80

Now you have those letters in your hand it is easy enough for you take Phoebe's side and look at me as a fool, or something worse. It is your privilege and if I did not wish you to have it, I would have kept the letters hidden. Yet I did not come into possession of them until 1930, when I had the indignity of buying them from a wizened man in the saloon bar of the Railway Hotel in Kyneton. He sat at the little round table, eating a musk stick, drinking stout, and dealing out his wares with yellowed finger. He offered me an envelope marked "personal effects" which contained postcards depicting Cossacks raping village women, then a comic strip of a baby with a ten-inch cock fucking a big-titted woman with a mole on her shoulder. Then my wife's letters to Annette. Jonathon Oakes, for that is who it was, did not recognize me and I did not ask him how his fortunes had fallen so low. I paid him five shillings for his stolen letters.

So this knowledge about my wife not only cost me pain, but also money. But it is yours. Take it. It goes together with the rest.

Yet I must tell you that Phoebe had not been able, or had no wish to, express herself so clearly to me. She did not deny me caresses. She did not fail to greet me with a kiss, to inquire about my work, to fetch my slippers – the slippers she appears to have hated were a gift to me from her. We played with Charles together. We pretended to love him together. My darling expected me, somehow, to be a mind-reader.

Doubtless I expected the same of her. I imagined my passion for building was shared by everyone. I did not doubt that it was understood: that my ruling love was for human warmth, for people gathered in rooms, talking, laughing, sharing stews and puddings and talk. Aeroplanes and cars seemed, in comparison, cold and soulless things, of no consequence in comparison to the family we were building. For the first time in my life I felt I had a place on earth.

But I did not explain myself. I felt it obvious. I thought my building was a language anyone could understand. Did they imagine I added rooms for no reason, that it was merely a hobby, a silly obsession? I built a room for a next child. I began tentatively. It rose as a question. I hung pink wallpaper. Phoebe admired it. I paced around her with a bucket of paste in my hand. It was a courtship dance. I have seen birds do the same in Mallee country. They build a mound. They show it. No words are spoken, but it is clearly understood.

So when Phoebe smiled and kissed me, her lips and eyes erased certain matters in the document I had so rashly signed. Still I did not contradict the cautious calendar my wife drew up. Neither did I ignore the details of the agreement in regard to ejaculatio, not, that is, until one Sunday afternoon when my wife, inflamed with passion after two hours of dangerous flying, clenched my buttocks tight and dug her nails in hard and then – and only then -I ripped forth a joyful sob of semen, a throb, a dob, a teeming swarming flood of life.

It was only then I realized that she could no more read my building than I could read her poetry.

81

The real bitterness did not start there, with Phoebe splashing water up her cunt, but on a July morning in 1923 while Charles slopped his spoon around a plate of soggy Weeties and Horace stood cooking bacon on the stove.

Phoebe left the room to vomit. When she returned she walked up to me and spat her morning sickness in my face.

"You bastard," she said.

I wiped the foul-smelling spittle from my face, dabbed at the small splash on my waistcoat, rolled my napkin and placed it carefully in its ring. I blinked. I walked outside. Not even Molly said a word.

Phoebe followed me. "I want to talk to you," she said.

I stopped. Everyone in that little kitchen must have heard – my voice as dead as stone, Phoebe's quivering and only just controlled.

"I will have this child," she said. "All right?"

"All right."

"That will make you happy?"

I did not answer. How could I answer about "happy" when I saw the liquid hatred in her eyes.

"Then you have my word. You don't need to guard me. I will fly for the first six months, but not the last three. I will spend the last three months writing poetry and then I will give you the child."

And from that point, with my feet frozen in the frost-thick grass outside the kitchen window, I became a different man.

I did everything in my power to regain my wife's affections. The more I tried, the more pitiful she found me. She was one of those people who admire strength and despise weakness. The more I kotowed to her the more she scorned me. She ridiculed me openly.

And yet she did not remove the possibility of hope.

82

One September afternoon, two king parrots settled on the gables of the house while Horace sat in the sunshine peeling potatoes and I cut out fabric for a wing section Phoebe had ripped on a fence post down at Werribee. It was Phoebe, looking critically over my shoulder, who saw the parrots.

"Shush," she said, although nobody was talking.

The king parrot is a magnificent bird, and the clear blue of a Melbourne spring day sets them off perfectly. Their heads and chest are red, their wings and backs green, their long tails green. They stood on the roof and preened each other, and I, estranged from my wife, was overcome with loneliness.

They did not stay long. They landed, preened, looked around, and flew away.

I expressed my disappointment.

"Why would they stay?" said Phoebe, walking to the house. "There are no decent trees. There is nothing for them here. If you had chosen some land with decent trees there would be parrots all year round."

"Not all year," said Horace quietly. He was the only person permitted to contradict my wife. "They follow the blossoms."

"Different parrots," she said, "at different times."

"That is true," said Horace. "But in any case, we have splendid water birds which have their own charm."

"It is parrots that I love," said Phoebe. "It is parrots that I miss."

I held up the fabric to the light. Charles bellowed somewhere in the house. It was, I think, the day he ate Horace's tobacco, and it was also the day I resolved to buy Phoebe parrots.

83

I bought the king parrot from an old bushie in a pub in Exhibition Street. I placed it on the kitchen table on a Friday night.

The gift acted like honey on Phoebe's bitter tongue. Her eyes shone. "Oh," she said, "how beautiful. How splendid. Herbert, you must build it a cage."

"It has a cage," said Molly, "a very expensive one too."

"No, no. It deserves a big cage. A room."

Was I suspicious? Did I perhaps detect the faintest whiff of irony? Was there any there to smell? I still think this first enthusiasm of Phoebe's was genuine, and it was only later, when she saw me working on that cage, that she allowed her bitterness to warp her original spontaneous feeling, to convert it into something artful, ironic and sarcastic.

I did not understand poetry in those days. I imagined it involved rhymes, and if not rhymes at least words. But now I know a poem can take any form, can be a sleight of hand, a magician's trick, be built from string and paper, fish or animals, bricks and wire.

I never knew I was a hired hand in the construction of my wife's one true poem. I knew only, in the midst of its construction, that Horace would puzzle me with his sympathetic eyes which would not hold mine when I confronted him. I observed how he left the room when cages were discussed, how he picked up Charles and plopped him on his pudgy hip and took him outside to play.

Sonia, growing up inside my wife's womb, became accustomed to the noise of hammering and sawing – the king parrot was merely the first bird I housed beneath my spreading roof. My family soon included lorikeets and parakeets, western rosellas, gold-winged friar birds and a cat bird from Queensland.