by Peter Corris
‘Are you all right, sir?’ The waitress was back, looking concerned.
I’d been sitting with the coffee cup in my hand, not drinking, and staring into space. I looked now at the big, bursting open sandwich—fresh lettuce, Swiss cheese, ham … The sight of it made me feel ill but I forced myself to smile, take a bite and nod appreciatively.
‘Wool-gathering,’ I said, through a mouthful.
She was in her early twenties and had probably never heard the expression. Why would anyone gather wool with several million unsaleable bales sitting in the warehouses? She went away, despairing of her tip, convinced that I was insane. I munched on the sandwich without appetite. Maybe I was wrong. There are lots of men with strong chins, brown hair and widow’s peaks. John McEnroe, for example. William Hurt. And maybe the photographer had been annoyed at the execution of the shot, not the subject. I looked at the picture again and knew I was kidding myself. It was Patrick Lamberte and the portraitist had hated him.
I left a good tip and most of the sandwich. The Paragon is famous for its handmade chocolates. On impulse, I bought a couple of dollars’ worth of a mixed selection. I had a feeling that Terry Reeves’ Wanda would be brave enough to eat liqueur-centred milk chocolates. I was pretty brave myself. I went to the nearest pub and had a couple of scotchs. I hoped the whisky might stimulate thought as well as brace me for the drive back to Sydney. Instead, I fell into a mood of self-reproach. I’d screwed up the Lamberte case from start to finish and so far Paula Wilberforce had taken all the points. I should have checked everybody involved more carefully before I started haring off in all directions. I finished the second drink. There was a self-breathalyser in the bar and I dropped a dollar in it and blew in the straw. The reading was orange for caution. I swore and walked briskly back to the car. The cold air did me good and triggered some professional responses at last. When it came to checking people out, it was never too late. On the drive back to Sydney I decided I liked the 4WD. I liked the way it held the road and the feeling of security, of being able to take the knocks. I liked the heater; I would probably get to like the cassette player. I already liked the mobile phone. I stopped in Wentworth Falls and set the machine on ‘broadcast’. Terry Reeves was at his desk as I’d expected and I asked him if I could hang on to the Land Cruiser for a bit.
‘You sound better,’ he said. ‘Amazing what a good vehicle will do for a man.’
‘You can bill me for it.’
‘Don’t worry, I will. The phone calls and everything. That’s if you’re working. If you’re planning a holiday, I guess I can work something out.’
Paula Wilberforce knows the Falcon, I thought, but she doesn’t know this crate. This is a justified expense. ‘I’ve got a client,’ I said. ‘Thanks, Terry. Love to Wanda. I’ll be in touch.’
‘You’ve got the equipment.’
My next call was to Roberta Landy-Drake in Vaucluse. A sometime client, Roberta has an inexhaustible knowledge of Sydney society and its workings—at the top end. She said she’d be delighted to see me. No one can say ‘delighted’ quite like Roberta. She was in the garden when I pulled up outside the massive double front gates later that afternoon. I touched the horn and it let out a deep bellow. Roberta lifted her head from what she was doing and gazed calmly at the gate. I got out and waved. She was thirty metres away with another thirty metres to the front of the house—a long, sandstone structure that seemed to have grown out of the earth, bringing up lawns and trees and garden beds with it. Roberta returned my wave, reached into her gardening basket, removed something and pointed it in my direction. The gates slid apart like two lovers who had done all they were going to do for now.
I drove up the gravel drive and stopped near the rose bed where Roberta was working. She wore a straw hat, a white silk shirt, tight trousers and black spike heels. Only Roberta would wear heels to prune roses.
‘Cliff,’ she said. ‘That truck thing is so very you. So masculine. How are you, darling?’
She advanced towards me, arms outstretched, the basket hanging from the right wrist. Roberta is tall, thin and very strong from all the exercise she does to stay looking forty-five when she is actually ten years older. Dark, auburn-tinted hair and expert make-up help the illusion. She wrapped the left arm around me and held on too hard to a burnt spot. I tried not to flinch but she felt the movement. She kissed my cheek ‘What’s wrong, darling? Are you hurt?’
‘I was. I’m okay now. You’re looking as good as ever, Roberta.’
‘It’s a struggle,’ she said. A spot of rain fell and she looked up at the grey sky. ‘Thank Christ. Now I can get out of this bloody garden. Come inside, you poor wounded man, and tell Roberta your troubles.’
We went up the drive to the massive porch that ran the breadth of the house—a sixty-metre sandstone dash. Roberta dropped the basket with its secateurs, meagre rose clippings and remote control gate-opener on the top step and marched into the house. Roberta’s house has at least two rooms for every kind of activity you can think of and, for some things, five or six. She threatened to sue a magazine that said she lived alone, insisting that she lived with six other people who happened to be her servants. It was typical of Roberta that she forced the magazine to publish their names and photographs in the retraction. She was the only filthy rich person I’d ever really liked and, as far as I know, the only person in that category who ever liked me.
We went into a room where there were books, a TV set and CD player, comfortable leather chairs and a bar.
‘What do men who drive those sorts of cars drink?’
‘Beer,’ I said.
She flicked open the fridge. ‘Light or … dark, is that what it’s called?’
I laughed. ‘Let me get it Roberta. You’ll have …?’
She glanced at the tiny diamond-studded watch on her wrist. ‘Low calorie tonic with lemon and ice, fuck it.’
Roberta has trouble swearing with fluency. I made her drink, opened a twist top of Cooper’s light and sat opposite her in one of the thousand dollar leather chairs.
‘Wilberforce,’ I said. ‘What can you tell me?’
‘Phillip? Oh, yes, I’ve heard about what happened to him. Tragic. A wonderful man. I once almost … but that’s no great distinction.’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘No woman under sixty was safe, darling. He must have been married at least three times and you could multiply that by ten, if you see what I mean.’
‘I’m interested in the wives and children. Particularly Paula. Now, she was the daughter of …’
Roberta sipped her drink and settled back to thoroughly enjoy herself. Two of her husbands had been industrialists and the other was a banker. Like the man we were speaking about, she had been an active sexual player in the social stakes where information is the basic currency. ‘Nancy Barlow. Bit of a mouse as I recall. Not up to Phillip’s standard at all.’
‘Or her daughter’s?’
‘Dreadful child. Ran them ragged, positively ragged.’ Roberta smiled, showing her fine white teeth. ‘A bit like me when I was young, actually.’
‘I’ll come back to her. I want to hear it all. For now, other wives, other kids?’
‘Darling heart, you’re asking rather a lot. Let me see. There was Lyndall Crosbie. She was an Abercrombie before she married Alistair Crosbie, the pharmaceuticals man. She had two brats by him but none, I think, by Phillip. Whatever are you doing?’
‘I’m making notes. This is important. What were the names of the children?’
Roberta’s high forehead wrinkled as much as she would allow it to. ‘Robert Crosbie and … Nadia.’
‘You’re amazing. Go on.’
‘Phillip was married to Selina Livermore about the same time as to Nancy. A bit after, I think. Scandalously soon. I think there might have been a suggestion of bigamy, actually.’
‘Children?’
‘You haven’t touched your beer. This must be exciting, though I can’t quite see how. Now, there was
Clara, no Karen. Awful name. Sounds like someone who might work in a nightclub selling cigarettes, don’t you think?’
Roberta crossed her long slim legs, which were still good enough to sell cigarettes as she very well knew. She plucked the piece of lemon from her glass and sucked on it. ‘Cliff, why are you looking at me like that? I can’t help it if all these people were playing musical chairs and swapping children backwards and forwards.’
‘More on Karen’s mum, Selina,’ I said quietly. Roberta had pronounced the name Kah-ren which I couldn’t bring myself to do. ‘Any previous or subsequent issue?’
‘I love legal language. It’s made me so much money over the years. Yes, I’m sure there was. A girl again, by Livermore, the husband before Phillip. Poor Phillip always seemed to have females around him, like a pasha.’
‘Her name, Roberta, if you please.’
Roberta sighed and looked around the room for inspiration. Nothing she saw helped and she moved her head to look out the window at the water far below. The harbour was dark under the sullen sky. Roberta’s finely plucked brows drew in and a minute line appeared between them. Then she laughed and clicked her fingers. ‘Verity,’ she said. ‘That’s it, Verity. I believe Verity and Karen hyphenated themselves for a time—Livermore-Wilberforce, if you please. Verity married that dreadful Patrick Lamberte.’
‘Paula Wilberforce is a step-sister to Verity Lamberte and Karen Livermore?’
‘Yes. I believe Patrick’s lost all his money.’
I stared at her. ‘Paula Wilberforce, Verity and Karen Livermore-Wilberforce,’ I said. ‘Nadia and Robert Crosbie. Jesus, this is complicated.’
‘Are you looking for a wife, Cliff? I can find you one ever so much more suitable than any of them.’
I picked up the beer and drank it in a couple of long swallows. I’d been probing for something about Paula—some incident or association that might explain why she acted the way she did or predict what she might do next. Instead, I’d come up with a firmer connection between the two cases. It threw me. I sat in the leather chair as the light faded in the big window. Roberta looked at her watch again, clicked her tongue and went over to the bar. She made herself a big gin and tonic and sat down with it contentedly.
‘Will you please stop staring out the window. It’s not at all amusing, darling. Now, d’you want to scribble down all this dirt or not?’
I forced myself to pay attention and take notes as she talked in between sips of her drink. I heard about the likelihood that Phillip Wilberforce had briefly been a bigamist and about the hippie step-daughter Nadia who’d run away to save a Queensland rain forest and had ended up in gaol for drug smuggling.
‘Only for a little while,’ Roberta said. ‘Phillip got her out quick smart. You could do things like that up there in those days, I understand.’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘I’m still trying to make sense of it. Paula has two step-sisters, Nadia and Verity, and one step-brother, Robert. Also one half-sister, Karen.’
‘Just so. That is, if the scuttlebutt is right.’
‘Scuttlebutt?’
‘You’re hopeless.’ She got up and walked over to where I was sitting. She took the notebook and pen from me and sketched in a family tree, pairing Phillip Wilberforce up with his wives. She drew a straight line to Paula and a wavy one to Karen. ‘It was said by certain malicious tongues that Phillip was the father of Karen although Selina was married to someone else at the time. Not a long marriage, I might add. Possibly of convenience, hmm?’
‘Go on.’
Roberta dropped the notebook into my lap and went back to her chair. ‘Do you know, darling,’ she said. ‘I get the distinct feeling that you’ve lost the thread. I thought you wanted all the goss. And there’s lots more, believe me. Phillip is a most interesting man. Have you noticed how interesting people tend to attract interesting people around them? Natural, I suppose.’
Roberta’s notoriously weak head has been the saving of her face, figure and brain cells. She was towards the bottom of a single stiffish gin and she was well away. She waved her glass jauntily. ‘You, for example. How’s the delicious Helen Broadway?’
The name, with all the old pleasurable and painful associations it carried, jerked me out of my daze. ‘I haven’t seen her for a couple of years.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry. Who is it now?’
‘A policewoman.’
‘Cliff, I’m disappointed. But I must meet her. Does she have flat feet and a flat chest?’ Roberta giggled and pushed out her own shapely, high-slung bosom.
I felt myself responding to what Roberta was putting out—a highly-charged essence of need and desire. We had never touched except in a stylised, play-acting kind of way—she the gushing socialite; me, the strong, silent pleb. I dropped my notebook and stood. She stretched in the leather chair, a slim, lithe figure. Her black trousers were tight across her flat belly and crotch. I bent over her and she hooked an arm up around my neck. We kissed and I could taste the gin and smell her perfume and the other womanly smells that are a part of it. Her hot tongue pushed into my mouth. I sucked on it and closed my hand around the hard mound of her right breast. She thrust up at me, giving me her mouth and her breast and wanting me to take everything else. I wanted to take it.
I pulled her to her feet. One of her shoes fell off and she propped up awkwardly balanced, pressing into me. I was gasping for breath and so was she. We broke the kiss and our hands moved urgently. Then she brought her hands down sharply in fists, knocking my hands away from her body. She stepped back.
‘No,’ she said.
‘Roberta. I …’
‘We’re friends.’
I reached for her. ‘We can still be friends.’
The banality of what I said cut through the lust and confusion. We both laughed. I struggled to recapture the moment. I got close to her and cupped my hands around her firm buttocks, pulling her towards me. She was rigid with resistance. Her legs were locked together. I released her and moved back.
‘Cliff, I’m sorry.’
‘It’s okay,’ I said. I cleared my throat, fighting to get out of the rutting mood, fighting off disappointment and anger. ‘You’re probably right.’
She flopped down into her seat. She looked as exhausted as I felt. ‘Did you ever go to bed with that lodger of yours, Hildegarde?’
‘No.’
‘Isn’t she still a friend?’
‘She’s married to Frank Parker. They have a son named Cliff.’
We sat in our respective chairs, both silent. A snatch of doggerel ran through my head:
Higamous hogamous, women are monogamous,
Hogamous, higamous, men are polygamous.
Right, I thought. Women are smarter. Like a lot of men, maybe most, I’d dreamed of attaining a perfect polygamy, a different woman for different situations and moods. Experience had taught me that it was a difficult condition to organise and an impossible one to sustain. Most of the women I’d had anything to do with seemed to know that instinctively. Even Helen Broadway, who’d let it run to the sixth tackle, had known in her heart that it couldn’t work.
‘Cliff?’
I’d left her adrift in her own thoughts, memories and regrets. I forced a grin and picked up my notebook. ‘Tell me everything you can about Paula Wilberforce.’
Roberta’s finely sculptured face lost its bruised look and its tension. ‘Dogs,’ she said. ‘Mad about dogs. Can’t understand it myself, darling. I was terribly keen on horses.’
13
The woman who opened the door of Phillip Wilberforce’s house was about the same age as Roberta Landy-Drake, but she hadn’t made a career out of looking younger. She was of medium height and plump. She wore her grey hair short and very little make-up. Her dress was a plain blue worn with a heavy white cardigan. A pair of spectacles hung on a light cord around her neck. She looked intelligent and capable.
‘My name’s Hardy,’ I said.
‘I’m Pamela Darcy. Please come in, Mr Hardy.
He’s expecting you.’
That got us off on the right foot as far as I was concerned. I was relieved that she hadn’t said, ‘Sir Phillip …’ the way some people working for titled employers do when they want some of the gilt to rub off on them.
‘How is he, Mrs Darcy?’
‘Not strong, but fighting. He’s got a touch of lung trouble which is worrying at his age. I’d ask you not to tire him and so on, but I know it’d be a waste of time.’
We were climbing the stairs. ‘How’s that?’ I said.
‘He’ll do exactly as he pleases.’
We stopped outside the master bedroom. Mrs Darcy knocked firmly and walked straight in. I got the impression that an interesting battle of two strong wills was going on here. The old man was sitting up in the big bed propped on a heap of pillows. His tan had faded to a sallowness and his hair lay flat on his skull. He looked like an old China hand who’d spent so long in the east he’d taken on an oriental appearance. This was emphasised by the embroidered silk dressing-gown he wore over a black pyjama top. Gold-framed half-glasses balanced on his nose.
‘A decent pause before entering is customary, Mrs Darcy,’ Wilberforce growled. ‘What if I’d been doing something you wouldn’t like to see?’
‘It’s hardly appropriate for you to invoke what is customary,’ Mrs Darcy said. ‘Have you taken your medicine?’
‘Damn you, yes.’
‘Damn you, too. Would you like a drink, Mr Hardy?’
‘Of course he would,’ Wilberforce said. ‘And get one for me while you’re at it. Scotch, Hardy?’