The Life and Loves of Lena Gaunt

by Tracy Farr

  Although we’d exchanged many letters and telegrams, I had not seen my uncle for a decade, since he’d delivered me to the port in Singapore. I watched him part the Fremantle crowd with his portly walk – he was, having kept his head above water during those financially depressed years, well-off and well-fed. He took me by the shoulders, locked his eyes with mine, then grasped me to him in a bearhug, patting his hands on my back until he released me from the embrace.

  ‘My girl, so good to see you. You are all grown up.’

  ‘As are you, Uncle.’ My arms had not reached around him when we’d embraced.

  ‘Wicked girl.’ He linked his arm through mine, and started walking me back through the thronging crowd on the wharf in the direction from which he’d appeared. ‘Come on, I have a car, let’s get you home and wrapped around a drink. I’ve directed the shipping office to deliver your trunks, we need do nothing else about them. You’re home now. Uncle Val will look after you, my love.’

  Uncle Valentine drove like a demon, both hands clutched tight around the steering wheel. We opened the windows of the heavy black car and the warm wind blew through our hair (or mine, anyway – Uncle’s had thinned to nothing, a shiny globe exposed when he removed his hat and placed it on the back seat of the car). We drove along the coast from Fremantle, north along the railway line. I stuck my head out of the open window, like a dog in a farm truck. The wind blew my hair across my face. I could smell the ocean, even as I only glimpsed it behind the sand dunes and buildings that now spread up the coast. I felt light for the first time in an age, for the first time since Trix had gone. I pressed a hand to my belly, my Grace, whispered, We’re home.

  Uncle Valentine – Call me Val, darling, no need for the uncle, he said as he handed me a glass of whisky no more than a moment after we walked through his front door – still lived in his big, comfortable house in the street that ran down straight as a die to the sea. We stood facing each other, glasses in hand, in his dark, curtained, familiar front room.

  ‘To your return, my dear.’

  ‘To being back.’

  We clinked our glasses together.

  ‘And to your dear Beatrix.’

  He put his big arms around me, then released me, and tossed the contents of his glass down his throat. I sipped mine – I had not had a taste for alcohol since Grace had been with me – and raised the glass towards him.

  ‘To Trix.’

  ‘Sit my dear, sit! You must be fagged. Sit and tell me something lovely about your journey. Or was it all tedious?’

  He waved his hand at the soft chairs and lounges arranged in the room. I sank into cushions, grateful that they didn’t sway and rock with the sea under them. Uncle Valentine pushed a velvet-covered ottoman towards me with his foot.

  ‘Feet up old thing. Another drink?’

  I shook my head, holding my glass of barely touched whisky up towards him. He poured himself another glass at the sideboard, then sank into the cushions opposite me, and we fell back into relaxed conversation, melted the years away. I’d always been comfortable with Uncle Valentine. Being with him did feel like being home. I felt justified in my compulsion to return to this place of my youth – not quite home, and yet more home than any other I could claim.

  He waved his whisky glass in the direction of the gramophone dominating the room.

  ‘Got all your recordings, my girl. Very proud, you know. Tell everyone I’m solely responsible for your musical education. And your various talents.’ He winked at me, swirled the whisky in his glass and downed it in a big swallow. ‘But you stopped playing, eh? Done with it?’

  ‘For the moment,’ I told him. I took a tiny sip of whisky, smiled at my uncle, looked around the room for a topic of conversation, anything to change focus. There was a small brass vessel on the mantelpiece, an odd little pot, almost like a teapot. I stood, walked to the mantel, lifted the pot. The lid was on a hinge. Within it was another, smaller container, a shallow bowl that fitted within the outer vessel neatly, snugly. A faint smell, smoky, sweet, arose from the open pot. When I closed the lid, there was a pleasing ting, a clear, bell-like note.

  ‘Ah, memories of days in Malacca, the eastern sojourn, misspent youth, eh?’ He wiggled his eyebrows, as he used to when I was a child. I laughed, shook my head. ‘It’s for smoking opium, darling. Lovely filigree work on the lid and the base. They’re collectors’ pieces now. Got it on my last trip up there. When your father…’ He paused, waved his hand in the air. ‘When I went to sort out his things, tidy up the loose ends. Sad business.’ He smacked his lips together, sighed, drained his already empty whisky glass.

  ‘But life, my dear Helena, is for the living. Here, more whisky!’ He poured from the decanter into his glass, and my own. I stood, and we faced one another, clinked our glasses. ‘To those gone, much loved, and to those of us who remain!’ His voice was loud in the room. My right hand clinked my whisky glass, raised the glass to my lips to drink. My left hand slid to rest on my belly, rubbing lightly, slowly, hardly at all.

  Uncle Valentine installed me in a comfortable bedroom facing north onto the wide verandah that shaded the room from the sun, and insisted I make myself thoroughly at home. My trunks arrived and were carried up to my room late in the afternoon of the day I arrived. I went upstairs to unpack, shaking each garment as I took it from the sea trunk before folding it into drawers dry and scented with sprigs of lavender tied with kitchen string.

  The next day I woke early, in the relative cool of morning, Grace churning within my just-bulging belly. I left quietly through the back door, leaving the house before it had started its day. The back door led to a path through the garden, past the old outhouses at the back and down, through a low gate in the back fence, to the laneway that ran parallel with the street, down to the ocean. The unpaved laneway had dirty sand in wheel ruts on either side of a central mound, topped at that time of the year by browned grass, the odd green weed. Weeds fringed the laneway on either side, frilled up against the back fences of the houses. Bougainvillea hung over back fences, thunderboxes backed onto them and through them. Back gates were sized to high-step through, cut so that they began a foot above ground level and reached only chest high at most.

  On that first day, and on most days that followed, I would wake early and walk the laneways and streets that ran to the ocean. In the cool dark, the nightcart men clattered; later in the day children played; but I had the laneways to myself in that in-between time, my pathway to the beach, to swim each morning as Grace swam inside me. Then I’d return to the front of the house as the streets were commencing their days, people starting to appear from front doors, milkos to deliver, motor cars and bicycles to veer from their parking places. The streets were for the daytime. The laneways were mine, in that liminal time.

  *

  Grace grew and took me over, as the months passed. Uncle Valentine and I failed to talk about this, even as it became obvious, even as my belly grew to match and then exceed the size of his. Finally he acknowledged my by then obvious state by leaving a slip of paper folded on my breakfast plate one morning, his neat writing spelling the name and address of his physician; Pop along and see Davidson, he told me, he’ll look after you, and look after the little one when it comes.

  He gave me one other gift, that day. He took both my hands in his plump hands, and pressed them together around something cold, hard. I parted my hands; they cupped a plain gold ring, barely remembered.

  ‘Your mother’s, my love. And our mother’s, before that. I was saving this for when you married, but I think that you have need of it now. Wear it proudly. Stare them in the eye, my darling girl.’ He kissed me on the forehead, and sat down to read his newspaper. I slipped the ring onto my finger, perfectly in place.

  THE NORTH TOWER

  A woman with blue eyes in a plain face, and dark black hair roped into a thick plait, took money at the public bathing pavilion that stood guard over the beach. Two turnstiles funnelled people through on a strict separation, men to
the right, women to the left, to wade through a shallow foot pool reeking of bleach – for hygiene – and on through to the changing rooms. The blue-eyed woman sat between the turnstiles, eternally smoking cigarettes while overseeing pennies dropped onto a tray for inspection before she fingered them down a smooth wooden ramp and into a metal box. When I reached the beach each morning it was too early for the turnstiles to operate, but by the time I had swum and was ready to climb back into my clothes, the door would be open, the wooden sign would be out, and I would nod to the woman as I dropped my penny into the tray. She’d nod back at me, blow smoke from her nose, and smile, smiling more – as the months passed – at my belly than my face.

  There came a day when, as I waddled up to the turnstile, the blue-eyed woman stepped off her high chair and, waving her cigarette at me, indicated that I should walk through at the side, where she unlooped the heavy rope that hung across from the edge of the turnstile to the far wall.

  ‘Through here, love, don’t want you jamming halfway.’

  I thanked her, handed her my penny, and she looped the rope across behind me.

  The next day, she smiled over her cigarette as I approached and, as she unlooped the rope, told me, ‘I’m Cath.’

  ‘Lena,’ I nodded at her, smiling back, dropping my penny into her palm.

  A week later, on an overcast morning, there was no one behind me at the turnstile as I went through under the unlooped rope. Cath waved me through, screwing her nose up at my penny, ‘Through you go, love.’ I saved my pennies from that day on.

  Cath was a brick-shaped woman who, though she looked much older, was close to me in age, thirty to my twenty-eight. We progressed quickly, after that week when the rope first unlooped, from learning first names to taking a cup of tea together in the sunshine while her husband, Eric, limped in from his maintenance work and spelled her at the turnstile midmorning. After my early swim, dried and dressed in the pavilion changing rooms, I’d come out past Cath, blinking into the sunshine.

  ‘Cuppa?’ she’d ask as I came through past the rope.

  ‘Lovely.’

  I’d install myself on the limestone retaining wall in the shade, bring out the novel or magazine I carried in my bag, knowing that by the time the sunlight moved enough to heat me, Cath would appear from the entrance to the pavilion carrying two thick china cups and saucers in her hands, with the cigarette clamped into the corner of her mouth somehow balancing her as she walked.

  We sat and smoked and talked and drank our tea in the shade. Cath soon knew that I was due to give birth in early May; that I’d been living in New Zealand; that I was comfortable but unsettled living at my uncle’s house; and that, while I didn’t want to talk about it, I was a recent widow. I found out that Cath and Eric had been married for ten years; that they’d come up to the city from the bush three years ago; that Eric’s leg had been mangled in an accident on the farm and Cath didn’t want to talk about it; and that she grew sadder and sadder with every month and year that passed without her falling pregnant. These things were enough for each of us to know. They were the basis on which our friendship grew. Cath and I would sit in the sunshine on the limestone wall, my hair drying into salt curls on my cheeks, me dobbing smokes from Cath, my belly growing bigger by the day.

  It caused disapproving looks on the beach, that big belly, more disapproving the bigger it became. It seemed it wasn’t proper to be seen in a swimsuit, stretched alarmingly, no matter how carefully, how demurely, I covered myself with a loose, long cotton shirt until the very moment I plunged out of sight, into the water. Complaints were made. But they were made to Cath.

  ‘Bugger ’em,’ she said to me. ‘Silly straightlaced buggers. What, do they think babies are found under a bush? Bloody bugger ’em.’

  I began to spend more and more of each day at the pavilion – Cath and Eric called it the Pav, so I did too. They lived frugally at the Pav, rent-free in exchange for working the turnstiles and some light maintenance, their small wage from the council supplemented by the proceeds of an insurance payment after Eric’s accident. When March came, summer – despite the searing heat – was deemed officially over and the Pav was open only at weekends and so, on weekdays, I would knock on the door and walk through to the kitchen, and Cath and I would sit and put our feet up on the low windowsill that looked over the ocean and we too would look over the ocean, smoking and drinking tea. Often, we found that we didn’t speak. Cath and I were comfortable just sitting. We did a lot of that, that autumn and winter. Just sitting.

  Cath started calling me Princess. She told me I spoke like one. I talked about Uncle’s house as if it was a castle, she said, or a palace or a museum or something posh where I couldn’t make myself at home. She’d ask me why I spent so much time at the Pav with her and her crip hubbie. I’d just smile, shake my head at her, oh, Cath, and we’d sit and smile and talk when we needed to.

  We were there in the kitchen one such afternoon. I’d brought horseshoe rolls fresh from the bakery, a pound of butter. The three of us, Cath, Eric and I, had demolished the rolls, Vegemite smeared on thick butter, lettuce wetly crunching, washed down with cups of tea. Eric had disappeared again after lunch. He never stayed with us unless he was eating.

  Cath asked me again what it was like living where I was – whether I was happy there, whether I’d stay.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know, Cath. My uncle’s lovely, but – well, it’s hard to say. It’s not that he’s said anything to me, but I think a baby in his house is the last thing he’s ever imagined.’

  ‘What, he doesn’t want you there?’

  ‘No, he’s happy for me to be there. He’s – bemused, I suppose. I think he just can’t imagine what he’ll do with a baby.’ I realised as I spoke that nor could I imagine what I would do with a baby. I rubbed my hands over my belly.

  Cath butted out her cigarette without lighting another from its glowing tip. She stood, rubbed her hands together as if she were trying to make fire, or warm them.

  ‘Well, Madame Princess, what about coming and having a look upstairs.’

  I remember being surprised – Cath had never talked about an upstairs. She led me down a hallway and through a door at the end. Four wide steps led straight up, then turned a right angle to the left, then turned back again on themselves – just a half-storey up from the level of Cath and Eric’s flat. At the top, the steps opened out into a square room soft with sunlight trying to get in through windows whitewashed to block it. Through the whitewash though, through the big, arched, paned windows stretching across two walls of the room I could see the Indian Ocean, so close, so blue, spreading forever. Furniture was piled against one wall of the room, and boxes; I poked at the corner of a bookcase, a chair with a broken leg, a narrow iron bedhead, a tea-chest. Dust rose, further softening the light. The smell was of dust, and dried salt.

  ‘Oh Cath, it’s beautiful.’ I felt surrounded by the ocean; not in the way it surrounds you on a ship, but with the height and groundedness that being on land provided.

  Cath stood in the doorway, unmoved by the ocean view she’d seen every day for the past three years and was afraid she’d be compelled to see for many years more.

  ‘What would you reckon’– Cath leaned forward to me, pivoting herself free of the doorframe –‘to paying us a bit of rent, just on the q.t., and moving yourself and your bub in here? Share the kitchen with us, of course. There’s the little bathroom at the bottom of the stairs you could use. We’re at the other end of the building, so Bub can scream his head off and we won’t mind. And I could give you a hand with things, with Bub. What d’you reckon about that, Princess?’

  I stood with my face pressed against a gap in the whitewash on the window, where I could look through and see all the way to Rottnest Island, a flat streak of ribbon floating hot above the water on the horizon. Heads bobbed on the surface of the water below. The white sand stretched forever up the coast, towards the north, past where the houses ran out, the city ended. I unlatched one of the
windows; it stuck at first, but opened with some persuasion. Now I could taste the salt in this room – the north tower of the Pav – hear the gulls, the waves.

  ‘I reckon that’d be perfect.’

  I walked across the room and put my arms out towards her. We hugged, tentatively at first, then tighter.

  ‘Move when you want, love,’ she said. ‘I’ll get Eric to sort a key out for you.’

  ALL THE PAIN IN THE WORLD

  Rather than, as I feared, having to be convinced of the sense of my move, Uncle Valentine – bless him – was so transparently relieved to see us go that he showered us with money and made us promise to come to tea every Sunday. I happily agreed.

  Eric handed me a key the following morning when I went for my swim. I turned the key over in my pocket, until it felt warm from my touch. We moved the next day. Uncle Valentine organised his man, and the gardener and his cousin, to tote my trunks, my theremin, and some furniture that Uncle Valentine insisted we choose for the room, to be comfortable, don’t want you camping. His housekeeper reluctantly handed over a rattan basket piled with linen, sheets and pillowcases, towels. A tea-chest filled rapidly, as Uncle Valentine cycloned through the house pointing at random.

  ‘She’ll need one of those, and one of those – fix it, will you, Mrs Anderson, you’re a dear.’

  Uncle Valentine’s small army trooped to the Pav carrying scraping tools, a ladder, and dropsheets. They took away the dusty pile of unloved, broken furniture, then draped the room with dropsheets, and spent the afternoon removing the whitewash from the windows while I sat and drank tea with Cath in the kitchen downstairs. Some hours later, we watched them carry my belongings, brought in procession from Uncle Valentine’s house, up the narrow stairs of the Pav, huffing and shifting and arranging themselves cleverly to fit. Mr Anderson saluted as they left, All done, Miss, ladder under his arm.