by A L McCann
“I can’t face Winton or Mother again,” Paul moaned to Hamish.
“Winton?” Les repeated.
“My stepfather.”
“D’ya hear that?” Les tossed the question back to Roxanne.
“What of it?”
“Charles Winton, eh?” Les asked.
“That’s right.”
The streets had a moist, greasy sheen under the dim illumination that leaked out of the occasional window or dripped down from an overhead lamp. On Little Lonsdale Street a pair of turbaned Indians hauled crates of fruit down from a creaky wooden cart, unbothered by the solicitous murmurs of a woman slouched languidly on the corner of a nearby alleyway, flicking the ash of her cigarette into the gutter.
As they turned past her into the lane and entered the Arcadia Club, Les sidled up to Paul, as if he had something to confide. “And how d’ya get along with your old stepdad?” he asked.
“Right now I’d imagine I’m just about cut off.”
“Well,” Les said, “I’d be happy to be of some use to you, after all. I ain’t much of a writer these days, but I can still tell you a bloody good tale or two.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
The next morning the Argus ran a mercifully unobtrusive column under the headline “Bohemia at the Paris End”:
Our laws against the dissemination of indecent and obscene materials are not wanting in their severity. Vigilant policing along the main thoroughfares of the city has forced the sale and exhibition of pornographic material into crevices, where it is at least kept away from the unsuspecting and the gullible. Yet the dealers in this illicit trade don’t lack in ingenuity when it comes to finding new ways of presenting obscenity in the guise of art, education or science. We have long been aware of a certain museum flourishing in an obscure arcade of ill-repute under the banner of medical science, and a collection of wax models, thought to have been outlawed, which occasionally reappears in slightly altered costumes for a week or so at a time, before our law-makers can catch up. Last night obscenity again reared its ugly head, in the most respectable part of town. To call it the Paris end of Collins Street is all very well, but we don’t welcome the riot of the left bank as a result. The occasion was a so-called art show of paintings by Paul Walters, under the Mercantile offices in Little Collins Street. These crude, almost childishly constructed canvases represented women of the filthiest kind in various postures of lewdness. There was no artistic merit here of any kind, save the art of attracting the prurient interest of passing larrikins, and before long the exhibition itself had degenerated into a disgusting debauch that had passers-by eager to cross to the other side of the street. Mr Walters is, we are told, currently studying painting at the Gallery School, where we hope his work and his crude showmanship are the exception, not the rule.
Anna and Winton both had the displeasure of reading the article. They sat silently in the sitting room like a couple in grief as Ondine went up to look in on her disgraced brother. When she came back down she was visibly disturbed.
“Doctor, I think you’d better look at him,” she said, and took Winton’s hand, the quicker to get him upstairs. “He seems to be raving.”
Paul’s room smelt of alcohol and cigar smoke. He was sleeping uneasily, muttering weird, incoherent imprecations, his face was pale, almost bloodless, and his lips were cracked and showing the first signs of ulceration. The doctor looked worried. When Anna appeared at the door she flew to his side.
“He has a fever,” said Winton, feeling the heat on his forehead. “He’s also probably still drunk and I’d say his body is quite run-down.”
“What’s he saying?” asked Ondine, trying to make some sense of her brother’s mumblings. But nothing made sense, save the words “Mr Pussycat”, which he said distinctly a number of times.
“What on earth does that mean?” Ondine asked, pondering the possible corruption of some childhood story they’d been told, like “Puss in Boots” or “Tomcat Murr”. The words sounded dirty. They sullied the thought of the serene nights she had shared with her brother for so long. The sores appearing at the corners of Paul’s mouth also repulsed her and she shuddered at the thought of her own snow-white complexion being disfigured by those weeping, red scabs.
“He’s going to need rest,” said Winton.
“Mr Pussycat’s coming,” Paul muttered.
“Did you hear that?” said Ondine.
Neither Anna nor Ondine noticed that Winton had gone suddenly pale.
“He’s in no danger,” the doctor said again. “We should leave him for a few hours and see how he recovers when he wakes up. I’ll check on him every hour.”
“Poor boy,” said Ondine.
In the hallway, out of Ondine’s earshot, Anna clutched at Winton’s sleeve.
“Charles, those sores on his mouth. You don’t think …?”
“No I don’t, fortunately, though it’s too early to tell. He doesn’t have any other symptoms just yet, and I’ll bet they are merely the result of a fever and exhaustion. Nevertheless, I don’t think Ondine should be spending too much time in there.”
Later, as Paul’s sleep became lighter, he found himself lying in a dank, dark room with walls made of clay. Outside he could hear voices arguing and the sound of ceramic pots being smashed against the ground, one after the other. He thought he was in an eastern city – in India or Egypt – but he couldn’t be sure. He’d just come from the Arcadia Club and his sleep was full of the ghoulish theatre he’d seen enacted in that brothel, where whores performed scenes from the madhouse or the torture garden, inviting customers to act out their morbid fantasies in inspired flights of horror. When he heard a voice somewhere in the distance, soft at first, moving towards him through the streets, he knew he was asleep and that the voice was merely the sound of his own dreams. “Mr Pussycat’s coming,” the voice whispered, but it wasn’t one voice, it was many, a chorus of whispers in the darkness around him getting gradually louder until he could hear footsteps mounting the stairs and edging towards the door. His blood turned to ice. He was paralysed with terror and struggled to wake himself up as the steps got closer. The door moved ever so slightly. His body tensed at the certainty of an evil presence waiting behind it. With one last terrified effort he roused himself out of the nightmare, clawing desperately at the liminal state between sleep and wakefulness until he could feel himself slipping clear of its grip, falling back into himself, his heart still braced for the horror of the thing left brooding at the threshold of consciousness.
When he opened his eyes the room was quiet. The voices had stopped but the door to the clay cell was ajar. He could see the subtle shift in the density of the darkness, the trace of a light crawling up the stairwell from the street. Then something stirred in the room beside him. He tried to raise himself but couldn’t move. Little animal paws scampered across the floor. He tried to scream out but his mouth was shut tight. He tried to wriggle like a worm but it was as if his limbs were numb and he were strapped down to the mattress. The thing leapt onto the bed near his feet and its red eyes glistened at him. When the terror finally tore itself free of his body, he screamed and woke up in his own room in St Vincent Place. It was dark and outside, in the street, he could hear the hateful sound of cats hissing at each other, and imagined their tiny fang marks festering with infection in the matted fur.
Paul spent a week recovering his strength and his will to face the world following his humiliation. While he convalesced, a letter arrived from the Gallery School informing him of his expulsion on the grounds that he had undermined the standing of the institution.
Ondine was frequently at his side, but his sister’s pity convinced him that something between them had changed irrevocably. She hadn’t assumed a position of superiority, but it was clear to both of them he had humiliated himself by giving in to a vulgar sensuality that had no place in their clandestine encounters. He felt dirty in front of her, as if he still carried upon him the traces of Roxanne’s lip paint, or the stench of he
r body.
Ondine, infallible, unassailable, assumed the aura of the sacred in his eyes, while he, a pitiful, fallen creature, had given into the lure of the street, the obscene riot of the city, the sickening dance of pleasure and boredom in which drunks and whores courted each other in a nauseating parody of human intimacy.
When he had regained his energy he sold the furnishings he and Ondine had bought for the studio back to a bric-a-brac man in Flinders Lane. As he was clearing out, Perryman showed up with a note from Gines.
Dear Paul,
Sorry to inform that my employer has had a change of heart. I can’t think why. I’ve been called away on urgent business to Adelaide, where I’ve read the Melbourne papers and learnt of your great success. Reuben Gines
With Hamish’s help, Paul took his paintings, all six of them, to Spielvogel’s pawnshop on City Road, where he received a pound for the lot. It was like waking from a dream. The phantom of inspiration had fled and he found that the clarity with which he’d glimpsed the secret of the elemental in art was utterly delusional.
No one had told Paul that in the week or so of his convalescence, during which he was seldom out of his room, Ralph Matthews had become a regular visitor at St Vincent Place. He had been to lunch, taken Ondine on a stroll through the Botanical Gardens and had driven her to the Exhibition Building where, on a whim, they had seen the much–talked–about “Maori Village”, in which a group of dancers in straw skirts stamped out their rhythms to the polite amusement and disdain of the crowd.
The circumstances around Ralph’s reappearance at St Vincent Place, after such an unfortunate introduction, cast the young man in a very positive light. To begin with, Anna and Winton were both relieved that Paul’s public disgrace had not diminished his readiness to court Ondine. Neither of them suspected that Ralph was in fact present at the fiasco, and he, of course, was not about to mention it. The article printed in the Argus continued to trouble them all, and as there could be little doubt that Ralph and his father had read it, Anna and Winton believed his considerate avoidance of the subject to be very much to his credit.
As for Ondine, Ralph’s brazen reappearance both flattered her and impressed her as an act of courage. He confronted her with a subtle disregard that showed no trace of the nervous, sheepish demeanour that had made her laugh on the occasion of his first visit. In fact he was very direct, and though clearly solicitous, also curiously uninterested. He made out as if her beauty were a matter of little consequence, insinuated that he had better things to do than join her in the sitting room, and that he could do no more than tolerate a walk through the gardens at her side. Anna and Winton saw none of this. It was only visible to the mind’s eye of a young woman who was used to adoration and whose interest was aroused by one who treated her not as a goddess, but as an equal. A week of this careful neglect had her studying herself in the mirror, arranging her hair and carefully selecting the right dress in anticipation of his arrival. Then she’d sit downstairs and try not to notice the doorbell ringing, looking bored at the prospect of his appearance when Mrs Norris introduced him.
“Oh, it’s you,” she said, feigning surprise.
“Yes, don’t look shocked. Who else were you expecting?”
She shrugged, as if the question were not worth answering.
“Are you ready to go? If you don’t mind I’d like to pay my respects to your parents.”
“Be my guest.” She twirled the end of a long blond lock nervously about her finger as she stood up to led him into the yard at the back where Anna and Winton had taken to the cultivation of a rose garden.
Later, as they walked down Victoria Avenue towards the beach, she said, “You don’t much care for walking, do you?”
“Not much,” he said. “I find it boring.”
“Boring? How can trees and birds and people and the sky stretching over the water be boring?”
“It seems so petty to me,” he said with the hint of a smile. “Compared to the landscapes I’ve seen, it’s petty and small.”
“Am I boring to you as well?” she demanded.
“Of course not.”
“Then why do you keep coming to see me only to carry on as if you couldn’t care less?”
He laughed out loud.
“Why?” she demanded. “It’s true.”
“You simply aren’t used to being treated as an adult.”
“An adult?”
“The others worship you as if you were the totem of some primitive cult. Your brother and that Hamish, nice fellow that he is, have an idolatrous devotion. You’re an article of faith to them. Even Dr Winton is scared of you. Now you’re offended because I treat you with a dignity to which you’re not accustomed.”
“What a ridiculous thing to say.”
He said nothing.
“Absurd, and arrogant,” she insisted. “Do you think you are that much smarter than everyone else? Take me home now.”
“You’re capable of getting home by yourself, if that’s what you want.”
He kept walking towards the water. She followed sullenly.
They arrived at the beach in silence. Ralph looked out over the bay while Ondine fumed.
“You’re hardly the chivalrous type, are you?” she said dryly.
“We’re living in the twentieth century. Do you really expect a man to fall down on his knees in front of you, or write sickly, devotional sonnets?”
“Of course not,” she said, blushing under her wide–brimmed hat, which now threatened to fly off in the breeze.
“Good, because I’m not about to.”
“If you did I’d have you whipped with your own riding crop,” she said impetuously.
“And I’d do the same to any woman capable of tolerating such nonsense.”
“Well I’m glad we agree on that.”
Her heart was pounding as they walked awkwardly over the sand to the pier, where men threw their fishing lines into the water and lazily smoked while they waited for the tackle to start showing signs of life wriggling at the other end. An old man yanked a flathead out of the water, threw it down onto the wood and pushed his penknife through its head. The creature struggled as dark, oily blood leaked out over its wet, green scales. Ondine watched as he tugged the hook out of its mouth and dumped it into a bucket of suffocating fish.
“It seems so cruel.”
“I hate to think what you’d make of life on a farm,” Ralph said.
“I should hope I’ll never know. You’re not planning on marrying me and turning me into a squatter’s wife, are you?”
“The first time I saw my father slaughter a lamb it seemed so ordinary. He pulled it up and cut its throat and then let it simply bleed to death. To tell you the truth I didn’t think much of it. It was only after, when I went to look at the entrails and the head, that I felt sick.”
“Why are you telling me this?” she asked, squinting at him.
“Because if you’re to see the property you’ll need to know what to expect.”
She looked at him, bewildered.”I’m a city girl, Ralph.”
“You call this a city?”
They walked back towards the sand, each retreating into their own thoughts, yet each still reluctant to leave the other behind.
“Why don’t you come to the opera next Friday?” Ondine said.
“I don’t much care for it.”
“Oh, why not bend a little? You’re becoming a caricature. Besides, you’ll have the pleasure of ignoring me in front of a great crowd. Won’t that satisfy you?”
“I don’t think I’ve been ignoring you.”
“Well, you can treat me with your much vaunted dignity then, while others belittle me with their adulation.”
“I’m just not much cut out for high society.” He said this without a hint of self-deprecation, as if it were a point of honour.
High society, she thought to herself, picturing the house she’d grown up in. Brooke Street was only a few blocks from where they were standing. She co
uld easily lead him there and show him that she was, if not exactly a child of the slums, then at least from a less exalted background than he imagined. Would that impress him? Or would something in him rebel against the thought of those ramshackle cottages and the mad father who threw himself into the river?
She wondered what she was going to do with Paul. Before she could marry Ralph Matthews, as she was now almost sure she would, she’d have to drag herself clear of her brother. For the first time, she was conscious of just how much she had been longing to be free of Paul, just as she had longed to be free of the house on Brooke Street and the shadow of their father.
A matter of a few weeks had worked a dramatic change in her. Watching her brother stew in the mire of his creativity had convinced her just how necessary it was to wrench herself clear of him and embrace the world as it was, not as it was dreamt. Ralph Matthews looked at things with none of Paul’s idealism, and none of his childish illusions. What did Paul think he would get from her? At any rate, he had betrayed her to the lurid enthusiasms embodied in his paintings. She was not going to demean herself in the company of the whores who flaunted themselves in her brother’s imagination. She was not one of them, was not about to be reduced to the simple, throbbing thing – the crime, the breaking of a taboo, the ritual of transgression – she imagined Paul wanting from her.
Blutschande. The word had begun to weigh on her. It was heavy and crude in its directness. She wanted to forget it, to erase it from her mind for fear that it might leak some unctuous liquid that would stain her or drown her in her own shame.
If she were to see Ralph at the opera the following Friday evening she’d know that his presence was a concession to her. But when the night arrived she had to sit through the last act of Madama Butterfly, disappointed that she’d not seen him at the interval, during which she’d felt too trapped by Paul’s presence to go off searching for him directly. Her brother had regained his strength, but still looked haggard. He clung to her side, watching the crowd move around them, at once disdainful and paranoid. Ondine wanted to push him away. How she longed to be free of him, free of the contrived, demeaning role that now seemed to have been forced upon her. The way her brother simpered in his crude performance of old world manners and tastes was pathetic. Suddenly the uncomplicated directness of Australia seemed like a positive relief.