I saw Diana a few days after I got home, when she was temporarily out of hospital, infection free and determined to get to Anna’s wedding to James on 3 September. We spoke of Anna’s adoption as a tiny baby and what my role as her godmother could be next. Diana had promised Anna that she would dance at her wedding and she did.
It took place on a clear blue day at the beginning of September 2011. I dragged myself there; needing a husband, I suppose. Going to big things alone was still hard. And this would be very hard indeed, for everyone. A map of so many lives.
The wedding was at Christ Church, South Yarra, where Diana and Jack were married long ago, and Anna was baptised with me holding her. The order of service, which Diana chose, was traditional and very beautiful. First, the processional with a trumpet voluntary, then ‘Praise, My Soul, the King of Heaven’, then the reading of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116: Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments …, then the First Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians: Though I speak with the tongues of men and angels, and have not love, I am become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal … And on and on—a loving tribute to the future, with the minister not shirking ‘the difficult time to come’. The church was full of James’s and Anna’s friends and family, Di’s and Jack’s friends, and some of mine from a long time ago.
Then we all walked to a pavilion in the Botanic Gardens, for an evening of great happiness, short speeches and dancing to a mix of music selected by Di’s nieces and 1960s rock and roll. Buddy Holly’s ‘Peggy Sue Got Married’ and ‘That’ll Be the Day’ had us all out of our seats. Diana danced and saw it through to 11 p.m., when the young couple left; Anna, creamy and beautiful, and so very happy with her James. It was precisely what she had wanted to give those two: a celebration of the future to come that she wouldn’t be in.
Then she was dying, and dying well, with jokes and cigarettes in the sun, and concern for Anna and for her friends. I sat with her for several short visits after the wedding, and we talked more about Anna and babies, and godmothers. Her family was protecting her, the palliative nurses were coming: Anna in charge; James there, calmly fixing a TV. She was very tired by the time I rose to go, but she took me downstairs to Les’s studio, which had all his tools laid out and his crazy-brave sculptures of filing cabinets bulging with dusty pages ballooning bile, and great crisscrossed arms attempting to hold everything together.
Late that same evening, I watched Sophie and Alex hula-hooping in the dark out on the street, with hoops that flashed pink and green: Alex leaping and whooping as he ran, Sophie, a strong houri figure, keeping her hoop turning and turning.
Before Sophie moved out to a tiny Carlton workers’ cottage with Em, one of her friends, they helped me carry my fiction collection downstairs. For the first time, I discarded ruthlessly books I don’t read or need anymore, many kept since the early 1970s out of a vague sense of the need to support local literature. I read the first paragraph or two and knew immediately if I would want to re-read them. Some of the books were still very much alive for me; others unreadable, their pages yellowed and fragile, their spines broken. English and American novels were always printed on better paper than Australian publishers had access to. My fear was that the copies of those books that haven’t been reissued somewhere else in the world would soon be turning to dust. Still, culling was good for me.
Raj Pandey’s son Nishad came to visit me one day from Kolkata, where he plays guitar in a famous group, Kendrika. I told him I was wondering how I might start to share my house and about the advice I was getting from friends. Some said I should share with writers—a very bad idea; others recommended a small publishing outfit. Somone from there had been in touch, but seemed surprised that I would need to charge a modest rent. I’d been hoping for African dressmakers, some of whose work I had seen displayed in a nearby gallery: lovely clothes and intricate patchworks. I imagined their sewing machines humming, their scissors snipping peacefully on long tables upstairs during the day. But then I heard they had found themselves a base a few blocks away.
The attic is a long room that runs the width of the house, with windows framing huge skies, freshly painted white walls, a sky-blue floor, and my Syrian mats. This, and two small rooms and a bathroom on the floor below, would be offered for as little rent as I could manage. Nishad didn’t need a room, as he was heading back to play in Kolkata and tour in South-east Asia, but he nipped upstairs to have a look. He took his time, then came down and said it would be perfect for musicians. The walls are very thick, the floors are wood and, except for the attic, the ceilings are high.
Most of my friends seemed startled that I would be sharing my kitchen and clothes line, and told me they couldn’t stand underpants left on the line for days or dishes in the sink. The underpants gave me pause. In Cortona, the washing would go out the window on retractable lines. In London, nothing was hung outside for long and my friends all had drying cupboards. So I bought a second washing machine, clothes horses, and plastic spiders to hang over the upstairs bath.
Someone told me about a Sydney cellist, Mee Na Lojewski, who was coming to Melbourne to do a professional performance course and fellowship at ANAM, the national music academy housed in the South Melbourne Town Hall. I pictured her playing her cello in the attic, looking up at the wild skies, but manouvering a fragile instrument up and down a stepladder would be hazardous for a cellist. Mee Na chose a different room and suggested another young woman for the attic. Georgia Ioakimidis-MacDougall, a French horn player and part-time psychology student also in her last year of study, arrived the next day.
And my life with the lodgers began.
The neighbours were pleased, because the sounds now coming from the house were very fine indeed. Georgia’s French horn pealed out across the rooftops from the attic. Her friend Callum G’Froerer stayed sometimes and played several kinds of trumpets, and improvised with others in a Brunswick Street shopfront. Georgia, a vegan, cooked many trays of biscuits for Callum’s gigs.
Mee Na’s cello I heard when I sat on the stairs, which I started doing often. Other musicians soon revealed themselves to be living nearby. A harpist, a pianist and a trumpeter. And many others visited.
The talk around the kitchen table, where we sometimes met, was the best kind. About composition, technique and discipline, about auditions, about the habits of double bass players and visiting conductors. So much gossip, so much hilarity. So much about the music world I was getting to know: how difficult it is, how much it depends on philanthropy. And, crucially, that players of brass and strings are very different species, and don’t talk much to each other. When Georgia went to Berlin with Callum, Mee Na’s friend Nicholas Waters, a young violinist I had met and heard play often at ANAM, would ask if he could move in. But that was another year away.
It was midwinter and the Brodsky Quartet was here from the UK, revisiting the cycle of Shostakovich’s string quartets composed between 1938 and 1974. ANAM announced a long weekend of music in early July in the South Melbourne Town Hall, where the Brodskys would play all fifteen quartets with the best string students. Each Brodsky player would be rehearsing and performing with three students; four quartets would be played by the Brodskys alone; and one quartet would be played by an ANAM group alone. There were masterclasses where I went to hear them speak about the quartets, and about the once-enlightened city of Manchester, and how it had provided schoolchildren with the best available instruments.
The opening quartet, on a Friday afternoon in July, began with flashes of lightning and a violent thunderstorm. The first transparent movements, written after the birth of Shostakovich’s son, were almost drowned out by claps of thunder. The weather outside gradually calmed for the Brodskys playing the confident overture of Quartet No. 2 in A Major, which gave way to a prayerful recitative. The weekend was a musical feast—far better than a Ring Cycle, someone said at interval—and it surely was, perhaps because of the intimate revelations of Shostakovich’s quartets against the backdrop of Soviet his
tory. But also because of the proximity we had to great musicians and their interaction with talented students.
The audience was engrossed, exhilarated, deeply moved. On the last evening, the Ninth in E Flat Major was played by four ANAM students: Mee Na Lojewski on cello, Caroline Hopson and Nicholas Waters on violin, and William Clark on the viola. It was an extraordinary display of skill and energy and, in the end, felicitude. The audience stood and cheered.
The following year, Nicholas will have moved into the house; a new ensemble, to be called Affinity Quartet, will be well on its way; and my small courtyard, full of borrowed chairs, will become the venue for several of Affinity’s early concerts. And when the quartet goes to Europe and England, Carmen will invite Mee Na and Nick to stay in her attic.
A joker in the office once described me as ‘much married’, and we all laughed. I have three grown-up children from my first two marriages. I have one stepdaughter from my third, and longest, marriage; and two grandchildren: one grown-up granddaughter, and one small boy, both the children of my eldest son, the HEMS paramedic. My other two children have no marriages or children, although my daughter has stepsons of her own with the partner she has been with for a long time. My youngest son is showing all the signs of never settling, always surfing.
Stepchildren and half siblings, godmother, stepmother and grandmother, are fluid categories selected for simplicity. I sometimes use ‘niece’ and ‘nephew’; even call myself a ‘great-aunt’ sometimes. Whatever the legalities, ancestry seems to me to depend more on love and point of view than on bloodlines.
I want to be tough, resilient, fearless and feared a little, and sometimes called ma’am. Asked for advice. Ruling the roost, if there is one. The roost these days is an old house I share with much younger people, where I spend time sending texts not leaving notes, organising repairs, walking the dog and punching cushions, hiding my face when it’s sad—in case everyone bolts.
No, not a matriarch by any definition. A woman who blames herself for much. And dreams of houses where she wanders from room to room, finding lost friends and former husbands, and babies.
There is a place I go to often these days, where the sky is so huge you could die in it, where the grasses bend with the wind, and birds screech warnings that I am near. There is a tree angled to the path, a giant rivergum once split almost in two by a tempest, made stronger by a great bulging scar between the divided trunks.
One morning, when trees were being earmarked for removal for a freeway, I approached the giant rivergum from a different path and saw ahead massive piles of sawdust, woodchips and fallen branches. Sickened, in panic, I ran, John Shaw Neilson’s words pounding through my brain. The tree that has the cripple’s heart, will know the cripple’s song—but there it was like a galleon, my Loving Tree, its prow turned northwards into the prevailing winds.
Oh, happy day.
Acknowledgements
FIRST, OF COURSE, was the great opportunity offered me by Their Royal Highnesses, Prince Hassan and Princess Sarvath. Without their confidence in me, there would be no book, nor could I have understood the depth and complexity of their work for their people and for the many hundreds of thousands of refugees now living in Jordan. It was their PA from my high school who first tracked me down, who didn’t want to be named, but who always encouraged me to write about it. She will, I hope, enjoy the result.
That clever, canny CEO, Louise Adler, suggested this book to me when I first returned home and my publisher Sally Heath gave me all the professional support and encouragement I needed to see it through. That Louise and Sally are not still at the helm of the MUP they built is a sad irony.
It has been a difficult book to write but many people kept me going. Dame Carmen Callil, Dr Rajyashree Pandey and Helen Wire in London, Lyndall Passerini in Italy cheered me on, read drafts and made crucial suggestions. Merran and Gareth Evans offered me their holiday house as a retreat near my favourite strip of the coast when I was drawing on diaries and journals and finding the shape of the story. Above all, it was my family and my friend Colin Oering whose conviction that it was a book worth writing kept me at it. I thank you all.
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