Prosperity Drive (25 page)

When they entered Fremantle, they did lose half their number. Mew said goodbye noisily in the cabin. She wept and had to blow her nose a lot. Even her swept-up hair had a distressed look. It looked in danger of imminent collapse as she backed out the door with her beauty bag in tow.

‘I'd sooner stay,' she said, ‘and go with you girls to Sydney.'

Stasia was disembarking too, though Mr Sheep Farmer was still another day's journey away.

They waved Mew and Stasia off, then Lil retreated to Bursar Bob's office on B deck. With the
Australis
on Antipodean time, the clock was ticking loudly. Where once their association had been impossible, now it was doomed and required
a great deal of mournful attention. Anita stayed on deck, looking down at the speck that was Stasia standing on the quay with her two cardboard suitcases, waiting for her trunk to be unloaded. She seemed forlorn standing there, fingering her ringless hand. The sight of Stasia, so tiny and singular, made Anita afraid. She was suddenly overcome with a mesmeric weakness, her breath coming sharp and shallow. The sea sparkled maliciously; the sky sick with cloud. She felt all at once her own invisibility and the terrible asthma of distance as if the world might at any moment inhale and swallow her whole. Viktor Varga came upon her like this.

‘Your Scottish friend? She is gone?' he asked, meaning Mew.

She made to speak, but when she opened her mouth the wind rushed in and choked her. Viktor fished in his capacious jacket pocket and produced a brown paper bag.

‘Here,' he commanded gruffly, ‘breathe into this.'

He placed a grounding hand on her shoulder. The crinkled brown paper inflated and crumpled before her eyes, eclipsing all else. Viktor kept time. When her breathing subsided he took the bag away. Then he wrapped his big arms around her.

‘Lento,' he said, rubbing her back, ‘lento.'

She was glad Mew couldn't see this; she'd have accused her of moving in on Viktor.

After Fremantle she and Viktor seemed to gravitate towards each other. With the girls gone – and Lil fully occupied – Anita couldn't bear the silence of the cabin. Viktor, too, came up out of the Brisbane bar. He'd lost much of his audience and the ship itself seemed intent on throwing them together. She would come across him on deck, not gazing out over the water or raising his face to the spitting sun, but bent over, sunk in contemplation, his hands linked prayerfully. Sometimes she thought of telling Viktor about what had happened in Aden. But it would have been too much like confession, appealing to an older man with a benedictory hand. She was done with
that; particularly now. So they just stood together, two figures linked by silence, and that other unlikely association – that he had clamped a paper bag over her mouth to save her.

If their departure had been a blizzard of noise, their disembarkation on Circular Quay was stealthy and unmarked by ceremony. The
Australis
, having embraced a crowd, seemed to want to exhale its passengers one by one. When the time came, Lil was nowhere to be seen, probably off with Bursar Bob, so Anita left Uncle Ambrose's address scrawled with Lil's lipstick on the mirror in the cabin.

She was shepherded with the crowd into a large arrivals shed through which they had to be processed. It was there she found Uncle Ambrose, ducking and weaving through the crowd at the far, dim end of the shed, trying to find a free place at the barrier. She felt suddenly shy at the sight of him. But when she finally made it to the barrier he opened wide his arms.

‘There you are!' he said. ‘Didn't think I'd recognise you. But sure you haven't changed a bit.'

Haven't I? she wanted to ask.

Over Ambrose's shoulder, Viktor Varga came into view, suitcase in hand. He was in shirtsleeves, his tie askew, damp patches of sweat under his arms. The heat seemed to make a fool of him. She disengaged and Ambrose wheeled around.

‘You must be the uncle,' Viktor said, stretching out his hand to shake Ambrose's. Ambrose eyed him warily. ‘Your niece speaks of you.'

‘This is Viktor,' Anita offered. ‘Viktor Varga.'

‘Good man,' Ambrose said and began to move away.

Viktor put a restraining hand on his arm.

‘Maybe your boys like to learn the rudiments of music, yes?'

He set down his case and took a battered-looking notebook out of his pocket. Uncle Ambrose grudgingly obliged with his
address, then snatched the book from Viktor halfway through because he was having trouble with the dictation.

‘Good man,' he repeated with a forced heartiness as he scrawled out his phone number. Then, irritated, he tugged on Anita's arm and bustled her away.

‘Rudiments of music, me arse,' he muttered as they made their way through the crowds. ‘Has his eye on you, more like. Bloody foreigners!'

Anita stole a glance over her shoulder. The bloody foreigner was standing forlornly between two large hatches of forbidding sun-glare, the entrance where they'd come in from the quay and the exit towards which Ambrose was steering her. Steeped in swampy shadow, Viktor was looking directly at her, appealing, but for what she didn't know. She considered waving to acknowledge their closeness. Yet what exactly was it but silence, an unspoken complicity? Instead, she turned away, not wanting to acknowledge the small stab of betrayal she felt. Ambrose took her hand and led her towards the light. They stepped into glorious sun-drench.

The great expanse of the harbour opened up before her. The white-capped water shimmered, playful like an ocean on a buried treasure map. The bridge arched in a pocket of blue.

‘Here it is,' Ambrose declared, pointing towards the scene as if he had painted it himself. ‘The beginning of a new life!'

But despite the rinsed sky and the bracing blueness, Anita didn't believe it. Her new life had already started. It wasn't out there; it was growing inside her.

Clods hit the coffin lid. It was a country funeral. They didn't go in for covering up the grave with what looked like a carefully cut sod of golf course.

‘Thanks,' Louis said.

‘For what?' Norah tugged at his sleeve playfully as they turned away from the graveside. It was an unruly day of spring, blustery and grey, the new-leaved trees tossed as if by grief. The wind shivered as they led the mourners down the ragged path between the furred gravestones. She wasn't sure if she should link him. It seemed too proprietorial; he no longer belonged to her, after all. Neither had she been sure of whether to wear black. Would that be laying claim to a grief that didn't belong to her either? (In the end she chose a Lenten purple.) Norah had not cared much for Louis's mother but only because she sensed his mother did not care much for her. It had been the first time she had encountered hostility for its own sake. The mere fact of her had been enough. And, of course, she was spiriting away Mrs Plunkett's only son.

The noonday pub smelled of damp coats and the night before. There was a further round of condolences as neighbours came up and pumped his hand, saying simply ‘Louis' as if his name were an incantation of mourning. Norah went to sit in a corner under the dartboard. He caught her eye above the knot of people gathered at the bar and cocked an eyebrow, part query, part apology.

‘A hot whiskey,' she called.

He clapped his thighs in search of his wallet, then hitched up the tails of his overcoat and rummaged in his pockets. If Norah missed anything from her former marriage it was the knowledge of those trademark gestures, so familiar, so typical, so male. These too had once been hers.

Nobody approached her, though Cora behind the bar had waved a vague greeting to her as she came in. The intervening years had reduced Norah to a once-familiar face that could not be instantly placed. But then, her memory of those who had peopled her young marriage had also dimmed. She recognised the postmistress (what was her name?) who used to beam at Norah as if she were visiting royalty. And there was Louis's Uncle Pat, haphazardly shaved and bow-legged, leaning against a stool, his chest softly growling as he tried to draw breath.

Ray, Louis's boyhood friend whose approval had once been so important, was handing out fistfuls of shorts, a cigarette clamped in the fork of his thick, scored fingers. He had smiled shyly as he passed Norah earlier in the church. She was sitting several pews down on the groom's side while he had stood beside Louis at the front, a brotherly arm around his shoulders. She had watched the back of Louis's head, his hair curling over his collar, his ears large and defenceless, the soft hulk of his back, and felt a choking sort of sadness. Not for him, but for the ancient loss of him.

‘It's Louis,' he had said when he rang with the news.

From his new life in America. She still regarded it as his new life though it was hardly apt. He had been away five years now. She had considered it running away. That was not her way. Hers had been to dig in deeper, to disappear into the debris of their marriage, to live among the ruins.

‘Louis Plunkett,' he added hastily as if there were a danger she would confuse him with some other Louis.

When he had first gone away he had rung regularly at odd hours of the morning because he couldn't get the hang of the time difference. She remembered those conversations and the poignant intimacy they achieved over the transatlantic hiss, the stalwart solidarity of two people who had survived a calamity as if their broken marriage were an external event, a natural disaster like a hurricane or an earthquake. Then the phone calls had petered out and she knew he had found someone else. He had settled in Ann Arbor, a place that sounded to Norah like the name of another woman. Safe in the arms of Ann Arbor.

‘It's my mother,' he had said. In the background she could hear the disappointed cadence of airport announcements. ‘I was wondering …'

‘The funeral?' she prompted.

There was an audible sigh from the other end.

‘Would you?'

She had agreed heartily; it was only now, sitting in the albuminous wash of a lounge bar afternoon, that she wondered what she was doing here.

Louis finally broke away and brought her the by now tepid whiskey. He took off his coat and slung it on a stool beside him. She resisted the temptation to lift the sleeve that was trailing in the sawdust and to fold it carefully. Even when they were married she wouldn't have done so; it would have been too wifey. They had prided themselves on not being conventional even as she marched down the aisle in white. To check one another they had used pet names. ‘Now who's being Agatha?' he would taunt when she complained about having to pick up his dirty socks from the bedroom floor. ‘Bangers and mash, George,' she would bark when he would ask what was for dinner. She smiled now at the bragging childishness and saw the fierce denial at the centre of it – George and Agatha. As if they had never played themselves. Louis had boasted to friends that he wouldn't have a rolling pin in the house because theirs wasn't that kind of marriage.
Which meant that Norah had to use a milk bottle; for baking, that is. All her piecrusts had the letters MBL imprinted on them. Sometimes, faint vestiges of the warning on the bottles would also appear before the tart went into the oven: Must Not Be Used Without Permission.

‘Well,' he said, ‘this place hasn't changed.'

She wasn't sure if he meant the pub or the country.

‘You look well,' she offered.

And he did. The years of hot summers had given him a glossy, cosmetic air. His clothes – the neat jacket, the tastefully sombre tie, the stiff white shirt – bore the hand of another woman. She tried to imagine the woman at the other end of his life, roused in the graveyard hours by the death of someone she had never known, standing in her slip at the ironing board pressing his good clothes while he called Reservations.

‘I'm knackered, to tell you the truth. Haven't slept in days.'

The pub was clearing slowly. The postmistress (Mrs Baines! – the bane of our lives, Louis used to say) came over to shake his hand. She was a stout, raddle-faced woman with small, pert lips.

‘Your poor mother, Louis,' she said, peering at him with an inquisitive sympathy. ‘All alone at the end.'

Louis shifted uncomfortably.

‘And with no family here, but Pat and …' she paused and turned to Norah, ‘your good self, of course.'

Norah did not know whether to feel complimented by this, her first official inclusion, or to be offended by the obvious reproach.

‘If she were at home itself. They go downhill once they go into those homes.'

There was a moment's silence.

‘You'll be selling the place, I suppose. Nothing to keep you here now.'

Norah felt oddly, bleakly disowned.

* * *

She had visited Mrs Plunkett once at the nursing home after Louis had gone away. She felt she owed it to her; it was a last-ditch attempt to be liked, she realised now, though with Louis gone it was less likely than it had ever been. It was an old manor house set in half an acre of rutted parkland. A modern annexe had been built on, with floor to ceiling windows which gave on to seeping foggy fields. Matron directed her to the Rec Room; in her mind's eye Norah saw a dry dock full of rusting hulks.

Mrs Plunkett was sitting in a large circle of plastic chairs as if a group therapy session were about to start, or an afternoon tea dance. Only one other chair was occupied by an old man in a cap with a leathery face and chipped teeth. He had no legs; he sat there like a lewd version of a nodding children's toy, his stumps swaddled in a tartan rug, grinning broadly and winking at Norah.

‘Mrs Plunkett?' Norah whispered.

Her mother-in-law was sitting upright with her hands firmly planted on a walking frame, but in fact she was fast asleep.

‘Mrs Plunkett?'

Startled she awoke and seemed ashamed, as if Norah had come upon her having a secret tipple.

‘It's me,' Norah said. ‘Norah.'