The Everlasting Secret Family

by Frank Moorhouse

  Another article from McDowell said that parents were dumping their children at cinemas so as to free themselves for good times.

  Irving was happy about parents dumping their children at cinemas and he thought it all right too that people should have “good times”.

  Irving, being the man he was, was interested in the role not only of the father and the mother but of the unrelated adult in the child’s development. He did not grant the father and the mother, the teacher and the priest, exclusive rights to shape the child. He felt that, for some children at least, the dark stranger had a role to play. Being a bit of a pederast, he had studied the Greeks from Branton’s books, and he was an admirer of King James I.

  He always felt he had a civic role to play, as well as a private path to follow, in the lives of the few children who “passed through his hands”.

  George McDowell was always giving people clips from newspapers for their instruction. George McDowell was a pain in the neck. But this time it was encouragement that McDowell had brought.

  Irving heard above the human cries of the organ voices, a hubbub of voices from within the Odeon.

  But there was no screening.

  Or was he about to die? He knew those stillnesses, sometimes a passing shadow of dizziness or a sudden queer high starkness which drew his attention to the world, for some reason, maybe for the last time. Or was it just from standing up too quickly.

  No, he was a young man, at his manager’s desk, shaped in an oval, in the style of the French Empire, ormolu, resting on two moulded elephants. The desk which folded in and locked together at the turn of a handle. The sliding out of the chair on runners raised the paper rack and pen stand at the same time, by lever action, and a writing platform slid forward to cover the space from which the chair had slid. The desk was too much of the world and, as yet, too unused to be relinquished at this moment, and his life also.

  No, it wasn’t death calling, or maybe it was death passing by, looking in.

  More likely, it was the police and the angry citizens come to get him and drag him from his throne.

  He looked through the slot at the single light in the whole empty cinema and saw the rotund Scribner playing the remarkable organ.

  The human cries continued from the organ but it was not making the other sound, the other sound was the cries of a crowd.

  He closed the slot and opened the other peephole into the foyer and there he saw people, milling.

  He closed the slot, paused, and opened it again, and the milling people blaring back up at him were still there. They were not locals. He knew who they were. They were the actors.

  Panting with the threat of it, Irving descended the spiral stairway to the foyer, to confront the milling actors. They were not, thankfully, the dead of past ages, a thought which had passed through his mind.

  “Now what!” was how he began.

  A person in a bowler hat came over, a ragged flower in his buttonhole, and said, “You bastard—you have put on a picture show on the night of our play.” That was how he began.

  Irving knew they were Maurice Gerrard’s Dramatic Troupe, travelling actors—he’d been expecting them, in a way.

  “There is no law against that,” said Irving.

  He wished he were in evening clothes, wished he were holding his long, silver-plated torch.

  “There is the law of fair go.”

  “I do not know that law.”

  Grumblings of complaint.

  “The clash you have, Gerrard, is with the history of things.”

  “We have to live,” cried the actors.

  “Join a circus—go to Ealing Studios, Pinewood, Hollywood,” said Irving.

  For a time in the past he had checked to see if there was to be a troupe in town but now it all seemed too late in the day to bother with travelling actors and to suspend screenings. They had gone out with the Illustrated Song. In the past he had sometimes had parties for the travelling actors, who came with their grease-paint on, their conversation a scramble of learnt lines from old productions. It was all a pity.

  Scribner then came to the door out of the dark cinema, feeling his way into the light like a mole, and stood next to Irving.

  Scribner, he knew, had a low opinion of travelling actors for the disservice they did to drama.

  Scribner burst out, “Him that enters next—his prattle is often tedious.”

  An actor kicked the statue of Thalia in the foyer and said, “What hide.”

  Two others pushed with him and the statue toppled, falling to the floor, breaking.

  “No!!”

  That was really too much.

  Scribner and he then tried to push and shove the actors towards the cinema door but they were instead both pushed back to the box office, the heel coming off Scribner’s shoe.

  Scribner shouted, “Make my skin into drum heads for the bohemian cause,” which didn’t help but caused a momentary pause while he and the actors tried to make it out.

  He and Scribner retreated, locking themselves in the grilled box office.

  The actors began to pull down the chocolate boxes in the refreshments bar. They tore down a portrait of Ronald Coleman.

  Irving found the cinema revolver in the cashier’s drawer.

  “Get out,” he shouted, waving the revolver. “Stop.”

  Scribner had his billiard cue in the box office and together they opened the grill and went back into the fray. The actors, undeterred, continued their destruction.

  “Scots follow me,” cried Scribner, using his billiard cue as a rod to force them back.

  The actors pushed and shoved.

  Irving then fired a shot at the ceiling.

  There was a human cry like that from a Wurlitzer organ and an actor fell forward holding his leg, blood on his foot, his shoe torn by the bullet.

  They were now all silent. Someone said, “Arthur has been injured.”

  The actors then retreated, carrying their wounded man, shouting stray abuse as they left, striking at an object here and there.

  One turned his back, pushed out his rump, and farted.

  Scribner ran at him with the billiard cue and they all scurried away.

  Scribner said, “We have won the day but not without considerable loss.”

  Irving looked at the revolver, to the ceiling, to the floor, and to the blood.

  Irving thanked Scribner with a guinea.

  He sat there then, plagued with the fear of consequences, the end of the desk, his cinema, the frolics.

  His first visit was from Backhouse and the second visit was from Doctor Trenbow.

  Don’t say a word, they said, don’t tell us a thing.

  They inspected the damage—the statue of Thalia broken in two, the strewn chocolate boxes, the tom portrait.

  Irving took them to the private smoking room of the dress circle (for which no one dressed); he’d built the smoking room for distinguished visitors but only one had so far come, Halloran, the designer of Pacific City.

  Nervously he poured the scotches.

  “A skirmish,” he said.

  “Nothing, I want to hear nothing,” said Backhouse.

  He was prepared to use braggadocio but they seemed to know and not want it.

  “I have just treated a man for ricochet wound,” the Doctor said. “The manager of Maurice Gerrard’s troupe said that it was an accident with a stage pistol.”

  “Get out in the fresh air more,” the Doctor went on. “Away from the smell of celluloid, out of these annexes, private rooms, sliding panels, dressing rooms, projection booths and underground passageways.”

  “The ladies are complaining,” said Backhouse, “that you haven’t been emceeing the flower shows, the fetes, the fairs.”

  Taking the Doctor’s advice, Irving rode out on his motor cycle and side car with his dear friend, the policeman’s widow.

  They went to Pacific City. Pacific City pegged out with the street signs up for the city not yet built.

  The Odeon
Cinema was built in a township on the boundary of the master plan for Pacific City and it was Irving’s dream that Pacific City would engulf the township and the Odeon and he would escape from the township into the new city.

  Henry F. Halloran had assured him that quite definitely Pacific City, when built, would more than engulf the town and the villages.

  Oh how he, Irving, wanted this. Backhouse planned one day to go to Fleet Street and Trenbow talked of going to Vienna to pursue his study of the human psychology. They would be gone, on to greater things; Irving hoped greater things would come to him through Henry F. Halloran’s master plan.

  They walked, the policeman’s widow and he, goggles pushed on to his forehead, through the race course, the railway stations, the court house, the university, the botanical gardens—all clearly marked with white pegs and signs.

  They made an unsmiling kind of love in the block denoted “World Class Hotel’’ in the Pacific City plan.

  “Backhouse is not confident of Henry Halloran,” Irving said afterwards, “but he is always the cynic. I am a cynic about everything except Pacific City.”

  They ate a picnic of pork fritz, tomatoes, arrowroot biscuits, fruit cake and English ale which Irving’s friend Charles at Camden had sent that week.

  “I hear that Maurice Gerrard’s troupe is never coming back to this town,” she said as they lay on a blanket looking across at the botanical gardens to-be. “That was their last appearance in the town, they announced.”

  “My passion,” Irving told her, once again, “for the young is a passion for the whole of life at its very freshest. Not the customary passion for a ‘person’, a single human being, but for the living abstraction of the physical, the fresh, the bursting young, before single identity has appeared.”

  He told her, once again, in new words, that he had no inclinations towards taking a “wife”.

  His was a much wider embrace than that.

  “Every organ in my body cries for . . .” He stopped the sentence and laughed. “Every organ of my body also laughs.”

  He looked across at her serious, intent face. She tried to listen to his inner thoughts but beyond a boundary she would not follow, her hearing would not go there and what she did hear she reinterpreted, purposefully misunderstood to keep him guiltless. And if she did understand she did not act upon it, and an hour later would give no indication that she had heard, and they would always go on as if nothing had been said, no confession taken.

  She would take two corners of the blanket, give it a good shake, saying, “I’m sure, Irving, it won’t be long. Henry Halloran is a man of his word, the city will be built.” Like the town, she treated him only as an outgoing, genial bachelor. The proprietor of the Odeon.

  They laughed at his battles.

  No one would take his confession.

  THE TOWN PHILOSOPHERS’ BANQUET

  Irving put on a small private banquet for Selfridge, the town’s only Olympic athlete from the Amsterdam Games, an eighteen year old who’d had a close friendship with Irving from the young days.

  Trenbow, the town doctor, Scribner, the town’s only proponent of the art movement “machinism”, Backhouse, the newspaper man, T. George McDowell, whose card said he was a “Busyness-man”, Branton, a classics scholar who taught something else at the public school. Tutman, the ice-man and inventor, wasn’t there. They were mostly Science Club members, in their late twenties, all philosophers in their own right and fashion.

  For old times’ sake, Irving and Selfridge swam that day in Spain’s Creek, in the green and not so clear water. Afterwards, lying naked in the sun on a flat rock further up the creek and away from the path down, Selfridge showed Irving a body balm which he’d brought back from his travels.

  “I thought you’d like it—with your curious tastes,” Selfridge teased, and they rubbed it on each other.

  It was an indulgent idea and they had a bit of monkey play while they rubbed each other down. The inevitable happened as they rubbed the balm into each other.

  “Not enough of this sort of extravagance,” Irving said, afterwards, “not in this saw-milling, sawdust-in-the-eye town. All this putting up of houses and everlasting talk of one day having ‘sewerage’, their one and only dream.”

  “And you’re not still forever talking about the day they’ll build Pacific City!” Selfridge said, laughing.

  In the banquet room of the cinema, designed for use on gala occasions but used for Irving’s own private gatherings, there being no gala occasions yet in the unbuilt city or the unfinished town, they met together, the town philosophers, to honour young Selfridge.

  Irving’s awareness of the physical beauty of Selfridge was heightened there among the young townsmen, they being physically nondescript, so unequal to Selfridge’s athletic youth. Since the Games he seemed also to have developed the gleam of worldliness which manifested itself in barking laughter and ready reply, he used his physique to give a flash to every word. He had a laughing confidence not found in the sluggish young of the town, with matchsticks or hay stalks forever in their mouths. A sureness showed in the way his hands fell, rested, or even when his fingers drummed.

  It happened, T. George claimed, to people after they’d visited the United States of America.

  Irving, in a burst of speech from his heart, welcomed Selfridge and said, “We surrender our hearts to his athletic skill, we pay homage to his . . . new mien.” He paused, pleased with himself that the word had come, and then, hesitantly, but without caution, said, “We admire his masculine shape,” and Irving then looked down at his plate. The “hear, hear” from the others stopped, but Irving was disappointed with himself because he had not spoken the lines boldly, and he noticed in a sideways glimpse that Selfridge, for all his new mien, blushed. But for Irving the blushing smile only enhanced, even if it showed that Selfridge was still timid.

  “Yes, his masculine shape, his every rippling, swelling part . . .’’ he said.

  Amid the “steady on Irving”, “don’t go overboard, old man”, T. George broke in, just too seriously, saying, “Men of science should be able to praise, anatomically, either sex.” But George was doing this to rid the gathering of any immoral flavour, and forgetting at the same time that it was not a meeting of the Science Club. Not a meeting of the Science Club and its insufferable arguments on magnetism, frictionless motion, and underwater cities.

  But in a way it was best that T. George, the earnest family man, take it up, Irving thought, and best that it stop there, because these days he could no longer depend on his own sense of caution, could easily go too far.

  “We are, after all,” T. George said, “speaking here of athletics.”

  T. George tried dutifully as ever to open that small tight gate to ideas which were not always respectable at the tea table. While he never became immoral he had at least sniffed at a few unrespectable ideas, now and then, at the Science Club.

  At the Science Club, with its zoological specimens in bottles, including one foetus entrusted to the Doctor between meetings, and the wrongly labelled rocks and the phial of (alleged) gold dust which the minutes said should be sold in the event of the club being wound up, they talked a lot about the need to see the truth in heresy. They quoted examples from the history of medicine but had been unable, to date, to find suitable heresies and, therefore, the truths within them. Or, at least, sufficient heresies for the monthly meetings of the Science Club.

  Branton now said that the Greeks accepted male beauty, “and more”. It was his only contribution to any discussion—it was always the Greeks this or the Greeks that.

  The meal was served by two of the young “usherettes” (a word Irving had taken from Los Angeles motion picture shows) and this relieved the unease, the men all commenting on the get-up of the usherettes. The wine was from Mudgee, sent down by someone’s cousin. The meal then lapsed into town talk despite T. George’s efforts to keep up the philosophical standard.

  The town bachelor, not the only one but the o
ne who filled the town’s idea of a dashing bachelor, Phillip, appeared at the door and looked in. He was the women’s hairdresser of the town and also something of a comedian.

  Phillip cut a dash but was not Science Club material, nor, for that matter, Philosophers’ Circle, if that was what they were tonight.

  Not having been invited, Phillip started off by saying that “good men do not have to be invited to a good party”, which he explained was a joke from politics.

  A place was found for him. The table began though to play with Phillip, he being so genial a person, so playful and good spirited, and probably too because he was slightly effeminate and men behaved towards him as if towards a bright young thing. They, the men, began holding back laughter from his witticisms, sitting poker faced, almost sadistically allowing things that he said to stand, balanced as it were on one leg, seemingly forever. Phillip depended upon laughter to feed his babbling, he tended to say whatever came into his mouth and mostly it was funny, but he needed supporting laughter.

  Phillip sensed that he was being played with and put on an act of leaving, pulling his coat over his head and pretending to sob. “I may as well give up,” he said. “There’s no laughter left in this town.” He said he might move to Milton, and “Who’s dead?” and “You should stop me if you’ve heard it before”.

  Laughing, Doctor Trenbow signalled to the table that the game with Phillip was up. He suggested that Scribner make a toast.

  Scribner was a university-educated man and liked to be seen as something of a bohemian. His toast was to “machinism—the beauty within the machine”.

  “We have praised the body, now let us praise the machines.”

  He turned to Irving. “Especially the cinema machine, the machine of illusory life.” Scribner spoke too of the need to rebel against “pretty things”, to look for beauty in the clank and steam and grit, not in the paintings of cows and sunflowers.