A Thing of Blood (2 page)

‘Well, I think that’s a bit of a leap,’ I said.

Brian became a bit short with me. Perhaps he was concussed.

‘I’m twenty-seven years old and the only injury I’ve ever suffered is a shaving cut. I’m with you for a few days and someone tries to kill me.’

He shook off my support and we returned to the compartment.

Brian bled quite extravagantly from the scalp wound but, apart from a headache, he declared that he was unhurt. We agreed that my entry into the corridor must have prevented his assailant from finishing off the job, although I had seen no one.

‘I suppose we should report this to the police when we get to Brisbane,’ I said.

‘Well, of course we should report it to the bloody police,’ Brian snapped. ‘Someone tried to kill me. That might be an everyday event for you, but I take a pretty dim view of it.’

Neither of us slept for the rest of the night and we kept a watchful eye on the door. We arrived in Brisbane without further molestation, but with Brian maintaining an uncommunicativeness that bordered on infantile self-indulgence.

In Brisbane we stayed in a hotel close to the station. There was no train to Sydney until the following morning, so this gave us plenty of time to inform the police about the assault on Brian. They were unhelpful, although their interest was aroused when I gave them a brief outline of recent, pertinent occurrences in Maryborough. News of that investigation had filtered through to them and they were mildly intrigued to meet me.

‘Oh yeah,’ said the overweight sergeant who was hearing our tale. ‘We heard there was some actor or circus rouseabout — can’t remember which — who got in everyone’s way. So that was you, was it?’

‘Yes, it was him,’ Brian replied firmly, thereby denying me the opportunity of correcting this buffoon’s absurd précis of my role. It transpired that the police were rather stretched at that time, what with all the Americans in town. They said that they would make a few inquiries, but that perhaps it was just a bungled robbery.

‘After all,’ the copper said, ‘if he’d really wanted to do you in, I don’t think you’d be sitting here telling me about it. But we’ll look into it.’

This was most unsatisfactory, but it was as much as we were going to get. We returned to the hotel, drank in the bar, had a disgusting meal and kept to our room afterwards. Brian had become more and more jittery about his personal safety as the day had progressed.

The remainder of the trip to Melbourne was managed without incident. We stuck close together, never leaving our compartment separately. Over the three days the chill between us thawed slightly, but every look Brian gave me was inescapably imbued with his resentment at having been dragged into what he clearly considered was my sordid life. It was with some relief that we alighted at Spencer Street Station in Melbourne. Whoever had mistaken Brian for me had had no further opportunity to catch me unawares.

In the tram, on our way up to Mother’s house in Princes Hill I was preoccupied by the impending meeting with the frightful and fertile Darlene, and with my mother, whose voracious appetite for gossip would brook no opposition. So I didn’t consider the possibility that whoever had boarded the train in Maryborough with the intention of attacking me might well have disembarked in Melbourne, his intention geographically relocated but otherwise unchanged.

Chapter Two

clutterbuck

OUR MOTHER’S HOUSE
in Garton Street sat opposite Princes Park and was rather grand. Unlike many of its neighbours it had not been subdivided into flats during the Depression. My father — who died when I was sixteen (his many absences meant that my memories of him were vague) — was a canny, and I suspect ruthless, banker. He picked up this double-storey Princes Hill mansion for a song, no doubt unsentimentally condemning its previous owners to a life of reduced circumstances in the process. Unlike my father, my mother, Agnes, looms in my childhood with the solidity of an impressive pinnacle. She is a striking woman. I get my looks from her. She is dark, and her hair has remained determinedly black throughout the vicissitudes of marriage and child rearing. It was a small shock to me to discover that its corvine splendour was protected by a proprietary dye.

‘Hirohito himself might be perched in Spring Street,’ she once said, ‘but he won’t have the satisfaction of seeing me with grey hair.’

The day of our arrival was, portentously perhaps, bleak. Rain was falling when we pushed open the front gate and climbed the few steps to the front door. There on the porch, despite the chill, was the gravid Darlene. Even from several feet away she exuded the smug self-assurance of the newly knocked up.

‘Brian,’ she said, her voice vibrating with solicitude, ‘are you all right?’, and she hurried to him. I couldn’t help but notice that she’d put on rather a lot of weight since I’d last seen her, and it didn’t suit her. If you don’t have much in the way of a personality, a decent figure is advisable.

‘Someone hit me on the head,’ Brian said.

Darlene uttered a little squeal of horror and shot me an accusatory glance, as if that someone might have been me.

‘He’s fine,’ I said, ‘and so am I, you’ll be relieved to hear.’

‘Well, of course I’m relieved, Will. It must have been a dreadful experience for you. Mum and I have been just sick with worry.’

Among the vast catalogue of Darlene’s unattractive features was her insistence on calling our mother ‘Mum’, as if marriage to my brother somehow entitled her to an extra parent. She leaned down and picked up my suitcase. This was an unnecessary gesture designed to elicit Brian’s immediate intervention, and expressions of concern for her welfare and that of her unborn child. It was like observing the rebonding ritual of the albatross. In a miracle of transference I was, fantastically, being held responsible for endangering Darlene’s health.

My mother was upstairs in her study, writing to my brother Fulton. Her correspondence with him was regular — much more regular than her correspondence with me. He was the youngest, after all, and being stationed in Darwin he was at far greater risk than I had been in Maryborough. He was also more assiduous in replying than I’d ever been over the course of my travels. Mother heard us come in and called from the top of the stairs.

‘Is that you, Brian?’ And with the awful thud of an afterthought, she added, ‘And Will?’

‘Brian was attacked,’ Darlene called.

Mother gave an exclamation of fright and began her descent. Although I hadn’t seen her in over a year, she’d somehow contrived to look younger than when I’d left to take my eponymous acting company to Queensland. She was tailored from head to foot, obviously diverting a considerable amount of her generous annuity into the coffers of a Collins Street seamstress. She never bought anything off the rack. It was a short step, she would say later, when the expression became current, from
prêt à porter
to
prêt à mourir
. With the example of our mother before him, how could Brian have settled for the drab fecundity of Darlene?

‘I’m fine,’ Brian said before Mother reached him. ‘Just a blow on the head. Someone thought I was Will.’

She turned to me then, took in my broken arm and the cuts and bruises on my face, and said, ‘Oh, Will,’ but more in disappointment than sympathy.

‘I have quite a story to tell,’ I said quickly. She cheered up at that.

‘I want to hear it all,’ she said, laying her hand on my good arm. ‘And don’t spare me the gruesome details. Darlene, could you make us some tea? And perhaps you could sacrifice this week’s fruitcake. I’m sure Brian and Will would love a piece. Darlene bakes a fruitcake each week,’ she said to me, ‘and sends it to the troops. It’s awash with brandy, so whoever ends up with it will go into battle with a smile on his face.’

Darlene retreated to the kitchen and Mother steered us into the front room — a room well furnished and dominated by its beautiful bay window. The window framed a view of Princes Park opposite, its surface scarred by wide trenches dug to provide residents with some form of protection should Japanese bombs begin raining down on Princes Hill. After the bombing of Darwin and the Jap subs in Sydney Harbour, this possibility didn’t seem at all remote. I couldn’t imagine my mother, though, hurling herself into a trench, a cork clamped between her teeth against the jarring shock waves produced by explosives. Nevertheless, a coat hung permanently near the front door, an object of clothing she referred to as her ‘trench coat’.

‘Now, Will,’ she said, ‘I’m cross that Brian had to get caught up in your affairs, but I am glad you’re safe and well and able to tell me everything that happened. It sounds frightening and terribly interesting. And I don’t want you to think that you can get away with leaving out the sex — unless there wasn’t any, of course. It cost quite a bit of money getting Brian up to Maryborough and, frankly, I’m looking to get some value for it.’

I was used to my mother speaking like this, and so was Brian, so neither of us batted an eyelid. Indeed, I would have been shocked by any demonstration of discretion. While Darlene was still out of the room I rapidly sketched in the outlines of my recent history, confident that Mother would press for more and more details over the ensuing days. I didn’t leach the colour out of the more lurid incidents. To do so would have been to agitate in my mother a suspicion that I was holding back, and this in turn would excite fierce questioning. I learned early in my childhood that my mother responded better to the embellished than to the undecorated truth. She liked, she said, a well-dressed story.

Darlene’s fruitcake was, it pains me to say, excellent, although she looked at me as I was eating it as if I was depriving a soldier somewhere of his last meal. She didn’t look at Brian in this way. He was able to eat his slice under the benevolent assumption that it had been well earned — which, given that he shared Darlene’s bed, I suppose it had.

After tea and more cake, both Mother and Darlene donned hats and gloves and set off for the city where Darlene was to be fitted for flattering (unlikely) maternity wear. I knew they wouldn’t be purchasing anything made of the scratchy, government-approved cloth called ‘shoddy’. Instead they would buy unconscionable silk and linen. Mother’s seamstress had access to expensive reserves of pre-war material and, despite the papers railing against extravagance, my mother’s philosophy not only accommodated such extravagance but insisted that it was, in fact, a sort of defiant patriotism.

After they left, Brian went upstairs to sleep, and I walked around Princes Park. Before I’d gone very far I’d determined that I would find alternative digs as soon as possible. I could not share a roof with Darlene for any longer than was strictly necessary.

On my way home I bought a copy of
The Age
, ignored the grim news on the front page about Stalingrad and an attack on Tobruk, and turned to the personal columns. My eye was drawn to a small advertisement for shared accommodation in Parkville, just a stone’s throw from my mother’s house:

‘Bachelor (32) with furnished house and housekeeper. Parkville. Desires gentleman to share same. Apprx. cost £3 per week.’

The rent was steep, way above the twenty shillings I had been thinking of as my limit. But obviously this was a good house, and the bachelor, whoever he was, was probably wealthy and possibly well-connected. Poor people did not employ housekeepers. Even rich people had released most of their staff for war jobs. Perhaps I could negotiate a reduction in the rent somehow. I had access to some funds, my father having left money in trust for each of us. I had drained most of mine, but there remained more than enough to pay for several week’s rent in advance to create an illusion in my landlord’s mind of my having a comfortable income.

I telephoned
The Age
when I reached home, obtained the details that had been withheld from the advertisement and connected to the number I had been given. A woman answered and identified herself as Mr Clutterbuck’s housekeeper. He wasn’t at home, she told me, but would be back at six o’clock, when she was sure he would be pleased to see me. There had been no other callers, the three pounds rent acting as a natural filter against the hoi polloi.

I knocked on Clutterbuck’s door at precisely six o’clock, punctuality being the courtesy of kings. The Edwardian house was very large (double-storeyed), and occupied the corner of Park Drive and Bayles Street. Its windows were disfigured by the ubiquitous anti-shatter precaution of cross-tape. The gate sat between two splendid square columns and it opened soundlessly, its hinges well oiled. Five steps led down to a tiled path that led, in turn, to the front door. The small garden had not been turned over to the growing of vegetables, despite the government’s frequent exhortations that it was the duty of every citizen to eschew the frivolity of flowers and plant vegetables in their place.