for his trip. Max recognised Edna’s need to spend time focused on her work, but also what the trip would symbolise. As an artistic pilgrimage, the trip represented an opportunity for the sort of exploration that Edna had never really been able to find time for. It was a way to make up for being blocked from the National Gallery School all those years before, a way to erase her experiences with the Archibald, a consolation prize for not being appointed to Vietnam. The problem was the children. Max and Edna struggled to decide whether Edna should take Victoria and Percy with her. Max himself was unable to leave the oversight of Black Swan Carpets, and did not want to be separated from the children at all. They planned for Edna to be away for a few months at least, and neither parent was sure what the effect on the children would be.

  In the end, it was decided that Victoria, just four years old, was too young to make the trip with Edna. Percy would go with his mother, and Victoria would stay at home with Max. Margaret was furious: it was not an outcome she had even considered when she went to John with the news about his biological mother. She tried to persuade Edna to stay, but nothing would change Edna’s mind.

  And so in March of 1969, Edna, John and six-year-old Percy boarded the PG&O liner Raleigh. John looked after Percy during the day so that Edna could work, sitting on the top deck of the liner and sketching the social life of the boat and the shifting light on the endless days of ocean.

  The trip to France was a turning point for Edna, and nearly two decades later, in 1987, she returned to the voyage out in her maritime work Raleigh.

  The liner was named after Sir Walter Raleigh, the Elizabethan explorer who spent his life in search of El Dorado, the city of gold. On his second voyage to find the city, Raleigh fell ill as he was sailing up the Orinoco River. While he lay in bed, his crew attacked a Spanish outpost without his permission, violating a peace treaty between England and Spain. King James had Raleigh beheaded.

  In Raleigh, Edna doesn’t paint the liner from the traditional angle for maritime works – a low sightline, with the ship rearing above the viewer on the waters. Instead, she looks down on the ship from above. Similar to the bird’s-eye view used in 1973’s Clutching, the perspective in Raleigh gives the observer a feeling of claustrophobia despite the fact that the landscape of the oceans is huge, and the figure in it tiny. The liner is em
pty except for the small shape of a woman, lying on the deck. She seems to be reposing, staring up at the viewer in the unseen skies. Her skirts are spread out around her like a fan. A red bag is on the ground beside her.

  The red bag is an interesting inclusion in the work. It could be coincidence, or it could be symbolic of the fact that Edna knew the rest of the story of the explorer Walter Raleigh and his wife, Bess Throckmorton. After her husband’s execution, Bess carried Raleigh’s embalmed head around with her in a red velvet bag for the rest of her life. Did Edna feel as if she was carrying the past with her as she set out to France? Regardless of whether or not the woman on the deck is meant to be an amalgam of Edna and Bess, or if the bag is coincidental, Raleigh shows how – even two decades after her return to Australia – Edna was still processing the meaning of that trip to France.

  In early May 1969, Edna, Percy and John landed in Southampton, England. They travelled from there to Dover, then by ferry to Calais, then cross-country to the small village of Pont-sur-Loup, a few hours outside of Nice, where Celine Delacroix was working as a property manager.

  The Biographer

  I pawned my jewellery, my wedding ring. I pawned my father’s binoculars.

  As I stood in the fluoro-lit store on the outskirts of Geelong and watched the skinny man behind the counter turn them over, looking for scratches, I felt Dad’s warm hands reaching around my head, adjusting the view for me, the taste of the salt air on my tongue as I stared through the glass out over the Rip.