The Biographer's Lover

by Ruby J Murray

  There was a single jasmine plant in that courtyard. I was teaching it to climb the wall.

  Margaret Whitedale’s funeral was to be held at St Mary of the Angels in Geelong, which meant going home again.

  The morning of the funeral, I drove the Falcon up over the swoop of the West Gate Bridge, and then down to where Melbourne’s suburbs subside. Every kilometre was a reminder. On either side of that highway, the light chases itself in great gusts across the plains. After half an hour, the granite spines of the You Yangs rise slowly in the dusty distance.

  When I was a kid and had nothing for comparison, I thought that the You Yangs were mountains, distant, high and sacred. But they’re barely tall enough to be mountains, more like crusts rising out of the ancient magma, from back when this part of the earth was a rumbling volcanic field. Only in the flat lands between the cities could the You Yangs look like peaks. Scale is deceptive out there; houses and factories jump up out of nowhere and then disappear behind you before you’ve had time to register them.

  The You Yangs. Wurdi Yawang; big mountain in the middle of a plain.

  I have driven the long flat expanse of the Princes Highway a thousand times, the coast wriggling in and out of the invisible bays beside me, but I’ve only ever seen the You Yangs from a distance. Standing high on the hills in the fancy part of Geelong, or rushing by them in a car on the long road between the cities.

  Mum always said it was good luck to look at them. Good luck, girl, look at the You Yangs. I don’t know if this was an Aboriginal tradition she picked up somewhere or an Irish one from Dad’s superstitious mob, or if it was just my mother: trying to distract her fractious child on that straight, featureless highway.

  I was eighteen when I left Geelong, the town I thought of as a godforsaken gold-rush husk on the bay within the bay. A week after graduating from high school, I piled my meagre possessions into the back of the Falcon. The car felt like an extension of Dad, assured, sleek. The day was clear-cut, high-skied, and I could not wait to get away.

  Mum hadn’t wanted me to move to Melbourne. She didn’t like big-city people. She had grown up in a children’s home outside Ballarat. (We did not talk about it.) Melbourne people were fakers, she said. Geelong people were makers. They created things – cars and compost, carpets and cheese, shoes, shirts, salt, rope, chipboard, a city of industry, not sham.

  On the morning I left home, she stood on the front steps of the house and waved at me as I pulled into the road, as if Melbourne was on the other side of the country instead of an hour down the highway.

  In Melbourne I avoided the other Geelong kids who I knew had also moved up to the city. When people asked me where I grew up, I did not say Geelong. I said ‘on the coast’. I let them imagine that my childhood had been one of rugged empty beaches and cool, peeling waves, not shopping plazas, football and fumbling peach-fuzz sex on railway sidings.

  I went home to Geelong so rarely that, when I did, I was a tourist in someone else’s life. I spent the slow afternoons walking the cross streets in the middle of town, being horrified and amused by the neon crinkle of shell suits. I sat in one of the only cafes that served what I considered to be drinkable coffee and wrote acerbic comments in my diary, looking out over the wide roads at girls pushing prams. I strode across the windswept mall where teenagers huddled getting high, and I thought serious academic thoughts about Freud and Foucault, Man Ray and Max Ernst.

  I stopped visiting Geelong altogether when I began dating Joe. I thought Joe was the beginning of my real life, and he preferred the ‘real’ coast: Torquay’s surf beaches or the crumbling Twelve Apostles, fingers of rock pointing accusingly at the windy skies. Places that looked like Australia, and could fit on a postcard.

  We got married on a day of soaring Melbourne heat. We held the ceremony outdoors, in the Treasury Gardens. Even the trees seemed to sweat. Joe had just been awarded his law degree, which meant I could finally give up the cafe jobs I’d been working to keep us afloat. In his speech, Joe made a joke about my ‘escape’ from Geelong, and I saw the hurt on my mother’s face as she sat stiffly in her new dress, the sharp spokes of the hired chair sinking into the grass under her weight.

  The only other person in the car park of St Mary of the Angels Basilica when I pulled up for Margaret Whitedale’s funeral was a pale man in a sodden jacket, wrestling with a camera tripod. I was late; the service had already started. It was a grey, wet Geelong day, an icy wind tearing in from the Bass Strait seas on the far side of the Rip. Flocks of white cockatoos made raucous baths of the standing water that pooled between the parked cars.

  Inside the vast basilica people had clustered in the first few pews. I sat in the back, with the smell of the damp wool coats left hanging and the soft drip of the umbrellas. I could see Victoria in the front pew, flanked by the men in her family. Her father, Max, sat to her left – tiny, shrunken, his head only as high as her shoulder. On her other side, a big man: Percy ‘Cranno’ Cranmer, the brother, the golden-boy footballer. As the service droned on, I watched the siblings. Percy’s profile was distorted by the lurch of a broken nose. He kept glancing at his sister, putting his arm around her, holding her tightly to him, stroking her hair.

  Percy, I realised, as the bodies of the congregation rustled and stood to sing and mutter, must be the reason for the sodden reporter in the car park outside. Percy was also probably why the funeral was being held in St Mary’s, and not one of the churches at the bottom of the hill. Geelong is a place of few celebrities: in our streets, football players are stars.

  The priest made magic symbols with his hands. A woman rose from the middle of the pews to give a reading. Her boot heels clattered on the black and white tiles. She was grey haired, flushed red, blood sitting unevenly under her thin skin. A big black bow was tied around the thick waist of her floral twin set, as if she was some sort of extravagant present.

  ‘Before I read this blessing,’ she said, ‘I just want to say that my aunt Margaret was one of the kindest people in the world.’ The woman turned her face up towards the vaulted ceilings, and blinked her electric-blue eyelids. She was shaking a little and, while she could have been ridiculous, she was not. Her deep, throbbing voice filled the space.

  ‘We all were welcome in Margaret’s house, when things were good and when things were bad. When Frank died, she stayed strong for all of us. She lost both her girls during her lifetime, but she never complained. Imelda, Margaret’s angel, she was only thirty when she died. Too young.’

  I noted that the woman didn’t include Edna in the angel category. She paused. Breathed deeply, composing herself.

  ‘But Margaret asked people in. Whenever you needed someone to talk to, whenever you needed help, a hand, she was there.’

  In the front pew Victoria began to sob, the sound carrying through the still air.

  I felt suddenly dirty, a voyeur. I rose and backed out of the cathedral as the woman began to read the Irish blessing: May the roads rise up to meet you. May the wind be always at your back.

  In the car, I pumped up the heat and waited. I thought about what the woman had said about Margaret losing both daughters before she died. Victoria had said it too. The repetition made it feel as if Edna had died a long time ago, not just the year before.

  It began to rain again.

  The service ended. Percy and Victoria emerged. Even at a distance, Percy fitted into his black suit strangely, too muscular for its pressing fabric. Brother and sister stood together inside the lip of the wide entrance, shaking hands, hugging the mourners who drifted out of the basilica and down the steps. It was hard to make out their faces through the rain. Max hovered behind them in the shadowy entrance. Compared to his enormous children, with their long limbs and bright skin, crippled Max almost seemed to disappear.

  A black hearse drove into the car park. Percy went back into the cathedral, and a few minutes later the coffin came out, borne on the shoulders of tall, thick Whitedale men, who slid it easily into the car. The doors to th
e basilica closed. Cars lined up in a procession.

  The reporter saw his chance. He hurried over to Percy and Victoria, but Max barred the way, leaning on one of his walking sticks and raising the other like a weapon. The reporter said something in protest, but Max’s face was blank.

  ‘Fuck off,’ I saw him mouth. He jabbed the stick at the reporter, who stepped back.

  Percy, Victoria and their father got into a sleek, dark blue BMW sports car together and drove away. The wheels spun and squealed on the wet tarmac. The Cranmers all drove Beamers, then.

  The reporter dragged his sodden gear over to the car next to mine, started packing up.

  Winding down the Falcon’s window, I asked, ‘What were you here to report on – the funeral?’

  ‘Nah,’ he said. ‘Cranno. Wanted to get him to say something about the sheep guts.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Someone’s been sending the team guts, you know. Sheep guts. ’Cause they’re cowards.’

  ‘Bit tasteless.’

  ‘Yeah, messy too.’

  ‘I meant coming to his grandmother’s funeral.’

  The reporter laughed. ‘I’m not from Geelong,’ he said. ‘I don’t have to worship these blokes.’ He got in his car and left. I was alone again.

  The wake was held in Margaret’s house, in the middle of a long row of Whitedale cottages on Dent Street, West Geelong. From inside the protection of the Falcon, I saw how the mourners had double-parked all the way down the street. Every house looked the same in that part of town: rows of bluestone workers’ boxes linked wall to wall, eave to eave.

  Stepping over the threshold into the stone box Edna grew up in, I passed from the grey, quiet rain into a place of heat and noise. Edna’s childhood home was cramped. Two couches were crammed into the front room where there should have been one, side tables groaned under faux gold lamps, the mantelpiece was lined with knick-knacks: a clock shaped like the Eiffel Tower, clusters of porcelain violets, shepherdesses skipping with their rough-cast flocks. Over the gas fireplace hung a faded reproduction of Monet’s waterlilies in a heavy gilt frame.

  Hardly anyone from the basilica appeared to have gone to the cemetery for the burial. Within minutes, the windows had fogged with the breath of the loud mourners. The Whitedale family were not the sort of people who spoke low and hushed in their grief. They kept jostling joyfully in through the front door, carrying plates of food covered in cling wrap and yelling questions and instructions: heat this up, Jan; Patty, put this out here; Suze, where’s the damned beer?

  I wanted to be alone in the house, to imagine what it would have been like for Edna to grow up there. I wanted clues. But there were too many people in the way. Taking a tinny from the table in the narrow kitchen, I wandered through the rooms, trying to stay in motion so that it would look as if I belonged. At twenty-nine, the only other wake I had been to so far was my father’s, back when I was ten. Everyone at that wake had been quiet, subdued. They had hush-hushed and whispered. That was how I thought people should react to death. Not like the crowing Whitedales and their friends.

  I found myself standing in the doorway between the hall and the living room with the woman who had given the Irish blessing. She was short, stocky, and up close her outfit was even louder than it had seemed from across the church. Most of the mourners’ outfits were black and cheap, but this woman, Edna’s cousin, was a display. The floral print on her twin set was subtropical, the black bow around her waist crinkled as she leaned back against the wall. Her hair was teased into a delicate cloud of grey perm. Massive gold metal hoops swung from her ears.

  ‘You spoke well,’ I told her. ‘It was very moving.’

  She beamed at me, all purple lipstick. ‘Thank you. How did you know Marg?’

  ‘I didn’t. Actually, Victoria invited me. I’m helping Victoria put together a bit of a book about Edna, and –’

  The cousin gripped my arm with her stubby fingers. ‘You’re the biographer who’s writing about Edna for Vicky! She said you might be here.’

  ‘It’s going to be more of a monograph, not a real biography. We don’t have a lot of time, you know. We’re just going to write up her life, catalogue her paintings.’

  ‘That’s great. It’s such a good idea. You come talk to me anytime at all. I’m Jennifer. Jack’s daughter. Marg was my favourite aunt.’

  ‘I’m sorry that I didn’t get to meet her.’

  ‘Oh, she was wonderful. She had real opinions, you know. Real tastes. She knew what she liked and she knew what she didn’t like and she told you about it. You were never bored with Margy.’

  ‘And Edna?’

  ‘Well, Edna was Edna.’

  ‘Strong-willed?’

  ‘Not exactly. She was quiet but, you know, she did things her own way.’

  In the middle of Margaret Whitedale’s living room, an over- weight man in stone-washed jeans was setting up an easel, balancing a shabby pin board on its strut. People began to pin up photos of Margaret. Jennifer and I drifted over.

  ‘That’s Margaret at the show,’ Jennifer told me, pointing at a photo of a beautiful woman sitting stiffly on a beach towel. She was in her fifties, sharp features and dark hair set in tight waves around her face. ‘Margaret didn’t like the water,’ Jennifer said, tut-tutting sadly. ‘Frank drowned, you know. But once in a while you could get her down to the beach.’

  Margaret and a thin man posed in front of a brick wall with two girls – a kid and a toddler. The kid’s hands hovered over the toddler’s curly blonde hair, as if she was trying to keep the toddler from flying away.

  ‘And that’s Margaret and Frank at the factory, and those are the girls when they were little, Edna and Imelda.’

  ‘Imelda’s the older sister?’

  ‘Real angel. She died not long after the war, left the baby John behind. She’d adopted him in London. Margaret took him on eventually. But we haven’t heard from him in years. A bit ungrateful of him, honestly. Not like Percy. No, Percy is a good son, a good grandson.’

  She pulled a photo out of her handbag and stuck it on the board: Margaret, standing in front of a towering sculpture – two soldiers carrying an eagle on their backs, a naked man towering over them, slaying the eagle with his sword. Next to Margaret stood a teenage boy in a sky blue uniform, all legs, arms behind his back, mock military style. Margaret was beaming up at him.

  That boy?

  ‘Percy’s graduation,’ I could hear Jennifer saying, somewhere next to me. ‘She was always there for them, for those kids. Everything she could do.’

  Teenaged Percy stared into the camera, straight-faced.

  I had told Anna-Marie at that first lunch that I didn’t know anyone in Edna’s family, that Geelong was a city, not a town. That I’d never met Percy Cranmer, the football player for the Cats. But seeing him with the years shaved off, back before his nose was broken and the muscle had piled on, I remembered him.

  ‘If you come over to my place,’ Jennifer was saying, ‘I can show you more. Anytime. Anytime at all. I’m only two doors down, in Dad’s old place.’

  I promised her I would, then I backed away through the crowd. In a hallway off the living room I found Margaret Whitedale’s bathroom and shut myself inside. Dusky pink tiles, with faded white and yellow bees daubed on them, flying into tight corners and down towards the floor.

  Would Percy Cranmer recognise me? Had I ever known his name?

  I hadn’t thought about that night in years. Hiding in the bathroom, it all came back to me. The last high-school dance at Matthew Flinders Girls. I took some boy from Geelong Grammar – David someone. A whole lot of us went with Grammar boys. We’d met them at an interschool swimming day earlier that month. The Grammar boys had thrashed up and down the pool, while we girls had lain back in our tiny bikinis on the bleachers, watching the grammar-school boys prance around in the glaring sun. For whatever reason, the boys had turned on their own kind that day. They had started attacking the girls from their own school i
nstead of us. The team captain had paraded along the edge of the tiled water with NO FAT CHICKS written on his back in yellow zinc. We had been their giggling audience. And when the dance came up a few weeks later, they became our dates.

  David – I think that was his name – was on the freestyle relay team. He picked me up in his car. We lay together on the damp grass behind the gym, smoking weed while the DJ played Men at Work inside the concrete hall. The ground was wet – it soaked into my dress’s faux velvet as David pressed against me. I told him not to, but he didn’t listen, and I was having trouble controlling my limbs, the grass undulating slowly beneath me, the sound of the music warping and flowing like liquid. The rising bile, my arms and legs useless rubber things I couldn’t use.

  Percy appeared out of nowhere, a cigarette and a strong pair of arms. My date ran away. I remember Percy almost lifting me into the front of his car. I couldn’t tell him how to get home, I couldn’t recognise the roads to take, they plaited and crossed – but Percy sat under a streetlight and calmly went through the Melways. When I vomited out the window he didn’t complain. He patted my back silently, and gave me water.

  Out the front of my mother’s house, I put my hand on his thigh when I thanked him, suddenly in love with this gangly saviour boy-man and his strong arms. He removed my hand disdainfully.

  ‘I’m not interested in girls like you,’ he said.

  I left Geelong a few weeks later. The rest of my life began to happen, and I forgot about that night behind the gym, just another minor mishap. Not the worst mistake I made as a teenager. I left it all behind, went on and married Joe, respectable Joe, haughty Joe, and for a long time I was not that sort of girl.

  Over a decade later, hiding in Margaret Whitedale’s bathroom, aged twenty-nine, I told myself I was a grown-up. I was divorced, a word that gave you a special kind of armour. I was so far from sex of any kind that the idea of it tasted like rancid meat in my mouth.