Wind isolated the bach as motion had isolated the car. Theo had a sense of everything outside being fleeting and disturbed, and the three of them inside the bach close-knit, fixed, with just the juddering doors between one state and the other.
When Theo asked Penny if Erskine was an unreasonable man she said it was difficult to be reasonable when your kids were involved. He then asked for her bottom-line requirements, and she said shared custody and fair distribution of what they owned.
'You mean half of everything?' he asked.
'Less than a quarter of what he's worth would do me.'
'Zack said he's got plenty.'
'He's rich enough, and I don't want to live over there any more. The point is the money thing for him is just a bargaining chip in the real issue of custody. That's the guts of the thing you have to realise. The judgement there gave him custody and me only visiting rights.' Theo had wondered about the reason for that, and as if to explain it, Penny went on. 'That judge had a thing against psychiatry as well, and I was having counselling.' There it was, for the first time, the fuse of something important in everything that was happening, but Theo let it lie.
The little guy became sleepy as Penny and Theo talked, so she took him through to the one bedroom, while Theo picked up the newspaper from the floor, folded it, took it to the back door and jammed it underneath to stop the noise. As he came back down the short passage, Penny was at the bedroom door. 'He's out to it already,' she said, and stepped back for him to see Ben on the double bed which filled most of the low-ceilinged room. She'd slipped off his shoes. He lay in his light clothes totally relaxed with his small arms spread on the faded patchwork quilt, and his breathing so easy no movement could be seen. The walls were rough tongue and groove, a worn marmalade lino covered the floor, stacked on the far side were four matching blue travel cases, incongruous in their obvious quality and fashion. All of it spoke of things gone awry; of a time of painful and uncertain transition. Maybe Penny was as aware of that impression as Theo himself, but neither of them referred to it as they went back to the main room.
Without Ben's presence and distraction, without Play- Doh being thrust at them for improvement, Theo and Penny were at one of those cusps of possibility in their friendship. She was asking something significant of him, and when a woman asks more, a man is entitled to seek some return. He imagined how good the sex would be with her; it was many weeks since he had last been with Melanie on the Christmas tree bed in her flat by the Heathcote. One voice told him just to reach out to Penny, kiss her and discover the reaction; another, with greater regard to experience, advised thinking with more than his cock. In the cliché parlance of the magazines, Penny was vulnerable, so it wasn't the time to ask for involvement. And sex involved some degree of commitment. Half an hour on that old couch while Ben napped, and he would be drawn into their lives, inescapably implicated in an unhappiness that had nothing to do with him, except professionally.
And Penny didn't seem set on seduction. She'd taken no extra care with her appearance, and talked on about Zack and Nice and how her husband would meet all expenses.
She'd taken no extra care, but nevertheless Theo lost his last reservations about her attractiveness. He had become accustomed to the startling whiteness of her capped teeth, her careless hair, her sometimes wary expression and assertive language. He liked the fullness of her hips and her long arms, and was drawn to her smooth, muscular neck. And her breasts weren't that small.
'Fixing something up with Erskine in Nice is the best chance,' she was saying. 'Probably the only chance, because we can't stay here much longer. It's not fair on Ben, and the money's running out, and Zack reckons if we don't have a compromise to take to the Family Court very soon that'll be it.'
'Did you play a lot of squash, or something?' he said.
'What's that got to do with anything?' Penny said.
'You look fit, that's all. Stronger than a lot of women.'
'A lot of women in the States work out,' she said. Then she paused and looked directly at him, and her expression gave a little wry twist that was almost a grimace: unattractive in itself, yet so typical of her that Theo found it quite moving. She was sitting on a kitchen chair and he was on the sofa. The wind still buffeted the building, although the thudding back door had been muted.
'Theo,' she said, 'I'm not looking to get into anything right now, okay.' It was a rebuff, but she leaned forward to deliver it. 'I'm only just holding things together as it is. I'm close to tears half the bloody day, and I can't sleep at night. I can only just keep myself together for Ben's sake, okay?'
'I can understand that,' he said. 'It's a rocky time for you. I just hope it all pans out, and you know I'll do what I can.'
'I like you,' she continued, 'but I'm a wreck right now. I can't take on anything else. You wouldn't want to know what's inside my head sometimes.'
'Maybe I would,' said Theo quietly.
'Fuck, no. Believe me you wouldn't.'
And that was the end of thinking with his cock for that day. He was glad he hadn't made a bigger fool of himself, that she had intervened before that happened. The surface of the conversation showed little of the stir beneath, but there was change. She knew Theo wished to be confidant and lover, and as she chose to continue a friendship he took it optimistically — assumed she was deferring opportunity rather than refusing it. And it suited his pride to think that, rather than seeing himself as the only help at hand.
'How old are you?' she asked. Non sequiturs had begun with him, so she felt justified.
'Thirty-eight.'
'So am I,' Penny said. 'You look a bit older.'
'Thanks,' said Theo.
'Anyway, let's get back to the Nice trip. I don't want you to feel you have to, but I see it as the best shot of finishing the business for everybody, and you'd get a good final exclusive out of it.'
They talked more openly than before about her marriage. 'You'll probably like Erskine,' she said. 'He gets on well with guys.'
'But not women?'
'Other women he gets on well enough with.'
'So you're splitting because he played around.'
'No,' said Penny. 'It's because we don't love each other enough any more and that's quite different. That bit's simple, but we both love Ben a great deal and that makes it hard.'
The wind continued to buffet the house around them, which made it seem even smaller, but no rain came. Rain would be both a novelty and a blessing at Drybread, just as it had been in the North Canterbury hills. Theo remembered how his father would leave the table to go and stand beneath the carport and watch the rain falling. 'Send her down, Hughie,' he would say, and the longer it rained the happier he became. In the winter, perhaps, rain came to Drybread as well as snow.
Theo faced the long drive back to Christchurch, and needed to get going. Also, for some reason not clear even to himself, he wanted to be gone when the boy woke up. Penny said he could spend the night on the sofa, and meant exactly that. 'Don't come out,' he said. 'It's a bastard of a wind. I'll talk again with Zack Heywood and send you an email.'
'I like you a lot,' she said. 'I don't think I can get through all this without your help. It means a hell of a lot to have someone on my side at the moment.' She reached out towards his face, and for a moment Theo thought she was about to stroke his cheek, but she gripped the Band-aid strip and removed it without comment.
She stood briefly at the window as he left, and gave a quick wave. Even the solid macrocarpa hedge was swaying slightly and the clear hill facings higher up were an undulation of tussock. The wind pressure made Theo's hair uncomfortable on his scalp and he was glad to close himself in the car. Was he going to get out of his depth in the whole thing about Penny and the boy? Who could say how much selfish calculation, how much selfless concern, lay in their attitudes? What passes between a man and a woman is a fluctuating charge, and never fully decipherable.
18
At the back door was a hard rubber and metal-studded doo
rmat on a folded sack. The dirt from her father's boots would fall to the sack, and her mother would shake it out on the lawn every other day. On the concrete beneath the overhang he'd leave his boots when he came inside. She would glance there when she came home from school, up the unsealed track from the road gate where the bus dropped her. The road, too, was unsealed, the gravel ploughed into furrows and mounds by occasional traffic. The back window of the bus was always dusty, and Dylan Churcher would write 'Fuck Me', or 'Okker Sucks Pussy', and make sure the others noticed. Okker was their headmaster. He came from Dubbo in Australia. By the time the bus reached her place there weren't many kids left. Dylan Churcher always went further than any of the others.
The kitchen window of the farmhouse had been enlarged. She could remember when it was done. Her father had taken out the old sash windows by sawing around the frames, but his skills weren't up to fitting the replacement window, and a young carpenter who was working on McFedrons' new house came over and spent a Saturday doing the job. Her mother liked to say it was a conservatory window, but didn't explain the term.
It was her third form year, and she liked the smooth, brown skin of the carpenter's face, and the way that sawdust caught in the fair hairs of his forearms. She liked the agility with which he could squat down to measure, or cut, and then bob up again like a cork, even if he had something heavy in his hands, and his breathing didn't alter. He talked to her while he worked, facing the window. He asked her if old Okker was still the same, and told her the only thing he'd enjoyed about school was playing in the first fifteen. He was planning to go to Australia where builders' wages were just about double what he was getting. 'Nothing much happens around here, does it?' he said. From the back he was pretty ordinary, with ears that weren't quite level, and a double crown that made his hair stick up.
The enlarged window gave an even better view of the yards and the woolshed. That's probably why she took no pleasure in the renovation. When she did the dishes she looked at the yards and the old concrete dip, or the disused pigpen, the pine shelter belt on the hill behind, or her mother's lavenders and climbing roses so much closer. She didn't need sight to evoke the woolshed: the smell of dags and sweat and new wool, the heat from the exposed tin of the roof, the mixture of awkward shame and abrupt determination with which her father would push her face down in the soft, open bale. He was never so unnaturally far away as when he was so unnaturally close. In the year of the kitchen renovations he never penetrated her. He would push between her thighs from behind and say, 'Okay, okay, it's all right, okay', over and over until he spurted. He'd wipe her thighs with the slightly yellow skin end of fleece wool and say, 'It's nothing, is it, nothing, okay. You know I'd never do anything to hurt you,' he'd say — and the thing was she knew they both believed it then.
19
As it happened, Zack and Theo flew into Nice on Anzac Day, though that meant nothing to Europeans. They didn't need any historical instance of bonding to confuse Kiwis and Aussies. Nice has a large, busy airport, but there was no direct connection from New Zealand. Theo and the Virginian flew through Singapore to Paris, and then down to the Côte d'Azur. Theo had been to the place once before: as a twenty-two-year-old following the completion of his degree. As Zack and he came into central Nice by taxi, he recognised the long sweep of the beach on which he'd sat for two days because he didn't have enough money to do much else. The fountains he recognised too, and the old quarter rising up the hill beyond the bus station. He told Zack about the ancient fortress on the summit, and the maritime curio shops close to the sea with brass navigational instruments, slave chains, ships in bottles and authentic scrimshaw. 'I think you'd find that anything bone, or ivory, would be prohibited by Customs,' Zack said.
Zack wasn't intrigued by Nice as a repository of history or art. He just wanted to do the business and go home. He was more interested in assessing the comforts of their hotel in Rue Gioffredo than the Chagall gallery, or the desperate zoo of the Algerian quarter. He didn't relax until he'd made contact with Erskine Maine-King and confirmed a meeting for the next day. 'Let me assure you we're committed to finding a way through,' Theo heard him say. 'I know, I know, but she didn't feel she could, and that's not a sign she doesn't want a solution. It's just that she doesn't feel up to a face-to-face meeting right now.' With his free hand Zack checked the quality of the linen on the bed on which he sat. 'We look forward to meeting you too,' he said. 'It's on for ten o'clock tomorrow at his hotel,' he told Theo. 'I thought he sounded a regular enough guy. I never could get Mrs Maine-King to say much about him, so it's not easy to know what line to take. Did she say much to you?'
'Not a lot. She's afraid of the way he uses his money I think.'
'We'll have to play it by ear,' said Zack. Money didn't frighten him. He'd found it a useful partner and companion.
In the dusk Zack and Theo walked from Rue Gioffredo to a couscous restaurant in the old town which had been recommended by the woman at hotel reception. The place was in a steep, cobbled street, and quite unpretentious: simple checked cloths on the wooden tables, and walls free of any decoration. The meal looked like something prepared in a musterers' hut, all meat chunks, and the gravy it was cooked in poured over the heaped couscous in a large bowl. It cost a musterer's weekly wage too, but that wasn't Theo's concern. He enjoyed it. He half expected Zack to be a wine bore, to go on about the vintages of some preferred Bordeaux vin rouge, or some local treasure he'd stumbled on while touring in Languedoc, but Zack drank what the Algerian waiter recommended without comment, and talked of family. In appearance Zack could have been that typical sort of Frenchman who is finely built and neat, yet masculine as well. Only when he spoke did he assume his nationality.
'Break-ups are so much more difficult if there's children,' said Zack. 'I see it again and again. You can separate out property, money, even citizenship, but children and memories always live on as the evidence of a relationship.'
'But you wouldn't put off having kids because you thought you might split up, would you?' said Theo. 'I mean you've got to have faith, surely?'
'Faith, yes I suppose so.' Zack sounded unconvinced, however, as if it were a point needing judicial scrutiny. 'I tell you what, the more marital and custody work I do, the more attention I pay to my own wife and family. Sad, unhappy people, Theo — I see plenty of those. Some of them achievers and bright as hell, some of them born losers, but sad, unhappy people because they're not right together. Some of the stories I hear, well, Jesus . . . as I say, I go home and feel like a lucky man.'
'I like stories,' said Theo. 'Stories are a journo's business.' But he didn't want to hear too many on that topic, or tell his own to the lawyer.
'Ah, professional confidentiality,' said Zack lightly, as if he had been pressed just a little.
'Of course.'
'There are times when things turn out well too,' the lawyer said, 'when common sense and respect provide a way through. It's the kids that matter most.'
Towards the end of the meal there was sudden, heavy rain. It surprised Theo because he hadn't been outside to see it building, and because he had no experience of rain in Nice. The weather you remember in a place is the weather it experiences forever. Through the open door of the small restaurant they could see the water gush down the narrow, sloping street, the uneven cobbles creating small turbulences. The proprietor took the opportunity to empty several ashtrays and a small container of rubbish into the stream. It was all over in twenty minutes, and Theo and Zack were able to walk back to the hotel. The market area at the edge of the old town, close to the bus station, full of food and flower stalls, soaps and hand-painted postcards during the day, was bare and glistening after the rain. There was a slight smell of engine oil, citrus soaps and vegetables, and an even fainter one of lavender.
It released in Theo a recollection of his time there years ago, when he'd met up with a South African boy at the railway station, and been best friends for a night during which neither of them could afford accommodation. Th
ere'd been nothing sexual whatsoever, just their common situation and the spontaneity of youth, and they'd walked and talked and drunk the night through before taking separate trains the next day. And in knowledge of the necessary transience of their friendship, they'd been quite candid with each other. Theo couldn't remember a name, but the guy told him he'd been attacked by two Algerians the night before and had stabbed one of them in the face. He showed Theo the knife he carried, which had a handle of bound cord, and stains on his clothes which he hadn't been able to wash out. They'd been sitting in the bus terminal, and as Theo passed there with Zack, he thought the dingy concrete bays, the litter, the few figures in dark corners, looked much the same.
20
Erskine Maine-King's hotel was more opulent than Theo's, and his room looked out towards the Promenade des Anglais and the sea. There was a low, glass-topped table surrounded by four black leather chairs. Close to the window was a large brass elephant, bearing a spidery plant instead of a howdah. Erskine introduced himself, and then his lawyer whose first name was Oliver. They were both tall men with similar and pronounced Californian accents. Zack's own nationality was a temporary point of interest, and Theo was aware of being the only non-American.
Theo had wondered often enough about the motivations and character of Penny's husband, but not his appearance, and found it oddly unsettling to have a physical presence finally before him: to notice that Erskine's thick hair was already greying at the sides of his head, that his visible teeth were almost as pristine yet unoriginal as his wife's, that he had no tan at all. Erskine bore no resemblance to any brash, beach-boy Californian stereotype. He looked like a man who, rather than playing sport, did some gym work to hold back incipient bulk, and on the pale bridge of his nose were two slightly pink indentations made by his glasses, which lay on the table. There he was, a complete stranger in appearance, yet Theo had been writing newspaper articles that concerned him, had attempted to make love to his wife, had bought sweets for his child. Erskine and Theo had no history, yet both knew Penny's body fragrance, the high arch of her blonde eyebrows, a certain brittleness beneath her assertive manner. Erskine had greater possession of her past, and Theo, surely, more understanding of her present. The future was a ground of contest.
Drybread: A Novel Page 13