Helga's Web (8 page)

“I’ve never been this way before. But you give me an inferiority complex.”

She said half-angrily, “Then why did you ask me to marry you?”

He grinned, at himself as well as at her. “Maybe I m a masochist.”

“You make any more silly remarks about your inferiority complex and I’ll give you something for your masochism.”

When she got angry the Dutch accent of her girlhood came back.

“I love you, you know that?”

“I’m glad to hear it.” Then she smiled and moved closer to him. He was tempted to take a hand from the wheel and put his arm about her; but there had been a time, when he had been on traffic duty, when he had arrested drivers for doing just that. “There’s just one thing, darling.”

“What’s that?”

“I don’t know that I like being back in Sydney. I find it, I don’t know, dull.”

Oh, that’s great, he thought. I’ll have to see the Commissioner, see if he will give me a beat in London or Paris. Maybe he could get them to swap me with Maigret or Gideon of the Yard. “I was afraid of that.”

“Does that make me sound—unpatriotic?”

“Why should it? You weren’t born here. What makes Sydney so dull for you?” He was ready to defend the city, but first he had to learn what was her attack. Not so long ago, before his visit to London, he would not have even listened to any criticism of Sydney.

She was aware of his hurt civic pride and she hung back now with her estimate of what made the city unattractive to her. “I’ll probably change my mind in six months or so. Sydney itself isn’t so bad. I like the climate and the harbour. What I miss is—dignity, I suppose you’d call it. But perhaps a city has to be old to have that. How many young people have it?”

“You have it,” he said.

She kissed him for that. “What troubles me is the people. They are, I don’t know, so—so insular, I suppose. They seem to think this is Babylon itself, as if no other place could compare with it.”

“Even the people you work for?” As soon as she had arrived back she had stepped straight into a job with a public rela-

tions firm and she was making almost as much money as he did and would soon be earning more. That was going to be another bone that would stick in his throat; and in his mother’s. It wouldn’t please Brigid Malone to have a daughter-in-law who made as much money as her son: that wasn’t the way the world was supposed to be run. “Not the people you work with. Your clients, I mean. You think they’re insular?”

“Some of them are the worst,” Lisa said. “I have a date on Wednesday with one of them. Ostensibly I’m supposed to be helping her promote the Blue and Red Ball. What she really wants me to do is make sure she’ll be the Queen Bee of Sydney Society. That’s Society with a capital S. She wouldn’t be interested in the general sort.”

“Aren’t there any Queen Bees of London Society?” he said, defending a type of Sydney woman he had never met and whom he privately sneered at on the rare occasions when he read the social pages of the newspapers.

She saw she had made a mistake in opening up the discussion. She kissed him again. “Let’s forget her. Instead, I’ll promote you into being Police Commissioner.”

“My mother would never be able to take that. It would be worse than being promoted as the Anti-Pope.”

Thursday, November 28

Walter Helidon came out of State Parliament House and stood in the sun on the verandah. Across the street were the buildings that housed the city’s medical specialists; every doorway stood in the midst of its own discreet aureole of brass plates. Next door to Parliament House was Sydney Hos- pital, a Victorian massif designed to depress approaching patients. Whoever had planned Macquarie Street had been a man with a wry sense of humour: standing politics and medicine side by side, he had invited the citizens to choose their own palliatives.

Helidon.mopped his brow, cursing that he sweated so eas- ily; it destroyed the image he so meticulously tried to create. It was difficult to be urbane when your face was shining, your shirt was sticking to your back and your glasses were misting up. He took off his glasses, the thick hom-rims that he thought made him look businesslike as well as urbane, wiped them and put them back on. Then he took out his pipe, another part of his image, and began to fill it. He sometimes regretted the pipe. It suggested a resemblance to Harold Wilson, a politician he would hardly have chosen as a model; but he had adopted the pipe long before Mr. Wilson’s image had been so universally projected and it was too late to change now. Passers-by in the street looked across the courtyard at him and he saw the sudden stiffening of the head on one or two of them that showed he had been recognized. That warmed him more than the afternoon sun, but didn’t make him sweat; politicians only sweated when they were not recognized. He wondered if he should nod to them, then decided against it; nods and smiles got you no votes unless they were for someone in your own electorate. Better to look businesslike, perhaps a little preoccupied with the affairs of government.

An Opposition Member came out and went down the steps, hurrying back to Party headquarters and further instructions on how to think. “Another wasted afternoon, Wally. Why don’t your mob learn how to get some business done? You’re supposed to be the businessmen’s party.”

“Just keeping you fellows in a job.” He wished they would give up calling him Wally: that didn’t have much suggestion of dignity about it for a Cabinet Minister, even a junior one.

A long crocodile of students went past on the opposite side of the road, their banners demanding an end to the war in Vietnam. As they passed they gave a perfunctory chorus of boos to Parliament House, but the off-handedness of their manner was more of an insult than their abuse; their main target was the Commonwealth offices some blocks away and they dismissed the home of the State parliamentarians as if it were no more than a suburban town hall. Helidon’s resentment of them was double-edged: he did not believe students were entitled to the voice they were assuming, but, if they were going to demand a voice, they should have more respect for their State representatives.

Then he was aware of a woman standing beside him and he turned to her, the smile automatically on his face before he recognized her. “You wanted to see me—oh, Mrs. Plummet.”

“I’m sorry to keep troubling you, Mr. Helidon. I know

you’re busy and all that—” She was a pretty woman whom worry had made plain; she carried scars that no beautician could ever erase. “It’s about my son—”

“Mrs. Plummer, you know I am only in parliament to do what I can for you and people like you. I am never too busy to listen to your problems. A politician has no problems of his own, only those of his constituents.” He was fluent in banality, his cliches honed by constant use. “In your case I am here to see that justice is done—”

“That’s it, but, Mr. Helidon. Justice hasn’t been done. Oh, I know you’ve tried. But couldn’t you try again? Bud, that’s my son, he never hit that policeman at all—”

Helidon stifled the sigh that welled up in him. He had already made inquiries and been assured by the police that the woman’s son had been particularly violent in a recent demonstration. But you couldn’t tell a mother, especially one from your own electorate, that her son was a liar and a beater-up of policemen. Perhaps the police had told a lie or two, too, but you never queried the police too closely about things like that. You never knew when you might need them on your side. “All right, I’ll look into it again, Mrs. Plummer, indeed I will. It’s not for want of effort on my part, I assure you—”

The woman went away, half-convinced, not from any reassurance on his part but from the stubbornness of her own hope. Helidon looked after her, feeling sorry for her; thank God he and Norma didn’t have any delinquent kids to worry about. That would shake up the old urbanity a bit, to be a Cabinet Minister and have a son up on a charge of belting a policeman.

He walked down to the Members’ car park, acknowledging the nods of the Assembly staff as he passed them. It had been a dull day in Assembly and he knew he had done nothing to relieve the boredom. He had the reputation of being one of the dullest speakers in the State parliament and today he had been below his usual form. But it didn’t worry him; no politician was ever elected on his performance in parliament. He had once bought a book of Churchill’s speeches, studied them and then tried a new approach on his own speeches. It had got him nothing but laughter and suggestions to “Cut out the bull, Wally, and give us some facts.” Oratory and rhetoric were no longer fashionable in Australian politics; speeches were made for today’s newspapers, not for history; a populace attuned to the brassy bibble-babble of disc jockeys was not likely to be patient with a speaker who tried to show the values of a silver tongue and golden phrases. But Helidon sometimes bored himself with what he had to say and how he said it, and today he had been desperately bored. He needed a pick-me-up.

He got into his car and switched on the air-conditioning. He had sold their Pontiac and bought the Mercedes 300SE last year when Norma, an.arbiter in such matters, had told him that American cars were no longer right for the Right People in Sydney. He sat for a while, cooling himself and drying off the sweat he had raised in his short walk. Then he headed the car towards Double Bay. Rather than use an official car he always drove himself on Mondays and Thursdays: those were Helga’s days. When he reached Double Bay he pulled into the car park behind the main section of shops; from here he could slip out of the car park into a side street and walk the short distance to Helga’s flat. Before he got out of the car he substituted dark glasses for his usual pair, wondering just how much of a disguise they were.

He had not gone ten yards from his car when a woman’s voice shrilled, “I thought it was you, Walter! What on earth are you doing out this way? Mending fences or whatever you politicians call it?”

“Hello, Louise.” Louise County was a thin sword of a woman, every side of her a cutting edge. He knew there had been a time, long before he had moved up into her circle, when she had been one of Sydney’s leading amateur whores; as a girl of eighteen she was rumoured to have ruined an entire school Rugby team on the eve of a Great Public Schools final and gone out the next day and cheered on the other side, whom she had accommodated that night. But now she was respectable and had once played hostess to Billy Graham. Helidon did not know her well, but he had met her several times at Norma’s charity functions. He knew that she and Norma hated each other with all the smiling, cheek-kissing hatred of rival society queens; and for once he was now on Norma’s side. “No, this is private business.”

He backed off and escaped into the side street. God, that had been close! How would it have been if he had bumped into her right outside the entrance to Helga’s block of flats? Private business, indeed. If Louise had guessed why he was there, it would not have been private for long. He knew her type: reformed whores always made the worst gossips. As he climbed the stairs to Helga’s flat he found himself sweating again. He waited on the landing outside till he had cooled down.

Helga was waiting for him as he let himself in with his key. No matter what time he came on Mondays and Thursdays she was always there waiting for him, with never a complaint that he might be late. He assumed that patience must be one of the major differences between a mistress and a wife; Norma looked upon punctuality as one of her conjugal rights. Helga kissed him, wrapping him in her arms and the musky smell of the perfume that was his favourite. He sometimes wondered if she wore it on the other days of the week, but he had never asked her about it. His life with her never went outside Monday or Thursday.

They went to bed at once, the pick-me-up he needed, and later she made him his favourite gin-and-tonic and brought it to him in bed. She sat naked on the side of the bed and looked at him with fond amusement.

“My own Cabinet Minister. Did you ever think, darling,

when you first started coming to see me that you would one day be where you are?” Yes, he had, but he was not going to tell her that. He knew that his ambitious outlook was now being held against him in certain places, that it was starting to tarnish his image.

“You do sweat, don’t you?” She had brought a towel with her and was lazily wiping his face and chest.

“Til sweat if ever anyone finds out I’m coming here.” Without his glasses he looked older than his forty-six years. He had a bland, sleek-cheeked face, but there was a tiredness about the eyes that aged him. There was no grey in his sandy-coloured hair, but it was thinning along the front temples and he had to comb it carefully these days. He had once been a keen surfer and still had broad, powerful shoulders, but the rest of him was running to plumpness. He would think twice about sitting around naked as Helga did. He drew the sheet a little higher on his chest, making the pretense of using it as a coaster for his ice-cold glass. He sipped his drink and bent his head forward as she straightened his mussed-up hair with her fingers. “Maybe we should adopt some of the Japanese customs, now we’re trying to be friends with Asia. No one there would take any notice if a politician had a geisha

girl.”

“I’m not your geisha, darling,” she said, still smiling at him. “They are much too—what’s the word?—servile?”

He smiled back at her. He always felt so at ease with this girl; she really knew how to make a man feel at home. But then home had never been like this: sex at five o’clock in the afternoon, gin-and-tonic brought to him in bed, Norma sitting naked on the side of the bed. At five every afternoon Norma was halfway between her charity bridge parties and her cocktail parties, changing from one expensive dress to another, watching her social diary as carefully as she watched her diet chart. He groaned inwardly: when he left here he was due to meet Norma at a cocktail party. He took his mind off her and went back to looking at Helga.

“And you’re not servile?”

“No, liebling” She got up, moved across to her dressing-table and took a chocolate from the box there. She bit into it, smiling suggestively at him as she did so. God, he thought, why can’t Norma be like this? “Walter darling, I’m broke.”