Before I Forget Read online

  In Memoriam, 1969.

  Mum and myself at the time of my father’s death. The wintery feel to this painting, the bleak landscape outside and the unmade bed all add to the sense of grief.

  Fraser Sees Me, I See Myself, 1975 (Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand). This painting also reflects happenings of the moment. I had painted the table and my portrait in the little mirror; then Fraser entered the scene, picked up my father’s old magnifying glass and observed me through it. Incensed by this scrutiny, I exclaim, ‘I am your wife, not your subject to analyse! Your analysis diminishes me, tries to control me. To paint I must be myself; I cannot be controlled.’ With Fraser included, the painting changed. The self-portrait became meaningful – or should I say took on another meaning. The stuff on the table is an anti-gentility statement as usual, our everyday life not tidied away: Fraser’s cigarettes; Emily’s radio and books; fruit and flowers as components of middle-class good living.

  Fraser Analyses My Words, 1977 (Collection of University of Auckland Medical School). It can be hazardous for couples to have a drink together before dinner. Here I depict myself suffering the illusion that my words are momentarily transformed, by booze, into jewel-like, iridescent little creatures. Fraser selects one for scrutiny; but he is also preoccupied with his own balancing act at the hospital and hoping for soothing moments of release, not stimulating discourse. The roses and the bottle on the table recall the days of wine and roses; the large dragonfly perched on the rim of the cocktail glass suggests the dangers inherent in alcohol. The card on the mantelshelf, sent from Rome by my friend Eric McCormick, is of a proud matron of ancient Rome. She is my alter ego – but I often fail to reach her standards.

  My Skirt’s in Your Fucking Room, 1979.

  My QEII grant for America had been approved, but I was to send two new paintings for an exhibition of the works of that year’s grant recipients. First, I painted my stage set, the kitchen, with the letter from the QEII council on the table. Buller’s book of birds had just been republished and it is there, with a book on women’s painting.

  Enter the two protagonists: Augusta has some request, and then Alex explodes into the room. A violent shouting match follows. This painting more than any other is an example of me not resisting the circumstances of my domestic life but incorporating it into my work. I could have treated this fight as a huge distraction; however, instead I used it to contribute to my painting. This philosophy stood me in good stead.

  Saturday Night, 1978.

  I think this is the painting I gave to the Aids Foundation, which at auction raised quite a lot of money. Alex and her friend Susie are off to hear a band, maybe Hello Sailor. Spinner, their friend in the black jacket, is pissed off; he feels used as a taxi driver, not appreciated as an attractive young man. Fraser has the flu and will be going back to bed as soon as their noisy presence has dissipated.

  Georgie Pies, 1973/77. There are good portraits here of Augusta, Nick Town (the photographer who took the photos of me in the living room) and Alex. My new diet choice is bacon and eggs. Fraser in in the background is watering the garden. The yellow hose integrates the background and the foreground – and those colourful Georgie Pie packets are so reminiscent of late 1970s and 1980s New Zealand.

  Luncheon on the Grass, 1982.

  Like a number of my paintings this one was a progression. First it was a landscape of the garden at Carrington; then it became a Kiwi picnic in that Carrington landscape. Then Augusta and her friend Lucy enter the scene; they are like two troubadours from old France. Their discourse is all about the theatre, the great playwrights, the impressive actors of today – next year they are off to Wellington to drama school.

  Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur I’Herbe came to mind. His idea of the nude female with clothed men was borrowed from Fête Champêtre by Giorgione, who borrowed the composition from Marcantonio Raimondi’s engraving The Judgement of Paris. I wanted to see in this painting how it would look at this Kiwi party if the young women were fully dressed, having the profound conversation, and the young men naked. The funny thing is that it just looks wholesome. A lovely painting of a captured moment, quite removed from any satire. The young man in the foreground looks wistful, as if he hopes someone will take some notice of him.

  Mother and Daughter Quarrelling, 1977 (Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu). When Mum first told me not to outstrip my sisters, I felt incensed by her lack of understanding, especially when she was so creative herself. She later decreed that I must devote myself to my children and to Fraser; I could no longer put myself first. And so it continued, a futile struggle. Deeply disturbing, and very common between mothers and daughters throughout history. Mothers, out of fear, are determined to confine their daughters, daughters determined to find meaning in life. Genetic matter is repeated again and again, as suggested by the Persian carpet, which rises up to compete with the genetic matter pulsing out of our heads. In the mirror my more compassionate alter ego watches, appalled at my lack of control.

  The Metamorphosis of Margaret Fahey and The Irish Trinity, both 1986. My mother’s decline was prompted by two or three falls. In The Metamorphosis the curtains that shut out our view of the void have been thrust aside, giving us a disturbing glimpse of what has been hidden. Mum’s memories are represented here as angels, preparing to carry her away into a classical world of baroque music.

  The repetitious flow of water – seen in waterfalls all over Ireland – suggests the cycle of life in The Irish Trinity. In this ancient trinity the maiden becomes the matron, the matron becomes the hag, the hag the maiden and so on. I used Emily, myself and Mum for this continuum. Though the waterfall shrines in Ireland are now dedicated to the Virgin Mary, the continuous flow of water suggests many other ideas.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Not Going Quietly into That Dark Night

  Not long before my father died, I made one of my frequent visits to Mum and Dad, who were living on Stanwell Street in Parnell. At an intersection, stopping for the lights, I saw my father. He stood in the middle of Parnell Road holding the traffic at bay, brandishing his walking stick, or more correctly his shillelagh. He crouched, embattled, like an old buffalo determined to go down fighting. And he was dressed for the performance in his Basque beret, pepper and salt cutaway jacket and old golfing plus fours. He had got his mobility back after a recent stroke but was left prey to uncontrollable impulses.

  Quite suddenly he abandoned confrontation and lurched off to the footpath. It was clear that he was now possessed by a desire for flight, an urgent need to be somewhere else. Maybe he was late for school. The Marist school on Parnell Road, where as a five-year-old he had gone with his brothers, was still there. Was he late for dinner at Garfield Street, scared his brothers would eat it all before he got there? Possibly he was hurrying to join his brothers on K Road to fight the Barrow Boys. I parked the car on Parnell Road and I didn’t have to look for him. There he was, tripping down the incline towards me crying out, ‘Jack! Jack! There you are!’ And he climbed happily into the car, the whole episode up at the lights apparently forgotten.

  It would seem, having returned to the home of his childhood and early adolescence, that in 1967 my father was having a different adventure: his journey towards death. It was a journey backwards to a time when Dad and his brothers were one of the gangs of Parnell. They were good-looking clever guys, defending their turf or invading someone else’s, so sure to win they truly believed they could never lose.

  I would drive Dad down Garfield Street until we came to the house where he had grown up. The place teemed with memories for him. The house with the observation tower at the top, from where his father would look for ships carrying contraband coming into the harbour. The Parnell Cliffs with their dumpsters full of fruit that had finished the voyage to New Zealand, into which he’d lower his brother Jim. The savage Barrow Boys on K Road who especially hated bog-hopping nerds who still went to school. Or he would say things like, ‘Hey, this is where the tram ran over Mi
lty!’ Milty lived, saved by a heroic sprint on his father’s part to the hospital. Wonderful to think that in his old age he could return to the Parnell he had left when he was fourteen.

  The more my father embraced his past, the closer he came to his oblivion. Running to the Parnell shops was not running away from Mum, but running backwards into his childhood. Actually, running isn’t very apt, more like staggering and stumbling into a once-upon-a-time Parnell.

  During this time, he acquired a companion. His doctor had said hallucinations were not uncommon with victims of stroke. It’s not the fact he had a hallucination that was unexplainable, it’s the form it took. Of all things, a leprechaun.

  This little guy was perfect in every detail down to the last polished gold button on his tunic. His cute hat, his elegant shoes, all iridescent green. What most impressed Dad, however, was the leprechaun’s expression. Dad explained it as one of benign mischief, as if the leprechaun was sharing with him the solution to the mysteries of life. My great-grandfather came to New Zealand from Ireland in 1860 and his wife’s family came before that. Dad never told Irish folk stories and I am sure he never checked exactly what leprechauns were. I have never been a fan of Jung’s idea that the unconscious has a genetic component, as if memories are passed on through some hereditary necklace. How could my emotional responses be prompted by Cromwell’s brutal march through Ireland? It’s a scary idea that my father had been gifted with some inspired recall of an Ireland he never knew, a recall that produced this perfect companion to accompany him into death. My mother was grown up about the situation. She was glad the little fellow, as she called him, had volunteered for the journey.

  Dad discussed his leprechaun with amusement and a sort of pride. Mum enjoyed him too, and would say as I came in, ‘He was here, you know, just a minute ago. You should have got here earlier.’ Like two people sharing a secret, they would give each other a knowing look.

  I learned something about death, watching both my mother and father die. I now believe that every death is different. This always seems to me a good enough reason for not attempting to prepare for something that you have no idea about. I mean, there is no reason why I should die like either my mother, my father or my sister Barbara. When it came to my mother’s battle with death, her resistance was instinctual and furious. I could feel the angel of death struggling with her; she fought back and the bed rocked with her rage against extinction.

  My father fell into an unconscious state, a sort of coma, but a vital coma where his breathing was a constant valiant struggle against death. This went on for two whole weeks. Wherever did he get the vitality from, with no food and very little water? After two weeks of this I could no longer bear it. I forced poor Fraser to come into town. Fraser was not well at that time but I knew that he would help at least to ease my father’s pain. The next day he was gone into that eternity or the void, or whatever you want to call it.

  It took me some time to get over that terrible noise – what is called in common slang the death rattle – and I’d hear it in my dreams. My father had been generating that same signal of coming extinction that the victims of the black plague in Europe many centuries ago had apparently generated. My ancestors in the potato famine were familiar with it and the same sound shook Hitler’s death camps. Such a bloody-minded poignant word, the death rattle.

  When he was dead, I drew him. I did three careful drawings of his head and then later, two years later, painted him as the Bog Man. This was before Heaney’s poem about the Bog Man but I am very pleased to think that I was on the same wavelength as that remarkable Irish poet.

  Dad’s death led me directly back into painting. That makes it sound as if it was a conscious decision, but it was nothing of the sort. It was a compulsion; I had to find out what was in my head, what was going on and what had happened. I knew only painting could do that for me, that it would explain. The understanding I took from my father’s death, that life is short, helped me towards some sort of decisiveness. I realised that if I didn’t commit to painting now I was never going to. I now know what Monet meant when he said, or something like it, that every artist knows when their time has come.

  Part of my new commitment came from what you might call a sort of volte-face. I decided that rather than getting away from it all, I would embrace domesticity, transform it, interpret it. Who better than someone immersed in it? I did not want to escape from my family, I loved them.

  I began to understand that what happened in my kitchen was as momentous to me as what had happened in Queen Elizabeth’s banquet hall. Perhaps I should correct that, as by then the empire at the centre of so-called civilisation had moved to the White House. I made the necessary move out of the middle- or upper-middle-class living room into the kitchen, into the bedroom. Everything that made up my life automatically became part of my work.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Mum’s Winter of Despair

  After Dad died, my mother came to stay with us at Kingseat. Her grief was awful. She would sob all night, half asleep. I don’t think she was aware that she was crying. When she woke in the morning and I would ask her how she had slept, she would say quite well.

  At lunchtime and in the evening, we had drinks. My mother found solace in gin. Out in the garden there were wonderful grapefruit, sweet and strong, so we had gin and grapefruit. That is what we are holding in the painting In Memoriam. I was pleased with that painting. It has a wintery feel to it, which mirrors my mother’s chilled state of mind. The bleak landscape outside the window and the unmade bed all add to a sense of depression.

  Whereas night time was dedicated to grief, Mum’s waking hours were full of anger against my father for having died and left her alone. Until Dad died, she had always insisted that giving up her career to marry her childhood sweetheart was a decision she never regretted. She implied that women who persisted in their careers were somehow self-centred and possibly coarse.

  But now, fuelled by alcohol and instinctual rage, my mother decided that my father had had affairs. I realise that is possible, but somehow I don’t think so. He was always there. His rooms were in front of the house and when he wasn’t working, he was in the house. His only night off was Friday, when he and his friend Mr Brock, the bank manager, went to the Canterbury Club to play billiards. Often in the evenings, after dinner, Dad would go for a walk with the current dog. Now, one could think, here was an opportunity. But again I don’t think so. He was always eager for one of us to go with him and we very often did. Our going with him or not going with him was always on impulse, so it seems highly unlikely that he had anything planned. I realised that Mum was looking for a reason to explain her sense of abuse and gross injustice.

  I was oppressed by Mum’s confidences, her anger against Dad and others. She was even angry at her sister Viz’s blue eyes. I have blue eyes and felt they offended her every time I looked at her. I hoped her spirits might lift, but things were to get a lot worse before they got better.

  One cold and rainy night I heard a car start up about two o’clock in the morning. I leapt out of bed and raced to the bathroom window to see tail lights disappearing down the drive. I leapt to the conclusion that my mother’s car was being stolen – it was no longer in the drive.

  Mum, however, was not in her bed. Some of her things were gone, so then it was clear that she had fled. I woke Fraser, rang the police and then we waited. I rang her house in Parnell hourly and at 7 a.m. she answered. She was quite calm but said that she was very tired, that she needed sleep and would explain what had happened later.

  I never did get that explanation but I did find out what happened. I asked my sister Barbara if she knew what was behind Mum’s flight. Barbara explained that Mum had unfortunately overhead Fraser and me talking about ‘the report’. I asked her what report that was. Apparently it was a report on my mother that Fraser was typing out. That clattering away of the typewriter all night had kept her awake. She could bear it no longer and left. What we had said about her upset her dreadfu
lly, Barbara added.

  The fact that we didn’t own a typewriter, or that if we did own a typewriter, neither one of us would have known how to use it, did not seem to impress Barbara. She had total belief in Mum’s story. Mum remained convinced that Fraser and I were plotting to incarcerate her in the lunatic asylum. Perhaps her mind was telling her that because she was already living in the hospital it was only a short step into the hospital proper.

  Mum might have been deluded but she had style. She had gotten lost on her way back to Parnell that night. She ended up in Otara because she ran out of petrol. She then fell into the hands of Mongrel Mob guys. She didn’t know they were the Mongrel Mob of course and quite unthinkingly put on her Queen Mother imitation, as she was liable to do. She did this very well indeed and she even looked like the Queen Mother. They filled her car with petrol and gave her a motorcycle escort back to Auckland. Mum said they were lovely boys, and I was thinking, Jesus, Mum. And I surely knew if they were lovely boys, I was not a lovely girl.

  Mum had one more bizarre episode. She was in hospital for a few days, maybe for a routine check-up. It cannot have been anything serious as she had very good health. On the third night she vanished. She had dressed herself, walked out, found a taxi and returned home.

  The next afternoon, clutching a gin, Mum held forth indignantly. She had been woken at 2 a.m., disturbed by strange sounds. The two other women who were in the room with her were too old and sick to care, according to her. Mum, however, was made of sterner stuff and she went out into the foyer to investigate. Seemingly she stumbled upon a scene of truly disgusting debauchery: drunk nurses, half-naked and cavorting and – worse – doctors injecting one pretty blonde intern. With what? She knew she had to get out of there.