The Complete Stories (33 page)

Well, it had come to nothing, of course. A childish dream. Only once after those early years had he and Coralie spent any time together.

At twenty-five she had turned up in Swinging London, at a time, just after the birth of their second daughter, when he and Jane were still dealing happily with broken nights, babies’ bottles, and wet nappies drying on a ceiling rack in the damp little kitchen. Coralie, while she made up her mind between a teaching job in Portugal and a return to the arms of a boy in Brisbane who was prepared to wait, though not perhaps for ever, had spent six weeks on the floor of their basement living room.

It was the time, as well, of his first novel, which he wrote each night at the kitchen table, in the early hours while his family slept in the room next door; getting up every half-hour or so and stepping away from the warm sunlight of his Brisbane childhood to feed the coke-fire or make himself a mug of tea, and when the baby woke to walk her up and down a little while a bottle heated. His head would be so brimming with sunlight, and images and whole sentences that he needed to set down before they were gone, that he would write on sometimes with the baby over his shoulder, feeding off her warmth, in a state of wholeness and ease with his life and work that he was never to know so completely again.

In the conspiratorial way of lovers, he and Jane had made alliance against their wanted, unwanted guest. When he crept to bed at last, Jane would tease him about his other woman out there—and he could never be sure how serious she was and whether it was Coralie she meant or his book.

And in fact there was a sense in which they could scarcely be separated, that's what he saw after a time, since it was Coralie's presence he was drawing on when so many vivid pictures came back to him. Of blue sand-crabs spilled from a gunnysack and setting out over the red-earth floor of a hut, till they could be grabbed by the back legs and dropped squealing into the pot. Of tiger-moths at a wire-screen door and the peculiar light of a ribbed sandbank when the tide rippled out and a whole battalion of soldier crabs wheeled and flashed, then darkened.

“She's still in love with you,” Jane whispered. “She thinks I'm a mistake. She thinks I'm the interloper.”

“Don't be silly,” he protested.

“She thinks you two were made for each other. And you love it—you really love it. Being the rooster with two hens.”

“Do I?” he asked, genuinely surprised but not entirely displeased with this new and more dashing version of himself.

“Yes, you do—bastard!” Her voice, in playful accusation, had a throatiness, a sensuality that stirred him. “At heart you're a philanderer.”

“No I'm not,” he told her. “What do you mean? I'm not,” and he clasped her more warmly in the rumpled bed.

It became a joke between them, one of her ways of playing up to his ego and exciting him. It had taken him another seven years to see that it was also true.

But she had been wrong about Coralie. Their moment was past. He found her presence at the edge of his enclosed and sufficient family an irritation. Too keen-eyed, too deeply imbued with their Lattimer scepticism, she was an infidel. He resented her humourous disbelief in his being so easily settled. Being settled was important to him—too important, perhaps, that is what she had seen, and if he had been less concerned to defend his own small victory over aimlessness and the fear that without the constraints of a conventional family life he would sink back into the perplexities and self-destructiveness of adolescence, he too might have seen it.

How little he had known himself! What a mess he had made of things. And now, after half a lifetime, this late reunion.

It did not help that Coralie and Jane had remained friends, and that she knew, from Jane's side, all the sorry details, the whole sad story. And would have heard as well that of his two daughters, Eleanor would see him only to make their meetings, each time, the occasion of bitter recriminations and punishment, and Annabel, who had been his favourite, would not see him at all.

They had been to the North Coast—a patchy occasion, despite the perfect weather. Now, sun-dazed, they were having drinks on the Ped-ersens’ verandah above the river. Coralie, shoes discarded, her bare legs tucked away under her, had retreated into silence. It was Eric who did the talking.

All day, intimidated perhaps by the years they had known one another, his wife and this almost famous cousin, and the times they had shared, or by a kind of play between them which was too light, too full of allusions he could not catch, and which represented a side of Corrie he did not feel comfortable with, Eric had been sulky, watchful; determined, Colin thought, not to be drawn in or impressed. Now, suddenly, he had sprung to life. He expanded, he was voluble. It was as if he and Coralie shared a single source of energy, and when one of them drew on it the other wilted. Or perhaps it was simply that he was on home ground at last.

He had just made a surprising discovery. That Colin, who in all other respects seemed a well-informed sort of chap, was entirely ignorant on the subject of futures.

“I can't believe it,” he kept saying. “Corrie, can you believe it?”

Futures, it seemed, were what everyone was into.

Eric, in a way that was almost winning, he was so shyly passionate about the thing, began a lecture on futures and how they worked, keeping the tone light—he did not want to appear ponderous—but making certain that Colin should not miss the fact that here too a certain imagination and flair might be demanded. The thing had its own sort of drama, and considering the dreams that were dependent on it, and the suspense and disappointments, might have the makings of a plot.

Colin nodded, but it was like listening to something that, however coherent it might be, made no sense; like a poem in another tongue. Did Coralie follow it? Was she even listening? He could make nothing of the little smile she wore. Anyway, she must have tired of whatever amusement it gave her to see him so easily discomfited. After a moment or two she got up and said: "Well, I'd better see what I can rustle up to eat.” She was abandoning—no, relinquishing—him. When she called them in, twenty minutes later, Eric had his arm across Colin's shoulder and had become cheerily sentimental. They might have been old friends who had just recaptured, in a series of boyish reminiscences, a moment forty years back when as spirited ten-year-olds they had slit their wrists Indian style and shared blood and spit. Colin did not trust himself to look in Coralie's direction.

“Big things are happening here,” Eric was telling him. “We're going on by leaps and bounds. No holding us. You ought to come back and be part of it, Colin. We need him, don't we, Corrie?”

“Mango,” Coralie told Colin, who was separating something from the green of his salad, "and shredded ginger,” and their eyes did meet for a moment. But any alliance between them could only be fleeting. And Eric was too deep in his pleasure in the occasion to see how lightly they let him off. Was she always so indulgent, Colin wondered.

Forgive me, she was saying.

No, he said. No need. I'm the one.

The fact was, he was a disappointment to her. She had read too many of his books. Eric's advantage was that he had read none of them. Then there was Jane, and London, and all those years when they had been so close that he could barely separate, when he looked back, what had been his experience and what hers. He had stolen a good deal of it—she of all people must know how much—and made it his own. But the fact
that he had used it in his work did not mean that he had used it up, or got to the end of its mysteries. It was still precious to him, all of it, and she was so much part of the way it played on his mind and on his senses, especially here among so many familiar sounds and objects, that his feeling for her was as fresh and real in him as it had ever been. This is what he had wanted, all day, to say to her. But they had spent the time in small talk. He had said nothing. And in the end it was Eric who had stepped in and claimed him, and would establish the tone of their last hours together.

There was a kind of comedy in that, and they might have to settle for the recognition of it in a shared glance as the nearest they would get, this time round, to their old closeness or the promise of a new one.

“Goodnight, Colin,” she said softly when the taxi arrived and they went out into the gathered nightsounds of the verandah. The touch of her hand very softly on his cheek was an assurance.

“Goodnight, mate—keep in touch,” Eric told him, leaning into the window of the taxi. And he called again from the foot of the steps where Coralie fitted into the hollow of his arm: "And remember, we need you. Come back soon.”

The events of the following hours he would have rejected outright if they had presented themselves to him as the components of a plot. They were too extravagant for the web of quiet incident and subtle shifts of power that were the usual stuff of his fiction. But they occurred and he was not granted the right of refusal. From the moment the Ped-ersens saw him into the cab (the front seat beside the driver) he was aware that some agency had taken over whose imagination was wilder than his own and which he could neither anticipate nor control.

The driver himself was part of it. Young, bearded, in boxer shorts and sneakers, he was one of the sociable ones, an Armenian or Yugoslav with the broad vowels of the local accent drawlingly prolonged and the consonants of another tongue altogether.

When a few direct questions established that Colin was a visitor, he began evoking possibilities for the remainder of the night: a gambling club, a massage parlour, other darker, more dangerous amenities that were not to be named. When Colin, with a wave of his hand, rejected
them, he shrugged and removed himself to a sulky distance, one hairy arm on the steering wheel, the other angled out of the window and drumming lightly on the roof. After five minutes or so of this Colin said abruptly: "Look, just let me out at the next corner, will you? I need a breath of air. I'll walk.”

The driver pulled in. “Please yerself,” he said. “You're the driver.” He sniggered at his own joke, consulted a card, made calculations, very slowly as if the figures wouldn't add up, and named a price. Safely outside, Colin passed him a note and relinquished the change.

The driver grinned. It wasn't a pleasant grin, and Colin wondered, as he set off beside a row of dingy shops that appeared sinister but were merely unlit, if the fellow hadn't after all delivered him over to one of those obscure and perhaps hazardous occasions that had not been named.

The city at this hour was deserted. The street (and he could see down a dip a good half-mile of it) was clear. He thought of flagging down another cab. But that was silly. He knew this place, he had grown up in it, his hotel was five minutes away, and he had the odd conviction that if he did hail a cab it would turn out to be the one he had just got out of making a circle around the block.

He had gone no more than forty yards—past a gunsmith's, its barred windows stacked with rifles and binoculars, a jeweller's, the frosted windows of a bank—when he was aware of a car, a battered Kingswood, that had slowed to walking pace and was travelling close to the pavement beside him. The driver's head was thrust out, in an effort, he realised, to see him more clearly in the diminished light.

He tried to conceal his anxiety, but began to walk faster. When the Kingswood put on speed at last and swung round the next corner, he crossed briskly against the lights, and was just beginning to regain his composure and admonish himself for being a fool when he heard behind him the footfalls of someone running, and a moment later was being pushed back hard against a wall.

It was a matter of seconds. His attacker, too close for him to get any impression except of damp flesh, had him pinioned and was breathing heat into his neck.

“You din’ expect that, didja,” the man hissed. “Didja? Didja?” With
each question he pushed his face closer and jerked Colin's arm. “You cunt!”

He whispered this almost lovingly into Colin's ear.

“I seen you get outa that cab. I knew I'd catch up with you sooner or later. Cunt!”

Colin's panic, now that the situation had declared itself, had given way to raging anger. He was surprised at the intensity of it and at how clear-headed he felt.

“Get off,” he shouted, and raised his elbow and pushed.

“Oh no you don't,” the fellow warned, and he held him even closer, half smiling, very pleased with himself. A lean-faced fellow of maybe thirty, red-headed, unshaven, wearing a singlet. Colin could smell the excitement that came off him, a yeasty sourness. When he was satisfied his grip was firm, he leaned back a little and said easily: "So here we are, eh? Just the two ‘v us.” He gave a short laugh, but seemed now to lose concentration, as if he did not know what should come next. Perhaps his arm was tiring and it had occurred to him that he could not go on holding Colin for ever. “I seen you get outa that cab,” he said again. Then he found what it was he really wanted to say. “You din’ think I'd face up to yer, didja? Well, you made a bad mistake, feller. I'm fed up t’ th’ gizzard. I'd rather fucken finish off the both of us.” He said this with passion, his voice rising to a sobbing note, but did not move.

“Look,” Colin said, "this is crazy. I don't even know who you are.”

“Don't you? Don't you? Well, that's what you would say.”

Once again the energy had gone out of him. He swung his head from side to side as if looking out for something. “Only I'm not that much of a mug. I know you've been with ‘er. I wanta hear you say it. Say it, cunt! Bloody say it!”

These were not so much orders as desperate appeals. When Colin did not respond, the fellow looked about again, and with a forceful motion broke his grip, then stood slumped, his arms hanging. His face was distorted with a pain so naked and hopeless that Colin, who was free now and might have run, was mesmerized. The man raised his voice in a dismal howl. “Say it,” he sobbed. But hopelessly now, as if the words were a spell that had failed to work, or whose purpose he could no longer recall.