Helga's Web (25 page)

He got out of the car, leaving it unlocked, went into the building and quickly up the stairs. He was sweating by the time he reached the landing outside Helga’s flat: not from exertion but from fear that someone would have their front door open, would see him and remember him if and when the demons came poking around here. He fumbled with the key as he put it in the lock, but then the door was open and he slipped quietly into the flat, closing the door behind him. In the darkness he stumbled over a chair, bumping the bruised knee where Helga had kicked him; he gasped with pain, then

cursed the bitch for what she had done. He crossed to the window, drew the curtains, then fumbled his way back to the light switch.

He looked about the room, wondering if he ought to do something about cleaning up the mess. But the sooner he got out of here, the better. Eventually someone was going to come here looking for the dame and they would probably get on to the coppers; but people disappeared every day in the week in a city as big as Sydney and most of them never got their names in the papers. Old Grafter might learn she had disappeared and he might wonder if she really had got on a plane for Europe; but if she never came back, and she wouldn’t for sure, then he wouldn’t worry any more about it. Get out of here as quick as possible, that was the shot, and get rid of the body.

He went right round the flat, wiping his fingerprints off everything he might have touched. He went out to the kitchen, washed his cup and saucer, dried them and put them on the draining board. He wiped the coffee jar and the biscuit tin and the door of the cupboard from which he had taken them. He went back into the living room, switched off the light, then wiped the switch. He pulled open the curtains again, getting enough light from the street lights outside to see what he was doing, then bent over Helga.

He pulled the silk dressing gown about her and tied up the cord. Even dead she looked a bit of all right; she’d have made a good tread, he’d have bet on that. He lifted her up to sling her over his shoulder, then felt something in the pocket of her dressing gown. He fumbled in the pocket and brought out the small leather-covered book. A diary: it might be worth hanging on to. He slipped it into his own pocket, then lifted her body on to his shoulder. She was not easy to hold: the silk kept slipping on her body and she felt ready to slide out of it. He grasped her tightly, feeling a certain stiffness already creeping into her. Maybe he had waited too

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long; he didn’t know how long it took for rigor mortis to set in. He’d better hurry.

He opened the front door a few inches, using his handkerchief to keep his prints off the doorknob; then he stepped out quickly, closing the door behind him. He went down the stairs, feeling his arm slipping on the silk of the gown but not wanting to stop to take another grip of her; he was in a cold sweat and he had the crazy feeling that his legs were going to give way beneath him. He heard a door open on the top landing, but by then he was on the bottom flight of stairs. He tried to move more quickly, stumbled, lost his grip on the body and it slid off his shoulder. He made a frantic grab, got a grip on the dressing gown and swung Helga round. She seemed to stand up in front of him for a moment, her wide-open, blood-streaked eyes only inches from his own; he jerked his head back, stumbled again and almost fell over. Then he grabbed her, swung her up into his arms, reached the lobby and went out through the front door as he heard the clack of a woman’s heels coming down the stairs.

A car was backing into a space at the curb two cars in front of him. He hurried across the pavement, jerked open the door of the Valiant, dumped the body into the rear seat, slammed the door and ran round to get behind the wheel. He fumbled with the ignition, pressed the starter and cursed frantically when the engine didn’t fire. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a man and a woman, the woman talking a blue streak, come down into the lobby of the flats and move towards the glass front door. He pressed the starter again, heard the engine cough, then start up. A moment later he was drawing out from the curb just as the man and woman came out of the flats.

He drove back towards the city, turned down a side road that led to Rushcutters Bay. He knew where he would be able to find a small boat without any trouble. From now it was all going to be plain sailing.

“You shouldn’t have gone there,” said Walter Helidon. “That was just plain stupid. What did you think you’d achieve?”

“I don’t know.” Norma, slumped in her chair, stared at the pearls lying in her lap. “I thought she might listen to reason. Sometimes women can talk to each other—” She looked up. “You talked to her, I gather. About me.”

He poured himself a drink, his third since Norma had come in less than an hour ago. “God Almighty, does Rosa have to have her television up that loud?” From the back of the house, from the small rear wing where the maid had her room, came blurred shouts; if one listened carefully it was possible to detect that the shouts had something to do with dog food: a dog barked and was answered by the poodle somewhere else in the house. “Are Italians deaf?”

“Some Australians are. I just said something to you. You talked to that girl about me.”

He took his drink and stood in front of the marble fireplace. No fire had ever been lit in it; Norma had not wanted the marble discoloured by smoke. Everything in the room still looked as if it had just come from the interior decorator’s showroom; varnished with the protective coating of mere possession, the room was designed for show and not for use. We call it the living room, Helidon thought, and how much of our living has it seen?

“I shouldn’t have done that,” he admitted. “But we’re not going to get anywhere— us, I mean, you and me—if we stay together and you go on throwing her up at me—”

“You threw me up at her—” Then she sighed and gathered up the pearls in her hands. “No, you’re right. Don’t expect me to forgive you for what you’ve done. But you’re right—we must forget her. I’ll try if you will.”

“That will be easy—”

“Will it?” She had more capacity for self-torture than he had, she was a woman; but she realized what she was doing to herself and she stopped: “No, I shan’t ask you that. If you stop seeing her—”

“I have to see her again,” he said. “J ust once. To give her the money. Unless you want to give it to her?” Then he saw the look on her face and he added hastily, “No, that was stupid. I’m sorry, very sorry indeed. I didn’t mean anything—”

“Can’t you post it to her?”

He shook his head. “She could say she never received it. We’re going to pay her once and once only.”

“Not we,” she said. “You’re paying her the money.”

“It’s for both of us.”

“It might be. But I don’t want to think that I ever paid a penny to her. I hate her, Wally, and whether we talk about her or not, nothing is ever going to change that.” She opened her hands and looked down at them and the pearls that lay in her palms. She saw the picture of herself crawling around the carpet looking for the pearls and she shuddered. Oh God, how could I have degraded myself so much? Suddenly she opened her hands flat and let the pearls fall to the floor. She stood up and went out of the living room. A moment later he heard her shut the door of their bedroom.

Helidon made a move to follow her, then stopped. Better to leave her to herself; he wouldn’t know what to say, anyway, if he did go into the bedroom after her. It was coming home to him now that he had never really made a success of the politics of their marriage; he knew how to canvass for votes, but he had never realized that it was sometimes necessary to canvass for love and understanding. Ambition had always been his disease and he had infected Norma with it. For the last ten years that had been all they had had in common. It had left him without words, or even the gestures, that would be needed if he went into the bedroom.

He jumped as he heard a shot. But it came from the back

of the house: someone had been shot between the commercials. He made a step to go and tell Rosa to tone down the volume of her set, then decided against it: while she was out there, wrapped up in whatever was going on on the screen, she wouldn’t care what was going on in here. He and Norma had not had their money long enough for him to feel completely at ease with their servants; an egalitarian society never drew a clear enough line between servants and their employers. Should you fight with your wife with a maid in the house?

He turned back and went into the small study off the living room. He sat down at the leather-topped antique desk and wrote out a check for twenty thousand dollars payable to Helga Brand Proprietary Limited. He stared at it: the price of stupidity. He had read somewhere that no man in public life was entitled to a private life and he had scoffed at the idea; but now he was beginning to realize that the man who had expounded the principle had not been such a fool. He wondered how much Helga would have asked for if he had been just a private individual.

He got up, went through into their bedroom and knocked on the door. There was no answer and for a moment he felt a sick panic: had Norma done something foolish like trying to commit suicide? He turned the knob, pushing against the door expecting it to be locked; but it opened at once and he almost fell into the room, only saving himself by holding on to the door. Norma lay on her back on the bed staring at the ceiling.

“I’m going out,” he said, and his voice trembled with relief at finding she was all right. “I’ll take the check to her, get it over and done with. I’ll be back in an hour.” She made no answer, didn’t even look at him. He hesitated, fumbling for the words he knew he didn’t have. “I mean it, darl. Only an hour. I won’t stay there. Just give her the check and come straight back. Will you be all right?”

She still did not look at him, but she said, “When you come back, I don’t want to hear a word of what’s happened. We never mention her again.”

“No,” he said. “We’re finished with her.”

He went out to the car. He drove carefully into the city, over the Harbour Bridge and out through the neon-lit congestion of King’s Cross. American servicemen on leave from Vietnam wandered the pavements of the Cross; they were all dressed in civilian slacks and shirts, but there was no mistaking them. They were just boys and they all had a look of innocence about them; it was strange, but Helidon had noticed that all of them seemed to look like country boys. It was as if the months of war in Vietnam had stripped them of any sophistication they might have had. They wandered the pavements looking for girls and Helidon, passing them in the Mercedes, hoped they found none like Helga. But even as he wished better for the young Americans, there was the lingering regret, only half-confessed, that it was all over with Helga.

He drove out to Double Bay, parked the car in Helga’s street, feeling secure now in the darkness, and crossed to the block of flats. He took his dark glasses out of his pocket, then dropped them back again. He would look more conspicuous wearing dark glasses at night than if he were without them. He went into the building and ran quickly up the stairs. By the time he was outside Helga’s door he was puffing; he’d do better from now on to spend his Monday and Thursday evenings at some gymnasium. He would do just that; he glowed with the self-righteousness of the newly reformed. He let himself into the flat with his key, closing the door behind him. He switched on the light, then stopped, staring through into the living room.

Norma had told him she and Helga had fought, but they couldn’t have caused this much destruction. The room looked as if a battle, not just a struggle between two women, had been fought in it. A glass lay shattered on the floor; he could see the mark where it had been hurled against the wall. All the chairs but the heavy lounge chair had been overturned; the coffee table lay on its side, two of its legs snapped off. A chocolate box was upturned on the floor, its contents scattered about and crushed into dark stains on the yellow carpet. One of the heavy drapes that curtained off the small dining recess had been pulled down and lay like a bundled body behind the heavy lounge chair. He felt sick, shutting his eyes against the picture that suddenly sprang into his mind of Norma and Helga fighting, rolling and tumbling about this room like two savages and causing this chaos.

Then he opened his eyes and called, “Helga?”

He waited, then moved towards the bedroom. But it was empty; so were all the other rooms. He came back into the living room, frightened now. Where had Helga gone? Had she decided not to wait for the money, was already on her way to see one of the publishers of the political scandal sheets?

He picked up the phone, dialled his home number. He waited for what seemed a long time; he began to wonder if Norma was going to answer the phone and once again he got the sick feeling of panic. Then the ringing stopped and she said, “Hello?”

“Darl, it’s me. She’s not here.” He looked around the room again as if expecting Helga to appear from some corner he had overlooked. “Darl, the place is a wreck. You must have had a terrible donnybrook with her.”

There was silence for a moment; then she said, “I cant remember doing any damage—”

“You must have. You probably didn’t notice. The coffee table has a couple of legs broken, you tore down a curtain. And there’s a broken glass—Did she throw a glass at you?”

“Nothing like that. I tell you, as far as I can remember we didn’t damage the place at all—” She broke off; then her voice faltered as she came on the line again: “Darling, come home. Quickly!”

He looked around the room again, feeling even more afraid. He would not come here again, but he did not look around trying to store memories. It would be best if he could forget everything that had happened in this flat. “I’ll be right home, darl.”

He was at the door when he paused, wondering if there was anything in the flat that belonged to him. He went back into the living room, then through into the bedroom and bathroom: he could find nothing that could be identified with him, that she could produce as any sort of evidence that he had been a regular visitor here. He took his key out of his pocket and dropped it on the small table beside the front door. He looked at it for a moment, felt the temptation of it. Then he turned his back on it; he had told Norma he was finished with Helga and he meant it. He would call Helga tomorrow, meet her somewhere else and give her the check. But he would not come back here again. Someone else besides Norma and himself had been here this evening and only God knew what had happened after Norma had left.