Aunts Up the Cross

by Robin Dalton

  Some years earlier, Errol had had some portraits taken, and had given us one: he was a gay and pleasant-looking man, but in black-and-white looked like an easter egg on which a grin and glasses had been painted. We had put it away in a drawer, and, in a war-time clean out, I had happened upon this fatuous face. Errol was now drafted from his peace-time occupation in shipping, and had a highly secret job on Garden Island, Sydney’s central naval dockyard. We knew this job had something to do with shipping movements: apart from that, we knew only the personal anecdotes about his colleagues with which Errol occasionally entertained us. He appeared to be waging a weekly vendetta with a spinster of uncertain age, a Miss Harrison, who was the Admiral’s secretary, and almost every Sunday he had some fresh tale to add to demonstrate Miss Harrison’s eccentricity. After some weeks, the lady started telephoning my father, in his capacity as Port Medical Officer, and pestering him with requests and suggestions for the use of the girls on her naval secretarial staff in his dockside medical posts. Her attentions became so persistent and so odd that he began to suspect a plan between Errol and the lady to tease him. ‘I believe she’s a perfectly ordinary and sane woman,’ he said. ‘She must be to hold down her job. Errol’s put her up to this.’

  The photograph provided him with what he thought was the perfect opportunity for a counter-tease. He typed on a slip of paper—‘WARNING. WHEN THE JAPS COME TAKE YOUR ORDERS FROM THIS MAN’—and with this pasted beneath the grinning face, he posted it off to the unknown Miss Harrison.

  Miss Harrison was the Admiral’s secretary all right: she had been perfectly serious in her telephone calls to my father; she was no friend of Errol’s; she had no sense of humour, or, after contemplating that bland smile above the incongruous message, no sense of the ridiculous. She scurried straight off to the Security Office and turned over the evidence to them. Poor Errol was called up and asked if he had had some photographs taken recently, to whom he had given them, and on failing to remember, was asked about his Germanic middle name and his frequent pre-war travelling on behalf of his shipping company. They released him by nightfall, but his dossier went into Security files.

  Not long afterwards he was transferred, and my father, who had confessed, had ‘our’ photograph mounted as a farewell gesture.

  His other war-time prank, of equal magnitude, remained undetected. He poisoned, in a mild but discomforting way, a girl called Libby, with whom I shared a flat. The flat was my first venture into freedom, and Libby and I were both allowed to live in it, provided we lived with each other. Libby’s father was a country doctor, and we were working in the same US Army office. We also ate all our meals, including breakfast, at my family’s house, and our ‘freedom’ did not even involve washing our own clothes. All the more irritating chores of domestic life were still taken care of for us by my mother.

  One night I was awakened by desperate groans. Libby, in her nightdress, was lurching about the room in which we both slept, bumping, albeit gently, into the furniture, and clutching her abdomen. Every now and then she gave a tiny shriek, grabbed a cushion from a chair, dropped it on the floor, and carefully fell on it. There she kicked and rolled and jerked, shrieking and groaning and frightening me to distraction. I soothed her as best I could and, having thrust myself into some clothes, ran the three blocks to my father. He got up, dressed, and came back with me. Libby had made herself reasonably comfortable on her pillows and smiled wanly up at him. I paced the bathroom while he examined her and gave her an injection—expecting an emergency appendix at least. Libby had a ‘grumbling’ appendix: this heightened our sense of gravity. It seemed, however, that all that ailed Libby was a severe pain of perfectly natural origin, and for which she must have, by experience, been well prepared. After that, Libby’s monthly pains got first me, and then my father, out of bed on two more occasions: the second time he arrived to find her calmly asleep in my bed.

  On the third and last time, he gave her, instead of an injection, some pills. The following morning was a beautiful, bright Sunday. Our usual party, including a fully recovered Libby, were setting out for the beach when my father drew Libby aside and advised her to stay quietly at home helping my mother with the lunch. After all, she had had, he pointed out, a disturbed night. We spent a blissfully peaceful morning which seemed surprisingly more so because of the absence of Libby’s undeniably whining voice.

  Around one o’clock my father stretched luxuriously on the hot sand. ‘We’d better get home to your poor mother. I imagine she’s had a busy morning with Libby.’

  Of course he had done something outrageous. Even without the tone in his voice and the gleam in his eye there was something anticipatory in his very stretch. Pressed, he admitted it: Libby’s pills had been the strongest dose of laxative he had felt could safely be given. She was unable to go to the office for two days: she never got my father out of bed again, and I don’t think she ever suspected what he had done.

  During the war it was almost impossible to find anyone to do house repairs, and so our house gradually began to fall apart. The roof was totally inadequate, and at each tropical storm we ran with basins and buckets from the kitchen to catch the drips, which steadily grew into torrents. My father once solved the problem of a bulging and waterlogged patch by drilling a hole through it. The water obligingly channelled itself through this in a single jet, directly above the middle of my mother’s bed. She once set off down the stairs for a gala premiere, suitably bejewelled, skirts held high over the soggy floorboards, with umbrella aloft. This was during a storm of such tropical fury that Amy’s black legs and arms whirled between bucket and window—bailing—and my mother swore her face turned white with fright that night.

  Maramanah, during the 1940s, was the first landmark in our lives to go. One night I was awakened by my mother jigging with excitement, to the noise of fire engines clanging down our street.

  ‘Quick! Get out of bed,’ she commanded. ‘Maramanah’s on fire—let’s go and watch.’

  Down the street we pelted: she always loved a good fire anyway, and as she rarely went to bed, the fact that it was two in the morning was no deterrent to her enjoyment. Indeed, it was an exceptionally bright blaze: the towers and turrets and iron-laced balconies showed up beautifully, and my mother was only disappointed that there was no sign of the aunts being lowered by ropes. We went back in the morning to view the damage, and for the first time, I was allowed inside the blackened rooms in which I had wandered so many times in imagination, accompanied by my grandmother’s ghosts.

  I had such a vivid picture of some of the rooms that it was a dreadful disappointment to see them, so banal, and so empty. I could not, for one moment, suppose that all my ten aunts had slept in one enormous bed, and yet I could not erase from my mind the picture of them all, under an acre of blanket, which my grandmother had undoubtedly planted there. She had, I swear, told me that there was a ‘bed’ leader, who commanded, at intervals throughout the night, ‘Turn!’, and turn they did, in unison, so that they should not be breathing germs down each other’s throats. Perhaps, I now wonder, was it the four unmarried ones who huddled thus for company, while their sisters lay in germ-filled and connubial imprecision in nearby rooms? But why? There was ample space in the house, and ample money, for separate beds. I do not know: the bed drill sticks, unchallenged in my memory, along with the green apples and the balloon, as family legend.

  I expected, too, to feel at least the aura of my great-grandfather’s benevolent personality as I had had it so often described to me. He had seemed such a genial and loving man in such satisfyingly concrete ways that I wanted some evidence of his presence to embrace me. Two of my grandmother’s anecdotes about him had endeared him to me—once when my mother was a small girl and was scolded by her nurse for standing under a garden hose in her new red shoes, he bundled the sobbing child into his carriage and they went shopping for an identical pair.

  ‘There you are,’ he said, ‘one pair is specially to wear under the hose if you feel so incli
ned.’

  I daresay it wasn’t the best way to train a child, but it must have been one of the nicest possible childhood recollections for my mother. And, as his children grew older, his remedy for any tears was to send to the cellar for a bottle of champagne to cheer them up.

  After the fire, the aunts never went back. They settled in an apartment nearby, and one night six families of ‘squatters’ moved into Maramanah with mattresses, babies and primus stoves, and there they stayed until finally ejected by the local council. The council then managed to coax the old ladies to sell the site, and it is now a fairly handsome park and children’s playground.

  Somehow, the aunts in an apartment no longer afforded the challenge that they had while brooding at the end of the street, and my grandmother’s visits to them grew rarer. Although Nana, in later years, remained almost permanently in bed, she also remained in full command of her surroundings. It was frustrating and pointless to struggle against her will in any matter on which she was already determined. My father had wrested a kind of negative victory from his private battles with her, but not for long did anyone else’s opposition prevail. One of the most abject surrenders which I remember was the Tax Inspector’s.

  Thirteen years after my grandfather died, it was discovered, quite by accident, that Nana had never entered a tax return. Everyone tried to explain to her why this should have been done, and to extract from her some plausible excuse as to why it had not. Her excuse was quite simple—she had never heard of such a thing and nobody had bothered to tell her. If the affair had not already reached the level of the lowest cubicle in the hierarchy of tax assessors, the family would have kept quiet and done nothing—the back liability of thirteen years being too vast to contemplate as an actually present problem to be tackled. But it was out of our hands, and too late. After my mother had had her session, the family doctor tried: then various business friends, and finally her bank manager—all seated by her bedside, explaining gently in a conciliatory tone the basic principles of paying one’s taxes. My grandmother plainly thought them all lacking in elementary common sense.

  ‘But how,’ she demanded, ‘can I pay something I haven’t got? I would gladly do so if there really were any money left over, but I spend all my income and, what is more, I spend it all on other people. So I don’t see how I can possibly find this excess sum. You have only to look at my bank statements to see on what necessities I have spent it.’

  Meanwhile, the paper work in the Taxation Department had been mounting, and demand notes being of no avail, her bank manager spoke in person to the Collector of Taxes. It was decided that in view of the fact that she was then eighty-nine, and seldom rose from her bed, the Collector would take his turn at her bedside.

  Nobody else was present at this interview. It lasted two hours, and at the end of it he came out red in the face and mopping his brow.

  ‘It’s no good,’ he admitted. ‘She’s an old lady and we’ll just have to wait till she dies.’

  And wait they did, another four years, while Nana remained smug and secure in the belief that common sense had won the day.

  Nana and Juliet and Bertie spoke on the telephone every day. The two old ladies had the telephone on the table between their beds, and usually took it in turns to talk to Bertie, relaying the conversation between sentences in shouts across to the other bed. I remember once bringing a schoolfriend in to see my grandmother. She was a new friend and so my grandmother was delighted to have such fresh conversational opportunity. We stayed chatting for some twenty minutes before Nana leaned half out of bed to reach the ginger jar she kept on her table. I caught a fleeting glimpse of something black in the bed where her body had been. This black object was making a queer muffled, rasping noise.

  ‘Nana,’ I said, backing away, ‘there’s something in your bed and I think it’s alive.’

  ‘Oh, dear God!’ she cried, ‘It’s Bertie!’

  It was Bertie—on the telephone. She was reading the Sydney Morning HeraId’s leader column aloud, and was blissfully unaware that she had been talking to the wrong end of her sister.

  As she and Juliet grew older and more bedridden, Nana finally succumbed to one of the many requests to let out part of her house, and her drawing-room and dining-room became an estate agency. Considerable reconstruction was needed, and this was carried out in a fine spirit of optimism by the tenants, as she refused to sign a lease. Every year, the manager hopefully presented himself with the lease ready for signature and every year she sent him away, saying, ‘My father told me never to sign anything I didn’t understand and I don’t understand a word of this. Mr Briggs, my word is my bond.’

  After the war ended, the life of the house weakened and slowly died. First, the troops left, and the Sunday parties shrank. Nicki, now able to rejoin his parents in Paris, and I, aching to join my latest beau in England, sat around waiting for transport out of Australia. What had remained a constant twosome throughout the war years was now a trio: we had been joined by a painter, Wolf Kardamatis—half-Greek, half-German—stranded too in Australia by the war. The three of us played endless games of cards with my mother and haunted the airline and shipping companies.

  Nicki, beautiful Nicki, already at twenty-three dying bravely of a fatal disease, wanted only to see his Russian parents and his Paris once more. Wolf had never wanted to come to Australia in the first place. His German mother had died at his birth, and his Greek grandmother had brought him up in Athens. When Wolf was fifteen, his immigrant father in Australia had sent for him. Wolf locked himself in a lavatory in Port Said and the ship sailed on without him: he conducted a flourishing business at his subsequent Sydney public school in hand-painted copies of the dirty postcards he’d picked up there while waiting for the next ship. Expelled, he had gone on to art school and, when in the first feverish week of war a formation of planes had flown overhead at a crowded cocktail party, Wolf rushed to the window and shouted, ‘Mein Fuehrer! Mein Fuehrer! Don’t shoot! It’s only me!’ Born in Berlin, he still had his German passport, but in disgrace next morning he was taken by his father to be naturalised. His passport was the only Australian thing about him: he remained permanently rebellious in an alien culture, but in our house he created a small Greek corner for himself.

  We left within a week of each other—the boys on a ship and I hitchhiking on a converted bomber. My parents made no attempt to stop me leaving. They tried, as they always had, to help me live my life to its fullest stretching point.

  But that was the beginning of the house’s decline. For a year or two, my mother had enormous fun with food parcels: my friends in England were inundated. Mine usually had a bottle of whisky, well padded by marshmallows, tucked inside. To test it, she stood on the dining-room table and hurled it to the floor: if the whisky didn’t break, she deemed it sufficiently padded to brave the post. At a Christmas house party in England, when all the other guests had had their quota of tins from my mother, Harold French and I composed a cable to her, silly with Christmas spirit: ‘Please send Harold French parcel. He’s old, silly, but rather nice and has never had a parcel.’

  My mother’s answering cable said: ‘Of course, darling, but who is Harold and what is a French parcel?’

  Meanwhile she’d been shopping, in a bewildered way, for all the champignons, pâté de foie gras and truffles she could find. I lived in England for four years before my mother died but her letters came daily and I, knowing her nocturnal habits, could picture her at the round dining table, patience cards and empty tea cups pushed aside, cigarette butts mounting up, writing far into the night. My father acquired a nurse, Peggy, shortly after I left, and Peggy increasingly filled the pages in my mother’s letters—not with a happy note but with uncharacteristic resentment. Peggy was always upstairs, Peggy had been rude to her—insulting—and the worst aspect of all this was that my father had upheld Peggy against his wife. The daily saga went on for weeks and I skimmed over this boring tirade until finally it dawned on me that perhaps the root of my mothe
r’s distress was a suspicion that my father was actually having an affair with this usurper, and that she was trying to tell me this in a gentle, indeed genteel way. Alarmed, I wrote back to ask her if this was the case. ‘Don’t be silly,’ she wrote back. ‘Of course not. He’s seen far too many twots better looking than her face.’ In no way could I afterwards visualise the unseen Peggy as a threat.

  In another year she was dead. Then Aunt Juliet. When Aunt Juliet was killed by the bus, although my grandmother, then over ninety, lived to link me with the past by her still wonderful letters, the secure, magic place of my childhood vanished with her. My father broke the news to me, in England, by a cable: ‘JULIET SKITTLED,’ it said. ‘LOVE, DAD.’

  Only he and my grandmother remained, unspeaking, in the lonely house.

  Lastly, outliving all her loved ones, my grandmother died. The house was sold. The new owners were the long-suffering estate agents who were my grandmother’s tenants. The rooms became offices, dress shops, coffee bars; the front was all plate-glass and the roof was renewed. In the fullness of time and progress these gave way in turn to a sex arcade and now an underground station. And, as a final gesture to conformity, the tree has been uprooted from the Cross.

  EPILOGUE

  Since the publication of the previous edition, I am able to add some new information. Nana’s imagination need not to have been put to use in creating my great grandmother’s past history. I have discovered two convicts in her family tree. One appeared to have been a splendid character who, after his first two years released in bondage to his wife, as her cook, became a sterling and prosperous character.