by Martin Boyd
“Then we shouldn’t be here.”
“No, that would be dreadful,” he said. “All the same, there ought to be a restaurant here with a French chef. It ought to be the thing to come here—like dining in the Bois.”
“D’you think you will stay long in Australia?” she asked.
“Why? I intend to live here.”
“But your mind is in Europe. You like Australia now because you are thinking of all the European things that could be done to it. There will never be a French chef in the Fitzroy Gardens. When you realize that, will you want to stay?”
“I don’t see why there shouldn’t be. We must put the idea about.”
“They wouldn’t like it—all those rich Toorak people.”
“Then they needn’t come.”
“They rule the roost, now, and their aim is to be as like correct upper-middle-class English people as possible. They have no idea of an aristocratic culture—of your ideas and Miss Rockingham’s.”
He gave her a quick look when she mentioned Miss Rockingham and she wished she had not done so.
“I mean,” she went on, “they have to build their house in good classical proportions before they can add a rococo façade. You have to be a gentleman before you can afford to be eccentric.”
“I must say I like rococo façades,” said Russell. “When d’you think you’ll come to Europe?”
“You say come to Europe. That shows you are living there in your mind?”
“All civilized Englishmen lived in Italy in their minds. Shakespeare did, but his heart was in England. One’s mind may be in Europe but one’s heart in Australia. Anyhow, isn’t your mind in Europe as much as mine? No one whose mind was fixed in Australia could talk of façades.”
“Yes, but I talk of going there, not coming there.”
“That’s simply due to your geographical, not your mental situation.”
“Are you advising me to go there, then?”
“No, certainly not. At least, not yet. Not while I’m in Australia.”
“How long will that be? I suppose that depends on the chef in the Gardens.”
They went on talking, half-seriously, half-chaffing, looking down the sloping lawns, where the elms and other English trees were sprouting in their fresh spring green. The scene was quite un-Australian, and though familiar to Diana, combined with Russell’s conversation, it reawakened her desire to visit again the other side of the world.
He walked with her to the station. Under the dome they ran into Wolfie, who did not show any surprise at seeing them still together. He explained that he had caught up with the Pringles, as if they had spent the whole afternoon wondering anxiously whether he had had to take a tram to the University. When Diana said that Russell had taken her to tea in the Fitzroy Gardens he bowed and said: “Most kind.” In his presence they did not like to make arrangements for a further meeting, but Diana said: “Do ring up and come out to see us.”
In the train Wolfie talked about the lunch party for a few minutes. He said that he liked the oysters, but the chicken was overcooked, and that he would have preferred hock to claret. He complained too, of Lady Pringle’s monopolising the conversation.
“She was not modest,” he said, “but I had pleasure with Miss Rockingham.”
For the rest of the journey he hid himself behind the evening paper. Diana thought about Russell. She talked with him more easily than with anyone she knew, although she had only seen him three times since his return. She found talking to him extremely refreshing to her mind, after a married life deprived almost entirely of mental, if not of emotional contact. She had long given up trying to reach intellectual understanding with Wolfie. In one way she understood him perfectly, as one understands a charming Labrador, which whimpers at the door to go out, or cheerfully sweeps a coffee cup on to the floor with its tail, or complacently eats up all the butter left on a low tea-table. But Wolfie did not understand her. She thought: “I mustn’t begin saying my husband doesn’t understand me, especially to Russell.”
She was by no means sure, of course, in spite of their easy conversation, that she understood Russell. His attitude rather implied that he wanted her to do something, to go to Europe or somewhere. She would say that to him the next time they met. This European-Australian business seemed to form a sort of pattern to which they were fitting their relationship. But how could she say so soon that there was a relationship between them? Yet she had never, in the whole course of her life, become so quickly on easy terms with a complete stranger. Their childhood’s association had left no tie, though perhaps an intimate knowledge of early background did make for a certain ease. She wanted to see him again soon, not only for the pleasure she had in talking to him, but to discover what he was really like. He said things which were not in keeping with the first idea she had of him, which was of a conventional but intelligent, perhaps rather precious bachelor with social ambitions. Even if he had been only that she would still have liked him, but would have felt that they could not have much contact. But he was more than that. It was nice of him to offer to help with gardening.
It did occur to her at this stage that if she were often seen with him “people would talk”, but she had never bothered very much about what people said. She was not “in society”. She did not go automatically to all the smart parties. She had friends and relatives, like Elsie and Maysie and Sophie who were regarded as the cream of society, but her association with them had no connection with social functions. She was independent of their approval and would have given any of them tea in the kitchen if it were convenient, whereas many people “in society” if they had Sophie to dine, would have been on tenterhooks lest their parlourmaid should make a mistake with the wine.
During the next few days she found that she was always a little excited when she answered the telephone. When five days had gone by since his lunch party and he had not rung up, she began again to have the doubts about him which she had when he did not call after their first meeting. He could not be simple. Offering to help with the garden must only have been a sophisticated affectation of simplicity. She made up her mind that if he did ring up she would put off any appointment he suggested.
He rang up the following day and asked her if she would go round the National Gallery with him, and have tea there. He sounded perfectly natural, with no hint of apology or suggestion that he should have rung up earlier. Diana, in spite of her resolution, accepted.
She thought she had been very stupid. Of course it was natural that he should wait a week before inviting her again. What on earth had she expected? That they should immediately spend every other day together? That was the frame of mind which had been responsible for what the family called her “idiocies” as a young girl. She always expected everything, superlatively, at once. It was in fact the frame of mind that made her marry Wolfie, and she had paid for that—though she loved Wolfie, and could not now imagine life without him.
She met Russell three times in the following three weeks, once in the Gallery, once on a wet day in the tea-room, and once he drove her out to Heidelberg in his car, and they had a picnic tea on the river bank, boiling a “billy” over a fire of sticks. She enjoyed that most of all. At each of these meetings their conversation continued much on the same lines, absolutely easy, lively and intelligent, with a good deal of chaff, and always the Australian-European argument cropping up, so that it seemed to have almost the character of a flirtation.
At the end of these three weeks he left for Tasmania, where there were festivities at this time of year, with the fleet at Hobart. Diana found herself criticising him for going there, for doing the correct social thing, though she had often done it herself in times past. Again she thought how absurd it was to expect him to stay in Melbourne during the blazing heat of January, when most people he knew would be away, simply to have tea with her once a week, and anyhow she would be away herself, as she had arranged with Steven and Laura to exchange her house for Westhill during that month. This enable
d Steven to bathe and Wolfie and Diana to have some mountain air.
CHAPTER SIX
On the week-end that Mildy went reluctantly to Westhill, leaving me alone to keep my engagement with the twins, she followed her usual inverted reasoning and left arrangements for me to have delicious meals while she was away, thinking this would endear her to me. Whereas if she had wanted me to long for her return, she would have given Mrs Trotter the day off, and have left the larder full of cold mutton and rice-pudding, saying: “That’ll teach the little brute to think he can enjoy himself without me.” So that when she returned I could only exclaim about the marvellous week-end I had had.
There was a further slight strain in our relations in the middle of the week. Sometimes on the fine evenings of early summer, my heart full of Wagnerian magic, I would walk all the way out to Toorak along the river bank. On Wednesday as I was crossing Prince’s Bridge, an open car drew up beside me, and a very nice voice said: “Hullo, can I give you a lift?”
It was John Wyckham. I was delighted to be offered a lift by an aide-de-camp, and accepted eagerly, although I thought that he would only take me as far as the Government House gates, which was not in the direction of my walk.
“I met you at the Radcliffes’,” he said. “D’you remember?”
“Rather.”
“Aren’t you a nephew of Mrs von Flugel’s?”
When I said I was he asked if I often saw my cousins.
“I see Josie fairly often,” I said, “she goes a lot to Warrandyte. My brother has a studio there.”
“Is that the place with the sad saplings?” he asked smiling.
When we reached the Government House gates he said he would run me home. He asked me more about the Flugels. He said that he liked Australians. They were so friendly. He asked me if I was one.
“Yes,” I said. “But I’ve lived some time in England. We have a place in Somerset.”
“Oh, you’re one of us,” he said.
I was highly flattered at being told by a member of the Government House staff that I was “one of them” and by the change in his manner to a kind of freemasonry.
Before he put me down at Mildy’s gate he said that he would “like to see those sad saplings” and asked if I would drive up with him one day and show him the way.
“Yes, but it would have to be a Saturday,” I replied, ashamed of the regular hours of my labour.
“We must arrange it.” He smiled with great friendliness as he drove away.
Mildy, the victim of her inordinate affection, was watching at the window for my return. She was pleased that I was early, but suspicious of my means of transport.
“Who was that young man?” she asked.
“John Wyckham.”
“You don’t mean Captain Wyckham?”
“Yes—why not?”
“Oh dear, how unfortunate!”
“What in the dickens is unfortunate?”
“You can’t possibly keep up with people like that.”
“Can’t I have any friends?” I demanded angrily.
“I want you to have friends,” she said, her voice thick with untruthfulness, as she thought she was my adequate friend, and also my brother, sister, mother, spouse and all those relationships which are attributed to the Deity in certain hymns, everything in fact except aunt. “I want you to have suitable friends—some nice Australian boy.” But she would only have welcomed an Australian boy if he had not been too nice, and if he had had some idiosyncracy which we could have laughed at together, when he had gone home. Miss Bath had a nephew of my own age, with whom I often asked her to arrange a meeting. When I met him a few years later, I found that he too had wanted to meet me, but that Mildy had always put him off, saying that I was working very hard, or that I only liked English people.
“I’ll be dead before I ever meet anyone of my own age,” I said bitterly.
“Now you’re not being yourself,” said Mildy.
For two months from the middle of December, the people who had met at Elsie Radcliffe’s party were scattered over three states. Cousin Sophie took the twins to Tasmania, the Pringles went to a wooden bungalow called Helicon perched on a hillside above Ferntree Gully, where it was surprising that they were not roasted alive in the heat, or roasted to death in the frequent bushfires which ravaged the neighbourhood in those days. Some of the squatters went to their stations in the Riverina. The Radcliffes went to the Western District. The Governor-General and his staff stayed some of the time on Mount Macedon, but also went for a tour of stations. It was said that Lady Eileen always took pink curtains for her bedroom on these tours, as a way of keeping Sir Roland’s fidelity, but this seems improbable as they would not have fitted the different windows.
There were two or three more dances between the party and this exodus, at which Anthea met Freddie Thorpe, and at which she danced with him the maximum number of dances which convention allowed. Josie also met John again at a dance and at a tennis party at Macedon, where she had been invited for a week by one of Diana’s old friends. Then all these promising associations seemed to evaporate in the heat, but those whom they concerned were conscious that they were in the atmosphere, ready to condense and fall again with the return to Melbourne in the late summer.
Mildy and I went up to Westhill for Christmas. Brian came across from Warrandyte, and Miss Rickson our former governess was there, and in terrific heat we ate roast turkey at midday and wore paper caps and snatched raisins out of burning brandy, and Mildy made a great fuss of avoiding the mistletoe.
Then we went down to Diana’s house on the seafront at Brighton, and the Flugels went up to Westhill. I stayed with my parents, partly because I preferred to be with them, and they liked to have me when it was possible, but also because I could bathe from the house before going to my work in the morning.
Mildy could not accept that it was more natural for me to be with my parents than with her, and for that month went off to stay with Miss Bath at a boarding-house in Healesville, to make it appear that it was only due to her absence, for pride was one of the chief ingredients of her love for me, as perhaps it is of most love, but more normally the pride results from the love, from its public acknowledgement. But Mildy’s initial impulse was to own me to satisfy her pride, which perhaps was natural, as she could hardly have been proud of Miss Bath, her only other close associate. Also I had been flung into her lap. It would have been as absurd to fling a young antelope into the cage of a hungry tigress and expect her not to eat it. And yet Mildy could not simply satisfy herself by eating me. She was hedged round by all kinds of inhibitions and proprieties, and I must have caused her agonies of suffering, which were no less real because they would appear ridiculous to the outside world, and any glimpse of which only made me irritable, though I priggishly accepted all the luxuries she provided for me. I was in the contemptible position of someone who accepts favours, while repudiating the affection which bestows them.
Diana at Westhill was living in the scenes of her past, before the worst experiences of her life, when she was still full of preposterous hope. For half of the month she was alone there with Wolfie, as Josie was at Macedon for a week, and for another week went to Warrandyte to stay with her artist friend Frieda Felpham, where life was amusing with the young art students who came to stay with her and with Brian, a few hundred yards away.
Diana was a good deal alone, as Wolfie spent much of his time at the piano, and she could only take in a limited amount of music. My parents now used a motor car, but there were still horses on the place, and the old governess-cart, jinker, wagonette, and even the Waterpark landau were still in the coach-houses. Sometimes she harnessed a pony and drove along the rough country roads, where the bell-birds made their strange tinkling sounds in the gum-trees, to see old family friends at Harkaway or in Berwick. Often when the heat of the day was over, she would walk out on the hill from which the house took its name, while below her, beyond twenty miles of plain, was the golden expanse of the bay, with pos
sibly a line of smoke from one of those steamers which had become a symbol for her.
In this solitude and in these surroundings, she felt that she had a clearer view of the whole design of her life, if it could be said to have a design. Being here, alone with Wolfie, and visiting these old friends familiar from childhood, brought back the expectations she had had in those days. Looking down towards the distant suburbs of Melbourne and the shores of the bay where she now lived, brought into sharp contrast her expectation and her achievement. One evening when the whole countryside was still, and there was no sound except the distant rattle of milk-cans down at the Burns’s farm, it suddenly seemed to her that her life had been given back to her again, for herself to shape the years that remained. The children no longer required her. Even Josie who still lived at home, was half the time staying somewhere else. Why should she not take what was left, and do something with it? She and Wolfie were practically free. With increased dividends and Harry self-supporting, their financial situation was better than it had ever been.
They could go to Europe. When they came back they could sell that white elephant of a house at Brighton and build a little house in South Yarra, but with one very big room where Wolfie could have concerts as Josie had suggested and where she could entertain her friends. She said to herself “Wolfie and Josie” but in her mind was also Russell. She was sure that he would advise and help her in her plans. That he should have arrived just at this time, when her life had become more free, appeared almost to be an omen. He gave her the feeling that he wanted her to do something with her life. She was sure that their friendship was now established. She thought a good deal about him and she was aware that although the steamers on the bay were possibly coming from Europe, they could also be coming from Tasmania.
At last, in the middle of February, we all returned to our normal homes, and our lives became condensed again. The chief moment of condensation was at one of Arthur’s Sunday afternoon tea-parties at the end of the month. All the usual habitués turned up, and a few extras. It was usual to ring up beforehand and say that one was coming, when Arthur would describe the other guests whom he was expecting, often in ribald terms, never failing to describe Miss Bath as “the wrong end of the magnet”.