by Biff Ward
When people asked, Why does she wear gloves? we answered, She says she’s got a rash.
For us, ‘she says’ was the giveaway, our code for ‘it’s not true’. What else could we say? How to describe what you can’t believe? What others heard, however, was that she had a rash. She gave us that sleight of word and we hid behind it.
Dad’s involvement with Phyl was different from his other dalliances. It was clear he was in love. They both were. The two of them attracted a group of friends who became their other family. Mum was permanently indisposed at home and Bill, Phyl’s husband, was absent for lengthy swathes of time being a politician in Sydney. The group, especially those without young children, had ‘drinks’ after work at Phyl’s house, they played tennis on Saturday or Sunday afternoons for years, they acted in very amateur theatrics and they went to parties and dinners at each other’s houses and soirees and balls at the university. As I saw it, the next circle out in Dad’s world consisted of the other lefties on campus and the next, bizarrely, was made up of the squatter couples of New England merino fame who had been part of Phyl’s world.
Dad was the happiest I ever knew him in those years with Phyl. He laughed often under her tutelage, in her spinning orbit. They swooped up and down the long streets and slopes of Armidale together, public and outrageous in their joy.
He asked me to meet Sue, Phyl’s daughter, who went to New England Girls’ School, the Anglican boarding school on the edge of town, and who was the same age as I was. Presuming he was wanting to augment his own social whirl rather than mine, I declined repeatedly. He and I were shopping on the main street one Saturday morning when, lo and behold, we bumped into Phyl with her Sue on a mid-term break. Within minutes, Sue and I walked across the road together to buy ice-creams. We have been friends ever since.
One night, walking with Prue to the pictures, I saw Dad’s Holden parked around the corner from Phyl’s place. A car in hiding.
Oh, I said. That’s our car, sure that Prue must be wondering.
Mmmm? She went on talking about a song.
I don’t know what he’s doing here . . . I muttered, looking theatrically at darkened houses.
She appeared to notice nothing.
As I grew, Dad insisted I learn the rudiments of cooking. I’m doing a leg of lamb on Sunday and I want you to be there and learn how, he would say to me. Mark was not corralled in the same way. I liked it though, just Dad and me in the kitchen on a winter’s afternoon, warmed by the stove, dusted with flour when we made a cake, me licking the bowl like the child I still was.
Once Mum erupted into this scene, tousled from her afternoon sleep, and threw something—a wooden spoon?—at Dad. He bustled her away and I kept my head down when he came back. We never knew when it would happen.
The other place I could be with Dad, just the two of us, was at his desk. He had bought it second-hand as we moved from Sydney to Canberra for the PhD. It was made of oak, with three drawers down either side and a shelf at the back. He placed his dictionaries, his Fowler’s Modern English Usage and an encyclopaedia in twenty-five small red volumes along that shelf, every book aligned precisely with the front edge. When The Australian Legend was published, the mainstream version of his thesis, it joined this shelf of his working resources and as he wrote other books, his own annotated copy of each would be added. The area underneath the shelf held piles of papers and letters, organised with print-room precision.
His chair, also of oak, was deep in the seat with support for back and arms created out of one splendid curve. He always maintained it was the only chair in the house you could swing on. This was a special chair, he said, built to withstand stresses no other chair could manage. And swing he did, spending whole evenings balanced on its two hind legs with his long, square-tipped fingers tucked under the front of the desk in a delicate fulcrum, his preferred position for reading and thinking. When he was ready to write, or when I came in to see him, the front legs thunked to the floor as he straightened up to talk with me.
Yes, darling, what is it? he would ask.
Some of my most lucid learning happened there, leaning against the curvature of his chair. In my leaving year, I was the only student doing English Honours and I was not inspired by my leaden English teacher in the special sessions we had after school. Dad explained the grammar that Mr Leaden could not. He asked questions and listened to my reactions to the extra novels and plays and poetry I was reading and he elucidated the more abstruse aspects of the history of the English language. When I gathered together copies of previous exam papers so that I could predict questions, he suggested quotes for the answers I was preparing.
I loved to stand there, maybe with his arm around my waist, while he talked. He could, like many men who revere knowledge, give too big an answer, take me on a detour fit for a university lecture in order to answer the small query I had laid before him. I was happy just being with him.
I did, however, sometimes long for him to be severe, like other parents were. His mantra for our teen years—I know I can trust you—meant that we seldom asked to do anything unreasonable, so he had no cause to say no. When the circle of fourth form girls rhapsodised about Moulin Rouge, the risqué John Huston film at the cinema, they all ended with the same cry, But I won’t be allowed to see it!
I knew I would. Yet I sat there wishing I could complain too, wishing there was some way I could rail against the injustices of life at home. Wishing that Dad would say no, so I’d have something out in the public arena to resent.
As it turned out, I developed acute appendicitis while seeing the film with Mark and remember nothing of it. After the operation, I had a lot of pain.
He sewed your bum-gut to your navel! was Dad’s take on it, even while he traipsed me to doctors and second opinions.
One day while I was home from school with my gut-ache, Mum had a visitor. She was a woman who proclaimed her professorial-spouse status by being queen bee of the university wives. There was at that time an official body named The University Wives. In a post-women’s liberation world, the visitor’s overweening energy would have been put to excellent use as a dress-shop proprietor or events promoter.
I’m representing the wives’ group, Margaret dear, she said as she sashayed down the hall. We were wondering how things are going and whether we can help?
From my bed, I could hear every word where they sat at the dining table with cups of tea.
Anything at all, her top girl’s voice bounced through all the rooms of the house. She stayed half an hour. My heart was thudding as I realised that somewhere out there was a group of women who’d been talking about my mother in a public way, all huddled together at a meeting. And what’s more, our visitor would be reporting back.
Mum hardly said a word.
As Top Girl bustled down the hall and out the front door, what did I feel? That I wanted to burrow deeper in the bed and never come out? That I wanted my mother to vaporise to nothing so that the shame and embarrassment would stop? That The University Wives were beneath us? That this was going on behind Dad’s back, as though people thought he couldn’t cope on his own? I tried to picture Mum joining the ‘Wives’. Impossible.
She drifted back to her spot at the kitchen table and I went back to school the next day.
Now I can see that the network of women, connected through the university where their husbands worked, might have cared about my mother. Or might have wanted to care but were not sure how to go about it. How could they have helped, for example, with the teaspoons—or her hands?
Her fervour about locking had come with us from Canberra but now it blossomed with the fertiliser of her growing paranoia. Fearing invasion, it became her standard practice to wedge a spoon under every door to the outside—all four of them. She added sliding locks as well and she hammered four-inch nails into window frames at odd angles to serve as further bulwarks against those she believed were trying to burst in. In the end, every door and window had at least three, even four, locking devic
es.
When I tugged at the door handle on my way out, only to realise there were two teaspoons at my toes, I became enraged. It was not only my frustration with the impeded movement, but also because the whole locking business was saturated with the helplessness and hopelessness of trying to reason with someone who was irrational. If I was coming in and couldn’t push the door open, I hammered my fury until she removed the spoons and locks and then I pushed past her, even through her, and stormed to my room.
She tried to time it so she could remove the spoons and nails when we might be about to leave and she’d hover by the door when we might be coming home, to forestall our anger. But she stayed up so as to replace them when we were all in bed to ensure our safety through the night. Sometimes Dad would see her and there’d be a spat while he tried to wrest the spoons from her. I was sure she did it later while he slept.
Mark developed a sleepwalking habit at that time, where he wandered in his pyjamas until he reached the front door and tried to open it by pawing and pulling at it, whimpering all the while. Sometimes, it was the sliding doors on the record-player cabinet but always he’d be saying, I can’t get out! The rattling and his cries that could turn into wails woke Dad or me and one of us would lead him back to bed. If Mum tried to help, we would shove her aside—she had no rights here, it was her fault that he was in this state, after all.
Me in my Indian skirt with the little mirrors
Then Christmas came—the four of us sitting at the dining table to eat roast chicken, our once a year treat. I was dressed in the red Indian skirt with little mirrors sewn on in white stitching which my Aunt Claire had sent from Delhi, a skirt to show off in the ’50s.
I can’t remember the trigger for Dad’s explosion, but I know the rhythm of it. Mum said something, something that was, by then, instantly seen by all of us as part of what we found unbearable. It might have been: Those people down the back lane have been watching us again. Or it could have been: That chook we had last year was rotten. I knew we shouldn’t be eating it. Or she might burst out with a sexual reference, giggling at her spoonerism: We could hut the potatoes with a cunting knife.
Whatever it was, Dad reacted, yelling, Don’t be mad! You’re absolutely raving!
It wasn’t that these big eruptions happened often. In fact, they were infrequent. What really gave them their potency was witnessing the dam breaking inside Dad, the flood of despair, grief and tired, tired anguish surging out through sluice-gates that had been opened too quickly. So this was familiar. Shocking and sad, yes, but known.
What was new was what happened next. Mark, the quiet one, spoke up. He attacked her too. Yes, you’re mad, he said, in his deepening voice, trying out being a man.
I stared at him. He sounded just like Dad, which made two of them bludgeoning her. I leapt up with some sort of cry, rushed down the hall and out the front door. I ran into the park across the road and sank down behind one of the giant pine trees, gasping and sobbing. Our Christmas.
After ten minutes, Dad peered around the tree and sat down beside me. He took me in his arms. We were too far inside this world to be able to talk about it and it was waiting for us across the road in that beautiful old house.
Thankfully, I never heard Mark join in again when Dad was being abusive. In our unwritten rules, Mark and I were allowed to show our frustration, to become angry even, but not to call her names, not to say she was mad. Dad’s struggle to hold us all together gave him licence, he was allowed to blow up.
In the new year, Grannie made the long trip from Adelaide to Armidale to test the waters as to whether she might come and live with us. Dad made the extraordinary decision that we, without Mum, could squeeze in a holiday because Grannie could keep an eye on her. The three of us plus a mate of Mark’s drove to the coast and camped behind some sandhills. We had bushes for shade and there was a tin shed nearby with toilets and water. We surfed all morning, read books and surfed some more after lunch, cooked chops on a fire and slept deeply on our groundsheets at night under the dotted black dome of the sky for five glorious days.
When we arrived home and walked through the front door into the hall, we were greeted by Mum in one of her seething, other-worldly states and Grannie, a truly sweet woman, was grey and stuttering. Dad went straight to his mother and led her away. I glared at Mum. What have you done? I said through gritted teeth.
Her eyes gleaming, she turned away.
Dad told us only that Mum had sworn at Grannie and been unpleasant and that Grannie had had a little stroke. Now I have read a letter he wrote to his sister Jean where he tells her that Mum dragged Grannie violently out of bed and abused her for imaginary wrongdoings and thoughts. The ‘little stroke’ caused the beginning of Grannie’s decline. She left soon after and never came to Armidale again.
I read Jane Eyre for the first time on that holiday. I was carried, rather than swept along, by Jane’s escape from the school of torment and her arrival at the gothic house of Rochester because it had the Dickensian familiarity of literature I was used to, including the hints of sinister doings in the night. Then I heard the screams from the tower. Next were the sightings of a captive woman, followed by her banshee attack on Jane and my realisation that this was a mad woman, a maddened woman, locked in the tower for her own good. On living with the woman in the tower I was an initiate.
The narrative of captivity and cruelty was only the surface. I didn’t need the rest of the book, the grief in Rochester’s bearing, the unfolding of the mystery, to see the underbelly, the why of the apparently callous treatment. Rochester had the money to create a private asylum for his wife Bertha. He was, I divined, a good man protecting her from a House of Bedlam. And that left him, like us, silently wailing.
Our household could look, to a visiting child—or adult for that matter—pretty close to normal, even neat and certainly under control. Just like Rochester’s. As the years went by, Dad’s exasperation with Mum flared more often so it might look as though he, his harsh abruptness, was the problem. But like Rochester’s helpers, Mark and I knew he was managing to maintain a nearly presentable life for us in a tremulous set of circumstances.
Much later I read an array of feminist and psychoanalytic interpretations of the book—Bertha as patriarchal exemplar for Jane as to what happens if you step out of line, for example. But I still feel only grief when I read Jane Eyre, grief specifically for Bertha and Rochester.
Some months after Grannie’s visit, Mark flew over the handlebars of his bike at the bottom of a long hill when his brakes failed. His head smashed into a fence and he was taken to hospital with concussion. He was given a cocktail of antibiotics for cuts and grazes and, believing all was well, Dad went away to one of his conferences. An allergic reaction to the drugs set in and Mark’s head blew up so that his features—his eyes and nose and mouth—which had not moved, became a grotesquerie, squashed together at the bottom of the large pink and white balloon his head had become.
Mum moved his bed into the dining room so that he was not out of sight, not even for a minute. She believed he would die without her fervid vigilance. She tried to give him a sponge bath—he didn’t want one but he did want to stay in bed to rest his aching head. She brought him fresh orange juice, she tried to plump his pillows, she insisted he eat some broth or told him with glassy eye and tense mien that he needed to lie on his side and not open his eyes and that would make him better. She leaned over him, pulled at sheet corners and poked Vegemite toast at him. She brought in doctors for different opinions. They looked embarrassed and said he would get better in a few days.
He cried, he shouted, he pushed her away. I pleaded with her to leave him alone but she couldn’t.
Dad was away, Mark was crying, we needed help. It was too much; eventually I rode off on my bike and left him to it.
His head gradually shrank to normal, Dad came home and Mum resumed her position at the kitchen table, cigarette burning, cup of coffee going cold, digging at her hands.
I m
issed seeing that I had been provided with a rehearsal for what was to come later that year. It would have been good if I had paid more attention. But at the time it simply drove me away, out out out into the alternative world away from the Bertha tower which no one outside the family seemed to see in the centre of our house.
NINE
The Pills
As we settled into 1959, my last year at school, the evenings became a minuet of will power. Mum had her position in the kitchen, all washed up and tidy, sitting at the table with her cup of coffee and her cigarette and her hand-gouging kit, perhaps giggling quietly, perhaps getting agitated, perhaps staring fixedly. While other men might have retired to a shed, Dad had his desk at the other end of the house. I was in my room in between them with Mark across the hall from me, door a bit open like mine.
The three of us were separated from Mum by two doors, both closed by Dad as he left after dinner. We were dotted like a cotillion along the hall with Mum, the leader of the dance, the instigator of movement, alone in the kitchen. If we heard her coming through from there, I could feel how Mark and I tensed and strained our ears, how nothing else existed for those seconds except the sound of her feet on the dining-room floor. Maybe she was going to the bathroom? But if not, if she was bent on coming further, the moment she touched the handle of the door leading into the hall, Mark sprang from his room to try and stop her. He begged and pleaded, he waved his arms like a dancer and tugged at her. Leave him alone! Don’t go up there.
