Secrets of the Sea

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  He swerved onto the lawn and stood very still, panting. He saw that she had taken her car.

  His breathlessness was slow to pass. He could not recall this fear before. Fear, though his legs were fast and his knife was sharp. He felt the wind on his torn fingers. Already he missed his room. The consoling smells of kitchen and puppy and log-fire, not to mention the sensation that came over him whenever his eyes looked into those bottles with their ships, shelf after shelf of them. It was so difficult, believing in an abstract. At Moulting Lagoon Farm he had come as close as he had known to belief. That household had offered him the prospect, if not of a lasting home, then a place he would like to have had as home for a little longer.

  Warm memories buzzed in his head. Her car–without any headlights on–braking in a skid on the lawn. The way she had stumbled into the house like a sick animal. The windows he had watched, waiting for her to switch on a light. It had relieved him to be away from the farm all day: he had felt the stirrings of desire, but even if he thought Mrs Dove attractive he was not going to get involved there. When at last he had stood up to follow her inside, it was to see if she needed help. Not to be suffocated by her. Not to be mistaken for someone called Hector. Not to be…

  So he stood by the tree stump, dazed and offended at the violence that she had disturbed in him. In his chaos, he thought: Ah, fuckit. What am I going to do when Mr Dove gets back? Towards Mr Dove he experienced a mingling of gratitude and respect and even a wish to learn from him. But now he had no idea what to do, where to go. He skirted the upended pine and ran and ran across the grass with the bottle burning his hands, until he could tolerate it no longer. At the bottom of the drive, he flung it into the darkness. But no sooner did he hear the scrape of glass on stone than he sank to his knees and scrambled on all fours searching for the bottle. He was convinced that he had lost or broken it, had given up hope, when in a glint of moon he saw the edge of the penny and the bottle still intact. He grabbed it and lay in the gravel and held it tight against his chest.

  CHAPTER NINE

  IN THE DEPLETED BAR, Ray lectured a truckie.

  “A man is a single person, though he might have a second nature. A woman is twenty-three different people, none of whom can stand to be introduced to each other.”

  “Fair dinkum,” the truckie said, stroking a wide black beard.

  “Chap in Melbourne told me that,” Ray said. Contentment had made him expansive.

  “Mathematician, was he?”

  “A businessman, more like.” Ray smelled his wine and sipped, rolling it around his mouth before swallowing. “Tell you another thing about sheilas. As soon as they get you, they want to change you. They want to bring out the heavy rollers and the sandpaper and rub off the rough edges.”

  The truckie finished his glass of Boag’s. The crowd had thinned and there was no one left to listen to Ray but him.

  At his end of the counter, Ray had had another thought. “Why is it that women ask other women for advice about men? Surely they should ask men, since that’s the area they want to know about. It’s like asking a colonist about the Aborigines. It really is.”

  The truckie patted his beard philosophically. But did not dwell on Ray’s wisdom. Perturbed still by the strange young man who had flagged him down an hour before. The truckie was coming round a tight corner north of Wellington Point when the man ran out at a crouch. His first thought: A large animal had skittered from the bush. Then in the middle of the road it stood up. Barely human, in the headlights. With the face of a persecuted creature, scary too. Any faster–roadkill. He had slammed on his brakes with every foot he had, skidding across the road and jerking his log-truck to a stop with less than the length of his arm to spare. So had he sat recovering his breath in large gulps, his eyes taking in this creature who nursed to his chest what he saw now was a bottle. A fucking wino! Wearing spectacles and with a ring in his ear and glitter in his hair and on his jeans like he’d been to a party. Except that it wasn’t glitter. You could see by the dashboard light when he opened the door and scuttled up into the cabin that it was little flecks of glass. Thousands and thousands of them. The wino had asked for a ride into Wellington Point. Too late to refuse him. He had sat for the next ten minutes, hugging that bottle of his, not speaking, until the truck hissed to a halt outside the hotel. “I’m gonna stop here and have a beer. Wanna beer, mate? Or you can have a gin if you like?” But he shook his head. Cheeks rigid in the street light. Eyes emptier than two cemetery jamjars. Then opened the door and leaped into the night, no word, not even a “Ta-ta, mate”.

  In ebullient mood, Ray ordered a glass of Merlot for his new friend and another for himself. “You, too, Belinda?”

  He had bought a whole carton of it.

  “He’s celebrating,” explained the lavender head.

  “Oh,” said the truckie, and turned to look at Ray. “Lotto?”

  “Not quite.”

  The truckie nodded. “I was gonna say, because there’s nothing in the whole wide world you look less like than a man who’s won the lotto.”

  “But almost,” said Ray, straightening a sleeve on which there gleamed a gold cufflink. “Almost.”

  It was in a different frame of mind that Ray had opened his door to Mr Talbot five hours earlier.

  “Ah, Albert, please come in.” In a grave voice tinged with surprise. Save at Keith Framley’s funeral, he had not seen him so formal. The oversized blue suit brought home to Ray the gravity of his son’s offence. As for his eyes! They stared at Ray with a distended look, as if set lengthwise in his face. “Do come in.”

  Mr Talbot had asked for this private meeting. His manner on the telephone furtive so that Ray immediately divined the reason behind the rendezous. Mr Talbot was going to discuss the problem of Zac, who waited in his bedroom to be summoned, forbidden to leave the house until he had delivered the apology over which father and son had spent time this afternoon rehearsing.

  “You’ll join me, I hope, in a glass of Craigie Knowe?”

  “Don’t open it on my account,” Mr Talbot said.

  “I was going to anyway,” smiled Ray, whose terror it was that Mr Talbot would make an official report of Zac’s small criminal misdemeanour to Sergeant Finter and so the news would inevitably reach Hobart and the columns of the Mercury.

  Mr Talbot felt the sofa and sat down. He dragged his morbid gaze around the room, the posters of the pyramids and Sphinx, the shelves double-stacked with books, before his eyes came to rest on the coffee table where there was a tray with six glasses on it. “That’s nice,” he muttered unenthusiastically, tapping his fat fingers on the pewter surface and rattling the glasses.

  “A wedding present.”

  “Mrs Grogan well?”

  “Tildy’s out,” in a light voice. Ray had furthermore instructed Montana to absent herself. And Savannah. And take Cherokee with her. This was man’s business. “She’ll be sad to miss you, but she’s good,” and pulled the cork.

  Mr Talbot’s eyes commenced a second circuit of the room. “Sorry to hear about your boat,” he said.

  “Yes, wasn’t that sad? But she was fully insured. No damage to your garage, I hope?” At the same time tempted to hope that perhaps, after all, this might be the reason for Mr Talbot’s visit.

  “Oh, no, I don’t think so.”

  Ray looked agitatedly at the wine label. He would speak first, he decided. “Mr Talbot…”

  “I’ll come to the point.” The oversized suit wriggled.

  “I’m sure we can reach some accommodation,” Ray said.

  “That remains to be seen.”

  “Before you say anything, try this. It’s young, but suggestive, I think.”

  Mr Talbot gulped at the young Cabernet with an indefinable thirst. It was many a year since he had felt this need to drink.

  Ray hovered, impatient for his reaction. “Well?”

  “It reminds me,” Mr Talbot said thickly, “of New Britain.”

  “I’m sorry?”

/>   “Papua,” Mr Talbot said. “Where I was in the war.” Waiting for the rum-drop. The alcohol floating out of the bomb-bay in a chaff bag that rolled and rolled and rolled. Sometimes the chute tore and he had to go with a spade and dig the stuff out.

  “Ologeta nau,” he urged the native who stood before him.

  Ray said nothing. He wondered if Mr Talbot was having a stroke.

  “‘All together now’,” explained Mr Talbot, and took another gulp. “It’s in pidgin.”

  “It must have been awful,” said Ray.

  Mr Talbot dipped his eyes to the tray, in which the elongated reflections of glasses seemed to hold some sort of fascination.

  “They say you should have won the VC three times over. For what you did. That’s what they say at the RSL.”

  Mr Talbot swallowed more wine. He said: “People think we won the war, but we sat on our arses most of the time. We could have been charged tourist rates. In fact, I wouldn’t mind doing it again.”

  Even so, he did not look happy. Remembering line after line of waiting women, the dried grass sticking out from between their legs like a rooster’s tail. The meri whom he had treated and sometimes comforted, his forbearance. And a woman and an evening that no quantity of Craigie Knowe could extinguish. Whether it was her sarong of blue-and-red silk, or the baby that she carried in a string bag or her stoicism towards her wound–the Japanese had damn near severed her arm–this young widow had pierced Albert’s defences.

  He cleared his pleated throat. “I have, as you know, no family.”

  “Then you are the lucky one,” Ray smiled tartly.

  But for mournfulness Mr Talbot outdid him. “You are looking, Ray, at the last Talbot. The last one,” and slumped back. “It is a responsibility you cannot imagine, to be at the end of the line.”

  Ray studied the blanched sockets, suspecting them of sheltering a hidden menace. Not finding it, he was uncertain where to settle his anxiety.

  “Mr Talbot…” he began pacifically, casting about for a line to take. “No one in Wellington Point understands better than I your wish to protect your property. No one.”

  “No, no, you cannot understand.”

  She smiled as she put down her bilum. In the bag, her baby slept. He remembered the shadow of the fibre mesh on the child’s face, the discreet and graceful motion of her arm, the pool of parachute silk on the beaten earth floor.

  “As I said, I am prepared to do anything to put this unfortunate business behind us.”

  “What?” he could just ask.

  She stood naked. The skin on her flat stomach palpitating where her heart beat quicker. But not so quick as his heart. She was still smiling. A smile without conditions attached, or secrets.

  “No women,” his commander’s final briefing reminded him.

  But did he have the strength to restrain himself? He would never discover.

  From outside, from beyond the chieftain’s hut, there came–soul-destroyingly–the sound of steady typing.

  Nothing would ever seem to him more separating than the vanishing of her smile as she recognised machine-gun fire, or the barbed wire of knotted string behind which a child woke.

  He sat motionless. Watching her scrabble to cover her nakedness and gather up the baby with the arm that he had managed to mend, and run for her life. He tried to be more invisible than ever that night.

  After an appropriate and respectful silence, Ray said: “Speak frankly. How much would satisfy you?”

  “What were we talking about…?” Albert shook his head. “This wine. It’s making me forgetful.”

  “Another glass?”

  He let Ray pour. His lips were rather dry.

  It was after that night that they killed the members of a Japanese patrol. They watched them walk up the head of the valley and picked them off in the moonlight one by one as they crossed a river–their reflections on the water like a row of glasses on a pewter tray. One man had cried out all night. Albert went down in the morning to treat him and found his body on the riverbank. As he turned round, he became aware of the eyes of a Japanese soldier on him. He was propped against a rock and staring. Albert had raised his hands above his head before he saw that the soldier was dead, shot in the back by his own men. He began to weep then.

  His eyes looked at Ray out of their hatched face. “I have decided to sell.”

  “Sell?” With extreme care, Ray put the bottle down. “What, the store?”

  They were sitting side by side on the sofa.

  “I want to know what you think it might be worth.”

  And after Ray had blurted a sum, so relieved that the visit was not about Zac–who would remain forgotten in his room for the rest of the evening, even after his mother arrived home and passed out on the sofa–Albert enquired what advantageous terms Ray might offer in the event that he would agree to act as agent, an agreement reached after a second bottle of Craigie Knowe stood empty on the round pewter tray, but not before Ray had jotted down a few particulars of the building, including its history–and, while he was about it, relieved a by-now tottering Albert of a spare set of keys.

  “Give me a couple of days to sink about it.”

  “Take all the time in the word,” said Ray.

  “There is just one fibrillation,” Mr Talbot slurred as Ray walked him home. “And I’m serious about this.” A log-truck coming towards them had jogged his memory. He caught the flash of a drawn pale face and was reminded of another–an oriental woman with a baby, peering anxiously out of her crowded, chauffeur-driven car as she was motored ever so slowly down the main street, ostensibly looking for properties to buy.

  “Yes?”–but Ray was not in a listening mood. Thrilled that Zac was off the hook. Thrilled at the prize of Talbot’s. So that even as Albert told him very seriously about his one fibrillation, he did not quite grasp the subtext: “Oh, don’t worry. That’s easily arranged.”

  All in all, Ray was brimming. He was already thinking along the lines of the development of the bark-mill in Swansea. Perfectly adequate, but a bogan’s shack compared to the potential of Mr Talbot’s building. There was, in fact, no limit to what he envisaged for the Talbot emporium. His fellow councillors were sure to line up behind him. They were going to be as jealous as bright green cats. He was thinking marina, fish restaurant, bottle-shop, youth hostel, art gallery, a library even! In the morning he would speak to his contact in Melbourne. Pump her up. A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to invest in the undisputed jewel of east-coast real estate.

  “Well, thanks for that, mate,” said the truckie. “I have to be in Triabunna.” And stood up, leaving his wine untouched and Ray on his own.

  CHAPTER TEN

  MERRIDY DID NOT KNOW how long she drove around before deciding to head back to the hotel. The bar was deserted, so that now it became possible to forget her visit earlier in the evening; indeed, to believe that no time at all had passed since the first occasion she came into this room, kitted out in Keith Framley’s flummery. Step by hesitant step she moved forward in the semi-darkness.

  The television was still on. With his back to it, a beefy man sat solitary at the counter.

  “Excuse me, but have you seen Tildy Grogan?”

  So addressed, the figure rotated. Thickset with a cigar-coloured moustache. His mouth gilded in the television light.

  “Why, Merridy!” His eyes seized her, growing wider and brighter.

  “Ray…”

  His scarlet skin was squalid, but it erupted, and she realised, on averting her eyes, that the Pope was being wheeled from the balcony–although not before one last upraised finger that mimicked an obscene gesture. Or a native pine teetering.

  Her look said: Jesus bloody wept, but he patted a chair.

  Hypnotised, she stood her ground. “I was looking for Tildy.” She had driven here with no other plan, only to find her cousin and to ask if she might stay the night.

  “Tildy?” and appeared bewildered. “Oh, Tildy.”

  The lavender-hea
ded woman called over her shoulder: “She was here about an hour ago.” And pushed herself through the swing-door.

  “There you go, she’s not here,” Ray said.

  For a bad second, all Merridy heard was the grave low buzz of the commentator and tearful American voices. Her foot stepped back. She did not want to stay.

  “Hey, don’t leave. I’ve hardly spoken to you. I’ve hardly seen you.”

  Last time together in the same room as each other–at the funeral service of Tildy’s father, but as per normal they had exchanged not a word. Otherwise, Ray saw her in snatched glimpses when she came out of Talbot’s. Or every summer at the Cranbrook Fair, selling oysters. It was amazing, now that he came to think of it, how in seventeen years the two of them never once had occasion to meet on their own; how they had continued to avoid all meaningful contact, beyond: “Hi, Merridy, how ya doing?” “Hi, Ray, not too bad. Yourself?” But he had thought of her, oh yes. From the moment she left him in his bedroom staring down at what, then, was unrevivable.

  The stool was hard. He parted his legs. “Like a glass of this? What we’re drinking, Belinda and me, is box wine, chateau collapsible.”

  It had never happened again, his inability to perform.

  “I think I won’t.”

  She seemed upset, with a flayed, uneasy look. Her hair springing from her head in tufts. She might have seen a ghost, or been violated. In that dress.

  The memory of her, shoes off, sitting on his bed made Ray wince.

  “Here, I’ll do it,” seeing as Belinda had disappeared into the kitchen.

  Still, she stood. Her thoughts slamming doors down the corridor of her skull. She was confused, but above all she was loathing his attention. This man who incarnated her own deficiency of character. Who had he been consorting with? That barwoman, she supposed. The hairdresser. A young Japanese businesswoman. And tensed herself to slap him, the complicated loathing like an ecstasy in her. At what he had done to Tildy. At what he might have done to her, had he only been capable. She shuddered. Even in her most unstable moments, she had not gone there.