Secrets of the Sea

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  He turned the page.

  A warning not to drink the town water. A theft from the bowls club: still no arrest. The local cricket league scores. Sergeant Finter, the lumbering policeman in whose team Alex used to play as a ten-year-old, had scored fifty-four against Swansea. And a poem by Agnes who ran the Op-Shop, a sterilised but nevertheless musty room where Alex had handed over all his parents’ clothes.

  A white shape went by. He looked up in time to see a van reversing a trailer with quite a nice-looking speedboat towards the jetty. On the side of the van italic letters spelled out THE LONG HAUL, and beneath: Jos. Silkleigh removals. The van stopped on the ramp and a man in a wetsuit climbed out to unhitch the floating boat, a twenty-foot runabout with a navy-blue hull and trim. He tied her expertly to the jetty. Alex was impressed. It was a cloudless day. The man was going snorkelling. Alex envied him.

  He blew on his tea. Beneath Agnes’s poem, the next meeting of the Wellington Point reading group: Mavis Pidd will speak about her recently released autobiography: “A Self-Published Life”. There was a column on the Summer Flower Show. Mrs Fysshe had taken second prize in the forced rhubarb category. Alex was reading how Harry Ford had won the Betsy Grogan Cup for his assorted chutneys when a face came up to the window.

  It was–not immediately, but in lapping ripples–the young woman whom he had helped up onto the fence.

  She peered inside. He hoped for a second it was at him, but whoever it was her blue eyes sought she did not see them, and then it became her own reflection that she needed to vet.

  He sat very still as she stared at herself, the candid expression of someone who did not know that she was being watched. This afternoon she wore a tortoiseshell comb in her hair, but no lipstick.

  Alex was aware of a surge in his chest. Then a voice whisked her round and she was adjusting to an athletic figure who crossed the road at a gallop. Ray Grogan in his brown suit and neat ginger moustache. And–on this particular afternoon–a gold stud in his right ear. Looking at her like a mink about to take a sea trout.

  He felt himself rise to his feet as the two of them came inside.

  “Hi, Alex,” said Ray with a hint of animus, and piloted her to the most distant table.

  Alex could not hear their conversation, but he saw that from time to time Merridy shook her head. Ray worked in Tamlyn & Peppiatt on the main street–selling and managing farms far and wide, organising home loans and dealing with holiday rentals–but it was easy to see him on a beach, cutting the throat of a bushranger for the reward while the kookaburras croaked their encouragement. Ray with his glib talk was the only man in town whom Alex categorically disliked.

  Then Ray got up and swaggered across the room as if he were in Parliament and not in a teahouse on the east coast, and through the door that led to the toilet outside.

  She was staring at the table.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Hi.” Not looking up.

  “Alex Dove. I met you the other day.”

  “I know,” in that voice. “You live at Moulting Lagoon.” She lifted her head.

  “Anything wrong?” he asked.

  “Not really.”

  “Ray doing a Ray?”

  “What’s a Ray?”

  “If you don’t know, you’re in the middle of it.”

  She laughed.

  “He’s sure got the magic touch,” Alex said.

  She rocked back in her chair. “Oh, come on. Don’t wind me up. He caught me with my guard down. I should have told him to get lost.”

  “Why don’t you?”

  “I didn’t want to offend him, but there’s a certain type of pushy fellow who gets up my nose. I hate feeling passive like that.”

  “Hi, Mr Dove.”

  Alex looked around reluctantly.

  A boy stood in the centre of the tearoom.

  “Rob, if it’s your mum you’re after, she left ten minutes ago.”

  The boy went on standing there with a timid expression. “Hey, I just wanted to thank you for the other day. It was tops.”

  “Glad you had a good time,” and explained to Merridy: “Rob came out with his school and watched the sheep being dipped.”

  “And how to mark them!” raising his leg. Scrawled on his jeans, a faded orange D.

  Alex smiled. “You realise what that means, don’t you? Now you’ll have to work for me. Come again in shearing time and you can write it on a sheep.”

  When Rob had left, Alex told Merridy how just after Christmas the school’s Deputy Head had telephoned him. There had been a falling-out with Jack Fysshe and they were looking for someone to take children in the holidays around a working farm.

  Alex had given over a day to Rob’s class. He had ridden them each on his tractor. He had lifted them all onto a horse and then shown them how to milk a cow.

  She said: “That was kind of you.”

  “Not really. In England, that’s what I was going to be, a teacher,” and leaned forward. “What were we talking about?”

  “Ray.”

  “Oh, God…” he groaned. “What did he want? What does Ray ever want?” Women somehow did not wish to be attracted to him, but were. By and large, men, of course, found him odious and shallow and vain, but women didn’t see that–until it was too late. Merridy, being a little brassier, a little brittler and more consciously tough than most girls in this town, might prove an exception to Ray’s motto that a cock could never have too many hens.

  “He’s invited me to the Jazz Social,” Merridy said.

  “But you won’t go?”

  She gazed at Alex and with a slow motion shook her head. But the exasperation might have been aimed at him.

  His cheeks boiled. He glanced down at the plastic bag at his feet, containing three bottles retrieved from a bin behind the hotel.

  “Would you come out for a meal one night?” he said.

  “You mean with you?” Not unkindly, but surprised.

  “Right. With me.”

  She went on sipping at him. It had surprised her less to discover that he had slept with Tildy. At the time when she removed her shoe, she knew nothing about him, but his hands were clearly pleased. “He seems nice,” she had said, putting her shoe back on.

  “He is. Thoroughly,” Tildy had murmured, her interest already shifting to what was happening over the fence. “But it was never going to work out. Even I could see that. I just knew my mother would have really liked him.”

  Across the table, Alex was smiling. Enjoying her forthright stare.

  She thought, looking at him: From the moment I arrived in this place, men have not stopped hitting on me. But Alex’s smile inspired confidence. She felt a mysterious sense of relief to see him there. He was tentative and she liked that. And withdrawn. A self-sufficient man but kind, who grazed his cattle and was educated. So Tildy had led her to believe. “He was going on about this ruddy novel. The way he talked about that book, I reckon he’d have preferred to take it to bed rather than me!”

  Merridy recalled Tildy’s indignation and thought of a book she had herself been reading the night before–a reprint on sale in the hotel, written by a Victorian settler to this coast, Louisa Meredith. She had not bought it, but would read a few pages whenever she was not having to help Debbie with the dishes, and it made her tingle with wisdom and unspecified fine feelings. And gentility and uprightness. Everything, in fact, that she had hoped to experience at university.

  Yes, I’ll come for a meal, under the influence of her book. Is what she meant to say.

  “Hey, leave my girl alone!”

  She turned her head towards the handsome shouter in his shiny brown tailor’s cloth.

  “Not your girl, Mr Grogan,” she said.

  “You don’t know what you’re missing,” replied Ray and glared at Alex. He resumed his place and squeezed her arm with a hand that was large and clean and scrubbed of the blue biro that Alex remembered from the classroom, covered with the correct spellings of English kings and queens a
nd, on one occasion, English trees.

  She lowered her head, but did not withdraw her arm.

  “Bye, then,” said Alex.

  “Bye,” ordered Ray, clicking his teeth.

  Alex looked at them for a moment. He gathered up his bottles and left.

  Unable to shake off the sight of Ray Grogan’s ginger-freckled fist on Merridy’s arm, Alex walked fast from the teahouse and along the footpath that seemed to sway under him like the suspension bridge in the school playground.

  The wide shy street was quiet, and behind the hedges and the Norfolk Island pines the owners of the single-storey houses had one eye on the cricket and one on the thin drift of smoke from their barbies. In the early morning the street would stir with log-trucks heading out for Hobart, but at five in the afternoon Wellington Point contained the promise of the empty road and the faint sewerage smell of seaweed that presaged rain.

  Doing his very best to think of anything, anything but the real-estate agent, Alex made his way past the school, along the esplanade, and towards the jetty and the street where he had parked his ute. The tide was out, the sun catching the white tips of the low waves and the mauve dorsal of the peninsula. However down at heart Alex might get to feel on the farm, he would never tire of this view–unlike certain of his schoolmates. He knew one or two who preferred nothing more than to sit slumped with their backs to the bay, their heads in the Mercury or peering through wreaths of home-grown marijuana at porn videos bootlegged from Canberra.

  A branch creaked above him. The air had been still when he entered the teahouse, but a breeze had blown up. He opened the door of his ute and stopped. The noise of the wind in the pines. Grit in his face. An ice cream wrapper sucked up into the sky. He closed the door and walked on. The thought of the snorkeller drawing him down the concrete boat ramp and onto the jetty.

  It was a saw of Miss Pritchard’s geography class that the next land mass south was the polar ice cap. As always when Alex walked out on the eighty-yard-long jetty, he was aware of being at the end of the line. With a keener pang than normal, it struck him–surveying the horizon–that he really did live in one of the earth’s more remote places. One of the more unvisited, too.

  Until the road was finished in 1911, the town was reachable from Hobart only by horse and cart, or by sea: a journey taking up to three days, the steam packet sailing down the Derwent, round the Iron Pot lighthouse, past Betsy Island, Blackjack Reef and across Storm Bay to the canal at Dunalley, coming out north of Eaglehawk Neck, round Hellfire Bluff, through Mercury Passage to Swansea and Wellington Point.

  Though this jetty was still here, where the scallop boats had unloaded, the bay had silted up. South-easterly breezes with sand-bearing waves had shallowed what was two fathoms of water at the time of the packet to a mere three feet, so that only shoal-draught boats could tie up alongside. At weekends, out-of-towners launched their tinnies from the ramp, anchoring off Dolphin Sands to catch flat-head, but vessels with a keel avoided Oyster Bay. Talk of a marina every few years invariably petered out in agreement that whoever was going to build it would have to construct an overlapping groin on the other side of the promontory–and have mighty deep pockets. Wellington Point boasted no such entrepreneurs and probably would not have made one coming in from outside welcome. As Alex’s father had soon discovered, this was not a Yorkshire village bobbing with life and fishing boats. It was a town on the sea without sea-life, affected by the same elements that affected the farm; and was vulnerable–even on the clearest, calmest day–to southerly busters from Antarctica. Fierce, sudden winds that gusted up without warning, driving the surface of the sea into the bay and giving rise to extreme tides and flooding.

  Perhaps this explained Alex’s sudden concern for the snorkeller. He had known too many occasions when a mainlander or tourist had misread the weather conditions and set out across a perfectly calm sea, expecting the calmness to last through the weekend.

  He reached the end of the jetty–four corroded planks–and looked out, his eyes sweeping the bay for a solitary blue-and-white hull. Past Maria Island, the Hen and Chicks, Schouten…but it was no good. All he could see was a young woman sitting at a table. And Ray.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  SIMPLY TO TOUCH HER reluctant flesh gave Ray a jolt of comfort. He was desperate to seduce Merridy. She had come into his office two weeks ago, on a mild afternoon in early February, wheeling her invalid father.

  Ray leaped up, in his enthusiasm to close the door almost slamming it against a foot. He peered around it to see a thin woman, dressed in loose-fitting nylon slacks with an onyx crucifix dangling from her throat.

  “You must be Mrs Bowman,” and flashed her an indulgent look. “Please, come in.”

  Still she stood there in her trance. Her face white and lined, with nostrils nipped in and eyes red-rimmed from weeping.

  “Mum, this is Mr…”

  With no effort he shifted his smile to the young woman. “Ray Grogan. But please call me Ray. As in sunshine.”

  “We’ve come to inspect one of your retirement units,” Merridy continued flatly. “I believe Mr Framley has been in touch.”

  She wheeled her father up to the desk.

  “Ah, yes, yes,” Ray addressed the wheelchair. “We’ve been expecting you, Mr Bowman. Welcome to the heart of Tasmania’s relaxed east coast!”

  Mr Bowman looked rotten. On this afternoon, he was in pain with a bloodshot eye after he had tried to join his wife and daughter at breakfast and had fallen getting out of bed. His second accident in a week.

  Ray asked cheerily: “Can you see me, sir?”

  A slow shake of the head.

  Ray turned his attention back to Merridy. “I think you’ll be pleased with the unit. It’s a pioneering scheme. I like to describe the philosophy behind it as ‘independence with a sense of well-being’.”

  He fished in a drawer for a set of keys. “Shall we walk or shall I drive you?”

  “Well, where is it? How far?”

  “End of the street and across the cricket pitch.”

  “We’ll walk,” decided Merridy. “The air might do my father good.”

  In the eight hundred yards from the office to the retirement unit, Ray sought to engage Merridy in conversation.

  Already from Keith Framley, her relative, Ray had learned a fair amount. Merridy’s father–the man she propelled up the footpath–had been a mechanical engineer who was electrocuted in Zeehan while installing a lift in the tin mine there. The shock had brought on an aneurysm that slurred his speech. He couldn’t complete the simplest sentence–humiliating for someone remembered by Tildy’s father as a man who enjoyed nothing more than to recite poetry.

  Because of his accident, Mr Bowman’s wife, from whom he had been separated, had come back to look after him–as had his daughter, who had taken a year off from her studies at Melbourne University.

  “It must be tough for you, leaving your course like that,” glancing sideways with keen green eyes.

  “I was only in my first year,” she said crisply, all her concentration on the asphalt ahead.

  “Keith speaks very highly of your Dad.”

  “My father helped him early on.”

  “Keith says he remembers your Dad always with a book of poetry in his hand.”

  “Then he’s exaggerating.”

  “I like poetry myself, I used to read it aloud at school,” Ray sailed on. “Did–does your Dad like anyone in particular?”

  Merridy twisted her head to look at Ray. “Well, a favourite is Edward Lear.”

  “Edward Lear?” his eyes boring into hers. He touched his moustache, a soulful expression on his face. “Now that does ring a definite bell.”

  The property to which Ray escorted the Bowmans was called “Otranto”, a modern one-storey villa behind Louisa Meredith House. The nursing home had funded the building of three “independent self-care living units”, according to Ray’s description in the brochure, of which this one was still for sale. Keith, a s
econd cousin of Merridy’s father, was on the charity’s board. As soon as he learned of her husband’s accident he had telephoned Mrs Bowman and encouraged her to bring Leonard immediately to Wellington Point to convalesce, even as he had brought Mrs Framley. The Bowmans could stay at his hotel free of charge while they inspected the unit or until other appropriate accommodation was found. He defied them not to adore Wellington Point. Its recuperative air had performed minor but measurable miracles for his late wife, even if it could not in the end prevent the cancer from spreading to her brain. “It’s heaven on a stick! Reminds a lot of people of the Bay of Naples.”

  “Naples,” said Mrs Bowman.

  From Zeehan, Merridy called to enquire if there was anything she could do to repay his kindness.

  “Nothing!” said Keith, who had never forgotten how helpful her father had been when a bed & breakfast had come up for sale in the Bowmans’ street in Ulverstone. “Nothing at all.”

  But a day later he telephoned to crave a favour. What he wondered was, would Merridy be willing to help out in his newly opened cocktail bar.

  Ray drew back the melon-pink curtains and stepped aside for Mrs Bowman to take in the view of Oyster Bay that was only partially obscured by an ochre wall. Beyond the wall was a close-cropped lawn where two people squatted dressed in white.

  “It’s close to medical facilities. And while you’re here you don’t pay rates, Hydro, only your own phone bill. Plus, there’s a nurse-call system for emergency,” and indicated a button on the wall above the pneumatic hospital bed.

  Mrs Bowman bent down–crucifix swinging–to her husband. “What do you think, Leonard? Would this suit?”

  From the wheelchair came a whining noise incomprehensible to Ray. He paused to plump up a pillow and waited until Mr Bowman fell silent before tapping the door-frame. “The unit is constructed throughout in environmentally friendly materials to minimise energy usage, and there’s an irrigated drip system in the landscaped garden. The whole idea is to make you feel very much at home.”