Meanwhile, Mottes have gathered in the Treasury Gardens, where the registrar is practising among the shrubs, pacing up and down, mouthing the words, the book behind his back. Mr Southwell. Every few paces he turns on his heel, licks his fingers and plasters down long strands of hair across his bald pate.
Bunny Motte, whose great-grandfathers assisted at the circumambulation of the continent, perished of thirst surveying the Ord, advised their daughters not to marry madmen and invented a medicinal powder which would cure everything if taken under medical supervision – Bunny Motte is about to foul the line. They wouldn’t have missed the occasion for the world. Gilchrists, Bloomfields, Beauchamps and Taylors are also in attendance. They mutter to each other that the chappie, though Italian by birth, is a French national. He is a painter and there are those among them who hope, on the quiet, that Bun hasn’t been taking her clothes off in draughty places.
The leaves fall red and the leaves fall yellow. The bride and the groom, the sister and the friend arrive in a taxi together. Most unusual. The two old men are in a taxi just behind. Tap, strut, tap, strut, they follow the bridal party over the lawn. Does she take this fellow for her wedded what-not? Yes, she does. And why not? Her lover and her brothers are dead. The leaves fall yellow and the leaves fall red.
Afterwards, there was quite a lot of working out to do at the reception. Who was this Marietta character? A pseudo-Frenchman was all very well, but a real Italian at such a time, just quietly, was a bit much. No wonder old Bob Motte wasn’t in the best of humours. And who was the old fellow in fancy dress?
As for Bun, what a scream – handing round the sandwiches at her own wedding, saying, ‘The ones without the parsley are the ones without the poison.’
The books beside me here on the table tell a story, but it isn’t that one. They only talk of lamentable stresses and strains. They say that Dadda’s exhibition, called ‘Where the Nice Girls Live’, the one that Viva Laurington mounted at Siècle in 1961, marked the start of the meteoric rise in his reputation and, less importantly, the failure of the highly irregular marriage contracted in the Treasury Gardens in May 1943, the purpose of which was to replace a lover and three brothers who had fallen from a devastated family tree, and to give a displaced person half a chance.
SIX
The Nice Girls
ALLEGRA HAS SHOVED so much stuff on her face she practically had to gum it on to make it stay there. She has teased her hair till not a single strand of it could come adrift in a hurricane. Her fingernails are painted green to go with her eye make-up. She is wearing fishnet stockings and our mother is furious. There are times when our mother would rather we wore party frocks and built-up shoes, and this is one of them. You never know who you will run into from Rumpton and Rudge’s at this sort of do. Our mother would have invited numerous people to run into, except that Viva Laurington stayed her hand, saying that Siècle had its own guest list and Stella mustn’t put herself to so much trouble. Our mother has had her nose put out of joint.
From the car park where Mum, Dadda and I are still debating whether or not to go in, Siècle looks like a low, malicious grin with the candy stick of the covered way protruding from it. I am wondering what it is like inside, where Allegra is already, playing it cool.
There wasn’t time to obey our mother’s command and wash the muck off her chops before Mrs Laurington called for her. The Brolga didn’t turn a hair, just said, ‘What a clever little thing.’
‘You and Bel go in, Henry. I’ll wait out here.’ Mum is not only angry about the guest list and Allegra’s make-up, she is also angry with Dadda because he is wearing a very loud tie with a dark blue shirt and a crumpled brown jacket. Allegra made him the tie. It has flying saucers and rocket ships embroidered on it and, across the bottom, she has written Ka-Boom! in stick-on glitter gold. She and I think it’s very good, but Mum is furious because we spoilt a perfectly nice tie she’d helped Allegra choose from the place where Rumpton buys his shirts.
Dadda doesn’t say anything, but he is frowning. He frowns as if all history were written on his face and had occurred for no other reason than to arrive at the moment of this impasse.
‘No. It’s your night. I’d only muck things up for you.’
‘Come on, Mum,’ I say to her, but she just whistles a tune and taps her fingernails on the dashboard.
Dadda sighs. At length, he opens his door. ‘Come on,’ he murmurs to me. He doesn’t take my hand in his growling palm as he used to, but shoves me in the back and pushes me along in front of him.
‘Shake a leg, Isobel,’ he says as we pass under the awning. I am shaking a leg. I’m shaking both of them and his fingers twitching in the middle of my back are really irritating me. He’s like a gladiator, using me as his shield. We climb a little ramp to the foyer of the gallery-restaurant.
Checkie Laurington is leering at us from the receptionist’s desk. ‘It’s an absolutely wonderful show, Henri,’ she croons.
I hate her! She is nineteen years old and you can see her nipples through her skivvie. Dadda smiles flickeringly and forces me forward under The Brolga’s smooching beak. ‘Where’s Stella?’ The Brolga warbles. ‘Nothing wrong is there, Henri?’ She doesn’t wait for an answer, but says, ‘I’d like you to meet …’ Gobble gobble gobble gobble and gobble, it sounds like to me. If you want to be upper middle class in this country, you have to develop a dewlap and wear your biscuits firmly poised between index finger and thumb just a bite’s length from your cherry-red lips. Similarly, you have to wear your drink cheek high and trot like a show pony all around the VIP. The gush is a thing I must practise as it is not taught at our school.
This first part of the restaurant hasn’t any tables and chairs in it tonight. They are all arranged in the second part, down a small flight of stairs, where there is a little parquet dance floor and a stage for a jazz band. The jazz band players are not here yet and the baby grand piano is closed. The lighting down there is dim, while up here, where the paintings are hung, it’s brighter, though very smoky.
Allegra is slouching around crankily and shoving trays in people’s faces as if she were carrying a circular saw and about to slice off their heads. Everyone’s noticed her fishnet stockings, particularly as one of the seams is crooked.
‘G’day,’ she says to me blackly. She thumps a platter down on a table in a corner and sloshes some claret from a flagon into a glass for me, ‘Get this inside you. Where’s Mum?’
‘Out in the car. Won’t come in.’
‘Don’t blame her,’ says Allegra and yawks her mouth down in the corners. ‘What about this lot, eh? There’d be about as much genuine feeling here as there’d be on a numb budgie.’
We sock down a couple of clarets each and she tells me that earlier on Checkie Laurington refused admittance to Bridget and Maggie Kelly. ‘I told her they were Dadda’s friends,’ says Allegra (she’s a bit tipsy), ‘and she just said, “Ew, well, thet’s regrettible, but I’m afred we corn’t allow people in without an inviteetion”.’ The Melbourne private schoolgirls’ accent is one of the most abominable ever foisted on the human race and we are glad we have good, ordinary, four-square voices in which we can express the full range of our passions instead of being stranded somewhere between the genuine and the fake, so worried about the sounds that are going to come out of our mouths that we can’t decide whether we’re throwing a tantrum or accepting a knighthood.
‘Gotta go,’ she says at length, and swings the tray up onto her shoulder. She weaves away through the fumes and the crawlers, crooning sensually, ‘Chartreuse? Anisette? Cognac?’ which are not the drinks on her tray, but the opening lines of a play by Pirandello.
For a man who collects rubbish, Dadda can be surprisingly neat. This exhibition is called Where the Nice Girls Live: Paintings and Drawings by Henry Coretti. Aunt Nina would be disappointed as there are no nudes.
In his paintings, Dadda sometimes uses little bits of machinery, like the wheels from inside clocks or little cast metal bloc
ks from gutted engines and radios. O the Mind, Mind is the inside of a neatly dissected female head in profile, filled with gadgets and pulleys and miniature light globes making a series which coils from the shaft of the nostril round the inside of the skull in a snail shell till it reaches the centre. There Dadda has put a doll’s house stove with its door off and a turkey in its oven. It is stuck onto an oblong of gold leaf, surrounded by exquisite squiggles in egg tempera such as you would find in an illuminated manuscript. I know he uses egg tempera sometimes, because it goes bad and the smell drives us insane. The rest of the woman is sitting up whole and clothed. The Dunlopillo of her armchair overlays springs which give in the correct fashion, demonstrated by arrows.
The notes to the exhibition read: ‘Where the Nice Girls Live, Numbers 1 and 2 make a pair of paintings in which the indentation of real tyre marks has been used to great effect. Number 1 depicts the aftermath of a hooligan “wheelie” over the gutter of a suburban street, recognisably outside Coretti’s own home. Number 2 is also painted in Coretti’s neighbourhood and shows the lower margins of a lavatory block in a local park. Here the tyre marks make an arc in front of a broken sapling, which is eerily casting the shadow of a mature tree on the wall behind it.’
The notes are signed at the bottom, Viva H. and Cecilia V. Laurington. Cecilia V., now in the first year of a Fine Arts degree at the University of Melbourne, is currently trying to hold a conversation in Italian with Dadda. She’s obviously practised it beforehand and Dadda is going, ‘O-oh’, in that sing-song way he has, his blue eyes moving about wickedly under his dancing brows. ‘Very goo-ood, Checkie,’ he says.
I’ve just about had enough.
Allegra has slung herself into a dark spot where the gallery stairs go down to the dance floor. She is emitting gobfuls of smoke and breathing very audibly behind them. People swan past gooing, gushing, kissing and congratulating. I squeeze in beside her.
‘Giss a puff.’ She hands me the weed. I bop out seven rings straight. ‘I’m going to see how Mum is,’ I say to her.
‘Don’t let her come in.’
She won’t be there anyhow. She will have gone home. She will have wrecked her shoes with angry walking.
From the covered way I can see that our mother isn’t in the car. She will have walked down to the main road and caught the tram home. She might still be waiting at the tram stop. But I hope not because, if she is, she will ignore me. She will go and sit up one end of the tram, facing the other way; I will go and sit up the other end, watching her. She will get off a stop after the one I get off at and be home earlier than I am and out of sight by the time I get there. I will lie down fully clothed in the dark in my unmade bed and stay awake till all of them are in, each making a separate set of sounds.
Someone has to look after them.
I like riding on trams up the end, in the dark, the loneness of it, watching my mother’s back up the other end, hating to be watched.
She stares rigidly back at herself from the glass over the advertisements on the driver’s cabin.
If I were to have feelings tonight, what a rag-bag collection they would make; they would be helter-skelter all over me with little sharp teeth digging into the veins that run over bones, their eyes twisting in their rotten little sockets. Just as well I am drunk.
I like this hurtling round on a tram at night and the steel wheels on the steel tracks turning time into abracadabra. Ding! My stop. Glass on the road. One street light illuminating one tree and the rest just black forms with wind in them. See. My mother’s back rattles away over the rise.
The clouds have coalesced to a mountainous thickness and the moon is being crushed in them. Enormous rain is falling down slowly, like dinner plates. I like this back alley bluestone street into which the trees come over the fences like thieves with a foot caught in a backyard crime. Cartons and household waste are piled up here and sludging into the stormwater channel, beginning to rush away now as the rain comes pelting. At the end of the alley, where the lane leads off to our street, a tree is churning violently against a light pole heaped with rubbish at the base. There’s a bat slung dead in the wires, been there for weeks, and the rain is plummeting down so violently now it bounces back off the stones for several feet.
I run. As I reach the alley’s end, the rubbish at the base of the light pole reels up before me. Say, little girl, will you be my partner? And it’s do-si-do and sashay with him with your left hand …
Numb nose and numb ears. In all this waiting for you I have polished off a whole bottle of white on my own. Frontignac. Bridget Kelly used to call it ‘Frontie-yack’, so my mother always calls it ‘Frontie’.
I have been told the story of my parents’ marriage break-up several times by different people in different places. In that beach house where Leslie Hallett sheltered during the war, for instance. By people who knew or thought they knew or thought I ought to know or thought the telling would erase the antipathy I would feel for Viva Laurington, née Hallett, for many, many years.
SEVEN
Correspondence
IN THE GATHERING dark, my ears strain for the sound of a car on the lonely road. Lucky to hear it over the din of rain on the roof. Cars, cars are crossing Australia and the greater world in all directions. A destination for every car, and for every destination, a departure.
When someone leaves, the ones left behind loll over the edge of the emptied space and speculate. They gauge its depth, they think about whether to fill it in, they imagine filling it in and try to see themselves doing so through various sets of eyes. For instance, would it trouble Aunt Nina if we filled Dadda’s space in? Probably not in the slightest. Would it trouble Mum? No doubt – but, being one of the left-behind, she had to be included among the speculators.
We sat around slackly for a while, curling our lips, then Allegra said she thought it was time I had a studio, because after all I’d begun my art course by the time Dadda disappeared. Our mother was dubious. ‘His things are in there,’ she said.
‘We’ll just move them so there’s room for Bel. Come on, Mum, we’ll clean it out together.’
She was reluctant, but we talked her into it, a joint exorcism; it would mean more room in the house.
The green door creaks open. Three people on the doorstep. Allegra dressed in a cleaning tutu, pink net, long white tights with holes in them, brand new pink satin ballet slippers without toe blocks. ‘Where did you get those?’ asks Stella, greying auburn fuzz sprouting from the leg holes of a pair of knickers worn on her head. She means the ballet slippers: we all know the tutu comes off the back of a St Vincent de Paul truck; Bridget Kelly sorts for the Paulines on Wednesdays and bears us in mind. ‘Leone,’ Allegra explains. Leone? Leone hasn’t been heard of for eight or nine years. ‘She gave them to me. They were meant for Isobel to make a house in, like the one she made in Dadda’s shoe. But I knew she wouldn’t make one for Leone, so I kept them.’ Allegra is standing in third position, mop rampant. I have the pan and broom, top hat and tails.
We peer in. It is dark inside, but a warm dark, the dark of an afternoon nap in Uncle Garth’s den at Clare with the brown velvet curtains drawn, fingers of sunlight drumming on their backs. Stella and Allegra stand each side of the doorway and peer at me peering in.
Helped up the two wooden steps by their eyes, I go first with my folded easel and my paint box. They wait outside.
The studio smells of oils and Dadda. Along the neighbours’ side, his work bench with the shadow of the window transom starkly on it. One old wooden easel. He’s taken the good ones with him. Mine is a small metal one. I spread its rubber-tipped tripod and stand it beside his. Father and daughter. Daughter doesn’t quite fit, so she goes on the map drawers he’s left behind him. I open the third drawer to see if he’s left his spoon collection. He has: plastic, silverplate and wood. In another drawer, old jewellery. He has taken his collection of gutted clocks that used to be in the top drawer, though.
I’m overwhelmed by the time that’s
passed since I was last here. As I sit down, the snoring of the dump sirens trembles by my ear. They are sleeping on the bench, lounging on the couch and chair he kept beneath the window facing our room, near his sink. Genoa cut brown velvet stuffed with horse hair. Apple green blind. Eight years without me setting eyes on them.
Sun-drenched Modigliani women snooze under the sills in the places where he might have put them, postage stamp sized, in a painting: minute, but full of allure. Oh, though they are not here, they warm the dark, they take the solitariness from the shadow of the window transom on the benchtop.
I hear the mop being leant against the wall and Stella murmuring. Keep cathedrals, grazed knees in the Lady Chapel, Scunthorpe Anglicans. We should lock this place with its stilled ghosts, as it is.
We should lock the last expression on his face in here. Don’t be like that, Isobel, his face said.
But what way was I meant to be? Joyful? Carefree? Do-as-you-like-Dadda-it’s-all-the-same-to-me? It isn’t all the same to me.
I grab my stupid little easel off the map drawers, ready to charge out, but something comes thudding down on my foot. Something light and black, fuzzed by tears, sounding and smelling like a … shoe.
He has left me a shoe.
I pick it up and rub the dust off it with the cuff of my dress shirt. It takes my hand in my father’s foothold.
By me on his bench, a little sharp knife. I pull the tongue out through the laceless upper and slit it so it sits upright. On this upper I shall build my church.
Soon my tears are the wine of consecration. They fall into the heel where his heel was as I carve my cross. In the beginning was the word and the word was: Here. Now. With me. Always.
I carve my way through the smell and feel of him, his foot my tutor. Quietly, Allegra is beside me. She rests her head next to mine and I feel the cushion of her frothy hair. She strokes my back and kisses the tear on my cheek. She has brought me a sherry in a peanut butter jar.
Mad Meg Page 11
