When the World Was Steady (16 page)

They rejoined the party when dance music started—Jenny’s doing again, Emmy thought—and then she was alone on the darkened fringe of the festivities. Until, that is, Buddy emerged at the far door, in conversation. With Kraut, Emmy realized, and with Frank. They spoke quickly and earnestly, and although the
arak
was making everything swim a little, Emmy listened.

‘… about it tonight?’ the German was saying. ‘Here?’

‘Just the basics. The dates.’ Buddy said.

‘Next month, I don’t know more.’

‘I’ve got to kick around here another month?’ Frank whined.

‘You can go to Bangkok sooner if you like. We can contact you there. As long as you don’t get yourself arrested on drunk and disorderly, like last time. Aimée can bring you the cash later. She doesn’t need to know. Kraut, just tell me, you’re sure of the quality?’

Drugs, Emmy thought. You’re paranoid, she thought.

‘You’ve seen the Polaroids yourself. A lot of temple carvings this time. And one—’

‘OK, fine. Are you sure they’ve got to go across by Chiang Mai? I would’ve thought—’

Kraut broke in: ‘It’s still the safest. Better pay off the scouts in—’

There was a sudden clatter and a mop of black curls pressed up against Buddy’s knee. He whooped and slung the small cloud of pink frills into the air above his head. ‘Hey beautiful! How’s my baby? How’s my Ruby?’

He twirled her and she chuckled, and Aimée stepped outside to join them. She wore a luminous white chiffon dress and seemed to move in a pool of quiet. A pool, Emmy thought, of hostile quiet. In the moment of her coming, Frank and Kraut managed to make themselves scarce.

‘Aimée, gorgeous!’—Buddy’s cheer struck Emmy as forced—‘How’s the mother of my daughter, eh?’ With Ruby still clasped against one hip, Buddy threw an arm around Aimée’s neck and slurped at it.

‘Busy as usual?’

‘C’mon Aimée, show us a little affection?’

He was twice her age, easily. It was unseemly. Emmy longed to leave but feared that she would be noticed if she did so, caught eavesdropping. Her head spun a little more, and her throat tickled furiously from the dregs of the punch. If she was going to cough anyway, Emmy figured, she might as well go back inside.

Many people, particularly the Balinese, had left. Suchi, for example, had apparently gone and taken her parents with her. The powerful
arak
had taken effect, and those remaining were speaking or dancing intently, above all intimately, like members of the tight community they were. Emmy saw Frank and saw him see her, and she cast around for any group to join to avoid him. A child molester and a drug runner, she thought. It boggled the mind.

Max and Jenny leaned by the front door. Emmy was on the verge of approaching them when she saw that their fingers were
interlaced, their feet shuffling into mutually satisfying crevices, their murmurings barely audible. She stood next to them, they next to the door, so she passed beside them and went out.

It was, perhaps, best. Elsewhere, Emmy had always held to her policy of leaving the party before there was no party left. This was part of her code, but she felt, nonetheless, that in this place, at this time, her code led only to anticlimax. There must have been something she had missed? She stood on the doorstep and struggled with an itch of anticipation that she hadn’t felt so strongly since adolescence: there were truths and adventures in the room behind her. Perhaps there was even evil.

But Emmy’s adult self was destined to triumph. She followed this tingling flurry with the thought that, among other things, the room contained Frank. Responsible Emmy reached for the railing and started down the steps.

‘Emmy?’ It was an unfamiliar voice. Or rather, a voice unfamiliar in the pronunciation of her name. ‘Are you off already? Let me walk you to your room?’

Buddy joined her on the grass. Emmy said nothing, but her heart jolted into complicated palpitations. He had seen her, she supposed, seeing him.

‘I’ve been wanting to talk to you,’ he went on. ‘All night. If only to tell you how great you look. Best-looking woman at the party.’

‘
Really
, Buddy—’

‘I’m not trying to chat you up. Believe me, if I wanted to do that, I’ve had plenty of time. It’s just—in the run of things, we’ve hardly spoken. And I don’t want you to think I’m an ungracious bastard.’

‘Not at all. Not at all.’

They had started walking, and strolled over to the low stone barrier beyond the pool site, to the point where the land dropped sharply and the view, in the daytime, was best. Now it was
merely an array of amorphous dark forms that seemed to Emmy to swell and contract with her irregular breathing.

‘I suppose I really wanted to say thank you, especially for being such a friend to Max. A surrogate mum, almost.’

Emmy frowned.

‘I mean, in the nicest possible way. Him and me, getting acquainted, it’s been a bit of a rough ride. And I know I don’t set the easiest example for a kid.’

‘I think this is a wonderful experience for Max. I really do.’

‘No need to lie. But he’s a good bloke.’ Buddy took her arm. ‘You would’ve thought we’d have met before,’ he said. His voice sounded peculiar. ‘Australia isn’t so big. Maybe when Max goes home, you’ll look after him?’

‘He has a mother, doesn’t he?’

‘She’s not your class. Don’t think I don’t know it.’

This struck Emmy simultaneously as vulgar and strangely exciting, and she wasn’t at all surprised when his thick face suddenly blocked her view of the night, and his lips landed somewhere between her cheek and her mouth. She didn’t resist, but he didn’t pursue the embrace. Rather, he took her arm again and walked her back towards her door. There, with the discretion and grace befitting, Emmy thought, a far more sophisticated host than he, he bade her a swift goodnight and departed.

Neither Buddy nor Emmy saw the fluttering white chiffon on the veranda, but Aimée had watched them, closely, until they had disappeared together beneath the veranda’s overhang beneath her feet.

Max couldn’t believe it. This was like a nightmare. He was stoned but not that stoned. He and Jenny: only minutes ago he had been tracing the outline of her shoulder, her neck, her jaw—and it had been fantastic, as if there wasn’t anyone in the room besides them.
She had looked pretty happy too. Or so he had thought. His stomach had been hurting, but he had hardly felt it; what had been bothering him far more was the need to pee. And when it couldn’t be ignored any longer, he had gone.

In the loo, the combination of his bladder and the aftermath of his shots had assailed him and, while peeing, he had almost puked. But he had finished and washed his face. He could guarantee that his malaise had lasted no more than a minute.

But now she was gone. There were still people in the room, even some dancing, but she wasn’t one of them. He looked on the veranda, where Ruby lay sleeping on a rattan sofa, and Aimée, impassive, chain-smoked beside her. But Jenny wasn’t there.

It occurred to him that she might have chosen to prepare herself, in his room, so he went up. But no lights were on, and nothing stirred but the gecko in the thatch. He went out to his small terrace, to see whether he could see her, wandering, perhaps, in the garden by the pool, or on the path towards the road.

And then he heard her childlike giggle. It came again, from next door, muffled by the half-open shutters of his father’s room and by the billowing curtains. But it was Jenny, no doubt about it.

Max took off his clothes, lay on the bed, and tried to cry. Short of tearing the house down, it seemed the only appropriate response. No tears would come, but as his eyes remained resolutely dry, great whorls of pain spiralled outwards from the bite on his neck.

He felt as though he was on fire. He knew it was the doctor’s fault. He got up to vomit, and his toes seemed to strike shards of glass with each step. Vomiting eased the pain a little, and brought tears to his eyes, but Max still felt as though he were being stabbed inside and out. Even his soul, he thought, was being stabbed.

He lay there and felt terrible and wondered whether he would throw up again, until he started to sweat and fell asleep—two things, both at once pleasant and unpleasant, that occurred at exactly the same time.

Emmy listened to the fading sounds of the disbanding guests, as she lay in bed and pressed her toes against the crisp sheet. She didn’t know what to make of anything any more. Buddy’s breath, so briefly against her cheek, had been warm, sweet and alcoholic, reminiscent of rum. She could still feel and smell it.

She conjured his stocky, athletic form in her mind’s eye and compared it with the lean, patrician physique of her ex-husband. William had never been sexy. She imagined Buddy meeting Pod, and she smiled. It would be absurd if, after all the tension over Pietro, Emmy were to bring home someone equally unsuitable.

But this was nonsense. An amicable kiss did not constitute a romance. Nothing of the kind. The man hadn’t bothered to notice her, Emmy knew, until she was somehow useful. He abused trust and affection; he chased girls, not women; he was possibly a law-breaker, a drug-dealer, even. And Emmy was not, she reassured herself, a fool. Absolutely not. But still, but yes, she had to ask herself whether, if the opportunity were to arise … And no, she didn’t want to, couldn’t, answer.

A
S
A
NGELICA REACHED
for the mixing bowl in which she intended to make the salad, she could feel it splitting, slightly, along its large crack. Twice repaired, it was really two halves of a bowl held together by Superglue and some obscure law of physics. An obscure and obviously defective law of physics. But Angelica had neither time nor another bowl; Nikhil was coming for supper, in a matter of minutes, and the salad wasn’t made, the salmon mousse hadn’t been decorated, while she herself was still in her slip, with her hair pinned up in a ramshackle, inelegant way. And Angelica wanted things to go well.

Were she to pursue her duty rather than her pleasure, she ought to be visiting Virginia on this evening. It was Saturday, and Virginia’s mother had called yesterday to say that ‘Virginia was feeling very poorly and might be for some time’. Unfortunately, she’d called when Angelica was extremely busy at work, and while Angelica had heard, and hadn’t forgotten, she had been unable to garner the details of Virginia’s illness, which, in a funny way, made it seem unreal. And of course she
had
invited Nikhil on Thursday, before she had known that there was anything the matter with Virginia, and there was a certain degree of duty—neighbourly, friendly—being discharged in this engagement as well.

Angelica, as she smattered her face with powder using a large,
feathery brush, decided to consider who needed her more, this being where her Christian duty obviously lay. Virginia, if ill, was most likely asleep; if not, then she was being tended by her mother—granted, an imperfect companion, but certainly her friend was not alone. Angelica knew that Virginia would be secretly hoping for a visit from her Angel, but were she to abandon Nikhil, he would sit amid textbooks in his little flat, alone and possibly unloved in a country far from home. Dismayed at the thought, Angelica squeezed rather feverishly at the pump spray of her perfume, and succeeded in enveloping both herself and her clothing in a daunting volume of scent. At which juncture, of course, there was a knock at the door.

Nikhil came into the centre of her sitting-room and blinked in the early evening light. She saw him eye the table set for two, and blink more furiously still.

‘Drink? What would you like?’ she twittered. ‘I’ve got both gin and scotch hidden away here—although you mustn’t tell Virginia. She’s practically signed the pledge!’ She paused, attempting to gauge Nikhil’s discomfort. ‘How about a glass of this delightful-looking Soave you’ve brought? Yummy!’

‘I don’t actually drink alcohol,’ he said.

‘Never mind then—you and everyone else I know.’

He settled on a mixture of orange juice and mineral water, which he held on his knee, looking dark and faintly miserable in the embrace of a voluptuous peach armchair.

‘I’ll be right with you,’ Angelica called from the kitchen. She hadn’t expected such nerves. She resolved to generate patter. Perhaps she would be visiting Virginia after all.

‘I hope you don’t mind,’ she called, ‘that I didn’t ask anyone else. I mean, you might have preferred it?’

His protest, from the depths of the chair, was feeble.

‘It’s just that I only ever see you with a cast of thousands—our neighbourhood God Squad! And I thought, after all those
helpings of cake and all the times you’ve listened to us chattering away, that it’d be nice for me to get to know you a little. To hear what interests you, you know? Really nice.’

There was silence from the sitting-room and then Nikhil said, ‘You’ve been speaking about me to Virginia Simpson?’

This brought Angelica to the kitchen door, from which she fixed his dark eyes with her large blue ones. ‘What on earth makes you say that? How very peculiar! Of course not.’

‘But she came to see me.’

‘She stopped off, I know, before the meeting on Wednesday, because I wasn’t home yet. I suppose, subconsciously, it may have made me think, but—’

‘So this is not a campaign to convert me?’

Angelica, indelicate though it was, guffawed. ‘To convert you? Whatever to? To our God Squad?’

He nodded.

‘Certainly not.’ There was a level on which she found Nikhil’s suggestion offensive, although this was in itself troubling, as proselytizing was part of her Christian mission. ‘Look at it this way,’ she said after a generous swallow of her gin and tonic, ‘the best advertisement for what we’re on about is our meeting itself.’ He made a face, which made her laugh. ‘OK, maybe not the
best
advert. But you
come
, after all, which is more than most. And you’re not even a Christian! So you see, if you’re willing to do our recruitment for us, why would we work overtime? If I wanted a potential Christian around for supper, trust me, I know plenty of them. I have other friends, you know. Unlike some of our number.’