On Lust and Longing
Blanche d’Alpuget has written eleven books, and has won the PEN Golden Jubilee Award, the Age Novel of the Year Award, the South Australian Premier’s Award and the Australasian Prize for Commonwealth Literature for her novels. Mediator: A Biography of Sir Richard Kirby (1977) was published to critical acclaim and Robert J. Hawke: A Biography (1982) was a national bestseller and the winner of several awards. After a long break, Blanche returned to writing with On Longing (2008). ‘Lust’ was originally published in The Eleven Deadly Sins (1993). Blanche has recently completed a quartet, The Birth of the Plantagenets, to be published in 2018 and 2019.
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Barrie Kosky On Ecstasy
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Don Watson On Indignation
Malcolm Knox On Obsession
Gay Bilson On Digestion
Anne Summers On Luck
Robert Dessaix On Humbug
Julian Burnside On Privilege
Elisabeth Wynhausen On Resilience
Susan Johnson On Beauty
Blanche
d’Alpuget
On
Lust &
Longing
MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS
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On Lust first published 1993; On Longing first published 2008.
Text © Blanche d’Alpuget, 1993, 2008, 2018
This edition published 2018
Design and typography © Melbourne University Publishing Limited, 2008, 2018
This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publishers.
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On Lust was first published in The Eleven Deadly Sins, edited by Ross Fitzgerald, William Heinemann Australia, 1993.
Text design by Alice Graphics
Cover design by Nada Backovic Design
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Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group
A catalogue record for this
book is available from the
National Library of Australia
9780522873092 (paperback)
9780522873108 (ebook)
For Bob
ON LUST
I first met the sin of lust one afternoon in the autumn of 1956 when I went downstairs to answer a ring on the doorbell.
Our house was in Darling Point, one of Sydney’s beautiful harbourside suburbs. It was a roomy old duplex and my mother, father and I lived on the upper floor. Visitors who were close friends—yachties, mostly—came around to the back of the house and up a flight of wooden steps to the kitchen. Others telephoned before arriving. The only people who rang the front doorbell out of the blue were Jehovah’s Witnesses, or collecting for charity. My mother was in the laundry shed in the back garden and could not hear even if I shouted to her from the kitchen that someone was ringing the doorbell.
I had already changed out of school uniform into a poplin housecoat and put some smelly stuff on my hair that needed to be washed off in the hand basin. I felt embarrassed about going to the door because of the goo on my hair, and the housecoat; Until a year earlier I had yearned to be Tarzan swinging through the jungle in a loincloth and wrestling with panthers, but suddenly my womb had sprung into life. Bloodied, I had to accept I was a girl. Girlhood presented a whole new set of rules to learn, among them proper girl appearance. At school—all girls—fierce spinsters hectored us about correct dress and deportment during the morning assemblies. We had glove inspections, hair tidiness inspections, clean, short, unvarnished fingernail inspections, length of skirt inspections, shine of shoe inspections and a random check on bloomers. Woe to the girl not wearing navy blue bloomers. The thought of strangers seeing me déshabillé, in a housecoat, even if they were only Jehovah’s Witnesses, was embarrassing.
Waiting on the doorstep was a neighbour from a few doors down the road. He and his wife were friendly with my parents, without being close friends. The two families had interests in common while being temperamentally unsympathetic. Each side had a certain attraction for the other. My father was a senior journalist, which had its own cachet, while our neighbour was inherently newsworthy. What’s more, he was a publicity hound. My father was in a position to grant the neighbour’s wish to see his name in print as often as possible. Another attraction was also to do with hounds: dachshunds. We had a spayed bitch, dark, comely and shy. They had a light-coloured dog with a frenzied libido. They were childless and their randy sausage was lavished with an affection normally reserved for grandchildren. The dog was called Rex and the wife referred to herself as ‘Rex’s Mummy’. She was a kind, plain, indolent woman and, as far as I could tell, brainless. Women were expected to be brainless, although a good eye for real estate was admired. She was rumoured ‘to have money’ and may have had intelligence too, but chose to hide it. In a loud, braying voice she would recount Rex’s adventures to my parents, to other neighbours and anyone else who would listen. Rex was their god and their toy, like the toy gods of couples who have pursued careers and childlessness until middle age. As with divine toy children, Rex the toy dog was a genius. He had a wardrobe of little jumpers and sent cards to other dogs at Christmastime. He posed for photographs wearing sunglasses on hot days. By 1956, fully grown, he was in demand all over Sydney as a stud. ‘Rex is getting married again,’ I heard his Mummy say. His Daddy, in their Rover, drove Rex to the weddings. I was shocked when once I overheard the neighbour say, ‘I have to be there to help him to do it.’ The yellowish crooked tips of his teeth showed in a strange smile. I had never watched animals copulating, and feared to do so, although I had already passed the age when playground descriptions of what women and men did in sexual embrace sounded unbelievable and disgusting. Now I found the thought of it fascinating, like black magic. I wanted to know more, but not yet. I used to find the dog’s randy behaviour embarrassing and was always pleased when our timid Rosie would drive him away with snapping jaws.
The man waiting on the doorstep made me even more self-conscious about how I appeared, for although he was solicitous towards me when we met in the street or when, accompanying my mother, I had afternoon tea with his wife, he was a person of authority, with a long stern face. I had a child’s natural caution with an adult who was not a close family friend and not of our type. We were rumbustious and rather bohemian. Besides journalists, my parents’ friends included artists, yachtsmen, boxers, photographers, strong-minded women, and men who had sailed around the world to shipwreck and other adventures. My own great grandfather, a South Pacific trader, had embraced the islands with such ardour that four generations later his features were still discernible in the faces of many Tahitians. A life without adventure was no life at all for us. In contrast, our neighbours were physically lazy. They played no sport; we spent every weekend sailing. They gave cocktail parties with a waiter and canapes. At our parties, the guests drank rum and danced barefoot.
He was dressed, as usual, in a three-piece suit and dove-grey Homburg which he doffed in greeting. He was lean, of average height, with dark eyes and hair that was beginning to grey. He was fifty-four years old. I had recently turned twelve. I was pretty, fair, and already my full h
eight, almost five feet three, quite tall in those days for a girl my age. The visitor gave a reason for calling by and then, as I stood somewhat awed by the meeting, he seized me and kissed me in the mouth.
My first affair had begun.
It was a love affair on my side. On his side, it seemed to be nothing at first—just a whim without consequence. In time, I realised it was a type of slavery. He was a slave of the Demon of Lechery, and that demon abused him and threatened to have him murdered, and to do so whether he obeyed it or not. But it was a jaunty demon, too, and often he was jaunty. He belonged to a certain class of which he could be proud, he was a Jew, active and respected in the Jewish community, and he was a Judge of the District Court of New South Wales. I always addressed him as ‘Judge’ until, aged fifteen, I suddenly realised I had more strength of character than he.
I don’t remember the order of events that unfolded. I do remember the shock of being kissed like a woman. I was flattered, and embarrassed: even then I asked myself, ‘Why did he kiss me when I had that stuff on my hair? Didn’t he notice?’ Intuition told me that something drove him not to care. The thought worried me, but excitement swept worry aside. His Honour had uncovered an eager accomplice.
Whereas I was shy and giggly with boys, I felt safe with a man. My model of the male world was my warm, protective, and doting father. I automatically included the Judge as someone concerned with my well-being.
It never occurred to me to tell my parents what he had done—or if it did, I dismissed the idea instantly. My father, whose temper was famous, would get in a rage and my mother would go around looking downcast. She had a strong sense of decency and expected people to behave well, as she always did. Bad behaviour, particularly unkindness or dishonesty, upset her deeply. I knew she would feel betrayed by the Judge, and this could make her woeful with shame on his account. We suffered from shame rather than guilt. Shame was an agony of sadness.
There was another reason that guaranteed I would not tell on him, then and later. Because I was an only child my parents took me with them wherever they went, so I was often the one kid in a group of adults. These adults had love affairs, committed adultery, lived in sin, and exhibited other exciting behaviour. I observed their dramas like an urchin enticed by the window of a cake shop. Suddenly one of the cakes had walked out the door into my hand. That kiss was my first taste of the heavenly food called ‘When You Grow Up’.
The Judge and his wife had a large, conservatively well-appointed flat and being on the affluent side of comfortable, they employed a housekeeper. I think she was a widow from Central Europe, and had a room at the back. Her teenage son stayed there occasionally and would catch the bus to school. He was handsome, with brown eyes and dark curly hair, but we were too shy to speak to each other.
Sometime soon after the doorstep incident I alighted at the bus-stop and discovered the Judge had been on the bus too. School hours and court hours were similar. He asked if he could walk home with me. We went along Darling Point Road chatting, with no mention of the other day. He enjoyed word games—‘if you expectorate, you can’t expectto-rate as a lady,’ was one he told me—and I knew riddles, so we passed the time with these. He asked me about my school work. I did not think to ask him about his court work although I had gathered, from reading stories about him in the newspaper, that he was known for harsh sentences, especially with sex offenders. I looked up sometimes and saw his eyes brooding on me.
When we reached my house, he walked me to the front door. A mandarin tree grew opposite the door, screening it from the street. Hidden by the mandarin tree, he kissed me again, hurriedly, and left.
There were more kisses—some of them in his flat, when other people were only a few yards away. He had one of the first television sets in Sydney and he and his wife held television evenings for neighbours, with drinks and hot cheese triangles. The Judge would leave the TV room on the pretext of getting more ice cubes and I would follow him out to the kitchen where we would kiss.
By now I was thinking about him for hours every day. I did not find him old or ugly, as I would in a few more years when I was a teenager. He smoked cigarettes through an amber holder and his breath smelled of smoke, but all men smelled of cigarette, cigar or pipe smoke in those days. I didn’t find it offensive. I was at that unique age, lasting only a year or so, which incorporates both the magic of childhood and the compassion of youth. I was young enough to regard him as magically beautiful, like my parents, whom one day a few years earlier when I was climbing over a fence I had actually seen as gods in the sky. A bronze-leafed plum tree grew beside the fence. As I looked at the tree, my mother and father appeared above it, each of them about twenty-five feet tall. I had noted, but was not displeased by, the deep vertical lines on the Judge’s cheeks, the wrinkles around his eyes, and his greying hair. These signs of age and decay were beautiful to me. Either that year or the next, at school, I began studying Shakespeare’s sonnets. Number seventy-three affected me deeply, especially the first four lines in which the poet speaks of being in the autumn of his life. I remember looking at the Judge as we walked down the steep part of Yarranabbe Road one afternoon, seeing his drawn cheeks, his sad, intelligent eyes, his world-weariness, and accepting it all in Shakespeare’s images, with a welling up of tenderness in my heart. I had learned the first law of love—the beloved is always beautiful.
Two summers later I went swimming with him. With his usual, formal, hypocritical politeness he had asked my parents if I could go with him to Bondi. It was not a suspicious outing, for ‘going to Bondi’ was among the most respected of Sydney’s rituals. It was no more peculiar for a family friend to take a child to Bondi in Sydney than, in Melbourne, to invite a kid to the footy—and indeed, nothing more than usual happened. But I was astonished to see how sallow and scrawny the Judge was. I was used to men in swimming costumes who looked like my father, deep-chested with shapely limbs. When the Judge bent forward his belly skin fell in thin pleats, and his legs were like sticks; I felt embarrassed and wanted to be away from him.
One day long before this, he was waiting for me at the bus-stop in his Rover. The car was grey, like his hot weather Homburg (he wore a black one in winter). There was little traffic so he did not need to drive far to find a secluded place. He parked and began to kiss me and, for the first time, put his hand up the skirt of my school uniform. He swiftly negotiated the navy bloomers and began to masturbate me. I loved masturbation but believed it was an activity for girls only, either alone or together. I never felt ashamed about it, although I would have been deeply embarrassed to have been caught in the act by an adult. I was still of an age when I did not associate love, or even sex, with genitals. Despite having heard that real sex was done with the genitals, I still could not and did not imagine such activity. Sex and love was kissing on the mouth and a feeling in the heart. What was happening now, cocooned by the glass and the leather upholstery of the Rover, was alarming. I was so self-conscious I don’t remember if I liked the way he was doing it or not, or what effect it had on him, but I do recall he seemed determined and, because of that, rather cold blooded.
A few nights later he again did what we called in the playground ‘number eight’, but this time he was unable to disguise his agitation. It was winter by now. I had been invited to watch television with him and his wife. At about 8.30 pm, the Judge said he would walk me home. When we reached a dark part of the street he kissed me and said in an urgent voice, ‘Why did you wear trousers, darling? Didn’t you think?’ I did not understand what he meant: trousers were appropriate for the cold weather. This was the only time I remember physically pushing him away—because, in his urgency to stroke my genitals, he was rough with me. I felt confused and scared because he seemed irritated with me for ‘not thinking’. Thirty-six years later I can still see the colour and texture of the trousers I was wearing that night and feel the hard fibres of his jacket against my face.
I did not know then that penises become erect. Although on subseque
nt meetings the Judge was often flushed and tense, I was never aware of something hard in his pants. I think he was impotent, and that his was an impotence which left him in a randy frenzy, snatching at women, fondling children, watching and talking about his dog’s copulations.
That night in the street was a turning point, for in me a seed of distrust was sown. Soon afterwards the Judge and his wife went away for a long holiday. When he returned I felt wary. However, our meetings started up again. He would pick me up in the car after school and we would park somewhere. Later he would drop me off close to my gate so I would arrive home at the time I would have if I had walked all the way. He always had a newspaper with him. One day someone approached as we sat close together in the front of the car. The Judge spread the newspaper over my lap and pretended he was leaning over, reading it. I loved the thrill of the secret rendezvous. On his side, there were ecstasies of guilt. In the car one afternoon he plunged his fingers into his hair and cried, ‘My God! I can be hanged for this!’ He looked hunted. ‘You must never tell anyone,’ he said. I think it was 1957. A woman had been hanged in England in 1956. He told me that rape carried the death sentence in New South Wales. I had read about rape in the newspapers: girls living in Blacktown were dragged into cars by half a dozen young men and thrown onto the roadway, half dead, hours later. I thought, I haven’t been raped.
Even murderers were not hanged in New South Wales in 1956, so he was exaggerating about that; I have not bothered to check if actions so far short of sexual intercourse with a minor could have been considered rape. I think his terrors came courtesy of the demon. It manifested images of him raping me. It ordered him to wait at the bus-stop. It whispered there would be a knock at his door at midnight by men wearing uniforms. The demon showed him his body hanging on a gibbet. One day a few years later I watched in amazement as, dressed in wig, bib and gown, he beat his breast with his fists and wailed, ‘It’s all my fault! I debauched you!’ What nonsense, I thought. A moment later he begged to be allowed to kiss me ‘between the legs’. He never used dirty words for sex.