My Brother Jack

by Johnston, George

  10

  The way in which Helen Midgeley came back into my life was quite fortuitous, really, and perhaps it would never have happened had I not gone to work with the Morning Post.

  There were formalities to be observed when I first joined the newspaper. I was obliged to begin as a first-year cadet, which meant that for the second time in my life I was working for fifteen shillings a week (in my case, however, the normal four years of cadetship eventually were compressed into eighteen months), and for many weeks I was kept on what were called ‘day rounds’.

  Much of this was rather dreary routine work, like checking with the principal hotels to collect paragraphs for the ‘Personal column’, or picking up the mimeographed Stock Exchange and market reports, or compiling the daily Shipping Intelligence lists of arrivals and departures and working out tide-tables and making up the directory of where ships were berthed in the port. All this was presumed to be part of a training in the accuracy of compiling and presenting facts. The Post was rather a special sort of newspaper (it was swallowed up a few years back in some big company merger, and promptly ‘killed’, after a century or more of always reputable and sometimes distinguished journalism), and it went to great pains in the training of its cadets. They were members of what was always called the ‘Literary Staff’, and this was not entirely as high-falutin’ as it sounds: the paper’s editorials were used as English lessons in some of Melbourne’s best public schools at that time, and a cadet who used a split infinitive even in a ‘personal’ paragraph would risk a week’s suspension, and any chronic mutilation of syntax might even lose him his job altogether.

  In addition to the routine work, I would be assigned on three mornings a week to cover the inquests at the City Morgue. These would be only the run-of-the-mill inquests, of course, because a senior man would always be sent down if a hearing looked sensational or if it seemed likely that old Lewis, the coroner, would have to bring in a finding of murder or manslaughter. Otherwise a cadet would be there at the press table for the drownings and suicides and accidents and misadventures that cropped up day after day and never made the news columns, on the off-chance of picking up a freak story, or if old Lewis, who had a sharp sense of publicity, sounded off in his summing-up with one of his always highly printable outbursts on drunken drivers or the dangers of household mishaps or the laxity of controls on potentially lethal drugs. But mostly, I suspect, the cadets were sent along to be toughened up, to have their natural sensitivities rubbed into professional callouses against the raw, stark facts of life and death. A coroner’s court is the place for this.

  (Often since then I have thought of those mornings at the morgue in Melbourne, of the enormous scope and range of human disaster in a big city too hackneyed or too unimportant to justify even an inch of column-space in a newspaper – the despairing struggles, the fruitless aims, the base endeavours, picked out on two fingers by a constable clerk, folded up in the sheets of a typed deposition, and filed away forever with a pink tape around the folder …)

  The morgue at this time was very much a part of a great change in my life. Although I still lived at home, Jack’s return and the panelling up of the front hall had dislodged me finally from that house in the suburbs called Avalon. I had moved out at last – or had I, perhaps, been moved out? – into a world which for years I had been doing my utmost to evade. There was no way of side-stepping it at the City Morgue – it stared down at you from the high bench in the grey compassionate unhardened eyes of the old coroner, it played across the nervous, frightened faces of the witnesses, it bubbled out through the incomprehensibly gabbled testimonies of old Cartwright, the Government pathologist who did the autopsies. It was almost as if life were presenting to me its darkest and most macabre face simply to sever me irrevocably from my complacencies.

  The Post, as I have indicated, was an old-fashioned and very conservative newspaper. It never ran a suicide story. It would never print the name of a woman if in any way her reputation might be imperilled. It never publicized abortion. But nonetheless one had to sit the cases through – the cold cross-examinations, the exposures of sordid desperations and pitiful surrenders, the grisly analyses of criminal abortions shabbily conducted in shabby parlours, with all the talk of furtive appointments and slippery elm and knitting needles, and the coarse frightened faces … the grimmest of the facts of life summed up in that most poignant of all phrases – ‘death by misadventure’.

  Sometimes, between the cases, I would have to walk down to the bank of the Yarra, just to get away from it, just to reaffirm other values of life and beauty: and there would be a pair of black swans and one white one floating beneath the arches of Prince’s Bridge, or two of the public schools eights practising for the Head of the River, or an old woman feeding crumbs to the doves, and one would be able to return refreshed to the grim building that looked out across the slow river to the trees and the green roll of the parklands and the proud flag flying over Government House.

  Yet after a remarkably short time one got used to it all, and would even affect a bored cynicism at the dullness of the day. By this time, admittedly, I had modelled myself to fit into the new challenge. I had bought a gaberdine trench-coat (which I painstakingly soiled) and a smart brown pork-pie hat, I had begun to smoke, and I would take a daring glass or two of beer in the pubs with the other young reporters. I began, I think, to grow very cocksure. It was one thing to be a lithographic apprentice, it was something altogether different to be a newspaper reporter! I had a sense of being somebody. I had a frame around me. I was nourished by the flowing sap of green years.

  And it was in this immensely vulnerable state that I met Helen Midgeley again …

  An enormous ‘escape’ thing had developed out of the Depression, a yearning desire among people to be distracted from the miseries and fears of the times – even in the darkest ‘Susso’ days you had to queue for half a block to get into a Ginger Rogers-Fred Astaire film – and among the urban effects of this were the proliferation of innumerable little coffee-lounges where in dim lights one could talk terror away, or intellectually invite it into safe surroundings, and a fantastic flourishing all through the suburbs of the threepenny lending-libraries.

  Along the main street in our suburb there must have been at least a score of these libraries at that time, and although most of them were tiny little shops run by elderly bookish spinsters who were forever recommending Jeffrey Farnol or Georgette Heyer or Ethel M. Dell, one of them, the largest, was part of a suburban chain owned by a sly, asthmatic little shrimp of a man called Perce Parkinson. Each of his libraries was managed by a young and attractive girl, partly to invite custom and partly because Perce lived in a permanent and vain delusion that he would be able to overcome his asthma sufficiently to exert a successful droit de seigneur over his pretty hirelings.

  ‘Day rounds’ at the Morning Post seldom ended before seven or eight at night, or sometimes even later, but I had got into the habit of walking up to Kooyong Road from the railway station, instead of taking the tram, because it seemed to be a way of prolonging the excitements of the day. One spring evening when I was on my way home I stopped to look at the books on display in the windows of Perce Parkinson’s library, which stayed open until nine-thirty so that subscribers could come down after their supper and select their reading at leisure, and I glanced inside and there was Helen Midgeley sitting at the desk. A man was standing beside her. She pressed down on a date-stamp, giving it a firm little wobble, fingered through a filing-cabinet, entered something on a card, said ‘I’m sure you’ll like Mowrer – he has something to say,’ flashed a quick cordial, workmanlike smile at the man, and handed him his books. He came out, and I went in.

  ‘Good heavens,’ I said, ‘what on earth are you doing here?’

  For a moment she looked at me without recognition, and then she smiled. It was an entirely different smile from the one she had offered her customer.

  ‘David Meredith!’ she exclaimed. ‘Well, for goodness’
sake!’ She looked me up and down. ‘You’ve changed,’ she said, and I was pleasantly aware of a note of admiration in her comment.

  ‘So have you,’ I said. ‘Well, it must be nearly four years …’ I wanted to say something very clever, but all I said was, ‘People should change in that time, I suppose.’

  She had grown very pretty. Her hair was much blonder than I had remembered – a gleaming metallic paleness that seemed to pick up light from everywhere, waved very smoothly to the nape of her neck, and then curved up into two heavy glittering sausage-like rolls that came forward to touch her cheekbones. Her eyebrows, which were much darker than her hair, brown almost, were plucked to the finest of arches.

  She was dressed very smartly, or so it seemed to me. A navy-blue linen skirt that was fitted to just below her knees, then swirling out around her calves in hundreds of small pleats (skirts were getting longer) and a fine white rayon blouse with navy-blue coin spots, and big Spanish-looking sleeves puffing out from a small curved bolero of the same material as her skirt. Her small waist was cinched in with a red leather belt, and under the neat collar of her blouse she wore a floppy red satin artist’s bow. Her lipstick was of the same red – dark and daring. It seemed to me to be a very striking costume, and in spite of the surroundings of battered library books and ink-pads and glue bottles she looked immaculate.

  I suppose it was the smartness of her dress and the fact of the artist’s bow that prompted me to say, ‘So whatever happened to the fashion-designing?’

  ‘There’s been a Depression, didn’t you know?’ she said and made a mouth at me. She stood up then. She was almost as tall as I was, and so slender in the tight waist and skirt that her hipbones projected in two tiny peaks below the red belt, and her long lean legs in flesh-coloured sheer silk had the colour and fragility of the legs of some graceful wading-bird. All her bones were fine – ankles, wrists, jaw-bone, nose. To-day we might have thought of her as having a kind of mannequin elegance: what I remember from that time is a swift fugitive thought, almost a regretful one, that she was prettier than Sheila, but I qualified it by thinking that she was somehow not as warm-looking.

  I remember being startled at the improbability of her smartness and her obvious self-confidence in that rather dreary suburban setting, for I was too naive then to realize that the great suburban artifice is to be smart on nothing, and all of this impressed me so profoundly that I was lost from the very beginning.

  ‘I’m just locking up the shop,’ she said. ‘Would you like to stay and have a cup of tea or something?’

  I accepted with an almost hungry eagerness.

  I examined the place curiously while she was tidying things away. The two side walls were shelved from floor to ceiling and subdivided into sections marked off with printed cards – ROMANCE, ADVENTURE, WILD WEST, DETECTIVE, GENERAL, TRAVEL, JUVENILE, NON-FICTION. (‘ROMANCE’ occupied by far the largest space.) There were tall stands by the windows with big bowls of Iceland poppies, and apart from these the only furnishings were the desk and filing-cabinet, two leather armchairs, and a huge, high-backed couch covered with rubbed Genoa velvet. At the rear of the shop, between high narrow shelves respectively marked NEW ISSUES and AUSTRALIANA, a curtained doorway presumably led to some private apartment.

  This almost at once was to be revealed to me, for by this time she had locked the outer door and switched off the shop lights, and by the dim, secret glow filtering in from the street lamps she led me through the curtains into a pair of very small rooms, divided by a folk-weave curtain of the same material that draped the doorway.

  The larger of the two areas was obviously a workshop where books were rebound and had their covers attended to. The air was oppressively heavy with the stinging pungent amyl-acetate smell of quick-drying clear lacquer. There was a small handpress, under which six books were flatly squashed, and a long, zinc-topped bench on which glue and lacquer had congealed in a brittle, peeling, transparent film, and paste-pots and white ink and labels and a stack of book-jacket covers and ‘blurbs’ cut out ready to be pasted on to the covers before they were lacquered over.

  The smaller area was a kind of tiny sitting-room, not much more than a box, really, but very neat and feminine, with a cane arm-chair and two straight chairs and a little cupboard which was covered with a patterned oil-cloth with scalloped edges. On top of this was a gas-ring, a tray of cups and saucers, a small willow-pattern set of teapot, jug, and sugar-basin, and a very shiny aluminium kettle. Miniature pots of small cacti were ranged neatly along a wall shelf, and above this was a framed Marie Laurencin print in pale pinks and faded blues and greys of a girl who bore a singular if fortuitous resemblance to Helen.

  A narrow book-shelf to the left of the gas-ring harboured a selection of volumes which, had I been a little older, instantly might have afforded me some clue to Helen’s character. A number of them were from the thin, lobster-pink editions of the Left Book Club, and Das Kapital was there, and Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class, and 42nd Parallel and Three Soldiers and Ten Days that Shook the World.

  From the workshop section a door led out into a small overgrown garden where there was a toilet and poky wash-room. The broken brick path in the garden was set with big rat-traps.

  After all this time it is interesting – and very sad, too, in a way – to draw on memory in such careful detail as to present in fair proportion the setting of one’s downfall: to this day that sharp sickly smell of amyl-acetate will often set me wondering about the strange bowers which modern civilization generally provides for our initiations into the holiest of nature’s rites. It did not happen, however, on that first night that I visited Perce Parkinson’s threepenny library.

  ‘Will you have tea?’ she said. ‘Or would you prefer a glass of beer?’

  ‘No, I’d love a cup of tea,’ I said. She put the kettle on, and from the cupboard she took a bottle of lager and a glass for herself, and I was sorry then that I had not asked for beer.

  We sat and talked together for more than an hour. I told her what I had been doing, and she gave me an account of her own experiences since that night of the birthday party in Royal Parade. She was still friendly, it seemed, with Moira and Jerry Farley. Jerry was a salesman of tractors and farm machinery, and doing well for himself, but Moira’s ambitions to be a great artist evidently had also curdled, for she was now a salesgirl in the lingerie department at Myer’s.

  ‘So you’re the only one of us who did what you said you were going to do, aren’t you?’ she remarked. ‘You always insisted you were going to be a writer. And now you are.’

  ‘Well … sort of.’ I wanted to sound modest, but her obvious admiration gave me a tingling feeling of warmth towards her.

  ‘You know, I’d give anything to be a journalist,’ she said vehemently. ‘To have the chance of doing something. To be able to champion the causes.’

  ‘What causes?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, you know … everything!’ She spread her long-fingered hands in a gesture of eloquent despair. ‘The whole world is falling to pieces in front of our very eyes, and nobody cares. Nobody does anything. Except to try to crush the working class and sabotage everything that’s decent. Just look what’s happening in Europe! Mussolini, and that beastly Hitler … yes, and you watch Spain, too … and the way they’re all winking an eye at Fascism just because they’re terrified of Russia. David, it makes me want to puke, it really does!’

  ‘Oh, all that, yes,’ I said, without very much enthusiasm. One heard quite a bit of this sort of talk in the reporters’ room, too, mostly among the younger ones, but I had never paid much attention to it. Listening to Helen – because she talked on about the disaster of the Depression and the way the capitalists were trying to keep the masses in their places – I had no great wish to go crusading or to champion causes about which I really knew very little, but that hour in the back room of Perce Parkinson’s library was my first introduction to Political Woman, and I must admit that it was heady stuff.

&nbs
p; Helen Midgeley, after all, was four years older than I, and I was greatly impressed by her sophistication, by her intellectual qualities, by her balanced maturity, and in that neat little annexe where the sharp tang of amyl-acetate was subtly softened by a smell of women’s cosmetics and the faint moody odour of the perfume she used, her smart cool beauty was somehow immeasurably enhanced, and I thought of the sofa in Sam Burlington’s studio and the queer musky smell that poor Jess had left there, and so I said, ‘What sort of perfume do you use?’ and the non sequitur cutting clean across her political tirade obviously delighted her because she smiled with a touch of coquetry and said, ‘Lenthéric. D’you like it?’; and partly it was the pleasure I felt at my conversational adroitness, and partly a stinging sense of joy that she used Lenthéric and not Evening in Paris (although I could not for the life of me have told the difference), and partly the unmistakable expression in her cool grey eyes that finally sealed my captivation to her.

  I called at the library again the following evening, but Perce Parkinson was there, watchfully suspicious, and Helen was very crisp and efficient, and I contented myself with entering my name as a subscriber, and paying the deposit, and taking away two books dealing with European political affairs which Helen recommended.

  After that I was a regular caller, and I would make a point of getting there as late as possible, so that Helen would be locking up the shop and I would be asked out into the back room.

  I was there on a warm evening towards the end of the second week when she excused herself and went through the curtain and out the back door into the garden. I reached over and took down Thorstein Veblen and I was idly turning his pages when something made me look up, and Helen was standing just inside the parting of the curtain, with one hand on her hip and the other holding back the drape, and she had taken all her clothes off! She just stood there, not four feet away from where I sat rigid in the cane arm-chair, looking down at me with the tiniest suggestive smile at her mouth, and the only adornment to her slender startling nudity was a heart-shaped gold locket on a chain around her neck.