She half-listened. 'It's probably why I became interested in the Green movement.'
'You don't say . . .'
'Towards the end, eucalypts - they were all she wanted to draw. Etching after etching.'
'I'd like to see those,' he said. 'God, I miss your mother,' with vehemence.
She nodded.
'Tell me, how did she die?'
'All I was told is that she had a heart attack. An accidental mix of prescription drugs. She had a raft of pills to keep her up, down and sideways.'
'I'm sorry,' and covered her hand with his. She moved to withdraw it, but, affected by the emotion in his voice, allowed it to stay there.
'She was only fifty-nine, but her liver was shot to pieces,' Jeanine said. 'Whether she died accidentally or on purpose, who cares? She'd reached a stage when it made no difference.'
He gave her fingers a tender squeeze.
When she looked around for something to wipe her eyes with, he handed her his napkin.
'What about Carl-Andrew?' he asked. 'Did your mother mention him ever?'
'No,' dabbing her eye.
'Don Flexmore?'
'No.'
'James Thetan?'
She shook her head. 'Sorry.'
Luther Azavedo, Wesley Stibbe, Simon Horner, Bijou Mandrake?
'Bijou? What kind of name is that?'
Her frown returned him to the table. He brought his chair closer. 'It's just that we were all at school together.'
She looked at him. 'Did you write their essays too?'
'Some of them. Some of them.'
'What did Xavier say?'
'Xavier?' releasing her hand.
'You went to see him just now.'
'Oh, yes. I wanted to involve him in my project to save those giant eucalypts.'
'He wasn't interested?'
'He suddenly remembered he had to do something . . . Then you came into my little world.'
'Honestly! That's so typical of Xavier! And you were at Oxford with him!'
His eye mechanically tracked the waiter who was wheeling in the cheese trolley.
But she was pensive. 'Maybe I should invest in your project.'
'You?' swinging his head back.
When she spoke, her voice was patient and serious. In a little less than six weeks' time, she stood to receive a sizeable sum from her father's trust fund. She had planned to invest in Henry's pioneering 'forest bond', but . . .
Across the table an eyebrow lifted.
Spontaneously, she said: 'I'd have to see the existing legislation, who has the rights to the forest.'
'No problem there. It's the indigenous people.'
'But you don't have indigenous roots.'
'Oh, dear girl, but I do.'
'You?'
'My grandmother,' with an air of unimpeachable gravity, 'was part Aborigine.'
She gazed at him with brown eyes the colour of new-hoed soil, full of tenderness.
'Tell me,' Wakefield said over a slice of cheddar, 'about your father.'
'My father?' her frown returning.
'You haven't mentioned him.'
'Why should I? I never see him.'
He selected another Bath Oliver. 'When did you see him last?'
'He walked out on us when I was ten.'
'You haven't been in touch since?'
'He didn't want us to meet.'
'I'm so sorry.'
'My mother impressed on me that the last thing in the world my father would have welcomed was for his only child to contact him. I don't even know where he lives. Somewhere in Australia. He only dealt with us through lawyers.'
'Oh, no, I don't think he's in Australia.' Taking another piece of cheese. Pleased by what she had revealed. By the indication of a tendency - which seemed to have dictated her interests since leaving school - to idealise and forgive everyone save her father. 'You may find he's closer to home than that.'
'What, you know where he is?'
'I have an inkling, let's say.'
She looked sharply up.
His face assumed the cast of a father confessor figure. 'What if I told you he's right here?'
'In London?' gaping.
'I can give you his address in Holland Park if you like.'
'That's impossible,' shaking her head, not wanting to allow her thoughts to go any further.
'More cheese? You must taste this one.' With his knife, he levered on to her plate, from his, a yellow Lancashire cream cheese made, he told her, by Butler's. He relaxed back in his chair, stroking his moustache, his tie. 'Before doing anything precipitate, it's always wise to eat cheese.'
Coffee taken, chit signed, Wakefield showed her upstairs to the library and the room where, he said, the Prince Regent was sitting when news reached him of the victory at Waterloo.
Tall windows opened onto a small balcony and they stood for a moment in the sun.
'Smell that air? Smell the lead in it?' He inhaled and thumped his chest and coughed. 'That's why we need to save that forest. Think how much healthier it would be if this square was full of ancient swamp gums instead of those . . . those manky oaks.' The wine had made him expansive. 'Why, they'd be pumping quantities of fresh air into the lungs of every man, woman and child in England. Plus it would be good for my angina.'
'Are you ill?' she touched his arm.
He coughed again. 'I do have to look after myself. But I mustn't complain. It's not so bad for me as for some of your father's victims.'
'What are you talking about?'
He gripped the stuccoed edge of the balcony and looked out over St James's Square. 'I shouldn't be telling you this, seeing as you're his daughter. But it sticks in my gullet what he did to those poor Armenians.'
'Which Armenians?' the strain of their conversation showing.
He suggested that they go down into the square, where, seated on a bench inside a mock Doric temple, and surrounded by secretaries eating their sandwiches, he elaborated.
'One of my assignments was to work for a Canadian mining company that had dealings with your father.' He coughed. 'I was their environmental adviser.'
Angry, upset, confused, she waited for him to resume, which he did in a regretful voice.
'Some years ago now, this company bought one of your father's mines - in Armenia, it was. Dreadful affair,' and shook his head. 'Whenever we had to speak to him, he was in a hotel in Burma. Even Rio Tinto refused to do business with that regime . . . But it sounds very much as if he did to those Armenians what he did to your mother, what it frightened her that he would do to you - if only he had the chance.'
'Go on . . .'
She heard him out, her emotions overcome by this stranger who in the course of two and a half hours had confirmed every single thing that her mother had said about her father.
What surprised Jeanine was that she warmed to Wakefield even more. She talked more freely, encouraged by proof of his interests, their shared concerns. She felt that she could trust him; he would be as good as his word.
An hour later, when, on the corner of King Street, she waved goodbye to him with the sheet of East India Club stationary on which he had written her father's address, she couldn't help but see through his solid, broad frame to that other man, the ogre of her adolescent years, with eyes black and unreflecting, so that it seemed a single tiger snake had taken possession of his skull and lay behind their empty sockets.
She gave a final wave and with reluctance turned and walked up King Street. She had not spoken to Wakefield about her mother, what she was like as a girl, but that could wait.
24
T HE DAY BEGAN COLD . In the afternoon it drizzled, and then the sun came out and for an hour it was unusually warm.
On the dot of six, a sober-dressed young woman squeaked open the metal gate and quickly climbed the steps. She kept her eyes down. Only when she raised them to the front door and saw the zodiac of stained glass, its blues and reds, did a memory shift.
This was the first time that Jeani
ne had returned to her childhood home. Out of some superstition, and in reaction to her mother's warnings, she had avoided this corner of London. The house held too many associations for her.
But now she made out, inlaid into the door, a herring-bone pattern of coloured glass. Memories sprang up to greet her like a kennelled dog. Maral's trembling hands. A child's green coat with an upturned collar - she felt its dampness rubbing the back of her neck and involuntarily hunched her shoulders. She reached out and pressed the instantly recognisable ding-dong of the doorbell.
Her eyes were open. She had rehearsed what she was going to say.
25
I NSIDE THE HOUSE , M AKERTICH prepared to receive the daughter he had not seen for eleven years.
Handkerchief in mouth, he had paced his study, rereading Jeanine's letter. The note was brief, but, he was pleased to observe, in an intelligent hand.
'Look, Maral, isn't that written by a bright girl, wouldn't you say?'
'She doesn't say very much,' she said cautiously, failing to keep the concern from her voice.
'Nonsense!'
There was no limit to the qualities that Makertich was able to read into those two lines, re-examining the handwriting for signs of character, evidence of determination, humour, honesty - and excusing his daughter that her letter was so short. Disappointed by its brevity, he was also touched by it.
'There's too much to say.'
Jeanine had written to remind him that in a few days she would turn twenty-one and this was an opportune moment to discuss her inheritance. She proposed coming to the house at 6 p.m. the following Wednesday. No mention of her mother's death.
'She wants to see me. It's just as I hoped. I upheld Cheryl's request and now she's coming back.'
Maral was despatched to the florist in Elgin Crescent with a mission to fill the house with lilies, irises and roses. She hoovered Jeanine's room, laid clean sheets on her bed. And spent Tuesday and a large part of Wednesday preparing a meal appropriate for the prodigal daughter.
Makertich hoped to persuade Jeanine to stay for dinner. He had a superheated discussion with Maral about what to serve her. Aged nine, she had been partial to cinnamon toast, lemonade and beetroot.
'We can't give her beetroot! Go to Lidgate's and order filet mignon.'
'And if she's a vegetarian?'
'To Portobello and buy the freshest vegetables.'
'What about to drink?'
'Leave the wine to me.'
'What if she's teetotal?'
'Then you and I will drink it, woman!'
Maral's questions, apart from emphasising how rarely he entertained, revealed that he knew virtually nothing about his daughter. Ever since Cheryl took her away, he had received no news, no photograph, no school report. Not one scrap.
Wednesday arrived.
He spent part of the morning sitting on her bed, leafing through her drawings, her books. He reread her holiday diary and smiled at an illustration, more cartoon really, of a girl fitted with metal fangs. He stood and looked at the images pinned to the cork board on the wall opposite. Although he had long ago put away his camera, he continued to change lenses in his head. But when he tried to capture Jeanine at twenty-one, his imagination faltered: he could not reach beyond the girl of ten. Any older, and he started to see a person resembling Cheryl at the age of their first encounter in the back of a Perth classroom.
Next, he shaved off the beard that had obscured his face since that appalling day eleven years ago. He looked different at sixty to the person who had hurried up his front steps holding a kitten and a bag of party balloons. His exposed cheeks, tingling with Floris shaving cream, had narrowed and darkened - they were almost as dark as his father's. His mouth had tightened. His eyes had set deeper in their sockets, with quills springing from the corners. What a horrible face. Guarded, clenched, light-deprived. Only his hair remained black and shiny. The colour of a cicada.
With a finger, he tugged down the skin below his left eyelid.
Jeanine was five when she caught him inserting his glass eye. He had not told her about his previous life as Krikor Makertich, still less about his Armenian and Turkish blood - he had been waiting until her confirmation. Tonight, over dinner, he would tell all. Also to himself before the mirror he said other words that he looked forward to repeating to Jeanine. He told her how sorry he was to hear that her mother, the love of his life, had died. He told her how in his bleaker moments the prospect of this reunion with his daughter had acted as his principal motive for living. There was also her inheritance to discuss - not only her trust fund, but the responsibility of his estate. So many things to talk about.
He was nervous, and also jolly. Maral had not for many years seen him in such good humour. The rain stopped, the warm sun came slanting in through the windows. And still he could not decide what to wear.
'Which one, which one?' And instantly changing it.
'He was like an adolescent choosing the right shirt and jacket for a dance. My instinct warned him not to expect too much, but he glowered that I was being too Armenian.'
'Tell me, Maral, what do you think she will see?'
'She will see her father.'
The bell sounded as he patted his jacket, checking the pocket.
'Maral! She's here!'
26
T HREE STEPS AT A time, he came down the staircase. But already Maral was opening the front door.
A confident young woman strode past her, into the hall, in the same moment as Makertich reached the bottom of the stairs.
The way he held on to the handrail - steadying himself against his irresistible compulsion to enfold her in his arms, and against a negative force, almost as powerful, that was set on repulsing him.
She glanced around at the paintings in the hall - two studies of Ned Kelly by Sidney Nolan, a gouache by Ian Fairweather and a portrait of William Dampier - before her eyes settled on Makertich.
He was staring at her in wonder.
His daughter.
She did not look filial. Her eyes emboldened in black eyeliner; her dark hair parted, and wearing a formal black coat that embodied her grief and anger.
He let go the handrail and flew across the hall towards her. 'My darling, my dearest.'
'It was painful to see. All that withheld love overspilling. It would have touched the most vicious heart.'
Ignoring his outstretched arms, Jeanine stepped to one side and said in a stinging voice: 'Please don't!'
He was not listening. 'Why don't we go upstairs -' where we will be more comfortable, he was about to say.
She cut him short. 'I won't stay. I'm here to deliver this message. I am disinheriting you. I don't want another penny from you.'
He stood still, open-mouthed.
Her look was piercing. 'I've been wanting to talk to you face to face. I still can't believe you were here all along. I can't believe you made no effort to get in touch.'
'It was your mother's wishes.'
'My mother's wishes,' her eyes despising him. 'You know what she used to say to me? "You watch it - or he'll ruin your life the way he ruined mine."'
'Believe me, Jeanine, I'm the first person who would have wanted it otherwise,' he said, feelingly.
But the anger in her voice was also genuine, nourished by all the sinister suspicions that fear and her mother and Kes had put into her head.
'You're a con man , Mr Makertich.'
'Jeanine, no!' Maral cried.
'Let me finish,' pushing Maral away and turning back to face him. 'Your money's tainted. You can't tread anywhere on this planet without leaving a trail of poison.'
'What are you talking about?' Impressed that his daughter had developed into this passionate woman, but horrified to have her scorn and hostility directed at him.
'You threw us out with no more consideration than you ejected those villagers.'
'What villagers?'
'You poisoned our lives just as you poisoned that lake.'
'What lake!'<
br />
'Did you or did you not own the Xemu open-cast copper mine on the edge of Lake Sevan?'
'Lake Sevan?' He lowered his forehead. 'I once owned a copper mine there, yes, but it had another name.'
'Oh, like you?' she laughed, and launched into the speech she had prepared.
'Hang on, hang on,' he said, once Jeanine had delivered her diatribe. 'Now I know what you're talking about. But all this must have happened after I sold the mine.'
'It's not what Kes says.'
'Kes? Kes who?'
'Kes Wakefield. I'm helping him to set up a business. The reason I've come here this evening is to let you know how I intend to distribute the money in my trust fund.'
'And what does he do, this Kes Wakefield?'
'He's an environmentalist like me. Dedicated to stopping priceless trees from being logged.'
'What kind of trees do you and Kes propose to save?'
'Eucalypts.'
His head took it in before his heart. He looked at her with a dull and strange detachment and apparent calm, and then his heart started beating wildly.
'This Kes - have you known him long?'
'I don't think it's any of your business.'
He was having difficulty breathing. 'When did you meet him? What does he look like?'
'It's a little rich, don't you think? Interest in my personal life after eleven years of complete indifference -'
'Don't you see! This wasn't an accident. He sought you out.'
'I don't know why I'm telling you this,' in the overly grown-up voice of someone trying to project a more knowledgeable self, 'but he's asked me to move in with him.'
'Jeanine, you must not!' his face now pale with horror.
'Maybe I will, maybe I won't. It's not for you to say.'
When he still had her in his sight, all was not lost. But she was preparing to leave.
'Wait!' He put his hand into his pocket and produced a small packet and stretched out his arm to her. 'I kept this for you . . . for your birthday.' And when she recoiled: 'It belonged to my grandmother.'
She wavered.
'Please - take it.'
She grabbed it and looked at him and said: 'I'm glad I came. It's good to lay ghosts to rest. For me, you are dead.'
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