Farewell to the Father Read online

  These women were Mum’s closest friends, but she never breathed a word to any of them. She just kept playing. And for lunch she served salmon sandwiches, sliced into neat little fingers.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Dad sang a lot when I was young. He had a lovely baritone. I’d hear him in the shower, singing ‘Where Do You Go to (My Lovely)?’ or ‘The Windmills of Your Mind’, which, looking back, was so incredibly appropriate – all those hollow sunless caverns and tunnels into tunnels. Or he’d sit on the edge of my bed at night and sing ‘Puff, the Magic Dragon’.

  I’ve asked myself a million times why Dad turned out like he did. Was it his upbringing? Genetics? Some perfectly explicable malfunction in brain chemistry that would be fixed relatively easily today, with the right medication? A couple of years after he died, when I was studying at university, I drove a cab part time to earn money. One evening I picked up a passenger, an older man, about Dad’s age. We were driving over the Harbour Bridge – it was sunset, everything coppery and soft, lacquered in dusk – when we got talking. It turned out my passenger was a psychiatrist, or maybe a patient of one of the many psychiatrists Dad had seen, I can’t remember. Either way, he knew about Dad.

  ‘Your father was a hopeless case,’ he said, just like that. ‘Nothing they could have done would have helped him.’

  A hopeless case.

  To this day, I can’t figure out if this is terrifying or consoling.

  *

  Dad was born in 1929, in Sydney, the son of George and Muriel Elliott. He had a younger sister, Faye, whom he grew to despise, thanks largely to Muriel, who encouraged her two children to compete for her affection in any and all ways. George was a doctor and had a thriving practice in Carlton, in Sydney’s southern suburbs. Muriel was a painter. (One of her works, a still life of Australian wildflowers, was given to the Queen in 1954. ‘It hangs in Buckingham Palace, you know, dear,’ she would say.)

  George died in 1976. I have only vague memories of him, of his slightly palsied, drooping, doggy mouth, of the spidery veins in his cheeks, of him leaning down from the dinner table one night to give me twenty cents and then saying, so everyone could hear, ‘Oh, you only love me for my money!’ It was a joke, but I was outraged. ‘That’s not true!’ I said, but everyone was already laughing.

  Muriel we knew as Nan Ell. Robust, vain and apparently ageless, she wore shiny black furs and heavy pearl earrings, her big handsome head permanently clothed in a pale blue nimbus of expensively coiffed hair, like a giant meringue. Her eyes stared out, deep blue and doleful; her fleshy nose, so fascinating to me as a child, was generously powdered and pitted with pores, like orange skin. Nan Ell spoke with a slightly English accent, clarion vowels, mannered diction, and laughed like a toucan. She called England ‘home’, which irritated Mum and Dad, since she was Australian. By the time I got to know her, George had died, and she lived alone in a Darling Point penthouse, twenty-six storeys above Rushcutters Bay. You could see Sydney Heads from her balcony, and the Harbour Bridge and the Blue Mountains.

  The first thing I learned about Nan Ell was that she had a favourite charity, the Guide Dogs for the Blind Association, for which she had done lots of fundraising. (She would eventually receive an MBE for this.) She gave them her paintings and the charity sold them and kept the money. ‘Goodness me, they do such maaahvellous work,’ she would say. ‘They’re saints, you know, dear.’ She talked about the charity quite a bit – not in a boastful way (that would be wrong), but just about how much she enjoyed helping them, what it meant to her, and, of course, how terribly grateful they were. Millions of dollars, she had raised. Millions, dear, millions! Without that money, who knew what might happen to the guide dogs? We were all given to understand that without Nan painting her fingers to the bone, the charity might very well not exist, leaving blind people dog-less, forced to wander the streets bumping into lampposts and fire hydrants.

  I loved her apartment. It had thick bouncy carpet and lots of things to play with, even though you weren’t meant to play with them. There was a golden antique clock in the shape of a miniature carriage – the kind Cinderella rode in – and little Lladró figurines everywhere: a decrepit but happy-looking peasant, a boy fishing in a pond, a revoltingly cute little puppy lying on its back with its feet in the air. There was a fancy bar that folded out from the living room wall, with crystal decanters containing various dark spirits and bottles of bitter lemon and an ice bucket with tongs. Whenever we visited, Camilla and I would get the ice, go onto the balcony and throw the cubes into the pool twenty-six storeys below.

  Everything was soft, as if to cushion some imminent fall. The toilet had wool on the seat: I would sneak in and sit on it, even if I didn’t have to go. On the wall beside the TV was a small framed platitude: I used to complain that I had no shoes, until I met a man who had no feet.

  Nan Ell and George had always collected art – Streetons, McCubbins, Tom Roberts – a collection that would in time be worth millions. Her apartment was like a rambling, overstuffed gallery, with every inch of wall space covered and canvases stacked in back rooms. Lots of the paintings were of the First World War, of the battles of Ypres and the Somme, where Nan’s brother Tom had been wounded in the trenches. The paintings made the war look pretty, with polite explosions across sunlit valleys. Nan Ell had been a great friend of the Australian landscape painter William Rubery Bennett, whose works she also had in abundance, including a miniature landscape painted for her on the back of a matchbox.

  But my favourite was a monumental painting, an action scene in which a team of horses struggled through the mud on the Western Front, dragging a brace of cannons. I would stand, shrinking, beneath the lashings of mud and paint, and stare up at the horses’ froth-flecked lips and flaring nostrils, the tendons in their necks, the terrible whites of their bursting eyes. The painting was by Harold Septimus Power, a warm-up for what would later be Bringing Up the Guns, which now hangs in the Australian War Memorial.

  I loved Nan Ell, at least to begin with. I loved her despite her guile and shameless false modesty, despite the vague sense I had, even then, that she always got her own way while making it look like a happy accident. I loved her kitchen, too, which had an almost life-size mural of a Parisian streetscape painted on the wall. She always had food in the fridge, whipped up by her maid, whom she called ‘dear’. Everyone was ‘dear’ when they were being spoken to; when they were being spoken of, they were ‘that little man’. The cleaner, her accountant, the concierge – they were all ‘that little man’.

  She travelled like a head of state – she and George would fly to Madrid and spend days strolling around the Prado – but her preferred residence was the Royal Sydney Golf Club, where doting staff would baste her, like a Christmas ham, in layer upon layer of rich, sticky compliments.

  She lived to one hundred and seven – almost fifty years more than her son. Sometimes I ponder her life, frame it as a whole, like a history experiment. She was born in 1897, before the Boer War. She was seventeen years old at the start of the First World War. She lived through the Depression (not that it touched her), the Second World War (she knitted camouflage netting for hospitals) and the moon landing. She remembered the Titanic sinking. She remembered her own grandmother telling her how when she was a little girl in her hometown in England a rider came bolting into the village square with the news that the Duke of Wellington had defeated Napoleon at Waterloo. From Waterloo to wi-fi. And yet the biggest change she had seen in her lifetime was that fathers now changed nappies. ‘I never would have believed it.’

  You could not kill Nan Ell. She was ‘a non-carbon-based life form’, as my brother once put it. Mum said it was because of her prodigious ego, her nuclear-powered sense of self. I pictured Nan Ell with a little chunk of plutonium deep in her stomach, her reactive core, driving her on, not allowing her to die. She was also cunning, and she passed this cunning on to Dad. Nan Ell used to tell how, as a very small bo
y, Dad had smashed a Lladró figurine. Entering the room minutes later, Nan Ell found him standing there, the shards at his feet. Rather than apologise, he looked her in the eye and said: ‘You shouldn’t put expensive things where small children can reach them.’

  *

  George and Nan Ell sent Dad to a private school, The Scots College in Bellevue Hill. As the name suggests, The Scots College is a pallid facsimile of secondary education as it might be practised in Scotland, or Scotland as someone in the eastern suburbs of Sydney might imagine it. At Scots, the boys wore kilts and played bagpipes; the school magazine is called Lang Syne.

  Dad was instructed to seek achievement above all: ‘Nothing succeeds like success,’ his parents told him.

  He did what was expected of him – he became a prefect at Scots, a senior cadet officer, the school swim champion – but he didn’t enjoy it. He hated the complacency and sense of entitlement, the air of self-congratulation. He disliked the school for much the same reason he would later dislike how his mother called her cleaner ‘that little man’. He was bullied there, too: some older boys held him down and rubbed boot polish on his balls, which burned them.

  It’s hard to imagine Dad as a kid. I once found a photo of him at ten or eleven years of age in a Sea Scouts outfit, wearing a scarf and a sailor’s cap. He looked ridiculous, which came as a shock: I’d seen Dad look frightening and frightened, I’d seen him look angry and sad, but rarely had I seen him look silly. I found the photo hard to believe, as if it were a fake. Also, I thought, he could never have been that young.

  Dad was a physical boy. He loved the water. His uncle, Jack Elliott, a dentist, would take him to Ramsgate Baths to swim laps before school. Later, Dad would inflict the same thing on us – lap training – the only difference being that Dad had just the right temperament for it: obsessive, masochistic, with a mind like a stoked furnace, so roaring with noise that he was incapable of being bored. Up and back he would go, through the sun and the needling winter water, gasping, pushing, paining.

  In the late 1930s, when Dad was young, his father took him on a camping trip to Seal Rocks on the New South Wales north coast. Back then Seal Rocks was barely a hamlet, just a few scattered shacks, but one of George’s patients had a property there. They had to go in on a bullock dray over dirt roads. They swam; they fished. One night an enormous commotion erupted in the ocean off Treachery Beach; it was an adult right whale fighting off a pod of orcas. There was much tearing of flesh and frenzied breaching, tail smacks and whale screams. It went on for hours, Dad later told me, majestic, remorseless, a cetacean opera of the doomed.

  *

  After school, Dad went to the University of Sydney to study medicine. One day, while standing on the road outside the Great Hall, queuing up to take part in a student procession, he spotted a slightly built young woman standing across the way, talking to another student. This was Mum. (Mum wasn’t allowed to go to uni, despite the fact she’d earned a full Commonwealth Scholarship at school. Her older sister had gone before her and fooled around and failed subjects, and their father assumed that Mum would do the same. She was devastated.) For some reason, Dad was dressed for the procession in medieval costume and was riding a tricycle. He sat there on the tricycle staring, slack-jawed. Later he would say it was love at first sight, though certainly not from Mum’s perspective.

  Not long after, they met again, at the twenty-first birthday party of an old school friend of Dad and future Australian rugby captain, John Solomon. The party was at Solomon’s house, where Dad had spent a lot of time growing up. Dad was sitting down, and Mum came and sat next to him. ‘You have nice legs,’ she said. In fact, Dad had been born with a deformed left knee, which jutted out an inch over his lower leg, like a cantilevered balcony. As a result, his left leg was noticeably shorter than his right, and bowed like driftwood. Dad was self-conscious about this. ‘Are you making fun of me?’ he said. ‘No,’ she replied. ‘I really think you have nice legs.’

  She then asked where she might find a non-alcoholic drink. Dad showed her. ‘I also know where they keep the biscuits,’ he said.

  It was love at the pantry door.

  How do you write about your parents’ courtship? It’s like describing a city you’ve heard about a million times but never actually visited. In my mind I see them as the ideal couple, glamorous in the way of a 1950s black-and-white photo, at black-tie dances or on the beach, breezy smiles, brown-tanned shoulders. They used to drive into the country on shooting trips, hunting bunnies: there’s a photo of Mum in a pleated skirt and bobby socks, aiming a double-barrelled shotgun. At the time Dad was playing first-grade rugby for Sydney University, and Mum went to all his games. Endless rugby games, endless hours on the sidelines with other ‘rugby widows’. They would drive to his matches together in Dad’s old MG.

  If there were any intimations then of Dad’s madness, Mum never mentioned them. Theirs was a perfect old-fashioned romance in an age of old-fashioned romance: chaperones, lawn tennis, picnics, fishing dates and chastity before marriage. This had nothing to do with religion: neither Mum nor Dad believed in God or heaven or hell or life after death or ‘any of that crap’, as Mum would later put it. But Mum played (largely) by the rules, and one of the rules was No Sex Before Marriage. As kids, we were amazed by this. How quaint, like brushing your teeth with baking soda. Weren’t she and Dad desperate? Oh yes, Mum said, of course. But we kissed. We canoodled. ‘We did other things.’

  Dad was besotted with Mum. He was singularly, powerfully in love. In all the photos I have of the two of them together, he is looking at her, rarely at the camera. Once, he got pulled over while driving home from a date with her. He’d been singing so loudly, his big head stuck out the window, that the cops thought he was drunk. ‘I can’t help it,’ he told a friend. ‘I always sing when I see Rosie. It’s the way she makes me feel.’ Another time, he crashed his car after spotting her in the city and turning to wave.

  Mum had big hazel eyes, straight teeth. She was kind, and bright, possibly brighter than Dad, not that she had much of a chance to show it. She liked to laugh, too, and be silly, and to make stupid faces. She had taught herself to wiggle her ears. ‘One of my many useless skills,’ she’d say. She did it for us when we were kids, as a distraction, when we were upset.

  I’m not sure if it’s because I know what was in store for her, but there’s something about those early photos of Mum that seems to me like willing vulnerability, as if she were waiting to be broken. There she is, promenading down George Street, a bow in her hair, or lying on the grass in a one-piece swimsuit, reading. Her scoliosis – what she would come to call ‘that ugly hump’ – had yet to emerge. I’m gripped by an urge to reach into the picture and warn her, to cup my hands and yell, ‘Go, now! Run while you can! Run and don’t look back.’

  *

  Mum grew up in Vaucluse, in Sydney’s eastern suburbs. She had a happy home, good parents, a comfortable house. She went to Kambala, a private girls’ school in Rose Bay. She learned to draw at the Julian Ashton Art School in the city, because drawing was what young ladies did in those days. Her father, Geoff King, had a film-processing business called Kinilab, which he later sold to Kodak. Geoff was good with his hands; he built his first car. He also flew Gypsy Moths, an old type of bi-wing, and gliders. One time the glider he was flying crashed in a paddock in the country and he broke his back. When Mum was in her teens, he would take her up in his Moth and let her take the controls. The cockpit was open: I see her with her goggles on, bug-eyed, hair snapping in the wind.

  Mum had an older sister, Joan-Anne, or Joanie, whom she adored. Joanie was tall, a fast runner and rebellious; Mum was more timid. One day, when they were young, Joanie and Mum were playing on the street, where the rag-and-bone man had just gone by with his horse and cart. Their neighbour was with them, a boy called Graham Thornton, whom they called Grahmy, and who always had the latest this and the best that. Joanie told Grahmy
that she had a surprise for him, that he should close his eyes and open his mouth. When he did, she bent down, scooped up a handful of horseshit and shoved it down his throat. Then she and Mum sprinted home and hid under Nan King’s bed.

  Ten minutes later there was a knock at the door. Nan King answered. It was Mrs Thornton. ‘Do you have any idea what your girls did to my little Grahmy?’ she asked.

  ‘My goodness, no, what happened?’

  Mrs Thornton explained. Horseshit. Mouth. Tears. Et cetera. She then demanded that Mum and Joanie come out here this very minute and apologise.

  ‘I’m afraid I haven’t the faintest idea where they are,’ Nan King replied, despite having just seen them run into her bedroom. ‘But when I find them, I’ll have a good talk to them.’

  Nan King never liked Grahmy Thornton either.

  *

  Many years later, when Mum was dying of cancer, she said to me: ‘I was really very good-looking when I was young, and yet I had no confidence at all. I wasted it.’

  Actually, she was being melodramatic. (Dying will do that to you, I suppose.) She didn’t ‘waste’ her looks at all: she dated lots of men, including Dick Tooth, who played rugby for Australia with Dad, and who would end up being the best man at their wedding. Intriguingly, she also saw – while Dad was overseas on a rugby tour – an Argentinian polo player who had come to Sydney for a tournament. He was dashing, urbane, bilingual. He wrote her lots of letters, trying to lure her away from Dad. He also drew her cartoons of a polo player on horseback, mallet raised, chasing down a whipped-looking wallaby holding a rugby ball. In another picture, a polo player in shorts and helmet stands triumphant beside a tombstone, over which is slung a pair of rugby boots.

  Why, then, did Mum pick Dad? They were so dissimilar. He was an egoist; she was empathetic. He was sentimental; she was a realist. Dad often seemed captive to his memories, good and bad; a certain sunset, the view from a bridge, a piece of music, a friend’s treachery. Mum wasn’t immune to nostalgia, but at her core she was a tough cookie, and practical, too. And yet she was like him in one important respect: she wanted life; she had an appetite for it. She was ready, and she was not afraid.