The Ancestor Game

by Alex Miller

  PRAISE FOR THE ANCESTOR GAME

  ‘A major new novel of grand design and rich texture, a vast canvas of time and space, its gaze outward yet its vision intimate and intellectually abundant.’—Helen Daniel, The Age

  ‘Takes the historical novel to new frontiers. It is fabulous in every sense of the word.’—Commonwealth Writers Prize judges

  ‘A superb work of fiction. One of the most engrossing books I’ve read in a long time.’—Robert Dessaix, ABC National Radio

  ‘Rich and evocative . . . A profoundly humane and compassionate novel.’—Sophie Masson, Australian Book Review

  ‘Alex Miller held me in thrall.’—Tom Shapcott, Overland

  One of Australia’s best loved writers and twice winner of our most prestigious award, Alex Miller first won the Miles Franklin Award, the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Barbara Ramsden Award for best book of the year in 1993 with this his third novel The Ancestor Game (his previous novels were Watching the Climbers on the Mountain and The Tivington Nott). He published his critically acclaimed novella The Sitters in 1995, which was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award. Conditions of Faith, published in 2000, won the NSW Premier’s Prize for fiction, was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award, the Colin Roderick Award and The Age Book of the Year Award, and nominated for the Dublin IMPAC International Literature Award. Journey to the Stone Country, published in 2002, was the winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award and was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Prize for fiction.

  Alex was born in London of an Irish mother and a Scottish father. He came alone to Australia at the age of seventeen and for some years worked as an itinerant stockman on cattle stations in Central Queensland and the Gulf Country. Alex eventually travelled south and enrolled at Melbourne University where he read History and English. He now lives in Castlemaine, near Melbourne, with his wife and two children and writes full time.

  This edition published in 2003

  First published by Penguin Books Australia in 1992

  Copyright © Alex Miller 1992

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10% of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

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  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218

  Email: info@allenandunwin.com

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Miller, Alex.

  The ancestor game.

  ISBN 978 1 74114 226 6

  eISBN 978 1 74269 722 2

  For Ruth and Max Blatt

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to express my thanks to Professor Bao Chien-hsing, of the Shanghai Foreign Languages Institute and to the painter, Yehching, for their generous assistance while I was in Shanghai and Hanghzou. I would also like to express my thanks to Nick Jose, then Australia’s Cultural Attache in Beijing, for introducing me to Ouyang Yu, who was at that time teaching in Australian Studies at the East China Normal University in Shanghai. Ouyang has since become a firm friend. My chief debt, however, is to Barrett Reid, Stephanie Miller and Bryony Cosgrove, from whose concern and candor this book has benefited.

  CONTENTS

  1 Death of the Father

  2 Only Children

  3 The Lotus and the Phoenix

  4 The Winter Visitor

  5 No Ordinary Child

  6 Portraits

  7 The Mother

  Homecoming

  Men

  The Campaign

  Signs

  8 An Interlude in the Garden

  9 A Memoir of Displacement

  10 The Entrance to the Other-World

  11 Reflections From the Gazebo

  Thirty-Four Days

  War

  Present Reality

  The Gift of Death

  Victoria

  Into Regions of Uncertainty

  12 The Lovers

  13 The Little Red Doorway

  DEATH OF THE FATHER

  In a wintry field in Dorset less than a year ago, I enquired of my mother, You don’t want me to stay in England with you then? She, clipping her words as if she were trying out a new set of shears on the privet, replied, No thank you dear. I waited a minute or two before venturing the merely dutiful alternative, You could come out to Australia and live with me? Thank you dear, but 1 think not.

  We resumed watching a pair of swans. Their pale forms merged with the river and the flat fields and the sky, then emerged again mysteriously, as if propelled by the unseen hands of giant children at play. Nothing else moved. Everything around us was grey, luminously grey, and very cold. We were closed in by fog. There was only the rushing sound from the motorway a mile off. As I stood beside my mother I realised I’d arrived at a moment of decision. Ill-defined anxieties flickered in my mind. I remembered the Chinese refer to these moments as dangerous opportunities.

  We watched the swans glissade into and out of our view, on the river that was indistinguishable from the sky, and we waited until the bruised sun had dissolved. Our cold vigil in the field at sunset was our homage to the memory of her husband and my father. There was to be no lasting memorial. There had been no service. There was no patch of ground to remain sacred to his memory. He probably would have liked there to have been: a headstone set among others’ headstones and incised with a couplet from Burns: Nae man can tether time or tide; The hour approaches Tarn maun ride.

  But my mother didn’t care for headstones, or for her husband’s taste in poetry, and so, as she was now in charge, there were neither. There’d been no arguments about these arrangements as my father had had no friends to argue for him, and my mother and I were the only surviving members of the family. She took my arm and walked me back to her home across the frosty fields. To have seen us we must have looked like any English mother and son taking their habitual evening constitutional; persisting, despite the bleak weather, the way the English do persist with such things. In fact neither my mother nor I was really English, and we’d not seen each other more than two or three times in twenty years.

  I hadn’t returned to England to bury my father, but to be present for the release of my first novel. It had provided me with an excuse for the journey. I’d hoped my book, which was set in England, might prove the basis for a reconciliation with the country of my birth. I’d hoped something might have healed between us by now. And I’d been on the alert for a sign of this healing when I telephoned from the airport to let my parents know of my arrival. My mother sounded put out when she realised it was me phoning. Oh it’s you Steven! I thought it must have been the doctor ringing back. Your father has just died.

  My gaze roved appreciatively over her lovely English furniture and the porcelain in its cabinets, pieces she’d collected with care over the years, and I saw how deeply she now belonged to this place, how buttressed against dislodgement she had grown in my absence, a successful cultural graft drawing her sustenance with assurance from the rootstock of her adopted country.

  Although it was winter she’d managed a dark arrangement of velvety chrysanthemums. I couldn’t resist the impression that these flowers signified a celebra
tion rather than an occasion for mourning. She looked at them when we came into the room in a way that did not ask me to share them. We sat in armchairs on either side of the gas fire, she in her own and I, I supposed, in my father’s, and we watched television. It was the London Philharmonic with Solti conducting. My mother moaned and swayed as if she were the cello embraced by the thighs of the cellist. Then, when Britten’s symphony ended, she rose from her chair at once, switched off the television and said matter-of-factly, That was lovely. To detain her a while longer I responded to an offer she’d made me earlier, I’ll take the book on Nolan then. If you really don’t want it?

  She paused behind my chair, holding the tray with our cups and the supper things on it, and looked down at the top of my head – I could see her reflected in the screen – and she reminded me, You sent it to him for his sixtieth birthday.

  I’d forgotten. In the instant of speaking I’d thought I was selecting the book randomly from my father’s things. Something of his to remember him by, not something of my own to recall myself by.

  He never looked at it, she said and laughed uncomfortably, impatient. He detested that sort of painting. Anything which reminded him that artists have abandoned the pictorial manners of John Cotman and Francis Danby made him angry. I thought you’d sent it to provoke him. He thought so too, you know.

  There was a pause, then she said, I don’t pretend to understand you Steven.

  She cast off this remark on her way out to the kitchen as if she were casting me off. I heard her clattering the things in the sink. She began singing the cello from Britten’s symphony. I realised that she couldn’t wait to have done with me so that she might at last get on with living her life quite alone. Her verdict, it seemed, was that if I’d wished to belong in England then I ought to have stayed.

  When she came back into the room she did not sit down again but plumped the cushions on her chair and stood and waited for me. She was ready for bed. I wanted to say something to her about how I felt, but I was unable to.

  I hope your book does well, she offered at last, as if she were referring to a world composed of a thin unreality that she could not quite bring herself to believe in.

  Thanks.

  Still she did not move. There was a mute tightening of the congested intensity between us. Then, You never wrote to us Steven! It was years before we heard anything from you. We thought you must have perished in the outback, or whatever it is they have there. Then that book arrived from you, like a taunt. You can’t blame us now for this whatever-it-is that’s troubling you.

  I took the heavy Sidney Nolan monograph to bed with me and sat up with it open across my knees. There was an inscription on the front end paper. I recognised the hand as one I’d tried out for a while, upright and orotund, before lapsing into the backward slant that came more naturally to me – a calligraphy, this, in which my words appear to test the way forward with one tentative, extended toe. Dearest Dad, With all my love and best wishes for a happy birthday, your son Steven. It was dated August 1961, the year of the publication of the book. How very up-to-date I must have thought myself then. I remembered writing the inscription. I remembered the fountain pen I’d used. Now, towards the end of my thirty-ninth year, I was the first person to read my birthday message to my father. Had it been my intention to taunt him, the antiquary and amateur watercolourist, with this paean to brutal modernism from the far side of the world? How else might he have viewed this unexpected gift from his only son after so many years of silence? It must have seemed to him – this man whose ‘eye’ had remained adjusted for more than half a century to the nostalgic fragilities of the faded watercolour sketch – to be a coarse rejection of the traditional craft he believed himself heir to and therefore guardian of. He must have shuddered with outrage as he placed the quarto volume on his bookshelf, unopened.

  Uneasy with an expectation of what I was to reveal, I turned the page and began to read the essay before the plates by Colin MacInness. Australia is an Asiatic island that Europeans inhabited by accident, it began. And a little further down the page, Everything about Australia is bizarre. I read until I lost interest in the writer’s insistence on a uniquely eccentric nature for Australia and for the ‘kingly race’ of Europeans who inhabited the continent. Yet I wanted to be reassured. I wanted to believe in the book. I turned to the plates.

  There were pictures of Ned Kelly in the bush, and pictures of abandoned ploughs in flat, empty country that couldn’t possibly grow anything, and there were carcasses of horses and cows and vast red uninhabited landscapes, and there were ghostly portraits of Light Horsemen with emu feathers in their slouch hats, invoking the Anzacs and Gallipoli. And then, in the midst of these images of soldiery and abandonment and of sterility and failure, there was Leda and the swan, the divine parents of the mythical Clytemnestra and Castor and Pollux, and of Helen of Troy. The landscape was still unmistakably Australian. The swan was white.

  What was one of the Queen’s swans doing here in this sinisterly brutal world, which appeared to rise less upon a vision of human tragedy than upon a bleakly dispassionate view of a civilisation that had failed: a European civilisation that had failed to take root in an environment hostile to its ageless central icons of the plough and the warrior. I examined the rest of the pictures. The images referred to an Australia of which I had no direct experience. The white swan, I decided, must serve as the cipher by which the other images were to be read. Its persisting whiteness I took to be sufficient evidence that the nature of myth must go much deeper and be less conscious and amenable to manipulation than was implied by the project of the book. It wasn’t that the pictures themselves were inauthentic – they were undoubtedly the authentic expressions of one man’s disappoint ment. It was the claims being made for the pictures that were inauthentic; the chauvinistic insistence that something unique and non-European had been established in Australia, when what I clearly had before me was an example of a regional vision located deep within the embrasures of a European tradition.

  I closed the book and dropped it on the floor beside the bed. A thick pain was pushing up against my diaphragm and there was a whooshing in my ears. I lay on my side with my head over the edge of the bed and breathed shallowly, my arm extended, bracing myself against the book. There had been the failure of my father’s heart the previous Saturday. The swift attack that had killed him while I was making my way through the customs at Heathrow. Had I inherited his condition? Was this the revenge his outrage had required? Would my mother be standing in the field watching the swans again in a day or two, on her own?

  After a few minutes the pain eased and the rushing in my ears subsided. As my hearing readjusted to the sounds of the world outside my body I realised I could hear music coming from my mother’s room. It was the ‘Dance a Cachucha’ from The Gondoliers. I pictured her dancing around her bed in her nightdress, gay and diaphanous, her thin, reddish hair flowing and translucent in the lamplight, celebrating her liberation from the onerous uncertainties of her Scottish husband and her Australian son. I listened gloomily to the catchy foot-tapping tune and to her dum-de-de-da-de-da-da-da and I saw how completely she had always kept her magic to herself. Was I returning to Australia in the morning to continue my exile, or was I going home? The book had been no help to me at all. Nolan and his Leda paintings had found their home in England long ago.

  ONLY CHILDREN

  At afternoon recess the man and the woman were there again in the staffroom. As before, they were in conversation by the gas heater. The heater wasn’t lit as the weather was fiercely hot, but the man held his hand out to it behind him every now and then as if he were in need of its warmth. She was taller than he by several centimetres. She was wearing a grey dustcoat and dark pants and she stood still and kept her hands thrust into her pockets. She didn’t look directly at him, even when she spoke to him, but gazed steadily in the direction of an unoccupied table tennis table by the far wall. She moved only when she laughed. She was about thirty. Perhaps
younger. He looked to be somewhere between his middle forties and early fifties. But boyish. Small and light-boned like an adolescent. He had a lopsided way of standing, one small, rounded shoulder higher than the other, one hand clutching his elbow when it was not reaching for the heater, while with the other he held a cigarette close to his lips. He repeatedly took long, hungry drags from the cigarette, never removing it more than a millimetre or two from his mouth, so that the exhaled smoke fanned out against the open palm of his hand and enveloped him. He might have wished to conceal himself within it.

  Unlike her, he was constantly on the move. They were indecisive movements, re-balancing himself from one foot to the other and, at certain moments, appearing as if he were about to set off somewhere only to change his mind at the last second and swivel round instead, reaching for the heater again, his point of reference. He was Asian. I preferred at once to refer to him in my mind as oriental. There was a coy and half-concealed refinement about him which insisted on this. He and the woman formed a composition of their own, a mobile triangle with the black heater its fixed vertex, distinct and unrelated to the activities of the other staff.

  I was clear about why I was attracted to the man. The woman was more closed and difficult to read. But he looked as though he would know how I felt. Like my father, I had no close friends. I’d always managed well enough without such relationships. Once I’d not noticed the absence of intimacies of this kind in my life. Things had begun to change for me, however. Since my earliest childhood recollections I’d believed that if I could only reach deeply enough inside myself, one day I’d come upon extensive and complex landscapes rich with meaning and mystery, waiting for me to explore them. I’d believed the purpose of my adult life would lie in the exploration of these places. My confidence in the existence of this internal homeland, however, had eroded over the years. It had been my confidence in its existence, my belief in my own uniqueness, which had at one time provided me with an immunity from being infected by the mannerisms and beliefs of my father. Without it there seemed nowhere for me to retreat from him. Without it I saw that it was possible I might eventually grow to be indistinguishable from him.