by Tracy Farr
‘Oh, it gets worse! I can’t believe I’m telling you this. I really identified with the image in the painting. I used to wear my hair in a bun, you know, I dyed a dress the same colour silver – or I tried to, but it came out a kind of dull murky grey. In the end, though, it helped inspire me to make the film. So I’ve always felt a very strong relationship with Carmichael. I’m sorry, that feels really presumptuous to say to you.’
‘Oh, don’t apologise. It’s – flattering, if anything. It explains the film, perhaps. It seems that it’s somehow about you, as well as Beatrix.’
‘I think that too, yes. She was the inspiration for the film, of course, and so was the painting of you. But I think it’s exactly that – when you watch one of my documentaries, you’re seeing as much of my story as you are of anything else, no matter who or what the film’s about.’ She rolls her eyes. ‘Well, anyway, I wanted to confess to you how much I’ve always loved this painting.’
I hold the tiny reproduction away at a distance I can focus on. I cannot speak. I don’t know what to tell her. The painting is in my bedroom. No; I think not.
‘It’s a shame. In this, the colours aren’t true at all. As I remember it.’
‘It’s very faded. I had it on my wall for years. Look, pin marks in the corners. You can see the colour’s brighter where the pins covered it.’
‘I was very young, you know, when it was painted. It was so long ago.’
I am young, in the painting, and – I can say it now, when I am no longer – strikingly beautiful. My hair is drawn back to the nape, a polished black bun of hair, shiny, so black it’s almost blue. I wear my silver dress, all sharp lines and curved folds intersecting, as if I’m wrapped in tin foil shot with blue light, gaping at the neck, at the breast, skin showing pale, almost luminous. The portrait is dominated by my hands. Beatrix captured the movement in my hands, even in repose, as if there’s light and sound held within them. In the background of the painting is the edge – just the very edge – of my theremin, its dark lacquered brown struck with electric colour, duck-egg blue, orange.
‘Do you have any of her work?’ she asks me.
I keep my focus on the postcard. I put it down on the table, tap it with my finger. I draw a box around it, like a frame, with my fingertip.
‘Beatrix Carmichael?’
‘Mmm, yes, Beatrix Carmichael.’ She seems understandably exasperated at my response. ‘She was very prolific. I just wondered if you had any of her paintings.’
I trace the postcard again with my finger.
‘I moved a lot. It was difficult – sometimes difficult to keep track of things, to know quite where things were, or are. I lost my mother’s wedding ring, you know, some other jewellery. Perhaps I’m not very good at keeping track of things.’
I pick up the postcard and hold it out to her. She takes it, biting her bottom lip with a rueful smile as she places the postcard back in her bag. She turns away and finishes putting her things together, packing her bags, coiling a microphone lead; tying up loose ends. The other woman, the camera woman, comes in from the front room and says she is finished. They both heave bags to their shoulders. I walk them to the door; they take their leave. They have film from me today, but nothing else.
SYDNEY
1927–1932
Without touching
MADAME PETROVA
On a cool day in the winter of 1927 the Houtman delivered me into the Port of the City of Sydney, marking the end of the journey that took me from Malacca – which I put far away, at the very back of my mind – by way of Singapore and Brisbane. I had packed my trunk and left it by my cabin door for the porters. I lowered my cello carefully down the steep stairway that led to the main deck. Sailors milled, busy in anticipation of our approach to the port, but few passengers were yet on deck. It was cold, the wind from the south biting across the ocean and across the bow of the Houtman. I pulled my light Malacca-weight coat tight around me, tucked my head down into its insubstantial collar, folded my arms across my breasts and pushed my hands deep into my armpits. I pressed my knees against the case of my cello, holding it hard under the overhang of the side of the ship, safe from water. The water, the wind, the salt, were cold but invigorating; glorious. I felt an energy that I had not felt during my time in Malacca. I was ready for Sydney.
We passed the Heads with their great swell of water, and steamed slowly into Sydney Harbour, rounding headlands dark with blue-green bush, sharp with the shine of iron roofing, the swell under us calming to the gentler rise and fall of the inner harbour waters. Buildings and roads became more numerous as we neared the city; houses dotted the land’s edge and climbed up into the bush away from the water. But all thought of houses melted from my mind as we rounded a headland to my first sight of that most beautiful and most modern of constructions, the powerful iron curves of the new bridge. I could not have felt further from the low, exotic stink of Malacca if I had landed on the moon. The two arcs of the bridge approached each other across the water, but did not yet touch. We steamed closer on our route to the wharves at Pyrmont. Workmen swarmed like ants, like bees, across the bridge’s curves, alive with construction, the noise audible and the movement visible the closer we drew to her flanks. The bridge seemed almost crystalline, its parts forming fragments that changed shape from each new angle of view. Stone pylons pushed her up from the earth at either end, raising her above the water, pushing the halves of the bridge towards each other. Girders, each alone straight and unbending, together formed curves and patterns as delicate as lace, as hard as steel. By now everyone, all the passengers, had come on deck to watch this marvel. We steamed under her, her shadow falling over us, our faces raised, like primitive man watching a solar eclipse. But we didn’t run and hide. There was no fear among us. This was modernity in progress; we were part of the modern age.
Percussion sounded from the bridge as we passed under her, the pitch of the beaten, metallic notes changing as we moved in relation to the bridge. Sound bounced in every direction, both muffled and reflected, complicated by the water around us. The thrugging engines of the Houtman provided a steady background beat, and the sounds from the bridge sometimes fought and syncopated with the ship’s rhythm, sometimes complemented it, ran with it, helped speed us along the water. We were part of the percussion, the music of metal and construction and water combined. I found my fingers tapping on the rails of the ship’s deck, adding the rhythm of my body to the music I heard around me.
I was going to like this city, this place of modern song.
We steamed slowly through to Pyrmont, eased into place against the wharf. I watched from the deck as four strong men manoeuvred the gangway into position, secured it in place. Then I stood in line to step onto the gangway, to cross from the water to the land.
My first days in Sydney passed quickly, in the attaining of little miracles, a roof over my head being the most crucial of these. Within days I was resident in a room in a house on the genteel fringe where the rough-and-tumble of Darlinghurst sidled up alongside the opulence of Elizabeth Bay and Potts Point. The house was owned by Mrs Baxter, a stern widow of comfortable means. I paid her for two months on the spot, and settled myself into the small, shaded room that overlooked her front garden.
On the ship I had been taken under the wings of a wealthy Sydney couple, Mr and Mrs Britten, and it was Mrs Britten who had given me a letter of introduction to a cellist by the name of Vita Petrova. So I found myself, on the morning of only my fourth day in Sydney, lugging my cello in its case through cold unfamiliar streets from Darlinghurst to Paddington, to the terraced house in which Madame Petrova lived and kept her studio.
Petrova was a fat Russian who favoured shapeless floral frocks down to her ankles, and pinned her stringy blonde hair up on her head with a lacquered wooden spike to keep it out of the way of the cigarette that always hung from the corner of her mouth. As I would learn over the months to come, Petrova started each day with vodka added to her coffee, and fed for the rest of t
he day on sugary poppyseed pastries and potato pierogies from the Russian bakery on Oxford Street. And cigarettes, endless cigarettes, each one lit from the one before, her apartment a haze of smoke and vodka that would fade only briefly overnight before she started to replenish it again in the morning, her first black cigarette lit before she had swung her fat legs out of bed.
Petrova, though, to her credit and to my delight, could play the cello like a dream. But more than that, she had an ear almost as attuned as mine to the clarity and organisation of sound.
On the day I first rang her front doorbell, Madame Petrova appeared behind the opening door, cigarette in hand, ash trailing her down the dark hallway. I handed her the letter I had from Mrs Britten, and she kept me at the front door, her foot holding the door half open, half closed, as if I might be an unwanted evangelist to be kept from entering her house. Her mouth and nose wrinkled, moved, as she read.
‘The Brittens, uh?’ She sniffed loudly, drew on her cigarette, and coughed. ‘You must come in, then,’ she said as she finished reading the letter. Turning, she gestured at me with a wave of her hand to follow.
I padded after her down the dark smoky hallway, past closed doorways and into a heavily curtained room at the back of the house. Madame Petrova collapsed onto a chaise by the draped window and gestured again, flapping her hand languidly in the direction of a hard chair by a small table.
‘Play for me, then,’ she rasped, lifting her chin in my direction as she drew in hard on her cigarette, then ashed it in the saucer on the table at her side.
I opened the case, withdrew my cello. Madame Petrova blew breath from her mouth as she saw it, my aluminium beauty, made a noise of dismissal or of distaste, perhaps a laugh; I could not tell which. She shook her head – I watched her from lowered eyes as I checked my instrument’s tuning, prepared to play – her eyes scornful, disdainful. I had ground to make up with her, it was clear.
‘What shall I play?’
‘For godsakes girl, play what you will, just play. Impress me, if you can, with your – tin cello.’
I played what came to me naturally, what I loved: Bach. I could play it without thinking, without needing to direct my fingers, my arms; my whole body knew how to play it. I heard it as if from across the room, as if sitting on Madame Petrova’s ample knee and observing myself, heard and saw myself as she would: good posture, strength in the upper arms, yes, a good instrument despite its appearance, tuned well; interpretation very fine, nuanced; mellow, light and dark showing in the piece. I justified my tin cello to her.
As I finished playing, my consciousness pulled back where it belonged. I looked across the room at Petrova. Her fat feet shifted as I watched, uncrossing from right over left, recrossing left over right. Like a reef knot, I thought.
‘Your name is Lena, you say.’
‘Short for Helena. I prefer it.’
‘Which? You prefer which? Say what you mean.’
‘Lena. I prefer Lena.’
She had the curranty eyes that fat people have, disappearing into her face. She blinked them slowly.
‘Lena. A name not uncommon in Russia, you know.’
She was silent then, drawing on the cigarette. I waited her out, silent too, just my right hand’s fingers tapping time on the bow resting across my lap.
‘Lena, Elena, same thing, they come from the Greek.’ She sucked her top teeth, ran her tongue across them inside her lips. ‘You know Greek, uh? Latin? Maybe even Russian? No. Yet you have some education, obviously.’ A pout of breath, not a laugh, not a sigh, but something in between, escaped her mouth. ‘Lena means peculiar, in Greek. Hmh!’ She lit another cigarette from the stub in her mouth, drew in hard on it, then stubbed out the old one. She looked at me, expecting a reply.
‘I’m sorry, I won’t take up any more of your time,’ I said, and started to stand.
‘Sit, girl, sit!’ she huffed at me, waving her hand in a flapping downwards motion, like a child waving goodbye. ‘Peculiar but good. Peculiarly good. Yes, pec-u-li-ar-ly good. I thought you would be one of Delphine Britten’s rich blonde dolls’ – she sucked her top teeth again as she said this, raised her eyes in contempt – ‘but no. Peculiarly good. You want work, I suppose? You don’t want lessons, of course?’
‘I would like…’
‘Yes, yes, you would like what?’
‘I would like lessons, I think, or – perhaps I should say – sessions. To play for you. For you to listen to me, to watch me. Help me get better.’
‘You should go to the Conservatorium then. They would take you, I’m sure of it. I can give you an introduction; surely there is still someone there who knows my name.’
But the Conservatorium sounded old-fashioned to me, conserving, unchanging. Conserving was not what interested me. I thought of the bridge. I wanted its clanging modernity.
‘No. I would prefer to work with you. I can pay.’
Petrova screwed up her nose, frowned, turned down her mouth at the sides. ‘If you pay me, I will happily do that. Even I can tolerate this tin cello in my house.’ But she smiled as she said this, with what I would come to realise was Madame’s strange humour.
I came to Madame Petrova’s house each Tuesday and Thursday morning from that week onwards, for what we called lessons. I had the money to pay her – thanks to Father’s allowance – and she gave me a sounding board, a good ear against which to play. Sometimes she would play, on a large cello, well worn, with intricate flourishes of purfling and beading at its edges; she played carefully, and beautifully; but not often. In truth, I did learn from her, but by my own actions, by the bouncing of my sounds against her.
She also gave lessons to young women from the opulent neighbourhoods of the Bays, Mrs Britten’s derided blonde dolls. She dragged them and their screechings towards genteel musicality, to please their rich or aspiring parents. These girls filled her afternoons, coming to her directly from school, smelling of paper and chalk and sweat and the tram. They would sit at the piano, or occasionally at the cello, backs straight in their school uniforms, strain or boredom on their faces. I knew this, because later I would help her to teach them.
But at first, my visits to Madame’s place were limited to our twice-weekly morning sessions. Each session lasted for two hours and – after a few weeks in which we sized each other up and decided we rather liked each other, different as we were – would always finish in the same manner: with tea, with shots of vodka, and with smoking, with Madame telling me that Australians had tin ears, and me telling Madame that Russian composers wrote music only for battles, or for madmen.
TINY BAMBOO SLIVERS
My sessions at Madame Petrova’s house filled only a small part of each week, but I managed easily to fill the remainder. When I was not playing the cello in my bedroom at Mrs Baxter’s, I would walk the streets of Sydney, absorbing the city. The winter was exhilarating after the dank unrelenting heat of Malacca. I bought a thick wool coat, wrapped a scarf around my face and up over my head, and walked through the rain, or the cold sun-filled days of winter. I walked always towards the water – not a difficult thing in this city, built around the harbour – and I came to learn which streets sloped down to meet the water, and where the headlands afforded the best views of it.
I went often to places from where I could view the progress of the bridge. My favourite of these was the lookout known as Mrs Macquaries Chair. I’d catch the tram to Pitt Street, turn into Bridge Street and trudge up past the castellations of the Conservatorium, lingering to listen for music that might filter from its windows. Then I’d continue on through the Domain and the Botanic Gardens, down past the pond to skirt the edges of Farm Cove around to Mrs Macquaries Chair. Just shy of the Chair, I’d sit on the point and watch the bridge.
As the weather warmed, from Mrs Macquaries Chair I’d follow the track around to the saltwater baths at Woolloomooloo, pay at the entrance to the timber and tin change shed, and swim and laze by the pool’s edge in the weak late-winter sun. I learned to
swim in the fashion of the time as I saw it practised there, Boy Charlton’s famous crawl stroke, my arms first aching then strengthening with each lap of the pool. But I missed the open ocean, the thundering of the waves into the beach near Uncle Valentine’s.
Walking through the city, I’d watch the women and men pacing its streets, observe their clothes, the docked, bobbed hair of the women, their lipstick red and bright, dresses sleek and modern, all straight up and down and beautiful. I bought myself such a dress, one day, from a flash shop on Pitt Street: a slim dress of silk, the colour of my cello; the colour of aluminium, which is really no colour at all. Shot through with metallic thread, it felt cool against my legs, slick. I did not bob my hair though. I kept it long enough to pull back tight from my forehead, like the Chinese women in Malacca, tight in a bun rolled to rest at the nape of my neck, pressing there, solid.
On the day I bought the dress, Mrs Baxter stood at the door to meet me on my return to the house in Darlinghurst. She held an envelope in her hand.
‘A telegram. Not half an hour ago. I trust it’s not bad news.’
She stood close to me as I opened the envelope. The terse language of the telegram advised me once more of loss, leaving out more than it told. Your father dead. Sudden. Buried today. Sympathies. The sender was Mr Holland, my father’s business partner. A picture of him flashed unbidden in my mind’s eye, his moustaches and bald head like my father’s, their suits and hats matching; and the longer I thought, the more I could not distinguish them, Father and Mr Holland, in my mind.
My uncle sent a telegram the next day: Darling Helena poor Charles dead. So sudden no warning. Will write. Love always Val. A letter arrived from him a fortnight hence, heavy with sympathy, bright with details. Holland had told of unrest – Uncle Valentine wrote – among the locals, and indeed there’d been attacks on Europeans throughout Malaya. It was rumoured – but not proven – that my father’s death had been caused by the addition of tiny bamboo slivers slipped into his food, that had made their way through his body and perforated his innards.