Encounters with Mrs L BA(OXON) - Page 3
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 11: Getting Smart
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Helen Elliott
BY 1969 I HAD MATRICULATED WITH HONOURS IN LITERATURE and history, studied library subjects and saved enough money to go to university full-time for one year, paying my fees and also board to my mother. These were pre-Whitlam, pre-free university days. After that I had no idea what I would do because I went to university certain that I would fail. University was for the brilliant and purposeful. What I wanted was modest: a chance to be someone other than myself for just one year, a chance to take what Bellow calls "a leap towards the marvellous". One year would be enough. That word "student" was marvellous in itself, another me in a shimmering and very distant mirror. "Student" gave respect to my obsession with learning and normalised my hungry curiosity.
During those years at the library I read. I was like an engine, driven and lawless. Ask me now what was happening in those years and I have no idea. I was reading. Summer of love? What was that? Dope? The Stones? Beatles? Hippies? I was more familiar with the Russia of Tolstoy, the moors of the Brontës and the Paris of Balzac than I was with Australia of the 1960s. As the books twined around my bones, my real, if disordered education took place.
That education sustained me through university because, astonishingly, miraculously, I didn't fail. I won scholarships at the end of the first year and the nag of money melted away. For the first time in my life, I felt free of a weight I was so familiar with I hadn't even known it was there: the weight of worrying about money. It was intoxicating. I bought myself some expensive dusty pink velvet jeans and, one morning, as I walked to catch the train to university, watching the sun exploding through the old gums, catching the cry of the magpies through the blue air, I wondered how this was the same track I used to walk to high school, then to catch the train to work and now to university. "University." I was a "student". My heart might have been the sun.
Later, I went to Oxford on a scholarship to do a postgraduate degree. But I was, by then, a captive of something other than education but equally powerful – love. I had been well taught, too well taught, about love by all those great books and was, unlike Chaucer's worldly prioress, sincere in my belief that amor vincit omni. I had to choose between love and education and I chose love, returning home without finishing my doctorate. I am still excavating the site of a dream deferred, but that's another story altogether.
IT WAS AN AFTERNOON PARTY ON A MILD AUTUMN DAY and a drive across town. I was too early, so I walked around the streets for a long half hour rather than sit in the car. But it suddenly seemed hot and I was distressed that I might arrive flushed. At the gate, a gate over which roses tumbled, I stood and counted to twenty.
I saw Mr L first. If he wasn't immortal, he was a miracle in suspended time, stooped maybe, but still with those memorable eyes fashioned from laughter and curiosity. Still sexy at over 80, I was intrigued to see. Thirteen-year-olds feel the impact of sexual charm, I now know, what they can't do is identify or classify it.
And then she was there. Mrs L. For the first time I saw her without the dark glasses and I was faintly disappointed to see that her eyes were pale and in no way remarkable. She was much smaller than I remembered. Her figure, though, was still exquisite and she could easily have been decades younger than her 80 years. Forty years collapsed into yesterday as I remembered something essential about her: the way she was put together. Every bone was artful. Centuries of trial and error had gone into making her.
We shook hands, then she stood back and looked at me, pale eyes skimming and taking me in. Click.
"Well! You've changed." The ice-queen voice sliced through my memory.
"Yes," I said, taking in and marvelling, all over again, at her perfection: the hips still narrow, the hair a skilful gold and silver blend. I, who have spent much of the past 30 years as a journalist interviewing significanti in the world, felt unthreaded, fraying. "I've tamed my hair".
Another sweep of those eyes. And then slowly, "You certainly have." Whose voice had the tone? That glorious stringency? Hers? Or the one echoing in my head?
"Yes, I certainly have," I repeated in my own ice-queen voice, a softer version that has belonged to me for so long now that it is thoughtlessly mine.
She smiled and with a neat gesture, almost a non-gesture, indicated my skirt.
"Beautiful tweed."
She was perfect. Would I ever be that perfect? That artful? Something so apparent that it was immediately recognisable to an ignorant thirteen-yearold. Since the day she was born, Mrs L had the authority of knowing who she was.
Click.
I glanced down at my beautiful, fitted skirt. "You like it? It's Armani. Tweed has always reminded me of you."
She beamed and I liked her so much I instantly, girlishly, wanted to spend
the entire afternoon with her and no one else.
"Tell me about Oxford," she said.
She was real. Not warm, but curious and so interesting that I wished I had had time to know her. I might have wished, too, that she had taken a few moments more than 40 years ago to look longer at the clump of debris that had washed up before her in that chaotic corridor. But that would be expecting too much; authority is never a natural companion of empathy. ♦