Guy
The night train and boat from Venice had him back in London early in the morning, but by the time he reached the flat Helen had already left for work. In the few days he’d been away spring had arrived; the clematis on the back wall was flowering, a bumble bee burying itself amongst the frail petals. He took his typewriter out to the rickety table and set up there, filled with a sense of promise. The sentences, though, came awkwardly, even with the model for a character provided by Edward. It was one thing to recall the way he had stood while shaving, quite another to make that image relevant to the story in a manner that wasn’t woefully banal. He stood up from the table, sat down again, went back inside, came out again. No longer knowing how to do this thing. It might be that he’d once known how to trust in the process that led to the creation of a novel, but he could no longer remember how that was so. He was in the same place he’d been before he left, pacing the confines of the flat, stopping to make coffee, eat lunch, read an old weekend arts section in the paper; sitting back down at the table then repeating. Looking up at every sound in the hope of seeing Helen coming in, laden with shopping, putting the bags down and rushing to him.
The afternoon turning to evening. Still she had not appeared. It occurred to him that her lateness was deliberate, that she was punishing him for having gone away without her, giving him a taste of what it was like to stay at home and wait, as if, after all the long winter months of fruitless work, he didn’t know what that felt like. He opened the bottle of wine he’d brought back from Italy and poured a glass, went back to the table and drank it, smoking, all pretence at work abandoned.
The long evening faded. The time for a meal passed. He brought his typewriter and papers inside, spreading them across the kitchen table, poured and drank a second glass. When he heard the key in the door he went to meet her, expecting she would come into his arms. Instead she pushed past him, dropping her bag on the floor, throwing her coat across the bench, without so much as glancing at him. Seeing the bottle she poured herself a glass. Only when she’d taken a mouthful did she raise her eyes. She had, he saw, been crying. He asked what the matter was, crossing the small space between them to offer sympathy.
‘Don’t touch me,’ she said.
He stepped back.
She asked him if he wanted to tell her what had happened in Venice.
‘What do you mean?’ he said.
She made a sound that wasn’t quite a word, more an onomatopoeic expression of disgust.
‘I don’t know where to begin,’ she said. ‘I think I could have dealt with you having an affair with a woman. Some young sycophant who worships your every word. That would have been hideous but understandable. I’m not sure what to do about you sleeping with a man.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘You’re going to deny it?’
‘Of course I am. I shared a room with Ed because the other hotel was awful, I told you that. I didn’t try to hide anything. I wasn’t sleeping with him, except to say we were in the same room.’
‘So you weren’t having sex with him?’
‘No.’
‘You can promise me that on, I don’t know … something you hold sacred?’
‘Of course I can. Nothing happened,’ he said. ‘I missed you. Where would you get the idea I’d been having sex with a man? You know me …’
‘Publishing’s a small world, Guy. Your lover has a friend. He’s been boasting about his conquest. His friend happens to be my friend, which is how I heard about it. Not that that matters, I imagine by now everyone knows, except me, of course, who’s locked in a squalid basement flat with someone who can’t even tell the truth to the one person in the world who actually loves him.’
She was crying again. Not making any noise, just tears running down her cheeks. The room become smaller than it already was, more obviously beneath street level. She was waiting for him to speak, but the shame of what he’d done, of being caught out for doing it, was too great.
‘I don’t have to listen to this,’ he said. ‘I know you’re pissed off with me because I went there alone. I’m sorry about that. It wasn’t fair. I see it now. That was what I was going to tell you.’
‘Why don’t I believe you?’
‘This is just gossip. Publishing-house gossip, which is even worse. Come here to me, let me hold you.’
Instead she let her head fall forward, putting her fingers to her temples as if to contain whatever was going on in there, to suppress it, pushing the tips hard into her skin. ‘You’re lying, Guy.’
‘I don’t have to listen to this,’ he said again, suddenly furious, at Edward for talking about it to some third party; at her for bringing it back to berate him with. He stormed along the hall and out the front door, up the steps onto the road where it was now dark, the orange streetlights spreading their weird glow across the bonnets of cars and pavements and onto the little hedges, the litter-strewn front yards and basement wells. The air cold. He went up to the main road, his hands in his pockets, his belly hard with the irrevocability of what he’d just done, telling himself it was for the best, that it was the clean thing to do, he didn’t have to buy into this sort of recrimination.
At the pub on the corner he ordered a half, grateful of the coin in his pocket, for his wallet was still on the kitchen bench. His whole life back there. He took a sip of the beer, casting a glance around to see if he was being watched; if his inner turmoil had some external manifestation.
The English never look so good when compared to Latins. There’s always a sense of disappointment arriving back on the island, coming off the ferry to fish and chips, sliced white bread, beer, a meanness to their interaction with the world, as if everyone is still on rations thirty years after the war, dependent on powdered eggs, dripping and roasted chicory when just across the Channel is a smorgasbord of wine and crisp hot bread, good coffee, of joie de vivre; a respect for their writers, well, at least when they’re dead.
The men in the pub were old, some even wearing flat workingmen’s caps. Nursing their drinks while watching a television slung above the bar. A football game in play, Division One, between Tottenham Hotspur and Arsenal, the rolling roar of the crowd picking up their team’s song as the little figures ran on the green. He liked this pub because it wasn’t one where the new young drank, it was a real pub, but right then it seemed like the last repository of the desperate and dying. It was, too, he could see this, what he was choosing.
He put the glass down, undrunk, and went back out into the street. He’d left without his keys and was obliged to bang on the door. For a few minutes he thought that she’d already gone, that he’d left it too late, but eventually she opened it, putting on a brave face for whoever was knocking at that time of night.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘It’s you.’
‘Yes, I’m afraid it is. I need to talk to you. I need to come in.’
She stood aside, closing the door behind him, waiting until he had made his way past the bedroom – her suitcase out on the bed – and along the passage to the tiny kitchen/dining/living room, with its odd collection of furniture, gathered together at local markets or off the street. The typewriter and his manuscript on the table.
‘What is it?’ she said. ‘I almost didn’t come to the door. I didn’t want anyone to see me like this.’
‘You don’t have to leave.’
‘Well, I do, actually, but that’s another thing. What do you want?’
‘I want to try to be honest with you.’
‘You want to try, or you want to be honest?’
He sat on the old sofa. She stood with her back to the kitchen bench, arms crossed.
‘It’s true,’ he said. ‘I did have sex with Ed. I didn’t mean to. He got me stoned and made a pass and I went along. I didn’t mean it to happen. It didn’t mean anything.’
‘Good for you,’ she said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. Good for you for telling the truth, at last. Good for you for experimenting. Good for you. Bad for me.’
He had the sense that she was finished with him, was looking for a way to dispatch him out into the world so she could get on with something more important.
‘What made you change your mind?’ she asked.
‘I love you. I went out there on the street and realised I don’t want to lose you.’
‘Maybe you should have thought about that in Venice.’
‘I mean it, I’m sorry. Really I am. I didn’t mean it to happen.’
‘Do you understand anything, Guy? Your books are full of such close observation, but it’s always of other people, isn’t it? It’s not of you and what you’re doing.’
‘That’s hardly fair …’
‘You’re going to talk to me about fairness? You’ve hurt me, Guy. And then lied about it. To my face. In the middle of all this … I don’t think you get it. This is about honesty, and respect and, I don’t know, fealty, being true to someone …’
‘I’m telling the truth.’
‘Are you? Bearing in mind that telling the truth isn’t the same as being true. But go on, then. Tell me. What happened?’
‘It’s like I said, he seduced me. He was, I don’t know, intelligent, attractive, cosmopolitan. I thought he enjoyed my company, I didn’t think it had anything to do with my body. I didn’t think it had anything to do with sex. Then he got me stoned and kissed me and … and … I didn’t think it was important. I’m sorry I lied about it. I was ashamed. I didn’t want you to know. I was acting badly before I left, I see that, I don’t want to blame my work but that was part of it, I was stuck …’
‘So, you’re saying this thing you … what … did, with this man Greave, it only happened once?’
‘Yes.’ To his surprise tears were running down his own cheeks. He wanted very much to be believed. The idea of having to confess to Helen that it had continued throughout their stay in Venice was more than anathema, it was as though all the shame he’d thought was absent when he’d been with Edward had, instead, just been piled up behind some crude obstruction in his mind, waiting there to pour out and smother him. The other things he’d done with Ed, which had seemed, he wasn’t sure what … daring, sophisticated, worldly … she would, he saw, judge as simply sordid, the activity of dirty little boys. She must not know about them or about his complicity in them. If she found out there could be no possibility of forgiveness. The weight of this feeling inexorable, all-consuming; shame as a thing in itself. Watching it envelop him, but thinking, also, in one corner of his mind, how he might use it, how it might be possible to describe this crushing sensation and his psyche’s desperate attempt to resist the onslaught, creating layer after layer of deceit in its own defence.
‘So, let me get this clear, just in my own mind.’ Helen still leaning against the bench, gone back to this business with the fingertips at her temples, her hair fallen across her hands. Brushing it back so that she could look at him. ‘You had some sort of sex with this man on the first night but then you stayed with him, in the same room, for the rest of the time, for several days?’
‘Yes, but that was just convenience. We’d paid for a room together before any of this happened. We weren’t going to get our money back if we didn’t stay there, were we? I mean I liked him. He’s a good man, don’t get me wrong, he just happens to be, you know, like that. I simply told him it wasn’t on.’
‘And he accepted that?’
‘Yes.’
She shrugged and turned. An expression on her face of profound disappointment. In him. As if she was sad about that, sad he’d failed to live up to what she had believed him to be, what he himself had always wanted to be. He saw, also, that she was unconvinced, and would now pursue this, drag him down through the folds of his lie, bringing further and more awful revelations, one after the other, until she had exposed the full unexpurgated version of his … the word that came to mind was, of course, sin, which was outrageous, except that in some way it was correct, albeit it wasn’t sin against God or church but against her, against what she saw as the sacredness of their bond.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Really I am, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you.’
‘Well you have, Guy.’
Here it was, coming now, the attack.
‘Your timing, too, is impeccable,’ she said.
‘What d’you mean?’
‘You think this is all about you? I suppose you do. Everything else is, isn’t it? Well, it’s not. My mother called last night, at about three in the morning. Dad’s had some sort of heart attack.’
‘Oh babe,’ he said, getting up and going to her, washed by relief at the possibility that her pain wasn’t all his fault, that he might be released from the requirement to delve further; he might be able to reverse their roles and offer succour.
She turned herself away from him.
He stood next to her, arms ready to embrace her.
‘Is he all right?’
‘Yes. I mean, no. He’s alive, they’re going to do some sort of surgery. His health hasn’t been good these last years. He works too hard and drinks too much. I’m flying back to Australia first thing tomorrow to be with my mother.’
‘I’ll come with you.’
‘No. I don’t want you to do that. I’ve already booked my ticket. I don’t want you with me. I want to be by myself.’
In the morning, after a sleepless night spent on a camp bed in the living room, standing in the awkward space of the hallway, Helen about to go out to a taxi, he asked, ‘Does this mean we’re finished? You don’t want to see me again?’
She with her bags around her, lit by the dim glow from the high window above the door, the autumn-coloured scarf he’d given her bunched around her neck. She had never been more beautiful than at that moment; the anger and the pain and the trepidation at the coming flight had leached all colour from her face, rendering her utterly vulnerable, but, at the same time, here was the thing, self-contained, a person entirely independent of him.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I need time to think things through. It’s not that I don’t love you, Guy. I do. But I don’t trust you. You’ve taken that away. Saying sorry doesn’t bring it back.’
There is, he has often thought, a powerful hunger for End Times. Every generation spawning its own variety of threat, its own species of impending apocalypse. For several thousand years, of course, religion has been at the hard centre of this need, tapping into its possibilities, the Second Coming always imminent. But the slow adoption of the ideas of the Enlightenment and the rational – which is to say, the concept that the universe might be comprehensible to the human mind if only we were to observe it closely enough – has undermined many of religion’s peculiar concerns, making them largely irrelevant, at least in the West. Which doesn’t mean that millenarian passion is spent, only that new and present dangers have to be dreamed up as its cause.
It might, he thinks, be possible to get a column up on the subject. End Times being no longer on the cards through Revelation and the Return of the Redeemer, he would begin, they are now to be visited on us through the agency of environmental destruction. The sins which will bring them upon us are no longer fornication, idolatry and usury, although, clearly, there’s still plenty of them to go around, but rather hubris, the crime of improving our lot, raising ourselves up to the level of the gods through ever more sophisticated technology. Everybody intrinsically understands this: we will have to be made to pay for our mastery of Nature.
Christianity replaced by its forerunners – Pan, Demeter, Gaia – the old gods rising up in new form to destroy us. The passion for End Times arises, he supposes, out of our innate horror when faced with the meaninglessness of our existence; the ego rebels, it demands a sense of the singular in our lives, a requirement that we must be living not just at a point of significance, but at the point of significance. And what could be of more consequence than the end of things? Indeed, if we’re not living at that time, if we are, after all, not the centre of the universe, but simply particles dancing like dust motes in infinite space and time, of no particular import to anyone, then what is left to us?
In the face of the void the hard Right’s response is entirely comprehensible: dig up some ancient prophecies from the Good Book to fill the vacuum. Or, alternatively, if you’re too smart to believe in fairytales, then call down the Wrath of Nature. Global warming. Or cancer from microwave towers. Even in a town like Winderran, where surely there is a higher than average IQ (but perhaps not, perhaps that, too, is vanity) there are as many crazy beliefs as people in the main street on this Friday morning, going about who knows what business – drinking coffee at tables outside cafés, blocking the road while they attempt reverse parks, dawdling on the pedestrian crossings – trapping him briefly in his car, the window down, looking out at them. Nobody looking back at him with anything other than casual interest, which is as it should be in one’s home town, regardless of one’s achievements. He’s never been accorded special status here. Soon, though, this will change. He will become a Senator, living on the government purse (a welcome eventuality that, after the years of slim royalties) with his own staff, an office in Canberra, a travel allowance. A person of influence.
Out of town then, following the line of the ridges, vouchsafed glimpses of the bucolic valleys to the south, rich and verdant, with the obelisks of the mountains standing out of the plain like discarded chess pieces, while out to sea the long sand islands sleep in the late summer sun, the air crystal after all the rain, a kind of perfect day, full of its own redolent fecundity, but rich, also, with the prospect of victory; making his way to the university to do some research. A friend has found something.
Few enough allies in the academic world, but Armistead remains true despite living like nothing so much as a cane toad in his preternaturally darkened building, a modern construction mysteriously lauded for its architectural bravery which is, in fact, no more than a prefabricated concrete and steel shed suffering from a lack of almost all amenity, the walls of Armistead’s office only partly softened by the wonderful stacks of books with which they are festooned. To enter his room from the long dim corridor is akin to slipping into an ancient secondhand bookstore at whose centre sits the febrile owner, spreading ever wider in his swivel chair.
‘Mr Lamprey,’ Armistead says without getting up, his slow middle-American tones softening the syllables, injecting much joviality into his tone. ‘How nice of you to grace us with your presence. I trust you were not accosted or assaulted in the corridors by any of your foes.’
‘No, Armistead, none at all, in fact I saw no living being in the place, not even that rare creature, a student.’
Hot in the room, the only source of air a loud fan in the corner. One of the building’s claims was that its superior design rendered the need for air-conditioning obsolete. As a result the place is freezing in winter and stifling in summer. Armistead swathed in an old football jumper, cut like a tent, many chins emerging from the ragged collar. An alliance between them that goes back to the time when the university was being invested. They have delivered up many favours to each other over the years. Guy takes the chair across the desk from him, the one reserved for visiting students when begging for better grades or more time with assignments. Armistead that unusual thing in Australian academia, an historian. A member of that even more curious sub-species who believe truth lies in the detail. His present project a history of nursing in Queensland. As part of his research he has access to the union’s archives, including the minutes of all meetings of hospital branches throughout the organisation’s tenure. Strictly limited to use on the university computer system, of course, which is why he’s suffered to drive down there.
‘You can sit here, Guy,’ Armistead says, pushing his broad office chair back so that he can get enough free space between his belly and the desk to stand. ‘I’ll take myself off to the refectory for a coffee.’ Lumbering out the door and away.
Guy going around and inserting himself into the man’s lair, into the not entirely pleasant warmth he’s left behind, noting the discarded chocolate bar wrappers in the bin beneath the desk, the detritus gathering in and around everything not in immediate use. Dust in a workspace denotes peace, Armistead has previously said. Guy only vaguely sympathetic. His preference being for cleanliness and order. But they share a love of research, the gathering of material. The older he becomes the more he relishes it. Nothing too dry for him, not even the minutes of meetings of the Queensland Nurse’s Association branches from twelve years ago and their deliberations on Safe Workload Management. Their attempt to institute a policy that resisted pressures from employers and other staff to undertake work deemed unsafe. Unfortunately the actual conversations are not recorded, only the outcomes, but even then it is not time wasted, it gives some small insight into the character of Eugenie Lensman, albeit in an earlier iteration.
When Armistead returns Guy gets up reluctantly. Can it be only an hour that has passed? The fat man works his way into his control centre, breathing heavily. A large number seven on the back of his yellow and white jumper. ‘You find what you wanted?’ he asks.
‘A little, nothing of real note,’ Guy says.
‘Which you can use?’
‘It gives me a general sense of the woman’s political background. Explains why she’s able to hold her own at a meeting. I did find out something else … her grandfather was a union rep before her … at the Great Western Milling Company. He’s mentioned in a newspaper article about the factory being closed for a week after a worker was injured.’
Armistead digs out a pair of half glasses, something Lamprey thought went out of fashion twenty years ago, and shuffles the bits of paper in front of him. It occurs to Guy that he might have overstepped the mark, that, for all his willingness to help, Armistead is still studying the union’s history and might be sympathetic to one of its members. But it turns out that what he’s doing is making sure everything is as he left it, that Lamprey hasn’t mixed anything up. When he’s done he looks up at Guy with rheumy eyes, peering over the top of the rims.
‘I’ve been doing a little backgrounding on the other matter,’ he says.
‘The listing of the remnant?’
‘Yes. But it is Science, you understand … my contacts there are limited …’
Armistead is being falsely humble. He sits at the centre of a labyrinth of connections within the university and beyond, his life devoted to the battles which rage between faculties and within them, between teaching staff and administration. He is the unquestioned master, minatory and ruthless, rarely, if ever, losing a fight, accumulating advantage in every corridor.
‘As we thought,’ Armistead says, ‘an application was lodged with what used to be called DERM – I’m afraid I can’t help you with the new name, it’s unpronounceable, although still vaguely connected with resource management – to have the whole riparian strip within the dam site listed.’
‘But that’s nonsense,’ Guy says. ‘Ninety-eight per cent of it’s been planted over the last twenty years. You can’t go classifying that as rare and endangered, or even threatened. And anyway, I thought there was some chance of delisting the original remnant, or at least re-classifying it.’
There’s a small bit of remnant rainforest within the dam site. At some previous time it has been listed under the Vegetation Management Act. The assumption has been that it would be deemed insignificant, small enough that it could be ignored or offset with plantings elsewhere. If, however, the new plantings are to be included then real problems might arise.
‘Not my field,’ Armistead says gently, chidingly.
Lamprey waits.
‘But, here’s the thing,’ Armistead says. ‘It seems the application wasn’t properly prepared – some technical issue with the process, you understand, not the content. They’ve made a case, as I understand it, that because it all comes from seed gathered within the remnant it represents existing vegetation, of which there’s only a tiny amount in the larger catchment. Something like that. It’s apparently seen as a good argument.’
‘And?’
‘Well, the application hasn’t yet been progressed.’ Taking off the half glasses again to clean them with plump fingers. ‘As you know funding’s tight everywhere, and the application for extension of the area is not exactly the most popular document on the government’s radar right now. There’s a process.’
‘There’s always a process.’
‘Indeed. In this case it’s been referred to a junior officer for attention. It’ll be his job to return it to the applicant to fix up the problems. As it happens I have some connections to this particular department. The supervisor is seeking funding for a project, and would appreciate my backing.’ He gives the smallest of smiles. ‘It seems possible the return of the application might be delayed, even beyond the time limit for submissions to the environmental impact statement.’
‘And there’s no paper trail, no emails?’
‘None whatsoever.’
‘Good man, Armistead. Good man. I really do owe you one this time,’ Guy says.
‘It’s nothing,’ Armistead says, brushing the praise aside with the nonchalance of one who knows his own worth.
Guy gets up. Now that he’s finished he can’t wait to get out of the place. Whenever he sees Armistead the thought comes involuntarily to mind that there but for the grace of God …
Armistead, however, is not yet prepared to let him go. ‘You’re spending a bit of time with Aldous Bain these days, I understand,’ he says.
‘What of it?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Come on, Armistead.’
‘It’s just a little thing.’ The fat man looks up at him. ‘I had a bit to do with him years ago. We were in Sydney together, just after I moved. I always thought him an unpleasant chap. Didn’t mind the occasional use of muscle to get his own way. Never forgotten that.’
‘Tell me more.’
‘There’s nothing to tell. We were on the opposite side politically, that’s all.’
‘Aldous doesn’t strike me as the sort to get in a fight.’
Armistead laughs at the possibility. ‘No, of course not. He had others do it for him, even then.’
There’s a four-wheel drive parked out the front when he gets home. Nick Lasker on the couch, jumping up to shake his hand. A couple of piles of stapled-together sheets of paper on the coffee table beside a glass of water. Helen across from him, if anything more reduced than he remembers from the last time he saw her, which had surely been only the evening before. Perhaps it’s just that she’s in someone else’s company, allowing him, for an instant, to see her as she is, so frail that even to be sitting, propped up amongst cushions, seems unlikely. No visible means of support.
‘Sit with us a minute,’ she says. ‘Have you got the time?’
‘Of course.’
‘You had a pleasant coffee? Did you see anyone?’
She assumes he’s been in town, knows nothing about his trip to the university. Probably best to keep it that way.
‘Nobody.’
‘Did you get my pills?’
‘No. No, I didn’t. I’ll go back in again later. I was distracted. I’m so sorry.’
‘Not to worry, darling, I still have some.’
The use of the endearment sounding odd, not just because her voice is so weak.
‘Doctor Lasker’s here to talk to me about my tests,’ she says, directing him towards Nick.
‘So, Doctor,’ he says, ‘I hope everything’s looking good?’
‘Well, that’s the thing, darling,’ she says, ‘it’s not. Not at all.’
The problem had been the intensity of the light. After living in London for so long he’d forgotten how exceptional it was; the different levels of colour.
He’d been travelling for what seemed like days: London, Ankara, Delhi, Kuala Lumpur, Darwin, Sydney, the stops in Asia dream-like affairs, the plane doors opening to hot heavy midnight air, damp and redolent of aeroplane fuel and partly treated sewage, clove cigarettes, the passengers hustled across the tarmac in the darkness to transit lounges boasting a single bamboo-faced bar and closed gift shops, while small brown men with thick moustaches mopped floors under the supervision of soldiers with machine guns strapped across their chests. The cleaners, it was understood, earning so little that they might mop for several lifetimes and never earn enough for the privilege of a single seat on the great silver plane that was ferrying him across the world towards the lover who’d said she wanted to be alone, but whose wishes he was ignoring because that was what a man who loved a woman did. A man like him, repentant, who had waited in London for the requisite number of miserable uncommunicative weeks, unable to write anything lucid or even coherent. A man who’d got on a plane and followed her right around the world. To Sydney and a change of terminals, a connecting flight to Brisbane, followed by an indeterminate journey on a rattling train from the ill-named Roma Street Station to somewhere whose name he couldn’t even recall but from where he’d finally taken a taxi, costing almost as much as the domestic flight, to this place which didn’t seem to be a place at all, just a conglomeration of bungalows huddled together on a wide flat plain behind the dunes, separated one from another by tall paling fences, their roofs festooned with television aerials that mocked the serried white trunks of the paperbarks in the distance, the remnant of coastal forest which, it seemed likely, the whole ugly tile-roofed mess had replaced. The taxi finding its way along neatly kerbed and guttered streets to another of these squat brick homes with its roll-a-door garage, it’s aluminium boat on a trailer parked in the double driveway. Important, in the face of suburbs like this, to remember that there is no such thing as normal, that all human beings are, as Anthony Powell would have it, driven as they are at different speeds by the same Furies – all people are equally extraordinary – except he couldn’t help but think it would be easier to imagine the lives of airport cleaners in Ankara than what occurred in the lounge rooms hidden behind these venetian blinds. Hardly a promising place, this suburb in the provinces of a province at the bottom of the world, in a country he’d thought to have left behind. He, Guy Lamprey, having come back to stand at the ripple-glass door and ring the bell; she, Helen, answering it and finding him there, coming wordlessly into his arms.
Explanations were required. She took him down the short length of street to a thin strip of bush which, when traversed, abruptly, suddenly, astonishingly, revealed the sea. Stepping out of the low scrub into vastness, terrible brightness, the Pacific rolling its waves onto an endless beach, one of those beaches which stretch to the north and to the south without interruption, without headland or bay, one single interminable strip that lost itself in either direction to sea mist, the tide high so that they were obliged to walk in the soft sand up near the low dunes, coming apart and together on the uneven surface, the waves around their ankles, pushing them up the slope with heavy runs of foam. He there in body alone, large bits of him still trapped in those midnight stops, in the long hours in the back of the smoky plane wondering if he was doing the correct thing, when the certainty he’d felt buying the ticket had been lost in that curious plastic limbo, and yet required to be here now, this was the point, called on to come into presence, here on the glaring beach, to deliver the message that must be communicated to this woman with the long straight hair blowing in her face who he loved but who’d been sent away from him by what he had done, who, it seemed possible, might still love him, this woman, here, in her rolled up jeans and her white blouse, appearing, extraordinarily, as in a continuum with that person he’d last seen in the hallway weeks ago. Never mind that she was tanned, radiantly healthy now, she was no less separate from him, regardless that her lips, when they’d kissed in the doorway, had been so full of longing.
‘I’ve come to get you,’ he said. ‘I’ve come to do whatever it is I need to do to get you back. I want you to come home with me. I need you. I can’t tell you how sorry I am for what happened.’
Prepared, now, at last, to come clean if necessary, if that was what it took, to tell her everything that had happened in Venice.
She with other ideas in mind, squeezing his hand.
‘What if I said I don’t want to go back there?’ she said.
‘You mean you won’t come back with me?’
‘No, I mean, what if I wanted to stay here, in Australia? What if being with me involved staying here?’
‘Here?’
Stunned by the enormity of the suggestion. This was nowhere. He looked along the beach and down at the sand, coarse-grained, golden-brown, the tips of the waves lapping their footprints, rendering them smooth-edged, ephemeral, the heavy sand absorbing the water as quickly as it arrived. At least, he thought, it was sand, not pebbles, not grey and bleak, and, for all the houses hidden behind the dunes, there were few people around, only a couple of surfers out amongst the waves.
‘I want to be with you,’ he said, the momentum of his journey carrying him forward. ‘If that means being here, then that’s what it means.’
‘I don’t want you to say you’ll live somewhere with me out of a sense of guilt.’
‘It’s not guilt,’ he said. ‘It’s recognition. I need you. I don’t think I’ve ever needed anyone before. Not like this.’
‘That’s good,’ she said. ‘I like that.’
They walked on. Every few hundred metres the scrub along the top of the dunes was punctuated by a set of wooden steps and a numbered sign, the latter, he supposed, a way of identifying where they were. So that if a swimmer or one of the surfers got into trouble they could call for help. But to whom would they call? Where might help come from?
‘I wouldn’t ask you to live down here,’ she said. ‘This is awful. I’m just here because it’s where Mum and Dad have moved. There’s better places, up in the hills. We could live there. D’you think?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’m lost here. You’ll have to show me.’
‘But do you want to? I mean, really? That’s what I’m asking.’
‘Yes.’
Turning to him, taking his hands in hers. The wind blowing her hair back from her face, spreading her shirt tight against her breasts, the cloth sharply white next to her skin.
‘I can’t tell you how happy it makes me to hear you say that,’ she said. ‘I’ve missed you, terribly. I don’t care about Venice.’ Pausing. ‘As long as you promise it won’t happen again. I’m pregnant, you see,’ she said. ‘I’m going to have our baby.’