air mail in South Australia. He read also that I had served in the Air Corps, was a “noted zoologist” and a “motoring enthusiast whose Hispano Suiza is currently on loan to a distinguished Ballarat family”.
Photographs, supplied by yours truly, were also used by the
Advertiser
(this, mind you, at a time when photographs in the newspaper were a rarity). The most notable of these showed the Morris Farman “in three positions of flight in a storm above Digger’s Rest Racecourse”. Quite a lot of this information was correct.
A week later I was able to mail a postal order for twenty pounds to the publican in Darnham.
14
It was nine o’clock at night but the temperature was still above 90 degrees. There was no air in the room. There was not enough air anywhere. From the bathroom window in Villamente Street you could see the red glow in the sky: fires covered the Brisbane ranges at Anakie and Steiglitz.
The front room crawled with insects with long brown abdomens. They fell into the jug of sweet lemon squash and died there. Phoebe had placed a thin book of Swinburne’s poetry on top of the jug, but the insects still managed to enter through the pouring lip.
Annette was limp and soaked with perspiration. Her grey dress was too heavy for the climate. It clung to the back of her knees and got stuck beneath her arms. Phoebe, on the other hand, did not seem at all affected. This irritated Annette. Phoebe was so wrapped up in her own feelings that she was insensitive to everything else, even the stinking heat. Phoebe also wore grey: a soft silky grey with a slightly paler grey scarf.
“For God’s sake,” Annette said, brushing insects away from Swinburne, “aren’t you hot?”
“A little,” Phoebe said, “but not much.”
“It doesn’t make sense.” Annette knew how pasty she looked.Her hair was plastered against her forehead, a pimple was emerging from her chin, her top lip shone. “I don’t think he’s a herpetologist at all. A man of science, surely, does not keep his charges in a jute bag in his bedroom.”
“Annette,” Phoebe said, “where else would he keep it? We really have no proper facilities for boarding snakes.”
“And yet,” Annette said, “there you are with
two
of them.”
(She is already defeated, before it has begun, while Phoebe is no more than a creamy shape in my dirty dreams.)
“You should be going back to school,” Annette said.
Phoebe smiled. “Where I’m safe from nasty men?”
They sat side by side on the One couch. Annette put her hand on Phoebe’s but it was a sticky contact and not pleasant. She removed it.
“You could go to university.”
“Ugh,” Phoebe said. “How bourgeois.”
She learned this sort of talk from Annette and it drove Annette crazy to have it thrown back at her.
“Last year you didn’t know what bourgeois meant.”
“But I know now,” Phoebe said happily and Annette had to fight an impulse to disarrange that cool copper hair which her lover had piled high on her head, perhaps for the heat, perhaps to show her long lovely milky neck to Herbert Badgery.
“Do you really want to have babies and spend your life picking up after a man?” said Annette, who later omitted certain things from her description of Bohemian life in Paris.
“Who said anything about babies?” Phoebe said. “Or picking up. I only said I liked him. I said he was ‘interesting’.”
“I know what you find ‘interesting’, you little brat.”
Annette had never met me, but she had already heard too much about this man whose only human imperfection was bow-legs. And even this was meant to be “interesting,” as if they were shaped like this to accommodate what Phoebe liked to call a “door knocker” of extraordinary dimension.
She had heard (twice) already how Herbert Badgery had brought the Farman back from Balliang East to the airstrip at Belmont Common, how he had circled over Belmont and then flown up river to the woollen mills where he banked
Photographs, supplied by yours truly, were also used by the
Advertiser
(this, mind you, at a time when photographs in the newspaper were a rarity). The most notable of these showed the Morris Farman “in three positions of flight in a storm above Digger’s Rest Racecourse”. Quite a lot of this information was correct.
A week later I was able to mail a postal order for twenty pounds to the publican in Darnham.
14
It was nine o’clock at night but the temperature was still above 90 degrees. There was no air in the room. There was not enough air anywhere. From the bathroom window in Villamente Street you could see the red glow in the sky: fires covered the Brisbane ranges at Anakie and Steiglitz.
The front room crawled with insects with long brown abdomens. They fell into the jug of sweet lemon squash and died there. Phoebe had placed a thin book of Swinburne’s poetry on top of the jug, but the insects still managed to enter through the pouring lip.
Annette was limp and soaked with perspiration. Her grey dress was too heavy for the climate. It clung to the back of her knees and got stuck beneath her arms. Phoebe, on the other hand, did not seem at all affected. This irritated Annette. Phoebe was so wrapped up in her own feelings that she was insensitive to everything else, even the stinking heat. Phoebe also wore grey: a soft silky grey with a slightly paler grey scarf.
“For God’s sake,” Annette said, brushing insects away from Swinburne, “aren’t you hot?”
“A little,” Phoebe said, “but not much.”
“It doesn’t make sense.” Annette knew how pasty she looked.Her hair was plastered against her forehead, a pimple was emerging from her chin, her top lip shone. “I don’t think he’s a herpetologist at all. A man of science, surely, does not keep his charges in a jute bag in his bedroom.”
“Annette,” Phoebe said, “where else would he keep it? We really have no proper facilities for boarding snakes.”
“And yet,” Annette said, “there you are with
two
of them.”
(She is already defeated, before it has begun, while Phoebe is no more than a creamy shape in my dirty dreams.)
“You should be going back to school,” Annette said.
Phoebe smiled. “Where I’m safe from nasty men?”
They sat side by side on the One couch. Annette put her hand on Phoebe’s but it was a sticky contact and not pleasant. She removed it.
“You could go to university.”
“Ugh,” Phoebe said. “How bourgeois.”
She learned this sort of talk from Annette and it drove Annette crazy to have it thrown back at her.
“Last year you didn’t know what bourgeois meant.”
“But I know now,” Phoebe said happily and Annette had to fight an impulse to disarrange that cool copper hair which her lover had piled high on her head, perhaps for the heat, perhaps to show her long lovely milky neck to Herbert Badgery.
“Do you really want to have babies and spend your life picking up after a man?” said Annette, who later omitted certain things from her description of Bohemian life in Paris.
“Who said anything about babies?” Phoebe said. “Or picking up. I only said I liked him. I said he was ‘interesting’.”
“I know what you find ‘interesting’, you little brat.”
Annette had never met me, but she had already heard too much about this man whose only human imperfection was bow-legs. And even this was meant to be “interesting,” as if they were shaped like this to accommodate what Phoebe liked to call a “door knocker” of extraordinary dimension.
She had heard (twice) already how Herbert Badgery had brought the Farman back from Balliang East to the airstrip at Belmont Common, how he had circled over Belmont and then flown up river to the woollen mills where he banked
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