He found the keys from his windcheater and passed them to me. I pocketed them and moved to raise Bickham. Chloe forestalled me though. She stood up and kicked both shoes off.
—Carry those, she told me.
I took them, too stupefied to see at once that accepting them disqualified me as a rescuer. In the instant of my accepting the shoes, she had bent again. Now the barely gasping and comatose Bickham, a remote deity of hers an hour ago, was over her shoulder in a fireman’s carry, and under the burden she was half-jogging towards Bickham’s house directly across the turf of Centennial Park. Khalil and I ran behind her, offering to help. She told us to go to buggery eh.
I overtook her at last, and opened the garden gate and then scurried up the steps to get the door open for Chloe and Bickham.
Behind me, poor Khalil gasped. Ground floor. Ground floor.
I had always imagined Bickham’s bedroom as high in his house, above the park, above the ground level spying of vulgar devotees. But of course a loving Khalil had moved Bickham’s bedroom down to the ground floor, so that the Nobel Laureate did not need to exhaust himself on the stairs.
Chloe jogged down the hallway, the novelist slung familiarly now on her shoulder. She found the room and heaved Bickham onto the bed and, by the time Khalil had rounded the door into the room, had the oxygen mask on Bickham’s face and was turning the succouring knob on the cylinder. Above the mask, Bickham’s forehead showed purple. Still applying the mask two-handed, Chloe looked across at us both.
—Well, you’re not far from a phone now are you?
Khalil went and rang. I could hear him weeping into the receiver as he described Michael Bickham’s symptoms.
So we had saved Michael Bickham from a threat to his life, from his own clenched air passages. Chloe had, by not being effete, by not wavering. Bickham’s own forebears had been sheep and cattle people. In fact he had a brother who still worked a massive property in the region of New South Wales called New England. His cattleman brother tried to pretend that Michael didn’t exist, and Michael tried to ignore that such a cliché of Australian balladry as his squatter brother occupied the same continent as himself.
But perhaps something of his own background, of the rough kindnesses of his childhood, recurred to comatose Bickham as Chloe put the fireman’s-carry on him and toted him home to the oxygen.
While Dr Ho the asthma specialist attended to him, I waited in Bickham’s living room. This home visit by a prominent physician was something rarely seen in Australia, where most emergencies were taken to casualty wards. But even the society Bickham wrote off as philistine and damned and brutish cared for him this much.
With the end for the time being of Bickham’s pulmonary crisis (a crisis of world letters also ended), I would soon have to drive Chloe back to poor Francis’s terrace house, and I would go with Khalil’s gratitude instead of the potential accusation; disgrace and dread I probably deserved.
Chloe and Khalil had left the living room at the front of the house where I sat pretending to look at pictures in an art book. Easing the book precisely and soundlessly back into its stack, as if I wanted to show unseen witnesses how little I wanted to intrude upon the fabric of Bickham’s life, I went looking for my two companions. As I passed up the hallway, I noticed through the door of Bickham’s bedroom that Ho and his nurse had a drip set up.
Chloe was making tea for Khalil in the kitchen, while Khalil himself sat disoriented at the table. It was she who pulled out canisters and found milk and sugar as if she were a familiar of this hearth.
—Thank God he’s got a strong heart, Khalil told me as soon as I came in. He can stand all that strong stuff they have to give him to bring him round.
I asked what the strong stuff was.
—Adrenalin, phenergin, you know. Stimulants. He has a stout Scots heart. His people are really very tough people.
Khalil and I drank our tea slowly, but Chloe took it at the gulp. She was searching drawers in the refrigerator.
—So pasta eh? I’d rather cook you a great whacking steak, Mr Khalil. It’s good shock food.
But he said that pasta was normal. Michael liked it. I saw a piteous gratitude on Khalil’s face as Chloe found the right pot, began boiling water, slung in an unfashionable bush-handful of salt – but Khalil wouldn’t complain – and began to sing an Aboriginal Land Rights song.
—Poor bugger me, poor bugger me,
Got no place in me own count-ree.…
I knew it was purely the tune she was interested in. The content was, to her and most other Northern cattlefolk, city liberal bullshit. Through song and clattering, she was making a place for herself in the great modernist’s kitchen. I wondered what would happen between her and Bickham if she established herself here. And what if future conversation came round to the Wodjiri and other tribes, and what equities should be applied to them?
Later in the night, when we left Bickham’s house, asking Khalil to say goodbye for us since Michael Bickham was sleeping, I drove her back to Francis Emptor’s place. It was clear to me she was delighted with herself.
—Well, she said, you came good for me, didn’t you eh? After a fair bit of squirming.
And whether or not she had ambitions to become a familiar in Bickham’s household, it would soon enough become obvious to many in Sydney that she had succeeded. The two old gentlemen were pleased to be supplied with regular pasta, and serving the failing Bickham distracted her from Francis’s state.
So Bickham, the rarest and most patrician presence in the Southern Hemisphere, took Chloe as a friend. Since I was not a friend I did not witness the process. But perhaps it worked because, unlike everyone else in Sydney, it didn’t occur to her to try too hard.
Though Bickham’s crisis in Centennial Park was an omen of the way his life might end, he was – to quote Chloe – full of rum and bacon by the following morning. Chloe no longer talked of Burren Waters, of getting north for the Brahma Breeders Ball in Hector. The women of the Northern Territory were welcome to Stammer Jack, for he meant little now beside the two high destinies which had befallen Chloe: to make Francis Emptor beloved in his last days, or better still to relieve him of the need to kill himself as a means of killing her; and to be maid and companion to Michael Bickham.
I heard someone say at a party at the Mulcahys’ place that maybe Chloe reminded Bickham of the rough generous Hunter Valley women his grandee parents had hired to bathe him, feed him and put him to bed in his childhood. And when I thought of it, Bickham’s novels would sometimes exalt someone unlikely, someone other than the sort of people he liked to invite to his table. Some creature of undesigned wisdom like Chloe. In Travelling with Elijah there was a figure called Mrs Karnak who was dismissed by both the formally godly and the intelligent as an uncontrolled and stupid woman, but who was in fact a knower, one of the chosen, one who found justification by taking events madly into her own hands. A ham-fisted transcendentalist of the bush. It’s obvious to me that Bickham later transmuted Chloe into a character called Mrs Cowley, a frank, battling saint, a genius of honesty, in his last novel. The City of the Sisters.
11
Hefty Mulcahy called me.
—Oscar and I saw Bickham and Khalil at Godunov.
She had the opera buff’s habit of dropping part of the names of operas.
—They were there with Francis Emptor and his mother.
I noticed at once: mother, not horrible mother as Hefty’s normal estimation of Chloe ran.
—And do you know, I’ve revised my estimation. She’s quite a pleasant woman in some ways. Oscar and she were thick as thieves. And a tragedy about Francis. We have to do something. If we had a final lunch for him at the beach, would you come?
The Mulcahys also had a wonderful house above one of the northern beaches of Sydney. They’d bought an enamelled plaque in Paris which said Place de l’Opéra. They stuck it on their outside wall facing the Tasman Sea, and so they entitled the house.
In Place de l’Opéra, Oscar produced superb
and very robust weekend meals for his guests. He was no respecter of angelhair pasta. He had, from his Irish working class origins, a generous respect for red meat and the complex carbohydrates of potatoes.
—Of course, Hefty told me, I’ll invite Bickham too. You like Bickham all right?
When we arrived at Place de l’Opéra for the lunch which had been prepared to succour and farewell Francis Emptor, I found some friends already seated under Oscar’s prodigiously big white and blue sun umbrella, nearly marquee-sized and tethered in place against the southerly by a heavy base filled with water. Amongst those already sitting in the shade was Dick Evans, a tall, boyish-looking and acutely thin playwright I was friends with. Dick was folded up angularly in a beach chair, and his smaller wife Renate was beside him in an upright. She had sharper features than Evans and always looked the more worldly. They both had untouched glasses of champagne in their hands, held in a way which made it look like they did not want to start drinking till the other guests turned up.
Earlier in her life, Renate had been a rigorous journalist and had been feared. But she had given that up to do writing of her own. The change had made her a genial soul. I loved the company of both of them. It held none of the menaces that the company of Bickham might. When I’d first known them, their marriage – very public because of Evans’s fame – had been turbulent, the stuff of feature articles. But now it was obviously successful, and so was subject to even more snide comment.
Immediately I saw the two of them I felt more at ease about Bickham’s threatened arrival. Dick Evans and Renate utterly lacked rancour. Maureen, who had quite a nose for people and could sniff out pretension, liked Renate and soon got into an energetic conversation with her. Dick had written some of the screenplays of the best Australian Revival films, and had – virtually on his own – created the modern Sydney and Melbourne theatre. Now, of course, he was flayed by critics for entertaining people and for not having given experts exactly the theatre they knew to be best for them and, above all, for the public. He was as beloved of the public as Dame Roberta Murdoch, had the rewards to show for it, and so was a largely content man. Still fresh-faced in middle-age, he uttered an occasional anxious thought about the waspishness of his enemies. I knew by the sort of thing he said about my work that he had a generosity of spirit, and was bewildered by the lack of it in others.
The other guests were as hulking as Oscar: Norris Chambers and his wife Marie, enormous, robust people with resonant opinions and a fine line in whimsy. Chambers and Marie were getting older now – they would have been at least in their mid-60s. Yet their faces were somehow fixed in the minds of the populace as ageless. Or at least you beheld them and age was not something you thought of. Like Evans, they were characteristic of the lustrous Australians Oscar was willing to serve up to the cancer-threatened Francis Emptor.
Norris Chambers had been Prime Minister of Australia until sacked one unhappy morning by the Governor-General, the Viceroy of the British Monarch, for not adhering to the Viceroy’s desire for a new election to break a deadlock in the Federal Parliament. Thereby, Norris had become something of an icon of Australian nationalism. His fall had en-fabled him, like Ned Kelly. The Australians like their mythic creatures either dead or neutered. They had never been comfortable with him when he ruled them, but their love for him had increased yearly since the Governor-General took away his power.
To suit the size of his myth, he and Marie would come close to filling the Mulcahys’ swimming pool when later they went for a pre-lunch swim.
We all had time to shake ourselves into place before the car driven by Khalil and carrying Bickham and Chloe and her tragic son Frank arrived and imposed a special nervousness on us. Coming up the stairs towards the big beach umbrella, Bickham seemed in good wind, but Frank moved fragilely. On the landing, he brushed the women’s cheeks with dry, dry lips.
We made functional conversation with Bickham, who seemed genial under a big straw hat. He sat down happily and accepted some wine.
—Not the bubbly stuff, he said.
—It gives him an allergy, Khalil explained.
When the Chambers went for their swim in the Mulcahys’ pool, Francis trailed behind them, refusing offers of help to get down the stairs. Brave and thin, he sat on the pool apron in a beach chair, and took his shirt off. He wore nothing but board shorts now, and his chest and middle body were marked off with some indelible pen for radiation therapy purposes. The Mulcahys were serving Dom Perignon and Francis held a barely sipped flute of it languidly in his hand. Looking down at him from the verandah of Place de l’Opéra, I wondered if his strength to keep the glass upright would last the lunch hour. Hefty had told me that when she and Irma Lauber took him to lunch at Emilia’s on Mondays, he ate a third of an entrée and nothing more. The waiters fussed around him, trying to make him taste this or that new dish the chef had devised. But he took only token nibbles.
Hefty told me. He’ll perish of malnutrition, you know, even before the cancer gets him.
I could see the big-boned and not particularly obese Chambers swimming in the pool, Norris’s masses of pale flesh, Marie contained in a large one-piece. We could hear them too, calling to Francis as they swam.
—And are you still working, comrade? he cried out to Francis. He had got the habit of calling everyone comrade from his early years in the Labor Party.
—I go in now and then.
—You’re a brave chap then, said Norris in his huge, aspirated voice. But I suppose it helps one’s mental attitude.
—It does, Mr Chambers. To see friends.
—Oh bugger this Mr Chambers stuff, Francis. Call me Norris, please!
Marie had left the pool and picked a long-stemmed carnation from a flowerbed near Francis’s chair. She dived into the pool again, holding it above the water in one hand.
—Look! called Marie. Esther Williams.
She put the stem of the flower between her teeth, and swam backstroke up the pool. Francis’s laughter could be heard, and Norris’s. And Bickham looked down on them and began to chuckle and applaud.
It took Marie about four strokes to travel the length of the pool. Her arms looked as strong as a robust girl’s.
Chloe had put down her Dom Perignon for a can of Carlton Draught, the beer whose white cans you found strewn all over the landscape of the Northern Territory. Outback confetti they called it.
With her free hand, she pulled me aside.
—You jokers get together a lot, you and Bickham and Evans and the Chambers eh?
—No. This is a red letter day.
—But I mean, what goes on eh? Do you get together and decide what’s best for the poor bloody country. All you socialist buggers! Because Bickham’s a great man, and okay he’s short of breath, but he’s also a socialist bastard …
—Chloe, I don’t know what you’re getting at.
—You never invite any cattlemen or women, that’s for bloody certain.
—You’re invited, Chloe.
—Yeah. But that’s a bloody accident eh.
I could by now guess what was gnawing at her. After all, she had shown in Centennial Park that in her world picture, all things were planned and nothing was contingent, even the folly and treachery of children. And so also city liberals like the Chambers and the Evans and the Mulcahys met over Sunday lunch, and orchestrated dismal outcomes and government intrusions for cattlemen and their families far, far in the interior. Nothing happened by accident. Everything was specific intent.
So it had been more than literary inquisitiveness which made her anxious to check with Bickham and discover whether he had framed a law in The Mother as Aphrodite. For some reason, in her mind, her children and the people at the Mulcahys’ lunch had the power to hammer out effectual statutes.
Such was the perceived might of the Chambers, those two big-boned people, splashing about in the Mulcahys’ pool, making it look pint-sized.
When Oscar Mulcahy had his famous roast potatoes to a nicety, he came an
d asked me if Maureen and I would go down to the pool with him to help Francis up and into the house.
—I hope the bloody Chambers haven’t splashed the poor bugger too much, he told me.
The Chambers had left the water and were towelling their great bearlike shoulders and talking with wan Francis. Oscar Mulcahy called to Francis that it was lunch-time, and Francis set his flute of champagne down on the concrete of the pool. Then, elbows on the plastic mounting of the chair arms, he tried to lever himself up. He seemed to lack adequate strength for it. I got on one side and Oscar on the other, but it was Maureen, a nurse in her earlier years, who was able to heave him efficiently upright while the Chambers watched, compassion on their big faces. I could see Hefty and Chloe watching from the verandah, Hefty caressing Chloe like a sister.
We helped him up the steps onto the verandah, where he got his shirt on, manoeuvring his bony elbows. Then we walked on either side of him to the door which led to the Mulcahys’ long dinner table. Because of its massive cliff-side window, the room seemed to hang above the pristine blue sea. The Evans, the Chambers, Maureen and Bickham and. Khalil stood back solemnly from the table and watched us steer Francis to it. We were a procession rendered holy by the young man’s skeletal valour. At last we got Francis seated at the head of the table. Light as a wafer, he sank down with a sigh.
—There you are, mon ami, Chambers said in his hooting intonation. He laid a tentative hand on Francis’s shoulder, massive enough, you would have thought, to put a strain on Francis Emptor’s stick-like framework. Chambers himself must have got the same impression and took it away again after a second.
We began the meal with Balmain bugs, and – orchestrated by Oscar – the males (why is it always so?) told their best stories in turn for Francis’s sake. Chambers told one about UNESCO and a relic. When he had been Australian Ambassador to UNESCO, living in Paris a block from the Eiffel Tower in Rue Jean Rey, he had been appalled by how, for weeks on end, the French press attacked UNESCO; all at a time when the United States was abandoning the organization, allegedly because of its cost, in reality because it sometimes opposed American policy.