The house was quieter now and I was able to work with undisturbed energy. There had been a kind of tacit agreement about not discussing in any detail my absence from home. Justification had proved to be on my side. Dad, I think, was secretly ashamed of his part in the affair; with the earnings from my writings I had bought a new wireless-set for the house and I had paid for the old Chev to be re-ducoed, and Dad’s hostilities, if he still harboured any, were well concealed. Mother was relieved and happy to have me back, and about her only references to my exile were in the form of remarks like, ‘There, I bet you didn’t get a pudding like that at the YMCA canteen,’ or ‘Heavens, Davy, who did you have to pick up after you at that YMCA hostel?’ (Jack had done his work well; she was perfectly sure that I had spent all my time away as a guest of the YMCA.)
My visit to Mr Brewster, at the Morning Post, had had splendid repercussions, and he would often commission special articles from me. With these, plus my own contributions, there were few Saturday editions of the Morning Post that did not carry some feature or other by David Meredith.
In my new standing an aura of benevolence seemed to extend almost everywhere. At work my articles were discussed and approved – Paul Klein saw me as his protégé and was quite puffed up about it – and even old Joe Denton held me in a curious kind of mystified respect. An odd thing is that this new self-esteem generated in me a greater humility in other directions; I tried much harder at Klebendorf’s and the standard of my work improved very distinctly; I became more conscientious about the Life School classes. Unfortunately, I had never really got over the excruciating embarrassment of my initiation to my first nude female model, even though she had been a grotesquely unappealing middle-aged woman who had lolled revoltingly on the throne with two leathery, pendulous breasts sagging to a wrinkled little pot-belly. Even so, unless I knew in advance that the exercise was to be a study in the draped figure, I generally skipped classes when a girl or a woman was modelling. In fact this often suited me, for another diversion around this time had given me unusual new interests.
The fact was that all my writing had not been as successful as my things for the Morning Post; in other directions there had been a couple of disconcerting setbacks. My book on the history of the wool-clippers had been completed, sent off to a publishing house, and curtly rejected. A novelette which I had written about the South Seas blackbirders, called Pearls of Maiëta, received equally unflattering treatment. I saw suddenly, with some dismay, that in the sailing-ship theme there might be a bottom to the pot. Escape, I began to think, might lie in a totally different direction. With a glib audacity which I now find quite surprising I reached back more than four thousand years in time. I decided I would be an Egyptologist!
My imagination had been greatly fired some time earlier by the accounts of the opening of King Tutankhamen’s tomb which were printed in one of the three volumes of Wonders of the Past which I had bought at Coles’s book sale with my first cheque from the newspaper. Gradually I had come to dream of an occasion when some eminent archaeologist, Sir Flinders Petrie himself perhaps, would come visiting Australia on a desperate search for a brilliant youthful assistant, and in this dream – for the dreams of the young have this quality of a lingering sadness – I saw myself shyly but confidently offering my services. My lack of education would be brushed aside. What would an Intermediate Certificate matter? … here was a young man trained in drawing and painting and copying, skilled in writing, who could also read the hieroglyphics of Ancient Egypt! This I saw as the crucial asset, overriding every other consideration, and much of my spare time was now devoted to the specialized reading-annexes at the Public Library to which enrolment as an art student gave one privileged access. Here I pored over scholarly monographs or diligently studied the facsimile they had there of the ancient papyrus of the scribe Ani known as The Book of the Dead. (It is within the frame of time that our attitudes are shaped: two minutes away from where I sat I could be repelled and terrorized by a shrivelled head in a glass display-case or by a sexless old lady apathetically naked upon a model throne, yet in the gruesome rites of Ancient Egypt, in the foulness of the embalming practices and the nightmare grotesqueries of its Pantheon, I found only beauty and wonder and delight!)
Within six months I was able to read and to copy the strange language of that long-dead civilization, but, alas! neither Sir Flinders Petrie nor any other eminent Egyptologist ever did visit Australia on such a quest, and after a time I went back to my sailing-ships.
These various activities, however, occupied almost every moment of my time in this long brimming period of treacherous stability. Without Jack there to goad and prod me I gave no thought whatever to girls or to going out. Nothing disturbed my complacency. Within the safe, comforting shelter of the wire fences and the privet hedges, I could find everything I needed in the times of an earlier century when ships moved in eternal beauty under pyramids of canvas, or in the infinitely more remote and thrilling world of lotus columns and stiff staring pharaohs and mummy wrappings and funerary boats on a great strange river …
The world then, as I have said, was poised exactly midway between two disastrous wars: I see now that I, too, stood in a kind of self-created vacuum exactly in the middle of two balanced points of experience. The First World War had ended ten years before, and ten years later the Second would begin. I had been born seventeen years before; it would be exactly another seventeen years, and I would be thirty-four, before I would be able to even partially disentangle myself from the toils which, all unwittingly, I was already beginning to fashion for myself.
I was not prepared for it. In a special sense I was not prepared for anything. I had turned seventeen and I had not taken a girl out, even to the local cinema. I would not have known how one went about it. My familiarities extended beyond the reach of true time and I was intimate with shadows, and the shadows had the heads of ibis and jackal and hippopotamus and cat and crocodile and cobra, and their names were Anubis and Thoth and Set and Sekhmet and Bast and Isis …
My recall to the realities of where I was came with the shock of a sudden, unexpected blow.
I know it was a Saturday morning, because I had bought my copy of the Morning Post at the Kooyong Road tram stop, knowing that one of my articles was to be printed that day. I turned at once to the magazine section, and read it with smug pleasure.
It was the format of the newspaper that postponed the shock. The Post was a broadsheet of conservative, old-fashioned type, and the front page carried only classified advertisement columns, mostly Deaths, Births, Funeral Announcements, and In Memoriam notices. These last I always liked to read because they were often very funny, for the bereaved advertisers would usually accompany their memorials with short verses of their own composition, which were regarded as more ‘original’ than the stereotyped and succinct prose tributes like ‘Still Missed,’ or ‘An Empty Place In All Our Hearts’. This trivial detail recurs to me most vividly – and I can even remember the verse that tickled my fancy on this particular morning:
Gabriel blew his trumpet,
St Peter shouted, ‘Come!’
The Gates of Heaven opened
And in walked Mum.
Amused at the picture of Mum moving into Paradise, firmly corseted, wearing sensible shoes and her best felt toque and a fur tippet, and carrying her shopping-bag on her arm, I turned to the centre section of the newspaper, and there, on what was always called the ‘cable page’, two half-tone blocks, one above the other, arrested my attention, for staring out at me from the grey columns were Sam Burlington and his girl-friend Jess!
There is always a sense of incredulity evoked by this sort of thing, when the taken-for-granted anonymity of a newspaper is fragmented. The world of half-tone blocks is peopled by strangers: the kidnapper, the murderer and his victim, the absconded embezzler, the jilted sweetheart, the unscrupulous financier, all these are people we never know. So it was a long moment before I could take it in: as if the machinery of cognition had
slowed down to deliberately postpone comprehension. Yet the bald captions on the blocks left no doubt as to identity. The single-column block said ‘Samuel Burlington’; the three-column block above it, showing a pretty, nymph-like girl in a striped bathing costume, with long fair hair blowing in the wind and a canoe paddle in her hand, was marked ‘Jessica Wray’. And at the top of the page, across what for the Post was the sensational splash of a four-column headline, the black Cheltenham Bold capitals said: STUDENT HELD FOR QUESTIONING ON JESSICA WRAY MURDER,4 and below this, in smaller type: Intimacy Admitted: Startling Studio Disclosures.
I was appalled … I felt dazed and sick and stunned. I hardly remember getting off the tram; with my fingers clenched around the unbelievable newspaper I walked to the railway station as if in a dream. Legs moved to the crisp, creased whip of trouser-cuffs, the freshly polished shoes of a working morning mounted the wooden footbridge, shook a dead match from a crack, crumpled underfoot a Capstan package, descended, rang metallically on chaffy asphalt; through a hundred flickering images, a fluttering scatter of discarded tram tickets, through legs, shoes, a white clock embroidered on a burgundy sock, the ferrules of umbrellas, attaché-cases, a strapped bundle of library books, a fluted Thermos-flask, through the mad jump of mundane things the placards screamed at me from the station bookstall: STUDENT HELD IN MODEL SLAYING … GIRL MURDER SENSATION … ‘WE WERE LOVERS’ SAYS ART STUDENT …
It was not until I boarded the train that I began to feel the thing turning in and beginning to invade me. An infinite distress possessed me. The carriage rocked and clattered through the flat suburbs; the shouting of the porters was echoed by the wheels and the name of every station seemed to clang from the steel rails along which we were rushing headlong into horror … Elsternwick, Ripponlea, Balaclava, Windsor, Prahran, South Yarra …
I was in a second-class smoking compartment. Women never rode in smokers in those days, and at each station more men would get in, and they were all discussing the murder, some of them with gravity, but mostly with coarse jokes and comments, and with lechery in the hard bulging eyes that seemed to roll along the headlines, and across the grey-black stippled facsimile of the girl I knew as Jess. Their words, lively and seditious, jumped from door to window, twined around the smoke wreaths and the chipped mahogany and the string mesh of the luggage-racks and the dead matches and empty cigarette packets beside the cuspidors and the old blotched tourist photographs of Porepunkah and Toolangi. ‘They arsk fer it, these young ones, the way they carry on. It’s no bloomin’ wonder …’ ‘Wouldn’t ’ve minded if she’d arst me; I could’ve given ’er an inch or two! Ha, ha, ha!’ ‘Spare me days, she sounds as if she was a real one, though!’ ‘You know wot t’expeck wiv these bo’emian types, though …’ ‘Humdinger, I’d say, didn’t mind strippin’ it off, neither …’ ‘Yea, but jist fancy a pretty sheila like that … dunno wot the world’s coming to, fair dinkum I don’t …’ ‘These days they think they kin git away wiv anythink, that’s the trouble …’
The train clattered on through the grimy deserts of suburban rectitude.
The pain of all these memories I set myself deliberately to revive almost a year ago when I came back here to the island from Provence. In the huge old trunk which Cressida once christened ‘our portable attic’ I found the newspaper clippings tucked away inside some old dog-eared note-books, and these yellowing scraps of coarse paper from more than thirty years ago are beside me as I try to set this down.
I had not seen an afternoon newspaper on the Friday, so the story of what had happened had come to me as an absolute surprise. One of the clippings I have preserved (why, I wonder?) is from that Saturday morning edition of the Morning Post, and this is what had happened:
At some time in the early hours of the previous morning, Jess – I do remember that I could only think of her then as ‘Jess’: Jessica Wray in an odd way was not really the same person, or was perhaps only a half-tone block after all, and not really a person at all – Jess, then, had been criminally assaulted and strangled to death in a desolate area of suburban parkland. Her body had been found by a night-shift worker taking a short cut home behind the St Kilda football ground, up towards Albert Park Lake. (In this clipping Jess is described as a ‘slim, beautiful 20-year-old art student, the only daughter of a Camberwell bank manager’.) The victim, it was alleged, had spent the previous evening in the company of a fellow art student, Samuel Justin Burlington, aged nineteen, of Spring Street. They had gone to the theatre to see No, No, Nanette!. Burlington, questioned later at Russell Street police headquarters, admitted that the girl had accompanied him after the performance to his studio apartment, which is close to the theatre. There they had had ‘a drink or two’, but had quarrelled. According to Burlington’s testimony he had wanted to ‘patch it up’, but the girl insisted on leaving, saying that she intended to spend the night with a girl friend who lived at St Kilda. Burlington walked with her to the Flinders Street railway station, saw her through the ticket barrier, and walked back to his studio. He went to bed but was still awake at 12.35 a.m., when, according to his account, Miss Wray telephoned him from a public call-box at St Kilda. ‘She felt mean about our quarrel,’ Burlington stated, ‘and now it was she who wished to patch it up.’ By this time the last train had gone but she suggested taking a taxi-cab and returning to Burlington’s apartment. She added that she was also a little worried and frightened because she thought a man who had been in the same compartment on the train from Flinders Street was following her. Burlington said that by this time he had become ‘rather impatient and irritated with her’. He told her she was imagining things, and advised her to go to her friend’s place for the night and they would ‘talk about it later’.
Here there was a cross-heading in bold black type, POSED NAKED, and below this was printed an alleged admission by Burlington that ‘he had been intimate with Miss Wray over a period of some eighteen months’. He also confessed to having used her ‘on a number of occasions’ as a nude model for his paintings. She had, he alleged, posed naked for other artists as well. A large portrait in oils of the victim, completely unclothed, was found by police in Burlington’s apartment, together with a number of obscene pictures and publications.
The story ended with: ‘Burlington is being held at police headquarters for further questioning.’
As I remember it now, it was the awful plausibility of the situation that began to assail me through the chilled numbing sense of horror and disgust with which I read the account through the coarse and callous chorus of the men around me – ‘Well, if you want to be the village bike, you’ve gotter expect to be ridden!’ ‘Ha, ha ha!’ And with this came a disturbing niggle of thought about my own participation. The world which these men in the swaying compartment gibed at and condemned was a world in which I was involved … this youth and this girl who were the pivotal figures of scandal and tragedy were friends of mine … I had slept in that very studio, commented on that very painting! It was not at this point that I began to feel my own security disintegrating, but it was here, I think, in this shadowy sense of involvement, of being invaded from outside by dangerous forces of association, that my moral corruption began.
I know that before the train reached Flinders Street a taint of nightmare began to intrude into my thoughts. I was staring out through the carriage window and against the white rush of movement I saw only Jess. The image kept changing. I saw a half-mocking smile amid a crowd of faces; a girl on the edge of a sofa, buttoning up a blouse; I saw a thoughtful young student’s face behind a falling wing of soft hair half-lighted by the reflection from a sheet of paper pinned to a drawing-board; a pretty, lolling, flaxen-haired doll drunkenly asleep with its head against a door-hinge … It was at this point that the texture of nightmare trespassed on my thoughts. She was there, walking ahead of me, half seen in the shadows and lamplight and the windy movements of a deserted night, and mine were the soft and stealthy footsteps that pattered along behind her, down the midnight-emptied pavem
ents, beneath the mottled black splashes of the eucalyptus, furtively across the coarse onion-grass of an empty park towards the cavernous secrecy of the trees. (Perhaps I only like to think this now; that I have made this up to show that I knew of Sam’s innocence from the very beginning. Yet the night of that Saturday was the first time I remember having erotic dreams.)
Yes, of course I believed in Sam’s innocence. I must have done. For it was only the sense of invasion that was so disturbing then.
In the studio that morning there was, naturally, much discussion about the case, but to my intense relief it was to Young Joe that they turned with their questions about Sam and Jess; assuming, I suppose, that being younger I would not have known them as well. The discussion in the studio was quite a different thing from the men talking in the railway compartment. These were all decent, respectable people, and there were elements of the tragedy that obviously shocked and disturbed them profoundly. Yet they kept the thing in some sort of balance. They saw nothing shameful in the fact of a girl posing for an artist. There was nothing of prurience in their observations; they were concerned for the proprieties, but not for the hypocrisies.
I ate lunch in the city that Saturday, and then walked along Flinders Street to wait for the first editions of the afternoon papers. The headlines, of course, were bigger. With the crisper, tauter approach of afternoon-paper journalism, the case had become ‘The Jessica Murder’. The victim was referred to as a ‘nude model’ and no longer as an art student, Sam Burlington was a ‘young bohemian painter’. ‘Our special reporter’ was given a whole column in which to describe Sam’s studio: ‘One sensed in these flamboyant and almost foetid surroundings the atmosphere of the seraglio and a taint of young depravity and irresponsibility that seemed to bear no relationship to the decencies and dignities of Australia’s proudest city.’
My Brother Jack Page 15
