The Golding

by Sonya Deanna Terry

  The real bee in Dette’s bonnet had been the fourth candidate, the one who had answered her newspaper notice. Too in-your-face attractive for Dette to consider. Someone waiting for Dette’s husband to get home before being dismissed for the day needed to be the opposite of a man-magnet. She hadn’t been stylish though. Matthew liked women with class. Beginning to run out of choices and reading through this candidate’s application again, which indicated the woman was hard working, had a teenaged daughter of her own and volunteered once a fortnight at a women’s and children’s shelter, Dette had pondered over whether she could trust her with him. Divorced, however. A big minus. Dette had reasoned then that not everyone was on the lookout, or in an unhappy relationship. She’d been dully dressed in a cleaner’s uniform. Dowdy. And certainly not what Dette would call slim.

  Overhearing a phone call between Matthew and a workmate had ultimately helped Dette to make up her mind. Matthew’s speaker phone had been on in the study. A man named Roddie, who Dette had never met, admitted to falling for a wide-hipped, bosomy Italian. It was Matthew saying ‘Voluptuous, do you mean? Woo-hoo!’ that had prompted Dette to take up her mobile and coolly inform the final candidate she hadn’t been selected.

  Bringing her thoughts back to the present, Dette gazed at the aqua of the sea. A smidgen greener and it would be the same colour as the Turnabout Teal she’d asked Dan to use on the bedroom ceiling. A breeze rose up, springing a dusting of sand onto Adam’s muscular legs. He stirred. Dette leaned down, planting her elbows on his Berry & Seale 2008 edition beach towel, and kissed his cheek. So beautiful. He was so, so divinely beautiful.

  Reflecting again on the interview process, Dette closed her lids against the sun’s persistent rays and flipped her sunglasses down over her eyes. The whole nanny-candidate thing had been a tedious waste of time. She’d resorted to offering Rhoda double her usual wage, and Rhoda had agreed to give away the idea of hanging around her grandchildren for one week of the holidays at least, confirming that everyone was corruptible with the right offer.

  And then one of the interviews she’d conducted had returned to haunt her. Dette had thought she’d seen the last of that final candidate, having barred any possibility of a poverty-wracked and worryingly voluptuous cleaner—devoid of a wedding or engagement ring—attempting to snatch her husband. Embarrassingly, this unsuccessful and perhaps disgruntled nannying hopeful was there at the bar on Friday night. Rosalba? Rosita? Rosalina?

  Dette’s memory flickered back to the name she’d scribbled down on the phone-pad. Rosetta. That had been it. Rosetta Melki. Matthew had called her ‘Lucetta’, and although Dette hadn’t recalled her actual name at the time, Adam’s ‘Rosie’ reference had sounded closer to it. So very Adam-ish of him, to shortcut something fussy.

  Dette had been catching up with Adam in whispers when she’d spotted Rosetta standing alongside Matthew. The woman was laughing uproariously at Matthew’s excuse for humour. Dette hadn’t at first recognised her, but the hair hadn’t been up at the interview, and the fringe hadn’t been forward. While Dette had known on arriving at the bar that someone dark-haired had been standing beside Adam, she’d assumed her to be one of the admin girls.

  Once settled into the bar’s couch, the one with the annoyingly purple cushions, Dette had confided her plight to Adam. She’d omitted, of course, any uncertainty she’d felt concerning employing Rosetta as a temporary nanny, avoiding mentioning too, the way the woman was at that stage gawping at Matthew like a goldfish: a sex-starved one at that!

  Instead she’d told him that Rosetta worried her, that she suspected Rosetta was there at the retirement night to seek revenge for having been refused the job. ‘She’s going to cause trouble, Adam,’ Dette had said. ‘I know she is.’ An exaggeration of course, but she couldn’t ignore her first impression when she’d stepped in. The woman’s stance alongside Adam had been somewhat territorial. He was, after all, more handsome than her husband, more sought after, and so probably less able to be trusted.

  Adam had done the gallant thing; had told Dette he would get Rosetta out of the way. ‘She’s our office cleaner,’ he’d said. ‘And she looks to me like she’s had way too much to drink. I’ll give her a lift home and scoot back to you. Soon as I can.’

  ‘We’re all moving on to that Circular Quay restaurant in the next half-hour,’ Dette had told him. Afraid he would phone to say he’d failed to find her and gone home, she’d added, ‘It’s down from the Opera House.’

  As the true gentleman he was, Adam had kept his word. Once dinner finished at Opera Underground, the musicians started up. That was when Adam had texted her to say where he was.

  Matthew had asked her to dance. Said the band they’d hired for him was his favourite.

  ‘Sweetie, I can’t,’ she’d said. ‘I had to go shopping for quilt covers this afternoon.’

  He’d eyed her with affection. ‘What does that have to do with not dancing?’

  ‘I walked my feet off trying to find one in a silver-tinted beige. These tootsies are too tired to party.’

  And then Matthew’s middle-aged secretary, a woman who really needed to do something about that jutting stomach of hers, had urged Matthew onto the dance floor, and while everyone was ensconced in grooving to the rhythms of Matthew’s requested song, Dette had seized the opportunity to go to Adam.

  She’d raced across to the neighbouring Quay West hotel, announced herself at reception as ‘Mrs Harrow’ and dashed up the curling flight of stairs to a room conveniently located on the first floor. A room this close to the foyer meant Dette was less than a minute’s walk from Opera Underground; no tardy lifts to mar the frantic return she would reluctantly have to make.

  High on anticipation, she’d opened the door with her card-key. He’d greeted her from the bed naked, having emerged from a shower that was still running in the ensuite, grinning that bad-boy grin, damp-haired and glistening skinned, his body resembling the statue of a rain-studded Olympian.

  So the evening had ended happily. After that climactic hotel visit, she’d returned to the restaurant to find the musicians thankfully packing up, and everyone milling around the small stage in readiness for the ‘goodbye and good luck’ speech, delivered with back-slapping alacrity by Matthew’s boss.

  Then there were farewell sentiments for her husband, and teary goodbyes from the tarts in admin who had hugged Matthew a little too tightly to be considered otherwise.

  During the cab ride home alongside slurry-worded Matthew, she’d gazed out at the city lights—a jeweller’s window of starry reds, greens and blues—while marvelling at how sublime it had felt to be skin-to-skin once more with the incorrigible Adam Harrow.

  Two days before the flight, she’d met her cousin in the city and paid her off to keep up the ‘Mum and Dad shouted me a trip to Vanuatu and I asked Dette to accompany me’, story, then she’d gone to Adam, who had taken ten days off work in May, and presented him with his early birthday present of a return ticket to Vanuatu, all expenses paid.

  ‘Who’s funding this?’ he’d wanted to know.

  ‘Does it matter where the money’s from?’ she’d said. And then she’d shocked herself with one of Grandma Carmody’s impractical sentiments. ‘It’s the thought that counts, not the money, and I believe that if there’s love, then that’s all that matters. Love is more important than money.’

  ‘And I love you for doing this,’ Adam had shouted. Then he’d picked her up, thrown her on the bed and proceeded to demonstrate his gratitude physically.

  On the day of the flight, Diondra had rung to wish Dette ‘bon voyage’ and to give a friendly warning about being discreet.

  ‘Believe me, I am,’ Dette had told her.

  Dette, while lily white she wasn’t, had still retained her dignity. She was a lady. Adam had told her that many a time. Ladies didn’t give away all their secrets. Adam had also told her she’d make a great actress, a brilliant one in fact, with all her seamlessly executed cloak-and-dagger darting about, and
Adam’s opinion was one she valued more than anyone’s.

  She loved him like crazy, this charming, fiery, ridiculously wealthy finance man with the Wall Street aspirations.

  If only...but no. Adam wouldn’t ask her to live with him. Six months of hotel room trysts and the plethora of lies she’d told Matthew over the phone while Adam smiled and turned the other way wasn’t the smartest method of earning a new lover’s loyalty. And solitude was Adam’s god.

  Being married to Matthew felt so different now. He had plans in place to leave her for someone else, Dette felt sure of it. Having a husband who ignited such nail-biting nervousness was like standing on a precipice, dreading that inevitable push. She could go ahead and break up with him first, of course, but the idea of putting her girls through the disruption of another move, especially if she'd given up on a second marriage, was too awful to consider.

  She would have to be careful once she got home. She would need to wait around for each mail delivery so as to read and discard Matthew’s credit card statement before he did, but that wouldn’t stop him from checking his balance online. She would have to arrange a problem. She could hide his laptop...but then she’d probably have to hide the cord of his desktop computer as well, but then...Ah well. She’d think of something. If he discovered she’d purchased ten days’ island accommodation at Honeymooner Haven, he’d abandon her within seconds.

  Dette stretched out on her beach towel and beamed at her golden Apollo. He did not return the smile. Instead, he regarded her with an enigmatic aloofness that could only be described as smouldering. Mmm!

  What if...? Ah yes. What if. A term that was only temporarily cheering, but still...

  What if Adam loved her in the same way she loved him and was hesitant to say? What if Adam had quietly decided to put a hundred per cent effort into their relationship? What if she could convince Adam that his life would be better if he lived with her?

  She mulled over it all with wistful resignation, then wondered how the same questions would sound if ‘What if?’ was replaced with ‘Needless to say’.

  Could it be done?

  Did she have the power to change mere longings into possibilities? Dette crossed her fingers and sighed. ‘Needless to say,’ she whispered. ‘I have all the power in the world.’

  Chapter Eleven

  Matthew eyed the Post-nuptial Agreement forms on his home-office desk, pinned in place by a carved wooden eagle. At Opera Underground Charlie had handed him a box. One of the admin juniors must have taken great care in decorating the box prior to its presentation; there’d been scissor-curled printer paper sprouting from its lid. ‘I knew you liked the bloody thing more than I ever did,’ Charlie had said when Matthew admired the artefact.

  Now, as Matthew glared at the forms, Charlie’s retirement gift from Norway stared at him blankly. ‘Think it’ll work?’ he asked the eagle. ‘You don’t? Matey, neither do I.’ He thumped his fist down on the desk and groaned. ‘She wouldn’t agree to this. Not ever.’ He’d realised this way too late.

  Pre-nuptials had felt extraneous seven years ago. The ideal for Matthew would have been a twelve-month engagement when he and Bernadette could have lived together to test out compatibility. All going well, he’d hoped they’d plan their family the following year, but Bernadette’s surprising announcement had sped things up. His mention of signing a pre-nup had made her sob hysterically. ‘This just shows you don’t trust me,’ she’d said. ‘And that you don’t care in the slightest about our baby.’ There had been no baby; just a four-month disruption to Bernadette’s cycle caused by dieters’ malnutrition.

  He had allowed himself to be shamed into believing a pre-nup was unfair to her. Became concerned that his fiancée would flutter away like a frightened butterfly into the arms of someone who made her feel safer. His lack of foresight proved to him that a man was at his most susceptible when in love. Just as well he didn’t have anyone else in his sights. He wouldn’t be asking anyone out after the marriage ended. Not until he was strong enough to be vulnerable again.

  Mulling over the poetry night, he remembered the book mentioned by the unseen poet named Rosetta, a novel about an elf and an eagle, which sounded like something esoteric outlets would sell.

  He looked at the clock, nodded, then reached into his pocket for his car keys. He had to see Marc Garrison at three-thirty, one of his former law colleagues, to discuss the setting up of his new firm. They were meeting at a Wynyard café. If he left now he could duck into that weird little New Age bookshop in Martin Place and snap up the book. Going there after the meeting would mean getting tangled in peak hour. Since leaving his job, homeward-bound traffic had become especially unwelcome, but if he were to visit the shop, he’d have to leave now.

  Maybe not. Matthew dropped his keys onto the desk. He’d go to the bookshop another day and would instead get those phone calls out of the way. A plethora of unread emails was another overdue task. He could start on those now, rather than in the evening. He’d then be free to spend more time with the girls.

  The day before, he’d picked them up a game of Monopoly—his favourite game as a child—reflecting on his way home from the toy store that he was pretty much a real-life player now, the thrill of property acquisition having never left his veins. Sara and Laura weren’t at all familiar with board games. As far as they were concerned, Park Lane was a London fashion label. After he’d given a lowdown on the rules, they’d all spent the remainder of the afternoon laughing and air-punching with each purchase made and scowling when things went financially down the gurgler. He’d promised them another game once they got home. Better to get his work knocked over before then.

  He took up a photograph from his desk, a framed snap he’d always treasured, Bernadette and the girls in California enjoying a lamplit tea party in the hotel’s Executive Suite. When he and the girls returned from Disneyland, Laura and Sara had gabbled animatedly to their mother about Sleeping Beauty’s castle and the swivelling teacup ride.

  ‘Teacups?’ Bernadette had said. ‘Did someone happen to mention teacups?

  Both girls had shouted that they had.

  ‘It’s funny the two of you should mention tea at a time like this.’ She’d led them into the suite’s opulent sitting room. A blanket had been set on the floor, picnic style, displaying a four-tier cake stand crowded with tartlets, chocolate ricotta cannelloni and other dainties, and an assortment of gleaming crockery. ‘The Mad Hatter dropped by with a tea party for my darling daughters and husband because he knew they’d all be hungry after that enormous trek through the magical kingdom! Have a sandwich, Matthew—I ordered walnut and cream cheese for you. Sara, sweetie, will you be Mother and pour?’

  He returned the photograph to its place on the desk, aware it had made him smile. He knew his attitude to Bernadette was often subjective. Frustration with the amount of disharmony in their marriage had caused him to draw on the negatives, but acknowledging Bernadette’s nicer qualities didn’t have to be done grudgingly.

  He reached for the mouse, ready to click onto his inbox, and hesitated. If he left immediately, he’d only be giving up half-an-hour. What, realistically, could be achieved in a measly thirty minutes? He snatched up his car keys and headed towards the stairs. The calls and emails could wait. He was his own boss now. He’d get Our True Ancient History today.

  Having parked in the nearest underground, Matthew scooted up the escalators, turned left at a news stand, and opened the swing-door of the mystical retailer with its walls of swirling purple and sandalwood scented air.

  A man with a grey-tipped moustache was advising an older lady that, while he could certainly order in the book, Numerology for Pets, it wouldn’t be in the shop for another three weeks.

  ‘That won’t do,’ the woman said with a shrug. ‘I could be dead by then.’

  Thinking what a morbid answer this was until he heard a shriek of laughter and the words, ‘Noooo, that’ll be fine, I’ll take the risk. Order it in please...’ Matthew made his
way down the fiction aisle in search of the L’s. Latterby...Lennington...Here was a Lidden. Lillibridge wouldn’t be far from that.

  * * * *

  Vaguely aware of the bell ringing as the shop door opened, Matthew looked up to see the customer with the raucous laugh toddle out onto the street. The murmur of the man at the counter phoning through for the woo-woo literature on animal name-numbers was almost inaudible.

  Books on rune stones caused Matthew to get side-tracked, so did the stuff on crystal energy, Out-Of-Body Experiences and theoretical time travel. As the shop drifted into its three o’clock lull, Matthew flicked through various titles, perusing paragraphs here and there, conscious of being due at Wynyard in another thirty minutes, wishing half-heartedly that he owned one of the time machines mentioned in the book he was leafing through to buy an extra hour for browsing.

  Ha! Time travel. Total con, he thought, putting the inevitably thin book back on its shelf. Even a layman like me could write a twenty-pager theorising all that.

  The bell dinged again. Matthew scrutinised a graphic in a rune stone book. The text below indicated it to be a representation of Odin, the eagle god of Nordic myth. The idea that eagles had become an obsession made him uncomfortable. So did the explanation of selecting that particular page: ‘A warning against trickery...’

  No-one was tricking Matthew. At least, he thought no-one was, although the whole point of trickery was to aim it at an ignorant target.

  He closed the book with a bang and wedged it back between the other fortune-telling guides, aware of a male voice—faint because he was now in the aisle furthest from the counter—enquiring after a female shop assistant who worked there.

  The moustachioed shop man, whose accent might have been German, said, ‘She’s avay at der moment. On her honeymoon, beliv-id-a-not.’