The Delinquents

by Criena Rohan

  ‘Gee, Brownie! Am I going to be respectable—the young matron, that’s me from this on.’

  So Brownie went off to learn about the Infallibility of the Pope and went shopping for a new suit and kept to himself his fears that he might die of nerves and stage-fright when the great day came.

  And then it was the wedding eve, and Lola’s mother was stepping off the plane from Brisbane, stone-cold sober, in a faultless black costume with a rich and mysterious wedding present tucked under the arm. And she and Lola fell upon each other’s necks, all smiles and tears and endearments, which left Brownie to marvel much at the ways of women.

  Then Brownie was thrown out of the flat for the night, which left him to marvel more, and particularly at Lola’s explanation.

  ‘It wouldn’t be the right thing, darling. Wouldn’t be the right thing at all—as well as being terribly unlucky.’

  Then Lola was going to Confession, and he was in the back of the church waiting for her—gazing up at a monstrous statue of Michael the Archangel, and torturing himself with the fantasy that the priest might order six months’ celibacy for a penance. However, she came out of the confessional a trifle pink around the ears, but happy, and professing herself to be much relieved in mind. She hauled Brownie off to buy her a cup of coffee, which they had in a little dark espresso down in McLeay Street, and they held hands silently for a long time, like very new lovers indeed. After which they were kissing goodbye outside the flat, and Brownie was holding her with his heart filled with fear, but she put his arms away gently and said:

  ‘It will be all right tomorrow, darling. You’ll see. Don’t be frightened, Brownie. Wait and see. Tomorrow we’re going to marry and live happily ever after.’

  Brownie went round to take a room at the hotel where the Mad Mariner was staying, and the Mad Mariner suggested a night on the town as the only cure for his woeful condition. Brownie professed himself aghast at the idea, so the Mad Mariner, like the true and unselfish friend he was, refrained from all references to high-minded young bridegrooms and contented himself with plying his suffering friend with night-caps of whisky and milk (taken hot—another great remedy of the bosun’s dear old mother back in Limehouse), till at last Brownie turned in, claiming that he was not going to sleep a wink.

  The faithful bosun aroused him at half past nine. Brownie swallowed some coffee and got his eyes open properly in the shower. Then came the dressing. The big ritual was on.

  And now they were dressed and speeding through the Cross in a taxi; or, more precisely, they were crawling through a near traffic jam and the cab-driver was leaning out every other yard to abuse mugs in Holdens, dills in Station Wagons, bastards in panel vans, etc. But Brownie had the sensation they were speeding in a golden cloud, and then, alternately, that they were crawling to their doom in a tumbril while hostile crowds shouted:

  ‘There he is, that’s the victim! That’s the victim!’

  Then here they were at Saint Canice’s, and the priest was meeting them and shaking them by the hand making gentle little jokes about brides being late, which Brownie could not hear for the roaring in his ears. They waited in the vestry.

  ‘Lucky for you it’s a mixed marriage,’ said the knowledgeable bosun, ‘or you’d be waiting right out there in the big church, stranded all alone there right in front of the altar, feeling a proper guy.’

  ‘She’s gone, she’s gone,’ cried Brownie within himself. ‘She’s gone. I’ll cut my throat. She’s late. God, I could belt the daylights out of her.’

  There she was getting out of a taxi. She was beautiful, glorious, terrible with banners, in her beautiful, secret wedding clothes. Brownie felt an almost over-whelming urge to rush forward and grovel at her feet in sheer relief. She wore a sheath of golden satin, and a wide white hat, and below it her hair was coiled in an enormous knot on the nape of her neck. Her heels were the highest that could be bought, and her gloves reached to her elbows and fastened with little gilded buttons. She was white and gold from head to toe, and in her hands she carried frangipani and fern.

  ‘Of course, darling,’ she had said, ‘I can’t go as a bride, but I can be smart. So elegance is the keynote, sweetheart. No good striving for that virginal effect.’

  She was dazzling, but had she perhaps neglected the virginal look too completely? However, Brownie noticed she had left off her gypsy earrings, and that the split in the back of the sheath skirt was what might be termed, for Lola, discreet. He decided they looked right enough for the Cross. He had a momentary qualm about his own brand new, American-style suit. It had seemed so glorious at the tailor’s, and now—he grinned to himself.

  ‘What the hell!’ he thought. ‘I look like a sailor who’s marrying the woman he’s been living with for years.’

  The Mad Mariner had arranged himself in a sort of modified Ivy League outfit. The effect sought was one of quiet good dressing, the effect achieved was that the Mad Mariner looked like a commercial traveller in one of the less reputable contraceptives. Lola’s mother, however, lent the necessary air of respectability. She stood there in the beautifully cut costume and a plain linen blouse. She wore English shoes, very little make-up and no jewellery. Lola had insisted on having a few friends along.

  ‘I’m damned if I’m going to sneak off and marry with only two witnesses,’ she had said. ‘I don’t care what I’ve done.’

  So the landlady came along, and the landlady’s daughter, and Joey the landlady’s daughter’s fiancé, and they were all crowding in behind Lola and Brownie; and now the priest was putting his stole around his neck, and the marriage service had begun, and Brownie was precipitated into vast chasms of stage-fright where coherent thought was no longer possible. For some few moments he had a bewildering mental image as of the vestry filling up with those whose lives had gone to make his and Lola’s—his grandmother, Martha Hansen, who would have been near to a stroke had she seen him married by a Catholic priest, his grandfather Hansen who would not have cared where he married, his father of the golden hair and blue eyes, gone no one knew where; and Lola’s Irish grandparents and wandering father and Indian great-grandmother, all were there—thronging and whispering shadows around him.

  Lola’s mother was weeping; the tears were pouring down her face. The landlady was crying. Brownie saw, with a flash of horror, that the Mad Mariner himself was noticeably watery eyed, blew his nose like a bugle, and was so shaken out of his usual aplomb that he dropped the ring right at the priest’s feet. Even Brownie, the agnostic, was profoundly moved by the beauty of the ritual. As he promised to love and to cherish, for richer and for poorer, for better and for worse, in sickness and in health, till death, he felt a lump rise in his throat. But Lola! Lola was transformed. She stood, head erect, shoulders thrown back, her eyes tilted with triumph, a faint smile on her mouth, flowers filling her hands, and she made the responses without hesitation, in a clear, ringing voice—Lola radiant, Lola in her glory, Lola the most honest honest-woman in Sydney. Outside the church, of course, the kissing commenced. Mrs. Lovell kissed Brownie, and said:

  ‘I’m very pleased with my son-in-law.’

  Everyone kissed Lola, first and foremost being the Mad Mariner.

  ‘An old friend’s privilege, my dear.’

  Then Lola tossed her bridal bouquet into the air, and it was caught by a little girl who always stood at the gate taking in all the Saturday morning weddings.

  ‘You’ll be next, sweetheart,’ teased Lola, and the little girl, who hoped to marry Elvis Presley, remembered this years later when she married a sailor in that self-same church.

  Now the Mad Mariner was wringing Brownie by the hand and saying:

  ‘Take care of her, Brown my boy.’

  Which caused Brownie to burst out laughing, and the Mad Mariner dropped the straightforward manly tones and returned to normal and said:

  ‘Now be my guest everyone. We’ll nip up into the “Mayfair” and drink to the happy couple.’

  It was ten o’clock the same night.
The wedding reception was going apace—drinks in the bed-sit, food in the kitchen, dancing on the balcony, the last thanks to the taxi-driver from the next flat who had loaned his radiogram and records, brought his girl friend and joined the festivities. Everything was going well. Joey and the landlady’s daughter had not yet had the fight with which they always enlivened parties. The Mad Mariner had so far successfully been prevented from making a speech that started: ‘I knew these two dear young people when they were living in a cabin aboard the old Dalton.’

  Lola’s mother had delighted all who knew her by having one decorous sip of champagne and refusing hard liquor for the rest of the evening, and she and the Mad Mariner had just performed a Charleston that was considered a great triumph by one and all. Said the Mad Mariner:

  ‘Didn’t I say, Brownie boy, that I’d dance at your wedding when you and Lola were down in Melbourne—’

  ‘Have a drink bosun,’ said Brownie, wondering if there were any precedent for doping the best man’s grog.

  Lola was standing by herself at the edge of the balcony, looking down at Elizabeth Bay. She was, for a moment, isolated in one of those little seas of silence that can close around one at a party. She was very happy and very tired. She had been up early; she had spent all the afternoon cleaning the flat, helping with the savouries and so on, and she had been rocking and rolling almost non-stop for a couple of hours. She bent down and pulled off the lovely wedding shoes. She felt the cool of the tesselated floor strike through her stockings, and she sighed blissfully.

  Brownie came up to her and put his hand on her arm.

  ‘Let’s shoot through for a while,’ he said.

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘Anywhere—just to be alone together on our wedding day. Get into something comfortable and we’ll blow.’

  Lola looked down at the crumpled golden sheath with love.

  ‘Oh, Brownie,’ she said, ‘I couldn’t take this off. I want to be buried in it.’

  Brownie laughed. ‘O.K., but let’s go.’

  So Lola slipped into comfortable scuffs and put Brownie’s duffle jacket across her shoulders and they went into the kitchen and told Mrs. Lovell they were going. She nodded.

  ‘A good idea,’ she said. ‘I’ll handle this crowd here.’

  Once in the street they caught a taxi and then had no idea where they wanted to go.

  ‘I’ll run you down to the ferry and you can go across to Manly,’ said the taxi-driver. ‘That’s where all the lovers go, isn’t it, eh?’

  He turned around and smiled at them.

  ‘Lovers!’ scoffed Lola. ‘We’re an old married couple.’

  The taxi-driver’s smile broadened.

  ‘Lady,’ he said, ‘wipe the confetti out of your eyelashes.’

  So they went to Manly where all the lovers go, but it was a little early in the season for lovers, and they strolled along in the darkness all alone, the way Brownie wanted it. They sat beneath the pine trees and looked out at the immensity of the Pacific, black that night because there was no moon, black with lines of white where the surf rolled shorewards. Lola turned round so that she could lean against Brownie and stretch her legs along the rest of the seat. He put his arms around her and drew her closer to him. She was silent for a while and then she said:

  ‘You know what, Brownie, we’ve got responsibilities now and, just think, you’re twenty-one, I’m nearly twenty.’

  ‘Well, I hadn’t noticed any actual senile decay.’

  ‘No, but no longer do we have the old teen-ager excuse.’

  ‘I was a teen-age werewolf.’

  ‘I just mean no one is going to feel sentimental about us any more.’

  ‘I never noticed anyone ever did.’

  ‘No, but we were a fashionable section of society and now we’re not. We’re old married squares.’

  Brownie kissed the top of her head.

  ‘Feels good doesn’t it?’ he said.

  ‘You ridiculous boy, I’m trying to be serious.’

  ‘The young matron, of course.’

  ‘Yes, I am, and what I’m saying is we’re married, responsible people. You might be a father by this time next year. How do you feel about that? Scared, eh?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘Darling Brownie, you’re never scared.’

  Brownie rose to his feet and took her by the hand. Together they walked to where the edge of the surf hissed up along the sand. Far across the water, making for North Head, the lights of a steamer shone through the dark. They stood without speaking for a moment then Lola linked her arm through Brownie’s.

  ‘Oh, darling,’ she said, ‘it’s terrible to end this day. Why must we get tired? But I am tired, sweetheart, so take me home to bed.’

  Brownie nodded.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’ll take you home.’

  And still looking out at the ship that glowed in the night he took a two-shilling piece from his pocket and flung it far into the surf.

  ‘The sea buys your gear,’ he said, ‘and the sea and I are going to look after you until the day I die.’

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