Dorothy Eden (29 page)

“Oh, honey, I’m so sorry. I just didn’t have time to look for that dress. It’ll have to wait. You’ve got a birthday soon. Do you mind awfully?”

“No,” said Deirdre, not lifting her head.

“Lola, she was looking forward to that,” said Mary in her soft nervous voice. “How could you have forgotten?”

“I told you, I just didn’t have time,” Lola said irritatedly. “It’s all very well for you, staying home. You’ve no idea what my day’s like. I’m whacked.”

She collapsed into a chair, stretching her long slim legs. Milton looked at her, saying nothing.

“Anyway, where’s she going to wear it?” Lola went on. “She won’t go to parties. She’s happier in those old jeans. Aren’t you, hon?”

Mrs. Moffatt lifted her gray frizzled head from her work, a piece of gros point, very intricate and subtly colored.

“A little girl should have pretty dresses. Deirdre would like them well enough if she was encouraged to wear them. Wouldn’t you, dear?”

“No,” said Deirdre, breaking another piece of the jigsaw.

“All right, all right, don’t go on at me,” Lola said exasperatedly. “She can have wardrobes of them one day. So can her poor hard-working mother. Maybe sooner than we think. I’ve heard from—”

Milton made the merest movement, a shuffle in his chair, and Lola checked herself, saying,

“Deirdre, hon, it’s time you were in bed.”

Deirdre, scuffing all the pieces of the puzzle into a heap, didn’t answer.

“You gave her her supper, didn’t you, Mother?”

“Yes, dear.” Mrs. Moffatt had a wrinkled, brown face that looked as if it had been exposed to the sun for years. Her liquid brown eyes were narrow, observant, anxious. She was a little like a lizard, with her wrinkled watchfulness. Several strings of brightly-colored beads hung round her scrawny neck. “She had egg and cereal and fruit. When she came in, that is.”

“I suppose she was down at the Fearon’s again.”

“Well—somewhere.”

“I have to be somewhere,” said Deirdre to herself.

Lola sat up brightly.

“You like Abby, don’t you, pet?”

“She’s all right.”

“She likes you, anyway. She says she’ll get you from school on days when no one else can. You’ll like that, won’t you?”

“I must say that’s kind of her,” said Mrs. Moffatt. “She seems a nice little thing.”

“Harmless,” said Mary.

“She’s quite attractive,” said Lola fairly. “English looking, of course. Wait and see what the sun does to her skin.”

“She shouldn’t be encouraged too much,” said Milton suddenly. “I told you from the beginning.”

“I don’t agree,” said Lola. “Better the devil you know—”

“She can be watched from a distance,” said Milton.

“Is Luke happy?” asked Mary in her soft voice.

“Happy? Well, I don’t know.” Lola glanced round. “Deirdre, I told you to go to bed.”

Deirdre stood up in a leisurely way. Her blouse had come untucked from her jeans. There were faint hollows of tiredness beneath her eyes. Her face was sharp and defiant.

“If you want to know,” she said deliberately, “I gave Abby one of your lipsticks today.”

There was a complete silence in the room. They were all looking at her. Now they would say, “Where did you get the lipstick? Did you steal it? Why did you steal it? Why did you want to give it to Abby Fearon?”

She answered the last question that hadn’t yet been spoken.

“I gave it to her because I like her. Actually, she’s my only friend.”

Still nobody spoke. Then suddenly her mother said flatly, and not to Deirdre at all, “Something will have to be done about that.”

“Send her to bed,” said Milton abruptly.

Deirdre tried to stare defiantly into his cold, gray eyes, too prominent, like Gran’s pigeon-egg beads, but her own fell. Milton was the one who frightened her.

“Yes, you get to bed,” said Lola. “And you stay home, in future. Abby doesn’t want you hanging round all day. Now get upstairs. And go to bed. Don’t sit mooning at the window.”

Deirdre obeyed slowly, her defiance not quite gone. When she reached her room she did go to the window and stand looking out for quite a long time. She thought the curtains might not be drawn in the house below, and she would be able to see Abby and Luke sitting at dinner.

But the curtains were drawn, showing no chink of light. The only light came from the boat lying down in the river. It shone on the tiny deck, and as Deirdre watched she saw the skinny man come out. He tipped something overboard out of a bucket, and then just stood doing nothing. She could see the faint, pale gleam of his face so that she knew he was looking up the hillside.

Presently he waved to somebody. In her interest to see who it was, Deirdre leaned so far out of her window that she nearly tumbled into the garden below. She could just see her mother standing on the veranda. And she was waving back. Why ever should she wave to that dirty old man? Deirdre both hated and feared him.

Then, quite clearly, Milton’s voice came behind Mummy.

“How can you be so careless with your stuff? You know that child’s a jackdaw. Always poking about and meddling.” His voice was that of an irritable old man.

“I know, I know. But is it so serious?”

“Of course it is.” Belatedly Milton added, “The child’s turning into a thief.”

“It’s a pity she isn’t a more mercenary type,” Lola was saying reflectively. “And the other way—we’d lose Luke if we tried that.”

“Exactly what I said from the beginning. You girls get carried away by a handsome face.”

“We can’t lose Luke!” said Lola.

“We’ll see. Anyway, tell me what happened today. It was all right?”

“Fine—No trouble…”

Their voices faded away. Disappointedly Deirdre realized that she wasn’t going to hear herself discussed further. Since there was nothing else to do, she got into bed. She hoped she would go to sleep quickly, and that nothing would wake her.

It was much later that she heard the walking up and down. She hadn’t heard it so much lately, but it was one reason why she hated going to bed.

Obscurely it was so frightening. One, two, three, four, five, six steps this way, a pause, and then six back. Measured, like a big clock ticking.

She didn’t know why she thought it might be the man from the boat walking in their house. She had never told anybody that she heard these footsteps or that she was frightened. But one night she meant to be brave enough to tiptoe to the head of the stairs and look down and see who it was. So long as he didn’t lift his strange face and see her. She had a feeling that something terrible would happen to her if she were seen.

She knew that the footsteps were those of a man because Lola and Mary both walked quickly on high heels, and Gran flip-flopped in slippers. And Milton couldn’t walk at all. So if it wasn’t the horrible man from the boat, who was it? Sometimes she wondered, crazily, if it were her father…

A
BBY SAW THE LIGHT
go out in Mrs. Moffatt’s room, which was next to Deirdre’s on the top floor. Much later the one in the big bedroom on the ground floor which was Mary’s and Milton’s was extinguished. But one in the living-room stayed on very late. She had been asleep and woke some time in the early hours to see it still shining.

She hated this twenty-four hour long consciousness of her neighbors. But unless she and Luke wanted to suffocate in dark airlessness she had to draw back the curtain and open the windows after they had put their own light out. So that the first thing she saw when she opened her eyes in the morning was the big stone house towering over them.

It gave her vaguely the same feeling that the gigantic bridge over the harbor did, an overwhelming consciousness of some heavy shadow hanging over her. When she crossed the harbor in the ferry the cheerful chugging little boat ploughed easily through the sparkling blue water until it reached the bridge. Then the mass of steel girders was strangely nightmarish, and her skin prickled with chilliness as the sunlight momentarily vanished. The bridge hung at the end of every street in Sydney. One turned a corner, and there it was, curved against the sky, disproportionately large, making everything else seem shrunken.

Just as the Moffatt’s house, built in the lavish days of the late nineteenth century, towered over hers and Luke’s modest one. Just as the faces at the window looked down from a superior height at her…

But this was the last half of the twentieth century, and the world was too full, and one had to grow accustomed to being overlooked.

It was three o’clock in the morning. A time for strained imagination and morbid fancies. Abby shifted carefully, trying not to disturb Luke as she looked at the peaceful shape of his face. Instead of going away from her in sleep, he seemed closer. Nothing else tugged at his mind, and he lay quietly beside her, all hers.

In the morning Lola was at the door before they had finished breakfast.

In spite of her weary voice, she looked bright and energetic and attractive in a tan-colored suit and white gloves.

“Isn’t this grim, getting up at the crack of dawn. Hi, Abby. Aren’t you lucky, having the whole day to amuse yourself. I can’t think what you’re doing up at this hour.”

“My husband likes to eat,” said Abby. “Have some coffee. Luke isn’t ready yet.”

Luke sprang up, wiping his mouth with his napkin.

“Yes, I am. ’Bye, darling. Be good.”

With Lola’s eyes on them, his kiss was again perfunctory. Was it time to tell Luke that she didn’t much care for all this chauffeuring he was doing of Lola? But they were neighbors. It was a neighborly thing to do. Otherwise Lola would have the long bus or ferry ride into the city.

All the same, Luke might have asked what she planned to do today.

What did she plan? The housework, the shopping, the walk to the library to change her books, perhaps a visit to the hairdresser if she could get an appointment.

Suddenly Abby had a moment of panic, seeing her life stretching out aimlessly ahead. Luke, preoccupied with his work in the daytime, his thoughts in the evenings, Luke beside her asleep until dawn. And what else but these aimless hours ahead?

In London she had been madly busy running a small flat and doing a full time job as assistant to the beauty editor on a magazine. As a result of that job she knew a great deal about cosmetics, probably more than Lola had begun to know.

It was a pity to waste that knowledge. Indeed, why should she? Alone in the now too quiet house Abby suddenly came to a decision. She would begin a series of articles on beauty treatment and sell them to one of the local newspapers or magazines. She wouldn’t tell Luke what she was doing until she had got a market. If it came to that, why shouldn’t she begin looking for a market at once. She could go into the city this afternoon, after spending the morning preparing a series of ideas. The accent would have to be on outdoor life, since every Australian spent nine months of the year in the sun, and a great deal of that time on beaches.

She could re-hash that article she had done about make-up and fashion on the Italian Riviera. And then do something on face lotions and perfumes. Perfumes… That reminded her of the intriguing taste Lola’s lipstick had had. That was a gimmick that could well be explored, the flavor of lipstick, and its resulting tug at memory.

From the man’s angle he could be nostalgically reminded of lost loves. Let’s keep it light, gay, sophisticated, non-sentimental. Let’s look at it the way she was making herself look at that little episode last night.

One of the kookaburras was at the window, staring at her with its beady, intense eyes. The other two sat on the clothes line, fluffing their feathers and looking cross.

“Okay, okay,” said Abby cheerfully. “Breakfast coming up. Just don’t start squawking for it.”

It was while she was on the patio feeding the kookaburras that there was a knock at the back door. The birds flew up, startled. Abby smoothed her hair and went through the house to open the door.

A scrawny man dressed in faded denim trousers and a crumpled shirt stood there. He had thin, dark hair and a mass of wrinkles over his sunburnt face. His eyes were pale blue and ingratiating.

It was a moment before Abby realized that he must be the man off the boat, the man Luke called Jock, for want of a better name.

“Morning, missus,” he said in a flat nasal voice. “Just wondered if you wanted any gardening done. Or any odd jobs. I live right down there on the river. Kind of convenient.”

Abby couldn’t have explained why she had such a sudden dislike for the man. It must have been an accumulation of the irritation she had experienced from the constant noise of his record player.

“I’m sorry. Not at present, I’m afraid. We’re planning to have our garden landscaped,” she felt it necessary to explain. “So nothing can be done until then.”

“That’s all right, lady. Just thought I’d ask.” The man was annoyingly cheerful. “I’m right down there. You could give me a shout if you needed me. Your husband’s away a lot, isn’t he?”

“No,” said Abby coldly.

“Thought he was. I see his car go away.”

Was there no escape from the watching eyes? Abby felt a twinge of something that wasn’t just irritation. It was apprehension, and the beginnings of fear.

She ignored the man’s impertinent remark, and said coolly, “But one thing, I do wish you’d play your records more quietly. I like music, too, but not necessarily yours, or all the time.”

The man’s eyes narrowed. He gave a cackle of laughter.

“You don’t like the platypus and the ’roo. I’ve kind of got that one on my mind. Sorry, lady. I’ll tune her down.”

He shuffled off, and she closed the door, standing a moment against it. He didn’t want work, her mind was telling her. He only wanted to see me. Or to tell me he was there, watching. So now I can never stop being aware of him…

But if she told Luke that fancy he would laugh at her. He would say, “What, old Jock! That old scrounger! He’s perfectly harmless.”

And perhaps he was. Perhaps her imagination was distorting things once again. It was because she was alone too much. All the more reason why today she must make a start on something that would take her out of the house and keep her busy. She would sit down and sketch out some ideas at once…