The Doubleman

by Christopher Koch

  But Deirdre Dillon seemed indifferent to her own atrocious unhappiness. She put a hand over mine, and spoke with discouraging calm. ‘If only I could,’ she said. ‘But you mustn’t talk like that. You must forget I ever spoke like this, Richard. It’s been such a lovely picnic, hasn’t it? And soon we must go.’

  She was right. Soon we’d have to walk back to the house, leaving behind the most important afternoon of my life. The time, on her little gold wristwatch, was after six o’clock; across the bay, the Hazards were turning purple, and the island’s glass-thin summer light was on the turn, as the tide was. The waves were drawing back, below on the empty beach — an end where no one swam, since the current was treacherous. On our little headland here, above the big rocks of ochre East Coast granite, we were out of sight of Greystones, and of all human eyes; and an immense change was overtaking the landscape. Not sunset, nothing so gaudy and obvious; the island’s long summer twilight, subtle and profound. Everything was slowed and transfigured by a deceptive, honeyed radiance that minute by minute made each object unnaturally distinct; and a huge tension began.

  It was the dangerous time, when the extraordinary might happen. Seagulls became brilliant as creatures sculpted from snow, wheeling above tangles of iodine-coloured kelp; and the rubbery green creeper called pig-face, with its blazing pink flowers, glowed among the rocks like no earthly plant. Spirits were watching us from the marram grass, I thought, and the salt-white chain of beaches, going north up the coast, reached amazing distances: tiny, uttermost territories of spume and violet mountains, no longer part of the island, nor of any ordinary world.

  ‘I do love it here,’ Deirdre said softly. ‘When I’m home, I never want to go back to Sydney.’

  ‘Don’t, then,’ I said. ‘Don’t go.’ And then: ‘When are you going back?’

  She didn’t answer for a moment. ‘Don’t ask that,’ she said. ‘Don’t let’s spoil things.’

  It was she who made the first advance, as before, this time kissing me on the mouth, her lips larger and warmer than I’d expected. When she drew back, the face that reappeared in front of me, like an image on a screen, was the Dutch doll’s, blank and solemn. Giddiness made the grass go white and the sea darken to indigo; its horizon revolved. I returned the kiss, gripping her bare shoulders; and I saw that her expression was changing imperceptibly as the light, registering alarm. But I sensed the falsity in this. I was made to know that very few initiatives could be mine; that few things were allowed. I might hold her decorously; I might kiss her and wait to be kissed, and that was all.

  ‘Now look what’s happened,’ she breathed. And: ‘You have to be like a son to me, Richard — no more. I’d love to have a son like you.’

  But I knew this was nonsense; I was no son. I would come to Sydney, become a great actor, love her with pure devotion until her aged husband died; then I would marry her, I said.

  She put her fingers over my mouth. ‘Stop,’ she said. Then she sat up, and pointed. ‘Look at the sea.’

  Sunset had finally come, thick in the olive western ranges, and the sea was dimming; but far out, there were light streaks of green. ‘It looks like land out there, doesn’t it? If only we could go there,’ she said. ‘Far enough to be safe from everything. From all the people who don’t want us to love each other.’

  Those were called the Green Meadows of the Sea, I told her. I had found them in a book of Celtic fairy tales: they were a place for souls not quite good enough to enter heaven.

  ‘Only you could have known that,’ she said. She laid her cheek against mine, staring out. Even inside happiness, I felt that she revelled in her own fervency, playing a part she had long ago chosen for life.

  ‘You’re the one I always waited for,’ she said. ‘Why did you come too late? Why didn’t you come when I was a girl?’

  8

  And so began my enslavement to the past.

  We went to the headland every afternoon for the next four days, with our sandwiches and tea. From their chairs on the front verandah, the old couples watched us go, murmuring.

  ‘Old fools,’ Deirdre said. ‘They think we’re lovers. What do they know about us?’

  As soon as we were out of sight of Greystones, we held hands. I was still allowed no more than kisses. Once, when my hand moved on to her thigh, she said: ‘How dare you,’ and removed the hand. Her clothes were always perfect; passion smelled of fresh ironing. We would kiss for an hour, lying in the grass, and she would dart her tongue into my mouth. But then she would gasp, and say: ‘This must stop.’ She was like a nubile girl playing sexual games; our delight must always be mingled with guilt, and sometimes she would say: ‘I feel someone’s watching, don’t you?’ But the beach, and the moorlands of dry grass and tea tree, were always empty.

  Deirdre was a shape-changer; I never knew which woman I’d be meeting. On some afternoons it was the child, with her loose flaxen hair hanging about her shoulders, her blank, wondering face, and her small girl’s voice; on others, it was the shrewd Sydney sophisticate, hair drawn back in a chignon, wearing a smart tweed suit with walking shoes. Her voice then could become severe, making me half afraid that she had grown cold towards me; or else it could be hard and humorous, and she would tell stories about her snobbish Sydney friends, or her husband’s obtuse business acquaintances, and go into spasms of laughter, smoking a lot, and coughing and wheezing from the smoke. In this mood, she walked with a comical, energetic motion, arms working, exaggerating the roll of her somewhat short-legged gait, enjoying some private joke on herself. At such times she appeared very Irish, and her eyes reminded me of pale blue seashells. We talked about our ancestry, and decided that our Irish great-great-grandfathers had known each other. The first Brennan here had kept a hotel in Launceston; Michael Brady would surely have drunk there, we said, and this drew us closer, I thought, in a way that her rich mainland husband could never compete with. Her third aspect, the one I longed for but which came very rarely, was the one which denoted true feeling: her face solemn, devout, immobile as a carving’s. But it came only seldom, and usually at twilight, when it was time to go back to the house.

  Certain things she said stayed in my mind to disturb me.

  ‘You’re such a beautiful boy — I love to kiss you. I hate my husband making love to me — grunting and panting.’

  ‘A boy is so pure. What we’re doing isn’t adultery, darling, is it? Only we know that.’

  ‘Being crippled refined you spiritually, Richard. Don’t be hurt. You’re not normal of course — and that’s why I love you. Neither of us is normal darling, admit it. I can’t bear bloody normal people.’

  ‘I must go and feed Fiona now. My breasts are aching.’

  She talked often about her girlhood, to which, it seemed, she wished to return. We shared the fatal love of lost time: we conjured up the decades of her girlhood, and an earlier one still; the 1920s.

  ‘I love the twenties, don’t you?’ she said. ‘People had such fun. My Dadda was a wild young man, then!’

  We found we both loved the whole yellowing myth: the Charleston; Scott Fitzgerald; gay young things; Rudy Vallee singing through his megaphone: that decade whose last years had seen her infancy, before I was born. Sometimes, I would suspect she needed to escape reality as much as I did; that she too had been crippled in some way. And in the end, I grasped the fact that if she had lived in the twenties, she would truly have been Dadda’s girl …

  Her father, Robert Brennan, the man she always called ‘my Dadda’, was never far from her talk. His big store in the middle of Hobart had been familiar to me all my life. I had seen Brennan about the store: a big, florid man with black hair and the same light blue eyes as his daughter. He had always been successful, but in recent years, according to my mother, his heavy drinking had endangered the business. Deirdre laughed about this; for her, the boozy Irish boy would always come out on top.

  ‘I wish you were still Deirdre Brennan,’ I said. ‘Then I’d ask you to marry me.’


  ‘Please — don’t talk like that. I’m an old woman, and you’re a child.’ She looked twenty as she said this; she was the young girl today, pale hair floating about her shoulders.

  ‘When are you going back?’ I demanded. ‘You never say.’

  For many moments, she failed to answer. We were walking along the evening beach, which was empty, and clothed in a warm stillness. The surf was small, this evening; the waves fell thoughtfully, and small orange clouds were becalmed above the Hazards.

  ‘Friday,’ she said, and stamped on one of the grapes in a pile of kelp.

  ‘Friday! But that’s the day after tomorrow!’

  ‘I know. I didn’t want to spoil things.’ She moved close, and put her hand on my arm, her voice dropping to coaxing intimacy. ‘There’s still tomorrow. And we’ll see each other again. I’ll come to Hobart, to visit my parents. And you’re coming to Sydney to be a great actor, remember?’

  But now I was shouting wildly. Why hadn’t she told me? She mustn’t go; she mustn’t rejoin a man she didn’t love. And I cried out other absurdities I’d rather forget.

  Her white face grew indistinct, gazing at me with calm sadness from the deepening dark; her face retreated, and I almost doubted its reality. ‘I’ll write to you,’ she said, and the words seemed to come from a distance.

  We were standing near the point of granite rocks below our headland, at the end of the beach. Facing me, she stood with her back to one of these giant, ochre boulders: a long, barrow-shaped edifice as high as a house. Some vast, aboriginal mournfulness gathered here, making her expression seem stricken; but the light was too deceitful for this to be certain.

  ‘I have to go up now,’ she said. ‘I have to see to Fiona. But I’ll meet you back here at eight o’clock. Just this once, we’ll go for a night-time walk.’ She had never agreed to this before; because of what she called ‘appearances’, she had only met me by day.

  Back at the rocks after dinner, I waited, pacing the few yards of sand while the sea went black and the foam of the waves shone in the dark like phosphorus. I didn’t dare leave the spot; I was fearful that she would somehow miss me in the dark.

  But this was unlikely. The beach was lit by a full moon, its silver disc standing high and cool above the grassy headland: that headland which had seen all our happiness; that place where our Irish great-great-grandfathers had wanted us to lie; where we had not been ourselves, but other people: she no married woman, I no silly boy; truly lovers, not guilty, free.

  The only sounds were the hollow crumpling of breakers, and the piping of plover. Uncannily, the red clouds above the Hazards continued to glow like coals in a grate, even after the peaks had turned black; then they were slowly extinguished. I waited in despair and hope, my true bondage just beginning.

  She comes when I least expect it, materialising behind my back as though she’s emerged from a cleft in the granite barrow. She’s wearing a green cotton dress, and holding a beach-bag: towels, she says; she’s brought towels, so that we can swim.

  I have to swallow before I can speak. Will we swim without costumes?

  Yes, she says, we’ll swim without costumes. She has a strange, patient, motherly authority that is different from any way I’ve seen her. No one from the house ever comes here at night, she says; we’ll be perfectly safe.

  We walk along the beach to where a little creek runs into the sea: she feels safe in the shallows here, she says; she’s not a swimmer. The place is under a huge dome of sky, and the shallow stream makes collapsing sandbanks and multiple runnels; hundreds of seashells stud the wet sand, gleaming in the moon, and the waves boom and sigh far out, their white tops hurrying wildly where the currents meet.

  She hands me a towel. ‘Keep your distance, remember, and don’t look. You’ve already seen me once.’

  ‘Have I?’

  ‘Yes. Do you think I didn’t see you?’

  She turns away, walking off the sand on to a level place of tussock-grass, where she stops by the dead, silver shape of a fallen gum. And now, some twenty paces off, she ceases to be Deirdre Dillon. The figure by the grey, dead tree, which I covertly watch through my lashes, unbuttoning my shirt with shaking fingers, has changed its shape again, and is no mundane form: distance makes her an image without sound, and removes all personal qualities; even in the bright moonlight, her expression can’t be read. She undoes her green cotton dress, under which she proves to be naked.

  Lightly, on the balls of her feet, she runs towards the water, holding with both hands the breasts that make her top-heavy, whose fruits are dark as plums. Night makes her a woman in majestic black and white; even the cirrus of hair between her thighs is ashen. Out in the hissing channel where the creek meets the sea she wades ahead of me, and I’m filled with awe once again by her long, frail waist, by the wide, perfect urn of her hips, and her truly amazing whiteness. She is white as the breakers in the dark; white as driftwood; not just her body, but her hair. Its floating web makes her look both ancient and young; a thought that suddenly repels me, and has to be put from my mind.

  She doesn’t swim; she wades in the estuary only to the verge of the waves, stooping to scoop up water and let it run down her body. Once, and only once, she smiles across at me. I swim, and don’t approach her. When she leaves the water she stands on the sand and briefly raises her arms above her head, as though reaching for a high shelf. Then, before I can reach her, she’s turned and is walking back to the fallen tree.

  I limp after her, one hand foolishly shielding my groin; when I come close, she’s standing with her towel held in front of her, staring at me, her eyes blank and seemingly scornful. I expect her to reprove me; but she lets the towel drop and hang from one hand, holding out the other dead-white arm in silence.

  ‘You’re shivering, aren’t you? You’re cold. You’d better come and dry yourself.’ She smiles.

  Only the tussock-grass is real, and softly prickles: her flesh is warm in parts, in others, cool from the sea. And the Elle-maid and the farmer’s boy, not thought about for years, flit through my head as I tremble. The Elle-maid was hollow behind, like a dough-pan; that was how the boy knew that she was one of the Elle-people, and would bring him sorrow; and he tried to get away. But so great was the enchantment behind what she did, that he had no power to resist.

  Her face looks down, full of calm majesty. Sand grits on her skin; from between her parted lips, a gold filling gleams in a tooth; the gold of her wedding ring glints near my face. Reality: things of the world.

  4. The Basement

  And pleasant is the fairy land,

  But, an eerie tale to tell,

  Ay at the end of seven years

  We pay a tiend to hell;

  I am sae fair and fu o’ flesh,

  I’m feard it be mysel.

  1

  During the eighteen months I spent at University, I drifted apart from Brady, and saw nothing more of Darcy Burr.

  When Brian had come back down the highway from Greystones, Sandy Lovejoy had given him a bed and a job. Once I met him by the doorway of the shop when he was loading furniture into Lovejoy’s van. We talked, but were both constrained; we now had so little in common. I seldom passed through Harrigan Street any more, and Brady had now retreated there, in my thoughts. His future as a wandering musician didn’t seem to have happened; perhaps he’d remain a second-hand man.

  I was doing an Arts-Law course, and had passed my first-year exams with a number of distinctions. This had pleased my mother, who worried about security; she had only a war-widow’s pension, and had taken in lodgers at Trent Street, a tedious, childless couple who complained about the heating. But my potential as a breadwinner meant little to me; I still wanted to act. Lessons from a private drama coach had given me some skill; I was prominent in the University Players, and beginning to be given parts in Hobart Repertory productions. Walter Thomas, the drama producer in the Tasmanian section of ABS, the national broadcasting company, was also giving me parts in his radio plays, some of
which were broadcast nationally. It all ought to have been satisfactory; but it wasn’t.

  It would be wrong to picture myself as unhappy, at nineteen; I had plenty of friends at University, and my life was a full one. But it wasn’t the life I wanted to lead; it wasn’t going where I wanted it to go. My ambition to become a professional actor hadn’t changed; I had no real desire for the substitute theatre of the Law, and I grew more and more impatient with amateur dramatics in a small town. What I wanted was to audition for the drama school in Sydney: the mainland metropolis where life and competition were serious. And I had tried to persuade my mother to let me go, using the modest sum of money which Karl Miller had left for my education.

  But my mother, who controlled my inheritance until I was twenty-one, wouldn’t let me use it in this way. Grandfather Miller had wanted me to do Law, she said; those were the terms of his will, and I must honour them. My mother quite enjoyed the Hobart Repertory, and was pleased at my success there; but she refused to take the theatre seriously as a profession: she saw it as a refined, spare-time amusement for accomplished people, and no occupation for a grown man. Besides, lawyers made money, and actors starved. She had all the Victorian prejudices intact, mixed with some Irish ones. There was a lie at the heart of acting; and she feared that lie. She thought she was keeping me safe from it.

  What gave away my inner discontent at this time were my periodic drinking bouts. Most of my friends at University were enthusiastic drinkers, but my outbreaks were different in their excessiveness: I would drink until I was ill, or passed out; and I did this with dedicated intensity. Once I woke up at dawn in the dew-wet grass beside a tram-shelter: I found I was at the Glenorchy terminus, but had no idea how I’d got there. My student friends pretended to admire prowess like this, but their faces were secretly dubious.

  At times I liked to drink alone, and I did this in seedy, out-of-the-way pubs where University people didn’t go; ‘working men’s pubs’, as they were thought of then. I had some callow notion about plunging into Low Life, like Dorian Gray; in such moods, I wanted to discover Hobart’s equivalent of the stews of Limehouse, in the dated British fiction I’d read as a boy. I would drink with labourers, and have long, solemn arguments with them. Finding I was a student, they addressed me as ‘Perfesser’. Some of them wanted to beat me up, but my leg usually saved me; they were chivalrous about it, as my mates at St Augustine’s had been. Then I gave up saying I was a student and masqueraded as a labourer called Arthur, who worked at the IXL jam factory and had caught his leg in a machine. I was then accepted totally, since Arthur’s accent and vocabulary were produced with perfect accuracy.