‘I’m glad you’re enjoying it,’ I said.
‘I am also admiring it,’ he said. ‘Brand-new house, guests guzzling a feast lavish enough for Lucullus himself, a gorgeous wife, this faultless décor – even including a not at all commonly appreciated Vlaminck – these prismatic pickled onions, a glittery little bawd of an MG parked out there in the drive next to that sad broken butter-box of a Baby Austin which is the best the poor old Turleys can ever run to. Great stuff, Golden Boy! Great stuff!’ There was the same amused, faintly ironic gleam in his chestnut eyes as when he would slump back in his chair and spill cigarette ash all over himself and tolerantly listen to Helen’s observations on politics.
‘Here, this one is emerald-green,’ Helen said, presenting him with another onion on a toothpick. ‘It’s only for the effect. The dyes are flavourless. They really all taste the same. Tell me, why do you call David “Golden Boy”?’ she asked. (She always referred to me as David now, never Davy any longer.)
‘Why? But, heavens above, why not? That’s what he is, isn’t he? Ask anyone at the Post.’
‘I’m asking someone from the Post. I’m asking you.’
‘Well, simply look around you. Study your own mirror, my dear Helen, if it comes to that. Or observe the chap himself. Look at him. A Simpson suit from Henry Buck’s if ever I’ve seen one. At more casual times Daks with Harris tweed, suède shoes, hand-knitted ties. Regard this fellow as he swings jauntily to the office each day, with the tiniest wing of a humming-bird in the band of his snap-brim Borsalino, the raglan topcoat, the pigskin brief-case, the smell of success he carries with him like an aura, that indefinable air of the coming man. Golden Boy, of course. Without a shadow of a doubt!’
‘I don’t see you getting around in reach-me-downs,’ I said good-humouredly. He wore all the same things himself, but carelessly, even sloppily, and with an air that I had always envied.
‘Ah, but you do not see the shining elbows, the careful darnings, the cobbled cuffs, the baggy knees, the gravy stains that never quite come out. It is the difference, old man, between your MG and my Baby Austin.’
‘Don’t change the subject,’ said Helen. ‘I want to know who calls David “Golden Boy”.’
‘Well, everybody calls him it, although to tell you the truth it was I who devised the name. You don’t like it, my dear?’
‘I prefer David. And you haven’t explained why they call him this.’
‘Simply because he has merited it. It’s justified. He is Golden Boy. You see, Helen, I think you would have to know the newspaper game to understand, but I’ll try to explain. It is a profession in which many are called but few are chosen, and even among the few there is always the one. On each and every newspaper this law will inexorably apply. Because, you see, on any newspaper you will find there has to be a Mr Brewster, and there always has to be a Golden Boy for the Mr Brewsters just as there has to be a Susannah for the Elders. My Biblical allusion I like, for there is in this inflexible law of the Golden Boy something of the imperious and unassailable quality of the rigid codes laid down by those ancient, stern prophets of the desert.’
‘Oh, shut up, Gavin, you silly bugger!’ I protested, laughing. ‘You’ve been whacking those gins too hard.’
‘You won’t stop him,’ Peggy Turley said affectionately. ‘The man is in spate. When he talks, he talks.’
‘If I am blind,’ said Gavin, ‘it is not from alcohol. More likely it is from the prismatic rainbow shimmer of the pickled onions.’
‘I’ll never touch ’em unless I’ve got a packet of those scented cachous in my pocket,’ said Wally Solomons. ‘Sandra can’t stand it when my breath smells.’
Sandra, glassy-eyed and inattentive, stared blankly through the smoke from a heliotrope cigarette.
‘I don’t mind ’em with beer,’ said the cousin from the Western District. ‘Not these little cocktail ones, but the big brown ones you get in those glass jars in the pubs.’
‘Yes, well, may I be allowed to continue my little dissertation to Helen?’ asked Gavin politely. ‘I was about to point out certain salient significances concerning David’s role as Golden Boy. This is what he is, and this is what he must inescapably continue to be. The point, you see, which I had intended to make is that on a newspaper there is also, among those who are above us, always Romantic Man and Practical Man. In our case, we have Mr Bernard Brewster representing the former, and Mr Curtis Condon representing the latter. Now, Mr Condon would, I think, have his happiest moment if he were carrying through the streets of Melbourne the head of David Meredith on a pike. Mr Brewster, on the other hand, regards this same David Meredith as the apple of his eye. He sees in him an Oliver Twist, a David Copperfield, a Pip. And Mr Bernard Brewster is, after all’ – he bowed slightly in mock reverence – ‘the editor-in-chief of the Morning Post.’
‘Aren’t you jealous then?’ Helen asked.
‘Jealous! I adore this brumby of a husband of yours. I study his progress with the same intensity and enthralment and excitement as Koch or Ehrlich studied the behaviour of bacilli under their microscopes. Oh, one has certain little wistful regrets about it, yes. All of us. But we make our obeisances, bow ourselves out, climb into our failing Baby Austins and chug-chug somewhat spiritlessly to our shabby little dens, and there perhaps the more sensitive among us may shed a single silent tear for languished hopes and dusty careers that have been filed away.’
‘Gavin just happens to be the best writer the Post has,’ I said, turning in explanation to the others, although, apart from a persisting interest in Helen, none of them seemed very attentive. ‘What he is —’
‘Without question,’ Gavin agreed cheerfully. ‘Certainly I am the better writer. But you are Golden Boy.’ He fixed his gentle brown gaze on Helen. ‘My dear Helen,’ he said, ‘have you never paused to consider what an extraordinary partner it is that you have chosen for this game of life? Do you realize that in this terribly chummy, hand-picked, gentlemanly club we have which is called the Morning Post Literary Staff, this husband of yours is the outsider, the maverick? Last month, on the day of the public schools boat races, here were all the young gentlemen in their old school ties, and wearing their partisan silken favours and rosettes from their lapels almost to their navels – dark-blue for Grammar, sky-blue for Geelong, red-and-black for Xavier, and so forth – and I must admit that I rather loathe this sort of thing and therefore waived the purple-and-gold of my alma mater in favour of my black-and-blue tie of The Shop – who were not rowing, of course – and here was David in the middle of this ridiculous schoolboy Mardi Gras being sneered at by all these privileged young pissants because no rosette was pinned to his lapel, and the tie he was sporting seemed to me to be of the Coldstream Guards but was probably only the stripy colours of his University of Hard Knocks.’
‘Oh, do shut up, Gavin!’ I pleaded.
‘Why should I shut up? The point I am about to make is vital. Here am I, five years older than your husband, Helen, and tucked away in Mr Brewster’s back room with old files and the Encyclopaedia. Under intellectual duress, as it were. You might even say I am old files and the Encyclopaedia Britannica! The years I spent at Wesley College were valueless except in that they took me to the University. The years at The Shop gave me nothing except a worthless BA and the privilege of being thrown into the University lake on one occasion in defence of the statements of Bertrand Russell. David here spends the same years in his University of Hard Knocks, in dreary dockland, comes in like Oliver Twist, and before you can say Jack Robinson, here he is Golden Boy. Remarkable! Don’t you agree? Yet – would you believe this? – on this day when he is being baited by these nincompoops in the reporters’ room, I find this chap in the toilet on the third floor chewing his lip and almost at the point of tears, because – isn’t this fantastic? – because he feels himself slighted and shamed!’
‘But David never told me about this,’ said Helen.
‘Yes, and I remember what you said to me,’ I said, feeling
myself choking up, knowing I had to tell about it. ‘I remember your very words. You said, “David, old cock, go and have a look at a Test cricket match. England and Australia. Observe the English team, the way the Gentlemen emerge from one exit, the Players from another. Glance at the scoreboard. The names of the Gentlemen are there with their initials, the poor Players have only their surnames. The game begins. And it is the Gentleman who is back in the pavilion for a duck, the Player who knocks up that double century. And remember also, old boy, that Australian teams do not have Gentlemen and Players, only players, without a capital P.” That’s exactly what you said, and I’ve never forgotten it because —’
‘I think it’s you, old boy, who is getting a bit pissed,’ said Gavin, and Helen looked at me and said, ‘He never told me a word about this,’ and I turned away and said, ‘I’d better mix up some more of that gin squash.’
But he really was in spate, because as I was squeezing the lemons he was still going on about it to Helen, and what he was saying came to me disjointedly through the conversation of the others, who had long since lost interest in the discussion, but I remember him saying, at the end of it:
‘We may respect him, admire him, even be intrigued and puzzled by some mysterious fallibility that is in him … it may be this, you know, that makes us not envy him … but I’ll tell you one thing you should know and always remember, Helen. There is no guarantee in him, my dear. There is no guarantee.’
Family visits were very different from the gay, glittering little parties Helen loved to give, but she devoted to them a formal attention which was impressive. Being quite secure in her ownership of me, she was friendly, polite, amusing, and hospitable – even especially considerate to any of the children who were brought – and she would go to almost as much trouble in the preparation of drinks and savouries, or in seeing that the house was at its best – as for the Saturday night parties attended by our real friends.
There was awkwardness in these visits, of course. Dad would fidget around, sitting bolt upright on what he clearly regarded as a very strange chair, looking as if he didn’t know what to do with the ash on his cigarette. He could never quite bring himself to meet Helen’s eyes directly. He would study the exotic savouries that were offered to him with a dubious look, as if he suspected strychnine. After ten minutes or so of this discomfort he would take himself off and prowl morosely around the garden, poking at the seedlings, or he would call me out to talk about the car. Mother would stay on in the lounge, knitting furiously, and smiling with a blank eagerness at Helen, and nibbling at things that were offered to her and then nodding her head quickly in automatic approval, but there were times when I would catch her warily eyeing the furniture or the pictures, as if she half-expected some unfamiliar object to suddenly snarl and spring at her. They called only on Sunday afternoons and never stayed for very long.
They were impressed by my new surroundings, yes, there was no doubt about that – Helen set out, I have thought since, to impress people rather than to please them – but I always had an uncomfortable feeling myself that Mother was forever awaiting an opportunity to get me away somewhere by myself and quickly to whisper something to me very urgently from behind her hand, but I could never decide what it might be that she would want to say or to know.
Although Jack and I remained the best of friends – our quarrel at Mother’s birthday party was never mentioned again, and we would meet often in the city to have a few beers together at one of the pubs – he visited the house in Beverley Grove only once that I remember. He came alone, because Sheila had just been delivered of the new baby. Another girl. ‘I read in a magazine somewhere that it proves the male dominance,’ he said, with a rather wry grin. ‘Ah, well,’ he said philosophically, ‘if at first you don’t succeed … They reckon even now I hardly give the missus time to get her clothes back on,’ he said cheerfully.
When he arrived at the house I was disappointed that Sheila was not with him, not only because of my fondness for her, but because I had rather wanted to show things off to her, but Jack had not been in the house for very long before I began to change my mind about it. Jack examined everything with great interest and a certain curiosity, but he made no bones about the fact that he was far more taken by my MG than by any single aspect of Helen’s home-making.
In fact, when we were sitting together in the lounge just before he left he suddenly began to chuckle and I asked him what the joke was and he said, ‘Nothing. It’s just this funny furniture. To tell you the honest truth, it gives me the creeps a bit. I get the feeling that if I take my eyes off it for a jiffy it’ll just get up and start walkin’ around the room on its own!’
We all laughed at this, but I could see that Helen was not amused.
Even so, the first misgivings I ever felt about my new condition arose not from these family visits but from my developing friendship with Gavin Turley.
It occurred to me quite suddenly one day that the Turleys were the only ones in our new gay social group whom I really liked, and the only ones who interested me, and I began to wonder what the connection was between them and the dull Solomons couple, or the Farleys, or the infinitely boring Justin Byrne. The thought, once implanted in my mind, was quite insidious. I would find myself, at the early stages of some soirée or other, feeling flat and bored and empty, and I would know that it was because I was only waiting for the Turleys to arrive. And the trouble about this was the Turleys were the least ubiquitous of our guests, because it was not often that Gavin and I would have our nights off together, especially at week-ends, because he was at that time, among his other specializations, dramatic critic for the paper.
His absences from the group began more and more to unsettle me, and this would lead to an increasing impatience with Helen’s other friends and the pompous inanities or the repetitive observations about nothing at all that passed for social chit-chat among them. Gavin Turley, I began to realize, was the only one among them who had any conversation, or any ideas about things, or anything to contribute, and even though his intellect was considerably sharper than mine, it began to be equally clear to me that I had nothing in common with them either! Why then did we go to all this bother? Why were Helen and I acting as some sort of social solder to make an amalgam of such utterly incompatible people? What the hell, I began to ask myself in the moods of irritation and depression that were coming more frequently, was it all about?
It was quite some months, now that I come to think of it, before the Turleys asked us to their own place to dinner, although before this they had entertained us occasionally in restaurants in town.
They had their separate apartment in one wing of the huge old dilapidated Turley mansion in Toorak, which had been built some seventy years before when old Sir Luke Turley, in his retirement, decided on something a little more substantial than the Colonial residencies which, in various pink sections of the Imperial map, he had for decades inhabited.
We arrived there in the appropriateness of a late afterglow, and went through great creaky wooden gates hung from square stone pillars and into a dusky jungle of a garden with black thickets of azaleas and the biggest rhododendrons I ever saw in my life until years later when I looked across at the crimson forests buttressing Tibet from the Kathmandu side, and there was a weird tangle of gigantic creepers and those huge leafy things that we always called elephants’ ears and fat cacti standing on enormous thick hairy prickly stems like mammoths’ legs. Curving through this dense wilderness of darkness and damp, decaying smells there was a crunchy gravelled carriage-drive scattered with fallen leaves, leaves that were long and stiff and curled-up and cardboardy, which had dropped from two tremendous Moreton Bay fig-trees that blocked out all the gloomy sky above us, and the leaves in the evening breeze were moving around with a dry, scaly, scurrying sound.
It was quite a walk up to the massive old entrance with the name of the house, Bangalore, chiselled in stone above a heavy, panelled door which had massive lion-knockers and big brass be
ll-pulls which, coming after the tangled garden, sharply reminded me of the old house where Helen had lived. This one, although in much the same condition of disintegration and neglect, was a stone house that had once been very grand and so it had more solidity and dignity, of course, and even a sense of some continuing splendour in its decay. But Helen must have been struck by much the same feeling, and perhaps felt an uneasiness about it, because this was one of the few occasions I remember when her cool poise seemed to be shaken by a disturbing breath of something, like superstition or an almost atavistic fear.
Or it might have been the Turleys’ apartment itself that unsettled her. Their section of the old house comprised one huge high-ceilinged room which they used as a combined living-room and dining-room, and a small kitchen, and a bathroom which had cracked porcelain fittings with blue Victorian floral patterns in the glaze, and one of those antiquated geyser bath-heaters which stood threateningly at one end like an upended Napoleonic cannon and which burned wood chips, and the kindling was there alongside it in a clothes-basket of battered unravelling cane, and on the linoleumed floor there was a drift of spilt wood-dust and tiny chips, and a brownish-yellow stain ran down the side of the big enamel bath-tub where the water from the geyser dripped. If it went on, one thought, a stalagmite would form. There was also a study for Gavin and two bedrooms. (It was some years later before I was really able to understand how it was that two people like Gavin and Peggy, who were so obviously devoted to each other, should want to sleep in separate bedrooms.)
My Brother Jack Page 29