The Doubleman

by Christopher Koch

  They’re good; the Rymers are very good indeed, and below the flickering, multiplied blue images of my creation, I sway and hum now in fervent communion, in rhythm with the music, no longer caring what the techs think. I mutter to myself, I call sudden commands, and the script assistant laughs in encouragement; she’s already sensed the flowering of something irresistible. I’ve put them inside the frame, and a magic is taking place; they’re more than themselves now, Katrin, Brian and Darcy. I concentrate on calling the shots, as we alternate faster and faster between the studio (where I cut from instrument to instrument, face to face) and the graphics I’ve matched with the progress of the song: the luminous, semi-nude fays of Huskisson, Simmons and Sir Joseph Noel Paton; the decadent and sinister Otherworld creatures of Fuseli and Richard Dadd; the equivocal Victorian flower-faces of Doyle and Fitzgerald. This is the soul of the show, as brownies, hobmen, kelpies, water-sprites, silkies, bogies flit and pass on the screen; as the slyly ominous heartbeat rhythms and haunting tunes Darcy has devised arrive to persist in the mind. His small hammers on the dulcimer produce notes like water-drops in a cave; his bass guitar whines in a way that would set the nerves on edge, if it weren’t seductive. Now he changes to treble recorder, its plaint a variant on Katrin’s singing, its far, ominous refrain announcing Janet’s arrival in the forbidden midnight wood, and her crucial attempt to rescue Tam Lin, her elfin seducer. I super Burr’s piping Pan profile over Brian’s working fingers on the guitar.

  ‘Roll credits,’ I say, and slump back in my chair as though I’ve run a race. Brian is singing ‘The Bard of Armargh’, the farewell ballad that will end each show — if we’re ever granted the series. Off camera, Burr catches my eye through the window; he grins and triumphantly winks.

  A hand falls on my shoulder; looking up, I realise Rod Ferguson has been standing behind me all the time. Well, he has a right to be here; without him, the pilot would never have been made.

  ‘Congratulations,’ he says. ‘Lovely production.’ His prominent blue eyes are further enlarged with unfeigned enthusiasm, almost, it seems to me, with awe; and the nearest techs imitate his smile. ‘It’s no ordinary folk group,’ he says. ‘Watch out though, Dick — you’ll lose that beautiful wife of yours to show biz.’

  Soft laughter from the darkness. Not malicious; the reverse in fact, since everyone now is scenting a triumph.

  7. And Pleasant is the Fairy Land

  1

  As the new summer opened like warm newspaper, and the deafening drilling of cicadas began in the plane trees of the Cross, all our lives were changed.

  We’d been granted a series of six half-hour programmes, slotted at nine o’clock on Thursday nights. It wasn’t a top spot, but by the time the fourth of these programmes had gone to air, in mid-November, the press attention and the ratings we attracted exceeded even Darcy Burr’s predictions, astounding the executives in Programmes. They’d only anticipated a minority audience for the series in Sydney; but after the success of the first two shows, they decided to make the series national, and the response in other states was just as enthusiastic. The slot was changed to eight o’clock on Friday nights all over Australia: prime time. A second series was planned for the new year, at a much higher fee for the group.

  The Programmes people shouldn’t have been surprised. We were not only riding the wave of the overseas folk boom, we were appealing to a section of the pop audience as well, just as Burr had planned. Darcy was ahead of his time, in Australia, and the press and the public were startled and intrigued by a folk group using strong electric backing, and by the ballads of the supernatural.

  The Rymers developed a cult following among the young; one of the Sunday papers labelled the group ‘electric folkies’, and the term stuck. The more trendy magazines began to use the term ‘occultic music’. A poster was produced of the group by ABS Publicity which I began to see everywhere, and media gossip pieces in the press began to refer to Katrin and Brian as ‘folkie sex symbols’. More and more of the publicity began to concentrate on these two; they were interviewed by a number of magazines, and showed signs of developing into pop stars. Both began to get fan mail; and Brian’s female following in particular was steadily growing in size. Large numbers of girls began to hang about the doors of the ABS television studios on the evenings when we recorded, waiting to surround him when he came out.

  It was a modest crowd in comparison to the hordes that mobbed overseas pop stars; but on one evening it was large and strident enough to warrant hurrying the group into a waiting ABS car and speeding away into the night of the Pacific Highway.

  The urgency of these girls, as they ran after the car towards the gates (all of them calling: ‘Bri-an! Bri-an!’) was strange and pathetic. As we left them behind, in that sterile suburb of floodlit buildings and giant transmission towers, I saw with amazement that some of them were weeping. Brady, sitting beside me in the back seat and waving back at them, was bemused and scornful. ‘Silly little scrubbers,’ he said softly.

  The fantasies and the group intoxication of popular success didn’t seem to move him; he remained a sardonic folk singer, and most of the time scarcely seemed to notice the effect he had on women. He grinned at them amiably, and slid away; it was Katrin’s opinion that he was afraid of involvements, and always would be.

  Now, watching the running girls recede through the back window, I believed I understood their longing. They wanted nothing less than to stay inside the music, whose high excitement seemed so much sweeter than life. Darcy Burr’s wistful recorder and mouth-organ accompaniments had much to do with this, but the girls were scarcely aware of it. Brian was what they wanted; he was one of those in whose face the stamp of the Otherworld was strong: that Otherworld the music summoned up. Yet he himself was unaware of it.

  Unable to stay with him there, they wept.

  I could hum and sway and be as eccentric as I liked in the control-room now: I was regarded with that awed respect which only top ratings can command. Only Martin Gadsby wasn’t impressed, and continued to look at me reproachfully; I was plainly deserting radio, and he shuffled past me in the corridors without a word. I felt briefly guilty about the old man, but put him from my mind.

  The show was simply called ‘The Rymers’. We brought in a few other folk singers as guest artists, to avoid overexposing the group and exhausting their material; but it was clearly the Rymers’ programme. I directed it in the studio, but occasionally, through an arrangement with Gordon Cartwright, it was done as a carefully-staged OB from the Loft, in front of a small, hand-picked audience. And Burr was ‘Thomas’. In what I saw at first as a modest gesture, he’d taken the stage name ‘Thomas Darcy’, to justify the group’s title. I dreaded the day when a journalist would dig up information on his prison term; then it occurred to me that Darcy had more than one reason for adopting his pseudonym.

  The supernatural ballads weren’t the group’s whole repertoire, even though they were central. Brian did a number of solos, mainly Australian bush ballads and Irish rebel songs, which were what did most to build his personal following; and he and Katrin sang a number of the traditional ballads of love and loss — among them ‘John Riley’. As well, we usually included at least one guitar duet by Darcy and Brian to demonstrate their virtuosity. Once, they played ‘Johnny Guitar’, ending with their spectacular bulerías — and as they bent towards each other in profile (beaked nose, broken nose, the two guitars raised like obscure weapons), I had a brief shock, studying Darcy on the control-room monitor: just for a moment, I was looking at Clive Broderick, bent over the Ramirez in the back of Sandy’s shop. This illusion was momentarily so strong that I was held and distracted by it. But it was simply a trick of the black-and-white image; checking through the control-room window, I found that the resemblance was no more marked than usual. At that moment, sensing my stare, Darcy looked up at me and grinned as he played; he gave me the sensation, as he often did, of having picked up my thought waves.

  I’d feared that we migh
t run out of songs, before the series ended; but Darcy’s inspiration in producing melodies and arrangements for the Child ballads seemed inexhaustible. He was very much subordinate to Brian and Katrin in the eyes of the public — the cunning instrumentalist who worked in the background and sang only in the choruses; and he wasn’t seen to have Brady’s sex appeal. But there was no doubt in my mind how much of the group’s success sprang from him. Some of his arrangements owed something to Pentangle; others, in weird yet harmonious contrast with the fairy ballad content, had echoes of the Beatles; but many were like nothing anyone had heard. He was influenced by Indian sitar music, as others were beginning to be at this time; he had acquired a sitar of his own, and the quarter-tones fitted perfectly with the pre-Christian and medieval themes of the great Scots ballads of the supernatural. He was also getting stronger and stronger percussive effects with his finger-drums, and with an Indian tabla. But he wanted an even bigger beat, he said; and only his need to play the other instruments prevented him from introducing a snare drum.

  We were always together now, the four of us, in one way or another. We had long restaurant meals; we schemed far into the night over bottles of expensive wine, in a state of exultant intimacy that was not of our own making but the show’s. It devoured our lives, and Jaan and old Vilde were left a good deal alone. Darcy and I were deferred to as the programme’s masterminds, and still spent many hours in planning sessions.

  As for Katrin, she had found her true home in the group, singing under the television lights with Brian Brady beside her, the cameras circling them like tall, intelligent insects; she’d never really enjoyed working as a soloist, she said, and Brian gave her the security and confidence she needed.

  ‘He’s so simple and easy,’ she said. ‘He makes me feel nothing can go wrong. We know each other’s thoughts, when we sing. He’s like family to me; perhaps it’s because he’s your cousin.’

  And certainly Brian was becoming a part of our home life. Although Darcy seldom came to Challis Avenue, Brian was at the flat more and more, rehearsing duo material with Katrin, or eating meals with us, or playing his guitar to Jaan, who was eager for his company and had the Rymers poster up in his room. Brady was apparently enjoying a series of girls from among his pool of fans, but he never brought them to the flat. He was often half-drunk, although he hadn’t come drunk to a recording again. I sensed that he now disliked living with Burr. He seemed somehow oppressed by it, and I guessed that it had been this way ever since Rita Carey disappeared.

  She’d left a white slip hanging on a chair in the Victoria Street flat. Like so many other things in that junk-shop living-room, it wasn’t moved for weeks. I would wonder whether Brian noticed it, and if so why he didn’t get rid of it. I’d never told him of her visit to me, and the slip was like a memento of someone I’d betrayed myself; my eyes would seek it out.

  2

  ‘Hello? Richard Miller?’

  In the first few seconds, on that hot afternoon in January, I didn’t know the voice. I thought it was an actress looking for work, and was half-impressed. It was a period voice, the sort of voice men once couldn’t resist: low and beautifully modulated, promising episodes and complicities beyond the humdrum, its associations Noel Coward comedies and songs by Cole Porter.

  ‘It’s Deirdre Dillon speaking. You may not remember me, after so long.’

  I sat absolutely still. It was a young woman’s voice, unchanged; but she’d now be nearly forty.

  ‘I remember you,’ I said.

  ‘Do you?’ She seemed to have drawn back from the receiver. There was a brief silence which I didn’t break; then she said: ‘I hope you don’t mind my ringing you like this.’

  ‘No. I’m glad to hear from you.’

  I waited, and she hurried on, the humorous undertone entering her voice which I remembered, and now decided was a sign of nervousness. Perhaps it always had been.

  ‘I’ve often thought of contacting you, Richard, but I could never pluck up the courage; and I didn’t really know where you were. Then I read about your show in some women’s magazine — so I watched it on the box. There was your name as producer, large as life. It gave me rather a turn. Had to have a whisky as a stiffener.’ Her voice deepened comically, in the old way; I listened as though to a monologue in a dream, gripping the receiver.

  ‘How is your husband?’

  ‘Mostly bed-bound, I’m afraid. A chronic invalid.’

  ‘I’m sorry. What’s wrong?’

  ‘Oh, something quite bad.’ Her tone had become light, cool and empty, dismissing a distasteful topic. ‘It may be cancer, actually. He’s not expected to live.’

  She cut short my awkward speech of sympathy. ‘I’d love to see you. Can we meet?’ I hesitated, and her delivery became humorous again. ‘Fraught pause. I realise you’re married — to that interesting Continental lady in the Rymers, isn’t it? The magazine told me everything. But this is partly a business matter I want to talk about — and you’re not on a leash, surely?’

  I made no response to this.

  ‘The only thing is, it’s got to be somewhere near here,’ she said. ‘My husband’s impossible about my leaving the house for long; he wants me here all the time. He’s made me into his nurse. The prisoner of Point Piper.’

  There was another pause, and the low voice of complicity came back, all humour vanishing. ‘Please see me, Richard. Just for an hour. I wonder how much you’ve changed? You sound terribly mature.’

  I laughed at the reappearance of the note of caricature on this last word. But after she’d hung up, I found myself trembling, which I told myself was ridiculous.

  Leaning on the rough wooden rail at the end of the Rose Bay pier, I pulled off my tie and undid the top button of my shirt, enjoying the small, humid wind. Tonight was less oppressive than usual, for January.

  The street lamps and traffic of the New South Head Road were at my back; in front of me, across black miles of Harbour, were the distant lights of the north shore. A long container ship inched by in midstream, the lamps on its many derricks glimmering in festive strings, like those of a fairground. The complex edges of the Harbour were marked out on this side by other strings of lights: the windows of Point Piper, Rose Bay, Watson’s Bay: the rich eastern suburbs, which ended where the great, landlocked water of Port Jackson finally found the sea, between the invisible Heads the ship was bound for. Deirdre’s districts: that was how I’d thought of them once, when I first came to Sydney.

  We’d arranged to meet at eight o’clock. I’d driven here from Potts Point after eating at home with Jaan and old Vilde. Katrin was out singing with the group at a club in the western suburbs — a frequent situation just now, since the Rymers had accepted a series of club engagements in this period before the new television series started. They were also working on an LP for local International Recording Company release; so I was left to myself quite often lately. Unless I cared to go along as a spectator, the Rymers were now leading a life that didn’t include me, and I’d be glad when the series began, and they were back in my hands.

  Twenty past eight, and I wondered if Deirdre would come. Curiosity made me go on waiting for her, pacing the pier with all the tension of a lover. Curiosity made my mouth unnaturally dry. Curiosity was all it was, I said; this and a faint, irrational guilt, generated because Katrin didn’t yet know about the meeting, and because Deirdre herself had made it seem like an assignation. She could slip down here from Point Piper, she said, on the pretext of taking the dog for a walk, and her sick, possessive husband need suspect nothing. I found the subterfuge silly; but it was no business of mine what games she played.

  I went on pacing the pier, which was almost empty. Two old men in shorts and towelling hats sat fishing with hand lines, plastic buckets of bait beside them; aged boys. When she appeared at the other end, I knew it must be Deirdre because of the big black Labrador straining on a leash beside her. I also recognised her hair, flax-pale as ever, and still worn youthfully to her shoulders.
I walked back to meet her, squinting to discern her face, the perspective of empty planks diminishing between us.

  Her walk was the first thing that was disconcerting. The faintly rocking gait I remembered, practical and slightly comical, which she’d only adopted in frivolous moods, now seemed to have set and become exaggerated. Or else it was accentuated by the dog’s tugging on the lead. A woman of fashionable appearance came towards me, a privileged eastern suburbs matron in a heavy-knit, expensive navy cardigan worn over a white summer dress. Her figure was good, but she was shorter than I remembered, and her full bust made her slightly top-heavy. A filmy white scarf was knotted at her throat, the ends floating in the breeze as her hair did.

  Now I made out her face, which peered at me and then oddly looked away, by turns. Yes, it was Deirdre; it was recognisably the face of the girl in the twenties headband, even though there were changes I couldn’t yet take in. She was still a strikingly pretty woman, and there was nothing I could do about the ridiculous hammering of my heart, a reflex uncorrected by time. I’d thought about her for so many years, until Katrin came.

  She came to a halt in front of me, and the Labrador uttered two pompous barks.

  ‘Down Major, be quiet,’ she said, and he sat and panted. Her smile was apprehensive, asking me not to judge her new face. I saw its double chin, its tracery of lines, and the papery quality of skin that would never be firm again, and was whiter than before. Her hair’s blondeness, too, appeared almost white, at close quarters; was it dyed?

  ‘Hello Richard.’ Her voice was the same, pleasing as it had been on the phone. ‘You’ve still got your limp,’ she said.

  ‘I’m not likely to lose it. You look well.’

  ‘I’m a middle-aged frump, darling. And when you last saw me I was the age you are now.’ Her pursed smile was impossible to read. ‘But you look just how I thought you would. You’ve turned into a handsome man. Harder-looking than I imagined. Are you hard?’