On the Stairs, 11
THE RORSCHACHS’ double door is wide open. Two trunks have been dragged onto the landing, two ship’s trunks, reinforced with studded leather, garnished with many labels. A third must be in the hallway, a room with a dark woodblock floor, panelled to head-height, with “rustic enlightenment” hatstands resembling deer’s antlers from a Ludwigshafen Bierstube and an art-nouveau chandelier, a hemispherical paste-glass bowl decorated with inlaid triangular motifs, giving a rather poor light.
Olivia Rorschach entrains at midnight tonight at the Saint-Lazare railway station for her 56th world tour. Her nephew, who will accompany her for the first time, has come to fetch her with no less than four commissionaires. He is a lad of sixteen, very tall, with very black, curly hair down to his shoulders, dressed with a sophistication beyond his years: a white shirt opening wide at the neck, a check waistcoat, a leather jacket, a tangerine cravat, and brown denims tucked into wide-topped Texan boots. He is seated on one of the trunks and sucks thoughtlessly at a straw inserted into a bottle of Coke as he reads The Frenchman’s Companion in New York, a small tourist-publicity fold-out published by a travel company.
Born in 1930 in Sydney, at the age of eight Olivia Norvell became the most adulated child in Australia when she acted in an adaptation of Wee Willie Winkie at the Royal Theatre, in which she played the role taken by Shirley Temple in the film of the same name. Her success was such that not only was the play a sell-out for two years, but also, when Olivia let it be known through cleverly released rumours that she had begun to rehearse a new part, that of Alice in Alice’s Dream, a play vaguely based on Lewis Carroll and written especially for her by a professional playwright who had come over from Melbourne for that purpose, all the seats for the two hundred performances initially scheduled were bought out six months before the first night, and the theatre management opened a waiting list for possible subsequent performances.
Whilst she let her daughter pursue her fabulous career, Olivia’s mother, Eleanor Norvell, an astute businesswoman, exploited the girl’s popularity for all it was worth, and Olivia soon became the most sought-after model in the whole country. And the whole of Australia was soon flooded with small newssheets and coy posters showing Olivia stroking a teddy bear or, beneath the professionally sentimental gaze of her parents, reading an encyclopædia twice her size (Let Your Child Enter the Realm of Knowledge!) or, dressed as an urchin in peaked cap and trousers with braces, sitting on a kerb playing fives with three twins of Pim, Pam, and Poum in an Australian forerunner of the Mind That Child! road-safety campaign.
Though her mother and her agent worried endlessly about the disastrous effect that adolescence and, even more, puberty would not fail to have on this living doll, Olivia reached the age of sixteen without having ceased for a moment to be an object of such adoration that in some places on the west coast riots broke out when the crypto-commercial weekly which held exclusive rights to her photographs failed to arrive with the expected mail delivery. And it was then, in a moment of supreme success, that she married Jeremy Bishop.
Like all pre-teen and teenage Australian girls of the period, Olivia had of course been a “war mother” to several serving soldiers between 1940 and 1945. In fact, for Olivia, it was a business of whole regiments, to which she sent her autographed photo; once a month, furthermore, she would write a brief letter to a private or NCO who had distinguished himself in some more or less heroic feat of arms.
Private Jeremy Bishop had joined up as a volunteer in the 28th Marine Infantry (under the famous Colonel Arnhem Palmerston, nicknamed “Old Lightning” because of the thin white scar running across his face, as if he’d been struck by lightning) and became one of the fortunate few: for having helped his lieutenant out of the water at the bloody battle of the Coral Sea in 1942, he got the Victoria Cross as well as a handwritten letter from Olivia Norvell, ending with “love and kisses with all my tiny heart”, followed by a dozen little crosses each having the value of one kiss.
Carrying this letter on him like a talisman, Bishop swore to himself that he would get another, and to this end redoubled his spectacular efforts: from Guadalcanal to Okinawa, by way of Tarawa, the Gilberts, the Marshalls, Guam, Baatan, the Marianas, and Iwo Jima, he fought to such effect and purpose that by the end of the war he was the most decorated lance corporal in all Oceania.
Marriage between the two idols of the young was called for, and it was celebrated with all requisite pomp on 26 January 1946, Australia’s National Day. Over forty-five thousand people attended the nuptial blessing in Melbourne’s great stadium by Cardinal Fringilli, who was at the time the ecumenical vicar apostolic of Australasia and Antarctica. Then the public, paying ten Australian dollars per person (about five pounds sterling), was permitted to enter the young couple’s new home and to process before the gifts sent in from all over the world: the President of the United States had given them the Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, bound in buffalo hide; Mrs Plattner, a Brisbane typist, had sent a picture of the happy couple made entirely out of typewriter characters; The Olivia Fan Club of Tasmania had sent seventy-one tame white mice trained to group themselves into the letters making up the name Olivia; and the Ministry of Defence had sent a narwhal’s horn longer than the one Sir Martin Frobisher presented to Queen Elizabeth on his return from Labrador. For ten dollars more, you could even go into the nuptial chamber to admire the conjugal bed carved out of the trunk of a sequoia, a joint gift from the Wood and Allied Industries’ Trades Association and the National Union of Foresters and Woodcutters. Finally, that evening, at a huge reception, Bing Crosby was brought by special plane from Hollywood to sing a version of the Wedding March composed in honour of the newly-weds by one of Ernst Krenek’s best pupils.
That was her first marriage. It lasted twelve days. Rorschach was her fifth husband. In between, she married in succession a young actor whom she’d seen in the part of a moustached Austrian officer in a frogged dolman, who left her four months later for an Italian boy who’d sold them a rose in a restaurant in Bruges; an English lord who never left his dog, a small curly-haired spaniel named Scrambled Eggs; and a paralysed industrialist from Racine, Wisconsin (between Chicago and Milwaukee), who ran his foundries from the terrace of his villa, sitting in his wheelchair, his lap piled high with newspapers from all over the world that came in the morning post.
It was in Davos in February 1958, a few weeks after her fourth divorce, that she met Rémi Rorschach in circumstances worthy of a classical American comedy. She was in a bookshop looking for a book on the Rich Hours of the Duc de Berry, of which she had seen some reproductions the previous evening on a television programme. Of course the only available copy had just been bought, and the lucky customer, a man of mature years but obviously still sprightly, was just then paying for it at the cash desk. Olivia went up to him without hesitating, introduced herself, and offered to buy the book back. The man, who was none other than Rorschach, refused, but they agreed in the end to share it between them.