The Dressmaker's Daughter (19 page)

For several days I had been in a respirator. I never again saw the Norma Tullo dress I had been wearing. And I have never again liked to wear black and white. I suppose they cut the dress off me.

Only now, seeing the word ‘respirator’, do I notice that when I met Richard it was he who was in the respirator and then I climbed in a few years later. He got out and I got in.

I never saw Rex again. But naturally Richard believed there had been a great affair. Probably Rex’s wife
believed it too. But it was as I have written. Richard and I never spoke of it because there didn’t seem to be any point. We had to go on. And to go on meant we could not speak of what ailed me.

While I lay there in hospital, Caroline’s godmother, my friend Joanie, came to see me. She was in her staff nurse’s uniform. ‘Blow your nose,’ she said. ‘I can’t,’ I said. So she took a tissue from a box on a table beside the bed and held it to my nose while I blew into it. For forty years, Joanie has kept that visit a secret and she has kept silent, too, on the fact that I had been there in a ward as an attempted suicide.

It was not long before this that I was told that a suicide attempt was a criminal offence. I believed I was lucky to escape prosecution. However, there was enough shame in me to prosecute myself a hundred times over. I could not understand why I had taken the pills and yet what I knew, with complete certainty, was that I would do it again and next time I would not make a hash of it. I became very afraid. But the shame meant that I could not speak of it to anybody. I couldn’t even discuss it with myself.

Yet one thing I did discuss with myself was that my principles had led me to take those pills. I thought, in my daft but terrible way, that since principles are for living by, my principles had taken the breath from my body and therefore I must discard them because I needed to live. I felt I must live. I should live. That it was right to live. So
in what was probably the largest leap my mind has ever taken, I decided to abandon the principles I had held and to take up new ones. I decided then that I would take lovers. I could not live within the marriage without lovers. I would be able to stay married if I had lovers. Never from that moment onwards did I feel the slightest twinge of shame or guilt. I didn’t know how to take a lover but I was certain that I would do it. And I did. It proved to be harder than I thought but I persevered. Starving while others feasted was the way I felt.

A friend of ours, Martin Begley, was an honorary physician at the hospital and it was he who gleaned what had happened. We had been due to go to dinner at Greta and Martin’s the night I went to hospital. Richard had rung them and said we would not be coming because I was in intensive care. Martin knew immediately what that meant.

The Begleys had four children, horses and dogs, and lived in a big house in the Adelaide Hills. Their children competed in equestrian events, jumping and dressage, as did Greta. We had first travelled in their horse float to dinner at their home and they had tried to teach us to play bridge. Richard could play but I never did learn. It bored me. They were passionate players at the time. Then they took up horses.

Martin and Greta offered to have me stay with them until I was well enough to go home. I couldn’t go home
straight from the hospital as there was nobody to take care of me and I had three to take care of.

Driving slowly up into the hills, I could smell brandy in the car. I thought that Martin must have been so ashamed having to collect me from hospital that he had to have a few brandies beforehand. Halfway home he apologised for the smell and said that a flagon of brandy he had bought for himself and Greta had broken, falling off the back seat. I wondered why he was driving so slowly. He said that he had heard that people find cars very fast after they had been in hospital.

Next morning, Greta put me to work polishing some plastic fruit in a bowl on the kitchen table. I polished it and couldn’t stop. I knew it was foolish but I was not able to stop until Greta took the cloth from me and said that it was enough.

There, day after day, with the noisy, happy children, the dogs and the horses, watching one of their children, Charles, practise jumping over logs on his horse, I sat feeling immensely sad over something, but I did not know what it was. The family’s creamy labrador came and sat beside me. It put its head on my knee and seemed to understand what was beyond words, what only the wordless creature could know.

When I was well enough to go home, Mother Llewellyn left her son and the children in my care. What
she thought and felt, I can imagine. But I did not think of it at the time. I was trying to be normal.

Martin suggested to Richard that I could be helped by seeing a psychiatrist. I refused to do it. There had grown a fetish in my mind that nothing is real unless it is written down. This meant that my illness would be with me forever if it was written down in the notes a psychiatrist would take. And, therefore, I could not afford to talk to a psychiatrist as, if I did, I would never get well, as the testimony of the word would be there forever.

This idea that settled in my mind like an eagle was never dislodged and although I am now recovered, the eagle still rests there. It is another source of my writing, which began in secret at that time.

For a year I had kept a small daily diary. Then I began to write on a piece of foolscap-sized paper, small poems, little portraits of people I knew. Friends. I collected phrases I overheard: ‘A drift of edelweiss’.

It didn’t occur to me to use a whole page for a poem. I began at the top left-hand corner and wrote down in a column. Then I began at the top centre of the page. When that was full, I made a third column. Only when the page was completely full did I feel I had permission to take a fresh page and begin again.

These I showed to nobody. It did not occur to me that I was writing. It was just something I did. Almost as if under hypnosis. Call it automatic writing, perhaps.

Now home, I became afraid that I would ‘do it again’, as I thought of my overdose. I knew that I would not make a mistake next time because the shame had been so great that I felt I could never bear to endure it again. And yet I did not want to die. (If you are looking for rationality in this tale, you are in the wrong place.) These ideas lodged in my mind like bricks cemented in and no-one could dislodge them. Nobody even tried. Mainly they didn’t try because they did not know these ideas were there.

Yet Martin knew I was sick and he told Richard that he had a friend who was not a psychiatrist but was a physician, and that he, Peter Last, had offered to come to the house and talk with me. I agreed to this and Peter arrived after work one day. I explained that I did not want him to write anything down. He rubbed his face hard and said that he would have to write something down because he couldn’t legally talk to me unless he did. But he would make it the briefest of notes. I swallowed this, although I am sure he wrote copious notes, but I never saw them and he never took out a pen in my presence. We went into the living room, he and I, and I lay down in front of the fire and tried unsuccessfully to seduce him. Shortly after this, although no word was spoken, I sat up and we began our talks. For months, he came several times a week, and then, as I recovered, he came once a week and then, perhaps, once a month. There was never a bill.

This was the talking cure if ever there was one. He prescribed no medication. We just talked. Week by week, the wish to ‘do it again’ faded. Peter always walked into the gallery first and spoke to Richard, and then he and I walked into the house and began our talk. When he was ready to leave, we returned to the gallery, he said goodbye to Richard, and then drove home to dinner.

I did not tell Peter that I had made the leap in my mind that I intended to change my life by changing the principles by which I had lived. In fact, I can’t remember what we talked of. He and his wife had a yacht and sometimes he told me briefly where they had been sailing on the weekend. What I told him, I do not know. But I did not tell him about my new plan for change. That, like so many other things, was unspeakable. Perhaps I began to write because I could not speak.

A
fter the turning point in my life, which I can never bear to call by its proper name and on which so much hung, as if a great wheel was grinding and changing everything to move in the opposite direction to which it had been heading, I developed two beliefs.

The first was in the almost literalness of words. A belief in their strange ability to enchant, their lusciousness and their balm. It’s not, in this case, their sound that I mean, although they can have luscious or enchanting sounds, nor do I mean their look. It is their representation of the thing itself that they can command. Cumquat, sweet pea, sasanquas, cyclamen, Valencia oranges, delphiniums, hollyhocks, bread. The words’ ability to lay these things down right there on the page, just as if you decorated your text with them in the way monks did when they illustrated so voluptuously their manuscripts.

As a result of this belief, my letters are filled with
produce, flowers, food and weather. They are not just placed there to tell people news; they are there to represent themselves and to make the letter more attractive, even beautiful and consoling if I can have my way.

The second conviction I developed is that if I say something, I mean it in an irrevocable way, and, if my words are not believed, or if they are questioned, a feeling of queasiness and panic rises in me, like the feeling Sartre describes in his book
Nausea.

For instance, this happens if I have told somebody something, revealing it slowly and carefully in some depth, say, in an interview, only to have the person say it back to me and ask me if I did, indeed, mean what I have just said. Or they then tell me what I have just meant. In other words, illustrating in the clearest way that words mean nothing – that what comes out of my mouth has no more meaning than rain.

When this happens, an abyss opens before me and I stand there staring in panic and horror. Growing increasingly desperate and distressed as the interview proceeds, I revert to answering ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ while the interviewer grows more and more perplexed until finally they turn off their recorder, put down their biro, fold their notebook and leave, convinced that they have interviewed a mad woman. I close the door, gasping with relief and shame.

I
began a secret diary. I think I began because there were things I couldn’t say. I couldn’t say them even to myself, but the diary let me hint at things. Nothing’s real, unless it’s written down. I began to feel this, more and more strongly, and this conviction became the source of my writing.

Looking back at the time my children were small and I was still married to Richard, my diary says that on Monday 1 January 1968 we had friends to a roast leg of lamb dinner. ‘Before lunch we drank Bianco vermouth. It’s delicious.’ Who the guests Virginia, Patrick and Louisa, Charlotte and Christian were, I no longer remember.

The next day our friends Annie and Brian came to stay while Brian had job interviews. Annie, the diary says, made ham sandwiches for lunch. Brian got the job and we all went to dinner at an Italian restaurant we liked called
La Cantina. After waiting one-and-a-half hours for the food, we had, ‘Very nice meal. Oysters, chicken livers en brochette, Lobster Newburg. Fabulous wine from WA.’ More interested then, as now, in the food than the wine, I wish now I had recorded that wine we drank.

On Wednesday 3 January we had more roast lamb for dinner and other friends came to drinks.

The next day we went to lunch at the home of my friend Joanie Pitcher, Caroline’s godmother, and a smorgasbord was served. This was a new custom. Before this we had had buffet lunches and dinners, which I think were much the same but somehow a smorgasbord implied something more modern. Yet it did not necessarily include Swedish food. There was no herring, smoked salmon, dill pickles or rollmops.

On Friday 5 January I took our children to Glenelg on the tram and we ate fish and chips on the beach. Caroline, I wrote proudly, sat on her own in the tram. I meant by this that she did not need to sit on my knee but sat beside Hugh. She was two and a half and he was five.

On Saturday 6 January: ‘Mary Martin’s booklist came and I rang up and bought
First Slice Your Cookbook
by Arabella Boxer –
Vogue
’s writer.’

This book was published in 1964 and soon after I owned the first of Arabella Boxer’s cookbooks, I bought the next, which was called
A Second Slice
and was published in 1966. The Nigella Lawson of her day, a
beauty and a cook, Lady Arabella had three children and was married to a famous man.

I cooked from these books for years and ticked off what I had made in the index with a blue pen. After I had written to tell Arabella Boxer how much I liked her book, she replied and enclosed a handwritten copy of the recipe for Floating Island dessert. I don’t have that page or her letter any more. It was a very old recipe and it is one of the cheapest. It is not in either her first or second book, perhaps because she thought it so widely known. It is made by using what was then a pint (half a litre) of milk, four eggs separated, and about a cup of sugar with vanilla. The eggs are separated and a meringue is made with the whites and some of the sugar. This is then poached in boiling water and floated in dollops on top of the boiled custard, which is made with the rest of the ingredients.

On Wednesday 10 January we had dinner at the Naval and Military Club with friends. ‘Smoked four cigars!’ But there is no record of what we ate. The next day ‘I found the neighbours’ children in shed – Tony reading my letters to Richard before we married. Shrieks of laughter from them. Hugh was too young to read so Tony was reading to three or four children. I snatched them and burnt the lot – they were dreadful!’

Now it is a mystery to me how it is that there is a box of my letters to Richard in the library when I believed that on that day in 1968 I had burnt them all. They were the
letters that had been smuggled out of Northfield Infectious Diseases Hospital by Richard when he was discharged. I had written to him almost every day for a year.

I don’t know what we ate that day but I had Mary Martin’s bookshop send to the man for whom we named Hugh (who by then had become a lord, being in favour with the UK Labour government), a copy of the biography of the explorer Edward John Eyre by Geoffrey Dutton. This was in response to the autobiography we had been sent by Sir Hugh and because he had once been Governor of Jamaica, where the explorer had lived and later fallen into disgrace.

Friday 12 January: World Food conservation on my mind. I am interested in becoming a vegetarian and using beans etc. for protein. Made lentil and frankfurter vinaigrette for tea from new cookbook. R. liked it.

A while after this, I did take up vegetarianism with a vengeance. Always one to overdo things, I ate mainly carrots and this, combined with the anxiety over my niece Joanne’s cancer (my brother Peter’s daughter), meant that I shrank to skin and bone and developed galloping periodontal disease and came within an ace of losing my teeth. A wonderful old man who called himself a horse doctor, a famous periodontist Fred Henning, who
worked on North Terrace, managed to save my teeth. As I was getting out of the chair after one of many visits, he said gruffly, knowing I had become a vegetarian, ‘What you need is a good piece of steak.’ Too wilful to take expert advice, I persevered for a few more months with my diet until sense finally took over and I began to eat meat. (Of course, if I had used a correct vegetarian diet, all this could probably have been prevented.)

Monday 15 January: 32nd birthday today. The children sang to me and gave me underwear and R. gave me lotion. Very hot. Several people called to gallery. Roast lamb dinner on lawn. Lawn cut.

The next day it was ninety degrees and we ate cold meat (leftover from the roast) with a cream and cucumber salad on the lawn.

The following day we had ‘Spanish beans [what could they have been?] with tomatoes for tea as an experiment. Mediocre. We ate bananas instead. Richard and Hugh played a new snakes and ladders game.’

Every year, Richard and I took a house at Aldinga Beach for a fortnight’s holiday. We closed the gallery and his parents drove the four of us down with some food and bed linen. Reading this tiny pocket diary now, which is
only three inches by two, it seems we ate mostly lamb, sometimes chicken and rarely fish.

There is a question sometimes asked: can a married woman keep a diary? She can, but can she write the truth in it? The smallness in size of these early diaries is, I think, from two causes. One is the same as the reason that I felt I could only write poems in tiny blocks in columns of three down the foolscap paper I used until the page was full. It was because I didn’t feel I had permission. Nobody stopped me. I stopped myself for want of permission. But who was to give it? It was a matter of confidence and it took some years before I used a bigger quarto page-a-day diary and a little less time before I put only one or two poems on a page.

The second reason I used tiny diaries is, I think, for secrecy. Though why secrecy was needed, I’m not sure. Usually I only recorded what we ate, what we read, what we did, sometimes what I wore, who came to dinner and where we went to dinner. My husband was almost totally paralysed and unless I laid my diary on his tray or, if he was in bed, on his chest, it was unlikely he would be able to read it unless he asked somebody else to find it and pass it to him. And why would he want to do that?

What tormented me, I kept to myself. It could not be said, could not be written and could never be acknowledged. If you have a paralysed husband you cannot, even if you are not a martyr or a particularly
virtuous person, say, ‘Well, I’ll be off then. I’ll ring the Home for Incurables and they’ll be round to pick you up.’ And that is what it came down to.

I could have taken the children and gone, but who would take care of Richard? He had done nothing wrong. It was not he who had changed; it was I. And I could not say it.

My father was dead and I had not mourned. I was mildly mad with grief, but I did not know it and perhaps nobody else did, either.

So we went on eating lamb, hot and cold, and having holidays at Aldinga Beach every January with the children. I continued to take them swimming and to keep up with the washing and the washing-up, and to all intents and purposes, a social life that now makes me dizzy to think of. We went on being a family because there was no other way to live. And I went on writing my tiny diaries and tiny poems.

Tuesday 23 January: Postal strike over. Very warm day. Caroline getting burnt. Beach 9 – 11.30. Caroline crying with tiredness. Lovely pasties and yeast buns. Read
The Nude
by Kenneth Clark. Cleaned. Ate outside – grilled steak with beans and potatoes. Delicious!

I took children down at 7 pm for swim. Very calm and delicious in.

Wednesday 24 January: Cooler day. Wrote to Mother [Mrs Llewellyn snr] and Mummy. Bought papers and meat and ordered side of lamb for next week. Pasty lunch with yeast on beach. Met Adam Sellars. It is a long walk to shops but I enjoy it. Swam 400 strokes. Read papers. Steak grilled for tea. On beach 9–1 pm today.

The next day it seems I was self-consciously aware of the content of the diary. The question is, who did I think might read the diary? For whom was I keeping it?

Windy day at first. Beach 9 am with Jen and Annabel Morisset. Swam 300 strokes and walked to telephone box. Pasty and yeast lunch. Slept and read.

I warn you this diary will be a deadly bore to read as you must see by now.

Steak, tomatoes and rice. I took children and Morissets to beach and had walk. Then had a drink with Morissets senior. [This was a family who had befriended us and whose children were a little older than ours.]

Why have I gone on keeping a daily diary for almost forty years? What impels me? It is that nothing’s real unless it’s written down. Something about my word against the rest of the world’s. The terror that I won’t be
believed. I have always known that if I am asked a question and disbelieved, I am able to turn to a diary, find the day in dispute, and read out (as if it were written in stone) what occurred. It is my testimony that these things happened and that we were there and that they happened to us and that there can be no dispute. Above all, that my word is true and I have made nothing up. If they would not believe my pages of testimony, then I may as well not have lived and there may be no floor to the house, or roof, or any reality at all. Only an abyss.

Friday 26 January: Perfect day. 9–1 pm beach. Pasty and bread lunch on beach. Swam 500 strokes. Jen and Annabel with us. Slept. 4 pm: Went to Morgan Street house for key then home then to the beach. A long walk. Grilled chops with tomatoes and rice. TV. Cleaned up.

Richard loved to be in the sun and so did I. These holidays left us all very brown, as was the fashion then, and perhaps, I think now, was part of the cause of his death in 2004 from a malignant lymphoma, which, it is said, is caused by exposure to sunlight.

When he had spent that year in hospital, he had loved being wheeled in his bed outside on to the veranda to lie in the sun. He grew a beard then, too, and Matron did not
like either finding him out on the veranda or his beard. She said that it made the ward look untidy to have his bed missing and that the beard offended her. She ordered him to have it shaved off but he refused.

There was a time before we were married, during the period when he used to come out of hospital to spend weekends at his parents’ house in Wattle Street, Fullarton, that I had a sharp insight into my situation. But I tearfully disregarded it. Richard liked to lie out on the lawn at the front of the house. To do this, he had to be taken outside in his chair and then the lifting machine brought out so that he could be lifted out and laid face down on the lawn. Then, after half an hour or so, he would be turned over to have the sun on his face as well.

The lifting machine was used to place him back into his chair and then he was wheeled over the gravel around to the back of the house and up the ramp into his bedroom. The lifting machine was then brought inside with difficulty, as it had small wheels and was hard to push over the gravel. It was wheeled up the ramp and then it was used when Richard needed to rest, to put him into bed. After a punishing round of this one Saturday, red in the face I said that I didn’t think I could do it again. And Richard said, ‘I didn’t realise how selfish you were.’ I cried and said, ‘If it wasn’t too late, I would leave you.’ But it was too late; I didn’t have the character.

Saturday 27 January: Hot day. Moved to house in Morgan Street. Pat Morisset helped with her car. Beach 11 am. Mr Bungey [the owner of the house we were leaving] said house has never been left in such good condition! We booked it for 2 weeks end Jan 1969 $35.

This house not so good. Darts for Hugh!

Camp pie lunch. Slept. Tea 9 pm. Barbecue outside.

The compliment about the condition in which I left the house was to become very important. The tyranny of the domestic has been a theme in my marriage because I feel I was always found wanting. So I loved this compliment.

Sunday 28 January: Swam 400 strokes. Children once again up at 6 am. Despite late night. They drive us mad. Beach 8.30 am with Jen and Annabel Morisset. Met Tiddemans there too. Fresh fish for us from Chris Morisset. Delicious. We always have cold Ovaltine. Slept. Grizzling kids. Big wind so stayed home. Boiled chicken with potatoes and carrots and vinaigrette sauce.

R. had his first shower in 8 years. Beautiful. Morissets came to pump up tyres and had a drink.

The reason Richard was able to have a shower for the first time since he got polio was because in this house in which
we were staying there were no steps between the bathroom and the bedroom. Usually we had a corridor that was too narrow for the wheelchair to be turned in. What bliss it was for him to have that running water. Eight years of being washed in bed. We managed the shower by taking him, undressed, into the alcove in the wheelchair and then after he had been towelled dry he was placed in the lifting machine and swung over into bed. Then the drenched wheelchair was taken outside into the sun to dry.