Window Gods

by Sally Morrison

  The tableau freezes. How is it to cope with the Different? The good old different! If only the undifferent would yield. Allegra and I were peaceniks when we were young: how naive we were! We certainly never predicted block-headedness on this stultifying scale. Socialism was going to create a whole new set of circumstances for us. The sitting rooms of old people’s homes were going to be hives of industry: we were going to paint, sculpt, write, fly the occasional plane and take the children tenpin bowling. We didn’t anticipate this mini Afghanistan here at Redeemer. Suppose the aid organisations managed to get buildings and air-conditioning up for the elderly of Kabul (supposing there ever were elderly), wouldn’t they be just like this? Old women of one faith dividing along sectarian lines to fight for their brand – Sister Colleen declaiming, ‘Progress!’ Mother Oldmeadow strenuously enunciating, ‘Obedience!’ in the deathly museum of our hopes.

  I get the old lady to her feet; she hunches under nearly a century of living, balances it on her skinny old shoulders, points the Wheelathon to…where? And takes a first, shaky step.

  I can’t imagine putting my affairs in the hands of Mother Oldmeadow and I feel deeply sad for anyone who has to. Yet, generations of women have done just that throughout the Christian world for centuries – for centuries we’ve been bidden to set some bloke on high and invest him with all the power we can imagine over our lives. I hope religion never stages a comeback as the great panacea for the sufferings of life, but I fear that it will come back, that we’ll invent some new, elaborate hoax for ourselves that, if we don’t look sideways or behind the smoke and mirrors, will hypnotise us away from being what we are: creatures in a universe, creatures able to act on our own behalf, and, if we put or minds to it, on behalf of those who are afraid of life.

  I know a few people who stick to religion and they seem to do so more out of custom than out of the conviction that Christ rose again or that Moses split the sea in two. Checkie, I feel certain, does it to create an impression. She loves church music and rows for the side of choirs and pomp. Well…fine! I actually like to hear a soprano soar into the vaults myself – but let it be for joy and hope and the beauty of singing and the human voice: though we die, we are alive and when we are dead, we will have lived. Let it be. But don’t go to your grave mean, covetous, full of jealous sentiment and spite.

  I’m not a litigious person. The only time I’ve had need of a lawyer was when Reg Sorby lent me his to get Viva to pull her head in about my right – and Nin’s – to a fair share in Dadda’s estate.

  Apart from that, which I’ll admit was a debacle, I’ve steered clear. The first time I bought a house, I did my own conveyancing – I remember ringing up the lawyer of the woman whose house I was buying to get some needed particulars and being told I couldn’t have them because I wasn’t a lawyer, so I had to go to the woman herself. It worked out right enough, although the seller, a divorcee who’d been given the house in a settlement, thought I was strange, by which I suppose she meant that I wasn’t what she’d been expecting – a man, or a man’s representative. No. I was just me: one of the first unmarried women in the state of Victoria to be allowed to have my own mortgage. I owed my luck to a recommendation from Vance – a mere PhD at that time, a post-doctoral fellow no less, not even on the permanent payroll. I’d gone first to the bank with references from Beryl Blake and been turned down, because Beryl, though a distinguished Doctor of Science, had never had enough clout to have a mortgage of her own – wrong reproductive organs.

  I’ve had much more need of GPs than I’ve had of lawyers. Although I go on about my mother’s GP, I like and appreciate my own very much. Mine is a soft-spoken, middle-aged chap of Greek heritage. He’s not ambitious; he’s in practice with a friend in a dilapidated house several doors up from mine. You can have your pathology specimens taken on the spot, they bulk bill and there is a woman dentist in the practice, too. ‘It’s not ideal,’ my GP tells me, resignedly. The Greek Church owns the land and won’t update the premises, but ‘I meet people I like and sometimes I go home happy with a job well done. If I had my time over, I’d do it again.’ They speak Greek at the practice and most of their patients are Greek immigrants. Sometimes people have to stand in the waiting room with its array of mismatched chairs, and usually there are kids playing with donated toys on the floor, and there’s trust. Where would we be without trust?

  In a lawyer’s office.

  The lawyer is in town on the twenty-fifth floor. When you exit the lift, there’s a wall in front of you with the names Raven and Barrat in golden printing on it, so that you see your face distorted by the ‘a’s and ‘r’s as you glide to the right where an unpersoned shiny plank is attended by a bright red upholstered chair in a chrome cage that does for legs. Something slim and black lies on the desk beside a screen and you can see as you approach that it’s a gadget – perhaps for rounding up lost sheep.

  A person eventually teeters in stage left in a too-tight lime-green frock and black heels that throw her arch forward so far you can see the articulation between tendon and bone at the ankle joint. ‘How may I help you?’ she asks as if she’s the fixture and you’re the fluff and you ask for your lawyer and she takes you to an empty, glass-panelled room with another shiny plank on a cage, only this time, the plank has a glass jug of water on it and four clean glass tumblers…let’s keep everything transparent. Kafka without the termites. And when you’ve been sitting there long enough to feel uncomfortable and are beginning to wonder if they remembered having put you into the room, in walks smiley with his polished dome that gives you back the glazed-over surroundings. ‘What can I do for you?’ he asks.

  Rub some mud on your head, I feel like saying.

  My lawyer received a demand from Checkie’s lawyer before Christmas. I was to furnish reasons why I should not surrender the paintings. I was also to furnish details about where the paintings are stored and the adequacy of the storage.

  I said I thought the demands were ridiculous and intrusive, since the paintings were awarded to me in a court settlement. This surely amounted to being sued twice for the same thing and was therefore a vexatious claim.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he agreed. ‘Vexatious. Some people stop at nothing.’

  ‘That must be good for business,’ I remarked.

  ‘Well yes,’ he laughed uneasily, ‘that’s what we’re here for.’ And he sent off my thoughts on the matter to Checkie’s lawyers, saying, ‘Sometimes it’s enough to make them back down.’

  But Checkie loves to sue. She’s made quite a killing from it: insurance claims, defamation, use in publications of Siècle’s images without consent; she’s well known for it. Now, her lawyers have responded. Their client has a case. Their interpretation of the law says that I was granted custodianship of the paintings in the settlement; custodianship is not ownership (tell that to the Aboriginals).

  I have to sort this state of affairs with Nin, as she is joint custodian. It would be sensible to divide the inheritance since Checkie is suing me but not suing Nin. So…here I am at Nin’s house, jousting with delaying tactics again.

  According to my lawyer, Checkie’s lawyers can quibble about the settlement in this way. Under the terms of the Siècle Trust, to which Dadda was a signatory, they can assert rights and contest ownership.

  I might as well consult the I Ching as decide which way to jump. Maybe I shouldn’t jump at all, except that I’m obliged to say something in reply to defend my right to the paintings.

  I’ve been sitting up here at Nin’s for a good twenty minutes playing games of patience on my laptop, waiting for their ladyships to notice that I’m here and in need of input. I bought myself a suite of several different types of patience and I eliminate them as soothsayers by how easy they are to get out. I then take medium chance games and play against the likelihood of my getting them out. A run of wins means I’m on the right track – Eli is not dead or a thug and there are still numerous moves to be made in life before the game is up and I lose my son and my house
. Three wins in a row of a one-in-five likelihood game means the week ahead has good auguries. Three losses in a row means the reverse. But if I go down the ill-favoured track, I reason to myself, I’m only going to enjoy life the less and waste it the more.

  The psychiatrist told me when I first turned up for help with my depression that I was the one who had turned up, therefore I was the one who needed help. The old mother, the suffering son, the persecuting half-sister and brother-in-law and the unlucky niece had not turned up for help, therefore they didn’t need it. Tell that to the asylum seekers: it’s no more logical than setting your mood by the stars or the outcome of a series of games of patience.

  The psychiatrist says there are no outside rules, only those we carry on board ourselves – so you may as well arrange your life just to please yourself. What if it is in your nature to be philanthropic, though? And to believe that a peaceful environment is the best place for life to prosper? Acting in accordance with your conscience might leave you in the position of someone who is loved and appreciated or it might leave you where you started – weighed down with too much responsibility. I’d like to be loved and appreciated, but these days it is fashionable to say deprecatingly of people like me that we are approval seekers and that it’s all right not to be liked. Margaret Thatcher, after all, was not liked and she saved Britain. Didn’t she?

  Where I started was with God the Anglican and the allpervading Anglican Jesus Christ. It didn’t take much formal instruction for me to cotton on that this was the bit of religious instruction where I belonged. Aunt Nina was the great, all suffering example (and Stella had received that postcard from the ‘Bish’). Turn the other cheek, be kind, put yourself in another’s shoes, be helpful. Yet, in the natural world where we are all destined to be carbonised or to turn into nutritious dirt that will or will not be of any use to the planet that sustains us, there’s nothing but motherhood to support Christ’s teachings and Christ was a man with a mother.

  No. To be good along Christian lines means believing in righteousness and righteousness is not something you can necessarily discern in yourself – you can only see it at a distance. It isn’t embodied: it’s occasional. Anyone who thinks they are righteous must lack certain sensitivities. They must be blind to squalor and not much moved by cruelty, ignorance and poverty. They must live in denial of their own faults. They must be complacent. They must never have had to make the decision to chop off the fingers of the hands clinging to the loaded and sinking lifeboat. They must never have faced the prospect of losing their own fingers and drowning themselves.

  Putting yourself in the position where you are in danger of losing your life is but a breath away from suicide. To the suicide I suppose that everything stops mattering at the moment of death. Peace, then, to the suicide – but to we who survive…brokenheartedness, truncation, division, Janus-headed judgement and the requirement to reconstruct around this hideous wrong.

  The assassin is on board the lifeboat and one’s life is always surplus to need.

  So where does that leave righteousness? It’s something in the ether that is only sometimes available.

  I’ve been sitting here so long, the battery in my laptop has grown hot on my knee.

  I am sitting on one of Nin and Wendy’s two sofas in an island, the width of my bottom, between multifarious piles of stuff. My folder containing some timeworn shots of our picture collection has fallen spine first down a crack in the seating and is castigating me with its fannyful of agenda. We’ve been drinking tea in Turkish glasses and avoiding getting to the point, hence my abstracted ravings and excursion into patience. Daniel has gone to see the Women’s Circus with Gorgon.

  I clap shut the laptop.

  Nin hasn’t received a Statement of Claim, nor has it been suggested that Nin will be sued. The claims are being made against me. Yet the paintings being sought are jointly owned. This is not something Nin wants to talk about and yet, talk about it we must. We have to decide which of the paintings we are to nominate as hers and which I will claim as mine.

  Wendy has a mirror on her lap and is French plaiting her own hair as if nothing out of the ordinary is going on.

  ‘I’m sorry guys,’ I say, ‘but the claim isn’t going to go away and we really have to deal with it.’

  Nin goes behind the chair Wendy is sitting on and holds up a strand of hair. ‘You’ve left a bit out,’ she says.

  ‘Blast! It’s really hard trying to French plait your own hair.’

  ‘I’ll do it for you if you like…’

  ‘Nin!’

  ‘It’s all right, Bel, I can do it and listen at the same time. I’m a mother, don’t forget.’

  ‘Well, we’ve got to decide who owns which pictures…’

  ‘I don’t see what the problem is,’ goes Wendy. ‘You never look at them anyway. They’re stuck up in a warehouse somewhere you haven’t even got the decency to tell us…’

  ‘Oh cut it out, Wendy. If you two wanted the paintings you could have had them. Instead, you leave everything up to me – storage, insurance…’

  ‘Why don’t you just go and get them and give them to Checkie? She can look after them for a change. After all, all that’s happening now is you’re shelling out to have them stored…’

  ‘Shut up We-en,’ goes Nin. ‘That’s not what it’s about.’

  ‘I’d like to know why not!’ Wendy fixes her impenetrably dark irises on the ceiling and this brings a heaving sigh up out of me.

  ‘Sometimes you’re as sensitive as old goats’ tits, Wendy,’ I say. ‘The pictures are all my father left that I can legally claim as mine. They are all I have of his. They are pictures of my adolescence and of Nin’s mother’s adolescence painted by our father. If I can’t hang them on my walls it’s because I haven’t any walls to hang them on. I would have to sell them to be able to afford the walls.’

  She yawks her mouth down at the side and rolls her eyes over the roof to settle on me. ‘I’ve heard all that before. The fact is, they’re just sitting in some shed somewhere.’

  ‘Off track, Wendy! We have to decide who owns what paintings specifically. In the past I’ve had sole responsibility and sold work from time to time to keep the family going; we now have to separate out Nin’s from mine.’

  ‘Why can’t we keep going in the way we have been?’ goes Nin.

  ‘Because we stand to lose my share to Checkie, Nin-compoop. She’s suing me, in case you’ve forgotten. The case will have an outcome and she can’t sue me for what I do not own – or at least, have in my custody. Now, let’s get down to tacks. I’ve been thinking about it even if you haven’t. The only painting I stake a claim to is Where the Nice Girls Live No 2.’

  ‘Does that mean it’s the most valuable?’ goes Wendy.

  ‘No, Wendy. It doesn’t. It means that it’s the one I want. Of all the paintings in the suite, that one has most significance for me. It was hanging on my wall when Allegra died. For me, she is in that picture. Nin, I thought you might like the one of Allegra sitting up on the kiddie kangaroo in the playground, looking like Eve Marie Saint in On the Waterfront but with different hair and smoking a cocktail Sobrani. She had so much make-up on you could have lifted it up in one piece and put it away in a bag for later.’

  ‘What’s that one worth?’

  ‘Wendy, pull your head in.’

  ‘Only asked.’

  ‘Have I ever dudded you and Nin?’

  ‘Not that I know of.’

  ‘Well I’m not about to start. I’ve got no idea what it’s worth. Or very little idea. Paintings can fetch extraordinary prices or be passed in at auction, way below the reserve. It’s a long time since any major work by my father was sold. And you can bet your boots that if we put it up for auction, some smart-fart auctioneer will buy it through a third party and then sit on it until he can make a killing. That’s how the market works these days. It’s hard to know who to trust.’

  ‘I don’t understand why Nin can’t give her share of the paintin
gs to David to manage. After all, he’s supposed to be the expert on Henry Coretti, isn’t he? And they’d come back to Nin anyway, wouldn’t they? Plus be looked after properly.’

  ‘Wendy, are you just being devil’s advocate or do you really not understand? We have to clear up ownership of these paintings. I need my share just as much as Nin needs hers. If Nin gave hers to David, where would he keep them, do you imagine? At the Siècle Trust. And the moment David died, which he will do soon, believe me, Checkie would just seize them. Nin couldn’t mount a case to get them back. Have you any idea how much money, time and resources it takes to fight a court battle over ownership? I want to warn you that if David or Checkie or anyone else has suggested to Nin that she surrender her share of the work into David’s care, it means that the work will end up in Checkie’s hands and not in Nin’s.’

  ‘You’re paranoid about Checkie and David, Isobel,’ says Wendy.

  ‘Am I? And what if their cordiality to you has nothing to do with affection and everything to do with Checkie wanting to rob you? Checkie has never taken no for an answer. She’s covetous; she always has been. And she wants to be famous. She does not have ordinary human feelings for other people: her ego is built on being Henry Coretti’s daughter. She and Viva have been spreading Viva’s story of love requited for decades. She would like the rest of the story never to have existed. She wants to be written up in Women’s Weekly as Paintings Back WhereThey Belong so she can show everybody how well preserved she is from never having gone out in the sun.’

  ‘Well, at least she’d put the darned things on show.’

  ‘The arrangement I’ve made might well mean they can go on show once the case is cleared up!’

  Nin has plaited and pinned, and pinned and plaited so that Wendy has had about five hairdos in the time we’ve been talking. ‘Checkie does send Daniel outside whenever we’re there,’ she says, lamely.