Secrets of the Sea

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  “What other reason could there be?”

  He pretended to study Tildy, who was pretending to talk to the Welsh sisters, although her body faced the wrong way.

  “That’s not kind,” he murmured, hurt, and yet Merridy’s annihilating laugh only intensified the appeal of her. He looked at her bust pushing against her damp blue dress. And gave one fiftieth of his concentration to her cousin across the yard and even less to the horizon that he decided to address.

  “Merridy, look at the sea, it goes on and on to the South Pole and makes me feel a grain of sand.” He adopted a pensive expression and wished that it would stop drizzling. He was talking like a version of himself that he would like to be. It sounded OK. It felt good. He could not understand why she was still laughing. But he was not in her fantastical scheme.

  Five days after his party, Ray was removing the details of “Otranto” from his office window when he caught sight of Merridy standing on her own outside the Bethel Teahouse. He seized the moment.

  “Hey, Merridy!”

  “Oh, Ray. Hi.”

  “What are you up to?”

  “I’m looking for my mother, actually.”

  “Let me buy you a coffee. There’s something I want to ask you.”

  “What?” standing her ground.

  “Do you like jazz?” and pushed open the door.

  “It depends. Why?”

  “Come on in and I’ll tell you.”

  He could have done, though, without Alex Dove sitting there to witness his humiliation.

  “Who was that?” asked Merridy to break the silence after Alex had disappeared out of the Bethel with his clinking bag. She knew, but was curious to know more.

  “That,” Ray said, “is Piers Dove.”

  “Piers Dove?” At the same time thinking: But Tildy called him Alex.

  “Oh, I can tell you about Piers Dove,” too pleased at the sight of her attentive face to be alert to the reason.

  “Then tell me.”

  “He’s a Pom,” said Ray philosophically. “Although we were at school together.”

  “He looks all right.”

  “Yeah, in his sleep,” with a murky smile.

  “And where does he sleep?”

  “Over at Moulting Lagoon.”

  “With someone?”

  “Lives on his own. TV reception’s not good. Nor is the bore-water.” He grinned, squeezing her arm. “He was crazy even before his parents had an accident,” and with his free hand tapped the side of his temple.

  She cocked her head. “What accident?” interested where before she had been merely curious.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  TALBOT’S STORE

  We apologise for any inconvenience caused by the refurbishment of the food aisles. From March 3, Bread and Cereals will be relocated to Toiletries.

  Deadline for the March 9 Newsletter: Tuesday, March 1, 5 p.m. All notices and advertisements to Mr Talbot. Donations to offset the cost of production are welcome. Ed.

  The binoculars tracked Alex to the end of the jetty with the same attention as they had observed him reappear in Wellington Point after an absence of twelve years. The scuttlebutt was that young Mr Dove would be gone back to England by the end of the week, once he had sorted out his affairs. Mr Talbot had heard this from his manager, Fred Coggins.

  That was four years ago.

  Whatever Albert Talbot made of Alex’s behaviour, he was unlikely to say. It was his inflexible habit never to make comments about what people did. Only to watch, listen, remember–as in his wartime watches.

  “You have one instruction, Sergeant Talbot. And you will reissue it to yourself every morning until the war is over: Make yourself invisible. That way you won’t get caught, and you certainly don’t want to get caught, son, take it from me. My advice to you, furthermore, would be to keep your head well down vis-à-vis the natives, too. If you’re going to live in the bush, you’ve got to have a very, very clean nose. That means: Don’t fraternise, don’t take them to your hidey-holes, and–above all–don’t borrow any of their women. Natives don’t like that, Talbot. But tell you what I do want to see when you get back. I want to see bruises all over your head and body. That’s where the wild animals have bumped into you because you’ll be invisible.”

  These had been his orders from Lieutenant Black, a compact watchful type himself who had picked Sergeant Talbot to be the radio-op–“because,” he said, “you get on with people.” They had met when Albert was taking his St John’s Ambulance certificate.

  Dropped ashore in Jacquinot Bay, Albert had followed Black’s orders to a tee. Safe as in church when sitting up there in the thick scrub, beneath a ceiling of sago palms and a red-and-blue silk parachute in which to catch the creepy-crawlies–or to cut clothes from. Living on swede and yams and dehydrated American rations as he crouched there–with no weapon, with nothing but his brass binoculars–behind a screen of vines and long grass, tracking the least movement of the Japanese. Where they ate, slept, the planes that flew over, the warships that stopped off in Rabaul, plus anything untoward. And twice a day reporting back what he saw on his ATR4 radio, in a code derived from sentences taken from a by-now damp copy of Agatha Christie’s The Secret Adversary, the words coming back to him in stray and disembodied phrases upon which once upon a time hung the freedom of the Christian world and now no longer made the slightest sense…“Repulsive goes the Whole Hog.”

  Half a century on, Sergeant Talbot’s radio was now his Newsletter. Together with the general store, it defined his life. Because, wisely or not–and he thought, on balance, not–he had obeyed Lieutenant Black’s other stricture: about keeping away from women.

  He had had opportunity and provocation galore. In the light of his first-aid training, he was expected to perform minor medical procedures on the natives. Alerted by drums, the women would walk for two days. They came down from the hills and lined up for him. Bent over, each carrying her child in a bilum, taking the weight of the string bag in a broad strap around her forehead. They were finely built women, with bold brown eyes that looked straight into his, and black hair that he wanted to touch. He conversed easily with these women–he knew them as meri–and spoke to them in proper pidgin taught by the missionaries. They were so immediately welcoming that he did not have to navigate a whole lot of prejudices, because they did not appear to have any. Many had been tortured to extract information about Australians. He dressed their spear cuts and bullet wounds. He drained their hands which sometimes blew up huge, like inflated rubber gloves. He injected them against fevers and yaws. And yet he had not known intimacy with a single meri. (There had been one never-to-be-forgotten occasion when, yes, he had known the desire, but the Japanese had put paid to that.) With the consequence that Sergeant Talbot’s detachment had got to be a habit. Educated not to be an encumbrance, he had not been one. But as he grew older he had come bitterly to wonder if, all things considered, he mightn’t have preferred to swap his very clean nose for the excitement and mess of an involved heart. The mess that he watched unfold below day by day, and now in Alex Dove.

  At the end of the jetty, Alex could see no sign of the snorkeller’s boat.

  Meanwhile, the wind had toughened, hurling the waves against the pylons and bringing the first pellets of rain. They stung his cheek in the same instant that he heard the whoosh of something rushing past–and a flock of tiny birds flew out of the sun from the direction of Schouten Island.

  The end of February and the swifts had come back, their colours radiant as if polished by the breeze on the long journey south. He followed them, one curved wing beating faster than the other, as he had watched them with his father on the top of Barn Hill. Alex had not known his father well, but there were things he had said that Alex could never forget. “Main point in life is to experience life. Some of those swifts may have flown from as far afield as Mongolia to warn us.” For they were storm-signal birds, heralds of a humid north-easterly. When you saw them circling high in a thermal and l
istened to their shrill twittering, it would be only minutes before you heard the first crack of summer thunder.

  Immediately, black thoughts flurried in on the backs of the birds. A cramped apartment in a red-brick mansion block in south London. The gloomy, low-ceilinged room and the lift, a vertical coffin that shuddered up past metal grilles through which his eyes fell on tense faces.

  He thought: No, I love this place.

  Alex felt good. Better than felt. Less than an hour ago, when he had pushed open the door into the teahouse, he was on the point of believing in everything that Ray Grogan said about him. He was a misfit. He would never make a good farmer. He might as well chuck it in and go back to London to teach. But now he was happy. Happy at the sight of the swifts and also at the prospect of a little more rain to put a tinge back on the paddocks. Above all, happy to think of the black-haired young woman in the Bethel. Her smile returned to him over Ray Grogan’s arm, a dim light flashing its enigmatic message across the darkening water.

  He turned, walked back, crossed Greer Street–a short road with three parked cars and Sergeant Finter eating flat-head–and climbed into his ute and drove home. Twenty minutes on and he still could feel a strange flicker inside him, like the jet of blue flame in the shape of a human figure that in his boyhood Bill Molson, his parents’ immediate neighbour, claimed to have observed hovering above the marshes behind Moulting Lagoon; at least, that was the story.

  Nor had this feeling diminished when Alex woke. As the day wore on, the prospect of seeing Merridy Bowman pushed every other thought from his head.

  Until he met Merridy, Alex had not pictured the kind of woman with whom he wished to share his life, how she might look. Now he discovered her traces everywhere; in the colour of the sand blown up from the beach; in the swallows under the eaves on the back deck; he even heard her voice in the iron windmill. When a helicopter tilted over the house towards Wellington Point he thought maybe she was looking up at it, too.

  The next time he saw her in town, bustling out of Tamlyn & Peppiatt surprisingly early on a Thursday morning, she was the averted glance across the road. Walking a purposeful walk that he would have run eight miles to see.

  “Hey, Merridy!” He started towards her with the exaggerated carelessness of someone on a vital mission, exhilarated.

  She turned. Looking different in profile. Surprised perhaps by his childish trick of opening his arms to attract attention.

  “That meal,” he said. His breaths came quick. It was absurd how nervous he was. He was seven or eight years older than her, dammit!

  “What meal was that?”

  He knew what he wanted to say, but it came out wrong. “The other day. I asked you out for a meal.”

  “Oh, yes,” and gave a smile in which there was reticence and relief.

  “I was wondering if you would take me up on it…” But his words did not fit. They had the looseness of a borrowed garment. He felt them drop about his ankles.

  She rescued him. “When would you like?”

  “Any time. Are you free Saturday?”

  “Where?”

  He faced the street for inspiration. “What about…what about…I know–the hotel?”

  She looked at him with a curious expression and seemed on the verge of saying something.

  “Or would you prefer somewhere else? Swansea perhaps?”

  “No, no, I’ll see you at the hotel.”

  The reason for Merridy’s distractedness was the embarrassing night that she had spent with Ray Grogan, the culmination of his energetic campaign to lure her into an empty bedroom in a Tuscanised brick bungalow south of Wellington Point.

  He had focused his attentions on her ever since she turned down his invitation to the Jazz Social, sauntering every lunchtime into the cocktail bar on no provocation and ordering a ten-ounce of Boag’s that she had little alternative but to pour. And then, because there was never anyone other than himself to serve, engaging her in soft, beseeching talk.

  It was perfectly, painfully obvious that Ray’s flattery was habitual. It was his vernacular; he was not expressing his passion for her, but making the bed for its possibility, uttering ridiculous compliments in a steady flow until she no longer heard them. She beat him away, and still he came back. He was robust in the face of rejection, and that was somehow attractive.

  Failing to interest her in the more recondite aspects of the local property market, Ray resorted to the dependable formulae that he employed for seduction. The lines tripped from his lips with the same ease as the phrases that came to him at his desk and that he taped to the windows of Tamlyn & Peppiatt.

  “Confidentially,” he said, “how would you like to go out with me?”

  She gave him a disagreeable smile. “I don’t think so, Mr Grogan. Ginger men always fall for me, but I can’t stand them.”

  “I’ll dye my hair for you,” he proposed.

  She looked at the stud in his ear. Debbie had told her that he had bought it to celebrate the sale of “Otranto”: “Green, pink, purple, orange, I won’t change my mind.”

  “Come on, Merridy, at least call me Ray,” he pleaded. “I’ll show you a wonderful time, really I will,” he whispered in a humid, tropical breath, a root-rat with a gold stud. He sensed that this was the wrong tack to take with Merridy, but by force of habit found himself heading there. “Every passionate relationship I’ve had has begun passionately,” he confessed. “But nothing to compare with this, Merridy. Nothing.”

  “Give me one reason why I should believe a word you say. One good reason.”

  “No, you’re right, perhaps you shouldn’t. Yet perhaps you want to. What’s more, perhaps you need to.”

  She laughed. “I’ve never heard such bullshit.” She had met his type in her first year at uni. Ray was an acupuncturist who knew nothing about women, but knew by dull rote the seven spots where to touch them so that in surprisingly more instances than not, and against every instinct, their cheeks dimpled and their skin tingled in a strange way up the insides of their legs.

  “You’re a clever girl, Merridy. All the same, I’d feel sorry to be your partner.”

  “Is that so?”

  “You know what they say: If you wish to be loved, love.”

  “‘They say’ is a big liar.” Then: “Have you been reading a manual?”

  “You mustn’t, Merridy,” with a grave face, “judge me by your past experiences.”

  And so uninsultably on he went. He had the resilience of the punching bag that he was rumoured to keep in his gym. It meant that Merridy could be rude to him and say what she really thought–without that penetrating either.

  Until the moment came when she decided that the only way to tackle Ray Grogan was head on.

  One Tuesday noon, he struck a match against the convict brick and studied the flame with an earnest expression.

  “You’re not going to smoke, are you?” she said. “I hate smoking.”

  “I do appreciate, Merridy, that we don’t have much to offer you here.”

  “What do you mean?” at this new departure.

  “Well, you’re beautiful, you’re intelligent,” tuning his voice to a concerned note. “You should be at university, not stuck in Wellington Point.”

  “I have to be here. My father’s dying.”

  “But one day, maybe sooner than you think, you’ll have to think of yourself. And if you look at everyone in Wellington Point, which is a small place, and you take away the gays and the lesbians, of which there are an inappropriately large number, and then you take away the happily married men, of which there are quite a few by the way–that’s all they know!–and then you take away the many no-hopers–the drunks, the drugged, the ditsy–then all you’re left with is me. And though it hurts me to say this, I’m aware that I’m no catch for the likes of you. So of course, you’ll go back to the university. Why wouldn’t you?” He blew out the flame and gazed at her with an expression of plausible vulnerability.

  It surprised her, what
she felt. She expected to feel derision, but she was unexpectedly stirred. He was, after all, physically attractive and touching, and she made a deliberate effort to look at him as though the weight of his stare was a hairy caterpillar crawling over her. “Don’t you have any homes to sell?”

  “Market’s off the boil. Not like me,” with a solemn, beery chuckle. He slouched forward. “If you like, I could read you poetry.” And tapped his nose.

  She could tolerate it no longer. She put down her tray and faced him. “All right, Ray-as-in-sunshine,” hand on hip. “Let’s go.”

  The unexpectedness of it caught him by surprise. “Where?”

  “Where do you think?” her cheeks dimpling.

  A slow smile returned to his face until he was positively beaming. “Listen, there’s a house out of town I’ve got to prepare for inspection. It so happens,” and jangled his pocket, “I’ve got the keys right here. The bedroom has a terrific view of Schouten. A terrific view.”

  “No,” she said so emphatically that he jerked his glass. “I’d like to see your house.”

  “My house?” Ray Grogan looked tense, uneasy, not at all prepared for this.

  She went up to him where he sat at the bar, laid the back of her hand against his cheek, smelled his dog’s breath between the glistening teeth.

  “What, the old hunter doesn’t want to kill?”

  “What about Keith?” he stammered. “Won’t he be missing you?”

  “Not on my afternoon off,” already putting her arms into a coat.

  Less than ten minutes later, Merridy stepped into Ray Grogan’s lair.

  “Do you share this with your parents?” noticing three fibre-glass fishing rods behind the door.

  “No, I live on my own.”

  She paused to unbutton her coat in front of a poster of the Taj Mahal. Further along the wall was a poster of the Sphinx, pyramids in the background; and one more, of a glittering gold dome and minarets.

  “I always wanted to go to Egypt,” taking off his jacket. “Don’t know why. It’s probably a shit-hole.”