Forty-Seventeen (21 page)

During the year 1911 Jenolan was visited by 8460 persons who paid 21 325 visits of inspection to the various caves. –
Percy Hunter, Superintendent, Immigration and Tourist Bureau.

The statistics for the Jenolan limestone caves of New South Wales included more than bona fide visitors, they included his great-grandmother's visits to the Caves as a whore.

The police documents described his great-grandmother's methods when she first worked as a young whore from Blackheath, Katoomba, and the caves in the Blue Mountains. She would join a party of men and go with them to the Jenolan Caves where she would stay overnight at the guest house, sharing herself among the men.

Earlier in her career she used to attract the attention of male parties while they had a pint for the road or whatever at the Carrington, the Ivanhoe, the Hydroa, or the Hydro Majestic. They would suggest to her that she join them for a lark, a jaunt down to the Caves. Later she worked from the Caves guest house.

According to the evidence, earlier in her career she pretended not to have been to the Caves and usually implied that she would lose wages if she went to the Caves with them.

The men would offer to make up her wages and she would accept. At some point she dropped this pretence.

He stood in the room at the Hydro Majestic, in the disused wing, at the room number given as one of her addresses during that time. The room was fairly much as it had been in her day. It might have been painted, but the fittings were from the turn of the century. The Hydro had had its own electric generator quite early but the electrical switches and fittings were dated. It was no longer part of the Hydro offered to the public as accommodation.

If she lived today, he thought, she would have advertised in the Katoomba newspaper as Trixie, Delilah or Monique and offered ‘relaxing massage', advertised ‘motel visits'.

He touched the chipped ‘Dreadnought' enamel hand basin, cold water only. She must have used the basin for her ablutions. The room belonged back with the days of rail, spas, health resorts.

‘You say your grandmother lived in this room once?'

‘Yes, great-grandmother,' he said to the manager, who had been persuaded to rent him the room.

‘As long as you're happy, as you can see it's not up to scratch.'

‘No, it's OK. It's how I thought it would be. It's a nostalgia trip.'

‘I had them sweep it out but there wasn't much more we could do with it.'

‘It's OK.'

He dropped his luggage and took off his coat and with this the manager left him.

He sat on the bed. The bed. He took out the First World War hip flask which had come down to him from his great-grandmother and drank deeply from the cognac. He'd fantasised that the flask belonged to a young lover of hers. It was certainly not what would have been considered a woman's flask. He saw men offering her drinks from their flasks, seeing it as a test of her attitude to life, she knowing this, swigging from it with gusto, letting them know what sort of woman she was prepared to be for them. But somehow she'd ended up with a flask in her possession. Now in his possession.

He opened the drawers, papered with newspapers about forty years old, not as he'd hoped eighty years old. They were her drawers though, she'd opened them, put her lace, silk and satin into them.

The electric light globe was only 25 watts and the dimness pleased him, it was more the strength of light of her times.

In the village of Blackheath he stood at the war memorial and wondered how many of the names on the list of dead had visited her before they went to Gallipoli, the Somme, the Sinai. Maybe they had talked about doing it but never got around to it before they left.

That she'd been stunningly beautiful might have daunted some of the younger ones. She had left 144
photographs of herself posing with men at the Caves – posing at the Devil's Canyon or the Grand Arch. Many were almost identical photographs and he had at first mistaken them for copies. He'd then noticed that the faces of the men were different from photograph to photograph.

The staff at the Caves must have known her. How did she prevent them making snide remarks about her changing male companionship? Maybe she paid them. She had eventually stopped pretending and for a time lived at the Caves guest house where it must have been accepted.

Going to the River Caves, the Temple of Baal, the Skeleton Cave, the Left Imperial, the Right Imperial, acting out exclamations of pleasure each of those 144 times.

He'd day-dreamed about the Caves and Katoomba and the Hydro Majestic while he'd been in Europe. He'd dreamed of the dim limestone caves and the grand hotels of Katoomba's grand days, the distinguished guest houses. He'd wanted to live among the relics and possessions of those times, he'd wanted to buy back his great-grandmother's guest house, restock the library with short-story collections,
Punch
magazine,
London Illustrated News
, the old
Bulletin.
He'd wanted to go alone into the huge limestone caves at Jenolan and be quiet and alone.

He and Belle had prowled the guest house, brothel, home of his great-grandmother. The place was dilapidated.

He wanted to insinuate himself into the intimacy of another generation and another time. He wanted to live among the obsolete and the quaint. To go away from his times, not because he disliked his times, but because of some genetic calling.

‘I became what I became deliberately and with as much good grace and pleasure as I could find,' she'd written at twenty. He wondered how deliberate it really had been.

Her travelling rug, her travelling drinking cups and the officer's hip flask had come down to him. But hardly anything written by her. He held the rug to his face, trying to inhale the essence. There had been the photographs and a piece of a stalactite. He ran his finger over a stain on the rug, smelled it again, willing it to be the stain of his great-grandmother.

Standing in the River Cave he shivered as he fingered the piece of stalactite. It had probably been broken off by one of the men who'd taken her there. How many pieces of limestone did men break off for her? She'd kept only one piece. They'd had to close the Arch Cave from which it probably came because too many pieces had been broken off in the early days. A ‘Goth' from Bathurst had destroyed five columns one day.

He stood there now in the Caves wanting to replace the one piece, but as the guide boomed with false animation he decided that it would be foolish to leave it. And he could not bear to part with it.

‘The Arch Cave, now closed, is separated from the Nettle Cave underneath by a thin layer of rock. You
can hear footsteps above you. The Belfry at the end will give out musical sounds when struck and can be heard as far away as the Imperial Cave.'

The Caves were repairing themselves. He kept the piece.

In the Sculptor's Studio he saw ‘the unfinished statues and grotesque forms'. The likeness of a woman with a large bonnet. The bird and animal in combat. The giant mushroom. The hands of Joshua. The Lobster. The Judge's Wig. The Orator with a bald forehead and white locks down to his shoulders, one arm raised.

The guide explained that the Mons Meg formation was named after a cannon standing outside Edinburgh Castle.

Had she spent the night with one man after she'd shared her favours among them?

One day last year he'd entered a Sydney antique shop and found no one at the counter. Signs were everywhere explaining method of payment, information about the items. He rang the bell and a woman appeared from the back of the shop.

In the low light the woman appeared to be hiding herself, the way she held her head down. He realised that it was a girl he'd known years earlier who'd been a whore. He was about to say to her, ‘Don't we know each other?' but stopped, realising that she'd seen too many faces in her life to be likely to remember him.

She'd told him what he'd wanted to know about the inkpot and then returned to the back of the shop.

Afterwards he'd thought that maybe all the signs in
the shop were to avoid questions and limit customer contact.

The Caves' guide called the stalactites ‘decorations' and talked of ‘nature the silent artist'.

‘We look to find the truth,' the guide said, ‘but find mystery.' He looked for traces.

He saw Victorian sexuality embalmed here, of both sexes, of all the sexual fluids. He saw the Caves through the eyes of his great-grandmother because they remained as they were when she'd lived, and when she'd come there.

The Charon, the Confectioner's Shop, the River Styx. The Enchanted Forest. The Devil's Table.

He went back to his room at the Hydro Majestic. He had to go to Canberra for a service to mark the death of his friend Edith and report to the office. His contract had not yet been renewed.

He drank. He lay on the bed, looked again and again at the few remnants of her life, fondled the piece of stalactite. He took ‘scenic walks' but most were now overgrown.

He extended his stay at the hotel for another month despite the spareness of the room and the manager gave up pestering him with offers of a better room.

He prowled the old guest houses, visited antique shops, visited the tourist ‘attractions' of her time, now unvisited and run down. He had fantasies of buying her old guest house. Or he thought of working in the Caves as a guide and telling better stories to the visitors to the Caves. He would tell them different, more
elaborate stories, he would rename the Caves, weave in the story of his great-grandmother's life. His life. He would change the commentary slightly every day until it was totally his.

After his visits to the surrounding villages and to Katoomba he would come back to his room having bought something she might have had in her life, a hair brush, a nail-care set, a perfume bottle.

The room began to fill with the shapes and objects of her life.

He received a note from his office in Canberra saying that his contract would not be renewed.

He was now living entirely on her – the wealth he'd inherited from her.

He liked it.

One day he came home with some dresses and a corset from her times and he knew then that he was falling down a genetic spiral. He didn't mind.

His young womanfriend in London wrote him a third postcard.

She addressed it to him at the Hydro Majestic Hotel where he was staying, where he and Belle used to stay, in the depressed, run-down, turn-of-the-century health resort district around Katoomba where his great-grandmother used to operate.

The postcard said:

 

If I offered you £100 would you consider us getting together in Vienna, London, or at this weird address where you're living in the mountains? Why are you living there? Are you writing that book at last? The Durruti story is really great. But you and I know the ‘full story'. Let's get together and talk about a love formed from the discipline of indiscipline. And don't you think it's time I stopped whoring and you became a father? You once said we had become footnotes to a poem by Levine. Isn't it time the footnotes became their own story?

Frank Moorhouse was born in the coastal town of Nowra, NSW. He worked as an editor of small-town newspapers and as an administrator, and became a full-time writer in the 1970s. He has written fiction, non-fiction, screenplays and essays, and edited many collections of writing.

Forty-Seventeen
was given a laudatory full-page review by Angela Carter in
The New York Times
and was named Book of the Year by
The Age
and ‘moral winner' of the Booker Prize by the London magazine
Blitz
.
Grand Days
, the first novel in The Edith Trilogy, won the SA Premier's Award for Fiction.
Dark Palace
won the 2001 Miles Franklin Literary Award and was shortlisted for the NSW Premier's Literary Award, the Victorian Premier's Literary Award and the
Age
Book of the Year Award.

Moorhouse has undertaken numerous fellowships and his work has been translated into several languages. He was made a member of the Order of Australia for services to literature in 1985 and was awarded an honorary doctorate from Griffith University in 1997.