The Biographer's Lover

by Ruby J Murray

  ‘To Australia? It’s not my home,’ he said. ‘I’ve never been sentimental like that. Geelong Grammar got that out of me. It was like Lord of the Flies there, except the kids knew they weren’t going to die. They were all going to win.’

  John Whitedale had started getting into construction after high school. Travelled all over the place. Sorrento and Warnambool and Queenscliff and Melbourne, even Sydney and the Northern Territory. After the move to France he studied architecture in Paris in the mid 1970s. He restored old houses. I could see him sitting across from me, white shirt on olive skin, deep-set eyes, wide forehead. I could hear him telling me things. But I didn’t want to hear them: I didn’t want to know all the ephemera; I only wanted to know what he had meant to Edna.

  ‘An old house is like a painting,’ he said. ‘Edna used to say we had the same job – houses and portrait painting. Maybe you have it too, writing biographies.’

  ‘Because of the stories inside a painting, or a house?’

  ‘No, I mean that they are both concealment and display. A portrait is about making the person inside it look rich and successful. In an old house your job is to go inside and decide what it is fashionable to reveal. Sometimes you cover up the ceilings, sometimes you want to show the old beams. When you rebuild it, you have to think about what people will think in the future too.’

  ‘That’s a very French thing to say.’

  ‘I didn’t say it. Edna said it. And trust me – she was very Australian.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Wide open spaces of the mind. But closed up and narrow. Somewhere in between.’

  ‘Well, I hope you’re right, at least about Edna being a real Australian.’

  ‘The campaign?’

  ‘It’s a huge opportunity. Do you think Edna would have wanted it?’

  John straightened his back, took a sip of his wine. ‘Yes,’ he said finally. ‘Yes, she would have loved it. Anyone who tells you differently is lying. Edna wanted it. She knew she’d be famous one day.’

  I had to be blunt. I had come too far and risked too much. ‘I want to ask you about the money,’ I told him. ‘The money Max and Edna have been paying you. You wanted to talk in person, you wanted me not to tell Percy or Victoria, and I’ve come all this way.’

  ‘Ah, yes.’

  ‘It was – is – a lot of money. And I know you and Max are hiding something. Did you have an affair with Edna?’

  John laughed. ‘You think it was an affair? I didn’t have an affair with Edna.’

  For a second, the photo of John and Max on the beach flashed through my mind: Max’s arm slung around John’s young back.

  The two men turning towards the camera, smiling.

  ‘Then what?’

  He brought his hands to his eyes, rubbing deep into his sockets.

  ‘I’m their biological father. Percy and Victoria. But it’s not what you think. I did it for them, for Edna and Max.’

  EDNA: A LIFE

  Max bought the land for Edna’s studio while she was still in France in 1969, but the planning and building did not commence until late 1970, after her return. The space had to be big enough for Edna to begin painting the large panel paintings that would turn into Poppies, Bomana and Nurses.

  Alone in the studio Max built for her in the hills above Port Phillip Bay, Edna produced a body of work dealing with memory, war and landscape that is today considered among the most impressive of any Australian artist. Circling back on the past and released from the pressure of the need to succeed in public, she developed a dreamscape and iconography completely her own.

  The Biographer

  I have replayed John’s story to myself so many times over the years that it has become part of my own memory. I can be there with him, inside it.

  In the summer of 1962, John returned to Geelong after a stint painting houses in Darwin’s tropical winds. He was twenty years old, and he carried his expensive education around with him in a suitcase that held everything he owned. He was meant to be staying with friends from school, friends who saw him as a novelty, with his torn jeans and builder’s hands. He stopped in at Dent Street to say hello to Margaret, and instead found Edna sobbing at the kitchen table.

  Edna. The absent woman, who had slipped in and out of his peripheral vision as a child. Whose rich husband paid for his expensive boarding schools, whose mother cooked him boiled chicken through the hot Australian summer holidays.

  Edna was waiting for Margaret too. (And I have always wondered about that. What would have happened if Margaret had been home on time?)

  John and Edna walked down to the bay together, to the silky grey boards of the sea baths at Eastern Beach. He had never really spoken to her, he said. As a teenager, seeing her once across a crowded room of Whitedales at Christmas, he had been sure that she hated him, that she held the fact of his existence responsible somehow for Imelda’s death.

  But that day, Edna was broken open, and John was the first person to walk into the room. She told him about the doctor in his impersonal office who had offered them anonymous sperm, about Max’s shame and depression, the way he had stopped talking to her, stopped meeting her eye.

  Edna had not wanted children. For Max, children were everything. And when Max had finally persuaded her, it was Max who was the problem. Max, who John had always thought of as a kind of hero. Max, who had fought in the same war that had made John an orphan, the war that had driven his mother to give him up. Max, who had paid for his years at boarding school, and who had supported Margaret so that Margaret could support John.

  John said he didn’t even think it through, not really. He just offered himself, instead.

  ‘It was a simple transaction,’ John said. ‘At first it was a sort of debt. And then, I grew to love them both, you know. Not in a romantic way. As people.’

  A simple transaction.

  At the Café du Sport, I watched the man sitting in front of me closely. There is a moment some men have in their early fifties, before their bodies slip into their final shape. Like their youth comes running back to them, flares one last time in their cheeks and their shoulders, roaring over their whole bodies. Sometimes it lasts a few months, sometimes a year or more, but in that flaring window everything about him becomes louder, brighter.

  I could see John at twenty. I could see him the way Edna would have seen him. But I chose to believe what he was telling me.

  ‘You have to understand that when Edna died,’ he was saying, ‘I knew Max would never tell them, and with Edna gone … It was important for me when I got to know Celine. You should know where you come from. But not Percy: when I told him, he was furious – he didn’t want to know, and I understand that now. He threatened me. He said that he’d destroy me if I told Victoria, if I let Max know that I’d reached out to him.’

  ‘Who else knows?’

  ‘It was a mistake, I realise now. He wanted to protect his dad. I just thought that because it was good for me …’

  ‘I get it.’

  ‘Do you? I don’t know who else they told, over the years. Who might have guessed.’

  ‘Aren’t you scared I’ll write about it?’

  ‘No. I think you’re going to stop other people writing about it, or talking about it, or thinking it. You want my permission to put her paintings on a medal. You’re here because you want to make her into some sort of war artist angel. And I’m telling you: that is going to be hard. You might want to keep our secrets.’

  That night John walked me back to the house, both of us uncertain up the dark path out of the village. At one point I stumbled, and he put his hand out to steady me, and the warmth of his skin came through the thin cotton of my dress.

  ‘Are the sketchbooks here?’ I asked him as we stepped onto the long gravel drive, the house lit up ahead of us. ‘Do you have the paintings, all the work she did while she was here?’

  Cars now gleamed in the driveway. A cherry convertible, a silky jeep. Music was playing somewhere deep in
side the stone walls. A scream of laughter, too high for real amusement.

  ‘Mum has the paintings,’ he told me. ‘I’ll show you tomorrow. And the sketchbooks should be around somewhere. I think they might have even ended up in the attic.’

  The front door was thrown open by a crowd who breathed names and kisses, close and hot on my cheeks, slapped John on the back, as if they had all been waiting for him to arrive.

  In a daze I let the crowd pull me through into the long back room, where the windows were now open onto the patio. There was a party underway. Someone was singing, someone was bleeding, a man was playing the baby grand in his wet bathers, dripping pool water all over the cherry tiles of the long room’s floor. In the midst of it all was the American tenant, Charles. He was holding court, smooth-cheeked, grinning, dressed in a flowing silk muumuu.

  ‘I’ll be back for you in the morning,’ John said. ‘Avoid these crazies. They’re only here for the summer.’

  He leaned in, kissed me on each cheek. His skin against mine was hot and dry. Then he was gone, his elegant, rolling walk taking him away.

  Charles tried to get me to stay up, but when he saw that I didn’t sparkle like John did he led me to a narrow bedroom off the orchard, then went back to his party.

  I fell asleep immediately. I dreamed of Edna, standing in the village square, surrounded by cardboard boxes full of sketchbooks. Edna was opening and closing her mouth, but no sound was coming out. In the dream, I realised that I’d never heard her voice before. That was why I couldn’t hear what she was saying.

  My memories of the south of France are saturated in colour.

  Cadmium yellow doors in the village; viridian terraces cut into the steep ravine, sackcloth and ash, lavender distance. The lampblack and Payne’s grey of the narrow stairs leading up into the attic at Charles’s house.

  The morning after I arrived, the air was hot and motionless. The house was empty again. I stripped down to my underpants and bra, went to the pool and dove in, feeling the water close over my hangover and shock it out of me. I changed back into the dress, hung my bra over the branch of the apple tree, and slipped into clean underpants. Then I sat in the driveway, eating an apple, looking out at the hazy distance.

  John drove a white truck. He kept the engine running while I clambered into the cab. The back of the truck was organised, tools and ordered tubs tied into place against the walls. A metal camp cot was secured to the ceiling.

  ‘Edna had a cot like that in her studio,’ I said.

  ‘She used them all the time,’ he said. ‘She’d throw them in the back of the car for the kids. She was tough, but she had a streak of the snobby housewife in her when she wanted it. She didn’t believe in sleeping directly on the ground.’

  ‘You went camping with them?’

  ‘No. But I helped them pack a few times, when I was living in the beach shack, when we were trying, for Victoria.’

  ‘Do you live out of this van?’

  He laughed. ‘I have an apartment here in the village. But I’m always on the road. So this is useful. This is probably more home than either of those places.’

  The road to Celine Delacroix’s house took us down the side of the gorge, a series of tight switchbacks that John’s van could barely edge around.

  ‘People crash on this road all the time,’ he told me. ‘Locals race it.’

  Celine’s house was small, set back in a rambling garden.

  When she opened the door I recognised her as the woman from the bus, the woman with the elegant French hands. She was taller, skinnier than she’d seemed the day before, dressed now in something resembling a silk kimono. Braless, cavernous chest, her long white hair pinned all over the top of her head. This was Victoria’s grandmother.

  Stepping back to invite me in, Celine swept an arm out as if displaying the kitchen and dining room all in one; dusky tiled floors and threadbare rugs. There was a vase of fresh sticks and flowers on the table. I thought of Edna’s collecting and arranging of dead things and weeds.

  Mother and son moved around the kitchen, making coffee and cutting bread. I could see both Victoria and Percy iterated in their bodies: long legs, narrow waists, all of them gave the same impression of being filled all the way to the very edges of their skins.

  Of course Max would have paid John to stay quiet, and would have been glad of his departure before the kids grew up. Seeing them together, the way they all moved, no-one would have doubted that John was their father.

  ‘Why has Edna become of interest?’ asked Celine. Her voice was syrup and rasp; it held hundreds of nights of wine and cigarettes.

  I told them that Edna represented something we’d been missing in Australia. That there were so few women’s stories in all those official histories. That we just needed the right kind of woman. That Edna was a great artist – and a mother and an adventurer.

  I petered out. I heard the sound of a car whirring by echo up the valley wall. Outside Celine’s kitchen window, a confused cicada began to sing as if it was evening.

  John broke the silence, springing up to sit on the counter next to Celine, a strangely childish movement. He slung his arm around his mother’s shoulders, pulling her into him for a moment, as if he was about to ruffle her wild hair.

  ‘I have always seen Australian women as very strong,’ said Celine, pushing him away. ‘Very assertive, almost like men.’

  ‘Was Imelda like that?’

  Celine looked amused. ‘Yes, I think. And Imelda was cruel – and a selfish woman. Not like Edna.’

  ‘Maman,’ said John, reproachfully.

  ‘What? I’m just telling her the truth, isn’t that your plan?’

  She turned to the wooden kitchen counter and poured two narrow glasses of clear liquid. She dropped an ice block in each. The liquid turned to grey clouds. Then she offered one to me.

  ‘Is that alcohol?’ I asked, my stomach churning. ‘It’s a bit early for me.’

  ‘When you are as old as I am,’ she replied, ‘you can drink whenever you want. Join me.’

  I accepted the drink.

  ‘Also,’ said Celine, ‘you might need it.’

  I took a tiny nip.

  ‘Come,’ she said. I followed her silk form down a wooden corridor to the back of the house. ‘John has one or two of Edna’s in the apartment in the village,’ she was saying, ‘and the sketchbooks are in storage in the big house where you are staying. But nearly all of the rest of the paintings are here. I put them out for you.’

  A kind of sunroom jutted off the back of Celine’s house and into the garden. The floor was made of dark slate, already radiating heat.

  In Celine’s room of glass, Edna’s first panel paintings were waiting for me, exposed canvas, six feet high and narrow, leaning against the light. I knew what I was seeing. I knew straight away. But I went to the first panel without saying anything.

  A street at night, the capes of two nurses walking in the rubble. The darkness of the city is so deep in that first panel that it pulls you in, an almost abstract mesh of fine lines, asking you to create the space with your own imagination so that the subtle undulations of Edna’s colour become full of hidden houses, bars, sleepers, devastated homes, people waiting for the next bomb.

  The women’s uniforms billow, sky blue against the darkness.

  ‘This is you,’ I said, looking at Celine as she stood in the doorway, John behind her. ‘You and Imelda.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That was us.’

  The second panel showed the dance hall.

  Displayed side by side, the darkness spreads from the first panel into the second, pushing in at the edges of the hall. Weak yellow bulbs swing from the roof. Uniformed men and women, with their hair piled up on their heads, spin around the dance floor precariously, all leaning in, mid-step, as if about to stumble and fall. An emptiness in the centre seems to be sucking at the dancers: Edna’s slight distortion of space.

  In the middle of the panel, Celine dances with an Australia
n soldier. The soldier is much taller than her, and slim. Elegant. His slouch hat casts a shadow over his face. It takes a moment to find Imelda resting against a wall in the crowd on the lower left side of the panel, watching the dancers.

  In the third panel, Celine and the soldier are in an alley. The whole panel is a study in darkness: London during blackout, midnight blue and charcoal. The solider holds her head against the wall, his hand pressing her face into the stone, thrusting into her, his uniform around his ankles, his mouth open in a grimace. The colours are jewel-like in the dim background. In profile, his muscular bottom is taut, each of his teeth a pearl, a shadowy rim running around their edges. The spiked star of Australia on his hat.

  Celine’s eye stares straight out from between his fingers. A scrap of skin and lightless crimson where her head hits the wall. The palm of his hand is crammed into her mouth. Her elbows are sharp, pointed up, as if she’s in mid buck. Above them, the rows of blacked-out windows seem to bend in, as if they are listening.

  The fourth panel shows an interior. Finally, daylight, a cold light – dawn? Winter? – pours into the room from around the edges of a blackout curtain. A fire roars in a small hearth. Celine sits on a cot bed, naked, her body a mottled float of purples and imperial blues shading to mustards and mint. Imelda is on her knees in front of her friend, one hand laced behind her friend’s neck to steady her head, reaching out to clean her face. The rag in Imelda’s hand drips pink into a bucket on the floor. There is something business-like, matter of fact about the women.

  Normally, the role of the nude is to stare out at the viewer, performing for them. But in Edna’s painting of Celine and Imelda, Celine looks into Imelda’s face, the two of them locked together. A door in the left-hand corner of the room is slightly open. Through it, a courtyard where washing hangs on a limp line, nurses’ uniforms caught in a silent wind, and beyond that a bombed-out building. Edna’s portrayal of connections between worlds, reminding you that you’re never alone, for good or for bad.