Lost Voices Read online

  Dedication

  To the memory of Frank Devine,

  joyous spirit, great friend.

  Epigraph

  Loved, idealized voices

  Of those who have died, or those

  Lost for us like the dead.

  Sometimes they speak to us in dreams;

  Sometimes deep in thought the mind hears them.

  And, with their sound, for a moment return

  Sounds from our life’s first poetry –

  Like distant music fading away at night.

  C.P. CAVAFY, ‘Voices’, translated

  by Edmund Keeley & Philip Sherrard

  Contents

  Cover

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  BOOK ONE

  Hugh Dixon

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  BOOK TWO

  Martin Dixon

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  BOOK THREE

  Hugh Dixon

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Author’s Note

  Other Books by Christopher Koch

  Copyright

  BOOK ONE

  Hugh Dixon

  1

  Late in life, I’ve come to the view that everything in our lives is part of a pre-ordained pattern. Unfortunately it’s a pattern to which we’re not given a key. It contains our joys and miseries; our good actions and our crimes; our strivings and defeats. Certain links in this pattern connect the present to the past. These form the lattice of history, both personal and public; and this is why the past refuses to be dismissed. It waits to involve us in new variations; and its dead wait for their time to reappear.

  God or destiny (whichever you prefer) drops each of us into a location and a time whose meaning we either inherit without thought, or else must struggle to discover. I was given the second kind: an island state on the southernmost rim of the British Empire, minding its own business and remote from the main roads of history. I left it in early adulthood; now I’ve come home on a visit, and I find myself moving through a series of vignettes from my earliest years. Yesterday, I walked through the suburb where my life began.

  A bright, still morning in Tower Road. All very much how it used to be, over fifty years ago. Silence, except for an occasional passing car. A woman weeding a flower bed by her gate. The small prim houses from 1910 and 1928 and 1935 still hiding their secrets, behind tight front porches and lead-light windows. A sense of waiting, and a wide, wide emptiness, under an overwhelming sky. All how it used to be, bringing back that vast desolation and yearning that had baffled me as a child, and which I found baffled me still.

  Here was the little bridge that carried Tower Road across the railway cutting: the bridge I’d haunted as a boy. The train tracks were running as always between high, steep banks where the sun lay in dozing yellow patches, and ranks of wild fennel grew. On top of the bank on the western side, the old rambling house with the green roof was still there, the ash tree still in its garden. Still there as well, running north above the cutting, the rickety line of paling fences that hid the little mysteries of back gardens. Over on the eastern side stood the sinister building I once knew as The Orphanage, its sombre brick turrets unchanged. Far off, houses swarmed on a hill on the edge of Moonah, and farther off still, in the utmost distance, lay the looming, grey-blue ranges where Wilson and Dalton once rode.

  I stood at the centre of the bridge. This was where the now-extinct steam train would pound through below me as I hung on the railing, sending out a long, high whistle that saluted the world, and leaving behind a thrilling reek of coal. When it had gone, the emptiness and silence would enclose me again under the intolerably high sky, and I’d be filled with a hunger that made my throat ache. The hunger was for nothing I could identify – except to say that it was for the world the train had summoned up, far beyond this suburb that was the only home I knew, here on the border of the district of Glenorchy.

  My parents’ house was a little over halfway down Tower Road before you came to the bridge. Tower Road took its name from a stone-built, ivy-grown Irish tower-house on the corner of Main Road which had survived from the 1830s. Otherwise, the street was lined with small, decent, solid brick bungalows built between the Edwardian era and the 1940s, set close together and staring at each other in silence. Our house was one of these.

  It had been built in the 1920s, in the American bungalow style of that period. It had a central gable over the small front porch, whose canopy was supported by fat brick pylons. On each side of the porch were pairs of wooden-framed sash windows, with lead-lights in their upper sections. There were also lead-lights in a window in the top half of the front door. These were of stained glass, and their reds and blues and greens were reflected on the walls and polished floorboards of the hall. When I was small I would sometimes linger alone there on late, sunny afternoons, and the lead-lights and their reflections would seem part of a mysterious suspension of Time: a place where everything had stopped, and where I found myself in a vacuum.

  It was pleasant at first, this vacuum. It smelled eternally of floor polish and clean carpet and the flowers my mother put on the hall table. But then I would sense in it a gathering expectation: the imminent arrival of something vast. Yet whatever it was never seemed to come; and at this, a hollow fear would seize me, and a feeling of abandonment. I was trapped in the hallway’s bland afternoon, where nothing finally happened, and the coloured lights shimmered on the wall; and I didn’t know what to do. I was only freed by the melodious chiming of the mantel clock in the sitting-room: a sound that told me that Time was continuing after all, and that I was free to go: to escape.

  This little hallway would eventually be the setting for the first serious crisis in my life. When it took place, I had the irrational notion that the hallway had always been waiting for it.

  An ordinary Saturday evening in November, 1950: close to the end of my final year at High School, when I was eighteen. I’d just arrived home for tea, so it must have been close to six o’clock. I no longer recall what I’d been doing that day; visiting one of my friends, perhaps. I came into the house through the back door as I always did, passing through the kitchen and entering the hallway that ran through the centre of the house. The doorway to the dining-room, where I was headed, was immediately on my right. At the end of the hallway, next to the front door, was my parents’ bedroom. Its door was open, and their voices were raised in tones that I’d not heard before.

  This brought me to a halt, and a wave of cold went through me. The radiance of the late spring sun was striking through the coloured lead-lights, and their reflections lay across the floorboards in the way they’d always done. But now those ancient, reflected colours seemed to glow with a kind of warning.

  I tell you, it was a certainty, Jean! Don’t you understand?

  My father’s voice had a note of wild pleading in it, as though he not only implored my mother, but fate.

  A certainty! Oh, Jim.

  My mother’s voice. It had a contempt in it that I’d never heard before: that note of transcendental judgement which a woman can employ with more devastating effect than a man, and which withers any hope of evasion. A pause of some seconds followed; it seemed much longer, as though Time itself had faltered. Then she said:

  There’s no such thing as a certainty, Jim. How could you have been so stupid? And how could you do this? You were always so straight.

  My father’s voice now rose higher. The note of pleading was still there,
but rage had entered now: the rage of a small boy defending himself against unreasonable persecution.

  Will you try and understand! It wasn’t as if I was stealing: I was just borrowing it over the weekend. I didn’t see any risk. Les knew the owner.

  Les! That damned scrawny creature. I knew that one day he’d lead you to this.

  He knew what the horse could do, and so did the owner. There wasn’t anything in the field that could touch it.

  But it lost.

  It lost by a nose. I believe the bloody jockey pulled it. If I’d backed it for a place I’d have been all right. But I backed it straight out. I wanted to go for broke, for once.

  Well you certainly did that. A hundred pounds.

  A hundred pounds. I just haven’t got it. There’s only ten in the savings account.

  Another pause; and when my mother spoke again her voice had a resigned hopelessness.

  That’s such a lot of money. It’s something like two months’ wages, Jim. I’ll ask my father if he can help, but I don’t think he’ll have that sort of money.

  No. I wouldn’t have you doing that anyway.

  How soon will they know?

  On the first day of next month. On a Friday, in just under three weeks. That’s when I sit down and do the reconciliation with Paul Fitzpatrick. He’ll see straight away that we’re a hundred quid short, and he’ll want me to explain it. That farmer’s got my signed receipt, and Mrs Harris has got the copy in her receipt book. Paul won’t show me any mercy. John’s got a heart, but Paul’s a hard little bastard.

  Why, Jim? Why did you do it?

  I wanted you to have those new carpets. Maybe take a holiday in Melbourne. I wanted us to have some real money, for once.

  My father’s voice now had lost its passionate defiance; it was low and weary and lifeless. There was another brief silence, and when my mother spoke again, her reproof was mingled with pity, as though she spoke to a child.

  There must be something we can do. This could mean gaol, Jim.

  They might not go that far. But it’s the end of the job, and I’ll be finished as an accountant. They’ll be bound to report me to the ASA. So it’s all over for me. I’m sorry, pet. I’m sorry.

  His voice had become strained, and not itself; it seemed to carry a hint of tears. I didn’t want to hear any more; I turned away and went into the dining-room. I turned on the radio on the sideboard, so that when my parents came in they’d think I’d been listening to it all the time.

  Over the days that followed, they were silent and withdrawn. They didn’t know what I’d heard, and it was clear that they wanted to hide the situation from me as long as possible. But I decided that I must try and rescue my father, and began to consider how I might carry this out.

  The only truly contented children are probably those whose parents are entirely at ease with life: people who are constantly benign, and approving of what they’ve been given. That wasn’t my situation. My childhood on the whole was similar to many others: a mixture of delight and despair, excitement and boredom. It would probably have been easier had it not been for my father, to whom I was something of a disappointment.

  He’s long dead, and has become in memory a dwindled, far-off form, his stocky figure planted with feet apart, one hand holding his chin in a posture that denotes thought, staring up from the tunnel of lost time as though seen through the reverse end of a telescope. This makes me more fond of him now than I was in life, so that I sometimes call out to him inwardly, in helpless sadness. (Dad!)

  I was an only child, and my father expected great things of me – or rather, things that he thought were great. Foremost among these were good marks at school – leading eventually, he hoped, to my becoming a solicitor – and brilliant performances at football and cricket. I delivered none of these things. My marks at school were mediocre, I wasn’t good at sport, and I wanted to be an artist, not a solicitor. I’d been born with a talent for drawing, and I’d already decided that I wanted to be an illustrator, like those early twentieth-century masters whose drawings decorated the classic English children’s books to which I was devoted: artists like Ernest H. Shepard, Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac and W. Heath Robinson. This was a disappointment to my father, who saw no possibility of my earning a proper living by it. Neither did my mother, who would gaze at me reproachfully, shaking her head. Scottish ancestry had given her large, judgemental grey eyes, dark hair and a nature that veered between stoic cheerfulness and melancholy. Then she became a mater dolorosa.

  My bedroom was at the back of the house. Intended as a sunroom, it was long and narrow, with sliding windows on two sides. Its door opened on to the back porch, which I must cross to enter the house through the kitchen. I liked my room, despite the fact that there was no lining in the ceiling, but simply the rafters supporting the iron roof. When it rained hard, the noise was very loud; but I found this dramatic, and enjoyed it. Here I did my drawing at a pine desk that had been bought for me by my father, who expected me to use it mainly for schoolwork. When he’d first noticed that I was talented at drawing, he’d bought me sheets of proper drawing paper, Indian ink, a special penholder, and a number of steel drawing nibs. I believe he came to regret this, however, when he found that I was obsessed with drawing to the exclusion of almost everything else, and that my homework suffered. The matter came to a head when I was eleven years old.

  A Saturday evening in summer, not long before the meal at six o’clock we called tea, I was hard at work on an illustration of my own for Treasure Island, using a fine-nibbed pen. I had a cup of tea in front of me, brought from the kitchen where my mother had made a pot. It rested on the ledge along the top of the sloping desk. There was a sudden rattling, and my father opened the door that led onto the porch and looked in, holding the doorknob as he did so. He had an accusing expression, and I saw that he was in one of his bad moods.

  Still at it?

  Yes.

  I finished the stroke I was making with the pen, and put it down. My father took a step into the room and stood with his hands on his hips, peering at my image of Long John Silver.

  You draw well, I have to admit. But you ought to get outside and kick a football with your friends now and then, instead of crouching in here all the time.

  I do get out. I just want to finish this.

  My father sniffed once as though he had a cold – which he didn’t – wrinkling up his nose. He continued to stand in silence for a few moments, his head on one side, and I saw that he was working out what to say next. He was of medium height, about five feet nine, and powerfully built, with wide shoulders, a broad chest and a broad head. He wore what he usually did at home: an open-necked shirt, an old grey cardigan hanging loose and unbuttoned, and grey slacks. His colouring was unusual: his eyes were brown, but his hair was blond. It had darkened a little (he was in his late thirties), but the yellow was still there. It was thick and straight and he wore it rather long; he had a habit of brushing his forelock off his forehead with the back of his right hand: a somewhat theatrical gesture in a man who was otherwise conventional. His features were regular, except for a rather short nose, and his shovel-shaped chin had a pleasing size and firmness. He was quite a good-looking man I suppose, and when he was in a good humour and cracking jokes he had an attractive, even whimsical personality. In his youth he’d been a keen sportsman, playing cricket and football and engaging in competitive rowing, which was what developed his chest: that chest which contained a fatal weakness.

  He had chronic bronchitis. It had developed in his boyhood, and had greatly marred his life. It meant that he was given to constant chest infections, despite all his efforts at fitness, and although he’d tried to enlist in the Army as soon as the War broke out, he was refused because of his ailment. He was bitter and ashamed about this, and it added to a resentment which was already lodged deep in his nature.

  He worked in the office of J. & P. Fitzpatrick’s, the largest hardware store in the city, and I gathered from remarks that he made
that his work sometimes bored and frustrated him. He seemed to hold Fitzpatrick’s in contempt at such times, and the War must have looked like a marvellous escape: the greatest adventure life had ever offered him. At eleven years old, this meant little to me, particularly since my mother openly said that she was glad my father wasn’t able to go. Why should she want him killed? Children have very little capacity for compassionate understanding, and when my father had bouts of wheezing and coughing, it also left me unmoved; it was just a disturbing noise to me.

  Finally, he spoke again.

  Where’s it going to get you, this stuff? There are so many other things you could do in your spare time that’d be more worthwhile. You’ll be twelve soon, and you’ve got to pass the exam this year to get into High School. I don’t want you ending up in the bloody technical college. You should be studying.

  I do study. But I want to be an artist. An illustrator.

  An illustrator? You think you’ll earn a living that way, when you grow up?

  Why not? The artists who illustrate good books must earn a lot. The books are sold all over the world.

  I waved my hand to indicate the world. As I did, I knocked my cup over, and tea flooded down the slope of the desk, ruining Long John Silver, mingling with the Indian ink, and rushing on in a brown and grey river. I stared in horror as it cascaded over my bare legs, poured onto the small blue and white rug on which my chair was set, and spattered the linoleum that covered the rest of the floor. Then I jumped up and met my father’s gaze, incapable of speech.

  Christ.