Purple Prose (15 page)

Somewhere in our present house is something that Mary had begun and set aside. It is indeterminate. Maybe the lining of a
dressing gown, maybe the beginnings of an evening dress? It's a mid-purple silk with Chinese embroidery of a slightly darker colour, a kind of silky damask. I try to know where things are, to hold onto them, but often I lose track. On some days, in this Age of Curation, I am happy that things slide out of my grasp. On other days I am appalled.

Purple is also the colour of bruises (life holding on too hard), the wet violets at Mundijong, the sheen on dark feathers, an eye-shadow compact I owned called Wuthering Heights, decomposition.

When did Mary come to me? Or when is it that I needed her? It was in that hinterland of starting and stopping bleeding – the ‘painters and decorators' in/out, out/in – a buffeting. The residue in public toilets of other women's menses would bring tears to my eyes. It was pathetic in the truest sense. I needed something, someone to get me over this hump. I started to notice older women as if truly for the first time: their dress and habits, their survival tactics, their public kindnesses to one another. Once I bumped into an older woman with my shopping basket at the supermarket and apologised. She turned and grasped my free hand with her own that was piled with rings.
You don't have to say sorry.

There is a list of disjointed facts that I know about Mary Coade (nee Tindale).

She was the second daughter of ‘the Bolter', Margaret Thompson. I guess every family tree has one or two. In
Love In A Cold Climate
the character is simply referred to as
Bolter.
Being
esposito
, I am rather fond of economical reasons being given for mysterious origins. My paternal grandfather, with his heavy Irish accent,
always said
Ach, dere was an impediment.
In a trajectory from Ireland to Newcastle-on-Tyne and then on to New Zealand, Margaret married her employer, Robert Tindale. They moved as family, Margaret, Robert, Mary and her elder sister Bess, first to Victoria and then to Western Australia where Robert set up the Perth Modelling Works.

Mary met Ted Coade in a shop in Victoria. They shared a birthday. Someone had called out to greet one or the other of them with a congratulations for the day and they both answered. It is thought that the gold rush may have brought them west.

Later they would run a haberdashery business in Newcastle Street, Perth. Renee, a daughter, came along quite quickly. Ted managed the social aspects of the shop and Mary, the finances. Through her shrewd management, business expanded. They bought farms in the Wheatbelt and opened other businesses around Corrigin and Wickepin. Tom Hewett, a building contractor recently returned from World War I, met Renee Coade in Wickepin where she was living with her parents and working as the postmistress. They were later married and had two daughters: Dorothy in 1923 and my mother Lesley in 1925. Ted and his son-in-law Tom, my maternal grandfather, would eventually coown and run
Lambton Downs
, the Wickepin farm on which my mother and her sister lived idyllically until mid-childhood. It was this country, this particular place, and the people in it, that were to shape Dorothy Hewett's work for a lifetime.

My mother remembers her maternal grandparents, Ted and Mary, as loving, hard working and unpretentious. In her recollections they are already old and set in various routines. Ted played billiards with Tom every Sunday night. Mary came over to Renee and Tom's every afternoon and sat on the sofa. On Friday nights they went to the Regal. They summered in an old weatherboard place at Como with a retainer called App. Ted loved the garden at
Cathay
and kept it up. Mary practised her Christian Science lying on the bed at the farm with her lessons, having ‘the
right thought' for those she felt in need, the tracts printed on pale pink and mauve paper. When Ted died and Mary's memory was failing she would ask the family for her husband. The answer,
He's just in the garden
, satisfied her.

There is a sculpture by Patricia Piccinini called
The Long Awaited.
A preppy young boy who looks like he might have walked out of a Spielberg movie cradles the head of an ancient woman whose bulky body morphs into a tail. It recalls that branch of work on early peoples which held to the idea of marine origins. She is no svelte sea nymph but solid as a dugong. When I stand in front of it I think of Mary and all of the ways that she walked towards me, or I back to her.

She came to me through that sea of material. She came to me through my mother's stories. She came to me through the upside down plaster brick in the café near my work with the words Perth Modelling Works carved into it in beautiful Gill Sans. Sometimes to see a woman's story it is best to look upside down, arse about etc. And she came to me through a newspaper clipping that one of my colleagues showed me. It announced the estate she left her daughter Renee, the estate that would trickle down to my mother, my aunt, and finally to my sister, my cousins and me.

A friend clutched my hand beneath the upside-down Perth Modelling Works brick and said, much like the song in the movie,
You must follow this!
But it was not explicitly or only pecuniary, this estate. It was also the estate of ‘may I' versus ‘can I'. It was the estate of great wild gardens and physical freedoms, a mother who could only bear to hit you through an eiderdown. It was an estate of places belonging to three women in a row – safe places you could skip to, one from the other, spaces that held their own particular light and dark, aromas, domestic routines – beloved as the house in
Howards End
or the lady house in
Lolly Willowes.
And ghosting these abodes, always that expansive childhood
lived on farms with largely indulgent adults, at least for most of the time.

There is a poem of Dorothy's about the big row.
⁴
Why wouldn't there be? For years after the girls, my mother and aunt, went to bed and prayed that there would not be another row like it:
please dear jesus make the quarrel stop
. It was a row over ‘can I leave the table' versus ‘may I leave the table'. It was a row between grandparents and parents of the worst kind.
Let her do as she likes. No, not until she says ‘may I'
. But my aunt left the table anyway, causing in my mother's mind, the baby sister, an indelible sense that some form of excessive rebelliousness had been practised and that nothing would ever be the same again. And perhaps she was right. A may/can scenario sounds like the worst kind of petit-bourgeois hairsplitting, hardly worth a fuss, but it must have been (or became) emblematic of a deeper rift, a recognition or acknowledgement of my aunt's difference and a signal to her that it was okay, or even encouraged, to begin on a path of defiance. How many grandparents are complicit in exactly this? Many no doubt. After years of playing hard corners with their own children, they are free to get subversive with the next generation. Now, I think of the family bolshiness, particularly in the female line, all being anchored back to that may I/can I split. And I think of Mary's resourcefulness, her creativity and everything it gifted to her descendants, female and male. There's a poem about that too:

nobody said
You're girls

You can't do these things

So we did them

fragile as cabbage moths

our white dresses flicking in sunlight
⁵

I married a man who wrote a thesis about what happens to the plots of nineteenth-century novels when the heroine inherits property. It seemed about books then and yet now it seems close to life as well, to Mary's life and her matrilineal legacy. I can imagine the unfinished purple silk garment would be most suitable as a day dress for a Dorothea or a Little Dorrit or indeed just our Mary. Mary in transit from Ireland to New Zealand, from Victoria to Perth, or just across the road from
Cathay
to the sofa. Mary with her tiny waist and her curls and her Irish chin; who, when she hugged you, bristled with dressmaker's pins.

… is the mother house with the ghostliest coordinates in my family tree. I can't begin to tell its story here because that would be to deviate from Mary's line. It is the name of a large house by the sea at Portici and concerns my sister, another Mary … Maria, who was sent to this American-funded orphanage as a girl. It is a story, not unlike a nineteenth-century novel, about a family trying to stay together. And it concerns a seamstress too.

Years later, years since Mary, years since the orphanage, Maria and I are finally together. We're together in the house that is awash with cloth, sorting this and sorting that. We have projects and energies that seem to come from somewhere beyond the present. Windows are redressed, cushions recovered, clothes mended. We trawl through Mary's great cloth estate.
What is this, honey? And what is this?

Even so, even then, the unfinished purple silk garment eludes me. I've learnt to love the potential granted from its unlocatable, partially made state. Things are nothing. They lie doggo, they can tell us something about the people in proximity to them but not everything. Some things persist but they are just little scraps and hints.

Purple is also the colour of some wild thing overlooked,
a violet by a mossy stone,
the skin beneath my second child's eyes, the insides of cockleshells, and the jacaranda bells falling and falling. The slide to summer –
l'estate
.

With thanks to Lesley Dougan, Josephine Wilson, and Tony Hughes-d'Aeth.

The ship was suddenly there: 2,700 years since it sailed, thirty years after I had left the Mediterranean to live on the other side of the world in Western Australia, and just as I was drafting this essay. The image glowed from my iPhone screen. A Phoenician trading vessel surrounded by turquoise water off the coast of Gozo, my grandfather's native island, in the Maltese archipelago. My inner poet wants to write that it floated on my Facebook news-stream, but floating was not what it was doing.