I’ve finally seen Toby. It’s worried me that he’s kept himself completely invisible. When I’ve gone up the stairs to Jim and Bob and Klaus’s level, his ladder has always been pulled up to the ceiling and his bell’s been disconnected. Jim and Bob haven’t changed toward me, though there’s a certain sorrow present for my obtuseness in choosing a man, and Klaus continues to tutor me in the kitchen every Wednesday night. I can now fry and grill as well as braise and stew, but he won’t teach me how to make puddings.
“The stomach has a separate compartment for desserts,” he said earnestly, “but if you train that compartment to close down now, dear Harriet, you will benefit when you get to my age.”
I suspect, however, that he hasn’t managed to close his own dessert compartment down, judging by his figure.
I didn’t go up to see Jim and Bob or Klaus tonight, I went up to see if Toby’s ladder was down. And it was! What’s more, the bell was back on its string.
He was wrestling with a vast landscape he couldn’t fit on his easel, and so was attacking it on a makeshift frame—painted white, of course—rigged on top of the easel. I’d never seen him paint anything like it before. If he did a landscape, it was always some blast furnace or dilapidated powerhouse or smoking slag heap. But this was a stunner. A great valley filling up with soft shadows, sandstone cliffs reddened by the last light of the sun, a hint of mountains that went on forever, endless still forests.
“Where did you see that?” I asked, fascinated.
“Up the other side of Lithgow. It’s a valley called the Wolgan, cut off all around except for one four-wheel-drive track that winds back and forth down a cliff and ends at a pub that’s a real relic. Newnes. They used to mine oil shale there during the War, when Australia was desperate for fuel. I’ve been spending every single weekend up there, doing sketches and watercolours.”
“It’s a beauty, Toby, but why the change in style?”
“There’s a contract being let for paintings in the foyer of a new hotel in the City, and this is the sort of stuff the management is looking for, so Martin says.” He grunted. “Usually the hotel’s interior designers have a graft going with some gallery owner, but Martin wangled me a chance at it. He can’t landscape, he’s purely a portrait man when he isn’t into cubism.”
“Well, I think this one should hang in the Louvre,” I said sincerely.
He flushed and looked quite absurdly pleased, put his brushes down. “Want some coffee?”
“Yes, please. But I really came to ask if we could make a date for you to taste my newfound culinary skills,” I said.
“And disturb you when the boyfriend might turn up? No, thanks, Harriet,” he said curtly.
I saw red. “Listen, Toby Evans, the boyfriend doesn’t intrude unless I want him to intrude! I don’t remember that you had much to say about Nal apart from an intolerant attitude toward my levity, but the way you’ve cut me since Duncan arrived in my life, you’d think I was having an affair with the Duke of Edinburgh!”
“Come on, Harriet,” he said through the screen, “you know why! The House grapevine says that he’s not the sort of bloke who visits girls who live in Kings Cross. Unless, that is, they’re working girls like Chastity and Patience.”
“Toby, you’re a bigot! I wouldn’t touch a man who patronised the Mesdames Fugue and Toccata!”
“Dirty water’s dirty water.”
“Don’t be crude! And you’re begging the question. What about dear Professor Ezra Marsupial?”
“Ezra doesn’t slum it here. Pappy goes to his place. And just who is your lordly bloke, anyway?”
“Do you mean The House hasn’t informed you of that snippet?” I asked sarcastically. “He’s an orthopod at Queens.”
“A what?” he asked, arriving with the coffee.
“An orthopod is an orthopaedic surgeon.”
“But Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz called him Mister, not Doctor.”
“Surgeons inside their own hospitals are always called Mister,” I explained. “Though you didn’t hear that from our landlady. I introduced Duncan to her as Doctor.”
He wasn’t rattled, simply lifted his brows. “Then I must have heard it from Harold,” he said, sitting down.
“Harold?”
“What’s peculiar about that?” he asked, surprised. “I often stop to have a word with Harold, we usually come in about the same time. And he’s the biggest gossip in The House, he knows the lot.”
“I’ll bet he does,” I muttered.
Because Toby’s good opinion matters to me, I tried to explain why I was involved with Duncan, tried to make him see that it isn’t immoral, even if it is illicit. But he retained his scepticism, I couldn’t dent it. Bloody men, with their double standard! Tainted by the venom of a snake like Harold Warner, no doubt. He was one who wouldn’t ignore the chance to make trouble for me with those I love. Oh, but it hurts when Toby condemns me unjustly! He’s so decent and straightforward himself, so incapable of being underhanded. Why couldn’t he see that my own openness about my affair with Duncan was evidence that I too am not underhanded? If it were up to me, the whole world could know. It’s Duncan wants to keep our secret so his precious Cathy isn’t embarrassed.
I changed the subject back to the painting on his easel, very glad that his absences weren’t on my account. Truth to tell, it is Pappy’s plight drove him up the other side of Lithgow. Then he floored me by telling me that he’d bought a piece of land on the wrong side of the tracks at Wentworth Falls, and was building a shack on it.
“You mean that you’re going to leave The House?” I asked.
“Next year I’ll have to,” he said. “Once the robots take my job, I’ll be back to living from hand to mouth if I stay in the City, whereas if I’m living in the Blue Mountains I can grow all my own vegetables, keep fruit trees, buy cheaply because prices are much lower. And if I get the hotel contract, I’ll be able to build a decent house, own my own place free and clear.”
I just wanted to cry, but I managed to smile and tell him how happy I was for him. Damn and blast Pappy! This is all her fault.