Lilian's Story

K
ATE
G
RENVILLE
was born in Sydney and holds degrees from the Universities of Sydney and of Colorado.
Lilian's
Story
won the
Australian/
Vogel Literary Award in 1984 and has recently been filmed. Grenville has also written
Dark Places
, a companion novel to
Lilian's Story
,
Bearded Ladies
,
Dreamhouse
,
Joan Makes History,
and two best selling books about writing.

Lilian's Story

Kate Grenville

First published in 1985
This edition published in 2008

Copyright © Kate Grenville 2008

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The
Australian Copyright Act 1968
(the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

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Australia

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National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

Grenville, Kate, 1950-

Lilian's story

Rev. ed.

ISBN 9781741754902 (pbk.)

I. Title

A823.3

Set in 12/15 pt Requiem by Midland Typesetters, Australia
Printed in Australia by McPherson's Printing Group

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Author's Preface

P
ART
O
NE
A Girl

P
ART
T
WO
A Young Lady

P
ART
T
HREE
A Woman

Author's Preface

Lilian's Story
is very loosely based on a famous Sydney eccentric, Bea Miles. She was an old woman when I was a university student and I often saw her (from the safe distance of a bus) sprawled massively on the church steps at Railway Square in army greatcoat, tennis visor, and split sandshoes.

Like everyone else who grew up in Sydney at that time, I knew a few things about her: that she was from a respectable middle-class family and had gone to one of Sydney's top schools; that she had briefly gone to university and dropped out under mysterious circumstances; that she had been institutionalised as insane; and that on her release from the asylum had made money by offering recitations from Shakespeare (sixpence for a sonnet, a shilling for a scene from a play). There were enough contradictions in these stories about her that I found intriguing.

I wasn't interested in writing a biography of Bea Miles, but these few things I knew about her seemed to provide a framework through which I could explore other issues, such as:

What was it like to be a clever woman born at a time when women were not even supposed to go to high school, much less university? What does it mean to refuse the life-story that has been prepared for you, and choose another of your own making? Once you step outside society's norms and aims, what alternative structure can give your life a sense of purpose? What might you put in place of motherhood, comfort, the trappings of a pleasant middle-class life?

With earlier books I'd made a plan in advance, and found that although a plan is reassuring it can also stifle your imagination. With this book I decided to write in a much more unstructured way and see what happened. It began in a sort of soup—lots of completely disconnected things going on in my mind. I used the few facts I knew about Bea Miles like navigation points and I'd invent a scenario that would make the journey between them convincing. I didn't start at the beginning. Each day I'd write another “fragment” based on whatever trigger I had found that day—a photo of Sydney at her time, my personal memories of the places she'd frequented, stories people told me about her. I also found I could use some details from my own life and give them to her. In doing so I also discovered the great freedom in writing of things I knew about without having to write about myself.

While I was writing the book I went to the National Gallery and I saw paintings there that just . . . exhilarated me. Blue Poles was one, and that Tiepolo ceiling where you're looking up the bums of all the cherubs, and some of Nolan's Ned Kelly pictures. They were so bold! I kept repeating the word, I remember, in a sort of astonishment. I remember coming back and throwing myself into the book with renewed energy—it wasn't that there was anything I could use directly from the pictures, it wasn't even really the pictures themselves, but that sense of risk-taking.

At the same time as writing
Lilian's Story
, I was reading the letters of Jane Austen and Flaubert. It was my way of getting the voice. Mainly it was their tone, the tone I wanted to be able to write in, a kind of expansive, confident, slightly self-mocking voice. I knew I wanted to write in that voice. But there was an element of magic about writing the book. There were times when I felt in direct relation to that voice, and that the book was—as they say— “writing itself ” through me. Lilian's voice felt very natural to me, although it's not a voice I ever use in my own life. In taking on that persona—that voice, actually—I discovered an astonishing freedom. Perhaps that's the compulsion of writing: the freedom to be, not somebody else, but another of yourselves.

The novel wasn't quite finished when I submitted it to
The Australian
/Vogel Literary award, but the prize has an age limit which I was just about to exceed, so while the judges were deliberating I finished it. When I won, I could hardly believe it. I'd written several other unpublished novels, and published a collection of short stories—
Bearded
Ladies
—but this was the first time I'd written a book “just for me”—without any thought of pleasing a readership.

That was in 1984 and the book was published in 1985.
Lilian's Story
was the first novel I wrote straight from the heart. Re-reading it now, I can still remember the blaze of elation in which I got the first draft down. It's the only book of mine that I occasionally pick up and dip into—just to remember that feeling.

Kate Grenville
Sydney, 2008

1

A Girl

It was a wild night in the year of Federation that the birth took place. Horses kicked down their stables. Pigs flew, figs grew thorns. The infant mewled and stared and the doctor assured the mother that a caul was a lucky sign. A
girl?
the father exclaimed, outside in the waiting room, tiled as if for horrible emergencies. This was a contingency he was not prepared for, but he rallied within a day and announced:
Lilian. She will be called Lilian Una.

Later, the mother lay on her white bed at home, her palms turned up, staring at the moulding of the ceiling with the expression of surprise she wore for the next twenty years.
You didn't tell me it would hurt
, she whispered to her friends as they patted the crocheted bedjacket, and she was already beginning to suffer her long overlapping series of indispositions. The friends picked up the baby from its crib beside the bed and placed it in the mother's arms.
A
lovely picture
, they agreed, and left.

Sunlight slanted between the curtains so that a band lay across the bed like something alive. The carpet flamed where the sun fell over it, and on the ceiling the reflection of the waves of the bay outside flickered on and on like a conversation. Eucalypt leaves rubbed against each other and a kookaburra pealed in hysteria somewhere. The baby slipped further down off the breast, but the mother lay smiling and staring at the ceiling, listening to the bird, until the baby fell to the floor. When Alma came in, reddened from dusting the banister, she saw Lilian's tiny fingernails scraping weakly over the patterns of the carpet, and her wet mouth opening and closing on air.

If it was mine
, Alma thought, and picked the baby up. She said to Cook, later,
If it was mine I would take better care
, but Cook was having a mood and plunged her ladle into broth without speaking. Lilian cried and was fed, cried and was changed, and so many nappies kept everyone busy.

Four years are enough to change every pore of one's skin, but were not enough for Lilian's father, that man of moustaches and excessive ear wax, to produce a son. He was beginning to feel that even another daughter might go some way to proving something. His wife began to dread the slippery shine of the peach nightdress over her skin. Behind his shoulder she watched the shadows coming towards her across the ceiling, and in the room below, Lilian lay across her bed with a pair of white bloomers on her head, mumbling through dreams like dull lessons.
Feelingly
, she said, and sat up.

In the room above, a wax-like bead of sweat fell cooling from her father's forehead.
Don't move
, he told her mother, and convulsed.
Don't move
, he said again, and clapped waxed paper between her legs.
Keep it in.

Mother's Story

Mother was a woman of pale colours: lilacs and lavenders and the grey of galahs. She cut roses in the mornings and laid them in the flat basket I was allowed to carry.
Alma
will take care of it
, she soothed when I dropped a vase that shattered into astonished pieces around my feet.
Alma!
she called, and rang the little brass bell.
Alma is a maid
, she explained when I asked.
And I am a lady. You will be a lady one
day, but now you are a little girl.
Her eyes became curved when she smiled, and close up she smelled of flowers.
Your father
is a gentleman, and is writing a book.

In the parlour there was a photograph of her standing erect and winsome, smiling, one hand on the saddle of a stuffed donkey, a waterfall frozen behind her, in a dress made of chips of light.
That was when I was younger
, she explained and apologised when visitors picked up the frame and commented on the halo effect the photographer had achieved around the hand resting on the donkey.
And sillier.
I watched Mother titter. She had little to say about the wedding photograph next to it, full of people looking anxious for the camera, in which the train of her lace dress had succeeded in drawing her feet into its coils.
He courted me
, she said,
and we married in
St. Andrew's.
Father's story was almost the same.
I found
your mother charming
, he said crisply,
so I courted her. We were
married in the rain.

Father's Story

Albion was a man of moustaches and of shiny boots that squeaked when he walked. His boots on the stairs filled the house, his hand with the powerful black hairs gripped the banister hard enough to make it tremble.
Lilian, do not
bang your feet like that
, Mother exclaimed.
What do you think you
are doing?
I tried explaining,
I am being Father, Mother
, but she did not hear, only said,
A lady glides, Lilian.

When I asked him, Father said,
Your mother is a wife and
mother. And a lady. And I am a gentleman.
He hoisted me up onto his shoulder and from such a height the floor shone in a strange way and the ceiling made me dizzy.
And you are
a young lady whose bedtime it is.

Some mornings Father went to an office and returned in the evening with a newspaper under his arm. At the office he
kept the business af loat
, and came home smelling of the ferry.
Someone has to keep the business from going under
, he said when I asked him about that office.
So that you will have
something to come into.
I thought, and asked,
Will we live in a
boat?
I was looking forward to the sound of waves against a hull at night, but Father sighed and slapped the paper against his thigh.
Anything is possible, Lilian
, he said, and went up to the study.