Illywhacker_ A Novel Part 19

When Bernstein understood the problem he was amused. He tried to drag the poet back into the wine bar to celebrate his lost virginity.

"No, no," said Horace, glancing nervously up and down the street, "not lost. The lady is a friend. Please, Bernstein, if our friends.h.i.+p is worth anything write me a prescription for the medicine you mentioned."

"It may not work," said Bernstein, meaning that any prescription written by him on plain paper would not be a prescription at all. "Wait, have a drink, and we'll go and see someone later."

"Now, now, I beg you. If it doesn't work, we'll try something else," (imagining his friend was merely worried by the efficacy of the medicine).

Bernstein shrugged his broad shoulders and took out a notepad from the pocket of his jacket. He wrote for a moment and then tore out the sheet.

So: Horace, ten minutes later, smelling as strongly of sweat as his tethered horse, fairly galloping into Mallop's Pharmacy in Swanston Street with Bernstein's piece of paper clutched in his broad-palmed hand. "Give it to the tall man," Bernstein had said. "Wait till he is free. He's an understanding sort of fellah."

Tall man? What tall man? There was no tall man here. There was not a fellow higher than five foot three. He had a boozer's face and mutton-chop whiskers. There was a tall woman, though, not tall for a man, but tall for a woman. She stood beside the man. She towered over him. Horace behaved no different from his horse-he had his momentum up and could not stop. He propelled himself towards the counter, panting, and thrust his prescription into the hands of the tall woman who read it, frowned, and retreated behind a tall gla.s.s-fronted cupboard. After a moment she called the mutton-chop man to join her.

Horace stood wet and panting. He had run a good race. He pulled out a scarlet handkerchief from his pocket, wiped his brow, and blew his little nose with relief.

He blew his nose so enthusiastically, so loudly, that the gurgling visceral noise cloaked the return of the mutton-chop man who called twice to his customer before he was heard.

"Do you know what this is for?" asked the pharmacist. He had a peculiar expression on his face, almost a smile.

"Oh yes," said Horace, plunging his snotty red handkerchief into his pocket where it tangled with loose lozenges, string and crumpled poetry.

"You scoundrel," shouted the chemist. "I shall have you put in gaol."

Horace's eyes bugged. His hand was trapped in his pocket, anaesthetized by lozenges and trussed with string. He tried to move but could not. His face screwed up with such astonishment that it resembled the handkerchief: red, crinkled, confused with unrelated things.

"The doctor ..." he tried, but hat pins pierced his tongue.

"The doctor too," the mutton-chops said, reaching for his telephone.

But Horace was already in retreat and before Toddy knew where he was he was cantering back up to Carlton with his nosebag still on and the reins belabouring his backside while the rhythm of his hooves drummed into Horace's panic: to aid, abet, to aid, abet.

The actress, when she saw him stumble through Dawson's door, carefully placed the wine gla.s.ses on the far edge of the table, against the dark panelled wall.

"I'm done for," said the poet, dropping heavily and smellily beside her. "They're after me."

They heard his story and persuaded him to take some wine. He was a teetotaller but gulped it down. Like lard, he thought, giving solace to the injured tongue.

"You're in love, my friend," Bernstein said, lowering his voice to a level which he understood to be a whisper.

"No, no," Horace said hopelessly, "she is a wonderful person."

"Are you really a virgin?" asked the actress who was very young to speak in such a manner. She wore a green headband and smoked her cigarette from a tortoisesh.e.l.l holder.

"I am, madam," said Horace. "Now, also, I am a criminal. They have my description. They even know the colour of my handkerchief," and he stared into the gloom of the wine bar as if its booths might be filled with policemen.

"You are in love," said Bernstein. "Why else would you do it?"

"She is a poet," said Horace.

"You are are in love," said the actress, "and I think you're sweet." in love," said the actress, "and I think you're sweet."

"I am not in love," Horace cried shrilly, pulling handkerchief and poems tumbling from his pocket. "I am in trouble," he said, wiping his face and dropping the handkerchief carefully to the floor. He slumped back into the hard wooden bench and, while his companions conferred in a whisper, sipped Bernstein's port while he tried to kick his handkerchief into the next booth.

"Give me a pound," said the actress.

He placed his florin on the table.

No one asked him how he had intended paying for the medicine at Mallop's Pharmacy. Bernstein opened his wallet, took out a pound, and handed it to the actress who squeezed out past Horace. He was so depressed as to be insensible to both his friend's generosity and the pa.s.sage of the silk-clad b.u.t.tocks which pressed briefly against him.

"We must buy the newspapers," he said to Bernstein who poured his friend more wine and was polite enough not to laugh at his misery.

The actress was gone an hour and Bernstein would not let his friend depart until she returned. He went out to buy the Herald Herald and let Horace pore through it looking for his name. and let Horace pore through it looking for his name.

"Probably in the Sun Sun tomorrow," he said, carefully folding the wine-stained broadsheet and ironing in knife-sharp creases with the flat of his hands. tomorrow," he said, carefully folding the wine-stained broadsheet and ironing in knife-sharp creases with the flat of his hands.

The actress (a Miss Sh.e.l.ly Claudine who was shortly to appear in the front chorus at the Tivoli) returned at last, slightly grim of face, but with a newspaper-wrapped bottle in her handbag. This she thrust at Horace.

"Tell her," she whispered hoa.r.s.ely, "that she must drink it in the morning when her husband has gone. It will hurt her, but she must not panic." And then she kissed Horace on his astonished wine-wet mouth.

Horace became emotional. He took the actress's hand and shook his head. Tears welled in his eyes but words would not come.

"Go," she said, "for G.o.d's sake."

"How can I thank you?"

"Write a poem for me," the actress said, and kissed him again, this time on the forehead (he had never been kissed so many times in a day).

"To h.e.l.l with the law," Horace told Bernstein, "the law is a monkey on a stick."

"An a.s.s," said Bernstein.

"A billy goat's b.u.m," said Horace, the bottle tucked safely in his pocket, his handkerchief abandoned on the floor. He bowed formally to his benefactors and withdrew.

He threaded his cautious circuitous way to the Maribyrnong River, heading north as if he intended to visit Brunswick, then south as if the zoo had suddenly claimed his interest. He trotted out towards Haymarket along quiet streets and, when he considered himself safe, finally allowed Toddy to wander with his lolling head and stumbling hooves along the last two miles to Ballarat Road. They stopped for snapdragons and roses, delphiniums and geraniums. They stopped so Toddy could s.h.i.+t, or merely lift his tail and consider s.h.i.+tting. The horse, perhaps aware that the excitements of the day were not yet over, prudently threw a shoe four hundred yards from home.

69.

The horse had its head at a pile of dung, purchased by Molly, intended for the garden. I saw it in my headlights and read the Rawleigh's sign on the panniers of the cart. My scalp p.r.i.c.kled and my hands clenched. I knew that something was wrong. I am not inventing this, not confusing the before and after. I knew something was up before I heard my wife's voice, refracted, splintered, like the gla.s.s across a fallen watercolour.

I ran towards the house. I found the kitchen empty. The bedroom was full of light and threw too many shadowed forms against the canvas walls. I ran up the two steps that had once led to the small stage of the hall and found the scene that follows: my wife lying on our bed, spewing green bile into a basin held by a stranger, my mother-in-law sitting on the end of the bed stroking her daughter's feet.

Phoebe wore a woollen nightgown. She twisted, stretched, jack-knifed, clasped her stomach and repeated the fractured moan that had chilled me at the front door. Her hair was wet and plastered on her forehead. My pocket bulged with commissioned photographs of "my house," "my home," "my family".

"What in the name of G.o.d is happening?"

Molly would not look at me. The man with the basin could not hold my eyes.

"Phoebe," I said.

"Poisoned," she said, and tried to laugh.

My first and strongest inclination in the face of these conspirators was to hit someone, to bend a nose, crack a tooth, bang a head against a floor.

"What poison?" I shouted and even Molly would not look up. She stared at her daughter's cold white feet. "What poison?" I asked the fat head. I gripped the iron bed with hands on which I had written the price of a limited slip differential.

Phoebe opened her mouth to answer, then changed her mind, moaned, and leant towards the stranger's basin into which she discharged a long stream of green liquid.

"I am your husband," I said, rocking the bed.

The man I later knew as Horace Dunlop opened his child's mouth and then closed it.

Phoebe pulled herself half up and leant on her elbow. "I am pregnant," she said, "and I have taken poison."

I pushed my way round to the head of the bed, my eyes half closed, my brows hooded. I would have unchaired the poet and trampled on him if he had not been wise enough to vacate his position swiftly.

I held the basin.

"No baby," Phoebe said wearily.

I shook my head.

"No baby," she said and tried to smile. "No nothing. No Phoebe either. Poor Herbert."

"Get a doctor," I said to the poet who was hovering at the doorway, "whoever you are."

"No doctor," Phoebe said, and took my hand.

"They'll charge her," the poet said. "She won't die. Don't call a doctor."

"Who is this man?" I demanded. "Why is he here? Did he give you this poison?"

"No, no," Phoebe said. "Only the Rawleigh's man."

"She won't die," Horace said, taking a tentative step back into the room. "She is losing the foetus."

"How dare you," I roared, standing up and spilling bile down my trouser leg. "How dare you call my child a foetus."

"It is the name...."

"It is not the name of my child you scoundrel and she will lose no child while I am here."

"It is the scientific name of the unborn child."

"And unborn it will stay, until its time. You mark my words Mr Man-or-Beast, she will lose no child. She will lose nothing."

"Poor Herbert," Phoebe moaned.

"It is a criminal offence," Horace said, plucking miserably at his cravat.

"There has been no poison here," I said. "There is nothing in the house. My wife is ill. She will not lose anything." anything." And if you had been there, had you seen me, you would not have doubted that I would keep the foetus clinging to the placenta by the sheer force of my will. And if you had been there, had you seen me, you would not have doubted that I would keep the foetus clinging to the placenta by the sheer force of my will.

"You get a doctor," I told the Rawleigh's man. "Now, get your horse out of the dungheap and go."

"It is lame," said Horace. "It threw a shoe."

"Then drive my car, man. This is 1921. Only a fool rides a horse."

"I can't drive," he stammered. He had the look you see in public bars when a man knows he is about to get a beating.

"I'll drive," Molly said.

"You can't drive," I said, "you don't know how."

"I can," she said simply, standing and patting her daughter on the knee, "and I will. Come, Horace," she said, "you come with me."

And she took Horace by the sleeve and led him from the room.

70.

It was still twelve years before Molly McGrath would come to public notice by refusing to sell her three electrical utilities, those of Ballarat, Geelong and Bendigo, to the newly formed State Electricity Commission. In 1921, however, we had no inkling of Molly's abilities. I did not doubt her pa.s.sions. One had only to see her gazing at the electrically illuminated cross she had donated to the Catholic Church at Moonee Ponds-her eyes shone with that ecstatic light one sees portrayed in pictures of all the female saints-to see that she had as much enthusiasm for the electricity as she had for G.o.d himself.

But we thought her silly. She encouraged us to think her silly. She was the half-mad wife of Jack McGrath, and had I known she was spending her days with real-estate agents examining the books of businesses for sale, I would have done everything I could to protect her. As for driving a car, I would have judged her totally incapable. However I was not there to stop her.

She had looked at the Hispano Suiza for a long time before she finally approached it.

"It's my car," she said at last, and having gone for a pee and put some lipstick on, she rushed up to the vehicle and climbed in behind the wheel. She taught herself (noisily) the principles of clutch and gears; Phoebe came running from the distant Morris Farman to discover the driver of the car that circled round and round the b.u.mpy tussocked ground was none other than her mother.

When Phoebe recovered from her disapproval, she begged to be taught as well.

Somehow they never got around to telling me, but the two women spent less time in the house than I had imagined. They were forever touring here and there-fast, unlicensed, but only sometimes reckless. It was this that gave Molly the idea about the taxi business, but that comes later on.

My mother-in-law did not drive well on the night of Phoebe's poisoning. She stalled three times and lurched across a garden bed. She left huge wheel ruts in excess of anything her late husband could have managed. She could not understand why Phoebe would wish to kill her child. This writhing daughter was a stranger to her. She prayed to the Blessed Virgin who claimed more of her attention than the car she carelessly controlled. She prayed her daughter would not die. She prayed the child would survive.

"I cannot understand her," she said to Horace as they crashed across on to the track to Newmarket. "Why would she ever contemplate such a thing?"

Guilty Horace did not answer. He sank miserably into the big leather seats of the Hispano Suiza, too unhappy to be afraid of the consequences of such erratic driving.