Illywhacker_ A Novel Part 17

59.

I stayed in my room alone that night, which is just as well, for if I had followed my natural inclinations I would have found my adversary in Phoebe's room engaged in a pa.s.sionate debate of which I was the subject.

"He is a confidence man," Annette said. "It is there for anyone to see. Even the waiters knew it. They gave the bill to your mother. Doesn't that tell you? They thought he was a gigolo."

Phoebe had taken off her hat and veil and kicked off her shoes. She sat cross-legged on the bed, a little drunk, not caring if she crushed the black linen suit she had, all day, been most particular about. A red toenail peeped through a hole in her stockinged foot and reminded Annette, painfully, of the girl with ingrained dirt on her knees and ink smudges on her fingers.

"What's a gigolo?"

"You know very well what a gigolo is," Annette smiled. "You want me to say something common."

"Perhaps I do," said Phoebe through barely parted lips, "perhaps I don't." Annette felt a short sharp rip of jealousy because she judged, quite correctly, that the excitement in Phoebe's eyes, the high colour in her cheeks, had been triggered by the pressure of a man's bowed leg.

"A gigolo," Annette said, "is a man paid by a woman for certain services."

"A waiter?" Phoebe suggested.

"No, you stupid child." Her pupils dilated and her eyes did not leave Phoebe's.

"A man paid to slide his rod," Phoebe whispered, closing her eyes and rocking slyly on her haunches.

Annette moved slowly and sat beside her pupil who smelt of dust and lavender. She kept her hands in her lap and did not risk rejection.

"Oh G.o.d," she said. "I'm so miserable."

"Poor d.i.c.ksy."

And she was in her arms and Annette was kissing her. "Tell me," she whispered in Phoebe's ear, "tell me what he does to you."

Phoebe told her. She whispered in her ear while Annette moaned and twisted in the opposing tides that would pull at her all her life: pain and pleasure, jealousy and l.u.s.t, the potential suppliers of which contradictory needs she would recognize in buses and restaurants, on footpaths and in ballrooms, men and women whose sensual lips were never quite in harmony with the unswerving ambition of their brilliant eyes.

60.

On Wednesday Molly McGrath ate a breakfast of steak, chops, bacon, fried bread and eggs. Somewhere between the first mouthful and the last she decided that she could not live in Geelong any more. Once she had decided she was eager to be out of it quickly, so quickly that she would, to everyone's surprise, agree to fly in the Morris Farman to Melbourne, leaving behind wardrobes of clothes for the Brotherhood of Saint Laurence and an eccentrically renovated property for Mr O'Brien of Mallop Street to dispose of by auction.

This decided on, although not yet spoken of, she rose from table, went upstairs, packed her case, and, when the urge took her, bustled noisily down the pa.s.sage to the toilet.

She sat in the huge white-tiled room whose high window contained a perfect square of sky. She grunted happily, pursed her lips, and expelled a t.u.r.d of such dimension that it would not be flushed down no matter how she tried.

The widow shrugged and turned her back upon it.

Annette, who followed her in, found the thing like a giant beche-de-mer beche-de-mer inside the bowl. It lay there, dull and malevolent, a parasite expelled, abandoned on the porcelain sh.o.r.es of Craig's Hotel. inside the bowl. It lay there, dull and malevolent, a parasite expelled, abandoned on the porcelain sh.o.r.es of Craig's Hotel.

61.

I am pleased I have lived long enough to finally meet a psychiatrist, although I cannot believe this one is typical. Jack Slane the lunatic psychiatrist and Maroochydore taxi driver has come out of retirement to take an interest in my case, and when I listen to him I fancy I know why he took to driving taxis.

I told him something (but by no means all) about the snakes. By G.o.d, you should have heard him. Snakes and aeroplanes, he says, are not snakes and aeroplanes at all, but symbols. Well, it's entertaining anyway and I would not have missed it for worlds.

When he discovered my t.i.ts he nearly wet himself. I expressed a little milk for him and he put it in a bottle to take away.

I told him the t.i.ts were just a lie, but he doesn't seem to understand. He has the milk and he is happy and he understands nothing about truth and lies. If my voice was better I would explain it to him. If I had more time I would write a letter for him, but I cannot spend my life amusing him. There are other customers to take care of and I must push on to the years 1920 and 1923 and get them done with. I wish I had been able to control them as well as I can now, for half the time I blundered ignorant and blinkered in the dark, not knowing what was up and what was down, blind as a bat, clumsy as a coot, but now I sit behind my instruments like Christ Almighty summoning up a stolen letter from Jonathon Oakes's drawer to get the next leg started.

62.

Oriental Hotel, Collins Street, Melbourne December, 1920 Dear d.i.c.ksy, You were wrong to write me off and cruel to ignore my letters which I hope you have had at least the decency to open. I know what you think about me and hardly a day goes by when your unsympathetic judgement does not cause me pain and I am determined upon convincing you that you are wrong, terribly wrong. You think I have wasted it all, thrown it all away, but I am far too aware of my life, all life-what a treasure it is-to squander it.

You see today I have flown an aeroplane. My eyes are sore and red from dust because I did not like the goggles H. wanted me to wear and so I insisted on going without them. No, it was not a solo flight, but d.i.c.ksy, d.i.c.ksy, it was a flight. We took off from Port Melbourne where H. has some land and then went right over Port Phillip Bay. I fancied I could see Geelong but am told this was impossible. In any case, I thought thought about Geelong, and you there in that terrible school and while the air was so fresh and clean I imagined you (not in a scornful way, I promise you) having to endure all the smells I remember and I fantasized a dictionary of smells which I have rendered, not as a proper dictionary, but as a poem which I will enclose if I can have time to make a fair copy before H. leaves. about Geelong, and you there in that terrible school and while the air was so fresh and clean I imagined you (not in a scornful way, I promise you) having to endure all the smells I remember and I fantasized a dictionary of smells which I have rendered, not as a proper dictionary, but as a poem which I will enclose if I can have time to make a fair copy before H. leaves.

You would not recognize Mummy. She has been buying (under my guidance) new clothes and she looks quite the grande dame. She has taken a fancy to the theatre and as Herbert also cares for it (I suspect actresses in his past) we take a box at the Athenaeum, the Lyceum or the Royal and make quite a night of it with dinner afterwards.

You did not say a thing about our plans to marry. Please do not be hurt. You must not be hurt. I will not allow it. I am selfish enough to demand not only your approval (for whose else can I ask?) but also your pleasure in it.

We have plans for entering the next big air race as husband and wife. Doubtless you will read about us in the papers but I would much rather, dear d.i.c.ksy, that you took the train up one weekend. I have spoken to Mummy and if you are wretchedly poor at the moment she will happily (yes, happily) pay for your hotel room here at the Oriental where we are quite the "Honoured Guests" and are known to all staff who we are privileged to call by first names although they (do not bite your red revolutionary lips with rage) are not permitted the return of this familiarity.

H. will take no money from us. It is a sore point and we have given up offering to help him while he establishes himself again. The loss of the aircraft factory was a cruel blow to him and now he must start to build up again. He is selling cars for Barret's, the Ford agents, working very hard indeed poor dear. He is also building a house although where or what it is he will not tell us. It is to be my wedding present from him.

Dear d.i.c.ksy, he is so kind. He looks after Mummy so nicely and does not complain when she wants to be driven here or there or become impatient when she wants to crawl along at five miles an hour, so slowly that men in horse-drawn wagons want to overtake and shout abuse at us. He does does clench his fists around the steering wheel and look like he could bite a rat, but he is quite lamb-like and does nothing nasty. clench his fists around the steering wheel and look like he could bite a rat, but he is quite lamb-like and does nothing nasty.

I have a lovely room overlooking Collins Street and I see all manner of celebrity walking below. Alfred Deakin, a fat old man, was at dinner last night (not at our table) and Herbert was kind enough to get his autograph for Mummy which was so nice of him, because he is not a groveller and the incident must have caused him pain.

I am writing ceaselessly. I am due for flying lessons on every Wednesday morning. I go to the theatre and the galleries. I remember the things that you taught me, d.i.c.ksy. I think of you as a true friend. If you will not answer my letters properly at least send me a postcard, unsigned if you wish, to let me know that you are, at least, opening the envelopes.

With much love and affection, your friend, Phoebe

63.

Melbourne, in case you did not know, has its charms: botanical gardens, splendid churches, a high-domed public library where an old man can read the newspapers and stay cool on a hot day, etc. But there is no use denying that it is a flat place, divided up into a grid of streets by a draughtsman with a ruler and set square. The names of streets are just as orderly. King precedes William, neatly, exactly parallel. Queen lies straight in bed beside Elizabeth and meets Bourke (the explorer) and Latrobe (the governor) briefly on corners whose angles measure precisely 90 degrees.

Melbourne has a railway station famous for showing fifteen clocks on its front door, like a Victorian matron with a pa.s.sion for punctuality, all bustle, crinolines and dirty underwear. It has Collins Street which is famous, in Melbourne at least, for resembling Paris, by which it is meant that the street has trees and exclusive shops where women in black with violently red lips and too much powder on their ageing cheeks are able to intimidate women like Molly McGrath by calling them "modom".

Oh, it's a good enough town, but it can take a while to realize it.

There is a pa.s.sion in Melbourne you might not easily notice on a casual visit and I must not make it sound a dull thing, or sneer at it, for it is a pa.s.sion I share-Melbourne has a pa.s.sion for owning land and building houses. There is nothing the people of Melbourne care for as much as their red-tiled roofs, their lemon tree in the back garden, their hens, their Sunday dinners. You will not learn much about the city strolling around the deserted streets on a Sunday, no more than you will learn about an ants' nest by walking over it. Thus, when I seek something peaceful to think of, some quiet corner to escape into, I do not think of sandy beaches or rivers or green paddocks, I imagine myself in a suburban street in Melbourne on a chilly autumn afternoon, the postman blowing his whistle, a dog crossing the road to pee on those three-feet-wide strips of gra.s.s beside the road that are known as "nature strips".

The people of Melbourne understand the value of a piece of land. They do not leave it around for thistles to grow on, or cars to be dumped on. And this makes it a very difficult place for a man with no money to take possession of his necessary acre.

When Molly, Phoebe and I took up residence in the Oriental Hotel in Collins Street, Melbourne, there was pressure applied to me to accept money from the McGrath Estate in order to purchase land. I will not say I was not tempted, but I am proud to say I did not succ.u.mb. I found my land, and took it, although its legal owners (the Church of England) were not aware of it at the time.

What the Church of England wanted with those poor mudflats on the Maribyrnong River I will never know, but anyone could see that it was no site for a cathedral and was of no use for anything but what I intended. It was a place where you could set up a windsock, land a craft, build a house and not expect to be troubled unless you asked for electricity to be connected.

The Maribyrnong is, in places, a pretty river, but as it snakes down through Flemington and pushes out through the flats to the bay it is neglected and dirty, enriched by the effluent from the Footscray abattoirs.

I took possession of my land by circling above it.

"There's my land," I shouted. Not once. Three times.

Phoebe had no goggles. Her eyes so streamed with wind-drawn tears that she could see nothing but the misty confluence of gra.s.s and water: brown and green like a runny watercolour. Later, over cuc.u.mber sandwiches at the Oriental, she described my land quite lyrically.

Now if I had never seen Jack's house in Western Avenue, never known a tower, a music room, a library, I may well have built my usual type of structure, something like the place I made for the girl in Bacchus Marsh, or the slab hut I built for the barmaid up at Blackwood. I could not have dug a hole, of course, because the land was not suitable. But I may have set up a series of rainwater tanks, connected them with short pa.s.sages, and covered the whole with earth for insulation. It would have lasted a year or two. However, you cannot ask women who have lived in a house with a tower to feel comfortable inside a burrow and I was not such a fool as to try to persuade them. On the other hand, I had no money. I could not even pay my keep at the Oriental Hotel and it offended me.

You see, my dear Annette, it was not the way you thought it was-I was not about to milk them dry, buy French champagne, visit actresses, contract syphilis and pa.s.s it on, talk sharp, dress slick, steal the Hispano Suiza or use the widow's fortune to buy an Avro 504 and leave them at home to knit while I flew across the world and got myself written up in papers from Rangoon to Edinburgh.

It was Molly and Phoebe who spent the money. By G.o.d, they loved it. There were boxes in the theatre, dinners in the hotel, new hats and dresses and picnics in the Dandenongs. I kept a notebook and recorded what they spent on me, and I got a job.

I have put off discussing the job. It was not what I wanted. But tell me what else I was to do? I hated that clever Yankee b.a.s.t.a.r.d, but there was no easier motor car to sell. Yes, yes, I took my book of cuttings round to Colonel Tarrant who had the Ford agency in Exhibition Street and he hired me on the spot. I worked right off the floor, which I had never done before, and I cannot say I enjoyed the city style of selling cars. It did not suit me. I would rather have been standing in paddocks ring-barking with the O'Hagens, in some room lit by hurricane lamps while the daughter of the house played the piano accordion. I would have happily suffered indigestion from bad food, done my card tricks, told some yarns, and taken my time to make a sale.

All of this, I tell you now. But for twelve months I did this work and did not let any of my feelings make themselves known to me. I could not. My great talent in life was my enthusiasm and I drew on it relentlessly, careless of how I spent it. I poured it over my new life with the same reckless style with which Molly poured creme de menthe creme de menthe over her treacle pudding, not giving a d.a.m.n for the pounds it added or the pounds it cost. I was protector and provider, or intended to be, and the role, of course, took its toll on me. A portrait taken at the time shows the increasing depth of the wrinkles around my eyes which the retoucher's well-meaning brush made more, not less, noticeable. My black hair was already showing flecks of grey and receding in such a way as to make a long promontory of what had once been admired as a "widow's peak". over her treacle pudding, not giving a d.a.m.n for the pounds it added or the pounds it cost. I was protector and provider, or intended to be, and the role, of course, took its toll on me. A portrait taken at the time shows the increasing depth of the wrinkles around my eyes which the retoucher's well-meaning brush made more, not less, noticeable. My black hair was already showing flecks of grey and receding in such a way as to make a long promontory of what had once been admired as a "widow's peak".

I worked early and late, I did deals in pubs and wine bars. I scrounged complimentary theatre tickets for the women. I took them to the aquarium and the art gallery. And, I can confess it now, I stole a church hall from the Methodists at Brighton and had it transported out to the Maribyrnong River where I had the foundation stumps already in their place and waiting.

The Methodists' hall was not a palace, and, being Methodists, they had balked at the luxury of a tower. But it did have a kitchen and the hall itself had a platform. I worked on that hall like a bower-bird, running in and out with nails in my mouth, hammer in my hand. I used the spare wing sections that had come with the Morris Farman to divide up the hall into three rooms. They worked very well. True, they did not go right up to the ceiling, but those wings were the best walls I ever put inside a house. They were made, as you'd realize, from timber struts stretched tight with fabric and they let the light through very prettily. There was not a dark corner, even in the centre room. On sunny afternoons they were like a magic lantern show with the green and amber windows of the hall projected prettily against the canvas.

I found some very good quality carpet at the Port Melbourne tip and bought a brand-new dining-room table from the Myer Emporium. I borrowed a rainwater tank from a building site at Essendon and connected it to the guttering of the roof.

I had no time for the outside world. No one told me that de Garis had made his flight from Brisbane to Melbourne, and if I'd known I don't think I'd have cared. Melbourne was in an uproar about the treatment the St Patrick's Day procession had meted out to the Union Jack, I had no time to make my views known. I taught my customers to drive their cars with a patience that was new to me. If they were upset about the Union Jack I did not contradict them.

I lived for my family, and for Phoebe in particular, who waited in her room for my gentle knock.

Melbourne was a city of dreams and my darling was drunk on them. She made, with her own hands, a bright yellow flying suit and made love to me in it, allowing me entry through the opening she had so skilfully designed. The Morris Farman quivered on its guy ropes beneath the moon, before the wind at Maribyrnong.

In the next room Molly rang for room service and regaled old Klaus with tales of Point's Point while he allowed himself a gla.s.s or two of the creme de menthe creme de menthe that the widow, magnificent in crepe de Chine, was pleased to offer him. that the widow, magnificent in crepe de Chine, was pleased to offer him.

64.

Annette said she would attend no wedding in a church and it was for her sake that the wedding was held in the register office in William Street, a dusty dismal place which we pretended not to notice. Annette did not arrive, so there was no bridesmaid. Dr Grigson, invited to give away the bride, had missed his train and arrived, puffing and blowing out his sallow cheeks, at the wedding breakfast with a patented electric device for toasting bread which he, confused about whose wedding it was, presented to Molly with a pretty speech.

We had a small private room on the first floor of the Oriental. The windows looked out, through the leaves of a plane tree, on to the dappled footpaths of Collins Street along which the Sat.u.r.day trams full of football crowds rattled, ringing bells.

When Dr Grigson, formally attired in tails, p.r.o.nounced the gathering splendid, he was, as was his habit, choosing his words carefully-he did not overstate the case.

Molly wore an emerald green tunic and a dress of gold tusser. She crowned her splendour with a wide-brimmed hat from which ostrich feathers cascaded in spectacular abundance.

Phoebe appeared for the breakfast in a navy and red faille dress with a matching poncho that was short and tailored and did nothing to hide the hugging dress which, as I remarked appreciatively, used no more fabric than was absolutely necessary. She wore a fur hat, a little like a fez, which had the disadvantage of hiding her copper hair but which capped her head tightly and presented her handsome face so pleasingly.

"I could fancy," Grigson said, "that I was sitting, this very moment, in Paris."

I was so happy I could not find it in my heart to ask the old gentleman what was wrong with sitting in Melbourne.

We toasted everyone. We toasted Jack, solemn in black suit and bulging collar, whose photograph Molly had arranged to hang beside the King's. We toasted Annette. We toasted Geelong.

Molly added a little creme de menthe creme de menthe to her champagne. to her champagne.

"To a new life," she declared, "for all of us."

Only Dr Grigson, suddenly reminded of the realities of Ballarat, saw reason to doubt it.

65.

It can be argued, of course, that I should have consulted my fiance about the house she was to share with me, to ask her advice, opinion, needs, to see the bedroom pointed in a direction that was pleasing and the layout of the kitchen was a practical one. Shopping at the Port Melbourne tip, she should, you say, have been by my side, and may well have selected a different piece of carpet, a different Coolgardie safe, a better chair, and so on.

I dare say you're right, but the house was my present to her and as it represented no more than the core of the mansion I intended to finally construct, could be altered, pulled apart, demolished and rebuilt, I saw no harm in it. Saw no harm in it! I saw great benefit. It was my gift, my surprise, my work, my love, my tribute to her.

She loved it. As we bounced along the pot-holed track through yellow summer gra.s.s she exclaimed with joy. There was confetti spangled on her fur hat. The bl.u.s.tering northerly wind blew dust into her eyes.

She jumped from the car before I stopped. She ran through the house in echoing high heels. She kissed and hugged me. She called me husband.