Читать книгу Angel - Колин Маккалоу, Colleen McCullough - Страница 18

I met several of The House’s tenants today. The first two happened after I’d had a bath (there’s no shower) and decided to visit the backyard. One of the things about Victoria Street that had intrigued me was that it had no streets or lanes leading off its left side, that our little cul-de-sac was a dead end, that there aren’t any houses lower than number 17. The brick paving of my side passage continued in the backyard proper, which was crisscrossed with washing lines, a good few of them festooned in sheets, towels, and clothes which seemed to belong to a man and a woman. Cute little lace-trimmed Gorgeous Gussie panties, boxer shorts, men’s shirts, girls’ bras and blouses. I pushed through them—they were dry—and discovered why there were no side streets off the left side, and why we were a dead end. Victoria Street was perched on top of a sixty-foot sandstone cliff! Below me the slate roofs of Woolloomooloo’s rows of terraced houses marched off toward the Domain—for this time of year, its grass is lovely and green. I like the way it divides Woolloomooloo from the City, though I never realised it did until I stood at the back fence to look. All those new buildings in the City! So many storeys. But I can still see the AWA tower. To the right of Woolloomooloo is the Harbour, flaked with white because it’s Sunday and the whole world has gone sailing. What a view! Though I’m very happy with my flat, I felt a twinge of envy for the inhabitants of 17c who are upstairs and whose flats look this way. Heaven, for a very few quid a week.

When I parted the sheets to go back to my painting, a young man carrying an empty basket was striding down the passage.

“Hullo, you must be the famous Harriet Purcell,” he said as he reached me and stuck out a long, thin, elegant hand.

I was too busy staring to take it as quickly as I ought have.

“I’m Jim Cartwright,” “he” said.

Oooooo-aa! A Lesbian! Close up it was obvious that Jim was not a man, even one with a limp wrist, but she was dressed in men’s trousers—fly up the front instead of side placket—and a cream men’s shirt with the cuffs folded up one turn. Fashionable men’s haircut, not a trace of make-up, big nose, very fine grey eyes.

I shook her hand and said I was delighted, whereupon she left off laughing silently at me, took a tobacco pouch and papers out of her shirt pocket and rolled a cigarette with one hand only, as deftly as Gary Cooper did.

“Bob and I live on the second floor, up above Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz—beaut-oh! We look this way and to the front.”

From Jim I obtained more information about The House—who lives where. Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz has the whole first floor except for the end room, right above my living room; it’s rented by an elderly teacher named Harold Warner, though when Jim spoke of him, she screwed up her face in what looked like detestation. Directly above Harold is a New Australian from Bavaria named Klaus Muller, who engraves jewellery for a crust, and cooks and plays the violin for amusement. He goes away every weekend to friends near Bowral who hold apocalyptic barbecues with whole lambs, porkers and vealers on spits. Jim and Bob have the bulk of that floor, while the attic belongs to Toby Evans.

Jim started to grin when she said his name. “He’s an artist—boy, will he like you!”

The cigarette disposed of in a garbage tin, Jim began taking the washing down, so I helped her fold the sheets and get the lot neatly tucked into the basket. Then Bob appeared, scurrying and frowning, tiny feet in blue kid flatties skittling like mouse paws. A little blonde Kewpie doll of a girl, much younger than Jim, and dressed in the height of female fashion four years ago—pastel blue dress with a great big full skirt held out by six starched petticoats, nipped-in waist, breasts squeezed into sharp points that my Bros always say mean “Hands off!”.

She was late for her train, Bob explained in a fluster, and there were no taxis. Jim leaned to kiss her—now that was a kiss! Open mouths, tongues, purred mmmmms of pleasure. It did the trick; Bob calmed down. Washing basket on one inadequate hip, Jim guided Bob down the passage, turned the corner and vanished.

Eyes on the ground, I wandered toward my flat, busy thinking. I knew that Lesbians existed, but I had never met one before—officially, anyway. There have to be plenty of them among the heaps of spinster sisters in any hospital, but they give nothing of it away, it’s just too dangerous. Get a reputation for that, and your career is on the garbage dump. Yet here were Jim and Bob making no secret of it! That means that while Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz might object to girls on the game in her front ground floor flat, she isn’t averse to housing a pair of very public Lesbians. Good for her!

“G’day, love!” someone screamed.

I jumped and looked toward the voice, which was feminine and issued from one of 17d’s mauve lace windows. 17d’s windows intrigued me greatly, between their mauve lace curtains and the boxes of puce-pink geraniums under each of them—the effect was actually quite pretty, and made 17d look like a seedy private hotel. A young, naked woman with masses of hennaed hair was leaning out of one window, lustily brushing the hair. Her breasts, very full and oh so slightly pendulous, swung merrily in time with the brush, and the top of her black bush peeked among the geraniums.

“G’day!” I called.

“Movin’ in, eh?”

“Yes.”

“Nice to see ya, hooroo!” And she shut the window.

My first Lesbians and my first professional whore!

Painting was a bit of a let-down after that, but paint I did until my arms ached and every wall and ceiling had a first coat. Some of me was missing my Sunday game of tennis with Merle, Jan and Denise, but swinging a paintbrush has much the same effect as swinging a tennis racquet, so at least I was getting my exercise. I wonder if there are any tennis courts near the Cross? Probably, but I don’t think too many Crossites play tennis. The games here are a lot more serious.

Around sunset, someone knocked on my door. Pappy! I thought, then realised that it wasn’t her knock. This one was authoritatively brisk. When I opened the door and saw David, my heart sank into my boots. I just hadn’t expected him, the bastard. He came in before I issued an invitation and stared around with this look of fastidious distaste, how a cat might look if it found itself standing in a puddle of beery pee. My four dining chairs were good, stout wooden ones I hadn’t started to sand down yet, so I poked one forward with my foot for David and perched myself on the edge of the table so I could look down on him. But he didn’t fall for that—he stood so he could look me in the eye.

“Someone,” he said, “is smoking hashish. I could smell it in the hall.”

“That’s Pappy’s joss sticks—incense, David, incense! A good Catholic boy like you should recognise the whiff, surely,” I said.

“I certainly recognise licentiousness and dissipation.”

I could feel my mouth go straight. “A den of iniquity, you mean.”

“If you like that phrase, yes,” he said stiffly.

I made my tone conversational, tossed the words off like mere nothings. “As a matter of fact, I am living in a den of iniquity. Yesterday a Vice Squad constable checked up on me to make sure I’m not on the game, and this morning I said hello to one of the top-flight professionals next door when she leaned stark naked out of a window. This morning I also met Jim and Bob, the Lesbians who live two floors up, and watched them kiss each other with a great deal more passion than you’ve ever shown me! Put that in your pipe and smoke it!”

He changed tack, decided to back down and beseech me to come to my senses. At the end of his dissertation about how nice girls belong at home until marriage, he said, “Harriet, I love you!”

I blew a raspberry of thunderclap fart proportions, and I swear that as I did, a lightbulb flashed on above my head. Suddenly I saw everything! “You, David,” I said, “are the sort of man who deliberately picks a very young girl so that you can mould her to suit your own needs. But it hasn’t worked, mate. Instead of moulding me, you’ve broken your precious bloody mould!”

Oh, I felt as if I’d been let out of a cage! David had always cowed me with his lectures and sermons, but now I didn’t give a hoot about his pontifications. He’d lost his power over me. And how cunning, never giving me an opportunity to judge him as a man by kissing or fondling or—perish the thought!—producing his dingus for my inspection, let alone use. Because he’s so handsome and well-built and such an enviable catch, I’d stuck to him, convinced that the end result would be worth waiting for. Now, I realised that he’d always been his own end result. I wasn’t ever to know his faults as a man, and the only way he could ensure that was to keep me from sampling other merchandise. I had had it all wrong—it wasn’t David I had to get rid of, it was my old self. And I did get rid of my old self, right in that moment when I blew my raspberry.

So I let him prose on for a while about how I was going through a phase, and he’d be patient and wait until I came to my senses, yattata, yattata, yattata.

I’d found a packet of Du Mauriers in the laundry and slipped it into my pocket. When he got to the bit about feeling my oats, I fished the cigs out of my pocket, stuck one in my mouth and lit it with a match from the gas stove.

His eyes popped out on stalks. “Put that thing out! It’s a disgusting habit!”

I blew a cloud of smoke in his face.

“The next thing it will be hashish, and after that you’ll start sniffing glue—”

“You’re a narrow-minded bigot,” I said.

“I am a scientist in medical research, and I have an excellent brain. You’ve fallen into bad company, Harriet, it doesn’t take a Nobel Prize winner to work that out,” he said.

I stubbed the cigarette in a saucer—it tasted vile, but I wasn’t going to let him know that—and escorted him outside. Then I marched him to the front door. “Goodbye forever, David,” I said.

Tears came into his eyes, he put his hand on my arm. “This is utterly wrong!” he said in a wobbly voice. “So many years! Let’s kiss and make up, please.”

That did it. I doubled my right hand into a fist and whacked him a beauty on the left eye. As he staggered—I do pack a punch, the Bros made sure of that—I saw a newcomer over his shoulder, and gave David a shove off the step down onto the path. I looked, I hoped for the benefit of the newcomer, like a particularly dangerous Amazon. Caught in a ridiculous situation by a stranger, David scuttled out the front gate and bolted down Victoria Street as if the Hound of the Baskervilles was after him.

Which left the newcomer and I to look each other over. Even given the fact that I was on the step and he on the path below it, I picked him as barely five foot six. Nuggety, though, standing lightly balanced on his toes like a boxer, his reddish-brown eyes gleaming at me wickedly. Nice straight nose, good cheekbones, a mop of auburn curls trimmed into discipline, straight black brows and thick black lashes. Very attractive!

“Are you coming in, or are you just going to stand there and decorate the path?” I asked coldly.

“I’m coming in,” he said, but made no move to do so. He was too busy looking at me. A peculiar look, now that the wickedness was dying out of his eyes—detached, fascinated in an unemotional way. For all the world like a physician assessing a patient, though if he was a physician, I’d eat David’s Akubra town hat. “Are you double-jointed?” he asked.

I said no.

“That’s a pity. I could have put you in some grouse poses. There’s not much meat on you and what there is looks sporty, but you’ve got very seductive breasts. They belong to your body rather than a bra manufacturer.” He hopped up the step as he said this, then waited for me to precede him inside.

“You have to be the artist in the garret,” I said.

“Dead on the knocker. Toby Evans. And you must be the new girl in the back ground floor flat.”

“Dead on the knocker. Harriet Purcell.”

“Come upstairs and have a coffee, you must need one after the wallop you gave that poor silly coot outside. He’s going to have a shiner for a month,” he said.

I followed him up two flights of stairs to a landing which had a huge female symbol on one of its doors (Jim and Bob, undoubtedly) and an alpine view on the other (Klaus Muller, undoubtedly). Access to the garret was up a sturdy ladder. Toby went first, and as soon as I’d climbed onto firm ground he pulled a rope which plucked the ladder off the floor below, folded it against the ceiling.

“Oh, that’s terrific,” I said, staring about in amazement. “You can pull up the drawbridge and withstand a siege.”

I was in an enormous dormered room with two alcoved windows at its back and two more at its front, where the ceiling sloped. The whole place was painted stark white and looked as sterile as an operating theatre. Not a pin out of place, not a smear or a stain, not a speck of dust or even the outline of a dried-up raindrop on the window panes. Because it was an attic, the windows had seats with white corduroy cushions on them. The paintings were turned with their faces to the wall in a white-painted rack and there was a big professional easel (painted white), a dais with a white chair on it and a little white chest of drawers beside the easel. That was the business area. For leisure he had two easy chairs covered in white corduroy, white bookshelves with every book rigidly straight, a white hospital screen around his kitchen nook, a square white table and two white wooden chairs. Even the floor had been painted white! Not a mark on it either. His lights were white fluorescent. The only touch of colour was a grey army blanket on his double bed.

Since he’d got personal first with that bit about my breasts—the cheek!—I said exactly what I was thinking. “My God, you must be obsessional! I’ll bet when you squeeze the paint out of a tube, you do it from the bottom, then carefully bend the empty bit over and make sure it’s perfectly squared.”

He grinned and cocked his head to one side like an alert little dog. “Sit down,” he said, disappearing behind his screen to make the coffee.

I sat and talked to him through the crisply ironed cotton folds of the screen, and when he came out with the coffee in two white mugs, we just kept on talking. He was a bush boy, he said, grew up around the enormous cattle stations of western Queensland and the Northern Territory. His father had been a barracks cook, but first and foremost a boozer, so it was Toby who did most of the cooking, kept his father in a job. He didn’t seem to hold that against the old boy, who eventually died of the booze. Back then, Toby’s paints were children’s watercolours and his drawing blocks cheap butcher’s paper, his pencils HB pilfered from the station office. After his dad’s death, he headed for the Big Smoke to learn how to paint properly, and in oils.

“But it’s grim, Sydney, when you don’t know a soul and the hay sticks out from behind your ears,” he said, pouring three-star hospital brandy into his second coffee. “I tried working in the cook trade—hotels, boarding houses, soup kitchens, Concord Repat Hospital. Awful, between the voices that didn’t speak English and the cockroaches everywhere except Concord. I’ll give hospitals this, they’re clean. But the food is worse than station food. Then I moved to Kings Cross. I was living in a six-by-eight shed in the backyard of a house on Kellett Street when I met Pappy. She brought me home to meet Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz, who told me I could have her attic for three quid a week and I could pay her when I had the money. You know, you see those statues of the Virgin Mary and Saint Teresa and the rest, and they’re all beautiful women. But I thought Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz, the ugly old bugger, was the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. One day, when I’m more confident, I’m going to paint her with Flo on her knee.”

“Do you still cook?” I asked.

He looked scornful. “No! Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz told me to get a job tightening nuts in a factory—‘Youse’ll earn big bikkies and suffer not a bit, ace,’ was how she put it. I took her advice, I tighten nuts in a factory in Alexandria when I’m not up here painting.”

“How long have you been in The House?” I asked.

“Four years. I turn thirty in March,” he said.

When I offered to wash the coffee mugs, he looked horrified—I daresay he thought I wouldn’t do it properly. So I took myself off down to my own flat in a very thoughtful mood. What a day! What a weekend, for that matter. Toby Evans. It has a nice ring to it. But when he’d mentioned Pappy, I caught the shadow of a new emotion in his eyes. Sadness, pain. Light dawned—he’s in love with Pappy! Whom I haven’t seen since I moved in.

Oh, I’m tired. Time to put the light out and enjoy my second-ever sleep in a double bed. One thing I know—I am never going to sleep in a single bed again. What luxury!