We thought our situation invulnerable; but in fact, it was totally fragile. Our marriage, like most new marriages, was a mixture of passion and game-playing; and each of us had a childish streak: the result of in-grown imaginations. This was the situation that Darcy Burr was now invading; yet had I been told that he represented a danger, even indirectly, I would have laughed at the idea.
It was after midnight when the phone rang in the living-room; it woke us both out of the first shallows of sleep.
‘G’day.’
I took a deep breath. ‘It’s not day,’ I said, ‘it’s the middle of the bloody night.’
‘Sorry, mate.’ He didn’t sound sorry; he sounded cheerful. It had been three weeks since our meeting with Rod; not having heard from Darcy since, I’d half assumed he’d given up his schemes. I waited.
‘We just knocked off at the restaurant,’ he said. ‘I forget that people like you are early to bed. Now listen, Dick, I’ve got to see you. Can you come around to the flat tomorrow night? It’s important. Brian and Rita will be out, and we can talk.’
Katrin looked alarmed when I came back to bed. Propped on one elbow in the bedside lamp’s half-light, she spoke in a tone of wifely accusation, as though I were somehow responsible. It wasn’t a tone I’d heard from her before.
‘I don’t like people who ring in the middle of the night: it’s threatening. Who does he think he is, this Darcy? And why must he see you alone?’
6
Victoria Street followed the line of the ridge above the city, linking the Cross with Potts Point. It was a street of cheap cafés and tall old terraces: frowning houses in Victorian bonnets, fallen on hard times, like the muttering old ladies of the Cross who went through garbage tins. The place that Brian and Darcy were renting was halfway between the junction and the corner of Challis Avenue, little more than two minutes’ walk from our flat; yet this would be the first time I’d called there.
Something had made me hold back; a premonition that soon enough, all our lives would be intertwined, and that I ought to keep clear a little longer.
Why? I wasn’t sure. I didn’t really mind helping them, even though I still thought that their dream of a television series was hopeless; yet something about the fact that Darcy in particular was now living so close by made me cautious. Once I’d been to see him, I’d probably have to return the invitation; and I was oddly reluctant about having him home. I half feared he’d eventually commit some fresh crime, I suppose; and I already sensed that he’d burrow into my life. The fact that I somehow wanted this only made it more perturbing. He was bringing something back to me, it seemed: something that had been missing from things, even though I’d thought I had everything; something that I wanted and yet didn’t want; a factor I couldn’t identify. No doubt this was a fancy preserved from the period when we three were boys together, its strong yet ghostly pungency explained by the fact that Burr and Brady had appeared from out of that time, when maturity and the commonplace hadn’t yet been earned; when anything was possible.
Their flat was in the ground floor of a narrow, three-storey terrace set back a few yards from the street. It had plainly been allowed to run down for years; the dim mosaic tiles on the front porch were like broken paving from a lost civilisation. The front door was half open; mynahs scolded in the street’s big plane trees, in the six o’clock twilight. When no one answered my knock, I walked into the dark entrance and knocked again on another door on my right, which was also ajar. Getting no answer there either, I peered in, wondering if I’d come to the wrong place.
But I was reassured by the sight of the mute guitars. Brian’s Ramirez and Darcy’s electric bass were propped against a long table in the centre of the room; a twelve-string and a banjo lay across chairs. I went in, to find that the room was empty and half dark. It was large, with a line of tall windows at the far end which looked out from the cliff-edge across the gully of Woolloomooloo, with its nineteenth-century slum cottages. Beyond, the modern towers of the city were adrift in an apricot soup of smoke and sunset. Aside from the view, the place was sombre and shabby, and disorder was everywhere: dilapidated, unloved furniture; ashtrays filled with butts; tape-cans; used coffee cups. There was a stale, sweetish smell I couldn’t identify, and the air was cold as a tank, colder than the winter street outside. But I could see why it would suit them; it resembled a junkshop. Harrigan Street was chronic with them, I thought, like bad breath.
I called out, but no one answered. There were two other doors here, besides the one leading from the hall; both were closed. Darcy would surely have heard me if he were here, I thought, and I decided to wait.
Taped to one wall was an old black-and-white poster which made me smile; lettered The Brady Brothers and Rita Carey, it featured a photograph of the three of them in the broad-brimmed stetsons turned up at the sides favoured by C and W singers: hats which were an Australian-American hybrid, as the music itself is. I picked up a newspaper and began to read. But then I had the sense that someone else was in the room.
Turning, I got the fleeting impression of a man-like shadow in a corner, but I found this to be imaginary, and went back to the newspaper. It was difficult to read in the deepening twilight, and I soon had the sensation again. When I looked around this time, it was like scratching an itch, and without the expectation of finding anyone here. But now my heart leaped like a fish, because there was a man, this time. It was Darcy, standing with the door behind him half open; he’d made no sound. His navy-blue turtle-neck and jeans were indistinct; only his pallid face was vivid in the dimness, and he grinned as though at a good joke.
‘I didn’t know you’d arrived, Dick,’ he said. ‘I was having a nap. Then I had the feeling you were here; it woke me up.’
I had the silly suspicion that he wanted these words to mean more than they said; that he knew all about the illusion I’d just had. It was somehow conveyed by his conniving glance. But I said nothing about it, and he stood aside and waved me through the door with a stage gesture, bowing a little from the waist. ‘Come through. I want to play you a tape.’ He put enormous schoolboy promise into this last word.
His long, narrow room, which was clean and tidy, was in considerable contrast with the main one outside — just as his bedroom at Sandy Lovejoy’s had contrasted with the shop below. In fact, he’d done a good deal to re-create his old den, even though the furniture here wasn’t as good. There was a crowded bookshelf, a small, flat-topped desk, and a divan bed covered by a Spanish-looking cotton spread, patterned in green and blue. Muted light came from a single standard lamp by the desk, creating deep shadows: the blind of the single window was drawn.
I recognised his lute hanging on the wall as before, and his enlarged pictures of the Tarot figures. There were no other decorations, only an odd-looking chart in the form of a tree that I could make no sense of.
He gestured me to an armchair and poured us red wine from a flagon, using an old marble-topped wash-stand as a bar. While I sipped, he busied himself spooling up a tape on a machine standing on his desk, his face half in shadow, his beaked nose intent. Then he switched on the machine and sat facing me on a kitchen chair, his grin still insinuating, his eyes coming back persistently to my face.
‘I reckon you’re going to like this Dick.’ His tone was embarrassingly intimate, as though I were a child. ‘We recorded it here in the bathroom, so you’ll have to excuse the poor quality.’
There was nothing but hissing on the tape for a moment; then it began.
It was recognisably their group, although only just, and the sound quality wasn’t really bad; they’d achieved an echo effect, and the words were clear. The complex backing had plainly been built through much care. I’d not heard the song before, and hadn’t imagined the group could produce a sound like this: in fact I’d never heard anything like it. As usually happens with something novel, I was at first disconcerted; unsure whether I liked it or not. But I quickly knew that I would.
‘What is this?’ I asked.<
br />
‘It’s our new sound,’ he said. ‘Our elf music. You know this ballad, Dick.’
Brian and Rita were singing the verses, taking them solo by turns, then coming together in unison. The melody sounded traditional, though I couldn’t place it. And I began to recognise the words, which I’d never heard sung, but had only encountered before on the printed page.
‘True Thomas he took off his hat,
And bowed him low down till his knee:
All hail, thou mighty Queen of Heaven!
For your like on earth I never did see.
‘O no, O no, True Thomas, she said,
That name does not belong to me;
I am but the queen of fair Elfland,
And I’m come here to visit thee.’
It was ‘Thomas Rymer’, I said, and Darcy nodded in delighted confirmation. He’d got it out of Child’s English and Scottish Ballads, he said.
‘But where did you get the arrangement — the tune?’
‘It’s my arrangement, Dick. My tune.’ His glasses flashed proudly as his head went back. Meanwhile, Rita Carey was carrying the verse in a high, empty voice, like someone singing in her sleep:
‘O see not ye that bonny road
Which winds about the ferny brae?
That is the road to fair Elfland,
Where you and I this night maun gae.’
I saw the extent of his talent, and how it had grown in eight years. In addition to the electric and acoustic guitars, there was the piping of a treble recorder (that would be Darcy), what sounded like a xylophone, and the sly pattering of a finger-drum, as the Queen and True Thomas set out on the road to Elfland. And in a solo passage before the voices returned, the little pipe summoned the listener to follow, beckoning the spirit away to the land of green delight with Thomas of Erceldoune. Meeting Darcy’s gaze, I saw that he understood what he’d created: music from that country of small, distant lights; music inspired by the Lady who comes to us in sleep, disguised in mortal flesh; music from the Barrow World.
As I digested this, I looked further about his room: it had an underground feeling, perhaps because of its tunnel-like shape, its drawn blind, and murky moss-green walls. I wondered if he’d created this effect deliberately, to reproduce Broderick’s little study in Varley’s basement; and I suddenly felt certain he had. The dead bookshop accountant was strongly in my mind now; his influence on Burr could still be seen. Darcy sat in an attitude like Broderick’s — long legs fully extended and crossed at the ankles — and there was even a similarity about his smile. Some of the occultic books on the shelves had surely once been Broderick’s; I seemed to remember certain titles, although I’d never read them: The Secret Doctrine; The Kabbalah Unveiled; works by Aleister Crowley. He must have made a gift of them, and I wondered if the chart on the wall was inherited from Broderick too. The names on it meant nothing to me: Kether, Binah, Chukmah.
When the tape was done, Darcy listened to my praises in silence, with a one-sided smile which was complacently pleased, legs still extended. Then he said: ‘You see why you’ve got to produce us, Dick. Only you could understand what I’m doing. Remember our talks in Varley’s? I thought this group might specialise in fairy material: the English and Scotch ballads.’
I saw immediately that we could do it. The whole show could be mounted on the theme of Faery, and I could back it with visuals; graphics. I began to talk, and his eyes never left my face. I suggested other ballads: ‘Tam Lin’, ‘The Demon Lover’, ‘Clerk Colvill’. We talked without consciousness of time, as we used to do in Varley’s; time was suspended, in Darcy’s closed room, and we played the tape over and over. Eventually I’d come to see the Rymers as partly my creation; now, I wonder. It was as though we’d taken some euphoric drug: it all seemed possible; it was going to happen.
‘What should we call this group?’
‘Thomas and the Rymers,’ he said promptly, and we both laughed.
‘Who’ll be Thomas?’
‘Maybe me,’ Burr said, and I laughed again, while he poured me another wine. ‘You understand Dick,’ he repeated. ‘I knew you would. We can make it happen, you and me. The others’ll be our instruments.’ And he winked.
Later, I’d recall this remark with some dubiousness; now, like everything else, it seemed the simple truth, and I was unable to resist the idea that he read my mind. More: that he read my memory, and saw me in the sewing-room at Trent Street, a foolish elf-boy severed from Fairyland, troubled by those figures, ageless yet pubescent, who flew against the moon. It was still not quite possible to feel close to Darcy, however convivial he seemed; there was always a cold barrier in him somewhere. Yet tonight I felt warmer towards him than I’d ever done: a sort of cerebral warmth.
He was right, he and I would create this together; we’d bring Faery into being, I said. I’d ask Rod Ferguson to let me make a pilot; then I’d propose a series, and see if Rod would back it. I was about to get up and leave, in this happy frame of mind, when Darcy surprised me again.
‘There’s just one problem,’ he said. ‘Rita.’
‘Rita? What’s wrong with her? She’s fine.’
‘Yes,’ he said jeeringly, ‘she sounded fine in the end — after I’d worked on her for hours, and Brian had persuaded her to keep trying. She doesn’t really like this fairy material, Dick — she doesn’t have the feel for it. All little Rita cares about is C and W, or else nice, simple Irish songs — about love, if possible.’ He lifted his upper lip in contempt. ‘She’s going to drag Brian down. She wants to keep him singing that corny material all his life. She never really wanted to quit doing Country and Western. The silly bitch wants to marry him, of course. She’s been hanging on for two years now, but marriage isn’t for a guy like Brian: he’s got to be free.’
We had to get rid of her, he insisted, she wasn’t good enough for the new group. But the brutality of this worried me, and I protested; surely she’d earned her place.
‘She’ll never make a lead singer,’ Darcy pronounced. ‘She hasn’t got the vitality. It’s Brian who’s the real singing star in this group — and I’m the one who knows what’s good for him.’ His eyes had taken on their peering, fanatical look; he’d ceased to smile, and thrust his head forward at me. ‘What we want is a female vocalist with real talent, who can match Brian, and really feel the fairy material. And I think I’ve found her.’
‘Who?’
‘Your wife, mate.’
I put down my glass and stared. He always had the power to disturb me, in the end; and yet I felt a reluctant excitement about this too. ‘Katrin? You’ve never heard her sing.’
‘But I have.’ He looked clever and triumphant. ‘I went to the Estonian Club the other night. When you told me how good she was, I got curious.’
It was true I’d praised her to him.
‘She’s bloody marvellous,’ Burr was saying. ‘That voice! Like a choirboy’s! It’s perfect for our elf music, Dick — don’t you see that? And can’t you imagine her and Brian together?’
I couldn’t see Brian dropping Rita, I said, especially since they were involved with each other.
His gaze shifted. ‘Leave that to me. We’ll keep both women in the group, if we have to. At least Katrin can try out with Brian at the Loft, can’t she? You’d like to give her a chance, wouldn’t you?’
Yes, I said; but not at Rita’s expense.
Things were going a little too quickly for me, and I wasn’t sure any more that my enthusiasm had been sensible. I decided I should dampen his over-confidence a little before I went. ‘All I’ve said I’ll do is try and make a pilot programme,’ I told him. ‘That doesn’t mean that Rod or the Programmes people will buy the idea.’
‘They’ll buy it,’ he said. ‘This is only the beginning. We’ll end up overseas, mate — and you’ll be our manager.’
My dubious laugh didn’t seem to disturb him in the least; it was as though he knew my commitment would soon override all scepticism. Opening the door for me, he still w
ore a smile which oddly parodied intimacy, even tenderness — as though he and I were committing ourselves to much more than a musical group.
‘You know, Dick,’ he said, ‘this was always going to happen.’
7
‘John Riley’ was always the best thing that Katrin and Brian did together, yet it wasn’t included on the LP the Rymers eventually made, and no practice tape survives; the only recording that exists now is the faulty one of memory.
This was one of three traditional ballads that Darcy chose for her guest appearance with Brady at the Loft, on the night when Rod Ferguson came there to see the group work. She and Brian had rehearsed in our flat for a number of evenings in succession — always placing themselves by the double doors that opened on to the closed-in verandah, as though on a little stage. They laughed a lot, I remember; she’d had little to do with Brian’s sort of Australian before, and she found him amusing, like an off-colour story. At the same time, she had great respect for his talent; the way it combined with his careless crudity was plainly intriguing to her. Brady made fun of what he saw as her stiff formality; when they argued about arrangement or interpretation, he would call her ‘Prima Donna’. But they got on well, finding accommodation by parodying themselves: she the starchy European, he the Australian roughneck, as she called him; she had something of a penchant for outdated slang, as many migrants did.
Brian accompanied on the old Ramirez. There was a particular solo passage he always did with great deliberateness, the strings buzzing a little: it stayed in my mind, and would come to me in moments before sleep; Brian’s sound, summoning up his tangled hair, intent frown as he played, and out-thrust bottom lip of Celtic fullness.
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