Mad Meg

by Sally Morrison

  The next day, when we came across Euphrosyne’s stud book and the pedigrees of Oberon and Countess, we supposed the table would be passing through Wodonga and would continue on to Corryong. There, it would have to cross the now overbrimming Murray and begin the perilous but beautiful climb up Kosciuszko. Here, fist-sized rocks were so numerous as to fling every twentieth car into the fragrant sub-alpine forests or down the gorgeous honey-scented valleys above the snow line. If our table had to come to rest, we prayed, let it be in this heavenly locality.

  The orphaned chairs were beside themselves.

  We packed the hand-embroidered tablecloths and guest towels, the monogrammed dinner service with its indigo rims, the breakfast china, the Minton, the Doulton, the Staffordshire and what was left of the Waterford after Helene Sorby’s lust had been satisfied by purloining the glasses from which she and Reg had had their drinks.

  Allegra observed that the table ought just about to be in the tablelands by now. We took sherry and heart. From there it was a mere spin across flat surfaces.

  The black wedding dress was loaded into the Kombi, the letters from the front, three chairs, the trinkets, the tantalus. The carving knives. Countess’s saddle – no, not the saddle – well, all right then, why not? But why? Because if the saddle, then not the tablecloths. The serviette rings, the silver. The portrait of the stud bull by A. Twine.

  And under the old camp bed where Uncle Garth used to recline drunkenly in his den, Mad Meg. She was mounted on a piece of hardboard, framed, the glass in front of her broken. Stuck on the back, in his scrawl on a Memorandum from one of his practices in Adelaide, was written:

  For this, be sure, tonight thou shalt have cramps, Side-stitches that shall pen thy breath up; urchins Shall forth at vast of night, that they may work All exercise on thee: thou shalt be pinch’d As thick as honeycomb, each pinch more stinging Than the bees that made them.

  Reg had refused to ring us when he arrived in New South Wales. All this fuss over something we no longer owned got on his nerves.

  We had to wait more than twenty years to find that our table had made the journey not over the Alpine Way as we imagined, but blamming up the Hume in a cattle truck onto which Reg had loaded it in Horsham. When it reached here, Reg was at pains to tell us, Helene had made him dismantle a wall to get it inside. He’d nearly sent it back to us. The walnut table was not his favourite piece of furniture. All the same, when Helene claimed it in the divorce settlement, he refused to relinquish it on the grounds that it couldn’t be moved.

  The old woman reaches into a pocket and hands me a fistful of poppy seeds, wrapped up in an embroidered linen handkerchief. ‘Why these?’ I ask her.

  ‘Well, since your garden’s full of trenches …’ She refers to a plumbing disaster at my house, and also to the Somme and the Marne and the connection between soldiers and poppies. If I did not know my mother, this gesture would be without significance. But even the hanky is meaningful. She is living the end of the embroidered linen era, when flowers were large and generous, china was fine, the silver solid and polished – never a quick-dry tablecloth, but threads, painstakingly pulled by Aunt Nina, who spoke so beautifully and announced, as she lay dying, that there was a cake nearly ready in the oven. We could eat it at the funeral.

  In the drawers of mahogany and rosewood chests we were to find, lovingly labelled and left for us, a half-a-century-old batiste of gentlest yellow with nasturtium sprays in the corners and the edges fluted and French turned.

  I can’t help loving my mother and Aunt Nina for that: all that faultless ironing, all that care. The Red Cross labels from their Aid Detachment coats, the regimental colours kept in the button box, the photos in nursing uniforms, the ambulance driver, the debutante whose dress was remodelled from Vere’s crepe-de-chine nightie. And our little letters, tied with Christmas ribbon, kept as treasures. Yet, how furious they made us! How small we sometimes felt and how unwilling to carry the burden their respectability thrust on us. How we despaired for the props of their endurance!

  How solid Aunt Nina seemed, and at death still was – unshakeably loyal. While we, young and yellow as the dandelions nodding stupidly from her grave, wanted to yell, Stop it! Cut it out! Quit it! You can’t do this to us! Pass the family brain, Aunt Nina, it looks like custard, needs more gelatine!

  Too ‘well bred’ to hear, she went on stitching, delicate eyebrows raised, served us off the best china, the proper table, and never a serviette without its silver ring. Now the Midnight Knitter holds down bills with them, wraps poppy seeds in the hankies … But they’re ironed, they’re clean, they’re polished all the same, and never a vase with something dead in it. Respect for things: things worthy of respect.

  TEN

  Our Father’s Daughters

  IN THE DAYS when men were men and women were their wives, O Best Beloved, in the way out, far off times when The Leader of the Opposition, Mr Whitlam, who was formerly the Deputy Leader of the Opposition, was, according to the Government, full of ‘gall’, ‘recklessness’, ‘desperation’, ‘malice’ and ‘lying’ (and his wife’s name wasn’t Marjorie), in those days, girls were ‘raven-haired’, ‘attractive’ and ‘pert’ and were the daughters of men. It was as if the men, and not their wives, had laboured hard and long to give their daughters life.

  Our mother was known as ‘Mrs Henry Coretti’, but during the year of 1968, had she been newsworthy, like the ‘attractive blonde from Sydney’ who became Miss World, she would have become ‘The Former Mrs Henry Coretti’, because ‘The Former Mrs Harry Laurington’ became ‘The Present Mrs Henry Coretti’, the two years for desertion being up.

  How did our mother take it? When the phone rang at home, she would give our number and say, ‘This is the former Miss Motte speaking. How may I help you?’ At work she would say ‘Rudge and Plant, formerly Rumpton, Rudge and Russell, O’Rourke speaking.’

  The troubled and destitute were still beating a path to our front door, among them an increasing number of Indians. The chap who had failed to levitate the stoppers from our decanters, name of Krishna, belonged to an obscure sect and called our mother Mummy. ‘Ooo, Mummy,’ he would begin his tale of woe, ‘in the Punjab it is not possible to purchase proper medicine.’ And Stella Coretti, née Motte, known variously as Motto, O’Rourke and Mummy, would twist the arm of some chemist she had befriended in the course of her labours and ‘proper medicine’ would appear in the Punjab. In our letterbox, letters in longhand from the grateful recipients, accompanied by new requests. Clothing required in Amritsa.

  Our mother, a grazier’s daughter, did not like synthetics. I, unmarried mother and inheritrix-in-waiting, had little money for clothes. My father bought me a new black boucle jumper. It went missing. A photograph from Amritsa turned up on our mantelpiece in which a grateful Indian was wearing it. I said, ‘My jumper!’ My mother said, ‘Oh, that old thing. I was going to put it in the poor bag.’

  Indians came, and priests whose vestments needed ironing. And not only ironing, but laundering too. The steam and dry iron, given me for my birthday by my father, caused such a sweaty pong to arise from the vestment armpits that the iron forever after wore a brown and bubbled skin on its ironing surface.

  My toothbrush tasted of soap. Was it an accident? Money, presents and salves for Dadda’s conscience were costing me.

  ‘You shouldn’t accept things from Dad,’ Allegra said.

  I felt like bursting. Little things such as a jumper meant a lot to me. There were also toys for Eli. Sometimes I sensed The Brolga’s hand behind them and couldn’t take them. Then they would come circuitously, ostensibly from Bart, turning up in the foyer at Figments, Bart’s brother’s gallery in Melbourne. Figments was right next door to Siècle, so I couldn’t imagine Viva having a hand in getting them there.

  Bart Turner continued to be very good to me. He came to Melbourne and organised a show of his painters’ works at Figments. I got my picture in the paper. The caption read, ‘Isobel Coretti (21), the pert, ra
ven-haired daughter of artist Henry Coretti, shows that she, too, can paint. Several of Isobel’s works are included in the “Turner at Figments” show in Harcourt Lane.’

  Not one of the works was photographed. The photographer didn’t even look.

  Allegra said, ‘It’d make you chuck.’

  Dapper, asterisk-eyed Bart Turner, eating mandarins at the front desk of the gallery with his brother Miles, made a noise like a grasshopper jumping up and down in a paper bag (that was his way of laughing), and said, ‘Well, don’t chuck here, Allegra, or you might make headlines: “Artist’s Daughter Chucks in Gallery Foyer – Part of Daring Show – Not Only Pornographic, but Sick As Well.” Never mind. It’s something to get a mention at all, considering how young and unknown we are.’

  Bart’s brother, Miles, was a hairy giant of a man, slow spoken and impenetrable, a weight in a doorway, reassuring when you considered what lay behind the door. In the ‘Turner at Figments’ show, naked women masturbated in murals, parallels were drawn between the bayonet and the penis, and frightfully injured Vietnamese women and children were pasted into very tasteful collages.

  Harry Laurington was believed, temporarily, to have lost the power of speech. He was rumoured to be thinking of regaining it in order to henpeck Miles over pinching one of his painters. Less explicit works by the Master of Masturbation had once graced the walls of Siècle. Miles Turner made a noise like a doormat being thumped (that was his way of laughing), and said, ‘Well, technically it’s still on the same wall it was last time, except it’s on the other side.’

  Siècle was the third of five buildings along a dead-end lane. The lane took its name from the second building, called the Harcourt-Wilson, an elaborate monster left over from the gold rush and now used as a detoxification centre and a home for destitute men. The Methodists who ran it owned the unprepossessing church on the corner of Harcourt Lane. Harry Laurington had half an old bond store and Miles Turner had the other half. Harry had the better part of the deal because Siècle’s steps faced in the direction from which people came, whereas the steps to Figments faced the dead end, giving onto the derelict back of a factory.

  On the far side of Harcourt Lane, downhill, was a children’s playground, hemmed in by Maggie and Kelly Kelly’s Pantechnicon on the street and by the back of a panel-beater’s at the dead end. With Maggie and Kelly close by, there was plenty of grass available for those who wished to partake. I still worked for Maggie and Kelly two days a week, but because the income from the Pantechnicon wasn’t enough to pay the rent on the shop and to put Chantal and Eli into preschool, I was often lumbered with the babies. I became a very good one-handed, hip-laden painter and they became multicoloured children.

  My contribution to ‘Turner at Figments’ had to do with the ironies of indoor/outdoor life in Paris, a city you might have imagined would be far from my thoughts as I mashed and nappied and trundled trikes.

  However, ten million people were on strike in Paris and students were rioting in the streets, while indoors, the peace negotiations for Vietnam were stalled because the delegates couldn’t agree on the shape of the table they were to sit around. Chantal and Eli couldn’t agree to sit around a table, either, and I, feeling very much inclined to stage my own riot, was struck by the coincidence.

  Another artist chose as his theme the assassination of Martin Luther King. Race riots, peace walks and the starving in Biafra also featured in ‘Turner at Figments’. Yet the regular press showed next to no interest in what one reviewer termed ‘infantile rage’, until the arrival of the police and the peaceful, not to say debonair, exits of Miles and Bart to the waiting paddy wagon.

  This occurred on the morning of the mandarins. Our show was five days old and we were in time to make the mid-week papers. Bart was stilled on the page calling out, ‘Remember to feed the fish!’ to me and Allegra as we waved him goodbye and the driver of the paddy wagon wondered how, having got the vehicle down Harcourt Lane, he was to execute a turn and get it out again. In the end he had to back, while I leant out into the main street, Chantal on one hip and Eli on the other, to see when it was all right for him to merge.

  The charge was obscenity. People might still have been talking about it at the end of the week, but Sirhan Sirhan got in with his gun and on the Thursday, Bobby Kennedy was dead. It looked as though our art show would pass relatively unnoticed into history.

  However …

  Summoned to attend and defend Bart and Miles, the Brothers Turner, was one Mr Ashley Monday LIB, known to his friends as Wednesday, who arrived from Sydney by Fokker Friendship at Essendon Airport in the company of the elder accused. ‘In spite of its being my first trip in an aeropla-yne,’ Wednesday told the press in his slow, joy-riding voice that crackled in the troughs and relished the bends, ‘I’m thrilled to annou-ounce that I didn’t have to use the paper bag kindly supplied by TAA-ee to be sick in.’

  His suit was creased and he wore no laces in his shoes. Sunken but bright of eye, craggy browed but perpetually amused, of all creatures on earth he resembled most the tawny frogmouth.

  ‘Gosh,’ he said amiably, when presented with the offending material in the courthouse, ‘If you think that’s obsce-ene, what about this?’

  And he festooned his sparsely haired head with plastic boils, which, he pointed out, you could buy at any trick shop you cared to enter. Furthermore, there was nothing to prevent you from wearing them on public transport; he’d done so on many an occasion. ‘Ver-y efficaycious in getting a seat,’ he explained. ‘But seriously,’ it was hard to take Wednesday seriously with a head covered in fake boils and p-sounds that exploded in his mouth like small incendiary bombs, ‘I’ve seen picture books on European cities available in public libraries on unrestricted lo-oan in which little or no effort has been made to conceal the public display-ee of genitals faithfully rendered in marble by persons who are considered to be patricians among the fay-mous.’ Pausing while the word ‘patrician’ sank into his audience, Wednesday clasped his skinny, veinous hands to his chest. The top of his skull, with its illustrative boils, weighed heavily on the bottom so that his jaw stuck out like a saucer and his terrible teeth could be seen in his glistening gums.

  ‘Obscenity,’ he summed up, ‘is a matter of taste. By some, I am considered an obscenity, and yet I walk the streets of Sydney every da-ay … in fact, the three days of this trial are the only days of my life, since I found my feet, that I have not walked the streets of Sydney. And I have walked them unmolested. War is obsce-ene, and yet there is war. Assassination is obscene, and yet there is assassination. Is the painting of a penis or a masturbating girl a more disturbing thing to see than the filmed slaying of innocents in war or the cutting down by assassins of those who strive for peace? In 1963 President Kennedy died in living rooms all over the world on slow videotape that was shown over and over and over again. Two months ago-o it was his brother’s turn. I saw Bobby Kennedy die in a hamburger joint in King’s Cross. I don’t know where you saw it, but you’re bound to have.

  ‘You cannot condo-one the nightly showing of footage of the Vietnam War, and in the same spirit, conde-emn the “Turner at Figments” show – alas that it was ripped untimely from the wa-alls, because here were young people speaking out, here were young people trying to point out that hypocrisy has reached a high pitch in this country. Girls masturbate, why shouldn’t they? There is no civil law against masturbation. Rockets and bombs are shaped like penises, and it seems to me there is quite a lot of point in saying so. While the middle class in this country decorates its walls with so-called “tay-asteful” art, people are dying foul deaths in Vietnam and Biafra; why shouldn’t you look into a collage and be given pause to reflect on what it’s made of?’

  Wednesday removed his boils. ‘Plastic,’ he said, ‘these sores are made of plastic. Girls are made of flesh and bloo-ood. They blee-eed. Physically and mentally they bleed. All the bedspreads and the decency in history won’t alter that. This country is guilty of insisting on plastic blood
, on pretending that Uncle Sam and the women’s magazines know be-est. Yet we cherish the right to free speech. You cannot take yourselves seriously and at the same time prevent the expression of controversial views in your midst.’

  You could tell by the expression on the magistrate’s face that Wednesday was a dead man. There was a short, tense interval during which Miles was heard to mutter crossly, ‘Why did you have to bring periods into it?’

  ‘Oh no-o, Milesss,’ sang Bart at his most operatic, ‘why no-ot? I mean, why no-ot?’

  The reason why not was pretty soon all too evident. The magistrate concluded, ‘If a person does something offensive, their motives for doing it are immaterial.’ Evidently the magistrate was no lover of poetic justice: Bart and Miles each got a two-hundred-dollar good-behaviour bond and Wednesday was charged with contempt of court. ‘The court ought to be charged with contempt of me,’ he said.

  Bart Turner sat shut up on himself like an umbrella. He was biting the mound of his thumb to stop himself from laughing. His eyes had disappeared into their asterisks and a tear or two slid feebly down his creases. Miles, too big for his chair, didn’t think it was quite so hysterical. Large, fed-up breaths escaped from him and made the hairs in his nostrils quake as they passed.