Illywhacker_ A Novel Part 43

When everyone had gone, Leah excused herself (it was time for her to make Lenny's cocoa) and Charles and Izzie were left alone together.

Izzie was irritable, not with Charles, but with his comrades who were so easily distracted from their work, like children in a schoolroom on a summer afternoon. He rocked himself back and forth in his chair, lit a cigarette, and tried to stop the tide of desolation that always overcame him when the meetings were over and he was left alone with his wife. He fidgeted, balanced his ashtray, bit his lip and tried to feel sympathy for his unwanted guest.

"So," he said, "what are your plans for Sydney?"

Charles missed half of the sentence but he understood more from Izzie's face than he would, anyway, have gathered from the words.

"I'm a bit hard of hearing," he said belligerently.

Izzie did not repeat himself. Now he was reinstated as a teacher his days were long ones. He nodded, wearily. Charles interpreted the weariness as hostility.

"I suppose you think I'm a bit of a mug," he said.

Izzie shook his head. "No," he said, and smiled.

They sat and looked at each other. Charles was soon in a panic. If he was not an idiot he should be able to say something. He did not know what to say or how to say it.

"I remember you," he begged. "We met before. My c.o.c.kie bit your finger."

Izzie would have preferred to be kind to the fidgeting boy, but Charles chose to remind him of the day he would prefer to forget.

There was another silence.

"I came down to find my mum."

Izzie said something but Charles missed it. He started fiddling with his hearing aid. He banged the metal box on his knee.

"Do you remember me?" he demanded. "I remember you. I was only a young fellow."

"I'm sorry. I'm tired."

"What were you talking about when I came in?"

Izzie explained but Charles gave up understanding almost as soon as he started and when he spoke again it was on another subject entirely.

"I owe Leah a lot."

"Everybody seems to." Izzie just wanted to go to bed and sleep. He did not wish to hear talk about his saintly wife, but he did wish her to come and rescue him. He looked expectantly towards the door.

"I'm going to take her to the theatre."

In fact Charles had been going to take them both to the theatre. He did not even know that he'd changed his mind until the words came out of his mouth and he had excluded Izzie from it. "And to a rest-er-raunt."

"Good for you," said Izzie Kaletsky, now thoroughly impatient with his b.u.mptious guest. He leaned over and started to pick up the typed pages that were spread on the surface of the bed.

"Yes. I'm going to take her to the Chinese acrobats."

"That's nice." Izzie placed the pages in a dun-coloured folder.

"It will be nice. There are twelve boy acrobats, from China. I've got the money."

"You're very fortunate."

"I worked for it, every zac and deener. I was going to take her to a pub, but I met a bloke on the train who said a resteraunt would be better."

"Then you should take her to Prunier's."

"What's that?"

"Prunier's. Here, I'll write it down for you," said Izzie Kaletsky with a malice that was no longer new to him. "It's the very best restaurant in Sydney."

"That's what I want."

Charles took the piece of paper Izzie gave him and painstakingly copied the name and address into a small marbled notebook.

But he was to cross out the address the following morning when Leah, declining his invitation, laughed. It was then he knew Izzie had made a fool of him and he never tried to like him again.

6.

It was Leah Goldstein who wrote to me to say my missing son was found at last. She described for me his half-grown-up face, his smell, his clothes, his croaking voice, his snake, his bankbooks. On the first morning she cooked him a big breakfast with grilled sausages, steak, kidney, onions, eggs, chops, b.u.t.tered toast, cups of tea. She served this monstrous meal on a plate with a blue rim. This is what she told me, and I am not saying it wasn't kind of her, or even typical of her, only that you can't rely on it being true-by 1938 my puritanical friend was as addicted to telling lies as another woman, equally unhappy with her life, might be to a sherry bottle.

Yes, yes, I am asking you to believe that Honest Leah had become Lying Leah. I am not saying that it happened overnight. These things don't happen like that. Lies were not on her mind at all. She had sought to do no more than deliver some happiness to me, each day, for every day I lived in gaol. She wrote me letters.

She did not tell me that this enraged her husband. Neither did she describe the weather when it was unpleasant. If she was ill she would not trouble me with it; she would write as if she were well. This, of course, is not quite lying.

She did not begin to tell real lies until Rosa was in hospital suffering that filthy rot that left her all eaten out inside, as light and fragile as a pine log infested with white ant. It was Leah who calmed down Rosa's husband and her son. It was Leah who cared for and nursed her angry friend, washed the sheets and nighties she was so ashamed of, sat with her, watched her sleep until she felt herself to be soaked in the ga.s.sy odours of death itself. Later she would think of these months, when she helped her friend die, as one of the most important times in her life.

But she wrote not a word about it to me. Instead she described long walks with Rosa along the clifftops to Tamarama. She did not date these walks, but the impression given was that they had happened an hour or a minute before, that Rosa sat across from her at the kitchen table, drinking fragrant tea. They were beautiful letters, bulging with powerful skies and rimmed with intense yellow light. Every blade of gra.s.s seemed sharply painted, every word of conversation exact and true. Perhaps these things had once taken place. Perhaps she invented them. In any case they gave me that electric, unnatural mixture of emotions that every prisoner knows, where even the best things in the world outside come slashed with our own bitterness or jealousy. This confusion of love and hurt is very powerful. I came to crave it even while I dreaded it. It is a more potent drug than simple happiness.

Rosa died and was buried. Leah eliminated her presence from the house, threw away stubs of pencils and old ball gowns, yellowed letters, sc.r.a.ps of lace. No one tried to stop her. Lenny and Izzie mourned like Jews. While they sat on floors, Leah sat at the table and brought Rosa back to life. Now that, G.o.d d.a.m.n it, is no longer mere politeness. She sent me descriptions of Rosa swinging her arms, Rosa burping, Rosa raising her lovely face to the sun. When it gets to this point she is no longer doing it for me alone. She is doing it for herself. And before a year is out she has the whole thing out of control and she has presented imaginary Rosa with imaginary grandchildren, made curtains, planted pa.s.sionfruit and worried herself about the whooping cough in a world that exists between nine and eleven o'clock in the morning.

There was a time, when I finally learned the truth, that I could have killed her for her deception, to have made me feel so much about what revealed itself as nothing. I will tell you, later, how I got on the train with my bottle and my blade. But when I think about her now I cannot even imagine my own anger. I see only the empty air around her, the coldness of the surfaces, the gloss on the linoleum, the yellow stare of the shining cupboard doors, the brown hard glaze on the cracked bread crock, the rusty drip mark on the empty porcelain sink, and my Leah sitting alone writing these letters to me, manufacturing a happy family.

It was dangerous work and it is hardly surprising that she got herself addicted.

And although she could put up with Lenny's whingeing about his bowels ("I'm all bound up, girlie") and even the cruelties of her husband's tongue, she would permit nothing to prevent her letter-writing and even Izzie had learned to leave her alone when she was occupied with what they both now chose to call "bookkeeping".

Do not imagine that she was lazy in regard to her other duties. Leah, at twenty-five, worked as hard and unrelentingly as any widow who does not wish to think. She rose at five thirty every morning, washed and dressed her husband, made him breakfast, cut his lunch. At six thirty they left the house and she pushed the wheelchair up the steep hill out of Bondi, right up as far as Neil Street where they met Izzie's headmaster, a Mr Wilks of tory views. Together they would pick up the crippled teacher and strap the light wheelchair to the spare tyre. Mr Wilks would not have the chair inside the car (although it was a collapsible American model and would have fitted easily) and complained about scratch marks on the paintwork on the outside.

Leah then walked briskly down to Campbell Parade, sparing no time to admire the pounding surf, bought a newspaper for Lenny, returned to the house, did the washing if it was a Monday, went shopping if it was Tuesday or Friday, and because these were the days of the Popular Front against Fascism and there were demonstrations, meetings, anti-war rallies, seminars and fund-raising exercises like the Artists Against War exhibition she-being only a young wife with no children to care for-was always busy organizing something, arranging a hall for an exhibition, begging paintings from artists, borrowing a tea urn from a union who wanted her to pay a deposit. She did all these things without complaint, but she would not give up the time allocated to "my bookkeeping" for anyone. During these two hours of every day she would not answer a telephone or door or even make a cup of tea. She sat at the kitchen table celebrating imaginary birthdays and picking fruit from unplanted apple trees.

Even when Charles arrived in Sydney to find his mother, even though Leah was delighted to see him, although she may have cooked him a huge breakfast with steaks and chops and kidneys and bacon and sausages and eggs and onions, although she accepted his invitation to see the Chinese boy acrobats, she would not give up her letters to help him find his mother.

Of course she was guilty. She probably cooked him fried bread and liver as well. She apologized more than was necessary. She hovered around him with a teapot. But she would not give up her bookkeeping.

Instead she conscripted Lenny, who was doing nothing better than studying the racing form and worrying about his constipation, to help in the search.

They were a bizarre pair, the neat little Jew with his dark suit and black hat (which he wore like a Riley Street larrikin, tipped forward over his eyes) and the wide-hipped, pear-headed youth who did not know what to do with his big red hands. Thus she was able, when they finally left her alone, to incorporate a truthful portrait of the pair into the letter that began "Dear Herbert;" this reflection of the real world was like a little piece of mirror gla.s.s sewn into the fanciful patterns of a Hindu bride's dress.

7.

Charles had never talked to a "foreigner" in all his life. He had met Englishmen, of course, and the Yank who taught him how to trap the rabbits, but he had not met a real foreigner. Yet by ten o'clock on his second day in Sydney he was sitting in tea-rooms at Bondi and the tea-rooms were full of foreigners. Lenny bought him a cake and showed him how to eat it with a fork. The fork was tiny and hard to use. Charles pressed his knees together and tried to keep his elbow to his side. When the cake was finished they set out for the Bondi Post Office. It was still early, no more than ten, but there was a dance hall already open and they stopped to peer through its open lattice walls at the couples gliding on the floor. Lenny nudged him and winked. Charles blushed. He would never have the nerve to go into such a place.

"You know how to dance?" Lenny asked him. They were walking past the newsagent's towards the Post Office.

Charles admitted that he didn't.

Lenny then showed him how the foxtrot was done, right in front of the newsagent's. Even though Charles was embarra.s.sed he was also impressed at the light graceful movements of the silver-haired man. He was so dapper and neat. He held his hands out as if embracing a slightly taller woman.

"Foxtrot," Lenny said, and smiled. "You can teach yourself." They then went into the newsagent's and picked up the Sporting Globe Sporting Globe.

At the Bondi Post Office they telephoned every Badgery listed in the Sydney phone book. It was Charles who supplied the pennies and Lenny who did the talking. They invested pennies in Miss A. B. Badgery and Mr W. A. Badgery, in a Badgery who imported and in another who manufactured rope; but they had no luck. Then, with hands smudged with phone-book ink, their cuffs soiled with post-office grime, they took a tram, a bus, another tram, and went to St Vincent's Hospital, not in search of Phoebe (which is what Charles had imagined as they walked up the steps) but to visit a friend of Lenny's, an old man, also a foreigner who described himself to Charles as "a common tout and racecourse urger".

Charles showed the man his snake and the man gave Lenny some money.

After that they went to a cafe in Rowe Street and Lenny asked questions about Charles's mother. It was a cafe for artists and poets and he thought she might be known there.

Lenny went patiently from table to table. He began the same way, exactly, each time. "Excuse me, please, gentlemen, perhaps you can help." Or: "Excuse me, please, sir." Charles put his hands in his pockets and jingled the pennies he had left over from the Post Office. He stared around at the posters on the wall. He tried to appear nonchalant, but he hated it. He wanted to go. He did not know why he was being stared at.

When Lenny arrived at the last table, Charles was already at the door.

"Excuse me, please, sir," said Lenny, "perhaps you can help."

The man was very fat. He had wet red lips and slicked-back hair. He sat sketching in a book no bigger than a matchbox but Charles noted none of this. Neither did he listen to Lenny's speech. He was hot with embarra.s.sment. He was wondering what item of his wardrobe was incorrect, if it was the coat or perhaps the hat.

"Know her?" the artist's voice was high and fluting. "I should say I know her. Casually," he said, "artistically, socially, biblically."

Charles was brought back from the open door to meet the man who knew his mother. The man's hand was soft as a pillow.

"Your mother," he said loudly, "is one of the great characters of Sydney. One of the great hostesses hostesses. One of the great free spirits spirits. Go," he said, tearing a page from his tiny sketchbook and giving it to Charles. "Here is her address. See her. Talk to her about your wardrobe."

The whole cafe burst into laughter and Lenny, escorting his young charge out into the hot street, suggested he might like to look at some clothes at Anthony Hordern's.

And that was how Charles presented himself at his mother's doorway looking for all the world (as Mr L., her visitor at the time, remarked) "like the very latest thing in bank clerks".

8.

Svelte cats named Swinburne arched their backs above the harbour and rubbed their silver fur against the fluted plaster columns that Annette Davidson had painted chrome yellow and kingfisher blue. The walls were pale peach and the great window uncurtained. On the polished wooden floor were rugs of exotic origin and on a low table (a snazzy thing of gla.s.s and chrome) sat a single white bowl with nothing in it but a dying beetle.

Charles, imprisoned in his new suit, pressed his knees together as he perched himself on the tiny chair. His neck burned beneath his collar. His mother had not, as yet, so much as touched his hand. There had been no embrace. No lipstick marked his cheek and every eye was free from tears. She had taken the parcel of rabbit skins but had not even opened it. He tried not to blame her. The fault was with the other visitor, this Mr L. who droned on and on in a voice that Charles, having limited experience of such things, thought must be that of a clergyman, the mistake being made because of its mellifluous nature, its lack of self-consciousness, its easy a.s.surance that its audience would not escape.

Charles balanced his cup and saucer on his knee. He had already finished it but he did not know where to put it and this problem occupied his entire mind. He felt himself observed and wondered what was correct. He was inclined to put the cup and saucer on the gla.s.s table and yet it was so ostentatiously bare that he felt it might be wrong to do so and, in any case, the table was gla.s.s and would make a loud noise and draw attention to his mistake, if mistake it was. So he continued to hold the saucer on his knee and looked, with what he imagined was polite attention, in the direction of Mr L.

The famous Mr L. sprawled in the settee while remaining, somehow, as neat as a pin. He was boom-voiced, big-nosed, with a sensuous mouth below oddly pinched, slightly disapproving nostrils. His hair was cut fringed like a boy's but was flecked with silver and Charles, attempting to understand the gist of the argument, gathered only that the speaker did not like communists, Jews or proponents of what he called "Bank Clerk Culture". He went on and on about "LCD" and it was twenty years later that an older Charles realized, one insomniac night, that he had been referring to Lowest Common Denominator and that what he was most frightened of was democracy.

But it was to my wife that Charles gave the bulk of his attention, and it was not the polite uncomfortable look he felt obliged to give the self-satisfied Mr L., but something its object felt to be a reprimand. Charles stared, his eyes heavy with love and censure. His mother was, in her mid-thirties, still a young woman. If there was something dark and shadowy around her eyes it suggested no more than the burdens of beauty. Charles's mother was like a gypsy. She was totally beyond imagining. Everthing about her (the painted pillars, the arching cats, the smooth honey colour of her skin) was unlike anything Charles had ever seen. She wore a scarf wrapped around her head and its tail fell, a cascade of tiny roses, over one bare shoulder. Her hands were shapely, the fingers long, flexible and expressive. When she spoke a throaty contralto came from lips which hardly seemed to move and yet enunciated her vowels in a manner that her son could only describe as posh; the manner of speaking suggested great pa.s.sion and great control.

He waited for a pause in the man's speech, imagining that, when it came, his mother would have a chance to explain that he was Charles Badgery, her son, and that they would, of course, wish time together and then the man might look at him less oddly. She had introduced him, with a jerky motion of her hand, as Charles, then held her bare throat and laughed. It was a jarring, silly outburst. Mr L. had blinked and continued with his speech.

The pause, at last, arrived. His mother stood. She took the saucer and cup from his knees and departed, with a murmur, to the kitchen.

Charles, disappointed, stretched himself inside the confines of his suit. He knew that Mr L. was staring at his brown boots and knew that Lenny had been right and that he should have bought shoes, or, if he were intent on boots, at least black boots. Now he was sorry he had been stubborn about the brown boots, but he had always wanted them, although this would be difficult to explain, just as he knew-looking at the man's pale sleepy supercilious eyes-that he could not explain that the suit was only so ill-fitting because he had been in a hurry to get here, that it was to be returned to Anthony Hordern's tomorrow where the legs would be lengthened, the sleeves let down, the backside made more generous.

"Nice day," he said to Mr L., unable to stand his staring.

"Noice day," said Mr L., and Charles could not believe that he was being mocked.

Meanwhile Phoebe clattered around the kitchen in a tizz, not knowing what it was she should do. Afterwards she would regret (particularly when in her cups) not having sent the famous little satyr away and thus removed the problem of having to socialize with two such different personalities at once. Yet both of them had arrived, almost together, and both without warning; she had found herself trapped between what she had once been and what she would like to be.

One always gave boys biscuits. She looked for biscuits but Annette had been up in the night, prowling the house, and had eaten them all. Her son (she found it hard to credit she had ever had one) and not even a d.a.m.n biscuit to give him. He had smelt (she wrinkled her nose, looking for sugar lumps) distinctly odd. He was like a yokel in a suit. He was odd, repelling, ugly, with frighteningly demanding eyes that she was tempted to label as insolent but could not, of course, because she was his mother. Also there was this: that he was disconcertingly familiar, like photographs of her father as young man, and she felt towards this image a halting pulse of affection that was no weaker than the undertow of her irritation.

Yet she could not send Mr L. away. She had laboured long to get his attention, had done what she always had-mixed up her literary ambitions and her powers of s.e.xual persuasion. It was, as Annette was never slow to remind her, a bad habit to have fallen into. But to this Phoebe would bitterly reply that their whole life was a bad habit, a habit none of them could break, not even Horace who, although he was presently away, working as a purser on a coastal steamer, would return as soon as he had forgotten how sharply he was cut by frustration and jealousy, or when he was dismissed for epilepsy and put off the ship, whichever was the sooner.

There were other bad habits too that Phoebe was not aware of, the worst being the whole system of illusion whereby Horace and Annette propped up Phoebe and made her believe herself a poet. Perhaps Horace, aroused by the sensational subject-matter, could not see the awfulness of the poems; but Annette (sarcastic, bitter, put-upon Annette, the history mistress with the wide beseeching mouth), Annette said nothing, perhaps from fear that Phoebe would, at last, turn on her and reject her totally, unconditionally, for ever. The nearest Annette would ever come to speaking the unutterable was, when most miserable, "We have spoiled you."

Thus, Phoebe: surrounded by her menagerie: Annette, Horace, the cats arching their backs. She had allowed herself to become ridiculous and did not know it. Mr L., who sat in the next room idly and elegantly mocking her son, was not about to publish her poetry in Isis Isis although he was doubtless aroused by the potency of some of the s.e.xual imagery which made up for in literalness what it lacked in subtlety. He could not take the poems as anything other than a menu for the pleasure that might await him in the curtained bed referred to with such pa.s.sion in one infamous unpublished sonnet that the men who drank at La Boheme would never publish no matter how often they pa.s.sed it, smiling, from hand to hand. although he was doubtless aroused by the potency of some of the s.e.xual imagery which made up for in literalness what it lacked in subtlety. He could not take the poems as anything other than a menu for the pleasure that might await him in the curtained bed referred to with such pa.s.sion in one infamous unpublished sonnet that the men who drank at La Boheme would never publish no matter how often they pa.s.sed it, smiling, from hand to hand.

While she looked for biscuits she knew already eaten, Phoebe imagined herself on the brink of publication and she could not ask Mr L. to leave to allow herself to have time with her son and she resolved to ask Charles if he would come back tomorrow. She intended to take him aside, and explain all the complexities. She would cook him a lunch tomorrow, or perhaps Annette might cook something tonight, and she would serve it to him tomorrow.

She returned to make this arrangement at a time when Charles had at last realized the sn.o.bbish and malicious nature of his interrogator and, having had his suit insultingly admired for ten minutes, was at the end of his tether. Phoebe, seeing the wildness in his eyes, panicked, and made her request there and then with the result that he stood in an urgent rush of limbs, sc.r.a.ping the chair along the floor, his eyes imploring, clutching for some sign from hers, but ready, belligerently, to reject it. She found herself rushing after him, up the steps and out into the road, where he stood trembling all over like a difficult horse. She quieted him, slowly, but ruined it again by being worried about Mr L. to whom she must return. She leaned towards him to kiss his burning cheek and he-realizing her intention-flinched from her and stamped off down the street where he was to become hopelessly lost, split his trousers, and all but ruin the rest of the suit in a storm that all of Sydney had seen coming.

When Phoebe returned to her flat she found that her guest had drawn a caricature of her son as a wombat which was as marvellously executed as it was cruelly accurate. He inscribed it to her, and signed it. She laughed and thanked him and made a great fuss about how she must have it framed.

But later, after they had disported in the curtained bed, a bitterness welled up in her so strong that she could not maintain her silence. It is to her credit that she told the artist that the wombat was her missing son and resembled her late father. It is also characteristic of her that she should also have the work framed and display it prominently; for although she would have loved to destroy the caricature she could not bear to part with the inscription.

9.