THE INTIMACY OF THE TABLE

DELIA FALCONER

But here I am in Sydney

At the age of sixty-one

With the clock at a quarter to bedtime

And my homework still not done.

- KENNETH SLESSOR

I was twenty when I met the great poet. It seemed to me then that I would always live in a narrow flat in a street between two steeples, that there would always be a bright arm of the harbour glimpsed sidelong through the eye’s corner as I read in trams or trains. All that year I wore a shabby cream suit with a crimson handkerchief folded at the breast and a hipflask in one pocket. This day I had a nervous quiver at the corner of my mouth, my hair was brilliantined and combed. Is it possible that I also clutched a sheaf of my own poems, in a buckram folio, marked with the date and place of their composition, in the hope that he might notice them? I admit I did.

It was late on a summer afternoon when I climbed the steps to the Journalists’ Club at the back of Central Station. The bar was dark; the sun squeezed in transverse cracks of heat through the edges of the blinds. The air was close and thick, as if it had been strained through dirty corduroy.

I saw him immediately at a table in the furthest corner, the thin neck and browless eyes I recognised from photographs, that broad and wizened head, the blue bow tie. There was a claret and a paper and a jug of water on the table. He wore a double-breasted suit, fastidiously buttoned. He made notes as he read the paper with a crabbed hand in a tiny notebook. From where I stood, ten feet away, I could hear the sharp, swift indentations of the pencil. I leant at the bar and sipped my schooner for now that I was here I had no idea how I should approach him. Although the temperature was less fierce than it had been outside in the street I seemed to sweat more. I had walked the full distance from my lodgings.

I wonder now exactly what I expected from him. I still imagined then that each writer knew himself as part of a club, that one great writer would always recognise another. I had come across his famous poem for the first time in my school reader where it had been placed, miraculously, among the work of well-known, foreign poets; I could still recite it. I knew that he had rarely published another poem since.

At last he put away his heavy spectacles and came up to the bar where he placed a pound note folded neatly into quarters on the counter.

‘Which do you think is quickest transport up to the University, the train or bus?’ he asked the barman. ‘I believe I’m to deliver a paper there at the English Department in an hour.’

‘No you’re not,’ I said.

He turned; his glare was quick and blank, the appalled expression of the recognised and put-upon which to my shame I feel sometimes flash across my own face if some reader taps me on the shoulder while I am standing at a festival with my literary friends, or if I meet a student in the street. His mouth was the same grim line which I saw on the faces of my father’s friends, and I also recognised something of their brittleness, which, with some fear, I considered a symptom of the office life, as if the atmosphere of heavy ashtrays and high-backed leather chairs had permanently pressed itself upon them.

‘It’s next week. You can take my word for it.’ I fished the crumpled flyer from my folio with shaking hands. I could not stop. ‘It’s true. I study there. Believe me, if there was a change of date I’d know about it.’

He nodded as he read, then shook my hand and thanked me. His palm was hard and surprisingly boney, for he was not a small man. He smiled faintly as he appraised me. He had the formal kindness I was later to associate with men who spent long periods of time alone, the outback reserve of country gentlemen or mining engineers. ‘I’ve been dying to read your next collection,’ I said.

‘Not dying, I hope.’ His eyes had lost a little of their flint. ‘I’m sure there are better things to die for.’

We moved to the table he had just abandoned. ‘Do you drink claret?’ I nodded although I did not. ‘Good,’ he said, as he waved the bartender over. ‘Rituals are the great comfort of growing older. It is important to remember that eating and drinking are also a kind of life. Some toast, or sandwiches? I knew a man once, a barrister, whose great pleasure in life was to go to the Lawyer’s Club in Bridge Street – do you know it? – they served up English boarding school food, quite dreadful preparations: tapioca, sago, trifle with the hint of the stale and confiscated cake about it. The rest of us would amuse ourselves by making up new names for the dishes: Matron’s Surprise, willow sausage, flannel soup. They were sold at tuckshop prices, the menu was scribbled on a blackboard mounted on the oak walls, between the portraits. My friend was a rather wealthy man, but I have never seen him happier than when he suggested we make an excursion there for their threepenny tart with custard.’

I could only nod, faced with the scrupulous mechanics of his conversation. The club began to fill. Occasionally, one of the men, with the lines of his hat still imprinted around his forehead, would greet him loudly, looming at our table. He responded quietly and introduced me to them as his ‘friend’. Yet I could sense his eyes move across the backs lined up at the bar and felt that I would be soon dismissed. And I had not shown him my poems about flying foxes and Moreton Bay figs, or spoken with him about the cramped parks with their palms and memorial arches near my flat, or heard him speak about his great poems of the Harbour, or asked him why he did not write.

He asked me where young people ‘went’ these days. I said I did not know; that I was fairly solitary ‘by choice’ because I was ‘too busy writing’; that I did go to the ‘usual’ bars around the university and the Greek cafeterias in Castlereagh Street; and that I went sometimes with my friend Robert who was a student politician to the branch meetings to which he was so frequently invited. He had no particular political calling, but had calculated that by this means we could save ourselves the price and preparation of around three meals a week. He had chosen the Liberal–Country Party because the women tended to be richer and the catering of a higher standard. The disadvantage was that we had often to travel up and down the North Shore train line to Lindfield or Wahroongah. We travelled to Willoughby only if the necessity was very great, for this required a bus, and the hostess at this particular branch lived in a house filled with uncleared mouse traps. She served without fail guacamole on a lettuce leaf balanced precariously on a piece of toast.

He had a charming way of laughing. He chuckled gently with his hands placed across his belly, bending back slightly, as if he took pleasure in gauging its vibrations.

I seized my chance. I told him where I lived, next to the Deaf Hospital in a pink federation villa which had been divided into bed-sits. I told him about the bathroom with its view of the railway tracks and the long ferny garden, the toilet pressed at an ungainly angle in the corner, the cantankerous water heater which I lit before each shower. I had been talked into minding a friend’s axolotl which hung suspended in its green tank on the washstand and regarded my ablutions with the single lugubrious eye which remained in its possession.

‘Is there a trombonist?’ he asked. ‘And an old lady with two sycophantic Pomeranians and an addiction to Epsom salts?’

There were no musicians, I said, but there was a thin American cartoonist who went out each Saturday evening and who, if he returned alone, played Mario Lanza on the gramophone and sang until the early morning. And once, I said, disturbed by his music which drifted unimpeded into my always-open windows, I had looked out of the bathroom at the grounds behind the Deaf Hospital and observed in the moonlight a game of naked rugby played in perfect silence.

The claret bottle was empty. The conversations around us seemed to have settled into more long-distance rhythms. ‘Let’s go to Holderigger’s,’ he said, and stood and wiped his eyes.

Outside the evening was diffuse and golden. The station steps had emptied and a molten calm crept down the hill from the back of Foys to Belmore Park. Above us the golfer on top of Sharpie’s Golf House began, endlessly, to guide his bouncing neon chip shot along its illuminated path towards the nineteenth hole.

He was not as robust, I noticed with some surprise, as he had appeared inside the club. Once he paused at the window of a shoe store and dabbed with his handkerchief at a thick vein in his forehead. He walked slowly, and did not talk much. He hummed instead from time to time.

At last, off a lane at the far end of the city, we entered a chilly portico of sandstone and passed through a set of double doors into a restaurant. Leather club chairs gave way, beyond the bar, to two long alleyways of tables. I could smell the starch of the tablecloths, the sweet and desiccated scent of breadsticks. The mirrors were deep and edged with brass, the walls panelled with some dark unshining wood which still held the thrill of polish. The maitre d’, an older man with thin red hair, greeted him by name.

‘And how is Madame Holderigger?’ he asked the waiter.

‘She’s very well, sir. Her grandson graduated this afternoon, an engineer, so she won’t be coming in this evening.’

‘That’s splendid news. Please convey my congratulations.’

He sat, without glancing backward, in the heavy armchair as the waiter, in one smooth action, pushed it in and draped the napkin across his lap. My own descent was not so graceful. I hesitated when the waiter gestured; I perched on the chair’s edge, then readjusted it myself. He asked if we would like a pre-dinner drink. Knowing of no other types I requested a gin and tonic. The poet ordered another for himself.

‘I have known Madame Holderigger’, he said, when the waiter left us, ‘for almost forty years. She is a Swiss, originally. She must be nearly ninety. You will no doubt have seen her at some event or other. She wears her hair scraped up into a tiny lacquered topknot like a cocktail onion. Many years ago she used to run some private clubs – when I was a young journalist she still had a reputation for sly-grogging.’ He smiled faintly; the word pleased him. ‘In the thirties she would go about looking for husbands with her daughter, an over-ripe spinster who tortured light opera. Gilda had the same broad décolletage and indelicate complexion as her mother – I used to think, when I spotted them in Martin Place, of two packet boats in full sail, rigged with lead crystal. Lindsay detested them, they always made him shudder. He used to say, each time they passed, “There goes the butcher’s wife and daughter.”’

Although I smiled I had begun to panic. I had imagined, when he first suggested it, that Holderigger’s was another bar. I realised now that I had not enough money for this sober restaurant. I began to say that I should be on my way once we had shared our drinks, that I was not particularly hungry.

If I had another appointment, he said, he understood, although he had hoped that I might permit him to shout me dinner.

‘May I show you something?’ He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket, opened a leather bill-fold on the table, and produced an uncashed cheque for five pounds. It was a royalty, he said, for his last collection, published twenty years before, which had been recently reprinted. It was not much, he told me, for a lifetime’s work, but it was the kind of thing I must get used to if I was to make poetry my life. One should regard writing as a pleasant hobby, he said, and never a career. In this way, any reward or word of praise would come as a surprise, rather than one’s due. The trick, he said, was to enjoy each windfall when it came. It was his great pleasure, when those cheques turned up, to buy dinner for his friends.

Our meal arrived which he had ‘taken the liberty’ to order. I had never tasted oysters on the half-shell. Later I would also see for the first time a salad tossed at the table and a fillet steak girdled tightly by a piece of bacon. We drank a bottle of red wine. I did not say much. I remember that he spoke – as he forked and cut methodically with his dry white hands – of the managing board of the Bulletin and its effect on various journalists unknown to me, which I could only, dumbly, nod at; of other restaurants where I had not yet been; of his cadet days covering pet shows and sewing fairs and go-kart races where young boys with cunning faces lashed fox terriers and pugs like Mawson’s huskies. He spoke fondly, too, of the architecture of the Harbour, although he did not mention his own great poems set there: of Beare’s Stairs – he liked the rhyme – with their graveyard pillars made of sandstone above the stovepot roofs of Darlinghurst; of Miller’s Point and its sailors’ homes before it was levelled by the hefty stanchions of the Harbour Bridge.

As the food came he pointed out the rituals of the service, the way the waiters wheeled out another, smaller table and placed it by our own, the way they plated out the vegetables from a serving platter. In this way the labour of the kitchen remained invisible but the hospitality of the cook was performed before us, recreating what he referred to as the ‘intimacy of the table’. He also made me observe the function of the furnishings and linen. The salmon-coloured tablecloths and napkins created, along with the brass and wood, the atmosphere of a cruising liner. The pale green menus which the waiters carried worked like a contrasting thread which relieved and lifted up the orange, he said, wound by their constant movements through the room.

Towards the end of the meal he ordered another bottle of the claret. I had been drinking cautiously but I still felt flushed. My eyes were vague and heavy. He sat upright in his chair. His spine did not touch the plush back, a posture I have come to think of since as the mark of a truly dedicated drinker, movement conserved, the body held in a state of relaxed anticipation. He seemed, if anything, to have become more pale and grave.

I do recall that a younger waiter about my own age arrived and dug ineptly with his corkscrew at the lead above the cork. The poet flinched and snatched the bottle from his hands. He opened it himself with a single turn and twist and poured out two full glasses. He spoke, more slowly now, about the flash Kings Cross landlords he had met as a cub reporter, about the best brains and tripe that he had eaten in greasy spoon cafés around the Rocks, about scandals involving politicians whom, again, I did not know. He disappeared for some time to the toilet while I waited. The wine stand and serviettes were whisked away.

When he returned he asked me who I liked to ‘read’. I began to make my list. I had been reading the minor poets, from Clough to David Jones, for the last few months, I said, but I remained rather fond of Larkin. I found his adept use of half-rhyme and para-rhyme quite daring. It made me want to write.

‘Wrong verb, wrong verb,’ the poet said.

I stopped. There was the hint of a smile on his thin lips. Yet I sensed, in the way he looked about for the waiter and winced when he saw no one, the chill edge of some distilled, exquisite anger.

Poetry should be the least interesting of topics to a young man my age, he said. What about the great Germanic verb in our English language? Did I find myself at present in a domestic situation?

I looked down, and blushed. It was painfully clear from the length of time I hesitated that I had thought of making something up. No, I said, at last. Of course, I added quickly, there had been ‘encounters’. I hoped the term was vague enough.

He gestured for the bill.

It was a deep blue night outside. The air of the laneway was still and damp. Five girls and three young men passed us, laughing, on the street which led up to the Gardens. He hunched over a cigarette and watched them. I noticed that he swayed a little as he lit it. He did not look at me. I had no conversation. I thought I could smell the tank stream which ran for blocks beneath our feet.

In the end, he said at last, as if he spoke to no one, he recommended women highly.

Women, with their tight little jackets and impossible perfumes, he continued, had always infuriated him more than they had pleased him. But they were indispensable for poets.

He turned and looked at me intently. ‘They understand faith, you see. They are the great interceders. Between you and your reputation.’

I was not sure if he expected me to laugh.

He straightened and seemed suddenly quite sober. He began to walk, stiffly, ahead of me, in the direction of the Cross. I should not take him seriously, he told me. Seriousness was the affliction of old men. Here was a limerick I might enjoy, he said:

There was once a girl, called Priscilla

Whose pubes were of perfect chincilla

—Each day she would knot

The hairs of her twat

And use them each night as a pill-ah.

He smiled tightly. His was a rather pedestrian para-rhyme, he feared, compared with Larkin’s.

I followed because he seemed to like my company, or at least he did not mind it. Now and again, he would point out some place he remembered or pause to share a joke. He showed me the boarding house where Virgil the hunchbacked artist had invited pretty girls and sketched them for Smith’s Weekly. And I seem to remember, although I have been unable to recognise the street again, that he took me through a breach in a wall behind a block of flats where there was a mossy grotto, its steps and niches carved into the cliff. It was all that remained of one of the colony’s first gardens and the optimism of that time, he said.

We passed a revival cinema, a drycleaners, a corner shop with tables of pawpaws on the pavement, and took a narrow street towards the naval base at Garden Island. I found myself in the vestibule of his building. He stood back at the bottom of the stairs to let me walk ahead. It was a white mansion, divided into quarters. The carpets were grey. I had glimpsed a small chandelier behind one window. There were dwarf maples in the garden.

Inside I exclaimed at the view. There was a full moon and the Harbour filled the window of the lounge room. I had not yet learned that it was unacceptable to urbane modesty to draw attention to its follies. Nor, by expressing my approval quite so openly, that I had instantly disqualified it. The water had the febrile glow of cine-film, I added. He appeared with two glasses from the kitchen. He said he was glad I liked it.

I stood and looked about me while he searched a drawer for coasters. The flat was dustless. I could see a music room with books of libretto piled up on the floor, his study beyond it which also faced towards the Harbour. I noticed gradually the smell of thinning carpet and dark suits.

He poured two whiskeys and added water with a silver teaspoon from a jug. No ice, he said, not ever. And one teaspoon only. The water released the flavour of the scotch. He had also brought out a platter of stilton and some water crackers. ‘Some of life’s small compensations.’ He placed them on the coffee table in front of the sofa where I sat. He settled in his armchair. He did not remove his jacket. His eyes closed each time he sipped the scotch.

There was a line of condiment bowls on the sideboard. He saw me looking at them. He liked to make curries, he told me, which took three days to cook.

I had placed my folio on the floor and it sat between us.

I decided at last to ask if he would look at them. I took a breath to speak.

‘When I was a cadet journalist, about your age,’ he began quite suddenly, ‘I was approached to write a small pamphlet on Australian vineyards. I seized the opportunity eagerly. I had three weeks vacation owing to me, and I thought that this would supplement my wages, which at the time were not inspiring. I also imagined, quite correctly as it turned out, that I would enjoy the company of vintners.

‘I caught a train to Melbourne and discovered at once that I despised everything about the countryside around it – the low skies filled with imperturbable grey clouds, the mournful cattle, the tattered yellow paddocks – but the wines were pleasantly surprising. On my last day there I met a German who made ice wines. The wine he brought out for me to try was miraculous; clear and sharp, and infinitely sad, as if cursed with an awareness of its own chill depths.

‘He brought up three more bottles from the cellar and we walked across the overgrown yard towards his house. I had come to expect a cautious wife, a prolific flock of children, but the house was empty and quite bare, with the exception of a piano and a clock. He had devoted the main room entirely to his experiments with wine. There was a variety of corks lined up along the piano lid and there were grafted grapevines, their roots bound up in handkerchiefs, between us on the table.

‘Each winter, he told me, he waited for the perfect temperature to pick his grapes. For a fortnight he would set thermometers among the vines and sit a vigil. He sang songs to the mice to keep himself awake. The grapes had to be picked, with the ice still on them, at precisely minus four degrees. By the second bottle he had become quite sentimental, and with the third he began to stop every few minutes and look about the room. I remember that he said he thought he was probably the greatest aristocrat upon this earth. For he could not bear, even for a second, the thought of an uncomplicated pleasure.’

A distant foghorn sounded on the Harbour. He looked at me and smiled, and I thought I felt a fleeting warmth.

‘I have thought of him quite often since.’

I went to speak again but he seemed to have withdrawn himself from the room and into his armchair by some elusive alteration of his posture. When I put my empty glass down he did not offer me another. I reached for my folio. He jumped up to see me out.

At the door he shook my hand and said he hoped that we would meet again although I knew he did not mean it. He brushed aside my thanks for dinner. He said he hoped I had not found it boring. I said sincerely I had not.

‘A young man who wanted to be a poet once asked for my advice,’ he said. ‘I told him. Invest in fine stationery. Be open to all social occasions. Always be shaved by a barber.’

I expected him to smile but his face appeared remote and blank again.

He closed the door behind me.

Outside, the night still held a gentle warmth. Random laughter drifted from the high white cupolas and minarets of the Del Rio apartments next door. A smell of gardenias mingled with the weed and mussel of the sea wall. I flattered myself, as I stood for a moment between the dwarf maples, that he would be standing at the darkened window, watching.

Then I began to walk towards my narrow rooms.

Author’s note: The headquote is the last stanza of Kenneth Slessor’s last published poem, which begins ‘I wish I were at Orange …’, written for class 5A at Orange in April 1962. It appears in Geoffrey Dutton’s Kenneth Slessor: A Biography, Melbourne, Penguin, 1991, p. 11.