When the World Was Steady (27 page)

They both moved with exaggerated quiet in the stairwell. Virginia thought of the two men at breakfast and wondered which door enclosed them. She wondered whether they had a big double bed, and whether they lay asleep in each other’s embrace, hairy forearms entwined on the coverlet. The idea didn’t seem alarming to her now, after all the cold wind, the running, the loneliness of the afternoon: it seemed warm and safe.

Just inside the room, on the blue carpet, lay a folded square of white paper. Kenneth Campbell, who preceded Virginia, stepped over it and fumbled for a light switch, but even inebriated, Virginia was meticulous, and saw it at once. It was a note from Angelica, of the day’s date, marked ‘7pm’.

Angelica’s handwriting was loopy and rounded, and she had drawn and shaded in a heart between ‘love’ and her name. Cheerful though the note was, Virginia could sense the disappointment behind it. She had a faint recollection that this couple—in particular this missing man—was to have held the answer, the key.

She could hear Kenneth Campbell peeing in the capsule lavatory. She did not come from a world where men were close enough to burp or swear, let alone go to the bathroom, but this man was in her bedroom, because she had allowed him to be. Virginia was suddenly shaky and had to sit down. On her own bed; she was careful; he had already sullied her mother’s sheets by intention alone.

He himself seemed awkward when he emerged from the bathroom, as if he had only just realized that he—or they—had done something out of the ordinary.

‘Small, ah, small facilities, eh?’ he ventured, looking out of the window. ‘Must be a nice view in the day.’

Their discomfort was sobering them both up: not, Virginia recognized, desirable. This whole sequence of events, she decided, was not pleasant, but there was a point to be proven and it was best taken care of efficiently.

‘That is your bed,’ she said, pointing at the one she wasn’t sitting
on. ‘I think my mother would be grateful if you didn’t use the pillow. I mean, she likes to, and two people—it’s not very sanitary.’

He went and sat on his bed. She could see in the lamp’s filmy light that his cheeks were dusted with grey stubble, and one of his eyes was ticking slightly. He tested the bedsprings with his fingertips and then lay back, deftly removing the pillow from behind his head before so much as a hair had touched it. He leaned it vertically against the bed, on the floor. He did not take his shoes off, and his eyes were already shut.

Virginia didn’t know whether this was an ideal or an anticlimax: she felt deprived of her fear. She sat, her body facing the room, her head turned to watch him. Long after she assumed he was asleep, he opened one eye.

‘Virginia Simpson,’ he said. ‘You can go to sleep if you want to. I may be a flawed man but I am not a bad man and you’ve nothing to fret about as long as I’m here.’ Then he shut his eye again. ‘We’re all frightened,’ he said after a minute, in a low voice. ‘It’s just a question of degree.’

Virginia held his words to her, closer than she had ever held her Bible. She didn’t mind when he started to snore, a great, gargantuan, bottomless rumble, wholly unlike her mother’s piccolo whistle. She just sat there looking at him, and then out to the black water, and then back at him, until, not so long after, it began to get light again. She didn’t even think to thank God.

A
FTER THE PARTY
, everything changed. For a start, Frank moved in. He slept sprawled on the bed in the main room and remained slumbering, imperturbable, for hours after Jenny and the others started work in the morning. Not even the pool-makers’ vigorous stone-cutting could wake him.

But his objectionable presence was not the only alteration. A weight hung in the air, heavier each day; Emmy could feel it. Aimée wasn’t its sole source, either: Jenny behaved differently, and so did Max (whom Aimée insisted on calling Christopher). Meanwhile, Buddy all but disappeared, and even the languid K’tut did not surface for a couple of days at a time.

Most people, Emmy knew, would take these subterranean currents as an indication that it was time to move on; but most people, she also told herself, would have something to move on
to
. Since the night of the party—since Buddy’s tiny kiss—she felt that she was accepted, by those who counted, anyway, as basically one of the family. And she was determined to stay where she was until she was good and ready. There were still things to be learned in the Sparke household. Emmy continued to imagine that her future (seeing as her past was gone) might lie somewhere hidden in this place: perhaps she, too, could belong to this tight community of misfits?

That said, Emmy was growing bored. Bored of the routine, or lack of it; bored of the pointed silences that punctuated many of the goings-on; bored of waiting. That was really the source of the tension, and possibly the reason why Emmy couldn’t bring herself to go: a full week after the party, everybody was waiting, coiled like springs, unspeaking. Even the slothful Frank was waiting. In the conversation she had overheard and only half recalled, Kraut had said something about ‘next month’. Next month was just about to become ‘this month’, and now everyone was so tired of waiting for whatever it was that they were all ready to burst. Which, Emmy reflected as she splashed in the hotel pool, beneath the outlet of the mountain spring, was all very boring indeed.

Emmy stood in the shallow end, her body underwater. She loved the way the refraction of light created a disjunction between what was above and what beneath the water’s skin. And she loved the way that her legs appeared to shimmer slimly in that other world just beneath her. That silvery, elusive self was much closer to the person she considered herself to be than was the matronly torso rising up out of the depths. When she lay in bed at night, in the darkness, with the cicadas singing, she was this aquatic being: invisible as it was to her, this was the body she imagined.

A fluttering at the edge of her vision made Emmy look up. Jenny was at the poolside, waving at her, with apparent urgency. Emmy swam over in a few brisk strokes.

‘Where’s Max? Have you seen Max?’ Jenny’s eyes were open very wide.

‘Not at all, not this morning. Why?’ Emmy had water in her ear and jigged up and down with her head tilted to try to get it out.

‘It’s not important. No, it is very important, but it doesn’t matter.’

Emmy stopped hopping. ‘What do you mean? I thought you and Max weren’t speaking. Am I the only one who isn’t to know what’s going on?’

‘Of course Max and I are friends. Do not be angry. Very good friends. It is only Aimée who does not like me. She tries to make my life very, very hard, and I worry that if she hurts me I will not go to Australia.’ Jenny, who had been squatting on her haunches, sat flat on the grass at the water’s edge. Her one long plait snaked across her shoulder and hung down between her breasts. She looked miserable.

‘What you really mean is that Aimée will make trouble for you if she finds out about you and Buddy.’

Jenny did not look at Emmy; she did not say yes or no.

‘But what hold does Aimée have?’ Emmy genuinely wondered. ‘She and Buddy aren’t lovers any more, are they?’

Jenny shrugged. ‘I only know the room I am in,’ she said. ‘I do not know the rooms of others. But there is also Ruby. Buddy loves his children very much. He loves Max very much.’

Facing the sun, Emmy’s back had grown dry and hot. All of her that was above the water had, in the heat, regained its fixed and freckled parameters. Even her bathing-suit was starting to dry. ‘So why are you looking for Max, then, in such a hurry?’

‘Buddy would like to go to Komodo, for the dragons, as soon as Max is completely well.’

‘Not today, surely?’

Jenny shrugged again. ‘I want to talk to him,’ she said, standing to go. ‘Maybe if you see him you will tell him I am looking.’

She turned and was heading off when she stopped and came back to the water’s edge. ‘Is it easy to swim?’

‘Of course it is,’ said Emmy. ‘Do you want me to teach you some time?’

Jenny nodded and then darted away, her plait beating time against her back.

Later, as Emmy walked barefoot up the prickly, stony slope to the house, she saw a car pull up on the road a few metres away. Kraut, who was driving, honked the horn several times and then
got out, his ears more pointed than ever. He walked over to Buddy’s house—with the awkward, halting gait of people wearing flip-flops—and began to shout in what sounded like German.

A vision in lurid batiks, Buddy appeared at the top of the stairs leading down from the kitchen to the road—the back way out. And in time to Kraut’s shouting, he sprinted down the stairs and along to the car. Emmy had never seen Buddy run. Even coming down Abang, he had kept to a stately, if athletic, pace. The two men got into the car, honked some more, to scatter any women or children or cocks or ducks that might take it upon themselves to round the bend at that moment and then, in a cloud of dust, they were gone. Northwards. Away from Ubud, but not towards Kintamani, either. Just gone.

The world settled back into midday silence, the sounds of heat and hovering insects and the distant whooping of voices and the thud of the stonemasons. Her feet stinging, Emmy passed through the carved Sparke portal and climbed the rest of the way to the house.

Except for Ruby, the main room was quiet. Quiet, but full: clad in his linen suit, barefoot, Frank lounged on the bed, scanning a tattered magazine; at the table, Jenny, bent over a massive arrangement of flowers, fiddled; while Aimée lounged in an armchair by the veranda’s edge, smoking and watching Ruby canter up and down, squealing like a banshee, naked but for a pink bow in her hair and her pink patent leather shoes.

Emmy tried to picture the scene minutes before: she attempted to rearrange the room in her mind’s eye to fit Buddy into it. Had these people been conversing with each other? Or had a deeper, more peopled silence prevailed?

As Emmy crossed to the veranda, Jenny flashed a squirrely smile, but said nothing. Emmy did not look again at Frank, so could not judge his reaction to her arrival. As for Aimée, Emmy
felt
her looking, and the feeling was not comfortable. Wrapping
her towel more closely around her, Emmy went to lean on the woven rattan balustrade and watch an easier world go by. No wonder, she thought, looking at the bare-backed workmen laying stones, and the waves of wriggling heat across the valley, no wonder K’tut did not come round any more.

After a long moment, Aimée cleared her throat. Not innocently, but in a deliberate way. Emmy knew this because she did it a second time and then, more impatiently, a third. Emmy turned to find that Jenny had slipped away, and that Ruby had been seized and silenced and propped upon her mother’s knee. One of Aimée’s hands gripped her daughter’s shoulder tightly, while the other twirled a lit cigarette in a holder.

Over the course of Aimée’s visit, Emmy’s sense of intrigue about this woman had turned to distaste and thence to dislike. Perhaps it was contagious: the effect of watching Aimée’s effect? Because there was no other cause: since the airport they had hardly exchanged a word.

‘Can so much smoking be good for a child?’ Emmy asked.

Aimée glowered. ‘I was wondering,’ she said, ‘how long you are planning to stay in my house.’

‘I wasn’t aware that it
was
your house. I’m Max’s guest, really, so I suppose it depends on him.’

‘As the mother of Ruby, I am the mistress of the house,’ said Aimée, adjusting the weight of her trophy child. Ruby was sucking her thumb, kittenishly tired. ‘I did not invite you and I do not know your intentions. So I ask. Because I do not like what I see.’

Emmy wished she were fully dressed. Her outraged dignity would have felt more robust than it did in a Speedo bathing suit. ‘Not only Max, but Buddy has asked me to stay—for as long as I want to. He has repeated his invitation. He’s even invited me to go to Komodo with the family to see the dragons,’ she lied, only a little—the invitation had been implicit, and he
might
have been about to ask, after all—to ensure that her position was firm. ‘If you
have a problem with it, surely you should take it up with Buddy?’

‘With Horace? Of course, you would say that. But women are Horace’s vice; they are
my
problem. And so I deal with them myself.’

‘What exactly are you implying?’ Emmy felt an involuntary surge of excitement: if Aimée thought that she and Buddy were lovers, then perhaps it was because of something he had said. It was, then, perhaps, a possibility.

‘I cannot see what he sees in you,’ Aimée said, with a disparaging wave of her well-manicured hand. ‘But I also have seen what I have seen. And I am asking you to go. If you do not, then I will make it impossible for you to stay. You may not think so, but Horace needs me. More than he needs you.’

‘I think you’ve seen too many old Hollywood films,’ said Emmy. ‘I really do. There is no connection between Buddy and me. We hardly speak, for Christ’s sake. I’m just a middle-aged
Hausfrau
on holiday from Sydney.’

‘Precisely.’ Aimée stood—gracefully, considering that she was hoisting the dozing Ruby on to her delicate hip. ‘You must understand my point of view. I was a child. Horace took that away from me, because it amused him. Now he owes me a life, and I must always make sure that I get it. I make the rules.’ She shook Ruby slightly and slid the child to the floor, where Ruby tottered half awake. ‘Come,’ said her mother, grasping Ruby’s entire forearm in her hand and practically dragging her to the door. ‘Nap-time.’

Had Emmy been able to whistle through her teeth, she would have. As it was, she laughed aloud at the absurdity. It was Frank who whistled through his teeth. He had remained prone on the bed around the corner throughout. ‘Cor,’ he said, ‘She’s a pistol, eh?’