One day ill remember thi.., p.12
One Day I'll Remember This, page 12
‘They that have power to hurt and will do none.’
Moments of terrible, groggy shock. And yet underneath it the sense of something logically unfolding. It doesn’t feel bad, or wrong, to me. The wake slaps me around but the pain I’m getting is vicarious.
What am I doing this evening? A trifling question. Doing the ironing. Listening to some music. Reading. Hoovering white fluff off the carpet. Upstairs, muffled, a choir is singing the Lacrimosa from Mozart’s Requiem.
Chicken pieces (?). Cold Power $3.75. Two chops $1.19. Coloured clouds in a low bank over the city, packed there as if to act as dense padding for the bridge’s tough curve. The pretty young woman serving in the grocery shop made me feel her fingertips, to show how cold they were.
R calls, I give a shout of joy. My dear friend. It’s taken me years of work on myself to become worthy of her. I often doubt that I am.
A whole life can be spent quietly and patiently drawing nearer to something important. It can’t be hurried. This is why there is no such thing as boredom.
Violets grow in a pot on the porch of this apartment. I picked some and put them in a glass. At the moment of picking they have no scent, but half an hour later, sitting here, I notice something faintly delicious and turn around. The violets have opened further, become purpler, are in their small way terribly beautiful.
Every morning I wake in a sweat. Where one of my knees has rested on the mattress there’s a little round pool.
The dying man’s shaven head is resting on a blue gauze pad. His wife and I go out to the lift so she can fiercely smoke. She lets tears pour. The smoke bumps its way across the thick curls of her permed hair. I ask, ‘Is there any comfort? What are you living on?’ ‘I believe certain things,’ she says. ‘They’re useful to me. I believe there’s a chance of more than one life. I believe this because for there to be one thing in nature which made no sense and contradicted itself would be illogical.’ We are sitting in two chairs, talking intently, tears running off our cheeks. Our voices are low, but audible to anyone who cares to listen. A teenage girl comes out of the lift and sits down facing us, very close, her forearms along the armrests of her chair. She sits like a judge or a witness, and gazes straight at us. Neither of us takes any notice. When his wife stops crying, her eyes are very widely spaced, full of life and feeling. I walk out through the huge front entrance. Late in the afternoon. Birds are calling very loudly in the trees along Missenden Road. A quick shot of being alive. Their song is so loud, it’s as if my lively ears had magnified it. Walk along sobbing and gasping.
The Queen’s drawing collection at the gallery. Appalled to see the little ER stamp of ownership in the corner of each one—on a Leonardo! A Michelangelo! What a hide these people have got. An Annunciation: an angel with arms spread and knees still flexed from landing. Glad to have gone alone.
I told R that even in a ghastly split-up there are certain moments of truce, where both people laugh freely, as if for that moment seeing each other truly and deeply and without rancour. She said, ‘How interesting.’
In Melbourne our dog has run away twice. She trotted all the way from North Melbourne to Fitzroy and arrived drenched and dirty at F’s front door, behind which he was at his desk reworking somebody’s terrible French translation of Monkey Grip: ‘The rhythm of the French sentence is different from the English and with not enough words to play with it is at times difficult to get the music right.’
A teenage girl gets knocked off her bike at a crossing, in front of a bunch of pedestrians. She goes flying. She is wearing a helmet and has only skinned her elbow, but she sobs with anger and fright, sweating, trembling, a dark red flush down one side of her neck and shoulder. The driver, an old man grey with shock, gets out of his car and approaches. She yells at him in a studenty, self-righteous way, tears and dirt streaking her round cheeks. As soon as he sees she is not seriously hurt he makes as if to return to his car, but an Arab truck driver pulls up and the old man is returned by the combined moral force of the silent group to face the raging girl. ‘You don’t even care!’ ‘I do care!’ he cries. ‘I care very much! I have two daughters!’ He says it was her fault. We all say no, it was his, and he becomes greyer and smaller, mumbling, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Thank you.’ ‘Those wheels,’ she shouts, shaking and sobbing, ‘cost one hundred and seventy-five dollars!’ I keep my hand on her shoulder: ‘Don’t ride home. You’re in shock.’ The truckie offers to drive her home. She refuses, and wheels her beautiful (undamaged) bike away. ‘It was an accident,’ says a man, and we all go about our business.
Babette’s Feast. The artist’s cry: ‘Let it be possible for me to do the very best I can!’ I went home smaller, ashamed of my agitated idleness, my unfinished story.
The officer-students at the Australian Defence Force Academy, their trim heads and uniforms, their marching gait with high-swinging arms: they have to fall into step if they walk anywhere in groups of two or more. The only place they don’t have to salute is in the library. At breakfast in the hotel my father was the only man not in uniform. I said, ‘You want to look out someone doesn’t hand you a white feather.’
Watching the TV news my father says, ‘What’s the point of showing us Israeli soldiers shooting round corners? They see the cameras. They’re just putting on an act.’
‘You mustn’t pity her,’ I said to V. ‘Your pity will weaken her. What she needs is your respect.’
My mother knitted as we talked, showing the best of herself—talkative, but not droning. V was sweet to her, asking her the direct questions he’s so good at: ‘Do you like having so many children?’ ‘How did they let you know your brother had been killed?’ She told him things I’d never heard before. She mentioned a childhood friend called Florrie Beanland. He threw back his head and shouted with laughter: ‘Nobody’s called Florrie Beanland!’
V said that women look ‘ugly and old’ when they cry. R to my surprise agreed. I protested. I said that once I’d cried for three days and then got out of bed, looked in the mirror, and found I looked ‘gorgeous—all soft and young’. They burst out laughing, having expected ‘raddled’, I suppose. We agreed that the final effect of crying was often relief and that this could take away ageing tensions.
I took Mum to the Opera House, to see Otello. We both had to wipe our eyes, loving the music. She said, ‘It made me think of Dad. That jealousy of nothing.’ Oysters at the quay. On the bus we were quiet, gazing out the window at the city, this spectacle. ‘Everything is older, here,’ she said. ‘I wish I didn’t have to leave.’ At Via Veneto we ran into L and the Cretan. The Greeks were charming and funny, behaved towards Mum with gentle respect, shook her hand upon leaving.
‘Your mother strikes me,’ says R’s son, ‘as as someone who doesn’t often enjoy herself. She seemed to be surprised whenever she laughed.’
Etty Hillesum’s diary. Her father visits. All our good intentions, she thinks, are as nothing before the huge negative force of our feelings towards our parents. The best that’s possible is intense self-control.
‘I lied,’ said V.
We talked at dinner about fights where plates were thrown. I said I’d loved the machine in The Rake’s Progress that turned broken crockery into bread: ‘I wish I’d had one of those when I was married to F.’ ‘Oh!’ said Z. ‘Did you smash things? I’ve always dreamt of that. I’ve only ever been close to people who sulked.’ ‘There’s a wonderful moment,’ I said, ‘when you hear the sound of the smash, but it’s very short, and then you have to clean up the mess. You have to get down on your knees.’
On the spare bed at R’s in the afternoon I try to sleep, counting my breathing, but wide awake. Something’s gone. I know what it is: the necessity for stoicism. A hard jacket’s been taken off me. At first what I notice about its absence is a kind of blank surprise—then a fencelessness. My thoughts no longer run up against the monolith. I lie under the cheap quilt, calm, empty, complete, as if at the end of some trial. ‘The monolith.’ That smashed thing. Full of holes. Air and light now pass through its breached walls. Who’s responsible?
A novelist gives a boring, shallow lecture. Why don’t people say what they have learnt about life and what they believe in? I don’t think artists should presume to speak unless they are prepared to say something serious—even if they’re obliged to slip it in among the fluffed-up egg-whites like a bitter pill.
‘One thing your wife’s done for you all these years is to create around you a cushion of comfort and attention. Hasn’t she.’ Staggered to see he has no idea he is dependent on this. Men who will not stoop to teach themselves the domestic skills and talents that women possess (or have had to cultivate): they live in a mess, without attractive comforts, waiting for some woman to arrive in a fluster bearing gifts, ready to set the place to rights.
I cooked spinach with butter and garlic. He made no comment and ate it without apparent relish. Perhaps he is going to be discontented and hard to please.
It feels like spring, and the shops are full of linen clothes not very well cut.
What causes stupidity? And what is it?
Going along the quay I saw the Opera House sails against a perfectly pure sky at sunset: they were mauve, the most delicate colour—such beauty, and soon I might be living in the city where it can occur.
A man on the building site sings aloud with a joyful shout—a falling and rising riff, like a warrior singing about battle.
R said enthusiastically that Emerson had ‘anticipated certain concepts in depth psychology’. V’s face lost all expression, like a blackboard just wiped. ‘Projection, for example,’ R continued, soldiering on. ‘The idea that we project on to others what is inside us.’ He had no word to say. I laughed and went out into the kitchen.
I’m tired. My life’s in limbo because he has not told the whole truth.
Visited a class at Glebe High School. The usual scornful, bored, closed faces one would expect in fourth-formers but the teacher used his imagination, and we got somewhere. The girls were very retiring. The bell went and the boys scattered; then the girls gathered in a tight group around me and the teacher. A Chinese girl asked, ‘Do artists have—strange moods?’ Another, packing her books, said over her shoulder to the teacher, ‘But teaching’s an art, sir, I reckon.’ I don’t know if it’s an art, but I remember that it’s hard labour: the cold modern building, the inarticulate kids—I take off my hat to teachers.
‘You said I was emotionally naïve,’ said V. ‘What did you mean?’
‘I don’t think you know much about the fluctuations of emotions that people go through in their relations with each other.’
‘But I’ve been married. And as an artist I’ve observed.’
‘Yes, but your life hasn’t depended on it.’
I walked a mile along streets near the dilapidated Canberra motel, looking for something to eat. I passed sad, neglected-looking buildings, cheap home units with blankets hooked over their windows. Yards of beaten earth. Arrangements of chicken wire and boxes near the gates—cages, but with no animals in them.
Her anxiety, at the meeting. Her super-willingness to grasp my points. Her eager face, the poised pen, the notebook.
R says that now is the time when I should consider what giving up my separateness could mean, that if I live with him I will of necessity become ‘cook and bottle-washer’. Painfully I consider these propositions. But how could I not live with him? Could I fight him about the housework? Could I make demands and hold out for them?
In the cafe R and I agreed that we were probably rather androgynous and that we liked this. I said I felt I was physically made of a dryer, harder substance than some more feminine women. She said she wished in fantasy to be an opera singer, but that she could ‘never bear that burden of flesh’. The paradoxical, or contradictory, idea that in order to produce an ethereal, heavenly or superhuman sound one must be even more fleshly than ordinary humans.
Two sparrows fuck on a twig outside the window. He hops on to her back and off, she flutters her wings very fast against her body, he hops on again—they do this five times within two minutes.
The empty apartment, a shell of fantasy, not a single stick of furniture, a long space full of light.
The sick man died, at last. By now he will be only a pile of hot ash and crumbled bones. The part of him that suffered has been consumed. But his wife. What will she do with all the love?
‘At our little girl’s funeral,’ said the woman, ‘I fell over.’
‘Do you mean you fainted?’
‘No, I didn’t faint.’
‘Did you trip?’
‘No. I couldn’t stand. I fell down.’
After the service we walked on the beach. E was very vivid and pretty in her black crepe skirt and jacket and her pink blouse with black spots. The escarpment looms over the road and the town. By four the day is ended.
In Bar Italia he looked narrower, paler, with darker eyes. I couldn’t look at him enough, the sight of him was so precious to me.
U’s Englishman went back to Cambridge, where she was meant to join him; but somehow she just never went. I imagine returning to Melbourne and quietly sinking back into my previous life—as if these recent upheavals had occurred in some opium trance. I know this is a kind of death wish, a slide into inertia. But these fantasies have occurred.
The child is doing her homework, making a list of twenty-six things (A–Z) that Captain Cook would have taken on his journey: ‘N?’
H: ‘Nibs.’
Her older brother: ‘They would have had quills, not nibs.’
H: ‘I bet they had nibs.’
Brother: (smoothly) ‘They didn’t invent nibs till 1830.’
H: ‘You just made that up.’
Brother: ‘No I didn’t. I read it in a history of calligraphy that came with my italic nib set.’
We will learn a great deal about each other now.
Fear makes people literal-minded.
Dreamt I bought a pair of black high-heeled shoes and wore them with socks. Pleased with my appearance. But when I met my sister in a cafe and asked her if she liked them, she said, ‘No. You look about fifty in them.’ She hadn’t waited for me, had already ordered her breakfast. I crept away wounded, with hunched shoulders.
To P’s show. I looked out the gallery window through the rain to Government House with its little flag, took a breath, and began. I realised that each picture contains hidden things: a sheep on a globe, two little yachts: you could look at them for a long time and be always finding her secret messages. And best of all is the way she puts on the paint: nothing lumpy or bumpy; nothing thick. A svelte surface, sometimes with a golden note or a glimmer in it, seeming to have been built up out of many very fine layers.
‘V’s aged a great deal,’ said his friend, ‘over the last few years. He’s an old-fashioned Australian country man who’s passionately interested in modern European culture.’ ‘He’s always struck me,’ I said, ‘as someone the modern world has passed by. It’s as if he hasn’t even noticed it.’
My nun’s long, detailed story of arriving at the decision to leave the Little Sisters of Jesus. Of choosing life above a promise. ‘I don’t know what I’ve missed and what I haven’t missed.’ I listened with full attention, fascinated, watching her face as she spoke: her smooth skin, her bones, her curly grey hair in its pretty crop.
In the newspaper a list of ‘the suits men buy: navy 60%, charcoal-grey 25%, mid-grey 12%, brown 2%, other 1%’.
V inveighs against the ‘tribal’ urge of women to ‘rush in’ and support each other when one of them’s ‘discarded’. What the hell does he expect women to do? I hold my tongue, remembering having to lie on the floor with the pain of being ‘discarded’.
I ask, ‘How are you?’
He replies, levelly and vaguely, ‘Oh…all right.’
I feel foolish, reproached for having asked. Maybe he expects me to probe, since he is not forthcoming. I start to see what I could be in for.
Wonderful spring day, little perfumed gusts of daphne, freesias, the very beginning of pittosporum. Windows rattle in the balmy wind. What a dry city Melbourne is: its winds come in off dry, grassy plains, while Sydney’s come off water. I wrote several extremely long sentences, the labour of which afforded me the most exquisite pleasure and satisfaction.
At the kitchen table with a pot of tea and a packet of Venetian biscuits I recommence A la Recherche du temps perdu (in English). My life now is likely to be filled with change, upheavals, departures, lies, white lies, damned lies, and a host of anxieties and sorrows. I need a large-structured element in which to rest and which I can step in and out of without fear of having lost the thread.
A puppy yapping in someone’s yard woke me at 1 am and I couldn’t fall asleep for ages. Why are night thoughts always so much more pessimistic, sorrowful and panicky than thoughts on the same topics in daylight?
The old woman showed me her Kakadu photos. ‘See? That thing there’s a crocodile. They’re brown, and they’re scaly, and we’ve intruded on to their territory.’
