Aunts Up the Cross (13 page)

Somehow, the aunts in an apartment no longer afforded the challenge that they had while brooding at the end of the street, and my grandmother’s visits to them grew rarer. Although Nana, in later years, remained almost permanently in bed, she also remained in full command of her surroundings. It was frustrating and pointless to struggle against her will in any matter on which she was already determined. My father had wrested a kind of negative victory from his private battles with her, but not for long did anyone else’s opposition prevail. One of the most abject surrenders which I remember was the Tax Inspector’s.

Thirteen years after my grandfather died, it was discovered, quite by accident, that Nana had never entered a tax return. Everyone tried to explain to her why this should have been done, and to extract from her some plausible excuse as to why it had not. Her excuse was quite simple—she had never heard of such a thing and nobody had bothered to tell her. If the affair had not already reached the level of the lowest cubicle in the hierarchy of tax assessors, the family would have kept quiet and done nothing—the back liability of thirteen years being too vast to contemplate as an actually present problem to be tackled. But it was out of our hands, and too late. After my mother had had her session, the family doctor tried: then various business friends, and finally her bank manager—all seated by her bedside, explaining gently in a conciliatory tone the basic principles of paying one’s taxes. My grandmother plainly thought them all lacking in elementary common sense.

‘But how,’ she demanded, ‘can I pay something I haven’t got? I would gladly do so if there really were any money left over, but I spend all my income and, what is more, I spend it all on other people. So I don’t see how I can possibly find this excess sum. You have only to look at my bank statements to see on what necessities I have spent it.’

Meanwhile, the paper work in the Taxation Department had been mounting, and demand notes being of no avail, her bank manager spoke in person to the Collector of Taxes. It was decided that in view of the fact that she was then eighty-nine, and seldom rose from her bed, the Collector would take his turn at her bedside.

Nobody else was present at this interview. It lasted two hours, and at the end of it he came out red in the face and mopping his brow.

‘It’s no good,’ he admitted. ‘She’s an old lady and we’ll just have to wait till she dies.’

And wait they did, another four years, while Nana remained smug and secure in the belief that common sense had won the day.

Nana and Juliet and Bertie spoke on the telephone every day. The two old ladies had the telephone on the table between their beds, and usually took it in turns to talk to Bertie, relaying the conversation between sentences in shouts across to the other bed. I remember once bringing a schoolfriend in to see my grandmother. She was a new friend and so my grandmother was delighted to have such fresh conversational opportunity. We stayed chatting for some twenty minutes before Nana leaned half out of bed to reach the ginger jar she kept on her table. I caught a fleeting glimpse of something black in the bed where her body had been. This black object was making a queer muffled, rasping noise.

‘Nana,’ I said, backing away, ‘there’s something in your bed and I think it’s alive.’

‘Oh, dear God!’ she cried, ‘It’s Bertie!’

It was Bertie—on the telephone. She was reading the
Sydney Morning HeraId
’s leader column aloud, and was blissfully unaware that she had been talking to the wrong end of her sister.

As she and Juliet grew older and more bedridden, Nana finally succumbed to one of the many requests to let out part of her house, and her drawing-room and dining-room became an estate agency. Considerable reconstruction was needed, and this was carried out in a fine spirit of optimism by the tenants, as she refused to sign a lease. Every year, the manager hopefully presented himself with the lease ready for signature and every year she sent him away, saying, ‘My father told me never to sign anything I didn’t understand and I don’t understand a word of this. Mr Briggs, my word is my bond.’

After the war ended, the life of the house weakened and slowly died. First, the troops left, and the Sunday parties shrank. Nicki, now able to rejoin his parents in Paris, and I, aching to join my latest beau in England, sat around waiting for transport out of Australia. What had remained a constant twosome throughout the war years was now a trio: we had been joined by a painter, Wolf Kardamatis—half-Greek, half-German—stranded too in Australia by the war. The three of us played endless games of cards with my mother and haunted the airline and shipping companies.

Nicki, beautiful Nicki, already at twenty-three dying bravely of a fatal disease, wanted only to see his Russian parents and his Paris once more. Wolf had never wanted to come to Australia in the first place. His German mother had died at his birth, and his Greek grandmother had brought him up in Athens. When Wolf was fifteen, his immigrant father in Australia had sent for him. Wolf locked himself in a lavatory in Port Said and the ship sailed on without him: he conducted a flourishing business at his subsequent Sydney public school in hand-painted copies of the dirty postcards he’d picked up there while waiting for the next ship. Expelled, he had gone on to art school and, when in the first feverish week of war a formation of planes had flown overhead at a crowded cocktail party, Wolf rushed to the window and shouted, ‘Mein Fuehrer! Mein Fuehrer! Don’t shoot! It’s only me!’ Born in Berlin, he still had his German passport, but in disgrace next morning he was taken by his father to be naturalised. His passport was the only Australian thing about him: he remained permanently rebellious in an alien culture, but in our house he created a small Greek corner for himself.

We left within a week of each other—the boys on a ship and I hitchhiking on a converted bomber. My parents made no attempt to stop me leaving. They tried, as they always had, to help me live my life to its fullest stretching point.

But that was the beginning of the house’s decline. For a year or two, my mother had enormous fun with food parcels: my friends in England were inundated. Mine usually had a bottle of whisky, well padded by marshmallows, tucked inside. To test it, she stood on the dining-room table and hurled it to the floor: if the whisky didn’t break, she deemed it sufficiently padded to brave the post. At a Christmas house party in England, when all the other guests had had their quota of tins from my mother, Harold French and I composed a cable to her, silly with Christmas spirit: ‘Please send Harold French parcel. He’s old, silly, but rather nice and has never had a parcel.’

My mother’s answering cable said: ‘Of course, darling, but who is Harold and what is a French parcel?’

Meanwhile she’d been shopping, in a bewildered way, for all the champignons,
pâté de foie gras
and truffles she could find. I lived in England for four years before my mother died but her letters came daily and I, knowing her nocturnal habits, could picture her at the round dining table, patience cards and empty tea cups pushed aside, cigarette butts mounting up, writing far into the night. My father acquired a nurse, Peggy, shortly after I left, and Peggy increasingly filled the pages in my mother’s letters—not with a happy note but with uncharacteristic resentment. Peggy was always upstairs, Peggy had been rude to her—insulting—and the worst aspect of all this was that my father had upheld Peggy against his wife. The daily saga went on for weeks and I skimmed over this boring tirade until finally it dawned on me that perhaps the root of my mother’s distress was a suspicion that my father was actually having an affair with this usurper, and that she was trying to tell me this in a gentle, indeed genteel way. Alarmed, I wrote back to ask her if this was the case. ‘Don’t be silly,’ she wrote back. ‘Of course not. He’s seen far too many twots better looking than her face.’ In no way could I afterwards visualise the unseen Peggy as a threat.

In another year she was dead. Then Aunt Juliet. When Aunt Juliet was killed by the bus, although my grandmother, then over ninety, lived to link me with the past by her still wonderful letters, the secure, magic place of my childhood vanished with her. My father broke the news to me, in England, by a cable: ‘JULIET SKITTLED,’ it said. ‘LOVE, DAD.’

Only he and my grandmother remained, unspeaking, in the lonely house.

Lastly, outliving all her loved ones, my grandmother died. The house was sold. The new owners were the long-suffering estate agents who were my grandmother’s tenants. The rooms became offices, dress shops, coffee bars; the front was all plate-glass and the roof was renewed. In the fullness of time and progress these gave way in turn to a sex arcade and now an underground station. And, as a final gesture to conformity, the tree has been uprooted from the Cross.

Since the publication of the previous edition, I am able to add some new information. Nana’s imagination need not to have been put to use in creating my great grandmother’s past history. I have discovered two convicts in her family tree. One appeared to have been a splendid character who, after his first two years released in bondage to his wife, as her cook, became a sterling and prosperous character.

Upon unearthing his past I have now been in touch with several cousins. All of these cousins, also unaware of their colourful antecedents, were already acquaintances, distinguished in their various artistic and literary milieu, and I had admired them from a distance. We have since had a cousins’ dinner. The second convict became a captain of industry and commerce whose descendants I have not dared approach.

My father, too, is still remembered in the essence of the Cross. Outside the house in which I which I was born, under the feet of the emerging travellers on the Kings Cross Underground station are set—not one but two—plaques:

Nobody else has more than one. I think it would have given my father a wry but emotional chuckle.

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