They both came to meet us at the door, and Peggy took the coats away while Gavin showed us into the main room, and this was just about the most extraordinary mix and clutter and congested mess of a room I had ever seen. It had once been stately, and probably had been used for receptions, because the moulded ceiling was superb and there were marble pilasters on either side of the fireplace and above the ornate carved mantel a huge and magnificent French Renaissance looking-glass in bad repair which gave back a mysterious muddy reflection such as one might get from a stagnant pond, and from the ceiling-boss still hung the heavy gilded chains which must have once supported a chandelier. The immensely tall windows were hidden behind tarnished velvet curtains hanging from sagging pelmets, and there were damp mildewy stains down one wall, while the plaster moulding was broken away, and alarming cracks in all four walls, and the carpets on the floor were very thin and faded out, like old flowers found pressed between the leaves of a book, and tattered at the edges.
The room was furnished in the most astonishing jumble of good antique pieces and second-hand junk which had been rather amateurishly painted, and there was a great quantity of chinoiserie, lacquered screens and cloisonné vases as tall as an adolescent child, and jade pieces and a gong, and books and gramophone records scattered everywhere, and a mad proliferation of bricà-brac, and a litter of papers and magazines, and more pictures on the walls than we had had in the front room at Avalon: great yellowed early Colonial landscapes of the Buvelot School, and dingy portraits staring out from their frames behind dark glassy varnish like night intruders peering furtively in through windows, and some works that were identifiably very good – a pair of lovely tiny Hilder water-colours, and a very good Elioth Gruner and a Heysen and a marvellous Tom Roberts – and in the very centre of all this incredible confusion was a gorgeous round table with a surface polished to the feel of soft old silk and on it were places set for four and white candles in Georgian candelabra.
‘I’m afraid it’s only the four of us,’ Gavin said apologetically. ‘To tell the truth, neither Peggy nor I really care much for big dinner parties. Or big parties of any sort, for that matter. Four’s always fun, I think.’
‘Oh, but that’s splendid!’ Helen said brightly, although the uneasiness seemed to cling to her, and she looked very slightly at a loss and not quite herself, or perhaps she was disappointed that there weren’t more people – possibly even Mr Brewster! – but I know his words gave me a sudden secret pleasure, because I saw it as proof that he did share my thoughts about our other sterile friends, and there was also this sense of privilege that it was only Helen and I who had been asked.
It was a very simple and wonderful dinner, a clear soup, and then a huge steak-and-kidney pie that was brought to the table in its blue enamel baking-dish, and a chocolate mousse to follow, and dry biscuits with Camembert and Gorgonzola. I remember being surprised at how heavy everything was, not the food, but everything else – the weight of the old thick china plates and the heavy crystal goblets and the solid Georgian silver and the massive, beautiful serving things, and there was even a great rich satisfying feeling of weight to the big square table napkins, which were of spotless white damask with the neatest tiny patches of darning here and there and stiffly heavy with starch.
The steak-and-kidney pie had a cockled crust with crimped edges and a big pastry rose right in the middle, and Gavin served the pie from his place at the table and passed the plates along for Peggy to add the potatoes and the broccoli, but before he began to serve he detached the pastry rose from the crust and put it carefully aside on his own plate and grinned rather sheepishly and said, ‘Excusez-moi. But I always do take that bit for myself.’ And then he cut down into the pie and the steam came and the rich baking smell, and it went inside my head like an ecstatic drug, and for a magical instant I was back in the old kitchen, with Mother and Jean and Marj all baking away on a Sunday morning and Dad with his violin out fiddling away at Irish jigs in a stink of flying resin.
It was one of those very warm and very easy dinner parties from which one recollects almost nothing of the conversation. I remember he encouraged Helen to talk a good deal about books from her experience as a librarian, and he contributed a little himself, but modestly, and when the meal was over Peggy and Helen took the dishes into the kitchen and then went into the bedroom to look at dresses and patterns, and we sat on at the table for a while smoking and talking about Munich and the Anschluss and the European crisis generally, and I asked Gavin if he really thought there might be war, and he said, ‘I can’t possibly see how it’s to be avoided.’
‘Helen seems perfectly convinced there won’t be,’ I said. She had been quoting something from some book during the meal.
‘But in this case Helen might conceivably be wrong,’ he said quietly. ‘Like a good many other people, I think she doesn’t want to believe there’ll be a war simply because she does not want a war. But I think it’s on the cards, you know. I really think it’s on the cards.’
‘And do you think we’d be involved?’
‘Who knows? England seems awfully dicky about it all. And after all we are a long way away.’ He began to push his chair back, and said, ‘You know, those two women will be stuck into those French fashion magazines for hours. Would you like to come into my sty and have a brandy?’
The study, because it was so much smaller, seemed even more of a clutter than the other room, if that were possible. Mostly, perhaps, because of Gavin’s incorrigible slovenliness. There were pictures on one wall above a rather crude-looking trestle worktable, on which was a portable typewriter and a goat’s nest of books and papers and folders and pipes and dust and note-books and things clipped together with bull-dog clips and overflowing ash-trays, and there were three waste-paper baskets under the table, but all three were stuffed with crumpled paper which had spilled out all over the floor. One never doubted that in this room no woman was ever allowed to tidy up. The three other walls were books from floor to ceiling.
‘Sorry about the mess,’ he said, without any real apology, and motioned me to one of two shabby but comfortable arm-chairs, very deep, with the leather covering worn to the softness of chamois. ‘It’s the only way I can work, really. All of it’s mostly my doing … I hammered up those shelves myself, but the confounded books keep swamping me. I get all these damned review copies, you see, and I do sell a lot to a tame dealer I’ve got in the Eastern Market, but there are always quite a few you feel you want to keep, and they mount up and … well, there the bloody things are!’
We had brandy, good brandy, Courvoisier I think it was, in big balloons, and I looked at the wall above his desk, at the paintings, a few bold, explorative abstracts of his own, not bad, and a good sanguine drawing of a nude which I recognized as old Barnaby Stanton’s, and another compelling oil-painting of a carnival scene, clowns and pierrots and masked figures, very vivacious and strong and forceful, which troubled me for a few moments, and then I said, ‘That’s one of Sam Burlington’s, isn’t it?’
He nodded. ‘Yes. A jolly good one, too, I think. How did you pick it?’
‘Well, I should know,’ I said. ‘He was my best friend at the Gallery. In fact I lived with him for a while. I ran away from home once, when I was beginning to write for the Post, and I went to live with Sam in that studio he had in Spring Street.’
He studied me with quizzical, amused interest. ‘You know you really do spring the most surprising things on people,’ he said. ‘So now we learn you ran away from home … you lived with old Sam Burlington! Bloody fantastic is all I have to say! Because I never knew this, you see. Sam and I were pretty good mates once … he grew up just around the corner from here, and we were at Wesley together before he went to the Gallery school.’
‘It’s a wonder I haven’t brought it up before,’ I said. ‘Because at times you remind me of Sam a bit … the way you talk, really … not always, but when you’re trying to get at somebody, like trying to explain me in the character of Gol
den Boy, for instance, the way you did at that party of ours. Then you talk just the way he used to.’
‘I wish to Christ I’d been able to paint the way he used to,’ Gavin said, staring up at the picture. ‘In me, alas, you find a frustrated Royal Academician.’ His eyes moved critically to his own paintings, still on canvas that was tack-spiked from the stretchers and just fastened to the wall with drawing-pins. ‘If I had had just a half of Sam Burlington’s talent ten years ago, you wouldn’t find me stuck there now in old Brewster’s dugout! Sam was the best of them all, you know. He should have won that Travelling Scholarship and shoved off to Paris. Bloody tragic that awful rotten business, and the way it all worked out for him.’
‘Oh, but I was involved in that, too,’ I said. ‘Right up to the neck! They even came down from Russell Street and practically put me through the third degree! They grilled me for hours about it.’ I sipped at the cognac in appreciative reminiscence. ‘Well, I knew the poor girl, of course, and I was Sam’s particular friend, but there was nothing much I could tell them. Nor would have.’
‘You don’t have any idea where he is now, or what the poor bastard’s doing?’ He looked again at the picture on the wall, this time rather sadly. ‘You never hear from him?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t think anybody does.’
I got up from the arm-chair and took my brandy across to the trestle table. Beside the typewriter there was a new copy of Faulkner’s The Unvanquished stuck with torn strips of paper as markers, and an unfinished review in the machine, and a stack of other review copies of books pushed to one side. I said, ‘I see you don’t work at a desk.’
‘Jesus, no!’ he said fervently. ‘I like a long table, plenty of room to mess up the way I want it. I made this one myself, you know,’ he said with some pride. ‘I knocked it up out of an old door I found in the stable-loft.’
‘I worked on a table like that before I got married,’ I said. And then I turned and said, ‘Gavin, while we’re just here together, there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you. One night at our place I overheard something you were saying to Helen.’
‘Yes?’
‘What you said, I think, was that there was no guarantee about me. Something to that effect.’
He looked up at me very carefully. ‘Yes?’ he said.
‘Well – well what did you mean by that?’
‘Just what I said, old cock. There is no guarantee about you. In proper context, of course, what I was saying was really to Helen. I was indicating that she would be unwise ever to entirely rely upon you … for you to stay put, was what I meant … for you to remain quite fixed in the role she seems to want for you.’
‘Oh, I see. I thought you were referring to me as a writer.’
‘Well, it would apply to that, too. They are part of the same thing, I think. Don’t you feel this yourself?’
‘Look, Gavin, I’m not even sure I know what you’re driving at,’ I said helplessly. ‘You’re saying in effect that I’m unreliable, or unstable, or … I don’t know …’
‘No – not quite.’ Again he gave me that long, considering look, and tugged at his lip and rubbed his finger against his big discoloured teeth. Then he seemed to come to some sort of a decision with himself and said, ‘Condon dislikes you, admittedly, but he talked to me about you some little time back, and he referred to what he called your “flashy unreliable brilliance”. All right, concede the prejudice, but Curt Condon’s no fool, you know.’
‘But this is what I said. Unreliable.’
‘Just wait a moment. To be perfectly candid, I’ve always thought there is a grave fallibility in you, David. And I told Helen as much, too, if you want to know. Your brilliance, I think – and you have brilliance, don’t make any mistake about that! – lies in the fact that you possess what I consider to be certain remarkable flairs. You have facility, adroitness, an almost unbridled imagination, a quite fantastic celerity in getting your stuff written. You know the old adage, “Don’t get it right, get it written!” Well, I think it would be a bit harsh to apply that to you, but at the same time you do, I suspect, have tendencies towards the slightly unscrupulous. Probably your best talent at the moment is for polishing things to the highest possible burnish. You really do keep coming in with the shiniest apples for the teacher!’
‘The teacher being,’ I said with an edge of tartness I could not quite control, ‘Mr Brewster?’
‘There you are, you see – another talent! Acumen. Great acumen!’ His grin softened it, but the remark still hurt a little. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘whatever is the name of that very odd bird – is it a creek-runner or something? – that seems to flit along on the surfaces of streams, gobbling up the midges and things as it darts about? No, wait a minute, better still … let us take those pond creatures – insects, are they, or beetles or bugs or what? – the tiny collywobble things that go skittering around on the surfaces of ponds. I remember them as a child when I’ve been yabbying. Well, do you know, David, I think you’re a bit like these collywobbles. You rely on surface-tension. If the surface-tension broke you’d drown! At least I think you’d drown. Now, that’s one of the troubles about you, you see – one invariably finds oneself hedging. Almost every time one finds oneself having to qualify the observation about you, because deep down one can never be quite sure. That’s rather strange, isn’t it?’
‘Well, all I can say is that without qualification it all sounds as if you don’t have much of an opinion of me as a writer.’
‘But are you a writer?’ he asked earnestly. ‘A real writer?’ He rubbed quite vigorously at his teeth. ‘I honestly think – no,’ he said at last.
‘Well, that makes two of you,’ I said with a note of bitterness. ‘It’s also Condon’s opinion. He told me to my face, months ago.’
‘Yes, but I believe Condon and I are talking about different things, really. What I mean is this – I think if you ever wrote a novel and I had to review it, I honestly believe I’d have to slam it pretty solidly.’
‘Then neither of us has any worries. I’m not writing a novel.’
‘No. Do you write anything at all now, David? Outside the office, I mean.’
‘There isn’t all that much time, is there?’
‘There never is all that much time, no.’ He uncoupled his awkward spidery limbs and rose gracelessly from the arm-chair, shedding a grey pollen of cigarette ash, and moved stoopingly to one of the bookshelves, and took down a slight small book and passed it across to me, rubbing the teeth again rather nervously. I opened it at the title page and read: D. H. Lawrence in Australia. A Critical Study. By Gavin Turley.
‘But I never knew you’d written a book!’ I exclaimed in surprise.
‘You are with the great majority, old boy. Very few people do know. It sold less than three hundred copies and was then remaindered for sixpence on the stalls in the Eastern Market. Rather a shame, really, because it has one or two quite interesting little things to say concerning Lawrence. Never mind. I’m working on something much more ambitious now,’ he said – rather ruefully, I thought. ‘I’m trying to do a critical biography of Henry Handel Richardson. Been at the bloody thing for two years already. But, as you say, there isn’t all that much time. Still, one has to have a go at these things. Take that copy along with you if you’d like to. I’d be overjoyed to have just one more reader.’
‘I’d love to have it. You’ll write something in it?’
‘I’ve written everything that is in it, old cock. Nothing to be added. And if it was just the usual crap to be scrawled on the fly-leaf, for you it would have to be something appropriately sinister like “Beware the ides of March” or “Mene mene tekel upharsin”. And that might put the mozz on you. Best if you just take it as it is, old boy, and admire the prose.’ He went back and awkwardly refolded himself into the arm-chair, limb after limb, like the same great spider returning to the centre of its web. ‘David,’ he said, ‘shall I sum it all up for you in one crisp sentence? I am safe,
and you are not.’
‘Far too crisp,’ I said. ‘You’ll have to elaborate.’
‘You have no guarantee, David. And I have. Simply that. After all, what is a guarantee? An insurance policy, a doctor’s diploma, a fixed superannuation, a certificate issued under the Pure Foods Act. Security. You see, I shall always play it for security and safety … for the cosy niche right next to Mr Brewster’s handsome office, for respectable advancement, for the occasional editorial praised in the House, for the just review, for the slim critical volumes appearing at intervals under my name, for the modest succès d’estime, for the gratifying half-inch in Who’s Who in Australia, for the intellectual warmth that I can wear like an undervest, next to my BA. And I can go on and on doing this and die at the end of it full of years and respect, like poor old bloody Farnsworth sitting at a desk staring at a spike, with rigor mortis setting in!’ He seemed to be smiling at himself with the irony that was usually in his eyes for others, and his hair had fallen across his forehead like a golliwog’s mop, and he rubbed at his moustache with a nicotine-stained finger.
‘And what about me?’ I asked him gently.
‘You are quite different,’ he said. ‘You have neither the desire for this, nor the credentials with which to accomplish it. In a way, David, you are like some queer, strange savage who has journeyed a long way from his own tangled wilderness, and you look down on the palisades of the little settlement, and you wonder how you will pillage it and what trophies you will find. You can be sure of nothing, of course, because you carry with you no guarantees. And we cannot be sure that you will ever try your wits against that particular stockade. It is, in fact, a thing we feel rather than a thing we know. We feel that you will have to go on and on in your own strange solitary way, too far from your own wilderness ever to go back to it, beating and bashing and cheating and striving towards some goal which up to now, I swear, you have never yet glimpsed!’ He gave me a quick, slightly embarrassed glance and squirmed deeper into his chair. ‘That’s why I sometimes think’, he went on in a tone which was deliberately more matter-of-fact, ‘it would really pay you to set yourself to this business of becoming a writer. In depth, I mean. A real writer. You see, one day that surface-tension will break, or you’ll just get fed up with being a pond-skimmer, the fastest collywobble on the pool. And you’ll have to learn some other way of getting around. Or you really will drown!’
My Brother Jack Page 30