by Peter Carey
I sat at the window watching the street through the rain-slick sunshine and after a while he came limping quickly along Jalan Treacher, bearing his manuscript before him like a pudding on a silver tray.
19
When my father was almost seventy, he got it into his head that Barbara—his mistress, I suppose you would call her— was planning to kick him out, so he turned up at The Modern Reviews office in Charlotte Street wondering how much it might cost to rent a room in a pub in the Orkneys.
Boofy always was a hopeless romantic, but there was something very sad and pathetic about this, and no matter how frightful he had been in the past, he was my father. I told him I would see what I could find out.
Straight away I rallied everyone possible—my cousin Janet, my pompous brother, and the one or two other relatives who did not actually detest my father—and we got together enough for a deposit on a flat in Bayswater which we would sell when my father finally died. It was quite an undertaking really, not least because he had betrayed so many of us, and also because we were, with the exception of my brother, rather poor.
Once I succeeded in getting everyone’s commitment I took my father to lunch at Simpson’s, where I outlined our proposition. I don’t think I was patronising or showed excessive pleasure in my charity. Boofy took it all very calmly. He sipped his Burgundy, nodded his head and, when it was all laid out, thanked me rather formally and asked if it was all right if he ‘got back to me.’ Then, a week later, he phoned to say Barbara didn’t intend to kick him out at all, that it had simply been his imagination.
The arrangements had all been such a stretch. And my heart, I suppose you could say, had been filled with love for him, a very little girl’s love at that. I had thought it a selfless love, but in fact it could not have been, because when he rejected the offer without ever once thanking me I suddenly, silently but violently washed my hands of him.
We may have spoken once or twice afterwards, but if so the conversations were cursory and I can’t recall them. As it happened, I was in Portugal with Annabelle when he died, and I found out late and did not even get home in time for the funeral.
I don’t feel sad about this so much as grimy, as if I am a lesser person than I would wish to be, and the sight of that lost man limping down Jalan Treacher brought these earlier emotions quickly to the surface.
I felt depressed all afternoon and finally decided I might take a constitutional. Perhaps I was flirting with the notion of visiting Jalan Campbell, but I got no farther than the foyer when I was waylaid by Slater, who called to me from the other side of the Highland Stream. I crossed the bridge and found him with his books and notebooks all spread out on a corner table, as if the bar were now his private office, where all the gorgeous waitresses were his friends and came instantly to see what the gawky white woman might have.
Well? he said when I finally sat down.
Well, what?
His eyes were twinkling in his sunburned cheeks, and he scooped a handful of his stinking little fish and ate one or two of them. He looked mischievous, as if he had indeed contrived to have the servants scrub at poor Chubb’s suit with a pumice stone.
Stark raving! I saw him—and in such a blinding rage!
Don’t you see how sad it is?
Let me tell you what you wouldn’t hear before.
What does this concern?
What does this concern? You’re starting to sound Australian, like a bloody policeman. He paused. He told you about Noussette, didn’t he?
That they were lovers?
Slater raised his eyebrows. Surely not? Is that what he claimed?
Exactly that.
Really? Slater did look immensely disconcerted. Lovers? Well, it doesn’t really affect things if they were.
20
The war was over by the time Slater was shifted from Malaya to Sydney as MI5’s liaison with Australian security. He was so quickly in the social pages that his job was never secret, yet the local press never did grasp the fact that this jitterbugging Brit was, like his famous detractor Dylan Thomas, a popular and controversial figure.
It was Noussette who made the connection and then called Trish Lawson at Australian Vogue, purring in her very best ‘European’ style, all cher and merde. On the subject of poetry Vogue was not easily persuaded, and it was not until Noussette showed Lawson the twenty-year-old photograph of the intense young man in cricket whites that she agreed that he might be ‘done’ on spec. Of course Slater was no longer that golden youth, but in his middle thirties he retained his dazzling blue eyes and cleft chin and the hair then was still as yellow as autumn wheat.
It is very clear that he was not at all averse to being photographed, particularly by a young woman who had such an exalted opinion of Dewsong On the day he visited the Kent Street studio he arranged to leave his afternoon quite free.
Obviously, from Noussette’s perspective, this was a lot of complicated skiving just to get a phony birth certificate, yet she seems to have had a taste for it. The point was not the complication but that nothing was impossible.
She had opened the big loft door on the westerly wall of her studio, and there, four stories above the wharves, she’d carefully positioned a rather unstable bentwood chair. Big banks of grey cloud were massing above the Parramatta River and the afternoon light was changeable, sometimes moody whereas at other moments the steely water below was cut with diamonds and the light inside the studio was unflattering and harsh.
Sit, she told the famous poet.
Slater, already delighted to find that her sultry voice had not misrepresented her appearance, was by his own admission titillated by this ‘little bossy boots.’
In the chair, she said.
Connoisseur that he was, he complied happily.
The assistant began to take meter readings of Slater’s face.
Norman, you can go.
This was a slim, foppish boy with a thin nose and a disdainful manner. He shrugged his slender shoulders, and smirked as his employer squatted immediately in front of her subject, unsmilingly turning his handsome face left and right.
In all his life no woman had ever ‘handled’ him in quite this way. Though of course he must’ve been accustomed to being regarded as attractive, it seems that this particular appraisement was new. The photographer’s large dark eyes gave away nothing except his own reflection, and when she failed to respond to his jokes he had no choice but to offer himself to someone else’s intense and very private will.
Norman remained a moment, his eyebrows raised as he watched Noussette work.
Light, he reminded her.
She changed the aperture on the Hasselblad.
Would you like me to take a reading?
Go. Remember to lock the door on the street.
He placed the light meter on a small stool near the door, where it stayed for the remainder of the sitting.
Noussette had exposed no more than a single roll of film when the westerly wind began to blow, lifting her subject’s hair.
There it is, she said.
Slater squinted uncomfortably into the light, his eyes crinkling, and she emitted a small purr of satisfaction.
You wanted the wind, he asked her.
Once again she took his chin and tilted it until the sunlight drilled directly into his eyes and a shadow fell, into his anger lines, those two fierce furrows above his nose. She was very close to him, near enough for Slater, like Chubb before him, to smell the slightly stale and musty odour of her body. The corners of her mouth lifted, ever so slightly. Smelling one thing, seeing the other, suddenly he knew exactly what her face would look like when he fucked her.
For the next hour he exposed himself to her enquiring gaze, as if the degree of his trust would ensure that the photograph was flattering. Naturally enough, the portrait itself turned out to be a disaster, but the evening proceeded as they both had wished, and by four in the morning photographer and subject were at Cremorne Point, asleep in each other’s arms.
What is it?
Noussette wrapped the sheet around herself and ran from the room.
Slater’s first thought was: Husband! He found the light switch, and dressed swiftly. By the time he discovered his socks, his shoes were already on his feet, so he slipped them into his pocket and waited. He heard a man’s voice, not in full control of itself.
Finally, he told me, I decided I might as well get it over with.
In the unused neon-lit kitchen Slater discovered a very distraught and wet young man who was, he was relieved to see, several inches shorter and a good ten pounds lighter. That he had his head shorn like a Yank also seemed important, for in telling me the story he mentioned it three times.
The visitor wore a towel over his sodden trousers and another wrapped around his shoulders, and if he was not exactly crying he was certainly disturbed. As Slater watched, Noussette took a third towel and began to rub the close-cut hair with such tenderness he typically decided the young man must be ‘a Nancy boy’
All conversation had ceased once Slater appeared. Noussette offered neither explanation nor introduction, so he wondered if he was meant to leave.
On the kitchen counter top, next to a dripping Akubra hat, was an advance copy of Slater’s new book, from which he’d earlier read aloud to what seemed great effect. Had he been prepared to sacrifice it, he might have escaped much else. Instead, he removed the book from the pooling water and thus caught the visitor’s attention.
That’s your book? Christopher Chubb demanded. Meaning, as Slater needlessly pointed out to me: Are you its owner?
Indeed.
Any good?
Not bad, said Slater. Pretty damn good, in fact.
Good, you think? Chubb took the towel from Noussette and, having wiped it roughly across a face which still showed all the signs of upset, tossed it through the doorway into the hall, a gesture Slater interpreted as territorial, ‘like a fox terrier pissing on a fence.’ In that moment he changed, Slater said, from this abject thing into a little Aussie brawler. You know the type, always looking for a fight, about a woman, a painting, or Sigmund Freud, it doesn’t matter. Of course there is something about their accent. We never expect a voice like that to talk about poetry.
What was his first book? Chubb said.
Dewsong.
Yes, Dewsong, Chubb said, that was an awful lot of tripe, you know, like overripe Dylan Thomas, if such a thing is possible. He stared at my new book and made a face. I seem to recall ‘ulcered air,’ he said. God fucking save me.
Slater was always physically imposing, and no matter what he said about ‘pub brawlers,’ he was quite capable of using his bulk to intimidate another man. I am John Slater, he announced. I wrote the book. So who in the hell are you?
A man who cannot understand ‘ulcered air.’
Ah, you should read more poetry then.
Not ‘ulcerated’? And if ‘ulcerated,’ how?
Let me guess, you’re a school teacher.
Slater saw then in the other man’s narrowed eyes what he described to me as ‘the most awful Irish pugnacity’ and ‘the vulgar certainty of the autodidact.’
Let me guess, said Chubb, you are a fraud.
This was pretty damn rich, Slater said in the Merlin’s pub, but he had appointed himself the Constable Plod of modern verse, as we all now know. I might have knocked him down for his impertinence but Noussette suddenly spirited him away, got him into the shower and then to bed.
If it hadn’t been raining I would have left, but instead I went out onto her porch, one of those huge sheltered porches they have in Sydney, and took to the hammock. By the time the light was coming into the sky Noussette had joined me with a very large tumbler of rough Aussie whisky. We lay side by side and watched this glorious storm move out through the harbour. It was such an odd, disrupted day, but do you know, Micks, it turned out to be one of the most lovely nights of my life.
At which point, to the amusement of the waitresses, he quoted Pound in full stentorian display.
And if she plays with me with her shirt off,
We shall construct many Iliads.
And whatever she does or says
We shall spin long yarns out of nothing.
21
God knows what her relationship was with Chubb, said Slater, but she was obviously very fond of the bitter little chap. Still, it’s a stretch to believe that they were lovers. If they had been, she would not have done what she did on the verandah.
What was that?
I suppose he had a sort of elfin charm, he said, but he was also a very aggressive and opinionated little snot. This is not a generous man, Micks. You heard what he said to me the other day, repeating that garbage of Wystan’s—which, by the bye, was about something altogether personal. And look what a narcissist he is. His suit wears out and the whole world is against him.
Not the whole world, John.
Slater’s wild eyebrows shot up. He thinks I did it? No!
Thinks you arranged to have it done. Now, do be calm. He is a little nutty, as you’ve said from the moment you finally admitted knowing him.
Yes, but ask yourself what sort of personality would even imagine having a fucking suit attacked. A fucking classicist— who else? He imagines this because it’s just the sort of dirty thing he’d play himself. That’s what his hoax was like. It was mean-minded. It was little. I knew David Weiss, did I tell you that? Yes, yes, I remember. Well, he was just a boy, a very generous, clever boy, and he died because of Chubb’s jealous bastardry And as for being a little nutty, he’s far more delusional than you realise. This is what I was going to tell you. He actually believed that Bob McCorkle had come to life and was intent on killing his creator. That’s what Noussette told me out in the hammock. It’s what all the upset had been about. There he was stumbling round the streets of Sydney, too frightened to sleep in his own bed. It was even more grotesque than that, though. He had it in his head that if only he could provide a birth certificate this beast would vanish. If there was some mad logic to this, I never got it.
Slater sipped his beer, then pushed the glass away. She was very, very beautiful, he said wistfully. She was ravishing, and cultured too.
Did she know you were in MI5?
Oh, I don’t think she worried about all that. What she cared about was that I was a poet. She admired my work, I thought I mentioned that.
You fool, I thought. It would never occur to you that a woman might not love you. Look at the way you sit here, puffing your chest out for the bar girls. I was not angry with him, just very irritated.
She had my book! he said. Not easy to find in Sydney back then.
Yes, but you did supply her with a false birth certificate for Bob McCorkle?
That stopped him for a moment. What are you suggesting?
I raised my eyebrows.
You know this?
I do rather think you may have been selected.
No!
I think so, John.
His eyes turned acid-bright. He brooded. The bloody tart, he said at last. Are you sure? Now he was smiling. Christ, she must have loved the prig. How very strange.
Behind us, a band was setting up: three boys with silver-sequined jackets and pomaded hair. Hearing them, Slater immediately began to pack up the snazzy bright-red Olivetti portable, far too mod-looking an object for a man of his age.
That was a hugely generous act, he said, but he had that same unsteady smile I’d seen at the Faber dinner. His pride was damaged badly.
In the hammock?
Don’t be vulgar, Micks, it doesn’t become you. I mean, here’s a beautiful woman going to extraordinary lengths just to ease his pain with a bloody birth certificate. So she did love the neurasthenic little beast.
Well, fuck him, he said as the drummer knocked his snare. You know what I am going to do? Lines of mischief appeared beside his eyes. I’ll buy him a new suit.
Why?
He smiled. So he can sit and puzzle about what foul and devious plot I am hatching against him.
I thought: God save us from old men.
And by the way, he said, this has nothing to do with the certificate. I can see you think otherwise, but I was very happy to get it for her and still am.
I’d be very surprised if he accepted the suit, I said.
This irritated him immensely. For Christ’s sake, why not? Oh, I see. Well, you give it to the little yoik. Say it’s a present from you.
No, no. I won’t play your games, John.
Micks, I am trying to give the silly cunt a decent suit. Is that really so evil?
I looked at him directly and his mouth quivered.
This is very boring, Sarah. Really, I am truly sick of it.
The band had begun a loud, discordant cover of ‘Love Me Do’ but Slater was now reopening his trendy typewriter and rolling in a sheet of Merlin letterhead. I had never seen him type before and was surprised to see how lightly his large hands passed across the keys. A minute later he ripped the paper out, signed it, and slid it across the table to me. Read, he shouted.
Dear Mr. Chubb, we at the Merlin Hotel were most distressed to learn of the damage that our cleaners inflicted on your suit. The maid should have informed you that all our guests’ apparel is insured against such loss and we will therefore be able to reimburse you for a new suit up to the value of M’500. Yours sincerely,
Rashid Ahbud,
Manager.
Who is Rashid Ahbud?
Doesn’t matter, he said. Now it’s just a suit, right? Does that make you happy? Is that nice enough for you?