by David Rain
Chapter Fifteen
Roger Dansie was famous in Crater Lakes. At seventeen he was a man in most respects, six feet tall with his chip-of-azure eyes and hero’s jawline gleaming from the razor. He was school champion in swimming and tennis and star attraction of the Crater Lakes Players; local matrons, and not a few girls, jostled for his autograph after his remarkable turn as Stanhope in Journey’s End. The Lakes had never seen the like. Picture him roaring down Volcano Street on his red Harley-Davidson, goggles flashing, gloved hands gunning the throttle. To ride in the sidecar was the ambition of every girl at the high. Few did so more than once; there was Deirdre Gull, of course, the mayor’s daughter, but she was a special case.
The Dansies had been kings of Crater Lakes since settlement began. Lately, though, the family star had fallen. Roger’s father had been a surly fellow whose sole delights were betting on horses, drinking, and thrashing Jack, the Aboriginal servant who more than once had saved his master from prison, brawls and car crashes. Nothing, it seemed, would tame Arthur Dansie. He squandered his fortune. He sold off land. Often at dawn, with red light spilling over the dewy outer paddocks, he paced his crumbling kingdom, stride purposeful, head down, as if he believed he could escape himself. His three older brothers had died in the Great War. Arthur used to say he should have died too.
News of Arthur’s marriage had caused a sensation in the Lakes. The girl was a McKirtle, from the Melbourne suburb of Toorak, then and now one of Australia’s most prestigious addresses. Dawn McKirtle was a lovely blonde fey thing who played the cello dramatically and dressed, disregarding both fashion and common sense, in flowing gowns of a type she termed ‘Pre-Raphaelite’. She was a cousin of Mr Quentin Phelps, a schoolteacher who had arrived only recently at the high; Miss McKirtle had been visiting him in the Lakes when Arthur Dansie, in one of his many attempts at reform, spied her at a Presbyterian service.
The marriage at first appeared idyllic. The girl, townsfolk said, had tamed Arthur Dansie. Some said he worshipped her. No more did he tear into town for the six o’clock swill. The birth of his son was greeted with toasts all over the district. The Dansie dynasty would continue! And yet, as months and years passed, rumour had it that all was not as well as it had first seemed. Arthur Dansie still paced the paddocks at dawn, Jack had a broken arm, and a big new chunk of family land had been placed on the books with Elder’s.
Dawn McKirtle, who looked younger than her years, had given up all hope of marriage before Arthur doffed his hat to her on the church porch that Sunday. ‘Your bloom has lasted,’ her Aunt Evadne used to say, ‘but it can’t much longer. Then where will you be?’ Her niece could never have guessed the answer: Crater Lakes! A big shadowy house miles from town! When the first blissful days of marriage had passed, she began to wonder, only half fancifully, if Arthur Dansie possessed hypnotic powers.
Before her marriage, Dawn’s life had been lived through poetry, art, theatre. In Toorak, she looked down from the iron-lace balcony and imagined herself as the Lady of Shalott. But Crater Lakes was another prison, and no saviour would come. Aunt Evadne, in spiteful spidery handwriting, informed her niece that she had made her bed and must lie in it. Quentin Phelps had been ardent for the marriage – he was such a snob, and the Dansies were top drawer; later, when his cousin reposed in him certain confidences which might have alarmed others, he dismissed them airily. Phelps was a prim, fastidious fellow who wrinkled his nose at the sordid things in life. The girl had always been highly strung.
Dawn Dansie despaired. Bruises like ink marked her pale skin. Soon Arthur’s farm truck tore into town again. What did his mates say, down at the Federal? ‘Hoo, boyo! Knew you’d be back.’ She sat at home and read Tennyson and made Jack sit with her. Fascinated, she watched his velvety black hands poised uncertainly over the curving chair arms. ‘You’re the only one who loves me,’ she declared, defying all shame. When Arthur found her in the drawing room with the abo, he whipped off his belt and thrashed them both.
Love has to go somewhere. Dawn Dansie’s flowed into her son. ‘Do what you like with me,’ she told Arthur. ‘But lay a finger on Roger and I’ll kill you.’ Her husband grumbled and let the brat alone. He was hers anyway: delicate, ethereal, hardly a fit heir for the king of Crater Lakes.
To the boy, his mother was from the first an object of wonder. He loved her as much as he hated and feared his father. How he revered her cello, her gowns, her hands with their delicate tracery of veins, blue beneath the pale unfreckled skin. What times they had: she would play a princess while he stood to attention at the bottom of the stairs, staring up amazed as she made her way down. Sunlight through the landing window danced on her jewels and they dazzled him. One day, he vowed, he would take her away. They would live a life in which their dreams became real. Naturally, the boy must perform for her in turn, striding through scene after scene from Shakespeare: Hamlet, Othello, Richard III. When he was alone, he would turn the pages of a musty Complete Works, conning famous speeches as if they were prayers. Jack had built a theatre in one of the barns: raised stage, footlights, red rep curtains that opened and closed. Each time Roger performed, his mother would applaud as if he were the greatest actor of the age.
One night she made her husband watch too. ‘What is he, a boy or a girl?’ Arthur Dansie raged, as his son pranced about in a tunic. He stormed out of the barn, and Dawn, as he did so, laughed and laughed, encouraging her son to laugh as well. Later that night, Arthur took out his anger on his crazy wife. The bitch had locked her bedroom door, but he smashed his way through. ‘It’s my house!’ he cried, while Roger, cowering under the stairs, did his best to cover his ears. It did no good: he heard too much, terrible things that told him, once and for all, that his father was a monster, and his mother a saint and martyr.
Tactlessly, Dawn Dansie informed her few visitors – wives of local worthies, who felt obliged – that her little boy was the one light in her otherwise benighted existence. Driving away, the wives shook their heads. Hadn’t they said that girl was peculiar? And the sight of her! Hair stringy, a hectic flush on her cheeks, dark half-moons under her nails. And that dirty abo! She makes him serve tea! Visitors grew fewer, then trailed off almost entirely. In business circles, word had it that Arthur was in hock up to his eyeballs.
Meanwhile, Dawn Dansie still dreamed of a better life. She decided to be frank with Quentin Phelps. Her cousin, after all, had his merits. At the high, he taught Shakespeare; as a young man, he had spent a year in London. And Aunt Evadne, his mother, had died recently, leaving him a small legacy.
‘My son cannot remain here all his life,’ Dawn Dansie said. Already, infancy lay behind him. Birthdays passed: seven, eight, nine. How quickly children grow! ‘Crater Lakes? Such a stage is too small for him. Of course, I have taught him what I know of art and culture.’
Phelps nodded. They had listened to the boy recite Adam Lindsay Gordon; now he sat across the tea table, pouting at the carpet. A pretty boy. His hair was neatly brushed. He was always dressed immaculately.
‘What I want for my son is a Continental tour. Imagine: La Scala. The Louvre. Covent Garden.’ Dawn Dansie, as it happened, could imagine none of this: Melbourne, Crater Lakes, and the railway line that linked them marked the limits of her world. ‘Naturally, we would need a guide,’ she added, and lay back in her creaking chair, attempting a coquetry which even she must have realised was years too late (and, as it happened, sadly misdirected).
Phelps, twisting his pinkish lips, looked like Aunt Evadne. Gently he asked his cousin if she knew what was going on in Europe. Of course she didn’t. She didn’t read the papers. There was no wireless in the old Dansie house. Attempts to enlighten her would be useless, he knew. The world outside was unreal to her; he had always known this, but still the extent of her ignorance took his breath away. Take, for example, this moment now. Sunlight played through dusty curtains, and the stringy pale woman dressed as Ophelia asked her cousin why he, with all his gifts, had chosen to remain in Crater L
akes.
‘My mother never told you? Well, well. It seems she could keep a secret.’
War broke out three months later. To Dawn Dansie, it meant only one thing: no Continental tour. She was crushed, and only nodded blankly when Arthur, one bright evening, told her he had enlisted. His voice, to her surprise, was tender; she could almost have believed he was still the man she had married. He asked her if she and ‘the lad’ would be all right, but it seemed he had convinced himself that they would. There were things, he said, that a man had to do.
As he left for the last time, clumping down the veranda in heavy boots, Dawn Dansie saw him briefly as the young man who had doffed his hat to her so many years earlier. Oh, but she had loved him! She loved him still; and when, as she knew it would, the news arrived of his death, she howled with a sorrow nothing could allay. Some weeks later, she dived into the swimming hole they called Dansie’s Pond. It was high summer, and the water was low.
‘Sad,’ said the ladies of the Lakes. ‘But a mercy.’
And merciful, all agreed, was the fate of the orphaned boy. Who was to look after him? Quentin Phelps, that’s who – most popular teacher at Crater Lakes High! Quentin Phelps, coach of the Magpies, president of the Lions Club, personal friend of Mayor Arch L. Gull. Many times Mayor Gull had said that Mr Phelps brought a valuable perspective to their little community. Fine fellow, Phelps. A man of the world. A man of vision. A man who made things happen. A mover and a shaker, that was Quentin Phelps.
The boy’s inheritance – the big, sagging house with its shabby outbuildings – was left in the care of Jack, who many said was a rum sort, even for an abo. When Phelps and Mayor Gull arrived to take the boy, Jack clutched him for too long, standing in the driveway, and sobbed in a manner both unseemly and disgusting, until Mayor Gull felt compelled to intervene, pushing the snivelling blackie into the dirt. The boy, overwrought, kicked the mayor in the shins, and resisted vigorously as the two men bundled him into the back of the Baby Austin. The boy, twisting around at once, gazed longingly through the kidney-shaped rear window.
‘He’s young,’ said Quentin Phelps, unalarmed, slapping the wheel decisively as they turned out of the drive. ‘There’s still time to bring my influence to bear.’
Some said Phelps made Roger what he was. The boy was twelve when he came to the schoolteacher’s neat modern house on Lakeview South. There was talk of sulks and tantrums. In his first year at the high, Roger was shy, withdrawn, applying no effort. His second showed little improvement, but more than once he lashed out at another boy and had to be punished. In his third year, few noticed him; he blended in among myriad lanky youths bound for futures in farming or forestry. But all the time he was a creature in a chrysalis. The fey McKirtle looks had faded; something of his handsome, manly father showed first in his face, then his body.
Quentin Phelps displayed remarkable patience. The boy might have been his own son. The townsfolk noticed how often the kindly schoolteacher took Roger out in the Baby Austin. Saturday morning at the servo: ‘Where yous off to, then?’ the bloke at the pump would ask, and Phelps, in the demotic manly manner he adopted for the lower orders, boomed, ‘Picnic up the lakes!’ or ‘Fishing, ain’t we? What do you call them rods, jutting out the back?’ Roger Dansie used to box at the Boys’ Club, with Phelps, his coach and mentor, cheering from the sidelines. Urged on by Phelps, the boy played football, cricket, tennis; Phelps also formed the Crater Lakes Players, some said wholly to show off Roger’s gifts.
Ladies who lived in the better streets of the Lakes, tinkling teacups, wondered sometimes why Mr Phelps had never married. Wasn’t he in the prime of life? Fine figure of a man, though he had been rejected for military service. Flat feet, wasn’t it? Heart murmur, you say? Still, it wasn’t as if he offered the boy no taste of family life. Mr Phelps spent many an evening at Mayor Gull’s house, which meant the boy did too. Mrs Gull spoiled him rotten, they said. Many a time she stroked his cheek and told him that one day he would be a great man.
It was during Roger’s third year at the high that Phyllis Gull died. Cancer, one of the viciously female kinds, carried her away in a matter of months. But what months they were. Poor Phyllis had been devoted to the boy, and he had loved her in his turn. He was different once she was gone. And that awkward, not-quite-pretty daughter of hers! Roger, from the first, had been a brother to young Deirdre; indeed, it was his kindness to the girl, according to some reports, that led Mayor Gull and Mr Phelps to club together and present him with his splendid sixteenth-birthday gift: the red Harley-Davidson. Roger’s time had come.
In the Players, his rise had been swift. Quentin Phelps, though gifted with the common touch, had aspirations to art. Often he spoke of his year in London, hinting at a theatrical career which, alas, had been thwarted. Now, in the Lakes, he would fulfil his dreams. A smash hit with The Admirable Crichton (the King Edward VII Theatre had been packed for two nights) led to more ambitious fare: Pinero, Shaw, O’Neill, even the Bard himself! In his last years at the high, Roger Dansie played the lead in every production. His talents stirred the Lakes to fever pitch. Was a star in their midst? Quentin Phelps said so.
It was early in Roger’s matriculation year that the Old Vic Theatre Company from London made its legendary tour of Australia and New Zealand. The war was over, and here, as if to prove it, were Sir Laurence Olivier and his movie-star wife, Vivien Leigh, bearing beauty and culture to the dominions. Everywhere they went the Oliviers were received like royalty, but never so much as in these distant backwaters of the British Empire. Their journey across Australia was a conqueror’s progress: Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney. For a continent starved of glamour, here was Hollywood and the British aristocracy rolled into one. Thousands lined the pavements just to watch the Oliviers pass.
Sir Laurence told reporters he was looking for new talent. In those drab years after the war, the vast continent of Australia possessed almost no legitimate theatre and barely a handful of professional actors. But there were amateurs. There were aspirants. Now, in each state capital the tour passed through, Australia’s young performers could audition for one of the greatest and most powerful figures in world theatre. It was the chance of a lifetime. The prize was a ticket to London, and professional training at the Old Vic Theatre School.
For Roger Dansie, the day he auditioned for Olivier in Adelaide was, he would realise later, the climax of his life. Nothing could be greater. He had climbed to a pinnacle and, afterwards, could only slip inexorably. Yet the triumph, at the time, seemed no triumph at all. It was a drizzly afternoon in April. Traffic hummed along North Terrace; above, in a fussy drawing room of the South Australian Hotel, sunlight played across gilt and plush and panelling and thick green fonds of ferns and picked out the boy as if in a spotlight. At a desk six feet away, with a sandy-haired male secretary at his side, Sir Laurence sat expectantly, twinkly-eyed. Royalty’s duties need all an actor’s skills. How many products of Adelaide Ladies’ College had they seen that afternoon? How many Mrs Worthingtons had pushed forward their daughters? But this was different. Country boy, eh? Was he really only seventeen?
The moment had come. Roger glowered and assumed a twisted gait. Everything rode on this. Quentin Phelps had told him as much, squeezing the boy’s shoulder hard enough to hurt when the secretary called his name. Not any old commoner got to see Sir Larry; Mayor Gull had gone out on a limb, pulling strings with a crony at Government House.
Roger breathed deeply. Deirdre, thrilled at the news of his audition, had told him last night over a crackling trunk line that she knew he would succeed: she simply knew it. He was brilliant. He blinked; sunlight flashed in his eyes, and suddenly he was back in Jack’s theatre in the barn, the theatre his father had smashed up years ago in a drunken rage. ‘Now is the winter of our discontent …’ Roger had known the speech for as long as he could remember. Did he even consider that Sir Larry, that very evening, would proclaim it from the stage of the Theatre Royal? Olivier’s Richard III was the star turn
of the Old Vic tour.
The great man sat forward, back bowed, fist pressed against tautened mouth, as cadence after cadence rolled richly towards him. Was he insulted? Was he suppressing mirth? Impossible to tell. Afterwards, in a belated rush of shame, Roger feared as much; and yet, the audition over, Olivier spoke to him for a minute or so in a manner friendly enough, then murmured to the sandy-haired secretary, who gave the boy two tickets to the Theatre Royal. That night, six rows back in the stalls, Roger writhed in anguish. Between the acts he snapped when Phelps pressed him for more details about the audition. What, precisely, had Sir Larry said? Nothing: ‘Last year at school, eh? What sports do you play?’ Then it had been over. Yes, Roger admitted, Olivier had said he would be in touch; but that, no doubt, was mere politeness. Roger had acted in front of Olivier; now Oliver had acted in front of Roger. What more was there to be said?
The Oliviers were on their way to Melbourne when they detoured to inspect the South Australian stable, deep in the verdant southeast of the state, which had seen the nativity of their friend Robert Helpmann, greatest male dancer of his generation. The Lakes lay nearby. Was it coincidence that a special assembly had been called that afternoon at the high school? Was it by chance that reporters from the city papers, Mayor Gull in his robes of office, all his courtiers, and many a lady of the Lakes in her finery happened to crowd the hall? Not unless chance led Sir Larry, with the lovely Viv beside him, to ascend the podium and proclaim in that richest of voices that he had witnessed much remarkable talent in South Australia and had been given many decisions to make. Now he had made them. Crater Lakes schoolboy Roger Dansie was to be offered a place at the Old Vic Theatre School. Cameras flashed like a lightning storm. Roger gasped at Quentin Phelps, at Mayor Gull, at Deirdre. They had known. They had all known except him. The applause, the stamping and cheering, almost brought down the ceiling of the school hall. He ascended the podium in a daze. Never again would his life be the same. Henry V had called him to arms. Scarlett O’Hara kissed his cheek.