The Affair (23 page)

He called out to Nina to stop but she was on the top step. She heard him call out her name. The anguish and pain in his voice tore at her heart, but she didn’t look back. She had to get out of there, off this boat. She shouldn’t have come. She had made it worse. This was such a mess. It took every ounce of willpower and concentration to make her legs propel her steadily forward. Once she had both
feet on the deck it was just a few steps, then a small leap across to the pontoon.

Tiger stood on the edge of the boat barking at the flames. Oblivious to what was unfolding below, Nina scooped him up and moved purposefully ahead. She heard her name again.

‘Neeennnnaaaa!’

It was a long strangled cry of despair that would haunt Nina for years to come. She blocked her ears, kept her gaze averted and ran as fast as she could, wanting to put as much distance between herself and Leo as possible.

As the flames licked up his legs and across his trousers, igniting more of the spilt fluid and spreading to his hair, Leo’s last sight of Nina was her retreating back, then he turned and threw himself onto the bed, rolling over and over to douse the flames.

James had been distracted and fidgety all afternoon. Nina wondered what was up. When she asked, James stared back at her blankly, denying anything was afoot. Nina shrugged and gave up. She didn’t feel particularly playful. She felt sad. It was her birthday in a couple of days and she keenly felt the distance from her family. This would be the first year she hadn’t spent it with them. Her mother had been disappointed when she telephoned to say she wouldn’t be coming home as planned and had asked if everything was okay. Her tone had been concerned, which Nina appreciated, but still she felt defensive. Nina had said they were just having a few temporary financial difficulties. They hoped they would be able to come at Christmas. Then she had hung
up the phone and her heart had been heavy ever since.

Nina had thought briefly of the money in her sock drawer but there wasn’t enough for two air tickets and she wasn’t about to go home without James.

‘Why don’t we pop up the street for dinner?’ suggested James.

Nina was surprised. He liked to eat at home, particularly on their new tight budget.

‘What about the Thai café? We could take Tiger.’

Nina found this even more surprising. ‘You want to take Tiger?’

‘Yes. Why not? We can eat outside and tie him up at the table. It’s a warm night.’

‘Okay.’

Tiger led them around the cul-de-sac, overexcited by the break in routine. He strained at his leash, sniffing out all the other dog smells. James picked a flower from the gardens of a neighbouring apartment block and handed it gallantly to Nina. It smelled beautiful and James looked so pleased with himself she felt her mood begin to lift.

They chatted as they walked, peeking into windows of ground-floor apartments, then looking quickly away if the occupants happened to be there. They admired some of the different architecture and derided others. Like most of inner Sydney, Elizabeth Bay featured apartment blocks from many different periods and styles. Some were beautiful and ornate,
a legacy from the elegant thirties. Others looked like they had been modelled on eastern bloc ghettos, thrown together in the seventies. Many had been updated, creating hybrid styles. They all jostled for space.

James held Nina’s hand as they ambled along the footpath. At the top of the hill James wanted to cross the road, which made no sense to Nina because the restaurant they were heading to wasn’t on that side. Nina started to object but James was pulling Tiger’s leash out of her hand and she was forced to follow. James picked up his pace. Having wandered along as if they had all the time in the world, he suddenly seemed in a hurry to get there.

‘James, slow down,’ said Nina. ‘What’s got into you?’

At first James didn’t appear to hear her, continuing up the street, then he abruptly stopped.

‘You’re right. Let’s wait here for a minute and catch our breath.’

Nina stared at her husband. ‘What is going on with you? You’re all over the place,’ she said.

James gave her his bewildered look again and she laughed. It was so unconvincing. He was up to something and she knew it.

‘I don’t know what you are talking about,’ he said, turning to look in the window.

They were standing in the doorway of an art supply shop. A ‘closed’ sign hung in the glass pane facing them. The window had been arranged with various-sized brushes and half-squeezed tubes of paints lying scattered on the ground around an
easel. On the easel was a large canvas. Something about it was vaguely recognisable to Nina. She moved to the front of the shop, to see the canvas in full view.

The sight rendered her speechless. Her mouth fell open as she stared at the painted canvas. It was a scene so achingly familiar, and yet out of context in this shop window in Sydney. Nina felt as if in an instant the world had shifted on its axis and she was seeing everything askance.

The painting in front of her showed a couple standing in front of a two-storey weatherboard house, while behind them, stretching as far as the eye could see, were the harsh arid prairies of what was unmistakably Saskatchewan country.

Her voice, when finally she found it, was a squeak. ‘That’s … my … parents.’

James held himself in check. He was tempted to rush in and explain but he was enjoying her surprise too much. ‘Why, so it is. It’s Ma and Pa Lambert!’

Nina shook her head, incredulous.

The figures in the foreground were small but easily distinguishable as Dorothea and Jake Lambert. A gust of wind was blowing her mother’s floral frock so that it billowed out beside her like a bell in mid-ring. Her father was wearing his fur-trimmed hat and overalls. The sense of space and desolation was breathtaking.

She noticed on the front of the easel, resting against the painting, a small white card. She read it and her eyes filled with tears.

‘To my darling Nina, happy birthday. Your loving husband, James. XXX’

Nina looked at James, only half-understanding. ‘It’s for me?’

James nodded.

Nina was overcome with nostalgia, wonderment and gratitude. She could smell the dry earth, feel the chill of that late spring wind, almost see her mother smoothing the folds of her dress.

She flung her arms around James’s neck, sobbing into his hair. ‘How?’

James explained about the talented Canadian artist who owned the art supplies shop and had featured in the local newspaper. James had visited him, taking with him some of Nina’s family photos and from those he had created this painting. It was not a copy of Nina’s photos but his representation of life in that part of Canada, with the prairies, a couple of distant wheat silos, the expanse of sky and Nina’s parents as the focal point.

Nina’s face showed her complete astonishment. ‘Can I take it home?’

‘Well, yes, but there’s a slight hitch,’ said James.

His bravado was gone and he looked embarrassed and shy.

‘Not yet. I told him it was your birthday but I wouldn’t have the money to pay him till next month, so we agreed he would finish it in time for your birthday but it would sit here in the window for a month. It’s been in the window all day. I was terrified you might see it before I had a chance to get the card to him.’

‘Oh, darling. How
are
you going to pay for it?’

‘Now don’t be so rude. That’s none of your business.’

Nina looked at her husband with new appreciation. ‘You are the most amazing man,’ she said softly.

From the verandah Leo watched a woman walk slowly across the lawn behind a toddler. She was patient, taking large occasional steps, keeping pace with the child who took dozens of little ones. The little girl was unsteady on her feet and every few steps she careered off in another direction, stumbling then righting herself. An elderly man smiled at the scene. He was sitting on a bench by a meticulously tended garden bed, roses swaying gently in the breeze. He was clearly enjoying the beautiful sunny winter’s day and the sight of the happy child and its mother.

Leo hated it. Everything about it irritated him. He tried to manoeuvre his wheelchair so he didn’t have to see the woman, her pretty curly-haired child or the contented old man. He rolled the chair back then forward, back then forward, till he was angled toward another corner of the garden. It was deserted and showed a bed of newly pruned rose bushes, scrawny and colourless. That suited his mood much better.

Leo wondered where the nurse was. Not the pretty, younger one. He didn’t like her tending him, touching him. Leo wanted the older woman.
She didn’t say anything, just coolly attended to his dressings then moved on. She was impersonal and professional. Just how Leo liked it. He didn’t want to make small talk, chat about what a sodding beautiful day it was. It wasn’t. It never would be again and he had neither the energy nor the inclination to pretend it would be. The new skin on his groin and cheeks was itchy and hot under the bandages. His buttocks ached where the new skin had been removed, leaving raw edges of flesh.

There were a few patients sitting on the verandah, some with visitors, but no-one approached Leo and the low murmurs of their conversations didn’t disturb him. He was surrounded by an invisible wall of pain. People could sense it even if they couldn’t see it and it made him uncomfortable to be around. His only regular visitors were his sailing mate Nick, every few weeks, and his accountant Felix.

Initially Felix had taken some urgent documents to Leo in the hospital to be signed – papers from Lloyd’s agreeing to a settlement and the sale of some shares to cover the agreed payout, plus some new investments that Felix had been working on for his client. But when Felix had seen the state Leo was in, he found excuses to visit every couple of weeks. He said he had more papers to be signed or decisions to be rubber stamped. It increased his workload considerably. He had many clients and to devote this much time to one while still doing justice to the others was a strain. But Felix was worried about Leo.

Leo’s body was healing but Felix wasn’t so sure about his mind. His eyes were lifeless. He had lost his spark, his humour, his interest in anything going on about him. Felix persevered, talking and keeping him up to date with what was happening in the world, while Leo looked at him blankly, signed what he was asked to, then looked off unseeing into the middle distance.

Part of his mind was still frozen at that moment back on the boat when he had watched the kerosene run up his arm and felt the flames ignite on reaching the spilt fuel, then the sudden, searing heat across his groin. He heard himself calling out her name in one long, drawn out yelp of pain and shock. It was audible above the roar of adrenalin, pain and flames. She had heard him. He was sure of it. He had seen her half turn her head towards him, then she had turned away, quite deliberately. Tiger had stood at the top of the stairs barking at him as he writhed across the floor, calling after Nina. Leo’s last vision, as the pain overtook him, was of Nina scooping up Tiger, leaping off the deck and running down the pontoon.

Leo remembered little of what happened next. Nick told him that because of the scorch marks on the bed he must have rolled around there for a while before bursting up the stairs, out of the cabin and flinging himself into the water.

According to the man on the next boat, Leo had sunk to the bottom of the marina and would have stayed there if he, the fearless good samaritan that he was, hadn’t had the balls to throw himself
straight in after him. He told the TV news and all the newspapers that he hauled an unconscious Leo back to the surface, singlehandedly got him onto the pontoon and performed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation before calling an ambulance on his mobile phone. With each retelling of his story, Leo’s plight became more desperate and he became more heroic.

Nick had a bit of trouble imagining this balding 60-year-old Pitt Street yachtie accomplishing even half of that, but no-one else came forward to say otherwise so he grudgingly accepted this version and passed it on to Leo.

Leo didn’t care. In the early hours of the morning when he sat up in bed unable to sleep, listening to the quiet sounds of the hospital, feeling muffled and claustrophobic inside the bandages, he wished he had been left at the bottom of the marina.

The past months had been hell.

When he woke up in hospital, his face was a mass of weeping bandages, his nose broken and his thighs and groin covered in gauze. Over the next few weeks they took fresh new skin from his waist, buttocks and back, leaving them tender and raw. The hair follicles on his face had been destroyed so while his eyebrows would never grow back, looking on the bright side, he would never have to shave either. The sweat glands in his groin were beyond repair so he may suffer some discomfort in the heat, but once the skin grafts healed he would be able to walk again. He was told he would never father a child. He may not be
the same smooth-faced good-looking young man that had broken hearts all over the eastern suburbs of Sydney, but plastic surgery would fix up the worst of it.

It took weeks after he regained consciousness for him to fully absorb what had occurred. Because his memory of it was incomplete, it remained surreal, abstract, something that must have happened to someone else. But eventually he accepted what the doctors told him.

He tried to reconcile the Nina who had given herself to him with the Nina who had left him to burn in hell. He had waited for her to come to him in hospital. He had letters from schoolchildren who read of his plight in the newspaper and created get-well cards in their art class. The Cruising Yacht Club sent flowers. But nothing from Nina. Not a card or a phone call. Finally he had given up.

Study became his therapy. He chose research, spending many hours bent over a microscope and working out probabilities. It kept him away from people and that suited him just fine. He didn’t like people so much any more.

But he never forgot Nina. He raged against her. He loved her. He hated her. He wanted to see her. He was a man in torment. It would take years for his body to heal and even longer for his heart. He was never again to be that carefree happy-go-lucky man who had danced in the rain with the stranger from the taxi. Eventually the sharp, brutal pain gave way to something more manageable, something he could live with. Whenever it rose in his mind, it
was a dull ache, like the dying nerve in an old rotting tooth that only occasionally flares up. He had his work, his research and sailing to occupy his waking hours.

Nina smoothed the deep red velvet dress over her hips. The bodice was low, revealing slender shoulders, while hugging her curves. If she stood side on to the mirror she fancied she could just see the faintest swelling at her waistline. It didn’t worry her. She kind of liked it. She was fourteen weeks and the doctor had said it was likely she would start to show around now.

The dress was fabulous, worth every cent she had paid for it. At first she had despaired when James had told her that the evening would be formal. She had tried on everything in Miranda’s wardrobe but the other woman was a much larger shape and nothing fitted. Then Nina had remembered her sock drawer.