Silver Bay (9 page)

‘He was a bully,’ Liza said, when she came in. ‘If it hadn’t been for her I wouldn’t have taken them.’

We exchanged a look. ‘Bet you made her day, though.’

‘Not really. Not a whale anywhere. I gave them an extra hour but it was like the seas were empty.’

‘Perhaps they knew.’

‘I sent out a whale sonar, telling them to bugger off for the day.’

Sometimes I can see her mother, my little sister, in Liza. She’s there in the way Liza tilts her head when she’s thinking, in her thin strong fingers, in her smile when she sees her daughter. That’s when I know my niece’s presence here, and Hannah’s, is a blessing. That there is an elemental pleasure in seeing the continuation of a family line, a joy that we who are childless might not otherwise experience. It’s that jolt of recognition when suddenly you see not only her mother but your great-uncle Evan, your grandmother, perhaps even yourself. I have been grateful for this knowledge, these last five years. Those glimpses of familial brow, frown or giggle have made up, in some small way, for the loss of my sister.

Liza, however, has other features – her watchfulness, the ever-present sadness, the faded white scar where her cheekbone meets her left ear – that are entirely her own.

I suppose it should have been of no great surprise to me that Nino Gaines hadn’t called by for a few days – not after the way I sent him packing the last time he came. But his unusual show of self-sufficiency got to me. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I missed him, but I didn’t like the idea that he might be sitting at Barra Creek thinking badly of me. More than anyone, I knew that life was too short for grudges.

After lunch I packed up a lemon cake in greaseproof paper, sat it on the passenger seat of my car and headed out to his place. It was a beautiful day, the air so clear you could see the mountains in the distance, and pick out every needle on the pines that lined the road. It had been an especially dry summer, and as I drove inland I glanced at the reddish earth, the bony horses with no grass to graze, killing time by swishing their tails at the never-ending flies. The air was different out here: the pollen and dust motes hung static, the atmosphere unfiltered and sullen. I don’t understand how people can live inland. I find that endless brown depressing, the solid outline of hill and valley too unchanging. You get used to the moods of the sea – like those of a spouse, I imagine. Over enough years, you may not always like them but it’s what you know.

He was just headed indoors when I pulled up outside. He turned at the sound of my engine, wiping his oversized hands on the back of his trousers, and touched one hand to the brim of his hat when he’d grasped who it was. He was wearing a quilted waistcoat that I swear he’d had back in the 1970s when his two boys were born.

I hesitated before I got out of the car. We had rarely fallen out, and I was not entirely sure of my reception. We stood squinting at each other, and I remember thinking how ridiculous we were: two brittle old skeletons, facing each other like teenagers. ‘Afternoon,’ I said.

‘Come for your order?’ he asked, but there was a twinkle in his eye that made me relax. A twinkle that, if I’m honest, I didn’t deserve.

‘I brought you a cake,’ I said, reaching back into the car to get it.

‘I hope it’s lemon.’

‘Why? Are you going to send it back if it’s not?’

‘I might.’

‘I don’t remember you as picky, Nino Gaines. Stubborn, greedy and rude, yes. Picky, no.’

‘You’ve got lipstick on.’

‘Over-familiar, too.’

He grinned at me, and I couldn’t quite keep the smile from my face. That’s what they don’t tell you about old age: it doesn’t stop you acting like a young fool.

‘Come on in, Kathleen. I’ll see if I can get Stubborn, Greedy and Over-familiar Mark Two to make us both a cup of tea. You look very nice, by the way.’

The first time Nino Gaines asked me to marry him I was nineteen years old. The second time I was nineteen and two weeks. The third time was forty-two years later. This was not due to any lapse in memory or attention on his part, but because in the intervening years, having given up on me, he was married to Jean. He met her two months after I’d turned him down for the second time when she disembarked at Woolloomoolloo from a bride-ship, having changed her mind about the soldier she was due to marry. He had been waiting for an old friend on the docks, found his gaze drawn to her wasp waist and crooked nylons and, like the force of nature she was, she had reeled him in and got a ring firmly on her finger before another two months were out. Many people thought they were a strange couple – they used to fight like billy-oh! – but he brought her back to his newly purchased vineyard at Barra Creek and they were together until she died at the age of fifty-seven from cancer. It didn’t take a fool to see that, for all their arguments, they were a good match.

I don’t blame her for her determination. Nino Gaines, it was widely acknowledged back then, was one of the handsomest men in Silver Bay, even wearing a woman’s bathing-suit. This he did every year, when the servicemen put on a show for the local children. It was a matter of some embarrassment to me that mine was the first he was told to ask for. In the war years I was a strapping lass, tall and square-shouldered; I’m not a lot smaller now. While other women have shrunk, backs bending like question marks, joints knotting with arthritis and osteoporosis, I’m still pretty upright, my limbs strong enough. I say it’s the effort of running the old hotel, with its eight bedrooms and only sporadic help. (The crews say that shark cartilage is now famed for its preservative qualities. Their idea of a joke.)

The first time I laid eyes on him I was serving at the hotel bar. He strode in wearing his air-force uniform, appraised me hard enough to make me blush, saw the newspaper picture framed beside the shelves, and asked, ‘Do
you
bite?’

It wasn’t the words that got my father’s back up, but the wink that went with them. I was such an innocent that it all flew as swiftly over my head as the warplanes that stacked up over Tomaree Point.

‘No,’ my father said, from behind his newspaper by the till. ‘But her father does.’

‘You want to watch that one,’ he said to my mother later. ‘Got a mouth as smart as a whip cut.’ And to me, ‘You stay away from him, you hear?’

Back in those days, I thought my father’s word was gospel. I kept my exchanges with Nino Gaines to the minimum, tried not to blush too hard when he complimented me on my dresses, stifled my giggles when he cracked secret jokes at me from across the bar. I tried not to notice that he came in every night that he wasn’t on duty, even though everyone agreed that the best nightlife was to be found a good twenty minutes’ drive up the coast road. My little sister Norah was just four at the time (it’s fair to say her arrival had been something of a surprise to my parents) and she used to gaze up at him like he was a god, largely because he plied her with chocolate and chewing-gum.

And then Nino asked me to marry him. Knowing my father’s stringent views on servicemen, I had to refuse. We might have been all right, I sometimes think, if the second time he’d asked me he hadn’t done it in front of my father.

When Jean died, nearly fifteen years ago now, I thought Nino Gaines might collapse into himself and fade away. I’ve seen it before with men of that age – their clothes get a little more unkempt, they forget to shave, they start living on packet food. They have a lost quality about them, as if permanently hopeful that someone will step in and take care of them. It was how that generation of men was raised, you see. They never learnt to do anything for themselves. But Frank and John John kept him busy, made sure their father was not alone, set up new projects with this grape and that blend. Frank remained at home and John John’s wife came twice a week and cooked for them. Yes, Nino Gaines did better than any of us had expected. After a year or so, there was little about him to suggest that he had suffered such a blow. Then one night, over a nice bottle of shiraz merlot, he confided in me that, two weeks before she’d died, Jean had told him she’d celestially box his ears if he moped around by himself when she was gone.

There was a long pause after he said this. When I looked up from my glass he was staring straight at me. That silence burns me now, if I think too hard about it.

‘She was quite right,’ I said, avoiding his eye. ‘Be silly for you to mope around. Make sure you get out and about. Go see a few friends up north. Best thing for you.’

There were other things he said, later, but we didn’t talk about those any more. For many years now Nino had accepted that he and I would never be more than good friends. I treasured his friendship – probably more than he knew – and it was rare that one of us was invited to some event without the other. We had settled into a kind of joke intimacy, a verbal dance that we performed partly because we both enjoyed sparring, partly because neither of us knew how else to hide the slight awkwardness that existed between us. But it was some years since he had talked to me with any intimacy, which suited us both fine.

‘Frank was in town yesterday, and bumped into Cherry Dawson,’ he said.

I had been staring at his place mats, with pencil and watercolour views of London landmarks, which he still put on the table for every meal, as Jean would have asked him to. Her presence was everywhere in that house, even so long after her death. She had favoured heavy, ornate furnishings, which were at odds with his personality. I was surprised the house didn’t depress him: it was like a funeral home. I had never yet been in his drawing room, with its flock three-piece and antimacassars, without wanting to rip out the whole lot and splash some white paint about.

‘She still working for the council?’

‘Sure is. She told me the Bullens have sold the old oyster farm. There’s a lot of cloak-and-dagger stuff in the town hall about what’ll go there instead.’

I took a sip of my tea. I hated the fancy floral teacups too. I always wanted to tell him that I’d be happier with a mug, but somehow it would have seemed like a criticism of Jean. ‘Land as well?’

‘A good stretch of the beachfront, including the old hatchery. But it’s the oyster beds I’m curious about.’

‘What can they do with an underwater stretch like that?’

‘That’s what I’m curious about.’

There had been a time, before he got into wine, that Nino had toyed with opening his own oyster farm. He’d considered buying the Bullen place, back when they were struggling against the Japanese imports. He’d asked my father’s advice, but Daddy scoffed at him, and said a man who knew as little about the sea as Nino Gaines should leave it well alone. I think he might have changed his mind a little when Nino’s vineyards won an award for Australian wine, and again when his turnover headed towards six figures for the first time, but he was not the kind of man to admit it.

‘You still got designs on it?’

‘Nah. Your old man was probably right.’ He downed the last of his tea, and looked at his watch. Every evening he climbed on to his quad bike to ride round the estate, inspecting the irrigation system, checking his vines for botrytis bunch rot and powdery mildew, still taking pleasure in the knowledge that he owned all the land he could see.

‘The bay’s not suitable for much. It could only really be another oyster farm.’

‘I don’t think so.’ Nino shook his head.

I got the feeling he knew more than he was telling. ‘Well,’ I said, when I realised he wasn’t going to elucidate, ‘they’ll have to keep the deep-water channel open for the boats to get in and out, so I don’t see how it will make too much difference to the crews, whatever they decide to do with it. That reminds me – did I tell you Hannah saw her first whale?’

‘Liza finally took her out, did she?’

I grimaced. ‘No, so keep it under your hat. She went out on
Moby One
with Yoshi and Greg. She was so happy that night I was surprised Liza didn’t guess. Went past her door at ten thirty and she was singing along to a whalesong tape.’

‘She’ll have to ease up on that kid eventually,’ he said. ‘She’s headed for the difficult years. If Liza tries to keep her too close she’ll pull right back the other way.’ He mimed straining at a reel. ‘But I don’t need to tell you that.’

I glanced at the clock over the mantelpiece and stood up. I hadn’t noticed how late it had got. I’d only meant to bring him a cake.

‘Good to see you, Kate.’ When I made to leave he leant forward to kiss my cheek, and I held his arm, which might have been a sign of my affection – or a way to keep him at a distance.

My dad had thought he was like all the rest, you see. He swore they were only after my fame and the hotel. It’s only now I wonder at a man who couldn’t let his daughter believe she was good enough to be loved for herself.

When I got back they were already out at the tables. Liza must have served them, and they sat along the bench, cradling their beer and packets of chips. Yoshi and Lance were playing cards, and all were wrapped in fleeces and hats, muffled against the cool southerly wind. Apparently no one had thought to turn on the burners.

‘The butcher’s delivery arrived,’ Liza said, raising a hand. She was studying the local paper. ‘I wasn’t sure what you wanted out so I stuck it all in the fridge.’

‘I’d better make sure he brought the right order. Last time he got it all wrong,’ I said. ‘Afternoon, all. You’re back early.’

‘One pod, too far off for the punters to see much. Been off with your fancy man, Miss M?’

Greg glanced at my niece as he spoke, but Liza was studiously ignoring him. I guessed she had probably not spoken to him yet and I felt almost sorry. He had meant well, Greg, but sometimes he was his own worst enemy.

When I reached the door I found Mike Dormer in the hallway, flicking through the newspaper I leave out for guests. He looked up when I entered, and nodded.

‘Did you get your car?’ I was going to remove my coat, then figured I’d probably end up outside again.

‘Yup. A . . .’ he pulled the keys from his pocket ‘. . . Holden.’

‘That’ll do you. You feeling any more human?’ He looked weary still. The jet-lag, I remembered, would hit in waves.