The Missing Heir

by Kylie Tennant

  There is the story of two old enfeebled savants who struck at each other from their wheel-chairs over the question of whether Tolstoy or Dostoevsky was the better writer. In our household, from the time of our marriage the writer in dispute was Roddy’s favourite Thomas Hardy and, in particular, his book, Jude the Obscure, which Roddy had adopted as a life fantasy. He had had a great struggle to become a teacher himself and Jude the Obscure, which was, in its time, a powerful indictment of the education system of nineteenth-century England, the study of a poor boy’s struggle to attain a university education, appealed to him in an intimate way.

  Jude the Obscure never was allowed the opportunity of erudition. He became a stone-mason and married a village girl, the wanton, earthy Arabella. No doubt you remember the excruciating scene where Jude is expected to kill a pig? From the squalor associated with Arabella Jude makes a partial escape, running off with Sue, the wife of a dry cold academic. They have six — or was it seven? — small children who are all strangled in an episode Thomas Hardy must have copied from a newspaper report of some domestic tragedy of real life — ‘killed because we were too many’. Jude returns to Arabella, now a barmaid if I remember rightly, and Sue returns to her lawful husband heart-broken. There is a final scene in which Jude dies cursing his birth, while the university bells ring out declaring the graduation of the fortunate rich youths who will become academicians. Arabella is off somewhere drinking with a plebeian of her own kind.

  Now Roddy admired this piece of masculine self-pity so heartily that I began to suspect that I embodied for him both the earthy Arabella and the sensitive child-breeder Sue. Probably more Arabella than Sue.

  While I was indifferent to the fate of the books I wrote — after all, I wrote them only to please him — I began to suspect that Roddy was cherishing his Jude Complex and thinking that he could probably write better than I did if he had the chance and was not tied to earning a living.

  He adored both the children. Before they were born he had been first in all my care. With their coming he was partly displaced by parenthood and developed an exaggerated anxiety for their welfare. Another of our arguments was over whether children should be surrendered to the care of experts soon after birth and be brought up in communal crèches. I was against it. Before the arrival of the children we had parted in separate coldness and gone home avoiding each other over this absurd question.

  Naturally, after the arrival of the children, nothing would have parted either of us from them. Older parents are particularly solicitous. The young parents have still their own lives and claims.

  The institution of marriage, so much abused, particularly by me, was an attempt to anchor the wandering male to a lifetime contract which humanity has often found impossible.

  While I was in Laurieton, before I was a parent, I was much puzzled by a tendency I had to suddenly see a prison cell with one ray of light coming through the bars of a high cell window. I was much comforted by this light. Later I would substitute the imagination of climbing out of a well to grass and peach blossom in full sunlight. Of course I told no one, least of all Roddy, about this queer upwelling of my subconscious. It was just a set of hallucinations. When I bought a block of land at Laurieton I heard the voice of my grandfather saying suddenly: ‘Don’t do it.’ I took no notice of hallucinations. I no sooner bought this waterside land — which would be very valuable now — than I had to sell it to finance our move to Sydney. I have always made it a maxim to take no notice of any intrusions from some weird psychic plane.

  Before Benison’s birth I was aware of a lonely old lady, utterly deserted and afraid, who was killed in a street brawl. She was very angry and unhappy, and wanted to depart from the safe haven I had given her. I soothed her and persuaded her to stay. After her difficult birth Benison was brought to me looking exactly like a little old lady. It was rather daunting. Of course she settled down to being a happy little girl, courageous, strong, athletic. Benison’s school report later read: ‘Benison is a fine little gymnast.’ She rode horses like a jockey, painted sensitive pictures and was dyslexic with no word sense at all.

  Before Bim was even conceived I was aware of a spirit with wings of flame pleading with me and I welcomed this being. After he was conceived I was aware of the history of an Indian who had camped as a hawker in the bush and was murdered there.

  While I was in labour I was aware of this radiance and joy. Bim was born smiling and hungry, seemingly relieved to have a human body again, on 26 September 1951. Aboriginal women, when they wish for a child, will go to the sacred place of the ancestors and summon a spirit. Because men had so long exclusively claimed the role of doctor no woman is likely to tell such a person how a mother communicates with a child before it is born and while she is supplying the body it will later use. Even a bird listens to the chicken in the shell before it breaks free of the constricting shell and her warm feathers. She will croon to it.

  I wonder, now that doctors are perfecting their brave-new-world techniques of rearing embryos, what kind of people these are going to be when they emerge from their bottles of nutrients. They have reached the stage of transferring an unborn child to a surrogate womb. And they will, make no mistake, sooner or later, achieve the objective of a child whose engendering and birth is ordered by men entirely. I often wonder if the uprising of women’s lib is a Yin revolt against an overplus of Yang masculinity in our society, and not least in what is gaily termed the Miracles of Science, which include anything from total extermination of the old human race dependent on womanly birth to the preservation of frozen embryos in some off-world masculine-ordered Nirvana. Females are so squalid, so bound to their blood cycles, that to the cold scientific mind the idea of doing away with these emotion-bound beings must have its obvious attractions. In their ideal world women would be merely sex-gratification, just super-bunnies for a men’s club to be done away with when they aged to unattractiveness.

  Once we were established in our decorous and safe little suburb at Hunters Hill in our mod-con brick cottage, with two children at school and the car in garage, I was much troubled by a voice which was suddenly heard saying: ‘I want to go away.’ As usual I dismissed this absurd hallucination. We were both working for the Aboriginal co-operatives. Roddy, more and more, immersed himself in his church, becoming the rector’s warden of Christ Church St Laurence, handing round the plate, organising church affairs. He gave the children a notable detestation of long services. Bim later became a Buddhist and Benison, when she grew up, although she was confirmed in the Church of England, would never pass within a church door. As a child she had taken great pleasure in helping to count the collection. I excused myself with my grandmother’s ploy that I had to cook the Sunday dinner. Roddy would go off at an early hour to his duties as church warden. I only attended vespers in the evening. But it was church twice a day on Sunday. On Saturday he would take the children swimming in the ute with all the other children in the street. He was very happy at school until, at a later period, he was burdened with a very poor staff and allowed his tendency always to overwork to fling him into his deep depressions.

  I became more and more convinced that our old joint life was cleaving apart: too much church, children and home. You can see this syndrome in any happy-seeming suburb where the local doctor is handing out tranquillisers to people who come to him with psychosomatic pains, well-dressed, well-fed, well-ordered lives, but haunted and shattered. Much later I tried to put something of this into Tantavallon. The publisher’s reader cut out most of it, particularly the young drug addicts.

  Now when I was feeling this rift between me and the husband to whom I was devoted I conducted the only extramarital love affair of my life. When I met the businessman who was referred to by horrified friends as the Gangster I said to myself before I thought: ‘Why, he’s Gaius.’ I remembered that old impression of mine that I had once been a gladiator and my friend Gaius had been a boon companion. I have never met Nicholas the Greek, a giant with a flowing black beard. B
ut here was Gaius, wicked, adroit, unscrupulous, in the guise of a modern businessman who, in the course of our transaction, had developed this strange craving for me. I knew he was a great womaniser and probably only wanted to add me to his collection. For a time I took no notice save to laugh contemptuously at the idea that I would break up two families, his and mine, to run off with him. I remembered my mother being similarly importuned by a lifetime lover to go off with him to India. It was certainly not ‘for the sake of the children’ that I intended to stay put. There was something ridiculous about the whole queer set-up. I could not leave him to his longing because it was hurting him. I much preferred my own husband as a partner.

  At last I said: ‘Suit yourself. You can have a choice between a brief affair and a lifelong friendship. If you choose the first I will never see you again.’ Guess which he chose? You are right. I slept with him four times and for all our brief intimacy — I am too scrawny to be any sex-kitten — the passion we felt when apart evaporated on closer contact. I took care never to be with him alone again. If we met in the course of our business it was with his wife, my husband, strangers, acquaintances, where our words were light. Anyway, I told myself, I just didn’t have time for any fly-by-night liaison. Gaius could go his way and I would go mine. It was a long time since we had fought side by side, beating off attackers as skilled with weapons as ourselves. Had I told him of this fantasy of mine he would possibly have laughed until he cried. He never thought of me as anything save a strange woman he wanted as men want women. I hated deception.

  Now where I made my mistake was that I thought Roddy with his sensitivity had probably suspected this affair. He detested the poor Gangster, a detestation the Gangster reciprocated. ‘Listen,’ Gaius would say to me, ‘You think you’re a Puritan like that husband of yours. You’re as big a villain as I am.’ When, after a few years of being careful never to see Gaius, I felt the episode was safely in the past, buried under a load of work and responsibility, of sedate domesticity, it occurred to me that if I told Roddy the thing was over and done with, just a passing attack of lust to which anyone is liable, it might establish again our old happy, easy accord. In a few words I said bleakly that I had slept with this man; if he wished to divorce me he was welcome to do so. I would have gone on to elaborate but he said, ‘Then I shall kill myself.’

  ‘Don’t be so silly.’ I was outraged at this domestic blackmail. Had it been he who made such an admission how gladly would I have cried: ‘Well, let’s forget it, darling.’ I have always been, as you know from this narrative, insensitive to masculine feelings.

  Recently a woman narrated to me how she had had such an affair and was torn by the idea of telling her husband. ‘Don’t ever do it,’ I advised. ‘Just go on bearing your own burden of falsity and duplicity and don’t load it on to him. To do so is merely inverted vanity. I don’t blame you for sleeping with the guy; but never, never tell your husband.’

  I had heard Roddy’s threats of suicide all my married life. Whenever he was in low health he was going to end it all. ‘Where is your Christianity?’ I would retort. ‘You are meant to live out your life however strong your masculine death wish. Don’t let me hear you say such a thing.’ I had moved him uneasily from Laurieton to his Jude-the-Obscure gothic school with the idea that a change of scene would restore him. For some years it did. Now I had given him the perfect excuse to load the blame of his planned demise on me.

  I came home to a houseful of gas or Roddy lying insensible from the effects of cramming handfuls of tranquillisers. His iron will was now set on his objective. My will was equally iron. He was going to stay alive. His last attempt, after a deepening insanity which saw him in and out of convalescent homes, even shock treatment, nervous breakdown, doctors, psychiatrists, was to fling himself under a train at Circular Quay. He recovered with a fractured skull, the loss of an arm and a foot. ‘They’ll be calling you Privet Hedge Rodd,’ I told him when he was semi-conscious. ‘You’ve certainly clipped yourself all around the edges.’ He managed to smile.

  After that he gave up trying to commit suicide. He became my first priority and a domestic tyrant because his lightest wish was law. If it was not he would relapse. He was chained by life to a rock and I was that rock. We never slept together again. Instead I nursed him. I had become once more the mother figure giving him total attention which he had craved.

  He had been told he would never walk save with two sticks. He walked in the front door without any sticks at all. He was in great pain for the rest of his life and set himself to learn to write a clear hand — with his left hand. He taught himself to type, one-handed, on an electric typewriter Peter Scriven gave him. Peter said he couldn’t use it himself because ‘the damned thing hums at me’. Roddy set himself to write his own books. He resigned himself to being chained to the rock of living.

  I had come home from the hospital where he lay, possibly dying, to say to the children, ‘Your father has been hit by a train and we are going to buy a television set.’ He had always refused to let them have a television set. While they sat in front of it entranced, I could visit the hospital every night. I also completed a set of social studies textbooks for primary schools — a commission I had accepted which had a time limit — because we needed the money.

  I was never thereafter troubled by any intimations or hallucinations. I was still inclined to see people’s auras but I had always done that and a very useful knack it is. I had been inclined to the habit of prayer — praying for those who were sick, but taking no credit when they recovered. I no longer did this. I had been one of a group which visited the local madhouse, now more kindly called a psychiatric hospital, to bring a breath of outside kindness and cream buns to the inmates. I no longer did this. Poor John Hope had a heart attack when he heard what had happened. I went on earning money. There were the children, there was Roddy. My bounds had narrowed to the pride that told me nobody should have occasion to pity me. Crowds of friends, doctors, advice, flowers, kindnesses had been pouring in on us. It should cease.

  We gave a ‘Put Out More Flags’ party when Roddy came home from hospital and the children handed round savouries, very courteously.

  Throngs of friends came and saw they had no need to sympathise. We then resumed our literary industries and saw that the children had gaiety and warmth. ‘I had a wonderful childhood,’ Bim once said when he too was trying to kill himself. ‘Nobody had a better childhood than I did.’

  7. The Duellist

  The two fish of the sign Pisces are linked by the tails, each going in opposite directions. Under this sign both Roddy and I were born. This lifelong linkage has both its advantages and disadvantages. I was struck by a quote in a review of The Brothers Mann by George Steine:

  A human being will often choose another human being, says Hegel, from whom he must compel recognition, in whose eyes and behaviour he seeks to read, to make graphic, the whole truth of his identity. Where it is reciprocal, such attempted enforcement, such exigence of mutual identification, will lead to intense psychic stress, to a duel, suggests Hegel, of such close range and totality that it must end, it can only end, with the death of one of the protagonists or with the simultaneous destruction of both. (The sons of Oedipus slain by each other’s sword.) If one duellist dies first, he leaves the other fatally bereft.

  There is a circular window behind the high altar of Christ Church St Laurence in Sydney depicting an angel, in blue and white. When Bim, who was christened John Laurence, was born I was struck by the blue and white uniform of the obstetric nurse who bore a peculiar trumpet with which she listened to the stirrings of the unborn child. I wrote ‘The Angel of the Trumpet’ after I came out of hospital, mentioning the brick wall on which I looked out from the labour ward and mingling the elements in what was unconscious prophecy.

  These verses were written just after my son was born:

  The Angel of the Trumpet

  What is it that goes up the sky? The sheer of a bright brick wall, a song, a cry? />
  The flight of a queen bee, sound of a silver trumpet?

  Surely the angel over the altar, the angel with the trumpet in the circular window,

  Coverlid of space and chaos, shall shatter with one blast the thin transparency

  That is her home.

  There is the moment, the hesitation, when sleep and waking struggle;

  ‘Shall I blow? Split open the window, let in light,

  And the differential airs on the dim church cobwebs and characters?’

  Thunderous the traffic whose vibrations burn and set humming the centuried belfry,

  So that the nobler tones in the crazed mind of Man return the rumble of the Coming;

  Set spinning all their bright atoms under the dust as yet unstirred,

  Tensed for the sound that brings the belfry down.

  Lips raised and trumpet raised the angel in a flower of sunlight;

  Lucina, the angel of childbirth, with a bright blue coif;

  The sister of the labour ward, the birth-peerer, whose silver trumpet feels at the heart-beat of the unborn:

  ‘I, eternal impatience, I, prisoned in glass, herald the Coming. Worship I the lord of blind delight, of the joy driving and raging, Resting not of accomplishment, fulfilling and surging on;

  For the joy and the task are one as the beginning and end are one. For love, never a loss, shall too, crash through, shattering pain; So shall I blow?

  ‘Contempt on the corbels, curse on the buttresses, to hell with the pinnacles of this dim place!

  The pagan daylight fierce with disaster and bright with necessary mistakes

  Lies the other side my window.

  One way am I, the angel over chaos with a trumpet, waiting the sign of the Coming;

  And in the other side of my window I look into the labour ward, And I tap the navel for the breathing of the unborn.