Fishing in the Styx

by Ruth Park

  All his professional life D’Arcy Niland had collected material about this boy, interviewing his friends, trainers, supporters and enemies. But no one had ever done the American research. The last few months of Darcy’s life were a half-glimpsed landscape, obscured by legends, suspicions and fantastic speculations.

  ‘No, I’ll have to relinquish that dream. We can’t afford to do both, so Ireland it is.’

  ‘But Rome first, and then London, for you to meet the Curtis Brown boys, and me to visit Michael Joseph’s, in Bloomsbury.’

  ‘And me to spend absolutely days in the Victoria and Albert Museum,’ said Anne, who, besides being a librarianship student, was something of an antiquarian.

  Unlike our previous ill-fated departure for England, when my every doomsaying instinct had indicated that we were doing the wrong thing, this second and grander venture was organised with ease. The twins agreed to spend two terms at a Blue Mountains boarding school; Anne was to come with us; and my mother and sister with the latter’s two children, to cross the Tasman to look after the boys and the assorted dogs, cats and other household pensioners.

  Leaving the little girls was a fearful wrench. Their father’s face was as woebegone as theirs. Driving homewards he muttered, ‘What made us think that going to Europe would be worth this?’

  Flying westward, though they say you get badly jetlagged that way, is very satisfying. There’s the mighty curve of the planet, plain as a pikestaff in front of you. The faster you fly the more steadily does the sun appear to sit on the horizon; it is sunset for ever. But the time comes when your aircraft descends for fuel at Singapore or Bangkok or somewhere, and the night immediately rushes in like an occupying army, losing you that lasting day.

  Night flights are uneasy and hallucinatory, especially when the lights are turned out and the curtains drawn between you and the service areas. The engines speed up and the plane begins a new, urgent vibration. They’re in a hurry to get to Rome. We all are, except my husband, who vacated his seat an hour ago and hasn’t returned.

  ‘He’s sick,’ I think. ‘He’s collapsed in the toilet and they can’t get the door open!’

  But when I go aft to investigate, there he is sitting on the floor with two stewards, playing two-up.

  ‘This is Dilip,’ he says, ‘and this is Krishna.’

  ‘Come in, spinner!’ adds Krishna.

  No, he doesn’t want to get to Rome in a hurry; he’s having a great time where he is. And fortunately this is how the entire five months go, without illness, without anxiety, but with unexpected benefits.

  But Rome was the city I wanted to see above all. Perhaps it was my love of Latin that had persuaded me to read Roman history so intensively I felt I had lived there. I wanted to see everything, experience things that could only happen in Rome.

  Peripeteia is a word one might hear but twice in a lifetime. Nevertheless it is a good and useful word which means a sudden change of fortune, not only without warning, but of a type beyond conjecture. It is mostly applied to events such as St Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus, because of the word’s root being fall.

  All the same, in a fall, even Paul’s crash from his horse, there is a static moment between losing balance and hitting the ground. One has time to realise: ‘I’m falling!’

  With me, and with John Milton and Martin Luther, who had the same experience in the same place, there was none of that. My peripeteia occurred in St Peter’s Basilica, in Rome, and in the twinkling of an eye. I have no explanation. I entered those imperial portals an uncommonly devout Catholic, full of solemn bliss that, in spite of all obstacles, I had got there at last. Within five minutes something had happened. Between one split second and the next, without any shift in consciousness, I knew I was a Catholic no longer.

  It seemed best to go outside to think about it, so I did. Past Bernini’s preposterous marble monsters, the Swiss Guards with their bad-boy faces and Michaelangelo bloomers, and into the colonnade. The sky was like the Queensland sky, immaculate and as deep as forever. Swifts or swallows, small scissor-tailed birds, flicked like bats into the crannies of St Peter’s stupendous façade. Like dark moss they clung to curly beards, scrolled gowns, croziers and palms and open martyred mouths.

  I knew something significant had happened. Yet my mind was a space seemingly filled with nothing. The velocity of thought was so great there was total stillness. I was aware, however, that I was an observer, and content with that.

  I sat in the sunshine beside a seminarian, a large potato-faced boy in soutane and black bedpan hat. In rapture he gazed at St Peter’s, eyes full of tears, rumbling something in what was possibly High Dutch. His face, if not the words, was fully translatable: How marvellous that God has allowed me to come and see this wonder for myself!

  His artless joy delighted me; his was the figure of a million, million pilgrims. It was easy to imagine a phantom staff, stout wallet, and a band of cockleshells on his foolish hat. I entered fully into his awe, his happy gratitude, and was conscious that what he felt and what I felt were parallels, and would continue as parallels. We came from the same place and would go on through life to the same place.

  ‘I suppose you feel very upset and guilty,’ said my husband when I told him later.

  ‘Not a bit of it,’ and I tried to explain that I hadn’t given Catholicism away, it had given me away, I didn’t know why. But there seemed no reason why I should be sad about it.

  ‘I don’t think we should tell Anne,’ he said soberly, as if I’d spent the afternoon gallivanting with a lover, and although he’d forgiven me, the children mustn’t know.

  However, my feeling of total and benevolent freedom surprised me. Always I had taken for granted that almost unbearable guilt accompanied loss of faith. Certainly sometimes it must. Too many times have I been the recipient of confidences from lapsed Catholics, laicised priests, and nuns who have fled convents. She’s a listener, they think, and off they go, mostly tedious tales of remorse and ruination, so that one wants hard-heartedly to cry with Meister Eckhardt: ‘For the love of God do not yelp about Him!’

  Nevertheless I am profoundly grateful I have a Catholic background. Not being a baptised Christian I unwittingly thieved it, but that makes me all the luckier. Catholicism introduced me to literature, fine art and a continuous range of historical drama that no other human establishment is venerable enough to give. What a mirror of humankind it is! Brave, corrupt, brilliant, opinionated, staggering along on basic instabilities, human indeed.

  It is true that in later years I did get baptised. My mother was extremely ill and, wanting to right what she now viewed as a wrong, asked me if I would undergo the ceremony. I entered into this with all wholeheartedness; I think no one can afford to lose the chance of gaining grace, no matter whence it comes. Eunice Gardner, the pianist, was my godmother and Frank Sheed, the famous Catholic apologist, my godfather. I told him that the baptism probably wouldn’t take.

  ‘Not for you to say,’ he said. ‘But at least it will save me worrying about you.’

  Frank was a genial, gregarious, amusing man, but every now and then one had a disturbing feeling. Whoo! We’ve got something pretty saintly here, I’d better watch my step.

  His wife, Maisie Ward, was a saint, an adorable woman. An aristocratic English lady of refined education, she could not say ‘to hell with it’ without a perceptible pause before and after ‘hell’ as though the word was in quotation marks. I loved her. Her charity was boundless; she poured out her life’s energy in the service of others, and when a problem came her way she went after it like a terrier until it was solved.

  My christening, archaic and solemn, was followed by unexpected happenings, momentous or not according to one’s frame of mind. First, beloved Maisie died. Frank sent me a memorable cable: ‘Joy in heaven. Maisie went home today.’

  Our good friend in the Order which had arranged for my baptism had a heart attack, and two of his colleagues fled, one to marry and the other, a conservative
scapular-wearing Irishman, to become one of those unsettling Californian priests who consecrate cake or Sao biscuits and conduct the Mass in mime with groups of amateur actors in wigs and greasepaint. That also is a peripeteia of a sort, I expect.

  But that was in the future, and we were still in Rome. Because of D’Arcy’s friendship with many priests we were taken to interesting places not open to the public. These men, lonely perhaps for ordinary male conversation, sought him out, never the reverse. This was not devotional or reverential friendship, my husband blanching at the thought of calling one of our black-socked visitors Father Joe. It was Joe or nothing. All enjoyed arguing about sport, literature and politics. Still, D’Arcy sometimes shook his head ruefully over the pitiful ignorance of the world that he found in these good men.

  ‘They go into the seminary too early,’ he said. ‘Tucked away in a pod. I’d like to see old Bob with a swag up, on the road out of Marree. Six months with empty pockets and no hope of a regular job would make his soul grow. And poor woeful Damien, full of devout fairy floss! But crikey, what could anyone do with Damien?’

  Nevertheless, our hospitality had been repaid with fifteen or twenty letters of introduction to Rome-based members of their Orders.

  The American Capuchins led us to archeologists, haunters of subterranea, who grumpily led us around floodlit fragments of old, old Rome, up bits of rutted streets, into a fallen-in grog shop, around the mosaic floor of a bathhouse. There is a pensive familiarity about these cities beneath cities. Inevitably one ponders: is this how my city will be one day, two thousand years away from the blue sky? But, though grumpy, these dedicated archeologists were kind. I was allowed to paddle in the Cloaca Maxima and when I wished to be shut into the deaf-and-dumb cell in the Mamertine Prison to see how St Paul or the notorious Jewish patriot, Simon Son of the Star, felt before they were led out to be beheaded, our lavishly whiskered guide obligingly clanged the iron door on me.

  One Irish Augustinian was directed to be our guide for a week; a jolly jabberer he was, ardent about food. I see him sitting eternally in a trattoria, poking cherries into his mouth with one hand while ten or twelve workmen file past, each kneeling reverently and kissing his other hand. It is this sort of thing that unnerves stern types like Presbyterians when they visit Rome. But one mustn’t take it seriously. Such little courtesies are traditional and graceful; no race could be more sophisticated and streetwise about their religion than the Italians. Or, if it comes to that, more sincere.

  This Irishman did his best to arrange for us to visit the famous stigmatic, Padre Pio, but the trip fell through.

  ‘Ah, never fret,’ he comforted. ‘Who’s to know if it isn’t a lot of holy blather anyway? What about seeing 11 Babbo instead?’

  It was endearing how the ordinary populace of Rome referred to the Pope in familiar ways, not only Babbo (Daddy) but SS (Suo Santissimo) and plain Giovanni. But from the vast crowd of pilgrims that jammed the concourse in front of St Peter’s every time John XXIII appeared at his balcony, there rose such a fantastic outpouring of respect and love I felt he should stagger before it.

  We did have a semi-private audience with the Pope, along with hundreds of other people, and I’m glad I did. I much approved of the impatient way he nipped out of his carrying chair, hitched up his petticoats and trotted up the steps. He was a brisk, affectionate, wise old Italian Babbo and I would have liked to give him a hug. He looked ill, and probably was – very sallow, dark stains about his eyes.

  We were sitting in the front row of seats – our Augustinian must have had some clout – and as the Pope passed on his way out, he gave us a grin, and raised his hand in blessing. As he lifted his hand, light from the high windows shot directly through the prodigious stone in his ring, in a ray so richly golden I gasped. I thought, ‘That’s a topaz in that ring, an enormous one.’

  But everyone tells me the Papal ring is amethyst. However, that’s how I saw it.

  Eventually we reached Ireland.

  ‘And would you be carrying any tinned salmon, sir?’

  All three of us looked narrowly at the Customs Officer. Was this an Irish legpull? He sighed.

  ‘For the love of God why would people like yerselves be carrying tinned salmon? But it’s a question they make us ask.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Them.’

  ‘Ah, them.’ We were on familiar ground. The Establishment, bureaucracy, the faceless ones. Australia jumped with people fulminating against Them. We nodded sympathetically, shook our heads with the correct ruefulness. Them! The injustices, the idiocies we good ordinary people had to endure from Them!

  ‘I can see from your name you’re one of us, sir. Come home at last, then?’

  ‘God willing.’

  So we passed out into early morning Dublin, a mist rising from the River Liffey and soiled swans sailing on its indolent brown stream.

  Our time in London had been frenetic beyond imagining. I felt as if I had spent a fortnight in a cake-mixer, so frequent had been the hospitality, so many the enthusiastic offers of future work. But everyone who offered, added, ‘You’re crazy not to live right here, on the spot. Australia is so far away.’

  ‘But it isn’t,’ I’d say. ‘Only twenty-four hours by air. And the airmail takes a couple of days at most. And there are telephones …’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ they’d reply. ‘It just seems on the edge of nowhere. It’s so out there.’

  And indeed English people do commonly speak of travelling out to Australasia, though you never hear an Australasian say he’s going in to the United Kingdom. I presume this curious anomaly is a leftover from the days of ‘outward bound’ sailing ships, or when London was the centre of an empire. Many people speak this way still, though no place in the world is now very far from any other place, and Australians living in Australia have little trouble getting work at long range from Europe.

  We had met film directors and producers, sat in on the sets of films then being shot, and passed within the orbits of famous actors and actresses, some of whom mechanically glittered at every chance-met stranger, but others who were unpretentious craftspeople. These levelheaded ones were supported in their levelheadedness by the admirable attitude of Londoners, whom I never saw flock around and gape. I daresay they did peek at much loved stars, but secretly. Once my literary agent and I lunched in a hole-in-the-wall restaurant in Soho (then not so sleazy as it is now). She said casually, ‘Have you met Roger Moore yet?’

  Mr Moore and Harry Corbett were chatting away at a nearby table, though one would never have guessed it from the demeanour of waiters or other patrons. When my agent caught Mr Moore’s eye, she invited him and Harry Corbett to finish their coffee at our table. They were pleasant men, both amateur painters, who had visited an art exhibition that day.

  Harry Corbett was a largish goodlooking man, very different from the persecuted romantic Harold of Steptoe and Son. He preferred stage work, and said in his unaccented voice that he would never do another Steptoe if he could help it.

  In real life Roger Moore did not have the watercolour good looks he had on the screen. Film must have flattened out or made pallid the strongly masculine character of this man’s handsomeness. His colouring was striking, his eyes the richest blue, his hair the blond of good whisky. He moved with flexible grace.

  ‘Bloody fellow sounds as if he has everything,’ grumbled my husband as I described him.

  ‘And he’s friendly and good mannered as well.’

  ‘Not losing his hair at all?’

  ‘Thick and shiny.’

  ‘Well, anyway, Sean’s losing his hair.’

  But Sean Connery didn’t care. He wouldn’t wear a toupee except under pressure; he went out without it and didn’t mind at all if his fans saw his bald patch.

  He seemed to me very much his own man, disregarding others’ opinions of him or his acting abilities. Physically he was - and is - impressive to a degree, tall, athletic, like an idealised portrait of an aristocratic Highl
ander. In fact, he came from a Lowland working-class background, and brought with him all its hard humour and hardheadedness.

  He told me casually, ‘I reckon I have about five more years’ work in my face.’

  As we know, Connery has gone on to far better film work than he ever did in his youth. However, this random remark illustrates how little he thought of his striking good looks except as a business asset.

  He was funny, too, in the dry Scots manner. Speaking of being paid off from the Navy and given a civilian suit too long in the arms, too short in the legs, tight here and baggy there, he concluded his story, ‘After I sold this suit to my father …’

  At that time he was being considered for the role of Fascinatin’ in the Twentieth-Century Fox version of Call Me When the Cross Turns Over. In spite of his looks, his fame, his reasonable, if not outstanding, abilities, I didn’t find him fascinating at all. In my experience fascinating men are mostly homely, if not downright ugly, and history supports me. Such men work on their personalities; some become charming, others well nigh irresistible. Handsome men don’t bother. I don’t say this was true of Sean Connery, but I was not sorry when through contractual and loan difficulties he dropped from the prospective cast.

  Our hotel in Dublin is small and Jane Austen-ish, once the town house of a member of the Quality. Foursquare, Georgian, built of raspberry brick, it has half-moon fanlights and a wrought-iron fence with brackets for holding torches, and tall extinguishers where the linkboys doused them.

  The hotel looks straight across at the Dail, the Parliament, which is housed in a wing of the magnificent palace of the Earls of Kildare.

  What a city this is, still half possessed by the ghost of England’s eighteenth-century glory, cynical, elegant, superbly tasteful. Yet the dead leaves blow up and down the streets and pile against exquisite Georgian doors; here and there the cold wind pounces through broken glass in the fanlights. The great pillars of the Courts, the Customhouse and Trinity College are velvet black with soot. The Liffey loiters beneath a cargo of slow-moving rubbish.