Second Half First

by Drusilla Modjeska

  As we walked, we talked. We talked about the problem of lovers, the problem of men. We’d both been admired, we’d both been loved. We’d walked away from lovers who’d loved us, we’d walked away from situations that had cramped us even as they promised security, fidelity, life going on – a marriage in my case, made too young for sure, not that it’s an excuse. We talked our private memories as we walked between the tides. Love and security; independence and freedom of mind. Was that the dilemma? And if it was, was it so bad to want both? A great deal was changing in the lives of girls and women, even our fathers had said so; it was why they made sure we had good educations. Now both were possible, did it have to be so hard, putting them together, marriage and a career, love and independence, was it still a choice – surely not, not in the last decades of the twentieth century? Were we the weird ones, wanting both? Or were we the ones who admitted what others clamped down? These were the questions we asked as we climbed the headland back to the house. We talked as we cooked on the campfire outside; we talked of sisters and we talked of parents – hers together, mine divorced; we talked of our mothers, whose educations were cut short by the Second World War, and who, afterwards, carried the burden of making us all happy – husbands, children – as the world they lived in recovered from news of the Holocaust, and from the bombs that had flattened large swathes of London, where Sophie had lived as a child and we had visited every school holiday. A country girl, not used to such sights, I’d looked from the tops of buses into deep holes half-concealed by hoardings, and at terraces that ended in a house with walls hanging open, more rubble. We grew up with photos on the mantelpiece of relatives killed in the war: young men with hopeful faces and barely a whisker of beard on their chins. My young husband, Nick, being American, had faced the Draft, but the boys we’d grown up with in England hadn’t been threatened by war, and nor had we; no nursing at the front for us; no deciphering codes in a dark room at night as an aunt of mine had done at the age of eighteen. Had we grown up soft as a result; soft and self-indulgent? Or were we forging a new way? And if so, what could it look like?

  And we talked in the car back to Sydney, Sophie and I, driving through the eucalypt forests, over bridges then still made of planks, where the estuaries came in before widening into lakes where the oyster farms were. We talked through the long, slow outskirts of Sydney with traffic lights we lost count of, suburbs of houses, acres of them spreading west and north, silencing us. Christina Stead, one of us would say, and sigh, a code of our own for the depressing vision of small pert houses with their garages and blank gardens. I’d given Sophie Stead’s For Love Alone, a novel I’d read on first coming to Sydney fifteen years earlier. It took me a long time to get the full irony of the title, but Sophie and I understood the character Teresa Hawkins at once. She became a figure in our talk, as real as anyone around the table, with her longings and her bad choice of Jonathan Crow – what a name for a figure chosen more for what he projected, and for what she wanted to see, than for what he was. And we shared Teresa’s horror of the suburbs, the houses stretching out along the railway lines, where her cousins and friends, rushing into marriage with their glory boxes and trousseaus, were setting up house with overgrown boys ‘gone into long trousers’. Were the bouquets of the wedding day worth it? Not to Teresa Hawkins, not to Christina Stead who’d created her. Not to me, not to Sophie. Driving back from the coast, it was always a relief when at last the city buildings came into view, and we could turn off towards Enmore and the house on the corner – two streets back from the railway, an irony lost on neither of us. Still, it was home, at least for the moment.

  A home for waifs and strays, we’d say; who knows where any of us will be in five years’ time – or even one – as the table filled and we cooked another meal for those who were broken-hearted, and quite a few who weren’t. Bit by bit friends of Ross and the Economist were let back in, though they watched their words, for our eyes could narrow quick as maybe. Sophie started with a therapist, an auntly woman with a reassuring face and an impressive array of Indian cushions. She cheered Sophie up so much that I went too. She used to call Sophie’s ex Charlie, which wasn’t the right name, and Charlie became the name for everyone’s exes, until I rarely spoke Ross’s name, displaced as it had been by Charlie, a much better figure to vilify seeing as he didn’t actually exist and one was under no obligation to consider another point of view – which even I was prepared (reluctantly) to admit Ross had. The veil didn’t vanish but there were days, even weeks, when it lifted, though if Sophie was away and I was left alone to contemplate that dark winter of 1986, I’d have dreams of being cold, as bereft as I ever had. I hadn’t begun the task of unpicking the knot that was bound tight around the grievous death of my mother, about which I was barely able to speak, even to Sophie; that lay undisturbed for a few years yet, before I gave up the therapeutic comforts of the Indian cushion room and began an altogether different, psychoanalytic venture in a room in a big house in a suburb I had never been to until I drove through it with Sophie. Several years before I knew the significance of that stone house we’d driven past, noticing its steep roof and its trees rising over the bungalows that crouched around it. We’d contemplated its existence when it would have had sheep and forest around it, the first house in the area, displacing those who’d lived for generations along the Lane Cove River – which was where we were heading.

  Sophie was teaching Urban Geography, a subject I barely knew existed. As we drove around Sydney on our way to beaches or markets, or just to explore, I began to understand something of the way we live in our built environment, which I hadn’t thought about until then. The houses we live in can form us in ways that have to do with more than food and shelter, though as my father, who’d fought in the Second World War, reminded us over and over, we should never forget to be grateful for that. In London Sophie had worked with housing associations in an era when there was a great deal of unused and mismanaged public housing. She lived in collective houses and worked with squatters’ groups, women’s refuges, organisations for the homeless, which took over unused houses, restoring them from vandalised states of disrepair. This very political action – it was only public housing that was occupied – was drawing attention to the public need, and wastage, at the same time as working to enable other, more communal ways of living than the default family house that had come to make up most of the housing stock in our towns and cities, and still does.

  Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, one of the few books that still has a place beside my desk all these years later, came to me from Sophie. Reading it, I began to think of houses as places of interaction and exchange, of engagement of minds and lives, and it was due to Sophie, and to Bachelard, that I realised the significance, the symbolism, of our house being on a corner. When I came to write about it, which I did, with her, in a book called Inner Cities, long out of print – which is a pity as it’s really quite good, better than I expected when I looked at it again – I called my contribution ‘Living on a Corner’. I meant it as a metaphor for living with a certain ambivalence, caught between the new ways of living that came to those of us who were moving into the inner city, and the old expectations that could confound us as longings, born, we supposed, of the family houses of our 1950s childhoods. Our ‘inner cities’ were of mind and emotion as much as of bricks and mortar, although the harsh reality – which I’m relieved to see I also wrote about – was that ‘our’ moving into the suburbs near the centre of the city was pushing out those who’d lived there in the unfashionable decades when even the now smartest of inner suburbs were frowned upon by those with the money and the distance to frown. When I moved into the house on the corner towards the end of 1979, there were no trees in the street that ran along the side; from the window of the bedroom that became mine when Sophie came, I could see the flats at the other end. By the time I left, there were trees the whole way along, as the new class moved in and the old working-class families moved out to the west. A few Greek f
amilies survived with their gardens of tomatoes and aubergine growing over the paths, but they’re long gone now.

  When I drive round that corner, which I do occasionally, I no longer stop to contemplate the renovations to the house that is no longer mine. I stop to remember Dulcie and Vince who lived in the single-storey terrace that abutted our garden at the back, facing the street that ran along the side of the house. They lived in their small house with their four boys while Sophie and I had my two-storey house to ourselves. The boys went to the primary school on the other side of the railway line, and in the afternoons they played cricket in the street. We could hear the ball and the glee of the little one when he sent his brothers hurtling down the street while he made his runs between our back gate and their rubbish bin. Until one afternoon, when a car sped round the corner and killed him. Everyone ran out into the street, an ambulance arrived. Dulcie was keening, and the young driver, clearly in his father’s car, too shiny-expensive for our neighbourhood, was asking for water, for coffee, which no one gave him, and sure enough when the police came and he was taken for testing, his blood alcohol was way over the limit. When the case came to court, the QC his father hired got his sentence suspended. He was fined barely more than Vince had been fined when he was caught driving over the limit after Christmas drinks at a pub near the factory where he worked. Vince had been stopped in a random breath test; he hadn’t been speeding, and he hadn’t killed anyone. Dulcie drew her own conclusion, that money ruled, and moved the family away. At the funeral, which everyone from both streets attended, and the kids from the school, and all Vince’s workmates, the priest spoke of God’s will. Dulcie, who wasn’t a believer, sobbed loud, angry sobs that expressed her contempt. If she were in charge, she said over and over, the death of a child would be worth more than this. It wouldn’t be allowed, she said, not if she had a say.

  I didn’t write about this in Inner Cities. I don’t know why, it seems a strange omission. Perhaps it was too raw, still too close. When I took the book down from its shelf, thinking if I’m writing a memoir I’d better check its date, I found it was published in 1989, the year before Poppy, when I’d have sworn – on a bible, in a court, if I’d had to – that it had come after: a postscript before I left the house. So sure was I that for a minute I thought Penguin must have made a mistake, ridiculous even as a thought, doubly so to check it on Google. Which raises another question about memoir: if memory is so unreliable even in this small matter – 1989 or 1991 – what else am I wrong about? Not about the death of that child, though I couldn’t tell you which year it happened; I remember it as an incident outside time. The easiest place for me to check would be my diaries, but the ones that survived the cull when I sold the house are in the National Library in Canberra. There’s an embargo on them for twenty years after my death, by which time I figure most of the people I wrote about will be dead, or demented or otherwise past caring what I said about our feuds and flirtations. The embargo doesn’t apply to me so I could, I suppose, go to the library and read them there. But then I’d be researching myself as if I were a subject of history and not myself, and that is a task in which I have no interest. Besides, being a diarist I don’t trust diaries; they depend too much on the moment, the mood, the weather, the person you’ve just talked to, or argued with, the flora in your gut. No, this is not an autobiography in the sense of an account of my life written as a biography of and by myself. Maybe it’s not even a memoir, simply a reflection on the arc of life thirty years after the death that propelled me into collision with the Charlie mirror.

  As I write this, at the beginning of January 2014, thirty years ago, in January 1984, my mother had just days to live. I’d arrived in England in time to see her before the drift out of consciousness began. She wasn’t interested in the news I had to give her, knowing, I suppose, as I did not, that the end was very near. When the hospice rang looking for me in London a few days later to say I should come as soon as possible, they got Lynne, with whom I was staying. When I got back to her house late that afternoon, she handed me the number. I rang and a kind doctor spoke to me. Would tomorrow do? I asked. If she were my mother, the doctor said, I’d come now. So I abandoned the evening with Lynne. I made some toast, drank a quick cup of tea, packed a small bag, and took the tube to Waterloo to catch the train to the town where my mother lived south-west of London. The stations we passed in the dark were bleak, passengers standing under dim lights with their arms wrapped around themselves, or slapping their sides against the cold. At Farnham it was drizzling and there were no taxis on the street outside the station. I walked the mile to the hospice with my head down and collar up. Poppy was in a softly lit room, lying on her back, propped up, peaceful. She looked as she’d looked when I was a child and had climbed into her bed in the mornings. Her eyes opened, dark, dilated, comprehending, I think, that it was me. I dropped to my knees with tears pouring onto her hand, which I felt tighten, very slightly, in mine. I’m sorry, I cried. I’m so sorry. So very, very sorry. A nurse brought a cup of strong, milky tea and coaxed me into a chair. Then my youngest sister, who’d been there most of the day, arrived back from a break for something to eat. We sat beside our mother, quiet together, and the hours ticked slowly past and the only words she spoke came in a sigh. Janey, Janey, the name of my middle sister, her second daughter, her favourite, I always thought, though how are any of us to know how the love of a mother measures itself. She’s on the train, we said. She’s on her way. She was coming down from Yorkshire and was in London already, crossing the city from King’s Cross to Waterloo for the train south. A friend of Poppy was to pick her up at the station; Jane was pregnant, with a baby due in March, my nephew Tom, the first boy into our family of girls: three girls to Poppy, two already to Jane, whom I called May in the book I wrote a few years later in the house on the corner. When Jane was expecting Amy, and then Martha, Poppy had knitted tiny bonnets in fine white wool, trimmed with lace, although we didn’t know the sex in advance then. This time, beside her bed at the hospice, not quite finished, was a helmet for the new baby, knitted in a blue and white nylon-wool mix. It can go straight in the washing machine, she’d told Jane. One of her friends finished it in time for the birth, and there he was, Tom, a huge baby bruised from the delivery, in his boy-blue helmet with earflaps.

  On the night Poppy died, Jane arrived at the hospice shortly before midnight. She’s here, we said. Janey’s here. Poppy opened her eyes and registered – or seemed to register – that it was her second-born kissing her forehead, whispering goodbye, tears falling. The room was very quiet, just that soft light, the curtains drawn across the windows, and beside the bed, chairs for her daughters. Later, after I’d written Poppy and Katherine Hattam, who’d become a friend, had read it, she gave me a collage, a painting of those chairs. It hangs near my desk, a reminder – of what? The transformations of art? Poppy dying and the chair I could not stay in, down on my knees beside her?

  In the winter of 1987, the year after the Ross disaster, I took a semester off from teaching to write Poppy – not that I knew when I started what, exactly, I was going to write. I didn’t have a title, though I did have her name – Poppy in place of the Pookie she came to dislike as the girlish name of her marriage, not the name of the woman who’d returned to an interrupted education and had become a working woman. Since her death, I’d had the impulse, the urge to write about her. Who was she, this woman I could see only as mother? What was her story? How had she lifted up out of the mire, the despair of an abandoning husband? What had happened to send me so far away, and to turn me so hard against England? For three years I’d had the idea of a book, but what with Ross and all, I hadn’t got far, or rather I hadn’t got anywhere at all, and by the middle of that year when I took leave, it had dawned on me that whatever it was that had drawn me into that destructive love affair was part of the same story that had had me on my knees, both literally and figuratively, as Poppy died. I was, you could say, still on my knees. My head was no longer bowed to the gr
ound; I was stretching again but I hadn’t raised myself to my full height. I didn’t know what my full height was.

  So there I was that winter, in the house alone each day, Sophie off at her university, my desk set up under the window at the front, a pen at the ready, a new notebook, a full bottle of ink. I sat down, the writer at work, and nothing happened. Not a word, not a sentence, not a page. I was a fraud. I retreated to the sofa while it was still winter, then to a chair in the garden once spring arrived, and read. That was when the way I read changed. I’d read to a purpose, or a programme, for so long I’d forgotten what it was to pick up a book and try it, as a child does, until either I was swept up into it, or had put it aside without qualm for another. It was a way of reading I’d once known, but had come to think of as self-indulgent – even frivolous – and by the time I was studying, and then teaching, I suppose it was. Alone in the house on the corner that winter I didn’t have a reading list or a programme. I learned to read by instinct, and if I wasn’t with a book after thirty pages I stopped, laid it aside, and often enough the time would come when I’d pick it up again and find it alive from the first page. I read a lot in those years, I read a lot now, sometimes in the weirdest patterns, and one way of thinking about who I became in the years after forty could be a history of my reading.

  What I needed to do, though I wouldn’t have put it this way at the time, was to read my way into, or through, that clouded inner place of dread and futility that could still wake me at dawn before the house came to life, before the garbage collectors rumbled round the corner and the men from the streets on two sides of us got into their cars for the first shift in the factories that were still manufacturing in Marrickville and Sydenham. That bleak hour alone in a bed at forty, the age when we might expect a man to be sleeping alongside us, and the sounds of children in adjacent rooms. That bleak hour before I’d hear Sophie get up, go for a pee, the lavatory flush and her bedroom door close again. Then I’d fall asleep and wake groggy to the smell of coffee, and if I wasn’t fast down the stairs the front door would close, her car would start up, and I’d know there was another day alone with that desk.