And the audience was jolly, despite the collapsing world out side. When I was in China in the 1980s as a cultural ambassador, the themes of the visit were Brotherhood and Peace and Inter national Friendship, which my Chinese hosts toasted in many speeches with many glasses of rice wine. As remarkable as Chinese cuisine is, it is limited in its combination of alcohol with food – there are no wines, no martinis. (I once said this to a Chinese communist apparatchik and it sent her into a rage.) But, now, at least, I was able to help correct that. Here I was, back in China, teaching them how to mix a martini. Maybe I was a tipping point in the history of China and would topple them into decadence.
Together that night, the audience, three Horsemen of the Apocalypse and I pondered the mysteries of the martini.
A week later, after the last performance of my martini lecture in Shanghai, the Consul-General Sam Gerovich took me aside and said they had received news that day that Richard Hall had died but had kept it from me until after my lecture.
I thanked him and then took my martini out on the balcony of the restaurant looking down on the Huangpu River and the moving lights of its interminable river traffic, and remembered Richard and all the drinking, dining and arguments we had shared since we were seventeen.
I recalled two things Richard taught me. When we were young cadet journalists we were talking about sex. He was a Catholic and I an atheistic socialist. I do not know what sexual experience he’d had and although I’d had very little it was, well, already varied. I remember him saying, ‘Sex is a tangible expression of the intangible.’ I liked that. I was to learn that it is sometimes the tangible expression of the tangible and that that’s fine too.
Later in our lives after he’d gone into politics, we were talking about government funding of the arts. I was interested in how we could convince people and politicians that the arts were important and worth funding. We looked at arguments about art being the ‘memory of the nation’ and that avant-garde art taught people how to think creatively; that it was important for a culture to ‘have its own stories’.
At the end of the discussion, he said, ‘I’m afraid a belief in the value of the arts is a matter of faith,’ and then he laughed. ‘Tell that to Caucus. Tell that to the electorate.’
Richard did tell them. And they did believe him.
Richard did not drink spirits at any time in his life. He believed that by sticking to beer and wine he would not become an alcoholic. He died of medical complications aggravated and almost certainly caused by alcohol, but his mind was in great shape through to the end.
My last meeting with him was in hospital just before I left for Hong Kong and Shanghai. He wanted to piss. I said that I would get a nurse but he mumbled, ‘You do it.’ I found the urine bottle and pulled down the bedding, pulled down his pyjamas, and put his penis into the bottle. I said, ‘After this I will get you a copy of Playboy and we can do the other thing.’
He laughed, in a sick, constricted way. ‘Don’t make me laugh, it hurts.’
Richard was a very traditional male. He and I had never shaken hands, put our arms around each other’s shoulder, hugged, let alone cheek-kissed affectionately, even in that new male way we were supposed to adopt in the days of liberation back in the 1970s.
The holding of his penis and putting it in the urine bottle is, I think, the only physical contact I ever had with him during nearly fifty years of knowing him as a close friend.
I left the balcony, went back inside to the milling crowd and had another martini.
Where are They Now?
And what has happened to those lively and, for me, hugely significant people who inspired the characters in the story that began this memoir, the chapter ‘Martini’ from my book Forty-Seventeen? And the others who came to mind during the writing, those people from my youthful days which this memoir brings to my mind again as I sit here with a martini.
My Male Lover. My lover from my teenage years, Paul J., who wanders through this memoir, is married with grown children, and, until recently, was still my lover. He says he has never had any other gay relationship. He hardly drinks now and anyhow never drank martinis. He does not read the New Yorker any more.
Trevor the Solicitor. I do not know what happened to Trevor the solicitor who took my anal virginity when I was a teenager after I had flirted with him and played hard-to-get. We did arrange to meet again some ten years later in the city when I was twenty-eight; before the drinks I’d had sexual fantasies about being with him again, but I found he was no longer interested in me. I was too old, or the passing of time had changed things. I wrote a story about the meeting entitled ‘Ten Years’, in Futility and Other Animals.
The Older Woman. The older woman, Norma Crinion, who taught me, among many things, how to make a martini, died from lung cancer at about sixty. A paradoxical woman, she was educated at Monte Sant’Angelo Mercy College, an exclusive Catholic Girls’ School, but became a communist in the dying days of the Party in the 1980s after working as an executive secretary of the Institute of Directors. I remember that she once became fed up with a job she had and asked me to call them and tell them she’d been killed in a road accident and go and pick up some books from her desk.
Some nights she would telephone me and ask me to come around and if I couldn’t come, she would ask me to ‘be a darling’ and call the cab, give money and tip to the cab driver, and ask him to buy her a cooked chicken, a two-litre flagon of wine, a carton of cigarettes, and deliver them to her. She never married. During her life, she was a lover of some of my friends, including Penfold and Dr Anderson, and of some people with high media profiles. She once went to a drive-in to see a must-see film with film theorist and actor John Flaus, then an impoverished student. Neither of them owned a car so they took a taxi (for which she paid) and were prepared to sit on the ground in a car space on a blanket, however the owner of the drive-in loaned them two chairs and they sat together on the chairs in a car space and watched the movie.
She was manager of the newspaper City Voices, which I started and edited.
She said around the time of her death that she wasn’t worried about dying: ‘I have always had an on-and-off relationship with life.’
Jenny the Poet. The poet Jennifer Rankin died in 1979 at thirty-eight of cancer. Before she died, when she was just becoming sick from the cancer, we did a reading tour together in Tasmania. On our arrival we were taken to the house of a poet where we were to stay. I looked around and pronounced the accommodation unacceptable for sick Jennifer (and for snobbish me). From then on we booked ourselves into the best hotels in whatever town we were staying and sent the bill to the sponsor of the reading tour.
While on the tour, we visited a church near where the painter John Glover had lived in the 1830s and which he had used, and we signed our names in the visitor’s book. Jenny wanted us to play ‘Bride and Bridegroom’ and we went to the altar and stood there holding hands and she had us go through the marriage vows from the Book of Common Prayer she found in a stack at the back of the church. After we went through the words of the ceremony she took on the voice of a minister and said, ‘You may kiss the bride’, and we kissed. She said that staying in the hotels was our honeymoon, but we did not have sex on that tour.
As she approached death she told me that she was giving up chemotherapy and taking on natural cures and meditation. I said to her, ‘Jenny, do both.’ She said if she did, the natural cures wouldn’t work. It would be bad faith.
During her development as a poet, she befriended Galway Kinnell and Ted Hughes, and it was Galway in a bar in Honolulu who told me that she had died. She married the painter David Rankin, who now lives in New York, and together they raised Thomas.
No one seems to know the whereabouts of Thomas, who was one and two when I knew him.
Penfold. Penfold ended up as a professor in the Department of Law at the University of New South Wales. He died of lung cancer in his fifties. We met only once after we’d both left the country. Recently a cou
ple of his children came to see me asking me to tell them more about their father who had left the marriage when they were young.
The Young Girl. The young girl in the story ‘Martini’ evolved from my relationship with Fiona Giles. She was the girl whom I taught to make a martini when she was eighteen, married her high-school boyfriend, was unfaithful to him with me, divorced him at twenty-seven, joined up with the Older Man – me – and we went to live in Oxford while she did her doctorate.
After a few stormy and exhilarating years Fiona and I split up and my heart was broken and I went into therapy three days a week for three years (which, of course, was about my problems as shown up by the relationship, not about the relationship as such). She lived for a time in New York, and has edited two books of stories and has written two books and went on to marry and have two children. She hardly drinks and never really liked the martini.
Recently we found ourselves together on a panel at a writers’ conference discussing the subject ‘Intimate Journalism’.
As I sat and listened to her contribution and admired her, it crashed down on me that she and I should be talking about the book Forty-Seventeen. I had written it while living with her and in some ways it drew on our lives together but until that moment the book had not come into my consciousness although I had been fully aware that we would be together on the panel and having lunch together after the panel discussion.
After she had spoken and sat down, I passed her a note saying, ‘Fiona, what about us in Forty-Seventeen?’ She laughed.
It was the only one of my books that had no dedication because I did not want her life to be blighted by people saying, ‘Oh, so you’re the girl in Forty-Seventeen.’
Her personal copy is inscribed by me this way: ‘This book is of course silently dedicated to you – only you and I know the true story.’
Recently we were having a drink together and talking about this book and she, in her forties, said, ‘I now rather like the idea of being remembered as the young girl.’
My Young Wife. What of the young wife from the martini story and our life before we were arguing about martinis? Margaret and I had grown up in a country town, had known each other since about age five, went to the same Sunday school, went to the same infant, primary and high schools, the same church, and we married in that church to please our families, even though we were atheists. We read the Communist Manifesto together at high school.
She went on to two marriages and had two children by her second marriage and one by her third and has remained married for years now. She became a magazine editor in London. So much for ‘I’m quite happy to be the country girl’. We are still in touch now and then.
Recently I was asked back to our former high school as a writer and I decided to read them a story based on our young love and about the school that they were attending and where the storytelling started. It was on this visit to the school that I had a stunning realisation that she too had A Story Not Told.
Memoir of a Story: Story of a Memoir
Noisy teenagers swirl by me in the corridor. They seem to flow around and passed me as a lifestream. I feel like a bear standing mid-river.
The ‘old school’ I’d known is obliterated by new buildings (back in my day it had just been built and was then the ‘new’ school). The new school is now my old school.
I was able to find Room 17 where I’d first kissed Margaret my girlfriend and put my hand on her breasts through her school uniform, the first breasts I’d touched since I was a baby. And we were to give each other our virginities (at least, I believe she was a virgin).
The teacher who had organised my visit to the school had not yet arrived and I found myself standing in front of the buzzing class. Some of the Year 11 girls had their nails varnished, some wore earrings in pierced ears and other jewellery. One girl even did the college toss with her shampooed and conditioned hair, as she looked at me standing uneasily in front of the class. I looked away.
When the teacher came in I felt that I was a student again, a student who’d been caught showing-off in front of the class. I felt I should sit down with the rest of the students and take out my books.
After the teacher had introduced me I told the students that I would read a chapter from one of my novels which told of my days at their school in the 1950s.
‘In Forty-Seventeen a novel I wrote a few years ago, I have some letters written by a girl student at a high school to her boyfriend who left school the year before and has gone to the city to work on a newspaper.
‘You don’t have to be a mind-reader to know the boy in the story is based on me.
‘The letters are a blending of imagination and factual record – I drew on the letters written to me by my then girlfriend and which I had kept. I thought they’d give you a taste of what it was like here at the high school back then – and maybe you can tell me what’s changed.’
Could they even envisage me having a ‘girlfriend’? Oddly, I felt sucked back through time to where I felt increasingly closer to their age. I felt somehow back at school. The sense of my contemporary self, or at least, my persona there today in front of the students – ‘the writer’ – was becoming unstable.
‘I was a year ahead of her and I’d gone to the city to be a cadet journalist and she was finishing her final year of high school. She wrote to me every week throughout the school year. The letters provide a great picture of life at school back then. Maybe it will connect with the way you experience school now. Or maybe things have changed too much. We’ll see. The story is entitled “A Portrait of a Virgin Girl”.’
I looked up over my glasses. No tittering, no giggles.
‘She is sixteen and I – I was seventeen.’ Small sensations of being seventeen came to me, further loosening my shell of identity, dissolving any sense of my age. She was a virgin. And I? Not really, although there are quite a few virginities. I was a heterosexual virgin.
‘Each letter in the story begins by repeating the first line as a refrain. I will begin now with her first letter to me.
‘“It’s hard for me to say ‘dearest’ … It’s hard for me to say ‘dearest’. I’ve never written real words of love before …”’
‘Dearest’. Did that sound old-fashioned to them? ‘Uncool’?
‘“Dearest, now there I’ve used the word … Dearest, now there I’ve the used the word and I hope it makes you happier … Your letters are on the lounge room table when I get home from school and I then journey into my bedroom where I emotionalise …”’
Had it made her happy to use the word ‘dearest’? I guessed not.
‘“At the local show I had a passion. At the local show I had a passion after I watched a sideshow where there was a hypnotist … the idea of having a spell or a trance put on me is frightening as another part of me would like it very much methinks …”’
As I read, I remembered our heavy petting, and the trance of that, the feverish urge to surrender to our wilful bodies but the resistance offered by her judgement and by the fear rising from our sexual inexperience.
What lay ahead of us was our first sex, then the wilful wedding against our parents’ advice, soon after we’d left school, the prickly confused marriage, the counselling, the long separation and then a flirtation with the idea of getting back together, the divorce, our curiosity about each other at our occasional, sometimes erotic reunions in London over the years, the unfolding of my true sexuality.
‘“Forgive me for being such a fool when you were home. Forgive me for being such a fool when you were home. I said some stupid things and I hurt you … you know the whole time what it was I was scared of – that one thing leads to another from saying ‘I love you’ and I wasn’t ready for the physical thing which comes from saying it …”’
I broke into the story to tell them that Margaret and I had ‘indulged in heavy petting’ down in the long grass at the edge of the playing fields while on prefect duty. ‘I see that the long grass has now been cut.’
I laughed. They didn’t. No expressions on the faces of Year 11.
‘“It was really great to be a ‘real girlfriend’. It was really great to be a ‘real girlfriend’ with you in the city last weekend. As much as I wanted to amaze them I didn’t tell Mum and Dad about going with you to the Greek Club and having the glass of wine …”
‘“I was in the Dainty-Lingerie shop this morning … I was in the Dainty-Lingerie shop this morning returning something (never mind what) and inside there was a woman buying a nightdress and her husband was there giving approval on her selection. It was funny to see a man doing such a thing … I can’t describe what it was that made me feel funny …”
‘“I’m sorry I forgot to read your short stories … I’m sorry I forgot to read your short stories you sent me …”’
Even now a shot of pain passes through my heart. How could she have done that? To have received my first short stories and then not responded. Was she frightened of what she might read? Or was she bored with it all? Was it all too much for her? Why hadn’t I got the message back then that all this was only some sort of trying-out of life for her, as it must have been for me, although we could never allow ourselves to think of it that way. And that she was now trapped in it. And what had I felt? I’d been driven by confused and hungry needs. Why had she gone along with it? Why had we ended up married? Why had I been driven to this girl, why had I persevered with such obsession? Was it because I loved her girlhood – was I trying to steal her girlhood?
‘“… And what is this ‘mysterious story’ you won’t show me? When will I ever ‘be ready’ to read it …?”’
That was ‘The Story Not Shown’, written in that year, and which was to become another chapter in my novel Forty-Seventeen thirty years later and never shown or told to her. There were other ‘Stories Not Told’ from my first years in the city. This story describes my visit to a prostitute.
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