Illywhacker

"Let them listen." She failed to stare down the porter who insolently refused to hide his interest. "You mean," she whispered, "Mother does not know that I am in Melbourne?"

"He is a strange man, Leah. Every year, by himself, stranger and stranger. No one else will bother with him. For everyone else he is too much trouble. About everything he is difficult, and proud, too proud."

"But I always thought you liked him."

"Yes, yes. Like him. A fine man, and very kind. But you must not phone your mother from here. I will give you money and you telephone her from Sydney. Have a good talk, an hour if you like. Here, ten pounds. Talk to her from Sydney with this."

"Here it is cheaper." She was already shocked by the prices on the menu in the dining room. "I will ring from here and say it is Sydney."

"No, no," said Sid Goldstein, truly shocked. "You must not lie to your mother, not ever."

Leah sucked in her breath long enough to stop her telling her father that he was a hypocrite. She contented herself with saying that she did not understand him, a suggestion that made him irritable.

"How can you not, my darling? How can you not understand? We write a hundred letters to each other and you say you do not understand. You have a brain. You have imagination. You think about things. Well, think, please. If you think about Wysbraum you will understand why you should not telephone your mother, why I could not tell her, why he could not have her here. Think, please."

"Father, I don't understand. I really don't."

Now it was his turn to suck in his breath. "You are going to look after your husband who you do not live with. Why?"

"It's obvious," she said angrily.

"Yes, he needs you. You love him, only, in the most general sense."

She tried to demur but now it was she who could not hold his eyes. She tried to remember what confessions she might have inadvertently made.

"In the most general way," he insisted. "In the sense that one loves one's fellows. I am not belittling this love. He is a human being, in trouble, and naturally you must go. I am proud of you that you should go."

"It is not to be proud of," she said defensively.

"And in my case," her father smiled palely, "it is just the same."

"What?"

"Wysbraum," (he was talking so quietly she could hardly hear him), "Wysbraum is the same."

"No." The single word rang like a shot through the troubled corridors of their talk. It was a cry from the dock, from the back of the court, a noise more dreadful than the judgement that had prompted it. She saw a vision of a future she did not want and had not guessed at. Even the snobbish moustached porter lowered his eyes and then turned his back, struck by the pain in the exclamation.

"It is a fine thing about humans," Sid Goldstein said. "It is the best thing." He held her shoulders in both hands. His grey eyes contained a small hard ball of fierce emotion. "I am proud of you."

It was thus that Wysbraum found them and, quite literally, prized them apart. Wysbraum walked up the stairs ahead of Leah, tugging possessively at his friend's sleeve.

As for the dinner, she endured it. She watched Wysbraum with disgust, seeing only a child, a limpet, a parasite living on her father's emotions and she could see nothing fine in the relationship at all. She said little but only her father, casting miserable glances across the table, noticed it.

Later, boarding the train to Sydney, she knew that what she had decided to do was not fine at all. Embracing her father at the door of the second-class carriage she was tempted to go, to pass through the turnstile, to tear up her ticket, to walk out into Spencer Street, a free woman. Instead she wrote a letter. She began it before the train reached North Melbourne. The letter was to Herbert Badgery and in it she expressed her feelings about the joy of the merry-go-round, the whirl of colours, the pleasures of movement. "I have not valued", she wrote, "what I have loved."

54

Spawned by lies, suckled on dreams, infested with dragons, my children could never have been normal, only extraordinary. Had they enjoyed the benefits of books and distinguished visitors they might have grown as famous as they deserved. They had the mark, not just of originality, but also of tenacity and, had they not spent their childhood in one poor school after another and their evenings bookless in the back of a Dodge, you might be reading this history, not to see how it was I failed as an Aviator or their mother as a Poet, but to see how it was that my wards, my child, my ghost's child, came to take their place in history.