Praise for My Hundred Lovers
‘A remarkable achievement, a genuine masterpiece of sensuality and an absorbing and very personal experience, like reading someone’s beautifully poetic and honest diary.’ Meanjin
‘The pleasures of bathing, cycling, Paris and song are threaded through memories of unrequited love, unrealised longing and lovers.’ Canberra Times
‘My Hundred Lovers is an original imagining of one woman’s waning flesh and the vibrant imprint of a life it still holds.’ The Age
Praise for The Broken Book
‘Both very Australian and resoundingly international, The Broken Book confirms Johnson’s status as one of the finest Australian writers . . . fiercely beautiful.’ The Australian
‘A bold narrative, in which we’re constantly reminded by the quality of her prose that this is an imaginative work . . . It’s a kaleidoscope of memory, jagged and disordered as the artist’s tragic life.’ Canberra Times
Praise for Life in Seven Mistakes
‘Feeling, insight, rambunctious wit.’ New York Times Book Review
‘She has a knack for presenting what can be unbearable in reality, of rendering it on the page with tremendous heart.’ Sydney Morning Herald
Susan Johnson was shortlisted for the 1991 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for her novel Flying Lessons, shortlisted for the 1994 National Book Council’s Banjo Award for the novel A Big Life and shortlisted for the National Biography Award 2000 for her memoir A Better Woman. Her other books include Hungry Ghosts, Messages from Chaos, Women Love Sex (editor and contributor) and Life in Seven Mistakes. The Broken Book was shortlisted for the 2005 Nita B Kibble Award, the Best Fiction Book section of the Queensland Premier’s Literary Award, the Westfield/Waverley Library Literary Award, and the Australian Literary Society Gold Medal Award for an Outstanding Australian Literary Work. Her last novel, My Hundred Lovers, was published in 2012 to critical acclaim.
In 2010 she returned from ten years in London to live in Brisbane. She is a feature writer at Qweekend magazine.
ALSO BY SUSAN JOHNSON
FICTION
Latitudes: New Writing from the North (co-editor, 1986)
Messages from Chaos (1987)
Flying Lessons (1990)
A Big Life (1993)
Women Love Sex (editor, 1996)
Hungry Ghosts (1996)
The Broken Book (2004)
Life in Seven Mistakes (2008)
My Hundred Lovers (2012)
NON-FICTION
A Better Woman (1999)
On Beauty (2009)
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
First published in 2015
Copyright © Susan Johnson 2015
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.
‘September 1, 1939’ on p. vii © 1939 by W.H. Auden, renewed.
Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.
Allen & Unwin
83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100
Email:
[email protected] Web: www.allenandunwin.com
Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available
from the National Library of Australia
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ISBN 978 1 76011 393 3
eISBN 978 1 92526 806 5
Internal and cover design by Sandy Cull, gogoGingko
Typeset by Bookhouse, Sydney
Cover photograph: © Ayal Ardon/Trevillion Images
Front cover quote: Daily Advertiser
For Sandra Hogan, encore, friend of my heart
And for Jeff Humphreys, who is loved
A novel—a small tale, generally of love.
DR SAMUEL JOHNSON,
A Dictionary of the English Language
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
W. H. AUDEN,
‘September 1, 1939’
Contents
PART I
1. A NEW WIFE
2. ARIADNE’S THREAD
3. THE WRONG SIDE OF THE LAKE
4. POWER WALKING
5. MARIE ARENE
6. THE ART OF LIFE
7. A DAZZLED WORLD
8. PANTS MAN
PART II
9. BANISHMENT
10. RADIO SYLVIA
11. NEW AUSTRALIAN
12. OUT OF THE CORNER OF ONE EYE
13. A FLY ON THE WALL
14. INVISIBLE FLOWERS
15. POP THE QUESTION
16. A MOIST-EYED LOOK
17. ANYONE WHO WAS ANYONE
18. THE GOOD DOCTOR
PART III
19. A GIRL OF AIR
20. VIVE LA FRANCE!
21. THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF MOTHERS
22. FIGURE, ASLEEP
23. OOH LA LA
24. THE FULL MECHANICS OF A SWIFT DEPARTURE
25. LADY OF THE LAKE
26. NANA NAP
PART IV
27. MUSICAL CHAIRS
28. THE VOICES OF WOMEN
29. A FREE PASS TO HEAVEN
30. LOVE-LONGING
31. INTO HER ARMS
32. ELSEWHERE
33. BREASTFEEDING
PART V
34. HOME AND AWAY
35. LITTLE LUNCH
36. GOOD NEWS, BAD NEWS
37. NOWHERE ON EARTH
38. THIS WOMAN OF MANY HUSBANDS
39. THE BLUE EGG
PART VI
40. CLOUDS UNCOVERING THE MOON
41. PEACE AND LOVE
42. INTIMACY
43. BREATH
44. HOUSE OF LIFE
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
PART
I
ONE
A new wife
If a separated man—about to be divorced—is in possession of a good fortune, must he be in want of a new wife? Jonathan Lott was fifty-five years old and almost a free man, despite his reluctance to relinquish the phrase ‘my wife’, which he had continued to use throughout the two sad years of his separation, even though that nominal wife had run off with a woman. What woman suddenly decides she bats for the other team at the advanced age of forty-six, two children behind her? When Jonathan thought of Sarah now, he thought of her not just as a loss to himself but as a loss to men: her crooked mouth, her tawny loveliness, still tawny, still lovely, though no longer young. He recalled the first time he entered the grandiose dining room of the Brisbane Club, that tall-ceilinged, hallowed place, after Sarah left him—silencing the room or else causing it to erupt into titters or whispers and sotto voce alerts, he can no longer remember which—as one of the bravest moments of his life. Everyone was talking about him, everyone, and yet he walked in. Which senior partner of a prestigious city firm specialising in construction law ever endured
such a public humiliation? Blokes either got caught with their pants down or their wives cuckolded them with their business partners or else they went broke or ran off with inappropriate young women—like Paul Raymond, who left his wife for his neighbours’ daughter, nineteen-year-old Scarlett Collins, the prettiest girl in The Landing, that modest settlement by the great natural lake where Jonathan had a holiday house. Jonathan thought perhaps the only thing Sarah could have done to scandalise the good citizens of The Landing or the Brisbane Club more was to run off with a pretty nineteen-year-old boy waiter.
The Landing was a slender tip of a finger of God’s earth extending out into a magnificent lake, part of a pleasing system of waterways made up of beaches, rivers and fresh and shallow saltwater lakes one hundred and fifty kilometres north of Brisbane. With a population of two hundred and twenty souls, it was a small but proud part of that lucky corner of south-east Queensland, the part growing faster than any other place in the country, attracting newcomers as if there were a goldrush or a mining boom. (As it happened there was a mining boom, but way out west, in that unglamorous sunbaked country where the questing residents of Toorak or Point Piper never ventured.)
Only a few of these newcomers knew about The Landing, nestled as it was in the hinterland of the more glamorous coast, down a perilous bit of road, slightly too far from the restaurants and bars of Noosa’s Hastings Street. It was hillbilly in comparison: a few streetlights and a couple of bitumen roads, kerbed and guttered, but slow and erratic internet and mobile phone coverage and definitely no reticulated water and sewage. There wasn’t even a fashionable coffee shop roasting organic coffee beans exclusively hand-harvested from Honduras Monte Escondido Estate or the remote highlands of Papua New Guinea. The only place to go at The Landing was the Orpheus Hotel, built during that other mining boom, the gold rush of the mid-1800s, and once famous as Nash’s Orpheus Philharmonic Music Hall Hotel.
Jonathan did not like to think of himself as winded by love, but he sometimes thought of those first days after Sarah left him, when he lay gasping in his bed, his heart trying to leap free from the cage of his body. He supposed these were panic attacks, these wild thrashings in the night, when the pump of his own blood seemed to wake him. He could hear the circuitry of his own animation as it were, the tracery of artery and nerve, which only the net of his own skin seemed to prevent from exploding. He had a vision of flying apart into pieces like one of those science experiments, released from the laws of physics and the motions of bodies, his own humbled workings and all the celestial bodies in space, blown, torn, scattered. Sometimes, back then, even when he was wide awake and walking, he had a physical sensation of listing to one side, and had to lean against walls to steady himself. In those early days he suspected a brain tumour or motor neurone disease, some lurking malignancy, trying to fell him. Now, in the car speeding north, Jonathan was loosening his grip on the grief of his impending divorce (which, Sarah had declared the day before, they should get around to finalising), on the pile of building reports and investigations into toxic waste on the Cardwell site, on the emails from women who had designs on him.
Already he could see the Glasshouse Mountains in the distance, named by that homesick Yorkshireman Captain James Cook for their resemblance to the glass-making furnaces and kilns of his native shire. The monstrous hulking mass of Mount Tibrogargan rising still thrilled Jonathan, as it had as a small child. One of his few pleasant memories of his irascible father was driving along the old highway and his dad telling him that the mountain was all that remained of an ancient fossilised gorilla and Jonathan being young enough to believe him. Jonathan could still make out the shape of the ape’s great shoulders and head every time he passed it. On a whim, he turned off the new highway onto the old, just so he could see it again. The mountain’s glacial patience rarely failed to induce a quietening of the incessant chatter and clang within his greying head. Who has not wished to quiet the clatter, to start afresh, renewed, awakened? Who hasn’t yearned to have one’s life spread out once more, a ribbon of endless hope? The great mountain and the ranges behind, the white-sand beaches beyond and the tempting dream were upon Jonathan now, the feeling that somewhere, sometime, he would find a beautiful sanctuary of infinite joy and rest.
The good citizens of The Landing—and even the not-so-good—were universally agreed that The Landing was indeed a peaceful refuge in the wake of relentless life. Jonathan felt it on the impossibly long winding road off the highway that led into The Landing at the moment when he flicked the switch to lower the Audi’s four windows, when the smell of lantana and gum trees and salt air rushed in, together with the squall of white cockatoos and grey and pink galahs, kookaburras, crows, butcherbirds, cicadas, so noisy, so clear, so freeing. He felt it at the first sight of that wide, sweeping view over the trees and across to the The Landing and the vast lake fed by the river, in its turn fed by the sea. Beyond, beyond, ancient sand dunes and, finally, the great swell of the Pacific Ocean, its endless depths spreading halfway across the earth.
Jonathan took his eyes off the road for a moment to take in that first sight of the ocean. He felt his body unclenching and noticed the slow spread of ease down his neck and across his shoulders. Might he—after all—survive the failure of love? And had his love really been a failure? He wasn’t ready yet to think of suitable candidates to replace the love that had for so long been at the heart of his life, despite the apparently endless stream of women figuratively offering to mend his socks. His mind turned to Rosanna, the cast-off wife of Paul Raymond, who ran off with Scarlett, but immediately veered away. He pictured Penny Collins, Scarlett’s embittered, once-beautiful mother, who might be awakened by a kiss—as, indeed, so might he. Did he even need a new wife when he was so stupidly and mistakenly attached to the old?
TWO
Ariadne’s thread
But even paradise feels landlocked to some: to Penny Collins, for example, the divorced mother of The Prettiest Girl in The Landing. Not so long ago Penny herself had been the prettiest girl and also, not so long ago, she had taken herself off, secretly, to an expensive room on Hastings Street, where she lay upon a virginal white sheet and had poison injected into the skin around her eyes and her forehead. Botulism was it? Bacteria? In truth, Penny Collins did not really care what Botox was, except that she hoped it might act like the hand of God, stretching out to stop time. Recently Penny caught herself relishing the idea that even her beauteous daughter, Scarlett, would grow old, even though Scarlett, like everyone young, did not believe this would ever happen to her. Penny accepted Freud’s theory that in the unconscious everyone was convinced of his own immortality.
Penny had once been the most brilliant art student at her small private Brisbane girls’ school, a favourite of the art teacher, who awarded her the school art prize and who predicted she was marked for great things. Penny left St Margaret’s in a blaze of glory, a celebrated figure, with an overheated idea about becoming a good artist—even a great one. But perhaps her ambition outweighed her abilities, or else her perfectionist’s unappeasable eye scuttled what talent she had, for at art college she soon discovered she was no longer the best student—and indeed could not even capture the attention of her teachers. The star students were making conceptual multimedia installations, featuring themselves, or photographing holes in the bitumen of roads, and she was left behind with her paints and figure drawings and nineteenth-century ideas about beauty, which no-one applauded any longer. She was full of self-doubt, forced to recognise that a modicum of talent got you so far and no further, and that while she had imagined she was climbing the mountain, in truth she was only ever at the bottom.
These days, while Penny did not feel herself to be inhabiting the wrong life, not exactly, she felt herself to be in not quite the right place. Her life was made, and she had made it, though she frequently blamed her reliably negative ex-husband, Pete. She had sent him a postcard from her recent visit to the Freud Museum in London. It’s Never Too Late to Have a Hap
py Childhood, the postcard read and she signed her name and drew a happy face beside it. After Freud and his family fled the Nazis, Freud had re-created his Viennese consulting room in the house. On the day of her visit, the famous psychoanalytic couch was draped in a richly coloured Iranian rug, and in the dark room an American woman was weeping openly at the sight of it. Penny thought the woman hysterical; she herself was at the house mainly because of Sigmund’s grandson, the late painter Lucian.
Penny was there in the hope of tracing the line of prodigious talent—Freud’s thickly strewn paint, not strewn in actuality but laid on precisely, truer than flesh, the corpulence of the bodies, spreading out to the edges not only of themselves but to the painting and beyond—for she had once wanted this painting truth for herself. Not so long ago, she had yearned to follow the Ariadne’s thread that would guide her to that point of release where she could express whatever was original in her, that shining point which would allow her to arrange her feelings of fear and wonder, without having to suffer for it, as in life. She wished to breach the disjunction between the forensic acuity with which she comprehended existence—the inchoate mess of tender understanding within her, for her husband and their lost life together, for her ruined daughter, Scarlett, for her maddening, impossible mother, Marie—with the silence that choked her. Penny suspected every human soul shared a desire for expression but, instead of comforting her, this suspicion only made her feel pinched and bad-tempered. She lived with her best words stranded in her throat but, unlike most, the painter Lucian Freud had learned to speak them.
The London visit was Penny’s third trip to Europe. The first had been as a young backpacker who still believed the adolescent dream of destiny, that she had marvellous things of interest within her, her greatness clothed, as yet unrevealed. The second trip, at twenty-five, was a year-long tilt at becoming a serious artist, spent mostly in France, her mother’s birthplace and what she hoped would prove her real home too. But nothing went as planned and she returned, as if waking from a dream, some veil of understanding beginning to be parted, the queasy doubts and concessions of humble, disappointing adulthood becoming faintly visible in the dimness ahead. Her most recent trip to London and the Freud Museum was spur of the moment, booked in a huff when she had grown fed up with seeing Scarlett and her two children—both under three—day after day. Scarlett, dumb to her ruined life! Penny felt overwhelmed by the conflicting pull of serves-Scarlett-bloody-well-right revenge and oh-God-she’s-wasted-her-life pity. How had Penny ended up a bit player in a Freudian drama not of her own fucking making? How had she produced a daughter who clearly had such an enormous daddy complex that she ran away—admittedly not very far—with a man six years older than her own father? Scarlett’s father and Penny’s disappointing ex-husband, Pete, still lived at The Landing, but Penny remained at the family home, next door to that abandoned wife, Rosanna Raymond. It was Rosanna’s husband, Paul—loud, big-gutted, big drinking—who ran off with Scarlett, now twenty-three and the harassed mother of Ajax and Hippolyte. Penny recalled the many sacrifices she had made for her daughter: the fights with Pete about sending her to a private church school instead of the local state high school (peopled by morons and ratbags), the ridiculous fees, the guilt loan from her mother, years of driving forty kilometres to drop Scarlett by the side of the highway to meet the school bus, then turning the car around and driving forty kilometres back to her own job as a high school art teacher. And for what?