Sally was completing a liberal arts course. During term, we ate with friends at the Sunah Restaurant and the Athenian and Veneziana, and I drove Sally back to the Women’s College. As we climbed up the steps to the front veranda we were greeted by a neutered tabby cat, a large handsome creature with a white bib. He had a trick: he would throw his front paws around your neck when you picked him up.
A rumour went around the college that stray cats were to be rounded up. One night we bundled this tabby into my grey VW, and drove him back to the Sutherland Street house. I confined him for a couple of days, prowling from room to room, and christened him with the absurd name ‘The Sun King’.
During university vacations, Sally stayed with her parents. Her letters were written in a small, distinctive, elegant script and full of incidents and natural feeling. I felt almost embarrassed by how they usually began: ‘Dearest Geoff …’ I wished there was the same spontaneous affection when we were together. There was an awkwardness between us. I was the driver who would not stop for the snow.
I was at that time a non-equity partner in an old established firm. The work for my main client, a Catholic building society, was conveyancing, and although this was repetitive, I enjoyed it. I had at last escaped motor vehicle insurance litigation. My senior partner, the owner of the firm, known by his initials ‘KD’, was a benign, silver-haired man, whose spacious office was decorated with large sepia photographs of the Roman forum and Hadrian’s palace circa 1900.
KD was executor of the will of an elderly estate agent and took out probate when she died. Although Mrs England was a Protestant, her beneficiaries were the Little Sisters of the Poor and other Catholic charities. To KD’s surprise, an old tramp called Edward Edwards, together with a tenant of a house she had owned, challenged our grant of probate. They were executors of a later will. However, we believed she lacked testamentary capacity by the time that will was made. We produced earlier wills, made over many years, consistent with our will. I conducted the case for KD. We lost. The later will was upheld.
When I had been seeing Sally for a few months, KD took on one of his partners as an equity partner. The new equity partner would eventually own the firm and did not want me. KD told me the news and said it would not have been his choice. I did not express disappointment. I knew I was not a good long-term fit. KD had been a great benefactor to me. I had little conveyancing experience when he took me on and gave me the firm’s largest client, a Catholic building society.
I told KD I wanted to write a novel about Mrs England and he agreed to my taking the file. He was chuffed several years later when I gave him a copy of A Spring Day in Autumn, published by Thomas Nelson. My not very good novel makes it clear the court’s decision was right. The printed dedication page reads ‘For K.D.M.’ His full name was Keith Dennis Manion.
Within a week of leaving KD’s firm, I found myself back with my former employer Charlie Willcox and doing insurance work again. Mr Willcox had been contacted for a reference when I applied for some jobs. He promptly telephoned me. His practice was not glamorous or innovative, but his clients were prosperous and dependable, like him. After a trial I was to become his partner.
Mr Willcox was short and wore leg braces – perhaps the result of childhood polio. An old-style solicitor, frugal and toughminded, he reminded me of my sister. He was someone I could work with. He sat, surrounded by several hundred active files in manilla folders, in a large dimly lit room. His day was made up of regular events. Early each morning he went through every file, setting aside those where action was needed, and tossing the other files to a girl who had the job of replacing them on a table, in a pile with no order, several tiers high. When the files cascaded onto the floor, he would announce, ‘Lass, you haven’t built the foundations right’. While impaling yesterday’s letters on the double prong which held the correspondence together, he sometimes stabbed his finger. Waving his wounded hand about, he would use his uninjured hand to press the button on the intercom for the switchboard girl: ‘Lass, get the Dettol please’. During the day as I walked past his office and he sat at his battered antique desk, I would hear him happily singing a tuneless song with the words ‘Kadink, kadink, kadink’. He always had a simple lunch, reading a novel at his desk; he got through two novels a week, ‘lending library books, nothing literary’ he once explained, apologetically.
He was devoted to his wife Mary, a former teacher, a fine looking woman, taller than Charlie. They had honeymooned on Turtle Island, Fiji. When their wedding anniversary approached his secretary had to find a gift with a turtle theme, such as a turtle brooch. After twenty years of marriage, finding new turtle gifts was not becoming any easier.
Mr Willcox was tolerant with his young adult children. If I phoned his home I might hear a good natured call: ‘Hey old baldy, they want you on the phone’. But his abrupt ways intimidated younger staff. He had an army of white and green intercom handsets – the Gecophone Junior – that barked like geese around the office. Young clerks almost fell off their chairs when he called them on their Gecophone. When I moved back with Charlie I noticed the legs of my predecessor’s chair had worn two rips in the office carpet.
One morning Charlie called on my Gecophone. He wanted to know what was happening in a particular matter. I opened the file and told him. ‘Are you checking in the file itself?’ he asked. I realised he could not understand how I had been able to get the file so easily. ‘Yes, Mr Willcox. I’m looking at the file. I keep them in alphabetical order.’
I was having lunch in my office with my squash partner Stephen Wilson. We sometimes shared a slice of pie my father had baked – ‘citronella pie’ was Stephen’s name for it. Each slice was a dense, highly spiced wedge of dates and dried fruit with a crust of sugary pastry like hardened concrete. We were talking. With an apology, Mr Willcox popped his head in the door to ask about a matter. I introduced them: Stephen, willowy and artistic, and Mr Willcox, short, brusque and Dickensian. After Charlie left the room, there was a look of gullible astonishment on Stephen’s face.
So I invented a suitable story: ‘Mr Willcox keeps a blue cattle dog under his desk. The dog is shooed from his office when he sees clients.’
Mr Willcox’s stringent honesty and economical ways were reassuring. One of his favourite sayings was ‘Little fish are sweet’, when we collected a mere $7 on a discharge of mortgage. I liked the fact that he wrote up his own trust account, which was audited every month by Mr Brown, a chartered accountant and friend of Charlie’s. By keeping an eye on the movement of funds through the trust account, Charlie had an overview of every matter. I followed this practice myself, when he retired. Mr Brown, a gentle and sceptical man, continued with the monthly audit.
As well as his insurance companies (one of them the Hartford of which the American poet Wallace Stevens had been a vice president), Charlie acted for Australia’s leading garage door manufacturer, largest poultry grower, and many families and small businesses. I imagined this would be my firm for life and was thrilled by my obscure Wallace Stevens link. I also hoped to marry Sally.
The Sydney Morning Herald published her poem ‘Cattle Incident’, about a herd of wild cattle her mother had encountered as a child on holidays at Pretty Beach. The poem describes:
Nights of driftwood fires, sparks crackling like salty stars, and the constant sound of the cattle, distant, invisible, among the shadows of the trees, camouflaged against grey lichened boulders, dappled trees…
I was happy to spend the rest of my life with the person who wrote this poem.
Sally had moved into the Sutherland Street house and was majoring in English literature. She talked about one of her tutors; she used to have coffee with him. David Malouf had recently come back from England, where he had taught in secondary schools. When Sally arranged for us to meet, we found we had a troublesome friend in common – John Quinlem.
John and Lyssa Hagan were ash blond and shared their blond-ness with their Samoyed dog. Frank Zappa’s Freak Out, which I did
not like at the time, was a favourite album they played at dinner parties. One night Sally and I had to park away from their house in Kirribilli. We took a shortcut across Anderson Park. Men were pacing backwards and forwards among the trees, snapping their fingers, and going in and out of a public toilet. We began walking quickly, looking straight ahead. The Hagans later told us how a man, covered in blood, having been bashed up in the park, came knocking on their door a few days earlier. This story became ‘On the Beat’ in Nero’s Poems when I had Nero write about his bisexuality.
In the winter of 1968 Sally and I decided to drive to Broken Hill. We wanted a congenial relief driver and asked a friend – Ross Grainger, a sailmaker with wild sandy hair like that of his great uncle, the composer Percy Grainger – to come with us. On our first night we slept in sleeping bags halfway up Mount Arthur just outside Wellington, NSW. At sunrise we boiled a billy and looked out across the mists rising from the plain. It was cold. We gave up our Broken Hill plan and decided to go north for the warmth. A couple of days later we got to Townsville. We found a row of small tourist shacks by the ocean and stayed overnight. I bought a postcard of a chimpanzee in an artist’s smock, with palette and brush, painting a canvas. I wrote a note in a disguised handwriting on the back:
Dear Mr Delprat
You may not remember me, but I remember you. I was one of the ladies you sketched at David Jones earlier this year. I live in Townsville and would be thrilled if you could come up here and paint my portrait. Would $850 be a suitable fee? I would of course reimburse all expenses. I do think the chimpanzee in the photograph is so cute, don’t you?
Yours sincerely, Fiona Bloomfield
I supplied a Townsville address and mailed the postcard with a Townsville post mark to Paul, who was under the impression we were in Broken Hill.
(Earlier in the year Paul had been an artist in residence at the David Jones department store. Seated beside a giant replica of Michelangelo’s ‘David’ and wearing an artist’s smock Monsieur Delprat, as he was styled, did quick sketches of the female shop-pers for Lancôme cosmetics. A retired colonel-type with white moustache walked past and said to his wife, ‘We used to see fellows like him in Cairo’. Paul laughed and the man harrumphed, ‘Oh, he speaks English’.)
We drove further north, past hillsides of burning sugar cane, through a fragrant, smoky dusk. In Cairns we stayed at a large, late nineteenth century hotel on the esplanade, one of those tropical hotels with wide verandas and rooms with high ceilings and white mosquito nets draped over the double bed like the ghost of Miss Havisham.
About 30 kilometres south of Cooktown we passed Kalka-jaka (Black Mountain, or ‘Death Mountain’), composed of large rectangular blocks of black granite piled one above the other. In the afternoon we got to Cooktown. It was a ghost of the town my German grandfather visited in 1891 – just a few old men haunting the hotel bar. I was worried Paul would be hatching plans for spending his $850, while Shelley Rose would be telling him not to be a fool. We began our drive back to Sydney that afternoon, the three of us taking turns at the steering wheel, thirty hours without a stop except for food and petrol.
I did not realise the countdown for our marriage began when the phone rang in the Sutherland Street house and I heard that my father had died. A logical sequence of events had begun. My father had signed a contract for the sale of the McMahons Point houses. When the sale completed later in the year the houses would be sold and new houses bought. I decided to disband Sutherland Street.
I drove my mother and Diana to Paddington to meet the Sun King. He embraced my mother and she screamed and dropped him. A few days later I took him to Gordon, a subdued passenger in my car.
My sister agreed Les Murray and his family (just back from Europe) could stay in the red-roofed cottage until the sale was completed. Diana, my mother and I began weekly visits to the houses. Diana took a colour photograph of Iris in a derelict hallway wearing a prim straw hat and spotted dress. I rescued the broken-down chaise longue I had insisted my father buy when I was a child. We made a bonfire in the garden of old furnishings, rotted wicker chairs and cheap gloomy nineteenth century oil paintings on cardboard that had hung in the hall of ‘Leddicott’.
The purchaser’s solicitor telephoned: the iron dolphins from Ben Boyd’s yacht had just been stolen from Number 51. We completed the sale next day and twenty-four hours later bulldozers moved in and the houses were demolished. The grand staircase of Fifty-three was carted away in one piece on a truck.
For several years the land was an excavation site. One afternoon I looked through a gap in the fence. I saw a deep rectangular pit with patches of water at the bottom and plumes of pampas grass – a plant that had never grown there. That night I dreamt an apartment tower had been built on the site, and strangers were sitting under beach umbrellas around a swimming pool filled with blood.
To avoid double death duty if my mother’s fragile health failed, my father made Diana and me the beneficiaries under his will, with a cash legacy to our mother. There was a family understanding that my sister and I were to hold assets purchased out of estate monies for Iris. We decided on shared ownership and began looking for a large house suitable for dual occupancy.
We looked at several large houses. One of them was owned by a client of Stephen Wilson’s, an old builder, ‘Big Phil’ as Stephen called him. At Stephen’s suggestion, my mother, Diana and I called on Big Phil in his house in the bushy outskirts of Hornsby, a long way from anywhere. Phil had built himself a two-storey cream-painted extravaganza of fibro-cement, with many rooms and long verandas. It was now too big. It had probably always been too big – a typical builder’s own house folly. He may have noticed me looking doubtfully at masses of Crofton weed infesting his land. ‘Those plants are a fire-break’, he told us. ‘If a bushfire came roaring up the valley, they’d stop it in its tracks.’
He soon realised we were not buyers and decided to entertain us. ‘I love Fiji’, he told us. ‘Their national drink is kava, you know. They drink kava until the early hours of the morning – big bowls of it. When I go there, they get me to dance with them – women and men all together with no clothes on, pouring kava all over themselves.’
When my mother and sister failed to express shock, he began talking about a cousin, ‘quite a girl’ or some similar description. Some person they knew ‘was bitten on the bottom by a brown snake. So she pulls his pants down, takes a big bite out of his bottom and spits out the poison.’
Diana and my mother were quietly happy when I drove them home. It had been an interesting afternoon. Stephen laughed incredulously when I told him about our visit. I was met with a similar defensiveness years later when a partnership he recommended did not work out.
We eventually found a house at Lindfield. It had a modern 1950s back flat where my mother and sister went to live, and Sally and I moved into the original house, built in 1907 – the date on a garden tap. It had high ornate ceilings, and a hall with arches and the remains of gaslight fittings. Sally and I held a large party. ‘We were worried a group of Beatniks had moved in’, our neighbours told us later.
Two people warned me against marrying Sally. After my father’s death I had driven up to the Gordon house with her. My mother and I were standing outside in the street and she was twisting her hands together (as I sometimes do now): ‘She’s too beautiful, like a madonna in a painting’.
The other warning came from Sally. We were shopping in the city. Somehow we lost each other, going off in different directions. About fifteen minutes later we came face to face outside a department store. I was pleased at our reunion. She may have seen our short separation as an omen: ‘Are you sure we should stay together? I may be cruel to you.’ I was obstinately deaf to what she was saying. I tried to be reassuring. I told her this was a risk I was happy to take.
Shortly after moving into the Lindfield house we went down onto the tennis court, each with a racquet. I patted a ball to her. I was hoping to teach Sally how to play. With a look of
distaste, she drove the ball into the back fence and dropped her racket. A few months later, I sent off a lengthy order to an Adelaide rose nursery. The court was an eyesore of yellow clay. My plan was to transform it into a garden of antique and species roses.
Liz Buttsworth, who had introduced us, had a gentle Methodist clergyman as a father. Charl, as his wife called him, lived in a house high up on Bilgola point. Sitting in his living room he used to scan the beach through binoculars and phone the surf life saving club if he spotted a swimmer in trouble. We called on him to discuss wedding arrangements.
Sally began sewing a wedding dress out of a length of white cotton, a garment that began to look like a toga. I became concerned and we found a short white Mexican dress with appliqué flowers. It was a light-hearted parody of a wedding dress. But I sensed even this was a uniform I was imposing on her.
I thought briefly about getting Sally a wedding ring. I had a horror of something metallic around my finger but if I was without a wedding ring, I could not expect her to wear one. I had noticed an antique jeweller, Maurice Mandelberg in the Imperial Arcade. His advertisements stated ‘Prices are not astronomical and the quality is the finest’. He worked with two delicate and talkative women in his small shop – his mother and sister. He showed me a nineteenth century half-hoop of Kashmiri sapphires (now rarely found outside museums). There was no exchange of rings at the wedding but Sally wore this ring when we were married.
We ordered a wedding cake from the Bar Roma, the café near Central Station where we had coffee and pastries most Saturday mornings, after our trips to the city markets and to Ashwoods’ long, narrow second-hand book and record shop.
A few days before we were due to be married Sally told me her name was not Sally – it was Seirian. If Seirian was the name on the marriage certificate, her doppelgänger Seirian would be marrying, and not her. It was a desperate last-minute message. I was nonplussed.
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