The Missing Heir

by Kylie Tennant

  I sat outside the morgue while the three assailants were sent to the Supreme Court on a charge of murder. I sat all day, not being called as witness until last. My heart had been giving trouble for some years but I had thrown away the heart pills the good old doctor at Hunters Hill had prescribed. Nine months after the inquest I sat in the Supreme Court when the three came to trial, claiming Bim had thrown himself out the window. I kept on being called back into the witness box. The arresting police — with whom I was on quite familiar terms by this time — said jubilantly: ‘Well, we’re home and hosed.’ First one murderer got off — he was the one who had pawned Bim’s watch in a hotel bar — on insufficient evidence. Then the girl got off because she said her confession had been obtained by duress. This left the character who had dragged the body into the laundry and removed Bim’s wallet, coming out wiping his bloodstained hands on his shirt.

  Someone once said that Dickens characters were supposed to be exaggerated but whenever you enter a law court today Dickens characters are still flourishing in their original luxuriance: the lying witnesses, swearing an alibi; the stout florid prosecutor who asked: ‘You are the authoress, Kylie Tennant?’

  ‘There is no such thing as an authoress,’ I said sourly. ‘The Latin word is author; there is no feminine.’ He hated me.

  ‘She may seem airy-fairy,’ he said later to the court, ‘but she has never altered her testimony.’

  I was apparently the last person to see my son alive because I had driven him in to the bank and taken out the sum he asked. The accused, being indigent and Aboriginal, had a solicitor and a barrister each. I had seen no reason to brief counsel. I began to believe I was the accused. My son was dead and whatever happened nothing would bring him back. I had thought that if I could keep him alive he might overcome his schizophrenia. Long before he died the local astrologer in Blackheath, Dymock Brose, refused to draw up his horoscope. He said it was ‘too terrible’. Bim’s ashes amid flowering plants occupy what was once a cement butter-cooler by the back verandah. A Japanese friend said it looked like a Japanese tomb. There is a plaque which says: ‘John Laurence Rodd. Died 6.3.1978. Aged 26. A poet.’

  At the trial the judge began to lose patience: ‘Am I supposed to believe that this murder never took place?’ he asked when the second accused was released.

  I condoled with the police afterwards. ‘It happens all the time,’ they said patiently. Next time I went to Sydney I took them a case of apples. I thought how hard they had worked, and the poor young man who had written out my statement had fallen into a panic when I went over it crossing out his errors in grammar. But, as I told him, no one would believe I wrote: ‘I come in to the house …’ The police had been so very painstaking. They knew, and I knew, that Bim had been buying drugs and the witnesses, lying their heads off, were protecting their ring.

  I left before the remaining murderer was sentenced but he is probably out by now. When the trial commenced I saw the social worker and, much to the horror of my friends, sent some money to the girl in gaol. I did not seek revenge. Bim would not have done so either. I did not want anyone to go to gaol — it does not improve even murderers. Bim’s thousand dollars insurance went to the church.

  A year later Roddy died at the age of seventy-three. He had learnt to love the farm and when I visited him in hospital I said: ‘Well, darling, you’ve got three choices: you can stay here and have chemotherapy, you can stay here with no treatment, or you can come home.’

  He came home by ambulance. Benison and I nursed him for seven weeks. She had moved in with me from the small house, Hillside, we owned the other side of Blackheath. She had a job as an occupational therapist at a hospital but gave it up to manage the farm. She still manages it, being entitled to a half share of any profits. This farm was cleared in 1912 and has never made a profit in all that time. I do the light jobs, jam-making for the stall at the gate, feeding the workers, washing, cleaning, paying the bills. We have honey, ducks, goats, turkeys, fruit trees, berries of all kinds. Benison is building up the trade in ducks and jams. You look out from our old sprawling farmhouse, over the barns and the fowl pens, to a smiling orchard which has just survived the five-year drought. People come and lean over our gate to admire wistfully our farm and envy us. We have been here ten years now and work seven days a week. Friends, well-wishers and people writing theses and bringing their tape-recorders pour in and out. A farm should be there to provide work and food.

  Mary Gilmore once wrote:

  Nurse no long grief,

  Lest the heart flower no more.

  Grief builds no barns, his plough

  Rusts at the door.

  Occasionally I have nightmares but nobody is interested so I never mention them. I used to say to Bim when he took off in some esoteric flight from the Hindu religion he followed: ‘It is no use talking about other planes. You are set on this one and you must learn to live on it as worthily as you can.’ He looked at me dreamily: ‘I’m God,’ he said. I retired into silence. A God can suffer also. I combed the tangles out of his long hair.

  Oh where hae ye been, Lord Randall, my son?

  Oh where hae ye been, my handsome young man—

  Oh I’ve been in the wildwood, mother, make my bed soon;

  For I’m weary of hunting and fain would lie down.

  Old Scottish ballad

  After my son and husband had died I found it rather ironical that in 1980 I should be offered the Order of Australia. I had already turned down, twice, being made an OBE. For an old revolutionary there was something faintly ridiculous about symbolically joining the Establishment. Then I thought how the Parent would enjoy going to Government House and basking in glory. My sister might as well come too. Roddy would have refused to go and Benison had to mind the farm. So I accepted the Order of Australia.

  The Parent had a wonderful time at Government House at the presentation. There was a fountain and a band and crowds of elderly has-beens, like myself, tottering forward to be presented with what looked like the Order of the Golden Cabbage. I advanced, as I was told, and the Governor of NSW, Sir Roden Cutler, smiled at me: ‘We’ve come a long way from Manly, haven’t we, Kylie?’ he murmured. Later I inadvertently dropped a sandwich on the shoe of the Governor’s Lady.

  ‘Here you are, Parent,’ I said. ‘You’d better keep this,’ and handed him the Golden Cabbage and its little ribbons. The Parent was enchanted.

  He bored all his friends and neighbours fondly producing this exhibit.

  ‘No use her keeping it,’ he explained. ‘She’d only lose it.’

  He continued to take trips to Europe or Hong Kong. A mandarin’s cap of silk with which he had been presented by friends in Hong Kong covered his bald patch in summer. In winter it was replaced by a knitted cap with a pom. I went down, while I was writing a book, to the garage of Kelvin at Patonga Beach which the Parent had fitted up as a study for me. He wore a track across from the house, bringing as an excuse, cups of tea and biscuits or Marmite. ‘You’re not working,’ he would yell. ‘You’re just reading or loafing.’ He would retreat again to think up another excuse for inspecting me. His nextdoor neighbour, Edna, supplied me with crates full of romantic fiction which gave me great amusement. It was often ungrammatical and the young women in it had the curious habit of feeling strange quiverings in their stomach whenever they approached the male sex object who, inevitably, had hair on his chest and deep unfathomable eyes.

  ‘Where’s the porn, Edna?’ I would ask as soon as I arrived.

  ‘Here you are, love,’ Edna would respond, handing a cardboard crate over the fence. ‘Oh, isn’t is nice to see you!’

  I would try to persuade the Parent to come and live with me on the farm.

  ‘What! I’d bloody freeze. Last time I came up there I didn’t get warm until I got back to Sydney.’ My sister tried to persuade the Parent to live with her in her home unit but he found it constricting. So he clung to his own house like a limpet to a rock.

  ‘You know you’
re getting very old,’ he said critically, when he was ninety. ‘What I need is a young woman — a pretty young woman.’ So there was the episode of Dee who established herself in my garage studio. She was a beautiful girl and very kind to him. It seemed a splendid solution to the problem of leaving the Parent by himself.

  I went down to see that all was well. (I wish I had a dollar for every time I drove that long twisting way to Patonga Beach from the Blue Mountains.)

  ‘She drinks too much milk,’ the Parent growled. Next time he reported, ‘She uses too much toilet-paper.’ Presently Dee was ringing me up to say that the Parent was making loving passes at her. ‘He’s very old,’ I pleaded. ‘You can dodge him.’ But Dee moved out. Edna took over his meals. Dee came in sometimes to clean the house and the Parent was indignant that she wanted to be paid. Many of the neighbours had taken on the task of cleaning at Kelvin and all had given up.

  ‘Do you think you could ask him to get a new mop?’ Dee whispered to me. ‘This one’ (she held up a ragged cotton remnant) ‘only swishes the dirt around.’

  ‘Hey, Parent,’ I called, ‘Dee needs a new mop.’

  ‘What’s wrong with the one she has?’

  ‘It should be thrown away.’

  The Parent examined the mop, then said brightly: ‘Tell you what I’ll do. When I’m doing the washing on Monday I’ll wash the mop as well. Will that do her?’

  ‘You know,’ Dee said, telling tales for revenge, ‘he’s decided to alter his will and leave this house to Jamie.’ Jamie was my sister Doffie’s son. ‘He says Jamie is the only man in the family so he should have the house.’

  All the old ladies in Patonga were united in doing odd jobs for him. He was sitting complacently looking out the window at Flo and Kathie and Edna trimming the oleanders from his fence. ‘Come and look at all my women,’ he said in the tone of a sultan. That did it. Edna was just recovering from a heart attack.

  ‘To hell with you and your women! I’m not one of your women. I’m your daughter. If I come down here it’s not because I want anything from you. You can leave your damned house to Jamie and welcome! Let him look after you. And buy a new mop!’ I flung into the car and drove the hundred-miles-plus home in the dark. The Parent was really surprised when he found I’d gone home. He even rang up on the phone. Usually he saved the price of a call and waited for me to ring. He wanted to know why I had left.

  ‘Because I’m not going to be treated like one of your bloody women and used for your convenience. You can go into a convalescent home where you’ll have to pay. It’ll kill you.’

  But of course I went back. What could I do? All the local doctors had given him up long ago and even his dear Chris Martin, the microsurgeon, hinted at yet another exploration of his very dubious intestines. The Parent continued to do the washing on Monday. I hung out the clothes. I had to buy a new mop myself.

  ‘No, I’m not going into hospital again. Last time I was there there was a man dying all night across from me.’

  He had come out of the hospital too soon, summoning me to drive down and bring him home. Flo-across-the-street was a trained nurse, Lloyd across the street, Kath and Charles nextdoor, Dick down the road — they all treated him like a totem and brought him gifts. They had been doing it for so many years that he was now the Oldest Inhabitant. On his ninety-fourth birthday he scored two birthday parties — one in Sydney and one in Patonga. I would stay with him — dash back home — go down again.

  He couldn’t see to read, he was deaf, he could hardly swallow. When I received a phone call from Edna-next-door to say the Parent had had to go into the local hospital again I had just hit my shoulder with a jagged tree bough and couldn’t drive. My sister and her daughter Kyanne drove down instead but my sister was too ill to stay overnight. I finally managed to reach his hospital. Because I knew it would make him swell like a bullfrog with pride I had brought the first copy of my latest book Tantavallon. He could just make out the cover. ‘My feet are cold,’ he muttered. I massaged his feet, adjusted pillows, gave him drinks of water. ‘I can’t read, now,’ he said, passing his hands over the book.

  ‘Never mind,’ I said carelessly. ‘I’ll read it to you when you get home again.’ I knew that this time he would not be coming home. ‘And that reminds me. You’d better come home pretty soon. That damned water-pump of yours in the backyard is out of order again. You know I can’t fix it. Nobody but you can fix it. So you’d better come home before I run out of water.’ He nodded contentedly.

  All the pump needed was some new parts. It had been needing them for years. I didn’t tell him I had just paid Charles-nextdoor to put the new parts in. The Parent preferred to attack the pump with a wrench, doing no particular good. It purred and puttered and complained. ‘There,’ the Parent would explain with satisfaction, ‘I’ve fixed it.’ He often tried to explain the expedients needed to make the pump go but I preferred not to know; just as I maintained my resolve not to clean out the grease-trap from the sink. ‘All this yelling for new parts. It doesn’t need new parts.’

  I drove from the hospital over the hill to Patonga Beach.

  The neighbours gathered at the gate to hear the news. ‘We’ve been in every day, love,’ Edna told me. ‘He pretends he doesn’t know us. Just shuts his eyes and grunts. I went in yesterday — he pretends he’s unconscious — so I hold his hand and say: “This is Edna, Tom. The one who does everything for you. I went into the bank this morning with two cheques that came for you.” “Who were they from?” he says, quick as a wink. And then he says, “Is that you, Edna? How much were they?”’

  ‘Kathie and I went in,’ Flo chimed in. ‘He did the same to us. Shut his eyes and pretended we weren’t there. When I said: “Well, we’ll be going now,” he said, “Don’t forget the tripe for Thursday night.” I always brought him tripe on a Thursday.’

  Next day at the hospital the matron said he had sunk into a coma. ‘He won’t recognise you,’ she stated. At the sound of my voice he started up from his pillows. I massaged his feet, put a pillow under his knees, talked to him and held his hand. He couldn’t speak. ‘Have a sleep now,’ I said at last. ‘I’ll be back again tomorrow.’ He did a curious thing. Slowly, fumblingly, he took up my hand and carried it to his lips and kissed it. This gave me a shock. It was the only gracious thing I ever remember him doing. It couldn’t be gratitude because he didn’t know what gratitude was. Could it be affection? Not just the pride of owning a racehorse but real affection?

  Doffie and Kyanne came in as I went out. I said to Kyanne, ‘Just surround him with white light.’ She gazed at me dumbfounded. I am too old to pray for people any longer. I just surround them with white light.

  At three o’clock in the morning I was sitting up in bed reading some of Edna’s pornographic literature, thinking of the many nights I had heard the Parent coughing in the next room, and got up to make him a hot drink or merely called out to let him know I was there.

  Suddenly the water-pump came on. It purred away to itself. Formerly it had shown no signs of activity but I had forgotten to turn off the switch. ‘Oh, well,’ I thought, ‘he’s dead, poor Parent. But he hadn’t forgotten the water-pump.’ A half an hour later the matron rang to say that my father had ‘passed away’. I was pleased that he had made it at last — struggled through the obstacles to death. It was a month to his ninety-fifth birthday in July but he wouldn’t have a party this year. I hoped they would give him a party wherever he had landed. If he’s gone anywhere. He is probably still sitting invisibly on the front verandah looking at the sea.

  * * *

  After Roddy and Bim had died I spent time, effort and money trying to trace Bim’s son. I joined an organisation which asked for greater rights for the relatives of adopted children. I wrote to the (then) Child Welfare Department and they stonewalled me. I suppose it is just and reasonable that adoptive parents should not be annoyed by claims or interference from the bereft. When Bim’s son — I call him Michael — is eighteen years old he will be at libe
rty to seek out his origins and trace his natural parents if he so desires. But not before. He must be eleven years old now so it is not likely I will ever see him.

  The terrible fear was that the adopting parents might find, as people do when they take a kitten or a puppy, that it is nothing but a pest when it grows older. Many adopting parents return the child to a state home if any defect develops. I brushed from me the thought of Michael, desolate and defective, limping or brain-damaged, in some state home. We could give him a good life on the farm, Benison and I, even if he were half-witted or crippled. Benison is waiting for Michael to turn eighteen and will share the farm with him faithfully if he should ever seek her out. He is the Missing Heir. Benison is nobody’s heir. She is my partner, a legal share-farmer entitled to half the profit of an orchard that has never made a profit. She is with me, a survivor on this wild, beloved place, where the fowls have one leg longer than the other from trying to find a level place to stand, and our chief product is instant squalor. Not much of an inheritance for the Missing Heir, although people flow in and out the gate, saying: ‘How lovely this place is. How lucky you are!’

  Then I reflect that the country is rich in my heirs: ‘All those girls called Kylie, who bear my name! (Maybe they won’t be so happy about it after this revelation of all my muddled stupidities.) There are all those scribbling children who are frowning and exultant over their first buddings of prose and verse. What shall I leave them? The power to smile crookedly at life? Not to fear anything and laugh at disaster? The power to make their own unique pattern on chaos? Warm friends — I have so many — and the kindness and generosity of poor people; the ferocity of the hunter and fighter; and the almost-Irish courtesy to the guest. My ghost to guard them. No: more potent than all, I will leave them the impulse to make fools of themselves.’

  I remember once on Manly Beach a man who was giving donkey rides was dealing in the traditional way with his donkey. He took a large stick and beat it to its knees. I stepped out of the silent crowd — Australians hate to make a scene — and my friends’ faces were very disapproving. They knew I was about to disgrace myself again. I spoke to that man. I told him what I thought of him as a human being. He sneered, he answered back. He turned in a superior way and called on those about to see this silly woman. All of a sudden there was a concerted roar from that crowd. They shook their fists. When I left the crowd was so abusing the donkey owner that he was hastily packing up and leaving.