Helga's Web (20 page)

“Liebling, I’m glad it’s going to be this way. I didn’t want us to part bad friends—we’ve been good friends too long. Tomorrow evening will be fine—” Jack Savanna would not be back, not after their last meeting: her Tuesday and Friday man was gone forever. He would be the one she would miss, the only man to whom she had ever said Ich liebe dich and almost meant it. “I’ll be here. Alone.”

Helidon had caught the smell of her perfume; he knew that something he had enjoyed was now over and he felt a physical twinge of regret. He stifled a sigh, nodded, put on his dark glasses and went out of the flat. Helga closed the door, locked it and walked to the window and looked out. A minute passed; then Helidon appeared on the pavement below, walking with that quick, suspicious walk that always amused her: he looked like a man hurrying away from an hour or two with his mistress: the dark glasses only added to the effect. Poor Walter, always afraid of being found out. But he had been found out, she guessed, years ago: by his wife, by herself, by his political opponents: a man who had only one talent: ambition.

She turned away from the window, saw the torn-up check scattered on the floor. Perhaps she had been hasty doing that; at least it would have been a deposit on what he was going to pay her. But in the event she had done the right thing; it had proved to Walter that at least she wasn’t thinking small; he would be back tomorrow with the full twenty thousand. Meanwhile, tomorrow morning she would go and see Mr. Leslie Gibson about the hundred thousand. That might be more difficult, but he, too, had a wife who would probably pay to keep her name out of the newspapers. A woman who was a vice-president of the Daughters of Mary, who figured three times in the manila folder in photographs with the Archbishop, who had had an audience with the Pope, wouldn’t want her husband being exposed as connected, however remotely, with drug smuggling.

She went out to the kitchen, got a dustpan and small broom, came back, swept up the pieces of the check and dumped them in the wastepaper basket. She did it with all the neat efficiency of a hausfrau; her mother had trained her well, if for the wrong profession. Then she went into the bedroom, took off her dress and underwear, put on the green silk dressing gown and went back into the living room. She sat down, chose a chocolate from the box, then picked up the small leather-covered diary on the table beside the chair. She opened it and with a ballpoint pen made an entry: Walter came this afternoon. Is coming back with the money. She looked at it with satisfaction; then she glanced idly at the entries, some just one line, others more detailed, for other days. The entry for the previous Friday disturbed her: Had argument with Jack. She would call him before she left Sydney, say goodbye and hope that there would be no bitterness.

Sunk in a mood of sweet despondency, she jerked her head up in surprise when the doorbell rang. Stuffing the diary into the pocket of her dressing gown, she got up and went to the door. She pulled back the lock, opened the door, expecting to find Helidon there.

Despite the dark glasses the woman wore, she recognized her at once. “Why, Mrs. Helidon! This is a surprise—”

Savanna pushed open the glass door to the entrance to Helga’s block of flats and slowly began to climb the stairs. As with his visit to Gibson, he was not quite sure why he had come to see Helga; it certainly wasn’t that he expected any sex with her. He was not even sure that she would let him into the flat; this was Monday, not his day for visiting her. Perhaps it was his day for saying goodbye: he had just said goodbye to Silver, forever and after twenty-two years of foolishly hoping …

“You know,” he had said as they had sat in the lounge of the Wentworth looking out through the tall glass walls at the breeze rocking the umbrellas in the outdoor garden area, “I’ve never really thought of us as being divorced. Separated, yes. But not divorced.”

“That’s foolish, Jack. Or worse.” She was dressed in a cinnamon linen dress that set off the golden tan of her arms and the pale silver of her hair; other men in the room besides Savanna were looking at her, none of them guessing her true age. There was a youthfulness to her smile that excused the small wrinkles that appeared around her eyes when she did smile; and her bare arms, still firm, showed none of the dimples that so often gave away a woman’s age. “Separated couples don’t have another spouse each—I love that word, spouse —and children. You have your daughter and I have my four kids. We’re divorced, Jack, make no mistake about it.”

“I didn’t mean it in that way, the legal way.” He sat back in his chair, cradling his drink in his big hands. He looked at her with careful tenderness, not wanting to offend her. “I’m still in love with you, you know that.”

She did not deny that she might know it. She stirred her Tom Collins, the same sort of drink he had ordered for her when they had first met twenty-seven years ago. He had suggested it this time when the waiter had come to take their order and, smiling, she had agreed. She was not afraid of sentiment, so long as he did not try to take it too far. He would be taking it too far if he kept on with this line of talk: “I think we’d better change the subject, Jack.”

A man sat at a nearby table morosely staring into his beer. A red-haired woman joined him, obviously having just come from the ladies’ room, and he looked up and said, “Geez, you were long enough! I thought you’d fell in.”

“Drop your voice,” said the woman, pulling dignity about her like a tattered shawl. “This isn’t the Leagues Club.”

Savanna and Silver looked at each other and smiled. They

had not been married to each other long enough for their relationship ever to have reached the stage where they had become just the spare parts of each other’s life. The break, when it had come, had been swift and sudden.

“What ever happened to us?” He continued to look carefully at her, as if trying to trace in her face all the years of her that he had missed. She’s still beautiful, he thought. She must be forty-eight or nine, but she still leaves every other woman in this room for dead. Her figure was still good, perhaps a trifle fuller in the bosom and round the hips, but he didn’t mind that. She had not entirely escaped the erosion of time, but you had to look hard, cruelly, to notice the faint thinning of the lips (like roses drying out, he thought; the Australian sun attacked so many women that way) and the tendons beginning to show through on the backs of her hands. She could still move him more than any other woman he had ever met.

“We went into all that a long time ago,” she said, ignoring her own advice to change the subject. She was safe with him so long as they did not move out of the hotel lounge. She had been in her bedroom when he had called from the reception desk and she had been on the point of asking him to come up. Then something had warned her, not against him but against herself; and she had told him she would meet him in the lounge. “Perhaps I didn’t have enough patience in those days.”

He remembered his irresponsibility, his inability to settle down after the war. “Do you have patience now?”

“You learn it living in the country. You have to, that’s if you don’t want to go off your head. We live by the seasons up there, Jack, not by the clock. And you come to respect them—the seasons, I mean.” That’s the only thing you and Josie have in common, he thought. Josie’s garden, her part-substitute for himself, had made Josie aware of the seasons. “I wasn’t brought up to bush life, but now I love it. Each time

I come down to the city, I can t get back to the property soon enough.”

Her husband, Claude Carson, ran a sheep and stud cattle property about two hundred miles northwest of Sydney. Savanna had never met him but had seen photos of him in newspapers and farm magazines: a tall bony man, eyes squinting beneath the brim of his pork-pie hat, sun cancers showing like freckles on his lean cheeks: he was almost the archetype of the man on the land. “It’s none of my business-no, it is my business. Are you happy with Carson?”

“Why is it your business?” she said, knowing the danger she was exposing herself to by asking the question.

“Your happiness is my business.”

“Do you mean that, Jack?” she asked, thinking he sounded too glib. But he nodded and she felt ashamed for doubting his sincerity. “Yes, I am happy with him. He’s a good man and a wonderful father. The kids adore him.”

“Do you?”

“That is my business. Don’t torture yourself, Jack. I’m happy with Claude and that’s all you need to know.” She put down her glass and stood up. It was time to go; once again she felt the warning against herself. Oh Jack, she cried silently, why did I leam patience when it was too late? Her eyes misted and she turned away, leading him through the tables towards the lifts.

They passed the red-haired woman and her husband, coupled in argument, the only mutual passion they had left: “All you ever do when we come out is drink!”

“That’s the only bloody reason I come out!”

Silver walked a little quicker, her eyes clearing now. She and Jack might have finished up like that if they had gone on together. What love she still had for him only remained because she had cut herself off from him. When they reached the lifts she turned and held out her hand to him.

“Goodbye, Jack. I’ve had my last Tom Collins.”

He held her hand in his, saying nothing for the moment. He could not remember ever having felt so unutterably sad, not even when she had said goodbye to him twenty-two years ago. It seemed to him that here outside the lifts of the Went-worth, surrounded by strangers gay with drink and careless of tragedy, his life had just suddenly come to a dead end. Quietly, without any callousness, she had just removed all the seasons from his life.

“Goodbye,” he said. “Be happy.”

Her mouth quivered. “Thank you, Jack.” Then the lift arrived and she stepped quickly into it, not knowing whether it was going up or down and not caring. Just so long as she escaped before she surrendered.

Savanna gazed blankly at the closed doors of the lift. Then he went back into the lounge and had another drink, pouring it down his throat like a man gulping at the quick, merciful release of poison. It was then, despondent as a condemned man, that he decided to go out and say goodbye to Helga. He would go home to Josie tonight and, though she would not know it, he would be all hers, for what he was worth.

He drove out to Double Bay, parked his car and crossed the road to the store in the shopping plaza. The woman in the store, a buxom Viennese, smiled at him as soon as he came in the door.

“The usual, sir?” She took down the box of chocolates from the shelf behind her, began to wrap it. “I envy your wife, you know? If I eat our chocolates, the weight I got to watch. One pound of chocolates, seven pounds of me, you know?” She tied a fancy ribbon round the package. “There, make it look attractive. What a pity all husbands are not like you, eh? We’d make a fortune in this store, you know?”

Savanna smiled. This woman, a romantic, would understand his mood of this afternoon. But he should have been buying the chocolates for Silver or (a pang of conscience) Josie. He paid for the box, thinking this would be his last

extravagance as far as Helga was concerned, went out of the store and along the street to Helga’s block of flats. He pushed open the glass door and slowly began to climb the stairs.

Helga’s flat was on the third and top floor and he had just reached the second floor when the woman came running down the stairs. She passed him without seeming to see him, but in the instant of her passing him he saw the tears running down her cheeks behind the dark glasses and saw the broken string of pearls clutched in her hand. She went on down, her high heels clicking like small hammers on the marble stairs; he heard the glass door open and shut and then there was silence. He paused, then shrugged and went on up to the third floor. There had been something vaguely familiar about the woman, but she wasn’t someone he knew.

He automatically took his key-ring out of his pocket, selected the key to the flat, raised it to the lock, then stopped. This was not Tuesday or Friday, his days. He held the key an inch from the lock, then abruptly dropped it and the keyring back into his pocket. He had come to say goodbye and he would do it, if it were possible, without any friction between them. Decorously, like a youth calling on a girl for the first time, the box of chocolates tucked under one arm, he pressed the buzzer. He heard it buzz, sharply and insistently, and he waited. He thought he heard a movement in the flat, but Helga did not come to the door. He hesitated, then pressed the buzzer again. He waited half a minute, beginning to feel foolish, wondering why he had bothered to come without phoning her first. She was in there, all right, with someone else, some other mug she was setting up to be taken. Suddenly angry, he took the key out of his pocket again.

Then the door of the flat next door opened. A woman in a house smock, her hair in curlers, came out with a large cardboard carton full of screwed-up newspapers.

“Just moved in,” she said cheerily; she had the sort of face

that instantly said she was a friend to the world. “Still unpacking. You our neighbour?”

He slipped the key back into his pocket, hoping she hadn’t seen it. “No. Just a visitor. But my friend doesn’t appear to be home.”

“Wouldn’t know.” She went on downstairs, flinging words back at him over her shoulder; the curlers glinted like antennae on her head, she had messages for everyone. “These are the old type of flats. Nice thick walls, you don’t hear a thing. You should of seen what we were in before. Walls like tissue paper—” Her voice trailed away as she disappeared down the stairwell.

Savanna looked at the open door of the woman’s flat, then at the closed door of Helga’s. Then abruptly he swung round and went quickly downstairs and out into the street. No matter how thick the walls were, if he went into the flat and there was another chap there with Helga, everyone in Double Bay would hear what happened next. He would come back and say goodbye to her on his day, Tuesday, when his anger might be a little more under control.

He was halfway across the road when he saw Bixby. The trawler captain was walking away from him, but there was no mistaking him. Savanna stopped in mid-stride, was almost run down by a car whose driver yelled at him for being a bloody stupid dill, then recovered and went on towards the car park. There was no reason why Bixby should not be in Double Bay; after all it was a harbour suburb and Bixby brought in his boat not far from here. But what was he doing in Helga’s street? Had Grafter Gibson got the idea of using him to talk to Helga? Savanna halted beside his car, pondering if he should go back and warn Helga. Then he shook his head, like a man talking to himself. Let the Monday man, whoever he was, look after her.