The Doubleman

by Christopher Koch

  ‘I was an actress, once,’ she said, and nodded quickly, like a child wishing to convince. ‘Nothing important — just amateur dramatics. I was in the Hobart Repertory.’ Her deep stress on the last word signalled amusement again. ‘But it wasn’t a bad little company,’ she said, ‘and we did do some good things. I was supposed to be rather talented, and my father sent me to drama school in Sydney for a while — but then I met my husband, and that was that.’ She sighed, her mouth made small, her voice taking on a childish note, her eyes round and regretful: the Dutch doll’s. There was a hint of doll-like fatuousness, as well; but it didn’t lessen my adoration. I began to see that Mrs Dillon had two faces, which alternated unpredictably: an indulged, precocious child’s (the doll’s), and a mature, cultivated woman’s, used to having her whims obeyed.

  And she was two people in another way, I thought. Beneath her respectable blue cardigan and tartan skirt, she was the other, nameless woman in the lit window; that frame which had held her beauty as my toy theatre had held Titania’s. Shame and tender amazement filled me at this; but she smiled with friendly interest, not dreaming that every line of her hidden body was known.

  ‘So now I’m a wife and mother,’ she declared. ‘No more acting.’

  ‘Wouldn’t your husband let you go on with it?’ I asked.

  She stared at this boldness. ‘Not him.’

  Her tone didn’t invite further enquiry, and we both fell silent. I knew that Aunt Dora’s morning tea-time must be close; that soon we’d no longer be alone. I could see the pygmy figures of old Mr Chandler the bank manager and his wife toiling up from the beach through the lower paddocks.

  ‘I might be able to give you a few hints,’ Mrs Dillon said suddenly. ‘About acting, I mean.’

  I thanked her, calling her ‘Mrs Dillon’.

  ‘Please stop calling me Mrs Dillon. Call me Deirdre. You haven’t learned elocution, have you? I thought not. Your accent’s good, but you’ve got a bit careless with those vowel sounds. I could help you brush those up.’ Her own accent, like that of most women of prosperous backgrounds in that era, was middle-class English; no doubt largely produced by her Ladies’ College.

  ‘I’ll see you here tomorrow,’ she said. ‘Shall I? You can read to me, and we’ll work on your voice. Come an hour before morning tea — then we’ll be by ourselves, until the boring guests arrive.’

  I was flooded with delight, and flattered by the implication that a special, shared difference made Deirdre Dillon and myself more interesting than other people.

  How was I to wait until tomorrow morning?

  That night, Brian Brady left home for good, riding his bicycle back down the highway to Hobart. He didn’t say goodbye to me, and I only found out about it the next day. A quarrel had taken place between him and Mick, the details of which I never learned.

  Mick had been getting uglier towards Brian. Sometimes his complaints were open; at others they were grumbled behind Brian’s back. (‘That bloody boy. Didn’t strip the cows properly yesterday. Useless.’) And Mick’s animosity had been increased by Brian’s affair with Hazel Pearce. He wasn’t sure that anything serious was going on between them, but he plainly suspected it, and forbade Brian to have any more to do with the girl than was necessary.

  But Brian had taken no notice. On a recent afternoon, I had seen him with Hazel in the barn, playing his guitar to her: a cowboy lover, I said. But my amusement had been feigned; I had looked at them with quite another emotion.

  It was the first time I had actually heard Brian sing. The sound came to me as I crossed the yard; I had peered in the open doorway of the barn and waved; but they hadn’t seen me. He sat on an apple box, one foot propped on a kerosene tin, accompanying himself on the guitar, a shaft of late sun through a crack in the boards catching one side of his face and tangled hair. Hazel Pearce, standing against an old tractor, small in her cotton dress of faded blue and white, was plainly nervous at being truant from the kitchen, and had the stance of someone who had merely paused there. But her face was alight, her eyes fixed on Brian as though what he sang contained all the rhymes her life would ever need.

  Already his fingering on the guitar was good, and the maturity of his deep voice was surprising. He was singing ‘Lonesome Whistle’ — one of the Hank Snow ballads often on country radio stations, about which I grew sarcastic. But I had to admit he sang it well. He didn’t imitate Hank Snow’s American drawl; he had a plangent resonance of his own which made the ballad personal: his own song of vagrancy and train-cry, where Carolina became Tasmania.

  His voice followed me across the yard.

  ‘All I do is sit and cry

  When the evening train goes by;

  I heard that lonesome whistle blow …’

  Sitting in my room, I said that I didn’t envy Brian and Hazel. But the sight of them had pierced me with a sort of abstract longing: a simple, silly wish to be what they were. I was already cleverer than Brady; I knew things he would never know; but I would never sing ‘Lonesome Whistle’ like that, and little Hazel would never be my girl. My regret carried a mournful pleasure that would lead to many things.

  5

  ‘You stay, son, if you want to,’ my aunt said at breakfast. ‘Just because Brian’s been driven out of his home doesn’t mean you have to go too.’

  Dora banged one of the lids down on her black, wood-burning stove. Her far-staring eyes, which were Brian’s, were red-rimmed; her big chin thrust out, she looked at her husband in a way he avoided, and Mick moved out of the kitchen with the quiet of an invalid, his hat pulled low.

  So now I was left here alone: a guest. This morning, my lessons with Deirdre Dillon would begin.

  Mrs Dillon disliked the verandah when it grew too hot.

  ‘I’m not going to be boiled like a lobster, thank you very much,’ she said. She nodded with humorous emphasis, in her parody of a wilful child. And she asked Dora for the use of the small, private sitting-room; a room hardly ever used, and closed to guests.

  It had a window on the verandah but this was always closed, its heavy brown curtains drawn, protecting the Genoa velvet of its armchairs and couch. Deirdre Dillon and I were alone in its dimness every morning, and I read to her there from novels she produced, as well as from unread books of English verse we found in Aunt Dora’s glass-fronted bookcase: Keats, Tennyson, Longfellow, Masefield. There was a fragrance of varnished woodwork pickled in ozone.

  Deirdre was serious and efficient about these lessons, stopping me with mock-severity when she considered my ‘a’ or ‘i’ sounds too crudely Australian. And she taught me how to produce my voice from the diaphragm; how to project it as an actor should.

  She was kindly, humorous, yet apparently serious about me, as few other people had ever been, and I tormented myself constantly with the question: why? I was sometimes humiliated by the idea that Dora Brady had told her to be nice to me; people were always being sorry about my leg. Or perhaps she was bored, and enjoyed the diversion of a seventeen-year-old courtier, whose worship must have been plain in his eyes.

  ‘I know I just didn’t grow, until I got out of this bloody little island,’ she said. ‘You’ll have to come to the mainland, Richard. It’s amazing that a boy can be so intellectually advanced, stuck away in Hobart, and going to those thuggish Christian Brothers. You’d have gone to the Jesuits, if I’d had you. That’s where my son Patrick goes.’

  ‘Have you got a son, as well?’ I was horrified. She was too young.

  ‘He’s my stepson, really. My husband’s first wife died. Patrick’s sixteen — almost as old as you, dear. So I could be your mother, couldn’t I?’

  This was untrue; ridiculous, I said.

  I could see that Deirdre Dillon was still in her late youth, and scarcely marked by time. In fact, she was twenty-eight, but looked no more than twenty. Sometimes, in my secret thoughts about her, I would say: She’s just a girl; and this formula, this fiction about a youthful matron, placed her almost within my reach. My infatuation
had reached that point.

  ‘I was twenty-two when I married,’ she said. ‘Dadda said that was too young. But my husband was a very strong-willed man — and determined to marry me.’ Nodding once, mouth small to indicate something was settled, she looked to one side in a way that didn’t invite further questions.

  On most of these mornings she had the baby Fiona with her, and when I came in, exactly at ten o’clock, I always found her there before me, the baby usually asleep in its bassinet. But on some mornings she would nurse it, sitting sideways. Refraining from looking, I would sit in the chair opposite, and read aloud to her. It was usually a bright day outside, but in here it was always dim, only a panel of sun coming in through the curtains. It smelled like one of those mysterious little boxes women kept on their dressing-tables: boxes that gave out a faint scent, but which usually proved to be empty. It recalled the sewing-room at Trent Street.

  She would speak of her lost stage ambitions. ‘I was told I could have done rather well,’ she said once. ‘I had a very good figure, Richard, believe it or not.’ She sighed, gazing down on the baby in martyred reverie. ‘But once you’re a mother, your girlish figure’s gone.’ As though to confirm her words, she lowered the infant to her lap, leaving her deathly, blue-netted breast quivering and bare; and now she and the woman in the bathroom window were one.

  ‘I don’t think your figure’s gone,’ I said. ‘I think you’re beautiful.’

  She looked across at me, her eyes paling. ‘Thank you, Richard,’ she said. ‘You’re very gallant.’ Her green blouse quickly done up, she reached for her packet of Craven A cigarettes, and lit one. I disliked it when she smoked; her face became harder, her eyes squinting.

  ‘By the way,’ she said, ‘tomorrow morning we’ll have to skip our lesson — I’m playing golf with Mr Gibson. I’m sure you’ll be glad of a break from your ageing actress.’

  6

  At the hour when we’d usually have met, I went down to the beach and swam far out into the breakers, chopping furiously into their bottle-green sides. There were no guests on the sand; the dazzling white curve was deserted. Soon I was past the line where the waves curled and broke, lying on my back in the swell and staring up at the sun.

  I had been told not to come out this far: there were undertows. But water was the element in which I was as fast and strong as the most athletic man on land: my years on crutches had given me powerful shoulders. Nothing else mattered but the sea, with its masculine bite of salt, its feminine loll and sway. Drifting and dipping, its big hand under me, I moved towards the line of the horizon.

  But this morning, something went wrong. I had turned, and was swimming back towards the beach; but the hand underneath continued to move me towards the horizon. I swam harder; but when I paused and looked up, the beach and the slate roof of Greystones were alarmingly far off.

  I wasn’t really afraid of my favourite element; I swam seriously, head down. But then I began to tire; I took a mouthful and gasped, and the sea became a cold, vindictive vastness. I entered a state of weakness that instinct told me was the prelude to drowning; and fear covered me now like a glass dome. I swam on, without hope.

  When I put my head up again, it was to see that the beach and the grey roof were much closer. The hand had relinquished its grip.

  I limped up the beach, the warm, domestic smells coming into my nose like baking cakes, filling me with humble gratitude. Shuddering, I made my way through marram grass over the low dunes, leaving behind me the iodine-smell of danger, the breakers and the cries of gulls; hearing instead the sweet chitter of landbirds. I went on up the gentle track through the paddocks, beside the hawthorn hedge.

  She was waiting for me where the sandy track came to the first dry-stone wall, smiling calmly from under a white linen hat.

  ‘Were you in trouble out there?’

  ‘I got in a rip.’

  ‘I thought so. Mr Gibson and I were watching from the verandah. He said you’d be all right, but I wasn’t sure.’

  ‘Aren’t you playing golf?’

  ‘I didn’t feel like it.’

  I began to go on up the hill, limping in my swimming trunks and old sweater, and she walked by my side. She should have been less calm, I felt.

  ‘You’re a very strong swimmer,’ she said. ‘Aren’t you? You looked like some sort of wounded hero, walking out of the sea. Byronic, with that limp. I adore Byron, don’t you?’

  ‘I prefer Shelley,’ I said pompously; but she wasn’t discouraged.

  ‘Wonderful Shelley,’ she enthused. ‘Have you read “Queen Mab”? “How wonderful is Death, Death and his brother Sleep!’” She broke off; and laughed. ‘Shelley was mad about the sea like you, and he drowned. Lost in his yacht, in a storm off Viareggio, and they burned his body on the beach. Byron plucked his heart out of the fire. Who but Byron would have done that?’

  And I was filled with excitement. This was no longer the east coast of Tasmania, it was the Mediterranean; and the whirring of crickets was a dry yet frantic chorus, telling me how love and death were linked.

  Suddenly she asked: ‘Do you really want to go on with my silly coaching lessons?’

  They weren’t silly, I said. They were the best things that had ever happened to me.

  ‘I like them too,’ she said softly. ‘But I wonder if they’re good for us? You mustn’t get too intense, dear. Nor must I.’ She stared, her eyes large; her face had become the Dutch doll’s. And then, pushing the hat from her head so that it hung behind by its strings, she leaned and rubbed her cheek against mine, one hand on my arm, the silky strands of her hair tickling my neck.

  What was she doing? In icy amazement, I put my hand on a shoulder left bare by her green and white sun-dress; but now she moved away and drew me on up the hill, holding my hand.

  ‘Why don’t we go for a picnic tomorrow, just the two of us?’ she said. ‘Dora will pack us sandwiches, and mind Fiona for me. There’d be no harm in that, would there?’

  7

  She sat erect in pale, dry grass on the headland above the beach, legs crossed in her full skirt, combing her hair, which blew sideways in the sea breeze. Then she replaced her white linen hat.

  I was glad she wore the same hat and the green and white sun-dress, whose broad straps crossed her shoulders. These belonged to the time that had begun yesterday, and like all lovers I was superstitious about such things. An empty vacuum flask stood beside her in the grass; we had drunk our tea, and the afternoon of the picnic was already late.

  ‘You really should come to Sydney,’ she said. ‘You can’t waste yourself here, Richard, if you want to get into the theatre. The only good drama school’s there.’

  Was this an invitation?

  ‘My husband and I could help you, if you came,’ she said. ‘Michael has influence everywhere.’

  ‘What does he do — your husband?’

  ‘Oh — he has a lot of interests.’ Her voice deepened on this word, to make business interests comical. But when I still waited she lapsed into her childish accent, her eyes becoming round, looking out vaguely over the sea. ‘I don’t know about those things,’ she said. ‘What he does is very boring.’

  ‘But you must have some idea.’

  She shook her head. ‘No, it’s all very boring. Stocks and shares and things. His father was a millionaire, you know. You must have heard of old James Dillon. No? I thought everyone had. He came out of the slums and made a fortune in property. He owned coal mines and newspapers and things, all over Australia. He was a fearful old man: a fanatic about the Church; gave it scads of his money. Michael did what he said, I can tell you.’

  I detected a note of contempt in her voice, and probed. ‘Is your husband older than you?’

  ‘He’s fifty-five,’ she said, and I stared at her appalled, while she looked back without expression. But there was a faint nod, as though she conceded that I should be appalled.

  Despite her hat, her nose had turned pink, like that of a child who had played too lo
ng on the sand, and I treasured this, as I treasured anything that made her look immature. I was now pretending that she wasn’t really a young matron of twenty-eight, but a girl who had grown up too soon. I ignored the first fine lines at the corners of her eyes; the faint beginnings of a second chin. I squeezed the twelve-year difference between us into nothing; I willed her to be seventeen, and in the grip of this madness, I blurted out: ‘Why did you marry an old man?’

  ‘I felt sorry for him,’ she said calmly. ‘His wife had just died — and he had Patrick to bring up. I’m very fond of Patrick, he’s a sweet boy. Very sensitive — the opposite of his father.’

  ‘Are you happy with him — your husband?’

  The small girl’s voice and face vanished, to be replaced by a tone that was cold, brittle and deliberate. ‘He’s a drunken, coarse boor,’ she said. ‘Of course I’m not happy with him.’

  I stared at her. ‘But why do you stay with him?’

  ‘You don’t leave a Dillon very easily,’ she said. ‘Nor a Catholic marriage. Besides, there’s the baby now. And my stepson needs me — he really does. You’d like Patrick, Richard, you and he are very similar. He and I are a great comfort to each other. He loves music and literature, just as you do: we have wonderful talks.’ She giggled. ‘Sometimes I think Michael’s jealous of us. When he’s dead drunk, we can forget he exists. Patrick loathes him. He calls him the Red-Faced Ogre. We shorten that to the RFO.’ She laughed again, and would have continued; but I wasn’t interested in stories of her stepson, whom I mentally brushed aside.

  ‘You should leave him,’ I said. ‘You should stay here.’ I knew I could say anything, now, and grew drunk with it.