The Dressmaker's Daughter (22 page)

By the end of the day of the opening, we had had over a thousand people through the gallery. When we got home to Dulwich, we saw that on our tessellated front veranda a full bottle of red wine had been broken; it looked like blood and gave a sinister air to the afternoon.

As soon as we were inside, I put Richard into bed. I was in the kitchen making tea and Becky was with Richard in our bedroom. Richard had been giving Becky her pay for taking care of him for a fortnight while I had been in Sydney finding artists for the art gallery we had just bought from Kym. As I carried the tea tray up the passage, I heard them whispering. I was puzzled. Becky
left and when I closed the front door behind her I asked Richard why they had been whispering. He said, ‘I am in love with her and she is in love with me.’ I was standing beside the fireplace facing him and my feet slid out in front of me. I sat on the floor and leaned on the wall. Suddenly I could smell an acrid smoke. It was a saucepan of tea that I had left on the stove to reheat. I was unable to get up to walk down to the kitchen and turn off the stove. The smell of burning tea leaves began to fill the hallway and seep into the room.

The doorbell rang. I got up and went to the door. It was Colin, the photographer who had worked all day recording the gallery opening. He had some rough shots to show us. I apologised for the stench in the house and for my manner, which he must have seen was disturbed. Richard thanked him and I explained that we had had, as I put it, ‘Some bad news and we will take a little time to recover. But it is not your fault and we are grateful that you have worked so hard.’ I let Colin out and came back into the bedroom. Richard said that he had fallen in love with Becky when she had entered the room on the first day.

I walked down the passageway, turned off the stove and tipped the burnt tea-leaves into the garden. Then the telephone rang and it was my mother. I had had no time to prepare myself to begin to lie about the news I had been told and so when my mother asked how the gallery opening had been and how Becky had managed to care
for Richard I said, ‘She has gone and she has taken my husband’s heart with her.’ Had my mother rung an hour or two later, I would have been able to hide the news but it was too early and I could not protect her.

It was my mother who reminded me, weeks later, of an event of which I have no recollection – that my father had said to me, within her earshot, soon after he learnt that I was to marry Richard, ‘He will discard you one day. He will throw you away like this slipper.’ And, she said, he had tossed his slipper aside on the veranda where we were sitting.

Let us call a halt to that day. I must have laid down beside my husband and gone to sleep, but I can’t remember.

M
y mother saw me through, though I would rather not have had her know of it, the dissolution of my marriage. What she thought, I never heard. If she was relieved, I was not told. If she felt despair, she did not say. She rang me every day and simply consoled me as best she could while never saying, ‘I told you so.’ Nor did she say what would have been more accurate: ‘I knew it.’

Richard and I lived for a while in a state of suspended decision. He went daily to the North Adelaide gallery while Mrs Collins – Lynn’s mother – and I ran the Dulwich one. If Becky visited Richard at work, I did not know and I did not ask.

Our children were not told what had occurred simply because it seemed too momentous. In a strange way I did not blame Richard for falling in love, as he said he had, with Becky because for a long time I had not been physically attracted to him. I can date the change precisely. Even the hour. It happened on the day my
father died. From that day onwards, I had no attraction towards my husband. I loved him as a sister loves a brother. It was not his fault, I knew, because it was not he who had changed but me. We still had much in common except this one crucial thing, the hinge, the nexus, on which our marriage hung. While it is true some can marry and have a celibate and happy life, we were not of their kind. And this is an irony I see now, because some people could not imagine us having a sexual life. In fact, some said we should not have children. But, I noticed, it was people who did not have them themselves.

Of course, marriage changes over time and passion lessens. Edmund White, the novelist, says that it takes five years for passion to wane. While I think that is faintly ridiculous, there simply must be a lessening of lust because how could children be reared and educated while the parents are in the full flush of sexual passion?

Perhaps I am confusing the knowledge I have now with what I knew then. Things merge and seep and it is hard to tell from this distance, unless my diary tells me what exactly happened. Even so, a diary takes much for granted and fails to spell out certain firmly held ideas and you can only glean what you believed by the actions that are laid out on the page. Few things have startled me more than reading a few pages of a 27-year-old diary. I never do it unless I must. Some pages rise in a tide. The cliché ‘wise after the event’ has fresh meaning for me now.

Richard, being a romantic and rather Victorian man, could not just have an affair. I knew that he had to have the whole full-blooded love-unto-death bond. The fact that he was to love me until death did not occur to him, I suppose, because we all adjust ourselves to the present situation and, having taken our comforts where we can, replace our ideals with fresh ones. I had done it myself.

Becky was young, beautiful, a product of America in its full cry of sentimental Seventies’ rave. But she was not a nurse. The district nurse had come twice daily while Becky stayed with Richard and made his meals. She was shielded from much of the reality of what caring for a ninety per cent paralysed person entailed. She saw a good-looking man in a wheelchair and then the same man later, after the nurse had been, in his bed. She saw him in our old gallery and in our new gallery, and she saw the way people treated him. They talked about the paintings on the walls and she watched him sell those paintings. It looked glamorous. And the contrast to that of the life of a struggling student was marked. Those black lisle stockings she wore were meant to last.

A few days after I had been told that my husband was in love with Becky, while we were still living in a state of hiatus and shock, Richard and I had a talk. He, being at heart a decent man, said, ‘Don’t worry, I will give her up.’ I thought about it for ten seconds. My instinct was that I had never lived with anybody who did not love me and I
did not want to begin. All my life I had felt loved. I did not wish to start living with somebody who did not love me and who was eating his heart out loving somebody else. So I said, ‘Don’t worry, you don’t have to. I will bring her to you.’

Over the next few days as I wondered if I could face living outside the safety of marriage and if I could rear our children away from their father, I became afraid. Yet, a year or so before, we had seen a mesmerising Japanese film called
Woman of the Dunes.
The plot involved a group of people who were trapped by others inside a pit formed among sand dunes. The trapped ones lived their lives for years within that pit. (How they were fed, I don’t remember. Perhaps their captors fed them.) Children were born inside the pit and the parents lived complete social lives. To all intents and purposes they were healthy and seemed normal, but they were full of longing. They burned to escape. One day the side of the pit began to move in the way sand does. All but one of those trapped crawled out. It was a pregnant woman who did not. She could not leave. She had learnt to love her trap. This film had a tremendous effect on me. Naturally I saw myself as that woman.

I thought things over. I felt strongly that I would betray my past suffering if I did not leave. I would negate those years of longing and make my life a travesty of what it should be. I decided that Richard should be able to court Becky in as normal a way as possible. I bought champagne
and told him to invite her out to dinner, which he did. Becky arrived at our house in a cape looking like Little Red Riding Hood. Later that night, Richard came home alone in a taxi and I put him to bed.

This was the first of several such outings. Then my main concern was that Becky should, if she and Richard were to live together, learn how to care for him in the way it was necessary without the help of the district nurse. For that, she would need to live in our home for a while. So we decided I should go back to Sydney to stay with Jenny and David Isaacs, where I had stayed while booking the artists for our new gallery.

Our children were not told even then of what had happened. They simply were cared for by Becky and by Richard’s mother while I was away. Being innocent, they knew no more. Or, if they sensed something strange, they must have managed to put it from their minds or invent reasons, as children do, that made things seem normal.

W
hy does the past hold this relentless appeal? Is it bracing for me to remember the past so that I can prop up the less comforting present with memory, like a wad of paper under the leg of an unsteady table?

While nostalgia is a form of kitsch, memory itself rearranges the present and makes it bearable. In common with other families, ours has formed certain myths on which it leans its elbows in great comfort and complete confidence in their veracity. One of our myths is that I left my husband – abandoned my family – and that after a decent lapse of time he met Becky and fell in love and then later they married. If that story were true, who could it be who cared for Richard in the intervening time after I left? Who fed, washed and dressed him?

I dressed Richard on our last morning together when he was leaving to live with Becky, and I said to him, ‘We must be mad, you know.’ After all, we had no quarrel. I had changed, not Richard; it was not his fault that our
marriage failed. We were friends and it seemed sad and peculiar and even unnecessary that we were about to part. He said, ‘Yes, I know.’ I said, to console us both (or was it Richard who said it?), ‘Yes, but we have to do it.’ And so we did. I buttoned up his shirt, pulled his jumper over his head and put his arms into it. Becky then arrived in a friend’s station-wagon and somehow, with the lifting machine, we got Richard into the car. We dismantled the lifting machine and that, too, was lifted in. I put his clothes in and off they drove with my sewing machine.

The children and I stayed on in our home in Dulwich and Richard and Becky stayed with friends. Later they moved into the house Richard and I had bought with our gallery in North Adelaide. These properties were in my name for taxation reasons. However, when it came time for our divorce, I signed them over to Richard, accompanied by the wails and hand-wringing of my friends. But I never felt I really owned those buildings. And I could not see how we could become divorced if I held on to them. My aim was to secure our Dulwich house for the children and me, and I didn’t really care what else I had.

Later Richard and Becky bought a house that faces the sea and there they lived in the happiness he and I once had and which I was unable to maintain.

And here now is another memory. It is 30 January 1970. I don’t need to look that up. It is our tenth wedding
anniversary. Richard, the children and I have returned that day from our annual summer Aldinga Beach holiday. I have given the children their dinner earlier than usual and Richard and I are having ours outside under the grapevine that I planted with Great Uncle Stanley years before. I begin to cry and, when Richard asks me why, I say that it is a miserable way to spend our tenth anniversary.

No doubt I was tired, and that would have had something to do with my feelings that evening. I’d done the usual packing up of the beach house, the cleaning of the fridge, the mountain of washing I brought home, and all the other drab tasks done on the final day of reckoning when a house and its key are returned to the landlord. I had Richard’s parents’ help at these times and his father always drove us home from the holiday. We were eating coleslaw and grilled chops – only because I was once again dieting. (Richard may have been eating mashed potatoes, which the children would have had with their meal, but probably not, because he too had to diet. He could take no exercise at all and if he became too heavy nobody would be able to lift him – not his father or a taxi driver or any of our friends – and, if that happened, it would mean that he could not get into a car and we could not go out together unless I pushed him wherever we were going in the wheelchair.)

Richard says that had he known I cared so much about our anniversary he would have taken me out to dinner,
and, in fact, we can go now. But it is too late and the dreary meal goes on.

When I remembered this meal recently, I thought, ‘Ten years! What was I doing? What did I think I was doing?’

After my overdose, when I returned from being in Martin and Greta’s care on their little farm in the hills, propped up like a doll, I went on with the marriage and Richard and I never spoke again of those events. And what a mirror of this propping up it was the night when I had the fit at dinner and then was led back to the table and propped up again, the dinner continuing as if nothing had happened. As if my dark red woollen dress was not wet from the drenching my voiding had caused when I was unconscious on my hosts’ white bed. I see now that my training as a doll stood me in good stead. But what were Richard and I to do with our marriage? This intractable problem felt to me like a sword stuck in a rock surrounded by a lake. Neither of us had any idea of a solution because the problem was insoluble.

I had always believed that with love and good will, no problem between people was so intractable that it could not be solved. I could not tell him I no longer loved him sexually. He, of course, could tell, or sense it, but there was simply no reason that this change had happened, as far as either of us could tell. I was simply bewildered. I could date it all right, from the day my father died, but that was no help in solving the dilemma.

We did not wrench the sword from the rock; we simply abandoned the rock, the sword, the lake in which the rock lay, and all that went with it. And, in doing so, our children were caught up in a storm over not a lake but a sea, and it is that storm and the weather that comes from it that I still endure. It is called blame and I am blamed. Which is true enough, because it was I who changed, not my husband.

So the myth that I abandoned Richard continues as part of that weather and it can no more be dislodged than that sword in the rock. In fact, it is believed so deeply that even at Richard’s funeral in 2004 my abandoning was read out by Robyn Archer in the eulogy, while I stood there at the back of the room and my children were down the front, seated with Becky and her children, and heard it again. It will probably be incised on my tombstone.