by Cathryn Hein
‘Planet of the Dead’ was nearing its climax when Jasmine suddenly slid her legs off the couch and jerked up straight, then reached for the remote and snapped the sound off.
‘What is it?’
‘Car.’
Digby checked his watch. It was after ten. ‘Bit late for a visitor.’
‘Yes.’ She rose and moved towards the hall on stilted legs. Digby jumped up to follow but Jas stopped and held up her hand. ‘No, you stay. I won’t be long.’ She looked back at the hall, her shoulders lifting and falling as she breathed deeply. With another few steps she was out of sight.
Digby headed to the window. He tugged at the side of a curtain and peered out. A long dark sedan was parked near his Mercedes. A man stood in front, hands on his hips as he regarded Digby’s vehicle. Moonlight shone over his cropped hair and the shoulders of what appeared to be a well-tailored suit jacket. He was about Digby’s height but a little more solid, like Digby used to be before grief sapped the life from him.
The door chain rattled and the man swung his head around and swayed. The front light flashed on, illuminating him further. He took an unsteady step towards the house, arms held out from his side as though posing a question.
‘Shit,’ said Digby quietly as he recognised Jasmine’s visitor, and worse, the stagger of a man who was dangerously drunk.
Mike Boland, the supposed gun financial planner the state bank had sent from Adelaide when Gabriel Arthurs retired. He’d been allocated the Wallace family accounts. Granny B had disliked him on first encounter, but she was a raging snob suspicious of everyone whose ancestry she couldn’t immediately trace back five generations. Perhaps her instinct had been right.
Digby let the curtain drop and strode out.
Jasmine was huddled behind the screen door, holding the main door tucked tight behind her. She was hissing in an attempt to keep Digby from hearing.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘You didn’t call me. I left you flowers.’
‘I threw them in the rubbish. We’re over, remember?’
Mike’s voice was choked and whiny. ‘No. We can’t be.’
‘We are. Go home. I don’t want you.’
Heavy footsteps sounded on the timber step. Digby moved in closer.
‘Don’t! I don’t want you here. Ever!’
‘Jas, please.’
‘Go away!’
Digby had heard enough. He pulled the door open and stood behind Jas. ‘You heard her. Leave.’
Mike paused and squinted, his face turning savage. ‘Who the fuck’re you?’
‘Digby, don’t,’ said Jas. ‘This is my business, not yours.’
That didn’t mean Digby was going to stand by and let this piece of shit harass her. Nudging Jas gently aside, Digby unlocked the screen door and stepped out.
‘Who the fuck am I? Digby Wallace-Jones. We’ve met, as I’m sure you remember.’
Recognition followed by horror slackened Mike’s jaw. Then just as quickly his posture changed, becoming straighter, but drunkenness glittered in his eyes. ‘Digby. Mate. Sorry.’ He lifted a hand towards Jas, secure behind Digby. ‘I need to see Jas about a matter.’ He nodded as though pleased with the explanation. ‘Work.’
‘Work, you say? Interesting, given you’re employed by rival banks.’
‘It’s to do with the Association of Financial Advisers,’ said Jas, stepping out from behind him. ‘Isn’t that right, Mike?’
‘Yeah. Yeah, that’s right.’
But Digby’s resolve was granite hard. ‘I see. And this important matter could only be discussed late on a Tuesday night at Jasmine’s home?’
‘You’re right. Of course. Inappropriate.’ Mike waved towards his car. ‘I’ll go.’
‘You’re drunk,’ said Digby. ‘You’re not driving anywhere.’
Mike stepped backwards, almost missing the step. ‘I can drive.’
Digby regarded Jas over his shoulder. ‘Do you know where he lives?’
She swallowed and nodded. ‘Ebony Street.’
Digby pulled his keys from his pocket and held them out to Jas. ‘I’ll drive him back to Levenham. You follow in my car.’ When she didn’t accept he sighed. The situation was shit but there wasn’t any other way around it. ‘He can’t drive and he can’t stay here.’ His gaze bored into her. ‘Unless you want him to.’
‘No.’ Her voice was barely a whisper.
Digby curled her fingers around the keys. ‘Then this is the way it has to be.’ Digby pointed at Mike and flicked his finger sideways. ‘You, get in the passenger seat.’
Mike’s expression turned mutinous, all attempt at chumminess evaporating under the force of Digby’s command. ‘Who do you think you are, ordering me around?’
Digby regarded him coldly. He understood the situation now and fury was building like a fire inside him. ‘The man who could get you sacked. Now get in the car before I shove you in.’
Mike obeyed, but not before spearing Jas with a bitter glance. For a moment Digby feared she might not be able to hold it together. Her eyes were huge and limpid, her mouth trembling. He wanted to offer some sort of comfort but he didn’t trust Mike not to attempt a runner. The man’s darting gaze told Digby he was contemplating it.
‘I wouldn’t,’ he warned as he followed Mike to the car.
This time Digby was on the receiving end of one of Mike’s razor looks but it had no power to cut. Digby’s scars were so thick they’d formed an armour, and Mike’s alcoholic anger had nothing on Digby’s wrath.
With Mike strapped in, Digby strode to the driver’s side. Jas was on the porch, huddled with shame. He paused, regarding her sympathetically. ‘It’ll be all right.’
Inhaling a shuddery breath, she nodded.
Digby focused on the road while Mike worked his hands open and closed atop his thighs and stared with drunken intensity at his rival. ‘So you’re seeing Jas?’
Digby didn’t answer. The man deserved nothing except a punch in the face.
Mike’s jaw jutted. The air inside the car turned viscous with his churning thoughts and huffing beer-stained breath. Though a thousand questions crammed his own mind, Digby continued to ignore him. A man who could lie to his wife couldn’t be trusted to tell the truth anyway. Digby wasn’t certain Jas could be either, but what would she gain from denial? That she’d been having an affair with this piece of shit was obvious.
He wished it wasn’t true.
His hands were fists on the wheel and Digby experienced that familiar surging need to jam the accelerator to the floor and hurl the car through the black night and into another realm. A place where love meant something. Where fidelity mattered.
As if aware further comment would only damage his cause, Mike managed to keep silent for the entire journey to Levenham but when the country road crossed into town he began to shift and tense. Levenham’s streetlights flashed Mike’s head with sickly orange and yellow, as though exposing his infected core. As Ebony Street came closer, Mike sat up, hand on the dash and eyes fixed on Digby’s face.
‘My wife …’
‘Now you think of her?’ Digby’s lip curled.
He indicated and turned into the street, but instead of driving on, Digby immediately pulled to the kerb. Mike could walk the rest of the way. The scumbag’s wife and kids were innocent, plus Digby wasn’t about to land Jas in the middle of a domestic dispute.
The man stared at him. ‘Thanks.’
‘I haven’t done this for you.’
Mike gave a ‘fair-enough’ nod. ‘Look, I know you won’t believe me but I love my wife.’
‘Nice way of showing it.’ Digby unbuckled his seatbelt and pushed the door open. He wasn’t a violent man but the way his emotions were erupting, one more second in Mike’s company and he’d be liable to break his nose.
‘But I love Jasmine too.’
Digby snorted and climbed out. What would this shit know about love? Love was a universe in which nothing else existed but the person you�
�d given your heart to. There wasn’t space for two.
Headlights appeared at the end of the street—Jas in his Mercedes. Mike remained seated. Digby went to slam the door but stopped as a glacier of cold rage crawled through him. Hands braced on the door and roof, he stooped to look inside.
‘If you visit, touch, or even think of speaking to Jas again, I’ll move every Wallace account out of your hands. And I’ll make sure the bank knows who’s responsible. You understand?’
Slowly, Mike nodded.
Message delivered, Digby walked off, leaving the door open to the cool swirl of night.
CHAPTER
7
Digby reached across to squeeze Jasmine’s hand. For the half second he could take it from the road she held his gaze, then she turned to stare back out the side window, left fist curled against her mouth.
Digby didn’t know what to say, how to broach the subject. Whether it was even any of his business. Now he’d warned Mike off she was safe. It was over. What other role did he have?
He drove at a steady pace. It was late and the road was empty but he had no compulsion to speed. If anything he wanted the journey to last. The chance to work out some sort of comfort for Jasmine. Perhaps solace for himself, too. Another shard had been hacked from his faith in humanity, and it had left him sore.
It wasn’t until the headlights hit the sign for Bradley Road that he realised he’d driven the main thoroughfare connecting Levenham and Port Andrews, and shaved the closest he’d been to Rocking Horse Hill since that terrible night. Not once, but twice. Apart from a lurch in his stomach upon seeing the sign, he’d survived. No emotional collapse, no uncontrollable surge of hatred and fury at what lay at the end of that road. Just the dull throb of loss and impossible want that was such a part of him now. Perhaps immersion therapy had something going for it after all.
He glanced again at Jas and tried to work out how he felt. He was disappointed at her choice, but mostly he was unsure and worried about what this would mean for their fragile friendship. Her steady ease had helped him breathe this past week, and stopped him drowning in himself. Losing that would leave him floundering once more.
‘I didn’t know he was married.’ She spoke to the window, her breath leaving a faint blush on its surface. ‘The building society offered select staff the chance to study financial planning. I thought it’d be a good way to get ahead, create a better career for myself, so I put my hand up and was accepted. The initial training included two weeks in Adelaide with a private college. Mike was one of the practitioners they brought in to teach us ethics.’ She laughed, the sound bitter. ‘Of all the people to teach ethics.’
Digby’s fists tightened on the wheel.
‘When he told me he was being moved to Levenham I thought my life, my future, was made. Instead it became my undoing. Finding out he was married, that he had kids, what an idiot I’d been …’ Jas was quiet for a while, her head bowed as if the memory had exhausted her. ‘You believe in love at first sight.’
It was a statement, not a question. It was no secret how hard and fast Digby had fallen for Felicity. They’d crashed trolleys in a supermarket, and in an instant of shy apologies and smiles he’d known that she would be his heaven and earth and everything in between. Two weeks later they were engaged.
‘That’s what happened to me,’ Jas continued. ‘I thought it happened to him too but that was a lie.’ Her fingers twisted together with anguish. ‘Everything was a lie, and I had no idea until it was too late.’
‘You could have broken it off.’
She made a choked noise and turned to face him, anger and regret raising her voice. ‘Like you could have broken it off with Felicity? I loved him, Digby. I couldn’t stop. It was wrong and I knew it and it shattered me into pieces every day, and then he’d come and put me back together again. He had me so fooled, so tangled and screwed up, I let him treat me like this for nearly four years! Then after the quarry accident, when all the press was hanging around and I had more important people than him to think about, I finally found the guts to end it. Four months I lasted. How proud I was, and how stupid, thinking I was free, when all it took was for him to catch me one night when I was feeling weak and lonely, and I was gone again.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Why should you be sorry?’ She touched her forehead. ‘Shit!’
Digby let the silence weave round them. There was little he could think of to add. Mike hadn’t deserved her love but Digby was sure she already knew that, and disliked herself for it. What he wanted to say was that he didn’t blame her. He knew what love like that did, how it consumed, but forgiveness wasn’t his to grant. This wasn’t his personal train wreck. He wasn’t the one betrayed.
Except he was, a little. And he didn’t like the realisation that he was claiming hurt from her mistakes.
Jas resumed staring out the window as Digby drove on, using the subtle vibration and hum of the car to drift into the safety of numb thought.
Jas had locked the gate behind her when she’d left to follow them. He watched her exit the car and trudge to deal lethargically with the chain and wished again he had some way to comfort her. Hunched against the cool, she seemed diminished. The woman he’d known since boyhood was outgoing and vibrant, and nothing like this. The world needed her back. He needed her back.
She let the gate swing open and instead of returning to the passenger seat, crossed to the driver’s side and indicated for Digby to wind down his window.
‘I’m all right now. You can go.’
‘No.’
She frowned at the force of the word, her mouth buckled in one corner.
Aware he might have come on too strong, Digby tried to lighten things with a joke. ‘Uncle James would roll over in his grave if he knew we’d left glasses of ’01 Pyrenees Shiraz half drunk. And we haven’t finished “Planet of the Dead”. You can’t leave me not knowing what happens to Lady Christina.’
Her front teeth dug into her bottom lip and her face took on the crumpled look of someone desperately trying not to cry.
‘Don’t send me away, Jas. I’m here. I want to help.’ He reached out to stroke a stray curl of breeze-blown hair from her face. ‘Lean on me.’
She really did cry then, turning from the car to buckle forward, hugging herself as though letting go would see her insides tumble out. Digby threw open the car door and rushed to gather her against him, shushing softly as she bawled and hiccupped into his chest.
‘It’s okay,’ he soothed, stroking her silky hair and kissing her temple. ‘He’s gone. It’s over.’
She didn’t push him away as he expected. Instead she cushioned against him, grasping at his clothes, his solidity, weeping and shivering until there weren’t any tears left.
Finally, swiping at her lowered eyes, she pulled away, shoulders hunched with embarrassment. ‘God.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
Tears still leaked but she managed a wobbly smile. ‘That was the last thing I wanted you to see.’
He shrugged. ‘I’ve been worse.’ It was true. In the early days, when his grief was at its most raw, there were times when he’d cried the way a toddler does, without restraint or care. Always alone, usually burying his face in his pillow to muffle the noise, or stopped on some isolated road in the district, far from habitation. He wasn’t proud of how he’d come undone, the unmanliness of it, but he was also aware that without that release the grief might have built and built until it exploded into something stupid. Jas was no different. Except in her case she had someone to help its passing. ‘You needed it.’
‘I did.’ The breath she took was long and juddery. ‘But that doesn’t make it any less mortifying. Oh,’ she said, eyeing his jumper and wincing, ‘that’s bad.’
Digby looked down. The fine wool of his jumper glistened with tears and perhaps more. He dug into his pocket and pulled out a hanky: after grief became his constant companion, he’d learned to carry one.
He wiped himself down w
ithout fuss, pocketed the hanky again and smiled. ‘Can we finish that drink now?’
The fire had burned down but the house remained cosy. Digby reset logs while Jas went off to wash her face, returning after several minutes with the shiraz.
‘I figured we could do with a top up.’
With their glasses refilled, Digby settled into his corner of the couch. Jas picked up the remote and skipped the DVD back several minutes to catch them up, and when she was finished it seemed the most natural thing to open his arm and nod to the empty stretch of space next to him. For a few seconds Jas stared, then she lowered herself into the crook of his arm and tucked in.
‘Planet of the Dead’ ran for another fifteen minutes but Digby could barely remember any of it. All he was aware of was Jasmine’s warm body, the way she fitted comfortably against his side, even the scent of her. He let his arm hang while the credits ran, palm cupping the point of her shoulder, hoping she’d stay, but when she moved to sit straight he immediately let go. It was one thing to share a bit of comfort, another to let it linger.
She flipped over to a music channel and turned down the sound. The room filled with the fire’s crackle and pop and their suddenly self-conscious breathing. Digby took a last sip of wine. Jasmine’s was still half full. Propped at an angle as she was against him, it had been hard for her to drink without spillage.
She took a gulp now and swallowed. ‘Digby …’
‘You don’t have to explain anything.’
She studied his face. ‘You don’t condemn me?’
He set his glass on the side table and leaned forward with his palms pressed together. ‘I’ll admit I don’t like it, but condemn you? No. You fell in love and couldn’t fall out. It shouldn’t have happened but it did. None of us are perfect, Jas. We all make mistakes. He just happened to be yours.’
