Mad Meg

by Sally Morrison

  There was a trust, The Brolga maintained, though she was tardy in maintaining it. It dated back to the early days of Siècle. It was called the Siècle Trust, and set up in memory of her brother, Leslie Hallett.

  When questioned by Wednesday Monday, Harry Laurington disclosed that he had given to Rose and Laurent Hirsch a collection of paintings to use as they wished, either lending them out or selling them, until such time as either they or Harry died. Following Laurent’s death, Harry had left all the pictures with Rose, permitting her to sell up to half of them. At the core of the collection, however, there were fifteen Halletts, twelve Corettis, eight Sorbys, and a dozen or so paintings by other artists which were not to be sold; these were earmarked for the Siècle Trust and Rose was paid a small fee for taking care of them. They were either to form part of a Siècle collection or to be sold to raise money for a scholarship. In the event of there being enough money to finance a scholarship without selling the works, they were to be hung as a permanent collection either in the Siècle Gallery or in the beach house, where the scholarship-holder would live and work for a year. Eventually, if Checkie Laurington should find herself in a secure enough position, Siècle would become the property of the state of Victoria, the collection being used to finance the Trust scholarship.

  The Brolga said Dadda had willed the bulk of his estate to the Trust. If he were to predecease Harry or the Hirschs, two-thirds was to go to the Trust so the scholarship could be founded as soon as sufficient income was realised. The other third of the estate he willed to Viva, except for a third of the third, which was to come to us. Hence the parsimonious out-of-court offering.

  Harry Laurington said it was quite plausible. In the early days of Siècle, when they’d all been dependent on each other for help, they’d dreamed of their influence extending beyond their lives, though it was true that Dadda had severed his connections with Siècle before Leslie had died and they’d come up with the idea of the Trust.

  The Brolga had the paperwork to back her up, but it came as no surprise that the father of her new curator, Jerry Gospel, was a legal gent, specialising in trusts. He was a partner in the firm which had drafted the agreement between Harry and the Hirschs. Over breakfast with David and Miles in the foyer of Figments, Wednesday rued that there was little he could do. The will looked legitimate and we’d have a job ahead of us to prove it wasn’t.

  We cooked crumpets in a two-doored silver toaster, plugged into a lump of plugs, on the floor. Five people, five plates with round, sweaty crumpet-smudges, Miles at his desk near the door where the fire escape served as an entrance. It was impossible to get ordinary chair legs to sit evenly on Figments’ floor, so Miles had Bauhaus chairs from the Pantechnicon; the involuntary lurching of days gone by had given way to irresistible jigging. Up and down went Allegra and, every time he turned a page of the Saturday morning Age, up and down went Miles.

  Wednesday Monday didn’t jig; he never sat right back in a chair, and these could only be jigged if sat right back in. He crouched forward, clutching the canvas where it met the chrome of his seat, pink mouth chewing out the bad news as if it were a low variety of cud and he were crushing it thoroughly in his molars: the only masticating tawny frogmouth in existence.

  I sat with my back to the cool, white-washed wall, my backside gingerly on the floor. Above me was a new all-white artwork by a chap called Barrie Bull. The smoke curled from David’s cigarette. As Miles shook the paper straight, delighted crease wings formed about his eyes. ‘Someone’s been done in with an umbrella,’ he said.

  ‘What’s it say about the Bull?’ asked David, meaning an article for which a journalist had been around to Figments to interview Barrie Bull. Through the anxiety in his voice, it was clear that David regarded Barrie Bull as the competition.

  The light was surfing through Allegra’s hair. While Miles went on about Zen qualities and the simultaneity of creation and destruction, I contemplated Allegra as the ideal model for anyone having difficulties with the concept of the halo, although there was Rose’s solution to make a yoke of it. I’ve always found it hilarious how the Virgin’s gold plate swivels round from the back to the side when she’s depicted in profile. I thought I’d get Allegra to pose for me for a few views from the rear. I shifted my seat to the front doorstep to place myself between Allegra and the light, but the halo effect was lost; instead the light travelled up and down tendrilling hairs, through dark places, leaping from hair to hair, a light monkey. I wondered if Jesus had ever stood on his head, and thought of asking Eli, now adolescent, whose hair was such a mix of cowlicks it was impossible to trim, to stand on his head under the clothesline. What would happen at the interface between the ground and the halo-haired head in the event of Eli ever becoming a saint?

  I was taken with Eli’s blondness but also other varieties of fair, like red. Kelly Kelly had wonderful hair, long, straight and silky, like a gum trunk. It luminesced at twilight. Maggie’s was much the same, but had a bit of yellow in it and didn’t fall as straight as Kelly’s. Allegra’s hair had a touch of red, just like Aunt Nina’s and our mother’s; my hair was much darker, heavily dark, I thought, too heavily dark for my rather pale complexion.

  Allegra jigged, playing with a cord in her lap as if she’d been spinning at a loom and her prince had just arrived. Much better than a pallid pre-Raphaelite’s, her face had a high colour over the gorgeous architecture of her bones. She was wearing long black boots under a dark red pregnancy pinafore.

  I thought as I sat there on the step of Figments that Mad Meg wasn’t going to supply the six members of its co-operative with much in the way of security. A one-sixth share was worth about five thousand dollars. I’d given Maggie hers, and was happy to have done so. We were like-minded about many things and the years had brought us close. If my ambition was to buy a house, Maggie’s was to get an education. She’d gained a mature-age entry to tech and was now three or four years along the track towards a diploma in art and photography. Because I’d forfeited a share in Mad Meg to Maggie, that brought me only five thousand dollars when the Troika bought in. The sooner I could raise the cash to buy a house for me and Eli and be free of the interminable financial dearth of our household, which now included David and would soon extend to the expectee, the better.

  Allegra had begun to suggest that I was mean, whereas I thought of myself as frugal. She’d never minded my frugality in the past, but was now of the opinion that Eli’s only decent clothes hadn’t been bought for him by me. It was true enough that my mother and Allegra bought most of Eli’s clothes and, before that, Dadda had, but I’d always thought this was a reflection of my poverty and their generosity rather than my selfishness.

  David had let it be known he didn’t like the smell of corned beef in the process of corning, so it was a question of whether Eli and I were to forgo a major source of protein for the sake of the olfactory sensibility of a chain smoker.

  In toto I had nine thousand, five hundred dollars saved and needed only two thousand more to afford a deposit and raise a mortgage. As two thousand dollars was more than a year’s saving for me, I was very tempted to call in my portion of Dadda’s estate, but had to close my eyes and grit my teeth. I was as certain as Allegra that the will was shonky.

  As there’d been nowhere else to take my fears and woes, I’d eventually taken them to Beryl Blake. Between us, there was an unspoken understanding for which I have always been grateful. Instinctively each of us knew where the other stood and that a bond between us was not only possible, but mutually beneficial. She’d moved me up to herbarium work with Loyola, where I was better paid and doing something aesthetically quite satisfying. It had been several years now since female pay rates had been scrapped, but I was still ineligible for superannuation as I was technically a part-timer.

  ‘Ah,’ she said, and then, ‘Ah,’ again. ‘How would you like to illustrate a book?’ She was watching herself rotate a biro, almost conscious of its slim elegance in her stout red hands. ‘There’s a chap
I know who’s an expert on orchids. He’s a painter and he’s putting together an orchid book. He wants someone to do the botanical drawings for it. I rather think he wouldn’t be Loyola’s cup of tea. You’re more the sort of person he’d be looking for.’

  She swivelled around on the plump seat of her office chair, which held her aloft, a beach ball balancing act, lifted her phone receiver and dialled emphatically so that the mottled but still firm flab of her arms swung briskly, a half-saucer stain of perspiration on her dress beneath.

  ‘Hullo,’ she said, the weight of command and a decent education in her emphases. ‘It’s Beryl Blake from Bunurong Gardens here. Could I speak to Mr Sorby, please? Oh, it is you, Reg.’

  My heart sank.

  I was told he had a townhouse not far from the gardens. The inhabitants of this area were either wretched or rich, but the wretched were not overwhelmingly so. They were near a hospital and the local chemist’s reflected their requirements: crepe bandages, Agarol, cough medicine, Rectinol, Alka Seltzer, disposable nappies, Mercurochrome, Bandaids, bunion pads, pensioner discount, moccasins; very little in the way of expensive adornment, but they did stock rainbow Kleenex tissues under a prominent sign saying: NO DRUGS OF ADDICTION OR MONEY KEPT ON THESE PREMISES. The garden, too, with its park benches under mature Moreton Bays offered a pleasant if fig-sticky spot for them to congregate, their bottles discreetly wrapped in brown paper bags. The bottle contents were consumed from enamelled mugs, giving the appearance of innocent tea-taking. They communed in good weather, coralled behind a picket of walking frames, crutches and sticks, and would yell ‘G’day!’ to me and drink my health when they started to recognise me on my way to see Reg.

  His house was behind a high brick wall in which, on my first visit, I found a small door ajar.

  Bricked courtyard. Double-fronted, whitewashed Victorian abode. Door open. ‘Come in,’ cheerily from the depths.

  I see myself, little, too dark-haired, shy, reflected on all sides in picture glass. Confidence uninspired, bedroom to the right of me. I am going past a doorway to the left of me, when ‘In here,’ comes out of it.

  Jolly, rotund, become urbane since he supervised the sack of Aunt Nina’s table, he steps back from a large bushscape, brush in hand, the quintessential painter in a white paint-pocked coat.

  ‘Isobel,’ he says, without turning round, ‘I poured you a glass of champagne.’ Behind him on the table, an open bottle of champagne, two flutes – one a sip’s distance from full.

  He sniffs, purses his lips, adjusts his glasses, dabs. Then he turns around to greet me. ‘Well, aren’t you pretty?’ he says, beaming, the voice a tyre, neither over-nor under-inflated, rolling on a bitumen road.

  He starts toddling forward and says, ‘Follow me,’ drink in one hand, bottle in the other. Through a kitchen, a courtyard and into an orchidarium. ‘They say your sister’s prettier,’ still toddling along in front, ever the tactful one, ‘but she doesn’t use her face as well as you do. Sweetly made, but sourly expressed. Looked good in the Moratorium but something’s happened to her. As for me,’ navigating himself into a blue-cushioned cane chair at the far side of an occasional table and managing at the same time to run the index finger of his flute-holding hand along my cheek, ‘I like the shy ones.’

  My heart sinks further. ‘Sit down,’ he says, and I take the opposite chair.

  Crosses knees, cocks head, amiable smile. ‘You have an interesting face, do you know that?’ I open my mouth to say something but he bats my intentions (whatever they may be) aside. ‘No, no, I mean it. It’s a distillation.’ He makes a distillery ring with his chubby fingers. ‘Everything I know about you comes together in that face.’ Again, the smile, like a contented baby’s. There are worse things than being happy, but I wonder if portrait painters should be exempted from the niceties of this liberationist world? ‘There’s only one problem.’ Moving forward, elbows on knees, thumbs in conversation. ‘When you smile sometimes your mouth goes down at the corners and it looks like a smirk. Why do women of your age do that?’

  ‘I didn’t know they did,’ I say.

  ‘You’re in-vol-ved in a plot,’ he says, stressing the ‘vol’; tests my knee for go-on-you-know-you-are, like palpating a mango for ripeness. ‘A smirk is the look of a guilty person, or a sly person, or a person whose aim is to set another person up.’ Swig. ‘Now you’re looking bored; mental shutters over your nice blue eyes.’

  Not bored, terrified! In the back of my mind, the bedroom off the hall, bed neatly made, coverlet straight. Grog, compliments and a dreadful reputation.

  ‘All right, Isobel.’ His laughter like suspension over pot holes. He slaps his own baby-bottom knee. I think he sees through my irises: no alps, no snow, no speckled trout; just house, bedroom, lecherous old man. No wife at present to keep him in check.

  ‘The orchids,’ I remind him. His dendrobiums are out, pink and, alas, labiate.

  ‘Some of them only germinate after fire, did you know that? Tiny little ground orchids. There’s a bright red one turns black after mating.’ He gives me a twinkling eye and says, ‘You’re blushing.’

  Allegra was disgusted, ‘Reg Sorby!’ she forced the ‘Sorby’ out as if divesting her mouth of a boot. ‘You’ve got to be joking!’

  ‘I’m not,’ I said. ‘He’s going to pay me. I’ll get royalties.’

  ‘That’s probably not all you’ll get! The old lech! If you let him anywhere near your duds, Isobel, that’s it! I’ll divorce you.’

  I was determined not to let either Allegra or David, or worse still the pair of them combined, wreck my act. But that meant practising self-defence on two fronts simultaneously. And on the other front not only my virtue was at risk, but my integrity as a painter of my generation, an integrity built on values that were in opposition to Reg’s.

  Was it that he told you how he thought you ought to feel, and then tried to castigate you into his power when it was obvious you didn’t feel it? Had he no suavity at all? I told him I wasn’t just a Sunday painter, nor simply a plant anatomist. I was serious about my work.

  Just because he was rich didn’t mean he had anything over me. I could say no; it wouldn’t be the first time I’d knocked back money.

  He liked that. He said so. And I wondered, as the platitudes gallumphed across the glass tabletop, if Reg was like this because he was naturally crass or because he despised the habit of finesse.

  In the world outside the orchidarium, women were being taught that Reg was the enemy. More and more of them were taking assertiveness courses to learn the verbal defences against manipulation. I was never vigilant in this regard and consequently found myself in ludicrous situations. But I got out of them.

  I told Reg he was made of leftovers from the sixties. Of course, he had fought the battle against pomposity, hypocrisy and prudery; furthermore, he had stood up and been counted over Vietnam and lent his name and reputation to conservation and alternative lifestyle movements. Lately, however, he’d been touting himself as the champion of women, while concurrently painting them naked with no heads.

  I said I believed personal philosophies ought to be thorough-going but self-critical, or it’s just huffing and puffing. Our ideas have to be able to co-exist without cancelling each other out. For instance, should the enemy of prudery be the friend of sexual exploitation?

  Harking back to the sixties, did Reg remember how women and their children were deserted by their liberated husbands, how husbands became sex-driven and wives, ignorant of their own best interests, countenanced adultery, even indulged in it themselves, though most probably not with comparable relish?

  ‘Do you know,’ he responded, ‘I didn’t know women had orgasms until last year?’

  ‘God! Pull the other one, Reg!’

  ‘Then I realised what my problem was,’ he continued, nodding seriously, ‘I’ve only ever been married to Catholics.’

  Thus was the outrageous strategy of Reg. A strategist would have been able to cope with it, but strateg
ies require space in minds and I was taken up with other things. ‘Catholicism’s the root of all evil,’ he said. Reg’s philosophy seemed to be that he could believe what he pleased. It didn’t have to make sense, if he wanted to think he’d just found out about the female orgasm, he could think so, though what kind of a dash he thought he was cutting, God only knows. The years when it was victory to turn your back on the world were now well in the past. General prudery was dead, but this was the age of women calling the tune and the tune was self-protective and conservative, not predominantly sexual, as Reg depicted it.

  When Allegra knew I’d been to a meeting with Reg, she wanted a blow-by-blow account. I told her I wasn’t blowing him. ‘Well, just watch you don’t,’ she said. ‘Nobody knows where that old bugger’s been. He’s probably a walking time bomb.’ Was I protecting myself? Weren’t there other ways I could earn money? Was money necessary? Why squander my honour just for a place to live?

  But I had always wanted a house for myself and Eli. I did not regard it as a sin, nor was I going to apologise for my desires. A boy from Eli’s school came home with him one afternoon and, finding it odd that we had no furniture, asked, ‘Is this your city house?’ Eli, who took our relative poverty in a happy spirit, answered, ‘Well, actually no. It’s our space museum.’ Eli ran a book on the football at school to keep himself in funds and bought his clothes, as ever, from lost property. When Reg arrived one night to take me out for a meal, he said, ‘Have her home by twelve, son.’ He was thirteen; his voice hadn’t even broken. Reg took a shine to him at once.

  Eli led him on a tour of inspection. ‘Needless to say,’ he said, ‘I won’t be showing you where she sleeps.’ That cracked Reg up.

  On Eli’s bedroom wall, he kept a blown-up photograph of Dadda. It was slightly misty, as if Dadda were really there, seen through uneven glass.