Moving Among Strangers (5 page)

10

M
y father, like my mother, had various other lives that I had never heard about. One was his life in Perth. Although he made regular trips back to see his family, I was never invited to go with him. I never saw him with his childhood friends or his sisters and nephews and nieces, never witnessed him in that broader family context. Even the words ‘Uncle Alec' had sounded odd to my ears. I'd never thought of him as an uncle to anyone.

Margaret Atwood believes that ‘
all
writing of the narrative kind, and perhaps all writing, is motivated, deep down, by a fear of and a fascination with mortality – by a desire to make the risky trip to the Underworld, and to bring something or someone back from the dead.'

My motive, at the beginning, wasn't so much to bring Stow back from the dead but to bring back my mother. Now, miraculously, it seemed that I had managed, without any intention, to rejoin almost the entire Carey family, who'd been gone from me for decades.

On my return from Perth I also found that ‘My Mother and Mick', an essay I had written for an indefinable audience, had been published in the
Australian Literary Review.
Calls and emails and messages had already come from Randolph Stow admirers. Perhaps he wasn't as forgotten as I'd thought. The lives of many people appeared to have been deeply affected and sometimes transformed by Stow's books. Some even considered him to be a kind of prophet. Former director of the Brisbane Powerhouse Museum, Andrew Ross, who'd written and produced stage versions of
Tourmaline
and
The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea,
believed that Stow's insights into the Australian psyche were as prescient as ever. In an online outpouring after Stow's death, the poet John Kinsella said that Stow was one of Australia's greatest writers, and poet Bob Adamson commented that
A Counterfeit Silence
remained ‘one of the most important and powerful books of poetry written by an Australian
'
. And in an interview with the magazine
Indigo
, Tim Winton said, ‘I still revere Stow as probably my favourite Australian writer,' and paid homage to Stow's ‘sacred apprehension of matter, of country'.

*

That afternoon I sat at my desk trying to make sense of the notes I'd gathered in Western Australia.

‘Mum, are you doing Stow stuff again?' my son called.

‘Why?'

‘Because he's ruined your saucepan.'

I had left milk on to heat for my coffee and then forgotten all about it. This was the love one has as a child, when you are in awe of that impossibly out-of-reach older other, the man or woman who seems to be the ideal you of the future. The kind of love that the young Rob, in
The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea
has for his older cousin Rick, who is away at war:

‘If I think to him,' the boy said, ‘he might hear me thinking.'

‘Yes, think to him,' Margaret Coram said. ‘That's what all the rest of us are doing. And perhaps, when you thought you saw him –'

She had enough of the Celt in her not to laugh at what she was saying. And the boy, who was all Celt, believed utterly.

‘I know,' he said, grinning now, gap-toothed and scab-faced. ‘I know. He was thinking back.'

I was going to do the same. I would think to Randolph Stow and hope that he would think back.

*

For weeks after the publication of ‘My Mother and Mick'
the phone calls, messages and letters continued from people who had something to say about Randolph Stow – the woman who sat next to him in primary school, sharing one of the old double wooden desks; another who'd met him on a bus and never forgotten the encounter with this strange, intense young man: ‘Remember my name,' he told her as he alighted the Guildford bus, ‘I'm going to be a world-famous writer.'

The odd thing about this business that Atwood also calls ‘negotiating with the dead' is that while you are digging away with your spade at a particular grave, you inevitably hit upon the bones of other, unexpected individuals. After reading ‘My Mother and Mick', an elderly man from rural South Australia wrote to offer one very significant spelling mistake.

Dear Doctor Carey,

I was interested to read the account of your mother's friendship with Randolph Stow. Of particular interest was Stow's recollection that your mother's favourite ballerina had been Elaine Tyfield. I feel that most likely he was referring to Elaine Fifield.

I went back to Stow's card to check. Was this Stow's misspelling or perhaps I read his old-fashioned hand-written ‘F' as a ‘T'? (As James Joyce says, when it comes to language, there are many opportunities for ‘missed understandings'.)

Elaine Tyfield was indeed no one – but Elaine Fifield, it now turned out, was a legend. Born in Homebush, Fifield grew up in a Seventh Day Adventist family who were opposed to her love of dancing. Thanks to a doctor who advised that dance lessons would toughen her up, at fourteen Elaine won a Royal Academy of Dancing scholarship to study in London. Less than a year later she was taken into the Sadler's Wells Theatre Ballet and was soon performing major roles. Critics compared her to Margot Fonteyn and Pavlova. ‘Elaine Fifield shows she must be regarded as the heiress-apparent to Margot Fonteyn,' reported the
Manchester Guardian
.

Yet Joan's favourite ballerina would never reach the heights predicted for her. In ‘a catalogue of exceptional promise vandalised by impetuous choices', after moving from Sadler's Wells to the Covent Garden company, Fifield became one of the five ballerinas immediately below Fonteyn – but when she wasn't invited on the company's Australian tour, she handed in her notice. Back in Australia in 1957, she joined the Borovansky Company, precursor to the Australian Ballet, but the Company dissolved within a few years.

‘Feeling a failure as a dancer, wife and mother,' the obituary reported, Elaine made an impetuous choice when she met a friendly man called Les on Manly Beach. Les invited her to his coffee and rubber plantation in Papua New Guinea and Elaine accepted. She also accepted his marriage proposal. ‘Aussie Girl Gives Up Fame for Love in Jungle,' the newspapers reported.

The house that Les had promised was primitive. ‘I had my first misgiving when my stiletto heel went through the floorboard,' Fifield wrote in her autobiography. They had two daughters but in time Fifield became seriously depressed. Then she made the most impetuous decision of all: she attempted suicide. Possibly Fifield's failure to kill herself helped her realise she had to return to dance. (Between 1964 and 1966 she was the principal artist with the Australian Ballet and danced with them until 1971, when she retired to live in Perth.)

Elaine Fifield was living in Papua New Guinea when Stow went to the Trobriand Islands in 1959 as a trainee anthropologist. While in Papua New Guinea Stow contracted malaria and had to be invalided back to Australia. Though another version says that he again became suicidal, like his doomed character Alistair Cawdor in
Visitants
, and – as he had been the first time – was discovered, one stormy night, just in time to be rescued.

These are unusual parallels: a sojourn in Papua New Guinea that ends in a suicide attempt; a child prodigy who doesn't fulfil his/her promise, an Australian artist with international recognition who has been forgotten on home soil. Stow was born in Western Australia; Fifield died in Western Australia – was there something in both of them that shied away from success? Is there something in the Australian character that feels uncomfortable with too much attention?

Shyness is one of those characteristics that is considered these days as a handicap. Being shy belongs to another era. Restraint, shyness, frugality; I wonder if these qualities, so characteristic of Stow and my mother, will ever find their way back into our culture.

11

Another letter arrived in response to ‘My Mother and Mick', from a former colleague of my mother's who had no connection with Stow at all.

I knew your mother Joan when we both nursed in the Bundaberg Hospital in 1950. I grew to know, and to like her very much, and we shared a holiday together at Heron Island before I returned to Victoria. We corresponded for some time when Joan was in Western Australia, and we then lost touch, but I never forgot her or ceased wondering what had happened to her.

Lorraine Bell (née
Osborne)

This was the first I'd ever heard of my mother going to Queensland, let alone working there!

On my next trip to Melbourne, I visited Lorraine and her husband in their modest, red brick house that had resisted renovation and updating since, it seemed, the mid-1940s. Over a small mountain of home-baked scones, Lorraine showed me the black-and-white photos from a holiday she and Joan had shared with a few other nursing colleagues on Heron Island, off the coast of Queensland, long before it was developed into a resort. The photos showed my mother, aged twenty-seven, with abundant, wavy, blond hair, wearing neat-fitting, hand-sewn beach outfits, cats-eye sunglasses and a broad-brimmed sunhat. She was tanned and relaxed; barefoot on the beach in one shot, in another holding a crayfish on the end of a spear. There is no wedding ring on her finger. One snap shows her sitting in a deck chair on the sand, wearing a strappy white dress, holding a middy of beer. A man is standing behind her with a schooner; both are smiling widely.

‘She had such poise,' Lorraine said.

‘Who's that man?' I asked.

‘Bill Bishop. I think that was his name. Joan seemed to know him. In fact, I got the impression she'd been to the island before. That they already knew each other. I'm not sure. I didn't ask. Joan was always very discreet,' said Lorraine. ‘We knew she was married and separated but we didn't ask questions.'

My mother was more than discreet; she was secretive to the point of impenetrable. She'd never spoken a word of her separation from my father so soon after their marriage, although this new information illuminated Stow's comment on how Joan had met Alex ‘again' on a park bench. In those days it would have been absolutely scandalous to be a young married woman recently separated from her husband. She could have been made to feel ashamed and embarrassed. But here she was having tropical holidays in Queensland, clearly enjoying her freedom, apparently with a cheerful-looking bloke called Bill who took her to the local bar and bought her beers. An independent woman who had worked and holidayed, had friends and lovers, gone boating and picnicking and spearfishing and drinking; a liberated feminist long before it was fashionable.

Only then, in Lorraine's lounge room, did I recall that in 1976 my mother had sent me to Heron Island for a holiday. At sixteen I was possibly the most atrocious teenager in the Sutherland Shire, so it was as much a holiday for her as it was for me. My brother and I had never been anywhere so exotic. Except for two visits to Perth, our holidays had almost always been on the Hawkesbury River. But Heron Island, even then, wasn't the rustic deserted isle that it had been in 1950. As an earnest, poetry-writing adolescent, I spent the entire week recording the spiritual emptiness of the Australian middle-class. Although I enjoyed the snorkelling, a sport my father had introduced me to in the waters around Cronulla, I couldn't delight in the island as my mother had. A spoilt Sydney teenager, I failed to find the beauty in the place. My mother must have been so disappointed.

But if only she had told me the story of her own voyage there, of her disillusion with marriage, of her time as a free woman, Heron Island might have had some meaning for me. I might have sought out her crayfishing spot or lingered under the pandanus tree where she and Bill had shared a beer.

It wasn't until forty-five years later, over Lorraine's coffee table in Victoria, that I could begin to understand.

*

On the plane back to Sydney I gazed at the photos that Lorraine had given me, of Joan as a young carefree blonde on the beach. I'd always believed that my mother had done the completely conventional thing by marrying in her early twenties and staying with the same man until they separated in 1969 after which she remained celibate until her death. When I'd had troubles with my own marriages I kept asking myself: If my mother could do it, why can't I? Now I thought over Stow's correspondence with his family, remembering his letter to his mother in 1952:

Talking of ballet, I had a letter from Joan on Wednesday and she has been to Sadler's Wells, and lots of beaut plays. She had a front seat for the King's funeral – right on the kerbstone, in Piccadilly, but she had to wait five hours for the procession. She says she hated England at first but likes it now. She's working at Eton as a nurse in the sanatorium. She sent me two prints of her favourite paintings in the Wallace Collection – ‘La belle Grecque' by Lancet and ‘The Roadside Inn' by Meissner. I am going to Oakover on Sunday. Hope it will be fine. At the moment it is pouring.

Lorraine had said that Joan returned to Western Australia from Queensland in 1951 – but if the King's funeral was on 15 February 1952, and my mother was already settled into work, she had been there at least since January, if not late 1951. Her return home to Perth must have been brief.

So … all I know for certain is that in 1952 my mother was taking in the culture she had been starved of in Western Australia. (The Australian Ballet didn't give its first performance until ten years later in 1962.) In 1952 Stow wrote to Joan of their shared appreciation: ‘Thank you for the ballet photos and the newspaper …' Then later in the same letter: ‘I have a very good little book on Ballet by Arnold Haskell. It explains a lot of the technical side that you don't see unless you know beforehand.' And then again, some years later, ‘I do hope … that you'll have plenty of time and leisure to enjoy the ballet and Regent's Park and everything else.'

My father, in contrast, disliked ballet because it was too bourgeois for his radical left-wing tastes. My mother must have been attending the ballet ‘and lots of beaut plays' with her friends, or perhaps a young, cultured Englishman. Who did she wander the rooms of the Wallace Collection with? And did she send prints of her favourite paintings to other friends or just to Stow?

Why had she never once recounted an anecdote of her time in London?

As there is no one alive to tell me the real story I can only imagine. I must imagine that my mother went to England some time in 1951 – not in order to follow her estranged husband, but because she, just like most young Australians of that period and that class, longed to see England, which was still considered the home country, and possibly because she was determined to enjoy her independence as a woman. I imagine she knew how much her young friend Mick longed for England and that's why she sent him photos and clippings and prints. But I don't imagine she did this for everyone back home in Western Australia. I imagine that her friendship with the young Stow was quite unique because of their shared passion for poetry, plays, art and ballet.

Another letter from Stow to his mother in that same year, his last at Guildford Grammar, provides one last vignette of Joan's life in England:

Had a letter from Joan on Saturday (written the Saturday before) telling me about Eton and ‘Pop' and whatnot. She says an Eton suit would just suit me. She is nursing a Russian woman now – or she was, but the woman is better and insists on Joan staying. They are terrifically wealthy – have six servants and wonderful jewels, and get burgled regularly. Joan sits in the garden all day and lives on chicken, turkey, caviare and vodka.

Who was this Russian woman? Some royal aristocrat leftover from the revolution? How did Joan come to be employed by them? Perhaps a young, na
ï
ve Australian nurse was seen as a safe sort, a trustworthy type to have among their jewels and their terrific wealth, she being from so far away that her employers might imagine she retained some strange antipodean innocence.

I love to think of my mother sitting in a garden eating caviar and sipping vodka, but I find it difficult to believe. I never in my life saw Joan sipping more than a small gin and tonic. Whenever I tried to buy her a delicious dessert she only ate two spoonfuls; if I took her out shopping for clothes and convinced her to buy a tasteful, expensive item she would leave it in the wardrobe unworn. Once, when I coaxed her into buying a beautiful string of pearls for six-hundred dollars she went back to the shop the following week to return them.
The jeweller refused to give her a refund so she came home with a credit note that was promptly lost. But perhaps this was just the Joan I knew. Clearly the Joan that Stow and Lorraine knew was someone completely different. Someone not so abstemious, but adventurous and quietly transgressive, who savoured Russian caviar in a sunlit corner of an English garden, free at last to indulge in sensuality after all those years of arid Australian-style austerity.

But I could be wrong. Being wrong, I've realised, is how I've spent most of my life: misinterpreting, misunderstanding, misjudging, miscommunicating. Words slip and slide, as T.S. Eliot said, or as Stow put it, ‘words can't cope'. And yet that's all we have. It is all that histories and stories are made of.