A Letter from Paris Read online

  Ayala continued translating the French letters out loud, wringing her hands anxiously. Her shoulders tensed.

  ‘You could go to the State Library, Lou’ she said, verbalising what I knew was inevitable. The only way I could try to find out more about Michelle.

  Dec looked at the floor and left the room with a dramatic ‘I’m out.’

  My sister’s work had been storing the heavy archive in one place for so many years. Dad’s records and photos took up a huge part of her study, as well as the bookshelves in the living room. I knew how complicated it all made her feel.

  Dec, too, had made a giant effort to try to sort the photos into some sort of order. Both of them had done what they did best — my sister worked as an archivist in global records management; her expertise was storing and preserving significant documents. Dec had spent months creating a system for the boxes. Perhaps my job was to investigate the material in the State Library?

  I had tried to look at dad’s library collection once, and this was maybe why Ayala wrung her hands, remembering the sobbing call I’d made from the steps ten years earlier.

  I’d been twenty-seven at the time, researching a story on haunted buildings for a magazine, visiting the library’s archives for some reference documents. I thought to type dad’s name while I was there. I just wanted to know — how many diaries were there?

  In my first year living as a freelance writer, I had wondered about his career. I wanted to know how and where he worked, how he wrote, what he did and where. I knew he’d been a writer, even if he had only ‘finished’ one book that I knew about — Education Under Six.

  Aside from that one published book, there was a biography of an Australian explorer left half-finished when he died. Other than that, his career had largely been a mystery, filled with those echoing words failure, dilettante, unfinished, words I’d read or heard before I could even comprehend what they meant or question where they’d come from.

  … there was something in Denison’s nature which prevented him from finishing a work, had been written in one of his obituaries.

  But asking to see the boxes was weird. I must have asked for the one box that was on the restricted list, with documents from mum and dad’s separation.

  Why were they even in the library? I’d never found out.

  Aside from the Arthur Boyd connection, the only other reason I thought dad’s stuff might be in the library was because of the material he’d compiled on explorer Peter Egerton-Warburton for the unfinished manuscript — I thought the library must have wanted the research material for reference.

  But when I’d been at the library that day, the woman at information told me to wait, and a different man had to be summoned before she should even make the request. Nothing about the process was quick or easy.

  I had to sign a lot of documents, almost like I was asking for something to be excavated from a tomb. I’d begged the librarians not to call my mum, because she was the person who needed to approve any readers for the restricted collection.

  They didn’t call her, but when I was wheeled over a trolley full of dozens of huge boxes, which only covered 1981, I had a feeling of panic at the size of the material. Why had I asked to see 1981? It was when mum and dad were going through the family court to separate. I’d felt so incompetent, so untrained to deal with such a story. It was more written material than I’d ever had to process — I had no idea where to start.

  Was this how lawyers felt, having to prepare a case overnight from a story that required years of background research?

  The trolley held reams of diaries, typed accounts of things, shopping lists — even a photo of me fell out of one of the folders, with dad’s handwriting on the back. It took hours to even read through one folder of material. It was so complex, so unsorted. And that was only one year of his life. I felt like I had to make a decision about who was telling the truth about dad. It was awful.

  The court documents from mum and dad’s separation were harrowing to read, because he desperately wanted us to stay together as a family. God knows how they’d wound up at the library, because other halves of the missing documents were at my sister’s house. I guess mum just handed it over in that messy, big year after he died — so much paperwork.

  So many notebooks.

  Oh, dad.

  I’d never understood why they split up, or why they were even together in the first place. I could never ask mum, sensing pain and guilt so taut she might snap if I’d asked. Dad was twenty-seven years older than mum; all I knew was that they met at Monash University when she was studying and he worked in the History Department. Aside from us, mum seemed regretful about the relationship — or something. I never could understand it.

  Why had she left him? What had they ever had in common? He seemed gripped by sadness, and there were endless letters begging mum to return with us, alongside matter-of-fact statements from mum citing missing clothes or late drop-offs as proof of his incompetence as a father.

  Mum was an introvert who, despite her unusual leanings, craved routine and stability, not wanting travel or wild escapades, especially when you added three young children to the mix. She had always been such a practical parent: everything about the way she raised us was timed and planned and budgeted and sorted to the nth degree.

  But one thing I never understood about mum was how she treated even the smallest details of life like she was battling for the Resistance — she always planned for, and expected, the absolute worst. She had impossibly high standards for everything — including herself.

  Dad’s style of living — impulsive and flamboyant and creative and extroverted and amused by the smallest details of daily life — seemed like the complete emotional opposite.

  Perhaps you couldn’t have chosen a less-suited pair.

  Nothing became clear to me, except the sad and complex realisation that they were too different. They couldn’t make it work. Mum had left dad when I was six months old.

  I got the feeling dad hadn’t even thought he could have children until mum fell pregnant with my sister. Perhaps that’s why he was still married to Gisèle when Ayala was born?

  I never did get to any place in my mind where I could see mum and dad in love.

  There was no romance in what I read of their relationship. No joy, no fun. Just dad’s longing for mum to come back with us — his children — as he faced death and sickness on his own, and mum’s dogged determination that she could do better raising us solo, resolutely refusing to be vulnerable and return to live with dad.

  I felt sorry for them both, and I felt annihilated by my grief. Opening those boxes of papers was pointless and futile.

  My sister knew how awful that trip had left me feeling. How I’d wept and wailed about dad’s sad final years separated from us and mum, the cancer which had been causing him pain for years undiagnosed until the final hour. I couldn’t bear the feeling that he’d been in pain, alone, and feeling unloved when he died.

  That’s what the boxes stirred up in me — memories of dad’s death, intense sadness at how his life ended, anger at mum for keeping us from him when he didn’t have long left on the earth anyway.

  But there were also precious pieces of my own connection with dad jumbled in there. On the backs of hymn booklets from Sunday church were scraps of dialogue from me and Dec on our fortnightly visits. Louie insists on changing socks and putting lemonade in coco pops … Diary entries on a trip we’d taken to the country and funny words said, delight at our childhood personalities and how they formed, even though he surely would have been in a lot of physical pain.

  Out fell a drawing of some crazy outfit I insisted on wearing, a description of Dec’s Irish temperament coming out in a game with the neighbour, notes on Ayala’s stubbornness … alongside a plaintive prayer that mum would return to him and we could all be together as a family again.

  Those prayers hurt my heart
.

  I’d learned nothing of the life he’d led before I was born. Dad had loved us, but he was dead. Why read that stuff again?

  I hadn’t returned to the library after that trip: it was just too huge and broken and emotionally difficult, even if the boxes I hadn’t seen may have held some stories that didn’t hurt.

  Looking in those archival boxes was like putting your hands into a box of snakes and hoping you wouldn’t get bitten finding a specific grain of sand.

  Dad was dead, and now mum was, too. Mum’s death had come in such a way that I’d had to accept she may not have seen the truth about life — or even dad — for most of it.

  She’d been such a protective, practical mum when she’d been alive. But she’d also struggled with depression and had some strange versions of events that weren’t based in reality.

  I wondered, now, if the version she’d given us of dad had been accurate.

  Sean broke my reverie, standing at the door jangling the keys, with the kids waiting outside in their soccer boots. Ayala looked at me before she followed them all to the car.

  ‘Just request to see anything from 1949,’ she warned me, as fearful of the snakes as me.

  ‘Okay. I’ll let you know if I find Michelle,’ I said, waving them all off, staying at her kitchen table with the photos spread out before me, reluctant to leave.

  I wondered how long it would take to sort through the 1949 material at the library, whether or not it was even dated. Would there even be any pages from 1949?

  I turned over another of the photos on the table, a small black-and-white photo of a portrait painting of dad, some trees behind it, as though it had been painted outdoors. Pencilled on the back of the photo was ‘portrait of dad by Sidney Nolan?’

  The notion was crazy. Nolan had been one of Australia’s most famous modernist artists, a member of the Heide circle, known for his depictions of bush life in Australia, most famously the Ned Kelly series.

  Yet I wandered into the living room, where an Arthur Boyd portrait hung protectively over the room.

  Dad.

  I’d found the original painting in an online catalogue of the National Gallery of Australia just a year before. The portrait was of dad aged eighteen.

  Mum had mentioned the painting just before she died. A writer had contacted her, saying Boyd had talked of the portrait, and wondered if mum had the painting. But mum assumed the painting had been destroyed, as the Ash Wednesday fires that swept through Macedon cindered most of dad’s family keepsakes the year before he died.

  But something had gripped me, and I’d scoured the internet one night in a frenzy, remembering a link a friend had once sent that I’d accidentally deleted, and randomly deciding to follow it up.

  A cosmic collection of forces led to that discovery — from the gallery’s digitisation and the descriptions in Darleen Bungey’s book, to Boyd happening to have written dad’s name and the date on the back of the actual painting, which was now housed in the National Gallery. Ten pages deep in a Google search, I found it.

  Man Kneeling.

  Denison Deasey. 1938.

  After I’d forwarded the online link to Ayala and Dec in a blur of wonder, Ayala had ordered a print of the painting.

  Three months later, it arrived.

  And Ayala had it framed and hung in the living room.

  A quick sketch done at night with a thick brush by an outdoor fire, Boyd had said when describing the painting in Bungey’s book. In oils of green and brown, dad is kneeling over something, his features clearly shown.

  The stories the painting told of dad and Boyd — their sensitive relationship, dad’s look of intensity — made it precious to me. That it had been stored in a gallery all these years made it even more special. Where it couldn’t burn or get lost … and where we could eventually find it.

  I stared up at dad, still getting used to seeing him on a wall in my sister’s house. Maybe we’d called him in by giving this painting such pride of place?

  This painting had been a gift, and a clue to a bigger life than the one I had known of. Like Michelle’s letters, it hinted at a life linked to art and artists, war, Europe, and a time in Australia when life was so conservative that people such as dad and the Boyds and their contemporaries had to struggle to find like-minded friends — when bohemia was a radical idea.

  But the main reason I appreciated the painting was that it lessened the feeling of shame. A little.

  If dad had been loved by someone sensitive like Arthur Boyd, perhaps he wasn’t the ‘failure’ I’d thought he was?

  Arthur Boyd couldn’t have known, as they both sat by that fire, that almost eight decades later we’d be reading his brushstrokes for secrets to an unknown father. What a miracle, that he’d donated that painting to the gallery. It was the clearest impression we had of dad as a teenager, but it had been so tucked away.

  Perhaps the library would hold similar treasures?

  I tried to be excited, but the memory of that awful visit in 2004 and how sad it had made me feel filled me with dread. What snakes could strike out, what pain might I find?

  Stick to 1949, I repeated as I rode home, steeling myself like a boxer about to enter a ring full of ghosts.

  Part Two

  Art

  Chapter Five

  Serpents

  On Monday morning, Melbourne was bustling. Late summer, in the first week of February, and everyone was returning from holidays, the new working year just begun and the sun high and bright. The city was full of promise and new beginnings.

  But I was anxious and distracted, full of endings, the complete opposite. I couldn’t bear the thought of bumping into anyone I knew. Everyone’s happiness contrasted wildly with my feeling of foreboding and confusion; I was unsure where the year was headed or what I was doing with my life — or what painful surprises this trip to the library might yield.

  I walked up the stone steps to the grand neoclassical entrance of State Library Victoria without looking sideways in case I lost my nerve. This was Australia’s oldest public library — and one of the first free public libraries in the world. I’d always loved writing in the circular, domed reading room. Libraries have always been my church; the eternal nature of books and words, and the silence and peace of those rooms full of scratching pens and deep thought, had comforted me through so many life changes. But today it felt very different.

  The doors were locked, so I went to a nearby cafe to fill the minutes until opening. At Mr Tulk, the cafe on the ground floor that doubles as a walkway from the street to the library, I ordered a coffee, recognising a friend from an old job and lowering my face so he wouldn’t see me. I took my coffee to the hidden archway near the library’s steps to read my emails, trying to calm my anxiety.

  Coralie had messaged again in the night, bolstering me for the search. She seemed to care as much about the story of dad as she did about seeing a photo of Michelle and Buckingham Palace. She didn’t seem to want or expect anything, other than to have found me and made our connection.

  You are on the other side of the world, these letters were written decades ago, and they tell us so much about people we love. To us it’s our grandmother. We discover through these letters that she wasn’t too different to us when she was 20 years old, living in London …

  To you and your family, it must be interesting to see what a charming man your dad was. Such a gentleman …

  That Coralie understood such a sensitive situation, yet also seemed to believe dad was someone special, filled me with a new sense of pride that his papers were inside this historic building. When the crowd moved as the doors finally opened, I walked straight to the library’s information section. Part of me was excited, like I was about to start a treasure hunt for Michelle. Romance, courtship, dashing days in London … fun and glamour and young love, all those things that had been missing from his relatio
nship with mum. But the other part of me was apprehensive, the word failure whispering faintly from somewhere buried deep.

  ‘I’d like to request to look at a particular collection, please … Or — a part of a collection, if that’s possible … ?’

  The librarian typed in dad’s name, and pulled up the inventory.

  ‘It’s a large collection. It will take a while to load.’

  She seemed surprised at my interest in her computer screen, the little mouse in a circle of thinking as we waited.

  ‘How many pages is the inventory?’ I asked her, when it had finally loaded.

  ‘Um, let’s see …’ She clicked for what felt like minutes. ‘Forty-four.’

  Forty-four pages. Dear God. Thinking I could confine my search to 1949 was clearly stupid.

  On screen, in each folder description, I saw that years were scattered non-chronologically, along with names, dates, and locations. Letters, books, and manuscripts had been dropped in boxes throughout the collection. Some of it wasn’t even categorised: the folder would simply say, ‘typed manuscripts … recollections’.

  I groaned inwardly at the task ahead of me. Dad’s material wasn’t just a couple of clearly dated notebooks.

  Or even — as Michelle’s letters seemed to be — a small, precise sketch of a year in time. Neat and decipherable, wrapped in ribbon, sitting in a room in Paris. She’d even annotated which ones mentioned ‘Denison’, to make it easy for the family when they found them.

  Dad’s manuscript collection at the library was a chaotic, massive jumble of pages and papers, including letters, diaries, photos, and manuscripts covering the entire span of his sixty-four years on earth. I’d been too distracted when I looked at 1981, and I’d never seen the description of the inventory in detail. There were hundreds of manuscripts in there. Were they all unpublished?

  Short stories. Book drafts. TV scripts. Radio plays. Memoirs. Poetry.