Given the confusions, it was something of an achievement that Garry and I tottered on for as long as we did, almost a decade; a patchy decade, but still, that’s ten years. Though he’d recovered, and retreated, from the wish to marry me as fast as he’d tripped into it, there remained something, some small something – comfort, friendship, a compatibility of mind (despite Zen), a certain tenderness – that gave us a basis for a continuing connection. To the extent that we were friends who were also lovers it was a good enough arrangement. It could also set off longings, in me if not in him – not always, but sometimes – that were hard to comprehend, so at odds were they with the actuality – which in a lot of ways suited me well. If I was working, or away on a road trip with Sophie, if I paid him no attention for days, weeks even, he let me be, he didn’t seem to mind, and I think he didn’t. I was the one who could be demanding, wanting some sort of certainty when there was none. When I pressed for assurances – of what? Of enduring love? A pact against death? The sense of the security I needed to balance (and enjoy?) the independence I took? – he was evasive and I became anxious and he stubborn and we wouldn’t see each other for a while, and life could feel precarious. Then he’d arrive at the house and we’d welcome him in to join us at the table.
I rarely see Garry these days but when I do we are pleased and greet each other happily. Last time I saw him was pure happenstance. I’d been across the Blue Mountains staying at a house a friend then had in a valley running back into the mountains from the inland side. I was there with Robyn Davidson. Jo, our friend, an artist, had painted portraits of us both: an interesting experience, I found, being looked at as an older woman by a younger woman. It was as intense a gaze as any I’ve experienced, and very different from the gaze of men. It was a scrutiny that began uncomfortably – vanity is not easily banished and I could remember the dismay with which I had regarded my mother at fifty, her boxy hips, the drop of her cheeks – but I found I could tolerate it, and far from feeling Jo’s victim, her object, as sometimes the subjects of portraits complain, I felt a kind of kinship, as if I had become part of the making of the portrait, which of course I hadn’t. She signed the drawing that preceded the painting ‘Jo Bertini by Drusilla Modjeska’, in part a private joke, but also to say something about the way we look, that convoluted scrutiny between the perceiver and the perceived, which tells us something about ourselves as well as about the painting, the image, the picture that, in the case of portraiture, emerges between them.
That winter week at Jo’s house over the mountains, Robyn and I overlapped with her briefly and then stayed on when she went back to Sydney. It was glorious up there: foothills, mountains behind, a river curving around the hill on which the house was built. We had roaring fires and read a lot, talked and slept. We didn’t wash – there was scarce water and no need – so by the third or fourth day we smelled of wood smoke and sweat. Then a storm rolled in, rain pounding down all day and all night, twenty-four hours solid. The morning it stopped, Robyn woke early, walked down to the river and came back to report that it was rising, and dark clouds were coming in from the mountains. Our car was parked on the far side of the river. On the way in, Jo had driven us across in her truck. She wouldn’t get across now, Robyn said. So we packed up, tidied the house, swept the floors, made sure the fire was out and any food secured in tins against the bush rats. At the river we stripped to our waists and waded through the cold, fast-running water, bags and books carried above our heads. We kept our shoes on against the rocks and logs – we’d never have made it barefoot – and when we were on the other bank, dried after a fashion, and dressed again, I put my slippers on, which were all I had other than the soaked runners dripping in the boot. The slippers were so old and familiar they were held together with sellotape, a solution to their collapse that wasn’t helped when my not entirely dry feet went into them. We looked a sight, Robyn and me, rugs tied around our waists for warmth; you can see where this story is going … And sure enough when we stumbled hungry into a café in the mountain town of Blackheath, there was Garry, silhouetted against the window talking to a group of young women with children in strollers. I squinted, not thinking, There’s Garry; more, That man looks like Garry, when he said, Yes it’s me, and came over and joined us. Actually my chagrin wasn’t so bad; it’s not as if he hadn’t seen me looking pretty awful, and his laugh at the sight we made was kind, enjoying the expression on the faces of the young women he was talking to when they realised he knew these two bag lady apparitions who had walked in, despite the rain, in slippers.
Afterwards, in the car as Robyn and I drove down the mountains and through the suburbs of Sydney that now follow the railway line all the way to their base, I told her about the day Garry and I were cut off by the tide. We were down the coast, alone at the house on the bay with the rock. It was glorious autumnal weather, the water wasn’t yet too cold to swim, and after a few days of lazing, we felt adventurous and set out around the rocks beneath the headland with the lighthouse. It was a fine day, as I say, clear to the horizon, when we walked round the bay and climbed to the next cove, using a steep, well-worn path. Instead of stopping there, as we usually did, or going back to check the tides – it wasn’t as if we didn’t know how large the headland was, or how steep – we decided, just like that, on impulse, to see if we could get the whole way round. Two hours later and still nowhere near the point, we were in a small cove with a narrow shingle beach, wet from a wave that’d caught us on the rocky cliff we’d just clambered round. We sat on the shingle to dry, pleased with ourselves, not noticing that the tide was coming in until we had to jump out of the way, and saw that waves were breaking against the cliff we’d come from, and also against the one ahead. White foam against black rock in either direction. Behind us, what was left of the shingle ended against a sandstone cliff, not sheer or overhanging like the black cliffs, but steep, very, with some dark rock poking through, a few hardy wisps of trees hanging on. It was a long way up, but it was our only option: the shingly beach was fast vanishing, there’d be no shelter unless we climbed up above the tide line, which, now that we looked, we could see quite clearly. There was nothing to stand on there, and the prospect of clinging on all day until the tide turned again was less promising than the prospect of climbing. We should be able to make it, Garry said, though I was doubtful, and he started to climb in a slightly zigzag way, reaching from protrusion of rock to spindly tree, finding the next foothold as I followed behind, until suddenly it was too steep; there was nothing to hold onto, and the top wasn’t close. Chunks of crumbling sandstone were coming loose and tumbling down. I can’t, I said, as if there were a choice. You can, he said, climbing on, balancing himself and turning back to tell me where to put my foot, where I could safely hold on, testing the strength of a small, bent tree that was growing out of the cliff not far from the top. I got there. I don’t know how, but I did. He hauled himself up the last few feet to the grass at the top, lay on his stomach, and with one hand on another of those spindly trees, reached down an arm strong as rope. One last haul, and I was beside him, as alive as the grass we lay on, the trees above. The sky. A tremble started in my legs, a shaking, shuddering tremble that spread to my arms, my chest, everywhere, as I looked back down to the rocks, the little beach that had vanished and the water where we could well both be lying, dead and broken. No one would have known, it was back before mobile phones, and who would think we’d be stupid enough to have done what we did.
Lying there on the ground, alive and shaking, we wrapped our arms around each other, and when our legs returned to a state that would hold us upright, we walked slowly through the gnarled banksia trees to the light house, which I always visit even if it is a modern lighthouse with no window or walkway, no keeper, nothing of character or romance, nothing like Virginia Woolf’s lighthouse: just a white smooth tower marking a line in the bush. We walked around it in superstitious thanksgiving, then back to the house, where we made huge toasted sandwiches and spent the rest of the day
recovering on a blanket under the trees until the sun went over the hills behind and the cold crept in. A fire, fish on the grill, a bottle of wine. Was that not enough? In memory it is replete. So why, after something like that, did I want Garry to say that yes, he’d love me forever and make sure I never fell, and I needn’t give up anything, not my independence, not even Ben who arrived one of those years and whom I’m not yet ready to talk about. I could be just as I was and safe. Double standards? Yes. But double standards work in strange ways; for Garry, with all that Zen, no commitment beyond the moment worked just fine; but for me, while it could, it didn’t always. It was, of course, when we enjoyed each other most that I wanted the words he wouldn’t give. As if the words could turn into a certificate I could hold in my hand, absolve me from my own infelicities, or an artwork I could walk around, or a fine pen that would know my thoughts even before they arrived on the page.
‘Bound. Free. Good. Bad. Yes. No. Capitalism. Socialism. Sex. Love …’ This is Anna in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, a free woman, like her friend Molly, in the London of my childhood, though not the London we saw on school-holiday visits to the Law Courts in the Strand with our father, or a pantomime with his mother, our grandmother. These were ‘free women’ of our mothers’ generation, whose education hadn’t been disrupted and cut short, who worked and wrote and earned through those years of the 1950s, who lived without husbands, though not without lovers; very different lives from those of our married mothers – though no less difficult, no less split; free and bound in different ways. When Doris Lessing wrote the introduction to the paperback edition in 1971, she likened it – the introduction – to ‘writing a letter to post into the distant past: I am so sure that everything we now take for granted is going to be utterly swept away in the next decade’.17 Well, she got that wrong, we all did, we optimistic feminists with our housing associations and politics of liberation. We’d underestimated the power of ambivalence, the volcano unconscious, Louise Bourgeois called it, meaning the ways we are formed, deep down in our psyches, at our mother’s breast, in this uneasy world we inhabit. What Doris Lessing does get right – in the novel, not the introduction – is the baffling nature of it all. The Golden Notebook is not just a portrait of a historical moment, though it’s that, but a plumbline through all the contradictions and dilemmas. Bound. Free. Good. Bad. Yes. No. Sex. Love.
Argumentative and contested though our relationships with men could be, sometimes wounding, sometimes tender, in that house we were free, as free as I’ve ever been. Complicatedly free, but free. Free to move; free to enjoy our lovers. But most of all, there was a freedom of mind that was new to me: a sense of my own voice as a writer, and the potential of writing, as I began to understand how to work the pliability of words. Yes, we wrote them one by one, an exacting art, but change the image to a thread rather than a road, and then words bend and weave, sentences and paragraphs gathering in stories, digressing and doubling back, making a pattern that may not be able to be apprehended as an embodied work to walk around, but can reveal its shape in the mind of a reader, a compatriot, a stranger. I knew that from my reading, of course: and I’d long known it in theory. The challenge was to work it on the page – and that was not so easy.
When Sophie went back to London, only briefly as it turned out, Helen – who’d been visiting from Melbourne staying in our small spare room at the back – moved into her room. The life of the house took on a new shape with Helen there during the day, writing upstairs while I was writing downstairs. I was well into Poppy by then. I’d bought a golf-ball electric typewriter, which had pride of place on a separate table in my workroom. Not only were pages building up, but chapters and sections. Hilary would stay when she was in Sydney, and she’d read the pages I showed her, the start of another long friendship as well as a collaboration that made Poppy possible. Yes, something was definitely happening. I don’t remember how it started or how I got through the impasse of that first winter of 1987. Bernard in The Waves says, ‘Some people go to priests, others to poetry, I to my friends.’ It’s a line that is often attributed to Virginia Woolf in lists of wise sayings, when it was her character who said it, and he was a writer, which makes it doubly unreliable as coming from her (or indeed from him). It is a thought, like a wave, like language that rises and falls, catches us and lets us go, which I copied out and pinned above the piano in the room where I worked. Helen and I had lunch each day, and in that house a conversation began that has continued on to this day, with interruptions and hiatuses, but still now, though with less intensity, we can drop back into the talk that started all those years ago. Not the same conversation but a continuation. Much of it about writers and writing. She was reading writers I’d never heard of, like Ingeborg Bachmann and Céline. Murray Bail – whom Helen was soon to marry, not that it eliminated ambivalence, just gave it another hue – said that if I was writing in the first person, which I was, I should at least read Thomas Bernhard. So I did, sort of, though really it was Virginia Woolf I was interested in, the ‘I’, the ‘eye’ she sent out to do duty for her, a creature called ‘I’ which was both her and not her, a screen that allowed her a certain privacy even as it gave her words their force. I read most of the books that came from Murray, European for the most part, and those I didn’t Garry would read, returning them when he went to Murray’s flat to watch the cricket with him. I’d grumble to Helen when I fell behind, the pile tottering beside my bed, or to Garry, but never to Murray, with his thick dark hair, the real deal of a writer with all those books on the table. Not that Helen wasn’t a real writer, but in that house she was also one of us, part of our city, our world, where there was nothing we didn’t speak of.
Even at the time Helen would say, as Sophie had said, we’d look back and see that they were good years in that house with the doors open and music playing and people coming in, and meals around the table. I could still wake early from a dream that had taken me back to the abyss, but there were also days, more as time passed, when I’d wake with the light coming through the expensive slatted wooden blinds I bought on a whim I couldn’t afford given the amount of leave I was taking in order to write, and I’d realise that, yes, I was happy. Or if not happy, at least not unhappy. Though the veil fluttered close enough for me not to forget, there were days when I’d find myself out in the garden with the pergola and the ochre paving stones Poppy had helped me lay on her one visit to that house, stretching from too long at the desk while the kettle was on, looking at my pots and at the astonishing sight of those lemons, and at least for that moment I’d know I was alive – wonderfully, marvellously alive.
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Another person who came to the house during those years was Hazel Rowley, and although she and I lived in the same city only for a few years, another conversation began that continued, albeit intermittently, until her sudden, shocking death in 2011. Like me, Hazel was born in London, but unlike me, she had come to Australia as a child when her family emigrated. She was restless for Europe: not England, but France. When I first met her she’d recently returned from Paris where she’d been researching her doctorate on ‘Simone de Beauvoir and Existential Autobiography’. This made her the perfect interlocutor when I turned to The Second Sex to learn more about Christine de Pizan, only to find a short, rather abrupt paragraph. Pizan might have taken up her pen in defence of women, but the ‘quarrel’ she joined, Beauvoir wrote, was but a ‘secondary phenomenon reflecting social attitudes, not changing them’. A damning end to the paragraph. I’ve never known if it was this that made The Second Sex so hard for me to read, a personal prejudice, or whether it was the legacy of failure with it in Papua New Guinea, where I’d tried it at the age of twenty-three, hardly the best place for it, way out in the Highlands where Nick was collecting genealogies and I spent hours reading in the shade of a small thatched house. I was overwhelmed by the excess of information that goes into her argument – and actually, I still am – most of it dispiriting. So, I asked Hazel, what does it take to cha
nge the secondary phenomena of social attitudes? Did Beauvoir? Could writers? Could we? Had Simone de Beauvoir found her way out from under the weight of male certainty that – as she’d gone to such trouble to show – had been with us in the Judaeo-Christian West for centuries, or was she, too, as the radical feminists would say, caught up in exactly the ‘male’ thinking that makes us the second sex? If she couldn’t escape the weight of history, who could, I’d grumble to Hazel? But she was on Beauvoir’s side. Hazel’s view was that it was seeing it that mattered, showing it to us, and anyway Beauvoir had achieved a lot.
Hazel had interviewed her in Paris at the end of 1976, and it’d been a bruising experience. Looking back, it was easy to see how bad a time it had been for Beauvoir, with Sartre suffering his long, miserable decline into death. (He died in 1980.) The women’s movement was in early bloom, she was besieged by feminists of our generation wanting her wisdom, her imprimatur, and her time. Among them was Hazel, who arrived at her apartment in Rue Schoelcher well prepared and bright with anticipation. ‘Beauvoir changed my life,’ Hazel wrote many years later, ‘and I worshipped her. I asked burning questions about her relationship with Sartre – about truth-telling, jealousy, third parties, and double standards for men and women. Beauvoir insisted there had been no jealousy between them, and as for double standards, she thought relationships between the sexes easier for women than for men because, given women’s secondary status, men tended to feel guilty when they left them.’ That doesn’t happen now, and it didn’t happen in our era; the price of claiming independence, I suppose. Beauvoir gave Hazel her attention for a short afternoon, then bustled her out, having answered, Hazel felt, ‘as if by rote, without the slightest reflection or hesitation’. Hazel could see, and it saddened her, that ‘[Beauvoir] herself could not disentangle the reality of her life from the myth’.18
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