While the Whitedales couldn’t talk enough, on the Cranmer side no-one would talk at all.
The adopted son, John, was a ghost: I rang the French phone number from Victoria’s place dozens of times.
There was no spoken message on his answering machine – like on Percy’s, there was only a piece of music. Bach. I listened to the piano playing on a recording thousands of miles away, then left a request for him to return my call.
He did not call me back.
Neither did Percy. Neither did Max. Neither did Nel Cranmer.
I went through Edna’s address book and wrote letter after letter – short, introductory notes: do you remember, did you know, would you be interested in? Edna had been meticulous: some addresses were crusted with white-out, written and rewritten over the old entries.
I wrote to farms in Queensland and strangers in Alice Springs, a church in Papua New Guinea, the Country Women’s Association in Ballarat, addresses on Parisian boulevards and suburban Melbourne streets. I wrote coded letters to Sir William Dargie and the members of the Australian War Memorial’s Art Committee. I could not ask them directly if Max Cranmer had blocked Edna’s application to be a war artist, as Jennifer had hinted, so I simply asked: did they remember Edna Cranmer? No-one replied. I was secretly relieved not to have to tell Victoria. I wrote to the address of John Whitedale’s biological mother, Celine Delacroix, in some tiny French village and, while I was sure for some reason that she would write back to me, she never did.
Then I moved on to the peripheral interviews.
The art of the interview is one of silence. Be silent and people will talk to fill it. I sat and asked no questions of women who lived in Sorrento and claimed to be Edna’s friends but who did not realise she was from Geelong. I sat quietly with past students of hers in the amateur drawing societies up and down both peninsulas, with those who volunteered with Edna at the annual Rotary Sorrento Arts Show, women whom she’d been to high school with, women she’d picked peas next to in the AWLA, and those who raised kids a few doors down from her homes. I made trips to the archives, the historical societies, galleries and museums.
The less people knew about Edna, the more they wanted to talk – it is easier to describe things from a distance. People who barely knew her at all fell over themselves to ramble into my dictaphone. They begged me to stay for one more cuppa. They pulled out their own sketchbooks and photo albums.
They told me Edna was polite, aloof, warm and had a mean sense of humour; that she was difficult to get to know but kind in the end; a great dancer but a bad driver. She was reserved; no, she was assertive. She liked to talk about her children; wait, she had children?
Mostly, they told me about themselves. But, slowly, my list of facts grew.
In the afternoons, after interviewing, I went to Victoria’s house on the hill. I switched on the kettle in her kitchen, stared at the loop of Edna’s painted Corio Bay on the wall and the flat shine of my Corio through the window, then went out to the shed and got to work.
The shed became the space that Victoria had promised me it would. She was a fiend of productivity and organisation. The walls grew into maps of dates and places. Our catalogue of paintings built out. She bought a library-card filing cabinet so that we could keep the cards with the painting notes on them in order. Rugs went down on the floors, threadbare Persians, glamorous and glowing. Edna’s paintings went up on the walls: Nurses. Portraits. Landscapes. She ripped the fluoro tubes out, installed new track lighting that illuminated the works and made them rich and deep.
Without really talking it through, Victoria and I began setting up a campaign. A campaign that was bigger than a short monograph. A campaign to make Edna Cranmer famous.
Victoria’s years in PR for women’s sporting organisations had made her strategic and canny. I would write a series of articles about Edna for the national press. Then we’d get the full catalogue photographed and start approaching galleries and agents. Each week, each month, had its own set of Post-its.
Percy was not pleased when Victoria informed him she was trying to get the paintings into galleries. He called me at home one morning in early July, just as I was leaving my house in Melbourne.
‘Victoria tells me that you’re going to try and sell the paintings now,’ he said.
‘Not exactly,’ I said. ‘But I’m helping her out, getting the process underway so she can if she wants to. Are you sure you and your dad don’t want to help out? It could be great.’
‘Stay away from Dad. He’s still grieving, okay? It’s only been a year. And now you’re taking Mum’s life away from him. This isn’t what Mum wanted.’
‘That’s not what’s happening,’ I told him. ‘This is only a small monograph, and a few articles.’
But he was gone.
Once every couple of weeks, I went to Edna’s studio above Sorrento to grab an hour or so with the triptychs. Edna was most real to me there, where we were alone together.
I parked away from the studio so that Max wouldn’t spot the Falcon. I hadn’t seen Max since Margaret Whitedale’s funeral, but I had grown to feel as if he was waiting to catch me every time I went to Sorrento, as if I could feel his baleful presence in the house below me.
In Edna’s studio, I was transported. I sat in front of the huge triptychs of the cemeteries and the nurses and tried to imagine Edna painting in that very room, year after year, with no expectation of recognition, with no-one to admire her work.
The more time I spent lying on her camp bed, staring at the shifting light, the more I became convinced that it was my job to give Edna the audience she never had in life. And I needed to convince myself.
By the end of August, the time we’d allocated for the monograph would be over. We still had a lot of work to do. I knew I wouldn’t be able to pay September’s rent on the Carlton house. My credit card was already carrying so much – petrol, fillings in three teeth, a parking fine that’d made me sit in the gutter and sob. Each debt comes back to me now like a wound: the things that obsessed me as I was writing her life.
Grey subtraction soup, needling my stomach.
When I was a kid, my father read me The Phantom Tollbooth, the story of a boy who finds a small car with a red ribbon and his name on it inside his room one day. The car is magic. Driving through the cardboard tollbooth, the boy begins an adventure across strange and distant lands. In the land of numbers, the boy arrives at the palace for a feast, and is served grey subtraction soup. The more he eats, the hungrier he becomes. His bowl is full of sharp, diminishing needles.
At twenty-nine I was never quite full, never quite finished, and the future was terrifying. The advance Victoria had given me on the project had been vanishingly small. I was too embarrassed to tell her that it did not return me to the black, but got me back to zero, from where I could only move backwards once more. My only asset was the Falcon. My escape car.
On a Friday night at the end of the month, I got home to Carlton, flicked on the light switch in the front hall, and nothing happened. I stood on the threshold in the darkness.
No lights. They’d turned my electricity off.
The next morning, I woke up freezing. I felt as if the tiny house that had been my refuge for three years had suddenly turned against me. The weekend stretched out, long hours of silence and chill.
I took my sleeping bag, and fled along the coast to Sorrento.
I slept in Edna’s studio that night. I found her stash of blankets in a cupboard, and lay down on her small cot bed, staring through the high windows at the stars over the Rip and the lights of the pilot boats rushing out to sea. In my head, I counted the things I could sell that would tide me over until the next month: the wedding ring Joe had given me. My father’s binoculars. The Falcon – unthinkable.
When I got up the next day in the grey winter light, I turned on the studio’s oil heaters and made coffee on her electric burner. There were still many of Edna’s things left in the studio – tubes of drying paints, tins of
pencils, scraps of bills and magazines, account books stuffed inside the desk in which Edna had kept track of the household expenses.
I spent the Sunday in the weak warmth of the winter sun, organising the things Edna had left behind. I went through the narrow drawers of the desk where she kept her account books, blank stationery, hair ties. I felt as if she was there with me, watching me as I moved through her space. I pulled a stack of account books out at random, stared at the numbers, the years of their marching.
The money flowed in and out, for groceries and miscellany; cryptic small sums – fifty cents here, thirty-two cents there. Edna grew up poor like me. Her accounting was as ritualistic as her sketchbooks. Regimented, lined items she kept her entire life, just like me, tracking every cent in, every cent out, even in the flush years she spent as a Cranmer, when she no longer needed to worry and battle. As easily as money came, she knew it could leave, like a phantom tide, pulling out into the bay. Poverty is women’s business.
The stack of accounts I examined were from the early 1960s, before the kids were born. I flicked from page to page. No school fees yet, no uniforms or sports days or cello lessons.
Max’s perpetual visits to the doctor, the physio. A couple of painting sales here and there – never for much. She spent more on framing and paying galleries for small shows than she made on sales. Entry fees for competitions. Endless donations to the RSL. An extremely expensive new walking stick. A new car. Shopping, dinners out, taxes, petrol, fence repairs, water bills.
And then, in January 1962, a huge lump sum: £5000. JW.
The first time the sum popped up I didn’t think anything of it. I kept reading through the weeks, the months. New linen, birthday presents, ferries, paints, canvases, taxes, a donation to the Geelong RSL.
In January 1963: £5000, JW.
Every January from 1962 onwards, a cheque was issued for JW, shifting into dollars in 1967, growing incrementally, right up until Edna’s death, when the ledgers stopped.
I called Victoria.
‘No idea,’ she said. ‘A charity? They were like that.’
‘JW. Could it be John Whitedale? Were your parents supporting him? Can you ask your dad?’
‘Sure. And I mean, yes, they were probably supporting him.’
‘It seems like a lot of cash. Can you ask your dad about it?’
‘It was probably some sort of allowance,’ said Victoria. ‘John would have just finished high school. He lived in their shack on the beach for a while, I think, down the road. What are you doing at the studio over the weekend? You should be having a break.’
‘Just trying to get us to the finish line.’
There was an awkward pause.
‘We’re at the end of the period of time we talked about spending on the project,’ I continued. ‘Officially, I mean.’
‘I’ve started writing bits and pieces up myself,’ said Victoria. ‘You could look at them. We could co-write it – would that speed things up?’
‘Actually,’ I said, ‘I’ve been meaning to talk to you about something.’
I hadn’t.
I hadn’t thought through what I was about to say. But the weekend pressed up behind me, put the words into my mouth.
‘I think we should do the full biography,’ I told Victoria. ‘I have the first section of the draft. It’s just all the other work we’re doing that’s slowing me down: the articles, the cataloguing, the reach-outs. And the more we do, the more I’m sure that I can sell it to a proper publishing house. That we can make this really good.’
‘A real biography?’
‘Yes.’
‘That we sell, to a publisher? Into bookstores? Under your name?’
‘Yes.’
Victoria was silent on the other end of the phone line. I felt a rush of fear – would she take the project away from me? Would she insist on writing it under her own name after all?
Then she said, ‘Yes. Yes, of course. Okay. And it will be more credible that way too. Better than if I wrote about her, because she was my mother, but you’re impartial. You’re a real writer. No, this is amazing. Great.’
We muddled through a new agreement. I would keep the money they had paid me so far. Victoria would pay me a secretarial wage that would go towards my time managing and promoting Edna’s work.
By the time we hung up, any hesitation on Victoria’s part had disappeared. She was jubilant. She was excited.
It was what she wanted.
And I was no longer a ghostwriter. I was Edna’s biographer … and Victoria’s secretary.
‘The past is a foreign country,’ wrote L.P. Hartley.
My problem was not that people did things differently there. My problem was the journey back. The map was made of scraps. And the distances between each scrap were vast.
The birth certificate expanded to meet the edges of the first photograph; I stepped across. The house’s deed attached itself to a note in a sketchbook written two years after the house was bought, a newspaper headline reached out and latched on to the fact that this was the year she left for France. Each scrap grew a tendril. A jungle put down roots in the empty plain where I had taken the first step.
It is easy, with just a little, to think that you have a lot, to close over the dark, unknown spaces. Over the last month, I had begun to feel as if knowing Edna was possible. As if I could move the outline of her life from the interviews to the page.
After weeks of walking in the past, I woke up that Monday morning in Edna’s studio and, standing in front of the soaring Bomana triptych, I thought: Fuck this.
I’m broke. If I’m seeing it through, it needs everything I have.
I packed up my Carlton house, dropped off any furniture that would fit in the car at the Brotherhood. I owned so little. I dragged my table and my chair and my fridge outside, and left them there.
Closing the door on the empty house I had loved so much, I knew I was doing the right thing. I was porcelain. Smooth and untouchable.
On Lygon Street, I parked the Falcon stuffed full of my life in a fifteen-minute loading zone and drank a single black espresso at Tiamo’s cafe while the city swirled up and down the footpath.
I called Mum from a phone box.
Then I drove home, to Geelong.
EDNA: A LIFE
Posed with her cousins in front of the row of Whitedale cottages on Dent Street in late 1940, Edna stands at the edge of the group in her school uniform. Eleven years old, lined up next to her boisterous and blurred boy cousins, she could easily have passed for fourteen. She does not slouch into her maturing body, but stands ramrod tall, new breasts pressing against her uniform’s smock. She looks as if she is about to follow her sister’s example and march away to war.
The ranks of Whitedale cousins are diminished that year. By March, 100,000 Australians had already applied for service, one in every six men between the ages of twenty and twenty-nine. All of Edna’s male cousins over twenty – and a considerable number of those under the age of enlistment too – were leaving.
Edna’s fierce expression in the photograph gives no hint of the turmoil going on in the bluestone cottages behind her. Over the scorching summer of 1940, as bomb shelters were dug into the side streets of Geelong and the local council fought about blackout curtains, her father stopped going to work.
Frank seemed to believe that he could stop the war single-handed. All he had to do was convince the men around him not to fight, one man at a time. The surviving Whitedale cousins remember Frank arguing with each of them as they decided to enlist, sometimes following them down the road to the enlistment office, yelling, cajoling, while Margaret hung off her husband’s arm and begged him to come back home.
The Biographer
It was raining again as I made my way back to Mum’s along the Princes Highway.
There were still three weeks until that year’s AFL Grand Final, and it wasn’t even a sure thing that the Cats would make it. But on the outskirts of Geelong billboards of football player
s loomed over me as I passed the Ford factory and the rope works. The shopfronts all along Malop Street were daubed in blue and white paint.
We’re with the boys in blue and white. Bring us a flag. Mighty, mighty Cats.
The street I grew up on was lined with Fords and squat utes. Functional company cars. People guarded their parking spots and shared their lemons, but mostly we did not know one another at all. Our neighbours were plasterers and middle management, alcoholics and the elderly. Every house on the street had signs in their windows: CATS. CATS. CATS.
Our family home was rickety, a brick-veneer shack. The front yard was full of Mum’s handmade signs on sticks, drenched in blue and silver: Go Geelong! Carn the Catters!
She opened the door almost before I knocked. I saw the fear in her eyes as she registered the black bin liners pressed up against the windows of my car.
‘It’s okay, Mum,’ I said. ‘I told you. Nothing’s wrong. I’m only here because of the commute. The driving is making me crazy.’
‘Of course,’ said my mother as she stepped aside. ‘This is your home.’
To get to my room in the house where I grew up, you had to climb into the roof.
Mum called my room ‘the brains of the house’. She’d built it into the attic space when I was a teenager, to try to give me some privacy. She tied a piece of rope to a trapdoor in the ceiling of the front hallway. If you pulled on it, a steep staircase unfolded. Once in the attic, I could draw the staircase up behind me, closing myself into the eaves. Mum even cut a window into the roof for me. There was no view of the ocean, only the rise of the hill, the flat grey bulk of St Mary of the Angels looming above us, and piercing blue skies. As a teenager I would sit on the narrow ledge and smoke joints, blowing the smoke out over the suburban ramble of Geelong’s lower middle classes, waiting for my real life to begin.
On the night that I returned, I clambered up the ladder and stuffed bag after bag into the narrow spaces where the drywall sloped down to meet the floor. The rain on the corrugated iron roof was like thunder, each tiny tapping drop lost in the great boom.
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