The Life and Loves of Lena Gaunt (4 page)

I
thought of my life as lived in a fairy tale.
Once there was a little girl named Helena Margaret Gaunt, who called herself Lena.
Sometimes it seemed almost as if I observed myself from a distance. Without other children to play with, I played all of the parts in my own little life story.

Lena sat on the path by the verandah at the front of her house, pouring water from pot to cup to make tea for her dolly, whose name was Enid. The girl and her doll sat in the cool of the garden, flowers around them, hibiscus big and bright and open, frangipani fragrant, moon-coloured, milk-coloured. She picked frangipani blossoms and put them on hibiscus leaves, and served them,
one for Enid, one for me.
She pretended to bite them, but didn’t quite touch them to her mouth, mindful of her mother’s warnings not to eat anything straight from the garden. As she pretended to eat, she nodded her head towards Enid, pursing her lips, as her mother and her mother’s friends did when they took their afternoon tea. Her mother and her mother’s friends all sat on the verandah that afternoon, in the deep cool of the shade, around a low table of tea things: pretty china
from Home, dainties on plates, milk in a jug. Lena could hear them, just yards away from her, tinkling china and low chattering and the whoosh and rustle and delicious slip of dress hems against ankles.

As she and Enid sat on the path in the shade by the house, enjoying their frangipani dainties and water-for-tea, a butterfly appeared and hovered above them, just out of reach, as big as one of Mother’s best dinner plates, but more brightly coloured. Suspended above her, it seemed to block out the sun, the whole sky. The butterfly’s wings were every colour the little girl loved: mango, hibiscus, blood red; purple of the sky at night; silver of fish gleaming on Cook’s plate; blue of Mother’s eyes. The butterfly was so big, so very big, that its wings made a sound as they compressed the air underneath and above them with each beat. The girl stood, lifting Enid in her arms, smoothing Enid’s soft mango-yellow hair.

‘Look Enid, butterfly.
Rama-rama
.’

She held Enid aloft, and as she did so the butterfly moved ahead of them, just a little. She took a step closer, so that Enid could see. With each step the little girl took with Enid, the butterfly moved just out of reach, just away but staying close, as if they were attached by a fine filament that the girl couldn’t see, as if the butterfly was pulling her and Enid along behind it. It stayed close enough that she could hear the sound of its wings, the waves through the air. The butterfly stayed above her head, so she was looking up, but she got tired of holding Enid up to see. So she tucked Enid under her arm as she continued to follow the butterfly, quite quickly moving far from the tinkling
teatime ladies on the verandah, towards the dark jungle at the bottom of the garden. Magicked by the butterfly, she ignored the warnings drummed into her: stay close to the house; stay away from the old well; don’t go near the dark trees at the bottom of the garden.

The butterfly came to rest on a twig at her eye height. She stopped, held her breath so the butterfly wouldn’t be scared. She reached out her arm, her finger outstretched, then took a step forward – just a tiny step – towards it.

And then her world dropped from beneath her, the butterfly flew up as if the filament was jerked by an angel in the sky, and the girl felt a rush and a drop and all the air above and below her pushed her down and she disappeared below water, the air replaced by water all around her and above her and below her, and she didn’t know how deep it was, or how wide. She felt herself fall through the water, felt her body move through the water and make it eddy and roil, felt bubbles rise in her wake and turbulence all around. Enid was there, above her, her mango-yellow hair around her head like a halo, like a dinner plate, like a sea anemone’s tentacles, like a star. Enid held her arms out towards the girl, then rolled in the water above her and faced away, her hair tentacling around her, blocking out the sun, the sky, the world, the air above. The little girl waved her hand at Enid, waved at her to turn back, to not go away, but Enid did not respond. The little girl stopped waving. The water was warm. It pushed against her ears, a pressure she heard inside her head as a single note, humming, musical, low. It sounded like the black strip near the bottom of the piano. But it wasn’t played on the piano, it was a different sound,
not a hammer on a wire; it was a humming, inside her head, like the sound bees make.

As the sound in her head changed, the little girl felt a clasping pressure on her chest, then a rush and then the water moved past her and she was pulled, blinking, spluttering, abruptly back into the air.

The panicking eyes of Cook’s boy were above her, close to her eyes, as big as plates, wide in his face. She breathed in deep, and smiled.

‘
Selamat pagi,
Malik,’ she said.

‘Miss, you were in the water!’

‘Where’s Enid?’

‘Enid, Miss?’

‘Enid went with me. We were having a tea party. Enid was in the water. I saw her. We followed the
rama-rama.’

The boy’s eyes panicked again, and he looked to the well, freezing for a moment before leaping up, imagining another pale girl, this one floating on the surface of the water, eyes open, not seeing.

He leant over the well, peering into blackness. But he turned back smiling, showing her Enid, bedraggled, hair like yellow seaweed over her beautiful face and dress.

‘Enid!’ the girl squealed, and then she coughed, and then she was sick, more water than sick, water flowing in waves from her mouth, more water than a little girl could hold coming out and coming and coming as if it would never stop.

M
other came to us trailing a wake of afternoon tea friends, oohing and aahing, each with her hands to her mouth as if to stop anything coming out. They stood around us, our little tableau in the jungle at the bottom of the garden: me lying on the ground by the well, Malik crouched over me, holding Enid out to me like a prize, all of us covered in watery sick. Mother scooped me up in her arms, the sick and the water and Enid’s hair all dripping down her dress, making it stick to her, making a sound of scraping and sucking against her legs as she walked, carrying me – me carrying Enid – the ladies all trailing behind.

Mother strode up the steps to the verandah and gently lowered me onto the thin mattress on the rattan lounge. The ladies gathered around me, muttering, their concern a lower register than their earlier tinkling clinking teatime sound. Mother’s hand plucked at my clothes, and the ladies’ muttering faded to a low hum. And then, from that moment on, my memory fades, fades on the face of Enid as I held her close to me.

After the water, I lapsed into a fever. The doctor was called, and Father came early from work. Although I do not remember it, I imagine the doctor, Father and Mother all huddled around me. I must have been taken to Mother’s room, had my wet clothes stripped from me, been towelled dry and tucked into the big bed in her dark room at the back of the house, the window shaded by large trees, the whole room smelling of powder and coconut oil, of lavender and Mother and mothballs.

I stayed cossetted in that soft, dark room for days and days as the fever ebbed and flowed, dimmed and raged, and then finally left me for good: weak, pale, but well. The cause of the fever was never determined. Its source was
something in the water,
Father would always say. The water had been inside me and outside me and all around me. And then the fever took its place: inside me, outside me, all around me. The water had been warm. The fever was hot, my brain turbulent with imagined things, terrible things, burning hot things. I remember them as a hot dark cloud, buzzing in a minor key, indistinct, swirling.

My mother stayed close to me for that long season after the water, after the fever, sleeping on a low rattan lounge by the side of her bed, where I slept. I recall looking down at her hair spread on the pillow. She made a soft breathing sound, and her hands were tucked up, one under her pillow, the other under her cheek, resting lightly on the fine cotton.

I recall the symphony of the dressing table. It is what I heard as I came out of the fever from the water. I have held
this with me, and can hum it still. It is the sound of my mother at her toilette, and it played for me each morning, the bristle and rustle as her hairbrush ran electric through her hair before it was trussed and tamed into its daily knot, its bun at the nape of her neck. The hairbrush creaked and crackled, released tiny purple-white sparks, like stars, in the dark dry air of the bedroom, tapped percussion as she placed it on the dressing table. Crystal rang like tiny chimes, and her rings sang gold and silver against the china tray she dropped them onto.

I became attuned to all the sounds I heard. I would sing them under my breath when she had gone, sing them in the dark before the shutters were opened, before breakfast was brought to me.

But when I sang them to myself, I corrected them, wrote the music properly in my head first, then in my throat and my ears. Because Mother didn’t make those sounds in the right order, the right rhythm. She didn’t make the notes last for as long as they should. It was as if she didn’t hear the music properly, as if she didn’t hear how it should be.

Mother made the dressing table sing. But I perfected it, made it right.

I am unsure how long I slept in Mother’s bedroom after the fever from the water. Enid slept with me, by my side in the big bed, her hard little body a companion, a comfort. I grew stronger as the fever left me, fed up on mango and papaya and good white rice, and a sherry glass each day filled with the dark, strong Guinness stout that the Chinese drank as a tonic. Soon I was able to swing my own legs
over the edge of the bed and hop down without assistance. Finally I was moved back into my own, smaller room at the side of the house. It smelled musty, from me not being in it. Enid still slept next to me. Her hair did not recover from its dunking, and its straggling thinness never failed to remind me of the water.

I was left with another reminder of the water, even after the fever had left me. The doctors told Mother and Father that my heart had a leaky valve, and advised them that I would do better living in the southern Australian climate. The humidity of the tropics would only worsen my condition, they said. And although it was never made clear, I associated that leakiness, that fault, with my time in the water. That leaky heart of mine was what made them send me away from them. For my health, they said, but I always felt that somehow it was my failure to stop the water leaking in, or leaking out, that caused it.

S
o it was that my parents sent me away –
back Home
, they called it – aboard the mail steamer
Arcadia
in the care of the ship’s stewards. I was four years old; it was 1914. I can barely remember that trip, arriving in Fremantle Harbour to be met by my mother’s brother, my uncle Valentine, in his fresh new uniform. I did not know what a war was, nor what it meant. Uncle Valentine deposited me at the private boarding school Father had booked me into, the school run by the Misses Murray in Lesmurdie, in the Hills above Perth, where the air was too cold in winter and too hot in the summer. I can recall my arrival there as if observed, not experienced: the little tiny child in a dress sewn for the tropics, shivering in the foyer of that winter-dark school building. My uncle patted me on the head, waved me goodbye, and left. So deposited, I settled into my life with the Misses Murray well enough, their solid teaching of all things musical the distraction I needed to replace the gentle first music – of dressing tables and bees – that my family could no longer provide. I would not see my uncle again for five years, and it would be twelve years before I returned to Singapore.

Of my twelve long years boarding with the Misses Murray, the less said the better. They taught us and disciplined us in the manner of the day, their aim to turn us all into little ladies, the sensible, well-spoken wives of cockies and bookkeepers, of doctors and clergymen. We learned to write letters for all occasions, to sew a trousseau, to mend a sock or a bedsheet, to launder each Monday, to iron each Tuesday, roast a joint of meat to its grey melting point, to bake scones and sponges and fruit cake for a shearing gang or a church fête. Miss Murray the elder taught art, leaning too close behind each of us in turn as she peered at our watercolours and pastel sketches, her breath sour and slightly wheezy, eager and hopeless all at once.

Miss Murray the younger, though: Miss Murray the younger taught music and it was she who uncovered and nurtured my musical abilities, starting me at the piano when I was so young that I learned the musical notes before I learned my alphabet. The symphony of Mother’s dressing table faded, replaced by the cleaner notes from the keys of the piano, notes that I could control and order. As it became apparent that I had both perfect pitch and perfect recall, Miss Murray the younger gave me my head, letting me roam through pieces considered too difficult for a child. The word
prodigy
was murmured – with a mixture of wonderment and distaste – but never knowingly in my presence; vanity was almost as dangerous as talent.

My days shaped themselves around the piano in the music room, around the locked case with its treasured music manuscripts behind glass. Music released me from
the humdrum of so much at the Misses Murray’s. My leaky heart did the rest: my parents had entrusted me to the Misses Murray with instructions that I was not to join the other girls in swimming, nor in any strenuous endeavours. And so I was left to my devices in the music room, my weak heart beating time with the piano’s hammers, hammers on wires.

Although we knew that the Great War was raging – for the Misses told us so – it seemed a far away thing, cloistered as we were, we girls, in the little school in the Hills. It came closer when the Misses took us to Guildford to see the men march down the main street and onto the train, with all the population of the Hills down to send them off. We waved at them and their fine uniforms, and we draped the classrooms with paper chains to celebrate our soldiers.

As time went by though, more and more girls returned to the Misses at the end of each holiday break ashen-faced, quiet, sombre with stories of fathers or brothers lost or wounded. I learned the word
elegy
then, learned the feeling of
lentissimo
and
larghissimo
, from the music Miss Murray the younger played us.

By the time the war ended, I had almost forgotten that my uncle Valentine existed, or at least thought of him only in the abstract.

His voice came as a shock when it rang from the foyer of the school, rang through the closed doors and into the music room. I heard the Misses Murray muttering, their footsteps tinkering beside his boots until he burst through
the door in a fresh grey suit that even I could tell was cut from expensive cloth. He stopped a good step away, and frowned at me.

‘Helena Margaret, it is you, is it not? Good God, look at you, the spit of your mother, and almost as tall. Welcome your uncle home from the war, there’s a darling,’ and he held out his arms towards me, as no one had done since my arrival at the Misses Murray’s. I stepped eagerly towards him. He smelled of soap and tobacco, and held me tight against him, patting my back,
there, there,
almost humming the words.

My uncle had me play for him. He laughed and clapped as I finished each piece, shouted
encore!
and
brava!
and stamped his feet on the polished wood floor. Miss Murray the younger brought him tea on a tray, and a dish for his cigarette ash, and stood behind Uncle Valentine’s chair, her hands clasped in front of her, listening.

‘Such playing deserves a treat,’ he said, rubbing his hands together. ‘An outing, my girl, you should have an outing!’ He stood and gathered me up from the bench at the piano. ‘Miss Murray, I’m taking Helena out for the day. We may’– he paused for effect, wiggling his eyebrows at me – ‘be a tad late home. Don’t keep her tea warm tonight, Miss Murray, she won’t be needing it!’

Uncle Valentine’s car, black and shining, was parked right by the door at the front of the school. I had not been in a motor car since Uncle Valentine had deposited me at the school five years earlier, but I remembered the smell of the red leather seat, remembered it pressing my skirt to the backs of my legs. As we wheeled down the hill towards
town, I watched through the window as the bush slid by. We followed the river past the tall buildings of the city, past the stinking brewery and on to the edge of the land, to the sea.

I had not seen the sea since I’d stepped off the
Arcadia
five years before. How had I forgotten its smell, the sticky salt everywhereness of it, its thunder? Uncle Valentine parked his car on a headland high above the waves, the car with its nose pointed out above the ocean like the prow of a ship. Even on a calm day, as it was then, the power of the ocean was evident. The water thundered within itself, even as it whispered at the sand in foaming curves on the beach below us. I could hear the roar,
basso profondo,
underneath.

Uncle Valentine and his bottomless pockets bought me a swimsuit that day. We paid our halfpennies to use the changing tents, met up again dressed in our woollen togs and walked down to the water’s edge together.

‘Can you swim as well as you can play the piano?’

I shook my head.

‘But you
can
swim?’

I shook my head again. ‘I’m not supposed to. My heart…’ I put my hands to my chest.

‘Oh good God, well forget that nonsense, we must get you into the water, there is nothing as bracing as a dip in the Indian Ocean! Come with me. No harm will befall you if you stick with your Uncle Valentine, I am unsinkable.’

He took my hand and we walked to the water. It tickled at my feet, effervescing. Again I heard the bass notes underneath. I shuddered.

‘It’s the salt that keeps you afloat. Old Briny. Taste it. Go on!’ He bent down, scooped his hand through the water and up to his mouth, rubbing it over his face. I did the same. It was cold and salty, but clean, crisp, metallic. It was different from the buzzing water that once was inside me and around me and all about, all those years ago.

‘Ready? Easy at first.’ Uncle Valentine was by my side. He took my hand in his. We both faced out to sea.

‘Ready,’ I told him.

My confidence in the water grew. At first I happily paddled in the shallows, bobbing in the clear green sea, until I became brave enough to swim out, just a little, just far enough to catch a wave into shore. I did not venture deep. I preferred to stay in close, where the water was pale. Uncle swam out to the dark water, the deep water. It made me anxious to watch him get smaller and smaller then disappear in the chop. But I learned that he would always come back, huffing and blowing from the exercise.