His mouth set in a fierce line. There had been some savage exchange between Francis Emptor, clerk-operamane, and brother Bickham, modernist god.
8
At last, soon after my first meeting with Francis Emptor, I went back to Burren Waters with my wife and a second photographer, poor Larson’s successor in the book project. My desire to lay eyes on the mongrel bastard Stammer Jack was dampened. I had nothing of any promise to report to Chloe in the matter of organizing a meeting between the great modernist and Nobel Prize winner, Michael Bickham, and herself.
Even though someone had once given me Bickham’s number, I hadn’t wanted to call him directly and perhaps delay his work. So I called a young poet I knew to be his friend and asked him would he kindly call Bickham’s place and give my number to Khalil, Bickham’s companion and – as some would say – housekeeper.
Nearly half a century before, Khalil had been a pleasant Levantine agent of British Intelligence whom the young Lieutenant Bickham of the Second AIF had met when the Australians captured Syria from the Vichy French in 1941. The gossip about their present domestic arrangements was that Bickham was a bit of a house devil and that Khalil was gentle and genial.
Khalil did call me at last. I told him that there was a woman from the Northern Territory who was desperate to discuss motherhood with the great writer. I said that at first sight she was not the sort of woman Bickham might like meeting, that she was loud and, in the terms of Woollahra, a bit primitive, but she had sensibility and passionate admiration. My shameful internal excuse for explaining Chloe away was that I was anticipating Bickham’s snobbery by giving voice to my own.
Khalil said, Michael’s having a bad time with his emphysema at the moment. He’s only seeing people he knows well. He’d love to see this woman, but he’s not in good enough health for adventures of that nature.
I was half relieved to hear it – I had fulfilled my duty. But then I asked him if I bought a copy of the book Chloe loved and dropped it in to Bickham’s place, could Mr Bickham find the time to sign it?
Even at my level of accomplishment, people asked such questions tentatively of my wife Maureen, who was my protector and mediator with the world the way Khalil was for Bickham. Khalil said grudgingly, but without rancour, that would be fine. I could understand why he would be reluctant. He was the one who would have to answer Bickham’s questions: Who? Him. Why didn’t you tell him …?
To write a major work and then have to put more verbiage into signing copies of it than you did into the work itself!
So I bought a hardcover copy of The Mother as Aphrodite and brought it to Bickham’s fine two-storey colonial mansion in Woollahra. The house sat behind a grey sandstone wall. Its sandy garden was full of roses and its wide verandahs ornamented with the sort of wrought iron which had come to Australia in the nineteenth century as ships’ ballast. Used then for building fences and grille work, it had been taken for granted by Sydney-siders until John Betjeman, poet laureate to the Court of St James, had so praised it in the ’60s.
I pressed the button on the gateway, and the gate buzzed itself open. As I walked up the path amongst the roses, the gentle-eyed Khalil appeared on the verandah to greet and intercept me. He said that Michael again sent his regrets, but he was having a very bad patch at the moment and couldn’t face people. I was very flattered that the great man found it necessary to offer me such excuses. I’d put a slip of paper in asking Bickham to sign it, To Chloe Emptor, a mother. Khalil brought it back at last in his soft, cautious hands, the hands of the young man Bickham had fallen for in a campaign which even Australians no longer remembered.
—Michael doesn’t usually do personal inscriptions, or should I say personalized ones.
The misogynistic old bugger – as I thought of him in that second – had written only Michael Bickham. Chloe would have to be content with that. I had spent three hours of what could possibly have been writing time on fetching the signature for Chloe, and it would get me – in her eyes – barely a pass.
That afternoon I made a complicated radio telephone call to Burren Waters. Stammer Jack answered the phone. I wanted him to know we were coming.
—We’ve b-b-been expecting you.
—Could you tell Mrs Emptor I’m bringing my wife too? Over.
—Okay. That’s fine with C-Chloe. I’ll t-t-t … I’ll let her know. Over and out.
Like Michael Bickham, Stammer Jack was pleased to be finished with me.
It took a day of flying from Sydney and the better part of a day of driving to get to Burren Waters. When we presented ourselves at the homestead on the afternoon of the second day, my wife, myself, the skinny English photographer who was taking over from Larson, Chloe clearly didn’t know that we were coming. She did not even know that my wife was my wife.
—And what are you? Chloe challenged Maureen. Some sort of production assistant or something?
I gave Chloe Bickham’s book and told her that explicit arrangements to visit Burren Waters had been made through Stammer Jack.
—That mongrel bastard! she said. He didn’t say a bloody word. He does it deliberately you know.
She stood on the verandah by the bookshelves and whistled. A young thin-faced Aboriginal stockman, who must have happened to be in the bookkeeper’s office, came jogging across the Emptor red dust station square.
—Mrs Emptor? he said.
—Go and tell that mongrel bastard Jack Emptor that I said thanks for not letting me know these people were coming.
The boy said Okay and Chloe, turning to us and adjusting her sarong around her brown breasts, said, Just as long as he knows I’m keeping a bloody score eh.
I was in sweet with her now. She liked Maureen and I had given her the Bickham book as well. She turned the hardcover of The Mother as Aphrodite over in her hands, considering and reconsidering it.
—Gotta thank you for this, she said.
Meanwhile the young stockman carrying her message of conjugal chagrin sauntered off towards the enormous hangar near the quarter-horse sale ring. In the hangar, apparently, Stammer Jack kept office hours when he wasn’t being a hypochondriac.
—You met my son Frank at the opera, murmured Chloe, pensively stroking the gloss of Michael Bickham’s dust cover with her thumb.
I said we had.
—What did you think he looked like?
My wife said that he had looked pretty splendid in his cloak.
Chloe stayed reflective. In a small voice she asked the vacant, blazing air above Burren Waters where she’d got her damn kids from.
—Anyhow, I said, he uses his inheritance pretty stylishly.
—Inheritance? asked Chloe, clamping on the word like a hawk.
—Everyone in Sydney thinks he’s had some lucky inheritance. I think he might even say so himself.
—What inheritance would he have that Jacko and Helen and Petie don’t? she challenged us. What he tells me is that some Australian tycoon who’s secretly a queen keeps him in style. Like a mistress, you know.
She thought about this for a while, balancing her huge passion for talk against her pygmy one for discretion, and then she said, The little ponce has even implied that it’s Basil Sutherland, you know, the press baron. He even reckons that’s why that hoon Jacko got the job with the blonde on morning television eh. But I don’t know if it’s the truth, see. Frank’s always had these fantasies about all of us being beholden to him. He wanted me to go and live with him, can you imagine that? Surrounded by mincing bloody popinjays eh. But he’d love to have me totally dependent on him, you know. Instead of being totally dependent on that mongrel bastard over there in the shed!
I asked how Petie and Sharon were. She told me Sharon had shot through. She missed her family and the soapies on the commercial channels.
—She just wasn’t right for here eh.
I didn’t tell her Frank Emptor felt the same about her, Chloe. That Chloe wasn’t made for it either.
—So … Petie’ll be off to Sydney on
another shopping expedition soon, and we’ll end up playing host to another little twat who doesn’t know what in Christ’s name she’s letting herself in for.
We drank tea amongst the books and then towards mid-afternoon an enormous man in an Akubra, overalls and stockman’s boots came lumbering through the continuum of bright light and red earth towards the verandah. Chloe gathered herself as if she had an invisible handbag clutched in her lap. Giant Stammer Jack, whom I’d only got a glimpse of on my last trip, came through the gate, into Chloe’s bore-watered, hectically green garden of succulents. Wearily he mounted the steps.
—Gidday, he said. The word of greeting caused him no stammer problems, since it involved the tongue very little and was as guttural as a throat clearing.
—Listen, Jack. Thanks a million for telling me these people were coming.
—Oh yeah. That’s right eh.
He said it in a tone of revelatory memory.
—I t-t-talked to you two d-days ago. Didn’t I eh?
His eyes were neutral and a little glazed. According to what Jacko would tell me later, from breakfast onwards he steadily drank Bundaberg Rum shipped inland from the Queensland coast. A riverine map of purple lay on either side of his nose. Tan did not hide it – in fact he was not very tanned at all. He came from a place and generation which saw no kudos in being blistered by the sun. For his sun was a different creature from the sun of the Gold Coast, Australia’s version of Florida, two thousand miles away on the Pacific coast.
Chloe said, Bloody hell!
Stammer Jack told us he’d see us later eh, show us some of the quarter horses if we liked.
—Most of them can communicate better than you, you old bastard! Chloe called after him in a way which made the words sound well-worn, habitual as a wedding ring.
Later in the afternoon, Stammer Jack fetched us from our rooms in the stockmen’s quarters and took us as promised to see some of his horses, who were being exercised on a long rein by his chief black stockman, Nugget. Nugget waved with an anthracite hand, for the Wodjiri were intensely black and, unlike the blacks of Manhattan, not even their palms had a pinkness. Nugget was a superb, ageless, skinny figure. He was both a Wodjiri elder and a distant in-law of the Emptors. At the time of course I did not understand this connection.
As we watched quarter horses do their circuits, I reminded Stammer Jack that last time we had been up here in Burren Waters he had been in bed with his damaged ankle. I asked how was it now.
After a number of assaults on the words, he said it wasn’t bad these days.
—What happened? I asked him.
I’ll relay what he then said without the stammers which punctuated it.
—I was out mustering with Boomer in the helicopter. Bloody thing lost aerodynamics. Crashed right in the middle of a herd of cattle eh. Must’ve killed a hundred of the buggers.
I said it was lucky it was just his ankle he hurt.
—Well, see, I had my ankle out the bloody door and the whole bloody contraption came down on it.
—On your ankle?
—Yeah. Bit painful eh.
He seemed to take thought and then decide that perhaps I wasn’t too bad a poor bastard. Perhaps Chloe had complained about me to him, how I was wilfully neglecting my real work to write a travel book about the banal, bloody Territory. Being complained about by Chloe gave us a fraternal bond. In any case he hoicked the leg of his overalls so that I could see his ankle in its cut-away cowboy boot.
I beheld above the excised leather something which resembled a purple tree trunk: scaly, the white of dead flesh hanging loose.
—Gave me a hell of a bruise, see. Sometimes it just swells up so hard I’ve got to let it all out with a knife and rub some meths in eh.
Since he clearly didn’t want me to, I didn’t exclaim and make undue noises of horror. I thought of Florey synthesizing antibiotics more than half a century ago for the sake of injuries like Stammer Jack’s. But in the Emptor world the knife and methylated spirits were men’s medicine. And Stammer Jack, hesitating perhaps before plunging the knife into his own ankle, became a hypochondriac in the eyes of his spouse Chloe Emptor.
The English photographer, seeing the little grandstand at the quarter horse sale ring, decided that he would get the entire population of Burren Waters – Aboriginals, stockmen, their wives and daughters, white stockmen, accountant, cook, school teacher, Petie, Stammer Jack and Chloe – to sit in there. It would be a kind of team photograph, a portrait of a medieval village in remote Australia.
He spoke of this to Stammer Jack.
—That’ll be fine. Just speak to Chloe eh. She’ll g-get it all together.
So we went and saw Chloe, and she called various stockmen over from the stockmen’s quarters and sent them off with messages, and at about four thirty in the afternoon, when the light was crystalline, everyone gathered at the sale ring for their picture. The children from the school were in holiday mood. Chloe, team captain, sat in the middle of the front row. But Stammer Jack did not appear.
The English photographer enquired, Should we wait for Mr Emptor?
Chloe sniffed and said, The bastard isn’t coming.
9
I had known Mark Torlucci for twenty years and had written a little screenplay for a quartet of short films he made in the early ’70s. I liked him and admired him for his proletarian and – dare I say – matey style and for his enormous talents. He was one of the rugged, founding directors of the new Australian cinema, about which people were starting to ask during the late ’80s, Where had it gone?
The truth was that, having revivified their film industry, the Australians then turned it into a mandarin bureaucracy, and for a time provided investors with tax breaks which made the completion of films more important than their quality. Little by little, control of the making of films fell into the hands of plausible, talentless people, pursuing and approving their own limited ideologies of film-making. By the mid-’80s the directors who had emerged in the ’70s, particularly Torlucci, Weaver and Brotherton, began to work in America. They would even seek a great deal of the finance for their Australian films in America.
Though by his fiftieth year Torlucci had worked with a number of esteemed screen writers and actors, and had shot films in Moscow and Prague and Mexico as well as in Australia, he retained the same Melbourne larrikin accent, the same antipodean loudness, the same business of masking his percipience in apparent callowness which had characterized him in his twenties.
I am sure that, thereby, he confused Americans not a little; they were used to people of sensibility speaking in delicate and careful sentences. They were not used to clever people – and Torlucci was certainly more than a clever director – parodying their own gifts in rough argot.
Torlucci did not speak so much differently from Jacko Emptor. His idiom, like Jacko’s, was in some ways a device, but it was bred in the bone too.
One braw afternoon as we sat in the Odeon, I told Jacko I was going to Torlucci’s birthday party. It was a very informal business at Torlucci’s flat up on the East Side in the Eighties. I should have remembered the experience I had with Chloe, for the intrusive gene rose in Jacko and he immediately asked, D’you reckon I could string along with you? I always wanted to meet Torlucci.
My friendship with Torlucci was long-standing enough, and Jacko’s renown or notoriety large enough, for me to ask the Torluccis, Could I bring Jacko and Lucy with me?
So Maureen and I went down to Thomas Street to pick up Jacko and Lucy, and travel in the one cab. Jacko was delighted. Torlucci’s door was one which he wanted to have conventional entrée to.
Torlucci’s apartment turned out to be a relatively plain one and not on the same scale as the Victorian mansion he owned back home. The functional nature of the apartment was explained in part by the fact he had begotten a large and expensive Australian family before meeting up with his present wife, a Los Angeles-bred woman of Russian-Jewish ancestry called Rachel. A woman who – everyon
e said – could not only control reckless Torlucci but also make him happy about it. I was aware that the feverish quality Torlucci had in the early days, as if he were worried he’d never get enough life, meet enough women, was gone now, and that was due to either age or Rachel or both. I suspected it was chiefly Rachel. Unlike Torlucci’s former Australian wives, Rachel spoke quietly in public and had a restrained laugh, a minute titter. But it was obvious my racy friend Torlucci – who had always said he liked loud women – was, just the same, calmly devoted to her in a way that hadn’t prevailed in his earlier loves.
Torlucci’s living room was decorated with the very fine Central Australian paintings of Rachel Torlucci. Rachel had painted them during a location shoot near Ayers Rock, and they gave the living room a certain spaciousness. Mark showed them to all arriving guests.
Around the living room I could see a number of the actors from Torlucci’s last film, which had been shot in the two new glamour locations for making films: Czechoslovakia for the architecture and the melancholy; Jackson Hole, Wyoming for the alpine clarity. As I looked into the room, I felt the electric excitement of spotting a star in the flesh; it is like seeing a ghost and it generates as many anecdotes.
Holding Lucy by one hand, Jacko dug me in the ribs with the other.
—Shit eh! he told me.
Jacko performed an intense version of the mate ritual with Torlucci.
—Good of you to invite me, mate. Always wanted to meet you, mate, really have.
We were all introduced to everybody else. Rachel’s mother and sister, various publicists, Torlucci’s agent, a renowned man named Abe Levi who, leaning on a bench in the Torluccis’ kitchen, was reading a New Yorker review of Torlucci’s new film.
We tried to be composed when introduced to the lead actors, the man and the woman.
—Oh hello!
As if we’d been trying to put a name to their stellar faces and Torlucci – through his introductions – had now resolved our bewilderment.