How Bright Are All Things Here

by Susan Green

  Last summer, before I came here, I looked at them again, and imagined I heard a rustling sound as a crowd of trapped, snapped souls, stuck in a shoebox since the summer of 1951, took flight.

  Fanciful? Oh yes, I am that. In the slivered fragment of time, you’re framed, captured, caught in the act. You move on, of course; is it unreasonable to wonder if part of you stays as well? I’ve also wondered about portraits. The painter spends so much time with the sitter, bound together by this rectangle of canvas and hitting back and forth a shuttlecock of thoughts and feelings, eyes meeting or not meeting, sighs, smiles and even, I’m sure, the odd erection lifting the artist’s smock. Which may explain the peculiar frisson one gets from time to time in the National Portrait Gallery. And perhaps that’s why I never claimed Gerald’s paintings. I never wanted to. Let the dead stay dead.

  ‘. . . for you to sort out later. What do you think of that idea, Bliss?’

  I’d stopped listening and abandoned myself to the contemplation of her face. You can get lost looking at a person, I find, and small details can move you to tears. In middle age Anne’s face is quite unlined, with none of the fretfulness of the perpetual dieter, but instead she’s got a strangely calm, bland look. Is it antidepressants, I wonder, or her iron self-control? I can’t read her face any more. Perhaps I never could.

  ‘What is it, Bliss?’ she says eventually. ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’

  ‘I’m sorry, darling.’ I add my catch-all excuse. ‘I’m tired.’

  She speaks to me in a clear, deliberate manner, as if she was talking to a rather slow child. The casserole dishes, the linen sheets, the good towels . . . and suddenly I am thinking of Gerald’s pictures from the mid-1950s, the Suburban Suite. Almost abstract, but just recognisable were the patterns of perfect paths and lawns, neat edges, weeded beds and, seen obliquely through a window or door, what could have been the shadow of a woman. They were political, apparently. It was the height of the Cold War.

  Suburban. Gerald used it as a term of abuse. Like bourgeois. His biographer talks a lot about his lacerating critique of the bleak emptiness, ennui and spiritual poverty of suburban life, but to my certain knowledge, Gerald never lived in any of those raw, brick-veneered suburbs. He lived in an apartment in New York, a house above a canyon outside Los Angeles, a villa in Tuscany and an architect-designed, three-storey modernist house in North Sydney, not a stone’s throw from where Tom lives now, with lush tropical gardens and a fabled harbour view. He drove through suburbs where thousands of lives were lived. They involved lawn-mowing and barbecues, certainly, but with love and hate and despair and whatever else we humans can cook up thrown into the mix. And all Gerald could intuit was boredom and souls starved of culture. To quote dear Caroline, bullshit.

  Look, to be honest, my metier turned out to be selling dreams to the upwardly mobile, and I dare say I’d have run a mile if invited to gather by the barbecue. Defender of suburbanites, moi? No. But I knew then, as I know now, that a gulf of understanding can separate us, one from the other. Gerald judged but he knew nothing about them. And the appearances of those suburban, middle-class lives can be deceiving, can’t they? Think of Rob and Judith, model citizens – mothers’ club, scouts, surf lifesavers, lawns mowed and car washed – and yet all the time she was writing historical novels about dispossession and violence and he, paintbrush in hand, was far, far away with the foxies.

  Think of Nina, mad as a meat axe in Moule Avenue, Balwyn. And poor Alec, barely coping, and Paula missing her childhood and the other two, the golden ones, living with the shadow of their mother’s presence and her loss. Think of those monsters of whom shocked neighbours say, ‘Such a nice, quiet man!’ while all the time the brick veneer next door is a charnel house of rape and torture. Flowers are nice, aren’t they?

  Think instead of Aunt Emu and Miss Minnie, ensconced in the solid brick, polished mahogany and Victorian lace of Loch Lomond in King Street, Elsternwick – the very epitome of prosperous, bourgeois and conventional – where, as the war raged in Europe and Pacific, the three of us would sit and drink verbena tea stark naked under the rose arbour.

  When we got the news about Daddy, Mother must have phoned the aunts, for despite petrol rationing they came the next day in their Daimler and took us back to Elsternwick. A month later Mother died. They said pneumonia, but I think she simply gave up. I understood that with Daddy gone she had nothing to live for, but I wished she had tried a little harder. There was me.

  They were not real aunts, of course. Back in the twenties, the well-known portraitist Miss (later Dame) Edith Maude Unice Vaile – E.M.U., you see: Emu – bought one of my mother’s watercolours and the older woman became a kind of mentor. She and her companion Miss Minnie Unstead were, it seemed, the only real friends my mother had, and she named them in her will as my guardians. I am ashamed that when I was at my worst, in my thirties, I liked to shock and intrigue by telling people I’d been brought up by a pair of doting elderly lesbians. Actually, there was no Berlin cabaret kinkiness. I say they were lesbians, but I never actually knew what went on in the big bed in their upstairs room. Quite possibly nothing but sleep.

  Miss Minnie and Aunt Emu were first cousins. When Miss Minnie’s parents died in the sinking of the coastal schooner Whaiharu in 1889, her maternal aunt took her in. She was shy and lonely, prone to nightmares and sleepwalking, and so her older cousin Edith let Minnie share her bed. They slept together for the rest of their lives. It wasn’t so uncommon back then. Maiden ladies – especially if they were related – living together, even sleeping together, wouldn’t have raised a single eyebrow. But their other little habits would.

  Aunt Emu and Miss Minnie liked to describe themselves as ‘seasonal, situational nudists’. They wouldn’t have considered joining one of the so-called naturist clubs, where the members swam, played tennis and did crosswords in their birthday suits, but if the weather and the place permitted, they liked nothing better than to strip off. The first time, it was rather a shock.

  I was still new to Loch Lomond when one morning Aunt Emu informed me, ‘Now that it’s summer, dear, we try to take a sunbath from ten to eleven. You may join us if you wish.’

  I went up to my room, changed into my shirred cotton bathing suit, and walked back down through the wallpapered, draped and antimacassar-ed rooms feeling uncomfortably bare. To say I was not prepared for the sight of them stretched on sun lounges, nude but for matching men’s Panama hats, would be a gross understatement. I had never seen a totally naked adult before, and I stared, entranced. Aunt Emu was all soft, floppy, crepe-y curves, with big lolling bosoms, a tummy like a pillow and a little grizzled patch between her legs. The sun made her skin a mottled red, but Miss Minnie, with a darker brunette’s complexion, had tanned up nicely and with her slim, rather tubular shape, resembled a large brown cucumber. They looked up, smiled, and just then Phoebe came out with the tea tray.

  ‘Here,’ she said, graceless and unconcerned, and laid it on the wrought-iron table in the earwiggy shade of the arbour.

  The ladies got up, with wickerwork patterns all over their backsides, and calmly had morning tea. Verbena tea, it was. They touched neither tea, coffee nor alcohol.

  ‘Unless we go out,’ Aunt Emu explained. ‘Then we accept whatever we are given.’

  ‘Like Buddhist monks, if you see what I mean,’ added Miss Minnie.

  I must have muttered something to show I didn’t, and Aunt Emu said, ‘Stop taking the mickey, Minnie!’

  ‘Boom, boom!’ cried Miss Minnie, and everything wobbled as they fell about laughing.

  I looked from one to the other, and the joke dawned on me. I gave a giggle, a small shy giggle, and Aunt Emu jumped up all naked as she was and crushed me to her pendulous bosoms.

  ‘Oh, darling child! I knew that if we just tried hard enough, you would laugh.’

  Yes, I learned to laugh. Also to make puns and double entendres, enjoy spoonerisms and malapropisms, invent limericks, converse in rhyming slang and i
nvent pet names for persons, animals and bodily parts. Who now, except for me, knows what and where is the smooey? Me they called Miss Bliss, Bliss-in-Boots, Blissy-kissikins.

  One evening, after I had finished reading aloud from Nonsense Novels (the aunts were great fans of the author, a Canadian humourist called Stephen Leacock; also in his oeuvre are Literary Lapses and Frenzied Fiction), I asked if they could call me Elizabeth.

  ‘Of course, dearest, if that’s what you want.’

  ‘I do,’ I said. I had decided to like living with the aunts, and indeed to love them, but Bliss was the child of Mother and Daddy. ‘Elizabeth is my real name.’

  ‘Indeed it is,’ said Aunt Emu. She sounded a little hurt, but I am sure she and Miss Minnie understood.

  ‘What are you doing, Elizabeth?’

  ‘I’m making patterns, Aunt Emu.’

  Lots of patterns. Sheet after sheet of patterns. Stripes, stars, dots and dashes, checks, wavy lines. These days a child psychologist would note my repetitive, indeed obsessive, behaviour and thrust me instantly into therapy, but Aunt Emu allowed me my quiet corner in her studio, as long as there were no sitters, and kept up the supply of paper and paint.

  One day I asked, ‘What are you doing, Aunt Emu?’

  She told me that she had painted a portrait and it was now nearly done.

  ‘Finishing touches,’ she said.

  ‘It’s very bright.’ It was a lady in a green dress with a red hat.

  ‘Yes. But there are dark parts, see?’

  ‘There’s no black lines.’ I was used to lines. Betty Brown’s face was simply an oval with two eyes, a nose and a mouth.

  ‘I don’t need lines because I’ve got colours.’

  I watched her mix her paint on the wooden palette and make the green dress not just one green but many, darkening almost to black, lightening almost to white so that the fabric seemed to glisten.

  ‘It’s silky, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘The shadows where the folds are. And there’s green on her face, too, like a reflection from the dress.’

  Aunt Emu wiped her brush on a rag and looked at me with her head on one side.

  ‘Would you like me to teach you to paint?’ she asked.

  Looking at Anne. Painting Anne. You’d have thought, wouldn’t you, that taught and trained as I was I’d see beyond plump cheeks, button nose, wide eyes. Regulation child, generically sweet. Don’t they all look much the same, one child or another? A brown-skinned boy, shivering as the thin ones do, with the baby in his arms. And Anne, stolid, plump, divinely coloured with her apricot skin and glossy black hair, wriggling in her chair. Ten minutes? Five? Another toffee, but then her jaw moves. Her hands, those exquisite fingers. The light on her cheek. My baby, my own Anne.

  Anne at art school. Her first end-of-semester folio spread around the living room floor. A pile of figure drawings, quick sketches on newsprint, longer poses on thicker paper, a few studies worked up with wash or pen and ink and mounted on white pasteboard.

  ‘What do you think?’ asked Alec.

  They weren’t terrible. Terrible would have been a kind of positive. They were nothing. And I thought of Rob. The things he used to say about passion, fear, anxiety, delight. I thought about how he loved the world, his world, his never-ending, always expanding subject.

  I said, ‘She’s worked very hard.’

  I worked very hard at my art lessons, though it scarcely seemed like labour. Melbourne in those days was a smorgasbord of private classes – perspective drawing, figure drawing, still life, watercolour and oils, not to mention the various artistic persuasions, much like religious sects, each with its own high priest – that one could join. I was gratified, of course, when I won the scholarship, but will you think me terribly big-headed if I say I was not surprised? The aunts sailed with me for England but, to their eternal credit, once we’d done the Festival of Britain and they had me safely settled in deepest Kensington, they left for their own little tour of France and the Italian Riviera before returning to Australia.

  It was three years before I did. Aunt Emu finally succumbed to the long-threatened stroke. It was urgent, so I flew. The Kangaroo Route, it was called, and it went from London to Rome, and then Cairo, Karachi, Bombay, Singapore, Darwin, Brisbane, Sydney and, finally, Melbourne. On and on and on, for almost a week. I made regular use of the sick bag and wondered how they could market air travel as glamorous. When I phoned Loch Lomond from Sydney, a stranger answered.

  ‘Oh, Mrs Grady,’ she said. ‘Oh, my dear. I’m so sorry. You’re too late.’

  ‘Can I talk to Miss Minnie?’

  ‘She’s sleeping, dear.’

  ‘Don’t disturb her. Tell her I’ll be there tomorrow.’

  I would be in time for the funeral, at least.

  I knocked – it seemed only polite after such a long absence – but no-one came, and in the end I had to let myself in. I walked through the house and eventually found Miss Minnie in the kitchen with a uniformed nurse, being fed by spoon from a bowl.

  ‘Miss Minnie,’ I said, and she stared blankly into my face. Her hair was tied back neatly and the scalp shone pink through the scant white strands.

  ‘I’m Miss Simpson,’ said the nurse. She put the spoon down on a plate, and held out her hand to me. ‘I recognise you from your pictures, Mrs Grady.’

  ‘Elizabeth. I think it would be better if you called me Elizabeth.’ I hadn’t told the aunts about Gerald and me. ‘And . . . well, it’s Miss Adair now.’

  ‘Oh.’ A tiny pause. ‘Well, the ladies were – are – so proud of you.’ She lowered her voice. ‘I’m sorry about . . .’

  ‘Are you Miss Simpson?’ whispered Miss Minnie.

  ‘That’s right, and this is Elizabeth,’ said Miss Simpson encouragingly. ‘She’s come back, haven’t you, Elizabeth? Say hello, dear.’

  There was something terribly wrong. Had I misunderstood? Was it Miss Minnie who’d had the stroke?

  ‘Perhaps if you’d say hello, dear,’ Miss Simpson urged me.

  ‘Oh. Hello, Miss Minnie. It’s me, it’s Elizabeth.’ I advanced towards her but Miss Minnie, with the look of a cornered animal, whimpered and shrank back in her chair.

  ‘Now, now, that’s not nice. Not when she’s come all this way to see you.’ Keeping her eyes on Miss Minnie, Miss Simpson said, ‘We’ll try later, shall we?’ and I went upstairs to my old room and threw myself on the bed and cried.

  I tried. Many times. But Miss Minnie didn’t seem to remember me at all. Not only that, she didn’t like me. She didn’t even like being in the same room as me. When the doctor came before the funeral to give her a sedative injection, he said that the shock of Aunt Emu’s death had been the final straw.

  ‘Merciful, in a way. They were constant companions, I understand, for most of their lives.’

  ‘Sixty years.’ Then I said, trying to understand, ‘So, this . . . this condition is due to shock, like a kind of breakdown.’

  ‘Oh no, Miss Adair. She’s been declining for the past three or four years – hardening of the arteries – and now it’s as if large parts of her mind have just been wiped away. It’s called vascular dementia. Second childhood, some people say. She’s senile. I thought you knew. I thought Miss Vaile would have told you.’

  ‘No,’ I said. I felt obscurely guilty. But how could I have known? Aunt Emu had always treated her own symptoms as a joke. She’d been at death’s door and Miss Minnie was senile – why hadn’t she asked me to come home? I didn’t consider that she might not have wanted me to interrupt my burgeoning young life to care for two old sick ladies. I did not then understand about stoicism, the use of denial or humour to deal with pain, or the fear felt by the elderly that they will be troublesome, a burden, a dead weight on the young.

  *

  Aunt Emu’s lawyer made it clear that there was plenty of money to look after Miss Minnie at home, and provision for me to use the house as long as Miss Minnie resided there.

  ‘I presume Miss Vaile considered the po
ssibility that you might supervise Miss Unstead’s care,’ he said diplomatically.

  ‘I would, but she seems to be scared of me.’

  ‘That’s unfortunate.’ But your problem, not mine, his brief silence seemed to say. He cleared his throat. ‘Looking forward, Miss Adair. After Miss Unstead’s death, the house and contents, apart from a few minor bequests, are to be sold. After a sum of ten thousand pounds goes to you, she intended the rest of the estate to fund a bequest, in Miss Unstead’s name, to the National Gallery. It is to be for the purpose of acquiring a painting each year by a female artist under twenty-five resident in Australia; that artist will also receive a sum of money in addition to the purchase price of the painting.’

  ‘So she can travel overseas to study?’

  ‘No, no. It’s for a woman artist resident in Australia. I imagine the money could buy materials, hire models or a studio, that sort of thing. Very generous, don’t you think?’

  I nodded. Very generous. Both the bequest and the legacy. But Miss Minnie wasn’t dead yet.

  ‘Anne?’

  ‘It’s Paula. Anne’s gone.’

  She stands up, smoothing her skirt over her hips, and I notice the subtle stripes of blue in her grey wrap. Very pretty. She is wearing blue earrings, too. Is her smile a little conscious? What’s going on?

  ‘I must go. Dave and I are going out to dinner.’

  Ah! So that’s it.

  ‘You remember Tom’s coming to see you tomorrow?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And I’ve spoken to Judith Freeman.’

  Oh. I’d forgotten that I’d set that particular ball in motion. I got Leo to tell the girls about the paintings. Valuable paintings, to be collected from storage. He’s rung Judith already. She’s expecting them.