Helga's Web

by Jon Cleary

  “More than that.” She picked up the box of chocolates, came back and sat down on the side of the bed again. She chose another chocolate and bit into it, this time without any suggestiveness. “I’ve decided to go into business, open a boutique. But I’ll need capital.”

  “How much?” Still wary, he looked at her over the top of his glass.

  She pushed the expensive-looking box towards him, but he shook his head. She picked out another chocolate and said, “About twenty thousand dollars.”

  He shook his head; even Norma had never asked him for that much. “Try someone else, Helga.” He nodded at the box of chocolates. “Try the chap who buys those for you.”

  She gave him a mildly reproachful look. “You sound like a schoolboy. How do you know I don’t buy them myself?”

  “Every time I come here, there’s a new box. For a girl who’s always complaining about being broke—”

  “I do not complain, darling.”

  “No,” he admitted reluctantly. “No, indeed you don’t. Not like—” He buried the comparison in his glass.

  “Not like your wife? Are you afraid that if you give me twenty thousand dollars, she will complain?”

  “I’d make damned sure she didn’t know.”

  “But I might tell her, darling. About us.” She picked over the chocolates carefully till she found a soft center. “Of

  course I shouldn’t do that if you gave me the money. I might even pay you interest, just so it would look legal and businesslike/’

  “How much?”

  She shrugged. “Half per cent?”

  He laughed, the glass on his chest jumping and spilling some of his drink. “You think my accountant would consider that businesslike? Forget it, Helga. I don’t have twenty thousand dollars to hand out like that.”

  “You do, darling. I’ve been watching the shares of all your companies. For instance, New Sydney Development has risen thirty per cent in the last three months. You own two hundred thousand preferential shares in it.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I bought some shares, darling, not many, then asked for a copy of the original prospectus. It was all there in black and white.”

  He looked at her admiringly, even though he was now beginning to feel something approaching dislike of her. “And I used to think you were a girl who only knew about one thing.” He gestured at the bed. “What sort of business were you in when you got those tattoos on your behind?”

  She stood up, holding the box of chocolates carefully in front of her. She looked at him steadily, then hit him in the face with the box, scattering chocolates all over the bed, spilling his drink and making him yelp with pain as the corner of the box split his eyebrow. Cursing her, he fell out of bed, blood pouring from his cut eyebrow, his body marked with dark splotches where he had rolled on the chocolates. He caught a glimpse of himself in the dressing-table mirror; he looked ridiculous and the image only added to his anger. He swiped at her, but she moved quickly backwards and he stumbled past her and into the bathroom.

  When he came back into the bedroom ten minutes later she was sitting in a chair by the window doing her nails. She

  wore the green silk dressing gown he had given her for her birthday and her hair was pulled back with a matching green ribbon. She had stripped the bed and the bloodstained and chocolate-daubed sheets were nowhere to be seen. Looking at her and the room one might have doubted that any scene had taken place. He knew how house-proud she could be, the whore in her ruled by the hausfrau, but this today seemed just a bit too cold-blooded to be called house-pride.

  But he wasn’t going to let her sweep him under the bed like that. “I think I’ve paid my last visit here. You can find someone else to fill in your Mondays and Thursdays.”

  “As you wish, Walter.” She didn’t look up at him, just went on filing her nails. “But I still want the twenty thousand dollars.”

  It was difficult to be righteously angry when pulling on your underpants. He teetered on one leg, waited till his loins were clad, then said, “You know what you can do, Helga. With your experience you should find several interesting ways of doing it.”

  She looked up at him then, her face puckered just slightly with contempt. “You’re still what you were at the beginning, aren’t you? A nasty little schoolboy trying to be a big man. Everything you’ve been since has not made a bit of difference to you.”

  A mistress flattered you; a wife and a whore told you the truth. He recognized the difference now: she would never be his mistress again, not if every day in the week for the rest of his life was blank of sex. He finished dressing, doing his best to ignore her. He had regained control of his temper and was regretting the cheap abuse he had flung at her. He hadn’t shown much urbanity up till now; at least he should try for a suave exit. He combed his hair, put on his dark glasses and patted the strip of plaster he had fixed above his eyebrow. Then he turned to her.

  “I apologize for what I said. But it doesn’t alter the fact

  that you and I are finished. Very much finished, indeed. Goodbye, Helga. You just made the mistake of being greedy. Hitler was the same.”

  He went out of the flat, wondering if the last barb had been a worthwhile one; there had been no change of expression on her face nor had the rhythm of the file on her nails faltered. Maybe she was right: he was only capable of schoolboy’s abuse.

  She waited till the door closed, not even bothering to get up and follow him out of the bedroom to the front of the flat. Then she put down her nail file, opened a drawer in the dressing-table and took out a small leather-covered diary. Its pages were thick with her heavy Germanic hand, but the entries were in English; even in her private moments she had drilled herself to put her past life behind her. Only occasionally did German words creep in and they were more numerous in the later entries; there was a point in the diary where one could almost read the beginning of the decision to return to Germany. If everything went as she hoped she would be back home in Germany for Christmas: well, not home, but in Germany. Home, the farm near Hanover, had been farewelled forever. The last pages in the diary would be written in German.

  She ran her finger down the list of names and phone numbers in the front of the book. She had never called Walter before, either at his office or at his home; but it was part of her thoroughness that she had both numbers in her diary. She chose the home number, picked up the phone, dialled and waited. Then: “Mrs. Helidon? We haven’t met—”

  2

  Norma Helidon floated through the cocktail crowd like a very elegant and not unattractive porpoise, catching balls of greeting and throwing them back to the guests. There had

  been a time long ago when she could not have exchanged a bon mot with the milkman, when it had been agony for her to meet anyone outside her immediate family. But ten years ago, when Wally, as he then was, had told her bluntly that she would have to do something about herself, when he had come home and said he was moving up from local government as a councillor into State politics and that she would have to pull her weight as his wife, she had begun the reconstruction task that today was recognized as Mrs. Walter Heli-don, society hostess and woman about town. It had not been easy at first, but time, practice and hard study had finally brought success and enjoyment. She had taken voice lessons, a slimming course and instruction in some of the more obvious aspects of politics. When Walter had been made Minister for Cultural Development she had bought a twelve-foot shelf of Great Books and now she was only four feet six inches from graduation. Her confidence had increased to the point of arrogance as she had looked around her and realized that practically all her competitors had had to go through the same process of manufacture and not all the results had been as good as her own. An egalitarian society did not breed natural hostesses; and once the hostesses developed themselves, they did their best to eliminate the egalitarian society. Norma just wished that some of the egalitarians were not so necessary to her charity causes.

  She floated up to
one of the worst of them. “Mr. Gibson, your lovely wife just told me you’ll give us a thrilling check!” She had not been to an expensive school, but her quick ear had soon told her that the product of an expensive school could always be told by its extravagant adjectives. “You don’t know how awfully humbled I am by your generosity—”

  “Don’t bust your girdle,” said Grafter Gibson, rich and rude enough never to need extravagant adjectives; he had the sour face of a man who would have paid to have had the whole cocktail crowd dumped in the harbour. “Your Wally

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  could match my check any day. You oughta get him to humble you some time/’

  He does that more than you know, Norma thought. But the smile had not slipped: she wore it permanently in public, like the double strand of pearls that were her trademark. She put her hand up to the pearls now, the only nervous gesture she had. “Charity should begin at home, but not with Walter. He thinks the voters would suspect a politician who contributed to a good cause.”

  “He’s probably right,” said Gibson grudgingly. “I see he’s just arrived. Who donged him—some suspicious voter?”

  Norma moved towards the door to greet her husband. She kissed his cheek with her teeth, her lips still open in the smile. “What happened to your eyebrow? Did Miss Brand give you that?”

  Before Helidon could reply she had drifted away into the crowd, the smile turned back at him like a dagger being withdrawn. Feeling slightly sick he headed for the table at the end of the room where the drinks were being served. Carrying the crutch of a gin-and-tonic he then sidled through the crush towards where Grafter Gibson stood in the big bay window that looked out on to the harbour.

  “Not a bad place, this,” said Gibson. “You a member here, Wally? That how Norma got it for her shindig?”

  Helidon had joined the Yacht Club a year ago, after three years’ waiting and three applications: he had found it much easier to get into parliament. It had cost him only a hundred and five dollars to join and the annual subscription was eighty dollars; it was not an expensive club, but it was as exclusive as if its dues were twenty times what they were. He was a member of twenty-seven other clubs, ranging from football clubs through national clubs to returned servicemen’s clubs: but they had been political joinings and he frequented none of them unless he had to. This yacht club and his golf club

  were the only two that ever saw Walter Helidon as a participating member.

  “Norma and I do quite a bit of entertaining here, Les. You and Glenda should come for dinner with us one night.”

  “You think they’d have me as a member? Or don’t trawler blokes qualify for a yacht club?” He grinned fiendishly and Helidon managed a smile in return. He knew that Gibson could have owned the world’s largest yacht, have won the Sydney to Hobart race three years in a row, and he would still never have been accepted as a member. “Don’t worry, Wally. I won’t embarrass you by asking you to nominate me. You gotta be a bit careful, now you’re in the Cabinet, eh? Minister for Cultural Development. My word, that was a turn-up. I nearly bust a gut when I read about it. What d’you know about culture, Wally? You wouldn’t know the difference between Van Gogh and Van Johnson.”

  Helidon knew that Gibson, vulgar and uncultured as he was, had one of the finest art collections in Sydney. He was saved from an honest answer by the arrival of Glenda Gibson. “What did you do to your eye, Mr. Helidon?”

  “Bumped it on my car door,” said Helidon, looking across the room at Norma. She was standing with Louise County, both of them looking as if they were suffering from smiler’s cramp, the society queen’s occupational disease; a photographer appeared and they grasped each other with loving claws. Then Norma looked across at him and without her lips changing the smile hardened. Again he got the sick feeling and he took a hurried gulp at his drink.

  “Doesn’t your wife look wonderful? But then she always does.” Poor old Glenda, he thought. She might have been pretty once and if old Grafter had given her money to spend in those days she might have kept her looks. But the purse strings had been opened up too late and Glenda would be forever several laps behind in the race to retain her looks and keep up with fashion. He guessed she was about sixty now,

  too old to recover the years that had been lost. “Every photo I see of your wife in the newspapers, she looks as if she’s just stepped out of a bandbox/’

  “And she’s in the papers every day,” said Gibson, smiling into his drink. “More than you are, Wally.”

  “Now don’t be nasty, Les. I’m sure Mr. Helidon doesn’t envy his wife all the publicity she gets. It must help you, too, doesn’t it, Mr. Helidon?”

  “Oh, she’s a great help, indeed,” said Helidon, struggling for enthusiasm: across the room Norma had left Louise County and was moving about among the guests, occasionally looking across at him with an expression that said she was going to be no help to him when they got home.

  “Men in public life would get nowhere without their wives, I always say.”

  “Hitler managed without one. And Mrs. Stalin didn’t get her picture in the papers much.” Gibson spent his time taming his wife’s wild generalizations, but he always did it with fond good humour. He had little, if any time, for other women, but he would have killed anyone who harmed Glenda. “Wally would have made it, with or without his missus. Ambition is more help than publicity, eh, Wally?”

  “You insulting old bastard,” said Helidon, losing his urbanity, and walked away, leaving Gibson chuckling and Glenda Gibson remonstrating with him.

  “You shouldn’t have done that, Les—”

  “Don’t waste any sympathy on him,” said Gibson. “His wife’s got more intelligence than he has and he knows it. He must be getting a bit worried, too—you notice how he kept looking across at her all the time? Trouble for him is, she’s got as much ambition as he has. Don’t ever get ambitious, hon.”

  “As if I would,” Glenda said, patting his arm.

  Helidon went out to his car. Angry and confused as he was, he had some trouble at first in finding it: the car park seemed

  to be full of blue Mercedes. Christ, he thought, the more affluent we become the more conformist we become. Per head of population Australia was now supposed to buy more Mercedes than any other country; that was a fact Helga had mentioned to him with some pride. Helga! With what he recognized as juvenile spite, he wished now he was looking for the old Pontiac.

  He found his car, got into it, wound down the windows and sat staring out at the small bay of the harbour where the yachts rode like sleeping gulls. A cool breeze came across the water and he turned his face towards it, towards the south and Coogee where everything had started. Only seven miles and twenty-five years, but it seemed like another country and another century.

  He had come back from the war, after six months in New Guinea, a twenty-one-year-old determined to be rich by the time he was forty. He had started out in a real estate agent’s office and within three years had his own office. He had married a girl from Coogee, but she had left him after two years, tired of sharing her bed with a man worn out by long hours and ambition. He had divorced her after three years, then married Norma; he had loved her, but he had also married her because he needed a woman to look after him. And she had looked after him, at least up till he had forced her to go into public life with him. Then she had become too busy for sex, for taking trouble cooking his meals, for running the house as a haven where he could come home to rest. Sex had become a Sunday morning ritual, as washing the car or mowing the lawn was for other men; they went out for most of their meals and when they did eat at home it was only to have a snack; and their home was no longer a haven but an aviary for chattering charity committees. He had never had much sense of humour, but he had been in politics long enough to appreciate irony. If it had not been for his ambi-

  tion and his insistent spurring of Norma’s own ambition, there would have been no need of Helga.

  He and Norma no longer had any financial
worries. He did not need his Minister’s salary of nineteen thousand dollars, but Australians were too cynical about their politicians ever to accept a man who might model himself on some of the wealthy Americans who had worked in Washington for a dollar a year. He would be classed as either a fool or a crook. And he could not risk the latter epithet. Half-buried seven years back in his political past was the one piece of skulduggery he had ever indulged in. As a real estate man he had bought some land several years after the war, but had been thwarted when a State Commission had zoned the area as green belt. But when he had got into parliament, become tuned to the atmosphere there, he had seen his opportunity. He had sold the land to Norma’s brother, a wheeler-dealer like himself whom he could trust. He had bided his time, then after two years had quietly worked to have the area re-zoned. He had been successful, his brother-in-law had sold the land for a three thousand per cent profit, had turned over the proceeds to Helidon, taken his commission and conveniently died six months later. There had been a few inquiries, even the police had been brought in, but they could prove nothing. On the face of it Helidon was clean and since then the matter had been forgotten. The profit from the deal had been the foundation of Helidon’s current fortune. It was part of the irony of his whole life that with the current boom of the past three years, when money could be so easily made by anyone who could add two cents together, there might not have been need of that skulduggery of seVen years ago.

  Helga had come into his life two years ago. Again there had been the irony: she had been a mannequin at a charity function arranged by Norma. He was not unhandsome, he was well-groomed and, even if it was still an effort, he was urbane; it had not been difficult, once he understood Helga’s

  arrangements, to get the key to her flat. She had cost him fifty dollars a week, an expense that his accountant accepted as a legitimate entertainment of constituents. The arrangement had been ideal, though he had known in the back of his mind that eventually it would bring its own complications and it would have to end. He had not expected it to end this way.