Leeward

by Geoffrey Lehmann

  Bob and Ed were two people I used to drink with at the Metropole when I was an articled clerk. Bob was a few years older and understood my situation. He once had a partnership in a small law firm, like mine, and became a legal academic. He was now at the University of New South Wales.

  I may have replied, ‘Yes, Bob, I will’. Whatever my reply was, within a few weeks I had sold my practice and become a tutor in the School of Accountancy. I was a public servant for the second time in my life. One morning I was hurrying across a university quadrangle. A man I did not know called out: ‘There’s no need to hurry. You’re a public servant now.’ I had no personal regret about selling my firm. My one regret was I had let go something Mr Willcox had built up over many years. I had not consulted him during my impulsive moves and at no time did he criticise me. The new owners – another small, old-established law firm – gave him an office, but his name would not appear on their letterhead.

  I had no illusions about the marriage I was trying to save. The first instalment of my Nero’s Poems – a dozen or so pieces – was published by Les Murray in Poetry Australia. The magazine’s cover reproduced an etching by Sally. Two depressed people – they seemed to be lovers – were wandering through a marsh-like landscape and holding a string attached to a large balloon in the shape of a person. The man-balloon was looking down and following them. I sensed it was me.

  Her feelings for Peter were as impossible and desperate as my feelings for her. Marriage vows and our children were not the only practical impediments. Peter was almost twenty years older, he had two daughters entering adolescence and lived on the other side of the world. His life as a London literary figure could not easily transplant to Australia.

  We were walking across a university quadrangle – I may have been showing Sally my new office. Young people were all around us, mingling and talking, heading to and from lectures. Sally seemed to be absorbing the excitement around us – the student life she had lost when she met me.

  At the end of the year I knew Peter Porter was serious about Sally. He arrived in Sydney with his two daughters. He and his daughters stayed briefly in the back flat at Lindfield until he found accommodation elsewhere. Sally wanted the back flat herself, so we could live separately in the same house.

  There was a sixty-year-old woman who minded the children when Sally and I went out at night. One of her group of parents knew me, she said. This was the girl whose passport application I had witnessed and who sent a Christmas card when she came back to Australia. I felt doubly cheated.

  We had two weeks of strenuous debate. It became a theatre of the absurd – accusation and counter-accusation, who was open and sensitive to the other and who was not, who wanted to leave whom. I was uncommunicative, Sally said. She recalled how I said nothing for half an hour when we went with the children to the Botanic Gardens.

  Julia, aged five, called out several times a day: ‘Cuppa tea mama’. A cup of tea did not stop her parents arguing. Lucy, aged two, called out: ‘Get another mama’. Her brother and sister laughed wildly and desperately when she said this. I asked Lucy did she want another mama. She said, ‘No, you get another mama!’

  I had been faithful for more than ten years. Sally was upset when I went out with an old girlfriend.

  In mid-December, we were in a bookshop buying Christmas gifts for the children. I was looking at a small replica of the nineteenth century Kate Greenaway’s Book of Games and thinking I could use it as a source for a poem. Sally noticed and said, ‘I’ll get it for you’ and inscribed it ‘Dear Geoffrey love from Sally low-ebb year 1976’.

  On New Year’s Eve we had our next-door neighbours Steven and Ros for dinner. The four of us sat around a cedar table I had bought from the Salvation Army a couple of years before our marriage. At about midnight Steven announced, ‘I feel a prophecy coming on. One of us – I don’t know who – will have a serious illness and may even die. And one of us will have an affair, and there may be a marriage breakup.’ Sally and I exchanged the ghost of a complicit smile.

  I did not want to live separately with Sally in the same house. Early in the new year I arranged for Peter Read, the son of the former owner, and his wife Jay, Ros Jeffery’s sister, to have the back flat while one of them was recovering from an illness. Our neighbours were told about the coming separation. Steven was full of apologies for his night of prophecies.

  We began looking for a house where Sally could live. We agreed the children would stay for an equal number of days with each parent. I arranged my schedule to teach early in the week when they would be with Sally. I would pick them up on Wednesday afternoon. The weekend handover alternated between late Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning. Over a fourteen-day cycle each parent had the children for seven nights.

  When we went looking for houses, our eldest child Julia made hopeful comments: ‘That’s a nice house, mama’. We inspected an old cottage with a large mango tree. The sixty–year-old owner shook his head and said he did not want to be involved in the break-up of a marriage.

  Sally signed a lease for a house in Pymble. I went looking for an antique ring, but not from Maurice Mandelberg. His shop had disappeared. I gave Sally a gold nineteenth century ring with an amethyst set between two green garnets – subject to a condition. She was to come back in six months. Six months later, as one of us was picking up the children, she handed it back, and I consigned ‘the poison ring’ to a drawer.

  When we separated, Lucy had just given up nappies. She has no memory of ever living in a house where Sally and I lived together. But she remembers walking up the front path on the day all four of them left, and in particular her mother putting a wicker basket down on the path. This basket is also imprinted in my memory. It had a cylindrical section that could hold a child’s drink bottle.

  Puss (‘The Sun King’) stayed with me.

  GAIL

  In Errol Morris’s documentary The Unknown Known Donald Rumsfeld repeats his aphorism about the ‘known unknowns’ and the ‘unknown unknowns’ and proposes a third category of unap-preciated facts: ‘unknown knowns’ or ‘the things you think you know, that it turns out you did not’. As the documentary is about to end, he corrects himself. ‘Unknown knowns’, he says, are ‘things that you know, that you don’t know you know’. I had married and entered a legal partnership knowing they could not succeed, and did not know I knew.

  The previous fifteen years of my life had been an elaborate costume party, as in Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes where a wandering peasant boy stumbles upon people wearing clothes from a previous century in a mysterious chateau.

  I was now an accidental legal academic and for half of each week a thirty-six-year-old single parent, looking after three children aged two, three and five. Sally and my former law partner had been generous. There were no disputes when the marriage and the partnership were dissolved. I survived as a whole person. Unlike the hero of Alain-Fournier’s short novel, who spent years trying to find the chateau of the costume party, I did not want to go back.

  I started reading Andrew Lang’s coloured volumes of fairy stories to the children, as much for myself as them. Julia was a consoling five-year-old voice. She used to tell me: ‘One day your princess will come’.

  Diana and Iris lived down the road from my Lindfield house for only a couple of years. They loved inspecting apartments on weekends and called in at the office of an estate agent called Douglas Uzell (pronounced You-zell); Iris’s nickname for him was Uzzle Duzzle. Eventually they bought an apartment at Lindfield through him, but stayed there for only another couple of years.

  While Diana was at work, my mother liked catching the train to Chatswood where she could sit in a coffee shop, or buy crockery ornaments or cloth to sew into a skirt. But when she caught a train, the gap between the carriage and platform was a crevasse. My sister sold the Lindfield apartment and bought an apartment in Chatswood.

  My mother and Diana seemed to regard my single parenthood as a punishment for neglecting them. They counse
lled me to stay single and wanted to get back the twenty-year-old son and brother I had been. Our misunderstandings were mutual. I did not understand my mother was eighty, and living in her past.

  Diana and Iris went on a trip to Eidsvold several years before Sally and I separated. I do not know whose idea it was to visit the town where Iris’s father had died of a morphine overdose. The few weeks Iris was there in 1906 replayed in her mind – her father’s white silk suit, tomatoes ripening in a few hours on a fence, the falling stars and dog whimpering as the white girls (but not my mother) danced naked around a hose.

  I recorded my mother’s account of their 1971 Eidsvold visit on a cassette tape – my mother speaking with hardly a pause, except for questions from me and interruptions from children’s voices. When she had finished, I stopped the machine and said, ‘Mum, I recorded all of that’. She pretended to be surprised. Diana remained resolutely silent during the recording session.

  The two women arrived at Brisbane’s Central Station an hour before their train for Eidsvold was due to leave. When it pulled in, they were the first to board and take up their seats. The train trip involved a confusing cast of characters: a reassuring and talkative Irish policeman (or ex-policeman); a group of rowdy young men drinking; my sister throwing a whiskey bottle out of the train window while its owner had gone to the toilet; a woman joining them in their compartment (‘Weren’t we glad when she got in’) – the woman owned a home for destitute girls that her husband did not know about, and my mother suspected it was a brothel – and at the end of the journey in their Eidsvold motel, my sister standing on a chair and chasing away a gecko on the bedroom wall.

  In Eidsvold Iris and Diana introduced themselves to some old men who seemed to recall a ‘Dr Rainer from 1905’ – my mother had confused the date. But the old men could not remember anything specific. These two strange ladies from Sydney soon became well known. (‘We heard them talking about us afterwards. “Fancy that, 1905”, they were saying.’) They refused a trip to the cemetery in a horse and cart – Iris checked this bizarre detail with Diana, who would not answer while the recording machine was switched on. My mother was worried about how they would get back to their motel, and they did not know the driver of the cart.

  On the return train journey to Brisbane they had an overnight stay in Maryborough, opposite the railway at an old hotel (recommended by the Irish policeman). They arrived after midnight. An old man answered the door in his night gown, ‘holding a lantern’. My voice interposes ‘A hurricane lantern, Mum?’, but my mother does not say. And he led them along a veranda, past open doorways and the alarming sound of men snoring, and showed them to a bedroom with mosquito nets. After they unpacked, they had to go to a common bathroom and repeat the alarming trip along the veranda, back and forth, past open doorways and snoring.

  The recording reminded me: all her life my mother was afraid. Diana grew up surrounded by those fears, yet did not grow up to be a frightened person. She threw the whiskey bottle from the train and chased away the gecko. But she was infected by Iris’s shame about her unusual physiology.

  When Iris said she married my father because he was ‘safe’, she convinced me men and women want different things when they marry. But this was not a disparagement. Hearing her after forty years – talking in an Australian, not English, voice as I had imagined – I realised for a woman who saw fear everywhere, a man who was ‘safe’ was as close as she could get to love. We blame the dead for sins they did not commit.

  I was cured of the costume party, but in a state of shock. The early years of the separation were a time of improvisation, finding false ‘bargains’, making mistakes that multiplied into more mistakes, hurrying from one emergency to another, and looking for a new partner. Sally was searching also. She did not continue with Peter.

  As the house and garden slowly deteriorated, I was teaching law to commerce students in the first half of the week and looking after children in the second half. There were clothes to wash – the children’s and mine. I mowed the lawns once a month – but irregularly, so my front garden became an embarrassment to neighbours. Once in a while I vacuumed the rooms, a beer glass in one hand (as I put it in a poem, although that may have happened only once). I did not concern myself about the back garden – it was invisible from the street – as the wooden poles of the tennis court began tilting and falling down.

  I held occasional dinner parties and maintained some rituals from my old married life: on Saturday mornings going to Paddy’s Markets in the city with the children – Saturday was one of my days – and dragging a trolley along with Lucy, aged two, standing in it and peering out. She had to get out as I began piling in fruit and vegetables. I bought a painted dragonfly mobile and hung it from an Indian lamp in the drawing room. There was a vegetable stall run by a Chinese man, an Aboriginal and a red-haired Anglo-Celt. All three stood on fruit boxes calling out to buyers like a team of actors.

  After the markets we had cakes and gelati at the Bar Roma. When Lucy was about to wet her pants, I had to jump up from my coffee and suspend her above the gutter in the street outside.

  On Friday nights I took the children to eat satay chicken at the Nanyang near Central Station. I had to get food into them within ten minutes or they would crawl under the table and start bickering. As soon as we sat down, I asked for prawn crisps. If I was lucky, friends without children – Paul Delprat and others – would be there, and we would sit at a large table. I did not wish to inflict my single parenthood on friends and did not phone to check if they were coming. On winter nights, coming home from meals in the city, I corralled the children up the back steps of the Lindfield house, carrying those who were asleep.

  I started drinking with the Push again. After a night at the pub I would let myself in and hear the crash of discords. Puss was playing the piano, wanting to be fed.

  My son John was subdued and had a male distaste for vegetables. I blended broccoli with meat in a food processor and cooked children’s meatloaf and bolognese spaghetti sauce that were green.

  When his mother’s car arrived in the paved back area for handover, John would run down the steps with sudden animation.

  I bought children’s clothes at Paddy’s Markets: for Julia a blue and grey corduroy dress, and for Lucy a smaller matching red and grey dress. Lucy and I loved the white-dotted red and blue pina-fore dress for a three-year-old, which I had bought second-hand. She was six, and the seams were falling apart, when she finally gave it up.

  Plastic bottles of warmed milk were something she refused to give up. At age eight her last bottle, coated with dust and half-filled with fossilised milk, was found under her bed. With Julia I staged a ‘Goodbye Dummy’ ceremony outside a toyshop. We agreed she would drop her dummy in a council bin with John and Lucy as witnesses, and I would then buy each child a toy.

  I had a reconditioned engine installed in the green van, ‘Bulk’. One hot morning two weeks later I was taking the children to school and we had driven 100 metres or so when the van died. My cheap reconditioned engine had just cracked. There was no warranty. Engine oil was ebbing down the hill, wet and dark like my own blood (I thought). We began the 4 kilometre walk to school.

  The tennis court poles dragged down the wire netting as they collapsed. Fleabane and pungent vines (German ivy and climbing dock) grew through the wire, mixed with climbing roses and the silken tents of large spider webs at the end of summer. This became a wall of shimmering green I had to attack, with spider spray, secateurs for the branches, tin snips for the wire, a bow saw for the square wooden poles and last of all a mattock for the roots, lifting up clods of yellow tennis court clay mixed with civilising carbon from the plants.

  I advanced, armed with my tools and wearing old shirts that were soon ripped, and a hat to keep the sun off my face. Covered with leaf-dust and sweating, I piled up the rubbish in the middle of the court and lit a succession of bonfires.

  I was a single parent for three years. As well as the back flat, the main pa
rt of the house had several bedrooms and veranda rooms, and I filled the house with young people, by advertising on university notice boards. I fell in love with a younger woman, and when that relationship failed, with another young woman. They became Poppaea in Nero’s Poems. These relationships could not survive the strenuous untidiness of my life.

  I was learning about the methods of the social sciences, test groups and control groups. I began writing academic articles and started a book I called Dividing the Child, about joint custody of children. I became a joint custody advocate – if women were to be men’s equals in the workplace, fathers should be their equals with children.

  During my breakup with Sally I played Janis Joplin; the relentless sexuality of Janis’s voice paralleled my excitement as everything familiar was falling apart. I was now the only inhabitant of my bedroom and could turn off the light whenever I liked. Because I felt I needed a respectable higher degree, I was studying until 2.30 in the morning. The bay window was open after a hot day, and baby green grasshoppers with red eyes were jumping about on the desk. I heard a voice on the radio, Frank Zappa singing: ‘Honey, Don’t You Want A Man Like Me?’. Zappa was the return of structure after the free form of Joplin. I still loved Janis, but she became the past.

  In summer I went to the beach with the children, sat on the sand and watched them calling and splashing as the waves rolled in. I kept track of their silhouettes in the glare, making sure I could distinguish them from other children in the water, and every few minutes counted: One, Two, Three. Everywhere I took them I had to count: One, Two, Three. Then I could slam the door of the van.