The Life and Loves of Lena Gaunt

by Tracy Farr

  He credits me with a fuller social calendar than I have. ‘Next Tuesday will be fine. Thank you. I’ll feel – happier – to have it at home with me. Let’s say middle of the morning – would that suit?’

  ‘Sure, sure, no problem.’

  He keeps talking, piling words at me. We dance around the perimeter of the review without acknowledging it, speak glowingly of the other bands and acts, and of little things. He promises to send me a cassette tape he is compiling from the festival. In the midst of the wash and flow of his words, I catch the sound of a name.

  ‘Patterson, did you say?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s right. Mo Patterson,’ he says. ‘She makes movies. You’ve probably heard of her. She’s dead keen on music, and she’s even more keen on you. She was filming at the festival – it was in the release you signed, you might have noticed as you read the fine print! Anyway, I’ve given her your number. I hope that’s okay. She’s good. A Kiwi. Lives here these days.’

  There is a gap, a silence. I realise he is seeking reassurance.

  ‘That’s fine, Terence. I’ve spoken to her already in fact.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘No, it’s fine. Really. She’s due here, actually, any moment. So I won’t keep you.’

  I hear him exhale smoke with a sigh, as if through tight, pursed lips.

  ‘Well, I guess that’s it. It’s been a pleasure working with you.’

  ‘And you, Terence. Thank you for the opportunity to play. It felt…good.’

  Good Lord, I can think of nothing more erudite to say to the man, and wish he would go away. At which, mercifully, there is a knock on my front door. I excuse myself, hang up, and breathe deeply. The breathing clears the slightly unpleasant taste of the phone conversation from my mouth. I smooth my hands down the front of my trousers, and go to answer the door.

  MAKING FRAMES

  The woman pushes sunglasses back onto the top of her head, her pupils contracting in the light that filters on to my front verandah. She holds out her hand towards me.

  ‘Dame Lena. I’m Maureen Patterson. Thanks for agreeing to see me.’

  Her hand is cool, dry; her fingers long, neat and fine. She is tall, nearly my height. She smiles as we shake hands. She has strange eyes, pale grey-green. She wears no make-up that I can see, but for dark red lipstick defining her smile. I find myself aware of my own older, meagre, pale mouth.

  ‘Ms Patterson, good to meet you.’

  ‘Oh please, please call me Mo.’

  ‘Mo, then. Come in.’

  She steps over the threshold. She carries a large bag looped over her left shoulder. It looks heavy. I reach past her to close the front door and smell perfume, citrus and clean. She seems half my age, perhaps forty. So young.

  ‘Please, come through to the kitchen.’

  She’s wearing black, so that she almost disappears into the shadows of the hallway, but is framed in silhouette by the doorway into the kitchen. She’s a tall pear on long legs; narrow shoulders and waist, plump arse. She wears trousers wide and a little too short, a black shirt loose over them. There are heavy boots on her feet, long laces tied around the tops.

  In the kitchen I motion to the chairs, the table. My beach towel is draped over the back of one of the chairs, already almost dry; I fold it, excusing myself, and ferry it through to the bathroom.

  ‘You’ve been swimming already,’ she says, as she takes a seat at the table. ‘So early?’

  ‘It’s ten o’clock, Ms Patterson. Most people wouldn’t call that early. However, I do try to go most days, the earlier the better. And you? Are you not a swimmer?’

  ‘Mmm, I never really got into it, to tell you the truth. Back at home – I’m from New Zealand, originally – it’s just like here, most people like to think they’re born on the beach, live all their summers barefoot and sunburnt but, well, I just never really liked it. I’m a terrible swimmer, too, so that doesn’t help. And I’m not very good at mornings.’ She smiles, looks apologetic.

  ‘Ah well.’

  I busy myself with coffee, the ritual of it, while she ferrets in her bag, brings out a spiral-bound notebook and a pen, and places them on the table. The notebook remains closed, though; she is prepared, but not overeager. She removes her sunglasses from their position on top of her head, places them on the table above the notebook – centred, straight, aligned. Her hair, released, is smooth, long, and as red as her lipstick, but for a long streak of theatrically white-blonde hair hanging from her right brow, across her forehead like a draped curtain, and down the left side of her face, framing it.

  Neither of us has said very much. We have busied ourselves with business, as they say in the theatre, with props; with notebooks and sunglasses and coffeepots and chairs. Coffee on the stove, I sit at the table opposite her.

  ‘Well,’ I say. ‘Why exactly are you here?’

  ‘I make films, Dame Lena—’

  ‘Please, just Lena.’

  ‘Lena.’ She nods her head. ‘I make films. That is, I’ve made several films – documentaries, some feature films as well. I sent you some biographical material, I hope that was useful for you.’

  ‘Yes. It was certainly interesting.’ The coffee bubbles and gurgles on the stove. I excuse myself to bustle with coffee and cups and milk and sugar, which I bring to the table. She realigns her pen and sunglasses in parallel with the spine of her notebook. She sighs lightly and starts again as I sit down.

  ‘Thanks.’ She touches the coffee cup. ‘I was so inspired by your performance at Transformer. Terry Meelinck would have told you I was filming there, and in fact I was planning on making a documentary that focussed on the festival. But, after watching you play, I find that I’m more interested in making a documentary about your life, your ideas, your work, your music.’

  I feel the bitterness of the coffee on the back of my tongue.

  ‘Your life’s been so, well, interesting.’

  ‘Has it?’ I look up at her. Another piss-take?

  ‘You’ve had a long, successful and, let’s face it, fascinating life.’ She’s animated now, her hands in arcs across the table. ‘You were like, I dunno, Madonna before she was even born. You’ve been through waves of fame and relative anonymity, but it seems to me – from the research I’ve done since Transformer – that you’ve always been represented as a caricature. I hope you don’t find this offensive…’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘It seems to me that what most people associate with you is weird music, a bizarre instrument that they don’t understand, and a vague whiff of scandal. It’s a kind of early version of the sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll stereotype, and – again, I hope you don’t find this offensive – I think, if anything, it shows you as a victim. I want to focus on you as a survivor – which you clearly are – not a victim. But I also want to show you as an innovator, and as a champion of your art, and your lifestyle.’

  She sits back, takes a breath, after what sounds like a prepared speech, a pitch.

  ‘I’m not sure…’ I start to speak but, in truth, I’m not sure what it is that I’m not sure about. She seems sincere, this young woman, with her soft, soothing vowels. She talks on, low and constant, about the film she has in her mind, about angles, about themes and stories. About women, and feminism. About music. She has done her research – she speaks of things I have done, things I had almost forgotten I had done, the things that are in the history books, that made the gossip pages of long-ago times. She talks about my music. She talks about my Beatrix. She talks about her vision; her hands move constantly together and apart as she speaks, making frames, containing and releasing images. My hands rest on the table in front of me, one crossed over the other.

  She stays for an hour. At eleven o’clock, she looks at her watch, gathers her notebook, pen and sunglasses from the table in front of her, thanks me for my time, and says she mustn’t take up any more of it, not today anyway.

  As she pushes her notebook into her bag, she brings out a video cassette
tape. She holds it in front of her in both hands, looks at it almost shyly, then holds it out to me.

  ‘This is the film I made, a long time ago now. I don’t know if you saw it, I don’t suppose you did. It’s called Beatrix.’ She looks at me as if waiting for some acknowledgement. ‘Well, anyway, I’ve brought this for you. I thought you might be interested. I know she was important to you.’ She holds it out to me and I take it, hold it tentatively, feel its lightness.

  ‘I don’t have anything to play it on.’ I don’t meet her eyes.

  ‘Well, I could bring you a VCR, you know, a video tape player. Or you’d be very welcome to watch it at my house, any time, just say so.’

  ‘Oh, no, I wouldn’t want to—’

  ‘No, no, I understand. Well, maybe somewhere like the local library?’

  I hold onto the video, squint at the label on it. ‘I would like to keep it, if I may. Borrow it. There is a machine at the university, the School of Music. Perhaps I can play it there. I still go in, on occasion.’

  ‘Of course,’ she says. ‘And please keep it, if you like. It’s just a copy. I don’t need it back.’

  I place the tape on the kitchen table. I see her smile as she watches me.

  I walk behind her towards the front door, open it to let her out. She turns to me – she outside on the verandah, lit by dappled sunlight, facing me inside, shaded – and holds out her hand as if to shake it. I take her hand, and she places her left hand over mine, so that my right hand is cupped, contained within her hands. We do not shake hands; we still them.

  ‘Don’t decide now’, she says, ‘about making the film. Think on it, and we’ll talk next week.’

  She releases my hand, hoists her bag onto her shoulder, and starts up the garden path. She turns and waves to me, then disappears into the dark up the side of the house.

  BEATRIX

  I turn the video tape over. Block letters on the paper label spell out BEATRIX. I trace it with my finger. Underneath, in smaller letters, is written © 1975 M. Patterson.

  I did not tell M. Patterson the truth. I’m not sure why. I do have a video cassette recorder. It is in a corner of my bedroom, underneath a small television, the two of them perched on a small, old wooden table, designed perhaps as a plant stand, or an occasional table. I rarely use either of the machines, but they are there, in that private room, just for me.

  She doesn’t need to know everything.

  I play the film on the machine in my bedroom. It is not a documentary, it’s – how best to describe it? – a portrait, or an improvisation; Beatrix jazz. It’s very beautiful. I see myself in it. Literally: there are images, parts of paintings, some of them paintings of me. It is full of colour and movement. Like Beatrix. There’s a bit I love, particularly, where the camera pans across a black-and-white photograph of her. The photograph has colours and lines washing across it; it’s alive with patterns drawn or painted or scratched onto the film – that must be how it’s done; shapes jump and judder across her face, across the screen. I press the button on the remote control unit to pause the video as it pans across the photograph. Her face – partly obscured by the colours, and by cigarette smoke as it often was in life – is just as I remember her, from our time in Sydney, that glorious time. Perhaps I took this photograph, with Beatrix’s camera? I peer in closer at it, trying to recall, until I am so close to the screen that I can’t see it at all.

  I move back, sit on my bed, staring at the stilled image on the screen. The remote control is in my hand; I hold it at arms-length, and press the button with the symbol most likely to mean eject. The tape slides out of the machine, spine towards me. I see the words I read on the side of the tape repeated on the spine label: BEATRIX © 1975 M. Patterson.

  M. Patterson: sly bitch with a muckraking agenda, or genuinely interested? Either way, with this film she may have bewitched me. If I’m not careful I’ll find myself telling her the story of my life.

  SINGAPORE, PERTH

  1910–1927

  The symphony of her dressing table

  THE SOUND THAT BEES MAKE

  If I were to write the story of my life it would begin, in a nutshell, like this: I am Helena Margaret Gaunt; I call myself Lena. I was born, the only child of Australian parents, in Singapore, where my father chased the riches of the booming rubber and export businesses after escaping the humdrum of work as a clerk in the bank in Tambellup, two hundred-odd miles – two days by train – south and east of Perth.

  I was a solitary child, lacking companions my own age, but I was not lonely. I was happy in my own company, dancing to my own drum. My earliest memories are of making music, patterning music. They linger, these memories, watery, hazy, in the back of my mind.

  I remember opening the door into Mother’s bedroom, the dark back bedroom in the little brick bungalow in Singapore. I pulled the rattan stool from the corner, dragged it across the floor until it was next to Mother’s dressing table. I clambered up onto the stool and reached across, past the dressing table set, the crystal tray, the dish with Mother’s rings, the perfume bottle with its bulbous ting-ting lid. I reached across, and took the tortoiseshell comb.

  Someone must have taught me this: I took a piece of thin tissue paper, wrapped it around Mother’s comb. I held the papered comb to my lips and hummed. The paper vibrated; the air formed bubbles that moved as waves between the tissue of paper and the teeth of the comb.

  I hummed quietly at first. The comb made the humming strange, changed it. I hummed into the comb; then I pulled it away and repeated the refrain – the sound was softer, quieter.

  I could not have been more than four years old. But I remember the feeling of my lips, buzzing against the paper and the comb.

  One time in my life – only one time, long ago and far away – I had a pet. Father bought him from the pasar in Singapore, a sweet little monkey, chattery, who when he found he liked you would settle and nestle into you, snuggling in under your arm. I called him Little Clive.

  When Father brought him home and handed him to me that first day, I squealed and let go, and he was up the tree in a flash. There he stayed, peering down at us while sucking on his thumb just as a human baby would. He sat up there for three hours until Father ordered Cook’s boy to shin up the tree and get him down.

  Father said that Little Clive must be tied up after that. So Cook’s boy, Malik, found a long piece of hemp rope, and plaited it to form a neat collar at one end, to slip firmly over Little Clive’s neck. Little Clive couldn’t undo it, even though his nimble fingers worried at the rope much of the day. Malik tied the other end to the verandah post. The rope was long enough that Little Clive could run, and even climb the trees closest to the house, but he could only climb so far – not far enough to get himself tangled, nor far enough to climb onto the roof.

  He would sit on the long rail at the front of the verandah and chatter at anyone who passed, like one of the old Chinamen at the pasar. Malik brought bruised fruit from the kitchen. Little Clive would sit and carefully peel the fruit, turning it over and over in his hands then stuffing it piece by piece into his mouth until his cheeks bulged and his eyes almost goggled from his head. At night he would wrap himself in an old sarong – against the mosquitoes, we always thought, but perhaps from watching me swaddle my doll in her blanket and hold her to me like a baby.

  Our garden was full of insects, and among them were bees, swarming and buzzing on their quest for pollen, staying only for an afternoon, a day, then passing on, leaving silence where their humming had been. They could engulf a hibiscus in minutes; the dizzy big plates of scarlet and orange circled our house, each flower with its nodding sticky pistil a syrupy flag of welcome to the bees.

  And poor Little Clive, perched there in the hibiscus with his hands and face and belly all sticky with the juice of mango and pineapple and rambutan and papaya, poor Little Clive was there one day when the bees passed through. And he was on his hemp rope and couldn’t get away when the bees swarmed him. He tried to fight them o
ff, poor thing, he squawked and screamed, he fought with his sharp little fingernails, but the humming buzzing mass of them settled on him like a cloud.

  Father wouldn’t let me outside, though I screamed for poor Little Clive, but the truth is, I didn’t want to go, not with those buzzing, stinging bees there. We stood inside, safe behind wooden shutters, and watched.

  ‘They will leave,’ Father said. ‘They always do.’

  And Father was right, as Father always was. The bees passed on and left Little Clive as suddenly as they had swarmed him. One moment he was writhing, black and thick with bees; the next, just his thin bee-less self remained, drooping, barely holding on to his perch in the hibiscus, fruit dropped to the ground below him.

  Father opened the front door and we went towards Little Clive. When Father stretched his arms towards him Little Clive screamed. I could see hard, round lumps already forming on the soft skin of his belly, the size and shape of the jade beads Mother wore around her neck. The little monkey scrambled to try to climb higher, away from Father, but the rope tightened around his neck and would let him go no further.

  Father got a mango – a good one, not a bruise on it – and tried to tempt him, but Little Clive just shuddered and shivered at the end of his rope, just barely keeping his balance in the V of the hibiscus branches. Even when night fell, he would not come to us. His little eyes stayed bright and watchful, not letting us close.

  Before I went to bed, I watched Malik put an enamel dish of water and a banana on the ledge of the verandah, close to Little Clive – like putting a glass of sherry and a slice of Christmas cake out on Christmas Eve. I went to my bed but I could not sleep. I could hear Father and Mother in the dining room, clattering cutlery, tinkling glasses. I crept quietly down the hallway and managed to open the front door without making a sound. On the verandah, my eyes adjusting to the moonlight, I could make out the shape of Little Clive in the hibiscus, where we had left him. His outline was smooth, draped, and as my pupils widened I could see that he had wrapped himself in his old batik sarong. He held the sarong over his head, like the little old Madonna at the Catholic church, and he picked the lumps on his belly with careful fingernails, picking the beestings out of the centres of the hard lumps. He looked at me and squinted his eyes, as if to let me know it hurt, so much.