Jacko (12 page)

Some Sydney operamanes, participants in the brother-and sisterhood of those great white wings of the Sydney Opera House, fashionably believed – at least on the days she did not come to Oscar's parties – that Dame Roberta was past her best. They even showed a common anger that the mass of the Australian public did not participate in their belief in Dame Roberta's decline and remained devoted to her and were excited by her as by no other singer. They were somehow annoyed by the well of love and respect the public harboured for her. It seemed, too, that the managements of La Scala or the New York Met, bereft of the sophisticated tastes of some of Mulcahy's guests, went on ignorantly renewing her performance contracts, and Philips records went on reissuing new editions of her recent work.

The proposition that Dame Roberta suffered from diminished timbre was not one on which Oscar and his sylph wife Hefty laid particular stress. Their fixed idea had more to do with what they called the
gay clique
amongst the devotees of the opera. They would fulminate about it in front of their thin, middle-aged housekeeper, René Fabre, a former ballet dancer from London. René, French by birth, would frequently agree with the Mulcahys, camping it up and telling the assembly at cocktail parties, These young queers are not as responsible as we older women.

But whatever René and the Mulcahys said never seemed to cast doubt on the standing of young Francis Emptor, Jacko's brother and a notable member, if not a focus, of the clique. Without question, the Mulcahys loved Francis, and René admired him.

—Very wealthy, my dear, said René, explaining young Emptor to me as Hefty took tall Francis's cloak of ermine off his shoulders and hung it in the hall cupboard with the coats of less flamboyant opera buffs. Works all week, just like a wage slave, even though he's so wealthy, don't you know.

René had learned to speak his English in the corps of Sadler's Wells, so that his conversation was full of these
don't you knows
and
my dears
.

—Independent wealth, said René. But he labours away as an airfreight agent during the week, my dear. Says he wouldn't be able to fill in his time without work.

I had heard nothing about Francis's wealth from Chloe, and very little about his friendships with the renowned. But at the Mulcahys' or at the opera, you could find Francis speaking with Sydney's wealthiest and most cultivated people, although, as Oscar would readily tell you, the two categories did not always coincide.

Francis Emptor had the enormous, plate-faced look of Stammer Jack and of his brother Jacko, but of course somehow different and refined down by the input of Chloe. The truth was – and I hesitate to say it since it is such a cliché, though even clichés recur with a biological frequency – that Francis Emptor resembled the young Oscar Wilde. The similarity existed in the enormous brow and long jawline, and was heightened by Emptor's taste for Wildean dress. He had that same celestial quality too. None of the houndlike sexual avidity which sat frankly beaming on Jacko's features.

Francis lived with a houseful of boyfriends in Woollahra, but that did not draw any sort of comment, nor did it make him look one iota less ethereal, less pre-Raphaelite, less like a visitant angel with significant tidings to impart.

—Life isn't fair to heterosexuals, said Oscar – who had also seen the resemblance to a Renaissance saint. Or maybe it's too fair. Women put up with a lot of grossness in men. But those buggers root all night and still look like the Angel bloody Gabriel.

One evening in Sydney's bright Opera House, I found myself sitting beside Francis Emptor at a performance of
Il Trovatore
, a neutral performance not involving Dame Roberta. I'd never been an opera lover, and Mulcahy frequently invited me out of a kindly perversity. I argued that the form was a kind of largely nineteenth century folk opera, which had become gratuitously sanctified to the point where people who wanted to be seen as respectable attended as at best a sort of necessary religious observance. A religious observance which then had to be subsidized out of consolidated revenue. I half believed this rhetoric, though I was always captivated by Dame Roberta Murdoch, who transcended all the rules.

The night I sat beside Frank, however,
did
suggest the limits of opera by featuring a fine English soprano who was nonetheless some fourteen-stone in weight. Her voice was as slim, piercing and angelic as Francis Emptor himself, but over her body – we were led to believe – the tenor and the baritone were willing to enter a death struggle with each other, or take into their hands the means of their own destruction.

The set designs that night were magnificent, the work of a man who shared a house with René, an older and soberer gay than Francis Emptor.

At the end of Act I, my wife Maureen and I left our seats briskly, keeping up with Francis who, as it proved, showed an unapologetic urgency to reach his preening station near the champagne bar. We talked with him about the designs. I said they were the only things I liked about the whole rampant excess of the thing, and he asked nicely whether I didn't think the design was totally out of character with everything else.

—Rococo and the surreal just don't fit, he threw over his shoulder.

We were separated. I saw him from a distance, laughing by the bar, a flute of Moët in his hand, amidst a flock of young, seamless-faced men. He was a young man so frankly enraptured by the elements of his life that I, a so-called
straight
boy from the west of Sydney, could imagine embracing him more or less as a kind of aesthetic congratulation. I was taken by the look of him, the same transcendent appetite I would come to see in different circumstances and in a different tone on his brother Jacko's face.

Maureen and I went back to our seats. We were close enough to the curtains to hear the urgent thump of stage hands. Francis returned too and settled himself.

—I met your mother at Burren Waters, I told Francis.

—My God, he said. You didn't meet my father the stammerer?

—He was sick.

—Tell me about it, said Francis, arching his epicene eyebrows. The man is so full of hate. I wish I could do something for him. Above all, for my mother.

—She's a rare woman.

—Oh yes. Lost up there amongst the cattle. Her only salvation: the arts program on ABC television! Don't worry, I've asked her to come down here and live at my place. I mean, all this … she'd love this.

In one sense it was true. But I imagined Chloe amidst the sybaritic pack giving off the same air of discontent as she did amongst Stammer Jack's dusty herds.

—She might simply love your father, I suggested, the result of an odd impulse to challenge him.

—Well, he said indulgently, she likes he-men. That's a weakness. She would like your friend Mulcahy. Oscar's the muscle man of the Australian Opera.

So we had another act, in which the English soprano delivered herself of the gravity of her size and achieved the weightlessness of her top register. I saw that beautiful Francis Emptor dozed for a time, his faintly tanned cheek leaning towards the shoulder of his cape under the weight of his own perfection.

I was more fascinated by him now than by the action on stage, the relentless coloratura of Verdi. When he woke up in the near dark, he seemed embarrassed. I looked fixedly at the stage to convince him I hadn't noticed. Just in case I had, he yawned at the end of the applause.

—It's the San Francisco Opera season, he said as people rose around us for the interval. I've gone over there the last two weekends out of three. Sometimes I feel my brain is located halfway across the Pacific. Neither at one opera house nor the other.

He rose wearily, but was soon sparkling in the company of others, this time in the Opera Board's enclosure, where drinks were served to business folk like the Mulcahys and to the stars of the opera audience. It became impossible to get near Francis – a woman parliamentarian from Macquarie Street was hogging his attention.

When we were back in our seats, I had time to ask him, How often do you go to San Francisco for the opera?

—I believe it's twenty-one times in the past nine months, he told me, certain of the authority of these facts.

—That's two weekends a month, I said, doing my awestruck sums.

—Sometimes three a month, he told me softly.

He was readier than I would have expected to give me the logistical details.

He always ended work half an hour early on Fridays, since a limousine arrived then to take him from his office block in the city to the airport in time for the evening flight to San Francisco. He lay back in his bed-like seat in first class, took champagne and a sleeping pill, and slept all night. He knew all the stewards on Qantas, he said, and they were very kind to him. It was like spending a night in a good hotel where the staff respected you and did all they could for your comfort.

Due to the mercies of the dateline, he arrived in San Francisco on Friday morning, at an hour earlier than he'd left Sydney. He had lunch with friends, took a nap, attended the San Francisco Opera, where he said he felt just as much at home as he did at the Australian Opera. He had made friends with Delva Costa, the great American contralto, and he was frequently invited to attend her levees after the performance. He told me in confidence and without braggadocio that he was very well known in San Francisco – a radio station had interviewed him about his passion for crossing the Pacific just to hear Delva Costa on Friday nights.

—They think it's a long way, of course. We Australians are the only ones who know the secrets of the size of the world. We
know
it's not such a long way.

Then he would catch the noon plane from San Francisco for Sydney, shedding Sunday as again he crossed the dateline, stopping in Honolulu, and arriving in Sydney around six in the morning, just in time to have breakfast and to go to his desk.

—That sounds really punishing.

—I love it. I absolutely love it. I've got this weekend off, but I go again the following weekend. I get high on Delva's great amber voice, and on champagne and jet lag. I mean, other people are terrified at not knowing what the time is. I'm stimulated by it. Sometimes though, midnight
does
hit me on the head in the middle of the morning.

—You land at dawn and work at your desk all morning?

—Oh yes. I know the air cargo business backwards. The whole operation would fall apart if I weren't there to tell them what to do. That's why I stay on. What would I do with my days anyhow?

I imagined him on humid Sydney Monday mornings, returned from Delva Costa and capeless at his computer.

It was only when the applause had died and Francis Emptor was turning to me to say goodbye that I remembered Mother Emptor's large objective.

—You know your mother wants to meet Michael Bickham?

—Yes, I know.

He made a tushing noise with his lips.

—I'm sorry, he told me. There's nothing I can do now. We fell out. I'm not really Michael Bickham's kind of queer, though his friend Khalil likes me. But with Michael –
persona non grata
.

His mouth set in a fierce line. There had been some savage exchange between Francis Emptor, clerk-operamane, and brother Bickham, modernist god.

8

At last, soon after my first meeting with Francis Emptor, I went back to Burren Waters with my wife and a second photographer, poor Larson's successor in the book project. My desire to lay eyes on the mongrel bastard Stammer Jack was dampened. I had nothing of any promise to report to Chloe in the matter of organizing a meeting between the great modernist and Nobel Prize winner, Michael Bickham, and herself.

Even though someone had once given me Bickham's number, I hadn't wanted to call him directly and perhaps delay his work. So I called a young poet I knew to be his friend and asked him would he kindly call Bickham's place and give my number to Khalil, Bickham's companion and – as some would say – housekeeper.

Nearly half a century before, Khalil had been a pleasant Levantine agent of British Intelligence whom the young Lieutenant Bickham of the Second AIF had met when the Australians captured Syria from the Vichy French in 1941. The gossip about their present domestic arrangements was that Bickham was a bit of a house devil and that Khalil was gentle and genial.

Khalil did call me at last. I told him that there was a woman from the Northern Territory who was desperate to discuss motherhood with the great writer. I said that at first sight she was not the sort of woman Bickham might like meeting, that she was loud and, in the terms of Woollahra, a bit primitive, but she had sensibility and passionate admiration. My shameful internal excuse for explaining Chloe away was that I was anticipating Bickham's snobbery by giving voice to my own.

Khalil said, Michael's having a bad time with his emphysema at the moment. He's only seeing people he knows well. He'd love to see this woman, but he's not in good enough health for adventures of that nature.

I was half relieved to hear it – I had fulfilled my duty. But then I asked him if I bought a copy of the book Chloe loved and dropped it in to Bickham's place, could Mr Bickham find the time to sign it?

Even at my level of accomplishment, people asked such questions tentatively of my wife Maureen, who was my protector and mediator with the world the way Khalil was for Bickham. Khalil said grudgingly, but without rancour, that would be fine. I could understand why he would be reluctant. He was the one who would have to answer Bickham's questions: Who? Him. Why didn't you tell him …?

To write a major work and then have to put more verbiage into signing copies of it than you did into the work itself!

So I bought a hardcover copy of
The Mother as Aphrodite
and brought it to Bickham's fine two-storey colonial mansion in Woollahra. The house sat behind a grey sandstone wall. Its sandy garden was full of roses and its wide verandahs ornamented with the sort of wrought iron which had come to Australia in the nineteenth century as ships' ballast. Used then for building fences and grille work, it had been taken for granted by Sydney-siders until John Betjeman, poet laureate to the Court of St James, had so praised it in the '60s.