The Serpent's Sting

by Robert Gott

  Cloris arrived at Mother’s house early. It was Wednesday 30 December. I don’t usually remember dates. I’m hopeless with birthdays, but Wednesday 30 December, 1942 is seared into my memory like an ugly, psychic brand. In the world beyond the one I inhabited, this is what was happening. The Russians were having some success in pushing the Germans back from Stalingrad; the Japanese thrust near Buna had been halted; and the eighth army was just 190 miles from Tripoli.

  I’d had more than a glimpse in the Northern Territory of the hardships endured by soldiers, so newspaper headlines struck me forcefully, and I always imagined the individual suffering disguised by a bland banner such as ‘New Trap Closing Round Enemy’. This actually came down to poor bastards freezing and starving to death. I tried to keep the war at a distance, and I tried to limit its effect on me to the minor inconveniences of rationing and shortages. However, I’d endured the suffocating, enervating heat of Gulnare Bluff; its humidity was sufficient to drown in, and its great clouds of mosquitoes harried remorselessly. The young men, placed there secretly, their clothes falling off them with mould and rot, suffered with no hope of recognition or even of relief. I knew that war meant more than powdered egg, ersatz coffee, and female tram conductors.

  I did not, I hope, take my job as an actor for granted. That day’s paper, which I’d glanced through before Cloris’s arrival, reminded me that there were other, more difficult ways of negotiating civilian life than the path I’d chosen. In Ballarat, two conscientious objectors had been jailed for six weeks for refusing to take the oath of service in the Citizen Forces. One of these men, a gardener, offered as his defence that he had to ‘obey God or lose my salvation. Anybody who disobeys God is eternally damned.’ The other, a driver, and the father of four children, offered the court as an explanation for his flouting the law that, ‘Once you have definitely experienced salvation you cannot do otherwise than obey God. You have your duty, sir, the same as I have to the law of God. I feel very sorry for you.’

  These were men of courage, I suppose, although I had no sympathy for their God bothering. They’d be dull dinner guests; humourless, dim-witted, and self-righteous. Martyrs are tedious people. This thought had just formed when there was a knock on the front door. I answered it because Brian hadn’t yet come down, and Mother was back at Drummond Street. The morning sky was heavy with cloud cover, and quite cool. Cloris wasn’t crying, but her face was set in a way that suggested it wouldn’t take much to release tears.

  ‘I’m sorry it’s so early,’ she said.

  ‘Not at all. I’ll rustle up Brian for you.’

  ‘No, Will. It’s not Brian I’ve come to see. It’s you.’

  ‘Really?’ I hadn’t meant to sound so surprised.

  ‘May I come in?’

  ‘Heavens. My manners. Please.’

  I took Cloris into the front room. The blackouts were still up. I took them down and offered Cloris a cup of tea, which she refused. She immediately put me in a difficult position by asking if Brian had spoken to me about her brother. As she’d specifically asked him to keep their conversation private, I decided the best policy was to lie. The truth is only sometimes the best option.

  ‘No,’ I said, and managed to sound puzzled, as though I couldn’t imagine what Cloris might be talking about. She accepted the lie with satisfying ease, and took a deep breath.

  ‘I’m just going to jump right in, Will. My brother was a drug addict. No one knew this, except me. Dad had no idea. I don’t know anything about drugs, but I know that the drug he was addicted to was heroin.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘No, Will, you don’t see. Drug addicts need to get their drugs from somewhere, and I think I know where John was getting his.’

  She reached into her purse and withdrew a folded piece of paper. I recognised it at once as a playbill for the Tivoli Theatre. Cloris passed it to me. On the reverse side there was a quick sketch. It was of John Gilbert. The artist had skilfully delineated his features, and I recognised immediately Geraldine’s very particular style. Even if I hadn’t, she’d thoughtfully signed it, ‘Gerald. With all my love.’

  ‘John’s never been interested in the theatre, Will, and he’s certainly never shown any interest in the Tivoli. Until recently, that is. Maybe it’s a coincidence, but until six months ago he hardly ever went out at night. Then he started missing dinner and coming home late. It didn’t bother me, or even interest me, really. I had little in common with John. We didn’t talk to each other much. There wasn’t any antipathy between us; I think we just had nothing to say. I did John’s washing, because Mum was ill, and there were stains on his cuffs and collars that were oily and hard to shift. It was greasepaint, so I knew he was seeing someone at the theatre. I caught him once, injecting something into his arm. I told Brian this. There were things I didn’t tell him, but which I need to tell you, because I want the people who turned my brother into a drug addict to be brought to justice.’

  There was the sound of a toilet flushing upstairs. Cloris looked nervously to the door.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘Brian has a routine. He won’t be down for a few minutes. Why do you think John was being supplied drugs by someone at the Tivoli?’

  ‘Of course, I don’t know for sure,’ she said. She looked again nervously at the door. ‘All I know is that his behaviour and routines changed at the same time as make-up starting appearing on his clothes. After I’d caught him with the syringe, he became quite frank with me about his habit. He didn’t call it a habit, for a start. He called it regular use, and said it helped him manage things. He didn’t elaborate on exactly what “things” he was managing.

  ‘He wasn’t in the least defensive about taking the drug. On the contrary, he offered to give me some heroin. You can drink it. You don’t have to inject it. As I said, we didn’t talk much, but he was talkative on the subject of heroin, which he didn’t think ought to be illegal in the first place. That was the fault of the League of Nations, apparently. Oh, he railed at length about that. The League decided which drugs to regulate, not for any moral reason, but to protect the profits of big companies. That just played into the hands of criminals, of course, who took over the distribution of some drugs and turned people who used them into criminals as well. I didn’t follow his argument closely. He was quite animated about it. All I knew was that he was acting differently from the way he usually did. Then I found that sketch.’ She paused. ‘And there was another page of sketches as well.’

  She reached again into her purse, and even before she handed the square of paper to me, I knew what it would contain. I wasn’t disappointed. There were three, small drawings, each of them of a naked, reclining, male figure. The face wasn’t recognisably John Gilbert’s, and perhaps only an intimate of his could attest to the accuracy of the rest of him. They weren’t pornographic, but they erred on the side of the louche rather than the academic. As with the portrait sketch, there was a dedication. This one left no doubt as to the sitter. ‘To John G. With love, Gerald.’ Cloris waited a moment for me to take this in.

  ‘One of the things about my brother that I didn’t know was that he was queer. Who is Gerald?’

  ‘Perhaps it will be some consolation to know that Gerald is a woman.’

  ‘A woman?’

  ‘Yes. Her name is Geraldine. Her friends call her Gerald.’

  ‘There are more of these drawings. Only this page was fit to show anyone. So you know this person?’

  ‘From the style of the drawing, particularly the well-handled foreshortening, I’m fairly certain that the artist is a woman in the Mother Goose company named Geraldine Buchanan.’

  ‘I want to meet her.’

  ‘There’s rather a queue of people wanting to meet her. She’s disappeared.’

  ‘Oh my. How dreadful. Oh, she was the girl who was going to come to Christmas lunch, but who didn’t arrive. She was your friend, your …’<
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  ‘Not my girlfriend, Cloris.’

  Cloris looked again at the sketches, and her face lost some of its colour.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Will. I feel embarrassed to have shown these to you. I didn’t make the connection. You must think me utterly gauche.’

  As if summoned by the word ‘gauche’, Brian came into the room, and did a small double-take at the sight of Cloris. He hurriedly did up the buttons of his shirt. Cloris gathered the two pages of drawings in a frantic movement that drew attention to them as being of importance. Brian discreetly acted as if he hadn’t noticed her rush to fold and stuff them into her purse.

  ‘How lovely to see you,’ he said, as he fastened his top button and tucked his shirt into his trousers. ‘I wasn’t expecting you. I try to be fully dressed for visitors, as a general rule.’

  ‘I was passing by,’ Cloris said, lamely, ‘and I thought I’d pop in.’

  Brian eased her discomfort by accepting the explanation as being perfectly reasonable and not requiring further interrogation.

  ‘A cup of tea?’ he asked.

  With noticeable relief, Cloris agreed that this would be lovely, and Brian retreated to the kitchen to prepare a pot.

  ‘He’s a very nice man, your brother,’ Cloris said, and I tried not to hear in this a distinction she was making between us.

  ‘Is there a lot of drug use among theatre people?’

  I felt oddly goaded by this question, as though Cloris was casting an aspersion upon my profession that was unjustified and personally offensive.

  ‘I hope you won’t take this the wrong way, Cloris, but we haven’t established yet which way the traffic went.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Her voice acquired a sudden, hard edge.

  ‘Well, I’m not sure it’s safe to assume that Geraldine was bringing heroin to John, rather than the other way around.’

  She took this rather better than that hardness in her voice had led me to think she would.

  ‘Yes, I see. But from where would John get a supply of heroin to sell to other people?’

  ‘The same question could be applied to Geraldine.’

  ‘Of course. I was assuming when I was thinking about this that Geraldine was Gerald. Now that I know she’s a woman, that does rather change things.’

  I didn’t know whether this level of naïveté was charming, frustrating, disingenuous, or just plain phoney — phoney being one of those rare Americanisms that I’d become fond of, and which I’d taken to using in everyday speech.

  ‘But you haven’t answered my question, Will. Do theatre people use drugs?’

  I wanted her to stop using the expression ‘theatre people’ as though it was interchangeable with ‘circus people’ or ‘socially unacceptable people’.

  ‘I wouldn’t think actors and actresses use drugs any more frequently than, say, the sons of lawyers.’

  I regretted saying this almost before it had left my lips, and its effect on Cloris was to offend her into monosyllables.

  ‘I see,’ she said, with ominous calm.

  I apologised immediately, but the damage had been done, and although she nodded, she made no further comment. This resulted in an awkward thirty seconds of silence before Brian came in bearing a tray with the tea things on it. Cloris gave no indication in the ensuing half-hour that anything untoward had passed between us. I tried to demonstrate that I was an ally, not an enemy, by being witty and by laughing easily at anything she said that was even vaguely humorous — not that there was much of this, and Brian didn’t help in keeping the conversation light by asking when John’s body would be released to the family so that a funeral could be held. Cloris said that she wasn’t sure, and that she and Peter hadn’t yet discussed what form John’s funeral would take. If the coroner ruled his death as a suicide, a Catholic burial would be impossible. Not that John would have opted for a Catholic burial if he’d been making the choice himself. Peter Gilbert, however, was conscious of his family’s position, and a service at St Patrick’s cathedral, where his wife had been sent off, would have been his automatic preference. This, despite his adultery, and his living in sin. The flexibility of the Catholic mind on such matters always astonished me.

  Cloris said that she needed to get back to Drummond Street, and, perhaps to disguise the strangeness of the early-morning visit, she asked Brian if he might walk her home. He agreed, and when he looked at me he drew his eyebrows together fleetingly to signal puzzlement. I opened my eyes more widely, just for a moment, to let him know that I was ahead of him. Cloris noticed neither movement.

  There were still several hours free before I needed to leave for the theatre. I had the house to myself, but its enclosed spaces seemed too restrictive to allow me to think clearly about what Cloris had told and shown me. I left the house, and crossed into Princes Park. It was too early for there to be any organised activities on the oval — recently, American servicemen had staged baseball games there — and there was no one about.

  I sat on a bench and tried to consider coolly the appalling and stomach-churning information that Geraldine Buchanan had had sexual relations with both John Gilbert and me. To say that I experienced a curdling of my feelings for Geraldine is an understatement. The thought that both John Gilbert and I had heard the same endearments, and touched the same skin, made my own skin crawl. I felt foolish, easily duped, and humiliatingly naïve. I couldn’t believe that Geraldine had been peddling drugs to John Gilbert. If she had been, surely she’d have tried to do the same with me. There hadn’t been the faintest hint of such a proposition.

  There was a way to find out, and it was my responsibility to do so. This was something I couldn’t deputise to Brian. I’d have to interrogate members of the Mother Goose company, and as I didn’t know them well, this promised to be fraught. How do you approach people with whom you are expected to work closely, and on whom you depend for cues and feeds, and ask firstly if they use heroin, and secondly, who supplies them with the drug? It wasn’t as though it was opium, though. Still, it was a personal question, and a little more personal than asking what brand of soap a person used. I’d detected no hint of drug use among the cast, but I wasn’t certain what heroin use looked like. I’d seen the effect of cocaine, and I was fairly certain that if cocaine was being used, it was discreet and very much after hours. I’d know if a person went on stage in a coked-up state.

  Pondering what approach I’d take had the advantage of taking my mind off Geraldine’s sexually indiscriminate choices. I was so immersed in my thoughts that when the subject of them sat beside me, it took a moment to register her presence. When I say ‘her’ presence, I mean that it took a moment to register the presence of a person sitting beside me. She sat at the far end of the bench, and made no sound. When I noticed a shape in my peripheral vision, I turned to see who it was, and had the peculiar reaction of being unsurprised, as if we’d simply made an appointment, and now here we were. She was staring across the oval, waiting for me to speak. With so many questions needing to be asked, I chose a truly ridiculous one.

  ‘Will you be coming to the theatre this afternoon? Sophie really is a dreadful actress.’

  Geraldine didn’t move her head when she said, ‘No, Will. I won’t be coming back to Mother Goose. I wouldn’t be welcome, and things have gone too far anyway for that to be possible.’

  ‘Too far?’

  She turned to look at me then, and I could tell that she’d noted my black eye.

  ‘Yes, Will. Too far.’

  ‘Are you referring to John Gilbert?’

  ‘That name is not familiar to me.’

  I experienced a sudden spike of anger.

  ‘Oh, you know him all right. I’ve seen your sketches of him.’

  ‘Stage-door Johnnies never give their real name, Will — not if they want to protect their respectable, private lives. An awful lot of them have wives.’
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  ‘John Gilbert didn’t have a wife. What he did have was a drug habit, and now he’s dead.’

  Her face didn’t change.

  ‘It always ends that way, doesn’t it?’ she said, with shocking blandness.

  ‘Does it, Geraldine? I wouldn’t know.’

  The conversation wasn’t going in any useful direction. I was aware that I was allowing my feelings to derail it, and that I needed to follow the advice I’d given Brian about questioning Cloris. I’d told him that he needed to remember at all times, regardless of his feelings, that she was a suspect. Geraldine was now unequivocally a suspect.

  ‘Will you help me, Will?’

  The question was weirdly mechanical. Whatever desperation was behind it had perhaps been dulled by a drug, or by repetition to God knew how many other lovers. Before answering the question, I said, ‘You were at my mother’s house last night.’

  ‘Was I?’ she said.

  This was a mistake. I knew now that this was an act. I didn’t know much about drugs in general, or heroin in particular, but I knew that Geraldine was sufficiently compos mentis last night to know precisely where she was.

  ‘You’re lying to me,’ I said. ‘This drug-induced amnesia is a lie, and so is this staring into space, and talking like an automaton. Stop it. If you need my help, if you really need my help, stop treating me like a fucking moron.’

  Geraldine began laughing.

  ‘Oh, Will. I’m so sorry. I’ve played this all wrong, haven’t I?’

  Her face was suddenly as mobile as it had been when I’d introduced myself to her in her dressing room.

  ‘Played?’

  She looked comically apologetic.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘No more acting. I do need your help. You see, I’ve killed someone.’

  She said this in a manner that was so neutral in tone that she might have been telling me about having lost the heel of a stiletto shoe. It made judging a response difficult. Was she joking?