Black Mirror (12 page)

 

And each time she re-entered their apartment on Rue Gît le Coeur, she expected to find her Jules returned. The bed still bore his shape and the curtains waved as they had when he was there. There were the garlic bulbs on the windowsill he had assiduously cultivated. There were potted plants she had purchased that he had undertaken to keep watered: a particularly vivid pelargonium, African violets, ivy. There was the
window shape that had framed him, since he liked to gaze down at the street, and its rectangle hung like a portrait of what explicitly was not there. The double bed they had slept in was entirely mnemonic; Victoria could hardly bring herself to climb under its covers only to find his persistent scent, and her own heart in quick-time, and her own erogenous rush. Sometimes she woke from dreams thinking he had returned and was beside her, but she found herself, empty-handed, embracing only air.

There on the wall was a trace in chalk of his profile. And there, his Turkish slippers, still nestling aligned under the bed. Superstition prevented her from moving and disposing of them, and they rested, twin boats and ridiculously long, beneath the green fringe of the emerald coverlet they had married their milky bodies on.

Victoria could not paint: half-finished images littered her apartment and were propped abandoned against walls. She was useless and unmotivated. She ate hashish, which burnt her throat, and then drank to excess, and tried violently to vomit out all of her sorrows.

 

One night Victoria dreamt of a network of kissing of which she was the centre. Nets of kiss patterns tessellated, lips meeting lips, kiss-cross, kiss-cross, until a kiss that had begun with her arrived at last with Jules. In this dream her desire travelled Surrealistically to find him, stretching out into night-space, travelling down half-lit streets and in the bellies of heaving trains,
across fields reaching in long stripes under glaring full moonlight, into laneways, into briny ports, all the way — in a zoom effect — around head-shaped France, finally finding the bed upon which he now lay separately sleeping, his brown eyes closed.

 

Anna searched in Victoria's drawers while she slept.

Victoria possessed an enormous number of gloves, in every colour, some paired and some single. They were something she collected, a kind of obsession. The pairs were pinned at the wrists with small golden pins and the singles formed their own piles, neat and multicoloured. There were also scarves and assorted beads; and secreted away, wrapped in tissue paper, was a fossilised starfish, perfectly preserved. A few dozen French post-cards, none of which was addressed to Victoria, lay tied with lengths of sepia-coloured ribbon. There was also a photograph, cracked and stained: Victoria with her arm around Pablo Picasso.

At the back of the dressing-table drawer was a box of ancient items — an opalescent buckle shaped as a broad-petalled flower, buttons of bone and of pearl-shell, small coin-shapes of amber, and a single satin shoe that was ash-smeared and smelt of smoke. There too rested Victoria's mother's journal, and Anna could not resist peering inside. Small fragments were legible, but for the most part it was written in an unfamiliar script; it looked furtive, illegible. Only ampersands, their filigrees, were at all familiar, but connection was clearly the least of its meanings.

Victoria woke suddenly.

I dreamt my brother was above my bed, swinging his swords. Here I am, an old woman, and still afraid of him, she said, in a voice quiet and tiny like that of someone dying.

Anna held the journal behind her back.

There is a stringency
to writing biography that Anna seems unable to observe. She had imagined a process of solidification, like the building of an identifiable face out of clay: the slow, careful achievement of feature and definition. But the more Anna knew of her subject the more imprecise she began to seem, the more dispersed in story, the more
disincarnated.
She assembled her notes and transcriptions in a chain before her, and saw not the neat confirmation of a life, but its meagre supplement. Not attestation, but its barest trace. Biography works, she thought, as reliquary does, investing in fragments. She remembered seeing the index finger of Galileo mounted in a small ivory and gold tower in the science museum in Florence, as though it signified something other than the adoration of his acolytes. The finger pointed to heaven, recapitulating cartoon-like his cosmic imaginings. And when Anna tried to take a photograph a museum attendant
appeared from nowhere to sweep down and prohibit her —
no! no! no! no!
the woman shouted. She gestured at a poster depicting a camera cancelled by a huge black cross.

 

What black crosses operate now, to prevent one person knowing another? What X-marked cancellations?

Anna is striving against the treason of images that Victoria has presented her with, to try to impose order on her information. She writes the words
skeleton plan
in the centre of the page. She will build the body anew. She will start with the parents.

It is a ludicrous reduction, but Anna Griffin begins to try to meet Victoria Morrell once again. Novelistically.

(i)

Victoria May Morrell was born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1910, to Herbert and Rose (née Boyle). Herbert was a banker and investor, fabulously rich, and Rose a society beauty of the hourglass, peaches-and-cream and rose-budded variety. This implies a parental species of cardboard cutouts — indeed one can almost see the spherical belly alongside an amphora of womanliness — but in fact both parents were unconventional, even eccentric.

Herbert Arthur Morrell had a passion for collecting — such as only the truly wealthy can indulge — and sought out objects on a criterion of radical unAustralianness. Contemptuous of the local, he
chased with laborious effort and at foolish expense exotic knick-knacks, gewgaws, art-works and curiosities.
Foreign
was a word he loved to roll in his over-dentistried mouth. He wore suits of Assam silk and smoked Havana cigars; his shoes were English and French and his hats inevitably Spanish. He was both lavishly multinational and stubbornly monocultural, and believed that the millionaires of the world had a duty to destroy nations in the interests of laissez-faire capitalism, so that in the end the Universal Marketplace would mother-succour all (his own chosen phrase, it must be added, garnered from the Melbourne
Argus
).

No more nations! Herbert declaimed, rather grandiloquently, in boardrooms — to the alarm of bewhiskered men with kangaroo-and-emu shaped tie pins and investments in wheat-and-sheep, some of whom thought him traitorous (though a damned spunky fellow) — and he would go on digressively to describe the features of this or that new taxidermic acquisition, a falcon in a bell-jar from the Royal collection in Persia, prized as much, he explained, for the scimitar particularity of its shiny beak as for its hunting prowess and general nastiness. The Persians are a race, he went on, for whom everything is symbolic: they cannot see a beak but think sword; they cannot see a woman but think honey. (Here the board-roomed men exchanged baffled glances and conferred.) They are by habit indolent, effeminate, untrustworthy and sly, but have arts of the highest distinction and calligraphic
genius.
Why I have myself
… and here Herbert would extrapolate with an authenticating traveller's tale, concerning adventures connoisseurish, gustatory or haremesque, that disclosed once and for all the pan-symbolic nature of Persians.

His utterances were legendary and widely reported, and no board meeting, apparently, was ever dull.

Herbert Morrell had opinions on every race and nation on earth and had systematically ranked them. At the top of the list, at one hundred per cent, he placed Great Britain, Great Britain the incomparable. This was a nation he considered peerless in its qualities and achievements. He thought of steam engines, country manors and Westminster Bridge, of butlers with white gloves bringing letters on a silver tray, and tier on tier of cakes and sweetmeats at Fortnum and Mason. He thought of dead Queen Victoria and her inestimable bosom. Her regal perpendicular. That nose. That chin. Of the words
British Empire
, which excited him, economistically.

Other races and nations (for he mentally conflated them) fell away in the steep declension of imperfection — the US at ninety-five per cent and Germany at ninety — right down to the Javans, the Peruvians and the lowly Hottentots. At the bottom of his scale were the Australian Aborigines, a people whom Herbert considered despicable since they were without markets, commodities and evidence of artistry, and moreover refused all the blandishments of Civilisation.
Australia would advance, he believed, only when the extirpation of the Aborigine was complete. In his utopian moments he imagined the nation renamed New Britain and the landscape converted entirely by hedgerows and elms, the final stage before an ultimate decomposition of all nations, whereupon the global marketplace would replace all known systems of government. He had written and self-published a volume on this topic, entitled
Whither History?
, and had performed numerous speaking engagements, the most prestigious of which were at the Melbourne and Empire Clubs. He considered himself ahead of his time, and was undaunted by a lack of official interest in his schemes. In the meantime he devoted himself to collecting objects and making money, and strode down Collins Street, his belly before him, knowing that wealth alone remained the incontestable index of worth.

Rose Mary Morrell, the woman before whom suitors grovelled and swooned, dissolving, weak at the knees, in truly disabling desire, was not interested at all in the construction of racial rankings or the envisioning of global markets. Born of a different class — her parents were indigent Irish, a farm labourer and a housemaid — she knew secretly but surely that wealth is always undeserved, and that value is always a perverse and calculating endowment. The invisible preciousness of things was never accounted for. Her father's meticulous memories. The bravery of crossing oceans. Threads of her
mother's grey hair left in the creases of a pillow. She adored all her brothers and sisters and mourned daily for her parents, and it was perhaps this grieving disposition that gave her an elusive and ambiguous quality, so that even in conditions most social and pleasantly extrovert she seemed distracted by some inner and private contemplation. As she listened to yet another of her husband's mercantile monologues — he was engaged by profit, regulation, the delights of trade surplus — she thought of the unprofitable and unregulated aspects of things, the shape of her baby son's head, the bitten fingernails of her lover, the Melbourne rain, so Irish, so soft-dripping on the plane trees, and the relic of her dead mother's hair, curled Celtic and frailly intricate in the Whitby jet brooch she wore nestling against her heart.

This disproportion in the value of things was known to both husband and wife; but Rose was more ideologically divergent than Herbert would ever discover. Persuaded to the cause of International Socialism by her lover, the chauffeur, she read inflammatory tracts and workers' papers with idealist avidity, and made generous donations, anonymously, to a dozen worthy causes. Her beauty, she knew, designated her ornamental, so that she was beyond suspicion with regard to having ideas. If in company she forgot herself and produced an insight or a witticism, this was regarded as an instance of charming aberrancy. Men and women gazed at her gorgeous face and thought only one thing.

Rose Morrell, that is to say, was a clandestine
woman. Their enormous house in Kew filled up with strange and valuable objects, but she cherished investments of a more occulted kind. The concealed. The unseen. The barely-in-existence. Secrecy enchanted her. She was drawn to dreams and varieties of inner space. She gazed into the centre of roses and composed verses about water. She kept a journal written partly in her own coded language and copied lines of other people's poetry whose heartiness she delighted in:

(Her favourite: Whitman.) And she cultivated, most especially, her love for the tall thin man who stood out there in the cold in his rained-on cap and white kid gloves, the man who stamped at the ground with his feet and rubbed his freezing hands together, who blew visible currents of breath and hugged himself against the wind, and who in a repeated simple action she found entirely affecting, would lean forward to take an umbrella from the elephant's foot stand, pop it open before her and hold it up in a steady dome — her own little baptistery, her own holy place — so that she might be sealed in his compass from the driving rain.

The cabin of the car was pre-occupied by their sweet complicity. It was the core of something, a cushioned centre.

When the second baby was born Herbert Morrell
announced in a loud and gaudy newspaper advertisement the Auspicious Arrival of Victoria May, sister of Henry Edward, and Scion Additional of the Eminent and Ever-expanding Morrells; but his wife was more than usually elusive and quiet. Rose read in her daughter's face the immanent presence of her lover: figments of his mouth appeared, the intimation of his nose; her body was long with his gangly and unself-conscious length, and her two tiny little hands looked like the hands of workers, like hands reddened and chafed and too much rubbed together. The baby was a reinstatement, a bundle of
déjà vu
. Rose rocked her and kissed gently the diamond-shaped fontanelle. She peered and itemised, thought how unMorrell. And when she awoke to attend Victoria at night — for she had dismissed the nanny from all night-time duties — when she stumbled with a flickering candle towards the beribboned and lacy cradle (hypnagogic, dazed, following a cry through the darkness), it might have been her chauffeur she was stumbling to embrace. She raised up the baby and held it against her, sexually overcome. Its scent flooded over her. Its signification.

This Secret,
Rose wrote in code in her journal,
is a concentrated version of all my other secrets: ‘the palpable in its place and the impalpable in its place'
— since she could never resist quoting a line of dear Walt Whitman —
‘O unspeakable passionate love.'

W and I were today in the Daimler together & he whispered, as he does, sweet'eart, sweet'eart, & he held our baby for the very first time. I thought he would faint away, his
features were so very ghosted & so intense, but instead he lifted Victoria's gown & blew noisily on her navel, as I had seen my own father do, in that comical way, with a blubbery blow, like an uncontrollable kiss, & then he smiled, & then he laughed, & then we laughed together, & it was a truly wonderful moment, in our dwarf house, the car, with our baby, Victoria, the palpable hieroglyph of all our impalpable combinations, of all that rests between us & by which I celebrate myself …

We almost hit a tram, returning, we were so altogether distracted …

It continues to rain & Victoria inflates with my milk. H wants to employ a wetnurse but I adore my own breasts & their melony roundness. Her mouth is sweetness itself. She suckles like a lover.

 

Herbert Morrell was by most accounts obtuse to the obvious and seems never to have noticed Rose Morrell's truant affections, nor the chauffeur's overzealous and particular attentiveness. He continued braggadocio and monumental: detailing the varieties of his means of accumulating wealth, rejoicing in the peculiarities of lesser nations, and unpacking crates of impedimenta that arrived on globe-encircling ships. As he clipped cigars in the Melbourne Club, he told of his Cuban cigar clipper fashioned from the teeth of wild animals which was reputed to confer on the act of smoking obscure sexual potentialities; then he railed against the new Fisher Labor government, against miners-who-were-always-on-strike, against reprobates,
Aborigines, Henry George and the IWW. He also announced his intention to purchase as soon as possible a Voisin biplane, exactly like the one magician Harry Houdini had just flown at Digger's Rest to the wild acclamation of the Australian press. He would fly, he said, and nations would blur beneath him. He began, Houdini-like, to lust for exaggeration.

 

It was in 1913 that Herbert Morrell's family — minus the chauffeur and most of the house-staff but complete with a brand-new Voisin biplane — moved to the Western Australian goldfields in a relocation that was meant initially to last just one year. Herbert had decided to expand his large interests in gold exploration and believed — in a symptom others would later interpret as the beginnings of his paranoia — that his current managers were untrustworthy and in the service of a Jewish conspiracy. He would simply intervene and take over, and set things aright. Rose was stricken. She pleaded her case, to no avail, to remain in Melbourne, and in the end consented to follow her husband to the other side of the nation.

I am to be carted away into the desert. W weeps in his car & is inconsolable. He says he will hang himself, but I have made him promise not to. It is one year, I tell him. One single year. Then I will return & we will re-establish our lives, & in the meantime I shall write in my secret way, & I shall not contort my heart nor allow any forgetting; in candlelight I shall think of you, in that quivering circle in the darkness, in that mystic visibility which I carry to light our child, pushing away
at the swallowing shadows with the globe of my coming, taking her up, infolding her, kissing both of you at once … Think of this, my love, kissing both of you at once.