Dying (7 page)

I liked Jenny and Ranald. They were kind and funny. Every morning the giant AGA stove
in the kitchen was fired up and spitting by daybreak. Ranald was the breakfast cook,
frying up huge quantities of lambs fry, bacon, onions, eggs, first for the working
men, who had to be away early, and then for us layabouts, who came to the table still
sleepy at eight.

‘Geez, did you ever see such a useless bunch?' he'd say. ‘Have to get you out cutting
fence posts for a day or two. Then you'll know you're born.'

We did go out with him some days, setting off in the truck to check a dam or repair
a pump somewhere. Jenny would load us up with smoko: lumps of fruit cake, tins full
of scones, tea for the billy. On the way, Ranald would talk about the weather or
the price of beef, and his fears about the state of the nation. He was a fierce conservative,
afraid
of the communists, the unions, the Catholics, and he was convinced that the
Chinese were intent on sweeping down from the north when nobody was looking. But
he was not averse to a debate, and when my mother challenged his views he happily
sparred with her as if it was a sport. He was also a lover of poetry and would recite
Burns and Tennyson as he worked away sawing timber, or mending gates, his mellifluous
voice echoing in the emptiness all around him. It made my mother cry to listen, which
was why he did it, I was certain.

‘You should never have gone away,' he told her. ‘You should have married a good solid
bloke from round here and been a plain country wife.'

‘And gone mad, just like Ril did,' said my mother.

Ril was my grandmother. Back on the verandah, Jenny and Mum talked as much about
her as they did about my father, often likening one to the other, as if they were
part of the same problem, the suggestion being that my mother had married a man who
reminded her of her own mother, and had paid the price. The image I formed of my
grandmother, as I listened to them talk, was of a beautiful, haughty, irascible
woman, incompetent as a mother, unhappy as a wife, beset by an unrelenting restlessness
that saw her crack once or twice under the pressure of it all. Most notoriously,
I learned, she had suffered a breakdown
during the war and had spent some months
in a clinic in Brisbane trying to get better. The cause was pretty clear: a son in
the navy somewhere in the Pacific, my mother nursing in Townsville at an army hospital,
my mother's other sister Judy already married at seventeen, and Jenny away at boarding
school, no men to help out on the property, her husband out working alone from dawn
till dusk, with all the attendant risks. He had come home one evening to find her
packing her suitcases at random, stuffing everything she owned into them, the rooms
turned upside down.

My father's nervous breakdown had been less dramatic. I was just old enough to remember
him taking to his bed and refusing to get up for days and days. Perhaps I took him
up a sandwich occasionally, leaving it on the bedside table for him to eat when he
woke up. I seem to remember him always asleep, his hair unwashed, his jowls covered
in dark stubble, his sheets stale. Jenny, who was visiting us in Sydney at the time,
recalled him sending messages to my mother via a piece of string lowered from his
bedroom window to the kitchen below.

‘He'd tie a note on the end,' she told me, ‘requesting a cup of tea and a biscuit.'

My mother laughed bitterly.

‘I made him an appointment to see a psychiatrist,' she said, ‘but he refused to go.'

I was fascinated by these problem relatives, my grandmother with her restlessness,
and my father with his inability to stay in one place, until his nerves frayed so
much he couldn't move. I couldn't help wondering how much of them might be in me,
and whether cracking under pressure might be a family trait. I also wondered at the
source of their fragility, whether it was an inborn hypersensitivity to things, or
bred of a justifiable rage at the conditions under which they were forced to live.
One of my mother's theories was that they were both people with enormous untapped
potential, who had missed out on a proper education and therefore felt they could
never catch up.

‘Interesting that neither of them finished school,' she said, explaining that my
grandmother had been expelled from her Toowoomba boarding school in her final year,
and that my father had been thrown out of home and school at the age of fifteen.

‘The war saved him,' she said. ‘He lied his way into the air force and never looked
back.'

As for my grandmother, she married at eighteen and had four children in the space
of ten years. ‘Out here,' said Mum, gesturing at the empty landscape beyond the fence,
‘with no one to talk to. No wonder she went nuts.'

At some point during our visit, my mother's brother Peter
and his wife Jan would
telephone with an invitation to visit Beaconsfield for the day. In some ways this
was the highlight of the trip, because Beaconsfield was the family home, the place
where my mother and her brother and sisters had grown up. And yet we never stayed
there. We only ever went for lunch.

‘What's the bet she feeds us in the kitchen,' said Mum, as we set out on one of these
excursions. ‘Off paper plates.'

I gathered there was no love lost between my mother and her sister-in-law. In a plot
worthy of Jane Austen, Peter, as the only son, had inherited Beaconsfield outright,
thus dispossessing his sisters of any claim to the place, other than a sentimental
one. In this, according to Mum, he was enthusiastically aided and abetted by Jan,
who had taken the extra step of suggesting that my grandmother was no longer welcome
in her own home.

‘That's why Ril took that round the world cruise,' said my mother. ‘She had nowhere
else to go. And then she came to stay with us in Ceduna.'

I had only the vaguest recollection of Ceduna, on the South Australian coast. We
had moved there briefly when I was four, when Dad landed a job with the Royal Flying
Doctor Service. But I did remember the miniature tea set my grandmother had brought
me from Hong Kong, and the dress with the gathering at the bodice that scratched
in the desert heat. And I had seen the photograph of her descending regally from
a DC3, her hair tied in a scarf, her eyes hidden behind enormous sunglasses, her
sadness wafting around her like a private cloud.

‘Poor Mum,' said my mother. ‘She spent her days sitting on the sand staring out to
sea. I don't think I'd ever seen anyone so lost.'

Exile, I decided. That must be the explanation for my mother's grief. First her own
exile from home, going way back to childhood, when she was sent to school in faraway
Brisbane at the age of eight, but then later the spectacle of her mother's banishment
from the place where she had lived all of her adult life. And if I cared to go even
further back, which other women would I find, displaced, banished, abandoned? Ril's
mother for instance, whom I knew only from stories, holed up in a rambling house
in Longreach where she waited hand and foot on Ril's bachelor brother Frank, in
an effort, I imagine, to keep him close. Grandma Cory was the one who was old enough,
when my mother knew her as a child, to recall spear attacks on the local squatters
and the deadly retributions that followed. Perhaps that was the original grief of
anyone who came from out there, from those towns; it was the grief for the exterminated,
the poisoned, the diseased and dispossessed. Perhaps no amount of forgetting could
fully expunge the memory of the original conquest, the primal crime, gone forever
unpunished, because there was nobody left to bear witness or tell the tale.

I thought about that as we drove over to Beaconsfield on one of our lunch dates.
I must have been in high school by then, and growing aware of my country's hidden
history. It struck me that only two Aborigines had ever featured in my mother's stories
of her childhood. One a young, nameless domestic servant who had been sent from a
mission to work for Ril shortly after her marriage to Norman. The girl had taken
fright and run away. The other an old man known only as Bill, who had worked for
Norman for many years as a stockman and general roustabout. My mother had a picture
of Bill posing for the photo beside a pony, with her sitting up on the saddle behind,
aged three or four.

‘He was devoted to Dad,' she said. ‘Every morning he'd sit outside the study door
until Dad came out and gave him his jobs. And then one day he was gone. Vanished.'

The way she told these stories, Bill and the housemaid were more like apparitions
than real people, ghosts returning briefly from some other world to lay claim on
their country, only to disappear all over again, too distressed to stay.

The landscape changes somewhere between Barcaldine
and Longreach. The trees disappear,
the soil changes from ochre to bleached bone. Seen in a drought it can look like
a moonscape, just a barren plain, but after rain it can turn into an ocean of grass.
I gathered that Beaconsfield was better country than Delta, though I couldn't tell,
knowing nothing of the exigencies of grazing. All I saw, turning onto the Beaconsfield
road, was more featureless nothingness. Not so for my mother, who knew every inch
of the road from years of travelling up and down it as a child. She remembered where
it took a turn towards the dry creek bed, where it rose again to give you your first
glimpse of the homestead, where it passed by the tombstone of the cowboy who had
been struck dead on the spot by lightning over half a century ago. She was excited
to be travelling the road again. I could tell by the way she sat forward in her seat
and pointed out what was up ahead.

‘That's where Dad bogged the car bringing me back from the train after I'd finished
school. On the way home I said I wanted to go on to university. Waste of time. Full
of communists, he said. We had to leave the car and walk the rest of the way, arguing.'

There it was again. My mother's exile. She went to university in the end, somehow
persuading her father to give her permission, and that marked her out, for the rest
of her life, as dangerously over-educated, full of ideas that were foreign to her
family. It made them afraid of her.

She gave a little cheer as the homestead appeared
up ahead. It was conspicuously grander than Delta, although of the same basic design.
A huge canopy of green tin over a sprawling structure that seemed without back or
front, having expanded over the years out from the centre. A lush garden shaded the
house on all sides, oasis-like in the middle of the scorched plain all around. Peter
and Jan appeared on the garden path and waved in a gesture of welcome. They didn't
look at all mean in the way I'd heard them described, just proprietorial, which was
enough to rankle Mum.

‘I'm surprised they don't charge us an entry fee,' she said.

Peter put his arm around his wife's shoulder in a protective gesture and they advanced
together through the gate to be there when the car pulled up.

‘Welcome to Beaconsfield,' he said, as if to a group of strangers, after which there
was embracing and handholding, none of it especially warm. It was a contrast to
Ranald who almost lifted you off the ground when he met you, held you to his barrel
chest so you could take in the working man smell of him.

‘Come in, come in,' said Jan. ‘Let us show you around.'

The tour was for my mother's sake, to show off all of the changes that had taken
place since her last visit. Rooms
had been added, or joined together, or opened up,
made more formal or more casual, redecorated according to Jan's taste. As I followed
the group around I could see my mother growing more and more irritated, as if the
whole exercise was a slap in the face. Peter had a way of referring to ‘
my
mother'
and ‘
my
father', a slip she found so exasperating she corrected him more than once.

‘
Our
mother,' she said. ‘
Our
father.'

But he took no notice. He was too busy showing off the formal dining room, which
was furnished, according to my mother, with pieces she remembered from her childhood:
the same long burnished table with the same solid chairs, the same sideboard heaving
with silverware and china she recalled using as a girl. Peter wanted to let her know
where the state governor had sat on his last visit, and which federal ministers had
sat beside him, but my mother couldn't have cared less.

‘This is where Ril used to sit,' she told me, ‘whisky in hand. She had a way of rubbing
her little finger against her ring finger, I remember. It was a sign she was about
to blow up.'

She sat in the chair and showed me the gesture, holding her head in the way her mother
had. I had seen enough photographs of Ril to recognise the lift of the chin, the
imperious stare.

‘She faced your father down the length of this table
once,' she told me, ‘and demanded
to know when he was going to give up adventuring and get a proper job.'

‘What did he say?'

‘I shall avoid it as long as humanly possible.'

‘That's why they got on so well,' said Jenny. ‘She didn't frighten him.'

According to legend, my father had thoroughly charmed my grandmother, the same way
he charmed everyone else. He played the dashing aviator, flying in once in a while
for a surprise visit in a friend's plane, alighting on the Beaconsfield airstrip
wearing jodhpurs and suede boots, tweaking the ends of his air force moustache, and
dazzling all and sundry with his villainous smile.

‘Errol Flynn, we called him,' said Jenny.

‘The boots were too much for Dad,' said my mother. ‘He thought suede was code for
queer. He even took me aside one night to caution me.'

‘Shall we have lunch now?' said Jan, discomforted by the turn of the conversation.
I sensed that she found my mother unsettling, and not entirely respectable, that
Mum's visits were an ordeal to be endured rather than an occasion for celebration.