Autobiography of My Mother (15 page)

The bank suddenly transferred King up to Bundaberg. He wasn't exactly overjoyed; we had just scraped together enough to buy a new gramophone for the flat. Music was very important in our house.

‘Just my luck to be moved away when we get the new gramophone,' he groaned.

After a few months, he came down for a weekend. Like everyone else, King hated the dentist but he had a bad toothache, and wanted to see our family dentist in Randwick, Clarrie Hughes. Unfortunately, Clarrie couldn't see him until Monday morning.

Saturday night King tramped around the house, unable to keep still because of the pain in his tooth. Then he disappeared onto the back verandah. Mum went to see what had happened. She was shocked to find a huge tooth covered in blood. King had used an old pair of rusty forceps to pull the tooth out himself. He tore his jaw to pieces in the process and Clarrie spent hours patching it up on Monday morning.

I don't like the dentist myself. As a child in Yass, I was climbing on some rafters my mother had declared out of bounds when I fell and broke my tooth. Because I was so frightened of the dentist, I didn't tell her about the tooth. Instead I tried to keep my mouth closed and I developed a dreadful, lopsided smile that stayed with me long after the damage to my tooth had been rectified.

King came down again the next year. He and Mary Frost were married and Mary went back with him to Bundaberg. Our family was splitting up again.

About this time, I received my first proposal of marriage. A heavily built and swarthy Greek Orthodox priest used to come calling on his flock down Botany Street. Mum always asked him in for a cup of tea. There was something contrary in Mum's nature; she never asked the Catholic priest in.

Mum liked the Greek priest. She said she felt sorry for him having to go round on foot in such hot weather collecting for the church. She used to make him a cup of tea and a sandwich and give him a shilling for the church, for which the Greek priest was suitably grateful.

One day when Mum was entertaining the Greek priest she called me into the sitting room; I could see her eyes were twinkling.

‘Father Constantine has a proposition for you,' she said blithely, and stopped. Father Constantine took over. His eyes
were glowing and he waved his hands around as he explained.

‘Margaret, my child, I have found a nice husband for you,' he said. ‘A nice Greek husband. The boy is here in Sydney, the marriage will take place in a few months. You will be very happy with him.'

Father Constantine was very happy. I was furious. I had not the slightest interest in an arranged marriage with anyone, not even a nice Greek boy. Father Constantine took my refusal badly. He wanted Mum to intervene. But Mum said the decision was up to me, since it was my arranged marriage.

The Greek priest went off in a huff. I don't know if he was paid to arrange marriages, but I think not. Probably he was fond of Mum because of the cups of tea and thought he was doing us both a favour by providing a husband for me. No more tea and sandwich visits to the Coens for him.

I received another equally strange proposal at about the same time from wealthy family friends, a married couple about Mum's age, who seemed quite elderly to me. The man picked me up as I walked down Botany Street and said he would drive me home.

Instead we drove off and did a circuit of Centennial Park. Then, in the most matter-of-fact voice, he asked me if I would consider becoming his mistress. He didn't touch me. It was as if he was offering me a business proposition.

‘What about your wife?' I stammered out.

‘My wife understands,' he said calmly. ‘She thinks it would be a good arrangement.'

I was terrified. I wasn't at all convinced that the wife knew anything about it. I didn't know what sort of maniac he was.

‘I don't think so. You'll have to ask me another day,' I said, stalling for time.

We did another circuit while he coolly elaborated, telling me that he had been watching me and how much he liked me. He had no intention of leaving his wife if I became his mistress, he added and concluded by saying that I would be very well looked after financially.

I wasn't going to be this man's mistress any more than I was prepared to accept a Greek husband I hadn't met. The man and his wife were childless and I often wondered afterwards if they had wanted me to produce a child for them.

If you say you are going to be an artist, the first stumbling block for religious people is that you have to draw from the model. It shocks them.

It doesn't matter that every artist who ever painted drew from the model; they are still shocked. In my case it began with Auntie Ina before she entered the convent, when I was a child and she was still living at The House. For reasons best known to myself, I had undressed a doll, but my doll appeared mysteriously dressed again. Miffed at this intervention, I undressed the doll as before; again mysteriously she was re-dressed.

Then I caught Ina in the act. I was cross with her for interfering in my games, and she in return scolded me for daring to be so bold.

‘Cranky Ina' I called her. The name stuck. She was ‘Cranky Ina' for many years thereafter.

During my first term at Rubbo's art school, I took a selection of my work up to show Grandma. It included a few studies of the nude. I hadn't quite made up my mind if I would show them to her or not. In the meantime they were safely stowed away in my bedroom. Or so I thought.

Ina, who had now long been a nun, was back at Yass for a holiday. She went investigating in my room and managed to fossick out the hidden nudes.

Is this what they teach you in art school?' she said in shocked tones.

‘Unless you draw from the model, you will never be able to draw the human figure,' I replied defensively.

Ina quailed. Nothing more was heard from her about the nude. Annie and I giggled about it in the kitchen, Annie agreeing that Ina shouldn't have gone snooping around my things in the first place.

Not only Catholics carried on about drawing the human body. One of Doug's strictly Anglican uncles was visiting us long after we were married and living in St Ives. The house was hung with nudes, mostly by Norman Lindsay. A nude that Norman made out of plastic wood (a filler that looked like brown plaster of Paris) stood on the mantelpiece, while a bronze figurine made the centrepiece of the dining table.

Uncle Wallace looked askance at all this nakedness, his wife pretended not to notice. After two whiskies and a few glasses of wine, Uncle Wallace recovered from his initial shock at seeing unclothed females adorning the house, and even grew a little lecherous.

I've never seen so many,' he confided over dessert.

‘Well,' I said, ‘when you finish your lemon meringue pie you'll find another.'

The dessert dishes were hand painted by Arthur Murch. At the bottom of Uncle Wallace's pudding plate was a curvaceous mermaid. Uncle Wallace scraped away at his pie with a gleam in his eye.

I was drawing the model as soon as I started Rubbo's art class. Usually Rubbo's pupils had to spend twelve months in another room drawing ‘the antique' before they were allowed anywhere near the model. This meant drawing from a series of famous plaster busts and bodies, starting with a head of Homer, moving on to the hideous bust of Voltaire, the bane of every art student's life, then on to the ‘Drowned Girl of the Seine' with such a calm expression on her face. A life-sized plaster torso with the skin stripped off to show the muscles came last.

Rubbo might have taken into account the years of drawing lessons I had from him at Kincoppal, but for whatever reason I escaped the antique. Later, at the Royal Art classes, I was not so lucky.

Despite my delight at having left school and becoming a serious art student, the first time I saw the model I nearly died. I knew I would have to draw from the nude and thought I was prepared for anything, but I was still surprised when I saw our model. She was not a young woman. She had masses of black hair which looked dyed to me, naturally dusky skin with a pinky glow and although she had a slim figure she must have been about forty – I was, I suppose, expecting the model to be like the women in Botticelli's
Primavera.

My mother was as alarmed as everyone else when I started the life class. ‘Do the models have any clothes on?' she asked. ‘The men wear vees,' I told her. ‘The women have nothing on, but during the rest breaks they go behind a screen and put on a dressing gown and slippers before they sit down with the rest of us.

‘Come in and have a look for yourself,' I said to her. ‘See how absorbed everyone is, it's almost like being in church. The invitation was sufficient to quiet Mum's concern. She
didn't come to the art classes and she didn't say any more about drawing the nude. What I said about the religious atmosphere was true; in a life class you can hear a pin drop, the students concentrate so intently. As for the rest of my family, I later learned what really set them talking, apart from my drawing nude models, was the fact that I didn't – except on the most formal occasions – ever wear a corset. I simply couldn't bear being constrained by tight elastic.

Rubbo's studio was on the seventh floor of a building at 15 Bligh Street. The lift up to his rooms was cramped and creaking, but once you arrived, the space was quite airy. Sun streamed in the front windows. Up to the left was the Hotel Metropole; directly opposite, in an old-fashioned sandstone building with Doric columns across the porticoed front, was the Union Club. In spring and summer, the jacaranda tree that grew in the small strip of garden down the side of the Union Club was covered with mauve blossoms and the members' wives held garden parties there. We watched them with amusement arriving in elegant frocks, big hats and white gloves. The back windows had a view right across to Circular Quay.

Not that we had much time to stand and stare with Signor Rubbo. We always had to call him ‘Signor'. ‘Perspiration, not inspiration' he told us was his motto. ‘Work, work, work!'

The Tuesday class I attended was made up of women pupils only, mostly of my own age. There was Elsa Russell, Janna Bruce and tiny pretty Dora Jarret, very proud of being half French. ‘The Jarret' Rubbo used to call her.

Rubbo gave everyone pet names. Janna was ‘Brucie', the other two girls were ‘Woy Woy' and ‘Goldfinch'. Irene Marr was ‘Titianella', which I thought was wonderful. Irene had
red hair and the fair complexion that goes with it. When Rubbo criticised her work, we could see the blush run up her face. Alison Rehfisch he called ‘Gorgeous'. ‘Gorgeous' was Alison's favourite adjective; Alison herself was gorgeous too. Golden-haired and blue-eyed, she was a little older than the rest of us. She had been married and used to bring her little daughter Peggy to classes. Peggy called me ‘Auntie Margaret'.

My name was ‘Gunner', which I didn't find nearly as attractive as ‘Titianella'. Rubbo said it was because one day I would go ‘boom boom'. I didn't know what he meant then, and it's no clearer to me now.

Signor Rubbo was in his mid-fifties then, still handsome, still wearing the green Borsalino low over one eye. With his curly black hair, he reminded everyone of Frans Hals'
The Laughing Cavalier
. Often he wore a red tie, like a Communist, to make him look dangerous. As he grew older, he became more sober about his dress and would appear in a double-breasted suit, a white collar and dark tie. Even in his most flamboyantly bohemian attire Rubbo was never untidy or ill-groomed.

Rubbo's head and hands looked slightly too big for his body. He should have been a tall man, but both his legs had been broken in some childhood accident, which impeded his growth at a critical period. His hands were beautiful, though; sensitive and artistic with the smoothest olive skin.

Numerous stories about how and why Rubbo came to Australia passed round the class. The one most often given as the truth was that he set out from Naples for South Africa but as a prank his friends put him on the wrong boat and he ended up in Australia.