Illywhacker_ A Novel Part 54

"Mother, it's very expensive."

"And take up with him?" him?"

"Come and meet him," Charles begged.

"Oh, don't worry, I'll come and meet him. But I will not leave my flat. I refuse, I absolutely refuse, Charles. I value my independence."

It was then Charles lost his temper and said some unkind things about her "independence". He succeeded in frightening his mother terribly.

44.

Amongst her friends, Phoebe was not thought to be unkind. Quite the opposite. But as she walked into the private room at the Hyde Park Hotel on that evening in February 1949, she was armed for battle. She was angry with her son who now strode across the vulgar carpet to welcome her, but she kissed him on his rough sunburnt cheek as if nothing was the matter. She nodded to Leah whom she had never liked, and smiled at Emma, trying to convey fondness while, at the same time, keeping sufficient distance to discourage those soft-centred kisses.

Everyone was standing except for Emma who had seated herself at table. She wore, Phoebe noted, the same ostentatious pearls she had worn on Christmas Day. She had also, through design or carelessness-it was not quite clear which-neglected to wear a corset and her round little stomach rose from below the belt of her long silk dress and disappeared into the floral valley of her thighs.

Phoebe accepted the kisses of her grandchildren. No one would have guessed that she was repelled by all this sticky-mouthed humanity. She was bright. She laughed as she always did when nervous, and put her hand to her throat. She let her eyes go to that place in the room where her opponent sat.

"Herbert Badgery, I presume," she said in a whisky-cured contralto. She laughed again. The feathers cascaded from her little hat.

I stood and walked towards her.

She held out her hand, briskly, with her handbag tucked beneath her arm. I shook her hand and found it damp.

"Well," she said, and laughed again.

I could feel everyone watching us, marooned there in the middle of that room, the long cloth-covered table by our side. I felt dead-eyed Henry sit with a thump on one of the chairs. I had gone for a rum with Goldstein. She said it was good for toothache, but I could see it had been a mistake. I had already called Hissao "Sonia".

"You've got old," said Phoebe.

I refrained from saying that she, also, had got old. Her carefully applied powder did nothing to hide the fine lines which were not those caused by laughing and smiling but were, rather, a fine network, like rivers on the map of her upper lip. Yet she had become the thing she had imagined and there was not, in either her bearing or her accent, very much left that would connect her to Jack and Molly.

A waiter came with sherry on a tray. I could have done with another rum, but I kept my hands jammed in the sticky pockets of my derelict suit, producing, doubtless, an effect that Phoebe would think was "common". She took a sherry. The boys said they wanted lemonade and I was pleased to feel that I was no longer the centre of attention. Henry was pinching Nicky and making him cry. Hissao wanted a pee and I could see Charles making toilet inquiries of the waiter. Emma started murmuring over Leah whose face she had so carefully made up, producing a doll-like beauty which, while foreign to her character and everything I liked about it, none the less made my wrinkled d.i.c.k stretch and unwrinkle as if it were lying, not in the dark discomfort of my underpants, but in the gentle warmth of tomorrow morning's sunshine.

The windows were open on to Elizabeth Street and the hot night was suddenly filled with the frenzy of exhaust pipes, slipped clutches, the distinctive slap of engines wrecked by wartime gas producers. I liked the smell of car exhausts and I sniffed in the stinking air as Goldstein would have sniffed in jasmine.

"I mean no malice," Phoebe said.

A strange expression. I looked to match it against an expression on her face, but she had her face bent from me, looking for something in her handbag-a white envelope, smooth, unbent, unmarked by powder.

When she looked up I thought she was frightened of me. She handed me the envelope. In my confusion I imagined it was money, compensation for that aeroplane she had stolen from me. I thanked her, and tucked the envelope into my pocket. It felt thick and comforting. Perhaps there would be sufficient to pay my son some rent.

"You see," she said, "I know you are a bigamist." She finished her sherry and looked around for a waiter. There was no waiter. She put the gla.s.s down on the table. "You were already married when you married me. You were married," she said, "to Marjorie Thatcher Wilson in Castlemaine on October 15th, 1917, and you were never divorced."

I said nothing.

"I have all the papers." She was quite gay. In the next room a dance combo began to play. There was a saxophone, I recall, and a piano player with an American accent. The waiter came and filled her gla.s.s. "It won't matter if you tear it up, because I have the real thing. It's a little folio tied up with a ribbon and it cost me forty pounds. But the point is, dear Herbert, that I will not give up my flat."

I had no idea what she was talking about, although I remembered Marjorie Wilson very well. She was a nice woman, and I was sorry I left her but the problem was not her but the screeching mother she would bow and sc.r.a.pe to all day long. I was silent. I was thinking about Marjorie and how we had to do it in the laundry while we took it in turns to keep the squeaky wringer moving.

My silence seemed to make Phoebe gayer.

"If you force me, I'll have you charged with bigamy and then, I believe, I'm ent.i.tled to sue you for all sorts of things."

She laughed again, and I was reminded of her mother in the days when she thought something was wrong with her brain, when, caught in Geelong, with no faith in her normal manner, she had crooked her finger and adopted a plummy accent and revealed her terrors in continual laughter.

I was feeling quite anaesthetized. I had another sherry to help it along. My teeth stopped hurting and I promised Phoebe that I would cause her no trouble. I congratulated myself on having moved beyond a young man's rages.

I winked at my flirty lipsticked Goldstein as I sat down at the table. She touched my calf and smiled softly. I felt myself master of the situation. I said as little as possible but smiled politely at everyone. I asked them questions about themselves, an old salesman's habit guaranteed to make your prospect think you both sympathetic and intelligent. I did not imagine there was a risk of an argument about Australia's Own Car. I did not think I cared about the subject. I imagined I had no pa.s.sions left except those involving shelter and the comforts of skin. I would do nothing to jeopardize either. I was going to have a place, with Goldstein, inside that wonderful building of my son's. I was going to wake each morning and gaze up at the skylight and know, straightaway, what sort of day it was.

Charles sat himself between Leah and his porcelain-faced wife. When the oyster sh.e.l.ls were removed, he stretched and yawned and put his long arms along the back of Leah's chair, a gesture perhaps accidental, but I did not take to it.

"So, Father," he said.

Phoebe, on my right, whispered that he only shouted because he was deaf.

"Tell me, Father," he removed his arm from Leah's chair, and leaned forward intently. "You haven't given your opinion of the Holden."

I was not insensitive to his feelings about the car. I had questioned him about it at length. I would have thought this enough to do the job, but he was not such a simple fellow as he looked.

"It went well," I said. "I couldn't pa.s.s an opinion without driving it."

"You can pa.s.s an opinion on one fact: it's an Australian car. I thought of you the day I read about it. I thought, Father has lived to see his dream come true. An Australian Car. Did he ever tell you, Mother," he turned to Phoebe who was now looking very bored and was taking exception to Charles's great pleasure in saying "Mother" and "Father" at the one table, "did he ever tell you how he walked away from the T Model on the saltflats at Geelong? When we were kids we used to ask him to tell us that story. He must have told it to us a hundred times. He...."

"There are no saltflats in Geelong," Phoebe said. "He was lying."

"The saltflats are at Balliang East," I said.

Phoebe shuddered. "A dreadful place."

"Very close to where I met you."

"That's what I meant."

Goldstein was the only one to laugh. It was also Goldstein who, on the subject of Australia's Own Car, made the point about the extraordinary deal General Motors had done with the Australian government. She talked about this in detail while Phoebe sighed loudly and shifted in her chair.

The roast beef arrived and for a moment it seemed as if the conversation would pa.s.s on to something less difficult, but Charles had no intention of letting it go.

"Yes," he said, polishing his fork with his table napkin. "There is money here to do things. There's no doubt about it."

"Yes, dear," said Leah. "It's our money, but the Yanks do get all the profit. They won't risk their money because we have-or they think we have-a socialist government."

"Who can blame them?" said my feathered wife. Her voice was not quite firm and bobbled uncertainly on its perch.

"Excuse me," Comrade Goldstein put her fork back on her plate and sat up straight in her chair. "Excuse me, but I do."

Phoebe ignored Leah. (Perhaps this made me angry, but I didn't think so at the time.) "I can't bear the way they speak," she said. "I just can't stand their vowels."

"I like it better than the Poms," said Charles. "It's not stuck up. Now, you've met Nathan...."

"No, no," his mother tapped the table with her dessert spoon. "I don't mean the Americans. I mean the Labour Party. They've all got pegs on their noses."

"It's the Australian way of speaking."

"It's pig ignorant," said Phoebe, "and if I were an American I wouldn't trust them either. They talk like pickpockets."

"Say again," said Charles. He placed his hearing aid on the table, propping it up against the blue packet of de Witt's Antacid Powder which he brought with him wherever he ate.

"They're thieves, pickpockets." Phoebe looked at her son's contrivance with disgust. "Put it in your pocket, Charles. Show some manners."

"He can't hear you if he does," Leah said, but Charles put his machine away, looking a little hurt. Phoebe smiled at Leah. She was too polite to call her a pinko.

Emma, in the meantime, had Hissao on her lap and was feeding him although he was now five and quite old enough to have his own chair and feed himself. Emma did not contribute to the argument although she smiled at me from time to time and occasionally I heard the barely audible sound of her murmurs. She popped mashed-up messes of food into her son's pretty mouth while his dark watchful eyes roamed over us. Once, in the middle of an argument, he smiled at me and for a moment I heard nothing that was said and smiled at him like a man in love. So late in my foolish life I was to acquire a real family after all.

"So, Father, what do you say about the Holden, eh?"

I shrugged. I am not a shrugger by nature but I wished to avoid saying anything hurtful.

"Come on. Come on." He put his ape arm behind Leah's chair and beamed at me.

When I had done my years of study in Rankin Downs this was not the context in which I had planned to unleash my learning. I had imagined dispa.s.sionate discourse, conversation as restrained as teacups quietly kissing their saucers. But still I answered my son in a considered way, avoiding anything that could be considered personal.

"I would say," I told him, "that we Australians are a timid people who have no faith in ourselves."

It was then that the trouble started. It was not with my comment, which was quiet and civilized. It was my son's reply. He roared with laughter as unmusical as the chair he sc.r.a.ped beneath him. I felt my temper begin to rise. I tried to bottle it. I had my heart intent on entering his household and I would not-not this time, please G.o.d-go hurling snakes around the room, ranting with a young man's pa.s.sion, destroying the very thing I wanted.

"You don't believe me?" I asked him quietly. I fancy you could describe my smile as wry but my eyes, I felt them, were small and showed themselves as an intense violet blue.

Charles laughed again.

I did not lose my temper. I spoke sweetly, so softly that he had to produce his machine again and listen with a strained expression. "Then why...." I said.

"Speak up."

"Then why," I waited for him to get the thing adjusted, "are we so easy to fool? Why do we let them call it 'Australia's Own Car'?"

He did not obey the rules. He did not know them, the b.l.o.o.d.y ignoramus.

"Because it is." He thumped his fist on the table and made the plates jump. Emma's eyes slanted and she hunched her shoulders. Leah stared at the tablecloth. Phoebe examined the little watch she had pinned to her breast and the two bigger boys, the apprentice dullards, put on their deadman's eyes and looked to the front.

"No," I said. I was still quite calm. "It's a lie. And the shame is, it's not our lie; it's their lie."

"Your father," Leah said, "uses the word 'lie' in a slightly eccentric way," and she touched my leg again, beneath the table, recalling the tender conversation we had conducted over our Bundaberg rum.

"There are several meanings to the word 'lie'," said Phoebe, speaking as a professional in matters to do with language, "but only one to the word 'liar'."

"A lie," I said, "is something that isn't true at the moment you say it."

I saw Goldstein's smile-it spread to her eyes and suffused her skin as pervasive as a blush.

"E.g.?" my son demanded.

I had lived with my Vegemite jar so long that I did not find its contents disgusting. Often it was frightening but mostly it reminded me of the trivial nature of my imagination-for I had no doubt that it was this that controlled its contents. I could do no better than some warts, a fish, and-for a week or two-a tiny fox-terrier (it was only half an inch long) that finally changed into something like a cauliflower. Even mad Moran had made angels.

"E.g.?" my son demanded.

When I placed the bottle on the table, I was pointing out our lack of courage and imagination. It was all so clear to me that I felt no need to explain it further.

"E.g.," I said.

But all they saw was a finger floating in a bottle.

Emma grabbed for it, but it was Charles who won possession. He looked at me with disgust but I was too far along the line of my argument to go back and explain it to the slower ones.

"What is this thing thing?"

"Almost anything you're brave enough to make it into."

"I don't understand you," Charles roared.

"I don't understand you either, mug." (I was blowing it. Tough s.h.i.t. Rough t.i.t. Too bad.) "How can you turn your shop into a wing-ding for a Yankee card trick? Australia's Own Car! It's bulls.h.i.t, boy. You've been done like a dinner."

"I haven't been been done, Father. I done, Father. I have have done. I've done more than you ever did. You lied and cheated and pa.s.sed dud cheques. You never fed us. We never had clothes. We were cold and hungry when you looked after us. Now look at you. Look at you all. Jeez, you get up my nose. I'm sorry, Leah, but it's true. I feed you all. I put food in your mouth, and yours, and yours, and yours, and yours. It's my worry, my responsibility, and no one here lifts a finger to help me." His voice went up an octave. "You come along here with your socialism or your poetry or your sarcasm or this, this done. I've done more than you ever did. You lied and cheated and pa.s.sed dud cheques. You never fed us. We never had clothes. We were cold and hungry when you looked after us. Now look at you. Look at you all. Jeez, you get up my nose. I'm sorry, Leah, but it's true. I feed you all. I put food in your mouth, and yours, and yours, and yours, and yours. It's my worry, my responsibility, and no one here lifts a finger to help me." His voice went up an octave. "You come along here with your socialism or your poetry or your sarcasm or this, this thing thing, but none of you actually do anything. In real life, someone has to talk to the bank manager. It's me. I'm the one. I'm a business man. All those years, Father, you talked as if you were a business man, but I can see now you weren't a business man's bootlace. You moaned and groaned about the Pommies and the Yanks but you never did anything. And now you've got the nerve to criticize my car. Well it's Our Car. There's not another one like it in all the world. Is there one in Russia? Ha. In America? No, it's ours and we made it."

Everyone was silent, but Charles was at that point-I know it well-where the climax of a rage is not quite reached and something, some definite thing, must be done to cap it off. The flag must be driven into the snow.

"But," he said, thrusting his hand into his jacket pocket and pulling out a crumpled quid note, "but, seeing you are all so independent, here's a quid from me towards the food and grog. I'm sure you can all pay for yourselves. Put that thing down," down," he said to Emma, but his wife was entranced by the Vegemite jar and did not even look up when her husband left the room and stamped down the stairs into the night. he said to Emma, but his wife was entranced by the Vegemite jar and did not even look up when her husband left the room and stamped down the stairs into the night.

Henry and George sat rigid. Emma and Hissao were already busy with my bottle.

"Well," Phoebe said brightly. "I must be off, too." She kissed me briskly on the cheek and she had been borne out into the night on black feathers before anyone had a chance to ask her for a penny towards the meal.

I must have looked miserable because Goldstein kicked my ankle and smiled at me.

"Don't worry," she said. "He'll be back in a minute."

It happened just as she predicted. He was away no longer than it takes to walk around the block, up Castlereagh, into Liverpool, and back. He came into the room holding his hat in his hand with his shoulders rounded, his long arms pressed against his sides. I did not want him to apologize. I thought him ent.i.tled to say what he said, even if I did think he had been tricked by the Yanks. I tried to stop him, but he insisted. He did not do it briefly. He went on and on and I had to listen. He was in the habit of it: apologizing for things he was not to blame for. I could not look at him, only at the tablecloth.

"I hope you will stay," he said.

"Oh yes," I said.

"Not just tonight."