Cooee (13 page)

‘What on earth do you mean?' asked Bea, in shocked tones.

I'd driven to the office the previous week, Kate in tow, and she and Dawn had carried on endlessly about Kate and what an unparalleled model of a baby she was.

‘I mean, it's gorgeous, she's gorgeous, she's adorable, motherhood's terrific, I've never been so fulfilled. That's what everyone expects me to say and that's what I say; I say it to everybody. It's even true, in a way. Bea, don't be like everybody else, please don't. I can't stand it. Can I come back? You've got enough work, haven't you? You miss me, don't you? You haven't got anyone else yet, have you?'

Steve wasn't happy, but there wasn't a thing he could do about it and he was sensible enough to realise that. ‘I just want you to be happy, lovely,' he said. ‘You know that. So long as you're happy. It's just that we talked it through and I didn't think we'd be doing it this way; I thought we'd be doing it the way we talked about. You're not worried about the money, are you, Isabel? There's plenty of money. We don't need for you to work: you know that, don't you.'

He hated it, that I wasn't maternal enough to want to be with Kate every moment of every day. It embarrassed him in front of his mother, our friends. I pointed out to him that Kate didn't suffer from it: Kate was happy to be with anyone at all. The girls at the childcare centre adored her because she never gave them a moment's bother. He disliked that: he disliked thinking that Kate did perfectly well without me, but it was true.

During the terrible year of our gradual, creaking separation he recalled this, and accused me of never having really loved our children, never having really loved him. It wasn't true. I did love my children. I do love my children. I'd die for them. I had loved him — in so far as I had understood what love was all about, then. But it was over. Over, over, over. Max had flared into my life like a comet, beautiful, dangerous, fascinating. Nothing could ever be the same. Not love, not anything.

And in the meantime, while everyone shouted and harangued, we were planning the house, Max and I. Soon the permits had been obtained and we could start building. I've never known a project like it: everything went with miraculous smoothness. I thought it was a signifier of some divine approbation of our union, our love.

All the bits fell into place: there was none of the usual nonsense of trying to get the plumber to talk to the plasterer, or the bricklayer to tell the carpenter what he was going to do and when he was going to do it.

Then I found Max was liberally greasing the palms of almost everyone involved. At first I was annoyed: I confronted him over it. He was astonished. He thought I was ridiculously naïve, not to understand that this was how things were done; this was how you got things done. Then I thought it was funny. If he had so much money — which seemed to be the case — that he could do this without noticing it, so much that it simply didn't matter, why should I stop him? He enjoyed it, anyway: he enjoyed the comfort of largesse, of distributing ridiculous bribes.

There was a kind of wildness about it all, an intoxication. I was conscious that Dawn and Bea were watching me with harassed eyes as I came and went in the office. I didn't care.

‘What does he do?' Bea asked me one day.

What does he do?
I felt like replying.
He turns my blood to honey; he transforms me; he comes to me in a shimmering shower of nine-carat gold
.

I looked at her. ‘Lots of things. Rather well, in fact.'

‘What does he
do
?' Bea said, crossly. ‘You know what I mean. Where does all the money come from? Tax evasion? Prostitution? Drugs? White slave traffic? Izzie, you don't know this man. You don't know where he comes from, who he is. You know nothing, nothing about him. What in Christ's name are you doing?'

I shrugged. Max was a businessman: that was all he had ever told me. I was quite incurious about his profession. I hadn't ever properly understood what Steve did in the bank, beyond putting on a suit and turning up to work every day. Why did it matter?

Still, after Bea started pestering me it did occur to me to ask Max where his apparently endless supply of cash actually came from.

‘What do you do?' I said.

He burst out laughing. ‘I wondered when you'd ask. They've been at you, haven't they? “What does he
do
?” they're saying to you. “Why don't you find out what he
does
?”'

Nobody could have been less troubled, more open, readier to find amusement in the interest people might express in his occupation.

‘I consult,' he said. ‘I develop. I invest. I keep fingers in lots of pies.'

‘You're telling me not to bother my pretty head about it?'

‘I'll tell you anything you want,' he replied, breezily. ‘There's no single easy answer, that's all. I've got dozens of business interests, dozens of investments. I do all sorts of things, my darling Belle. I buy land and build things and then sell them as big packages. Then I buy more land and build more things. I own multi-storey car parks; I own rubbish tips. I own cranes.'

‘Cranes?' I said, bizarre images of stalky long-beaked birds flapping through my mind. ‘You run a rent-a-flock?'

‘Industrial cranes,' he said, laughing. ‘I lease them to builders, to large-scale developers. You've no idea how boring it all is,' he continued, diffident, modest, humorous, spreading his hands in that self-deprecatory, slightly puzzled gesture with which I was to grow so familiar, which indeed was to haunt me, years later. ‘Lots of people pay me lots of money for all kinds of different things. Business advice, marketing advice, planning advice. It's all to do with bean-counting, really.'

I didn't actually care. It was just as well I didn't, for nothing much was clarified during our marriage. I was to discover, after we started to live together, that letters rarely came for Max.

‘I use a post-office box,' he told me. ‘More convenient, easier to keep tabs on.'

Much of his business seemed to be conducted in other people's offices or else in expensive restaurants. I met no colleagues, no associates. None of this bothered me in the slightest. This was all peripheral stuff, cloudy trivial filaments hanging inconsequentially around the solid gorgeous fabric of our relationship.

One day, when we were in my office, he used the telephone. Halfway through the conversation — it was obviously about money, about shares, I recall, but I didn't try to follow it: I didn't want him to think I was inquisitive, and in any case it was impenetrable to me — he laughed, and started speaking in Italian. It seemed to me that he spoke with extraordinary speed and fluency: he sounded like a native.

‘I didn't know you spoke Italian,' I said, later.

He glanced at me. ‘I speak a few languages. Some better than others, some worse. It's helpful, for business.'

‘Do you travel to those countries?'

‘A bit.'

He did travel during the years we lived together, but not frequently. Once or twice to Bangkok; two or three times to Singapore. Indonesia, a couple of times. Maybe half-a-dozen trips to Sydney, the same to Perth.

He did spend a good deal of time on the telephone: his sleek, little study in Rain (mahogany desk, burgundy leather chairs) had separate telephone and fax lines; and that was when it was quite unusual for people to have such an arrangement at home. He did send and receive faxes, but unobtrusively, without fuss, and I think infrequently, too.

He didn't welcome anyone fiddling with his things, and I soon learnt to leave his study alone, not to search through the papers on the desk, not to open the drawers. It didn't bother me. He was a reserved and private man: he had a right to keep his papers to himself if he wanted to.

Nor, I realise now, did I ever find out much about his life — his life, that is, before meeting me. He wasn't evasive; it just wasn't something we talked about. He had grown up in Sydney, the only child of patrician and distant parents. There had been a brief marriage, when he was still a very young man: his wife had died of a catastrophic and rapacious cancer within three years. Her name had been Caroline, and there had been no children. He looked faintly baffled when he spoke of this first marriage: when I said this to him he laughed, wryly.

‘It's so long ago, Belle, that's all. It's as if it happened to somebody else. I swear I loved her: I adored her. But now I can't really recall what she looked like, to tell you the brutal truth.'

After her death he had travelled, lived for a while in Canada, for a while in London. It had been a rootless kind of existence, he said, dismissively. Comfortable enough, but finally without direction, without substance.

On his return to Australia he had made Sydney his headquarters, but he had always had a yen to live in Melbourne; and, after a windfall from some unusually successful enterprise, he had bought the land on which Rain was built with the intention of settling down for at least four or five years.

‘And now I'm here for life,' he said, grinning at me. ‘Well, for as long as you're here, anyway, my darling.'

He never avoided a question I put to him about his life. He never volunteered information, either. I didn't mind. As far as I was concerned, I'd emigrated to a brilliant new country: I didn't talk much about the old one, either. I suppose I assumed that, as we continued to live together, as we became more and more accustomed to each other, we would gradually learn more of each other's lives; our pasts would roll out slowly for each other's minute inspection, just as the years ahead would unfurl, like long, lush carpets, intricately patterned and richly interwoven, waiting to be trodden on.

But while Max and I worked on our house, our home, I was still living with Steve, and he and I were engaged in an intense and concentrated war. It was only by small degrees that he accepted the inevitability of the split. Towards the end there were awful nights when he wept — noisily, unattractively — and begged me to stay, begged me to give the marriage another go.

He offered me different domestic arrangements as a compromise; he said he would welcome Max at our house, that I could go and spend nights with him sometimes, that he would promise not to have sex with me for a year or more, that he would do anything, anything at all, if only I would stay with him.

All of it was impossible. He was desperate, mad. I'm not sure that it was me he cared about, so much as the life he had made, the life in which he was comfortable. I was up-ending his life, and he would never forgive me.

Eventually, however, he accepted it. And we started to talk about what would happen with the children.

‘I'll take Dominic,' I say.

‘Will you now?' replies Steve, rather unpleasantly.

‘Yes. I will.'

‘Not Kate?'

‘It would be better if we split them,' I say. ‘You know we talked about this: we don't want to have custody battles, that sort of thing. It's silly. The only people who profit are the lawyers: we both know that. I thought we'd agreed, it would be better to have one each. It isn't as if they're going to be broken up for good: they'll have plenty of time together. It isn't as if they're inseparable anyway, either: most of their time they spend apart.'

‘I realise this. Why don't you take Kate? That's what I'm saying, Isabel. I'm not suggesting you take them both. I'll have them both, gladly, but I don't think that's what Kate wants. I'm suggesting you take Kate instead of Dominic.'

I stare at him. This is not an alternative I have considered. Why would I take Kate? Doesn't he understand? It's Dominic I want, my prince, my dark angel.

‘But Dominic's mine,' I say, stupidly. ‘We've always said that. Dominic's mine; Kate's yours.'

‘Don't be so idiotic. We said that as a joke, a parody on ourselves if you like. The dark and the light. It doesn't work like that. You know it doesn't.'

‘I can't take Kate.'

‘Isabel, you can be so blind. Kate adores you. Dominic doesn't.'

‘Dominic does love me.' With terror I feel the prickle behind my eyelids, tears approaching. It will never do, to start crying at this point. I have to be strong, to demonstrate that I can be strong.

‘Of course he loves you,' says Steve, with that exaggeratedly patient manner I so resent. ‘That's not what I said. You don't listen to what I say, Isabel: sometimes I think you've never listened to what I say. You'll break Kate's heart if you leave her.'

But I insist. Dominic will come with me. Kate will stay with her father, in whose mould she is cast and whose habits and predilections she understands and to a large extent shares.

I do not take Dominic's feelings into account. Why should I? He is only little: he is ten. He is too young to know what he really wants. Of course he will do as he is told.

Dominic, of course, has never done as he is told. I find a quiet time to speak with him. I try to cuddle him (an ill-advised strategy), tell him how I love him, how happy we will be together. He refuses to listen.

‘If you're leaving, well, okay then,' he says. ‘Cool. You leave. I'm staying with Dad.'