Question 7, page 5
And yet when we went to church, the essence of everything Mate respected, we always sat near the back, the place I seek out to this day at any event, a place where disrespect and comedy flourish, where the power and authority on the stage called the altar are mocked with whispered asides, jokes, mimicry; where one is always closest to the exit and the real world of sun, sea, of life itself. When it came time for Communion, the theatrical catharsis of the mass, I never saw my father partake.
As a child this act of revolt felt powerful and unnecessarily non-conformist. The point of mass was mutual agreement—that much was clear even to a child—and any act of disagreement threatened to upset the whole edifice. Yet there he was, week after week, at church, sitting up in the last few rows and refusing at the apotheosis of the ceremony to agree. He didn’t disagree, or say no. He was no, the embodiment of no, the most powerful no there is: peaceful, passive, respectfully and adamantly no.
Only now can I see how he said no to almost everything that life offered, not in rage or terror, not with vehemence or in indignation, but with a wry smile and a funny story, amused by the absurdity of the world. His revolt was self-contained and self-sustained. I don’t know how he did it.
We justified sitting up the back because the fervour of those who sat up front was seen by us to be undignified, unseemly and ill-judged, their belief too total and too complete. The front of the church was where converts always sat—or so the wisdom of the family had it—and converts were said to be ferocious in their belief.
When I find myself at this other end of life once more sitting up the back of literary and artistic events of today that so resemble the churches of yesterday, old rituals in new drag, with their unquestioning subservience to new orthodoxies and their contempt for difference which many find comforting, replete with their savage castings-out and swooning agreements which many find necessary, my mind drifts. A world of sacrosanct orthodoxy is a world in which the novel and the novelist have no home. A writer, if they are doing their job properly, is always a heretic. As I sit silently through the stale tedium, the po-faced hypocrisies and dreary homilies, my mind is escaping once more into dreams of the sea and sun outside.
13
My father said he was a bush Catholic. A priest would come around once or twice a year to remote places like Cleveland and marry and christen whoever needed such formalities observed. Other than that, Catholicism was not much present. My father’s own belief, with which he saw no conflict with his Catholicism, was that people returned to this world as kangaroos, wallabies, wombats and birds. Things were mysterious to him and he found that reassuring. Though a teacher, he did not believe or profess any ultimate answers. He felt a deep connection with the people he was descended from and yet about them he knew next to nothing. We were taken to the places they lived in some lesson that was also a quest, some imparting of knowledge that was also a question he couldn’t answer. We would stand just down from the railway line, the old Georgian coaching house at our back, staring at the empty block, there in the bush, where once had stood the railway labourer’s wooden cottage in which he had been born. There as a child he had filled out his illiterate father’s work sheets in the wavering light thrown by a kerosene lantern in their kitchen, oily shadows abruptly darting across the page when a draught blew, and afterwards read aloud to his father the footy results from The Sporting Globe.
14
We had two boxes of comics and twopenny westerns we reread every holidays. There were Phantoms, Eagles, Disneys, some Superman and Batman comics. But the favourites were Phantom and the war comics. It wasn’t until I was six or seven that one of my brothers mentioned Dad had been a soldier in the war—there was only one war in those days—and, excited, I asked him, using the lingua franca of war comics, how many Japs he had killed.
My father, whose attention was almost impossible to get, who was so remote and so distant, suddenly turned and fixed his gaze on me.
Never, he said with an anger the ferocity of which I can still feel these years later, never ever ask such a question again.
That was all. Yet the sudden intensity of him I had not experienced before and never would again. It was overwhelming. I was at once undone and bewildered.
He didn’t seek me out to explain any of it. It was left to me to slowly piece together the knowledge that a war comic was not war, nor yet life; that there was a real world that had to be addressed with the utmost respect and seriousness. My father liked folly and fancy. What he could not tolerate was when they were conflated with life.
Whenever I hear the babble of nonsense with which politicians dress up the horrors of war, I am once more that seven-year-old child, shocked, bewildered and deeply ashamed.
War, my father told me decades later, is the ultimate obscenity.
15
Our father wasn’t impractical but he was uninterested in practical things. He took pride in his neatly kept fingernails, owning a small half-oval leather wallet containing nail scissors, files and assorted manicure tools he had bought after the war and kept until his death. Coming from a labouring family, a successful sportsman in his youth, something of a local champion, and having only just survived being a slave labourer, he felt no need to prove himself physically, had no interest in manual work and made no pretence he did. Nor did he have his idea of masculinity bound up in it; that is, if he had any idea of masculinity. Men amused him but women interested him. He spoke of women seriously, while men, for the most part, were no more than comic relief. He seemed bored by ideas of masculinity, or perhaps he had simply seen what boys playing at men led to and none of it seemed to him worth the candle.
His primary emphasis in all things was on gentleness, kindness and a certain restraint. Sometimes, at our mother’s urging, he would throw me or my sister over his knee to punish us when we’d been badly behaved, raise his hand to smack us on our bottoms, and then shudder. Even today I can feel it, the thrumming of my father’s body and its gigantic unknown yet understood history vibrating into me, its incommunicable yet clearly communicated meaning. Shuddering and shuddering, until he threw me back on my feet and walked off, while behind him we would ape his shivering and shaking and silently laugh at him.
And he would allow that too, that we, his children, would mock his strength as weakness.
16
Much to our mother’s frustration, our father rarely ate with us, his family, claiming he had work to do, preferring to wait until we were done to then emerge and eat alone. He liked to eat and he liked his food to be for a simple palate. My mother had boarded for a time during the war with Miss Joan F—, who was contemporary in her culinary pursuits, and upon being married my mother, seeking to emulate Miss Joan F—’s example, presented my ever more sullen father with meals of meat and four veg. After a few weeks my father was said to have remarked, ‘Helen, this modern food is all very well—but can we just get back to the meat and three veg?’ And so it was ever after, although my mother, who was both an experimentalist and an adventuress, and unreliable in her enthusiasms, did successfully sneak mushrooms in over some decades, claiming they were offal off-cuts.
There was a strong distinction between adult food and children’s food, with products like butter and real cheese reserved for my father, along with the eyes of lamb chops, while the kids made do with margarine and dripping, Kraft silver-wrapped cheese, and the fatty tails of lamb chops. My mother took the worst and ate the leftovers: the burnt bits, the fatty bits, the remains. Food was a hierarchy with my father at its apex and my mother at its base. And yet this was not imposed on her by my father, who merely took what he was given. It came out of some far older order of things in which we were all implicated variously and in servitude to which we all paid a price at some point.
And yet, when my mother lost her way with vascular dementia, my father, in his eighties, took up the domestic burden without complaint and with even a certain gusto, cooking, cleaning, and overseeing my mother’s growing needs. My mother, in turn, having erratic memory, would sometimes eat both her meal and his, or take his tablets as well as her own, and all this he bore with a gracious humour. His methods and standards were not necessarily of the first order, but they worked. When one day I visited to find a hairdryer blasting into their refrigerator’s deep freeze and I thought he too had lost his mind, he merely pointed out how much easier it was to defrost with this method.
17
My father talked rather less than our mother but when he talked he was original. For a long time I was puzzled by his originality: his principal reading was two local newspapers of despairing quality, the Hobart Mercury and the Launceston Examiner. As he aged he read both ever more assiduously. Laughter and feeling were closely allied in him and he was particularly taken with what people wrote in obituaries. The doggerel of death in its tragicomedy never ceased to amuse and move him. He found wisdom and meaning in the most mediocre reportage of local sporting events. He was, in short, a very good reader.
Of the many necessary illusions that enable a writer to write, two are paramount—one, the vanity they can write a good book, and the other the conceit that a good book will be read by good readers, people with the insight to recognise what is good within it. But, of course, good readers are as rare as good writers, perhaps even rarer, and most books in consequence find only poor readers. Writers rail against misunderstanding, but poor writers prosper by being misunderstood, some even accidentally elevated into the pantheon of greatness in consequence, the bad clay of their work forever after glazed with the good fortune of brilliant readings. In a similar way my father blessed every court report and obituary notice with the weight of a remarkable life, finding unexpected depths and breadths in the thinnest journalese and kitschest sentiment, the words nothing, the drift of them everything. His kitchen filled daily with insights that belonged to an order other than that of the rags he read. He told one of my brothers that a single In Memoriam column could contain purer feeling than a book of poetry. He didn’t need literature to essay the universe. His mind only needed the smallest spark.
18
He once told me he never cried during the war, nor did he cry in the months after Thomas Ferebee released the lever over Hiroshima and 60,000 or 80,000 or 140,0000 people died and he lived and finally made it back home to Tasmania. Only forty years later when my elder sister’s son, Tom, died did a strange transformation take place. He would see a mesh screen in a car’s rear window used to shield a baby from direct sunlight and begin to uncontrollably sob. He would see a child’s empty stroller at a park and sob. A mention on tv of a missing child or a sentimental song on the radio and he would sob. He would not seek another room or place of privacy to hide his emotion, perhaps because the world was full of the same sadness, the inescapable sadness that was life, that was the shame of his brutally impoverished family that he, the only one of his siblings, was able to escape with a high school education, that was his mother’s death of consumption, that was the many friends he witnessed die in the slave labour camps of Thailand and Japan, a sadness that could only be tempered by the love of those close to you, the love they had for you and you for them. But now his grandson was dead and he, a man in his seventies, could not stop crying. His vegetable garden ran wild and then to seed. The only thing that now occupied his time was making compost for which he had no use, cutting up prunings and forking them over and over.
19
Near the end of his life, my father managed to piece together the story of what had befallen a woman who had vanished from his childhood hamlet when he was a boy. But having solved the mystery he discovered it was just another story, that there was no one left other than himself for whom it was of interest.
And this made my father sad.
‘There’s no one left to tell,’ he said.
By which he meant no one for whom it would help, no one for whom it might answer some implacable, inexorable question at the centre of their being. For memories too have their moment. There is a time for forgetting and a time for remembering and then even that time becomes a memory and, after a further time, nothing at all.
20
I knew my father was dying at that moment he told me he loved me. It was the first time he had ever said such a thing. He was ninety-eight. Ironically, one of my earliest memories and enduring terrors was that he would soon die. For so long he was a sick man struggling to hold many things together, his job as a country schoolmaster, his growing family, his marriage, his mind and his body.
He would spend the first week of his Christmas holidays mostly sleeping in that little bedroom with its row of south-facing louvred windows that rattled in the night wind and filled with a soft light in the early morning as the sunrise slowly slanted its way around. We children were warned by our mother not to disturb him. He would be exhausted and said and did little.
At some point he might rise and take us across the track that passed for a road through the mostly empty camping ground—a few tent spots cut into the boobialla linked by more tracks—over the dune and onto the beach. He would carry a folding sun lounge threaded with yellow plastic tubing under one arm and an umbrella across the other shoulder, set himself up, pull his giggle hat over his eyes and go back to sleep, yet keeping, I imagine, more of an eye on us than we thought. Or there again, perhaps not.
The sun would grow in its bite, the ocean would go its very long way out or make its very long way in and we would swim and play, but my father only rarely joined us. He was a family man who liked being alone, a solitary man who nevertheless greatly enjoyed company.
He would lie there in the summer heat, turning so dark that when we went on a family camping trip to the mainland he would be refused service in bars and bottle shops as another half-caste, and each time this happened he never argued or complained or said he was not one of those down on the riverbanks by the country towns we passed through, sitting in circles under the shade of eucalypts under one more of which my father now lies, as he wished, facing northwest where the sun sets on the mountain each evening, buried next to my mother.
That’s life.
Three
1
Rebecca West and H. G. Wells were completely wrong for each other, they were completely right; she saw he wouldn’t leave his wife, he saw she needed a wife; they jarred each other and annoyed each other from the beginning and from the beginning they were inextricably physically attracted to each other. He thought love was just common sense, she thought it was a way of losing it, he was for sex without love, she was for the whole damn business. He believed he was reinventing literature as a form of proselytising journalism, while she wrote many years after their affair ended, as if still arguing with him, that art was ‘not a plaything, but a necessity, and its essence, form, is not a decorative adjustment, but a cup into which life can be poured and lifted to the lips and be tasted’, and the book she wrote those words in, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, reinvented journalism as literature, prefiguring much of what literature would become.
They should never have met, they were destined for each other, he would make her life and destroy her life and she would make her life in spite of his life, he would be an inexhaustible source of love and friendship for her for the next thirty-five years, he would madden her, he would win her and lose her and win her, she would be the one person he cared to see to the end, and to her immense surprise only after his death would she discover within herself the one thing she had never expected: a crack in the cup of life that opened into a desolation that was utter and inconsolable.
2
Perhaps because she was irresistible Wells at first resisted her. Perhaps he sensed he had met someone his equal—or even greater. In any case, something startled Wells, even frightened him, for he abruptly retreated, and after they had kissed in front of his bookcase, he wanted no more to do with her. He packed up his papers and fled to Switzerland, where he hoped he might escape the confused feelings enveloping him and find a renewed clarity and purity of thought in the spectral whiteness that surrounded Château Soleil, Elizabeth von Arnim’s alpine retreat.
3
Rebecca West, though, was not for defeat. For her, love and victory were synonyms. And she was not one for losing. She coupled audacity and ambition with an idea of stability she would forever after mistake older men as offering. She held herself to a high standard. She had written only a few months earlier how unrequited love was pathetic and undignified, adding as proof her contention that Christianity lacked dignity—and by implication was pathetic—not because Christ was crucified, but because his love for the world was unrequited. ‘A passion that fails to inspire passion,’ she wrote, ‘is defeated in the main object of its being.’5
Having dispensed with God, she wrote to Wells that she was going to kill herself after being rejected by him, that all she could do was love. She had tried to hack the overwhelming love she felt for him back to the little thing he seemed to want. But even that, she realised, was too much for him.
4
Wells arrived at his mistress’s magnificent Swiss retreat with his two sons and half a suitcase of scientific reprints concerning the recent discoveries about radium—discoveries that, he told Little e, as he called the diminutive Elizabeth, pleasantly took his mind as far away as laudanum once had Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s and which would form the basis of the novel he would write—the story of man summoning a power equivalent to the sun.
And this, no less, Little e said, to be created in our own magnificent house of the sun, Château Soleil!
Wells coughed. The plural pronoun had the effect of entropy on his spirits. He suggested a walk.
After an hour of wandering the Swiss forest, Wells and Little e stopped. While resting, Wells divided between them a copy of The Times he had with him. They began reading aloud to each other gobbets of advertisements and articles that amused them. Little e came upon a letter by Mrs Humphry Ward. She read it in a grim, quivering Victorian falsetto that amused them both, as Mrs Humphry Ward, the greatest woman writer of the older generation, denounced the moral tone of the younger generation, citing a rising young writer as a most pernicious example of all that was wrong: Rebecca West.
As a child this act of revolt felt powerful and unnecessarily non-conformist. The point of mass was mutual agreement—that much was clear even to a child—and any act of disagreement threatened to upset the whole edifice. Yet there he was, week after week, at church, sitting up in the last few rows and refusing at the apotheosis of the ceremony to agree. He didn’t disagree, or say no. He was no, the embodiment of no, the most powerful no there is: peaceful, passive, respectfully and adamantly no.
Only now can I see how he said no to almost everything that life offered, not in rage or terror, not with vehemence or in indignation, but with a wry smile and a funny story, amused by the absurdity of the world. His revolt was self-contained and self-sustained. I don’t know how he did it.
We justified sitting up the back because the fervour of those who sat up front was seen by us to be undignified, unseemly and ill-judged, their belief too total and too complete. The front of the church was where converts always sat—or so the wisdom of the family had it—and converts were said to be ferocious in their belief.
When I find myself at this other end of life once more sitting up the back of literary and artistic events of today that so resemble the churches of yesterday, old rituals in new drag, with their unquestioning subservience to new orthodoxies and their contempt for difference which many find comforting, replete with their savage castings-out and swooning agreements which many find necessary, my mind drifts. A world of sacrosanct orthodoxy is a world in which the novel and the novelist have no home. A writer, if they are doing their job properly, is always a heretic. As I sit silently through the stale tedium, the po-faced hypocrisies and dreary homilies, my mind is escaping once more into dreams of the sea and sun outside.
13
My father said he was a bush Catholic. A priest would come around once or twice a year to remote places like Cleveland and marry and christen whoever needed such formalities observed. Other than that, Catholicism was not much present. My father’s own belief, with which he saw no conflict with his Catholicism, was that people returned to this world as kangaroos, wallabies, wombats and birds. Things were mysterious to him and he found that reassuring. Though a teacher, he did not believe or profess any ultimate answers. He felt a deep connection with the people he was descended from and yet about them he knew next to nothing. We were taken to the places they lived in some lesson that was also a quest, some imparting of knowledge that was also a question he couldn’t answer. We would stand just down from the railway line, the old Georgian coaching house at our back, staring at the empty block, there in the bush, where once had stood the railway labourer’s wooden cottage in which he had been born. There as a child he had filled out his illiterate father’s work sheets in the wavering light thrown by a kerosene lantern in their kitchen, oily shadows abruptly darting across the page when a draught blew, and afterwards read aloud to his father the footy results from The Sporting Globe.
14
We had two boxes of comics and twopenny westerns we reread every holidays. There were Phantoms, Eagles, Disneys, some Superman and Batman comics. But the favourites were Phantom and the war comics. It wasn’t until I was six or seven that one of my brothers mentioned Dad had been a soldier in the war—there was only one war in those days—and, excited, I asked him, using the lingua franca of war comics, how many Japs he had killed.
My father, whose attention was almost impossible to get, who was so remote and so distant, suddenly turned and fixed his gaze on me.
Never, he said with an anger the ferocity of which I can still feel these years later, never ever ask such a question again.
That was all. Yet the sudden intensity of him I had not experienced before and never would again. It was overwhelming. I was at once undone and bewildered.
He didn’t seek me out to explain any of it. It was left to me to slowly piece together the knowledge that a war comic was not war, nor yet life; that there was a real world that had to be addressed with the utmost respect and seriousness. My father liked folly and fancy. What he could not tolerate was when they were conflated with life.
Whenever I hear the babble of nonsense with which politicians dress up the horrors of war, I am once more that seven-year-old child, shocked, bewildered and deeply ashamed.
War, my father told me decades later, is the ultimate obscenity.
15
Our father wasn’t impractical but he was uninterested in practical things. He took pride in his neatly kept fingernails, owning a small half-oval leather wallet containing nail scissors, files and assorted manicure tools he had bought after the war and kept until his death. Coming from a labouring family, a successful sportsman in his youth, something of a local champion, and having only just survived being a slave labourer, he felt no need to prove himself physically, had no interest in manual work and made no pretence he did. Nor did he have his idea of masculinity bound up in it; that is, if he had any idea of masculinity. Men amused him but women interested him. He spoke of women seriously, while men, for the most part, were no more than comic relief. He seemed bored by ideas of masculinity, or perhaps he had simply seen what boys playing at men led to and none of it seemed to him worth the candle.
His primary emphasis in all things was on gentleness, kindness and a certain restraint. Sometimes, at our mother’s urging, he would throw me or my sister over his knee to punish us when we’d been badly behaved, raise his hand to smack us on our bottoms, and then shudder. Even today I can feel it, the thrumming of my father’s body and its gigantic unknown yet understood history vibrating into me, its incommunicable yet clearly communicated meaning. Shuddering and shuddering, until he threw me back on my feet and walked off, while behind him we would ape his shivering and shaking and silently laugh at him.
And he would allow that too, that we, his children, would mock his strength as weakness.
16
Much to our mother’s frustration, our father rarely ate with us, his family, claiming he had work to do, preferring to wait until we were done to then emerge and eat alone. He liked to eat and he liked his food to be for a simple palate. My mother had boarded for a time during the war with Miss Joan F—, who was contemporary in her culinary pursuits, and upon being married my mother, seeking to emulate Miss Joan F—’s example, presented my ever more sullen father with meals of meat and four veg. After a few weeks my father was said to have remarked, ‘Helen, this modern food is all very well—but can we just get back to the meat and three veg?’ And so it was ever after, although my mother, who was both an experimentalist and an adventuress, and unreliable in her enthusiasms, did successfully sneak mushrooms in over some decades, claiming they were offal off-cuts.
There was a strong distinction between adult food and children’s food, with products like butter and real cheese reserved for my father, along with the eyes of lamb chops, while the kids made do with margarine and dripping, Kraft silver-wrapped cheese, and the fatty tails of lamb chops. My mother took the worst and ate the leftovers: the burnt bits, the fatty bits, the remains. Food was a hierarchy with my father at its apex and my mother at its base. And yet this was not imposed on her by my father, who merely took what he was given. It came out of some far older order of things in which we were all implicated variously and in servitude to which we all paid a price at some point.
And yet, when my mother lost her way with vascular dementia, my father, in his eighties, took up the domestic burden without complaint and with even a certain gusto, cooking, cleaning, and overseeing my mother’s growing needs. My mother, in turn, having erratic memory, would sometimes eat both her meal and his, or take his tablets as well as her own, and all this he bore with a gracious humour. His methods and standards were not necessarily of the first order, but they worked. When one day I visited to find a hairdryer blasting into their refrigerator’s deep freeze and I thought he too had lost his mind, he merely pointed out how much easier it was to defrost with this method.
17
My father talked rather less than our mother but when he talked he was original. For a long time I was puzzled by his originality: his principal reading was two local newspapers of despairing quality, the Hobart Mercury and the Launceston Examiner. As he aged he read both ever more assiduously. Laughter and feeling were closely allied in him and he was particularly taken with what people wrote in obituaries. The doggerel of death in its tragicomedy never ceased to amuse and move him. He found wisdom and meaning in the most mediocre reportage of local sporting events. He was, in short, a very good reader.
Of the many necessary illusions that enable a writer to write, two are paramount—one, the vanity they can write a good book, and the other the conceit that a good book will be read by good readers, people with the insight to recognise what is good within it. But, of course, good readers are as rare as good writers, perhaps even rarer, and most books in consequence find only poor readers. Writers rail against misunderstanding, but poor writers prosper by being misunderstood, some even accidentally elevated into the pantheon of greatness in consequence, the bad clay of their work forever after glazed with the good fortune of brilliant readings. In a similar way my father blessed every court report and obituary notice with the weight of a remarkable life, finding unexpected depths and breadths in the thinnest journalese and kitschest sentiment, the words nothing, the drift of them everything. His kitchen filled daily with insights that belonged to an order other than that of the rags he read. He told one of my brothers that a single In Memoriam column could contain purer feeling than a book of poetry. He didn’t need literature to essay the universe. His mind only needed the smallest spark.
18
He once told me he never cried during the war, nor did he cry in the months after Thomas Ferebee released the lever over Hiroshima and 60,000 or 80,000 or 140,0000 people died and he lived and finally made it back home to Tasmania. Only forty years later when my elder sister’s son, Tom, died did a strange transformation take place. He would see a mesh screen in a car’s rear window used to shield a baby from direct sunlight and begin to uncontrollably sob. He would see a child’s empty stroller at a park and sob. A mention on tv of a missing child or a sentimental song on the radio and he would sob. He would not seek another room or place of privacy to hide his emotion, perhaps because the world was full of the same sadness, the inescapable sadness that was life, that was the shame of his brutally impoverished family that he, the only one of his siblings, was able to escape with a high school education, that was his mother’s death of consumption, that was the many friends he witnessed die in the slave labour camps of Thailand and Japan, a sadness that could only be tempered by the love of those close to you, the love they had for you and you for them. But now his grandson was dead and he, a man in his seventies, could not stop crying. His vegetable garden ran wild and then to seed. The only thing that now occupied his time was making compost for which he had no use, cutting up prunings and forking them over and over.
19
Near the end of his life, my father managed to piece together the story of what had befallen a woman who had vanished from his childhood hamlet when he was a boy. But having solved the mystery he discovered it was just another story, that there was no one left other than himself for whom it was of interest.
And this made my father sad.
‘There’s no one left to tell,’ he said.
By which he meant no one for whom it would help, no one for whom it might answer some implacable, inexorable question at the centre of their being. For memories too have their moment. There is a time for forgetting and a time for remembering and then even that time becomes a memory and, after a further time, nothing at all.
20
I knew my father was dying at that moment he told me he loved me. It was the first time he had ever said such a thing. He was ninety-eight. Ironically, one of my earliest memories and enduring terrors was that he would soon die. For so long he was a sick man struggling to hold many things together, his job as a country schoolmaster, his growing family, his marriage, his mind and his body.
He would spend the first week of his Christmas holidays mostly sleeping in that little bedroom with its row of south-facing louvred windows that rattled in the night wind and filled with a soft light in the early morning as the sunrise slowly slanted its way around. We children were warned by our mother not to disturb him. He would be exhausted and said and did little.
At some point he might rise and take us across the track that passed for a road through the mostly empty camping ground—a few tent spots cut into the boobialla linked by more tracks—over the dune and onto the beach. He would carry a folding sun lounge threaded with yellow plastic tubing under one arm and an umbrella across the other shoulder, set himself up, pull his giggle hat over his eyes and go back to sleep, yet keeping, I imagine, more of an eye on us than we thought. Or there again, perhaps not.
The sun would grow in its bite, the ocean would go its very long way out or make its very long way in and we would swim and play, but my father only rarely joined us. He was a family man who liked being alone, a solitary man who nevertheless greatly enjoyed company.
He would lie there in the summer heat, turning so dark that when we went on a family camping trip to the mainland he would be refused service in bars and bottle shops as another half-caste, and each time this happened he never argued or complained or said he was not one of those down on the riverbanks by the country towns we passed through, sitting in circles under the shade of eucalypts under one more of which my father now lies, as he wished, facing northwest where the sun sets on the mountain each evening, buried next to my mother.
That’s life.
Three
1
Rebecca West and H. G. Wells were completely wrong for each other, they were completely right; she saw he wouldn’t leave his wife, he saw she needed a wife; they jarred each other and annoyed each other from the beginning and from the beginning they were inextricably physically attracted to each other. He thought love was just common sense, she thought it was a way of losing it, he was for sex without love, she was for the whole damn business. He believed he was reinventing literature as a form of proselytising journalism, while she wrote many years after their affair ended, as if still arguing with him, that art was ‘not a plaything, but a necessity, and its essence, form, is not a decorative adjustment, but a cup into which life can be poured and lifted to the lips and be tasted’, and the book she wrote those words in, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, reinvented journalism as literature, prefiguring much of what literature would become.
They should never have met, they were destined for each other, he would make her life and destroy her life and she would make her life in spite of his life, he would be an inexhaustible source of love and friendship for her for the next thirty-five years, he would madden her, he would win her and lose her and win her, she would be the one person he cared to see to the end, and to her immense surprise only after his death would she discover within herself the one thing she had never expected: a crack in the cup of life that opened into a desolation that was utter and inconsolable.
2
Perhaps because she was irresistible Wells at first resisted her. Perhaps he sensed he had met someone his equal—or even greater. In any case, something startled Wells, even frightened him, for he abruptly retreated, and after they had kissed in front of his bookcase, he wanted no more to do with her. He packed up his papers and fled to Switzerland, where he hoped he might escape the confused feelings enveloping him and find a renewed clarity and purity of thought in the spectral whiteness that surrounded Château Soleil, Elizabeth von Arnim’s alpine retreat.
3
Rebecca West, though, was not for defeat. For her, love and victory were synonyms. And she was not one for losing. She coupled audacity and ambition with an idea of stability she would forever after mistake older men as offering. She held herself to a high standard. She had written only a few months earlier how unrequited love was pathetic and undignified, adding as proof her contention that Christianity lacked dignity—and by implication was pathetic—not because Christ was crucified, but because his love for the world was unrequited. ‘A passion that fails to inspire passion,’ she wrote, ‘is defeated in the main object of its being.’5
Having dispensed with God, she wrote to Wells that she was going to kill herself after being rejected by him, that all she could do was love. She had tried to hack the overwhelming love she felt for him back to the little thing he seemed to want. But even that, she realised, was too much for him.
4
Wells arrived at his mistress’s magnificent Swiss retreat with his two sons and half a suitcase of scientific reprints concerning the recent discoveries about radium—discoveries that, he told Little e, as he called the diminutive Elizabeth, pleasantly took his mind as far away as laudanum once had Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s and which would form the basis of the novel he would write—the story of man summoning a power equivalent to the sun.
And this, no less, Little e said, to be created in our own magnificent house of the sun, Château Soleil!
Wells coughed. The plural pronoun had the effect of entropy on his spirits. He suggested a walk.
After an hour of wandering the Swiss forest, Wells and Little e stopped. While resting, Wells divided between them a copy of The Times he had with him. They began reading aloud to each other gobbets of advertisements and articles that amused them. Little e came upon a letter by Mrs Humphry Ward. She read it in a grim, quivering Victorian falsetto that amused them both, as Mrs Humphry Ward, the greatest woman writer of the older generation, denounced the moral tone of the younger generation, citing a rising young writer as a most pernicious example of all that was wrong: Rebecca West.
