Other People's Houses

by Hilary McPhee

  Then a young architect who lives in the same street came riding by on her bicycle. I told her of an idea I had had in PNG that was starting to take root, for a tiny guest house if I could find some money by selling my papers.

  It is May and I pick Carmen up at the airport, where she has flown in from the Sydney Writers’ Festival and the brouhaha of the Man Booker, the judging panel of which she has resigned from in protest at the prize being awarded to Philip Roth. I am shocked to see her limping towards me, with terrible back and leg pain. No complaining, of course, nothing but her great funny fortitude and self-mockery. I feel a huge rush of affection. This woman saved me five years ago, when I landed on her with my broken heart, battered pride and misery, after my mother’s death and my husband’s dumping. In her house, her big heart saved me. And having her here in mine is full circle.

  She is in the shabby little spare bedroom, which I’ve tricked up as best I can: new bed, new mirror, new hanging of my daughter’s pictures, and my best rug from Damascus. She is here to see her family and to start researching her next book. But first, painkillers and a big sleep, then a cab to an ABC radio interview with Ramona Koval on The Book Show, about her resignation in protest at Roth’s inevitable scooping of the pool. I listen at home and can tell the two women don’t get on.

  My former husband has asked to see me, in a grim voice that makes me think of a rickety little rope bridge being thrown across a chasm. I expect bad news. I expect him to cancel. I don’t want him to run into Carmen, so I meet him in the café on the corner, which, at eleven in the morning, is full of young mothers and prams.

  He immediately tells me he is having a baby in September, with a woman the same age as his daughter. He smiles at one of the toddlers playing nearby and I surprise myself by a rush of wanting him to have a son. He needs a son. He has been a good stepfather to mine. We walk back to the house and sit on the stairs, and I laugh and laugh and can’t stop. Luckily, Carmen has left for the country.

  Later, she holds me together with her fury and disdain. I want to do this well but it feels like a total annihilation. Which, of course, it is. I am back in the mire. Some of my friends rant about irresponsibility, children growing up without a father; others, like Diana, who is in deep mourning after Les’s death, are gobsmacked but gentler. A woman I know only slightly, shouts across to me in crowded Marios one morning, ‘What do you think about the baby?’ I don’t know what I think, except that I find it in me to wish them well.

  Next, I drive up the Hume to visit my brother’s family and also my former brother-in-law. We do not talk about the baby. I listen all the way there and back to Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, which says it all—an old man writing an account of his life, and the love of his young wife and his joy at a baby. So, that must be enough.

  9

  Home is a long time gathering me in

  THE HOUSES OF my family, on both sides, have always burned down. At least one or two in every generation, going back as far as I could see. Down to the ground they burned, leaving scorch marks on rocks in the Hebrides; singed cypresses and burned fruit trees in the Strathbogies; threatening neighbours’ fences in inner Melbourne, when my father’s family’s small weatherboard house caught fire when he was young. A few years before that, in south-eastern Tasmania, a weatherboard house attached to an apple-drying factory caught fire while my mother’s family were at the pictures. My childhood house in the foothills of the Dandenongs, the house I visit in dreams, had a near miss when a back room burned down. Then, during the Ash Wednesday fires, after a summer holiday with a man not yet my husband, his daughter and my youngest son, our fibro shack at the beach exploded.

  This is what often happens to the flimsy houses of crofters, to poor farmers and immigrants everywhere. But listing them here gives me pause. My house in inner Melbourne is probably the first house in my family with walls so thick that it can’t burn down, but it is surely tempting fate to say so.

  On my desk is a half brick, handmade and rust-coloured, the surfaces pitted and the edges worn smooth. I picked it up long ago from a mound of burned timbers and bricks half buried in jonquils, on flat land beside the creek in the hill country near Euroa, in what used to be Gooram Gooram Gong. Sometimes, heading north up the Hume, I turn off and drive very slowly along unmade roads, with the car windows down so I can sniff the air, searching as if the ghosts of the old place will surely show themselves. I am deep in a fantasy of buying a few acres of what could hardly be called ancestral land, where my great-great-grandfather selected his first block in 1870, land that flooded every winter, good for grazing.

  My reticent father, shy in the way his eldest son would be, amid the big-hearted teasing and constant story-telling and letter-writing of my mother’s family, would describe his summer holidays at the farm in the 1920s. How he and Angus, his younger brother, were taken first on the tram from his parents’ weatherboard cottage in Windsor, to Spencer Street, to catch the Albury train stopping all stations to Euroa. His memories were of rabbiting, and swimming in waterholes and fishing for yabbies in Polly McGinty’s weir, and bunking in with his cousins under mosquito nets in back bedrooms, or in Boer War canvas tents when the house was full. He sometimes described the mealtimes there, when silence fell and grace was said, and the old order was uppermost.

  And I can imagine the labour of his grandmother and the unmarried aunts in the cookhouse he described, separated from the main house, where the wood stove was kept stoked all year except when bushfires threatened, and that smoked if the wind was coming from the wrong direction. The Coolgardie safe hung by the cookhouse door to catch the breezes, its hessian walls kept damp with water from the tray on its roof.

  There were fruit trees in the paddock next to the house, whose slab walls and bark roof were still there in the 1920s, beneath the new weatherboards and roofing iron and striped wallpaper in the sitting room. The vegetable garden stretched down to the creek, where the boys would be sent to bucket water into the trenches before supper, and to wash their hands in the enamel bowl near the back door, sloshing the soapy water over the climbing roses and geraniums.

  My father might have written his name in tiny letters behind his bunk bed, so he could find it when he came again, and know he belonged to Woodville, Gooram Gooram Gong near Euroa, in the Strathbogie granite ranges—in the winter mists, so like the Cuillins on Skye his great-grandfather remembered sailing away from—a 13-year-old Highland boy among his kin.

  What is this dream of kin, of belonging, I find myself falling into? Selling up, leaving the city which makes me sad, which has become clogged with black SUVs and gleaming Mercedes in my absence, building a little place for myself in the Strathbogies. I imagine small children feeding the chickens, friends coming to stay, a vegetable patch, jonquils, fruit trees. I put my name down with an estate agent in Euroa for land, 10 acres or more, I say firmly, with good fences and buildings suitable for conversion, so permits won’t be needed. Then I drive back to Melbourne, in a dream: visions of a wide veranda and wire doors, a long table for family and friends, and a small guest house.

  Solitude I know I can handle. There are days when I crave it. Others when only sociability, and live music or a film will do. Of course, family and friends will come, I tell myself, but not so often and Extreme Loneliness will set in again. Then I hear a program about wildfires in south-eastern Australia, and the Strathbogie Ranges are identified as the most fire-prone area on earth.

  Another fantasy punctured.

  Obviously, I should move into a smaller house. Everyone tells me so. Real estate agents send me Christmas cards and offer valuations. Friends tell me to look in Collingwood, in Brunswick, in Thornbury. Nothing is affordable. Nothing new has enough room for even drastically culled bookshelves and pictures. I need ground and a garden I can plant myself. I dream of chooks. I dream of kin. I head up the Hume again to a favourite couple, my former brother-in-law and his partner, who are good to me and make me laugh. We talk music and politics. I return home wit
h a box of vegetables, a bottle of their olive oil, and many quinces, which turn dark red in the oven.

  Home is a long time gathering me in. Some thread that used to bind me here has frayed. Someone tells me they’d heard that I have joined the Arab street. I guess I have in a way. I feel myself privileged beyond belief when I look at the fate of others.

  I hate the hard-heartedness of our country’s politics, the affluence, the waste, our suspicion of Muslims, of difference, of race. I try to tone down my rage but without a Makarrata and still not a republic, I lecture anyone who’ll listen about how the two must happen.

  I visit another favourite couple with a house in Tasmania, in the bush overlooking the South Channel, just on the edge of Kettering, where my mother’s parents settled after World War I.

  There’s a photo of my grandmother in 1920 on Palm Beach, with her two small children, her hair in a turban, smoking a cigarette in a long holder and laughing at the crowd of small boys—‘ruffians’, she called them—who have gathered to stare. She would wait three months for a boat to take them on to Hobart, to join the husband she hadn’t seen for more than a year and who lingers in family mythology as demanding to know on arrival if she has been faithful to him. Reasonable question, I should have thought, looking at photographs of her as she was when he preceded her on his doctor’s recommendation ‘for the sake of his health’ to visit his family’s investments in apple orchards and drying factories in Tasmania’s Huon Valley.

  My grandfather, only known as W.R.A. or Arthur, was mildly tubercular, much older, evidently adoring but more conventional than his young wife. She knew nothing of Tasmania, except that her husband’s doctor had said the climate was good for weak lungs. Over breakfast in Cheshire, as World War I ground on, Arthur had shown her the ads in The Times for investment in the Apple Isle; the blacks were long gone, Tasmania was ‘trouble free’, they said. He chose Kettering, opposite Bruny Island, as the place to bring his family, some distance from his brothers’ enterprises in the Huon Valley. His ashes are interred on a hillside in the Kettering cemetery.

  What did they know then of the place’s genocidal past? Probably enough, after a short time of finding middens on the beach and hearing the silence in the bush, to shudder, and pray sometimes for the ghosts of the Brune people, and of Truganini in particular. She had spent her last years alone, first at nearby Oyster Cove, and then in the home of a Mrs Dandridge, 30 kilometres away in Hobart, where she died. In 1922, at Kettering’s one-teacher school, my mother was told firmly there were no Aborigines anymore, that they had all died out. The Risdon Massacre in 1804, when soldiers came upon a crowd of Oyster Cove people hunting kangaroos, was never mentioned. Nor were the children told that Truganini had been taken with forty-seven survivors of her people of the northeast, to the abandoned convict station, just a short walk through the bush from Kettering. Henry Kendall’s poem ‘The Last of His Tribe’ was in the school reader, but not read aloud in the Kettering school in the 1920s. Truganini’s skeleton was still on display in the Hobart Museum in the late 1940s, when I was a child. My grandmother advised me not to linger or I’d have bad dreams, but told me nothing more.

  My mother shuddered and would certainly have prayed. My grandmother probably preferred not to think about what had befallen almost the entire population of Tasmanian Aboriginals, although if told, she would have admired how Truganini joined three others to become bushrangers in Gippsland.

  My father’s family, at Gooram Gooram Gong in Victoria, would have known much more. In the late 1850s, Angus McPhee and his son John worked off the cost of their passage, then headed northeast to the vast Seven Creeks Estate in the Strathbogies. Just twenty years earlier, a few kilometres to the north, at the Winding Swamp on the Broken River, shepherds and assigned convicts were droving flocks of sheep and cattle south from Goulburn in New South Wales, for William Pitt Faithfull. They were heading for the rich grazing pastures towards Port Phillip when a group of Pangerang warriors attacked, killing eight shepherds and scattering the stock into the bush. The reprisals, known as Faithfull’s Massacre, went on for many months. The settlers of the district rose up and slaughtered the Pangerang, men, women and children, and burned their bodies. Few Aboriginals were ever seen again around the Strathbogies.

  Did the farmers and their children wonder who built the intricate fishtraps along the waterways near the Gooram Falls, or what the massive systems of stone walls near Euroa were for? But they were soon overgrown with blackberries. Then it was Ned Kelly country, which divided the district like nothing else, my father said. My Scots Presbyterian ancestors were very likely firmly on the side of the law.

  In London again in mid year, I went every day to my favourite library on earth, the Wellcome, reading up on sex and Eros, eugenics and monstrosities. The library is spacious and quiet; bookish, yet fully digitised. My first call each morning was into the astonishing medical collection, ranging from the beginning of life to its end, celebrating what the Wellcome calls medicine’s huge debt of gratitude to the dead. I often got sidetracked by the collection, the nucleus assembled before World War I, when the ambitions of its American founder were huge, liberal, idiosyncratic. The memento moris and vanitas used to remind the living of the transience of life and to mock the pursuit of luxury had signage both fulsome and touching: The figures represent dead twins from the Yoruba of Nigeria, 1870–1910 who have the highest rates of twin births in the world, where their loss is a great misfortune. The mother commissions figures to memorialise the children, dresses them and keeps them by her bed, performing elaborate rituals on feast days.

  The Wellcome feels like an oasis in the Euston Road.

  More an echo than an oasis is Bloomsbury, just around the corner from the Wellcome, near SOAS and the London Review Bookshop, a kind of distillation of the literary post-colonial London that gave Diana and me such a hard time in the early days of McPhee Gribble. We were rank outsiders trying to interest English agents and publishers in the authors on our list. Only Carmen at Virago and her close friends agent Deborah Rogers and publisher Liz Calder at Bloomsbury welcomed us and had the wit to see the quality of what we were publishing. For the rest, we were in the way, cutting across the cosy British structures of Commonwealth publishing.

  I telephoned I.B. Taurus to see if Hope Against Hope, or whatever the book was now called, had been scheduled. It hadn’t, but for years I kept expecting it to appear, updated and maybe with photographs—there were wonderful pictures in the photograph archives in the Majlis.

  Meanwhile, Carmen had agreed to have an operation to fix her excruciating back pain and I said I would stay for a few weeks afterwards to help her, if she would let me. Her friends were pleased. She’s a terrible patient, they laughed, and left me their phone numbers, Deborah ringing me from Wales several times. My family tells me I am a terrible patient too, so I reckoned I could do this. It was the very least I could do, given what Carmen had seen me through.

  The trouble started soon after she got home from hospital. I went downstairs first thing and found her moving stools of different heights. I later wrote in my diary: This week has been a nightmare of being here for her, watching her stoicism which borders on the insane. She is not supposed to pick up anything or carry weights over two kilos. The arrangement of stools are so she can lean into the refrigerator and feed Louis, which I could do. I find her dragging pot plants into the middle of the garden, and watering with a heavy hose, which I could do also. But my role is to be an extra limb, an extension of her, to pick up things when she remembers not to, to sort the rubbish, to be in the background.

  I survived by swimming every morning in the council pool five minutes away. Then back to Carmen’s, to try to help. I could tell I was driving her nuts. I was sure she longed to have the house to herself and Louis, her beloved elderly Border Terrier. I walked slowly to the shops through the gardens with Louis, and returned to play three terrifying games of Bananagrams every afternoon. A new dictionary had been acquired and a small book
called Difficult Words but there was no time to consult them. Carmen raged at the board, at me, at herself. I never won. I drank much wine and cooked supper. She was in terrible pain, but made light of it. We’d watch something on Sky Record. Thank God for Wallander.

  After she headed upstairs with Louis, I stayed up very late. The Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks drama was unfolding, with endless trumpeting about the Evil Empire. Murdoch apologised to the family of Milly Dowler, the murdered schoolgirl, whose emails were hacked. There was an extra thick layer of loathing, it seemed to me, because Murdoch is Australian; also whenever Julian Assange’s extradition case was mentioned. He, too, was loathed, when what he had done with WikiLeaks seemed to me to be admirable. I couldn’t wait to go home.

  Thank God for novels. I was reading Javier Marías’s A Heart So White, which Raj Pandey gave me when I was last with them in Lewisham, about the betrayals and misconstruings that lie beneath every relationship. So delicately structured, that by the end, the complicity of everyone is, if not laid bare, certainly implied.

  On my return from the shops one afternoon, I tried to ring Diana, whose sister had been ill. I left a message. When Kath Hattam rang me back, I had a dreadful sense of foreboding. She told me that Di had just been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer of the most virulent kind. I had had a premonition after Les died, only four months before, when Di told me she felt as if the cage door were open but she didn’t want to leave. She had nursed Les day and night through his long illness. Now her daughter Anna was nursing Diana, who was already in the midst of aggressive treatment that was making her terribly ill.

  Oh, the pull of friendship/love/obligation, and all the layers of my life; how they coalesce at times like these. I must go home. Carmen doesn’t need me. Nor does Diana. But I need them more than either will ever know.