The Biographer's Lover

by Ruby J Murray

  In the final panel, the women are outside. Celine is in the courtyard in the lower left side of the painting. The bombed-out building next door is under construction. She leans over a half-built wall, screaming up at me, mouth open and distorted. And Imelda is walking away along the cleared street in front of me, heading towards the high horizon line, a baby under her arm. There are distant figures on the streets above: soldiers in uniform patrolling, tiny and precise.

  I turned back to John and Celine, waiting in the doorway. Celine ashed her cigarette into a cup on the sill next to her.

  ‘I don’t know what to say,’ I said. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  Celine blew out smoke, exasperated. ‘It was a long time ago, yes? I was a very stupid young woman. Imelda always thought she knew best. But I could have done it. You don’t know what you’re capable of until you try. I should have kept him with me.’

  ‘Anything here that you think you’d like to put on a medal?’ asked John. ‘You think that government department – or the War Memorial – will want these in the exhibition?’

  EDNA: A LIFE

  In her 1976 work in oil Birth – the Ships of War, the headlands of Port Phillip Bay’s rival peninsulas are visible through an open doorway, the spiked masts of a ship approaching in the rough waters. A single line – a scrawled black swan – wings its way across the white sky.

  In the foreground, a woman lies on a stumpy bed in a bare, roofless room. Her smock is stained with blood where the hem has ridden up to her clenched thighs. She has thrown her arm over her head, to obscure her face, but it is clear that the subject is intended to be Edna’s mother, Margaret, and the birth Edna’s own.

  Edna’s choice of oil pastels for both the preparatory sketches and the final work is significant. Accustomed to working with an irregular budget as a girl and young woman, even after decades of marriage to Max, Edna was meticulous when it came to choosing her mediums.

  The pastels used in Birth – the Ships of War are a combination of pigments and non-drying oils bound with wax. Oil pastels effloresce with age as fatty acids build up on the surface of the work, causing opaque blooms and veils of white to mar the image. Edna knew that works in oil must be constantly attended to, polished back with care, or they simply disappear. This painting is both a tribute to her mother, and a statement about what it means to be caring for the past, burnishing your beginnings.

  The Biographer

  I had travelled thousands of kilometres chasing a story that didn’t belong to me.

  Back at the American’s house after visiting Celine, the clouds of the alcohol she had given me still sat in my stomach. I took a bottle of wine to the olive orchard where the terraces had begun to decay and slide down the cliff. I imagined that Edna would have stood in that orchard, would have walked through rooms of that house.

  I looked out over the red-tiled roofs of the village and thought of home. Of the windowless spaces of the art museums. The wide streets of Geelong, the way they changed over the years, how the city of my mother’s childhood was not the city of mine, the trams torn up from the roads, the buildings demolished, the past erased over and over for glass and concrete, concrete and glass.

  We walked the same streets, my mother, Edna and I. My feet touched Moorabool’s open sidewalks, the slight slope of Malop, the hidden laneways and the planks of the piers. When I was a child my mother took me to the Geelong Gallery on days when Edna might have been there, leading the drawing classes, or sketching alone from the Buvelots and von Guérards hanging on the walls. The lessons those male artists taught were that the world was big, that people were tiny in its landscape, that voices echo only distantly across the vast expanse. But they were wrong. The world is small. It is close, and violent, and secret.

  I drank.

  That night I went to John’s apartment in the village to look at the rest of the paintings – that was all.

  He was waiting for me. We sat and talked about our lives, and opened more wine.

  It was not flirting – we were too serious. We talked about the biography. We talked about the future. We talked about rape. He’s still the only person I have told. And then, because he made it easy, we moved on to his building work, and painting, and other pasts. And when I put my hand on his, he didn’t take it away.

  Lying on the mattress in his spartan room, I could feel his heart beating through his chest, and his skin burning against mine. I moved over him. He kept his hands around my waist, and I caught glimpses of our reflection in the shard of mirror balanced on a milk crate next to the mattress. Our breath filled the room.

  In the last hour of the night, John cooked me dinner, silvery and shirtless, sautéing asparagus, cutting small blocks of cheese, placing it all out on a board in perfect symmetry.

  The next day John came to the big house with me, to help me look for the sketchbooks.

  The attic was vast, more like a hall than any attic I had ever seen, the space stretching the entire length of the original house’s main structure. Motes of dust circled one another in the patches of light that had managed to make their way in through the windows.

  A world of flotsam and junk stretched out from the doorway where we stood. Chests teetered on top of upholstered chairs that burst with stuffing. Cardboard boxes wrapped around with peeling tape. Gap-toothed dressers with the drawers long lost. We found a pair of lurid velvet flares, a vintage orange-juice press, a lawnmower, a cello with no strings, all bobbing out there on the frothy sea of stuff.

  ‘You’re sure they’re up here?’ I asked John.

  He smiled at me, wryly. ‘It’s been more than twenty years. They were in a couple of cardboard boxes. Labelled.’

  We looked for hours. When I passed John, I could not help touching him. I had forgotten what the nearness of another body was like, how it felt to brush against bare skin.

  In the afternoon, we left the attic to wash the dust off in the pool.

  That night, John’s tiny apartment didn’t seem spartan anymore. It was elegant, raw. Like John himself.

  We looked for days. But we did not find the sketchbooks.

  I spent two weeks with John in the village. Then he caught the train with me to Paris. We stayed in a tiny hotel near the Pompidou. The real memories belong to flesh. Events are never over in the body. Remember them, and they are conjured up. The stomach, the hands, the breasts will think that it is still a night in May 1993. Even today, I can feel a flush of warmth, a pulse in my pelvis. Sometimes I sit on trains or in crowded cafes and the smell of that tiny hotel with its empty wardrobe and musty walls will hit me, and I will be transported back to those warm nights with John, thirty years old and belatedly launching myself into adulthood. Learning how to remake myself.

  Then I went back to Australia. I never expected to see him again.

  Over the years, I have wondered what I would have seen in Edna’s sketchbooks from her time in France, if I had been able to find them. Wondered if they would show John in the same way they had shown Max. Wondered if she had loved them both.

  Because of course, there have been moments when I have taken out John’s version of events, held them up to the light, and asked: Really? When I have remembered the photo I picked up in Max Cranmer’s room on that very first morning I went to the Sorrento house, the young man and the crippled man on the beach, the woman watching them, smiling. Or when I have driven past the shack at the bottom of the cliff in Sorrento, the one that John had lived in during the year and a half they were trying for the children. When I have wondered how they really did that. A cup passed between two rooms? Or Edna walking down the road under cover of night, slipping into his bedroom, removing her overalls? Or both of them. Edna and Max together.

  After John died in 2010, I went back to France with Immy to clear out the apartment and the house, to prepare the paintings for shipment to Australia and organise crates and insurance.

  Celine had passed away the year before. I really thought I would find the sketchbooks then; I was so sure t
hat John had kept them.

  But they were gone. He had not left them for me to find.

  EDNA: A LIFE

  In the mid 1980s, after finishing the final panel in the Poppies triptych, Edna began to focus on smaller, standalone pieces, and particularly works that featured water.

  The most famous painting of this period is certainly Raleigh, with its soaring birds-eye view of the vast, shifting Pacific, but the first ‘maritime’ painting that Edna completed after the waving poppy-covered fields of the Western Front was a much subtler work: My Father’s March, a reflection on Frank Whitedale’s presumed suicide. In that 1984 work, Edna returns to the waters of her childhood, to the shallow edges of the Swan Bay estuary where she had played with Imelda, and where her father had drowned.

  The oil shows the figure of a man, his arms descending into feathered wings, walking through the bay’s shallow waters. Encircling the bay are crowds of people, staring in at him with blank expressions. They seem to be waiting for something.

  For the first and only time in her work, Edna places text inside the picture’s frame, something she would have considered radical even ten years earlier. Ringed in ornate lettering around the edge of the canvas she has transcribed the Ern Malley poem ‘Sybilline’:

  It is necessary to understand

  That a poet may not exist, that his writings

  Are the incomplete circle and straight drop

  Of a question mark

  And yet I know I shall be raised up

  On the vertical banners of praise.

  Of all her maritime paintings, My Father’s March is the most haunting.

  The Biographer

  I remember someone once asking my mother how she dealt with telling people bad news all the time, at the hospital. I was nearly a teenager, hovering in the kitchen while women sewed massive swathes of blue and white together to wave at the weekend footy game.

  Mum responded that she didn’t normally tell them – the doctor did. That she just sat with them after the doctor was gone. The other woman pressed. Mum sighed, exasperated, and said, ‘You just don’t get sad yourself. You don’t get angry. It’s not your shit. You just let them have their moment. That’s all.’

  I’ve wondered since then, many times, if that’s what she thought she was doing with me all those years. Just letting me have my shit, my moments. Or if we drew so far apart because the opposite was true. Because we each needed to believe that the other was content, and contained.

  I twisted my mother’s lesson, and I made it my own. As I lay in the bed in my attic room in Geelong, jet-lagged and disoriented, the plan grew inside me.

  There would be two books. Two lives. One that gave Edna her moment. And then later, when Max was dead, when Celine was gone: one that gave the truth its moment.

  But I had to have an ally. And so I called Percy.

  He met me at the very end of the Bellarine Peninsula, by the lighthouse at Point Lonsdale. Far out on the grey Bass Strait, tankers appeared on the horizon. The wind whipped sand off the dunes and into our mouths and hair. Tiny hooded plovers skipped ahead of us on the cold sand, desperately attempting to lead us away from where their nests lay on the high tide line.

  I didn’t apologise for anything. I just told him I had gone to France. That I knew that John was his biological father. That we could work together. That I couldn’t keep their secrets forever, but that I could do it until Max was gone. That there would be two biographies: one for now, and one for later.

  At first, he didn’t believe me.

  Then I told him it wasn’t only Max I was waiting for. I showed him the photographs I had taken of Edna’s paintings. Celine’s rape.

  ‘Do you know who he is?’ Percy asked as we stood on the beach. ‘The soldier, the man who did it?’

  ‘No,’ I lied. ‘I don’t.’

  Later, as we walked back to the car, he said: ‘I just wanted Dad to stay our dad. That’s all. Vicky can’t know. Dad can’t know that I know. Dad didn’t want that. Mum didn’t want that.’

  ‘I know,’ I said.

  ‘After he’s dead, it won’t matter. I don’t give a fuck then. Just wait.’

  ‘I will,’ I said. ‘I told you I will.’

  Percy and I stood in the tiny, sheltered car park under the lighthouse. His hair on end, salted by the wind.

  ‘Do you remember that night, at the dance, when you got me home?’ I asked him. ‘When we were teenagers?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  I wrote, I rewrote, I edited as my cheap heater pushed air around the small room in the roof of my mother’s house, dividing Edna’s life into two separate bags.

  In the first bag, I carefully folded her family life with Max, her endless churn of work, her adventures in the world, her years of retreat into reflection, her keen eyes and her surety.

  In the second bag, I stuffed things in for later. No folding. I would have years to spend alone with its mess, with Celine’s rape, with my mistakes.

  When I was done, the first bag was neat and ordered. The second bag was splitting at the seams, its contents trying to get out. But I put it aside. I focused on what had to be done with the neat version of her life.

  Every chapter that I sent to Victoria came back to me covered in red marks. She was furious with me over the trip to France. But whenever it seemed as if things would come to a head between us, there was Percy, standing in Victoria’s way, insisting that I stay on as the biographer. His support brought Max on board. And, together, we sailed our rickety ship into the uncertain waters.

  News of the exhibition for the Australia Remembers campaign spread. On the afternoon that we signed our first contract of representation with an agent at Sotheby’s, Victoria and I went down to the Eastern sea baths to celebrate. We were still sort of talking to each other, on the good days.

  Victoria was twirling a Sobrani cigarette in her fingers nervously, light-lemon coloured, gold foil tip. She had started smoking a few months earlier. The first time I saw her light a cigarette – waiting for the movers to come and pack up the paintings and move them out of her garage, return them to Edna’s studio on the other side of the bay – I had been surprised. She was dressing differently too, lightly kohling her eyes, wearing red lipstick and flowing scarves.

  On the pier behind the sea baths, Victoria touched the gold foil to her lips. She lit the cigarette, and I felt a wave of nausea rise suddenly in my gut. I got up from the bench, tried to stretch. It shook through me, every muscle clenching and unclenching so that I gagged, but nothing came up.

  ‘Are you okay?’ she asked.

  ‘I just … I’m fine. I think I might be coming down with something.’

  I took the test that night.

  Squatting on the bathroom’s dull tiles, staring at the plastic rod, its tiny pane of pink lines expanding to engulf the sink, Mum’s neat and ordered house, the suburb at the bottom of the hill, the stretch of Corio Bay with Port Phillip beyond, and outwards to encompass the whole state, the whole dry continent.

  Then Mum knocked on the door, to check if I was okay.

  I told them separately, Percy and Victoria, as soon as I was sure that I was keeping the baby.

  Percy laughed. Victoria slammed the door on me.

  There were nights I was sure I was doing the wrong thing, when I lay awake, sweating, fearing. So many lies are a matter of timing. I had enough of them already to hold on to. Every time I saw Anna-Marie, I wanted to tell her the truth. I wanted her blessing, her permission. But I couldn’t risk it. Instead, I let Anna-Marie write my contracts, and send me jobs, and we kept it professional, and we barely knew each other.

  And there were also nights I slept soundly, knowing what I had written was simply another version of the truth. No worse than any other version. Better, in fact. Truer, because it was unfinished, it was unstoppable. It would keep on going. Because I had made it important. No-one cared about Edna Cranmer before I began to write her. And they should have.

  On one of the ba
d nights, shortly after Immy was born in the autumn of 1994, I needed a break from my desk. Immy was still small and pink and fragile; he was dependent on me for everything. I kept him in a bouncer next to my desk, and rocked him with my foot. My room in the attic of Mum’s house smelled of baby, sweet and strange. Mum had built me a real staircase: no more ladder.

  The ‘official’ biography had been released the month before. It wasn’t selling, not yet – but I knew that would change once the Australia Remembers campaign was launched mid year. In the meantime, I was back to ghostwriting.

  Every time I looked down at Immy I saw John, striding across the village square, his floating walk, his clear eyes. He had promised to come out and visit in the summer. (He never did.)

  I picked up my son from his rocker, strapped him to my chest, and we went out into the dark of Geelong.

  Mist rolled in off Corio Bay. Down on the Esplanade, the invisible boats clinked and sighed in the water. The streetlamps shone out. The roads were deserted. I walked and walked, the air wet on my face, until I reached number 27.

  There was a light on in the front room. The same old car was still parked in the driveway. The chairs where I had sat drinking tea two summers before had disappeared from the porch. It was past ten o’clock. I could see the flicker of the television playing through the living-room window next to the front door. The sports news.

  Inside, the man who raped Celine, the man whose son had been my lover, the man who was my child’s grandfather, whose blood was my son’s blood, was sitting in an armchair in front of the television.

  I knocked on the door, and watched as he rose uncertainly from his chair. The light in the hall came on.

  He left the flyscreen closed between us. ‘Hello?’

  ‘I’m sorry to disturb you so late.’