The Best Australian Stories (22 page)

The claret bottle was empty. The conversations around us seemed to have settled into more long-distance rhythms. ‘Let's go to Holderigger's,' he said, and stood and wiped his eyes.

Outside the evening was diffuse and golden. The station steps had emptied and a molten calm crept down the hill from the back of Foys to Belmore Park. Above us the golfer on top of Sharpie's Golf House began, endlessly, to guide his bouncing neon chip shot along its illuminated path towards the nineteenth hole.

He was not as robust, I noticed with some surprise, as he had appeared inside the club. Once he paused at the window of a shoe store and dabbed with his handkerchief at a thick vein in his forehead. He walked slowly, and did not talk much. He hummed instead from time to time.

At last, off a lane at the far end of the city, we entered a chilly portico of sandstone and passed through a set of double doors into a restaurant. Leather club chairs gave way, beyond the bar, to two long alleyways of tables. I could smell the starch of the tablecloths, the sweet and desiccated scent of breadsticks. The mirrors were deep and edged with brass, the walls panelled with some dark unshining wood which still held the thrill of polish. The maitre d', an older man with thin red hair, greeted him by name.

‘And how is Madame Holderigger?' he asked the waiter.

‘She's very well, sir. Her grandson graduated this afternoon, an engineer, so she won't be coming in this evening.'

‘That's splendid news. Please convey my congratulations.'

He sat, without glancing backward, in the heavy armchair as the waiter, in one smooth action, pushed it in and draped the napkin across his lap. My own descent was not so graceful. I hesitated when the waiter gestured; I perched on the chair's edge, then readjusted it myself. He asked if we would like a pre-dinner drink. Knowing of no other types I requested a gin and tonic. The poet ordered another for himself.

‘I have known Madame Holderigger', he said, when the waiter left us, ‘for almost forty years. She is a Swiss, originally. She must be nearly ninety. You will no doubt have seen her at some event or other. She wears her hair scraped up into a tiny lacquered topknot like a cocktail onion. Many years ago she used to run some private clubs – when I was a young journalist she still had a reputation for
sly-grogging
.' He smiled faintly; the word pleased him. ‘In the thirties she would go about looking for husbands with her daughter, an over-ripe spinster who tortured light opera. Gilda had the same broad décolletage and indelicate complexion as her mother – I used to think, when I spotted them in Martin Place, of two packet boats in full sail, rigged with lead crystal. Lindsay detested them, they always made him shudder. He used to say, each time they passed, “There goes the butcher's wife and daughter.”'

Although I smiled I had begun to panic. I had imagined, when he first suggested it, that Holderigger's was another bar. I realised now that I had not enough money for this sober restaurant. I began to say that I should be on my way once we had shared our drinks, that I was not particularly hungry.

If I had another appointment, he said, he understood, although he had hoped that I might permit him to shout me dinner.

‘May I show you something?' He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket, opened a leather bill-fold on the table, and produced an uncashed cheque for five pounds. It was a royalty, he said, for his last collection, published twenty years before, which had been recently reprinted. It was not much, he told me, for a lifetime's work, but it was the kind of thing I must get used to if I was to make poetry my life. One should regard writing as a pleasant hobby, he said, and never a career. In this way, any reward or word of praise would come as a surprise, rather than one's due. The trick, he said, was to enjoy each windfall when it came. It was his great pleasure, when those cheques turned up, to buy dinner for his friends.

Our meal arrived, which he had ‘taken the liberty' to order. I had never tasted oysters on the half-shell. Later I would also see for the first time a salad tossed at the table and a fillet steak girdled tightly by a piece of bacon. We drank a bottle of red wine. I did not say much. I remember that he spoke – as he forked and cut methodically with his dry white hands – of the managing board of the
Bulletin
and its effect on various journalists unknown to me, which I could only, dumbly, nod at; of other restaurants where I had not yet been; of his cadet days covering pet shows and sewing fairs and go-kart races where young boys with cunning faces lashed fox terriers and pugs like Mawson's huskies. He spoke fondly, too, of the architecture of the Harbour, although he did not mention his own great poems set there: of Beare's Stairs – he liked the rhyme – with their graveyard pillars made of sandstone above the stovepot roofs of Darlinghurst; of Miller's Point and its sailors' homes before it was levelled by the hefty stanchions of the Harbour Bridge.

As the food came he pointed out the rituals of the service, the way the waiters wheeled out another, smaller table and placed it by our own, the way they plated out the vegetables from a serving platter. In this way the labour of the kitchen remained invisible but the hospitality of the cook was performed before us, recreating what he referred to as the ‘intimacy of the table'. He also made me observe the function of the furnishings and linen. The salmon-coloured tablecloths and napkins created, along with the brass and wood, the atmosphere of a cruising liner. The pale green menus which the waiters carried worked like a contrasting thread which relieved and lifted up the orange, he said, wound by their constant movements through the room.

Towards the end of the meal he ordered another bottle of the claret. I had been drinking cautiously but I still felt flushed. My eyes were vague and heavy. He sat upright in his chair. His spine did not touch the plush back, a posture I have come to think of since as the mark of a truly dedicated drinker, movement conserved, the body held in a state of relaxed anticipation. He seemed, if anything, to have become more pale and grave.

I do recall that a younger waiter about my own age arrived and dug ineptly with his corkscrew at the lead above the cork. The poet flinched and snatched the bottle from his hands. He opened it himself with a single turn and twist and poured out two full glasses. He spoke, more slowly now, about the flash Kings Cross landlords he had met as a cub reporter, about the best brains and tripe that he had eaten in greasy spoon cafés around the Rocks, about scandals involving politicians whom, again, I did not know. He disappeared for some time to the toilet while I waited. The wine stand and serviettes were whisked away.

When he returned he asked me who I liked to ‘read'. I began to make my list. I had been reading the minor poets, from Clough to David Jones, for the last few months, I said, but I remained rather fond of Larkin. I found his adept use of half-rhyme and para-rhyme quite daring. It made me want to write.

‘Wrong verb, wrong verb,' the poet said.

I stopped. There was the hint of a smile on his thin lips. Yet I sensed, in the way he looked about for the waiter and winced when he saw no one, the chill edge of some distilled, exquisite anger.

Poetry should be the least interesting of topics to a young man my age, he said. What about the great Germanic verb in our English language? Did I find myself at present in a domestic situation?

I looked down, and blushed. It was painfully clear from the length of time I hesitated that I had thought of making something up. No, I said, at last. Of course, I added quickly, there had been ‘encounters'. I hoped the term was vague enough. He gestured for the bill.

It was a deep blue night outside. The air of the laneway was still and damp. Five girls and three young men passed us, laughing, on the street which led up to the Gardens. He hunched over a cigarette and watched them. I noticed that he swayed a little as he lit it. He did not look at me. I had no conversation. I thought I could smell the tank stream which ran for blocks beneath our feet.

In the end, he said at last, as if he spoke to no one, he recommended women highly.

Women, with their tight little jackets and impossible perfumes, he continued, had always infuriated him more than they had pleased him. But they were indispensable for poets.

He turned and looked at me intently. ‘They understand faith, you see. They are the great interceders. Between you and your reputation.'

I was not sure if he expected me to laugh.

He straightened and seemed suddenly quite sober. He began to walk, stiffly, ahead of me, in the direction of the Cross. I should not take him seriously, he told me. Seriousness was the affliction of old men. Here was a limerick I might enjoy, he said:

There was once a girl, called Priscilla
Whose pubes were of perfect chincilla
—Each day she would knot
The hairs of her twat
And use them each night as a pill-ah.

He smiled tightly. His was a rather pedestrian para-rhyme, he feared, compared with Larkin's.

I followed because he seemed to like my company, or at least he did not mind it. Now and again, he would point out some place he remembered or pause to share a joke. He showed me the boarding house where Virgil the hunchbacked artist had invited pretty girls and sketched them for
Smith's Weekly
. And I seem to remember, although I have been unable to recognise the street again, that he took me through a breach in a wall behind a block of flats where there was a mossy grotto, its steps and niches carved into the cliff. It was all that remained of one of the colony's first gardens and the optimism of that time, he said.

We passed a revival cinema, a drycleaners, a corner shop with tables of pawpaws on the pavement, and took a narrow street towards the naval base at Garden Island. I found myself in the vestibule of his building. He stood back at the bottom of the stairs to let me walk ahead. It was a white mansion, divided into quarters. The carpets were grey. I had glimpsed a small chandelier behind one window. There were dwarf maples in the garden.

Inside I exclaimed at the view. There was a full moon and the Harbour filled the window of the lounge room. I had not yet learned that it was unacceptable to urbane modesty to draw attention to its follies. Nor, by expressing my approval quite so openly, that I had instantly disqualified it. The water had the febrile glow of cine-film, I added. He appeared with two glasses from the kitchen. He said he was glad I liked it.

I stood and looked about me while he searched a drawer for coasters. The flat was dustless. I could see a music room with books of libretto piled up on the floor, his study beyond it which also faced towards the Harbour. I noticed gradually the smell of thinning carpet and dark suits.

He poured two whiskies and added water with a silver teaspoon from a jug. No ice, he said, not ever. And one tea spoon only. The water released the flavour of the scotch. He had also brought out a platter of stilton and some water crackers. ‘Some of life's small compensations.' He placed them on the coffee table in front of the sofa where I sat. He settled in his armchair. He did not remove his jacket. His eyes closed each time he sipped the scotch.

There was a line of condiment bowls on the sideboard. He saw me looking at them. He liked to make curries, he told me, which took three days to cook.

I had placed my folio on the floor and it sat between us. I decided at last to ask if he would look at them. I took a breath to speak.

‘When I was a cadet journalist, about your age,' he began quite suddenly, ‘I was approached to write a small pamphlet on Australian vineyards. I seized the opportunity eagerly. I had three weeks vacation owing to me, and I thought that this would supplement my wages, which at the time were not inspiring. I also imagined, quite correctly as it turned out, that I would enjoy the company of vintners.

‘I caught a train to Melbourne and discovered at once that I despised everything about the countryside around it – the low skies filled with imperturbable grey clouds, the mournful cattle, the tattered yellow paddocks – but the wines were pleasantly surprising. On my last day there I met a German who made ice wines. The wine he brought out for me to try was miraculous; clear and sharp, and infinitely sad, as if cursed with an awareness of its own chill depths.

‘He brought up three more bottles from the cellar and we walked across the overgrown yard towards his house. I had come to expect a cautious wife, a prolific flock of children, but the house was empty and quite bare, with the exception of a piano and a clock. He had devoted the main room entirely to his experiments with wine. There was a variety of corks lined up along the piano lid and there were grafted grapevines, their roots bound up in handkerchiefs, between us on the table.

‘Each winter, he told me, he waited for the perfect temperature to pick his grapes. For a fortnight he would set thermometers among the vines and sit a vigil. He sang songs to the mice to keep himself awake. The grapes had to be picked, with the ice still on them, at precisely minus four degrees. By the second bottle he had become quite sentimental, and with the third he began to stop every few minutes and look about the room. I remember that he said he thought he was probably the greatest aristocrat upon this earth. For he could not bear, even for a second, the thought of an uncomplicated pleasure.'

A distant foghorn sounded on the Harbour. He looked at me and smiled, and I thought I felt a fleeting warmth.

‘I have thought of him quite often since.'

I went to speak again but he seemed to have withdrawn himself from the room and into his armchair by some elusive alteration of his posture. When I put my empty glass down he did not offer me another. I reached for my folio. He jumped up to see me out.

At the door he shook my hand and said he hoped that we would meet again although I knew he did not mean it. He brushed aside my thanks for dinner. He said he hoped I had not found it boring. I said sincerely I had not.