When she looked up I thought she was frightened of me. She handed me the envelope. In my confusion I imagined it was money, compensation for that aeroplane she had stolen from me. I thanked her, and tucked the envelope into my pocket. It felt thick and comforting. Perhaps there would be sufficient to pay my son some rent.
'You see,' she said, 'I know you are a bigamist.' She finished her sherry and looked around for a waiter. There was no waiter. She put the glass down on the table. 'You were already married when you married me. You were married', she said, 'to Marjorie Thatcher Wilson in Castlemaine on October 15th, 1917, and you were never divorced.'
I said nothing.
'I have all the papers.' She was quite gay. In the next room a dance combo began to play. There was a saxophone, 1 recall, and a piano player with an American accent. The waiter came and filled her glass. 'It won't matter if you tear it up, because I have the real thing. It's a little folio tied up with a ribbon and it cost me forty pounds. But the point is, dear Herbert, that I will not give up my flat.'
I had no idea what she was talking about, although I remembered Marjorie Wilson very well. She was a nice woman, and I was sorry I left her but the problem was not her but the screeching mother she would bow and scrape to all day long. I was silent. I was thinking about Marjorie and how we had to do it in the laundry while we took it in turns to keep the squeaky wringer moving.
My silence seemed to make Phoebe gayer.
'If you force me, I'll have you charged with bigamy and then, I believe, I'm entitled to sue you for all sorts of things.'
She laughed again, and I was reminded of her mother in the days when she thought something was wrong with her brain, when, caught in Geelong, with no faith in her normal manner, she had crooked her finger and adopted a plummy accent and revealed her terrors in continual laughter.
I was feeling quite anaesthetized. I had another sherry to help it along. My teeth stopped hurting and I promised Phoebe that I would cause her no trouble. I congratulated myself on having moved beyond a young man's rages.
I winked at my flirty lipsticked Goldstein as I sat down at the table. She touched my calf and smiled softly. I felt myself master of the situation. I said as little as possible but smiled politely at everyone. I asked them questions about themselves, an old salesman's habit guaranteed to make your prospect think you both sympathetic and intelligent. I did not imagine there was a risk of an argument about Australia's Own Car. I did not think I cared about the subject. I imagined I had no passions left except those involving shelter and the comforts of skin. I would do nothing to jeopardize either. I was going to have a place, with Goldstein, inside that wonderful building of my son's. I was going to wake each morning and gaze up at the skylight and know, straightaway, what sort of day it was.
Charles sat himself between Leah and his porcelain-faced wife. When the oyster shells were removed, he stretched and yawned and put his long arms along the back of Leah's chair, a gesture perhaps accidental, but I did not take to it.
'So, Father,' he said.
Phoebe, on my right, whispered that he only shouted because he was deaf.
'Tell me, Father,' he removed his arm from Leah's chair, and leaned forward intently. 'You haven't given your opinion of the Holden.'
I was not insensitive to his feelings about the car. I had questioned him about it at length. I would have thought this enough to do the job, but he was not such a simple fellow as he looked.
'It went well,' I said. 'I couldn't pass an opinion without driving it.'
'You can pass an opinion on one fact: it's an Australian car. I thought of you the day I read about it. I thought, Father has lived to see his dream come true. An Australian Car. Did he ever tell you, Mother,' he turned to Phoebe who was now looking very bored and was taking exception to Charles's great pleasure in saying 'Mother' and 'Father' at the one table, 'did he ever tell you how he walked away from the T Model on the saltflats at Geelong? When we were kids we used to ask him to tell us that story. He must have told it to us a hundred times. He…'
'There are no saltflats in Geelong,' Phoebe said. 'He was lying.'
'The saltflats are at Balliang East,' I said.
Phoebe shuddered. 'A dreadful place.'
'Very close to where I met you.'
'That's what I meant.'
Goldstein was the only one to laugh. It was also Goldstein who, on the subject of Australia's Own Car, made the point about the extraordinary deal General Motors had done with the Australian government. She talked about this in detail while Phoebe sighed loudly and shifted in her chair.
The roast beef arrived and for a moment it seemed as if the conversation would pass on to something less difficult, but Charles had no intention of letting it go.
'Yes,' he said, polishing his fork with his table napkin. 'There is money here to do things. There's no doubt about it.'
'Yes, dear,' said Leah. 'It's our money, but the Yanks do get all the profit. They won't risk their money because we have – or they think we have – a socialist government.'
'Who can blame them?' said my feathered wife. Her voice was not quite firm and bobbled uncertainly on its perch.
'Excuse me,' Comrade Goldstein put her fork back on her plate and sat up straight in her chair. 'Excuse me, but I do.'
Phoebe ignored Leah. (Perhaps this made me angry, but I didn't think so at the time.) 'I can't bear the way they speak,' she said. 'I just can't stand their vowels.'
'I like it better than the Poms,' said Charles. 'It's not stuck up. Now, you've met Nathan…'
'No, no,' his mother tapped the table with her dessert spoon. 'I don't mean the Americans. I mean the Labour Party. They've all got pegs on their noses.'
'It's the Australian way of speaking.'
'It's pig ignorant', said Phoebe, 'and if I were an American I wouldn't trust them either. They talk like pickpockets.'
'Say again,' said Charles. He placed his hearing aid on the table, propping it up against the blue packet of de Witt's Antacid Powder which he brought with him wherever he ate.
'They're thieves, pickpockets.' Phoebe looked at her son's contrivance with disgust. 'Put it in your pocket, Charles. Show some manners.'
'He can't hear you if he does,' Leah said, but Charles put his machine away, looking a little hurt. Phoebe smiled at Leah. She was too polite to call her a pinko.
Emma, in the meantime, had Hissao on her lap and was feeding him although he was now five and quite old enough to have his own chair and feed himself. Emma did not contribute to the argument although she smiled at me from time to time and occasionally I heard the barely audible sound of her murmurs. She popped mashed-up messes of food into her son's pretty mouth while his dark watchful eyes roamed over us. Once, in the middle of an argument, he smiled at me and for a moment I heard nothing that was said and smiled at him like a man in love. So late in my foolish life I was to acquire a real family after all.
'So, Father, what do you say about the Holden, eh?'
I shrugged. I am not a shrugger by nature but I wished to avoid saying anything hurtful.
'Come on. Come on.' He put his ape arm behind Leah's chair and beamed at me.
When I had done my years of study in Rankin Downs this was not the context in which I had planned to unleash my learning. I had imagined dispassionate discourse, conversation as restrained as teacups quietly kissing their saucers. But still I answered my son in a considered way, avoiding anything that could be considered personal.
'I would say', I told him, 'that we Australians are a timid people who have no faith in ourselves.'
It was then that the trouble started. It was not with my comment, which was quiet and civilized. It was my son's reply. He roared with laughter as unmusical as the chair he scraped beneath him. I felt my temper begin to rise. I tried to bottle it. I had my heart intent on entering his household and I would not – not this time, please God
