Secrets of the Sea

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  “That’s nice,” said Mrs Bowman, a thin hand mashing the onyx Christ into her throat. She walked over to the window and stood in the alcove, her concentration on the neat lawn and the two white-haired women stooped there. She released her hand from her throat and spread it on the glass.

  Ray noted that something in Mrs Bowman had mended. “As you can see, our town has a thriving bowling club. The green is a stone’s throw away. And should you wish to join there, my mother is the president! You know, it’s funny, but I always find myself telling newcomers to Wellington Point the same thing. Excellence, dignity and respect are the priorities of our little community. And companionship.”

  “It’s perfect, I’m sure,” Merridy broke in. “But what happens when we come to sell?”

  Ray smiled at her. He could tell who made the decisions in this family! “Should you ever wish to sell,” he ploughed on without missing a beat, “the unit reverts back to Louisa Meredith House, and half the profits go to the family.” He positioned himself to catch her eye. “I hope that won’t be for a long while.”

  Many years later, when his jaw lifted with pride at the Mercury’s description of him as “the David Boon of real estate”, Ray would date the recovery in Tasmania’s east coast property market to his sale of this retirement unit. Ray took the credit. It was his description of “Otranto”, he advised Mr Tamlyn on his return to the office, that had swayed the Bowman family. “You should have seen the lady’s expression when I told her about the bowlo.”

  Since joining the company office seven years before, Ray had discovered that one enjoyable aspect of his work consisted in writing short paragraphs to accompany the half-dozen photographs that Tamlyn & Peppiatt advertised each Friday in the Mercury’s property section. At primary school, his worst subject had been English: it was a standing joke in the class–in which Ray consistently hovered close to the bottom–that Ray Grogan had to cheat to spell his own name. But at his office desk, he developed a knack for describing the most ordinary-looking weatherboard shack in such a way that people would more often than not wish to view it.

  It was very simple. Properties were like dogs: they took on the characteristics of their owners. As Ray bade farewell to the Bowman family outside the nursing home, he reflected that Mr Bowman was a ruin that no amount of renovation could restore. His wife, rewired, upgraded and tastefully refurbished, had potential, although her religion might be an obstacle to a quick sale. He perceived her in the same light as he had once viewed the Bethel Teahouse. Not for the faint-hearted, but offering great prospects for enterprising buyers looking to invest in a historical quarter. Renovate. Renovate. Renovate. This dame is just crying out for you to rescue her from her loneliness!

  As for the daughter…His eyes lingered on Merridy as she wheeled her father around the boundary to the hotel. This gorgeous 1960s prestige home has long been coveted by many, but owned by few. Rarely on the market, an inspection will not disappoint. Do not miss this golden opportunity!

  Nothing he could think of, though, quite captured the commanding, grave beauty of the young woman who passed in front of the score-keeper’s hut and turned into the hotel courtyard.

  Her impregnable and valiant look would have Catherine-wheeled the stumps of most men, but an unhappy woman appealed to Ray’s vanity. The fact was that if she were a house, then he had never come up against anything so splendid, so grand, so classical–unless it was Talbot’s (which Albert Talbot had made clear that he would never in any circumstance put up for sale, not while there was breath left in his body). No, she was more one of those Crusader castles that he was taught about in his history class. Walls eight metres thick that no amount of cannon-fire could broach, with buckets of boiling tar tipped onto the head of anyone rash enough to scale them.

  But where properties were concerned, he had the patience of a snake.

  Merridy could feel his eyes like marbles on her neck and shivered. She pushed the wheelchair quicker, her mother following in silent contemplation. Not until they reached the courtyard did her mother say: “What was your honest opinion of that young man?”

  “Awful.”

  “And the place?”

  “It will do.”

  “Couldn’t we get a better deal if we rented? If your father…”

  “Well, we’ve got to hope he doesn’t. Anyway, I think Keith is keen to have his rooms back.”

  “I will write the cheque tomorrow.”

  They had arrived at a door with a brass “7” screwed into it. Keith had allocated them a suite in a ground-floor block next to the main building. Merridy opened the door and together the two women lifted Leonard’s body out of the wheelchair and onto the bed. Her father’s feet had shrunk and his shoes slipped off as they lay him down. A wheezing noise issued from the dry lips, the sound of air bubbling through the fluid on his lungs.

  Merridy looked at the bloodshot eye that roved the ceiling, the cracked skin. The lines in his face were inscriptions that had weathered and were now unreadable. “We’re making the right decision, Mum,” in a quiet voice.

  Her gaze remained on her father while her mother rinsed a glass and filled it with tap-water and gulped it down. The walk had tired Mrs Bowman.

  Suddenly, she was spitting out.

  The noise whipped Merridy around. “Mum! Keith said we’re not to drink the tap-water.”

  Mrs Bowman grimaced, spitting again into the basin. “I forgot,” wiping the taste from her lips.

  “Over there–I put it over there.”

  Mrs Bowman drank two glass of water from the bottle and lay down beside her husband. She licked the corners of her mouth. “I found the church, Merridy. There is a late service this evening.”

  “What time?”

  Mrs Bowman checked her watch. “Nine o’clock.” Then picked up the photograph that she had propped on the bedside table, a black-and-white photograph of a young boy racing barefoot along a narrow strand.

  He would be with her for ever. Her only regret was, every time she turned her eyes to him, that she had not told him how beautiful he had looked in his boots.

  “I’ll make sure I’m back in time,” Merridy said, and sat on her Glory Box–a wooden steamer trunk at the foot of the bed–to take off her shoes. She crossed her arms and stared a moment at the orange lino. Then she stood up, put on a pair of dark tights and the navy-blue skirt and jacket which Keith insisted that she wear, kissed her mother on her forehead and her father on the cheek, and set off across the courtyard, her book under her arm.

  There were two places to drink in Wellington Point. The Returned Servicemen’s Club on Greer Street and the Freycinet Court Hotel. In a bid to excite more customers, and partly to distract himself in the hollow months after his wife’s death, Keith Framley had the previous winter fitted out a cocktail bar at the suggestion of a mate in the hotel trade who overheard at a convention of travel agents in Bali that Tasmania was set to become a destination for the discerning European tourist. His mate had blundered. There were no tourists here in 1988, not in Wellington Point. Steady drinkers went to the pub in Swansea for their beer. The odd backpacker misdirected to Framley’s cocktail bar at the extremity of the globe almost invariably preferred to join regulars in the public bar on the other side of the hotel.

  The only person to disturb Merridy’s reading that night, around seven o’clock, was Keith’s despondent daughter.

  “Hey, Tildy,” said Merridy, and closed her book.

  “Have you seen Dad?” her face drawn beneath the flawless fringe.

  “In Hobart.”

  “What’s he gone to Hobart for?” hunting around in a black handbag until she found her lip gloss.

  “The cricket, could it be?”

  “Oh, yes, the cricket,” in a disappointed voice. She finished touching up her mouth. “Like some?”

  “Not really.”

  “Go on, take it. If you want to get on in this place, you wear lip gloss. That’s a fact.”

  “No, it’s an opinio
n.”

  “No, no, believe me, it’s a fact. Put this on and you’ll see. You’ll be a hit with it. Hey, what you reading?” She picked it up. “Louisa Meredith. My Home in Tasmania.” It might have been some unpalatable medicine. “Part of your studies, is it?”

  “I borrowed it from the front desk.”

  “Looks boring,” Tildy yawned.

  “It’s interesting–if you’re interested in history.”

  “I’m not interested in history. What sort of history, anyway?”

  “I was learning how they got the feathers off the black swans at Moulting Lagoon.”

  “Really?” She climbed onto a stool and looked around the bar. “How did they? Someone I know, his family made their money from swan down.”

  Merridy found the place. She read aloud: “The general custom was, to take the birds in large quantities in the moulting season, when they are most easily captured and extremely fat; they were then confined in pens, without any food, to linger miserably for a time, till ready to die of starvation, because, whilst they are fat, the down can neither be so well stripped off, nor so effectually prepared.”

  The sound of Tildy listening made her look up.

  Tildy’s lips were trembling. “That’s me! That me! Oh, Merridy, I’m no different. I know how those swans feel.”

  “Why, what’s the matter?”

  “I have a pain, it’s right here,” and squeezed under her breast. “Normally if I have a pain there’s a good reason. But this pain is different. I can’t make it go away. I can’t breathe. I can’t sleep.”

  Merridy put the book down. “Maybe it’s indigestion.”

  “I’ve never felt so bad,” said Tildy, and lunged over to a table to seize a paper napkin. She blew her nose and dabbed one eye and then the other.

  “Maybe you’re in love.”

  “Oh, Merridy. How can you be so cruel? Now I know how Mr Twelvetrees suffered.”

  Merridy straightened a brick that was on the counter.

  “You haven’t forgotten Randal Twelvetrees?” accusingly.

  “Oh, no.”

  “He liked you. My God, he did.”

  “He was just ill, poor man.”

  “Obsessed more like,” and blew her nose again.

  “It was more my mother who affected Randal, Tildy. As I think you know.”

  “Whatever, whatever. Pointless, I know, to ask about your love life. Am I not right?”

  Merridy had not taken her eyes from the brick. Baked by a convict and with its frog filled with Redhead matches to strike on the side, it was one of half a dozen that Tildy’s father had bought from an antique shop in Battery Point and scattered on tables and counters around the hotel.

  She began separating the matches. “My hands are pretty tied at the moment,” in a tight voice. “For romance.”

  “Oh, Merridy, how selfish of me,” and Tildy’s eyes watered again. “I’m so sorry about your dad.”

  Merridy lay the back of her hand on Tildy’s wrist. “Who is he?”

  Tildy’s disconsolate face looked up. “Have you a moment? I know you’ve got a lot on your plate, but I need someone to talk to.”

  With a nod of her head, Merridy indicated the empty room. “I’m all yours–until ten to nine.”

  “This is so embarrassing,” and went behind the counter. “No, I can do it.” She poured herself a double shot of the Captain Morgan–one of the rums that her father had stocked in the bar for discerning customers and which she much preferred to Bundaberg. “You wouldn’t keep anything from me, Merridy? I couldn’t stand that.”

  “I wouldn’t keep anything from you.”

  “Well, it’s Ray Grogan.”

  “Ray Grogan?”

  “You met him this afternoon. He showed you the unit.”

  Ray, in case Merridy had not already heard, was a man renowned in the district for having bedded most women in Wellington Point–not including Tildy.

  His reticence on this score was a source of frustration that Tildy had begun to mistake in herself for passion.

  “Why not ignore him?” Merridy suggested.

  “I’ve tried to. Believe me, I’ve tried to,” looking up and down for tonic. “But it’s no good,” and sniffed.

  Around about the time of Merridy’s appearance in town, Tildy had decided that the handsome real-estate agent was all she ever wanted. Even though part of her could see clean through him to the other side.

  “I was so furious the other night, I up-fronted him: ‘You’re nothing but a proper slut, Ray. That’s all you are.’”

  “And his reaction?”

  “He told me that I couldn’t be more mistaken. But I know Ray.” She poured the tonic into her rum and swallowed. “He screws them in his clients’ beds or wherever he’s showing them around,” grimacing. “He’s got keys to every house in Wellington Point, I wouldn’t be surprised. He even shags them in the score-keeper’s hut! Oh, he’s a shonk. You should hear his lines. They’re the same for every woman.”

  “Must be good ones,” observed Merridy, who had heard enough.

  But the bit was between Tildy’s teeth. “He was pashing on with Rose-Maree, promising that all he ever wanted was to give her pleasure. And telling Abbygail that she smelled like the Taj Mahal by moonlight. He’s nothing but a root-rat. And don’t think he minds how old they are! Teresa overheard him at the RSL saying that he knew Mrs Prosser found him attractive because when he put his hand down her pants it was like feeding a horse–and she must be over sixty. Oh, he’s disgusting,” and shivered.

  “But you aren’t just disgusted?” toying with the lip gloss that Tildy had left on the counter.

  “I don’t know. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve said to myself: Right. That’s it. Step back, Tildy.”

  “Have you told him how you feel?”

  “No. He has enough tickets on himself.” And shivered again. “Such a skite.”

  “He must have something good hidden away,” Merridy said.

  “Oh, Merridy, it’s not that!” Her voice had risen to a wail at the injustice of it. Beyond the porkies that he told her, beyond his reputation for–in her father’s words–“rooting like a leather-punch”, Tildy discerned the outline of a different Ray; the Platonic version, as it were. “The truth is, there’s a side of Ray which is actually quite sweet and generous.”

  Merridy was not convinced. “What’s in it for you?”

  “Well, I’m not alone,” her eyes downcast. “And now he’s having a birthday party on Saturday. He’s invited Rose-Maree and Debbie and Abbygail and Teresa. He’s even invited the girls from the Bethel Teahouse. But the bastard hasn’t invited me.”

  She grappled with the upturned rum bottle. Empty.

  Merridy plucked the bottle from its holder and dropped it into the bin. Above the counter the clock said 8.55.

  “Listen, I’ve got to go. But if you want my opinion, I think you should have nothing whatever to do with him.”

  Next morning, first thing, Merridy walked into Tamlyn & Peppiatt and handed over her mother’s cheque for the deposit on the unit.

  Ray scrutinised Mrs Bowman’s signature. He clipped the cheque to the folder on his desk. “What are you doing this Saturday?” light as spray.

  “I’m busy,” Merridy said.

  “Would you like to come to a party?”

  “No.”

  He gave a pleasant laugh. “It would be a chance to meet some locals.”

  “Why haven’t you invited Tildy?”

  “Tildy? Do I know a Tildy?”

  “Tildy Framley, my cousin.”

  “Oh, Tildy!” guarded, all of a sudden. “You’re right. I haven’t.”

  “Is there a reason?”

  He hesitated. “Tildy and I…Listen, it’s difficult—”

  “Invite Tildy to your birthday party and I’ll come.”

  He stared at her, weighing what she had said. “That’s blackmail.”

  “So…” At the door, with her back to him,
she paused. “Tell me, why don’t you like her?” addressing the carpet, its fake Aboriginal design. “She likes you.”

  “I do like her,” his voice high-pitched and apologetic. He twisted his moustache. “But…But…”

  She turned, bristling. “But what?”

  On that Saturday afternoon, Ray looked up from his tuna steaks–and there she was, head in the wet gum leaves, sitting on his fence right next to Tildy, and gazing down at his family and friends and the barbie that had started to hiss. Despite the damp, the sight of Merridy rekindled furtive hopes.

  “Hey, girls, come on down.”

  “Both of us?”

  “Both. Of. You.”

  After that, he was overly welcoming. He poured a Bloody Mary for Tildy, saying how pleased he was to see her, and took her over to speak with Rhiannon; and a tomato juice for Merridy.

  “Here you are.” His eyes moved from her lip gloss that emphasised the whiteness of her skin. He had never seen a face so white–like milk to tempt a snake.

  She accepted the glass. A pulse of colour darted into her cheeks, then was gone. “I suppose I should say Happy Birthday.”

  “Couldn’t keep away, eh?” swilling the thought of her naked around the bedroom of his mind.

  “Lord, I tried,” she laughed. “Nothing else to do in this godforsaken village.”

  He was wearing blue shorts daggered in white slashes, and had a footballer’s build, with ginger hairs on his chest, and was tall.

  Something puzzled him. “Why the fence? Why not come round the front like everyone else?”

  “Fences are for gatecrashers.”

  “But I invited you.”

  Her body moved inside her clothes, away from the wet clinging cotton. “Not without her,” nodding at her cousin.

  “You mean,” it began to dawn on him, “you really are here only because of Tildy?”