by Biff Ward
I nodded yes. Yes, I said.
I might be a rebel, but not against him. He acknowledged what I had said with a crimple of his lips and a tiny nod—and with his eyes, those blue depths of sadness which never left my face.
I remember walking away, down that long corridor, across campus and down the curving path to my college, simply a girl on the move in the park-like landscape to anyone seeing me, but his question had caught me like a perfect cobweb. Its silken strands lay across my mind and a viewer could not see how I was clawing at those threads, desperate to scrape the sticky net off me, to get back to where I had been half an hour before.
A scant two weeks later I started having sex with Ken, who was also a virgin, or as good as. I simply became less resistant to his exploring hands and the deed was done. I didn’t know that somewhere inside me was a plan. My motivation was buried way too deep for me to connect that first touch of an erect penis with the request Dad had made of me.
Ken was twenty-one to my nineteen. Sex was scary. In our girls-only conversations in college, we speculated endlessly about who might not be a virgin, our words breathy with horror at the thought of getting pregnant. No one, absolutely no one in our world, ever discussed abortion. The pill was two years away, not that we had even heard of it in rural Armidale. I fell quickly.
So there I was, back in Dad’s office, this time with Ken, to explain that we had to get married. He looked surprised, concerned, faux-happy in quick succession.
Eventually he said, We’d better look at a calendar then.
We never spoke about my role in his sabbatical leave again. By bringing this new problem to his room, I gave his conundrum back to him. He would solve it somehow—without me. I would be long gone because just before all this happened, Ken had won a scholarship to do a PhD in faraway England. When we had finished talking with Dad and set a date for getting married, I thought of Mum.
Can I borrow the car? I asked, I need to go home.
Of course. He handed me the keys.
Outside in a brisk cold wind, I said to Ken, I’d like to ask Mum if I can have her engagement ring. Is that all right with you?
Yeah. His lips were pinched, his face tight. He must have been in a state of clinical shock. I was too; yet here I was working out what needed to be done for both of us. I hadn’t known before this how lickety-split I could be in making decisions. I was on the move. I was getting away.
Mum had to get up from her afternoon nap to remove the locks.
I’ve got something to tell you, I said.
We moved into the front room: even she could sense the portent I had brought into the house with me.
Ken and I are getting married.
She smiled a little, that fleeting smile of hers that could, on occasion, struggle up out of her world and touch the one the rest of us inhabited.
That’s nice.
I was wondering if we could use your engagement ring, I asked. You know, sort of pass it on.
Yes. All right.
She turned and the familiar waft of lanoline, face powder, tobacco and Nescafé drifted behind her. She came back from their bedroom across the hall with her hand outstretched.
Here it is.
It lay on the palm of her white cotton glove, the silver band with the square sapphire rising from its collar of diamond chips. It was the only real jewellery she owned.
Thanks.
I curled my fingers around it and pressed it into my palm. I looked at her eyes. I hoped she would say something, anything, that fitted the moment. She moved away.
From the car, I looked back at the house: would she come running out and take me back in? I drove around the corner with tears clogging my vision and drew to a stop. I had let down my guard, that palisade I had maintained since I ran away when I was thirteen. After six years, I had opened the gate, just a little, and hoped. She hadn’t even asked why we were getting married. She hadn’t . . .
As I straightened up and drove away, I knew it was an ending. I had no notion then how big that ending would turn out to be.
The wedding day was graced with cold blustery rain. Frank Willcock, my old history teacher, the one I failed to talk to during the nights of the hammer and the axe, drove Dad and me up the main street in the perfect wedding car, his gigantic black Sheerline, one of only six in Australia, Austin’s answer to Rolls Royce. Sue and Rosie followed in Dad’s car, driven by Mark, in their apple-green chiffon dresses. I had chosen the Methodist church because the minister was the only one I could bear in Scripture at school and it would please Ken’s mother, who was the organist at the Methodist church in Katoomba. In a photo taken in the doorway after the ring and the register signing was done, Ken and I are smiling into each other’s eyes.
The reception was held at the house of kind friends from Dad’s group. The food was provided by the guests, tables full of supportive cooking. Dad had bought crates of champagne which I had never drunk before. No one mentioned that the party couldn’t happen at our place because of Mum, that she was incapable of being a hostess.
Ken, 21, and me,19, just married
That night we left in Dad’s car for our honeymoon at ten o’clock, heading off into the black night to drive across the mountains to Grafton along a dirt road which spiralled through thick forest country. After an hour, Ken pulled over so I could drive.
As I accelerated to a cruising speed I headed straight off the road into the trees. There was a brief bucketing, then a smashing from underneath: the world stopped and all was completely still except for our gasping breaths. Tree trunks were all around us, columns of gold in the headlights, but not one had stood in our path. Plates and containers of food from the back seat had flown forward; passionfruit sponge dripped off the sun visors.
We changed places shakily. Ken turned on the ignition, put the car in reverse, gently put his foot down—and out we sailed, backwards onto the road. In the morning we put the car on a hoist and the mechanic pointed to a dint in the solid Holden chassis. You landed on a rock, he said.
If it was a cry for help, it was far too late among the black trees with the cobweb wrapped around my brain and the ring on my finger.
Poor Ken. He’d won his scholarship and should have been off to Britain alone and unencumbered to make his mark. In September, we left on a Qantas jet, his first time in a plane, my second; two children going overseas to have a baby and produce a thesis on a scholarship for one person. We were flying away just before the whole campus noticed I was pregnant.
Was it five years later, or ten, that I started to see what had happened that windswept winter of 1962? Started to see that the prospect of looking after my mother for a year was something I could not even begin to contemplate. It was only two and a half years since she’d been patrolling with her axe, since she’d bought a gun and then our doctor talking about knives. I had been away from home most of the time since then and I had no desire to live back in that house, not even with Dad there.
What on earth was he was thinking when he asked me to do such a thing? I didn’t have any way of saying no to him—except, as it turned out, this elaborate journey of sex, pregnancy and marriage to someone who was about to leave the country.
I never did my honours year. Ken completed his PhD in record time, with me doing a great deal of typing. I remember walking on the Downs above Brighton when he put little Genna on his shoulders and ran into the bracing light and my heart fairly flew open. In spite of such moments, what I felt for him and he for me seemed insufficient to sustain us for the next fifty years.
And so it proved.
After I’d gone and 1962 rolled into 1963, Dad decided that he would have to let go of his sabbatical completely because I wasn’t there as his backstop. His friends, however, took him in hand. They reminded him that he had never been overseas and that The Legend was highly regarded by key figures in the history worlds of the UK, the US and Canada. Phyl, who knew his absence would cast deep shadow into her days, was central to this group who encoura
ged him. They gathered around him, I was told later both by him and them, they said he had to go.
Biddy Williams, my wedding reception hostess, is the last of the group left. I recently talked with her about that interregnum after Mark and I had left, before Dad got away too.
He used to come to our place frequently, she told me. Sometimes he was crying. The worst was one night when he came home and Margaret was hiding behind the door with a bucket of hot coals. She threw them over him.
I sighed in horrified recognition.
He talked about Phyl too, she said. His feelings for her.
They were so happy together, I said. We both smiled.
I think having her made a huge difference, said Biddy. It really helped him.
With events like the bucket of coals and continued encouragement from Phyl and the others, he eventually contacted Mum’s sister, Lib. I imagine it was one of the harder decisions of his life. Lib and her husband, her brother, her parents, her sister-in-law and no doubt all the cousins dotted about the wealthy eastern suburbs of Adelaide each maintained there was nothing wrong with Mum—except that she had married Dad. Not one of them ever came across the country to visit us. They were lost to our sense of family, except for those brief visits to them during the summer expeditions to Adelaide.
He wrote a letter, asking Lib if she would keep an eye on Mum, telling her he would arrange for a flat and a comfortable stipend. To his surprise, I think, Lib said yes. He was deeply grateful. So Mum went to Adelaide and Dad spent four weeks on a ship crossing the Indian Ocean, to arrive in Portsmouth at the beginning of 1964.
Trawling memories with other Armidale friends and acquaintances of his, several tell me that some people (never anyone they can name) were appalled when Mum left because there was considerable gossip to the effect that he had dispatched her to Sydney, that he had somehow ‘got rid of her’. I am apoplectic at this injustice, even though it’s scuttlebutt from half a century ago.
While no one ever used the phrase ‘until the children leave home’, it was in fact because we had grown up and left that his friends were able, with some effort, to shoehorn him out of his sense of daily obligation to Mum into this long-distance arrangement. As it turned out, over the rest of their lives, he would only see her one more time.
And the four of us, the nuclear family we had been, would never again be together in one place.
TWELVE
Running
Ken and I arrived in England in 1962, just before the Cuban missile crisis held the world in stasis. We were in prime nuclear-target territory. I longed for home, which was as far away as you could get from the warheads. Weeks passed and Kennedy and Khrushchev kept the missiles in the ground.
That year also catapulted me into adulthood. Some might have said that I already knew how to step up and take responsibility—but I had always had Dad behind me and I was not really, not fully, responsible for anything.
Ken went from Brighton to the British Museum in London every day while I sat for exams long-distance and collected baby clothes. In February 1963, Genna arrived at three-thirty in the morning with only the midwife and a nurse in attendance. Being a Saturday night the women were in charge because the doctor was at a party. After they finished with me, they moved on to an even younger first-timer at the other end of the same room. Curtained for hours in half-light with Genna in the crook of my arm, I became a silver woman from a fairytale, speaking soundless wishes into her bottomless eyes.
The other first-timer ended up in the bed beside me and our babies were spirited away from us to the nursery, brought out only for four-hourly feed times. When we were allowed to get up after three days, we saw placentas lying in kidney dishes on a rough wooden shelf outside the toilet.
We talked about our lives as young people do. On the third day she suddenly said, Is your mother dead?
My heart thudded. My eyes went dry.
What do you mean? I stammered.
Well, you never mention her, so I thought she must be dead.
No, I stumbled. No.
Oh. She continued to watch me.
She was . . . sick a lot.
What was wrong?
Oh . . . lots of things. I didn’t have much to do with her, I finished in a rush.
The lie I found was enough to evade her skewering question, to sweep Mum back to oblivion. But I remember the shock, how my heart went berserk. To have someone on the far side of the world drop my mother into the conversation had me back where I floundered for words.
I had similar moments with my Aunt Claire, the magic, generous one who kept me safe before I could walk or talk. She’d run away from her ambassador husband in The Hague. She was seeing lawyers and visiting her boys in their different boarding schools and she stayed with us often in the two-up, two-down terrace we’d found at the back of Brighton, not far from the green Downs. Shopping and cooking, cleaning and being a mother, learning on the job were all manageable, but supporting Claire about the problems which were overwhelming her was not, at least not always. A couple of times it made me resentful and weepy.
When this happened, she would murmur, I know it wasn’t easy for you with Margaret . . .
My mother was so far from my conscious mind that these well-meant comments of Claire’s were always shocking. Why had she even mentioned her? I swung my face away and changed the subject.
Although I couldn’t have said what, I expected something different when Dad arrived to start his sabbatical leave. We borrowed a car to collect him from his ship at Portsmouth. I dreaded he would disembark with an attractive woman, his sexual trophy for the trip. But instead it was Irene Handl, a much older woman, cockney comedienne in every second British film and television show, whom he escorted down the gangplank, her arm crooked through his.
I didn’t know I was going to do it, but I flung myself onto his chest and my tears of joy morphed into sobs. I wanted to hang onto him and never let go. It embarrassed everybody. He stepped back, patted my shoulder and introduced Irene who took off on a series of sketches about how the two of them had poured oil on the waters of right-wing rhetoric at the captain’s table.
I snuffled up my tears, set my jaw tight and smiled weakly, while inside I saw that the rock in my life had let me go. Dad loved me best when I was strong, resilient, resourceful. Whatever my sobs were about, he knew they were to do with the life of my childhood and he didn’t want to be dragged back there. He’d just had four weeks on a boat without Mum and he was off on his big adventure. I was on my own.
He dived to Genna and swept up her toddler body swathed in tartan rompers. He was thrilled a couple of days later when her attempt to say Grandpa came out as Gang-gang. He wasn’t familiar with the grey-black parrot whose males have bright red heads but he knew it was as Australian as billabongs and that was enough for him. Much later, across his two different generations of children and the grandchildren, Gang-gang became the generic way of referring to him in the family, eventually shortened in proper Aussie style to Gangy.
He came and went during that final year we were bunkered down around Ken’s thesis. We mentioned Mum briefly. Dad might say, Lib says that having her in Adelaide is going all right, and I would nod. Mark sent me a birthday present of gum leaves inside a copy of My Brother Jack. When I burnt them, I cried eucalypt tears.
One day, on the weekly shopping trip downtown, walking the stroller with Genna towards the Co-op, a voice at the back of my head suddenly spoke. It said: ‘This marriage will not last.’ It froze me in my tracks, right in the middle of the footpath. The voice wasn’t clearly male or female; it did, however, carry an ex-cathedra certitude in its tone. I stood in a pool of weak sunshine, the words bouncing round my brain, echoing down the street. I looked at the top of buildings, up into the sky, all around me, wondering if anyone else had heard.
I waited until the PhD was over and we were on the ship home, our passage paid for by Sydney University, where Ken had secured a lectureship. I tried to tell him I was unhappy
but he was unable to respond to my melancholy.
It was February 1965 when we arrived in Melbourne and Mark was on the wharf with Auntie Jean. He was living with our Aunt Claire who had come back to Australia before me and when we got to her house, rooms were festooned with Mark’s paintings. He was twenty-two and his artist’s wings were just unfurled, wild and strong. He was playing around with big eyes, black and white like Dickerson’s, and there was a painting of a fey girl-woman, hands held up to her face covering her mouth, flowers in her hair. He called it Mad Woman though he had no sense at the time of it being personal. The background is abstract: curving blocks of green and white and blue, faintly reminiscent of a road. While I never found that part of the painting appealing, my focus always on the sad, pretty figure, it does serve to push her forward, almost out of the painting. Yet it’s clear that if she could step into the room, she would remain stuck in this pose, unsure of where she is going.
Nowadays, I see it absolutely as a portrait of his feelings for Mum.
Dad came back that same month by a different ship. It stopped in Adelaide, where he saw Mum for a few hours.
We just started arguing, he told me. It was awful.
He looked crushed, in that hopeless way I was used to.
His love affair with Phyl was at an end too. In spite of their declarations before he went away, he had, of course, had sex with other women and he told her that he had. She could not bear it. She rang and asked me: Can we meet?
We sat in a car watching rain fall in huge fat globs on the waters of Sydney Harbour while Phyl cried and told me she’d never love anyone again the way she loved Russel. We held hands and I realised that she would disappear from my life. Their laughing days up and down the streets of Armidale were over. It may have been their destiny to be together but fate, the slings and arrows, had other plans for them.
Mark’s portrait of Mum, which he named Mad Woman. Oil and enamel on masonite, 77 × 44 cm
