WHILE Bess and Audran talk in his room and Harry is taking his second curtain-call at the Opera House, his shirt soaked with sweat, a tall man is trying to get out onto the rooftop of the Hotel Metropole. He uses the key the manager has loaned him to open the door, which sticks a little, at the top of an interior staircase. The door groans then gives way. He emerges like a coal-miner leaving a shaft at the end of a day’s toil.
After replacing the key in a waistcoat pocket he gazes up at the night sky, a different sky to what he has seen in the United States or at home in Italy, hands clasped together behind his back.
Nobody will bother him here. The manager has assured him he is the only other person who ever comes up. A match flares. The orange light accentuates lines on the composer’s face as he leans into the flame with a cigarette. There are no clouds. The sky is smoky grey, almost purple, and studded with stars except in the vicinity of a crescent-shaped moon, still low, which has blanked out its less lustrous competitors.
It is pleasantly mild, like a July evening in Rome. Savouring the sharp tang of the tobacco, he wonders why he has come up here. For inspiration? Perhaps the outlaw Dick Johnson – lover of Minnie, his Girl of the Golden West – could sing his final aria as if he were serenading the stars. Caruso would enjoy that, and it would be up to others to devise ways to have stars inside the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. The composer has also been considering a scene with Johnson and Minnie in a snowstorm. His next opera must feel as big as the Wild West itself. As imposing as a clearing in the Californian forest with some colossal redwood trees. And perhaps ten horses on the stage. What a sensation that would be. But first he must finish his work, or the only sensation will be the cancellation of the scheduled premiere. A scandal to match the jeering and catcalls that greeted his first Butterfly.
He has come to Australia to finish this new opera. And he has come for the comet, having read that it will be best seen in southern skies, brighter and more beautiful than anything ever witnessed before. More beautiful and radiant even than his Minnie. He is blessed to be here and alive in the year the comet will reveal itself for the first time since 1835, when Verdi himself had not produced his first opera. There are days and nights, however, when the composer fears that his last Act for Minnie and Dick Johnson will still be incomplete when the comet comes again in another seventy-five years.
He is tired. And there is still so much to do. Wrestling with the divine art which begins, or ought to begin, where the singing stops. Rising above the silence. It is puzzling: after all his work, all the scribbled notes on sheets of paper for the music to accompany her songs, he still cannot see Minnie – a problem he did not experience with Mimi in Boheme and then Cio-Cio-San in Butterfly.
Minnie is as elusive as the comet. He stands quite still on the roof, keeping a safe distance back from the ledge around the perimeter. He has no interest in peering down at the street three storeys below. All that may captivate him is above. It is, no doubt, a beautiful sky. But it does not reveal what he is hoping to see.
He is weary. And there is no comet. So he will return inside.
The composer draws deeply on his cigarette one last time, then flicks it upwards. For just a few seconds, as he turns around, it flares brilliantly, soars in an orange-red arc, then fades away against the stars.
13
EARLY the next morning there is a stillness that hints at the heat to come. It is just before dawn. Roosters in the backyards of timber cottages strung out in rows facing the railway line have not yet stirred. But already there is activity. In bakers’ kitchens there are lights and the smell of new loaves. Horse-drawn wagons bearing boxes of earthy potatoes and carrots make their way to the produce market. Another dray, laden with fish netted a few hours earlier, lurches east along Collins Street. The carter will do the rounds of city restaurants and hotels, the Metropole among them, filling orders for seafood and leaving on kitchen steps cases of fish covered with damp newspaper and a few stones in areas where stray cats lurk. On the west side of the city, rattling past the motor garages and the station, is an open-topped Darracq automobile. The driver is John Jordan. Harry is next to him, hands thrust deep into the pockets of a leather flying-jacket.
‘Don’t reckon you’ll need that,’ says Jordan, nodding at the jacket. ‘Going to be a hot one. Look – red tinges in the sky. Hardly any breeze, neither.’
‘That’s what we’ll want when my flying machine is ready,’ Harry replies. ‘One fine day. Wind is the enemy of the aviator. A pilot’s controls can’t compete with the breeze. It can flip you over in a second. My mechanic is a stickler on this. He lights a match and holds it above his head – if the match is blown out he deems it too windy to go up.’
‘Good thing he’s no taxi-driver. If he were that fussy about getting out he’d never make any money.’
‘You can’t compare them. A flying machine defies gravity. The motor car is still a rudimentary form of transport.’
Jordan turns to glare at his passenger.
‘Well, you can catch the bloody train next time, mate. There’s a station in Diggers Rest. Not much else, mind: a store; post office; weighbridge; chaff-mill and that’s about it. Be a long walk to your paddock, too.’
‘I meant no offence,’ Harry says. ‘I’m sure your Darracq will do the job just fine. What speed can you get in it?’
‘Past twenty miles an hour on the flat. Faster downhill. Depends on the road. Any rain will mean a bog both sides, so it’s best to keep to the ridge in the middle. Trouble is, others can have the same idea.’ Jordan swings the steering-wheel hard to the left as another vehicle appears over a rise, smoke billowing from its exhaust. Once it has passed, Jordan falls silent as Harry looks around. He can make out shapes in the grey light.
‘Doesn’t take long to feel like you’re out of the city,’ he says. ‘Not that there is much of a city. Compared to New York, I mean. There are open fields here, and … what’s that rank smell?’
‘Flemington stockyards. Cattle brought down from the bush are held there before they’re sold or carted off to the abattoirs. There’s a bone mill, too, and a fellmongery.’ Harry wrinkles his nose in distaste.
‘My wife is inclined to be a vegetarian,’ he says. ‘Perhaps I should join her. Are you married, Jordan?’
‘Not me. I’m a single man and intend to stay that way.’
‘You’re missing out, I assure you. I have loved only two women in my entire life: my mother, and my wife of sixteen years.’
‘I run my own race,’ is Jordan’s only response. Then, as they pass a bluestone church: ‘St Brigid’s, Moonee Ponds. We’ll be into the country proper soon. Any children?’
Harry pauses before replying.
‘We haven’t been blessed. In the conventional sense, that is. My wife and I share a son of a different sort, Jordan. We always bring him along when we travel. Discuss how he’s getting on. If you could hear our conversations, you’d understand how real he is to us.’
Harry is leaning forward in his seat. His manner has become so animated that a flummoxed Jordan wonders if his passenger is about to produce a likeness of this phantom infant. But he says nothing, and the early-morning gloom hides his expression. Harry sits back. Then, after another long silence, starts to unzip his jacket.
‘You were right,’ he says. ‘It is getting warm. Where should I put this?’
‘Toss it in the back.’
Harry twists himself around but hesitates, still holding his jacket.
‘You have quite a load here already, it seems. All these boxes.’
‘Phonographs. Special offer in the newspaper. Importers of the Champion line are giving them away free, on condition that you test a machine and tell your friends. Reckon I can sell this lot, so long as the road doesn’t get too rough and bugger up their workings.’ He swerves to avoid a pothole.
‘Can’t see there’s a future in phonographs myself,’ says Harry. ‘Why would anyone want talking machines?’
‘Music’s the thing. They’re making cylinders now. Flat disc recordings, too, of orchestras. Singers as well. Our Melba is on discs for these Champions.’
‘You’re a musical man, Jordan?’
‘A businessman. If I can sell for more than I buy, I’m in.’
‘Music doesn’t move me. The finest art is what you can see, not hear. My own success, for example, rests on an audience not being able to believe their own eyes. But my wife is fond of music. Perhaps I could get one of your Champions for her. I fear she resents the time I will spend out here.’
‘I’ll keep a phonograph aside. Sort out payment later.’
