Jonathan had swept the leaves from the front lawn, checked the water tank levels, taken a quick reconnaissance walk around the boundaries of his castle. Of course there was no way the walkway would get approval; surely the council or the Department of Environment and Resource Management—he’d have to check but he assumed DERM would be the responsible body—surely everyone would see that while the lake itself and the bit of beach at the front of his house might not technically belong to him, his privacy did. He’d check, too, the precise boundaries; Jerry—the firm’s senior property lawyer and one of the other partners—could have a look and give him some advice about how to proceed. While Jonathan understood the disquiet engendered by the continued private ownership of some of the most beautiful squares in London, The Landing was not a private square but an Australian lake: generous, beautiful, the property of the people—including him. The people owned it, except for this one tiny bit, this little private slice of paradise, these reeds, these waterlilies, the harmonious Japanese quiet that existed only because it was cultivated and tended by him, Jonathan. He loved his portion of The Landing, the wash of the waves, the tiny beach; the whole pleasing aspect laid out before his eyes. It was his, he had made it; it was his own Sarah-free space, the first place on earth where he had reclaimed sovereignty, and the more he thought about the possibility of its loss, the more exercised he became.
Jonathan’s bare feet were in the water, the waves slapping, his eyes on a red-painted rowboat moored further out and on bruised clouds on the very edges of the horizon. He did not hear Bites approach, and when her wet nose swiped the back of his leg he turned around. There, like a miracle, she stood, Anna, all in white, the lady of the lake.
‘If only I could paint,’ she said. ‘The endless sky, the red boat, the lonely figure stranded in the landscape. Pity there’s no beckoning green light.’
‘Green light?’
‘I take it you’re not a reader.’
He shrugged. ‘Not especially. Are you?’
‘Not really. I prefer the cinema, or good television drama. I’m a visual person.’
They started walking along the edge of the lake, Bites trailing. Anna walked in front, with an attractive loose-limbed confidence, her stride slow and meditative, her long plait swinging gently against her back. Her form was shrouded by billowing white garments, weirdly appropriate to the dreamy, otherworldly moment she appeared to be caught in; she seemed only half present, as if her real self were elsewhere. He had not noticed before how beautiful her voice was, low and hypnotic. He did not know the first thing about her. ‘What is it that you do, Anna? I mean, your job.’
‘Oh, I don’t have a job. I leave that to other people.’ Her thin, restless hands made a pretty arc across the air.
‘To dull people like me,’ he said, smiling.
She laughed. ‘I suppose so. I never really found the thing I wanted to do.’
He let this pass. ‘Where are we going?’
‘I wasn’t heading anywhere in particular. Looks like there might be a storm.’
‘Nah,’ he said. ‘Those clouds are too far off.’ They kept walking, the wind blowing, the trees bending; Anna, in floating white, her clothes a dazzling, drifting cloud in the breeze.
‘Do you think anyone ever finds the thing they want to do?’ he asked.
She looked at him.
‘Rhetorical question,’ he said. ‘It’s just that it seems to me as I’ve got older that life is one long series of compromises. Don’t you think? You’re fortunate if you haven’t had to compromise. I don’t mean you in particular. I mean “one”.’ He had better stop.
‘Oh, I never compromise,’ she said. ‘I’ve never chosen compromise, not once. I’m at my best when the house is burning down.’ Her face had a strange, wild look.
He laughed, baffled. He supposed this evidence of intransigence might go some way to explaining the four husbands. He loved the smell of burning.
They walked around the lake, or at least as far as it was possible to go, right up past the camping ground, where they reached the national park which did not allow dogs; past the mango trees, the gums, the knotted strangler figs in the old cemetery, through the screaming forest of parrots, alarmed by the approach of a storm. The blue was dimming; dark clouds blew in, great, full-bellied clouds, blocking out the sun. They began to walk back, fast, not talking now, just making it inside Gordie’s front door before the gunfire of rain came shooting down, rat-a-tat-tat, on the dry earth, on the roof, down the gutter. Whoosh, down it came, a full pail from the sky, thrown over the lot of them: the houses, the cars, the poor souls running, the squawking birds.
‘So much for my weather forecast,’ Jonathan said.
‘Pa?’ she called into the house, which was hot, muffled. ‘I’ve brought Jonathan back.’
There was no response. She walked into the kitchen, which Jonathan noticed had been cleaned, at least nominally.
‘You don’t happen to have any contacts for professional cleaners, do you?’ she asked, as if she had followed the course of his mind.
‘Talk to Sylv. Her mother does house cleaning, or at least Phil’s mother does. Phyllis. She’s not very good, though.’
‘Pa!’ she called again, before her eye fell upon a note from Gordie informing her that he was nipping around to Penny’s to see how Marie was getting on.
‘Well, you can’t go home in this. Would you like a cup of tea? A glass of something cold?’
Bites looked from one to the other, a sort of cartoon look, her eyes swinging back and forth. They both noticed her expression at the same time, and laughed.
Then Anna raised her head and her face closed in; her smile stopped.
‘I’m not very good company. I know it’s unfashionable to say your heart is broken, but do you know what? My heart is broken. My husband, Charles, is the love of my life. He’s older than me, much older, and he promised that when he died—he always said he must die before me because he couldn’t live if I died before him—he promised he would wait for me in his grave.’ She spoke faster now, to no one in particular, her eyes not on him but out the window, at the rain, at the houses across the street obscured by its fall. Speaking in her lovely voice, her body fluid and moving, her hands restless and fiddling with the sheer white cloud of her dress, her eyes looked glazed, odd.
‘He promised he would be like Abelard, twenty years dead, his skeleton opening its arms to embrace Heloise. Love is not far-fetched, you know; love is not an abstract thing. It’s not even a myth! It what makes men murder their children rather than live without them. Or their wives.’
He wanted to say that’s not love, but he saw that she was lost in some deep, unreachable place. He wanted to look away, from the dark, from the failure of love. He wanted to pull her towards him. He stepped forward but his movements returned her to the room, to the rain, to the muffled air.
‘Oh, listen to me,’ she said. ‘The thing about a broken heart is that every day takes you a tiny bit further from the pain of it. After a while, after a very long while, you don’t feel anything at all.’
He did not trust himself to speak. He wanted to prove her wrong. He wanted to ask about the man who intended to wait for his true love beyond death, how such a mighty love could falter, but his tongue was stilled, his head drowning in unanswerable questions.
‘I’m very good at speaking the unspeakable,’ she said. ‘You might even call it a core skill. I believe that’s the correct term. Don’t ask me something if you don’t want to know. Because I will tell you.’
The rain hammered down. There was no air in the room, outside the world was drowning, and they had arrived at a point when to return to conversation about tea with milk or without, or the possibility of a biscuit, was unfeasible.
‘Look, I’m going to make a run for it,’ he said. ‘I’m heading back to Brisbane in the morning and I’ve still got things to do. Perhaps we could have dinner sometime and discuss the meaning of life? Your father’s got my number.’ And he was out the door before he could embarrass himself further, before he ran off at the mouth any more than he already had, before he fell at her feet in a pose of mercy or supplication. She believed in burning down the house and he no longer knew what he believed in. He was running in the thundering rain, his feet bare, his shirt wet.