'She always asks after you,' said Melanie. 'You guys have managed a split as well as anyone I know.'
'What is it they say — We Are Still The Best Of Friends.' The truth was that Theo believed pain a form of anaesthetic, and so you learn to touch and talk with a detached and mutual sympathy, your other feelings reduced.
Later, Melanie and he got onto the Maine-King case and his articles. She thought it was some of his best writing. Nicholas had told her that the pieces were being run even in competing papers and magazines. It was the best exclusive story for Theo since the Flowerday audit fraud, and he'd won a prize for that. Because he was the only one with access to Penny, and because she trusted him, he could shape and develop the story as he wished, with plenty of personal stuff and parallels with other cases. A couple of other journalists had made contact with Erskine's lawyers, but he didn't open up his side of things, and just pushed the line that he wanted the custody orders enforced.
'You get the sympathy vote, don't you,' said Melanie. 'She's a Kiwi, she's a mother come home with her child, she's a victim of foreign judicial processes, she's attractive and she did that trash television thing. It's all there as a magazine package.'
'I've had approaches from other papers — bribes really. And there are people sniffing around to find out where Penny's hiding. A detective came and interviewed me at the paper.' Theo decided not to go into detail about the parson — not to mention him at all.
'What's she like?'
'I think she's quite gutsy really,' he said. 'I didn't like how self-centred she was at first, but now I realise the pressure she's under: holed up with a kid and everything stacked against you. In a way, I suppose, she's fighting for her life.'
'Nick says you see her quite often.'
'No, I've only met her a couple of times.'
'He says you've hit it off.'
'You know Nick: close a door on any man and woman and they're shagging.'
'And are you?' said Melanie.
'No.'
'But you like her, I can tell.'
'I like her okay now I've got to know her a bit better. She's been in a hell of a situation.'
Theo thought of Penny right then. No phone to ring anybody, no neighbour, and if she went to the curtainless window, or the door, there would be just the country darkness with no lights at all. Just the far removed stars in a plush, shadowed sky, and the massed hills even darker; just the occasional sheep in its stupid sleep; just the wild briar with no sun to show its burnished orange and red rose hips; just the oily flow of the dark creek.
Melanie liked beer, but had no interest in sport, which in some ways was a bit odd. On the other hand she was a very direct person, completely without snobbery, and accustomed to working with men. Theo preferred wine with meals, but brought export lager when he came to Melanie's place. They drank it after the meal too, when the trays and pasta bowls had been taken back to her small kitchen and they sat talking on the sofa facing the blank television. She was having a disagreement with her proprietors about the space given to obituaries. She was opposed to extended eulogistic accounts of locals who achieved nothing of significance except old age, extended service to fatuous organisations and a multitude of children and grandchildren. The owners believed those children were her readership. 'So help me God, Theo, is there anything more crassly commercial than a community newspaper?'
Theo, running his hands over her warm breasts, of course agreed: a flat earth apologist would have had his endorsement at the time. 'Let's go through to the bed,' he said. It was a large bed, the cover of which had Christmas trees of different colours on it. Whenever they lay across it, he could see through the screen of Melanie's springy hair a narrow strip of carpet between bed and wall. The carpet had a haze of pale fluff, and on it, sealed in green and blue foil, was a cough lolly. He had seen it occasionally over the months, but never mentioned it to Melanie. She may not have understood that such conscious observation was no indication he was less than fully involved in lovemaking: she may have taken disclosure as a criticism of her housekeeping.
That night he was to see nothing of Christmas trees, or cough lollies. 'No, I don't think so,' Melanie said. 'I don't think we should shag while there might be something developing between you and Penny Maine-King. It doesn't feel right, Theo. I'm happy enough with our style of friendship, but not while there's someone else in the picture.'
Theo's first response was a purely selfish one: he told himself he was a fool to have said anything about Penny until after Melanie and he had sex. He knew her well enough to have anticipated both her intuitive sense of Penny's significance and her reaction. She was right, of course, but his cock was aggrieved. A cock has ancient wisdom, but little awareness of what is politic in the contemporary world. The cock is an equal opportunity employer, yet has no deeper motivation than mere opportunity. Melanie didn't demand marriage, or any proprietal relationship that involved living together, but she did insist on being the one lover in a man's life. Absolutely right and wholly admirable, but cock thought bugger to all that.
'You understand,' she said.
'Sure,' he said.
She was relaxed on the sofa, leaning on his shoulder. 'Tell me how things work out,' she said. 'We go back a long way, Theo.'
'That's right.' They did go back a long way. She was a good friend, a good person.
'You won't forget about Stella's dad, will you?' she said. A good friend, but not perfect of course: capable of arousing irritation as well as desire.
In the office the next morning Theo was checking Reuters reports when he thought of Stella's father. Maybe Norman came to mind because the editor passed by, with his thin hair combed forward as the weed aligns in the current of a shallow stream. Maybe it was the report of how many people had died at a wedding in Hyderabad because of illicit booze made from refrigeration fluid.
Theo rang Norman, who answered with the courteous professionalism of the dentist he'd once been. 'I heard you haven't been so well,' Theo said. 'I'm sorry about that. Hope they can get to the bottom of what's causing the turns.' Norman told him he was having both brain and chest scans, and a raft of other tests. He said he was finally getting something back for being overcharged by his private health insurers for years. He made a joke of it in his typical, wry way. He'd still be waiting to see a specialist if he'd relied on public health, he said. 'Anyway, you take care of yourself. If there's anything heavy to do around the place don't hesitate to give me a ring,' Theo said.
Norman didn't say anything at all about Stella. Her mother had been dead for a long time, but perhaps Norman still remembered how private a thing a marriage was, and could imagine the complex pain of its deliberate dissolution. Maybe that pain was not so different from the grief Norman had felt at the separation forced upon him. Theo wanted Norman to call him by name, say he shouldn't feel blame for what had happened, that relationships collapse of some subtle and external volition rather than at the instigation of those concerned. Theo wanted Norman to absolve him of some offence to the family. He might say, Theo, don't beat yourself up about such things. He might say, I know there was no cruelty in it all, no intention to hurt. He might say, personal growth is achieved by accepting the inevitable, and that human personality is intractable.
'Well, thanks for calling, Theo,' Norman said calmly, and rang off.
11
Angie was the hottest of the women reporters. Nicholas and Theo agreed on that. So did the entire male editorial staff, though no formal vote was taken. The consensus was apparent in their jocular acceptance of her. No doubt in the end she'd be overweight, but in her midtwenties the fullness of figure was just contained by the elasticity of youth. She had that confident disregard for her own attractiveness that naturally good-looking women can afford. Allure was second nature to her, as much a part of who she was as the relaxed laugh and the love of innuendo.
She could get anything out of Nicholas, and the others would sometimes use her as emissary to tap his contacts and his exp
ertise. He knew, she knew, they knew, that proximity to such buxom promise cheered him greatly, and he was old enough to understand that simple and healthy pleasure was as far as it went. Since his divorce Theo had sometimes imagined a relationship with Angie might be one of greater and more profitable ambiguity, but she treated him in just the same way. Theo was never quite sure how he had reached the age of thirty-eight, or why. He wasn't conscious of growing older, but Angie obviously placed him in the same category as Nicholas.
'You know the boat people stuff you did,' she said. Standing at Theo's desk she looked out into the alley and back entrances to the beautician and pet shop, as all journalists from the dark side of the reporters' room tended to do when they came over to the window. The reminder of a world external to the baleful flicker of computer screens was intriguing. 'Anna's asked me to do a story on the women — their perspective, motives, how they cope and all that.'
'How predictably inclusive,' said Nicholas.
'I know,' said Angie. She said it in a conspiratorial whisper, and drew out the vowel in an exaggerated way. She really was a good-looking woman. Even her hands were perfectly formed and indefinably suggestive. Do such women ever have feelings of inadequacy, fully realise their power, and how are they reconciled to life when their beauty fades? 'Anyway, I thought you might be able to give me a couple of contacts from the refugee people you spoke to for your piece.'
'He's still in touch with a few Philippine and Indonesian women,' said Nicholas slyly. 'They look to him for succour.'
'Really,' said Angie, and gave Nicholas the eye flash he sought.
'He's offered to go down to the centre and help them get orientated. I don't know which direction they'll end up facing.'
'Really,' said Angie.
'Knock it off, you two,' said Theo. 'You'll end up mud-wrestling together soon.' Nicholas made as if to take off his shirt, and Angie wriggled slightly and pouted. Nicholas then returned to his work, and Angie pulled a stool to Theo's side. He found his file on the boat people and suggested some contacts, especially an Indonesian woman who spoke good English and whose reasons for getting out seemed to be political rather than economic. And there was a much older woman who had given her life savings to some con man who promised fully authorised and official admittance to the country. Angie was relaxed and professional, flirtation done with at a stroke, unless of course Theo chose to begin it afresh. He admired the ease with which she altered her response so surely from one mood to another, and without apparent calculation. He felt the pleasure of being beside her, yet recognised how instinctive it was, how little concerned with his knowledge that she was intelligent, ambitious and good-natured.
His feelings for Penny were different weren't they? Or rather they included the same response, but more besides. There was something about Penny that discovered in him an emotion he'd not felt before: not for Stella, not for Melanie, not for women important in his life before either of them. Some combination of sympathy and apprehension: a protective concern for some recovery in her life, and a wish to be part of that restitution. The closer he came to her, the more he sensed in her something drawn dangerously tight, something suppressed, which might snap with immense consequence. Even as he talked with Angie, even with the physical awareness of her presence, in the quieter preserve of his mind he thought of Penny and Ben, hidden and isolated in the Dunstan hills. Penny's hands on the little boy's shoulders: her preoccupation with his happiness, and his careless possession of it.
You could leave a woman, or have a woman leave you, but you could never fully abandon the experience of the relationship, for that isn't amenable to conscious choice. Like the time of childhood, it may seem to have concerned a different person, but it held its own power nevertheless, and had an independent influence on all that followed.
When Angie went back to her desk, Theo returned to his own work, but uppermost in his mind was an incident of over two years before. He had come home early in the afternoon, after saying he would be late. The politician he'd arranged to interview had postponed his flight and was no longer available. Theo didn't realise there was anyone in the house at first. There were no cars in the drive, and he used his key on the door. He left his jacket hung on the back of a dining room chair, and went through to the kitchen to make a corned beef sandwich. As he finished that small task, he heard a man's voice and then Stella's quick, subdued laugh from one of the bedrooms.
He could have left the house then, for everything except the identity of her companion was in that laugh. He didn't, of course. He stood indecisive at the kitchen door with the sandwich on a white plate. The sun through the dining room windows made bright geometrics on the carpet and table; a circle of pale petals lay beneath the roses on the table; Theo's jacket was unmoved. So the jester challenges us to see the subjective and objective as distinct.
Had Theo been an innocent, as well as injured, husband, he may have burst into the bedroom in the pantomime way. Instead he walked quietly into the passage, glanced into the empty main bedroom and passed on to the guest one, in which Stella lay on her back. There was no movement. Her eyes were closed, her hair spread on the sheeted mattress from which the pillows had been tossed to the floor. Just her head was visible above the pale shield of her lover's back. He was partly bald, well muscled and had a patch of dark hair at the top of his spine. Theo wasn't interested in the man's identity, and surprised himself in that. Before he could leave, however, he needed to have his presence acknowledged by his wife. And so the three were quiet and motionless together there for a moment — Theo at the doorway, Stella and the other man on the bed. Theo had time to recognise that post-coital hiatus of relaxation and achievement; time for the thought that Stella had chosen the spare room, as he had himself in similar circumstances, then she opened her eyes and saw him at the doorway.
Their gaze met. Just for that instant the stark pain registered for both, then she squeezed her eyes shut and turned her head to the side. Nothing was said; nothing external changed. The stranger's back remained relaxed, and only as Theo was taking his jacket from the dining room chair and preparing to leave, did he hear the murmur of voices from the bedroom.
Theo had driven back to the paper and sat at his desk overlooking the service alley. He wrote up a piece about high country runs being bought by overseas buyers, and the possible economic and political implications. He did nearly a thousand words of serviceable copy before he finished work for the day, and during the time it took, one part of his mind was in a quite different, empty space, considering what the afternoon had made inevitable. Sadness it was, rather than indignant surprise, or anger. The man in the spare bed was a consequence of failure between himself and Stella, not the cause of it. Theo knew it, just as he knew the mixture of guilt, remorse and justification that Stella would be feeling.
He was about to leave when Anna asked him to come into her office. She was alarmed at the standard of work coming from Michael, a middle-aged reporter not long over from a newspaper on the Coast. 'The stuff 's crap,' she said. 'The subs are really struggling with it. I've talked to him — I've tried him with all sorts of stories, and nothing decent comes in. If he was a kid it would be bad enough, but he's been a journo for years, for Christ's sake.'
Theo made an effort to bring Michael to mind, and gradually assembled the image of a badly dressed guy known in the office mainly for being able to imitate the prime minister's voice and run an office sweepstake on anything from rugby to the hip measurements of the editor's wife. He also had the habit of ridiculing others, then laughing so loudly that no rejoinder was audible. It was a stupid, irritating and effective technique.
Theo saw Michael most working days, talked with him, but didn't give a damn about him at that moment.
He felt glassed off from the rest of the world. He sat in Anna's office as she asked him if he would take a mentor's interest in Michael for everybody's sake, but the words seemed to bounce away before they quite reached him. 'He nominated you as someone he was prepared
to take advice from,' said Anna. 'He's got some hang-up about being told anything by a woman, I think, though he won't admit that of course. It's funny, isn't it, the less ability some guys have, the greater their conviction they know it all. He doesn't seem to realise his job's on the line here.' A woman less comfortable with her role may have insisted that Michael be instructed by her, but Anna was looking for a sensible solution.
Theo could have said he didn't give a fuck. He could have recounted the story of his afternoon and taken note of the chief reporter's response. He could have said Michael was a useless prick and should be fired as soon as possible. He could have said nothing, and concentrated on Anna's competent netball hands as an anchor in the here and now. 'Yes, okay,' he said. 'I'll give it some thought over the next few days and get back to you. It'll have to be something reasonably formal, or he'll just arse around.' Anna seemed quite happy with that. When Theo stood up to go, he felt for a moment as if that normal propulsion would keep him rising steadily until he was held, checked beneath the ceiling, with unusual view upon Anna and the flat of her desk, the framed awards on the wall behind her. But then he steadied and was able to walk out, though very light on his feet.
He knew that Stella would be there when he went home. It wasn't in her nature to evade a meeting. She was sitting in the sunroom, looking out to the brick barbecue area and the plum tree on the boundary. She had no book, which was unusual. Her face was blotchy, but her voice steady. 'You told me you weren't going to be home during the day,' she said. Was his inability to keep his word the issue between them? It wasn't of course — her comment was meant to indicate she'd been discreet. Theo felt better standing by the French doors: sitting seemed to indicate a complacency, a relationship, neither of them felt. 'It wasn't to hurt you, you know that. You told me that about your women.'
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