Back of Sunset. Jon Cleary
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Charles chose me as his partner. I don’t think he took me in just because he knew Dad.”
“You gunna take over from him when you come back?”
“That was the idea originally.” Stephen changed gears carefully, turning the car into the main road from the parkway, keeping his eyes on the road as if he were still besieged by the battling traffic they had now left far behind. “I don’t know that I’m coming back.”
“Why not?” Tristram’s crackle had an edge to it. “Too many bloody people leave this country and never come back.”
“I’ve got other plans. Or rather, Charles’s daughter has. We’re sort of semi-engaged.”
“And she’s making the plans for you? Stone the crows, what’s happening to the bloody men of this country? Charlie’s wife running him, his daughter running you – and if it comes to that, your mum ran your dad’s life.”
Stephen felt a surge of anger. “You’re one-eyed about that. My mother tried – don’t you think Dad owed her something?”
“I’m shoving me neck out, not minding me own business.” Tristram’s teeth clicked savagely: the words were awkward in his mouth, too long held back. “Your old man was meant for more than being a good husband, being a father to you, looking after a lotta patients who never appreciated him. He was wasted, son. Christ, I never seen a man whose life was so wasted!”
“How do you know he was wasted?” said Stephen, defending his dead mother but knowing she would never have defended herself: she had loved his father and had tried, really tried, to live where Tom McCabe’s heart had driven him: but her body and her will had been weak, and Tom, loving her as much as she loved him, had given in. “How do you know he was wasted?”
“He knew it himself, son. When I said good-bye to him back in ‘38,I knew which one of us was already the dead one.” He handed back the aboriginal charm. “Here you are, Steve. You may need this yet.”
The Goodyears’ parties were always the same: too many people, too much noise, too much drink. Neither Charles nor Peggy Goodyear drank, but Peggy’s idea of hospitality was to discover everyone’s taste and then surfeit them. Her dinners were gargantuan affairs that would have kept a mob of medieval plunderers happy; her week-end parties, as Stephen described them, were like the combined centenary celebrations of a distillery and a brewery. The largest collection of drunks in Palm Beach was to be found under the Goodyear roof every Saturday or Sunday evening during the summer.
“A weird mob,” said Tristram. “I wouldn’t give you tuppence for the lotta them.”
“Appearances are deceptive,” Stephen said. “From Monday to Friday some of these men here work harder than cane-cutters.”
“Doing what? Chasing money?”
“You sound old-fashioned, Jack. There’s nothing criminal about trying to earn money.”
“I am old-fashioned.” Tristram looked out of place in the big crowded living-room; he had looked out of place in it Friday night when it had been empty. He had come into it, stared round at the vari-coloured walls, at the one wall that from floor to ceiling was glass, at the copper-hooded freestanding fireplace in the centre of the room, and the click of his false teeth had been like the disapproving sound of a judge’s gavel. Now, on this Sunday evening, in his shiny blue suit trousers held up by braces and his starched white collar supporting its plain black tie, he looked like a man in fancy dress among the bright linen and cotton trousers and shorts, the shirts with patterns that fractured the gaze, and the vivid scarves and neckerchiefs, of the other men. “In my day people worked for money, but they didn’t talk about it all the time. I been listening to some of this mob. Somebody says to ‘em, ‘How’s old So-and-so?’ And they say, ‘Oh, he’s great. Making three or four thousand a year, got a new car, coupla television sets – oh, he’s great. Don’t worry about old So-and-so.’ Stone the bloody crows, what sorta answer is that when you ask how a bloke is?”
Stephen felt uncomfortable. He knew Tristram was right: Australians were now worse than the Americans, at whom they had sneered for so long: Australians didn’t keep up with the Joneses, but had outpaced them: money had become the only standard, even among those who didn’t have any. But, though they sometimes annoyed him and sometimes bored him, these people whom Tristram was criticising were his friends. He had made his life among them for several years and he knew that, as with all friends, some of their faults were his own. All at once he felt weary again, and something else besides; a feeling of aimlessness, of wandering through a world that would never remember him, that would never show the slightest effect of his passing. He looked about the room and all at once it was full of strangers: there was no one here whom he would miss if he went to England and stayed there for ever. And if that was the case, then something was wrong with his world.
Then Peggy Goodyear was at his elbow, grey hair tinted blue, eyes a trifle too bright, her mind intense and deep as a television commercial. “Stephen, darling, Rona wants you out on the patio.” Diamonds on her fingers winked like chorus girls’ eyes; the gem-encrusted watch on her thin wrist showed how valuable time could be. “She’s unhappy. It’s the three weeks she’s going to be away from you.”
“Where’s Charlie?” Tristram was looking at the aboriginal shield and crossed spears on the wall above his head: native to the country, they looked out of place in this room, chi-chi as an Eastern totem-pole against the noisy, sophisticated crowd that flowed through the house.
“Charles?” Peggy Goodyear looked at Tristram as if he were a gatecrasher instead of her week-end guest. “Out in the kitchen mixing drinks.”
“A good place,” said Tristram, raising an empty glass, and moved off.
Peggy Goodyear looked after him with genuine pity: it hurt her almost physically to see people go downhill socially. “It’s hard to imagine he comes of one of the oldest families in Sydney. One of his great-uncles was a lieutenant-governor, did you know that? And now he looks like some swaggie down for the Sheep Show or something.”
“He’s old-fashioned,” said Stephen. “He told me so.”
He circled the room, admiring the women as he went. Australian women were not as confident-looking as the American women he had met, not as chic as Frenchwomen, nor as sexy-looking as the Italian immigrant girls; but they had a little of all those qualities, and it was enough for a man of his temperament. He would miss them, as well as the sun, when he went to England.
He went by a school of three stout matrons, sisters under the fatty tissue to Mrs. Crepello, and gave them his professional smile; side-stepped a posy of pansy interior decorators gasping over the pink chiffon scarf one of them was wearing; slowed by a group of models, a conceit of young felines posing continuously, as if every man’s eye were a camera lens. He got them into focus, admired the bloom on them but wished they had more flesh on them; then he saw Rona out on the patio, staring at him with anger plain as a bruise on her beautiful face. He moved out of the hot, overcrowded room and ran headlong into the storm.
“I’ve been looking absolutely everywhere for you! Where the blazes have you been?”
“Having a beer with Jack Tristram.” He pointed carefully back through the wide open doors. “Right there beneath your latest abstract. People kept asking me if it was a colour X-ray.”
Rona was an amateur painter, but she was good and she knew it; she ignored his uninformed opinion of her latest effort, and went on: “You’ve spent all week-end with him!”
“Darling,” he said patiently: his head ached and his nerves twitched, but he would be patient with her: “Darling, you and I spent two hours in bed together yesterday afternoon.” They had borrowed the week-end home of a girl friend of Rona’s, a girl whose husband