Peter Carey: Illywhacker

Annette Davidson was a striking woman. Norman Lindsay used her as a model in Perseus amp; the Beauties which is now in the Art Gallery of Victoria. Lindsay got her to a T, not an easy thing, because although she had a proud, strong face and quite remarkable Amazonian breasts, she also had a masochistic cast to her mouth and her shoulders looked as if they were ready to mould themselves around the trunk of a man (deceptively, as it turned out).

I cannot blame her for disliking Geelong – in the end, I didn't care for it myself. Teaching at the Hermitage she got the worst of it: all those stout-legged daughters of squatters who displayed the dull certainties of their type. But it was in that mullock heap she found a muddied stone more valuable than any of the fool's gold the staff so proudly presented her with.

Phoebe was an awkward misfit. Her fingers were smudged with ink. Her knees were ingrained with dirt, her toes raw with tinea, her fingernails black and broken. She was the daughter of a bullock driver who had made his pile, and a dizzy overly-talkative ex-barmaid who did not know her place, although – Christ knows – she tried hard enough to find it.

Phoebe had a beautiful voice. She sang deliberately off-key. She had a gift for painting but "dashed off" something at the end of a lesson when everyone else was washing their brushes. It was known that she smoked cigarettes. She was one of the group known as the "Dorm 5 Co" who were suspected of active homosexual relations which, if the stories were true, left the school's more normal Sapphic romances looking almost Christian. She was known in the common room as "the little horror".

God knows what the common room said about Annette. She wore black or grey with flashes of brilliant colour: a shoulder panel of red, a pleat that opened obscenely to reveal a heart like a plum. She had a way of walking, a sort of slouch, with long strides, which may have been all very well on the boulevard St Michel but was not the thing at the Hermitage. Miss Kane, the headmistress, had reason to talk to her about this walk. She had noticed several of the older girls were imitating it.

Amongst the imitators of the Davidson walk, Phoebe was by far the most accomplished. She was in love with the new history mistress, even before her ears had been caressed by that round, soft north country accent. Within a month they had formed an alliance. Soon Phoebe (said examinations in French and history. She knew the names of the streets of Paris and many of the people who had walked on them. She knew the stations on the metro. She knew what a bidet was. She read Ruskin and learned to scorn Henry Lawson (whom her father loved with a passion) and learned to mock his bush poetry with her mentor's one-sided smile. With Annette's help and petroleum jelly she removed the ingrained dirt from her knees.

She began to imagine a place in the world where she might not only belong but also be admired, a place where there were other problems than the price of wheat or wool, or whether the waterside workers would be engaged in Yarra Street or Corio Quay.

Annette had been the subject of schoolgirls' crushes before, but she had never thought of herself as homosexual until Phoebe, who boarded during the week and went home at weekends, came creamily into her history mistress's bed on the second night of the final term.

No matter what the pleats of her dresses suggested, no matter how recklessly she walked, Annette was both cautious and sensible. She hated her enemies silently and smiled at them politely. She tried to please her employers. She attended chapel and sang the hymns out loud. She argued with Phoebe, reasoned with her sensibly and listened for footsteps in the corridor outside: but none of this was any defence against Phoebe. There was no denying the force not of her arguments which danced from peak to peak as unpredictably and carelessly as lightning but of her almost unbelievably soft lips, her smooth skin, her tender strokes, her shocking tongue and Annette Davidson (not without a tiny Protestant tremble) gave herself to her student's embraces which compared most favourably with those of the impressionist Dussoir.

I like to think it was on this night, with her ugly brown uniform and heavy brogues shucked off on to the floor, that Phoebe revealed herself as a beauty. It had occurred to no one that she might be. And when it happened it caused a terrible confusion. The boys from College and Grammar not only seemed to overcome their distaste for her vulgar background, but gave her presents of school scarves. And when the anxiously awaited invitations to the prestigious end-of-year dances began, at last, to arrive, slipped into the green-felt letter rack, to be collected and displayed like trophies on study walls, the "little horror" had more than her share. But by then Annette (cautious, careful Annette) had taken the house in Villamente Street, West Geelong, and Phoebe gave not a fig for the Manisides or Chirnfolds or the Osters or any of the other social luminaries of the Western District. She attended no dances and created a perfect scandal by tearing up an invitation to the Geelong Grammar School dance, before witnesses. She might as well have spat in the altar wine.

There were elm trees and peppercorn trees in Villamente Street and the people next door kept a cow. It was a quiet, almost rural, lower middle-class street. Phoebe (who had left the school at the end of 1918) had persuaded her parents to pay "Miss Davidson" to give her history lessons there.

Some history.

There they are now. Their conversation is as clear as crystal. I simply have to reach out and take it.

"It cannot be immoral", Phoebe says, "to have a clear idea of how one looks."

"Not as long as it doesn't become a preoccupation."

A match is struck, slicing through the squeal of pigs. Cigarette smoke streams urgently towards the ceiling.

"Oh Dicksy," Phoebe sighs, "if only there was something to make me forget it."

"That", says my bete noire, "is exactly what I mean."

Phoebe, gazing out the dusty window at the retreating pigs, knew exactly how beautiful she was. She had a creamy skin, brilliant waving red hair, long legs like a water bird's, a small waist and breasts which were just… so.

To look at a photograph you would not understand the extent of her beauty. There is no doubt that her face was not classic. The chin and lips were perfect, as if the imaginary almighty had lavished extravagant amounts of time on them and then, realizing it was getting late, had rushed on to the small nose and forehead, cramming them in where there was hardly room. In photographs the forehead looks a little low, the nose too high in the face, the magnificent chin and lips too dominant. Yet in life this was not the effect at all. Only the loveless camera shows these things in this way, blind to her strength, her spirit, the intensity of those small brown eyes, the porcelain complexion, the hypnotic way she spoke, hardly opening her mouth to allow the passage of words between her small, fine white teeth.

Annette Davidson did not doubt Phoebe's beauty. But she did not like the way Phoebe had begun to speak about it. She thought it was unhealthy, or unlucky. She brooded on the consequences but none of her insights, which were numerous, did anything to free her from her pupil.

"Your beauty", she said, "will be your downfall. You'll end up like Susan Bussell."

Phoebe groaned. "How could I be like Susan Bussell?" She turned from the window. She wore a short black dress with a flash of chartreuse on the shoulder. The light was behind her and Annette could not see the hurt in her eyes. "Susan Bussell is a cow," she said, and turned back to the street.

"A dull, complacent cow," said Annette, "who doesn't bother to think or feel because she knows she will marry a rich farmer and knows exactly what schools she will send her children to."