by David Malouf
Every significant happening here belongs to the past and was of a geological nature. A line of extinct volcanoes whose fires were dashed out several millennia back, leaving a heap of dark, cone-shaped clinkers, are the most striking components of the scene. Cooling as they have in odd shapes, they have ceased to be terrible and are merely curious. Even their names in the Aboriginal language, which were often crude but did at least speak up for the mysteries, have dwindled on the local tongue to mere unpronounceables, old body-jokes whose point, if there was one, has been lost in the commonness of use.
It is one of my duties as an emissary of the Arts to bring news of our national culture to this slow back-water. My name is Adrian Trisk, livewire and leprechaun; or more properly, Projects Officer with the Council for the Arts.
The routine is always the same. Advertisements are placed in the “Canefarmers’ Gazette" or “Parish Recorder” and the Shire Hall hired for say Tuesday night at seven thirty, with supper provided and no charge. I show slides of contemporary Australian painting and sometimes a film, using the projector that is housed, along with the paraphernalia for Sunday Mass, in a hutch at the back of the hall; or I lecture on the life and works of an Australian poet. Nothing rigorous. Usually there are no more than a dozen in the audience; sometimes, in bad weather or when my appearance coincides with a meeting of the.
Country Women's Association, just two or three. Most difficult of all are places like Karingai where the population “mixed"—that is, part Australian, part Italian, part Aboriginal, part Indian; and worst of all is Karingai itself, where even the Indian population is split into sects that worship at rival temples. I make certain, so far as these things can be arranged, that towns like Karingai appear on my itinerary no more than once every two or three years. Bridging the gap is all very well, but there is a limit to what a man can do with the discovery poems of Douglas Stewart and a slide evening with William Dobell.
The culture business, it's a box of knives! I could show wounds. I have been at it now for half a lifetime: twenty years as an expatriate with the British Council in Sarawak, Georgetown, Abadan; a stint at a West African University; two years as tutor to the brother-in-law of a sheikh—I'm not altogether without experience. But at fifty-six I have no firm foot on the ladder. There are always the young, pouring out of the universities with their heads full of schemes for converting the masses; little blond geniuses, all charm and killer-instinct, looking for cover while they finish a novel; girls with a flair for doling out rejection-slips and serving coffee to visiting celebrities; streamlined lesbians who know just how to re-organise everything so that it works. I have enemies everywhere, and they have not scrupled to poison the ear of authority with insinuations that I am not what I claim to be: that my post at that flyblown university, for example, was not on the teaching side but in catering. Life is a constant struggle.
I meet it with energy. Boundless energy. Nothing disarms people so completely, I have discovered, as breathless enthusiasm. Hopping about on one foot, crowing, chuckling, slapping one's thigh, pinching people's elbows in an excess of delight at finding them alive, well, and just where they might be expected to be; peppering the speech with absurd formulations like “Aren't we all having a marvellous time? Isn't this just what the doctor ordered?,” or such patent insincerities as “Hello there, all you lovely, lovely people!;” above all buttering the ear with flattery, flattery so excessive that only the most hardened egotist could take it seriously and lesser men curl up with embarrassment—these are powerful weapons in the right hand, and immediately establish the user as a harmless crank, too clownlike, too scatty, too effusive and highly strung to be a master of calculation.
Well, it's one of the strategies. In fact I am full of good will and want only to be left alone to make my way and to enjoy a moment of late sunshine at the top of the tree, but to achieve that I must protect myself, and protecting myself means playing the buffoon and avoiding places like Karingai where for reasons quite beyond my control (like the fact that the wretched Indians have rival temples) I will be left presenting my Brett Whiteley extravaganza to the wife of the Methodist minister, a retired timbergetter who is rewriting the works of Henry Lawson, and the hapless two-year incumbent of the one-teacher school.
2
I had finished my lecture and was waiting for the minister's wife, C. of E. on this occasion, to lead me to supper. The coffee-urn and the trestle table laden with sausage rolls, anzacs, rainbow cake, date-loaf, and pavlova were waiting at the end of the hall, presided over by two large-bosomed ladies who had spent the whole of my talk in setting it up, its impressive abundance determined less by the expected size of the audience than by their own sense of what was due to the Arts—the Arts, out here, meaning Cookery, of which the higher forms are cake-decoration and the ornamental bottling of carrots. The platform lights had been removed, the extension lead and projector, like some image of local veneration, had been restored to its hutch.
“If y’ don't mind, Mr. Trist, I'd appreciate a few words. You might ‘ear somethin’ t’ yer advantage.”
It was the legal phrase that startled me—I was used to the little confusion about my name.
The speaker was a diminutive woman of sixty-five or seventy, very battered looking, whom I had taken when she first came in, she was so dark-eyed and brown, for one of the Indians; except that she wore a hat, a crumpled straw with two roses pinned to the brim, and a pair of white gloves that suggested Anglo-Saxon formality, the effort a woman makes who has to see her lawyer about the terms of a separation, or a doctor for what might prove, if luck is against her, to be a fatal illness— occasions she would want, later, to remember and be dressed for.
She had made no pretence, I noticed, of following my lecture, though it is one of my finest and had been delivered with all my customary verve. “Arthur Boyd and the Mystic Bride" was not, it seems, her cup of tea. Easing off her shoes with a series of gasps and sighs that was itself very nearly mystical, and which she in no way attempted to hide, she had slumped deeper and deeper into the canvas chair, blinking her eyes at one moment, as if what she saw on a vivid slide alarmed her, then once more sinking from view; and had difficulty, when it was over, in getting back into her shoes. An inconsiderate woman, who astonished me now by announcing: "It's t’ do with that article you writ on Alicia Vale.”
Now there is such a paper. It is one of several on a wide range of topics—West Nigerian gold-weights, Renaissance scissors, house interiors in Muscat and Oman. My publications at least are indisputable and can be produced as proof positive of their own existence. It's a little coup it gives me great satisfaction to produce. But that my Vale monograph, which isn't entirely unknown to followers of the Diva, should have found its way to Karingai! And into the hands of this odd, ungrammatical woman!
“You've read it?” I said foolishly.
She ignored the question. “I can't talk ‘ere, it isn't the right place. But I reckon you'll be interested in some information I got.” She worked her mouth a little, having lost control for the moment of her teeth, which she must also have assumed for the occasion. She snapped, got them fixed again, and went on. “And things. I got some ‘v ‘er things. ‘Ere's me address. I've writ it on this bitta paper. I'll expecher round ten.”
She thrust a page of ruled notepaper into my hand, “Thanks"— once to me and again to the minister's wife—and was off.
“Who was that?” I asked, and stood staring at the floral back.
Mrs. Logan allowed her lips to form a superior smile. “Oh that, poor soul, was our Mrs. Judge. She's quite a character. Lives out near the Indians.”
My first thought, I should admit, was that it was a trap. My passion for the Diva, my obsession we might as well call it, with her life, her records, her relics, is pretty well-known at the Council, and I have enemies who would be happy to see me discomforted.
As a matter of simple caution I pushed the scrap of paper into my breast pocket as if it were of no importance, rubbe
d my hands together in a gesture of exaggerated delight at the prospect of sausage rolls and pavlova (overdoing it as usual to the point where it declared itself to be quite plainly an act), and waited for Mrs. Logan to move. She did not. She was observing me with amused but dangerous detachment.
She was a tall young woman whose husband had hopes of being a bishop. She was bearing their period in the wilderness with a good grace but was impatient. It showed. Her words snapped, her fingers flew at things, the tendons in her neck were strained. Her intelligence, finding no object out here, had begun to spin away from her, and since she leaned so much towards it, had set her off balance. She was poised but unstill, and seemed quite capable, I thought, of taking an interest in me, and in the unfortunate Mrs. Judge, out of boredom, or because no larger opportunity offered itself for revealing how superior she was to the follies and passions of men.
“You mean to go?” she asked.
I tried to laugh it off.
“Oh well, it depends, doesn't it? On how the morrow feels. I mean, you never know, do you? Perhaps it will be a Mrs. Judge day.”
She seemed to find this very comical. I did a little jig as if I too recognised the absurdity of the thing; and experienced a wave of nausea at my own impiety. The bishop's wife, no doubt, had other notions of what was holy.
But I had saved myself, that's what mattered, and looked on the three sausage rolls I forced down, and the two slices of pavlova, as a proper expiation, and a proper snub to my hostess, who had assumed that in the matter of pavlovas at least there would be a certain complicity between us. In fact I loathe pavlova; but this is a question of taste, not Taste, and I took two slices very willingly to make amends. It was only when I got outside at last, and felt the dense sub-tropical night about me, the restless palm leaves fretting and rising, the low stars, the beating of wings and bell-notes in distended throats, the heavy scent of decay that is also the sweet smell of change—it was only then that I let myself off the leash and felt my heart quicken with a sense that even the dreaded Karingai might be the site of a turn in my fortunes, some unique and unlooked-for revelation. A magic name had been spoken and Mrs. Judge's address was burning above my breast.
But of course I would go!
3
I found the house easily enough. One of five unpainted weatherboards on high stumps, it stood apart from the rest of the town on a narrow ridge. The other houses belonged to Indians. Plump dark children, the youngest of them naked, splashed about in mud-puddles in the front yards; chickens rushed out squawking; a lean dog tied to a fence post stood on its four legs and yowled. Morning-glory, running wild in every direction, hauled fences down till they were almost horizontal, swathed the trunks of palms, was piled feet deep above water tanks and outhouse roofs. The big purple blossoms were starred with moisture. From beneath came the faint hum of insects and the smell almost over-poweringly sweet, of rotting vegetation.
Climbing the wooden steps, which had long since lost their rails, I paused at the lattice door and prepared to knock.
The woman was there immediately. She must have been waiting in the shadows beyond. Darker than I remembered, she had, in the clear light of day a driven look, as if she had been hungry for twenty and maybe thirty years for something that had hollowed her out from within and which the black eyes had slowly sunk towards. She wore the same blue floral, but it was beltless now, and her feet on the dry verandah boards were misshapen and bare.
“Come on in,” she said, peering over my shoulder to make sure there was no one with me; then stood and smiled. “I reckoned you wouldn’ let me down.” She turned into the hallway with its worn linoleum. “Come on out t’ the kitchen an’ I'll make a cuppa.”
Indicating a chair at the scrubbed-wood table, she used her forearm to push back mess—jam-tins, scraps of half-eaten toast, several dirty mugs; then filled a kettle, scooped tea from a tin with Japanese ladies in kimonos on each of its faces, and sat. Behind her, on the wood stove, the kettle began to hiss.
“As I was sayin',” she began, as if our conversation of the previous evening had never been interrupted, "I got information t’ give, seein’ as yer interested in ‘er.”
“Alicia Vale?”
She laughed. “Well I don't mean the Queen a’ Sheba.”
She glanced round the smoke-grimed kitchen, cleared a further space between us, as if she were preparing an area amid the chaos where large facts could be established, and with a new light in her eyes, thrust her hand out and opened her fist.
Coiled in her palm was an enamel bracelet of exquisite red and gold, in the form of a serpent. Beside it, two tiny Faberg eggs.
She was delighted with my look of astonishment and gave a harsh, high-pitched laugh.
“There! You didn't expect that, didja? I thought that'd surprise you.” She set the three pieces down and turned away to haul the kettle off the stove. “You oughta know that piece if you're an expert. She wore that in Lakm. New York, nineteen o-five.”
It looked even more extraordinary among the breakfast litter of the table than it might have done in the museum where it belonged: one of those elaborate pieces that were created for her first by Lalique and later by Tiffany—lilies, serpents, salamanders, birds of paradise, all in the blue-green or red-gold of the period and intended to be worn offstage or on, tributes to the fact that her own plumed splendour was continuous with that of the creatures she played, and that these ornaments of her fantasy-life in Babylon or India belonged equally to the world she moved in at Deauville and Monte Carlo, at Karlsbad, Baden-Baden, Capri. The thing writhed. It flashed its tail and threw off sparks. It was solid metal and had survived. I turned it and read the signature.
“Oh, it's genuine alright,” she told me, pouring tea. She gave a wry chuckle. “I took one look at you and I reckoned you'd be the one. I knew it right off. This one, I told meself—he'll believe, if on'y the bracelet. And he does! Here, young feller, drink yer tea.”
She sipped noisily and watched me over the rim of her cup.
“Y'see,” she said, suddenly serious, "I trustcher. I gotta trust someone and you're it. I've decided t’ come out a’ hiding.”
She let this sink in.
“I s'pose you know she was back ‘ere in o-six.”
“O-eight,” I corrected, glad at last to prove, after so many surprises, my expertise. “There was a tour in o-three and another in o-eight— Lucrezia, Lucia, Semiramide, Adriana Lecouvreur” I had it all off pat.
“Yair,” she said. “Well she was ‘ere in o-six as well, that's what I'm tellin’ yer. O-six.”
I was in no position to argue. Nobody in fact knows where Vale was in nineteen hundred and six; the whole year is a blank. In o-five she was in San Francisco, New York, Brussels, London, Paris, and St. Peters- burg. In o-seven in South Africa, Vienna, Budapest, Warsaw, Berlin, and was back in London again to close the season. But in o-six nothing. The theory is that she had a minor breakdown and was hiding out in the south of France. More romantic commentators suggest a trip to China in the company of a Crown Prince, or a time in Persia with an Armenian munitions manufacturer who later, it is true, bought her a house in Hampstead and her first motor. But no one, so far as I know, has mentioned Australia.
“She spent the time,” the woman informed me without emphasis, though her little black eyes were as lively as jumping beans—she was enjoying her moment of triumph—"in a suite in the Hotel Australia in Melbourne. And that's where us twins were born, me and a brother. I am Alicia Vale's daughter!”
She opened up like a fist and presented herself, as she had previously presented the bracelet; all without warning, a glittering jewel. As if to say: "There! If you believed in that you should believe in me. We're all of a piece.”
She sat back sucking her gums and grinning, delighted at having played her little scene with so much skill, and at having, for a second time, so convincingly set me back.
“You can put that down now,” she told me, indicating the bracelet. “We're talki
ng about me.”
I HAVE SPENT nearly twenty years following the career of that extraordinary woman, through newspaper articles, reviews, programmes, opera house account-books (my little paper is a run-up to what I hope may be a full biography), and had, even before I made my first venture upon the documentary records, been spellbound for another twenty by the legend of her and by the thin, pure voice (unhappily a mere ghost of itself) that comes to us from the primitive recording-machines of the period. She was still singing after the war—after 1918, that is—but only small things: a Schubert lullaby, "Home Sweet Home.” Such is the magic of her art that even these become, in her rendering of them, occasions of the most poignant beauty; as if the simple melody of “Home Sweet Home” were being plucked out of the air by an angel banished for ever from the forests of Ceylon or the Gardens of Babylon, bringing with it, out of that lost world, only a radiant and disembodied breath. As an adolescent I would listen to those recordings with locked eyes; imagining from photographs the exotic realm out of which it was climbing, in which a common farmgirl from the South Coast had been transformed by her own genius, and elaborate machines for making ground-fog, clouds and columns that can dissolve before the eyes on a view of endless horizons, into a creature of mythical power and beauty, a princess with the gift of immortality or abrupt extinction in her, a bird of paradise, an avenging angel—though she might also on occasion, and without one's sensing the least disjunction, appear in the pages of an international scandal-sheet, where her notorious language and ordinary, not to say vulgar affairs, like the exploits of the gods in their earthly passages, were transfigured and redeemed by the glory that came trailing after.
A coruscating meteor. Given that a meteor, all light and sparkle as it pours across the heavens, is at centre stone. Nothing so convinces us of her ethereal majesty as the fact that she was also a hard-headed businesswoman, who swore like a navvy (and got away with it), drank three bottles of Guinness at breakfast, and was surrounded wherever she went by a motley circus of book-makers, card-sharps, stand-over men, and a whole chorus-line of pale young fellows with shoulders, who made her every entrance a spectacle. Onstage she was, as often as not, a queen disguised as a gipsy Offstage she was the gipsy itself, demanding that she be treated as a queen.
