Leeward

by Geoffrey Lehmann

  Ursula was also looking after her invalid landlady, a Miss Harte, who was in her eighties, had the best bedroom at the front and was constantly ringing the bell, calling for attention. For one whole hectic year Ursula looked after Agnes, Miss Harte and Billy in one small semi-detached cottage, with little help. (Miss Harte was a retired estate agent. By a bizarre coincidence I had already given the retired estate agent heroine of my novel – in real life Mrs England – the same surname.)

  Throughout her life Ursula had earned small amounts as a medium. Once I was chatting with her and one of her grown sons. She stopped in mid-sentence: ‘A spirit just flew past the window!’ ‘MUM!’ her son shouted, the blood rushing to his face. (I was reminded of my problems with my mother.) Apart from this, Ursula never mentioned spirits to me. We talked like brother and sister, despite the age gap.

  I had a reliable agent (Pax Lambert) acting for my aunt. One day he met one of North Sydney’s largest developers in the street and reminded him about my aunt’s property. A few days later we had an unconditional sale. Otto, now eighty-seven, called in at my office. He produced the lost certificate of title and explained he had taken it to make sure it was safe. I handed it back. It was a nice piece of old parchment. ‘Otto, you keep it. We have a replacement.’ He came to the real point of his visit. He had obtained ‘a very good offer. Eighty-eight thousand.’ ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘We’re selling for a hundred and fifty thousand.’

  A friend on the local council phoned to say that the zoning was changing from commercial to residential. The purchaser would want to get out of the contract. I issued a notice to complete and kept Ursula informed. We completed on the day when the notice expired. Agnes died next day. If she had died before then, we could not have complied with our own notice.

  Agnes, the ‘heathen’, was ever a romantic. As Ursula accompanied her in the ambulance on her last day, Agnes said, ‘Now I’m going on my journey to the stars’.

  Otto, as the main beneficiary, was able to buy the first house he had ever owned. He turned up at my office and gave me Agnes’s kitchen lamp with the blue and white ceramic shade. It had a new base of nicely turned, oiled timber he made himself. As well as her share of the estate, Ursula was paid for looking after Agnes. She already had some blue agapanthus plants and I gave her a white agapanthus to take to Melbourne, when she moved there to live with her son Robert.

  My sister had a sign made, ‘Agnes Cottage’, with gilt lettering on black glass, for a rental house in Glebe she bought with her share of the estate. I used part of my share to buy Sally’s parents a dam builders’ house that was transported from Carcoar dam to ‘Spring Forest’.

  I dug up some of June Read’s lawn and made a large square bed next to the tennis court for half a dozen Iceberg roses. I was with Sally at a window by the kitchen sink: ‘You’ll be able to look down and see the roses from here’. I immediately regretted my remark.

  I sometimes imagined my father walking up the hill towards the house, in the brown tweed suit he was wearing when he died. I felt that none of what I owned was mine – I was an imposter. Our best wine glasses, a wedding gift, were crystal with a dense glass bulb in the stem. At dinner parties Adrian Heber would run his finger along their rims and made them sing. They were broken one by one when my children drank milk out of them and I washed them in the dishwasher.

  I was less cavalier with my clients’ affairs. One of the pleasures of owning a small law firm was advising others more constructively than I could advise myself. I twice refused to act for a young man who wanted to buy acres of romantic bushland. Keeping them weed-free would cost hundreds of dollars every year, I said; buy an uninteresting quarter-acre block in Liverpool, and it will increase in value. He eventually did.

  A widow told me there was something she could not discuss with her doctor. Her only child had confessed he was homosexual. Her sister wanted her to disinherit him and leave everything to the sister’s children. I said she should feel proud of her son. Telling her must have been difficult, I said, and was the right thing to do. I arranged that when she signed her new will (keeping the son as sole beneficiary) he would also be present. When they came in, I congratulated them on the respect they had shown each other. My intention had been to stage a small ceremony, giving a legal imprimatur to her new relationship with her son. She could also tell her sister all about it.

  My intervention did not work out well when I was acting on a purchase for a young woman I knew. I prided myself on being an expert at old system conveyancing, which was then a dying art. I noticed an error in a thirty-year-old conveyance by a group of vendors. A name was missing in the conveying words. Solicitors acting in later conveyances had not picked up the error – under-standably, as the person whose name was missing had signed the deed. Fortunately she was still alive and we obtained a confirmatory conveyance.

  I kept my client informed about the reason for the delay. I made sure she and her mother realised my cleverness. But she was living in a rented house while waiting for the title to be fixed, and was stabbed to death there by a person unknown. If I had not detected the flaw in title, she would not have been in the house where she was murdered. A neighbour heard two female voices arguing just before the death. Her lover had a light voice and became a suspect. He was cleared at the inquest. Years later he had a messy and protracted suicide. A female friend of my murdered client was charged in a foreign country with an assault on another woman.

  My cat followed me down onto the yellow clay tennis court and I dropped him in one of the waterlogged holes I had dug to receive a score of roses. These arrived at Lindfield railway station in the depth of winter, bare roots tightly wrapped to stay damp, and I carried them home. I was intoxicated by their names: Rosa muta-bilis or the Changing Rose with pale yellow petals that age to pink; and ‘Nuits de Young’, a moss rose with small red flowers, almost black, named after Edward Young’s poem Night-Thoughts.

  One day I heard a loud noise from my mother’s upright Lipp. When I entered the room Puss had jumped down from the piano. I placed some cut-up liver in a small plate at one end of the keyboard. He jumped up again, treading uneasily on the keys, and ate a piece. I moved the plate to the other end. He ran along the keys for more. By snapping my fingers and gesturing at the piano, I trained him to run up and down on the keyboard without liver. Puss performed for friends. Stephen Wilson almost fell off a couch laughing.

  Stephen had become a junior partner in his father’s law firm, with his father and another older man. Then his father succumbed rapidly to cancer. Stephen and I had an understanding that his law firm and mine would merge when his senior partner retired.

  One of his friends had acquired a small, established law firm. She was a few years older than me. Stephen suggested her law firm and mine should merge. She was a likeable and intelligent woman. I asked would he want her as a partner, when his firm and mine merged. He said yes. I said if that was so, I was happy to have her as a partner now. An office suite with wood panelling, far more palatial than my ‘little sweat shop’, had just been vacated next to Stephen’s law firm. It was ready to move into, which my new partner and I did, a few weeks after my conversation with Stephen.

  I did not examine her client base or her firm’s income and expenses. Nor did she examine my firm’s books. I ignored some early impressions. My first memory of her – I was a young student, studying in the State Library – was of her walking into the reading room waving a daffodil. A year or so later she was working in a government office with Chris Koch and John Quinlem. Quinlem claimed to have calculated her weekly taxi fares to and from work each day; it was more than her salary.

  Our partnership did not go well. My clientele was different from hers. Our temperaments were different. I was more risk averse. The numbers did not add up. I had already started the demerging of our firms when a mutual friend, a barrister whom she often briefed, accosted me in the street and warned me against remaining in partnership with her.

  Untangling th
e two practices took some months. My firm eventually moved to different premises, leaving her with the offices next to Stephen. She was exceptionally co-operative when all this happened, and I was not upset with her. But I was upset with Stephen. When I first told him about our difficulties, he stared up at the ceiling and said nothing. Our friendship never recovered.

  Stephen’s friends loved him for his altruism. When I jammed my hand closing a car door, he was more agitated than I was myself. After one of his overseas trips he came back with an antique creamer, a white ceramic cow with black spots and floral base, which he gave me. The partnership with his friend was one of his gifts.

  The venture into partnership was not helped by a six-month recession in conveyancing work when the Whitlam government engineered a credit squeeze – with the bizarre intention, it was rumoured, of freeing up money for public housing. Even worse, the Whitlam government’s 20 per cent increase in public servants’ pay (intended to put the squeeze on private employers) was the start of fifteen years of runaway inflation.

  I survived the credit squeeze and my failed partnership. I had become the secretary of a small listed company, with a finance company subsidiary. I held dinner parties for friends who were clients, and for clients who became friends. My bouillabaisse was written up in the National Times. We went to many dinner parties. Judith Wright invited a group of younger people to dinner when she was staying in a flat at Rushcutters Bay. When we sat down at the dining table, she announced with aplomb, as she served reheated meat pies, ‘Well, I think it’s the company that counts, not the food’.

  We were having dinner at the Hunters Hill apartment of Elizabeth Harrower not long after the dismissal of Gough Whitlam’s government. Elizabeth confessed she had Gough’s photograph in the back of her wardrobe. I said I was not unhappy to see Whitlam go. This was greeted with a shocked silence – Patrick White’s face froze. White’s partner Manoly Lascaris came to my defence.

  Manoly and I used to talk about plants at Elizabeth’s dinner parties. I once mentioned driving through Castle Hill past a cottage that had roses climbing over a veranda, a red rambling rose with a white eye, ‘Bloomfield Courage’, and a yellow Banks rose. ‘That was our house’, Manoly said (referring to the house where Patrick White wrote The Tree of Man). ‘I planted those roses!’

  (Elizabeth later inherited a house on the hillside above Balmoral Beach, and Christina Stead stayed with her. I met Stead there. Her presence was like that of a large, aged camellia flower, blotched and falling apart – she did not have long to live – but somehow still splendid. Unfortunately I had not read any of her novels and I could not query her about the trip up the Lane Cove River, which may have been in my father’s boat the Liberty. I now regard her, along with Henry Handel Richardson, as one of the greatest Australian novelists.)

  Sally and I were at a party held by the Sea Horse Club, a group of heterosexual transvestites, at the Castlecrag house of a friend, Neil Buhrich. Neil was investigating bloodstream hormone levels and sexual orientation. (The house, regarded as a modernist masterpiece, was designed by Neil’s father Hugh. Long before I knew Neil, I had been embarrassed to stand in its grounds with Livija.)

  Men in dresses, top-heavy wigs and high-heeled shoes, were clattering up and down a perilous spiral staircase without a railing – Hugh Buhrich was aesthetically opposed to railings. The men – or girls – had stored their dress collections on the ground floor: cocktail frocks with sequins or lurex such as middle-aged women might wear. After a quick bathroom change, they paraded upstairs in their new outfits, sometimes several outfits in a night. A club rule was they all spoke in normal male voices. Some brought their wives and children.

  ‘Constance’ – I have changed her assumed name – came without her disapproving girlfriend. Blood was showing through heavy face cream from a shaving nick, and her bra was askew: ‘Y’know, I love mixing with women when I have all my gear on – they think I’m one of them – and I find out all their secret likes and dislikes. If you go into a room and see a really, really expen-sively dressed woman, you can bet she’s one of us! We spend all this money. And you know what? We look bloody awful! All a girl has to do is put on a sweater and pair of jeans and she looks fantastic … You learn so much watching women. I’m always learning. The way they smoke a cigarette, for instance…’

  Constance said she was a storeman and packer. A few days later I saw a man with dark hair and a blond streak striding up from a city basement with a cigarette stuck to his lips, and he spat the butt into the gutter. It was Constance, who loved watching women smoke cigarettes.

  I still regretted my remark to Sally when we looked down from the kitchen window at the newly planted ‘Iceberg’ rose bed. This grew into a mass of bright green leaves with clusters of white flowers as though it was a single gigantic plant. It was an optical illusion, like our marriage.

  Only a few of my friends who married in the 1960s and 1970s are still together. Yet for much of the duration of the failed marriages, one spouse and perhaps both imagined they were in marriages that would last. When I acted for friends in their divorces, I imagined I was immune. Divorces happened to other people.

  When Sally and I went to the 1974 Adelaide Writers’ Week, Sally’s mother (or perhaps her aunt Joyce) looked after Julia, aged three, and John, aged one. We drove down to South Australia in ‘Bulk’, the pale green Kombi Van. Sally was pregnant with Lucy. There had been an outbreak of Ross River fever and we crossed the flat plains of the Riverina late in the afternoon with haste and unease, past a long, twisting line of tall trees on the horizon marking the course of the Murrumbidgee. I was seeing for the first time a large wheat growing property, ‘Wahwoon’, where I had acted on the purchase. ‘Wahwoon’ was so flat, my client said, ‘You can stand on a beer can and see another ten miles’.

  At the opening of Writers’ Week in the grand nineteenth century central room of Ayers House, Peter Porter was the person I was interested to meet. He was a tall, good-looking man in his mid-forties. Sally and I headed across and spoke to him. Much of the next week in Adelaide we spent with Peter. When he came to Sydney I invited him to stay in the Lindfield house.

  We stayed up each night talking after dinner. We would open a bottle and then another bottle. I was shocked at how much Peter drank. He would blink behind his glasses and laugh and the conversation did not stop. I had to go to my law firm next day.

  I remember two of his stories. He was to read to the Oxford University Poetry Society. They did not want to miss out on free food and several young Oxford poets attended the dinner before the reading. Then they excused themselves, except one, who led Peter down long corridors, muttering ‘We’re expecting a good turn-out tonight’. As Peter was ushered into the hall for the reading it was empty – he was the only person there – and his guide had vanished.

  In the second story Peter was one of the poets at a reading given by some of the great luminaries. There was an arrangement to eat afterwards. As they were leaving, Auden (the most important influence on Peter’s poetry) turned anxiously to Stephen Spender and said, indicating Peter, ‘Stephen, are you inviting him? There won’t be enough food.’

  Peter interrupted his stay at our house to visit his father in an old people’s home in Brisbane. On his return, on the last night of his stay, Peter took Sally and me to Verdi’s Othello at the Opera House – a generous way of thanking us, I thought. I had no idea I was at the opera with them. My presence was an intrusion.

  During the course of a marriage spouses may become aware of the other’s small, innocent crushes. At a Chiron College party I had a long conversation with a teacher I liked. I am sure Sally noticed me talking to her. On one of our long car trips Sally playfully mused ‘I wonder what … is doing now’ (… being a new friend). I assumed she had a mild attraction to him. (This was a variation of a formulaic exchange we had on long car trips. ‘I wonder what Puss is doing now’, we would say to ease the monotony of the passing landscape.)

  I became aware
in a ludicrous way of her feelings for Peter. She did the household washing. ‘Peter is offering to wash his underpants separately’, Sally told me one day. It was apparent she was surprised and impressed by his delicacy about this matter. I may not have thought much about her remark – apart from the implication that I was too coarse to care about washing underwear separately – but a seed had been planted in my mind.

  When Sally and Peter met, and he was staying in our house in 1974, she was pregnant with Lucy. But she felt a spiritual compatibility with Peter, which she did not feel with me, and they began what I understand was a lengthy exchange of letters. I am unaware of the details.

  When Lucy was about a year old, Sally and Peter travelled in Europe. While she was away, Sally’s aunt Joyce looked after the three children and taught them to speak in Bunkum. In Bunkum or ‘Bgunkgum’ a hard ‘g’ is inserted before every vowel. While the children were speaking non-stop Bunkum, I began to realise Peter’s relationship with Sally was not just a friendship. I had a sinking feeling as I picked her up from the airport.

  A plum tree beside the drive had white flowers in mid-winter, at the time of Julia’s birthday. A plum next to it had pink flowers a month later on Lucy’s birthday. (There was no tree in the garden whose flowering coincided with John’s birthday.) I began telling the children these flowering plums were their birthday trees. Sally responded with irritation. She did not want them to become attached to the Lindfield house.

  I was working in the garden one weekend when I noticed a young fair-haired woman in the grounds of the next door house. Ros was married to Steven, who was the son of the previous owner, Maurice Jeffery. They had bought the house from Maurice. They had two small girls. We began having neighbourly dinners together – the four young parents.

  Sally had been saying she wanted me to give up legal practice. My working hours (which I thought were quite short) she thought were too long. My failed partnership with Stephen’s friend had exacted a toll on both of us. We were at a book launch for Father Edmund Campion’s Lord Acton and the First Vatican Council at St Patrick’s Seminary, a vast stone edifice on the cliffs at the end of Manly beach. As the waves were breaking on the rocks below, I was standing on a stone balcony and talking to Bob Vermeesch. ‘Life is very civilised in the School of Accountancy’, he said. ‘Why don’t you come and join us?’