Illywhacker

At sixty-five years of age, women do not see you. You are invisible. Until, that is, you walk down George Street with a young woman with a dancer's walk and then you go from invisible (flip-flop) to neon-signed and you are, take my word for it, a celebrity, a ballet master, a painter, a famous anarchist, a free-thinker, a revolutionary, an inventor of note, a criminal of power and influence, but look at me, I am only Herbert Badgery and once I was shy about my legs and now all I want is to lie down on my bed and take an Aspro and hope my toothache will go away.

I should have quietly withdrawn myself, gone back alone to my hotel, read an uncensored newspaper and gone to bed early. Charles, however, was busy arranging my life for me.

43

In all her fifty years Phoebe had never once worked for money. She was not ashamed of this. On the contrary. She had, after all, given her life to art and as for money, it always turned up somehow. Visitors to her little flat would look around at the pretty walls, the small works by famous artists, the rugs on the floor, the view of the harbour out the window and – feeling themselves steeped in nasty compromises, pot-boilers, jobs with newspapers, unpleasant sinecures with the Education Department- not only envied her but admired her.

Her poetry, of course, was little known, but by the end of the war she had begun the little magazine that historians now talk about so seriously – Malley's Urn, a private joke amongst the literati at the time and if you don't get the joke, don't worry – it was never very funny.

There were those who imagined her to have inherited wealth, but if Phoebe even smelt a whiff of this misunderstanding, she set it straight – her mother had left five coal mines to the Catholic Church. Imagine!

So where had the money come from? First from Horace until his ship had sunk, torpedoed in the English Channel. Also from Annette Davidson until, at an age when you might think her past it, she had run away to Perth – in the middle of a school term – with her own PE instructress. She had arranged a telegram to Phoebe which announced her death but everybody -even Phoebe – knew the two women had a "horrid little milk bar" in Nedlands.

So it was left to Charles to be a patron of the arts and he was not at all displeased by this. You could buy (if you wished – few did) Malley's Urn in the pet emporium – there was always a stack on the cashier's desk and Charles had a complete set of that quarterly green magazine in his musty bedroom which he read on his insomniacal nights.

Now all of this seemed firm and settled until the day that I arrived in Sydney and Charles decided that his mother should have the flat in the pet emporium. Charles was so excited by this idea that he did not even wait for the reunion dinner he was planning for that night. He got his mother on the telephone and came straight to the point.

"And leave my flat? My lovely flat?"

"Mother, it's very expensive."

"And take up with him?"

"Come and meet him," Charles begged.

"Oh, don't worry, I'll come and meet him. But I will not leave my flat. I refuse, I absolutely refuse, Charles. I value my independence."

It was then Charles lost his temper and said some unkind things about her "independence". He succeeded in frightening his mother terribly.

44

Amongst her friends, Phoebe was not thought to be unkind. Quite the opposite. But as she walked into the private room at the Hyde Park Hotel on that evening in February 1949, she was armed for battle. She was angry with her son who now strode across the vulgar carpet to welcome her, but she kissed him on his rough sunburnt cheek as if nothing was the matter. She nodded to Leah whom she had never liked, and smiled at Emma, trying to convey fondness while, at the same time, keeping sufficient distance to discourage those soft-centred kisses.

Everyone was standing except for Emma who had seated herself at table. She wore, Phoebe noted, the same ostentatious pearls she had worn on Christmas Day. She had also, through design or carelessness -it was not quite clear which – neglected to wear a corset and her round little stomach rose from below the belt of her long silk dress and disappeared into the floral valley of her thighs.

Phoebe accepted the kisses of her grandchildren. No one would have guessed that she was repelled by all this sticky-mouthed humanity. She was bright. She laughed as she always did when nervous, and put her hand to her throat. She let her eyes go to that place in the room where her opponent sat.

"Herbert Badgery, I presume," she said in a whisky-cured contralto. She laughed again. The feathers cascaded from her little hat.

I stood and walked towards her.

She held out her hand, briskly, with her handbag tucked beneath her arm. I shook her hand and found it damp.

"Well," she said, and laughed again.