My Brother Jack

by Johnston, George

  This second experience was even more terrifying, in a different way, because my elevation provided me with the first opportunity I had had to look out over all the Beverley Park Gardens Estate, and there was nothing all around me, as far as I could see, but a plain of dull red rooftops in their three forms of pitching and closer to hand the green squares and rectangles of lawns intersected by ribbons of asphalt and cement, and I counted nine cars out in Beverley Grove being washed and polished. In the slums, I reflected, they had a fetish about keeping front doorknobs polished, but here in the ‘good’ respectable suburbs the fetish was applied to cars and to gardens, and there were fixed rituals about this, so that hedges were clipped and lawns trimmed and beds weeded, and the lobelia and the mignonette were tidy in their borders, and the people would see that these things were so no matter what desolation or anxiety or fear was in their hearts, or what spiritless endeavours or connubial treacheries were practised behind the blind neat concealment of their thin red-brick walls. The door-knobs and this more elaborate ritual were part of a similar thing, of course, the public ‘front’, but it occurred to me suddenly that the door-knob people might be a worthier tribe, really, because they still grappled with existence where audacities were possible, and even adventure.

  I stayed up on the roof because once I had worked this out a great many other things began to follow. Strange things. Terrifying things. Wondering things. (I could even stay up here for years, I thought, like some Stylite of the suburbs, on terracotta building tiles in place of a Syrian pillar, and ruminate on all the problems of the world. The ancient Stylites had liked desert places for their meditations.)

  The realization that I did not love Helen, and never had loved her, came to me quite dispassionately at first; so dispassionately that I was able to examine the revelation with a kind of clear careful logic, and found it sound, and put it aside for later. ‘Later’, of course, would be another thing altogether, when I would want to blame her for the predicament we were in, and then passion and anger would need to be invoked. But not yet.

  Still, it was the thought of Helen, busy at her casserole in the kitchen, that diverted my reflections at once to all the disturbing little problems and quandaries which up until so recently had baffled and troubled me – politics and Spain and the German ships and the interviews on the liners – because I saw that I had been wrong to allow Helen to work these things out for me. I should have seen for myself that a lot of the dissonance of the world had nothing whatever to do with ‘downtrodden masses’ or any of Helen’s other clichés, but was there because half the world lived in mental deserts very much like the Beverley Park Gardens Estate, and that the real enemy was not the obvious embodiment of evil, like Hitler or his persecution of the Jews or the Russian purges or the bombs on Guernica, but was this awful fetish of a respectability that would rather look the other way than cause a fuss, that hated ‘scenes’, that did not want to know because to know might somehow force them into a situation which could take the polish off the duco and blight the herbaceous borders and lay scabrous patches across the attended lawns.

  But there were gradations of this respectability – this was the next thing I worked out as Meredith Stylites of the Garden Suburb – and I knew that there had been more things of true value in the shabby house called Avalon, from which I had fled, than there ever would be, or could be, in this villa in Beverley Grove. This was where my meditations began to turn in and maul me. I stared around over the whole of the sterile desolation, and I realized with a start of panic that I had got myself into the middle of this red and arid desert, and there was nobody to bring me water.

  I had chosen it, of my own free will. I had planned for it, approved of it, connived at it, worked for it, and paid for it. But no! – I winced as the mauling became more brutal – the whole point was that I had not paid for it! Oh no, I had not paid for it, not yet … I had mortgaged my life and my career for years ahead simply for the privilege of living between Mr Phyland and Mr Treadwell and directly opposite Wally and Sandra Solomons!

  And the console-radio, the hated new acquisition of the console-radio, inclusive of the Quicktite Patent Antenna Clamp against which my back rested, was another seventy-five pounds, thirteen shillings and elevenpence to be added to all those other precise and handsomely-printed documents with which the top drawer of my study desk was stuffed. My guarantees! Diplomas! Some of them even looked like diplomas, with their Old English type and the copperplate flourishes and the big red impressive seals. Diplomas conferred in testimony of some inalienable right to live on in the soft warmth of these empty plains where heads could always be hidden in the comforting granular sand of an unimpeachable respectability. Gavin Turley’s guarantees …

  (This was the point where Meredith Stylites of the Garden Suburb abandoned his red brick chimney-pillar and eased himself down the pitch of the tiled roof, and was transformed into the qualified Meredith, Bachelor of Deserts, Doctor of Sterile Studies, Master of the Empty Soul, by the time he reached the point where the borrowed Solomons’ ladder poked two rungs above the eaves, and there he sat for a few more minutes with his long legs dangling over the guttering, staring around at the desert of his choice as if he might memorize forever its every shade and contour, and this was when the really forceful realization came to him …)

  There was not one tree on the whole estate.

  Yet there must have been trees once, I thought, because when you closely examined the layout of the estate there were little folds to it and faint graceful rises and declivities, not anywhere near definite enough to be thought of as hills or gullies, but the place was not really flat, that was the point, and at one side, a little distance beyond Dr Felton Carradine’s house, there was almost a real knoll. Once – I felt absolutely sure about this – there would have been trees growing here and there, and I pictured this knoll as having two or three good sturdy blue-gums or stringybarks on the crest, and slopes brown with bracken, and some sandy chewed-out patches where rabbits would have made little squats scattered with the liquorice-black pellets of their droppings and where they would have hopped about at dusk, flickering the pale cotton tufts of their tails. The place could have been really beautiful at one time in a tranquil sort of way, I thought – before Bernie Rothenstein came in with his bulldozers and graders and grubbed out all the trees and flattened everything out so that the subdivision pegs could be hammered in and his lorries could move about without hindrance – because there was a blur of higher ground much farther out, and beyond that the bluish bulk of the Dandenongs sat up there against a good bright sky in nice shapes and colours. And now there was nothing but a great red scab grown over the wounds the bulldozers had made, and not a single tree remaining, because by no stretch of the imagination could anybody count the spindly little sticks which had been stuck in at intervals along the footpaths, because they really were only sticks, and too hidden behind their ugly little tree-guards for anyone to know whether they were leafing or whether they were dead.

  I climbed down the Solomons’ ladder at once and went straight out to the car and just drove off. It was only about a mile to Goodenough’s Nurseries, and we had bought our seedlings there so I knew he stayed open on Sunday mornings, because that was when a lot of suburban gardeners who were tied up at their offices through the week would come to pick up shrubs or seedlings, or to arrange for top-dressing, or to discuss pruning or spraying, or just to talk with him or his gardeners about mulching and tilth and compost-heaps and reinvigoration of their lawns and beds.

  I parked the car outside and went in through the gate beneath the painted sign that simply said goodenough nurseries – Jos. Goodenough, Prop. – Est. 1907, and there was Jos. Goodenough himself standing beside the potting-sheds, looking square and reddish and sort of flatly cut out against the slow cool sweep of the sprinklers over the flower-beds, like the Jack of Hearts in a pack of playing cards, and I felt renewed at the very sight of him because there was something earthy and true and reliable abo
ut his presence as he stood there in the smell of damp loam and blood-and-bone manure, with a felt hat on his head, his Sunday hat, and his thick braces up over his grey flannel undershirt, and I remember that his braces were striped the way men’s winceyette pyjamas used to be and the words police and firemen were stamped on each of the little metal clips that adjusted them, and I have often wondered since what sort of a guarantee that was supposed to be.

  I told him I wanted to buy a tree, and he rubbed at his nose and said, ‘Well, mister, that’s a bit broad and sweepin’ like, ain’t it? You know, a tree. Which district do you live, can you tell me that to give me an idea?’ So I told him and this brightened him up, because at once he nodded knowingly and said, ‘Beverley Park Gardens, eh … yeah, well up there they’re goin’ in fer the more decorative type of thing, aren’t they? You know, the camellia, like, or the hardier sort of hibiscus, or gardenia, even a good well-developed double-fuchsia. Or some of the nice ornamental shrubs an’ that.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘A tree. I want a proper tree. Something that’ll grow into a real tree very quickly.’

  ‘Well …’ He went back to rubbing at his nose, harder than before. ‘It wouldn’t be something like a decorative cypress you got in mind, one each side of a front entrance porch, like … although they are pretty slow comin’ on, you know, they do look well in the long run but they’re slow old growers.’

  ‘Listen, Mr Goodenough,’ I said patiently. ‘It’s quite simple. I want something you can put in the ground now and look at it in, say, two years’ time and say, “There, that’s a real bloody tree!”

  He had both hands busy now, one scrubbing at his nose and the other scratching pensively at his backside.

  ‘It ain’t a gum you got in mind, is it?’ he asked at last, rather dubiously. ‘One of them quick-growin’ eucalypts … you wouldn’t be thinkin’ of them, though?’

  ‘Why not? Do they grow quickly?’

  ‘Some of ’em. Some of ’em shoot up like billy-oh. The sugar-gum ’ld be about the best taker, I’d say. The sugars won’t get to the size of some of the others, mind you, not at the mature growth, but in the early stages I reckon it’s the sugar ’ld give you the best show. Oh, I reckon you could get a tree say thirty foot high or so within a couple of years if you gave her a bit of encouragement early. Maybe even up to forty foot if the spread’s there for the roots.’

  ‘But that sounds exactly what I want.’

  ‘Sugar-gum, eh?’ He scratched away at his bottom and shook his head. ‘Yeah, well you’re the customer, mister, an’ if that’s what you got your mind set on … Matter of fact, I got a pretty fair sort of a sapling round behind the sheds there – I keep a few of ’em on hand just in case there’s a call for wind-breaks, you know. I c’ld let you have her for six bob. I wouldn’t like you to regret it later, though, mister, and be complainin’ so I better warn you. Plants an’ trees are just like anythink else, you know, an’ you can’t never expect anythink to come on well unless it’s at the expense of somethink else, an’ these gums they do tear a pretty solid amount of nourishment out of the soil. I mean you’d have to expect strife with your lawn growth and your flower-beds.’

  When I got back to Beverley Grove I dumped the sapling on the drive near the front gate and went through to the kitchen, and Helen said, ‘David, where on earth have you been? You didn’t say you were going somewhere. I thought you were still up there on the roof, and when I went to call you for your cup of tea —’

  ‘I went out and bought a tree,’ I said.

  ‘A tree?’

  ‘A tree for the garden. I drove down to Goodenough’s Nurseries. Only six bob,’ I added proudly.

  ‘David, how marvellous!’ she cried. ‘Where is it?’

  ‘Out the front. Come and see.’

  Her expression changed when she did see it, and admittedly.

  It did look rather scruffy and limp and drab with its roots packed up into a big shapeless pudding of wet hessian.

  ‘Yes, but what is it?’ she asked. ‘It – it looks like a gum-tree.’

  ‘It is a gum-tree. It’s a sugar-gum.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, and for a moment or two she looked blank, and then, ‘Where are you going to put it?’ she said. ‘I mean, where do you want it to grow?’

  ‘There.’ I pointed. ‘Right there, smack bang in the middle of the lawn!’

  ‘Oh!’

  ‘Why do you just keep saying “Oh”?’

  ‘No reason … I mean, well, do you really think that’s the place for it, David? I mean, if it’s to be there, right in the middle of everything, I would have thought something smaller, or even —’

  ‘What’s wrong with a gum-tree?’

  ‘Well, if you want to know, darling, I personally think they’re rather ordinary. They’re so drab, David. I’d honestly prefer something decorative, especially for there, right in the front of the house, some nice flowering shrub, or camellia, or mock-orange. What would look lovely would be one of those Japanese dwarf-maples.’

  ‘Not on your sweet life, my dear! No dwarf anythings! I want a tree. A proper bloody tree! Do you realize,’ I said, ‘there’s not one tree growing in this whole damned street … on the whole estate if it comes to that? And this is a grove we live in, darling. It’s printed on the footpath at the corner. Beverley Grove. Don’t you know the definition of a grove? We’ve been letting them pull the wool over our eyes. The Beverley – Park – Gardens – Estate.’ I spaced the words with careful sarcasm. ‘It isn’t a park and it isn’t a garden and this isn’t a grove. They’ve got us here on false pretences. They can’t bloody well do that to us! Besides, this is our chance to be original. Let us be leaders of fashion, Helen. And let me point out – because old Goodenough told me this himself – that that thing you’re turning up your nose at – all right, I admit it does look a bit scraggy at the moment – but he assured me it’ll grow into a tree forty feet high in two years. A real tree! And what this damned place needs is a good firm farsighted policy of reafforestation!’

  I went round to the shed in the back yard then and got out the pick and shovel.

  I think there are more people than will admit it who are inclined to force their big issues on trivial things, rather than face up to the basic problems full on, and certainly this was the way it worked with me. It was this six-shilling sugar-gum from the Goodenough Nurseries that was to become the bone of contention between Helen and me, and ultimately the hammered-in wedge that split us apart. Yet I have often wondered since how many marriages there are that seem to founder on the dramatic reefs of adultery and illicit liaisons and eternal triangles and paranoiac pressures that are really scuttled long before, cravenly and treacherously, with the trivial little augers of spite and resentment and camouflaged incompatibilities and petty prejudices. Marriage is an institution not notable for the big-mindedness with which it sees its failings and its hazards.

  From that moment of revelation on the roof of the house I was in conflict with Helen, but there was no open declaration of hostilities. Subterfuge, rather, was to be the pattern. In this I was entirely to blame, for Helen had had no similar revelation, had found no reason whatever for conflict or enmity. My turning against her in the way I did was treacherous, deliberate, and very cruel. One sees now, of course, that the destruction of individual character is never the sudden dramatic fracture: it resembles more a slow poisoning: it begins with the smallest indifference, the littlest act of cowardice, the tiniest of compromises, and the toll it takes is slow and deadly.

  She continued to behave well. But I watched her now, surreptitiously, in much the way I had watched her at Mother’s birthday party, and I detected changes in her – changes, I think, that were perceptible only to me. Outsiders, I think, saw no ruffling of her composure, no weakening of her poise, no wavering in her affection for me or in her sedulous attention to the building of a pattern of life which she desired and which she honestly thought was what I desired also. Yet changes were there all right
: I could see them, like the shadows of unknown things glimpsed beneath the surface of a running stream – little subdued fears, anxieties, uncertainties, mostly a desperately baffled desire to find some reason behind the subtle changes in my temperament, the moods that would take me, the studied little injuries I would inflict, the moments of polite coldness, the resentments hinted at yet never quite declared, this secret enmity that now lay hidden beneath the surface of our relationship. I knew all this, but I would not confront her. I see now how cruelly difficult it must have been for her, because she had no back-reference to which she could refer that did not disclose my own choice of and admiration for everything which I seemed now to resent.

  When I could I evaded the issues in the privacy of my study. I would spend much time there, with the door closed, and sensing my almost childish sulkiness and my need for evasiveness, she would come to the room now only when it was unavoidable. She had gone back to doing her telephoning from the bedroom. The study remained very much as it had been. Helen had tidied up. My flare of revolution had won me only paltry gains. The desk, it is true, remained where I had pushed it against the wall, and there was a new waste-paper basket, a plain one of wicker, often filled with crumpled paper now – the desperate calculations I would make of the money we owed and the instalments due, which I would work out from the handsome diploma-forms stuffed into the top drawer. The books were back on their shelves behind the sliding glass. The pictures had been returned to the walls. There were times when I realized that it was a strange privacy I had won for myself, morose, embittered, doubting. I did no writing.