That much I remember. Her overpowering loveliness, that smile beneath the casque of golden hair, the long lean flanks of her nakedness, youthful sensuality imaged for me for the first time. My reaction to this was ludicrous. I must have leapt up from the chair and pushed right past her in a blind panic of embarrassment and fright. I remember nothing really except the slam of the shop door behind me, and then I was running, with pumping arms and jerking legs and whistling breath, running beneath the blue dip of the overhead tramway lights; running along beneath the verandas of dark locked shops and through the mad quick pursuing echo of my clattering heels; running along the blank hedges and the blind borders of the walls, past drifts of fallen peppercorns and peeling posters that flapped and scratched in the night wind, and I must have run for almost a mile before I reeled to a standstill, gasping, and brought my knee up to take the pain out of the ‘stitch’ in my side, and then there was nothing else to do but to face my own hot pained confused self, but it was still early and there were people walking around the streets, so I cut across to the Hopetoun Gardens and went in and sat on the carriage of one of the old Boer War cannons and tried to examine my anger and mortification and shame. It must have been quite some time before I worked it out that whatever it cost me in humiliation I would have to go back to the library anyway; because my hat and raincoat were there and my books and some papers I needed for work.
I could have saved myself all the mental agony. When I finally did walk back the padlock was on the shop door and Helen had gone home.
Yet the following evening it was as if nothing whatever had happened. Helen did mention my having left the hat and the raincoat, but quite casually, as one mentioned someone having left an umbrella long after the rain has stopped. Once the shop was locked she took out beer and two glasses instead of making tea, and we drank some in a deliberately drawn-out way, and then she came and sat on my knee and she kissed me and moved her fingers over me, and when she was ready she led me out to the old couch in the dimly-lighted shop.
I suppose it was a better initiation than I deserved, really. Helen Midgeley was – and while I knew her remained – a neat, clean, expedient, safe lover rather than a particularly expert or a particularly passionate one, and she always seemed to get about as much satisfaction out of it as she ever really wanted, but at least she was kind about it and patient with my ineptitudes. (I clumsily slipped off the couch and bruised my knee painfully on the floor! I had ghastly images of everything being drenched in blood; it was not until some time later that it occurred to me that it was only my virginity that was being taken!)
It is a wonderful and fearful experience, that first physical communion with a woman … the feverish fumbling, the sad inexperienced groping for those complex and eternal mysteries that are harboured in a woman’s body, those wobbly intrusions into the perilous poetry associated with a hundred bewildering new sensations of both the flesh and the spirit: no matter how many women we may enjoy later nor how adept we become in the practices of sex, there is probably no other moment in life that ever repeats itself with such an excitingly exact mixture of alarm and ecstasy; fear and frenzy; doubt and intoxication; delight and dread. In a first seduction, I think, however foolish or naive or ridiculous, there is some wistful breathless magic which preserves forever – even if the preservative be sadness or regret – some little memorable trace of a great wonder and a great loveliness … Perhaps. I grappled with Helen Midgeley on a Genoa velvet couch in a darkness that seemed too dark and yet not dark enough, and I desperately tried to remember the things my brother Jack had told me years before.
Yet that first night must have been satisfying enough in its way, because it established a kind of pattern for the strange relationship that was to continue for several years. The centrepiece of this experience continued to be the huge old Genoa velvet couch. As we grew bolder we would take off all our clothes in the back room, then one of us would peep through the curtains to make sure the coast was clear, and we would scamper out in the pale illumination which filtered into the shop from the lights on the overhead tram wires, or flashed more brightly from the headlights of passing cars, and like two pagan lovers in a play of moonlight we would fling ourselves together on to the couch. The couch normally faced towards the rear of the shop so that once we were coupled together upon its rubbed resilient velvet its high back would effectively obscure our activities from the street and from passers-by who might chance to peer in through the big plate-glass windows. But one night when I came I saw that Helen had turned the couch the other way around, so that it was directly facing the front of the shop and the plate-glass windows, and when she was stacking the last of the books away I asked her, ‘Why is the sofa this way?’
‘I just thought it might be fun, darling,’ she said eagerly. ‘I mean, there’s hardly a glimmer of light really comes in, is there? Don’t you think it’d be marvellous to lie here, the two of us together, making love, and watching the crowds walking past coming home from the pictures!’ She giggled suddenly and put her hand over her mouth … ‘And none of them even suspecting we’re here at all!’ – she giggled again. ‘Well, if they did see they wouldn’t believe their eyes … they’d just think they were imagining things!’
‘Not for me!’ I said firmly. ‘Oh, no, not on your life! What if one of them has a torch and flashes it in? Or suppose it’s the local constable on his rounds, checking? He always shines a torch into the shops, doesn’t he?’ I took hold of one end of the couch. ‘That’d really give him something for his note-book! You just grab the other end of this and let’s get it back the way it was!’
‘I must say you’re not very adventurous,’ she said with a little pout, although she didn’t really seem upset by my firmness, and later when we were making love she began to giggle again and said, ‘My! it would give them a shock if they looked in and saw, wouldn’t it?’
One night I asked her what she kept in the locket she always wore around her neck, and which I would often encounter when I was caressing her small high breasts. ‘You’d never guess in a million years,’ she said.
‘Then I shan’t try and so you’d better tell me.’
‘Oh, no, I’ll show you,’ she said agreeably. We were in the back room at the time, dressing, and she snipped the catch of the locket and bent over me, still half-naked, to show me tiny facing photographs (clipped from a half-tone magazine illustration) of two swarthy, intense-looking men, sealed within tiny ellipses of glass.
‘Who are they?’ I asked.
‘The martyrs,’ she said, rather melodramatically. ‘Sacco and Vanzetti.’
‘Oh, come on!’ I exclaimed. ‘You mean those two Italian bolshies who got electrocuted years ago? In America? You’re not serious!’
‘Yes, the martyrs.’ She nodded and closed the locket reverently and began to fasten her brassière.
‘But isn’t that a … well, a funny kind of a thing to keep in a locket?’ I said, still not quite believing that she could be serious.
‘Why funny? It’s a reminder’, she said stoutly, ‘of man’s inhumanity to man.’
‘Yes, but you can be reminded of that a million different ways,’ I said. ‘You don’t have to hang it in a gold locket around your neck, do you? Shaped like a heart, too. I’d have thought you’d have kept a picture of your mother in it, or a lock of hair from when you were a baby, or something like that …’
‘Well, it happens I like to keep my martyrs,’ she said determinedly, and pulled her stockings up along her thin, graceful, elegant legs. Later she made me read Boston, the Upton Sinclair novel about the Sacco-Vanzetti case, but it didn’t make much impression on me, and often afterwards when I was making love to her, or just fondling her, my fingers would come across the little golden locket with the dead radicals inside and I would very gently caress this tiny receptacle that was the casket of political martyrdom – as warm from the life of her own breasts as if the electrocuting charge had just burnt through it – and waves of silent inward laug
hter would threaten to choke me, and when this would happen I would deliberately rub her pinky-brown nipples with the Sacco-Vanzetti locket until they swelled into hard little columns of sexual erection …
When, a little later, the Morning Post graduated me to general rounds, at night, I was able to see Helen much less frequently. But she was usually there on the occasions when I did need her, and she was always accommodating and never demanding. Of her family life, indeed of any life she lived outside the library, I knew virtually nothing at that time. She was a member of some suburban tennis club, I gathered, and I think she would go to its socials and dances, and she was too pretty not to have boy friends, but I knew nothing about them; in all those years I never once took her out at night, and I never even really knew what she did with herself at week-ends. For me she existed only as a part of Perce Parkinson’s threepenny library, and the little rooms at the back and the cups of tea and the smells of gum and amylacetate and Lenthéric, and the old big couch of Genoa velvet that had come to have the smell of the sofa in Sam’s studio after Jess had been there.
It was an odd arrangement (I imagine it could have gone on for years and then petered away into nothing, and probably would have except that my importance became important to Helen) and the very oddness of it, of course, suited me down to the ground. Here I was with my own secret mistress, who was beautiful and clever and kind and who asked for nothing, it seemed, except my occasional attentions. She left me free of social obligations and at work I could press my ambitions without distraction. I felt myself to be in an enviable and singular state of grace. It did not occur to me then that one day I might have to pay for all these special dispensations.
11
There is a useful clue to that time – for a good deal more was happening than these late awakenings of sexuality or the beginnings of a kind of maturity – in the importance we used to attach then to the Monday morning arrivals of the incoming mail steamers, the Orient Line or the P&O, from London and the European ports: it was always my regular assignment on these days to meet the ships and to interview the more important passengers before they went ashore at Port Melbourne. I would be up long before dawn and would board the ships far down Port Phillip Bay from the launch that carried the customs officers and the port doctor and the harbour pilot and the man from Thomas Cook’s with his leather bag of currency to change.
We would see the faint blur of lights down the beacon-flashing curve of the South Channel, and then the big lean graceful shape would emerge out of stardust and darkness and the ground-scum of morning and mist patches brushed across the flat sea and the dark awakening shore of Rosebud and Dromana and Mornington. To the west, the Werribee marsh-flats would remain dismal and forbiddingly black, with only a faint forlorn light from some building on the sewage farm, and even when the sun did come up it would just turn the line of earth dismally and forbiddingly grey instead of black. But by this time we would usually be aboard the big liner.
There would be a wait, tossing in the launch, until the great ship declared itself in the whiteness of superstructure, in the clarification of masts and Samson posts and the orderly array of lifeboats, and the elegant yellow smokestacks and house-flags and pennants and signal-hoists lit dramatically by the floodlighting, and we would hang on a line in a rush of foam below the jacob’s-ladder until the doctor gave medical pratique, and then we would climb aboard into a strange confined warm sea-smelling humming world of sleepy-eyed officers yawning over greetings, and stewards buttoning jackets, and seamen in bare feet sloshing water about with squeegees in lighted alleyways, and a few dishevelled passengers in bathrobes shuffling to the shower blocks with towels and toothbrushes, and through all of this there would be the clang of bells and the throb of power through the muffling decks and the faint changing cadence of the engine vibrations until one would know that the liner had cleared the channel and the big tugs, the Taronga and the James Patterson, were making the great manila hawsers fast to their towing-bits.
The purser would take us down to the empty dining saloon for breakfast, and he would give each of us a copy of the captain’s report of the voyage and a mimeographed ‘prominent passenger list’, and after we had had breakfast we would try to hunt them out in their cabins. There were times when the passengers, anxious to pack and get ashore, would be angry at our intrusions, but generally they liked being interviewed.
So far as Australia is concerned, this, of course, was a very old tradition which newspapers like the Morning Post had continued to keep up, because being so far away from the rest of the world, twelve thousand miles, in fact (this was the figure they always liked to give for Melbourne: ‘After all, we are twelve thousand miles away from these events!’ they would say in apology, or as an explanation, or to waive responsibility), and before the time of radio or submarine cables, this had been the only way for generations that the people of Melbourne had got any news at all of the outside world, by shipping reporters meeting ships coming through The Rip and up the South Channel – the old-fashioned square-rigged steamship packets and the fast sailing clippers – and talking to passengers and bringing ashore copies of English and sometimes even Cape Town newspapers (even the ‘latest’ news therefore would be anything from a month to three months old by the time it got to Melbourne, so that ‘news’, rather than being something that actually was happening now, had more the quality of the light of a distant star, in that the cognition of the light had no true relationship to the moment of its emission, but there was nothing else to go by.)
I think this sharp and almost traditional sense of isolation from the things that were happening in Europe – which in a subtle way is still very important to the average Australian mentality – was most profoundly felt in the thirties. I do know that right through almost until the time of Munich the meeting of those Monday morning passenger liners continued to be of great importance, and each week, ritually, parties of reporters and photographers would go down the dark bay and climb the jacob’s-ladder and expect to find in a two-berth cabin some revelation or oracular presence or mystical enlightenment which, in bringing truth from far away, might help explain the dissonance of the world.
By this time we had our cable services and our radio broadcasts, of course, yet it still seemed that whatever was happening in Europe, the spiritual truth of events, I mean, could be given reality only by the fact of somebody talking about them.
He had to be there, right there in front of us, sitting in a tasteful cabin with the louvres faintly whistling, describing the smoke pall above the Reichstag, or the massed banners tossing on the Tempelhof or the endless torchlit tramplings of the Brownshirt columns down through the Brandenburger Tor and along the Unter den Linden and the Wilhelmstrasse … or telling of the nightrappings, the shots in the streets, the forced arrests, the marks on walls, the brandings, and the whispered rumours of Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald and Ravensbrück … or scoring the grim comic-opera of Mussolini ranting from his balcony … Only then did it all move out of the pages of the lobster-pink editions of the Left Book Club that were on Helen’s bookshelf; only then did it become part of the true and terrible dissonance of the times.
Once, in one of these early morning ships riding up out of the South Channel off a dawn-gilded Luna Park, a great theosophist came, and his followers then were hailing him as the ‘New Messiah’, but we caught him in his shower and he hid his ascetic nakedness behind an Orient Line bath towel and shook his gentle beautiful face very sadly, and he had no solutions to offer nor any explanations of why Brazil was throwing the coffee crop into the sea or America was burning its wheat or Hitler torturing Jews or Mussolini bombing Ethiopians. There was no answer, he insisted, except love … Christian love. That, for some reason, didn’t seem enough.
Dissonance is a good word for that mad little era, I think. It was a time of dissonance. People were looking at their own problems so closely and so bitterly, and with such total confusion that it was very hard for them to see much else. I think most reason
ably intelligent persons were aware that something of awful importance was happening – even if it was twelve thousand miles away – but nobody could define it with any sort of precision at all, because the discordances rang in their ears instead of truths, and everyone was inclined to push away the things that were too complex and new, and so the strange terrible forces that were forming were still being assessed by old ideals and prejudices and judgments – like Helen with her clichés about the down-trodden masses and her childish belief in the symbolic magic of the martyrs in her locket; or like Dad turning his back on it all by having a sign screwed to the front gate – and what is incredible is that out of all this woolly thinking true causes did begin to take shape: and although I have been told often enough since by the new clutches of young intellectuals that the arguments were weakly based and were blind to the deeper problems, the fact remains, I think, that that was just about the last time the world did have true, pure causes to believe in. Or thought it had.
It certainly created a particular generation. They belong to me even though I defected on them, and I can pick them now with my eyes closed, just by the way they talk – they are all well into their forties now, or older – and although I don’t know one among them who is an idealist any longer, and in fact most of them seem to be rabid cynics about most things, there is still a sort of soft patch of belief in them somewhere, and they all have a little weakness in their hard-shelled armour about that time of the thirties when the world had causes. It always gives this queer faint flavour of pessimism to their words.
What was even more curious in a way was that the greater the defections and the political betrayals, the more powerfully valid these causes grew, so that even after the way we would betray Haile Selassie or connive with Hitler or play along with Mussolini there were any number of these eager young idealists more ready than ever to take sides on Spain. The Germans had an odd system operating at this time because they were desperate to get foreign currency into their country, and so they were selling very cheap passages to Europe through their Reichsmarks, which meant that you could get all the way from Melbourne to a port in Europe for only about twenty Australian pounds, and so this was the way most young Australians would travel if they wanted to get to Spain and fight against the Fascists.
My Brother Jack Page 22
