A Letter from Paris Read online

  Letters from famous artists were mixed in with a Paris hotel receipt, a postcard from Gisèle with an outline for a radio script or a snapshot of dialogue from a pub in London in the post-war years.

  Just looking at the inventory on screen brought back a memory I forgot I had.

  In dad’s house, he always had a big notebook by his side.

  His bookshelves were full of spilled-out folders, with papers stacked high, under and over hardback books. Even the smell of the library took me back to him, that sense of academia, the fascination with higher concepts mixed with amusement at the mundane, scribbling away on any piece of paper he could find — the backs of envelopes if they were nearby and he found it too painful to get out of bed or his chair.

  While I stared at the screen, searching for dates and times in folders that each needed a separate request slip, a memory of mum pushed through at the same time that I remembered dad.

  ‘You’ve taken up the entire page!’ she’d said grumpily over the phone, only slightly joking. After moving to Sydney from Melbourne, I was up to my fifth change of address and phone number.

  Mum liked things to be neat and tidy. But by age twenty-two, I’d filled up the whole ‘D’ section in her old-fashioned address book, and she had to start putting me in ‘E’.

  Oh, mum. I remembered how well she organised everything. Tears threatened to surface. No wonder. How desperate she would have been to hand over the load when dad had died — the hugeness and the messiness of his life, her inability to quickly sort it into a methodical pile.

  ‘Why do you need to see 1949?’ the librarian asked suspiciously, puncturing my reverie. I felt unmasked.

  She was young — my age, maybe. I decided to trust her. How else could I put it?

  ‘Well, I received this email from Paris …’

  My head spun just trying to articulate the story, hearing it come out of my mouth in a mixture of old and modern words forming a strange sentence: ‘This woman’s grandmother dated my dad in 1949 … in London … and that’s … that’s my dad’s papers … so I want to find anything he may have written about her …’

  She shrugged, uninterested, not bothering to reply.

  ‘You can only request five boxes at a time. You need to sign each of these slips. If I get the order in now, they’ll be waiting for you in the Heritage Reading Room by 11.00 a.m. And you’ll have to put your things in a locker — you can’t take any photos. Turn your phone off or put it on silent.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘And no pens allowed in the room.’

  She clicked the screen shut and turned away.

  My mind was on 1949, still trying to figure out what dad was doing in London, where he lived, and how he’d come to get there, trying to remember what I’d seen on the inventory on the screen. Had I imagined it, or did one of the folders say ‘photographs’ from the 1940s? Also — why did the folder seem to span Paris, as much as London? As well, I saw Vienna, Zurich, Dublin, Germany, Spain, and various other cities and countries on the description of diary entries and places visited in those late-1940s years.

  I looked at my phone: it was ten fifteen. With forty-five more minutes to wait before dad’s boxes arrived, I walked through the library. Past Family History and Newspapers, I detoured into Arts, finding an empty chair under a lamp to put down my bag. Quiet, cool, and less busy than the larger library rooms, I could forget the pace and noise of the city, the summer life outside.

  I felt a strange mixture of intimacy and formality, as though I was about to meet a member of my family for the first time. In the background was sadness, too. The sense of futility that he was gone, and what was I doing, unearthing his life when I’d never have him back anyway?

  I stood up to look through the shelves of books, flicking through Mirka Mora’s Wicked but Virtuous, remembering an encounter with the French artist back when I’d been waitressing at Florentino’s.

  She had known dad. She’d told me so. But even then, I hadn’t followed up. Something she’d said had frightened me, and I couldn’t recall what it was. I made a note to look into my old diary, to remember.

  Alongside Mirka Mora’s autobiography was a book of letters from Sidney Nolan to Albert Tucker. Tucker, like Nolan, had been one of Australia’s most famous modernist artists and a member of the Heide circle. Remembering the photo of the day before, when I saw there was an index I searched for dad’s name.

  There it was:

  Deasey, Denison: 70, 71, 72, 73, 245.

  I tore ahead to the first page, a letter from Albert Tucker to Sidney Nolan — dated June 1947.

  … Deasey’s in Dublin. Got TB on the boat ride over …

  This information was more to comprehend than the fact that he’d lived in London in the post-war years. Dad had tuberculosis when he was only twenty-six? I hadn’t known you could recover from that. And — how had he wound up in Dublin, particularly if he was so sick?

  Nolan wrote back, asking Tucker to give his regards, referencing dad’s earlier years and their friendship in Melbourne.

  Dad had known Nolan — and Tucker. Perhaps that painting we had the photo of still existed somewhere? The notion seemed ludicrous — almost as ludicrous as the painting by Arthur Boyd, which had, in fact, proved real.

  I tried to keep the three new pieces of information separate: Dad being close friends with Sidney Nolan, and Albert Tucker; that he once had TB …

  But it hurt my head.

  If the photo we had was a painting by Nolan, maybe that was the one mum had thought gone? Burned in the Ash Wednesday bushfires in Macedon, or sold when he’d hit hard times?

  Maybe mum had even sold the painting when dad had died? I didn’t know how she managed to scramble together enough money to buy the house we moved into the following year. All I knew was that mum always had that worried money face.

  I guessed that to mean he’d left us nothing.

  There was that sense of shame, again.

  Dad had done something wrong, and I couldn’t put my finger on it. It was tied into his open-handed attitude to art, or creativity.

  It was a wound I carried inside, a sense of failure about pursuing life as a freelance writer, like it was inherently wrong that I could do nothing else.

  It was all wrapped up in my impression that dad, the only other writer in my family, had been a failure, too. That his and my attitudes to art, creativity, relationships, life — were somehow too out-there. A bit cracked. A little broken.

  Why couldn’t I stick at boring things, stay in a good job for a good institution, and just think of the money like a ‘normal’ person? Why was I so obsessed with creative freedom?

  Failure. Dilettante. Amateur … Wasted three fortunes … The words mixed and swam with the new information from the Nolan and Tucker book.

  My head hurt.

  Perhaps there was a Nolan portrait of dad out there in a gallery, still … ?

  I snatched photos of the letters with my phone, texting them to Ayala and Dec. I’m not in the manuscripts yet — just saw this in a book on the shelf, I typed. He did know Nolan … and Tucker.

  Then I went to look at the boxes.

  At eleven o’clock, I walked to the Heritage Reading Room, past the Victorian portrait gallery and up the stairs. Swallowing deeply, I was aware I was about to reopen a wound. It felt fated and necessary, much like a family funeral, sombre and threatening and like I was about to come face-to-face with dad’s face in a coffin like I had in 1984.

  All the ideas I’d had about dad rested on what others had deigned to tell me. I’d caught snickers and snatches over the years — the repetition of certain words, those contrasting impressions of awe and shame, but mostly silence.

  But private letters and personal diaries don’t lie. This was the first time I would have the freedom to make up my own mind. Yet that terrified me, to reassess everything I’d unc
onsciously believed for over three decades. What if all his diaries did was confirm that he was, indeed, a failure?

  That he did leave so much ‘unfinished’?

  This could be a disappointing task, and maybe I’d have nothing to give the French family.

  I have to try to find Michelle, I said to myself, marching forward. Romance. The idea of the romance pushed me forward. I remembered Coralie’s picture, and I thought of Paris.

  ‘Yes?’ a disapproving older woman looked down her glasses and opened the glass doors as I pressed the buzzer.

  ‘Can I help you?’ she said when I made it to the counter. The archive boxes marked DEASEY were in a shelf behind her. She wasn’t smiling.

  ‘Yes! I have an appointment. I’ve requested some boxes …’

  ‘Have you been here before?’

  ‘Um … no, I don’t think so.’ I looked around. The room didn’t look familiar at all. I wondered if my failed attempt twelve years earlier had been somewhere else.

  She didn’t make any move towards dad’s boxes.

  ‘Are you aware this is a partially restricted collection?’

  ‘Yes. Well, it’s my dad’s manuscripts. My mum was the contact, but she died —’

  ‘It doesn’t matter whose collection it is, these papers are library property. I’m going to need to see some identification.’

  I kept my mouth closed while a visceral feeling of grief and anger filled my chest.

  ‘You can’t take any photos with your phone. You’re aware of that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I pulled out my library card, filling out two more forms and collecting a locker key, putting everything inside except my large spiral-bound diary and some pens.

  ‘You can use one of these pencils to write.’ The librarian pointed to a box of tiny blunt pencils. ‘No pens.’

  I grabbed one of the miniature pencils, putting away my biros, and she finally moved towards the boxes. The room was large, cold, and silent. Not being able to drink water in that room was a bit strange, but understandable, though it really threw me not being able to write anything down in pen. I hadn’t written in pencil since I was a child.

  ‘There’s a lot of folders in this one box, so you can only have one box at a time.’

  Fine, I felt like snapping, nodding instead. Just give me my dad’s papers.

  She placed one archive box down on the large table at the front of the room, where she could keep her beady eyes on my movements, and I moved the box directly in front of my notebook for some privacy. I wanted to be able to silently text my sister or see messages without her knowing.

  But I didn’t text Ayala that first day. For the next six hours, I was like a miner with a headlamp, chipping through a tunnel. I didn’t bother writing anything down in my notebook with the stumpy little pencil, either.

  I just read, and read, and read.

  (from the diaries of Denison Deasey)

  London 1949

  Afternoon at the National Gallery among the Italian paintings. Returned by tube to Regent’s Park, ascended into light and walked up the horrible Albany Road towards the butchers for my microscopic ration (two chops for the week, fit in my pocket.)

  Heart heavy from the change from the gallery, I spy a small boy clutching a bottle of milk toddling towards me. I was astonished to see that he was approaching me and saying something;

  ‘What is it, me lad?’ I says.

  With a confident, doleful note he says ‘lead me across the road, please Mister …’

  Feeling vastly flattered at being mistaken for a confident crosser of London death-roads I drop a line for him to take a hold of and a small grubby fist clutches it. Gravely we traverse the road and part as do the oldest of mates, without a word.

  What a thrill is the slightest touch of humanity!

  Paris, 1948

  As night fell on my second day in Paris, I left my room to walk, and chose the Boulevard Saint Michel, and was soon passing many bright cafes and looking at the smartly dressed ‘artists’ who inhabit them.

  There, for example, was a man with a well-made tweed suit. But he had sinned by growing a beard — eccentric fellow. His eyes were interesting, though, something familiar about them. The bearded head was bent over a large plate of saucissons, and the artistic jaws chomped steadily.

  I stood still for a moment, as I realized that I knew the face, that it was Bert Tucker, no doubt the only other person I might know in Paris, but whose address I had no idea.

  I tapped him on the shoulder, and the sight of my face sent a saucisson or two down the wrong way. His mouth dropped open and stuck there for a few seconds. We exchanged mutual noisy Australian greetings. What a droll business, to stroll down a boulevard and find the exact man you had hoped to find, casually, munching a sausage and disguised by a beard. We both felt very joyful, on each other’s account, because we were each in Paris. I congratulated Bert, and then he me, for being away from England and in the beautiful city.

  For 1949, I would need to consult numerous boxes — and each box contained ten or twenty folders, overlapping with 1948, 1947, sometimes 1951 or later.

  Each folder might hold a series of letters containing references to people I would have to hold a history degree to decipher, or it might hold a draft of a story for which I didn’t know the context. And dad’s handwriting — usually in pencil — was another hieroglyphic code entirely.

  It would take me hours of reading just to understand dad’s M’s, the scrawl that meant ‘art’, the initials he used for his friends. That ‘B.T’ was Albert Tucker, ‘Al’ was Alister Kershaw, and ‘A’ was Arthur Boyd. But who was ‘T’? Who was ‘R.A’? Who was ‘G’? Who was ‘Nin’?

  To read the entire span of 1949 seemed as though it would take months of research, for all the disparate references I struggled to understand. Famous literary names mingled with European places and snatches of dialogue so intriguing I wished I could devote the whole day to uncovering one identity, reading endless Wikipedia entries to make sense of it all.

  1949 was so much more than Michelle and London — it was the South of France, a trip to Vienna where he looked for a flat and met a prince, references to poets and painters, and an endless battle to get English pounds or French or Swiss francs and food. A concert at Royal Albert Hall in London, a trip to Florence in Italy, psychoanalysis with a Jungian analyst in a place he called ‘The Quiet Room’ in London to deal with his ‘problem’ from the war.

  Was it PTSD?

  How do you look at one year of someone’s life without looking at everything that led to that point?

  The effects of World War II were everywhere in dad’s writing. Tiny pats of butter after a long queue in London. An account of trying to replace his ration book after having to surrender the original to the boarding-house owner, and being denied. Endless lists of foods and their costs, and wondering if he’d survive the endless hunger when he was still clearly sick from TB.

  References to the ‘bleakness’ of London, even after they’d won the war, because everyone was starving and many of the buildings were destroyed. But in stark contrast was the Art that fed him, the galleries and culture, the delight of being in England, finally, writing about how even the poorest Londoners knew so much more about history and music than even the most well-educated Australians.

  And all this assumed knowledge of the war …

  References to ‘the time in the Territory’, to the death they’d all narrowly escaped from the war years.

  I realised, while reading, I didn’t even know how or where or when dad had served. I knew the vague outline of his biography: born in 1920, studying at Melbourne University when World War II broke out, married briefly in Melbourne in 1946 … Where and how had he served?

  And when did he go to London?

  Trying to make anything chronological interrupted the flow of j
ust letting myself be carried along by his writing. It was so honest, so filled with emotion, with so much feeling.

  London, 1948

  Back to the tube, back to my district. A half-hour walk brings me to the grocer and the butcher. The grocer looks at me suspiciously, ‘no, we have no eggs …’ I find the butcher. Closed. No word of explanation. Clutching a piece of butter the size of a matchbox, I totter home and cook a cup of coffee. Only the milkman doesn’t come … I have to post my milk registration card to the dairy … Two chops for one week. Unrationed food (rice in tins) is on points.

  Later return for eggs — get two. ‘Persistent, aren’t you?’

  I felt like Gabin when the little man pushed his face in the soup. Persistent, yes one does become persistent in keeping alive even at the cost of tracking monotonously back to that cockney trollop’s milk shop.

  The London buses roar down the Marylebone Road …

  Handwritten papers helped me get the sense that I was travelling with him in his first months abroad, and wild enthusiasm mixed with references to famous names I knew vaguely but had yet to absorb their significance.

  There were descriptions of drinking at The George in Soho, where South African poet Roy Campbell introduced dad to his ‘mate’ Dylan Thomas, who was ‘morose and only drank pints’, then another random introduction on Oxford Street to Louis MacNeice, whose poetry dad had read and loved as a student in Melbourne.

  Then we were on a train in Germany — dad had an unexplained broken leg, but there was a kind Russian who let him travel despite his expired documentation.

  The writing was of a different time: when phones were telephones and cars were motorcars and anything involving swift travel or currency or communication cost a fortune.

  And always — the references to the lack of food.

  He recorded everything on paper because he had to — letters were the only way to convey a message, and diaries were his way of processing the enormous shift his life took after he caught what he referred to as a ‘hell-ship’ to London. The ship that gave him tuberculosis.

  London, in the immediate aftermath of World War II, sounded a grim place to be, despite the glamour described in Michelle’s letters. It seemed dad had done the hard yards in his two years there before he met Michelle, undergoing the requisite ‘introductions’ to become a member of the naval and military club on Pall Mall that had proved so seminal to her letters.