It looked even more extraordinary among the breakfast litter of the table than it might have done in the museum where it belonged: one of those elaborate pieces that were created for her first by Lalique and later by Tiffany — lilies, serpents, salamanders, birds of paradise, all in the blue-green or red-gold of the period and intended to be worn offstage or on, tributes to the fact that her own plumed splendour was continuous with that of the creatures she played, and that these ornaments of her fantasy-life in Babylon or India belonged equally to the world she moved in at Deauville and Monte Carlo, at Karlsbad, Baden-Baden, Capri. The thing writhed. It flashed its tail and threw off sparks. It was solid metal and had survived. I turned it and read the signature.
“Oh, it's genuine alright,” she told me, pouring tea. She gave a wry chuckle. “I took one look at you and I reckoned you'd be the one. I knew it right off. This one, I told meself — he'll believe, if on'y the bracelet. And he does! Here, young feller, drink yer tea.”
She sipped noisily and watched me over the rim of her cup.
“Y'see,” she said, suddenly serious, "I trustcher. I gotta trust someone and you're it. I've decided t’ come out a’ hiding.”
She let this sink in.
“I s'pose you know she was back ‘ere in o-six.”
“O-eight,” I corrected, glad at last to prove, after so many surprises, my expertise. “There was a tour in o-three and another in o-eight— Lucrezia, Lucia, Semiramide, Adriana Lecouvreur” I had it all off pat.
“Yair,” she said. “Well she was ‘ere in o-six as well, that's what I'm tellin’ yer. O-six.”
I was in no position to argue. Nobody in fact knows where Vale was in nineteen hundred and six; the whole year is a blank. In o-five she was in San Francisco, New York, Brussels, London, Paris, and St. Peters- burg. In o-seven in South Africa, Vienna, Budapest, Warsaw, Berlin, and was back in London again to close the season. But in o-six nothing. The theory is that she had a minor breakdown and was hiding out in the south of France. More romantic commentators suggest a trip to China in the company of a Crown Prince, or a time in Persia with an Armenian munitions manufacturer who later, it is true, bought her a house in Hampstead and her first motor. But no one, so far as I know, has mentioned Australia.
“She spent the time,” the woman informed me without emphasis, though her little black eyes were as lively as jumping beans — she was enjoying her moment of triumph—"in a suite in the Hotel Australia in Melbourne. And that's where us twins were born, me and a brother. I am Alicia Vale's daughter!”
She opened up like a fist and presented herself, as she had previously presented the bracelet; all without warning, a glittering jewel. As if to say: "There! If you believed in that you should believe in me. We're all of a piece.”
She sat back sucking her gums and grinning, delighted at having played her little scene with so much skill, and at having, for a second time, so convincingly set me back.
“You can put that down now,” she told me, indicating the bracelet. “We're talking about me.”
I HAVE SPENT nearly twenty years following the career of that extraordinary woman, through newspaper articles, reviews, programmes, opera house account-books (my little paper is a run-up to what I hope may be a full biography), and had, even before I made my first venture upon the documentary records, been spellbound for another twenty by the legend of her and by the thin, pure voice (unhappily a mere ghost of itself) that comes to us from the primitive recording-machines of the period. She was still singing after the war — after 1918, that is — but only small things: a Schubert lullaby, "Home Sweet Home.” Such is the magic of her art that even these become, in her rendering of them, occasions of the most poignant beauty; as if the simple melody of “Home Sweet Home” were being plucked out of the air by an angel banished for ever from the forests of Ceylon or the Gardens of Babylon, bringing with it, out of that lost world, only a radiant and disembodied breath. As an adolescent I would listen to those recordings with locked eyes; imagining from photographs the exotic realm out of which it was climbing, in which a common farmgirl from the South Coast had been transformed by her own genius, and elaborate machines for making ground-fog, clouds and columns that can dissolve before the eyes on a view of endless horizons, into a creature of mythical power and beauty, a princess with the gift of immortality or abrupt extinction in her, a bird of paradise, an avenging angel — though she might also on occasion, and without one's sensing the least disjunction, appear in the pages of an international scandal-sheet, where her notorious language and ordinary, not to say vulgar affairs, like the exploits of the gods in their earthly passages, were transfigured and redeemed by the glory that came trailing after.
A coruscating meteor. Given that a meteor, all light and sparkle as it pours across the heavens, is at centre stone. Nothing so convinces us of her ethereal majesty as the fact that she was also a hard-headed businesswoman, who swore like a navvy (and got away with it), drank three bottles of Guinness at breakfast, and was surrounded wherever she went by a motley circus of book-makers, card-sharps, stand-over men, and a whole chorus-line of pale young fellows with shoulders, who made her every entrance a spectacle. Onstage she was, as often as not, a queen disguised as a gipsy Offstage she was the gipsy itself, demanding that she be treated as a queen.
In her later years, when she lived on the harbour at Kirribilli, she became a kind of native Gorgon. I have a photograph, taken at her seventieth birthday-celebration at Anthony Hordern's, where she is caught, very grand and baleful, among a group of admirers — all elderly, all male, and all looking strangely fossilized, as if she had just that moment turned her hooded eyes upon them. Yet the occasion itself is as innocent as a children's party. The little cakes in their silver dishes are made up to look like snails, frogs, piglets; there are jelly-moulds, and a huge, heart-shaped cake with a knife in it and a ring of hard-flamed miniature candles.
She had survived and would live to eighty. Not for her the tragic destiny of Phar Lap or Les Darcy, done to death, their proud hearts broken, by foreigners. They're a tougher breed than the men, these colonial girls: the Alicias, the Melbas, the Marjories, the Joans. They conquer the world and come home to die in the suburbs, in their own swan's-down beds … But to be told now, after nearly half a century, that the catalogue is incomplete; that to the collection of Riccio grotesques and Kaendler Meissen, the gold Rolls-Royce, the Louis Seize commodes by Dubois and Riesener, the Daum vases, the Tiffany lamps and jewels, the costumes in which she filled out with her own marvellous presence courtesans, princesses, village girls afflicted with somnambulism, we must add an unacknowledged child — real, human — and especially, after so long this child, "our Mrs. Judge,” a weatherbeaten, slatternly but oddly impressive woman at a grubby kitchen table in Karingai, who has appeared at last to claim her place in the glittering tale and to demand, with an authority that might be a shadow of the Diva's own, that I should stand up now and be the first to acknowledge her! Is this how the great tests present themselves to us? At ten thirty in the morning, in a country kitchen, in a place like Karingai?
The woman set herself before me. She dared me to believe and take up her cause.
I WAS SPARED at the last moment by a footstep on the verandah. A man appeared, a big man in wellingtons. He had the soft-footed, respectful air of a visitor, but one who knew the place and was at home. The woman turned to face him. She made no attempt to hide the bracelet, or the fact that there existed between us a state of high drama.