‘But—’
‘I don’t want to talk about it anymore,’ she said.
I hunched my shoulders and did not reply. I was used to this kind of unfair treatment, but still it wounded me.
We were home in good time and separated to our bedrooms. Pippa slammed her door, but whatever trouble she had landed herself in was her own fault and nothing to do with me. I went into my bedroom and drew down Lambs’ Tales from the bookcase, turning to the passage in Othello that confused me. Othello demanded proof from Iago of Desdemona’s guilt:
Iago, feigning indignation that his honesty should be taken for a vice, asked Othello if he had not sometimes seen a handkerchief spotted with strawberries in his wife’s hand. Othello answered that he had given her such a one, and that it was his first gift. ‘That same handkerchief,’ said Iago, ‘did I see Michael Cassio this day wipe his face with.’— ‘If it be as you say,’ said Othello, ‘I will not rest till a wide revenge swallow them up.’
I was back with the wretched handkerchief again. Yet it was clear to me that there had to be more to it than that. It is hard, from this distance, to disentangle the strands of my ignorance and my knowledge, to recover whatever it was that I actually suspected from the storm of conjecture swirling around me. I remember that the word affair troubled me: I understood that it had a specific meaning, and my mother was having one; I also noticed that it had a blurrier sense, as in the Matthews Affair, or The Affair of the Missing Sapphire, which was the name (or if it wasn’t it was something like that) of a detective novel I had seen my father reading. Lambs’ Tales said that Othello had employed Cassio in his love affair with Desdemona: this too was confusing, as people who were employed were office workers, or shop assistants, or tradesmen. If you were having a love affair (whatever that was, precisely), why would you employ anyone?
There was no one I could safely ask about my suppositions, and so they continued to plague me. This was especially so at night, when I battled with the throngs of unwelcome and hostile visitors I had myself called into being. As they clustered around my bed, I felt besieged not only by them but by all the shadowy doubts and fears that equally inhabited the darkness. I suppose most children take their good fortune for granted, since it is all they know: I had never contemplated my luck in being born into a comfortable and stable family in the comfortable and stable suburbs of Melbourne. Nor was I capable of analysing my situation and detecting those elements of it which were starting to fracture. But I could intuit that something was fracturing, and I could sense danger: the safe terrain of my childhood had become slippery. Increasingly I looked to Grandpa and Rose for my security, for my sense of myself, for my place in the world.
The Hawks that weekend thrashed Sydney by seventy-three points at Princes Park; my father was contented. Leigh Matthews kicked his 900th goal during the last quarter of the match, thus providing what my father termed the icing on the cake. In the meantime, however, the business of the charges against Matthews (the Matthews Affair) had come to a head. My father was apoplectic to read in the paper that the league had written to Matthews in what he called an insulting manner.
‘What the hell do they think they’re doing?’ Small flakes of toast escaped from his lips as he fulminated. ‘Here you have a man who is an absolute hero, a man who is literally beyond reproach, a man who has been best and fairest in the club eight times. I ask you.’
I waited for my mother to say that you couldn’t say somebody was literally beyond reproach (I didn’t know whether this was the case or not, only that the use of literally usually galvanised her into a purist’s rage), but she let it float past.
‘They’ve got the unmitigated gall to say that Leigh Matthews—Leigh Matthews—has brought the game into disrepute,’ he spluttered. ‘Disrepute!’
I murmured something. Pippa (buttering toast) and my mother (making school lunches) took no notice.
He kept on reading, his brow dark. ‘Knights did a hammy, Nicky,’ he said. ‘Sometimes the news is all bad.’
‘I’m leaving in ten minutes sharp,’ said my mother, who always drove us to school. ‘I can’t be late this morning. Pippa, Nicky, will you be ready? And you’re going to be late if you’re not careful, Frank.’ She closed a lunchbox with a snap.
The following weekend Essendon (strengthened by the inclusion of Paul Salmon, an impossibly tall young full-forward who was being hailed as the latest superstar and was already called the Big Fish) played Collingwood and won by eleven points. My father didn’t know whether to be pleased or not that Collingwood had nearly managed a boilover: had it been any other team he would have rejoiced to see Essendon beaten, but he was unable to celebrate anything about Collingwood. With only six weeks left of the home-and-away games, he was delighted that Hawthorn managed to thump Richmond and retain third place on the ladder.
His pleasure in this victory was considerably diminished, however, by the news—reported on the morning of the match—that the police were charging Leigh Matthews for breaking Neville Bruns’s jaw. This affair was still simmering; to my father’s amazed indignation, the league had earlier in the week taken the unprecedented step of deregistering Matthews for four matches. The involvement of the police was for my father the thin end of the wedge, an opening of the floodgates, a slippery slide to perdition, a descent into insanity and probably hell. A sporting game was a sporting game, he explained to us all. It was not something in which the police had, or could have, a proper involvement. The rules were different. You didn’t go round punching people in the street, of course; but if you inadvertently injured someone in a game of footy it was nobody’s business but yours and the umpire’s.
‘And the person you injured?’ my mother suggested. My father agreed, but impatiently. The thing was, it was a game of footy, and it had its own set of rules, and these rules were nothing to do with the police.
My mother and Pippa rapidly tired of the topic.
Then my mother lost her temper.
‘He’s just a bloody footballer,’ she snapped. ‘You carry on as if he’s the epitome of saintliness. He’s just a footballer, Frank. He’s a footballer who beat up another footballer. He’s not Jesus Christ.’
My father was incensed, and turned to me for vindication. ‘Nicky, tell your mother about his ’77 season. You know the stats.’
‘Don’t tell your mother anything, Nicky,’ she said. She whipped around to my father and her voice ramped up almost to screaming point. ‘Frank, can’t you ever, ever, ever talk about anything but the damn bloody football? I mean, honestly, do you have the faintest idea of how totally and completely bored and frustrated I get when you never, ever talk about anything halfway sensible or important, for Christ’s sake?’
My father’s jaw dropped. It is hard, looking back, to imagine that he was surprised by this outburst, but so it appeared. I had often thought that he used his football obsession deliberately to drive my mother crazy. Judging from his visible astonishment and hurt, however, this was the last thing he had intended; and, to my surprise, I felt sorry for him. With dignity he exited the room, and went to turn on the television.
That week, deprived of the attention of his wife and daughter, my father talked incessantly to me about the Matthews affair, about Hawthorn’s best strategies for the rest of the season, which players would prove crucial, and what mistakes the coach was likely to make. I listened as best I could.
Sometimes, however, the pressure was more than I could handle. I always tried to respond sympathetically. The more I did this, the more my father thought everything was (in his own words) hunky-dory, and the more swamped I became by the false persona of a football-loving son. I tried to add further layers to this flimsy persona, to be a manly son, a son who didn’t cry or panic, who didn’t suffer terrors at night. And the more my father believed in this persona, and encouraged him, the more miserable I was, and the more trapped I became.
Normally I might have talked to my mother about these difficulties, but I could detect that s
he was not interested in talking to me; in any case I was angry with her, because, in some way that I could not properly understand, her behaviour was imperilling all the rest of us. Her focus had shifted. She had twice given me cheese sandwiches with Vegemite in my school lunch although she knew perfectly well I hated them. And one day I had to wear an unironed shirt to school. Her perfidy was extreme. She was concentrating on another place, another person, and I knew who that person was. I might not have known what it was my mother and Mr Ben Bloomberg did during their mysterious assignations, but I sensed their capacity to devastate us. From my mother’s preoccupied silences and her failure to give us all proper attention, I feared untold things.
It was a complicated business at the best of times, living with my parents. In my father’s one-eyed ardour, and his implacable devotion, there was a kind of stability. I knew what to expect from him. But his demands on me had previously been counterbalanced by what I now understand to be the subversive tug from my mother, who had always been willing to collude with me in excuses and postponements, who was infinitely tolerant of those activities of mine which my father found disconcerting and suspicious, and who would always say, Oh Frank, give him a break. Without this compensatory pull I was left to cope on my own, and it was hard work.
My despair over these matters came to a head near the end of the week, while I was loading the dishwasher. On this evening it was definitely Pippa’s turn. She had, however, denied this and flounced off, and my mother had unjustly taken her side.
‘It doesn’t matter anyway, Nicky,’ she said. ‘I’ll help you. It won’t take long.’
But it did matter. From this distance it was a trivial dispute, of the kind that frequently happened between Pippa and me, but I remember I was distressed by Pippa’s obliviousness to my efforts to be nice to her. These efforts had been heartfelt: although I had no idea what was going on, I didn’t want Pippa to be in anguish. I had tried to show her that I was on her side in whatever her trouble was. So I thought it unfeeling of her not to try a bit harder to be on my side.
I was snivelling as I stacked dishes and glasses and cutlery. The despised tears began to slide down next to my nose, which I wiped on my sleeve, thereby dashing a glass to the floor, where it broke. My mother—normally so even-tempered—uttered an exclamation of annoyance. I squatted down to try to pick up the shattered glass pieces.
‘For God’s sake, Nicky, leave it, will you? I’ll get a brush and dustpan. Don’t touch it, I said.’
I straightened and she saw my wet face. Something cracked in her.
‘It’s not anything to burst into tears about. Oh for heaven’s sake, Nicky, can’t you try not to be such a dreadful little cry-baby?’
It was the last straw. Sobbing, I ran up the stairs, slammed the door of my bedroom at least as loudly as Pippa had ever managed, and hurled myself onto my bed. There I gave myself up to my misery.
I expected my mother to arrive speedily at my bedside. Head-stroking and cuddles and sympathy would follow. But she didn’t come. First Pippa had been unkind, now my mother. My desolation was complete. I was misunderstood, mistreated, unloved and unwanted. Life was all but at an end.
My father believed that I willed my turns, bringing them on by my behaviour. My mother was certain that this wasn’t true. I don’t think I ever did deliberately bring them into being: they were so exhausting and unpleasant that I would have done almost anything to evade them. But prolonged weeping could generate them, and so it was on this occasion. By the time my mother knocked on my door, perhaps half an hour later, the dreaded jackhammers were pounding inside my head and I was unable to give coherent answers to her questions, which were (I was able still to register) less concerned than usual. If anything she sounded annoyed.
She was more like her old self when she woke me the next morning. I had slept deeply, as I did after these episodes, and awoke to find her rubbing my back.
‘You have to get up, Nicky,’ she said. ‘How are you feeling, darling?’
‘All right,’ I said, which wasn’t true. I felt weak and achy.
‘I’m dropping you off at Grandpa’s. I asked him to come over but he’s got a plumber or somebody coming, so you’ll have to spend the day there.’
‘Okay,’ I said.
Rose wasn’t there when I was delivered to Grandpa’s, but a fire was already burning in the garden room and the old couch was ready for me.
Grandpa arranged the scarlet cushions around me and nestled me up in rugs. ‘Do you want the telly on?’ he asked.
‘No,’ I said.
‘Book?’
‘No.’
‘Just going to lie there and look at the fire?’
‘Yes. Thank you,’ I added.
‘Okay, old chap. Let me know if you need anything.’
‘Will Rose be here?’
‘Later she will. She’s out shopping. You snuggle down and see if you can get some sleep.’
I half-woke an hour or so later to the sound of muted voices. Grandpa and Rose were sitting in the big old armchairs in front of the fire. I was still feeling woozy. I kept my eyes shut and my breathing even. I don’t think I was even trying to eavesdrop: I was simply dozey, and didn’t want to wake up.
‘I love Nicky so much, you know,’ Rose said. ‘I love to think I’ll be part of his family.’
‘You’re an angel,’ said Grandpa.
‘And I think Pippa and I can be good friends.’
‘I’m sure you can be.’
‘I adore you,’ said Rose.
‘You’re a silly girl. But keep on adoring me.’
There was a smoochy noise. By this time I was thoroughly awake, but also gripped with embarrassment. The last thing I wanted was to interrupt Grandpa and Rose in this weird conversation, or to let them know I had overheard any of it. So I breathed evenly and kept my eyes shut.
‘You are the loveliest, sexiest, most gorgeous guy,’ murmured Rose.
‘You are the gorgeous one,’ said Grandpa. ‘You are my gorgeous one.’
‘Sometimes,’ said Rose. ‘Sometimes, I think, how did this all happen? It seems so—so mysterious, and wonderful.’
The next few minutes were taken up by fluffy stuff of this kind. Grandpa said Rose had made him young again; Rose said he was the most divine man in the world; he said he hadn’t ever realised happiness like this was possible; she said it was the same for her. My alarm was reaching record proportions. I was trying so hard not to listen that I almost missed the next bit.
‘I feel so guilty,’ said Grandpa.
‘You have no reason to.’
‘I can’t help it.’
‘Darling, we’ve been through it so many times now. You know what we did was right. It was right for us. There is no reason to feel guilty.’
‘I know that on a rational level. But I still worry.’
‘Darling, darling, you mustn’t. You mustn’t worry. We did nothing wrong.’
There was a silence, and when Grandpa broke it his voice shook. ‘I did love her very much, you know, once. When we were young—’
Rose cut in. ‘I loved her too, Dan.’
‘I know you did.’
‘Dan, my darling,’ continued Rose. ‘Between us we gave Didie the very best of care. And she understood that. She knew how well she was cared for.’
‘I’m sure you’re right,’ said Grandpa.
‘We gave her a great gift,’ said Rose, with a kind of noble gravity that I found very moving.
Grandpa made a murmury noise.
‘My dearest love, you mustn’t agonise over it. You’ve been through some dreadful times, but that’s all over now. We’re together, and I’m here to look after you, and I’ll always, always be here for you.’
‘I don’t deserve you,’ said Grandpa.
There followed another silence, during which I assumed cuddling of some kind was taking place. It went for so long that I nearly dropped off again, but then the telephone rang and Grandpa went to answer it. It gave me
a good opportunity, and I opened my eyes and cautiously stretched.
‘Welcome back to the land of the living,’ Rose said, giving me one of her marvellous hugs. She smelled slightly different, now—less antiseptic, more flowery—but I still had the feeling of sinking into warmth and strength and softness. ‘You’ve been so sound asleep! How are you feeling?’
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Will you be here all day, Rosie?’
‘I will. I’m going to spend the whole day attending to your special needs.’
‘Aren’t you being a nurse anymore?’
‘Well, I’m being a nurse while I’m looking after you, aren’t I?’
‘But you’re not going out to be a nurse at other people’s places?’
‘No. No, at present I’m spending time with Grandpa.’
‘That’s nice,’ I said.
‘Now,’ said Rose, ‘are you ready for a little something?’
She spoiled me for the rest of the day, tempting me with goodies and hot drinks and even videos: we didn’t have a video player at home, so this was a special treat. By the time my mother arrived to pick me up I was (I had to admit) recovered. My mother found it in her to be polite to Rose, and to thank her for the care she had given me.
‘I love looking after Nicky,’ said Rose, glowing. ‘He’s such a good patient.’
She and Grandpa beamed at me.
‘Yes, well,’ said my mother, unbending. ‘Time to go home, Nicky.’
It occurred to me, later that evening, that it was within my power to do Rose and Grandpa a service by helping my mother to realise how generous they—especially Rose—had been to Didie. I waited until I was in bed and my mother came in to say goodnight. She sat on the side of my bed.
‘Did you know that Grandpa and Rose gave Didie a big present?’ I said.
‘What on earth are you talking about, Nicky?’
I repeated the information.
‘What sort of a present?’
I found I didn’t know. ‘A big one,’ I said.
‘Did Rose tell you this? Or Grandpa?’
‘Not exactly.’
The Starlings Page 16