Tegan Bennett Daylight - The Details: On Love, Death and Reading

Daylight is simply a superb writer. Her prose is supple, discursive, funny, restrained and loving. On finishing The Details, I felt as I do at the end of every great book: washed clean and scoured out; unmade and remade.

Like all great art, The Details is about many things at once: among them birth and death, laughter and misery, mothers and children, the body and the spirit and informing and transforming all this, of course, it is about reading and the creation of a sustaining inner life. It reminds us that in life as in writing, its the illuminating detail that reveals the truth of who we are.

If you love reading, youll cherish this book for showing you why.

CHARLOTTE WOOD

Also by Tegan Bennett Daylight

Six Bedrooms

Bombora

What Falls Away

Safety

First published in Australia in 2020 by

Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster (Australia) Pty Ltd, 2020

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Copyright Tegan Bennett Daylight 2020

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher.

This project has been assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

A Cataloguing-in-Publication entry for this book is available from the National Library of Australia

9781760855253 (paperback)

9781760855277 (eAudio)

9781760855260 (eBook)

Cover design by Alissa Dinallo

Typeset by Midland Typesetters, Australia

For Russell

When I told my mother I was bored, she would start a pilgrimage around the house. Shed go from room to room, shelf to shelf, and come back with a pile of eight or ten books. Shed sit on the edge of my bed and slide the pile apart, describing each book. Some of them I knew I would never read, either because Id already tried them and found their first few pages dull, or because the lettering on the cover or the font inside was too small, suggesting a density of thought that I would find impenetrable. But in general every pile contained two or three books I could read, and boredom would be held off for another day or two.

My mother used books as a form of communication. It wasnt simply the exchange Ive just described her giving me books shed read and loved as a child, and hoping I would love them too but the words in the books themselves. If we drove towards the Gladesville Bridge at night, the lights of cars cascading down its curve, she would quote Hart Crane, who described headlights in The Bridge as the immaculate sigh of stars. Hamlet formed a great deal of her spoken language if I came home from school after a bad day, shed sigh about the slings and arrows. If you asked her whether she was telling the truth about something, she was likely to answer, Tis true: tis true tis pity, / And pity tis tis true.

Now that I talk in this way to my own children, I know what was happening for her. The words of great writers somehow enrich experience in borrowing them to describe our own lives were amplifying what weve seen or felt or heard. In high school I had to study the poetry of Philip Larkin, which back then I found mostly a collection of depressing observations about a world that I was thankful had very little to do with my own. But I memorised the single poem I liked, Ambulances, and could not and cannot see an ambulance without hearing in my head, A wild white face that overtops / Red stretcher-blankets momently / As it is carried in and stowed. When two friends died in a car accident a month or so before our final exams this poem haunted me, troubled me and somehow informed my imaginings about what had happened that night.

Mum Deborah Bennett was born Deborah Snowden Trahair in 1941, the fourth and much the youngest child of Alice and Geoff. Alice Snowden and Geoff Trahair married against the wishes of his strictly Methodist family, after meeting at an Australian Communist Party gathering early in the 1930s. Alice was older than Geoff and wore a tennis dress to their wedding the only white clothing she owned.

I dont know how long into their marriage it was when Geoffs brain tumour was diagnosed, but it was after the births of Nick, Tim and Catherine. I dont even know what kind of brain tumour it was. There are photographs of Geoff with his head half shaved, stitches train-tracking across his skull. He endured several operations and treatment I find hard to imagine what did they do for brain tumours in the 1940s? Deborah was born after the diagnosis, the surprise child of the marriage. Geoffs illness was always a feature of her life. At some point he took up a course of cold showers as a kind of general health improver. What Mum remembered particularly and most fondly was the sound of his screams as he turned the tap on.

She also remembered reading aloud from the Bible on Sunday mornings while the strictly atheist Geoff lay patiently listening in bed. She had conceived a passion for Elsie Dinsmore, the eponymous heroine of a series of books written by American author Martha Finley in the late nineteenth century. Elsie is a little girl so pious that, despite her terror of authority, she stands up to her hot-headed, sinful father when he demands (amongst other things) that she break the Sabbath. His attempts to break her will, and her subsequent brain fever, make for compelling reading. The limp, half-dead but still virtuous Elsie became a heroine of mine, too.

Geoff committed suicide late in 1950, when Mum was nine. He had tried before, several times, but Mum didnt know this. When he died she was not told that he had killed himself. On the night after his death the rest of the family Alice and the four children were taken to dinner by friends so that Alice would not have to cook. Later, Mum felt guilty about enjoying this so much.

In the year following, Mum developed headaches whose cause no-one could diagnose. Alice, who had been studying for several years in anticipation of Geoffs decline, so that she could find a job to support the five of them, had begun work as a legal secretary. Mum was not well enough or did not feel well enough to go to school, and so she spent nearly a year, between the ages of nine and ten, at home on her own.

Later shed paint pictures of this, which still hang on my fathers walls: the view from beds, from floors, the view to be had from someone small sitting next to a door and playing marbles. This is easy for me to imagine a house empty in the long hours of the day, all its uses quiescent. Clocks tick when you are at home alone, but bedclothes, chairs, cups and saucers on the kitchen bench remain still and noiseless. The sounds of the day come in like a radio turned down in another room. In fact, the radio was Mums only company. She listened to serials every day. I am not sure what else she did, apart from read.