Browning Battles On

by Peter Corris

  The day was warm and there was a stiff breeze coming off the water. My head was full of memories, sweet and sour, as I followed the concrete path around the beachfront. The old sea baths were showing signs of wear and tear; the facade needed a coat of paint and the admission prices had almost worn away. I looked closely, trying to read the figures. It looked like twopence for adults and a penny for children, but that couldn't be true any more. I turned around to look at the house and experienced a shock like a punch in the solar plexus. The house wasn't there. The driveway, the garden, the stables and the ugly red brick pile itself were all gone. The hill was occupied by a hospital.

  I leaned back against the sea baths' wall and lit a cigarette with a shaking hand. Somehow, you expect the house you grew up in to endure forever, even if, as in my case, you half hated it and fled from it as soon as you could. You may change but it shouldn't, at least not too much. To see it swept away altogether shook me. I was suddenly aware that people were looking at me. I had been oblivious of them, but things were coming back into focus. I straightened up and took a few brave puffs on my fag. So what if it's gone? I thought. I remembered 'Wild Bill's' drunken rages and his whistling strap. My mother's gentle, useless pleas. If you think I'm going to make a pilgrimage to the cemetery you've got another think coming.

  I caught the first train back to Sydney.

  When I got to the flat I found Finch tidying up. This was something I hadn't seen him do before and I watched in amazement as he attempted to dust the top of a bookcase. 'Tamara's coming back,' he said. 'Due in tonight. You'll have to move out I'm afraid.'

  There was no arguing with that. The flat was definitely a three's-a-crowd kind of place. I gave Peter a hand with the dishes, which meant washing every single cup, saucer, plate and glass in the place. We had rather let the housekeeping go. When we'd finished, only breaking two or three pieces as I recall, Peter shook my hand and practically pushed me out the door.

  'Got to clean myself up, too. Best of luck, Dick. Be seeing you.'

  I shouldered my kitbag, bought a paper and made for the nearest pub. Turning to the 'rooms to let' section I got my third shock for the day—rents in Sydney had skyrocketed. A furnished room in a good suburb cost as much as three pounds a week and the ones at the rate I was interested in, around the one pound mark, did not sound promising: 'attic room', 'sleep-out', 'veranda room' and so on. I was tired after my long and distressing day, but I began the tramp from house to house. I'd marked myself out an acceptable area—Kings Cross, Woolloomooloo, Darlinghurst, Paddington—but my spirits began to fall after the first few enquiries. The rooms I liked, with a bit of space and light and reasonable facilities, I couldn't afford and the ones I could afford were flea traps.

  I inspected floors so covered in cockroaches that they seemed to move, walls that dripped moisture, boarded-up porches, landings lit by low watt light globes and cellars that required wellington boots to negotiate.

  'Not la-di-da enough for you, eh, Yank?' was the standard reaction when I suggested that these places weren't fit for pigs. Slatternly landladies and men with beer bellies that made it hard to get by them on the stairs mocked me and made it clear that if I didn't take the room someone else would. After a couple of hours of this I ended up outside a narrow terrace in Crown Street, Darlinghurst. I was hungry, my feet were sore and I was feeling ill from some of the foul air I'd breathed. I knocked and lowered my bag wearily to the pavement.

  'Yeah?' The voice came from above. I looked up. The balcony overhung the footpath.

  'I've come about the room.'

  'You a Yank?'

  I'd suspected that being taken for an American had inflated the prices of the rooms I'd been shown. After rejecting yet another rat hole I lost my temper. 'No, for Christ's sake,' I shouted. 'I'm a bloody Australian!'

  'All right, all right, don't do your block. Hang on and I'll let you in.'

  I caught the glimpse of a female face and the flick of red, silky fabric. That's how I came to meet Ushi and to live in a brothel.

  16

  Ursula Tanvier was half French and half German.

  'The top half is French and the bottom half is German,' she used to say. She had a small face framed by dark hair. Her brown eyes were huge. She had small, high, hard breasts, slender arms and a small waist. Then she expanded; her hips were wide and her bottom generous. Her legs, although shapely, were large. I found these odd proportions very erotic—physical perfection has never counted greatly with me, although it's agreeable when it happens along. When women's characteristics are at issue, give me a loving disposition every time. That's what Ushi had, in buckets.

  She showed me the room—a pleasant, spacious, scrupulously clean one at the back of the house with a view towards Hyde Park. Ushi was wearing a red satin dressing gown with a long skirt. Her hair was still wet from washing and she had no makeup on. She was quite tall in her bare feet, and I was somewhat discomforted by the way she looked at me—like a casting director surveying a bunch of extras.

  Eventually she smiled, leaned back against the wall on the landing outside the room and said, 'One pound per week.'

  'It's great. I'll take it. I can't understand why it's still available. The ad's been in the paper all day.'

  'Lots of triers,' she said. 'You're only the second bloke I've let in. I told the others the room had already gone.'

  I put my kitbag on the double bed, a solid-looking brass job, and turned to face her. 'How come?'

  'Me 'n Pam're working girls. Pam lives here with me. D'you know what I mean?'

  Tricky, I thought. Don't want to jump to the wrong conclusion, but don't want to look dumb either. I recalled the sitting room I'd glimpsed on the way to the stairs—a red velvet sofa and a big, gilt-framed mirror. The scent in the air wasn't from roses and, although Ushi was without makeup, her finger and toenails were painted the brightest red I'd ever seen.

  I shrugged and opted for honesty. 'I think I know what you mean. You entertain men here. I'm broadminded. This is the best room for the price I've seen and I want it. I'll be out a lot. I won't get in your way.'

  'That's not it. We want a man around, but we don't want him bludging off us.'

  'I've got a job.'

  'Good. You're big. How old are you?'

  'Forty.'

  'You look it. Been in the war?'

  I nodded. Well, I had been, in a way. 'I was in the Canadian army. But I'm an Australian, like I told you. How about you?'

  Something about her face and movements made me ask. That was when she told me she was half French and half German, but not the rest of it. 'Suppose Pam or me struck a bit of bother, would you help out?'

  I had a good deal of experience of brothels in my younger days, and I knew that most clients were nervous or drunk or both. A man with his pants on has a big advantage over one with them off. I removed my hat and gave her a half bow. 'I'd be happy to.'

  'OK. I'm Ushi Tanvier. Who're you?'

  'Dick Browning.'

  She put her hand out and I shook it. She smiled at me, showing slightly protuberant, slightly gapped teeth. I was starting to find everything about her arousing. She pulled her hand free and turned it palm up. 'A quid in advance,' she said.

  I paid her, which left me very little money in hand. She gave me a latchkey and showed me the bathroom and kitchen. The whole house was spotless and, if it was slightly overdone in the mirrors and soft furnishings department, I wasn't going to object.

  'D'you cook, Dick?' Ushi asked.

  'No.'

  'Good. Me'n Pam usually have our evening meals out in the line of business, and we don't eat much other times on account of our figures. Also, we don't want to stink the place up with snags and onions and such.'

  'The smelliest thing I make is coffee,' I said. 'Not that there's any coffee around just now.'

  'Oh, we can get plenty from the Yanks. Look, we've got some now.'

  She opened a cupboard and showed me several large, unopened packets of PX coffee. Sh
e told me that one of Pam's customers had given her a percolator, which she'd never got around to using. I opened the box, assembled it and had coffee perking on the gas stove in no time flat. We sat in the kitchen, drank our coffee and talked about America. Ushi had heard a lot about it and wanted to go there. She asked me questions like, 'What does a hamburger taste like?' and I tried to tell her. It was fun. Then the telephone rang. She spoke briefly, gulped the rest of her coffee and went into a mad rush from her bedroom to the bathroom and back again about ten times. When she left she was wearing a green silk dress and a white wrap, seamed stockings, gold shoes with high heels and I was jealous and in love.

  I went out for a meal, spent some money on beer and cigarettes, and returned to the empty Crown Street house. I've always been an incurable snoop and I took a good look through Ushi's room. I would have investigated Pam's too, except that it was locked. Ushi possessed a lot of clothes, shoes and make-up and very little else. Her private papers consisted of the usual things—baptismal certificate, some school reports and photographs, a diary with only a couple of entries, some documents relating to her mother's hospitalisation and death from influenza in 1919. Ushi, I calculated, could only have been a child at the time. A newspaper clipping, undated, recounted her success in an interschool swimming carnival—Ursula Tanvier had won the under-fifteen 50 metres and 100 metres races in freestyle and breaststroke and had finished second in the diving competition. It seemed to be the only record of her teenage years she cared to keep.

  I drank my beer and went to bed early, tired after the accommodation-seeking tramp. Ushi and Pam could have returned home with Americans or Hindustanis for all I knew. After several weeks on Finch's lumpy couch, I slept deeply, peacefully and very late in the big, soft brass bed.

  The first person I encountered in the morning, what little was left of it, was Pam. She was a redhead, as a matter of choice rather than nature, with a bright friendly smile below eyes as hard as prison bars.

  'Hi, big boy,' she said. 'Ushi reckons you make great coffee.'

  'That's right. You must be Pam.'

  'Pamela Walker. No jokes about streets, if you please. Make us a pot now, would you, love? I had a hell of a night. He had me out dancing—which is to say, trying to keep my feet from being squashed—and drinking bloody champagne, till two a.m.'

  I made the coffee and she drank a cup so hot it would have scalded my throat. She didn't seem to notice.

  'Oh, that's good. You're a treasure. Got a cigarette?'

  I gave her one and we both lit up. She was small and neatly built and sat very straight, although she looked tired. Her hair was hanging down to her shoulders and her face was very pale. I put her in the mid-thirties with the clock ticking fast. She wore Chinese-style pyjamas with a high collar and mules.

  'Where's Ushi?' I asked.

  'What's today? Friday? She's out at Waverley visiting her mother's grave. Always does that of a Friday morning, rain, hail or shine. She'll be back soon. Well, ta for the coffee. I have to go and see my Friday afternoon fella.'

  Soon after Ushi came in, wet from a sudden spring shower. I told her I'd met and liked Pam. Then I made coffee and we sat in the kitchen and talked, which she was in a mood to do. She told me about her French mother coming out to South Australia to work as a governess for a wealthy German family.

  'Old story,' she said. 'Herr whatever his name was got her pregnant and kicked her out. She came to Sydney, had me and died in the 'flu epidemic after the war.'

  I had witnessed the ravages of that epidemic in Europe and could sympathise. I didn't tell Ushi that though—I was only supposed to be forty years of age, remember. Instead, I asked what had happened to her. 'You must have been very young.'

  She nodded. 'I was three. I was fostered out. I don't remember her and I don't even have a picture of her. Some relations from France wrote to me years after and what they told me is all I know.'

  'She must have been an educated woman. The family should have looked after you.'

  'The chap who wrote said they lost everything in the war. They didn't want to have anything to do with me. I think Mum must have been a bit of a black sheep.'

  She told me that the foster homes had been bad.

  'When I was little it was all right. They clucked over me. Then I grew up this funny shape.'

  'Your shape looks fine to me.'

  She was too deep in memories to notice my tone or to take offence. 'I hated school. Nuns, Christ, how I hate nuns! I was a lot of trouble, so I was sent back to the orphanage. Got taken on twice more. The first pair wanted a slave, the second time the man wanted somewhere to wet his wick. I shot through, worked at this and that and ended up here. Jesus, I haven't talked like that in years. Must be the coffee on top of visiting Mum. Always makes me soppy.'

  I offered her a cigarette, which she refused.

  'I like the smell, but I can't stand inhaling the smoke. Go ahead though, Dick. I must say you're a good listener. What's your story?'

  I gave her an edited version, heavy on the Hollywood stuff, very light on the rest. I smoked only one cigarette. We moved on from coffee to brandy and coffee, and then to brandy neat. She told me that her American of the night before had left her at the door with a handshake.

  'He decided he loved his wife too much to spend the night with me. Can you imagine that?'

  'No,' I said. 'I can't.'

  'You married, Dick?'

  I told her a little about May Lin, but not about the others. I was genuinely confused about my current marital status.26

  'I don't know,' I said. 'The way it is in Los Angeles, it's hard to tell.'

  'I'd love to go there.'

  'I'd love to take you.'

  'Would you, Dick? Would you really?'

  By this time, she'd shucked off her raincoat and her hair had dried into a ring of curls around her face. She was wearing a red blouse and a black skirt. Her eyes glittered from the brandy, and something else. I leaned across and kissed her wide, soft mouth. She kissed me back and, although I was half drunk, I knew enough about kissing to tell that this wasn't professional. Our tongues thrust and writhed together like snakes.

  'Ushi,' I gasped, 'I want you.'

  'Well, take me, big boy. Take me.'

  I stood and she did the same. We gripped each other—bum, breasts and crotch—then rushed out of the kitchen, up the stairs, towards the back of the house. She led the way and the sight of her big hips and buttocks rolling in front of me made me pant with lust. I caught her on the landing and swept her towards my room and the big brass bed.

  Her fingers clawed at the buttons of her blouse as I was stripping off my shirt. 'Pam?' she said.

  I spun her around and unhooked her brassiere. 'With her fella.'

  Ushi pushed my hands away, freed her breasts and lay back on the bed, unbuttoning her skirt.

  'Good on her,' she said. 'Good on her. Come on, Dick. Come on!'

  I plunged forward and then it was all nipples and fingers and tongues and hard things and soft things and warm, sweet rushes of love.

  17

  I wasn't the first man to be romantically involved with a working prostitute and I won't be the last. It isn't as hard a role to play as you might think. The woman swears she gets no pleasure from her trade and the man believes her. Of course she might derive the occasional bit of enjoyment, and of course the man is jealous, but there are worse problems—such as snoring or frigidity—and Ushi and I got along extremely well, all things considered. For one thing, she met Finch and wasn't attracted to him. This made her a very rare specimen indeed.

  'He loves himself too much to love anyone else,' she observed, when I asked her the reason for her apparent indifference to Peter.

  'I'm not sure that's true,' I said. 'He's been a good friend to me.'

  'Friend, fine. I'm talking about love.'

  I left it there. Love was a difficult subject under the circumstances. Only on two occasions did I have to intervene in dealings between Ushi and Pam
and their clients. A US Marines colonel got excited one night and wanted to bring his sidearm into the sex play. He was badly out of condition, and I didn't have any trouble getting the Colt .45 automatic, which I kept, away from him. An Australian officer objected to Pam's insistence on him using a condom. He found it amusing to inflate a few and burst them like balloons. Then he got rough and I had to tap him on the skull with a shifting spanner.

  He lay sprawled across the bed, naked except for his singlet and socks. Pam began to work on him with her hand.

  'What're you doing?' I said.

  'When he wakes up he'll have a frenchie on and I'll get my money. Thanks, Dick. You can go now.'

  It could have taken the fun and flavour out of sex but it didn't. Ushi and I went at it enthusiastically whenever we could. As I say, I found her unusual proportions unusually exciting—it was like having two different women at the one time, without the complications, if you see what I mean. She was cheerful, as generous with her money as with her body, and we had a hell of a good time through the last months of 1944. It was a cheerful time generally. The war news was all good, with victory in Europe and the Japanese on the run throughout the Pacific.

  I did some location scouting for Eric Porter and found a house in Wahroonga that was ideal for the Selden mansion in A Son is Born. It had a circular staircase inside and big, opulent rooms. There was a swimming pool and a balcony at the front overlooking a sweeping driveway. The owner was happy to let the place for a few weeks and Porter assigned me the job of finding some suitable cars. The script called for a sports car and a saloon that had to be driven off a cliff and totally wrecked.