The Good Boy (12 page)

Next holidays, perhaps in desperation, my aunt asked me to go down the street and to help an elderly lady friend of hers, Miss Inez Abbott, to pick fruit in her garden. This turned out to be quite an experience. The Abbott family had made a fortune in the tanning business in the late nineteenth century and Inez's father had been a member of Colonial Parliament for many years before becoming a senator for Victoria in the new Federal Parliament. The Abbots were important people in Bendigo; they had a large house out of town near one of the tanneries, and a handsome townhouse at the bottom of Rowan Street in the city. By the time I met Miss Abbott in her late sixties, she lived alone and was well on the way to eccentricity. She was tall and solid, with longish greying-brown hair elaborately and artistically swept up in a complicated version of a ‘French roll'. She was always well dressed and wore a gold-rimmed pince-nez attached to a black ribbon somehow fastened to her ample bosom, when not perched on her nose. I had never seen a pince-nez before and was fascinated by this aristocratic piece of equipment. I suggested to my aunt, my grandmother and even my father, who all used reading glasses, that they switch to a pince-nez … but alas, none did. Miss Abbott, being a young ‘gell' of good family, had never had to work but she had studied painting extensively in Australia and France, where she had lived for nearly twenty years in Paris and in Provence, successfully exhibiting her work in Paris and becoming a very accomplished artist. Indeed one of her paintings was said to be hanging in the Louvre, or was it in the Jeu de Paume, in Paris. (My grandmother said, with that quizzical little smile of hers, that in the 1920s the gallery in Paris had approached the Australian Federal Government for examples of the work of Australian artists, and Inez's father, the senator, had been able to offer one of his daughter's works for the French gallery's collection, at no cost.) Each year, when the big old flowering gum in front of the Capitol Theatre in Bendigo was covered in its deep-red blossoms, Miss Abbott would set up her easel and stool and, with an artist's smock over her usual clothes and an outsized straw hat perched on her head to protect that
nez
from the sun, she would paint the scene, taking a couple of days to do it. She would sit there in busy View Street, seemingly oblivious of the passing trams, traffic and pedestrians. I wonder what became of those paintings! I believe some of them are now in the Gallery but as far as I know, Miss Abbott never sold any of her work nor gave any of it away.

I knew all this about Miss Abbott before I somewhat nervously rang her front doorbell and offered to help pick fruit. The door opened an inch or two and a very sharp grey eye examined me while I explained who I was and why I was there. She let me in. Did she say, ‘Come in, boy'? I can't be sure that she said anything just then, but she did address me as ‘boy' whenever she spoke to me. I had only ever met the term in Dickens' novels and was startled to hear it applied to me. She rather brusquely led me through the house to the back garden and pointed to a huge old peach tree, laden with fruit. ‘Can you pick that?' she asked. I thought I could, provided I was given a ladder to reach the fruit.

I propped the ladder against the outbuilding beside which the tree stood and on the roof of which many of the branches rested. I climbed onto the roof and started picking peaches for all I was worth, with Miss Abbot supervising from ground level. ‘To your right, boy,' and ‘above your head, boy,' and so on were fired up at me whenever I wavered in my choice of fruit to pick. We filled several baskets before it was time for me to climb down and enjoy, so I supposed, at least a glass of lemonade. In heading across the shed roof back to the ladder, however, I inadvertently stepped on an area where the rafters were rotten, the corrugated iron gave way under me and I partially disappeared from Miss Abbott's sight. I dropped the basket of peaches, which went tumbling everywhere, grabbed at the sheeting at the edge of the hole, cut my hand and then managed to grip a stout piece of timber and haul myself to safety, inwardly cursing the rotten old roof and the silly old woman who had sent me up on to it.

‘You bloody fool!' was all Miss Abbott said. There was no lemonade, no proffered handkerchief to bind up my cut hand, not even a few peaches to take home. I was shown through the house and out the front door as if I were a dangerous intruder. My grandmother, stifling her amusement, had one of those ‘I told you so' smiles when told the story, and my aunt, whose idea it had been to offer my services, sort of apologised for Miss Abbott, saying that poor Inez by then had very few social contacts and had no experience of handling young people.

Perhaps as some sort of apology, the whole family was invited down to Miss Abbott's for sherry before Sunday dinner when my parents were next in Bendigo. My mother, father, aunt and I were received in the front sitting room, crammed with quite beautiful furniture and antiques which must have looked much better in the larger rooms of the house in the country when Miss Abbott had been young. I was supplied with lemonade while the others enjoyed their sherry and biscuits. Miss Abbott was, as usual, immaculately coiffed and beautifully dressed, this time wearing some sort of tailored linen dress with light black and brown geometric motifs on a pale straw background. She seemed very at ease chatting with my father, deftly resisting my aunt's attempts to steer the conversation around to Miss Abbott's painting (there were several framed examples in the room) and seemingly oblivious of my mother's clinically appraising eye. I, of course, the ‘boy', was ignored. That was my last contact with Miss Abbott, although I did see her once or twice more sitting at her easel in View Street painting her favourite flowering gum. My mother concluded that Miss Abbott was not merely eccentric but drifting towards madness. My aunt (I know from my grandmother) tried to draw Miss Abbott out and back into social life, but without success. A few years later Miss Abbott was found on the floor of her hallway by the cleaning lady who came once a week; she had been dead for several days, having died there alone of a heart attack.

Another old lady with whom I had contact during my holidays in Bendigo was my grandmother's neighbour, Miss Donovan. Maggie Donovan had started off her working life in the 1880s as a maid to Mrs John Crowley. The Crowleys had built the Shamrock Hotel and the Royal Princess Theatre in Bendigo and lived in some style in Marlborough House on the corner of Rowan and Wattle Streets, entertaining Dame Nellie Melba when she sang at the Princess, as well as most of the other notables who visited Bendigo, then in its ‘golden days'. When Mrs Crowley died, Miss Donovan was promoted to housekeeper and with the help of a ‘girl' and a ‘man', with the girl doing the housework and the man doing the outside work such as looking after the firewood (there were seven fireplaces, the woodfire stove, the boiler and the copper to keep supplied with wood) and the horses. Miss Donovan ran the house, did the cooking and looked after the widower and his two sons. John Crowley died in 1899 and the younger son, Cornelius, moved to Sydney after graduating in Medicine at the University of Melbourne while the elder son, William, by then a law graduate, stayed on in Bendigo and managed the family estate. Mr William Crowley never married. My aunt and grandparents moved into one of the seven houses adjoining the perimeter fence of the Crowley property in 1933, and became friendly with him. My father, when up from Melbourne on a visit to his in-laws, also called in on Mr Crowley; the younger brother and Dad had been in medical school together.

Fifty or so years later I purchased Marlborough House and, as an early retirement project, ran it for ten years as a bed-and-breakfast. My aunt, by then 85 and living in Melbourne, said with a sweet little smile that if she had ‘played her cards differently' with Mr Crowley in 1933 (he died suddenly in 1937) she, not I, would have then been the owner of the Crowley home!

When young Mr Crowley died his will provided that Miss Donovan would continue to live in Marlborough House until she died, his estate paying all the bills and allowing her a comfortable income. In my memory of school holidays spent in Bendigo, Marlborough House was ‘Miss Donovan's place'. Occasionally I would be sent next door with a message from my grandmother, and would have to brave Miss Donovan's pet magpie which patrolled the back garden just as a dog might, eyeing the legs of nervous visitors and clicking its beak in a most intimidating way. It never did actually attack me, but always seemed to be about to … was it a master of the art of bluff, just having a bit of fun, or was it simply a well-trained security guard?

Sometimes from our back garden I would hear Miss Donovan singing to herself as she pottered about beyond the high dividing fence. Her house had a detached laundry where she would now and then light a fire under the old copper and make all sorts of strange soaps, oils and ointments, one of which (an intriguing orange-coloured cream that I was always tempted to try eating, it looked and smelled so good) was presented in a small white Pond's face cream jar labelled ‘Miss Donovan's Ointment' and was apparently very helpful to my grandmother in reducing the pain of her rheumatism. Sometimes we would all go in to Miss Donovan's for afternoon tea which for me would mean lemonade and a piece of heavily iced fruit cake – Miss Donovan was reputedly a great cook. Once, when Miss Donovan's nephew Mick was staying with her and available to drive the Crowley car (gathering dust in the garage), my grandmother and I joined them and we all set off for a day's picnic in the country.

Miss Donovan intrigued me. She seemed to have a quite grand lifestyle, the (perhaps guarded) friendship of my grandmother and family members and the respect of the Bendigo community. I once asked my grandmother why we never saw Miss Donovan at Mass on Sundays and was given the somewhat evasive reply that ‘she probably went to early Mass' (we went to the 11 a.m. one). I developed the suspicion that Miss Donovan's status as an independent woman even saw her miss Mass on Sundays with impunity whenever she felt like it. I suspected that my aunt would have liked to do the same, but she never would, for fear of upsetting my grandmother.

A few years after my grandmother's death, my aunt leased the house and went to live in Europe, returning to Bendigo for half a dozen years and then retiring to a house she bought in Melbourne where her sister and brothers lived. My aunt told me that not long before she finally left Bendigo she had a brief chat with Miss Donovan, then in her 80s, frail and fading, living alone in that great house, and that Miss Donovan had kept repeating, ‘Tell me what to do, Nell, tell me what to do'. I think that Nell, like me later on, was shaken by the way even the strongest of souls can be brought low by age and weariness … and I doubt that she was able to give Miss Donovan any real answer to that most fundamental of questions: what comes next?

What does indeed come next? Surely that is a question we all ask from time to time. I had, I think, reached the end of secondary school and had begun university before the question really occurred to me. Until then I had thought that my parents and family and teachers collectively knew all the answers, or at least where to find the answers, to all the important questions. I just had not begun to understand how many questions there were, nor how difficult they were to answer.

I understood that religion was the explanation of the origin and purpose of life. I had believed, at age sixteen, that when my father died his body was indeed dead and had to be buried but that his soul lived on and, because he had been a good man, had gone to God in Heaven. This was a comforting explanation of the events surrounding his death. Although sad at losing his company (and the comfortable lifestyle his hard work had brought us), I therefore never doubted that we would all be reunited with him in Heaven after our own deaths.

My father had seemed all his life to have been a convinced Catholic. On one occasion I went to my parents' room just after lights out and saw Dad kneeling beside the bed, head bowed, silently saying his evening prayers. He never missed Mass on a Sunday, and once a month went to an earlier Mass than usual so that he could sit with the other men of the parish who were members of the Holy Name Society. This was an organisation which all the men of the parish were urged to join by the parish priest and indeed by the archbishop in order to strengthen their spiritual life and, I think, to show a bit of organisational muscle to the non-Catholic majority of citizens. My father's sister was a nun and he always seemed totally at ease visiting her in whatever convent she was stationed in, as he did when visiting any convent or religious institution for that matter.

One afternoon at the local hospital Dad had just delivered a baby after a long and difficult labour when he suffered a massive heart attack. The mother and baby were fine but he was immediately hospitalised himself. On regaining consciousness and after talking with the medical staff around him, he realised what had happened and that, although only 55, he should prepare for impending death. He called his solicitor and his confessor to his hospital bedside, tidied all that up, received the Last Rites devoutly, and died peacefully in his sleep some days later. Over a thousand people – family, friends, patients and parishioners – packed the parish church to overflowing for his funeral. The parish priest visited the house and gently urged my mother ‘to accept God's will and to understand that He moves in mysterious ways'. My grandmother, Dad's mother, did not come to the house but attended the funeral and at the church found the opportunity to utter one sentence to the interloper daughter-in-law – one final, realistic comment: ‘You'll have your work cut out for you now.'

I think that even as my mother quietly followed Dad's coffin down the aisle and from the church, her mind was focusing on realities rather than on pieties, on grandma's grim comment rather than on the priest's words. She was thinking not of God and Heaven but of her life with Dad, and of a future without him. As the six men lifted the coffin to place it in the hearse for the drive to the cemetery, she moved forward with a cry of anguish and almost animal pain, embraced it briefly, and then with a sigh stepped aside and let it go. She did not come to the cemetery; my grandmother and I stood together at the graveside to watch son and father buried. When I finally got home (my grandmother returning to her own empty home and never speaking to or seeing my mother again) my mother seemed almost her usual self, talking quietly with family and friends and keeping an eye on the efficient serving of afternoon tea and other household tasks temporarily entrusted to others. There were no outbursts of grief and no intensification of religious observances. A day later, my brother and I went back to school and my sister to university, my mother urging us all to just carry on with life ‘as that is what your father would have wanted you to do'.