The Serpent's Sting (3 page)

‘You make Mother sound like a scarlet woman.'

‘From their point of view, perhaps she was. Their father was committing adultery with her, and that's frowned upon in Catholic households.'

‘I think you'll find it's frowned upon in a broader church than that one.'

‘Anyway, they seem quite at ease with Peter and Mother's engagement, so perhaps they're not as straitlaced as you might expect. Just hurry up, please, and try not to be rude.'

It wasn't until Brian had left the bathroom that I realised his parting statement implied that he believed rudeness was so entrenched in my nature that a conscious effort was required to quash it. I dressed, combed my hair carefully, and decided that I'd be on my best behaviour with Gilbert
frère et soeur
. There was a bottle of Hungary Water in the cupboard — it must have belonged to Peter Gilbert (Brian had never used cologne) — and I splashed a little on my neck. It was a most agreeable scent, and I thought it might annoy Peter Gilbert to know that I'd taken the liberty of using it.

When I entered the front room, the earlier laughter, which had implied warm relations, had evaporated, and there was an unmistakeable
froideur
in the air — unrelated, I hasten to add, to my entrance. Something had gone wrong. John Gilbert was standing near the bay window, his back to the room, his hands thrust in his pockets. His sister, Cloris, was sitting with her hands clasped between her knees, staring at the floor. Mother wasn't there — she was in the kitchen, finishing preparations for dinner. Brian looked stricken and embarrassed, and I surmised that he'd somehow been responsible for the ruin I saw before me. I wouldn't have been human if I hadn't felt a small spike of satisfaction.

Peter Gilbert was standing by the fireplace, and his usual air of benign stewardship had entirely deserted him. His face was drawn, and his eyes moved from his daughter to his son and back again so rapidly that I believed he was experiencing a form of internal hysteria.

‘Good evening,' I said, thinking this to be a relatively uncontroversial interruption. John Gilbert swung around and managed to extrude, ‘Is it?' from between lips that barely moved. Cloris Gilbert allowed a small sob to escape.

‘I'm sorry,' she said, as if weeping were an unforgivable social gaffe. ‘It's just that it's such a shock.'

‘I feel as though I've missed something,' I said, and perhaps my tone was inappropriately, if accidentally, rather lighter than the circumstances demanded. Nevertheless, it hardly warranted John Gilbert's savage riposte.

‘You've missed something! It's we who've been kept in the dark. You looked better in that dress than out of it, by the way.'

‘It's looking less and less likely that our friendship will flourish, John.'

‘If was up to me I wouldn't even be here. I wouldn't have had to meet you. Unfortunately, our father's behaviour took care of that, didn't it?'

‘Well, yes, I suppose it did. So here we are, almost brothers.'

This had the intended effect on John Gilbert and he sneered extravagantly. What I wasn't expecting was that that word, ‘brothers', would draw a rasping sound from Cloris, and I suddenly understood the cause of the tension in the room. Mother's and Peter Gilbert's issue, Fulton, was, in fact, the issue. The existence of Fulton as their half-brother must have been unknown to them until a few minutes prior to my entrance, and it must have been Brian who, in his blundering way, had let the cat out of the bag. It must have been quite a bombshell, and yes, I do know that the metaphor is mixed and that a cat is not a bombshell.

‘I'm sorry,' I felt compelled to say. ‘It must be terrible to discover that you had a half-brother and that he died so recently.'

Cloris stopped sobbing. John Gilbert's face drained of colour so quickly that I thought he might faint. His father's darting eyes fixed on me, and his expression was not dissimilar to the expression on the face of a man who was suffering a massive stroke. Brian's mouth was open. Cloris turned her head on one side and said, ‘What? Half-brother? What half-brother? Died?' Each word was eloquently expressive of their novelty for her. I felt ill.

‘You were discussing Fulton when I came in?'

‘Who's Fulton?' John Gilbert said. ‘Who the fuck is Fulton?'

The obscenity was, under the circumstances, quite shocking. I'd expected John Gilbert to be prissier.

‘Fulton. He's your brother. Surely that's what you were talking about. Why else would you both be so upset?'

Brian coughed.

‘Cloris and John were just digesting the fact that Mother and Peter had been together rather longer than they'd realised. That's what we were discussing.'

It was at this point that Mother came into the room, wiping her hands on an apron, and declared airily that dinner was ready to be served. Cloris, who'd pulled herself together, stood up, faced Mother, and said, ‘Who is Fulton?'

It took a moment for Mother to comprehend the question. She stared blankly at Cloris and managed to express a small, ‘Oh.' She then did a most extraordinary thing. She sat on the floor and said, ‘Oh, oh, oh.' A good dinner was suddenly a distant prospect.

Chapter Two

GERALDINE

THE REVELATION THAT MOTHER AND PETER GILBERT
had begun their affair while their mother was still alive was a shock for Cloris and John. I don't think it was a moral shock, particularly. Neither of them had inherited their mother's religiosity. Perhaps they felt betrayed. The fact that this adulterous relationship had produced a child whose identity had been kept from them was especially difficult to accept. John Gilbert reacted very badly to the news that he had a brother, and his perspective on it was perverse.

‘You wouldn't give mum another child, but you were happy to breed ex-cathedra.'

I half-admired this astonishingly Roman expression. It was Cloris who'd managed, after my unfortunate blunder, to calm things down sufficiently for all the dirty laundry to be laid before her and her brother. My mother's resilience in the midst of this emotional cataclysm was a revelation. She outlined the essential facts of the matter with business-like efficiency, and she assured Cloris and John that she and Peter had intended to tell them about Fulton, but that they were, for the moment, still wrestling with the awful fact of his death.

‘He was a soldier,' Mother said. ‘He was shot by the Japanese.'

John Gilbert, callously indifferent to this information, asked, ‘How long have you two been lovers?'

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.'