The Missing Heir

by Kylie Tennant

  ‘Damn them for a set of Glugs,’ I swore hotly. ‘Of course I’ll write it myself.’ I didn’t think it would take me three years. But then I had to fit it in with so much else. Roddy was in favour. He helped immensely with the correspondence. He typed the manuscript. He had a host of friends and an interesting life. He had the children, and he ruled, as he always had done, our modest menage. He had come out on a new plateau of achievement.

  We were not, of course, the only husband-and-wife writing teams of the fifties and sixties. Ruth Park and D’Arcy Niland put four children through university, Charmian Clift and George Johnston also had a family — and it took two writing parents to support one family in those days, because the trade is so ill-rewarded. Ruth Park was writing children’s serials for the ABC when her fine talent demanded a wider range. I, at one time, even considered switching to television and wrote a play that has had only amateur performance because the ABC didn’t like the epilogue. It is about the Irish rebels deported to Australia after 1798. I refused to change it so Firehead went into the bottom drawer and there remains.

  Changes were, of course, taking place in both my English firm and the Commonwealth Literary Fund. In the firm the changes were brought about by the realisation in Britain that Australia was now quite a respectable market. The main office in Melbourne had long eyed the increasing influence of Sydney with some alarm. I was editing a series for the firm which the office there claimed they should take over and I was only too delighted to let them have the extra work. Unfortunately, Parkinson’s Law operated. You know how Parkinson says that in every firm there is a character known as Old Bill and when he goes out, the firm — whatever it is — has to create a department of six? So the series lapsed. I had done it as just part of the job.

  On one occasion directors came out from England and announced that they were going to raise my salary. ‘No, don’t do that,’ I told them. ‘At present you’re in my debt because I do more than I’m paid for. If you raise my salary I’d need to work harder and it just isn’t on.’ On another occasion they shifted the office to larger premises. ‘And this will be your desk, Kylie,’ one of them said proudly.

  ‘Well, put a vase of flowers on it. I work at home.’

  Famous persons would come out from England and Elizabeth and I would deal with them. Elizabeth was excellent at arranging parties for the firm’s authors and the directors who wanted to meet them. At one of these parties a left-wing author, having eaten and drunk freely at the firm’s expense, decided to denounce them as capitalist oppressors. They hadn’t published any of his books. Next day I thought it would be fitting to apologise for my fellow writer. ‘Think nothing of it, Kylie,’ one of them said. ‘It made our day.’

  Melbourne continued its empire-building — literally — they had a building all their own now. The directors told me proudly they had put in a computer in England. The head man in Melbourne came to break the news to me kindly — over lunch — that the computer said the Australian firm in Melbourne had to pay for me and the Melbourne bunch said they couldn’t afford me. ‘Does this mean,’ I cried gladly, ‘that I am no longer picking cotton in your literary cotton fields?’ He indicated that it did. The rush of pure pleasure that always comes over me when I leave a job was very much in evidence. I was singing to myself all the way home. If one door shuts another opens.

  About the same time the Government down in Canberra changed. It decided to get rid of the old and find some new blood for the Literary Fund and move in a representative of the very talented people one found in Melbourne. So I was freed unostentatiously from the Literary Fund.

  Later I was asked if I would take a literary pension. I was averse to this but Roddy, with his deep fear of poverty, was all for it. When more changes took place in the Literary Fund I was informed that they had cut out the pensions and replaced them by an emeritus fellowship. So every year the chairman of the Arts Council (Literary Fund) writes to me to enquire what my financial circumstances are and I am always able to inform the Literary Fund that I am flat broke as usual. It’s the truth. But, on the other hand, were it not for this Emeritus Fellowship, I would not be writing anything at all. I have all those scars on my shoulders from so many years of literary drudgery but I feel that while I am being supported by the tax-payer I should turn out something in return.

  * * *

  When Roddy was writing the memoirs of his childhood, A Gentle Shipwreck, and his life of John Hope of Christ Church St Laurence, I was writing Evatt: Politics and Justice. It took me three years. My friend Elizabeth Harrower and I shared a small house in the Blue Mountains about six miles from this orchard where I now live, driving up from Hunters Hill at weekends. The place was called (wait for it!) Hillside. I didn’t call it that. The previous owners had done it for me. It was, as you would suspect, a steep little farm. Elizabeth and I, or Roddy and I, or the children and their friends, would all go up there for weekends and holidays. Later Benison went up there permanently when the boss of her factory moved the factory to Katoomba. So I bought Elizabeth out. She had been a loyal friend to me for many years, and still is, but she is not a rural type. She is elegant and slender and intelligent. Her books are appreciated by Europeans as well as Australians. Another friend of the same ilk is Nancy Phelan who also lives in the Blue Mountains and has written books of her travels in every continent. When Roddy was recovering Nancy insisted on teaching us yoga because she has written a number of popular books on yoga. I think it did Roddy good to be made to relax but she was fretful over me. Standing on my head made me dizzy. ‘You are earth-bound,’ Nancy scolded. (Only water and earth in my horoscope, I am told.)

  Elizabeth is inclined to scold me also for being a ‘J.C. Williamson peasant’. I should, she says, go and live in Sydney. My sister cannot understand why I prefer a place where freezing gales blow to her immaculate flat where you speak through a grill in the main door before you can get into the building. Mavis Cribb, who had been a teacher of shorthand at Muswellbrook all those years ago and taught me shorthand, and came with me to the mission at Lockhardt River when I was writing Speak You So Gently, still shares this tendency to say: ‘The trouble with you is …’ The main complaint is that I am not self-protective. Why should I be with all the good companions who are ready to guard, protect and do me kindnesses? I just muddle along in my vague way.

  Because I am not very accurate I write everything down in a notebook and double check. When I was getting the material for The Honey Flow, I was a pest to the friendly apiarists, the brothers Koina and Brogan, with whom I travelled. ‘What’s wrong with the girl! We told you that yesterday!’

  ‘And “Bimble Box”.’ This was a species of eucalypt. ‘How would you distinguish Bimble Box?’

  Bill Koina gave a scowl and the perfect answer: ‘It’s bimbley, of course.’

  So when my son was born I looked at him and said: ‘Well, I don’t know, John Laurence, what you are but you’re certainly bimbley.’ He was always called Bim. He later claimed it was the name of a Hindu war god and he liked that.

  9. I Come to Murder Mountain

  Bim was the hope and pride of the family — indeed the heir to whom all was offered. Benison was a quaint, intelligent, sturdy little girl, with the hands of an artist, beloved by animals, friendly and confident, very deft and cheerful. She had no word sense at all, but was the image of my mother-in-law who wrote all accounts neatly in a book and was descended from a banking family, the Waterhouses of Adelaide.

  As soon as we moved to Hunters Hill from Laurieton, which he only knew as a baby, and settled in our modest brick-con cottage Bim began to run away. At the age of three he would slip silently over any gate or fence and rove off. Take your eyes off him for five minutes and he was gone. And I ran after him. There was the river at the bottom of the street into which our lane debouched. There was the mainstream of traffic at the top of the hill. How I ran! He was probably setting off to follow Benison to the convent school her father insisted she attend. Benison later ref
used to go to the convent school when her favourite nun left and she came home muttering angrily about ‘that damned ole nun’ who taught her. Her father resigned himself to her going with him every morning to his well-loved primary school where he was headmaster. Later Bim, too, attended his father’s primary school. Each of them had to be turned out like miniature fashion-plates in school uniform, clean, well brushed, shoes polished. They were the headmaster’s children who must set an example.

  I had for many years seen Roddy off to school in the morning in an immaculate white coat, starched and crisp, such as dentists and doctors wear. It was my task to keep up a supply of such white coats, freshly washed and ironed. If I went away I saw to it he had a supply of white coats to wear until I came back. My mother, sometimes minding my household in Laurieton while I was sweating in the scrub taking off honey for The Honey Flow, refused any such responsibility. ‘Oh no, dear. It is really too much. Why can’t he wear ordinary clothes like any other man? You oughtn’t to encourage him with all that washing and ironing.’

  As I would do anything to give Roddy pleasure this white jacket was an unnoticed part of my domestic routine. Roddy must have a white coat to teach in — not a long white coat — a special, medical kind of white coat. Roddy also saw to it that I was dressed as befitted a fashionable housewife. High heels, hair curled and groomed, the full regalia. It was just a costume to me. If it gave him pleasure … He was very happy in Hunters Hill. The high school was built on the site he selected. He was involved in constructive works. His advice was taken. He was admirable.

  Not until Roddy’s breakdown and retirement, when Benison was in second year in high school and Bim at St Andrew’s Cathedral School in the city, did the crash come. Bim refused to go to St Andrew’s where he, who had sung in the local choir, was not accepted into the cathedral choir. He insisted on leaving St Andrew’s for the local high school, claiming all his friends were there. Benison, who could not spell at all, dropped from top of her class to near bottom. It was her response to trauma. Bim wore his hair long — to his father’s outraged protests — and was turned out of his place as captain of the basketball team for stubbornly wearing his hair long. When he went up to collect his Latin prize the school broke out in yells of applause and boos of horror. He was the only boy with long hair. He tossed it defiantly. Also at high school he began to take drugs, because all his friends did. I discovered a row of pot plants outside the shed in my backyard and suspiciously tipped every one on the compost heap. ‘Mrs Rodd,’ Bim’s best friend reproached me, ‘you were about to be elected Oldie of the Year until you destroyed our whole crop.’

  Bim was still playing soccer but, like his father, he was accident-prone. I was always driving him to the doctor, bleeding and perhaps unconscious. ‘Haven’t I seen this boy before?’ the old doctor murmured resignedly when one night he was found unconscious in the gutter, having got his bootlaces tangled in his bike pedals on his way to soccer practise. You could always pick out Bim in a football match. He was the one who was limping or carried off the field.

  He went off to look for a job in Queensland with a friend, hitch-hiking, and had just found a job at the Mount Morgan mine when they were involved, by night, in a motor crash. The two arrived back on Christmas Eve looking ghastly but eating heartily. On Boxing Day I insisted on driving them to hospital. His friend had — I think — two broken ribs. Bim had broken his neck. He could, they told me, have been a quadraplegic. Emerging from hospital, he bought a motor-bike and, again by night, was run down by a drunken driver and carted back to hospital, having been flung over a parked car. I have omitted quite a few of the earlier accidents.

  Then, at the university, writing poetry and taking more drugs, hearing curious voices and becoming harder to live with — occasionally turning out a brilliant essay or neglecting work entirely, he sold his motor-bike and set off wandering, going all round Australia. He returned and went to Bali. He returned and went to India. His great friend at primary school had been an Indian boy. He went to India twice and to Bali three times, alienating his best friends by sending them a packet of hashish in brown paper which burst inconveniently in front of the customs officers.

  By this time I was desperate enough to pounce on him and send him off to a psychiatric hospital, where he was diagnosed as schizophrenic. It was in and out of psychiatric hospitals, going downhill all the way. There is nothing to stir the comic spirit in having your son removed by the police in handcuffs to yet another psychiatric hospital because he is frightening the neighbours. In his lucid intervals he was brilliant, gentle and kind. You had to watch him in case he took an overdose.

  I began to plan to get my family away from the city and the dangerous drugs. On the farm he cut his wrists and called to me from the bathroom where he was lying tranquilly in the bath. ‘I’ve cut my wrists.’

  ‘Don’t bleed all over the rug,’ I replied coldly, binding him up in tight bandages. In the morning he had thirteen stitches at the hospital. Between times he would be back at the university. One night he made a pile of all his short stories and poems and left a fireplaceful of ashes for me to clean out.

  While at the university he and a fellow student had an affair; she became pregnant. I made her an allowance and threatened Bim with mayhem if he didn’t stand by her. He wouldn’t marry her because she insisted he become a Roman Catholic. It was no use my bringing her home to live because Roddy was going through a bad spell. She passed her exams and had the child three days later. I went to see her in hospital and tried to adopt Bim’s son. She was adamant. The child must be adopted by Catholic parents and have a good Catholic upbringing.

  As they were not legally married Bim had no claim on the child; I had never despaired before and refused to do so now. I addressed my husband and son: ‘We are going to move. We are going to live in the country on an apple orchard. As there are a number of cliffs just over the fence, if either of you decides to commit suicide kindly use the cliff. It is cheaper and less troublesome.’

  Neither of them availed themselves of the facilities. Having two negatives in the family I had to become more positive. Roddy had always made the decisions. Now I made them. I felt that I must be responsible for the sorry state of my family: Roddy cramming himself with legal drugs prescribed by doctors and once being removed for shock treatment; Bim taking whatever illegal drugs his gang of friends procured for him and in and out of hospital. Yes, I had been the cause of it all. Benison was sturdily at work making components for telephone switchboards and driving her own car. Bim had been forbidden the family car. He had taken jobs and lost them, all kinds. Now he could put his muscles into hoeing. He went off to India one more time while I organised the move. I had looked for a place by the sea because Roddy loved surfing but after searching as far as the Queensland border I decided any prospects were not isolated enough. Progress was turning the coast to high-rise housing.

  My friends were horrified when they inspected Cliff View Orchard before we moved in. It was the first place I had ever chosen. All the apple trees were old, decayed or uprooted; every bough wore a sporran of pale green lichen. It was sixty-two acres of neglect and desolation. The house was ready to fall down.

  Just before I closed the deal I was sitting in front of the television in Hunters Hill and viewed thereon a posse of police removing a murdered body from a shallow grave on what I recognised as the fire trail at the back of the orchard. ‘Look out for the bloody trapdoor spiders,’ one policeman advised another, and the report hastily cut out. I bought the place. After all, Sydney dumps murdered bodies all the time in the Blue Mountains. It is the nearest convenient wild place. Our fire trail became known as the Girl’s Grave and youths on motor-cycles made little forays to view the place.

  Bim’s friends moved in to restore the house. I had a Literary Fund grant which meant, to my conscience, that I had to go on writing. The tax-payer had to get something for his or her support. Bim was returned from India and began a series of unhappy love affairs. Roddy was
in and out of hospital and now had cancer. He was very brave and helpful but sometimes plagued by thoughts that police were about to arrest me for tax fraud. As he made out the tax papers meticulously, and I couldn’t count, I brushed this aside.

  After I had paid off all the no-hopers who repaired the house and cleared the orchard I had time to go into hospital and have my left breast cut off. I had cancer.

  ‘Well, now I am an Amazon,’ I told my visitors. ‘The Amazons used to cut off one breast from their warriors. I have forgotten which it was — for a captain who used a sword. It was the opposite one for a common Amazon who fought with a long spear. I’m probably a common Amazon.’ There was no question of my having a recurrence of this blighting disease from which all my family die — and so many others in the population. I had too many responsibilities.

  Bim went into yet another psychiatric hospital and returned to the farm declaring he was going to study law. He seemed much improved. I entered him for the university again and gave him the money he had earned working on the farm. He went off to the city and the police rang up to say he was in hospital in a dying condition having been pushed out of an upstairs window by three drunken dark persons, a woman and two men. The woman was Aboriginal, one of the men a Cook Islander and the other a Torres Strait Islander. They were living in a condemned house in Kings Cross, inhabited by derelicts. Bim had enough money — nearly a thousand dollars — to lodge decently. But he always headed for some squatters’ pad.

  ‘What was he doing there,’ I asked, ‘buying drugs?’

  After four days the Reverend Austin Day of Christ Church St Laurence took up station by Bim’s bedside. He was joined by a Catholic nun and they prayed for him. Bim, in a nest of tubes and life support, died as they prayed.