The Serpent's Sting Read online

  If he was expecting Mother to be shy about this, he would have been disappointed. My mother had never been shy about sex. I grew up fielding her impertinent and insensitive questions about my sex life, and she had a mortifying tendency to interrogate any girl I brought home in such a way as to embarrass her into flight. She explained coolly to John Gilbert that she and his father had formed a sexual alliance when their respective partners had no longer excited their passion or fulfilled their needs. This frankness was dramatically at odds with Mother’s appearance. Our father had left her a wealthy woman on his death, and she wasn’t given to austerity. She dressed elegantly, and never in shoddy, and her hair was expensively coiffed, and dyed a rich black. Hirohito, she was fond of saying, would not arrive to find that he’d turned her hair grey with worry.

  ‘You are two selfish, selfish people,’ John hissed.

  ‘Entirely,’ Mother replied. ‘Self-sacrifice has never been one of my strong points.’

  John hadn’t expected Mother to agree with him, and he was infuriated by it. He declared that he wasn’t hungry, and that when he thought about the way his father had deceived them, he didn’t think he’d ever eat again. This was so absurdly melodramatic that even he was mortified by it, and it was that mortification I suspect, more than his disgust at his father’s behaviour, that caused him to storm out of the house.

  With John Gilbert gone, and an apology made for him by Cloris, dinner was served. The beef was excellent. Cloris asked many questions, and all of them were answered without demur — mostly, it must be said, by Mother. Peter Gilbert was, I think, rather shaken by the vehemence of his son’s reaction. This fragility seemed rather odd to me, given his early career in Intelligence and in the hurly-burly of the law. I think Fulton’s death had unmanned him in some way, and when I looked at his face I thought I could see there the effects of a profound, irremediable sadness.

  It must have been difficult for Cloris to assimilate both the existence and simultaneously the absence of a brother. She asked if she might see photographs of him, and Mother produced a large envelope, bulging with them. I’d never seen these pictures. There was certainly no similar record of my childhood, youth, or manhood. As the photographs spilled on to the table, I felt small twinges of pique that Fulton’s every move seemed to have been deemed worthy of chronicling, while my own progress to maturity had largely escaped the lens. Perhaps he’d been the product of love, while I’d been the end result of joyless duty. I didn’t recall Brian being photographed much, either, and that made me feel better.

  Cloris pored over the snaps while Mother and Peter Gilbert commented on the circumstances that had surrounded each click of the shutter.

  ‘He looks like John,’ Cloris said. ‘In this one, especially.’

  She turned the photograph towards me for confirmation. I took it from her and examined it. Fulton looked to be about nineteen in it. He did indeed resemble John Gilbert, although he was grinning, so his face wasn’t disfigured by John’s sulky scowl.

  ‘All this was going on,’ Cloris said, ‘all this … this other life, and we knew nothing about it.’

  ‘Well, your mother …’

  ‘Did Fulton know that you were his father?’

  ‘Eventually he did, yes, but not in the beginning. Even after Agnes’s husband died — and Fulton could only have been five or six — it would have been too much to burden him with. I wasn’t here all the time, and he wouldn’t have understood. As he got older he began to suspect. I couldn’t disguise how much he meant to me, and he asked me directly just two years ago, when he was nineteen. Not long after that picture was taken, in fact. He wasn’t angry, or even shocked. He was happy. He knew I loved him. And I did love him, Cloris. I loved him as deeply as I love you and John, and that’s the truth of it.’

  ‘But you didn’t love Mum.’

  His shook his head.

  ‘No. Well, at first, of course. I think, or I thought, but no, not later. I’m sorry.’

  Cloris, in an impressive demonstration of pure nerve, asked, ‘You weren’t able to divorce Mum. Did you come to hate her for that?’

  ‘No,’ he said, and his voice was thin with astonishment. ‘How could I hate the person who gave me you and John?’

  ‘Did she know about this liaison?’

  Mother interrupted.

  ‘Excuse me, Cloris. I am Agnes Power. I am not a liaison.’

  ‘Your mother was never humiliated,’ Peter Gilbert said softly. ‘She may have known, but it was never discussed. She retreated into her faith.’

  ‘She must have hated you.’

  ‘No. She thought I was weak. She saved her hatred for the Presbyterians. There wasn’t any left over for me.’

  Cloris Gilbert suddenly smiled.

  ‘She did hate the Presbyterians.’

  Everything seemed all right after that. We all understood that there would be deeper discussions later. These would take place in private, when Peter Gilbert would try to explain himself fully to his children. Cloris might prove a sympathetic listener. I had my doubts about John Gilbert.

  I am a man given to healthy introspection, but even if this hadn’t been the case, I would still have had to acknowledge in the court of self-awareness that I was temporarily without direction. As an actor, I was resting; as a private-inquiry agent, I was resting; my love life was resting. Only the first of these caused me real grief. I was an actor, and I’d been thwarted in the expression of this noble art by circumstances and by the fog of ignorance and indifference that had settled over Melbourne since hostilities with Germany and Japan had begun. I needed the stage — not the applause, it was never about the applause — the way a teacher needs pupils, a dentist needs teeth, and a surgeon needs a rumbling appendix. I pondered this as I tried to sleep after the revelatory dinner.

  I’d barely spoken to Brian, who’d remained unnaturally and discreetly silent throughout the meal. I associated this reticence with his having decided to work for Intelligence, his denials notwithstanding. Ever since our return from the Northern Territory, Brian had been so generally measured in his demeanour that the only conclusion I could draw was that he was exhibiting a kind of emotional professionalism, and that the spontaneity of anger, or even the ill-considered remark, were henceforth under tight rein. I was surprised at how keenly I felt his withdrawal from the possibility of confidences, and as I lay there in the bedroom of my childhood home in Princes Hill, I experienced isolation greater than I’d experienced in the remotest corner of the Northern Territory. Although I’d been back in Melbourne for barely a week, I felt internally bruised by a pounding urgency to leave, to put some distance between me and this new world of secretive siblings, impending nuptials, and the disaffected offspring of Mother’s paramour.

  I had breakfast with Brian on the morning after the big dinner. He maintained his annoyingly bland, if smiling, uncommunicativeness. The most controversial thing he said was that John Gilbert seemed rather priggish, a statement of such obvious truth that it didn’t require expression. I pointed out to him that his small talk had become so small as to be unobservable. He smiled with the condescension of the spy I was sure he had become — smug and secure in his secret employment. The telephone rang, and as Mother and Peter Gilbert were upstairs, I answered it. Percy Wavel was on the other end, with the astonishing news that Jim Stokes had, as I’d meanly predicted, died during the night. There was no suitable understudy available, and as I knew the part, perhaps I would step in. I was silent.

  ‘You’d be paid Stokes’s salary, of course. It is the main part, after all.’

  My first thought had been that I couldn’t possibly step into the same costume that had enveloped Jim Stokes’s repulsive body, but the mention of my being paid his handsome stipend cauterised my disgust.

  ‘Perhaps at the close of the season, management might find other roles for you,’ Wavel said. ‘You’ll need to come down
to the theatre now for a rehearsal.’

  After a brief show of reluctance, I agreed, and left for the theatre immediately. A hasty rehearsal had been organised with Roger Teddles, Mother Goose’s maid, who’d come down with the flu and who I’d never met, although I’d worn his dress. It was ghoulish, I suppose, to clamber into Jim Stokes’s costume — ghoulish and revolting. I’d seen the skin these garments had rubbed up against. It didn’t bear thinking about.

  Roger Teddles was the polar opposite of Jim Stokes. His ambitions in the theatre were limited. He was at the end of his working life, and was glad to be employed. His knees were going, and he spoke frankly about his left testicle, swollen over the years by a hydrocele. It was painless, he said, but tended to get in the way. I expressed my condolences to him about Jim Stokes. He said that people were unlikely to be plunged into grief by his passing. It was a shock, but only in the way that any sudden death is a shock. Subsequent emotions probably wouldn’t run to sorrow. There were many who would shrug and say, ‘No great loss to the human race.’

  ‘Sometimes,’ Roger said, ‘natural selection gets it right.’

  Percy Wavel didn’t bother to supervise our rehearsal. You won’t find his name decorating the lists of Australia’s great theatre directors. He ought, if talent were the decider, to have been in charge of the theatre’s boilers. With a great deal of study and application, he might have learned how to take tickets at the door. As it was, by some ghastly, war-driven flaw in the machine, he’d been given the task of directing the Tivoli’s matinee-only pantomime. He had no understanding of, or sensitivity towards, the peculiar needs of actors and actresses. He didn’t care about the performance, and so he made the assumption that neither did we. It didn’t take me long to discover that he was wrong about almost everyone in the company. Most of them were second-rate vaudeville performers, not actors at all, but they certainly cared enough to give their best.

  My first performance in Jim Stokes’s role went smoothly. I brought a subtlety to the part, the possibility for which had escaped his end-of-the-pier sensibility. The laughs weren’t as loud, but you can’t hear a wry smile, and that was the response I was after. Percy Wavel, who’d surprisingly prised himself off a bar stool to watch the performance, demanded that the laughs be put back in.

  ‘They’ve paid to see those hairy legs, so lift your fucking skirts,’ he said. Now that I’d signed a contract, his reserved and reasonable phone manner had been entirely abandoned.

  I’d had little to do with the rest of the cast when I’d been filling in. Now I made an effort to introduce myself properly. After I’d changed, I ducked my head into the other dressing rooms. There were only two in use, apart from mine and Roger’s — one for the females and the other for the males. They were a chaos of costumes and make-up, and the air in each was a fug of sweat, cigarette smoke, and grease paint. Activity was feverish, as most of the panto cast had to hurry back to the Tivoli to appear in the evening vaudeville show. In no time at all, before I’d had a chance to say a word, there was just one woman left in the dressing room. The rush of men down the corridor suggested that that dressing room would now be deserted.

  ‘I’m Will Power,’ I said to the actress, who was removing make-up from her eyes. She looked at me in her mirror.

  ‘Oh yes, you’re our new Mother Goose.’

  I smiled.

  ‘Well, I’m trying to be. It’s all been a bit of a rush.’

  ‘You can’t be worse than Jim Stokes.’ She turned to face me. ‘At least you’re slimmer and better looking than he was.’

  ‘Damning with faint praise.’

  She stood up and held out her hand.

  ‘I’m Geraldine. Everyone calls me Gerald. Nice to meet you off stage, Will Power.’

  Geraldine was assembled in ways that were designed to excite admiration. She wore her dark hair in a shorter version of Veronica Lake’s peekaboo style, and although she resembled the blonde Miss Lake only slightly, I could tell from the way she angled her head, and her general air of assured swagger, that she modelled herself on the star of This Gun for Hire. I must have been staring, I hope at her face, because she reached out and placed her hand on my forearm — a gesture of electric intimacy.

  ‘You don’t look like the last person I knew who was called Gerald,’ I said. ‘He was bald for a start.’

  ‘I feel like I’ve got a head start.’

  She didn’t remove her hand from my arm, and I didn’t want her to. I found myself examining her elegant fingers. She wasn’t wearing nail polish, but her nails were flecked with paint. She removed her hand and flexed her fingers.

  ‘I’m an artist as well as an actress. I help with the scenery, but before the war, portraits were a specialty, although I could knock you up a gum tree if requested.’

  She stepped back from me.

  ‘Have you ever been painted?’

  ‘No.’ Without thinking, I added. ‘I worked as a life model once.’

  I don’t know why I revealed that. It’s one of the incidents in my adult life that’s best forgotten.

  ‘Really? Posing pouch or no posing pouch?’

  ‘No posing pouch, I’m afraid. It wasn’t a planned component of my working life.’

  ‘Well, it’s nobody’s childhood dream to stand in a draughty room without so much as a posing pouch to cut the wind. Let’s face it, acting isn’t always enough to pay the bills.’

  ‘Which is why it’s not the only arrow in my quiver.’

  ‘You’re not a teacher, are you?’ Her tone suggested that this would be a grave disappointment if true.

  ‘No. In fact, the life modelling was in the way of being undercover work. Ironically, I suppose, given the lack of cover.’

  ‘Heavens. Are you a policeman?’

  ‘I’m a private-inquiry agent. It’s a sideline. Mostly, I’m an actor.’

  ‘It’s just like in the movies. Do you investigate murders? Oh lord, was Jim Stokes murdered?’

  I laughed.

  ‘Jim Stokes was murdered by his diet. I have looked into a couple of murders in my time.’

  ‘I am frankly riveted.’

  ‘Would a cup of tea somewhere be in order? I’d like to get your views on the rest of the company. I haven’t met them properly yet.’

  ‘A cup of tea would be marvellous. Where?’

  ‘Somewhere quiet.’

  ‘I live in Parkville, but my landlady disapproves of gentlemen callers, and besides, it’s only a room really, and it’s a ghastly mess.’

  In a rush of gallantry, I offered Mother’s house. It was on Geraldine’s way home, and I would walk her across the park afterwards. The murderous Eddie Leonski, despite having been hanged, had left Melbourne nervous about unescorted women after dark. I reassured Geraldine that we wouldn’t be alone in the house, that it was all very proper. She lowered her chin and raised her eyes, and told me that I was a gentleman and that gentlemen in the theatre were a rare and unexpected pleasure. She laid her hand on my arm again and said, ‘Lead the way.’ I somehow knew that it was I who was being led, and it was my inclination at that moment to follow.

  We walked up to Princes Hill, and Geraldine was free in her opinions of her fellow cast members. It was a mostly happy company, with friendships forged in the Tivoli. The pantomime was an annual money-spinner, and it was considered a bit of fun and a distraction from the hard grind of vaudeville. Geraldine had never done vaudeville. She couldn’t, she said, sing, dance, or juggle, and she wasn’t willing to strip and assume a static, heroic pose as one of the living statues. I withheld my feelings about vaudeville and vaudevillians, not wishing to get off to a bad start. Geraldine clearly held her fellow performers in high regard.

  ‘We should go and see them after tomorrow’s show. Peggy Dunston — she’s the girl who plays Jill — is incredible. She’s one of the Dunstan Sisters, and you won’t belie
ve what they can do.’

  I was feeling queasy at just the thought of what the Dunstan Sisters might be capable of. I suspected that they were one of those acts involving inhuman and nausea-inducing feats of physical elasticity. Nevertheless I agreed to go with Geraldine to the Tivoli the following evening. I’d known her for barely an hour, and I was already in her thrall.

  We arrived at the house in Garton Street to find both Brian and Mother standing at the front gate. Peter Gilbert was walking south towards the cemetery. All three of them saw us approaching, and Peter Gilbert paused as if considering whether or not etiquette demanded that he return and offer a greeting. He decided against it, and strode on. Mother and Brian at least had the grace to wait for us. I began to introduce Geraldine, and realised too late that I didn’t know her last name. She rescued me by saying, as she took Mother’s hand, ‘Geraldine Buchanan. How lovely to meet you.’

  She created precisely the impression that I’d hoped to create myself — that we’d known each other for some time. Brian looked Geraldine up and down, and his gaze was appreciative — a fact that made me absurdly and inexplicably proud of her. I’m not given to sudden, adolescent attachments, but as we sipped tea and made small talk in the front room of Mother’s house, I found my feelings for her migrating into the regions of the heart.

  ‘Do you enjoy being in pantomime, Geraldine?’ Mother asked.

  ‘Please, call me Gerald. Everybody does.’

  ‘A woman called Gerald? That’s rather unusual. Are you a lesbian?’

  I was both appalled and unsurprised. Mother had made the impertinent inquiry into something of an art. Geraldine, to her credit, didn’t blanch.

  ‘What an interesting question, Mrs Power. I’m not a lesbian. Are you disappointed?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose I am rather. I like lesbians.’

  ‘My father’s name was Gerald. He died when I was very young and I just sort of assumed his name, but not his moustache.’