Secrets of the Sea

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  “And what happened to Cheele?” Merridy was asking, still suspended. Something about the way that he lowered his voice a little, sounding grave, made her believe and forgive him. She saw Alex in that moment as a lion in a poor zoo, prey to teasing boys. Prodded and prodded, until he behaved like a hyena.

  “I tried to get in touch when I came back. But like a lot of people at school, he’d left Wellington Point. No one knew where he lived, whether he’d gone interstate, whether he was still in Australia. So I don’t know what happened to him, but I composed endless letters in my head.”

  His answer seemed to satisfy Merridy, who resumed her place. She poured milk into her tea and stirred. “Tell me, why does Ray call you Piers?”

  He looked sharply at her. “You’ve been talking about me to Ray Grogan?”

  She blushed.

  His turn to come to the rescue. “Because Piers is my first name. But I never use it.”

  “Why not? It’s a lovely name.” So English–evoking buckets and spades and music-halls.

  He breathed in. “It’s the name I had when I lived here before.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  ALEX HAD GROWN UP in Wellington Point until he was eleven. Sometimes he looked back, invariably without success, to his boyhood. He had pulped so many memories that whenever he tried to invoke his mother and father, a hopeless distortion overtook him. His parents sprang from their photographs on his bedroom wall, discoloured, in wool clothes saturated with a particular smell, and addressing each other in rotund voices by names that might have come from the movies that they saw at the Prince of Wales on their monthly excursions to Hobart. Marjorie. Basil. Piers.

  It was not intentional, his name change. After the accident, he had gone to school in England but arriving at Sedbergh at the start of the Easter term, he was told by his housemaster: “You’re not going to be called Piers, old chap. We’ve got four Pierses.”

  “My second name is Alexander.”

  “Alexander is toooo long.”

  So he became Alex. He even got used to it, wanting nothing more in a way than to live in the present tense. It was only when he came back to Wellington Point that he found himself having to explain to people that for reasons too silly to go into he was now actually Alex–in fact had been Alex longer than he had ever been Piers.

  But he could not shake off that frowsy odour of old wool. He still caught a whiff of it when passing Agnes’s charity shop. He did not know if the odour was soap or dead skin, or what it was, but whenever he smelled those “pre-loved” clothes he was jolted back to the sight of a wardrobe filled with his father’s suits and, next to the bookie’s tweeds from Bidencope’s, his mother’s cropped jackets and angora sheaths. Plus a blueberry Crimplene frock, bought in the Mather summer sale for the occasion of Prince Philip’s visit to Hobart.

  When, having been away more than a decade, Alex had returned to Tasmania, almost his first action after visiting the farm and observing its neglected state was to remove his parents’ clothes from the house and drive the whole lot to Agnes.

  Upon leaving her shop he had walked into a man getting out of a new Holden. He was a healthy-looking type, dressed in clerk-grey trousers and a plain white shirt with cufflinks.

  “Piers Dove,” cunning eyes evaluating him.

  “Ray Grogan. I didn’t recognise you…the moustache.”

  So they faced each other outside the Op-Shop.

  “Fancy meeting you here, Piers,” and patted the moustache that gave the impression of a bird hovering over his mouth.

  “Living people often meet.”

  “What brings you back to Wellington Point?” and his green eyes looked searchingly at Alex.

  “It’s my home, Ray. I was born here,” he said stiffly.

  “Couldn’t make it in the big smoke, eh?”

  “Matter of fact, I’m about to go back there.”

  “How are you earning a crust these days?”

  “I’m training to be a teacher.”

  “What, like Miss Pritchard? You know, that surprises me. You were so raw, Piers, I wouldn’t have fed you to my chooks.”

  “How is Miss Pritchard by the way?”

  “She carked it. But they’re looking for a teacher. You should apply. You really should.”

  “Actually, Ray, I’m glad I bumped into you.”

  “What can I do for you, Piers?”

  “I wanted to track down Cheele.”

  “Cheele? Who the heck’s Cheele?” caressing his chin, in the guarded way that he used to do when Miss Pritchard asked him to spell out a word.

  “You don’t remember Cheele?”

  But Ray had spotted something. “What happened to your hand, mate?”

  Alex to his chagrin forgot Cheele and looked down at the black sock that he had taken off to bind his torn palm. “I was fixing a windmill,” he muttered.

  Ray contemplated the makeshift bandage. “Be careful of tetanus. It gives you lockjaw. You won’t be able to speak. God, wouldn’t that be great?” and the sun glinted gold on a cufflink.

  Alex rubbed his hand.

  But Ray was on a roll. “Talking of smoke, that place of yours ought to have a match put to it. That’s what it wants. It puts me in mind of some of them people in Egypt.”

  “What, Moulting Lagoon Farm?”

  “The house is back to buggery. Not worth a thing.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Oh, yes, I do,” and gave a husky chuckle. “I’ve been looking after it, mate.”

  “You? But Mr Tamlyn arranged the lease.”

  “One of my first jobs when I went to work for him was to take care of your place. And know what? I could hardly give it away with a tea bag.”

  So turning points come in plain clothes. The abysmal state of the crops and fences, the gates that wouldn’t swing, the dilapidation of the house–all this, Alex understood, could be blamed on his schoolmate. Ray had had it in his power to walk around the property with the tenant and force him to put things to rights. Instead, he had done nothing with the asset but pocket his 10 per cent. One more thing for which he never would forgive Ray.

  And having returned to Wellington Point steeled to get rid of the farm, Alex was all of a sudden determined to keep it.

  “That’s a pity because I was going to ask Mr Tamlyn to put it on the market.”

  “Is that so?” Ray leaned back against his car and folded his arms. “I suppose I could do a valuation. Mind you, nobody in their right mind would buy it except maybe a bloody Japanese–who are buying just about everything.”

  “You please yourself what you do, but if you ever come round there you won’t walk away from the place.”

  “I said I could do a valuation.”

  “Save your precious time, Ray. I wouldn’t wipe my arse with any valuation you did. Just ask Mr Tamlyn to send me back all the keys and papers to do with the lease. I’ve a damned good mind to give them to a lawyer.”

  “What? You’re going to keep it now, are you?”

  “Too right I am. And one more thing.”

  Ray waited.

  “I’m not Piers any more. I’m Alex.”

  “Can you do that?” said Ray. “I suppose you can. Like a sex-change. But don’t think giving a mongrel another name makes him less of a mongrel. You’ll always be Piers to me. Always.”

  “Fuck you, Ray.”

  At this, Ray laughed. “Not while the dogs are still on the street.”

  “Hi, Ray.”

  “Hi, Agnes.”

  “I must say, it’s grand to see Piers again,” she smiled, locking up the shop and its new stock.

  “I suppose.”

  They watched her cross the road to Talbot’s.

  Ray said almost wistfully: “I had a dig in that once,” before his curiosity overcame his facetiousness.

  But Alex was walking away.

  He was passing the chemist’s when he heard Ray call out in a different voice. “Hey, Piers? Why keep it?” And when Alex
hesitated, he went on. “Hell, Piers…Alex…whoever you want to be. Why would anyone who’s been lucky to get away from here look for a reason to come back? There’s nothing to do in Wellington Point ’cept die.”

  Alex strode on. Into the view he had been about to renounce, and left Ray standing there, his arm frozen in a vague gesture at the bay.

  Very possibly Ray was right. Unlike Swansea or Bicheno on the same coast, the town had not grown. Nothing commercial had made it sprawl larger than the backwater it was. Roads of red dirt leading to all sorts of futures, none of them enviable, and crawling with copperheads like Ray who took the colour of the country they lived in.

  It had been down one of these roads that a 60-ton semi-articulated Scania log-truck came thundering as Alex’s father, already going blind, and his wife beside him, nosed the family’s Ford Zephyr out of their drive. Alex could never see a log-truck without imagining that moment: the dragonish smoke streaming from the two vertical exhausts, the air brakes screaming, the old-growth eucalypts tumbling.

  The truck had killed his parents outright, picked them off clean like an artillery shell. In the crater that it had left behind, Alex had struggled ever since to find some battered meaning.

  His parents had willed everything they owned to him. Instead of their possessions being dispersed, Alex inherited their house, estate, belongings. Right down to a lifetime’s subscription to Bottleshipmagazine.

  All this he had abandoned until such a time as he felt equal to dealing with it. While in England, he had deliberately put any decision on hold. But by the time of his reappearance in Wellington Point on this hot, dry afternoon, he had made up his mind. He told Agnes that he planned to stay until the weekend, by which time he hoped to have washed his hands of the place.

  “So you won’t be coming back?” she said.

  “No, Agnes. I don’t think so.”

  That was before he bumped into Ray Grogan.

  After the conversation outside the Op-Shop, to steady himself, Alex had taken one of his father’s rods and driven in his hired car to the mouth of the Swan. The river broadened into an estuarial beach of white sand, dotted with tiny red crabs and patrolled over by pelicans. He walked along it, calculating. It was one thing to change his mind about selling Moulting Lagoon Farm, but what could he do with the property? His parents had lost enough money on the farm, and on a regular basis. Could he, with what little he had inherited, make it work?

  Alex tried to bat away the thought. He put up the cane rod and caught a small bream with a prettyfish. He was eleven the last time he had stripped out a line or spent a quiet hour fishing. He could tell it was a bream by the black chevrons on the tail.

  He buried the bream head down in the sand after gutting it. The fish flapped for a while on the beach amongst its guts, a headless, tailless, gutless creature trying to fly.

  Am I being a pathetic bastard? he asked himself. He looked at the bream and then out across the bay, and there was not a nerve in his body that did not twitch like his line.

  By the time he returned to his car an idea had formed. He knew what he was going to do.

  Until this moment, Alex had assumed that he would continue to live and work in London. On coming down from Oxford with a degree in English he had enrolled at a teacher-training college in Putney. He lived in a rented one-bedroom flat on the sixth floor of a mansion block near Southfields Tube station, and had a girlfriend, Sarah, a teacher on the same course whom he described to his uncle-cum-guardian in Sedbergh as “good for me”.

  Even so, Moulting Lagoon Farm was always at the back of his mind a refuge; a place where he was in his heart while he was away. He might be living on the other side of the world, but on February nights in London, after two or three months of slanting grey rain, he recalled a jetty on the edge of some sea, and kept alive the notion that he would one day go back there for a visit or maybe longer; maybe even with Sarah.

  Since his departure from Tasmania twelve years before, the house and paddocks had been let out to the neighbouring farmer. The call when it came was a letter from Mr Tamlyn, the managing agent, to say that Bill Molson had died and his estate had to sell up. As a result, the trustees wished to terminate the lease on Moulting Lagoon Farm.

  The letter was a signal for Alex to face what he had left unresolved. But when he invited Sarah to accompany him to Tasmania, she declined: “I’d be getting in the way.” Not until the night before he flew did she enquire with the seriousness of an oldest child what his plans were for the farm, and he went through the motions that he was returning to tidy up various odds and ends. But Sarah sensed the shape of his longing. She knew when he went out the door and stepped into the lift that he did not know what he was going to do.

  A large part of her hoped that distance would lend clarity and he would arrive at a decision about their future as well. Nine days later he telephoned from Tasmania and said in a careful voice: “I have something to tell you.” But rather than ask her to marry him he announced that he could not see a way of continuing their relationship unless she was prepared to abandon Southfields for the outermost margin of the earth.

  “You? A farmer?” Sarah had shouted on the telephone. “I’ll tell you one thing what you are. You’re completely fucking nuts. All you’ve ever husbanded is a cold.”

  From Hobart, he had already called his uncle. “I’m going to do something quite mad.”

  “I’m so glad,” said his uncle, “she sounds the right girl for you.”

  “No, no, I’ve decided to keep the farm.”

  At any rate, he had passed Merridy’s peculiar test. She sat down and picked up her cup and looked at him over it.

  “Well, whatever happened between you and Tildy, it no longer matters.” On Thursday, out of the blue, Ray Grogan had invited Tildy to the Jazz Social at the Town Hall. “She asked me to pass on a message. She says her heart is spoken for.”

  It sounded like a phrase from one of Tildy’s magazines. But what, Alex wanted to know, about Merridy’s heart? “Tell me, why was Ray ringing you just now?”

  “Oh, just being an idiot,” and sat back.

  “Did he hope you might change your mind?” Even at the last moment, with Tildy humming to her reflection: Your ship has come in, honey. Your. Ship. Has. Come. In.

  “I don’t know what Ray thought,” Merridy said quickly.

  Still, it nagged. “What made you crash his party–if you dislike him so?”

  “I didn’t crash. I was invited.” Her eyes held his and a sly expression came into them. “And maybe I fancy him.”

  “Do you?”

  “He has something.”

  “Do me a favour,” Alex said. “Just explain to me for my peace of mind and my education, what was it between you and Ray? Everywhere I go in this town, I hear about you and that odious fucker.”

  “Oh, Alex. What is it with you people? He’s not odious, he’s footling.”

  “No, he’s not footling, he’s odious. He has one woman after another.” And again saw Ray’s face, in the moment when he squeezed Merridy’s arm. His expression like that of a farmer in Cumbria who shot badgers in the stomach so that they crawled back to their sett and died there out of reach and without trace.

  She tilted her head. Eyes glinting. Not knowing yet whether she found Alex attractive. But willing to concede that he was intelligent and generous and pleasant to look at, and dependable as the navigation-light beam that she saw from her bedroom, flashing on the tip of Schouten; and that something about him, while being tender beyond belief, was obviously strong enough to wrestle a steer to the ground, and even to punch it on the forehead if need be. And she could talk without strain to him.

  “You really want me to tell you why women like Ray? Well, he’s one of the few guys in this place who’s on the make–and that’s sexy. He’s hustling, he’s ambitious, he works hard, and that isn’t very common here. He listens, which is always a bonus. And there’s a bit of danger around him.”

  “Well, I’m sorr
y…I don’t see it. I do not see it.”

  “Then can I ask you to keep this to yourself? I can’t have Tildy knowing. At one time, yes, I did have a slight walking-out with Ray, but oh, my, how slight. Tildy wasn’t in the picture and anyway she’s my best friend. Well, it was appalling. You know what they’re like, these men–the engineering faculty was full of them. They’re so transparent, but you get used to them. I always knew that if I stopped dead and turned around and said: ‘Take your trousers off, let’s go to work,’ they’d run a mile. Though Ray, I have to say, really got up my nose. I thought: OK, I’ll do just that–and I did it. But what you probably don’t know is what subsequently happened.”

  “No, that’s not completely convincing.”

  “Oh, Alex!” shaking her head.

  “What?”

  She looked at him, then burst out laughing. He had never heard such a laugh. It reverberated through the whole building.

  “I was on his bed down to my underpants and he ran away.”

  Ray would never forget the humiliation in his bedroom.

  “I just want to have a cuddle,” he told Merridy. “You could lie on top of me. It would be safe. I probably wouldn’t even get an erection.”

  “But I want you to put your hand down my pants,” she said hospitably.

  Ray sat down heavily on his capacious bed and looked sideways at her. He had thought that he wanted her. But he was not feeling seductive.

  He stared down between his legs with a ghostly expression. “I’m…not sure I can,” he said brokenly.

  She went on, musing: “Isn’t it funny how we talk about vaginas as the sexual zone rather than the labia?”

  It had never happened to him before. “I don’t know why you dislike me. I just want to give you pleasure.”