Mad Meg

by Sally Morrison

  Advertising hoardings have more effect on behaviour than nuclear stockpiles, those masculine playthings which, their bluff now called, have been moved aside to reveal – not the Palace of Reason – but the Republic of Unintended Consequences.

  The Midnight Knitter is clicking away again, driving her needles into a web of wool and mumbling about scruffiness and boot polish. Even if only in her mind, there are still men in shiny shoes somewhere. They chat affably with one another, as if the answer lay in shiny shoes. But then they stall, they break down, they get deadlocked. The moment passes. Catastrophe bowls along, a strapless, backless prima donna whose price is beyond all reckoning.

  God is back. The widow Coretti has been seen among the Anglican flock, at one with the Christmas miracle. Her brolgaisms quelled by the swell of song, at her side an undersized young gentleman from whose shuddering shoulder-length curls fervour has shaken the dandruff. Beside the undersized, an oversized young lady bursting from a clinging cotton garment lavishly decorated with sunflowers and clapped to her midriff by a wide black shiny belt. Beside her, a tweed coat that might have been made for a schoolboy shop dummy encases an erstwhile schoolboy with wisps of mouse-brown hair. Between carols the oversized young lady sits forward on the pew, eagerly and piously listening to the efforts of the choir above. As she listens, she blinks false eyelashes and the undersized young gentleman gives the tweedy young gentleman a look behind her back which says, ‘See what I have to put up with’.

  God has struck. The organist strikes back. The Brolga rises. The Brolga kneels. Once in royal David’s city, sings The Brolga. Stood a lowly cattle shed, sing her three young friends. When the time comes for the body and the blood, The Brolga has a way of looking as though she belongs, whereas the undersized young man rushes forward far too eagerly and has to jig about to shake nonchalance into his person as the queue heads for the altar. The oversized young lady would look wrong anywhere, her presence increasing the insignificance of the tweedy boy.

  This line of humanity, stuck between a fat chap with naturally wavy hair and his jumper on inside out and the sexton, who wears his suit like a coffin, is the directorship of a new gallery, south of the Yarra, called Viva Hallett-Coretti. Not only but also. O come all ye faithful. On the way back from communion, the undersized young man throws his dramatic but amateur gaze on the cross before entering the pew.

  How do we know this? Belinda Bloomfield, Eli’s godmother, is the organist. We at Mad Meg feel that the undersized young man, known as Jerry Gosper to intimates and Jerry Gospel to us, has suggested the God tactic. He finds it good for his own malaise, which goes clothed in the tweed coat, even in warm weather. To this tweed ambitious parents have attached the name Nyle Laidlaw. It is Jerry Gospel’s sister Pattie who interposes her sun-flowered girth between the would-be lovers (though it is difficult to think of Jerry Gospel in an attitude of sprawled scrawn inviting the reluctant Nyle to join him on the couch). Jerry and Pattie Gospel share premises, while Nyle lives alone and is pursued around parties forbearing to be kissed.

  God can count himself lucky, having found employment. He resides in the large black onyx cross that once belonged to Allegra Coretti the First and ought now to belong to her namesake, but instead is to be found ostentatiously flattening the already flat chest of Viva Hallett-Coretti. Can we stand it? And what’s more, is it legal? Where is the will? Is there a will? Dadda was not a careful man in earthly matters. The first solicitor we hire tells us to go for a settlement out of court. But we do not know the extent of the estate. Wednesday Monday looks up the rules and tells us to contest.

  We lodge objections. Probate is deferred. The Brolga is ordered to furnish reasons why Allegra and I cannot co-administer the estate with her.

  An inventory is produced and prophylaxis offered in the form of two paintings, a drawing of ourselves as children and the annotated photograph of ‘An Ingenious Sewerage Plant’. This is not a third of his estate. We are entitled to a third of his estate.

  She furnishes reasons why we cannot co-administer, citing our hospital siege as grounds.

  There is humming and hah-ing. We are furiously impatient. What has she done with his mess? I demand his shoes and his collection of clock parts at point-blank range. ‘Oh, really, Isobel,’ she says through her flywire door, ‘really!’

  Allegra, armed with a colander, hooks a whole cauliflower out of a pot where it is softening for the jardinière in a kitchen at someone’s party and hurls it at her as she passes by. It misses and sieves itself through a window screen.

  We are not increasing our chances of being permitted to co-administer. There are grounds for The Brolga to suppose she might be done grievous bodily harm. A restraining order is issued, but probate is not cleared. We slap caveats on her house, her gallery and Dadda’s estate. Negotiations stall. We are pushing as hard on our side as she is on hers.

  When Harry Laurington turned up on his own in Mad Meg one Saturday morning, Allegra and I gave each other sidelong glances and slid from behind our desk to stand before him, a couple of bodgies, our arms folded across our chests. Harry swung his good arm down, palm upwards, in a conciliatory gesture. We shifted our centres of gravity. ‘Please …’ he said in a tone that told us he was finding the going hard.

  Then, ‘Coffee, Harry?’ Allegra asked à la Lauren Bacall. After all, except on an artistic level, our quarrel was not with him.

  ‘Thank you.’ Harry dipped his head and prodded his middle momentarily in a courteous little bow. We showed him into Mad Meg’s closet-sized kitchen, put on the percolator and sat him down.

  Suspicious Motte gazes wandered upon him from Coretti faces. ‘It’s about your father,’ he said, making the kindly gesture again. ‘I haven’t come here about the will, because I know nothing about it, but I think you have a right to know where Viva spread Henry’s ashes.’

  Allegra said aggressively, ‘Of course we have. He was, after all, our blood relation. It may seem strange to you, but Isobel … we … both of us loved Dadda. We didn’t ask him to throw our mother and us over for that … Mink Murderer!’

  Harry nodded. ‘Quite. Quite. Believe me, there are several people who wish your father had not run off with Viva. Checkie and I, for instance, share your pain.’

  We doubted it in silence.

  ‘But as I was saying … I have a house on the Bellarine Peninsula. It’s been in my family since it was built in the 1890s. I am very attached to it. When I was small, my parents used to take me there. I had good parents, I loved them very much. It’s a peaceful place, my mother had everything done in white, and while it is many years now since she died, I’ve kept up her custom. The yard is planted with rare Australian plants; again, it was my mother’s idea. She loved the native plants of this country and would go on expeditions to find rare species in order to try and propagate them. She was a great friend of Elinor Sorby, Reg’s mother, who used to collect orchids. Anyway, such plants as survived on the peninsula my mother nurtured to maturity. Elinor drew them, particularly the orchids, which my mother used to classify. Reg has a collection of sketchbooks somewhere. They’re quite special.

  ‘My mother was a kind and careful woman, very dignified, but not unadventurous. When I was still quite young, she and my father were drowned in a freak yachting accident. The weather seemed perfect for sailing, but treachery can wear the calmest face. There was a rip, the boat was carried out, they tried to get back in but capsized and were carried out themselves. They were never found. As you can imagine, I was devastated. The beach house came to represent my mother and her marriage for me; it was my solace. I don’t let anyone alter it.

  ‘During the war I met up with a young chap – Viva’s brother, Leslie Hallett – as you no doubt know. A terrifically gifted painter. I kept him down in the beach house AWOL for much of the war. He was sensitive, given to depressions, quite unlike Viva as it turns out. He detested war, yet felt guilty about having evaded it. Young friends of his had gone off to die or be captured. He and I shared
this guilt of not having gone; I’d been considered unfit because of my arm.

  ‘You probably know Leslie’s final painting – everyone does – the soldier drowning in a vast green sea?

  ‘He’d been reading Auden’s poem on Bruegel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, that’s why there are two unattached wings falling out of the sky. In shape, they mimic the sails of the ship in the Bruegel. Of the ship, Auden says and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen/ Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky/Had somewhere else to get to and sailed calmly on. Leslie has cast the sea as the overwhelming aspect of war. You, Isobel, once had a related idea: your painting of heavy people with miniature wings; but whereas your figures had never been able to fly, Leslie’s soldier had flown, if only in thought.

  ‘Perhaps there’s even more to it than that. I sometimes think the “expensive, delicate ship” to which the wings refer is how Leslie imagined my life. When he’d finished that painting, he must have walked into the sea and kept on going. He was found washed up along the coast towards Point Lonsdale. He was in uniform. There were no marks on him to suggest there’d been foul play: Viva and I took him back to the beach house and buried him under the grevilleas. We chose the grevilleas because they’re wonderful in spring, tumbling with nectar eaters: wattle birds, silvereyes and the like – real, not mythical wings.

  ‘When Henry died, Viva begged me to let her bury him near Leslie. I tired to explain to her that nowadays you need all kinds of permits. When I rang to find out, I was told no one had been buried on private land since the 1950s. She badgered me and dragged Reg Sorby into it, too, but Reg told her to get some sense and have Henry cremated and scatter his ashes. Ultimately, that’s what she did. I understand Reg arranged it all. I gave her permission to scatter the ashes at the beach house. She would have done that, I dare say, quite probably near Leslie’s grave.

  ‘If you would like to go down to the house, either of you or your mother, or all three, whatever you like, you can just tell me in advance and I’ll give you instructions and tell you where to find the key. It takes a couple of hours to get there; you may like to stay in the house for a day or so, however long you wish.’

  The percolator hicked its coffee-scented fumes. As I set out three mugs on the sink, I was overtaken by the feeling I’d done it exactly this way before. I glanced at the kitchen light; someone had stuck a Japanese bookmark to the shade – flypaper, I thought of flypaper, and Granpa’s terry towelling hat. I almost expected to hear the squabbling of doomed chooks as I poured the first coffee and handed it to Harry. I almost laughed, but Harry’s tone had pulled me away from the farcical and all I could do was contemplate how we rob ourselves of feeling when we laugh too soon.

  ‘I don’t hate your father,’ he said. His voice was low and quavery; our mother would have called it ‘well bred’. ‘He was a terrific painter, among the best: highly original, very perceptive. His world was a system of interconnecting signs; his approach was something like a highly eccentric doctor’s. Your father saw worldly malaise, but it was incurable.’

  ‘Fatalistic bastard,’ said Allegra, but Harry ignored it and went on.

  ‘When Viva came home from Europe in 1937, she came with Henry. I knew neither of them then, nor did I know Leslie. I had heard of Rose and Laurent Hirsch and seen them in various places, and to tell you the truth I thought Rose was a terrible exhibitionist, but there was no doubting she was lovely. I was happy to meet her, ultimately, when Leslie came into my life, and it was through Rose I met Viva. Naturally I was interested in Leslie’s sister. Though Viva didn’t paint herself, she had a terrific eye for art. Leaving aside all else, Viva is one of these people with a highly developed sense of aesthetics. She certainly brought out my own latent sensibilities. I still believe we made a better pair than Viva and Henry. And, anyway, Henry’s heart wasn’t in it, not then.

  ‘I know there is no love lost between you and Viva, but I should tell you she’s nobody’s fool: glib, yes, but stupid, never.’

  ‘H’mph!’ went Allegra. ‘That’s a matter of opinion. There are other ways to be. Why did she choose that one?’ This drew no reaction from Harry. ‘Are you quite sure you don’t know anything about Dadda’s will?’ Allegra then asked sharply.

  ‘No, I don’t. But you were quite right not to settle out of court. You must press her to disclose the whole estate. It could be that she had things salted away in her name. It wouldn’t surprise me; she’s extremely shrewd.’

  ‘Extremely hard! How could you marry her?’ Allegra cried, suddenly passionate. ‘How could anyone marry her?’

  ‘You might well ask, Allegra. Once, you know, we were all great friends: Rose, Laurent, your father, Leslie, Viva and me. Rose is completely beside herself about Henry. She can’t bear losing friends, so she doesn’t; she makes a doll or an image and that person stays alive as long as she does.

  ‘I’m sorry we can’t be better friends, you two and me. People say I’m contemptuous of the sort of art you show. Not at all. But you will find in time, as I have, that in art you are destined all too often to become what you oppose. In the forties and fifties Siècle was truly radical, believe me, but Bart and Miles took over then and they were younger. Some of my artists had become rich and famous, when not every work of theirs merited adulation. Bart doesn’t like me, just as I didn’t care for the conservatives who preceded me. You do your best. By my own rood, I’ve succeeded; my artists eat. They’ve shocked Australia out of its hide-bound provinciality from time to time. Bart would have had nothing to complain of had I not gone in first.

  ‘I don’t dislike the work you show at all. It’s wonderfully witty, but wit alone can’t give you an income. You’ll either have to rely on government grants to keep going or you’ll have to compromise if you want to be running in ten years’ time.’

  ‘Well, there’s always our share of our father’s paintings,’ said Allegra.

  ‘That’s what I mean. Compromise. Let me know when you want the beach house key.’ And with that he rose. Allegra pouted and sulked as I walked him towards the door. As he left, he squeezed my elbow. ‘I’m sorry about it all,’ he said.

  Harry Laurington seemed pretty civilised to me, but Allegra said he was a manipulating hypocrite. She was sure he was trying something on. I was forbidden to take up his offer, kind though it had seemed.

  Until his visit, we’d always treated Harry as beneath contempt for having married The Brolga and inflicted Checkie on the world. I’d never talked to him before and found myself surprised, even hurt, by his sensitivity and intelligence. I didn’t want Harry Laurington to be clever, compassionate and far-sighted. I wanted him to be a fraud.

  I had not seen Rose since Dadda died. She sent a little note to say how sorry she was and how Allegra and I must be brave, though she herself was feeling like a coward. Allegra said Rose probably knew where the ashes were and deliberately didn’t tell us. ‘I wouldn’t trust her as far as I could kick her,’ she said, bitterly. But I trusted Rose and eventually went to see her, remembering what Harry had said about her making a doll or an image in remembrance of someone who’d died. There was a blue-eyed boy with wings and a curly serpent’s tail watching her now. We’d laughed together over how the artists in the Sforsa Castle had dealt with the problem of haloes and perspective, and now her boy had a halo stuck around his head, shoulder to shoulder, the yoke of sainthood.

  Of course she knew where Dadda’s ashes were, and would have told us had Harry not decided to do so. Furthermore, Harry had given Rose, to give to me, a little stack of letters Uncle Nicola had written to and received from the Corettis after he came to Australia. Harry thought Viva had borrowed them from Dadda to read and then forgotten them when she and Dadda eloped.

  NINETEEN

  Uncle Nicola

  AS WELL AS leaving me his shoe to make a church from when he eloped, Dadda had left a mysterious package in a cupboard in his studio. At first I thought it was just an old newspaper in a plastic bag, part
of one of his constructions, but it was pretty heavy when I picked it up, and I noticed the newsprint was in Italian. I put it in my bedroom to open later, and promptly forgot about it. A couple of years afterwards, Dadda asked if I knew where it was. I recognised the package from his description, but I didn’t know where I’d put it, and it wasn’t until after he died that I found it. The wrapping was a disintegrating copy of Critica sociale, the journal run by The Apparition and Filippo Turati, and inside was a brace of duelling pistols (essential luggage for a man of Uncle Nicola’s stamp) and three diaries.

  Uncle Nicola had a fine, neat, beautifully sloping hand. Afterthoughts and postscripts were added into his diaries in exquisite little boxes, making the record a work of art. Roughly translated, his frontispiece reads, ‘We cannot assume good outcomes from good intentions.’ Elsewhere he makes the comment, ‘All acts, regardless of intention, have consequences, the preponderance of which cannot be foreseen.’ I think these are admirable observations; they impose nothing on those who read them, but the moral gravity of choice.

  In 1926 he wrote that life in Italy had become sad and joyless. City councils had been bullied out of existence and fascist Podestà, (mayors), appointed in their places. The large, high circulation non-fascist press was broken into submission, several papers having had their offices ransacked and their printing presses violently destroyed. According to the Fascist’s official historian, Giovanni Gentile, the Fascist Party had recently become the organ of the ‘self-perfecting state’, which at maturity would express the moral will of the people, so that anyone not wishing to serve it would be its enemy. The most depressing feature of the whole farce was the ‘investigation’ into Matteotti’s death. It had taken place in a provincial town where communication was difficult and witnesses could be watched. The murderers were tried for manslaughter (principal culprit unknown) as the result of ‘a practical joke gone horribly wrong’. Though the order for the abduction had come from high up in the Fascist hierarchy, quite possibly from Mussolini himself, the hierarchy was exculpated, and the assassins were free men inside a year.