Trio Read online

  TRIO

  TRIO

  GERALDINE WOOLLER

  MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA

  www.transitlounge.com.au

  Copyright © Geraldine Wooller 2015

  First Published 2015

  Transit Lounge Publishing

  This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be made to the publisher.

  Cover image: Marta Bevacqua/Trevillion Images

  Cover and book design: Peter Lo

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  This project has been assisted by the Australian government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body.

  A cataloguing-in-publication entry is available from the National Library of Australia: http://catalogue.nla.gov.au

  ISBN: 978-1-921924-84-2

  CELIA

  1

  London, 1966

  It was Celia who introduced Marcia to Mickey. On a peasouper of a foggy London evening, at a workmate’s invitation, Celia walked to a party just around the corner from her flat. It was one of those Kensington affairs with darkened rooms that led off into bedrooms and niches, where couples who couldn’t bear to make eye contact by day, here would mouth each other in wet kisses, grope and wrestle, any notions of class, in every sense, thrown to the winds.

  These were pleasant, Georgian houses, once respectable homes of the upper middle class and now carved up into bedsitters: by day dreary lodgings, walls painted black; by night, places of questionable atmosphere, with parties that Celia never wanted to go to, and in the end never wanted to leave. There was always at least one individual there the likes of whom she’d never met before.

  Quite a tall girl, she had that I’m-a-cut-above-you look on her face, she could feel it, standing there gazing – somewhat myopically – through the smoky air. Mickey, the observer, was looking at her, smiling at the disdain. He took to her immediately: a fair young damsel with her chin raised, looking everyone over, long eyelashes, intelligence dancing all over her face, along with that uppity air.

  ‘I’ll bet you don’t come from around here,’ he said, an entrancing burr to his voice. ‘Drink?’

  ‘Nor you, I’ll wager,’ she tilted her head. ‘You’d be from across the Oirish Sea, now.’

  ‘Stop it.’ Although he was grinning. ‘You have to live there for a bit first.’ He was appraising her, so she drew her eyebrows together ferociously and let her tongue loll out of the side of her mouth. That made him laugh. He had a sweet expression with a dimple in his left cheek.

  ‘I’m from the Antipodes – please don’t call it the underside of the earth and I’ll make no more remarks about auld Oirland.’

  ‘Ah, you’re a grouse sheila, I can see that,’ he said, and chortled at himself in a light, throaty way; to her ear just the hint of a gurgle that suggested a smoker of long standing, say from the age of seven, and it could well carry him off one day.

  They talked, drink for drink, for an hour. A pretty kettle of fish! A bitter pill to swallow and other such phrases he would say, leaning away in disbelief at her remarks, unearthing old tropes in a tone that reminded Celia of a long-ago uncle: sayings uttered with a frown and not a scintilla of irony. Very soon of course, since she was a bright young woman, she saw that he was indeed taking the Mickey.

  He went on to spirits. ‘Irish whiskey,’ he said, ‘with an e in it.’ She shook her head, downed her last beer and asked for a tonic water.

  What she liked most about him was, there was none of that keeping his guard up; indeed he allowed himself to be vulnerable, openly laughing at her jokes. But strange to say, the more they talked, when they got onto their latest theatre experiences, the more his Irish accent slipped up – into a top form of English that sounded the way W.B. Yeats would have spoken. Was it just in pubs he assumed a Hollywood version of Paddy who’d just come out of the bog, to cross the Irish Sea into Liverpool?

  They did not seek out a hallway or bedroom but stumbled away through the fog down Gloucester Road, arm in arm for support. He got her to say her phone number slowly, then said: Right, he’d stored it in his memory. I’ll bet, she thought, but it was coloured with regret that she’d probably see no more of him.

  He called her three days later, on the very day Marcia applied to share her flat. Marcia was from Hull, in Yorkshire. ‘Ool!’ cried Celia, and luckily Marcia thought it amusing, or smiled and pretended to. Celia laughed and looked the other woman up and down frankly. Marcia did a more oblique assessment of the what, slightly younger girl? Nevertheless it was one of those moments where two people new to each other understood the potential for connection.

  Marcia was looking for acting work while selling bed linen, and Celia said that she’d met this director chap at a party the other night who was mounting a play sometime soon. Marcia smiled and raised an eyebrow.

  ‘What play is that?’

  ‘Well … to tell you the truth we’d had a few drinks and I can’t remember whether he told me the name of it.’

  But, Celia pushed on, there might be a job for herself, painting sets. He seemed to know people. Why didn’t she arrange a meeting for the three of them to talk – it could perhaps kill two birds? It would probably be in a pub, the kind of place she imagined Mickey liked to have his meetings.

  Marcia – it was pretty obvious – had the trace of a doubt about this rush of enthusiasm. But all of a sudden she crinkled her quite lovely, green eyes and gave the girl a stunning smile. Celia saw exactly then that she wanted to know this slightly-built, composed woman, whose laughter was an indrawn ahhah rather than any vulgar explosion.

  ‘Actually, Marcia,’ said Celia, who was beginning to talk like an English person, ‘he’s looking for a place to live as well, and I mentioned that I had taken on a largish flat.’

  Marcia shrugged. ‘The place is spacious enough to accommodate three people, don’t you think? And the extra rent money would help. Though we should consider him in the harsh light of day, wouldn’t you agree?’ As if she and Celia were already in league.

  Celia grinned. ‘Couldn’t agree more.’

  With swift follow-through, Celia set up a lunch. The two women arrived early at the Cock and Bull, ordered lemon, lime and bitters and settled themselves at a corner table.

  ‘I like the English pub,’ said Celia. ‘They’re cosy and welcoming – even to dogs.’

  ‘Though oddly, not to children, you’ll note.’ Marcia looked around, eyeing the fixtures.

  ‘I’d never realised that.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ then added, ‘I did quite a bit of hard work, long hours, in a pub, years ago.’

  Celia tried to pin down the emphasis and waited to hear more, but the lifting of Marcia’s head and a look towards the back wall told her that no stories would be aired today. Just then Mickey arrived nicely on cue.

  Between the three of them they knew the plays that were showing, who was producing them, the actors’ names, and Mickey even knew one of the angry young writers in Sloane Square’s Theatre Royal. A heady current buzzed between them. Perhaps only Marcia knew that this element would always have a buckled quality, nevertheless an understanding of friendship was tacitly reached.

  As for any accommodation arrangement, Mickey and Marcia clicked. At least this was how it appeared to Celia. Yet Mickey also had an eye to the Australian girl: his cobber, as he liked to call her. She meanwhile treated him with an eye-rolling, casual indifference that young women usually reserve for brothers. Men didn’t interest her, she liked to say.

  As it happened Mickey had indeed landed the title of artistic director for a forthcoming
new play and gave Marcia the contact for auditions and Celia the stage manager’s number. Flushed with anticipation they ordered a bottle of cheap wine with their pork pies.

  He seemed uncomplicated. Though why would a talented young man born into a wealthy Dublin family – something that reluctantly emerged from him – and had attended Trinity College in Dublin, then Cambridge … why impersonate a navvy? From the facts that slipped out when they touched on their childhood, the two women realised he had determinedly taken a few steps down the class scale, making a laddish caricature of himself. And with attendant drinking habits, so that, who knows? – maybe he would be taken seriously as a true artist? This was the kind of conundrum Celia liked to ponder: whether he saw his reconstructed self as a means of gaining recognition in the theatre.

  Marcia at the beginning thought he was a failed actor who used the disguise – since you can’t mask your background all the time – to better practise his natural charm. Girls like rascals. It was a capricious thing as far as she could see, the changing stamp of his speech – his voice – that most intimate part of us. She would later reach the conclusion that, in this new identity, he forgot who he really was and where he had come from, as the old saying went.

  After a modest success in Leeds then, this made-over Michael Flynn (distant cousin of Errol, he claimed) was an up-and-coming theatre man of the year. As an actor he hadn’t cut the mustard – this frank admission came from himself.

  ‘But my agent, so-called, has never got me anything worthwhile,’ he added. ‘An old luvvie who’s more interested in courting playwrights, promoting himself.’

  ‘Some of them are lazy,’ Marcia conceded.

  ‘But I’ve been saving my energy for this big one,’ he answered.

  ‘Well, here’s to it,’ Celia raised her glass, meeting two other pairs of eyes.

  The dreams of those whose passion is to tread the boards, put on the paint, offer their own interpretation and hear the drug of applause! In the event, Marcia’s role was cut and she was given a walk-on part, Celia painted the sets satisfactorily but the production ended after a short run and a lukewarm public response.

  Mickey wouldn’t be put down. When he wasn’t drinking he was writing, or talking his way into free tickets, going to every production around. ‘Getting a holistic picture,’ as he put it, and the hint of a swagger.

  ‘Holistic picture. Silly bugger,’ said Celia to Marcia later. ‘Still, he’s sure got the patter. To woo financiers, I mean.’

  Marcia exhaled smoke away from her friend who had given up smoking. ‘Yes. But he’s also rather too much the gentleman when push comes to shove, don’t you think? It’s not such a principled profession we’re in.’

  The months went by and the trio scooted about town like true Londoners, gauging the old city’s moods and discovering its secrets. They drank cheap wine with scratch meals, Marcia made pots of tea and they talked theatre, literature and the latest headlines. Politics they scanned but treated scornfully as someone else’s concern.

  What Mickey liked to call a threesome was thus established in the large flat in Earls Court: a sweeping kitchen/living room and three bedrooms, though it was clear which way the wind was blowing, as far as Celia could see, looking at Marcia and him together. Mickey was scrupulously chivalrous, inviting Celia along to shows or pubs he and Marcia were going to, and Marcia wanted her with them as well. Unless he was being crafty – could that be so? She and Marcia became good buddies, a word Londoners at that time were using, and Celia for the first time in her life had a true female friend.

  ‘Did you see in The Standard,’ Celia said to Mickey one day, ‘that scientists are storing male sperm so that it can last for hundreds of years.’

  ‘Why would they want to do that when the real walking, talking homo sapiens is right in front of them?’

  ‘It means you can create future generations from la crème de la crème males, first class genes. The duds will be a thing of the past.’

  ‘And what about the dud women?’

  ‘There are no dud women.’

  ‘Ah, of course not,’ he said, putting his feet up, exhaling smoke from his cigarette.

  ‘Think of it,’ Celia went on, ‘the male of the species could actually become redundant. Without their pernicious influence on politics and women, the world would be a better place.’

  ‘You could go into politics yourself with that line pet, or become a stand-up comedian; they’re one and the same anyway. And what about me? Would my sperm be acceptable? Or am I pernicious?’

  ‘To be sure we’d keep you on our books Michael – you do no harm. Not much, anyway.’

  It was early times, halcyon days they separately thought, many years later.

  The rhythms of living were frequently out of step and out of time for Celia. Back in Australia very early in her green days, to steal a little bit of Dylan Thomas, when Guy Fawkes Night was still marked – almost on her very own birthday date as it happened and therefore something of significance – she’d learned about the dark intrigue of that night, the burning of the Guy at the stake. As an eight-year-old she regarded the dummy and saw, smelled, the cooking of his body. The faux memory was fused with the faint stench of the roasting potatoes, charred and horrible yet tasting delicious. She had been too young to separate the historic image from the present. Such thoughts would have been better kept for a few more years. But by the time she’d grown up a little more, firecracker night was decreed as dangerous and unlawful and she lost herself in yearning, wanting back those fireworks and the effigy, the charred potatoes and the glow of people’s faces around the fire, alight with laughter.

  What a complicated procedure growing up had been! When she was sixteen and in the workforce, she had only been to the theatre twice, with her school. But a young woman at her office told her one day about an evening at the theatre the night before. It was in the 1950s and Waiting for Godot had just opened. Intrigued by the title Celia wanted to know whether it meant God, or what, and the other woman answered what she’d understood by Beckett’s play – that it could be God, or the revolution, or your life beginning, anything. She said this in such a confidential, all-embracing way that Celia was made to feel older. She made up her mind to see the play.

  Five years later she was still in her home city, changing jobs, looking out of windows, mooning about. Again an older woman said to her: You know, you’ve got no ties Celia, that’s the advantage of being alone. You can do whatever you want to. She took up fencing, the en garde! variety, and then dropped it, learned to tap dance and then ice skate, then joined a painting class. It was all part of a burning restlessness, each activity coming to nothing, yet adding to her small store of knowledge. Still she kept searching, thinking of distant places.

  She saved her money and wondered about the matter of good timing, living in a certain time in history. That was it: being young and ignorant she couldn’t quite grasp what she was taking part in! Only later would she get it. Going with the flow, she took up ballroom dancing for a while, whirling and swaying to the strains of Victor Silvester – who was just about on his way out of fashion, as jiving to Elvis Presley gained momentum.

  There were lots of short Italian boys at the dance studios in those days. No one told her and she didn’t ask, but she gradually learned they were from the south of Italy, the poor regions that had been plundered not only by the Huns and the Vandals but by their own. Northern Italy had taken over any manufacturing that belonged to the south and left them with gelato, pizza, pasta and olive trees. Hordes of stunted Italians, deprived of meat dishes, got on boats and made the long journey to Australia for a life that offered more justice, education, good food.

  Celia danced with them, with these short-legged young men with beautiful faces on noble heads and taught them how to hold her, their right hand not too low on her back. They spoke little English and their eyes were perplexed, obedient towards these tall young women who couldn’t wait for the dance to be over.

  In
hindsight it filled her with shame.

  Bad timing stalked her. When she made her escape from Australia, she hitch-hiked that first European winter through Germany and Austria to see Mozart’s little house in Salzburg, the museum with his very instruments. Somehow it didn’t have the impact it should have – there was no sense of the sanctity she’d wanted to feel – and she thought it was because she’d got there too late. Too much time had elapsed and there wasn’t anyone around her to note the import of such a sight. She swung between the sensations of being too early or too late on the scene; like an unsuccessful party, those whom she wished to commune with hadn’t yet arrived or had already left.

  All of that adolescent anxiety was in the past. Now she was in London, had joined forces with Marcia and Mickey and was no longer that gauche ignoramus. The previous year, on an ocean liner that had taken four weeks to reach Tilbury Docks, she had chatted with a Sydney man in the Second Class bar who had talked seriously to her about the Australian national psyche. In a tiny undeveloped island called Bali a smiling guide showed them a temple and gave them a humble explanation of his faith, comparing it to the one she had learnt. In Bombay she walked along a street and saw a rat crouching quite close to a baby sleeping in a gutter. A woman approached her for money and Celia, breast heaving in distress, gave her half the contents of her purse. In Port Said she rode sedately on a camel led by a man in a long white dress where she saw the outline of his erection as he smiled up at her. Berthed finally in London she felt a cold she had never experienced. But nothing could dampen her spirits: her head was so full of recent sights and sounds she could barely sleep for excitement.

  It was the end of April and her landlady assured her that spring would come. Surely if she kept staring at the ground the crocuses would appear? In the first week she found work in an office and proceeded to pack into her life a score of joys London had to offer: concerts, heaps of theatre, galleries and the like. And for nearly four months she had endured fog, snow (unusual for London, they all said), frost, rain and bone-numbing cold. The stubborn memory of that first winter however was the act of buying The Guardian at the tube station every morning from a woman whose hand held out for the fourpence was gnarled and blackened from the coins, the nose on a pinched face chapped and reddened, underneath a dirty-looking cloth cap. Buying a paper had never been disheartening before this. The transaction was impersonal: she never met your eye to say good morning. There wasn’t time: here was another customer, another fourpence.