When they quarrelled I had a simple way of establishing order. If they were in a ruck on the floor, I pulled them apart, held up my hand and shouted, ‘Smack wall’. Each child was then surrounded by an invisible wall. If they breached it, they would be smacked. My hand hovered in the air for a few seconds, but I never had to use it.
Teaching at university and looking after small children were not all that different. In my first term I taught the same tutorial twelve times each week to twelve different classes. The dangerous time was at three in the afternoon. I sometimes fell asleep as I stood before a class. The words I had to repeat passed before my closed eyes like hallucinatory words on a teleprompter. I knew I had to ask a question from time to time. Having commented on the answer, I closed my eyes again and continued repeating what the teleprompter told me.
I was appointed a lecturer. My class was now 400 students in a steeply banked lecture hall. Paper darts began to rain down on my dais at the bottom, when I turned my back to chalk up points of interest on the board. By the end of each lecture up to fifty paper darts were scattered about. The next term I began wearing a coat and tie to all lectures, and never turning my back. I stared at the 400 students for the entire fifty-five minutes. One day at the end of my class, another lecturer, about to take a class, asked why there were no paper darts. I explained my method.
The Blackmans’ marriage fell apart. Les Murray and I drifted away from each other. He told me he found my poems about the marital breakup too painful to read. The Push, with whom I occasionally drank, were becoming middle-aged. I was immersed in the lives of small children growing up and the unfamiliar world of academe.
Four friends made a particular effort to stay in my life. I drove over to Salvatore Zofrea’s house every week. We listened to music and I watched Salvatore’s painting style change to intricate and glazed tableaux. He was counsellor, friend and psychotherapist as we discussed my marriage over and over again; the small, painful details. I was able to reward him for his patience. I had a platonic friend, Stephanie Clare, to whom I introduced him. Salvatore and Steph have now been together for almost four decades. Paul Delprat kept me in touch with a wider circle of people, while Robert Gray (now more in touch with other poets than I was) and Christopher Koch gave me emotional support to keep writing.
I still saw Stephen Wilson as we had friends in common. He was diagnosed as having a malignant melanoma. I thought about our days on Mona Vale beach and how many more days he had spent, burning his skin for an elusive tan. A girl at the university often asked about him. He had been ill for a couple of years and his condition was terminal. I thought she should be told certain facts. She answered, almost angrily, ‘I know for a fact he’s not!’
In his last few months he travelled to Europe with his male friend, and they accompanied Melina Mercouri on tour and were at every concert. A few weeks before he died we had lunch, and that was the last time I was with him. He insisted on my coming back to his house and showing me a painting he had just bought. He was still collecting objects.
His funeral was at St John’s Anglican church in Darlinghurst, where a few years earlier I had watched Stephen as a stunned mourner at his father’s funeral. There was confusion about the service. A week before Stephen died, he had converted to Catholicism and his family did not know. A Catholic and an Anglican priest agreed to officiate together. Stephen was buried in the family vault in Waverley cemetery. At the cemetery one of his oldest friends suggested I write a poem about Stephen. I was not a good mourner. We had no family vault and I was not born into a law firm.
I was still bitter about his role in my failed partnership. I felt that Stephen did not see my former partner and me as real people. He had been nostalgic about a prominent Roman nose she had – before cosmetic surgery. Her old nose, he often said, had ‘character’. That appeared to matter more than her personal happiness.
But when Gail and I met several months after his death, I regretted she had not known him.
My mother and sister wanted to see the Japanese Gardens which had opened in Sydney’s west. I took them there with the children. It was early spring, there was not much foliage, and I could look in any direction and see the children running among the newly planted beds. My mother drew me aside: ‘I want you to promise to look after Diana when I’m gone’.
If I was to find a wife, I thought a good place to start was fixing the bathroom. It had a claustrophobic brick shower cubicle, faced with large pale green tiles. Diana and Iris were horrified when I said I was replacing this with clear glass shower screens: ‘People will be able to look at you when you shower!’ I found some white Spanish floor tiles with a hand painted blue daisy in the centre and became an owner-builder, arranging for tradesmen to come in the correct sequence. The Italian tiler thought it odd my children called me by my Christian name.
The year 1979 was the year of the triple birthday party at Ian Bedford’s house for three Push friends: Ian turning forty, Doug Nicholson turning fifty, and Bill Lindbergh turning sixty. Ian introduced me to Gail Pearson, saying I was the author of a book, Ross’ Poems. We talked for a few minutes. I assumed she was his girlfriend. Bill Lindbergh was a guest at a dinner party I held a few weeks later, and he brought Gail. I still assumed she was Ian’s girlfriend.
We both taught at the University of New South Wales – she was teaching Indian history – and one day near the start of term in 1980 we met by chance on the library steps and agreed to have lunch at the University Staff Club. Gail talked about Indian arranged marriages and made it clear she was not Ian’s girlfriend. I was nervously sure she was the girl I would marry.
We arranged to meet one night. She was surprised when I picked her up in ‘Bulk’, my green Kombi Van, to be driven to a restaurant – not a very good restaurant near where she lived, but neither of us were connoisseurs. We saw each other a second time. The next morning she was moving into a flat in Woollahra, and I came along with my children to her new apartment, so she could meet them. If they were to be an impediment, I wanted to find this out quickly. As her possessions were carried in, they played, running up and down the stairs and calling out.
A few weeks later Ian said: ‘When I introduced you, I thought you’d suit each other. You’re both such difficult people.’
Robert Frost’s poem ‘Meeting and Passing’ is about an unidentified ‘I’ meeting an unidentified ‘you’ and they walk together. Afterwards each retraces the path which the other took to get to where they met. I wanted to retrace Gail’s life to the point where we met: her childhood in Maryborough, schooldays as a boarder at Somerville House, her first boyfriends, her love affair with India, four years studying for her PhD at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, and most of all her mother, who had recently died – the innocent fresh-faced mother of family photographs. ‘She would have warned me against you!’ She was still grieving and would wake up at night in tears.
Although I was in a hurry to introduce Gail to all my friends, I did not talk about our future. I was ten years older and had children. A couple of months after we started seeing each other, I was swatting mosquitoes on her bedroom wall. Next morning she spoke about our relationship: ‘As Lenin said, “What is to be done?” ’ We decided to marry within a year. She thought I was a little mad when we met, but I had renovated the bathroom – I had shown I was ‘practical’.
As a prelude to marrying, Gail moved her antique chests of drawers into the Lindfield house, also a glass-fronted book cabinet with drawers she had bought with her mother, a white nineteenth century cast-iron bed, Indian objets d’art and books about India. Three decades later, my daughter Julia remembers being entranced by Gail, her waist-length black hair, her voice and the whiteness of her skin. Gail began to create order in the house and teach my children table manners.
I once came along as Gail’s accompanying spouse when she gave a speech at the opening of a Sikh temple. As she spoke from a lectern on the history of Sikhism to several hundred Indian Australians, dressed
in a decorous salwar kameez, the twenty-nine-year-old Australian girl I had fallen in love with transformed herself into an Indian girl with choreographed smiles and glances. I was astonished.
We were married the following year on St Valentine’s Day after a prenuptial honeymoon with the children at a beach house at Gerroa. The children could not swim properly. I stood in the ocean with them, counting them as I always did, and they splashed and called out, and hermit crabs in small seashells rolled in with the waves. At night in the beach house I was writing a set of sestinas about a single father with three children. Gail was upset because I was not helping with the wedding invitations.
One day I was reading my sestinas to Pixie O’Harris over the phone. I had given the children in the poems pseudonyms, but Julia called out: ‘He’s written a poem about us!’
Keith Looby and Kerry Gregan were the first guests to arrive at our wedding reception. They turned up at our house a week early. We were married the following Saturday morning at the city registry office. Gail was wearing a red and yellow wedding sari sent from India by the wife of her PhD supervisor at Jawaharlal Nehru University. Paul Delprat was best man and Gail’s sister Deborah was bridesmaid. After coffee and cakes at the Bar Roma – our Saturday morning routine – we drove back to Lindfield. The paint was peeling on the wall by the stone terrace where speeches were to be made. I changed out of my suit, opened a pot of white paint, and repainted the wall. This was still wet when guests began arriving. We had to warn them: ‘Stay away from the wet paint’.
We served wine in plastic cups and our few glasses, and chicken and salad on paper plates. Gail’s sister Deborah had made the cake. The three children jumped up and down and called out during the speeches. I made a children’s alcohol-free fruit punch in a large brass Chinese bowl of my father’s. Later that evening they suggested I taste it. The fruit punch had an awful metallic taste. I had almost poisoned my children. The last guests had left by midnight.
True happiness is not elusive. When I married Gail, I became truly happy for the first time in my life. I was forty years old.
At the end of the year we holidayed with the children in a flat her family owned that looked out over the khaki tidal waters of the Brisbane River. In the morning we went to the Corinda swimming pool and Gail taught the children to swim: ‘Face under and blow’. I discovered why I had not been able to swim a convincing freestyle.
Back in Sydney we had to find a spot for a red-flowered frangipani bought in Brisbane. Mrs Read had planted a Hibiscus rosa-sinensis with showy, double pink flowers. When its flowers opened for the first time, perhaps in Hawaii in about 1950, its obscure breeder must have known his plant would soon be in millions of gardens. My guess is he was a modest man, so he named it after his wife: ‘Mrs George Davis’. I began chopping down ‘Mrs George Davis’. Puss sent me an imploring look. He used this tree to climb up and sun himself on the roof. He began scrambling up what was left of the trunk. Three years later, by then about twenty years old, Puss disappeared. We called out and probed the dark with electric torches. But the Sun King had gone. The flowers of the red frangipani, when it flowered, were a scentless white.
Gail and I ordered a ping-pong table. On fine weekends I played ping-pong on the stone terrace with our next-door neighbour, Steven Jeffery (who had made the New Year’s Eve prophecy). His forte was to serve with his back to the table. I laughed and could not get the ball back. When he sent me an unplayable shot, he announced it was a ‘TS Eliot’ or ‘This is a Wordsworth’.
Gail was three months pregnant when we went to India. I was delivering a paper about Australian poetry at an academic conference in New Delhi, and Gail was leading a student tour afterwards. On the morning of our flight Gail emptied out her university office – she was giving up teaching Indian studies and about to start a law course. We arrived at Sydney airport twenty minutes before departure and the airline staff checked us through, laughing incredulously. I had never been out of Australia and was forty-two.
As we drove from the airport into New Delhi by bus, I was excited by the fragrant smell of wood fires. An old woman was trudging beside the highway, bent, insect-like beneath a huge load of sticks. She was a small black silhouette against a primrose yellow dusk.
Gail and I were staying in staff accommodation at the University of Delhi. We had an upstairs room with a squat toilet and our own rooftop where we sat in the late afternoon and watched monkeys playing in a stand of silk floss trees at the edge of a lawn.
We called on a friend of hers, the owner of an iron foundry, Chiku – his nickname from the small sweet fruit – and sat in his small office in Connaught Circle and drank small glasses of chai sweetened with condensed milk, a stream of visitors calling in to see Gail, back from Australia for the first time in four years. After dinner one night at Chiku’s joint family house, Chiku’s chauffeur drove us back in his Ambassador car (the Indian version of a 1950s Morris Oxford saloon) to our university guest house. When we had been let off, the car would not start. The grey-haired chowkidar (nightwatchman) who sat outside all night on the veranda stirred himself. He and I pushed the back bumper while the chauffeur ran alongside with the driver’s door open, also pushing, and jumping in when the car started with a puff of blue smoke.
As we travelled through India I learned to drink only from freshly opened bottles or boiled tea, and eat only freshly cooked food. I went looking for puppets for the children. (Sally was looking after them for the five weeks we were away.) I bought Amar Chitra Katha comic books retelling Indian epics and myths at every train station where we stopped. We drank chai out of small earthenware cups which we smashed on the railway platform – that was the local custom – before rejoining the train.
On a bus trip to the thirteenth century redbrick ruins of a Buddhist university at Nalanda we drove across desiccated plains past derelict trucks that had tipped over – our bus driver speaking angrily with peasants who had laid a tree trunk across the road.
On a bus trip to a Madhubani village of lady painters, we were already on our way when we made contact by short wave radio with the government guest house where we were to stay. They had been out of contact for days. There was no booking, the caretaker claimed. We arrived late at night. He gave us a large room with three beds for fifteen Australian students. Most of us slept on the floor. A small boy was perched on a black water buffalo which was cropping the grass when I woke up next morning and looked through a window. There was a bustle as the caretaker organised half a dozen young cooks and served a frugal breakfast. As our bus drove away, he stood on the veranda, bald headed in his long white shirt and dhoti, bowing and waving goodbye, flanked by his retinue of young cooks.
Our bus driver had to stop several times in a flat landscape amidst a jumble of unsignposted, dirt roads and ask directions for our village of lady painters. Eventually, the son of the senior lady painter hailed our bus and led us through clustered houses with thatched roofs and mud walls painted white, and across shiny yellow mud floors, like polished cement. Naming the upper caste women artists, he unrolled his stock of paintings – brightly coloured traditional subjects, populated by small flowers, birds and fish. He unrolled paintings by Harijan women, in duller, raw-earth colours and at lower prices. One of these – ‘It is tantric’ – had grinning heads branching from a tree trunk. Gail and I bought it and would have liked to pay more.
One night our tour group was waiting for a train. Hundreds of people were milling around. The train was darkened when it arrived, and the windows were shuttered – to reduce the risk of attack by dacoits, we were told. A sudden blackout plunged the station in darkness. A universal cry went up. Our tour organiser agreed to fly us to Calcutta.
In our tour’s first week some younger women were in tears, overwhelmed by swarms of beggars, street children selling small items, red splashes of betel nut juice on the cream walls of corridors, peacocks strutting on roofs, whole families riding one pushbike with a child in a basket perched on the handlebars, young m
en on their way to work urinating against walls, horses with garlands of marigolds pulling carts, and lepers demanding money and flaunting their ruined limbs as we entered a ruined temple complex.
When Gail began at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University in the early 1970s, with no Hindi, she was the only foreign student. She went on to study there for more than four years and made life-long friends. I would have lasted no more than a week.
Several months after India, Gail was heavily pregnant and we were with the three children, driving down the Pacific Highway. Gail had sold her Mini Moke and I had sold ‘Bulk’ and we had just one vehicle, a new pale blue Ford Econovan with the initials LLW on the numberplate. A friend suggested we call it ‘Leslie Walford’ after the fashionable interior decorator. Lucy was eight years old and brooding on one of ‘Leslie Walford’s’ two back benches. She said to Gail, ‘When that baby’s born, IT’s not going to last long. I’m making sure it’s just Baby Bones.’
Nicholas was a planned child. When contractions began I drove with Gail to the hospital and stayed. I had brought a transistor radio, and the obstetrician joked it was the first time he had delivered a baby while listening to the 7 o’clock news. It was the first time I had witnessed a birth.
Diana and Iris were now living in an apartment next to the Chatswood shopping centre. Sometimes they came to eat with us. About every three weeks Gail and I, with the three children, went to the Chatswood flat and ate one of my mother’s bland evening meals. I was relieved she had no loss of short-term memory as she talked without stopping about recent TV programs. Her vehemence was depressing. I was the ‘intellectual son’ she had to convince and convert. For her that was a special relationship, not the tranquil companionship she shared with my sister. My mother was afraid of Diana’s common sense. Diana could silence her with a look.
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