Everywhere I Look (7 page)

‘How did Hora take it?' I ask.

‘Oh,' he says, filling my glass, ‘I don't think he noticed.'

On Sunday morning the magpies are shouting when we set out in the car on what I am beginning to realise is a highly structured visit to a series of personal shrines.

Gaita shows me the site of the long-gone camp where the Cairn Curran Reservoir labourers were accommodated, and the ramshackle hall opposite it, where dances were held and films shown. We visit his primary school, at which ‘Professor Gaita' has recently instituted two awards: one for intellectual achievement, and the other the Romulus Gaita Prize for Kindness: ‘though I did wonder,' he says, not quite joking, and I'm not quite sure if I should laugh, ‘if it might be a
corrupting
prize—that kids might try to be kind for the wrong reasons.'

And then we head for Frogmore. He parks beside the bitumen road. We climb over a gate and walk a couple of hundred metres along a straight gravel track into the low, flat, empty landscape. My God, it's bleak out here. A steady, cool wind passes across the plain, coming from nowhere, going nowhere. Everything is brown or grey. Our boots crunch on the gravel. This is the road along which Christine Gaita trudged in her heels and waisted cotton dress, carrying her little suitcase, coming back to try again with her husband and son after each of her desperate flights to Melbourne.

‘When I brought Nick Drake here,' says Gaita, ‘it was a very hot day. The house had burnt down years ago. Scotch thistles had grown all over it. It was…desolate. It shocked me to see how desolate it was. I insisted on bringing him back another day, in softer light.'

‘What sort of life did your mother expect or hope to have?' I ask.

‘She'd been training as a chemist, in Germany.' His tone is carefully neutral. ‘She thought she would have a city life. When I brought my aunt Maria here from Germany a few years ago, she didn't say much. She just cried. To think her sister had had to live in such a place.'

We climb through a wire fence. There's a small dam.

‘Is this where you chucked your dad's precious razor?'

‘This is the real dam,' he says, ‘in which my father's real razor still lies rusting. Not long before he died he asked me again what happened to the razor. I just shrugged.'

‘You
never told him
? You held out for forty years? What a power struggle!'

He looks surprised. ‘I suppose it was.' He puts his head on one side, and gives his rare, endearing smile.

The burnt ruin of the house was demolished in 1969. The place where it stood is now just scraped-looking dirt strewn with old-fashioned brown beer bottles and studded with pieces of broken concrete, rusty iron and smashed crockery. A crumbly patina of sheep shit coats everything. We mooch about with our eyes on the ground. I long to pick up a piece of the china and put it in my pocket, but one does not steal souvenirs from shrines. A large lump is starting to form in my throat.

In the dirt near the fence lies the metal head of a spade, rusted away into a graceful curve like a palm tree. I pick it up by the shaft and hold it out to him.

‘Look. How beautiful.'

‘That,' he says in a noncommittal tone, ‘is probably the one with which we buried Orloff.' In sentences of perfect syntax, as formally as if he were reciting a liturgy, he relates how the dog, which had taken a ground-glass bait, managed to drag himself as far as the outside of the wire fence, and died there.

‘My father lifted him over the fence, so that he could be buried on the right side. It was the first time I saw my father cry. The only time we ever cried together was beside the grave of Orloff.'

Looking down at the unmarked ground where the bones of Orloff lie, I feel my self-control begin to slip. There's a loud squawk above our heads in the pine tree. We look up with a start. Two brilliant white cockatoos glide down from a high branch in a big showy curve. I glance at Gaita. Down his cheek is pouring a sheet of tears.

‘I know it's silly,' he mutters, wiping them away with the back of his hand, ‘but for a second I thought it was my cocky Jack. They can live for eighty or ninety years, you know.'

We stand there in silence, in the steady wind, heads down, hands in our pockets.

He drifts over to a huge pine that has toppled beside the dam. Its bare upper branches, trained sideways by decades of wind, look like thick grey hair streaming. Its roots are in the air, but its lower branches are still putting out cones and fresh green needles. The symbolism of this is so obvious that we can't even look at each other.

Once we have inspected the collapsing shed on the nearby farm, where Romulus Gaita laboured over a forge at his ironwork, and once we have peered through the smashed windows of the derelict house where Raimond was often invited to afternoon tea by the old ladies of the Lilley family, the morning is gone.

As we drive into Maryborough, I spot a white tower on a bushy hilltop.

‘What's that?' I say, making conversation.

‘That's the Pioneer Tower.' He keeps his eyes on the road. ‘From which Mitru jumped to his death.'

We drive to its base. The observation deck at the top has been enclosed with white cyclone wire: Maryborough is a town whose economic base has collapsed, and whose young people know despair and have acted on it. We climb the stairs, stand awkwardly at the railing for a few moments, and hurry down again. We drive in silence down the old town's handsome streets, and then he steers the car on to the overgrown land along the railway line, behind a deserted flourmill.

‘This,' says Gaita in his quiet, neutral voice, ‘must be where they shot the bit with the pram'—a scene in which the boy Raimond, trundling a pram that contains his baby half-sister, hurries after his disturbed mother who has picked up a stranger in the street. She and the man disappear into a shed, and have sex against a wall. The frantic boy watches the encounter, with its violence and degradation, through a crack in the corrugated iron.

I don't know how much more of this I can take. I am struggling to hold on to some sort of self-command.

By the time we reach the cemetery and walk among the graves of these tragic people, Romulus, Hora, Mitru and, finally, near the fence, Christine, with its stone marked
She suffered deeply
(I read the dates, I do the sums; this woman killed herself a few weeks short of her thirtieth birthday), I am rigid with a distress so overwhelming that I know, with what's left of my mind, that it can't possibly be only mine. Some barrier between me and this man I hardly know has been breached by his story. I'm at the mercy of a tremendous force, a depth of sorrow that no book, no film can ever fully express or console.

Ritual behaviour is called for at shrines, but I can't think of a way to act. If we knew each other better, it would be natural for me to make some sort of human gesture of sympathy, or respect. But I'm paralysed by the fantasy of professional detachment, and by a strained sense of formality that I don't understand.

We stand side by side in front of Christine Gaita's grave.

Then Gaita moves slightly so that his shoulder lightly touches mine. I lean my shoulder against his. He puts his arm round my waist. I copy his movement, and we turn and walk back to the car like that, in silence, as if we were friends, though which of us is trying to comfort the other I have no idea.

2007

My Dear Lift-Rat

LAST week I had my hair cut. I was pleased, in the limited way one dares to be at this age. The next day my five-year-old granddaughter came home from kinder. She studied me up and down, and said with a crooked smile, ‘I don't like your haircut, Nanna. You look like Luke Skywalker. It's dumb at the sides.'

The complex emotions provoked in a woman by this kind of remark have been recorded in literature by only one writer I know. Oh, there are sure to be others (Barbara Pym, for example, or Patrick Hamilton) who can strike a note of mortification and inject it with the tincture of the ridiculous that makes it bearable. But the one closest to my heart is Elizabeth Jolley.

It must have been the early 1980s when I first met Elizabeth. She was only four years younger than my mother. We lived on opposite sides of the continent, so we began to write to each other, and kept it up for twenty years.

She wrote flesh-and-blood letters, dipping an old fountain pen into a bottle of ink. She had an attractive hand, swift and slanting, with plenty of underlinings, and the same German-style capitals that she uses in her books on nouns she wants to stress—important words, like Birth, or School, or crashing Bore.

Once I told her, at an unhappy time, that I couldn't sleep. ‘Don't just lie there,' she wrote back. ‘Get up and make yourself a cup of Tea. Take a handful of Biscuits to the Desk and do your Tax Return.' I've never said to her face how much her books mean to me, the spasms of mad laughter they provoke, the quiet tears of recognition and relief. I wrote about them in literary magazines, trying not to go over the top. She would write to thank me for the articles, in a formal way. Her manners are impeccable. I never knew whether she really liked them, or if she thought I had missed the point.

But I am still grateful for certain observations that she keeps returning to, throughout her work, leitmotifs that resound like quietly struck chords. To me they have the calming power of prayers.

‘The strong feeling of love which goes from the parent to the child,' she writes in
My Father's Moon
, and again in that tiny, beautiful book
The Orchard Thieves
, ‘does not seem part of the child which can be given back to the parent.'

‘Water,' she says, ‘is the last thing to get dark.' And my favourite: ‘It is a privilege to prepare the place where someone else will sleep.'

Late in the 1990s, when I was living in Sydney, Elizabeth came to town for some literary event. We made a date to go out for dinner. I was to pick her up at her hotel, the swanky Hyde Park Hyatt where her publisher had installed her. I arrived in the lobby. No sign of a thin, tall, old lady in a loose cotton dress, with Roman sandals on her beautiful, bony feet. What was the polite thing? Should I go up to her room?

I approached the twin banks of lifts. The one at the far end landed with a discreet ping. Its door hissed open. Nobody appeared. Then, in profile to me, a grey, bespectacled head poked out, like that of a rat cautiously preparing to leave its hole. It swung this way and that. Its eye caught mine. It was Elizabeth.

I won't try to describe what she would call our ‘endless laughing fit', the way we staggered about the lobby on sagging legs. But from that evening on, she signed her letters ‘Lift-Rat', and that's how I addressed her.

In 2000 and 2001 Elizabeth's letters grew fewer, and odder. She wrote indignantly about Hitler, how as a sixteen-year-old on holiday in Nazi Germany she had only escaped by ‘being rushed to a small cargo ship'.

She told me that, ‘like Ibsen and other writers', she had started having trouble ‘remembering words and phrases'. Her spelling was shot. Her handwriting shrank to a scrawl.

‘Destruction,' she wrote, ‘can't go on forever.' Soon the letters stopped. Her son wrote to tell me that she had been diagnosed with dementia and admitted to a nursing home.

On a very hot February day in Perth, I was taken to Claremont to see her.

‘You might get a shock,' they said. ‘She won't know who you are.'

The only patient in a four-bed ward, she lay under a crisp white sheet with her head back on the pillow, her mouth open, her eyes closed. The veranda outside gave on to a shaded courtyard full of big old trees and strongly flowering shrubbery.

Pleasant airs came in through the open door. There was no airconditioning, and I was glad of this: she would hate to be shut away from the world of plants and grass that her work so quietly, so stoically praises.

I had never touched her, and I didn't touch her now. I stood at the end of the bed and looked at her. She was peaceful, cared for by people who loved and respected her. She didn't seem to be suffering; and she certainly didn't seem close to death.

But it was too late for me to say goodbye, or to thank her for the last sentence of
The Orchard Thieves
, where an old woman points out comfortingly to her daughter that the difference between a bad haircut and a good one is only a week.

2005

PART THREE

Dreams of Her Real Self

While Not Writing a Book

DIARY 1

The grandchildren I mention are Olive, Ted and Ambrose, aged at the time eight, four and two; they and their parents live in the house next door.

Early in the morning, after a heavy night of babysitting, I'm watering out the back when I hear a shuffling sound. Olive comes up behind me in her spotted dressing-gown and slippers, looking hunched and dramatic, and holding a sheet of paper in one hand. ‘Read this,' she says. ‘Dear Nanny I feel really Embarrased about last night and Ted got all the Books he wanted, all the games, and all the things he wanted and I didn't even get one single thing! And I would like you to acknowladge that. Lots of love Olive xxoo.'

I acknowledge it (it's true). She straightens her spine and runs off cheerfully. When I come inside I find her on the couch watching the end of
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
. Together we gaze at those bizarre sequences: the tiny ‘scientists' in shirtsleeves and ties swarming everywhere on the landing site; François Truffaut in his neat, pale-tan bomber jacket; the communication by music, the mysterious riff played on a keyboard by the young nerd; the advance guard of smaller vessels; then the shimmering into view of the colossal spacecraft. I'm leaning forward, holding my breath, with a lump in my throat. The shining object opens its maw and the abducted earthlings stagger out: the navy men in their World War II uniforms who state name, rank and serial number—then the children—then
the dog
.