by Peter Corris
"You've been living with someone named Gee for the last two years."
"Getting married's different. I don't care what they call us afterwards."
Jack gave in, as he always did when Trudie's mind was firmly set. Luckily, it wasn't like that often. After the wedding at a registry office, and the reception in the back room of the Surry Hills Arms, Jack and Trudie went to Manly for a week. They had a spell of Sydney's best winter weather—clear, bright days and cold nights. Jack bought ten hot water bottles and heated the whole of the bed. They made love the way they had four years before, on the ship, when they had no thought for anything but themselves and before Jack had begun to drink regularly. In recent times Jack had been more interested in sleep than love, first because he was exhausted from training and fighting and then because of the beer. But not at Manly.
"Ever think about your mum, love, or Clive?" Jack said as they stood on the pier, well wrapped against the cold wind and looking across the clear green-blue water towards the Sydney Harbour heads.
"Sometimes." Trudie clutched his arm. "Not that often. I think of London a bit but I really love it here. It's good, isn't it, Sydney?"
"If you've got enough money," Jack said.
"What about you, Jacky? Do you think about your sister and brothers? I mean, I suppose Mum and Clive have got their pub and there they are, somewhere. But the kids . . ."
Jack turned away from the water and the wind and lit a cigarette, another habit he'd adopted since finishing with boxing. "When my pa packed us all up and we left bloody England was the day my life started." He blew smoke which was plucked away by the wind. "No, it started when we snuck off from that hotel in Fremantle. I dunno. There was a fresh start somewhere. No, I don't think about 'em."
That night, Trudie lay awake beside the gently snoring Jack until the early hours. She'd seen big houses fringing the harbour, really big, and she wanted one for herself. In the city she saw the women who lived in the houses, heard how they spoke, saw how they dressed and ate. She knew from what they said that some of them had roughneck husbands, but they were worthy of the houses they lived in, and she would be worthy too.
8
Only gradually did the war make any difference to Jack. At first he ignored it, saying it was no business of his. In private, with Trudie, he joked that he was half-German himself so he wouldn't know which side to fight on.
"Don't say that, Jacky. Don't ever say that." Trudie's look was fierce. "If they hear you saying things like that they'll lock you up, and then where will we be?"
When talk of conscription began, Jack's other joke, especially when he was drunk, was that he was too young to be conscripted. "Can be called up till nineteen bloody sixteen," he said. "Too young to die."
This angered rather than frightened Trudie; she didn't like attention being drawn to her being slightly older. Jack continued to treat the matter of war service lightly. After Stephen's birth, a long and painful affair for Trudie, whose narrow, boyish lines were bad for childbearing, Jack excused himself on the grounds of his family responsibilities, as the highest people in the land were doing. "My fight is here," Jack said, "against the landlord and the butcher and my bloody wife's shoemaker." At times he mentioned other responsibilities—for a sister and three brothers. "Not a one of them," Jack would say, glass in hand, "yet ten years of age."
Jack's 'plans' involved, initially, the use of his fists and boots. The conqueror of Les Dixon readily secured contracts to protect card games, to persuade defaulting gamblers to pay up and to supervise proceedings when the owners of brothels and illegal gambling establishments made payments to the police. After 1916, when a referendum was passed which closed Sydney hotels at six p.m., Jack moved into sly grog. He supplied the places he formerly guarded, and now guarded the places he supplied.
The soldiers were thirsty. Some were awaiting transshipment, some enjoying leave on account of wounds or meritorious service, and some were permanently based in Australia. They needed sex and diversion. They had some money and Jack helped them spend it. By the end of 1916, with the referendum on conscription decisively lost and six p.m. closing firmly in place in the southern states, Jack Gulliver employed eight men and had interests in profitable enterprises around Sydney, which did all of their business at night. He was twenty-one years of age, but boxing scars and the strains of living by his wits and intimidation made him look older. He weighed fourteen stone (beer and easy living having filled him out) and he was having a good war.
The white feathers worried Trudie. They arrived in the mail at the three-storeyed house in Bellevue Hill and were sometimes to be found on the front seat of Jack's touring Buick.
"Forget it," Jack said. "I'm collecting 'em. Soon I'll have enough to stuff a mattress for Stephen."
"Don't talk like that, Jacky," Trudie said. "No one in this street'll have a cup of tea with me."
"Bugger them and their tea. Come out with me tonight. You can drink wine and whisky and eat caviar and they know what they can do with their tea."
"I can't go out. I have to look after Stephen."
"We can get someone in to look after him."
Trudie's face closed. She remembered being looked after—long, lonely nights with drunken women who, like as not, had some man around to look after them. "No," she said.
"Suit yourself."
Jack spent more time in the rough and tumble of Kings Cross than in well-mannered Bellevue Hill. But he paid for everything his son needed. He opened a cheque account for Trudie and left money lying around in the house. He shouted at his wife often, when she refused to 'come on the razz' with him and when she was cold to the people he brought back to the house for chicken suppers with champagne. She objected to the noise that might wake Stephen, although he was two floors above in a room she called the nursery.
One day Trudie found a note which had been folded small and tucked into one of Jack's waistcoat pockets. She picked it up from the bottom of a wardrobe where it had fallen into a shoe. The hastily written pencilled scrawl read: 'Darling Jack—don't worry about it. it happens to a lot of men sometimes. i still love you and we can tri again. Barbara.'
Trudie remembered Barbara, a plump baby-blue-eyed blonde Jack had brought back to the house late one night alone with several men, all of whom were considerably older than the women they escorted. Jack had paid particular attention to Barbara, refilling her glass almost as frequently as his own and ending up very drunk. He had not attempted sex after the guests had left but Trudie was sure what the outcome would have been. If he prepares himself for Barbara that way, Trudie thought, it's no wonder she has to write notes afterwards.
Trudie made a copy of the note and placed it on Jack's pillow in the bed they shared when he was at home. He saw it two nights later and his high colour faded. He almost fell onto the bed.
"Jesus," he said.
"It's just a copy. I've got the one she wrote put away."
"Why?"
"So I can divorce you."
"Jesus, Trudie, no!"
"Why not?"
Jack rolled on the bed; his collar stud popped and his collar and tie hung loosely around his neck. "You can't."
Trudie stood at the end of the bed and looked at him. She was wearing a silk nightdress and there was lace around the edges of the light silk dressing gown she wore over it. "No, Jacky," she said. "You're the one who can't. You can't do it with anyone else, can you?"
Jack wept, burying his head in the bedclothes. "No. No. No, I can't. I can't."
Trudie sat on the bed and drew his head towards her. She leaned down and let her big, ripe breasts fall from her nightdress. She put her nipples to his lips. "Suck it," she said. "I want another baby. I went with twenty men before you, but you're the only one who gave me a baby. Suck it!"
Trudie used her weapon against Jack ruthlessly. She secured the enrolment of Stephen at a private school against Jack's wishes, by sleeping apart from him for a month. She brought an end to the late night carousing visits and fo
rced her husband to take her to the theatre. Jack wrote cheques for paintings and a piano. He permitted a dog, a snarling German Shepherd, fanatically loyal to Trudie and Stephen, to share his home. At Trudie's insistence, as soon as he entered the house, he placed the .45 automatic he always wore in the box attached to the hall-stand.
"It's no use to me there," Jack had protested. "Take me half an hour to get to it."
"Jacky Gulliver," Trudie had said coldly, "the day a shot is fired within a hundred yards of this house is the day you leave. And you know what that means."
Trudie lived in fear that Jack would overcome his disability, but he did not. She frequently seduced him because she desperately wanted another child, but this did not happen either. Trudie mothered Stephen, who was a sturdy, cheerful child, closely. Jack appeared to be fond of the boy in an offhand way. In fact his one child reminded him of the fact that he was apparently incapable of fathering more. Jack attended the business. The Gee family rubbed along, to all outward appearances no unhappier than most.
One of Jack's favourite sayings was that as a businessman he preferred liquids to solids. After the war he continued in the sly grog selling that had served him so well, and included black market petrol and smuggled perfume among the commodities he dealt in. He now employed ten men and hired others on a casual basis—as drivers, warehouse hands and gun carriers—when he needed them. He acquired an office in a building that also housed a greyhound trainer, a dentist and a doctor. The greyhound trainer was a race fixer and bookie, the dentist dispensed cocaine and the doctor did abortions. All four shared a lawyer named James Wright-Wilson, who was a cousin of the chief commissioner of police.
"I'm known to the police," Jack would say. "I oughter be. I buy the buggers drinks every day an' put the bloody petrol in their tanks."
Trudie devoted herself to a minute study of 'respectability' and to an obsessive concern for Stephen, his health and his happiness. She became the mainstay of Carnley, the small private preparatory school he attended. Trudie's cheques arrived on the principal's desk regularly—for double glazing to insulate the building and make it quieter, for first aid equipment in the infirmary, for sets of encyclopaedias. Trudie served on committees, hired caterers for school functions and personally resolved the dispute over whether the Reverend Angus Cameron, a Presbyterian clergyman, should be permitted to minister to the spiritual needs of the students, as well as one from the Church of England. The Reverend Cameron was an ambitious man.
This debate, which raged within the school and among the parents, provided one of the few opportunities for Trudie to seek Jack's help. They talked about it at home one night, after dinner and after Trudie, against her usual practice, had taken a drink or two.
"I don't want the Prezzos in on it," Trudie said.
"Why not?" Jack was expansive, well-oiled and smoking his fiftieth cigarette for the day. "What the hell difference does it make? It's only make-believe anyway, all that religious sh—rubbish."
"Of course it is Jacky, But it's a question of tone."
"What?" Jack said.
"Tone. The look of the thing. Really good schools don't have Prezzos around. It'll affect Stephen's chances of getting into Shore."
"Christ." Jack's soul revolted at the school's name and everything associated with it. But Trudie, at twenty-eight, with leisure and money to spend on her appearance, was still the most beautiful woman of his acquaintance. And if he played his cards right and didn't get onto the brandy he could have her tonight. "What's this parson's name?"
"Angus Cameron."
"Forget about him," Jack said. "Let's go to bed."
Ten days later the Reverend Cameron was under a cloud, the nature of which he never quite understood. His neighbours in the fashionable suburb of Centennial Park began to avoid him, his housekeeper resigned and his wife took their two children on an extended holiday to Scotland. Angus Cameron began to wear a neglected look and he impressed Carnley's Presbyterian-leaning parents less and less. When he was removed to a posting in the Riverina Trudie took Jack to bed, giving him the lace underwear and all the trimmings.
"How did you do it, Jacky?" she said after he'd collapsed following his second orgasm within an hour.
Jack gulped air and waited for his pulse to slow. "It's who you know in this town," he said when he had the breath. "What've we got here? A couple of hundred thousand people and only a few of 'em matter. You can always find someone to squeeze and he'll squeeze someone for you."
Trudie nodded. She was lying on the bed, brimming with Jack's sperm and trying to calculate how long it had been since she'd enjoyed sex with him. Too long. And she'd had no one else; she wouldn't dare. She looked at Jack as he slid towards sleep. His belly was large and his second chin rested flabbily in folds on his neck. He rolled onto his side and snored. Trudie seldom smoked but she had a craving for a cigarette just then. She eased herself off the bed, straightened the nightdress over which Jack had slobbered and hitched at its torn shoulder. She went quietly to her wardrobe and took out a plain dark dressing gown. Jack's clothes were lying in heaps around the floor. She found his jacket and extracted a packet of cigarettes and a petrol lighter.
The bedroom was big, as wide as the house itself, and deep. It had two large bay windows, one of which was equipped with a small padded settee and a satin footstool. Trudie sat and smoked and looked out at the dark starless night. Jack snored on the bed.
School committee work had taught Trudie the importance of a properly prepared agenda. She understood the necessity for priorities, ambitious claims and positions to retreat to. Over the next eighteen months she worked carefully. First, she ensured that Jack had a substantial life insurance policy and that his will was in order. One of the benefits of her sexual hold on Jack was that there were no mistresses around, no mothers of illegitimate children to be taken care of. Jack's will left his estate in its entirety to Trudie. But there were subsidiary arrangements—an endowment to Shore Grammar to smooth Stephen's path and an educational trust fund for the boy.
Jack's business interests now ranged from racehorses to pie stalls. He was a partner in various enterprises such as a gymnasium and a factory that produced motor car tyres. Trudie found ways to involve herself in many of these businesses. She was aware of the other activities, those that generated helpful cash, but she never acknowledged their existence.
"You could've handled the books in Clive's pub," Jack said one night after Trudie had resolved an accounting problem. "I wonder if they made a quid. D'you think we should try to find 'em, Trude? Might be able to help em out a bit if things didn't work out so well."
Trudie looked at him cautiously. It was rare for Jack to extend consideration to anyone. He wasn't drunk. She observed him closely for any changes in his moods and attitudes that might signal a new sexual confidence. She saw no such signs. She poured drinks for them both. The last thing I need is for Hester and Clive to turn up, she thought. She's probably the size of a battleship by now, and God knows what color her hair'd be.
"They'll have done all right," she said. "Don't go soft, Jacky. You've got too much on your plate. By the way, I think you should discharge the mortgage on the Avalon beach house. You can afford it."
"All right, love." Jack sipped his brandy. "Did I tell you I might be going into politics?"
"What?"
"Yeah. No joke. Couple of men around town think I could be useful."
"Which party?"
Jack was surprised. "Labor, a'course. I'm a Lang man."
Trudie shuddered at the thought of Stephen's father as a wheeling and dealing Labor machine politician. Besides, she didn't want him in the public eye. She pressed on with other aspects of her preparations. These involved hiring two men who had seen service in the war and fallen on hard times: tough, resourceful men who wanted capital to establish themselves as coffee planters in Africa. Hearing of Jack's plantation interests in Fiji, they had applied to him for a loan and been refused.
Jack had laughed about t
hem. "Africa, my arse," he said to Trudie. "Remember passing the bloody place on the way out here? Africa! If we could still buy and sell niggers I might be interested."
Trudie made contact with the aspiring planters. She sold jewellery Jack had given her, skimmed from the household accounts and made apparently foolish mistakes with her cheque book.
"I'm forever forking out for you and the kid," Jack complained.
"He's your future," Trudie said.
Jack poured more brandy and lit another cigarette. "My future's in my own hands. John Gee, MP." He laughed and got very red in the face.
On 12 August 1925, at nine p.m., two hours before the Wilhelm Weber sailed for Mombasa, a Buick tourer, travelling at speed, went out of control on a steep, wet road in Dover Heights. The car broke through a barrier and plunged sixty feet onto the surf-lashed rocks. The body of John Gee, aged thirty, was recovered from the water the following morning. It was identified by Gertrude Gee, his widow. John Gee was buried in the Church of England section of the Waverley cemetery.
9
New Guinea, July 1945
First Lieutenant Stephen St John Gee crouched over the Bren gun in the shallow trench, taking care not to touch the breech, which was sizzling hot, steaming in the damp New Guinea air. Spent cases had sprayed from the gun and lay glinting in the thick, mud-matted grass. One live man squatted down beside him, but three other men, clad in the same khaki as Gee and his companion, lay dead in the depression.
"How many d'you think we got?" Private Frank Lewis asked.
Across a clearing which had been sprinkled with saplings and bushes before the murderous fire had cut them down like wheat, was thick jungle. A path appeared as a darker blur in the deep green background. Down this path the Japanese had come, more of them than Gee had expected, almost more than he'd been able to stop, even with the element of surprise on his side.
