Works

Stories of Laughter and Lament

Widows

Charles Rand fell off his yacht, somewhere in the middle of the bay, on one of the first pale blue evenings of autumn. Later, the Coroner would be unable to fix that time more precisely than between six and ten o’clock. Newspapers, reporting that he had sailed off without crew, used terms which pictured Charles as a hardy loner. Anyone who knew him smiled at this.

So begins Widows, with the loss of the wealthy husband whom Dorothy Laird had caught, by playing her cards faultlessly, for marriage to the beautiful Elizabeth, her one child. Elizabeth is Dorothy’s straight flush. This is the world of the Lairds.

Spring is a faithless season. Family neither to the winter which bore it, nor to the summer it will grow to resemble, spring is a discomfort to bookmakers at steeplechase meetings, to anxious mothers of brides unexpectedly entangled in tulle, and to the meticulous actuary of any underwriter insuring charity fetes against the possibility of rain.

Children Aren’t Supposed to be Here at All

Our apartment has the best view in Sydney. Father tells us often. A panorama wall to wall. Five hundred feet above the harbour, and every foot ten thousand dollars. How much is that in metres? Troilus asked, and walked away before his father could think of it. Troilus is six.

Troilus and Cassandra spend their days at a private school, are then alone until their parents come home from the office.

The best view in Sydney, panorama wall to wall, ten thousand dollars a foot.
All that view, Troilus said, locks us in.

This is the world of Troilus and Cassandra. Troilus begins to spend more time alone in his room. Troilus has secreted an illegal kitten.

The Routine

An airplane journey, in reverie the narrator reprises scenes from the recent breaking up with his lover . His defence is hard-bitten cynicism. His neighbour in the next seat is spectacularly disabled.

He had a strangely taut face, of indeterminate age. Either thirty-five or very old, pallid cleft chin and lumpy nose. Describe it with artistic integrity: Bent as a 1930 Labour politician’s/ Shapeless as a football after a wet game/ Hit by a Bondi taxi, the trams were on strike/ He is the other guy. There.

But his shapeless neighbour displays a quiet brilliance with jokes, and likes to play the comedian, as a gift to his companion. Each is uniquely disabled, so a strong current of love begins between them. This is the world of the tragic human comedy.

Pedigrees

I found Elinore Carver where I should have looked earlier in the night, in the poolside bungalow my wife Catherine and I call our Bower. She was still drunk. The Bower was dark, but I could make out the open door of the cocktail cabinet against the wall. Elinore stopped shouting to herself only when I had stood in the doorway long enough not to startle her, and I saw the long cigarette butts which littered the floor at her feet like discarded marks of exclamation she had stamped angrily into the ground, having drawn from each of them the emphasis she needed.

This is a world of croquet on the lawn, the breeding of horses for dressage, of dogs for the shows, and very little sanity.

It does not seem to be fear of falling which has made her unable, by herself, to move, although she is clinging to the bole of a white gum which overhangs the cliff. She is intent only on a bundle lying on the rocks fifty feet below her. It is the sodden and dislocated body of her daughter’s rag doll Cindy. It is to take psychiatrists three months of gentle prying to release from Elinor’s mind the belief over which it has closed. This belief is that she has thrown her own child over a cliff.

Inventory

A son of English Old Money, whose talents so far have won him note as a failure, expects Christmas dinner in Kent to win him derision from his father in front of his entire family.

But Sir George did not wait for Henry Edward Charles to recount, over the remains of the goose, the imminent failure of his second marriage, six years old in January; or the collapse of his racing stable, a draining of the finest blood ever exported from Ireland and New Zealand; or the sale of the few remaining blue-chip investments to pay his slandering creditors so he could remain in his club.

Sir George is appointing him head of the family’s vast mineral extraction empire in Australia.

Lady Anne felt her son bow his head. You are, she haltingly breathed, to be given a continent.

Ticket for Charity

When Charity Lord fell pregnant she told each of the six boys who were that month’s quick loving, in turn, as they stumbled from the hotel.

Slow Billy, the dry-country farmer, became the boy who would marry her. He would also become the boy whose life is transformed by her fierce gratitude. Together they worked his heartbreaking farmland until time for the birth.

It was dead. Billy folded the hem of her skirt over it and began to lift her from the car. He saw it had been a boy. As he stood up with her she gripped the back of his neck and pulled her slanted face into his with a fierceness that frightened him.

Now that’s over, she said, we can have a child of our own.

Melodrama for a Plastic Heroine

A love story. He lives alone, penniless, in a city tenement. He scrapes together enough money to buy himself a wife. She is a life-size inflatable doll whom he pushes about in a wheelchair, shawled, as if she were merely lamed. On the busy sidewalk they do not draw a second’s interest.

And here is a vendor selling wind-up toys and balloons and dizzy windmills. He pays for two balloons. They crowd about and make his choosing difficult. He takes time to choose a red and a blue. Their cheeks seem to him to be chubby and irrepressible, and they tug, now, at his hand with the campaigning impatience of small children. He wheels them all away and they set off for the far side of the hill.