had once been tight before I so cleverly dissolved them in the acid of my lying mind.
I swear to God I will never understand Goldstein's criteria about skin, for she found nothing wrong with mine. She touched it and looked at me with her velvety cat's eyes. She did not flinch. She smiled. So did an old lady who was standing on the wrought-iron balcony above those narrow steps. She was hanging out her washing between her canary and the wall and she stopped, with wooden pegs in her mouth, and smiled.
Once the skin was settled, we moved on. My back hurt like hell, but I did not confess it. There were pains shooting up my legs and my teeth set up an ache as vague and persistent as people talking in the next room. I drew myself up and tried to tell myself I was a young man. I drew up my forearms a fraction and imagined myself on the sand at Bondi Beach. But you do not slough off a shuffle so quickly, and I soon had to admit that I would be an old fellow for a little while and that I could not match the dancer's walk beside me.
At sixty-five years of age, women do not see you. You are invisible. Until, that is, you walk down George Street with a young woman with a dancer's walk and then you go from invisible (flip-flop) to neon-signed and you are, take my word for it, a celebrity, a ballet master, a painter, a famous anarchist, a free-thinker, a revolutionary, an inventor of note, a criminal of power and influence, but look at me, I am only Herbert Badgery and once I was shy about my legs and now all I want is to lie down on my bed and take an Aspro and hope my toothache will go away.
I should have quietly withdrawn myself, gone back alone to my hotel, read an uncensored newspaper and gone to bed early. Charles, however, was busy arranging my life for me.
43
In all her fifty years Phoebe had never once worked for money. She was not ashamed of this. On the contrary. She had, after all, given her life to art and as for money, it always turned up somehow. Visitors to her little flat would look around at the pretty walls, the small works by famous artists, the rugs on the floor, the view of the harbour out the window and – feeling themselves steeped in nasty compromises, pot-boilers, jobs with newspapers, unpleasant sinecures with the Education Department- not only envied her but admired her.
Her poetry, of course, was little known, but by the end of the war she had begun the little magazine that historians now talk about so seriously – Malley's Urn, a private joke amongst the literati at the time and if you don't get the joke, don't worry – it was never very funny.
There were those who imagined her to have inherited wealth, but if Phoebe even smelt a whiff of this misunderstanding, she set it straight – her mother had left five coal mines to the Catholic Church. Imagine!
So where had the money come from? First from Horace until his ship had sunk, torpedoed in the English Channel. Also from Annette Davidson until, at an age when you might think her past it, she had run away to Perth – in the middle of a school term – with her own PE instructress. She had arranged a telegram to Phoebe which announced her death but everybody -even Phoebe – knew the two women had a 'horrid little milk bar' in Nedlands.
So it was left to Charles to be a patron of the arts and he was not at all displeased by this. You could buy (if you wished – few did) Malley's Urn in the pet emporium – there was always a stack on the cashier's desk and Charles had a complete set of that quarterly green magazine in his musty bedroom which he read on his insomniacal nights.
Now all of this seemed firm and settled until the day that I arrived in Sydney and Charles decided that his mother should have the flat in the pet emporium. Charles was so excited by this idea that he did not even wait for the reunion dinner he was planning for that night. He got his mother on the telephone and came straight to the point.
'And leave my flat? My lovely flat?'
'Mother, it's very expensive.'
'And take up with him?'
'Come and meet him,' Charles begged.
'Oh, don't worry, I'll come and meet him. But I will not leave my flat. I refuse, I absolutely refuse, Charles. I value my independence.'
It was then Charles lost his temper and said some unkind things about her 'independence'. He succeeded in frightening his mother terribly.
44
Amongst her friends, Phoebe was not thought to be unkind. Quite the opposite. But as she walked into the private room at the Hyde Park Hotel on that evening in February 1949, she was armed for battle. She was angry with her son who now strode across the vulgar carpet to welcome her, but she kissed him on his rough sunburnt cheek as if nothing was the matter. She nodded to Leah whom she had never liked, and smiled at Emma, trying to convey fondness while, at the same time, keeping sufficient distance to discourage those soft-centred kisses.
Everyone was standing except for Emma who had seated herself at table. She wore, Phoebe noted, the same ostentatious pearls she had worn on Christmas Day. She had also, through design or carelessness -it was not quite clear which – neglected to wear a corset and her round little stomach rose from below the belt of her long silk dress and disappeared into the floral valley of her thighs.
Phoebe accepted the kisses of her grandchildren. No one would have guessed that she was repelled by all this sticky-mouthed humanity. She was bright. She laughed as she always did when nervous, and put her hand to her throat. She let her eyes go to that place in the room where her opponent sat.
'Herbert Badgery, I presume,' she said in a whisky-cured contralto. She laughed again. The feathers cascaded from her little hat.
I stood and walked towards her.
She held out her hand, briskly, with her handbag tucked beneath her arm. I shook her hand and found it damp.
'Well,' she said, and laughed again.
I could feel everyone watching us, marooned there in the middle of that room, the long cloth-covered table by our side. I felt dead-eyed Henry sit with a thump on one of the chairs. I had gone for a rum with Goldstein. She said it was good for toothache, but I could see it had been a mistake. I had already called Hissao 'Sonia'.
'You've got old,' said Phoebe.
I refrained from saying that she, also, had got old. Her carefully applied powder did nothing to hide the fine lines which were not those caused by laughing and smiling but were, rather, a fine network, like rivers on the map of her upper lip. Yet she had become the thing she had imagined and there was not, in either her bearing or her accent, very much left that would connect her to Jack and Molly.
A waiter came with sherry on a tray. I could have done with another rum, but I kept my hands jammed in the sticky pockets of my derelict suit, producing, doubtless, an effect that Phoebe would think was 'common'. She took a sherry. The boys said they wanted lemonade and I was pleased to feel that I was no longer the centre of attention. Henry was pinching Nicky and making him cry. Hissao wanted a pee and I could see Charles making toilet inquiries of the waiter. Emma started murmuring over Leah whose face she had so carefully made up, producing a doll-like beauty which, while foreign to her character and everything I liked about it, none the less made my wrinkled dick stretch and unwrinkle as if it were lying, not in the dark discomfort of my underpants, but in the gentle warmth of tomorrow morning's sunshine.
The windows were open on to Elizabeth Street and the hot night was suddenly filled with the frenzy of exhaust pipes, slipped clutches, the distinctive slap of engines wrecked by wartime gas producers. I liked the smell of car exhausts and I sniffed in the stinking air as Goldstein would have sniffed in jasmine.
'I mean no malice,' Phoebe said.
A strange expression. I looked to match it against an expression on her face, but she had her face bent from me, looking for something in her handbag – a white envelope, smooth, unbent, unmarked by powder.
