The Life and Loves of Lena Gaunt

by Tracy Farr

  She was buried, of course, in the cemetery by the sea. We stood there in the wind, the salt on our lips, all of us – you could have seen us from the window of the kitchen of the house in Tomahawk Road if you’d leaned far enough out. We walked back from the graveside to the house, arms linked, eyes gleaming, ready to make noise again. We drank beer, then the wine in flagons that Armin had brought. There was bread and cheese, sausage rich with garlic, a plate of curried eggs; there were oranges, and grapes, and apples. A bowl of walnuts was in the centre of the table. Someone had made a fruit cake. Tom played the piano, and we sang. Someone brought more beer, perhaps sherry. I was sick in the flax bush by the verandah, in a great, hot, wine-dark wave.

  A cool cloth bathed my forehead; a glass of water pressed against my lips. The bathroom was dark; no, the bedroom was dark. The sheets were white, smooth, cool against me. Trix, her hand raised in benediction, was by my side.

  I slid my arms around the smooth, broad back above me, over me, felt prickling lips on my lips, my forehead, my breasts. I felt hard pain, where I had not felt pain before. It felt like the pain of loss. I cried out, sang out, loud, still alive.

  BONFIRE

  With Trix’s death came a strange, in-between time, the house busy with solicitous visitors, but hushed, reverent. I missed the noise, from the time before sickness. But at least there were people. Mardi and Celia came often, would bring me food, stay for tea, then leave me, kissing me gently on each cheek, rubbing my back, smiling sadly. Armin and Tom came one day with boxes of Trix’s papers and paints, cleared from her desk, her studio at the school. They brought two bottles of beer, and we drank them sitting at the kitchen table, as we always had. As they left, Tom hugged me, the empty bottles in his hands clinking together behind me. While Tom took the bottles to the car, Armin took my hand, the two of us framed in the doorway. He pressed my hand between his hands; I felt his beard brush first one cheek, then the other, felt his stubble then his lips on my forehead. He patted my hand, then dropped it, and walked to the car. I walked to the edge of the verandah, and waved to them both as they drove away.

  I had nothing to do, no job to attend to, just myself to feed. I shopped for groceries, just enough for one, ever-thankful for the money in the bank that funded it. I walked on the beach each day. I tended the garden. I slept in Trix’s studio, her paintings around me. I stopped expecting to hear her voice, smell her cigarettes, every time I walked through the front door. I realised that a week had passed, then a month, then two.

  I lay on the bed in her studio, my hands on my belly, thinking of her hands, thinking of other hands. I had not bled since Trix was alive.

  My uncle had sent me a telegram the week Trix died: Darling Lena so so sorry for loss. Love always Val. A letter had arrived a week or so later. My darling girl, he wrote, you must know you always have a home here if you want it, in this house that is too big for me alone. I had not known what to reply, had not been able to decide what to do, where to go.

  I walked to the cemetery, stood by the mounded earth where Trix lay, no longer Trix. I crossed my arms, tucked my hands in hard. I bowed my head against the cold wind, closed my eyes against its stinging. This cold, conventional city was no place for the artist’s unmarried, orphaned niece to have a baby.

  That afternoon I walked to the post office and sent a telegram. Dear Uncle. Yes please. Coming home. Will send details. Love Lena.

  In the weeks before I left Dunedin, although my belly had not yet started to swell, I could feel the subtle changes in my body, and knew that Trix would have felt them too. I noticed changes in my mind too; an inner anaesthetic calmed me, soothed my days and nights, as a drug might. I hummed to the shape forming inside me, hummed too to Trix, sent vibrations into the air, the aether, to connect us. I spent less time in the house, with its furniture and quiet, and more on the beach, walking into the keening wind. On the beach I felt alive, felt Trix close, felt the three of us together.

  One warm day, I watched from the kitchen window as sudden spring rain pelted in from across the ocean. I ran from the house, ran down to the beach, my dress soaking and dragging at my legs, the smell of me rising from the wet wool of my cardigan. There was no one but me on the beach. I stripped off my cardigan, my dress, threw my arms wide, my face to the sky, let the rain soak me, let myself cry to the sea and sky. This was how Trix stayed with me; I did not need corporeal reminders. And so, as I prepared to leave Dunedin, I determined to rid myself of our possessions.

  Furniture Trix and I had accumulated, softened with the shapes of our bodies; tools we had used to dig and tend our cold, salted garden; these I left in the Tomahawk Road house for whoever would live there next. All of Trix’s clothes, her notebooks, her paintings – I could not bear to keep these; I could not. I burned the clothes in a great bonfire in the back yard at Tomahawk Road, on the night before I handed over the keys to the land agent. Her notebooks, her paintings, I handed over to the care of Armin and Mardi and Tom. I took with me few things: one trunk of clothes, another of linen and sheet music, my fat scrapbook tucked inside; and other than these, my theremin, packed in its crate, with just two small paintings – one of me, one of Trix – nestled beside it, turned inwards, facing one another.

  All of the stories of my life have begun and ended with the ocean. And so I left Dunedin, boarding yet another ship. While I considered myself an old hand at travel by sea, the voyage was my daughter’s first. It was to be her only voyage by ship. She was doubly buoyed on that journey, by waters exterior and interior – my daughter travelled from Dunedin to Fremantle within me, in utero, not yet her and yet her, already kicking and rolling with the waters’ movement.

  COTTESLOE

  1991

  Weather turning

  KIA ORA

  The weather is turning; you can feel it in the mornings most, see the difference in the light, smell the cooler weather. It’s still beautiful to swim; there’s not yet the bite of winter, the cold touching your skin, getting under it. Even so, this morning the other bathers at the beach are fewer in number. As I hold the towel around me after my swim, absorbing the salty wet, I watch an old woman hobble to the water’s edge, leaning on a stick. She pushes the stick down into the wet sand just up from the water, and gently sashays into the ocean. She bobs, her head in a rubber bathing cap studded with floppy rubber flowers; bobs on the waves, not swimming, just being there. She bobs back and forth on the water, bisected in my sightline by the upright of her walking stick in the sand. I turn away from her, stuff my towel into my bag, pull my cotton shirt over me, slip my feet into sandals and head up the sand, off the beach, to home.

  Mo is coming again tomorrow. Not with Jonno and Caro. She just wants to kaw-reh-raw, she says. I beg your pardon, I say. Talk, she says, kōrero. She is using strange words, today, words I haven’t heard her use before, as if she has just had a language lesson and wants to show off. They are like ripe fruit, round and heavy off her tongue. Kia ora. K rero. Kai. They are not familiar to me, these words; I have to ask her their meaning. She touches the bone pendant at her throat when she tells me. Hello or thank you or agreement. Talk. Food.

  Kia ora, I tell her.

  She brings only her audio recorder, as she did for our early sessions together. She sets it up on the kitchen table, fussing with the business of it, placing the machine and the microphone, adjusting their positions, carefully uncoiling leads, making connections. I busy myself with the coffeepot, my back turned to her as I face the stove. We both work in silence, saving our words for the machine.

  I hear her exhale – a deep whoosh of breath – and mutter fuck under her breath.

  ‘I’ve forgotten the power lead. Shit. I’m sorry. Look – I don’t like to rely on battery to run it. Shit. Do you mind – shall we just forget it for today? I can’t believe this.’ She is flustered, not herself.

  ‘No matter. I don’t mind.’

  ‘Thanks. I’m so sorry, I don’t like to mess you around. I guess I’ll pack up.’

/>   ‘And we shall have coffee, at least.’

  She starts unplugging and recoiling leads, packing the gear back into the plastic box she brought it in. I finish making the coffee, and turn to serve it. As I hand hers to her she – both hands busy – gestures with her eyes, her head, to the table, where I place both cups. She lifts the last lead, finishes coiling it, and bends over to put it in the gear bag on the floor by her feet. She straightens up, holding the lead, and staggers a little, then steadies herself by placing her hand on the table.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I reach out my hand towards her, but don’t quite touch her. ‘You look pale. Are you not well?’

  ‘Sort of. I’m pregnant.’

  ‘Oh.’ I understand now the cause of her pallor, the bathroom hijinks. Not a user after all. ‘Well, congratulations.’

  Still standing, she puffs out breath – pfou – and her shoulders relax. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘But you should sit. You look dreadful. I’m sorry – tired, I should say.’

  ‘I’m okay. It comes and goes. It’s getting better.’ She sits, the audio lead still coiled in her hands, resting in her lap. ‘I’m past that first trimester thing.’

  ‘Are you – I’m sorry, I don’t mean to pry, but I’m a little surprised. Was it planned?’

  ‘God, no! I mean, that sounds dreadful, or irresponsible. It was…’ There’s the puff of breath again, pfou, and she lifts both hands, palms upward, in a gesture of resignation, or acceptance. ‘It was completely unplanned. The product of a reckless New Year’s Eve fling, and – ah – contraceptive failure, if you must know.’ She looks at me over her glasses, with something approaching a sly smile. ‘Classic, really. An ecky at New Year’s and I’m anyone’s. I should know better, at my age.’

  ‘Anarchy? At New Year’s?’

  ‘An ecky. Sorry, I thought you’d…’ She shakes her head. ‘Never mind. Ecky. Ecstasy. Kind of a love drug. A party drug. I hardly ever – ah well, that’ll teach me, eh.’

  She bends down – is it to avoid eye contact? I can’t tell – and places the lead in her hands into the plastic box at her feet. She wraps both hands around the coffee cup and sips from it, holding the cup close to her mouth even when she has finished drinking. Her face is hard to read.

  ‘What will you do?’

  ‘Do you mean am I keeping it? Having it?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose that’s what I mean. Are you?’

  ‘Well, yes. I didn’t really think about not keeping it. Once I was pregnant, I realised I wanted it. You know, I’m forty. Now or never.’ She shrugs her shoulders.

  ‘But it’s hard, you know. You should think carefully, if it’s not too late to do something about it. A child; it slows a woman down. Anchors her. Perhaps artists shouldn’t have children.’ I lift my chin as I say it, as if to challenge her to disagree.

  ‘But – do you really think that’s true? Plenty of men who are filmmakers have children. I dunno. Francis Ford Coppola. It hasn’t stopped him. Why should it be any different for a woman?’

  ‘Well, put simply, because it is different. Any male artist who has a child also has a wife, or a woman playing that role. If you had a wife to look after it, then it wouldn’t be different. You know that, if you think past the rhetoric. It is simply different. The biology of it. The sense of connection. I have – seen it happen. It can suck the creativity from a woman, if she’s not careful. Suck her time and her energy, so that she has nothing left for art, for music.’ I sip my coffee before uttering my final curse, only half-believing it. ‘Your art will suffer if you do this.’

  ‘I’ve heard the arguments before. I just – I’ve always been able to do whatever I’ve decided to do. I don’t think having a child will fundamentally change that. There has to be a way to do it.’

  I sigh, shake my head. ‘Is there a father to have some say in the process?’

  ‘Of course. I just – we’re not – he’s not in a position to be part of a couple.’

  ‘Ah, so he’s married.’

  ‘No, no, not that. He’s – he’s not father material. It was just a thing, a fling, sex, not a relationship. He’s a nice guy. Young. Too young.’ She smiles, shrugs.

  ‘He knows?’

  ‘About this?’ She touches her belly. ‘Nah. I haven’t told him. I don’t think – I don’t think I’m going to tell him. He’ll notice soon enough. But I’m going to do it. On my own.’

  I clap my hands, raise them together, clasped in a salute. ‘Excellent! That’s precisely the way. If you’re set on doing this mad thing, do it by yourself. Make your own decisions. Don’t rely on anyone staying in your life, being there to take things over. Pay someone to look after it for you. Pay a nanny, that’s my advice. Then when they leave, you can find someone else to pay. It’s the best way. People don’t stay.’ I look past her, out the window. Then I shrug, drain my coffee, stand up, pull myself up straight. ‘When will I see you next?’

  She gathers the last of her things, swipes them into her bag. ‘Can we go again tomorrow? Caro and Jonno are keen. Would that be all right?’

  ‘I have no other commitments. Tomorrow is fine. Let’s start earlier. Eight o’clock. I like the mornings. It may not suit you and the others, of course. I know the young tend to rise later. And perhaps mornings are difficult for you, with this…’

  I gesture with my hand towards her belly.

  ‘No no, it’s fine. This isn’t going to change the film. Tomorrow. Eight o’clock. Thanks for today. I’m sorry about the lead. And everything.’

  I see her to the door, wave her away as usual. Her confiding in me – my response to her – has not changed her view of me. I have responded to her news in the odd, embittered fashion of an old, childless woman. I have played my childless part.

  THE HEART OF THE MATTER

  And so she comes back, and she keeps asking me questions, endless bloody questions. Why did I agree to this? I cannot bear to think back on my life, now. Sometimes I make things up, when I don’t want to answer her. Spin stories. And yet, somehow, she manages to hit to the heart of the matter, seeing things through the cool glass eye of her camera.

  ‘What I’d really like to know is what’s kept you coming back here, of all places. I mean, just before the war; why here, after you left Dunedin? After the war you left again; then, all those years later, you came back. You settled here – left and settled – time and again. What is it about this place; what’s sent you away, but always brought you back?’

  The grey-green eyes of the filmmaker look at me from behind the solar flare of the lights; I can’t see them but I know they’re there. Oh Mo, what can I tell you about the losses that have shaped the paths of my life, the forces that have pulled me from here so many times, and yet drawn me back? Is now the time to tell? Am I old enough not to care?

  I sip my wine. A drop of condensation falls into my lap, spreads wetly; I feel it, cool against my leg.

  ‘There is an extent to which it is just easier to return to one’s homeland. If I can call on a musical analogy, maybe it’s like the motif of an orchestral piece – you come back to it; it flows through the music, anchors it, no matter how far the music wanders from it. It comes back to that motif. It centres around it. Its heart is there. I guess this place is somehow at my centre. It’s where I refer to – it’s my reference point. My life has been lived relative to this place. And so, while I’ve flung myself far away from it many times, I return to it as if I’m on elastic. God, I’m mixing my metaphors, aren’t I?’ I sip again. I’ve responded to her questions – done my duty – but really, I’ve told her nothing.

  The camera continues to roll, the light to shine, the condensation to form on the side of my wine glass and trickle down onto the coaster at the glass’s base. I breathe in, breathe out, consciously, calming. I hear the house shift and creak as it heats in the warmth of the sun.

  Perhaps I will get away with it, this time.

  I see her to the door, nearly-empty glass in my hand. Closing the door be
hind her, I walk through to my bedroom, draining the last of the wine as I walk. I place the empty glass on the dressing table. Condensation wicks around under the base of the glass. A ring will form, will mark the wood. Well. So it shall.

  I open the door to my wardrobe, and part the clothes that hang lowest, the long dresses, skirts, silky trousers, their wire and wooden hangers screeching on the rail as I push them aside. I kneel down – slowly, as I must, with age. At the bottom of the wardrobe, long left untouched, is my box of scrapbooks, of cuttings and clippings and keepings. I lean forward to lift it out. As I bring it close to my chest, I smell old books, papers, and dust. There is a faint, soft smell, too, like face powder, or flowers in another room. I stand – slowly, again – turn, and place the box on my bed. This is the story, in this box, the public story that Mo – or anyone – might find if she looks hard enough, through newspaper microfiche and musty library archives. Does it answer the questions she’s asked me, though?

  Behind where the box was, in the shadows at the back of the wardrobe, I see the dark curves of my old typewriter and, underneath it, another box, smaller than the one on the bed. I push the metal hooks of the hangers, and my clothes fall softly, densely back into place, curtaining the typewriter and the box. I close the wardrobe door on them, for the moment.

  COTTESLOE

  1937–1944

  Grace note

  A PLAIN GOLD RING

  Uncle Valentine met me as we disembarked in Fremantle. The voyage had put in at Melbourne and Adelaide en route from Dunedin, but we had not had the opportunity to go ashore at any of these ports. I was tired of the roll of the ocean, ready for land.