The Life and Loves of Lena Gaunt

by Tracy Farr

  I walked often through the cemetery, the wind whistling in my ears, walked between gravestones and plinths and obelisks and angels, and on to the beach. It was too wild for swimming, cold and wave-beaten. I walked, instead, listened to the water pounding on the beach, the ocean pounding at the margin of the land. I hauled great leathery seaweed, heavy as seal hides, up and into the garden, to form sculptures that would soften in the moist air, then stiffen on days when the air was dry.

  And so we settled into quiet domesticity in Dunedin, a mild suburban couple after our heady, busy bohemian time in Sydney. On the rare occasions when anyone enquired as to our domestic situation, we felt it best. to leave questions vaguely answered or, better still, unanswered, until it somehow came to be understood that we were relatives, the widow Mrs Carmichael, her niece Miss Gaunt, an orphan. The narrow grey city seemed able to tolerate this much.

  My musical talents were not called upon to grace the stages of the theatres of Dunedin – my former fame seemed barely to have spread to this corner of the world. There seemed nowhere in this city’s social life to match the modern music culture that Sydney had offered, although for Trix, the small art scene seemed to provide some stimulus, at least. Each of us felt a gap where our social circle had existed. We missed being able to be ourselves, together among friends. Trix had not been teaching for a month before she invited a small, carefully selected group of students and fellow teachers home to Tomahawk Road for the first of what became regular nights of eating, drinking, smoking and talking. It didn’t take long before I managed to introduce a heavy dose of music to the evenings. Someone had a brainwave, and the group gained a name: the Brush and Blow Group – Brush for Trix and the others, and Blow for Tom, one of the students, who played the trumpet while I played piano. The Brush and Blow-ers – or Beebees, as we soon called ourselves – had as its core me, Trix, and another teacher from the school, Armin de Groot; and the students Armin and Trix gathered closest around them, Tom, Alastair, Mardi, Celia. Others came and went, but that core remained. We all thought of ourselves as bohemian, as modern, as artists apart from the workaday world around us, and free from its morals and strictures, its curtain-twitching and mouth-pursing.

  We’d sit in the kitchen, the narrow room stretching across the back of the house. The wood-fired stove at one end cooked a stew, warmed the room, heated water. A piano stood against one wall. At night we’d pull heavy curtains across the windows. In winter I pinned old wool blankets up on top of the curtains for extra warmth. In the daytime, the blankets and curtains pulled aside, sunlight would steam the windows, cross the room, heat it to a pale yellow warmth. But at night, when the Beebees met there, we were wrapped in wool and warm and dark, fugged with beer and smoke, noisy enough to wake the dead across the road and invite them in for a beer.

  I was wife, and I was lover. Trix and I huddled together in the draughty house, heavy blankets shielding the windows of our bedroom, eiderdowns piled upon us so that we could hardly move under their weight. But we moved – we moved! – our bodies slick and curving, slipping upon and into one another, until we erupted from the eiderdowns, pushed them to the floor, melting hot, gasping, musky with our cunning.

  We survived in the curtain-twitching south only by being careful, so careful. As aunt and niece, we were almost respectable; as respectable, at least, as a woman artist and her household could ever be. And every night, as we held each other, curved into one another, we cared not what the world thought of us. We were entire, within ourselves. Perfect.

  *

  Trix’s painting changed, in the low light of Dunedin. In Sydney, she had focussed outwards, on landscapes, on views through a window; or on still life studies: branches of lemons plucked from a tree, or oranges tumbled from a string bag arranged on a table, rendered strange by her kaleidoscope eye and its breaking of light and shape. Only rarely had she painted portraits – of Delphine Britten, of me. In Dunedin, although she said she loved the way the light fell on the land, she felt that she couldn’t paint it, and she shifted her art from landscape to portrait. But the light and the landscape would sneak into the portraits, their backgrounds the St Clair waterfront, the harbour, the hills of the Otago Peninsula. She painted me, had me pose in the kitchen by the piano; I wore a blue shirt, but in the painting Trix made it green, a rich, deep, lustrous green, like satin. Instead of the kitchen and the blankets and curtains, she painted gravestones behind me, the cemetery across the road; a horizon line of gravestones in front of the seascape in the far distance.

  Trix painted me a handful of times in those years at Tomahawk Road, but her self-portraits from that time are almost beyond number. In the end, they were piled against the walls in the room she used as her studio; as she finished one, she would stack it and move on, turn almost directly to the next, and the next. I can see her, the mirror she used propped by her side, her eyes staring into it, flickering back to the canvas – that constant motion, eyes moving from mirror to canvas, but her body retaining its position. Sometimes she painted the clothes she wore into the portraits; at other times, she invented costumes for herself, changed her hair, painted herself earrings she did not own, a flower behind her ear or in her hair. The landscapes that formed the background to these paintings became more fantastic as time passed. Her colour palette changed with each painting, expanded beyond what she saw in front of her in the house in Tomahawk Road, the cemetery and beach at our doorstep, or the painting studios at the school in Stuart Street; even the colourscapes we saw when Armin or Mardi drove us out to the plains to the south or to the hills of Otago couldn’t provide her with all the colours she put into her paintings in those years. Trix came to live and paint from behind her eyes, from inside her mind.

  ARPEGGIO

  I don’t know if Trix felt the lump before I noticed it. She must have: by that time it was the size and hardness of a pebble from the beach, rounded by the passage of time, by wearing against fluid; or of a small egg. It sat, her pebble, her egg, under the soft skin in her right armpit. Once I knew it was there, when I saw her lift her arm – or if she rested it behind her head, on the bed, against cold sheets – I could see it, hard under the surface as she held her arm aloft.

  There was nothing that could be done, the doctor told her when I made her go to see him. She’d cycled in to town, her satchel over her shoulder. I waited in the kitchen for her, drinking tea. I heard her bicycle clank against the gate at the front of the house, heard her footfall on the steps, on the verandah; heard the door open, heard her walk down the hall; all these sounds came to me as if through liquid, under water, slowed down and other-worldly. Trix sat down at the kitchen table opposite me, her satchel draped over her shoulder. She sat very still. I went to the stove to fill the teapot, to make fresh tea. When I poured it for her, she put her hand over mine on the table.

  She started a painting that day, when she returned from town, tired, grey-faced, started it in a frenzy that day but came to finish it, that week, with a strange sort of calm. She faced out from the canvas at a quarter turn, so that you could see the outline of her right breast, clearly, against a background of pebbles, grey stone, damp, on a beachscape littered with grotesque sculpted seaweed, bull kelp blades like seal corpses, kelp stipes white like skeletons. She stared out of the painting with clear, blue eyes, her mouth a thin strip of lips pale as death, but smiling, turned up, just like that, at the corner. In her left hand, cupped gently between her breasts, there was an egg, mottled grey on ivory. Reflected, barely there on the top surface of the egg, you could see her eyes. She wore a pale blue smock, a simple shift, its texture quite clearly that of linen, the nubs of it silky, soapy on the surface of the canvas. The sky in the painting was a calm blue-grey and in it were two birds – one to the left, one to the right – with their wing tips almost touching in the middle of the painting, in the sky above Trix’s head, almost forming a circle surrounding her. In the open palm of her right hand, extending into the foreground of the painting, defying perspective, she held
a sea star.

  I could not bear to look at the painting then, when she seemed well. Later, as she became sicker, and sicker, I could look within it and, seeing her calm, feel some comfort.

  Trix was able to finish the teaching year, though her health slowly ebbed, leaving her thin, tired, and grey. In June we moved to a furnished flat in Tennyson Street, to be nearer to the school, to save Trix the bicycle ride each morning and evening. From Tennyson Street, she could walk up the hill to Stuart Street in the mornings, when her energy was at its peak for the day. In the afternoons, I would walk up and wait for her by the steps of the school; we’d walk home down the hill together, quiet, Trix leaning into me, her thin body against my side. She’d drink tea, eat a small meal I put in front of her, then she’d fall into bed and sleep a hot, restless, fitful sleep. We’d kept separate rooms as studios in the big house in Tomahawk Road, but – out on the coast, away from people – had shared a bedroom. In Tennyson Street, in town, we kept separate bedrooms once again, as we had years before in the house in Mosman. I cleaned the house, cooked for us, washed her sweat from bed sheets.

  On occasion – to escape the sense of enclosure, of tightness I felt in town – I’d ride Trix’s black bicycle down to the beach at St Clair and along the road skirting the coast, prop the bicycle by the gate of the house in Tomahawk Road, and walk down to the tide line, picking over the pebbles and seaweed strewn there. I’d walk back up from the beach, back between the salt grey stones of the cemetery and up through the gate, letting myself into the house, walking through its quiet rooms, filling them with the sounds of my footsteps, my breathing. I’d draw open the curtains in the kitchen; lift the lid of the piano and play an arpeggio, play scales, play anything that came to me. Often, I slammed my hands into the keyboard, up and down the length of it making noise, uncontrolled outbursts of noise, no musicality, no organisation to it, just pure, horrible, terrible noise; mimicking the thunder of the waves on the beach but without rhythm, without tone, just pure noise. I raised my voice with the sound of the piano – hammers against wires – raised my voice to hammer against the air, in a wail, a scream, a cry; I screamed until my throat was raw. I’d sit then at the piano, dry-faced, empty.

  Trix’s studio in Tomahawk Road was filled with her paintings, her sketches and notebooks, an easel. Paintings were propped up, most of them facing the walls, covered with dustsheets; dotted around the room, Trix stared at me from other paintings left face-out. The smell of her was everywhere: turpentine, smoke. In my room was my theremin. There was no electricity to power it. I stood by it, stood in the position in which I would play it, held my hands as if to play, but it was dead, silent. My hands dropped to my side; I closed the doors to the rooms as I left, closed the front door behind me, locked it with the key I wore on a plait of red wool around my neck, and rode back to town.

  FROCKS AND FURS

  The graduate show was her last hurrah. We chose our outfits with care, dressed more extravagantly than we had in years, as if to acknowledge the significance of the night.

  I drew a bath for Trix, warm, full, and knelt beside her while she washed. I sponged water down her back with a flannel; she shivered, although the water was warm. As she stepped from the bath I wrapped a towel around her shoulders, wrapped her in my arms, her back against my front. Her clothes were laid out on the bed, and I helped her into them, straightened her jacket, buttoned the silver buttons, buckled her shoes; although she could still do all of these things for herself, it was somehow a service I could perform for her, a gift, that night. I dressed quickly, gathered the train of my dress in my hands and, from the mantelpiece, took the ampoules of morphine the doctor had left that day. Trix sat at the kitchen table. I injected her as the doctor had shown me, watched relief suffuse her face.

  When Armin arrived to pick us up, Trix and I sat, quiet, her hand on mine, at the kitchen table.

  *

  All our friends gathered around us that night, the whole group. But Trix tired early; I could see the labour behind her eyes as the night progressed, as the morphine wore off. Armin drove us back to the flat in Tennyson Street. We slept together – just slept, just held one another – that night for the last time, my arms around her thin body feeling her restlessness, her fitful sleep, and the deep, strong heat of the sickness all through her.

  ART SHOW GALA A LA MODE

  Otago Daily Times, 13th November, 1936.

  Teachers and students from the School of Art joined together for a sparkling ceremony in the Town Hall on Saturday last to mark the opening night of the graduate art show. Others more learned in the artistic world could comment knowledgeably on the art works on show, but your reporter was delighted by the array of jaunty outfits on display by our brightest Bohemians. The acclaimed artist and teacher at the school, formerly of Sydney, Mrs Beatrix Carmichael, wore a charcoal coloured skirt and matching jacket trimmed with silver buttons, a small black velvet toque and silver fox furs. Mrs Carmichael’s niece, the musician Miss Lena Gaunt of South Dunedin, also formerly of Sydney, was elegant in a beautiful frock of pale blue ring-velvet, with fish tail train lined with silver. She carried a muff of rucked velvet to match her dress. Miss Mardi Devenish, a student at the school, wore a frock of flowered georgette in colours of white, geranium red and touches of black and pale blue, a necklet of red camellias, a hat of velvet, with shoes en suite. Miss Celia Beilby, also a student, wore a gown of midnight-blue, trimmed with white satin and large white buttons, and a small white hat with blue feather.

  SELF-PORTRAIT, WAVING GOODBYE

  That summer, after the end of term, we moved back to the house in Tomahawk Road. Trix stopped painting me, stopped painting anything or anyone but herself. She painted many self-portraits during her illness, charting the course her body took, the effect of the disease on her body, her face. But she didn’t paint what she saw in the mirror. Her image in the mirror was a reference, like gridlines on a page, like the converging lines of perspective drawn as guides to the eye. Trix didn’t paint to the image; she painted away from it. She painted herself from the inside out.

  She painted again with a frenzy and fervour, in the first weeks back at Tomahawk Road, needing little morphine and less food, surviving on tea and cigarettes and the smell of paint. I walked to the shops for food, even walked again on the beach, but never far away, and never for too long.

  Armin visited most days; Mardi, Tom, the others came often. They came in the daytime, brought sandwiches and fruit, cigarettes and gossip, and we’d sit in the kitchen, talk, eat, drink tea. Trix would curl on the daybed pulled close to the stove, pillows behind her, red wool rug over her feet. Ash from her cigarettes would drop to the floor, gritting the rug in front of her. When she’d had morphine, her head would nod as we talked, her cigarette held aloft, held lightly between her fingers, dropping lower, burning lower; I’d watch it, carefully take it from her to stop it from burning the mattress, the rug, her clothes. Armin and the others didn’t stay long, when they visited. They’d kiss Trix’s cheek as they left, bend over her as she reclined on the daybed. I’d walk them to the door and it was me they embraced, tight, hard, as if I was dying; as if it was me they might not see again the next month, or week, or the next day.

  She stopped painting, just stopped. She moved herself to the daybed, to the red rug, the pillows, the ashtray, although the cigarette in her hand remained unlit, there for comfort.

  I went to the studio where she’d been sleeping, to strip the sheets from the bed, to wash them, wash away the sweet sick smell of her. There was a canvas on her easel. She’d told me it was finished, but there were great patches of white on it, the prepped canvas underneath showing through, lacking paint. Where there was paint, the colours were muted, grey. The usual fracturing of light that always fragmented her works was missing from this. Her face shone with pallor from the centre of the canvas, her brow wet with sweat. Her right hand was raised, the painting of it not complete, half of it in outline still.

  BENEDICTION
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br />   People are quiet in the house of the dying. Armin and the others would let themselves in, walk softly, reverently to the kitchen, kiss me, take my place by the daybed, rest their hand on Trix’s. We’d all speak in lowered voices, like the genteel murmur of a cocktail party. We didn’t play the piano; no one sang. We ate sandwiches; no one cooked any more.

  It was quick, in the end, although it didn’t feel quick from within; time seemed to drip by, moment by moment, like honey, or treacle; like paint. The doctor came, and nurses. Morphine stayed the pain, for a while; then it could no longer. I would sit with her, sit by the stove, by the daybed. I would sit, hold her hand in mine.

  When I slept, I slept in her studio, surrounded by her paintings. I made the bed with clean fresh sheets, thin wrinkled waves forming a front as I smoothed the white cotton across the surface of the bed with the palm of my hand. From the canvas on the easel Trix’s hand was raised in greeting, or farewell.

  *

  On the last day, sun shone through the window in the kitchen. I prepared the morphine, as the doctor had, as the nurses had. I held my breath; I exhaled. As her breath eased, I slid beside her on the daybed, lay the length of her, our bodies still.