The Idea of Perfection (44 page)

Well, once a set of pewter mugs, he admitted.

He looked at her helplessly. She smiled, and nodded encouragingly, but could not think of anything to say that would rescue him. He floundered on.

They made everything taste funny.

But now there was a family, all in check shirts, that had just come in and not seen that there was something being watched. They were pushing up behind him, with a child nudging at the back of his legs, and the edge of a stroller knocking into his knee, so that he was more or less propelled away from the table.

She took the money from the man in the check shirt, and tried to write down the name he was spelling out. It seemed to have too many
ms
in it, and he was determined that she get it right.
Oh, forget it,
she wanted to say.
Who cares how you spell it?

Suddenly she realised that Douglas had forgotten his tickets. She jumped up so quickly she knocked against the stand where the patchwork hung, making it tremble and nearly fall.

Whoops! she heard someone call out and laugh, as if this was the best bit of the show.

Douglas! Douglas! Come back!

She had not used his name before. It sounded terribly intimate, although she tried to make it casual. He turned, and suddenly the space between them was empty, and she felt as if she was shouting his name across it. She thrust the tickets at him.

Look, she started, I was —

But he interrupted.

Listen, he said, urgently, and she listened.

I’ve been thinking about the bridge, he said.

Then he seemed to lose heart.

She tried to help.

How do you mean, exactly, the bridge?

Well, he started, but suddenly another lot of new arrivals was coming in the doorway between them, saying
Hello, Harley!
and
How are you, Harley?
and
Congratulations, Harley!
and crowding around, blocking her off from him.

I said, tomorrow, he said loudly, around the heads. After lunch. At the bridge. I’ll show you.

A woman buying raffle tickets heard and looked over at him, smiling as if amused, looking from him to Harley.

Harley stared back into her face. Yes, he was arranging a rendezvous.

And that was perfectly all right, because she was going to say
yes.

IT WAS TRUE that
after lunch
left a fair bit of latitude, but it was now quite a long way
after lunch.
The afternoon was cooler than it had been, the sun sinking towards a mass of little tufted clouds. Long shadows were beginning to stretch out across the paddocks.

Douglas stared out at feathery stalks of long grass haloed with the late sun, and two horses head-to-head over a fence. From his own feet a long thin shadow went out along the roadway of the bridge and bent over the side.

He thought about how she had been at the Museum opening. It had seemed to him then that she had been quite warm. Definitely cordial. Perhaps even something more than cordial. He had gone over it in his mind, the look she had given him, the way she had said his name. He replayed it again and again.

It had not been anything as straightforward as a smile. But there had been something around the mouth, and something round the corners of the eyes too. You could call it a
twinkle.
There had been a
twinkle in her eye.

Put that way, it did not sound quite right.

He looked up into the bush where the orange ribbons around the doomed trees flickered.

Mr Denning had been surprised to hear from him. Surprised, too, it seemed, at some change in the way he spoke.

Cheeseman, he had said warily. Everything all right, Cheeseman?

In the moment of hearing his voice, feeling the little clutch of fear, Douglas had realised that talking to Mr Denning had always been like the Legacy teas. Those tough old blokes expecting him to be a hero like his father. The way they turned away, contemptuous, when they found out he was not.

He was still no
hero.
That was never going to be the right word for what he was. But you did not necessarily have to be a
hero,
to do what had to be done.

He had noticed that Harley Savage had a way of squaring her shoulders back before she spoke and he had tried it, right there in the stuffy phonebox at the foot of the stairs in the Caledonian.

It’s about the bridge, Mr Denning, he said.

Getting your shoulders back definitely helped. Or perhaps it was thinking about Harley Savage that helped.

I think we can save it.

We,
meaning whom, exactly?
We
: Douglas Cheeseman and the Supervising Engineer from Head Office? Douglas Cheeseman and the concerned citizens of Karakarook, NSW?

He knew who he meant. He could pretend to himself if he liked, but he knew that he knew. There was a picture in his mind, of himself and Harley Savage. He could see them, the two of them, side by side. Shoulder to shoulder. Being
we.

 

 

He glanced over the side of the bridge, at his own footprints in the sand down there. When he glanced back along the road that led to town, he saw a little figure coming towards him. It was too far to see, but he knew who it was.

Suddenly he was not so sure about that look she had given him, and the sound of his name in her mouth. Now that she was upon him, he had an impulse to hide. She would never find him if he ran down to his burrow under the bridge. He would hear her walking on top of him, but she would not know he was there. If he was that kind of man, he could even look up through the cracks, up her dress. If she was that kind of woman, the kind who wore that kind of dress.

She was tall and solid striding through the landscape. He was prepared to admit that she frightened him, and the way she walked was one of the things that frightened him the most. It excited him, too. She held her shoulders back hard and took long strides. It was a kind of swagger. Her feet came down hard. She was like an army marching. Nothing would stop her. She could forge on right over you, not seeing you, bearing herself along on those pulled-back shoulders.

It made the fur along his spine stand up.

He did not think she had seen him yet, dim, pale, probably invisible in his
neutrals.
Hiding was not out of the question.

But hiding was not a realistic option. It was a disgrace even to have thought of it. He got his shoulders squared back.

We can save the bridge,
he would say. He would not beat around the bush.

Getting his shoulders squared back did not seem to be helping as much this time.

He could see the smile on her face, and it looked as though she might be humming. She still had not seen him. The dog was there beside her but it was having to trot to keep up. It looked alertly from side to side. Soon it would smell the invisible fawn-coloured man who had had shameful thoughts about hiding.

He took a meaningless step forward, snatched his hat off and used it to wave away a fly that was not there, so that she would see him. He did not want her to think he was trying to hide.

The dog saw him first, and then she saw him too. She did not stop coming on but each step was slower than the last. Her smile went through some kind of small metamorphosis.

He told himself not to rush in. Let her set the tone.

I was hoping you’d come, he blurted, as she came closer.

He blundered on, trying to remember what he had rehearsed. She was wearing a blue shirt of some coarse sort of fabric today. It definitely
did something
for her.

To have a chat. About the bridge.

In a bush beside the road a bird was scolding on and on.
Peep peep a cheep a parp par, parp parp parp a chick chick pirrup.
Another answered:
Eep eep,
then again
eep eep.

There’s no need to knock it down, you see.

Oh?

Under the hat, her face was noncommittal.

He felt things were already getting away from him. Perhaps he should have written it all down, done a list.

The trees will still have to go, but we can use them for the corbels. Chook can work the timber. Then we’ll bolt concrete on top to keep it all dry. In modules. We’ll cast them upside-down, in sections, you see, to allow for movement.

He had a nasty feeling he was gabbling.

Because really, it’s only the corbels.

He could not remember if he had already explained to her about corbels.

As well as the lines going out from her eyes, there were curves cut into her face, like brackets, on either side of her mouth. It must be where her face creased when she smiled. He imagined it. Years and years of smiles. Hundreds and thousands of them.

She was not exactly smiling at the moment. But she was not exactly frowning, either.

The what?

He wished he was better at explaining.

They’re sort of joiners, he started.

He put one hand out, palm down, and jabbed the other up against it.

They kind of join where two beams meet on top of a pier.

He jabbed away desperately.

Look, he said suddenly, I’ll show you.

He found he had put his hand behind her upper arm. He did not know he had it in him to be so bold. The coarse blue fabric was surprisingly soft to touch. He guided her over towards the fence, surprised, too, at how she allowed him. He folded himself in half to get through the fence, hurrying so he could hold the strands apart for her, and his shirt snagged on the barbed wire, pulling free with a musical twang. It sounded ridiculous and their eyes met for a moment but neither of them smiled.

On the narrow strip of sand beside the water, they had to stand close to each other. Together they looked up into the private underparts of the bridge.

Really, it’s as strong as anything.

He slapped at one of the piers.

Not going to move any more.

He wished she would say something.

Look, he said, too loud.

He tried again, softer.

See up there? See the corbels?

He crouched and pointed up into the darkest corner.

Completely rotten. See?

Actually it was hard to see in the heavy shadow, and the flickering reflected light was confusing.

She crouched beside him and stared up at the wrong place.

He leaned in towards her so she could follow the line of his pointing arm.

See?

When he turned too quickly, with another thought about corbels, he knocked against her in the tight space so that she lost her balance and had to save herself with a hand down on the mud.

Oh! Sorry!

She ignored this.

So why are they so important? she said. These corbels.

He glanced at her, to see if she was being hostile, but she was simply waiting to hear what he would say, her face blank with concentration. She was shoulder-to-shoulder with him, their faces almost touching. He could smell something exotic coming off the coarse blue shirt. This close, he could see things he had never noticed about her before. He had a good view of her neck as she looked up. It was not young and smooth, and where the neck of the shirt was open the skin of her upper chest was crepey and spotted with brown freckles. But as he watched her staring up at the underneath of the bridge, strangely lit with rippling light, he longed to put his face into that corner where neck met chest, to feel the warmth of her, the large powerful strength of her, the way the blood moved with such eagerness in her veins.

Well, he started.

He had managed it with Mr Denning, he reminded himself. He would manage it with her, too.

They distribute the load. That’s why they’re important.

He bunched up his fingers and jabbed them against the pile beside him.

See, when you do that, well, it’s quite a load. It’s all going into that, um, small, um, area of the headstock.

He jabbed away at the pile. Little flakes of old bark drifted down.

But if you do it like this —

He opened his hand out and laid the palm flat against the wood.

Well, you’ve got more, um, surface area to distribute the load. The weight. That’s what the corbel does, takes the load and distributes it and sends it down into the piers.

He was making broad distributing-and-sending-down gestures with his hand when he became aware of her watching him. He stopped in the middle of a sending-down movement.

Sorry, he said. I’m a bit, um, obsessed.

He looked at his boots, sinking slowly into the mud.

My wife was always telling me I was a bridge bore.

She stood up, a bit at a time, cautiously, between the beams. He heard her joints cracking. She wiped her muddy hand on a pier.

Yes, she said dryly. You already said.