and I had been—oooooo-aa, that’s an interesting tense!—I had a funny feeling that there were fences I’d be wise not to try to peek over. Merle and I were sort of equals, even if she had had a couple of affairs and I hadn’t had any. Whereas Pappy is ten years older than me and immensely more experienced. I can’t summon up the courage even to pretend that I’m her equal.
She mourned that we weren’t seeing much of each other these days—no lunches, no walks to and from Queens. But she knows Chris Hamilton, and agrees that she’s a bitch.
“Watch your step” was how she put it.
“If you mean, don’t look at the men, I’ve already taken that point,” I answered. “Luckily we’re awfully busy, so while she bustles around making a cuppa for some twit in white pants, I get on with the work.” I cleared my throat. “Are you all right?”
“So-so,” she said with a sigh, then changed the subject. “Um, have you met Harold yet?” she asked very casually.
The question surprised me. “The schoolteacher above me? No.”
But she didn’t lead the conversation down that alley either, so I gave up.
After she left I fried myself a couple of snags, wolfed down potato salad and coleslaw, then went upstairs looking for company. Starting at ten means not getting up early, and I had enough sense to know that if I went to bed too early I’d wake with the birds. Jim and Bob were having a meeting, I could hear the buzz of voices through their door, a loudly neighing laugh which didn’t belong to either of them. But Toby’s ladder was down, so I jingled the bell he’s rigged up for visitors, and got an invitation to come on up.
There he was at the easel, three brushes clenched between his teeth, four in his right hand, the one in his left hand engaged in scrubbing the tiniest smidgin of paint on a dry surface. It looked like a wisp of vapour.
“You’re a southpaw,” I said, sitting on white corduroy.
“You finally noticed,” he grunted.
I supposed that the thing he was working on was an excellent piece of work, but I’m not equipped to judge. To me, it looked like a slag heap giving off steam in a thunderstorm, but it caught the eye—very dramatic, wonderful colours. “What is it?” I asked.
“A slag heap in a thunderstorm,” he said.
I was tickled! Harriet Purcell the art connoisseur strikes again! “Do slag heaps smoke?” I asked.
“This one does.” He finished his wisp, carried his brushes to the old white enamel sink and washed them thoroughly in eucalyptus soap, then dried them and polished the sink with Bon Ami. “At a loose end?” he asked, putting the kettle on.
“Yes, as a matter of fact.”
“Can’t you read a book?”
“I often do,” I said a little tartly—oh, he could rub one up the wrong way!—”but I’m working in Casualty now, so when I get off duty I’m in no fit condition to read a book. What a rude bastard you are!”
He turned to grin at me, eyebrows wriggling—so attractive! “You talk as if you read books,” he said, folding a laboratory filter paper, inserting it into a glass laboratory funnel, and spooning powdery coffee into it. I was fascinated, not having seen him making coffee before. The screen was shoved out of the way for a change—it must have got a mark on it.
The coffee was brilliant, but I thought I’d stick to my new electric percolator. Easier, and I’m not all that fussy. Naturally he’d be fussy, it’s in his soul.
“What do you read?” he asked, sitting down and throwing one leg over the arm of his chair.
I told him everything from Gone With The Wind to Lord Jim to Crime and Punishment, after which he said that he confined his own reading to tabloid newspapers and books on how to paint in oils. He suffered, I discovered, a huge inferiority complex about his lack of formal education, but he was too prickly about it for me to attempt any repair measures.
Artists traditionally dressed like hobos, I had thought, but he dresses very well. The slag heap in a thunderstorm had received his attentions in clothes the Kingston Trio wouldn’t have been ashamed to perform in—crew-neck mohair sweater, the beautifully ironed collar of his shirt folded down over it, a pair of trousers creased sharp as a knife, and highly polished black leather shoes. Not a skerrick of paint on himself, and when he’d leaned over me to put my mug down I couldn’t smell a trace of anything except some expensive piney-herby soap. Obviously tightening nuts in a factory paid extremely well. Knowing him a little bit by now, I thought that his nuts would be perfect, neither too loose nor too tight. When I said that to him, he laughed until the tears ran down his face, but he wouldn’t share the joke with me.
“Have you met Harold yet?” he asked later.
“You’re the second person tonight to put that question to me,” I said. “No, and I haven’t met Klaus either, but no one asks if I’ve met him. What’s so important about Harold?”
He shrugged, didn’t bother to answer. “Pappy, eh?”
“She looks terrible.”
“I know. Some bastard got a bit too enthusiastic.”
“Does that happen often?”
He said no, apparently oblivious to the hard stare I was giving him. His face and eyes looked concerned but not anguished. What a good actor he was! And how much it must hurt him to have to endure that kind of rejection. I wanted to offer him comfort, but that tongue of mine has developed a habit lately of getting too tied up to speak, so I said nothing.
Then we talked about his life in the bush following his dad around, of this station and that station out where the Mitchell grass stretches to infinity “like a silver-gold ocean”, he said. I could see it, though I never have. Why don’t we Aussies know our own country? Why do we all have this urge to go to England instead? Here I am in this house stuffed with extraordinary people, and I feel like a gnat, a worm. I don’t know anything! How can I ever grow tall enough to look any of them in the eye as equals?
My goodness, I was in a self-abnegatory frame of mind last night when I wrote the above! It’s Toby, he has that effect on me. I would really like to go to bed with him! What’s the matter with Pappy, that she can’t see what’s right under her nose?
Well, I did it at last. I’ve had the family to dinner in my new flat. I invited Merle too, but she didn’t come. She rang me in January while I was still in Chests, and I had to have a junior tell her that I couldn’t come to the phone, that staff are not allowed to receive private calls. Apparently Merle took it as a personal rebuff, because whenever I’ve phoned her at home since then, her mother says she’s out. The trouble is that she’s a hairdresser, and they seem to spend half their lives on the phone making
