Down in the City (12 page)

Laura smiled a little. She believed in death, but she believed in life. She believed in the heart. When she went back to the pool it would be because it had water and sand and Anabel liked both.

She was walking up the hill, pushing Anabel's stroller towards the park where they would wait for Esther. They passed the bright, expensive food shops, the chemist's shop with its heavy air of French perfume, and gazed for a moment at the window where Madame Didet was showing a hat from her new collection.

From the canvas stroller came the chant: ‘Anabel got a shell! Anabel got a shell!'

As she moved on, Laura's smile was strained. Anabel had been having her shell on and off for three-quarters of an hour. ‘All right, darling,' she crooned. ‘We'll soon meet Auntie Esther, get Anabel a nice big drink of milk.'

She smiled modestly but gaily at a woman who stopped to compliment her on Anabel's sweet face.

‘There's a good girl,' she said.

‘Anabel got a shell! An-a-bel—'

‘Oh, please, darling!'

‘Hello, Mrs Maitland.'

Laura glanced round sharply. ‘Rachel! Goodness, you seem to have grown. I hardly knew you. Why are you wearing a coat, today? It's spring.'

‘Is it? I felt cold.' She dropped to the side of the stroller to kiss Anabel. ‘Hello, sweetie. Oh, you are a dear baby,' she teased, smiling at the little girl, delighted to see her.

‘And where are you off to this morning, Rae? I haven't seen you for weeks.'

‘I'm going to do some shopping—into town. Saturday morning's the only chance I have.'

They fell into step and walked on slowly, Anabel craning round to catch Rachel's attention.

‘I've really missed you, Rachel,' Laura said. ‘And I've been hurt, too. I think you've been staying away deliberately because you don't want to see me. I don't know what I've done to deserve this kind of treatment from you.'

A soothing, not disagreeable, sadness swept over Rachel as she heard this, and she thought how effectively Laura called up this emotion. She guessed that Laura's feeling was genuine as spoke, even if the scene and its result were calculated, and her own feeling beat true, too, in spite of a subterranean resistance to being conquered.

‘I'm sorry,' Rachel said, remembering past kindness, remembering that Laura alone had noticed she was unhappy, and that she had sometimes cared, which, short of performing a miracle, seemed now the most and best she could have done.

They were separated by a group of people who stood talking in the middle of the footpath. Rachel could hear Anabel's urgent cry. ‘Rae! Rae!'

They came together again and Anabel was pacified, her attention soon caught by the sight of a gleaming Irish setter prancing along in front of her. Laura had stopped to wait for Rachel, and for just a second before they moved on, she turned her glorious eyes on the girl.

‘I don't want you to apologise to me, Rae. But come up to see us sometimes after work. It doesn't matter if Bill's there. He likes to see you, too. And as for Anabel—well, she's been asking for you nonstop for weeks.'

‘I'm sorry,' Rachel said again, and Laura smiled at her with a glint of her old humour.

Rachel knew the expression: it signalled forgiveness and friendship and made her spirits soar, for no amount of critical analysis could alter the fact that, whatever else she was, Laura was wonderful.

They had reached the small public park at the end of the shopping centre, and as Laura manoeuvred the stroller onto the path, she said, all boisterous charm now, ‘What's all this about going into town? You can't run away like that. Sit down and talk until Esther comes along, and then have coffee with us at the Casablanca.'

Wrinkling her brow, Rachel looked at her watch. ‘It's awfully late and I'm desperate for shoes,' she wailed with the youthful abandon that Laura liked to see.

The older woman smiled and shielded her eyes from the sun as she watched Rachel's show of indecision.

‘Come on!' she said, knowing she would have her way, and went on down the path. ‘Esther and Anabel are great friends now,' she called. ‘Wait till you see! You'll be jealous.'

The park, which was square, had flowerbeds at each corner, and was dissected by two long paths into four smaller squares. At the junction stood a piece of sculpture, the subject of many and much juvenile delight, for the unidentifiable protuberances that chafed the aldermen were a joy to small rock-climbers.

Unfastening the straps that held her daughter in the stroller, Laura leaned back on the seat and watched her running unsteadily to join a group of children who were playing with a ball.

‘One piece of news I've had from your aunt is that you're going out with an Italian.' She raised her voice on the last word in the manner of a counsel for the prosecution. With a long fingernail she flaked red polish from another nail. Her arms felt cold.

Rachel pressed her lips together. ‘Yes,' she said, and thought of Luigi Roberto, whom she had met at work. A former classics master from Milan, he was twenty-seven, and had been in Sydney for three years.

Laura's eyes narrowed with triumph as she dislodged a piece of polish that had clung to her nail like cement. ‘There's no doubt you're a different girl since you took this job,' she said, tacking round the subject, her absorption in her fingernails giving her voice a tight abstracted note. ‘As long as it doesn't make you forget all your old friends, I'd say I was very happy about it.' She abandoned her surface mining operations and clasped her hands together.

All my old friends! Rachel looked at the sky.

The children were calling to one another in high, excited voices. Laura heard Anabel shriek as the ball fell into her hands.

Turning again to the girl, Laura said, ‘While I've got you here, darling, I want you to promise me something.' She paused. ‘I want you to promise that you won't get too deeply involved with this Italian. I don't mind telling you, Rae, I'm surprised your aunt hasn't put a stop to it.'

Anger tore like a whirlwind through Rachel's chest, and echoes of her recent appraisal of Laura lent it strength.

‘After all, dear,' misled by her silence, Laura continued, ‘what do you know about him?'

‘Quite a lot,' Rachel said stonily: that he had knowledge, that he treated her as an adult, and liked her to say what she thought. She knew that he was working to bring his mother and sister from Milan. ‘Quite a lot,' Rachel said, and Laura stopped, but decided to ignore the challenge in her voice.

‘I know you've been lonely, and I think every young girl should have her boy friends. But a foreigner!—I won't call him a new Australian—I don't suppose he's even naturalised. They come here and take the good things we have to offer and they don't even want to become citizens.' For a moment she was almost diverted to the fall of the Empire, but she saw in time that its introduction would be inartistic. ‘What do you say?' she asked, when Rachel was silent. ‘I know you won't like this plain-speaking, dear, but I talk to you like this because I'm fond of you. Don't be taken in by your friend's polite manners. You won't remember what the Italians did to the Abyssinians, but I can tell you they weren't so charming then. You wouldn't think so much of this friend of yours if you knew all that I know about the Italians, my dear little girl.'

Rachel was at home accustomed to a certain amount of ridicule: she had trained herself to listen objectively and test the accuracy of the charges against her. But that Luigi should be attacked because of her, made her despair.

In the old dependent days, afraid as she was of exile, she had never dared to answer Laura truthfully if that meant contradiction, but now, trying to control her uneven breathing, she said stiltedly, ‘I know you're thinking of me, Mrs Maitland, but generalisations about national characteristics, or anything else, are so pointless as a rule. Luigi's only one Italian. He's very nice, and you've never met him, so how can you warn me against him?'

Laura recoiled. ‘How dare you take that tone to me, Rachel! You're a very silly ungrateful little girl and I really wonder why I bother with you at all.'

To her astonishment, for she never cried by accident, tears of mortification came to her eyes. Apart from having a word like ‘generalisations' thrown at her, the unparalleled revolt had upset her badly. At her side Rachel, not less astonished by her utterance and her daring, sat quite frozen.

While Laura searched for a handkerchief, Rachel, horrified to see her tears, had to blink rapidly to keep back her own. Loyalty had never seemed more complex.

‘I never thought you'd speak to me like that, Rachel,' Laura said in a voice so grave that the girl had to force herself to meet her eyes.

‘I didn't say it to…'

‘What you intended, I don't know. But you spoke rudely to me for the first time since I've known you, and it's very hurtful indeed to see that you think so little of me. That man's been filling your head with ideas. It's what I thought would happen. He's changed you. He's probably a communist.'

Misery vanished, and, looking away from Laura, Rachel rolled her eyes. She thought if it went on much longer she would disintegrate.

At that moment Laura saw Esther, and a slight frown appeared on her face. Esther was saying goodbye to a fair, well-dressed woman who seemed, as she stared, increasingly familiar. She puzzled for a moment, and it came. Impatiently she tapped at Rachel's arm. ‘Wasn't that girl Angela Ford before she married? She was terribly well known when she was a deb. I've seen a million photos of her. Her people are rolling.'

But Rachel was no help. She didn't know. When Esther joined them she left to go to town almost at once.

‘Oh, goodbye, Rae,' Laura said vaguely. And as she walked away, Rachel heard her say, ‘Wasn't that Angela Ford you were talking to just now?'

‘Angela Prescott now. She's my sister-in-law—my brother Hector's wife,' Esther said.

‘Well, well, well. Imagine that!' Laura smiled. ‘I thought I recognised her face.' And, still smiling, she called Anabel and strapped her back into the stroller.

In the smart, crowded Casablanca half an hour later, she remembered Rachel and said, ‘I was having a dreadful time with that young pal of ours this morning.'

‘Oh?' Esther was noncommittal: she thought if it was true, it was a healthy sign of independence on Rachel's part.

‘It was about this Italian boy friend of hers.'

‘You've met him, too?' Esther asked.

‘No…'

‘I have. One night last week. I thought he seemed particularly nice—exactly the right sort of person for Rachel. I was so pleased.'

‘Oh?' Laura turned to Anabel. ‘Have another biscuit, darling? There's a good girl. Cigarette?' She held out her case to Esther, and when they were both smoking she smiled and turned again to her daughter. ‘Doesn't Auntie Esther think Anabel's a good girl, sitting there so nicely all this time?'

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The ceiling was thick with flies. Esther gazed at them with passive disgust for a while and then went to grope in the cupboard for the fly spray.

Her hand brushed over a jagged tin as it lifted the spray from the clutter, and, as she straightened up, she saw blood oozing with poisonous slowness from a long tear across the joint of her thumb. She looked at it indifferently, then, rousing herself, turned on the cold-water tap, squeezed the wound and held it under the clear glugging funnel of water. She dabbed it with iodine, and managed to tie one of Stan's big handkerchiefs around the joint, knotting it at her wrist.

Trailing in to the other room with the spray, she started to push the plunger, releasing the disinfectant, which rose in a strong-smelling mist, disturbing the black colony of flies, and fell again in a damp cloud on her head and shoulders. She held her breath as long as she could, and then, with a final burst of the spray, dashed onto the balcony, and gasped the air with relief.

It was hot. The sky was near white, heat-hazy, dazzling. It was a boring heat that muffled sound and slowed movement. The air that had seemed clean a moment before was dusty and humid. Her hair clung damply to her scalp. She would need a shower after bathing in insecticide.

She leaned on the balcony and looked out. She supposed, but hardly believed, that people were working somewhere out there: canning food, sewing clothes, making steel, while machines clanged victoriously, impervious to heat.

Hector, Clem and David all worked in cool, straight buildings, air-conditioned, marble-staired, high-ceilinged. And Stan—he could be anywhere.

The straw mules on her bare feet flap-flapped as she went to the bedroom to find some clean clothes, a thinner dress, then flap-flapped into the bathroom.

The cold tap three-quarters, and the hot, one. She tested the result and stepped onto the tiled floor of the shower recess. The soft warm water ran over her head, into her ears, over her face. She gave a groan of satisfaction as the heat left her skin. After she had washed herself, she shampooed her hair, automatically, while some thought, some memory, hovered dreamlike in her mind, just out of sight.

She dressed slowly, wondering what it was, not wanting to know, compelled, at last, to drag it from the hidey-hole.

Oh, yes. That was it. How could she have forgotten?

In self-defence her face assumed a wry expression to show to the mirror, but even so, she felt a little sick.

That doctor this morning—a Macquarie Street specialist, so he knew what he was doing—no children, he said.

She saw his face again as he talked to her afterwards, pale, smooth-skinned, steady eyes. He had been very kind.

Dr Burton-Travers. He has a good reputation. No children…Well, it doesn't matter. He said we can always adopt one if we want to. But Stan doesn't want children…At least, he said right at the beginning that we wouldn't want one yet. But I think he was making sure that I didn't, at all. And neither I do. I only thought it might…