The Happiness Glass Read online

  I lived in that house as girls of slender means have lived in flats and bedsits all over the world, and in stories, relishing my independence one minute and wringing my hands over my impoverished circumstances the next. Others recognised the fairy tale of a girl living alone in a little wooden house on a hill, and they found their way over the footbridge: once, late at night, a television journalist I knew slightly arrived without shoes, having fled her violent husband. I made up a bed for her on the sofa, but that is another story – or perhaps it does belong here in this account of how it was sometimes, to be young and female in the second half of the twentieth century.

  Despite the occasional visitors, I spent much time alone in the buttercup house, including the loneliest few days of my life. It was the New Year’s Eve after my father died – the night before my twenty-second birthday; I sat at the kitchen window watching tail lights diminish up Tinakori hill, and celebrated at midnight with raspberries and cream, and a glass of wine from the bottle the landlord had left for Christmas. I didn’t see anyone to speak to until the third of January, when I returned to work. In a letter to my mother I wrote: I’m getting too old to attach much importance to birthdays, but it would be nice to have a happy one. I haven’t enjoyed a birthday since I was small and used to get a party dress, and an ice-cream cake, and a doll. It was the closest I ever came to Isobel Callaghan’s uncelebrated birthday, though Amy Witting would not finish writing I for Isobel until 1979, and the book would not fall into my hands until the century had turned.

  In Thorndon I started French lessons; I beat out letters on the borrowed typewriter, and tentatively began a children’s novel. When the family who lived downstairs said they could hear me typing I told them I was studying, and since I always stopped at a reasonable hour they remained good-natured. In Amy Witting’s story ‘The Writing Desk’, young, aspiring writer Emily pretends to her dreadful landlady that she is writing a thesis rather than admit she is working on a novel. Witting’s young women, like Emily, and Isobel Callaghan, know that there is something about a girl reading, writing, and showing a preference for solitude that provokes people. According to Isobel it contravenes The Eleventh Commandment: Thou shalt not be different. As well as these first fumbling attempts at writing I still had my nose in a book, and at weekends I would read all night because there was no one to say I couldn’t. But after a year I had to relinquish the buttercup house; its beauty was a luxury I had never really been able to afford. Even the landlord shed a tear for me, though he did not offer to lower the rent.

  In The Poetics of Space, French philosopher Gaston Bachelard says of the houses we have lived in: “All our lives we come back to them in our daydreams.” When researching our old address in Wilcannia on the Internet, I was strangely stirred by photographs of houses in the town. I did not know them, but felt a throb of recognition, and sorrow for their bleakness. There it is, I thought, the foundation of melancholy laid down by ill-shaped rooms with concrete floors, by utilitarian windows, and the desolation they framed – landscapes as parched as the mournful cry of a crow – a dark layer of longing concealed at the bottom of every bleach-bright day.

  As a child, of course, the Reid Street house was simply where we lived, it was home, and it is only my fortunate present that allows me to look back and judge it harshly. But my thoughts return often to the buttercup house where, despite the loneliness, and surviving much of the time on toast and tea, the dream still brings only a buzz of joy. Yet it is only one of many houses that have sheltered me, and they are all inside me still; I remember the patterns of their wallpapers, I could reach out in the dark and find their doorknobs and their light switches.

  4.

  So Paris swam before her eyes, like a shifting ocean, glimmering through a rose-coloured haze.

  Madame Bovary, Flaubert

  In a second-hand shop on Tinakori Road, I bought a set of the short stories of Guy de Maupassant, nine volumes, hardbound. When I left Wellington for South Africa, and eventually London, I carried them in my luggage, and I cannot begin to list the occasions when their presence there caused complications, let alone explain why I clung to them so tenaciously.

  The South African adventure was a dangerous folly. I went with a friend, a journalist, who had read Trevor Huddleston’s Naught for Your Comfort and decided on a whim to have a look at the place. Television had just started up there, and a sound operator we knew had written to say that there was plenty of work. However, by the time we pitched up for interviews it had all become a lot more difficult. Broadcasting in apartheidera South Africa was government-run and tightly controlled, and its employees were required to be bi-lingual – English and Afrikaans. With a shortage of trained sound operators, they had fudged the rules for our friend, but a foreign journalist was regarded with suspicion. By association, I had no chance.

  We were thrown into a labour market where the jobs traditionally undertaken by travellers were filled by black or coloured people. For other work, our visas revealed that we would not be long-term employees. Starvation was suddenly a very real prospect, until a chance encounter yielded news of a vacancy for two live-in barmaids at a hotel up the coast. The deal was done by telephone, to our great relief, and we took the train to Mossel Bay, where the Hotel Santos faced, across a dusty road and a narrow railway line, the perfect blue expanse of the Indian Ocean. Sun-faded, and flanked by palms, it looked like the setting for a Somerset Maugham story.

  The first shock was that we were to appear before a magistrate, who would decide whether we were of sufficiently moral character to be barmaids. Since we had only just stepped off the train, and there was no one to vouch for our characters, moral or otherwise, Gerry the Dutch hotel manager went with us to the interview, and undertook to guarantee our behaviour. The second shock was that news of our imminent appearance in the Hotel’s Ladies’ Bar had spread, and on our first evening shift – the first behind a bar for either of us – the room was packed with rugged men with ruddy sun-damaged faces. Their silent scrutiny unnerved us, to say the least, and not knowing the names of the drinks, or how to pour them, was, by comparison, a minor embarrassment.

  Liquored-up, the men began to speak in Afrikaans. The manager appeared then and threatened to close the bar. They were to speak English in front of us, he said, and treat us with respect. He was such an unlikely knight, but knight he surely was. Afterwards, he explained that the men had been discussing us in coarse language, and although we had not understood what they said, he apologised on their behalf.

  The first-floor bar, with its bay windows facing the sea and a view of the Outeniqua Mountains, was a pleasant enough place to work, but the space behind the bar was strangely set up, with a screened-off area that seemed to serve no purpose. This turned out to be where, until very recently, drinks had been prepared: since the business of pouring alcohol into a glass might somehow corrupt the women whose husbands brought them to the Ladies’ Bar on Saturday nights, bottles had been kept out of sight, and the barman would slip out the back to mix the drinks. We had noticed that the women who came into the bar never made eye contact with us. When we approached to ask what they would like to drink, they would turn and whisper to their husbands, and the husbands would relay their order. At first, we thought this was hilarious, but as time went on it grated.

  Our room was in an annexe close to the hotel kitchen; it had a concrete floor and a few pieces of plain furniture. With working alternate lunchtime shifts, every second day was free for one of us until six in the evening, and on those long, hot, empty afternoons I would read, or walk along the dusty road to the town’s public library. I carried back framed prints for our empty walls – Van Gogh’s Café Terrace at Night was renewed again and again.

  In a letter to his sister Wilhelmina about that picture, Vincent asked whether she had yet read Guy de Maupassant’s Bel-Ami, and what she thought of the writer’s talent. The beginning of Bel-Ami described a starry night in Paris, with lighted cafés shining along the dark boulevards. It was
very like the subject Vincent was painting, and in asking his sister’s opinion of de Maupassant’s talent he was, indirectly, asking about his own.

  In that hot little room on the east coast of Africa, with Vincent’s lighted café at the foot of my bed, I vanished into Alexandre Dumas’ novels – The Three Musketeers, Twenty Years After, The Vicomte de Bragelonne, Louise de la Valliere, The Man in the Iron Mask – those swashbuckling tales, with their intricate plotlines. I revelled in Zola’s macabre Thérèse Raquin. I read Balzac, and, for the first time, Flaubert’s masterpiece, closing my book each evening only to go to the bar where, like a somnambulist, I went through the motions of serving drinks to customers who would become so many ‘Yonville peasants’.

  5.

  What will become of me? What help can I hope for? What consolation? What relief?

  Madame Bovary, Flaubert

  As a young woman, my mother longed to go to art school. At the School of Arts and Crafts in Adelaide she could have been taught by Mary P. Harris and Dorrit Black, but instead she was sent to learn shorthand and typing. In patriarchal post-war Australia, millions of letters were dictated – invariably by men – and dispatched – invariably to other men – via the well-drilled, helpless hands of innumerable young women. When the responses came, women filed them. To dodge this fate required greater reserves of courage and money than either I or my mother possessed. In Amy Witting’s I For Isobel, when Trevor, one of the university students Isobel Callaghan has befriended, asks why she doesn’t go to university, Isobel says, “I have to earn a living.” Trevor responds that it is “rotten luck”, but to Isobel, the money she earns and her ability to earn it are fundamental to her precarious independence.

  Aside from the typing, I was barely educated; as time went on I would resort more and more to self-teaching, and it would be decades before I set foot inside a university. My mother would wait forty years until both her father and my father had died, to enrol at art school at the age of sixty. She gained her diploma, but it was, she said wistfully, too late for her to do anything with it.

  For Emma Bovary there was no possibility of work outside the home. Emma seeks to escape the drudgery of farm life in marriage, but marriage does not bring control of her own destiny. Burning for something she can barely name, she plunges into a clandestine affair, and then another. Her character does eventually become ugly, distorted by extravagance, desire, and – worse even than adultery – indifference to her daughter. Yet from one so tightly held, from a wife and mother who is still a child herself, from a woman denied expression, except through her domestic role, surely ugly behaviour might be expected.

  An academic friend who has taught Madame Bovary tells me that, without exception, her students hated Emma. Young female undergraduates – beneficiaries of the struggles of suffragettes and feminists in the century before they were born – can afford to despise her weakness. But as Emma’s extravagance casts her deeper and deeper into debt, men offer help in return for sexual favours; even her suicide is only possible because the chemist’s assistant is attracted to her. After her death, others act despicably: the piano teacher sends an account for three months’ lessons, though Emma never had even one; Félicité, Emma’s servant, takes to wearing Madame’s dresses, and eventually flits from the town with the remains of her mistress’s wardrobe; Homais the chemist discourages his children from intimacy with little Berthe Bovary, in view of the difference in their social position. No one emerges from this story with honour.

  In the end, all that is left to Madame Bovary is death, and when Charles looks upon his wife’s corpse it comes as a relief to the reader to realise that she is free at last.

  “On Emma’s satin dress, white as a moonbeam, the watering shimmered. She disappeared beneath it. It seemed to him as if she were escaping from herself and melting confusedly into everything about her, into the silence, the night, the passing wind, the damp odours rising.”

  As with life, fiction is filled with Emma Bovary characters. Lily Knight McClellan in Joan Didion’s Run River, published in the same year as Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, is a product of the myth that a woman will only find true fulfilment in matrimony. Like Emma, Lily McClellan looks outside her marriage, and though the consequences are bloody, Lily survives, scented with Joy by Jean Patou. Nora Porteous in Jessica Anderson’s Tirra Lirra by the River is a version of Emma. On the verge of splitting with her odious husband, Nora is filled with panic, “and a longing for the undemanding dullness and steady misery of my captivity.”

  Isobel Callaghan’s landlady, Mrs Bowers, expresses the social mood still prevalent in my girlhood when she says, “I always say, if a girl has a decent engagement ring, she has something of her own”, and modern young women might be amazed to learn that plenty of people would have agreed with her. Isobel appears for the last time in the short story ‘Soft Toys’ published in Faces and Voices (2000). Amy Witting died while in the early stages of writing her third Isobel novel, and the Isobel of ‘Soft Toys’ – single, pregnant, and planning to live in an uninsulated wash-house once her baby is born – offers a clue to the next phase of her life. We will never know how she might have managed in these circumstances, and those of us who have loved Isobel Callaghan will be forever anxious about her – she plans to keep on writing, but the odds are against it.

  When questioned about the identity of Emma Bovary, Flaubert famously declared “Madame Bovary, c’est moi!” Casting back over my own life, especially the parts of it revisited here, I exclaim with Flaubert: “C’est moi! Je suis Emma!” For although in the end I did go to university I never conquered French or Latin – it was too late for that dream. Like Isobel Callaghan, I did eventually accept that I could become a writer, but life still teems with Madame Bovary moments, and this is the truth at the heart of Flaubert’s great novel, the reason it has endured: we are all, in our own ways, Madame Bovary.

  In Emma’s drawn-out downfall we recognise our own dark struggles, the desert of days in which we measure longing against need and calculate the inevitable shortfall. Alongside dreams we strive to wake from, and those we strive to keep on dreaming, there is, too, the shadowing darkness of history.

  Looking back, I see that we never belonged in Wilcannia, and that the Barkindji, who did belong, had long since had their peace and their way of life destroyed. For in his quest to explore along the Darling River, Major Thomas Livingston Mitchell, poet, painter, failed duellist, was responsible for the deaths of seven Aboriginal people near Mount Dispersion, and an unknown number between Menindee and Wilcannia. He was also responsible, in the vicinity of Lake Repose, for the separation of a very young Aboriginal child from her mother. The girl, Ballandella, returned with Mitchell to Sydney, where although she was introduced into his family with a degree of affection she was really a kind of living exhibit from Mitchell’s expedition.

  In one of those drifts of direction language often takes, the Anglo-Saxon word ‘wyrd’ once meant fate or destiny before its modern meaning of odd, or strange. An assessment of one’s wyrd, or fate, must begin with where and when one was born. After that it depends on what you think and do, and who you meet. For the relative safety and privilege of post-war rural Australia, where my greatest trial was being made to master the typewriter, I count myself fortunate. The impulse that drives a writer is as instinctive as that of a sea turtle hatchling that digs itself from the sand and scuttles towards the ocean, and touch typing has been useful to me in a way my father could never have foreseen. Like turtle hatchlings, writers are rarely blessed with ideal conditions. I started school in Wilcannia, but I have seen Paris. Most days, that is enough.

  The Stars of the Milky Way

  Beth and I are balanced on perches inside the chook house, crouching comfortably, with our elbows bent and flapping like wings. It is an ordinary Wilcannia afternoon – hot and flat as the bottom of an iron – with nothing more interesting to offer than teasing the hens. The weight of the sky presses the air out of town in summer. You c
an see it in photographs, people looking as if it is almost too much effort to breathe. The divorce and death rates soar in the hot months. No one gives us kids details, of course: people simply disappear, amid whispers, and knowing looks, and a fine red dust collecting on the surface of things.

  Beyond our back fence the Darling River sidles, olive green and shallow in this droughty year. From inside the house comes the bleat of the wireless. Mum is in there trying to ignore the heat as she damps down laundry, sprinkling cotton pillowcases with rainwater from her old tomato sauce bottle with holes punched in the lid, rolling them into sausages for ironing. She has been cranky all day because of the ruckus last night.

  Yesterday evening, while she was out watering, our neighbour, Dorrie Brickle, appeared at the gap in the fence and said something in that stuck-up voice Mum swears is the fakest thing she has ever heard.

  “It’s rr…radiation damage, Missus Brennan.”

  Dorrie has strange pale eyes – sheep’s eyes, our father calls them – and a skin that flares into a rash at the least excitement. With her black fluffy hair tucked out of sight under a scarf, her thin little face, with nothing to soften it, looked both too intense and exceptionally plain.

  “Causes sterility in both sexes,” she said.

  Mum’s fingers tightened around the hose, and she shot an anxious look to where we stood fiddling with Beth’s old pedal car.

  “It’s wrecked my memory,” Dorrie continued. “In rr… repertory my lines were perfect. Whole scripts. I prided myself. But since these bomb tests, I can hardly remember what happened yesterday.”

  Our mother aimed a stream of water into the trough surrounding the base of a young peach tree and muttered something neutral. She has her own theories about Dorrie Brickle’s memory lapses.