Daisy and Woolf

by Michelle Cahill

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

'This is where I begin. This blank page draws me nearer to you, the day sweltering, my courage quickens, the curtains billowing and the punkah swaying, the punkah rattling as I sit at my writing bureau ... it is a soothing sound.'

Mina, a writer, is navigating her place in the world, balancing creativity, academia, her sexuality and the expectation that a wife and mother abandons herself for others. For her, like so many women of mixed ancestry, it is too easy to be erased. But her fire and intellect refuse to bow. She discovers 'the dark, adorable' Eurasian woman Daisy Simmons, whom Peter Walsh plans to marry in Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway. Daisy disappeared from Woolf's pages, her story unfinished - never given a voice in the novel, nor a footnote in any of the admiring Woolf scholarship that followed.

While dealing with the remains of another life, Mina decides to write Daisy's story. Travelling from Australia to England, India and China, freelancing and researching, she has to navigate cultural and race barriers, trying hard not to look back or flinch at the personal cost. Like Woolf, her writing both sustains and overwhelms her. But in releasing Daisy from her fictional destiny, Mina finds the stubbornness and strength to also break free.

PRAISE FOR MICHELLE CAHILL:
'Her deftness and linguistic grace masks her purpose, till she reveals a shocking glimpse of the price that art can exact' - HILARY MANTEL
'Traverses centuries, cultures and continents to deftly explore how race, gender and class have the power to shape a narrative' - MAXINE BENEBA CLARKE
'A dauntless novel of empire, and its ever-replicating costs. There are echoes of Michael Ondaatje in this novel's lush and observant prose-craft. This is fiction at its most human and humane' - BEEJAY SILCOX
'In luminous prose, she has brought an old world back to life. Her background as a poet is clear in her evocative and detailed descriptions of colonial India. Daisy's voice is perfectly tuned and her story is compelling' - MELANIE CHENG
'At once critically acute and narratively rich, Daisy and Woolf shows us that there are always new ways to read the past in order to understand the present' - PATRICK FLANERY
'Michelle Cahill deploys poetry and history in the most powerful manner possible to write back to Virginia Woolf, and expose the colonial gaze that did not (does not) acknowledge the full humanity of others. This novel will be to Mrs Dalloway what Wide Sargasso Sea was to Jane Eyre' - MEENA KANDASAMY

Release date: April 27, 2022

Publisher: Hachette Australia

Print pages: 304

Sample

London

15 March 2017

I did not know the dead could speak until today, when I received a letter from my mother. It seems there is every possibility an afterlife exists. A place I have questioned. A place from where those who have departed shed their quiet, unseasonal praise, like winter leaves falling. The warm wit I have cherished in my mother’s voice has returned to this earth to bring me solace. Love is a strange feeling when it is controlled by the impossibility of separation and distance. It feels like hunger, a fine vibration tapping the sheath between my heart and my stomach. My mother had started to suffer dementia in her last years; it was a fluctuating absence, although she could still write and her conversation was unexpectedly sharp, if hesitant and unsustained. She was usually wheelchair-bound. Her gaze would slowly fix on me, when I visited, accommodating its milky focus to clarity, and she would stop scratching her nose, a habit that seemed to fill time in her absent moods. From the periphery of her disorganising mind she would speak beautiful sentences. One day, as I approached the house carrying flowers, she raised her stooped head and said, in that dry, surprising manner of hers, ‘Nobody could not want to keep living to see you …’

She had passed away in January, while I was living in London, freelancing, teaching a poetry workshop at City University and reading the novels, the diaries and the letters of Virginia Woolf.

The prospect of the trip home for the funeral terrified me. I booked the first available flight, but worried that I could not bear the trauma of travelling there and back alone, sitting in a Boeing between strangers, presenting myself through border security and customs. Muslims and refugees were being restricted by Trump’s immigration ban; Theresa May was advocating an early Brexit deal, with Scotland calling for talks on a second referendum. All over the world, people of colour felt vulnerable when crossing borders. Did the same apply to the transit between life and death, I wondered, or was that zone of separation excised from all political upheavals?

I felt guilt-ridden for all the times I had been less present for her, the times when I had been stuck in routine, driven by ambition, or when I had been competing with my ego, bettering myself at conferences or writing stodgy articles to earn a living. (As I am writing this, I wish my mother was alive, and that I could call her now and listen to the ebb of her voice, the rhythmical tap, tap, tap, tap of the phone shaking in her trembling hands.) How little I could do to help her. She had gradually stopped complaining about the pain in her thigh and her leg. I could not take it away. By the time I had flown back to Sydney, slept for four or five hours in a hotel before driving a hired car to Tathra because there was nobody willing or available to collect me, I was several days too late.

A breeze entered the house like an oblique presence. It lifted the vertical blinds, filling the emptiness. My brother would have wanted to keep my mother indefinitely but, according to Australian law, once a person has been certified as having died, they may stay in their abode for no longer than twenty-four hours. Arrangements had begun for the church service, a guest list, the selection of hymns and gospel readings. The funeral directors arrived with a fold-out trolley. They zipped her body into a bag. They transported her to storage. All of this, I had been spared from. My sister sat down with me. She offered me a glass of water. She told me how my mother had died in her sleep, unattended; how she and my brother washed her, turning the board of her body from side to side, dragging the sheets from under the sticks of her legs, which were bent like the folded wings of an insect. She showed me the first photographs taken after she was found cold. Her body was covered by a sheet on the bed where she lay suffering for the last two years, ever since the exacerbation. She looked peaceful, her skin only slightly loose over the fine facial bones. Then a photograph of my family by her side, the sad beauty of my niece, and then the two Polish priests saying prayers. One of them told my sister that my mother’s soul had left. How raw the grief that followed. My brother had kept the garments she wore: the over-stretched t-shirt; the shoes she sometimes slipped on, betraying the smallness of her feet; her six bangles. He removed the solitaire ring my mother wore and gave it to my sister to keep. In her wardrobe were her dresses, dry-cleaned and hung on carefully spaced coathangers. In the room, the wheelchair, facing the window where the morning sun streamed. No sign of the neighbour’s cat, which was often stationed there, outside, looking in.

The dead never look pretty. On the day of the funeral they kept her body behind a screen in the church in Bega. The choir was seated but the organist was playing, and the pews were filled with family members who had travelled from Melbourne and Perth, and friends from the parish. I walked to the coffin, straight up to her. Mentally, I had been trying to prepare for the alteration. Her face had thawed after the refrigeration. A blotchiness had crept into her skin as she lay in the coffin. Her shrinking flesh was thin like the petals of native indigo I have found on the bluff growing under rocks. I bent over to embrace her; instantly and violently I wept. The wreath my sister chose was less to my liking than a spray of pink lilies, cream roses and dark green foliage I had ordered. The choir sang hymns my mother had chosen. Her head was turned to the left side as though she were facing a portal into the afterlife, and a slight frown creased her brow, not as in a gesture of resistance to dying, but to me, at least, it expressed all the pain of her parting without us exchanging last farewells, and without her dying even being witnessed.

There had been a spill of vomit on her pillow. She had been refusing food intermittently for over a year, her lips pursed when we endeavoured to feed her. The illness left her muscles weak. She often struggled to breathe but we all understood she would not tolerate tube feeds. That would have been cruel, an artificial prolongation. The hospital staff had never quite understood our cultural beliefs about caring for our elderly family members at home. Then again, I let her down. I hadn’t come back, too busy writing, so what was the point of living? (How is it in life that words betray us? How can we say or write the most devastating things to people we love the most?) I kept thinking about the bile entering the stem of her oesophagus, burning the life out of her, ballooning into her mouth. My brother may have been sleeping off his boozing from the previous night that afternoon in the house overlooking Horseshoe Bay.

Our family live halfway between the old wharf at Tathra, the refurbished hotel and Kianinny Bay, where my father and my brother used to take the boat out fishing on weekends. They might catch yellowtail or salmon, occasionally a small shark. The view is deceptive; the indigo bay at dawn, the sea’s corduroy lines and the trees obscuring the ragged foam and rip currents as the swell beats and pounds the shore and the rocks bite back mercilessly. The bluffs were overgrown with melaleuca, the dry undergrowth easy fuel for bushfires.

Along this looping foreshore I had often pictured the first maverick European arrivals, Robert Campbell and William Clarke, and seventeen Bengali lascars who made peaceful contact with Djiringanj people of the Yuin nation. They had left Calcutta for Sydney Cove in 1797, with the promise of trading supplies, but after being shipwrecked on Preservation Island in Bass Strait they took longboats to the mainland. They were shipwrecked again at Ninety Mile Beach in Victoria. From here they had no choice but to walk north to Eden, through Merimbula and Tathra, all the way along the coast to Sydney, a distance of seven hundred miles. Historical records written by European settlers describe the Aboriginals as hostile, even though Campbell and Clarke’s party had been fed and guided through country by First Nations people. About the lascars, little is recorded in the official history, but the wiry, barefoot, hardworking dark-skinned men wearing lungis were the mainstay of indentured labour in the colonies: in Burma, India, China, Malaya, East Africa and Britain. I have been thinking of lascars on the steamer Daisy travels on; they were recruited often, from north-eastern Bengal, also from Gujarat, and were treated harshly. Like First Nations peoples, they are the invisible ink in the history of cross-cultural connections between India, China, Australia and England.

My brother heard voices, which drinking spirits helped to subdue. Through no fault of his own, Dad said. He was teased for his brown skin at school in England and he had never fully recovered from the breakdown. We had talked to doctors and mental health nurses, but they said he was not a danger to himself or to others and all they could do was offer him an appointment. He was friendly, capable and well-liked by the neighbours. The voices told him that my mother had a microchip implanted in her brain and that through a complex network of conspiracies involving rebels in Zanzibar, I was somehow responsible.

I’m not sure why he sent the letter. In the tangle of paranoia it is possible he misread the note as a threat, and more than likely he had retained it for a considerable time before posting it. Perhaps it was mislaid somewhere in the trail of South Coast mail, which is slower and less reliable than mail from the suburbs reaching the CBD’s general post office in Martin Place. The road to Cooma up Brown Mountain is a very steep single lane with hairpin bends used by fuel tankers and logging trucks. Sometimes they have to swing across the other lane to take the bends, and when there’s frost and ice they can lose traction. Driving the alternative coast road often means queuing behind wide loads and station wagons. In the days of the first aeroplanes and motor vehicle transport, in the time that Virginia Woolf was writing Mrs Dalloway, in the quiet village of Rodmell, the letter would have been bundled up and sent by horse and wagon to the old Tathra wharf at Kianinny Bay, thence by coastal steamer with pigs, livestock, cheese, butter and a few passengers to Sydney, from Sydney to Adelaide, to Colombo, from there to Port Said and then to Italy, across the continent.

The letter hadn’t been airmailed. It was written in my mother’s neat handwriting, the loops and curves grown shaky. As was her habit, the tone is reserved. Two lines were all she had composed:

My darling Mina,

I hope you find in London the inspiration, time and distance you need for your writing. Please let me know how it is going

Mum xx

I notice that the second sentence is not punctuated by a full stop, because my mother was particular about such things. Before she was married, she had been employed as a bookkeeper for the Department of Finance in Nairobi. She had borne three children, nurturing them with a partiality for myself and for my brother. As Anglo-Indians from East Africa we had our misfortunes, of course. But her disposition, I would say, was contrary to mine entirely; like so many women of her generation, my mother was able to strictly govern her duties in marriage and in her professional life.

I am too upset to figure it out, or maybe I can’t face accepting that I knew so little about the daily flux of Mum’s deterioration. I suppose she wrote it for me at Christmas, when I didn’t show. Perhaps the time it took for my brother to send it by second-class mail to England had delayed its arrival. He had been kept occupied in the last year of her life, as her dependency increased. He refused help. Often, he carried her in his arms instead of using the lifter. They loved each other, and he cared for her tenderly. The envelope lay on the patterned blue carpet. It had fallen through the magazine slot in the front door of the house in Tavistock Square, bundled up with advertising pamphlets and the rest of the mail. I am renting the ground floor flat of university housing, my hallway tucked behind the stairwell, furnished with a coat and umbrella rack, where I drape my flimsy scarves and gloves. I can hear the student tenants come and go, greeting each other in passing. Going by the thud of boots or stilettos on the steps I can tell if it is Celine, a Jamaican drama major, or James, a medical postgraduate in cardiology who lives on the top floor. He is carrying out research which he explained in technical detail; something along the lines of measuring calcium levels in heart muscle during stress testing.

I always hear the doorbell ring, and from time to time the door sweeping over the carpet, then whispers in the hallway, so already I have acquired a little skill in interpreting the words of those who speak when they are not visible. This morning it was raining outside. The wind needled my nipples when I walked to the shop run by the Bangladeshi family in Marchmont Street to buy oranges, bread and milk. Despite the blotches, leakages and spills, the pavement stones were bleached by the cold. Bags of garbage were bundled near the railings of the houses, waiting for the rubbish collection. The gusts played havoc with my umbrella, turning it inside out. Within minutes a spine snapped, and it became a useless instrument in my hands, the frustration of a wasted purchase so that by the time I returned to the flat I was soaked and for the rest of the morning I have been drying off.

But the envelope was dry, and I recognised its ethereal appearance at once. I sat down on the sofa in the lounge room, perplexed and deeply sad for the love it bears, and for whatever truth is wrapped inside, to which it is impossible that I can respond. But here it is: simple, wretched, irretrievably mine. I sit feeling trapped by life. There is no way out. I want there to be less of the future left and more of the past. How I miss being able to talk over the phone to my mother; the ease by which that liberty had been at my disposal to exercise seems to mock me now, in this stranded, powerless state. The point in time at which her dementia began and she found it hard to follow the meanings of conversation is elusive to mark, and so it just happened that she progressively lost her grip on the real. I could no longer expect her to understand my complex thoughts, my impatient demanding mind, and even her memory grew dim. Yet still, how it dawns on me now with the envelope fulfilling its destiny in my hands, that I had taken our relationship in this world for granted, expecting it was prearranged, for love feels deceptively boundless, though our days are numbered from the start.

On the table there are books I am reading: Mrs Dalloway, the Woolf diaries, her later Sussex novels, and her essays, including one on Oxford Street in the city and another on the docks of London, published in a popular magazine. There are essays I have been reading on Woolf and Empire. I like to have them here as a signpost to a theme that curiously beckons. On days off, I sometimes read the original digitised manuscripts at the British Library in St Pancras. Here I discover that Woolf had lively, forward slanting, at times uneven handwriting. Her words are strongly spaced, and where phrases have been struck through, the corrections have a neatness and are methodically placed above her original lines. I’m not sure what I expect to find from these readings; perhaps another interpretation of the novel, meanings that had escaped from the final draft (though what could have escaped the numerous volumes and scholarly articles of criticism on Woolf?).

I wanted some clue to Peter Walsh and Daisy Simmons: how they meet; why it so happens that she falls perilously in love with him; what eventuates after he leaves India. Does she leave her husband and elope with him? And is she as madly jealous in her moral ruin as Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina? What does she think of Clarissa, if ever the two women should meet: the privileged upper-class socialite from Westminster and ‘the dark, adorably pretty’ Eurasian mother? They had, at least, motherhood in common. The joys and the constraints, they knew all these.

Sentenced to trip over a single word for a few moments I stare at the envelope. Till now the depths of my melancholy has not vented. I had been choking at my mother’s funeral, a hot summer’s day, the worst time of the year for undertakers to preserve and paint the dead. We sweltered at the cemetery as hymns were played and they lowered her body into the ground. All of us so forlorn, wearing sunglasses and black-ribboned hats. I watched the flowers disappearing with her. I cried on my return to London. It sometimes feels like I am travelling in her footsteps, a mother taking the calculated risks and measures required to immigrate. How much more difficult it would have been for Daisy Simmons to immigrate. I need to give Daisy a voice and a body. Daisy is the character whose story I hope to write, the woman whom Virginia Woolf had scarcely sketched as naive, vulnerable and wanton, giving it away too easily, pretty and young, all dressed in white.

Tears stream, running fast down my cheeks. I feel guilty about how my mother died, the gradual emaciation, the physical dependency, the spill of vomit, the way she had choked in her sleep. What had I been doing for so long? Dying my own slow death, year after year, since before my divorce. The truth is that writing has consumed me, overtaken my part-time work responsibilities, distorted my values, even my sense of harmony and proportion in friendships. Writing justifies unhealthy habits, social media addictions, tendencies and erroneous actions. It had been a slow deflation by a few reductive reviews my work had received, by ‘gatekeeping’. When I had received an international prize I couldn’t convince the newspapers to run it. I once read about an author who faked being her own publicist and sometimes wish I had given that a go. Never mind. None of us are special and being in London I feel protected. I have been turning over in my mind the seed of Woolf’s idea of colonial India, and London. The hub of the empire she sought to question and to flag, was a place I have passed through like so many new arrivals with my mother and my father, my sister and brother. Now it is a place of temporary refuge. I’ve returned as an author, trying to escape from racist hierarchies, only to find myself re-entering them until I strike it luck. . .