by Gil Hogg
Ellen and Paul climbed the stairs to Lucas’s dusty office, scattered with files and piles of paper curling in the heat. Lucas himself was fat, seventeen stone, with thin, damp hair and an eroded face hanging in wads of red flesh. He had wet, bloodshot eyes. He was probably in his late forties, but looked sixty.
“Lovely to see you, Ellen,” he said, the gravity he had assumed for the funeral sliding into a leer as he waved them to seats.
“You’re starting early,” Ellen said, seeing the beer can on the corner of the desk.
“Have one,” Lucas said, pulling a can of Fosters out of a small refrigerator on the floor behind his desk and offering it to Paul.
“Don’t encourage the boy!”
“He’s eighteen,” Lucas said, taking a long pull at a can.
It surprised Paul that this stranger knew how old he was.
“What do I have to do?” Ellen asked impatiently.
“Well, now, Ted’s will is short and simple. He’s left everything to you, Ellen.” He handed a document over. “Problem is…” he halted for another drink.
“What’s the problem?” Ellen asked sharply.
“Ted left a few debts. Some are gambling debts and needn’t be paid, but where Ted has borrowed and given security, those debts have to be paid or the security given up.”
Paul knew that his mother wouldn’t be surprised at the mention of gambling. Virtually all the men on Mirabilly drank and gambled.
“You didn’t know it was serious, Ellen?”
“How serious is it?” she asked in a chilly voice.
“The car, the holiday house in Cairns and all Ted’s insurance policies are in hock. When it’s all added up there’ll barely be enough to bury him. The insurance payable by the Mirabilly owners comes to you directly.”
Ellen sat silently considering this. A fly buzzed. Lucas reached for a cigarette, lit it quickly and sucked the smoke into rheumy lungs.
“This is what happened on binges in Katherine and here?” Ellen said, outrage quivering in her voice.
“Yeah, I guess.”
“You ought to do more than guess. You were there! I can’t understand how Ted let this build up without telling me.”
“I reckon Ted believed he could recover.”
Paul thought that was probably right. His father wouldn’t have meant to do anything to hurt his mother; they were a close pair, but she had a definite attitude: drinking and gambling weren’t fun, they were despicable and there must be something wrong with anybody who persisted with them.
“I expect you can remain in the Mirabilly house for a while, but you’ll have to give it up, Ellen.”
“What about Paul’s education? He’s got a place at Sydney University. Will we be able to afford that?”
“Look, Mum…”
She silenced him with a gesture.
“Yeah, I’m glad you mentioned it. I’d like to speak to Paul,” Lucas said, crumpling the empty beer can in his fist. “In your presence of course.”
“You what?”
“Ted asked me to,” Lucas said, scuffling behind his chair for another can.
“Stirring up trouble where none was before! It’s bad enough Ted’s dead, bad enough he was in debt, and now you want to finish off his memory by belittling him to his own son!” Ellen’s voice was raised, fury in her face.
“It’s not like that Ellen. I have a signed statement by Ted. And I promised him. I have to talk to Paul.”
“What’s the big deal in talking to the man, Mum?” Paul was confused by the conversation. Surely they could talk about anything?
Ellen stood up.
“Please stay and hear this, Ellen,” Lucas wheedled.
“Never,” Ellen said. “You’ll spoil my life and Paul’s for a lot of drunken pub-talk and promises! Are you coming, Paul?”
Paul sat without moving. He didn’t understand the reason for his mother’s outburst. He knew that there was something she could have explained to him. He was well used to her dictatorial stance and inclined to frustrate it if he could. As an only child, who had been brought up in the solitary world of correspondence school lessons, there were many things about the so-called adult world that he didn’t know because nobody had explained them to him; he had an underlying resentment about this. He decided to stay.
Ellen moved away. Lucas stumbled after her and stopped her by the door. “I want to help you, Ellen.” His puffed fingers like sausages reached out for her breasts.
“Get away, you sot!” Ellen went out slamming the door.
Lucas came back to his desk sweating and irritable at his rebuff. “You better listen, son. We have to talk.” He sank back into his reclining chair, his hairy navel protruding from a gap between the buttons on his shirt. His breath rasped. He stared at Paul over an extinct volcano of scorched paper and cigarette ash.
“Ted Travis was a mate of mine, Paul. Ten years ago he asked for my advice on something that was worrying him. He told me that he had promised your mother, before they married, never to reveal that he wasn’t your father.” Lucas reached for the beer can without taking his eyes off Paul, knocking the can off the edge of the desk.
“Not my father?” The ugly words stuck in Paul’s throat.
Lucas swore, recovered the can and belched. “S’right. Ted wasn’t sure he should keep the promise. He was a decent man. You were growing up and you and your real father were entitled to know. It worried Ted. I told him he had to sort it out with you and your mother. Ted said he would think about it but if anything happened to him, he wanted me to tell you. I took notes at the time.” He held up a few yellow handwritten pages and copies of a marriage certificate and Paul’s birth certificate. “Ted’s signed each page. And take a look at the dates on the certificates.”
Paul heard this as though it was a story about somebody else. Ted had always treated him affectionately as a son. He loved and respected his father and had been distraught at losing him. “I don’t get it,” he said, taking the notes from the lawyer’s outstretched hand, but after a minute he couldn’t focus on the pages and dropped them on the table.
“Who’s supposed to be my father, then?” he asked in a shaky voice.
“Surely you’ve heard the stories?” Lucas smirked.
“I haven’t heard any stories!” Paul shouted.
He was speaking the truth. Nobody had ever said anything directly to him. What he had heard were obscure (obscure to him) remarks relating to his mother, about her being ‘the duchess’ and him being ‘the young prince’. These rare comments were usually accompanied by laughter ridiculing him and his mother as though they were very funny. Paul thought that they arose from his mother’s superior attitudes and her pampering of him. There were all sorts of people on Mirabilly and a lot of them were rough and rude but not in an aggressive way; that was simply the way they were; nevertheless they were good people. Paul had therefore taken very little notice of these jibes. He had accepted that there was some difference in gentility between him and his mother on one side and the Mirabilly hands on the other.
“All right! OK! Everybody else on Mirabilly has,” Lucas said cynically.
“Not me!” Paul shouted, standing up.
“Sit down, son, calm down.” Lucas’s eyelids slid up over his inflamed eyes. “Your father is Marchmont. The mighty Marchmont. The lord high panjandurum. Surely you know your mother came out from Pommie-land with him when she was a kid?”
“No. Not with him!”
“You’ve been cosseted! He went back to Pommie-land and left her on the station with a bun in the oven. Namely, you.”
Paul’s head was aching. His father wasn’t his father? Why? How did this happen?
“What’s the proof that my father is Marchmont? Why not somebody else?” Paul snapped.
“You’re a smart kid to make that point. There isn’t any actual evidence. Ted doesn’t say who the father is. He didn’t want to write anything about that. But he told me. And the chain of evidence is clear. Lord and
Lady Muck arrive at Mirabilly. He goes home, leaving her. She is pregnant. She extracts a promise from Ted, marries him and has a baby three months later.”
“Somebody else could be the father.” Paul’s voice was feeble.
“No way.” Lucas wiped the beer foam from his lips with the back of his hand. “Now you see where your education comes in. Your old man could send you to Oxford or Yale tomorrow, never mind Sydney. Now, I’m going to set you up for life…”
Paul walked out of the room before the lawyer had finished, impelled by the cocktail of emotions in him which had ignited.
Lucas caught him up on the landing, grabbed his arm. “Listen kid, I meant that about setting you up for life…”
“Let me go!”
Lucas had lost his patronising manner. Paul jerked away and stalked out of the door. He couldn’t have sat down again with Lucas, watching his navel squirm.
As he was going down the stairs, Lucas leaned over the railing. “You’re a stupid young bugger!” he called hoarsely. “You’re walking away from a fortune!”
*
The funeral service that day didn’t stir anything in Paul except a faint and distant warmth for a man whom he had liked and admired; a man who had apparently engaged in a deception against him and deprived his mother of future support. The coffin rested in front of the altar. He had a clear picture of the body inside, although he had not seen it as a corpse, cleaned of river mud, laid out with orifices stuffed with cotton wool, hair combed, cheeks rouged, dressed in Ted’s best blue suit: the body that was supposed to have sired him.
While the parson droned through a commendation of his father and tried to coax a hymn from the tardy congregation, Paul thought of Marchmont. His father? No, his sire, perhaps. He could remember the man from occasional meetings over the years: when he was about ten helping Dinka Djawida in the kitchens at the Big House and two years ago when he was a waiter at a Mirabilly banquet. Marchmont was plump and pink and friendly with lank yellow hair; a man of authority, while Ted Travis had been inarticulate, lean and bleached from a lifetime in the dust of the outback, like a piece of bone, part of the vast dry land.
When the mourners moved away from the graveside after the coffin had been lowered, they sought the shade of the gums along the fence-line of the cemetery. People were hugging Ellen and shaking Paul’s hand – which he suffered coldly. He walked with the crowd as some turned off at Trail Street, in the direction of the bar of the Commercial Hotel and a smaller number walked back to Maude Geary’s house on a new subdivision two blocks away.
The house was on one level, low and spacious with a tiled gable roof; it was set square on a quarter acre plot, in a street of new upmarket houses all set square on quarter acre plots. Every house was trying to be different, with slightly different panels on the facade and slightly different muted colours, but really they were all the same. Guests gathered in the Gearys’ lounge behind almost closed venetian blinds, able to breathe in cool air.
Paul watched, sickened, as Maude Geary, with Ellen’s help, brought out plates of food; cold roast ham, fried sausages, a leg of lamb on a carving board, bowls of salad, roast potatoes, sweet yams, breadfruit and fresh baked bread. Beside the table was a cool box filled with canned lager and on the sideboard, backed by a regiment of glasses, two bottles of Johnny Walker Red and a bucket of ice.
Paul couldn’t eat and went to the room Maude had given him for their overnight stay. He lay on the bed turning his past over and over. He had to wait until six o’clock in the evening for the guests to depart before he could corner his mother alone in her bedroom. She was sitting in a chair by the window, awake and motionless.
“I want to talk to you about what Arthur Lucas said,” Paul began.
“This isn’t the place to discuss such things, Paul. The walls are paper thin.”
“No place is the right place for you. Why haven’t you told me?”
“Don’t raise your voice. You don’t want to listen to Lucas. He’s a drunk. Him and those Buffaloes!”
“Why have things happened this way?” His voice and hands shook. “Why this secret?” He couldn’t stop his voice trailing away, thin and incredulous.
“What nonsense!” she scoffed.
“It’s not nonsense. Lucas knows. Dad talked to him. You know. You knew what Lucas was going to say before he said it. You told Lucas he was stirring it up. You knew!”
“Get yourself something to eat from the kitchen. There’s plenty left.”
“Don’t put me off. Lucas made notes at the time and Dad signed them. There’s no mistake. Years ago. Why would he do that if it wasn’t true?”
“Because he was a stupid, weak man who had doubts about his paternity. He did what his drunken friends persuaded him to do.”
“Lucas said my father was Marchmont.”
“Do you want to believe an alcoholic in preference to me?” She turned to him fiercely.
“Lucas had a marriage certificate with the papers. Dated three months before I was born.”
“So you were conceived before Ted and I married, but we were married when you were born and he signed the birth certificate, isn’t that enough? Don’t you think I know where my body has lain?” Ellen said calmly.
“No! I want to see you, you’re not going to hide in the shadows!” Paul snatched at the blind cords, filling the room with light. He saw an imperious woman with carefully waved short, dark brown hair, smooth olive skin, scarlet lips and even today in her mourning, sensual. Her brown eyes were unflinching.
“For God’s sake tell me about myself!” His heart was like somebody inside him kicking his chest.
“Keep your voice down. You don’t want to share our business with the Gearys.”
“I have a right to know!”
She sniffed. “You’re my child. There’s no doubt of that.” She was still in the sunlight like a waxwork.
One part of him was attached to her by the unseverable umbilical cord of maternity; another, at this moment, hated her with a violence which made his fists clench.
4
In 1967, when Paul Travis was twelve years old, he had the first encounter that he could remember with John Marchmont, on one of Marchmont’s fleeting visits.
In the afternoon when school lessons on the radio were finished and his set work had been marked by Ellen, he was free. The marking was a formality and seldom delayed him. He knew his mother didn’t understand his lessons properly because she couldn’t read and write as easily as he could. He stopped for a hurried scone and a glass of orange juice in the kitchen. His schedule for the rest of the day was crammed with business.
To avoid enemy patrols, he had to keep to the grove of wattles and acacias around their house. He moved carefully to high ground where he could get a clear view of the Hill. He scanned the orange tile roofs of the houses scattered through the trees below him. He checked the weather and compared it with the records in his notebook, inserting the temperature figure he had taken from the thermometer in the garden: 84 degrees fahrenheit. He wrote, ‘Clear sky, stirring of an afternoon breeze. Usual for July.’ He could see clearly downhill, to the Village, where there were shops and stores and small houses. There was no sign of enemy activity.
Then he headed for the Big House. He slipped through a fringe of newly planted pines, then through the gums which ringed the Big House. He broke cover briefly as he crossed the lawns, pausing to cool himself in the spray of the sprinklers. His cotton shirt sodden, he dashed for the safety of the wall of the house, flattening himself against it.
This was an alien place, headquarters of the enemy with secret rooms and passages. He’d never been inside, except the kitchen and the storehouse. Ellen had told him about the ‘owner’s cabin’ in one of her rare reminiscences. This was the name of the most secret place; even Dick Mather the general manager wasn’t allowed in there. The word ‘cabin’ was misleading; it gave the impression of a small room when in truth, Ellen had said, it was vast, like a palace. Paul had read that
the owners of cargo ships on the Australia run, like the Marchmonts, often had a special cabin set aside for themselves and this was the origin of the deceptive name for their palace.
Paul edged round the shrubbery and looked in the laundry doorway. Dinka, the boss of the maids, was bending over a tub. He crept inside, drew the Colt 45 he carried in his belt and let her have a couple of rounds right up her big backside: Pow! Pow!
She leaped up with a scream. “Jeezgod Paul Travis, you damn scared me!”
“You’re dead, Dinka,” Paul said, replacing the Colt. “You need a decent security system around here.”
“Don’t need security ‘gainst anybody but you, boy.” Dinka led him outside, heaving with fright. “Goffy says you clip the hedge.” She pointed to the low macrocarpa surrounding the kitchen garden.
Paul went to the tool shed, selected a pair of hedge clippers and surveyed the task; it would take an hour to give it a neat shape and clean up afterwards if he didn’t cut too close. And the money would be welcome for his secret Swiss bank account. He calculated that he would still have time to check on enemy action at the airfield and log the makes and registration numbers of any new aircraft for his intelligence report.
He began to work his way along one side of the u-shaped hedgerow. He finished this side two minutes ahead of schedule according to the old pocket watch his mother had given him. He braced himself to begin the next side, realising that he was going to suffer exposure to nuclear radiation slanting in with the sunlight. He also became aware of a man on the lawn, watching him. The man was about as old as his mother, with a plump boiled-looking face, stringy poet’s hair and blue x-ray eyes. He was a stranger, possibly a mutant from another planet. Paul took no obvious notice, but classified the man temporarily as Class A: dangerous.
The stranger, grinning, ambled over the lawn in his loose shirt and dirty white trousers, one hand in his pocket, the other shading his eyes. “Hullo,” he said, “who are you?”
The stranger had the same poncy voice that Paul had heard on English radio programmes. He knew his schedule would slip if he paused. He didn’t reply, but lifted his head and gave the man his gamma-stare which usually had a withering effect.
