Vera (27 page)

  
23
  

AN AXING

T
DT
is axed in 1978, after eleven years. Isn't it interesting that shows are ‘axed' rather than ‘put to sleep' or ‘permanently retired' or even ‘terminated with extreme prejudice'. In show business, the violence of the act is candidly preserved in the image of execution.

No single reason for the axing is offered. Bill has been gone for three years, and maybe
TDT
hasn't been as engaging since he departed. Maybe. I'm not sure. And maybe there's another reason: the playfulness, the satire that was such a part of the show, just doesn't suit current affairs any longer. After the Dismissal, politics in this country has become more intense. There is not so much room for the satirical songs we commissioned; the April Fools' Day hoaxes; Peter Nicholson's animations; even Bill and his banjo. The Dismissal thrust politics onto a new stage in a new theatre – this is my opinion. And this new venue is for serious drama. It's as if people are saying, ‘You think politics is funny? Politics is not funny. Politics is John Kerr going berserk with the Constitution.'

The country has lost its innocence, and it won't come back. In the Coalition, they're either exhilarated by their own audacity, mad on self-congratulation, or full of pious rationalisations. Very earnest men and women, very competent men and women, have raised their hands for pre-selection in the ALP. They want revenge, but they're patient. They're not ready to laugh. Bob Ellis in the Whitlam years, I happen to know, wandered Parliament House like a barfly on a pub crawl, propping his arse on the corner of a desk and picking up drafts of bills to peruse under the nose of the minister himself, herself. By 1978, the shadow ministers are not so easygoing.

My dear friend Mungo MacCallum has kept his sense of humour, but he's maybe the only journalist in Australia capable of seeing the laughable and the pitiable in the same situation, simultaneously. Well, seeing the laughable and the pitiable is not the accomplishment, of course; writing it up is where the gift comes in. When he comes to Loch Street for dinner, his conversation is what you bother to live for: an Australian wit that circles and delves and probes, and reaches its destination with a great cackle of laughter. Really, if you can't laugh at your own jokes, what hope is there for you?

It's over,
TDT
. On the final show, Paul Murphy interviews John Kerr in London, where the ex-Governor-General has gone to live. Nobody in England cares about the Dismissal; nobody asks Kerr questions of any sort; nobody throws tomatoes at him. And watching that final show, you think, ‘Why is this program being axed? Why is this excellent program, with reporters like Paul, interviews of that quality, being axed?'

We drown our sorrows, all of us, and prepare for the replacement show, which is to be called
Nationwide
, much the same sort of program as
TDT
but more earnest. Was Andrew Olle the first presenter on
Nationwide
? Or was he doing
Four Corners
? Robert, can you find out?

Andrew was the loveliest man. When he died, I thought,
What the hell? If Andrew can die, anyone can
. It was 1995. Glioblastoma multi-forme: which is to say, a brain tumour. Glioblastoma multiforme – who on earth thought of a name like that? What pretentious twaddle. And Andrew was the most unpretentious man you ever met. Anyway, this is incidental.

We moved on to
Nationwide
. I continued on in the same job: officially researcher, which is to say jack-of-all-trades, factotum, virtuoso dogsbody, what you will.

Nationwide
is, as I say, more earnest. And we who are working on the show are a little more chastened. There are fewer lunches; there is less wine. There's a feeling that we've seen the best of everything we're ever going to see.

Well, that's not entirely true. It's not that we've seen the best, but that we were in a certain place at a certain time where something was happening. Do you know what I mean? In various places, at various times that cannot be predicted, the most vital thing happening anywhere in the world is happening there. Between 1970 and 1975,
this
is where something was happening; Australia was the most interesting place on earth, the most vivid. The gods were gathered here for five years, and now they're gone, with their music. The country is more mature; journalism is more mature.

During my time at
Nationwide
, I come to know Mary Delahunty. Not everyone can get along with Mary, but I can. I'm a sort of corrective to the hifalutin aspects of Mary's personality. At times when other people might roll their eyes, I smile and shrug, and, if the occasion calls for it, take the whole conversation in a more casual direction by telling bawdy stories maybe, because I do have a great store of bawdy stories.

Mary asks me to come with her to Japan, where she's to send back a series of pieces on politics and culture. I say, ‘Of course.' It might have been for
Nationwide
. Yes,
Nationwide.
In either case, Mary's pieces are well crafted, well presented, and Mary is good company. If some people find her difficult, what's the matter with them? And I get a look at Japan for the first time in my life, which is absorbing.

What in God's name the Japanese thought they were doing in Manchuria and Korea and China and the Pacific between 1936 and 1945, I can't imagine. They're obviously much better at peace. They're the only people in the world ever to have experienced nuclear war, and that appears to have cured them of the desire to go charging about with fixed bayonets.

Mary meets Jock Rankin not so long after I come to know her; Jock, a wonderful journalist, was with the ABC as Director of News and Current Affairs, although not when Mary met him, I think. Who wouldn't marry Jock, with that intellect and great competence?

He and Mary have a place up in the country, Rosebank, at Wood-end. I visit her there from time to time. Mary's a horsewoman, cantering about in the bush, very striking on horseback, like a Valkyrie scouting the mulga for fallen Norwegians; watching her, you expect to hear the Ring Cycle echoing around the hills.

Darling Mary. To this day, she remains one of my dearest friends.

And then I'm producing. Being virtuoso dogsbody prepares you perfectly for producing. It's like taking a degree in journalism at Warsaw University, where you learn every damned thing there is to learn about creating television.

I'm tired of daily current affairs. I wake up one morning and I think, ‘Enough.' The news is the news forever, it rolls on endlessly: this man's ambition, that man's, sometimes a woman pops up for the sake of variety, a thousand social issues with arguments on both sides that have come to seem tedious to me.

I speak about this exhaustion here and there, including to Di Gribble, that marvellous woman, who sits on the Board of the ABC.

She says, ‘Hmm, let me think.' And she thinks. She says, ‘You could apply to produce this arts show the ABC is thinking about for Monday evenings,
Review
. Whoever they appoint will do the research and also produce. Could you contemplate that? You'd have to go through the interview process.'

I say, ‘Okay, I've contemplated. Sure!'

I apply, I have my say before a panel of intelligent people, and I'm appointed. It means leaving behind friends in politics and current affairs, but what the hell. I have to find the stories for the show, get them shot, oversee the writing of the script, get the footage edited, usually overnight, and have everything ready to run by the Sunday before the Monday broadcast. It's hectic, but heaven. Shooting an arts show, meeting artists, writers and musicians: what better employment is there on earth?

Creative people are unusually sensitive to sympathetic qualities. They – well, the people who are invited onto the show – hear hyperbole all the time, and they respond to it, as we all do, make allowances for it, but their hope is that they will hear something different, not simply fulsome endorsements but actual recognition. Many things I have no talent for, no knack, it's true. But, if I may say so without conceit, I know how to enter into the sensibility of the artist.

This is never more the case than with theatre and opera director Barrie Kosky. We meet when he appears on
Review
, at a time when he has a reputation as an
enfant terrible
. He directed
The Knot Garden
, the Michael Tippet play at the Spoleto Festival when he was twenty-two, then established the Gilgul Theatre in Melbourne in 1990. For the Victorian State Opera, he staged
The Marriage of Figaro
and
The Barber of Seville
, each of them distinctive, a little crazy. A little ahead of the time I first met him, he staged
The Exile Trilogy
for the Gilgul, including Ansky's
The Dybbuk
. He's a genius: mad, bad, an inveterate show-off and wonderful to know. I enjoy flamboyance.

He comes to dinner at Loch Street, other friends join us, and it's a pleasure to watch him playing up to his reputation, but also, at quieter times, to listen to his introspection. He's taking a greater interest in his Jewish roots and heritage and will one day – a few years from this time I am talking of now, in the early nineties – listen to me when I encourage him to go to Warsaw and look at the Jewish Theatre, in fact Polish theatre altogether.

This is living. Meeting and working with creative people. Let me do this forever.

  
24
  

JAN

M
arek is becoming more critical of Jan's boozing. My son is becoming absorbed by the life of the spirit. At university, he studied mathematics; away from the university, the esoteric. This must have been dwelling in him since birth, this fascination. But it's not inherited from me or Viktor. Nor from Jan. Perhaps, when he was very young, Marek looked at Jan and me and thought, ‘My mum and dad are not from the same mould as me.' And from the age of twelve he has known that Jan is not his father. But I don't think his criticism of Jan's drinking has anything to do with discovering that Jan is not his father: it's just that now that he's in his twenties he can see the waste of talent more clearly.

I'm not among those who are critical of the boozing. When Jan met me, when we fell in love, he said, ‘I will never try to change you.' He meant that whatever my appetites – and some of them another man would have found difficult to deal with – he would not interfere, if that's the right word. If I had an adventure in mind, okay, have it. We would stay loyal to each other. And there was an agreement, unspoken, that I would not nag him about his drinking. In fact, that I would not nag him about anything. And may I say, among the many vices I might be accused of, nagging is not one of them.

Dear God, when I hear nagging – some of my friends are guilty of it – I'm perplexed. I want to say, ‘But why bother? If your husband (or your wife – men can be the worst of nags) irritates you so much, then leave him, find a man you like better.'

I have been known to worry aloud in front of Jan that a man who drinks as much as he does is bound to die young, or relatively young – I will concede that. Because I don't want him to die young, or ever. I love him; nobody could be loved more.

He says, ‘Werunia, it's a sickness. It won't go away. Not today, not in a month, not in a hundred years.'

When he says this, he isn't drunk. In his face, I can see all the intellect, all the gift of insight that I have admired over our years together. Admired is not the word: I am besotted by the power of his mind, by his conversation. Nothing he says is savage. But of all the men in the world I have known (and yes, Robert, there have been many) and all the women, Jan's intellect, his ability to see to the heart of any matter, any issue, I have never seen equalled. Who cannot love such a man? And to have him love me in return, to understand me so completely – this is something I don't want to lose.

I can't cajole a man like Jan into pouring the booze down the plughole. It would be an insult to his intellect. Addiction is a choice, not something that overwhelms you while you're unaware. Whether it's booze or heroin, at a certain point you know that the road you are on will reach a stage beyond which you will no longer have a choice. And Jan made that choice – the choice to forego any further choices; he chose addiction.

Most things in life you get better at with practice. Drinking isn't like that. You become steadily worse at it. All the little schemes and devices you once employed to help you get through the week fall away. You restrict yourself to three drinks before starting work in the morning, and the three drinks make it possible for you to get through to midmorning, when you take yourself off to the toilet and drink from a flask. You suck a mint before you leave the toilet. Then you're okay until midday. And so on. Your life is dominated by strategies that disguise addiction. All those around you know that you're an alcoholic, but they recognise the effort you're putting into remaining functional. They make allowances that fit into your regime. Then the three drinks in the morning become four, and your visits to the toilet or the cleaner's cupboard become more frequent. Sometimes you go home at midday and don't return to your office until four in the afternoon. If you're out on the road – and Jan was now working for Yencken's Glass as an assessor – you're boozing as you drive to an appointment and all the way back. That regime that your friends and colleagues understood and tolerated, it turns to shit. They give up on you. But they are a long way behind you, because you gave up on yourself months or years earlier. Sometimes it amazes you that your friends and colleagues don't yet grasp what you yourself have well and truly conceded: that you're fucked.

Nagging, no: I don't nag. But I encourage Jan to try rehab. I say, ‘Give it a chance. Maybe you will like being sober.'

He tries it a first time. It doesn't take. He tries it a second time. No better.

I think an alcoholic looks at a full bottle of liquor, the cap still unscrewed, the label celebrating the wonder of what is contained inside the glistening glass, and he experiences something like love, genuine love, in the same way that a smack addict glances down at the syringe in his hand and thinks, ‘You and me, forever.' If you throw away the syringe, if you smash the bottle of Ballantine's, you're breaking a heart and destroying a loyalty. Of everything you can accuse yourself of, at least let it not be this. The bottle, the sharp: be loyal to something in the world.

It's 1982, and Jan no longer has a job at Yencken, or anywhere. He's fifty-eight. I support him. But I don't support the liquor, or not at the volume that Jan craves. I'm researching at
Nationwide
, long hours, fairly intense. Marek is up north, exploring immortality. Jan is at the start of a period of unemployment that will never end. He can inhabit the rooms of Loch Street, he can read, he can watch television.

In a situation such as Jan's, the term ‘the future' always has to be expressed inside inverted commas. But he returns to Poland for a visit, to see old friends, old Poland, old Warsaw, and perhaps also to experience a legendary binge. Among his old friends, some still think of him as one of the finest journalists of his generation, an ornament of Polish political culture.

When he returns from Poland, what money he might have taken away from Yencken – savings, super, severance – is gone, and it is acknowledged between us that my income will be the only income in our two lives from this point on. I am not distressed. Jan will drink and drink until the intervention of death, and I will love him regardless. How could I not? Was I to find this wonderful man in a bar in Warsaw, to hear him shape the world with words, to live with him in the way I have, see him sharing the love of his heart with my son, feel his arms holding me, the intimacy of his voice in my ear – all this, then turn away? Not on my life.

An addict who intends to remain an addict will sooner or later absolve himself of any obligation to tell the truth. Jan begins to draw money from my bank account – the arrangement with the bank is such that he can do this – to cover the cost of the liquor he cannot do without. I keep finding that there is less in the account than I believed there was, and then much less.

One fine day I discover that the bank intends to take me to court to recover a large sum of money, more than twenty thousand dollars, that I am said to have borrowed against the house in Loch Street and have not repaid. I say, ‘I never borrowed such a sum.' But Jan had. The bank manager, who knows me well enough (and what does this mean about me, that at the age fifty I am on quite friendly terms with a bank manager?), says this: ‘Vera, we won't try to recover the sum. I know your situation. But alcoholics, Vera – I've had experience of them – you can't ever stand between them and a big pile of money. They'll tunnel underneath you to get to it, jump over you, and if necessary, shoot you. You must establish an entirely separate identity. You must divorce Jan.'

I can see that I must. I say to Jan, ‘It's a formality. Do you see?'

Jan says, ‘Go ahead.'

I say, ‘It changes nothing, except that you can't rob me, my darling.'

And so we are divorced. My friends say, ‘Vera, this was something you had to do. It was forced on you. You had no choice. Jan would have cleaned you out.' I say, ‘Sure, I had no choice.' But it wounds me. Maybe it wounds Jan, too, but he doesn't say so.

I am down at Sorrento with my friend Kate Baillieu. It's 1986. Sorrento is lovely, as everyone knows. The green sea, the pier. Kate is fine company. Jock Rankin and Mary Delahunty are here too, staying in a hotel.

For the past two days, I've been ringing Loch Street to talk to Jan. He doesn't answer. Why not? He always answers. So I'm concerned. Kate and Ted and Jock suggest that Jan might be too drunk to answer. No, no. Jan can function no matter how pissed. I'm troubled – there is something in my heart, like a foreboding.

I call David and Leslie, the neighbours in Loch Street and ask them to check our place, see if Jan is around. And the neighbours call me back. Jan is lying on the floor.

I ask, ‘Asleep?'

The answer is: ‘It doesn't look good.'

I ask David and Leslie to call an ambulance. Now Jock offers to drive me back to St Kilda – it's evident how distressed I am. And it is a long, long drive up the Nepean Highway to St Kilda. Jan is dead. He is dead. I sit in the car beside Jock, preparing myself for the confirmation of what I know. Someone soon will say to me, ‘Mrs Wasowski? I'm sorry to tell you this, but your husband has passed away, Mrs Wasowski. Yes, passed away.'