The Missing Heir

by Kylie Tennant

  ‘No, you were quiet.’

  I had, before she died, asked my mother what kind of a child I was.

  ‘You were always surprising me, dear. I remember when you were a tiny thing just learning to walk — your sister wasn’t born then — we were staying with my father and mother at Lauderdale and there was a terrible quarrel. Your father said some unforgivable things to your grandma and she said: “Get out of my house.” Well, we had to go. But we didn’t have anywhere to go to. So we set off for Manly.’

  My grandfather’s two-storey house overlooked the little bay of Fairlight about a mile from Manly. ‘We took a short cut and sat down on a sandy track. Your father threw himself full length on the ground, muttering furiously. You know what his temper was like. Well, you got up on your little fat legs and tottered away and found a big rock. I don’t know how you carried it. You came back and dumped the rock on his forehead. Very quietly and deliberately.’

  The incident came back to me, dimly.

  ‘Your father yelled and swore.’ He must have thought that it was the last straw to be attacked by an infant daughter.

  ‘Where did you go?’

  ‘We went to the Salvation Army and they were very kind to us. Of course we made up the quarrel with your grandmother. But I will never forget how surprised I was when you dropped that huge rock.’

  The Parent and I had had some epic battles over the years, and I had won most of them, gradually wearing the poor Parent down. ‘I stand in loco parentis,’ he used to roar when I was young.

  ‘Loco, maybe,’ I would mutter to myself.

  In his last years he would plead: ‘Come down and have a row with me.’ And I would drive the three and a half hours from my farm on Murder Mountain to the bush-enclosed waterway of Patonga Beach where you could step through the Parent’s broken-down front gate on to the sand-dunes. There the lighthouse by Lion Island winked through the night and there was the faint roar of the ceaseless tide. The Parent would sit on the glassed-in front verandah with a pair of binoculars and count the big container ships held up at anchor waiting to go into Sydney wharves. ‘Bloody trade unionists,’ he would yell. ‘There’s always a strike losing this country millions in turnaround.’ Cursing the trade unions and saving money were all the pastimes he had left. I would come down loaded with vegetables, honey, apples from our orchard, my home-made jam.

  ‘How the hell do you think we’re going to eat all this?’ he would roar, hurrying out tremendously pleased, eager to see what I had brought. He would hoard it away and live on it after I left. I would go down to the store and buy in tins and assorted delicacies he was far too mean to buy himself. I bought fresh lobster or oysters from a resident with whom the Parent was not on good terms. I always paid for the food from the store but then the Parent, after a struggle with himself, told me to put the stuff on his bill. ‘You shouldn’t do it,’ he would wail. When the bill came in it affected his blood pressure. I took no notice. My sister and I treated with contempt his plea that he wanted to leave us money in his will. We had decided he should have all the comforts we could buy him.

  ‘Anyway,’ I would snarl, ‘you have to stay alive because I can’t afford to have you die and leave me any money. It would muck up my income tax.’ If he was in hospital I would go down and get him out and nurse him for a while. He always got out of hospital too soon and once when I drove him home I was in the middle of having his kitchen painted. It only had one coat. The sooty grime of years had taken the men all their time soaping it off. He noticed the new letter-box. ‘It’s a birthday present,’ I told him. ‘And I suppose this is another birthday present,’ he said, glaring around the kitchen.

  So I had to sack the men and moved the furniture back. Also I had to pay for it myself, because it might have taken him back into hospital if he had been asked to pay. We circled around each other cautiously like two jaguars, I reminding myself of the Parent’s extreme age and high blood pressure, and the Parent reminding himself of my extreme bad temper. If my visit ended peaceably we went our separate ways congratulating ourselves on our inordinate restraint.

  ‘She is a true Tennant,’ he used to say reverently when I was a child. ‘The Tennants are a race apart.’

  My mother also respected my sudden bursts of fury. ‘Just like a kitten,’ she said fondly, ‘bounding into the air, bristling and glaring.’ Other people were not so tolerant. They called it a prima donna temperament. My husband joined joyfully in battle and found the throwing of plates something he could do well. He would get in first. ‘Many a time I have put back one of your favourite vases,’ he mused, ‘saying to myself: “No, if I smash that it will take too long to make up.”’

  So my father’s statement that I was a quiet child was wishful thinking.

  My parents had married far too young. She was eighteen and he just twenty-three. At that time my mother’s father, Frank Tolhurst, had a large house overlooking North Steyne at Manly. He was a prosperous builder, and the house had a tennis court. My uncle had a sailing boat. It was a hospitable house where everyone sang at the piano. Grandpa had a splendid tenor, my aunt Beryl was a contralto, mother sang soprano. They danced, they gave dinners and musical evenings. The Parent was entranced by the pretty blonde elder daughter, Kathie Tolhurst. I have often heard my mother describe life at The Gumtrees on a rocky eminence with the surf rolling below, the magnificent view of the coastal headlands, and outside the gate a stone statue put up where the first kangaroo was killed by Captain Phillip’s men when he landed at Manly. This, in some later flurry of sentimentality, commemorated a murderous beginning that continues to this day.

  Anyway, handsome young Thomas Tennant had no more chance than that first kangaroo. At the time he had a secure job with Lysaght’s, he was building up a carrying business for himself with teams of Clydesdales and he owned a block of land, inherited from his father over towards Harbord beyond North Steyne. Although he lived at Artarmon with his mother and two sisters he came down to Harbord with a group of gay young blades to camp and enjoy the surfing at the weekend.

  You could rent a cheap weekend cottage at Harbord and the young men clubbed together to find their own freedom. As Don McIntyre, the Parent’s friend, once said: ‘Girls were snatched up and hustled out the back door half way through lunch if anyone like a wife or mother appeared on the horizon.’ The Parent was introduced to the Tolhursts when sailing with his future wife’s brother. He also knew the Farr family who lived in Artarmon. Grandma was a Farr, the eldest of thirteen children. In a later quarrel my father reproached my mother with having snatched him from his fiancée, the youngest of the thirteen Farr children. If the Parent escaped marrying my mother’s Aunt Myra he ought to have thanked her for a merciful salvation. None of the Farrs ever stopped talking. And Aunt Myra could also thank Mother’s wooden-headedness for her escape. My mother looked down from the balcony on to the tennis court and said: ‘That is the man I’m going to marry.’ At the time she was a blonde with curls and a dreamy expression. She had nothing to do but go into the city and buy herself costly raiment or practise her piano. The Parent had a small black moustache waxed at the tips which he later mercifully discarded. He was athletic. He sang baritone, rendering ‘I am the Bandillero’ with verve. He was a passable dancer, wrestler, surfer and tennis-player. What else could you ask of a prospective husband?

  There should have been set up some marriage board to test incompatibility. Neither Katherine Tolhurst nor Thomas Walter Tennant would have passed. Alarms should have been sounded in the streets to warn them. Instead the Tolhursts moved happily to their new house — Lauderdale above Fairlight. Grandpa Tolhurst built his daughter a house called Narbethong on the rise of land behind Lauderdale. Orange blossoms, my red-headed young aunt Beryl as bridesmaid, white satin, costly wedding presents of silver and china, a three-tiered iced cake with a sailing skiff on the top and the motto: ‘God sends the wind to fill the sails’, which Tom Tennant claimed was his family crest, all these signalised a wedding that should
never have taken place. My mother treasured the little silver-painted skiff from her wedding cake for many years when the lustre had worn off everything else.

  It looked, then, as though the future was set fair for them. After a year the Parent was brooding. Why had his wife not produced a son? Did she not realise it was her duty to carry on the Tennant name? This naturally aroused resentment in an idealistic young girl who had looked forward to a romantic and continuing dream; the Parent being expected to equal that deference, courtesy and affection with which Grandpa Tolhurst treated his womenfolk.

  She was just twenty when I was born. A daughter! What the hell use was a daughter? Where was his son? The heir? He lamented dramatically and went on lamenting. Two years later she bore my sister Dorothy. By this time my mother’s attitude to her husband was tinged by disillusion. My sister was adorable, cuddly, with a blue mark on her lip which caused anxiety. Not even the Parent could resist her. He enjoyed his second daughter, petted her. but did not cease his vocal dramatics, telling everyone of his great tragedy. He had grown up with a widowed mother and two sisters. Now he had a wife and two daughters. ‘I always wanted a son, not a lot of women.’

  He had not reckoned with my mother, who had a far firmer character than his. She set her face against any further childbearing. There was nothing a husband could do. So many women of my mother’s generation had their own means, handed down for generations, of protecting themselves from unwanted offspring. Had the Parent been just a little less selfish, arrogant, overbearing towards her, he could possibly have had a flock of sons, but he had spoilt his chances.

  Many years later, when I was a member of the Commonwealth Literary Fund board, I was down in Canberra when Sir Harold White persuaded me to put my name in a large book he kept in the library of Parliament House. Still later he insisted I look at the next signature. It was my father’s. And beside it my father had written ‘The Parent’. Nothing else.

  ‘I have never,’ Sir Harold declared, ‘known such charming modesty. What a splendid gesture. What a delightful man your father must be.’ I gave a very sceptical grunt.

  3. The Infant Phenomenon

  I can remember learning to breathe when I was born — an exquisite sensation, but it has to be learned consciously and practised. Once you have mastered it you go on to other things. I was weaned to Horlick’s malted milk — why I don’t know, becoming independent of maternal nourishment. Walking is not difficult after learning to breathe. It is complicated. Later I learned to walk on stilts, and this was a repetition of walking on legs. Scrambling forwards and sideways, moving, rolling, working the toes, crawling, all are preliminaries to the stagger. You hump up your hind-quarters, proceeding on hands and hind feet. Then dragging up on a chair-leg. Why not? The thought comes: Stand. Swaying and falling. Up again. The thud on the padded backside stimulates further thought. Up! Sometimes large hands maddeningly interrupt the procedure. You sulk or give cries of rage.

  Ah, the crib again. Solitude. Cautiously you experiment in pulling up. Got it. Pulling along sideways. Got it. Standing. No hands, no sway. One foot forward. Careful! Thud! Try it again. What a sense of achievement. No triumph in later life will ever equal the thrill, any success in business or art pales before learning to walk.

  Prior to this period of intense activity I had merely lain and listened with shut eyes. There was a remote tinkling and when I could focus my eyes I located it. The baby basket was placed in the cool breezeway of Narbethong and the tinkling was from a set of glass wind chimes. I now knew where the noise came from. Human voices I disregarded. They did not arouse any curiosity. I was now seeing a sound.

  Much, much later there would be the agony of teething. What a baby asks is something to chew on. Luckily my ignorant parents gave me a rubber dummy. I bit these dummies through as fast as they were supplied. Think of a gumboil. Think of this gumboil pierced by a piece of sharp bone. The relief of getting the bone through the tender flesh is marvellous but then the pain starts afresh further along your jaw. People who are confirmed cigarette smokers find the same labial stimulus that the dummy gave them. They were probably weaned early as I was.

  By the time I was two years old I had collected many valuables. A strong sense of location, a judgement of the personalities of people about me. My red-headed aunt Beryl, slipping upstairs at Lauderdale to bring me jelly in my cot, was able to tell me that the star I was observing through the window was Venus.

  My family discovered that I could learn anything. At the age of two I was set to recite ‘The Night Before Christmas’ — which I knew by heart — before a circle of adults and my Uncle Toss, who married my aunt Beryl, laughed so immoderately that he fell off his chair when I came to the words ‘He had a white beard and a little round belly Which shook when he laughed like a bowl full of jelly’. I hated him with a cold hatred which endured. He was laughing at the precise diction I had copied from my grandmother.

  What upset the women about me was that I was left-handed. Spoons were always being snatched from my good left hand and transferred to my right. Later, at school I was taught to write with my right hand. So I now draw with my left hand and write with my right, all because before people owned toilet paper it was taboo to use the left hand — which was used for toilet purposes — for food which was taken with the right. Maybe there was some other less logical reason. Excrement was associated with the Evil One so the left hand was the Hand of the Devil. Extraordinary how the two lobes of the brain have been distinguished. Being ambidexterous didn’t worry me but anything that did not conform to the ordinary worried my mother and grandmother. What grandmother said was gospel. She imposed her will. Also I was undersized. Very active and precocious but undersized. Not a big fat handsome baby like my sister.

  My idiot parents — and my scorn for them as a baby was as great as my later affection — were already at work attempting to corrupt my judgement. Before I had my teeth I was given a small black doll made of some shiny material and the fool females around me sang a ditty which went:

  I’ve a little black dolly named Topsy

  Who doesn’t like sleeping alone,

  So I just put her under my pillow

  ‘Cause I know she likes sleeping with me.

  And when the sun shines in the morning,

  I sing till I think she’s awake;

  Then I take her right out in the garden

  And give her a bath in the lake.

  But Topsy is blacker than ever,

  Just as shiny as shiny can be,

  Though I wash her and wash her and wash her,

  She’ll never be white like me.

  That I can remember this drivel shows how often it was chanted over my infant head. I felt a cold dislike of the Topsy fanciers. For one thing, I reasoned, there was no lake in the garden. Who would want to immerse this rather chipped and damaged object in it? Topsy was chipped and damaged because I was energetic. I could now crawl out into the garden, smash Topsy against a rock and bury the bits. I was not yet walking when I was bothered by the Topsy diversion.

  I was two years old when I can remember running in the dusk to meet my grandfather and being given The Book; my first book. It was read to me and I burst into tears at the pathos of the story, which was Mamie and Her Little Wog by May Gibbs. Mamie was a small girl and she and her dog Wog were lost. By this time the family dreaded any display of emotion on my part. Owing to my successful expanding of an outsize pair of lungs and the practice I had put into breathing, my voice was enormous in comparison to my body.

  They discovered that my attention could be diverted. Having fallen head over heels down two flights of stairs and bellowing at the recollection of how humiliating it is to lose your balance — for I had practised crawling up and down those stairs energetically — and now — proud — a walker on two feet — I had fallen! — my grandfather could make me cease crying by saying. ‘I’ll give you a rose if you stop.’ My mouth shut like a trap.

  Do not tell me of your noble ancestors. All
ancestors are of equal nobility. They managed to survive long enough, under execrable conditions to breed. This is all that can be asked of them.

  Do not boast to me of your blue blood or advance the claims of lions and tigers to superior ferocity. The tiger that paces the bars of your flesh is far more terrible.

  I am descended from many thousand years of suffering. Forgotten miseries and delights are the spider-thread that dangle from the roof of eternity and on this thread you and I equally depend. Your gallant ancestors got you where you are now. And not alone you and me but the millions that are breeding and feeding, destroying, hoping and despairing at this moment. There are no accessions to this nobility. You are born into it. It is life.

  I can remember being born and my grief that I had lost my memory. This conviction that I had lost my memory endured through my earliest years. My own people, I decided, had gone on somewhere else, leaving me behind. I would never overtake them. But I wished someone would come by, as I sat, lonely and bored, on the stone gatepost of Lauderdale, and have an interesting conversation. Not the conversation you have with a baby girl.

  You may ask if I believe in reincarnation. No, I don’t. You may consider a theory but you don’t need to believe in it. The early fathers, framing Christian doctrine, very luckily decided against reincarnation as part of their equally absurd set of dogmas. Purgatory and hell are a good deal less horrifying than reincarnation. The very contemplation of such a doctrine is enough to sink human beings into that apathy which, with a hot climate, hinders the people of equatorial countries. Anyone who has ever seen diseased animals dragging around a Buddhist monastery because no one will kill them should think twice about reincarnation.