The Grand Hotel (24 page)

Unfortunately for the evolution of our very late in the day local dialects, a veritable cyclone took over the garden party, laying waste to everything before it. But this wasn't as synchronous or apt as it sounds, for the cyclone was not one of a meteorological nature but rather of a kind far more disastrous for those concerned. Yes, it was Cyclone Joan, an unrequited hailstorm of the heart.

The Garden Party Brawl

It was around one o'clock, the tables were all resplendent in the spring sun, and Mary and Kooka's heirloom fish cutlery, including bone-tweezers and crab scoops, was shining like it hadn't for years. The dusty pink of late flowering ficifolias was arranged along with pelargoniums and banksia fronds in crystal vases on the white cotton tablecloths of every round table. As the guests arrived and the tables were filling up, a group of galahs perched on the powerline just on the other side of the hedge. Usually when they propped right there, they faced in the direction of the dunes, but this time they were looking our way, as if they had come to catch the show from front row seats. Mistakenly I took it for a good omen.

There were five tables of eight spread out across the lawn behind the hedge and in no time at all they were almost full. At the head table, where the proposed names of the winds would be read out from the box that had been in the bar for the previous six weeks, sat myself, Veronica, Ash Bowen and his wife, Vita, Darren Traherne and his sister, Barbara, with two chairs empty, waiting for The Blonde Maria and The Lazy Tenor to come downstairs and join us. When I'd got back from the banking in Minapre, I'd knocked on both of their doors to make sure they were coming to the party. I'd found The Lazy Tenor sitting at his window desk with the curtains drawn, reading the newspaper cartoons in his underwear. He said as far as he was concerned, the party sounded like a good excuse to get back on the Black Velvets.

Once again I noticed beyond the open cartoons on his desk that the lid of his laptop was firmly shut, and I don't think I was mistaken that a thick film of dust, salt, and eucalypt pollen had begun to gather in the debossed logo on the lid. The Lazy Tenor said that although he was keen, he couldn't speak for The Blonde Maria and that I'd find her in The Sewing Room with Kooka, whom she'd taken to giving a daily foot massage in his bed. ‘The naughty old cunt,' The Lazy Tenor said as he stood up in his jocks without a hint of self-consciousness to show me to the door. ‘I betcha he gets his jollies from that.' I laughed dubiously, said seeya, and walked up the hallway towards The Sewing Room.

I found The Blonde Maria washing Kooka's feet in olive and peppermint oils. The old fella was propped up on three pillows, with his corny old toes poking out from under the sheets at the bottom. He looked like he'd just won Tattslotto and proceeded to tell me that at his age a life in bed beat an upright life hands down.

‘Well, that's of course if you've got the right attendants,' I said.

Kooka laughed and wholeheartedly agreed. ‘She's an angel, Noel. She sits with me at night, reads to me from marvellous books, and then carries on like this in the mornings. God bless her.'

The Blonde Maria looked up at me smiling. I reminded her about the party that arvo and that The Lazy Tenor had said he'd come down for it. Maria told me she'd be there, with bells on. Purely out of courtesy I then invited Kooka to the party as well but unsurprisingly he said he'd pass. ‘Oh, the afternoons up here in this room are not to be missed, Noel,' he said. ‘The sun filters through the pines, hits the floorboards like honey. I'm gettin' quite used to tranquillity like that.' He nodded in Maria's direction. ‘With Maria's help of course.'

I said goodbye and was about to make for the door. ‘One thing before you go, Noel,' Kooka said. ‘When it comes to wind, there's only ever been one nickname that I remember from round here: The Leveller. That's what Ron McCoy used to call the first day of the northerly – when the wind swings around offshore and takes the tops off the waves. Three or four tides later the sea's flat as glass – without fail. As you remember, old Ron never did talk much but when he did you tended to listen. The Leveller. Why don't ya throw that one into the mix?'

I thanked him for the tip and quietly left the room.

Nan Burns and Jen had agreed to pour the drinks and serve the menu, which read as follows:

Just after one o'clock Joan Sutherland arrived unexpectedly with his plaster in a tea-towel sling, declaring that as the kids had gone to stay with their cousins in Bendigo he thought he could at least lend a hand with clearing tables and the like. Nan and Jen, of course, were happy to see him, and the big fella with the broken wing looked jovial, almost as if he was relieved to be back in the pub.

But I was worried. If, as they had promised, The Lazy Tenor and The Blonde Maria were coming to the party, how would Joan cope with what would be their first official public appearance as a couple?

Well, I didn't have to wait long to find out. As the local wines were poured in the sunshine and we at the head table were readying ourselves to begin the official proceedings, a resounding crash was heard from inside the bar. All heads turned, but before anyone could get up to see if everything was alright who should come waltzing out the verandah doors, arm in arm and dressed to the hilt for the gala occasion, but The Lazy Tenor and The Blonde Maria.

A collective gasp rose from the tables on the lawn. Mangowak hadn't seen such a glamorous pair for many a long year, if ever. He was dressed in an emerald-green velvet suit with black cloth buttons, a jet-black shirt, a vermilion silk tie and cornflower-blue cufflinks. His hair was oiled and swept back from his brow expertly, the oil darkening his bright-red hair to a rich ochre colour; his jaw was clean-shaven and on his feet were a pair of blue suede slip-on shoes that harmonised with the cufflinks. It was the genius of Blokey Hollow, the golden-voiced Lazy Tenor, in a display of style and colour we'd never seen from him before.

Next to him The Blonde Maria's hair was piled high in a spiralling Spanish braid. Her dress was a close-fitting turquoise crêpe with fine silver threads through it. From her ears hung two miniature brass bells that tinkled as she sashayed from the verandah doors down to the lawn, her hips swaying, her legs poured into lace stockings the identical colour of The Lazy Tenor's vermilion tie. She smiled radiantly, her eyes glittering like diamonds, obviously relishing the surprise of their entrance. What was most striking about her appearance, however, was not the peachy clarity of her complexion, nor the pale Irish creaminess of her long neck or the glinting shots of silver in her dress, but rather the unavoidable rich russet mark she proudly wore on the bunched-up flesh of her left bosom. Yes, with the blood-stippled texture that only freshness can supply, The Blonde Maria's outstanding fashion accoutrement for the Naming the Winds garden party was a lovebite, obviously administered by her beau only minutes before descending the Grand Hotel staircase. This hiccy seemed still to be pulsing with blood-red passion and not only attracted everyone's immediate attention but also no doubt explained the cacophonous crash from the kitchen just before the resplendent couple had emerged onto the lawn. At the sight of it I knew instinctively that we were in trouble and, abandoning my post at the official table, dashed back inside to investigate.

Behind the counter in the bar the Shoalhaven trout, once so painstakingly reproduced by one of our country's great artists, and then so lovingly prepared and cooked into a Sémillon, dill and cream sauce by Nan and Jen, was now scattered in fibrous lumpen dollops all over the checked lino floor. The large cast iron pot in which the fish had been simmering had been knocked off the stove and lay clattered into a corner. I could see by the look on everyone's faces in the kitchen that this had been no accident. A sudden and familiar flash of colour raced across my vision, and for a moment all I saw were the front-row galahs flying from the powerlines in a burst of pink and grey.

Our good omen gone, Jen was gesticulating at Joan, wanting to know what the hell he was up to. Nan, meanwhile, was staring at me with a sober expression, having immediately deduced the reasons for the tumult.

‘Oh well,' I said, reverting to levity for no other reason than to avoid my own guilt in front of Jen, ‘that's the first course over.'

I don't think anyone heard me. Joan was standing stiff as a board in the corner by the sink, with the haunted blinkered expression of a nightmare-ridden child, as Jen demanded an explanation. Whether or not she had already twigged, it was hard to say, but for the time being at least she was feigning innocence and giving her love-addled husband the compassionate good grace to explain himself.

But Joan was tight-lipped, his face aflame with pent-up emotion. And nothing that Jen could say would move him. It was brutal to watch; he had a mad stare in his eye, a look simultaneously cold and hot, distant and close. Jen eventually threw her hands up into the air in exasperation. She turned and looked at me for clues. And once again, in a critical moment of cowardice, I looked away from her gaze.

Then Nan burst into action. ‘Well don't just stand there like a mad bastard, Joan. Get the hell out of here and let us clean up the mess you've made.'

When Nan Burns was riled, there were few who would brook an argument with her. Joan Sutherland was definitely not up to the task. Nursing his broken tap-arm with his other hand, he stepped through the remains of the dish on the floor, rounded the bar and stood glaring out the verandah doors at the crowd outside. We could hear the hubbub rising as the local wines were sipped on the lawn: Pinot Gris, Rosé, Grenache, Merlot Petit Verdot – everyone no doubt presuming that things had been taken in hand back inside.

But things had not been taken in hand, and what happened in that next fateful hour constituted my greatest failure in my brief tenure as a publican. What was it that Joan had said, on that starry night as he lay floating on his back in the river? That he should be allowed to fall in love, not only as an innocent youth but as a fully grown man. That belief and the magnetic sexuality of The Blonde Maria were causing this. Joan Sutherland was in exile, after all, and now was flailing in a zone of new temptations. For his whole life the lush blackwood-bordered dairy pastures on the Barroworn had shaped him, given him air and pride and purpose, but now he had been dislocated, his passions disorientated, and all the held-back anguish of his hereditary loss was unstitching his life at the seams.

What could I have done? How could I have diverted the disaster? I'm not quite sure, but what I am sure of is this: at the crucial moment – the ‘psychological moment', as our old footy coach Barry Anguilla used to call it – I decided selfishly that the proceedings of the Naming the Winds garden party were too important to interrupt and chose to pretend that the air could be cleared as easily as Arthur Boyd's trout on the floor.

On the surface what happened next could be directly attributable to that Saturday forty-five years previously, when my bachelor-girl Aunt Rita, in the prime of her social glory, called a Silver Top taxi to her flat in South Yarra to take her into the Georges department store in Collins Street, Melbourne, to lay-by the set of René Lalique champagne glasses that had caught her eye during her lunch hour the day before. Little did she know as the Holden EH taxi lumbered over Princes Bridge and past St Paul's Cathedral that all those years later the Lalique glasses she was about to buy would cause a hardworking dairy farmer with a heart as big as the Southern Ocean to crumple into a blubbering leviathan mess and be given up for insane.

The Lazy Tenor and The Blonde Maria arrived at their chairs at the head table to find a crisp jug of Black Velvet waiting for them. This was my doing. Caught up in the excitement of the occasion and happy that they had agreed to attend, I had painstakingly poured the jug twenty minutes before they had made their grand, and lovebitten, entrance. On either side of the jug of Black Velvet I had specially placed one of Aunt Rita's Lalique glasses, in the vain and ridiculous hope that with such flattering and high calibre encouragement we may have been able to persuade an inebriated Lazy Tenor to adorn the gala event behind the flowering tea tree hedge with a famous aria in his golden voice. In my inebriated state the previous evening I had lain prostrate over the Horse Room pool table dreaming of just such an event. With at least a handful of wind-names established and everyone well fed and well sluiced, I had pictured my fork tapping a glass, the crowd's happiness falling silent, and The Lazy Tenor rising to ensure the day would take pride of place in the brief but momentous history of the reawakened Grand Hotel.

As it happened, The Lazy Tenor did rise, to his full stature, after pouring himself and The Blonde Maria a glass each of the Black Velvet. But not to sing; instead to gloat. At the same time as Joan Sutherland had rounded the bar and was glaring through the verandah doors, The Lazy Tenor, inspired by the naked nymph resting between his fingers, stood to raise a longwinded and boorish toast to the ‘magnificence of the female body and in particular to the current beneficiary of my vast physical prowess, The Blonde Maria'.