I’m sitting there in the room looking at my shoes. Dad’s shoes on my feet, and he’s saying this about me.
“Oh, good,” Violet says, “let’s talk about someone else, I’m terribly bored of me. Tell me about this strange child of yours, this Lucas. How old is he?”
“Ten.”
That makes the tape within a year of dad leaving. I’m trying to remember what I was like when I was ten. Was I strange?
“Do you like him?” she says. “Do you get along?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think he likes me all that much.”
I’m thinking, Yes I do, you idiot, yes I did.
“And why is he strange?” says Violet, and I can’t believe she’s asking about me, they’re talking about me while I’m sitting in the corner listening. I would be honoured, except for what they’re actually saying.
“He’s on his own a lot. He stares. I think he suspects me of something.”
“Suspects you of what?”
“Later, maybe. Another time,” my dad says, and the funny thing is he’s looking at me when he says it, like he knows I’m listening in.
“Do you have children?” he asks her, and she frowns and shakes her head while she sips her tea the way people sip tea when it’s way too hot, just for something to do.
“No,” she says. “I never wanted them. I’m not the mothering kind, too selfish. I would have been stuck at home playing the piano to nobody. That was never my intention. I always knew I would never have any.”
“What made you so sure? How old were you when you knew?”
“I didn’t want to turn into my mother – all that talent stifled. She was a miserable, bitter woman who spent her life in the reluctant service of others. She would have considered my having a family the utmost betrayal.”
“So because your mother was unhappy you decided being a mother wasn’t for you?”
“Precisely. Although imaginary children are no trouble at all.”
“Imaginary children?”
“Yes. In the fifties I invented a rather glamorous son called Orlando, who was a racing driver or a horse trainer or a stunt actor, depending on what party I was attending.”
“You told other people about him?”
“Of course! That’s why I invented him. He was irresistible. They couldn’t get enough of him. What else was I going to talk about at all those parties? The key of B flat? The dressing rooms and catering at Pinewood? Orlando livened things up a bit.”
My dad laughs his brilliant, all-consuming laugh, the one I can’t believe I’ve nearly forgotten. Saying something funny to my dad and hearing him laugh always made me feel proud and smart and warm inside.
“I can’t believe you,” he says, and he is still laughing, wiping his eyes. “You invented a child to have something to talk about at parties? Who was the father?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t talk about him,” Violet says with a smile. “I may have hinted that he was awfully famous. It raised the stakes you see, upped the scandal. Fatherless children were very big news in those days, not like now, where nobody raises an eyebrow.”
I did, I want to say. I raised an eyebrow when I became one.
My dad says, “Tell me about growing up in Tasmania” and Violet says, “I thought it was paradise, the sea and the mountains and the heat. I thought I must be one of the lucky ones, to be born there. And then I found out it didn’t belong to us, we stole it from its people. Can you imagine how that felt?”
My dad says, “Did you feel responsible?” and Violet says “Well, someone in my family had to.” And then she pauses and says, “I felt like a blood stain on a white sheet. I felt terribly conspicuous, terribly to blame.”
“How did you find out?” asks my dad, and she says, “I read it in a book. I was no more than eight or nine. I was sitting by myself on a cushion in the corner of Hobart Library. Very shiny floors in Hobart Library, very high ceilings.”
“What was the book called?”
“Do you know, I can’t remember? It was lying on the floor under a shelf and I felt sorry for it so I picked it up and started reading.”
“You felt sorry for the book?” My dad is smiling.
“I am a very emotional person,” Violet says, and she shifts a little in her seat, rustle rustle. “Think how I felt for the aboriginal people.”
Violet’s voice has only the slightest hint of an accent. She speaks a very proper English, quite blunt and sharp and clipped with only a shadow of down under. I am thinking about her voice, and my dad must be thinking about it at the same time because he says, “Is that why you have removed all trace of your homeland from your life, from your voice?”
“Oh, I became less angry the further away from the place I was,” she says. “And I mellowed with age. Now I’m proud to be a Tasmanian woman. I just wish I had a few more native warrior women for company. I mean, what did I do? Play the piano at the movies.”
“And your voice?” my dad says. “You sound utterly British.”
“I had to take speech lessons to get anywhere in my business. You poms all thought I was a sheep shearer,” and for that sentence she puts on her richest, overbaked Tasmanian drawl and they laugh briefly together, two different octaves on a grand.
He asks her when she left Tasmania and she says, “I was seventeen. That was a time to arrive in London, my goodness. I came to study at the Royal Academy. Coming here was like somebody turning the lights out. There was no heat, no glare from the sun, no colour. It was too strange, too depressing. I stood on Westminster Bridge and imagined the water in the Thames flowing all the way back to Australia, flowing all the way back home.”
“Were you homesick?”
“Yes, very. But I learned to live with that because I didn’t want to go back. I never have.”
“Do you regret that? Would you like to go there again?”
“Darling, the next place I’m going is in the ground.”
“Oh, Violet, you’ve got a while yet.”
“Not if I have a say in it.”
Me and my dad both look straight up at Violet when she says this, our heads snap up at exactly the same time. It’s not so much what she says, a simple, throwaway comment that could mean nothing. It’s the way she says it. The silence between them stretches out as I watch him watching her say that.
“What’s this interview for anyway, darling?” she asks, changing the subject, and my dad says it’s not for the book, it’s just a profile, maybe for a Sunday paper, nothing much but he likes to be thorough.
Violet says, “And there was I thinking you just wanted to spend time with me,” and they smile at each other in the quiet on the tape.
“Will you write my obituary? I’d like you to do it.”
“If I’m still around,” Dad says, and I think, You will be, give or take a year, and then you’ll fall in a big black hole. I’m wondering if her obituary might’ve been the last thing he did before he went, if he ever did it.
Then Violet coughs and shifts in her chair which creaks, and says, “And now I’m tired of listening to myself talk. It’s your turn. I will ask you five questions about your personal life, for my own profile. And keep the tape running because it’s only fair.”