Illywhacker (68 page)

“What do you like best?”

“Sitting in the kitchen,” he said.

He never explained it. She could see the pressure of his emotions pressing against the back of his eyes, and she did not like to ask him what it was he meant.

He could talk at length about the injustices of the world. He knew he was poorly informed and badly educated, and he would
never pretend to know more than he did, and this gave to his feelings the extra strength of his natural honesty. But he could, at least, in his own way, talk about poverty, hardship, unfairness, even the subject of being Australian-these were emotional subjects, but not nearly so loaded as what it meant for him to sit in the Underhills’ kitchen—the steam, flour-dusted hands, women’s laughter, hairbrushing, the short hiss of a damp finger on a hot black iron, aprons with pockets full of wooden pegs, shining peeled potatoes, spitting fat, hot jam on steamed puddings in the middle of the day—these were things too precious to be spoken of.

Only Henry Underhill could spoil the kitchen; introducing his harsh opinions, his barked orders, his acrid tobacco odours, and it was only then, after work, or during weekends, that Charles felt such a desire to take walks, or to visit the dunny down the back.

The wind whipped down into the town from the cold stone churches on the Pentland Hills and when you left the kitchen to go to the dunny the dogs threw themselves, yellow-eyed and broken-toothed, against their chains. It was cold out there and a draught as thin as a knife blade blew through the trapdoor at the back of the can and froze your bum and shrivelled your balls. You wiped yourself in the gloom with old government forms, all torn neatly and hung on a nail. The paper was cold and hard and the hair-trigger dogs barked every time you ripped off a sheet; a well-informed stranger, walking along the street, could look down across the top of the link chain fence and see the closed dunny door and the dogs straining towards it and imagine, exactly, what it was you were doing.

Charles did not like Underhill’s dunny, but when Henry Underhill was home he stayed there for long periods, luxuriating in the remembered kitchen.

Among the things he pondered, with his trousers pulled around his goose-pimpled thighs, was why his father-in-law had singled out Emma to say that she was like a horse. For Emma’s mother and her two sisters were just like her. They were broad and strong with comfortable backsides and nicely shaped big-calved legs. They all wore skirts with lots of fine pleats and twin-sets which they washed carefully—each of them following an identical procedure—rolling them dry with several bathroom towels before leaving them to lie flat on a little table near the kitchen stove and thus contributing a sweet clean odour of soap and wool to all the other feminine perfumes that Charles found so comforting and kindly. And as for being flighty—there were no
signs of flightiness at all. If anything they seemed the opposite—they had soft placid brown eyes, round untroubled faces, black fringes, and small even white teeth. They all had the endearing habit of murmuring as if they were reluctant to commit themselves to an exact opinion, and Charles did not feel critical of this—how could he?—this soft wash of sound.

Charles liked these women as much as he detested the man. It did not occur to him that one might be the product of the other, that their way of talking might be the consequence of Henry Underhill’s intolerance for opinions other than his own. The mistake is understandable because they did not carry themselves like meek women—they walked confidently with their heads up and their shoulders back—and yet when little Henry Underhill came into the kitchen, there was nothing they would not do for him and the whole mood of the place was ruined. They polished his brass and blancoed his military webbing, not reluctantly, but eagerly. If he complained about his tea, they brewed a new pot, and looked happy to do it. They laundered his whites for boundary umpiring. They stood in Lederderg Street at night without overcoats, their arms folded beneath their breasts, watching while he drilled the surly militia up and down. They, alone in all Bacchus Marsh, could not see what a fool he looked.

Charles did not confess his true feelings about his future father-in-law. When Henry Underhill was in residence Charles took the lowliest seat, near the doorway, and drank the dark black tea the man of the house required. While Emma cleaned her father’s boots, filled his cup, or warmed his newspaper, Charles watched silently. When she laughed at some joke against the Best Pet Shop in the World, Charles smiled.

He was having his own quiet revenge and he was conducting the whole affair with a nicety that would surprise those who thought him clumsy. It was not in his nature but (if you take my meaning) well within his ability, and he tortured Henry Underhill without the victim realizing that it was intentional. He did it very simply. He refused to discuss the bond. Hints on the subject he ignored. Even the most direct questions seemed to produce a malfunction in his hearing aid. So while the two appeared to be great friends, there was really a war in progress. Underhill insulted Charles’s business ambitions. Charles refused to discuss the bond while, at the same time, he conducted his secret negotiations with the Education Department from a post office box in the main street. And this was the real reason he went back
to Jeparit—because Henry Underhill discovered he had been sneaking down to the post office, cutting through the sale-yards and the side lane in the Lifeguard Milk Factory. Charles did not have the nerve to lie to a direct question and that was why he and Emma returned to Chaffey’s. Their excuse was the AJS but the real reason was to avoid questions about the bond which Charles had by then, formally, committed himself to paying off, at the rate of five pounds five shillings and sixpence a week for three years.

They arrived back in the middle of the wedding arrangements and found Henry Underhill ill with nerves. He had swollen lumps on his legs like water-filled pigeon’s eggs and, less dramatically, a measle-like rash across his chest. Charles was thus not only permitted, but instructed, to remain away from him.

On the wedding day itself Henry Underhill coated himself with calamine lotion before dressing in his best suit. He had striped trousers and a long black coat. It did not occur to Charles that his refusal to discuss the bond had produced Henry Underhill’s illness and he did not mention it until after the wedding itself, when they were lined up for photographs outside the church.

The photographer was Jack Coe, of course, and he was darting around in his usual style, making sure everyone was in their place. He moved the itchy Underhill a fraction closer to Charles Badgery.

“I paid the bond,” Charles said.

An odd smile surfaced from beneath Henry Underhill’s moustache, a vulnerable nervous thing fearful of being squashed if it came out into the sunlight.

“You what?” he said.

“Now,” said Jack Coe, “Mr Underhill, could you please….”

“I took the responsibility,” said Charles, “to pay the bond.”

“Ha ha,” said Henry Underhill, looking at the camera. “Ha ha.”

“That’s right,” said Jack Coe, hidden under his black hood. “Mr Badgery, please, a smile.”

“You’ll never make a business man, lad,” said Henry Underhill, scratching himself in the secret of his pocket.

“I am a business man.”

Emma murmured in her young husband’s ear.

“I would have paid
half,”
said Emma’s father.

“Right, now, steady,” said Jack Coe.

“I would have paid
half!”
yelled Henry Underhill. “You’ll never make a business man. You’ll never make a business man’s
bootlace.”

It was the best photograph taken. Both Henry and Charles had
spoiled the others but now they beamed at Jack Coe’s camera and Underhill’s face was so creased you could not notice the swellings. No one looking at the photographs since that day has ever doubted the quality of their happiness.

It is obvious to anyone—Emma Underhill was Henry Underhill’s daughter. This was not, it seems, so obvious to Charles. When he paid his five hundred quid and took possession of the daughter, he imagined himself to have liquidated the father and erased his influence. So if the Marching Martinet had once fathered Emma Badgery, now he was forced to magically un—father her, to withdraw his penis and blow it like a nose in his checked handkerchief, to fold the handkerchief like a table napkin and slip it through a silver ring, to leave his seed where it would do no harm, on the kitchen table. Emma had emerged,
de novo
, untainted. Charles had paid his five hundred quid and Emma, therefore—I trust you follow-had never made her father’s tea, blancoed his webbing, held out her hand for the sharp burn of his strap or her lips towards his frosty affections.

Once they were safely in Sydney Charles never mentioned his father-in-law again and the only message he ever sent him was each year at Christmas when he added his signature (C. Badgery) to the card his wife sent. And because his memory, like any river, changed its course, cut a corner here, exaggerated another there, soon all he could remember was that Henry Underhill had said Emma had a backside like a horse. It certainly did not occur to him that he had been warned about her mental stability.

If it had not been for the war (whose slow birth he had watched so keenly and also so wilfully ignored) I doubt that the question would have arisen. In almost every respect Charles and Emma were well suited to each other.

Leah, who came to visit their little shop, saw (typically) what was good about the place-that it had a murmuring, nurturing quality. It was a place of succour and tenderness. Leah was delighted with the variety of life, the rabbits, big and fat, the lorikeets as richly coloured as oriental rugs, the dull white-eyed python waiting patiently to lose its skin, the not-for-sale Gould’s Monitor, the little seas of kissing jewels which were aquariums,
the smell of straw, apples, grain, and the volatile odours of faeces which were, mixed together, pleasant and repugnant all at once.

Amongst these charges the newly weds were like a pair of giant children, forever kneeling or bending, pacifying, supplicating their easily upset charges. They both had big hands and big feet and young faces and Emma’s speech, although shy and indistinct, did not feel timid but rather sensuous and sleepy. She seemed to speak with the drowsiness of a happy lover.

It is true that Charles talked a great deal but he did not do it to exclude his wife and looked, continually, to her for agreement, so that the whole business enterprise was flavoured with their great tenderness together. And although Leah was interested in the problems facing the best pet shop in the world, what really pleased her was the couple’s affection.

She was impressed too that they wished to do everything properly from the beginning, had made appointments to speak to people at the zoo, made notes and constructed cages that were really too big for the little shop. It was a mistake, perhaps. But they were happy not to have a prison like those overcrowded holes in Campbell Street. The big cages did create problems because they had to bunk one species in with another. The pretty blue bonnets had showed themselves to be pugnacious in the extreme. Feathers had flown. Blood had run.

And Emma had been wonderful, Charles said. The girl blushed and lowered her eyes. Leah could imagine those strong-wristed hands offering succour to wounded rosellas or rescuing a terrified guinea-pig from the well-meaning attentions of a buck rabbit.

She could not think of anyone who would suit Charles better. She seemed earthy, practical, loving and unpretentious. They both prepared the pets’ meals together, working side by side at the kitchen table, carving dark hunks of horsemeat, breaking eggs, crumbling Madeira cake. They already had their own moth trap and would soon start breeding flies for their pupae. They did not seem to notice that their flat had a funny smell, but even this smell, unpleasant at first, soon came to be associated, in Leah’s mind, with happiness.

It was 1938. Hitler was in Austria. Bukharin and Rykov were already on trial in Moscow. Bondi Beach was not yet strung with barbed wire, but the cafés were already filling with Jews from Europe. Leah Goldstein stood on platforms beside her husband while he spoke against fighting the Nazis.

She would appear, standing erect in that severe grey suit of
hers, her flinty face unsmiling, like the popular image of a severe communist, but it was from this time that her letters began to fill with the sweet fecund odours of the little pet shop where she would go, more and more often, to drink tea with Emma, to watch her belly swell, to breathe deep of air rich with straw, rape—seed, molasses and fur.

She was as happy there as in a letter. She did not speak. The two women sat behind the counter. Emma knitted.

Phoebe came to borrow a pound and was shocked by Emma’s kissing. It was not Emma who started it. It was Phoebe who was a great one for kissing everything that crossed her path. It was not the act of kissing that was shocking. It was the quality of the kiss itself. You could feel in those kisses the juices of Emma’s contentment and Phoebe—who had thought her daughter-in-law’s big straight toes quite disgusting—was much disturbed. It was embarrassing, like walking into the middle of someone else’s love-making, and Phoebe, who had come to flaunt her newest young man as well as get a pound, left the shop feeling old and out of temper.

She was not alone in being affected by those kisses. Leah wrote me a page about them. Emma was a plant grown in an austere climate suddenly transplanted into a fertile tropical latitude. She stretched herself luxuriously and felt her toes uncurl in the warm red soil. She was all abloom with kisses.

The extraordinary thing is she had not even loved Charles when she’d decided to marry him. She had thought only that he was a decent manly man and she had been comforted not only by his hearing aid but by his funny looks. He was like that dog-leg bridge the shire had built out over Parwan—stumpy and awkward but no one ever questioned its reliability. When he promised to honour and obey, you could rely on him. Anyone could see he was not a flash Harry or a lounge lizard or a drunkard. He would look after her.