Illywhacker

I winked at my flirty lipsticked Goldstein as I sat down at the table. She touched my calf and smiled softly. I felt myself master of the situation. I said as little as possible but smiled politely at everyone. I asked them questions about themselves, an old salesman's habit guaranteed to make your prospect think you both sympathetic and intelligent. I did not imagine there was a risk of an argument about Australia's Own Car. I did not think I cared about the subject. I imagined I had no passions left except those involving shelter and the comforts of skin. I would do nothing to jeopardize either. I was going to have a place, with Goldstein, inside that wonderful building of my son's. I was going to wake each morning and gaze up at the skylight and know, straightaway, what sort of day it was.

Charles sat himself between Leah and his porcelain-faced wife. When the oyster shells were removed, he stretched and yawned and put his long arms along the back of Leah's chair, a gesture perhaps accidental, but I did not take to it.

"So, Father," he said.

Phoebe, on my right, whispered that he only shouted because he was deaf.

"Tell me, Father," he removed his arm from Leah's chair, and leaned forward intently. "You haven't given your opinion of the Holden."

I was not insensitive to his feelings about the car. I had questioned him about it at length. I would have thought this enough to do the job, but he was not such a simple fellow as he looked.

"It went well," I said. "I couldn't pass an opinion without driving it."

"You can pass an opinion on one fact: it's an Australian car. I thought of you the day I read about it. I thought, Father has lived to see his dream come true. An Australian Car. Did he ever tell you, Mother," he turned to Phoebe who was now looking very bored and was taking exception to Charles's great pleasure in saying "Mother" and "Father" at the one table, "did he ever tell you how he walked away from the T Model on the saltflats at Geelong? When we were kids we used to ask him to tell us that story. He must have told it to us a hundred times. He…"

"There are no saltflats in Geelong," Phoebe said. "He was lying."

"The saltflats are at Balliang East," I said.

Phoebe shuddered. "A dreadful place."

"Very close to where I met you."

"That's what I meant."

Goldstein was the only one to laugh. It was also Goldstein who, on the subject of Australia's Own Car, made the point about the extraordinary deal General Motors had done with the Australian government. She talked about this in detail while Phoebe sighed loudly and shifted in her chair.

The roast beef arrived and for a moment it seemed as if the conversation would pass on to something less difficult, but Charles had no intention of letting it go.

"Yes," he said, polishing his fork with his table napkin. "There is money here to do things. There's no doubt about it."

"Yes, dear," said Leah. "It's our money, but the Yanks do get all the profit. They won't risk their money because we have – or they think we have – a socialist government."

"Who can blame them?" said my feathered wife. Her voice was not quite firm and bobbled uncertainly on its perch.

"Excuse me," Comrade Goldstein put her fork back on her plate and sat up straight in her chair. "Excuse me, but I do."

Phoebe ignored Leah. (Perhaps this made me angry, but I didn't think so at the time.) "I can't bear the way they speak," she said. "I just can't stand their vowels."

"I like it better than the Poms," said Charles. "It's not stuck up. Now, you've met Nathan…"

"No, no," his mother tapped the table with her dessert spoon. "I don't mean the Americans. I mean the Labour Party. They've all got pegs on their noses."

"It's the Australian way of speaking."

"It's pig ignorant", said Phoebe, "and if I were an American I wouldn't trust them either. They talk like pickpockets."

"Say again," said Charles. He placed his hearing aid on the table, propping it up against the blue packet of de Witt's Antacid Powder which he brought with him wherever he ate.

"They're thieves, pickpockets." Phoebe looked at her son's contrivance with disgust. "Put it in your pocket, Charles. Show some manners."

"He can't hear you if he does," Leah said, but Charles put his machine away, looking a little hurt. Phoebe smiled at Leah. She was too polite to call her a pinko.

Emma, in the meantime, had Hissao on her lap and was feeding him although he was now five and quite old enough to have his own chair and feed himself. Emma did not contribute to the argument although she smiled at me from time to time and occasionally I heard the barely audible sound of her murmurs. She popped mashed-up messes of food into her son's pretty mouth while his dark watchful eyes roamed over us. Once, in the middle of an argument, he smiled at me and for a moment I heard nothing that was said and smiled at him like a man in love. So late in my foolish life I was to acquire a real family after all.

"So, Father, what do you say about the Holden, eh?"