67

Horace Dunlop was what is known as a Rawleigh's man – it was his job to travel door to door selling the jars and bottles of milky medication which bear the slogan "For Man or Beast". Yet to call him a Rawleigh's man is to do a disservice to everyone, to the real Rawleigh's men who went about their jobs in a methodical way and fed their families through their labours, and to Horace himself who was nearly a lawyer and almost a poet.

It has always puzzled me, puzzles me still, how he could have lost his way so completely that he ended up at that isolated spot on the Maribyrnong River. I am tempted to explain it all by means of an epileptic fit: the poet left unconscious, slumped on the seat of his cart while Toddy, his gelding, wandered feeding all the way to Phoebe's door. Yet this will not do. I have seen Horace have one of his fits and it is not the sort of thing that leaves a man on the seat he started out on. It is a wild, banging, eye-rolling, tongue-swallowing, terrible thing and had the fit struck him whilst sitting in his cart he would have catapulted himself to earth to continue his arm-flinging amongst the roadside thistles.

So let us not concern ourselves with how the fellow got there. It is of no importance.

There he is, clear as day, sitting at the kitchen table, speaking to Phoebe who is watching the poet spread lard on one more slice of bread and marvelling that any man can eat so much.

Horace Dunlop was a broad heavy man in his early twenties. He had unusually short legs, a barrel chest, an exceedingly large, closely cropped head. The features of his face were all too small for the large canvas they were painted on and perhaps they appeared more intense because of it: the small intelligent eyes, the mouth with the cupid's bow that would never quite be swallowed up by the corpulence that would later overtake him – even when he was at his most grotesque the eyes would command interest and the lips demand affection.

Horace had no love of lard. He explained this all to Phoebe while he licked it from his short thick fingers. He ate lard to ease the pain in his tongue which had been pierced (well-meaningly) with a hatpin during one of his fits of petit mal epilepsy.

He had written a poem to celebrate the event: "The poet, tongue-pierced, / Trussed, gagged, / By butcher's wife in Wil-liamstown."

I would never have viewed the funny-looking fellow as a competitor for my wife's affections, and in this I was both right and wrong. I doubt they ever shared much more than a peck on the cheek, and yet, I fear, there are poet's caresses that are more intimate for not being visible.

While I went to Billinsky's to buy my tin billy full of bortsch, I saw no more than one more steamed-up little cafe full of drunks in overcoats. I did not recognize the prostitutes and did not know it was a place for poets and artists to boast to each other and recite their works out loud.

I brought back soup from Billinsky's. I won't say it was not appreciated, but what Horace brought from there was treasured more. He spent his evenings drinking tea with jam in it and trying to overhear more prestigious conversations at other tables. He also knew Dawson's wine bar in Carlton where short-story writers and housebreakers rubbed drunken shoulders. He knew little rooms in Collins Street where painters lived in bare rooms divided by Japanese screens, rooming houses in East Melbourne whose moth-eaten felt letter racks held letters that might one day be published in books, whose polished brown linoleum floors led to tiny apartments where people waited until being called to fame in London or New York.

In short, he filled my darling's head with nonsense. He recited his poems and listened to her while Molly tilled the clay-heavy garden beds close by and kept a suspicious eye turned on the events inside the kitchen.

It was to Horace that Phoebe revealed her pregnancy, not me. It was with him that she discussed the complicated state of her emotions produced by the little gilled creature who stirred within her: blood, birth, life, death, fear, and the final decision that she could not, no matter what guilt it caused her, have this child.

The papers that year were full of abortionists being arrested and patients charged. She had already visited Dr Percy McKay who had since been arrested and put in Pentridge Gaol, but not before he had informed her that her body played tricks on her. She was not one month pregnant as she imagined, but nearly three. Dr McKay's last day of freedom was partly occupied with lecturing Phoebe Badgery on the dangers of a late abortion and her perfect situation (in terms of health and financial security) to have the child. He had put no weight on aviation or poetry. He had judged her doubly fortunate to have such hobbies.

From Phoebe's point of view the situation had now become quite desperate. She was anxious, angry, guilty; and frightened of what she read in the papers. Yet, at the same time, she could watch her own drama with an appreciative eye: here she was, twenty years old, married, in Melbourne, a poet in the kitchen, an aeroplane out the window, conspiring to procure a dangerous abortion without her husband's knowledge. All these things, the authentic and the false, the theatrical and the real, were all a part of her nature and I do not mean to belittle her by pointing them out.

"What", she asked Horace Dunlop, "are we to do?"

Phoebe could co-opt people like this – she included them in her life generously, without reserve, and included theirs in hers as readily.

"What are we to do?" she asked, and the poet was flattered and frightened as a clerk given a too rapid promotion. He had no idea what to do. He was an unprepared explorer about to embark in a leaking dug-out on a dangerous journey up a fetid river.

"I will make inquiries," he said, standing. "This evening."

"No, no, you mustn't go, not yet."

Molly coughed, loudly, outside the window.

"But I must, dear lady," Horace said, mournfully arranging his cravat, "must bid adieu."

Phoebe was at the shelf I was pleased to call the mantelpiece. She dug into a large biscuit canister.

"No," Horace said, holding up his hand. "I will not permit you to buy more."

"If I must buy a bottle to maintain your presence, then that is what I'll do," Phoebe smiled. "A bottle, sir, of your excellent product. If it would make my condition disappear I would pay you a thousand pounds."

"If I could make your condition disappear I would consider myself amply rewarded with nothing more", Horace said, "than to be permitted a kiss." And he blushed bright red.

"Mr Dunlop!" Phoebe said, but she was not displeased. "You are absolutely the most immoral man I have ever met."

"A poet", said Horace, "has his own order of morality."

"My husband would kill you just the same," Phoebe smiled. "Here is the florin for your balsam but perhaps you had better give me the bottle another time; I already have four of them."

The poet hesitated. He would rather have denied himself the florin, but he was too impoverished to allow himself the luxury. He took the money and dropped it into his jacket pocket where there was nothing for it to jingle against.

"There will be no doctor in Melbourne who will touch you," he said. He was probably right. The press was in a hysteria about abortion and did not hesitate to report what grisly details came its way. "But I will arrange something."

He would have done anything for this throaty-voiced woman who spoke without moving her lips, and yet the very thing he was to arrange made him clench his thighs together in sympathetic agony and his fearful imagination was peopled with bloody instruments and tearing life.

"It is monstrously unfair," he said, "the whole thing. I would not be a woman for a million pounds."