This makes her smile, but nothing can happen until she has taken me to wash my hair, and dried it, until she has put make-up on me, and it is as she does this that she begins telling me how well my face is made, how fine my nose, how she alone on earth can own me like this. She makes me look at myself in the mirror and it is true. I am beautiful, but only for her, only with her, in the secret part of my life.
That Monday night in Malaysia, I tossed and turned until somewhere around four o’clock. Finally I dealt with myself, and then I slept.
26
I suppose Slater had been lying to women all his life, but what he did the following morning still takes my breath away. Sleep in, he told me at six. The plane is broke. The flight is cancelled.
It would take all of five years, by which time we’d become much better friends, before he confessed that it was he, not the airline, who had cancelled our flight to London.
The effect of this vast untruth was to bring me rather violently awake. It was good news, of course—a second chance to get the poetry. On the other hand my board meeting was on the fourteenth, tomorrow. Lord Antrim was about to leave for Italy on the fifteenth. Without him present it was very likely that Mrs McKay would not bother coming down from Manchester and without her cheque book, there was, quite bluntly, no point in having a meeting.
Telephone them, darling, Slater said. Talk to London all day long if that is what you need to do. But of course I could not phone London then. I spent a completely wretched day waiting until I judged that Antrim would have finished breakfast.
I realise now my calculation was off, but desperation never makes one sensitive. Without preamble, I begged him to delay his departure.
Sarah, you might as well ask me to change the date of Christmas.
What would make you stay in London one more week?
Nothing.
A death?
Only my own, possibly not even that.
Bertie, I said, do you remember that night in Cheltenham when you made me cry?
Please, Sarah. This call must be costing the firm a fortune.
You said I had not published a single great poem in fifteen years.
Silence.
Bertie, I do know how you love to be in Italy on time, but if you will only stay in London just five more days I will bring you a really nice surprise.
This meant leaving on the eighteenth and going to the meeting straight from Heathrow.
If you are not there when I open the manuscript, I said, you will be exceedingly jealous of those who are.
There was a second silence, somehow rather warmer than the first. What I had laid so recklessly before Antrim was the very thing that kept him coming to our meetings—the thought that we might one day publish a work like ‘The Waste Land.’ I could hear the singing of the submarine phone cables.
Sarah, he said at last, are you smuggling ganja?.
You know exactly what I am saying.
Well, certainly you haven’t found a genius in Malaya.
It was my turn to be silent.
In Malaya? His voice had changed.
I now knew he would postpone his departure. Immediately I felt ill. It may take a little guts, I said.
That cheered him even further. Antrim was so easily bored, so mischievous. It was the best thing about him.
You will put the cat amongst the pigeons?
Bertie, I promise there will be feathers floating in the air all over Bloomsbury.
By the time I had rung off, he had given his agreement and I had not so much as a limerick to put before him.
27
While I was pacing the room, waiting to make my reckless call, Slater had been presenting himself not at the airline office, where he had promised to ‘deal with this nonsense,’ but down on Jalan Campbell. What he wanted was the girl, although exactly what sort of ‘want’ was by no means clear, not even, I suspect, to him. He was responding instantly, as he had responded to the invitation to Kuala Kangsar, as he had responded to Noussette’s touch in the hammock while the lightning sheeted across Sydney Harbour. He dressed himself in a rumpled white linen suit in which he managed to suggest a romantic, if elderly, incarnation of the English poet.
When he arrived at the bicycle shop Chubb was sitting on the concrete floor, searching for the leak in an injured inner tube. Can’t talk now, he growled.
A less wilful man might have given up, but of course Slater didn’t give a damn for Chubb’s opinion and settled himself in a metal chair by the door like a Presbyterian cat with its paws tucked patiently underneath.
Soon the Chinese woman came down and set herself up behind the display case where she once again began sorting elastic bands.
When Slater raised his hat, she smiled, though he could not have known how unusual this was. In any case he felt himself to be at home. He had kopi susu brought in from the kedai at the corner. He smoked a clove cigarette. He thought about Noussette, arousing feelings so old and delicious that it is quite likely he’d forgotten all about Chubb’s suit. But to Chubb, labouring in his filthy rags, the suit was at the very forefront of his mind. And this I know, because he told me so the following day.
But why was Slater in my shop, Mem? Why did he come? Because he loved me? No, I thought, he is involved in this silly prank to buy the suit. Then I am thinking, Why should he care I have a suit or no? Does he like me? Ha. It makes no sense-ah. Yet there he is, drinking his damn coffee like some maharoger, passing the time of day while all the natives swarm around him.
You would think I would ask him, What’s your game, old man? But I held my tongue. I sandpapered the inner tube and vulcanised the patch. Mrs Lim came downstairs and started her idiotic business with the rubber bands. With this we will get rich? I inflated the tube, tested it in water, deflated it, fitted it inside the tyre, inflated it again, got the wheel back on the frame, and replaced the chain. For this we earn a few miserable shekels, God help us all. You will think me such a beggar but I could never afford another suit, not ever, and I was thinking, Without the suit I am trapped here until I die. I am K in The Trial, sitting outside the door. The door is for me. The suit is for me. I had intended to say nothing, but I could not bear it. I came right out to him.
What for you visit? My suit?
That startled him.
Why yes, he said, of course.
Why not say?
No hurry, no hurry.
I was suspicious. What for he do this for me? I thought. Get this over. If it is a cruel trick, then get it done with now.
One mo’, I told him. Then I got togged up in what was left by the previous incumbent. How I hate to wear his clothes. Make my skin creep.
Come on, I said. We go now.
No hurry, old chap, he said. We have all day.
I saw I had caught him on the hop. No, now, I told him. The little battle-ax had seen me wearing her ex’s suit. What an animal she is, you would not believe how bad. Come on, I said to Slater. Then I was off and he had no choice but to follow. Like you, he wanted to drag me to those Chinese bastards but I would not stop until we got to Batu Road. There is a Muslim Indian there, Hadji Ramesh, my customer. A decent man.
This tailor had his business set up in an alleyway between two gaudy department stores, and the bolts of fabric were racked so high up the walls that in order to fetch one it was necessary to send two small barefoot boys shinning up them like monkeys. When the fine grey wool was finally selected, Chubb stood on a wooden box and the tailor solemnly took his measurements and called them out for his older son to record in a leather-bound ledger.
I was waiting to see what trick it was, Mem. How badly I wanted that suit I am ashamed to tell you. I was standing on the box when Slater started off his questions.
How many are you, old man, in your little household?
What for I lie to him? I told him three.
Your wife has very remarkable eyes.
Not my wife, I told him, but why would he say such a flattering thing about her anyway?
Her eyes are crazy. You’ve seen them? They would melt a pound of lead.
Then she has a child?
I have a daughter, I told him.
Where is she? Why have I not seen her?
So casual, Mem.
I’d like to meet her, he said.
Then I saw the trick. It was not the suit. He had me pimping for my daughter. No, I said, they don’t like that.
What on earth do you mean, old chap?
Don’t like to meet, no.
I did not want him near my daughter but I wanted the suit, so I begged the tailor full speed forward. He promised a second fitting—the suit itself—that very afternoon. I thought myself so very cagey, Mem. The time of the fitting was exactly when my daughter came home from college. But of course yesterday was Tuesday, and I had forgotten that she is let out early on Tuesdays.
She hesitated at the doorway, just a moment. With the light behind her she was outlined like an angel. Then Slater rose—he looked so old, Mem, but horribly powerful, I can’t tell you. At that moment I saw the glory of her, young skin, fresh eyes. Slater was looking at her and I knew he saw her mother—who would not? Eyes, cheekbones, mouth, also the way of walking.
My daughter saw him but how would she know who he was? He looked like nothing she had seen in all her life. She returned his smile. And then he made the strangest bow, Mem.
I do believe, he said, I knew your mother.
My daughter ran away upstairs.
I had been soldering in the back of the shop, but I could not leave him with his filthy thoughts. You remember her-lah, I called. The mother? You mentioned her before. Noussette.
Oh yes, he said. So smugly, Mem. Such a Don Juan. But who was he to know a thing about her? Only his great arrogance.
One day, one night, I told him. Not much to know, is it?
I was angry, and he heard it, and came down through the bicycles to talk. Listen, old man, he said, is there something I ought to apologise to you for?
Something? Cheh! Of course, you slept with her. You think I don’t know that? She was a bad woman.
Only one night, old man.
But when I said she was a bad woman, Mem, that is not what I meant. Why did she sleep with him? Slater was such a vain, romantic fool. He had no idea of how she used him. I thought it was time he learned who she really was.
Chubb then produced yet another of his parcels and, after his fussy unwrapping, handed me a plastic sleeve inside which a yellow sheet from a tabloid was protected. On the front of it was a photograph of a much younger Christopher Chubb dressed in his then pristine suit.
This is what you showed to Slater?
He shook his head. No point, he said. Turn over.
Through the plastic on the other side I saw the masthead of The Sunday Telegraph of July 4, 1952. FATHER OF ‘MISSING BABY’ TO BE CHARGED WITH MURDER.
Shit, I said.
Yes, Mem, exactly. Life is never what you think.
28
I do believe I mentioned my second trip to Australia in 1975, which is when I made a thorough attempt to locate Robert McCorkle in the Registry of Births, Deaths, and Marriages. Three times I thought I had my man. Alas, not so. Finding Noussette Markson turned out to be almost as trying. She certainly knew I was looking for her but the only response I had was through her lawyer, a Kings Cross cock-sparrow named Bob Hamilton, who made it clear that I would be hurt in some way—legal or physical, he did not say—if I should ‘muck-rake’ Ms Markson’s past. She was, Mr Hamilton pointed out, a public figure, the friend and confidante of well-known politicians and artists. Until the year before my visit, I discovered, she had been the owner of a very fashionable restaurant called Noussette, and this was about as near as I ever came to her. I found the walls still crowded with her faux-naïf self-portraits and through the grime of who knows how many years I could see her big eyes and wide mouth, and I strongly disliked the way she advertised her desirability.
The other woman in Chubb’s life, his mother, had died in April 1960. I could discover almost nothing about her and in the end she must occupy this story like a fire that is known from the scars it leaves on the trees it has briefly engulfed.
I know she threw Chubb’s father out of the house, although why she did this not even their son could tell me. She worked as a saleswoman in the glove department of David Jones for thirty years and, at her death, had ten pounds and five shillings in the bank. Years later in Kuala Lumpur, Chubb was still passionately angry about her parsimony, forever referring to the little bowls of leftovers in the kerosene fridge. He seemed unaware of how he’d replicated the habits he despised, and when he described his ascetic life in Chatswood—the one chair, the single setting of cutlery—his lack of self-awareness was breathtaking.
How different Noussette must have seemed to him: beautiful, reckless, spendthrift, fearless. While insisting he did not love her he certainly did admire her and celebrated behaviour he would have judged fiercely in anyone else. She lied continually about her life, reinventing herself at will. Between 1945 and 1952 she changed her occupation five times and her nationality twice. By the time she started the restaurant she had decided she was French. She could not cook but she hired a Maori chef called Bibi and served snails and onion soup and steak au poivre.
Meanwhile Chubb was still writing brochures for the same undistinguished advertising agency. By 1952 this job had become part-time, for he had determined that just two afternoons of employment would provide income sufficient for his needs. He could write verse each day. Every morning he moved the single chair to his trestle desk where he laboured over his sestinas and villanelles.
They do seem an unlikely couple, yet when Noussette discovered she was pregnant it was to suburban Chatswood that she drove and Chubb’s hand she placed upon her lovely stomach. Did this mean the poet was the father? Later this question would be of immense importance to him, but at the time he had the rather touching idea that it was not his business.
He does not seem to have made any plans to either care for or support the child, nor does Noussette appear to have expected it. In anticipation of motherhood, she was, as with everything, energetic. Once the pregnancy was certain, she spent her mornings creating a nursery in her cottage. She painted more of those naïve self-portraits on the walls and constructed mobiles to hang from the ceiling. She filled the cupboards and dressers with baby blankets and smocks, interviewed nannies, and drank countless glasses of champagne to celebrate her great good fortune.
Sydney has a reputation as a raffish sort of town, but this was 1952 and even her customers at Noussette were amazed to see their beautiful hostess making her putatively fatherless pregnancy a public event. It seemed, Chubb told me, that there was not a single patron who had not touched her stomach and felt the baby kick. The breaking of her waters was almost a performance. The supper crowd applauded her as she left for hospital.
But she was, when Chubb next saw her, dark and moody. The delivery had been by caesarean section and a brutal scar now marked that perfect stomach. She was tired. She hurt all over. The baby was small, just six pounds, agitated, and fretful, having considerable difficulty in latching on to her mother’s swollen breasts. She was starving, so Chubb thought. He had the ghastly sense that the child was panicked, gulping and gasping for its life.
And Noussette, who had always been so light and lively was stiff and unyielding. Chubb thought, This woman does not want this child. It was the first time he had ever felt angry with her.
When he returned on the following day, however, the room was filled with people. Champagne had been opened and Noussette was once again her generous, reckless self. After the crowd had gone, he sat with her while she fed the baby. Perhaps the champagne had helped relax her, as now she nuzzled the little dark-haired head, and afterwards Chubb walked from Paddington to Chatswood, nine miles with a silky north-easterly blowing in his face.
The next day the wind swung to the south, but even if it rattled the windows of the Women’s Hospi
tal the room itself was sunny and bursting with flowers. The baby was asleep in the nursery. Joe Cahill, the Premier of New South Wales, had visited with more champagne, and plastic tumblers covered the windowsill and bedside table. It was in tidying these up that Chubb saw papers by the bed which he assumed were hospital bills. He slipped them in his pocket, but later, as the Wahroonga bus ground on its northern route across the bridge, he discovered they were adoption papers concerning the girl child of Noussette Markson and Father Unknown.
He left the bus at the next stop and took a taxi back to Paddington, where he found Noussette implacable and unflustered.
Christopher, she said, you should not snoop.
You know I wasn’t snooping. I thought it was the bill.
Even if it was the bill, it is my bill. Please give it back to me.
Chubb was furious. You cannot give her away.
Well, darling, I certainly can’t keep her.
You hired a nurse.
A nurse is not a mother, Christopher. How could I have her raised by a servant?
Then a very strange thing happened, Chubb told me. Suddenly I loathed her. Don’t ask me why-lah. I told her I would adopt the child.
Every woman knows these big placid men can be the most terrifying and as a young man Chubb must have been formidable with his wide shoulders and great powerful thighs. But it was not Noussette’s style to show fear and she began to laugh. Christopher, darling, how could you possibly care for her? You cannot even earn a proper living.
I don’t know how, he said mulishly, but I will.
You think she’s yours, don’t you?
I don’t care whose she is.
You know nothing about feeding babies.
Then I will bloody well learn.
It is likely that Chubb, at that moment, tangled in emotions which he could neither name nor recognise, imagined that Noussette would eventually assist him in caring for the child. He did not understand that he had come to that sudden, unexpected part of the journey where the road has simply ended at the edge of a cliff.