Babylon South (13 page)

“Darling, Emma is a sick woman—”

“What did she mean—whose bastard am I?” Justine herself felt sick. She was thoroughly modern, didn't believe marriage was necessary if two people wanted to live together, saw no shame in an unmarried mother; yet she felt as if muck had been splashed all over her when her aunt had asked
that
question in front of all those stuffed shirts, male and female, who were her mother's enemies. She had never thought of herself as a bastard; to be accused of being one with no known father shattered all her up-to-the-minute attitudes. She was more Mosman than she had realized: there are degrees of illegitimacy that are unacceptable. She
wanted
to be a Springfellow.

Venetia looked out past the rhododendrons towards the harbour. A lone yacht fluttered its sails, like a pariah gull; a Manly ferry hooted for it to get out of the way.
Walter,
she said to the man she hadn't spoken to in years,
what do I tell her?
But Walter, for all his kindness, had never been a forgiving man: lifelong standards had propped him up like callipers.

“I've never thought of anyone but Walter as your father,” she said at last.

Justine looked sideways at her. “But you've had your doubts?”

“I didn't say that.”

“No, but you're thinking it. You've puzzled me sometimes, but not always. You and I think alike. That's how I know you better than you think I do. So someone else could have been my father?”

Venetia hesitated, then nodded. “It's possible.”

“Who?”

“No, it wouldn't be fair to them. It was all so long ago and they're leading other lives now.”

“
What about being fair to me?” Justine's anger was being switched from her aunt to her mother. If she was a bastard, she wanted to know whose. She felt lop-sided. “You said
them.
God, how many were there?”

Venetia shook her head. “No, I'm not going to tell you that. I wasn't any angel, I never have been—you know that. We're alike, Justy. We can't do without men.”

“Even when you were married to—” All at once she couldn't say
Father;
for who was he?

Venetia smiled, though it was only camouflage. “Are you just going to call him Walter from now on? Darling, I'm sorry this had to happen. You'd never have known it if it hadn't been for that bitch Emma. Yes, there were other men while I was married to Walter. But only in that last year when he spent five days a week down in Melbourne. It might have been different if I'd been a stay-at-home housewife—” She knew in her heart that it would not have been different; she'd have found a lover or two, perhaps even amongst the tradesmen calling at the house. Her sex drive in those days had exhausted Walter and she guessed he had realized the dangers of it. “But I was working at the studio—there were plenty of attractive men who wanted to take me out . . . So long as Walter didn't know, I didn't see any harm in it. I've never thought much about sin. Neither have you.”

“Speak for yourself,” said Justine, suddenly prim.

“Well, all right, if that's the way you feel . . . I'm sorry Emma had to be such a bitch towards you. It was no way for you to learn . . .”

“Would you have told me some day?”

Venetia thought about that for a moment. “Probably not. It might have been a pretence, but I've always thought of Walter as your father. Perhaps because that was the easiest thing to do.” She could be remarkably honest with herself at times; but it hurt her now to be honest with her daughter. “It never really mattered to me who your father was. You were
mine.”

“Like everything else.”

“You really are being a bastard, aren't you?” She had never before quarrelled with Justine. Her life had been full of enemies, but never one so close to her as this; for she could sense Justine turning into
an
enemy. So she softened her tone, put out a hand to take Justine's, but the latter drew hers away. “Don't let's fight. I love you, I really do. Isn't that enough?”

Justine looked at her, not coldly but with no warmth. She felt abandoned, a bastard left on a doorstep. There had always been a streak of romanticism in her: inherited, she now wondered, from whom? “I don't really know, Mother. I'd like to go home and think about it.”

“Stay here—this is home. I'll get rid of the crowd—”

“No.” She had her own apartment in a luxury block overlooking Circular Quay, a million-dollar twenty-first birthday gift from a loving mother. “I'd like to be on my own for a while. Everything's all of a sudden, I don't know,
changed.”

Venetia said fiercely, “I could kill Emma!”

“We're going,” said Ruth Springfellow right behind them. She and Edwin had come silently across the thick buffalo grass, moving in that quiet way that some elderly people have, as if afraid of disturbing the air about them. “Thank you for asking us to come.” She spoke as if they had come a great distance instead of from just across the street. “It was nice to meet all of Walter's old friends.”

“Like old times.” Edwin had an old man's habit of repeating himself. “Goodbye, Justine. Black suits you. It doesn't always suit a young person.”

“I'm going, too. I'll walk out with you.” She hadn't the panache of her mother; she was afraid of exits. “Goodbye, Mother.”

“I thought you two would want to stay together on a day like this?” said Ruth, an arranger of other people's moods.

“No,” said Venetia. “I think it's a day for each of us to be alone with our thoughts.”

“I shouldn't worry too much about Emma,” said Edwin as if listening to another conversation.

Ruth gave him a sharp glance. “You all worry too much about her. Walter was the only one who kept her in check.”

Venetia watched the three of them go round the corner of the house, avoiding those guests still up on the verandah. She turned and looked out at the harbour. Rain was coming up from the south: it
would
be a good day for misery. Over in the city fortunes were crashing, greed had given way to fear. For once, however, she was not thinking of the making or losing of money.

She had felt like this only once before, the day they had come to tell her Walter had disappeared. She had always liked to think that since then her character had been based on rock; some might have thought it flint. Now she could feel fissures in herself, a crumbling to sand.

“You all right, sweetheart?” Alice Magee had come down from the house. She was dressed in black like her daughter and somehow looked more at home in it. She was of an age when funerals could be regular events, though she did not go to many; her old friends, the ones who were dying, were too far away, in Cobar and points west. “I saw you and Justy—what was going on?”

“Did you hear what Emma said to her?”

Alice nodded. “I won't ask if it was true. That Justy's father could be someone else. I'm just glad Walter couldn't hear her say it. He was looking forward to being a father.”

“How do you know?”

“He told me, once. He never confided in me much, but he told me that. You cheated on him, sweetheart.”

“Don't rub it in, Alice. You've never been the Mother Superior.”

“I couldn't be if I tried. I wonder what they think of you in the convent back at Cobar? Where you are now. What you are. Poor Justy. Someone should hit that Emma bitch on the head.” She was talking to herself, her thoughts jumping around like fleas. “Walter would have hit her. He could've been a violent man, I think.”

Venetia turned to her. “How did you know that?”

“I didn't miss much, sweetheart. He was something like your Dad, only he never got drunk like Dad did. Did he ever hit you?”

“No, I still remember what Dad did to you, even though I was so young. Walter knew I'd have left him if he'd hit me.”

“Strange, how most people didn't know him. He was nice, but. I liked him.”

“
You
loved
him.” She didn't say it accusingly, but her gaze was steady, a kindly prosecutor's.

“Yes,” said Alice. “But he didn't know. And I'd never of tried to cheat on my own daughter.”

IV

“It'll mean a new sort of garage sale,” said Lisa. “Porsches and Ferraris will be going like old washtubs.”

“Serves „em right,” said Con Malone, bugle voice of the workers. “Greedy buggers.”

“Wash your mouth out,” said Brigid Malone, who would have protected her grandchildren from even a nun's mild imprecations.

“I said beggars. Me teeth slipped.”

“It sounded like buggers to me,” said Tom, whose ears would have been worth a fortune in industrial espionage.

“Don't listen to him, Tom,” said Brigid and stroked the head of her youngest saint.

She never stroked my head, thought Malone, not even when I was Tom's age. But his mother had softened in her latter years, affection was beginning to peep out like a tiny flower between old bricks.

“The papers will be full of it for the next week,” said Lisa. “At least we shan't have to keep looking at photos of Jonno and Danno and Jenny Kee.”

“Who are they?” said Con, who read only the political and sports pages and wasn't interested in ordinary celebrities.

“I haven't the faintest idea,” said Lisa airily; she could tell small lies with the smoothness of the best of them, but a big lie would tie her tongue in a painful knot. “I suppose the Springfellows lost a packet?”

“I wouldn't know,” said Malone, tucking into the apple cake and whipped cream, the dessert Lisa made for Con every time he and Brigid came to dinner. “Russ will fill me in tomorrow. He's the stock market expert.”

“What's your homework, Claire?” said Lisa.

“
The Depression of the 1930s.” Claire wrinkled her nose. “Sister Catherine whipped that one in on us this afternoon, after she'd heard the news. I think she's a sadist.”

“She believes in capital punishment,” said Maureen.

“So do I,” said her grandfather.

“Caning?”

“No, hanging.”

“They don't go in for that at Holy Spirit Convent,” said Malone.

“Pity,” said Con Malone and grinned mock-evilly at his three grandchildren, who reacted with mock horror. All three were older in the head than he thought: they knew that the wrinklies had to be humoured.

Con was shorter and broader than his son; he was sixty-six years old and it seemed that every year had made its mark on his long-lipped, broad face. He and Brigid came every second week for dinner; in the other week Lisa's parents, Jan and Elisabeth Pretorius, took their turn. Malone welcomed the visits, if for no more than to see the effect on his own children, who adored being adored by all four grandparents. He was often at odds with his father, a cloth-cap Labour man; not because he himself had become anti-Labour, which Jan Pretorius was, but because experience had made him apolitical. Sometimes, however, he envied his father's simple outlook on the world and its evils. If prejudice was the child of ignorance, as he had once read, then he was not his father's only child.

“The Yanks are to blame,” said Con.

“What for? Capital punishment?”

“No, the stock market crash.”

“You blame the Americans for everything,” said Lisa amiably. She tried to have a fair opinion of the world, but sometimes found it difficult.

Con nodded in complete agreement with her and Brigid said, “He'll never forgive President Reagan for being part-Irish.”

Brigid was the one who had given Malone what looks he had. She was plump and always plainly
dressed,
a chaser after bargains; but there were hints in her plump face of the pretty girl who had gone to the altar with young Cornelius Malone. She had a narrow view of life, believed in the efficacy of prayer and thought holy water was an elixir. She loved everyone to whom she was related, but had great difficulty in showing it.

Later Malone drove his parents home to Erskineville in his five-year-old Holden Commodore. The older Malones had never owned a car and, when not being driven by their son, still went everywhere by public transport, flashing their pensioners' concession cards like gold badges.

“I was at a funeral this morning,” Malone said out of the blue, trying to stop the flood of his father's diatribe against the greed of capitalist bludgers. “Walter Springfellow's.”

“His missus is another of them capitalist bludgers.” Con Malone could sidestep a subject like a rugby league winger.

“She's a widow,” said Brigid from the middle of the back seat. “I always feel sorry for widows, no matter how much money they've got. Money doesn't make you happy, does it, Scobie?”

“I wouldn't know, Mum. You and Dad never made me rich.”

“Are you trying to find out who killed Springfellow?” said Con, executing another sidestep.

“Trying.”

Con looked almost sympathetic; it had taken him a long time to accept his son as a mug copper. He was the unrecognized grandfather to the cast and crew of
Sydney Beat.
“Why don't you give up on it? He's been dead for years.”

“We have to tie up the loose ends.”

“He was never much good, not to the unions. He always had them spooks of his spying on us in the union.” Con had worked for years on the wharves and in the construction trade, where union politics had always been Far Left. Malone sometimes wondered if his father had been a Communist, but had never dared ask him. If he had been, it would have killed Brigid; or anyway had her on her knees for a month, praying for his soul. “Give up.”

“Did you ever give up on anything? You've been fifty years trying to resurrect Keir Hardie and
Karl
Marx.”