A Petrol Scented Spring (21 page)

If she had to prise her old bones out of Chelsea for six months, Hilda would have chosen Paris or Barcelona or Buenos Aires or New York. But no: it had to be South Yarra, where the art scene is all sausage-fingered Aussies brawling over
figs
or
abs,
and Billy can't drink in the bars in case she starts a fight, so it's night after night at Maisey's or that old poofters' coffee lounge, or back to the suburban box with its swing seat, barbecue and car porch
.

But that's a subject best avoided for now. It doesn't do to criticise the love nest, with the bowerbird not yet cold in the ground. Who would have thought it: the cosmopolitan Billy Bellairs swilling lager and swapping blue jokes with the convict stock in South Yarra? The famous artist's business manager and bed-warmer. True love, Hilda has no doubt. Billy would have stared at that revolting wallpaper, going quietly doolally, for the next twenty years, if she hadn't arrived to take charge. Weeding out the paintings to be kept, getting a contract drawn up so the gallery can't flood the market with the rest. Selling the house and most of the furniture. Shipping the bed. She's not completely heartless.

Hilda liked Jan Cumbrae-Stewart well enough, but there was just too much of the Edwardian soap advertisement in her portraits. Those rosy-skinned, golden-haired nudes (so often painted from behind) that met with such acclaim, while Hilda had her hopes raised so cruelly by being shown in the British pavilion in Venice in twenty-four, and afterwards . . . nothing. Or worse: a badly-lit side room off a couple of Jan's shows in Australia and a yawning paragraph tacked on to each of Jan's gushing reviews. One critic noted the hard-edged quality in Hilda's etchings, finding it not stark or unflinching but ‘rather unpleasant'. As if she had sneezed over the soup. As if art had to
please
, when she was capturing the moment, and doing it rather better than Jan Cumbrae-Stewart, if truth be told. Of course, the fact that Jan was decades out of date was just what they liked about her. Along with that broad hint of the bedroom, the fireside glow, the coy provocation of all those turned shoulders and plump young buttocks. Public taste was ever base.

And to prove it, here they are at this Sunday painters' jumble sale in Sydney. Mountains and seascapes. Vases of flowers. Still lifes. Soulful-eyed cats
,
for Christ's sake. And this oddity, an abstract, crudely executed but with more feeling in its slashing diagonals than all the pretty-pretty figuratives put together. Just look at that bloody carmine, the bilious green, the sheer force in that line pushing down from the upper right hand corner. Hilda squints at the typed card, the old peepers not being what they were.

‘Body Politic,' says a voice behind her. Scottish, if she's not mistaken. ‘Rather pretentious, I'm afraid, but it sums up what I wanted to say.'

She has all the marks of age, ivory teeth, mauve-tinted skin, fleshy grooves and folds, but it's still an astonishing face. A quiet intelligence that says
I
am a person of consequence, if only to myself
. ‘Arabella Colville-Reeves.' They shake hands and Hilda's heart gives a little thump, though she hasn't gone home with a stranger in fifteen years, and Billy's just the other side of the room, having her grief stroked by one of you-know-who's many admirers. She turns back to the canvas.
The body politic
. She sees it now: oesophagus, stomach, intestines, painted with such anger. Those poor bloody queers in Soviet loony bins, being cured of what ails them. Aversion therapy. Electric shocks. But surely they'd leave the Brits alone?

‘I'm so sorry,' the woman says, ‘I wasn't trying to upset anyone. Let me find you somewhere to sit.'

 

A return to civilisation is what Billy needs. England, where they drink proper beer and the spiders don't bite and the sun doesn't fry your brain in your skull. A fresh start in London. Or Surrey, if she must, but near the station, no more than an hour from Soho and Shaftesbury Avenue and old friends. In South Yarra, Billy conceded the wisdom of this but, now that they have landed at London Airport and are stuck in a very English queue, she is having second thoughts. Thank Christ for Dodo! Sweeping through passport control against the tide with a nod that says
I know perfectly well I'm
not supposed to do this
. The years overseas have left her with an old colonial's arrogance. Who can refuse that frizz of white hair, the sparkling gaze, the blend of sweet-old-lady charm and steely command? (‘It's
Doctor
Coubrough.') She has found some lackey to escort her into the arrivals hall with an empty wheelchair. Billy spots them first, tipping Hilda the wink to play up her limp. ‘
Hilly!
' ‘
Dodo!
' Hilda gives the smirkers an icy stare. Of course she's a fossil, but she had the best of it, being young when the Modern carried a whiff of blood and madness, not refrigerators and drip-dry nylon. And being old's not so bad when you're whizzed through customs with your smuggled bottle of scotch and out into the blessed drizzle of good old Blighty.

‘
Well
.'

Always this moment when the sisters stop and take a gander at each other. A few more liver spots on the backs of Dodo's hands.
Sun
spots
, apparently. And she'll have to watch that stoop, it's halfway to a dowager's hump. Meanwhile Dodo sees what: the cripple's walk, the tippler's complexion? (But then, they both like a stiffener before lunch.) Perhaps just age
.
These days Hilda looks the older sister. Not that it matters any more, except with Dodo. The only person in the world Hilda still needs to best, and the fact that Dodo doesn't feel the same only makes the struggle more compulsive.

Billy knows exactly what's going on and springs to the rescue with gallantry all round. The only thing better than spending time with one of the Atkins gels is being in the company of both. A celebration is in order! A late lunch at the Ritz? Or is the old place in Sloane Square still open? Hilda quite fancies the Gay Hussar, but Dodo is wearing the colonial smile that brooks no contradiction. They're going back to Langstone Manor where the daily is cooking roast lamb and apple pie. A weekend of sea air and good English food (and drink) to recover from the flight. Beefy will drive them back up to London on Monday.

And talk of the Devil, here he is: waiting outside in the Consul. Beefy Bill Coubrough. If it's sausage fingers you're after, he's your man. Hands like shovels. Big head, big shoulders, big feet. Probably big where it matters, too, but Hilda finds these Frankenstein types utterly sexless. No nuance. The booming voice and hearty guffaw. Not so different from Billy B at first glance, but with Billy it's ironic. Beefy spent thirty years yelling at the natives in words of one syllable before coming home to play lord of the manor. Plus fours and an alcoholic bulldog. A
character
. And a bit of a bully behind closed doors. The way he growls at Dodo sometimes. To marry one overbearing oaf may be regarded as misfortune. To marry two looks like perversion. Not that Hilda would say it. At least, not outright. Though who knows where the conversation may wend once she passes on her news?

 

Design a hideous home for returning colonials. A Rayburn under a shelf of brass preserving pans; twelve-seater dining table; crewelwork curtains; fire dogs either side of the roaring grate. A Jacobean settle opposite a grandfather clock with an echoing tick and a chime like the knell of doom. All inside a redbrick villa built for the local brewer in 1904.

Beefy's a parvenu. Forever bragging about growing up in Old Ballikinrain. (And so he did, in the staff quarters.) A Tory, like all those
I pulled myself up by my bootstraps
types. Still, he's not stingy with the drink. Hilda has stayed with them before, she knows the form. Down to the pub at eleven so Bobby the bulldog can have his beer; gin and tomato juice at lunch; whisky in their afternoon tea. They'll all be three sheets to the wind hours before they sit down to the serious drinking at dinner.

And so it goes.

The lamb is burned and the mashed potato lumpy, but it soaks up the booze. Beefy delivers his party piece:
faint heart never won fair lady
. How he was turned away by the houseboy, though he knew damn well Dodo was in: he could hear her in the bath. Did he get to be inspector of works for one of Africa's biggest public building programmes by taking no for an answer? He did not. Crawled under the house, found a hatch to climb through. Planted himself on the end of her bed. You should have seen her face when she came out of the bathroom! Hilda has heard this tale at least three times, and finds it more sinister with every retelling, but Dodo twinkles with wifely satisfaction, says she had to marry him, just to bring him under control. Which is Beefy's cue to ask when Hilda is going to settle down with a nice chap? ‘I'm waiting for Dodo to tire of you, Bill.' Laughter all round. Then that revolting dog tries to roger the ginger cat, and Billy B tells a couple of the riper stories doing the rounds in South Yarra, to much
ho ho
-ing and table-slapping from their host. Dodo clears the table. Hilda picks up the gravy boat and follows her out.

‘How're the legs?'

Poor old
Hilly, never the same after that hit-and-run driver
.
Give Dodo a symptom and she'll be off, airing her knowledge of tibias and fibulas because she's a medical professional, not a failed painter living on Mama's legacy, and so Hilda has to answer ‘Right as ninepence,' when in truth her knee is killing her.

Odd, the way she can feel so overshadowed and still bask in Dodo's reflected glory. It doesn't hurt a girl's cachet, having a sister who has met a witch doctor and delivered black babies in mud huts. Does Dodo ever boast about her little sis the bohemian, palling around with spies and deviants? What Hilda wouldn't give to find out.

Watching her kick drunkenly at the wheel that makes the Rayburn hotter, she feels a sudden stab of affection. How marvellous it was when Dodo left the prison of her first marriage and they were the Atkins girls again, gadding about London, working up a glow on the Kit-Cat dance floor, vying for the affection of Billy Bellairs. What larks! Then Dodo hooked it. Toronto first, then Cairo, Damascus, Borsad, Accra, anywhere but home. Fourteen long years. Hilda missed her so dreadfully that, in the seventeen years she has been back and living seventy miles away, they've hardly met. Why should she have it all her own way, taking off to the ends of the earth and then, just when it suits her, coming home to the welcoming arms of her kin? But who suffers most from Hilda's sulk? Not Dodo. She has her shovel-handed husband, her bookish Oxford professor down the lane, all the friends and neighbours who drop by to drink her gin, and her career (so indispensable she's still seeing patients at seventy). While Hilda has – what? A tenancy in Phene Street and the crowd in the pub across the road. The odd port and lemon in the Gateways, eavesdropping on the latest slang. Bugger, it's good to see Dodo again. But even now, alone together in the warm kitchen, both of them woozy with drink, Hilda can't seem to break through. So many things they could laugh over, so much to say, yet here they are, their small talk petering into silence.

If only Dodo would ask how she is. Not her legs,
herself
. Is she happy with her lot, is she afraid of dying alone, is she still carrying a torch for Billy Bellairs? How many people in her life has she truly loved? Hilda would like to ask these questions of Dodo too.

‘Billy's on good form,' Dodo says. Bloody Pollyanna.

‘Tonight.'

‘Not generally?'

Hilda pulls a face.

Dodo sighs, ‘It's so sad.'

‘It's always
sad
. You don't get life without death. I would have thought you'd know that, Doctor Coubrough. I met a woman over there who's been widowed twenty-five years. Longer than she was married. She's made a go of it—'

Dodo retrieves the apple pie from the oven.

‘—interesting woman. About your age. Travelled around. France during the war, South Africa, Oz. A Scot.'

‘Oh yes?' Dodo pours the top of the milk into a jug.

‘In fact, she had a connection with Perth.'

Moving towards the dining room, Dodo says over her shoulder, ‘Be a darling and bring the cream.'

 

Hilda had her own brush with the body politic. Stumbling down the hall half-asleep to find a gaberdine mac at the door: was she aware that Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean had flown the coop? Had she helped them? At the time it seemed rather a hoot, being knocked up by MI5 in the middle of the night. She dined out on the story for weeks. But the joke wore thin. Her telephone emitted peculiar whirrings and clickings. Her god-daughter was turned down by the civil service, despite a first in Greats. The off-licence stopped giving her tick. One or two of her more conventional friends simply dropped her.

She learned it pays to be cagey. And yet, settled in a quiet corner of a Sydney tea shop, she found herself spilling the whole story to that graceful stranger with the faint Scots burr. She too had had a police tail, before the Great War. Then she went to gaol. She opened her lovely mouth and showed Hilda her ruined teeth. All that sacrifice, and by the time the government caved in she was living on another continent. She'd had her fill of Britain. Too many bitter memories.

‘He was my brother-in-law.'

A long silence. Was she going to get up and walk out?

‘Biggest mistake of my sister's life,' Hilda added, lest there was any ambiguity.

Arabella Colville-Reeves regarded her across the Victoria sponge. ‘I wondered if he was altogether sane,' she said at last.

 

It's late but the coals are still glowing in the grate. Beefy has gone up to bed, completely blotto. The grandfather clock lulls them with its ponderous tick. The bulldog snores on the sheepskin rug. Dodo, Hilda and Billy carry their brandy balloons to the hearthside chairs.