The next couple of weeks were a joy all round. Rush’s presence had taken out a choice in Daniel’s life that probably wasn’t there to begin with. It angered him somewhat that he was relieved from making a decision, but then he had responsibilities and so it wasn’t really his decision to make. And while Jean went on about the impropriety of a mother having a dalliance with her daughter’s teacher, it was obvious she felt relief too.
Daniel enjoyed tête-à-têtes with Juliet, although brief, as each took it in turns to host the other’s kid, for Jack was either at Mel’s place, or Mel was at their place, but rarely the two apart.
He enjoyed that these exchanges were not chaperoned by Jean, her sense of danger having all but passed. He appreciated this ‘freedom’ despite the implicit slight to his character. Was he really so ‘safe’ after all?
Yes, probably.
But was he being honourable? Or merely honourable by default? And what arrogance on his own part to think his feelings were in any small way reciprocated.
Jean warmed slightly to Mel, but nonetheless worried she was dragging Jack away from more manly pursuits in which his older brother engaged, and which he was normally inclined to avoid anyway. She didn’t have much truck with all this listening to music, or gazing in art books, or making costumes, choreographing dances, composing songs, constructing pictures, putting on shows; in short, all the stuff of indoor activity in the height of summer.
It wasn’t as if Mel, or Jack for that matter, was entirely averse to outdoor engagement. In truth, much the opposite, with all their tree climbing, bike riding, nocturnal walks between each other’s properties. It’s just that it all involved an imaginative, fantastical component which bothered Jean, but in which Daniel could find no fault. Of course, Juliet did not even seem to notice, it felt so natural to her; the infinite rubric of make-believe.
Jack and Mel became wonderfully helpful to Daniel, with shifting the sheep from one paddock to the next, gathering up firewood, collecting the eggs from the hens, and all the other farmyard duties. Mel especially became quite an excellent little drover in their musters. She asked why they didn’t have dogs to assist and Jack showed her the two stone mounds behind the settler’s huts in remembrance of their kelpies. Telling her the story, she promised never to move them.
This all went well till Jean began to involve Simon in her domestic chores and activities, something from which she’d previously exempted him given his all-important dream of becoming a state footballer. The outcome was to make Simon resent, not Jean, but Jack and Mel all the more. Daniel wished Jean would not respond that way and tried to encourage Jack and Mel to help her, but when they would run between the clotheslines, pressing their faces against the sheets to mimic ghosts, and whatever other tomfoolery they put their genius for joy into, she would get so unaccountably exasperated. It wasn’t as if they didn’t do the work; they just elevated it to a game. And this was life, her life now, and she saw they were making fun of it. Rather than making it fun.
The suns, whose rays are all ablaze…
They really knew their worth, the sun and her.
For Jack’s part, he got to know Rush better too. His full name was Dashiell Landon Rush, ‘Dash’ for short. There was some fun about the middle name thing when it was discovered Jack did not possess one. He was simply Jack Bennett. Mel was in fact Mallika Evangeline Jeffries, and Juliet was Juliet Poppy Jeffries.
Rush behaved much as he did at school. Which would have been dreadful if he’d been any of the other teachers. But he was friendly, cordial to kid and adult alike. Only, Jack noted a strangeness between him and Juliet, a secret shared. When he could, Dash would drive her all the way to the doctors in Adelaide for ‘routine’ tests.
The two would sit on the porch and say nothing for hours at a time, or laugh and joke uproariously. Once, Jack saw Juliet sobbing into Dash’s arms when he’d run back to the house alone from the Cubby House to collect more paper for their drawings—Mel was too busily engaged in gluing to suffer an interruption—when Jack chanced on the, to him, inexplicable scene. They had neither seen him and nor did he tell Mel out of a tacit understanding with himself that he should never speak wherefore he did not fully comprehend.
On Daniel’s part, he first met Dash at the stile. Dash was riding the rather bored mare from the neighbour’s property beyond Juliet’s at breakneck speed up and down the paddock.
‘Hope you don’t mind,’ he said, reigning the mare in to a splash of sods. ‘Did an awful lot of polo one time. A snob’s game for the most part, but the only way to get noticed in the rarefied circles I asphyxiated in. Dash.’
Daniel reached up and took his hand.
Daniel had never expected to meet Rush and had not prepared an attitude with which to confront the reality. He rather felt he should have hated the man but instead found him instantly likeable and quite genial, and he took a great interest in Daniel’s scheme for pumping water from the creek to the concrete troughs in the paddocks not fronting the water. And how Daniel had worked out schemes of natural downhill pressure for the excess to run off into their somewhat haphazardly planted and thought-out garden. It was a level of interest no one could have maintained without it proceeding from a genuine core, and so their in-depth conversation on pipe diameters, faucets, pump engines and other farming matters was one of the most unexpected afternoons of his life.
He felt afterwards something he’d been unable to place before, and that was an acute sense of not having anyone with whom to share these banal intimacies. He and Jean ‘lived together’ in only the most superficial sense of that phrase.
‘Actually,’ said Rush, as he mounted his horse at the termination of their first encounter, ‘I was never really accepted by the polo crowd. I was adopted by a well-to-do white family, and tried so hard to fit in, but… well… to this day, I don’t know who I am.’
Daniel pawed at the ground with his foot, like an agitated, tired horse. ‘I can only imagine how hard that was for you.’
Dash grinned and squeezed Daniel’s shoulder. ‘But that’s the point—you imagine!’
Daniel admitted to himself that Rush was a massively attractive individual. For some reason, women could say that out loud about other women but men could not say the same about other men, because it brought out ugly words. Daniel felt he had little to be proud of, but he was honest enough to admit Rush was the sort of person he wished he could have been, or at the very least properly befriend.
Because he was lonely. He was infinitely lonely. There wasn’t a single bloke in town he could properly call a mate. His son was his best friend.
And the love of his life, the woman with whom this Rush was spending so much time, was both within physical reach and never further from his arms.
Besides, he had his family.
Like many a miserable married couple, he and Jean were putting their energies into their children. Yet not even in this were they united. They had chosen one each.
Jean did drag Jack to the pool one Saturday with her and Simon, insisting Daniel stay at home. It would be just her, her two boys and she even condescended to include Mel.
The concrete surrounding the pool burnt the soles of their feet. Jack and Mel made their way to the shallow end. Jack normally took forever to get in—if he wasn’t ‘encouraged’ with a push, that is, from the older boys—but this time he jumped straight in of his own accord. The gasp exploded up his body, and he splashed furiously to get warm. Even in summer the pool was always cold. Mel got in the way he normally did—by increments—making a great deal of fuss in the process.
They stayed in the shallows since the big kids, including Simon and Troy, the friend he always seemed to hang off, were bombing in the deep end. The year before, the postman’s son had drowned that way. He had jumped in but was unable to return to the surface with all the other kids unthinkingly bombing on top of him. They weren’t meant to bomb anymore, but for some reason no one stopped them.
When Jack and Mel got out, they walked freely on the hot concrete this time, their wet soles affording their protection. They bought a Redskin each for twenty cents from the canteen then Mel followed Jack’s example and found a bare stretch of ground to lie on. There they lay a good while, in a wet outline of their own bodies, two dead kids who hadn’t yet been removed from the scene of the crime. Arms folded in front, they eyed each other, blinking in the reflected glare from the sun on the blinding concrete.
Slowly, as they dried, the ground would become intolerably hot again. And so another quick dip, and then another, until the lengthening shadows of the trees made even the concrete cool. By which time, they would no doubt complain of sore backs, necks and shoulders from the sun, and peel for the next few days.
Jean had spent a pleasant afternoon tanning and chatting with the other mothers about all the local scandals. Simon didn’t bother them but Jack did notice his brother splashing a girl by the slide and trying to get her to laugh with him. When they left, she didn’t even look at Simon. But Simon was looking at Jack with Mel hard enough. He was searching for something in them, like there was a secret to their bond he would never unlock.
Simon turned away from them. But he could not so easily turn from his sense of gnawing dread. For whatever was the cause of his failure, it was welling from within.
On one of the dusky, purple eves, Mel and Jack were with Daniel in the shed, where Daniel had renewed his fervour for handyman activities. Mel got up to put on Borodin’s Prince Igor. Gently, Daniel stayed her hand and selected ‘Shangri-La’ by the Kinks instead.
Daniel and Jack watched Mel carefully to see if she liked it. After a few bars, her face lit up. For Jack, the moment called to mind the first dinner he’d had at Juliet and Mel’s house, as they watched nervously to see if he liked the food they lay before him.
It was more rewarding than he’d ever dared dream, this opportunity to share a life with another.
In the Cubby House, in the paddocks, by the creek, in the shed, Mel taught Jack about the classical composers and how to sing, and Jack taught Mel to draw.
Summer ended, and with it Miss Jackson’s six weeks respite. She did not return, while Rush stayed on. Autumn passed by. Winter came next and with it—what could not be so relied upon—the rains. They flattened the grass, swelled the creeks, and greened the land.
Daniel seemed equally renewed, and politically engaged. To Jack and Mel, he outlined Whitlam’s sweeping reforms. How the Prime Minister had abolished conscription. How he’d secured equal pay for women. Introduced no-fault divorce. Established a family court. Reduced the stigma around single mothers. Rolled out mothers’ benefits and welfare for the homeless. Provided federal funding to state schools. Set up social planning and community development initiatives. And brought Australia’s sewerage network into the 20th century!
He’d also inaugurated free tertiary education. This made Daniel especially glad for Jack; for Mel too, if she and her mother stayed in Australia to enjoy it. And for Simon, of course, if he ever wished to take advantage of such forward-thinking.
Whitlam had prohibited the reinstatement of the death penalty. Stamped out legislative forms of racial discrimination. Initiated land rights for the dispossessed original inhabitants, the Aborigines.
His achievements weren’t solely national. He’d turned about Australia’s xenophobic foreign policy, through recognising China, granting Papua New Guinea its independence, and renegotiating a less servile relationship with the US.
He was also unusual in being a Prime Minister not engaged exclusively with sport. He’d established a national gallery, a council for the arts, and radio stations for the young, which Daniel would play for Jack and Mel. Under Whitlam’s stewardship, the Australian film industry was also thriving. Whitlam believed that in the arts, not sport, could be found the true soul of a nation.
But perhaps most transformative of all, he’d brought into existence a free universal healthcare system. It was a truly democratic initiative that would no doubt become the envy of other first world nations like the US.
‘God save any future government that tries to repeal that initiative,’ declared Daniel.
Jack and Mel did not understand it all, but they were infected with Daniel’s enthusiasm.
‘Of course, that’s why the opposition mongrels are being so obstructive,’ he concluded, his old dourness reinfecting his tone. ‘But I don’t see that man giving up.’
One time, at Mel and Juliet’s house, the three of them sitting in the lounge, with daylight streaming through the transom windows of coloured glass, Jack and Mel played the Kinks to Juliet. It was a startling touch for Juliet, this getting to know Daniel’s tastes in music, and him of hers, through the intermediary of their kids. For what had their actual meetings totalled in these past months—a scant half day at most? It wasn’t their musical interests alone, the two had gleaned of each other. They also shared political sympathies—indeed, were aligned on numerous topics and issues. Married, almost, in thought…
It was the oddest, most enjoyable, but also excruciatingly sad pattern, this communication through the medium of youth neither any more possessed.
Yet all the while, Juliet’s fate preyed on her. Her imminent, inescapable fate. Every little pain, the slightest headache, the smallest dizzy spell, she saw as a symptom. How soon till she would need Dash to move in? Had she asked too much of him? Yes, demonstrably. In such a place, Dash could never truly be himself.
Why wasn’t she back in France with her friends? Mel, with hers? It would have been much simpler for Dash, too; more understanding on her part. He’d graciously complied with her last wish: to come home—her home, not his. But had Mel a friend in Paris to equal Jack? She looked at the large eyes of the two kids opposite her and realised she would need to speak before crying, before giving in.
Too soon. Too soon.
No, it wasn’t over for her yet and she would still live while she might.
She leant forward on her mauve, tufted lounge, its threadbare state hidden under a slip cover, and addressed the two kids on the one opposite.
‘Jack, why don’t you come to the opera tomorrow night with Mel, Dash and me? It’s Lakmé, by Delibes.’
Mel pounced on the idea. ‘Please, Jack. That’s where I get my name.’
Jack’s old hesitancy gone, but still some of his indecision remaining, he muttered, ‘Yep. Okay.’
‘And afterwards you can stay the night. Can’t he, Mum? In the Cubby House?’
Jack’s eyes lit up, but then a stricken look crossed his fair features. ‘I’ll… I’ll have to ask my mum.’
Dressed in a sheer black gown with her hair up, Juliet was glad no one had recognised her when they entered Don Dunstan’s Festival Hall, and found their seats on one of the strange balconies, shaped like the rubber mouldings on sixties kitchenware. She’d never sung at the venue herself; Whitlam had only opened it two years earlier.
The orchestra finished warming up and the lights dimmed. The audience hushed as the royal red curtains parted.
A wonderful origami garden was revealed, resplendent with jade paper birds, the whole glade lit in dazzling colours. Mel watched with great interest as Lakmé, daughter of a Brahmin priest, sang with her attendant—and Mel’s namesake—Mallika, in an exquisite pairing.
‘The famous ‘Flower Duet’,’ her mother whispered beside her.
So the garden was known of before, Mel thought. And it would be known of again, no doubt, glimpsed through the door in the wall.
Alas, silly people in their English foppery invaded its sanctity, and Lakmé and Mallika fled. Lakmé re-emerged from a temple half-hidden among the foliage in an apricot dress, trimmed with cherry-red, to intercept the least absurd of the English gentry, Gerald.
Juliet had played the part of Lakmé five years earlier, in Vienna. Like the soprano before her, she too had been described as possessing a peerless legato, divinely controlled. But now she wondered if she should have sacrificed her mastery, teetered closer to the edge, and even gone over it. Considered a formidable talent, what heights might she have reached then, having now been acquainted with her imminent extinction, and the insights that brings?
The burgeoning love duet between Lakmé and Gerald touched her more acutely now than when she had sung it herself. The colour, the exoticism of this underrated opera! Each male part with its mellifluous arias, each female role with its ardent, sophisticated yearning.
Exuding confidence and strutting forth, Gerald began his persuasive seduction, with ascending and descending intervals, the inhalations and exhalations of an unquenched passion. Lakmé joined in and the irresistible seesawing in emotion was repeated, as their voices intertwined in long and longing flights, two souls briefly dovetailed. An aching, if imperfect, conjoining of hearts.
Juliet gripped the arms of her seat, bumping Dash beside her. He, meanwhile, was embroiled in his own thoughts and emotions, equally inspired by the spectacle before him. Memories of past loves, both requited and spurned, wearily sought anchorage in his mind. It finally occurred to him how to explain to Mel why he and Juliet had not ended up together. As always with him, it would take the form of a story.
Juliet stopped herself gasping at the aria’s termination, and looked down to see that tears also gemmed her daughter’s eyes. They were each beset by a parallel grief. For Mel was gazing at the empty seat beside them. Jack’s.
Toco Productions 