Death Before Wicket: Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries 10 (8 page)

‘Did you really see Jones part his beard, Professor?’ asked Bretherton.

‘Certainly. And what did the great man do? Ruffled his beard back into place and took guard again and struck the next ball over the fence.’

‘There were giants in those days,’ said Phryne, without marked irony.

‘Golden days, they were. All dead now. You will come and see our own cricket match, Miss Fisher?’ asked Professor Jones.

‘I certainly will,’ said Phryne. ‘When is it to be?’

‘On Friday,’ Professor Jones told her. ‘Faculty against students. Relying on you, Bretherton, to get a hundred.’

‘You said,’ Professor Bretherton pointed out, ‘that cricket was a young man’s game.’

‘Test cricket
is
a young man’s game,’ the old man corrected. ‘If we have you and Bisset opening the batting, and that chap from Edinburgh bowling, we might give the students a surprise.’

‘And you will be there?’ asked Phryne.

‘Certainly. I’ve seen every University match since the year ‘12, and I’m not going to miss this one. Come and sit with me, m’dear. You can tell me about Warwick Armstrong’s last hurrah. The Big Ship, eh? He was a man, not like these namby-pamby modern ones. He knew he was a Captain and the artists— Trumper and Mailey—flourished under his leadership. Knew what he wanted, see? He wanted to win. Nowadays Australia’s lost the will to win.’

‘Delighted,’ said Phryne. The faculty showed signs of enthusiasm. The annual cricket match against the students might be amusing, after all.

At eleven precisely Phryne was escorted to the door by Professor Bretherton and handed into the VC’s Daimler. The driver did not blink an eyelash when she asked him to take her to an address in Chinatown.

‘Theo’s, is it, Miss? Lots of my gentlemen go there. Interested in poetry, Miss?’

‘Yes,’ murmured Phryne, who was very sleepy. ‘Very interested.’

She slept lightly until the door opened and she was escorted across a hot pavement. The driver rang three times—one long and two short—at a bell in a dingy green door. A peephole slid, there was a pause, then the door swung open. A doorkeeper surveyed her without a word and allowed her to pass. Phryne climbed some stairs into a very noisy cafe and immediately felt herself begin to rouse. Universities were foreign to Phryne; her natural habitat was a cafe. She knew how cafes worked.

Theo’s was an unremarkable room in the top half of an unremarkable building in a depressed bit of the city. The Campbell Street address was on the corner of Pitt Street, in Chinatown, and very unrespectable. The room was whitewashed and decorated with a few Chinese lanterns that had seen better decades. Two full-sized sketches hung on the wall: a female satyr and a cartoonist’s charcoal of a tall man. A large washing tub stood on a kitchen table in the middle of the floor, around which were ranged an eclectic assortment of tables and chairs and an even more eccentric collection of people, some drinking from china teacups, some dancing in whatever space was left between the furniture. A sinister woman in a turban raised her eyes from an array of Tarot cards and gave Phryne an unfriendly glance.

‘Yes! We have no bananas,’ sang a gramophone. ‘We have no bananas today!’

Phryne stood by the door, trying to see through the fog of smoke generated by a kero stove cooking sausages, the fume of boiling spaghetti and a lot of people smoking cheap tobacco. Experience in Paris had taught Phryne that one didn’t just stride boldly into a strange cafe. Paris had thousands of cafes, all with their own clientele, who could get noticeably unfriendly to outsiders who walked in at the wrong moment and rapped a coin on the wrong zinc counter. Therefore she leaned on the wall and groped for a cigarette. She could not see any woman who bore a resemblance to Dot’s sister Joan.

A large man loomed before her, flourishing a match.

‘New here?’ he asked through the side of his mouth.

‘Chas Nuttall,’ said Phryne, providing a name to support her presence. The huge man nodded slowly. He had all the earmarks of a professional chucker-out (broken nose, split eyebrows, and ears which any greengrocer might have exhibited with pride amongst the cauliflowers) and Phryne did not want to be chucked. At least, not just yet.

‘Chas ain’t ‘ere yet,’ said the bouncer. ‘You know artists. You po’try, paintin’ or slummin’?’ he wanted to know.

‘I expect I’m poetry,’ said Phryne.

‘Poets’re in that far corner,’ said the chucker-out, looking a little disappointed. He stood back, allowing her to pass, and Phryne walked slowly across the room, collecting a teacup and some punch and leaving a shilling in the saucer next to the washing tub. She had no intention of drinking the foul concoction and insulting the University’s port, but it was protective colouration.

She put a hand on the back of a chair at the furthest table and said, ‘Mind if I sit down?’

The whole table stopped in mid-word and stared.

‘Bet you a deener I fuck you in a week,’ said a young man with a very conscious grizzled beard and locks of hair straggling into his uncollared neck. Phryne assessed this as an opening bid.

‘I wouldn’t put any real money on it, but I’ll watch your progress with great interest,’ she promised. She sat down. The chair was paint-stained and rickety, thrown out by some respectable kitchen. Phryne leaned both elbows on the table and said, ‘Nice to meet you,’ to the grizzled beard. ‘My name’s Phryne Fisher. I’m thinking of establishing a magazine, since
Vision
has gone down the drain. What do you think?’

This was a demand bid and she was not disappointed.

‘Who sent you here?’ asked the beard.

‘Chas Nuttall,’ she answered. ‘Why, do I need a sponsor?’

‘You do to come into Theo’s, unless you’re just slumming amongst the gay Bohemians. Don’t mind about Jack, he says that to every new woman he meets after it worked once in 1924, even though it never worked again. I’m Bill, this is George, and Christopher Brennan is…er…not entirely with us at the moment.’

He referred to a large man who was snoring, face down, in a puddle of punch.

‘But doubtless he’ll be back,’ added George.

‘I’m from Melbourne,’ said Phryne. ‘Via Paris. This is the first cafe I’ve seen which bears any resemblance to Bohemia. Smoky. Contentious. Noisy. Colourful. Not, however—despite Jack’s sporting offer—very salacious.’

‘Night’s young. And the girls from Tillie’s haven’t knocked off yet. They usually come in here after the evening rush.’

‘I’m looking for one of them,’ said Phryne artlessly. ‘I have a job to offer her.’

‘Who?’ asked the bearded man.

‘Darlo Annie.’ Phryne handed over her photograph. ‘If this is her? I’ve got a friend who wants to photograph her. At quite a reasonable fee, if I could find her very soon.’

‘Haven’t seen her for a week,’ said George. ‘You sure you’re not a cop?’

‘Quite sure,’ said Phryne. They all looked at her again, and decided that she really couldn’t be. Then they looked at the picture.

‘Looks sorta like Darlo Annie,’ confirmed George. ‘Younger, but.’

‘Well, if you could come back tomorrow night, I reckon we could lay our hands on Darlo Annie, we can go round and order her from Tillie and you can hardly do that, can you? We’d like to do Darlo Annie a favour,’ offered Bill. ‘Especially if you are in the market for some poetry.’

‘I might be,’ said Phryne. ‘What have you got?’

‘Some pretty hot stuff,’ promised Bill.

‘“The loveliest whore in Darlinghurst was in the family way,”‘ announced Jack. ‘“In spite of her diamond pessaries and the jewelled whirling spray…”‘

‘No, no, not that sort of thing!’ protested George. ‘She wants to buy good poetry!’

‘And who are you to disdain the poetry of the people?’ demanded Jack. ‘The poetry of the workers? You and your symbolism!’

‘Symbolism,’ said someone, ‘is the only way to make a pattern out of Fate, dust, and time.’

Phryne located the voice. Christopher Brennan had spoken without moving from his puddle of wine. She waited, but he seemed to have passed out again.

‘You! You’d do anything to get into
Smith’s Weekly
!’ accused Jack.

‘And you wouldn’t?’ Voices were rising. While a fight would be amusing, Phryne thought, she didn’t have time to wait until it had died down. Grabbing Bill as he started to his feet, she said firmly, ‘I want some good poetry, by which I do not mean either réchauffé T.S. Eliot or what sounds like an Australian version of the “Ballad of Eskimo Nell”, which I have already heard.’

‘“Oh, the harems of Egypt are fair to behold…”‘ began Jack hopefully.

Phryne squashed him. ‘And that one,’ she snapped.

‘How about: “In her breasts’ rise and fall/I felt the mighty ocean of desire/Swell to the calling Moon…/Her impulsive thighs/Pressed tighter to my side like petals that close/About a trapped bee venturing too far”‘ quoted George.

‘Hmm. Whose is that?’

‘Jack Lindsay. He’s the boy for erotic verse! But there’s lots more. We’re all poets here.’

Phryne felt a hand slide onto her knee, and the beautiful voice of the great poet pronouncing ‘“All mystery and all love beyond our ken/She wooes us, mournful ‘till we find her fair:/And gods and stars and songs and souls of men/Are the sparse jewels in her scattered hair/Jewels in her hair…”‘ Phryne looked full into dark, deep and agonised eyes as of a wounded deer before Brennan fell back into his puddle and subsided.

‘He’s comparing you with Lilith,’ commented Bill. ‘He must like you.’

‘As I recall, Lilith was the demon who mated with Adam before Eve came along. She was dismissed for being too forward,’ said Phryne.

‘Are you forward?’ leered Jack.

‘I’m probably so far ahead of you, my dear, that you could run all day and never catch up with me,’ Phryne told him. ‘Is Mr Brennan always like this?’

‘Sometimes. He’s a great poet, you know. But…he’s got his troubles. Annie, for example.’

‘A stupid slut,’ said Jack. Phryne liked him less and less as their acquaintance festered and lit another cigarette to stop her fingers itching for his ears.

‘Venus of the Gutters, they call her,’ said Bill consideringly. ‘There was a terrible scandal. They said…’ He leaned nearer and whispered in Phryne’s ear for some time. Against her will, her eyebrows rose.

‘Really?’ she asked. Incest was not new, perhaps, but surely close to the last taboo. The advanced age in which she found herself demanded free money, free love and free beer—not that it got them—but incest seemed too extreme even for the more altitudinous of the
fauves
. And that was in Paris.

‘That’s what they say. That’s when his wife threw him out.

And we don’t know how long he’ll last with the University, either. They don’t appreciate what he does.’

‘What does he do?’

‘He shuts himself in with his students and they can’t leave until they have undergone self-examination. Not to go out of someone’s sight, to pee in a bottle and use a wastepaper basket for a lavatory, never to leave the others, until they have it. The university don’t like it. They have to call in cleaners. They don’t know what he’s doing for us, making us see.’

‘See?’ asked Phryne.

‘Yair.’ Bill’s face was radiant. For a moment, he looked like a cheap religious lithograph and the blurred lighting cast a glow around his head like the halo of a saint. Then Jack nudged him and said, ‘You’re talking to a sheila. She can’t understand.’

‘I can’t?’ asked Phryne, resisting the urge to stub her gasper out on the young man’s hand. His venom was catching. Another womaniser who didn’t even like women, she thought. There were a lot of them about.

‘But there are sheilas here who do understand,’ protested Bill. ‘Don’t be such a woman-hater, Jack. Jeez, I dunno. Nice lady wants to give us money and you’re putting her off. But they’re stuffed shirts, up at the University. You won’t find any real poets up there. Remember the
Hermes
scandal? The University magazine published a poem by one of our friends, Bert Birtles. Real nice. A remembrance of how his girl lay in his arms with the moonlight coming in through the window and the birds cooing on the roof.’

‘“Lie still, dear, and rest awhile,/Contented, our longing now appeased…”‘ quoted a man behind Phryne. ‘Best thing that ever happened to me, that scandal. “Move not dearest. Unfold not your warm limbs from about me.” The U summoned the
Hermes
editors and warned them with the utmost academic severity not to do such a thing ever again, and the craven scoundrels haven’t, either. No balls at all.’

‘Hullo, Bert,’ said George. ‘Miss Fisher, Bert Birtles.’

Phryne shook hands with a brisk young man. He grinned.

‘What happened to you, then? And your lover?’ she asked.

‘Oh, well, you see, they really got on to poor Dora because she’d written a poem in much the same vein, and she was rusticated for two years and I was flung out, neck and crop. She’d enjoyed that night as much as I had, so we got married and started a magazine. You might have seen it. Called
Vision
. Didn’t last but it was good.’

‘Miss Fisher’s thinking of starting a magazine,’ put in Bill.

‘Wonderful,’ replied Bert Birtles warily. ‘Takes a mint of money and a lot of work,’ he added. ‘You might want to think about it, Miss Fisher, before you let these blokes bully you into anything.’