The Dressmaker's Daughter (27 page)

One day, at lunch, I was talking to Thomas about my writing and he suddenly said in a surprised way, ‘You’re really serious, aren’t you?’ Serious? What did he think all the effort and the maelstrom of poems had been about? I stared at him. He, who had a doctorate in Literature. A proper education, as I thought of it. And the use of a secretary in the Department of English, time to think, to travel, to research, who knew how to use a library properly, who had stamps, who had free photocopying. Who knew without asking where to send poems to magazines, what meter was, what iambic pentameter was, what Dryden wrote. Serious? I had so much work to do to learn, and so little time and so little money that to photocopy poems at ten cents a page or to post them off with a stamped self-addressed envelope enclosed felt like a triumph whenever I had done it. Serious? I was serious all right. What had I been doing if the struggle had not been serious? Could it ever have been for my own amusement? I was dreaming poems. I was not going to toss off poems in a fey way that lacked all seriousness. Oh, I was serious. I had seriousness to burn.

Thomas seemed amazed at my reaction but understood that I was never going to be mucking about, as I put it.

I could not have had a better teacher, nor could I have had a wiser one. What he thinks of those years and whether he thinks of them as wasted, I don’t know. But I don’t. I had a fetish for married men and he was not to blame for falling into my clutches. I seemed incapable of finding a man who was not attached. Later, more men made the list. I never learnt, and never conquered the nuttery of it.

The day I walked up with a load of books under my arm to the tall man in the green corduroy jacket with his silver curls and said, ‘Dr Robson, I want to thank you. My friends and I have enjoyed your lecture on Jane Austen,’ was the beginning. That was the Rubicon. It was crossed that day.

If I had not met the man in the green jacket I would perhaps not have gone to live in Sydney (where I fled to get away when it seemed only distance to the other side of the country could stop the affair that we needed and agreed to end). My children would not have gone to university in Sydney, nor would they perhaps have had children with the partners they met there. That Rubicon has had consequences. People have been born because of that moment of…what? Nerve? Courtesy? Enthusiasm? Flirtatiousness? A combination of all, perhaps.

L
ike a photograph, a diary read years later reveals more than it ever did when it first came into being. Now I ask, ‘What did I think I was doing?’ But at the time, I was blithe. Blind to the foolishness of the affair with a married man. Blind to the effect this may have on my daughter; blind to the harm it did to his wife. And to his daughter. Blind, blithe and merry.

Tuesday 1 April 1980. Cleaned kitchen.
New Poetry
came with four of my poems in it plus $40 (and $65 from Sisters Publishing [a publishing company set up by Hilary McPhee, Diana Gribble, Joyce Nicholson, Anne O’Donovan and Sally Milner in 1979] came too!). Hooray!

1 pm. Lunch with Wendy, Niffy [a friend from Sydney], and David [Wendy’s boyfriend] and Thomas at Campari. Felt ill and suddenly fainted. Taken out into a courtyard and lay down with ice. Had pins and
needles in my hands – tingling – so was sent by Wendy to Casualty.

Very embarrassing. Niffy, Wendy and David waited until Thomas got his car and paid the bill at restaurant. David drove me home after the intern had told me off for taking 4 Lasix [a diuretic I had been prescribed for chronic idiopathic oedema]. Two doctors have told me it’s OK. What does he know and why did he speak to me as if I’m a naughty child? I told him it wasn’t his place to criticise me in that manner.

Niffy and Wendy went shopping for clothes for Wendy, and I went to bed. Thomas arrived and I made him make love to me, as he felt I was too ill. Nonsense. He left and Niffy and Wendy came home with the clothes. I felt too ill to get dinner so they got takeaway and gave it to me on a tray.

Wednesday 2 April. Felt fine and washed up. Niffy and I were going to a film after lunch with Thomas but she wanted to shop. So I went with her in car and got Chinese food for Thomas and me and taxi home. Felt so ill and depressed I couldn’t face cooking and felt worried about my drinking. I eat too little and drink too much. Since last Friday I have only had one meal a day or none, and have not felt like eating.

1.30 pm. Thomas came late and had had lunch with his wife. ‘Oh la!’ I said. ‘You must tell me to eat lunch or I won’t and I’ll get ill.’ So we read
New Poetry
in bed and had a tray of food and didn’t go to the film but made love all afternoon.

5 pm. He left. Niffy came home and ate Chinese food with Caro and me and I cooked abalone and ate some. I felt a lot better and glad of it because I thought earlier I could crack up easily.

7.30 pm. Went to bed. Niffy washed up.

Thursday 3 April. Thomas came to take me to the ABC to do a broadcast of poems with JB from
Dots Over Lines.
JB was asleep when we went to get her—full of pills and bronchitis. We made tapes of poems and drove JB home, talking of how she’d have two joints and the day would begin for her.

Went to the bank and to David Jones to look at boots. Thomas said, ‘Your life is full of contrast – JB and
Vogue
in the same hour.’ We went to Campari and met Chrissie Squires. I had 6 oysters and veal. We went to North Terrace and I left messages for Ian North and Alison Carroll and saw old shows. Met Thomas with his library books for his wife and drove to Dulwich and went to bed for an hour. He left and I packed and washed up with Caroline. Niffy came back and we drove to Trudy’s, Caro’s friend, who will
go to a rowing camp with Caroline for Easter. Left Caro there and drove to the beach. Putt, putt went the little car in heavy traffic. I drank from a flagon. Got takeaway chicken for Niffy’s dinner and taxi back to Poets’ Union meeting re Friendly Street Poets. Am now in group of four who will run it.

Thomas came and was very nice and was asked to read and a fuss was made that he’s never read before at Friendly Street. What a breakthrough! Rory Harris drove me back home to Julia’s.

The Poets’ Union had been formed in Melbourne not long before this – I had reluctantly gone on the overnight train to the meeting that had set it up. I had not wanted to go but told myself that if I did not, and then found fault with what had been decided, I would have no hope of changing what I did not like. So I went. The meeting was held in the Trades Hall. I was elected National Secretary and climbed up on stage in my brown beret. Pio, the Melbourne performance poet, had his boots up on a chair. In a sudden and peculiar rush of annoyance, perhaps caused by my sudden authority, I asked him to take his boots off the chair. He didn’t want to and kept them there while asking me why. I said, ‘Because workers paid for those chairs.’ He took his boots off the chair.

One of the biggest problems poets had was that editors sometimes did not acknowledge submissions for months,
even years, and sometimes never. Also, poets were not always paid what the magazine in which they were published had been funded by the Literature Board to pay. One editor famously spent the money on his kitchen, and, when asked at a meeting in Sydney to pay the poets the money he owed them, took down his pants and said something unpublishable.

The Poets’ Union was set up to fight for the rights of poets. It had always been difficult for an individual poet to stand up to an editor who did not pay because the poet feared that they would not be accepted again in that journal. So often they let the matter of payment slide.

We formed committees for the next two days after the meeting and then I was taken to the train and given violets by Lyndon Walker, a Melbourne poet and social worker. The station was full of fog. We might have been in Moscow. The left-wing atmosphere of the weekend, the trains, the fog, the violets, the man waving as the train drew out…who did I think I was? I don’t think I had heard of the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, but the feeling of being a minor figure in a great exciting union during a time of change was definitely there. And the man’s sweetness, the gesture wanting nothing from me, seemed an illustration of what the union could become.

(Years later, at a meeting of poets at Balmain Town Hall, I ran into a tall man whom I thought was Lyndon Walker. Joyful to meet him again, I patted the seat next to
me and said something like, ‘How wonderful to see you again. Come and sit with me!’ I stayed beside him all day chatting happily. Days later, I found out the man was Philip Mead, a poet and academic who had given me a scathing review for a book of my poems.)

Friday 4 April. Made toast with cottage cheese and ate by sea. Walked on beach with Julia and had a swim. Niffy slept and read. Julia is on a grape diet (only grapes) in the fourth week to cure her sinusitis.

Rang Graham Rowlands re Pam Brown’s reading for the Union. We must see her work first, I say, until we see how good P. Brown is.

Rang Peter Goldsworthy re Union meeting at my house, as he is worn out and sick of wine on the carpet.

Alison Carroll came and we sat and watched the sea and drank bottle of wine. She told me she is in love with B and could marry him. Niffy too weak to come out to talk.

We ate stuffed peppers with mushroom and onion sauce I made, and drank wine and talked about poetry.

Saturday 5 April. Julia still on grape diet. Niffy up and better and is energetic. Walked on beach. We
talked about plays. Drank wine and went to airport with Julia to take Niffy there, 5 pm. She went back to her difficult life.

5.30 pm. Julia and I went to
Manhattan.
We both loved it. I’d seen it in London and it’d cheered me up from trouble. Drove home to Henley [Julia’s home]. I ate stuffed pepper and Julia had grapes. She’s very thin – her legs and arms flap.

We watched TV and I knitted Caro’s jacket. Began reading
Lives of Girls and Women
by Alice Munro – it’s wonderful; a masterpiece, I think.

Thursday 17 April. Warm then rain!

Caro got up at 5.30 again for rowing. Cleaned kitchen, fridge and house. Made brain and chicken stew and fricassee. Finished Poets’ Union Newsletter.

12.00. Thomas came and he got some champagne and wine. We ate lunch at home and went to bed and I read him a chapter of Alice Munro’s
Lives of Girls and Women.

We went to Burnside Library after he’d punctuated the newsletter (he’s always punctuating me) and photostatted it.

Posted letter to Telecom (serves them right! I’d have paid them first if they weren’t so rude) and $400 to John Martin’s department store.

Big rain! Thomas left and I served Caro the fricassee. She is tired and pale from rowing. Sat. is Head of the River.

I read a biography of Katherine Mansfield and dreamt of her all night.

Because of my lack of formal education, I had difficulty punctuating correctly. I solved this by seizing on the fashion for writing poetry that dispensed with punctuation altogether. Where a comma would be, and where the voice naturally pauses, I used line ends, and where a full stop would fall I used a double space, and I made a paragraph by forming a stanza or a verse at the end of a complete idea. In this way, I bluffed through my ignorance for years.

However, when faced with writing essays or the newsletters I wrote for the Civic Trust or the Poets’ Union, I needed help.

I seemed to spend years typing up the minutes of meetings I had agreed to join. The Civic Trust was the most difficult because it all had to be roneoed off on my old machine lifted up onto the dining-room table for the printing. I found it a rich thing that, after explaining to the president that with two children and doing a full-time degree I had no spare time for being a secretary, he had said to me that if I agreed to be the secretary of the Trust there would be almost no extra work involved. Then one day, during a meeting, I saw him secretly give a mocking
glance to a member when they saw the typing errors in my minutes. He, who had a secretary of his own and a wife at home making dinner.

Saturday 19 April. Caro rows in Head of the River! She rode to the sheds [on the River Torrens]. I cooked quiche and chicken pieces and packed lunch.

11.00 am. The Salmons [parents of a rower] drove me to West Lakes. Caro looked beautiful in her black singlet and shorts and a tie. I took photos. She cried before the race.

12.30 pm. They won! She and Trudy walked out of the water sobbing. Caro said, ‘Mummy, we won.’ We ate lunch with wine and watched Head of the River won by Christian Brothers College. Caro’s team got silver cup – first team to get it as under-15 girls is a new event.

I went to Julia’s and swam alone and Caro went to Trudy’s.

8.15 pm. Ghilly’s recital in Edmond Wright House. Very wonderful and moving!

10.15. Wendy and David came and got me and drove me to coffee with friends and then to Stirling to Wendy’s to stay.

12.00. Finished K. Mansfield’s biography.

21 April. Drove home with Wendy in rain. Put autumn leaves in the house. Made pâté and rang Thomas and ETSA [the electricity company – I was often late paying bills and was continually in debt] and made appointment with Commonwealth Employment.

Louise Baird and David came and talked for an hour.

Lunch with Thomas. Made pepper steaks, potatoes and salad.

Roger Marshman [a schoolmaster] came re a school’s poetry-teaching seminar [to be held at Prince Alfred’s College, a boys boarding school that was nearby and where I had recently been Writer in Residence].

We three had claret until 2 pm and Thomas and I ate lunch too late and were drunk. Wendy arrived in the midst of this. They drank tea and I had a claret. Thomas and Wendy left. Caro didn’t want dinner so she went to bed and Louise Baird came and we went to see
Get Out Your Handkerchiefs,
a French film at the Capri. Lovely film. Made me strangely happy. We had coffee there and drove home.

24 April. Thomas and I drove to Burnside Library and I photostatted poems by women for the conference on Monday [a Marxist conference in
Lorne, Victoria, where Terry Eagleton from the UK was to give a paper, and to which Thomas and I were going – I to accompany Thomas, he to be a participant] as they only chose male poets for it and I’m going to balance that if I can and if they’ll let me.

Posted 3 last newsletters to Union and books to Niffy, Paula and the Nissens [Rosemary Nissen had worked with her husband, Peter, on the
Dictionary of Australian Poets,
along with the poet Philip Martin, a friend of mine].

Sorted it all on top of Thomas’s car and felt ashamed – his life’s so organised!

At home the post came with two letters, from [the poets] Susan [Hampton] and Andrew [McDonald]. I was screeching and tripping on Bliss [Caro’s cat] in the dark. Lovely photos of Writers’ Week and lovely poems from Susan, who is on retreat to write a novel with her Lit. Board grant. Wrote to them and wrote a poem called ‘The Warren’.

Liz came and my heart fell—she wants to come and stay as Peter, she and TC are in the usual knot. Oh bugger! I said yes. [Lizzie played harpsichord and she had a little dog that she carried, like an eighteenth-century beauty. She had given up Medicine to study Music. One day, we ran into each other on campus and she said breathlessly, ‘They’re playing Messiaen at lunchtime.’]

Before that, I read Amanda’s letter to Caro as she ate her soup. 9 pm. Bed.

Friday 2 May. Stuffed turkeys.

10.30 am. Go to 5MMM to do bit on Poets’ Union and on Sisters Publishing and finish the hour’s programme on women’s poetry to be broadcast for a separate hour.

Q. Who will I interview? A. No-one today as I didn’t get time to organise it. Did two bits – one Union and one on Sisters. Rode Caro’s bike there – flat tyre and only one brake – scary. Mine is too flat.

12.30 pm. Thomas came and got me and took bike and me home.

Made steak and mushroom lunch with broccoli and had gin and tonic. Went to bed when we had planned to get dinner organised.

3.00 pm. I washed up at last, Thomas vacuumed and set table. Cooked two turkeys and potatoes and a big pumpkin filled with cream and cheese and milk for soup.

Made lemon soufflé – cold – and had gin and tonic and sat with Thomas and Caro after they advised me on a dress. Wore my long, black, silky dress with boots and pink silk jacket and he said I look like a sexy version of his grandmother.

Ian’s farewell [he was leaving to work at the new National Gallery of Australia in Canberra]. Therese (O’Brien), Ian, Stephie, Clifford, Julia, Thomas, Kay Lawrence, John Wood, Dee and Doug Jones, and Olive and Tony Bishop came. The last two left at 2 am.

Tuesday 6 May. Washed up and knitted. Man came to value the furniture and made offer $500. Oh pooh. Another came—Greenwood his name—offered $1450! But that includes the blue grandmother chair and two beds. [We were moving to the cottage I had bought in the city after Richard and I had sold the Dulwich house as part of our divorce, and the furniture was too large for this smaller house.] I said I’d let him know. Very pushy man but sociable and good looking. Thomas came and we went to Norwood Spectrum shop and I bought a cream lounge suite for $1400 and glass-and-steel table and 6 chairs of black beech, cane seats and silver all-in-one legs for $750. (It’s my symbol, this furniture – that I’m not going downhill quite so fast!)

We went to Leon’s [a Norwood bistro], as I felt weak but had planned to cook lunch to save money. Rang Greenwood who got stroppy as I refused his offer so he offered $1750 and so I said yes. Muttee’s chair! I didn’t mean to sell it just to get its value!

6.30 pm. Dinner at La Campari with Thomas and Louise Baird.

8.30 pm. Thomas read at Friendly Street (at last). Ian North and David Dolan came to hear it. He was very good. Drove home and had a drink.

Van coming to collect furniture at 4 pm. Had drink with lawyer and he left. Caro got home and I told her all the doings! I’ll only have $62 from sale of house and she said, ‘Oh well, it wouldn’t be normal for us if we weren’t in debt.’ She’s lovely!

Thomas was worried about not speaking to people at his reading. Pick. Pick. Nothing satisfies him. I said, ‘I could carry you back over hills to the sea and when I put you down you’d complain.’

Wednesday 7 May. 6 am. Got into bed with Caro after bad dream. Caro went to school on bike. House quite empty now. Miles of rubbish, though, and I’m terrified of how we’ll get rid of it all. Posted lots of poems to editors, just to make me feel I’m still productive in the dissolving of this house. Sent off new poem plus old ones (‘Wilderness’ is the new one and I’m fairly pleased with it).

Thursday 8 May. Packed up. Thomas drove me to bank. We went to Thomas’s and ate kidneys and also octopus and roast veal. Hastily drove to Concordia
College at Highgate to do poetry class (fee $20). Finished at 3 pm. Taxi home – Thomas had had a walk and was waiting.

Friday 9 May. 9.30. David and I began painting Caro’s new room cream. New glass table and chairs arrived at new house—look lovely. One room will be OK and not too chaotic to live in. Tenants on the other side. Oh Blast! Going in 2–3 weeks they say! [The house had been divided into two flats.] Thomas arrived and we all painted till 12. Made picnic lunch, bread, cheese, artichokes, pâté and jar of Italian anti-pasta, with wine and beer. We ate in the garden. D left and Thomas and I painted ceiling and we did the walls. Drove back to Dulwich and slept there for last time.

Saturday 10 May. Friends coming to help me move to Blackburn Street (I hope).

David Stokes, Wendy, Tim and Annabel [Wendy’s children who are the same age as my own] and their cousin Kim came. Amanda came. Also Ron Pratt came and he and I got the hired truck and we worked ‘til 7 pm. Wendy’s back bad, all weak, so she put flowers in and poured wine for us. Small glass coffee table broken. My bed support broken but can be soldered, I hope. Hugh didn’t turn up. Caro worked like a strong man. Paid Tim and Annabel $10
each and took Ron, Amanda and Caro to dinner at La Trattoria. We had a very happy time and a delicious meal. Caro almost asleep at table. Bed 9 pm. In bunks in new house.