The Missing Heir

by Kylie Tennant

  ‘Yes, I know,’ Hope growled. ‘She wants to discuss instincts with me but that’s because she hasn’t got any.’ Actually I had an instinct for danger; I had all kinds of instinctive reactions which had stood me in good stead. He knew I had caught him out equating instincts with sex. Where would the church be without sin, my good people? It would be a whole new ball game.

  John Hope was quite right to emphasise to his people that they should watch their instinctive behaviour. But he was wrong in confining his warning to the impulse to procreation. In a woman the instinct most powerfully implanted — you can see it working in birds — is to cherish and protect, not only the young, although most definitely the young, but to help and nurture the helpless. Old, ill or greedy people can make demands on women that are often outrageous and succeed because this instinct is blind. Many women marry from compassion. They don’t know it, of course. The parallel instinct in men is to guard and feed — not only the young but more especially the young. Watch a gander down the paddock trying to steal another gander’s little goslings so that he can add them to his own. Finally, after much shrieking, all the ganders agree to share their proud task and go off with the geese and little goslings in the middle of a watchful circle of ganders all ready to fly aggressively at a predator. And this instinct to protect, guard and guide has, in human beings, been so overlaid by the insistence in our society on individual greed and selfishness that many men do not know the pure pleasure of gentleness and generosity for which they were born.

  These two wholly laudable and life-enhancing instincts must be distinguished from the terrible passion for one particular man or woman which is left over from our animal ancestry also. To take the birds again (who mate for life) — who has not delighted in the albatross, who greet each other ecstatically, to breed in the same nesting spot after a two-year absence and steadfastly return as long as they live? Nature knows nothing more admirable. Unfortunately human beings who do not confine themselves to rutting seasons — or maybe they do and I have missed the research on it — are liable to the onset of passion or lust at most inconvenient times. Our history is scarred by the consequences, for such passion is to be dreaded and is irresistible. It gives churchmen their opportunity to impose their impulse to guard and guide to a quite excessive extent.

  So we looked at each other, the Reverend Hope and I, with amused antagonism long ago. Now that stout churchman is ashes under the high altar and I am too old to argue about passion any more.

  6. GPO Box 2000

  The Parent had gone off to Germany in 1936 for the Olympic Games. He came back full of praise for Hitler. He was also full of praise for German efficiency. ‘When you go in to get a beer over there,’ he said in a grandiose tone, ‘the waiters are on their toes. They give you Service. After all, that is what you pay for — Service.’

  ‘No you don’t,’ his friend Don McIntyre yelped at him. ‘You pay for the beer.’

  This greatly amused Roddy. ‘You pay for the beer,’ we would murmur when, in the Australian way, food or drink was dumped in front of us.

  It was the Parent’s concern to be on intimate terms with politicians of all parties. There was no knowing when the duty on imported steel (which had as a result of pitiful pleas been increased) might not, because of higher costs of production in Australia, be subject to a plea from its users to lower it. Millions of pounds were involved in these friendly little conversations in his favourite hotel in Canberra.

  One of his closest friends was Jimmy Donovan. Percy Dean was the most famous of W.M. Hughes’s secretaries but Jimmy Donovan had the honour of being the most often sacked and reinstated. If legend is correct he was seven times Hughes’s secretary, and Jimmy was a good Catholic who would certainly not exaggerate on such a matter.

  He was a little man who in his later years suffered from the most enormous hernia which he used to carry around like a boy’s football. It did not affect his cheerfulness and it was a general belief that he would have gone around carrying it for years if he had not been persuaded to have an operation. The operation was a success but, of course, Jimmy died as an aftermath. The Parent would often cite Jimmy as an excuse to put off a badly needed operation.

  At one time Jim Donovan was secretary to Senator R. V. Keane, Minister for Trade and Customs in the Curtin Ministry, a huge man and Leader of the House. It was my father’s belief that it was always easier for capitalists to do business with a Labor Government than with the Nationalists or Liberals. Donovan was most efficient and, like many public servants, reached the stage of feeling that he was running the department for which his minister was responsible.

  He persuaded a member of the House of Representatives to put up a small bill by which public servants who were compelled to board in Queanbeyan should receive an extra allowance. It was an insignificant matter on the surface though actually it was a financial bill and its defeat could have meant serious consequences for the Government. The Labor Government, absorbed in the problem of winning World War II, had only a skeleton representation in the House when the bill came to the vote. The division showed an equal number of ayes and noes, and the Government’s defeat was averted by the casting vote of the Speaker. When the enquiry was made as to how many public servants did board in Queanbeyan it was found that Donovan was the only one.

  Donovan had his downfall when he was approached by a member of the Opposition with a request. ‘Of course, of course,’ said Jimmy, ‘We’ll see to it.’ Unfortunately Senator Keane was just behind Donovan in the corridor and the big man’s comment was brief. ‘We’ll see to it, will we? You’re sacked,’ he roared.

  Donovan was relegated to the position of an inspector of Customs in Sydney where, with his usual efficiency, he set up a keen group of sleuths to investigate the various applications of business firms.

  During the war my novels, which had sold briskly enough in England and America, were unprocurable in Australia. The overseas sales were of little benefit to me because of the double taxation system. I would be cheered by a letter from the friendly firm of Macmillan in London announcing that they had decided to increase the advance royalty on a novel from £750 to £1,250, to find that after my agent had taken his £125, the British Inland Revenue their £625, and the Australian Taxation Department its ten per cent of the remainder, I was left with £450. Also Macmillan in those years of paper shortages had a laudable policy of sharing what paper there was among its many authors. It was for this reason that Macmillan declined the honour of publishing Winston Churchill’s history of the war, because to have done so would have exhausted their stocks of paper.

  The Parent and Roddy decided they would form a publishing company to reissue my books in Australia. It was called the Sirius Publishing Company. Although my father, my husband and I put in £100 each, the method of publication was one that would bring tears of envy to the eyes of authors who know that their publishers today are handing out discounts of 45 and 50 per cent to booksellers while they are being asked to be content with 10 per cent. We engaged a printer who had already contracted for the entire editions of 5,000 to 7,500 with a wholesaler and we divided the difference above the printing cost between the three of us.

  The books were printed on abominable newsprint paper, and I was never given the opportunity to check the proofs, so, as these were the only editions Australians saw for many years, I do not wonder at the disparaging attitude of academics, never very partial to my work. Still I thought it rather hard that a critic in one pretentious compendium should quote with complete seriousness the opinion of the Communist weekly that I had lightheartedly placed as a blurb on the back flap of the jacket of one book, Ride On Stranger: ‘A cynical and slanderous novel. A more morbid, contemptuous view of Australian life has never been written … it is a scandal that valuable paper should ever have been wasted on this irresponsible nonsense.’ Even in those years newsprint was fairly cheap.

  Jimmy Donovan needed a cover address for the bait letters he sent to firms whose requests to the C
ustoms Department he considered needed delicate investigation. He couldn’t write from the Customs House, Circular Quay, so my father suggested that he use the box number of the Sirius Publishing Company, Box 2000, GPO Sydney, as the address for his investigating officers.

  This worked excellently for many years but I am not writing here an account of the inside maneouvres of the Customs Department. Jimmy died and the post office adopted the post code. My father had kept on the box for his own reasons but found on his infrequent visits that the box was not only crammed with letters but there were requests for him to call and collect many more. Letter-writers have a habit when they forget the correct box number of an addressee of just writing c/o GPO Box, Sydney, trusting that it will find the correct box. With the new code added of Sydney 2000, the sorters were saving themselves much trouble by putting all the stray letters into Box 2000. We disposed of the box but whether it was ever allotted to some other unfortunate I do not know.

  The Parent’s whole life had been devoted to steel, particularly corrugated iron which made efficient water catchment possible in a thirsty country. He was there as a youth when steel was imported from Lysaght’s mills in England through the building of the plant at Newcastle and later the rolling mills at Port Kembla, to the great sprawl of machinery, furnaces, acid baths, electrical sheet steel, prefabricated metal work of all kinds, from motor bodies to circular saws, petrol tanks, silos, vats, roofing, car number plates: anything made from steel interested him. In 1939 an inventor called Owen submitted a model of a gun to the Invention Board, to be told that the British Army did not use such weapons and later that the drawings would be sent to England but no answer could be expected for two years. The disheartened young man enlisted in 1940. It was the men at Lysaghts who pushed the Owen gun on the Australian Army experts for tests, built an annexe at Port Kembla, erected a machine shop at Newcastle and hired women to turn out Owen guns and then aircraft parts. The Army chiefs wanted steel butts which made the gun too heavy and they had to be argued out of this. During the first part of the war it was not possible to visit Manly for some surfing without hearing the Parent giving tongue in highly technical language about this gun. After the war we heard all about the Hot Strip Mill and the new Cold Strip Mills. The Parent spoke of a cold strip mill with a tender affection he had never shown his family. You would have thought a new rolling mill was a nestling he was nurturing under his breast feathers.

  My sister enlisted in the Navy, the WRANS. I pointed out that she was my only contribution to the war effort, and a highly valuable contribution she proved to be. Later my mother went down to Melbourne when Doffie was posted there, to housekeep and see that she had proper food.

  1940 saw Roddy and me in Muswellbrook when the news came that I had won the Prior Memorial Prize for The Brown Van. Its later title on publication was The Battlers, which was an improvement. In Muswellbrook we made a lifelong friend in Mavis Cribb who taught shorthand at the school and, without much success, to me. She went off to Europe and came back to become chief librarian at Maitland. In her roomy flat over the library some years later I waited for my son to be born while I cut down Tell Morning This to a truncated form, published as The Joyful Condemned, by Macmillan. They were unable to produce the full text because it was too big a book for their (then) paper quota. Indeed as I said before they had had to refuse Winston Churchill’s book about World War II for the same reason.

  It was in Muswellbrook I began to realise that Roddy was brooding about his lack of children. People have asked me if none of the men I encountered camping and travelling alone ever tried to rape me. I had to wait until we were living in an ordinary house at the end of a street in Muswellbrook before this happened. A very large man came asking for gardening and, in my usual way, I told him to start on the vegetable patch, which certainly needed a very large man instead of just me hoeing. When Roddy came home from school he asked the man in a friendly way where he came from and where he was going. The man returned the next day and, when I was giving him lunch on the back verandah, he suddenly seized me and attempted to drag me into a small bedroom we had at the end of the verandah. I tried to gouge his eyes out and yelled very loudly for help, which made me feel absurd, particularly as he crunched his very large hands around my throat. He was deciding whether it was worth his while to choke me and then he relaxed his hands and decided against it. ‘Get out of here,’ I yelled, seizing the garden fork by the back door. He got.

  When Roddy came home from school I croaked as he got in the door: ‘That so-and-so doing the gardening tried to rape me.’ Roddy looked out at the large patch of vegetable garden the man had turned over. ‘We’d better encourage a few more in on the same terms. Did you pay him?’

  ‘Pay him hell! For deciding not to strangle me?’

  Roddy said bitterly: ‘If we had had just one child this wouldn’t have happened.’ Which was a strange thing to say. Then he went off to see the sergeant who despatched a man to the camp by the railway to see if they could pick him up. ‘He’ll be long gone,’ the sergeant said, ‘But he’ll try it again: the typical set-up — lonely house, woman by herself. What did your wife do?’

  ‘She screamed at the top of her voice. It frightened him.’

  ‘I wish more women would scream,’ the sergeant said wistfully.

  I had a muffler round my throat for a few days. That disc at the back of my neck still creaks in cold weather.

  ‘How would it be,’ I proposed, ‘if we had a baby?’

  Roddy considered. ‘I’m game if you are.’

  While we were on holidays at Coolangatta I had an appendicitis attack in the middle of the night. The pain was frightful, but I roused enough to throw a pillow at Roddy who was sleeping the other side of the room. He phoned for an ambulance. The hospital was ghastly so I found my clothes and came home as soon as the pain subsided. I was greeted with abuse. How did I get back to the flat? Roddy and our friends Woodie and Sadie wanted to know. Walked, of course. I’d have the op, I told them, when we got home. So we finished our holiday and when I got back to Muswellbrook I went to see Hank Rutherford, whose son was in Roddy’s class.

  ‘I have this appendix,’ I explained. ‘I also have an ovarian tumour but that belongs to Sue, my doctor in Sydney.’

  ‘How long has Sue had this ovarian tumour?’ Dr Rutherford asked.

  ‘Five years more or less.’

  ‘Tell her she’s lost it. It’s mine now.’

  When I came out of the anaesthetic the nurse said gleefully: ‘You were just like a bargain basement. We kept on finding all kinds of interesting things.’

  ‘Good for you,’ I murmured. I lay in an upstairs private room and judged a short-story competition, taking each entry from one packing case by my bed and sorting it into another the other side. I could see Roddy in his white coat in the playground of the school on the hillslope. He brought me fresh carrot and orange juice which he had to grind by hand in our old juicer. Affection can go no further. While I was recuperating at home a woman was hired because I was in bed. She stole all my mother’s jewellery — which she had given me. I did not discover the theft of all those pendants and rings until we were moving to Laurieton at the end of the year. I never wore even a wedding ring and the jewellery was in the drawer of a dressing-table. I suppose she made better use of it than I did. I have discovered that nurses — some of them — have this habit of stealing from people in bed and from the dead in hospital. When my mother died in hospital many years later some nurse stole her gold bracelet from her body. I advised my sister to let it go. If you have lost your mother who is going to make a fuss about the loss of pieces of metal and stone? My sister, if I hadn’t restrained her. Or my mother, if she knew about it in whatever realm she went to.

  At the height of the sunlit summers when my children were young the Parent owned two motorboats and would putter serenely up the creek and round the back waters, or out over the bar to his favourite fishing spot off the point where his young grandson was seasick as s
oon as the boat anchored. Not that the Parent was a skilled fisherman. I regard as apocryphal his story that he had bribed an official of the Lands Department to transfer his land from leasehold to freehold by taking him fish. It was a long and intricate tale. So was the other one of how his ‘influence’ with certain parliamentarians had prevented an oil depot being established at Patonga Beach. He told everyone of the sailing ships in colonial days dumping ballast from South America on the sandspit where his house stood, before going on to the Hawkesbury to load produce.

  He would sit for hours on the glassed-in front verandah inspecting the shipping with binoculars. Any large tankers moored off Lion Island waiting to go into port maddened him. ‘Bloody trade unionists,’ he would howl, ‘ruining our trade with strikes.’ His years as Lysaght’s customs agent had formed this prejudice against strikers on the wharves.

  He would tell tales of his friends — an inventor he had known who was rescued from a tribe of New Guinea cannibals and had partaken of their stew. His shrewd and witty business friends who had helped him build the house retired and were swallowed up by the final bankruptcy of the grave. Jimmy Donovan, that gay Catholic with the hernia the size of a football which he had nursed for years, finally had an operation and, as the Parent said darkly, never came out of it. ‘Look at my hernia,’ he would say, revving up his singlet. ‘Don’t catch me going the same way as Jimmy.’ And where was Somerville who was going to come down and share the house with him? ‘They’ve all died,’ he said darkly, accusingly.

  His family held council about his living alone. George, my brother-in-law, who was an engineer, took much trouble looking out possible nursing homes. George had a tidy mind and while he lived would go down to paint the Parent’s house, grizzling about the lack of hygiene in the cooking. George was meticulously clean. When poor old George finally died of cancer the Parent was still there, simmering up brews that cooked for days in a pot George had always suspected.