XVI

WHEN WAS IT THAT I BECAME A VOYEUR in their midst? I was the perfect witness, an unsuspected anthropologist disguised within the body of a young girl, surrounded by other young girls who were part of the family. Yet I was a cuckoo in the nest, an imposter who listened and observed, hoarding and collecting information. It was sometime after that morning in art class when our art teacher, Miss Warren, blushed as she discussed contemporary art and said, ‘I don’t want to embarrass her, but Eva’s father has been very important in bringing the modern style to Melbourne.’

That was when history made itself known to me, like the devil to Faust. I saw that I was standing on a page in an art history textbook, saw Evan and the others in the trajectory we had learned in class, from Caravaggio to Kandinsky; from the Port Phillip Painter to a point on some distant timeline. 1936: the first exhibition of the Melbourne Modern Art Group. And I had been there.

Was it that evening that I tore out the used pages from the front of last year’s geography exercise book and began to write on the second blank page, leaving the first as a shield over my words? That night I wrote down what the artists had discussed at dinner? Often the talk was that of any other family. Bea was thinking about what to do after finishing school at the end of the year. Ugo’s vegetable garden was well established by this time and he pointed out that the potatoes, carrots and peas we were eating were all fresh from the ground. I remember shelling those peas into a battered green colander. The bright green of the peas against the lighter green of the colander pleasing to the eye. Maria talked about the war in Spain and worried about her family. Her brother’s wife had just given birth to their first child, a boy.

Then there were the snippets of insight, like minerals glinting on a creek bed. Jerome said he was reading Shelley. He told us the story of the young poet buying lobsters live from restaurants and releasing them into the Thames.

‘They probably died within minutes from the pollution,’ Evan said.

Jerome talked about Shelley’s politics. He was thinking of a series of paintings: Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound transposed onto an Australian landscape. The conception of the series that would cement his reputation and take him to Europe.

First term had come and gone. I had helped my parents with their move, packing up my old room into boxes that would live in my grandparents’ garage. But it was oddly simple not to think about my mother and father, to shake off their sadness with callous, adolescent ease.

I began waking early, going outside to sit on the faded wooden sun bed and write. I kept my writing secret from Eva. She too began to keep her secrets. These were the first between us. Hers were about Robert, who I had not seen again since our afternoon at the Dive. Eva kept the details of their relationship to herself, for what reason I could not guess. I thought she would tell me all about it, her venturing ahead of me into the terrifying, unfamiliar zone of love, or whatever it was between the two of them, more terrifying it seemed to me than leaping from the cliffs of the Dive. She began slipping out at night, sliding up the sash window and climbing out onto the sloping kitchen roof. She must have known I was awake as she eased up the rattling window, but she never spoke of it to me, and I did not ask.

I remember that morning with Jerome in the garden. The soft clarity of six a.m. when the day is going to be hot, as if the sun has not yet thrown off its white sheets. A family of magpies had befriended me, a mother and two juveniles, gangly and insistent with their drawling squawks. I brought them cheese each morning, and each morning coaxed them closer, wanting them to eat from my hand. The young ones were inching towards me each day, while the mother stood back and watched. They eyed the cheese on my outstretched palm, their heads swivelling, eyes twitching between me and the food, leaping backwards if I moved.

I saw him coming towards me through the garden, a book in his hand. He paused and watched the birds. We stayed frozen, smiling at one another. I could see that the magpies were not ready to eat from my hand yet, and I threw the cheese high in the air. The mother magpie swooped upwards, catching the morsel mid fall. Jerome walked nearer, and I shut my notebook. The magpies fled, half hopping, half flying.

‘They’re terribly ungraceful.’

‘I know.’ I laughed. ‘But they’re so quick too. Did you see how she caught the cheese in the air?’

‘Mmm. Impressive. Are you trying to tame them?’

‘Not tame them, just get them to trust me.’

‘That’s good. Nothing wild should be tamed. There’s nothing more tragic than caged animals.’

‘I agree.’

We turned our eyes again to the magpies. The mother dug her beak into the grass. The young ones loitered near her, squawking.

‘What are you reading?’ I asked.

‘Shelley still.’

‘We just did Ozymandias in English.’

Jerome screwed up his face. ‘Such a classroom poem. You should read Ode to the West Wind, Mont Blanc, Hymn to Intellectual Beauty. Brilliant. The way he’s able to mix the mythic with the political; the ancient with the contemporary. I wish I could paint as he writes.’

‘I’d like to read them.’

‘I’m reading his letters at the moment.’ Jerome raised the red-covered volume in his hand. ‘But you’re welcome to borrow my copy of the poems. I’m waiting for my mother to bring my books over. I think she’s coming this week. I need them badly. As you know, I’m thinking about a series of paintings based on Shelley’s Prometheus. But you’re most welcome to read them.’

‘I’d love to.’

He smiled and walked off towards the house.

The car was in the driveway when we got home from school the next day, a black Bentley. A driver was sitting in the front with the window down, smoking. He nodded to us as we passed him, staring.

‘Gosh, Jerome must be really rich,’ said Bea.

‘He told me he was,’ said Eva as we neared the front door.

‘Really, when?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know. Sometime. He despises it. He says it’s obscene, considering what people have been through in this Depression.’

‘How rich is he?’

Eva stopped and put her finger to her lips, inclining her head towards the library to the right of the open front door. We heard voices inside. We crowded into the passageway, Eva and Heloise standing in the doorway to the library, and Bea and me at their backs.

‘These are my daughters, Margaret,’ said Helena. ‘Eva, Heloise, and behind them Beatrice, my eldest, and their friend Lily. Girls, this is Mrs Carroll.’

Jerome, his mother and Helena were sitting around a small mahogany table by the window. Jerome was on the window seat, and Helena and Mrs Carroll were on the armchairs that usually sat in front of the bookcase. Jerome’s mother seemed younger than I had imagined her. She was not beautiful, but had very clear skin and a high forehead with no visible lines. Her hair was light brown and was set in a wave. She wore a grey fur stole across her shoulders, despite the warmth of the day.

‘How do you do?’ she said, without smiling.

There was a large silver teapot I had never seen before on the table between them, and three china cups and saucers. Jerome gave us a small wave from his perch on the window seat.

On the floor in the middle of the room were three cardboard boxes. Eva went over and opened the flap of one box. ‘Are these your books?’

‘Yes. I’ve got some treasures to show you later,’ said Jerome.

‘Where’s Dad?’ asked Heloise.

‘Don’t poke around in there now, Eva,’ said Helena.

Bea began to shepherd us out of the room. ‘Let’s go. I’ll make us some tea.’

Half an hour later Helena called us back from the kitchen.

‘Girls. Come and wish Mrs Carroll goodbye.’

They were already through the front door as we walked up the hallway. The driver got out of the car and opened the door for Jerome’s mother.

‘Goodbye, Mother,’ said Jerome, kissing her cheek.

‘It’s been lovely to see where Jerome’s living now,’ said Mrs Carroll to Helena, gripping her handbag in front of her with both hands. ‘As a mother, you do worry, as you would know. Especially reading the papers.’

‘Mother, please.’

‘It’s only that I worry about you. I wish you would come home.’

‘We’ll take good care of him,’ said Helena.

‘I do hope so.’

‘Please don’t worry, Margaret.’ Helena moved towards her.

‘Of course I’ll worry,’ she said, her eyes beginning to well up.

She turned away, past the driver, who had been standing very still with his hand on the door, and ducked into the car. She nodded, and he shut the door and walked to the other side. Jerome stooped to the window. We could not see his face. Then the car started and pulled off into the curved driveway. Jerome shook his head, but remained standing with his back to us.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Helena, putting her hand on his shoulder. ‘We’ll win her over.’

‘What did you think of Jerome’s mother?’ I asked later when Eva and I were upstairs in our room.

‘What a horrible old hag,’ she said, unbuttoning her school dress and dropping it to the floor, still wearing her stockings and shoes and her white slip.

‘Why? I felt sorry for her.’

‘Why? She obviously doesn’t understand him at all.’

‘No.’ I paused. ‘But it must be hard for her, especially sitting down to tea with your mother, who’s so beautiful and smart. She must feel ugly and boring in comparison.’

Eva frowned.

‘I mean, it’s obvious that he’d rather be here than with her. That must be hard for her.’

‘You’re the same, aren’t you?’

‘I suppose so,’ I said, feeling defensive. ‘But it’s different. My mother doesn’t even want me back.’

As I said it, I made the thought present to myself for the first time. Since I’d met the Trenthams, I had always taken all I could of them, never homesick for my own family. Now I realised that, unlike Jerome’s mother, my own had relinquished me without a struggle. I had been living with the circle for months by then, and it was almost May. My father’s legs had not yet healed properly, and he would require more surgery. My mother was preoccupied by her worries. Although I sometimes stayed at my grandparents’ house for a night or two, I was part of the Trentham family now, even more than my own.

‘Well, I’m glad she doesn’t want you back,’ said Eva. She must have seen the melancholy in my face, because she sat down beside me on the bed and put her arm around my shoulder. ‘I don’t ever want you to go home.’

I managed a smile.

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Get changed.’

‘So you don’t mind having so many people living here?’ I asked when we were outside in the garden, sitting with our backs against the seed train, our knees drawn up and shoulders pressed together, cigarettes in hand.

‘Not really,’ Eva replied. ‘I like it mostly.’

‘Don’t you want your mother and father to yourself sometimes?’

‘God, no. Sometimes I wish they would go away.’

‘You should try living with mine. You’d never complain about yours again. Yours are interesting. They have parties and travel and talk about ideas and don’t care what people think about them.’

‘Sounds like you might rather be friends with my parents than me,’ Eva teased.

‘No. I mean, you’re like them too. You don’t want to just grow up and get married and be ordinary.’

‘No.’ She sighed and stubbed out her cigarette.

That evening, while Ugo and Maria cooked, Eva, Heloise and I helped Jerome unpack his books and arrange them on an empty shelf in the library.

‘Does Byron go before Baudelaire, Helly?’

‘Whoops. No,’ Heloise giggled.

Jerome rumpled her curls. He pulled stacks of books from the boxes and passed them to us, and we slotted them into alphabetical order. There were art books, some exhibition programmes, a number of Lawrence novels, books of Australian history and a few hefty law books, and many slim volumes of poetry, from the metaphysicals to Pound and Eliot.

‘Ah, here we go,’ said Jerome, straightening from the box and holding up a red-bound book. ‘The collected poems of Shelley. This is for you, Lily.’

‘Thank you.’ I placed the book on the floor to take upstairs later.

‘Why is it for Lily?’ asked Eva.

‘I said I’d lend it to her.’

‘When?’

‘We ran into each other in the garden yesterday morning,’ said Jerome. He handed another stack of books to Heloise, who frowned and began to whisper her way through the alphabet.

‘I was telling him that we read Ozymandias at school,’ I explained. ‘And he said it was the worst one.’

‘Well, maybe not the worst,’ said Jerome, smiling at Eva, who nodded.

‘What should I read then?’ she asked him.

‘Well,’ said Jerome. He reached for the glass of wine sitting on the coffee table. ‘Let’s see. I think you might be more of a modern girl, am I right?’

‘Maybe,’ said Eva, looking pleased.

‘What about some Eliot? Maybe not The Wasteland straight away, but eventually, I think you’d like it.’

‘What about me?’ Heloise asked.

‘Goodness. This is a big responsibility,’ said Jerome. ‘Here, Eva, here’s some more. Hmm. Heloise, I think you might like to start with some Blake. Maybe we can read some tomorrow when you’ve finished your lessons.’

‘Alright, let’s,’ said Heloise.

Evan appeared in the library door, bringing with him a cloud of turps. He was rubbing his paint-stained hands with a wetted cloth, and the skin of his fingers was a damaged white where he had scrubbed it free of pigment.

‘Glad to see you’re putting my girls to work, Jerome,’ he said. ‘But I have been informed that I must fetch you all for dinner.’

We put down our books and filed out of the room.

I hung back and bent to pick up the volume of Shelley’s poems. ‘Thank you,’ I said, waving the book at Jerome.

‘You’re very welcome.’ He smiled and lifted his glass before following Evan out of the room.