Dorothy Eden (27 page)

Only then Miss Atkinson, Luke’s secretary, would look at her with her subtle reproach, thinking but not saying, “Why aren’t you at home cooking a meal for your husband? All this gadding about…”

One of the kookaburras outside the window, seeing movement within, gave an abrupt impatient cry.

“Be quiet!” Abby muttered. “And stop staring. Why does everybody stare in this place?”

She didn’t look up the hillside towards the stone house. Its windows might appear to be blank, but they wouldn’t be. Either Mrs. Moffatt or the invalid son-in-law Milton would be looking out. Or Mary, but she would stand well back out of sight. She was more timid in her curiosity than the others. Lola would be at work. If Luke hadn’t left too early he would have given her a lift, saving her from the tedious journey by ferry.

It was a very natural thing to do. And he didn’t always bring her home at night because, although she had a husband in San Francisco, or some place, she frequently spent the evening in town. She was a very attractive young woman…It was funny that Luke had never written to Abby about the Moffatts, when he seemed to be such a close friend of theirs. He had simply said:

“I’ve bought a piece of land down by the river. It’s in one of Sydney’s older suburbs, once very exclusive, but now slightly decayed. It’s coming back, though, and this is a good investment.”

And later, “The house is finished, we had a rush to get it ready before you arrived, but we’ve made it. Now that you’re on the way I can’t wait…”

But he hadn’t said that Lola had helped him with the essential furnishings, carpets, chairs and tables, beds. The final touches were left for Abby who would want to choose her own colors. But the house had had to be liveable, and since Abby was arriving sooner than he had wanted her to, in spite of that impulsive, “I can’t wait…” someone had had to choose things. Lola had hoped she liked the all over carpet of dull green. It wouldn’t clash with most colors, she had said. Like a garden with its permanent green background: But Australian gardens didn’t have green backgrounds. They were a flaunting riot of red and purple and amber, unless they were stony or red clay deserts where only the lizards thrived.

So Abby had come into the house that Luke had rushed to build and Lola to furnish. Because of all this expenditure she and Luke hadn’t had a honeymoon, but had come straight here on their wedding night. And the Moffatts, all of them, including Deirdre, had been waiting with champagne. And no one had told Abby about the noise the kookaburras made early in the morning…

That was eight weeks ago. She was settled now, Abby told herself. She had made cushions and hung curtains in bright nasturtium colors, heavy linen ones that could be drawn across the windows at night and give them the privacy the house lacked in the daytime. She had bought two pictures—the windows took up too much wall space for pictures to show to any advantage—and the kind of attractive modern china that went with the furnishings. She had said nothing at all about missing the old polished wood and delicate traditional designs of century-old Dresden and Royal Worcester china which she had been accustomed to. She hadn’t, after all, craved for chintz and a fourposter bed. But, among many other things, Luke hadn’t realized she had needed a transition period. She couldn’t grow used to her new setting all at once.

Because everything was so utterly different. Even Luke…

But in eight weeks things were beginning to take on a more familiar look, and she thought that if only Luke’s eyes would lose that hardness that couldn’t come from living in the too bright sun, although people said it did, she would be happy.

The sun was dazzling already. It streamed through the wide windows of the living-room, and quivered on the green river where the shabby boat, painted a faded khaki, rocked gently at anchor. The boat had been anchored there ever since Abby had arrived, and for weeks before that, Luke told her. An itinerant Australian, perhaps one of the old swagmeri type who had taken to the water instead of the road, lived on it. He occasionally did odd jobs in the neighborhood, Luke said, when he would row ashore in his leaking dinghy early in the morning and back again at night. To Abby he was just a vague shape, pottering about his shabby domain, a scrawny figure usually dressed in nothing but a pair of faded denim trousers. But his odd jobs couldn’t have amounted to much, for he always seemed to be there, playing records on his record player.

He was particularly addicted to one tune, a strident hit of the day.

The platypus was in a frightful fuss

When he met the roo…

Wouldn’t it be fine to ask her to dine…

But I love only you-oo, I love only you…

The tune was rapidly becoming Abby’s theme song to Australia. She did all her household chores to the thin wailing strains drifting across the slow-flowing river.

She hadn’t yet got to the stage of unbearable irritation, but if Jock didn’t soon tire of that tune, she would. Luke called the man Jock. He didn’t know his real name. He said he had never met him. But there he was, day after day, always looking up towards the house, like a private eye watching.

“Well, you look down at him as much as he looks up at us,” Luke pointed out reasonably.

“It’s just that he seems to stare.”

“Then draw the curtains.”

“I know I can. But I like to look at the river. It’s cool. And if I have the curtains drawn this side, then I have Mrs. Moffatt or Milton looking down on the other. Or those beady-eyed kookaburras staring in. Or that little horror, Deirdre.”

“Granted you’re decorative enough to look at, darling, I don’t think all those people are that interested in what you’re doing.”

“I don’t suppose they are, but they have nothing else to do. That lazy creature on his boat, poor Milton stuck in a wheel chair.”

Luke laughed again. He wouldn’t take her seriously. “Then give them a little pleasure.” He didn’t realize that in even so short a space of time as eight weeks she was getting a fixation about being stared at. She must certainly try to hide such a silly state of mind from him.

Nevertheless it grew a little more each day. She drank her coffee to the thin strident music from the boat,
I love only you-oo, I love only you…
and then started violently as a movement at the window caught her eye. It was a flash of pink which disappeared as she turned. She sighed and waited.

Presently, as she had expected, the thin, foxy little face appeared, unashamed now that it was observed. The sharp nose pressed against the windowpane, the meagre body in the faded pink shirt and jeans stood in an attitude of expectancy. There was a tentative grin.

It was Deirdre, Lola’s daughter. Abby thought she was the least attractive child she had ever seen. Because of that, she couldn’t be unkind to the poor thing, although, as well as being unprepossessing to look at, she shared her family’s inquisitive traits. In some uneasy way she reminded Abby of herself. She too had had a lonely childhood with a stepfather at an early age, and a mother who was too young and pretty and devoted to her own personal interests to give much time or understanding to the daughter of an early unhappy marriage. Although she hadn’t peered in windows as this child did, she knew all too well the feeling of being shut out, of looking in at other people’s happiness as if there were always an impenetrable glass wall between them.

So she couldn’t quite bring herself to be harsh to Deirdre, and the consequence was that the child seemed to be giving her an embarrassing devotion. This took the form of always lurking about, either appearing silently at the window, or scuffing dust in the garden, or perching on a rock half-way up the hillside and staring with the basilisk stare of the lizards. She had a thin, white face and tufted, sandy hair and eyelashes. She had almost no flesh over her small bones. She ate like a horse, her mother said, but where was the result? She took after her father in San Francisco. Or was it Singapore? Or the mountains of the moon? Although she went to school, she seemed to have no friends of her own age. She was a solitary, either from unpopularity or her own desire. One thing one would never know was what went on in her secretive mind.

But now she was tapping peremptorily at the window, some small object in her hand.

Reluctantly Abby went to the door and opened it.

“Hullo, Deirdre. Why aren’t you at school?”

“It’s a holiday.”

“Then why aren’t you doing something more interesting than looking in my windows?”

The child looked at her with simple honesty.

“What is there to do?”

“Well—I suppose your mother’s at work.”

Deirdre shrugged.

“She said she might buy me a dress today if she had time.”

Deirdre’s thin wrists usually stuck too far out of her school blouses, and the hemline of her tunic crept higher and higher up her growing legs. But Lola was always smartly dressed. She had to be, she said, in her job. You couldn’t work in a smart beauty salon and look dowdy. Deirdre’s father had apparently never been around since she was born. Whether Lola was entitled to be called Mrs. Henderson was a matter for conjecture. But she did say that, seeing what a plain baby Deirdre was, and thinking of the handicaps of bringing her up presumably more or less permanently without a father, she had at least given her a fetching name. It was something.

“That’s nice, Deirdre,” Abby said. “But in the meantime, what are you going to do all day?” (Although she was no longer a lonely child herself, she, too, was burdened with a too long, too empty day. There was this uncomfortable bond between the child and herself.)

“I don’t know. Mooch around.” The child was deadpan. She didn’t show she cared. “Milton had a bad night, Mary says, so I’d better make myself scarce. Gran might let me have her beads for a while. Only I broke a string last time, and she was wild. The amber ones. But we found them all. Mary says so long as I don’t make a racket in the house.” Instinctively Deirdre looked over her shoulder towards the window where Milton might be sitting. “I’ll be glad when he’s back in hospital,” she said flatly.

“Is he going back soon?”

“I guess so. It’s about time. He hasn’t been since last school holidays.”

Milton’s trouble was obscure. Even Luke didn’t know much about it. An accident which had damaged the spine, requiring frequent hospital treatment. Milton was not a man who cared to discuss his infirmity. He had a tense, irritable, heavily-browed, handsome face and an abrupt manner. Living with him must be like living with a live electric wire. No wonder Deirdre kept out of his way, and Mary, his wife, was meek and nervous and subdued. Quite unlike her sister Lola.

“Then you’d better go and see your grandmother, hadn’t you?” Abby suggested. “I have to get on with my work.”

“Yes. I guess so.” The child shuffled. Then suddenly her face brightened. She held out a tightly wrapped object.

“I almost forgot. I brought you a present.”

“Why, Deirdre! You shouldn’t have done that.”

“Take it,” the child said impatiently. “It’s only a lipstick.”

Abby unfolded the scrap of paper, disclosing the lipstick in its smart gold case.

“But this is new, Deirdre. Where did you get it?”

“Mummy’s got dozens.”

“Dozens? Surely not.”

“Yes, she has. She gives them away. She gets them from work.”

“But I don’t think—”

“Don’t you want my present?” said Deirdre, deeply hurt.

“Of course. It’s sweet of you. But would your mother—”

Deirdre waved her bony little hands.

“Oh, don’t bother about her. She won’t care.”

Then abruptly, with her peculiar ability to vanish silently, she had turned on her heel and disappeared round the house.

Abby shrugged. Lola’s lipstick. She didn’t want it, but she absently removed the top and looked at the color. It was a vivid pink, and was called Galah, presumably after the Australian parrots with the rosy underwings. So it must be a local product. Abby noticed a small curl of paper on the floor which must have slipped off the lipstick. She picked it up and read the printing “Rose Bay Cosmetic Co.” Nothing more.

She twisted up the paper and threw it in the wastepaper basket. But the color of the lipstick was nice. She would use it tonight and wear her white shantung dress.

So far she had worn very little other carefully selected trousseau. There hadn’t been the opportunity. If one hadn’t married Luke one might almost have said marriage could be rather dull. The short ceremony at a small modern church in a Sydney suburb, dinner at a rather dark very expensive restaurant called unromantically The Duckbilled Platypus, and then home. Luke had given her her choice of an hotel, or their own house, and she had unhesitatingly chosen the house. She had told herself that every newly-married couple should spend their first night in their future home.

She still stubbornly maintained this, although she had had her first startled awakening to the laughter of the kookaburras, and for a nightmarish moment she had thought that everything in this new strange country was mocking her, even Luke. For although he was laughing at her fright, there was that hardness in his eyes—as if he were all the time considering not her but something else. Or someone else…

And after that Luke had said he had to go to the office for a little while. On their very first day of married life! So she had been left to make the discovery of the elusive half-naked man in the boat on the river, who kept looking up, and of the Moffatts (whom, of course, she had met previously) but whose habit of looking out of their high windows down to her house she hadn’t known. And of Deirdre’s scarecrow shadow always lurking.

So there hadn’t been much occasion to wear her honeymoon clothes. But she might have expected that, for she had come out from England against Luke’s wishes. He had wanted to wait another year before they married. He had said he would be firmly established in his profession by then, but at present with all his financial commitments things would be tough.

Abby had preferred the toughness to the separation. She loved Luke so much. When she had met him in London two years previously he had been unrecognizably gay and light-hearted. Or unrecognizable from the way he was now. She had foolishly imagined their courtship would go on after marriage. She had thought the two years that had left her unchanged would have been the same for Luke. But she might have been warned by his letters. Wait, he had kept saying. He loved her, of course, but wait.