by Fiona Capp
Richard stares at her in dismay, his blue eyes flaring like the centre of a flame. ‘You’re leaving? But we were going to spend the weekend together. Call Ned back. Tell him there’s no need. You’re tired, you just need to rest. I can look after you.’
Angela propels herself across the lawn with Richard following behind. He does look after her – with a tenderness that touches her deeply. The way he lifts her out of her chair, the way he kisses her neck, the way he undresses her and lays her down on the bed, the way he touches her face. He is always telling her how beautiful she is, how much he loves her eyes, her mouth, her smile. Her whole body, he says, is beautiful to him. Hard as she finds this to believe, he seems to mean what he says.
She goes right up to the fence between the garden and Millionaires Walk and stops there. The light is fading, the wind has dropped. Dusk has turned the air grainy and soft. When she first came here, she saw all this with the eyes of an outsider, like the tourists who wander along Millionaires Walk. Back then she was full of wonder that people actually lived like this. With all this capacious beauty on their doorsteps. Full of wonder that each morning they looked out their windows and were greeted by the oceanic sky held in the great bowl of the bay. A view that set you free from yourself, made you briefly forget who you were. She wondered what a view like this did to your head. And now she knows.
With Richard encouraging her to regard the place as her own, she started to see things differently. From the veranda, she would watch people going by on the cliff-top path, peering up at the house. If they waved, she would wave back, feeling vaguely imperial, and even though she laughed at herself, the divide between them out there and her up here imperceptibly became a fact of life. She started taking it for granted, actually believing it. This is what a life like this did to you, it set you apart.
Richard has pulled up one of the wrought-iron garden chairs. She can tell he’s distressed, desperate to know what’s on her mind – except that he’s afraid of what she might say.
They sit in silence. Tiny insects dart over the grass and wisps of sea mist begin rising from the water like spirits of the dead. Angela knows there is no point asking him what Stone was talking about when she interrupted their conversation. Or why he warned her to be careful whom she trusted. The pieces are there to be put together. But why bother? Richard’s silence says enough. It is her job to read silences. Silences far more complex than any speech. It is one of the paradoxes of the talking cure that healing begins with overhearing what cannot be said. But that’s a different kind of silence, an involuntary one that takes time to decipher, to hear the low murmuring within it. Richard’s silence is much more straightforward. There’s nothing noble about it. It is the kind of silence that roars.
In her experience, Richard, like most politicians, is not a man usually lost for words. It is second nature to him to gloss over awkward moments with conversational ease. To ignore difficult questions, ones he doesn’t want to answer, and to take them in another direction. Which makes his silence all the more troubling. Like a white flag of defeat.
She can see him from the corner of her eye. He is sitting forward, his head in his hands. Misery seeps from his slumped body.
He turns to her, suddenly. ‘Stone was right. I don’t deserve you.’
It’s the beginning of a confession, but Angela doesn’t want to hear it. When she speaks, her voice is impatient. ‘He was just messing with your head.’
Richard doesn’t reply. If only it were true. Out on the darkening bay he can see the ghostly outline of some large cruisers, one of which is probably Stone’s. The last of the polo revellers kicking on into the night. The light northerly breeze brings with it jagged gusts of laughter and the faint pulse of music swamped by the intermittent revving of a jet ski ripping up the bay.
He thinks of the blackmail letter and how it shook his world because it came from within it, or so it seemed. As for his deal with Stone, it hurt no one. Robbed no one. He hadn’t been bought. The government was going to approve Stone’s development regardless. It was only Stone’s arrogance that allowed him to think his money had any sway. Richard’s only regret was being found out, finding himself in someone else’s power and not knowing whose.
He was practised at pushing away things he didn’t want to face. Regret was a pointless emotion, a weakness he had no time for – until he turned around from talking with Stone, and glimpsed the way Angela looked at him, and, in that moment, saw himself through her eyes. And didn’t like what he saw. And if he didn’t like what he saw, how could he expect her to?
Angela doesn’t dare look at him. She has no comfort to offer him. Not because he’s been reckless or abused his power, as she suspects that he has. He is human, he is fallible. She is not one to stand in judgement. She understands all too well the grip of the past and what it makes people do. If it was the only thing that stood between them, there might be hope. If it weren’t for his world. The world that made him, that defines him, that keeps him in power. That allows him to believe he is perfectly entitled to act this way. A world that finds only its own reflection in the blind fish-eye of the bay.
There is a boom out over the water and then a burst of white light shattering in a cascade of stars. As they watch, a series of fizzing blue fountains leaps up from one of the cruisers while neon rings cartwheel across the night sky. More explosions of light follow in rapid succession until a new Milky Way hangs fleetingly above them. An alternative universe, what might have been. Then, as each point of light begins to plummet, it traces faint cracks in the sky.
She had thought she loved him even though she knew such feelings were no more than light projected on a screen. And how did you separate them from the prospect of a whole new life that someone like Richard Morrow offered? Had she let herself be bought? As long as they remained in the seclusion of the Anchorage it had been possible to believe in this love. But she, of all people, should have known that the fantasy could not possibly last, that reality would reassert itself once they moved out into his world. They will have to settle for Freud’s common human unhappiness. The fairy tale is not to be.
Over the bay, another loud boom marks a new round of fireworks that light up the pained contours of Richard’s face. Bouquet after brilliant bouquet of iridescent flowers blooms in the sky, each burst of pleasure never quite enough, each explosion leaving behind a black hole, an unquenchable ache for something more. The next time she looks, he is no longer seated beside her. His dark figure, illuminated by the bright waterfalls in the sky, is disappearing into the house. Above them, a galaxy of light meeting its fiery end in a spray of blazing colour: hot pinks and royal purples, radioactive oranges and deep sea greens.
Angela is staring dumbly up at it when Ned and Mai appear at her side. They watch in silence as the night sky fades to black and only the memory of the fireworks remains in the faint whiff of acrid smoke.
‘Where’s Morrow?’ Ned says.
Angela points to the house.
They turn to look at it. All the lights are out, every room in a darkness deeper than the gloom outside.
Part II
24.
It was Mai who saw mention of the open house at the Anchorage in the local paper. They’d been staying at the old fibro shack which had been put up for sale. It would be Ned’s last summer there. Whopping boxy houses were consuming the landscape. Soon, there would be another where their shack now stood.
Ned and Mai hadn’t been back to the Anchorage since that night, a year ago, when they came to take Angela home. They still see Richard Morrow on the news occasionally and in the papers, but they have had nothing to do with him. And neither has Angela, or so they assume. She has said very little about what happened, except that the polo opened her eyes to things she hadn’t seen before. Ned was happy to leave it at that. He didn’t want to push his luck.
Life goes on. He has discovered he has a talent for study after all. He still has dinner at Angela’s once a week; Mai still cares for her as s
he always has. And Angela works harder than ever trying to save people from themselves. Ned tries not to think about the risks he took to replace Angela’s money and what might have transpired if he’d been caught. He tells himself he has spared his sister the unthinkable prospect of losing her home and therefore the freedom and independence it safeguards; that he has deferred, hopefully permanently, the day when she asks him to give her the thing that she wants. But there is nothing he can do about the sadness that has taken up residence in her eyes.
He still can’t quite believe they got away with it, that they pulled it off. There has been no knock at the door, no ominous voice on the phone. Somehow they managed to go out there into that lawless landscape of rocky outcrops and tumbleweed and vultures circling where the blue sky goes up and up, and then find their way back. Untouched. Two bumbling amateurs. Ned no longer gets twitchy when a police siren screams by, no longer fears they are on his trail. Morrow, it would seem, has decided it’s not in his interest to pursue the matter. Which is why it feels safe to come here again.
They park at one end of Millionaires Walk and take the cliff-top path to the house. The garden, in which Ned had worked so hard, is flourishing in a tamed, trimmed kind of way. The front path now leads to a fountain surrounded by low box hedges, with subsidiary paths branching right and left through rose-covered archways. Deep cottage-garden flowerbeds border the lawns. For all its crisp edges, there is something hectic about the care lavished on it, something overdone. An atmosphere, Ned can’t help thinking, of yearnings barely contained. A surprising number of people are wandering the property and he is happy to be lost in the crowd.
Inside the house, there have been big changes. Morrow has obviously found the money he needed. Perhaps his shares have recovered. Perhaps he’s engineered more trickle-down from above. No cost has been spared in replicating the Victorian grandeur of the interior Ned glimpsed in the oldest of the photographs Morrow showed him. Heavy velvet and brocade ceiling to floor drapes darken the windows. Oversized mirrors with rococo gold frames hang above the fireplaces, adding virtual dimensions to rooms furnished with embroidered firescreens, chesterfield sofas, hard-cushioned chaise longues and lamps with bulbous glass shades. In one room, Ned notices a gramophone with a gleaming bronze horn. But was it really like this when Morrow was a boy? Or has he found, in this world of his great-great-grandfather, the certainty he has always hankered for, the solidity his life seems to lack?
As Ned moves through the house, he finds himself thinking of the first time Angela came here and how enchanted with her Morrow had been, right from the start. The way he looked at her, the subterranean pleasure with which he murmured her name.
Only the kitchen and sun-filled living room belong to the twenty-first century. Ned’s eyes sweep over the marble-topped chopping block and the stainless steel benches and then he notices that the old dumb waiter has been overhauled. Closer inspection reveals it has been transformed into a lift. Just big enough for two people or, it suddenly occurs to him, a wheelchair like his sister’s.
Aware that there is someone waiting behind him, he turns, about to apologise for getting in the way, when he finds himself eyeballing Morrow. His body goes rigid. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Mai had been so sure. The open house would be like a real estate inspection where the owners absent themselves.
Typically, it is the politician who composes himself first. ‘Well, well. The smiling assassin. How are you, Ned?’
Smiling assassin? Ned’s eyes dart over the crowd, hoping Mai will come to his rescue. Morrow is greyer at the temples, but apart from that looks much the same. ‘Fine. And you?’
‘Carrying on.’
‘The family tradition.’
‘Exactly.’ Then his steely smile falters. ‘I don’t suppose Angela is with you?’
‘Sorry. Just me. And Mai’s somewhere around.’ Ned nods towards the lift. ‘I see you’ve had the dumb waiter upgraded.’
Morrow gives a helpless shrug. ‘I thought it might be useful. If Angela were to consider coming back.’
That’s another topic Ned wants to steer clear of. He mutters that he better get going and puts out his hand.
Morrow ignores it. ‘So it’s true, eh?’
‘What?’
‘About returning to the scene of the crime.’
Ned opens his mouth to protest, but Morrow won’t let him. He moves a step closer. ‘I know, Ned.’
The shaving rash on Ned’s neck flares like an infected wound. He can feel the stain of it covering his cheeks, his ears, even his skull.
‘No more games, Ned. I know you sent it.’
Morrow ushers him out to the living room, to a quiet corner away from the crowd.
There is a strange, almost fatherly, intimacy to the moment, which Morrow had not expected. As if they are bonded in ways that neither of them quite understands. When he received the letter, he considered employing a cyber expert to trace where the money had gone. But an expert might also have discovered what transpired between him and Stone. So he held back and held his enemies close, watched Ned and Howard, his chief advisor, and found himself hoping the culprit was Howard. He’d quickly grown fond of Ned. Had held him too close, perhaps. Then things got even more complicated when he met Angela. For a time, his suspicions fell heavily on his advisor, who quit the week after the letter arrived. The timing did look incriminating. And there was the possibility that Stone had been behind it all along.
When Angela left him, she took his defences with her. His supreme confidence, the armour that had been his inheritance, completely deserted him. He will never forget the naked shock of it, of feeling flayed. Everything preyed on his mind, everything hurt. Suddenly he had to find out. So he brought in the expert, followed the money, found out about Ned’s bad investments. And unearthed a new level of torment: the possibility that Angela had known all along.
The corner of the sideboard is pressing into the small of Ned’s back. Amid the rising pressure in his head, the growing unreality of everything around him, he has to make Morrow understand.
‘Angela knew nothing at all.’
Morrow doesn’t betray the slightest hint of what this news means to him.
‘I trusted you, Ned. I believed you were a decent person.’
Ned half turns away in disgust – at himself, at Morrow, at the world. Is this what is meant by karma? Angela would know, but she’s the last one he could ask. ‘You’re hardly pure yourself.’
To his surprise, Morrow puts a hand on his shoulder. ‘We’re all flawed, Ned. But that’s not the issue here. We must focus on Angela, mustn’t we? Her happiness, her well-being. This is what . . .’ He pauses and deliberates. ‘. . . unites us. Which is why I want you to bring her back to me. All you need to do is lay the ground. Some encouragement, then arrange a chance meeting between us. I’ll look after the rest.’
Ned can feel his lips, his whole body, twisting.
‘Don’t look so outraged, Ned. You haven’t been straight with your sister for quite some time. It’s a bit rich to start protesting now.’
‘And if I refuse?’
‘I think you know what will happen. You’ve done it yourself. You know how it works.’
Ned waits for him to go on. Over Morrow’s shoulder, he can see a young boy stumbling backwards towards a wooden pedestal with a porcelain statuette on top. An older girl, perhaps his sister, grabs the boy just in time.
‘Of course you could go to the police. And incriminate yourself. But where’s your proof against me? My bank accounts are clean. It’s your word against mine. And mine carries slightly more weight, wouldn’t you say? Who are you, Ned? Nothing but a drifter who turned up in my boatshed with some half-baked story about being turfed out by his wife. And what did I do? I gave you work, I trusted you to oversee my renovations. I treated you and your sister as family. And you betrayed me.’
Ned meets Morrow’s frosty blue eyes. The politician has skewered him. For the first time since they met, they are speaki
ng candidly, their conversation no longer shadowed by suspicion or lies. No longer dressed up in civility or banter. And with this decorum, this playfulness, stripped away from the relationship, the bare bones of power are revealed. What is left is pure transaction. Nothing to soften or grease it, not even the oil of deceit.
Ned has no choice. The bullet he thought he’d dodged has been coming at him all along, building steam over the year, like some heat-seeking missile. And now it has arrived, on this sunny afternoon when he was least expecting it.
A mask of affability slides over Morrow’s face. Somehow Ned must do the same. If he makes a scene, he will suffer. He will only make things worse.
‘Angela made her decision. I can’t force her to love you.’
‘I’m not asking you to. She still loves me. I have no doubt about that. But she thinks she doesn’t belong here. You can help persuade her that she does.’
‘She never speaks of you.’
‘That means nothing. She’s afraid to. Afraid that if we see each other, her resolve will weaken. I know, because she wrote to me. What she needs is encouragement.’ He gives a tight smile and doesn’t mention that her reply came only after he had called her, emailed her, written to her. All of which was answered with silence. Her letter was a request for him to leave her be.
Ned glances around. He has to get out of here. Soon Mai will wonder why he is taking so long and come looking for him, and he can’t allow her to know about this. She wouldn’t stand for it, he’s sure of that. Angela is heartbroken, Mai believes, because she fell for a man she couldn’t trust. In Mai’s eyes, Morrow’s coercion would only prove her right. If Ned encourages Angela to go back to him, his betrayal of her will be complete. And unforgivable. That’s what Mai would say. Just thinking about it puts a vice on his heart.