Helga's Web

by Jon Cleary

  She shook her head, looking in the mirror and pulling back the corner of her mouth to look at the cheap cap on one of her canine teeth. “No, it’s my lucky charm.”

  “How’s your luck been lately?”

  She made a face. “That was why I had to ask you for the money this morning. It’s that youth fetish again—photographers don’t want twenty-six-year-old models these days. All they want are what they call birds, eighteen-year-olds with blank faces and minds to match. Do I sound like a middle-aged bitch who is just jealous?”

  He kissed her bare shoulder, went past her and into the bathroom. “We’ll go out Thursday night, show these kids what a couple of middle-aged squares can really look like.”

  “Not Thursday night.”

  He put his head round the bathroom door. “Why not? I know it’s not Tuesday or Friday. Let’s have a bonus night. For the both of us.”

  “Not Thursday, darling,” she repeated. “No questions, remember? I never ask you why or why not, you never ask me.”

  He looked at her, then shrugged and went back into the bathroom, feeling curiously relieved rather than disappointed. A wife and a mistress, he thought, neither of whom ever asked questions. In a way, he guessed, he was lucky.

  2

  He left the flat before Helga went to her dental appointment. He went downstairs and out into the silverplate atmosphere of Double Bay. Even at this early hour of the morning women were coming and going through the expensive boutiques, shopping at nine-thirty for a seventy-dollar pair of silk slacks with the same casualness as they might shop for a pound of sausages in Woolworths supermarket across the street. The women of this well-to-do harbour suburb always reminded him of well-groomed dogs: between the entrance to Helga’s block of flats and the taxi rank he passed two poodles, a borzoi and a pekinese: the pekinese woman confounded the image by having a real pekinese on a pink lead. He beat a toy bulldog in lime-green slacks to a cab, ignored her broken-accented comment on Australian men, gave the cab-driver the address of Olympus and sank back on the stained and fraying vinyl upholstery.

  “Bloody reffo women,” said the cab-driver, a naturalized Australian from Calabria. “You get ‘em all da time down thisa way, you know? They treat you like dirt.”

  Savanna just nodded, not wanting to get involved in a xenophobic discussion with a cab-driver who, among his mates out at Fairfield or one of the other Italian communities, might say exactly the same thing about Australians. Reffo

  was a term that had been out of date for years; he wondered where the Italian had picked it up. There had been refugees arriving in Australia since the war: Baits, Yugoslavs, Hungarians and, just recently, Czechs; but they were never referred to as reffos. Tr^at was a term that belonged to the Jewish refugees of the Thirties, the fugitives from Hitler, the people thirty years resident now in Australia but still saddled with an epithet that Savanna found even more insulting than the official New Australian. He wondered if the cab-driver, noticing any trace of Helga’s German accent, would have classed her as a reffo. Probably not: it seemed a name reserved strictly for Jews. It suddenly struck him that he had never asked Helga what she, as a German, thought of Jews. It was one question that, perhaps, he never should ask her. Come to think of it, he had never asked her what she thought of Australians, though occasionally she dropped hints that had a stiletto-sharpness to them.

  The cab dropped him at Olympus and he went into the narrow, three-storied building squashed between the brewery and the meat-pie bakery. Olympus’ single sound stage was on the top floor, heavily soundproofed to keep out the noise from both sides; but they had been able to do nothing about the smells, and the technicians, actors and agency people reeled between the overpowering whiffs, depending on which way the wind was blowing, of yeast and hot meat pies. Savanna’s office was on the middle floor and, like the workers in the brewery and the bakery, he had learned to close his nose against the odours that surrounded him. The agency people had not and gradually they were dropping him as a maker of their commercials. But with the soaring rents in Sydney, he could not afford to move elsewhere. Perhaps he should try for beer and meat pie commercials, to be shot on alternate days.

  The phone rang as soon as he sat down at his desk. He waited for Betty, his secretary, to take the call outside; but

  she was not at her desk, was in the Ladies’ or upstairs dodg-^ ing Hopkins’s hands as he zoomed in on her. There were plenty of people he wanted to avoid talking to these days, but he could not complain if she was not around to take the calls. She was worth far more than the fifty dollars a week he was paying her, yet he could not afford more; and he was forever afraid of losing her. Reluctantly he picked up the phone, and knew at once that it was not a creditor. Well, not a business creditor.

  “Sweet—”

  He had known it would be Josie even before she spoke; he had an instinct for recognizing her presence even on the end of five miles of telephone cable; her very humility had its own nagging quality. “You didn’t call. I was worried—”

  He looked around his office, not really seeing it, not having to see it: this was one print that would never fade or crack. The grey walls that hadn’t had a coat of paint since he had moved in here; the desk, very moderne, as the salesman had called it, that now looked like a plywood antique from the Twenties; the clients’ two leather chairs that had finally revealed their plastic cow’s origin; the carpet, worn so thin that the floorboards beneath created their own pattern in it. The row of bookshelves beneath the one grimy window: books on film by Rotha, Grierson, Manvell, books that hadn’t been opened in God knew how long; the books on advertising, by Mayer, Ogilvy, that also hadn’t been opened in the same time; the stacks of trade papers. Not a thing in the room that identifies me, he thought. Unless you could salvage enough out of the dust and debris of dreams to identify him.

  “I stayed with one of the fishermen to dig up some background.” Lies slid off his tongue these days as easily as saliva.

  “I rang the wharf. They said you left over two hours ago.” But there was no accusation in her voice, no protest or question: if there was an abstraction of voice, she had achieved it. Then she went on: “You haven’t forgotten Glenda and Les are coming for drinks. And Father Wrigley.”

  He had forgotten. “No, I hadn’t forgotten. I’ll be home early.”

  “Sweet, could you bring home a check? There’s no money in my account.” No whine, no rebuke, nothing: she had refined humility to a point where it was a deadly weapon. Yet he couldn’t bring himself to believe that she was intelligent or cunning enough to have done it wittingly.

  “I’ll do that. I’m busy—”

  “I’m sorry, sweet. It was just that I was worried.”

  The phone went click in his ear. The timing was too exact: she had cut him off as if she had heard him draw in his breath to reply. He looked at the instrument in his hand, then slowly put it back in its cradle. He had felt for some time that Josie suspected there was another woman, but it had not perturbed him. Not because he was callously conscienceless about his infidelity; he had had a conscience once and there were still some dregs of it left in him somewhere. He had not worried about Josie’s suspicions because he had convinced himself she would do nothing about them; it was as if, falling far short of other people’s targets, she had achieved her own complacency of self-fulfilment. But now he wondered: had she done something about her suspicions, found out about Helga? And then quite suddenly he didn’t care. Life was becoming so bloody complicated that any untangling of it, even if it meant argument and heartache, would be welcome. He suddenly longed for everything to come to a head: the bank to foreclose, Josie to divorce him, Helga to tell him that their affair was over. He would be bankrupt and alone, but it would give him the detachment that he now found he craved.

  3

  He did not manage to get away from the office as early as he had hoped and when he arrived home Grafter Gibson, Glenda and Father Wrigley were already there. As he pulled his seven-year-o
ld Jaguar into the drive he saw the black Rolls-Royce, so new that he imagined he could smell its leather upholstery from here, parked at the curb, the chauffeur slumped in his seat with his cap pulled down over his eyes. He wondered if Wrigley had come in the Rolls with the Gibsons: it would be just what the smug little bastard would revel in.

  The smug little bastard was pouring the drinks as Savanna came into the living room. “Ah, Mr. Savanna! Your good wife asked me to act as barman. However, your brother-in-law thinks I’m a trifle light-handed with the liquor. He thinks whisky should not be dispensed in the same measure as altar wine.” He giggled, his plump face, smooth as a cake of expensive soap, showing not a wrinkle as he smiled. Unctuous, a product of one of the worst elocution schools, an ambitious man who had decided that doubters never got on in the Church, he was a priest who at the early age of thirty had managed to take on the image of a spinster aunt, a career aunt. He had spent all his priesthood in well-to-do parishes and you knew he would never find himself in a poor district: he was too good a politician for that. “What can I get you, mine host?”

  “How’d the trip go?” Leslie Gibson lolled in Savanna’s favourite chair, one short thin leg crossed over the other, half a dozen inches of bare white skin showing above the black silk socks. He was a small, wizened man, his thick grey hair cut short back-and-sides, his skin mottled with sun cancers, his blue eyes still as bright and shrewd as the day he had first played another man for a sucker. His silk-and-mohair suit hung on him like a Chinese peasant’s pajamas and the ten dollar tie he wore could have been a piece of string for all it did for him sartorially. Glenda tried hard to make her husband look like the millionaire that he was but he remained looking like the New Guinea gold fossicker he had once been. He was fond of quoting that fashion was for fools who had no confidence in their own taste, and did his best to advertise that he had no taste at all. Savanna hated him with that comfortable sort of contempt that is often as good for a mans well-being as a feeling of charity.

  Savanna took the drink Wrigley brought him and sank down on the couch beside Josie. He pressed her knee with his free hand and was surprised when she gently lifted his hand and dropped it on the couch between them. Savanna saw Glenda’s eyes narrow and at once he thought: hullo, you two have been having a little chat about me. On a sudden impulse he winked at Glenda and almost laughed with delight when she straightened her neck in surprise. Then he looked across at Gibson. “It went all right. Except—” he wondered how far he dared go “—except I don’t think your skipper welcomed the idea of having us aboard.”

  “Who was it? Bixby? Wouldn’t take any notice of him. He’s always got shit on the liver.”

  “Les—” Glenda glanced warningly in the direction of Father Wrigley.

  “Oh, don’t mind me,” said the priest, raising his glass. Savanna noticed the level of whisky in it; it hadn’t taken Wrigley long to switch from his altar wine measures. “Obscenity, not brevity, is now the soul of wit.”

  Gibson screwed Wrigley to the wall with a gimlet glance, but the priest seemed unaware of his gaffe. Savanna smiled into his glass and said, “Do you ever go out on the boats, Les?”

  “I won’t let him,” said Glenda. “He’s too old for that sort of thing anymore.”

  She said it with affection and in her fluttery, high voice,

  but Savanna knew that what she dictated, Gibson did without argument. The vulgar old bastard had more enemies than the Minister for Defence, treated everyone he met as someone to be exploited; but Glenda had defeated him years ago, he had succumbed to something that he recognized in no one else: love. She sat there on the edge of her chair, corsetted upright at great expense, her pale pink face bright with that impregnable blankness that Savanna found in women of no imagination. He looked across at Josie: she was even worse, but at least she didn’t try to run his life. He felt a sudden warmth of feeling for her. Not love: he could never remember feeling that for her. And, hard on the heels of the warmth of affection for Josie, was the cold stab of conscience that he didn’t feel, had never felt, anything more for her. He had never loved any woman but his first wife, Silver, and she had left him twenty-two years ago and was now the wife of another man. He looked back at Gibson, wondering what the bastards of the world did to merit happiness in their marriages.

  “You should go out sometime,” he said, feeling malicious in his knowledge of what went on on at least one of Gibson’s trawlers. “J ust to keep up with things.”

  “He’s too old,” Glenda repeated, hurting her husband as only a woman with too much love can; Gibson shook his head, trying to struggle out of the grave she was digging for him. “Anyhow, we’re going abroad again soon. We’re going to Rome again,” she said, and turned her face to Father Wrigley as if looking for a benediction.

  “Wonderful!” exclaimed Wrigley, chalking up indulgences for himself. He had been pressing this trip on Mrs. Gibson for months, hoping that she might suggest taking him with them as their personal chaplain; he had read, with an envy that had required an Act of Contrition, of those priests fortunate enough to be chaplain to the aristocrats of Europe. It would be difficult to see as an aristocrat the sinful old repro-

  bate who would be paying for the trip, but perhaps a miracle would be worth praying for.

  “Dunno why we’re going there again,” Gibson grumbled. “Last time we were there I got sick as a dog. Had some seafood stuff in a restaurant down the arse-end of the Colosseum.”

  The arse-end of the Colosseum: so much for the antiquities of Europe with Grafter Gibson. Savanna smiled, holding out his glass to Wrigley for a refill; the priest leapt to it as if he were an altar boy. “Stick to steak, Les, wherever you go. Steak and beer, you can’t go wrong.”

  “He’s poking fun at you, Les,” said Glenda. “Trying to make out you’re nothing but an Australian.”

  But Gibson wasn’t offended. He winked at Savanna, realizing he had an ally against the priest. “I don’t find that such an insult. I been called a bloody lot worse. I bet Father Wrigley here’s called me a thing or two.”

  “I pray for you all the time,” said the priest, pouring himself another drink. “Mrs. Gibson asked me to.”

  “Father is going with us,” said Glenda, her smile expanding as she saw the priest’s face swell with delight. “It’s time we told you, Father. Les agreed to it this morning.”

  “Our own bloody personal chaplain,” Gibson growled. “How’s that for buying your way into heaven?”

  Savanna had felt Josie tense beside him and when he looked at her he could see the slight quivering round her mouth, as if she were about to burst into tears. You poor old cow, he thought. I can’t afford to take you to Surfer’s Paradise for even a week, and here’s this smarmy bastard being shouted a three months’ trip to Europe. Grafter doesn’t deserve to keep his money if he’s going to waste it like that.

  He stared across the room at the photographs on the bookshelves, one of Josie taken fifteen years ago when she had had no weight problem and when she had still believed that happiness was one of nature’s gifts and didn’t have to be worked

  at, and one of their daughter Margaret taken the day she had graduated, the day she had told him she no longer believed anything he would ever tell her. I had every opportunity for happiness, he thought, and IVe buggered it. And started to feel sorry for himself, something he would have despised in himself on any other day.

  The conversation of the others spun on about the coming trip, meaningless words clouding the room, while Savanna sat back beside Josie, his eyes half-shut, and began to half-dream, a dream that after a while took on some of the chill of a nightmare as he realized what was taking shape, like a sudden tumor, in his mind. And all because a tight-fisted old scoundrel, instead of using some of his money where it would come in handy, was going to give a free trip abroad to an unctuous fat little priest whom probably the Vatican couldn’t stand. He stared glazedly across at Gibson and wondered how the old man would respond to the suggestion
that Helga had frivolously made this morning. Twenty thousand dollars, Les. That’s all I want, and I shan’t say a word about the drugs your men are bringing in. Twenty thousand dollars, Les, and I might even join Wrigley in saying a prayer for you.

  “We must be going,” said Glenda. “We’re putting Jack to sleep.”

  She stood up, giving him no time to make a polite protest. Gibson also stood up, glad of the opportunity to be gone; he had never acquired a taste for the bon-bons of small talk. Father Wrigley rose more reluctantly, knowing he was soon going to be dismissed, dropped off at the presbytery to return to the company of the two older priests whose only talk was of cards, football and the Holy Father’s problems with the upstarts of the Church. Oh, wait till he told them tonight he was going off on leave to Rome!

  He shook hands with his host, aware that Savanna hated him as much as if he were some fire-eating Redemptorist who had forced his way into the house on some evangelical mis-

  sion. Why, and all he wanted was a little social ecumenism! “It’s been a pleasure, Mr. Savanna.”

  “You should come up here sometime before we go, Father,” said Glenda, acting like a Mother Superior. “Have a talk with Jack.”

  “What about?” asked Savanna; and even Father Wrigley looked blank.

  “The Church, of course,” said Glenda, and looked at Josie for support.

  But Josie shook her head, and Father Wrigley looked relieved: he was not built for the role of evangelist. “Jack’s all right as he is.”

  “Well—” said Glenda, making it apparent she thought otherwise. She put on her coat and gloves, straightened her hat, picked up her small elegant parasol. Christ, Savanna thought, she’s become a typical society matron, making every outing look like Ladies’ Day at the races.

  “You should get Les to church more often,” said Josie, and Savanna loved her for the sweet delicate way she placed the barb. “Especially if he’s going to have a personal chaplain.”