Brother Fish

by Bryce Courtenay

  ‘Well, no, there’s been no discussion. It is just that I am anxious to get things going and the opportunity arose when I was obliged to talk to the Tasmanian Fisheries Department on quite another matter we were to run in the Gazette, so I grabbed the chance,’ she replied.

  Jimmy gave a short laugh. ‘Brother Fish an’ me, we done survive da POW sit-u-ation ’cos we always talk ’bout every-thin’, make sure we done both agree. Now we da three mus-ket-teers, it da same.’ He said it quietly, but I saw Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan’s neck begin to colour.

  There was a moment’s silence. ‘Oh, dear. Do forgive me, Jack!’ she cried, immediately recognising Jimmy’s quiet rebuke. ‘It’s just that I am so accustomed to doing things on my own.’ She hesitated. ‘No, that’s being cowardly – making excuses for myself. I don’t know what to say other than I’m sorry, and promise not to do it again.’ She sounded genuinely distressed.

  ‘S’all right,’ was all I could think to say. Not a very gracious reaction, I admit. Then I stupidly added as an afterthought, ‘Most of the Fisheries blokes have boarded a few fishing boats in their time, but I doubt they’ve done a good week’s fishing in their lives.’

  ‘Countess, I gonna lose dat letter iffen yoh give it me now. Tell you what. I gonna cable yoh my address in da States an’ yoh gonna send me a letter, eh?’

  ‘Yes, quite right. Thank you, James,’ she replied in a small voice.

  ‘Yoh an’ Brother Fish, you gotta dis-cuss what we gonna need. I don’t know nothin’ ’bout what’s good, so include me out.’

  We’d arrived at the airport so, thankfully, couldn’t discuss the incident any further. But we’d hardly managed to disengage ourselves from the tiny Ford Prefect when there was great yahooing and laughter as Percy Pig’s ute pulled up with eight girls in the back and Dora Kelly behind the wheel. She must have ‘borrowed’ it while he was away cray fishing. They were all pretty pissed, including Dora, and they crowded around Jimmy, following us into the terminal hugging and kissing him and generally being pains in the arse. In the end, there was only just enough time for the two of us to say our goodbyes. Jimmy laughed as he hugged me. ‘Next time when I come back I gonna wear me one dem back-to-front priest collars. See yoh soon, Brother Fish.’ He shook my hand. ‘Yoh my good brother.’

  ‘Yeah, mate, look after yerself. See ya soon,’ I said, trying to sound casual. I remembered how I’d felt after we’d been released as prisoners of war and when we’d been sent to separate hospitals in Japan. Now it was the same feeling all over again. Cory and Steve were my brothers, my own flesh and blood, but I didn’t begin to feel the same way about them as I did about Jimmy Oldcorn.

  I dreaded the drive back to town alone with Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan. She might apologise again and all I wanted to do was go to the dunny and throw up. Like Alf, I wasn’t good with the grog – I was too small and light of frame, a four-beer screamer, and I was only just hanging in. Then Dora Kelly saved me by falling on her arse trying to get back into the driver’s seat of Percy Pig’s ute. In the name of the family I told her she wasn’t fit to drive, and I’d take them all back.

  ‘Will you please call in at the Gazette tomorrow, Jack?’ Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan asked as we went our separate ways.

  ‘I’ve got three days on a boat,’ I told her. ‘I’ll call in when I get back.’

  ‘I’d like to make amends,’ she said quietly, so the girls couldn’t hear.

  I guess if you wait long enough there’s a first time for everything.

  But Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan apologising to me was some sort of miracle.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I replied, this time meaning it.

  You’re kept pretty busy on a cray boat, going from dawn to dusk and often well after that. You have to have your wits about you most of the time, so there wasn’t a lot of time to think about the boat we should have. But I’d been on enough bad boats in my life, ones that had been adapted, more or less, to suit the job at hand. Just about every fishing boat is some sort of compromise because of the usual lack of money. Boats are often inherited, some for two or three generations. Passed from father to son, like people they grow old and infirm – even crotchety. They seldom catch up with the latest technology or are ideally suited to the job at hand. So I knew pretty well what we didn’t want. Which was, as far as I was concerned, half the problem solved.

  Ever since it had materialised that we’d be able to get a proper boat I’d been thinking about it and asking questions. Steve and Cory were by now very experienced fishermen, and a great help. Steve, in particular, had taken his engineer’s certificate by correspondence and knew about the correct outboard combinations and ratios and other mechanical aspects. I was confident there were enough people I trusted on the island to ask if we didn’t know something. I think this was probably why I’d been blown out of the water when Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan had gone ahead and written up a set of specifications without talking to me first.

  Besides, no bastard in the Fisheries Department would have a clue about this kind of practical information, and I wondered who the so-called other experts they’d recommended to her were. Fisheries inspectors only see a boat in terms of safety equipment and, of course, the legitimacy of the catch in the hold. Which is fair enough, I suppose, but any fisherman will tell you that on a boat forty-five foot or less, if you have state-of-the-art safety you can’t always have absolute efficiency. A bigger boat wasn’t going to happen – the 14 000 pounds Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan was prepared to outlay was a king’s ransom anyway. Which brought the next tricky problem to mind. Was it really her boat, meaning we’d have to eventually pay her the money back? She’d suggested it was her way of buying in, but what precisely did that mean? Was a loan of the capital the cost of the partnership? Or did we own the boat and gear jointly? I was glad of the three days out to sea so that I could clear my head and sort out the questions I needed to ask her.

  When we got back to the island Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan had left a note to say she had gone unexpectedly to Launceston on Gazette business. She suggested a belated dinner on the following evening, saying that we’d have another when Jimmy returned. She also mentioned that being in Launceston would give her a chance to get some of the ingredients she needed from a Chinese restaurant she trusted, and she also hoped to persuade Wendy to have lunch with her while she was there. Her note was warm and friendly, and I smiled when she signed herself ‘Yours often foolishly, Nicole’. Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan eating humble pie was something I never thought I’d witness, and ‘foolish’ wasn’t a word you’d associate with her.

  Again I was glad of the postponement. It would allow me to make notes of the many things that had occurred to me while out at sea, which would show her I knew what I was talking about. I considered doing a bit of an initial sulk, making her work for the information, but decided that the old resentful Jacko was in the past. I had to forget all the past silent recalcitrance. Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan wasn’t my teacher any longer – we were equal partners now. If she hadn’t quite realised this when she’d gone off on her own to write the specifications for the boat, thanks to Jimmy’s tact and firmness she most certainly did now. She’d copped it sweet and we’d avoided our first quarrel by both of them behaving like adults, and it was time I did the same.

  Her cottage was surprisingly untidy, but comfortably so – a place for three comfortable-looking cats and a parrot, which seemed to wait until you reached the end of a sentence and then would say in perfectly accented English, ‘I beg your pardon. Would you mind repeating that, please?’ Moments later, it would follow with, ‘You must learn to correctly clip some words and others you shall round.’ This was exactly what you might expect from a parrot owned by Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan, but I have to say it was initially most disconcerting. I laughed, and she told me that when she’d been a young girl in Shanghai Sir Victor Sassoon had presented her with the parrot. At the time she was practising her English accent and perfecting her grammar so that she would appear indistinguishable from cognoscenti amo
ng the English taipans. This entailed repeating phrases and the peculiar argot of Shanghai’s pretentious residents until she sounded as though she’d been educated at Rodean, a famous English girls’ school for the upper class.

  ‘I taught the parrot to say those words so that whenever I heard them I would go over whatever it was I was phrasing just one more time. I wasn’t to know that a parrot may live for a hundred years, and Vowelfowl has haunted me with that sentence ever since.’

  ‘I beg your pardon. Would you mind repeating that, please?’ the parrot squawked. ‘You will learn to correctly clip some words and others you shall round.’

  In my mind’s eye I saw a twenty-something petite Russian countess, disguised as the quintessential English woman with her la-di-da voice, slim as a pencil, dressed in the very latest fashion, stepping off the island ferry. The locals might have noted her smart outfit and strange-looking snakeskin suitcases with a hatbox to match, but they’d be incredulous at the huge red-and-black parrot in its large gilded cage, and piss themselves when the bird repeated the offending sentence to anyone on the dock who opened their mouth. I remember as a child the dock workers talking of how it had taken twenty of them to unload a huge, beautifully made polished wooden crate that fitted together without the use of a single nail. They swore it was bigger than the front room of most fishermen’s cottages. It had taken a bullock team and wagon to take it up to the cottage she’d bought on the cliffs facing out to sea.

  The incredible thing was that I very much doubt if anyone, with the exception of the Reverend Daintree and now Jimmy and me, still knew very much more about Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan than they’d learned on that first day. She had so completely concealed her original identity, stepping ashore as an imperious young upper-class English woman, that it would never have occurred to any of the islanders to question her. In those days you knew your place in society, and kept it. It was only after the Second World War that the class structure in Australia began to break down, despite the notion fondly held but seldom demonstrated by the working classes that Jack was as good as his master. The islanders would almost certainly have sniggered behind their hands at all Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan appeared to represent. At the same time they would have been completely in awe of someone as grand and prepossessing. Attempting to pronounce her surname with the correct accent would have been seen as putting on the dog to the extreme. Even today she was known as Nicole Len-was-Jo-dan, and very few people had the courage or closeness with her to call her Nicole. I had always, even as an adult, referred to her as ‘Miss’. It had taken a barnstorming Jimmy to break down the name barrier and call her Nicole ma’am and, latterly, Countess.

  Now I was in this formidable woman’s home, sitting on a comfortable if somewhat worn brocaded couch with carved black mahogany dragon-claw legs. The small room had a distinctly oriental appearance. An elaborately woven Chinese silk carpet spread out across the wooden floorboards to encompass the entire room, stopping just six inches short of the skirting boards. Two large chairs that matched the couch held two cats, while a third cat was perched on the armrest furthermost from where I sat. The parrot’s cage rested on a tall but compact table draped with a tasselled green-velvet cloth that fell to the floor. Two small mother-of-pearl inlaid mahogany tables held Tiffany lamps, one beside one of the chairs and the other next to the couch where I sat. A large cherry-coloured lacquered cabinet embroidered with elaborate brass hinges that resembled rampant dragons, and a lock formed in the shape of a dragon’s head, stood in the corner. Above it rested a huge case ending two or three inches from the ceiling and featuring brilliant yellow chrysanthemums as a design. A window with heavy brocade curtains drawn against the outside light, and what I imagined was the cliff-top view out to sea, was set into the wall to my left. Next to the window stood an upright piano with a piano stool on a brass swivel set into three ebony dragon-claw legs. There were no pictures because, with the exception of the cherry-coloured cupboard, bookshelves occupied every inch of the four walls, stretching from floor to ceiling. I estimated that there must have been several thousand books filling them – so jam-packed were the shelves that some volumes stood in piles on the adjacent carpet. She possessed more books than the town’s library. I remarked on the beautifully crafted shelves.

  ‘Yes, they are rather nice. They were the planks that formed the original crate that contained my furniture when I first arrived from Shanghai. I had them cut and polished on the inside as well as the outside by a Chinese master craftsman. If you look carefully on the underside of the shelves, alas you may observe the odd dent sustained from the journey. But when I got here I had Mr Bronson, the carpenter from the co-op, cut them to fit the walls, and he restored the polish and shine as much as he could to the underside. I remember him modestly observing that the crate had been beautifully made, and the shelves it became deserved a better carpenter then he’d ever be to do the fitting and dovetailing. He was a dear man and passed away when you were a small boy, Jack,’ she said as she disappeared into the next room.

  I knew of Mr Bronson, the carpenter, because he’d carved a crook-looking Madonna and Child for the Catholic church, but Father Crosby had replaced it with the lurid plaster model with the flaming heart after the old man died. As an aside, several years ago I discovered Bronson’s original carving in the church cellar, and it is now on display at the Launceston Art Gallery where it is considered a bit of a masterpiece.

  I told Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan the story of Mr Bronson’s Madonna and Father Crosby and had no sooner done so when the bloody parrot said, ‘I beg your pardon – would you mind repeating that please?’

  ‘Oh, do keep quiet, Vowelfowl!’ Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan called out. ‘He’s such an old curmudgeon. I’ll have to put the cloth over his cage – otherwise he’ll be interrupting us all evening. Excuse me please, Jack, I shan’t be a moment.’ I could see that this parrot was far from a simple pet that shared her life. They probably talked a great deal to one another, whereas she hadn’t even drawn my attention to the three cats lounging about. I guess while a cat may agree to live with you, it’s always on its terms.

  Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan returned with a second green-velvet drape that she threw over the cage. ‘Polly needs a pee!’ the parrot called out.

  ‘Oh dear. I really must apologise, Jack – Sir Victor Sassoon taught him that.’ She didn’t elaborate, but I tucked the name away for future reference. It was the second time she’d mentioned him and there weren’t too many sirs around our neck of the woods – the only ones I’d ever met were the Tasmanian premier, Sir Robert Cosgrove, and the governor, both at the medal ceremony. This Sassoon bloke must have been close to her.

  ‘Let me get you a drink, Jack. Would you care for champagne?’

  I hesitated, not sure whether to bluff it out, but decided to come clean. ‘I’ve never tried it,’ I said, trying to sound offhand, as if the decision not to drink champagne had been of my own making.

  ‘Oh, then you must!’ she insisted. ‘I’ve had several bottles tucked away for just over twenty years and while I turn them religiously, I’ve never really had an occasion to open one. One cannot drink champagne alone – it’s such a joyous, sharing drink.’

  Twenty-something years seemed a long time for a bunch of bottles to hang around the kitchen and I wondered how this particular champagne would taste after all that time. I began to question what I had let myself in for. First Chinese food, and now plonk that had been lying around since I was a boy. Then it struck me how sad her last statement was. How very lonely she must have been – in fact, was. She hadn’t even had someone to share the few bottles of grog she’d had stored away all these years. Why? Why had a young woman with the improbable name of Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan arrived on Queen Island looking like someone from the cover of Vogue to live a life that had been busy enough, but completely isolated from all she’d previously known?

  After removing the Tiffany lamp and placing it on the carpet, she brought the small lacquer table beside the couch to
rest in front of me. The circle where the base of the lamp had stood was clean while the rest of the table carried a thin patina of dust. ‘Oh dear – I never seem to have time to dust!’ she exclaimed. ‘Excuse me, won’t you, Jack.’

  ‘It’s only a bit of dust,’ I said. ‘Can’t harm you.’

  She left the room but, instead of the duster I’d anticipated, returned with a silver champagne bucket from which protruded the foil neck of a bottle of French champagne. She placed it down within the clean circle on the table, almost as if that’s what it had been intended for all along. Then she removed two champagne glasses from the cherry-lacquered cabinet. ‘Darn,’ she said, ‘the dust seems to get into everything, I’ll have to give these a rinse.’ She returned a short while later with the two flat wide-brimmed glasses clean and polished. ‘Can’t put champagne into a dusty glass,’ she explained, then added, ‘I say, Jack, isn’t this exciting? I haven’t done this for years. In fact, it’s been twenty-two years between glasses of champagne. How time flies.’

  If she hadn’t had champagne for twenty-two years the dust on the glasses had been allowed a fair while to settle, I thought to myself.

  Pointing to the ice bucket, she said, ‘You do the honours, please, Jack.’ I wasn’t to know at the time, but the first glass of champagne I was ever to taste was a twenty-seven-year-old bottle of vintage Krug.

  There wasn’t any point trying to seem casual about all this – if I messed it up I’d look an even bigger fool. ‘I’ve only seen this done in the movies. I’m not sure I know how . . .’

  ‘Well, now is the perfect time to learn. I do hope there will be many more occasions like this for the three of us!’

  I removed the bottle from the ice bucket, where it had obviously stood for some time as it was icy cold to my touch. Drops of water from the melted ice dripped onto the table and the carpet. ‘Oh blast! I forgot to bring a napkin,’ she commented. ‘I really am too, too careless. Never mind, it won’t do any harm. And as a matter of fact I don’t think I quite know where the damask napkins are kept.’ I suddenly realised that Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan was nervous, another first as far as I was concerned. But she wasn’t alone – I was shitting myself, not knowing what to expect from the bottle I held. I’d seen champagne bottles explode against the hull of a ship in newsreels at the movies and make a fearful mess and she’d told me this bottle was at least twenty years old!