by Peter Carey
The lights of the doctor's Packard, which blazed into the back windows of the Hispano Suiza, seemed to Horace to be charged with the malevolence of an inquisitor.
"I'm in for it now," he told Molly who had been silent since her tyre-squealing departure from the doctor's house. "He'll have me charged."
Molly sucked in her breath and expelled it. She accelerated grimly. She had heard every word of Horace's speech as it swooped from high falsetto to surprising baritone.
"Love her," she snorted, attacking the gearbox with anger. "Love her. Some way to show your filthy love."
"She begged me," Horace said, aghast to find one more enemy. "She wept. Dear lady, please…"
"Don't 'dear lady' me," said Molly grimly. "If she dies I'll charge you too. I have one hundred thousand pounds", she said, "and I'll spend every penny of it on lawyers if I have to."
"Oh God," moaned Horace. "Oh God, dear God."
"You pray to God. Pray to God she doesn't die."
"The love is platonic."
Molly shuddered at such a dirty-sounding word. She fled from its filth at seventy miles an hour down Ballarat Road with the doctor's Packard roaring at her tail.
"She asked me to do it," Horace cried as they bounced on to the track to the house. As Molly ploughed into her rose bed with the handbrake full on, Horace was catapulted upwards from his seat and slammed his shorn head against the roof.
She turned off the engine. "Pray," she said, "if you know what's good for you."
Ernest Henderson, arriving a minute later, caught the sight of a woman in a huge black taffeta dress splendidly decorated with rose appliques. Seen in the headlights of his car, she appeared large and blowzy and theatrical. She strode towards the house with the poet stumbling miserably behind.
No one stayed to escort the doctor inside. He entered the kitchen to find the large black taffeta dress at prayer with her knees on extravagant linoleum and her head on the kitchen table. The poet was leaning against a window and staring out into the night.
The doctor coughed.
Horace turned to face his executioner.
"She's praying."
"Yes."
"If you don't charge me, she will."
The doctor winked. "Let's see the patient, mmmm?"
Horace took him to the bedroom where they found Phoebe in her husband's arms. The doctor asked for more light. Horace brought back a second lamp and when he returned he found the doctor standing and silently contemplating the embracing couple. Horace held up the lamp and sadly regarded this evidence of his complete betrayal.
74
When the doctor had contented himself that the patient's stomach was quite empty, he administered a draught of Galls solution to stop the spasms and gave her a strong sedative.
In the kitchen he found atheistic Horace kneeling at the kitchen table beside the mother whose bosom, whether from religious passion or anger, was heaving in a manner that was impossible to ignore.
I leaned against the kitchen sink too weary and worried to counterfeit devotion.
It was Horace (looking up from pragmatic prayers) who asked the question about the patient.
The doctor was pleased to announce that both mother and child would survive the ordeal. He helped Molly up from the floor.
"Just the same," he said to me, "you should be indebted to your lawyer mate. You'd never have got me here if not for him."
Molly gave the poet and the doctor a look of utter disgust.
"If not for him?" she said, sitting with a grunt.
Horace stared at Molly with his mouth open, but when she did not continue, he shut it again.
"What lawyer?" I said. Relief had made my face go as soft and foolish as a flummery.
"He's just a Rawleigh's man," said Molly.
"Is he now?" said the doctor, chewing his moustache and raising his eyebrows at the poet in question.
"For Man or Beast," said Molly. "Door to door. Horse and cart."
"Then he makes a prettier threat than any barrister I ever heard. You should have heard him," he told me. "He would have had me drawn and quartered, locked in gaol and left to rot. He had judges and juries and clerks of court ready to grab me and tie me up. So if he is a Rawleigh's man, I'll wager a quid he will end up a rich one, and he deserves it too."
Thus Ernest Henderson brought all his power to save the skin of a man in love.
"You should thank this man," he told me, "and the dear lady who drove so well. It was a performance few men would be capable of."
Molly and I exchanged glances. Somewhere in the air, half-way between us, incredulity met a star-bright beam of triumph.
"She can't drive," I said. "I know it."
"She can," the doctor said. "Like a dream."
Molly blushed deep red with pleasure.
"Granted," the doctor said, "it is a fine motor car, but she raced it like a gentleman."
But Molly could not be appeased quite so easily. She folded her arms across her bosom, as if to ward off further flattery, and demanded to be told the cause of her daughter's problem. The doctor said that he had no doubt it was caused by a gastric attack similar to many he had seen that day, that it was, if anything, milder than normal; there was no risk to the child.
It was I who raised the question of poison. I raised it meekly, pointed to it, as though it were a household mouse I wished a stronger soul to kill.
Ernest Henderson, if you want my opinion, was not normally an inventive or practised liar. But that night the muse was with him and he constructed such a dazzling thread of pure invention and looped it back and forth so many times that I could not work out where anything started or stopped; he buttoned it neatly with Latin words (like bright-coloured pills with shiny coatings) and, although Molly did not trouble herself to believe a word he said, Horace and I, for different reasons, looked at the fabric he wove with appreciation and relief.
Well, tell me then, what was my choice? To believe my wife deceitful? A liar? A cheat? A collaborator with other cheats? Of course not. I took the lies and held them gratefully. I wrapped them round me and felt the soft comfort a child feels inside a woollen rug. And this, of course, is what anyone means when they say a lie is creditable; they do not mean that it is a perfect piece of engineering, but that it is comfortable. It is why we believed the British when they told us we were British too, and why we believed the Americans when they said they would protect us. In all these cases, of course, there is a part of us that knows the thing is not true, and we hold it closer to ourselves because of it, refusing to hold it out at arm's length or examine it against the light.
So I embraced Horace as a friend. I promised the child would bear his name (a promise I later made to several others and all of which I honoured).
We opened beer. I strutted around the kitchen. I found glasses to drink from and a few stale Thin Captain biscuits to eat. I fancy I was like a cocky rooster, with chest and bum thrust out before and after. I erased all memory of bile and tears.
"To wife and child." I raised my glass of warm frothing beer. "To aviation, to Australia."
"To wife and child," they drank.
Ah, they all must have thought I was a mug in their different ways, but their wisdom did not stop them from dying in the end, and my foolishness has not killed me yet.
We had several bottles of that soapy-tasting beer. I became garrulous and told stories about flying. Molly recited Lawson at my request. Horace, unused to alcohol, declaimed two sonnets which confused us mightily.
When the doctor judged his work quite done, he rose to go. I took him by his arm and walked him to the door. There was another matter I wished to discuss with him in private.
I left Horace alone with Molly. The poet was nervous and recited Lawson (whom he loathed) with the same enthusiasm with which he had earlier knelt to pray.
Molly watched him as one might watch a spider that may or may not be venomous.
75
I would not let the doctor go, and yet I
could not bring myself to examine the tender matter which so much occupied my mind. The poor fellow found himself stumbling at my side through the tussocked darkness, wandering into flower beds and stepping into horse shit while I thanked him for his trouble and followed a line of conversation that echoed our odd perambulations through the mist-streaked dark.
Ernest Henderson must have thought I had something contagious to admit: syphilis or TB or both.
But it was legs that were on my mind, and nothing else. What I wanted to know was how it was that one characteristic was passed on to a child and how one was not. I gave not a a damn for the shape of a head, or the colour of an eye, or even (as yet unaware of the stubbornness of my unborn son) such things as character and temperament. I wanted to be set at ease about the question of legs, and wondered out loud whether bowed legs (I could never bring myself to say they were inherited from father or mother and, if it was inheritance, then whether the male or female would be the most important in the choice of legs, and if this was something that could be guarded against. I did not put it quite so neatly for, although my thoughts were clear enough, shyness hindered their expression. I had words to say about the Chinese, observing that bow-legs were a common condition, particularly amongst the old. I had seen it in members of Goon Tse Ying's family, seen it before I realized I shared the same condition. Yet I was not quick to come to the point and I confused the matter by discussing the anti-Chinese riots at Lambing Flat where Goon Tse Ying's father and uncle were killed and where he learned to stand in such a manner as to be invisible.
"Should, for instance," I asked the doctor as we turned back for the fifth time towards the dank direction of the Maribyrnong, "I feed her up on vegetables?"
Now Dr Henderson, you will say, had had no time to notice my legs, and I must have been puzzling the fellow to distraction, wasting his time, wearing him out when he should have been home in his bed. But if that is the case, he did not show it. He answered me as best he could, saying that the shape of legs could indeed be determined by a bad diet but he had also observed them to be as hereditary as Habsburg ears and as to whether the male or the female would triumph in the selection of legs for the child, it was a toss-up.
I received this comfortless news in silence. The doctor peered at the luminous face of his watch.
"So it's vegetables," I said, "or nothing."
"There is no harm in vegetables."
I saw him to his car, shook his hand, and waited for him to turn it. As he reversed he caught me in the full glare of his lights. I had no idea whether he was looking forwards or back, but I turned my left foot sideways and stood with my hand on my hip, in such a manner that my deformity, looked at from the doctor's point of view, to all intents and purposes, disappeared.
76
I have made no great study of epilepsy, so I have no accurate idea as to why Horace chose the moment of the doctor's departure to have a fit. It may have been the strain of reciting Lawson's poetry, the excitements of the day, the introduction of alcohol to his overwrought system, or just plain relief that no one was going to put him on a charge. Whatever caused it, the moment the headlights of the doctor's car washed across his bulging eyes all his systems went suddenly haywire. He was a ball of elastic unravelling. He was a full balloon suddenly unstoppered. He tossed and crashed on to the floor, thrashing his arms and banging his big head. His eyes rolled dreadfully. He made shocking noises, gurgling up from the back of his throat.
Molly screamed. He heard her. He heard every sound. Every word. He heard my footsteps as I ran inside, and every syllable that followed.
"He's choking."
"It's a fit."
"Pull out his tongue."
A pause.
"Quick, Mother," helpless Horace heard me say, "get a hatpin."
77
It is unendurable, Phoebe wrote to Annette, and she has become quite mad. She is no longer dotty, which she always was, but mad. You would find it hard to imagine, if you can only think of her as the dear happy soul she was in Western Avenue. She has small unblinking eyes like a currawong, turning its head on one side and staring malevolently, as if she thinks I'll pull the needle from the wool and drive it between my legs into the baby's heart. I cannot talk to her. I have tried. Of course we both know what the matter is: she thinks poor Horace is my lover, God help me. Even Horace has the grace to laugh about it.
Annette, I am big and heavy like a fat bloated slug and I am so bored. The aeroplane sits where I can see it from the window. It is the only thing that keeps me sane.
No, I am not disenchanted with H. He works hard and loves me, but I am bored. You would not recognize me. I sit for hours staring out the window. I cannot even clean the house or cook. Only Horace amuses me, and how can we discuss poetry or life oranything while she sits there with her hands folded on her lap as if we will, at any moment, leap on to the table and start performing adulterous acts.
I was so ignorant. I did not even think to do anything to stop getting in this condition. I assumed it was something he would do. What a child I was. Now I feel fifty years old and sad and wizened and I look at my mother and listen to her talk about buying ataxi business and you would not believe how sad it makes me. I enclose my latest poems. Please criticize them. Tear them to shreds. Tell me. I have only Horace to show them to and he is so sweet. If I listened to him I would start to imagine myself a genius. are they any good? Am I deluding myself? Should I stop all this useless dreaming and be content with what I have? For he does love me, Annette, and I know I can make him so happy yet I did not, even for a moment, guess that what he wanted was soordinary: a fat wife with a dozen children and cabbage and stew every night.
I do not go into town. I do not go to the theatre. I sit on the back step shelling peas and trying to love the child kicking at me. I know you are busy but I beg you to visit. Please write as soon as you get this letter. There is nothing else in my life that brings the prospect of so much pleasure.
With much love,
Phoebe
78
It was not the ghost that made me fearful. I was already fearful before it came. It was the counterweight to my contentment and the greater my contentment grew the greater was my fear of losing it. The eucalypts I had planted now thrust out tender pink shoots that glowed in the spring sunshine like blood-filled skin. My wife's belly pushed against her dress. Her breasts swelled. Everywhere life seemed tender and exposed and I did not need a whistling ghost to make me consider the risks of both life and death.
I could not bear to hear my wife discuss aviation. This subject, which had, so short a time before, contained the juices of happiness itself, was poison in the air we breathed. My mind was filled with visions of ruptured organs and broken struts and I wished to encourage her in gentler safer pursuits. This was one of the reasons I invited Horace to stay. I built a room for him. And while Molly clucked her tongue in censure I cut new timber with my saw and inhaled the sweet sour smell of blackbutt. This was a real room, fifteen feet by fifteen feet, with shelves for books and a proper desk for poetry.
Horace was cosy and comfortable and domestic. He was as fearful as a guinea pig and his nervousness soothed me and made me feel safer. It was comforting to have him in the house, like a pet who can be relied upon to give affection. Also: he could read. I had it in mind that I would learn the knack from him so that when my ink-stained wife offered me her poetry I might have some idea what it was, that I would no longer stare dumbly at the dancing hieroglyphics, my skin prickling with suspicion while I counterfeited understanding and enthusiasm. In the meantime I could have him read the work aloud, pretending that I liked his feathery voice.
Horace was a nice man, but far too gentle. He was no match for Phoebe's will, and when she wished the subject to be aviation he could not and would not swerve her from it. When Phoebe demanded to have her knowledge of Sidwell tested it was Horace who held the tattered volume in his warty hand while I, watching from my place at the head of the uncleared table,
did not know whether to be jealous that my position was usurped, pleased that my illiteracy had not yet been uncovered or delighted that I had, at last, a home, a family, a domestic hearth.
"Should the engine stop suddenly?"
"The cause will be failure of the ignition or fuel supply," said my wife, her brow untroubled by the thought of such a calam-ity.
"To cure it?" Horace turned the page with the same leisurely sweep of hand he brought to his prized edition of Rossetti.
"To cure it, test the magneto and switch off the petrol supply."
"If the engine is misfiring?"
"Ah," said Molly, replacing her fluffy pink knitting in its paper bag and standing. "You should be reading recipe books, my girl."
"If the engine is misfiring on one cylinder," Phoebe smiled at her mother, "it is a faulty plug."
"Or ironing your husband's shirts," said Molly, putting the big kettle back on the stove.
"Herbert doesn't mind. If the misfiring is accompanied by loud banging or rattling it is probably a broken valve. Anyway, Horace irons the shirts."
"If irregular or infrequent firing occurs?" asked Horace, colouring at this public mention of his housekeeping. He looked up at Molly then looked away quickly when she caught his eye.
"You spoil her," she said to me. "I'll never know why you signed that silly paper. It's the most disgusting thing I've ever seen."
The paper she spoke of was a legal document that I had signed to honour my promise to her about the aeroplane.
"It will be because the rocker arm on the magneto contact-breaker sticks occasionally," said Phoebe smiling at me. "It's only sensible," she said to Molly. "He's a liar."
"Phoebe!"
"I love him, Mother."
"Oh dearie me," said Molly, clattering with teacups at the sink. "Perhaps I'm just old-fashioned."
