Do You Love Me or What? Read online

  With the immersion of children in the present, it was enough to know he’d come to Australia and met our mother, the important events to us. He was probably banking on that self-absorption. And he was glad to get onto a more comfortable subject.

  ‘The smell of Australia,’ he said. A man who crept up shyly on words, he struggled for more accuracy. ‘The perfume,’ he managed. He’d been up the mast, and for hours before he sighted land, he’d smelled the spicy eucalypts.

  ‘I had to see those trees,’ he said.

  ‘What’s a rabbito?’ I asked.

  ‘I was good at it – lucky, I was always lucky. Rabbits were everywhere in the bush, food for the taking. I’d catch them, skin them and sell them to housewives in the towns, they’d be at their doors, ready with the money. “Rabbito!” I’d call’ – his voice high, remembering, laughing.

  ‘Stop it,’ warned my mother.

  He yielded, as always, to my mother.

  At school I was a late reader and when I finally learned to make out his signature on the lower right-hand corner of his paintings, I discovered that it wasn’t the name we knew him by.

  ‘You left out “Arthur”,’ I objected.

  ‘I don’t like “Arthur”,’ he said. He could often turn a difficult moment into a joke. He was always joking. ‘If you had a name like Arthur, wouldn’t you leave it out?’

  It didn’t occur to me until much later that it had been a difficult moment.

  As I look back, I ask myself: was there a warning in her voice of what she might divulge to us if he disobeyed her? I knew, it seems for always, that she was desperate for us to be an upper-class family, like the one she’d originally come from. But at twelve the orphanage had disgorged her and she became not an heiress, but a servant.

  Fate continued to lash. My oldest brother, their adored first-born, died suddenly from meningitis and then the next child while still a toddler was deemed unmanageable by the authorities, and taken away to die. In today’s terms, he was autistic. In the fashion of the times, my mother was blamed. My parents hid their grief from us, though once I walked into a room and found my father sitting at his work-desk, head on his arms, weeping. I crept away.

  In our bush townships, fires raged every summer. There were always ghostly, abandoned houses in the district, only a stone chimney and sometimes a shell of a structure still left. Anyone could buy them for next to nothing. My father would move our family into one of the blackened shells, put up a roof, and soon there’d be walls, floorboards, and when it looked like any ordinary house, he’d sell it and we’d move to the next shell. Later, the family could remember what year anything happened by what house we lived in. All around, less lucky families lived in Nissen huts. The family in a street nearby, the Ormes, cooked with open fires, so that in my childish eyes it seemed they were always on jolly holidays, camping like The Famous Five. Mum wouldn’t allow us to play with the Ormes. They constantly appeared in her reprimands: ‘You’re behaving like an Orme kid.’

  However, my parents behaved far worse than the Ormes. My mother’s sadness turned into rages that to my child’s eye could be triggered unwittingly by any of us. In these rages, she seemed to be in a trance. Once, I saw her jump through the glass front door and, crouching on the porch, she gazed in bewilderment at the glass fountain falling around her. Often at night, no doubt sleepless and fretting for her dead children, she’d begin to batter my sleeping father or my brothers. They’d wake up shouting and fighting off the nightmare. Many times the alarmed neighbours would call the police, who’d bang on the front door as if to break it down. They’d rush in, two or three burly men, much larger than my father, who I slowly began to realise was not much taller than us. Rescuers had such heavy feet. But they’d tramp out the front door as soon as they’d spoken to my incoherent mother in her nightie – I’d hear, with sinking heart, that ours was ‘just a domestic’.

  My father said my mother’s nerves had been damaged. It was a time when men were responsible for household order, and against her nerves, he didn’t know what to do. He believed that a dash of metho or turps, sometimes both together, would fix any wound. But where was Mum’s wound? In those impoverished, pre-Medicare days, families like ours called a doctor only if death threatened. At the most he consulted the chemist, and about my mother’s nerves the chemist had nothing to say.

  Sometimes when I was alone with my mother, her rage would be triggered by something invisible to me, and she’d pin me to a wall and in an odd voice shout continually: ‘Slut!’ and ‘Cretin!’ When she finally sank to the floor exhausted, I never thought to cover her with a blanket, but crept away to hide, dazed by her rage, grateful she hadn’t hit me. Only much later did I wonder if she’d confused us both and was raging at what she feared about herself. I longed for an ordinary mother but was too narcissistic and pitiless to love the one I had. In comparison, my father seemed solid and dependable. I gave him the love they both deserved.

  So it was a shock that I still feel, the terrible day that he came into my solitary bedroom, with its old raffia pram of dolls that I was too old to play with but still too much a child to throw away. He’d never been in my room since he painted it pink with a blue ceiling, to remind me of the sky, he said. He seemed to be always in my brothers’ room, laughing and horsing around, and I’d listen with envy to chairs toppling. He preferred my brothers, it seemed, even though I could list my advantages on my fingers: I was the one he asked about his new paintings – ‘It’s finished, don’t you think?’; I was the one who did well at school, which is what he longed for with my brothers, to no avail; I was the one who watched him paint.

  By this time we were living in the city. He stood looking out with a peculiar fixity through the dusty venetian blinds into the street, not at me as I sat on my bed, the book I’d been reading open on my lap. Black cockatoos were raucous outside on the telegraph wires. He had to raise his voice against them. He was leaving, he said, and taking my brothers.

  I imagined, in the din, their new home with the smell of hot sweet cakes baking, along with linseed oil and metho and turps. All the walls would gleam with his paintings. There’d be a yellow ochre cat on the hearth, coiled up in peace, with shadows of Prussian blue at its folded limbs. There’d be no darkness in the house and even the nights would glow.

  ‘And me – can I come?’ I said. There’d be curtains floating at the windows, and I’d iron everyone’s clothes, but at last leaving no creases.

  Deep down, I half-knew the answer.

  ‘No,’ he said, watching the cockatoos fly off as if he’d never seen them before. Suddenly the room was very quiet. His voice dropped, confidingly. I was to stay behind, to look after my mother, that was what a girl must do, a girl must look after her mother, he needed me to do that. What would happen if everyone deserted her? And if he and the boys didn’t leave, someone would end up in jail. I didn’t want that, did I?

  From somewhere, from a place I didn’t know existed, I heard my voice, suddenly very grown up. My new voice agreed that I would do it. For him, for them, for him. I was fourteen years old.

  ‘Do you love me?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And you’ll come back for me?’

  ‘Of course.’

  They left the very next day. That hurt me particularly, that while they’d toppled chairs in the boys’ bedroom, they’d been planning their escape. Didn’t one of them say, ‘Shouldn’t we take her?’

  I let myself in fearfully that first afternoon but the house was silent. My mother was face-down in her rumpled bed, still in her defeated nightie. I went into the kitchen, till then her private domain, and she didn’t shout. I opened the fridge door and found chops, and still she didn’t shout. I cooked the first meal of my life, the first meal of our shared life. She accepted hers meekly, and ate her chops in bed, and I ate mine bent over a book.

  When her rages began again, I’d breathe with her as I’d done as a child with my father. Eventually she’d stop, and
I’d slip away and pick up a book, and pretend to read until my heart stopped hammering and I heard the door latch click behind her.

  I began to wonder if books had the power to make her leave. In those days I’d finish one book and pick up another. I methodically read around the shelves in the public library, encountering world literature alphabetically. Once, she came with me to the library and fingered the spines of encyclopedias, especially the children’s ones with bright covers, but she didn’t take them down. Perhaps by then she felt she had no passport, after all.

  I escaped daily to school, though there were walls between me and my classmates that I couldn’t begin to scale. I was no one’s friend. Sometimes I’d write a note. ‘My daughter has had a stomach ache for a fortnight.’ My mother always agreed to put her signature to the notes, perhaps hoping I’d be company. But I was waiting for my father to return, to say ‘You’ve done enough’, and take me home.

  Slowly, subtly, pity for my mother began to filter into me. It took a long time – how deeply vengeful a daughter can be – but slowly, subtly, I became aware that my mother was not a monster, only grief-sodden. Not powerful, only grief-sodden. I didn’t know how to give her love, or how to ask for it. I wanted to tell her I loved her because she needed that comfort, but ‘love’ stuck in my throat every time I tried to say it. Such a tiny word, but sometimes to utter it feels as if you’ve lost something precious forever. I took to going into newsagents’ and reading the verses on cards for mothers, as if they could advise me. But my pity was too late, for by now my mother was shouting at strangers in the street, at neighbours across the back fence, at astounded deacons in the hush of the church.

  ‘Your father hates women,’ my mother would say to me. ‘He hated his mother and that makes him hate us.’ I didn’t search her eyes because there I’d find only unwavering conviction. All I could do was question the womanly figures in his paintings. I searched for an ugliness of expression, a spitefulness of the body, a threatening lift of the arms. But the women innocently strolled through the landscape and out the frames. I decided that my mother was wrong. The reason for his rejection of me must be far more complex, far more subtle.

  At least I got my wish and stayed at school, because my mother’s thoughts on anything were confused, and my father’s thoughts we no longer knew.

  Three long years passed. Then suddenly, out of the blue and probably because of my endless reading, I won what was then called a Commonwealth Scholarship to study at a university.

  ‘Can I go?’ I asked my mother.

  She left the room. I didn’t dare pursue her. I opened a book. But three days later, she told me that my father was coming to talk to me. Till that moment, I had no idea she could contact him.

  Now, I dreaded his arrival. Your place is with your mother. It’s no use educating a girl. A girl can only be a housewife.

  He let himself in the front door. I ran to him, and stopped. He seemed smaller, bowed, abashed. There was a space between us, even when we embraced.

  I thought I’d cry. I didn’t cry. I was too shrivelled with waiting.

  ‘The Commonwealth means the Queen, and if the Queen wants you to go to university, who am I to disagree?’ he said.

  Though he painted the Australian landscape as intimately as if he belonged to it, he still belonged to England.

  To keep books around me, I became a writer. When I wrote my first book in my early twenties, a textbook that unexpectedly earned money, I bought my father a ticket to fly back to London, to home. His brother was unwell and my father had never been back; I assumed that was because we’d been too poor.

  ‘To see George,’ I said.

  The ticket bore his full name. He wouldn’t take it out of my hand.

  ‘I mightn’t get back,’ he said.

  I thought he meant that the cultural centre of the world would be so alluring, he wouldn’t be able to drag himself away.

  One of my brothers finally went to London and tracked down his brother George, now in his dotage, and found out enough to acquire our father’s birth certificate, and his actual name, and so we found out that the year of Dad’s birth was curiously different from what we’d all variously thought.

  I was still in my twenties – I told myself that I’d never had time to ask the real questions, to make the right deductions, though I’d had a whole long childhood – when my father’s luck finally petered out. He had a heart attack so minor that going to hospital in an ambulance embarrassed him. He should’ve walked there, he said. It was hard to tell if he was blushing, with all the instruments on him, all the beeping. I never wondered why he asked so little for himself.

  ‘I’ve got to get out of here. I’ve got a painting to finish,’ he whispered to me. He didn’t want the nurses to think he was ungrateful; they were going to so much trouble for him.

  After his death, it took a decade – the death of my mother, a short-lived marriage and the birth of my daughter – to say his name again. It was my daughter who brought me back to life. I’d died with Dad.

  My brother knew the address of George’s second wife, our Auntie May, now widowed, now in a hospice. He hadn’t been able to trace anyone else.

  ‘You always wanted to know about Dad,’ he said. ‘You should go and ask her. But hurry.’

  I told myself I had to go for my child’s sake, so she could know who her grandparents were. I’d seen from my father’s birth certificate that my grandfather had been a gardener, and I hoped he’d been a Capability Brown, since he’d had such an artistic son. Maybe there were landscapes I could show my daughter. Or maybe there was a house still standing, the family home, surrounded by a beautifully wrought garden. But my real question was – had my mother been right? Was it because of my drunken grandmother that he couldn’t love me?

  My Aunt was sitting up straight in a chair beside an impeccably made bed. There was a shock of white hair, strong and wiry, above her fragile face.

  ‘You’ve come,’ she said as soon as I sat down, ‘because of what I said!’

  I was astonished.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘To her. To your grandmother.’

  A nurse came up.

  ‘She’s been very worried about your visit. Please don’t upset her.’

  I gazed between their faces.

  ‘I wanted to know you, and find out …’ as usual, I was struggling for words, ‘who my father was.’

  My Aunt, deflated, sat back in her chair.

  ‘There you are,’ said the nurse to her. ‘I told you it’d be all right. Just a nice family visit. I’ll get you both a lovely cup of tea, and your favourite biscuits.’ She left, her white dress swishing against her stockinged legs.

  My Aunt seemed energised by the promise of tea and biscuits.

  ‘He was a good man, your father,’ she said. ‘George loved him.’

  I knew that old ladies loved photos, so I thought it would please her if I asked for a photo of the family. My Aunt seemed taken aback.

  ‘No, dear, there’s none.’

  ‘Where could I see my grandfather’s gardens?’

  The old woman struggled with this question too.

  ‘Gardens? He was just a handyman, dear.’

  And the house where they lived?

  ‘Oh, the worst of the slums were cleared out in the thirties. There’s good social services now but then—’

  ‘Slums?’

  ‘Your father spared you all this? Perhaps I should too.’

  ‘No, please—’

  I sighed, settled back in my chair.

  ‘They didn’t have a house, they just had a room.’

  I laughed in disbelief.

  ‘A single room! What, for all those children? It must’ve been a huge room – George and Frederick and Florence and—’

  ‘Tiny. And of course, they were always being evicted, and so there’d always be a new room, if they were lucky.’

  The nurse came with two cups of milky tea.

  ‘See? I
t’s all fine,’ she said to my Aunt. ‘You’re having a lovely chat!’

  ‘But there wouldn’t have been enough space for all the beds—’

  I was grabbing a biscuit.

  ‘There was only one bed, dear, for Walter and Hannah. The children slept under it, on the floor.’

  I tried to make light of this.

  ‘Such a squash, five kids under a bed. They probably had such fun.’

  ‘And there was a lodger, who worked night shifts, so he used the bed during the day.’

  ‘A relative?’

  ‘No, dear, people lived like that then. There was desperate, terrible overcrowding in the slums. George and your father would often sit up to scare the rats away. If they were lucky, there’d be one toilet for say, sixty people. Sewage littered everywhere. No furniture. Just rags and rubbish. Often they’d go for a whole day without food. And your grandfather often went without work – there were few jobs to go around, and they were almost unpaid. No unions then, of course. You couldn’t have earned your way out of it.’

  I gulped my tea. Under my Aunt’s tutoring, I was sadly reconstructing my childhood image of Dad and his brother naughtily eating from the streets – I realised I’d always imagined the food they plundered as being contained in neat, Sydney-style garbage bins – and replacing it with a new image of ragged, shoeless, freezing and starving children, arms plunged in a rubbish pile up to their elbows, devouring scraps of mouldy food.