A Letter from Paris Page 12

  Even though the times of his life were fascinating, I’d developed this constant hollow ache of loss in the background. I lost my sense of humour and became sensitive to anything anyone said when I tried to explain what I was doing with all my spare time.

  At the same time, I learned that the library had actually paid for dad’s material — mum hadn’t donated the collection, as I’d always assumed. The money they’d paid, documented in a series of letters, had allowed her to buy our house when he died. It wasn’t that it had been kept a secret, more that mum had always implied to me that dad’s writing hadn’t amounted to anything. Or maybe that’s what I assumed?

  Mum had often mentioned dad’s connection with the Boyds, but his life in London and France, before she’d met him in Melbourne, was a mystery. Maybe no one knew about that time. Or the ones who did were already gone — like Gisèle. Coralie emailed from France, one of those days, with the sad news that Gisèle was nowhere to be found, even though she and her uncle had both searched French records. Gisèle’s surname wasn’t French, but rather Dutch-Indonesian, it seemed, and perhaps she hadn’t been born in France, which might have been why they couldn’t find a death certificate.

  There were dead ends everywhere I looked. I left messages for Mirka Mora with her son’s gallery, and eventually tracked down another son. But Mirka was old and frail, and, I later found out, had completely lost her memory.

  Somewhere in that time, my sister mentioned some cassette tapes of dad’s from the 1970s that she doubted would still work. I rode over to her place and collected the box: there were seven tapes in full. I stayed up late in the night working my way through the ones that didn’t play, until I found one that was from a dinner party in Highgate, London.

  It was dated 1974.

  Dad’s voice … he was here again.

  Recorded at Arthur Boyd’s Highgate house (where dad, mum, Ayala, and Dec were then living), it was dad hosting a dinner party with what I assumed were two Londoners, ‘Bob’ and ‘Val’ (I later discovered it was Robert Southey, who wrote the large Corian obituary, and his first wife, Valerie). Dad sounded in his element, talking about the education books he was writing, the Boyds, France … He was animated, excited, serving up some mussel dish for dinner and chattering to Ayala. Mum barely spoke. I worked my way through another three tapes — a radio interview dad gave when the education book was published, a speech at a cousin’s twenty-first birthday …

  By the final tape, I was a wreck.

  It was from a summer Sunday afternoon — 1980. I must have been three; dad was sixty. He was trying to organise a trip to the swimming pool with me, Ayala, and Dec, playfully urging me to sing, intent on recording my voice.

  Lou, Lou, skip to my Lou …

  Sing a song of sixpence, Lou …

  From what I knew of all his illnesses and ailments, I couldn’t believe how energetic he sounded. Friendly, lively.

  I was shattered from tears when I got up for work the next morning. The man on that tape was a good dad. Affectionate, fun, loving. Interested in history and books and songs, and sharing it all with me. But I’d left him to gather dust in boxes all these years.

  It took months for me to put parts of the letters in any kind of timeline. I’d use my lunch break to return calls to historians, art dealers, galleries, librarians, journalists, cousins. I kept repeating the story to strangers who might offer clues, my throat tugging and pulling while the words formed themselves on repeat: I never knew my dad.

  It was the constant reopening of a wound, to say it out loud. Guilt and grief and loneliness and obsession all got mixed up with an exhausting sense of futility. My workdays became a strangely opposing contrast. During days in the office in the city, I’d stretch out my tasks, trying to work as slowly as possible just to fill in the hours. But before nine and after five and in any break in-between, I was juggling phone calls and emails and library collections and request forms for collections overseas, chasing leads for people who may or may not have still been alive, who may have been linked to dad.

  After numerous lunch-hour trips to the State Library reading room, late-night Wednesdays in the same room, and most weekends spent in library archives, I stopped cycling to work, so that I’d have more time to read my emails on the tram.

  My life became one-dimensional — work, home, library, research. So far I’d found sixteen library collections around the world with material about dad and numerous new books with references to him.

  One place and one name kept appearing and reappearing. In dad’s diaries, his letters, the books in which dad was mentioned: Richard Aldington, the English poet and author who lived in Saint Clair, in France.

  Saint Clair, Le Lavandou. As Melbourne skies went dark with the coming winter, I tried to picture the South of France but came up blank.

  Aldington’s letters to dad were interstate — a seven-hour drive away, in Canberra — and I couldn’t fathom when I’d have time to get up there and read the collection.

  I’d never been so antisocial. But my sense of self was melting, and some of my friendships moved on ground that felt like water.

  All the painful reasons I’d never looked into the boxes before fought with my obsession at the task. Resistance began to show up in careless remarks from friends, reflecting my own thoughts and doubts. When the conversation inevitably wound to this story I was still trying to articulate that was taking all my time, I’d be met with statements like ‘It’s not good to live in the past’ or ‘Why didn’t anyone tell you this before?’ and I found myself wondering, too.

  I became reclusive and quiet, reluctant to share the story with anyone new.

  Even to explain why the library had his diaries made me uncomfortable. The library had paid mum for those papers. Thousands of dollars. I had to keep repeating the knowledge to myself to believe it. It didn’t just shift my view of dad, it shifted my view of myself.

  Dad’s writing is how she’d bought our house. The belief that he’d left us with nothing was wrong. And my understanding of mum and dad’s relationship was also shifting. He’d known Gisèle for twenty years when he met mum, and he hadn’t thought it was possible to have children. Gisèle had been back in Paris because her mum had been ill. Dad had travelled to Paris in 1968 to stay with her for Christmas, returning to Melbourne in late-February 1969. Mum and dad were in the middle of a ‘casual’ affair when mum unexpectedly fell pregnant. Neither mum nor dad had wanted anything more than a brief liaison. Mum had known dad less than a couple of months and, of course, he had still been married.

  I wasn’t just learning of dad, I was learning of mum — and why she’d never spoken about his life. She’d barely known him. The mum I’d heard in the background of those cassette tapes in London and Australia was the mum I’d grown up with: serious, anxious, tired. When she’d been alive, I’d just thought that was her personality. And it wasn’t until now, years later, that I could reflect on the contrast with dad’s enthusiasm and gregariousness, and why my parents had always seemed such a strange match. No wonder mum had never talked happily — or even openly — about living in London and Europe with dad. The depression in her voice on the cassette recording was audible.

  All I ever remembered her saying about the years she spent in Europe with dad was that it was freezing cold.

  It became harder and harder to talk with friends, even close ones, because unravelling the truth about my parental stories was excruciatingly deep and painful. Some friends understood with minimal explanation; others fell by the wayside.

  When one said he’d rather watch a game of cricket than read his dad’s diaries, I was so hurt I couldn’t talk to him again.

  You know your dad, I thought. What he did, where he went, the major dot points of his life.

  Whether you liked him or not, at least you know.

  I felt grief, as if dad had died all over again, but this time I had to process it as an
adult.

  I’d never really talked about dad’s life in detail with my sister before. I was reluctant to prod her for memories of her childhood, aware that it brought up all her grief, too.

  ‘Well of course who could forget the story of me losing dad’s war medals,’ she said one day when I sat at her table searching through her childhood photos for clues to something else.

  ‘Ay, I didn’t even know he had war medals. When and how did you lose them?’

  We broke into laughter at the insanity of it all. Ayala, locked in tension and guilt at this family story she assumed we all knew. Me, surprised and delighted to hear about dad proudly taking her on the Anzac Day march when she was ten — and on her dress pinning his medals, which then fell off, somewhere on Nicholson Street near the Carlton Gardens.

  After what I’d read about how much he suffered in 1942, I was glad to hear that he even celebrated Anzac Day with his fellow comrades, and, later, his daughter.

  Bugger the medals!

  I must have looked confident in my search, because I was at it every day, but every day I questioned what I was doing. I particularly hated making people uncomfortable — which I knew I did — asking questions about dad. Some of the surviving people who’d known him didn’t give me answers when I asked, and that hurt the most.

  Maybe what I was doing was destructive — pulling his life out of those boxes and forcing other people to look at it, trying to unravel the mess? Why couldn’t I just accept the story that I’d always been told, that he was a failure, that his writing didn’t matter?

  Because I’d uncovered enough from his papers already to know that wasn’t entirely true. And he was me, and I came from him. I didn’t like the feeling of anger it all stirred up in me — anger that I hadn’t been told the truth, or hadn’t questioned it, or something. Anger that all I’d had was that obituary, which focused on his failures. Anger that no one had told me the rest.

  On a Saturday afternoon at my sister’s house, while I was sorting through another box, a friend dropped around to return a book. I had cards strewn out in front of me as I looked, fruitlessly, for records of Gisèle’s mother’s address in Brittany in a futile attempt to send another clue to the French sisters to continue the search.

  The friend came to the back room and looked at dad’s portrait by Arthur Boyd.

  ‘That’s a beautiful Boyd painting,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, it’s dad!’ I said, proudly. That treasure of a painting had become a talisman to ward off thoughts of giving up on dad’s story.

  But she shook her head and left.

  Sitting in my apartment with a wad of the tissues I had to keep on hand since I’d opened the boxes, I emailed Clémentine.

  I just don’t know if I’m doing the right thing. Maybe it’s not right if it makes me — and others — feel so terrible … ?

  Immediately, from Paris, she replied.

  Louisa

  Sometimes people can’t hear about the past, they don’t know how to deal with it … or it disturbs them. But don’t let their behaviour damage your research. What you’re going through is so important. It’s your dad, your roots … It’s a gift to have that opportunity, a gift for you and for your dad. Don’t doubt it, ok?

  Follow your intuition, Denison is guiding you Louisa … You’re finding so many beautiful and meaningful things.

  I know the importance of it. What you’re discovering is huge.

  One other thing: Michelle was very intelligent and she saw something special in your dad.

  Lots of love …

  I trudged along at work, tired and sensitive, clinging to my emails from Clém and what I’d already uncovered of dad’s life to remind me that there was beauty in among the pain.

  Our office was sent on an all-day training seminar, organised to help foster better verbal communication with members of the Indigenous community. The training involved learning to use the right types of language to connect with their history and be culturally sensitive to their historical situation.

  The woman who took our day’s training bravely told us her family story, which, like that of many Indigenous Australians, was a harrowing tale. A member of the Stolen Generations, she was a living, breathing reminder of our government’s fairly recent decision to take Indigenous children from their families and force them to assimilate in a white family, far from their kin. This woman hadn’t even known who her blood father was until after he’d died.

  When we finished work that day, I walked straight to the State Library to make the most of their last two hours open. Her story had given me perspective on this huge privilege of sitting at the library — even if it could be painful.

  I found a book I suspected might have something of dad in it in the larger reading room. It was written by Alister Kershaw. Since I’d learned they both ‘escaped’ Australia within months of each other, I suspected there might be more about dad in Kershaw’s memoirs of living in France.

  The book, The Pleasure of Their Company, held tales of Melbourne bohemia and Paris life at the Hotel Floridor. Dad was there, written of in most chapters, relevant to the entire book, transforming the Hotel Floridor into ‘Little Australia’ at one point when Kershaw and Geoff Dutton moved in. And there were fascinating stories about his life in Saint Clair, including a tale of a man who arrived, pretending to be a Count, and swindled the entire seaside village.

  This was the seventh new book I’d found that referenced dad since first receiving Coralie’s message about Michelle. It was clear there were more.

  Something about the photo on the cover of the book was familiar, and when I double-checked at home, where I now held the massive pile of dad’s unchronicled black-and-white photos, I realised it was from a strip of photos dad had taken in Paris outside a bistro in the 1950s. I’d always wondered who the people were. According to the book, they were the tribe from the Floridor, including the hotelier Louis Marandou, sitting outside over a drink.

  One of dad’s photos, one that had sat blankly at the bottom of a pile, until now an inexplicable mystery — was on the cover.

  Maybe that was enough. Maybe it was enough to know how and where he’d served in World War II, about the Hotel Floridor, that dad had loved France. Maybe one day I’d get to visit the Hotel Floridor and meet the French sisters. Maybe … I still couldn’t bring myself to book a ticket to Paris.

  The money was too much, I’d have to use my credit card, he squandered three fortunes … I feared I was too much like dad. It all felt too risky.

  The supposed Nolan painting had proven to be another dead end. The experts I’d contacted had all said Nolan didn’t go through a portrait phase.

  Maybe it was time to stop searching, to focus on the here and now. Get back to my old self, whoever that was, pay attention to Melbourne in 2016. Get out of the boxes.

  But I just couldn’t let dad’s story go.

  On Sunday, I crept out of my apartment to try to cure my blues. I had to leave home despite the incessant rain, because my downstairs neighbour had been screaming and bashing the roof for over an hour. I’d called the police and didn’t want to be there when they turned up. I should have looked for a new place to live, but I felt frozen. I’d worked so hard to save that money — it was supposed to be for France, not moving house.

  My life felt like it was imploding from its very foundations. Everything I’d felt to be so secure until just a few months ago was suddenly not at all. That apartment, in one of the loveliest areas in inner-city Parkville, had been my home for the last three years. Thanks to one scary neighbor, it now felt like a squalid slum.

  I drove to Northcote and wandered into a second-hand bookshop. A friendly and eccentric older man greeted me at the doorway to the shop, which held paperbacks stacked floor to ceiling in two rooms. I tiptoed around the bookshop, trying not to bump the towers of books. I peeled out a few nonfiction titles from one shelf, op
ening one on the science of memory, which filled me with story ideas I wanted to scrawl down. I suddenly missed freelance writing and felt relieved my contract in the city was coming to an end.

  I put down the book and moved to the back of the shop, flicking through some poetry and a stack of Australian memoirs. Ninette Dutton. Nin. I recognised the name from dad’s diaries. Geoffrey Dutton had been dad’s other close friend in Melbourne. Like Alister Kershaw, he’d pursued a literary life.

  Ninette picked me up from the train, dad had written.

  Geoff, Ninette’s husband, had enlisted with the RAAF in 1942, had been dad’s friend since Geelong Grammar.

  I paid the sweet man at the counter for Ninette’s memoir, then dodged pellets of rain to get to the car. Once home, I opened the book on my kitchen table.

  There, in the collection of photos in the middle of the book, was dad.

  Denison Deasey, Saint Clair, 1949.

  The tuberculosis, the South of France … I calculated the date — it must have been taken the month before he met Michelle.

  I’d never seen that photo before in my life.

  I googled Ninette, who had died many years earlier, it seemed, but her diaries were also in the National Library, in Canberra. I stayed up until midnight reading the book from cover to cover, learning more and more about dad, and that time in Saint Clair. A fisherman’s boat to an island, an idyllic retreat with a poet in the South of France … The affection with which she wrote of dad filled something in me, so that I felt just as I had with Michelle’s letters, as though she was a long-lost aunt sitting me down and telling me about my dad.

  The photos in the middle of the book explained more of what was in our family collection, particularly the photos of the Duttons in London. I was sure Geoff and Ninette had met Michelle, had been the friends they’d met at the club in 1949. And the photos taken in Saint Clair gave me names and dates.

  An artist herself, Ninette had found inspiration in the South of France for one of her first series of lithographs, and in her memoir she described Richard Aldington, and dad, and life in Saint Clair. One chapter chronicled a boat trip with dad to the island of Port Cros. I looked at my collection of photos, of which about ten were taken on that exact day.