Secrets of the Sea

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  “Come on,” Ray said, in the soothing tone of an acupuncturist.

  So that she was left poised between her feeling of repulsion and another feeling, in which all sorts of opportunities for shame rehearsed themselves. Numbly, her rage deserting her, she sat on the patted chair and accepted the glass that he had poured. His kindess was an attrition, but she had no contours, she could blur into anything.

  Denting his cheek with a fist, Ray took a longer look at her. He wondered if he would find Merridy so beautiful were he first setting eyes on her. This evening she reminded him, in a way that he had never considered before, of Tildy. But still attractive.

  “That’s a nice dress,” fingering the lapel as his wife had done and picking some fluff off the shoulder.

  She rocked back. “I have to go to Melbourne.”

  “Oh?”

  “My wholesaler. He’s been pestering me to sign a contract.”

  He shifted on the hot stool, though it was not lust exactly that rose within him. Rather, the consciousness of a tenderer person who was obscured by this other Ray.

  “Well, you’ve certainly made a name for yourself,” giving her a smile. “With your oysters.”

  “Yes, they do seem popular,” she mumbled. But his politeness did not deceive.

  “Pity one can’t get them locally. Pity you have to go all the way to Melbourne to eat them.”

  “You only have to call the shed. Jason could deliver. Or I could,” reminding herself that he disgusted her.

  “You would?” Looking into her eyes that swilled with Captain Morgan and tonic. That stared sightlessly ahead. At the photograph of the log-truck. At the bottles that flickered in the reflected light of an empty balcony in Rome.

  In this watery light, a dreadful vista opened up behind her: of untaken roads, unopened doors, unkissed faces. So with a pang she remembered Kish and the absurdity of a passion that she could not now credit, or explain. And most of all the panic that suddenly had seized her in the bedroom. The knowledge that if Kish was home then so too was Alex, and she could not face him in this state.

  Ray sat forward. It was important that he told her. It was more vital to him even–in that moment–than the once-in-a-lifetime chance to develop the Talbot emporium. A Mass had started and the music emphasised to him the solemnity of his emotion. He had aimed his passion at her and it had missed its mark, but he had kept Merridy upright in his head, unattainable as an angel.

  “You know, Merridy, you always made me feel, somehow…” But it was out of reach, what he wanted to say.

  “What?” Her tactic of not looking at Ray–as if he would thereby vanish–not working. “What are you saying?” And swivelled her head.

  He wore a belt now around his wider waist, and gold cufflinks. Plus gold in a bangle on his wrist and in his ear and in a thin chain around his neck; anywhere visible, it seemed. Apart from the gold, he was older. More sinew about his neck and across his shoulder, and under his chin the adipose fin of a scar. But not so very much changed.

  “I’m saying that you always made me feel good.”

  “Oh, Ray.” In her eyes a glint of frost, because of her disdain. But her disgust was not collaborating with her desire.

  Ray touched the convict brick on the counter. Matches were still arranged in its hollow for smokers to strike. He laid them out carefully side by side. They might have indicated dead men. Or his conquests.

  “It’s true,” he said, emboldened by the organ music and her gaze. Never had he felt so serious. He wanted her to slice out the tender person encased within him. Whom he glimpsed whenever he tracked the sun as it toppled over Maria Island, or inhaled the wind across the bay; or fished for stripy trumpeter on the continental shelf.

  He struck a match. It flared and shrank.

  Smiling at the flame in rather a sad way, Ray thought again of how little he had seen of Merridy and of how very much, by contrast, she had consumed his thoughts. She served to remind him that his life was not more wonderful for his success. He would have left Wellington Point years ago if it had not been for Tildy and the children, like five spears through the feet. But also–a little bit–because of Merridy too.

  He didn’t even bother pretending to himself otherwise. He had dreamed of Merridy so deep on his wedding night, at a self-contained cottage in St Helen’s, but all he retrieved from his dream was a sturdy erection that caused him to leap out of bed and race through the house shouting: “Tildy, Tildy,” until she relieved him of it against the low bluestone wall of the rented kitchen, pressing her buttocks into his groin until she had rubbed and squeezed it away.

  But it was Merridy he was thinking of. Impregnable as Talbot’s. Whose image he had continued to summon to any number of creaking beds. Who sat less than a yard away, so close that if he wanted he could reach out and touch her face; who watched the flame eat its way along the matchstick, twisting it, blackening it.

  He had such thin wrists, she saw.

  Her eyes smarted.

  It was Captain Morgan leading her astray. And Tildy’s joint. And now the wine. Grape and grain don’t mix, her father used to say. She wanted to leave this place and go back to what she knew. The samplers stitched by young girls for future husbands. The cockatoo and the sieve. But Kish was there. Sealed in the wardrobe behind his absurd pine key. What would she have done if he had desired it? If he had permitted? No, she could not go back. Not tonight. Not while she was so indistinct to herself.

  He blew out the flame.

  So they continued to sit there. Red wine has its own moroseness in a dark room with a television on. There were a number of people she could call on, but when she imagined greeting them at the door she lacked the energy to drag herself away.

  While he tossed the dead match behind the counter and waited for her to expose his second nature, the good man she had discovered during a rain-soaked barbecue for his twenty-seventh birthday.

  Then Ray, who had lined up his matchsticks like so many years of his life that separated him from that moment, leaned forward.

  “You never liked me, Merridy.”

  “That’s not true,” studiously not looking at him.

  “You saw what you saw and you made up your mind.”

  She touched her hair. “That’s not true.”

  His lips drank the wine. “What did you want with Tildy, by the way?”

  “Oh, nothing that can’t wait.” It did not seem appropriate, now, to tell Ray that she had hoped to spend the night under his roof.

  Bending, he said: “You know, I’m worried about Tildy. I think she’s not well. All those books. All she ever does is read.”

  If Merridy had expected Ray’s view of his wife’s reading to be contemptuous, his next words surprised her.

  “It makes me jealous. It really does. I’d like to be able to understand, too.” And thought of his bookish wife on the sofa, her thick legs under her, away in some realm where he could never expect to join her. “Thing is, Merridy, she prefers books to me…”

  “Oh, come on,” and kicked him.

  “Aah!” said Ray. “Aaah!”

  He rubbed his shin. His face crumpled. And now he longed for her. To win her without cheating. Without the intervention of his outward self, who–he could understand–repelled her.

  The muscles softened round her eyes. With pleasurable dread she looked at him. His moustache so close to his mouth, like a mutton-bird gliding low over the water.

  His intensity surprised him. He felt an old warmth spreading over him. He felt exalted.

  “King Lear, wasn’t it–what you read to me? I never forget a name. I tried to get hold of a copy afterwards. But it was different without your voice. It didn’t make sense. I mean, why would a king want to give up his throne?”

  “That was another Lear, Ray,” in spite of herself. “Another species of Lear altogether.”

  He smiled back and his smile made his eyes small. She could see the gold fillings and the illusion of some bright luminosity.

>   “Then that explains it!” He was mightily relieved. “I remember there was a fella with a big nose and there was a light attached to it. Come on, how did it go?”

  “I thought you knew.”

  “No, I never knew, I was just boasting,” and took another pace unchallenged into the citadel.

  His moustache was thicker with straws of grey, but he had not changed. She saw that in some circumstances he might be a comfort.

  His mouth opened and all of a sudden the light burst incandescent on his grin and on his neck and wrists and sleeves. He was, in that moment, something holy. She wanted to be sated with that golden light. Her hunger for it had the sharpness of pain.

  “And Alex?” he said. With all that that word implied, a weak and infertile Pom.

  “In Woolnorth.”

  “You know,” in a voice austere with emotion, “I still can’t figure out why you married him.”

  “No, well, you wouldn’t.”

  At this, the other Ray moved forward to protect Merridy, but the old one elbowed him aside. “All on your own, then?”

  She felt her throat tighten.

  “Go, Harvey, go, Harvey, go Harvey Norman.” On screen the Mass had yielded to a commercial.

  “You can turn that down, love,” said Ray to the woman behind the bar.

  She had come out of the kitchen, giggling and holding a plate at which her fingers pecked. “Hey, didn’t I see you earlier?” to Merridy.

  “This is Belinda,” enlisting her. “I’ve been trying to persuade her to buy the Tearoom. Belinda, my old friend Merridy.”

  “Sorry, folks, but I’m going to have to chuck you out. It’s eleven o’clock.” And, with a finger that she licked, began to snap off the lights one by one.

  In the street he was all chivalry. “I’ll see you to your car.”

  No Taj Mahal in this moonlight, she thought. He’s afraid I will laugh at him. And under the influence of rum and wine felt a spasm of nostalgia for what might have been.

  Mist was coming off the road. There was no sign of anyone. A bilious light in Harry Ford’s window suggested the only life.

  The houses drifted by. Ray held her arm. He was bigger than Alex. He towered over her, a minaret from a poster she remembered.

  She bent forward a little, not in step with herself, and he caught her arm. She straightened her knees.

  Then he kissed her. She neither thrust him away nor responded. She thought how his breath was strange and the smell of his skin. But his mouth was warm, not greedy. Her lips relaxed and spread into the kiss.

  She was drunk. “You’re drunk,” she said, wiping and staring.

  “No, no, I’m not.”

  This is not how I saw it, he realised. He continued to hold her, a wobbling minaret of indecision.

  But his closeness was contagious. She wanted more of the light that the moon was already discovering in little gold flashes all over him. To have the desperation that was in her taken away.

  “Listen, I think you’d better not drive home. You’d better come and stay,” he said, as she held onto him.

  “Your house is the last place.”

  So rather than escort Merridy back to his home he applied a pressure on her shoulders in the direction of the Tearoom.

  “Then you must sleep it off in here. I have the keys.”

  “No,” she said. “I wouldn’t want my mother to see.”

  “Your mother?” he said, not really asking a question but to keep her steady. It would not do to startle her. “What about Talbot’s?” kissing the top of her head. He had Albert’s keys in his pocket.

  She thought of Rose-Maree and again shook her head.

  But Ray had stopped, was gaping upwards. “Look, Merridy,” speaking in a careful voice with words like kindling that would leap into flame at the smallest spark. “Look at the moon.”

  They looked at it together. The moon had sailed free of the Norfolk pines and shone with a penetrating glow on Talbot’s. So that it became not a four-storey brick building–erected as a warehouse for wool and skins that were block-and-tackled to the second floor; then closed after the ’29 depression and reopened only when Sergeant Talbot returned from the jungles of New Guinea–but a palace that mesmerised, with windows of honey-coloured marble and pillars inlaid with jasper and jade. A memorial to the gods of love whom Ray had invoked ever since he touched Rachael Ehrman on the cheek at the age of fourteen.

  Ray had never seen anything like it.

  “Merridy…”

  Holding her hand. Who was thinking:

  And at night by the light of the Mulberry moon

  They danced to the flute of the Blue Baboon.

  “Come with me.”

  Stroking it.

  He looked around for a bench, a wall, somewhere to sit and watch the operation of this moon–its light also falling, he noticed with excitement, on the feldspar of the Freycinet Peninsula and giving to the highest peak the contour of a volcano, perhaps, in the Bay of Naples.

  “What about that bus shelter?”

  Then Ray squelched on something, disturbing up a smell. In the middle of the road, a dark smear of fur and bone and sleek entrails.

  “What’s that?” aghast. And stared down at what had been a large animal, but so disfigured that in that light he could not tell if the corpse was that of a dog or feral cat or quoll, or what it was.

  All thought of a bench was extinguished, too.

  They were opposite a place he recognised.

  “I know where you can spend the night!” and walked in confident quick steps across the yard where as a small boy he had rolled marbles, patting his pocket for Tildy’s spare key and encountering a condom. “I’ll put you in the staffroom. And I’ll wake you up tomorrow.”

  In the schoolroom, standing amid the sloping moonlit desks, the smell of textbooks and furniture wax and cooking oil, Merridy started weeping. Her tears came without warning and surprised herself as much as Ray, who really was about to go.

  “Don’t leave,” she whispered. She needed his shoulder more than anything else.

  He touched the top button of her dress.

  Her tongue found his teeth and then his tongue. Then her clothes were being pulled inside out and she was following her dress and stockings to the wooden floor.

  Ray collapsed on top of her, his hands–that once had all the answers written on them–on her thighs, her breasts. In his groping, a cup of crayons fell. He kneed apart her legs and buried himself between them.

  So she ground her face into a hard metallic surface, gusts of pleasure rocking through her, slave to a fatal and lacerating hunger. Shaken by the lust–if that it was–he had outed.

  In time, she became aware of Ray pinning her down; and her arms stretched back behind her head, grasping the cold iron legs, black-painted and intricate, of a classroom desk. Images came to her as they used to, sometimes, after prayer. Hector, pulling on a new shoe and looking down at his foot, how it fitted. Upside down, Kish’s face staring at her through the window. And Alex, whom she suddenly wanted to run to and kiss, to tell him.

  But no prayer.

  She moved her leg, which hurt from a splinter when she had opened it wider. Where had Alex sat?

  The Blue Baboon stirred in her. Now he was sighing. The gloom of a man who had winged an angel. He had not failed this time, but his lust remained and because of it he was still.

  Then he rolled over, leaving his hand awkwardly in hers. He stared at the ceiling, his brown body covered in scrolls of greying hair, and thought of the boy out fishing on his father’s boat, the tug on his line as certain as a handshake, and the shiny darkness of the tuna’s eye, round and black–he had never seen anything so black, not before or since–a retina that had only ever focused on the deep and now was confronted by Ray. Whose life flapped from him in awe and fear.

  She withdrew her hand. The stickiness drying on it. And now she did in fact remember some words of a prayer.

  Beside her on the splintery floor, R
ay raised his hand that she had been holding and squinted at the freckled back of it, as if to examine answers to questions that he still, after forty-three years on this earth, did not understand the first thing about.

  While she, looking at the same ceiling through the interrupted tears that were leaping back to her eyes, mouthed to herself: “There is a mystery in every meeting, and that is God.”

  “What’s that? Did you hear something?” said Ray, his neck alert. Staring at the window.

  “No.”

  It was Ray who got up first. How his ankles were hairy she saw between the legs of the desk. He could not look at her. Her breasts white as eyeballs. Her glossy cheeks.

  She began to pull her clothes towards her. She was awfully cold, though she felt so little for herself that any feeling was a comfort.

  “I think that’s yours,” picking up a cufflink.

  She stood on one leg like a stork and put her shoe on. It was untenable, she saw that now, to stay the night here.

  Then they were outside and he was throwing something into a bin, muttering: “I’m not sure how safe that was.”

  The street looked at them. Harry’s light had gone out and the world had dwindled to a pitch-dark stain on the road.

  She waited for it to absolve her.

  High in the sky, a hole–and in the hole a movement.

  “What’s that?” For she, too, had seen the face. Like the face on a coin.

  Behind her, she heard a sound–a muffled explosion almost–in the playground, but she did not turn around.

  Ray went on looking at the round fourth-storey window where Albert Talbot stood–the corrected proofs of his Newsletter in his hand–swaying slightly. “I’ll see you to your car.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  SOMETHING CRUNCHED UNDER HIS Blundstones. Alex found the switch and turned on the light. Cowering under the table, Rusty; and everywhere broken glass.

  His eyes moved to the dresser–the Otago was missing–to a strange dark redness on the wall.

  The clock that had survived this tempest told fifteen minutes after midnight. He had been gone two hours.