Faustine (3 page)

I had left home, as I’d come to call Maureen’s house over the years, and gone in search of the home I’d had before this one, on a day when squalls of rain kept Bill Fisher busy with his sheep up-country, and I’d had to take a bus alone to the airport. Maureen waved me goodbye. She was holding little Zoë, a strange child who used to bawl when her mother and stepfather came to pick her up from the nursery, and Chi-ren was standing just behind, head popping round
Maureen’s
bulk from time to time to see if I was really going. Chi-ren was miserably hurt, I knew, at my walking off like that, and I had the honesty, even if this sounds boastful, to see the feeling I still had about my grandmother written all over his intelligent, sad little face. But people do have to go away sometimes, I’d told him again and again. And I’ll be back very soon, I promise. The last part of the sentence had a hollow ring that made me think of Anna, my mother – then I did begin to hate myself for leaving him with no one but Maureen to understand his moods and smiles and tempers. Too bad, Ella, I said to myself as the bus pulled away into the foggy rain that seemed to have come down on us for good, all thoughts of sun and summer buried for the foreseeable future. Too bad, you just have to go. And I felt, with an unpleasant lurch of self-consciousness, as if I were starring in some biopic of my own making – as if someone other than I boarded the bus with the requisite
hardness of heart to leave a little boy with no mother and father, only an overworked supervisor to care for him when I didn’t, while knowing I might never come back at all.

 *

The plane journey was featureless, except for the fact that I’d never gone further than Auckland before, and the size of the world, preshrunk as it has been by satellite and cable, was quite amazing to me. For all the drowsing semi-comfort, and the in-flight movie, and the junk music to be selected while nibbling at junk flight food, I knew I’d had no idea of quite how far I was going – to find this chimera, this grandmother of mine who hadn’t even sent one of her increasingly unsuitable presents for twelve years. And just as the continents that unrolled beneath me seemed too
enormous
ever to cross back again, just as the world expanded and lay before me in all its terrifying complexity, so did the real length of span of twelve years begin to present itself. Things were always so much the same at home: Bill coming in from the sheep to the ranch-house, going behind the fifties American-style bar, mixing himself an old-fashioned with Jack Daniels, swigging it back before bothering to wash off the blood on his arms, right up to the elbow; Christmas in the stone house in Melbourne, with the decorations taken out by Maureen and carefully counted before being attached to tinsel thread and hung on the tree with its fresh,
disinfectant
smell. The years simply passed. How could I imagine that a woman who had in all probability put me completely out of her mind would be waiting for me in this oddly named place – a name that had slipped out only because of Maureen’s hatred for the people who had come with the sixties: drop-outs, vagrants, prophets of a new age? Surely Muriel had moved on somewhere, had left the country,
perhaps
, for a more rewarding life in the States, had – yet I
couldn’t bring myself to contemplate it – died. The fact that I might not even have been informed, if this were the case, stiffened me yet again at the thought of the one meeting that would in all probability take place: the meeting with Anna, my mother. I stared from the lozenge of window at a black sky over India and saw my own face look back at me with no love for Anna printed there at all. And I knew, for all the ‘grown-up’ efforts I was making to picture a new life for my grandmother, I saw her in a kitchen – a warm, messy kitchen where I was allowed to make toffee whenever I wanted, and there was her knee to sit on while drinking cocoa from the mug with my name on it.

*

The train from Waterloo was crammed with people, and all the windows were so fogged with grime that it was
impossible
to see the countryside – the countryside for which I’d prepared myself for so long (with some of Maureen’s
resentment
against a class-ridden country, and a pinch of longing too, for the spreading chestnut tree and all that Old England stuff that’s oddly hard to resist).

Tourists with backpacks – a midsummer visit to the West Country, to the old stones of Avebury and Stonehenge, was, to judge by guidebooks sticking out from the rolls of sleeping-bags, a must – jostled and tripped me as I tried to make my way to the (non-existent, as it turned out)
restaurant
car; and I ended up in the corridor of a first-class compartment, as dirty and run-down as the rest, staring in at the passengers.

The first thing that caught my eye was the unexpected shabbiness of the people who travel first class in Britain. The women wore corduroy trousers that looked as if they had last been worn to muck out a stable; the men, pushed like dark-blue cannon fodder into pinstripe with dark tie and
white handkerchief, exuded a rumpledness and lack of care for their appearance that quite went against the travel
posters
, everywhere to be seen in Australia, depicting a smoothly suited British ticket-holder and his cashmere-clad,
complacent
wife. Here was a total disregard for appearances; and a strong sense of indifference between the sexes that so often goes with it.

Except, that is, for one man – a man, I think, Maureen would term a ‘gentleman’ (this with a light laugh, both
contemptuous
and repressed), a member of a species, at any rate, that we don’t have back home, however many
mega-millions
the Packers and the Murdochs may make or
however
far-flung their empires. This gentleman was wearing a suit of the deepest black – wool, I suppose – and everything that went with it was perfection too, from the ‘understated’ (I knew that had been a key word for the British in the old days) cut of the shirt, to the shoes, handmade obviously, which, crossed one above the other, seemed to nod with the movement of the train, as if applauding the elegance of their wearer.

My stare was suddenly returned – just as we were drawing into Salisbury, as it happened – and I was glad to be getting off, embarrassed by now at having peered so hard.

Pushing past the students and tourists, I found myself on the platform of Salisbury station with a group of hippies, or this at least was what I imagined they must be. Not at all what Maureen portrayed in her impassioned attacks; quite dashing-looking in a way, with torn velveteen trousers and jackets and long frizzy hair that looked as if the wind had been blowing through it since the days of Bob Dylan. Not like the hippies who used to camp near Maureen’s sister’s either, the time we were taken to the sea and then had to be taken home again because Maureen said they smelt and
she couldn’t stand them near her. This group – as far as I could see, they all burst out of a first-class WC at the same time, maybe having avoided the ticket collector that way – carried guitars and smelled of something strong and fusty, like the musk roses our neighbour in Melbourne tried to grow one year, and then dug out again after they bloomed. The group, about four young men and a couple of girls, had a pair of dogs that looked like large greyhounds on a string (hidden too, I suppose, on the journey in the WCs).

The hippies, once we had all passed in single line through the ticket barrier and out of the station, set off at a brisk trot down the road away from the town, the dogs bounding ahead of them. I wondered if they were going to walk or hitch a lift to Stonehenge, about six miles to the east; and whether they planned to stay up all night, to greet the summer solstice. And a part of me mourned the fact I had never had that kind of a youth, with the music and the acid and the dawn raids, that I’d never had a youth really, and if given the chance to have it all over again, would hardly know what there was to go back to that was so different from now.

 *

A solitary taxi sat at the kerb outside the station. The train had pulled away and I was conscious of a silence; not the kind of silence you find sometimes in towns when there’s a lull – on a hot day, perhaps – or at a time when most people have hived themselves off somewhere to watch a football match, but a silence that seemed to come off the stray patches of willowherb and foxglove that grew on the unused asphalt of the station forecourt. A silence all the more remarkable because at the foot of the gradual slope that led from the station to the main road, a roar of traffic could be guessed at but not heard. Tall lorries overtook each other and
screeched to a halt by the roundabout. A tractor, noiseless as the rest, came into view, pulling a wagon of hay. A man at the wheel of an ice-cream van drove past and then stopped in a bay just below where I stood. The klaxon must have blared out, because a queue of five-year-olds instantly formed.

I had my hand out to open the taxi door when another hand came from behind me and opened the door instead. I had to look round. I saw the gentleman of the first-class compartment, and I thanked him awkwardly. He obviously had no desire to reply and strode off down the road – though whether he turned away from the town, like the hippies, or made for the centre, I have no idea at all.

I had the feeling, none the less, that he heard my
stammered
instructions to the driver to take me to Woodford Manor at Woodford-cum-Slape ‘and wait a little’. It was so quiet you could have heard a pin drop on the asphalt, with the ragged flowers and the litter bin filled to overflowing with crushed Smarties packets and yesterday’s newspapers. Then, as we went slowly out into the main road, the full sound of packing-up time in a busy West Country market town came in through the open car windows at me.

I open the door and walk in.

Behind me lies the kitchen, with its institution paint and square, scrubbed table where a letter lies – for the couple, presumably – addressed to Mr and Mrs John Neidpath. Then there are two steps up out of the kitchen again, and a
twisting
corridor, very dark and smelling of old puddings, of bad food cooked too long and left uneaten by its captive consumer. And then the door, green-felt-lined from this side, into the other portion of the house.

Of course … I begin to see … the shrine that lies before me is guarded by this man and wife; they’re caretakers of the place, and with instructions to let any passing visitor come in and look around. This house is open to the public, in the way that houses of special interest were in England in the eighteenth century; to knock was to be admitted and given hospitality.

 *

Mr Neidpath – he’s an ugly man, toad-faced, with a cast in his eye that must have given me the impression, at first sight, that he was looking at me sinisterly, that he’d seen me somewhere before and had the utmost suspicions of me – steps behind me into the long, wide room. The door swings shut with a muffled thud, and then is pushed once more to admit Mrs Neidpath, whose shiny, dyed curls poke round the door first, to be followed by her unsmiling face. Then
the door sighs back into the wall again, and I turn to try and thank them, for I see, I have seen at first glance, that the Neidpaths have a deep pride in Woodford Manor and its contents. And I want to tell them that I’m not a casual tripper, a sixties enthusiast who will press a note into their hands when I leave, eyes starry with excitement from having been transported into the past. I came here for a specific reason, I want to say. I was searching for my grandmother, Muriel Twyman, and there is no way whatsoever that she could be here.

There’s something about the place, though, that makes speech unacceptable. It’s as if – and I remember that strange stillness in the forecourt of Salisbury station – the house lies enchanted, like a house in a fairy-tale, with its occupants waiting to be woken by a visitor, long-hoped-for or dreaded; and I know, of course, that the visitor can’t be myself. So I walk as softly as I can on a grey pile carpet that reminds me suddenly of a visit to a grand hotel in Sydney with Maureen, the time we all went on an outing and looked at the
completed
Opera House. And I pause before the monuments – all to the most famous woman of her time – the pictures and silkscreen prints and lithographs and bronzes, the screens of photomontage. I walk past a bank of hydrangeas, the false pink of their petals as dead as everything else in this great, deep room with mullioned windows that look out at the back on terraces and lawns sloping down to the river. I stand by a wall of mirrors with signed studio portraits tucked in at the edges, as a teenage girl might stick snaps in her looking-glass at home; as a star’s dressing-room might look, preserved for ever after a stunningly successful first night. And everywhere the signature is the same: looped and bold, with an underlying flourish that looks as if it has been taken
from a parchment manuscript of an ancient deed. The
signature
of Lisa Crane.

 *

‘Don’t ask me,’ Maureen Fisher used to say, when I was at the stage of collecting autographs and pinning up posters in my room of the dead stars that were just beginning to
exercise
their morbid power over a world no longer able to make sense of past or present. ‘Don’t ask me what people see in Lisa Crane or any of the rest of them. And take those drawing-pins out of my fresh paint!’

Yet it wasn’t really hard to see what Lisa Crane had had; and while some would remain faithful to the memory of Marilyn Monroe, or even pin up Jean Harlow and Mae West in their adolescent dens, Lisa Crane had held me – and many others – partly for the reason that she had never been a star. A face as the ultimate symbol, a symbol of the
meaninglessness
and uniqueness of beauty, and of the potential for the endless duplication of that image, until the beauty was reduced to meaning nothing at all.

Something like that, anyway. The age of the throwaway, of the excitement of anonymity and the destruction of the bourgeois pomposity of signed art – those were the notions going around, though I was too young to know them, of course, and by the time I came to read the endless rehashes of the lives of the stars and to see the Warhol multiples in the colour supplements, the pop-art images of Marilyn and Liz and Lisa had become bourgeois collectors’ items in
themselves
. But by then the whole glow of that era had faded anyway, and bad imitations started to appear everywhere. The age of iconoclasm and idol-worship had gone.

The faces of Lisa Crane are blurred by the printmakers’ hand, lipstick smudged over the endlessly repeating smile,
eyes the cheap blue of pictures that come plopping out of a polaroid or an airport machine.

 *

I stand, observing the reverent hush, by the table,
glass-topped,
where more of the incunabula are laid out; and Mr and Mrs Neidpath, murmuring they’ll be back in a minute, retreat into the servants’ quarters of the house. I wonder – while part of me frets over the taxi waiting by the thick screen of laurel bushes at the top of the drive, and another part of me feels a dead tiredness, a sadness that my quest for Muriel has ended in a dead end – I wonder also what it would have been like to have lived then and to have been Lisa Crane.

But it’s impossible to imagine. The letters from John Lennon; the coat, in violent colours, given to Lisa by Jimi Hendrix; the photos signed by Dylan. How did she feel, this star who had no need to be a star, whose wealth and power and beauty made her few appearances on screen talked about and commented on with a ferocity denied even the most famous? Did she regret the passing of time? Where is she living now?

And I realize, as I stand enfolded in that artificially
recreated
glow, in that exotic shrine in a plain old house in the English countryside, that I don’t know whether the famous Lisa Crane is alive still or not – and why should I care to know?

The stifling atmosphere of the narcissism of another age makes me want only to fight my way out of this mausoleum into fresh air.

I know nothing of this place. I have never been here before.