The Dressmaker's Daughter (18 page)

A
month before Caroline was born, Richard’s parents had given us the house in which we now lived. We’d been allowed to choose it. To say why I liked the old stone house in Dulwich near Victoria Park Racecourse with its return veranda encrusted with elaborate white decoration cast-iron seems daft to me now. The reason was that there was a white marble bench in the kitchen and I thought it would be good for making pastry on. I had heard it said that marble was good for pastry-making because it was cold, but it wasn’t as cold as I was about to become. Richard’s father went to the auction and bought the house. We moved in when I was eight months pregnant.

The house needed painting inside so we decided to hold a busy bee. These were not uncommon at the time and people would gladly join in helping each other with large jobs. Not unlike farmers who help each other at times of harvest or in crisis, raising barns and so forth.

For three or four weekends, I baked cakes and lunches,
and Richard, Hugh and I were driven with the food by friends over to the house. Ten or twelve friends wearing old clothes or overalls came with ladders and paintbrushes. I fed them and they worked. Richard sat and talked to them and they painted, hour after hour.

In the week before Caroline was born, I was up a ladder in the pantry thinking that I must finish painting it because if it wasn’t done then it would not be completed for a long time after the birth. (I had learnt a few things having Hugh.) Yet the ceiling was so high that I did not dare to climb right up to the top to reach it because somebody had said that effort could cause the umbilical cord to get tangled around the baby’s throat. When I left that house fifteen years later, the marks of my brush were still there on the unfinished wall of the pantry.

Into this scene came a man like a figure from a tarot pack. Rich, idle, a painter who had had a block of flats built with some of his wife’s inheritance. He wanted Richard to help him find tenants. They hit it off. Day after day Rex came and sat talking with Richard who, since we had moved into the house from our drycleaning shop, no longer had the daily traffic of customers, of people talking to him while they waited at the bus stop. With no passing trade to capture, he had become depressed in his idleness. We were off the main road in a quiet suburb. A letting business that he had begun with such success had fallen away. There was now a glut of flats and houses for lease,
so tenants could easily find what they needed. They no longer asked Richard to find a flat. He tried approaching landlords because now it was they who needed help. But, being business people, they often had plenty of ideas on how to find tenants and perhaps did not feel as overwhelmed by their need as the people who wanted somewhere to live.

Daily, I lit the fire in Richard’s office, made bread, painted the room, tried all I could to keep him cheerful, but somebody like Rex, charming and clever, was a boon. He seemed to have nothing else to do but to come and talk and to have lunch and keep talking to Richard. Sometimes he came out from the office and spoke to me. He called me a typically stitched-up Adelaide prick-teaser. He kissed me. I kissed him back. I’ll show him! I found I liked it very much. He kissed me some more next time, and the next. Soon I was looking forward to his visits.

Rex brought some of his own paintings around for Richard to hang in his office. The idea was that if a customer came and liked one of the paintings, Richard could sell it and take a commission. This is how our art gallery began. Paintings occasionally sold. Rex brought more. They were heavy, dark, figurative paintings, with the paint laid on encrusted layers with a political message that the blind could read. Loneliness haunts the city. Something like that. Not exactly Edward Hopper but nonetheless they sold.

Richard and I saw that we could sell other artists’ work. We had what we thought was a brilliant idea. If we, a young couple, who had little money, would like to hang original paintings on our walls, wouldn’t others like to, also? Since none of us could afford to buy paintings from the big art gallery in town, which was owned by Kim Bonython, who showed Sidney Nolan and Arthur Boyd, we, perhaps, could fill the void by selling paintings that were much, much cheaper but were original works. So we put an advertisement for paintings for this new gallery, which was to be the walls of our new house, in
The Advertiser.
An overwhelming flood poured in. Boxes and boxes of paintings. Fruit boxes called half-cases came by the dozen. We had no idea what to do. We struggled on and hung the hallway, the living-room and dining-room, as well as the office, with some of the works.

Asking critics to come, however, was another matter. A woman named Marjorie Hannan, to whom we are indebted for the advice she gave us, said, ‘Look, you can’t run an art gallery selling rubbish. You have to send it all back and start again with real artists. You will never get anywhere selling trash but you might make a living if you get some good paintings in to hang.’ We fought this advice, which we thought elitist. To Marjorie Hannan’s credit, she plugged on and finally we saw that she was right. Back the boxes went.

First of all, the idea was that we should have a print gallery. We could sell original prints by some of Adelaide’s artists, most of whom made them from time to time for about fifty dollars or less. This would allow our friends and people who had a small income to have original work.

I can’t remember why we didn’t go on with that idea. We may have done it for a short time, but in the end we felt we had a better idea – we should ask artists to bring us their paintings that we could sell for fifty dollars or less. Most of these artists taught at the School of Art in North Adelaide and they had much old work in their studios that they were willing to sell cheaply. And that was how Llewellyn Galleries began.

Knowing nothing and fearing nobody, we asked the Director of the State Gallery, John Bailey, to open our gallery. He agreed.

Standing in the corner of our living room, surrounded by a crowd, John made a speech and we were off. We sold paintings from that day onwards for the next decade. It was 1965 and there was a gap in the market that we were filling.

There was no hint of what was to come. I had no idea and nor did Richard. The baby flourished. She spent her days in her pram under the lemon tree or sitting beside the cat on a rug on the back lawn under that tree.

The calmest child I ever saw, she cooed and gurgled. It was my theory that I had been mistaken to let Hugh be
stimulated to such a degree in our shop. In my anxiety to rear him correctly and in my inexperience, he became a very active baby and infant. This time I was determined to make a better job of it. This meant that I kept Caroline away from shops, cars and noisy places. While it worked, it may have been that she had a calmer nature, and that it had nothing to do with the peace with which I surrounded her. Not for us the baby in the bassinet in the station wagon as we took the other child to school. Not for us the trip to the supermarket. We lived the life of the Amish. Homemade bread, natural products, fish, vegetables, grains and fruit were what we lived on. And even our dog had no kangaroo meat, nor our cat. We were idealists in common with the times when many of our friends were either hippies or lived a life very close to that of hippies. There were few organic foods – they came later – but whatever we could buy that seemed natural and healthy, we ate.

On one occasion, when the baby was a year old, friends came unexpectedly. They decided we should go to a fish-and-chip shop as a treat and buy dinner. I took Caroline. She watched the lights as she sat in my arms and I realised that they were amazing to her. Mirrors, lights, noise; the smells must have been a surprise, too. She sat up very straight, excited, dazzled by it all.

Selling paintings in the house had been successful and the house-and-flat-letting business was fading. Richard’s parents agreed, when he asked, to lend us money to build an art gallery in our back garden.

They had recently built a two-storey block of flats with the help of my old friend Dinah’s husband – an architect called Rob Trotter – and a builder. Richard rang another architect, John Chappell, and got plans for the gallery drawn up and a quote. The building was like a pagoda and was very expensive. We paid the fee and decided to dispense with an architect. Richard asked his parents’ builder to give him a quote for an L-shaped shed. The builder told us later that he went home to his wife saying, ‘What does Llewellyn want to build a shed in his backyard for?’ The reason was that Richard had realised that the moment he mentioned the words ‘art gallery’ the price went up. An art gallery is, in a way, a shed, and it was a shed we got – and very cheaply, too. Facing down our driveway, it was made of Besser bricks and the base of the L-shape covered the spot where our lemon tree had been. (I cried when they had to dig up that tree.) The gallery had a set of French windows at the front and, on the base of the L, another set that opened out into the garden.

The Electricity Trust of South Australia came and designed a strip of fluorescent lights to go above the walls of the gallery. They made the lighting as close to normal daylight as was possible and advised us to have the walls
painted a very pale pink. We took a lot of flak later about those pink walls but it was from people who had not known that it was to give the nearest effect of daylight. A young curator called Lou Klepac had come to work at the State Gallery and he was a newspaper critic, too. He became a famous art publisher and our friend but he did not like those pale pink walls and often said so, but we plugged on with them.

This was the first purpose-built art gallery to be built in the State. It flourished. It took off like a comet. Richard had found something he enjoyed and together we listened to artists who came to see if they could have a show. They talked to us about their ideas. We learnt quickly. Surrounded by paintings every day and reading art books, we suddenly developed a way of seeing that we had not had before.

Rex continued to visit. More kissing. Suddenly I was not able to sleep. Lying awake all night, I’d get up in the morning and tell Richard I had not slept. But it didn’t seem to matter. The house was in perfect condition, the gallery was thriving, and the children were too. The only problem was what seemed a small one – my insomnia. I became very thin.

Sometimes I ran around Victoria Park Racecourse, which was at the end of our street. I felt I was running from the demons that pursued me but what those demons were I could not say.

Kissing Rex in the kitchen, finding myself sexually aroused in a way I had never been before, making the baby’s bottles every morning, taking Hugh to kindergarten on the back of my bike at nine, smiling at my husband and feeling perfectly fond of him, with no complaints at all, everything seemed perfect. What did I think I was doing?

A knife hung over the house by a thread and nobody knew. I knew something was wrong although I couldn’t have put it into those words. I was like a sick animal with no comprehension of what was happening. I just lived day by day, waiting for Rex to visit, I suppose, but I can’t even recall that. He just turned up, sat yarning to Richard, and then walked down the passage and the kissing began. Then he invited me to come to a motel for an afternoon with him. He would leave his home, call in and pick me up, and we would go off together.

Never having been to a motel for this purpose, I had no comprehension of how long this might take. I had always been able to leave Richard for an hour or two on his own in the gallery. When I needed to go out to shop or see friends or take the children to the doctor or do any of those other things that mothers do, Richard’s mother, whom I called Mother Llewellyn, would come and stay with him until I returned home.

I was dressed in my best black-and-white striped woollen dress made by Norma Tullo and ready to go. Rex
didn’t arrive. I rang up, but either he or his wife – I can’t remember – said he was not coming around. Suddenly it seemed I had an answer. I would take all my sleeping pills. Incredible though it sounds, I had no intention of killing myself. I thought that I would have my stomach pumped out. Rationality had fled months before. I took the pills standing in the kitchen, the whole bottleful, which I think was about 500,000 milligrams of Pentone but dropped one on the floor. I couldn’t pick it up. I was worried that Caroline, who was crawling by this stage, would find it and eat it. Even so, I could not bend down and pick it up. I left it.

Then I walked out to the gallery where Richard was working at some figures and said, ‘I have just taken all my sleeping pills.’ He didn’t look up. He said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ I said, ‘Well, I have, but if you don’t believe me, that’s all right – you don’t have to.’ He put down his biro and looked up. He said, and I suppose my face must have looked earnest, that he must call our doctor. I said, ‘Don’t do that; there is no need.’ But he insisted. I turned on my heel and walked into the house. I remembered there was some soiled linen in our bedroom and hastened up the passage to retrieve it. I thought I must get it into the laundry immediately, before whoever was coming would see it. Who did I think was coming? I don’t know. Somebody. I knew somebody would have to be there because we couldn’t survive without somebody coming.
Walking back into the gallery, I said to Richard, ‘Now don’t tell your mother. I don’t want her to know.’ How could she not know?

The doctor arrived as I stood in Caroline’s bedroom with the French wallpaper of a tangle of pale blue convolvulus and honesty climbing up the wall. He looked breathless. I said, ‘Now I don’t want you to dine out on this.’ He seemed astonished and said that he certainly would not. I said I knew that it would make a fine tale and that he would be regaling his friends with it. Then I knew nothing more.

I woke up in my old training school, the Royal Adelaide Hospital, tied with rags to a bed. A saline drip hung beside the bed. ‘Oh, this is disgraceful!’ I thought. ‘I must get up and help these girls.’ I lunged upwards, pulling down the bottle of saline, which broke on the floor. A nurse came running. I fell back and watched her sweep up the glass into a dustpan with a small hand-broom.