An Indecent Obsession

Yet he never doubted the existence of the unspoken understanding between them; had she not shared it, and acquiesced to it, she would have disabused him immediately, feeling it to be her duty to do so.

The only child of wealthy, socially prominent Melbourne parents, Neil Longland Parkinson had undergone the peculiar genesis of that time in that country, Australia: he had been molded into a young man more English than the English. His accent held no single trace of his Australian lineage, it was as pear-shaped and upper-crust as any accent that ever belonged to an English noble. He had gone straight from Geelong Grammar School to Oxford University in England, taken a double first in history, and since his Oxford days he had spent no more than months back in the land of his birth. It was his ambition to be a painter, so from Oxford he gravitated to Paris, and then to the Greek Pelopo

Marriage had not entered his plans, though he was aware that sooner or later it must; just as he was aware that he was postponing all decisions about the future course of his life. But to a young man not yet into his thirties there had seemed all the time in the world.

Then everything changed, suddenly, catastrophically. Even in the Greek Pelopo

So he had sailed for Australia in the latter part of 1938, arriving back in a country he scarcely knew to greet parents who seemed as remote and devoid of love for him as Victorian gentry, which happened to be exactly what they were—not Queen Victoria, but the State of Victoria.

His return to Australia coincided with his thirtieth birthday, milestones which even now, over seven years later, he found hard to remember without a fresh upsurge of the awful terrors which had plagued him since last May. His father! That ruthless, charming, crafty, incredibly energetic old man! Why hadn’t he sired a whole quiverful of sons? It didn’t seem believable that he had produced only one, and late at that. Such a burden, to be Longland Parkinson’s only son. To want to match, even to surpass, Longland Parkinson himself.

It was not possible, of course. Had the old man only realized it, he was himself the cause of Neil’s failure to measure up. Deprived of the old man’s working-class background with all its attendant bitterness and challenge, saddled with his mother’s refined preciousness into the bargain, Neil knew himself defeated from the time when he became old enough to form opinions about his world.

He was into his teens before he realized that he cared for his father a great deal more than he cared for his mother. And that in spite of his father’s indifference to him, his mother’s cloyingly brainless protectiveness. It had been an enormous relief to go away to boarding school, and set a pattern which he was to follow from that first term at Geelong Grammar until the day of his thirtieth birthday. Why try to struggle with a situation that was manifestly impossible? Avoid it, ignore it. His mother’s money had been settled on him at the time of his majority, and was more than enough for his needs. He would live his own life, then, far from Melbourne and parents, carve his own kind of niche.

But the imminence of war had destroyed all that. Some things could not be avoided or ignored, after all.

His birthday di

Later Neil had understood the magnitude of his own immaturity at that relatively late stage in his life, but when his father had linked an arm through his as the men finally rose to join the ladies in the drawing room, he was simply absurdly pleased at the gesture.

‘They can do without us,’ said the old man, and snorted derisively. ‘It’ll give your mother something to complain about if we disappear.’

In the library full of leather-bound books he had never opened, let alone read, Longland Parkinson settled himself into a wing chair, while his son chose to subside onto an ottoman at his feet. The room was dimly lit, but nothing could disguise the signs of hard living in the old man’s seamed face, nor diminish the laceration of a gaze that was fierce, stone hard, predatory. Behind the gaze one could see an intelligence which lived quite independent of people, emotional weakness, moral shibboleths. It was then Neil translated what he felt for his father in terms of love, and wondered at his own contrariness; why choose to love someone who did not need to be loved?

‘You haven’t been much of a son,’ the old man said without rancor.

‘I know.’

‘If I’d thought a letter would bring you home, I’d have sent it a long time ago.’

Neil spread out his hands and looked at them; long, thin-fingered, smooth as a girl’s, having the kind of childishness which only comes from never putting them to work that had soul-deep meaning and importance to the brain controlling them; for his painting had not meant that to him. ‘It wasn’t your letter which brought me home,’ he said slowly.

‘What was it, then? War?’

‘No.’

The wall sconce shining behind his father’s head lit up its pink hairless dome, threw all the shadows forward onto his face, in which the eyes burned but the hard gash of a mouth remained resolutely closed.

‘I’m no good,’ said Neil.

‘No good at what?’ Typical of his father, to interpret the statement dynamically rather than morally.

‘I’m a rotten painter.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I was told so, by someone who does know.’ The words began to come more easily. ‘I’d accumulated enough work for a major showing—somehow I always wanted to start with a bang, no single work hanging here, a couple there. Anyway, I wrote to a friend in Paris who owns the gallery I wanted for my debut, and since he rather fancied the idea of a holiday in Greece, he came down to see what I’d done. And he wasn’t impressed, that’s all. Very pretty, he said. Quite, quite charming, really. But no originality, no strength, no instinctive feeling for the medium. He then suggested I turn my talents to commercial art.’

If the old man was moved by his son’s pain he didn’t show it, just sat there watching intently.

‘The army,’ he said finally, ‘will do you the world of good.’

‘Make a man out of me, you mean.’