The Life and Loves of Lena Gaunt (13 page)

A
small padded envelope has arrived in the mail. I open it, and a cassette in a case slides out onto the table. I peer into the envelope, looking for a note, but there is only a small card tucked inside the cover of the cassette; one of Terence’s business cards with a note scribbled on the back which may or may not read:
Enjoy! T
. The cassette is labelled, again in Terence’s scratchy hand, an only slightly more legible
Transformer – Sampler.

I’ve been staring at this tape for half the day. It’s on the kitchen table, on top of its padded envelope, Terence’s card with its jaunty note next to it. I’ve
worked around it
, you might say, all day. I’m nervous about listening to the tape, hearing myself played back, juxtaposed between the youngsters, hearing the crowd’s response. Will it match my memory of it? Did I dream the whole damned thing?

It’s dark now. I’ve eaten a light meal, drunk a glass of wine, eaten cheese with a crisp green pear; washed my meagre dishes.

I sit at the table, contemplate the damned tape.

‘Well,’ I say aloud. ‘Well, then.’

I pick up the tape from the table, walk to the front room,
slot it into the empty tape deck and press play, turning my back on the machine and moving to sit in my lounge chair, my listening chair.

The clean hiss of the leader tape gives way to the roars and shouts and percussions of the crowd, sounding as big and loud as I remember – bigger and louder, if anything. There is the sound of instruments tuning, just briefly – distonic, discordant – then an electronic whine over and above it all kicks in, cranks up and overcomes all sound, screeching, reaching high and ramping to a bright white heavenly, unearthly, hellish scream of beauty. As it reaches its peak – the peak that I can hear with these old ears – the crowd noise is mixed down and I hear Terence’s voice-over.

Beats fade up over the crowd noise, rise and peak. I crank the volume knob on my stereo so that the house shakes and shudders with the noise of it. This is glorious, glorious. I nestle into my chair, my feet on the ottoman, my knees curled slightly to the side. Terence – I presume it is Terence who has mixed this – has done an extraordinary job; piece flows into piece, song into song, the crowd noise is up in the mix just enough, just often enough, to catch the feeling of the live performance, of the size of the crowd. There’s even somehow the essence in there of an outside
performance; not that I can quite hear cicadas, nothing as obvious as that. But the sonic feel of it is there, remarkably, and listening to it I can tell that this is not a recording that could have been made inside a building; it is not limited by walls.

Side one finishes, and the tape clicks off. I sit for a minute or two, smiling, absorbing what I’ve heard, before I get out of my chair, turn the tape over, press play again. I will be on this side. Steroidalab, Lena Gaunt, then Gristmonger will play out the tape, as we played out the festival that night. I return to my chair. I listen, waiting to hear myself, not afraid any more, not caring; not when the rest of the music is this good, when the sound is this good, when the mix makes it this good.

I hear Terence’s voice announce me, say my name, say words about me; I hear the crowd. I can feel the feel of the trousers I wore, the swish and glide of them as I walked on stage, like walking on air, carried on stage by the sound of the crowd.

I listen to myself play. The sound of me playing fills the room, as I sit, listening, playing nothing. How remarkable it is to listen to oneself; what a privilege. I look down at my hands on my lap; the fingers are flexing and twitching, moving to play the notes I hear. My shoulders are taut; not tense, but taut, ready, in the playing position. God, it felt good to play that show. And, in this recording that the angel Terence has sent unto me, I have the evidence that it was good; I sounded good. Piss-take be damned; there was no piss taken, no mistake made.

I celebrate my self-discovery in the usual way, even though it is, as they say, a school night. Nothing much for this old dog to learn though, tomorrow or any day. I revel in the familiarity of the preparation, the anticipation, the regimen; I toke in hard, then lean back in my chair and wallow in well-earned self-congratulation, my body flooding with warmth and light and well-being.

T
he filmmaker will bring her camera crew again tomorrow. I say crew, but really it’s just Mo, the woman called Caroline who operates the camera and tweaks the lights, and a very beautiful young man named Jonathan who operates the sound-recording gear. They call each other Caro, and Jonno, and Mo. My own given name is so long unused that I almost forget it; everyone who used it is long dead now. I hear it – Helena, Helena, Helena. An aspiration fronting the name I use, Lena – an aspiration, the sound of a breath fogging glasses to clean them; of a laugh contained in the throat.

The name I use – I choose – is missing that breath. Or it is understood, parenthesised like the subject in a parsed sentence: You (understood). Lena is Helena (understood).

But I am distracted; it must be the junk.

Mo (and Caro and Jonno, tra-la) will film me tomorrow. She brought them both to meet me yesterday – just briefly, to chat over coffee. They were all on their best behaviour, as if meeting the Queen. Caroline has been here before, with Mo, but tomorrow will be the first time the three of them – the four of us – will work together. It will be a
sounding out, a metaphorical walking around each other, a sniffing of bottoms. Yes, were we dogs we would sniff each other’s arse. Perhaps one of us would attempt to hump the other, establish herself as dominant. Perhaps one of us would roll over, submissive, on our back, pale belly exposed, paws pathetic.

But dogs we are not, we Bitches of Art, so we will do it human-style: smiling, tentative, eager to please, polite; yet each standing our ground, apart.

We film in the front room, the music room. They bring lights, to penetrate the dark, and a different camera, larger, noisier. I think I hear them calling it Harry.

‘Not Harry;
Arri
,’ Mo tells me. ‘The camera, it’s an Arriflex. Sixteen mill, that’s the film size, sixteen millimetres. The Hi8 was just video. This is the real deal.’

It is busier with three of them, with noisy Arri, with more complex lights and microphones. I sit in the kitchen, apart from them, and let them get on with it. I can hear them even from here. They are noisier than the two women together were; instructions fly across the room, no longer in lowered voices.

The filmmaker comes to find me. She wants me to play my theremin for them, wants to film that. Why not? They move me around – a light touch on the arm, a hand directing me to move just a little – stage-managing me. Caro uses a Polaroid, spitting out tongues glossy with image. She plucks them from the camera and waves them in the air, peering at them, wrinkling her nose, showing
them to Mo before tweaking the position of the light, the camera, the theremin, the old lady.

I set up the machine, and then I play for them. I start with some scales, some trills, improvise a little to check the sound. Then – without meaning to, although I feel my body as it does so – I straighten my spine, hold my head high, relax my shoulders, and start playing. Bach. The first cello suite, in G major. So beautiful. I forget they are there, lose myself in the music like the cliché that I am.

They film me in my chair, in the kitchen, everywhere. She doesn’t interview me, today. Mo (with Jonno, and Caro, tra-la) mills about me all day, has me make coffee, stand in my kitchen – just so, with the light like that – then stand by my front door.
Static shots
, she calls them.
Flavour. Atmosphere.

‘You’re good at being still,’ the filmmaker tells me, lifting her head from the viewfinder of the camera.

I am the stillness at the centre of things, the focus of their attention, their reason for being here, and yet separate from them. I am their subject, and yet somehow not here. Lena (understood).

They are busy at the end of the day, carefully coiling leads, packing equipment. At a sign from the filmmaker, the three of them huddle together briefly, speaking quietly, nodding, making plans. Caro and Jonno make their goodbyes, then disappear to heft their kit to the car.

The filmmaker gathers up the remaining gear-bag and her big shoulder bag, balancing them to hang one from
each shoulder. I walk her to the door. We make a time for our next session, a week away. She wants to work a little on the footage she has, she says, think about what’s still needed.

‘Give you a bit of breathing space.’

‘Time to work on my improvised life?’

‘Yeah,’ she laughs. ‘See you!’

Coffee cups and water glasses are scattered around the house, the day’s detritus. I ferry the dirty dishes to the kitchen sink. I wash them, dry them, put them away, thinking on the day and its busy-ness, its activity punctuated by stretches of quiet. The filmmaker looked wan, today. Pale, behind the lights. At one stage she disappeared to the bathroom. She took her voluminous bag. She was some time. She came back – refreshed – but she wouldn’t meet my eyes.

I wonder; I wonder: does she use? Wouldn’t that be the damnedest thing.

S
ydney never had a cold like Dunedin’s. Trix’s position teaching at the School of Art took us to the small, dark southern city, all grey stone and grey clouds when we arrived that winter. Trix loved the low light, the very southernness of it. Of course, it was coming home for her; she’d been born in Dunedin, then a thriving place of industry and gold and frozen sheep; nearly half a century since, her parents long-dead, Trix came back for its art and learning. But for me, there was nothing but damp chill, huddled in layers of woollens that first winter, in the big, damp house in Tomahawk Road, out past South Dunedin, that we moved into during our first week there.

The outgoing teacher who Trix would replace at the school had offered her the lease on the house he and his wife and their tribe of children had lived in for six years. We took it, eager to settle somewhere, anywhere. He told us the neighbours wouldn’t complain about rowdy parties; the house turned out to have a view across Dunedin’s cemetery, to the wild empty ocean. We didn’t mind; we could live freely there, the two of us in that solitary house,
out of sight of the conservative eyes and minds of the good grey Presbyterian people of Dunedin. We moved our belongings into the house on a Friday morning while the wind off the ocean blew across the cemetery and howled like the waking dead. Two men and a truck deposited our trunks, cases and tea-chests on the south-facing verandah, where they chilled in the bitter wind until we were ready to move them inside. We walked in through the front door, down a narrow hallway. Doors opened off to each side into old-fashioned rooms, generously sized but with mean little Victorian windows, heavily draped against the weather. The darkness of the rooms was immense, tangible, solid. I flicked on the electric light switch, then opened the curtains in the first room we entered, to let in light – but the dim overhead bulb and the pale winter light through the window failed to penetrate the dark. We stepped backwards from the room, and closed the door on it. The hallway zigzagged, and we opened another door into a big kitchen that spanned the back of the house. The pale sun eked into it through north-facing, pale-curtained windows that let in the wind, too.

The previous tenants had left a linoleum-covered table and three wooden chairs in the kitchen. I pulled one of the chairs out and collapsed onto it. Trix put her hand on my shoulder, and bent down to kiss the top of my head.

‘All right, doll?’ she asked.

I nodded, smiled at her, patted her hand with my hand, and wondered how I might survive this chill southern place.

Trix slotted into life at the art school easily enough. After the move from Sydney, she was re-energised, enthusiastic about everything – the students, the other teachers, the facilities, the generosity of the La Trobe Scheme that had brought her there, the whole idea of learning and teaching. There weren’t a lot of students, but at least a few of them
had something
, she said, some spark. She relished the freedom the position gave her to paint, to work, even after being warned, within her first week at the school, that she would have to rein in her more modern ideas in front of the classes she taught. Dunedin was, she was reminded, an upright and deeply conservative city. Even that failed to dim her delight.

‘Time for the quiet life after Sydney, eh, doll.’

She taught classical skills at the art school, perspective, figure drawing, landscape, portraiture; made contained sketches and demure water colours with the students. She saved her own art for home, working long into every evening in the room that soon came to smell like Trix, permeated with turpentine and cigarette smoke.

She’d leave for the school early each morning, wearing a voluminous separated skirt –
Trousers, Mrs Carmichael, are as entirely inappropriate for a female teacher as for our female students
, she had been warned on her first day teaching – clipped in at the ankles, safe from spokes and chain. Satchel over her shoulder, she cycled her big black bicycle into the Octagon then walked it up the steepness of Stuart Street to King Edward Technical College, where the art school was housed.

I’d still be in bed when she left, curled around a no-longer-hot water bottle. My first weeks were taken up with unpacking our things, making a home in the house on Tomahawk Road, but I soon completed this task. I found myself in the role of stay-at-home wife, a role to which I was unaccustomed.

But eventually, like Trix, I too settled into a routine. Mine revolved around the house, the landscape surrounding the house; a private routine, a private life, to balance Trix’s public one. When the rain held off, I’d walk to the shops in South Dunedin. The air was cold, even on sunny days in the winter. People walked with heads down, eyes following the movement of their feet, staring at their toes. I bought meat from the butcher, vegetables from the greengrocer, and cooked great warming stews for us to eat by the fire. I bought beer from the pub in South Dunedin; on occasion they had wine, and sometimes it was drinkable.

I walked often through the cemetery, the wind whistling in my ears, walked between gravestones and plinths and obelisks and angels, and on to the beach. It was too wild for swimming, cold and wave-beaten. I walked, instead, listened to the water pounding on the beach, the ocean pounding at the margin of the land. I hauled great leathery seaweed, heavy as seal hides, up and into the garden, to form sculptures that would soften in the moist air, then stiffen on days when the air was dry.

And so we settled into quiet domesticity in Dunedin, a mild suburban couple after our heady, busy bohemian time in Sydney. On the rare occasions when anyone enquired as to our domestic situation, we felt it best.
to leave questions vaguely answered or, better still, unanswered, until it somehow came to be understood that we were relatives, the widow Mrs Carmichael, her niece Miss Gaunt, an orphan. The narrow grey city seemed able to tolerate this much.

My musical talents were not called upon to grace the stages of the theatres of Dunedin – my former fame seemed barely to have spread to this corner of the world. There seemed nowhere in this city’s social life to match the modern music culture that Sydney had offered, although for Trix, the small art scene seemed to provide some stimulus, at least. Each of us felt a gap where our social circle had existed. We missed being able to be ourselves, together among friends. Trix had not been teaching for a month before she invited a small, carefully selected group of students and fellow teachers home to Tomahawk Road for the first of what became regular nights of eating, drinking, smoking and talking. It didn’t take long before I managed to introduce a heavy dose of music to the evenings. Someone had a brainwave, and the group gained a name: the Brush and Blow Group – Brush for Trix and the others, and Blow for Tom, one of the students, who played the trumpet while I played piano. The Brush and Blow-ers – or Beebees, as we soon called ourselves – had as its core me, Trix, and another teacher from the school, Armin de Groot; and the students Armin and Trix gathered closest around them, Tom, Alastair, Mardi, Celia. Others came and went, but that core remained. We all thought of ourselves as bohemian, as modern, as artists apart from the workaday world
around us, and free from its morals and strictures, its curtain-twitching and mouth-pursing.

We’d sit in the kitchen, the narrow room stretching across the back of the house. The wood-fired stove at one end cooked a stew, warmed the room, heated water. A piano stood against one wall. At night we’d pull heavy curtains across the windows. In winter I pinned old wool blankets up on top of the curtains for extra warmth. In the daytime, the blankets and curtains pulled aside, sunlight would steam the windows, cross the room, heat it to a pale yellow warmth. But at night, when the Beebees met there, we were wrapped in wool and warm and dark, fugged with beer and smoke, noisy enough to wake the dead across the road and invite them in for a beer.

I was wife, and I was lover. Trix and I huddled together in the draughty house, heavy blankets shielding the windows of our bedroom, eiderdowns piled upon us so that we could hardly move under their weight. But we moved – we moved! – our bodies slick and curving, slipping upon and into one another, until we erupted from the eiderdowns, pushed them to the floor, melting hot, gasping, musky with our cunning.

We survived in the curtain-twitching south only by being careful, so careful. As aunt and niece, we were almost respectable; as respectable, at least, as a woman artist and her household could ever be. And every night, as we held each other, curved into one another, we cared not what the world thought of us. We were entire, within ourselves. Perfect.

Trix’s painting changed, in the low light of Dunedin. In Sydney, she had focussed outwards, on landscapes, on views through a window; or on still life studies: branches of lemons plucked from a tree, or oranges tumbled from a string bag arranged on a table, rendered strange by her kaleidoscope eye and its breaking of light and shape. Only rarely had she painted portraits – of Delphine Britten, of me. In Dunedin, although she said she loved the way the light fell on the land, she felt that she couldn’t paint it, and she shifted her art from landscape to portrait. But the light and the landscape would sneak into the portraits, their backgrounds the St Clair waterfront, the harbour, the hills of the Otago Peninsula. She painted me, had me pose in the kitchen by the piano; I wore a blue shirt, but in the painting Trix made it green, a rich, deep, lustrous green, like satin. Instead of the kitchen and the blankets and curtains, she painted gravestones behind me, the cemetery across the road; a horizon line of gravestones in front of the seascape in the far distance.

Trix painted me a handful of times in those years at Tomahawk Road, but her self-portraits from that time are almost beyond number. In the end, they were piled against the walls in the room she used as her studio; as she finished one, she would stack it and move on, turn almost directly to the next, and the next. I can see her, the mirror she used propped by her side, her eyes staring into it, flickering back to the canvas – that constant motion, eyes moving from mirror to canvas, but her body retaining its position. Sometimes she painted the clothes she wore
into the portraits; at other times, she invented costumes for herself, changed her hair, painted herself earrings she did not own, a flower behind her ear or in her hair. The landscapes that formed the background to these paintings became more fantastic as time passed. Her colour palette changed with each painting, expanded beyond what she saw in front of her in the house in Tomahawk Road, the cemetery and beach at our doorstep, or the painting studios at the school in Stuart Street; even the colourscapes we saw when Armin or Mardi drove us out to the plains to the south or to the hills of Otago couldn’t provide her with all the colours she put into her paintings in those years. Trix came to live and paint from behind her eyes, from inside her mind.