The Life and Loves of Lena Gaunt

by Tracy Farr

  I hit the high note at the end of the first phrase: perfect. My fingers’ movement was all I could have wanted for this demonstration, this first outing of my technique, the notes crisp and sharp.

  I finished the piece, lowered my hands to the resting position, the theremin quiet, just a low hum from the speaker behind me. I could hear Madame Petrova’s breath heavy at the piano. From the silence, applause burst astonished from the audience, shouts of brava rang through the room.

  As we had rehearsed, I played ‘Vocalise’ by Rachmaninoff, then Ravel’s ‘Habanera’, the applause vibrant between each piece. The Professor stood to the side, nodding, his hands clasped to his face in a fist.

  My final piece was Bach, of course. I played them the Prelude from the first cello suite, solo, without Madame on the piano. As I finished, I stepped aside from the theremin, and bowed low, the applause coursing through me, energising me. I smiled as faces started to distil into individuals from the blurred mass of audience. Delphine Britten smiled hard at me, raised her hands to me as she clapped them together. Mr Britten did the same, kissing his fingertips and throwing the kiss to me, his raised eyebrow lightly leering. Madame Petrova stayed at the piano, raised a glass of clear fluid, winked lustily, and downed the drink in a long single draught. The Professor moved towards me from the crowd, took my hand, raised it in his, and we bowed. Blood rushed to my head; this was extraordinary. I had received applause before, but polite, domestic. This felt different. Electric.

  As I stared and smiled again into the crowd of faces, a critical eye creased – in laughter? In scrutiny? In approval? – and caught my own eye. Hair was slicked to one side across a face worn but warm, lightly lined but young underneath the lines. When I first saw Beatrix, for a moment I did not know whether she was a man or a woman. Beatrix seemed beyond gender; and so she was.

  She was dressed as she sometimes dressed in those days, in a man’s clothes – evening dress, sharp-creased black trousers, glossy black patent shoes, a white evening shirt. She wore a silk scarf tied in the fashion of a cravat, much like that the Professor had worn the first time I had met him. On Beatrix the scarf hung low, masked the rise of her breasts under her gathered shirt.

  She caught my eye among the many present that night. She was part of the electricity, of the novelty of the night for me, the feeling running through my body that felt residual from the theremin, as if I had indeed been connected to it, been part of the electrical circuits the Professor had built, a connection as if made by wires touching wires, metal wound around metal. But Beatrix connected to me without touching, as soon as I saw her. She made me hum, even from across the room.

  The Professor dropped my hand, and the crowd broke from its formation, its split between audience and performers – we all joined in a buzz of congratulations and conversation about the aetherphone, about electricity, about music. My connection with the world of music in Sydney had been limited, until this night, to Petrova and the Professor, and the Professor’s connection with music was a product of his beloved machines, rather than love of the music itself. But, as much as I had craved this talk of music, as the crowd mingled, as groups formed and broke and reformed, I found myself searching for the figure I had noticed before, the eyes that had caught mine, the face of the woman I would come to know as Beatrix Carmichael.

  Across the room, an arm described an arc through the air, trailing cigarette smoke, standing with Delphine Britten by the fireplace. They stood before a painting hung on the wall above the mantelpiece. The painting was of a figure on an armchair, and I could see at once – despite the light and shapes and planes of the figure being sharp and unreal, unreadable, nonetheless I could read it – that the figure was Mrs Britten, Delphine. Clutching the chair’s arm, she pushed herself upwards, bursting from the painting. The figure standing by the fireplace raised a hand to the painting once again, once again traced an arc through the air, close to the surface of the painting, tracing the arc of Mrs Britten’s sharp jawline on the canvas. Then I watched as she raised her other hand, traced her finger along Delphine Britten’s jawline, the real-life jawline in front of her. Mrs Britten raised her own hand to her face, pushed her hair back. I heard myself exhale hard, not noticing that I had been holding my breath.

  Hands clapped sharply across the room, and all of us in the crowd turned to face the sound. Mr Britten, clapping as he walked across the room towards me, commanded our attention.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, if I could ask you – if you could please give me your attention. Please.’

  As he reached my side, all eyes were upon us. He slid his arm around my waist, kissed my cheek, held his other arm in the air as if conducting an orchestra, or hailing a tram.

  ‘My friends, please. A moment more of your attention. Tonight, we have seen, and heard, history being made, I’m sure you will agree.’

  Applause and shouts rang once more from the room. Mr Britten waved his arms, pushed his hands down through the air and the noise lowered to silence.

  ‘Well my friends, let’s move from history to something more personal.’ His hand, still at my waist, slid lower, to my hip. ‘Today is Miss Gaunt’s eighteenth birthday. Our clever Professor has prepared a surprise to help in its celebration. Professor, please.’

  The Professor walked up to me and took my hand, leading me through the double doorway to the adjacent room, the crowd of people parting as we passed, all applauding politely. He led me to a small circular table, on which stood a cake large enough to perfectly fit the tabletop, white, decorated with flounces of sugar and small balls of silver in patterns of musical notations, treble and bass clefs, quavers and crotchets.

  A candle stood in its centre with an electric light as a flame. A device was inside the cake, surely. As I approached, the candle lit, first flickering then glowing steadily. As I moved closer, the whole table started to rotate, going faster the closer I stood; then as I stepped backwards, the rotation slowed, the glowing candle faded to a flicker. I stepped forwards and backwards, my hands to my face in delight. I stepped away and raised my hands in front of me – almost in the position I would adopt to play the theremin – to see if the proximity of my hands was enough to rotate the cake, but it needed a greater body mass, a greater disruption of the electrical field than my hands could provide; it needed my whole body.

  All the people of the crowd had moved around me, forming the shape of a crescent moon, oohing and aahing, clapping quietly. The Professor stood by my side, smiling at me, nodding as I understood what he had done, as I played his invention for him. The people in the crowd added their bodies and their arms to the influence of the cake and the table, and soon all were in a huddle, a scrum, hands and bodies moving together and apart in delight, in wonder. Mr Britten moved to my side and kissed my cheek once more, his hand straight to the small of my back and lower, caressing, and his breath in my ear was warm, wet, unpleasant as he hummed Happy birthday, darling girl, and I shrank into myself to avoid him, my eyes seeking the floor, seeking escape.

  But then I saw the glossy patent of her shoes appear by the pale silk of mine, toe touching toe.

  ‘Edward Britten, for godsakes leave the poor girl alone, won’t you? You’re dreadful, darling, honestly.’ Her arm slipped around my waist, her lips brushed my cheek, close to my own lips; I caught her scent: the honey wax of lipstick, tobacco, turpentine faint in her hair. ‘Happy birthday, darling Miss Gaunt. Your playing was wonderful. Don’t mind Edward; he’s a dreadful slut, and he always goes running back to Delphine, don’t you, Edward?’

  ‘Thank you, Miss…’

  ‘Beatrix Carmichael, doll. Call me Trix. Run away and bring us drinks, Edward; you’re not looking after your guests.’ Her arm still around my waist, loose but warm, slipped lower – just slightly, just lightly – so her hand rested on my thin hip. She was shorter than me, the top of her head at the height of my eyes.

  There was a shout from across the room as Madame Petrova and the Professor clinked small glasses one agai
nst the other, and we turned, Trix and I, to watch them down the liquor in unison, shouting something guttural as they finished.

  I turned back as Trix did, so that I turned my face into hers – we were facing one another, my face above hers, hers tilted up towards mine. I caught her breath under my tongue, smoke and whisky, as she said in a low voice, ‘Come to the beach with me, doll. Let’s go to Manly. Tomorrow.’

  TRICK THE LIGHT

  We met at Circular Quay. Beatrix was dressed in trousers, wide at the ankle. I saw her first from a distance; she faced away from me, yet I knew it was her. She turned, as if she felt my eyes on her, and as she turned, the legs of her trousers swished and moved like the sails of a ship, revealing ankle straps on her glossy shoes. Her face was lit with a smile. She wore a white fedora over bobbed hair, powdered face and the reddest of red lipstick on her wide lips. Yet while her clothes and appearance were a mixture of mannish and womanly, no one could see her at that moment and not know she was a woman.

  Beatrix doffed her hat, winked at me, walked towards me, rested her hands on both my shoulders and kissed me on one cheek and then the next, in the European way I was used to from the Professor and Madame Petrova.

  ‘Ready, darl?’ she asked me, turning so that we faced in the same direction, towards the ferries, and taking my arm with hers. ‘I took the liberty’– she squeezed my arm gently – ‘of purchasing tickets for the two of us to travel. We’re just in time. Hustle your bustle, doll.’

  Whisked along as I would come to expect by Beatrix, we joined the flow of people boarding the ferry berthed at Manly Wharf. The day was fine, and we secured a position on the deck, sitting close together on wooden slats that bounded the cabin. Beatrix took a packet of cigarettes from her pocket, and offered them to me. I took one, and Beatrix leaned in and lit it for me, her hand around mine around the match to shield the flame from the breeze.

  We talked about everything and nothing on the trip to Manly; and we watched the bridge.

  ‘Look at it,’ Beatrix said, ‘God, it’s so beautiful. I love painting it. Not just the bridge. The water, the light. The shapes. The spaces between the shapes. The way they change as we move past them. I like to try to paint that.’

  From the water, the view of the bridge was different than from anywhere on land – from that low angle, looking up, it seemed so much larger. Its overall shape had not changed since my view of it from the Houtman as I’d steamed into Sydney for the first time. The shape was the same, but denser, spaces filled, lines and curves connected. It looked stronger, more permanent, even though still the two arcs of the bridge did not meet. The air around and between the arcs hummed and rang with the sounds of construction from the bridge, of human voices drowned by metallic ringing.

  The air had been still that morning, heavy with humidity and unseasonal warmth for autumn. On the water, air moved past us as the boat moved through it, creating a cooling breeze. It felt like an escape, to be surrounded by water, by its sound. The sweat on my back, under my arms, dried quickly in the breeze. I felt light again, released from the dragging effect of the city. I wore the dress I had worn for my first meeting with the Professor: black and white, elegant. I felt myself cool underneath the dress, felt the fabric move against me.

  The ferry docked at Manly and the crowd of disembarking passengers streamed off onto land. Beatrix – she had said again, on the ferry, call me Trix – Trix took my arm. Her arm was cool; I could feel my sweat slicken the soft underside of my elbow against her dry skin.

  Trix walked us to tearooms that overlooked the water. We took a table in the rotunda, outside but shaded from the sun. She ordered tea, sandwiches, and cakes. We talked as we ate. I learned that she was an artist, a painter, and that – born ten years from the close of the old century – she was more than twice my age. Having long ago escaped from the cold southern town of her birth across the water in New Zealand, more recently she’d returned to Australia from living in Europe, in places with romantic names, Paris, Vienna, Berlin. I spoke of my music, of my conversion from cello to theremin, of my interest and delight in the modern. We were loud, sometimes, over tea that day. We were looked at, by quieter patrons. I rested my hand on the table; Trix covered it with hers, cool and slight.

  We walked down past the hotel and on to the beach, shoes off, sand crunching and squeaking between our toes. I could feel the stretch in my calves, felt myself push against the hard wet sand low on the beach. Trix linked her arm through mine. The waves were quiet that day, not booming, just a light, rounded swell. At the western end of the bay, where the beach curved around, long shadows from Norfolk pines fell on the beach, formed strips of shade on the white sand. We fell in and out of darkness as we walked.

  We caught a late, crowded ferry back to Circular Quay. People smelled of beer and oil and sweat and fish. Trix and I resumed our places at the front of the boat, where the air moved the smells away, and the boat thrummed underneath us with its rhythmic tug. We were quieter now, all talked out. We listened instead to the talk around us, talk of football and fish and Missus this and Mister that. We smiled at each other, smiled at the same overheard fragments.

  I looked at Trix. The light from the low sun glowed. She reached for my hand, resting in my lap. As she reached, tucking her little hand around my long fingers, her knuckles brushed against me, pressed the fabric of my dress to touch me lightly, underneath. I glowed with the sun, with the touch, with heat, a spark in me fired.

  We arranged to meet again the next day. I waited for Trix at Circular Quay, watched her step from the ferry and stride towards me. She placed her hands on my shoulders, brushed her left cheek first against my right cheek, then her right cheek – slowly – against my left cheek. She breathed out hot breath against me, spiced with cigarette smoke.

  ‘I’ve brought lunch.’ She lifted a large, worn velvet bag. ‘And a little drink.’ She linked her arm through mine, and we walked together. I matched my long stride to her smaller step. We walked for hours in the autumn sun, through the Domain, the Botanic Gardens. At Mrs Macquaries Chair we sat and ate cheese sandwiches unwrapped from waxed paper, washed down with sherry from a tin bottle, all drawn from deep in her velvet bag. We sat close on the seat in the shade, so close I could smell the sherry on her breath. She lit a cigarette for me, and one for herself; she shifted closer to me, turned her body, just a little, so that she looked at me. We sat and smoked and watched the world, watched each other.

  We walked back to Circular Quay late in the afternoon. Trix held her bag in front of her, low, almost dragging on the ground as she walked. As we approached the terminal, she turned to me, placed her hand on my arm.

  ‘Come to my house. Come for tea. My paintings – I want to show you. Come on.’

  We chattered up the hill from the ferry dock at Mosman to Trix’s house in Royalist Road, leaning in on one another, giggling and scurrying like two schoolgirls. We climbed up the steps onto the verandah that wrapped around two sides of the house.

  ‘Turn around, look!’ Trix told me. ‘This is where I paint, sometimes.’

  From the verandah you could see the bridge. The shapes and curves of it, the two halves like the swell of full breasts, or pregnant bellies, reached towards each other, approaching completeness. You could imagine the arc the finished bridge would form; your eye drew it in, filled the space, completed it, connected the two pieces. We stood for a moment; I could think of no words to say. I could feel her next to me, and nothing else mattered.

  The house was quiet, dark inside; no one answered Trix’s coo-ee! as we slammed in through the front door from the verandah.

  ‘Sherry? Mmmn, sherry, yes. Come on.’ She took my hand and pulled me with her through to a lean-to kitchen where, on a shelf, bottles of liquid shone, next to glasses of every shape, none of them matching. They stood upon embroidered linen, next to candles in silver sticks, as if on an altar. Trix poured amber sherry into two glasses, one of panelled red glass, the other fine crystal. She handed me the red glass
, clinked the crystal against it, and took my hand again.

  ‘Come on. I want to show you.’

  She led me down the hallway, through an open door. It smelled of paint, of turpentine, of smoke, of our sherry.

  ‘Look,’ she said, ‘let me show you. The light. What we’ve been looking at. What I see. What I can make it do.’

  She drew the curtain aside, let in the pale light of the dying day. The room was full of paintings. Canvas rested against canvas, some framed, most of them not. Paintings faced out into the room, or turned their backs to us, faced the wall. They were on the floor, on a bookcase, a desk. They hung on the wall, they sat on a well-stuffed chair by the window. She lifted one – small, barely bigger than the width of a dinner plate – and held it to me. I took it from her.

  It was the bridge viewed from the verandah. Somehow, though, I could see it not just from the verandah, but from the ferry, from the other side of the harbour, from Mrs Macquaries Chair, all at once; all of those views and angles were combined. The painting was all about movement, and shape. It swam before my eyes.

  ‘But how?’ I said. ‘How do you – how does it move like this?’

  She took the painting from me, kissed my cheek – just shy of my mouth – and placed the painting on the chair by the window.

  ‘Ah, see, that’s why I wanted to show you. It’s what I do. I trick the light.’ She held her hands wide, inviting me, enticing me to move around the room. I looked at canvas after canvas of the bridge, the rooftops, the sky and the water. Still lives – the altar of wine and glasses – cigarettes and matchboxes. People I did not recognise, their faces and bodies formed in shapes and planes and colours.