And then in an uncontrollable welling-up of clownish, affectionate exuberance, he was coming at me grinning on his nimble dancing feet, feinting short-arm jabs and uppercuts and right crosses and that straight left of his.
He had tied six old sea-boots to the back of the limousine that was to take us to the railway station, but when we were around the next corner and out of sight, Helen ordered the chauffeur to stop, and made him get out and untie them and leave them there in the gutter.
12
If I recall nothing of our honeymoon it cannot be because it was, as honeymoons go, a failure, for that would have had immediate repercussions, and the first months of my married life with Helen I clearly remember as being almost blissfully satisfying.
I had the thrilling feeling of having finished a long and difficult period of probation and come at last to the beginning of real life. I was stimulated by that immediate consciousness of maturity which the responsibility for a separate and personal establishment creates, I was relieved at being free at last from the inhibiting background of my family, and I had an almost intoxicating sense of delight that I was standing finally on my own feet in a world which I believed to be entirely mine.
A more intriguing factor of the changing circumstances was the quite new and different emotional regard I felt for Helen. It was much more than the intense and possessive pride I had in a partner who was beautiful, intelligent, mature, and admirably presentable – here, I told myself, was the ideal companion for this new, modern, sophisticated, and challenging world in which, ambitiously, I imagined myself cutting an ever more important figure – but there had been a deep change at the most intimate level of our relationship. She had become, to me, so much more valuable and desirable as the public figure of a wife than she had ever been in the role of the secretly cherished mistress: we were not blatantly and unmistakably ‘in love’, we talked and we behaved as lovers, to the last cliché of endearment and as sentimentally as in the popular songs, and in a way we had never been able to bring ourselves to do in that long, curious, and incompletely casual liaison we had shared in Perce Parkinson’s library.
Perhaps one should have been able to see then beneath the surface of the sentimentality, for the physical act of lovemaking remained very much as it always had been – clean, neat, expedient, and somewhat passionless – but it was to be many months, under the balm of a romantic magic, before I even began to suspect either the true sterilities of our association or the trap which I had helped to fashion around myself.
I think that subconsciously it was the disparity between our ages that led me to entrust so much of the material construction of our new lives to Helen’s decisions. On this question of our ages we had developed odd little tacit understandings: while the fact that she was four years older than I, for instance, was never directly stated we were in general agreement that women under thirty were almost certainly either ‘frivolous’ or ‘immature’. Helen, therefore, naturally assumed leadership on matters of taste and sophistication; where mature judgments were needed it was usually she who would make the decision. I admired her originality and vitality. I had unbounded confidence in her.
It was she who decided on the house in Beverley Grove, in a new ‘garden’ subdivision in what at that time was considered a ‘good’ suburb, and which placed almost half suburban Melbourne between us and the two old, shabby, antiquated houses where we had separately grown up. I am sure it must have been at least partly her violent resentment, and rejection, of the decay which had hitherto surrounded her, and the sordid dreariness from which she believed she had rescued me, that developed her insistence that we should begin our married life in a house so new that it seemed to me to have come to us still damp from the plasterer’s trowel.
It was what at that time was usually described as a ‘double-fronted, ultra-modern, red brick, three-bedroom villa’ and it stood on its sixty-foot frontage behind a low brick fence on its own small block of land beside a concrete drive leading to a separate fibro-plaster garage. It stank of cement mortar, raw floorboards, fresh paint, damp putty, and insulated electric wiring.
We were both of us inordinately proud of it, and on the day we signed the lease and were given the two Yale keys to the front door, Helen and I toasted each other in the empty ‘model’ kitchen, which smelt of stainless steel and wood-shavings, from a bottle of Minchinbury Sparkling Hock I had bought specially for the occasion.
Beverley Grove, the house, the subdivision, the suburb, even that bottle of Sparkling Hock, were immediate tokens and symbols of social progression. Of an advancement in caste, even.
So were our neighbours in the new houses around us. Mr Treadwell, our neighbour on the left, was a retired police court magistrate. Mr Phyland, our neighbour on the right, was a chartered accountant in the city. Wally Solomons, who had the house directly opposite us and an indolent, soignée, highly sophisticated and very beautiful wife called Sandra, who spent most of her time in black slacks and boleros, smoking pastel-tinted cigarettes through a twelve-inch holder, was the head salesman in the main showrooms of General Motors. On the corner, where Beverley Grove joined Park Crescent (these names were incised in Roman capitals into the cement paving blocks), lived Dr Felton Carradine, the dental surgeon.
The entire Beverley Park Gardens subdivision had been a big investment on the part of a building-contractor by the name of Bernie Rothenstein, who in the speculative days of Melbourne suburban estate developments had a record for civic malefactions which was probably unmatched in the Southern Hemisphere, but which later won him a respected seat on the City Council and ultimately a knighthood: and although only three basic ground-plans were used for all the hundreds of houses in the subdivision, there were still no two houses in anyone street, grove, crescent, drive, or avenue which could be said to really look alike. Each front elevation had its own distinct difference, in the design of the porch, the placement of the picture-window, the run of the paths and whether plain or ‘crazy’, the position of the drive, the design of the chimney, the style of the front door, and so on, and even further permutations were possible, because there were three distinct ways in which the roofs of flat terracotta tiles could be pitched. The interiors of all the houses were virtually the same, of course, to the very inch in things like roof-area and the dimensions of rooms and halls and passageways and cupboardspace, and the immutable sameness of their inventoried fittings. (Not until long, long afterwards did one pause to marvel at the deadening democracy of a system which could dictate, over nearly one square-mile of human habitation, that no man should have one more light-switch or power-point or water-faucet or sliding drawer than any other!)
I was by this time earning a good salary at the Morning Post, I had money in the bank and unshakable self-confidence, my prospects were excellent: so it is not surprising that, with the benevolent assistance of the hire-purchase system, we committed ourselves deeply and eagerly to the panoply that was in keeping with our new standing. For the virginal garage I bought, extravagantly, a flashy and almost new MG, with wire wheels, Brooklands hubs, a throaty exhaust, and a dashing finish in pillar-box red. Helen calculated, bargained, and shunned excessive extravagances – for she was, in fact, a dedicated home-builder in the best practical sense – but she had set her heart on precisely the sort of home she wanted, so the house was furnished in severely modern pale-wood furniture, and she chose sophisticated Indian mats and scatter-rugs instead of wall-to-wall carpets, and selected with careful taste the folk-weave fabrics from which she made curtains and drapes and the covers for cushions. She bought for the walls reproduction prints of the right modern paintings, both the Van Gogh chair and his cypresses, a Matisse odalisque, that Braque which is so suitable for modern kitchens, and the Cezanne apples – but also, with an admirable subtlety, a Vlaminck and a Derain and a Bonnard – and all of them were framed either in knotty pine or raw, rubbed limewood. We had low twin beds for the front bedroom with parchment-shaded lamps and a white handset telephone on the night
-table between us, and it was Helen’s idea that the two spare bedrooms should, in fact, be used for more practical purposes, so that one became my study and the other her sewing-room. Here, too, there were tacit understandings that Helen did not propose to have children and that there was little likelihood that we should want guests to stay overnight. Her room went through a series of rapid transformations. She made all her own clothes, so that the sewing-machine which we bought on monthly terms was really a very sound investment. To this was added a dressmaker’s ‘shape’ made exactly to her own measurements, and then, when she went back to the fashion-drawing which she had given up years before – mostly to design clothes which she would make, or thought she might make, for herself – first a drawing-table and then an easel were installed. The consequence of this was that she began to paint, in watercolour and gouache, in the beginning as a hobby but eventually with a quite zealous conviction of her own creative ability. My study was another story …
To a very large degree it was Helen, also, who directed the reorganization of our social life. She adored entertaining, or being entertained. In the cocktail parties which to me, until then, had been only part of the unavoidable chores of daily journalism, she found endless excitement and pleasure; she adored gallery openings and the dull receptions given on the maiden voyages of new ships and theatre parties and dress rehearsals – any gathering, in fact, where she could meet people. Her delight in these activities was genuine and disarming, with the result that she made friends easily, and most people seemed to like and to admire her. Well, she was an extraordinarily attractive woman, she dressed smartly, she had style and a gay, shallow exuberance and vivacity which people found appealing. Certainly for a good long time she had no admirer more devoted than myself … and, in that misleading period of our social betterment, nobody more proud of her …
The companions for our leisure hours were chosen as conscientiously and with as much attention to taste and suitability as she would select the picture for a wall, the guest-towels for the bathroom, the mats for the dining-table, the tapestry covering for a lounge chair.
The Farleys were quite suddenly our boon companions – Jerry with his tidy little businessman’s paunch and his Oldsmobile sedan and his membership in the Junior Chamber of Commerce and his rather plain, scatterbrain wife Rene, whom he had really married, I suspect, because her father was someone important in one of the big stock-and-station agencies and her uncle owned a wealthy grazing property down Camperdown or Mount Elephant way – it was somewhere, at any rate, where polo was played – and the still beautiful and now haughty Moira, with her dull fiancé Justin Byrne, who was a teller in the head office of the ES and A Bank. The six of us were forever visiting each other, and on Sunday nights when I was not working we would make up gay, convivial parties at Mario’s or the Café Latin, where we would sit by candlelight and eat minestrone or real Italian spaghetti or ravioli, and drink Chianti or Rheingold.
It was Helen’s triumph that within a matter of only two or three weeks of our arrival in Beverley Grove we were also on the friendliest visiting terms with Wally and Sandra Solomons, who to this day occupy a rather special little niche in my memory as perhaps the two most stupid human beings I have ever known. But in those dazed months of bemused advancement, they were very much a part of Helen’s chosen ‘set’, and sometimes at week-ends we would all go dashing off in our cars on long, wild, exhilarating drives to Sorrento or Portsea, under enormous non-suburban skies that had the wind below the clouds, to frolic together over the measureless sand-dunes and scream our infantile challenges at the great strong beating sweep of the surf. Sometimes there are moments of splendour even in our stupidities.
The surprising addition to Helen’s chosen coterie of intimate friends were Gavin Turley and his wife Peggy, who was a charming, pretty, and genuinely ‘social’ girl who came from a well-off Toorak family, had ‘finished’ in Switzerland and been presented at Buckingham Palace, and had met Gavin at the University (never referred to by Helen or her set as anything but ‘The Shop’) where they had graduated together in Arts. From the very beginning, Helen had been most sedulous in cultivating the more important or interesting of my colleagues on the newspaper – she was forever plaguing me to invite Mr Brewster to the house for cocktails or for dinner, but I never did – and of those whose age qualified them for entry into Helen’s group, Gavin Turley was certainly both the most important and the most interesting. His wife got on very well with Helen – they shared some mutual and esoteric passion about clothes and were forever shopping together and exchanging fashion magazines – but I know now that Gavin’s liking for our company was based partly on the fact that he genuinely had an odd sardonic affection for me, which he continued to preserve for all the time I knew him, and partly because in his droll, analysing way he was always able to derive an infinite amount of whimsical and ironic amusement from our ambitions and our antics. He had an astute, observing mind which generally was allowed to operate behind a demeanour that was gentle, tolerant and only faintly quizzical, in much the way that his clever, lofty brow was always hidden under the dishevelled locks of fine black hair, worn very long, that seemed to fall at random all over his head. He was thin and tremendously tall – six-feet-six I think it was – and almost misshapen in his general awkwardness and the pronounced stoop which he cultivated. He had a long, thin, horsy face, which women found most attractive, a Ronald Colman moustache, huge square teeth which were discoloured by nicotine, and an almost faultless eye for human foibles. I never knew him to do an unkind act.
I still remember the first formal party he attended in the house in Beverley Grove. This was the ‘intimate’ little function which Helen had substituted for the far more elaborate ‘housewarming’ party she had at first intended to give. That idea had been quietly allowed to lapse after I had pointed out to her that such a party would of necessity mean the inviting not only of my parents and my sisters and Jack and Sheila, but of her own father, too, and her brother.
With Helen, there was to be no commingling of the old life and the new. There was, I believe, a certain forceful integrity about her determination never to return to the surroundings of her past in that she set herself just as obstinately against her own family and background as she did against mine. It was quite extraordinary after our marriage to observe the almost ruthless way in which she cast off everything that had gone before. Her meek, spineless little father called on us only once, and had almost nothing to say, and he never repeated the visit. After the day of our wedding I never saw the sullen, shadowy brother again. Helen seldom spoke of them afterwards. Her mysterious political friends vanished, the tennis club might never have existed, and apart from the fact that she would describe herself to my friends as having been a ‘librarian’, Perce Parkinson’s library and the Genoa velvet couch were not talked about any more.
One sees now that what was so sad about her, really, was that she never at any time saw any true and worthwhile goal for herself, that once she had escaped she had no idea where to go. Her ambitions had the impetus of desperation, and no scale.
At any rate, instead of the ‘house-warming’ we had cocktails and a buffet supper for twelve more fastidiously-chosen guests – the select of Helen’s new ‘set’, the Turleys, two other young reporters from the newspaper and the assistant social editress, and one of Rene Farley’s burly, polo-playing cousins from the Western District, who was visiting the city at the time on some matter concerning stud service for a pedigreed Aberdeen Angus.
Helen went to immense pains to get everything right. She was up at dawn and she happily worked all day with the same unruffled and practical poise that she applied to almost anything she ever put her mind to, including copulation. She spent hours in the kitchen, wearing the red rubber work-gloves which had become almost a talisman of her domesticity (she had a repugnance for touching raw meat or fish or any tuberous vegetables, and, in any case, she always took the greatest care of her fine and beautiful hands), indefatig
ably busy and every now and then referring to an illustrated article in the Ladies’ Home Journal entitled ‘Sixteen Savouries With a Difference’.
The result of all her labours was lavish and striking. Colour, she had decided, was to be her theme. I recall that each person’s table napkin and tumbler was of a different colour, that colour glittered in gherkin parings and maraschino and pale cheese and purple olives and blushing carrot gratings on the varied dishes of savouries (I suppose there were sixteen of them; certainly they were all with a difference!); I remember mounds of grapefruit and oranges curiously porcupined by coloured pickled onions stuck there on toothpicks; there were oysters Kilpatrick and chicken patties and bacon slices served with fried apple and baked ham with grilled pineapple rings.
She must have known that she had carried off a real tour-deforce when, in a wave of general compliments, Miss Kirkwood, the gaunt and crane-like assistant social editress, conferred on her the professional accolade of ‘imagination, my dear, originality, and excellent taste’. Helen accepted this commendation with a composed smile and a winning, self-deprecating little curtsy, but I knew that she really felt as if someone had pinned a medal to her breast.
I basked in my own pleasure for her. I saw her as the perfect hostess. I was gratifyingly conscious of how beautiful she looked. She was wearing a cyclamen chiffon cocktail dress with bare shoulders – the thin gold chain became an arrowhead pointing down to a slightly daring décolletage, and Sacco and Vanzetti were buried there behind a corsage of frangipani I had bought for her – and she wore her golden shining hair upswept and high in the Edwardian manner, which emphasized her tallness, her elegance, and the lovely bare shoulders. (Sandra Solomons, the week before, had given her the idea for the Edwardian hairstyle, but on the night of this party Sandra had changed to a smooth and extremely attractive page-boy, which, a week later, Helen also copied.) Gavin Turley, holding aloft a puce-coloured pickled onion on a toothpick, rather in the manner of a Regency fop with his quizzing-glass, stared intently at the wall above the lounge buffet, and said, ‘You know, that is a jolly good touch, that Vlaminck, I honestly have to admit it. It is, you know. In fact, everything is a jolly good touch, the house, this wonderful spread, our beautiful hostess, the hospitality. Simply superb! I must say you are doing fabulously well, Golden Boy, aren’t you?’ He looked at me mischievously.
My Brother Jack Page 28