He turned to grin at me, eyebrows wriggling-so attractive! “You talk as if you read books,” he said, folding a laboratory filter paper, inserting it into a glass laboratory funnel, and spooning powdery coffee into it. I was fascinated, not having seen him making coffee before. The screen was shoved out of the way for a change-it must have got a mark on it.
The coffee was brilliant, but I thought I’d stick to my new electric percolator. Easier, and I’m not all that fussy. Naturally he’d be fussy, it’s in his soul.
“What do you read?” he asked, sitting down and throwing one leg over the arm of his chair.
I told him everything from Gone With The Wind to Lord Jim to Crime and Punishment, after which he said that he confined his own reading to tabloid newspapers and books on how to paint in oils. He suffered, I discovered, a huge inferiority complex about his lack of formal education, but he was too prickly about it for me to attempt any repair measures.
Artists traditionally dressed like hobos, I had thought, but he dresses very well. The slag heap in a thunderstorm had received his attentions in clothes the Kingston Trio wouldn’t have been ashamed to perform in-crew-neck mohair sweater, the beautifully ironed collar of his shirt folded down over it, a pair of trousers creased sharp as a knife, and highly polished black leather shoes. Not a skerrick of paint on himself, and when he’d leaned over me to put my mug down I couldn’t smell a trace of anything except some expensive piney-herby soap. Obviously tightening nuts in a factory paid extremely well. Knowing him a little bit by now, I thought that his nuts would be perfect, neither too loose nor too tight. When I said that to him, he laughed until the tears ran down his face, but he wouldn’t share the joke with me. “Have you met Harold yet?” he asked later.
“You’re the second person tonight to put that question to me,” I said. “No, and I haven’t met Klaus either, but no one asks if I’ve met him. What’s so important about Harold?”
He shrugged, didn’t bother to answer. “Pappy, eh?” “She looks terrible.”
“I know. Some bastard got a bit too enthusiastic.” “Does that happen often?”
He said no, apparently oblivious to the hard stare I was giving him. His face and eyes looked concerned but not anguished. What a good actor he was! And how much it must hurt him to have to endure that kind of rejection. I wanted to offer him comfort, but that tongue of mine has developed a habit lately of getting too tied up to speak, so I said nothing.
Then we talked about his life in the bush following his dad around, of this station and that station out where the Mitchell grass stretches to infinity “like a silver-gold ocean”, he said. I could see it, though I never have. Why don’t we Aussies know our own country? Why do we all have this urge to go to England instead? Here I am in this house stuffed with extraordinary people, and I feel like a gnat, a worm. I don’t know anything! How can I ever grow tall enough to look any of them in the eye as equals?
Wednesday, February 17th, 1960 My goodness, I was in a self-abnegatory frame of mind last night when I wrote the above! It’s Toby, he has that effect on me. I would really like to go to bed with him!
What’s the matter with Pappy, that she can’t see what’s right under her nose?
Saturday February 20th, 1960
Well, I did it at last. I’ve had the family to dinner in my new flat. I invited Merle too, but she didn’t come. She rang me in January while I was still in Chests, and I had to have a junior tell her that I couldn’t come to the phone, that staff are not allowed to receive private calls. Apparently Merle took it as a personal rebuff, because whenever I’ve phoned her at home since then, her mother says she’s out. The trouble is that she’s a hairdresser, and they seem to spend half their lives on the phone making personal calls. At Ryde the policy wasn’t so strict, but Queens isn’t the same kind of institution. Anyway.
I’d wanted to have Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz and Flo to dinner as well, but that lady just grinned and said she’d come down later to say hello.
It wasn’t a huge success, though on the surface it was smooth enough. We had to wedge up at the table, but I’d grabbed extra chairs from the front ground floor flat, which is vacant again. Two women and a man who said they were siblings had rented it, but I tell you, men are not fussy when it comes to getting rid of their dirty water. The prettier of the two “sisters” made Chris Hamilton look like Ava Gardner, and both of them stank of stale, horribly cheap scent over the top of their B.O. The “brother” just had B.O. They were doing a roaring trade until Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz rang the Vice Squad and the paddy wagon arrived. There’s an American aircraft carrier in port, and when I pushed the front door open on Thursday night, I saw sailors from arsehole to breakfast-sitting on the stairs, leaning against Flo’s scribbles in the hall, spilling into Pappy’s hall and trooping by the dozen to the upstairs toilet, which was flushed so often that it took to groaning and gurgling. Mrs.
Delvecchio Schwartz was not amused. The “brother” and his “sisters” were hauled off to the pokey in the paddy wagon, and the sailors scattered far and wide at the sight of the Boys in Blue behind Norm and his sergeant, a hugely beefy bloke named Merv. Good old Norm and Merv, stars of the Kings Cross Vice Squad!
It really hurt that I didn’t dare tell this story to the family.
As I haven’t met Klaus yet, let alone started to learn to cook, I cheated and imported all these delicious foods from my favourite delicatessen. But they didn’t like any of it, from the macaroni salad to the dolmades and the shaved ham. I’d bought this divine orange liquer gateau for pudding, skinny layers of cake separated by thick layers of aromatic butter cream. They just picked at it.
Oh, well. I daresay steak-and-chips followed by Spotted Dick and custard or ice-cream with choccy syrup are
what they dream of when their tummies rumble in the middle of the night.
They walked around like cats in a strange place they’ve made up their mind not to like. The Bros pushed through the bead curtain to inspect my bedroom a bit bashfully, but Mum and Dad ignored it, and Granny was too obsessed with the fact that she needed to pee every thirty minutes. Poor Mum had to keep taking her outside and down to the laundry because my blue-birded toilet is too high for Granny to get up on by herself. I apologised for the state of the toilet and bathroom, explained that when I had the time I was going to do everything out in bicycle enamel so it would look absolutely spiffy. Cobalt blue, white and a scarlet bathtub, I rattled feverishly. Most of the conversation fell to me.
When I asked if anyone had seen Merle, Mum told me that she was convinced I didn’t want to have anything to do with her now I had moved. She wouldn’t believe that Queens refused to let its staff take personal phone calls.
Mum spoke in the gentle tones mothers use when they think their children are going to be bitterly disappointed, but I just shrugged. Goodbye, Merle.
They had more news about David than about Merle, though he hadn’t visited them-didn’t dare, was my guess, until that wacko shiner I’d given him faded.
“He’s got a new girl,” Mum remarked casually. “I hope she’s a Catholic,” I remarked casually. “Yes, she is. And she’s all of seventeen.”
“That fits,” I said, breathing a sigh of relief. No more David Murchison! He’s found a new bit of female clay to mould.
After I’d cleared the uneaten gateau away and made a pot of tea, Mrs.
Delvecchio Schwartz and Flo materialised. Oh, dear. The family didn’t know what to make of them! One didn’t talk, the other’s grammar wasn’t the best, and the most that could be said for their unironed dresses was that they were clean. Flo, barefoot as always, was clad in the usual snuffbrown pinny, while her mother sported orange daisies on a bright mauve background.
After giving my tall, athletic-looking Dad the unmistakable glad-eye, my landlady sat down and monopolised him, much to Mum’s annoyance. As her excuse, Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz chose the Harriet Purcells, and quizzed him as to why, when there wasn’t one in his generation, he’d bestowed the
dread name on his only daughter. Normally oblivious to feminine advances, Dad absolutely glowed at all this attentioneven flirted! He might be pushing eighty, but he doesn’t look more than sixty-five. In fact, I thought, watching the pair of them, they went well together. By the time she got up to go, Mum was so livid that poor Granny, legs and eyes crossed, was desperate to go too. Only when Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz was well and truly gone did Mum oblige Granny. I’d never seen Mum jealous before.
“That kid gave me the jitters,” Gavin said. “Looks as if God intended to make her retarded, then forgot and gave her a brain.”
My hackles rose as high as Mum’s; I glared at him, the myopic git! “Flo is special!” I snapped.
“She looks half-starved to me,” was Granny’s verdict when she and Mum returned from the toilet. “What a great lump of a woman her mother is! Very common.” That is the most damning thing Granny can say about anyone.
Common. Mum agreed fervently.
Oh, dear. I ushered them out at ten, stood and waved goodbye as Dad drove off in the new Ford Customline, and hoped they would never return.
What they said about me, my flat, The House, Flo and Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz as they went home I can only guess, except that I had a fair idea Dad’s opinion of my landlady was a bit different from Mum’s. My bet is that the old horror was just making enough mild mischief to make sure the Purcell Family did not make The House a regular stop whenever they went out.
What makes me want to cry is that I was so bursting with opinions and impressions and conclusions about everything that’s happened to me in the last four weeks, yet the moment I looked at their faces as they eyed Flo’s scribbles in the front hall, I knew that I couldn’t air a one of them. Why is that, when I still love them to death? I do. I do! But it’s like going down to the Quay to farewell a friend heading off for England on the old Himalaya. You stand there looking up at the hundreds of faces clustered at the rail, holding your brightly coloured paper streamer in your hand, and the tugs get the ship under way, it unglues itself from the wharf, and
all the streamers, including yours, snap and float on the dirty water with no purpose left except to contribute to the flotsam.
In future I am going to Bronte to see them. I know I said in here somewhere that I could never go back to Bronte, but I meant inside my soul.
My body is going to have to do its duty, however.
Sunday February 28th, 1960
Tomorrow I can propose marriage to some bloke I fancy because this is a Leap Year, February has twenty-nine days. Fat chance.
Today I met Klaus, who didn’t go to Bowral for the weekend. He’s a chubby little bloke in his middle fifties with big round pale blue eyes, and he told me that he’d been a soldier in the German army during the War, a paper pusher in a depot near Bremen. So it was the British who interned him in a camp in Denmark. They offered him his choice of Australia, Canada or Scotland. He picked Australia because it was so far away, worked as a clerk for the Government for two years, then went back to the work he was trained for, goldsmithing. When I asked him if he’d teach me to cook, he beamed all over his face and said he’d be delighted. His English is so good that his accent is almost American, and he doesn’t have any SS tattoos in his armpits because I saw him
hanging out his washing in his singlet. So poop to you, David Murchison, with your petty biases against New Australians. Klaus and I made a date for nine o’clock on next Wednesday night, which he assured me wasn’t too late an hour for a Continental. I was fairly sure I’d be home by then even if Cas was a nightmare.
On Friday night I had stopped in at the Piccadilly pub’s bottle department to buy a quart of threestar from Joe Dwyer, whom I’m getting to know quite well now that brandy doesn’t taste so foul. This afternoon I trotted it up the stairs to the lady herself, who greeted it and me with great enthusiasm. She fascinates me, I want to find out heaps more about her.
While Flo took her dozens and dozens of crayons and drew her aimless squiggles on a freshly painted section of wall just inside, we sat on the balcony in the steamy salty air with our Kraft cheese spread glasses, a plate of smoked eel, a loaf of bread, a pound of butter and all the time in the world, or so it seemed.
She never once gave me the impression that perhaps someone else was due to visit, let alone tried to hustle me out quickly. I noticed, though, that she always kept an eye on Flo, sat herself where she could see Flo scribbling, and nodded and grunted whenever the little sprite turned her head with an enquiring look.
I yattered on about my continued virginity, about David, about Norm’s disappointingly sloppy kiss; she listened as if it was important and assured me that the breaking of my hymen was definitely in the offing because it had appeared in the cards.
“Another King of Pentacles, another medical man,” she said, making a sandwich out of smoked eel, bread and butter. “He’s right next to your Queen of Swords.” “Queen of Swords?”
“Yep, Queen of Swords. Except for Bob, we’re all Queens of Swords in The House, princess. Strong!” She went on about this King of Pentacles next to me.
“A ship what passes in the night. Which is real good, princess. You ain’t gunna fall in love with him. It’s murder to do it for the first time with someone you think you’re in love with.” Her face took on an expression of mingled malice, amusement and smugness. “Most men,” she said conversationally, “ain’t very good at it, y’know. Oh, they brag a lot among themselves, but braggin’ is all it is, take me word for it. See, men are different from us in more ways than havin’
dinguses, hur-hur-hur. They gotta come-they gotta fire the old mutton gun, or they go barmy. That’s what flogs the poor bastards on like lemmings to the cliff.” She sighed. “Yeah, lemmings to the cliff! But we don’t need to come, so for us it’s kindaI dunno, less important.” She huffed with exasperation. “No, that ain’t the right word, important.”
“Compulsive?” I suggested.
“Spot on, princess! Compulsive. So if your first time is with someone you think shits caramel custard, you’re likely to be disappointed. Pick a real experienced bloke who loves pleasurin’ women as much as he loves shootin’
his load. And he’s there in the cards for youse, I promise.”
Finally I got around to telling her about my family’s dismay, even though she was a big part of it-she can take stuff like that on the chin-and about the ship with the broken streamers.
As we talked she fondled the cards like friends, occasionally turning one up and sliding it back into the pack, I fancied a bit absently. Then she asked me whether I was on the ship or the shore, and I said on the shore, definitely on the shore.
“Good, good,” she said, pleased. “It ain’t you who’s lost hold of the ground, princess. You never will either. Feet as firmly planted as a big old gum tree.
Not even an axe can chop you down. You ain’t one to drift with the tide, which is what our Pappy does. Like a bit of weed at the mercy of the current.
You’re the bringer of light to The House, Harriet Purcell, the bringer of light.
I’ve been waitin’ for youse for a long time.” She glugged down the last of her brandy and poured another. Then she shuffled the cards properly and began to lay them out.
“Am I still there?” I asked selfishly.
“Large as life and twice as beautiful, princess.” “Am I ever going to fall in love?”
“Yeah, yeah, but not yet, so hold your horses. There’s tonsa men, but. Ah, here’s the other medical bloke! See? That’s him there, the King of Pentacles I keep seein’ for youse every time. Hur-hur-hur.”
Wait, and all will be answered. I’d wondered what she was on about with her Kings of Pentacles, now I found out.
“This one’s a real posh chap, talks plummier than Harold. A mile of letters after his name. Not in the first flush of youth, as they say.”
My heart did a funny flip inside my chest as I thought of Mr. Duncan Forsythe the orthopod. No, surely not. A senior H.M.O. and
a lowly X-ray technician? Not on. But I listened as closely as Chris Hamilton would to the minister supervising her wedding vows.
“There’s a wife and two sons in their teens. Heaps of money in the family-he don’t need to work, but he works like a navvy ‘cos work’s all that keeps him goin’. The wife is as cold as a stepmother’s breast, so he don’t get nothin’ at home except a hot meal. Ain’t in the habit of playin’ around, but he’s hooked on you, the poor fish.”
That, no matter what the cards said, was a fallacy. I’d only seen Mr. Forsythe once. Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz gave me a wicked grin, but kept on dealing her cards.
“That’s the lot about you. Now let’s look at the rest of ‘em. Ah! I see a man for Pappy too! This one ain’t in the first flush of youth either, and he’s got as many letters after his name as your bloke does. Jeez! What’s this? Oh, shit! “
She stopped, frowning, and studied the cards, pulled another, grunted, shook her head a little sadly, I thought. But she didn’t volunteer any information. “Toby’s caught in a net he didn’t make,” she said when she resumed her spread, “but he’s gunna break out of it after a while. Good young fella, Toby.” She gave a rumble as she saw
the next card. “There I am, the Queen of Swords! Real well placed. Yeah, yeah, I keep shovin’ ‘em back in.”
I was growing a little bored, perhaps, because she didn’t always inform me what each card meant, or how it fitted into the general picture. But about four or five cards after the Queen of Swords, she put down a card showing a figure lying prone with ten separate swords stuck in its back-what sex it was you couldn’t tell. The moment she saw it she jumped, shivered, took a swig of brandy. “Shit!” she hissed. “There’s the fuckin’ Ten of Swords again, with Harold right next to it.”
I was so busy swooning with delight that I hardly heard all she said-she’d used the Great In-And-Out Word without turning a hair! Maybe one day I’d get up the courage to do the same. But as I couldn’t very well comment on that, I asked about the Ten of Swords, what it meant.
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