The Life and Loves of Lena Gaunt

by Tracy Farr

  ‘And this, look at this. Ah, it’s old, but still…’

  A cello was fractured into parts; not the parts of a cello, and yet somehow, combined, they made me know they formed a cello. The dun colour of the wood was enlivened, shot through with blue, light reflecting from glass under the instrument. It stood by a window; that was it, a window. Or was it water? I couldn’t tell.

  ‘I used to play – before the aetherphone – I played cello.’

  ‘You told me.’

  ‘It’s beautiful. But I don’t understand how you do it.’

  ‘I interpret what I see. This is how I see the world. This is how I make it look.’

  The cello in the painting was a cello, and yet not a cello.

  ‘It makes me think – of the sound I make with the aetherphone. Not like a cello, but like it. Both more than it, and less than it, at the same time, and yet itself as well. I’m not making sense, I—’

  ‘No, no, it makes sense. I think that’s it exactly. Itself, and more than itself, and less. Everything connects.’ She stubbed her cigarette out in a bowl on a table. ‘Everything connects!’

  She moved towards me, took the empty red glass from my hand, placed it on the table next to the ash-filled bowl. She reached up to place her arms around me; her hands hooked over my shoulders and her fingers reached under my chin, their touch gentle.

  ‘Beautiful girl.’

  I breathed in, almost could not breathe out. My face turned to the left and I kissed her finger.

  ‘Oh.’ She made a noise like tsk, with her mouth. ‘Beautiful, beautiful girl.’ And she raised up on her toes, and I leant – just slightly – downwards, and we kissed, our lips light at first, then heavy upon one another, smoky, sweet, intense.

  We fell into one another. Beatrix took my body and fractured it into parts, so that I felt every part, every piece of my body with an intensity that was new to me, delicious. I felt the parts put together into a whole that was greater than it had been, before Trix. All of the planes and curves of my body were showing, all at once, inside me and outside me and all around me.

  TOUCHING

  Trix was unforeseen. My life became compartmentalised, split. I was working hard each day with the Professor, learning my craft – I had still so much to know. I wanted it all at once, to be better, more skilled with my instrument at the end of each day than at its beginning. Most of the time I was inventing the skills anew – there was no one who could teach me, who knew more about the aetherphone than I. I learned from my own body, from my muscles and from my ears and brain. The Professor made small changes to the configuration of the instrument, tweaking here and there, in response to the sounds and the music that I squeezed and teased from it – I would hit a limit, and he would manoeuvre wires and components until the limitation was overcome. In time, our machine became limitless. The Professor soared as I did, watching and listening beside me. This was the shape of my days.

  But the evenings were for Trix, and a different kind of music.

  Trix would arrive fresh off the ferry from Mosman at the end of each day, come to get me when she’d finished painting. She’d ring the bell at the front of the house; Mrs Baxter would let her into the front room and knock on my door, Your aunt, Miss Gaunt. I’d introduced Trix as Mrs Carmichael, a widow, and had not corrected Mrs Baxter when she assumed – from our ease in each other’s company – that Trix and I were family. On hot days, I would wait on the verandah, fanning myself with a sheet of paper or a leaf from the garden until Trix bounded onto the verandah two steps at a time and planted kisses on both my cheeks, squeezing my hands.

  ‘Come on, doll. We are going to have a good time tonight.’

  The Buzz Room was not the name over the door, but that’s what everyone called it. It was easy to miss if you didn’t know what you were looking for, down a laneway off the Cross, poorly lit, the kind of place to be warned about, to avoid. Through the door was a crowd, a push, a smoky haze of glory, of masculine women and feminine men, of all sorts and all kinds and nobody cared what. Trix would kiss my lips hard as we came through the door, our ritual; as we broke apart she would always say There, because I can, whisper it in my ear.

  But almost best of all, there was music.

  A raised stage filled one end of the L-shaped room, and the stage was always filled with musicians, a stream of them playing music to dance by, music to move to, music that wouldn’t let you stay still. Bands would form and part several times a night; there was the same permissiveness to the musical groupings that pervaded the rest of the place. Women played; men played; jazz predominated, but dark, different; there was a wildness, a not needing to please, to conform. There was heat to the music, heat and fluidity.

  Everyone danced with everyone, and no one – we just danced, with a freedom I’d never felt before. People would dance without touching, couples connecting with their eyes, or by mirroring or responding to the movements of their partners. They would connect by shouting out, calling, crying, get hot, get hot, mad cries would ring through the room, yeah! Coats and hats and bags piled in a corner, people piled straight onto the dance floor. We danced and danced until we dropped. And when we dropped, Trix showed me how to dance some more – from the Cross you could buy little glass vials filled with white grains. Trix tapped a small mound of powder onto her thumbnail, then onto my thumbnail; I mirrored her movements, hungry. You raised the thumbnail to each nostril in turn, as you held the other nostril closed and inhaled sharply, then flicked your tongue over the nail to lick the sparkling grains remaining there. A cold light would fire through you; first an ultraviolet black-and-whiteness followed by a suffusion of such brilliant energy and light. We would dance for hours more, topping up as we needed to with a thumbnail of snow, as I learned to call it. Trix took more than me, would top up more often. Her eyes shone with it.

  With snow cooling our limbs and minds we could dance for hours, generating our own heat in response to the heat of the music. Heads bent for lips to kiss lips, arms were flung, bodies moved and touched and separated, came together, moved apart. The space was dark, the only lights shone on the players on the stage, and smoke hazed what little light there was. We didn’t need light. We made our own light. The music soared above us; bass notes rumbled in our groins, tumbled from drums, from the double bass held wild like a woman between the legs and in the arms of the musician on the stage, sawing across her, growling bass. Saxophone pierced and lowed, animal and metallic all mixed together in an unnatural fusion, creating sounds unheard before, unheard again, riffed, jammed from the air. Sometimes the players on the stage would all seem to be playing a different music; there would be as many different songs coming from the stage as there were players on it. Then they would all fall into step and soar on a wave of sound, push it up to the ceiling and it’d rush down on us on the dance floor, hit us with a rush and a flow that was unbearable and glorious and gorgeous. A phrase I recognised – of Rachmaninoff, of Shostakovich, of Stravinsky – would flow into a new form, would bend and break under the weight of instrumentation and rhythm, take a new form that rose up from deep within the old, but liberated from it.

  Faces and names, bodies and faces, limbs and necks and lips and hands. We were all doll and darl and honey and baby and skirt, daddy-o and baby again. There were more dark faces there than I would ever see in the streets of Sydney, crammed in, jammed in, dark face against white face, any colour melting into any other, skin on skin in the dark and the buzz of the place. Trix would tell me names – such-and-such an actress, so-and-so an artist – but they all swirled around me, nameless, beautiful, bright with sweat and snow, baby and honey and doll.

  And sometimes, just sometimes, at the end of the night, we would go to the Chinese dens and, reclining, smoke sweet opium, concentrating the night, defusing the snow, smoke diffusing through our minds and flowing outside and up through the hot air, to the docks, to the hissing water in the harbour, out between the two halves of the bridge, across and over Mrs Macquaries Chair
and out through the Heads to the ocean, deep, blue, unfathomable.

  I moved into Trix’s house in the late winter of 1930, August, when everything was green and luscious, the garden pushing dark and wet against the sides of the big Mosman house. I felt comfortable with the loose community of bohemians – writers, artists, intellectuals, no-hopers, musicians – who lived in the houses that crowded down to the water there, set into the bush. I had been spending more and more of my time at Trix’s house, so it made sense for me to move my few things into the large room that became vacant when the painter who I knew only as Nora moved out, moved up to the Blue Mountains to join some community or other of painters and drinkers and opium-smokers.

  Trix came with me to Mrs Baxter’s to help me carry my few belongings. She arrived with a heavy old barrow with a wooden wheel; we loaded it with my clothes and books, the few things that hadn’t yet made it to Trix’s. Mrs Baxter waved us off from the verandah as we piled my neglected cello on top of the lot, then we wheeled it all the way to the ferry dock, onto the ferry, and off again at Mosman. It took the two of us and all our strength to wheel it up the steep street to the house in Royalist Road, where we collapsed in a heap on the verandah.

  The spans of the bridge had been closing on each other, leaning closer and closer, filling the gap between them. Two days after I moved into the Mosman house, Trix and I prepared a picnic of bread and ham and wine and apples and cigarettes. Trix brought her new camera with her, the gleaming black and silver Rolleiflex she was still learning to use, her new modern tool to help capture subjects for her paintings. All of these we carried in a basket, down to the end of Milson Road and up the track to the end of the point, where Trix sometimes came to paint, and there we watched the gap close. We celebrated it, this joining of the city, the coming together, and yet Trix mourned it too. Since her return from Europe, since her arrival in Sydney, she’d been painting the growing bridge in parts, separate; in fragmented shapes formed of light and colour and sun and music.

  ‘I’ll miss it, you know.’ Trix bit her lip in a habitual way I had come to know so well, peering down into the camera, adjusting it, framing the bridge. ‘Somehow there’s less of a thrill in breaking it into parts on the canvas when it’s made whole in real life. Oh God, I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong, maybe it’ll be better like this. But I’ve loved the idea of it being under construction, I suppose that’s it, of it reaching across at itself.’

  ‘Well, you can hardly ask them to keep it in pieces for you.’

  ‘Ha! Don’t you think I should? Mrs Carmichael the arteest requests the abandoning of the bridge project. Can’t you see it, darl? I can.’ She turned the camera on me, and I waved her away. ‘Oh, let me!’ I raised my teacup of wine towards her. ‘Ah! Perfect!’ She rested the camera in her lap, then picked up her teacup and clinked it at mine. She raised her other hand to my cheek, her finger lightly stroking.

  ‘Oh well. To touching, then.’

  ‘To touching.’

  Trix and I maintained separate rooms in the house in Mosman, not for the sake of propriety – there was little enough of that at the house – but for the sake of sanity. We each needed our space to retreat to, to make or practise our art. And Trix remained a lark, while my owl tendencies firmed and extended. Trix would march into my room at noon to wake me, trailing her silk robe, vermilion and azure and scarlet, trailing lapsang souchong steam and Gitanes smoke. She would have been up for hours – she rose with the sun, whatever time of the year, whatever we’d been up to the night before – would have breakfasted, painted, cleaned, read the newspaper, had an argument, gone for a walk, written a letter. Trix was always active, always moving.

  I settled quickly into my new room as the late winter lightened to spring and light filtered, warming, into the house. I set up the theremin and speaker the Professor had gifted to me, placed them in the centre of my room. I’d flick a switch and stand there, and play with the electricity in the air, fragment it, change it, affect it with my body’s capacitance. My room smelled of ozone and wire, metal and hot ceramic. Trix, in her room, layered pigment and somehow captured air and light within the layers; colour shone from them. She painted the light on the water in Shell Cove, blue-green bush touching the edges of red-roofed houses, eggs glowing on a clementine-orange dish, the bridge cracked in two above the water of the harbour. Sometimes she even painted me – made light break and curve around me. Her studio smelled of cigarettes and turpentine, oranges and lapsang souchong tea; these were the smells of Trix.

  FAME

  Despite our differing internal clocks, Trix and I managed to spend nights together in gatherings in our big house, or in the houses of others we knew in Mosman, or down at the hotel by the ferry dock, afterwards to tumble and stumble and fumble our way up the hill to home. Or we’d go across on the ferry, go to the Cross, or to Balmain, to hear music, to dance, to talk, to argue, to come down after it all with a smoke in Chinatown.

  In the meantime, music had – almost unnoticed – become my career, and I had attained a degree of fame through it. Through all the ructions and rumblings of the financial world tumbling to its feet, the Brittens seemed to retain their standing, even most of their fortune, and they continued as patrons to me, to the Professor, and to Trix, among the coterie of artists they still supported. After my first, not very public, performance on the aetherphone at the Brittens’ house on my eighteenth birthday, I started to receive more and more invitations to play. I played small theatres and halls, at first, and initially accompanied only by Madame on the piano, with the Professor always in the audience, or in the wings, watching over us, watching and listening for ways to fine-tune his instrument. Soon my audience grew, and I was in demand, playing more and bigger shows. I was written about in magazines and newspapers and talked of on the radio. I was a product of the modern age, and the hunger of people for such a thing was great, even as money markets crashed and jobs became scarce. And so, through the early years of that new decade, I became, to my surprise, famous. I stuck paper bill notices for my performances into a bound book, cut reviews from newspapers, charting my rise in the public imagination: ‘Creating Music from Aether with a Wave of the Hands’; ‘Hands Create Radio Music’; ‘Music like None Ever Played’; ‘A Thoroughly Modern Woman’.

  Trix made striking designs, cut into linoleum, from which to print the notices advertising my shows. They were variations on a theme: thin arms in black approaching a loop of metal, red rays emanating from them all. They were like nothing ever used before for the advertisement of music, and they caused as much comment as the music itself. There came to be built around me a notion – a mythology – of my fame and my music, a tying together of the music, the look of Trix’s posters, the exotic otherness of the Professor, the magic modernity of the aetherphone. Somehow, I was expected to embody all of these things. I could feel the electric expectation of the audience each time I walked on to the stage. And I found that I could fulfil their expectation, and more than that, extend it. Reviews were enthusiastic. Invitations to play increased, and so did my repertoire and skills, and my fame.

  As interest in the music I produced grew, so others started to learn to play the aetherphone. The Professor sold the license for production of the machine to a local radio firm, and they produced aetherphones for sale – by 1931 they were in the window of the biggest music shop in Sydney, with a photograph of me above them, my smiling endorsement an incentive to buy.

  It was largely through Delphine Britten that I came to play my most famous shows. Delphine was a patron of the Symphony Orchestra, her father on the board of the State Theatre. My fame was such that by the summer of 1932, I suspect that the orchestra would have sought me out anyway, without the link that Delphine afforded. We played an unheard-of week of shows at the State Theatre. The tickets sold out quickly for all of the performances. The poster that Trix designed was as striking as always, yellow wave shapes forming a background under purple lettering, centred over the black arm, the loop, the
red radiating lines, images that had become deeply associated with my music, and with me. I imagined the sound of my electric music filling the huge spaces of the new theatre as never before, soaring up to its famous chandelier, vibrating it, fracturing the sound as the crystals of the chandelier captured and fractured the light.

  I worked with the orchestra on a programme that would fill the theatre and foreground the aetherphone, let it soar on the sound from the mass of instruments. The programme included what had become my signature pieces, and some that were new to me, that needed an orchestra to fill their spaces. We would play from Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring; Rachmaninoff, Shostakovich, Dvořák would complete the bill. In rehearsals, I found that I required all of my concentration to work with the orchestra and the conductor; not to follow my own lead, but to play with others. We both, the conductor and I, made music by flinging our arms about in the air, flailing like mad things.

  On the first night of performance, we achieved what I thought to be perfection. We exceeded it on the second night, and on each night that followed. And on the final night, a moving picture camera captured fragments of the performance that showed it for what it was: glorious, rapturously received. On this, as on each night of our performance, the audience on their feet called encore and, after the orchestra had taken their bows, the conductor and I ours, after flowers had been presented, after we had all walked off stage and Trix had held me tightly in the wings, as the applause continued and the stamping grew, I walked back onto the stage – just me – into a single light trained on the aetherphone. The stamping, the applause, rose to a crescendo as I stood, facing the glow of the audience. I raised my arms, and the audience became silent. I nodded, lowered my arms to my side.