by Peter Carey
In short, he filled my darling's head with nonsense. He recited his poems and listened to her while Molly tilled the clay-heavy garden beds close by and kept a suspicious eye turned on the events inside the kitchen.
It was to Horace that Phoebe revealed her pregnancy, not me. It was with him that she discussed the complicated state of her emotions produced by the little gilled creature who stirred within her: blood, birth, life, death, fear, and the final decision that she could not, no matter what guilt it caused her, have this child.
The papers that year were full of abortionists being arrested and patients charged. She had already visited Dr Percy McKay who had since been arrested and put in Pentridge Gaol, but not before he had informed her that her body played tricks on her. She was not one month pregnant as she imagined, but nearly three. Dr McKay's last day of freedom was partly occupied with lecturing Phoebe Badgery on the dangers of a late abortion and her perfect situation (in terms of health and financial security) to have the child. He had put no weight on aviation or poetry. He had judged her doubly fortunate to have such hobbies.
From Phoebe's point of view the situation had now become quite desperate. She was anxious, angry, guilty; and frightened of what she read in the papers. Yet, at the same time, she could watch her own drama with an appreciative eye: here she was, twenty years old, married, in Melbourne, a poet in the kitchen, an aeroplane out the window, conspiring to procure a dangerous abortion without her husband's knowledge. All these things, the authentic and the false, the theatrical and the real, were all a part of her nature and I do not mean to belittle her by pointing them out.
"What", she asked Horace Dunlop, "are we to do?"
Phoebe could co-opt people like this – she included them in her life generously, without reserve, and included theirs in hers as readily.
"What are we to do?" she asked, and the poet was flattered and frightened as a clerk given a too rapid promotion. He had no idea what to do. He was an unprepared explorer about to embark in a leaking dug-out on a dangerous journey up a fetid river.
"I will make inquiries," he said, standing. "This evening."
"No, no, you mustn't go, not yet."
Molly coughed, loudly, outside the window.
"But I must, dear lady," Horace said, mournfully arranging his cravat, "must bid adieu."
Phoebe was at the shelf I was pleased to call the mantelpiece. She dug into a large biscuit canister.
"No," Horace said, holding up his hand. "I will not permit you to buy more."
"If I must buy a bottle to maintain your presence, then that is what I'll do," Phoebe smiled. "A bottle, sir, of your excellent product. If it would make my condition disappear I would pay you a thousand pounds."
"If I could make your condition disappear I would consider myself amply rewarded with nothing more", Horace said, "than to be permitted a kiss." And he blushed bright red.
"Mr Dunlop!" Phoebe said, but she was not displeased. "You are absolutely the most immoral man I have ever met."
"A poet", said Horace, "has his own order of morality."
"My husband would kill you just the same," Phoebe smiled. "Here is the florin for your balsam but perhaps you had better give me the bottle another time; I already have four of them."
The poet hesitated. He would rather have denied himself the florin, but he was too impoverished to allow himself the luxury. He took the money and dropped it into his jacket pocket where there was nothing for it to jingle against.
"There will be no doctor in Melbourne who will touch you," he said. He was probably right. The press was in a hysteria about abortion and did not hesitate to report what grisly details came its way. "But I will arrange something."
He would have done anything for this throaty-voiced woman who spoke without moving her lips, and yet the very thing he was to arrange made him clench his thighs together in sympathetic agony and his fearful imagination was peopled with bloody instruments and tearing life.
"It is monstrously unfair," he said, "the whole thing. I would not be a woman for a million pounds."
"Dear Horace," Phoebe said, "you are a good friend."
"Ay," the poet said sadly.
"You can help, can't you?"
"Yes, yes. I will. I will. I will do something. I will make inquiries." He pushed away the bread and lard with a quick shudder of revulsion. He stood up, brushing the crumbs from his vest and tucking in the tail of his shirt. "I will make inquiries and be back by dinnertime."
"My husband will be here."
"Then you will introduce me to him, dear lady," said Horace, allowing himself the liberty of kissing her hand. "I cannot spend my time sneaking in and out of your house like a criminal. Does he not care for poets?"
"Very much," she smiled. "So much that he has impregnated one."
"I will be careful," Horace said, smiling so primly that the small mouth became even smaller and Phoebe, considering the twitching nose, was reminded of a guinea pig called Muffin she had once had as a pet. "Will bemost careful, that he attempt no such thing with me."
And so saying, he bowed theatrically.
Molly saw the poet depart. She nodded to him as he ran towards his horse and cart. She dug her spade deep into the ground, frowned, and, as Horace began his dash towards the city, went into the house to interrogate her daughter about these visits from the Rawleigh's man.
68
Horace's carthorse was a dun-coloured, sway-backed, lop-eared gelding with furry fetlocks and soup-plate hooves. Nothing in its experience of Horace had prepared it for such a desperate journey. The gelding had been inclined to dawdle and the poet had not been keen to change its mind. It had wandered on a loose rein, eaten flowers when it cared to, and stumbled along the cobbled streets of North Melbourne, Flemington, Moonee Ponds and Essendon, with a low lolling head. The only thing that seemed to have the capacity to excite the animal was a motor cycle, to which category of machinery it had a strong aversion. Horace, on hearing the approach of a motor cycle, would dismount and stand by the horse's head, soothing it, reciting incantations until such time as the offensive machine had passed.
But on this Tuesday afternoon the poet ran to the jinker as fast as his short chubby legs could carry him. His small brown eyes bulged. His button nose shone. He did not take his seat with his usual fussing of cushions and rugs. He did not first introduce himself to the horse's attention and mutter soothing words to it, as if apologizing for the necessary subjugation of one being to another. He stood in the jinker and gave the horse a great thwack on the backside with the end of the reins.
"Geddup, Toddy."
And Toddy did geddup. He started in shock, with such a jerk that Horace fell backwards into his seat with a crash that the horse felt through its bit. There had never been such excitement in the Rawleigh's jinker. The bottles rattled in the wooden panniers. Toddy picked up his great soup-plated hooves and set off in a brisk canter along the pot-holed track beside the Haymarket sale-yards. He did not loll his head or try to scoop up dung between his leathery lips. He held his head high. He felt the urgency of the errand and must have hoped, in his slow cunning brain, that it was something that would lead him to flower beds.
Horace flung himself at his errand with a passion, not (as Phoebe thought, watching him depart so dangerously) because he wished the pregnancy terminated this very instant, but because he was a coward in the face of the law. He dashed at the matter recklessly so he would have it done before his cowardice claimed him.
Horace Dunlop loathed the law and feared it, not in any normal degree, but in his bowels. His father was a lawyer in Bacchus Marsh, and much respected in that pretty town. His brother was an articled clerk. He himself had done three years of law at Melbourne University until he could stand it no more and he had flung himself into failure just as he had, now, flung himself into the jinker – eager to get it done with before the thought of his father's wrath dissuaded him.
He did not like the faces of lawyers. He liked even less the faces o
f judges with whom he had, since childhood, been called upon to dine. He did not like their cruel contented faces, the waxy finish to their folds of skin, the arrogant noses, the hooded eyes.
His terror of the law did not incline him to rebel, but to sneak away and lie very still and quiet, to sit inoffensively in some dusty corner where he vented all his fear and spleen in poems littered with the "cruel cold instruments of reason".
Yet here was Horace Dunlop careering towards the procurement of an abortion. He tried not to think what he was doing. He was not travelling to Carlton to see his friend Bernstein. He was not intent on a conspiracy. He was off to the city to buy a new hat. With only a florin? Well, a beer then. That was all. There is no law against the purchase of a beer, not, at least, before the legal closing time of six o'clock. But, ha, we have a witness who says you do not drink. In secret, yes, in public, no.
Involved in cross-examination, he gave no thought to automobiles through whose midst he cantered. In Flemington Road they passed a motor cycle before either horse or driver could realize what they'd done.
Insisting on his fabricated story, he ignored Grattan Street which led to Bernstein, and went pell-mell towards the city. At the Latrobe Street corner he reined in a little but people stopped to laugh at the soup-plated sway-back cutting such a dash. A street urchin threw an apple core which struck the driver on the back of his closely shorn head. "Fatty fool face," the boy yelled, "fatty big bum," somehow seeing what no one else would see for five years more.
Horace lost his forty-shilling Akubra hat and did not stop for it and the Elizabeth Street cable tram sliced it in half before he had gone another block. He swung left into Collins Street then left again into Swanston, leaving his imaginary beer behind and heading back up to Carlton without legal explanation.
Toddy, unused to such exercise, glistened with sweat and frothed around the bit, but he did not seem inclined to halt for cars or lorries and when they finally arrived at Harold Daw-son's wine bar in Carlton he was slow to respond to either the shouts of the driver or the pressure in his mouth and would have, if he had his way, gone all the way to Preston before he'd had enough. Horace circled him around the block and finally pulled him up outside Dawson's, hooing, haing and whoaing, his face red with excitement and embarrassment.
Toddy got no soft words, no apple, no sugar, no flowers. He looked around, blew out his black lips, showed his yellow teeth, and emptied the steaming contents of his bladder into Lygon Street.
Bernstein was exactly where Horace had expected him to be, drinking plonk from a beer glass in one of the dark booths of Dawson's smoky sawdust-floored establishment. Horace did not need to be told that Bernstein's drinking companion was an actress, but he was too preoccupied to blush or become tongue-tied in her presence. He merely nodded, and reached to remove the hat he had already sacrificed to the cable car.
"Bernstein," he said, "a word in private."
He made a sweeping gesture with his hand towards the street, knocked over Bernstein's glass and made the actress leap to escape its treacly flood.
"To the street," he said, leaving the actress to hover an inch above her seat in the corner of the booth while the wine dripped sweetly to the floor.
Bernstein was a large broad man who was only twenty-one but already balding. He was an atheist, a rationalist, a medical student of no great distinction, an SP punter, a singer of bawdy songs, an acknowledged expert in matters erotic. He was perpetually, attractively, blue-jowelled and sleepy-lidded.
"Bernstein," Horace said when they were standing amidst fruiterers' packing cases in the street, "you must help me."
When Bernstein understood the problem he was amused. He tried to drag the poet back into the wine bar to celebrate his lost virginity.
"No, no," said Horace, glancing nervously up and down the street, "not lost. The lady is a friend. Please, Bernstein, if our friendship is worth anything write me a prescription for the medicine you mentioned."
"It may not work," said Bernstein, meaning that any prescription written by him on plain paper would not be a prescription at all. "Wait, have a drink, and we'll go and see someone later."
"Now, now, I beg you. If it doesn't work, we'll try something else," (imagining his friend was merely worried by the efficacy of the medicine).
Bernstein shrugged his broad shoulders and took out a notepad from the pocket of his jacket. He wrote for a moment and then tore out the sheet.
So: Horace, ten minutes later, smelling as strongly of sweat as his tethered horse, fairly galloping into Mallop's Pharmacy in Swanston Street with Bernstein's piece of paper clutched in his broad-palmed hand. "Give it to the tall man," Bernstein had said. "Wait till he is free. He's an understanding sort of fellah."
Tall man? What tall man? There was no tall man here. There was not a fellow higher than five foot three. He had a boozer's face and mutton-chop whiskers. There was a tall woman, though, not tall for a man, but tall for a woman. She stood beside the man. She towered over him. Horace behaved no different from his horse – he had his momentum up and could not stop. He propelled himself towards the counter, panting, and thrust his prescription into the hands of the tall woman who read it, frowned, and retreated behind a tall glass-fronted cupboard. After a moment she called the mutton-chop man to join her.
Horace stood wet and panting. He had run a good race. He pulled out a scarlet handkerchief from his pocket, wiped his brow, and blew his little nose with relief.
He blew his nose so enthusiastically, so loudly, that the gurgling visceral noise cloaked the return of the mutton-chop man who called twice to his customer before he was heard.
"Do you know what this is for?" asked the pharmacist. He had a peculiar expression on his face, almost a smile.
"Oh yes," said Horace, plunging his snotty red handkerchief into his pocket where it tangled with loose lozenges, string and crumpled poetry.
"You scoundrel," shouted the chemist. "I shall have you put in gaol."
Horace's eyes bugged. His hand was trapped in his pocket, anaesthetized by lozenges and trussed with string. He tried to move but could not. His face screwed up with such astonishment that it resembled the handkerchief: red, crinkled, confused with unrelated things.
"The doctor…" he tried, but hat pins pierced his tongue.
"The doctor too," the mutton-chops said, reaching for his telephone.
But Horace was already in retreat and before Toddy knew where he was he was cantering back up to Carlton with his nosebag still on and the reins belabouring his backside while the rhythm of his hooves drummed into Horace's panic: to aid, abet, to aid, abet.
The actress, when she saw him stumble through Dawson's door, carefully placed the wine glasses on the far edge of the table, against the dark panelled wall.
"I'm done for," said the poet, dropping heavily and smellily beside her. "They're after me."
They heard his story and persuaded him to take some wine. He was a teetotaller but gulped it down. Like lard, he thought, giving solace to the injured tongue.
"You're in love, my friend," Bernstein said, lowering his voice to a level which he understood to be a whisper.
"No, no," Horace said hopelessly, "she is a wonderful person."
"Are you really a virgin?" asked the actress who was very young to speak in such a manner. She wore a green headband and smoked her cigarette from a tortoiseshell holder.
"I am, madam," said Horace. "Now, also, I am a criminal. They have my description. They even know the colour of my handkerchief," and he stared into the gloom of the wine bar as if its booths might be filled with policemen.
"You are in love," said Bernstein. "Why else would you do it?"
"She is a poet," said Horace.
"You are in love," said the actress, "and I think you're sweet."
"I am not in love," Horace cried shrilly, pulling handkerchief and poems tumbling from his pocket. "I am in trouble," he said, wiping his face and dropping the handkerchief carefully to the floor. He slumpe
d back into the hard wooden bench and, while his companions conferred in a whisper, sipped Bernstein's port while he tried to kick his handkerchief into the next booth.
"Give me a pound," said the actress.
He placed his florin on the table.
No one asked him how he had intended paying for the medicine at Mallop's Pharmacy. Bernstein opened his wallet, took out a pound, and handed it to the actress who squeezed out past Horace. He was so depressed as to be insensible to both his friend's generosity and the passage of the silk-clad buttocks which pressed briefly against him.
"We must buy the newspapers," he said to Bernstein who poured his friend more wine and was polite enough not to laugh at his misery.
The actress was gone an hour and Bernstein would not let his friend depart until she returned. He went out to buy the Herald and let Horace pore through it looking for his name.
"Probably in the Sun tomorrow," he said, carefully folding the wine-stained broadsheet and ironing in knife-sharp creases with the flat of his hands.
The actress (a Miss Shelly Claudine who was shortly to appear in the front chorus at the Tivoli) returned at last, slightly grim of face, but with a newspaper-wrapped bottle in her handbag. This she thrust at Horace.
"Tell her," she whispered hoarsely, "that she must drink it in the morning when her husband has gone. It will hurt her, but she must not panic." And then she kissed Horace on his astonished wine-wet mouth.
Horace became emotional. He took the actress's hand and shook his head. Tears welled in his eyes but words would not come.
"Go," she said, "for God's sake."
"How can I thank you?"
"Write a poem for me," the actress said, and kissed him again, this time on the forehead (he had never been kissed so many times in a day).
