A Literary lunch - an adjunct in fiction to The Way We Were. The story was published in my collection Libbing (1990).

I wrote this in 1989.

If only literary lunches were like this.

‘Olga’ is Olga Masters who died before realising her potential as a novelist.

‘Elizabeth’ is the late Elizabeth Jolley.

‘Jill’ is Jill Wran – then a literary agent to only the best and wife of ex Premier Neville Wran whose delaying of the decriminilisation of male homosexuality in New South Wales (1984) was scandalous.

Frank Moorhouse didn’t exactly escape homosexuality but that’s all too complicated for me – ask him.

As for the others …

LUNCH WITH HELEN AND FRANK AND ELIZABETH

`Homosexuality was a strange, romantic cult ... Sometimes I think I was lucky to have escaped.' Frank Moorhouse quoted in Outrage.

Elizabeth got to Place de l'Aus first, she'd caught the train.

She was admiring the huge flower arrangements in the vases on the bar, they had something haphazard about them. Was it the bottlebrushes? Slightly dusty from the bush? Those mad lilies - gymea? raggedy.

No, she wouldn't have a drink, she said to the waiter, a slim blond whom one could use, the perfect type, she thought, for something. Just waiting?

It was at moments like these, she thought on, one should smoke. She wondered if it were more worse for you than good, under what circumstances, probably the number had something to do with it but the woman next to her on a bus once had told her she was going to her hairdresser's funeral: lung cancer and he never smoked or drank and did exercises; his wife was distraught. That was the odd bit. But she hadn't used that word had she? what word?

Really, it was good being schizophrenic, not that this was schizo, one knew that, one had tasted that. One had to have.

Frank came in next. She saw him get out of the taxi outside, charging it and saying something matey to the driver who was a vanished stereotype. The sort who said, `Lady, I don't go that far for my holidays' but would drive Bea Miles to Melbourne. Oh, she'd pretend she hadn't seen him, didn't know him. Let him handle it, he'd been to the Gollan Heights, or whatever it was when he got stale or whatever it was, hadn't he?

‘Yes,’ she said.

He sat down and said, ‘So she set you up with a piece of trendy Sydney, did she?’

He meant the restaurant.

It was Jill. Elizabeth had ignored her when she came in with Andrew Peacock. Oh well, she wouldn't get this at the Fremantle Arts Centre. She wondered what sort of food it was.

Frank waved with ironic urbanity to Jill, and Andrew.

‘Is he writing a book?’

‘Everyone's writing a book. Probably about the pressure to conform.’ He chuckled.

Helen came in.

Clothes-wise, Elizabeth thought.

Everyone took a look but Elizabeth was already peering outside; so she'd come in a hire car, a white stretch limo. Great. Great. She smiled. This was quite good.

They knew one another.

The headwaiter came over and welcomed Ms. Everyone was getting their money's worth today: Jill and Helen. He wished Peter Carey was with them; who was that guy? knew him from somewhere - where?

The waiter turned up and said hullo to Ms and what did she want to drink?

Did they have lite?

She was probably writing that afternoon.

Frank made searching enquiries about the beers and sent the glass back because it hadn't been chilled and made the waiter take the bottle away because it'd gone off while he was getting the glass chilled and he had to get another.

‘He's the type that likes to obey, don't you think?’ he said by way of revealing something of his capacity for insight.

Helen said nothing.

Elizabeth decided she wanted a gin and tonic or she would have to take one of those headache tablets later on and they made your gut bleed or something.

Helen gave a charming wave and smile to Jill, ignored whoever it was she was with. We all have to make a living, or something, something. Who cared? She had to get back to her hotel in Bondi. The guy next door was freaking out, or going to, on something he'd bought in the bar and he had to play tonight at Selina's. He'd said she could come along.

She mused over a phrase from the lieder, Schumann. She was Schwarzkopf. Why didn't she have one of those little headsets? What on earth were they here for? Why here? Why did that woman set it up for here? Was she a sadist? Watching over there from that public corner.

Elizabeth said, ‘Garçon!’ The eyebrows of the other two shot up. Helen could get hers much higher than Frank.

‘Please take the straw away.’

The other two were aghast.

‘Democracy gives, of the political forms which I can think of at the moment,’ she said, ‘the most opportunity for sadistic play.’ Oh God, she was pissed off, how dare they keep her waiting! anyone.

‘I haven't really thought about it,’ Helen said, sitting up straight and wishing she'd worn gloves.

Frank was remembering it.

He didn't dare do anything with the wines after that, ordered plain, straight and expensive.

‘I want to talk. Let's get the business out of the way. Do you both want to be in it?

I think you can trust something Don's set up and Jill's done her apprenticeship.’

It was, Elizabeth decided, entirely unnecessary to say, in what?

‘I wouldn't mind the exposure, to be frank. The Americans . . . ‘

‘Don was her tutor at Sydney Uni in the sixties.’

Helen flinched. How she loathed that expression.

‘Tell me,’ Elizabeth thought she'd better not let this get away from her, ‘how do you get so much mileage? I know how you do,’ she said to Frank.

He was the first to recover from his abusement, or was it that he wished to address that and Helen wished to keep counsel with herself?

He laughed a beer-softened throat laugh that he could even do without the beer when threatened sufficiently. ‘How do I?’

‘Oh well, one reads you . . . everywhere.’ Elizabeth's hand corkscrewed through the air.

Helen decided she liked her enough to want to use the gesture herself.

The food. Oysters. A dozen for him, half for her. Elizabeth had prosciutto but dragged it off in shrivels to get at the melon, which was nice. Fortunately, she didn't care anyhow, the gin was getting to her.

‘It seems a good idea. It's reputable and there'd probably be an American reading or two out of it. New York, of course.’

‘I do not wish to tour America. At this juncture,’ Elizabeth said.

Helen tapped the side of an oyster shell with her fork. She hoped this woman wasn't going to turn out to be an old bitch. She wanted a mother, she ought to know that.

‘I do hope it's alright?’ Elizabeth enquired in lucent tones. ‘We don't want you getting sick. They wouldn't be from the harbour?’ she said sharply to Frank, giving Helen what she wanted, slapping him around a bit too.

‘No. Oh no. Not these days. I hope.’ He laughed his urbane chuckle.

‘It seems odd, just three. It's not representative of . . . well, anything, is it? But it suits me,’ Helen added hastily. ‘A third each. Three stories?’

‘Or two long ones,’ Frank said, his eyes on Elizabeth.

‘I would want to see what you two were putting in.’

‘I'm scripting,’ Frank remembered to say.

‘Oh, what?’

‘Something early. I - a few of us thought it'd come out well, make the move nicely.’

‘Like ‘The Coca Cola Kid?’ Elizabeth said brightly.

Who was this? 'Look I don't think I need this. I've got a . . . ‘

Second course.

‘I remember your marvellous line about a cold collation,’ Helen said to Elizabeth, eyeing with some distrust the colourfully glazed chicken breast on her plate.

Elizabeth smiled warmly over her grilled lobster. ‘Do you remember the grilled lobster in that book?’

Helen nodded.

‘It was better than this,’ she said.

They both laughed.

Frank cut a chunk of his smoked buffalo.

‘I wonder what Patrick White's eating,’ Helen, who loved parlour games, said.

Then she got away first. ‘Scrambled eggs in ham cornets, and he's dribbling – ‘

‘Manoli!’ Frank roared with laughter.

‘Dog's balls,’ Elizabeth said when he'd subsided.

Oh, that's off, he thought.

Helen shrieked.

‘Oh don't dear,’ Elizabeth said.

‘So it looks as though it's not on.’ Frank wasn't having this feminist collusion shit.

‘Oh.’

‘Then we can just enjoy our lunch?’

But Frank wasn't having that either.

Leonie came in.

‘Showing some bankers around, I bet,’ Frank explained to the two women.

‘Don't you just want to go up to her and say, the word is cunt. And you won't forget it, will you?’

‘It'd turn them all on,’ Helen nodded.

Elizabeth wanted some decent sliced white bread, no butter. She simpered at the waiter who ignored her. She got up and went over, ‘You don't want me calling you garç, do you?’ she said.

She got a bread roll and decided to complain to Jill about it later.

‘I'd want Rose and Jean in on it,’ Frank said.

Helen nodded.

‘I think I know them,’ Elizabeth said.

‘Won't . . . well what about the photographs. How . . . ?’

‘We'll get someone, that can be got around.’ He was thinking of American money, Hollywood, that cute kid in the film . . .

‘Who's . . .?’ Helen was less sure.

‘Diane Arbus is dead. I think that one of you sitting, cross-legged on the bed is as good as an Arbus.’ Elizabeth thought Helen would be pleased.

She wasn't.

‘We could - we've got a guy here, a fucking Chinese prince - now, he could – ‘

‘No photographs. Tacky.’

They ate for a bit.

‘Awful wine,’ Elizabeth thought she owed it to something to start the conversation again after slaying it.

‘Mine's O.K.’ Frank was doing well with the red.

‘It's alright with the chicken.’ Which had no taste in any case. At least they hadn't overdone the msg in the aspic, or the gelatine.

‘Well that's settled then,’ Frank said, having devoured the buffalo.

‘It worries me . . . ‘ Elizabeth said and the other two gave her their undivided attention, ‘that there is so little representation of gay writing in Orestralia.’ She had, in her intoxication (one gin, one wine) become royal. ‘I know you did your best in the past Frank dear but, and let's face it . . .That nice Don in his nice anthology - congrats dears, I was so pleased to see us all included in this one.’ She gave Frank a dowager's ravishing smile; he squirmed as was intended. ‘But no gays. Helen, you - I've always . . . why aren't there ever any dykes in your books? I mean, do you feel you've internalised the issue to the extent that it's enacted without direct correlatives? In your writing.’

‘I do have dykes. I'll have a whisky with my coffee. No, no dessert- pudding.’

‘A nice pear dear.’  She ignored the waiter's intrusive remonstrations.

‘Strega. And coffee. Any chocolates?’

‘Oh, I know that bit on St. Kilda beach but surely, hardly . . . ‘ Elizabeth lifted one quizzical eyebrow. It was an expression worthy of Garbo: wise, tolerant, weary, graceful.

Helen scratched her neck. She'd buy some new earrings with this, rubies. And thank God she'd put a stash of cassettes in her bag. This would obviously have to be a Bach-on-the-bed afternoon. Why wasn't he, if he wasn't dead - that was another way they had of nay-saying - why wasn't he a Maori? at least.

‘There was not, as one reviewer I thought succinctly and truly put, one transgression in it. Not one. That is of course . . . And how is Michael? One hears so little of him - either from you or him lately.’

‘Oh, what are ya?’ Frank said. ‘I put Gary in mine. He's in Rose's stables. She should be here! Bloody Jill! All this fucking around. What is this? I thought we were here to work out the parameters at least.’

‘Are there a lot of Maoris in Sydney? I just thought I saw one go – ‘

‘Not in fucking Balmain!’

‘I think too, that they ought to import more. Too much Mediterranean is . . . ‘

The other two looked at her.

‘Well look at Carlton,’ Elizabeth said. ‘An infusion of the Pacific. And they make such wonderful, such sure . . . gays, though the pallid New Zealander has not . . . enough, don't you think?’

‘Oh absolutely.’ Helen thought this woman was fucking marvellous.

‘Gary's on her books. He's doing a treatment. What da ya mean? Gays?’

‘You are an apostate.’ Elizabeth decided coffee would give her a headache. Ordered cognac. Then coffee because she couldn't drink it by itself: only in alternate sips with coffee. ‘The trouble is, you're supposed to sniff and - What do I mean?’ The restaurant stopped. ‘What do I mean? You were never one, so you can't be an apostate. What were you? What were you? What happened to you and Michael? What did? And the embassy?’ Her tones rang out very Ingrid Bergman.

Heavens she's beautiful, Helen thought.

They drank, sipped, sniffed on.

‘Well, it's agreed,’ Frank sighed at last.

It was going to be quite a trip with those two.

Before they rose Elizabeth decided to make another fuss. After all, this was only Sydney, nobody knew her here. ‘And what about Tim Winton?’ she said.

‘I can't stand intra-uterine writers,’ Helen said, after considering this.

Elizabeth was drunk enough to be insistent. ‘If you are not an apostate - in your own remarkable idiom - what are ya then?’

He belched some buffalo. Probably the best part of it, he thought. He smiled at this old woman.

‘And Olga's dead,’ she sniffed, thinking of Sydney again.

‘Oh, let's not get maudlin.’

‘Yes dear,’ Helen said, ‘come on and I'll help you find a taxi.’

‘Maudlin? At least no-one mixes me up with Craig McGregor!’

Frank gasped.

‘And I can sustain a narrative line.’ She glared at Helen too but decided to stop, she wasn't on the strongest ground with that one.

‘At least I can write about more than dykes,’ Frank said, wishing this place had tooth-picks.

‘Yeah,’ Helen said. Who did she think she was?

‘The parameters, to use your so very useful word, of my world - actual and fictional, not that I distinguish any longer - stretch beyond one small aspect of a single suburb,’ she glared at both of them again – ‘some idealised portion of Australia au naturel,’ (her accent's quite good, Helen noted) ‘and Barcelona,’ (Elizabeth, oh Elizabeth, say it again) ‘in the thirties, and there, only the telephone exchange.’

They all smiled at Jill and ignored him with her in their ways.

Frank dallied towards the bar, the waiter. ‘Gees I'd like to put a silver bracelet on him, wouldn't you?’ he said. ‘One with a lock.’

‘Where?’ Elizabeth asked.

Helen was playing a Bach cello suite in her head. She hoped her daughter would put in the full hour's practice tonight. She'd give her a ring before she started to get ready for dinner and Selina's. She hoped the guy wasn't dead. Then she thought, maybe it'd be better that way. She could always go by herself.