He smiled. ‘Is having fun a sin?’
‘Yes!’ They both laughed. She said, ‘It’s in the Catholic Catechism: “Thou shalt not have fun”. You weren’t raised a Catholic?’
‘I was raised with nothing. Look, when I was younger, I got on the wrong tram,’ he said, shrugging.
‘My heart bleeds for you,’ she said. ‘And Olivia’s boyfriend, Luke – did you have him killed?’
‘Jesus – no!’
‘Do you know who did?’
‘It was Jake Phipps. I had no idea he was going to do it and o’ course coming across the body on Coogee Beach unhinged Olivia and we had to put her in the asylum, me and that piece o’ work, Mrs Kettlewell, God rest ’er soul!’
‘What happened after the fire? Did Jake Phipps get the burnt-out gallery?’
Howard nodded. ‘Ruthless brutality and police bribery get you a long way in this country.’
‘What did he do with it?’
‘He restored the building. He kept expanding his empire for the next twenty years and there were always enough crooked cops to protect him. He became a very rich man. But Jake had a heart attack at fifty-two. That was in nineteen sixty-three. No children. He died intestate.’ He lit another cigarette and continued. ‘There’s a crudity about the way men like Jake Phipps think. They have no idea about … human connection. I mean, without that, what are we? Worse than animals. And ignore other people’s feelings for long enough and you lose contact with reality. Please, Keira – have some fruit.’
‘No thanks.’
‘Listen, there are things in the past that I shouldn’t have done. I’m a different person now,’ said Howard.
‘People don’t change.’
‘You said Olivia has changed.’
‘Well, some people do. But not people like you!’
Howard emitted his brief bark of a laugh. ‘I s’pose you’ve been getting a pretty negative press about me.’
‘Not without reason.’
‘If I could change some of the bad things I’ve done I would,’ he said.
‘They’re in the past. I’ve always looked to the future. I raced towards the future in fast cars. I lived my whole life like that. Till I crashed.’
‘Are you speaking metaphorically?’
He barked a brief laugh of surprise and said, ‘I’m speaking the literal truth. The Mercedes was a write-off. I was in a coma for four days. When I came to, I had time to think. Nothing to do but think. When you nearly die it forces you into seeing things from a different perspective.
‘Then when Madge Burnside started in on me with her Bible-bashing crap I told her to shut up. I pressed the buzzer for the nurse to come and eject her. Then she told me – about you. I waved the nurse away and pretended to be cool about Madge’s news. But it shook me to my foundations. All this time, you were growing up in the world – not a million miles from me. I might have died, not knowing!’
Keira said nothing and Howard continued. ‘When I saw Linh’s pictures I couldn’t believe it. You were so lovely and smart-looking. And you were mine! Please, let me finish – you don’t realise when you’re younger. But it’s the meaning of life – you are the future.’
‘I’m not in your future.’
‘Don’t say that.’ He looked crushed, the eyebrows drawn down and the lines from nose to mouth deepened. ‘Keira, you’ve got no idea the difference this makes to me.’ He paused. ‘I’d do anything for you. I’m your father.’
‘I’ve already got a father.’
‘I know. I’m just offering … Listen, I just want you to know that I am here for you too … if you ever need money or anything else, I can help you.’
‘I might get a job in Melbourne.’
He looked alarmed. ‘You’re going away?’
‘Don’t know yet. If I do get that job, it’s for a year.’
‘Keira, let me pay for your plane fares to visit Sydney on weekends, any time you want. This is my home number,’ said Howard, leaning over to take a card and a biro from the bedside table drawer. He wrote on the back of the card and handed it to her.
‘The Cormorant Leagues Club,’ she read. ‘You’re the Managing Director!’
‘Sounds impressive, doesn’t it?’ He laughed. ‘As well as a co-owner. Keira, you will keep in touch, won’t you?’
‘If I said no, would you spy on me again?’
He gave her a sad, level gaze.
‘If we want to have any sort of relationship,’ said Keira, ‘it has to be honest.’
‘I took it as a rhetorical question.’
‘I took your lack of reply to be an affirmative.’
Howard kept staring at her. ‘I’m an optimist,’ he said. ‘We’ve found each other now. You’ll write to me from Melbourne and I’ll write back. We’ll telephone each other and when you visit, which will be regularly, I’ll take you out to dinner and we’ll catch up on each other’s lives.’
‘You’ve got it all planned, eh?’
In spite of herself, his nakedly direct blue-eyed gaze touched her heart.
‘It’s not a plan,’ he said. ‘It’s a hope.’
*
Later that morning, Keira wandered away from the Rocks end of the Quay towards the wharves, leaving Deirdre with the Art in Australia journalist, Marilyn Brydges-Carter.
She walked past the wharves, past a ferryman lassoing a belaying pin on the jetty with a heavy rope. He threw down a short boardwalk between ferry and jetty and passengers disembarked in small clusters or singly.
It was a sunny, blue-skied day with little gusts of wind blowing Keira’s hair in chaotic strands. She whipped out a rubber-band from her little shoulder bag and gathered her hair into a ponytail.
Beyond the wharves, in the distance, the new Opera House, majestic, gleaming and serene, sat solidly on Bennelong Point, the upward thrust of its white sails against the sky putting her in mind of a cathedral. She took off the lens cap and captured a few photos with the Nikon strapped around her neck.
She walked closer to the water, breathing in the smell of the silty seabed, not unpleasant, and in fact there was something sensual and satisfying about it. Vampires, she thought, would love that cold, muddy subterranean smell. A whiff of frying chips from a cafe near Circular Quay railway station undercut the salty air.
A young man with long hair and a goatee beard was strumming his guitar and singing ‘Suzanne takes you down …’ Keira saw a mass of people in their summer clothes spilling off a yellow and green ferry. She imagined how Circular Quay must have looked to Deirdre, alighting from her passenger liner more than forty years before.
Keira moved to a less crowded part of the Quay and stood at the iron fence decorated with cast-iron seahorses. Leaning against the chest-high railing, she looked into the dark green harbour water, noticing an oily sheen shifting slowly on the opaque surface.
Ahead, a ferry called Lady Denman ploughed through the dark water towards Wharf Four, excited children leaning over its side. She remembered Kenneth Slessor, melancholy chronicler of the city’s edge, and wondered why she’d never seen a ferry named after him.
In Australia, thought Keira, posh dignitaries, politicians and sportsmen get their names on things, not poets. But why?
Deep and dissolving verticals of light
Ferry the falls of moonshine down …
Doesn’t that deserve a monument of some sort? And ‘the harbour floating in air’ – that was Slessor too, as every schoolchild knows, or maybe they don’t anymore. It’s three years since the poet died.
She stared into the water, sad but hopeful, listening to the slap and suck of saltwater against the massively thick wooden posts supporting the wharf. Slessor was a poet of the past, of the mystery of time, death and memory. Who was the poet of hope? She gazed across the harbour.
Distant ferries looked like toy boats. Maureen was probably on one of those ferries. She checked her watch. Nearly time to walk back. There would be time later with Deirdre and Maureen to see the Oper
a House close up.
She walked back towards the park, past the bearded young man, now singing Bird on the Wire, past a juggler in a red and blue polka-dot shirt and tattered jeans, past a teenage girl eating fish and chips from a white butcher-paper cone.
An ice cream van was on the path, selling soft-serve vanilla, strawberry or chocolate to a swarm of chattering children. Deirdre, in the distance, was standing near the seahorse railing further on, having her photograph taken by a photographer from Art in Australia. Deirdre, the sun flashing off her gold earrings, turned this way and that in her green cotton trousers and elegant black top.
Keira walked closer and waited. When the session was finished, Deirdre introduced her to the photographer, Simon Blackwell. Keira asked him if he would take a photo with her camera. She and Deirdre against the harbour might be a good image to end her essay with.
‘That Opera House will make an amazing backdrop,’ said Deirdre. ‘She looks as if she might want to slip her moorings, perhaps at night when no one is watching, and go and sail on the harbour under the moonlight, then hop back in place in time for people waking up.’
‘Deirdre was telling me that you’re majoring in photography,’ said Simon. ‘What are you going to do afterwards?’
‘I’m applying for curatorial jobs. There’s one in Melbourne I’m hoping to get.’ His warm hazel eyes encouraged her to continue. ‘But if I don’t, I’ll keep trying. I want to keep doing my photography. It’ll sound silly – but I feel as if I’m on the brink.’
‘You are on the brink,’ said Deirdre.
‘Yes, and when I get the opportunity I just want to plunge in,’ she said, winking at Deirdre.
‘That’s grand, Keira,’ said Deirdre. ‘We Wild women know what we want and don’t stop until we get it.’
‘That’s the spirit,’ said Simon, taking more shots. ‘Just three left on this, Keira – can I finish the roll?’
‘Sure. This might end up in my photographic essay. Can you leave me your card so I can acknowledge the photographer?’
‘Yep.’
‘Here comes another Wild woman!’ said Deirdre. Keira looked over to see Maureen walking towards them in her red seersucker sundress.
After introductions and goodbyes to Marilyn and Simon, the three women walked to the little park between the wharves and the Harbour Bridge and rested their baskets and bags on the grass. They sat and unpacked their picnic supplies. A gust of wind blew Maureen’s paper plates away and they scudded like frisbees just above the grass.
‘Oh!’ said Deirdre, leaping up and running after them before the others could react. The wind dropped and the plates floated to the ground. She picked them up, returned and sat on the grass again.
‘How agile you are, Deirdre,’ said Maureen, adding teasingly, ‘for someone of your advanced age.’
‘Very funny. It’s the Tibetan yoga that I can blame for it.’
‘Is that hard to do?’
‘’Tis easy.’
‘Does it take a long time?’ asked Keira.
‘Five minutes a day.’
‘Give us a demo,’ said Keira. ‘I’ll take photos and put them in my essay!’
‘I’ve never cared what people think. However, making a public spectacle of myself is where I draw the line. I can lend you the book if you’re interested. Long out of print, from the nineteen thirties.’
‘I am interested,’ said Maureen.
‘Yes, maybe you should be,’ said Keira, ‘at your advanced age.’
‘We have strong genes,’ said Deirdre, ‘but as we get older – and this will happen to you, young lady – we need to help them along. After all, if you don’t look after your body, where are you going to live?’
Maureen served pasta salad and quiche on the paper plates and they ate them with white plastic forks.
‘Shall we drink some of this?’ asked Deirdre, holding up a bottle of red wine and ferreting with her other hand in her bag for paper cups.
‘Yes, please,’ said Keira.
‘Keira, I forgot to tell you this, but Gemma has found another Captain Cook painting, belonging to an artist in Mosman. She is there, over the water as we speak,’ said Deirdre, gesturing airily to the harbour, ‘taking photographs and arranging to have the painting sent to Melbourne.’
‘That’s fantastic. And it would be great to use her photo of it for my essay. This is worth celebrating.’ She raised her cup of wine and proposed a toast. They raised their paper cups.
‘To Captain Cook!’ said Keira.
‘That pervert,’ said Deirdre.
‘To Mrs Cook!’ said Maureen.
Keira looked at her quizzically.
Deirdre said, ‘Her name was Elizabeth.’
‘To Elizabeth Cook,’ said Maureen. ‘For running a household, for maintaining a garden, for managing the budget, for keeping the children safe and happy and warm and fed, all while the Great Man was doing his grand tour of the Pacific islands for years and years.’
‘Do you know Kenneth Slessor’s Captain Cook poem?’ asked Keira. They shook their heads. ‘He gives her one or two lines: “a noble wife but brisk” is what I remember.’
‘She probably had plenty to be brisk about,’ said Maureen.
‘Speaking of brisk, Madge Burnside still lives just over there,’ said Keira, pointing to The Rocks with her fork.
‘Does she now?’ said Deirdre. ‘Maybe we will visit her. Then again, maybe we won’t!’
‘Gosh this pasta’s tasty, Mum,’ said Keira.
‘Mussolini tried to ban pasta,’ said Deirdre.
‘Good God,’ said Maureen. ‘No wonder they strung him up by his heels!’
‘Yes. Too bad the same thing didn’t happen to Franco in Spain.’
Seagulls squawked overhead and ibis stalked the grass. ‘Those birds were here before, but there used to be kookaburras and lorikeets in this park,’ said Deirdre. ‘Driven away by the traffic and noise, I suppose.’
They were sitting close to the concrete path and they noticed a handsome couple, probably in their forties, stop close by with a portable cassette player. The man had longish straight dark hair and expressive eyebrows. He wore a white shirt and black trousers. The woman, who had short dark hair, kicked off her shoes and strapped her feet into spike heels. She wore a black singlet with spaghetti straps and a short, red swirly skirt. She bent to press ‘Play’.
It was the music of D’Arienzo. The couple glided into each other’s arms and embraced, heart to heart, and effortlessly moved to the insistent beat, torsos welded together, feet synchonised.
At the increasing pace of the bandoneon they whirled round and round, pivoting and embellishing in a complicated poetry of hearts and hips. He whirled in another direction and stopped, the momentum compelling one of her flexible legs to wrap around the back of his.
They were advancing and retreating, circling and gliding, attacking and yielding. They turned again, their feet sliding and striding, their embrace intense. The people in the park watched, marvelling at their precise movements, at their dexterous grace and the expression of poignant longing. The couple moved to the interweaving melodic lines and loosened their embrace as she executed a series of harmonious pivots.
Sandwiches were in mid-air and conversation stopped; everyone was awed at the mercurial power and speed of the dancers. The music lifted them up as if they were dancing too.
The music slowed and the swelling harmony of the strings seemed like a series of repeated soft green waves that lift you up then gently set you down on the sandy bottom.
When the music finally came to a stop, the couple bowed, donned their jackets, changed their shoes and picked up the cassette player before the audience had recovered from the spell.
The picnickers and passersby looked around at each other with wondering half smiles as if they’d shared a hallucination. They burst into applause.
The woman gave a little wave to the crowd and they hurried away in the direction of the sandstone Old Sailors’
Home.
Everyone was speechless for a moment.
Deirdre said, ‘I saw a pair of Argentinian tango dancers in nineteen twenty-eight in Rowe Street, not far from here! I’d never seen anything like it.’
‘I’ve never seen anything like that!’ said Maureen. ‘Weren’t they astonishing?’
‘Yeah,’ said Keira. ‘Did you ever see it again, Deirdre?’
‘A few times, in Paris. But nowhere else. The best of tango expresses what there’s no word for in English. The Portuguese word saudade means an intense longing for something we’re not even sure exists, at least not on this earth.’
They finished their lunch and drank more wine.
‘It’s time,’ announced Deirdre, ‘to have a look at what they’ve done to the old tram depot.’ They packed up and walked along beside the wharves towards Bennelong Point, smelling the salty, silty sea, and fish and chips, meandering their way through little groups of people until they drew closer to the sublime white sails of the Opera House and Deirdre said, ‘What a brilliant architect!’
‘A brilliant architect who has not been invited to the opening,’ said Maureen. ‘Politics. Corrupt state politics.’
Deirdre nodded, ‘Yes, but politics is transitory. Art will triumph. You know what Napoleon said to Fontanes?’
‘No. And who was Fontanes?’
‘A poet and reformer. He was the Grand Master of the University of Paris.’
Keira laughed. ‘Hey, imagine applying for that job – for me, it would be: “With my education and experience I hope to be considered for the position of Grand Master of East Sydney Tech”!’
‘Go on, Deirdre – what did he say?’ said Maureen.
‘Napoleon said, “Do you know what fills me most with wonder? The powerlessness of force to establish anything. There are only two powers in the world: the sword and the mind. In the end the sword is always conquered by the mind.”’
‘So that’s where the pen-is-mightier-than-the-sword theory comes from,’ said Maureen.
‘It’s not a theory, it’s a fact. If anyone would know, it would be Napoleon,’ said Deirdre.
‘The fact is that the paintbrush is mightier than the sword,’ said Keira. ‘But Utzon didn’t use a paintbrush. He used a clutch pencil and an orange!’
After She Left Page 34