Mad Meg Read online

  Acknowledgements

  Very special thanks to Helen Chamberlin, who edited the first edition of Mad Meg.

  I made extensive use of the La Trobe University Library for texts on the rise of Mussolini and on the lives of the Italian émigrés in Paris, particularly Filippo Turati and Anna Kulischov. Without this library, which furnished the Italian Department at La Trobe, now sadly defunct, I would have remained ignorant of how Mussolini ‘disappeared’ the Risorgimento from Italy.

  I travelled to France with the ingenious and resourceful Merlin Crossley at the time of the fiftieth anniversary of the round-up of the Paris Jews and the slaying of the leaders of the Italian resistance in Normandy.

  I remain indebted to the work of Gianfranco Cresciani, whose book Fascism, Anti-Fascism and Italians in Australia was a major source. I also read of the life of Omero Schiassi in books borrowed from the Baillieu Library at the University of Melbourne.

  I would like to thank the following authors and publishers for permission to reprint material in this book: Ezra Pound Perserae © 1926 New Directions Publishing Co; W.H. Auden The Musee des Beaux Arts © Faber and Faber; ‘Bee-bop-a-lula’ © Davis and Vincent, reprinted with permission of Warner/Chapple Music (licence no L0432); ‘Universal Soldier’ © Buffy Sainte Marie, reprinted with permission of Southern Music Publishing Company Australasia, Pty Ltd; ‘Raining in my Heart’ © Boudleaux and Felice Bryant, Acuff Rose Music Inc.

  This book was supported by the Literature Board of the Australia Council.

  I dedicate this edition to all my friends and family who have shown me their good faith over the years.

  Family Trees

  Notes on Historical Characters

  Filippo Turati Leader of the moderate Italian socialists, co-led by Claudio Treves and Emanuele Modigliani (older brother of the painter) during Mussolini’s rise to power.

  ‘The Apparition’ Anna Kulischov, Turati’s lover and political mentor.

  Carlo and Nello Rosselli Carlo escaped from jail in Italy to become leader of the group Giustizia e libertà and eventual leader of the Italian antifascists in Paris.

  Nello, Carlo’s younger brother, was a young liberal historian who tried to set up intelligent opposition to the fascist regime in Italy. He was assassinated with Carlo while visiting him in France.

  Had they lived, the Rossellis would certainly have played a major role in the postwar reconstruction of Italy.

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Family Trees

  Notes on Historical Characters

  PART ONE: Where the Nice Girls Live

  1 Christmas at ‘Clare’, 1956

  2 The Connotations of Sausages

  3 Perpetual Succour

  4 More about Mottoes

  5 Family Trees

  6 The Nice Girls

  7 Correspondence

  8 If

  9 Respect: the Odyssey of the Walnut Table

  10 Our Father’s Daughters

  PART TWO: Mad Meg

  11 The Art of Bamboozlement

  12 Encroachment

  13 The Politics of Kite-Flying and the Elusiveness of Cash

  14 Dadda’s Beginnings

  15 Reason, Religion and Folly

  16 Mad Meg’s Basket

  17 History and Moving into It

  PART THREE: Good Intentions

  18 Christmas and an Explanation

  19 Uncle Nicola

  20 Displacement and Despoliation

  21 David

  22 A Table in the Presence of Enemies

  23 The Crushing

  PART FOUR: The Promised Land

  24 Translating

  25 Modernity and Obsolescence

  26 Allegra

  27 Relations

  28 At Harry’s Beach House

  29 Paris

  30 Faking It

  31 Justice and Liberty

  32 Homage to Bruegel

  About the author

  PART ONE

  WHERE THE

  NICE

  GIRLS LIVE

  ONE

  Christmas at ‘Clare’, 1956

  ‘AHEM, AHEM! WOULD you stop behaving like a hooligan?’ Allegra bats her eyes and folds her arms across her chest.

  ‘Hooligan, Madam? I don’t know anyone called Hooligan. My name’s Coretti.’

  ‘Coretti? Who’d have a name like that? I don’t believe you. You’re a liar, little girl.’

  ‘I’m not a liar. I’m thirty.’

  ‘You are not thirty. You’re ten.’

  ‘I didn’t say I was thirty. I said I was thirsty.’

  ‘In that case, I’m thirsty, too. I’m going to have a gin,’ and then she pours herself a drink of water from the round-bottomed jug in its cage on the wall. ‘You can’t have any. You’re too young.’

  There’s a patterned metal contraption on the floor to rest your feet on. Allegra says it’s a heater in the wintertime, but we’ve never been on the train in winter. Every year we come to ‘Clare’ in summer.

  Allegra is moving along in front of me, her back swaying to her pony’s gait. Over the soft, bruised paddocks, the sky trails a knife blade, raising red dust in the pasture.

  Behind us the house lies low in its garden. We have left the trellis. From underneath it, in December, you can just see sky between the purple flowers and green leaves. The faint, persistent scent of wisteria threads the air. By January, the flowers that haven’t fallen are transparent brown and the leaves form a withered grip around them.

  Fly buzz. I am sitting badly on my pony and don’t know how to handle it. Listening out from under the broad brim of my hat, I can hear the noxious bleating of sheep, and the carolling of magpies, clear and hard. I’m hot, my legs are short, my pony’s fat, my boots are small.

  Allegra has Granpa’s old mare on the leading rein. Last year I was thrown by her. ‘Pull on the bit when she does that, girlie!’ Granpa yelled. ‘Hurt her mouth!’ As I was falling, Aunt Nina ran from the house, crying, ‘Oh, that child!’ So I was the one who was hurt, and not by the fall.

  Allegra looks back, squinting. She can see I’m crying. She stops. She doesn’t say a word. I slither down my pony’s side and give the reins to her. I pick a big tree and squat down under it. The trees at Clare have coiled up fifty feet of drought and bumper season, sealing off the years. When you run your hands up the trunks, you can feel the years pulling you into them; rest an ear and you can hear them. The ring of our lives is being gathered in.

  Before us were Granpa’s parents, his wife Euphrosyne and his three sons. They’re all dead now. How does it happen, what does it feel like, do you really wake up on the other side? I think I can see Euphrosyne sometimes, in her button boots and skirts. Why should she die? It doesn’t make sense. She could stay here, we wouldn’t mind that her clothes were out of date.

  As I do up my jodhpurs, there’s a tractor ticking round the paddocks in a cloud of dust. They are throwing out hay bales for the sheep. It’s hot, though it’s only eleven in the morning. In other years the pasture has been gold, and when you moved through it, looking down, there were ripples of mauve and turquoise, interrupted sometimes by a green stalk thrusting yellow buds against the breeze.

  I mount my pony. Allegra takes up the slack of the old mare’s lead and we move off slowly down the shadeless tracks towards ‘Mountshannon’. Granpa lives there. In his father’s day, Mountshannon was The House. Now there is Clare. It was built when Granpa married Euphrosyne, an upright lady with soft, dark eyes. They say it took him eight days to bring her here from Melbourne. His carriage had red-painted wheels and brass lanterns for travelling by night. It was beautifully sprung, our mother says. She is proud of that carriage and of the mother who was fit to ride in it.

  Euphrosyne was descend
ed from a lord. She left behind her silver-backed hairbrushes, her monogram on their handles, chiffoniers with velvet lining, damask tablecloths, a giant walnut table, rows of stately, matching chairs. Her father was a surgeon from Edinburgh who wrote an advice to his eleven daughters. Though God has sent them among us for a reason, he wrote, never marry a madman. It’s our mother’s favourite saying.

  Euphrosyne was a socialite. She threw balls in the hallway at Clare. Aunt Nina calls this place ‘the vestibule’. Unlike other halls in grand houses in the district, this one runs transverse to the front verandah, so that, on fine nights, the verandah could also be used for dancing by opening all the French doors.

  The light in the vestibule is yellowish and happy. The curtains and carpet runners are burgundy, edged with gold. Sometimes I see the ghosts of people dancing: our uncles, Hedley, Haydn and Shaver Motte, and their stately cousin, Vere de la Motte, whose eyebrows were looped and black to match her signature.

  They believed in handwriting, these people: the letters from our uncles came in copperplate from the front in the Second World War. Uncle Hedley went to Jerusalem and Bethlehem, where he saw the manger. He believed in God. Uncle Haydn sent photos of camel races in Damascus and Uncle Shaver wrote home on Raffles Hotel paper from Singapore. Dearest sisters, they wrote, and Dear old Dad.

  Euphrosyne had died before the war. A clothesline killed her. The crossbeam crowned her in a windstorm. Handwriting and noses she believed in. She pulled the children’s noses at the dinner table so they wouldn’t be snub. Euphrosyne Isabella Motte. A lady. I am named for her, but Isobel Euphrosyne, for how could I be as grand as the wife of Granpa?

  But I am grand. Oh, I am very grand. I am extremely grand, and everything I see I own, those paddocks, those trees, those sheep, that tractor. And all the sky and all the earth are mine. I made them. I am God and none of the others know. Yes, I am God and they will have to watch themselves. ‘Fear the name of the Lord,’ I shall say when my day has come, ‘the name of the Lord is Isobel Euphrosyne.’

  We have come eastward through the paddocks for three miles. The land has begun to buckle and plunge. Gun-metal green marks the valley’s edge and, rearing up out of it at the far side, a low, balding mountain is the boundary between Clare and Coolang. The trees stop abruptly at Coolang’s fences. Down in the valley is Granpa’s house, Mountshannon.

  It gives me vertigo to ride down there. It’s a steep tangle of native trees and the smell of dust and eucalyptus billows out of it. You could get lost. Allegra has lots of times – or so it seems on the thirsty waits crouched at the edge of the road when she goes in after wombats and possums. Once, a herd of wallabies nearly trampled me as I sat doodling in the dust, holding the pony reins, waiting, imagining her bitten by snakes as the ponies’ velvet noses butted me and I ran my fingers over their quivering lips.

  Mountshannon is peaceful. You can’t hear woeful bleating way down here. Granpa doesn’t like sheep; he used to run cattle. He likes the look of a ‘decent beast’ on pasture. Just as well he can’t see any more … I close my eyes to feel what he must feel … the sway of the pony, the warming and cooling of the blood in my eyelids as I shift along under the shadows. Kookaburras are cackling, now soft, now loud. Insects buzz by my ears. I have to lie on my pony’s neck to avoid the branches. I can feel his hot coat and coarse mane moving under my cheek. I can smell him. The smell of horse is kind of sweet, kind of sharp.

  I sit up. And as my eyes come open, a flock of corellas busts out, white, from the treetops and startles my pony under me. I rein him back. Ahead of me, Allegra lets her pony have his head. ‘Stop!’ I yell out, ‘It’s dangerous!’ But she doesn’t listen, and perhaps she can’t hear. Off she goes like The Abracadabra Lady – that’s my name for her in this mood, The Abracadabra Lady – kicking up pillows of dust and making my pony sneeze. Her hair comes out from under her cap, a couple of long, rough clubs thrashing her back. Oh well, at least Allegra is not God.

  I am. And if I were a jealous God, as it says in the Bible, I would give her sunstroke.

  I remember sunstroke. From the Christmas before last I remember. You think your eyes are burnt out and you have to have ice cold bottles put behind your knees. It’s a horrible sensation, as if your life were rushing for your hands and feet in a frantic effort to escape you.

  I gave myself sunstroke as a trial punishment for Allegra if she should get out of hand. It is an excellent punishment and I devised it. She and Granpa have their secrets, but I have my weapons and one day I shall use them and show mercy. Then they will know what mercy is.

  I suppose Granpa will die in Mountshannon one day. Where he was born. Eighty-seven years seems a very long time to have lived, but he is still alive as I slip my pony’s reins through the disintegrating pickets of his front fence.

  It’s a timber house with a bull-nosed verandah running down the sides and across the front. The front door’s open and I can see right down the hallway to the backyard, where the dogs are chained. They’ve set up a racket and are leaping forward as far as it’s possible without choking; their taut legs hang quivering under their twisting, whining, prick-eared heads. Granpa is sitting on his chair on the verandah, belting divots out of the floor planks with his stick in an effort to shut them up.

  ‘Is that you, girlie?’ he calls. ‘Come and give us a kiss.’

  When you get off a horse, it’s as if you have to learn to walk again. I’m a bit too big for last year’s boots, and my feet are numb. I trudge over the hardened, scratched-up ground of the yard, where Allegra has cornered a white leghorn up the lemon tree and is poised, ready to grab it. I know what that means: Granpa’s going to treat us to a slaughter. The yard stinks and the leghorns are racketing violently through the scanty bushes and blackberry tangle. The house hasn’t been painted for years and the iron roof is rusty.

  I grab Granpa’s stick to stop it belting divots out of me as well as the planks and put my lips on the brown, leathery cheek, hold my breath, and kiss it. It’s not that Granpa’s dirty; in fact, he’s very clean, he just stinks of tobacco. He cuddles me up so tightly, I nearly drop the thermos.

  ‘Brought you some milk tea, Granpa. With a spot of whusky in it.’

  ‘Whusky?’

  ‘Whusky. Mum sent some up for Christmas. Real stuff. It’s called Old Parr.’

  ‘Scotch whusky?’

  ‘Yep. She said it’d make the hairs on your chest curl.’

  ‘Ain’t got no hairs on my chest, daughty.’

  ‘I knows that, Granpa. You’re bald as a badger.’

  ‘Badgers ain’t bald.’

  ‘C’n we have some?’

  A great cacophony breaks from the lemon tree where Allegra has grabbed the chook by its scaly legs. She comes down, bottom-first, and bears it triumphantly back to the verandah. It’s hanging upside down and flapping violently, its comb in the dust and its pink, reflective eye twisting in its socket so hard it could wrench out.

  ‘Pour us a whusky tea, daughty,’ Granpa says to me, ‘while us bigguns get this chook here ready for Neeny.’

  The axe is resting against a chopping block in the corner of the yard. Granpa keeps his axe sharp. He can sit for hours sometimes, running a whetstone over it. He’s proud of his axe. I pull the tough old flywire door open on its rusty hinges as Allegra and Granpa struggle towards the chopping block, Granpa with his hand on Allegra’s shoulder, Allegra stamping and dancing round the chook. The wire door slams behind me and I clop down the hallway to the kitchen at the back of the house. Where I’ll stay till the killing’s over, till they’ve had their fun and tried to set the headless thing running.

  I take down three chipped, pale blue china cups and set them on the wooden running board of Granpa’s sink. Hot light has baked dust onto the panes of the back window. There are dead flies in a layer on the sill and more flies stuck to the flypaper hanging from the cobwebbed, conical light shade where, obviously enough, Granpa has brushed his head, as there are fibres from his cloth hat on i
t and his hat is lying in the middle of the floor. I pick it up and sit, twirling it on my finger, on a wooden chair by the kitchen table. The oilcloth cover is sticky and smells rancid as I peel it back to rest my elbows on the table edge. I close my eyes.

  Now God,

  Please don’t let Granpa chop his hand off or bring the axe down

  on Allegra’s head on Christmas Day. He is old, but let him die with both hands on of natural causes, and let my sister live. And please, God, don’t let Uncle Garth get so drunk that he insists on doing the carving like last year, when he cut his thumb to the bone and pretended all Christmas Day that he hadn’t and got blood poisoning on Boxing Day and we had to get his brother Tony over from Coolang to drive him to hospital because he wouldn’t admit he was sick and had to be persuaded and Tony was so angry he drove over Aunt Nina’s red standards and flattened them.

  Amen.

  There is a terrible squawking in the yard. The axe comes down and they start laughing.

  I pour the whusky tea.

  Poor Aunt Nina.

  She pulls the disgusting heap of trampled chook from the sack and lets it drop on the kitchen bench. ‘Blast him,’ she mutters. Allegra let Granpa gallop across the home paddock. He forgot the gunny sack with the chook in it and it fell.

  I put my hand on her wrist, ‘It’s all right, Neeny. I’ll pluck it for you.’ I hate plucking chooks, the feathers give me asthma. I’ve only ever plucked one and had bad dreams after. ‘Bless you, darling,’ she says, and kisses me. Allegra strides through the kitchen, slamming the back door. ‘It hopped,’ she says as she passes.

  Uncle Garth is sitting under the clothesline with a tumblerful of Christmas cake rum, bellowing verses from the Rubaiyat. He always bellows, his voice is astonishing, his mouth a keen slice in his thick skin, the teeth strong, broad and discoloured, the tongue bright pink behind them. He has to suck in air as though through meshes. His mouth is always open, his head forced up; in his hands he holds a smudged glass, full or empty.