David Malouf - The Complete Stories

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.”

4

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.