‘Cranes?’ I said, bizarre images of stalky long-beaked birds flapping through my mind. ‘You run a rent-a-flock?’
‘Industrial cranes,’ he said, laughing. ‘I lease them to builders, to large-scale developers. You’ve no idea how boring it all is,’ he continued, diffident, modest, humorous, spreading his hands in that self-deprecatory, slightly puzzled gesture with which I was to grow so familiar, which indeed was to haunt me, years later. ‘Lots of people pay me lots of money for all kinds of different things. Business advice, marketing advice, planning advice. It’s all to do with bean-counting, really.’
I didn’t actually care. It was just as well I didn’t, for nothing much was clarified during our marriage. I was to discover, after we started to live together, that letters rarely came for Max.
‘I use a post-office box,’ he told me. ‘More convenient, easier to keep tabs on.’
Much of his business seemed to be conducted in other people’s offices or else in expensive restaurants. I met no colleagues, no associates. None of this bothered me in the slightest. This was all peripheral stuff, cloudy trivial filaments hanging inconsequentially around the solid gorgeous fabric of our relationship.
One day, when we were in my office, he used the telephone. Halfway through the conversation — it was obviously about money, about shares, I recall, but I didn’t try to follow it: I didn’t want him to think I was inquisitive, and in any case it was impenetrable to me — he laughed, and started speaking in Italian. It seemed to me that he spoke with extraordinary speed and fluency: he sounded like a native.
‘I didn’t know you spoke Italian,’ I said, later.
He glanced at me. ‘I speak a few languages. Some better than others, some worse. It’s helpful, for business.’
‘Do you travel to those countries?’
‘A bit.’
He did travel during the years we lived together, but not frequently. Once or twice to Bangkok; two or three times to Singapore. Indonesia, a couple of times. Maybe half-a-dozen trips to Sydney, the same to Perth.
He did spend a good deal of time on the telephone: his sleek, little study in Rain (mahogany desk, burgundy leather chairs) had separate telephone and fax lines; and that was when it was quite unusual for people to have such an arrangement at home. He did send and receive faxes, but unobtrusively, without fuss, and I think infrequently, too.
He didn’t welcome anyone fiddling with his things, and I soon learnt to leave his study alone, not to search through the papers on the desk, not to open the drawers. It didn’t bother me. He was a reserved and private man: he had a right to keep his papers to himself if he wanted to.
Nor, I realise now, did I ever find out much about his life — his life, that is, before meeting me. He wasn’t evasive; it just wasn’t something we talked about. He had grown up in Sydney, the only child of patrician and distant parents. There had been a brief marriage, when he was still a very young man: his wife had died of a catastrophic and rapacious cancer within three years. Her name had been Caroline, and there had been no children. He looked faintly baffled when he spoke of this first marriage: when I said this to him he laughed, wryly.
‘It’s so long ago, Belle, that’s all. It’s as if it happened to somebody else. I swear I loved her: I adored her. But now I can’t really recall what she looked like, to tell you the brutal truth.’
After her death he had travelled, lived for a while in Canada, for a while in London. It had been a rootless kind of existence, he said, dismissively. Comfortable enough, but finally without direction, without substance.
On his return to Australia he had made Sydney his headquarters, but he had always had a yen to live in Melbourne; and, after a windfall from some unusually successful enterprise, he had bought the land on which Rain was built with the intention of settling down for at least four or five years.
‘And now I’m here for life,’ he said, grinning at me. ‘Well, for as long as you’re here, anyway, my darling.’
He never avoided a question I put to him about his life. He never volunteered information, either. I didn’t mind. As far as I was concerned, I’d emigrated to a brilliant new country: I didn’t talk much about the old one, either. I suppose I assumed that, as we continued to live together, as we became more and more accustomed to each other, we would gradually learn more of each other’s lives; our pasts would roll out slowly for each other’s minute inspection, just as the years ahead would unfurl, like long, lush carpets, intricately patterned and richly interwoven, waiting to be trodden on.
But while Max and I worked on our house, our home, I was still living with Steve, and he and I were engaged in an intense and concentrated war. It was only by small degrees that he accepted the inevitability of the split. Towards the end there were awful nights when he wept — noisily, unattractively — and begged me to stay, begged me to give the marriage another go.
He offered me different domestic arrangements as a compromise; he said he would welcome Max at our house, that I could go and spend nights with him sometimes, that he would promise not to have sex with me for a year or more, that he would do anything, anything at all, if only I would stay with him.
All of it was impossible. He was desperate, mad. I’m not sure that it was me he cared about, so much as the life he had made, the life in which he was comfortable. I was up-ending his life, and he would never forgive me.
Eventually, however, he accepted it. And we started to talk about what would happen with the children.
‘I’ll take Dominic,’ I say.
‘Will you now?’ replies Steve, rather unpleasantly.
‘Yes. I will.’
‘Not Kate?’
‘It would be better if we split them,’ I say. ‘You know we talked about this: we don’t want to have custody battles, that sort of thing. It’s silly. The only people who profit are the lawyers: we both know that. I thought we’d agreed, it would be better to have one each. It isn’t as if they’re going to be broken up for good: they’ll have plenty of time together. It isn’t as if they’re inseparable anyway, either: most of their time they spend apart.’
‘I realise this. Why don’t you take Kate? That’s what I’m saying, Isabel. I’m not suggesting you take them both. I’ll have them both, gladly, but I don’t think that’s what Kate wants. I’m suggesting you take Kate instead of Dominic.’
I stare at him. This is not an alternative I have considered. Why would I take Kate? Doesn’t he understand? It’s Dominic I want, my prince, my dark angel.
‘But Dominic’s mine,’ I say, stupidly. ‘We’ve always said that. Dominic’s mine; Kate’s yours.’
‘Don’t be so idiotic. We said that as a joke, a parody on ourselves if you like. The dark and the light. It doesn’t work like that. You know it doesn’t.’
‘I can’t take Kate.’
‘Isabel, you can be so blind. Kate adores you. Dominic doesn’t.’
‘Dominic does love me.’ With terror I feel the prickle behind my eyelids, tears approaching. It will never do, to start crying at this point. I have to be strong, to demonstrate that I can be strong.
‘Of course he loves you,’ says Steve, with that exaggeratedly patient manner I so resent. ‘That’s not what I said. You don’t listen to what I say, Isabel: sometimes I think you’ve never listened to what I say. You’ll break Kate’s heart if you leave her.’
But I insist. Dominic will come with me. Kate will stay with her father, in whose mould she is cast and whose habits and predilections she understands and to a large extent shares.
I do not take Dominic’s feelings into account. Why should I? He is only little: he is ten. He is too young to know what he really wants. Of course he will do as he is told.
Dominic, of course, has never done as he is told. I find a quiet time to speak with him. I try to cuddle him (an ill-advised strategy), tell hi
m how I love him, how happy we will be together. He refuses to listen.
‘If you’re leaving, well, okay then,’ he says. ‘Cool. You leave. I’m staying with Dad.’
I reason. I flatter. I schmooze.
‘No,’ says Dominic, regarding me with unfriendly eyes. Eyes like pebbles.
I represent to him how splendid life will be with me, with godlike Max, in our beautiful house, sharing our bliss.
Dominic measures me with his stern and pebbly eyes, and finds my dimensions lacking. ‘No,’ he says. And he will not be moved. Not then, not ever.
‘I told you,’ says Steve when I tell him. ‘I told you, but you wouldn’t listen. You never listen. What are you going to do about Kate then?’
‘I’ll think about it.’
‘Well, don’t think too long. She knows it’s happening; she’s worried sick. She’s waiting for you to talk to her.’
But I talk to Max, first. I find this embarrassing, as in our previous discussions I have always assumed Dominic will be the child who joins us; I have assured Max of Dominic’s virtues and painted vivid pictures of how he loves me and how he will love Max, how well we will all get on together, how beautifully our lives will mesh.
Max has met Dominic and has (I suspect) found him sulky and distant, but is too well-mannered to say so. Kate has played little part in our discussions. I find it hard to explain to Max that my beloved son doesn’t wish to join us.
‘He’ll come for weekends and so on, I imagine?’ says Max, consolingly.
‘Well, yes, I suppose so,’ I say, already hearing Dominic’s flinty refusal.
‘Well, then. There’s no worry, is there?’
‘No.’
And Max enchants Kate by bearing her off to various exotic shops where together they handle fabrics and inspect colours for the purpose of furnishing her bedroom: he even manages to educate her a little towards his own severe style of elegance, distracting her from the twee white four-poster and the ruffled pink curtains she at first covets. Kate has always had an unfortunate penchant for tinsel and frilly knickers.
It’s rapidly clear that she adores him; at fifteen, ripe for crushes, deep in adolescence, she hatches a fully fledged worship of him. He’s faintly amused, but flattered. I’m pleased, of course; and ironically it makes for greater harmony between us than she and I have ever enjoyed. But I miss Dominic’s dark sardonic presence in my life.
I had little to do with Kate’s bedroom, but I revelled in furnishing the rest of the house. For now we knew that we would live in this house together, that it would be not solely his but ours. We would sit on the patio during summer twilights; we would knock together dinners in the gleaming kitchen at the end of the day’s work, we would dive into the pale beautiful pool. We were building not just a house but lives, furnishing not just rooms but years.
We would sleep together and make love in the glorious main bedroom, so spacious and light; and waking, would together enjoy the view, framed by the lemon-scented gums we had so carefully preserved. Together we would gaze up through the vast clear shaft of the skylight Max had insisted upon, directly over the bed, inspecting the weather in the mornings, the moonlight at night.
Normally I had little to do with soft furnishings: Bea used an interior decorator on a casual basis and we called her in when clients didn’t have the time or the nous to construct a heart for the body we had made them. I was asked for advice sometimes: Bianca had got me to talk her through Granada, and she had done a lot of what I’d suggested. But here I could run riot.
Not that Max was the sort of man to run riot. Nothing but the best, nothing over the top, was his rule. In one sense he was reckless: he loved lavish gestures and he could spend more extravagantly than anyone I’d ever come across, but he wasn’t stupid and he didn’t buy rubbish. His taste was immaculate.
We fleshed out the house’s skeleton together, choosing the carpets and timbers, the tiles and the paint. We spent hours there, experimenting with colour and texture, holding up drapes, comparing ceramics and woodgrains. When we had these right, we moved to curtains and furniture, cushions and pictures, lampshades and ornaments and lights. It was one long, incredible spendfest.
I’d never known anyone who spent money like this. Nothing was too expensive for him. In the living room we chose lamps that spilt pools of brandy and whisky; cushions the colour of burnt toffee and a dark honey, like honey mixed with rust, to scatter over the fine milky leather of the acres of sofa stretching in a soft crescent around the fireplace. I felt drunk every time I walked in there, intoxicated by the room’s simple magnificence, the beauty of colour and sweep, stone and glass.
One evening I went there after work (it was before we were living together, and we used to meet there for an hour or so at the end of the day, for our daily charge, our shot of ecstasy). Max was standing before the fireplace (its façade a streaked amber stone) rolling something over in his hands. As I entered, he turned and held it out to me.
It was a sculpture, about the size of a grapefruit. It was round and smooth and startlingly heavy, a deep polished cream, marbled with the amber of the hearthstone. One’s hands curved around it with gratitude for its cold smoothness, its satisfying weight and density. Its centre was carved into a hollow, crossed over with swathes of the stone, passing and weaving in heavy ribbons that intersected and dissolved back into the substance of the stone.
It was like a highly stylised version of one of those Chinese puzzle spheres that nest within each other, except that there was only one of it. I weighed it and turned it and stroked it: I didn’t want to put it down. I cradled it in my hands.
‘Where did you get it?’
‘That gallery in Richmond,’ he said. ‘The one on the corner, you know. It had those woodcuts you liked. Isn’t it exquisite?’
‘It’s perfect. What sort of stone is it?’
‘Don’t know. I thought it might be onyx or something of the kind, but I think it’s too grainy, too heavy. The gallery bloke didn’t know.’
‘It’s meteor stone,’ I said. ‘It came flashing down to earth, just for us. It’s our meteor.’
‘It is, too,’ he said, hugging me.
On the day I finally left Steve, he wept inconsolably. I took little — only clothes, and a few books. He ought to have been pleased, that I left him with everything, that I didn’t force him to a division of property. I wanted nothing. He could have the house; he could have the car, the shares. None of it meant anything to me.
Max bought me a new car. He bought me a Fred Williams painting and a crisp, glittering diamond ring.
Zoë spat bitter things into my ear. Bea wrung her hands.My mother cried.
‘You’re just being bought,’ she sobbed.
I didn’t say that if Max had wanted to buy me he could have managed the transaction a lot more cheaply.
I did keep on trying to explain to them, to my family and my friends. But they none of them wanted to know. Even my mother, who was at the time so ill, even she — knowing death approached, knowing that within the year she would leave us — was harsh to me after I’d moved in with Max.
‘Thank God your father’s not alive, Isabel,’ she said. ‘He was so fond of Steve. We all are.’
‘Well, I’m not. It seems to me I’m the one who counts, here.’
She shook her head. ‘Of course you’re still fond of him,’ she said, impatiently, just as if I were still ten, a child who needed reminding of common sense. ‘This is some kind of mad aberration. You’ll grow out of it. You’ll regret this, Isabel: you mark my words. You’ll regret it.’
She astounded me. I had thought Max would fascinate away her prejudices in five minutes. She was usually susceptible to personable men, and I’d expected Max’s sheer good looks and fluent charm to knock her over, if not immediately, at least in time. She remained conspicuous
ly unaffected; and her obduracy was reflected by almost everyone I knew. Kate was the only person to respond with warmth to him.
Everyone seemed to assume that I had been bewitched by his glamour, by the sheen and gloss of him. Of course he was glamorous; of course he was sexy; but his glamour and his sexual charge weren’t all there was to love about him, and it enraged me that nobody seemed able to see this.
Everyone apparently assumed the man I had fallen for was nothing more than a silver-haired debonair stud, who had seduced me and bemused me with wealth and sophistication and flair. Was I so shallow? Did they think me so easily enamoured, so ripe for cheap enchantment?
His gifts were amazing. No less amazing was the manner in which he delivered them. If Steve gave a present, it was heralded and trumpeted from afar. It seemed Max’s gifts slid sideways from his pocket, like those of some captivating and talented conjuror.
‘The start of your investment portfolio,’ he said, kissing me as he gave me the ring. It had not just one diamond but three, set elegantly on a simple band of white gold.
I’d never known generosity like it, nor extravagance. It was dizzying, intoxicating. He would bring things home for us, for Kate and me — a bikini for me, a pair of sandals for her, a silk wall-hanging, a Mixmaster, a silver cocktail shaker, theatre tickets, a Swedish glass vase, pewter candelabra. I had to tell him to stop.
‘You’ll be coming home with frankincense and myrrh next,’ I said. ‘It’s all getting ridiculous.’
He laughed at me, but did as I asked. He could see my worry about Kate: her world had been turned on its head and this giddy shower of presents was doing nothing to restore a sense of reality to her life.
So we all settled down, more or less. I continued to work in the partnership with Bea; Kate continued to go to school; Max continued to pursue his mysterious financial occupations.
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