Mad Meg

by Sally Morrison

  She had lost not only her brothers but also the man she was to have married, Geoffrey Latimer, her youngest brother’s friend. Mottes worth their salt didn’t cry. She didn’t cry; instead, grief found its way into her movements, making her hopeless at getting tops off bottles or lids off cans. Keys wouldn’t open doors for her, and all contraptions conspired to send her into frustrated rages.

  From the roof of the bank where she’d been working in Sydney, as she’d watched one brother’s regiment return, she’d allowed herself to look at the manager standing to attention by her side, flinchless. The soldiers marched by below, waving and smiling and she had felt herself at a cocktail party of the soul, safe in her dress and underclothes, her stocking ladderless on a roof in sunshine.

  In her mind’s eye there was Haydn, June 3rd, 1941, Crete, his lungs destroyed from the impact of a bomb going down the funnel of his ship; Shaver and Geoffrey last seen June 21st, 1941, Syria, dying of their wounds; and Hedley, February 14th, 1942, blown to pieces in a shell attack at the fall of Singapore. She knew about Hedley because someone had escaped and made his way home, helped for no other reason than kindness by ordinary people trying to live ordinary lives in the midst of other people’s madness.

  Sydney being the place where returning soldiers disembarked, it was also where Stella gazed out windows and saw phantom troop-carriers entering the Heads bringing phantom brothers: one tall and heroic, one strong and barrel-chested, the third a little fellow with a cowlick and a lopsided smile – Euphrosyne had always said that Shaver was born while he was looking the other way and had never caught up with his expression. And nothing was sadder to Stella than the arms of Sydney Harbour, yearning to gather in her lover: she used words like yearn inside her head, but found she could not wrap four slaughters in such sentimental rugs. Thinking she would leave behind her torment, she came south in the May of ’42 to the kinder city of Melbourne.

  On the roof of the bank where she worked in Melbourne, she was taught how to fire a revolver, a skill she could put into practice in the event of a bank robbery. In the evenings and at weekends, she dispensed pathological goodness along with the soup at the Voluntary Aid Detachment canteen where Leslie Hallett must have seen and drawn her.

  Wartime Melbourne lives on for her now in the chopping motion she makes with her hands. She has taken a flat in East Melbourne; the chop, with the hands parallel, is Clarendon Street, which lies between her chair and the bluestone chimney. She walks her fingers over it to the Fitzroy Gardens. Across the Fitzroy and Treasury gardens, indicated by two large, left-handed loops, while with her right hand, she holds Clarendon Street in place. It is a shortish walk into town to the bank each morning. In May 1943, when the fortunes of war have turned one way in Europe but the other in the Pacific, this is what the gardens look like: there has been rain and between the slim blades of well-mown grass, neatly illustrated in parallel lines where her fingernail greets the imagined picture plane, the ground is dark and wet. Underfoot the asphalt paths are deep bluey-grey and very cold.

  Fog skulks in the tops of trees.

  The puddles are still because nature isn’t talking.

  Green mottle on grey trunks; orange mottle on yellow.

  To strike off to one side of the path would be to find it slippery and unsuitable for walking; water would certainly get into shoes and shoes would reach work with soak lines on them.

  Work is situated in the city buildings, well hidden by trees. These, in the main, are elms. Elms turning yellow, guarding the paths, keeping back with strenuous arms the giant figs, the sorrowing willows, the globe-shaped Golden Elms, the shimmering poplars, the crisping oaks and plane trees, the pittosporum covered in variegated spear heads.

  In the autumn light of 8 a.m., the trees look like assembled royalty. A spill of red down a golden gown. Filigree coronets on claret cushions. Parchment on plush.

  Through the branches she glimpses the sky, bruised and broody. Even though the Japanese have been forced from the Solomon Islands, they have taken Timor and Java and are rumoured to be amassing a tremendous force to Australia’s north. Nina’s told her of women on the land who are keeping cyanide by in the event of an invasion. On Tuesday, Darwin was bombed and they won’t say what the losses were, except that they were heavy. It is just three weeks since the papers finally admitted that the situation in Australia is desperate.

  Stella feels tears in her eyes as she passes thick-waisted Diana with her swept-up bronze hairdo and hounds. She likes this statue for its bounding step, the lively contradiction between the form and the metal it is cast in. She has read somewhere that Diana is not just the Goddess of Hunting but also of Mood and Contemplation, and this too seems a contradiction. Diana will be lucky not to end up as a gun barrel.

  Mist on the glass conservatory walls behind her, where there’s an exhibition of tropical plants and, just quietly, it’s hilarious how the anthurium lilies look like penises – all different sizes and colours. If Nina knew what went through one’s head, she’d be scandalised.

  The cold from the footpaths gets to her ankles, though Nina has supplied lisle stockings, several deniers of thickness. There’s a sheen on her ankles seen to come and go under her nose and a coolness on her leg tops under her skirt, as well as a slight pinching sensation from the suspenders. Over her step-ins, her taffeta-lined skirt slips: left, right, left, creating a bit of electricity about her hips. Hat pinned to head: grey, with three magenta feathers sitting close. Leghorn feathers, dyed. Envelope handbag with two smart flaps, one grey, one white. Thin grey gloves. Left, right.

  She is a smart, sweet, neat little woman thinking of her new fiancé. She doesn’t know him very well, but what does that matter now? He is twenty-six. He has been in Australia about six years. The nationality stated on his passport is French, though he is Italian and spent the first nine years of his life in Milan. His father seems to have been a newspaper editor. He says he lived opposite a marvellous castle where he used to play in the moat. Poor people used to come to the moat to trap cats, then they seemed to kill and skin them and hang them in streams until they were ready to cook. Sounded a bit like what the shearers did with rabbits on Clare.

  She is thinking also of her fiancé’s uncle, Nicola Coretti, a charming, dapper old fellow, even if his name is that of a woman in English, a language he doesn’t speak.

  Before the war, her fiancé says, Nicola Coretti was the subject of an investigation by the Italian Consul-General in Australia. The Consul-General has now been detained, along with other consular staff, including the husband of Stella’s friend Marietta, who she is sure has nothing to do with the investigation. After all, Marietta and Lamberto come from Parma, and that’s in the north, just like Milan, so there’s no reason Stella can think of why they wouldn’t take to Zio Nicola. It’s all just a little troubling, though, because the wedding’s tomorrow and Marietta, who lives upstairs from Stella, is lending her flat for the reception. Marietta hasn’t met Zio Nicola: Henry said it might be better not to mention him.

  Marietta runs an Italian language school and is most amusing. She has said she will protect Stella when the Allies lose the war. Even though Stella has lost Geoffrey and all her brothers, she has not yet, in her heart, lost the war. After all, in February the Germans were being routed on the Russian front, and there were anti-German demonstrations going on all over Italy.

  It was in February, as the Italian Consul-General was whiling away the hours ‘until victory’ in prison, that Stella encountered Marietta on the way to a pawn shop and bought from her a beautiful set of ceramic coffee cups, to spare her the embarrassment of hocking them. Stella had entered the bank at a trot, laughing at Marietta’s pricelessness, the cups in a hatbox. It was her lunch break and she was a trifle late. The hatbox was decorated with travel stickers which said Milano, Venezia, Roma, Cremona, eccetera, eccetera. She plunked it down on her desk, dashed over to the teller’s window, whipped the Next Teller Please sign out from under the grille, where it had been keep
ing the hordes at bay on the counter, and there was a handsome man with light blue eyes in front of her, wanting to open a bank account.

  ‘Coretti,’ she repeated after hearing his name, and explained forthwith, as she attended to his banking, about the cups and the friend, the lover, the brothers and the unlost war because it was obviously an Italian she had before her, ‘but you’ve got blue eyes, so you must be from the north,’ she said as she stamped the last page of the new bankbook and handed it over in its jacket through the grille. ‘Ciao,’ she said, because she liked him and Marietta had said it’s what you say.

  Friday. Tomorrow, she is going to be married. To a younger man she met three months ago over the counter in the bank. Nina and Father are on their way from Clare. For better or worse. Motte cousins from Toorak and Brighton will be out in force, particularly on the distaff, as the staff is for the most part embroiled in the imbroglio. Richer or poorer. And the man she is going to marry is bringing his uncle. Whether or not it will be all right, Zio Nicola is the only relative he has in the country.

  Tomorrow, provided the weather holds, she will be married here, in the Treasury Gardens, beside the ornamental pond, among the pink camellias and the palms, behind which the white Treasury Buildings are as close to a palace as Melbourne affords. If you exclude Government House. But you do exclude it because if the Treasury Gardens are damp, the Botanic Gardens around Government House are even damper. Nobody else she knows has been married out of doors by a registrar and not a minister. When Nina said why not a church, Stella said, ‘God? What’s God got to do with anything?’ ‘In the sight of,’ said Nina. ‘Bunny, we are gathered in the sight of.’

  But for Nina’s information, there’s something she’d better get straight, the man’s an Italian. He’s asked, he’s here, there are children to be born to replace the men who’ve died. You’d marry an Australian, but your experience of Australians is they don’t last. Twenty thousand taken at Singapore; it doesn’t bear thinking about. Henry wants to stay here, so you’re marrying him. Anyway, who knows how long ‘here’ will last? If Nina doesn’t like it she needn’t come.

  She doesn’t like it, but she’s coming all the same. From behind the clump of bushes she is coming, hurtling along in a splendid temper. Green hat. Green suit. Green crocodile handbag. Green crocodile shoes. Storms across the lawn towards the elm-lined bitumen – you can see her now as if it were yesterday. You can see her from the flat where you’re about to put on your wedding dress, because it’s tomorrow already, the day you’re getting married.

  It takes her seven minutes fast and furious walking from the moment you first see her to the moment she rat-a-tat-tats on the door and you get your friend Marietta, who has lent her flat for the occasion, to go and greet her. Nina makes you nervous, but you’ve decided she’s not going to get the better of you today.

  She pulls herself up to her majestic five feet five (easily two inches taller than you) and from under the Garbo brim of her hat announces, ‘You must call it off at once.’

  ‘Oh, Neen,’ you say.

  ‘I can’t have my brothers’ sister …’

  ‘Now, Neen. Fair go, old girl.’

  ‘My husband is a war hero.’

  ‘Your second husband.’

  ‘Perhaps I …?’ Marietta intervenes. ‘Now I, Mrs Furlonger, am an Italian. It is one of the oldest and richest cultures in the world. Think of the Roman Empire.’

  ‘What about the British Empire?’ goes Nina.

  ‘War puts the stamp of nobility on those who have the courage to meet it,’ thus Marietta. It sounds like something Nina ought to believe. ‘The English have lost their glorious past. They have made a religion out of eating and games. When the war is lost, who will protect you? You have been abandoned.’

  ‘The Allies have taken Tripoli,’ Nina sniffs.

  ‘The Japanese will take Australia.’

  ‘I’m getting married, Neen, and that’s that.’

  ‘To a painter,’ goes the fervent Marietta, ‘to an Italian painter! Italians are the best painters in the world. Think of Da Vinci, Mrs Furlonger. Think of Raphael.’

  Nina thinks she is thinking of these, though in fact she’s thinking of Michelangelo and of the Americans on whom she is pinning her hopes, and Stella, too, is thinking of Michelangelo, though she thinks she’s thinking of Da Vinci and Raphael and all this thinking is making her very tired and causing her to see things.

  Weddings.

  Brides divide to reveal other brides.

  Everywhere you look, there are leaves falling and people marrying. Stella’s mind has travelled half a century and she sees attendants at Italian weddings in the Treasury Gardens in the 1990s wearing red, Yugoslav attendants in cream, attendants from Essendon in apricot, from Hong Kong in mauve and Mauritius in taupe. Everyone gets married in the gardens now and no one makes a fuss about it. Brides, brides, the air is the shifting of their veils. The leaves fall yellow and the leaves fall red. The cameras click. Many of them are Japanese cameras with Japanese film in them taking photos of Australian weddings. The leaves fall. The wedding parties gabber and jabber and chatter and talk in tongues.

  Things looked bad the week my parents married. The Germans were fighting back savagely in North Africa and the Luftwaffe was active. The Japanese were in Java and were bombing Darwin aerodrome; the day of the wedding, they sank five allied merchant ships in Australian waters. Leslie Hallett painted a picture that weekend called Glory, in which a little Australian soldier is drowning in a great green sea. When it was finished he walked into the sea at Indented Head and kept on walking. His body was washed up five days later.

  If Leslie Hallett caught her eye, it’s something that slipped through the crevices of my mother’s memory long ago. He painted her not as she was, but as she appeared, with her pretty rounded brow, the soldier’s friend. The brushwork broke with tradition, laying itself down on the canvas with a simplicity pure in its core. Two months before he died, this painting was part of Siècle’s first big show. If Reg Sorby had had the money then, he tells me, he would have bought the entire exhibition. But Reg was hardly more than a boy, taken along by his mother to whet his appetite. He was seventeen. Three years later he was shooting to kill, and the hatred of it never left him.

  The Hallett show at Siècle was where Reg met Dadda, and Dadda, he tells me, was Harry Laurington’s rival for the hand of Leslie Hallett’s sister, who’d come home from France before the war broke out, bringing Dadda with her.

  Hallett. A name made famous by the young painter who suicided at Indented Head on the Bellarine Peninsula in May 1943. His sister would capitalise on it some years later.

  The Midnight Knitter wakes up again.

  She’s at Marietta’s flat now, in a wedding frock. White, modest wartime pattern. Nina, having conquered her initial repugnance, is now in a tizz because a mouse got in under the icing of the cake they brought from Clare and perished, drunk with rum, under the fondant. Oh well, at least it was drunk. Stella doesn’t think the guests will notice if they slice off the block of cake containing the mouse. They’ll pretend it’s being set aside for poor children.

  The future Granpa is seated on a sofa grinding his teeth and just able to see through foggy irises the source of sperm that will cause him to gain a name in ten months’ time. The soon-to-be-grandparental shoes are exceptionally shiny and the hose on the well-turned ankles matching. Midway between the manly spread of the rheumatic knees a handsome, no-nonsense bamboo cane is recording the pulse rate of a heart that is ticking off the seconds between now and doomsday when at last that calculator, History, will be called to account.

  The source of sperm is lounging on a cocktail cabinet in an attitude at once indolent and elegant. The legs are long, the hands unavailable for scrutiny, being buried in the trouser pockets. There is a paisley waistcoat being worn beneath a dark jacket with satin lapels. The trousers do not match the jacket. They have red cords down the side seams and look for all the world like a Salvatio
n Army bandleader’s pants. It is amazing what you can see through foggy irises when hungering for detail. The source of sperm is making quite a lot of roguish noise to cover deficiencies in the occasion. He is laughing with the bride and the unlikely matron of honour.

  The future Granpa casts around for consolation. He thinks of the joining of certain bulls with certain cows and decides that the source of sperm, being sound of limb, could well have been a Hereford/ Hereford cross, his favourite. There’s a bit of height there, a decent shoulder girdle. Good brow, fair teeth. He’d like to put his ear to the rib cage to check the heart and lungs, but the voice, at least, has the kind of timbre a man would expect in a better class of beast. You would probably not sink this particular cut of Italian in the same boat as you’d sink the Hun, given half a chance.

  The senior sister is restraining her gaiety in fitting fashion. As a person who has blundered openly at least once at marriage, it is perhaps not hers to do more than address her thoughts to the Almighty and dispose of the mouse.

  There is a knock at the door of the flat. The hostess, Marietta, wife of the interned consular official, Lamberto, opens the door. ‘Oh,’ she says, and her formerly smiling mouth becomes a line of chagrin. She does not know the name of the old gentleman standing in the doorway, but she has seen him before and heard him spoken of by the Melbourne fascist elite, the Sansepolchristi, in less than glowing terms. He doffs his grey top hat. Full wedding regalia, white carnation in the button hole of his frock coat.

  ‘Zio Nicola,’ says the groom, with a fond cadence in his voice. There is general embracing. Marietta retires surreptitiously to her bedroom, takes a little book from the bedside table and notes down the names of everyone present.