The Making of Christina

by Meredith Jaffe

  Bianca rushed out what she wanted, leaving Christina flabbergasted. ‘Why on earth do you want to board when we live half an hour away from school?’

  ‘By bus it’s almost an hour,’ Bianca retorted. ‘Anyway, Mrs Hardcastle has designed this cool new program for the Seniors. She asked who was interested. Phoebe and I put up our hands. Mrs Hardcastle is sending a letter home to parents this week.’

  ‘What kind of program?’ Agitated, Christina took a gulp of her wine. Bianca’s proposal was nonsensical. She had everything she could ever need or want here.

  ‘Like all our meals are made for us and there is an exercise programme. You can book to see a teacher for before- or after-school tutoring. Plus I’ll be able to use the darkroom after hours for my major work. There’ll be special workshops and mock exams and we’ll learn meditation so we can manage stress. It’ll be so cool.’

  ‘All your meals are made for you here,’ Christina snapped. ‘And if you’re so keen on exercise, can I remind you that you have two horses to work?’

  Bianca folded her arms across her chest. ‘I can be a weekly boarder. Then you’d only have to drop me off on Sunday afternoons and pick me up Fridays and I’d still have more time to focus on my studies. I need eighty-five to do Vet Science at Sydney Uni.’

  Despite her defiant stance, it was clear Bianca was desperate for Christina’s agreement. Christina stared at Bianca’s pleading face, hurt at the implication that home was not where Bianca wanted to be. Bianca had always said she wanted to work with animals when she finished school but she hadn’t realised Bianca’s dream was so specific. Not once had Bianca consulted her about these elaborate plans. ‘What’s wrong with the local uni?’ she said. ‘That way you could still live here.’

  ‘You can’t do Vet Science at KU, Mum,’ Bianca exploded.

  ‘All right, Bee, there’s no need to shout.’ Christina took another mouthful of her wine. ‘We’ll have to talk to Jackson. At the end of the day, he’s the one who’ll have to pay for it. But I have to warn you, I can’t see him being happy with your decision.’

  ‘Why?’ Bianca shouted. ‘Why do we have to talk to him? Why can’t you pay for it?’

  ‘Oh!’ The word escaped as a nervous chuckle. Christina rubbed her palms on her hips and fought the urge to turn away from Bianca’s accusing eye. ‘I’m afraid that’s not possible.’

  Bianca paled. ‘You’ve spent it all?’

  It was hard to explain to a child how easily money disappeared – a little here, a little there – but Bianca was furious, so she tried. ‘There are always expenses, sweetheart. There were your horses . . .’

  ‘But he bought those!’

  Christina licked the line of sweat forming along her lip. ‘Well yes, but you know there were other things as well – the tack and whatnot.’ Anything not tax deductible, she thought. ‘Your clothes. Birthday presents. Things for the house. It adds up over time.’

  As a rule, Christina tried not to think about where all the money had gone. She’d had a hundred thousand dollars left after settlement. It was frightening how quickly it had vanished. Christina hated asking Jackson for money for every silly little purchase she wanted to make. He had a way of talking her out of things, told her she had champagne taste and a beer budget. But there was more to it than that. It was important to her to maintain some independence and not be running to Jackson with her hand out every five minutes.

  But over time it had become easier and easier to let Jackson take financial control. She reminded herself often that she made a tangible economic contribution to their relationship supervising the extensive restoration of the house and gardens. And that was fine because they were a team and as Jackson often said, ‘A rugby squad needs hookers and fullbacks to win a match.’

  Watching Bianca’s glow of confidence flicker and fade, Christina wished she didn’t have to crush her daughter’s dream. ‘I’m sorry, Bianca, but I can’t afford to pay boarding fees. You’ll have to stay a day student.’

  ‘Fine.’ Bianca snatched the elastic capturing her long curls in a ponytail. Released, they bounced over her shoulders. She tossed her head, lifting the mane of hair over her collar. ‘In that case, I’ll ask Jackson.’

  Christina’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Oh, I don’t think that’s a good idea, sweetheart. I think it’s best if I handle him.’

  Bianca snorted. ‘Why? Since when does he ever listen to you?’

  Christina opened her mouth to object but Bianca was already striding off in the direction of Jackson’s study. Christina trailed behind, making anxious comments about avoiding a confrontation with her stepfather. The problem with Jackson was that he had a short fuse and when he went off he was very intimidating. Funny how he never used to be like that when they lived in Sydney. True, Jackson rarely lost his temper at Bianca, but if Bianca went about this the wrong way, her chances of boarding at Valley View would be nil.

  They reached the door to Jackson’s office and as Bianca raised an arm to knock, Christina held her back, whispering, ‘Please, Bianca. Let me see if I can convince him how much this means to you.’

  This close, she could hear Bianca’s breath singing through her nostrils. The tension in her muscles reminded her of the quivering nervousness of a frightened horse whose every instinct was to flee. A horse like that could explode into action at any second, harm all around and itself in the process. The urge to soothe her ran through Christina’s fingertips.

  ‘Sweetheart,’ she said at the same time as Bianca’s free arm shot out and rapped on Jackson’s door. Not waiting for an invitation to enter, Bianca strode around his desk and sat in the visitor’s chair. She pinned her knees together, captured a stray lock behind one ear and swallowed.

  Aghast, Christina hung in the doorway.

  Jackson swivelled in his chair. Christina could see he was about to say something nasty about interrupting his work, but he stopped himself, taking in Bianca’s prim schoolgirl pose and Christina’s reluctant grip of the doorframe. She could tell that he knew something was up; he looked set upon by their unexpected arrival.

  Bianca tilted her chin and said, ‘Can I talk to you about something?’

  Jackson glanced up at her, then back to Bianca. She could hear his leg knocking against the timber panelling under the desk. Bianca hadn’t said anything yet. It was a bad sign.

  Christina said, ‘Bianca, I –’

  Jackson cut across her. ‘What do you want, Bee?’

  Taking a deep breath, Bianca outlined the same argument she had given Christina. Jackson pressed his twitching leg against the desk. It was proof he was deeply unhappy with Bianca’s proposition. To his credit, he waited until Bianca had finished before he exploded from behind his desk.

  ‘Why should I fork out another three grand a term so you can board when we live in a thirty-room house, Bianca? You want a study enclave? Take the south wing. This is the most ridiculous idea I’ve ever heard.’

  Christina remembered one of Jackson’s favourite sayings: the best form of defence is attack.

  Bianca had lowered her eyes during his onslaught but she stood now and squared her shoulders. She elaborated on her argument but Jackson refused to be placated. Christina could see the rage bubble and froth inside him as he struggled to contain it. All of a sudden, a brilliant solution popped into her head. ‘I think I have an answer.’

  Jackson and Bianca swung sharply, barely a shoulder width apart. They seemed surprised to see her still standing there. Christina stepped forward. ‘Maybe a way of offsetting the cost is to sell Sugar.’

  Bianca’s mouth dropped open in horror but Christina was determined to stand up for her daughter and make Jackson see reason. ‘Selling Sugar,’ she forged on, ‘will go some way to covering the additional expenses. And it will mean one less horse for Bianca to take care of. It’s a fair compromise.’

  Bianca burst into tears, her self-contro
l abandoned. Christina’s smile faltered but at least Jackson had stopped yelling. In a flash he had gone from incandescent rage to cold control.

  It seemed to Christina that now she’d made a tangible offer as part of this negotiation, Jackson was back on familiar turf. He even smiled. She assumed it was because he agreed that she’d presented a rather clever option and returned his smile. Although she noticed Bianca had collapsed back into her chair and was twisting a lock of hair across her lips.

  ‘So,’ Jackson considered the bowed head of the inconsolable Bianca, the fury of his temper blown away, ‘you never mentioned you were willing to sacrifice Sugar, Bianca.’

  Bianca looked up at her mother through her curtain of hair and mouthed, ‘Why?’

  ‘Yes, CC, Bianca’s right.’ Jackson’s smile broadened. ‘Why would you say that? If I didn’t know you better, I’d think you were keen for Bianca to leave.’

  Christina pressed her fingertips to her lips. Tears threatened. Jackson made it sound as if she was pushing Bianca away. That wasn’t her intention at all. She was trying to help Bianca, wasn’t she? And look how the situation had turned out. Bianca miserable and Jackson gloating. She wished she could undo her words.

  Trapped between them, whatever Christina said next, she could not make them both happy.

  She said, ‘I was just trying to offer an alternative solution.’ Christina drew breath. ‘Of course it would be an option of last resort.’ She hoped Bianca could see how she was being sincere.

  Except Bianca glared at her. She was breathing so hard that even from the doorway Christina could see her chest rising and falling beneath her uniform. She rushed to reassure her.

  ‘I don’t want you to leave home, sweetheart. I know how much you love it here and I don’t want to get rid of the horses either. Of course I don’t. I, we,’ she gestured to include Jackson, ‘want you here with us, don’t we, honey?’

  Jackson beamed. ‘Indeed we do, Bee. It’s just a shock seeing you growing up and wanting to have a say in what happens in your life.’

  Christina smiled too. ‘Exactly! We appreciate you’re not a child any more and are old enough to make your own decisions. That’s a normal part of growing up.’

  Jackson seemed to find Christina’s attempt at diplomacy highly amusing. Bianca wouldn’t even look at her. Christina hoped she was not making things worse.

  She walked over to Jackson and placed a hand on his shoulder. ‘Would it really be the end of the world if we let her weekly board? She’d still be home weekends and holidays. We wouldn’t necessarily need to sell Sugar.’

  Jackson shook her off and stepped away. ‘You do this every time, CC. Trying to please everybody doesn’t work. You know she plays us off against each other and I’m sick to death of it. She’s sitting there acting all broken-hearted because she knows she’ll get your sympathy.’

  Bianca buried her chin in her chest. There was nothing to see but a mane of chestnut curls. Christina wanted to go to her but Jackson moved between them, forcing her attention back to him. ‘You’re encouraging this bullshit behaviour we’re witnessing, CC. Let me remind you that this is my house, my money, my rules,’ he stabbed the desk with his finger on each point. ‘Now I suggest you leave Bianca with me to reach some sort of compromise without you muddying the waters. Get on with your stupid heritage listing or whatever it was you were doing.’

  Her cheek burned as if she’d been slapped. Jackson had attacked her on so many fronts she didn’t know which accusation to respond to first. Christina glanced across at Bianca who wore a strident flush from her chest to her chin. The way she stared at Jackson made Christina shiver. This situation was becoming ridiculous.

  ‘I don’t think that’s appropriate, Jackson,’ Christina began.

  ‘For fuck’s sake, Christina, don’t you speak English?’ he roared.

  She stepped back in fright, her heart hammering in her chest. Her mouth opened but the words buzzed in a chaotic frenzy inside her head, refusing to come out. Christina turned to her daughter. ‘Bianca?’

  Bianca turned and concentrated on the wall of photos. ‘Bianca?’ Christina repeated. Bianca twisted further in her chair and waited. Now Christina didn’t know what to do. Why wouldn’t Bianca answer her? What was going on here? ‘Sweetheart, do you want me to stay?’ but all her words earned her was a small shake of the head. Christina backed away and hesitated in the doorway. If only Bianca would look at her, give her some sense of what she needed, but Bianca refused to face her. Half in, half out of the room, Christina pleaded with Jackson, ‘You won’t say anything stupid, will you?’

  Jackson began closing the door after her. ‘Just go will you, CC? Bianca is big enough to handle her own negotiations, aren’t you, Bee?’

  Bianca nodded, turning to offer Christina a thin smile, but her eyes were sad, as if she’d lost something precious.

  Alone in the hallway, Christina waited for her heart to calm. She was missing something but for the life of her could not think what. Perhaps if she stayed and listened at the door. It wouldn’t be eavesdropping; after all, whatever agreement they reached affected them all. Creeping forward, she put her ear to the door. She heard the key turn in the lock and felt embarrassed that she as a grown woman was snooping on her own family. She decided to go to the hexagonal room and distract herself with her research on the Rivers estate.

  Changing Jackson’s mind couldn’t have been easy for Bianca. Jackson really knew how to dig his heels in, but then again Bianca could be equally as stubborn when she had her heart set on something. Bianca had come to find Christina after they were done, to tell her she had won the fight to finish school as a weekly boarder. Christina hadn’t known what to say. Getting her own way should have made Bianca happy, but standing there with her eyes scribbled red and her face grim, Bianca had looked far from it.

  The strange thing was, Jackson didn’t seem happy either. In the weeks that followed, Christina tiptoed around them both. Bianca refused to answer a direct question and Jackson bit her head off.

  ‘Have you changed your mind, sweetheart?’ Christina ventured one day. She had tracked Bianca down to the stables, waited until Bianca had finished her workout in the arena. Christina held Licorice whilst Bianca unsaddled him and hosed him off.

  Bianca flashed her a look of horror. ‘No!’

  ‘It’s just that I thought . . .’

  ‘Leave it, Mum. It’s fine.’

  The trouble was, it didn’t feel fine. And that troubled feeling stayed after Bianca left. Christina noticed the spaces where she ought to be. Although her concerns were somewhat alleviated by seeing how well boarding suited Bianca. The dark circles around her eyes faded. She put on a bit of weight, which may have been due in part to the lack of exercise. Poor Sugar had been sold and Licorice spent his weekdays getting fat and lazy in the paddock.

  Christina found comfort in her continued investigations into Genevieve’s fate at Kitchener library. She spent days reading pages and pages of the 1929 issues of the local newspaper. Notices of the bankruptcies, births, deaths and cattle sales competed with advertisements for the town emporium. In the drowsy central heating of the library, the names and events of pre-war Kitchener blurred into a single mass of life so that she almost missed the two lines buried in the personal notices. She was halfway through 1931 when she saw it. It read:

  SUTTON, Genevieve 6 September 1931. Death by misadventure.

  May the good Lord see her gentle soul rest in peace.

  She was only seventeen years old. Christina slumped in her chair, her mind racing with possibilities. What did misadventure mean? Had she had an accident or, worse, had she taken her own life?

  Back in the hexagonal room, Christina pinned a copy of Genevieve’s death notice in its rightful place on the timeline that ran around the walls. Christina re-read Bartholomew Rivers’ death certificate.
The immediate cause of death had been a blow to the head occasioned by a motor vehicle collision. Perhaps the real cause of the painter’s descent into drunkenness wasn’t Mary’s departure, it was the death of Genevieve. It seemed too great a coincidence that the car accident that killed him occurred only months after his muse’s death.

  Was Genevieve’s death also the reason Rivers had locked all his paintings and brushes, his etching equipment and his easel, himself really, into that closed-in verandah and sealed the room? Was it in grief or guilt that he had ceased to be an artist?

  Christina propped the two completed paintings of Genevieve next to each other. The inevitable conclusion was that Bartholomew Rivers had shown no compunction in taking from Genevieve those qualities that were youth’s gifts – purity, innocence and physical beauty. He had recorded that bounty in every stroke of his brush and every line of his pen. Preserving her for posterity had left him free to ruin the flesh-and-blood Genevieve. To betray rather than protect her.

  Christina had succeeded in unearthing the story of Bartholomews Run, a story that unquestionably captured the cultural imagination. In all these years, this was never how she had imagined success would feel. It was a hollow moment to recognise that uncovering the true history of this artist was not a moment of celebration. The truth was, Bartholomew Rivers disgusted her.

  Christina completed the application for heritage listing with fanatical care. She had started this exercise envisaging the restoration of Rivers’ property and good name as an act of philanthropy. But now her motivations had changed. The annals of history were full of men like Bartholomew Rivers, admonished for their personal failings whilst celebrated for their genius. The truth glossed over for the sake of art, commerce or political power. Now Christina wanted to tell Rivers’ story for different reasons. Genevieve deserved to be remembered. As the muse of an iconic Australian painter, of course, but Christina hoped in sharing Genevieve’s story she had found a way to give meaning to the girl’s tragic life and unfortunate death.