Yesterday's Shadow (20 page)

He had waited two days, pondering the letter, then he had phoned Sarah, the first time he had spoken to her in all those years. Her voice hadn't changed, it was still fruity, like that of an old-time actress. “Ohmigod, how good it is to hear your voice! But you sound so—so different. So—so
American
.”

“Canadian, actually.” Down in the southern hemisphere, no one ever knew the difference. “How's Dad?”

“Bad. It won't be long. He does want to see you—he keeps asking have I found you—”

“Does he say why?”

“No—just says he has something to tell you. Like a confession, I gather.”

He had no idea what his father, the Presbyterian churchgoer, would want to confess to him. “What's the cancer?”

“
Melanomas. All that golf and gardening—”

He remembered his father, the tall lean man who, as if to escape all the bottled health in his pharmacy, spent as much time as he could in the open air and sun. Which was now killing him.

“Please,
do
come,” said Sarah. “If you want the fare, Walter and I—”

He smiled at that, unoffended; he could probably buy out Walter and Sarah a couple of times over. “No, that's no problem. It'll take a day or two—I have some things to attend to—”

“So I can tell him you're coming? It will keep him alive—”

“Yes. Tell him to hang in there—”

“You sound so American—”

“Canadian, actually.” He took his time and she must have thought he had rung off.

“Are you there?” Pronounced
the-ah
? with the rising inflection.

“Yes.” Another long pause; intuition told him she was suddenly remembering the past:
his
past. “Sarah, don't broadcast that I'm coming. I'd rather come home quietly—”

There was her own long pause; then she said quietly, “I understand. Walter will, too.”

Meaning Walter, her husband, would understand for his own reasons. In Toronto the killer had often gone to the public library and looked at the Sydney newspapers, subconsciously looking to see how much of the 1980s was being exhumed. There he had occasionally seen mention of Walter, a successful barrister who, the legal columnists said, had hopes of being a judge. Walter wouldn't want his brother-in-law's past peccadillos, whatever they were, brought out for an airing by the tabloids. Secrecy is an infectious disease, a health hazard Julian Baker appreciated.

He had leave due to him from the bank and he took it; since the country was in the summer doldrums, his absence would hardly be noticed. Then he told his three sub-teen children he was going to Asia on business and they, ready to leave for summer camp in New Hampshire, couldn't have cared if he was going off to Moscow to see if more Russian crooks were looking for a money laundry. It is often forgotten that children can be as incurious as they are curious. It was not so with Lucille, his wife. She was as curious as a tabloid reporter.

He
had always believed that truth was a negotiable commodity. So he told her only half of it. Yes, he was Australian as he had told her; but no, both his parents were not dead. He had told her he had run away from home when he was sixteen and he let that lie lie; he did tell her that, no, he was not an only child, he had a sister and it was she who had told him his father, still alive, was dying. He was going back to Sydney to patch up the estrangement from his father.

She was touched. “I want to go with you—”

“No—” He had to bite back the word so that it didn't sound like an expletive. He loved her, still occasionally looked at her with a stranger's eye and saw what a beautiful woman she was. She had a poise to her and sense of commercial duty that made her a good corporation wife, but she was still her own woman; and his. He put his hand on hers: “Let me see him alone—first. If everything works out okay, I'll call you and you can come. If it doesn't—”He knew that it wouldn't. If there was a reconciliation with his father, it did not mean he was going to take up life again on the Sydney scene. “I'll let you know—”

She had then looked suspicious; she was French-Canadian, but more French than Canadian. French wives have been suspicious of their husbands since Clovis' time. “You're telling me the truth? You don't have an old girlfriend out there?”

“One I knew when I was sixteen? I'm not chasing another woman—forget anything like that.”

There had been one or two short-term affairs, but Lucille had known nothing of them. They had been during the last two months of her last two pregnancies and he had viewed them as nothing more than therapeutic, a flushing of dirty water off his chest. But now he thought of Trish Norval . . .

Lucille kissed him, then gave him a love-bite that raised a welt on his neck. “If ever I found you with another woman, I'd bite right through your carotid artery.”

He told himself he was lucky to have such a loving, if ferocious, wife and left her and came to Sydney. Sarah and Walter Wexall were at the airport to meet him. Sarah was—what was the word? he wondered.
Matronly
? Walter was—what was the masculine word for
matronly
? Sarah hesitated, then put her arms round him and kissed him on the cheek. Walter shook his hand and patted him on the shoulder as he might a horse.

“
My God, how you've changed! Is it
really
you?” Sarah's voice carried; elderly arriving passengers turned back to see if Sybil Thorndike, risen from the grave, had been on the plane.

“It's me—”

Then suddenly Sarah had sobered, her voice lowered: “But you're too late! Dad—”

She stopped, put her hand to her mouth and tears ran down her cheeks. Walter said, “He died at the weekend. We told him you were coming, but he couldn't hold out. He seemed pleased, though. He's being cremated tomorrow—”

Walter Wexall might once have been good-looking, but middle age and flesh had taken over. He now had the bland sort of face that is given character by glasses; he wore designer gold-rims. He had a good deep voice, ideal for sentencing when he became a judge, and an assured dignity that was genuine. He was a Senior Counsel and regretted he had been too late to be a Queen's Counsel. QC after one's name sounded so much better than SC.

Driving out of the airport in the Mercedes, Walter said, “As Sarah says, we wouldn't have recognized you.”

“I had a car accident. They re-modelled my face a little.” Lies slid off his tongue as smoothly as truth; sometimes their sincerity fooled even him. “And I've gone grey.”

“Worried?” said Walter, as if cross-examining.

“Not at all. I've forgotten my past, if that's what you mean.” He said it with a smile and was met by smiles; insincerity bloomed in the car like paper flowers. “I just hope everyone else will forget it.”

“Oh, of course,” said Walter and looked relieved.

They dropped him at the Regent, Walter pulling the car into the concourse with the familiarity of a man who came often to this hotel. Julian wondered if he should not have chosen another hotel.

“Get a good night's sleep,” said Sarah, sounding just like their mother. “We'll pick you up at ten tomorrow morning. The funeral is at eleven. Oh, it's so good to see you again!”

“Likewise,” he said.

“So American!”

“
Canadian, actually.” Then he leaned on the roof of the car, lowered his head and his voice: “I shan't be coming to the funeral.”

“Oh my! Why not?”

He looked past her at Walter. “I think it would be better if I remained invisible, don't you, Walter?”

Walter was not surprised by the question; he nodded. “I see your point.”

Julian looked at Sarah. “I mean no disrespect to Dad.”

She stared at him, then nodded. “I understand. Come to dinner tomorrow night, just we three. There's so much to catch up on.”

“I'll look forward to it.” He looked past her again at Walter: “Thanks, old chap.”

Walter understood, as if a password had been exchanged. “Good to see you back. We'll keep it low-key.”

“The best way,” he said and watched them drive away. The rear of the Mercedes, he thought, looked like Walter: solid and bland.

Next night he caught a cab and went out to Killara, a breeding wetlands for lawyers; children there, it was said, learned the alphabet from the
Law Society Journal
. The houses were as authoritative as courthouses, the gardens as neat as the women residents' hair. There had been one or two drug scandals amongst the local teenagers, but the North Shore is more experienced and adept at putting the lid on the scandal pot than the other, less conservative areas of Sydney. Julian Baker had grown up here under his real name and he knew the environment as well as anyone. He had groped girls from Pymble Ladies College and passed out dead drunk on a green at Killara Golf Club. He was coming back to familiar territory.

Sarah opened the door to him, greeted him with warmth. “Come in, come in! The boys are here, but they're going out—”

The two boys, in their late teens, looked at him with suspicion: born lawyers, he thought. Or cops. “Hi,” they said, articulate as two pillar-boxes and left.

“
They're going to miss Pa,” said Sarah.

“How did the funeral go?”

Sarah put her hand over her mouth and turned and went out to the kitchen. “Without fuss,” said Walter. “The way your father would have wanted. Drink?”

“Sarah very upset?”

“Yes. But she's strong, she's not going to crumble. The living always feel it more than the dead, don't you think?”

“I don't know. I've never asked the dead.”

Walter smiled; he was not going to crumble. “How do you feel?”

“I wish I'd got here before he died.” It was an honest thought.

Later, when they moved into the dining room, he saw that dinner was prologue. Sarah must have come straight home from the funeral to prepare it, though Julian wondered if there had been coffee-and-cakes for the mourners. His father had had many friends and Julian guessed that Sarah and Walter, always conscientious about doing the right thing, would have held some sort of reception. Nonetheless, Sarah had not allowed herself to be put off from preparing a proper dinner for her long-lost brother. Which, he knew, was how she would be thinking of him. She had always had a touch of the theatrical, though only in her thoughts, never in her behaviour.

There were oysters—“I remembered how much you liked them”—and beef burgundy and diplomat pudding—”Remember how Mother used to make it?” The wine was excellent—“I have a half- interest in a vineyard up in the Hunter,” said Walter—and there was port with the coffee. Only over the coffee did Sarah mention that she had had a caterer prepare and bring in the meal. For some reason he felt disappointed. When they were young she had been so solicitous of him, always his defender. The wine had made him sentimental.

Then they repaired to the living room and the real talk began.

The room was expensively, if conservatively, furnished. It was an upholstered complement to Walter and Sarah. The only odd note in the room was a Jeffrey Smart painting of a desolate Italian
autostrada;
Julian could only guess that it had been bought as an investment. The other two paintings suited the room: solid spring landscapes, no sign of drought or ring-barked trees. Walter and Sarah had surrounded themselves with security. But then, he reminded himself, so had he back in Toronto. He was feeling mellow, prepared to feel at home with them.

“There is a problem,” said Walter.

“Oh?” Julian was now drinking mineral water, keeping his mind clear.

“Your father left no will. He knew he was dying, but for some reason he kept putting it off. I tried to get him to make one, but he was adamant. He was waiting for you to come home.”

Julian had no illusions: “To see if I was still the bastard he always thought I was?”

“He never said anything like that. You know what your father was like—he could be very closemouthed. I'd known him for years before I found out he always voted Labor.” As if he had voted for the Ku Klux Klan or belonged to some satanic cult.

“Perversity, that was all it was. He knew a Labor vote in this electorate would probably be dropped in the dustbin by the scrutineers.” Though he had not known how his father had voted; they had never discussed politics. “But he can't have left much. The house and maybe the business—can you sell a pharmacy as a going business?”

“The house and the pharmacy are small potatoes,” said Walter.

“His portfolio manager—” said Sarah.

“His
what
?” Julian sat up. “I know he had a few shares, blue-chip stuff, but not much—”

“The portfolio,” said Walter in a measured voice, as if delivering a court judgement, “is worth nine and a half million dollars. Give or take a few dollars.”

Julian looked at the glass of mineral water, then said, “May I have a whisky?”

Walter poured him a whisky from a cut-glass decanter. This was not the sort of room in which bottles were displayed; at dinner the wine had been decanted. “I had a stiff whisky myself when I was told. We didn't know of the portfolio man's existence. He read of your father's death—evidently portfolio managers read the obituaries—”

“
Like lawyers?” But he smiled.

Walter smiled in reply, but it was an effort. “Yes . . . Did you ever give your dad investment advice?”

“Back in the eighties I mentioned some stocks, flyers that I thought might take off. It was just in conversation—when we talked at all—”

“He must have taken your advice. He was buying and selling for years, evidently, before he took on the portfolio manager. He must have borrowed and borrowed big, but there's no debt now.”

Julian sipped his whisky, trying to conjure up the image of his father as a stock exchange gambler. And yet it could have happened; he had seen plenty of it in the eighties. Cautious men who took a flutter, won, took another flutter and then, caught on the surf, just kept going. Was that how it had happened with his father?