Down in the City (4 page)

At the door, Clem stopped and turned back. ‘Did I see a Cadillac leaving here as we turned the corner? It looked as if it had come from our direction.' His whole pose expressed the slightness of his concern, the unlikelihood of an affirmative reply.

‘Yes.' Esther looked up at him. He was her youngest brother, more light-hearted than either of the others. If she had a favourite it was Clem. ‘A man came to get Jeffries' address.'

‘Oh? In a Cadillac?' He frowned. ‘What kind of man?'

Esther said patiently, ‘Just a man. Quite ordinary.'

‘It was a queer thing to do, wasn't it? Why did he want to see him?'

‘He didn't tell me.'

‘Yes, but why come here tonight?'

Esther dropped her hands. ‘I really don't know.'

Clem grinned, signalled an apology for his insistence and left the room, already uninterested, remembering the unsatisfactory meeting in the office.

Alone, Esther closed her eyes and took a deep breath. A dozen voices chattered in her brain. She chose to hear one that asked: Why did you lie to him? And she cried, But how did I? What did I say that wasn't true?

For the first time she knew the remorse that comes with concealment where none has existed: remorse that was like firm, bony fingers pressing on a bruise, not entirely painful, pleasing in its pain.

She went about the large, high-ceilinged kitchen opening cupboards blankly, standing, looking, realising dully—cream and sugar; remembering—cups and spoons. The reality of, the necessity for, each concrete object was acknowledged grudgingly by a brain besieged, by senses that surged, phrenetically excited.

She carried through the tray. When David came in a few minutes later he beamed on her, on the shining cups, then, rubbing his hands together, murmured, ‘Chess!'

CHAPTER THREE

She stood on the comer at the bottom of the hill and felt the warm breeze blowing in from the sea. It was ten minutes past seven. There was no moon, but a myriad stars, shining white and strong, lit the sky and cast shadows on the earth. Esther raised her face, marvelling at their brilliance. It seemed a night of unusual magnificence.

A few hundred yards in front of her the harbour stretched, dark now, forked and islanded, hung for mile on mile with rocky cliffs and ancient gums, with fresh white houses and limp spring flowers. Ferries, constellations of light, moved across from north to south and south to north, crossing and recrossing from city to suburbs.

She glanced at her watch. Leaving the house had been too easy, she reflected. All her apprehension for nothing. Clem was out with Erica—quite unexpectedly. Old Mrs Watkins had arrived to see Marion at four and would stay until eleven. And David had brought work home from the office and retired to his study, simply wanting, perhaps, to escape from Mrs Watkins.

Esther had looked in on him for a moment and called, ‘I'm going out, David—to the Rialto, I think.' But whether he heard or answered she did not know. She was along the hall and out of the door, running, she thought wryly, like a naughty schoolgirl. As if anyone would, or could, have said: ‘Stay!'

She felt suddenly wretched at the memory, and the exultation of a moment before washed away.

Just then the car appeared at her side and Stan jumped out to open the door. When they were moving off towards the city he said, as if he challenged her to contradict him, ‘You came.'

‘I said I would.' She sat at as great a distance from him as the length of the seat allowed.

Trying to force her at once on to a more intimate plane, he said, ‘I thought we might go to a place I know by the harbour where we can talk without—'

He jerked the car to a stop as a tram pulled up beside him, and when he started forward again he did not finish his sentence.

What am I doing here with this man? Esther wondered, not expecting an answer, simply trying to assert to herself her distaste and incredulity at finding herself by his side. He's crude. I don't know anything about him. And that hair oil!

Its scent was overpowering. It made her sick. She hated it and the man who wore it. A complete stranger, and yet he had made her dishonest with her own family. The thought hurt. She was not used to self-criticism, and its necessity shamed her. That her previous honesty had been a negative, untested virtue was an idea she had not considered.

Looking at the familiar kaleidoscope of lighted shop windows, cafés and crowds, Esther tried to project herself, to escape, in spirit and consciousness at least, before he said another word.

And she had actually gazed at the stars! A woman of thirty-three. As if last night's peculiar incident had had some significance—as if she had imagined—as if she were a schoolgirl. Yes, there it was again. School-girlishness characterised her behaviour perfectly.

And you liked his eyes. That's not true. I noticed them, that was all. They had a look—a lost look.

The other voice was silent, mocking. A lost look, indeed.

Esther turned her head instinctively as the words appeared and disappeared in her mind. Her eyes met Stan's for a fraction of time, then they both turned again to the windscreen, to the road ahead where a face hung mirage-like in front of each for an instant, and then dissolved.

Everything had altered. Looking down at the skirt of her dress, feeling the texture of the material under her hands, Esther asked Clem's question.

‘Why did you want to see Jeffries?'

She, who never cared, who never asked, whose only queries concerned impersonalities like train times and programmes, had broken her long silence with a question involving people—strangers and their private affairs.

Stan was ready for it. He had expected that she would ask, would have been surprised if she had not.

‘I deal in exports and imports,' he explained glibly, ‘and Jeffries was going to put me in touch with some pals of his who have some good contacts. He's no spadepusher, you know. He ought to chuck it again.'

‘Oh, I didn't realise…' Esther said, vaguely surprised. ‘You have an office in town, I suppose?'

‘Not exactly.' He hesitated and then went on firmly, ‘I do most of the paperwork in my flat. Deal a lot with people. Live in my car.'

‘I see.'

They had crossed the harbour bridge to the north shore and were, by this time, approaching the end of the established suburbs. Stan pressed a brown suede foot on the accelerator and turned the car down a narrow rocky road, badly lit, tree-flanked, ending in a flat dark reserve which had been reclaimed from the harbour years before by an enthusiastic council.

It lay, in the daytime, a dreary brownish expanse, dismal and useless to all except small boys who dreamed of roaming the prairies of the Wild West. But at night, when the bush—an aromatic mixture of scrub and gum, old as the continent—rustled on its perimeter, and the black water lapped against the retaining wall, it had mystery and beauty.

The engine died and they listened to the silence. City, human, mechanical noises were far behind them; no sound but the screeching of the cicadas disturbed the warm air. High-low, high-low, they screeched in chorus, intensifying the silence.

‘I thought we'd be able to talk here,' Stan said, and cringed at the sound of his own voice. He smoothed his knuckles over the finger grips of the wheel and half turned to Esther's shadowy profile. ‘I said some things last night that need explaining.'

Lightly she said, ‘Did you?' and then, with a last frantic struggle against a world of unknown feeling, she went on, ‘I didn't notice. But, in any case, it really wasn't necessary to bring me out here to explain whatever it was. I don't know why I said I would come.' She gave a thin, false laugh. ‘We seem to be in the middle of the bush.'

Stan felt himself cringe again at her tone. She despised him. Money, and his talent for acquiring it painlessly, easily, gave him a place of respect among his own crowd. Few of the boys were as wealthy as Stan, or as smart. They gave him confidence. He could hardly have managed without their admiration and envy. They made him a big fellow. She couldn't treat him like this—he was a big fellow. Everyone knew he was.

He tried the formula now, as he did when shrill, confident, Oxford-Australian accents rang around him in nightclubs and golf clubs; when their owners looked through him and his party or stared at their too-smart clothes and curled at their voices.

She was one of them. Money meant nothing to her: she was used to it, you could tell. As far as she was concerned, he was just a tramp. Still, she wasn't one of those damned fish-faced types. Last night, for instance, she wasn't all superior, though she had a good right to be, and tonight, when she looked at a man, sometimes you would have said she was thinking he wasn't as bad as all that. That's what you would have said, but Stan wasn't sure…He was afraid to touch her. He, Stan Peterson, of all people, was afraid to touch a dame.

His dumb acceptance of her attitude killed Esther's triumph. This was not what she had wanted.

There was no light but starlight. In the smothering intimacy of the car her awareness of him was agonising. Their dark looming figures filled her mind. They were cramped in a world where there was no light, no land or sea.

Stan spoke her name. She had been waiting, poised, nerves and senses strained almost beyond bearing. Stan put his hands on her thin shoulders. He was an experienced lover, but he felt awkward now as Esther, silent and rigid, shivered under his hands.

Presently they began to talk in sentences, in single words, in silences. The monotonous creak of the cicadas still occupied the air.

Just after midnight the twenty-two inhabitants of the unfinished road called Harbour View stirred at the, as yet, unfamiliar sound of a car speeding past their bungalows.

Bill Stevens, red-haired, freckled and tanned, sat in one of the toll booths at the city-side of the harbour bridge. He was wondering if Doreen would come dancing tomorrow night, and he shuffled his feet in front of his stool.

The cinemas and theatres had emptied an hour ago or more, and the spate of cars had dwindled; even those who had stopped for supper had gone now, paying their toll, zipping across the tarmac of the broad bridge road.

Gazing into the quietness, he trilled and whistled an old dance tune through his teeth. Then he saw the Cadillac come swerving into his lane, and his eyes narrowed. Driver and one passenger. He tore off and held out the tickets. Stan thrust a ten-shilling note into his hand and his lips came forward in a generous pout. ‘It's all yours, mate!' he said, and the car shot forward.

The boy smoothed the crumpled note. ‘Gee! First time that's happened. I'm doin' well for myself.'

By the time they had made their plans and said good night it was late. Esther left the car and walked up from the corner, up the quiet black street overhung with trees, knowing that Stan was watching her. She heard her footsteps, saw, ahead, the pale stone of the pillars at the entrance to the drive. She turned to wave again, not knowing if he could see her any longer.

Halfway up the drive she noticed the house, looked at it, and saw that elongated strips of light fell from the windows and lay stretched across the lawn. So they were waiting for her. They would be alarmed. No one knew where she was, and it must be late.

She hesitated for an instant longer, then went into the house, into the room where they all stood, harassed and tired.

Where had she been? David asked. Why hadn't she said? Well, he hadn't heard her. Then where
had
she been, now that they'd all waited up? This was so unlike her.

All right, Clem, he would say he was sorry to Esther. It was true he was hectoring her, being highhanded. He didn't mean to be. He was tired, worried. It was ridiculous, of course: no one wanted or expected to know where she had been. He had insisted that the others should stay up. It was all his fault, and he apologised. Would they all have a drink and go to bed?

But then she was talking, and she said she had been with Stan Peterson. Who was he and what did he do? He was himself, and exports and imports, but that was irrelevant. They would all think she was mistaken, or that they could persuade her to change her mind, but please would they try not to? She was going to be married to him in two weeks' time. She was sorry to have shocked them; sorry to have frightened them first, and now to have told them this.

CHAPTER FOUR

Stan moved from his bachelor flat on the ground floor of Romney Court to a fourth-floor double. It had a kitchen, a green-tiled bathroom, a twin-bedded bedroom, small, all lilac and white, with thin black furniture, a dining and sitting room combined, and a balcony enclosed waist-high by a brick wall.

Mac the janitor, knowing that it would pay well, saw to it that the flat was vacant in time to suit Stan. He was the only one who knew the reason for the move at first, but Mrs Mac soon heard, and after that it was no time till Laura and Bill Maitland and the Demsters knew. They were only slightly less surprised than the Prescotts.

Bob Demster was a professional golfer, and Bill Maitland and Stan played together with him once a week on the course where he was employed.

To Demster, bluff and grizzled, and to the cheerful, up-and-coming Maitland, Stan was a moody character. A queer cove, but a good golfer. Yes, a good golfer, but not, they privately agreed, the kind of fellow you wanted to ask to your home too often.

They were partly persuaded to this view by their wives, to whom Stan was a boor. He ignored them, denied them the small flatteries due from unattached men to married women. What was worse—he seemed not to know that anything was due: debts of politeness to women were outside his comprehension. But more troublesome than his lack of gallantry—which, after all, the men did not dislike as seriously as they allowed their wives to suppose—was his business.

Stan was a man of grunts and nods and silences. If he could avoid an eye or a question, he did, his expression enigmatic. Nevertheless, after a few drinks at the club house he had given enough away—hints of grandiose schemes, not caring how his listeners interpreted them—to indicate that whatever his business might be, it was not legal.