The Everlasting Secret Family

by Frank Moorhouse

  Frank Moorhouse was born in Nowra, New South Wales. He has lived for many years in the Sydney suburb of Balmain, a place he has affectionately fictionalised in his writing. He has worked as a journalist in Sydney and as an editor of a number of country newspapers.

  As well as seven published books of stories he has written fiction and commentary of Australian life for magazines and newspapers in Australia and overseas, including Germany and France. He has also scripted several films including Between Wars and The Everlasting Secret Family.

  Nobody is who or what they seem to be. . .

  Within these four stories, each complete in itself but together creating a reverberating atmosphere, and the suggestion of unrevcalcd connections, there are all manner of intriguing secrets.

  The erotic fantasies and activities of the Proprietor of Darkness, Irving Bow, dreaming of a decadent future from the project ion-room battlements of his dream castle, the opulent new cinema in an Australian coastal town of the thirties, striving for its respectability.

  The hidden-away letters, chronicling the disintegration of the security dreams of a Dutch husband and wife into three secret and separate tragedies.

  The concealed rape of Cindy by the “Redfem Delegation” at a recent academic conference.

  And a politically scandalous “erotic memoir in six parts”.

  The stories abound with secret brotherhoods, with foreigners defying all attempts at assimilation, with strangers whose only real identification marks are the secrets they carry.

  The Everlasting Secret Family created a milestone when first released in 1980; it is now a major feature film.

  Also by Frank Moorhouse in this series:

  Futility and Other Animals

  The Americans, Baby

  The Electrical Experience

  Conference-ville

  Tales of Mystery and Romance

  Forty-Seventeen

  Other titles by the author:

  Days of Wine and Rage

  Room Service

  State of the Art

  A Steele Rudd Selection

  THE

  EVERLASTING

  SECRET

  FAMILY

  FRANK MOORHOUSE

  All c haracters in this book are entirely fictitious, and no reference is intended to any living person.

  ANGUS & ROBERTSON PUBLISHERS

  Unit 4, Eden Bark. 31 Waterloo Road, North Ryde, NSW, Australia 2113, and 16 Golden Square, London WIR 4BN, United Kingdom

  This book is copyright.

  Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may he reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publishers.

  First published in Australia

  by Angus A. Robertson Publishers in 1980

  This Sirius paperback edition 1988

  Copyright © Frank Moorhouse 1980

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-publication data.

  Moorhouse, Frank, 1938-

  The everlasting secret family.

  ISBN 020715970X.

  I. Title.

  A823.3

  Printed in Australia by the Australian Print Group

  CONTENTS

  Pacific City

  The Proprietor of Darkness

  The Etiquette of Deception

  The Crying Organ

  The Town Philosophers’ Banquet

  The Illegality of the Imagination

  The Science Club Meets

  The Dutch Letters

  The Hidden-Away Letters (1)

  The Hidden-Away Letters (2)

  Some Background to Dirk’s Letters

  Why the Dutch Airforce was in Australia

  The Mitchell Bomber

  The Broome Incident

  C.E.M. load

  Toc H

  Man the Unknown

  An American Tea

  Romano’s

  Imogene Continued

  Dance of the Chairs

  Yesterday Stone Age. Today Space Age

  Stockholm Syndrome?

  Yes. the Stockholm Syndrome, I Think

  Writing Yourself a Proper Narrative

  Only the Interaction of Complex Things

  Only the Interaction of Confusing Things

  A Cat Called Telosis

  Audition for Male Voice

  Epilogue

  Notes

  Fourth World

  “Thank God. White Man”

  Syphilis and the New World

  Dreams of Idyllic. Exotic Cultures

  Okot p’Bitek

  Aversive Racism

  The Stockholm Syndrome

  Cindy’s Age

  Legendary Lovers

  “Only the Interaction of Complex Things”

  Old Vadim’s

  Iohn Henry Challis (1806—1880)

  Horne’s Rule on Doing Conferences

  Eric Bottral at the Conference

  Hard Cases

  The Match Game

  A cross the Plains. Over the Mountains, and D own to the Sea

  The Everlasting Secret Family

  I. The Bad Dog and the Angel Custodio

  II. The Letters

  III. The Little World Left Behind

  IV. A Map for the Child

  V. The Gift of a Son

  VI. The Wand and the Cup (and the Magician)

  PACIFIC

  CITY

  THE PROPRIETOR OF DARKNESS

  What was worrying Irving Bow, proprietor of the Odeon Cinema, (apart from the possibility of a child blabbing its mouth off) was the way that conversation was crumbling to dust.

  He had his talks with Backhouse, the newspaper editor, through a bottle of whisky but these were not the problem, even when they talked in whisky arrangement, trying out meanings on each other sometimes before they’d got it right in their own heads. The words going out and around the bottle and back again, sometimes it being interesting to hear one’s words again as they resounded around the bottle. Sometimes repeating the same thing then, only with better words and maybe the second time being understood by the other. Sometimes they completed each other’s sentences or said the second sentence of the other’s conversation. Sometimes Backhouse completed Irving’s sentences in a much better way, although sometimes along altogether different lines of meaning. But he usually let it go and went with the new meaning contributed by Backhouse, wherever it went. Sometimes the way they misunderstood each other was more interesting than what they’d meant to say. So the conversation was sometimes tricked along by misunderstandings and non sequiturs and they found themselves in drunken country.

  No, it wasn’t all this that worried him. This was all fine. What worried him were the conversations which he had around the town and at which he was considered very good, having the right thing to say in public chat. But the public chat had crumbled to dust in his mouth and ears and he felt at functions, jumble sales and carnivals that he was in a sandstorm.

  He had recently stood working the Sesquicentenary Chocolate Wheel before a crowd and had lost his words. His attention had become fully engaged by the refusal of his mouth to go on speaking and by a white rushing silence in his ears. He had felt like remaining silent, like remaining fully engaged by the sensation and perhaps going wherever it might lead—whatever might follow from not speaking again. He had stood there with one hand on the chocolate wheel, what he had just said to the crowd or what he should say next wiped from his mind. He was fallen, down in the crevice between words. But he had instructed himself to return to the chocolate wheel, had screamed an order to himself to come back to the crowd, to leave the rushing white sil
ence or be lost down there forever. The words had fumbled back, he had regained his patter, and the faces of the crowd had changed from puzzlement, from their abatement, and become smiles again as he spun the wheel with a strong flick of his hand, a flick full of the old flair. He spun the wheel. “One fat hen,” he cried, “one fat hen.” And “Sixty-six—clickity-dick.” And gave the prizes with a flashing smile.

  It was the how-are-you and are-you-well which were the scorpions in his ears and how-much-I and isn’t-it-a-pity and isn’t-it-a-scandal and isn’t-it-a-shame and isn’t-it-an-outrage. The-authorities-should-do.

  Irving thought that most of the things that the townspeople “knew” were wrong and this had occurred to him on and off over the years and had ground away at all his conversations with them. Made them sand and grit.

  He knew the town was wrong about the true cause of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, which was perfectly explicable in scientific terms.

  Whether the ice age was returning.

  Whether the weather was changing.

  That the blind do not smoke because they cannot enjoy the sight of the smoke curling from the cigarette.

  Irving had built the Odeon Cinema—a magnificent cinema in every way, even by city standards—with his mother’s money.

  It was hoped that one day Pacific City would be built and the Odeon would be the centre of public life in Pacific City and the Golden Age that it would bring.

  In the meantime it served an ill-mannered audience of townsfolk in a town that never seemed to be finished.

  The Odeon was a cinema waiting for a city.

  Pacific City was pegged out, a race course had been constructed, a town park and gardens allotted, street signs erected, a university site marked out. People had bought lots. They waited now for the railway link with the capital. No houses had yet been built. But the railway station site was marked and the name Pacific City erected.

  Backhouse, the editor, said he would not wait for Pacific City but would one day pack his bags and go to Fleet Street. Irving said he would wait—and let the city come to him.

  Irving wanted to know how a town could believe so many wrong things and still survive.

  He had come to the conclusion that for a town, whether something was correct or not didn’t matter.

  The world did not work by facts and he had told the Science Club this in an outburst and they had disagreed with consternation.

  Words and conversations, he privately thought, were just noises in the jungle.

  His Odeon Cinema was a direct contraposition to the jungle, was a monument against the jungle. And he saw it too as a monument against silly conversation. For the cinema was a place to be quiet. Like a gallery of art or a library.

  As he sat there then, listening to the deputation from the combined church ladies, he found himself hearing the sandstorm ease, heard the wind drop and began to pay attention.

  The blah finished and he heard Thelma McDowell, a good-looking young woman, say “delicate matter”.

  Thelma McDowell blushed, the sandstorm cleared and he leaned forward on to the desk, smiling his white citizen smile, saying “My door is always open,” and the dragon within him crouched.

  If a child had blabbed they would have called the police. He began to listen, feeling confidently immune seated there behind the inlaid folding desk supported by two moulded elephants. The opulence of the Odeon overwhelmed and out-ranked anything in the town and had dazzled it. It had become his embassy.

  Whenever he walked the passages, aisles, stairways, private smoking rooms, backstage rooms, underground passages, the secret bookcase doorway, he felt immune and fortified.

  No, they had not come because of a child blabbing.

  He had, glancing at their faces, probably pleasured children of the women present, and he looked at the pleasant faces, trying to fade back their faces, back down the years to their youth. The child, though, carried within its face, its body, the beauty of both its parents, refound there as it withered away in the parents. And children were one gender.

  “We,” they went on, “have reports . . .”

  Could they send him into exile?

  “. . . that in the darkness of the cinema . . .”

  You, Irving Bow, did wittingly and with aforethought. How would they ever understand the shy knowing and accepting smile of a young person who came to him.

  “. . . young people in the cinema are exposed to moral danger . . .”

  Not only exposed, the young people relished it, of all the places in the town the cinema was a place of dark freedom and “another place” not of the town.

  “. . . spooning which awakens the passions and could initiate immorality, could . . .”

  Could? Irving was disappointed. Oh that. Yes. Could. Oh that sort of thing. But, ladies, there were many secret rooms within the Odeon, behind the screen and underground, where more, much more than spooning went on, in costume and to the beating of drums. The leather tom-toms. The oiled bodies.

  Irving often watched through the slot of the manager’s office, watched the petting couples.

  Saw the timid hands become hot, driven and searching, enter under sweaters and into the milky softness of the breasts and the hardness of the nipples, and up skirts through underwear to the wetness, the hairy wetness between the legs.

  Oh that.

  “I well appreciate,” he said.

  He had told June, the usherette, a vamp, that it was against the international requirements of good cinema presentation to shine torches on petting couples.

  She had giggled. June knew all about him and was not treating him with the correctness due to an employer. Last year they had played hide and seek in the empty darkened cinema, fondled and frolicked. June, now sixteen, said she was “bored” with games. June was becoming modest and saying things the way her mother might say things. “The weather is so trying.”

  It is the darkness, they said. “Could the lights, some of the lights, be left on?”

  “No, it is not scientifically possible for the lights to be left on during the screenings.”

  Parents never accepted that the lasciviousness of their children was destined for strangers.

  However, he told them, he would keep an eye on things.

  How good of Mr Bow.

  He pushed the buzzer and Mrs Turner, the cleaner, brought the cakes and tea on a traymobile, wearing a waitress cap he had found for her, and he presented them with autographed copies of Stars of the Screen.

  What a lovely, Mr Bow. You think of.

  She had the cap on incorrectly.

  Not every day. The mothers.

  A tour of inspection then?

  And what are these rooms? These are the dressing rooms for live performances which are not held “excepting my own live performances”. They laughed as he spoke the truth in a way that it would not be understood.

  Behind those doors, he told them, are a wonderland of masks, costumes, jewellery and stage makeup.

  Ohhhh.

  Unfortunately, ladies, he apologised, he could not open the door for them to see. Would not reveal the secrets of the art. He apologised for the broken statue of Thalia awaiting replacement, for he. liked all things to be whole, undamaged, working and painted.

  “It is really the darkness which is behind our complaint, Mr Bow,” they said. “That young people should sit together in the dark. Can nothing be done?”

  “Nothing.”

  Matter of home training.

  Decline in bible reading.

  Restraint of animal passions.

  Adequate outlets.

  Occupied hands.

  Mischief.

  Unbridled. Without bridles.

  Who think of nothing else.

  He looked fondly at the women in their hats who had ridden out of the sandstorm to speak to him of such things. Bedouins. In young middle age, policing the town with gossip and the cracking of whips. Competing with each other for ultimate decency, any two of them together alw
ays rating themselves more decent than those about whom they gossiped. Soon they would crack into the interesting shapes of old age, crack into stone grotesques to decorate the moral wall around the town, turn into little monuments as well as nerve cases, shrews and hags, but still operating the machinery of manners and politeness, still reprimanding and deploring and working for the eradication of the hunger of the flesh from which he, Irving, would not mind, at times, a respite.

  He said, “About the darkness, ladies, I can do nothing.”

  And then he said, plainly and crisply across the foyer at them, more as a verbal whip to send them on their way into the sandstorm, “I think myself that the young should be permitted the delights of the flesh.”

  But only sand came back into his face.

  You said, Mr Bow? Oh quite right and something must be done to stamp. Our best.

  “About the darkness, ladies, I can do nothing.”

  He was, after all, the guardian of darkness. The elimination of chinks of light was part of the cinema business. His art.

  The ladies left in a sandstorm of thank you and so kind and what did he say about flesh and very fruitful, and then were out in the daylight and found themselves looking in shop windows.

  THE ETIQUETTE OF DECEPTION

  Irving had the lights raised and the projector stopped. The film died away and its frantic life became still. Out oh the stage he faced the cinema audience, mostly children, caught in the lights, held mid-fantasy, interfered with. He did not speak immediately but stood, in his dinner suit, holding and basking in their hurt attention, smiling his white popular smile behind which lay the bad, brimstone breath of a swishing dragon.

  “I am Irving Bow, manager and proprietor of the Odeon Cinema,” he said, stating a fact known to all present. “Now that we have this motion picture temple in our town,” (cheers) . . . he reprimanded them with a silence, looking away coldly until they quietened, “. . . now that we have a motion picture temple, let us learn a few of the rules of cinema etiquette, the prescribed ceremonial, shall we? You do not, firstly, and this is the reason for my interruption of the screening tonight, you do not address remarks to the characters in the film-play. You do not warn heroes and heroines of their peril . . .”