Mad Meg

by Sally Morrison

  FIVE

  Family Trees

  WHAT DID HE see in her? The closer we looked, the less we found. She seemed to us ugly, arrogant and condescending. ‘She’s intelligent,’ our mother used to say. We wouldn’t have granted her the grace of that adjective. To us, she was ruthless, hard, acquisitive, selfish. Necessary, some would have said, but not us.

  The Harry Lauringtons were by no means the richest members of that august clan. By Laurington standards they were hardly rich at all. Harry’s dead now, but there’s a book about him. An only child, he was orphaned at fifteen when his parents drowned in a yachting tragedy. He was then brought up in his mother’s sister’s family. By the age of twenty-four, he had a few bits and pieces souvenired by his trustees from a heavily mortgaged estate. He had been to Oxford and had a degree in Art History. He was touring Europe when the war broke out, resulting in a swift departure for England from Trieste.

  If his fellow Australians had a sinister impression of Harry because he was sophisticated, well educated, and dark-complexioned, this was intensified by an obvious physical handicap. At ten he had been the victim of infantile paralysis, resulting in a withered left arm. Perhaps to compensate for the defect, Harry dressed distinctively and smartly; there were such things in his wardrobe as three-piece suits. His casual clothing featured Scottish pullovers, hand-made shirts of Egyptian cotton, French and Italian shoes. There was plenty else he didn’t wear until it became fashionable years after it had been bought: serapes from South America, ponchos from Mexico and caftans from India. Harry was always a man remarked upon.

  When, in 1940 at the age of twenty-five, he was as a matter of course rejected for military service, Harry decided on a career no Laurington before him had taken. In among his fabulous selection of clothes were some black trousers with satin stripes down the sides, a blousey white shirt, black patent Italian pumps and a black water-weave satin cummerbund: the clothes of a maître d’. Harry Laurington became a restaurateur.

  Siècle, as the restaurant was called, was in a déclassé part of town. Arcaded windows gave out darkly onto a dual carriageway which was lower on the restaurant side than on the far side, the road being divided by a plantation that had seen better days. Root-bound palms laid their fronds over an unsightly mess of scraps blown into the plantation off the nearby beaches. Opposite, Harry Laurington had screwed coach lamps at intervals along his arcade of windows. From these, one assumed that the century referred to in the restaurant’s name was the nineteenth.

  Siècle scowled on the downhill side of a large car park, from which the patrons could enter beneath a covered way. Though the striped awning of the covered way was out of keeping with the brass coach lamps, it was in keeping with what Harry Laurington knew about Australians. The lure of a false front was everything. Get them in with ersatz, could have been his motto, then confront them with art.

  In the early days of Siècle, it was cheap art he’d picked up on the quays of Paris on his trip to the continent before the war. But, slowly and shrewdly, Harry began to show Australians something that was happening in their midst. He began to hang the work of local painters.

  Harry’s father was a stockbroker. Typical of Melbourne gentry, he’d had a house in town and another at the beach. During the years of Harry’s growing up, the town house had been lost, but the beach house remained as part of the inheritance. Though it was modest by family standards, and located on that drear bit of beach called Indented Head on the Bellarine Peninsula, the house itself was elegant. It was one of the earliest built on the coast. The high-pitched roof swept down over a verandah that ran along all sides, making it a great pity that the house, being on the flat land, had no view. Its garden, however, was planted with rare Australiana. Eucalyptus rhodantha swung ungainly, carbuncled arms in a petrified dervish dance. Giant banksias, many-eyed, guarded the house from among serrated leaves. Grevilleas warded off evil by poking purple tongues through mouths of green.

  The sea swelled in the shallows as if it were breathing in sleep. Low angles of light sought out the shapes in the interior; the hand of a woman had been there, a bride who had wanted everything in white. Tatler and ballet programs lay on bedside tables in remembrance of a marriage; marriage had taken on the house with such conviction, Harry had had no wish to change it. He went there to be in the shrine of his parents’ love.

  But then there was the war, and the sea dreamt new realities. In February 1941 the HMAS Sydney came home from the Mediterranean where she’d sunk an Italian cruiser and survived sixty bomb attacks. Harry felt restless and impotent. He knew several of the crew, but because of his handicap couldn’t bring himself to join their celebrations. Then, at the end of November, all those young men were lost when the Sydney was sunk by a German boat off the West Australian coast, and Harry was filled with a desperate malaise.

  One morning in Swanston Street he teamed up with a young soldier who took him to an army canteen. The soldier, too, was full of unease. As they sat watching the Voluntary Aid Detachment girls trotting among the tables with trays and trolleys, living up to their nicknames, Virgins and Devils, the soldier began to draw them on the butcher’s paper which served as a cloth. There was a lyrical compassion in his drawing. It was so unexpected, Harry wanted to know all about him and where his gift came from.

  The soldier, Leslie Hallett, hailed from Yarra Valley, where his father was a timber feller. His mother had gone mad and thrown herself in front of a train when her only other child, a daughter, had run away from home. The father had put these calamities down to his own insufficiencies and began to drink heavily, with the result that Leslie left home at fifteen and came to Melbourne looking for his sister; that had been in 1935. He found where his sister had been living until a while before his arrival: it was a boarding house in St Kilda, run by a Jewish woman, a Mrs Hirsch.

  Leslie liked Rose Hirsch immediately. She was a lively, bright-eyed little Frenchwoman in her twenties. While Australian snobs sailed on every available boat in order to kiss the hems of superior European traditions, Rose had sailed the other way, repelled by those same hems and nonplussed by the kissing of them.

  She told Leslie his sister had gone to France. Leslie imagined she had gone with some man, but Rose assured him that wasn’t the case. She had saved the money for her trip of her own accord, and was staying with Rose’s relatives.

  Rose, who had no children of her own, took Leslie under her wing and found him odd jobs among the Jews of Melbourne. When he wasn’t working, she sat him down in her parlour and let him draw. The boy had a native talent with which Rose knew better than to interfere; she let it grow of its own accord, supplying only materials and the techniques for using them.

  Leslie had stayed with Rose until he had been called up during 1941. Rose was broken-hearted and didn’t want her ‘so talented’ boy to have to go and fight a war.

  The evening of their encounter, Leslie took Harry Laurington to meet the inimitable Rose, whose boarding house was like no other. It was crammed with dolls and ancient toys, lace in the process of being tatted hung from pins on satin cushions. The tenants did their ablutions in a Bacchanalian mosaic cave and sidled their way to their rooms up steps and through corridors lined with wicker dolls’ prams, miniature houses and rocking horses.

  They found Rose dining on a clove of garlic and a tot of Pernod. She was weeping; down her sweet white porcelain face, generous blobs of water coursed a trail of mascara. She wore her thick black hair in Indian braids, and the tears splashed onto the white lace of her costume, which was more like a doll’s dress than the dress of a modern woman. The Health Department had been round again and given her notice. Not enough toilets for the number of bottoms, it seemed. ‘And zay say I am a fire hazard.’ She contemplated this for a moment, biting her thumb and then flashed up, pummelled the table, and said, ‘Zay’re right!’

  During the evening Rose impressed Harry with her indomitable vitality. On the surface gay and romantic, Rose had a deeper self that was shrew
d and intelligent. Life for her was a system of transactions opening doors to richer, larger life. She was not rich in money and probably never would be, but her soul was luxuriant.

  Until this meeting with Rose, Harry had thought Australia a confining place where the cultural milieu weighed down his hopes. The other people who had surrounded him took fright at the mention of a restaurant, but not so Rose. She put the blossoms on his dreams and made him decide to act. He would buy a suitable building, Rose’s husband Laurent would be his cook. Rose, with her radiant manner, would help run the place.

  Leslie Hallett found himself swept up in the idea of a place that would become the focus of new and fresh ideas, for Rose and Harry had talked of showing art, and having music and readings to liven the culturally undernourished palates of Australia. He abandoned himself to their dreaming and, though he was due back at his barracks by ten, stayed on and was still there talking in the early morning.

  Before the sun was fully up, he found himself being taken on a car trip to Indented Head, where Harry had a mind to conceal him and foster the talent he had seen unfolding on butcher’s paper in the canteen.

  With Siècle Leslie Hallett’s artistic career was born, and through Leslie Hallett, Harry’s reputation as a dealer grew. By 1961, when Dadda first showed at Siècle, Leslie Hallett and his story were famous and Harry was known as the man who’d launched a great original talent.

  Reg’s roof leaks in several places so, in addition to the furious playing of rain, I can hear a smaller, more delicate polyphony of water dripping into buckets: each set of drips coming at regular intervals, but the intervals never coinciding. Reg says he can’t be bothered to fix the flashing since he’s always changing the roof line anyway.

  There are photographs stuck on the noticeboard in the kitchen, newer ones on top of older ones, putting the assertive, jolly, latter-day Reg in the vanguard and leaving the radically slimmer youth to peek and peer through from the past. The kitchen is not closed off so much as partitioned by benches from the room with the walnut table and the log fire we need for warmth at this time of year. At the far end of the room there is a slow combustion stove, without which we would have to go about swathed in more clothing than would be comfortable. Reg looks out into the room, proud and amused. White curls scroll down over his jolly pink head. Embedded in the pinkness, a pair of sparkling blue eyes. He exudes well-being.

  Round the corner, however, in a colder room where the fire is only lit for parties in winter – the room through which the Midnight Knitter has to come to brew her coffee – there is a self-portrait of a different Reg. This Reg is worried and downcast, his face in shadow.

  Reg is a prolific painter. He might create twelve major works a year, thirty or forty smaller ones and innumerable drawings. The market for his work has always been strong and is firming. Painting is his life: all else is secondary. Or so he says.

  After the war, he and his circle declared themselves against abstract art. To them it was iconoclastic, insidiously destroying the true language of art. This language resided in the image and the translation of the image into paint through the painter’s imagination. They did not insist on an art derived from nature, but they did insist on images; dots and lines, however suave and elegant, were not enough, they could only ever be decoration.

  Dadda was outside this circle. They dismissed him as a painter whose ideas were stuck in the past, allied to Dada and Surrealism. What they didn’t see was the prophecy in his work, his discomfort with the prevailing world view, the products of which would come to threaten the earth with destruction. Dadda used to say that A + B might very well equal C, but C, once produced, could never again equal A + B.

  Though Dadda painted images, he had nothing against abstraction. Objects of contemplation were all right by him, contemplation was never obsolete. He appreciated games and was given to them himself; there is optical and logical whimsy in many of his works.

  While Reg and his circle stuck insistently with figuration, a younger generation, my contemporaries, rid itself of images, claiming that painting should not be interpreted by the artist for the viewer, but should respect the viewer’s right to perceive and feel and be a part of the process of art making. If Reg regretted his anti-abstract stance, he ran in front of his regrets and staved them off in whatever way he could. He was never an intellectual. His work appeals to those who like intuitive, and, on the whole, narrative, painting. He is a sensualist; he doesn’t like to have to stop and think. Thought might betray something in his art that has more to do with the nature of perception than the narrative power in what is perceived.

  Though to all outward appearances Reg is sedate, I believe he is a driven man. No one around him goes wanting, and this is evidence of what drives him. He is a classic man, a provider, the quest of his life has been not so much to prove himself as a painter but to prove what a great provider he is. Providing is an obsession; he will take on any commission, no matter what, if he can see some way of making provision by it.

  Reg, on the tail end of his middle years, has sat up covered in leeches in rainforests while bulldozers bore down on him; he has appeared as a tree at the Mardi Gras in Rio; he has cuddled wombats and prime ministers and painted tablecloths for charity; he has been up in a balloon and down in a diving bell. Pretty nearly all these things he has done with a glass of champagne in his hand. He is leaving his liver, one of nature’s miracles, to a university medical school, along with the rest of him, ready pickled.

  He has had five wives, but is without one at the moment. His ex-wives like him. Each year two or three of them get together and throw him a Christmas party. He supports the ex-wives in their ventures and is tolerant of the husbands, though they are not necessarily tolerant of him. He helps with the children whether they are his or someone else’s. He helps with the grandchildren. If Reg had antlers, they would fill a banquet hall.

  Reg paints large wild animals and naked women. He paints nature red in tooth and claw, and the pleasures of the flesh. Feminists attack him, critics leave him well alone. I have heard the word ‘vulgar’ spring to lips that shape his name, but he also paints images of war and violence, and there are times when he paints the hypocrisy, doubt, malice, greed or knowingness hidden in people’s faces. His is a major talent which, in addition to his major works, has produced a plethora of minor ones.

  Reg knows what it is to be afraid, but he does not so much race against time as roll against it. When his vision fails he takes another sip of champagne and plucks a woman from the tree of life. Yet when Reg looks back from his art into life, he knows he is alone, and that the curse of the artist is unique vision.

  Reg is a collector as well as a painter, and among the paintings here are six by Leslie Hallett. Leslie Hallett died during the Second World War. Because he was undoubtedly a major talent, his work is as expensive as it is rare. The paintings here came up for auction during the incumbency of Reg’s fourth wife, and she felt entitled to a share at the divorce. I understand there was quite a falling-out, but Reg, who is stubborn and lets go of nothing that matters, argued that the paintings were a set and had to be kept together. There was an out of court settlement and he bought the fourth wife off with a Jaguar.

  I’d sooner have the Halletts than the Jag, and I’ll bet the fourth wife would, too. It is not what they are worth; they are, quite simply, stunning paintings. They are not large, but fresh on the eye, bold and sweet in execution. They are paintings of the wartime VAD canteen. They date from 1941 to 1942, so, to paint them, he must have braved being caught by the military police. In one, a girl with smiling hazel eyes and dark foaming auburn hair is handing a soldier a plate of soup. There are not two faces like this one. It is a painting of my mother.

  Think: the rumbling of my mother’s tummy is an emanation that goes on forever through the universe as she swills the coffee flavour over her tastebuds. But the molecules are laying themselves down like logs across the access and passage to her memories. Not to remorse, though �
�� the access and passage to remorse is not blocked up. Confession time. It’s lucky I’m not far away from fifty, or these revelations would be as silver paper to a body made of tooth nerve.

  ‘That wide, Allegra,’ she says to the absent daughter, chopping the air into a vicious three-foot width. She is snarling bitterly as she alludes to the windowsills at Clare, and their owners, who ought to have been rich if only history had done the proper thing by them. And now she is laying her story like a fat cat on the sill, perhaps in the hopes that some rich person will pick it up and stroke it. She is arch and soulful by turns.

  Ideally, she says, she would have lived her life between the ages of just born and eleven, then none of this nonsense would have gone on: Italians and daughters and so forth. Princes would have given her sweets, duchesses would have cuddled her, Jane Austen would have written the house into immortality and set it in fields by Boris Pasternak. I ought to know what she means, whatever my name might happen to be, because she’s sure I was there. She’s seen my face before. It’s got that chin.

  I push the log further onto the fire and adjust her chair so she isn’t exposed to draught. Be kind to her, I tell myself; it’s confession time and I suppose she thinks that all must out as she travels backward, backward, the memory doors thudding shut behind her as she goes.

  Poor women, to have been so kind and yet so full of guilt! Euphrosyne, her mother, resented the timing of her birth. She has lived a contradiction ever since. Her name and face do not tell her story. Though her eyes danced her youth away, denying sadness, her face was a slope of snow before an avalanche. Sometimes the snow would shift, crack a little, an avalanche not allowed to happen. Smoothness covered the crevasses. The sweet exterior hid bitterness packing itself densely inside.