Leeward

by Geoffrey Lehmann

  She had a ponderous shyness. At the Canberra railway station, as I stepped forward to kiss her goodbye, she hid in the railway shed, and came out waving only when the train was leaving. She showed me the spot in the Cotter River where she lost a gold necklace and cross in the water. Following her through the bushes and willows on the river bank I felt she was running away. But she began addressing me as ‘dear’, which no other woman had called me.

  She agreed to spend some weekends in Sydney and we became lovers – once at a hotel in Manly and the second time at a motel in Auburn. (These were places a friend had used for assignations. He was irritated when I told him. I had no wish to innovate and did not want embarrassing questions at the front desk.)

  When I picked her up at Sydney airport in my 1928 Studebaker, she persuaded me to drive to a Castlecrag house where she had met a man at a party who ‘would climb walls’ for her. We wandered around in the garden for a while. Neither of us knew the owners. This type of consideration did not worry her. (I later got to know the Buhrich family well.)

  She had heard about a party that night on the northern beaches. It was my first experience of the Beatles, their banal ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’ blasting us as the front door was opened. We did not stay long and checked in at the Manly Pacific on the front beach. Afterwards she explained her experience of sex. It was different from a man’s. She had never had an orgasm. When she made love, she could see right into the man: ‘I have a splinter of glass in my heart’.

  I took her rowing next day in Lane Cove National Park. That weekend, as we drove around Sydney, she was disheartened by the untidiness and humidity, the crowds on city footpaths and the traffic jams. Despite this, after our second weekend together she applied for a transfer from her government job in Canberra to an administrative job in Sydney with the navy at Garden Island.

  I rented a flat with high ceilings at the back of a Federationera house in Wahroonga. Furnished by the owner in a bohemian style, it looked out onto a lawn and tall trees. I thought it would be good for Livija to have a cat as company. We wandered one night around the deserted city markets and found a scrawny black and white cat. We called him ‘Oliver’ after the Dickens hero.

  Livija had surprised herself by moving to Sydney. She and Oliver moved into the flat but I did not. She made it clear she wanted time by herself. I imagined if I was patient, I could make our relationship work, and I let a few days go past. She had started her new job. I suggested we spend the night together. She shrank back and burst into tears. I did not press her and drove away to my parents’ house.

  Two incidents hastened the break-up.

  At a gathering in the Short Street, Balmain house, John Quinlem turned to Livija and me and said in his loud voice – he intended the whole room to hear – ‘You two should get married’. I could not say anything. John knew he was meddling and I was angry.

  Another friend (who had a fiancée) used to tell me to get rid of Livija: ‘She’s no good for you’. One morning he telephoned: ‘I’ve done you a good turn. I slept with Livija last night. I can tell you, for her it was just like having a cigarette.’

  Livija moved out of the Wahroonga flat and I saw her one last time in a room she rented, looking down William Street, near the naval dockyards where she worked. She had a water lily floating in a glass. She had left her parents to be with me. She was a stranger in an unfamiliar city, in a new workplace. I should have stayed in contact.

  The Wahroonga flat became my occasional residence. It had a white Bendix front-loading washing machine, far more efficient than my parents’ primitive arrangements. My mother still washed my clothes but I began washing my Wahroonga sheets.

  I held after-the-pub parties, cooking up a large pot of borscht, a dish I copied from Irene Koch, Chris’s wife. I do not remember what happened to Oliver. Ten years later I received a phone call from Rod Madgwick in Port Moresby. Livija had been killed in a car accident in New Guinea – she was with her husband and their car had collided with a tree.

  There was no chain of friends who introduced me to Stephen Wilson. ‘Robert’ pointed him out to me as a person one should know. But they were not friends. Stephen and I saw each other around the university and lived in adjoining suburbs. In about 1960 we probably introduced ourselves – perhaps on the train.

  Tall and fair haired, with hazel eyes – an odd colour combination – he was a few years older and active in university politics (not something I cared about greatly). He had a shy manner, and many women (and men) were in love with him. He was aloof, yet popular. To be his friend made one a member of a charmed circle. We may have known each other for a year or so when I invited Stephen to join the John Quinlem squash group. He and I became its nucleus.

  His father was a Freemason and partner in a small, old established law firm that had specialised in admiralty law. Stephen was articled to a larger firm that acted for the Masons – their reception room displayed a print showing the burning of Sydney’s St Marys Catholic cathedral. It was always the plan that Stephen would join his father’s firm at the end of his articles. Unlike my own bizarre mixture of backgrounds, he was solidly upper middle class.

  The Wilsons’ single storey Federation house in Orinoco Street, Pymble was palatial (to my way of thinking), with a wide veranda, and had the Catholic name ‘Loyola’. Stephen’s father Cecil may have chosen the name as a joke, or it may have been inherited from a previous owner. Either way, Mr Wilson apparently enjoyed the perversity of a leading Mason living at such a Catholic address.

  While Stephen was willowy in build, and tactful and gracious, Mr Wilson was stumpy, gruff and practical. Mr Wilson’s old gardener had an ex-wife who kept on turning up at the gardener’s house to shout abuse. ‘Turn the hose on her’ was Cecil Wilson’s advice. Technically an assault and battery, the advice put a permanent stop to her visits.

  Mr Wilson erected two heavy front gate posts, as sturdy as small telegraph poles – probably with help from his old gardener. Stephen was amused that his father dug the post holes so deep that, if you could stand in them, they would be up to your waist – deep enough to survive an earthquake. Everything about Mr Wilson was solid and robust. I sensed he was disappointed in his son.

  Stephen reminded me of Ralph Touchett, Isabel Archer’s self-effacing cousin in Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady; but Stephen was strikingly good looking and not ugly or sickly as James describes Touchett. With his devotion to his parents, his politeness and instinctive conservatism Stephen was like a survivor from the Edwardian era. He spent much of his childhood in his grandmother’s mansion in the industrial suburb of Botany. A railway line ran through a garden of several acres. The ceilings were 15 feet (4.5 m) high and a stick was placed at the door of each room to strike down any snakes that might find their way inside. The house was demolished in his late childhood to make way for a large chemical works.

  Stephen’s undiscussed childhood illnesses (asthma in my recollection) meant he was slightly older than his classmates when he left school. An air of knowledgeability and this age difference gave him an edge over his peers and younger friends like me.

  He used to collect me from my parents’ Gordon house in his family’s large grey Vauxhall. We would drive down the final steep hill of Mona Vale Road and head for the beach. Stephen seemed more interested in getting a tan than swimming. Both of us had pale skins, and I tried to cover up under my beach towel. I once fell asleep and woke with a badly sunburnt leg. Stephen welcomed this punishment from the sun. He would regret it.

  On Saturdays Stephen and I played squash in the late morning, usually at the Kings Cross squash courts – others often joining us – and had lunch at the Chuck Wagon Bistro in William Street, a steak with a cream and cracked black pepper sauce, always finished off with lemon meringue pie and ice cream. After this I would feel ill. It would be another four or more hours before I was able to eat again at the Veneziana in Stanley Street or at the Athenian Club.

  In late 1964 or early 1965, Ian Fincham, St
ephen Wilson and I rented a terrace house in Sutherland Street, Paddington from Diana Dupain, wife of the photographer Max Dupain. The terrace she owned was one in a row of three, it was newly painted pale grey inside, had a basic kitchen and an outdoor toilet and shower. The tenants of the other two houses moved in at the same time and were the cinematographer Mike Molloy (Les Murray’s friend), and Raina Campbell, the daughter of David Campbell the poet. Despite our common links and affinities the three sets of neighbours did little more than nod to each other.

  There were no carpets and I stained the floors with a mulberry-coloured stain. Stephen had large black-and-white linoleum tiles laid on the kitchen floor and furnished the house with nineteenth century mahogany items his parents had in storage. He also installed silver mounted emu eggs in the small dining room. I planted three roses in the cindery backyard. They did not do well.

  Ian was the only full-time resident and had the large upstairs front bedroom. Apart from being in the law, he and Stephen had little in common. Ian had a bushy, brown beard and was a passionate spear fisherman (and still is in his mid-seventies). He had a testosterone-fuelled suite of standard epithets and witticisms. One of them – ‘very superior’, his adjective of approbation – he said came from me. We both enjoyed a dish called cauliflower au gratin at Lorenzini’s wine bar. ‘Well, I think I’ll have some cauliflower au gratification’, Ian would announce. Unknown to him, he was a leading character in my notes for a novel about an all-night bonfire on a beach, a great deal of hetero-sex and a possible murder.

  My two house mates regarded each other with amused tolerance, and Stephen was able to retreat from Ian’s jovial wisecracks into his small upstairs back bedroom. I had the front downstairs room, which opened onto a small concrete veranda with five steps down to the street. It lacked privacy but was large enough to fit a double bed.

  On our second weekend at Sutherland Street I set about cooking duck à l’orange, a dish I had always aspired to, and believed was the ultimate in haute cuisine. I kept opening the oven door to see if anything was happening. By about midnight the duck was only slightly warm and we realised the oven was at fault, not the duck. We must have chopped it up and braised it. ‘Rubber duck’, Stephen’s name for my dish, became one of his favourite jests.

  Paddington had only just become a hub for artists and bohemians. One night a group of ten or eleven of us was trying to ride in a small white VW beetle, some sitting on the bonnet. It was travelling at about 6 kilometres per hour as we scrambled around it. I had sold my Studebaker and was now driving a 1963 anthracite grey VW beetle. I used to call it the ‘Dodgem Car’ after its DOJ 896 numberplate. At about eleven one evening I was driving my VW past the foot of Cascade Street, a long sloping street that cuts Paddington in two. I saw an unruly group of people and did not stop. They were pushing a piano down the hill. It heeled over and smashed.

  Richard Meale was one of Stephen’s musical friends. Meale’s compositions were then fiercely atonal, but he was a fan of Virgil Thomson’s tuneful short opera Four Saints in Three Acts. Stephen and I each bought a recording from Edel’s music store where Meale worked. Stephen collected people, introducing himself to Alfred Brendel when Brendel was spending hours tuning his piano for a performance. He befriended Alicia de Larrocha after a concert. On her tours of Australia each year he organised a motor launch party for her on the harbour. His friendship was why she kept coming to Australia (she told me). A concert pianist’s life is very isolating.

  He collected information, as well as people, giving me, for example, a detailed account of the Mongol siege of Kiev. This became a poem I wrote which in turn prompted Robert Gray to become my friend.

  Stephen had many girlfriends and sometimes told me of their attempts to seduce him. ‘Of course I couldn’t’, he would say. I was envious, and at first amazed by his ability to resist these advances. X ‘is a terrible old queer’ was a typical comment he made. I did not try to clarify where his true sexual interests lay. Once or twice he took me to ‘camp’ parties – effeminate men with a sprinkling of women. ‘Some interesting people will be there’, he would say. I thought these invitations odd. By then I knew I was limiting his ability to mix freely. We continued with this charade for years. I was a ‘straight’ friend he could show his family. Our pact of silence allowed us to continue sharing the Sutherland Street house. Ian and I would have been uncomfortable if Stephen had begun taking back male lovers.

  My second serious relationship after Jan occurred a year after my breakup with Livija. Again I learned nothing from it.

  I had been seeing a very pretty girl. Not much was happening between us. At her twenty-first birthday party I was to come as ‘her boyfriend’, which I was not. She warned me I would be very attracted to her best friend, when I met her at the party. She insisted I should not start taking her out. A few days after the birthday party I had dinner with the best friend and we spent the night together. She reminded me of Jane Fonda and I’ll call her by that name. I was twenty-four or -five and she was three years younger.

  She had a natural innocence and called me ‘James’ after James Bond because of some fanciful physical resemblance she saw between me and the actors who played Bond. Every week we spent three or four nights together in the Sutherland Street house.

  It was summer and we went swimming on the weekends. I remember lying with her in the sand hills by a beach in our swimming costumes, tormenting ourselves, other people nearby. One night we went swimming naked in Parsley Bay, inside the shark-net. We were alone and swam out into the middle of the bay, and made love treading water.

  Our bedroom door opened onto steps leading down to the footpath and there was an old quarry on the other side of the street. To give the room some pretence of privacy I put up a bamboo blind across the window. As we lay in bed I found myself tapping out the beat of a poem with my fingers on her shoulder (as in one of Goethe’s Roman Elegies), and hoped she didn’t notice.

  One night I was at a Christmas party held by some art students in the top storey of a building in Taylor Square, a former sewing factory. An old bearded tramp, who used to sleep on the landing, had been adopted by the students as a sort of mascot.

  Wearing a decaying singlet, like Spanish moss, he was dancing with them and boasting he was ‘no mug’. He had snaffled a couple of chooks and a bottle of champagne from office parties raided earlier in the day. Ferdie – I think that was his name – began drunkenly sweeping small cakes off a table with his arm. Then he picked them up off the floor and pocketed them.

  I was used to being anxious at such parties, the young man with no girlfriend, wondering if there was some girl I could find. But not that night, or during my months with ‘Jane Fonda’. I left the party. She was working late. I did not have an arrangement to pick her up. As she came out of the building and walked towards me her face lit up.

  I was faithful, but unsure of myself. Although I was on the letterhead of a firm of solicitors as a partner (a salaried, not equity partner), I spent what I earned on rent, my car, and eating out with her and friends. My father was not well. I was preoccupied with selling his properties.

  Once we were at a beach. For no particular reason – so it seemed to me – she said, ‘You will remember this moment for the rest of your life’. Afterwards we went back as usual to Sutherland Street.

  She sometimes spoke of another person. The other person eventually married her – he was someone I immediately liked, when I met them together years later.

  I did not sufficiently appreciate our equal relationship. It was too novel.

  LEO

  Unlike my mother, my father avoided explicit statements. When he ceremoniously planted in the garden at Gordon a cutting from his father’s fig tree in Walker Street, there was an implication. I should continue this tradition. There should be an apostolic succession with the same fig clone passing down the male line, like the male chromosome I inherited from him and passed down to my sons and grandsons.

  As well as not t
aking a cutting from his fig in the Gordon garden, in other ways I was a disappointment, although it was not in my father’s nature to complain. He was keen to transmit his expertise with tools and his interest in horse racing, things which were quite foreign to me. I tried to show my affection in my own way.

  Old people seeing a photograph of themselves as a child or young adult may feel they are looking at a stranger. We are multicellular organisms. We are each a living bundle of attributes. We are different beings when we are awake and asleep, and as we age. Our fluid selves change into what we think observers think we are.

  It was hard for me to have a normal conversation with my mother. I became the target of her diatribes. But my mother was a different person with my sister. They talked together as a mother and daughter, and as two adults. The mother my sister genuinely loved was not the mother I found so hard to love.

  Our father chatted to strangers he met in the street, but with us was not a talkative man. As well as not revealing his age to his children, he would not tell us his religious beliefs or how he voted. Yet Diana and I could both have normal conversations with him. We were living at Gordon; he was excited by an unusually active aurora australis. He walked with me, and probably Diana, to a high point in our street one night where we could see more of the sky and the flickering red and green veils as they formed and dissolved. He said very little. It was a conversation without words I could not have had with my mother.

  He recommended eating bananas that were almost rotten. I do not know whether this was because he hated waste – an example of his penny pinching – or whether he really liked them that way. He also had a genuine love of fatty meat.