The Life and Loves of Lena Gaunt

by Tracy Farr

  The lacquered wooden cabinet opposite me is quiet, cold. I could flick a switch on the wall and it would warm, come to life, electrical, humming. It is not quite as old as me, this box of wires and capacitors, ceramic and metal. I recall when I first saw it, recall the wonder I felt. It will be here long after I’ve gone. I extend my arm, meaning to touch its surface, but it’s just beyond my reach. My hands return to my lap, rest on my knees, fingers tapping in pattern to match my heart.

  Next to the typewriter on the desk in my bedroom is the small box from the back of my wardrobe, dun cardboard, the size of a manuscript. I lift the lid, smell the dust smell. Blue ribbon forms a cross that binds the papers within. The pages are tightly typed, near-black with words packed line upon line, margins out close to the edge. Each page is crinkled with the imprint of the typewriter keys.

  I untie the ribbon, lift the papers, and upend them onto the desk. The undersides of the pages are grey with the shadows of words bleeding through from the face. From the shelf behind the typewriter I take another sheaf of papers – new, thicker, fresh – and place them on top of the older pages. I retie the blue ribbon around and across the bundle, wrap it loosely with thick brown paper kept from long ago. On it I write her name – MAUREEN PATTERSON – in large capital letters.

  She will make a better story of it than I could, than I have. She will make the connections, pull it all together, make it sing. Make sense of it. It’s her job. It’s what she does. I just make music. Pull music out of thin air. I am electrical by nature, musical by nature. The old lady in the chair, who once was striking, and is still there.

  Across the room, the two paintings – one of Trix, so sad, so final; the other of me, silver-blue, electric – hang on the wall above the low, heavy jarrah mantelpiece. At full stretch, I can reach to lift them from their hooks. I place them on the bed: first Trix, face up; then me, face down, facing her, our frames matching, touching.

  There is no more paper rolled onto the typewriter platen. The empty manuscript box is next to it, its lid askew. My scrap box is on the dresser, its contents spilled across the surface, onto the floor, in disarray. From the desk I pick up the bundled papers, take them to the kitchen, and place them on the table, neatly, in the centre. There is paper in a drawer. I sit at the table and write, concentrating to form the letters clearly, unambiguously.

  Dear Maureen,

  Keep this.

  It’s yours now.

  Yours,

  Lena Gaunt.

  I mean use it if you want to. Tell the story. I hope she understands that.

  In my bedroom, I wrap brown paper around the paintings on the bed, wrapping them thickly, using all of the paper. The last layer of paper curls away, loosens, unwraps itself. I take a scarf, charcoal silk, from my wardrobe and tie it around the parcel, criss-cross it snug and secure. With a thick marker pen I write her name, large, and underline it. I carry the parcel to the kitchen, place it on the table next to the bundled papers. To the note on the table I add: These two paintings, also, are now yours.

  I pick up a tea towel from the back of the kitchen chair, fold it in half lengthwise, hang it on the hook by the sink, where it will dry. I take a glass from the draining board and fill it with water from the tap. I drink slowly from the glass, tasting the water, feeling it wet my lips, my mouth, my throat. I look out the window. The sun is low in the sky. The sky is grey, pale grey, watery grey. The light in the sky is liquid, limpid, cold.

  I prepare my sweet smoke – just enough, and then some more. There is comfort – in the end, as always – in repetition, in ritual. My hands make movements that my conscious mind does not have to control, automatic, nerves firing electrical impulses, skin and bone and flesh responding. My gear is on the table by my side. I do not have to be careful any more. I am patient. Aetherised. I am acutely conscious of the sounds I am making. Even the smoke has sound.

  I cannot move my body from this chair. But the smoke can take me anywhere. Blue smoke, ti-tree, the scent of oranges, turpentine and tea; sweet boronia, rosin, rosewood, on a wave of salt ocean air.

  I hold the smoke in my lungs, in my body, sweet and bitter connected. My feet are flat on the floor, rest bare on the silk-warm pile of the rug. My hands rest on my knees. My fingertips tap a rhythm, pattern the blood and drug flowing through my body. Why do they call this wasted? This beauty. This stillness. This escape.

  It’s a long, slow dawn at this time of the year. The air is cold, as I walk down the road to the beach, cold but thick, like walking through cold honey. The streets are quiet. It is still early. I am facing west, facing the vast ocean, my back to the land. The sun will rise behind me.

  The beach is empty. This beach is never empty; but today, now, the beach is empty. I am alone; just me. I stand by the limestone wall above the beach and look down on the sand, the water, look out to the horizon curved against the still-dark sky. I can hear the water move the seabed, if I listen hard enough – liquid on solid – and I breathe air, my breath shallow, shallow like the edge of the ocean, its margin, where I swim.

  I walk down the stairs, kick off my sandals, feel concrete cold and hard before I step onto sand. My trousers drag, collecting grains at their hem, collecting damp from the night. I watch the moisture wick up the fabric of my trousers, a rising tide; I imagine molecules, their movement, their tiny orbits, their positive and negative, repelling and attracting. I cannot tell if the universe is in the molecules, or the molecules in the universe, or how they all connect. But I know that all is electrical by nature.

  I slip my trousers down. I pull my shirt over my head, drop it at my feet. The air is cold on my skin. My skin is warm against the sky. I run my hands over my head, feel every short, silken hair alive.

  My feet step into the foaming shallows. I stand at the edge of the ocean, the edge of the land. The water is cold, effervescent. I can taste salt – from the smell of it – raw in the back of my throat. I lick my lips, and taste salt there, too. I step through the shallows, my feet raising sand storms in the sea. I cannot see my feet. As I walk further, deeper, I feel the touch of seaweed against my legs, brushing lightly, delicate, frightening. I walk out until it is deep enough to swim. I lift my feet from the sand, pull my arms through the water from in front of me to the side. I hear the water bubble, hear it increase in pitch as I push it away from me, like a waterfall flowing uphill. I feel the phush of smaller, finer bubbles, their small bead on my arms, trapped in the pale hairs.

  I dip my head below the surface of the water, lift my feet again from the seabed, my arms outstretched and circling to keep me afloat. I sing, under the sea, my human voice waking in the salt water, singing words I could not say in the air, singing, each to each. The sea sings back to me, humming syllables that make no sense, maaaah maaaaah. I push my head up, surface into the air, into quiet.

  Nearly there.

  Under the surface of the water I drop my arms into position to play – right hand raised to shoulder height; left hand dropped as low as my waist. My hands fall into place – left hand palm down, flattened, to draw volume; right hand with fingers pinched lightly together to form an eye. I move my fingers in the water, effect tiny changes in the waves that effect bigger movements. I play, with minute movements of each hand, long ago learned. Muscle memory takes over from my conscious brain as my fingers and hands move under the water’s cover. I know the movements, from a lifetime of playing.

  As I pluck the final note, I let myself sink under the water. Expelling air from my mouth and nose, as the bubbles rise to the surface above my head I hear waveforms, harmonic intervals; I can hear the sound waves mixing in the air and water, undulating, soothing. I will myself to be as heavy as I feel; I feel myself within the water, feel myself displace it, feel my body move through the water and make it eddy and roil, feel bubbles rise in my wake and turbulence all around. Trix is there; Grace is there. Grace is there, above me, her dark hair around her head like a halo, like a dinner plate, like a sea anemone’s tentacles, like a s
tar. Grace holds her arms out towards me, then rolls in the water above me and faces away, her hair tentacling around her, blocking out the sun, the sky, the world, the air above. I wave my hand at Grace, wave at her to turn back, not to go away, but she does not respond. I stop waving. The water is warm. It makes a pressure against my ears, a pressure I can hear inside my head as a single note, humming, musical, low. It is B-flat, like the black strip near the bottom of the piano. But it isn’t played on the piano, it’s a different sound, not a hammer on a wire, nor a bow across a string, nor an electrical field interrupted; it is a humming, inside my head, but low; lower than any note I have heard before. It is the lowest note in the universe; a grace note, a ghost note, the low hum of everything, connecting.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Half of the first draft of this novel was written while I was 2008 Emerging Writer-in-Residence at Katharine Susannah Pritchard Writers’ Centre. Grateful thanks to the Katharine Susannah Pritchard Foundation and ArtsWA for funding the residency, and to all at KSPWC – particularly Mardi May – for support and encouragement.

  I owe much to this novel’s first readers, Barbara Polly, Robin Fleming, and Michelle Edgerley, for their honesty, their helpful comments, and their enthusiasm for the book’s early draft.

  To Jane Fraser, Wendy Jenkins and Georgia Richter, at Fremantle Press, I owe huge thanks, particularly for taking a punt on me in the first place. Thanks are due to my editor Nicola O’Shea, for her enormously helpful and thoughtful input. The clear-eyed wisdom and patient professionalism of these women were vital in helping me craft the novel into its final form. I cannot thank them enough.

  I’d like to thank Jane Aitken, Emily Boyce and especially Scott Pack at Aardvark Bureau, for leading Lena into the bigger, wider world; and a great big kia ora to everyone who’s championed this book, with particular thanks to Lisa Northcote.

  This book was inspired and informed in part by the documentary film Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey (written and directed by Steven M. Martin, 1994). I also found inspiration in the films of Gaylene Preston (particularly Lovely Rita – A Painter’s Life [2007]) and rich reference material in the articles and interviews available on Preston’s website (gaylenepreston.co.nz).

  My great-grandfather, Charles Beilby, wrote a detailed account (as well as a sheaf of intriguing, incomplete notes) of travelling north from Perth to Singapore, and of his subsequent life in Malaya from 1907 to 1928. The transcription by my father, David Farr, of Charles’s writing was an invaluable source. Thanks, Dad, for this and other family history material.

  From anecdotes and family stories told by my grandmothers, Joan Farr and Betty McKenzie, and my mother, Dee Squires, I have drawn inspiration, detail, and a very long bow. Their stories provided points of connection and reference for Lena’s fictional life – points for me to improvise from – and I am deeply grateful for them.

  This book and I would also like to thank: all at Michael King Writers’ Centre where I was visiting writer in 2009, particularly Ian Wedde (who then held the University of Auckland Residency) for helpful discussion and encouragement; Joe Hubmann and Michele Morris for providing somewhere to write when I needed it; Jan Rogers for additional family stories; Spencer Stevens for considered comment and lively discussion; and friends, colleagues and family – most especially Spencer – for tolerating and understanding my frequent absences and distraction.

  While I have the chance, thanks for their support and encouragement, particularly early in my writing career, is due to Fiona Kidman, Elizabeth Smither and Bill Manhire: all gracious teachers, generous mentors, beautiful writers.

  My biggest, most grateful thanks, for this book and much more, go to Craig Stevens, my first first reader, who introduced me to the odd world of electronic music. I doubt Lena Gaunt would ever have moved on from cello to theremin without the influence of his strange interests and curious mind.

  READING GROUP QUESTIONS

  • I was a solitary child, lacking companions my own age, but I was not lonely. I was happy in my own company, dancing to my own drum.

  What kind of a character is Lena Gaunt? Do her childhood experiences shape the woman she is to become, or is there something innate in her character that helps to shape her life story?

  • What is the impact of different relationships on Lena’s life, beginning with her relationship with Little Clive and ending with her relationship with Mo?

  • How would you characterise Lena’s relationship to the concept of ‘home’?

  • It might be said that Lena’s oldest and longest relationships are with Uncle Valentine, and with music. What difference do these make to her life?

  • What is Lena Gaunt’s relationship to grief? And what is her relationship to music?

  • In those magazines of my uncle’s, and in the slim literary volumes on his shelves, I found pages alive with the buzz of the next new thing. Like me, they were of this century, not the last; they looked forward, not to the past. If these are possible, I thought – this machine, or this poem – if these are possible, then anything, anything might be possible.

  In what ways are aspects of the unfolding twentieth century revealed through the character of Lena Gaunt? In what ways are they metaphors for her life?

  • Does it matter that we do not ever really find out what happened to Grace?

  • What is Lena’s reason for beginning – and then finishing – the writing of this story? Why does she choose to withhold and then deliver her long-kept secret to Mo?

  • Why does the novel end in the way that it does? Does this book have a ‘happy ending’?

  About the Author

  Tracy Farr is an Australian-born, New Zealand-based writer and former research scientist. The Life and Loves of Lena Gaunt is her first novel.

  Visit the author at www.tracyfarrauthor.com

  Copyright

  An Aardvark Bureau book

  An imprint of Gallic Books

  First published in Australia by Fremantle Press in 2013

  Copyright © Tracy Farr, 2013

  First published in Great Britain in 2016

  by Aardvark Bureau, 59 Ebury Street,

  London, SW1W 0NZ

  This ebook edition first published in 2016

  All rights reserved

  The right of Tracy Farr to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  ISBN 9781910709108 epub