I nuzzled my nose behind his perfect ear and before he even had his coat off I told him what I had done with my parents’ estate. My share was all for him, I said so.
He said I was an amazing woman. I had changed the game completely.
It was lovely to see this was not the broken man I feared, but the one I married, the one I loved. He flipped the cap off a bottle. He grinned. He teased me. He found a penny in a private place and I let him be the way he was.
We finished our beers and I washed the glasses and we were husband and wife, warm in bed while the wind raged around us but he would not say what I had changed. I didn’t worry very much. I expected he was going to buy more used vehicles from Joe Thacker. That was how he thought.
It was early morning when the phone rang and I thought it would be Thacker. But it was Dunstan asking for Mr Bobs as if he didn’t know me.
Ronnie was awake so I rushed him out to the shed to help me blacken tyres. Then Titch finally appeared, in his striped pyjamas. I sent Ronnie back inside.
‘That was GMH,’ he said.
‘What did they want?’
‘Strange timing don’t you think? Day after Ford?’ He was looking at me funny. ‘He knew all about me somehow.’
I waited, nervous.
‘His name is Dunstan.’
‘That was your game-changing idea? You’re going to GMH?’
‘Irene,’ said he, ‘I got the entry papers for the Redex Trial.’
There was no money in the Redex Trial. It was all for skites and show-offs, men who got drunk off printer’s ink and headlines, public heroes who could afford the luxury of fame. It was for publicity hounds like Dangerous Dan. It was a so-called ‘reliability trial’ which punished ordinary production cars and made them do things they were never meant to do. Of course it was a big thrill for the so-called General Public. Two hundred lunatics circumnavigating the continent of Australia, more than ten thousand miles over outback roads so rough they might crack your chassis clean in half. I told my husband what I thought.
‘I knew you’d be like this,’ he said. ‘But it would make our name.’
‘We’ve got a name. It’s Bobs. It’s time to shift to Holden.’
‘But we’ve got the money from your parents’ house.’
I thought, now he’s stuffed up everything I’ve done.
‘I picked up the entry papers yesterday. When I left Ford I went down to Melbourne. For Christ’s sake listen. Ford cut my knackers off. I need something to look forward to.’
‘I’m sorry about Ford,’ I said. ‘But we’re not gambling. That’s agreed. We’ve got to make a living.’
‘Calm down.’
‘No, it’s my money.’
‘You said it was for me.’
‘We’ve got two kids. It ’s around Australia, eighteen days. All you’re left with is a wreck.’
‘Don’t you see? It could make us famous. That’s the value. The fellow thought it was a good idea.’
‘What fellow?’
‘Dunstan. He could see the business sense of it. If we were Holden dealers.’
‘He never.’
And he was laughing. ‘We’ve got it,’ he said, and lifted me in the air and carried me, walking on gravel in bare feet. ‘Tell me it’s impossible. Holden franchise. Redex Trial. You beauty bottler, Irene. You saved our bacon.’
And he was kissing me and my feelings were all confused by what I knew and didn’t know. How could we go in the Redex and leave the kids? What made him think we’d win?
‘Talk to this Dunstan,’ he said. ‘Listen to what he says.’
‘We can’t start a dealership and then run away.’
‘This is going to take months and months of prep. At the same time there’s building to be done. We’ll come back from the trial to open the new showroom.’
I didn’t ask him what ‘building’ because of course I knew. ‘So this Mr Dunstan. He’s going to look after Ronnie and Edith? He’s going to tuck them in and hear their prayers?’
‘I’ll solve it. I’ve got months to sort it out.’
‘You’ll go away and leave me.’
‘We’ll be co-drivers,’ he said, with those bright keen eyes and his thin pyjamas and I could feel how much he wanted me. ‘You watch,’ he said. ‘We’re going to be a household name.’
Who would have thought what the sight of us, this private moment, would do to someone else? Who might imagine that a well-educated schoolteacher might see this confusion as the ideal model for a modern life?
15
That was the first time I saw Dunstan. I did not know his name, of course, but I wished I never saw Mrs Bobbsey in the mongrel’s arms. It churned me up to think: Titch a cuckold. So I, who had previously coveted his wife, now wished to perform some act of unexpected kindness, to wash his car for instance, anything.
In the cafe, Clover had been unable to fathom why I was upset. ‘You’re sweet on her?’
How could I explain? That I had been in love with the idea of Titch Bobbsey, his Jaguar, his wife, his children tumbling across the grass in the middle of the night. ‘Her husband is my friend.’
Clover’s upper lip contracted and I was moved to place my finger there, on that entrancing mole. She wished I wouldn’t.
‘Your beauty mark,’ I said, and she removed my hand.
‘It is a mark of sin, according to my mother.’
‘It is certainly persuasive.’
‘No. It’s not funny.’
‘Your sin?’
‘I told my mother: if it’s not my sin it must be yours. She slapped my face.’
‘Ha.’
‘Exactly.’
I thought, what unknown winds have delivered our spirits to our bodies?
‘Come on,’ she said. ‘It’s time.’
Time for what? As we rose from the booth I thought, you do not know her. You will say you love her because of something brainless like a lovely clavicle.
Bones, I thought, as we entered the darkness of Gisborne Road, up the hill where the air was damp and cool and smelled of rotting leaves and the excretions of cattle and attendant horses who had recently passed that way. Mare urine is an aphrodisiac for stallions, so Ben Calvo says. He owes his cafe to his knowledge of racecourse matters so perhaps this will prove true.
The doors of the chemist shops had been locked but we walked as if they were open to our desire, arm in arm and by the Church of England graveyard where we stopped to kiss. Sex makes a man dishonest with himself, as is well known. I feared the slippery ambiguity of false feeling, of expediency, of things not being exactly true.
We entered the front gate of my house, and squeezed down the side by the hydrangeas, and I smelled her soft neck, imagining rooms and places beyond my life.
In the smudgy dark I spied my sleeping chooks, chalky lumps up on the roof.
‘I’ll clip their wings,’ she said, ‘before I go.’
Once inside I was deaf with worry about the chemists and my disfigured shoulder. I drew blinds and curtains everywhere and she smiled at me and I wished she would not see my awful scar. She kicked off her shoes. I could not imagine what she thought.
Say we were in Italy, what then?
In the kitchen we embraced and she held me close and breathed my breath and said that was how you knew a person was right. She was so lithe and exceptionally beautiful and gentle and, with her hands clasped around my shoulderblades, she pulled herself up into my life.
I said we could not do what we both wished.
‘That’s for the girl to say.’
‘Not without a “thing.”’
‘You’ve got a very nice thing as far as I can feel.’
Then my veins and arteries were full to bursting, but I would rather kill myself than play this game. Then we were on the bedroom floor, amongst the books, like teenagers, and I said, outright, plainly, the problem was the absence of the contraceptive.
She said there were lots of ways to skin a cat but she did not
understand I was who I was because, once upon a time, I had been a boy. I had spurted in a second, like a sparrow. I spilled my seed, but not upon the ground.
I trusted my secrets to those glistening observant eyes. I confessed. Adelina Koenig and I had been just twenty years old when she got pregnant and we ran away to Melbourne. I had assumed we would have the baby there. It was Adelina, the nurse, who found the abortionist. I did not know such men existed.
‘Poor children,’ Clover said, ‘how awful. What a lot of money you had to find.’
I was touched she would accept my ugly secrets. I confessed that I had borrowed the money from Sebastian Laski who I did not know well enough to ask so much of, but who would, more than once, descend into the wreckage of my life to save me.
‘You are an attractive man,’ she said. ‘You will always be forgiven.’
She helped me remove my shirt and there was no choice but to reveal the scar, that brutal wound like a fissure in a concrete slab. She licked it, as deep as she could go. She loved me. She said so. She sucked my nipples like I was a girl. I moaned. I thought, the power of sex cannot be denied, stopped or plugged, is as insistent as water leaking through a roof, finding its way in darkness, emerging in the back seat of a car. There was nothing to be frightened of she said, no, I thought, only what it makes you do, clawing at the trees, splintering the bark like a tomcat, the blind and violent need of it, a joy, but who would not want to be relieved of it. I pity the Catholic priests suffering their sex, the stream of desire finding its way to the ocean without regard to good or evil, and if it ends up as evil then that is the relentless nature of it. The cat was flayed alive.
Hours later, still on the floor, we talked and talked, kissed and cried and my wound must be examined and my tumble from the kitchen window lived again and Adelina Koenig, also, must be described.
‘It means King,’ she said.
‘I know.’
‘But you must have had another baby. That’s why you’re hiding from the summonses now.’
‘He turned out not to be my child.’ Any moment, I thought, she will not love me any more.
‘How could anyone be certain he was not your son?’
‘Just say the baby was red-headed, and that my wife was not.’ I could see she was about to argue and I would not tolerate it. ‘And there was a red-haired bloke who was always at your house.’
‘What did Adelina say?’
I wished she would not use her name.
‘You left her, is that correct?’
‘You don’t understand,’ I said, but I saw her face and it was clear she did.
‘Poor Willie.’
‘I’m sure she suffered and he suffered too, the poor little blighter.’
‘How old are you Willie?’
‘Twenty-six.’
‘You’re too young for all this guilt. See. Look. You’re ready.’
In self-defence I summoned an urgent interest in my grandmother’s coloured atlas of the Holy Roman Empire. I laid it before her and she admired it and listened to my unshakable belief that I did not belong where my mother had delivered me. I had no reason to be in the hot streets of wartime Adelaide, not when my true home must be in the atlas of the Habsburg Empire and the lands of Hungary. There was no map of Adelaide that could produce the longing aroused by the dense fibrous universe of that atlas, which, being hand-painted in a slightly unconventional if not eccentric manner, had the mellow colours of a closely woven Persian rug, in which our red Hungary had turned a greyish brown, Salzburg was the colour of dried straw, Croatia was pale pink. Bohemia like the other states was now foxed and speckled brown. The crumbling coast of Dalmatia in the south was what I believe is known as Spectrum Violet.
‘But of course, dear man.’ She herself had not belonged in Dandenong.
There was her gorgeous silk skinned leg, folded beneath her dark private hair glistening with dew and here were all of these lands with their diverse peoples, Germans, Magyars, Spanish Jews, Romanies and Mohammedans, which had been a source of wonder to my childish imagination. My grandmother told me that an ancestor of ours, a Venetian nobleman, had been called to advise the Imperial Council in Vienna. What he had done there or what became of him we could never know but he was the reason that I had curiously splayed ‘Italian toes’ and although blond haired as my father the pastor, would turn ‘brown as a Mediterranean berry’ in the Australian sun.
Likewise, Clover was olive skinned but did not know, she told me, where she came from. She thought her grandfather had been in a poem by Wordsworth, perhaps in ‘Troutbeck’ and she had read compulsively but never found either poem or boy. Her grandmother was a ‘real cockney’ in Bow, but the address on her birth certificate had been bombed to dust in the Second World War. There were olive skinned Scots and Irish, she supposed. Her great-grandmother had hated de Valera because he would not take off his hat to the Prince of Wales. She had a magpie history, bright pebbles with no bedrock. ‘We know nothing. It is l ’État australien,’ she said. ‘Think about the red-headed child. What might he ever know of how he came to be?’
I told her the father was an American nurse at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, he had been our friend. He was a good nurse, I thought, a good friend, I had imagined.
‘And fucked your wife,’ she said.
Dear God, how could I defend myself from that brutality?
‘You should have killed him,’ she said, playing with my toes, rumpling the maps. ‘ Who knows what murderers we descend from?’
You will expect me to be repulsed by this, and yet this imaginary murder was an expression of passion, an expression of support, of love, a renewal of unresolved desire, and Lord, well never mind, she drew a fine wet thread from my sex and there was more than one way to skin the cat and the walls were thin and I did not care how she snorted or shouted out to God.
When we finally rose from the floor the Holy Roman Empire was in shreds and, for the moment anyway, I really did not care.
16
When my husband told me he was off to ‘see a man about a dog’ I assumed it was somehow related to the show-off Redex Trial. It did not occur to me, not for a moment, that after all I had said, after all he had said, he was going back to Ford to try again. It was predictable of course. This was how he was with his father, always going back to take another beating.
It was morning. Edith was in strife for handing in a drawing in which all the kids were purple. No-one wears purple, the teacher had said. She was allegedly old and crabby. And Edith was Edith. She had ‘just pointed out’ that Barbara Radford had purple stripes in her sweater. Her teacher said Barbara Radford did not have a purple face. Edith did not wish to go to school.
Ronnie was stamping around the house. ‘Roundy bouty’, as he liked to say. He had never had real boots before and he was mad with happiness, rushing outside to break the ice in the puddles and tramp mud back across the carpet.
I walked them hand in hand to school. I returned intending to make a trunkline call, to learn what Dunstan had said to Titch and what Titch had said to him.
At home I discovered there had been a chicken massacre next door. Huge white flowers, dead mounds of dusters, dead as dodos, and in the midst of all this sudden death in his vegie garden, wearing a woollen beanie in Bacchus Marsh colours, stood Mr Bachhuber grasping a dead creature to his chest.
‘We cut their wings,’ he said.
On their first flightless morning his chickens had been visited by next door’s cocker spaniel. I don’t see this was my fault, although I felt it. I did not ask him who was ‘we’.
Titch was meanwhile travelling at ninety-three miles an hour towards new humiliation.
I was at home, busy on the phone with Dunstan. I asked him why had he given in about the Redex. He needs something to look forward to, Dunstan said. Wasn’t a dealership enough? I asked. He laughed.
In Geelong the Big Noises asked my husband what he was doing back with no appointment.
‘I have the capital,’
he said.
‘That’s nice, mate.’
‘Plus, I am going to win the Redex Trial.’
‘Yes, but we have the franchise allocated, all signed up.’
‘Unsign him.’
‘Mate . . . ’
‘No-one can match my sales numbers.’
Why was it, they asked him, that salesmen always imagined they were the centre of the universe. This was not so. The Ford Motor Company required a Bacchus Marsh dealer with business acumen, as they called it, plus substantial capital, marketing know-how, promotional capability, real estate experience. Salesmen were a dime a dozen.
Titch was not offended, he said so. He had been insulted by experts in the past. If a dealership was impossible then he would make it possible. Doubtless he annoyed them, shouting, not knowing that his power was no longer what it was.
‘Give me a chance,’ he said. ‘I’ve got the capital.’
To tell the truth, his capital was not enough. Also, he might as well hear it from them: there was the problem of confusion about Bobs Motors.
‘What confusion?’
‘Your old man has opened up outside of Melton.’
‘No he hasn’t.’
‘Yes he has.’
‘Opened what?’
‘A motor business.’
I can see his mouth, poor darling. ‘Well what of it?’
‘Branding,’ they said, a new word that had to be explained. ‘We can’t deal with two Bobs Motors. Can’t do it. When you see the place, you’ll understand.’
Of course it didn’t matter that Dan had gone and opened up his own used car business on the Melbourne Road. But it mattered to my husband. In fact, it winded him.
‘Sorry Titch.’
He should have come home to me. Instead he rushed off to chat to his tormentor. Forty-three minutes later he found the one-hoist garage with BOBS FOR FORD in fluorescent orange.
Of course Dan had no franchise, never had and never could. He was a crummy second-hand car dealer with one vehicle and the deposit written in whitewash on its windscreen.
‘Why are you doing this to me?’ Titch asked.
The answer was: the mongrel couldn’t help himself. He took his well-dressed son around the back where, beside the battery shed, he showed him a propeller rescued from the Darley tip.