‘Yes, you must, Cress,’ Gavin said soothingly. ‘It will brush up your geography.’ He patted her hand as he said it, but I could see that he hated to let me go, because he said to me, ‘And tomorrow, I read in the popular press, the curtain-raiser to the big parade is to be none other than our David Meredith delivering a patriotic exhortation from the top of a tank in Collins Street!’
‘What odds?’ I said. ‘I have made a speech from a captured midget Japanese submarine in Times Square at seven o’clock on a Sunday evening. What’s a tank to me?’
‘I am going to Times Square too,’ said Cressida. ‘No-body listens to a word I say. I keep telling everyone that I am going to Venezuela after the war, and to —’ and Gavin picked up her hand and kissed it lightly, and, ignoring her, he said, ‘I am an impolite bastard, David. How is Helen? I should have asked …’
‘Oh, you know Helen,’ I said easily. ‘She has her friends …’
‘This bloody war!’ he said.
‘I think we should listen to Lieutenant Morley on her future Odysseys,’ I said lightly. I didn’t want to talk about Helen, and I didn’t want to even think about her, and I was sorry he had mentioned her name. ‘We two have hogged it long enough,’ I said, and I looked across at her and in the jump of light little beads of gold slid along her cheekbone, and that same tremulous childish eagerness gave a curious mobility to her wide mouth, and again I was aware of that unsettling impression she gave of only awaiting some clue to release the strong latent forces she was holding back, of joy perhaps, of excitement, of some pure intensity of living.
One of the black-and-white waiters was on the platform, fat, with a sweat-glaze on blue jowls that gave a mackerel look to his complexion, and he looked like the old stiff photographs of Caruso which they still sold in the back streets of Naples except that he had a table napkin over one arm and a white apron taped across his paunch, but the stance was the same, and the cocksure Neapolitan tilt to the curly head, and he cleared his throat and plucked at his Adam’s apple as the instruments began on the opening bars of ‘Sorrento’.
‘Let us then consider Lieutenant Morley,’ Gavin said, and he pulled a comic judicial face, then examined her intently as if he found it difficult to get her in focus, and a little unsteadily, as if his long shaggy head was suddenly insecure on the thin stalk of his neck. He was having difficulty too, it seemed, in fixing his feelings, because interest, affection, irony, possessiveness, and a kind of sadness all moved across his long lean face like the shadows of drifting clouds. ‘My darling Cress,’ he said at last in a kind of soft wondering admiration. ‘You have here a savage, David,’ he said, talking to me, but still staring at her as if searching for something in her that might surprise him. ‘An authentic savage. At least as authentic, old cock, as those fuzzywuzzies and Hottentots and kuku-kukus which you’ve been chucking in for colour! Consider her beginnings. She is born on a barren mile of Pacific beach. Not a soul goes there. Nothing but sand-dunes and sharks and kelp. Oh, a log or two of driftwood, perhaps. And our Cress …’
It was perfectly and absolutely right, of course! It had to be – that was where her eyes came from, out of the ocean, out of the endless Pacific depths. And that was precisely what she was – a savage, a pagan, an authentic something that was quite different from anything else … and she was only twenty now, and she would have gone from her long lonely beach to a gun-site and from a gun-site to Gavin Turley, and she would never have known a suburban street in her life, or a garden subdivision, and she wouldn’t know an Antirrhinum from a Phlox drummondii or a mock-orange if one fell on her! And of course she would go to Venezuela, there was no question about it … I was absolutely perfectly sure. That was what she had said on the stairs … absolutely perfectly sure … I was probably almost as drunk as Gavin now, because I had a whole lot of thoughts suddenly mixed up together … that bottom-wiggling, grubby gamin of the gun-site, and that in some way was tangled with the mound and Jack and I playing there as kids, and I saw suddenly that there was something about her, some absolute and perfect directness that reminded me of my brother Jack … she was not the same sort of person as Jack, no, but she was the same sort of thing … That was it … Gavin said, ‘Never wore a pair of shoes until she was thirteen. Isn’t that so, my darling Cress?’
‘Well, not quite. But I know you like to think so.’ The smile she gave him indicated such rapport between them, so close and so tender a bond, that I felt panic lay a light finger on me.
‘Like Christopher Robin, she still has sand between the toes, David. Important to remember this. Bless you for your sandy toes, Cress.’
The fat waiter had come down and was singing through the tables and the girl with the accordion walked behind him, and a man with a guitar behind her, and they were moving towards us through the black and white and the smoke and the dance of candles, and the song came towards us growing from the clear high tenor voice and the folding and unfolding pleats of the accordion and from the throats all round the room, and Cressida Morley said to me, ‘Have you been to Sorrento too?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘That’s another place I am going to,’ she said with husky determination.
We were all drunk, I realized, the three of us.
‘Why don’t you take her, David?’ Gavin said, and his face as he turned to me seemed twisted in the candle-flare, as if there was a sudden sharp twinge of pain he was trying to screw out of himself. ‘Now there’s a challenge,’ he offered thickly. ‘A real challenge. She has no guarantee either, did you know that? Down at the Barracks there is talk of striking a decoration for personnel game enough to take on our Cress. You take her to Sorrento, Little Jack Horner! If you’re game!’
‘I don’t know about Sorrento,’ I said, parrying him, ‘but I would like to take her to dinner tomorrow night. Before I go back again to the intrepid life.’
‘On your last night?’ he said, raising his eyebrows.
‘Why not?’
He looked at me. ‘This would be without my tagging along, I assume?’
‘Naturally. I’ll be gone the day after tomorrow. You’ll have her for the rest of the war.’ I turned to her. She was holding Gavin’s hand. ‘Will you?’ I said.
‘Thank you. I’d love to.’
It was Jack who had suggested the visit to Port Melbourne. ‘They’ve been extra good to me at Klebendorf’s,’ he said to me. ‘You know, they make up some of the army pay so Sheil’ can get along a bit better with the kids, so I pop down and see ’em every now and then. You know, keep in touch. They like that. And they’d love to see you, Davy, they really would. They’re always asking about you.’
The new factory was very functional, concrete and saw-toothed roofing and steel-framed windows, all on one floor and covering about two acres, and it was in a part of Port Melbourne just up from the old pier where the Ceramic had come in after the First World War.
It was Werner Klebendorf who greeted us in the front office, treating Jack with affectionate familiarity, and me with such respect that I felt for a moment as if I were the Governor-General, and I half expected him to bow. He had aged quite a bit and grown grey and stout and was beginning to look very much as his father had looked, which struck me as rather odd because there was nothing of the German thickness in his speech, and his accent, in fact, was rather cultivated and clipped in the public school way. He was bursting to show me over the new premises.
As we went around I began to realize that he was almost as proud of showing me off to his employees as he was of showing the factory to me. What with time, change, and the war, there were very few familiar faces, and the factory itself, which seemed enormous and efficient on its vast cement floor, was so utterly different from the old factory that the machines were almost unrecognizable and I could hardly believe it was the same business and I expected the big presses to be turning out canned food or aeroplane parts instead of printed sheets, and I suddenly remembered Jane Avril’s shoe still kicking beneath the wrecker’s
sign and I had a surge of nostalgic sadness for the old place with its dust and dark corners and collected smells.
Down one side of the factory were five big enclosed rooms flickering with blue light behind frosted glass, and Werner explained to me with great enthusiasm, ‘It’s all photo-lithography now, David. Photo-offset’s the shot, and we’re into it up to our eyeballs. Hand-lithography’s almost out. Thing of the past.’ That made me wonder about them all, and so I asked, and he chuckled and said, ‘Oh, you’ll see your old boss in a minute or two,’ and then he told me about the others.
Paul Klein, it seemed, was in charge of a Red Cross unit somewhere up in the Philippines, and Barney Druce was now head-artist with a rival firm, and Tom Middleton was with a camouflage section in Dutch New Guinea, and Young Joe had been caught in the crossfire of two of those heavy Juki machine-guns and shot to death on the bank of the Gerua River.
His father had a room all to himself now on the side of the factory opposite the photo-litho rooms, and unlike the rest of the factory it was a cluttered place and hung with things pinned up. We stood at the door looking in for quite a time before he realized we were there. He looked shrunken and very old, and he was on one of the high stools crouched over a polished oatmealcoloured stone, and he was working in the way old Fritz Richter had always worked, with the fine camelhair brush underneath a magnifying glass.
‘Practically no call now for the fine hand-work,’ Werner said, almost in a whisper. ‘So we just keep old Joe on that.’ I saw that the Bavarian stones – or those still preserved, for there seemed fewer of them than I remembered – were stacked along the wall, still numbered and dusted down, and as we walked in I could not resist running my fingers across the surface of one, just to feel the cool sweet silkiness again, and then old Joe Denton was rising and staring, and blinking his eyes back to a longer focus, and then he seemed to give a funny little hop and he was trotting towards me with quick little jerky steps, and he grasped both of my hands in his and shook them up and down furiously and said, ‘Bless my soul! Bless my soul! Bless my soul!’ There were tears in his eyes, perhaps from the strain of the fine work he had been doing, and he looked incredibly old, as old as Steiner had looked and Richter had looked, and just as much of an oddity, a survival from some other thing that had long since vanished. ‘Bless my soul, David!’ he said, and shook his head very quickly, blinking away like mad.
Werner and Jack went away to look at some new equipment in the paper store, and left me with him, and he took me along to his work-table and made me sit on the tall stool while he perched himself on a great stack of Penrose Annuals, and we talked about all sorts of things, about his dahlias and Gilbert and Sullivan and poor old Richter and about Paul Klein’s walking-stick, and neither of us said anything about Young Joe, and I leaned over to look at the stone and saw the meticulous neatness of the gumming-out and the hairline precision of the register-marks and beautifully modelled on the pale sleek stone was a toned patch of the finest, finest stippling that would make the flushing ripeness of a peach on some fruit label. He smiled when he saw me looking and said, ‘It’s the third colour, the light-blue. It’s for Ardmona. They’re submitting a range of their products for some international trade show, and they want specially handsome labels. Nine colours and gold-embossed.’ He nodded his head admiringly. ‘They don’t often go to such pains nowadays,’ he said. Behind the shaggy, snowy fall of his hair I saw the things on the wall, the templates and the colour-wheels, and the proof sheets with their improbable blobs of pink and blue and scarlet and yellow, and the key drawings on transparent paper, and a French curve, and a tracing of an initial letter for an illumination, and a calendar advertising Wimble’s Printing Inks.
He walked all the way up the factory with me when I was leaving, and when he shook hands with me he said, ‘It was so nice of you, David, to drop in like this. I have enjoyed it. I sometimes think’ – he chuckled and squeezed my arm – ‘yes, I sometimes think you’re just about Klebendorf’s proudest product, you know.’
When we left I suggested to Jack that we walk down to the sea-front, and I went to the end of the pier and sat on a rusty old bollard, and I stared out across the blue dancing bay to Williamstown and the Gellibrand Pile Light, and after a time I said to Jack, ‘You know, this is about the first thing I ever remember in my life, this pier here. It’s where the Ceramic pulled in when Dad came back from the war. Do you remember? We came down here with Mum and old Gran.’
‘Do I remember?’ He laughed. ‘And the Old Man picked you up and you howled like a stuck pig! Jesus, eh … that’s a long time ago, isn’t it?’
I thought of the bands playing and the flags and the triumphal arches, and the putteed legs and the thick boots pounding on the planking, and Jack said, ‘Someone was telling me they hardly use this pier any more. It’s been condemned or something.’ And I could smell the rank iodine smell of the seaweed rotting underneath the piles and I thought to myself, The Glory That Was, eh, Stunsail? The glory that was …
I don’t know how long it was that I sat there staring out across Hobson’s Bay with the marching feet pounding inside my brain and there was a gull in the sky slanted on the wind like a lick of white paint, and Jack was walking along the pier kicking at the splintered wood, but then he was tapping me on the shoulder and saying, ‘Eh, no time for day-dreaming, sport. We better get cracking. You’ve got that speech to make, and you’ve got lunch with your boss, and then you’ve got to meet me for the march. So come on, let’s go.’ We walked over to the tram stop and while we were waiting he said, ‘Jesus, they were tickled pink to see you there at Klebendorf’s, weren’t they? Eh? I’m bloody glad you did it. I’m very grateful. I’ve been promising ’em I’d try and get you down. They all think the bloody sun shines out of you.’
I was not the only one to give a speech from the top of the tank, because the Defence Minister was there and a man who’d won the Victoria Cross and a radio comedian and there was a musical comedy star who sang ‘Wish Me Luck As You Wave Me Goodbye’ and ‘This is Worth Fighting For’, and I made my little patriotic exhortation – rather self-consciously, because Gavin Turley was there, overtopping everyone in the crowd and grinning up at me. It was something to do with the opening of a new War Loan drive – they called this one the Victory Loan, I remember, and after the speeches I joined Mr Brewster and Helen at The Australia. Helen, having got Mr Brewster at last, seemed less excited than she should have been, and for a time in the dining-room she seemed to pay more attention to acquaintances at other tables, waving and smiling and patting at her hair, which I remember was not golden-blonde any longer but tinted Titian. I also remember wanting to kick old Brewster under the table, and kick him hard, because he kept telling Helen how proud she should be of her husband and what a splendid future there was in store for him – because this did seem to quicken her interest considerably – and I might even have strangled him when he said, ‘I am sorry, Mrs Meredith, that we have had to cut his stay so short, but I know you don’t have to be told how vitally important his work is. After the war is over, of course, it will be different. You’ll be able to share things. You’ll go abroad with him. You’ll see these places too. Just bear with us a little longer, my dear, just until we see the great task through.’
Under my breath I said, ‘Pompous old pissant!’
The only real pleasure I got out of the luncheon was in making an excuse as we left the table and going discreetly to the head waiter and ordering my table and the wines for dinner, and I had a momentary little flurry of self-esteem as I walked off to catch up with Helen and Mr Brewster, not only at the discretion with which I had done it, but with the way I handled waiters now, or selected wine, or ordered food, and of course the head waiter’s air of deferential respect had pleased me too …
The march was by one of the good AIF divisions, which was going away somewhere or had just come back from somewhere, I no longer remember, and I left Helen and Mr Brewster, and I met Jack, and we found a good p
osition in the crowd, almost on the barricades up near the top end of Collins Street.
It was the usual patriotic thing – there were other units in the march, and half a dozen bands, and WAAFs and AWAS and some garrison units and contingents from the Air Force and the Navy, and it moved along to the jumping bursts of applause and showers of torn paper and the waving of little flags, but the big thing – and you could hear it coming by a growling, rolling, thunderous note in the cheering – was the march past by the fighting troops.
I am sure my mood must have been deeply affected by the visit to Klebendorf’s and the old pier at Port Melbourne, because the thick boots were still trampling and trampling inside my brain, and a kind of panic clutched at me as I remembered the black mirror in the freezing room in the palace at Caserta, and I was almost afraid to see them again after not having seen them for so long, but I was craning my neck like all the others, craning through the tumult and the frantic shimmer of the little flags and the overhanging foliage of the plane-trees, and I heard the shrill pipe of the whistle and the slow nasal wail and bark of the order, and my stomach seemed to cramp into a hard knot of pain as I saw them wheeling at the top of the street within the thick green frame of the trees, the first ranks of fifteen thousand fighting men, swinging on the inside man in the steady slow up-and-down beat of the white gaiters and then rising to the forward stride and coming down, marching nine abreast, with the rippling blue flash of the fixed bayonets on their shouldered rifles. They marched as they liked to march, in their slouch hats with the grey-bordered colour-patches on the bleached-out puggarees, in khaki shorts and their open neck shirts with sleeves rolled up above bunched brown muscles, and the white wide belts and the white canvas gaiters over the brown boots, and on practically every chest were the multi-coloured campaign ribbons of the deserts and the jungles and the mountains and the islands and the beaches, and they came towards us behind the colour-party with the drawn swords and the hoisted flags and the brave emblazonings of the old-familiar and the new-familiar names. And I had to blink and gulp and fight with the emotion and sentiment and pain that racked me to the very guts.
My Brother Jack Page 41
