polite attention, in the direction of Mr L.

The famous Mr L. sprawled in the settee while remaining, somehow, as neat as a pin. He was boom-voiced, big-nosed, with a sensuous mouth below oddly pinched, slightly disapproving nostrils. His hair was cut fringed like a boy's but was flecked with silver and Charles, attempting to understand the gist of the argument, gathered only that the speaker did not like communists, Jews or proponents of what he called 'Bank Clerk Culture'. He went on and on about 'LCD' and it was twenty years later that an older Charles realized, one insomniac night, that he had been referring to Lowest Common Denominator and that what he was most frightened of was democracy.

But it was to my wife that Charles gave the bulk of his attention, and it was not the polite uncomfortable look he felt obliged to give the self-satisfied Mr L., but something its object felt to be a reprimand. Charles stared, his eyes heavy with love and censure. His mother was, in her mid-thirties, still a young woman. If there was something dark and shadowy around her eyes it suggested no more than the burdens of beauty. Charles's mother was like a gypsy. She was totally beyond imagining. Everthing about her (the painted pillars, the arching cats, the smooth honey colour of her skin) was unlike anything Charles had ever seen. She wore a scarf wrapped around her head and its tail fell, a cascade of tiny roses, over one bare shoulder. Her hands were shapely, the fingers long, flexible and expressive. When she spoke a throaty contralto came from lips which hardly seemed to move and yet enunciated her vowels in a manner that her son could only describe as posh; the manner of speaking suggested great passion and great control.

He waited for a pause in the man's speech, imagining that, when it came, his mother would have a chance to explain that he was Charles Badgery, her son, and that they would, of course, wish time together and then the man might look at him less oddly. She had introduced him, with a jerky motion of her hand, as Charles, then held her bare throat and laughed. It was a jarring, silly outburst. Mr L. had blinked and continued with his speech.

The pause, at last, arrived. His mother stood. She took the saucer and cup from his knees and departed, with a murmur, to the kitchen.

Charles, disappointed, stretched himself inside the confines of his suit. He knew that Mr L. was staring at his brown boots and knew that Lenny had been right and that he should have bought shoes, or, if he were intent on boots, at least black boots. Now he was sorry he had been stubborn about the brown boots, but he had always wanted them, although this would be difficult to explain, just as he knew – looking at the man's pale sleepy supercilious eyes – that he could not explain that the suit was only so ill-fitting because he had been in a hurry to get here, that it was to be returned to Anthony Hordern's tomorrow where the legs would be lengthened, the sleeves let down, the backside made more generous.

'Nice day,' he said to Mr L., unable to stand his staring.

'Noice day,' said Mr L., and Charles could not believe that he was being mocked.

Meanwhile Phoebe clattered around the kitchen in a tizz, not knowing what it was she should do. Afterwards she would regret (particularly when in her cups) not having sent the famous little satyr away and thus removed the problem of having to socialize with two such different personalities at once. Yet both of them had arrived, almost together, and both without warning; she had found herself trapped between what she had once been and what she would like to be.

One always gave boys biscuits. She looked for biscuits but Annette had been up in the night, prowling the house, and had eaten them all. Her son (she found it hard to credit she had ever had one) and not even a damn biscuit to give him. He had smelt (she wrinkled her nose, looking for sugar lumps) distinctly odd. He was like a yokel in a suit. He was odd, repelling, ugly, with frighteningly demanding eyes that she was tempted to label as insolent but could not, of course, because she was his mother. Also there was this: that he was disconcertingly familiar, like photographs of her father as young man, and she felt towards this image a halting pulse of affection that was no weaker than the undertow of her irritation.

Yet she could not send Mr L. away. She had laboured long to get his attention, had done what she always had – mixed up her literary ambitions and her powers of sexual persuasion. It was, as Annette was never slow to remind her, a bad habit to have fallen into. But to this Phoebe would bitterly reply that their whole life was a bad habit, a habit none of them could break, not even Horace who, although he was presently away, working as a purser on a coastal steamer, would return as soon as he had forgotten how sharply he was cut by frustration and jealousy, or when he was dismissed for epilepsy and put off the ship, whichever was the sooner.

There were other bad habits too that Phoebe was not aware of, the worst being the whole system of illusion whereby Horace and Annette propped up Phoebe and made her believe herself a poet. Perhaps Horace, aroused by the sensational subject-matter, could not see the awfulness of the poems; but Annette (sarcastic, bitter, put- upon Annette, the history mistress with the wide beseeching mouth), Annette said nothing, perhaps from fear that Phoebe would, at last, turn on her and reject her totally, unconditionally, for ever. The nearest Annette would ever come to speaking the unutterable was, when most miserable, 'We have spoiled you.'

Thus, Phoebe: surrounded by her menagerie: Annette, Horace, the cats arching their backs. She had allowed herself to become ridiculous and did not know it. Mr L., who sat in the next room idly and elegantly mocking her son, was not about to publish her poetry inIsis although he was doubtless aroused by the potency of some of the sexual imagery which made up for in literalness what it lacked in subtlety. He could not take the poems as anything other than a menu for the pleasure that might await him in the curtained bed referred to with such passion in one infamous unpublished sonnet that the men who drank at La Boheme would never publish no matter how often they passed it, smiling, from hand to hand.

While she looked for biscuits she knew already eaten, Phoebe imagined herself on the brink of publication and she could not ask Mr L. to leave to allow herself to have time with her son and she resolved to ask Charles if he would come back tomorrow. She intended to take him aside, and explain all the complexities. She would cook him a lunch tomorrow, or perhaps Annette might cook something tonight, and she would serve it to him tomorrow.

She returned to make this arrangement at a time when Charles had at last realized the snobbish and malicious nature of his interrogator and, having had his suit insultingly admired for ten minutes, was at the end of his tether. Phoebe, seeing the wildness in his eyes, panicked, and made her request there and then with the result that he stood in an urgent rush of limbs, scraping the chair along the floor, his eyes imploring, clutching for some sign from hers, but ready, belligerently, to reject it. She found herself rushing after him, up the steps and out into the road, where he stood trembling all over like a difficult horse. She quieted him, slowly, but ruined it again by being worried about Mr L. to whom she must return. She leaned towards him to kiss his burning cheek and he – realizing her intention -flinched from her and stamped off down the street where he was to become hopelessly lost, split his trousers, and all but ruin the rest of the suit in a storm that all of Sydney had seen coming.

When Phoebe returned to her flat she found that her guest had drawn a caricature of her son as a wombat which was as marvellously executed as it was cruelly accurate. He inscribed it to her, and signed it. She laughed and thanked him and made a great fuss about how she must have it framed.

But later, after they had disported in the curtained bed, a bitterness welled up in her so strong that she could not maintain her silence. It is to her credit that she told the artist that the wombat was her missing son and resembled her late father. It is also characteristic of her that she should also have the work framed and display it prominently; for although she would have loved to destroy the caricature she could not bear to part with the inscription.

9

He could not admit to anyone that his mother had not hugged him or asked him to come back and live with her. Neither would he lie about it. Yet his actions were lying actions, for he stayed out at dinnertime and generally behaved like a young man with a busy social calendar.

Leah imagined him being entertained by Phoebe while all the while he was mooching along George Street eating a pie from a paper bag or sitting in the stalls at the Lyceum by himself. When she asked him about his evenings she received the same smile the Chaffeys had when they wanted to know about his black eye; she squeezed his hand hard and felt, in the answering squeeze, what she thought was joy. He was miserable.

He went back to Neutral Bay where Phoebe lived, not once, but three times. He walked up the steep street from the ferry and stood across the road from her flat. On one occasion a man entered the building just as he

Вы читаете Illywhacker
Добавить отзыв
ВСЕ ОТЗЫВЫ О КНИГЕ В ИЗБРАННОЕ

0

Вы можете отметить интересные вам фрагменты текста, которые будут доступны по уникальной ссылке в адресной строке браузера.

Отметить Добавить цитату