Rose Boys, page 13
In hindsight, Robert’s articles were punchy. At times they were downright provocative. I wonder now, rereading them, how his old team-mates reacted. Robert didn’t shirk controversy or soften his criticisms because of old allegiances. He was quick to suggest that a certain player should be rested or cajoled or promoted, and another one cleared to Coventry. He was impressed by courage and flair, and scornful of lapses or timidity. I like his acid tone, typified by this verdict on his old coach Neil Mann: ‘Neil’s a good coach in certain respects, but he wouldn’t be the best speaker in the world. Neil doesn’t go in much for tactical talk during a final. When I played he left us very much to our own designs.’ Robert ‘couldn’t suppress a smile’ when Murray Weideman, never known for his exuberance at training while playing for Collingwood, succeeded Mann as coach and began laying down the law. ‘A little bird tells me the Magpies won’t take too kindly to the six-day plan, or to Murray Weideman for that matter.’ One week Robert attended a function for sports writers. The article begins, ‘A funny thing happened to me on the way to the Victorian Football Writers’ Soiree the other night’. He is photographed next to Kevin Sheedy, who had just won an award. Lou Richards compered the show, as Robert noted: ‘I must say I’ve enjoyed Lou’s quips, jibes and witticisms more since the accident, because I can assure you while I was playing footy he always got on my pip.’
Robert was prepared, or encouraged, to write about personal subjects. He devotes one article to our father. ‘I’ve a lot of time for Bob Rose. He’s the man I always hoped I’d grow up to be. Ours has always been more of a friendship than the usual father and son relationship.’ Robert also wrote about his old mate Trevor Laughlin, a deliberate, and successful, attempt to bring him to the notice of the Victorian selectors. Celebrating Trevor’s loyalty, he talked about ‘a different kind of love…the bond existing between two blokes that some may call queer, some unhealthy and most will hide with embarrassed smiles’.
The rest of us muddled along. The pattern of hospital visits and weekend outings was unchanged. We saw more of Salli, who was growing up precociously. I enjoyed my new avuncular role. ‘What’s that?’ Salli demanded like a staccato doll. I named things for her and watched her fascinated reactions. She was delighted by her first moon and by her debut on my old recorder. I thought I would like to have a child of my own one day. Sometimes I wondered how Robert reacted to my being able to frolic with Salli while he was immobile.
Barbara married an academic and promptly announced that they were moving to the United States. I knew I would miss her immensely and decided to visit them at the end of the year. One of our last outings as an unconventional family was to a fundraising benefit for Robert. I was unnerved by one of the acts, a drag queen named Stan Munro, but I did enjoy one pouting line: ‘You don’t really think Mick Jagger got those lips sucking strawberries!’
Footscray, with a late surge, made the finals for the first time in many years, only to be quietly eliminated by Collingwood. Encouraged by their late-season form and by the likely recruitment of the South Australian champion Neil Sachse, Dad decided to stay on as coach. Mum, as before, would have preferred him to stop.
Our emotional instability produced moments of strain and euphoria. One morning Robert and I were joking with each other as I gave him breakfast in bed. I said he had a cheek expecting to be fed just because he was a cripple. It was one of those stupid jests that die on your lips, staining them. We looked at each other, then went on talking, but that silence was terrible. Why did the word ‘cripple’ intimidate us so? Robert understood the innocence of my remark, but also the everlasting tragedy of it. Later Terry told me he had cried all the previous night, and I felt even worse. Robert didn’t get up that day. He told me he was going through a silly period and decided not to attend a family function he had been looking forward to for some time. But everyone’s mood improved next day. Robert had a visit from Jack Ryder, simply ‘The King’, still ramrod and immaculate at eighty-five. Ryder had played in Collingwood’s first district match in 1906 and had made 295 in 245 minutes when Victoria hit 1107 against New South Wales twenty years later. I took photographs of him with Robert.
That evening, about to take Robert back to the hospital, Terry accidentally put the car into reverse and slammed into a brick wall. Anyone standing behind her, as we often did when seeing them off, would have been killed. No one was hurt, but Terry became distraught and Salli howled in her harness. Robert stayed amazingly calm. I began to hate cars and all the misery they caused. Some nights, when A. drove me home late, often stoned, in his white Volkswagen, I became petrified and fully expected to be paralysed in an accident. I hyperventilated, but said nothing.
My mood fluctuated, like Terry’s driving. I often became morose at night: the old death wish. I was reading Conrad again, including the incomparable Nostromo, and was much affected by Martin Decoud’s nihilism. I often quoted Conrad’s ‘We, living, are out of life’.
Nor was I alone in my despondency. One day Mum and I agreed, innocuously enough, that the year was flashing by. Then she said she wished that time would go even faster. The casual bleakness of it haunted me. Nevertheless, Mum returned to work for the first time since December.
Robert somehow rose above it all. Terry and I took him to one of the last games of the year and sat with him inside the fence. I wrote in my journal, ‘I felt very close to him, but was saddened as I watched him. But then, he is stronger than anyone.’
Still, there were lifelines of sorts. A. and I continued to circle each other warily. After a woefully anonymous year and a half at university—‘always slightly veiled’—I began making new friends, largely because of a riotous ethics tutorial on Tuesdays. My studies were shambolic. I read all the wrong texts and had the deductive skills of an ant. Why didn’t someone advise me to suspend my course until the next year? (Perhaps because they didn’t know what had happened.) Why didn’t I think of it myself? Logic, so liberating the previous year, addled my brain, but I loved reading the Greeks and thinking about ethics. I was seduced by Hamlet’s indecision and often quoted the sweet prince on Tuesday afternoons—‘There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so’. My new friends also wearied of my other motto, one picked up from Tolstoy: ‘If man must die, what even is truth?’
We were a lively if undisciplined bunch. Whole days were spent in the dopey ‘caf’. We would meet at breakfast, stay for lunch, then move on to our hotel in the afternoon. We often missed lectures; sometimes we forgot exams. Assessment was a controversial issue that year at Monash—why, I can’t remember. By a large majority the students sought its abolition. The vice-chancellor, not surprisingly, demurred. Agitators promptly occupied the administration building. It stayed occupied for more than a week. Sir John Monash’s bust acquired Mickey Mouse ears, and portraits of Che Guevara replaced those of the obstinate vice-chancellor. Mum woke me one morning and inquired if I intended to go rabble-rousing today, and how would I like my eggs. After rare lectures and tutorials we visited the siege for thin coffee and revolutionary gossip. Never, perhaps, has so much fornication happened in a vice-chancellor’s office. I felt terribly grown up. Finally, inevitably, the police appeared and seventy-four students were arrested.
Throughout all this I never mentioned Robert or his illness. None of my comrades knew about my family. I preferred to uphold my alien status. When I took my new friends home there would be a surprised thud of recognition, that is if they knew anything about sport, which many of them didn’t. (I marvelled at the thought of a life without sport.) Fanatical or not, my female friends all adored Dad, the most charming of men.
As the year wore on, and exams and essays loomed, my lassitude increased. I found it impossible to study in our new, noisy household. I began to hate the tyranny of sport—the endless broadcasts, the idiotic commentaries and post-match analyses. Robert, naturally, could watch whatever he liked. Sometimes two or three televisions and radios were going simultaneously. I hated being shushed during horse races. I loathed the jockeys, the contest—I even hated the bloody horses. I withdrew and played Velvet Underground very loud to block out the hysterical commentators. Other times, when Robert was confined to bed, I knew I should go in and see him, but often I didn’t. What on earth would we talk about? One of my English tutors, a snooty Blakean, told us that all undergraduates should live away from home. She was of course right. But flight, even if I had been ready for it, would have been indefensibly selfish.
So I began to feel guilty and resentful at the same time. Robert, especially when morose, was demanding. Always anxious about the next lift or dosage, he could be quite tetchy. We were all doing far too much lifting in those days. Hoists, now mandatory, weren’t available then. By October I had permanently damaged my back. Because I was still wary of chiropractic—especially the final neck adjustment, which would surely be paralysing—I tried to conceal my injury. It would also have been outrageous to complain. My back ached, but not as keenly as Robert’s thumbs. His comfort was paramount. We all knew we were close to an affliction we couldn’t comprehend. We circled this ordinary and extraordinary force-field. It was centripetal, irresistible. Robert sat there in his wheelchair and even when he was comfortable, even when there was no crisis, even when the wretched nags were turning into the straight and everyone was willing them on, all our thoughts somehow veered towards him. Living on like that, bizarrely, sufferingly, Robert alone mattered.
I was becoming aware of the creeping ambivalence, the feelings of unease and inadequacy that arise when you care for someone as seriously disabled as Robert. You start to feel unworthy just because you move freely, or loathe the trots, or want to drift. I wasn’t alone in this, but I probably thought I was, for we never discussed it as a family. Perhaps 1974 wasn’t the right year for me to ponder philosophical notions of duty and altruism, egoism and responsibility. Then again, maybe it was.
Minor things irritated me. John Bayley, in one of his books about his wife, Iris Murdoch, stated that, unlike the many disagreeable tasks he had to perform when caring for the senile novelist, feeding her was always enjoyable. He said it gave him pleasure. This surprised me. Mum liked feeding Robert (it was the most overt way of nourishing him), but I always found it vaguely repellent spooning soup or sausage and mash into his waiting mouth. Fortunately Robert was able to feed himself with the aid of a wrist brace, but it was obviously quicker for us to feed him and we often did. I was always glad when it was over. I’m sure Robert didn’t enjoy being fed either. He ate far too quickly as a consequence, gulping down the soup—sighing if I was too slow, even sucking it through a straw if it was thin enough—and swallowing whole biscuits or sandwiches rather than biting them in half. I used to worry about it. ‘You’ll choke,’ I’d warn him. ‘Just like good old Mama Cass,’ he’d quip. He went on masticating and never choked. He always thanked us at the end of each course, just as he did when we emptied his urine bag or removed his faeces. He never forgot.
Bayley’s first book impressed me as a study in eccentric devotion. The second one I found more troubling. I still wonder about the propriety of writing such a book about a living spouse, however famous or senile. Isn’t it otiose, even gratuitous? I have no intention of writing a second book about Robert. I’m not even sure I should be writing the first. What would Robert have made of my essay in fraternal juxtaposition? Would he have liked my tentative portrait? Would he have approved? Would he have tried to stop me? And how would Iris Murdoch have reacted had she suddenly, miraculously, recovered from Alzheimer’s disease? Would she have resented her spouse’s affectionate promulgation of her descent into infantilism? And what of Bayley’s motives? Did the writing comfort him as Iris sank into vacancy?
And what is my true motive (if I can be said to have formulated one)? Am I perpetuating my brother’s memory, which is what our father believes and perhaps why he is so enthusiastic about my book? Am I writing it for Salli, and Lachlan Robert, the grandson Robert didn’t live to see? Am I trying to reveal the essential Robert, the latent messenger in the Herald editorial? Or am I trying to impose a version of him on the public, unconsciously distorting what really happened? Do I still need to recognise my brother, as in the dream? Do I crave his recognition? Is it atonement for things left unsaid and undone?
In all likelihood Robert would have ignored my book, while politely asking about the reviews. His interest in my career was genuine, but the writing itself never interested him. We never talked about my work, other writers, or the books I published at Oxford University Press, excepting two companions to cricket and sport in which he and my father featured.
Yet while I was writing this book a family friend told me something that gave me pause. Laurie Adamson got to know Robert well after the accident. They shared a passion for parties and a sardonic sense of humour. When I asked Laurie for some general impressions, he said that Robert was proud of my poetry but couldn’t understand it. He added that Robert was distressed by my poem ‘I Recognise My Brother in a Dream’. This surprised me. I don’t recall us ever discussing my poem, although I dedicated it to Robert and gave him a copy of my first collection, in which it appeared. Should I be touched or contrite?
In October 1974 Robert developed his first serious bedsore, the quadriplegic’s curse, or one of them. It kept him in bed for several weeks, delaying his departure from hospital. The only way to get rid of pressure sores is to stay off the affected area, usually the buttocks. Finally, on 29 November, Robert was discharged from the Austin. Again he went straight to West Heidelberg, a much shorter drive.
Three days later I flew to Greece. In hindsight, it was one of the best things I have ever done. In my green and cloistered state, the challenge was overdue. Although I had always regarded myself as self-reliant, this isolation was entirely new. There I was on a chilly Monday morning, standing in the middle of Syntagma Square with no map, no Greek, no contacts, no itinerary, no reservation, just an outsize suitcase full of novels by Henry James and Tobias Smollett. I was on my own at last. But I loved the deracination: the not knowing and the not being known. I found a hostel and went straight to the Acropolis. In those days you could still wander through the Parthenon. Behind the Erechtheum an urchin was nonchalantly kicking a feral cat to death. I suddenly felt very foreign. Otherwise, it was a thrilling time to be in Greece. The tyrannical colonels had just been overthrown. Near the Athens Polytechnic, where eighty students had been gunned down during the uprising, walls and pavements were still pocked with bullet marks. Five days after my arrival, Greeks overwhelmingly supported the abolition of the monarchy in a referendum. Like the Athenians, I stayed up all night, drifting from one packed square to another, excited by the republican euphoria.
This exposure to Greek sculpture and architecture, at the Acropolis and the National Archaeological Museum, was seminal. I had come late to art. Before going to Europe I had never been inside a gallery. Although I would go on to title one of my poetry collections Donatello in Wangaratta, after an equally formative experience when I was six, the title poem—about a chance glimpse of a reproduction of Donatello’s sculpture of David in an encyclopedia, which occasioned a shock of sexual recognition, however furtive—was accidental. (A few readers, struck by my unlikely title, expressed surprise that Wangaratta owned a Donatello. I didn’t like to tell them that it didn’t even possess an art gallery when I lived there.)
After Greece I went to Italy, where I formed a passion for painters such as Titian, Poussin, Raphael, della Francesca and the incomparable Giovanni Bellini. Somehow, mystifyingly, they changed my godless life. I would never be so content as when looking at a Bellini.
In Paris I pounced on my first English newspaper in four weeks. Arrested by The Times’s headline—‘CYCLONE DESTROYS AUSTRALIAN CITY’—I phoned home to find out if Melbourne was still intact. Reuters Rose was predictably informative, and I heard all about Gough Whitlam’s summer of discontent. Mum also told me about Robert’s belated arrival at Crosby Drive a few days before Christmas. Still prostrated with bedsores, he had been driven home on a mattress in Uncle Kevin’s van. It sounded ghastly, but at least he was home. There was talk of taking him to Sydney in the new year to consult some American doctors.
Mum’s ordeal wasn’t over yet. In January her beloved sister died during a seemingly minor operation. I was staying with Barbara and her husband, Leo, in Columbus, Ohio, when I received the letter. I wondered how Mum would endure this further loss. My aunt’s death and the impending anniversary of Robert’s accident weighed on me. I had inherited my mother’s dismalness about certain dates. In Mexico I became acutely homesick, despite my thrilled response to the great revolutionary mural art of Diego Rivera and his school.
Earlier, in Venice, I had ruminated about Robert. One chilly evening I sat in St Mark’s Square writing in my journal during the passeggiata. Guiltily, I thought about how different 1974 had been for both of us. For me it was turning out to be the boldest year of my life; for Robert it had been catastrophic. I questioned my seeming acceptance of what had happened after those first few terrible months. I regretted the intermittent tension between us and was troubled by my ambiguous relations with Robert. I spoke of ‘the disease of detachment’. I also recorded a typical dream I had had about Robert, in which he died horribly after an epic ordeal.
