Helga's Web

by Jon Cleary

  “Drop your voice,” said the woman, pulling dignity about her like a tattered shawl. “This isn’t the Leagues Club.”

  Savanna and Silver looked at each other and smiled. They

  had not been married to each other long enough for their relationship ever to have reached the stage where they had become just the spare parts of each other’s life. The break, when it had come, had been swift and sudden.

  “What ever happened to us?” He continued to look carefully at her, as if trying to trace in her face all the years of her that he had missed. She’s still beautiful, he thought. She must be forty-eight or nine, but she still leaves every other woman in this room for dead. Her figure was still good, perhaps a trifle fuller in the bosom and round the hips, but he didn’t mind that. She had not entirely escaped the erosion of time, but you had to look hard, cruelly, to notice the faint thinning of the lips (like roses drying out, he thought; the Australian sun attacked so many women that way) and the tendons beginning to show through on the backs of her hands. She could still move him more than any other woman he had ever met.

  “We went into all that a long time ago,” she said, ignoring her own advice to change the subject. She was safe with him so long as they did not move out of the hotel lounge. She had been in her bedroom when he had called from the reception desk and she had been on the point of asking him to come up. Then something had warned her, not against him but against herself; and she had told him she would meet him in the lounge. “Perhaps I didn’t have enough patience in those days.”

  He remembered his irresponsibility, his inability to settle down after the war. “Do you have patience now?”

  “You learn it living in the country. You have to, that’s if you don’t want to go off your head. We live by the seasons up there, Jack, not by the clock. And you come to respect them—the seasons, I mean.” That’s the only thing you and Josie have in common, he thought. Josie’s garden, her part-substitute for himself, had made Josie aware of the seasons. “I wasn’t brought up to bush life, but now I love it. Each time

  I come down to the city, I can t get back to the property soon enough.”

  Her husband, Claude Carson, ran a sheep and stud cattle property about two hundred miles northwest of Sydney. Savanna had never met him but had seen photos of him in newspapers and farm magazines: a tall bony man, eyes squinting beneath the brim of his pork-pie hat, sun cancers showing like freckles on his lean cheeks: he was almost the archetype of the man on the land. “It’s none of my business-no, it is my business. Are you happy with Carson?”

  “Why is it your business?” she said, knowing the danger she was exposing herself to by asking the question.

  “Your happiness is my business.”

  “Do you mean that, Jack?” she asked, thinking he sounded too glib. But he nodded and she felt ashamed for doubting his sincerity. “Yes, I am happy with him. He’s a good man and a wonderful father. The kids adore him.”

  “Do you?”

  “That is my business. Don’t torture yourself, Jack. I’m happy with Claude and that’s all you need to know.” She put down her glass and stood up. It was time to go; once again she felt the warning against herself. Oh Jack, she cried silently, why did I leam patience when it was too late? Her eyes misted and she turned away, leading him through the tables towards the lifts.

  They passed the red-haired woman and her husband, coupled in argument, the only mutual passion they had left: “All you ever do when we come out is drink!”

  “That’s the only bloody reason I come out!”

  Silver walked a little quicker, her eyes clearing now. She and Jack might have finished up like that if they had gone on together. What love she still had for him only remained because she had cut herself off from him. When they reached the lifts she turned and held out her hand to him.

  “Goodbye, Jack. I’ve had my last Tom Collins.”

  He held her hand in his, saying nothing for the moment. He could not remember ever having felt so unutterably sad, not even when she had said goodbye to him twenty-two years ago. It seemed to him that here outside the lifts of the Went-worth, surrounded by strangers gay with drink and careless of tragedy, his life had just suddenly come to a dead end. Quietly, without any callousness, she had just removed all the seasons from his life.

  “Goodbye,” he said. “Be happy.”

  Her mouth quivered. “Thank you, Jack.” Then the lift arrived and she stepped quickly into it, not knowing whether it was going up or down and not caring. Just so long as she escaped before she surrendered.

  Savanna gazed blankly at the closed doors of the lift. Then he went back into the lounge and had another drink, pouring it down his throat like a man gulping at the quick, merciful release of poison. It was then, despondent as a condemned man, that he decided to go out and say goodbye to Helga. He would go home to Josie tonight and, though she would not know it, he would be all hers, for what he was worth.

  He drove out to Double Bay, parked his car and crossed the road to the store in the shopping plaza. The woman in the store, a buxom Viennese, smiled at him as soon as he came in the door.

  “The usual, sir?” She took down the box of chocolates from the shelf behind her, began to wrap it. “I envy your wife, you know? If I eat our chocolates, the weight I got to watch. One pound of chocolates, seven pounds of me, you know?” She tied a fancy ribbon round the package. “There, make it look attractive. What a pity all husbands are not like you, eh? We’d make a fortune in this store, you know?”

  Savanna smiled. This woman, a romantic, would understand his mood of this afternoon. But he should have been buying the chocolates for Silver or (a pang of conscience) Josie. He paid for the box, thinking this would be his last

  extravagance as far as Helga was concerned, went out of the store and along the street to Helga’s block of flats. He pushed open the glass door and slowly began to climb the stairs.

  Helga’s flat was on the third and top floor and he had just reached the second floor when the woman came running down the stairs. She passed him without seeming to see him, but in the instant of her passing him he saw the tears running down her cheeks behind the dark glasses and saw the broken string of pearls clutched in her hand. She went on down, her high heels clicking like small hammers on the marble stairs; he heard the glass door open and shut and then there was silence. He paused, then shrugged and went on up to the third floor. There had been something vaguely familiar about the woman, but she wasn’t someone he knew.

  He automatically took his key-ring out of his pocket, selected the key to the flat, raised it to the lock, then stopped. This was not Tuesday or Friday, his days. He held the key an inch from the lock, then abruptly dropped it and the keyring back into his pocket. He had come to say goodbye and he would do it, if it were possible, without any friction between them. Decorously, like a youth calling on a girl for the first time, the box of chocolates tucked under one arm, he pressed the buzzer. He heard it buzz, sharply and insistently, and he waited. He thought he heard a movement in the flat, but Helga did not come to the door. He hesitated, then pressed the buzzer again. He waited half a minute, beginning to feel foolish, wondering why he had bothered to come without phoning her first. She was in there, all right, with someone else, some other mug she was setting up to be taken. Suddenly angry, he took the key out of his pocket again.

  Then the door of the flat next door opened. A woman in a house smock, her hair in curlers, came out with a large cardboard carton full of screwed-up newspapers.

  “Just moved in,” she said cheerily; she had the sort of face

  that instantly said she was a friend to the world. “Still unpacking. You our neighbour?”

  He slipped the key back into his pocket, hoping she hadn’t seen it. “No. Just a visitor. But my friend doesn’t appear to be home.”

  “Wouldn’t know.” She went on downstairs, flinging words back at him over her shoulder; the curlers glinted like antennae on her head, she had messages for everyon
e. “These are the old type of flats. Nice thick walls, you don’t hear a thing. You should of seen what we were in before. Walls like tissue paper—” Her voice trailed away as she disappeared down the stairwell.

  Savanna looked at the open door of the woman’s flat, then at the closed door of Helga’s. Then abruptly he swung round and went quickly downstairs and out into the street. No matter how thick the walls were, if he went into the flat and there was another chap there with Helga, everyone in Double Bay would hear what happened next. He would come back and say goodbye to her on his day, Tuesday, when his anger might be a little more under control.

  He was halfway across the road when he saw Bixby. The trawler captain was walking away from him, but there was no mistaking him. Savanna stopped in mid-stride, was almost run down by a car whose driver yelled at him for being a bloody stupid dill, then recovered and went on towards the car park. There was no reason why Bixby should not be in Double Bay; after all it was a harbour suburb and Bixby brought in his boat not far from here. But what was he doing in Helga’s street? Had Grafter Gibson got the idea of using him to talk to Helga? Savanna halted beside his car, pondering if he should go back and warn Helga. Then he shook his head, like a man talking to himself. Let the Monday man, whoever he was, look after her.

  He got into the car, dropped the box of chocolates onto the seat beside him. He looked at them, then suddenly smiled.

  164 o-

  He would give them to Josie. She would get them only by default, but even so he felt better for the thought. If today was the day for goodbyes, it could also be the day for a new start. He might even ask Josie about the seasons.

  3

  Helga looked at her broken nail, then felt suddenly squeamish as she saw the sliver of skin and the blood under it. Still breathing heavily from exertion and anger, she stumbled into the bathroom and thrust her hand under a tap. She leant on the basin, her hand still under the tap as if she were trying to staunch a gush of her own blood instead of washing off the tiny streak of Norma Helidon’s, and stared at herself in the mirror. There was a slight bruise on her cheek where the other woman had hit her and the collar of the green silk dressing gown had been ripped. I could have killed her! she told her reflection; then all at once her anger went and she was afraid. Afraid of herself and the web she had created.

  She had known from the start that the blackmail she had planned would not be easy. Men, even weak men, did not give away large sums of money without some sort of fight; especially self-made men like Walter Helidon and Leslie Gibson. She knew of the mercilessness that lay behind the acquisition of wealth: charity never paid dividends of riches. She had expected to see the worst side of Walter Helidon’s nature; but she had not expected the venomous opposition that Norma Helidon had shown. Walter’s wife, the society matron, the queen of the charities, had come here this afternoon and shown all the alley-cat spirit of the girls Helga had once seen brawling on the Reeperbahn.

  “Walter’s been here, hasn’t he, Miss Brand? I saw him down at the car park. No, we didn’t speak to each other,” she had said as she had seen Helga’s questioning look. “He didn’t see me. He looked as if he weren’t seeing anything. I just

  hope he gets home safely,” she added, and for a moment her voice softened; it contrasted strangely with the harsh note that had been in her voice from the moment she had entered the flat. Then the harshness came back, as if she could not control it: “I’m sure you wouldn’t want him hurt. Or has he paid you the money?”

  Helga leaned against the sideboard, drawing her gown tighter about her. Norma Helidon had sat down as soon as she had entered the flat, as if her legs had been able to carry her only this far and had then run out of strength; but she sat on the edge of the chair, her knees close together, her gloved hands clutching her handbag so tightly that the cream leather of it was dented. She had taken off the sunglasses she had been wearing and there was a pinched dark look to her eyes as if she were in pain.

  “Why did you come, Mrs. Helidon?”

  Norma ignored the question. “Has Walter paid you the money?”

  Helga hesitated: how much would Walter confide in his wife? Then she shook her head, deciding that from here on it would pay her to be nothing but honest and frank. After all she was selling them only the truth. “Not yet. He is coming back tomorrow with it. He is being very reasonable.”

  “He’s being stupid,” Norma said flatly, a wifely opinion without malice. “He has been stupid all along, getting mixed up with a girl like you.”

  “Whose fault was that?” Helga couldn’t keep the malice out of her own voice. Though she had never looked for a husband, had, with reservations, always enjoyed what her own life had brought her, there had always been part of her, the inheritance of Lutheran puritanism from her mother, that had envied the security of the woman who had a husband. “You should have been a better wife to him.”

  “I’ve always been a good wife to him.”

  “You didn’t give him what he wanted—”

  “What you gave him, you mean?” She glared at Helga, voluptuous in the green silk, and became aware of her own body with the breasts that had begun to sag, the stomach that protruded when released from its expensive girdle, the buttocks with their dimpled porridge look. Oh God, she thought, they always have youth on their side. Why couldn’t Walter have fallen for an older woman? But knew the question was foolish even as she asked it of herself. “Giving him perverted sex—”

  Helga smiled. All these wives were the same: any sex a man got outside his marriage bed had to be perverted. Walter had certainly had a fundamental approach to sex when she had first met him, an attitude that reduced the act to a simple athletic exercise: he seemed to look upon it as a test of his stamina and she had half-expected him to get out of bed and mark up his score on the wall, as if he were playing darts. She had had to teach him a lot, but what they had indulged in each Monday and Thursday had been nothing to the experiments she had been expected to perform, and had loathed, in her days in Hamburg. “It wasn’t perverted, Mrs. Helidon, except to a perverted mind. A man is entitled to having it more than once or twice on a Sunday morning. Sex is more important than the Sunday Telegraph.”

  Norma flushed, a mixture of anger and embarrassment. “He really talked about me, didn’t he? Oh my God, discussing me with a trollop like you—!” Her gloved hand went to the double strand of pearls she wore, as if words were stuck in her throat behind them.

  Helga snapped, “Only once—that was all he ever talked about you! We had other things to do—to talk about. I didn’t give him just sex—I listened to him, gave him an audience. When did you last do that? What do you want, Mrs. Helidon? To ask me to give him up?”

  Norma Helidon nodded, her hand still at her throat.

  “For nothing?” Helga shook her head angrily. “I’m giving

  him up—but not for nothing! You—he and you—you have to pay for all the boredom I have had for two years—” She was suddenly finding reasons for her extortion: she had been acting the role of his wife while his real wife had been engrossed in her social activities: she became almost self-righteous, the blackmailer who had all at once found she was not so sinful. “If it hadn’t been for me, it would’have been someone worse —at least I have been discreet—you owe me for that—”

  “I cant let him pay you—” Norma’s voice was hoarse now, a croak. “It would be buying him back from you—”

  Helga took a step forward, leant down till her face was close to the other woman’s. “That’s for him to decide. He will not be paying for himself—he will be paying for you. And perhaps he will not think you are worth twenty thousand dollars—”

  It was then that Norma hit her. The gloved hand came up in a sudden involuntary blow; Helga saw the look of hatred in Norma’s eyes even before she felt the pain in her own cheek. She grabbed at the strands of pearls, cursing obscenely in German; then Norma clutched her by the collar of the dressing gown and she heard the silk rip. In a moment th
ey were wrestling, swaying together in the middle of the room to a slow rhythm like women without male partners at a tea dance. Norma’s handbag and sunglasses had fallen on the floor; then the strands of pearls followed them, individual pearls slipping.off the strings and scattering about the carpet like white dried peas. Helga continued to curse in German as she fought, but Norma struggled silently, the only sound coming out of her being an occasional great sob. An airliner went overhead as it headed down towards the airport south of the city; its jets coned into the one great scream that filled the room like the fury of the women who fought there. They did not move from the spot where they had first grappled; each of them stood with her feet firmly planted in the carpet. Then abruptly they broke apart, as if the horror of what they

  were doing had suddenly stepped between them like a referee. Norma dropped to her knees. She knelt there, her head hung on her breast, and now the sobs were coming out of her in awful tearing gasps. Helga staggered back, leaned against the door that led to the kitchen.

  “Get out! Get out!”

  Norma did not look at her. She lifted her head for just a moment and took a deep rasping breath; then she got down on her hands and knees and, still sobbing, like some huge lumbering dog in pain, she began to crawl about the carpet. Helga, still recovering from the struggle, her gaze still blurred by her exertion, stared at the other woman in puzzled shock: had she gone out of her mind? Then she saw the gloved hands fumbling with the scattered pearls. Norma crawled around, still making the awful sounds deep in her throat, picking up every pearl she could find. Helga stared fascinated, unable to move even when Norma came crawling across the floor to pick up a pearl beside her foot.

  Then slowly, the sobs subsiding, Norma got to her feet. She looked around for her handbag and sunglasses, picked them up and put on the glasses. Then without a word she stumbled to the front door, opened it and went out, one hand clutching the pearls to her breast as if she were trying to hold in her life’s blood.