The Affair (21 page)

When the last light faded he set off home. He tried to sort some boating equipment but his mind wouldn’t settle. What did he know of her, this wispy sprite, Miss Knee?

Nina had referred to her father as Jake Lambert, star of the Barbershop Chorus. So her last name was Lambert. And he knew Nina was her first name. It could be short for something. He couldn’t think what. Janina? She wore a wedding ring so he knew she was married. But he had no way of knowing if she had a married surname.

He knew it was hopeless but he found himself scanning the death notices in the newspapers anyway. Then, with his heart in his mouth, he phoned the hospitals. No-one called Nina anything had been brought in over the past week, nor were there any unidentified females that fitted her description.

It was late but he walked up to Kings Cross Police Station, lining up with some drunks, a man who was bleeding from the forehead and a skinny abusive girl with the pasty complexion and unmistakable scowl of a heroin addict. A sympathetic policewoman listened to him, her expression altering only a little when he earnestly explained that this Nina must be missing because she had missed their fourth date. He thought he knew what the sergeant was thinking but she had looked up the name in the computer anyway. No-one called Nina Lambert had been mugged, raped, arrested or detained by police in the past week. Leo was both relieved and near despair. What had happened to her?

He walked home slowly. He didn’t want this to be a game any more.

Leo hovered about the security entrance watching people come and go from the apartment block. These were Nina’s neighbours, he thought, eyeing them with interest. They looked back at him suspiciously. They didn’t seem to appreciate the presence of the young man in the baggy shorts and baseball cap, smiling cheerfully. People in exclusive inner-city apartment blocks didn’t like strangers hanging around. It made them wary. Leo tried to look nonchalant and at ease, as if he was waiting for someone who would be along any minute.

He must have been partly convincing because a kind-faced sprightly woman in her seventies smiled a friendly greeting as she passed, and Leo plucked up the courage to ask if she knew Nina Lambert.

‘Who? No, I don’t think I know her. Sorry.’

Nina had gone, dissolved into the air like a wisp. He couldn’t understand it. Where was she? It must have been something pretty bad to have kept her from him. Perhaps her mother had suddenly taken ill and she had had to race back to Canada? Or maybe something very trivial and ordinary had kept her away from the park last week. The flu? How would he know? How could she contact him? She would turn up this week with a perfectly reasonable excuse and Leo would feel foolish for having been so worried. Leo sighed and looked around him, hoping for some sign, something that was unmistakably Nina.

Letterboxes lined the foyer, each with a neatly stencilled name. Avery, McKean, Gerstle, Latham, Watson, Wilde. Dozens of names divided into neat rows of six. That must be how many apartments there were to each floor. Hardy. Muschamp. Lewin. Molloy. Porritt. Stubbs. It was a big building. Leo scanned them all. There was no Lambert.

He wondered what to do. He wanted to see Nina, to talk to her. He had been unable to concentrate on anything else all week. So he had come here. He was sure this was the apartment block she had disappeared into when she left the taxi that day they met and she turned his world upside down. Had she said anything that would indicate which floor she lived on? He tried to remember.

Nina, my pretty Nina, where are you?

Leo pulled from his pocket a white envelope. He placed it on top of the row of letterboxes. It
looked brazen and obvious propped up for everyone to see as they walked in. He didn’t like that. But his heart was too full. He couldn’t wait. He would burst if he didn’t express how he felt. It had come to him as a revelation, the sudden overwhelming realisation that he was in love – for the first time in his life, unless he counted ten-year-old Kimmie Butler from next-door, which he didn’t. His feelings for Nina easily eclipsed those. Suddenly the songs he had sneered at made sense. He had so much he wanted to say to Nina. He felt foolish and happy and clever and vibrant, all at the same time. He didn’t want to scare her but she had to know something of the intensity of his feelings. This wasn’t a game for him and she had to know that.

He had jotted down some of his garbled thoughts in the blind faith he would find some way to get them to her. He left the letter there, telling himself it was in the lap of the gods, and they had been kind to him so far.

Nina spotted the envelope as soon as she pushed open the foyer doors. It looked out of place. She didn’t get personal, handwritten notes to Nina Lambert. She was Nina Wilde. Mrs Wilde. James’s wife. She felt a ripple of unease.

Her arms were full of bags of fresh vegetables from Patty’s garden and Tiger was straining at his leash. She set her bags down and slipped the white envelope into her pocket. James was a few seconds
behind her, bringing their cases from the boot of the car. She heard him panting as he came through the foyer door.

‘I’ll get the mail. You go on up,’ said Nina. She couldn’t look at him. She felt inexplicable panic. She didn’t want James opening the letterbox. She had no way of knowing what else may be in there. This letter had something to do with Leo, she was sure of it. But he shouldn’t know her name, Nina or Lambert. How did he find them out? What game was he playing? And had he come here? Surely not. She had been careful to compartmentalise her life. It was how she managed to deny the feelings of guilt that hovered below the surface of her consciousness. Nina considered James and their marriage as her day-to-day existence, while Leo was her fantasy, not entirely real. The thought that James and Leo could at some point collide was too horrific.

The happiness of the car trip with James, the feeling of being connected again, evaporated in an instant. Suddenly home didn’t feel so safe any more. She felt it had been invaded.

Stop it – this was completely irrational, she told herself. It had been a long day and she was just tired. She forced herself to breathe slowly and deeply. There was a bundle of letters, mostly bills and junk mail. An apartment circular telling of body corporate rates that were due. Some fabulous special offers she had no interest in. She rifled quickly through it all. Everything seemed normal. Nothing untoward in there.

Nina took the lift up to their apartment on the sixth level.

Once inside she looked anxiously around. She couldn’t have said what she was looking for, she just felt on edge. But everything was fine, exactly as she had left it. She should just relax, she told herself.

Nina unpacked the vegetables and fed Tiger, tensely aware of the white handwritten envelope in her pocket. James went into the study to phone Felix and Nina found herself alone. She stepped out onto the balcony and wedged herself behind the door. It meant she couldn’t be seen from the room or any other balcony. It was unnecessary but Nina felt a strong need to be hidden when she opened the envelope.

The light was fading as the sun sank behind the city buildings, and the shadows lengthened across the water in front of her. The first of the evening’s fruit bats flew across the sky. The air was still and the harbour calm. Some voices carried up from a lower balcony but they were a long way away. Nina felt alone. She let out a deep sigh, then tore open the envelope. A handful of dried blood-red rose petals spilled out onto the tiled balcony floor. She unfolded a sheaf of white writing paper.

Nina felt the tears burn her cheeks and realised she was crying. Soundless tears that came from somewhere deep within her, spilling out of her eyes and down her face. What had she done? If she felt shamed before she opened the letter she felt doubly so now.

It was as if he had just moved on a notch ahead of her, confident she would follow. And while he was going forward at a rapid rate, she had been going backward. Where they had been as one, now they were poles apart in their expectations and desires. She couldn’t love him. It wasn’t allowed. She realised that with a sickening, heartbreaking certainty.

How does he know my name? He came to my home.
Nina felt a ripple of panic shoot along the nerve endings under her skin.
He was here. He could come
here again. Anytime he chooses.
The thought terrified her. ‘… the urge to place myself irrevocably in your life,’ he had written.
NO, NO, NO. I have to
get you out of my life!

She felt vulnerable, spied on, threatened. She wished she could talk to James about this. What would he do? He would approach it logically. Had she given this man the impression they had a future?
Yes.
Had she encouraged him to such fervent feelings?
Yes again.
Would he understand that it could not go on? Would he just walk away meekly now that she had suddenly just changed her mind?
Oh my God. What if he doesn’t?

Nina wanted James and marriage and fidelity and trust and all those things she had promised. She
wanted to be there for him while he faced this tough time with the family business and his guilt over his mother’s stroke. He had once told her that he wanted to wake up next to her every morning for the rest of his life. That, she realised, was what she wanted too. How could she ever have doubted it? How could she have put it at risk?

What was I thinking?
Nina dabbed at her eyes and took deep gulps of the night air.

She screwed the letter into a ball and placed it on the barbecue, then picked up some matches lying nearby and set it alight. The flames devoured it in a few seconds. It was a decisive action that felt good. She was banishing Leo, wiping him out of her future. It was what had to be done. How could she convey that to him? How could she get him out of her life without any hint to James of what had gone on?

And was that really what she wanted?
Yes, yes,
yes.
Never to see him again … to walk away … to deny that part of her heart that cried out for him, his smile, his touch?
No, no, no.
The pain was excruciating.

Nina didn’t sleep that night. While James snored softly she paced the balcony, watching the moon rise across the cloudless sky, climb above her head and eventually start to descend. She would ignore the letter. It was best if she never saw him again. It would be the cleanest for everybody. She made herself a mug of tea.

No. That was cruel. After what they had shared she owed him an explanation at the very least. A
farewell. Give him a sense of closure. Wasn’t that what the psychologists would say?

No. She slammed the mug onto the table. She didn’t owe him anything. She couldn’t trust herself to see him. Their connection was too powerful. She was married. She owed only James and she had betrayed him enough. To see Leo again would only compound her betrayal.

No. That was no good. It had gone too far. His letter showed that. She had to see him. One more time. To convince him to stay away. Make him understand it wasn’t allowed to be.

Nina picked up the mug and resumed pacing. She stopped and looked out at the reflection of the moon on the still harbour.

He wanted to place himself irrevocably in her life. She felt scared. The tone in the letter didn’t reflect the carefree playful fun they had shared. The game was over. He wanted more. What had she done?

Leo pottered about on the boat all morning. He degreased the winches, using kerosene and a toothbrush to get into the tricky corners. Then he applied liberal amounts of fresh new grease. He topped up the fuel container of the two-burner galley stove with methylated spirits and cleaned out last night’s grains from the stove-top espresso maker.

The end of the cabin met in a V-point that had been converted into a large bed. It was where the
crew took it in turns to get a bit of sleep on the rare occasions they sailed overnight.

He tucked the headsails into the stowage space underneath the bed and arranged the cushions on top. He frowned. It looked too much like a boudoir, so he picked up the cushions and rearranged them, flinging them around haphazardly. It looked far more casual and he was satisfied.

All the while
Carmina Burana
played loudly in the background. He had brought a few more CDs from home. He wasn’t sure what Nina’s tastes were so he grabbed a bit of everything.

He moved onto the brass lamps on the walls, removing the tubs from their gimbal fittings, which allowed them to sway with the boat without spilling their contents, and filled them with kerosene. In each one he placed a new wick.

There were half-a-dozen small ones and one larger one at the cabin entrance to light the steps down into the cabin. He replaced each lamp, cleaning the glass tops and standing back to admire them. He would light them just before 12 o’clock. Even though some daylight reached into the cabin, they would create just the right mood. He checked his watch. She was still half-an-hour away. If she was coming. Of course she was coming, he told himself. And if she didn’t then he would find her, somehow. He would go back to her apartment block. He would try the Canadian Embassy. He would phone the Eyebrow Post Office, if there was such a thing, and get an address for Jake Lambert, barbershop singer. ‘I need to get in touch with your daughter.’

He would not give up. His excitement continued to build. He was desperate to see her.

James kissed Nina goodbye. It was a long and lingering kiss.

‘I won’t be late, darling,’ he promised. ‘Tonight it’s just you and me. A romantic night in for the two of us. Perhaps you could slip into something slinky and we could send Tiger out for the night. There is a cute little puppy down the road who I am sure would enjoy his company.’

Nina laughed. She clung to James’s neck, inhaling his scent, feeling the solidity of his shoulders and back.

‘What are you going to do today?’ he asked.

Nina’s eyes slid off into the distance.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said vaguely. ‘Go for a walk maybe. Take Tiger out to visit some of his lady friends in the park.’