Paul was in such a stupor that he barely noticed them leaving or, at least, pretended that their presence was a matter of little consequence to him. Other people glided in, students from the Gallery School, faces that he recognised from Fasoli’s, and night-birds from the queer end of Bourke Street or the peepshows at the Eastern Market, all helping themselves to wine and champagne. Hamish was loyally slouched in a corner, happy that his lowly occupation at the hospital rendered him anonymous to the passers-by who gazed through the window or took a timid step or two into the exhibition only to withdraw in disgust. He’d watched Anna leave and realised that the whole exhibition was in such bad taste that it would be difficult for Paul to regain his family’s confidence.
The evening took on a delirious, dreamlike atmosphere. Paul felt unsure on his feet and as the tobacco smoke got the better of him he became faint. When Roxanne appeared, draped in a fur and made-up with a thick layer of rice powder, carmine cheeks and glistening red lips, he thanked his lucky stars that Ondine and his mother had left, and glimpsed for the first time, with a sense of shock that would grow more pronounced as the night wore on, what dissipated company he was keeping. Roxanne looked like a garish china doll.
“Hello there, handsome,” she said, embracing him. “Is my cunt famous yet?” She’d brought the three other models from the Arcadia Club with her. Maggie, Violet and Minuette, faded flowers miraculously resuscitated by the powers of night, mingled through the crowd, effortlessly holding its attention as they posed theatrically before their portraits.
“Not famous just yet,” said Paul gloomily.
Where the hell was Gines, he wondered. He’d expected him to magically appear, rescuing him from the ignominy into which he was fast sinking with the promise of a three-figure banknote for his trouble. The crowd seemed to swell around him. Young men, larrikins most probably, were now jostling past to admire the paintings. One almost stumbled right over him. Roxanne clung to the lapel of his jacket, pushing her breasts into him, while Paul almost had to prop himself up against her. Her skin gave off a poisonous, artificial scent that overwhelmed the room’s rank, asphyxiating mixture of sweat and smoke.
The gathering was getting rowdier and Paul cursed the second-rate throng of the colonies. He was staggered at the uncouth individuals, some no better dressed than swaggies or street urchins. The night dragged on and still there was no sign of Gines. In the studio Roxanne entertained her friends on the velvet-covered couch, holding court in front of a host of leering young men. Who are these people, Paul thought.
He was on the verge of throwing everyone out, which would probably have been impossible, when in through the front door walked Ralph Matthews. Paul shrank in front of the confident, unabashed step of his sister’s suitor. He wished he could say Ralph was a fool, but the casual detachment with which he made his way through the mêlée towards Paul, who knew he was looking haggard and tired in the glass by comparison, made a mockery of these wishes.
“Hello, Paul,” said Ralph, offering his hand.
“Come to find the
Zeitgeist,
have we?” said Paul, trying his best not to slur his words.
“I’d hoped to find your sister here, but on reflection,” he said looking around him with subdued amusement, “it’s not really a place for a decent young woman, is it?”
Paul was enraged. The room was spinning around him as if the alcohol he’d been steadily consuming had suddenly rushed from his stomach to his head, demolishing his sense of balance and proportion. He fell against Ralph, who picked him up and, with the help of Hamish who had just appeared from his corner, led him into the studio.
“Jesus,” Paul heard Ralph say on beholding Roxanne and her ilk sprawled about the room, half-hidden in the deep crimson shadows thrown off by the Venetian lamp. The scene before them – the dim lighting, the bloodstained darkness and the ghostly white of the women’s make-up – had the aura of a monstrous pantomime. Paul lifted himself up to attention and shook his head in his hands, hoping to regain his focus.
“What d’ya say?” Paul mumbled aggressively.
“Can you take care of him?” Ralph asked Hamish. “I guess I’m not wanted here.”
Before Hamish could answer he noticed Paul dribbling a viscous yellow liquid from his mouth and hurried him to the back door, where he vomited into the darkness of the alley. Hamish, hand under his stomach, eased him onto the cobblestones.
“Just leave me for a bit,” Paul said, on his knees. The cool night air had already revived him and he felt his stomach purge again, contracting into a short, violent spasm of anger that yielded nothing but a string of saliva tainted with bile.
“Doing some painting out there, are ya?” he heard a voice roar above the general din behind him. There was the sound of glass smashing and another roar of laughter mingling with the shriller giggling of a woman, maybe Roxanne, he couldn’t tell. In a moment of resolve Paul picked himself up and went back inside, determined to throw this horde of freeloaders onto the street.
“I’ve ruined my fucking life,” he said to Hamish, who was standing just inside the door.
“Don’t be absurd,” his friend said. “You want me to kick this lot out?”
But the crowd was already thinning of its own accord, as if the blister had burst and its poison were dissipating. The alcohol had run dry and the night-birds of the city had begun to move off in search of other pleasures. Ralph approached Paul again.
“Why don’t we just close up the front, eh?” he said calmly.
Paul couldn’t look into his eyes, but nodded despondently. He sat down beside Roxanne, who wrapped a leg around him and kissed him on the mouth, herself too drunk to taste the vomit on his breath. Paul hoped that Ralph wouldn’t reappear to accuse him with his good-natured, even-headed attitude. By the time Hamish returned to the studio, without Ralph, an exhausted silence had descended on the room. Besides Roxanne and Maggie, only Hamish and, of all people, old Les from Fasoli’s remained.
Paul was surprised that he hadn’t noticed him before. Les was sitting on the floor with his back to the wall, lazily sucking on a bottle hidden in a brown paper bag. Maggie had taken to him and was stroking his rough, unshaven chin with a drowsy affection, both treacherous and condescending. The place looked as if it had just hosted a riot.
Paul dragged himself up and went to the basin, splashing some water on his pale face.
“Like a swig?” Les held the bottle towards him.
Paul took it without a word and choked back a mouthful of whisky, spluttering like a consumptive.
“That’s bloody good Scotch whisky, young fella,” Les said.
Paul fell back down next to Roxanne.
“I take it you ain’t sold a cracker, eh?” Les croaked from the floor.
“Leave off, Les,” said Roxanne, “we can’t all be fucking big-wigs.”
She’d noticed Paul’s depressed state and, with a degree of sympathy that surprised him, modulated her own mood accordingly.
“You know him?” Paul asked.
“‘Course. Don’t you know who that is? His eminence? How’s that, Les? One person in the city that don’t know ya.”
“Leave it off, ya cruel bitch,” Les said.
“That’s Christopher Leslie Collins,” Roxanne went on with pomp in her voice. “A genius forgotten by the twentieth century. Can’t afford to buy his own books back from the second-hand stalls. Lives on the charity of whores.”
“Leave off, ya cruel bitch,” he said again, this time in a cracked, lifeless monotone.
“The Life of Charles Whitehead,”
said Hamish.
“Hurray. You read it, then?” Les said ironically.
“Heard of it,” Hamish corrected, feeling awkward and out of place.
“Well good for you, young man. Good for you.” Les’s voice tapered off into resignation.
“You’re a writer?” asked Paul.
“Was, mate. Now I’m a drunk.” He said this with a finality that suggested it would be futile to try to talk to him about his work.
Paul shuddered. The skeleton of a man in front of him, the wasted cheeks, and the sad eyes reddened with alcohol and the life of the streets, offered him a vision of the misery that now clawed at him out of the crimson half-light of the surrounding shambles.
“You feel like coming back to the Arcadia?” Roxanne said. “At least we’ll find something to drink there.”
“What else does the place have to recommend it?” Paul asked.
“Ya never been there?” Les said, perking up.
“No.”
“Never?” Les addressed Roxanne.
“I didn’t think he’d be the type, did I?” she protested.
“By God girl, take a look at his paintings.”
Paul’s interest was piqued. He was already feeling wretched and almost fancied a good dose of self-mortification as a way of completing his fall.
“All right then, let’s go,” Roxanne said.
“Where is this place?” Paul asked.
“Not far, just off Little Lon.”
The group roused itself. Les walked arm in arm with Maggie, who had almost fallen asleep on his shoulder. Roxanne draped herself around Paul and seemed to be both dragging him down and holding him up. Hamish reluctantly tagged along in the wake of this odd collection, determined that he’d keep watch over Paul until he was safely away from the underworld and back at St Vincent Place, which now seemed as remote as the surface of the earth to someone trapped at its sulphurous centre.
“I can’t face Winton or Mother again,” Paul moaned to Hamish.
“Winton?” Les repeated.
“My stepfather.”
“D’ya hear that?” Les tossed the question back to Roxanne.
“What of it?”
“Charles Winton, eh?” Les asked.
“That’s right.”
The streets had a moist, greasy sheen under the dim illumination that leaked out of the occasional window or dripped down from an overhead lamp. On Little Lonsdale Street a pair of turbaned Indians hauled crates of fruit down from a creaky wooden cart, unbothered by the solicitous murmurs of a woman slouched languidly on the corner of a nearby alleyway, flicking the ash of her cigarette into the gutter.
As they turned past her into the lane and entered the Arcadia Club, Les sidled up to Paul, as if he had something to confide. “And how d’ya get along with your old stepdad?” he asked.
“Right now I’d imagine I’m just about cut off.”
“Well,” Les said, “I’d be happy to be of some use to you, after all. I ain’t much of a writer these days, but I can still tell you a bloody good tale or two.”
T
he next morning the
Argus
ran a mercifully unobtrusive column under the headline “Bohemia at the Paris End”:
Our laws against the dissemination of indecent and obscene materials are not wanting in their severity. Vigilant policing along the main thoroughfares of the city has forced the sale and exhibition of pornographic material into crevices, where it is at least kept away from the unsuspecting and the gullible. Yet the dealers in this illicit trade don’t lack in ingenuity when it comes to finding new ways of presenting obscenity in the guise of art, education or science. We have long been aware of a certain museum flourishing in an obscure arcade of ill-repute under the banner of medical science, and a collection of wax models, thought to have been outlawed, which occasionally reappears in slightly altered costumes for a week or so at a time, before our law-makers can catch up. Last night obscenity again reared its ugly head, in the most respectable part of town. To call it the Paris end of Collins Street is all very well, but we don’t welcome the riot of the left bank as a result. The occasion was a so-called art show of paintings by Paul Walters, under the Mercantile offices in Little Collins Street. These crude, almost childishly constructed canvases represented women of the filthiest kind in various postures of lewdness. There was no artistic merit here of any kind, save the art of attracting the prurient interest of passing larrikins, and before long the exhibition itself had degenerated into a disgusting debauch that had passers-by eager to cross to the other side of the street. Mr Walters is, we are told, currently studying painting at the Gallery School, where we hope his work and his crude showmanship are the exception, not the rule.
Anna and Winton both had the displeasure of reading the article. They sat silently in the sitting room like a couple in grief as Ondine went up to look in on her disgraced brother. When she came back down she was visibly disturbed.
“Doctor, I think you’d better look at him,” she said, and took Winton’s hand, the quicker to get him upstairs. “He seems to be raving.”
Paul’s room smelt of alcohol and cigar smoke. He was sleeping uneasily, muttering weird, incoherent imprecations, his face was pale, almost bloodless, and his lips were cracked and showing the first signs of ulceration. The doctor looked worried. When Anna appeared at the door she flew to his side.
“He has a fever,” said Winton, feeling the heat on his forehead. “He’s also probably still drunk and I’d say his body is quite run-down.”
“What’s he saying?” asked Ondine, trying to make some sense of her brother’s mumblings. But nothing made sense, save the words “Mr Pussycat”, which he said distinctly a number of times.
“What on earth does that mean?” Ondine asked, pondering the possible corruption of some childhood story they’d been told, like “Puss in Boots” or “Tomcat Murr”. The words sounded dirty. They sullied the thought of the serene nights she had shared with her brother for so long. The sores appearing at the corners of Paul’s mouth also repulsed her and she shuddered at the thought of her own snow-white complexion being disfigured by those weeping, red scabs.
“He’s going to need rest,” said Winton.
“Mr Pussycat’s coming,” Paul muttered.
“Did you hear that?” said Ondine.
Neither Anna nor Ondine noticed that Winton had gone suddenly pale.
“He’s in no danger,” the doctor said again. “We should leave him for a few hours and see how he recovers when he wakes up. I’ll check on him every hour.”
“Poor boy,” said Ondine.
In the hallway, out of Ondine’s earshot, Anna clutched at Winton’s sleeve.