The Doubleman

by Christopher Koch

  But Burr and his troupe always came back. The dreams continued for many nights, operating now through a sort of shorthand. I had experienced the essentials; there was no need for the actors to play out whole scenes again. They had only to appear in their various guises for me instantly to understand my fatal position. Katrin and Brian always wore their Rymers costumes; Deirdre always roamed naked, in the perfection of her twenties, speaking with her middle-aged voice which, unlike Burr’s, rambled towards no destination, no final point.

  In those strange weeks, it wasn’t dream that imitated life, but life that imitated dream; because Deirdre’s phone calls had now begun again, almost as though she’d been prompted. Since her husband’s death, she’d begun to allow herself to say things to me she’d not done before: directly erotic hints; frank appeals to the shred of past that linked us. And she begged me more and more frequently to visit that Point Piper villa I’d once longed to enter, and whose interior I’d never seen.

  I continued, patiently, to refuse; it wasn’t a good idea, I said.

  ‘Patrick now says he’s in love with me. He wants to marry me, and take me abroad. Isn’t it indecent? I’ve told him never to mention such a thing again. He bought me a print of a Titian Venus yesterday; he said she reminded him of me. He says I’m his goddess. I told him I wasn’t quite as overweight as his Venus — that dampened him. He’s getting impossible, lately.

  ‘Too late now, I suppose; but it should have been you. I think of us more and more lately, the way we were. You were so beautiful, with your poor leg. And we loved the same things, didn’t we, Richard? Remember your Yeats? “Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams.” ’

  With the flavour of Darcy’s nightmares still in my mouth, I grew alarmed and finally angry. I asked her to stop calling me, and she went off the phone, her voice hurt and frigid. I had finally cut the connection, I thought; it had been that simple.

  And now the dreams changed. Deirdre vanished from them, and so did Brian and Katrin.

  I’m still unable to account for their new content. Where did it come from? Forgotten reading? Conversations in Varley’s basement, lodged in my unconscious? No doubt; but at the time, this somehow didn’t seem likely; instead, the sensation of being a receiver for entirely novel messages from Victoria Street became even more intense than before.

  Burr was alone with me in these episodes, talking at me directly; and I listened to him with a mingled sense of loathing and boredom so insupportable that I felt myself suffocating. I would wake in panic, sucking in air with the most vivid physical relief, as though I’d just escaped drowning. Yet the extraordinary thing was that Darcy seemed to be doing little to harm me except to recite names, frowning as he did so: endless lists of names, tedious and repellent, all but one of which meant nothing to me.

  ‘Bunting,’ he said. ‘Puckrill; Fury; Maumet.’ And then: ‘Phouka.’

  He stood in the street and whistled me out, and I looked down from the verandah window not wanting to come, while he grinned up at me. I had no such emotion when this happened in reality; merely a sort of reluctance, lately, which his perennial air of bringing important news would quickly overcome. There were two Burrs: the one by day, and the one in dreams. Yet I sensed they might soon blend in some way.

  ‘You should give up these long planning sessions with Darcy,’ Katrin said. ‘You look drained, after you and he have been together. Do we have to do so much of this ghost material? Brian and I would rather do more love ballads. That’s what we’re best at — everyone says so.’

  6

  We had taped the last show, and the Rymers were mine no longer.

  As we went into the last week of March, most of their talk was of a three-day trip to Melbourne, where they were booked to do two big concerts, as well as a TV appearance. They were driving down on Wednesday, in a minibus Darcy had bought to take them on tours. All of them were excited about the concerts, but they were a good deal more excited by the advent of Roy Slade, the talent scout from IRC, who was due here from London on the day before their departure. Uttering his name, their voices came close to awe; even Brian seemed reluctantly affected.

  On Monday, the eve of the northern envoy’s arrival, Deirdre Dillon’s call for help came.

  ‘I have to see you.’

  ‘I’m sorry, that isn’t possible; I’m very busy.’

  ‘Don’t hang up.’ The voice seemed genuinely urgent, without affectation, and I waited for three beats.

  ‘I wouldn’t phone you if I had anywhere else to turn. I want you to come over to the house immediately. I’m in serious trouble.’

  I looked at my watch; it was a little after five o’clock. ‘Isn’t Pat there?’

  ‘I can’t talk, Richard. Just come.’ Muffled weeping began, and the line went dead.

  The sign still says no through road. The Southerly hisses in the leaves of the palm and banana trees. This millionaire’s tip of Point Piper is deserted as ever, and when I slam the door of my car in Wolseley Crescent, the bark of a big dog breaks the hush. It’s Major, staring at me through the black, wrought-iron gates.

  ‘Hello Major,’ I say. He lowers his nose, and growls in his throat; then he wags his tail twice, and admits me.

  The stage is empty, just as it was when I made my expedition here years ago. The late sun is vacuous and mild; it’s not yet twilight. Silent, the big white villa, whose chimneys are tall as minarets, wearing hats of Cordova tiles. The half-glimpsed, half-real terrace still muses over the Harbour at the back. No sign of trouble: untrodden levels of lawn go off empty as ever to the water’s edge; the roses and tamarisks nod and writhe. The Harbour is pale blue as reverie; an oil tanker slides past Shark Island.

  But one thing isn’t right: the black iron safety door is off its latch, and the front door is slightly ajar. I push it open and step in, my heart thumping as though I’m trespassing. For a moment, I’m twenty-five again, and her unknown husband is waiting inside.

  On black-and-white ceramic tiles, I stand inside the Dillon house at last. There are faint, clean odours: furniture polish, flower scents, and a dry, papery smell which is the house’s individual essence. Airy light fills the entrance hall; I sense that the house is full of light, reflected off the Harbour, dancing on white walls upstairs and down. Directly in front of me is a handsome staircase with cedar banisters.

  She’s standing on the landing in a belted dressing-gown of moss-green silk, looking down at me with no sign of recognition, her face like powder. I feel certain she’s been standing there ever since her phone call.

  ‘Are you all right?’ My question is loud, in the clean silence.

  At first she makes no reply, her mouth pursed and dubious, both hands holding the gown together. Finally, her voice floats down to me.

  ‘Shut the door behind you.’

  She’s as solemn as a child in shock, and her explanations can wait. I cross the tiles and begin to climb the stairs. Her blanched hair, which falls loose to her shoulders as always, alarms me with its web-like disorder, and as I climb, she seems formidably larger than her true size: statuesque. But when I stand in front of her, she’s quite small again, her uncorsetted figure soft and vulnerable. Only her bosom remains almost massive, her hands still clutching the gown together there: pale, freckled and appalled.

  ‘Patrick raped me,’ she says.

  It’s been uttered so quickly that I almost doubt what I’ve heard. Without waiting for a response, but giving me a single, swift glance, she turns and makes off towards a hall that opens off the landing.

  ‘We’ll go to my room.’ This is called over her shoulder, peremptory and abrupt, as though I’m to be taken to task for what’s happened. I follow the lustrous, moss-green gown and floating web of hair down the hallway’s dimness; she hurries with the certainty and authority of a woman in her own house, but only through habit, I think, since everything is altered for ever.

  She lives in this room; I sense it as soon as we come in. I imagine she seldom leaves it, a
nd is seldom out of her dressing-gown either. We sit side by side on a little couch. Still holding the gown together at the throat with one hand, as though for protection, she pours two sherries from a decanter: a good hostess. But her face is still blank, and I fear that in a moment she’ll give way. I continue to behave normally, as though this may postpone her hysteria from surfacing. And I look about me, while she sips her sherry in silence; a silence which in her is more alarming than complaint.

  Large as a sitting-room, this long-imagined ‘boudoir’ of hers is furnished much as I would have expected: thick, blue-grey carpet, antique double bed with brass knobs, rosewood writing-desk, a small rosewood table on which the decanter stands. Armchairs, and the couch we sit on, are covered in blue-and-white brocade; there are crowded white bookshelves, and a record-player. It’s the bed-sitting-room of a solitary: a pampered, unmarried girl with cultivated tastes. But although it’s clean, and although one of the casement windows is open on to a view of the Harbour, a white curtain undulating gently in the breeze, the room has the fustiness of a place whose occupant has lost interest in order. There are faint food and cigarette smells in the warm, quiet air, mingled with scent. The bed is unmade; underclothes lie on chairs. On the long, cluttered white dressing-table, with its mirrors and battery of jars, a coloured portrait photograph stands: her twelve-year-old daughter, whom I last saw as an infant. She’s pretty, with auburn hair, but it’s a pale, indoor, Victorian prettiness, from which her mother’s life-force is somehow absent; the large, dark blue eyes are a disillusioned woman’s, rather than a child’s.

  I decide to break the silence. ‘What happened?’

  She turns to me, putting down her glass on the table and letting go of the collar of the gown so that it gapes, disclosing deeply divided whiteness. ‘I told you: Patrick raped me.’ Her voice rises a little. ‘My stepson raped me; and Darcy Burr encouraged him to do it. Otherwise, it never would have happened.’

  I sit astounded yet not surprised. But now she ducks her head and begins to weep, a handkerchief held to her nose, hunched forward in profile, gasping. Her whole body shudders, under the gown.

  ‘Where’s Pat now?’

  ‘He’s gone.’ Her voice is squeezed and small. ‘Gone off with Darcy. Fiona’s at her uncle’s, thank God. And the housekeeper’s away. So I’m here by myself.’

  ‘Have you called the police?’

  She turns quickly to look at me, blanched hair swinging. ‘Of course not. How could I do that?’ Her voice is a wail; the suggestion frightens her, and the open, crying mouth is a child’s: almost square.

  ‘You’re not hurt?’

  She blows her nose and grows quiet; it takes her some time to answer. ‘He’s assaulted me; he was trying to force himself on me. When I screamed, he stopped. It’s only my face he didn’t mark, do you see?’

  I see, since she’s opened the gown, under which she’s naked: a martyr displaying wounds in a sentimental painting, her reddened, sky-pale eyes accusing the world. Then, seemingly satisfied by my dismay at these few sad bruises, she wraps herself up again. But my dismay has sprung as well from seeing what Time has done to the body of the Elle Maid, making her death-white and voluptuously swollen: a creature of Earth.

  I put my arm about her shoulders. Humbly, she lays her wet and papery face against my neck; I smell her powder and the sherry on her breath, and my pity is love’s familiar. She has no understanding of why this penalty has come to her: even now, she doesn’t see that her mirror-games have gone too far. It isn’t her fault, it’s Burr’s fault; Patrick’s fault. She’ll run away crying, to tell Dadda. But bankrupt Robert Brennan is dead now; and so is Michael Dillon. Both Daddas are dead, and there’s only me.

  In a muffled voice, talking into my neck, she says: ‘He hurt me, Richard.’

  I stayed, my arm still about her shoulders, while it darkened in the room.

  Twilight: the dangerous time, when things begin to change, and no longer seem themselves. The world faded, through Deirdre’s bedroom window; colour drained from lavish, grass-green water-plains as spacious as her carpet, extending for miles: a Harbour for the rich, the far, violet headlands like frontiers, imagined rather than seen. A few last yachts bent at a distance; a miniscule Manly ferry hurried towards the city, and the big, empty house on the point seemed ready to drift away; to sail out on to the water in the next Southerly.

  As she talked, I began to see that she almost feared it would.

  She spoke slowly at first, then more and more quickly, in full, panicky flight from that land of strange insights where Burr had been leading them. Patrick wasn’t really to be blamed, she insisted, he wasn’t really vicious, it was Darcy. If it weren’t for Darcy’s influence, Patrick would never have forced himself on her. His whole personality had changed: he only did what Darcy suggested.

  ‘Patrick used to be so gentle. Now he’s aggressive and demanding. He’s not himself. They’re both on that horrible hash, of course; I hate the smell of the filthy stuff. Even Fiona’s become defiant; I see Darcy whispering to her in corners. She’s infatuated with him. I’m sure it’s innocent, but it frightens me.’ She blew her nose, while the red-haired girl on the dressing-table gazed at me, with her look of precocious disillusion.

  ‘Patrick keeps saying that he and I must marry, and go abroad with the Rymers,’ she said. ‘It’s mad. The family would have a fit. And he keeps wanting more and more money. That’s Darcy’s doing too, I’m sure. He’s taking over our lives.’

  The note of panic rose higher. ‘He’s practically moved in here, and he won’t go. He says he’s Patrick’s guest. Major barks and barks, when he sees him. He’s never liked Darcy, from the first.’

  She should simply demand that Burr stay away, I said; it was her house. Surely her brother-in-law would help, if there was any trouble?

  But now a new agitation gripped her; clearly the worst alarm of all.

  ‘No. I can’t. Bloody Paul would blame me,’ she said. ‘I asked Darcy here in the first place, and Paul would say I’d created the situation — that I’d exposed Fiona to bad influences. He’d take away my income. He’s only wanting an excuse like this.’

  The handkerchief went to her nose; she looked out the window in vague and helpless anguish, and I recognised what spectres she was staring at now: the big house floating off; the investments and securities she laughed at and didn’t understand bobbing into infinity: lost toys of a fortunate child, who had never imagined the world without them. The room was almost dark.

  I tightened my arm about her shoulders; her body-heat came through the gown, and she turned back to me in mute appeal. The sails of the yachts on the dimming Harbour were like flashes of thought, and I saw that the indistinct face turned up to me was changed by some alchemy of darkness into the Deirdre of Greystones again: a girl in her twenties, her beauty absolute. The wave that went through me was like warning; but its true identity was longing.

  ‘You talk to Darcy,’ she murmured. ‘You can make him leave us alone.’

  ‘I’ll do what I can. Now I have to go.’

  ‘No. They might come back.’

  ‘I’ll phone in the morning to see that you’re all right.’

  For a moment, she said nothing; then she spoke under her breath. ‘It should have been us. We would have been happy. Stay with me, Richard. I need you to look after me.’

  I stood abruptly. ‘I’ll let myself out,’ I said.

  She looked at me once more and then turned away, making no response at all. Her expression in the dark was unclear, her face a white blur. Hunched forward, motionless, elbows on her knees, white-blonde curtain of hair hanging about her face like a tent, she neither looked up nor spoke, as I moved to the door.

  Outside in the Crescent, walking uphill to my car, I took deep breaths. I wouldn’t phone her in the morning; I’d never hear her many voices again. The Hobart girl with the Irish sense of humour; the old-fashioned child; the cool and cultivated Sydney matron; the cruel and lovely Elle-maid: al
l were gone. I walked quickly; but I couldn’t quite leave her behind, no matter how fast I walked.

  I wasn’t involved, I said. But I knew that my protest was hypocrisy. I’d somehow entered the condition of guilt, in a zone beyond the rational where Darcy’s dreams had become reality. I was held by frail webs more enduring than adultery; I always had been, and eventually, I’d pay.

  7

  The meeting with Roy Slade and Phil Brown took place at nine o’clock at night. This seemed to me a curious hour, considering that we were to meet in the International Recording Company’s Office in North Sydney.

  But nobody commented on it as Darcy drove us across the Bridge in the new minibus. I certainly wasn’t going to do so, since I was in no mood for conversation; and I guessed that in the minds of the others, the talent scout from the other hemisphere was a being to whom no normal rules applied. They probably imagined that Slade remained on London time here, or worked throughout the night.

  Nobody spoke much at all, in the dark van; and slowly it filled with the tension of all our separate thoughts. There ought to have been exultancy, but there wasn’t. Darcy’s white nose pointed ahead like a knife, and his expression, in the lights through the windscreen, looked more grim than excited. Now and then he drummed his fingers on the wheel as he steered. Beside him, Brian had his back to me, so his mood couldn’t be judged. Only Patrick, seated beside Katrin and me in the back, seemed cheerful, and I glanced at him with morbid curiosity. He looked as well-turned-out and inoffensive as ever, in a lightweight pastel-blue suit. He whistled softly through his teeth, until Darcy’s head half-turned.