Mad Meg

by Sally Morrison

  She knows that when I lift myself from my work my life becomes an unrelieved absence, a gone-for-goodness. A tyranny of love.

  Quietly she moves about behind me, flicking dust with her duster-wand. She is doing her cleaner’s dance as I carve. Every so often the shuffle of pink taffeta feet. Her wraith spins along the wall, flits over the bench. She is weaving a spell of peace around me.

  He had been away six months before we began to close his tracks over. He was on our house like a system of wounds, everywhere: in the gable over the front verandah, inset with stone and bottle-top eyes from his trade with Bridget Kelly; in his bell and miniature drum collection, which visitors shook to rouse us at the front door; in the passage and the parlour, his nooks and crannies, assemblages of saints and martyrs pinched from Catholic churches; in the neglected woodwork and uselessness of all contraptions. He was even in the toilet with his photo of D’Annunzio’s bedroom. For a long time we held his place.

  Then he rang us on a dodgy line from London. We were to understand he loved us. Whatever he did, we were to remember that. He would like us to write to him and would we please redirect his letters to a London poste restante? His tone was apologetic and we could put The Brolga’s voice to every word he said.

  At our end, indignation – at his, play-acting, pretending to be the victim of circumstances. Allegra and I tumbled the receiver back and forth between us as if it had been scorching, while Mum took her fury out on doors. She slammed, she banged, she battered with her fists in frustration. He could hear her twelve thousand miles away in England. ‘What’s that noise?’ he asked, though he knew full well what it was, having heard it before. ‘I think there’s something wrong with the line.’ Perhaps he was enjoying himself. We suspected he was, both of us grabbing at our stomachs as though we’d been kicked. Our faces reddened, our heads sang, we could no longer hear what he was saying. We had lost his protection, if indeed we had ever had it. To score with Dadda, we would have to become tough, rich and shallow.

  But we didn’t ask for money. We were too slow. The Motte streak in us made it too difficult. He paused at the logical spot where we should have asked, but we didn’t name our sum. So he made an unspecified offer, which, when it came, was not enough.

  Our scholarships didn’t run to allowances. Identical letters came from the Department of Education. Dear Miss Coretti, they said, respecting your recent correspondence with our office, living allowance is payable on a Commonwealth Scholarship when the holder is female, single and under 21 only where the holder can demonstrate three years’ continuous full time employment, is living away from home, or the family breadwinner’s income is below that specified on the attached schedule. As it appears none of these conditions applies to you, living allowance will not be paid.

  We thought of talking our mother into taking divorce proceedings, but knew we’d be in more trouble with her than it was worth. She would accuse us of mercenary motives and would feel we were suggesting that she had failed.

  We knew you had to wait two years for a divorce on the grounds of desertion. If Dadda set foot over the threshold in that time, a suit would fail. To prove adultery, you had to force an admission out of the adulterer or catch him, preferably photograph him, in the act and name the other party. Technically that was beyond us, as Dadda and his paramour were so far away.

  So nothing was done.

  What did he see in Viva Laurington that we had to suffer for her existence in this way? The more we thought about her, the worse we found her to be. We concentrated on hating her, hatched plans for her murder in our spare moments. It didn’t occur to us to take our feelings out on Dadda. What was Dadda but putty in a wicked witch’s hands?

  We were not the only ones to be left, of course, but we had no fellow feeling for Harry and Checkie Laurington.

  Harry Laurington took the blow by shifting Siècle from its déclassé restaurant setting to something cooler, a disused bond store just two streets from the bluestone brontosaur. There he hung art, pumped a cappuccino machine with his good arm and allowed the young to recite new poems, perform dance routines and sing their heavy-laden, guitar-strumming songs.

  The opening of the new Siècle coincided with Checkie’s twenty-first birthday. Rumour had it that incense was burnt and a dancer from the Alvin Aley Company of New York performed for her delectation.

  We suspected that Checkie Laurington, being made of a different metal, didn’t feel as we did. We were curious to know, all the same. We pried at edges and lifted lids and found out from those people who attend life’s dramas that, in her mother’s absence, Checkie was being groomed to run Siècle. Remote and unassailable as a character in a novel, she was being inducted into a social rite from which we, two willy-willies of emotion, would be forever banned.

  Love. There’s nothing rational about it. A lifetime isn’t long enough even to know oneself, let alone another person, so why is a year, a month, a day, deemed long enough acquaintance by a woman to allow a man access to her body? If it weren’t that this silent script were evoked by circumstance, what woman in her right mind would lie down under a man and let him have her? Without the script, which is virtually saying Go Mad, lovemaking would be an appalling pastime.

  Love began for me when Rumpton turned sixty and decided to play golf three days a week. He left it up to Rudge, the junior partner, to choose his eventual successor. Alive to alliteration, Rudge chose a young man of twenty-six called Russell. Arnie Russell. A young married man of twenty-six, father of two with a third on the way. Wonderful handicap.

  Rumpton, Rudge and Russell, one day to be Rudge and Russell. What could be better? Rumpton the heron, Rudge the late ape and Russell the great white whale. Blue eyes. Not light and luscious like Dadda’s, but the product of a blue-blue cross, ‘the gold standard of blue’ Rudge called it in doctor’s parlance.

  In the latter half of 1964, after Dadda had been gone nine months and a brass plaque bearing the name Arnold F. Russell had been added to those of Rumpton and Rudge at the entrance to the stairwell, the petit fours were got up for afternoon tea by Rudge’s daughters, Rosemary and Sue, whose eyes, close set under heavily boned brows, did not stir Rumpton in the way Allegra’s and mine had when we were their age.

  Because Rosemary and Sue could not be relied upon to choose suitable fare, Stella would ring down to the cake shop and order beforehand. Stella considered the Rudge girls talentless and unexceptional and had given Allegra and me glamorous press prior to our meeting Arnie.

  One afternoon when Marjorie Rudge and daughters were paying a visit, I trudged onto the aspidistra’d verandah, my folio on the point of spilling on the floor. I launched myself into one of Rudge’s rattan chairs to wait for my mother, who was busy with a dictaphone at the new electric typewriter. Above the buzzing and clackety-clack, Marjorie Rudge was being nasal and prolonged to some friend on the phone. Like a toy tiger, she rubbed herself up the lintel of the door separating the office from the verandah. It was petit four time and her daughters had been dispatched. She regarded me nonchalantly as she twanged along, slinging words carelessly from her red-painted mouth. Her eyes, mauve-lidded, were at half-cock and the sun kept catching her pink woollen bosom as it lurched to her breathing, in and out of her fake fur coat. I’d never seen her looking wanton before: it came as a surprise. My drawings slewed onto the floor. I began to shuffle them back into the folio when a pair of exceptionally well shined shoes with a considerable weight being borne on the outsides of the heels slid into view like the water police into a mooring. Jaunty flagging of the trouser bottoms, navy blue, betokened something tall and built, as the eye travelled upwards, along the lines of Chesty Bond. Kindly smirk, Gothically arched white eyebrows over slightly drooping blue-blue eyes. Gold standard blue. A long, long way from the floor. And then much closer as Arnie squatted to examine, as it happened, pencil sketches of the female nude.

  He said, ‘My wife draws,’ three words which told me that though his wife drew, she didn’t draw professi
onally, or as well as I did. They also suggested that if he hadn’t already had a wife, he would have considered me a candidate for the post. At eighteen, being new to the ways of love, one sees oneself saying I do, I do half-a-dozen times a day to the likes of Arnie, because to Arnie’s shape and status adheres the pulp cycle marriage myth, happily-ever-afterness. All that had to happen was for his wife, Marjorie, to die.

  Only her name was Margaret and, interestingly, it wasn’t Arnie who let that cat out of the bag. His strategy of seduction involved naming his children, but keeping the post of wife speculative for as long as he was able. This was throughout afternoon tea, during which his eyes never strayed from my person. To the self-satisfaction in his voice, I ascribed kindliness and doctorly concern. It is true that Arnie was a funny man, even a parody of himself, self-consciously glamorous, wishful in his conventionality, unreliably reliable. With the collusion of Marjorie Rudge and Stella Coretti, he painted himself as a provident father and a good husband, a man who in other circumstances would have been ideal for me.

  Marjorie Rudge, who knew a vibe when she saw one, said, when he’d disappeared into his consulting room, that he’d left a trail of carnage behind him. ‘A trail of carnage! But he’ll never leave Marg.’

  I cannot say I wasn’t warned. But who would believe Marjorie Rudge? Stella called her ‘Ersatz Personified’. How could the fake ever be real, and therefore capable of uttering the truth?

  When, after a respectable lapse of time, my mother told me she thought I had ‘an admirer’, her tone was complicit, even encouraging. Perhaps she wanted to live a love affair with Arnie through me. Soon the focal point of her days became my afternoon visits.

  Then Arnie got her to rearrange his Thursday afternoon appointments and I stopped coming on Thursday afternoons. Because … I had discovered what my father already knew about the Genoa cut velvet couch in the studio. Between ten past four and five twenty-nine in the afternoons, it was deliciously warmed by the sun through the window on the neighbours’ side. When the apple-green blind was drawn the people upon the couch could not be seen.

  Thursday afternoons were all the more delicious for being ‘illicit’, though there were those who knew about it. Stella was jealous. As long as she was a party to what was going on it was all right with her, but the affair between Arnie and me was passionate, out of her control and pretty soon out of ours.

  Allegra, who had taken up the politics of the left and was beginning to shape up on the side that would soon be vigorously opposing the draft for the war in Vietnam, had to make an exception of Arnie and put him in a special category for my sake, though the dismal facts were that Arnie had done his National Service, no one in his family had ever voted anything but Liberal, and he was completely in favour of conscription for Vietnam.

  He would make brief appearances at the pub where I met with Allegra and her student friends – Prince Charming and the Existentialists – and he would kiss me in front of them, a naked warning to the young men present that I was spoken for. Then he would leave. Naturally the student friends wanted to know who the hell the weirdo in the suit was and Allegra, between salient points she was putting to them about the iniquities of the draft, would say, ‘Oh, he’s an eye doctor.’

  Consider the eye. There are those who insist that you only have to consider its complexity to prove the existence of a divine architect. And yet few would maintain the thousand and one things that go wrong with the eye to be the work of a divine saboteur. Granpa didn’t blame the Devil for his blindness, he blamed sheep dust.

  Consider the oyster. Much more open to invasion than the human eye, it hasn’t the machinery of a highly organised human body to protect it. It has but its shell.

  Seventy-one oyster shells lay scattered on the sand of Camp Cove, Sydney, in March 1965, the result of thirty-five oysters having been devoured between gulps of cold Riesling by two people, the thirty-sixth being held aloft, a smelly little pleasure dome on its home-made plate resting on the fingertips of Arnie’s clean pink hand. Framed in the cup formed by the hand and the oyster’s shell, a sunset over the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

  ‘It’s got glaucoma,’ Arnie said. ‘Its vitreous humour can’t escape through its ducts. They must be clogged. If this oyster came to me for help, I would have to puncture it with this oyster knife to let its humour escape. Terrible thing to have to be punctured to let your humour out.’ And so saying, he drove the point of his oyster knife into the dome and released a spray of sea water that dived into the ruddy liquid sky. ‘I don’t know what we’re going to do, Isobel.’

  The beach chilled a degree. He was lying on his belly, still holding the oyster up, watching me with his left blue eye. He was smiling, but he was also crying. We had decided against an abortion on the threshold of the abortionist’s.

  It was an illegal place, of course, they all were then: up some fire-stairs, above Woolworth’s in King’s Cross. Arnie couldn’t countenance it.

  At this kind of point you think it’s love that’s going through their heads, but it isn’t. You only have to read what they write to know that behind the tears they think you’re a boggy fen into which they, in their innocence, have stumbled. You are the scarlet woman against whom someone has been warning them all their lives.

  Or is that a harsh judgement? When I put it much later to Reg Sorby, he agreed with me.

  From the abortionist’s, through a trip in a bus up South Head, to the purchase of the oysters, Arnie was going to leave his wife and children for me. During the eating of the oysters and the drinking of the wine, he changed his mind. But the interval had attached me hopelessly to the vision of Arnie, me and my baby. We would live up high in Sydney, always looking out over the sublime view of ferries and sailing boats on laughing bays. He would be the father and husband he had described himself to be.

  But there was his wife. The children he had already. Margaret hadn’t dropped dead as the jettisoned woman does in so much fiction. She wasn’t evil or mentally ill. By the thirty-sixth oyster, ominously rotten, it was I who was to be sacrificed.

  I felt it keenly. I had no notion of myself as a boggy fen into which an innocent man had blundered and was now stuck fast. I thought I was the woman Arnie loved. I did not see myself as the Viva Laurington of his family: I would at all times leave Arnie free to choose. And how beautifully he chose, with his noble, uninhibited weep.

  What I did not think was that I had no choice. We flew back to Melbourne and he went back to his family, who never even knew he had been away.

  Lucky for Arnie Russell I was far too young and poor to cause him trouble.

  He and his family returned to their original home in Sydney in a hurry. ‘Offered something better up there,’ said Rumpton, gloomily shaking his head as he explained Russell’s sudden departure to ‘Motto’. An acceptable myth. Rumpton was piqued; it meant he had to give up his golf while Rudge found someone else.

  The replacement was called Plant, not alliterative, but proper, didn’t everyone think, Plant being a bit of a weed? By the way, while we were on the subject, that Arnie Russell seemed to have landed himself something in California. Marjorie Rudge looked at me and said again, ‘A trail of carnage.’

  In July, not knowing what else to do, I ran away from home. I went to Sydney, put my age up, and took a job in an Oxford Street pub that served beer to art students, like me. I wrote a note to Allegra before I left, telling her I was pregnant and going to Sydney. I didn’t know what I’d do with the baby, perhaps I’d give it up for adoption, but I didn’t think so.

  Oxford Street was a street of junk shops, Greek and Lebanese cafes, fruit shops, butchers, and in one place they sold fish – fish that were still alive. Eels writhed in the windows, bream and bass and shark flapped out their last, even the skirt of a manta ray once rippled feebly, the creature’s eyes sunk like cannon shot deep in their sockets. Torpid crabs tapped on this baffling substance, glass, and the whiskery edges of the lobsters were bent around no-room-to-move in a highly con
centrated sea.

  Shabby, tacky, dark brown Oxford Street with its bespoke tailors, their dummies clad in double-breasted Mafia suits, the pawnbrokers full-to-bursting. Walls stacked with unclaimed articles, maroon glitter electric guitars, grimy radios, Electroluxes, Sunbeam Mixmasters in yellow, in blue, in white, no bowl, one beater, patched with skin-coloured Elastoplast, with black insulation tape. Binders, folders, bed ends, pots and pans, trays, chairs, irons with frayed electric cords wound round them.

  The main window of my pub was a head-on scene of racing jockeys, whips flailing, haunches high, one in the lead with his eye on the winning post, one behind looking over his shoulder. Inside it wasn’t as salubrious as out. The milky backs of the window pictures were covered in tobacco murk. Old cream tiles along the walls at wainscot height were falling off, leaving here and there a quincunx of cement dabs. The top tiles were trimmed with a dull green glaze where they bevelled into the wall and pictures advertising Resch’s Pilsener and Dinner Ale were so begrimed as to be only marginally present. One thing I learnt from being a barmaid: no New South Welshman worth his salt drank Dinner Ale. Dinner Ale was a myth on the wall being handed to an apron by a suit and hat.

  The students drank Bloody Marys, beer and Turkish coffee. There was more flash and dash to them than there’d been among Melbourne students. Melbourne took its painting very seriously, and on the whole worked harder at it than Sydney. But Sydney had colour and fire. Everything was lively and rude. No one brooded and fought with themselves in Sydney. They fought with each other. Beers were emptied over contemptuous heads. Tussles were quick to flare up and just as quick to die down. I loved it. It pulled me out of myself till I forgot that one day a baby would be born to me. My tummy became what seemed a permanent source of delight and ridicule.

  I got along well with my boss, an insomniac called ‘Wednesday’ Monday – his name was actually Ashley Monday – and, since I was good for custom and unable to partake even of sherry without feeling nauseated, he let me have time off to go rampaging with the students.