My Hundred Lovers (5 page)

THIRTEEN
The smell of love

MY FATHER CAME FROM A
long line of braggarts and fools, mainly dirt-poor Scots given to making a great deal of money before losing it.

In general we might be called history's bit players. In his youth my foolish great-great-grandfather once shared a cell with the iconic Australian bushranger Ned Kelly. My great-great-grandfather was in jail for debt, in Beechworth prison to be precise, and the only helpful thing he recorded in his diaries about Ned Kelly was that he snored manfully.

This same relative, who, even in his dotage, was given to taking off for newly discovered goldfields at the drop of a hat, once met the author Mark Twain in 1895 while travelling on a ship from San Francisco to Sydney. Apparently Mark Twain, who introduced himself as Sam, confided to my great-great-grandfather his belief that dreaming was better than reality. The journal in which my forebear noted this comment has now been lost but I remember reading this journal in my twenties and being struck by how my relative kept missing the point. For example, on the day he married Mademoiselle Emilie Joubert—the daughter of a baker from Angers and believed to be descended from Huguenots—he failed to mention his marriage at all, noting instead the specifics of the weather.

Perhaps it is my splash of French blood, bequeathed to me by the long-dead Mademoiselle Emilie Joubert, which leads me to the adoration of the croissant. But perhaps poor Mademoiselle Emilie Joubert preferred a crusty
tartine
over a croissant? A baguette fresh from the oven, split in two, spread thickly with butter and jam made from red berries, dipped in a bowl of warm coffee.

Perhaps when she found herself living in a tent next to a stream in the middle of Victoria, Australia, because her new husband believed there was gold in it, she dreamed of
tartines.
In the early, bird-filled mornings she might have woken to find the smell of them in her nostrils, so rich, so true, that it hurt to realise her own memory had been baking them. There was no oven, no father standing next to it, no fine, flowery Viron flour turned by heat into the smell of love.

Where are Mademoiselle Joubert's phantom
tartines
now? Where are her body's memories, her cherished recall of freshly baked baguettes which smelt like love?

Mademoiselle Joubert's husband never wrote down her memories. In his journals he noted the sky, the gold, the manful snores of Ned Kelly, but all Mademoiselle Joubert's bodily store—her recall of flour, with its residue of ash which left a fine powder on her fingertips, of the sharp, singing taste on her tongue of
fleur de sel de
Guérande
, the champagne of salt, and especially the smell of bread and love in the morning—have disappeared.

I once loved the fragrance of leather in the handbag shop where Nana Elsie spent her working life.

I absorbed into myself the rich scent of cured animal hide, redolent of distant grasses, plains and valleys. Leather smelt of love in that dark cave of a shop of fine Italian leather goods in every shade of cream, brown and black, that cave of shiny gold buckles and folds of softest suede.

FOURTEEN
Mother's red fingernails

MY MOTHER WAS A PRACTISED
back scratcher. She kept her nails long and one of the great thrills of my life was discovering that the nail file she used to keep the edges of each nail rounded and smooth was made of diamonds. The earth's most precious stone, pressed into service so that my mother might keep her fingernails tidy.

She let me inspect the nail file, shot through with brilliance, with glittering flecks that flashed like stars. The file finished in a cruel tip, curled like a hook, which could easily scoop out an eye.

I would sometimes lie face down beside my mother on the bed or the sofa and pull up my top in a wordless signal to her that I wanted my back scratched. More often than not she would bat me away, too engrossed in whatever book she was reading. She was a great reader, anything from
Peyton Place
and
Gone with the Wind
to
Love in
a Cold Climate.
She was particularly fond of Dickens. But sometimes she would smile down at me in a preoccupied, absent-minded way and reach out to run her long, red-painted nails lightly over the skin of my back. Her fingernails drew intoxicating patterns, arabesques and whirls, inducing wafts of sensory pleasure that stupefied me. Sometimes they passed across the surface of my skin in loose, feathery circles, and sometimes they traced a firmer line that followed some secret path only my mother knew. Occasionally her fingernails moved too close to the small of my back, to the place that tickled, and then my whole body arched in an ecstatic involuntary shiver.

FIFTEEN
Giggling

SHE IS NOT SUPPOSED TO
remember the night that her sister was born but her body remembers her father gathering them up, the girl and her brother, and a long, flickering, dreamlike drive through deserted Sydney streets.

In the week her sister Jane was born the local creek flooded and her mother and the new baby could not come home because the carpet was wet. The girl remembers feeling cold on the way to the hospital, a new unpleasant feeling she could not name twisting up her guts, for the body is always first to get the news.

She was a beauty, was Jane. My mother, June, came from a long line of beauties. Milky Irish beauties for the most part, rosy-lipped and white of skin and teeth. June was one, and her mother Elsie too. Nana Elsie was so beautiful as a small child that one day as she was playing in the garden of the house where she lived in Orange, New South Wales, a rich childless couple stopped and begged to adopt her. And in her youth Nana Elsie's mother Lil, my great-grandmother, was famous for being the most beautiful girl in Orange. Lil was the daughter of Joseph, an Irishman who owned the finest hotel in town. We called her Super Nan to distinguish her from Nana Elsie.

Jane belonged: pale, translucent skin, blue eyes, grey at the centre, like a Siamese cat's. Grown, her face carried the secret blueprint of beauty, in that its symmetry matched that composite face used in tests by advertisers and market researchers and university students to find out which particular human face is considered the loveliest. Jane's face was mathematically correct: oval, with the right symmetry between forehead, eyebrow and cheekbone, between mouth and jaw.

The girl's body knew something was up. She stood shivering in the rain, looking up at the hospital room where her mother and the new baby were sleeping. ‘Look, up there!' said her father. ‘Mummy's up there. Wave!'

It was night. It was raining. The hospital was closed to visitors and, anyway, in those days hospitals did not let children visit new babies because of germs.

They stood shivering in the rain, waving at the darkened building, at the mother they could not see, at an invisible baby with a beautiful face somewhere inside. June and Jane, mother and daughter, so alike even their names were distinguished by only a single letter: June, Jane, tick and tock, the beginning and the end.

When Jane grew up she had golden curls, like a girl in a story. She wore them in two pretty plaits and when the girl was eight she cut off one of her sister's golden plaits: snip.

She should have been ashamed of herself.

She was old enough to know better.

She was, perhaps, prefiguring the future. You might say that, in a modest way, she was avenging her coming self.

The sister grew up to possess the most magnificent giggle you have ever heard, the kind you wanted to cause for the pleasure of hearing it.

Jane's giggle was like a rinse of sun, an unexpected present, and had the effect of making you happy. Getting Jane down on the bed and seeing her collapse her beautiful neck in order to escape the fingers trying to reach her most tickly spot was a joy beyond words. The hot pant of her breath, the flushed face, the giggling in her which set up an answering giggle in you so that before long all your insides were shaken up, exultant, and there was nothing but the happiness of flopping back exhausted on the bed, the giggling having pumped everything noxious from you and rinsed you clean. You should have known that one day you would wish to cut the giggle from her throat.

SIXTEEN
The dog who loved me

NOT JUST ANY DOG,
a prince among dogs. A chocolate labrador, a silky short-haired gun dog with a chocolate-coloured nose to match his coat, name of Rhett.

At first an unruly puppy, lurking under tables, nipping childish toes. Little pointed shark-like teeth, razor sharp, soon to fall out, and the more you squealed, the more he believed your toes and legs to be a moveable entertainment designed especially for him. Loose in his skin, a soft, downy armful, a face sweeter than a baby's, but soon a digger of holes to China, kidnapper of socks, chewer of shoes. Named by my mother for Rhett Butler from
Gone with the
Wind
—the bookish Rhett and not the Hollywood actor, Clark Gable.

‘What's the difference?' I asked when I was sixteen, and Rhett was on his last legs.

‘In my mind Rhett Butler in the book doesn't look a thing like Clark Gable,' my mother said.

‘Does he look like a chocolate labrador?' I asked.

She gave me a withering look. ‘You are a very literal-minded girl, Deborah,' she said. ‘You have no imagination.'

This was one of her favourite put-downs. She said it about my deflowerer, Jonathan Jamieson, he of the wounded, dark-lashed brown eyes and the caramel-coloured skin, the singer of songs, the first boy who loved me.

The dog had a straight, powerful tail, thick at the base and slightly tapered at the end so that when wet (he loved to swim) it resembled the tail of an otter. Wet, the whole of Rhett resembled an otter or a seal, the plump meat of his dark back and stomach glisteningly revealed. There was something liquid about him in general, too, in the swift, effortless way he moved in space, in his remarkably moist chestnut-coloured eyes, full of sympathy and helpless love. He readily proffered the wet snout of friendship, and he had a knack for endless fluid patience, for standing still for hours while frilly bonnets were wrapped around his head and skirts draped across his back.