Something about Max was unsettling. I wanted him to like me. In the meeting with Leslie the lawyer and Anna-Marie, Victoria’s neediness had been off-putting. Her father’s reticence had the opposite effect on me. Driving him back down the hill to the house I found I wanted to impress him. I pitched him a real biography, not a ghostwritten monograph. A sweeping look at his wife’s life and work.
‘This could be big,’ I told him as he unlocked the front door of his house for me, and we walked down the wood-panelled hallway to a kitchen swimming in the pale green light.
‘I could see the themes in her work,’ I kept on at his bent back. ‘Love, the tragedy of war. Nursing. Family.’
Long windows opened up onto a deck. Swaying eucalypts, and the distant blink of the bay.
‘You want coffee?’ he asked, opening cupboards.
I said yes, knowing it would turn my stomach. It was my mother’s drink, not mine.
Leaning against the bench, he poured beans into a hand mill and began crushing them. As he turned the crank, the smell was rich and heavy.
‘I did a lot for Eddy, when she was alive,’ he said. ‘Now that she’s gone, I don’t know if I want this. My wife took a piece of a person and she put it in a painting. Some of her work has more of me in it than it does of her. If she was here today, she wouldn’t want it all out in the world. Did Victoria tell you that? Eddy knew what was really important to her. It wasn’t fame, it wasn’t attention. It was us. It was her family. She didn’t care about people seeing her work in the end. That wasn’t the point.’
The more Max pulled away, the more I tried to persuade him.
‘But she kept painting until she died, right?’
‘Yes. On and off.’
‘So she probably wanted people to see it eventually.’
‘Oh, you know that, do you?’
‘I’m sorry, that sounded presumptuous.’
‘You’re what – twenty-five, thirty years old? I was married to my wife longer than you’ve been alive. I’m pretty sure I know what she would have wanted.’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘This is all up to you; what work you show publicly, what you choose not to.’
‘We’ll think about it,’ he said. ‘As a family.’
I looked around the kitchen, trying to find something to talk about that would keep the conversation moving. The room was sparse, all polished wooden furniture and clean benches. Everything felt intentional. A glass vase containing slender stretches of driftwood had been placed in the middle of the dining table. The driftwood was beaten smooth, like silk. I touched one.
‘These are lovely,’ I said.
‘Eddy collected them. Day before she died. She was mad for collecting branches and oddments. Not flowers, mind. Twigs and weeds and things.’
It seemed morbid to me, that he had kept them. The only comparison I had for his grief was my dad’s death, when I was ten years old. After he died, Mum had thrown everything out. Cleared the house of him in one fell swoop.
Behind the dining table, a glamour bookshelf ran along one wall, the kind I have always associated with people who like to display their intellect. While Max brewed coffee in a stovetop espresso, I read the book titles, trying to work out what they said about the man. Patrick White’s Voss. A.B. Facey’s A Fortunate Life. Graham Greene’s The Quiet American. The History of Australia volumes by Manning Clark.
The top tiers of the shelf were reserved for trophies instead of books. First plastic trophies, then ribbons, then swinging medals. Heavy metal plaques and statuettes of male bodies caught the afternoon light. Every trophy was emblazoned with Percy Cranmer’s name, from childhood tournaments all the way through to ‘Best on Field’ for the Geelong Cats.
‘Lots of trophies,’ I said.
‘There’ll be a new one this year. Percy’s going to bring it in for me. The Cats’ll win in September.’
‘It’s been a long time.’
‘1963.’
‘The year I was born. My dad used to say it was his last lucky year.’
‘Year Percy was born too. Your dad’s a Geelong supporter?’
‘He was – he’s passed away.’
Max looked up at me, met my eyes for the first time since we’d left Edna’s studio. His eyes were pale blue, shallow. Like staring into still water.
‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ he said. Then he went back to sipping his coffee. ‘Everyone has a season of struggle. Cats’ll get there. This is a good team. And they know it, those boys. Know how good they could be. That makes them all over the place unless someone can keep them in hand. But they’re damned good when they’re on form.’
I wanted to point out that they weren’t the same ‘boys’ over the years. That football chewed them up and spat them out, arrogant brats or broken losers. But I didn’t.
‘Was Victoria into sports as well?’
‘Netball. Made state. Works for the netball people now. Trying to get the two organisations to merge, netball and football. Good for the girls.’
From the back deck of their house, I could see shadows rushing over the bay. The white shard of the ferry left the pier below us, pushing out across the Rip towards the long, low strip of the Bellarine on the far side of the headlands. I could see the smear of smog where Geelong would be.
I felt Max watching me stare.
‘Victoria’s probably on the ferry by now,’ he said. ‘But I have to go to my meeting. Local council. Can’t be late. I’ll tell Vicky how it went.’
Before leaving, I had to use the bathroom. Max directed me down a long corridor, left, then right. His clattering in the kitchen faded behind me as I went deeper into the house.
The door to the bedroom was ajar. I could see a glimpse of a painting. I only went in there for a second, to stand in front of the towering canvas of the bay that hung over the bed, of clouds building over the headlands. Unmistakably Edna’s.
As I was leaving the room, I saw the photograph on the bedside table, leaning against the lamp. Two men and a woman, together on a beach. The older man was Max, recognisable by his sticks. The younger man was much taller than Max, with light hair that looked white, stiff with salt. He was dressed in cut-off jean shorts, his long legs muscular and lithe. The two men had their arms slung around each other’s shoulders, skin on skin. They were both laughing. The younger man was looking down into Max’s face. But Max had turned towards Edna, grinning like a goblin.
Edna.
Tall and as slim as the driftwood. Haggard eyes, ash blonde hair. I had expected a suburban housewife – a shy smile and a floral sack of a dress – but the woman in the photograph was in a tattered pantsuit, a cigarette clamped between her teeth. Arms crossed under her breasts, she stood a couple of feet away from the men, watching them wryly.
I left Max’s bedroom quietly, closing the door behind me.
All the way back up the straight stretch of coastal road, I thought of Edna’s studio full of paintings, the flooding light, the riot of colours.
As soon as I got home to Carlton, I called Anna-Marie to tell her I was going to take the project.
‘Edna’s work is actually pretty amazing,’ I told her. ‘You know, I was even thinking I could try selling it to a traditional publisher. Make it a real biography.’
‘Look,’ said Anna-Marie. ‘My advice is the same. Set a price, do it as a vanity project under the daughter’s name, or get the brother on board and do it under your name. I’ve been reading up on Percy Cranmer. Cranno. He’s a real recluse. Very aloof. Fans are crazy about him. Reporters hate him. He’s the one you want to weave into her life if you want a real book.’
After we hung up, I sat in my tiny kitchen and made a list of the things I needed to raise with Victoria.
I loved that house. I’d been there since the divorce. The dark, narrow front hall, the cracked bricks out back and the exploding passionfruit vine, the way the light tracked across the kitchen for a few hours of each day, the constant call of people on the street outside, the f
eeling that I was in the middle of a bustling world, that I could join it at any time, but that I was also completely closed up inside the deep stone walls. I slept alone on a double futon. I felt old. Over.
I only had a few friends left. Joe had taken most of them in the divorce. No-one had told me that dividing your property meant taking people too. His story – that I had cheated on him, that I had betrayed him – was better than mine: that I had been unhappy, and aimless, and that my edges had dissolved like ink in water.
I left a message on Victoria’s answering machine, told her I was interested.
She called me back later that night.
‘This is going to be wonderful,’ she said. On the phone, the slightly posh edge to her voice was more obvious. The rounded, gentle vowels. ‘I’m so excited. Thank you. I can’t thank you enough. And Dad said you thought it might even be … well, a real, proper biography. With a publisher.’
‘I loved your mother’s work,’ I said. ‘I’m looking forward to it. But that was just me getting excited. Honestly, I don’t know whether it would make a full biography yet. Let’s just stick to the monograph plan for now. We’ll meet up in person to set out the details, but I wanted to let you know straight away: I’m in.’
‘You wait and see,’ she said. ‘We’re going to get along, you and I.’
In 2010, Victoria turned Edna’s estate into a Trust, and opened the studio up to the public. I caught the ferry across to Sorrento. I wanted to take my son Immy to visit, but I had to see it alone first.
There was a coffee cart parked in front, next to the locked gate at the bottom of the hill. During opening hours, it served lattes made with locally roasted beans. A young man with tight black jeans and a moustache made me my coffee. A school bus was just leaving, girls piling in, chattering, adjusting their straw hats. I stood in front of an information board that showed excerpts from my biography, and a timeline of when Edna’s most famous works were painted. I blew on my coffee, making ripples on its surface.
There was a photo of Edna, Max, Percy and Victoria at the studio engraved into the information board too. The photo was taken on the day that Max presented Edna with the finished studio in 1972. Her prison, or her sanctuary, depending on your point of view. Edna stands in the huge open studio doors, the ones that a small truck can fit through. She has a cigarette in her mouth, dark oval sunglasses. The children are sprawled at her feet, bare-legged. Percy is nine and gangly; Victoria is eight. Max leans on a carved stick, pointing at the photographer, as if he’s in the middle of delivering some sort of instruction.
After Edna Cranmer’s death in 1991, read the information board, her daughter, Victoria Cranmer, kept everything in the studio exactly as her mother had left it. Nothing was moved or disturbed. The studio you see today, with its austere cot bed and displays of sticks, is exactly as it was when Edna Cranmer left it.
That, obviously, is bullshit.
EDNA: A LIFE
The Australia of Edna’s childhood in the 1930s was a nation under construction, caught in the middle of a depression, a population of five million still reeling from the 90,000 men who had returned from the Great War maimed, mad, and worse. Behind closed doors, families struggled to care for their ‘changed’ men. In public, the nation enacted its rituals. Throughout the year, Edna marched in the fine dust of the stadium on the edge of the city for coronation ceremonies, Rotary Club days, Empire Day, graduations, district fairs and royal visits.
Of all the days of the year, Anzac Day was the most important in the Whitedale family. Like Australia, Edna’s father Frank was under construction too, constantly rebuilding himself. The eldest and most respectable of the notorious Whitedale brothers, known throughout the area for their poverty and drinking, Frank was trying to distance himself from his family’s reputation. The only time of year he drank was Anzac Day, the day when he remembered what had turned him into a fierce pacifist and committed family man. Frank’s nieces and nephews remember that day as the one the surviving brothers ‘let loose, got blasted’.
Frank Whitedale and his six younger brothers had enlisted together in the first months of 1915 as part of the 21st Battalion. At thirty-eight years old, Frank only just made the age cut-off for enlistment, which was not relaxed to forty-five until later that year. After training in Broadmeadows, the brothers sailed for Egypt in May. The youngest Whitedale, Peter, died on board of dysentery before landing in Alexandria; the black-humoured brothers would later joke that ‘Fly Away Peter’ got off light.
While the brothers were training in Cairo, the situation at Gallipoli deteriorated. In August 1915, the 21st Battalion was sent to the doomed Turkish peninsula as reinforcements. It was an eventful trip: the ocean liner carrying the brothers and 1400 other troops was torpedoed off the Greek island of Lemnos. The troops abandoned the ship. Forty men drowned; the brothers rowed to shore in a lifeboat.
The 21st Battalion eventually made it to Gallipoli in September 1915. The brothers stayed on the beach for four months. Two of them were killed – Herb and Louis. Ernest Whitedale lost both his legs, miraculously survived, and was discharged.
The remaining Whitedale brothers, Frank, Paul and Jack, were transferred to the Somme in early 1916. They went on to fight in the battles of Pozières and Mouquet Farm, where nine out of ten men in the ‘Geelong Battalion’ were killed. Through it all, the three Whitedale brothers survived. Paul was discharged for shell shock in December 1916, just as the battalion was being moved to Belgium. Jack was discharged after the amputation of his right arm and losing toes on both feet to frostbite in January 1917. Edna’s father Frank continued alone through the final year of the war, marching across Europe.
When the war was finally over, forty-two-year-old Frank met twenty-two-year-old Marguerite Lisson in London, while he waited for passage back to Australia.
The daughter of a professor of architecture at École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Marguerite had fled, along with her parents and sister, from Paris for London in 1915. The Lisson family escaped the end of the Great War, but they could not escape the Spanish Flu. The influenza swept across the world in the last days of the conflict as soldiers left the battlegrounds and returned home, carrying the virus that would ultimately kill more than fifty million people. In the months before meeting Frank, Marguerite lost both parents, and then her sister too.
London was a city of fever and panic. Alone in a foreign place, with a war-torn country behind her, Marguerite saw the tall, older Australian with his dark, wry wit as a safe haven – and an escape. Australia, as Frank described it, was a fresh, golden paradise that could take her away from the terrors of Europe. For Frank, Marguerite was a new beginning: a refined, fragile girl who needed his protection. A prize. He renamed her Margaret, and married her.
When the couple arrived in Australia in 1919, the surviving Whitedales were waiting for Frank to put their family back together again.
Geelong was still ‘the pivot’, a name the town had adopted in the 1860s when it acted as a shipping and rail hub between Melbourne and the booming goldfields. A bustling town of 30,000, by the 1920s it was ‘riding the sheep’s back’, ringed with mills and stores that serviced the fields of the Western District. In the thriving society of Geelong, the Whitedales balanced precariously between the respectable world of the emerging working class and the sordid convict history that Frank was still trying to persuade his family to shed.
Returning to his job at the Black Swan Carpets factory, Frank found his surviving three brothers jobs on the factory floor. In Whitedale legend, Frank ‘ran’ the carpet factory, although its owners Nel and Pop Cranmer would later claim that the Whitedales were employed as an act of charity.
Despite Frank’s claims to have the family in hand, his control over his surviving brothers was a thin veneer. Like so many of the veterans, the brothers turned inwards. There were screams in the night on Dent Street; there were broken bottles; and there was Anzac Day, when they put aside their differences and marched.
; In the afternoons of the Anzac Days of Edna’s childhood, the Whitedales swapped positions, and it was Edna’s turn to perform. Year after year, Geelong’s school girls traced slow, spinning routines in front of the city, 1500 young ladies of the Commonwealth in matching white dresses, linking hands while they danced for the solemn crowds on the crisped grass of the Corio Oval football grounds. On the sidelines, their mothers and aunts sat next to the veterans, watching the children march.
The Biographer
Virginia Woolf called biography ‘a plodding art’.
Every life, she wrote, should open with a list of facts. The biographer should set events down in the order in which they occurred, a stately parade of the real. Births, deaths and marriages. Broken limbs, acquisitions, graduations, wars. Any interpretation of the facts, she said, is fiction. But the facts remain.
Two days after I drove the long coast to stand in Edna’s studio, Edna’s mother, Margaret Whitedale, died. An event. A fact.
Victoria called to tell me. I stood in my bare kitchen, back against the bluestone, and listened to her trying not to cry.
‘Both her daughters went before her,’ she said. The sadness in her voice was tempered with anger. ‘Can you imagine? Both Imelda and Mum. Granny Margy wanted this book so much. And now she won’t be round to see it happen, and she won’t be around to tell her stories. I was going to record her. I should have started earlier. I should have started the moment Mum died. I wanted to give Dad more time to recover from it, but it was too much.’
Victoria invited me to the funeral. I said it felt strange, turning up before we’d formalised the project, before I’d even met the rest of the family, but she insisted.
‘You’ll see the house where Mum grew up. Before she ran away. You’ll see everyone all together, get a feeling for her side of the family.’
When I hung up the phone, I stood looking through the back window of the Carlton house into the tiny brick courtyard, feeling that I should be starting too. I had to start my list of facts.
The Biographer's Lover Page 3
