He downed another long glass of water, not meeting her eye.
‘Need any help?’
‘Nah. I’ll work it out.’ He sighed as he leaned on the bench-top, gazing at the dry paddocks baking in the midday sun.
Since Christmas he’d been uncommunicative. She’d questioned him casually. Did he feel okay? Was he having trouble sleeping? But Deborah had never summoned the courage to ask him directly what was wrong. He always reassured her, yet he seemed distracted. These days he was always tired … listless. Though they still had sex, well, it wasn’t what it used to be.
The old camaraderie had been replaced by silence. He never asked her what she was doing anymore. Maybe other people wouldn’t have noticed but she felt it strongly. Nothing she did seemed to make any difference.
‘Don’t forget we’re at mine tonight, just you and me.’
‘How come?’ asked Heath quickly.
Deborah winced. He looked trapped. ‘Mum will be in town for the Livestock Association meeting and Dad’s visiting Gran in Tamworth, remember?’
‘Oh yeah … kinda.’
‘Can we go over the menus too, before you forget? I need to call the caterers tomorrow,’ Deborah said. Come on, Heath, wake up.
But he looked at her blankly. ‘Didn’t we do the menu last week?’
Deborah sighed. Why did she have to do everything? ‘That was for the wedding. This is for the rehearsal dinner, the night before.’
‘Rehearsal dinner? Jeez, Deb, how many more bits and pieces are there?’
Deborah’s mouth tightened. Couldn’t he support her this once? Weren’t they on the same side?
Now he was on his way out again. Deborah followed, hoping for something, anything, from him.
‘Just got to check the tank in paddock three before I finish the paperwork. Everything is so bloody dry,’ he called from the verandah without a backward glance. He jumped into the ute and started the engine.
‘See you at dinner,’ she muttered. He flashed her the briefest glance and roared off, saluting with his arm out the window, as always. Deborah stared after him. What was with him?
Mum had said it was just bachelor nerves. Maybe.
Driving across the bridge into Wandalla, Nina felt oddly weightless, as though she were an astronaut attached to the world by the slenderest of lines. Two weeks ago, straight after she had received the cashbox, she had put in her notice, much to Helen’s relief. She had no job. She had no home. She’d arranged for a pair of foreign students to lease the furnished flat for three months. That would cover her mortgage repayments and expenses for long enough to get this sorted. The thread that still attached her to anything at all was this quest to find her father, and she was going to give it every atom of effort she had.
In the midday sun the road and iron roofs shimmered with mirages, ghostly lakes and ponds that highlighted her sense of detachment. There were so many mirages. So many dead ends.
During the drive she had rehearsed her confrontation with Harrison over and over. Sometimes the scene was angry, sometimes gentle; sometimes she was the accuser and sometimes the consoler. She still didn’t know how it would be.
She parked near Harrison’s office, grabbed the battered cash tin and swung her car door open. Automatically, her hand drifted over to the passenger’s seat, unconsciously seeking a small woolly head that was no longer there. She bit her lip and pushed out into the glare, hurrying across the baking footpath to the sanctuary of air-conditioning.
Climbing the stairs to Harrison’s office, Nina’s anger rose. He had lied to her. She’d treated him as a trusted family friend, and he’d betrayed her. He’d been so nice to her, looking after her, joking with her, but all that time hiding things that could have helped her find her dad.
Half a ham sandwich lay abandoned on Suzie’s desk. Nina crossed directly to Harrison’s door and pushed it open without knocking.
Harrison was bent over his computer, fingers flying across the keys, a pile of briefs tied in pink tape beside him. He started when he noticed her. ‘Nina? What in the world …? Are you ready to exchange contracts?’ he asked, getting to his feet.
‘No, I’m not.’ She slapped the cash tin down on his desk. ‘A gift from the Wandalla Hospital. They’ve had it in storage since the death of a certain Russell Larkin. Seems it got lost in a storeroom.’
‘Nina, I’m sorry. If I’d known, you would have received it along with everything else.’ Harrison indicated the visitor’s chair.
‘I’m fine, thanks,’ she said.
‘What’s in it?’ he asked, sitting on the edge of his desk. He seemed calm, his tone measured, but his eyes were cautious.
‘Russell’s diary,’ Nina said.
Harrison’s body seemed to relax. ‘Well now, you’ve got to understand, Russell was a very sick man. You never saw him the way we did, his … oddities.’
‘Really? So there’d be no surprises if I told you Dad came here after he went missing?’
‘What? He wasn’t here. He would have called.’
‘Harrison, cut the bullshit. I know, okay? I know you two were lovers.’
His face went pale and he took a step towards her.
She held up her hand, palm forward, to stop him and felt a surprising surge of strength. She was in charge here. ‘I am not going to hear any more lies, do you understand?’
Harrison nodded, mutely.
‘What else have you been keeping from me? When did you last see Dad? Did you sneak down to Sydney and see him while Mum was working and I was at school? Did you?’
‘No. I … we weren’t …’ Harrison looked at her and took a deep breath. ‘He hadn’t been here since that last Christmas.’
Nina snapped open the tin, took out Jim’s wallet and held it up. ‘See this? It’s Dad’s.’ She opened it so he could see the driver’s licence.
‘Oh my god,’ murmured Harrison, his voice shaking.
Then she handed him the Wandalla receipt she’d found in Jim’s wallet. He held it up to the light and narrowed his eyes to see the tiny writing. Then his hand dropped as though he had lost all strength.
‘This can’t be right. This was after Jim went missing. How did Russell get this? I don’t understand.’ Harrison seemed genuinely bewildered.
‘Dad was at The Springs. Russell wrote in his diary that they had a big fight. Dad left in the middle of the night. Russell thought he’d moved on. He found the wallet and his clothes weeks later, out near the waterhole.’
‘No. Oh, no. Jim.’ Harrison’s voice cracked, his hands shaking in distress.
Nina watched him intently.
‘I don’t understand – he was such a good bushman. He could get himself out of any trouble,’ said Harrison. ‘What happened? Why didn’t Russell call the police?’
‘He was scared, I think,’ she replied. ‘He thought they’d try to pin the disappearance on him. He assumed Jim had run off straight away, but when he found the bag he knew that wasn’t true.’
‘Run away? Why would he do that?’
‘They had a fight.’
‘Jim would never run away because of a fight with Russell. They fought all the time – it was never anything –’
‘There’s something else.’ She held the crushed foolscap page towards him. ‘I think this explains the fight.’
Harrison took the paper and leaned towards the light. As he recognised the handwriting, a great breath left his lungs, and his body slumped.
Nina’s anger wavered. She finally sat in the visitor’s chair, clasping her bag on her lap, unable to watch his face as he read. At last, a deep, gasping sob made her look up. Harrison’s handsome face was crumpled into a spasm. He sobbed again, as if even breathing was agony, seeming not to notice his streaming eyes and nose or anything around him.
Nina got up and poured them both a whisky from a bottle on the sideboard. Harrison gulped it down. It was some minutes before he could speak.
‘What must you think of me? What must you think?’ he said, wiping his face
with a handkerchief.
‘I don’t think anything, Harrison, really. I just need to know when you saw Dad last.’
‘I told you. Christmas night, 11 months before he disappeared.’ Harrison walked to the window, folding and smoothing the letter in his hands over and over again like someone in a trance. He spoke to the blazing day outside, but his voice was full of an evening long ago.
‘We didn’t sit on the verandah drinking beer like I told you. We met at the fountain. It was our place. Jim lied to Julia, saying he was too tired to go over to Kurrabar, where the Blacketts were having Christmas drinks. He lied so he could meet me.’
Nina remembered it. She’d been so looking forward to playing with the Blackett boys after a boring day with the grown-ups, but Dad hadn’t come with them. In the car her mother had not been her usual chatty self. She’d had great fun, as usual, with the boys, but when they got home again her mother’s silence in the face of her father’s cheery patter made her uneasy. It occurred to her now that he must have been feeling guilty, and that her mother might have known more than she let on.
‘I’d already decided to break it off,’ Harrison said. ‘I just couldn’t live with it anymore. I loved him more than I loved my own life, but the pain we were causing everybody, including ourselves, was just too much. I told him exactly that. He didn’t want to believe it. He wrote to me after you all went back to Sydney. But I burned his letters. I had to.’
‘If he wanted you so much, why didn’t he choose you from the start?’ asked Nina, tears spilling.
Harrison turned and his face softened. ‘Nina, he loved you and your mother so much. You don’t understand. That love was just as real as his love for me.’
‘Did he tell you he loved you? Back then?’ Nina couldn’t let it go.
‘Nina, does it really matter after all this time? The fact that he chose you and Julia for ten years tells you everything you need to know. He tried so hard to make himself into the man he wanted to be for you. But you can paper over the cracks all you like, eventually they’re going to start showing through. Besides, back then it was different. He and Russell would both have been shunned.’
Harrison turned and faced the painting of Sydney Harbour in a storm.
‘And what about Mum in all of this?’
‘Like he says in the letter, he was trying to find this gold to set you up financially. That tells you that you were his main priority. What a crazy, fantastical idea. So like Jim. She was the opposite. It was her confidence and stability that drew him. I mean, she knew exactly where she was going and what she wanted to do, whereas he was in the heights of ecstasy one month and a pit of despair the next.
‘He could just walk out of his messy, directionless life here and straight into her established life in the city. She made it easy. And I must admit he was a better person when he was with her. But we are what we are.’
‘So, where did this leave Mum?’
‘We decided it had to end when they married. I thought I was doing the right thing, though now it seems laughable.’ He put his glass down, his face grim.
‘The result was that every time Jim came out this way, or I found myself in Sydney, we had to meet. It was an obsession. I’m so sorry you had to find out like this. I never wanted you to know.’
Tears brimmed in Nina’s eyes. Poor Dad. Poor Mum. And there was something else there. A whisper of self-pity about her feelings for Heath, maybe?
Harrison turned to Nina again. ‘He hated himself for deceiving your mother. But what we had was just so strong …’
‘So strong that he decided to come back for good?’
Harrison looked away. ‘In some ways, I wish to god you’d never showed me that letter. It’s like you let me have a glimpse at heaven through the crack of a door and then slammed it on me. It could really have happened, me and him. Can I keep it?’ he asked, smoothing the letter with his hands.
Nina nodded and stood. ‘I think we should take this to the police.’ She caught his anxious glance. ‘Just the wallet, the diary and the receipt, I mean. I’ll leave it up to you if you want to give them the letter as well.’
‘Thank you,’ said Harrison quietly. ‘There’ll be a coronial inquiry most likely.’
Nina nodded. ‘There’s that other thing. Remember what Possum Brody said about seeing Hilary picking Dad up in her car after he disappeared?’
‘So strange. She and Phillip had just moved back from Tamworth. She’s the last person he’d have wanted to contact. I can’t explain it.’
Nina looked at Harrison and pity filled her heart despite herself. They had both lost their best-loved man.
‘I’m sorry if I was harsh,’ she said, getting to her feet.
‘No, my dear, you were right. I should have told you about Jim and me. No matter how painful, the truth is always better.’ He came out from behind his desk and put his hands on her shoulders and kissed her forehead, like a benediction.
Nina nodded, tears spilling again. ‘I’m going to stay at The Springs,’ she whispered.
Harrison looked down and smoothed the folded letter with his fingers again.
Nina crossed to the door, keen to get away from this office where the past hung heavily in the air.
‘Nina. Hold on, wait!’
She turned to Harrison.
He seemed so much older. ‘There’s something I need to …’ He paused.
‘What? What is it?’
He sighed. ‘Nothing. It’s nothing. I was just so sorry to hear about your little dog.’
She headed down the stairs.
Harrison closed his office door, his heart racing.
Who were we fooling? he thought. As if it all could just be swept under the carpet forever. He poured himself another whisky and sat on the couch by the window. And after she had read Jim’s innermost thoughts, seen what it was they meant to each other, why had he still not told her everything? Seeing the outline of her slender, vulnerable shoulders retreating through his office door, he had wanted to call her back again. Wanted almost to fall on his knees, blurt out the rest of the ugly story and beg for her forgiveness. What had held him back?
He heard Suzie close a drawer, jangle her keys and leave the building.
The letter. He gulped his drink and poured another. God. He grimaced as he remembered how for a fleeting second he had thought Nina was going to say that Jim was still alive. No chance of that now, by the sound of things. He sat and re-read the letter hungrily.
So, Jim had come back to Wandalla after all. He could read between the lines. Jim was in one of his hyper moods. The delusions about hidden gold were a classic symptom. There was always some new idea, some new scheme to try. Why on earth had Jim not come straight to him like he always had? It was unthinkable that he would have called on Hilary of all people at a moment like that. But then Hilary always found a way to control those around her. God knows, he understood how she could use leverage to get what she wanted. Could she have been involved in Jim’s disappearance?
Poor Nina with her hopeless search. Every time he saw her it felt like his heart was about to burst. She was so like Jim, and yet she had some of Julia’s steadiness as well, her focus and determination.
He glanced at his reflection in the glass front of the book shelf. He looked old. Shaken. Weak. That was his problem. If only he’d been stronger back then, been able to stand up for who he was, things might have turned out differently.
Jim had never been as bothered, he’d always lived in the present. He seemed to think they could carry on for years, confident that their secret would be forever safe. This letter showed a new man.
One who was finally accepting his true nature.
When Jim had first left Wandalla for a life with Julia, he’d done so without a backward glance. My god, he’d even asked Harrison to be his best man. That had stung. Russell ended up doing the honours.
And now Harrison’s mind turned to that last night. Christmas night. The last time he and Jim were together …
Jim and Julia and Nina had been up at The Springs for a week or so, but he’d hardly seen them. Once he’d dropped around unannounced and Julia and Nina had been so happy that he gave up trying to get Jim alone.
The day before Christmas Eve he’d made his decision. He’d dropped over to The Springs on the pretext of checking some paperwork with Russell, but hoping to see Jim on his own. He immediately noticed Russell’s truck wasn’t there.
He had just pulled up when he heard Julia and Jim on the side verandah. He couldn’t quite make out the words. She seemed to be very upset. He wanted to drive off but of course they had heard the car.
‘Nothing’s wrong. I don’t want to talk about it, okay?’ Jim’s voice thundered. And then he was out the front in a flash, smiling, seemingly unperturbed. ‘What’s up, mate? Want a beer?’
He looked from Jim’s sunny face to Julia’s tear-stained one. For the first time, he noticed Nina. She was tucked up in the space under the house, grasping a Barbie doll to her chest and rhythmically kicking at the wooden pier in front of her, her face closed and remote. And he knew this had to end.
‘You’re busy,’ he managed, turning on the ignition.
‘Wait, Harrison.’ Jim had looked confused. He lowered his voice. ‘We need to get together. I want you. Please.’
‘You need to go and play with that daughter of yours. Go and look after Julia. Just go.’
‘Okay, okay.’ Jim leaned close to the driver’s window. ‘Meet me at the fountain, Christmas night, about eight,’ he whispered.
Harrison had hesitated. ‘All right. But it has to be the last time.’
Harrison loosened his tie and walked over to his desk. He opened the top drawer and pulled out the newspaper photo of Jim laughing.
All so long ago.
There had been a full moon that night so he hadn’t needed a torch. The magnolia flowers almost glowed. At first he couldn’t see him. Then he heard a splash. Jim was in the fountain, his muscular figure standing naked against the moonlight, his hair forming a halo around his head.
‘You’re late,’ he said, stepping out of the water and walking towards him. ‘Why so quiet? Stunned by my beauty?’ he asked playfully, kissing him lightly on the lips.
The Painted Sky Page 20