He’d told her he was having a little problem with his waterworks. (Not you too, she wanted to say.) She was afraid this could be serious when he told her, laughing, that the only way he could urinate successfully was to stamp his feet hard whilst waiting for it to happen.
‘Have to do a bit of a fandango, hah!’ He’d been to the doctor who had examined him and declared all plumbing to be in good working order. James was like that: he had medical problems from time to time but was going to outlive them all. The matter was of no further interest to him, he told her. He was now thinking about the young patient he was visiting in hospital. That is the strange thing about health Celia believed; some people grow very old without much mishap when they’ve not necessarily taken better care of themselves than anybody else.
He looked down on the patient, on the one who had been destined to be the maestro’s amanuensis, in a manner of speaking. Please don’t leave me. Even without the music, even in your moments of madness, I want you to be here. He had always felt younger than Jeremy, who was still only in his early thirties.
Jeremy opened his eyes and unexpectedly told James he was sorry for putting him to so much trouble. And just as James was beginning to arrange his face and words for a suitable reply, at least the boy wasn’t talking the old nonsense, Jeremy went on to say he remembered James’s fits of spleen, malevolent looks, how they cut into him. The sulking at the Christmas party when the tempo wasn’t right. ‘Remember the Christmas party? When Belinda didn’t have the tempo to your satisfaction? You were right. It had to be slower.’ All said with the merciful gaze of someone on high, granting absolution.
James certainly remembered the first Christmas party when he’d had the trio of then new friends there. Twenty guests had sat down to a sumptuous meal on James’s immense back verandah, prepared by Celia and Marcia, with Mickey doing the drinks, saying that there had to be an extra place set for the stranger. What stranger? James asked, with too incredulous an expression.
‘You never know,’ said Mickey. ‘It’s a custom, James.’
‘In my country,’ the woman from Bulgaria said, ‘we set an extra place for Jesus Christ.’
‘In case he pops in for a sherry?’ said James, faking even more astonishment, enjoying himself.
But these years later, the authority of the terribly ill was at large and James listened with head bowed as the young man weakly and conversationally had his say. ‘I always loved you better than I did my parents,’ Jeremy finished. James might not even have been there. But he was, and he swiftly turned his head away.
He couldn’t manage this at all, and told Jeremy that he was not to dwell on past disappointments, his own or his teacher’s.
‘I may have pushed you too much. But you had such a capacity to learn, and to me a great deal hung on it. I didn’t realise you were so …’
‘Vulnerable?’ Jeremy had always been quick with words, even now. But his arms on the sheet were twigs.
James however could not bear much more. He left soon after. Celia was always quoting Pascal to him. Man is no more than a reed, the weakest in nature. But he is a thinking reed. And he wondered who was left feeling the weaker, Jeremy or himself.
He was vulnerable all right, James well knew that. What had provoked the teacher’s ire more than anything during that fateful lesson was Jeremy’s performance of the fast movement in the Rachmaninoff. And the boy hadn’t even been under any drug influence that day – James knew this because he was familiar with the boy’s every tic. And he had told Jeremy about holding that line; beware of the danger of over-involvement, of losing yourself in the piece to the extent that all control was lost. But that day Jeremy had poured himself into the music to the degree that he had lost the pace, made it into a gallop: his fingers flying over the music, getting all the notes out well enough but too excited to be able to pull back when necessary. The boy had ended the piece looking like a rag, high-coloured and shaking, and almost ill. Disastrous.
14
Perth, 1990
Marcia was feeling tired and thought she might have taken on too much teaching work. Probably she needed a holiday. It shouldn’t be underrated, a change of scene. Scotland had been a success.
She must try and point out to Celia that they shouldn’t think the sentiments between the three of them had been paltry, or that their comings and goings were disloyal or abandoning but perhaps necessary and sufficient to the day thereof.
The holidays they’d had, she, Celia and Mickey. And how each had been idyllic in different ways. They all got along together quite well as a trio, yet the lack of one or the other showed her that the harmony was not what it appeared to be, for why else did she feel such ease without a third party? Except that there had been that one time.
One summer, so-called, in London – one of the bleakest Junes she could recall, she and Mickey found time between work to take a trip up to Scotland where the weather was even worse. But you never know, suggested Marcia the optimist, as they drove north in her old Austin, it just could turn out to be nice once they arrived. Rain tumbled down in buckets on the little car as it made its determined way to Glasgow. At a petrol station a man with a resigned sort of wisdom said:
‘Ye’ll faynde ut no tae bod furrther awa’ turds the west – once ye gang oot a thuss toon a durt an grayme.’
Mickey replied: ‘You’re probably right.’ Then he murmured to Marcia. ‘Did you catch that?’
‘No,’ she said softly and gave the man a beautiful smile, mouthing ‘Thank you!’ as they drove off. The man nodded, as he touched his cap in a two-finger salute that was both grim and jaunty.
A friend of Mickey’s, more of an acquaintance – an actor who was always in work – had offered him the use of his log cabin north of Glasgow, for practically nothing. It was more to show signs of habitation to any passers-by, he said, that he let it so reasonably. There was a stream nearby. Mickey was transported by the idea of landing fish in the way that Robert Mitchum had in an old Hollywood film he had once seen. Marcia watched with twitching lips while he outfitted himself in a Glasgow camping shop with rubber boots up to the thigh, a leather apron over his shirt, a fishing hat, and tackle that included worms and an expensive rod, courtesy of herself.
The little cabin turned out to be pretty, dusty and damp but the last users had thoughtfully left a pile of wood for the fire at least, and they had brought their own provisions.
‘I feel like Cinderella,’ said Marcia with one of her ah-ahah laughs, sweeping the floor and setting the fire while Mickey stood at the door, appraising the scenery, taking lungfuls of air.
‘Or Snow-White.’ Mickey broke into Whistle while you Work and did a little jig. ‘I’ll be Happy.’
‘Was there a Happy?’
‘Oh, bound to’ve been.’
For ten days they stayed in the hut, as they came to call it, unable to take any walks to admire the scenery as the weather continued with unforgiving persistence to thwart outdoor activity. They played Scrabble, he taught her card games and she read books and did crosswords while Mickey with rare determination walked down to the stream every morning, dressed in his absurd leggings, coat and hat to try his luck. He caught nothing.
‘I’m glad, really,’ said Marcia one evening as she prepared them tinned sardines done in spaghetti and garlic with herbs and tomatoes while Mickey toasted bread in the fire and served the wine. ‘I don’t like the idea of catching fish – pulling the hook out of their poor tender mouths – it must be agonising.’
‘A fine time to tell me this,’ said Mickey, handing her a glass and raising his. ‘I don’t like the idea of it either, to tell you the truth.’ They rolled the wine around their mouths and made pursing lips at each other.
‘We could become vegetarians,’ said Marcia.
‘Oh come now, let’s give this some thought! Carrots and nuts and soy milk.’
When Marcia recalled that holiday years later, she was conscious that Mickey did less joking and took possession again of wh
at must have been his own real voice. Gone for that time were the endless imitations and wisecracks he did with Celia. He gathered firewood and dried it in front of the fire, turning it over, made his sortie to the stream to try his hand at angling. Marcia took to doing exercises indoors, keeping the place warm, knitting a pair of socks for him. They seemed at last to be a couple.
For the first time sex was better. Mickey had often been gentle to the point of diffidence. She saw that now he was being more attentive and she naturally returned favours in his coin but more so: she persuaded him into frolics that left him wide-eyed and spluttering. They were murmuring and then laughing and indeed engaged in lovemaking, not merely bonking. Marcia had always doubted that he’d had very much experience at all. Had he been living in a monastery, she asked him, before he went to London? He simply shrugged. For all his outward-going ways he didn’t find it easy to let go, it seemed to her. With an expertise she had learned years ago she caressed him in the numerous ways she knew, so that there in their eyrie he finally howled and yipped above her and beneath her and kissed her in long lingering sessions in their little wood cabin. She lay back exhausted and pleased, casting sideways glances at his calm, boyish-looking face. He felt her eyes on him and opened his, stretching an arm over her:
‘My wanton.’
‘My Irish monk.’
‘I’ve got to get on to some contacts when we get back.’
Marcia had the part of Juno coming up in Juno and the Paycock and Mickey was waiting for the acceptance of his rewritten script, now in the hands of a producer.
As they drove south back to England the weather progressively improved, the sun came out, so that when they reached London the trees and parks were gleaming.
On arriving at the flat, in the hall, the first thing that caught their eye was Mickey’s bulky manuscript. He snatched it up and opened it, read the letter and she watched as his face changed into dullness, all his features losing their sharpness. He dropped the package back on the hall seat and said:
‘Did you ever hear that line of Groucho Marx? From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.’
Celia came down the stairs at that moment and gauged the situation. She embraced them both, one by one, and said: ‘I’m so sorry, Mickey.’
Marcia remembered it clearly, that episode, before they came to Australia. And she now lost herself for some time in that distant memory: Mickey’s bitter disappointment with her response and Celia’s. Nowhere near enough adequate, any of it, so of course he had to find something to laugh at. She had felt almost as badly as he did but said nothing because Celia had come downstairs. For Marcia to have embraced him lovingly, as she wanted to in light of their Scotland retreat, and in view of his crumpled-looking face, would have been in bad form somehow, given something away which didn’t normally happen when the three of them were together. So she expressed some sort of platitude and none of them voiced anything much at all because what useful things can be said about recurring rejection other than timeworn, flat truisms?
15
Perth, 2000
Celia, not far away, had her own recollections of Mickey that took place after that time. The night of the opera in Perth when they were in such high spirits at the catastrophic production. How good the audience was about the whole ruined farce. The head-wagging resignation of the sweating conductor and the courageous cast who had pressed on regardless!
It couldn’t have been many nights after the opera shambles, and the episode should have been foreseen, she thought later, since whenever one is going along fairly happily with things working well, the world tends to turn upside down. But she was unprepared for it, that winter’s night in Daglish, sitting on the sofa with the cat who had recently adopted them, Celia, with her legs tucked under her and Pepper taking advantage of her lap, purring as loud as a lawnmower. Marcia was doing a season at a suburban theatre. The knock on the door’s glass was uncompromising, so that the cat jumped off in fright. Through the glass she could see a hulking dark figure.
Unflinchingly she threw open the door: to be truthful she’d recognised the shape of the duffel coat seconds before.
‘Mick! What’s up, where’s your key?’
He pushed past her, mumbling that he’d lost it. He was dishevelled, smelling strongly of whisky. They were used to his steady drinking but Mickey was the kind of charming drunk, laughingly seen as in his cups, or three sheets to the wind, quaintly tolerant sayings that suited his condition. You wouldn’t ever call him rotten drunk or totally pissed. But he was in a bad way tonight; sullen and with a morose glint in his eye, a bruise on his cheek and blood on his knuckles. It was so unlike him to be in such a state that there was something shocking about it, like coming across Sister Mary Ignatius down the road in the local sex shop.
Celia waited, going back to the sofa, as he shuffled into the kitchen and opened the fridge before taking his coat off. She heard him go into the bathroom and have a bit of a wash. Finally he returned with a drink in his hand.
‘Care for one?’ he asked her, more like himself. She shook her head, looking at him.
‘You haven’t been in a fight, have you?’
For answer he impatiently nodded his head. ‘With a brick wall.’ Then said without preamble:
‘I was in the Leederville pub today and guess who I met?’
She shrugged.
‘Albie Duxton,’ he said, sitting opposite her, sniffing at his whisky, the parody of a connoisseur, like someone who doesn’t throw it down his neck in one go, she was thinking, but taken aback by the name.
‘Albie Duxton? From London?’
‘The very same.’ He stood up, walked around the room, then sat down again and twirled his glass. ‘It seems that when we were out of London on holiday years ago, he met you by chance and asked about me because he had a biggish job. But you couldn’t think of my whereabouts.’
‘I didn’t know your exact whereabouts – you were both in Scotland, remember?’
‘I certainly do remember, Celia. Remember telling you the name of the place in the Highlands where we’d probably be staying.’
‘Probably be staying.’
‘We did stay there.’
‘Some little hut in the wilderness. How would I have been able to contact you?’
‘Because you knew the name of the guy who loaned me his cabin. He would have been contactable through his agent. Albie would have known how to get hold of him. And there were such things as telegrams, remember them? We weren’t in the Antarctic after all.’
And on he raged, Mickey the ever-sanguine, now accusing, belabouring her over her sin of omission. How his life had been misdirected because of something she might have, could have, added to that conversation. She defended herself, saying that she didn’t withhold anything intentionally; how was she to know; he never followed an itinerary to the letter and she was half-drunk at the party anyway. But it was at this point she realised there was self-justification spread all over her explanations. Why hadn’t she passed on to Albie exactly what she did know? Mickey was waiting.
‘I needed the work and you knew it. What was it?’
She looked away, knowing she’d just have to sit still and hear what he had to say.
He threw taunts at her: how she would find and then lose a job, always leaving before she was dismissed. He reminded her that she said that there was nobody in her life but Marcia and him, but she was so snobbish she thought herself a cut above most people – that’s why she was friendless.
‘Oh for God’s sake, take a look at yourself,’ she interrupted.
If she wanted to be exclusive, he continued, if nobody’s conversation was good enough, if their sensibility wasn’t honed enough, if their bloody table manners weren’t refined enough – then she was doomed to be on her own, which must be after all what she wanted. Didn’t she know by the way, was she too obtuse to realise, that he was pulling her leg with his table manners?<
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Caught in this tirade she was nevertheless mightily impressed by the lucidity of his arguments and the feebleness of her own thoughts, as they sat quietly and saw their friendship turning rancid in front of their very faces.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, finally. ‘You’re right. I suppose I was jealous.’ Even more was required. ‘I beg your pardon.’
He stood up wearily and looked at himself in the mirror over the fireplace.
‘I’d not have thought you had a mean streak in you.’ He heaved a sigh. ‘I’m sorry too, I didn’t just mean all that.’
‘Yes you did.’
‘That’s more like it.’
He swallowed more whisky slowly, thinking hard, as if the force had been taken out of him and the momentum at a standstill.
‘I thought life for me would be healthier here,’ he said, unexpectedly, straightening himself in the mirror.
‘You can’t surely blame the way of life in this country for the look of you.’
‘I’m not talking of the way I look, my dear, but the way I feel.’
‘Or that.’ She eased up a little. ‘I thought you liked it here; it was you who wanted to come to Australia. You get along well with people here.’
‘Oh yes,’ he seemed fully sober now, ‘and it’s friendly and the parks are beautiful and the girls are divine.’
He came to a halt for a while. ‘I think it’s the grinding bloody smugness of it. The conviction that there’s nowhere else on earth.’ He flicked at an imaginary and persistent flying insect at the corner of his eye, a new twitch he’d developed.
There was also, she thought, the fact that he wasn’t getting work of any description because, look at the sight of him. In the British Isles people would look beyond crumpled trousers and bloodshot eyes and see some worth or recognise a past success.
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