The Biographer's Lover

by Ruby J Murray

  The pawnbroker gave me $200. No matter what he gave me, it wouldn’t have been enough. The next person who bought my father’s binoculars would see only metal and glass. For me, just looking at them, I could smell the sharp comfort of his denim work overalls, hear the whistle of a distant wind tearing off the open ocean.

  I loaded my books into the trunk of the Falcon, and sold them to the second-hand bookshop on Moorabool Street. I needed every cent.

  Then I drove my beautiful, gleaming Falcon to the car dealers and sold it too. The dealers paid me in cash. I watched them re-park the Falcon in the lot, stick a piece of cardboard adorned with its new price under the windscreen wiper. RED HOT DEAL.

  Walking back home through Geelong’s industrial district in the twilight, the money rubbed up against my thigh like a hot little animal. Every step I took away from the car unhinged me further from the life I had been leading up to that point.

  I stopped in at the mall. The travel agent had fading photographs of faraway places plastered all over the windows. I bought a ticket.

  On the phone, John had asked me not to tell Victoria or Percy I was coming to meet him. Especially not Percy, he’d said. But I couldn’t just disappear.

  Before leaving, I went to Victoria’s house on the hill. It was late morning – I knew Victoria was at work. I stood at her front gate, looking down the path I had walked so many times over the last year. The Corio was a sheet of light below me. I slipped my note into Victoria’s letterbox.

  I’m sorry we’re not getting along right now, but I know this is all going to come together. I’m going away for a few weeks to finish some chapters and get my research in order. Let’s talk when I’m back.

  Boarding the plane in the dusk at Tullamarine, I felt that the weight of what I was carrying might keep the machine earthbound. We taxied along the runway, the roar of the engines building in my ears. I spread four photographs of Edna out on my lap:

  Edna the child, in ruffled pants, with Imelda standing protectively over her on the beach in Geelong. Behind them, the sea baths, the faded You Yangs.

  Edna Whitedale in Alice Springs, cigarette hanging from her mouth, leaning against a car, so beautiful she hurts to look at.

  Edna Cranmer crouched in the front door of their Sorrento house in the late 1960s before the trip to France, frowning and smiling at the same time, the shock of John’s thick blonde hair in the shadows behind her, five-year-old Percy and the toddler Victoria on the step in front of her.

  Edna in her fifties masquerading as Imelda Delacroix, looking back over a slim shoulder at the cameraman, face hidden behind the flat, black lenses of her sunglasses.

  Edna Whitedale. Edna Cranmer. Imelda Delacroix.

  Edna Cranmer was not yet a symbol as I sat there in the taxiing plane. But the story machine pumping away under the hill in Canberra was moving much faster than I was, creating the past to fit the present.

  The plane took off in a scream of metal and engines, and Melbourne dropped away below me.

  EDNA: A LIFE

  When Edna returned to Australia in late 1970, she left everything she had produced in France behind her: her arrival back in Sorrento that summer marked the beginning of her retreat into artistic isolation.

  The trip to France had been hard on Edna. She had sacrificed time with her daughter and husband to try to work on her craft, but she had been unable to produce anything worth the effort of bringing home. Edna’s paintings from that year, which she ‘gifted’ en masse to John’s mother, Celine, have never been displayed. What’s more, Edna did not even keep her sketchbooks, making the months after her father’s suicide in 1944 and the year of 1969 the only missing links in an otherwise unbroken chain of visual documentation.

  The trip itself was not the deciding factor in Edna’s move to solitude. Repeatedly missing out on the Archibald, the humiliation of the lack of an award the year she was finally selected, and then being passed over not once but twice for the Vietnam War posting had all taken their toll. At every step, Edna was making personal sacrifices that were not resulting in work that was appreciated. She had even lost the small audience that the Archibald exhibition and her brief contract with the Hendley Gallery had given her in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

  In many ways, though, it was the rise of abstract expressionism that finally determined Edna’s retreat from public exhibition. With its blank fields and American individualism, abstract expressionism was the new way of seeing – individualistic, atomised, male. The mind was elevated; the body disappeared.

  Edna was disgusted. The art world that had ignored her for so long was now lauding a group of men who she considered to be making fun of everything she had worked for. ‘There is nothing already as wildly difficult to capture as the human body,’ she wrote in a rare page of text in a sketchbook in 1970. Next to her notes, she pasted a muddy reproduction of a Jackson Pollock, cut from a magazine.

  ‘Why, why, would anyone waste their life on this posturing over the meaning of a splat – is it because they are scared of how impossible it is to capture the triangulation of light, skin and bone, of a body and a soul in movement? You can only reduce a thing so far before its simplicity becomes not beautiful, but terrible. A triangle is a triangle is a triangle. Only an idiot makes the simple complicated and the complicated simple. This is not portraying life as it is experienced. It is selling wallpaper.’

  The Biographer

  When I landed at the airport at Charles de Gaulle it was still night. It seemed as if it had been night for twenty-four hours. On the train to Paris, the suburbs of the periphery drifted by on the other side of the glass, and then in a blink we crossed over the road that divides the city from everything else and were racing past boulevards. Colour leached into the world again as the sun rose, scarlet shop awnings and the splash of potted marigolds high on distant windows.

  At the Gare du Nord I ordered coffee and stood in a daze at a metal table, waiting for the TGV to Nice. Women strode by, all soft hair and nude stockings. Shell-coloured lips and no bras, suit jackets open, scarves slung around necks. I was acutely aware of the pilled track pants and acrylic sweater I had thrown on for the plane. Of my dingy duffel bag, and its shabby contents.

  Edna would have fitted right in with the crowd at the Gare du Nord; I sensed her standing at the table next to me, overalls, plimsolls, straight back. I drank my black coffee and stood in the corner, invisible.

  I was in Paris. Somewhere out there in the boulevards were galleries full of the art I had spent years writing about but had never seen in the flesh: naked female puppets on pointed legs and crowded, hysteria-filled collage. But I wasn’t going to visit them.

  By mid-morning, I was replaying my arrival in Paris in reverse; a tunnel spat me out into the suburbs, which slowly subsided into rolling, painful green. Every now and then a town or village popped up out of a fold in the terrain.

  I arrived in the city of Nice on the edge of the Mediterranean in the late afternoon. I counted my francs, and found an outdoor market where they were selling flowers and cheese and junk pretending to be antique. Crushed poppies and the remains of felafel and McDonald’s wrappers littered the ground.

  It was hot. Stopping to roll up my jeans, I noticed the thin blonde hairs on my legs – it had been a long time. In a shop off the square I bought a razor and a bottle of red nail polish. Back in the market, I found the second-hand clothes section. I ran my hands through the fabrics, piled high on folding tables, rough and soft and synthetic and smooth.

  I bought a thin, bright-red cotton dress with lacquered buttons. It was the first dress I had bought in years – one of those dresses that opened at the front, a long line of closed suggestion.

  In a public toilet on the seafront, I discarded the jeans and put on the dress. I slung my legs one by one over the sink, ran the razor across them, washing the coiled clumps of hair down the drain. When I had finished, my legs were smooth and tingling, as if the metal blades had removed a layer of old skin too. I pain
ted my toenails. After staring at myself in the mirror, I took off my bra, stuffed it deep inside the duffel.

  I spent the evening walking the edge of the Mediterranean, the dress’s fabric brushing against my thighs. The city had taken the sand off the beach and replaced it with stones – they were warm and hard against my bare feet.

  I ate an omelette in a smoky bar, and then I counted my francs again, took my duffel bag into the park above the city, looking for the perfect spot to lie down and sleep for a few hours, until dawn came up and the buses began to run.

  There was a bench at the very top of the hill. Pulling my jeans on under my dress, I lay down with the duffel as a pillow and a cardigan as a blanket, and blinked at the upside-down stars.

  I had only been away from Geelong for forty-eight hours, but the distance between who I was there and here could not be measured in time. I felt unknowable, even to myself; as if I was free from a weight I hadn’t realised I was carrying.

  The bus I caught into the foothills of the Alpes-Maritimes the next morning was full of tourists, flocks of neon shirts flapping over slack flesh. In each village, touts and guides waited at the bus stop to greet the visitors, ushering them into the narrow grey and lavender passages, pointing to the things the tourists should be looking at. As we climbed higher, the bus emptied, and the villages grew smaller. The guides and tourists dissipated, until it was only me and an old woman who sat up the front with the driver, a wheeled wire basket full of plastic bottles of bleach and cleaning fluids on the floor beside her.

  Warm air flooded in through the open windows, tangy and almost sweet. Altitude, height. Up and up we climbed, the bus whipping around the turns, the sea blinking in the distance.

  All it would take, I thought, would be a single oncoming car.

  Instead of the bends in the road, I tried to focus on the woman who sat at the front of the bus. Her conversation with the driver was animated. She regularly raised her hands in exasperation. I thought of them as French hands – long and graceful, tapered at the fingers, the nails painted the colour of pearls.

  Pont-sur-Loup was the last village on the bus route. A single road in, a single road out. The bus pulled into the quiet grey stone stillness of the village square.

  The woman descended from the bus carefully, negotiating the steps with stiff joints, balancing her baskets. Waiting behind her to get off, I went to take the load from her, but she made a tsk noise and said something in French, smiling. I smiled back, then watched as she wheeled her cart away. She disappeared into the only business in the square that seemed to be open: a cafe with a faded yellow awning, the Café du Sport, where I was supposed to meet John that evening. I looked at my watch. Four more hours.

  The bus rumbled back to life, and left the way it had come. The ride had taken up half the day. I clambered through the shadowy streets of the upper village. The doors on the houses were all closed; no human voices, no car engines. Just a sound like the wind – the rushing of my own blood in my ears.

  I had written down John’s instructions: the directions to the house where I could stay.

  ‘Celine manages the place,’ he had told me on the phone in his slow, deliberate voice. ‘It’s where we all stayed, Percy and Edna and I, when we first came out here. There’s an American, Charles, who rents it now in the summers – they’re invading the area – but he likes the whole history of Celine’s arty people passing through and he’ll put you up. He’ll be expecting you.’

  Through a break in the village wall, I stepped onto a dusty track bordered by a low scrub of thyme, baked in the sun. I was dehydrated. The weight of the duffel bag chafed. The sleepless nights and the jetlag pressed in. The track ended at a gravel road. Then high metal gates, a pebbled drive. Potholes, sparse trees, a house rearing into a white sky.

  I knocked on what might have been a front door. No answer. Passing the stained-glass panes of a conservatory I went from door to closed door, calling out, ‘Hello?’

  I imagined Edna arriving here in the summer of 1969, driving a puttering car into the turning circle, the anxious young man about to meet his mother in the passenger seat next to her, six-year-old Percy grizzling in the back.

  At the rear of the house stretched a long, paved patio. The last of the sun bounced off the French windows, making a fire in each pane. When I pressed my face to the warm glass I saw a huge hall, stone floors smothered with rugs, a scattering of settees and tables all a little too close to one another, a deer’s head mounted high on the wall, a grandfather clock, tall lamps, an African statuette with a massive penis, over which someone had stuck a candy wrapper.

  Next to the patio was a pitted croquet lawn. Rusty hoops. A mallet abandoned on the dry, spiky grass, as if someone had just stepped away from the game. Then the grounds fell away in a series of terraces linked by stairs. On the first terrace down, a swimming pool. Below that, a small grove of olive trees. The further from the house the terraces were, the narrower they became, finally disintegrating into a sheer drop, then the red tiled roofs of the village floating over the gorge. Far away, beyond the lavender wash of the foothills, a strip of brilliant sea held up the edge of the sky.

  Passing through a stone arch and into an orchard I found a rusty tap coming out of the wall. I drank long and hard.

  I fell asleep in the shadow of what I’d assumed was the front door.

  When I woke up the sun was dropping, the light turning liquid. My watch read eight pm. I was meant to meet John Whitedale at the cafe in half an hour. I was starving. My stomach clenched and groaned. I heard distant music and a burble of voices.

  Stashing my duffel bag on the rear patio, I walked unevenly back down the darkening path towards the village. The square that had been empty in the afternoon heat had come alive in the evening. Someone had set a speaker up on the cobbles, and a few couples were dancing lazily to music that fuzzed and distorted. A group of old men played boules in the sand. As I watched, one of them undid his fly and pissed straight onto the court. Children ran screaming in the shadows.

  Chatter spilled out of the Café du Sport. Inside was a wash of cool air and murky smoke. The men and women perched on high stools at the bar were wrinkled and battered with the sun, not like the Parisians I had seen at the train station.

  I ordered a glass of wine and a meal in my broken French, then took the drink outside to a rickety metal table on the edge of the square. I was on my second glass when I saw him emerge from a passageway opposite me: John Whitedale, thirty years older than the laughing man-boy on the beach who I had seen in black and white that first morning, on the table next to the bed that Max and Edna had shared, who had floated, indistinct, in the background of so many conversations and images since.

  But none of the photos I had seen of John Whitedale showed his incredible grace. He was long legged, tall, with a narrow waist. His feet were sockless in dirty plimsolls, raising soft puffs of dust as he stepped across the square.

  The memories we carry around with us, those are just impressions, tricks of light. We have to run over and over them to keep them fresh, handle them daily. And each time we touch them, we change them, ever so slightly.

  The colour of the jeans that Percy Cranmer was wearing on the night that he drove me home to my mother’s house after the graduating class dance. My arsehole of a knight in shining acid wash. That memory began as humiliating, but now it’s intimate, almost fond.

  Joe, a week after I left him. We met in a cafe for breakfast, as if we hardly knew each other. It was warm inside, and Joe was wearing a dark blue cashmere cardigan I had bought him on sale at Myer. It had a delicate red line around the collar. Afterwards, as we were saying goodbye, he hugged me, and cried. He still thought I was moving back in. I stood there on the grey Melbourne concrete and waited for it to be over.

  Joe said: ‘You know that wasn’t rape, don’t you?’

  I said: ‘Of course.’

  And because he said it, I had to know that it was.

  John Whitedale coming
towards me out of the hot, shadowy square.

  ‘I was wondering if you’d actually make it all the way up to us today,’ he said as he sat down at my tiny table. ‘This is your first time in France?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, then. Champagne?’

  John went inside. Through the plate-glass window, I watched him move in fits and starts, from one group of people to the next, kissing, embracing. He was liked in this town. Returning with a bottle, he sat down next to me again, crossed his legs like a dancer.

  ‘This is awkward,’ he said. ‘Thank you for coming.’

  ‘There wasn’t a lot to go on.’

  ‘If you’re worried about what this exhibition, what this thing with the War Memorial will mean, it is important that we do this in person. When Percy called …’ He shook his head. ‘This must seem strange to you. But I didn’t want to be involved, and I could just ignore it until this thing with the War Memorial. You didn’t tell Victoria you were coming?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Good. Good.’

  ‘So … how shall we start?’

  ‘With a drink. For courage.’ John Whitedale raised his glass of champagne. ‘Then we should talk about Edna.’

  But he didn’t, not straight away. We talked around her, as always happened with my Edna interviews. He told me about his early memories of the Kildare Children’s Home, the orphanage on the edge of Geelong. The tidal Whitedale clan, cousins and aunts who came to pick him up for weekends and take him away from one almost-family into another.

  Margaret would always make him the same meals, ‘for continuity’.

  ‘She had great pride in being a real French chef,’ he said. ‘Boiled chicken and thick sauces. It was terrible.’

  ‘You’ve never returned home?’