Open Secrets (23 page)

One day she walks past the hotel and the park. The verandas are clamorous with the afternoon drinking. All the trees in the park have come out in bloom. The flowers are a color that she has seen and could not have imagined on trees before—a shade of silvery blue, or silvery purple, so delicate and beautiful that you would think it would shock everything into quietness, into contemplation, but apparently it has not.

When she gets back to the Miramar, she finds the young man with the red hair standing in the downstairs hall, outside the door of the apartment where he lives with the old man. From behind the closed apartment door come the sounds of a tirade.

The young man smiles at her, this time. She stops and they stand together, listening.

Gail says, “If you would ever like a place to sit down while you’re waiting, you know you’re welcome to come upstairs.”

He shakes his head, still smiling as if this was a joke between them. She thinks she should say something else before she leaves him there, so she asks him about the trees in the park. “Those trees beside the hotel,” she says. “Where I saw you the other morning? They are all out in bloom now. What are they called?”

He says a word she cannot catch. She asks him to repeat it. “Jack Randa,” he says. “That’s the Jack Randa Hotel.”

Gail lies on the sofa pressing this letter with both hands against her stomach. Many things are changed. He has been in Walley, then—he has been told how she sold the shop and started out on her great world trip. But wouldn’t he have heard that anyway, from Cleata? Maybe not, Cleata was close-mouthed. And when she went into the hospital, just before Gail left, she said, “I don’t want to see or hear from anybody for a while or bother with letters. These treatments are bound to be a bit melodramatic.”

Cleata is dead.

Gail knew that Cleata would die, but somehow thought that everything would hold still, nothing could really happen there while she, Gail, remained here. Cleata is dead and Will is alone except for Sandy, and Sandy perhaps has stopped being of much use to him.

There is a knock on the door. Gail jumps up in a great disturbance, looking for a scarf to cover her hair. It is the manager, calling her false name.

“I just wanted to tell you I had somebody here asking questions. He asked me about Miss Thornaby and I said, Oh, she’s dead. She’s been dead for some time now. He said, Oh, has she? I said, Yes, she has, and he said, Well, that’s strange.”

“Did he say why?” Gail says, “Did he say why it was strange?”

“No. I said, She died in the hospital and I’ve got an American
lady in the flat now. I forgot where you told me you came from. He sounded like an American himself, so it might’ve meant something to him. I said, There was a letter come for Miss Thornaby after she was dead, did you write that letter? I told him I sent it back. Yes, he said, I wrote it, but I never got it back. There must be some kind of mistake, he said.”

Gail says there must be. “Like a mistaken identity,” she says.

“Yes. Like that.”

When Gail goes out to buy food, she uses the back door of the building, she takes a roundabout route to the shops. On her return by the same back-door route, she comes upon the young red-haired man standing between the dustbins. If he had not been so tall, you might have said that he was hidden there. She speaks to him but he doesn’t answer. He looks at her through tears, as if the tears were nothing but a wavy glass, something usual.

“Is your father sick?” Gail says to him. She has decided that this must be the relationship, though the age gap seems greater than usual between father and son, and the two of
them are quite unalike in looks, and the young man’s patience and fidelity are so far beyond—nowadays they seem even contrary to—anything a son customarily shows. But they go beyond anything a hired attendant might show, as well.

“No,” the young man says, and though his expression stays calm, a drowning flush spreads over his face, under the delicate redhead’s skin.

Lovers, Gail thinks. She is suddenly sure of it. She feels a shiver of sympathy, an odd gratification.

Lovers.

She goes down to her mailbox after dark and finds there another letter.

Gail does not leave the apartment for two days. She does without milk, drinks her coffee black. What will she do when she runs out of coffee? She eats odd meals—tuna fish spread on crackers when she has no bread to make a sandwich, a dry end of cheese, a couple of mangos. She goes out into the upstairs hall of the Miramar—first opening the door a crack, testing the air for an occupant—and walks to the arched window that overlooks the street. And from long ago a feeling comes back to her—the feeling of watching a street, the visible bit of a street, where a car is expected to appear, or may
appear, or may not appear. She even remembers now the cars themselves—a blue Austin mini, a maroon Chevrolet, a family station wagon. Cars in which she travelled short distances, illicitly and in a bold daze of consent. Long before Will.

She doesn’t know what clothes Will will be wearing, or how his hair is cut, or if he will have some change in his walk or expression, some change appropriate to his life here. He cannot have changed more than she has. She has no mirror in the apartment except the little one on the bathroom cupboard, but even that can tell her how much thinner she has got and how the skin of her face has toughened. Instead of fading and wrinkling as fair skin often does in this climate, hers has got a look of dull canvas. It could be fixed up—she sees that. With the right kind of makeup a look of exotic sullenness could be managed. Her hair is more of a problem—the red shows at the roots, with shiny strands of gray. Nearly all the time she keeps it hidden by a scarf.

When the manager knocks on her door again, she has only a second or two of crazy expectation. He begins to call her name. “Mrs. Massie, Mrs. Massie! Oh, I hoped you’d be in. I wondered if you could just come down and help me. It’s the old bloke downstairs, he’s fallen off the bed.”

He goes ahead of her down the stairs, holding to the railing and dropping each foot shakily, precipitately, onto the step below.

“His friend isn’t there. I wondered. I didn’t see him yesterday. I try and keep track of people but I don’t like to interfere. I thought he probably would’ve come back in the night. I was sweeping out the foyer and I heard a thump and I went back in there—I wondered what was going on. Old bloke all by himself, on the floor.”

The apartment is no larger than Gail’s, and laid out in the same way. It has curtains down over the bamboo blinds, which make it very dark. It smells of cigarettes and old cooking and some kind of pine-scented air freshener. The sofa bed has
been pulled out, made into a double bed, and the old man is lying on the floor beside it, having dragged some of the bedclothes with him. His head without the toupee is smooth, like a dirty piece of soap. His eyes are half shut and a noise is coming from deep inside him like the noise of an engine hopelessly trying to turn over.

“Have you phoned the ambulance?” Gail says.

“If you could just pick up the one end of him,” the manager says. “I have a bad back and I dread putting it out again.”

“Where is the phone?” says Gail. “He may have had a stroke. He may have broken his hip. He’ll have to go to the hospital.”

“Do you think so? His friend could lift him back and forth so easy. He had the strength. And now he’s disappeared.”

Gail says, “I’ll phone.”

“Oh, no. Oh, no. I have the number written down over the phone in my office. I don’t let any other person go in there.”

Left alone with the old man, who probably cannot hear her, Gail says, “It’s all right. It’s all right. We’re getting help for you.” Her voice sounds foolishly sociable. She leans down to pull the blanket up over his shoulder, and to her great surprise a hand flutters out, searches for and grabs her own. His hand is slight and bony, but warm enough, and dreadfully strong. “I’m here, I’m here,” she says, and wonders if she is impersonating the red-haired young man, or some other young man, or a woman, or even his mother.

The ambulance comes quickly, with its harrowing pulsing cry, and the ambulance men with the stretcher cart are soon in the room, the manager stumping after them, saying, “…  couldn’t be moved. Here is Mrs. Massie came down to help in the emergency.”

While they are getting the old man onto the stretcher, Gail has to pull her hand away, and he begins to complain, or she thinks he does—that steady involuntary-sounding noise he is making acquires an extra
ah-unh-anh
. So she takes his hand
again as soon as she can, and trots beside him as he is wheeled out. He has such a grip on her that she feels as if he is pulling her along.

“He was the owner of the Jacaranda Hotel,” the manager says. “Years ago. He was.”

A few people are in the street, but nobody stops, nobody wants to be caught gawking. They want to see, they don’t want to see.

“Shall I ride with him?” Gail says. “He doesn’t seem to want to let go of me.”

“It’s up to you,” one of the ambulance men says, and she climbs in. (She is dragged in, really, by that clutching hand.) The ambulance man puts down a little seat for her, the doors are closed, the siren starts as they pull away.

Through the window in the back door then she sees Will. He is about a block away from the Miramar and walking towards it. He is wearing a light-colored short-sleeved jacket and matching pants—probably a safari suit—and his hair has grown whiter or been bleached by the sun, but she knows him at once, she will always know him, and will always have to call out to him when she sees him, as she does now, even trying to jump up from the seat, trying to pull her hand out of the old man’s grasp.

“It’s Will,” she says to the ambulance man. “Oh, I’m sorry. It’s my husband.”

“Well, he better not see you jumping out of a speeding ambulance,” the man says. Then he says, “Oh-oh. What’s happened here?” For the next minute or so he pays professional attention to the old man. Soon he straightens up and says, “Gone.”

“He’s still holding on to me,” says Gail. But she realizes as she says this that it isn’t true. A moment ago he was holding on—with great force, it seemed, enough force to hold her back, when she would have sprung towards Will. Now it is she who is hanging on to him. His fingers are still warm.

When she gets back from the hospital, she finds the note that she is expecting.

Gail. I know it’s you
.

Hurry. Hurry. Her rent is paid. She must leave a note for the manager. She must take the money out of the bank, get herself to the airport, find a flight. Her clothes can stay behind—her humble pale-print dresses, her floppy hat. The last library book can remain on the table under the sagebrush picture. It can remain there, accumulating fines.

Otherwise, what will happen?

What she has surely wanted. What she is suddenly, as surely, driven to escape.

Gail, I know you’re in there! I know you’re there on the other side of the door
.