‘It’s rather late to go looking for board, isn’t it?’ she asked. ‘Call round and see me tomorrow.’
‘I want a bed for tonight,’ I persisted, then with a gesture I added impatiently, ‘I’m all right. Take another look at me.’
The quality of a smile touched her face for a moment and she said, ‘I have a small single room opening out on to the driveway. Come in and have a look at it.’
The room suited me and I moved in gratefully for I was, as Mrs Shrink suspected, a man on the run. I was fleeing from Mrs Edward Bloomfield.
Mrs Edward Bloomfield owned an exclusive boarding house in Brunswick Road with accommodation for four gentlemen of excellent character, preferably studying for a profession. They must come from good homes.
This was how the advertisement in the Age put it. I read it as one would a news item announcing the birth of a rhinoceros at the zoo. I would visit the zoo under such circumstances and gripped by a similar spirit of curiosity I presented myself at Mrs Edward Bloomfield’s home the next evening, conscious of my lack of qualifications but determined to brazen it out.
The house was a double-fronted brick house with a tiled veranda and a heavy door encrusted with petals of old paint the edges of which had shrunk up and away from the wood. A cast-iron goat’s head with a swinging beard formed the door-knocker. I beat a tattoo with the beard, then gazed at the goat in silence.
Mrs Edward Bloomfield opened the door. I was immediately transfixed with a look from eyes that never blinked and I stood for a moment meeting it.
‘You advertised for boarders?’ I said.
She was wearing a V-necked blouse and her full breasts were partly visible. Her dry hair was curled into pale ring-e ts that clothed her head like a cap. It was a cap I felt should be hanging in the dusty corner of a museum beside the feather bags of savages. The hair that comprised it had long since died under the attack of lotions and tints and to me it now suggested primitive man’s ingenuity rather than the crown of a woman.
‘Come in,’ she said and I stepped inside.
Mrs Bloomfield led me into a sitting-room dominated by a plaster statue of a woman in flowing garments carrying an amphora upon her shoulder and here she questioned me in the manner of one conducting a friendly conversation. She just wanted some details of my background, she said. The three gentlemen boarders with whom I would associate were naturally interested in any newcomer and took it for granted he would be a gentleman also. It was quite obvious I was the type of person she looked for in a boarder but the family atmosphere she encouraged depended on a friendly interest in each other.
‘Quite so, quite so,’ I felt like saying, seeing myself as a character from a Jane Austen novel.
Mrs Bloomfield’s conversation and appearance did indeed give me the impression of enacting a scene from some book of a past period and I decided to board there, even if only to follow the book through to some revealing chapter.
She showed me my room, a den opening off the kitchen, but the board was cheap and the room in which I was then living was worse. I had already removed her doubts about my crutches which must have seemed to her an unsuitable means of progression for a gentleman, but ignored her oblique efforts to find out what college I had attended. Her method of assessing a person’s ranking in knowledge was a simple one and based on the assumption that the more you paid for your schooling, the higher your standard of education.
Once having realised this, I told her I was educated at a State School. It was a heavy blow, since it also suggested poverty, and poverty in her boarders was a state that threatened her devious plans for avoiding it herself.
She made one last attempt to justify accepting me as a boarder.
‘I suppose your parents are quite comfortable, Mr Marshall,’ she said as she showed me out the door.
‘Very comfortable,’ I replied.
She smiled at that.
I was to find Mrs Bloomfield’s boarding house a depressing place. There was a strict observance of all the cliches of good manners, a reverence for the trimmings of worthy behaviour but no exercise of thoughtfulness, consideration, and compassion upon which the relationships between people should be established.
Four of us sat at one table. We were the gentlemen as advertised. The man who sat next to me was in his early twenties. He was an architect, had a high effeminate voice and on cold mornings was in the habit of saying, ‘I should have changed to my woollens today.’
The bank clerk who sat opposite him used conversation as a means of countering silence.
‘Life is real, life is earnest and the grave is not its goal,’ he sometimes quoted in the midst of that gloomy during-breakfast silence that marked our table in the mornings.
The observation did not demand an answer, though sometimes the engineer raised his head and looked carefully at him for a moment.
The engineer sat opposite me. He was good-looking, had a happy manner and an air of vitality.
‘I’m very fond of girls,’ he told me one day. ‘Not unduly so, I hope.’
There was a fifth boarder the members of our table did not regard as a gentleman. His name was Mr Thomas Falcon. He was a heavy dogmatic man shielded by ignorance from all doubts in the correctness of his opinions. He felt no need to listen to others; he always knew.
He believed that respect was expressed by fear, yet despised those people who feared him. His anger and contempt increased in proportion to growing evidence of victory over another. His confidence and desire to demonstrate power stemmed from the weaknesses in others and flared into abuse on their capitulation.
It was Mrs Bloomfield’s custom to prepare each new boarder for outbursts of anger and bad manners from him.
‘Take no notice of Mr Falcon’s temper,’ she adjured me, speaking in a low hurried voice as if the matter was urgent. ‘He doesn’t mean what he says. He’s a fine man really. He has a very good job at the mint and is an important man. I don’t want to offend him. He’s boarded with me for years. Just put up with him.’
I attributed her plea to a concern over the danger of losing a profitable boarder but within a week I realised he was her lover. Wrapped in a dressing-gown and wearing felt slippers, he visited her room each evening carrying a copy of the Herald. He emerged about midnight still carrying the newspaper and strode down the passage to his room, the floorboards creaking to his steps.
He was her lover yet she feared him. There was trepidation in her attitude towards him, a nervous compulsion to placate. They ate their meals at the same table and here they conversed. He lowered his voice whenever he spoke to her but the sound, even though the words were indistinguishable, had the quality of a command.
I was wary in his presence, avoiding him wherever possible, but I was not to escape his tongue. My apparent inability to defend myself must have roused in him a desire to make me fear him.
My room, built off the kitchen, had a window through which I could see the side of the house extending at right angles from my windowed wall. The windows of three bedrooms were built into this side of the house, the centre one opening into the room occupied by Mr Falcon.
I sometimes sang as I was dressing to counter an early morning depression of spirits. My bed was beneath the window and my voice could be heard through the windows of the other rooms.
I was singing to myself one morning when I was suddenly interrupted by a roar from the window of Mr Falcon’s room.
‘Shut up that bloody row, you fool!’ he stormed. ‘You damn caterwauling tomcat, what do you mean waking me up! You’ve got a voice like a cross-cut saw. Shut up or I’ll bloody soon come in and make you!’
I was unprepared for this outburst. It seemed unreal, impossible … Abuse from another always filled me with amazement and I needed time to adjust myself to any changes in relationships I had regarded as permanent. Anger grew slowly in me, reluctantly following comprehension until, when full realisation of the situation was established in my mind, it was too late to defend myself. It was so
now. I sat on the edge of the bed frozen in the act of pulling on my trousers while I considered exactly what had happened.
I had been insulted. And by a man I despised. Retaliation was called for, streams of invective, threats of violence, a burst of furious anger that would make him cower in his room while I raged at the window. I hurriedly pulled on my trousers and thrust my head through the window.
‘Shut up!’ I bawled in a voice I hoped was the equal of his in rage and power. But it seemed a little too high, a shade forced, I thought as I dressed. Inadequate too; quite inadequate. If it ever happened again I decided to pitch my voice lower and deliver a prepared piece of invective that would establish him as a proper bastard.
Comforted by the thought I went out to breakfast where an agitated Mrs Bloomfield bent over my shoulder as I sat facing a boiled egg and urged me to forget the incident but on no account to sing again in the mornings.
I decided to discuss it with the engineer but he did not come in for breakfast. He had left the night before, Mrs Bloomfield said, and she was advertising for another gentleman.
To hell with gentlemen, I thought sourly, feeling the engineer might at least have told me he was going. I was certain he had left because of Falcon and our mutual dislike of the man would have made this breakfast a comforting exchange of denouncements.
I made up my mind to seek another boarding house but the weeks passed and I did nothing about it. Then I left suddenly.
I was standing before the chest-of-drawers mirror in my room adjusting my tie. It was nearly eight o’clock and that night I was attending a meeting of the Australian Natives’ Association where I was to take part in a debate.
The boarding house was quiet. All the boarders had gone out and I seemed to have the house to myself. I had no reason to suspect that Mrs Bloomfield was in the kitchen but suddenly the door slowly opened and she stepped into my bedroom.
She said something—I don’t know what. It was a reference to sex, I think. She moved towards me and lifted her arms to place them around me. I swung back on my crutches, back and around her with so violent a response from the muscles of my arms that I reached the door in two bounds and flung it open. One leap more and I was in the kitchen.
Mr Falcon stood there watching the door, leaning forward, one hand on the table, his head held in the attitude of an animal scenting.
My sudden appearance disconcerted him. He straightened himself and looked at Mrs Bloomfield who had followed me and who now stood in front of my bedroom doorway. She too seemed at a loss. She looked at him with wide-open eyes that urgently sought guidance, asked a question, a question for which, at that moment, he had no answer.
He turned and glanced at me, his expression revealing an effort to control some seething frustration.
‘What’s wrong?’ he asked sharply.
‘Nothing’s wrong,’ I said.
‘Didn’t someone sing out?’
‘No,’ I said.
He turned, relinquishing with reluctance any further development of the situation and left the kitchen followed by Mrs Bloomfield, her eyes downcast.
I entered my room hurriedly, put on my coat and left by the back door. I walked down to Sydney Road where I waited, walking up and down the street until an empty taxi came along. I hailed it and was driven back to the boarding house where I persuaded the driver to come into my room while I packed my suitcase. He carried it out to the taxi for me and waited while I had a last look round. My room was tidy, just as it was when first I entered it. My board was paid in advance. I closed the back door behind me and walked round to the car.
Half an hour later I was sitting in a bedroom watching Mr Shrink hang a clean towel on the rail behind the door, adjust the quilt on the bed and pat the pillow, preliminaries to a statement.
‘All board is payable in advance,’ he said apologetically.
‘Oh, yes! Good!’ I exclaimed.
I gave him the money.
‘Breakfast is from seven to eight,’ he told me before he left.
I presented myself for breakfast at seven o’clock the next morning. Only one boarder was in the dining-room when I was ushered in by Mr Shrink. He had his back to us as he sat eating at a central table.
Mr Shrink directed me to the chair next to him, introducing me ceremoniously while gazing fixedly at the framed picture of a girl holding a dove against her cheek hanging on the wall.
‘We have a new boarder, Mr Foster—Mr Marshall. I’d like you to meet him.’
The man rose and faced me. It was the engineer. The look of surprise imprinted upon his face slowly changed to a smile, a smile of satisfaction I thought.
‘Well, well!’ he exclaimed as he sat down again. ‘You, eh! When did you arrive here?’
‘Last night,’ I said.
‘In a hurry?’ he asked, his knife and fork poised over his plate.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I was.’
‘Ah!’ he exclaimed, then added, ‘How much did it cost you?’
‘It cost me nothing.’
‘It cost me fifty pounds,’ he said.
Our experiences with Mrs Bloomfield began the same way. She entered his bedroom while he was dressing, but where I had fled from the room, he had lifted her in his arms and carried her to the bed. Here she suddenly ripped her blouse from her shoulders and screamed. Falcon, who had been waiting in the passage, burst into the room and spun him round away from her. She slipped to the floor continuing her act of an hysterical woman, saved from the attack of a sex maniac by a noble man.
‘She did it very well,’ said the engineer, then continued, ‘Anyway I had too much to lose by facing a court case. Falcon seemed determined to ring the police and a doctor and it was possible that he had either one or the other in league with him. I couldn’t risk it. I paid up. He named the figure. I think it must be their standard rate.’
‘It probably is,’ I said, then grew thoughtful for a moment. ‘Do you remember that chap down there who was always quoting, “Life is real, life is earnest and the grave is not its goal”?’ I asked him.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘He sat next to me.’
‘I wonder if they’ll get him?’
‘I wonder,’ said the engineer.
2
Paul Freely, the young man in whose company and with whose help I was seeking meetings with girls, was twenty years of age. He was an enthusiastic and smiling young man, proud of his muscles, the grace with which he moved, the energy he possessed.
‘Don’t you feel good these mornings—it’s nippy but the sun’s out. This morning there was a bloke running ahead of me to the station. The train had whistled and we had to stretch ourselves to make it. I let him keep the lead. I paced behind him, breathing just right. You know … I just sat there, arms swinging good, building him up all the way. Then round the last corner I came up on him fast. He put in a spurt but I left him standing. He didn’t have a chance with me. It was good just going past him, him straining and me running sweet.’
He never seemed conscious of the attention drawn to him by my presence, the contrast in our appearance. The fact that I walked on crutches seemed of no significance to him in our relationship with people.
Physical incapacitation in another never disturbs the athlete. He is too far removed from the burden of a crippled body ever to anticipate the possibility of experiencing it. It is the man who fears the flaring into life of all the dormant illnesses he imagines he is nurturing who is acutely conscious of the cripple beside him.
That girls might consider my paralysed legs repellent never entered Paul’s head. He was not aware that those girls with whom we sometimes sat at cafe tables suffered me for the pleasure of his company and he was quite blind to my inability to interest them.
I was self-conscious, awkward, incapable of conducting a conversation, however trivial, in the presence of girls, though in demonstrating to Paul the type of conversation I felt would interest them I became most eloquent.
He listened to these essays in ef
fective conversation with great interest. Gradually under their influence he was to change his ideas, become anxious to express himself on a higher level of appeal.
When he referred to my crutches it was in a manner that suggested affection for them. They were to him a source of humour rather than symbols of suffering.
‘Let’s take Isabel and Horace to a dance,’ he sometimes said, giving them the names I had bestowed on them for the benefit of children.
He was a turner and fitter and lived in Brunswick with his parents. He never read. He was living the only book that mattered to him and he was filling it with pictures.
‘I’ve read a couple of books,’ he told me, ‘but I never get no time for reading. I’m out nearly every night. It’s no good sitting at home.’
He approached girls as if about to experience great pleasure in their company. Because of this he was popular with them. His confidence in himself had grown with his popularity but had never turned to conceit. He was sure of himself, sure of his reception when he spoke to a girl. He respected them but this did not prevent him seeking to take from them the most they were prepared to offer. His conduct was subject to their control and he was never feared.
‘There’s a way a girl has of knocking you back that makes you like her. She doesn’t make you feel a bastard. She doesn’t blame you, she just doesn’t play that way. Well. All right. That does me. I’ll go along with that sort of girl. But these sheilas who string you on then knock you back … Two can play at that game.’
He had no compulsion to pursue a friendly relationship with a girl to the stage where she confessed a love for him, the goal of the man with no reserves of confidence, but basked happily in evidence of the pleasure he was giving.
I sometimes wondered what type of girl he would marry. I had a mental picture of a happy, plump girl looking up into his face and laughing.
In Mine Own Heart Page 2