After the meeting we ran into Dick Lamb in the forecourt of the Hospitality Inn, but to my confusion he was formal and remote. Not only was there no trace of his eccentric ebullience of the other night, but he seemed, I thought, to be wanting precisely to correct any false impression he had given then. I am a severe, co-ordinated, authoritative man, he appeared to be saying now, and it would be both naive and presumptious of you to suppose anything else. We accepted a lift back to town with him and parted in coldness.

But later that evening, as we were on our way to meet Stanley Brown at Hannans, we ran into Dick Lamb again. He was carrying several brown paper bags full of bottles under his arm and seemed to be sucking a lolly. He greeted us like long-lost friends, slapped his head, fell sideways, and otherwise exhibited all those signs of odd affability with which we were familiar. He didn’t give any indication at all that he had encountered us earlier in the day.

Had we not had somewhere else to go we would no doubt have spent the evening drinking with him, and then in the morning he would have hated us for what he had shown us of himself. Funny how people will round on the best part of their own natures.

There was no such volatility around Stanley Brown. He was his usual sociably elegiac self. He took us back to meet his wife and an English couple, Chris and Deirdre, who owned an estate agency, a restaurant, and a motel in town. After dinner he showed us his most prized possession, a magnificent Steinway bought some years before from the man who used to tune the pianos for the ABC. It was signed by the various virtuosi who had played it including, to my surprise, Kamal. Had we been standing outside, at Stanley Brown’s gate, we would have been able to watch the last effects of the sun on the tailing stumps, the pink hillocks of dust which closed the view from where ever you looked in Kalgoorlie. It was part of the town’s distinct charm that you were never allowed to forget, not even visually, the reason for its existence. But here, gathered around the Steinway in Stanley and Valerie Brown’s drawing room, there was no clue as to where we were. Only a queer ectopic sensation of being out of time and place.

We spent our last evening in the Goldfields with Stanley Brown at his grand piano, Rosalin on a cello, and the rest of us open-mouthed singing ‘Danny Boy’. It wouldn’t have been the first time that the pipes, the pipes, had called out from glen to glen into the Kalgoorlie night.

11 A Roomette with a View

Eleven
 
A Roomette with a View