#
After packing up, they took a final walk to the beach where they threw pebbles across the rocks towards the distant surf. Rob stared at the sky.
"What do you see?" Toni said.
"OK. The sky is a tightly stretched skin." Rob pointed. "See that plane – Christchurch to Sydney – it's the tip of a scalpel that's starting to incise the flesh. And, as it cuts, you can see a wound opening up. You'd think the whole sky might burst, but the speed of the plane is cauterising the incision. See, behind it, there's the contrail turning into scar tissue."
Toni looked along Rob's arm, beyond his fingers, towards the images in the sky she could never have seen alone. She'll never sleep with him, but she did want him in her life. "Do you know why I was so pissed off with you last night?"
"No, why?"
They avoided each other's eyes as they stooped to gather more pebbles.
"I felt you'd betrayed me," she said.
"What, because I got drunk and left you to the mercies of Owen Huntly?"
"No." Toni fixed him with an accusing look. "I could handle that. It was because you let him get away with his cheating. It was so wrong and made me want to blow my top with the unfairness of it all."
"I don't really see how that was betraying you, but, anyway, he hasn't got away with anything." Rob threw a pebble high and far.
"Yes, he has – you told him everything was going to be OK."
"I was drinking my way through the man's best wine," Rob said. "I was hardly likely to tell him he's getting the chop come what may. Besides, he thought he'd bought me off, so the least I could do was let him have that satisfaction. I dread to think how much that wine must have cost."
"God, you do amaze me sometimes! But we couldn't find anything wrong with Artemis's claim."
"There's plenty wrong with it. I'm just not exactly sure what yet. What I do know is that Owen will be getting the boot come what may."
"So why didn't you confront him?" she said.
"Get real. You must be absolutely nuts if you think I'd accuse someone like Owen Huntly face to face in his bloody wine cellar. He's got the anger management skills of Sonny Corleone but I will nail him all the same."
"But we haven't been able to prove anything."
"Will you please stop saying 'but' to everything I say. I'm sober now and not so scared of you." Looking down, Toni didn't see his grin. Rob put his arm around her shoulder and squeezed as a big brother might. "Cheer up." She managed a small laugh. "This thing with Owen is like when the FBI wanted to nail the gangster Al Capone. He'd been whacking people left, right and centre for years but in the end he went to jail for tax evasion. That's how it's going to be with Owen. God only knows what he's got away with over the years when his fellow Mason Ralph Gisborne was there to protect him, but we'll probably end up getting rid of him for making a spelling mistake in an application form."
"That doesn't seem fair either," she said.
"You really do like things to be black and white, don't you?"
"Yes, I do."
"Well," Rob said, "I'm afraid, in this life, you're going to be disappointed."
Toni hesitated, concerned she would seems even more naïve in Rob's eyes, but said, "Whatever he's done, I still can't believe Owen had anything to do with Artemis's death. You can't fake love like that."
Rob studied her face before he speaks. "For what it's worth, I don't either." He threw a last pebble. "We'd better get going."
Darkening grey had already displaced the blue of the early morning sky, and rain would come in curtains before they leave. Rob touched Toni's arm. "Don't you find it strange this place is called the Five Seasons?"
"It's only because they couldn't call it the Four Seasons," Toni said. "I heard Adam tell you that."
"Yes, yes, but why should they want to refer to any number of seasons? If they're going to change 'Sunny Days', they could call it, absolutely anything. I don't know, 'The Exmouth Hilton'."
"Now, that really is asking for trouble," she said.
"You know what I mean. It's called the Five Seasons, we're here, and that can't exactly be a coincidence, can it?"
"Sorry. I really don't get what you mean."
Rob looked at the sky before speaking. "You see, when I was kid, my dad used to say we can have five seasons in one day. If you think about it, we've had two in the last half an hour."
"It's four seasons in one day," Toni said. "Like the song."
"I know it's supposed to be four, but Dad was an engineer, so believe me, if he said five, he meant five." For the most fleeting of moments, Rob thought of his father in pressed khaki shorts on Exmouth beach pointing at a cumulus nimbus cloud formation. What if he had meant to say four? What if Dad did say four, and I misheard him? Rob dismissed this heresy right away. "It was always a game between Chris and me, seeing if we could spot when it was the fifth season. He says he can't remember now, but we did. So you knew if there was snow it was winter, sun it was summer, and so on, but if there was rain and sun at the same time, we'd say it was a sign of the fifth season."
"I like that," Toni said.
"And, as I got older, I carried on trying to spot the fifth season in different places."
"I don't understand."
"The thing is, it's not only about the weather, the seasons as such. It's much more than that," he said. "I'll give you an example: I have to confess I went through a religious phase when I was younger. And then I thought, if the first season is spring and is represented by birth, and the second season is summer, when everything comes into bloom. Then, in autumn, the third season, things start to decay, and winter is death, then, the fifth season must be the resurrection." He pauses. "Look, I was only thirteen, and I soon grew out of it. But I still sometimes think about what the fifth season might be."
Though Toni said nothing, Rob understood she wanted him to carry on.
"All right, take this one: if we say enquiry is the first season, knowledge is the second season, doubt is the third, and ignorance the fourth, what would be the fifth season?"
She was lost and frowned.
"Don't worry, I don't know either, and I've been playing the game for years." Rob realised he might be babbling, but he's never got this far with anyone before. "Look, maybe the story is this: if it was the fifth season we'd be able to understand everything. Then again, sometimes I think it would probably be the opposite, and everything would become so mixed up, we wouldn't be able to understand anything anymore. Or maybe it's something so different from that, we wouldn't have the words to describe it, not even think of it. Perhaps trying to think how things would be in the fifth season would be like imagining a new colour and how that colour would smell."
Toni took a pace ahead of him, and didn't look back when she said, "I think I may have been living in the fifth season since we came here."
Rob could have fallen to his knees. For the last forty odd years, he'd been searching for the fifth season, and Toni had found it by being with him. He shook his head. "Let's go."
Before they entered the copse that led to the camp, they stopped and turned to look at the ocean for one last time. Rob didn't know when it happened, but he was holding Toni's hand. It was a lovely human weight, not small but soft, yet strong too. Passive in his tender grip, he could feel the pads of flesh locked with his, the intricacies of her bones. He wished he could bear this weight forever, it was all the intercourse he would need with her.
The light was queer and shadowy, and the water by the shoreline had become black and listless. The sea flopped in slow viscous spasms. Then angular beams shone down like searchlights as the crust of cloud ruptured. Toni looked him in the face as he stared at the clouds. "What's wrong?" she asks.
"I thought god was going to talk to me," he said. "But I guess he couldn't pluck up the courage." Rob sighed deeply, knowing this idyll had to come to an end. "Let's go into town on the way back. I expect you'll want to say goodbye to your new best friends."
"What?" Toni looked
betrayed, and Rob hated himself.
"Well, there's your cute detective – and, Owen, of course."
She pulled from his grip. "I told you, I don't like him."
"Yeah, yeah, yeah." Rob covered his eyes with his hand. He felt like punching himself in the nose. "Actually, I need to take the coffee plunger back."
"What? How can you? You've used it."
"I know I've used it. That's the whole point. It's faulty – just as I said it would be. It nearly burnt my hand off. So I'm going to get my money back." He bounced a little on his toes like a washed up boxer promising one last comeback. "I'm going to exercise my consumer rights. That's my revenge on them all for selling crap. God, I love doing that in a packed store in front of an audience."
In the Fifth Season Page 32
