The Life and Loves of Lena Gaunt

by Tracy Farr

  I appeared on television, once, after Newport. You still sometimes see the footage, fuzzy with age (as I was not yet, not then, not quite). I do look striking. I have seen myself, my flickering self: in a silk sheath, high-necked, pale, the black pattern appliquéd to curve down the front of the dress, black on oyster white, curving up over my shoulder. My shoulders are straight, strong. My lipstick is dark. My hair is short, nun-like, mannish. I do not smile. I play the theremin, my arms and hands orchestrating music from the machine, a short piece to camera, then applause. My mouth smiles, briefly. I bow. The camera pans back across the set. I remember; I remember the light on me fading, so that I was again in darkness, the crowd’s focus pulled from me.

  Over the years though, finally, I did start to run low: on money, and on energy. Keeping up with the younger ones became a drain, and there came a time when I just – lost interest. Then, I stayed in my apartment every day, every night, with myself for company. I emerged only to play my music. I had no time for the energetic excesses of the young. I rejected their preference for the needle, which I’d always found too clinical, masculine. I retained my fondness for the primordial hit of the smoke. I lost my tolerance for them, the clever boys and girls who I had, in the past, been content to let milk my finances, funding their bands and their films, their drugs, their paintings and their parties.

  I played; I kept to myself. Myself and the smoke, always smoke, my money up in smoke (just a little, just enough). Things slipped away from me – pawned, lost or stolen, I was never sure which – my mother’s wedding ring, her jade beads. The silver cigarette case Uncle Valentine had given me. It was a strange time, hazy.

  It was after the 1971 Newport Festival – I didn’t know it was the final one, not then – that I received a letter in a buff-yellow lawyer’s envelope. My uncle had died. I was his sole heir. He had left me his house, some money, some shares. Another death; but he was an old man, by then, his death timely, his life well-lived. And yet, with that letter in my hand, something was released. I wept and wept, wept for my beloved uncle, in a way I had not been able to, not for Trix, nor Grace, nor my mother or father. Such uncomplicated love he’d shown me. I wept and moaned until I was empty, wept all the weeping I should have done years before.

  Uncle Valentine had come to the rescue in death as he had so often in life. Instead of returning to the salt blue, pale blue of St Ives, I would go to the place I had long ago called home, that southern place, that hot place, my uncle’s house near the tower by the sea.

  LEAVING ON A JET PLANE

  I was tired of crossing the Atlantic Ocean. I had only some clothes and books in the cottage in St Ives – Jeremy could send someone to pack them for me, send them on. I would leave from New York, leave before winter set in. This time – the only time in my life – I made the journey by aeroplane.

  From New York, we flew across the vast wide land to Los Angeles; from there to Sydney. The bridge arced across the water, flattened by the angle I viewed it from, smaller than I remembered, beautiful still. The new opera house, brilliant white stacked on the foreshore, reflected light in all directions. The light was high and the sky went on forever. I had been away from Australia for twenty-five years, from Sydney for nearly a lifetime.

  I took a room in a hotel in the Cross, not far from where the Buzz Room had been, where now a sign advertised Sex aids & XXX. I walked where I had walked forty years before. I swam at the baths, named now for Boy Charlton. I walked to Mrs Macquaries Chair and sat watching the bridge, the boats on the water, the light, listening to the harbour and the city all around me. I caught the ferry to Manly, and saw the bridge again from the water, streaming now with cars as it had not forty years before.

  I walked through the Domain to the Art Gallery. In the new wing, I stopped before three paintings on the wall. One showed the bridge under construction, its two halves reaching towards each other over aquamarine sea, green hills mounded soft against rooftops angled for the light to glance off. Next to it was the portrait of Delphine Britten; I remembered watching her standing in front of it, remembered Trix standing with her, touching the painting, tracing Delphine’s face. Delphine perched on the edge of her armchair, pushing herself up into the foreground of the painting, as if about to burst through the surface of the canvas and reach out and kiss my cheek, take me by the hand, and show off the latest painting or musician she’d acquired.

  The third painting was of a bowl of oranges. I had put those oranges in that bowl. There was an orange in front of the bowl, on the table, next to a glass. There was a knife next to the orange. I had cut the orange with the knife. I had placed the cloth under the bowl. I had stood behind Trix as she had painted the oranges. I had brought her tea, laid my hand on her shoulder as she painted. I couldn’t remember what I’d done then. It had been so long ago. I couldn’t remember. The painting no longer smelled like a painting, just had its look, its shape. I read the label on the wall next to the painting:

  Untitled [Still life, knife and oranges], 1930 Beatrix Carmichael (1890 –1937)

  I reached my hand forward and stroked the frame surrounding it with the tip of my finger. I touched my finger onto the surface of the paint, traced the raised ridge of orange, edged with blue, that formed the arc of skin of the wedge of cut fruit. I closed my eyes, moved my fingertips lightly across the surface of the painting. Touching my fingertips to my lips, memory sensing smoke and tea, turpentine and sweet oranges, I turned away from the paintings.

  After two days in Sydney I flew west across the continent, my forehead pressed against the fractured-looking perspex of the aeroplane’s window, looking down at red earth split by lines of road, curlicues of dry riverbed, and southern coastline brilliant blue against white beach against red dirt, the contrast almost hurting my eyes. The aeroplane’s engines cycled up and down in pitch, juddered through me to the bone. In the late afternoon, with the sun glowing low over the ocean to the west, we floated down over the Hills where the Misses Murray had schooled me, over red tiled roofs and swimming pools like evil eyes. The aeroplane coasted in slowly on the hot wind. I walked into a furnace of shimmering air, down the metal stairs onto tarmac so hot it took my breath away.

  A fat man in a white taxi chain-smoked as he drove me towards the beach. He spoke in a flat nasal voice of money and mining, of the easy wealth that was being dug from the ground, of things I didn’t care about. We drove around past the lights of the city – tall now, but not tall like New York – and the curve of the river directed us towards the ocean.

  Uncle Valentine’s house had stood empty for months, since before his death. I unlocked the front door and stepped through into the darkness of the hallway. It was clean, still furnished, but airless. Running my hand down the wall, I flicked the switch, but it remained dark, the electricity not connected. The house was quiet; there was no refrigerator hum, not a breath other than my own. I left my case in the hallway, climbed the stairs, and opened the door to my old bedroom at the front of the house. I opened the window, let the smell of the ocean in. I found sheets in a cupboard, made the bare bed with them, and slept as soon as my head touched the crisp cotton.

  I woke early the next morning, when the sun only barely coloured the sky. From the bottom of my case I retrieved my swimsuit, put it on, covered it with a long loose shirt, slipped my feet into sandals. From my uncle’s house – my house – I walked down the road, slowly, one hand clutched low across my belly. Magpies called from the branches of pine trees. I crossed the road and stood above the beach, looking down at it from the path, catching the smell of it, the sound of it washing over me. I turned to my left, to the building, the pavilion, much of its structure cement-covered now, rendered workaday. There was a large wooden sign on the side of the building, paint bright and garish, advertising ice-creams. I walked under the arched limestone, touched my hand to its grain; dragged my fingertip down it, felt its cool abrasion. I looked up, just briefly, to the windows of the north tower; they were whitewashed again, blanked out. I
walked on down the steps, kicked off my sandals and sank my feet into sand, closed my eyes at the wet-dry squeak. I dropped my towel and sandals, slipped off my shirt and dropped it too on the small pile by my feet. I walked to the water’s edge. I sank into the sea.

  MY BACK PAGES

  Uncle’s lawyer had left me a cluster of keys on a brass key ring. There were small keys that opened cabinets, tiny keys that unlocked drawers; keys to back doors and side doors and front doors, to the gramophone and the liquor cabinet and my uncle’s bedside table. I moved through the house, clanking and tinkling, trying every key in every keyhole, discovering, uncovering.

  From the house’s back door, I walked through filtered light down the neat path under the jacaranda tree, the carpet of blossoms underfoot, purple turning brown. The long, looped-head brass key turned easily in the lock of the front door of the cottage at the back of the garden. The door opened onto a dark hallway with a dry, stale smell. I opened the door to the room that led off the hallway to the right. Square shapes, uneven shapes, were piled against two walls of the room, draped with cloth, theatrical. I lifted the cloth; dust flittered in the dim light through the whitewashed window. There were tea-chests underneath, HELENA scrawled across them in black, or MISS GAUNT lettered in a different hand. On one was marked SCRAPBOOKS, on another, MUSIC.

  I turned to the window, scratched a tiny patch of whitewash from its surface. I looked out to the dark shading protection of the long, low verandah. Across the room, behind the boxes and tea-chests, was a fireplace with a heavy jarrah mantelpiece. I imagined Uncle Valentine’s brass opium pot shining upon the shelf, perhaps a vase next to it, with strong-scented roses, or orange blossom. Trix’s sad self-portrait; the silver-blue painting she had made of me; I could imagine them there, too. This would be a fine bedroom in which to grow old.

  I sold Uncle Valentine’s house and all its contents for a good sum of money, employing a lawyer to rejig the land title so that I could retain the cottage at the back for myself. I engaged a builder to install French doors to the back of the cottage, turning the dark lean-to into a bright, light kitchen, with a small laundry and bathroom leading off it. I planted a lemon tree by the new back doors. Then I moved in. I unpacked the few things I needed. Mother’s silk rug, my theremin, and Trix’s two paintings, long in storage in the front room of the cottage, were uncovered now, mine again. Jeremy sent my books, my things from St Ives, packed into a trunk. My leather chair and ottoman were shipped from New York. I had left my New York theremin there, in the apartment, when I left. I imagined the next tenant moving in and finding it, there in the middle of the room, imagined arms outstretched in wonder, to touch, to play. The idea made me smile. I could afford such expensive indulgences again.

  While no work came my way, interest remained in what I’d done in my years overseas; a serious man from the radio telephoned to interview me about avant-garde music and, out of interest, or boredom, I agreed. You can find that in their archives, I’m sure; I staggered from vague to lucid, I can just recall it, but he edited me kindly and I sounded interesting, and sensible, my voice low and smoky. I sounded old on the radio; I sounded like the old woman I had become. Listening to myself, my voice, made me realise this in a way that looking in a mirror did not.

  And then, of course, there was the dame-ing. It didn’t take much to be made a dame in the ’70s. I didn’t go to the ceremony. I stayed at home and – I don’t remember what I did, but I know I stayed at home. They delivered the thing, the medal, to me later. In recognition of services to music, apparently that was what I received it for. They like a bit of fame, here; they particularly like it when you’re famous somewhere else. As long as you come home.

  They replayed the interview after that, replayed the part where I said ‘I am electrical by nature’ – that mad quote! – where I talked of fame, and electricity. I sat in my bedroom, the day I received it, looking up at the twin portraits on the wall above the mantelpiece – of Trix, of me – and held the velvet case that contained the medal on its thick ribbon. It meant nothing, a medal for surviving. I put it in the bottom drawer in the kitchen, under the clean tea towels, and I called myself Dame when it suited me, if I needed to.

  I went to the School of Music at the university one day a week, taught students, said wise things to them, nodded sagely. Thank you, Dame Lena. When you grow old, everything you say is wise. I swam in the ocean. I grew older. I drifted away on sweet smoke plumes – just a little, just enough – and drank my coffee and played my Aetherwave machine in the dark front room of my cottage. Just me, just quietly, comfortably, slowly eating into the pile of money that Uncle Valentine’s house had provided.

  There was another machine, too, that I found in storage when I came back to this house: this typewriter, the old black Underwood. I couldn’t bear to read the papers I’d typed for Grace, and I couldn’t bear not to. In the end, I left them tied with their blue manuscript ribbon, and I packed the typewriter and the box of papers into the bottom of the wardrobe, behind my box of scrapbooks. It’s stayed there ever since, another twenty years in storage, my story – part memoir, part autobiography, part meditation – all tied up. But I knew the story needed finishing. I couldn’t tell Grace – I couldn’t even tell you, with your film and your lights and your cameras and your baby – so I’ve typed it for you, tapped it out on the machine. I bought a ream of thick bond paper, after you told me about the baby. I hauled the typewriter out of the wardrobe, put it with the fresh paper on the table in my bedroom. I straightened the pile of paper, fed a piece under the platen of the typewriter and – without thinking about where to start, or what to write – I let the story flow again.

  COTTESLOE

  1991

  The lowest note in the universe

  AETHERWAVE

  She sat in her front room; she made coffee. These are the ways to measure my life: music, coffee cups, coffee spoons. She stood there and played that damned machine.

  I have played my machine, played my music. I have swum. I have stood on the worn silk in the front room, feet bare on the pile, flat to it, grounded, and raised my arms and held them there and felt the music through my bones, in my back teeth, my jaw bone aching, the electric smell, ozone cracking the air in the room, lifting the dust, an aching arc of sound.

  I have lived in this house, this cottage, for twenty years. I will die here. I have lived here and played my machine, pulled sound from the aether. I am electrical by nature; music invents me.

  I suppose Mo will want to come back, perhaps next week. She will come back with Jonno and Caro, with the camera and microphone, the solar flare of light, and set them all up in my front room, again. Mo and Caro and Jonno, trala. The three of them will come and make their film. They will finish their film of the little old lady in the chair.

  How tired of it all I have become.

  I have not seen the film, what there is of it so far, and I do not want to. Mo will finish the film. She will make what she will of it – of me – tell a story, another story of me, her story of me. Add to the mythology.

  If I were to write my own story again – to start from the beginning – I wouldn’t write a great long manuscript, this time. I’d fit it all on a page of blue onionskin paper; perhaps just a list of names, or of places and dates, on that single page. Or I might write a list of objects, instead: a well, a comb, a doll transformed by water; a snake, a cigarette, and a paintbrush; a strange musical cabinet, a wooden box filled with wires and transformers; a bowl of oranges. Or perhaps I’d write a piece of music on the page, a musical phrase, or just a note; or a pair of notes linked by a curving tie – grace notes, ghost notes.

  I have not swum for days now; weeks. The weather has turned; that has never stopped me before. But now, I do not have the energy to drop myself into the calming, anaesthetic waves, feel their soothing good.

  The room is getting light now; pale grey seeps in under the shading verandah. I have sat in this chair all night. My lips are dry, stuck together like
cigarette papers. I force my tongue between my lips. Even my tongue feels dry.

  I press my hands into the arms of the chair, lift my body out of it. I am light; I can feel the slightness of my bones, fine, flexing as I stand. My feet bear such little weight. I feel transparent.

  *

  Perhaps Mo has filmed enough. Perhaps she already has what she needs to finish the film. Last week she asked me what she should call it.

  ‘Aetherwave,’ I told her. ‘Call it Aetherwave.’

  I presumed she meant the film, not the baby.

  She is getting quite a belly; her pregnancy is obvious, now. She looks well on it, not sickly and pale like she did. I wonder about the father. She doesn’t talk about the father. I understand why. Perhaps I should have told her that. Never mind.

  She will grow, Mo will, grow big with her baby. She will make her film, make her baby. She will feel all the pain in the world, as I did; that particular pain of birth, like no other.

  I hope…

  I hope…

  I wish her well.

  I should have told her that, too.

  I sit in my chair. Pale grey early morning light filters into the room. My feet are flat on the floor below me, on the silk rug that long ago was my mother’s, that is now mine. Father bought the rug from the pasar. I can smell the pasar, durian, satay, clove cigarettes and dung, hear the sounds of the market, cacophonous.