The Complete Stories (68 page)

“Oh, it's genuine alright,” she told me, pouring tea. She gave a wry chuckle. “I took one look at you and I reckoned you'd be the one. I knew it right off. This one, I told meself—he'll believe, if on'y the bracelet. And he does! Here, young feller, drink yer tea.”

She sipped noisily and watched me over the rim of her cup.

“Y'see,” she said, suddenly serious, "I trustcher. I gotta trust someone and you're it. I've decided t’ come out a’ hiding.”

She let this sink in.

“I s'pose you know she was back ‘ere in o-six.”

“O-eight,” I corrected, glad at last to prove, after so many surprises, my expertise. “There was a tour in o-three and another in o-eight—
Lucrezia, Lucia, Semiramide, Adriana Lecouvreur”
I had it all off pat.

“Yair,” she said. “Well she was ‘ere in o-six as well, that's what I'm tellin’ yer. O-six.”

I was in no position to argue. Nobody in fact knows where Vale was in nineteen hundred and six; the whole year is a blank. In o-five she was in San Francisco, New York, Brussels, London, Paris, and St. Peters-
burg. In o-seven in South Africa, Vienna, Budapest, Warsaw, Berlin, and was back in London again to close the season. But in o-six nothing. The theory is that she had a minor breakdown and was hiding out in the south of France. More romantic commentators suggest a trip to China in the company of a Crown Prince, or a time in Persia with an Armenian munitions manufacturer who later, it is true, bought her a house in Hampstead and her first motor. But no one, so far as I know, has mentioned Australia.

“She spent the time,” the woman informed me without emphasis, though her little black eyes were as lively as jumping beans—she was enjoying her moment of triumph—"in a suite in the Hotel Australia in Melbourne. And that's where us twins were born, me and a brother. I am Alicia Vale's daughter!”

She opened up like a fist and presented herself, as she had previously presented the bracelet; all without warning, a glittering jewel. As if to say: "There! If you believed in that you should believe in me. We're all of a piece.”

She sat back sucking her gums and grinning, delighted at having played her little scene with so much skill, and at having, for a second time, so convincingly set me back.

“You can put that down now,” she told me, indicating the bracelet. “We're talking about me.”

I
HAVE SPENT
nearly twenty years following the career of that extraordinary woman, through newspaper articles, reviews, programmes, opera house account-books (my little paper is a run-up to what I hope may be a full biography), and had, even before I made my first venture upon the documentary records, been spellbound for another twenty by the legend of her and by the thin, pure voice (unhappily a mere ghost of itself) that comes to us from the primitive recording-machines of the period. She was still singing after the war—after 1918, that is—but only small things: a Schubert lullaby, "Home Sweet Home.” Such is the magic of her art that even these become, in her rendering of them, occasions of the most poignant beauty; as if the simple melody of “Home Sweet Home” were being plucked out of the air by an angel banished for ever from the forests of Ceylon or the Gardens of Babylon, bringing with it, out of that lost world, only a radiant and disembodied
breath. As an adolescent I would listen to those recordings with locked eyes; imagining from photographs the exotic realm out of which it was climbing, in which a common farmgirl from the South Coast had been transformed by her own genius, and elaborate machines for making ground-fog, clouds and columns that can dissolve before the eyes on a view of endless horizons, into a creature of mythical power and beauty, a princess with the gift of immortality or abrupt extinction in her, a bird of paradise, an avenging angel—though she might also on occasion, and without one's sensing the least disjunction, appear in the pages of an international scandal-sheet, where her notorious language and ordinary, not to say vulgar affairs, like the exploits of the gods in their earthly passages, were transfigured and redeemed by the glory that came trailing after.

A coruscating meteor. Given that a meteor, all light and sparkle as it pours across the heavens, is at centre stone. Nothing so convinces us of her ethereal majesty as the fact that she was also a hard-headed businesswoman, who swore like a navvy (and got away with it), drank three bottles of Guinness at breakfast, and was surrounded wherever she went by a motley circus of book-makers, card-sharps, stand-over men, and a whole chorus-line of pale young fellows with shoulders, who made her every entrance a spectacle. Onstage she was, as often as not, a queen disguised as a gipsy Offstage she was the gipsy itself, demanding that she be treated as a queen.

In her later years, when she lived on the harbour at Kirribilli, she became a kind of native Gorgon. I have a photograph, taken at her seventieth birthday-celebration at Anthony Hordern's, where she is caught, very grand and baleful, among a group of admirers—all elderly, all male, and all looking strangely fossilized, as if she had just that moment turned her hooded eyes upon them. Yet the occasion itself is as innocent as a children's party. The little cakes in their silver dishes are made up to look like snails, frogs, piglets; there are jelly-moulds, and a huge, heart-shaped cake with a knife in it and a ring of hard-flamed miniature candles.

She had survived and would live to eighty. Not for her the tragic destiny of Phar Lap or Les Darcy, done to death, their proud hearts broken, by foreigners. They're a tougher breed than the men, these colonial girls: the Alicias, the Melbas, the Marjories, the Joans. They conquer the world and come home to die in the suburbs, in their own
swan's-down beds … But to be told now, after nearly half a century, that the catalogue is incomplete; that to the collection of Riccio grotesques and Kaendler Meissen, the gold Rolls-Royce, the Louis Seize commodes by Dubois and Riesener, the Daum vases, the Tiffany lamps and jewels, the costumes in which she filled out with her own marvellous presence courtesans, princesses, village girls afflicted with somnambulism, we must add an unacknowledged child—real, human—and especially, after so long
this
child, "our Mrs. Judge,” a weatherbeaten, slatternly but oddly impressive woman at a grubby kitchen table in Karingai, who has appeared at last to claim her place in the glittering tale and to demand, with an authority that might be a shadow of the Diva's own, that I should stand up now and be the first to acknowledge her! Is this how the great tests present themselves to us? At ten thirty in the morning, in a country kitchen, in a place like Karingai?

The woman set herself before me. She dared me to believe and take up her cause.

I
WAS SPARED
at the last moment by a footstep on the verandah. A man appeared, a big man in wellingtons. He had the soft-footed, respectful air of a visitor, but one who knew the place and was at home. The woman turned to face him. She made no attempt to hide the bracelet, or the fact that there existed between us a state of high drama.

“This,” she said, and might have been speaking to herself, "is my husband George.” She got up, turned away to the dresser, and brought another cup.

The man looked abashed but came forward, extending a large hand. He was a man of seventy or more, wide-shouldered and strong, with a head of wiry grey hair and long hairs, also grey, sprouting from between the buttons of his flannel shirt. He seated himself at the table, and when the kettle was ready she poured tea.

“You've told ‘im then,” the man said. He seemed embarrassed to be addressing her in another man's presence.

“Yes, I told ‘im. Not the whole of it, but.”

He nodded, sipped, gave me another sidelong glance. He was oddly defensive for so large a man. As if he saw in me a kind of power before which his strength would be of no account. Faced with whatever it was, he flinched, and his largeness, now that it had been dismissed, was like a
burden to him. He seemed unhappy with his own shoulders and arms, handling the china cup with difficulty. But when the woman put her hand on his for a moment, and their eyes met, they seemed beyond any harm that I or anyone else might do them, inviolably contained in their own concern for one another. His hairy Adam's apple worked up and down. He fisted his cup and drained it.

“Well,” he said, "I'll be gettin’ back.”

He got to his feet, and when he turned to go she called after him. “Don't worry, George. It's oright, you know.”

He was framed for a moment in the light from the doorway.

Sunlight was streaming down the hallway behind.

“If you say so, Mother.”

He gave me a curt nod.

“I'll be back at five.”

She listened while he crossed the verandah and went on down the seven steps, and when she faced me again she had a look of command that I would not have predicted in so small a woman. She glowed; she rose to the heights of what she must have seen as her true self; and was imposing enough to convince me then that she might be just what she claimed to be, the daughter of one of the greatest performers of the age.

“Now,” she said, "I'll tell you the whole story, and you will believe.”

I should point out that the facts of the Diva's life, as I know from twenty years of attempting to follow her course from a South Coast dairy farm through half the capitals of the world, are so meagre as to be almost non-existent. A secretive woman, deeply suspicious of even her closest friends and advisers, she seems to have protected the truth about herself by spreading conflicting accounts of her parentage, her marriage, even of the place and date of her birth. It isn't that she lied exactly, any more than Bernhardt did. Rather, she allowed others to make suggestions, the wilder the better, and then herself added the flourishes. As the years wore on and she moved further from the source, the flourishes increased and predominated, grew more extravagantly baroque. The common truth, if it had been laid bare, would have had to be rejected. It no longer fitted her style.

In the early days, when she was just a prodigious voice that had appeared, almost miraculously it seemed, out of a far and empty land, she had let journalists tell people whatever they wanted to hear; to dream up previous lives for her that were appropriate to Odabella or Semiramis, since her own outlandish country was to her present admirers every bit as fantastic as theirs. So her father was said to be a nephew of Napoleon, who had settled in New South Wales in the Fifties and married a local heiress. Later her parents were
saltimbanques
in a travelling circus, Hungarian Jews, and she had been born on the Dunolly goldfields on the day the continent yielded up its most spectacular nugget, “Welcome Stranger.” Later again, when she was firmly established, she confessed (which again may not be true) that she came from a poor farming family near Bega and offered romantic views of herself wandering about the paddocks and singing as she brought in the cows. (A marvellously evocative image this: dusk in the green pastures above the surf, a barefoot girl sleep-walking through the gathering dusk as the first notes of that angelic voice touch the colonial air; to be heard, like some as yet undiscovered spirit of the landscape, by a stranger who pauses a moment on the road and wonders if he is dreaming, then shakes his head and goes on—her first obscure admirer, quite unaware of the grace he has been afforded.)

Evocative but unprovable. The versions of her past that are promulgated tend to mirror her current status. It is only late in life, when she had abandoned her more extravagant roles and become a household favourite, that the farmgirl appears.

Did she really marry at nineteen the keeper of a small-town hardware store, and pass bags of nails, and nuts and bolts and screws over the counter? What happened to the man? Why didn't he come forward in the days of her ascendancy to claim his bride? Did she pay him off? Did she hire bullies to scare him off? She was capable of it. Did he never realise that the great Vale and his sullen bride were one? When she makes her first appearance in the early Nineties she is in the company of an ageing tenor from an Italian touring group; but he too disappears and is just a name.

And in a way, of course, none of this matters. It is part of the legend that she exploded into the consciousness of an adoring public as a fully developed Voice, clothed in the jewels, the satin folds of a savage empress; that she came into existence as what she always endeavoured,
after that, to remain: a dramatic illusion with no more past in the actual flesh than the characters she played. As well ask what Norma or Lucrezia Borgia were doing between seven and thirteen as imagine the Diva's childhood. Living legends are not born, brought up, schooled in this place or that. They burst upon us. They are spontaneously, mysteriously, inevitably,
there.

It was always like that. Between seasons she simply disappeared; and though the rumours were many there were no facts.

Was she the mistress, the morganatic wife even, of the Comte de Paris? Did she marry and then abandon the Armenian munitions manufacturer? Her relationship with the court at St. Petersburg was close enough for her to have had access to some of its most exclusive circles; but whether this was based on her quite unprecedented success in the theatre there or on some more personal tie cannot be confirmed. She destroyed the letters she received and herself wrote none—a few surviving notes are very nearly illiterate. Even her fortune cannot be traced. Terrified of being stranded without funds, she opened bank accounts in false names in some thirty or forty cities from Pittsburgh to Nanking, a good many of them still undiscovered and still accumulating interest, and when she died left no will.

Whether she herself believed the stories that circulated about her or was satisfied simply to be what she had become, the Earthly Angel, the Incomparable, la Vale, we shall never know. But there had been a childhood—parents and a home; there must even have been an original and quite ordinary name. She herself can't have forgotten. But they were her secret. What image she turned to when the costumes, the jewels, the bold lines of an Amelia or an Elisabetta were laid aside— that is the greatest of her mysteries. Who was she when she looked into her glass at five in the morning? Who was she in her sleep? (Imagine it, the Diva's sleep!) Inside the gestures of a dozen great characterizations, murderous queens and princesses, vengeful lovers, wronged maidens, and other monsters, was a lost and secret child that only she could have recognised, and it was that child, grown into a sixty-year-old stranger, who came home at last and looks out at us, terrifying but also perhaps terrified by her own strangeness, in the photographs; a woman who has survived the life she created and is left now to resume the earlier, ordinary self she sailed away from and has never entirely outgrown.