‘Hello, Alex,’ said Scarlett coolly. ‘Goodbye.’
‘Hello, Alex, and goodbye,’ said Hannah, not coolly at all.
Alex flushed. ‘Scarlett, I didn’t mean . . . I was just . . .’ He looked around, obviously hoping the café’s noise had drowned out the previous discussion.
‘Yes, I heard exactly what you meant,’ said Scarlett. ‘I’d better be going,’ she said to Hannah. ‘I’m driving back to Gibber’s Creek tonight.’
‘But you’ve only just got here . . .’
‘It’s not because of what I said?’ asked Alex quietly.
‘Don’t overestimate yourself. My sister’s nine months’ pregnant. I shouldn’t have come up in the first place.’
Scarlett pushed away the internal whisper that said that, just possibly, she had hoped to meet Alex again before term began. He shared the squat only a few streets away from her flat. They might drink coffee and discuss Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene, Sweden’s banning of aerosol sprays, what would happen to the earth if the hole in the ozone layer kept spreading, the success of the first cochlear implants and the sequencing of the first complete genome ever with PHI 174. None of the other students got really excited by a genome.
She looked up at him: tall, dark, handsome, the most perverse cliché in the universe. She would never be such a predictable idiot again.
‘I’ll phone you from Dribble,’ she said to Hannah. ‘Enjoy the magazines.’
‘All two hundred of them,’ said Hannah dryly.
‘Only ten. Ciao.’ She pressed the start button on her wheelchair and bumped across the footpath. She had gone perhaps two metres when she discovered Alex was still beside her.
‘I need to explain.’
‘You need to go away.’ And put your head up an emu’s bum, she thought, which had been the worst insult she could think of when she was ten years old. Nancy had forbidden her Sunday ice cream for an hour after that one. It would have been longer if her foster mother hadn’t laughed.
‘I didn’t mean it the way it came out. I just meant I can’t afford tickets for a charity just now. If I was going to ask anyone, it would be you.’
‘If ifs had mass, we could climb them to the stars,’ said Scarlett.
‘Is that a saying from the weird town you come from?’
‘In a way. It’s from one of its weird residents. Me. And I know perfectly well that there is no point asking someone who can’t dance to a ball.’
‘Scarlett . . .’ The wheelchair was fast enough on the smooth paving that he had to stride to keep up with her. She zapped around a bloke limping with a cane, blessing Thompson’s Industries.
‘The real reason I can’t ask you to the ball is that I’m broke. I didn’t even have coffee back there.’
She slowed down. ‘Really?’
‘Cross my heart and hope to fracture tibia, fibula and humerus by lunchtime,’ said Alex, in that voice that willed her to believe him. ‘I can make up sayings too,’ he added. ‘In fact I have to lug my stuff on the train over to Grandmère’s — to my grandmother’s. She lives out at Parramatta, which is going to be convenient for uni. Not.’
‘So why stay there?’
He shrugged. ‘I don’t get a living-away-from-home allowance because Grandmère’s place is technically in Sydney. And the builders are moving into the squat tomorrow.’
‘Where do your parents live?’
He hesitated. ‘They died.’
Oops. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Me too. Car accident when I was twelve.’
‘That’s hard.’
He nodded. ‘At least I had Grandmère. Or rather the Grand Duchess Maria-Theresa, if you want to be formal, which she usually does. How did you lose your parents?’
So he was a prince. Or whatever the grandson of a grand duchess was. Why had they never spoken of these things? she wondered.
‘I didn’t lose them. They dumped me because I couldn’t move by myself. They tried to pick me up again when they were broke and found out my adopted sister has money, but I didn’t want to be undumped.’ Scarlett shrugged. ‘End of story.’
She regarded him tentatively, the wheelchair on its slowest setting now. ‘I have a spare bedroom,’ she blurted, surprising even herself. She’d never have made the offer if she’d thought about it.
Alex considered. Finally he met her eyes. ‘Thank you. But no.’
She kept the pain from her face, but not the flush. ‘Okay. It was just an offer.’
‘Scarlett,’ he looked down at her, ‘I’m not getting involved with anyone till I’m through uni and have done my residency.’
Her flush grew hotter. ‘I just meant a place to stay for a while.’ And she had, she told herself. ‘But sure, people might misunderstand.’
‘Sorry. I’m really chewing my foot off today.’ He hesitated. ‘Can I ask a favour?’
She shrugged again. ‘You’ve only insulted me twice this afternoon, once in front of half the anatomy class. But okay.’
‘You said you were heading back to Gibber’s Creek. Could you give me a lift to Grandmère’s? It’s more or less on the way. Otherwise it’s going to mean three train trips, which is more cash than I have just now, or hitchhiking, which is not easy with your arms full of garbage bags.’
Parramatta wasn’t on the way back to Gibber’s Creek. Plus she was really worried about Jed. But this was Alex . . .
‘Okay,’ she said, thinking, Idiot, idiot, to herself. ‘Get your stuff and meet me at my place.’
Big Red was parked outside the flats: red for Scarlett, not the nice conservative white Jim Thompson had wanted the van painted; big because, much as she’d love a sports car like Jed’s, she had two wheelchairs, plus luggage, plus a friend or two, and one of those friends was Leafsong, who wanted help transporting ninety kilograms of tomatoes and fifty bunches of basil from the commune to her café, or sent letters asking her to collect a whole salmon from the Sydney Fish Market, or find some weird shop to buy filo pastry, black olives, Turkish Delight or halva, and no place like that ever had a ramp, so she had to sit at the front and call out to people who then fussed over her and gave her thick sweet coffee and baklava and almond crescents, or made her taste twenty kinds of halva before allowing her to leave — which actually was pretty good, and she had made several friends of old women with high stomachs and black dresses and hankies tied about their heads. All that meant her vehicle actually needed to be a small van, tall rather than long to make room for the mobile bars that allowed her to swing the wheelchairs up, down and in and out, as well as other stuff.
Which would have been noteworthy enough apart from Leafsong’s and Mark’s input . . .
Alex stared. ‘The boxing kangaroos on the doors are a nice touch.’
‘A Christmas present from my friend Leafsong.’
‘Purple really suits kangaroos.’
‘Leafsong thought so too.’
‘I’m not quite sure about the green ducks.’
‘Me neither. I’m beginning to wonder if she sees colours the way other people do.’ Alex glanced at her questioningly. ‘She can’t talk. Or rather, has chosen not to. But she does have some apparent asymmetry, possibly an early endocrine imbalance.’
‘She hasn’t been properly diagnosed?’
‘She doesn’t need diagnosis,’ said Scarlett shortly. ‘She is also the most fabulous cook in the universe and runs the Blue Belle Café with her partner, Mark, and is my best friend.’
Alex glanced at her. ‘I’m looking forward to meeting her.’ He grinned as he slid into the passenger’s seat, painted with the rear view of a duck. ‘I think you are going to get on just fine with Grandmère.’
Scarlett pulled expertly away from the kerb. The advantage of being taught how to drive by a terrible driver like Jed was that you learned very quickly what not to do. ‘Is she really a grand duchess?’
‘Of course not,’ said Alex patiently. ‘All Russian aristocratic titles were abolished in 1918 as part of the Communist revolution. But most of those who had Russian titles kept using them, and their kids and grandkids and great-grandkids still do sometimes. And if idiots like Barbara marry someone who might, possibly, be descended from a prince, then they push to keep the titles too.’
‘Are you descended from a prince though?’
He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Grandmère believes it utterly. So did Grandpère. I think. Mum and Dad didn’t give two hoots, but played the part for Grandmère. Want a potted version of the family history?’
‘Please.’ She pulled up at a set of traffic lights.
‘Okay. Sometime in the early 1920s — Grandpère was always carefully vague about exactly when — a White Russian who called himself the Grand Prince Michael Alexis Romanov, supposedly the youngest brother of the murdered tsar, arrived in Paris, where there was quite a colony of White Russian émigrés, mostly poor as church mice, living mainly by being invited out to dinner, lunch and even breakfast if at all possible, and holidaying in the chateaux of old friends, or the new rich who wanted to hobnob with royalty.
‘Some of them did very well, were given company directorships, where they only had to add their name and title to the business, and go on long lunches and dinners. Grandpère was one of those. Except . . .’ He paused and grinned at her.
‘Let me guess. There’s no historical record of a Grand Prince Michael?’
‘There’s no historical record of most White Russian aristocrats. The records were destroyed by the Communists. Which was convenient for the fakers who decided to become members of the Russian aristocracy.’ He shrugged again. ‘To be honest, I don’t know what is true and what isn’t. Grandpère was an actual con man . . .’
So that was where Alex inherited his charm, thought Scarlett.
‘. . . but Grandmère talks proudly of how they would leave someone’s chateau with enough francs to see them through another three years, plus a fur coat and an emerald brooch to be hocked at some later date. But then true aristocracy also probably acts as if they are entitled to francs and fur coats. There actually are a few letters in English and German archives that mention a younger brother of the tsar, but in the official family trees there’s no mention of one.’
‘How did your grandfather explain the discrepancy?’
Alex laughed. ‘He didn’t. Royalty never complains, never explains. Grandmère is French, at least twenty years younger than him. Her father was a Parisian baker, as bourgeois as they come. He loved having a grand prince as a son-in-law. He even bought them a house, almost beautiful enough for an aristocrat.
‘And then the war came, and the Boche.’ Scarlett was reasonably certain Alex hadn’t noticed that he had used the French term. ‘Grandpère joined the Free French under de Gaulle and ended up in Darwin. And before you say the dates don’t fit and he’d have been too old: I know. Grandmère says he dyed his hair and got away with it. Anyway, he had a stroke and was still in Darwin Hospital when the war ended. Grandmère was given permission to join him, with my father, and later granted residency then citizenship. Grandpère died about a year after she arrived.’
‘She didn’t want to go back to Paris?’
‘I don’t think she could afford to. Her parents had been in the Resistance, and the shop confiscated. With no money, a husband who couldn’t speak or move, a young son . . .’ He shrugged. ‘Grandmère worked as a barmaid, then as a cook. No one in Darwin was impressed by a grand duchess or princess — she changes titles as it suits her — so when Grandpère died she came to Sydney, where a title has snob value. By the time my parents were killed, she had just retired as functions manager for one of the big hotels. She has her flat, her pension and . . .’
‘And what?’
‘You’ll see,’ said Alex.
The fire consumed the dry bark, the shimmering eucalyptus oil evaporating from hot trees. Now it had heat enough to burn green leaves and sap-rich wood. For the first time smoke sifted into the air, almost too faint to see . . .