Those Brisbane Romantics, page 5
“Couldn’t we smother them?” Tara’s mother begged.
Miss Quinn shook her head. “They’d struggle. You’d relent.”
The women went to the butcher over the coming weeks and had their meat knives sharpened. Lots of them cut their fingers accidentally on the unusually sharp knives and sobbed more than they should have over the small cuts.
Tara was afraid to go to sleep at night. “Please, Mum, I’m not sleepy. Read me another fairy story, will you?”
Remembering this while Tripta Srivastava’s party raged around her, Tara had a flash of something: her mother had put her into the convent (something Tara had always held against her) in an effort to save her life. Miss Quinn would have killed her with her own hands if they’d been invaded and her mother had reneged on it.
“For god’s sake, have a drink,” Joe said to Tara.
She was sitting on the floor, still as a tree—looking strange, she supposed. It had been hard for her to go to the party that night. Some days she could be overwhelmed by such a sense of insignificance she would be hard pressed to get out of bed. Today had been one of those days.
Joe poured some white wine into her glass from a nearby flagon that stood, inexplicably, under a dining chair. “Why did you come if you’re not at home here?” he asked.
Flagon wine was new to Brisbane. The Mates had discovered it and introduced it to their crowd. It was obtainable only from McWilliams Wine Company in Petrie Bight, and you had to return your empties or you’d lose your five-shillings deposit. The men drank it only when they were broke, though they used it to lace their fruit punch, which went down well with the women. Tara didn’t like wine, but she drank it now to please Joe. She could see he was in one of his moods.
“Well?” he asked her.
“I wanted to see you.”
“I’ve been practising.”
“I know.” The words were out before she could take them back.
He made no comment on what she’d revealed, but a small frown appeared on his forehead. Tara knew he hated the nights when she hid in the loquat tree watching him practise and would have bought curtains if he’d had the money.
“What are you looking for, Tara?” He sounded exasperated.
She was looking for someone to keep her alive, but she could hardly say that. This was a party, god damn it. She remained silent, tracing the outline of the flowers in the carpet with one fingertip.
Joe shook his head. “Now you’re going all morbid on me. I thought for a while there you were going to be cheerful.”
All right for him, Tara thought. His father had run the telephone exchange during the war, an essential service. He got to stay at home. “I’m not morbid,” she said. “The pain’s there and I see it. Anyone with eyes to see can see it.” Beautiful people grew old, lost their looks. People you loved died—or disappeared. Hell, it was everywhere.
“What about happiness, do you see that too?”
The rest of the Mates arrived, carrying their musical instruments, Cluster and Rupert on the handles of the ubiquitous garbage bin full of punch. Leigh was with them. Tara saw Joe frown at the sight of her.
“What are you scared of?” she asked him.
“Ah ha, lady’s brought in the battering ram. Not scared.”
“Then what’ve you got a wall for?”
“What do you live in a house for? It’s handy. Everybody’s got some sort of wall.”
“I haven’t,” Tara said. “And I don’t want one, I hate walls.” An image of the convent rose up before her, and she tossed down the wine. As usual, it tasted like vinegar. “You know what I think? I’ve got no edges.”
“Ego boundaries,” Joe said automatically. It was a phrase he’d just learned from a book on psychology. If you want to remain the leader of a group, you have to keep up with things.
“All right, ego boundaries. And I’m always sidling up to people, trying to become part of them somehow. Sometimes when I’m near them, it’s all I can do to stop myself from huddling up to them like a sheep in a snowstorm. It’s appalling.”
Cass appeared out of the crowd, holding a bottle of rum in one hand and a bottle of Coca-Cola in the other, each topped with an upturned glass. She leaned on the wall beside them. “What’s appalling, colonial cobber?”
“You are,” Joe said, “with your virtuousness while waiting for Ling to return from out west.”
“Ah, but he comes back tonight—and then! My hormones start zooming at the thought. Anyway, before I get all carried away I’d better tell you the boys want you for the music.”
Joe had traded Tripta Srivastava’s dance in the revue for music at her party. He rose to his feet. “I’ll see you later then.”
“Oh Cass, you wretch,” Tara wailed when he’d gone. “It’s the first time I’ve been able to run him to earth for weeks.”
Cass slid down the wall, holding the bottles carefully. She poured double shots of rum for each of them and topped up the glasses with Coke. She patted her friend on the knee. “Sorry.”
Cass Clayton was like the roses that are in tight bud one day, burst into bloom overnight and fall the following day. She had wild, russet-coloured hair and restless eyes, eyes that never seemed to settle on anything for very long. But they had settled on Ling Chang, and how was that going to end?
The two sat for a while without speaking. Tara began looking through a pile of vinyl LPs stacked on the floor.
“Doug’s,” Cass explained. “They’re a bit heavy.”
“So I see.” Not for the first time, Tara wished she knew more about classical music.
“Well, colonial cobber, I hate to leave you, but the boys are signalling. In a rash moment I promised I’d sing. God, I wish Ling’d come. I’ll go mad soon if he doesn’t. I shan’t be leaving you alone. Guess who’s coming? Just grit your teeth and think of England.” She departed, laughing.
Margot arrived. She was a Hitchcock blonde, but she had to watch her weight. Joe had once described her to Tara as having thighs that could crush a man to death. Just what had he meant by that?
“Good evening, Tara.” Trying to look beautiful all the time, Margot never achieved that sudden unconscious flash of prettiness that can fell a man with one blow. “You look tired.”
“I’m fine thanks,” Tara said evenly. “How about you?”
“I’m quite well, thank you.”
Margot sat down on the floor beside Tara, but the conversation had stalled. The two would never have been on speaking terms if they hadn’t worked in the same government department. As it was, they maintained an uneasy friendship and looked forward to the day when their destinies would separate them. There was never any open warfare; there was never any real accord either.
Margot lit a cigarette, it was something to do. Tara knew she hated the music the Mates played, considered it dilettante.
“I’ve been reading a fascinating book by Hemingway,” she told Tara. “Which of his books do you think is the best?”
Margot and Tim were going steady, and it was all Tara’s fault, damn it. The Mates had wanted some new women for the cast party, so she’d asked a couple of the girls from work. Tim was a reader, loved classical music—an appreciator, as he’d described himself that night. He must have lurched off the back steps straight into her arms, and she’d roped him in with her highfalutin’ talk of Richter and Yevtushenko. Damn.
Margot looked around her, she always seemed to be waiting for something. Tara wondered morosely if she’d ever find it.
Whether either of them ever would.
Cass was singing an old Cole Porter song. Her voice was very low and rich and steady. It was a voice with the power to make people listen. As she sang she swayed slightly to the music, while her eyes, those restless eyes, watched the door. Only Tara picked up the sound that now held Cass’s attention. Was it the sound of footsteps, or dead leaves blown through the grass?
Ling Chang came in through the back door and stood near the wall across the room from Cass, watching her sing. Unlike the Australians, he didn’t lean. He was as perfectly turned out as ever: crease in the trousers, pressed shirt, shined shoes. They smiled at one another, making love to one another with their eyes.
She went over and took his hand when she’d finished the number. “Ling, it’s been hundreds of years!”
While the smoke from Margot’s Sobranies drifted past her and Margot talked about Hemingway, Tara watched the couple searching for a quiet place to be alone. There were people in every room. Eventually, Tara saw them sneak down the back steps. Cass carried a mohair blanket, Ling carried a large glass of water.
That’s right, Tara thought, he didn’t drink alcohol.
The party had broken up into groups. The women keen to display their domesticity were in the kitchen washing up with Tripta. Joe and Doug were with a group in the living room, drinking Doug’s Courvoisier and discussing Christianity. Doug was an atheist, Joe a sometime Roman Catholic.
Tara leaned against the wall and studied Doug Jarratt. It was the first time she’d had a chance to get a good look at him. He was a big, rumpled sort of man with close-cropped hair and the face of an ex-boxer. Apart from this, it was a very ordinary face except for the eyes, which were unusual in the depth of their compassion.
“For all we know,” he was saying, “the Earth could be a cell in the left kneecap of some giant. What do you suppose a white blood cell makes of me?”
Joe was clearly disturbed by this concept. “You’re missing the point. A white blood cell is only a white blood cell, it doesn’t have a soul. A white blood cell won’t rise again when it dies.”
Tara felt a stab of pity for the white blood cell. It had been dismissed so summarily.
Doug laughed. “So, you’re expecting to rise again—you, me, that girl over there?” He pointed to Tara, who shrank back further against the wall.
Joe tossed down the first cognac. He was as confused as Tara, although he would never have admitted it. “I’ve met people, marvellous people, and they couldn’t have achieved such goodness, Doug, without their belief in a life after death. And certainly, yes, I agree with them.”
“So,” Doug paused before delivering the coup de grâce, “are you expecting to keep your hair colour? What age will you be, do you suppose?” He laughed goodnaturedly and poured them both another cognac. “If I had your religion, I’d be terrified night and day. I know you, Joe, and you’re not worried.”
On the other side of the room, Rupert, Cluster, Tim and Bill (Alastair had already left with one of the more gullible women), were discussing the White Australia Policy. Designed to prevent anyone of colour from entering Australia and undercutting the wages of white, blue-collar workers, this legislation dated from 1901.
“It’s printed on the front page of The Bulletin,” Rupert was saying, elegant in dove-grey cords. “In Italics, under the title: AUSTRALIA FOR THE WHITE MAN for chrissakes!”
“What else can we do?” Cluster asked. “We don’t want to become another South Africa. We’ve gotta keep these people out now. That way, we’ll avoid the whole problem.”
Nobody mentioned the Aborigines, who had been in Australia for over sixty thousand years when James Cook sailed into Botany Bay in 1770 and declared the continent Terra Nullius. Now, with the grabbing of their land, not to mention various massacres and episodes with poisoned flour, their numbers were greatly diminished. Their segregation had been so complete that no one in the room apart from Jarratt had ever seen an Aborigine.
Tripta Srivastava came in from the kitchen and sat down next to Doug. She wore a crimson sari over a choli of sun-coloured silk. Her earrings and bracelets were gold, she wore white flowers in her hair. The bracelets jangled, the jewels glittered. And the eyes.
As Tara watched Doug reacting to her beauty, no doubt wondering how he could ever have caught the attention of someone so exotic, she felt a stab of envy. Why couldn’t she glitter like that? But she didn’t have the colouring, for one thing. Her green eyes faded into candlelit gloom, her lack of confidence made every movement studied.
Overseas students tended to hang together, strangers in a strange land. Tripta and Ling were friends, so Cass knew a lot about Doug Jarratt. He was twenty-six, she’d told Tara, a few years older than their crowd at a time of life when a few years mattered. He’d just been seconded from the Department of Children’s Services to the Department of Native Affairs, whose policy of segregation he was finding not at all to his liking. The more Doug saw, Cass said, the more he brooded on the injustice of it. Tara wondered where it would all end; Doug didn’t look to her like someone who would sit around brooding for very long.
Interesting, she thought, and risked another mouthful of rum and Coke.
Twisting one of the ornate gold bracelets around her left wrist, Tripta looked about her and noted Cass’s absence, “Poor Cass.” She leaned closer to Doug and whispered to him; Tara only just caught the words. “I am glad we are not sleeping together. Passion blinds people.”
Even more interesting. From the look on Doug’s face, he seemed to be wondering if unfulfilled passion didn’t blind people even more.
Tara needed to pee, but some guests had locked themselves in the bathroom. When she knocked, she heard laughter and the clink of bottles. Near to bursting, she made her way through the crowd and down the front steps, mercifully clear of people.
The night was chilly, the wind was crisp and clear. The stars glittered coldly in a sky the colour of violets. Someone, probably Doug, had mown the front yard to within an inch of its life. There were no shrubs to squat behind except near the front fence, but that would leave her exposed to anyone coming to the front of the house.
Still, she had to go. She stepped under the front balcony and dropped her slacks and knickers. When she was in full spate someone came on to the balcony above her: Tripta. Tara could hear her bracelets jingling. She decided to wait her out.
Mistake.
She heard the young Indian woman sigh, “Ah, it is so beautiful here.”
“Sure you won’t stay?” Tara heard Doug shut the French windows behind him and cross the balcony to where Tripta leaned on the railing.
“Every minute of every hour of every day I am considering it. But the answer is always the same.”
“No?”
“It is so. No.”
“Marry me at the end of the year and stay here in Australia. It isn’t as if you were on a Colombo Plan scholarship like Ling. You’re a private student. You don’t owe your government anything.”
Tara was stuck. The moment when she could have revealed herself had passed. She could not go around the side of the house in case she fell over Cass and Ling in flagrante. She sat down on an upturned paint tin under the balcony and resigned herself to waiting out the couple above her.
Tripta spoke. “How cold my feet are.”
“Here, sit down in this deck chair. I’ll soon get them warm for you.”
Tara heard Tripta’s silk pumps hit the balcony floor.
“Thank you,” Tripta kept saying. “Thank you. They were so cold.”
Did he pause and look up at her, that rumpled man with the compassionate eyes, holding her feet between his palms?
“Stay?”
“I would stay, Doug, but for my sisters. My sisters …” Tripta’s voice held the threat of impending tears. “My sisters are thirteen and sixteen. Gay, bright girls. You have seen the photographs of them. If I were to defy my father and marry you, it would be a scandal. A terrible scandal.”
“We can weather it.”
Yes, Tara thought, you could weather anything. I like you.
“You do not understand, you do not see,” Tripta was saying. “Friends would say to my father, ‘What a foolish man you were to trust your daughter so far away.’ And others would say, ‘It is in the blood. Ai Ai, it is in the blood.’ And no one would marry my sisters, it would be such a terrible scandal.”
Doug stood up, walked to the end of the balcony and came back.
“This is 1961, Tripta,” he said. “You’re a doctor, trained in the west! How can you subject yourself to this blackmail?”
Tara heard a match being struck. Doug had been trying to give up smoking for months, Cass said. Rumours were starting to circulate that it was bad for your health, although these hadn’t yet reached the general population.
Tripta’s voice was small when she spoke again. “Maybe we should not see one another anymore.”
Doug exhaled heavily. “It’s a bit too late to be thinking like that now, I’m afraid. We’re well on the road now. We’ll just have to try to solve the problem as best we can.”
Tripta blew her nose. “And how are we to be doing that?”
Through the slats that enclosed the underneath of the house, Tara could see the moon sinking, going down past the partly-built television mast on Mount Coot-tha. Doug must have noticed it too, for he said, “See the moon, Tripta? Did you know it gets tangled up in the mast sometimes? The technicians have to climb up and prod it off with poles.”
She laughed at that. “You are pulling my legs.”
“No,” he said. “Not even one of them.”
They went back inside and closed the French doors behind them. For a long while after they’d gone, Tara sat there on the upturned paint tin. Torn by the love in his voice.
After the sweets and the coffee, the talk faltered. People lay back on cushions on the floor, listening to the Kingston Trio’s “Tom Dooley”, while the pavlova and the whipped cream went down. If they stayed long enough, Tara knew Margot would sneak on a piano concerto to show she was a classical music aficionado. This had happened before.
She looked around. Joe was gone.
The giant bottle lamp with its gold raffia lampshade threw a friendly glow. The shadows of the candles danced against the walls.
This is life, Tara thought. We really are alive. We live.
A snail made its way around the goldfish bowl. She wondered what its pain was.
