Bert had aged, too, although he still had that fresh pink rustic complexion of a boy, and the same innocence of years before in his blue rather stupid eyes, but there were lines of pain and petulance scored around his cheeks and mouth, and all the collective suffering had knotted up his hands and wrists into an arthritic tangle of swollen veins and knuckles. A long series of amputations had taken his leg by this time almost to the joint of the knee, and he seldom wore an artificial limb any longer. He generally got about on one French crutch and a walking-stick, with the right leg of his trousers neatly pinned up, which, as he once pointed out, at least always got him a seat on a crowded tram. At this time he had a job driving one of the lifts in a big city insurance office, which was easier for him.
Bert had always been rather overshadowed by Jean’s exuberant and more voluble personality, and what in earlier years had been only the shy taciturnity of a country boy had developed by now into almost a complete block so far as original conversation was concerned, so he seldom opened his mouth except to echo other people’s observations, or to repeat the points of jokes that somebody else had made, which he would do very good-naturedly and with much laughter and nudging and winking. (All Bert ever wanted in his life, I think, was simply to be liked and approved: it was only his dream of the unattainable that went beyond this, where he was a brilliant original wit, a practical joker of immense audacity, a debonair and flashy character whom everybody talked about.) His one very earnest pursuit at this time was an involvement with Dad in a series of complicated projects for working out new betting systems which eventually were to make fortunes for both of them: he would come across to our house after supper and they would spend hours together compiling tables and statistics from the sporting sections of the newspapers and the form-guides in The Circle and The Sporting Globe. It had something to do with ‘beaten favourites at last start’, and was very involved, and although practical tests were made each Saturday at Caulfield or Flemington – ‘two bob each way Dark Man’ (Dad also had a mystical obsession about any racehorse with a name in which an ‘r’ was the third letter), ‘all up, if any, top weight in the last!’ – no riches ever did come of it.
Bert was echoing Jack’s jokes on this particular afternoon, because it was Jack’s personality and ebullience that were dominating the occasion. He was a little drunk and merry and spilling over with a flood of universal affection – and at the beginning I could see he was trying very hard to see that Helen fitted in – and he had already teased Dad by suggesting that they reverse the big, burdened table and play a ‘hundred up’ at billiards, and now he was making a comic appreciation of Mother’s massed oil paintings on the walls. ‘But why should all these Old Masters just be gathering dust in this place, that’s what I want to know, when the National Art Gallery could fill a whole bloomin’ wing with ’em?’ he was saying. ‘Just think what the public’s missing! What you are depriving them of, Mum! That beaut snow scene up there, for instance, with the steam roller chuffin’ round the bend and —’
‘Oh you are a fool, Jack!’ Mother protested, laughing. ‘It’s not a steam roller, it’s a sleigh!’
‘Or this one. Eh, now what about this one? This wonderful study of a bunch of … well, what is that a bunch of, Mum? It can’t be carrots, because I don’t see how you’d have carrots all mixed up with a broken windmill and an old railway bridge, and it’s too red for parsnips, but it looks more like carrots than beetroot, say, and —’
‘You know very well they’re not carrots at all, you idiot!’ Mother giggled, delighted by the badinage, and playing up to him. ‘It’s a sort of cliff, a rock formation coming down to that path there leading to the mill. And it’s part of a water-wheel and nothing to do with a railway bridge at all, and anyone can see that who isn’t blind or half tipsy.’ Having got that shaft home she turned to Helen and said, ‘You mustn’t pay the least attention to anything this one says, Miss – er – Miss Midgeley. He’s always acting the fool and trying to tease, and —’
‘Are they really your paintings, though, Mrs Meredith?’ Helen asked, and there was something a little stiff and faintly disparaging in the way she said it – at least that was what I thought – and the whole conversation at once moved away from the plane of familiar, good-natured bantering that Jack had established, and Mother looked slightly uncomfortable and suddenly defensive, and I tried to save the situation on both sides by saying, ‘Helen used to be an art student herself, you see, Mother, and she knows something about painting,’ but Mother still looked very uncertain, and she flushed a little when she spoke:
‘Well, most of them are just things I did when I was a girl; they’re only copies, really … and these idiots are always making fun of them. They’re not all by me, anyway. Jack likes you to think they are, but they’re not. That big one over the fireplace, goodness only knows who did that; we bought it at an auction sale the time we got that sideboard and the billiard-table, and it fits nice up there … and those two over on that wall in the carved frames, the autumn scenes, they’re two that Davy did when he was still working at Klebendorf’s. They’re my favourites, really …’
Helen gave a considered attention to the two Steiner temperas I had stolen and put my name to, while my stomach chilled with the shame of it, but she only said ‘Hmmm!’ and nodded, and that made me feel worse than ever because even poor old dead Ludwig Steiner didn’t get any praise out of it …
This was the point when I suddenly began to realize that in some subtle and as yet unspecified way Helen and my family were not really hitting it off too well: more, I had the disturbing additional reflection that this fine sharp edge of incompatibility which had already been presented could never be withdrawn, and that, in spite of all Jack’s good-natured efforts and Mother’s innate kindliness, a sense of constraint would inevitably grow.
At once I began to study Helen’s behaviour and reactions with a nervous, watchful concern, which, I realize now, doubtless communicated itself both to her and to everybody else. Watching her with this new vigilance it occurred to me that the stiffness that had been displayed in the tone of her voice was in fact only a part of her whole attitude. She was not comfortable. That was it – she was not comfortable. She even sat stiffly, with her handbag and gloves still on her lap, as if to imply that she would prefer not to stay for very long, and she was anything but relaxed as far as the swarming children on the floor were concerned, for she would instinctively flinch away and draw herself more tightly together when one of them crawled anywhere near her, and I think I realized the full measure of the tension that was gripping her when I noticed that Sheila was studying her from the rocking-chair with a kind of secret watchful amusement in her eyes.
Poor, simple, good-hearted Bert was hardly a help at this stage because he would insist on offering her dishes of food with a kind of forced ingratiating politeness, and she would keep refusing – ‘We had an absolutely huge lunch, and I’m honestly not a scrap hungry,’ she would say – and Bert in his innocent anxiety to please her and make her feel at home would promptly produce a dish of something else, and say, ‘But you’ve got to try one of these, though … they’re homemade, they’re my old woman’s speciality …’ and again she would refuse, and he would blunder on making the situation hopelessly worse until her rejections grew colder and curter and edgier, and finally Jack had to say, ‘Oh for God’s sake, Bert, why don’t you listen to what she’s telling you? She’s not hungry. If she’s told you once she’s told you a hundred times! Why don’t you offer me a sausage-roll? You won’t catch me knocking back tucker like this!’
But then Sheila’s baby, Kathleen, who was only at the crawling and the trying-to-stand-up stage, emerged determinedly from beneath a chair and before anyone could do anything about it she had grasped one of Helen’s gunmetal-sheathed legs in her two pudgy, grimy little hands, and she drew herself wobblingly and uncertainly erect, and gooed at everyone, dribbling triumphantly through a paste of damp milk arrowroot biscuit and raspberry jam, an
d I could see the repugnance run like an electric charge all through Helen’s body, and then Sheila leaned forward from the rocker and very gently disengaged the swaying baby and sent her crawling on her way, and murmured, ‘I’m sorry, the little devil seems to have left some of her jelly on the hem of your skirt. Here, I’ll wipe it with this, it won’t leave a mark.’
I could feel the situation slipping distinctly out of control now, and at the same time becoming less diffuse. Mother had forgotten her momentary discomfort and was beamingly happy with everything, because Jack had insisted on giving her another glass of sweet muscat, and this had made her a little ‘wizzy’, and at this stage Jack, I think, was still desperately trying to keep the harmonies intact, but the under-current of strain was becoming obvious in the room. Bert, still hurt by the impatient edge to Helen’s last refusal of his offerings, and stung by Jack’s rebuke, was rather petulantly taking it out on two of his children who were squabbling in the corner by the sea-chest, and crying children in a crowded room are seldom soothing to adult tensions. Jean and Marj had got to the stage of exchanging meaningful glances with each other. Dad, stupefied by heavy food and too much beer, was half asleep in his chair, and belching softly. Sheila rocked herself back and forth and watched her husband.
I have not the faintest idea how the conversation ever moved to politics, although I imagine Helen and I probably began it out of some intuitive nervous desperation to re-establish our own rapport, but there we were suddenly discussing the Spanish Civil War and ‘Potato’ Jones and Hoare and Laval and nonintervention and Fascist duplicity, and Helen was projecting herself a little, perhaps to establish herself on her own knowledgeable ground, and then quite suddenly, quite matter-of-factly, Jack was saying:
‘Davy came to me with some cockeyed idea about going over there to get into it, and I told him he ought to have his bloomin’ head read.’
‘And why do you consider it a cockeyed idea?’ Helen wanted to know. She put the question quietly enough, but the antagonism and the challenge were there all right – she didn’t like Jack any better than she liked his wife – and Jack was an old street fighter who could smell aggression in a syllable and who knew a chip when he saw one on a shoulder, and he was never anybody’s fool about the way people felt about him, so he knew what she was up to, of course, and he was just drunk enough to want to meet the challenge, and that was when the atmosphere began to change for the worse. Permanently, as it eventually turned out …
‘Eh?’ He ran his fingers through his thinning yellow silky hair and looked at her in a measuring sort of way, and said, ‘Well, don’t you?’
‘Of course not!’ she said firmly, and for a disloyal moment I found myself wishing she didn’t sound so superior when she really only wanted to be emphatic. ‘I think we have to believe in things,’ she insisted. ‘We have to have causes, and objects, and beliefs. And I don’t think we should just stand back and allow people to be trampled on. I mean, what’s democracy for, after all?’
Jack said, ‘Yes, that’s all very well, but what I’m getting at is, do you think Davy should’ve gone to Spain with those two mates of his?’ and Jean pulled a face and said, ‘Oh, this is all way over my head!’ and she made a signal to Marj and they began to clear dishes away, and Bert sulked, and Mother, reeking of sweet muscat, had returned contentedly to her knitting, and Dad belched again and mumbled something about the papers never printing the truth of things anyway, and the children squawled and bickered, and I realized suddenly that we were to be involved in antagonisms that would never be forgiven, and that these antagonisms would only concern Helen and Jack and me.
‘No, not Davy necessarily,’ she said. ‘But that’s only because he’s more valuable here, as a journalist. He can do more for the causes here, more than he could by going over there and perhaps sacrificing himself in a physical sense. But that doesn’t mean the others shouldn’t have gone, those friends of his … well, it doesn’t matter about one of them, he was going to help the Fascists anyway, but —’
‘Weren’t they journalists too?’ Jack asked.
‘Yes. Yes, they were. But Davy is different. I mean he’s not just a reporter. He can be very important here, writing things. But there are thousands of others who could go over there and give their help if they really wanted to, if they saw the need for taking up the challenge … well, if they think Fascism is something we have to destroy before it destroys us, and —’
‘But that puts Davy in a pretty funny position, doesn’t it?’ Jack said. ‘Look, I don’t read his articles so I don’t know what he writes about, and I’m not too hot on this political lingo, Fascism and all that, but it makes a queer sort of a joker out of him if he’s the one to stay back here simply because he’s got to tell everybody else they’ve got to go over there to Spain and roll up their sleeves and start fighting! That makes him just a sort of an urger, doesn’t it? You know what an urger is, don’t you?’
‘Oh, Jack, that’s not what Helen means at all!’ I began to protest, because the perils were all too obvious now, but Jack was just staring at Helen very intently, and he went on talking as if I had made no interruption at all:
‘Listen,’ he said to her, ‘why should Davy or anyone else out here get involved in a stoush between a bunch of wops and dagoes way over the other side of the world? That’s what I want to know. Why? It’s none of our business. People ought to fight their own battles, that’s my rule. Just suppose there was some strife up north there in the canefields, between those dagoes who work the sugar around Innisfail and Cairns and Ingham. D’you think all those other dagoes from the Mediterranean are going to come rushin’ all the way out here to take sides? Not on your bloomin’ life they’re not! Catch them! So why should we poke our noses into what’s happening over there? If you want causes to worry about or to fight about, there’s a whole bloomin’ raft of things here, isn’t there? You wouldn’t call this flaming country a true and shining example of democracy, would you? There are plenty of things here anyone can have a go at, without an urger to push ’em into it. Have a look at the mines at Wonthaggi, or the timber camps at Powelltown, or walk along one of the Susso queues, or go down the docks on a wet morning and take a dekko at a wharfies’ pick-up, or see the way they treat the factory hands in those sweatshops out West Melbourne way or Footscray. Why do we have to go fighting things in Spain, for God’s sake?’
He paused and took a deep breath, and then turned to me suddenly, deliberately, I think, and said, ‘Listen, do you feel like watering the horses?’ and I hesitated, and then nodded rather grudgingly, and we both stood up, and Jack said, with an apologetic grin, ‘All this beer, it goes right through you!’ and I am sure he said it quite blatantly to shock Helen, and then we were both walking down the passageway together, and through the vestibule and out into the back yard, and we walked right up to the old sycamore-tree before we spread our legs and undid our buttons.
‘That’s a bloody good-looking sheila you’ve got,’ said Jack, pissing a golden jet. ‘Bloody good figure, too. Bit on the skinny side for my taste, mind you, but she’s certainly an eyeful!’ He played the jet higher against the trunk of the tree and said, ‘Got a mind of her own too, eh? I mean, she’s got pretty strong opinions about things, hasn’t she?’
‘What do you mean by that?’ I asked suspiciously.
‘Well … oh, nothing in particular. Gee! this is a relief, isn’t it? … getting the old bladder emptied out, I mean … do you know I’ve been sitting there for the last half-hour with my legs crossed like a pair of bloody nutcrackers.’ He directed the jet at a knothole in the tree trunk and flushed a spider out, and broke wind and said, ‘Better an empty house than a bad tenant,’ and then, without any change of tone: ‘You serious about this sheila of yours?’
‘Helen? Serious? Well, I’m probably going to marry her, if that’s what you mean.’
He shook himself and began to button up, and said, admiringly, ‘She’s a good-looker all right. I’m not denying that. Dress
es nice, too. And she seems pretty clever … you know, she’s able to talk about things, sort of educated like.’ He paused, giving it consideration, then frowned slightly and said, ‘She seems to have pretty strong opinions, though, that’s the thing that worries me, Davy. You are sure about this? I mean, well, you can tell me to mind my own business, but what I’m getting at is, marriage is a pretty serious affair … it’s the rest of your life, really, and it’s having kids and all that … you know, it’s quite a business … And you haven’t really knocked around much … I mean she is just about the first woman you’ve had anything to do with, isn’t she?’
‘What’s all this to do with you?’ I turned on him sharply, cold and angry and resentful.
‘Nothing, Davy,’ he said with a faint smile. ‘It’s to do with you. That’s why I said you could tell me to mind my own business. No, it’s to do with you,’ he repeated. ‘Whether you make a mistake or not, that’s what I mean. People do, you know. You see, Davy, there has to be a lot of give and take in marriage. A hell of a lot. Even Sheila and me, well, we get on all right, but it’s never all plain sailing, you know … there’s always a bit of strife that’s bound to come up, and sometimes the kids get on your nerves, or you might have been down the pub with the boys for a few too many beers, or you blew half your earnings on some bloody nag that runs dead, and you can get yourself into a pretty rotten mess unless you and your sheila have this thing of give and take with each other, and —’
My Brother Jack Page 26
