Respect: the Odyssey of the Walnut Table
UNCLE GARTH USED to lilt his way through The Windhover when I was small and on the hottest of those hot summer days, I would shiver when he came to ‘blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,/Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion’. I could never explain to myself the power of vermilion, how it was greater, warmer, more marvellous than gold, how it released me from oppression and made of my uncle’s voice a sound striving to lose itself in the universe. This word, this thought, vermilion, must be the Resurrection. The drunken body of Garth would not redeem him, but his passionate voice, though it resounded in numb isolation, afforded him his glimpse of paradise. I seemed to find God when I listened to him reciting Hopkins, and God was profound. We were not made in God’s image, but could only catch flashes of something infinitely more beautiful than we could comprehend.
God was beyond me, and I knew on earth we’d got it wrong. From childhood upwards I found I could not walk into a religious place without feeling defrauded and ashamed. In adulthood, although I could feel the sincerity of the people who believed, I was horrified by the stupidity of belief itself. Churches made me feel self-conscious, sermons made me angry. There was no genuine comfort in the world, no grace. It was all just an outpouring of rote-learned words for the occasion. Catholicism, with its plaster representations of divinity, was laughable. Protestantism was parsimony carried over into everyday life.
Where was the essence in religion? We could name its component parts, but inevitably, in the naming, we besmirched that which it is beyond our power to describe. Was the human race, by its make-up, then, condemned to an eternal naming of the parts? In personality, I, like my father, wavered towards those who believe that to search for the essence of things is a waste of time; such activity leads to infinite regression, anything might be called an essence, so it seems the human lot to be stuck with naming things and demonstrating how they work as things. I began my life as a painter immersed in this mental set. It was a bleak one – works of Dadda’s, such as his refrigerator chapel, demonstrated that meaning was easily lost or subverted and suggested that it might be more honest to worship fridges than to worship God.
There was something in Dadda’s work too difficult for me when I was a young painter; while his outlook was bleak, it was mocking rather than angry. I felt I belonged among people who were more passionate than Dadda; I felt that if I did belong among those people, Dadda would be stung. He would be sorry. So it was with my generation, we turned against images, and we turned in anger – you want images, we’ll give you images was how it started – and we gave them American hegemony, blood, ugliness, effluence and greed; we gave them sex and guns and lies. In time, we would deny the image altogether and, with us, the image would take from, or sink through, the canvas, leaving only its minimal representation.
In time, we would learn that minimalism is not a virtue in itself, that there are times in history when simplification increases the power of statement, and times when it is merely trite. On the way to that understanding, however, our search would lead us to an altered understanding of religion. We would expose ourselves to Eastern orthodoxies. Unfortunately, we would do it from a position of affluence and, in time, we would make connivers of gurus, and gurus of connivers.
So we exposed emptiness: an emptiness in which our own footsteps would come back to us. And if we had read history we would have known it was not the first time a generation had found itself in a sepulchral cul-de-sac.
Notwithstanding my experiences as a painter, I still find churches either grandiose or banal. However, there is one Lady Chapel, attached to a college in Melbourne, in which the concept of grace seems to have been deeply understood by its creator. Pews adzed from heavy beams lie horizontal in a mothering space. The atmosphere is steeped in motherhood, apprehended as a holy idea.
I came on this place when I had no one to turn to, when I was lonely, sick and unhappy. I am not religious, yet I know the context of being is immeasurably larger than the self. I know we are contained. Before I was in this Lady Chapel I had never incanted a prayer that gave me comfort. But in there, instead of dogma, I found symbols, guides to a way of thinking, to choosing hope, even when in despair – and I remembered Uncle Garth reciting Hopkins, ‘Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee.’ For Hopkins, Christ’s mother symbolised the life force. ‘Wild air, world-mothering,’ he called her. And in her, ‘God’s infinity/Dwindled to infancy.’
The chapel embodies kindliness and bears the weight of life within it. The mother of this chapel is both doomed and redeemed. She is God’s essential partner, and he is hers. Without her, God cannot be.
I had a heated discussion about religious aesthetics once: it was in this room, with Reg, at this old walnut table. Reg was decrying the pope because he wouldn’t sanction contraception. I thought of the pope, I thought of the breeding millions and I thought of the unbridgeable gap between the holy man making pronouncements from his palace and the people who are often so poor, a baby is an asset to beg with or to sell, and I lost my temper with Reg and said he didn’t understand poverty. For most of the world’s poor, contraception was a luxury they knew nothing of and had no access to. Their lot was to wait for death, and their chance of staying alive probably increased when they had children.
I had never believed Reg capable of a lofty thought, and continued on to say that though much religious dogma was manifestly stupid, it wasn’t all bad, in fact it was the source of some good thinking. As an example of good religious thinking captured by art, I described to him the Lady Chapel I’d found. I had thought to teach the earthy, self-indulgent Reg a lesson in humility, but it was I who learnt. ‘Go on,’ he said, not unkindly – I was aggravated into deeper righteousness by his tone – ‘tell me more.’ And he heard me out, adjusting his glasses to look at me over the top of them. Then he looked away and as I continued my description, he pouted and grunted, ‘Mmm, Mmm,’ at intervals into his clasped hands.
‘You know,’ he said, when I’d finished, ‘I like you, Isobel. You’re a passionate, talented woman. And I know what you think of me, but I have a confession to make. Irreverent and irreligious as I might be, I was the person who created that chapel.’ And he patted my knee and chuckled as if his laughter were bouncing on a spring.
It was totally unexpected. I had either to reject a hard-won notion of religion or to accept that Reg, for all his seeming lack of refinement, had a spiritual side to his nature that went deep. I did not think that such an achievement might be accidental, and even supposing it were, it had to be deeply instructive.
At night in Reg’s house the spaces are low, wide and embracing. His ceilings rest on broad beams. The hanging lights commemorate his wives – from the giant Chinese lantern in the kitchen, tasselled and ceremonial, with a picture show in silhouette on every panel, to the milk glass chandelier with translucent centres in the drops. One wife adorned the ceiling with corn dollies from America. It might have been the same one who hung globes of Helichrysum from it, giving this room a joyful yellow light.
If houses can be said to reflect their owners’ natures, then Reg is a stout beam on whom a wide and motherly ceiling rests.
I think Reg’s chapel is his finest achievement. It goes much deeper than a man’s idea of what motherhood ought to be. It’s not about sex, but about gravity and grace and the natural purpose in female life, which isn’t there in the lives of men. Reg made the place in genuine homage; he made it in spite of himself.
When I think of Clare, I think its every intention was motherhood, but it spoke more of Granpa than it did of Euphrosyne. It was a place of opulent comfort, its verandahs generously deep, its windows wide and reaching from floor to ceiling. In the front of the house, the inside and outside flowed into each other. Most of the furnishings, too, were supplied by Granpa, the monster table symbolising amplitude, generosity and conviviality, but also luxury, the luxury of walnut, and the further luxury of its having come, in sections, from Ireland by ship.
When Allegra and I knew Clare, we were conscious of its having been tragically maimed; what’s more, its maiming was synonymous with Granpa’s. It was the maiming of an honourable, well-intentioned man, a provider brought low by circumstances beyond his control. Allegra and I were encouraged to imagine what Clare had been in the past: a paradise under the reign of Euphrosyne. Granpa had lain all bounty at her feet. She was his Virgin Mary. Yet we knew damned well that Granpa was a rash man with a violent temper and deeply stained by prejudice and, furthermore, Euphrosyne, who had withrawn from life when she fell upon hard times, did not translate into our world. We could not withdraw; the hard times were there from the time our mother was born; withdrawing was a luxury you came across in Chekhov and Charlotte Brontë; it implied a labyrinth of rooms and someone rich enough to keep them, even in decay.
The keeping of rooms at Clare not only required money, of course; it also required flair, a flair our mother had and tried to apply to our less-than-salubrious home. It was not surprising that by the time we were young women, Allegra and I began to find a lot to criticise in our mother’s proud, flamboyant housekeeping. As little children, it hadn’t struck us as anomalous, and we would side with her when frugal people tried to hem her in. But then came Marx, and everything in our mother’s attitude began to seem wrong. We upbraided her constantly for her love of possessions and her inability to accept anything synthetic, or of what she called ‘inferior workmanship’. While Allegra and I admired things for their potential to do work, our mother attached a different set of values to them, a set we believed to be both aesthetically and morally obsolete. Our mother held plastic and vinyl in contempt, just as Euphrosyne before her had looked down on electroplating. The cutlery at Clare was either stainless steel or solid silver; people of discernment would know it was and use it as a measure of Granpa’s capacity to provide. Against this standard, of course, our own father had demonstrated no capacity.
Allegra and I understood there was a historical aspect to our inheritance, but we couldn’t have named it in 1967, when Aunt Nina died. We lived a world away from her Australia. To us she was very dear, very quaint, but everything except her upright manner was irrelevant to the future, and we had often been deeply irritated by her.
By the end of November 1967, when Aunt Nina was dying, farmers were preparing for a terrible summer drought. It had been the driest year on record. The dams at Clare were evaporating and there wasn’t enough water for the garden.
Tony Furlonger had taken Aunt Nina into Scunthorpe Hospital before we arrived. When we opened the house, blowflies reverberated in the long, bright rooms.
Stella cleaned up as if in conversation with her home. She oiled away its dust and polished its silver as if massaging its bed-sore muscles. The crystal sang with her care. She was trying to work up the courage to go and see Aunt Nina, but she couldn’t do it. Nina had terminal cancer. The thought of her vacating life was almost more than Stella could bear. Afraid of those recesses of her soul that were filled with tears for her family, she stayed behind, with Eli to keep her company, while Allegra and I drove into Scunthorpe in Allegra’s battered Kombi.
We found Aunt Nina giving the staff hell at Scunthorpe Hospital. Her Chinese doctor was in tears. ‘I know what you’ve got in that needle, young man,’ she kept announcing in her tremulous, most forbidding contralto. ‘I’ve heard the name Furlonger whispered round this hospital, don’t think I don’t know what you’re up to! My relatives will hear about this!’
Her relatives could hear her well before they reached her side. When they did, she seized Allegra with one hand and me with the other in a grip of iron. ‘They’re trying to put me down,’ she quavered.
She didn’t want to be treated by an Asian doctor. We were to take her home immediately. The poor doctor was inconsolable. It was morphine he had in his needle. All he wanted was to ease her pain. ‘H’mph,’ said Nina, gathering strength, ‘a likely story.’ She wouldn’t let go of us. Her brothers hadn’t given their lives so she could be killed by this fellow.
The doctor wept, the matron soothed, Aunt Nina clung.
I noticed an old woman in a wheelchair abandoned in the middle of a gaggle of crones on the way to the bathroom. She was dead, one arm slung out over the side of the chair, round face staring up at me, goggle-eyed dead. She was dead, but I didn’t like to say so. She was dead, I could see she was, and it was an embarrassment. You didn’t expect to see her sitting there in that condition. Life had just passed out of her on the way to the bathroom and now the need for a bath had been bypassed. The nurse who’d been wheeling her had probably seen she was dead and thought it best to leave her among the other old women where she mightn’t be noticed. Who knows but that the nurse was hoping someone else would find her?
The doctor had been saying in a low voice between sobs that Aunt Nina would die soon and nothing could be done for her except the relieving of pain. I undid her fingers from my wrist, thinking life could pass out of her by accident in this cheerless place and we would not live with ourselves if it did. On my way to phone Stella, I passed the dead woman and her company of jaw-chumping white heads into which life had shrunk down past the periphery of knowing.
‘We’re bringing her home,’ I told my mother, allowing her no say in the matter. ‘It won’t be for long,’ I tried to reassure her. ‘It’s horrible in here. Too horrible.’ I knew she would understand this message, though she would be afraid of it. I felt it being delivered to me by people who were already dead; I was under instructions.
When she saw me returning, Aunt Nina seemed to know what had just passed between me and my mother, and sprang up as if there’d been nothing wrong with her. She flung on her dressing-gown and filled the spaces that had sagged in it. Pink bloomed in her cheeks.
She remembered the date. When we arrived home, she had us bring out a bagful of Christmas presents she was saving for December along with cards, cellophane and ribbons. Sherry was fetched. We opened her windows onto the rose garden where, in spite of the drought, her standard reds were in full bloom and filled the room with their scent. She wrapped, she tied, she inscribed. She sent us shopping for more sherry.
Then she thought she heard a baby crying. A baby? She frowned – surely not a baby? Our mother took quick breaths and went to say words, but her little jaw clacked up under her top teeth before she could frame what she had to say. Didn’t Nina remember Eli? we asked. He wasn’t such a baby now. He was two.
‘Oh, well, in that case …’ said Nina. Having a baby in the house made her get up and attempt to take charge again. Obviously we were unfit to run things. There was nothing to sterilise the nappies in, of course. And no proper facilities for boiling bottles. I didn’t know whether or not to construe this as an invitation to leave. I, like the doctor, was cowed by her.
I did penance in the passenger seat of her ancient Pontiac, 10 m.p.h. for a distance of fifteen miles to Scunthorpe cemetery in hundred-degree heat – object, to choose her plot. When I offered to drive, her retort was, ‘You wouldn’t like another person to drive your car, would you? It’s like using someone else’s hanky.’ I refrained from comment. Mercifully, we had left Eli at home, or he would surely have boiled away. Even though I had my window wide open, we were going so slowly no breeze at all was coming in on us.
The whole exercise took three and a half hours, and by the time we arrived home, Eli, demanding my presence, could be heard at the front gate, just under a mile from the house. That night, because the atmosphere had grown rather tense at Clare, Eli and I went back to Melbourne with Allegra, who had to submit a thesis for her master’s degree. This was the part my mother had been dreading from the outset. I’d been hoping we wouldn’t have to go through it.
Nina’s grip on life was so tenacious it became a competition between life and her. She had it by the throat, daring it to atone. The top was off the sherry bottle way before the sun had crossed the yardarm every morning. ‘Men,’ she would say at random, ‘are brutes.’
Then, just before Christmas, she was laid low by a stroke. All faculties went except the ability to point to the sherry bottle and then to her lips. A nurse was summoned for the daily bath.
She did not die till the last day of 1967. Rain was falling steadily and drenchingly, making its longed-for sound on the roof and releasing from the earth the aroma of abundance.
We had not only to relinquish Aunt Nina, but Clare as well. Mountshannon belonged already to the Furlongers, who had cut a path to it from Coolang and were keeping their traps and guns in it.
There were no horses to ride over on and bid it farewell, and in any event we hadn’t been there since Granpa died. Then it had been overgrown, shadowy and mournful. The only happiness we’d had was on the beautiful track leading down to it from Clare. We had had to dismount to allow a herd of grey kangaroos to cross the path. There’d been more of them grazing around the house, and ringtailed possums huddled in the wainscoting. There was the smell of long-dead fires in the grates, and in the kitchen, the stench of bush rats.
A couple of days after we had buried Aunt Nina, a strange car came jolting over the pot holes from the gate to the front driveway. It was a Landrover containing a man and a woman. The man turned out to be Reg Sorby, whom we only knew by reputation at that stage. The woman was his second wife, Helene. They had heard we had a giant walnut table for sale.
‘It isn’t for sale,’ said our mother indignantly.
‘Oh, well, would you mind if we just had a look?’ asked Helene Sorby, who was a short wasp of a woman with the determination of a pneumatic drill.
Stella barred the steps.
‘You wouldn’t have a cool drink?’ asked Reg from the driver’s seat. Another woman, Aunt Nina, for instance, would have been affronted by his gall, but Stella, being Stella, said, ‘Well, you’ll have to have it without ice. There isn’t any.’
When we said to her Don’t give him a drink! her answer was that the poor man had probably driven his bitch of a wife for miles in the heat and was on the verge of desiccation. She returned to the verandah with two ginger ales in the best crystal glasses.
Allegra and I both knew that wasn’t the tactic you used with frightful people like the Sorbys, but our mother appeared to be under the impression they’d be so cowed by the glassware they’d hightail it out the gate.
Predictably, when Helene Sorby had finished her drink, she flicked a finger against the side of her glass and said, ‘Got any more crystal like this?’
‘Of course we have!’ carolled our mother. ‘There’s a whole set, even down to proper whisky and martini glasses.’ She supposed Helene Sorby would have no answer to that.
But, ‘Decanters?’ asked Helene Sorby.
‘Of course.’
‘How much do you want for them?’
Save for our sentimentality, Helene Sorby would have robbed us of our every small adornment. She was the sort of person whose family appreciates her only after her death, when the thought of highway robbery gives way to a feeling of legitimised possession.
The least liked of Reg’s wives, Helene was the most acquisitive. Reg says he must be the only person in the world who ever liked her. She was responsible for many of the painting commissions from which he made his name. Some time after she robbed us of our table, she divorced Reg for someone else but then regretted it and ever since has kept in close contact with him, telling him how fond of him she is – fond, says Reg, in a preposthumous way.
Among other things, Helene Sorby dealt in antiques. She had circled the Scunthorpe district like a hawk when ‘a friend’ had told her of the imminent demise of Aunt Nina. She’d sniffed out ‘the relatives’, having been advised that the most vulnerable point of attack was Tony Furlonger, who could probably make use of her talent for cannibalising deceased estates. Tony had come and asked what we were going to do with all the furniture, then buttered us up and told us to be on the lookout for an antique dealer. He was, said Reg, ‘too honourable’ to take a commission.
We hated Reg for buying our beautiful table; we hated Tony Furlonger for letting him. With a sense of occasion that made us put our ideological soundness into mothballs, we declared that a real man would have offered to keep the table for us until such time as we could come by a mansion we could fit it in. But we were a few shekels short of a mansion and, instead, the table came here, across the Alps like Hannibal’s elephants, to end up in the room where I am now at Reg’s retreat in New South Wales.
It was last seen leaving Clare, two of its handsome legs tethered to the bull bar of Reg’s Landrover, the other two tethered by a very long length of rope to the back bumper bar. We exhausted ourselves with its ordeal. And as we exhausted ourselves, we packed.
We had objected with energy to the table taking a long journey practically naked, but Helene Sorby had remarked scornfully that the table was in need of new French-polishing anyway. But what about stones, crashes, injury, rain? Well, that was a risk she was prepared to take, didn’t we realise we were lucky to fetch anything at all for such a white elephant? Somebody else might have made us pay transport costs and we could imagine what they would have come to, considering our isolation.
Chagrined, we charted the table’s course across Aunt Nina’s 1935 Broadbent road maps. After wandering through the baffling scenery of the south-west, where nothing changes but the position of elephantine outcrops on flat horizons, we had the table calling in at Warracknabeal to freshen up at the Ladies’ Restroom. We’d just come across the ancient letter announcing Aunt Nina’s election to Life Membership of this establishment. Her name was to be inscribed on the frosted mirror behind the manageress’s desk.
Daughters of life members were admitted free of charge to the Warracknabeal Ladies’ Restroom, while foreign bottoms had to pay for the privilege. We had been a special case for exemption, being nieces, when we passed through Warracknabeal in childhood. An almanac had been consulted, the passage on childless aunts being referred to, and we’d been given the nod. To partake of the privilege we had had to walk down an aisle of assorted chairs, some dating back to the Boer War, before going through a low-lintelled Alice in Wonderland door. This gave onto a semi-circle of quaintly painted outside conveniences. We pictured Helene Sorby being turned back for bad manners at Warracknabeal, and derived a modicum of satisfaction.
As we riffled through the requests for payment of upkeep of graves and the thank you notes from cemetery caretakers, it occurred to us that many a Motte lay under a tended sod, thanks to Aunt Nina, and there was a short debate as to whether charity dictated that we take over the sod-tending as her legatees. We got over that difficulty by finding a bigger one. Aunt Nina’s beeswax preparation for polishing the table had been left behind on the front steps of Clare, along with the special polishing rags made from Granpa’s singlets. The contempt! We bundled them into a parcel with a short sharp note from Stella. This was not just any table, she wrote. This was an heirloom upon whose surface nothing but the traditional polish should be applied. She included a time-honoured recipe and insisted that no common rag be used in the buffing. This table required pure cotton that had been worn next to the skin of a well-bred man.
The next day, when we came across Euphrosyne’s stud book and the pedigrees of Oberon and Countess, we supposed the table would be passing through Wodonga and would continue on to Corryong. There, it would have to cross the now overbrimming Murray and begin the perilous but beautiful climb up Kosciuszko. Here, fist-sized rocks were so numerous as to fling every twentieth car into the fragrant sub-alpine forests or down the gorgeous honey-scented valleys above the snow line. If our table had to come to rest, we prayed, let it be in this heavenly locality.
The orphaned chairs were beside themselves.
We packed the hand-embroidered tablecloths and guest towels, the monogrammed dinner service with its indigo rims, the breakfast china, the Minton, the Doulton, the Staffordshire and what was left of the Waterford after Helene Sorby’s lust had been satisfied by purloining the glasses from which she and Reg had had their drinks.
Allegra observed that the table ought just about to be in the tablelands by now. We took sherry and heart. From there it was a mere spin across flat surfaces.
The black wedding dress was loaded into the Kombi, the letters from the front, three chairs, the trinkets, the tantalus. The carving knives. Countess’s saddle – no, not the saddle – well, all right then, why not? But why? Because if the saddle, then not the tablecloths. The serviette rings, the silver. The portrait of the stud bull by A. Twine.
And under the old camp bed where Uncle Garth used to recline drunkenly in his den, Mad Meg. She was mounted on a piece of hardboard, framed, the glass in front of her broken. Stuck on the back, in his scrawl on a Memorandum from one of his practices in Adelaide, was written:
For this, be sure, tonight thou shalt have cramps, Side-stitches that shall pen thy breath up; urchins Shall forth at vast of night, that they may work All exercise on thee: thou shalt be pinch’d As thick as honeycomb, each pinch more stinging Than the bees that made them.
Reg had refused to ring us when he arrived in New South Wales. All this fuss over something we no longer owned got on his nerves.
We had to wait more than twenty years to find that our table had made the journey not over the Alpine Way as we imagined, but blamming up the Hume in a cattle truck onto which Reg had loaded it in Horsham. When it reached here, Reg was at pains to tell us, Helene had made him dismantle a wall to get it inside. He’d nearly sent it back to us. The walnut table was not his favourite piece of furniture. All the same, when Helene claimed it in the divorce settlement, he refused to relinquish it on the grounds that it couldn’t be moved.
The old woman reaches into a pocket and hands me a fistful of poppy seeds, wrapped up in an embroidered linen handkerchief. ‘Why these?’ I ask her.
‘Well, since your garden’s full of trenches …’ She refers to a plumbing disaster at my house, and also to the Somme and the Marne and the connection between soldiers and poppies. If I did not know my mother, this gesture would be without significance. But even the hanky is meaningful. She is living the end of the embroidered linen era, when flowers were large and generous, china was fine, the silver solid and polished – never a quick-dry tablecloth, but threads, painstakingly pulled by Aunt Nina, who spoke so beautifully and announced, as she lay dying, that there was a cake nearly ready in the oven. We could eat it at the funeral.
In the drawers of mahogany and rosewood chests we were to find, lovingly labelled and left for us, a half-a-century-old batiste of gentlest yellow with nasturtium sprays in the corners and the edges fluted and French turned.
I can’t help loving my mother and Aunt Nina for that: all that faultless ironing, all that care. The Red Cross labels from their Aid Detachment coats, the regimental colours kept in the button box, the photos in nursing uniforms, the ambulance driver, the debutante whose dress was remodelled from Vere’s crepe-de-chine nightie. And our little letters, tied with Christmas ribbon, kept as treasures. Yet, how furious they made us! How small we sometimes felt and how unwilling to carry the burden their respectability thrust on us. How we despaired for the props of their endurance!
How solid Aunt Nina seemed, and at death still was – unshakeably loyal. While we, young and yellow as the dandelions nodding stupidly from her grave, wanted to yell, Stop it! Cut it out! Quit it! You can’t do this to us! Pass the family brain, Aunt Nina, it looks like custard, needs more gelatine!
Too ‘well bred’ to hear, she went on stitching, delicate eyebrows raised, served us off the best china, the proper table, and never a serviette without its silver ring. Now the Midnight Knitter holds down bills with them, wraps poppy seeds in the hankies … But they’re ironed, they’re clean, they’re polished all the same, and never a vase with something dead in it. Respect for things: things worthy of respect.