Tirra Lirra by the River (6 page)

He knew it was not horror. His voice was low, the look in his eyes like a caught breath. I turned and ran, flaming with fear and excitement, into the big bedroom set apart for the girls. I
stood in the centre of the floor, beating a fist against my mouth and saying softly, ‘Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh.’ Then I made up my mind, bent swiftly to the mirror to look once into my own eyes, and ran back to find him again.

But where he had been standing, I found another man, similar but younger, and fair instead of dark. He was smiling, and touching with two fingers the handkerchief in his breast pocket. Behind his head was a picture of camels and pyramids. ‘Are you looking for someone?’ he asked.

‘That man …’ I could not go on. I was confused because it seemed like a deliberate trick of substitution.

‘What man?’

‘The man who was here.’

‘You must mean John Porteous,’ said the fair man. ‘He’s my uncle. I’m Colin Porteous. We’ve both been putting up next door with my other uncle. And I still am, if that interests you.’

I said nothing. I wanted to ask where John Porteous had gone, but I was afraid of the fair man’s mockery, and did not dare.

‘I knew it was him you came back to find,’ said Colin Porteous. ‘I could tell by the way you looked at him.’

‘How do you know how I looked at him?’ I asked furiously.

‘Because I was standing here beside him.’

I started. ‘I didn’t see you.’

‘I know you didn’t. Eyes,’ he said, ‘only for him.’

‘I wanted to ask him something,’ I said. ‘That’s why I came back.’

‘Ask me instead.’

‘I want to ask him.’

‘I’m sorry. He’s gone.’

‘But it’s early. Won’t he be back?’

‘Back from India? I don’t think so.’

‘You’re joking about India.’

‘No. He sails at eleven forty-five. If you run out to the gate you might just see the tail lights of my other uncle’s car.’

I couldn’t speak. He came a step nearer and looked closely into my face. ‘Well, well, well. My, oh, my.’

The sky was red behind the two camels, the pyramids, and the third camel now revealed to me by the forward thrust of Colin Porteous’s head. I studied them earnestly while he softly stroked my arm.

‘Do you know who you’re like?’

If I did, I would not say.

‘Lillian Gish. With your hair down, I bet you look just like Lillian Gish. Dance? I’m not my uncle, of course, but at least I’m not married. And I’m a darn sight younger, too. He’s forty-five.’

I was twenty-five. You wouldn’t think a woman of twenty-five would go on like that, would you? But that is what happened. Colin Porteous was a lawyer who worked for the New South Wales government. After his first call on me, my mother looked at me with respect, and Grace, her brows raised and her mouth awry, called him ‘Prince Charming himself’.

‘At last,’ she said, ‘you will have a chance to leave this hateful place.’

‘I have never called it hateful. Never.’

‘Never out loud.’

‘Girls, girls.’

‘You may not have noticed, mother,’ said Grace, ‘but I am no longer a girl. I am thirty-one.’

As a signal of approval he was asked to dinner. With the port wine (for him alone), my father’s photograph was brought out.

But it was I who looked at it with curiosity, who took it from his hands and carried it to the light. ‘I can’t remember one single thing about him,’ I said in wonder.

‘How old were you when he …’ asked Colin.

‘Six,’ replied my mother, taking the photograph from me.

‘Old enough to remember,’ said Colin, and added in his ‘teasing’ voice, ‘I hope you are not heartless.’

Although the silence of my mother and Grace may have implied that I was, nothing could deflect him from his covetousness of me. Having lost confidence in my own attraction, I could not imagine what I had done to deserve it. We were married before he returned to Sydney.

‘A whirlwind
ro
-mance,’ said Una Porteous in her slow grating voice. Colin was annoyed because his brother, with his wife and three children, had moved into Una’s house in his absence, and had left no room for us.

‘A man goes away for a break,’ he said, ‘and comes back to find himself ousted.’

‘Well, Col, if you had of come back alone, naturally you would of had your old room back and no argument. We could squeeze one in even now, but to squeeze two in wouldn’t be fair to anyone, least of all to Nora, who will be wanting her own little place. Of course if I had of known you was getting married, Col. But I was not informed. I don’t know how I was expected to know, when I was not informed.’

It was a red-brick house in a big flat chequerboard suburb, predominately iron-grey and terracotta in colour, and treeless except for an occasional row of tristanias, clipped to roundness and stuck like toffee apples into the pavement. ‘If I had to live here I would die,’ I told Colin.

‘Die?’

He had just come home from work and we were getting ready to go to Una Porteous’s house for dinner. While we looked for a small flat he had found board for us both in the same street. ‘Die?’ he said, combing his hair in the mirror.

‘Oh, of course I don’t mean
die
. What I mean is, it’s not like Sydney.’

‘What
is
like Sydney?’

‘The harbour.’

‘You won’t find a flat near the harbour, not one I can afford.’

But he was wrong. He had never looked. I found one in an old house with a waterfront garden, and begged Colin to take it. He was in love with me then, and besides, he could save on fares by walking over Wolloomooloo and the Domain to his department in the city.

The old house was one of four on Potts Point. I remember their names. Bomera. Tarana. Crecy. Agincourt. In Sydney recently my nephew offered to take me there, but I had already looked across at Potts Point through his binoculars, and had seen Bomera and Tarana joined to Garden Island by an ugly, car-infested concrete isthmus. Garden Island was a real island then, with a few little battleships mooning about like the navy of Ruritania. The four houses stood opposite. One, Bomera, was of stone, built by convicts, and the other three were early Victorian. Ours was Crecy. I could not find it through my nephew’s binoculars. Our flat was only one big room with a kitchen and bath, but the big room was very big indeed, with a high ceiling, a north aspect, and three pairs of long double windows through which one saw people, flowers, cats, water, sky, seagulls, ships. It was furnished with some old unimportant pleasant things, and it has remained for me a pattern of what a room should be.

When one falls in love with a city, it is always with only a part of it. ‘My’ Sydney, of which the houses on the point were the heart, was bound on the north by the harbour, on the south by Bayswater Road, on the west by the city (some of which it included), and on the east by Beach Road at Rushcutters Bay. In this Sydney I became conscious for the first time of the points of the compass, and felt for the first time the airs of three other climates, borne on to my skin by the three prevailing winds. In this limited territory I was very happy in spite of my sexual difficulties.

I do not propose to add to the documents on coition, but it does seem necessary to say that for a long time I got no more enjoyment from it than I had from the mangling and pulling about by the boys under the camphor laurels, of whose activities it seemed a simple but distressing extension. Perhaps I had waited too long. ‘Do this,’ Colin Porteous would say. ‘Do that.’ And I would do this and that, and not know whether to laugh or cry in my misery.

He was always very amiable about it. ‘Well, you’re frigid, and that’s that. Women with your colouring are often frigid.’ And he would go on to tell me about ‘passionate Spanish women’ and ‘experienced French women’ in a way that I knew perfectly was puerile, though I would not let myself admit it lest it undermine my determination to be in love with him. The first substitute I made for him was a man I could love, and in this I was greatly supported by the happiness of my life while he was at work.

I suppose many women of my generation can recall a similar delicious period, when one’s idleness and play are without guilt because ‘it is only until the children come’. Bomera had a shifting population of which the two stable elements were a dressmaker, Ida Mayo, and a gentle bearded watercolourist in a grey dustcoat, whose name I have forgotten. At any given time, the rest would be mostly artists and actors, but one might also find a restaurant cook, a remittance man, a clerk or an engineer. The old carriage drive led from the gatehouse to a portico under a magnolia tree. This portico was square, with a broad balustrade suitable for sitting on, and opened on to a wide hall with a floor of white marble. Across the hall two statues faced each other. One, Wisdom, held a book in her hand, and the other, Folly, held, I think, a bunch of grapes. The double front doors stood open day and night, and at whatever time I went there, I always found someone about and was sure of a welcome. I would talk to them, pose for them, drink their coffee, listen to their music, and borrow their books. I began by trying to match their sophistication (as it seemed to me then), but they soon detected my ignorance, and took pleasure in startling and shocking me. I took the cue, and to please them, pretended to be even more ignorant than I was, covering my face and giving a dramatic cry, or putting my hands over my ears and begging them to stop. Amused by this game, they began to treat me with a sort of teasing condescension, as if I were a toy, almost a mascot. Only Ida Mayo the dressmaker refused to be amused.

‘The fact is, Nora knows more about colour than any of you lot, with your daubs.’

Ida was a specialist, her card said, in evening wear. I was impressed by her skill, and enjoyed helping her. Colin held the opinion, common in those days, that a man was disgraced if his wife worked for money, and with Ida I had occupation without disgrace. Her two rooms were dimmed by a broad verandah, and I loved to go in and see the little lamps shining so privately on opulent materials while all was so sunny and windy and fresh outside. She used to let me break open the wrappings of her overseas fashion magazines, which I think excited me first by their smell, that celebrated smell of the glossy mag, the scent of twentieth-century folly.

‘Have any more come, Ida?’ I would always ask.

She would not let me take them away, and as I knelt on the floor of her workroom and turned the pages, I was under enchantment again. What did they make me long for? Not the clothes, exactly. Nor the life shown, exactly.

‘
I
don’t know,’ said Ida, when I asked her.

But Lewie Johns, kneeling on the floor by my side, moved one hand to and fro and said, ‘Just to somehow approximate the style, that’s all. I bet it’s a chimera, though, all that style. In real life, when you got close to it, it would just melt away.’

Lewie was one of the artists. ‘The worst of the lot,’ he said,
‘and
that’s
saying something.’ Honesty had made him give up all notions of painting and content himself with picking up a bit of commercial art here and there.

‘And I’m not much chop at that, either.’

In times of idleness he would often come to Ida’s rooms. ‘Oh, I like
this
.’ And he would walk about, draping himself in satin or lamé and striking poses that even now, in memory, surprise me by their wit. Sometimes the three of us would sit together and sew on a rush job, and at these times Lewie usually complained about his love affairs. Colin, my only mentor in these matters, had depicted homosexuality as something vile and horrendous, but by the time I thoroughly understood that the men Lewie complained about were not friends but lovers, it was too late to be horrified, because he had become the best friend I had had since my school days. With him I never played the game of exaggerating my shock. He had given me an early warning by breaking off his narrative, pointing a needle at me, and saying bitterly, ‘Look at her face’. I soon became very artful at disguising my shock, although I must say here that as he became equally artful at detecting it, many sulks and squabbles were the result. But in spite of this we were (as Fred remarked long afterwards about the group at number six) ‘hopelessly simpatico’, and a dozen times a day I would think, ‘I must show Lewie this’, or ‘I must tell Lewie that.’ I had not acted on such fervent impulses of friendship since the time when Olive Partridge and I used to run across the paddocks to each other’s houses with books we had just finished reading.

Every evening, at a quarter to six, Colin came home. He kissed me. ‘And what did you do today?’

‘I went over to Bomera.’

But one evening he frowned. ‘I don’t like that mob over there.’

‘But Colin, you hardly know them.’

‘I don’t want to know them. If you ask me, they’re pretty queer.’

‘What’s queer about Ida?’

‘She seems a decent enough old stick. But most of the others look pretty queer.’

The word ‘queer’ had not then acquired its sexual shading. Colin used it simply in its original sense of ‘unusual’, but don’t imagine it was much less hostile for that. The people at Bomera returned his dislike, and the manner in which they just barely refrained from expressing it, their sudden change, if I should mention his name, from frankness to cautious politeness, made it the more potently felt by me. None of them except Ida ever mentioned him first, and even Ida never spoke of him by name, but always called him ‘him’ or ‘he’.

‘You had better go now, Nora. He will be home soon.’

As time passed, and I also spoke of him as little as possible, the avoidance of his name became a conspiracy to which I consented so that I could enjoy their company while still persuading myself of love for Colin and my loyalty to him.

Ida Mayo was Lewie’s chief confidante, but one day, when she was out, he came over to Crecy to complain about a man named Harold. I was cooking the dinner, and he stood behind me at the stove and talked. The difference in our heels made me hardly shorter than him that day, and presently, continuing to talk, he put his chin on my shoulder. It was the only time we ever touched each other.