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Italy was home to a cultural heritage as rich as the one his adoptive father had sought to hand him. In Venice, Neil felt he was no more stable than the gently rocking gondolas. Looking into the faces of passers-by—he could not even discern the tourists from the locals — and peering at the stones of the Piazza San Marco and the bricks of the Basilica di San Marco, no secrets were revealed, no answers harvested. So he travelled to Verona, home of Romeo and Juliet, a city on the traveller's route from Milan to Venice, with its Romanesque basilica of San Zeno Maggiore dating from the twelfth century and a Roman amphitheatre built in the first century and still used for concerts. He had now realised that “Italian” had more nuance and diversity than his stereotypes had allowed it. This town had been Etruscan, Roman, German, Venetian, French, Austrian and Italian. Like him, finally Italian.

And he went to Florence, the place where da Vinci had worked. If there was something to be found, surely a clue would be evident there. But, as he paced the streets and steps, he still could not find this unnamed thing he was looking for. It was not revealed to him between the Palazzo Vecchio and the Arno, in the Palazzo degli Uffizi, the sixteenth-cen-tury former government offices and law courts. It was not trapped in worn, cobbled stones, waiting for his gaze to release it.

As Neil stood on the Ponte Vecchio, standing since 1350 and the only bridge in Florence not destroyed in the recent inferno of Allied bombing, he could sense a certain history, but in all that richness, he could sense nothing of himself. No matter where he went, the buildings and pavements, after all they had borne witness to, refused to deliver the truth, his truth, about how all he was viewing was connected to him. Neil ended his travels just as exhausted and unsatisfied as when he had started. That his journey ended without conclusions only raised a persistent demand: “Di mi. Tell me,” he would command the air.

Scientists modify their opinions, even desert their central thesis, if they are presented with sound contrary evidence. That is the way the scientific method is supposed to work. Some, however, cling to their old ideas, making themselves ineffectual, obsolete. They become too afraid to face the humiliating possibility of being wrong, having invested too much emotion and labour in their erroneous results. Creationists cling to their theories in the face of the revelations of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace. Darwin had sought the truth; he had often openly acknowledged he was wrong when contrary evidence was presented to him.

Neil's beliefs were constantly challenged by the revelations of his heritage. The rational knowledge that culture was merely an environmental factor could not counter the emotional longings, his need to find “his place”. It never conquered his need for something tangible, something that would replace the sound of his father speaking in Gaelic, telling him tales of mythical heroes and a land he had grown to love but had never seen and now had no connection to.

Where'er I roam, whatever realms to see,

My heart untravell'd fondly turns to thee.

Neil returned to his life in Sydney. In 1947, he started work as a lecturer in the same science department he had studied in. While he had chosen a career in the biological sciences, he no longer found comfort in the cold rationality of the scientific method. He watched the developments in his field of genetic biology over the years of his professional life, and the emerging dominant theories told him that his family tree, like all family trees, was rooted in Africa. This meant that Neil had African ancestors dating back two million years — another identity, long encoded in his genes, long running in his blood. The “African Eve theory” placed the ancestors of everyone — Celtic, Italian, Tongan or Chinese — back in Africa only a few thousand years ago. Using that theory, and the broadest definition of 'cousin', every marriage is a marriage between cousins. Neil speculated that, under that hypothesis, his adoptive parents were really just distant relatives.

Scientific reasoning, Neil realised, could not be his sole guide. He knew that even those who discover the rules or write the theories that provide the framework for analysis can't be held captive by the pure rationality of science. Charles Darwin had married his first cousin, Emma Wedgewood, even though he was afraid that his children might suffer from ill-health as products of such close relatives. He worried that his genetic material had not been given proper opportunity to compete with stronger genes in the gene pool. Yet he loved Emma deeply, adored her, admitted that she helped make him a success, and he hated being away from her. His scientific rationality, his understanding of genetics and inter-breeding, could not conquer the love he felt for his wife, did not stop his heart from feeling the way it did.

Where'er I roam, whatever realms to see,

My heart untravell'd fondly turns to thee.

One encounter, one thought, haunted Neil, remaining with him all his adult life. He had been walking through the park opposite Central Station in Sydney in the early afternoon of the last shopping day before Christmas. He was laden with wrapped presents from Mark Foy's department store as he walked the path through the shade that protected him from the summer sun of 1953.

The park always made him feel nervous. He pitied the Aborigines in their drunken clusters, and he thought once more of the tales his father had read to him about the beggars at the gate of the wealthy town. As he strode through the tree-filled park, his eyes locked with one of the men, his dirty grey pants and dark green football socks the only clothes he had on. His hair was long and curly and matted with leaves. He was lying on the ground and looking at a brown paper bag that was wrapped around a bottle. As Neil walked past him, the black man looked up at him and continued to hold his gaze. In that look there was some kind of recognition. Somehow the man, drunk on the grass, seemed to know him, to know his mystery, as though Neil could have been one of them.

This unnerved Neil. The thought was too shocking, too shameful to him. To him, the extinction of the Aborigines was inevitable. With their bottles of acidic wine in brown paper bags and their dirty-rag clothes, they would disappear. He could see this dwindling race with their lack of flexibility and inability to adapt when unfavourable changes occurred.

Darwin had seen it in South America, in the extermination of the Jews throughout Europe in the centuries before the Holocaust and in colonised people all over the world. He had been disturbed by the brutality of the genocide that he had seen, but he put it in context. Neil, too, believed this evolution to be natural and could no more be mourned than the millions of species that had already disappeared from the earth. The strong devoured the weak; one makes room for the other to grow. It was the natural order, the struggle for life. Neil believed that mild-mannered Darwin could have possessed no desire to do these remnants of a race any harm; he just sought to understand them. It was beyond his control that his ideas were used for cruel purposes: cold, rational, scientific fact.

Even though, as Neil knew from the findings in his field, we are all distant cousins, he needed to show that he was not one of those fading remnants of a dying race. It was as his father had quoted Oscar Wilde: “The only thing that sustains one through life is the consciousness of the immense inferiority of everybody else.”

Neil had no proof that he was Italian, that he was heir to da Vinci, Puccini and Etruscan villagers, other than the word of his adoptive mother and father. He wanted something that he could hold up to them, those Aborigines in the park, that drunk lying on the grass, who thought they knew him, and say, “I'm not one of you. I'm not a beggar at the gate.”

Later in life, amongst the leafy streets of Paddington, established in his own family home, he would peer into the fair, freckled faces of his children (some so like him, some stamped with the features of his wife, Eliza) to see his Italian lineage. The path to truth, Neil would discover, could be travelled in vain. He found nothing amongst Italian words, food, custom and culture that made him feel the passion and pride that his father's Irish tales and nationalistic reminiscing had given him. And he found nothing that could reconnect him to that Irish tradition once the knowledge he had no blood connection in him severed his ownership of it. From that instability, that question mark, he embraced the nearest thing he did know. He avoided inflicting this pain of the uncertain and irrational onto his children, telling them only of their Irish ancestry as though dark Celtic blood had been passed down to them.

15

1960

C
AROLE DYBALL ENJOYED the crisp Canberra mornings. The frosty air bit into her lungs; the leaves had already changed colour. She inhaled the coldness, as though it were life-giving. Carole had been in the small, tree-lined city for only a few months, long enough to find her way around efficiently and to blend into her surroundings. Her attempts at anonymity were undermined by the sharpness of her navy-blue uniform and appealing features. With her creamy, almond-coloured skin and sporty blonde hair, she'd bloomed since she had joined the Women's Royal Australian Navy Service and moved first to Melbourne, then to the national capital. She had embraced the eastern states, preferring the industry, variety and progressiveness to the insular life of Fremantle. The freshness of her new career, surroundings and experiences gave her complexion a soft glow that enhanced the easy kindness of her face.

Carole caught the shuttle bus around the base. She had shifted towards the window when a man, also in a navy uniform, seated himself beside her.

“Cold today,” he smiled, crossing his arms with a mock shudder.

Carole was wary of men who grinned at her. She turned her attention to this dark-featured man now sitting next to her. “Quite,” she answered, as cool as the air around her. She began to soften with inner warmth as she studied the man's face more closely.

“Where are you off to?”

“That's classified,” she replied, smiling shyly.

He grinned back, his eyebrows arched, “You mean that I am not authorised to know? You obviously don't know who I am. I'm Bob. Bob Brecht.”

“I'm Carole, Carole Dyball. I'm very pleased to meet you Bob-Bob Brecht.” She was unsure why she was so quick to relax with him.

“No. I can assure you that the pleasure is all mine, Carole.” He liked the lightness of the sound of her name. “So, do you like dancing?”

“No. I don't like dancing.”

“Hmmm. Like to keep off your feet, eh? Well, you must like the pictures then. Don't have to dance through them. Just have to sit.”

“Yes, I like the pictures. I like them a lot. But it does depend on what's showing. I don't say yes to just anything.”

“No, that's wise,” joked Bob, enjoying watching the red blush as it crawled across Carole's face as she realised how he was twisting her remark.

“I just meant,” she said quickly, “that
The Grass is Greener
is playing at the moment and I would like to see that.”

“Ah, a Cary Grant film. I'm guessing you're a fan.”

She smiled, relieved that he was not going to tease her further and returned his gaze, taking in his high forehead and the small dark curls that lapped around it. His mouth was firm, his chin well crafted. “I've been a fan since before I can remember.”

“Well, he has been making movies since before you were born.”

“Yes, since 1932.
This Is the Night.
Over eight years before I was born. Anyway, Mr Bob-Bob Brecht,” Carole rose, “it has been nice talking with you but this is my stop.”

“I'm getting off here too.”

She shot him a skeptical glance; this time it was she who arched her eyebrow.

“I've missed my stop talking to you,” he said with mock indignation, “I should have gotten off two stops ago. It's your fault. You distracted me with all this talk about Cary Grant so now I'll have to walk back and I've already told you that I'm finding it very cold today.”

Carole was used to being flirted with and had become quite adept at dodging charming talk and overfriendly gestures in the three years she had been a member of the armed services. This time she felt flattered and enjoyed the attentions of this angelic, dark man with the shy, boyish grin. She sensed a softness in him and so agreed to meet him on Sunday afternoon and go to the matinee to watch the Cary Grant film she'd already seen three times.

Carole should have been a boy, her father had once told her, as should her older sister, Margaret. With Carole, her father had been so sure that he had filled out the registration forms with “Carl Edmund Dyball” before he had seen her. He then had to return to shout abuse at the Registrar for the mistake the next day.

Carole's mother had all her faith in life squeezed out of her by her bullying husband, Reginald, whom she married when she fell pregnant to him. The marriage had never been a happy one for Ruth Dyball. In the early days of her union, after Margaret's birth, she had attempted to run away from him, but without money, family support, or a skill — and with a child to look after—she had to return, defeated. It was a humiliation that hung between her and her husband for the remainder of her life. His taunting of her failure to escape, of her captivity, intensified her suffering. Her isolation and imprisonment would be mocked by her husband's self-congratulatory smirks. She would distract herself with her housework, her children, her thirty-six cats and her Catholicism.

Since Reginald was a butcher, it was never a problem to feed the children and the cats. He had settled them on a large plot of land on the outskirts of Fremantle. The house stood amongst vacant blocks and large open spaces, and this only heightened Ruth's feelings of loneliness and isolation. As the years passed by, and her daughters grew up and left home, the neighbourhood built up. But, rather than feeling connected to its swelling population, she felt increasingly claustrophobic and trapped.

Carole grew up living a double life. There were the times when it was daylight, during which she enjoyed the freedom of the wide fields where bark could be stripped and rocks overturned to reveal tiny creatures. There were the compliant cats in dolls' dresses, whose ears she would peg together so she could put little hats on their heads and pretend that they were attending a tea party. With the cats, cows, chickens, goat, and the usual array of sick birds and ensnared bugs, Carole would make hospital beds and play doctor to real and imagined wounds and illnesses.

Being interested in boys, Margaret disdained Carole's play, but Carole didn't need the companionship of a disapproving sister while she had the world around her to explore, her menagerie of animals — trapped and tamed — to heal. She had her imagination for company.

The other side of Carole's life unfolded in the evenings, after the sun left the sky, when her companion cats were banished from the house and her father was home. He was the only fear she knew as a child. It was a terror that made her stutter. Reginald worked all day at the meatworks and when he was irritated he would come home and relieve his aggression with the slap of his belt. He lashed out when dissatisfied, at furniture, at Carole, her sister and her mother. His anger left red welts and marbled bruises on their arms and legs. Carole quietly hoped she would be ignored, especially when eclipsed by the older, more rebellious Margaret. Most times she could escape detection but would, on occasion, draw her father's ire by not speaking or by stuttering with nervousness.

Carole could not understand Margaret's fascination with boys. To Carole, all men were like her father, who yelled at her and beat her and left her shaking with fear when he shouted at her for being “stupid” and “a fool”. When furious, he would grab at his belt with one hand while he held her hair with the other and she would feel the sharp whip of leather against her skin. She would say to herself that the more she knew about men, the more she liked cats.

She would suffer his rage if she failed to complete a chore to his satisfaction or if he was angry with her mother if she cried. And he was so unpredictable. Carole would freeze after accidentally dropping a bottle of milk, expecting him to shout abuse at her, but instead he would say with a laugh, “You know what they say, no use crying over spilt milk.” But then when she dropped a glass of juice, he yelled at her for being wasteful and not appreciating the cost of things and sent her out to stand in the cold night air to reflect upon her “selfishness”. Instead, she stood in the dark on the back step and puzzled about the difference between spilling milk and spilling squeezed oranges.

Her father embodied the night, her mother the day. If her father's presence in the evenings frightened her, the freedom of her rustic playground and the safety of her mother's presence ensured happiness during her childhood days. Her other escape, her only other point of reference for the wider world, was the moving pictures.

She had first seen Cary Grant in
Every Girl Should Be Married
when she was just eight years old. In the darkened cinema, Carole felt, for the first time, attraction to a man. She was entranced by the way he looked, transfixed by his self-assured manner and acid wit. Her infatuation grew when she saw
Room for One More,
in which Grant played a devoted family man and husband. As the antithesis of her father, Grant was her ideal. She knew that he would never lash at her with a belt or yell at her when she stuttered. Since then, she had seen every new film he'd been in, watching each new feature once a week while it screened at the theatre. Except
An Affair to Remember,
which she saw ten days running, crying at the ending each time.

Carole read everything she could about Cary Grant. She saw him as a man who hid secrets behind the polished sheen of his on-screen charm. Born in Bristol to a working-class family, Grant's father was a trouser-presser given to murderous rages and insisted that his wife never speak to others at parties. Carol could empathise with the image of the cowering child and the silently suffering mother and wife. Even when Hitchcock brought out the brooding, bleak side of Grant's character — as Roger Thornhill in
North by Northwest
(the kind of man who made women who didn't know him fall in love with him) and Devlin in
Notorious
— the strange, shadowy angles of the camera revealed a confident, worldly charm. To Carole, Grant was a man who could understand the split between her own night and day worlds.

Margaret left home when she became pregnant to her boyfriend Darren. When Margaret announced she was departing, her father raged, calling her names that made Carole blush. Margaret had told her that marrying Darren was a way of escaping their father, but to Carole, it seemed like her sister was leaving one prison and entering another. Carole had never liked Darren, finding him too confident, too slick. He winked at her and called her “Doll” while he waited for Margaret to finish getting ready to go out. Carole couldn't keep from staring at his shoes; they were too shiny. Carole, in contrast to her sister, kept her distance from men who tried to court her, fearing that she would be suffocated by marriage just as her mother had been. Having learnt her mother's lesson, Carole didn't wish to have another man standing over her, abusing her and making her feel trapped.

Carole wanted to be a vet. She could then do what made her happy — looking after animals — and be able to escape her father. She planned her High School studies around this goal, but in her second-last year her father stopped her. He had allowed her to begin, believing she would fail. Sensing her success drawing close — with good grades and glowing reports — he forbade her to continue. No pleas, tears or ultimatums could move his iron will and Carole was transferred into the subjects required for secretary school. Not even her school's administration could persuade her father to rethink his actions. Carole knew from the lifetime of sarcastic comments directed at her mother that there was no escape from her father's demands and any opposition to his decisions only made him more unwilling to compromise.

As Carole cried for her lost dream, locked in her room and surrounded by the memorabilia of her childhood, she looked at the photograph of Cary Grant on her mirror taken when he was filming
Destination Tokyo.
Grant was dressed in a naval uniform, his eyes seeming to focus on the inner thoughts that preoccupied him, his hand clasping binoculars. His wedding ring sat prominently on his hand.

Cary Grant had always offered her an escape from her home life, even if it were only for the hours she watched him on the screen. Now he gave Carole an idea of how she could escape permanently. There was something in the reflective resolve of Grant in the naval uniform that drew her in.

Carole had older studio shots in her scrapbook from Grant's earlier films. In three he was dressed in Air Force uniforms. He was a member of the Royal Flying Corp in
The Eagle and the Hawk
in 1932, a blinded pilot in
Wings in the Dark
in 1935 and a French flyer in
Suzy
in 1936. All were made before Carole was bom. He had, Carole recalled, had donated his fees for
Philadelphia Story
and
Arsenic and Old Lace
to the war effort. He had flown to London to ask what he could do to help the Allied cause, only to be told that he should return to Hollywood “and carry on doing what you do best”. The US government decided that he was more valuable to them as an actor than a soldier. Grant was disappointed, but had said: “Wherever Uncle Sam orders my utilization to the best purposes, there I will willingly go, as should every other man. I feel that Uncle Sam knows best.”

Carole applied to join the Women's Royal Australian Navy, the WRANS, in 1957. She passed the admission test and was accepted. It was then she discovered that she would need her parents' consent since she was only seventeen. Her father refused and Carole already knew that it was beyond her power to change his mind.

Then, unexpectedly, her father's sister arrived. Aunt Beatrice saw her brother only on rare occasions. In the quiet of the afternoon, she spoke with her brother behind the closed door of the lounge room. Carole and her mother sat silently in the kitchen and heard the muffled and heated voices.

“How did she know of Father's refusal?” Carole whispered.

“I wrote her,” her mother replied, her brow furrowed as she looked at her wedding ring. “I should have thought to do it when he made you change your subjects. I'm sorry.”