Pants on Fire (28 page)

We turned off again and wound down a hill until we came to a much more picturesque settlement of weatherboard buildings, right by the shore. Jasper drove past them and then along quite a rough track, ignoring a sign which said No Entry. After a couple of miles through dense trees he parked, and we just sat there and listened. Apart from the waves and the odd bird call there was complete silence.

“No man-made sounds at all,” I said. “Heaven. Do you know there is practically nowhere in the British Isles where you can find this kind of silence anymore? There always seems to be a motorway in the distance or a plane overhead. This is amazing.”

We sat there for a while, just listening. Then Jasper said, “Let me show you to your accommodation, modom,” and he took my hand and led me through the trees to the beach. It was pristine. There were no plastic bottles on the shore, just shells and seaweed. Then I saw something jumping in the water.

“Look!” said Jasper. “Dolphins.”

A whole pod of them were swimming and leaping, not far off shore.

“You've done it again,” I said to Jasper. “You've stood me still.” And then it seemed the most natural thing in the world for him to take me in his arms and kiss me. For a long time. Slowly and sweetly, just as I had imagined it.

We swam. We built a fire and baked potatoes in it. We drank pinot noir out of real glasses—“No need to slum it,” said Jasper—and we ate salad and ham and cold watermelon out of an “esky.”

“The same one who had the icy pole?” I asked him and he kissed me some more.

When night fell and the stars came out, we lay on our backs, as we'd done so often in the cupola, and smoked a few joints and talked and talked until we fell asleep. Well, not asleep exactly. Jasper had a double sleeping bag in the boot. He'd also brought two single ones, he told me.

“I'd hate you to think I was making assumptions,” he said.

The next morning we woke with the sunrise, running into the sea to wash and wake ourselves up. Jasper disappeared for a while with the car and came back with coffee and bacon and egg rolls. All day we swam and sunbathed and slept and talked and made love. Skin to skin. I felt like sunshine was running in my veins.

“We're living like savages,” said Jasper.

“And aren't savages on to a good thing?”

When the sun got up high I wondered sadly if he would soon say it was time to go. Instead, he leaned over and tickled my face with a blade of grass and said, “Want to stay another night?” I just nodded. Bugger work. I'd made enough excuses for Debbie Brent over the last two months—now I was going to chuck a little sickie myself, as I'd heard Liinda call it.

I had deliberately left my mobile behind, so I drove Jasper's car (which we had christened “The Whale”) into the little village to find a phone box and left a message on Seraphima's voicemail at work. I said I'd been struck down with food poisoning on Saturday and still felt really rough on Sunday afternoon, so I wouldn't be in on Monday. That would cover me for Saturday night too, I thought. Debbie would hear and she could tell Antony and it would all hang together. And I was sleeping a lot, I told Sera's tape, so if anyone called I might not answer the phone. I didn't feel remotely guilty. I just felt high on the pure pleasure of being with Jasper.

That feeling didn't go away for all of Sunday and it was still there on Monday morning.

“I feel like we've been away for weeks,” I told Jasper. He nodded.

“We can do this anytime you like,” he said. “It's only four hours from Sydney. We could come here every Friday night if you wanted to.”

I smiled at him. He might be a flake, but his dreams were charming. There was nothing dangerous in them. And he was a wonderful lover. Maybe it was the pot, but he took it all so slowly and easily, he wound me up to fever pitch. And even when we weren't skin to skin, I felt completely relaxed with him. I knew he liked me, because he'd told me so many times before we'd even kissed, so I didn't feel I had to be on scintillating form every second as I had with Nick Pollock. And I knew I was never going to marry him. With Jasper, I was quite happy to live in the moment.

But eventually the time came when we had to kiss our Blue Lagoon goodbye. There was no brutal “better be off then,” it just seemed to happen. One minute we were lying in the sun, the next we were carrying things up to the car. When it was all packed away Jasper took my hand and led me along the beach to a sheltered spot where he'd written J & G in the sand with shells. He picked up one of the shells and gave it to me.

“Every time you look at this shell for the next week, I will be thinking about you,” he said.

“Only a week?”

“We can renegotiate that each Monday morning.”

The journey home was easy and companionable, with a suitably soppy compilation tape playing. Briefly I wondered if he had made another one to fit the mood if I'd opted for the single sleeping bag. I fell asleep on the bench seat with my head on Jasper's lap and woke up to find him stroking my hair. And then we were back in Elizabeth Bay.

He left the motor running while we kissed goodbye. I wondered for a moment if he was expecting me to ask him up to spend the night there, but I wanted to keep our precious weekend separate from the reality of the alarm clock going off in the morning. We kissed for a long time and as I started to get out of the car I turned round and asked him what he would have done if I'd been late for the rendezvous.

“I would have waited all afternoon,” he said and I went inside, humming “Galveston” on the way up in the lift.

 

 

The next morning there was a bunch of purple bougainvillea outside the door to my flat—no note, but I knew it was from the garden at Caledonia. It made me smile and my insides did a quick somersault when I had a sudden image of Jasper walking out of the sea naked, shaking his long dark hair. I was going to have to make a real effort not to have too obvious a case of post-coital glow when I got into the office.

Sometimes it's a real pain working with a bunch of women and their collective intuition—you can't get away with anything—but for once they didn't seem to notice. To be on the safe side, I told Debbie and Zoe I was still feeling too sick to have lunch, so they wouldn't have the chance to observe me close up.

At three p.m. precisely Jasper called me.

“I left it until three, because I didn't want to seem too keen,” he said and told me he would have loved to see me that night, but he had something on. That was fine with me—I wanted a bit of time just to enjoy remembering how wonderful it had been, before seeing him in reality again.

Later on Antony called to see if I was over my food poisoning—the bush telegraph was working perfectly—and to tell me tales of Trudy's party, which had been the expected wild and crazy night. He wanted me to go over to his place for drinks, but I used the sick excuse again and we made arrangements to go to the various lipstick promotions, gallery openings and product launches that made up the next ten days in Sydney's social calendar.

I did want to see Antony and the rest of the gang, but I also wanted to make sure that I'd booked in plenty of nights when I would be unavailable to Jasper. After feeling so helpless and cast adrift by the fiery-panted Pollock it felt really good not to feel desperate about this man.

When I did see him again, everything was as easy as ever. We had a Mongolian meal, watched a Mongolian movie and then went back to my place for a spot of what Jasper called Mongolian horizontal folk-dancing.

It wasn't as romantic as the beach, but Jasper seemed to have a natural flair for creating atmosphere—he'd brought some tea lights with him, so we could create a more conducive mood in my bare little room.

After that it seemed quite natural to see him again on Friday night, and we spent the whole of Saturday together going round Surry Hills markets and various junk shops to buy things to make my flat less like a nun's cell. I bought a mad old 1950s lamp in the shape of a gypsy dancer, complete with original pleated shade, a multicoloured bead curtain to put up in the kitchen and a framed school map of the world with Australia right in the middle. Jasper bought me a plastic pineapple ice bucket like his.

And so we drifted into an easy companionship. We didn't see each other every night and when we did stay together, he always came to my place. We didn't declare ourselves a couple, but inhabited our own secret universe whenever we were together and our separate ones when we were apart. It made me think of that country-and-western song—it's not love, but it's not bad. And it was exactly what I wanted.

 

 

Not long after our weekend away, Jasper started going on about the Royal Easter Show, which he kept telling me was a Sydney institution I mustn't miss. It sounded like just my kind of thing—it involved animals
and
men in Akubra hats—and I desperately wanted him to take me. But Jasper refused, saying he had boycotted it ever since they'd moved it from the old Showground to new buildings in Homebush. “I've heard that new place is just like a multi-storey car park,” he said.

So I went on my own, Jasper had a point about the buildings; it was all grey concrete and seemed more urban than country. There were a few young fellows in hats, but I couldn't even get a whiff of cow shit. At first it just made me feel really homesick, it was so very different from the county shows I used to love when I was growing up. I wished that Hamish was there to share it with me—agricultural shows are his idea of bliss—and I wondered if he had done anything yet about coming over to work for Johnny Brent. I'd have to give him a call. Meanwhile, Jasper had given me a list of essential Easter Show experiences and I was determined to have a good time.

According to Jasper I had to watch the wood chopping, look at the prize-winning scones and cakes, check out the tableaux in the Hall of Industries, go on a terrifying ride, get him a Violet Crumble showbag and eat something called a Dagwood Dog, followed immediately by fairy floss, while watching the Grand Parade.

So I found myself eating a vile thing which seemed to be a deep-fried battered hot dog on a stick, followed by what I knew as candy floss. I'd already marveled at the amazing rural scenes made entirely out of soya beans, lentils, pumpkins and wool, I'd inspected the cakes, watched the wood chopping, cooed over the piglets, battled through 10,000 screaming children in sugar shock to get Jasper's showbag and decided which ride I was going to pretend I'd been on. All that remained was the Grand Parade, where the winning beasts in every class were led around the big arena in concentric circles. I loved it all.

I particularly loved the cattle. I couldn't believe that such mighty animals could be so gentle, and when I went to look at them more closely in their stalls, their bodies made such beautiful shapes, it made me want to draw them. I still hadn't found a life-drawing class to go to in Sydney, so I got my notebook out of my handbag and started sketching.

They had such lovely big curves, I found them even more engrossing to draw than humans. They were very good at keeping still too and soon I was lost in concentration. People stopped to look, as they always do when you are drawing in a public place, but I didn't take any notice until one of them said my name.

“Well, look at that—it's Georgie. Hey, that's not bad.”

I looked up and saw Billy Ryan, accompanied by an attractive dark-haired woman. It was such a surprise to see him I felt myself blush.

“Hello, Billy, I'm just drawing the cows . . . they have such lovely shapes . . . Hello,” I said to the woman, putting out my hand to shake hers and dropping everything on the floor. “Georgiana Abbott, how do you do?”

“Oh, Georgie,” said Billy. “This is Lizzy . . . er . . . Stewart.”

“Hi Lizzy,” I said, a little too brightly.

She had a good handshake. I hated what she was wearing (an A-line denim skirt and a white blouse, which made her look like a transplanted Sloane Ranger), but at least she could shake hands properly. So this was Lizzy Ryan, Billy's sister-in-law and secret love. Rory's sister. The scarlet woman of Walton. How interesting that he'd introduced her by her maiden name. And how interesting that they were out in public together.

“I didn't know you were an artist, Georgie,” said Billy. “I think these are quite good, don't you, Lizzy? Perhaps you'd like to come up to the farm and draw our cows.”

“They're lovely,” said Lizzy. “I can see how much you like animals.”

I smiled at her. She was growing on me.

“Actually, I know someone else who draws cattle. My brother.” She looked at me steadily.

I could feel a serious blush starting, but luckily Billy blundered on in his usual gung-ho way.

“Does Roar draw cattle?” said Billy. “Well, I knew he got bored up on the farm, ha ha ha. Lucky he just draws them, eh? Just kidding, Georgie. So how have you been? How are you settling in to Sydney?”

“Great, thank you,” I said, marvelling at what a dunderhead he could be. A likeable dunderhead, though. A terrifically handsome and likeable dunderhead.

“Glad to hear it. We'll have to get you over for supper one of these nights. Can we get hold of you at
Glow
?”

I noted he was talking in the royal “we.” I wondered how his poor old brother Tom would feel about that.

“Yes, that would be lovely,” I said, lily-livered Pom that I am.

Lizzy was looking at my drawings.

“Georgie, I don't suppose you'd sell me one of these, would you?”

“Oh Lizzy, you can have one, they're only silly sketches. Please, take one, I'd love you to.”