The Life and Loves of Lena Gaunt (22 page)

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.

U
ncle’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,
H
ELENA
scrawled across them in black, or
M
ISS
G
AUNT
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.

S
he 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.

The lacquered wooden cabinet opposite me is quiet, cold. I could flick a switch on the wall and it would warm, come to life, electrical, humming. It is not quite as old as me, this box of wires and capacitors, ceramic and metal. I recall when I first saw it, recall the wonder I felt. It will
be here long after I’ve gone. I extend my arm, meaning to touch its surface, but it’s just beyond my reach. My hands return to my lap, rest on my knees, fingers tapping in pattern to match my heart.

Next to the typewriter on the desk in my bedroom is the small box from the back of my wardrobe, dun cardboard, the size of a manuscript. I lift the lid, smell the dust smell. Blue ribbon forms a cross that binds the papers within. The pages are tightly typed, near-black with words packed line upon line, margins out close to the edge. Each page is crinkled with the imprint of the typewriter keys.

I untie the ribbon, lift the papers, and upend them onto the desk. The undersides of the pages are grey with the shadows of words bleeding through from the face. From the shelf behind the typewriter I take another sheaf of papers – new, thicker, fresh – and place them on top of the older pages. I retie the blue ribbon around and across the bundle, wrap it loosely with thick brown paper kept from long ago. On it I write her name –
MAUREEN PATTERSON
– in large capital letters.

She will make a better story of it than I could, than I have. She will make the connections, pull it all together, make it sing. Make sense of it. It’s her job. It’s what she does. I just make music. Pull music out of thin air. I am electrical by nature, musical by nature. The old lady in the chair, who once was striking, and is still there.

Across the room, the two paintings – one of Trix, so sad, so final; the other of me, silver-blue, electric – hang on the wall above the low, heavy jarrah mantelpiece. At full
stretch, I can reach to lift them from their hooks. I place them on the bed: first Trix, face up; then me, face down, facing her, our frames matching, touching.

There is no more paper rolled onto the typewriter platen. The empty manuscript box is next to it, its lid askew. My scrap box is on the dresser, its contents spilled across the surface, onto the floor, in disarray. From the desk I pick up the bundled papers, take them to the kitchen, and place them on the table, neatly, in the centre. There is paper in a drawer. I sit at the table and write, concentrating to form the letters clearly, unambiguously.

I mean
use it if you want to. Tell the story.
I hope she understands that.

In my bedroom, I wrap brown paper around the paintings on the bed, wrapping them thickly, using all of the paper. The last layer of paper curls away, loosens, unwraps itself. I take a scarf, charcoal silk, from my wardrobe and tie it around the parcel, criss-cross it snug and secure. With a thick marker pen I write her name, large, and underline it. I carry the parcel to the kitchen, place it on the table next to the bundled papers. To the note on the table I add:
These two paintings, also, are now yours.

I pick up a tea towel from the back of the kitchen chair,
fold it in half lengthwise, hang it on the hook by the sink, where it will dry. I take a glass from the draining board and fill it with water from the tap. I drink slowly from the glass, tasting the water, feeling it wet my lips, my mouth, my throat. I look out the window. The sun is low in the sky. The sky is grey, pale grey, watery grey. The light in the sky is liquid, limpid, cold.

I prepare my sweet smoke – just enough, and then some more. There is comfort – in the end, as always – in repetition, in ritual. My hands make movements that my conscious mind does not have to control, automatic, nerves firing electrical impulses, skin and bone and flesh responding. My gear is on the table by my side. I do not have to be careful any more. I am patient. Aetherised. I am acutely conscious of the sounds I am making. Even the smoke has sound.

I cannot move my body from this chair. But the smoke can take me anywhere. Blue smoke, ti-tree, the scent of oranges, turpentine and tea; sweet boronia, rosin, rosewood, on a wave of salt ocean air.

I hold the smoke in my lungs, in my body, sweet and bitter connected. My feet are flat on the floor, rest bare on the silk-warm pile of the rug. My hands rest on my knees. My fingertips tap a rhythm, pattern the blood and drug flowing through my body. Why do they call this
wasted
? This beauty. This stillness. This escape.

It’s a long, slow dawn at this time of the year. The air is cold, as I walk down the road to the beach, cold but thick,
like walking through cold honey. The streets are quiet. It is still early. I am facing west, facing the vast ocean, my back to the land. The sun will rise behind me.

The beach is empty. This beach is never empty; but today, now, the beach is empty. I am alone; just me. I stand by the limestone wall above the beach and look down on the sand, the water, look out to the horizon curved against the still-dark sky. I can hear the water move the seabed, if I listen hard enough – liquid on solid – and I breathe air, my breath shallow, shallow like the edge of the ocean, its margin, where I swim.

I walk down the stairs, kick off my sandals, feel concrete cold and hard before I step onto sand. My trousers drag, collecting grains at their hem, collecting damp from the night. I watch the moisture wick up the fabric of my trousers, a rising tide; I imagine molecules, their movement, their tiny orbits, their positive and negative, repelling and attracting. I cannot tell if the universe is in the molecules, or the molecules in the universe, or how they all connect. But I know that all is electrical by nature.

I slip my trousers down. I pull my shirt over my head, drop it at my feet. The air is cold on my skin. My skin is warm against the sky. I run my hands over my head, feel every short, silken hair alive.

My feet step into the foaming shallows. I stand at the edge of the ocean, the edge of the land. The water is cold, effervescent. I can taste salt – from the smell of it – raw in the back of my throat. I lick my lips, and taste salt there, too. I step through the shallows, my feet raising sand storms in the sea. I cannot see my feet. As I walk further, deeper, I
feel the touch of seaweed against my legs, brushing lightly, delicate, frightening. I walk out until it is deep enough to swim. I lift my feet from the sand, pull my arms through the water from in front of me to the side. I hear the water bubble, hear it increase in pitch as I push it away from me, like a waterfall flowing uphill. I feel the
phush
of smaller, finer bubbles, their small bead on my arms, trapped in the pale hairs.

I dip my head below the surface of the water, lift my feet again from the seabed, my arms outstretched and circling to keep me afloat. I sing, under the sea, my human voice waking in the salt water, singing words I could not say in the air, singing, each to each. The sea sings back to me, humming syllables that make no sense,
maaaah maaaaah.
I push my head up, surface into the air, into quiet.

Nearly there.

Under the surface of the water I drop my arms into position to play – right hand raised to shoulder height; left hand dropped as low as my waist. My hands fall into place – left hand palm down, flattened, to draw volume; right hand with fingers pinched lightly together to form an eye. I move my fingers in the water, effect tiny changes in the waves that effect bigger movements. I play, with minute movements of each hand, long ago learned. Muscle memory takes over from my conscious brain as my fingers and hands move under the water’s cover. I know the movements, from a lifetime of playing.

As I pluck the final note, I let myself sink under the water. Expelling air from my mouth and nose, as the bubbles rise to the surface above my head I hear waveforms, harmonic
intervals; I can hear the sound waves mixing in the air and water, undulating, soothing. I will myself to be as heavy as I feel; I feel myself within the water, feel myself displace it, feel my body move through the water and make it eddy and roil, feel bubbles rise in my wake and turbulence all around. Trix is there; Grace is there. Grace is there, above me, her dark hair around her head like a halo, like a dinner plate, like a sea anemone’s tentacles, like a star. Grace holds her arms out towards me, then rolls in the water above me and faces away, her hair tentacling around her, blocking out the sun, the sky, the world, the air above. I wave my hand at Grace, wave at her to turn back, not to go away, but she does not respond. I stop waving. The water is warm. It makes a pressure against my ears, a pressure I can hear inside my head as a single note, humming, musical, low. It is B-flat, like the black strip near the bottom of the piano. But it isn’t played on the piano, it’s a different sound, not a hammer on a wire, nor a bow across a string, nor an electrical field interrupted; it is a humming, inside my head, but low; lower than any note I have heard before. It is the lowest note in the universe; a grace note, a ghost note, the low hum of everything, connecting.