by Susan Green
‘How strange,’ said Judith.
‘She’s always been secretive,’ said Anne.
‘No, not secretive,’ said Paula. ‘I think she’d tell you anything if you asked her.’
But she hadn’t answered any of their questions about Judith.
‘I went with her to London when I was in art school,’ said Anne. ‘And apart from a couple of old friends, we didn’t meet anyone from her past – not one member of her family. I thought she must have been ashamed of them.’
‘She has no family in England. Bliss isn’t English. She’s Australian.’
‘Are you sure?’ said Paula. ‘She told us her parents died in the London Blitz.’
‘Her father did. She and her mother stayed here during the war and I can assure you she was born here. Her mother’s family came from Colac.’
‘How odd this is,’ said Paula.
‘It’s a bit hard to process,’ said Anne. Over the years, she had walked with Bliss through mile upon mile of exhibition space, earnestly discussing the work of prominent artists – Grady among them – and Bliss had never breathed a word of it. Why did she feel she’d been tricked somehow? ‘It’s odd she never told us. Weird, actually.’ Anne pursed her lips. ‘Married to Gerald Grady . . .’
‘There was another husband as well. He was English. Bliss was the marrying kind.’ Judith looked from one sister to the other with bright, amused eyes. ‘When I first met her in London she was very young, hardly twenty. She’d won a scholarship to study art in England and was finding it all rather overwhelming.’
‘And she married Gerald Grady?’
Judith ignored Anne’s prompt. ‘She was exquisitely beautiful in those days, but I don’t think she fully realised the effect she had upon people. The various effects. You see, most of the time she lived in a world of her own. Men, of course, found her very attractive, but some were, I think, more intimidated than drawn by her beauty. Have you ever found that?’ She didn’t wait for an answer but continued, as if she was talking to herself. ‘Beauty can do that, you know. And as for women . . . I suppose there was often that instinctive dislike of a competitor. I felt it myself at first. I knew it was silly, but I was young, just married, attractive enough in my own way but not in her league. I soon realised that Bliss was an innocent abroad, very young and gauche, quite out of her depth. I felt very protective of her.’
‘She always seemed so sophisticated,’ said Paula.
‘Oh yes. That came later.’ Judith looked at them both for a few seconds, eyes narrowed. ‘I was telling you the history of the paintings, wasn’t I? They are all portraits of Bliss. When they parted, Gerry ripped the canvases off their stretchers and threw them out into the street to be taken away with the rubbish. Rob retrieved them and took them back to Gerry, but he didn’t want them. “Give them to Liza,” he said – Liza was what he called her. “Let her have them.” But she didn’t want them. None of us had any idea of Gerry’s future reputation. Rob – was it “waste not, want not”? I have no idea – rescued and re-stretched them. Then, when we moved out here, we had so many paintings crated for the voyage, it seemed best to take them as well. We asked Bliss about them on each visit but it was never the right time for her to take them. Years turned to decades and now – it’s more than half a century. And here you are.’
‘Why did he throw them in the street?’ asked Anne. ‘Why was he so angry?’
‘She’d left him. I’m sure there’ll be some so-called historian eager for the story. Look how they keep raking through the ashes of Bert Tucker and Sidney Nolan and Sunday Reed. People love to read about artists with their irregular lives. It fits in with the popular idea that the artist is larger than life, not bound by the rules of ordinary folk. They will like the twist, too, that Gerald had a son he never knew about – Malcolm.’ She gestured again towards the photograph. ‘Malcolm, the boy who played with you, Anne. He was born here, at the local hospital. Bliss was his mother. Ah, Asha. The tea.’
BY THE SHORE
It was stinking hot and only November. Loch Lomond was stuffy. I felt bloated and out of sorts. Not ill, exactly, but my tummy was behaving oddly. Surely travel sickness was supposed to cease once you’d arrived?
I’d raided the old ladies’ medicine cabinet for bottles of Eno’s salts, milk of magnesia and syrup of figs and ranged them in front of me on the kitchen table.
‘Which one should I take?’ I asked Miss Simpson.
‘I’d see a doctor, if I were you.’
‘Oh no,’ I said. ‘It’s just some tummy bug. You’re a nurse; which one should I try first?’
‘I’m a nurse, dear, and I really think you should see a doctor.’
‘I’m sure it’s nothing serious. Just the food on the flight, and then the shock of Aunt Emu and now Miss Minnie . . .’
Miss Simpson stood looking at me.
‘A doctor. Really? Do you think so?’
‘Yes, dear, I do.’
When I got home from my appointment, Miss Simpson was sitting at the kitchen table drinking tea. I dropped into the chair opposite her and she poured me a cup in silence.
‘Well,’ she said, after a bit. ‘What did the doctor say?’
‘You knew, didn’t you?’
She nodded. ‘You didn’t guess?’ she asked. ‘You didn’t even consider it?’
‘No.’
‘These things happen,’ she said sympathetically. ‘What will you do? Is the father . . . I mean, can you marry?’
‘I was married. We’re getting a divorce. I’m also engaged.’
She poured another cup of tea for herself and then for me. ‘Complicated, then,’ she said.
When the doctor told me, I was astonished, but more inclined to be happy than not. I even grinned as I reattached my stockings to their suspenders behind the screen. Clever us, I thought, meaning Felix and me. Only that one time!
The doctor washed his hands carefully in his little basin, and when I appeared from behind the screen fully dressed, he waved the nurse out of the room. He sat at his desk and motioned to me to sit in the chair.
‘This is most unusual,’ he said. ‘You are sure you had no idea?’
‘What is unusual?’ I asked.
‘You are four months pregnant, Miss Adair.’ His voice was thin and sour with disapproval. Was it because he thought I was unmarried or because I was too stupid to realise that I was going to have a baby?
‘Are you sure? But I can’t possibly be. I mean . . .’
Felix and I . . . that one time was only five weeks ago, if that. This baby was Gerald’s.
I sat under a Moreton Bay fig in the scruffy little park opposite the surgery watching the sparrows pecking and scratching in the dirt. A dog mooched up, sniffed my feet and mooched away. An old man with a pram full of beer bottles trundled past.
But he’d used a Frenchie.
Felix and I hadn’t used anything, and I had been worried that I might start a baby.
But there’d been some blood.
I never paid too much attention to that side of things, never marked the calendar – careless of me, I know, but I wasn’t one of those girls with heavy monthlies; it was usually more of a spot and a dribble and every now and then I skipped. I skipped a few times after I miscarried, and spent days dreaming, wishing, hoping. If I had become pregnant then, Gerald and I would be on our Greek island and I would be posing for him as the One of Sweet Kisses, the Madonna of Tenderness, in a whitewashed room with a window that looked out onto a sea of fishermen and porpoises. That dream baby lay peacefully asleep at my breast, her dark lashes soft on her cheek, but this one, curled up inside me, was a wide-awake and spiteful little homunculus. Gerald’s child. What was I supposed to do with it? I couldn’t go back to him. I couldn’t get rid of it – even I knew that if you wanted to go down that route, it had to be early days. And I couldn’t see Felix and I . . .
No. Not with Gerald’s child. I was caught, trapped, stuck.
‘Miss Adair? Are you all ri
ght? Do you want me to call a cab for you?’
It was the doctor’s receptionist. She’d been watching me through the office window. ‘Was it bad news?’ she asked.
‘No,’ I said, pulling myself together, smiling as one does.
It was the worst.
Miss Simpson was sympathetic, but in the end she asked me if I could, perhaps, find somewhere else to stay.
‘I think that would be best, Miss Adair. You can see for yourself the state Miss Minnie gets into every time she sees you. It takes a lot to calm her down again.’
That afternoon I had my one and only appointment – under my married name – with an obstetrician, in her rooms near the Queen Victoria Hospital. That, Dr Pendlebury told me, was where she would deliver the baby.
‘Deliver,’ I repeated, caught, as I am so often, by an inappropriate image. This was of a baby in a parcel, punching its fat fist through the brown paper to get out. Looking down at the just-perceptible swelling above the lap of my flowered dress, I still couldn’t believe this had anything to do with me.
‘Is there anything else?’ Dr Pendlebury thought by her shuffling of notes she had dismissed me. ‘Mrs Grady?’
Through the window I had a clear view of the tall, dingy red-brick hospital, like some Victorian poorhouse, and its ghastly Gothic hideousness suddenly struck me. It looked like somewhere you were taken, and from which you did not return. Some of this must have shown in my face, for she looked at me over the top of her wire-rimmed glasses.
‘My dear,’ she said, ‘there’s nothing to worry about. You’re a perfectly healthy young woman, and –’ She reached out to pat my hand, but she had enormous fingers and big teeth and I didn’t think I could bear her to touch me again, so I just ran out of the room and past the desk and down the stairs. When I met Judith at a quiet little cafe near the town hall I was breathless and nearly hysterical and, like the eagle she was, Judith swooped down and caught me up.
‘You must come and stay with us,’ she said.
I had two or three weeks of stormy unhappiness, which must have tried Rob and Judith’s patience sorely, and then, to everyone’s surprise, serenity wrapped around me like the Virgin’s blue cloak. Call it denial, or stupidity, or a stubborn refusal to face the future, but I found myself living day by day – no, moment by moment and the problem of Gerald’s baby ceased to trouble me. I think I was never happier in my entire life. It was the hormones, you see.
I wish I had known about hormones. I wish I’d understood that Mother Nature is, fundamentally, a conniving bitch. She is armed and dangerous with chemicals. There are the ones that make you fall in love; the ones that fill you with unslakable lust; the ones that stupefy you with contentment so that you lie in the sun without a thought in your pretty head.
Clever Mother. She gets the job done, but don’t be fooled; she doesn’t care about you. Nature wants babies. Even when they cancel each other out – baby foxes and baby rabbits, baby Nazis and baby Jews – that’s all she cares about. To get them conceived, she spares no expense – there are costume parties with feather ruffles, swollen pink posteriors and, of course, a spring theme – but she never sticks around to clean up the mess. So many times I thought I was in love, knew that I would die if I didn’t have this man or that man, and what was it all about? Getting those trillions of tiny warriors, poor spermatozoa, to go over the top and once more into the breach. And what a wasted effort, for even if the timing was right, they were so often met by rubber or hostile creams and foams, or cold-shouldered by an indifferent egg.
Or not, for the old girl was on a winner in those years after the war. Having lost so many, she had to speed up production. When did they come up with the phrase ‘baby boom’? It was more like a tsunami. In the mornings, the shopping strip was clogged with perambulators and pushchairs and would-be bolters in harnesses and leads. The swelling tide of tots then flowed into kindergarten and out again, washing up against the inadequate old school building, and the education department looked around desperately for teachers.
Judith told me that Rob was thinking of doing a Dip Ed; he was sick of freelance work and a steady job would be good.
‘Are you going to start a family?’
She stared at me for a few seconds, then said, ‘I can’t.’
‘Can’t what?’
‘I can’t have children.’
‘Oh. But do you . . . did you want . . .?’
‘Oh yes.’ She half turned her face away.
‘Judith, I never knew.’ Hesitantly I put my hand over hers. I was not used to offering comfort to Judith. ‘Would you like to . . .’
She laughed again. ‘Tell you about it? It’s awfully dreary, Bliss.’
I took her hand in mine, and felt the thrill of intimacy. ‘Go on.’
‘I had an ectopic pregnancy, years ago, before Rob. Do you know what that is? The egg lodges and begins to grow inside the tube. It can kill you but I was lucky, I had a good doctor who picked it up. But – after that – well, they found that the baby-making apparatus had become so scarred, so stuck together with adhesions and generally the most awful mess there inside . . .’ She withdrew her hand and began, uncharacteristically, to halt and almost stammer. ‘That’s why . . . I thought . . . when you have reached a decision about . . . about the baby . . .’
I’d told Rob and Judith everything – well, not quite. Actually, not at all. I left out the other mad sexual encounters that led up to the conception. Why? Quite simply, I was ashamed of myself. I didn’t want them to know about Bliss the tigress of lust and passion. I thought, obscurely, that they would stop loving me if they knew, so I only said to them that, at our last meeting, ‘something happened’ between Gerald and me, and that I didn’t want to talk about it.
They knew about the engagement to Felix. They understood that the pregnancy once longed for was now simply a waiting game and the baby itself was neither hated nor loved, only vaguely, gently pitied.
‘I would . . . I mean, we would . . .’
I finally understood. She wanted it. That was what she was trying to say. She and Rob wanted my baby.
Don’t judge me. The world is different now, but then a child without a father was a bastard, and its mother no better than she should be. I was not brave, I was not bohemian, and my imagination, which could just possibly have painted a rose-coloured picture of Felix and me and baby makes three, baulked at the pair of us and Gerald’s child. It was a way out of the mess. Simple. Well, a good lawyer and some of Aunt Emu’s money made it simple. That’s what I thought.
Rob’s Chelsea self worked in his studio dressed in loose trousers, an absurd striped Breton shirt and espadrilles, but once or twice a week he suited up and took the train into Melbourne to the advertising agency where he worked. He returned with French champagne, oysters, syrupy Greek cakes, pistachio nuts and apricots, books, magazines and bubble bath. It was usually just in time for dinner, which had been cooked companionably by Judith and me. We listened to the radio or talked, and then, as I got bigger and slower, I would simply sit and watch her. In London, she’d dressed in gathered skirts that made her look dumpy, and turtlenecks that showed no skin, her style sternly librarian-ish with glasses and pulled-back hair. Now I saw that she was, actually, elegantly voluptuous, like a Modigliani, with high, firm breasts and a hand-span waist. In her cotton sundresses with her arms and back bare, she was tanned and radiant and, if not beautiful, then nearly so.
Letters from Felix. To Felix. Par avion on the envelope. On wings to my love.
At first, before I got too big and couldn’t be bothered, I went into the city nearly every week. To have my hair cut, to shop, to go to the cinema, to visit Loch Lomond and see Miss Simpson. I dressed with care, did my face, put on a hat, gloves, heels and a matching handbag, and as for frocks, until seven months I could get away with clothes worn a size or two larger as long as they had a bit of draping at the front or a high waistline. Judith made a face when she first saw me in full rig.
‘My
goodness, Bliss, you look like you’re going to the Coronation.’
‘It’s good for my morale,’ I told her.
‘But you don’t look like yourself,’ she said, unknowingly an echo of Gerald. ‘You look so artificial.’
‘She looks all right to me,’ said Rob. ‘And smells delicious. What is that?’
‘Je Reviens,’ I said. ‘It’s French and terribly expensive.’
Judith snorted. ‘You ridiculous child.’ She disapproved.
Judith often disapproved. Or, rather, she was so bent on improving me that she lost sight of the fact that, like most people, I didn’t want to be fixed, I wanted to be loved as I was. And if ‘as I was’ consisted at times of layers of artificiality, the several coats of lacquer, buffed and polished to a reflective shine that I maintained until after I married Alec, I only wanted all the more to be seen, to be listened to, to be coaxed out of my pearly shell and reassured that around me were no dangerous beaks and claws.
I tried to tell Judith once. Transparent jellyfish had begun to wash up on the beach and float in drifts in the shallows, and I said to her, ‘Sometimes I feel like one of those.’
She thought it was funny. ‘You feel like a jellyfish?’ And the more I floundered to explain myself, the more she laughed.
Rob said, ‘I know what she means, Ju. She’s trying to say that her identity doesn’t feel fixed and permanent; it feels scarily adrift and fragile and . . . well, jelly-like. Squashable. Am I right, Bliss?’
Exactly right.
February. The hot brazen disc of the sun, the arc of the bay, the faint shapes of the You Yangs in heat haze across the water. Judith and I would stand ankle-deep in the sea to watch the clouds change colour as the sun sank lower and the last gulls, crying, winged home. Under our feet the sand was gritty with shell fragments and marked with corrugations left by the waves. Wading out, we would go up to our knees, thighs, and then step up onto a smooth sandbank. The neighbours, Dutch immigrants, all tall and blonde, passing by in their little boat, waving, called our names.
