Murder on the Apricot Coast

murder on the apricot coast Apricot13-12 264pp.indd i 22/1/08 4:40:45 PM Also by Marion Halligan The Apricot Colonel...

Author: Halligan Marion

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murder on the apricot coast

Apricot13-12 264pp.indd i

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Also by Marion Halligan The Apricot Colonel The Taste of Memory The Point The Fog Garden The Golden Dress Cockles of the Heart Wishbone The Worry Box Lovers’ Knots Eat My Words Spider Cup The Hanged Man in the Garden The Living Hothouse Self Possession The Midwife’s Daughters (for children) Out of the Picture Collected Stories

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marion HALLIGAN

murder on the apricot coast

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First published in 2008 Copyright © Marion Halligan 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10% of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act. Allen & Unwin 83 Alexander Street Crows Nest NSW 2065 Australia Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100 Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218 Email: [email protected] Web: www.allenandunwin.com National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry: Halligan, Marion, 1940–. Murder on the apricot coast. ISBN 9781741753844 (pbk.). I. Title. A823.3 Edited by Rosanne Fitzgibbon Text design and typesetting by Blue Rinse Setting Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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For John

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Change the name and it’s about you, that story. Horace, Satires

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Reader, I married him. Those words mark the end of Jane Eyre’s story, but they are the beginning of mine. Or, no: maybe I should say a beginning? Another beginning, perhaps. So calmly the words take control. I married him. Well, yes I did. But he married me. We married one another. We are married. Of course Jane’s story didn’t end there. Her author just stopped telling it. Our imaginations can go on following it. Some people are even presumptuous enough to think they can publish their own versions for the rest of us to read, but they never get it right. If anything can convince you of the genius of a writer’s work, it is someone else’s sequel. Always so clumsy, dull, ill-written. Pride and Prejudice. Rebecca. We have what their authors gave us, and however sad it makes us that has to be enough. Except for what happens in the privacy of our minds. We are still telling our story. Now we are married. Al and I. The man I used to think of as the colonel. My Apricot Colonel. I am Mrs Marriott. On certain bits of paper, anyway. In fact I remain Cassandra Travers. I’m in the habit. It’s my working name. Call me Mrs Marriott and I may take no notice. 1

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I am a good wife. I like to make my husband happy. It’s not what I expected. He makes me happy, I make him happy, that makes us both happy, the giving and the getting. We live together, I work as a freelance editor, and he, ah, he does what he does.


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Chapter 1 I hadn’t seen Briony in years when I ran into her in Manuka. We’d been at university together, here in Canberra, then she’d lived in Sydney for most of her twenties with a guy called Tony, who’d suddenly had a crisis of commitment and gone off with a woman the same age Briony had been when they’d started living together. Briony went to England and after a few postcards we’d lost touch. That was getting on for ten years ago now. I’d lived through a similar history with Bryce, and done a very nice job of training myself to live the single life. Telling myself that the tolling of biological clocks was no concern of mine. I saw her coming out of the newsagent and at first I thought, No, can’t be Briony, but then of course it was, and there we were giving one another hugs and sinking into chairs at the nearest pavement café. You haven’t changed a bit, I said, and she hadn’t, as pretty as ever, in that pale blonde way. Not like me, I’m silver white really; my hair suddenly lost its colour at the end of my twenties and now it hangs in a heavy fall and is my one vanity. So I tell myself. Briony’s eyes are grey, her 3


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skin is rosy-fair, her hair ashy; she’s a kind of rainy English beauty, like a medieval lady who washes her face in a spring and combs her hair by her reflection in it. And unicorns put their heads in her lap. Blame Briony for these romantic notions. You have, she said, changed. I nearly didn’t recognise you. Your hair, that colour, it’s fabulous. Is it … hard work? All its own doing, I said. For no good reason that I can see. Oh Sandra, she said, it is good to see you. I had to point out I was Cassandra now, I’d lengthened my name, just as my grandfather had shortened his, from Traverso to Travers. Thus we reinvent ourselves, with quick strokes of the pen, adding and subtracting letters of the alphabet and becoming different people. Cassandra, said Briony. It suits you. We talked for ages, over two cups of coffee and then a glass of wine. Briony had a job at Santa Sophia, teaching English to teenage girls, and was renting an apartment in Kingston. When I mentioned love life she gave a little purse-lipped smile and didn’t say anything. She came round for a meal some days later—Al was away on mysterious consultant’s business, I don’t ask though sometimes he tells—and we had rather a lot of champagne. She’d brought an excellent bottle and we sat on my chintzy old rose-patterned sofa and she told me that she was in love. With the most marvellous man. Everything she’d ever wanted in a guy. Tall, handsome, distinguished, sexy. A little older than her, a real man of the world. Something about this catalogue of wonders made me suspicious. He sounds a perfect dream, I said.


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Oh he is. One day you’ll meet him. Where did you find him? In London. Oh, she said, seeing my quizzical look— I know I looked quizzical, I felt my face doing it. Oh, he lives here. Is that why you …? Yes. Such wonderful luck. Getting the job here. I know what’s coming next. Why she isn’t out and about and upfront with him. He’s married, right now, said Briony. He’s very big in Defence and up for a top job. So we have to be secret for now. But when that’s fixed he’ll divorce his wife and we’ll be married. Oh Briony, I said, that’s the oldest trick in the book. No, Cass, if you knew him. It’s true. We’re going to be married. Just as soon as the job is secure. I could see she was living her own version of the starcrossed lovers narrative, unique, tragic. Highly pleasurable in its way. Was it my role to warn her how commonplace the story is? And that it was likely to end in equally commonplace and not at all pleasurable woe? It seemed hard to me, that, having lived through one of the great generic stories of our era, the commitment to a man you believe is faithful and honourable and your life-partner, and with the expectation that you will have children together and bring them up and maybe even grow old together, and then have him bugger off and take up with a woman young as you were once, she should have the awful bad luck to be living through another terrible generic narrative, the love affair with the married man who swears he will leave his wife, and is lying.


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And who knows, maybe I was mistaken, maybe he wasn’t lying. And now I was with Al I knew that all that unconcern with biological clocks was putting on a brave face. Which made me think about Briony, and this guy stuffing up her hopes of having children. Having started, Briony wanted to keep talking about him. How he came to see her between five and seven in the evenings, stealing a bit of extra time with her when he had to go away on business—even a day sometimes. Not very often, of course, they had to be so discreet, a breath of scandal and the top job would elude him forever. I wondered about this; is divorce such a scandal these days? Would anybody even notice? He was more likely to miss out on promotion because he was distracted by Briony from doing the job he had properly. She said she called him Carlo. Not his real name. He sent her cases of champagne—fine vintage stuff like the one she’d brought to me—and she always had bottles chilled for when he dropped by. Briony was starting to seem more and more like a medieval maiden, but enclosed in a tower awaiting her lord’s pleasure, not washing her face in a spring and having a unicorn’s head in her lap. We saw one another from time to time through the winter, a coffee, or maybe a cocktail—Briony likes pretty coloured drinks in fishbowl glasses—a movie, though I was often busy with Al and the occasions tended to stretch apart. I noticed that she was getting slenderer. That her cheekbones had a polished look and her grey eyes were huge. Tragic love seemed to suit her looks, anyway. The top job seemed slow in coming.


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Are you sure it’s really love, I asked her, after yet another catalogue of his wonders. Not just lust? Carlo adores me. And I adore him. We want to spend our lives together. I’m not sure about this word adore. It’s a word in a Christmas carol. It’s not an earthly word. Do I adore Al? Of course. But I wouldn’t say so. Somebody in a novel remarks in a plaintive voice: Men adore me, but they don’t stay with me. Precisely so. Then one night she rang me up, about half-past nine it must have been. She sounded upset. Could she come and see me, tomorrow, after school. Come to my place, I said. My place was where I worked. Al and I hadn’t actually made up our minds where we lived. Apart from the coast house he had his pad in O’Connor and I had my duplex on the other side of the suburb and somehow we seemed to need all of them, extravagant though it was. We told ourselves we’d sort it out one day. The problem was each of us used our house as an office, mine especially was full of books and working spaces. Being freelance I need sitting spaces and lying spaces, sofas, chairs, desks; my sitting room is my working room. I thought of getting a tenant, maybe a student, and keeping it as a place to work during the day and living with Al at night, either in O’Connor or down at the coast. I have to say, I was luxuriating rather in this embarrassment of riches. Two people, three houses. A wickedly large footprint, my ecologically concerned friend Gavin would say. Briony brought some more good champagne. He sends more than we drink, she said.


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I had some smoked salmon and made nibbles with rye bread; I thought she’d need some food. But she didn’t eat anything. Last night was parent–teacher evening, she said. At Santa Sophia? Yes. I knew they were coming, I had them noted down on my timetable … They …? Carlo. And … You mean Carlo has a daughter at the school? She nodded. In year twelve. I had an appointment with them, for quite late in the evening, for eight o’clock, and I was all prepared, I’d psyched myself up for it, what else could I do? She’s not very good at English, of course they would want to talk to me. But … she took out a handkerchief and wiped her eyes. But, she went on eventually, it was much earlier, and I looked up, and suddenly I saw them, when I wasn’t expecting to though of course it was logical, they were standing in line for one of the other teachers, and oh Cassandra, they were just so there, so together, making such a couple, and it was as if they’d carved this space out in air for so long that they fitted together, perfectly, as if nothing would ever part them. They weren’t standing particularly close—not touching, nothing like that—but they occupied this couple space, together, inviolable somehow. I nodded. I remember reading a short story once, I forget whose, which said exactly that same thing; it made a deep impression on me, so that it’s something I often notice. They would, I said; if you’d thought of it, you’d have known that.


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I felt so hopeless. Her voice wobbled. I thought it is all just a beautiful dream, it won’t ever happen. I don’t think anything’s changed, Briony. You saw that, that couplehood, but it’s always been there, your situation is exactly the same, your seeing it doesn’t make any difference. How’s that for ambiguous comfort? But Briony took it in the way useful to her, her face brightened, and she smiled, and said, You’re right, of course. She put her handkerchief away and sat up straight. The trouble is, he’s off overseas for a fortnight, and I don’t know when I’ll see him again. It’s so much harder, on my own for so long. I wanted to go round right then and shoot Carlo. What frightful arrogance it is in a man to shut a woman up like this in an impossible love, while he goes on living his life, working, travelling, being conjugal, while she sits and pines. I resolved to try to get her out more, encourage her to find some other life apart from school and that tower of his imprisoning. About seven Al came to pick me up. My heart gave a little jump, as it always does. I love looking at him, his long fingers, his smooth rosy cheeks, his neat ears. But start making a catalogue of these things and you might never stop. He glanced at Briony and decided we’d eat at my house tonight, and soon he’d cooked fat little fillet steaks rare on the griddle, with green salad and a pile of sugar snap peas. I know Briony hadn’t meant to stay but somehow Al persuades. We had some red wine, not a lot but enough on top of the champagne to make it inadvisable for Briony to drive, so I fixed her up in the spare room.


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We’d had a good time. Al had made her laugh which I don’t think happened much in her life. When we went to bed I told him all about Carlo. This is the bit of being with him that I love, cuddled up in bed, talking. Well, one of the many bits. I hate men like that, he said, his voice softly vehement. So greedy. So narcissistic. Think they can have everything. Think they deserve everything. I bet he’s quite happily married, very nicely settled there, thank you. I was pleased that Al felt like this; I wasn’t sure that male solidarity might not have come into play. I said, Of course, he may be telling the truth, he may be going to leave his wife and marry her. At that moment a possum landed on the roof with a thump that shook the house. There, said Al, hear that? That was a flying pig crash-landing. When I had finished laughing at that, at the possum’s timing as well as the use Al had made of it, he said, Why do women believe men who tell them these things? It’s such a famous lie, such a perennial lie. Surely mothers warn their daughters from an early age about married men bearing promises of marriage. We all know it but somehow we all seem to fall for it. I suppose the thing is that when you love someone you want to believe that he’s telling you the truth. I can see that. But how does it happen in the first place, that a woman comes to love a man who is married? You don’t think he tells her? We’re not talking honesty at any point here. Briony met Carlo (ugh, the name feels so sleazy, I bet he’s not even a real Carlo, sleazy yes but not a


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real Carlo). She met him in London, he’d have been single, glamorous, he’d have been out for a good time, no way he’d have mentioned a wife up front. Maybe he did fall in love with her, he certainly would have liked having a good time with her, and by the time she finds out it’s too late, she’s in love and it’s tragic. And don’t forget, tragic has its charm, for a bit. You’d think when she finds out he’s married she’d be so disgusted she’d throw him out. Oh, by this time the thing is bigger than both of them. It’s a grand passion. He can’t help himself. It all obscures the fact that he knew what he was doing in the first place. Adultery, said Al, in a musing voice. What an ominous old word. It’s funny that people never realise they are always wrong about it. They think it can be fun, a game, simple sexual pleasure, that they are too clever for anyone to get hurt, and they’re always wrong. Always, my prophetic Cassandra? Always. Because there are always three or maybe four people involved, and it might be fun for two but not for the others. My dear promiscuous friend Justine would say it’s because heterosexuals are so foolishly hung up on monogamy. Maybe she’s right. Maybe. But the fact is we are monogamous and people are going to be hurt. Everybody, usually. Somebody has got to be betrayed. Look at this coil: Briony unhappy. Carlo seems to be having fun but I bet there are tensions. His wife … even if she doesn’t know about Briony she’ll know there’s


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something wrong somewhere. The daughter, remember. And there’s no way out without somebody and probably everybody being even more hurt. You’re wonderfully well informed, said Al. Is this personal experience talking? Actually, I said, I seem to have avoided that particular folly. Entirely by good luck, I should think. But there’s enough of it around. To look at, to read about. It’s an evergreen narrative, and still the subject of a lot of novels, don’t forget. The trouble with being an unreconstructed reader like me is, your brain’s full of other people’s words. Shreds and patches of them. Hard to resist when they are so much better than your own. The fragments, scraps, the bits and greasy relics … That’s Troilus raging over Cressida’s faithlessness. Faithlessness. I just love the anger of those words, the way they spit out. The orts of her love … Orts are refuse, scraps, bits of leftover food. We should never have lost the word. Even if only for describing the debris of dinner parties. But Troilus is talking about the debris of Cressida’s love for him, the greasy scraps, now offered to another man. Dodgy leftovers. Put Carlo instead of Cressida, that’s what you’ve got. Poor Briony being fed dodgy leftovers. I’m newly married. And for love. I cannot envisage faithlessness, cannot conceive it. Al fills my vision. You can see I like to rehearse to myself the idea of marriage. Like so many women of my age, I had learnt not to expect it. Trained myself out of any hopes. So I am enjoying the unlikeliness of it. Justine was a game, a game of my singlehood. You’re no


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Lesbian, she used to tease me, you’re just greedy. I loved Justine, and we did have fun. But not like this. I was quiet for a moment. Then I said: Do you really think Justine’s right? That heterosexuals are stupid to expect monogamy? That we’d all be happier having it off with whoever offered and not minding? Maybe we would be. But I don’t think we can do it. Not humanly possible. And personally I’m into monogamy. By this time we had rather lost interest in talking. Oh, I do like being in bed with Al.


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Chapter 2 I’d thought the dinner party was obsolete, well apart from Cleo’s manifestations which are so out-of-category they certainly aren’t anything I would think of emulating. Cleo is my dearest friend and I do admire her apparently easy achievement of perfection in everything she does, especially as I know it isn’t at all as easy as she makes it look. Admire is the word, not copy. But with Al and me a couple, and a wedding to prove it, dinner parties started to loom large. I can’t do this in return, I said to Al, sounding probably more panic-stricken than I felt, but I wanted to make sure I made my position clear. I didn’t think I could turn myself into a giver of dinner parties, even for him. Never fear, he said. We’ll come up with something. We will? I will. In the end we took to returning hospitality with lunch parties at the coast. Al thought up the food and mostly cooked it. And the dinner invitations tailed off rather. Once everybody had got a look at the new wife the energy seemed to go out of them. 14


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But there was still the occasional event. Hugh was a sometime colleague of Al’s. They went way back. Hugh and his wife Sylvie had been posted in Finland for three years and though they’d been back a while we hadn’t managed to get together. So we fronted up on a sharp autumn Saturday night to a spreading house in Forrest with porticoes and a carriage drive. Two other couples: Angel and Ted, Des (who turned out to be Despina) and Nick. There is a curious washing-up quality in these occasions, I mean in the shipwreck sense, not doing the dishes. There you are, people who go about your own lives in your own way and then suddenly your hosts grab you and strand you on the beach of their dinner party, eyeing off complete strangers. Ted, a journalist at the press gallery. Angel, a public servant so important she’s spent the week answering awkward questions at Senate Estimates about her department’s behaviour. Is this why I think she has cold eyes? No, I’m sure she has really. Nick works with Hugh. Des is a life coach, says Hugh, and when she flaps her hand at him in playful irritation (not for the first time, I can tell), he says, Sorry, I mean consultant. Good. That’s everybody in their own box. Now let’s see how they crawl out of it. Hugh pours champagne. Sylvie passes a plate of what she calls hors d’oeuvres and Ted pronounces horses doovers. Haven’t heard that since Gran died. Very soft Nat King Cole from the sound system. Silence could cause panic. A life coach, said Al, smiling his sweet smile at Des. She’s a statuesque woman with springing dark curls and a marvellous nose in a straight line with her forehead.


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An executive coach, actually, she said. Al kept smiling, raising his eyebrows. I work with public servants, she said. Helping manage cultural change in large institutions. Developing the skills of individuals in leading teams to achieve outcomes and in contributing to departmental goals. I could make a lot more money editing government reports than I do for fiction, but I’d more than earn it. I’d have to deal with language like that all the time. I don’t say this, just nod wisely. You want promotion, said Nick, Des’s your woman. She’ll have you up the ladder and into the Senior Executive Service in no time. Well, it’s not quite so simple as that, said Des. Mobs of grateful clients to prove it, he said. Angel said to me, You’re an editor. What do you edit? Fiction, mainly. That’s what I really like. Oh, fiction, said Angel. I never read fiction. I prefer history. I like it to be true. Well, we’d all like history to be true, I said. But it mostly isn’t. If you want truth, then read novels. That’s where you’ll find truth. A good novel never lies. I saw Al giving me a small wicked grin. Oh sorry, I’m proselytising again, I said. It’s an occupational hazard, I’m afraid. I looked at Angel. Does your job have any occupational hazards? Angel was taken aback. Before she could reply Ted said: Only power. You know, power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely? You do talk such nonsense, Ted, Angel said in a disdainful


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voice. She was thin as a prickle and had pale blonde expensive hair cut in a close cap to her head. Ted was somehow ramshackle. Al said, I read an interesting variant on that. It is the fear of losing power that corrupts. I was about to say, That’s so true, look at our government, when I remembered that I shouldn’t talk politics to strangers. History would seem to bear that out, Nick said. It might depend on who’s writing it, said Hugh. Traditionally the victors, surely? said Ted. Only initially, said Hugh. The hosts’ daughter came in. A rather heavy girl. Surly. Schoolgirls are usually so gorgeous these days. Maybe being heavy would make you surly. Her parents smiled uneasily and introduced her. Nicole. How’s school? asked Nick in a jolly voice. Sucks, said Nicole. Oh Nicki, said her mother, you don’t really think that. Yes I do. What would you know? She skolled a glass of champagne and went off. Teenage girls, said Sylvie. You have to believe they’ll grow out of it. It’s impossible to imagine it when they’re in it, said Des, but they do. One day you suddenly realise. They aren’t vile anymore. Fern’s lovely. Especially now she’s moved out, said Nick. Has she? said Sylvie. You are clever. How did you manage that? I’m not depending on it, said Nick. She still comes back for odd nights. I doubt she’s gone for good.


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Apparently they never are, these days, said Angel. Only by hearsay do we know that, said Ted. Being so cleverly childless. Home’s too much fun, said Hugh. Drink and sex and a decent washing machine. All the things we had to leave home for. Everybody laughed, except Angel. How old is Fern? I asked. Twenty, said Sylvie. And Ivy’s in the same class as Nicole at Santa. Ivy’s Fern’s sister. And right smack in the middle of horrible teenagerhood, said Nick. I doubt she’ll slough it all off so neatly as Fern. Maybe, when she gets to uni. Are the girls good friends? I asked. Oh yes, said Des. Ivy’s a bit younger than Nicole. It turned out Hugh’s postings had set her back a bit. Only in terms of school years, said Sylvie; I think travelling abroad is so good for a child’s development, and there’s no hurry to finish school. Give her time to grow up, said Hugh. And fine down, murmured Sylvie so softly that most of the guests couldn’t have heard. Hugh poured more champagne. It was nice but I realised I had been spoilt by Briony’s delicious bottles. Hugh said that for an Australian bubbly it was quite like a French wine. Not quite, said Sylvie. Not nearly quite. It was a complicated rich dinner and I gathered from the remarks of other guests that Sylvie was famous for her food. I thought of Al’s prawns, his fresh-opened oysters, his little grilled Barbounia. Sylvie was serving a dish called ris


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de veau financière. I thought ris meant rice but it turned out to be sweetbreads in a thick cream sauce with green olives and pearl-like little onions. Perfectly delicious. It’s called financière, said Sylvie, to suggest a rich man’s dish, but of course sweetbreads in this country, if you can get them, aren’t at all expensive. Maybe it was the cream sauces that were responsible for Nicole’s stolidity. Oops. I meant solidity. Didn’t I? Hugh had just been in Bangkok and talked about the marvellous street food. Isn’t it dangerous? asked Angel. Dangerous? Tummy bugs. Food poisoning. I’m an old soldier. You’d have trouble poisoning me. No. It’s fresh, spicy. Never had a twinge from it. Hugh had once been posted to Paris. Military attaché. Sylvie said there were some wonderful cuisines in the world, but French, ah French, you couldn’t beat it. What about Finnish? asked Angel. Hugh and Sylvie both rolled their eyes. All that raw fish is supposed to be good for you, said Hugh. Hugh was a burly and bear-like man, the hair on his chest and arms a thick pelt. Sylvie was little, tiny-boned and slight-fleshed, in the French-women-not-getting-fat category. It was her father that Nicole resembled. How cruel genes can be. Somehow the conversation didn’t warm up, didn’t ever achieve a momentum of its own. People started topics that might have led to interesting places but somehow they


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didn’t. They sparred a bit, one-upped. There were silences in which they said things like, This cheese is delicious—where do you get it? And: Chocolate mousse, I adore chocolate mousse—Angel, why do you never make chocolate mousse anymore? Angel said, You could try looking in the mirror for an answer to that one. I had a go at talking about movies, but that didn’t help. People didn’t go to the cinema, they watched pay TV at home. I’d just seen Match Point and thought it was wonderful, so full of ambiguities. And the corruption, so delicate, beginning with the box at the opera, proceeding through adultery to murder. Adultery, said Sylvie, as though it were a word not to be uttered in company, and Angel said, Now you’ve spoilt the ending. All the music was from operas, I said. It was so intense, it just pounded out, sex and death. It gave me the shivers. Opera, said Angel. We’re seeing The Magic Flute next week. Oh, is that on, said Des. In Sydney. At the Opera House. We have season tickets. I don’t think movies can compete with reality TV, said Nick. That turned out to be the most lively conversation of the night, but I hadn’t much interest in it. Reality TV, compared with a work of art like Match Point! Over coffee I remarked to Hugh, So, were you and Al in the army together? Hugh laughed in a strangely hearty way. Oh, Al and I, we go way back. Way back. Did you both fight in the Gulf War?


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Oh, we’re old comrades in arms, said Hugh. Many a tale we could tell you. But he didn’t. Instead he asked Al how the book was coming on. Okay, said Al. I knew he wouldn’t answer that one. His first book, the one we met over, when he employed me to edit it, an account of the Gulf War, had been published to some acclaim, received some decent reviews from people who counted, got him invited to talk about it for a while. But finally didn’t go anywhere much. He wasn’t too worried, he’d got it down on paper, got it out, it was there as a record. Now he was writing a book about warfare in the twentieth century. He often talked to me about it, and I talked back, but I wouldn’t have liked to try to tell anybody what it was about. He’d learnt a lot writing the first one, about how to put words together. The second was going to be different, perhaps more philosophical, certainly quite a lot about ideas. I was going to be able to read it after he’d finished the first draft. We met Fern late in the evening. She came to pick her parents up, something to do with her having the car. She was a beautiful girl, with a tumbling mass of dark curls and a classical straight profile like her mother. Her skin was a golden colour and she was slender, with a long curving neck. There are so many lovely looking girls about these days, but Fern was stunning. She reminded me of something, not a person, a painting, I racked the brain and finally decided it was one of those wall paintings from Pompeii, of young women gathering flowers, their dark curls bound with ribbons and their clothes swirling round their bodies. She


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was wearing short tight black trousers and a top of heavy satin, with a pattern of flowers resembling a watercolour painting whose pale colours had run into the texture of the fabric. It moved in a slow fluid way with her body. In the car on the way home I said to Al, You and Hugh certainly are a pair of old friends. Same habits. Both brilliant at not answering questions. Al laughed. We are old friends. We’ve been through a lot together. I knew that was a kind of apology, the nearest I’d get. Love me, love my friends. Nobody ever says that is one of the rules of marriage, but I reckon it is. Along with its corollary: Love me, give up all your irritating friends. Fortunately there was no question of giving up old friends where Cleo was concerned. Cleo adores Al—that word again—because he saved her baby Pomona from a serial killer, though for a long while before that she thought he was the most frightful cad—she said ‘cad’ in inverted commas but she really meant it. Sometimes asks him awkward questions. Are you a spy? she said to him the other day. We’d been having an early Sunday evening barbecue, we often do at the weekends, relaxing with simple food and Paul reckoning he needs the chance to drink some decent red wine. We usually go to their house, it works better with the children. Al and I find good things to take, not always extravagant: strawberries from the market, a huge bunch of gladioli, smoked trout, shiraz chocolates. Cleo tossed the question at him as she spread the goat’s cheese we’d brought on some sourdough bread. Al looked at her. All Cretans are liars, he said.


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Cleo adores him but he likes to confuse her. I know better than to ask. He has promised always to tell me the truth, but I don’t want to make it too hard for him. All Cretans are liars is a famous conundrum. The sentence is spoken by a Cretan, who if it is true must be telling a lie. And if he’s telling a lie then the statement is true but it’s a lie. Mind you, a person can be a liar without lying with every utterance he makes; the most shameless liar in the world will sometimes tell the truth. But for these purposes a liar is always a liar, which I suppose is an idea of some truth. Look at that. Some truth. And I am a bit pregnant. No, I’m not. Damn it. So, yes you are a spy or no you’re not? How would you like it, said Al, if I asked Paul: When did you stop beating your wife? Oh, I can answer that, said Cleo, he hasn’t started yet. I can’t persuade him to. Paul looked startled. All these years of marriage, and he’s still quite hopeless at catching Cleo’s jokes. I have long seen how attached they are to one another, so I don’t find him dull, the way I once did. The wife-beating is an interesting question because it seems to require an incriminating answer. I expect there’s a name for that particular trope. I wonder what it is. And of course I know Cleo is teasing when she asks Al about spying. She’s a lawyer, she knows all about professional discretion. This is a game they play. Cleo’s gratitude means Al is a dear enough friend to be treated robustly. Pomona is a sweet-scented tiny girl who goes to kindergarten now. She is my godchild and I have promised


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to keep her safe. She has Cleo’s dark eyes and brown curls. Sometimes she just sits on my lap and rests her head against me. I must be getting old and settled. I think these are some of the nicest moments in my life. Old I suppose I mean in a wise way. The other children were watching a video and we were finishing off the meal, the goat’s cheese and some tiny intense strawberries. I was pierced with longing and held Pom closer. Cleo said, Time for bed, Pom, but the child didn’t move. I was glad. Cleo didn’t really mean it because she didn’t do anything about it. I reckon Hugh’s a spy too, she said. I didn’t know you knew Hugh, I said. Not well. Done some work with him. You’re a mischievous woman, Cleo, said Al. The only kind worth knowing, she replied.


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Chapter 3 I have to leave my apartment, said Briony. What! Zelda’s coming back. There’s a clause in Canberra house leases that says you have to vacate the property if its owner has to return unexpectedly for professional reasons. That’s from the days when most of the places for rent were people’s homes, which they let while on postings abroad. Briony was living in a townhouse in Kingston whose owner had been first secretary at one of the Middle Eastern embassies; she’d had some sort of breakdown and was coming back after only a few months. I’ll have to find another place, said Briony. Just what I need, at the moment. That’s when I had my bright idea. Al and I living in our three places; an extravagance to say the least. I suggested she become a tenant in my house, until something else turned up. Briony was a bit doubtful at first, but then her time ran out in Zelda’s townhouse and she hadn’t found anything suitable, so she was grateful. We formed a pleasant pattern to our lives. I’d work in the house during the day, Briony 25


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would come in the late afternoon, we’d have a cup of tea or a glass of wine if it was that late, and it often was, her school kept its staff busy after hours, and then I’d go to Al’s place, walking usually, and this was good for me, I don’t get enough exercise, and spend the night there. I enjoy these late afternoons. Briony is interesting to talk to when you can get her off the narratives of tragic love. She teaches literature, rare enough these days (communication is the thing; always makes me think of morse code), and has a passion for books too. Her courses focus on the classics more, but she keeps up with contemporary writing; she has a lot of time to herself. And her stories of school are fascinating. The girls are on a constant crusade to subvert authority, particularly in the matter of earrings, necklaces and hair ornaments. The school uniform is strict, and they do have to follow that, but it’s in the extras that possibilities of fantasy lie. No lace bows, no ribbons more than one centimetre wide, only very plain sleepers in the ears: the girls extend these bounds fraction by tiny fraction until they are likely to be sitting in front of you with a ribbon the size of a cocktail hat on their heads. The trouble is, said Briony, I am not very good at noticing. I get going on Antony and Cleopatra and wouldn’t register if they were wearing bikinis, provided they keep responding to the text. Then the headmistress comes in, and boy, I see what’s going on then. Too late, and we’re both in strife, girls and me. The parents pay huge fees, I said. Of which the visible expression is the uniform. About which I do not care one jot, said Briony.


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We laughed, and I poured more tea. She likes it the way I do, very weak and pale, which is handy, since I am bad at making strong tea. One afternoon she was upset. What has Carlo done now? I asked. It’s not Carlo, she said. Not exactly. It was a late day, I got a bottle of riesling out of the fridge. She kept saying it doesn’t matter, and trying to talk about something else. I thought of saying, Don’t you think it’s time you got rid of Carlo? He’s wasting your life. He’s ruining your life. All this marking time, waiting. But I didn’t say that. Friendship is a delicate growth, you have to take care of it. Besides, Briony knew I thought all those things. Saying them wasn’t going to change anything. She said: One of the girls is blackmailing me. Trying to blackmail me, I guess you’d say. Blackmail! How? She came to see me after school. She said she knew about me and Carlo and she’d tell the headmistress unless I gave her an A for her essay. I was speechless. Briony drank several mouthfuls of wine. I’d already looked at the essay, she said. She’d be lucky to get a C. What a little toad, I said. What business is it of hers? Carlo’s her father. The parent–teacher night. Yes. He’s worried about her marks. He thinks she’s clever enough but doesn’t do any work. She’s in trouble at home because of that. He’s grounded her. Still, blackmail isn’t exactly the solution.


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I’m not sure that she is very clever. And she claims to be stressed about the situation. The bad marks? That too. But me and Carlo. Her father betraying her mother, and so on. Well, I suppose she is. She says she can’t bear to see her mother suffer. She’s never seemed very concerned about her in the past. Has screaming arguments all the time, I gather. That doesn’t mean she doesn’t care about her, I said. I was a bit surprised at Briony’s response, it seemed strangely insensitive. Schoolteachers are supposed to care about the welfare of their students. But her own misery is obscuring everything. True, said Briony. But as you say, blackmailing me isn’t exactly going to help her mother. She’s not saying, give him up. No. Give her an A or she tells the headmistress. It’s horrible. Yes. And horribly clever. Either way it ruins me. She tells the headmistress, I’m out of a job and without a reference; never-work-in-this-town-again kind of thing. This country more like. And if I don’t, that’s my integrity as a teacher forever compromised. Oh Briony. Surely it wouldn’t be as bad as that? If they knew about Carlo? Why not? These schools … there’s a kind of feudal control goes on. Believe me. I wasn’t sure I did believe her. I thought she might be overreacting. I said, The thing about blackmail is it never


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stops. You’re never done with it. Give her an A, next essay the same thing. And if you do pull out she can still tell and you are entirely incriminated. Are you telling me I should refuse to have anything to do with it? No, I can’t advise you, you have to decide that. But we can talk about it, see if that helps you make up your mind. The thing is, said Briony, part of me wants a big bang. Say to her, No, you great lumping monster, I am not going to dance to your tune, do your worst. So she tells the headmistress, scandal erupts, Carlo leaves his wife and we live happily ever after. Briony knows I think that men like Carlo never intend to leave their wives. They are too comfortably entrenched in their home comforts. They want the passionate love affair, they know it’s dangerous, that’s part of its charm, but they believe their wives will always forgive them. My darling, it is you I really love, this was just a foolish aberration, I have been an idiot, please please, what we have is so important. Et cetera et cetera. And they get away with it. The wives have them back. I know nothing about Carlo and his marriage but I reckon this is what will happen. What I say is, Good beginning for life with your stepdaughter. Do your worst, you great lumping monster. Briony laughed, in a shaky way. Teenage girls are monsters. Blackmail is possibly the least of it. So you think, if it came to a public showdown, Carlo would come out on your side? It would be a way of finding out, wouldn’t it. I poured out more wine. I’m walking, Briony’s staying


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put, we can be a bit reckless. I said, Did she give you a deadline? She said she’d see me the day after tomorrow, after school. I suppose that gives you another night to let it work itself out. I don’t know, though, I think this is something that maybe you have to think about. I mean, not just let your subconscious work it out. I know I said I wouldn’t advise you, but I suppose I can say what I think. I think you have to act for the right reasons. Maybe, not for the big bang, but for your own, well, the person you are. So you are saying I shouldn’t give in to the blackmail? It’s never worked, has it? Have you ever heard of a single case of blackmail that has turned out well? Briony shook her head. Bad argument, she said. By the nature of them, you only hear about those that go wrong. Like abortion in the nineteenth century. The successful ones stay a secret. I can always be seduced by an interesting idea. Yes, all right, what about abortion in the nineteenth century? Apparently it was very common: rogue doctors, wise women, backyard butchers. It was the main method of birth control. And only a very small percentage went wrong, but they were the ones you heard about, because the woman died, or nearly. But all the successful ones just stayed a secret. I see. So you think the world is full of successful blackmails? Well, it’s possible, isn’t it? There’s one thing we haven’t thought of, I said. The really obvious thing. Talking to Carlo about it.


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She shrank. I saw her body pinch in and go even thinner. Oh, I don’t think that’s a good idea, she said. Why not? It’s his business. Maybe he can stop her. Use his fatherly authority. I don’t think he knows that she knows about us. Well, he should find out. Why should you have all the burden of it? I think this is my problem, she said. I wanted to shake her. No, I said. Without him there is no problem. No, she said. Anyway, he’s away. My phone rang. It was Al. Was I coming home to dinner? I tried to persuade Briony to come with me, but she wouldn’t. You said I have to think, she said. Ring me up, I said. Tell me what you decide. She came out to the gate to say goodbye to me. I turned as I walked up the street, and waved. She looked frail, standing there in the gap between the tall green walls of the photinia hedge. If Carlo could see her now, would he run forward and take her in his arms, metaphorically, in front of the whole world, or would he stand safely in that shape of coupledom that Briony had seen at the parent–teacher meeting? Not for the first time I wondered who Carlo was. I’d like to speak to him, tell him what I thought. Accost this complete stranger and say: What do you think you’re doing to my friend? At home I told Al about the schoolgirl’s blackmail. Briony hadn’t asked me not to, and I knew he would be secret. What a nasty little brat, he said. Though clever, I suppose.


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Cunning, I’d say. A criminal mind in one so young. I suppose she’s her father’s daughter, I said. He seems a nasty piece of work. A frightful spiv, said Al. I love his words. I can see Carlo wearing Brylcreem and spats and driving a car with a dicky seat, I said. Al grimaced. We could work on finding out who he is, he said. How? Oh, a little discreet inquiry. Does he visit her at your house? You mean, spying. Anyway, he’s away at the moment. Is he, said Al. This was the first time it had occurred to me that Carlo would be in my house with Briony. I didn’t like the idea much but after all what could I expect? Briony paid rent, the house was hers in the evenings, what else was she to do? I wondered what the girl’s name was. Briony carefully hadn’t mentioned it.


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Chapter 4 I didn’t see Briony the next afternoon and when I rang to see what ideas she’d had about being blackmailed she didn’t answer. I’d been thinking that really she had to say no, otherwise her integrity as a teacher would be hopelessly compromised. Of course the scandal about her affair with a pupil’s father would mean her integrity as a teacher was fairly stuffed anyhow, but at least she sort of deserved that, in the sense that she’d done it, she no longer had any choice in the matter. And of course it was by no means certain that the girl would go ahead with it. It might be a bluff, she might decide she couldn’t stick with it after all. She might realise that setting up such an ultimatum in her own family would not be a good idea. I was pretty certain she would want the status quo to remain, that is, she would want her father to stay with her mother. Kids mostly do. She could reason that exposing him would destroy that. And I was a bit nervous that Briony might be going to say no for the wrong reasons, for the big bang. I put all this down in an email, rambling on the way you can in such a form, and sent it off. I still felt edgy about it, though I knew, logically, that I had done what I could. 33


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Logic isn’t always a help. Next evening, deadline evening, I was going out with Cleo to a fashion parade of new winter clothes at her favourite dress shop, in Braddon. I am not entirely sure why I’m going; I’m not in Cleo’s league with clothes, not with the money she spends on them. Al said, If you find something you really like get it, I’ll buy it for you, which was sweet of him. I’m not very good at being a kept woman yet. Generally I don’t worry much, but somehow having your clothes bought makes you feel like a possession. I said this to Cleo once and she thought I was mad. But then on her lawyer’s salary she can afford to buy her own designer clothes. There was champagne, in small bottles that you drank from, the clothes were gorgeous, even allowing for the models all looking like precocious twelve-year-olds. I did rather fancy a knitted top. Cleo bought a Trelise Cooper polka-dot jacket because she was sick of looking corporate. The label said Soul Treasures: The love of life is necessary to the vigorous prosecution of any undertaking. That’s why you buy her clothes, said Cleo, for the wise words on the label. It was funny seeing all these beautiful clothes in among the car yards, the bicycle shops and pizza houses of Braddon, but of course such funky contrasts are what fashion loves. And even though it has this industrial nature, and is hot and dusty, the street is shadowed by large trees full of sunsetshrieking birds. I tried on the knitted top, it was a Megan Salmon with welted seams and fastened with a satin-covered safety pin. I bought it. When I got home Al was sitting in the dimness with a small whisky glass, staring at the wall. His face was sombre.


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Remember the Christos? he said. Des and Nick? Their daughter is dead. A drug overdose, they say. Their daughter? I remembered the people at Hugh and Sylvie’s dinner, and talk of two daughters, and Fern coming to pick up her parents. Which one? The elder, Fern. I remembered them congratulating themselves that she’d left home, was living on her own and making a go of it. That’s bad, I said, that’s so bad. Al nodded. How did you find out? Sylvie rang. The sister Ivy is a good friend of her Nicole. The parents are very upset, of course they would be, but they say Fern had nothing to do with drugs, that they are quite sure she wasn’t a heroin user. Parents are often the last to know, I said. Des says she was so scared of her daughters and drugs that she kept a really sharp eye on them. Always looked out for signs, on their arms, in their faces, in their rooms; she reckons she’d have known if there’d been any question of drugs being a part of their lives. Where did it happen? In her bedroom, in the house she shared with two other students. Just over here in Lyneham. Lying on her bed and the stuff beside her. Al’s face was sad; his voice full of pain, the words dragging out as though each one was almost impossibly difficult to utter. I thought of his daughter, Imogen, who had died when she was small. Of meningitis in her case, but the cause is not so important, it is the loss that matters.


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Perhaps it was because she was a beginner, she didn’t know what she was doing. Maybe the dose was too strong, or the heroin itself too pure, or faulty. Des is certain Fern would have had nothing to do with drugs. Des knows how much she hated and despised them. I understood how the mother would not want to believe this, would repeat to herself that her daughter would not do such a thing, and felt the terrible pity of it, the beautiful girl lost, and whatever the mother believed, by a drug overdose that mocked everything she thought she knew about her daughter. I’d met Fern only once and briefly, but I sat with Al in the now dark room and mourned her. I thought of the beautiful girl, her mass of dark hair and huge dark eyes. The maiden in the wall painting, picking flowers in a field. Graceful. A bit melancholy. I sighed. It would be nice to suppose that she was in heaven, that the family could go on from where it had been so cruelly ruptured. Greater minds than mine have believed that, I know, but I suspect it was because they so badly wanted to. They can’t bear the waste, the absence, the loss. The beautiful child ought to be safe in the arms of God. Not ashes in a box, or scattered back in the earth. Not a skeleton crumbling into fragments of bone. Al stirred first, standing up, putting the kitchen light on, opening the fridge. Are we still going to the coast tomorrow? I asked. I had a new manuscript I planned to work on. Al had some business. And he had to check on the last of the apricots. Canberra had seemed drearily tired and dusty on my evening walk home through O’Connor. I was looking forward to a bit of sparkle,


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the sun rising out of the bright sea and setting through veils of mist swathing the green slopes of Al’s former dairy farm. Walking along the beach instead of through the suburbs. Yes, he said. We could come back for the funeral. There’s nothing to be done here. Sylvie’s upset, of course. They were very fond of Fern. And Hugh’s away again. She can be a bit frail on her own, Sylvie. Really? She seemed quite tough to me. All a façade. She always depends on him to run things. Maybe I’ll get like that with you, I said. Aren’t you? We laughed at that, much more than it deserved. Then we hugged each other. And found ourselves on the sofa making love. Afterwards Al stir-fried vegetables and opened a bottle of red. We sat together in his little flat, which I call his dairy flat, since it is painted in all the colours of milk and cream and yoghurt and pale cheeses, with little touches of Roquefort blue. The window was open to a faint cool breeze from the faraway sea, and the linen curtains lifted gently in its breath. I took Al’s hand, thinking as one so perilously does in the nearness of death, how good it is to be alive.


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Chapter 5 I forgot all about my intention to ring Briony about the blackmail, so did it next day first thing, and got her sleepy and morning cross. No, she had not heard from the girl; she’d waited and nothing had happened. And yes she was certainly going to say no; she wanted nothing to do with the stupid great lump. I didn’t mention Fern Christo’s death, forgetting that she’d be likely to know her sister Ivy. We were slow getting away. My fault. I needed to get some books from my house, pack up my computer and the manuscript. I know I hold Al up, he is very quick with his departures. I was packing the dishwasher and making the bed and generally trying to be orderly. It was late lunchtime when we arrived at the coast. We bought prawns and oysters at Bateman’s Bay and stopped at a secret little spot we know, where there is a table practically on the sand looking out over a tiny glittering bay with great rocks at either end and a yellow sand beach: an idyllic place, full of sparkle. A sickle-shaped curve of yellow sand; a sickle-shaped silver moon; when I was young I found those phrases swooningly beautiful. All those sibilants helped. Sickle-shaped. What truck had I with sickles? 38


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We sat side by side on the bench gazing out over the water. I spread butter on black bread, made a pattern of prawns, squeezed lemon on them, ground black pepper. Blissful food. Al peels all his prawns then eats them; I peel a few, eat them, peel a few more, and so on. I expect this says significant things about our characters but I don’t know what. A little white boat sailed past the bay. A bent tree gave shreds of shade, and there was a slight breeze off the water. All that blueness, I said. Sometimes I think it’s a good idea just to sit and absorb blueness. Al hummed a little song about feeling blue. Yes, I said, but it’s just the opposite of that. This blueness isn’t sad, it’s full of happiness. He looked fondly at me. You’re good at that, he said, finding happiness in small moments. Ordinary things. Of course. Where else is it? People think, in grand plans, in significant occasions. I’m learning, he said, you’re a good teacher. He kissed me. Our fishy breaths mingled. I laughed. What? I was thinking, I’m glad we’ve both been eating prawns. That’s why lovers should do things together. Not sit alone eating garlic. As people are wont to do, I said. Yes, said Al. It’s a good panacea for loneliness, eating garlic. Not to mention a guarantee that it will continue. We’d bought peaches, but they weren’t very good, they were cottony and bland. I fear it’s the end of the season, said Al. There was sadness in his voice and I knew what he meant. The end of the stone fruit is the end of summer.


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I don’t like summer all that much, but maybe it’s my northern ancestors, I always feel nostalgic when it’s ending. My phone rang. I thought we might have been out of range, I muttered. It was Briony. In a panic. Cassandra, have you heard? Fern Christo, she’s dead, she’s died of a drug overdose. I had heard, I said. I’m very sorry. Accidental, of course, it’s not suicide or anything, it’s so terrible. And on top of that her sister’s disappeared. Her sister? Yes, Ivy. Ivy’s disappeared. And the thing is—Briony gave a gasp, like a sob—Nicole has gone with her. I didn’t say, Nicole … I was afraid I was beginning to sound like a parrot. I made murmuring noises. So that’s why I won’t have heard about the blackmail. Her father’s still away, the mother’s beside herself, the school’s in a state, a recent ex-pupil dead, two pupils missing, and under what circumstances, why have they disappeared now? And drugs, you know how schools go with drugs, total panic. So you are okay for the moment, I said. I suppose, if okay is the word. Well, the blackmail would appear to be on hold, at least. I suppose that’s something. The rest is as bad as it gets. I’m sure Ivy and Nicole will be all right. They’re big girls. But why did they run away? They must be frightened of something. Maybe I should say—about the blackmail—it might be important. No! Not a good idea. Not yet.


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You don’t think? Briony, what good can it do? How can it have anything to do with present circumstances? It can only confuse everything. I suppose you’re right. Why don’t I ring you later tonight? Things might be clearer then. I closed the phone and said: Ivy and Nicole have run away. Nicole is the blackmailer. So Carlo is … What! Carlo is … Hugh? That’s the sums. I can’t believe it. Somehow I could. Hugh struck me as a man who liked a lot. A man greedy for everything that life has to offer. A wife and family. A pretty mistress. French champagne. I sat and stared at the blue sea. He’s not my good friend the way he is Al’s. And yet, said Al … I suppose … he has been distracted lately. Hard to get hold of. Pin down. I suppose that is what he’s been up to. Think I might be right about Carlo having no plans to leave his wife and family? I always did think so. But yes. I’ve seen Hugh and Sylvie get through a lot. He’s always been a bit inclined to philander. But more one-night-stand sort of philandering. There’s always a one-night stand that gets away. Maybe, said Al, it’s another Nicole. Not Hugh’s daughter at all. I mean the blackmailing girl. I suppose I could have checked that with Briony. But when she mentioned the name suddenly I knew. The surly


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girl. I also knew that she hadn’t meant to identify her, and I hadn’t wanted to go there. I said, Do you think Ivy’s got two best friends called Nicole? I better ring Sylvie. Al dialled the number and paced up and down the little yellow beach. I packed up the picnic. Then my phone rang again. It was my mother. Oh, there you are, she said. You’re so hard to find these days. And always the mobile, so expensive. Hello, Edith. Hang up and I’ll ring you back. Oh I’m here now. I’ll stay while I’ve got you. Where are you? At the coast, gazing at the blue sea. What a life. One long holiday. I don’t say anything to this. Everyone else’s life is always one long holiday. Maybe she’s right about me and Al. Still, work gets done. It’s more a state of mind. I’m just ringing up to tell you I’m getting married. Really. Anyone I know? Sandra! Giovanni. Giovanni. Have I met him? I’m sure you have. Doesn’t ring a bell. How old is he? He says he’s thirty-nine but I think he’s more like fortyfive. How old does he think you are? She ignored this. He’s very sweet and good-looking. What does he do? He has his own business. Well, I hope you’ll be very happy, I said. Trying not to sound as doubtful as I felt.


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Oh, Giovanni makes me happier than any man I’ve ever met. That’s why I’m marrying him. She says this about every man she’s ever taken up with. But hasn’t ever talked of marriage before. Are you doing a pre-nup? I asked. Sandra! That’s somewhat coarse. Of course, we’ve … that’s one of the things he’s very good … No, Edith, I don’t mean that. A pre-nup. It’s a contract. A legal document. Why would I want one of those? People think it’s a good idea. Where there’s property. Just setting out who owns what, who gets what, that sort of thing. Celebrities have them, when there’re millions of dollars involved, but so do ordinary people. Just for clarity, really. Nowadays, when people are so litigious. She’s not too thick, my mother. Sandra, are you suggesting he’s marrying me for my money? You might be marrying him for his. No, it’s just something people do these days. It can save a lot of grief, later on. How could I possibly suggest a thing like that to my poor dear Giovanni? Do you want me to? No, of course not. She was silent for a moment. You worry me, Sandra. You always worry me. I don’t mean to. I just care about you. Why is it that whenever I talk to my mother I feel as if she’s the child, and a difficult one at that, and I have to try to give her wise counsel? I could hear her sulking on the end of the phone. When am I going to meet him? I said.


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I don’t know. You know how I hate Canberra. Sworn never to go there again. I suppose we could come to Sydney. Would you bring the colonel? We often go places together. My mother has never got over the fact that so gorgeous a man as the colonel should want to marry her hopeless spinster daughter Sandra. She says so every time she gets the opportunity. She is also inclined to say she hopes it lasts, in a doom-laden voice. How is the colonel? she said. Flourishing, I said, very busy. What have you done with him? He’s here, walking up and down the beach, talking on his phone. Oh. I can see he’s sending you a big kiss and a hug. Oh. Oh goodness me, I must get off the phone, it’s costing me a fortune. Bye. I always feel a bit bad when I’ve been talking to my mother, but at the time it’s a war, you have to bring out all your artillery, all your big guns, every bit of ammunition you’ve got, otherwise you’ll be defeated before you even start. I feel relieved if I’ve avoided dishonourable defeat. I don’t think there’s ever been a victory. Not on my part, maybe a few on hers. I’m worried about this Giovanni. I wonder if he’s what Al would call a spiv. I love my mother, despite the battles. If a man twenty years younger than her wants to marry her I have to pay attention. She’s a very attractive woman but


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that’s not the point. His own business! Maybe something very wonderful and powerful. Maybe not. I’ll tell her she should talk to a lawyer before she gets married. A girl I went to school with is working as a solicitor in Sydney, I’ll have a talk to Sarah. I wonder why marriage at this point? She’s never mentioned that before. Never even wanted to live with them, always said she liked her own space. I sat with my chin sunk into my hands, staring at the blueness in front of me but no longer seeing it. My mother is always meeting wonderful men who stay that way for months and maybe even years sometimes, but they always finally lose their shine and she has to get rid of them. I was always glad I lived with my father, otherwise I’d have been the child with the myriad uncles, found sleeping in Mummy’s bed next morning. As it was I’d lived a calm and solid life with my father. This was a good spot for thinking about him, which I like to do quite often. In my mind he’s a man of interiors, yet he liked to walk; he knew all the textures of Mount Majura, its bush, the birds, the small creatures, the ponds and their life. But I think of him in the sitting room, the light in a yellow pool over the old armchair we called the elephant chair because of its shabby grey wrinkled velvet cover, with a book in his hands. Because he was short-sighted he held the book up quite high and there were lamps beside all the chairs, so we could all see to read. He used to take me to the Lifeline book fair and we’d find treasures, and every so often he would call in a joiner he knew and have some more shelves built, so all the bedrooms and then the halls and even the toilet were lined with books. For a long time


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we didn’t have a television set but my sister Linda whinged so much he bought one. It was in the sun room and she sat out there watching it, with Gran sometimes, but I found myself quite often in the sitting room in one of those pools of yellow lamplight that still seem magic spaces to me. I make them in my own house and wish he could see them, wish he could have met Al. Sometimes he’d feel in his pocket and pull out a bag of ginger chocolates and we would have one, only ever one. Such a dull man, Edith still says, so boring. I never say, Edith, the dullness was all yours. I don’t even know if my father thought that. He was far too courteous ever to say so. Al sat back beside me. We’d really colonised this spot, we were conducting our lives from it. How was Sylvie? I asked. Beside herself. Not making much sense at all. Nicole’s been bothering her for weeks, so bad-tempered, so angry, won’t listen, just screams, Sylvie can’t talk to her, Hugh’s no help. She’s got a sense of something deeply wrong but doesn’t know what. I suppose it’s Nicole knowing about Hugh that’s at the bottom of all the anger. I suppose. It’s hard for teenage girls who are just growing up to be faced with a father’s blatant sexuality, I said. Especially with a woman who’s not much older than they are. Yes, I know Briony is a good bit older than Nicole but it’s not very evident, she looks very girlish, she’d seem like a rival. And there’s the business of their father betraying their mother, and they hate their fathers for doing it and their mothers for


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having it done to them. It’s so hard for a girl. And hate can fill a house with noise and wind, gales of fury. You’re very wise, said Al. I’ve read a lot of novels. That’s what a lot of novels are about, betrayal. I asked Sylvie about Hugh, said Al, but she doesn’t know what he’s up to. Very vague about where he is. She depends on him ringing her. Doesn’t seem to be with Briony, anyway. Do you think Sylvie knows about her? She’s so upset it’s hard to tell what she knows. I think she sort of knows something but doesn’t want to know that she knows. It seems to me the three of them, mother father daughter, ought to sit down and have a good talk. With Hugh telling the truth for once. Well, that is, if Carlo doesn’t intend to go off and make Briony happy. I hate adultery. It’s such a recipe for unhappiness. Al said, I suppose it isn’t entirely impossible that Hugh really is utterly in love with Briony and does intend to leave his wife and go and live with her, that it is a great love and that’s the only thing that can be done? He’s just trying to do it as kindly as possible to his wife? I stared at him. Not entirely impossible. But do you think it’s likely? I’m asking you. That’s the romantic literary version, the Lancelot and Guinevere thing, that’s your field. Lancelot and Guinevere never thought they could get together. They knew their love was doomed, they just grabbed whatever they could.


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Maybe that’s Hugh and Briony. Doomed. Grabbing what they can. Somehow, I don’t see it as a great love affair. I still think Hugh’s greedy. Life isn’t art, said Al. Maybe. Sylvie wants me to find Nicole. How can you do that? What did you say? I said it was difficult at the moment. The police were the ones with those skills. But I kind of said I wouldn’t be away for long. So much for my lovely long days by the sea reading the new book I have to edit. I knew it was going to be a chore, I liked the idea of being somewhere pleasant while I read it. Al said, Where do you think they might have gone? Two teenage girls? Neither very happy. I suppose the question is, why did they go? Who’s driving the situation? Ivy because of her sister’s death? Nicole because of her father’s betrayal? When you know why you can maybe work out where. Sylvie thinks that Fern didn’t give herself the drug; Des reckons she was murdered by somebody, so there’s an idea that they might have been kidnapped by whoever killed Fern and are in serious danger. Sounds a bit far-fetched, I said. Far-fetched doesn’t mean not true. As you’re always telling me. Why would drug murderers want to kidnap them? Maybe they’re drug-crazed. Are the girls at all into drugs?


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Their mothers swear not. They say they’d know, and that they’ve never had anything to do with anything, not marijuana, not heroin, not ecstasy. I wonder would they know. The police have searched their rooms and not found anything. Perhaps they’re just very careful. You’re very suspicious. Well, I’ve known teenage girls. They’re devious. They don’t always tell the truth. And what their mothers know is not necessarily very much of the story at all. By the time we got to Al’s house, the cliffhanger he calls it, it was dusk. Most of the light was gone. There is one point in the road up to it where you can catch a glimpse of the house from the side. There’s a light on, said Al.


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Chapter 6

The terrace of the cliffhanger seems impregnable but there is a way in from outside. Al had stopped the Land Rover shortly after he’d seen the light. Maybe you left it on, I said, but he was quite certain he hadn’t, and I knew he would be right, there is a precision to his acts and a knowledge of them that can never be faulted. We’d walked softly the rest of the way, on the quiet rough grass, and he’d unlocked a door in the downstairs wall and crept up on to the terrace. He’d indicated that I should stay behind but I hadn’t. I felt safer with him. The windows on this side of the big room were not continuous; they cast light across the deck but there were bands of shadow. We stood in one of these until we had managed to see what was happening inside. Then the colonel walked heavily along the terrace, around the corner and through the French windows into the room. Hallo, he said. Two faces looked up at him, first in fear then in guilt. They were sitting at the dining table, with a bottle of red wine and two bowls of baked beans. The television had 50


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been pulled round so they could watch it. I recognised the solid one: Nicole. The slight one with the mass of black curls looked so like Fern she had to be Ivy. Well, said Al. There’s a story to be told here. He paused. The two girls began talking, like starlings twittering on a wire, and he said, In a moment. Cassandra, would you get a couple more wine glasses? He picked up the bottle. 2005, huh? I’d’ve gone for something a bit older myself. He poured wine into the two glasses, passing one to me, and topped up the others. Don’t worry, he said, there’s more. I settled into a dining chair, aware that there was a performance about to unfold, and that I was there mainly as audience. Let’s be orderly, he said. I could see the girls found this control of his intimidating, as of course he meant it to be. How did you get here, and how did you get in? We hitched a lift, said Nicole. Well, this guy. Fern’s boyfriend, it turns out. He’s pretty upset about Fern. Says she was his true love. Bit of a knobjockey, said Ivy. He’s called Xavier, said Nicole. I knew where the key was; I heard you tell Dad. And also that the code for the burglar alarm is the last four digits of our telephone number. I knew that this would be the case. All the people who are given the code have their own numbers keyed in; it means they can easily remember them if there’s an emergency. I hadn’t known that Hugh had access, but it didn’t surprise me. Ah, said Al. Were you spying? Not really. Not on purpose. You were in the study. I heard you talking and stopped to listen. That’s spying.


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Nicole flushed a purplish red colour. I was in my own house, passing by, she said. Well, that’s the easy bit. He was silent for a moment, taking sips of the wine. Why? The girls looked at one another, then Ivy took up the tale. Fern, she said, and her voice wobbled. Nicole squeezed her hand. My heart softened to them, but Al sat, stern, waiting. Fern … we don’t think she killed herself. Drugs weren’t her scene. She asked us to come to her place. Said it was very important. She said she wanted us to take her laptop and guard it with our lives. We went over to her house and knocked but nobody came, then the door was open so we went in, like, and called, and went up to her room and there she was, just lying, and we knew she was dead, and we thought all we could do was get the laptop but we couldn’t see it and we thought, like, someone had killed her and whoever it was had taken the computer but then Nicole looked under the mattress and there it was so we started to go and then we heard a noise on the roof, the house is one of those Cape Cods with the bit upstairs sticking out of the roof, that’s Fern’s room, and then we heard this rustle from the tree then a thump and then a kind of hiss like heavy breathing on the telephone and we were so scared we just ran, we like had my mum’s car and Nicole rang 000 on her mobile and we went to the Holy Grail and thought that if we just sat there, like, we’d be safe because of there being so many people and then we thought we should disappear for a while because whoever had got Fern would be trying to get us. There was a lot more of this narrative, how Xavier was at the Holy Grail and came to talk to them and burst into


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tears when they said Fern was dead and then them taking Ivy’s mother’s car back and Xavier saying he’d drive them down. Al said: Didn’t you think your parents might have enough worry with the death of one child, without the disappearance of two more? We wanted to save any more deaths, said Nicole. We thought we’d be safe here, because nobody would know to look for us here. I think you should ring your parents and tell them what’s going on. Both girls looked so woebegone that he paused. What is it about the laptop that got Fern killed? he asked. Each girl took a deep breath and looked at the other. No, don’t tell me yet. I’ll ring up your parents and tell them you’re safe and you don’t want to come home yet. They have to know at least that. He took the phone and walked up and down the terrace. We could see him arguing. He came in: Well, at least Hugh’s back now. They’re not happy but they’ve calmed down, for the moment. Are you committed to those beans? They shook their heads. He removed the bowls to the kitchen, went and got the Land Rover and unpacked it. He cooked the flathead fillets we’d bought earlier in the day, crisp brown in butter and olive oil, making me realise how hungry I was. I set the table in the orderly way we both like. There was a green salad with some little grape tomatoes and sourdough bread brought from Canberra. The girls sat, looking with big eyes at all this happening. I couldn’t think of anything to say to them. We were in the middle


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of a terrible story, and anything that might be a subject of conversation was too frivolous. Finally we had a bit of the local cheese that Al keeps ageing happily in the cellar. He put more wine in our glasses and leaned back. Ivy looked at Nicole. You tell them, she said. Fern, well, she was, like, a working girl. You know, at this place in Fyshwick. She stopped. Al waited. A … a prostitute. He sighed. Is this true? Yeah. A lot of the girls at uni do it. You get all this money, and don’t have to work all that long. It beats waitressing. And you’re not nearly so tired, it’s better for your uni work. I gather your parents don’t know this. They’d think it was so, like, not funny. They thought she worked in this café. They asked her why, whenever they went there, it wasn’t her night on. She said the boss made a pass at her and she’d left and was looking for another job. Dad gave her some money to tide her over. And the laptop? She’d written her memoirs. That was what was on the laptop. And there were people who didn’t want them published. There are facts there that some big people don’t want known. Ivy was almost whispering now. Underage sex slaves from Asia and some top guy in Immigration involved in getting them in, that kind of thing. A lot of people, Fern said, didn’t want that book to see the light of day. I think she knew she was being targeted and knew she had to get it away. So she was killed, not by drug-crazed kidnappers, but by some top guy in Immigration?


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Well, not him personally. He’d’ve taken out a contract. And when we realised he’d got Fern we thought if we could stop him getting the laptop that’s the least we could do. Was the bedroom ransacked? No, not exactly, said Nicole. But we reckoned we’d scared him off, when we came calling up the stairs, two of us being too much to handle. I see, said Al. Where’s the laptop now? Under Ivy’s mattress. Go and get it. He opened the safe while Ivy was gone. It sits under a panel by Rosalie Gascoigne, one of her soft-drink-case works. She takes small oblongs of wood from these cases, old and grey and just clumsily washed with this marvellous pellucid blue, which is quite worn away in places and yet so poignant, and she puts them together in a plain pattern. Not specially carefully or skilfully, there are gaps, they don’t fit together at all neatly, but you look at it and it catches your heart, and your breath. I sometimes think that when I understand how a work of art can be greater than the sum of its parts then I shall be very wise. How can these battered little strips of faded packing case be so tender? How lucky I am, to have married a man who owns a Rosalie Gascoigne. Al shut the laptop in the safe. I gazed at the blue, this blue so much more poignant, so much more human, than the sea. Okay. Nobody can get at that now. You girls clean up. You know how to do the dishwasher. I guess you’ve fixed up beds. We’ll sort it out in the morning.


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Fortunately Al kept our rooms locked up, even inside the house. Because of what was in the wardrobes. We left the girls in the kitchen. I sat in a chair in what Al liked to call the boudoir. Well, I said. What do you make of all that? I thought you might tell me. What a coil. What a farrago. Is any of it true? Some? Most? I know I said schoolgirls are full of deceit, but however do you untangle it? Al sat down too. It’s a pretty room this, quite dim, lacking the big windows of the main space; its walls are built-in wardrobes and there are comfortable chairs, and a table for writing at, or whatever. On one side a spiral staircase to the bedroom upstairs. He said: I don’t think it’s all made up. Maybe if we break it into parts. Maybe if we leave it till the morning. Question them again. Interrogate them, I said, looking hard at him. See if they crack. Al gave me a look. Sorry, I said. Not a good joke. Okay. One thing. Do you think Fern really has been working as a prostitute? Could be. Girls do. I read an article in the paper about students putting themselves through uni by such means. Oh, I said, yes, I see what you mean. Maybe this pair read it too. The same with the business of a contract taken out on her life. That does happen. Remember the policeman who hired some hitmen to kill his wife? I did remember that. A terrible story, and the hitmen so bad; evil, but hopelessly inept as well. They stood in the kitchen drinking beer, waiting for her to die from the heroin


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overdose they’d injected her with, as I recall. Stood drinking while the woman died a vile death. Left the empty cans behind. Fingerprints and all. The police got them. It’s the same thing, said Al. Did it actually happen, or did they get the idea from reading about another case in the papers? Do schoolgirls read the papers? The prostitute thing—girls would talk about that, it would be common knowledge. I could tell both of us wanted the whole thing to be some stew cooked up in the overheated brains of schoolgirls. Well, somewhere there must be evidence. I suppose it’s not our worry, in the end. I wonder how long they planned to stay here? Living off our baked beans and red wine? Till they ran out, maybe. They obviously didn’t imagine we’d turn up. You didn’t mention the blackmail. I was leaving it to you. And I thought there’d be time for it, later. After all, they don’t know that we know about it. I said, That beautiful girl. Fern. If it’s true. Her death is. What a stupid life—and death. It’s too hard. It’d be easier never to have children at all. Since when did easy interest you? I asked.


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Chapter 7 I slept deeply when I first went to bed, then I woke up and lay sleepless for hours, all the strange facts of the night skittering like insomniac sheep through my brain. I used to worry about this sort of thing, until I read an American article that said it’s quite normal, a hangover from our days of living in the savannah, when a period of wakefulness between two deep sleeps could mean avoiding being eaten by big cats. It seemed to me that the big cats had only to time their attacks during the deep sleep period but perhaps they had predictable habits. Anyway I’ve now stopped worrying, I just think big cat time, and cuddle up to Al very cosy and comfortable and let the thoughts skitter away. He as always was fast asleep. I thought of that word fast. Obviously not to do with speedy, but as in hold fast, make fast, a sense of being held, and safe. The king in his mountain fastness. It passed the time until I slept again. And of course when I go back to sleep I sink deeply in and don’t wake up early. If only I slept straight through the night I’d have longer days. On the other hand sometimes I cuddle up a bit more enthusiastically and Al wakes up too. That’s a good way of getting back to sleep, afterwards. 58


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Anyway Al was long gone by the time I woke up. I think I heard the faint groan of the spiral stair as he crept down it but I turned over and tucked the doona closer. When I got up and went out on to the balcony it was a pewtery kind of day, the sky a high grey dome of cloud, the sea like stormy beaten metal. I had some words of a song in my mind. Joy like a phantom eludeth the lover, Night comes at last when the weary shall rest. To a faint tune that I could hear in my head but not sing. The words seemed very beautiful in their antiquated melancholy and I didn’t know where they came from. They would have been my father’s, he liked old songs, but beyond that I had no idea. He often used to sing his mother’s old songs, not loudly but melodiously, and usually tales of sad love, dead, lost, betraying. I used to think that maybe it was thoughts of Edith that put these songs in his head, but maybe he just enjoyed the sadness, the beauty the songs made out of it. Not at all like the mess and anger and anxiety of real life. The words repeated themselves, and I wondered why. I didn’t think joy was eluding me, and I had just escaped from the night. Perhaps I was thinking about Fern. There would not have been much joy in the love she was paid to make, and that did seem horrible for a girl so young—and so beautiful, I found myself thinking, but stopped; why should beauty deserve joy more than plainness? And I doubted that Fern would have welcomed the night that had swallowed her; when I met her she was a lively young woman stepping briskly through her life. I could see that she could believe that prostitution was just a job, like waitressing, not morally a problem—you do it for a while till something better


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comes along, you get your degree and go into the public service or become a lawyer or whatever. Put like that … The melancholy words sang themselves over: Joy like a phantom eludeth the lover, Night comes at last when the weary shall rest. There was a faint hazy smell in the air. Sugar. Al must be at work. He brought up coffee and croissants he’d taken out of the freezer and heated. Luxuriously I wrinkled my nose at him. The last of the apricots, he said. That will be it for the summer. We sat on the balcony and he told me the girls had gone. Run away again. I’ve rung their parents. They’re calling the police. He replied to my expression: They may be in trouble, as they claim. It’s the only thing to do. It’s out of our hands now. I thought, you get your chance with Al, but you can’t muck about. I said, So we can get on with things here. Seems like a good idea. I was editing a manuscript by a woman who wrote in streams of words suddenly ended with a full stop. No other punctuation at all, and no good reason for the full stop at that point anyway. It was an account of converting a barn on an asparagus farm in Germany into a bijou contemporary residence. Hasn’t it been done before? I asked the publisher. In France, he said, and Tuscany of course, but not in Germany, and not on an asparagus farm; the details of growing asparagus are fascinating. People couldn’t get


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enough of olive growing. Now it’s the time of asparagus. The blanching of the crowns, and so on. The book’s called Spears and Crowns: My Asparagus Adventure. Yes, but she can’t write. I didn’t say this to him. I have this old-fashioned view that a book is about language as well as its subject, and however fascinating that is, unless the words delight us there is no charm in reading it. But if I insisted on that view I wouldn’t get much work. Instead I told him that the manuscript was a mess, it would take a lot of time—and thus much money—to turn it into readable prose. The publisher grumbled, but I could tell he believed he had a bestseller on his hands (amazing what publishers can think, sometimes, and even more amazing that they should be right, sometimes), so after a bit of prevaricating he agreed. Nothing like the sums paid me by the colonel when I edited his manuscript, but that was exceptional. I settled myself on the deck and got to work, covering her pages with pencilled suggestions almost as copious as her own text. I didn’t try to stop the breathless flow, since I assumed that’s what the publisher valued, just tried to make reading it a bit less like white-water rafting. After a couple of hours I’d had enough, and went to find Al. He was in his bottling room under the house, cut into the rocks of the hill, and the air here was wrinkled with the fumes of sugar. There was a little pile of spotted fruit, that he’d rejected for his purposes, and I ate one, it had an antique rich taste, not quite decadent but full of experience, worldly and somehow spiritual too, I bit into it and it seemed that one more mouthful and I would know all sorts of wonderful


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things. I read that the fruit the serpent persuaded Eve to eat and give to Adam was not an apple at all but an apricot. This was its heir, full of knowledge that in a minute I would completely understand. I don’t quite share Al’s passion for the bottling of apricots. He envisions them whole, perfect, suspended like luminous globes in syrup of an intense clarity, and occasionally his vision is rewarded. Me, I prefer to eat them straight off the tree. But Al’s fruit is not about eating, not anymore. It would have been once, with thrifty housewives bottling fruit like sunlight made flesh to cheer the winter months. But what he wants to achieve is the perfection of its process. The eating of that perfection is not important. But for me the eating of the raw fruit can be a mystical experience. I remember the first time I ate one, in the garden, it was like a drug transporting me. What I learned did me no harm at all. But then I think Eve was brave and wise, eating that apricot in the Garden of Eden; it needed to be done. Even if it does mean that women must bear their children in sorrow. And lose them in tears, like Des. Eve’s descendant, Rachel, weeping for her children; it comes to all women. But I do look with fascination at the seething syrup as it quakes and heaves in the wide copper pot, the fruit turning languidly in its heat. I’d seen such pots before, in Paris streets, the confectionery makers stirring their vats of sweets while children gazed in hope. I once bought nuts in a sugar coating from such a vendor. They were delicious but I only ever wanted to do it once. Sugar makes me nervous. This big wide pan with its two iron handles is an ancient implement. Al sometimes believes that the old ways are best. The flames


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of the gas and the copper changing colour in strange oily rainbows seem instruments of alchemy. I once said this to Al and he replied, A lot of ordinary things are magic. He ladled the fruit into sterilised jars. It was jam that he had made this time. Too late for preserves, he said, I thought I’d make jam and we could eat it. It blobs stickily into the jars, dense, pulpy, scented. Sourdough toast and apricot jam, with butter; my Saturday breakfast treat. Al washed the copper pot and his implements, while I sat on a stool and watched him. Neither of us spoke. We sometimes don’t, but being together was not less companionable for that. If you can’t be with a person and not talk to them a relationship can become fatiguing. When everything was tidy we went for a walk. We always do this, shortly after arriving at the coast, walk across to the enclosed garden and sit on one of its seats and gaze out at the sea from this quiet and ordered place. It’s a kind of formal garden with its patterned plantings of trees and shrubs, cleverly chosen for shapes and colours. But when we got near it on this day there was something wrong. The wooden statue of Priapus wasn’t in its place by the entrance. You have to touch him when you go in, this ancient creature holding a platter of fruits high over his head so there is room for his giant erection. He has to be made of wood because of its living nature; stone is for funerals, not fertility. I believe in the pious act of touching him, even if I don’t have a lot of faith in the fertility. The space where he had been was startling in its emptiness, and even fearful. He is immensely heavy; the wood he’s made from is old, and dense. We stopped strolling


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amiably and hurried. He hadn’t gone far, he was tipped over and rolled a little way from his usual guardian post. Al bent over him, then straightened suddenly and ran back towards the house. I didn’t lock it, he shouted. His long legs covered the ground at speed; he doesn’t often run but when he does he moves in giant bounds. I understood what he meant, after a minute. The upsetting of the Priapus implying a threat. Some evil intention. Maybe the person, the people, who had done this were still lurking around, and would try to get into the house. Maybe the same people who’d tried to kidnap the girls. I tried to stand the statue up. I couldn’t move him. I couldn’t even roll him over the ground. Had somebody wanted to steal the carving, prowling round the gardens, coveting the old and beautiful object? Or was it an act of vandalism, trying to destroy something so old and beautiful? How long ago had it happened? The grass was tufty around him, but it was that kind of grass, not growing much, always this long. When he was moved it would be possible to tell if he had lain there very long. Maybe it had just happened? I looked uneasily around. The peaceful garden, the slopes of the valleys to the sea, the still silvery dome of the sky, they had all turned sinister. What had been calm and lovely, comfortable and beloved, had turned threatening. I even felt cold, suddenly, with that kind of shiver that makes people say, someone walking over your grave. Digging it, more like. I hurried back to the house. There was somebody coming across the paddock. A tall lean figure, moving at a kind of fast and jerky lope. He was going to get to the house before


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me. I would be cut off. I supposed Al would hear me if I screamed. The man saw me coming, and paused at the front of the house, waiting for me. He smiled, baring long yellow teeth, strong, horse-like, and all the wrinkles of his face scrunched up. Hello, he said, holding out his hand. Hector Stollen. Your new neighbour. He nodded back across the paddock. Always wanted a place down here. And now I’ve got it. As of this week. I had to knock on the door to get in. Al was still making a close check. Hector introduced himself again, and Al offered coffee. We sat on the deck. The guy who lives in the mansion on top of the hill swooped low overhead in his helicopter. We couldn’t talk for several minutes, only grimace. Does he do that often? asked Hector. Any time at all is too often, said Al. Fortunately, I suppose we should think ourselves lucky, he mostly has bigger fish to fry, so he doesn’t come here all that frequently. That explains the red balls on the electricity wires, said Hector. Yes. It could be spectacular if he flew into them. Al told a story of the previous owners of the mansion who used to come and go in a seaplane, using the lake at the bottom of the hill. Once they took off in a high wind, did a flip and landed in the surf. Al and some friends ran down and rescued them. They had a lapdog, which perished, but the people were okay. They gave up the seaplane and built a runway to land an ordinary plane on. People seem to be amazingly rich, said Hector, in a rather daunted tone.


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Newcomers, said Al, his voice cold. Hector blinked. You know what I mean, said Al, rich people, who buy up things because they can, not because they love them. So loving a place makes you an old resident? Well, not immediately. But it has an ageing quality, said Al. Hector laughed, a booming laugh, throwing his head back and showing those yellow teeth, so immense and healthy. Have you retired here? said Al. Oh my golly no, said Hector. I wish. No, I work for DIMIA. And not for my sins. I am innocent. Innocent. He held up his hands, palm out, as though we had pointed a gun at him. I could understand his desire to dissociate himself. DIMIA, the Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs, had been stinking to high heaven lately, shoving Australian citizens into detention camps, deporting them, making mistakes and not paying attention so that it was actually breaking its own laws, apart from its usual unpleasant work of shutting up refugees. And leaving aside anything else, it suddenly occurred to me, why had they stuck Indigenous Affairs into Immigration? Wasn’t that insensitive, to say the least? Well, what’s surprising in that. Well, I said, I can see that not everyone who works for it is as big a bastard as the crooks who run it. Hector looked a bit shocked, then laughed again. I notice he didn’t ask Al what he did, and Al didn’t volunteer. Cassandra, eh. The Trojan princess who told the truth and was not believed.


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Yes, I said, I’m an editor by trade. It seems appropriate. Again the yellow teeth gleamed in that snorting, headtossing laugh. They got quite a lot of air, those teeth. You and I, he said, we obviously had parents who read the Iliad. Hector, and Cassandra. I believe we are brother and sister. Yes, I told you not to go, Hector. Told you to stay home from the battle that day. But you insisted on going. And died. Not always an easy name to carry through life, is Hector, he said. Not when young, anyway. When you are old, you can appreciate how noble. And Cassandra—? My father read the Iliad, I said. My mother didn’t. She called me Sandra. Cassandra is pretty much my own work, and not till after school. How very clever, he said, in a musing voice. Cassandra: it’s musical, as well as rich in history. I wasn’t sure why I was telling him all this. He was a new neighbour paying a call. We did not have to exchange life stories. Good coffee, he said to Al. I perceive you appreciate the finer things in life. The helicopter roared off again. I can see why you would call it a chopper; it seemed to chop the air into pieces that fell in great crashing chunks around us. Yes, said Al, when it was quiet again. Hector looked puzzled. Well, he said, I should be getting back to my lovely wife. Just between you and me, he said, she is not so enamoured of this little adventure as I am. Nadine sees herself as an


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urban girl. Mind you, you could wonder what she’s been doing in Canberra all these years. He laughed again. She’ll be chuffed when I tell her what decent neighbours she’s got. Hector gave a jerky wave that was more salute and loped off over the paddock. Al watched him out of sight. Odd bloke, he said. Is he for real, do you think? You mean, you think he’s a fraud? A fraud? Oh, I don’t suppose so. More of a construct. Somebody who’s invented himself, you mean? Hmm. Well, I suppose we all do that, don’t we. In our own funny ways. He picked up the coffee cups. Some are just funnier than others. I’ve been thinking, he said. That scenario of the girls, there’s likely to be some truth in it somewhere, but it’s impossible to tell just where. I suppose it could be a narrative entirely invented. Could be. But I think there’s some truth, as well as some fantasy. How to tell what’s what, that’s the thing. Don’t ask me. I’m a fiction person, remember, I accept the truth of fiction. When it’s honestly told. Is this honestly told? You can tell with books. But people are different. If they are telling lies there’s not much point in trying to work out whether they’re telling them honestly or not. Ha, said Al. There we are again. And in the meantime, we’ll keep a close eye on things round here. In the meantime? I said. What are we waiting for? What happens next, said Al, with his crooked smile, the one that says, ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies. The phone rang and Al answered it, pacing along the deck while he spoke. Not a short conversation, though not


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overly long either. That was Hugh, he said. The police have picked up the girls. Hitchhiking along the highway at Bateman’s Bay. So they’re safe, for the moment anyway. And the laptop is in our safe, I said. Do you think anyone knows that, apart from the girls? Al stared out over the sea. The sun had come out in patches, and the water was a stormy blue. The thing about teenage girls, he said, they hate getting into trouble. Not just teenage girls, I muttered, but he took no notice. They’ll lie outrageously to avoid trouble. Okay. They say, first, that Fern was killed by an intruder whom they scared away. Second, that he was looking for a laptop with a memoir on it, written by Ivy’s sister who was working as a prostitute. So, the question is, what kind of trouble would those claims get them out of? Sounds to me as though they would get them into trouble, not out of it. Yes, said Al. On another hand, we can take it that they loved Fern, especially her sister, and so probably would want to do the right thing. So maybe they aren’t lying at all. It’s all true. As they see it, of course. Of course. The bit that worries me, though, is this prostitute business. I can’t see it, a girl so lovely as Fern, so normal, why would she do such a thing? That’s the bit I think the most likely, I said. I think what you’re up against is a shift in morals since your day. Our day. Maybe this is the final end point of the sixties sexual revolution. They seem to be able to see it as a job like any other. You wait on tables, you service men.


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No daughter of mine will grow up thinking that! I can see you being a true Sicilian papa. Won’t let the poor child even look at a guy until she’s seventeen, and then marry her off to a husband of your choosing. Barefoot and pregnant before she’s old enough to vote. Sounds good to me, said Al, with a grin. And I have to confess that I liked the idea, not the marrying off at seventeen, but the idea that there were morals, that some things were right and some weren’t, and that Al felt strongly about them. I might not have his trouble in believing in Fern’s behaviour, but still I did not care for it. The phone rang again. Al paced again. Hugh, he told me. I’ve said we’ll go back to Canberra. Bugger. And we’d hardly got here. Tomorrow.


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Chapter 8 Two hours at a time is as much as I can stand of the asparagus farm. The headlong dash of its prose makes me queasy. The writer has no idea at all of syntax. She seems to stand back from her words and throw punctuation at them, mainly full stops, and occasionally like mud it sticks. Smiling, evilly at the moustachioed hunters. I could say, Just occasionally give your sentences a finite verb, but I am afraid she would ask me, What’s a finite verb? I could say, It’s a verb with a subject, which would be her cue to ask, What’s a verb? A doing word, basically, or a being or having word. I suppose there may be composers who don’t know what a chord is, or painters unfamiliar with the concept of brushstrokes, but somehow it seems unlikely. When she does have something resembling a verb she doesn’t know how to control it. Rushing down the road like a maniac the solemn old church loomed its ancient brass-studded welcoming doors in the eyes of the countess and her diminutive grieving maid. Don’t ask me what this has to do with asparagus farms. But you’ll be able to guess that the countess is inconceivably aristocratic, heartbreakingly beautiful and in dire trouble. Like Magda Velinda’s prose. That’s the writer’s name—watch 71


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out for her masterpiece in a bookshop near you, in the fullness of time. There are various villains, heavy Krautish characters— she even calls them Huns—who stuff themselves with liver dumplings and grunt the odd monosyllable. And Nazi types who click their metaphorically booted heels and utter long guttural monologues. If she behaved in this racist way in their country no wonder she had such trouble getting German tradesmen to do any work for her. And she writes the locals as such stereotypes you would imagine she had never set foot in their country. Am I just jealous that I didn’t get to spend a couple of years in Germany, renovating a barn on an old asparagus farm? I don’t think so. I’ve been in Hamburg in asparagus season, and eaten the fat white juicy spears of the new spring’s asparagus, and admired the delight everybody takes in this annual delicious phenomenon. It’s the time of the asparagus, they sing, you must eat our asparagus—the point being that the season is short, you have to seize the moment. That was a good experience, and sufficient. What do I mean, two hours. This afternoon I’ve spent half an hour and I can’t stand another moment. Usually I go for a walk when this happens, but today I feel a bit nervous. I keep remembering Priapus rolled on his side in the grass. Hector Stollen over the paddock isn’t much help, and helicopter man is only a sinister noise. So I get Fern’s laptop out of the safe, I’d promised to copy the manuscript on to a memory stick and delete it from the laptop so the machine was no longer of interest to the thieves. I stare at the screen as the manuscript copies.


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Well, I’m an editor. Of course I began to read it. Just a skim-through. It made a change from the asparagus farm. For one thing, the prose is a lot neater. Very tidily composed in exact sentences, clauses all beautifully marshalled. No fragments, which irritate my computer. (Like those last two nonsentences.) My father was a stickler for verbs and drilled them into me, but you don’t need them all the time. Which isn’t the same as never. The vernacular often dispenses with them, and even formal writing has caught this freedom. But Fern’s syntax is very strict. There’s something almost prissy about it. But maybe that’s in contrast to its subject matter. It’s quite clever, really, this erudite formal prose, and then the contents. No need for melodrama in the prose, with these goings-on. Fern’s pretty keen on avoiding people simply saying, she searches for fancy alternative verbs, and likes to throw in telling adverbs: he sniggered crudely; she whispered sadly; they murmured defeatedly. Always makes me think of that character of Henry James’s, the prince I think it was, who said something (nothing significant, as I recall) ‘smokingly’. You can picture it, though it’s an image that has lost any charm, or power, it might once have had. I thought I knew a good bit about prostitutes’ lives but it turns out I don’t. The day-to-day stuff is ordinary enough, the men, the regulars, the sad and the strange and the kinky. We all know about the ones who want just to talk really and those who would like to hit. There’s some interesting stuff about work away from the brothel. Several times Fern and another girl are taken to a sumptuous penthouse apartment to play


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games with a certain rich man and his mistress. She says she’s using false names to protect the well-known. Hardly, she’s protecting herself from litigation. Perhaps the disguise isn’t strong enough, and it’s the rich man who is trying to get hold of the laptop. She describes him as having made his fortune from the treatment and recycling of garbage. I suppose this is a disguise too. People disguise things in cluey ways, in metaphors often; a little thought can make a quite wide leap of connection. He has a very handsome wife his age who is active in charity work, and a mistress who is half as old and a model. I thought, a wife, a mistress, and he needs a couple of prostitutes as well before he can really have fun. I think it shows a sad lack of imagination. He and his wife are ardent fans of the opera; you’d think all that love and death in glorious music might be enough. Art is partly about having experiences that wouldn’t otherwise be available to you. Maybe Fern thought her book was a work of art. I was scrolling through the document fairly fast. The trouble with this sort of memoir is that it is repetitive. Nice men, nasty men, lurid tastes, simple desires, after a bit it is just men paying for sex and really all the same narrative. There aren’t any surprises. Ah, but I was wrong. I was stopped short in my skimming by the introduction of a new girl to the brothel. Girl; child. An exquisite eight-year-old, from Thailand, perhaps; Fern guesses that was her birthplace. She is a virgin; much excitement. Some lucky man, and a huge price. Fern maintains her po-faced prose through all this. She makes the point that the madam insists the girl be gently treated.


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And ceremoniously, as befits the so expensive loss of a maidenhead. That she be sold not necessarily to the highest bidder but to the most appreciative. If Fern’s shocked she’s not letting it show. After a bit the child disappears, and there’s another. Several times this happens. Fern wonders what becomes of them. She does mention that she scrutinises the faces of the men in the parlour, wondering which of them might be paying a great deal of money to deflower a child. She wonders if she could tell by his face, and if then she could look at men’s faces in the street afterwards and recognise such things in them. She decides not, they seem ordinary well-fed, sometimes over-fed, typical public servants. After several children, all exquisite, tiny fine-boned creatures, appear and disappear, one of her fellows tells her what is going on. They are destined for pornographic movies, snuff movies. That is why they disappear. They are dead. Fern thinks this can’t be true. She asks the madam, who says, Of course not. What do you think we are, murderers? But the colleague says that naturally the madam would lie, wouldn’t she. There are enormous amounts of money at stake, and dire penalties if they are found out. Fern asks the girl, who is called Serena, how she knows, and she says that the photographer is one of her clients. How does he feel about it, she asks, and Serena replies that she doesn’t think he is very happy, that’s why he tells her about it. What, says Fern, does telling you ease his conscience? No, says Serena, but maybe he is practising stopping doing it. But that will be impossibly dangerous, because then they will have to kill him too.


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There’s more. The children are illegal immigrants, provided by traffickers in sex slaves, and they are brought into the country with the collusion of someone very high in Immigration. Serena knows who this is and has told Fern, but Fern is not going to reveal it in the memoir. Suffice to say that it is someone extremely grand, and the scandal, were it ever to be known, would bring down the government. No it wouldn’t, I thought to myself. Nothing brings down this government. Their shameless ability to weather scandals is legendary, and a scandal in itself. This is the piquant centre of the narrative, the anchovy in the olive, so to speak. I have a horrible thought: exactly how do the girls die in the snuff movies? Do they know what is happening to them? No mention is made of means. Is it a sexual death? Do I really want to know? After this Fern gets back to the catalogue of clients, and I go back to skimming. She talks about money quite a lot, and how this is helping her get through her university courses. Media and communication. She wants to be a writer. She hopes that this book might set her on that path. Then she will probably give up the game. (You can see she has hopes of a bestseller, and it could well be; the prose is dull but when did that ever matter, with bestsellers?) Though she might keep on a couple of special clients, specially generous ones, work from home and be her own mistress. Instead of which, she’s dead. Dead for the matter of this memoir, if her sister and Nicole are right, and her death wasn’t just another tragic heroin overdose, accidental or otherwise. Certainly the Immigration person might be implicated, if he feared he could be traced as a result of


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Fern’s stories. We all know how illegal acts multiply into more illegal acts. Or the garbage millionaire, though he doesn’t seem to be very secretive about his fun and games. I am sure—given the wife, the mistress, the penthouse, the money—a bit of decent detective work could uncover him. Then there’re the pornographic film makers. Their actions are so criminal that they would go to equally criminal lengths to avoid being found out. Whatever was Fern doing, writing this stuff down? Her starry eyes saw only bestseller, not the darkness of her narrative, and the danger of it. I look out the window. The western sun is shining through the sea mist, the landscape is swathed in its gauze. The slopes are not yet back to their old rainy emerald, but they are greening up. They look like silk, your hands can imagine feeling their sheen. The clefts and slits of Al’s Picasso woman—that’s how he describes this landscape, as a beautiful woman reassembled by a painter’s gaze—hazily shape her curves in the dimming light. The sea is silvery. I find all this so beautiful to look at, yet now I am chilled by the recognition that such things cannot matter to certain people, that their pleasures do not come from gazing on beauty but possessing it and using it, defiling, deflowering it. Such weighty old loaded words; I did not imagine myself ever using them. I got a glass of bubbly water out of the fridge, feeling the need for something sharp and cleansing to wash away bad tastes and their slimy residues. Often in the late afternoon I walk down to the sea and sit above the little stony cove where the sand washes away and back again and the cliffs


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drop like vertical gardens to the water. Today I felt there might be someone to push me over, or that somehow with whatever degree of inadvertence I might stumble and fall, all by myself. I sat and watched the changing light, instead, not even out on the deck, inside the sitting room. I thought of lost girls, lost children. Their lives over before they had begun. I suppose I was finding Fern’s book moving, as well as disturbing. It worried me in a lot of ways. Something about that stern formal prose allowing her subject matter all its naked power. Quite sophisticated, really, this plain telling of terrible events. No contemporary vernacular to distract you. I went back to the beginning of the manuscript. (Interesting we still say this, even though it’s words on a screen now.) I hadn’t looked at the title pages before. I wanted to see what the book was called. Its name was written in bold black italics. Merry Tricks. Tricks I know is a word for what prostitutes do, ‘turning tricks’ is maybe the expression, though Fern doesn’t ever use it. Merry seems a bit quaint. Al came in at that moment. He was bringing us a glass of sparkling wine, a good drink at the end of a fatiguing day, and even better than bubbly water for washing away bad tastes. Look, I said, Fern’s called her memoir Merry Tricks. Then I twigged; saying it aloud gave me the word. Meretrix. From an old Latin word for a prostitute. Not that I would pronounce it quite like the pun, but still it was clever. I wondered if the publisher would let it stay. It’s not exactly a word in common use. Who knows it these days? Or the adjective from it, meretricious, meaning showy but false, worthless really. It’s one of my favourite


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words, and I’m impressed that it’s in Fern’s vocabulary. I’ve often thought it’s a good description of a lot of the prostitute memoirs flooding the market at the moment. Al of course recognises it. I can trip him up on words if I search a dictionary but I haven’t yet caught him out in daily usage, however erudite. Clever, he says, but maybe at the expense of contemporary relevance. Sounds a bit eighteenth century. Yes, I said. The publisher will probably change it to something riveting like On the Game: the Diary of a Prostitute. On the Game; that’s good, he said. Probably been done. Like all the good things. I gave him a quick summary of Fern’s subject matter. He looked horrified. If that’s true, it’s evidence of a crime, he said. I can see why certain people would want to suppress it. He sat in his favourite chair, upright, with arms, and comfortable in a severe way. He stared into a corner of the room. I took little mouthfuls of the wine. Outside the light drained from the sky and the land, leaving the pools of water holding the last of its brightness. The room was dark and shadowy, and still he sat, for a long time. I hadn’t seen him so disturbed in all our married life. I waited for him to come back, and speak. At last he said, I cannot see myself having any power to sort this out. Not intellectually, or legally, or even morally. I can’t see how I can ever discover where the truth lies. Well, he went on, let’s eat, and tomorrow in Canberra things may be clearer.


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Chapter 9 Early in the morning Briony rang. Before she’d said three words I could tell she was upset. The blackmail. It’s still on. She rang at two o’clock this morning. Oh Cassandra, she was horrible. Sneering, and saying I bet you thought it had all gone away but it hasn’t it’s worse than ever, and I’ve only got till tonight or she’ll tell. Tell Nicole to meet you this afternoon and I’ll be there too. There was a pause. How did you know it was Nicole? You said so. I didn’t think you quite realised—it slipped out at an anxious moment. Then you know … Carlo. Yes. There was another pause. I said, Well. I’ll be there—if you want me. Have you decided what to do? I thought it had all gone away. Fern dying and all that, I thought at least this would be okay. Yes. Well, it isn’t, I said, cruelly, I suppose. Look, I know I said I wouldn’t interfere, but I think you have to say no. I’ll come with you and you can tell her why it just isn’t on. Mention her father, and how upset he would be to find his daughter behaving like this. Do a bit of moral heavying. 80


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She’s a tough girl, Nicole. So are you. So am I. You can’t succumb to blackmail. No. You’re right. Okay, I’ll be back from school at five, at the house. I’ll tell her to come at six. I’ll be glad to have you there. I’d helped Al move the Priapus back to its rightful place. It didn’t seem to have been lying in the grass for long. It was too heavy for one person, and really too heavy for two. It took a lot of shoving and grunting to get it rolled back and then pushed upright. I wondered if only one person could have knocked it away. Possibly, said Al, a bit of momentum and then using its own weight. But then vandals would quite likely prowl around in pairs. Hector Stollen was walking down to the water, and waved his staccato salute. No sign of Nadine the urban girl. I said, Maybe we could pick his brains about sex slave scandals. See if he knows anything. No, said Al. No. What if he is the sex slave scandal? Maybe that’s why he was so anxious to chat us up? You really think … ? My god … I probably don’t really think. But I have to suspect. He may be exactly what he says he is, but we can’t presume so. You think he might be the Mr Big who is organising it? Al shrugged. Good grief, Cassandra, your vocabulary—it isn’t really a joke living in a cheap thriller. But he could be. Or be the minion of whoever is. Sometimes when I am talking to Al the world shifts on its axis and I see how dark it really is; all intentions are evil, there are no good people. Winds blow howling through it and the sun doesn’t shine. I once asked him did he live in


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this world all the time and he said, No, of course not, but he never forgot it was there. I do forget, a lot of the time, then suddenly there is the shift and I cannot pretend that there is anything else. For a few moments. Hector Stollen with his large yellow teeth was one of the monsters who inhabited it, stalking through the wastelands with his stick insect legs and his sinister smile. But then there was another shift and the sun shone and the wind no longer howled and Hector Stollen was an eccentric though maybe not entirely trustworthy neighbour. We locked up very carefully before we left. But then we always do. It’s one of Al’s habits. So orderly. I sometimes wonder how he can stand living with me. I gazed carefully at the house before we left, at the paddocks and hills and the silvery water. As though it might not be there next time. Stolen by a sex-slave-importing immigration officer. As we drove up the coast I told Al the blackmail was still on. He was shocked. Hasn’t that girl any sense of decency? he said. I find it hard to believe, Hugh’s daughter. Where’s her sense of honour? Where’s his? Having a mistress, telling lies … That’s different, said Al. But I could tell I’d made him wonder. You could actually blame the whole thing on her discovering how her father is behaving. You know how teenage girls can idolise their fathers. The shock, and she goes off the rails herself. Al was clearly thinking about this. I don’t suppose you can expect kids to behave well if you don’t give them a good example. It’s a minefield.


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I’m not too keen on these muttered worries of Al’s. I said, Not for you it won’t be. You’ll be behaving well, no problem. He cast a glance sideways at me. Yeah? Won’t you? We were just starting the perilous climb up the Clyde Mountain. There’s that kind of false climb, where as soon as you leave the roundabout on the main highway north you seem to start up very swiftly, but then you come down again, and this happens several times, as the road swoops up and down over the foothills, and you think it’ll never get to the real mountain. But at last we had started on the steep slopes and the sharp bends. Steep hairpins that demand you turn as well as climb. There are occasional stretches of overtaking lane, not a lot, but everyone driving the road knows they’re the only place to pass, no chance of overtaking into the downcoming traffic, the visibility is nil. As good as. A raspberry-coloured ute came up very fast behind us. I heard its deep revving roar, saw it flash past, on a tight left-hand bend. There was a logging truck coming down the other lane and the ute pulled in abruptly so that Al had to steer off the road to avoid hitting it. We veered on to a soft and leaf-slippery verge. I looked out my window and hastily looked away. It was a long and vertical way down. I clutched the armrest and hoped. The car slid, fishtailed a little, but Al knew how to handle this kind of skid and we ended up back on the road, just enough in front of the next car behind. The raspberry ute had accelerated off and was away beyond the next bend. Fuck, he said.


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What was that about? I said, my voice shaky. Do you think someone did that on purpose? Didn’t they? I thought it was an idiot who doesn’t know the first thing about driving. Seems a bit much of a coincidence. The Priapus. And now this. They could be waiting around the next corner. An idiot on this road is pretty much par for the course. I didn’t know whether Al really thought this or whether he was arguing a case. He does that, as a kind of test, not of me, but of the case. Seeing if it will stand up. I knew he wasn’t sure that the driver was simply an idiot, but it was a possible hypothesis, it had to be thought about. And the fact was, thinking wasn’t going to get us much closer to the truth. We continued, accelerating up and around the lethal bends. Just past Pooh Corner we came across the ute again, its shining raspberry bonnet stove in against a tree. It was a very new and sparkling car, which was why I wondered about the driver’s intentions; you couldn’t imagine he was just a hoon. I was still in favour of him being a criminal. The two men were standing in the road looking at the pranged bonnet, having one of those violent conversations that start off with nudges and pushes and will quite likely end in fists. Al swooped past, slowing only slightly, I deliberately didn’t stare at the men while trying to get a good look to make sure I could recognise them again. I saw that they were wearing footy jumpers, and got an impression of angry snarling faces under fancy gelled hair. Not a very precise identification.


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So, there they are. Waiting around the next corner, said Al. Shortly afterwards we were at the top, and driving through the droughty countryside to Braidwood. We pulled up at our usual place for coffee. Al took my hand gently in his. Were you scared? he asked. For a second. But I knew just about straight away you were in control. Driving is one of the things that Al does well. And the Land Rover is in great good order. It looks a bit scruffy on the outside but inside it’s luxurious, and its mechanics are always in peak condition, its engine highly tuned. I think it’s kind of custom built. Al would say that war teaches you that you may be only as safe as your equipment. I feel safe with him. It’s nice after years of looking after myself. I hadn’t thought of marriage being like that. Do you think they meant to scare us? I said. Scare us, kill us. It’s not impossible. And it may only be our suspicions, reading meanings where there are just random acts of malice, or carelessness. Or clumsiness. Hitting the tree suggests clumsiness. And so we will keep all these possibilities in our head at once, ready should the truth reveal itself. No, we shall forget about them all, for the time being, and have some coffee. As we cross the street and walk along the pavement he squeezes his arm around my waist and bends round and kisses me. This is another nice thing about being married: walking through the world with someone who desires you.


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The coffee here is very good, provided you ask for it double strength. And I know I am right. Al may say, we shall forget them all for now, but he won’t, they’ll be in his brain, lurking there for when he needs to pull them out. Lemon tart? he asks, and I say yes. I spent a couple of hours in the afternoon, at my house, on the asparagus barn. The countess keeps turning up, she’s some sort of neighbour, a Prussian aristocrat it seems. I don’t know why I don’t believe in her, why I think she’s a melodramatic invention of Magda Velinda’s (like Magda’s name). I’d like to say, lose the countess, but it’s not my role, I’m not doing a rewrite sort of edit. She speaks rather like the sinister but handsome Germans in old war movies, her highly accented speech spelt out phonetically. I suppose it slows down the helter-skelter prose, but not to any useful effect. The countess owns a BMW—worth 250 000 marks, says the author in her breathless way, not explaining what that means in any other currency; the mark was equal to the dollar when I was there but who knows now, and shouldn’t it be in euros, these days? I pencil in this comment. Anyway, this BMW regularly cruises the roads round Hamburg at 250 kilometres an hour, while the countess tells tales of her relations, complete with generous gestures of her two hands. Maybe Magda feels as though she is living in a thriller; it sounds considerably more dangerous than most thrillers. There’s a lot of weather too, which is doubtless how you feel in Hamburg. Everybody’s out in it, piling up earth around the stems to blanch the asparagus crowns. The countess sends her husband, who is senile, but whose family


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has grown asparagus since time immemorial. I suppose his long-term memory of the process functions excellently well. No prizes for guessing I’m not enamoured of this book. There’s one part of it I do like, though, and that’s her facts about the vegetable she is growing. She’s got some good recipes—my favourite is the one that says the spears should be picked and washed while the water to cook them is coming to the boil—and points out that thinner doesn’t mean more tender, it is usually the reverse. Of course she is dealing with the juicy fat white asparagus of Germany. The Romans loved it, too, the emperors had special ships called the asparagus fleet that they sent in search of it. They also preserved it by freezing it. Asparagus is a member of the lily family. From when you plant it you need three years before harvesting, and in season it can grow ten inches overnight. The warmer the weather the faster it grows. A good bed of asparagus can last twenty or thirty years. And it is fabulously healthy: no fat, few calories, no cholesterol, full of folic acid and other goodies. Must tell Al, we should be eating it daily by the sound of things. We could get some crowns and plant a bed of it at the coast. Briony comes home from school. Her eyes carve dark circles in her pale face. She says she hasn’t been sleeping properly. What about Carlo? I ask, thinking what’s the point of a lover if he can’t comfort you in difficult situations. I know he’s around, since Hugh is always on the phone to Al. But of course the answer is, she hasn’t seen him, she hasn’t even talked to him. He has been in a worry about Nicole, I say.


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I know what you’re thinking, says Briony. Of course you’re right. But Cassandra, I love him. I know he loves me. But you’re right, he’s not showing it, is he. You always said it was hopeless. You’re right, married men always stick to their wives. Doesn’t matter how much they love you, they always stick to their wives. She sits on the fat chintzy sofa and cries, tears running down her cheeks and sobs choking in her throat. I put my arms around her and hug her. I agree with her, of course, she is quoting me, but it seems cruel to say so. And she may say I am right, over and over, but that is a sign that she doesn’t want to believe it. Perhaps, if you told him about the blackmail, I say. I felt her body shrink up. No, she said, shaking her head so tears flipped in my face. No. I have to manage this. And I am going to stand up to her. Too bad if the headmistress sacks me. I’ll go back to London. I saw a look of terror flit across her face. Let’s have a glass of wine, she said, getting a bottle of chardonnay out of the fridge. Not for me, thanks, I said, I think I’ll have a cup of tea. Cassandra! You’re not drinking? Are you—you’re pregnant! She rushed across the room to hug me. Oh Cassandra, that’s so wonderful. She started to cry again. I’m so happy for you, she sobbed. I was shaking my head. No. I wasn’t pregnant. Not now. I had been, twice, and not managed to stay that way. The miscarriages had been late, and heartbreaking. The doctor said a miscarriage was nature’s way of getting rid of a foetus that had problems, which didn’t cheer me up any.


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Why did the foetus have problems? Why not a perfectly okay baby? No, I said. I’m just taking time off wine. Might try again, I muttered. You could wonder why. I am getting on for forty. Before the colonel I believed I was very happily childless. But the thing is, I do get pregnant, I am fertile, it is just carrying that’s the problem. We’ve decided not to give up yet. Nevertheless, it was lucky it was chardonnay that Briony was waving about. A decent bottle of riesling now, I might have felt less strong-minded. She poured herself a glass of wine, I made some peppermint tea. The time for Nicole to come passed. She was more than half an hour late. Do you think she is playing with me? asked Briony. Making arrangements and not keeping them, so she’ll get me into a state? Thinking of Nicole and her behaviour over the last days it seemed all too likely a possibility. Let’s go to her place and call on her, I said. Briony shivered. No. I couldn’t. Yes, you could. We could. Let her see she isn’t the only one to call the shots. So we did. Got in Briony’s car and drove over the lake to the Charlestons’ house. All the way Briony kept saying, I hope this isn’t a really bad idea. I think it might be. I hope it isn’t. Hugh answered the door. I admired his expression when he saw Briony. Elegant politeness, charming welcome of a near stranger to his house. Ms Beauchamp, he said, how very nice. And Cassandra—hello. Do come in.


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No faint blanching, not even slightly taken aback. His daughter’s teacher, calling in. Maybe the only false note was not enough surprise at so unlikely an event. Al’s in the study, he said to me. I quickly said, We’ve come to see Nicole, actually. He didn’t even look relieved. Hang on, I’ll go find her, he said. I didn’t look at Briony looking at the entrance hall. It was a big room, in the generous high-ceilinged style of old Canberra houses, the 1930s ones, with originally not a lot of rooms but those they had were spacious and even grand, with wonderful huge blocks of land. Along one wall was a wooden sofa with a woven rush seat and a carved back (Provençal, rustic-antique, a family piece), in the centre a round table, old and polished, with a tall vase of ginger lilies on it. Flowers from a florist. Large bright oil paintings by French impressionists, not quite Manet but not bad. A grandfather clock, its brass pendulum gleaming. Sylvie does not I believe have a job, and the house shows tender care. It gleams in a rich and cosseted fashion. The house of a married couple is such a document. It is at once symbol and substance and symptom of the marriage that is living there. This house said, flourishing. Hugh came back and took us into the family room. This is in fact an extension to the original house, but so cleverly done you wouldn’t realise it, were you not familiar with their old style, of large but dank and gloomy kitchens. It opened out into a big and airy room, with a smart new kitchen (European appliances, in real-estate speak) with a long farmhouse dining table and French windows into the


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garden. Nicole was flopped on a sofa, eating low-fat potato chips and watching the television. Hugh turned it off. I’ll leave you people to your own devices, he said. Nicole, there’s some white wine in the fridge, you could offer a drink. He went away. We said hello to Nicole but she didn’t respond. Briony said, I was expecting you to visit me. Nicole shrugged. Me mum wanted the car. There is the telephone, I said. She shrugged again. I could see Briony was getting annoyed—a good thing. The answer’s no, she said. The girl scrunched the chip packet. You’ll be sorry, she said, with such venom in her voice that we both recoiled. You’ll be sorry, she repeated, with a shriek this time. It’ll be the end of you. Nicole, said Briony gently, this isn’t going to help any of us. It’s you it’ll hurt most, she said. And you! she shrieked again. Hugh had come into the room, with Al behind him.


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Chapter 10 Hugh said, with probably enraging calmness, since it was evident she hadn’t, Did you get the ladies a drink? I’m not giving sluts a drink, growled Nicole. Now Hugh did look taken aback. I find that extremely rude, Nicole. It was clear to me that he was very wary, going carefully until he found out what was making her behave like this. Though he must have had a fair idea. He raised his eyebrows to us in a sort of apology, went to the fridge and came back with a bottle of white wine. He bent to a cupboard and got out four glasses, and then a fifth. Nicole made a loud noise, a kind of grinding groan, and flung herself back on to the sofa. Maybe, said Hugh, you should go to your room until you are feeling a little better. You’d like that, wouldn’t you. Get rid of me. You don’t care about me. Nicole … You only care about sluts. Sluts and tarts and molls. I think we’d better go, said Briony. Afraid you’ll hear the truth, can’t stand the truth, can you. 92


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At that moment Sylvie came in, wearing a pretty black suit, cocktail not corporate, one of those tiny hats called a fascinator, and shoes with very high thin heels. She looked immensely chic. Sorry I’m late, she said. The taxi took ages to come, honestly the situation with taxis in this town is just so bad … She looked at our grim faces, at Nicole squirming on the sofa, and stopped speaking. She looked her questions at Hugh. Ms Beauchamp was just about to go, said Hugh, putting down the bottle beside the empty glasses. Without a drink? said Sylvie. Nicole gave another of those dreadful grinding groans, even louder this time. She came to fix up some extra work for Nicole, said Hugh. See, said Nicole, more lies. All stinking big fat shitty lies. Sylvie looked frightened. Yes, we have to go, said Briony. So nice … but she couldn’t manage such a false pleasantry. Nicole sat up suddenly. No, stay, she said. Let’s see which lies he comes up with here. Ms Beauchamp, she said, with poisonous emphasis, came to refuse my offer. An A for my essay in return for my silence. Blackmail, that’s the word. I think you’d better go to your room, said Sylvie, in a voice whose fright she couldn’t hide. No, Ma, no pretend, not anymore. He, she said, he— jabbing her finger at her father—he … Suddenly she looked terrified, and sat with a thump on the sofa arm. Oh Ma, how


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can you not see what’s going on? It’s her, he’s on with her, she’s what he wants. The room somehow trembled with outrage. Everybody, including Nicole, waited with a kind of breathlessness to see what could happen next. I confess I too was interested in which lies Hugh would tell here. Or would he tell the truth? Faced with the two women he had been lying to for months, what would he say? The silence lengthened. None of us wanted to say anything. Sylvie took her silly hat off and dropped it on the bench. Briony turned, trying to put in place the plan to leave. The wife, the mistress—on their own Hugh could tell each of them what she wanted to hear, but now that was impossible, there was nothing that could be said that would please both. Nicole, you’ve got yourself in a state, said Hugh, his voice warm and soothing. All this business with Fern, and the book, let me go with you and tuck you up in bed. I’ll get you a tisane, you know you like a tisane when you feel tired. He put his arm round her shoulders but she shook it off. You have to say, she said. You have to tell Ma what’s going on. You have to tell her what you’re going to do, and tell her too. You can’t keep doing this. Nicole is a kind of monster but I am admiring her, here. Briony is looking at her in horror, but you can see a terrible faint wash of hope seeping through it. Maybe this is the moment Hugh is going to tell his wife that the marriage is over and that he is leaving her. Somehow I don’t think so. I want to go and hold Al’s hand. It’s easy for me, to think the truth should be told, at last. It isn’t my life that’s going


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to be shattered, as is Sylvie’s, or Briony’s, or Nicole’s, come to that. All of them are being broken as we stand here. I stare at Hugh. I know he doesn’t actually know, like all adulterers of his kind, what he desires; when he tells Briony she is the one he loves he means it, when he is with Sylvie in their lovely marriage she’s the one he wants to be with. I understand, but I don’t feel sorry for him, he has made no attempt to practise self-knowledge, otherwise he could have worked this out, that he is greedy and wants both, that he has had no intention of choosing. He immerses himself in one, then the other, and refuses to see what he ought to know, that one has to exclude absolutely the other. The silence stretches. Cruel it may be, we are all waiting for Hugh to speak. He says, at last, I want to go and talk to Sylvie, alone. Nicole laughs, an ugly snicker that I am sorry a girl her age can produce. Briony says, Yes, good idea. I’ll be on my way; Cassandra, you can go home with Al, can’t you, I’ll take my car. She walks out, with a heartbreaking dignity. Hugh looks wretched. I say, Yes, we’ll go too, and Al says, Yes, time we went home. Nobody says goodbye. As we’re driving home he says, I’m glad that’s getting said in private. Whatever it is. Don’t we know? What you always said, that he never meant it when he told Briony he would leave his marriage for her. You don’t think he’s telling her he’s leaving to go and live with Briony? Do you?


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Do you think Sylvie will accept it? Probably. Don’t wives usually? After all, she knows him, she’s accepted a lot in her time. Though it will doubtless take a lot of fast talking to persuade her. Poor Nicole. Yes. I don’t know that fast talking will do him any good with her. I suppose it is his profession, I said. What? Fast talking. Al laughed. And mine too, you’re saying. Isn’t it? Possibly. But not with you. I believed him. As doubtless Sylvie will believe Hugh. And Briony, he said. She knew too, didn’t she. Yes. As soon as he said he wanted to talk to his wife alone it was as if he shouted, That’s it, Briony, all over. What a cad, you’re thinking. Well, I am rather. Cad. I taste the word in my mouth. It’s a good one. I said, It’s all just so greedy. So selfish. People who aren’t total egocentrics know they can’t have everything they want. In a perfect world, said Al. But you know, plenty of people do manage to have wives and mistresses and keep all the balls in the air. I snorted. Al laughed too. Balls in the air, I said. It’s good. I thought about the garbage millionaire: not just wife and mistress but a couple of prostitutes as well. I wanted to ask him about his afternoon with Hugh, but some discretion, or delicacy, stopped me. I regard this


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relationship with a certain curiosity; it’s such an ancient friendship but it has strict limits, which are also idiosyncratic. When I met Al the first thing I realised was how secretive he was, and I know he is still the same person. I let him choose his frankness, I have faith it will be right for both of us. Seeing Hugh betray his wife did not make me think Al would ever do that to me. Al looked at me out of the corner of his eye. I took the laptop back to Nick and Des, he said. Ah. The funeral’s still postponed. The police are saying it’s an overdose, possibly on purpose, possibly not. The parents are so sure it absolutely could not be either, that there was no way their beautiful daughter would have had anything to do with drugs. Just as Hugh wouldn’t be able to believe Nicole and blackmail. Maybe he’s a bit more clear-eyed there. Nicole is after all a bloody pain in the neck a lot of the time. Fern was pretty, virtuous, conscientious, talented. And she didn’t live at home, so they saw only the good sides of her. How cynical you are. Yes. So now there’s Ivy running round insisting she was a prostitute … How did they take that? Badly. Total disbelief. At first. They got very angry with Ivy. Desecrating her sister’s memory and all that. But then I turned up with the laptop—I think they’d believed Ivy was raving, and were beginning to think they’d lost two daughters. So when I arrived with the computer and the


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news that not only was Fern on the game but she’d written a book about it, they completely fell apart. I remembered Des and Nick on the night of Sylvie’s dinner party. So sure of themselves, so … was smug the word I wanted? So certain that their life was so good. So unselfcritical. They haven’t seen the book? No. I told them I had it safe on a memory stick. They didn’t seem to want to. Wise, I thought. I thought so too. It wouldn’t be good for parents to read about the professional activity of a young girl who becomes a sex worker, as they like to call it. Especially not written by her. I kept seeing pictures of that lovely girl in the situations she described, and being angry with myself because her beauty made it all seem so much sadder. Fern was at pains to explain that prostitution was as good a career choice as most, but I doubt any parents would have believed her. She didn’t convince me. So of course, said Al, now that it seems Ivy has turned out to be right about her sister’s profession, they are taking notice of her claim that she was murdered. They’re having the body embalmed; you have to do that if you don’t have the funeral within a certain time. Do you still embalm people? The police don’t believe in the murder theory. They say, Nah, a girl, a sex worker, of course she was on drugs, that’s why they do it, to feed the habit. But you don’t think so? Well, can’t discount any possibilities, but I think it’s likely that she did it mainly for the money to get her through


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uni. She was only part-time. She doesn’t mention drugs in the book. She was a busy girl, uni, moonlighting in the oldest profession, and writing a book. I suddenly heard his last remark. Have you read it? I thought I should have a look. Maybe the book was part of her course, I said. You know, these creative writing courses, they have to write a book. Hah, said the colonel. What sort of book? A novel usually, I think. Maybe this thing’s a novel. Maybe she made it all up. You mean, even being a prostitute? What do you reckon? Well, somewhere along the line something’s likely to be fiction. Maybe she was a pro, but made a lot of the rest up. I suppose she could have started the narrative from scratch, but people don’t usually, usually there’s a kernel of autobiography somewhere. Maybe we should do some research and find out if it is fact, or just fiction. Just fiction. I laughed. What’s funny? Oh, it’s such a fashionable debate, these days. Is it more significant if it’s fact than if it’s ‘made up’. And so many hoaxes. Hoaxes? You say a book is true, all this really happened to me, my best friend’s father did actually kill her because she fell in love with an Englishman, to give an example—people’ll buy it in millions. However badly written it is. Do the same


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thing as a novel and you might shift two thousand copies, if you’re lucky. So there’s money involved. Money, and fame. Hmm. Millions of copies of a book is many millions of dollars, you know. I know, said Al. I wrote one, remember. We both laughed. Al said, Oh, and Fern’s boyfriend was there. Her boyfriend? What does he make of all this? I didn’t talk to him. He wandered off, before we got on to the sex worker business. A most beautiful boy, with long fair curling hair and huge green eyes; I’ve never seen such a beautiful boy. He looked like an angel out of a Renaissance painting. Good grief. Apparently he’s clever too. Got the university medal, in philosophy. He’s filling in time till he goes to Cambridge, in the northern autumn. He seemed a bit of a wraith in the house, but Des said she was glad he was there. She said it was good to get to know him, there hadn’t been a chance before. Well, I’m glad she’s finding something pleasant. That night I watched a small program on the television. SBS. I hadn’t meant to, but I caught the beginning of it and it seduced me. It was set in India, in a small village some two hundred kilometres from a city, I forget which one. Narrated in English, with subtitles when people spoke. It was a vignette of a family, an ancient grandfather, his son


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and wife, their son and his wife, and a little boy. They lived in a bare house which they described as large, with plenty of room for the seven of them. It was high-ceilinged and open. At night they rolled out bedding; the ancient man put on a balaclava and tucked up in coverings. There was very little furniture; they ate sitting on the floor, with wonderfully neat scoops of their fingers forming mainly rice into little balls and slipping them delicately into their mouths. The mother or the grandmother fed the child. The young woman worked in a shop selling gas bottles for cooking, and at home did little jobs of sewing on a chipped machine, hemming saris, that kind of thing. At the gas bottle shop she worked three hours in the morning, three in the afternoon, and had some Sundays off. The husband worked at repairing motorcycles. The family also had coconut palms and grew betel nuts; they made more money from this but the mechanical repairs gave a regular income. The young people had been introduced by family friends who thought they might be suitable for one another; after a fortnight they were married, never having had a private conversation or even a telephone call. She was a pretty girl, with teeth a bit gappy, very shy and gentle, and she looked adoringly at her husband, who was happy to be so regarded; he had a gush of shining dark hair growing low over his forehead. She was slender, with a long plait, wore saris and rode a bike to work. Her most prized possession was the sari her husband had given her before they were married; she held it up to show us. Her fingers were long and graceful. The little boy was rambunctious as most little boys, but the mother and grandmother were always gentle with him.


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All their movements with the child had a slow and loving grace. Of course he was a boy beloved by three generations. His most prized possession was a piece of wood on a string that he could pull around; he called it his buffalo head. The ancient man’s most prized possession was a book, old and precious. There was so much calm and order in this family’s life, they were always busy yet in an unhurried way. The grandmother sat on the floor, fanning a little fire of palm fronds under a bowl-shaped metal plate, cooking bread; she moved and stretched the circles of dough with her fingers as they browned and puffed only a little, quick slender fingers that never seemed to get burned. I watched mesmerised, surprised at the way this small picture of other people’s lives so charmed and indeed moved me. At the end of the film the young couple stood together. She said how happy she was to live in India, how lucky. She gazed with such love at her husband as he said that yes, they were very lucky. He did not think they could have had so tranquil and rewarding a life anywhere else in the world. I turned the television off after that, and sat with tears in my eyes and those words running through my head. So tranquil and rewarding a life. The words seem so wise. I thought of all the people I had had dealings with these last days. Not one of them could have said that sentence, could even have conceived it. Tranquil and rewarding. I thought I could make a kind of charm out of the words, for myself, and say them over in my head as a measure, a test of worth, of what was happening.


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Chapter 11 I’d come to the end of the asparagus-farm saga. The countess had been driving the BMW at her usual 250 kilometres an hour—such a silly woman to be in charge of so much speed—and had managed to kill herself and her ancient feeble husband. Ran off the road into a tree, so at least nobody else died along with her, apart of course from the count. So then his heir, son of his first marriage, had come to sort out the property and Magda Velinda had fallen in love with him, and he with her, which was the amazing thing, to me, to her it just seemed par for the course, and so they went off to live in his Bavarian castle. I could see the next bestseller: Schloss in Bavaria. By Magda Velinda, Countess Whoever. Talk about deus ex machina. She even described him as a god. Tall, blond, handsome. She made him sound like a character out of the Ring Cycle. Her son, also from a previous marriage, was left to get on with the asparagus, which were causing a stir in the markets of Hamburg when last noted. I was walking over to my house to pack the thing up and get it back to its publisher. But I decided to take a detour and drop in to Tilley’s, have a coffee and a read of the paper. 103


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Don’t go to Tilley’s much anymore, that seems to belong to my single life, so I thought I’d revisit it. There was nobody I knew there, and nothing in the paper. Still you can spend a bit of time reading nothing in the paper. I rather enjoyed walking along the old paths from Tilley’s to my house. I was thinking about my next project, how I wouldn’t start it yet. Something about the prostitute memoirs, Merry Tricks, what an absurd name, was worrying me. I couldn’t work out what it was. I thought I’d have another look at it and see what it might be. I rather like this habit I’m into now, of walking over to my house in the mornings and doing my day’s work there. It means Al can have his house to come and go as he wishes. Even with Briony as tenant it works well, because she has always left by the time I arrive. But Al’s come up with a plan. The apartment next door to his is for sale. It’s actually on another staircase, but if we bought it we could link it directly with ours. The place might fall down if we start knocking walls out, I said, but Al said there were ways of doing things, nothing like that was insurmountable. Of course, then we’d have two entrances, and exits, on different staircases, which seemed a funny thing. Very spy-like, I suppose you’d say. It makes good sense. The other apartment is bigger, and combining the two would make a very fine space. There’s even a little balcony on the other one. Views of Black Mountain. And a real kitchen, not a cupboard. I’d miss my little house; it’s my own. Al’s idea is to sell it to finance his plan. There’s a logic to it; we’ve got a house with a lot of garden at the coast, we don’t need a house and garden here. I see his point. I suppose we will do it. But I’ll be sorry to give up my house.


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When I let myself in the first thing I see is the asparagusfarm manuscript, strewn all over the floor. I let out a yell of fury and charge in. The next thing I see is Briony lying half on her face, with her head bleeding. I stop. Not so much bleeding as having bled. What if she’s dead? I walk slowly over to her, afraid to touch her. It seems to take a long time but it is only a second. She feels warm. I don’t move her; she looks to be lying at a funny angle. I find the phone, as usual off its cradle so I have to use the finder, and discover it beeping under a sofa cushion. Call 000, and then Al, on his mobile, goodness knows where he is and he’s not answering so I have to leave a message. I get the soft mohair throw that Briony has tossed in a heap on the sofa and cover her. The ambulance comes quite quickly, the depot isn’t far away, and then the paramedics, a very young man and an older woman, the tough but kindly kind, spend a long time with her, examining her body carefully, checking all her vital signs I suppose, hooking her up to a drip, fixing an oxygen mask in place. Did she fall? I ask. Is that how she cut her head? They cast sceptical glances at me. Looks more like an attack, says the man. The woman frowns. How badly hurt is she? I ask them, but they don’t know, or won’t say, and then they get the stretcher and put her in the ambulance. She’s still unconscious. They ask me do I want to come too, so I say yes, and then in a panic rush round and check that the doors are properly shut; how did her attacker get in? Is anything taken? I doubt the television set is worth the carrying out and I can’t see anything missing. Just the papers strewn about the floor.


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I can’t use my phone in the ambulance so when we get to Calvary I stay outside Accident and Emergency for a moment to call Al again and tell him where I am but I still have to leave a message. Then I skulk in through the ambulance entry and when a nurse stops me ask for Briony. She’s parked in a bed waiting for attention; I’m allowed to sit beside her and hold her hand. It feels cold and soft and small. There are curtains around the bed so there is visual but not aural privacy. I can hear the young woman in the next bay who has tried to commit suicide. She’s had her stomach pumped out and now her husband is with her, asking her over and over again, speaking soft as breath because he knows it’s not private but even so I can hear every word, asking her over and over why she did it, doesn’t she know he loves her, how could she have even thought of such a thing. And the young woman sighs, and murmurs, says nothing but I don’t know. The husband can’t believe that, on and on his same questions go, and then he wants promises, that she will never do this again. All right, she says, but I don’t think I would believe her. Sitting by Briony, holding that sad little hand, I thought of the papers strewn over the floor. I had to think that it wasn’t burglars, but someone looking for something quite specific. The people who had wanted the laptop. Who had killed Fern to get it, according to Ivy and Nicole. The laptop was with Fern’s parents, but the manuscript wasn’t. It was on a memory stick, in my bag, on the floor beside me. As was my computer. I’d got into the habit of taking it home at night with me; it’s probably my most stealable possession. If I’d


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left it in the house I could be sure it wouldn’t still be there. It seemed that somebody badly wanted that manuscript. Would a careful reading of it tell me why? A quick skim had come up with quite a few possibilities, but there wasn’t any certainty about them. The garbage millionaire: was he really a suspect? Did a lurid sex life turn you into a murderer? I wished Al would come. It occurred to me that now I was the person with the manuscript, so to speak, I was the person of interest to the attackers. If they knew I had it. When they found out I had it. I wondered if they had meant to kill Briony, if they supposed they had, or if they had simply meant to knock her out. When she regained consciousness she might be able to tell us. I resolutely said, when. A doctor came to examine her. She pulled the curtains so the bed was in a closed cubicle and I was sent away, out to the waiting room. They would tell me when there was anything to say. I went outside where the smokers lurked and called Al again. Still not answering. The waiting room was quite crowded, with people staggering in, supported by friends, sometimes parents with children, little bodies bleeding, bandaged. People vague and stammering. They went to the triage nurse whose job it was to assess how immediately they needed treatment, who could wait, who should be at the top of the queue. Most were sent to sit down. Some groaned, or muttered. A child with no visible signs of injury roared its head off. An old man, helped stumbling in with chest pains, was taken straightaway through a door at the back. Triage. I have read criticisms of this, that it was a way of categorising people,


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deciding who needed to live. But I’ve never thought of it that way; it seems to me, in these circumstances, a way of working out who needs instant treatment to live. A lot of these people are evidently in pain, but I don’t think any of them are dying. Mind you, that nurse’s responsibility is not one I would like, but then I am often glad I don’t have to make medical decisions about people. My phone rang. The sister jumped up and glared at me, pointing to the sign that had a mobile phone with a red slash through it. I grimaced and turned it off, seeing that the call was from Cleo. Probably not urgent. After a while Al came in. I hugged him. When I tried to explain what had happened, I realised how little I knew. A woman came out and took us into a little messy office. She seemed unhappy with how little I knew. I explained that all I had done was find my friend, I actually knew nothing about what had happened. Had she fallen? Had she been hit? Was it attempted murder or a careful knockout blow? How could I possibly tell? I couldn’t even be much help about time. I had found her a little before ten in the morning. I knew she normally left for school before eight, which could mean that it had happened before then. But perhaps she felt ill and wasn’t going in. Perhaps it had happened last night? Have you told the police? the woman asked. No, I haven’t. I was in too much of a hurry to get help to her. The police will have to know. Is she okay? The woman shrugged. What about her next of kin? Her family?


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I said I knew her mother lived at Noosa. She should be informed, said the woman. Now, she’ll need a scan, and we need to know her medical history. I can’t help you there, I said, maybe her mother … though I doubted her mother would know much about her. Does she have any history of drug taking? Of course not. Well, I don’t think so. I suddenly realised I didn’t have the faintest idea about Briony and drugs. One assumes things with friends, but who knows what the truth is. The woman frowned. We’ll do tests, of course. Does she drink? We finally got her to tell us that Briony was resting comfortably, that she was as well as could be expected, and at this point it looked as though she would regain consciousness. Of course, as the woman told us, nothing is certain. Al drove us to the house. I was afraid I’d never find you, I said. Where were you, to have your phone turned off? I realised instantly that this was not a good question to ask. Lucky I am not a jealous wife, I would have to think that all these mysterious activities of Al’s could be secret trysts with other women. He raised his eyebrows and grinned. You don’t want to know … I suppose you were bonking Des Christo … So I’m going to tell you. I was examining Fern’s group house. Was anyone there? How did you get in?


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No, that was the point. That no one would be there. And you know how I got in. I wanted to have a good look around, to see if there might be anything the police had missed, especially since they thought it was just another overdose. As I guessed, he said, the girls aren’t great housekeepers— not like boys—so I don’t think they’d done any cleaning since it happened. I couldn’t find anything of interest in the bedroom, but I found this in the hall. Under a low bureau, you had to be rather flat out to see it. He felt in his pocket and held out a small plastic envelope, without taking his eyes off the road. It contained a thin plastic cone. I couldn’t tell what it was. It’s the cover off a syringe, he said. The bit that stops the needle sticking into you, before you want it to. You think, the syringe that gave her the overdose? Seems possible. In the hall. Yes. That is, not in the bedroom. I suppose she could have dropped it there, on her way upstairs to inject herself, but wouldn’t you leave it on until the last minute? Of course, if it’s a house of druggies it could have happened any time. Well, possibly. But there was only the one. So you think, it was her … her murderer? But why wouldn’t they drop it in the bedroom? Presumably they didn’t mean to drop it anywhere. But in haste, leaving the house … The girls said he left by the window. Remember, the crashing on the roof?


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Yes, well, I don’t know what it means, yet. Just that it might mean something. Once inside my poor little house we stepped gingerly over the mess and I called the police. We searched for an address book, and finally found it in her satchel, which was in the kitchen, full of marked papers. I rang up her mother, but got an answering machine and didn’t leave a message. I looked carefully to see if anything was missing. I was anxious to pick up the papers strewn all over the floor, make sure none were gone, all that dreary work, I couldn’t bear to have to do it again, but it had to be left so the police could see it. The colonel was searching about, trying to work out how the intruders got in. There’s no sign of forcing, he said. Well, do you leave any? I asked. True, he said. The police searched too, wandered about, walking with patterned boot soles all over the papers on the floor; they didn’t want to move them, they said. They said it would be kids looking for drug money. No doubt. There were mobs of them in a suburb like this. They knew who they were, but catching them was another thing. This looked like the kind of vandalism they got up to when they were frustrated. Good idea to leave a bit of money about for them, said the older one. I used to leave fifty dollars on the hall table for just this reason, but I’d forgotten to mention it to Briony. Not that I thought that this was what had happened here, but it was a useful thing for them to think, easier than going into dangerous laptops and all that.


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Do they usually try to kill people? I asked. More likely they gave her a shove, she fell, hit her head. Probably thought the place was empty. I suppose she may be able to tell us when she wakes up, I said. Yeah, they said, we’ll talk to her then. In the meantime, this was a crime scene, it would have to be sealed off, and examined by forensics. They’d need to check the blood spatter patterns. But the manuscript, I said, I have to send it off, it’s important. They said they were sorry, but it was a crime scene, they couldn’t help that. I looked at the pages, curling, dusty, already marked with the hieroglyphs of their boots, wondering if they would ever become a book. I decided to take my computer and the memory stick back to the dairy flat and work there. I’d brought it in with me, it wasn’t part of this crime scene, so I could take it away. And even if it had been available to me, I didn’t like the feel of my house at the moment. Maybe this was the time to sell it, commit ourselves to Al’s apartment. Walking up the stairs with a bag of shopping plus the computer I said, Only thing is, this is a lot of stairs. Healthy, said Al, who was carrying most of the shopping. All very well, I said, but what about when we’ve got a baby? Humping the pram up. The nappies. All the baby stuff. Not to mention a hefty toddler. He can walk. Al stopped on a landing and looked at me. Have you noticed, the way the staircase is configured, it’s set


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in from the walls of the building. There’s space to put in a lift, without changing the façade. A lift! Wouldn’t it cost a fortune? Probably. But there’re other tenants. Six apartments. Four, he said, the ground floor ones will hardly be interested. I know that. I have to hand it to Al, he thinks grand thoughts. Scruffy old public housing, and he’s turning it into a spacious apartment, with an elevator, no less. Will it ever happen? Quite possibly. When we looked at the next door flat I had to admit it had possibilities. There were three bedrooms, as well as quite a big sitting room, we could reconfigure it with ours and it would make a pleasant space. There was a view of the hills. It was drab, much of it painted that mission brown colour which so understandably fell very swiftly out of fashion. I could see it glowing with the milky creamy yoghurty colours of our dairy flat. Dairy: it makes me think of cows grazing, said Al, which of course had been the business of his family. I notice he calls it that now, too. And I can see by the gleam in his eye that he is itching to take this project on. I suppose I can always keep my house and rent it out, I said. Properly, with a real tenant. But somehow I could see that I would move beyond it, I was already feeling detached. I noticed that I’d said, when we have a baby. But I am not getting any younger. Profound remark. I rang the hospital. Briony was in a stable condition. I know this can mean, very drastically ill indeed, just not


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getting worse. I rang her mother in Noosa again, still no reply, just the answering machine. I tried to return Cleo’s call. Answering machine. I suddenly envisage a world where there are no people, only machines endlessly dialling one another, leaving cryptic messages piping unheard in a wilderness. Your call is important to us, they chatter, but there is no longer any us to find them so.


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Chapter 12 The hospital had said no visitors for Briony yet so I went into the colonel’s study and printed off a copy of Merry Tricks. I felt a bit guilty, pages of trees dying in such a cause, but I did use recycled paper. And I can’t read things properly on a screen, I like to have the pages between my hands. Funny how we all thought that computers would abolish the waste of paper, and it’s been just the opposite. I have a sudden thought, and look up meretrix in the Macquarie Dictionary. I like the Macquarie for its Australianness, it’s good as a measure of the present state of the language. It gives us received local spellings and saves lots of arguments. Meretrix isn’t in there, which is a sign of how current it is in the country at the moment. Meretricious is, but only its third meaning is to do with prostitutes, and the dictionary says that’s archaic. I try typing the noun into the Mac. It gets a wavy red line under it, and when I check it in the dictionary no results are found. It says much the same as the Macquarie for meretricious. I add meretrix to the vocabulary through the tools menu. It gives me great pleasure to teach my computer new words; sometimes, if that’s the kind of book I’m editing, they’re swear words, rude 115


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words, whatever silly term you want to give them. I can’t stand coy computers. The Shorter Oxford gives ‘pertaining to a prostitute’ as the first meaning of meretricious, and does have meretrix; it comes from the Latin meaning ‘serve for hire’. Well, we all do that, it’s called having a job, but I suppose the dictionary means serve in a sexual sense. Like breeding animals, except breeding isn’t the intention here. I’m amusing myself while the computer prints out. I try Al’s Cassell’s Encyclopedia. No mention. Not really surprising. It belonged to his father as a boy, and is meant for children. It has narratives of fairy stories and poems like Hiawatha because they are the kind of phenomena that an encyclopedia should be concerned with. Al used to turn the pages and read its stories when he was a child. There’s a bunch of pages printed so I settle down at the desk to read them, with a pile of yellow stickies and a pencil. Such funny stitched-up prose. There’s no energy in it. The subject’s salacious, the prose is dull. This makes a dull book so far as I am concerned. But readers interested in salacious subjects won’t think so. There are people who don’t care how a book is written, all that concerns them is the subject matter. I’m pleased when Cleo rings, so I can stop. She’s a bit more relaxed than usual. She’s at home, Pomona is sitting in her lap, singing a little song. Cleo and the three children are watching a video, they are allowed half an hour at a time. This one’s Snow White. Pomona has to be nursed because it’s scary. Though she’s not paying much attention. Shh, Mummy, says Lily, so Cleo talks very softly into the phone. I can see the scene, the bathed, sweet-


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scented children, the drowsiness, the warm house. When I think of Cleo’s astonishing efficiency, that allows time for dreamily sitting in front of the television with her kids (though she is talking to me at the same time), I wonder how I can even consider having children. I’d like to think I would miraculously become her kind of superwoman but I know I won’t. But I also think, I don’t care, we’ll muddle on. And anyway, Al is our organised person. Two in one family would be too much. Cleo wants us to have lunch, so we arrange that. Then Al comes home, and says let’s go down to the Vietnamese for dinner. We’d shopped today but only bought loo paper and soap powder, rice and pasta, nothing fresh to make a meal out of. The point of the Vietnamese is we can walk; we order bowls of noodles and green tea to drink. He’s going to do some work tonight. I think we need to know more about the prostitute business, he says. Brothels, what really goes on there. I’ve managed to find out the name of the place she worked in. Yes, I said, as he’d paused. I’m always amused by the fact that brothels in Canberra are situated in the light industrial areas. You’ve got a planned city, you organise where the brothels are. They used not to be legal, and there might be one in the house next to yours. Cleo’s parents live in quite a grand suburb and that’s what was going on in the house down the street; cars at all hours, taxis, comings and goings. People complained. Now the sex workers are complaining, they reckon that brothels don’t have any of the usual waste and noise and so on of industrial sites so why do they have to be among them?


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It’s at Mitchell, he said. The Cabinet Room, it’s called. You can have girls in-house or take away. They have drivers to deliver them and collect them afterwards, it’s a safety matter for them. The Cabinet Room. It’s a nice little joke. How are we going to find out? I said. Do you want me to go undercover? What? Cassandra! No way. I could approach one for a job, I said, infiltrate the place. Very good, said Al. And when you get it? Well, I wouldn’t actually go to work there. You’d need time to infiltrate, he said. They don’t let people in that easily. No, it’s not on. These are dangerous things; remember the snuff movies. But the girls like Fern who just see it as a job of work, they don’t regard it as dangerous. More fool them, you could say. After all, we are talking about Fern being dead. But wasn’t it the memoirs, not the prostitution, that got her killed? Whatever, she’s dead. I shivered. Scooping up noodles with chopsticks, such a simple pleasure, made me think of the Asian children, their expensive virginity, their even costlier murder, captured on film.


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Chapter 13 The sky was blue And high above The moon was new And so was love Al was singing this favourite song in the shower. The first time I heard him I was surprised; that song was old when Gran sang it. Al had played the role of the French lover in the musical at school. New Moon, I think it was, Sigmund Romberg. He wanted to be the girl, he said, but he was tall, he had to play the man. I looked out the kitchen window; the sky was indeed blue, that marvellous deep intense blue that you get in autumn, and the coloured leaves fell from the trees in showers. Soon they would be bare branches against the sky. Al’s voice soared up: And so my lonely heart is singing Lover come back to me Love songs. Al doesn’t know very many, but when he sings them my heart turns over. Mind you, that one is very 119


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sad and full of loss, but it’s all right, I think, because they get together in the end. I think of this, with me and Al. We’ve got together. What next? Happily ever after? Can we be so lucky? I still hadn’t reached Briony’s mother. I planned to go and see Briony that afternoon. Al had gone out and I was doing emails, boring business emails, when the doorbell rang. Whoever comes calling in the morning, without warning? We don’t live in a casually calling society. When I looked through the spyhole there, even fish-faced from the lens, was a beautiful young man. I didn’t think I knew him, but I opened the door anyway. He bowed a little. Mrs Marriott, he murmured. You don’t know me. My name is Xavier … Xavier Dove. I took in his long fair curls, his pale carved face, his wide green eyes and silky red lips. And the manners. Xavier, I said. You were … Fern’s boyfriend, he said, and I saw water flash in his eyes. Come in, I said, do. I am sorry to intrude … I want to talk to you. I said to call me Cassandra and offered coffee and sat him down at the dining table. He told me about himself, mainly the things that Al had already mentioned. That he was a student of philosophy, that he was at the moment filling in time a little before going to Cambridge in the spring, our spring, he said, to study; he’d got a scholarship to Cambridge. He put three sugars in the coffee and stirred it with a curious whipping action that hardly disturbed the surface.


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What will you be working on? I asked. It’s a kind of moral philosophy, to do with politics. You know, the idea of the end justifying the means … Machiavelli … Yes! Machiavelli, and Plato—the philosopher king and all that—they are sort of in the middle … Machiavelli you know was widely misunderstood, still is; you have to read the Discourses on Livy, not The Prince, to find out what he really thought, but people just look at The Prince and don’t see where it’s coming from, the politics of the day that dictated it. So, I said, Machiavelli wasn’t so Machiavellian after all. Exactly. I’m going to start off with the Egyptians. Listen to this: I have never let anyone suffer from hunger. I have never caused anyone to weep; I have never made anyone afraid. I have never spoken with a haughty voice. I have never been deaf to the words of justice and truth. Isn’t that marvellous? Indeed, it is. Where does it come from? The Egyptian Book of the Dead. It was what a public official had to be able to swear to before he could get a place in the next life. Do you think there would have been many who could have done that? Wouldn’t work too well in modern times, I reckon. I have never caused anyone to weep … I repeated the words. How many of us could say that? Xavier frowned. Yes, well. I’m supposed to be reading, but mainly thinking, about what moral behaviour for a politician or a civil servant might be. But now, he said, with Fern … He turned his head away, his voice choked.


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Yes, I said, I’m so sorry. I didn’t think I could say, so what can I do to help, so I poured more coffee and waited. This is a very beautiful room, he said. Yes, isn’t it. It’s Al’s, I said, his taste, I mean, he chose it. I like it too. I expect I’ll have strange digs in Cambridge. Was Fern going to go with you? I wanted her to. But she had to finish her own degree. Maybe after that. He stirred his coffee again. If I had known, that she was into drugs, maybe I could have … maybe I could have saved her. Helped her somehow. So she was into drugs. He looked at me. She died … of a drug overdose, that’s … He spoke in broken sentences, fragments, you could see the pain they cost him to utter. Yes, I said. She was such a beautiful girl, he said. But she had her own ideas. Girls do, I said. But so dangerous … for her. If I’d known … I was beginning to think he just wanted to talk. Why not? It was the least that I could do. Presumably he couldn’t say these things to Fern’s parents, who refused to believe in the drug taking. Do your parents live in Canberra? I asked. He shook his head. In Buenos Aires. I am supposed to go and spend some time with them before I go to Cambridge. And all this reading. But somehow I can’t settle to any of that.


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He sat with his hands loosely curled on the table. I put my hand gently on one of his. It’s natural that you should grieve, I said. You owe it to yourself, and Fern. He suddenly smiled, a dazzling smile that lit up his face and the whole conversation. That’s very wise, he said. So very wise. Of course. I must grieve, and then there will be time for other things. The most beautiful young man he had ever seen, Al had said. He was right. Xavier was staring down at his hands. His long curling lashes fluttered like hummingbirds about a flower, the tears in his eyes were like drops of dew. I don’t often get this lyrical about young men, but I’d never seen a young man like this before. Fern’s book … What? he said. Did she tell you about it? I know there’s some sort of exercise, they have to write a novel then do an exegesis of it, but that’s later, I think. Seemed a bit mickey mouse to me. Though I don’t suppose I know. Was she writing a book? She didn’t talk to you about it? He shook his head. I didn’t know how much he knew about Fern’s working girl activities. Xavier heaved a sigh. I don’t know how my life can go on without her, he said. I imagined the two of them together. Her burnished curls, his long silver ringlets, his sculpted fair face, her rosy vivacious darkness. How people must have gazed at them when they went about together. I imagined what beautiful children they might have had. I sighed too. I thought of


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Sylvie and Hugh; a handsome couple but their daughter no beauty. But it was the tremulous youth of these young people, the freshness of their skins, their bodies so unused, so unworn. Luminous. I patted Xavier’s hand, then got up and cleared the coffee cups away. You’ve been such a help, he said, I’m so sorry to barge in like this. Maybe you should go to your parents in Buenos Aires quite soon, I said. Yes, he replied, his head lifting a little, yes, that would be a good idea. But not yet, there’s … there’s the funeral. But … they’ve had it. What? Yes. This morning in fact. This morning! I thought they wanted to wait. They did. Des wanted all sorts of things from the police; mainly to find the murderer. But then she decided she couldn’t leave her daughter unburied any longer, and held a small private funeral, only the immediate family. I thought … I was going to say, I thought she might have included you, but that seemed too hurtful. Xavier was smiling a strange smile, his face twisted into a grimace, his eyes faceted like emeralds. Buried, he said, buried. I told him that Nick had talked to Al about it, that they were going to have a tiny funeral at the Greek church and then bury her in a real grave. Funny, Nick said, we thought we’d given up the church forever. You never know, do you. Xavier said, still with that glittering smile, So, she’s finally gone.


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He was worrying me. I thought he was on the edge of a fit of some kind, of hysterics, or even some sort of psychotic episode. But he shook his head, sharply, his ringlets bounced against his cheeks, the smile died, and he had control of himself. Sorry, he said, I still can’t believe it. We sat in silence for a moment. Your topic, I said, it sounds fascinating. Oh, do you really think so? Fascinating, and apposite. There’s not much sense of the importance of morality in public life these days. Xavier grinned. No. The phone rang. I’ll leave you, he said, and shook my hand. There was a grave courtesy to his manners that was very charming. I picked up the phone as I let him out the door. It was Cleo. Lunch, said Cleo. I can’t manage that day. Okay, I said. I had to get my diary and again we planned the occasion like a campaign; for some days away. We lead mad lives, said Cleo. She does, I know. I rang Briony’s mother again, and left a message on the answering machine, asking her to ring me, it was important. I wanted to speak to her before visiting Briony. I settled down to a close reading of Fern’s book. Not the quick skimming that gives you an idea of subject matter, but the careful paying of attention that gives you the proper experience of a book. There was something about it that worried me, not the subject, though that bothered me quite a lot, no, there was something else, something odd. I got my brain into editorial mode. If I were fixing this for


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publication, what would I be doing with it? I read carefully, my unease growing, but not yet sure what was wrong, or what could be done about it. I stopped reading and began pacing. Not a lot of room, but I covered the same ground, back and forth. It didn’t help. I made a sandwich. The telephone rang. An apologetic publisher. Could she put a manuscript in the post for me, overnight? There’d been a disaster, one of her writers having hysterics about the edit she’d been given by one of the inhouse girls, could I possibly take over? I’ve just had her on the phone, said the publisher. She’d just discovered that the editor didn’t know the story of Jonah and the whale, she’d written on the manuscript, What is this all about? Need to clarify! The writer went ballistic. Said it was the final insult. I had to promise I’d try to get you. Please, Cassandra. I’ll owe you. I said yes. I’m a fan of the writer. The asparagus book was done, even if it had turned into evidence in a forensic investigation, and the memoir, well, where was I going with that? What did I hope to achieve? Maybe Briony could help; she might have some idea of why she was attacked, and who had done it. I could do this novel, it was called Beside the Black Sea, which had a mysterious quality, and in the meantime the memoir might sort itself out in my mind. Besides, the memoir wasn’t work, and the novel was. If you think of work as being paid. I drove out to Calvary, musing on ignorant editors. Usually young women, who think jobs in publishing are the glamorous life. It’s not so much that they don’t know things, as that they are so aggressive about it. They find it personally


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offensive that someone should mention something of which they have no knowledge. A kind of solipsism; if they don’t know it, it doesn’t exist. Jonah and the whale is one of the great narratives of our civilisation; I’d expect to walk down the street and ask people at random and find them all knowing it: it’s even a song. And a further thing, these kids are children of the internet, why don’t they just google things, instead of rudely demanding clarification of authors? Anyway, this was all my good luck, for I now had a book to edit that I was also very keen to read. I know I sound like grandma, and believe me I tend to feel like one when I see what these baby editors don’t know. When I got to the hospital and asked to see Briony they said, no, no visitors. Does that mean she’s dangerously ill? I asked. Stable, they said. Had the police been to see her? What, they asked, the police? I wished Al was here. He might have got something out of them. I was back home, sitting at the table with a cup of tea and a library book when the key turned in the lock. There was a quick twirl of scarlet and a tall woman with a fall of blonde hair was turning to shut the door behind her. The scarlet was a suit, finely tailored, with a straight skirt, pencil slim and below the knee, its jacket neatly fitted into the waist, with a flared peplum. Black stockings, pointed shoes with kitten heels, a flat clutch purse under one arm. The person did a kind of double take and turned back from the door before it was properly fastened. I could have been wondering what this strange woman was doing, letting herself into my apartment, but I had an idea. Though I was as usual stunned at what an elegant and graceful figure my husband made.


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Hello, I said. Cassandra. I thought you were at the hospital? They wouldn’t let me see her. So I came home. Hang on a minute. He went into the bedroom and came back, without the blonde wig, the make-up, wearing jeans, loafers, a pale blue cashmere jumper. He looks so masculine in his own clothes, well I suppose they are all his own, in men’s clothes then, and so feminine in women’s clothes. I gazed at him, not wanting to say anything. But I did. Nice suit, I said. I like the peplum. He took my hands, which were sitting like scared mice on the table. I know I promised I wouldn’t do this anymore, he said, but it’s not what you think. It’s work. Undercover. Pretty spectacular undercover, I said. His small smile was wry. Always the best kind, he said. You do it so horribly well. There wouldn’t be any point if I didn’t. You make a better girl than I do. No, that’s not true. I’m an okay clotheshorse, but I am not a good girl. And you’re not going to tell me what it’s about. Soon, he said. I admit, I thought I could have it over and done before you came back from the hospital. What the eye does not see, the heart does not grieve over. Please don’t grieve, Cassandra, there’s nothing to be sad about. Admire the job I’m doing. I had to laugh. And I did marry him, knowing that he had a habit of dressing in women’s clothes. I’d seen him in them, several times, before I really knew him, certainly


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before I knew it was him, and been fascinated by the figure he presented, she presented, so elegant, so of the past. Like one of my grandmother’s Butterick dress-making patterns, come to life. Never suspecting that ‘she’ was my client, the colonel. And I did believe him, that it was work, now. Still, I felt a bit shaky, and was glad when he put his arms around me and held me tight. I know now, after our several blissful years, that there’s nothing effeminate about the colonel. But it is still disconcerting to see him doing such a marvellous job of being a woman. You shouldn’t have changed so quickly, I said. I’d have liked to get a good look at you. The fleeting impression is better. I did wonder what it would have been like to have been hugged by a tall woman in a scarlet wool suit, a woman with a swoop of blonde hair falling across her face and long shapely legs in black stockings (I’ve noticed a lot of men have gorgeous legs with exceedingly fine ankles), but I didn’t say this, in case it sounded a bit kinky. Yes, well, I said, the hospital said Briony couldn’t have any visitors. I don’t know what that means. Maybe she is more severely injured than we thought. Do you think she might be going to die? Al frowned. Ring up her mum again, he said. So I did, and this time she answered. I didn’t waste time asking her why she hadn’t responded to my messages, but told her, rather abruptly, what had happened. She said she’d come down straight away. I said this was probably a good idea, but why didn’t she first ring the hospital and say she was Briony’s mother, and see if she could find out any news.


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I gave her the hospital’s number, and my own. Ring me back when you’ve talked to them, I said. Al was unpacking the dishwasher. I told him about Xavier’s visit. I described his thesis topic as best I could. I mentioned that he hadn’t known about the funeral. Al thought that was odd. I thought they’d almost consider him family, he said. I said that Des and Nick were obviously in a state and probably not thinking clearly. I wish she’d call herself Despina, said Al. What’s the point of having a handsome old name like that if you don’t use it. Look who’s talking, I said. You’re blushing, Al, I said, but he wasn’t really. He looked in the mirror to see what the blush looked like. So vain you are, I said.


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Chapter 14 You wouldn’t guess from looking at it, but this apartment is a kind of fortress. The handsome panelled wooden door is steel lined, the windows are deadlocked, and three floors up. There’s a silent alarm. Even so, Al said we should keep the laptop and the printed-off manuscript of Merry Tricks in the safe. But the apartment is impregnable. The Titanic was unsinkable. Well, it wasn’t really, I said, as events proved. People deluded themselves in thinking so. Exactly. And maybe we delude ourselves in thinking impregnable. You’ve observed enough murder mysteries to know that people love breaching impossible sites. So you think someone could get in? No, I don’t. But it’s not much effort to put the things in the safe. I actually thought it was a hassle and a bore, but didn’t say so. Al is extremely disciplined in this way, no routine is too much trouble, he has a kind of patience that takes pleasure in mundane and necessary tasks. He’s a brilliant ironer, too; I am embarrassed to admit that my linen shirts have never 131


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looked so crisp and sparkling. Only a little embarrassed, I am much more delighted. Once I got over being miffed at his not so well hidden scorn of my efforts. Ironing is one of the skills of a military man, he says, that women can’t begin to emulate. Do you think we’re in danger? I asked. Oh yes. You should always look both ways crossing the street. Look to the right and look to the left and look to the right again. Except in Europe and America, where it is the opposite. I sighed. I’m being serious, Al. So was he, I knew. It was his way of saying life is never truly safe. But I wanted him to be precise. I don’t quite know, Cassandra. It’s an odd situation, and I’m still trying to get a handle on it. It seems there are some nasty things going on, but how much is seems, and how much really so? Be careful, is all I can say, and whatever that means. I remembered his words when I went out, checking the landing through the fish eye lens before I opened the door, scanning the car park for suspicious activity. It was half empty on this mid morning, quiet under another brilliant blue sky, the last leaves drifting down, the sun gentle on the skin. The air still, and yet somehow quivering, like the freeze frame on an old video recorder. Deserted: people go to work, often on bicycles or foot, it’s not a place of stayat-home mums or retired persons. The car park is a sort of yard at the back, anybody can walk or drive in; I imagine Al coming up with a scheme to excavate a secure underground cage for parking in. Maybe accessible from his lift.


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As I was unlocking the car door a sporty Honda zoomed up beside me and a person in a hoodie slid out from the passenger seat. Something very hard poked into my ribs. It’s a gun, a slurred voice said, from the depths of the hoodie. Get in to this car. He opened the door wider as the driver pushed the seat forward, and shoved me roughly into the back. I didn’t know what a gun in the ribs felt like and I wasn’t entirely sure it was one, but it was all over before I could think of resisting. Hoodies are sinister on the most innocent of kids, and this one, pulled so far forward that his face was entirely hidden, seemed business-like. Lay down, he said, as he shoved his seat back. So much for me opening the door and jumping out at the traffic lights. He pointed the gun into the gap between the seats. It had the air of a real gun. Pull that blanket over you. You hear of people memorising blindfolded journeys. Left out of the car park, right at the roundabout, so far down this street, left into that. A main highway here, a turn off into a rough track. I didn’t have a hope. The blanket stank of years of unwashed bodies, I’m not good in the backs of cars at the best of times, and lying down wasn’t helping; the guy drove as though the Honda was the sporty car it looked like, and I was busy not throwing up. I gagged. The hoodie shoved a box of tissues under the blanket. None of that, he growled. At least with a ball of tissues over my nose I could shut out some of the blanket’s smell. It was a neat operation, I thought. Needed some luck, the car park empty of people, a space next to my car, but then neatly and efficiently carried out. Maybe they had had


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to wait for a while, they might have been keeping watch for some time. The Honda’s windows were dim, I hadn’t seen anyone sitting in the car. These were the things I thought, not wanting to consider what was going to happen next. I was trying to stay sharp and poised for any opportunity, but mainly I was trying not to be sick. Then I thought that might be a good move; vomit in the back of their car might be a distraction. The blanket would cope, though, I was pretty sure it had known plenty of vomit in its time. I was getting ready to let fly when the car slowed, turned, slowed right down; there was the hum of an automatic garage door and then we accelerated in and stopped abruptly. I thought we were somewhere in the suburbs, that we hadn’t gone far enough to get out into the country. Hoodie plucked the blanket off me. Don’t forget the gun, he said. It’s loaded and I’m happy to use it. Keen, even. He grunted a kind of laugh. I doubted this, a bit, I didn’t think people killed people all that easily, but maybe he would. Would you face a murder charge for such a silly crime? I said, and he hooted his laughter this time. They’ve got to catch me first, he said. Shut up, said the driver, and I realised she was female, she had a deep felt hat pulled down on her head so that her face was hidden, provided she kept it lowered or turned away from me. Shut up, she said, you always talk too much. We were in a garage so dark it was impossible to make out anything much at all. There were bright slits of sunlight round the door but they were blinding rather than illuminating. The driver opened an internal door and we


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went up a staircase, dank as a cellar; my legs trembled so much that I couldn’t move them and the guy behind shoved me. I stumbled through the door and into the hallway of a house, lit by the same dim bulb as the stairs. No natural light. We went in to a lounge room with heavy curtains pulled and the only light from a fitting hanging from the ceiling. The globe must have been about twenty watts and was swathed in a t-shirt. The light in the room was so gloomy it was like something you could see, smeared on the walls and the furniture, rather than something you could see by. Siddown, said Hoodie, make yourself comfortable. The hood was attached to a sort of sweatshirt in that arctic fleece stuff they reckon is made out of old plastic bags; it was pulled down so far over his face that I doubted he could see much above his own shoes. But he held the gun steadily enough, and pointing at me. Clever of them not to have grabbed Al, he’d have known how real the gun was. I was glad to sit; the trembling in my legs was turning into a spasmodic jerking that I had to use all my will to control, while my brain raced ahead, trying to make sense of danger. The girl went out of the room and came back wearing a George Bush mask, very sinister that looked. Hoodie handed her the gun and did the same, except his mask was Betty Boop. My brain wove around even more frantically, trying to make meanings. The elaborate facial hiding meant they didn’t want me to recognise them, which meant they probably didn’t want to kill me. Bare faces might have meant I was expendable. And what about the mask swapping; was that simple playfulness? Or was I supposed to be distracted by it? Betty Boop in a hoodie wasn’t impossible, and George


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Bush on a skinny figure in jeans and trainers and a sweatshirt didn’t look unlike the president prettily roughing it on his ranch. I suppose I mean that neither was spectacularly male or female so the contrast with their normal selves wasn’t great. Worse was the mad cartoon face of Betty Boop, so evidently unhuman. (Ditto Bush, some might say.) Get the rope, said Bush. Betty went behind the partly disembowelled sofa and pulled out a furled bundle of cord. Sit at the table, he said to me. Put your hands on it. I pressed down hard to stop them shaking. Betty pinched me to make me lift them. He looped the cord round my wrists and then over the table and tied it with a number of big knots to the ladder-backed chair opposite. Okay, talk, he said. Certainly. What about? Shall we have a conversation about modern art? Or the state of the nation? The morality of politicians? The decay of youth? I thought it was important to keep talking. I knew all I had were my wits. They had the gun, the numbers, the control of the situation. Of course talking like this might irritate them, and that could be useful, or not. I needed to watch and listen and think. Not being able to see their faces meant I had to depend on their voices to read their emotions, and that was difficult. They tried to remember to change them; Betty slurred and hooted and carried on but often forgot. The woman mumbled. Tell me what you want me to talk about and I’ll have a go, I said. Bush blew out air in a sigh, so her mask rattled. Playing silly buggers won’t get you anywhere, she said. Where’s the laptop?


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Mine? In the safe at home. The laptop stolen from Fern. Can you steal from the dead? Besides Fern gave it to the girls while she was still alive. We may have to torture her, said Bush. How do you plan to do that? I asked. Bush handed the gun to Betty and left the room. I can’t believe you are the kind of person who tortures people, I said. I won’t have to be if you tell me what we need to know. The laptop you mention—the manuscript isn’t on it anymore. It’s been copied a great many times and printed out as well. It’s hardly a secret. Maybe to you it’s hot property. I know it’s not very good, as a piece of writing. How do you know that? It’s my job. I’m an editor. There was a method to all this friendly chatting. I wanted him to see me as a person, that way he might not so easily be able to harm me. I had a feeling he was not a very big villain, under the cartoon mask. Not because of the mask, which was specially sinister, under the circumstances, but a certain tentativeness, perhaps thoughtfulness, that I hoped I was detecting in his manner. You’re an editor! What’s an editor do? Helps writers turn manuscripts into books. You could help me. Help you? Yeah. You can tell me why I got a fail in my assignment. He was about to rush out of the room when he remembered he had the gun. I’ll get it in a minute.


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What’s the assignment? We had to write a story. Three thousand words. Except mine got to ten thousand. Had so much to say. You’re doing a course? Yep. Communications. I’m going to be a writer. I’m going to be the next Matthew Reilly. I see you’re ambitious. Well, got to think big. No point unless you think big. True. Anyway, the teacher gave me a fail. You know what I reckon? I reckon she’s jealous. She wants to stop me being the next Matthew Reilly. She thinks she’ll discourage me. She doesn’t know how strong I am. Maybe she just doesn’t like Matthew Reilly type writing. What! She’s a teacher of creative writing, isn’t she! Not everybody likes his work. But he’s a millionaire bestseller. So … Well, it’s her job to teach us to be successful writers. Some people don’t judge the success of writing by the amount of money it makes. What else is there? The beauty of the prose. The way it sings. Its rhythm, which speaks to your heart. He was silent. I thought I could feel his bewilderment seeping out from under the mask. Does Matthew Reilly’s writing move you? Dunno. Haven’t ever read any. I see. I mean, I know how he writes …


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What do you read? I don’t read, really. Don’t writers say reading messes with their writing? I watch the TV a bit. Maybe if you read David Malouf you’d want to write like him. Malouf … He the bloke does those thrillers set in North Africa? Never fancied them much. I mean he’s not famous or anything. I’ll tell you something. Matthew Reilly has done an enormous amount of reading. He read every thriller he could get his hands on and analysed them to see what made them work, then reduced them to a kind of essence and that’s how he writes his books. So I’ve heard. I thought it was all inspiration. That’s what I work on. I had a vision of Betty as the virgin writer, unlettered, uninformed, producing a masterpiece that owed nothing to any tradition or genre or mode that had ever existed. Presumably this was what Betty supposed he could do. It wasn’t a vision I had any faith in. Remember, I said, genius is supposed to be one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration. Yeah? Who says? Somebody who knew from experience. I reckon it’s like a rock band. You’ve got it or you haven’t. Don’t you think rock bands listen to other rock bands? There’s no doubt I was keeping the conversation going. But where was it getting me? I still had my hands tied together in front of me and to the back of a chair. I was holding them very still, I didn’t want him to think I was trying to escape his knots.


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Why don’t you get the assignment and I’ll have a look at it? I’m no teacher, but as an editor I do have some idea of what makes publishable writing. Okay. But as he turned the gun wobbled in his hand and recalled him to his duty. Hang on. Then you’ll escape, right? How could I do that? Houdini couldn’t get out of these bonds. Who? he said. Or maybe it was Hou …? He turned his head and yelled: Antsy! What the fuck are you doing? Antsy, I said. Short for Anastasia. Some people have stupid parents. I was thinking that some people had stupid children, when Bush came back. Sorry, she said. Me period started. I haven’t got anything, she said. These jeans, they’re so fitting … I’ve got some tampons in my bag, I said. What kind are they? I’m very sensitive. Can’t use just anything. Have a look. She put my handbag on the table and opened it in front of me. In that little red case, I said. She reached in gingerly, showing me she wasn’t touching anything else. She opened the case. I suppose these’ll do. She took one out and disappeared again. Betty gave a great huffing sigh. They were quite polite people, basically. Kids. Could you torture a woman whose tampons you’d borrowed? Not that borrow was the right word here. Maybe you botted tampons, the way you botted cigarettes.


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Who’s the expert on torture? You, or Antsy? Look, why don’t you just tell us what we want to know, and there’ll be no need for torture. But I have. The laptop’s back with Fern’s family, and its contents are all over the place. Do you want a copy of the manuscript, is that it? As I said this it occurred to me, maybe it wasn’t the manuscript at all that was so desirable, but something else on the computer, something else of commercial value, or blackmail value. Something that somebody didn’t want to fall into the wrong hands. Or maybe the somebody was the wrong hands trying to get hold of it. Who are you working for? I asked. The garbage millionaire? The madam? The man in Immigration? What do you mean? Who are all those people? They’re characters in a story. It may be a true story, but they’re characters in it. So they’re not exactly people in real life. I dunno what you’re talking about, he said, and I knew that was likely to be true. I wasn’t too sure myself. The person you’re working for hasn’t told you? He gave a groan that rumbled inside the mask. Antsy, he called, where the fuck are you? He began to pace up and down the room. Maybe it’s you wants the manuscript. Maybe you want to pass it off as your own. A stupid hysterical giggle rumbled up from my stomach. I could just see Betty Boop as the putative author of prostitute memoirs. I’m no … whatsit, those people who steal other people’s work.


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Plagiarist. Yeah, that’s what I’m not. I’ve got ideas, teeming, don’t need anyone else’s. What’s your story called? Terminator Men. I see. Do you write under your own name? Yeah. And I’m not telling you what it is, I’m not stupid. There was silence for several minutes. I said, My husband will be coming to find me, soon. How will he do that? Betty sneered. A good question, one that had been troubling me for some time. There would be absolutely no clue to my situation, simply an unlocked car in a car park. Al would know there was something wrong, quite quickly, but I couldn’t see how he could find me. He’s clever like that, I said, and I did believe it. But I also thought, maybe not clever enough. Maybe I did a Hansel, and threw down breadcrumbs. What? he said. You know, the story of Hansel and Gretel, sent out to be lost in the forest. Throwing down breadcrumbs to make a trail, so they can find their way back. What are you talking about? Shut up. George Bush, Antsy, came back into the room. God, I feel terrible, she said. Fucking period, it’s always like this. She threw herself on to the couch. I could cut my throat. I had the feeling we were all coming to the ends of our tethers. I was tired out by my bright conversation, and my kidnappers seemed to have run out of ideas. I thought that torture probably was unlikely.


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We could try sticking lighted matches under her fingernails, said Bush. Betty didn’t say anything, and Bush stayed quiet for a while too. I said, I tell you what, you let me go and I’ll give you the memory stick with the manuscript on it. But you’ll have to let me go and get it from home. What about the computer? I keep telling you, I don’t have it. You’ll have to go and hold up Fern’s parents to get that. We let you go, you’ll just disappear. No, I won’t, I promise. Why would we trust you? It’s your only chance. Betty handed the gun to Bush. You do this for a bit, he said, and went out. Moments later he came back with a sheaf of typed pages, a notepad and pencil. Here’s what we’ll do, he said. You write a note to your bloke, and we’ll go and get the memory stick, and then we’ll come back and let you go. I thought about this for a while. At least Al would have some idea of what was happening, he’d know I was all right, and was likely to think of a plan. I said, Okay, but I can’t write a note like this. Betty loosened the cord round my right wrist. No codes, he said. I wish, I thought. Husbands and wives mostly don’t work out codes to communicate to one another that they’ve been kidnapped. I tried to think of something that would help Al and that the kids would let pass. I didn’t think they were


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very bright, but they were clever enough to spot any of the clunking clues I could think of. I’ll tell you what to write, said Betty. He ummed about, and finally came up with some words: Please give the bearers of this missive the memory stick from the computer and I will be let go in safety. Now sign it, usual signature. I added kisses and smiley faces. Cross those out, shouted Betty, so I did, they hadn’t meant anything except affection and cheerfulness. Well, maybe a signal to Al, since I never normally do them. He pulled on the cord to tighten the bonds again. The house is deadlocked, you can’t get out, he said. If you were thinking of trying. You can give me your opinion on the story when I get back. Betty made this sound quite threatening, the implication being that if I knew what was good for me I would admire it. I wondered why they didn’t leave one of them behind to guard me. I suppose they thought they needed two to deal with Al. After they went I sat for a moment, looking around the room—the kind of scruffy nobody’s room you get in certain group houses, everybody’s mess, nobody’s order—taking deep breaths and considering. Maybe the knots weren’t quite so tight as they had been before the note. The chair the cord was attached to was pressed against the other side of the table. Trying not to pull the knots tighter by my movements, I stood up, then leaned across the table, hands in front of me like a diver. I used my feet against the chair behind to lever me up, it fell over but still gave my feet some purchase, so I could slide across the table to the other side. Now the rope was loose, and hung in loops. I sat on


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the table and fiddled with the knots on the chair, they were clumsy grannies, a great many of them but tied without skill. Sitting picking patiently I could undo them. I wasn’t afraid of Betty and George returning too soon, I knew that Al would hold them up while he worked out the next move. Typical, I thought, as the knots unravelled. Betty suffering from the hubris of youth, believing he can do anything, but knowing nothing, not bothering to find out how to write stories or to tie knots, or to get information out of people, or even how to torture them, not considering what to do if immediate plans failed. Lucky for me, this hubris. The cord bruised my fingers, but soon I had it undone from the chair. The wrists were still tied tight, but maybe they didn’t matter. At least they were fastened in front of me; another failure of the imagination. If Betty had read any thrillers at all he’d know more about immobilising people. I stood up and stretched my shoulders. Went over to the window, pulled the curtains. The outside world was marvellously brilliant. Somehow it had felt like gloomy night in the room, but of course it was still sunny blue day in the real world. It made me squint after the darkness. Outside was a suburban street, with houses probably very like the one I was in, scruffy brown lawns in these days of drought, steps up to high front terraces and garages under. The front door was deadlocked, and so was the back. I tried the door to the garage stairs, it was too. In the kitchen was a brass plaque fastened to the wall, with a tile on it showing a cute coloured picture of a thatched cottage, the smoke from its chimney spelling out Welcome against a turquoise sky. Underneath this was a row of brass hooks with keys.


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It took a few tries, my wrists chafing as I tried to manipulate the different keys, but finally I found one that opened the front door. I left the keys on the floor inside and pulled it to behind me. I stood on the terrace and looked around. At one end of the street was a hill; what I love about Canberra is the hills at the end of streets, it’s the first thing you notice when you come back from elsewhere. This one might be Mount Taylor. I don’t know anybody in this part of the world, so I hadn’t been here in years. I could be wrong about Mount Taylor. I set out the other way, very slightly downhill, then followed a main road until I saw a sign saying shops. I turned into that street and there was a bus stop, one of those little concrete huts with a seat. I sat on that wondering how long it would be before a bus. Not much likelihood of a taxi. And remembered my mobile. I was getting as stupid as the kids. I’d had to hang my bag round my neck since I couldn’t get it across my body, not with tied hands. I imagined somebody coming down the street and my asking them, please untie me. What would they say? Just do it probably, and leave it at that. Or they might grab my bag and run away with it. It wasn’t easy getting the phone out—Betty and Bush should have confiscated it—but not too difficult pressing last number redial. Lucky I am always ringing Al up. Where are you? I said, as people always do when they ring up mobile phones. Al was in Fyshwick. So he wouldn’t have seen Bush and Betty yet. I supposed they would have taken off their masks to visit him. Even they weren’t silly enough to go out in masks. Where are you? he said. I told him I was in a bus


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shelter in a street called Sherborne Street, just off Athlon Drive, escaping my kidnappers. By the time I had finished my narrative Al was in his car and on the way. I hoped I was well hidden in the bus shelter, in case my friends came back after not finding Al at home. It would be good if they lay in wait for him. It didn’t take him long, he must have broken speed limits to get to me. I took him back the way I had walked from the house, to the address I had memorised, the ugly red brick house with its neglected garden and dead lawn. Al was grim. I tried to show him the funny side of my inept kidnappers, but he wasn’t very good at seeing it. And he could tell how shaky I still was. He kept holding me and soothing me. He considered waiting for them and showing them a thing or two, but I said we should go home, we might find them there. We didn’t. I said this incident showed how handy it would be to have an apartment with two entrances; if someone was waiting at one we could use the other. I knew I was babbling on rather, relief at being safe, I suppose. Al just grabbed my hand and squeezed it from time to time. He didn’t think their not being able to work out how to torture me was a very good joke at all. Maybe I could give them a few hints, he said. Some actual lessons, why not. I said I didn’t think he should do that, they hadn’t hurt me. They were relieved to go off and leave me. Maybe they knew I’d escape? Al would give them the memory stick and I’d escape, solve all their problems. Al said, Would you like me to get the police? You can leave it with me. You, I said, and hugged him.


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I think they might be in trouble now, I said, after all they haven’t got me and they haven’t got the computer or the memory stick or the manuscript. That’s the question, isn’t it, said Al. Who will they be in trouble from? Who sent them? Good question, I said. Antsy and Bill Burdon, though, they shouldn’t be hard to find. I hadn’t read Betty’s manuscript. But I had noted his name on the cover sheet, and the subject code of his course.


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Chapter 15 Al went back to find Bush and Betty but had no success. A young man answered the door. Bill, Anastasia, he said, no, there’s no one of those names here. Maybe they are lying low, I said, they are inside the house but not answering the door. Al replied that the car wasn’t in the garage. He’d waited to see if they arrived or left, but nothing happened. They’ve done a bunk, Al said. Probably the first sensible thing they’ve done. He tucked me tenderly into bed and next morning, late, after whatever hunting he’d done, he brought me breakfast in bed and told me not to get up. I’m not an invalid, I said. But he reckoned I’d had a nasty shock, and that I had to rest. So I stayed there, and read for a while, and it was lovely. The morning was half gone when Al came and reported. He’d checked out the universities and discovered they were at Canberra in the Communications course, the same one Fern was in. Antsy was Anastasia Vandermark, and he tried ringing the people with that name in the phone book, but none of them seemed to recognise Anastasia’s name. She may be from out of town, he said, or else she’s persuaded everyone to cover her tracks. 149


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The name of the class teacher had been on Bill Burdon’s assignment, so I put my book aside and had a go at ringing her at the university. I was an editor, I said, and I was interested in talking to Bill about a story of his. She sounded noncommittal, as well she might, even, I imagined, sceptical. She couldn’t give out a name or a telephone number, she said. She suggested I send her an email and she would forward it to him, as if he were a famous author and I a potential nuisance fan. Thank you, I said, when do you think that might be? Who knows, she replied. I wrote down the email she gave me, as one does. Do you get the impression, I asked Al, of some wonderfully clever mastermind running this whole thing, securely hidden, obliged to use inferior workers, but able to recover easily from their mistakes? I’ve been wondering, said Al. Or else it’s all just muddle and luck and no cleverness at all. We seem to be in some twisted plot, and there’s no way of telling how deliberate anything is. And in the meantime there was Briony. I had neglected her in my own excitements. Her mother hadn’t got back to me. I went out to Calvary, determined to see her. Al insisted on driving me. Briony was sitting on the edge of her bed, her eyes wide and I thought hazy, dressed to go home. Her mother was collecting her in a minute. She looked strained, not herself somehow. Are you thinking of going back to my house? She’s taking me to a hotel for a few days. She doesn’t think it’s safe in your house. No. Anyway, it’s a crime scene, we’re not supposed


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to go in. And you’ll have better peace of mind in other surroundings. She’s got one of those apartments in a hotel, and she’ll help me find another place. I needed to do that, anyway. Don’t think I’m not grateful, she said, a bit shiftily, I thought. It was good of you to let me have your house. Briony, what happened? It was really late, I was just going to go to bed, it’d taken ages but I’d finished my marking and packed it up ready for school next day, and these two … people … came crashing in. I’d burnt the toast, and left the kitchen window open. They were wearing masks. One was Betty Boop and the other was George Bush. Cassandra, you can’t imagine how sinister they looked. I know what you mean. They had a gun. I think it was a gun, I mean I’ve never seen one but you aren’t going to argue, are you. They asked for the laptop. I said my laptop was at school, I hadn’t brought it home. They said I was lying and the George Bush one gave me a great shove and I fell over. That must have been when I hit my head, I think it must have been on that stone book you keep by the coffee table. Sorry, I said. It was an award, that stone book, sort of carved with a plaque on it. I’ve never known what to do with it. I think I came to a couple of times in the night but then I’d kind of swim off again. It was so cold I thought I was dying, that death was creeping through my body and I couldn’t move. I could see one of those lights at the end of the tunnel things and I thought when I was cold all the


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way through I’d get to it. I thought that was a good thing but I wasn’t sure. People here have been a bit worried about that, being more or less unconscious for quite a long time. You seem to remember it rather well. Yeah, that’s the good news. Anyway, they’ve done tests and scans and they think I’m all right, but you never can be sure, can you? She said this in a rather accusing way and I was beginning to see that somehow she blamed me for this. Could you tell anything about them? No, the light was dim, just one lamp, I was going off to bed. They had jeans and trainers and big parkas, and they spoke in funny voices. Men, or women? Couldn’t really tell. The masks covered their hair and faces, and they wore gloves. It’s hands that give away gender. Briony, what do you think it was all about? Well, I thought you could maybe tell me that. Do you think it’s anything to do with Nicole and the blackmail? How could it be that? Maybe a punishment for you speaking out or something. It sounded very lame as I said it. You reckon she’s violent as well as nasty? I don’t think so. Anyway I reckon I’d’ve known if it was Nicole. And what about the laptop business? Are you mixed up in something, Cassandra? I knew she didn’t know about the girls and the laptop and whatever it was somebody so badly wanted. It’s a mystery to me, I said, which was true. I always like to tell


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the truth when I can, but of course I was leaving so much out that a truly honest person would say I was lying to her, by omission. Sins of omission, that’s where our real guilt lies. Still, I didn’t think it would help to tell her the new developments, and I reckon she’d had enough of Betty and Bush for the time being. It’s very wise of your mother to take you to a hotel, I said. And who knows when they’ll unseal it? Oh, she said, can’t we take anything out? I’ll have to find out. But tell me, you really are okay? They are letting you go home? Yes. I’m not supposed to go back to work yet. They say I should keep having myself monitored. But it seems okay. I thought Briony was saying this rather grudgingly, as though she didn’t want to admit that things were all right. And probably it was best to be cautious. My mother reckons I should sue, she said. But I don’t think that’s a good idea. I considered whether I felt guilty. I don’t think I did. Who would you sue? She wasn’t answering that when her mother arrived. She was dressed in a full swinging skirt patterned with parrots, white strappy sandals, and a tiny yellow t-shirt with a shruggy pink angora bolero over it. Noosa clothes. She looked cold. I realised that was what was odd about Briony’s appearance: the Noosa clothes, obviously borrowed from her mother. I’d been thinking it was the aftermath of the accident but now I realised that in her own gear she’d have looked quite okay. It wasn’t just that the white pants and hibiscus t-shirt weren’t warm enough for a Canberra autumn, which


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however bright and blue and sunny was still chilly, they were psychologically wrong. They were resort clothes, pastel pale and with bright patterns, whereas here we were settling seriously down to the plain-clothes coming of winter. I was wearing tall leather boots like shiny chestnuts with a black woollen skirt, a short leather jacket in the same chestnut colour and my olive green pashmina. Al had looked at me lasciviously. I should be taking you somewhere more interesting than hospital visiting, he said. This is my mother, said Briony. Dee. Pleased to meet you, said Dee, though I didn’t think so. I said, If the house is still closed I can lend you some winter gear, if you like. No need, said Dee. I’ve got plenty of things. The hospital was warm. Outside wasn’t. Borrow my jacket for now, I said. You don’t want to get cold. No. Don’t fuss. We should be going, said Dee. Do you want a lift, or something? We’ve got a hire car. I’m glad you’re here to look after Briony, I said. Be company for her. Yes, said Dee. Do you need any help with anything? But I could see there wasn’t much to take away. A small bag and an expensive florist’s box of mixed flowers. Dee picked them up and made for the door. We can manage, she said. They from Carlo? I murmured. Then felt bad at being so malicious. Briony gave me a gloomy stare.


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I guessed not, they matched the Noosa clothes. Well, I’ll be off. I’ll give you a ring. I would, too. But I wasn’t sure it would be welcome. I couldn’t wait to tell Al the earlier adventures of Bush and Betty. He’d made lunch, his pumpkin soup that he does with Thai red curry and coconut milk, garnished with garlicky croutons, it’s seriously delicious. By this time it was quite late and I was starving. Of course, he said, it doesn’t mean that they’re the same people. There might be a whole gang of them, wearing the same masks. Maybe not even the same masks, just identical masks. They were wearing gloves, you said. So no fingerprints. Probably how they came to scatter my manuscript all over the place. Clumsy, not used to doing careful things in gloves. Fingerprints, I said, remembering the little red tampon case. I’ve got Antsy’s fingerprints, I said. On plastic. I got one of those sealing lunch bags out of the kitchen drawer and slid it over the box. Here. Okay, said Al. That’s Antsy. But we haven’t got anything yet to compare them with. Unless she’s got a criminal record and is known to the police. Supposing we were consulting the police about this. Are you wondering if maybe we should be? One always has to think of it. But about what, exactly? Two attacks by masked people? I am keeping it in mind, said Al. Briony had this hideous box of flowers so I asked her was it from Carlo. She just gave me a look. I don’t reckon it was, though. Have you talked to Hugh about any of this?


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Not really. I’ve given him opportunities but he doesn’t take them. This male reticence of Al’s always fascinates me. So fastidious he is in talking about things with his friends. But I’m assuming he’s working it out with Sylvie, said Al. It would be simple good manners to tell Briony about it. Good manners, eh. People can commit adultery but they should have good manners. Al was teasing but it made me angry. Maybe if there’d been good manners in the first place there’d have been no adultery, and that would have saved a lot of people a lot of anguish. Not Hugh, maybe, who’s doubtless been having a high old time, but Sylvie, and Briony, and poor old Nicole. The blackmailer. You could say that’s admirable behaviour. Taking action so as to make events turn out in a way that will make her happy. And her mother. I was sick to death of all this, the uncertainty, the ugliness, the mysteries. And I had work to do. So I settled down to Beside the Black Sea. A fresh manuscript, I didn’t have to negotiate around the insensitive editor’s work. It was in fact a very clean manuscript, idiosyncratic, certainly, her commas very much her own work, but that was her tone, her voice, her style. The commas, when you followed them, gave the rhythm that she wanted to her writing. I needed to do very little changing. That’s the problem with some editors; they seem to think that they have to show they are earning their money by fiddling with a whole lot of things. But a publisher once said to me in my early days, and it was as valuable a piece


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of advice as I’ve ever had, Don’t think you’ve got to make a lot of marks on the page to prove you’ve read it. It’s just as important a job to read and change nothing as it is to do a drastic big edit. But I’ve also noticed that in certain ways a clean manuscript has its own problems, not least that it lulls you into its own rhythms, and when there is something that needs remarking you don’t notice it. I sat on the sofa with my feet up and enjoyed myself. Pencil at the ready, of course. Yellow stickies. It was cosy and safe. After a little I dozed off. Partly because it was such good writing that I had to keep stopping and just let myself enjoy it. It was in one of those mildly blissful moments that I went to sleep. I dreamed I was walking along the street to my house in O’Connor. In the distance I could see two people on roller skates. Together they swooped and turned, swift and graceful, full of joy, and I watched them with envy as well as admiration, for I have always wished I could skate with such effortless speed and grace, on wheels or with sharp blades on ice. They came nearer, and I saw that they were Betty and Bush, and when they were really close they parted and sped in loops around me, and as they circled me they exuded fine tough threads of gossamer, so that in a little while I was trussed like a spider’s prey. They broke the threads and tied them in a bow on my stomach, and skated off, laughing without mirth or kindness. I was woken by the ringing of the telephone, and when I answered it a soft female voice asked: May I speak to Alfreda, please. I said … she was not there, and the voice said: Will you tell her I called? Who shall I say called, I asked, and the voice said, She will know.


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Chapter 16 Sometimes I think people have a gene that makes them love the land they are born in. Certain places are intrinsically lovable; most people adore Paris, or charming cobbled villages decorated with geraniums, but then there are the earth’s truly terrible places, the deserts of heat or ice, beautiful certainly in their strange barren extremes in which can be discerned minute and lovely detail, but not easy places to live. Yet people do, and love them. Once I was driving with a friend to the coast, not through Queanbeyan but going north along the Federal Highway and then turning towards Bungendore, driving through that worn bare country with its occasional scruffy stands of trees, its dry droughty grasses, and she said, I love this landscape, it is my heart’s place. She grew up in Goulburn, and that is what the countryside is like there. I grew up in Canberra, and I love the place. That’s not difficult, whatever stupid outsiders say, blaming the city for the decisions of the politicians they elect. I love its high country light, its ancient hills at the end of new streets, its clear air. Its hot unhumid summers and frosty winters. Yet it’s not a simple place. It is supposed to be more prosperous 158


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than most of the rest of the country, not rich, there are hardly any very rich people here, but people seem to be comfortable. But mortgages are high and there is a lot of white-collar crime. My father used to remark that Hackett, where I grew up, was where all the white-collar criminals lived; whenever you see a picture of such a person in the paper, you can be sure, he said, he lives in Hackett. That was probably partly my father’s joke, but there would have been some truth in it. He was a person of blazing rectitude, is how I see him, and he did not care for the pernickety financial betrayal that sort of crime represents. This city has its victims too, the single mothers, and indeed fathers, the schizophrenic sons and daughters, the mentally ill, of whom there is apparently a considerable number. The druggie kids. The homeless, the unemployed, the families living in cars, sleeping under bridges. It’s so cold in winter it is impossible to live if you have no money for heating, for blankets and warm clothes and nourishing food. You can’t lie on a beach and slice a mango, in the tropical dolce far niente of Queensland hippies. And then there are the crimes, not the paper fiddling, but the angry red crimes of murder and spilled blood, the sons who stab their mothers, the old lovers who kill their once-beloveds. When you fall out with a loved one, do not turn your back on him. Or her. I have been following the story in the paper about a woman found stabbed in her house on Christmas Eve. A fine grand house in a suburb of fine grand houses, with a swimming pool and terraces, the suburb one of those rimming the bush, built on the slopes of one of the smudged


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old Canberra hills, where many dwellings were destroyed during the dreadful summer of bushfires, the summer I met Al, though theirs was fortunately spared. But fate had other evils to befall them. Who could have done this? An ordinary woman, with a pleasant job, three children, a prosperous husband. Her friends could not understand who could have wished her such damage. She was a good woman, good wife, good mother, everybody liked her. I remember reading these reports and thinking, there is something not being said here. Something is being left out, and it is haunting these accounts of the crime, a dreadful one, what was it, fifty-seven stab wounds? And I thought, I bet it is one of her family who has done this; they are not saying but any observer of True Crime in Canberra would draw this conclusion. And it is now alleged: her son did it. She was cruel to him, she kept the food locked up in the cellar, he couldn’t get enough to eat. He flew into rages and threw things. There is a lot of anger about: the woman’s sisters, her daughters, feel it, express it, accuse others of it. The son was full of fury at his mother, and they are full of fury at him. Of course, he’s not been tried yet. Has not even been committed for trial. He is not condemned, is still innocent. And may not be guilty of the alleged crime. The word alleged gets used a lot in the television and newspaper reports. It means you can say outrageous things about this young man but you are drawing people’s attention to the fact that they may not be true. Saving yourself from accusations that could turn out to be libellous. I expect we will see in the fullness of time. There may be a trial, he may be found guilty. They may find some


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other murderer. In the meantime the boy’s life seems fairly ruined; he has given up university and appears to be a kind of vagrant. I suppose this is all allegation, too. Such hope as children are born into; how quickly it seems to run out. There’s a baby in the paper. His father was feeding him a bottle of milk, when he vomited. The father beat him, saying several times, it is bad to vomit. The child is not expected to live, he was so violently shaken his brain sloshed around and swelled. The father lived with his wife and girlfriend; the girlfriend is the baby’s mother. Poor little mite, he is perhaps better out of it. How often you think that babies in certain situations are better off dead. Beaten for vomiting; it wouldn’t stop him doing it. Wouldn’t stop anyone. I think, do these people ever try to imagine, what would it be like to be this child, this baby, how would I feel if I was this small person and this was happening to me? Why is there no notion of comforting? Cleo reckons we should write a book on True Crime in Canberra. It’d be a bestseller, she says. We should write: I get the impression I write, she gives me the details. Being a lawyer she has access. She’s told me a lot of stuff about the policeman who hired hitmen to kill his wife. He was her third husband; the first had been a gay cross-dresser, the second had to have an AVO taken out against him, the third killed her. She wasn’t lucky in husbands. This third was a motorcycle cop. One day he stopped a woman in a car. It had a fault, he said, he’d have to fine her. The woman, a young single mother, said she couldn’t afford


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to pay a fine. He said, give me your address and I’ll come and see you tonight and fix it for you. You see, said Cleo. There is a kind of contract here. The woman knows what he is saying. He comes to her place, she gives him sex, no fine is paid. The woman in fact becomes his mistress. Then she gets to know the wife. She babysits the little boy. She gets fond of the child. She wants him for herself, a brother for her own kid. She and the motorcycle cop will go to Queensland and take the children with them. Except, there’s the wife. The mistress has busied herself becoming a good friend of the wife. Maybe she has an affection for her, but she is in love with the baby, and the cop, affection won’t stand in her way. Or maybe the friendship is totally cold-blooded from the beginning. The husband doesn’t even seem to think of asking for a divorce. A divorce will mean a custody decision, and he certainly won’t get full custody, maybe he won’t get much access to the child at all. The mistress wants the child for herself. So no legal solutions. Instead he gets a couple of blokes, not mates exactly, more like clients—presumably they owe him—and offers them $2000 to kill her. You and I would know, Cleo goes on, that that’s too cheap for a decent contract killing. Who’d do it for that much? The answer is, junkies. You can buy a lot of heroin for $2000. Possibly the cop thought they might buy enough to do themselves in too, but he wasn’t that lucky. The junkies mixed a bit of battery acid in with some heroin and injected that into the wife—the battery acid just to make sure. Save them wasting too much useful heroin on her.


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She took a long time to die. They stood about in the kitchen drinking beer and left the cans behind. Fingerprints all over them. The handy thing about junkies, said Cleo, is all they think about is the next fix. Questions of morality, or good and evil, don’t come into it, they aren’t even rational, they can’t think straight about something as simple as getting caught. Some people behave well because they believe it’s the right thing to do, others behave well because they are afraid of getting caught. Junkies can’t think in either of those ways. The thing is, said Cleo, the cop expected to get away with it. The junkies wouldn’t betray him. And anyway it was his word against theirs. And his mates would look after him. In a way they did. The investigating officer was a friend; he thought he would help his colleague by finding the murderer of his wife. But almost immediately he knew the cop was behind it. What a dilemma for him. Fortunately he was an honourable man, he pursued the investigation. The cop couldn’t believe his bad luck, that his mate would act against him. Betray him. The junkies held out for a while, but they got offered deals they couldn’t resist. Not to mention the fingerprints. Gaol’s a good place for junkies, said Cleo. Food, shelter, and plenty of drugs. Can you get drugs in gaol? Cleo gave me such a look that I withered. Okay, I said, I am naïve. So, you can come to this book fresh, said Cleo. There’s one good narrative, for a start. Plenty more where that came from.


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You should write it, I said. You tell it well, just write it down like that, the plain unvarnished tale. No, I’m not a writer. Neither am I. You’re an editor. You know about these things. The idea intrigues, but not to the extent that I think I might actually do it. What would interest me would be the idea of exploring why this city, with its reputation for blandness, its higher than average intelligence, its apparent comfort, its distinct but secret beauty, should nurture so much crime of this passionate kind. A cop wanting another woman so much he will kill his wife for her. Hubris, said Cleo. I love that word, it explains so much. He thought he was above the law. He thought he could get away with it. I love the word hubris too. It seems particularly applicable to contemporary life. Hubris: pride, overweening. Insolence, presumption, excessive self-confidence. Thinking you know it all and of course you don’t. The Greeks saw it as challenging the gods, and you always came to a bad end as a result of it. Most of the bad things that happened to people in the ancient world happened because of hubris. Another definition would be: complete absence of self-knowledge. The cop got twenty-four years and the mistress twenty. He turned on her during the trial, tried to incriminate her to save himself. His child is in care and deeply disturbed. I hope someone is loving him, I said. It’s probably difficult, if he’s badly disturbed, said Cleo. It comes back to the children, doesn’t it, I said, and Cleo shuddered. She remembered how close she was to losing


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her Pomona, a psychopathic killer on the point of drowning the child and knifing Cleo. Now that wasn’t a crime of passion, anything but, it was cold-blooded convenience killing. The aftermath of a white-collar crime. But he didn’t live in Hackett. He wasn’t the meek and clerkly type, but a high-flying legal colleague of Cleo’s. Psychopaths of course are in a world of their own. Canberra is my birthplace but I haven’t always lived here. The years I spent with Bryce were in Sydney. I worked in a publishing house then and we had a pretty apartment in Kirribilli. My share of that, when we split, bought my house in O’Connor, the rather shabby but comfortable old duplex, which had once been government housing. That house has sheltered me in all sorts of experiences, happy and sad; I set up my freelance career in it, you have to not have a mortgage when you are going to live the dicey life of a freelancer. I am always amused by the military implications of that name: free lancer. Like being a gun for hire. A mercenary. A condottiere, foreign and romantic. My mother has never stayed with me here in that house, or any house. She hates Canberra. When she left my father she also left the city, full of anger with both and glad she was getting rid of them. She’s visited the city but never slept in my house, and every time she comes it’s a disaster. Once somebody tried to kill her by slashing the tyres of her car; she still says what a miracle she wasn’t killed in a high-speed highway accident. That reminds me; isn’t she getting married? To … I’ve forgotten his name. Is it Giorgio? No, that was someone


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else. Maybe Guiseppi? I should ring her up but I can’t till I’m sure I’ve got his name right. Al will know. Crimes of passion. Crimes of anger, crimes of love. So easily they end up the same thing. I don’t think Edith ever thought of stabbing my father. Or he her, though from my point of view he had more cause. Nothing elemental happened. She went, he let her. Mind you, she stabbed him with her words. Was always telling us what a bore he was, how dreary. He never spoke a harsh word against her. I still wonder if she has made her peace with him, in her memory. If she recalls him with a certain fondness, now that he is dead. I don’t ask, she wouldn’t tell me; her narrative is the boredom, the grinding impossibility of it all, which was true for her, and I think she doesn’t wish to revise that. Perhaps she lacks the passion to kill anyone, just as she lacked the passion to love him truly, as he loved her. He was a man of passion, but not of knives. I love my mother, I wish her well, but I don’t want to spend time listening to her complain. Maybe this is what happens to all the men in her life; so many are drawn to her, but they never last. She tells me how glad she is to see the back of them, it is always her choice, but I do wonder. I never hear their side of the story. Al is something of a problem for her; why does so beautiful a man fancy me? When will he stop? How long is it now? How can he still be interested? It is my sister Linda who is the admired one. Living in Brisbane, lovely Brisbane with its warmth, her successful husband and her gorgeous children. They are going to turn into teenagers any day now; I wonder what Edith will make of that. Dysfunctional, thy name is Edith.


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And yet, she is not murdering dysfunctional. Not picking up knives or blunt instruments or poisoned syringes and actively ending lives. I am still trying to get my head around this. Maybe Des, or Nick, or both, found out about Fern’s working life and had been so upset they’d killed her. A matter of family honour. Maybe Greeks feel strongly about that kind of thing. I know Des and Nick are no longer very Greek, but a generation or two back they were. Blood will out. If a mother wanted to kill her child, how would she do it? A beautiful grown adult daughter? A drug overdose might seem a painless way, but how would you do it? One hold her down, the other administer? How tight you’d have to hold her, how she would struggle, how roughly you would have to subdue her, you, who were meant to hold her tight to keep her safe. A Greek honour killing. That would be a handy solution. I wondered how likely it was. And it didn’t explain the memoirs. Although maybe the memoirs explained it. Giovanni, said Al. Of course. I rang my mother up. Hello, said Edith, still on holidays? No. Back at work. What about you? Holidays! I wish. You can’t imagine. It’s not running one shop, remember. It’s a whole chain. Naturally I remember. Homemaker, it’s called. I always think of homewrecker. I say, Thought I’d ring to see how you are. And Giovanni. Giovanni, she said. She seemed to be trying to work out who he might be.


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I just wondered when the wedding’s going to be. If you want us to come, that is. Wedding? Who to? You don’t think I’m marrying Giovanni? That would be a very silly idea. I have to say I was quite pleased to hear this. I wasn’t keen on the idea of Edith marrying anyone. Especially considering her lack of interest in pre-nups. It wouldn’t be so easy to give her men the flick with a marriage certificate to undo. And whereas Edith was prosperous, it wasn’t always clear that the blokes were. I hated the thought of her being cheated. It was all right for her to spend her money on them, but I didn’t want them to get their hands on it direct. I wasn’t too thrilled with her implication that marriage had been my silly idea, but I could live with that. I wasn’t mentally sharpening any knives. Oh, so you’re still footloose and fancy free? I don’t know why Edith makes me say such stupid things. The moment they are out I cringe. Why don’t I hear them before I say them? She giggled. I don’t think Raymond thinks so. Raymond, eh. It would be nice to see you. And Raymond. I expect he’s very cute. He’s eighty-three and very rich. He’s the one I should marry. He’s so romantic. Poetic. Sounds as though I ought to meet him. He’s keen to come to Canberra. I don’t think so. You could come for a visit. Not in Canberra. Come down to the coast. Oh, she said, there’s the doorbell. Must fly. Bye, Sandra.


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She’s not marrying Giovanni, I said to Al. It’s Raymond in her life now. He’s eighty-three and rich. Sounds as though she’s giving up sex for money. Ha, said Al. What a choice. Whereas we have both. Have we? I mean, do we have money? Enough, he said. That’s enough. Very Mr Micawber. It was his definition of happiness, said Al. I usually tell Al what I am thinking. He’s always interested, even though he doesn’t always agree. Sometimes I convince him, sometimes he persuades me. But I didn’t say anything about my thought that Des and Nick had killed their daughter. I thought of doing so, but somehow when my mind began to form the words my mouth didn’t want to follow. Instead I said, You know how in Canberra murders are so often committed by people’s ex-lovers? What about Briony? Can you imagine her killing Hugh? No, said Al. Can you imagine Hugh killing her? Can you? I asked, suddenly fascinated. If he thought it necessary. It’s the wrong way round, I said. She’s the one betrayed. If she was thinking straight she’d kill Sylvie. That would solve her problems. Except she’d be in gaol for the rest of her life. That’s always the catch. If it’s revenge you might think it was worth it. Unless you could argue crime of passion, that you could not help yourself.


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Sylvie’s the one might get away with that. But I don’t think judges look kindly on crimes of passion in this country. Who would Sylvie be murdering? Hugh? Or Briony? Good question, said Al. There’s Nicole, I said. She might want to murder Briony. I think she very likely does. Maybe it was her, in your house, trying to get rid of Briony. The laptop was a ruse. She should have stayed and made sure it happened, then. She wasn’t efficient. I shivered. This is a horrible conversation. Sitting here murdering people. I notice you assume the murderers won’t get away with it. What if they kill people and nobody catches them at it? I looked at him. Yes, he said. I’m thinking of Fern.


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Chapter 17 I decided I should try to talk to Ivy so I rang up her house late in the afternoon. Des answered. Well, Cassandra, she said, we think she’s been through enough for a while. We want her to have a rest and put all this behind her. Of course, I said. I understand. I did too. But it was irritating. Especially as I couldn’t give a good reason for wanting to talk to her. I just had a feeling there were more things to be known. Fern was dead, and buried, but it seemed her death was not an end to anything. I thought of saying to Des, It’s important to have closure here, except that closure is a word I hate, and I’ve resolved never to use it. I can’t always stop the manuscripts I edit from going for closure, but I try. What does it mean, when you examine it? I don’t think human life lends itself to closure, not even death can do that, though it certainly puts a stop to things in no uncertain way. Mostly when people say we want closure they mean, we want whoever did this to be hideously punished, much more severely than the sentence the court has just handed down. Maybe that is my objection to it. It so often means retribution. I looked it up in the Shorter Oxford, thinking such a newfangled word 171


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wouldn’t be there, but it was. Meaning entrenchment, or fortification. And also having a parliamentary connotation. Macquarie, which is what I use professionally, says it is close, or conclusion. I can cope with that; I would like the death of Fern to have its conclusion, and I don’t think it has, yet. Has she gone back to school? I asked Des. Yes. We want her life back to normal as soon as possible. I didn’t think it’d ever be that, but I said, Yes, of course, I hope things are going well for her. Yes, said Des. I happened to be in the vicinity of the school as it was finishing the next afternoon, so I drove past. There were a number of gateways and myriads of girls swarming out of them. They all had dark red pleated skirts and blazers, with round ribboned hats jammed down on their heads; they jiggled about and danced around and threw back their heads laughing, their black legs and lace-up shoes flashing. Most were slender and lithe, their bodies bent easily, but some were heavy and sluggish, with thick legs and sludging tread. How unfair it was, I didn’t think they would have done anything to deserve it, except inherit the wrong genes. In my experience it would be the skinny ones eating the cream cakes and the hot salty chips. I expected Nicole to be one of the departing girls, but I couldn’t see her. The girls clambered on to buses, shot off on bikes, jumped into cars. Not a hope. I thought of writing Ivy a letter but that seemed sneaky, since her mother had so thoroughly warned me off. I was driving away from the school when I saw a solitary girl


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walking along the footpath. She was wearing a big backpack and dragging her feet. It was Nicole; of course, she lives close enough to walk home. I stopped, and wound down the window. Hello, Nicole. Would you like a lift? My voice sounded horribly cheerful. She regarded me with her usual frown. She didn’t say anything, then she shrugged. Why not, she said. I think she muttered, Even if you are a friend of hers. I prattled at her, asking about school and such. I didn’t mention blackmail, or laptops, or drug deaths, or kidnapping. I drove quite slowly and took a wrong turn on purpose, but even so it was quite a short trip. We were pulling into her street when I said, How’s Ivy? Okay, said Nicole. What would you expect? Yes, I said. Do you see much of Xavier? Nicole sneered. Xavier. He’s a creep. I thought he was very clever. He’s certainly pretty beautiful. So? And very charming. You sound like her mum. He’s a creep. Fern seemed to like him. Nicole shrugged. He’s a creep. Oh. Well, it’s nice to see you. She turned and looked at me. Her contemptuous stare gave the remark a clunky kind of echo. I thought that having Nicole around would certainly uncover the hollowness of daily pleasantries. She got out of the car, then turned and muttered, Thanks for the ride, which I thought was a distinct victory of upbringing over desire, and stomped inside.


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How awful she was, and how desperately unhappy. I felt sad for her, for all the plain girls, the awkward, the overlooked. I wanted to say to her, Look at Fern, how lovely she was, and it didn’t do her any good. I wondered, if I had a daughter like that, how could I help her? I wanted to think that I would never have a daughter like that, that I would have loved her too much for her ever to be so unhappy, but maybe that was arrogance on my part. The hubris that I find so dangerous. I thought of Al, how he would never betray his daughter by having an affair with another young woman, and then I thought, maybe Sylvie had believed that about Hugh, too. Maybe if I’d been really clever I could have found out from Nicole how to get in touch with Ivy. I didn’t see how. Her conversation, you couldn’t call it that, with its repetitions, its shrugs, its banal avoidances, was designed to kill communication. If I’d been a psychiatrist with hours at my disposal I might have broken through it, but in this brief space I could only have tricked her, and I didn’t know how to do that. I was Briony’s friend, Briony was the enemy; I was an adult, adults were the enemy. Really, the thing was, none of it was my business. Fern was dead, her parents had buried her, not satisfied perhaps, but apparently accepting. Okay, so Briony had been attacked, or probably just shoved, and I had been kidnapped but there was an odd amateur quality about these crimes that made them somehow ridiculous. Unfathomable. I couldn’t help wondering if there would be more, and more dangerous, action on that front, but couldn’t see what to do about it except be vigilant. Stick with fiction, I told myself.


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No crimes in Beside the Black Sea, except the usual human betrayals, and there’s nothing illegal about them. Beside the Black Sea, by the way, is nothing to do with historical novels, or the geography of the old Soviet Union. There is a real sea, but Black isn’t its name. The blackness is more a state of mind, though that isn’t an image that is flogged in any way, it’s poignant and full of layers of melancholy. That lovely rhythm of the title is reflected in the book. You’d need to read it to know really what I’m talking about.


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Chapter 18 An acquaintance of Al’s has written a book and we’re invited to the launch. It’s called Underpants on the Outside. I think this sounds quite amusing. Maybe, says Al. But look at the subtitle. That doesn’t suggest a lot of laughs. The subtitle is The Hubris of Superpower. Maybe not, but it’s my thing at the moment. My answer to what is wrong with the world, from the president and the prime minister down: hubris. Mind you, I say to Al, it strikes me as one of those books where you only need to read the title. We know what it’s about. Al thinks he might have something more to say. I ask if he’s a good writer. Al says he wouldn’t know, he’s never seen anything he’s written. I expect we’ll find out, he says. The launch is at the National Library, in the foyer, a beautiful space but death to the feet. Marble floors make you understand why the Romans reclined on couches. It’s being launched by some professor of international law, who hasn’t been chosen for his brevity or wit. I eye the one sofa. I wish I were old enough to sink into it without feeling cowed by the staunch ancient ladies who look as though they could stand on their sparrow feet forever. Then the author who is called Simon Malarkey makes a speech and 176


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I doubt I shall find the book riveting. Keep an open mind, Cassandra, I admonish myself. After the speeches Al goes to buy a book and I see Xavier who comes to talk to me. Let’s go sit on the stairs, I say, which leaves the sofa for the old ladies, should they weaken. What’s the etiquette of book launches? asks Xavier. I mean, are you supposed to buy the book? Is it too rude to come and not? Good question. Best is to come and buy the book—even better, several books, and give them to your friends. Getting them all signed so he knows you’ve bought them. Next, well. I have been known not to come to launches because I couldn’t bear the thought of buying the book. But when you think of it, not coming and not buying must be worse than coming and not buying. Don’t you think? At least that way you are being rent-a-crowd, for free. It looks as though there’s a lot of interest. I’d like to have a copy, says Xavier. But it’s $59.95. I say to Xavier, Good grief, no. Don’t buy it. Read it in the library. Students can’t afford these expensive university press publications. People hide books in the library. They take them off the shelves and put them back in the wrong places so no one else can find them. And it’ll be ages before this one’s available. I’m familiar with the evil habits of students. That’s the university library, I say. Read it here, in the National Library. Nobody can get into the stacks to hide anything. Xavier smiles, his beautiful melancholy angel smile, that


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breaks your heart and consoles it at the same time. He beckons to a waiter who brings a tray of drinks over. I take a glass of red in case the white is chardonnay. Xavier has the white. You give good advice, he says. I’ve emailed my parents. They say to come as soon as I want. So maybe I will. Spend a bit of time in Buenos Aires. It’s an amazing city, I say. I should be preparing for Cambridge, he says. I suppose I can do both, if I take a lot of books with me. I nod. I am sitting five stairs up, Xavier is one lower. I can observe the crowd quite well. It’s not a thick crowd and I can see Al at the signing table, chatting to Simon. Al is the only person in the queue. Not surprising, at that price. My eyes wander over the crowd, checking out who is here. Xavier is staring into his glass and ruminating on the morality of politicians. I see Hugh standing with Sylvie, he has his arm around her, he is tall and she is small despite her heels, so his arm has to slope down at an angle for his hand to reach her waist. I can see that every now and then he gives it a squeeze. She says something to the people they are talking to and he looks down into her face and smiles. So, rejuvenated marriage. I think I can read Briony’s fate in this. Of course it’s not impossible that he would want to maintain the old status quo, loving both wife and mistress, but I can’t see either woman letting that continue to happen. Can I? Xavier looks up out of his glass. Of course what I should do is a lot of thinking, he says. Think and think about what I already know and work out my approach from there. A PhD isn’t about other people’s work.


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I thought you had a historical background to it, I say. Well, yes, but I have those texts. I know them. Philosophy is supposed to be original thought. True, I say. What about your supervisor? Presumably he will have some ideas? She. She’s written to me, making a few suggestions. I wasn’t very impressed with them. Al is leaning over the banister. Come and meet Simon, he says. Xavier, I say, you want to come too? Yes please. So the three of us go over and meet Simon Malarkey. Wonderful title, I say. You think so? The publishers were unsure. They thought it might sound frivolous. Frivolous with a deep and serious undercurrent. Like a lot of popular culture. With a certain element of yuk, too. And your subtitle is extremely serious. He smiles, delighted. Ah, he says, hubris, yes. My word of the moment, I say. But does anybody know what it means anymore? You do, he says. Ha. But what about … what about you, Xavier? Of course I know it. I am thinking of having a chapter about it. The Greeks did a lot of good thinking. I like the singular in your subtitle, I say. The Hubris of Superpower. Well, it hardly could be plural, could it, he says. At the moment. He casts his eyes around the room, speaks very softly, mainly to Al. I wanted the head of my old department


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to launch it, but she wouldn’t have a bar of it. We cannot say a word against the status quo. We cannot be seen to be reading a word against the status quo. Remember the old independence of public servants? Maybe the book will be interesting after all, I think. But hearts in the right place don’t always mean words in the right place. Xavier says: The whole point of the superhero is that he is a good man. Highly moral. Noble. But the superpower, now, it may say it is all these things, but … We leave Xavier earnestly chatting up Simon and walk through the foyer. A waiter brings a platter of tiny savoury muffins. Delicious. We come to where Hugh and Sylvie are standing. Turns out they are just off. Pity, says Al, we haven’t seen you for ages. You know, says Hugh. Busy. Busy. And Sylvie and I are planning to get away for a while. Should be good, says Al. It’s a long time since we had a holiday. Where? He pauses. We thought, maybe a cruise, on the QE2. Southampton to Portugal. Bit of wall-to-wall luxury. Back by very fast trains to Paris for a couple of weeks. Sylvie hasn’t been to Paris in a while. Get some frocks. During this quite long speech they extricate themselves and are making for the door, with an abrupt wave from Hugh, a small smile from Sylvie. They will never forgive us, I say. You think? says Al. What do you mean? The disarray we saw them in. Knowing about Briony.


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You observe, this is one solid devoted marriage. Has never been any other way. Anyone who might be able to suggest otherwise will not be tolerated. But Hugh and I go way back. You and Hugh can probably be boysy friends together. But you watch, as couples, you and me, Hugh and Sylvie, the friendship is finished. I didn’t get a chance to ask how Nicole is, says Al. Just as well. I don’t suppose she gets to go. Unlikely. I know she wouldn’t want to go, not with her parents, but I also know that she will feel even more thoroughly abandoned. It’s a big box of bribes, isn’t it, said Al. Cruise, luxury, Paris, frocks. Sylvie doesn’t seem critical. At that moment Ted and Angel come up. Ted his usual boisterous self, leaning over to grab another glass of wine from one waiter, a spinach tartlet from another. What about this book? says Ange. Sounds seditious to me. Do you think it’s going to be critical of America? asks Al in what I can tell is a falsely guileless manner. Well, hubris is not usually anything but pejorative. I suppose so, says Al, in a tone of voice that suggests, given a second or two, he could come up with a number of occasions when it was a word of approval and indeed of admiration. Still, there are things to be said. Are there? says Ange. I think more important are things not to be said. I think in a democracy everything should be said. This


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was my contribution to the conversation. Quite right, says Ted. We’ll all be living under Sharia law next. We should talk about that. None of us wants to go there. I look at Ange’s rose-pink power suit and her giddy stiletto heels. What wonderful shoes, I say. Aren’t your feet killing you, on this floor? I’m used to high heels, says Ange. In my job. Sad about young Fern, says Ted. Such a pretty girl, says Ange. Yes, we say. A friend of mine from the Society of Editors comes up. Derek is one of those people who makes higher-than-usual editing fees proofreading deadly dull government reports. He’d been enjoying the red wine. I introduced him to the others. So predictable, these occasions, he says. Praise, thanks, praise. Churning on and on. Don’t you long for something to happen? Somebody to come in and shoot someone? That would be good. A disgruntled author, I say, whose own work had been plagiarised, who wanted revenge for the years of stolen studies? Yes, says Derek. Or a cuckolded husband, killing his faithless wife. Or the lover who’d taken him from her. A mistress, killing the hated wife of her paramour. Doesn’t sound very amusing, said Ange. Not if you copped a stray bullet, says Ted. They went away, frowning at our frivolity. Ah, you fiction people, says Derek. Where your imaginations take you.


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You started it, I say. No, you did. The whole idea of shooting was yours, I say. You should get about into fiction more. You wouldn’t be so starved for interest. I don’t suppose anybody will ever shoot anyone at a book launch, says Derek. But I bet there’s a lot of people who could want to. You could say that about all of life, says Al. Yes, says Derek. How is it, I wonder, that some people make it happen? Maybe it’s more a matter of not being able to stop it, said Al. I think shooting someone has to be a violent and irresistible desire, before you can do it. Not likely to be me, then, says Derek. All I ever have a violent and irresistible desire for is another drink. He wanders off after a waiter. Some of the guests had drifted away but there were still a lot of people we knew. I got into conversation with Philip, whom I’d met at Cleo’s a number of times, a tall guy with an almost shaven head and square glasses. And then there was Bill, who used to work as a waiter at Cleo’s parties and eye off Philip in the old days. It turns out he’s doing a PhD in international relations. He hasn’t read Simon Malarkey’s book but he is critical of it for its failure to understand the nature of Australian–United States relations. Maybe he understands them all too well, I say. Hardly. His book wears its left-wing bleeding heart all red and pulpy on its sleeve. Is left-wing bad? I ask.


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Left-wing bias is, says Bill. We need people to see clearly and fearlessly just how this country needs America. What for? To lead us into unwinnable wars? There has to be some quid pro quo, says Bill. So that when New Zealand attacks us the sheriff will come galloping to the rescue? Bill smiles a superior smile, the kind that says, yes, I recognise a joke but don’t for a minute suppose I think it’s a good one. I look around for Al. He’s standing with a group of guys he seems to know rather well; they appear to be having a good chat, and I don’t want to interrupt. Then I see Hector Stollen, who’s just arrived with a lady holding on to his arm. Lady I do mean. Excuse me, I say to Bill, and walk over to him. Oh Cassandra, he says. Have we missed the fun? You’ve missed the launch, I say. You see, he says to the woman. She’s tall and quite lean, with a cloud of gold hair that looks as though it would be stiff as wire were you to touch it (I remember Shakespeare or one of his fellows wrote poems comparing women’s hair with gold wires—never seemed attractive to me) and rather stagily made up. She is wearing a bright cobalt-blue stiff taffeta dress; there is something odd about this, and I work out that it’s a cocktail dress and this reception is not a cocktail party, although it is at a cocktail hour. All the other women are in smart—or not—day wear. The blue taffeta has an elaborately folded collar affair which is actually a halter neckline; the revers turn into a strap round the nape of her neck and her back is plungingly bare. It’s draped over with a purple lace stole so she is quite covered, but she’s not going to be warm.


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It occurs to me that the colour is that particular blue that Margaret Thatcher favoured. And the gold hair not dissimilar. Hello, I say, since Hector doesn’t seem to be introducing us. Nadine, isn’t it? Oh no, says Hector, not Nadine. This is my … um … sister. Paulette. Pleased to meet you, she says. She’s not paying any attention to me, she’s looking round the room, her eyes darting, as though she’s afraid of missing something. The author is still here, if you want to buy a book and have it signed. (That’s me, always keen to help a writer sell some books.) A book? Oh no, says Paulette. Which is the author? I point out Simon Malarkey, in the group with Al. Paulette has still got her grip on Hector’s arm and steers him away. See you, I say. I notice Derek lurking hopeful by the door, a full glass of red in his hand. I know he will be on the lookout for a lift home. Derek doesn’t drive; he long ago made a choice between drinking and driving, and chose drinking. He’s shameless about begging lifts, and lives miles away on the edge of a suburb. He’s very good at the buses, too, since he isn’t keen on taxis. I think if you choose not to drive that’s your problem. So I drift behind a group of people and come upon Marnie Froggat, who’s someone quite senior in the library. She is leaning thoughtfully against a pillar holding a glass of white wine. I expect it is her job to represent the


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library for the space of the launch. She’ll have to stay till everyone’s gone. Hello, she says. You haven’t got any wine. I thought I should stop. I’ve had this glass all night. It wasn’t crash hot when it was cold, but now it’s lukewarm … She stops a passing waiter and puts it on his tray. Have you bought the book? she asks. Al did. He’s an old friend, I think. I wouldn’t mind reading it, says Marnie. I doubt it will cheer me up much though. I’ve noticed this happening a lot lately. You start to talk to your friends, and almost immediately you’ve fallen into gloom. Somebody out there must be happy with the state of the nation, I say, but I must admit I never meet them. No. Everybody I know is appalled at the way we’re losing liberty and all the freedoms we’ve always taken for granted, and valued. That’s a good point. Taken for granted and valued—those things aren’t contradictory, are they? Actually, I did just meet someone who seems to admire the status quo. Bill. He was a waiter when last I saw him, but now he’s doing his doctorate. One of the new right-wing apologists, is he. Did he complain about left-wing elites? No, but I didn’t talk to him for long. He didn’t mention the consumption of lattes either, but then I didn’t give him much opportunity. Marnie laughed. It’s good to see you, Cassandra. Why


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don’t you come over and have lunch sometime, we could have a decent gossip. I reckon there’s a lot to catch up on. That’s a good idea. I’ll give you a ring. Over her shoulder I see a woman called Bambi approaching. Why is it that Bambis are never beautiful bigeyed young women? This Bambi might have been once, a very long time ago. Now she is the rather spectacular ruin of a number of facelifts. She’s good at what she does, which is running a private art gallery. Rich people call her in to buy artworks for their walls. She has grand names, grander than I can afford. Sometimes she remembers me; it depends what other significant people are nearby. I don’t think there are many of those around at the moment, so I slink off in the other direction. Time to interrupt Al. He’s looking for me. Let’s go, he says. Then he mutters, Did you see Hector Stollen? And his companion? Mmm. I sort of got introduced. You did? Al is taking us in a wide arc around the room, avoiding people. There are only desultory groups left. The blokes want to go out to dinner. But I said no. Al looks at me. You can have enough of blokes’ talk, he says. By this time we were out in the cold night. The rows of poplars raised their bare branches to the stars. It felt very fresh and lively after the warm room and all its conversations I imagined in cloud-like speech balloons above people’s heads. Full of steam, hot air, boasting, ambiguity, pretence, fakery. I said something like this to Al. Boy, you were having a good time, he said.


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Well, I was, I suppose. It was just at the end … I did suddenly feel weary of all that palaver. That was a word of my father’s. I liked thinking of it, thinking of honesty and fun in talk. I thought we might have dinner, said Al. Not round here, too likely to run into someone. What about the Vietnamese at Dickson? We were having a nice time reading the menu when a man at the next table leaned over and tapped Al: Are you two always this good together? he asked. We looked at him in astonishment. I said, Yes, what do you mean? Al was cleverer, he said, Only when we’re not better. They were craggy men in polo shirts with company logos on them. The questioner slid back in his seat with a disgruntled air. We ordered our old favourites, the fresh rice paper rolls with prawns, and pork balls, and campfire beef, which cooks in a ceramic dish over a plate of spirit flame while you watch it. It was lovely to be there, just the two of us, not making forced conversation with people we didn’t care about. Al held my hand across the table, and fed me morsels of the rare spicy beef. I looked into his face, loving him so much. The elegant Vietnamese woman who seems to be always on duty smiled at us as if it were all her doing. We had green tea in tiny cups. Al looked at me. Hector Stollen, he said grimly. That lady with him … His sister, Paulette … He said so, did he? Well, maybe she is. She’s also the madam of the brothel where Fern worked.


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Chapter 19 When the big cat moment came in the middle of the night I didn’t worry but snuggled up to Al and let my mind do a bit of ruminating. We were lying like spoons, him behind, and it was very comfortable. I like cuddles in the night. Sometimes he spoons behind, sometimes I do. Sometimes we entwine. I hate the king-size beds in hotels, you practically need to keep your mobile phone under the pillow in order to communicate with your beloved. We have resolved never to acquire a king-size bed. When he told me Paulette was the madam of Fern’s brothel I squawked, trying to say, How do you know? and What does that mean? at the same time. Al took some sips of tea. I went out to see her, he said. At Mitchell. The brothel is at Mitchell. I remember, you said. You wouldn’t let me go. Kept it for yourself. Too dangerous for you. I always think it is quite comical, this business of brothels in light industrial areas. You take your car out to be serviced, or go to buy a spare part for the lawn mower, and downstairs will be a greasy workshop, upstairs, suitably signposted, a house 189


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of sexual fantasy. There isn’t any heavy industry in Canberra. What’s it called again? The Cabinet Room. Oh yes. Excellent local colour. I laughed. She did remind me of Margaret Thatcher, I said. The thing is, said Al, and he was staring into the cup as though its several leaves of tea would tell his fortune, that’s what I was doing when … in the red suit … Did you ask for a job? I thought of it. He grinned. But then I thought she might look at me too hard, and decide I wasn’t young enough, or even the right sex. I mean, that disguise does depend on a sleight of hand. Sleight of figure. Yes, well, so I pretended that I was doing research. Into the role of the sex industry in the empowerment of women. Wow. Yeah. I was blinding us both with jargon. Was she helpful? Not very. I think she was a bit scared of the whole idea. But she let me have a look around. What did it look like? Not at all what you think when you say, this place looks like a brothel. It had a very gentlemen’s club air. Bottlegreen leather and varnished wood, brass lamps. A heap of ancient gilt and morocco books artlessly arranged on a plinth. All very Cabinet Room, I suppose. Do the women wear pin-striped suits? Well, the women weren’t in evidence. I did ask if I could talk to some but she said, vaguely I have to admit, that they were all busy. It was the middle of the day.


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Maybe that’s when they do their best trade. They do offer specials, eleven to three o’clock. I went back in the evening and staked out the place. Saw the staff arrive. But of course they just looked quite ordinary, like any women going about their business. Jeans, trainers, parkas, that kind of thing. Maybe they wear lace knickers and balcony bras and fishnet stockings and the contrast of the sombre surroundings with little wisps of lingerie gives a frisson. Possibly. Anyway, I can’t say I got much out of it. Paulette seemed a bit edgy, nervous maybe. I don’t know whether it was the notion of academic research, or whether it was to do with core business. You didn’t ask her was she making snuff movies about the place? I knew I’d forgotten something. I did mention, since I was doing research, that I’d heard that there were university students working part-time, but she said, primly as a doctor’s receptionist, she couldn’t give confidential information. Did the women arrive in cars? Some of them did. A couple came on the bus. One rode a bike. Two came in a taxi. It’d eat into your profits, if you had to keep taking taxis. They offer a lot of services, said Al. Client reward programs. Discounts for pensioners and disabled. Discreet parking. As well as all your desires fulfilled. And of course the takeaways. Order the lady of your choice. No homeboys or transsexuals, though. And no gentlemen for ladies. Not at the Cabinet Room. They’re called gigolos, I said.


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Lying curled up with Al I thought about sleeping together. I suppose it’s the one thing you don’t do in a brothel. And it’s nearly the nicest part of having sex with someone. Do gigolos sleep with you? Maybe if you pay them enough. I wondered if women in these brothels had pimps. I couldn’t imagine Fern having a pimp. A boyfriend, yes, but I couldn’t see Xavier in the role of pimp. I’d decided he didn’t know anything about her moonlight job. I suppose most women are fascinated by prostitution. I mean those of us for whom it’s never become an option. Would you ever do it, sort of thing. What sort of circumstances would you need to consider it. What’s the whole thing like. I have to say Fern’s book didn’t go on about the fancy psycho-spirituality of it all, the way some such memoirs do. The beauty of men who come to pay for sex, their inner loveliness, their neediness, their vulnerability. The grandeur and generosity of the women who become great courtesans in fulfilling their desires. Hard and dirty work, it seems to me, but somebody’s got to do it; so it would appear. How does anybody know it’s the world’s oldest profession? Fern said it was much like waitressing, only the money was a great deal better. And you weren’t on your feet all night. The big cats are restless tonight. Time I was back asleep. Then something hit me. Those memoirs. The last one to do the book-club circuit had been as much about feeding the author’s heroin habit as it had been about being a sex worker. I gave a yelp and my legs jerked straight. Al was instantly awake. He sleeps wonderfully soundly and much more easily than me, but comes wide awake in a flash. What? he said. What is it?


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I’ve just realised. There are no drugs in Fern’s book. You woke me up to tell me that? Sorry. I didn’t mean to. But it struck me as important. She doesn’t ever mention drugs. Nobody does. Everything else, snuff movies, children, porn, but no drugs. I don’t think. I’ll have to have a closer look. You do that, said Al, already back to sleep. We turned over. Now I was the back one. And I knew the absence of drugs from Fern’s book was important. But working out just how was lost in a going-to-sleep dream of a shopping trolley full of red-stoppered vials of white powder. There’s the washing soda, said a voice. No, not washing soda, said another. Washing soda. Who uses that these days? My gran might’ve done. I never have. In the morning I got the manuscript out of the safe and had another flick through it. Al said, So you think it’s important that Fern doesn’t mention drugs in the book? Considering that’s why most women get on the game in the first place, to feed the habit. And that she died from a heroin overdose. Isn’t that more your full-time professional? Fern just did it part-time, for extra cash. Part-time, maybe, but she was a professional. And anyway, Al said, because she doesn’t mention it doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. It’s a book, you know, it says it’s a memoir but we all know memoirs aren’t necessarily true, and are certainly often not fact. Nor do they include everything. Isn’t that my line? I’ve learnt it off by heart.


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So, I said, it keeps coming down to this: we haven’t the foggiest notion what’s true and what’s not. I squared up the pages. I’m sick of it, I said. I just wish it would all go away. I want to stop thinking about it. I think you should. I keep resolving to, but then there I am again in the dead of night. Maybe it has all gone away, said Al. No sign of Bush and Betty. Hugh and Sylvie about to fly off on a cruise. Des repelling all boarders. Briony lying low. A number of times I had dialled her mobile phone but she never answered and never called back. I had a go at ringing the school; they said she was in a class and couldn’t be reached. I had no idea where she was living. Two unhappy women, I said. And all Hugh’s doing. Meanwhile he’ll be sailing the seas in uxorious luxury. Al sighed windily. He doesn’t like me going on about Hugh, but he hasn’t got an answer, otherwise he’d do something more than sigh. People have to take some responsibility for their fates, he said. I hummed my little song, that I couldn’t find any reference for. Joy like a phantom eludeth the lover, Night comes at last when the weary shall rest. I thought, joy isn’t eluding me. I sat down to Beside the Black Sea, and forgot the coils of sad lives about me. Bliss was it in that book to be alive. It didn’t last long. Al had been marching about the place, sitting at his computer, standing at the window, making coffee. He said, There is something.


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What? Hector Stollen. Paulette’s um brother. Remember how he works for Immigration. I looked at him. We did wonder if there was any connection—the smuggled children. The illegal little Asian girls. Fern saying it’s someone high in Immigration who’s doing that. Is Hector high in Immigration? Not really. That’s the problem. But maybe he knows. I should think. Can it be coincidence? There must be a way … I’m trying to think … perhaps there’s blackmail there, as well. So it’s also not a coincidence, him being at the coast. He was on the trail of the laptop too. Mmm … Maybe he knocked over the Priapus. Hard to see why. Fury, impotence, frustration? I have to be able to get on to this, said Al. Maybe it’s time for the police. It’ll be very carefully hidden. Plunging in with the police … they could just get rid of everything. Or lock it up and turn it into a crime scene. I was thinking Hector didn’t much look like an importer of sex slaves, but of course that was the point. If people advertised their wicked deeds in their faces then nobody would ever get away with anything. Today I was having lunch with Cleo. After I’d got to Manuka and parked, quite quickly for a change, she rang to say she’d be ten minutes late. Just enough time for me to pop into


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Paperchain and see what was new. Immediately inside the door was a stand, covered with fanned piles of one book, and multiple photographs of the author, Amabel Crane, as pretty a little long-blonde-haired nymph as you could hope to see. Head turned and dipped, lips half smiling, large cornflower blue eyes tilted slyly to the viewer. We all know that publishers believe young and beautiful sells books, but you’d think anyone in search of a decent read wouldn’t naturally expect it to emanate from such a body. I’d just as soon believe a speech balloon looping out of her mouth: Trust me, I’m a brain surgeon. Of course she might be. Nothing is impossible. The book is a glossy hard cover, called Tricks of the Trade. The front is in shades of brown: a sepia nude lying foreshortened on a bed, a dark male figure looming; practically generic, these days. I see it is not a novel. It’s a memoir. What vasty experience of life has that child had? Ah ha. I perceive the genre: prostitute memoirs. I am about to put it down—bored with all the bare-all-fuck-all-tell-all that seems to keep on coming—but I read the first paragraph. I’ve read it before. Carefully. About an hour and a half ago. The first paragraph of Amabel’s book is identical to the first paragraph of Fern’s book. I leaf through the pages. The beautiful Asian children. The snuff movies. The clients who just want to talk. I can’t begin to think what this all means. Except that we’ve been running round protecting something that’s already a published book. Publishing isn’t quick. It would be months rather than weeks since this book had this form, longer still since it began its journey from manuscript to hard cover.


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Much against my principles I bought the thing. I had to take it home and look at it beside the manuscript I had. How did this come to be on Fern’s computer? The girls said they thought it was the reason she had been killed. But that couldn’t be the case. And it certainly couldn’t be the reason why Briony had been attacked and my house ransacked; why I had been kidnapped by a pair of hopeless amateurs. Was it because the manuscript had been stolen by Fern? But that wasn’t important either, since here it was already published and so in the public domain. She may have had an intention of plagiarism—could one plagiarise a whole book?—but it was foiled by the lovely Amabel’s getting in first. So maybe Fern’s claimed murder was only a routine drug death after all. Or maybe she had stolen the book from its rightful owner, and that’s why she had been killed? But that couldn’t be the case either, the time scheme was wrong; once the book was in place as Amabel’s nobody else could steal it. Amabel. What an eighteenth-century name. No reason to suppose it was her birth name. But not impossible either, parents like romantic names. Sitting in the café I studied the picture and biography. Fern and Amabel could have hardly been more different in looks, except that they were both beautiful, one in a classical fair fashion, the other gorgeously dark, but their biographies sounded the same. That is, nicely brought up middle-class girls going on the game to put themselves through uni. In different cities, was the only divergence. No, Amabel had been born in Melbourne, but she’d been living here for some years.


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Cleo came flying in, her cheeks rosy from hurrying, which suited her wonderfully. The usual boring, she said, I’m so sorry. Hugging me, sitting down, picking up the menu. What are we going to eat? You look lovely, she said, which was sweet of her, and she really did, in the little jacket with polka dots that she’d bought at the fashion parade. I used to say, Let’s have a bottle of wine, so she could reply, Cassandra, it’s lunchtime! Not even a glass. But I didn’t feel like teasing her, and we ordered mineral water and a sandwich. Do you know anything about brothels? Cleo looked at me with her wide brown eyes, and I could see her rejecting a range of frivolous answers. You mean, in a legal sense, she said at last. What did I mean? I didn’t know how to even start thinking about the matter in hand, and brothels, at that moment, had seemed a possible place to start. It’s a long story, I said. Cleo looked at her watch. I haven’t got much more than an hour. I’ll be brief. I started at the end, and told her about finding the book, and its being identical with the manuscript, and the tale of that, and Fern’s death. It all sounded entirely improbable and foolishly shapeless. I could see Cleo’s sharp brain trying to put it together into some sort of pattern. I had hoped that having to construct it as a narrative for someone who knew nothing about it would clarify it for me, but it wasn’t happening. So, said Cleo, Fern’s sister says she was murdered.


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Yes. Her boyfriend says she wasn’t. I nodded. Her parents swore she didn’t ever take drugs. Yes. They can’t all be right. I don’t think. No. They can’t all be telling the truth. But they may all believe they are. Or does one of them know they are lying? How can you tell? Mm? Ah, if only there were a simple test. Like litmus paper in science lessons. Lick this: pink for true, blue for false. That’s the process, the difficulty, the fun, trying to work out who is telling the truth, and whether the truth they are telling is the truth of the matter. I was thinking, shouldn’t it be blue for true, since the rhyme always links the two words, but that’s my kind of brain, always wandering off, not fast and tight to the point like Cleo’s trained legal mind. Combined with her natural orderliness. This book, said Cleo. It’s a memoir? I pulled it out of its bag. It says so. The stranger-thanfiction true story of one girl’s descent to the underworld. Ah, said Cleo. The true story again. She flipped through the pages. Is it? she asked. If it is it’s so horrible that … I paused. What? What should happen if this tale of the murder of children for the sexual gratification of the rich was something that actually happened? Criminal trials? Life imprisonment? People locked up and keys thrown away? It’s so horrible that I don’t want to believe that such things could happen in the society I live in.


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Hmm, said Cleo, in a tone of voice that I took to mean I was a hopeless innocent and of course such things happened. You need to find that out, she said. I’ve had some dealings with Susan Rommel. You know, she’s a spokeswoman for sex workers. Sharp woman. She’s done a lot of work towards the legalising of brothels and the regulation of the trade. She might be a place to start. I’ll send you her details. I’ve got to go. If she’s concerned with the legalisation of brothels she’s not going to admit to this kind of criminality. If she knows it exists she should be busy stopping it. True. How are the kids? She sat down again. Well, Pom loves kindergarten more and more every day. She has a friend called Jilly, she can’t get in the gate fast enough to see her. And she’s got an imaginary playmate. He lives down near the back fence. Or meets her there, anyway. He’s called Elepharion. Elepharion? That’s what she says. He’s big on carrot sticks. She keeps saying. Elepharion needs a carrot stick; it’s never Pom. And he’s very keen on raisins. Does he eat them? Apparently. They all disappear. But not in our presence, we have to go away, he’s too shy to do it while we’re looking. We need to see you and Al. I’ll ring and we’ll have lunch one Sunday very soon. I like going to Cleo’s for lunch, then I’m there when the children are around. My godchildren. I suppose children in god are good for women with none of their own.


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Cleo rushed off and I ordered a cup of coffee. I stared at the book on the table. Maybe if I put it under my pillow at night and slept on it I would absorb some understanding of what was going on. Two women came in and sat at a table in a booth; this café was a bit retro, with banquettes and booths and wall lights like pointed shells. They spread out papers and ordered coffee. One of the women was Des. I guessed she was showing her companion how to go places in the public service, upwards of course. And for a cosy consultant’s fee. She looked up and caught my eye, smiled a tiny mouth-puckering smile, and turned back to her spreadsheets. I sat idly watching Des and her client. Des’s face was pale and somehow collapsed. She smiled at the woman, but it was the performance of a jobbing actor. Or was I reading this into it? Expecting the grieving mother and so finding her. I remembered my wild thought that Des had killed Fern as a matter of family honour. I remembered the terrible picture that had come into my head, of the parents holding their beloved child down, subduing her struggles, those parents who were meant to hold her tight to keep her safe, not to kill her. Des took a calm sip of coffee. It was an image that ought to be impossible, but I had it in my head. I thought of Medea, beautiful, enraged, killing her child because it had to be done. I could cast Des in that role, with her formidable classical nose. It didn’t seem likely. But I could see it. That ravaged face could do it.


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Chapter 20 Suddenly Tricks of the Trade was everywhere. On the Book Show. On Stateline. On the 7.30 Report. Even the commercial channels featured it in their scandal-mongering comments on the news programs. Amabel Crane’s lispy little voice breathed out of the radio; on television her lispy little face, half hidden under its fall of blonde hair, its china blue eyes veiled, drooped under the weight of secrets revealed. The book pages ran interviews, the newspapers hustled up articles about prostitution in the twenty-first century, one commentator asked, Was HECS driving our students into selling their bodies to put themselves through university? (What malignant guru thought of naming this loan system the Higher Education Contribution Scheme? I suppose they considered it funny to provide an acronym that is pronounced hex. So students can always speak of it as a curse.) The publicity was to die for; I imagined the book was walking off the shelves. Amabel’s head drooped lower and lower, her hair fell further and further over her face. Her voice became so whispery you hardly heard it. She said so faintly you could hardly discern the words, It is a true, honest and accurate account of my life as a sex worker. An 202


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interviewer mentioned her fearless candour. It’s so raw, so real, enthused another. Gradually the questions became balder, more intrusive. One interviewer said: You did these things, you wrote about them, you should be prepared to talk about them. Amabel dragged a tatty bit of tissue out of her sleeve and wept into it. I knew she’d have had no idea what she was letting herself in for. Sex slaves, smuggled children! Did you never think of reporting these crimes to the authorities? thundered another. In the meantime, and before the tumbrels of the publicity machine rumbled with quite such malevolent momentum through Amabel’s career, I had taken yet another look at the book. Merry Tricks, Tricks of the Trade—what you will, it was the same document. Odd changes in words but a series of spot checks turned up no major differences. I was still bothered by it, and wondered why. Not just that it wasn’t very good; I was used to bad books shooting like comets across the scene, scattering sparks, gazed at with amazement and delight, enjoying veneration. But there was something, what, inauthentic? about it. Authentic is a difficult word. For a while it was very popular, everything had to be authentic, food, travel, giving birth, the colours you painted old houses, nothing was too vague or too grand to be included. I never thought it was a bad idea, provided you knew what you were talking about. But then the word became so debased by being such a catch-all you could no longer use it in respectable company. People made fun of it; a pity, since it has its uses. But why did I think Amabel’s book was not authentic? Did I not believe she had done those things?


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It wasn’t that. I was turning the pages, reading a bit here and there, when Al came and leaned over my shoulder. He read some sentences aloud: The punters that night were a ferociously smirched lot. They appeared to have come from a nearby building site, and were variously clad in muddy boots, torn off and unravelled jeans, and grimy besloganed t-shirts. Several had FCUK printed across them; I always thought that was an unfortunate name for a purportedly designer range of clothing. Grinning bashful grins that revealed startlingly strong white teeth, they lounged on the green leather seats, shedding plaster and sundry curls of wood shaving. Strewth, said Al, snorting into my ear. Who’d have thought the vapid little blonde could be so wordy? That’s it, I said. What? No twenty-year-old talks like that. Of course I had been thinking that all along, the rather formal, as I had put it to myself, style of writing, I had mainly seen it as dull, a bit pompous—I had thought, what do they teach them at creative writing classes, certainly not to write a memoir in their own vernacular voices—but I had not formulated it so exactly. This was not the voice of a girl. It was a much older person, schooled in a day when vocabularies were more Latinate and constructions


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branched and flowered. Now I was doing it. I had thought boring, when I should have thought, old. As well. I turned over the pages. What about anachronisms? I found a chum—Amabel looks round the door and sees an old chum in the sitting room and won’t go in—and two chaps, but I suppose I had registered them as playful rather than fuddy-duddy. The manuscript had wristlet watch but the book had dropped the wristlet, so there must have been some editorial intervention, minuscule though it was. Wristlet: what a small but powerful lens of history that is, informing us that it was not the more usual fob watch worn by gentlemen on their waistcoats. Now of course it is the fob that is to be remarked upon, or the pocket, both rare; the watch worn on the wrist is the norm. Gran might have had a wristlet watch, I doubt Edith ever did. She described a dress cut on the bias, so it followed the line of thighs and crotch. Well, dresses are still cut on the bias, even if people don’t know the term. One of the girls wears a ballerina with its skirt layered in purple tulle: not conclusive on its own, perhaps, but if you are making a case … An old gentleman with mutton-chop whiskers comes in wearing herringbone-patterned knickerbockers: straight from golf, she supposes. Straight from P.G. Wodehouse more like. Not all the paragraphs were quite so pompous as the one Al had snorted over, but once you started looking the evidence was there. Abundant use of subjunctives, for instance: were I to …, she says, should the punters wish it … Plenty of sentences beginning with participial phrases, and none of them dangling, not like the asparagus woman.


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In fact the syntax, old-fashioned and formal as it is, when looked at closely has a complexity that simply isn’t taught these days, that comes from close reading of nineteenthcentury classics. Not taught, not valued; we prefer a simpler more transparent manner of speaking and writing. I sat with my head in my hands, feeling a total idiot. How could I have so failed to trace my unease to its source? I’m an editor, I’m supposed to know these things. Certainly, I’d got sidetracked on to inauthenticity, which of course was right, but I’d done an authentic piece of sloppy thinking in giving it a name but not bothering to find a cause. Could I blame the asparagus book, had it deadened my sensibilities? That was a gruesome thought. It could endanger my whole career. Al gave me a hug. It wasn’t your job, he said. It’s always my job, I said, so mournfully that he laughed. Forget that, we’re there now. Or on the way. Next question? What? If Amabel didn’t write it, who did? Not Amabel. Not Fern either, the same forensic study of syntax excludes her. Whoever sent out after the laptop? You think the young women stole it? Maybe. From an older colleague? I imagined educated older prostitutes penning their autobiographies. Except, I said, it’s written in the persona of a young woman. Purportedly, said Al, grinning again. I recalled the book launch, the late arrival, the Margaret Thatcher face, the hard cobalt blue of a stiff taffeta dress. The madam, I said, what was her name? … Paulette. What do you reckon? I bet she’s the author of it.


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Of course, said Al. But why not just write it as herself? Young and beautiful sells books, I said. Old and Margaret Thatcher-faced doesn’t. Can you imagine the television cameras making love to her, the way they do to Amabel? Simple, said Al. Moreover, I said, there’s the prodigious effect; the same thing, written by a young woman, has greater value, is more shocking, fascinating, revealing, unlikely, i.e. more prodigious. Of course, said Al, gazing at me with admiration. I gave him a gentle head butt. Okay, I said. Paulette writes it, publishes it as Amabel. Where does Fern come in? Fern dies, so she needs someone else to be the young and beautiful front. Oh, I said. So. And I shivered, though the room was warm, good central heating, no suffering from the highcountry cold here. So, there’s an endless supply of pretty young women to front the enterprise. Except, I said, if it was Fern’s book, how was there time to switch to Amabel? You know how long it takes to produce a book. Hmm, said Al. Good question. We sat gloomily, for a while. Then Al said, I think we can leave it to the press. They will nut things out. And so they did, till I found myself wanting to call the dogs off. Poor Amabel was becoming wispier and paler. I thought, she’s not strong enough to bear the burden of Paulette’s life. But that was later.


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Al made us dinner. Swordfish, that he’d marinated in ginger and garlic, and the spinach with butter and cream he does so well, and luckily not too often; too sinful. I was delighted, to begin with, and then I felt a bit queasy. Guilt, I supposed, at being so bad at my job. And maybe the food a bit too rich as well. Even a specially delicious New Zealand sauvignon blanc didn’t help. Then, suddenly, the phenomenon of the Amabel Crane prostitute memoirs was over. Andy Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame; evidently she’d had hers. Al would mutter about it from time to time, and I knew how he felt, there was the itchiness of unanswered questions about the whole thing, but mostly I was too immersed in Beside the Black Sea to worry too much. I have this theory, about reading books, it’s all to do with rhythm. Sometimes you find yourself in prose that has a rhythm that somehow suits yours and so you are carried along with your reading of it, it chimes beautifully with your own sensibility. It’s like what they call chemistry with a lover. It explains why some people love books that others can’t stand. The Black Sea was my rhythm. The police rang and said my house was no longer a crime scene. I rang Briony to tell her she could get her things out. As usual, she didn’t answer; I had to leave a message. I assumed she was getting my messages, and just choosing to ignore them. I retrieved the asparagus book and put it in an overnight post bag, with an apologetic note pointing out that the marks on it were policemen’s boots. I was pleased to see that nothing was actually illegible.


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When I looked round the house I realised that Briony had taken her belongings anyway. I imagined her mother saying, To hell with it, you need those things, and going in and fetching them. Later that day she did return my call. She sounded a bit more like her old self. Yes, her mother had left, and she had found a flat, quite quickly in fact, in Braddon, it was new and very cute, I must come and see it sometime. Yes, life was going well, she said, yes, all her problems were sorted. It didn’t seem the moment to mention them by name— Carlo, Nicole—so I said I was glad, and we must meet for a coffee sometime soon. Give me a ring when you have time, I said. I wondered if she would. When you know a lot about people, when you have been close to them in a crisis, they will often push you away, as though shutting you out of their life now can somehow shut you out of all that other stuff then and it will be as if you’d never known that, either. The drama, the terror, the panic. What was that? I don’t recall that. Of course none of this is logic. It would be more sensible to take a ‘keep your enemy close to your bosom’ approach. I am not Briony’s enemy, but that is how the friend who knows too much can be seen. I felt sad about this; I had enjoyed our evenings after school, over cups of tea and glasses of wine. I knew they wouldn’t happen again.


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Chapter 21 My friend Gavin—the one who concerns himself with the size of the footprint we make upon the earth—is in town. He’s a journalist, and for some reason has been asked to write a review of a newish restaurant. It seems to be some kind of perk, a reward for good work; I’ve noticed his paper doesn’t have a regular food writer, just uses staff members. I have often thought, what do they know? as they reveal their ignorance of not very arcane matters. What do you know about food? I ask. I eat, don’t I? Eating isn’t exactly what Moutarde is about. I’ve read about Moutarde. It’s cutting edge, fusion, a miraculous example of just where Oz food is at these days. It’s as though Barthes dropped into Barton and penned a philosophical exegesis of it. Well, maybe it’s time somebody analysed that, says Gavin. The ecologically sound approach to dining. Hmm. Anyway, that’s why I’m taking you. You know about food. We have to have two people. My companion had the larks’ tongues sort of thing. 210


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I attempt to make a joke about teeth and free meals, and he says, Now, Cassandra don’t get it into your head it’s a free meal. You are going to have to work. I am relying on you. He flies in, swings by in a taxi—you can swing by in taxis when you have cab charges—and off we go to Moutarde. Moo-tard, I tell him how to pronounce it, it’s French of course. It means mustard. Weird name for a restaurant, says Gavin. Will it cut the mustard, I wonder. Could make a decent headline for the piece. Does anybody talk about cutting the mustard anymore? And anyway what does it mean? Being up to scratch, says Gavin. Making it work. Can your husband cut the mustard? Just an example, linguistically. Yes, I know that, but why does it mean that? Cutting mustard doesn’t seem difficult. On the other hand, getting into Moutarde isn’t easy. They don’t seem to have a booking for Gavin and without a reservation, sir … the waiter shakes his head. Gavin’s doing this anonymously so he can’t tell them how dangerous this is for them. He goes all haughty, yes, he booked, he rang from Sydney, they assured him it was all arranged, he is appalled, an important occasion. So then they find somewhere. The restaurant has a number of people, but is by no means full. The doubt at the beginning looks like a charade, designed to make us, what, grateful? It’s a while before a waiter comes. Would we like a drink? Wine, please, we would like to see the list. This takes more time, and twenty-three minutes after we have been seated nothing has happened. Gavin isn’t writing this down, but he


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enumerates the faults into a small recorder that looks like a mobile phone, so he won’t have to remember. Well, I say, it gives us time to admire the décor. Unfortunately this doesn’t take long since it is minimalist, the ground floor of a new block of the kind of apartment that is going up all over the city, even here, in Barton, even the parliamentary triangle isn’t safe. Low ceiling, oyster walls, white tablecloths, no pictures, just wall sconces; more oyster. There are odd little alcoves and corners with silvery corrugated-iron screens making certain tables quite private. The patrons visible are mostly blokes in suits. I’m the only colourful person, in my crimson pashmina, but I haven’t come here to look at me. I thought they might have jolly yellow posters of mustard, I say. Mr Coleman making his fortune from the mustard left on the plate. What does that mean? asks Gavin. You can’t eat a lot of mustard, not if it’s hot English. People take a dollop but leave most of it on the plate. That’s where the profit comes in. Oh. Typical capitalist excess. Gavin decides we’ll have a bottle of wine, since if we order glasses at this level of service they’ll mostly be empty. He says we can’t have the same dishes, and we have to have three courses. I feel frail at the thought. The dishes are rich; the cream sauce is alive and well in this restaurant. I like the idea of scallops but these are served with pork belly. I know this is fashionable but I don’t like the sound of it. In fact as I read the menu nothing appeals. I think I’ll have oysters, I say. The tasting plate of oysters. A small tour of the geography of Australian oyster waters.


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Not much to judge the cooking by. It’s food, I say. Cooking is a very small part. There’s ingredients, freshness, plating, that sort of thing. Plating? says Gavin. You have to learn the vocabulary. The oysters come on a bed of ice with little labels telling you where they’re from. There’s a shallot vinaigrette in a shot glass, which is too sharp for them but is nice with the crusty Italian wood-fired sourdough bread which we nearly forgot to order. Gavin says the scallops with pork belly are terrific, the belly just melts and is mild in flavour. The look of all that fat makes me feel a bit queasy. For mains I’ve ordered fish and chips. A classic, I say. Let’s see what they do with it. It comes on a big white plate, wrapped in newspaper. You tear down through that, and through the butcher’s paper underneath—the waiter starts me off with a pair of Chinese scissors—and there is the steaming food. There’s balsamic vinegar in a little bottle. Shouldn’t it be malt? I ask the waiter, who looks shocked. The fish is okay but the chips are soggy. The authentic experience, I mutter. A good thing about the chip paper, it hides how much I haven’t eaten. Gavin has a whole lobster à la nage, which means it’s in a huge basin of consommé with little wisps of coloured vegetables like pond life floating around it. What’s à la nage? he asks. Swimming, I say. One lobster swimming. Though how it can even pretend to do that when it’s cut in half I don’t know. He says it’s delicious, but very rich. Ask for a doggy bag, I say. Cassandra, he says, how vulgar. You think this place isn’t? Suddenly I think it might be a


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good idea to go to the lavatory. Excuse me, I say, and walk as fast as I can without appearing hasty, down to the back, out a door, along a lane. Will I make it? After I’ve thrown up I feel quite good. Amazingly good. I wonder if it was a tricky oyster? Maybe I am becoming bulimic in my later years. I don’t think so. Should I tell Gavin I’ve just vomited up all this expensive food? Not that all was much. I splash water on my face, no lipstick, didn’t stop to pick up my bag, saunter back to the restaurant. As I come in through the door I see the people at one of the tables hidden by the metal screens. They are a couple with their heads together, oozing intimacy. The woman looks up. It’s Briony. The man is Hugh. Carlo. I start to smile but Briony’s eyes slide over me, as if incurious; she picks up her glass and smells the wine. There is a small smile curving her mouth. Maybe it’s an exceptional vintage. When I get back to our table I’m feeling quite strange. Are you all right? Gavin asks. I feel cross, I was perfectly okay until I saw that pair. Feeling very pleased with myself, that Gavin would never guess what I’d been doing. I’ve just had a shock. Seen something I didn’t expect to see. Gavin cranes his head around. You can’t see from here. That’s the point of the natty little silver screens. Privacy for adulterous lovers. Can I put that in the review? Why not? She retorted bitterly, says Gavin. Shit, it’s not—? No. A friend. I thought it was all over and here she is. It’s just such a bad thing for her.


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She doesn’t seem to think so. Doesn’t mean she’s right. No good can come of it. Gavin has eaten the lobster but the pond and the vegetables are still there in the basin. Now for pudding, he says. I couldn’t. You have to, Cassandra, that’s the bargain. Free lunch but you have to eat it. Order one anyway and I’ll eat a bit of both. He orders the trio of chocolate: mousse, marquise, and mud cake. All I can manage even to pronounce is the selection of gelati: I choose lime, lemon and pistachio. And when it comes I eat it, quite successfully, Gavin only has to help out a bit. Afterwards I order peppermint tea. Good, says Gavin, let’s see how they do that. He’s quite impressed, it’s a Moroccan blue and silver glass of hot water with a bunch of mint poked into it, with a bowl of honey for sweetening. The stalks of the mint are tied together with a silver ribbon, you fish them out when it’s infused. When the bill comes he mutters, This place charges like a wounded bull. Thank god Rupert’s paying. We go back to the flat and Gavin gets out his laptop, he wants to get it down quick. While the indigestion is still fresh, I say. He looks at me. How do you know? Just reading the trio of chocolate would give you indigestion, I say. Let alone eating it. I get us some mineral water with bubbles and lie on the sofa with a book, one with covers, not a manuscript. But I don’t get much reading done. I am thinking of Briony, there with Hugh. Carlo. Even if


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this lunch is supposed to be a farewell, it is not a good look. She didn’t have the expression of a woman saying goodbye forever. I thought of Sylvie, about to go off on the contrite husband’s honeymoon cruise. More lies, more betrayal. I felt a bit sick, not the queasiness of before, a kind of malaise of melancholy, that life could be so cruel. Why blame life, when it was Carlo doing it, and Hugh, both. Doubly doublecrossing. Is that meant to be the clue? Carlo the adoring lover, Hugh the devoted husband? He is two men, he needs two women. I think he is failing to love either woman as she deserves. Gavin says, I think the food was pretty good, don’t you? Mine was delicious. It’s the service and the attitude that’s so bad. It’s as though you go out and spend a fortune to be insulted. Yes, my food was nice, I say. I don’t mention dodgy oysters. I’m hardly ever sick, and hate admitting it when I am. And I feel excellent now, light, calm, very comfortable. Unlike Gavin, who keeps grimacing, and rubbing the stomach that must be groaning under all that food. Email me a copy when it’s done, I say. He shuts up the laptop, calls a taxi. I pick up my keys, meaning to walk downstairs with him. When I open the door there is a woman in a red suit with a peplum about to put a key in the lock. Alice, I say. She stoops to give me a kiss on the cheek and I use this chance to give her a hug. He feels like a woman, but also like Al; more like Al, I think. You smell nice, I say. Alice, this is Gavin. Gavin, Alice.


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Alice puts out a gloved hand, they shake, she keeps her head shyly bent forward so her hair falls over her face. Gavin says, Sorry, got to rush, and I say, Make yourself at home, Alice, I’ll be back in a moment. The taxi is already there. Gavin kisses me goodbye. We should do this again, he says, and is off back to the airport. Quite an expensive little outing for Rupert. Upstairs Al is in his jeans and the blue cashmere jumper that makes his eyes so beautifully violet. Make yourself at home, he says. So? Gavin thought you were just an ordinary visitor, I say. I think I’d better go back to working in my house, and then Alice can come and go without remark. I went to see Paulette again. She’ll be offering you a job next. I think she sort of did, this time. I’m not sure what, exactly. Maybe she is diversifying, into transvestites. Al frowned. He doesn’t like that term. He sees wearing women’s clothes as exploring another mode of being, or at least he did. Now he seems to regard it as a disguise. I tried to talk to her about the book. I said it was written by one of her girls. She said, Was it? One of her girls, and about her brothel. First of all Fern, and then Amabel. Of course, she denied all that, I knew she would, what I wanted to do was see how she denied it. I think I saw a look of complete terror on her face, and then she threw me out. Literally? It would have been, if I hadn’t gone quietly. A big bouncer came. I didn’t think it behoved me, as a lady, to get into fisticuffs.


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God, you’re learning your prose style from Paulette. But I did manage to say, I thought the police might be interested in child prostitution and snuff movies. She threw a brass bell at me, I ducked, it made a frightful clang. Another bouncer came. Must be expensive, all those bouncers. I think they double as chauffeurs, to take the escort girls to their gigs. As it is, I think I’ve got a bruised bicep. And did she write the book? I think she did. A certain guilty consciousness. But why should she admit it?


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Chapter 22

Time to phone a friend or two. Jane Cavalier works at the publishing house that did Tricks of the Trade. We often talk shop. I’ve done her a few favours. Tell me about Amabel Crane, I said. Have you been in Siberia? She’s been all over the media for weeks. Yes, but the real person. I’ve never met Amabel. She deals with us through her agent, someone I’ve never heard of. Fran Paul is her name. She’s a real dragon lady. So you’ve only seen her picture? Funny you should say that. We were working with a picture of quite a different woman, then suddenly this agent rings up in a terrible panic and says there’s been a dreadful mistake, her assistant sent the wrong picture, the picture of another of her authors, and she’s terribly sorry but of course she knows we’ll want to use the right one. People weren’t too happy, they had to pulp the dust jacket, Mick went ballistic. But fortunately he’s more than recouping. What did the other author look like? 219


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Oh, young, she seems to have a young clientele, the dragon lady, and dark; dark curls. Snow White and Rose Red. Who? Jane’s only an editor, why should she know her fairy tales? They were sisters, I said, one blonde and pale, the other rosy and brunette. My second call was to the literary editor of the Canberra Times. Flora Parslow is a good acquaintance. We often find ourselves having a chat at literary functions. How would you like a scoop, I say. A dramatic literary hoax. Not another one, she says. Haven’t we had our fill of literary hoaxes? This one is closer to home. Happening right here. I told Flora the story, not of Fern’s death, but of her memoir on the laptop, and the book appearing under the name of Amabel Crane, but there being no way it was written by a twenty-year-old. I told her who I thought had done it. Ah, she said, Cassandra, are you sure? I don’t want to go with this and find I’ve been wrong. I’ll write a piece for you. Carefully hedging. We won’t mention Paulette, just say that experienced editors (suddenly there’s two of me) have shown that the book is not the work of the young woman who claims to be the author; the vocabulary, syntax and sentiments are those of a much older person. So whose is it? You can break the story, then leave the Sydney and Melbourne literary sleuths to pick it up and run with it. They’ll do the expensive checking, and nut out who the real author is. Won’t be difficult.


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I was thinking of them doing the sort of thing thesmokinggun.com had done with James Frey, the expen-

sive meticulous checking. Are you sure, Cassandra? Flora said again. I don’t want egg on my face. The paper’s face. I had an image of the Canberra Times as a face with egg on it. Trust me, I said. I’ll word it in such a way as to tantalise but not allow for any legal problems. Well, she said, write it and let me have a look at it. So I did. I wrote it like a piece of breaking news. I didn’t mention the late switch of photograph, that was a betrayal of my source, and could come out later. I based my account simply on interviewing the editors (they wished to remain nameless) who had done an analysis of the document. But I embedded it in an account of the various memoir hoaxes that have rocked the international scene of late, concluding that it certainly appeared that the author we’d seen all over the media was not the person who had written this so-called memoir, and since her identity was in question, what did this say about her story? Was it true, or was it equally a fabrication? I constructed a name for myself, too. Back to the old Sandra, and used my middle name, Robyn, to give me Robb. Sandra Robb. A good no-nonsense name. I didn’t want to stick my neck out. I told Flora it was my pen name, because people don’t like to see their editor being a writer too. I could tell Flora was still slightly doubtful, but she liked the piece and liked even more the idea of the scoop, after the media’s saturation with Amabel Crane. So she used it. I hadn’t told Al I was doing this. I’m not sure why, I mean


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why I hadn’t told him. Wanted to see if I could make it work, perhaps. I’m also not sure why I was so keen to sort the thing out. For Fern’s sake, maybe, though I hadn’t known her. But I felt there was something that was murky and needed to come out. And I wasn’t too happy about being kidnapped and having my house ransacked and my housemate hospitalised. It was supposed to be for the sake of the laptop, but I couldn’t make any sense out of that. Cracking the identity of the memoirist might solve some of those mysteries. And maybe Fern’s death. Al read the piece in the paper and gave me a quizzical look. Sandra Robb, eh? Neat name. How did you guess? Hardly guessing, Cassandra Robyn. And even without the name I’d have had a fair idea, I reckon. He was still looking at me with that quizzical and it seemed also admiring smile. You’re really keen to sort this out, aren’t you. I’m giving it a go. It worked, too. Other papers took it up. Literary world bedevilled by hoaxes. Another book trick. Those cheating pronouns. When is an I not an I? They took off on excursions into prostitution, what was happening to our society when young girls of good families stooped to the oldest profession. Was it always drugs? That was the received wisdom, they said, drugs needing so much money, and then the drugs blunting them to the reality of what they were doing. But then in some cases it seems the girls were in it for just a bit of pin money. Pin money! What ark were they out of? And such a putdown, with its suggestions of frivolity and extravagance, real


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money being something else again. The fact is students have jobs, they with few exceptions need to earn money, and one can see the sense of Fern’s argument (her reputed argument) that being a sex worker gives you an excellent ratio of time spent to money earned. If you didn’t feel any personal, emotional, physical repugnance to it, why not? There’s the rub, of course. How many people wouldn’t? Come on, I said to the newspapers. Who wrote the bloody book? That’s what we want to know. Amabel Crane was not available for comment. Nor was her agent, Fran Paul. A spokesperson for the publisher said Miss Crane was holidaying in an undisclosed location to recover from the rigours of the promotional tour for her recent book. When asked was it true that Amabel had not written it the spokesperson said that was a mad idea and just not true. The papers talked to the madam of the brothel. Paulette Franjic. She preferred the word hostess, she said. She denied any knowledge of the book. She wasn’t a writer, she said. Her girls were happy. It was a wonderful opportunity for them to earn good money. They were a very nice class of girl. In an interview on the 7.30 Report Paulette managed to look a lot less like Margaret Thatcher, she was distraught and in a funny way quite motherly. My girls have a good life, she said. They are all well old enough. And they are all bona fide citizens. What about the children? The sex slaves? I don’t know anything about them, said Paulette. How would I? The book’s nothing to do with me. I’ve never even


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read it. I run an orderly establishment, all perfectly legal. Anyone who says anything else is telling a wicked lie. So then the papers announced that not only was the memoir a fake in that it wasn’t written by the young woman whose name was on it, it was not even a memoir, it was fiction. The publisher issued a statement saying he had published the book in good faith and he stood by his author, a memoir was an art form and could use fictional embellishments in telling its story, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t a true account of a person’s life. Fictional embellishments got a good run. Gavin rang me from Sydney to tell me that the talkback radio hosts were playing wonderful riffs on the idea of life embellished by fiction. When does it stop being life and become a tall story, asked one columnist. What are the public’s rights in regard to literature purveyed for their consumption? Can’t a writer be sued for lying to them? Literature, I said. Ha. I rang a friend at another publishing house and asked her to give me the Neilsen Bookscan figures. Bookscan is a statistics gathering device that tracks the retail path of every book and gives exact sales figures. You have to subscribe and it costs a fortune to belong so only the big rich publishers can afford it. Tricks of the Trade sold thirty thousand copies in its first month. Stunning. I thought of Beside the Black Sea. It was so beautiful and yet it would sure as sugar never sell that many in all its life. Ten thousand if it was lucky. Less if word of mouth didn’t keep it selling. I know this happens all the time and mostly I am quite calm about it. But this time


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I was enraged that a bad, ill-written and lying book should rake in money like that. Beside the Black Sea might win a prize but unless it gets taken to in England and wins the Booker it doesn’t mean much in this country. People hardly notice prizes. And shortlists don’t even rate a mention. One journalist tried to talk to the police about the illegal activities the book described. Were Asian children smuggled into the city for sex? Was there a trade in snuff movies? The rather ponderous response was that it wasn’t possible to comment on such a thing at the moment but of course if it was discovered that the book was dealing in true facts then it would be a matter for prosecution. I imagined a whole lot of policemen reading Tricks of the Trade trying to discover if it was true facts. The Department of Immigration said it wasn’t concerned with fictions though it did think it was irresponsible of reputable firms to publish fantasy and claim it as truth. It was a cold grey dead-of-winter day. The sky was leaden with clouds that never rained, the drought gripped people’s conversations, as well as their gardens and the countryside. I wished we were at the coast, with a big log burning in the fireplace and the stormy sea a spectacle to watch. Not this greyness that kept threatening rain but never delivered. Local government spoke darkly of further draconian water restrictions. I went to my little house which felt cold and dank and neglected and lit a fire there and sat on the sofa and read. I did like it as a working space. Its invasion by Bush and Betty was an ugly niggle at the back of my mind, but I thought that the fire would clear the air, warm and


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freshen the place. I should seriously think of selling it. But in the meantime I might start working in it again. At lunchtime I put a guard in front of the fire and walked down to Lyneham shops to buy a sandwich and decided to have a cup of coffee at Tilley’s. I was sitting in a corner of one of the shiny red booths partly looking out the window and partly reading the newspaper when Xavier walked past. He waved and then came in and sat with me. He was quiet and seemed depressed; having sat down he didn’t seem to have much to say. I asked him about going to Buenos Aires and he said it was just about sorted. He had so many books he didn’t know what to do with them. Can I get you a cup of coffee, I said, but he refused, and went to the counter himself, coming back with a tall greenish icy drink which may have been lime and mineral water but which had the slightly oily quality that spirits give a drink. Vodka, I thought. He would still be grieving for Fern; alcohol for lunch is a way of doing that. He kept his head bent and made halting conversation, pausing a lot. He seemed very tired. Perhaps it wasn’t his first vodka of the day. Since his eyes were downcast I could look at his face. I was still struck by its astonishing beauty. The perfect oval domes of his eyelids, the long fluttering hummingbird lashes, the pale carved lips and long fair curls. Botticelli could have painted him. Giorgione. Caravaggio. He could be the young man who stands looking out of the picture, while behind him Christ is crucified, the money lenders are cast out of the temple, Judas kisses his master. His lips curve in that small smile that offers beauty for contemplation. This is all you need to know.


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Oh, all over the top, I know. But I have never seen a young man of such perfect loveliness, even pale and tired looking, as he was now. I did wonder if he knew what to do with it, if he supposed he ought to do anything with it. Is beauty ever of any use, except to make us loved? A modelling career, perhaps, but that wouldn’t count, here. Oh look, I said, pointing out the window at a red Ferrari that was just pulling into an empty parking space. Dead leaves and paper scuttered in the breath of its exhaust. Would it be good to have one of those? Xavier looked up, frowned a little, focused his eyes on the sticky red of the car. I saw that his eyes had lost all their green. Nah, he said. Overbred and no room. He went back to staring into his vodka. I’d finished my coffee. I wanted to go home and eat my sandwich and get on with work. I’d posted off the Black Sea, now I’d been sent a tome on weeds, not enough changed from a doctoral thesis. It was going to need a lot of sorting. Theses aren’t books. I said this to Xavier, who replied, You never know, maybe you’ll be able to work on my thesis, one day. The moral dilemmas of politicians. People in power. I’m thinking of calling it The Haughty Voice, you know, those words from the Book of the Dead. I have never spoken with a haughty voice. It has got quite a ring to it. Xavier spoke in a languid voice: Yes, I would hope so. Shall we see you before you set off on the great adventure? Sounds as though I’m going to die. Remember Peter Pan?


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There are other adventures than death. Give us a ring, come round for a drink before you go. I’d like that. I was surprised to meet Briony on the pavement outside Tilley’s. She said it was her afternoon off and she was doing a bit of shopping at the supermarket; she’d got to like this supermarket when she lived in my house. She didn’t mention Carlo or Moutarde and I surely wasn’t going to. Still I was fascinated that she was behaving as though I hadn’t seen her. Maybe she was so starry-eyed she thought I hadn’t. She nodded at the window, where Xavier still gazed into his vodka, another full glass. The gorgeous young man, she said. Mmm. Gorgeous young men make me nervous, said Briony. I don’t like men who are too beautiful. They’re usually frightful narcissists. He seems quite nice-natured. You never can tell. Ivy tells me he’s trying to hit on her. What! But he’s still grieving for Fern. Apparently he’s ready to be consoled. Ivy’s very upset. That’s why she told me. She thinks he’s a creep. She did anyway, but having him trying to hit on her makes it worse. I remembered Nicole saying, He’s a creep. Maybe the beautiful young man staring out of the Renaissance painting was a creep. I thought girls would be keen on him, he’s so beautiful. It’s only us mature women who think like that. Girls like spunky. In fact he gives Ivy the shudders. She keeps saying, I dunno how Fern could do it, he’s not her type at all.


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I nearly said, Well, it was her profession, kind of, but then thought that prostitutes have their own love lives, quite separate from work. People are always not seeing what other people see in people, I said. Briony gave me a sharp look. Yes, well, I’d better be getting on. I’ve got a lot of marking to do. Back at home I mended the fire and got stuck into the weed book. I decided to do just one chapter. It needed a lot of work. It was only supposed to be a copy edit, nothing structural, but even so I was making marks all over every page. I’d send them the chapter and they could decide if they wanted to spend the money to go on. Several hours later there was a knock at the door. I got up and looked through the peephole, which Al had put in for me when we hardly knew each other and I still thought of him as the colonel. Am I interrupting? he said, not really anxiously. Only, I think I know who wrote the memoir.


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Chapter 23 I’ll make some tea first, he said. I knew an announcement of this magnitude would have to be done with proper ceremony. He made our present favourite, green tea with lemongrass and ginger. The fire had burned down to red hot glowing logs and he sliced sourdough bread which he toasted on my long iron fork. If I sold this house I would have to remember to keep that fork. I made it in manual arts at school and it’s a very fine and useful object, if you have an open fire and coals at the right stage of readiness; flames won’t work. I let him do the buttering, he has a wonderful prodigal hand with the butter when he chooses. Butter is the only thing to have on toast made over an open fire. If you are going to do it, do it properly. We sat and licked our fingers. We were close together on my old puffy chintzy sofa, that I bought because it was fifty dollars and then fell in love with; where could that go in our other establishments? Okay, I said. Hector Stollen, said Al. I stared at him. How …? 230


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Remember ze little grey cells? You sit in ze chair with arms and you employ ze little grey cells, and see you, you come up with ze answer. Al’s French accent was stage-villainous. So, I said, ’ercule comes up with ’ector. Very classical. I still ask, how. Well, I was thinking, going over things, and I remembered how you suddenly realised that the book wasn’t written by a twenty-year-old … Yes … I thought that if I looked carefully enough at it maybe it would reveal more secrets. If it wasn’t Paulette, who was it? Her age was right … I looked at the prose carefully, read chunks aloud. I decided it was written by a man. Remember those things you picked up? The chums. The knickerbockers. I know about those things, too, a lot of women do. What about the dresses? There’s more. The sex scenes—remember you remarked on the authenticity of the book—how it so much lacked authenticity. I looked at the descriptions of her job by the young Amabel; I don’t think any woman, young or old, would write them like that, so cold, so mechanical, so male. Not, said Al, that I am meaning to say that cold and mechanical is male … Not at all … But totally unlived, somehow, and unimagined. Yes, I said. You’re right; I thought the same thing, but didn’t pursue it far enough to identify it. So, Poirot again: think. If not Paulette Franjic, who?


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Stollen fits. We know he knows Paulette. We’re guessing that Paulette is Fran Paul. Funny how people don’t want to stray too far from their own names when they make up an alias. Too true, Sandra Robb. I blushed. I think you feel you are keeping something of your identity if you hang on to part of your name. You’re not turning yourself into a complete stranger. So, think of it. The more you look, the more fits with Hector. Okay, so Paulette is the agent. Hector Stollen is her brother. Her um brother. Yes. Maybe she’s his mistress. Or maybe he’s a very good client of hers. Maybe they are just accomplices. Just accomplices? Interesting that he had Paulette at the launch and not urban girl Nadine. Maybe it is Nadine and Paulette who are sisters. Both names being somewhat French. As always, I am fascinated by names. None of that really matters. Mainly, they are associates. Maybe he’s blackmailing her. Anyway, after a strict forensic examination of the text, plus the circumstances in which it exists, I have come to the conclusion that Hector is the author. Or at least, he’s my present working hypothesis. Merry Tricks, I say. That would be very Hector. The sort of thing a funny old fart like him would think was clever. Not Paulette. What next?


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Hang on. I got hold of Nicole and showed her the picture of Amabel Crane. She used to be a friend of Fern’s. Her real name is Jenny Doyka. They both worked for Paulette. It took her a while to recognise her; all that blonde hair is a wig. She didn’t stick too close to her name. Neither did Fern Christo. Probably I reckon because it wasn’t them choosing the name. I think Fern was going to be Amabel, and when she died they had to find someone else. Which explains the last-minute change of picture. Yes. We know the book was far advanced; it had been chugging its way through the system for some time. It was always going to be by Amabel Crane, it was only the picture that needed changing. So, that suggests, if Fern was murdered, that neither Hector nor Paulette had anything to do with it. They had nothing to gain from it. And presumably it wasn’t them that tried to get the laptop back, either. They knew they had the manuscript, and that it was well on the way to being a book. One thing, I said, why did the girls go along with it? I rubbed my forehead with my fingertips, hard. Nothing explains anything, in the end, I said, it just complicates it. Why did Hector Stollen want to write a book of prostitute memoirs in the first place? Money? You mentioned money, remember? That’s the explanation for the girls, too. They went into the business for the money in the first place, and they must have been offered fat sums to put their face to the book. I bet neither of them would have imagined what it involved, in the end.


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Not very bright of them. People often aren’t, when money is involved. And Hector—I reckon he read about literary hoaxes and what a lot of money could be made out of them. He has some sort of close relationship with Paulette, and went on from there. Paulette, you’d have to say, isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, either; it doesn’t seem to have occurred to her that being involved with a book about snuff movies might be a bit awkward. Well, I suppose money makes it nice and simple. Maybe, too, some sort of revenge on Hector’s part, said Al. He works in Immigration, remember, he’s quite an ordinary clerkly sort of person. Maybe he’s getting his own back on the department which hasn’t valued him, hasn’t promoted him as it ought to have. By fabricating stories of child sex slave smuggling, or reporting on what’s actually happening? I’ve been trying to find that out, said Al. That’s where Hugh comes in. Aha, I think, so Hugh is a spy too. But I just look at Al with wide eyes. He thinks it’s both. In the sense that there is something tricky going on with underage Asian girls, but not at all in the way the book describes. It could be a complicated form of whistle blowing. Whistle blowing by proxy. Point at a fantastical thing, so that the real one comes out. The snuff movies are real? No, I don’t think so. That may be a kind of wishful thinking. Hector inventing what he would fancy. I think the snuff movies are fabrication, and the trafficking in children


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real enough, but not in Paulette’s establishment. She says she’s legal, and I think she is. But it happens elsewhere, and Immigration seems to be implicated in various ways, well, somebody in Immigration. It’s at quite a high level, the corruption. Not the minister! I don’t think so. I am no fan of hers, as you know, but I don’t think she’s up for that. So it’s more evidence in favour of its being Hector Stollen. Yes. In fact, well, I probably shouldn’t say this, it is heavily confidential, but Hugh is talking to him now. Is in fact very grateful for the tip. I’d told Al about seeing him with Briony. He’d said, She didn’t see you, why don’t you pretend you didn’t see her? We can’t do anything, let’s not even think about it. I did wonder how Al could work with Hugh in these circumstances, but I think men are good at putting things in boxes. I’m trying to follow his advice, and not think. Al said, Do you want to ring your friend Flora and tell her that Stollen is the author? Do we have proof? Don’t tell her we have proof. Tell her it’s a rumour. See what she does with it. She can always say alleged. What about the kidnapping? What about the laptop? And Fern? Ze little grey cells haven’t got that far yet. Maybe, I said, Hector was the person who knocked over the Priapus. Why?


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He was there. Do you think he’s really bought a house, or was he spying? He’s not that rich—yet; maybe he thinks he will be. He’s only renting. The Priapus was probably vandals. But maybe he wanted to make us nervous. And the raspberry ute? I said at the time. Idiots. Well, he did and he didn’t, I remembered that. At the time there was a possibility it was intentional. Though I’d liked to think it wasn’t. The fire was going out. I hadn’t put any wood on the red hot embers that had made the toast and now it was dying. I thought it better, since we would be going home in a short while, not to leave it blazing. I remembered Xavier, and told Al about the vodka, the weird eyes. So, it’s more than vodka then, said Al. Yes. Presumably that’s how Fern came to take the heroin. Probably she and Xavier used it together. You have to wonder: Xavier so clever, so beautiful. Why drugs? And why would someone as hard-headed as Fern go along with it? I sat staring into the fire, thinking these things, knowing too the answers. The young so often think they are exceptions to the rules. And the beauty: those of us who’ve never had it don’t realise what an exemption it is. Beauty takes all and is forgiven all. So it is led to believe. It hadn’t worked like that for Fern. It was quite dark outside now and the possums had come out to play. They romp about and hiss their sex songs and sound altogether like drunken wombats holding


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three-legged races. They are small and nimble creatures, but somehow on a roof they make a huge racket. I remembered Al’s flying pig remark. But that was about Carlo’s intending to marry Briony, and I wasn’t going there. So you think the overdose was accidental, or deliberate? Al was frowning. I’ve never been happy with the idea she wanted to kill herself, I said. More likely bad luck, they got some that was too pure. Maybe she wasn’t used to it, maybe her parents were right. What about the cap of the syringe I found under the bureau? If she was using it along with Xavier, maybe he dropped it. Did he know that it had killed her? There was a knock on the door. Al looked through the peephole. The very subject of our conversation, he said. Xavier said, I was hoping I could take you up on your offer of a drink. Since you asked me to drop in before I went. By all means, said Al. When are you going? Soon. Xavier stood just inside the door. He looked more slender, more graceful than ever, his head drooping, his body languid. Come in, said Al. Sit beside Cassandra. He put another log on the fire and poked it back into life. Xavier draped himself into a corner of the sofa. Tea? Al said. Xavier frowned. He seemed to be concentrating. Would it be too terribly rude of me to ask for wine? The words were a parody of his old courtesy.


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Not at all, said Al. The only problem is, we don’t have any. We don’t really live here anymore, you know. I’m afraid it’s tea or nothing. That would be delicious, he said. How did you find us? I asked. I mean, we’re usually at the flat. Yes, said Xavier. But I tried here. It wasn’t an answer, but speaking seemed such an effort for him I didn’t want to pursue it. So lovely, a fire, he said. In novels they always have gas fires in Cambridge. A gas fire doesn’t make such good toast, I said. I don’t suppose it does. Do you read a lot of novels? His eyes were still not emerald now, but drab, and shrunken. He squinted them up. Yes, he said. They are good for … he lost his drift, but with a little shake found it again … understanding how people are. Or were, I said. I wonder do they still have gas fires in Cambridge? I shall find out, won’t I. He was wearing a sweatshirt with a hood, just like Betty Boop’s, it occurred to me, but on him it was elegant. It had loose sleeves, and when he put his arm up to rub his forehead with the back of his hand the fabric slid back and I saw the scars inside his elbow. A lot of needles had been stuck in there. I said, Do you know Anastasia? Antsy? Oh yes. We shared a house. In first year. She still is. In first year I mean. Not a hard worker, our Antsy.


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Do you still see her? Sometimes. She hangs around with that loser Bill. He was leaning back in the corner of the sofa, still with his hand over his forehead. His eyes were shut and his answering of my questions was somehow automatic, like somebody in a trance. I wondered what else I could ask him that he would answer. Did you know about the kidnapping? They didn’t ask me. What if they had done? Maybe it would have worked. His pale carved lips curved into a smile, very slightly. Al had come through from the kitchen with the tea tray; he stopped, froze was perhaps the word, when he understood what was happening. You mean they would have got hold of the laptop? The laptop? The laptop was never important. They just thought it was. Anastasia’s father’s in Immigration. He thought it would incriminate him. What made him think that? I told Antsy it would. Fern told me about the memoir. She said it would blow things wide open. She gave it to Ivy and told her to look after it. How do you know all this? I was there. Suddenly he sat up. The tea, he said. I never drink tea. Do you think I will need to drink tea in Cambridge? I don’t think they drink tea in Buenos Aires. They have maté, said Al, putting the tea tray on a side table. What is maté? An acquired taste, I believe. But tastes can be acquired.


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Sometimes it only takes a sip. He bent over the tray and poured tea into a cup. Xavier said, How very remiss of me, not to bring wine. I could have brought a bottle of some fine wine and we could have drunk fine wine. It doesn’t matter, I said. Doesn’t it? He sat up quickly with a sinuous striking motion and grabbed my wrist. The other, that had been resting on his brow in that potentially melodramatic gesture, slid into his pocket and pulled out a syringe with blood in it. He jumped along the sofa, I tried to pull my wrist away but his long pale fingers held it in a wrenching grip, he pulled the cap off with his teeth, spat it out and rested the length of the needle against my arm. Don’t struggle, he said. It’s got blood in it. I got it from my friend Anton. He’s got AIDS. He’s dying. You wouldn’t want it to slip. I said, in a friendly voice, Is that how you killed Fern? I didn’t kill her. I just gave her a fix so she’d be nice to me. How could I know she’d go and die. She wasn’t your girlfriend, I said, remembering Nicole saying, he’s a creep, Ivy saying, he’s a creep. She could have been. She’d do it for money, why wouldn’t she do it with me? Did you offer her money? I said I loved her. I said I’d loved her for a long time. She just laughed. I thought if I gave her a hit she’d let me love her. She was asleep. She woke up and looked at me. I don’t know why it went wrong. But it has, said Al, gently. It’s gone wrong, it’s all wrong.


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Xavier looked at him with his black bottomless eyes. I’m putting it right, he said. How? I sat very still. The length of the needle pressed into my arm. If I flinched away a little it would prick me. I tried to remember if it was certain you’d get AIDS from a contaminated needle, or if it was only a possibility. Or was it becoming HIV positive that was the certainty? It’s funny, you hear these warnings all the time and think you know but when you actually need the information you realise it’s not really there. You’re going to let me get away or I’ll kill her. But you were away. You could have gone to Buenos Aires any time and nobody would have stopped you. But you knew … No, we didn’t. Neither of us knew anything until you told us. Xavier thought. The needle wobbled. I wondered just how much smack, how much vodka, he had had. He frowned. It’s too late now, he said. I’ll have to kill her anyway. I’m not her, I said. I’m me. Cassandra. How can I edit your thesis if you kill me? I can’t help it, he said, if I have to kill you. How will that help? Al spoke very carefully. Injecting bad blood isn’t instant, you know that. It’ll be weeks before we even know if she’s infected. You’d have to kill us both, now, this minute, if you want to stop us talking. With a gun. Or a knife. Something quick. You can’t do us both simultaneously. While you are sticking that in her I will


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have knocked you out. And suppose you did kill us both, right now, what would you do with the bodies? He took out his mobile phone. The fact is, I can ring the police now. I can infect her now. The police will still know everything. Plus the fact of this malicious wounding with an intent to kill. If you don’t do that you can argue you and Fern were just a pair of silly kids taking heroin together. Because you’d heard that it gave sex a terrific rush. When you saw what actually happened, you panicked and ran. It’s not great, but it’s not murder. You’ll be contrite, and that gets sympathy. What about Cambridge? Cambridge won’t go away. I thought the scholarship might, but didn’t say so. I wondered if his grip was slackening. I didn’t dare try to pull away. Any scuffle and the needle could scratch me. This polite boy, whom I’d had in my house, made coffee for, talked to. He was trying to kill me. Something like that is too big to take in. I just thought, keep very still. Why don’t you give me that. Al spoke patiently, firmly, as if Xavier were a nervous child. I’ll get rid of it, then we’ll tell the police that you have confessed, about you and Fern, that it was a game that went wrong and you panicked. Why would you do that? Because you are a friend … Am I? We’ve been getting to know you. You came tonight to have a farewell drink. We’ll come and see you in Cambridge. Cassandra is fond of you. It’s hurting her that you’re intending to murder her.


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I’m sorry, he said. He looked at me and tears welled up into his eyes and once again they looked huge and precious as cabochon emeralds. The tears quivered, then ran down his cheeks. He let go my wrist. His bony fingers had made angry red marks. He held the needle over his own arm, where such an instrument had often been before. Maybe I should inject myself, he said. Fix it like that. Don’t be silly, said Al crossly. Whatever good would that do? Think of your parents, you’d break their hearts. My parents. They don’t want me around. Never have. They don’t want me to go to Buenos Aires, they don’t care what happens. Maybe his parents thought he was a creep too. I still wasn’t quite there. I suppose his beauty had seduced me, his lovely manners; I looked at him sitting on the sofa, contemplating the syringe full of blood, and felt sad. He’d tried to hit on Fern, and failed, moved on to Ivy—that was tacky—but surely that would not be the pattern for all his life. Had not been. He was in a morass of self-pity. Suddenly I felt sick. I’m going to vomit, I said. No, said Xavier. I took deep breaths. The fire seemed to have started smoking, the air was thick. Al reached out delicately and took the syringe out of his hand. Xavier dropped his head between his legs, his silvery curls tumbled forward. Cambridge, said Al. That’s what you have to keep in mind. Cambridge is a whole new world. And you will be in a good position to consider the moralities of public life. I remembered The Egyptian Book of the Dead. I have never let anyone suffer from hunger. I have never caused


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anyone to weep; I have never made anyone afraid. I have never spoken with a haughty voice. I have never been deaf to the words of justice and truth. I said, You may have caused people to weep, but I don’t think you’ll be deaf to the words of justice and truth. He gave a big snorting snob and curled up in the corner of the sofa. Al said, Was it you on the roof, heavy breathing and frightening those girls out of their wits? What? said Xavier. No. It was a possum. I was in the cupboard.


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Chapter 24 Cleo asked us to lunch. Paul had bought some wines from old vines in the Hunter that he thought we might like. We all sat in the dining room eating Cleo’s freshly made pizzas. After that Cleo sent the children off to the playroom with their fruit and cheese. Paul poured more wine. I took a deep sniff of it: it smelled good. Well? Cleo said. Al laughed. Oh yes, very well. Don’t tease, said Cleo. Okay. What do you want to know. Ooh … how did you get Xavier to confess? Xavier? I said. He was completely off his face. Totally smashed. Remember I’d seen him drinking vodka in the afternoon. And his massive pupils. When he started threatening me with the syringe of contaminated blood … There’s evidence he was on ice, said Al. You know how ice makes people go mad. Not just metaphorically. They lose any sense of what is real, or right. When I asked him was that how he killed Fern, meaning with a syringe, not very accurate I know, and he explained 245


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he hadn’t meant to kill her, he just wanted her to have sex with him, that somehow got him started talking, he didn’t stop. Couldn’t understand that a woman who’d do it for money wouldn’t do it with him. Poor Xavier, said Cleo. He was beautiful. And so clever. You know him? Somehow everybody knows him. He seems to infiltrate. I think he’s lonely. The girls all think he’s a creep. Of course, said Cleo. They’re right. Beautiful, clever, lonely, and a creep. She shuddered. The terror of children. You mean, he terrorised children as well? said Al. Oh no, I mean, all those gifts, and him so awful, that’s the terror. And was the blood infected? asked Paul. Oh yes. Anton’s badly ill. Xavier smoked some ice with him and then stole his blood. Not very clever any longer, said Cleo. Not noticing that infecting somebody with a slow death is desperately incriminating. All that time to tell their story. His brains were quite fried by then, said Al. He’d been injecting the methamphetamine. Evidence that he’d begun putting it in his penis—running out of veins. Will he recover? It’s likely he’ll get his brain back, his reasoning powers, intelligence, that sort of thing. But there’ll probably be a lot of emotional and personality damage. I suppose there are always consequences, said Paul. Were you frightened? Cleo asked.


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Al looked at me. Oh yes, I said. But somehow I also had that old image of an interesting polite boy sitting at my table discussing The Egyptian Book of the Dead … I have never caused anyone to weep … I was thinking, one of these people can’t be true. Then she offered to vomit, said Al. That did for him. Pom came back and climbed on my knee. I took deep breaths of her. Children have wonderful curative properties. That’s about it, really. That’s pretty much the end of my story. Fern’s death; the memoirs, the laptop, the snuff movies and the child sex slaves; how glad I will be not to have to recite that little lot of mysteries over again. Of course it is not the end of their stories. They’re still going on. Some have moved a good bit further already. Hector Stollen has resigned from the Department of Immigration; he was about due for retirement anyway. Tricks of the Trade has continued to sell wonderfully. Being outed as a fraud doesn’t seem to have done it any harm. Nadine has left him (I suppose she did exist) and he and Paulette are moving down to the coast, not to the property he was renting but another. Paulette has sold the brothel, the goodwill anyway. The scandal in Immigration is being investigated, and certain corruptions uncovered, but this is a very slow process and we’ll all be a lot older before anything comes of it. Antsy’s uncle is a suspect. If he was as amateur at people-smuggling as he was at kidnapping then prosecution seems inevitable. Xavier’s mother came whooping back from Buenos Aires


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and got him a good lawyer and an excellent psychiatrist. Looks like he won’t have to face a murder charge but he’ll miss his start in Cambridge. Whether they will have him after all is another matter. Alina Dove is tall, willowy, green-eyed and platinum-curled; her one desire she says is to get poor dear Xavier some help. Help being a stint in some expensive rehab, disguised as a rest cure. Overwork has caused him to have a breakdown, is her story. I think sometimes of poor dear Fern; it’s all we can do for the dead, think of them sometimes. Hugh and Sylvie went on their cruise. Last time I saw Nicole she had got a lot thinner. She’s become anorexic, Hugh told Al. Sylvie is quite pleased, as long as it stops in time. Nicole looks gloomier than ever. Thin and gloomy, instead of hefty and gloomy. Des and Nick still want closure for Fern’s death; they think this will come with Xavier being found guilty of her murder and getting a hefty gaol sentence. What they’d really like is the death penalty; what a pity we haven’t brought that back yet. They can’t tell if they are happier knowing she didn’t intend to commit suicide; that’s too hard, Des says. Ivy is doing well at school and wants to go to university in Melbourne. No way, say her parents, she is living nowhere but with us. Carlo and Briony? I haven’t sprung them together again. I never see Briony now. I feel sad whenever I think how good it is with Al and me. There’s more news. I’m glad I didn’t mention the dodgy prawn to Gavin. I’m pregnant. Of course as soon as she saw me refuse Paul’s lovely wine Cleo knew. I occasionally have


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bouts of morning sickness in the afternoon. It’s going well. The doctor is pleased. I’m nicely past the milestones of old miscarriages. Al says it is a sign that we must buy the other apartment. I want to go to the coast and stay there most of the time and work from there, so we can live a tranquil and rewarding life, so our child can run free on the slopes to the sea, play in the secret orchard, find himself at some stage looking Priapus in the eye. Maybe being rolled gave Priapus a fright, says Al. Maybe he decided to get his act together. Maybe, I say, it was all our own doing. Though I also wonder if Al gave him a heave, to get him going. Al says he is going to write another book, about crime, he says. He hasn’t got a plot but he’s got a name: Murder on the Apricot Coast. What’s the Apricot Coast? I ask. I don’t know, he says, I don’t know about the murder, either, I just like the title. So do I. I am entranced by titles. I’m persuading Al to give it to me.


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Marion Halligan was born in Newcastle and grew up by the sea. She is rather surprised to find herself living in Canberra, instead of on the coast. She always believed she was going to be a writer, though took a while to get started. Halligan has now published some twenty books (including a children’s book, The Midwife’s Daughters) and has written short stories, articles, book reviews and essays for various publications. Her most recent book is The Apricot Colonel. She believes fiction illuminates our lives, and for this reason she loves to read it as well as write it.


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marion

HALLIGAN

the apricot colonel A beautiful man, and all she can do is tinker with his prose … For Cassandra, an editor, books are easy to sort out. It’s real life that’s the challenge. It doesn’t sit quietly and let itself be fixed. Right now Cassandra’s life is suffering from a distinctly unconvincing romance. And, recently, it’s been far too heavy on the suspense: there’s been a spate of murders and she’s beginning to suspect that her own name is on the killer’s hit list. Murder, match-making and the dark arts of book editing: The Apricot Colonel is Halligan at her light-hearted best. ‘Marion Halligan is one of Australia’s most beloved and prodigious writers’ RAMONA KOVAL

(Presenter of Radio National’s Books and Writing)


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