The operator’s voice said: ‘Melbourne calling, please wait.’
Brady came on next.
‘It’s me. Brian.’ He waited, as though I should confirm receiving him. He didn’t often talk on phones, and still had a rural unease with them. They were things for emergencies.
‘Why I’m ringing is: I’m quitting the group,’ he said. ‘I won’t be coming back up to Sydney, so I thought I’d tell you goodbye. Katrin’ll fly back in the morning. I’m not sure what Darcy’ll do.’
‘What’s happened?’
‘Hasn’t enough happened? Do you want any more?’
‘No. I suppose not.’
There was another silence, delicate and humming; interstate calls had the music of distance, then.
‘So what will you do?’
‘Go back on the road. Pick up what I can. I won’t go short of work now — neither will Katrin, if she wants it. I’d rather sing what I want anyway. I never liked this fairy stuff you and Darcy cooked up. He’s ridden long enough on my back. So have you.’
I said nothing.
‘Darcy’s looking for someone to blame, now his big London deal’s all stuffed. You’d better watch out — I think it’s going to be you.’
His voice held no real enmity, no concern: there was nothing personal in it all; I might have been a stranger. It was the voice that had spoken to me in his smoking-spot by the cypress trees, in the St Augustine’s lunch hour. (‘Can’t you see I’d rather be on me Pat? ’)
‘When’ll I see you again?’
‘Some time. Maybe never. It’s you she loves. I got it all wrong.’ He’d gone, and I stared at the whirring receiver.
I was kept awake that night by a mixture of sadness and joy. They weren’t as incongruous as they seemed; joy wasn’t happiness, I’d learned that long ago.
I ended by taking a sleeping pill. When the knocking woke me, I realised it must have been going on for some time.
9
It seems at first to be at the bedroom door, and I sit up in the state of fuddled terror such deep-night knocking always generates.
It’s still dark, and I switch on the bedside light. The small alarm clock shows five. The banging comes again, and now I realise it’s at the front door of the flat, booming in the old, high-ceilinged landing.
When I open the door, I find Patrick Dillon.
I blink at him, relieved that it’s no one more menacing. But he’s sweating, and his forelock hangs over his right eye: a touch of disarray in Patrick when he isn’t drumming, and concern surges back in me.
‘What’s wrong?’ I speak in a whisper. ‘What’s happened?’
‘It’s all right, Richard. Katrin’s OK, if that’s what you mean.’
His polite hissing, which smells of whisky, is only just audible. I have the impression he’s drunk, but holding it well. ‘She’ll be here today — so will Darcy. I flew back last night.’ He looks solemn. ‘I’m sorry to wake you up.’
He attempts his wide smile, but it fades quickly, and his brow looks narrow and puzzled. From inside this mask, he appears to be asking for something to stop.
‘I want you to come to the house at Palm Beach,’ he says.
‘Now?’
‘The car’s outside. Please, Dick. You have to come.’
The Barrenjoey Peninsula is different from the rest of Sydney. A long, slender dragon basking in the Pacific to the north of the city, it basks also in the illusion of a different latitude and a different time-zone.
The latitude is the South Seas; and the time, for the Peninsula’s cargo of beachside suburbs, is always holiday. Its temperatures are more equable than those of the city; in its humid warmth, bamboos, bananas and palms coexist with homely ironbarks and ghost gums. Houses are half-submerged in miniature jungles; orchids, gardenias and cannas blaze in its fortunate gardens: all the flowers of South East Asia, which suddenly seems as close as it is. Driving up the Peninsula, you are driving towards Asia.
On its inner side is the lake-like inlet of Pittwater, filled with safe yachts; on the ocean side are the big surf-beaches, tiny figures of boardriders fixed like dreams on the bottle-green prows of breakers, the sequences of red-gold sand running north in curve after curve: Newport; Avalon; Palm Beach. Tropical languor is dissolved in that foam, since the water contains a startling stream of cold: the Antarctic current that creeps up the east coast of the continent. Every bay has towering sandstone bluffs at each end, with faces like lions or gargoyles: stage-sets, where high shapes of spume rise like silent cries.
Patrick speeds us up the Barrenjoey Road in his red MG, driving into the sunrise. But now that he has me in the car, he can’t or won’t speak. He bites his lip, his eyes fixed on the road; he’s certainly half-drunk, and is driving very fast; although there’s little traffic at this hour on a Sunday, I’m concerned that he’ll smash. But after one vain attempt to slow him down, I’ve given it up.
Now I try a question. ‘What made you come back early?’
His mouth tightens; stubbornly, he doesn’t answer or look at me.
He’s plainly not to be reached, and I sit back. I’ve left a note for Katrin at the flat, telling her where I’ll be. We swerve through easy suburbs of low brick buildings, where palm trees throw fingers of shadow across the road: a wishful California, pale with salt. When the day advances, the naked, sand-gold young will walk the warm bitumen here, surfboards balanced on their heads, looking for a last big wave before autumn ends. The MG’s top is down; the tepid morning air is delicious.
Now we’re on the Whale Beach Road, humming around towering cliff-tops past the hanging villas of the rich, the fibro beach houses of humbler decades left behind. Here where the dragon’s body narrows at the neck, we’re nearing Palm Beach on the tip of the Peninsula, and a huge, heart-lifting expanse of ocean has opened up below, dark blue and green, inviting us to fly. Clouds out there are lava-gold with dawn; ochre and cream headlands like memory recede to Sydney. There’s a white half-moon.
Patrick decides to speak now, his face in profile. ‘We’re nearly there.’ His voice tries to reassure me, and I glimpse the beach’s line of red sand. Beyond it, the tied island of Barrenjoey stretches out its hammer-head to the tropics, and Sydney finally ends. But all this disappears as the road drops down through a miniature forest of palms, the dark green fronds glinting like glass.
‘I like it at the house. It’s the best place to get away,’ Patrick explains reasonably. ‘You haven’t been there, have you? I often meant —’ He breaks off, compressing his lips with an expression of impatience; he sniffs and takes deep breaths, and I suspect that he’s on something else besides whisky. His small double chin and the puffiness under his eyes make him look middle-aged; his young yellow hair flutters in the slipstream.
Now he takes a hand from the wheel, pulls out a handkerchief and blows his nose hard, wiping it for a long time. His eyes remain on the road. ‘There’s been an accident,’ he tells me. ‘Mother’s dead.’
I’m now aware of nothing but the strong smell of humus out here: a compound odour of tropical decay, wafting into the car as we drive.
‘She fell,’ he declares. ‘Deirdre fell and hit her head.’
‘Who was with her?’
‘No one. Only me.’ He sniffs back hard and looks quickly at me, hazel eyes wide; the tragic heroine confounded. There’s something indecent now about the quality and smartness of his sky-blue linen shirt. He’s wearing one of his fighter pilot’s scarves, loosely knotted; an orange one, today. ‘It was an accident,’ he repeats, and puts something into his mouth and chews.
Chewing, drawing uneven breaths, he pulls the car over to the edge of the road and switches off the engine. Then he puts his hand over his eyes, and sits quite still. The loud, monotonous calling of currawongs tears at the laden air, which is otherwise silent, and already growing warm. The time by my watch is seven-fifteen.
‘Are we here?’
He nods, his hands still hiding his face.
‘Is this where it happened?’
He shakes his head. Then, with sudden decision, he pulls out the ignition key, jumps from the car and runs across the road, reaching a white wooden gate. He opens it and disappears through, his yellow head quickly bobbing below the level of the road, disappearing.
I get out. The road’s quite deserted, and a big cream bungalow above it on this side has its blinds drawn. Because of the downward slope of the land on the ocean side, the gate over there apparently leads to nothing: it frames sky, treetops, and a dark blue horizon of sea.
I cross the road and pass through, closing the gate behind me.
A long flight of steps, made from wooden railway-sleepers set into the earth, descended into a gully. There was no sign of a house, or of Patrick.
I began to walk down, limping and jolting into a warm, muggy silence that enveloped me like sleep. The steps went into a tunnel; trees were its walls. To the right was a stand of giant bamboos some fifteen feet high; to the left, the smooth, leopard-like torsos of spotted gums, and the standards of more palm trees. The gully’s damp red floor was a tangle of morning glory, the electric-blue flowers flaring everywhere like lamps. The sea rumbled and sighed, out of sight. Mynahs and currawongs made their cries of empty concern.
The steps turned left past another palisade of bamboo, and now the house appeared, with a gabled roof of charcoal-grey tiles. Beyond was the sea and Barrenjoey Head again, its lighthouse visible through spindly Norfolk Island pines. I went on down, moving slowly.
Patrick’s inheritance was a large L-shaped villa of sandstone and white-painted brick. I remembered being told that his father had used it only in the summer; they had kept it closed up in the winter. When I walked across the flagstones leading to the front door, there was still no sign of Pat. I called, but got no answer. Bees buzzed in the baroque pink trumpets of azaleas; young orange trees stood in blue ceramic tubs. Everything said wealth, and nothing moved.
The varnished front door was an odd one for so elegant a house; it had a porthole of clear glass at eye level, set in a nautical brass frame. I peeped through, and found myself looking down a hallway. At the far end, windows framed a perfectly tended lawn; beyond this was the sea. A line of globular glass lamps hung from the ceiling; the wood-panelled walls had nautical decorations, like a seaside guest-house with pretensions: a barometer; framed prints of sailing ships. The door was locked, but I continued to peer at the view through the distant windows: the green lawn and open sweep of sea had the unreal perfection of a picture in a children’s book.
I walked around to the southern side of the house. There was no sign of a lawn here; instead, the garden descended the hill in terraces, ending in a grove of gums and cypresses, through which the sea could be glimpsed in blue shards. Immediately below me was a long swimming-pool, from which came portentous washing sounds: Patrick was breast-stroking across it, his hair darkened by the water. His clothes and a white terry-towelling beach-robe were neatly laid on a redwood chair at the edge. Pop music was coming from somewhere, at low volume.
I walked down a short set of steps. ‘You were quick,’ I said. The normality of my voice surprised me.
He smiled at me from the middle of the bright blue pool, and pointed to a pair of swimming trunks laid on another garden chair. ‘Come in,’ he said.
‘No thanks. We’d better talk.’ I took off my jacket and sat on one of the chairs, in the feathery shade of the casuarina.
He breast-stroked towards me, his face naked and happy. He seemed different; there was an ebullience I didn’t understand; an unsound gaiety. He climbed out, dried himself briskly, and put on his rich terry-towelling robe; he was smiling the Alan Ladd smile, but his eyes wouldn’t stay still. ‘I used to love coming here, as a kid,’ he said. ‘It seemed the only place to come, today.’ His voice trailed off and he looked down the garden, his smile fading as though he’d heard something; but there were only bird-calls. ‘No one knows we’re here,’ he said.
He walked over to a redwood table on which sat his silver whisky-flask, a transistor radio which was the source of the music, and a paper bag. He held out the flask. ‘Have a snort.’
‘At this hour?’
‘Please.’ He took the chair beside me, gesturing insistently with the flask. ‘You’ll need a drink, Dick.’ There was something wrong with his eyes; their variegated greens and yellows appeared to be dissolving, melting into each other.
He hadn’t agreed to our having a coffee before we left, he’d been too anxious to go; so I was glad now of the whisky, and took two large swallows. Immediately, I began to feel hopeful; I decided he was lying, or fantasising on hash: she wasn’t really dead.
He unscrewed the paper bag now, and took out two little cakes. One of these, which I saw was half eaten, he put into his mouth whole; then, cheek bulging, he held out the other. ‘Have a cookie.’
I was hungry, but I studied it dubiously. It was an odd-looking cake, round and dun-coloured, with darker flakes. ‘What is it?’
‘A cookie. I bought it at a health-food store. Good for you, Dick. Roughage.’
It tasted inoffensive enough, coarse and cardboard-like. He watched me chew, his eyes certainly not normal.
‘What are you on, Pat?’ I’d finished the cake, and brushed away the crumbs.
‘I’m just on cookies,’ he said.
I jumped from the chair and stood over him. ‘You stupid bastard,’ I said. ‘What was in that thing?’
He cowered as though I’d already hit him, and his face softened into totally childish lines. In a little voice, he said: ‘It’ll make things big or small; whatever you want.’ Then he giggled.
I grabbed the front of the terry-towelling robe and drew my fist back; my outrage at my own stupidity produced a lust to bully him, and I shouted at him again to tell me what I’d eaten. I probably had only a few more minutes before I was lost, here in this beautiful garden.
‘Just a few pieces of Darcy’s magic mushrooms,’ Patrick said. ‘That’s all.’ He still had his arm up to ward off a blow, but his eyes had grown drowsy, the lids drooping. ‘They won’t hurt you, Dick,’ he said. ‘They’re good magic, from the old Toadstool-god.’
I swore and let him go, and sank into my chair again. There was nothing to be done, and I asked him what the effects would be.
‘Nothing bad,’ he said. ‘The mushrooms will change things, that’s all.’
‘Tell me what happened to Deirdre. Tell me the truth, this time.’
I was leaning back in the chair, staring at the glinting blue oblong. The Beatles were on the radio singing ‘Ticket to Ride’, their poignant, famous voices mingling with the sea’s distant sighing.
‘All I really wanted was Europe. I belong there, not here. Would you believe how I love Greece? Something’s in the landscape that isn’t here. The air’s light, and the light’s magic. You should understand that, Dick. Darcy understands.’
The swimming-pool was growing smaller: all that was close to us grew distant; even Patrick’s flask on the table. I grew faintly nauseous, but wouldn’t give in to it.
‘Deirdre started to get afraid of Darcy. She liked him at first, but then she rejected him. Her soul was too small. She could have come with me to Greece, but she wouldn’t. It would have been like living in a vision.’
He was half turned to me, gripping the chair-arms, his face thrust pleadingly towards me. But I watched the swimming-pool, which had shrunk to a postage-stamp.
‘Deirdre understood, at first. She felt the action of the god inside us. Have you ever felt the liquid of the moon go into you? ’ His voice went up and down, sometimes reasonable, sometimes cajoling. ‘And then she turned into a silly, frightened, bourgeois woman worrying about money.’
‘Why did you come back early?’ My voice didn’t seem my own; it sounded inside my head. The nausea from Darcy’s little cake was growing.
He was silent; then he sighed. ‘Brian’s left us, did you know? And now Katrin won’t come to London either. R
oy Slade will never back us now: everything Darcy worked for’s ruined. But Darcy won’t give up; he says we have to form a new group. We need money to get to London, and Deirdre could have helped us; she could have made us free. I came back to talk to her about that. I wanted her to marry me, did you know? Yes, you know that, Richard. You know how I loved her.’
The thick autumn sun which had recently been pleasant now had a sickly glare: light in a photograph wrongly developed.
‘We stayed up late talking, but she wouldn’t listen. So I followed her.’
‘Followed her?’
‘I tried to reason with her, but she was violent. She smashed two of my records. They were King Olivers, irreplaceable.’
Now we were both enclosed in a bright, amazing bubble. I wanted to cry out, but couldn’t. I wasn’t sure whether Patrick would hear me if I spoke, and at the same time I saw him clearly in the house at Point Piper, going from room to room after Deirdre. Clutching at her moss-green dressing-gown, her blanched hair trailing, she tried to get away from him. He embraced her; he fell to his knees and buried his face against her belly; but she pulled away, drawing the dressing-gown together, her white face cruel to him.
‘She ran down through the garden on to the beach — being silly. It was warm last night, and no one was there but us. She ran away from me, and I had to get her back to the house. She was making a scene.’
Bright, merry specks began dancing in the air.
‘I tried to make her come back. Her dressing-gown was coming off, and there are houses there, neighbours. She seemed to be very light, just like a feather; she got away, and began to float. She really floated, Richard, right through the air. But she fell against a rock, and hit her head. It was an accident. An accident. They’ll believe that, won’t they? ’
‘Where is she now?’
‘In bed. In bed. No one will come. Not until Monday; Fiona’s away and no one will call in. She’s safe, in her room.’
He was getting up from his chair, hugging himself in the terry-towelling robe as though it had grown cold. And it had. In our bubble, we were being chilled to the bone; the leaves of the gums and the fronds of the palms were all glinting cold; the sun was cold.
The Doubleman Page 35
