There wasn’t one single, shining moment when Marie came out of her corner, swinging. Her move from the shadows into the light was gradual, uneven, one step forward two steps back, as was her resignation (never acceptance) regarding the facts of her life. She did not speak French to anyone because she did not know another French person—and besides, that part of her life was gone. There was an irreparable rift between her and her native place, between her tongue and its home. She did not look back but forward, never speaking French to her babies, because they were Australian and another language would only confuse them. If language was the house of being, Marie was changing addresses.
But slowly it began to dawn on her that being French was an advantage. The Courier-Mail breathlessly reported on the latest fashions from Paris, and one morning at the breakfast table she was astonished to read a local woman journalist’s highly glamorised account of her trip to the Continent, and to Paris in particular, where she observed that when a French woman came into a room, ‘the first thing you notice is that she walks better, her head and feet are better dressed, her clothes finer and better put on than any woman you have ever seen’. Marie laughed. What was this nonsense? She must remember to try it out, being ‘French’, more splendid than she had previously supposed.
Soon, little by little, being French became a sort of confidence trick she could pull, ooh-la-la-ing all over the place, intimidating Australians, who, to her great surprise, immediately bestowed upon her all manner of superiorities: in fashion, food, manners; in something they called ‘good taste’, an altogether impossible elegance which they found indescribably glamorous, full of romance, an unreachable quality that could never be theirs. Who knew it could be so uneventful, slipping off one identity and assuming another, the dark airless room in Passy swept from view, that old box of malevolent tricks locked, so far away?
If there was never a moment when Marie stood up and declared This is me, Marie, if you don’t like me, then come out and say so!, there were many small moments, starting with her first nervous dinner party in her new dining room at Ascot, when she failed to properly cook the roast chicken right through. ‘Oh, well, it would be too much for my wife to be both the most beautiful woman in Queensland and the best cook,’ said Syd, and everyone laughed. She was so embarrassed! The blood that ran out when the chicken was carved, the flesh at the centre of the bird oozing like a ruptured internal organ. She blushed and blushed and one of the guests—the buyer for ladies’ fashion for McAlisters, the foppish Mr Stuart Middleton, who was rumoured to be a nancy boy—laughed with especial delight. ‘I did not believe it was possible for your beautiful wife to look more beautiful, but look at her! She is charming, Sydney. She is the most charming creature I have ever seen in my life!’
It seemed that the new Mrs McAlister was going to be a success.
She never grew to like entering rooms. She always had to make a little mental adjustment, a sort of gathering-up, an internal call to arms. She learned to make this adjustment every single time, to play at being Mrs Marie McAlister entering the room, ahead of herself, until at last her newly composed artificial glamorous French self could walk into any room, any house, any restaurant, any reception. She supposed she had become like one of those stage actors she had read about, who conquered nerves by pretending to be an entirely different person. She conquered herself by putting her old self in a box and shutting the lid, where that girl of loss lived on, but in the dark, as if with her mother in a locked room. The girl outside the box, the woman, wore the new season’s frocks before they arrived in Australia, attended church when she could, learned to smoke and how to make brilliant small talk. She was an intelligent girl, she knew—like her father always said—and she learned, excellently, how to be the new Marie, just like she learned well how to do everything else. All her moments, strung end to end: the first dinner party and then the second, the third, the fourth; the first opening night, the first meeting of the lord mayor and his wife. One year, two years, five; one daughter and then a second; the new sophisticated Marie, far from vulgar cousins; smiling and kissing cheeks and shaking hands with confidence, learning to cook like a cordon bleu chef, the most beautiful woman in Brisbane. There was a third child, a son. He lived for two days and was buried by Father Williams. He was named for her brother, Eric, gone to join that long, numberless line. But with every passing year she felt a little safer, even though her anxiety about the facts of her past never left her. The day came when she was a stylish, accomplished French woman who could talk to anyone, who could even give a small witty speech to one of the many charities she was invited to join. She went to charity lunches, to the races, to the Moreton Club, where she sat among the fellow wives of rich men, their handbags in their laps, white gloves covering their jewelled fingers. By the time the ladies of Queensland removed their gloves for good, she was one of the most famous hostesses in Brisbane, an invitation to one of the annual Christmas parties she and Syd hosted at the Chevron down the coast one of the most desirable in town. She liked being admired, flirting with Australian men, who seemed to think that her being French as well as beautiful gave them an excellent reason to flirt back. She knew life was counterfeit and her new self was counterfeit, too. She sometimes felt breathless with an inner recklessness at what she, or anyone, could do. Why, everyone was fake; their public faces put on, every single day: her sister-in-law, Evelyn, Syd, even sweet, unassuming little Wendy O’Brien. Why shouldn’t she invent herself?
Penny and her sister, Rosie, were always the best-dressed girls at any party. They wore frilled ankle socks to Sunday school with white patent-leather shoes, a single strap buckled at the sides. They wore the latest, most expensive dresses from McAlisters, their dresses lined and fitted with stiff petticoats. They wore their hair the same, in tight little plaits, but even then Rosie’s were forever coming undone, escaping constraint. Even then Rosemary was practising her getaway, digging the tunnel through which she would travel beneath Australia so that she could pop up, victorious, on the other side of the continent. Bye-bye, Penny, bye-bye, Marie, good luck, nice knowing you and all that.
The girls attended St Margaret’s, one of the best girls’ schools in Brisbane, a short walk from the house. Penny chose French over German, but Marie refused to help with her homework. ‘Honestly, who speaks French these days? A few natives with bones in their noses,’ she said.
At parties at home she made the girls carry trays of nibbles, offering smoked oysters on Jatz biscuits, and it seemed to Penny that the only time her mother was ever pleased with her was when important people complimented Marie on her polite and pretty children. Their mother had no sentiment, no pity, no time for childish dramas and no time for foolish memories held dear. She threw out Penny’s favourite books and gave her favourite toys to charity the moment she judged her to have outgrown them. ‘You are too old for that foolishness,’ she said when Penny burst into outraged tears at finding her favourite doll vanished. ‘Arrêt!’ she shouted at last, when Penny would not stop crying. ‘Arrêt! Arrêt!’ Marie only spoke French to shut her up, when she was at the end of her tether, and soon Penny equated French with the language of withered tears.
Penny knew her mother was different from all the other mothers. Nobody else’s mother was French, nobody else’s mother was as beautiful or as exotic. She was not like all the other mothers from somewhere else, not like Kris Comino’s mother, from an island in Greece called Kythera, who was small and squat and dowdy, dressed in black. Kris was the only Greek girl in the whole school, and when Penny went to the Cominos’ house one weekend everyone talked Greek, all at once, and it seemed impossible that Kris Comino could be the only Greek at St Margaret’s. There were so many of them! But they all went to State High, or suburban high schools in far distant suburbs; none of them was lucky enough to be the daughter of rich Stav Comino who owned a string of Queensland restaurants and cafes and wanted nothing but the best for his only daughter. Penny’s mother was nothing like the mothers of the Italian girls from New Farm either, that noisy group who together caught the tram every afternoon to cluster around the school gates, talking, laughing loudly, so different from her own mother, who laughed loudly only at parties.
Penny and Rosie constructed fabulous stories about their mother. She was a descendant of Marie Antoinette, their ancestral home was a turreted chateau in the Loire. Sometimes, when they begged her, her mother would tell them about a wonderful summer in a forest, enormous bowls of hot chocolate, a box at the Paris Opera. It was clear she came from the aristocracy, and that a great tragedy had befallen her.
‘Maybe we are countesses,’ said Rosie, who was never as avid as Penny to find out everything she could about Marie. Rosie didn’t seem interested, because what was happening to her, Rosemary, was so much more interesting than what happened to anyone else. Penny was jealous of her sister’s attractive ease, her insouciance, her lack of regard or interest in other people. Unlike Penny, Rosie did not care what other people thought of her, which gave her an air of giddy freedom.
‘Don’t you want to know the whole story?’
Rosie shrugged.
‘Really? You’re not even a bit interested?’
‘She’s here isn’t she?’ Rosie said, leaping up to answer the phone. The boys were already calling for Rosemary, whose beautiful, unexamined life was just beginning.
What was clear to Penny was how irritated her mother often was with her father; how his benign, gentle smile caused her to fly into unpredictable rages. What was not clear to her was that Marie was reminded of her father’s smile, disappointingly passive in the face of her mother’s endless onslaughts, Marie wishing her father would raise a fist and knock her mother clear across the room, silencing the ridiculous, self-pitying words rushing from her mouth. Marie was nothing like her mother, nothing, and yet here she was, in a room with a smiling husband.
One afternoon after school, just before her father died—one of the many mercies of the future, griefless and beckoning, unknown, ahead—Penny unexpectedly found her father at home. Penny knew the famous story about her father jumping off the bridge and—besides the usual difficulty in imagining one’s parent young—she could not imagine her bespectacled, conservative father doing anything so rash. His was the steady hand within the family, the calm voice among the raised. He was evenhanded, even-tempered; the only clue to his outsized capacity for emotion were the tears which sometimes ran shamelessly down his cheeks during sentimental movies or when he let out small wrenching sobs while listening to Adagio for Strings. His was a closed world, as much as her mother’s was; their family life a trackless, wordless place.
‘Dad,’ she said, ‘what happened to Mum’s family? Why won’t she ever speak about it?’
He looked at her, his expression unreadable. ‘I can’t tell you, sweetheart. It’s up to Mum to tell you, not me.’
She felt hot, flushed; furious with him. ‘It’s not fair!’ she cried. ‘Everybody else’s mother is normal! I hate her! I hope she dies!’
How was she to know it would be one of the last conversations she would ever have with her father? How was she to know that words fly off, rushing through the years, moving too fluidly, too fast, never unsaid? The words were spoken, her father died, her mother—alone with him on a beach at Umina—caught him.