The Serpent's Sting (7 page)

I paid the bill and took a tram home. Mother and Peter Gilbert had gone out. Brian was in the front room listening to some dreadful serial on the wireless. He turned it off when I came in.

‘Peter said that you and he had a chat.'

‘Like most conversations I've had with Peter Gilbert, it was something of a curate's egg.'

‘It hurts Mother's feelings, you know, the way you conscientiously refuse to accept Peter.'

‘Yes, and of course the fault is all on my side. It's possible, you know, that Mother has one or two failings of her own. I'm sure you find it difficult to believe that she has character flaws, but perhaps you haven't been on the receiving end of them for most of your life.'

‘We've all got flaws, Will.'

‘Yes, but we excuse them in people we like by calling them character traits.'

Brian surprised me with a conciliatory
non
sequitur
.

‘I'm coming to see
Mother Goose
again, now that you've settled into the part.'

‘I'll get you a ticket.'

‘All right. That can be your Christmas present to me.'

I then produced my own
non sequitur
.

‘How much are they paying you, Brian?'

‘How much is who paying me?'

‘Why are you maintaining the pretence that you're not working for Intelligence? I watched you walk out of Victoria Barracks just a couple of weeks ago, and you had the air of a man who'd signed on the dotted line.'

He stood up and managed to control any exasperation he might have been feeling.

‘I'll say it again, Will. I signed nothing.'

‘You don't seem to be looking for work.'

‘How would you know?'

There was no point discussing this matter further. I didn't want to argue with Brian. We'd grown close during our tour of the north, and it was a great disappointment to me that he was willing to have any kind of relationship with the arseholes in Military Intelligence.

‘All right, Brian. Let's not talk about this anymore. What day would suit you to come to the theatre?'

‘How about tomorrow arvo?'

‘Goodo, and I'll get you tickets for the Tivoli show afterwards. I know you're inexplicably fond of the Tiv shows. There are three sisters in this one whose gifts are truly astonishing — but not in a way that anyone would celebrate or emulate.'

Brian smiled and switched the radio back on. I decided to take a walk in Princes Park. One of the few wonderful things about growing up in the Power household was its proximity to Princes Park. It was just a few steps from our front door. I was so familiar with it that I'd felt comfortable and unafraid to wander it even at night from an early age. I was unaware until I was an adult, and had had to politely decline the invitation from a priapic young man, that one section of the park served as a meeting place for the dangerous desires of homosexual men — dangerous because the police would occasionally use entrapment to extract exorbitant hush money from terrified married men, pastors, and other upstanding members of the community, who enjoyed physical pleasures that couldn't be satisfied by wives or girlfriends. An actor I know, who witnessed one such capture from behind a fig tree, said that it was curious that the two policemen who were using themselves as bait made no move to declare themselves until, as he rather biblically put it, they'd successfully spilled their seed upon the ground.

As I crossed the road and headed into the park, I thought how one's life turned upon the smallest and most unexpected of chances. If I hadn't been with Joycey Dovey at the moment the assistant stage manager had come to her with a vomit-stained bodice, I wouldn't now have a salary sufficient to allow me to escape my mother's house. The untimely (for him — not for me) death of Jim Stokes was a stroke of luck, and an even grander stroke of luck was my meeting Geraldine Buchanan, who would return from Puckapunyal in a day or so. I was looking at the ground, so I didn't immediately see the person who called out, ‘Hey, you!'

I looked up to find Peter Gilbert's son, John, leaning against a tree with his hands in his pockets. I walked towards him. He detached himself from the tree, and stood with his feet apart and with a surly expression on his face.

‘If you're here to apologise for your behaviour on Thursday,' I said, ‘it's not me you need to apologise to.'

He gave a derisive little laugh.

‘I haven't come here to apologise to you or anybody else. But it is you I want to talk to.'

‘Why?'

‘A couple of reasons. Your mother said something about you, and so I thought, even before I'd met you, that you might be useful.'

‘Useful? You make me sound like a piece of plumbing.'

‘I had second thoughts when the first thing I saw of you was your plumbing.'

‘You have to expect that if you burst into a person's dressing room.'

He waved this away.

‘Forget about that. I'm certainly trying to. I want you to tell me about my dead brother.'

‘Your manner isn't really very inviting, if you don't mind me saying so.'

‘I'm not here to charm you. I want to know about my bastard brother.'

‘Ah, there's the rub. Fulton's birth offends your religious beliefs.'

‘I don't have any religious beliefs. I lost my faith a long time ago. I don't believe in sin. I'm not going to stand here quivering from head to foot in an ecstasy of indignation about Dad's adultery. The duration of his deception was something I could accommodate. The fact that he'd another son was something else altogether. That he thought so little of us that he couldn't be bothered telling us is a personal betrayal I find hard to forgive.'

I felt the need to mollify him in some small way, so I said, ‘If it's any consolation, John, you and your sister weren't the only ones to be deceived about Fulton's parents. I didn't know that Peter was his father until a few weeks ago, and I grew up with Fulton.'

‘Well, you must be really dumb.'

‘All right.'

I turned and began to walk away.

‘Wait!' he called, and, astonishingly, he added, ‘I'm sorry.' Even more astonishingly, he contrived to look contrite. I suppose I'm a sucker for contrition, because I walked back to him.

‘Can we go for a walk?' he asked. I nodded, and we set off into Princes Park.

‘Do I look like him? Cloris saw photographs, and she said I looked like him.'

‘Yes, you do. Very like. Only Fulton smiled a lot, which I've never seen you do.'

To confirm the observation, he looked at me sourly.

‘There's nothing to smile about. Nothing.'

I had little sympathy for the tedium of his misery.

‘What is it that you want from me, John? Surely more than the fact that you look like Fulton.'

‘What do you think of my father?'

I was suddenly conscious of the incipient hypocrisy of my position on this point. I disliked Peter Gilbert on the basis of his betrayal of my father's trust. Was my objection to this adultery of the same order as John Gilbert's? They may have been distinct, but perhaps they weren't different. I decided to answer his question truthfully.

‘I don't think much of your father.'

‘So we agree on that much, at least.'

‘He was my father's closest friend, and yet he cuckolded him.'

‘I sometimes wish I still believed in sin. Calling something like that “reprehensible” doesn't seem adequate.'

‘I don't believe in sin, either, John. I do believe in character, and it doesn't say much for a man's character if he's willing to do what your father did.'

‘What about your mother's character?'

Without hesitation, I said, ‘It says a great deal about her character, none of it flattering.'

John reached out and grabbed my wrist.

‘I think we have a lot in common, Will.'

There was a desperate quality in his voice that was unsettling.

‘Disliking the same people isn't the same as having a lot in common.'

‘I wasn't suggesting a friendship. Look, can we stop this pointless banter? Your mother mentioned that you were a private-inquiry agent as well as an actor.'

‘That's true.'

‘I want to hire you. I have money. Dad is nothing if not generous.'

This was so unexpected that it stopped me in my tracks.

‘You want to hire me? Why? What do you want investigated?'

He looked at me, and his face was calm. I couldn't see in it the fevered contortions of madness. His eyes were clear and sane.

‘I want you to investigate my father. I believe he murdered my mother.'

I was silent.

‘I believe he poisoned her, slowly. I don't know how he did it. I only know that he did it.'

‘Have you spoken to Cloris about this?'

‘Cloris and I don't …' He stopped, his eyes drawn now to Mother's house. We'd moved some distance away, but we were close enough to see Mother and Peter Gilbert turn in at the gate. Peter Gilbert looked towards the place where we were standing. He shaded his eyes with his hand, but he couldn't possibly have been certain that the small figures, deep in the park, were his son and me. John Gilbert pressed a piece of paper into my hand.

‘That's my telephone number. He did this, Will, and he might do it again. Think about that.'

He walked away towards Royal Parade.

Mother and Peter Gilbert were in the kitchen when I entered the house. I went upstairs to my room and stretched out on my bed. John Gilbert's accusation had dismayed me. I thought it was absurd and probably the product of an agitated mind. Still, what did I know about Peter Gilbert, really? I knew he was a solicitor, and that both he and my father had worked in some vague capacity in Intelligence in the Great War. It was where their friendship had been forged. I tried to think this through. If my recent travails in the Northern Territory had taught me anything, they'd taught me the perilous consequences of jumping to conclusions. Nevertheless, it was difficult not to succumb to the irresistibly satisfying notion that Peter Gilbert was a murderer. I began to doze with this thought in my mind, but before I'd slipped into sleep, a knock on my door roused me.

‘Who is it?' I asked, ludicrously, given that it could only have been one of three people.

‘It's me — Brian. I need to talk to you.'

I got up and went to the door. I hadn't looked closely at Brian since our return from the north, but when I did so, I thought his new life in Intelligence was agreeing with him. Even though he hadn't shaved, his face was a picture of health. It had filled out a little since he'd reacquainted himself with Mother's cooking, but it wasn't jowly or fleshy. The gauntness he'd acquired was gone, and for the first time I began to think that perhaps he looked more like Tyrone Power than I did — an observation that had been made in the past by others, but which I'd always dismissed as ridiculous. He seemed nervous, which wasn't like him when he was around me.

‘I've been wondering what to do,' he said, ‘since we got back.'

I looked puzzled.

‘For work, I mean. I've been wondering what to do for work. I don't want to go back to teaching.'

‘But you have a job. You work for Intelligence.'

Just as he'd managed to do earlier, he kept exasperation out of his voice.

‘I don't work for them, Will. They offered me a job, I'll admit that. I turned it down. If I'd taken it, do you think I'd still be here?'

‘Perhaps even Intelligence was willing to give you until after Christmas, after what they put us through.'

‘I don't work for them.'

He said each word slowly, and carefully. ‘I don't like their methods any more than you do, Will. I was vulnerable up there. I'm not as emotionally strong as you are.'