Moving Among Strangers (9 page)

18

When I was a small boy, I spent some time, for some reason, with your Carey aunts, June, Rachel and Dawn, who were young then and had rented a house in Geraldton near my grandmother's for the summer, as a break from White Peak … Rachel was the beauty of the Carey girls, taller and darker than the other two (though they were nice, too) and in my memory (which plays tricks, I know) looking rather like Jane Russell in
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
.

Back in Perth, Carey went back to work and I went to stay with Aunt Rachel – the most memorable, according to Stow, of my father's three sisters (although Rachel assured me later that Stow's memory was indeed playing tricks and it was Dawn who was ‘the real traffic-stopper'). As well as her beauty, Rachel was famed for her dress sense and her fabulous cooking. My sister had told me all about our Aunt Rachel, because she had spent holidays with her at the family holiday house in Busselton, while my brother and I stayed home. Cathy came back with stories of our stylish Aunt Rachel: Aunt Rachel could cook, she could sew trendy clothes, she could sing and tell stories. There was nothing Aunt Rachel couldn't do. Cathy said Aunt Rachel was the best aunty in the world. I'd never had an aunty in my life, at least one I'd got to know, so I really couldn't tell a good one from a bad one.

The last time I'd seen Aunt Rachel was when I was ten. All I could remember of that visit was my father, the balding lecturer and anti-Vietnam war campaigner, arguing incessantly with Uncle Ken, a Liberal-voting architect, across a surreally hot Christmas lunch.

‘Old money,' the taxi driver told me now, as we headed for Mosman Park. ‘Everyone in this area comes from old money.'

‘My aunt grew up on a sheep station in Geraldton.'

‘That would be right,' he confirmed. ‘Then sold up and bought around here. A lot of graziers did that.'

I am not sure if Mosman Park is old money or new money; probably both. Tree-lined avenues, sandstone mansions and private schools.

My aunt's house was modest in comparison with the nearby mansions, and it was a relief to see her old Datsun in the driveway. If she was ‘old money', she wasn't putting her wealth on display.

‘Gabs!'
This was the nickname my father had always used. ‘Darling!'

Even at eighty-four her beauty still lingered. She embraced me with the affection of the lost aunt and I handed her a bunch of white lilies. A special choice: she only liked white flowers. My aunt is a woman with very firm opinions. Strong-minded, they called her, and of strong character. When she was barely out of her teens, she eloped with a handsome rogue everyone knew would come to no good. ‘She only did it to get back at Granny,' a cousin told me later. The marriage soon collapsed and Rachel returned home with a little daughter – ‘It was Alex who rang and told me to come home,' Aunty Rachel confessed later, when we'd settled. ‘He couldn't bear the thought of me being so unhappy. He was the one who paid for my train fare home and came to pick me up from the station.'

To my aunt, this may have seemed like a small, insignificant comment, but to me it was deeply redemptive; her story was the nicest thing I had heard said about my father for more than twenty years.

*

That evening Aunty Rachel and I sat together looking at her old photos of the family, of
White Peak, of my father as a blond-haired boy on a rocking horse. One photo showed a tennis party that included my grandparents and Stow's father, Cedric Stow.

‘Every Saturday, Mother went to Geraldton to play tennis with the Stows so I went too,' Rachel recounted. ‘Mother
loved
tennis but Mr Stow never played. He always came in a suit. Randolph was in a pusher then and I was given the job of wheeling him around while the grownups played their games. He was a beautiful little boy, with blond, curly hair and startling blue eyes. Very pretty.'

On the wall of my aunt's study was a studio portrait of my grandfather Henry Carey, whom I'd never met. You could tell he had ice-blue eyes even though the photograph was black-and-white. He had a strangely delicate expression and looked more like a dreamy poet than a grazier. How had he maintained that pale Irish complexion? Why had he not been hardened by that vast, lonely landscape north of Geraldton?

‘He looks so sensitive,' I commented.

‘Father was very emotional,' Rachel confirmed. It was something she would repeat throughout this visit, as she told stories from the side of the family I had been separated from for so long.

*

Aunt Rachel had anecdotes too, about my father's childhood, tales my father never told, had forgotten, or deliberately suppressed. Rachel remembered how downcast he'd looked when, on his twelfth birthday, he had received a suitcase containing his uniform and hat for Hale School in Perth, where he was to board for his secondary education. Alex had no desire to leave White Peak for a bunk bed in a Perth boarding school. Rachel reiterated what an enchanted childhood they had had, despite the isolation.

‘There was the spider orchid season, the mushroom season and so many birds. Alex collected birds' eggs and kept them in a suitcase under the bed.'

Years later, when my father graduated, the headmaster of the school made the trip to White Peak to convince Henry and Erica that Alex should go on to university. He clearly had an intellectual disposition. My grandmother had also wanted to go to university but had been told by her father that education was wasted on women so she may have been secretly supportive of the idea. But Henry was opposed.

‘Look,' he said to Mr Buntine, ‘I am not well.' Henry had never fully recovered from a shelling he received in World War I, and suffered constant headaches. ‘I need my only son. Otherwise I won't be able to run the farm.'

So, my father's work on White Peak was set.

‘Your father was in charge of the windmill run. Every day he would ride his horse from one windmill to the next to make sure they were still working. Without windmills there was no water for the sheep and without water the sheep died.'

The failure of windmills had already caused a number of disasters. Once, when the children were small, a windmill had stopped spinning but the sheep were still drawn by the smell of water in the well. One by one, they fell into the well and drowned. By the time the discovery was made, eight sheep were down the well. Erica had to climb down and heave each stinking carcass onto a winch for Henry to crank to the surface. Another time, Henry had given an unemployed Chinaman refuge in a hut, in exchange for looking after the coastal windmill. The Chinaman had gone mad with loneliness and killed himself. The children were instructed never to go into that hut. But one day, when Rachel was out mustering with her father, she couldn't resist sneaking into the forbidden shack. Her father discovered his disobedient daughter, but by then both were bitten by fleas carrying typhoid fever. For Henry, it was almost fatal.

‘He also did the crayfish run,' Aunt Rachel recounted, ‘which he
loathed
. He had to fix the head of a slaughtered sheep into a trap made from fencing wire and then ride to the beach to set the trap.'

At that time the Geraldton coastline swarmed with crayfish and Alex was regularly sent to set the trap. The beach was about five miles away and he had to make two trips – one to set the trap, and one to collect it. He brought back the pot jammed with pink crayfish, hungry for sheep's brains, and delivered the catch to Erica.

‘Mother prepared the flesh, French style, in the oven, covered in fresh cream,' said my aunt, ‘and then we jumped up and down on the leftover shells to crush them. That was to make shell grit, for the chooks to make their eggshells hard. And then, what do you think happened? Mother's meringues came out of the oven flamingo pink!'

And then there was the butchering job.

‘I remember how Mother used to say, “Alex, we have no meat, you must go and kill a sheep.” And Alex would say, “Can't I just shoot some rabbits?” He would procrastinate for days, bringing home rabbit after rabbit. Until the weekend was approaching and Mother would say, “I
must
have meat for the Sunday roast. Alex, you have to kill a sheep.”' So Alex went out and chose a sheep to slaughter, took the animal in his arms and slit its throat while the victim's eyes looked up at him. This was the job, Aunty Rachel told me, that my father hated most.

Country children know more than they know,

They see the pony, lusty and unwise,

Follow his dam with hot incestuous eyes;

And slitting up a rabbit's belly, seeing

The wet fur never to be born, they know

The underlying cruelty of being.

‘Country Children' – Randolph Stow

*

As a young woman in 1945, while living in the Geraldton nursing quarters, my mother was invited to White Peak. Joan came to visit with her friend, who would later be the first Mrs Hancock. Alex, apparently, charmed them both. At least, that's my aunt's version.

My sister's version has my father in the Geraldton hospital (with an unspecified illness) when he first met my mother. According to Cathy, because the Carey family had such a limited social life on their isolated sheep station and Alex rarely met women, he proposed to his nurse.

My version, which is complete conjecture, is that my mother, being a keen tennis player, was invited by the Stows to their regular Saturday game and there met Mrs Carey who, knowing Joan was from ‘a good family', then invited her to White Peak.

The bride, who is the daughter of Mr and Mrs D. Ferguson, of Oakover, Middle Swan, wore a beautiful short-trained gown of ice-blue lace and a long matching veil held by sprays of frangipani.

Her bridesmaids, Misses Margaret Ferguson and June Carey, chose smart frocks of lilac crepe with attractive hip draping. The groom, who is the son of Mr and Mrs H.E. Carey, of Perth and White Peak station, Geraldton, was attended by Mr E. Hester and Mr J. Roe.

After the ceremony a reception was held in the gardens at Oakover, where Mrs Ferguson received her guests wearing a gown of black chiffon velvet with a yoke of palest blue. She was assisted by Mrs Carey, who chose a frock of black crepe with a beaded bodice. Mr and Mrs Carey will leave in the
Gorgon
for a holiday visit to Singapore.

This was among the scraps of paper my aunt Rachel had kept over the years – a small, yellowing snippet from a newspaper, undated.

‘Alex and I were very close,' Aunt Rachel said one evening. ‘He came to stay with me the night before his wedding. Some of his friends took him out; God knows what they gave him to drink but he came home and spent all night vomiting. The next morning he got up looking like death. “I'm not sure if I should be doing this,” he told me. “I don't think I'm marrying material.”'

And so my parents left together, on the
Gorgon
, and then Joan returned sooner than planned, alone. It was clear to everyone that something must have gone terribly wrong. Was Alex not good at intimacy even then? Or maybe his expectations of intimacy were too high – hoping for a true soul mate, a perfect match, like the one he had lost during childhood.

He was back a week after her, that time. But perhaps the truth of their constant departures and arrivals, those recurring separations, was that neither of my parents were ‘marrying material'. My mother's escapades to a tropical island, as well as her independent life in London, showed the will of a woman of individuality, honouring her single soul. My father's apparent inability to live with my mother, and inability to live without her, reflected his lifelong indecisiveness, one of the principal symptoms of depression. Yet, like many of us, neither seemed able to confront the blindingly obvious: they were ill-suited and incompatible.

In those days, expectations were both high and narrow. Western Australia of the 1940s gave people one shot at marriage and they were expected to stick at it no matter what. My father was expected to be a farmer, like his father, and my mother was expected to be a farmer's wife, like her mother. Just as Stow, the son of a solicitor, was expected to become a lawyer.

But being a farmer was never what Alex wanted. Despite Henry and Erica's conviction that their son's destiny lay in sheep-dipping and fence-fixing, and despite his full-time devotion to White Peak for eleven long years after graduating from Hale, my father still longed for the life of an intellectual. He would come home at night, dirty and tired after a long day labouring the land, and yet at midnight his light would still be burning.

‘Alex, come to bed,' my mother would say. ‘It's late.'

‘I've spent all day exercising my body,' he answered, ‘now I have to exercise my mind.'

My mother's version of those early years together was that once they were married, she went to live at White Peak, where she learnt to cook from her mother-in-law, Erica. My aunt Rachel's version is that Erica and Henry vacated White Peak for the newlyweds and went to live in Perth. The truth is that very quickly the marriage broke down and Joan returned to the nurses' quarters in Geraldton.

But then, it seems, my father got lonely and invited her back. And that, apparently, set the rhythm for their entire married lives.

When we were growing up, there were no framed portraits of my mother and father on their wedding day on the mantelpiece, there were no photo albums, and no anniversaries celebrated. But none of these things were ever talked about.

Only a year or so into their marriage, my father had finally seized the opportunity to escape the farm and fulfil his intellectual ambitions by going to study in London. England was as far away from White Peak as he could get. My mother once said he'd been unable to afford to further his education until the Korean War created a sudden demand for wool. But my mother, as usual, wasn't telling the whole truth. After she died, when Stow wrote to me, the scandal of my father's escape was revealed.