The Serpent's Sting (6 page)

‘Oh, I see,' I said. ‘Bastard.'

In the brief dictionary of slang at the back of the booklet, Americans were told:
Bastard (pronounced ‘bar stud') — sometimes a term of affection.

I advised Harlen that it might be best to avoid using any of the slang terms glossed in the booklet.

Geraldine wasn't in the least flirtatious with either me or the Americans, and I appreciated her discretion. The champagne had a slightly depressive effect on her, which was a surprise, and we'd been in the club for barely an hour when she asked if I'd walk her home. Harlen and Anthony, who by this time had insisted that we call them Len and Tony, said that they'd be pleased to walk up to Parkville with us. They were stationed at Camp Pell, which was in effect Royal Park, and very near Geraldine's digs. I couldn't blame them for not understanding that Geraldine and I might want to walk alone. No signals had been given that we were a couple, so I tamped down the small resentment I felt at their accidental intrusion into our privacy.

Geraldine was silent as we walked. She didn't reach for my hand or lean into me. I put this down to natural reticence in the company of two young soldiers. They spoke warmly about their families, and said that Christmas was going to be hard for them. Len, who said he came from a large family, couldn't accommodate the idea that Christmas could be celebrated in summer heat. In a rush of sympathy for their feelings of dislocation, I invited them to have Christmas lunch at Mother's house.

‘Geraldine's coming,' I said.

‘Am I?'

‘Of course you are.'

She put her arm through mine at that point.

‘Well now,' she said, with an odd hint of melancholy, ‘I think that will be grand.'

Len and Tony struggled politely against the idea, but accepted the invitation with alacrity when I mentioned that my mother was an excellent cook, and that it would be a poor table without them. As the effect of the champagne wore off, I wondered how Mother would receive the news that two strangers and a girl she'd only met once would be joining us on Christmas Day.

At Geraldine's house, after I'd given them Mother's address, Len and Tony left us.

‘You can't come up, Will. House rules.'

To soften this stricture, she kissed me and called me ‘darling', and when she said that word she contrived to make it sound as if I'd been the beneficiary of this promotion for years. It fell into the portals of my ears and flowed through my body, flushing all doubts and misgivings before it. I kissed her, and experienced an anaesthetising rush of euphoria. This was, I thought, bliss. I'd never felt anything as powerful, not even among the undiscriminating, unrequited, and unpredictable attractions of my youth. The bliss was almost immobilising, and I was reluctant to leave her.

‘Goodnight, Will.'

‘Will I see you tomorrow morning?'

‘No. I'm leaving for Puckapunyal very early. I'll be back in two days. Be kind to Sophie.'

‘Who's Sophie?'

‘She's my understudy. You saw her tonight at the Tiv. In fact, you saw all of her tonight.'

‘All those naked women look exactly the same.'

‘It's not their fault they're not allowed to move.'

She kissed me again, and disappeared into the house. At some point over the next two days, she vanished.

Chapter Three

SUSPICIOUS EXITS

I WALKED THROUGH THE DARK OF PRINCES PARK
with some nervousness. I'd had, relatively recently, an unfortunate encounter with policemen in the shadows of the Treasury Gardens in the city. On that occasion I'd been following a suspect in a case upon which I was engaged, and it hadn't gone quite as smoothly as I'd hoped. In short, I'd been assaulted, only to have this ignominy compounded by two policemen who were patrolling the gardens to disrupt the socially compromising couplings of local women and American servicemen. These two buffoons had found me, sprawled and injured, and had leapt to the conclusion, upon noting the word ‘entertainer' on my identification papers, that my purpose in being there could only have been to engage in buggery. Fortunately, in Princes Park this night, I met no one.

Although it was quite late, when I arrived at Mother's house I found her listening to the last radio program before closing at midnight. A colourless, female voice was exhorting listeners, on a show called ‘What shall we have for dinner?', to surprise their husbands with a ghastly meal of soup derived from beetroot tops, onion skins, ragged lettuce leaves, and celery tops, followed by an allegedly delicious baked custard made with unpearled barley and lemon juice. Mother looked up and smiled when I came in. I thought she was smiling in acknowledgement of my arrival, but it soon became apparent that the source of her delight was her imagining families all over the city struggling to digest this hideous meal. I had enough champagne still in my system to tell Mother that Christmas lunch would be busier than she'd anticipated. She was, in fact, delighted that two Americans would be coming. She reserved her dubiousness for Geraldine.

‘I liked her of course, darling,' she said, and how different that ‘darling' sounded to me. ‘The soldiers are strangers, but doesn't it imply a degree of, well, permanence, when you ask a young lady to a family occasion?'

‘What on earth are you implying?'

‘You've only just met her. Surely she wouldn't …' She stopped before completing the remark, but as we both knew, she might as well have delivered a lengthy dissertation on my various inadequacies. I couldn't give her the absolution of believing that her grief for her favoured son, Fulton, had naturally reduced me in her eyes. My reduction had begun long before Fulton had been born, so, however she might protest, if pushed, she couldn't lay that flattering unction to her soul.

‘Is it really so difficult to believe, Mother, that a woman might find in me qualities to which you are blind?'

I was immediately and mortifyingly conscious of how pompous I sounded.

‘Well, Will, I mean to say, a woman?'

The rising terminal was stunningly offensive.

‘What exactly are you suggesting, Mother?'

‘Darling,' she said, and I could tell that she hoped that that word would function as some sort of salve for what she was about to say.

‘It makes no difference to me at all; it's not like I haven't in my time … well, never mind. I just mean that I always assumed that, well, the theatre, the general air about you. Oh dear, I'm not doing terribly well, am I?'

I was losing the battle to assimilate the components of this fragmented confession and simultaneous
j'accuse
.

‘Just yesterday, Mother, you asked Geraldine, a woman you'd known for less than an hour, if she was a lesbian, and now, here you are, asking your son if he's … I suppose I should be flattered that at least you have the grace to find the inquiry an awkward one.'

‘Are you absolutely sure Gerald isn't a lesbian? I did like her. She seemed more interesting than any of the other girls you've brought home.'

‘You really have no idea, have you, how offensive your remarks can be?'

‘Oh Will, don't be so corseted. Sometimes you can be ridiculously Victorian.'

I saw no reason to prolong the discussion, so disciplining a desire to defend myself against this absurd claim, I kissed Mother on the forehead and wished her goodnight.

‘I am pleased about Christmas, Will. Truly I am.'

I walked into the hallway and found Brian, who tried unsuccessfully to assume the position of a person who hadn't been lurking and listening.

‘You have to be a ghost if you're going to be a spy, Brian, not a fucking poltergeist.'

I went upstairs to bed. I'd scour the next day's papers for rooms to let.

The next day was Sunday, and there were no papers to scour. I flicked through Saturday's
Argus
, and found a flat in South Yarra that seemed possible. I tore the page from the paper and put it in my pocket. There was no show on Sunday — the absence of anything to do in Melbourne on Sunday had been a cause of tension between the Americans and the city fathers. After a great deal of pressure had been applied, picture theatres were allowed to open on Sundays, thereby getting thousands of soldiers off the street and into the movie houses, along with their giggling and compliant Australian girlfriends. The experiment didn't take, however, and Sundays soon returned to dull normality.

It was an overcast day, but by 10.00 a.m. it was already hot. I went into the back yard, much of which had been turned over to the growing of vegetables. Peter Gilbert was out there, turning earth with a garden fork. He was wearing baggy shorts and no shirt. He'd kept himself in good shape — I gave him that. The hair on his chest might have been grey, but his skin hadn't yet begun to go slack and sag indecorously. He must have been sixty-five, yet he carried himself convincingly like a much younger man. The sight of him bare-chested had an unexpectedly positive effect on me. I realised that part of my antipathy towards him had been a sort of visceral disgust when I thought of him as my mother's lover. The thought wasn't quite so disgusting now, which may point to a shallowness in me, although I don't think it does, really.

‘Good morning, Peter.'

I could tell that he was surprised to be addressed civilly by me. He leaned on the garden fork.

‘You know, Will, I could have happily killed you on Friday when you blurted out that Cloris and John had a brother.'

I was immediately defensive.

‘No reasonable person would imagine that that particular nugget of information had been withheld.' I regretted my tone instantly. The ‘nugget' was, after all, the source of both Mother's and Peter Gilbert's grief. He didn't give me time to redress what I'd just said. Instead he sighed, as if he could expect nothing better from me — a presumption I resented mightily — and ran his forearm across his brow.

‘I was going to say, Will, that early in the evening I wanted to kill you. Later, though, I realised that you'd done your mother and me an enormous favour. Cloris and John had to find out sometime, and the longer we left it, the more awkward it was becoming. My wife has been dead now for almost six months. Of course my children are shocked by what they rightly see as almost a lifetime's deception. They don't understand, they can't understand, how I could live a lie. I think Cloris knows that I did it for them — and yes, I did it for myself, too. Don't imagine that I'm not aware of that. However, a separation from their mother would have disrupted their lives. She was a fanatical Catholic. It didn't bother her one iota that there was nothing between us. We slept in separate bedrooms, for God's sake. She liked the arrangement. She found sex disgusting, and took no pleasure in it.'

‘Why are you telling me this?'

‘Because I'm going to marry your mother in a few weeks, and I hardly know you at all.'

‘My father and you were very good friends.'

‘Yes, we were, when we were very young.'

‘And yet you cuckolded him.'

Peter Gilbert didn't bat an eyelid.

‘Yes, I did. Our friendship wasn't worth the tiniest part of the love I felt for Agnes. I threw it away without the slightest qualm, and I'd do the same again. Your father was a strange, cold man, Will.'

‘Mother is very fond of saying that I'm very like him.'

‘I'm sure she's only referring to your mannerisms, which are similar to your father's, and you do look remarkably like him.'

‘I don't really want to discuss these things with you, Peter.'

‘No, I see that. I just wanted to tell you that what happened on Friday night is for the best. I was perhaps labouring under the misapprehension that you might have been feeling bad about revealing the truth about Fulton.'

I was about to reassure him that I wasn't indifferent to the consequences of my
faux pas
, when Brian, with the poor timing that is his special gift, shouted from the back door that tea and cake were ready in the kitchen. Peter Gilbert retrieved a shirt from the back of a garden chair and put it on. The moment had passed when I felt I could apologise for my blunder. It would sound now like a rushed, insincere afterthought. I'd do it later that day. While I was thinking this, Peter Gilbert moved past me. Before he entered the house, he turned and said, ‘You're a hard man to like, Will Power. You really are.'

I was sufficiently unsettled by what Peter Gilbert had said to want to avoid small talk over tea and cake. I decided instead that I'd walk into town and take advantage of Sunday lunch in the Menzies Hotel dining room. With a regular income, although its permanence was uncertain, I shouted myself to the full, three-shilling option. The room was very crowded and noisy, and the male diners were still mainly American servicemen, despite most of their number having been moved to Queensland. I sat alone and repulsed the advances of two women who thought I might like company, and by extension that I might like to pay for their drinks. I assumed that they'd been emboldened by the regular success they no doubt enjoyed when making similar offers to American officers. As I ate a passable beef consommé (which hadn't been clarified as well as it ought to have been — perhaps it was the difficulty in getting egg whites), I thought about my conversation with Peter Gilbert. I felt embarrassed by my childish peevishness, but acknowledged in my own defence that my poor feelings about Gilbert had their roots in my childhood. In that light, they were perfectly explicable. By the time I'd finished an excellent rabbit terrine, I'd reassured myself that I had nothing to apologise for — unless I bore some responsibility for being an unwelcome disruption to the smooth running of my mother's and Peter Gilbert's affair.