But most of him wasn’t like that, because most of him was gentle and decent and moral in the way that only people who don’t have to think about being ‘moral’ can be.
Religious people try to tell us that ‘morality’ is all down to God and that, without God’s influence, there would be no decency or goodness in the world, but that’s nonsense, I think. I’m pretty sure it’s nonsense, as I’m pretty sure I have a consciousness rather than a soul, but that I call it my soul, and that you have the same, and that there’s no heaven or hell, or that God is sitting above the clouds with a clipboard recording all the things I do, or you do, or any of us does, so that, when we die, he can tot up the sum of our lives and decide whether we go up to Saint Peter or down to the Devil. How ludicrous is that as a guide to a moral and decent life? Are Christians only moral out of fear?
I know that ‘decency’ and ‘morality’ are things we all have inside us, and are a part of what makes us human. ‘Indecency’, ‘immorality’ and ‘amorality’ are there too, and no amount of religion changes the balance of those things inside any of us. There are as many evil clergymen as there are evil atheists. But atheists aren’t so smug when they’re good, or so hypocritical when they’re bad. Why does religion do those things to people? They aren’t good things. No one would want to be a smug hypocrite, would they?
I was a wonderful actress, and had been since my schooldays. I could act happy when I was sad, sad when I was happy, committed when I was un-, resolute when I was ir-. So much of acting is about acting out a lie and making the lie seem true. I could act out a lie and tell a lie without noticing that I had and I think the telling of lies became second nature to me and, because the telling of them became second nature to me, there was no feeling of guilt or remorse attached to the telling of them. I couldn’t count the lies I told Tommy in our first few months together. The biggest lie was when I told him I didn’t love him.
All the things I wanted for my life, did not include falling in love with a dyslexic hermit, Asperger’s retard ten years my junior, but the dyslexia and the Asperger’s turned out not to be what I thought they were, and he was never a retard, quite the opposite. So I fell in love with him, and it was so inconvenient.
You may know how I cured the hermit bits of him, and that the inconvenience cured itself.
In the end, I did tell him I loved him, but by then it was already too late, almost already too late. Too-late is the cause of a lot of sadnesses. Some sadnesses are small and some sadnesses are big.
I’ve learned to be careful about lying, and I don’t need to do it anymore. My acting career’s over now and while, not being Portia still hurts, it doesn’t consume me, not in the way it used to.
I liked Ambrosia living with us, and it felt right for the three of us to live together. We were a threesome, and had been from long before the girls were born. We were a threesome even before Ambrosia said she wanted to have our babies, Tommy and my babies, from before the time she said she could be my womb, and that she could be the stand-in for the womb I lost when I was young, from before the time she said that doing that would bind us together for the rest of our lives. Ambrosia has always been a wise woman.
We were good as a threesome and it was good that the three of us lived together in the way we did, because each of us loved the other two, and it would have been all wrong if Ambrosia didn’t live with us.
I knew I was in love with Ambrosia before I knew I was in love with Tommy. Falling in love with Tommy wasn’t part of the plan we made for getting Peter his fourth Melancholy, but as we all know, things don’t always go the way they’re planned.
Falling in love with Tommy was so inconvenient that I denied it, and I denied it to myself most of all. You may know that denying it to myself almost destroyed us all.
Well, it wasn’t really the three of us, was it? Not anymore. It was the five of us. We didn’t want to hide it from anybody, so we didn’t. All our friends knew about Ambrosia and how she came to have our girls for us, and how we all lived our lives together, and none of them cared. None of our friends is religious.
It took some of our friends a while to get their heads around how two little red-headed girls, girls who looked so much like me with their big noses and big mouths, could have come out of a woman as black as Ambrosia, but they sorted it out in the end. Some of the men were a bit slow and had to have the mechanics of it all explained to them. Sailing Club John was slowest of all, not because he was stupid, but more because John’s ideas of sex and procreation were somewhat one-dimensional, maybe two-dimensional. After he did get his head around it, he said, “What a fucking wonderful, fucking marvellous, fucking fantastic thing. Fuck.” John liked saying ‘fuck’, it was the staple of his conversation, but you may know that already.
Mrs B. knew Ambrosia from the time when she was living here with Tommy. From the time when I deserted them both, and from the time when I left Tommy with what he thought was a lie, and when I took his Munch to Peter as we’d arranged for me to do, and how Tommy came to know that I was part of the plot to get him to sell his Melancholy to the one man he didn’t want to sell it to, and how he came to believe that I was part of the plot to swap the original for the fake, and have him accused of fraud and have him sent to jail. How all the things I did to him made him hate me, and how I couldn’t blame him for hating me, and how I couldn’t do anything about it.
I knew Tommy was like another son to Mrs B. I knew she came to love him after all the bad things I did to him. In the end, she came to love me too, once she forgave me for the bad things I did, and after she found out about the one good thing I did, the thing I did to save him, the one thing no one knew about, but us.
Tommy was special to her and I became special to her too.Mrs B. knew, more than anyone, what we went through that first year. She said she knew it would all sort out in the end. I’m glad she was right. We all are.
She was used to us lying au naturel around the pool and said it was lovely. She said it was funny to see Ambrosia sunbathing. “You can’t get blacker than black, my dear,” she used to say.
When Ambrosia and the girls came home from the hospital, there was never a thought that one day she would leave us. She was our family and we loved her. I did and Tommy did too, and it was just that he loved her in a different way to the way he loved me. That was enough for Ambrosia and it made her happy to know that Tommy loved her in that different way. He didn’t love me in a bigger way than the way he loved her, just in a different way. I think everyone we love, we love in different ways. Wouldn’t it be boring if all love was the same? Knowing Tommy loved her made her happy, and knowing she was happy made me happy too. Tommy was happy too, because Tommy was happy about everything, now.
Four
I had grown to like Mr Laroche-Lodge soon after his parents were killed, and after I went to see him, to explain to him the need for security, for himself, for The Collection he would inherit, and for the Trust he was setting up to disperse the Laroche-Lodge fortune. I came, also, to like his wife, Anne, Ambrosia Dickson, the friend from Antigua who they had living with them, and, of course, their twin daughters. I wanted to keep them all safe.
Mr Laroche-Lodge is the only client this firm has ever had who I am happy to call by their first name. It happened in Sydney the night I told him of the plot that had been launched against him by Sir Peter Prouse, and that for his own safety he had to leave the country until we could get things sorted out. He said it would be better for him if I called him ‘Tom’ and, since then, I always have.
We had managed to protect him from Sir Peter at that time. We weren’t so good at protecting Anne, but she wasn’t within our remit at that earlier time. She appeared to be a major player for the opposition and we were unprepared for what happened to her.
Following the successful conclusion of the court case and Sir Peter’s precipitous departure from Australia, Tom believed himself to be safe from further a
ttack. I didn’t want to dampen the celebration of his victory by telling him that, almost certainly, he wasn’t, and that people like Sir Peter Prouse didn’t lose quite as easily as that.
Munroe & Sons continued to provide security for the family and for the Laroche Trust. As principal of the company, I thought a more all-encompassing approach was required, and I was right, as it turned out.
It is best never to underestimate a powerful adversary. It was one of the things my father impressed upon me and what I have equally impressed upon my sons.
We didn’t do as well as we might have done in that regard.
Five
When I came home from the hospital with the girls, I worried that my life with Annie and Tom would be different. I knew Annie loved me and I knew Tom loved me too.
I worried that the love they had for the girls would lessen the love they had leftover for me.
Thankfully, I guess, that’s not the way love works. Love doesn’t get divided up like a fruit cake, does it? It just somehow grows to fit the ones we love. It gets bigger as it needs to. It can get smaller too, sometimes, I suppose.
At the start, but not right at the start, because ‘right at the start’ was when I couldn’t help myself and had to do to Annie what I did to Annie that day on the couch in the storeroom at the back of the gallery. That was the real ‘right at the start’, but what I’m talking about now is the ‘right at the start’, when Annie took me home to the big house by the sea and the gallery staff had dinner together. It was when I first met Tom, and I knew she wanted to share me with him, and later, after she did share me with him, and the three of us spent a lot of the time together, I came to know that this was the happiest time of my life.
Then things happened, and it wasn’t the happiest time of any of our lives. Then things happened again, and then it was a happy time again, and then I had their girls and I worried that things could ever be as happy as they were before, but they were. It was silly of me to worry about Annie and Tom loving me less.
But then things happened again, changed again, and the happy times went away again. Things you don’t know about yet.
So, bad things happened, things that couldn’t be undone happened. Bad things happened to me that could never be undone and I carry those bad things with me every day, even now. That’s what this book is about. It’s about the bad things that happened to all of us and the sad things that happened to all of us. This isn’t a happy story.
Six
We talked a lot about the future, and how we should bring up the girls. Tommy was the father, that was simple. He didn’t want to be Father and I understood why, and you may too. His father was ‘Father’ and ‘Father’ was a monster. Tommy wanted to be Daddy and Daddy suited him. I don’t know why it did, but it just did. Somehow, he just looked like a Daddy.
Who should I be? Should I be Mummy or Ma? His mother called her mother Ma. What should Ambrosia be? Should she be Aunty or Mummy or Ma?
We decided that I should be Mummy and Ambrosia should be Ma. We were happy with that. So it’s what we became, but not quite, because children tend to call their parents what they want to call them, not always what we want them to call us.
So, I became Mummy, Tom Daddy and Ambrosia Mummy Brosie. We were glad they thought of Ambrosia as their other ‘Mummy’.
We talked a lot about the future, and how we should bring up the girls. They would have two mothers and a father, and when they asked us why they had two mothers, we would tell them, but we thought we should wait for them to ask. We thought that was the right thing to do, and when I look back over the years, I think we were right to do that.
We talked a lot about the future, and how we should bring up the girls, and what we were to do about clothes. Should we bring them up in our clothesless world? We decided that we should, and it was the thing we discussed least.
They would know the difference between home and not-home. Not-home was where we wore clothes and home was where we didn’t have to, because home was where things were simpler, easier, freer.
Ambrosia said the girls would have a shock, one day. She said one day they would discover that other men weren’t made the same as their father. Tommy laughed when she said that. He could laugh about it now, because the deformity he had didn’t worry him anymore, not as much as it used to, and it certainly didn’t worry us.
Tommy had come a long way from the shy, bumbling boy I met on the beach that April day. He was always a strange man, and I suppose he still is and, in some way, always will be, but strange-nice, mostly, not strange-nasty. Quite a few of the men I’ve shagged in my life have been strange. A few strange-kinky and a few strange-nasty, but none of them strange-‘a little bit weird, but nice’, not until Tommy came along. He knew he was strange, and he thought he was strange-weak when he was really strange-sort-of-strong. He was always stronger than he thought he was. I think it was all the bad things that happened to him when he was a boy that made him strong.
Now he knew he was strong, and now he was happy with who he was, who he always was. I showed him who he was and it was one of the few good things I did for him back then. You may know that, most of the things I did to him, were bad things.
You may know that I lost my right eye, and how I lost it. Not just lost the sight in it, but lost the whole thing, all of it, and you’ll know that, because of the damage to the bones around the eye, I couldn’t wear a glass eye and that I never got round to having the plastic surgery that was meant to hide all the scars from that terrible night. I have a lot of faults, but I don’t think vanity is one of them, and people who judge me by what I look like aren’t the people I’m interested in getting to know anyway. So, in the words of Sailing Club John, “Fuck ’em all.”
You may know that, before the time when I was crucified and mutilated, people thought I was beautiful, but only beautiful in a funny sort of way, because all the parts of my face, taken on their own, weren’t beautiful and people only thought I was beautiful when all the parts were put together, which, of course, they are, with all our faces.
After I was mutilated and my face was no longer attached to my skull, the surgeons in Sydney fixed all the parts back to where they should be. They used plates and screws to do that and that added more scars to those that were left by the men who mutilated me. So, I ended up with a face that was still beautiful, in a funny sort of way, and in an even more funny, destroyed sort of way, given all the scars. Tommy said he didn’t mind about the scars and, when he said that, I knew he meant it. Tommy couldn’t tell a lie, not and have anyone believe him. Ambrosia doesn’t mind my face either and she always kisses my blind eye before we go to sleep.
I’ve got used to having no right eye and now I can’t remember what it was like to see with two. It’s amazing how the brain can adjust to losing bits. So when you lose an eye it doesn’t mean you’re half blind. It just means that you see twice as well with the one you have left. It makes playing tennis more difficult, but I still do.
After I deserted him with the Munch, Tommy moved his piano into the long-room. He never referred to it as a piano, but always as ‘the Bosendorfer’. You may know that already. After me, Ambrosia, the girls and the dogs, it was the thing he loved most.
You may know that he hated Steinways, and that that was because his father played a Steinway and because he hated his father he hated the sort of piano he played. He hated Purdeys too. They were his father’s favourite shotguns and when his father shot Candy, the cocker spaniel puppy his mother gave him for his birthday, he did it with one of the Purdeys. You may know that, after his parents died, he went home and destroyed the Steinway and all the Purdeys. Psychiatrists have a word for that, and I think it’s called ‘transference’. Tommy isn’t mad, and he wasn’t mad back then, not even when I met him, but he was on his way. When I first met him, I was only interested in getting hold of his Munch and getting it to Peter. I knew Tommy wasn’t mad, but I kne
w that, if his life kept on going the way it was, he would end up warped and unsalvageable. I made an effort to help him, even though I didn’t have to, because it wasn’t part of my brief and wasn’t in the script. I knew he was in love with me and I liked him enough to want to help him.
I did help him and helping him made me feel less guilty when I thought about what I was really doing in his life. I helped him and then everything came crashing down. Then he hated me. Then I saved him. Then he saved me right back. Then Mum asked him to phone me. Then he did. Then we talked. Then I knew he still hated me. Then I cried when he hung up. Then we went into limbo for a year. Then he forgave me. Then the hate went away. Then the love came back. Then things turned out alright. That’s the first book in a nutshell.
He wears a piano-playing face. It’s a look he gets when he plays and it’s a mixture of sadness and serenity. I recognised it the first time I ever saw him play. That was on the first day of my assault on the citadel he’d built around himself to protect himself from a world that had only brought him sadness. The citadel he’d built to protect himself from people like me.
The first thing he ever played for me was Debussy’s Valse Romantique. I’d asked him to play Debussy, because I knew he was Tommy’s favourite, and I knew that because I’d read the dossier prepared by Peter as part of his plan for destroying Tommy. I didn’t know, then, how far the plan went and I didn’t know that it involved destruction, but I’d got to know Peter well enough by then, and I should have known that he would want more than just Tommy’s Munch. How easy it is to be wise after the event, when you look back at things after they’ve happened. How lucky we both were that things turned out the way they did. Most lives are determined by one or two lucky, or unlucky, turns of fortune, and ours certainly was, but I knew, even back then, that things weren’t finished yet, but we’d both survived so far. Tommy and I both knew things weren’t finished yet, but, for some reason, we didn’t talk about it enough, and, in retrospect, we should have talked more.
A Judgement on a Life Page 2
