The living room was a long rectangle at the centre of the original dwelling. Darkstained timber doors down either side leading off to the dining room, the kitchen, the study and the bedrooms. There were no windows. A subdued light penetrated from a louvred verandah which had been added by her father and which was separated from the living room by a fretworked blackwood screen. The room was furnished with heavy Edwardian pieces from Haddon Hill, the old cattle property out in the Suttor country. The low ceiling elaborately ornamented with geometric plaster designs, a heavy brass lamp on a chain hanging from a starburst of triangles at its centre. The stale, faintly disgusting smell of other people’s clothes. Other people’s lives. The anonymous, departed tenants. She would give the place a good spring-clean.
She carried the stone to the end of the room and stood at the screen looking into the front verandah, wondering where to put it. She knew she should have the courage to accept Bo’s invitation and go with him to the playgrounds of the old people. She should do it, she knew that. She should face the consequences of knowing such things. Go to his heartland with him. For there surely would be consequences. It wouldn’t be a free ride. Nothing was ever a free ride. The verandah ran the full width of the house, its louvres giving directly onto the frontlawn and Zamia Street. Angled against one corner was her grandfather’s old squatter’s chair. An enormous heavy black thing, low to the ground, its timbers squared, the wide arms and leg-rests flat and uncompromising. Was there ever such a design conceived in any other culture, she wondered? It was a chair made for an exhausted man to rest in. Impossible to read a book in such a chair. Impossible for a woman wearing a skirt to sit in without being immodest. The chair and the low table beside it were piled with faded back issues of women’s magazines and newspapers, copies of the
National Geographic
. A stained Persian rug on the worn floorboards. She turned and surveyed the room. Dead insects, dust and cobwebs over everything, white cat hairs caught among the cobwebs. Annabelle turned to an Edwardian sideboard backed against the blackwood screen. On the marble an alabaster bust of Dante as a young man in the days of his
Vita Nuova
. Leaning against Dante a framed sepia photograph of her grandfather in the last months of his life. The old man stood in the paddock behind the homestead. He was wearing a black three-piece suit and a narrow-brimmed hat, just as Bo had remembered him. He was grinning, posed beside an enormous roan Shorthorn bullock, Paddy, the companion of the old cattleman’s senility. She heard a car turn into the drive and the slam of its door. She put the stone down beside her grandfather and leaned to see out the window.
The voice of her sister called, ‘You in there Annie?’ Her sandals clattering on the front steps of the verandah.
Annabelle went out onto the verandah and unbolted the front door. They embraced and kissed.
‘Christ, just look at you!’ Elizabeth said. ‘I knew you’d be here the minute he told me you’d gone. Why have you got your mobile switched off?’
Annabelle surprised herself by saying firmly, ‘I’m not going back to him, Beth. So don’t start being an intermediary.’
Elizabeth said, ‘He’ll crumple. He’ll be a hopeless mess without you.’
‘He should have thought of that before he went off fucking his honours students.’
‘You’re being brutal. He was mesmerised. She’s got big tits and beautiful thighs. What do you expect? He’s only a man. She shimmered at him. They can’t resist it. Anyway it’s over. It was a little burst of glory for him. He needs you now. You’re his reality.’
‘I never want to see him again.’
‘Grow up for God’s sake, Annie! He’s just had a little affair. None of us are perfect. You’ve got to let them have a bit of fun now and again.’
‘It’s not that. It’s not him I’m thinking of. It’s me. I’m suddenly free to decide things. I haven’t been free since I was in my twenties.’
Elizabeth said incredulously, ‘Free? You’re not a bloody hippie, are you? Who’s free, for Christ’s sake?’ She stepped into the living room and looked around. ‘God this place stinks. You’d better move in with me for the time being.’
Annabelle followed her sister. ‘He humiliated me. He discarded me without a thought.’
Elizabeth turned and looked at her. ‘You’re being melodramatic.’
‘You can scoff if you like, but for the moment I want to enjoy my freedom. Susan’s been fantastic. She understands.’
Elizabeth said drily, ‘Susan Bassett’s a man-hater.’
‘No she’s not.’
‘She’s never had to deal with this stuff. You’re being too tough on Steven. You’re being unbalanced.’ She stood looking at Elizabeth. ‘Come on, get some clothes on. I’ll shout you lunch. Give yourself a week or two.’ She put her arm through Annabelle’s. ‘Europe was wonderful. I want to live in Paris. I’m going to see if I can wangle it. You’ve got a department of foreign travel and rorts at that uni where you work haven’t you? My French was better than I’d thought. Not the left bank though. Somewhere near the Madeleine. One of those little business streets with six houses in it and a little North African café at the end.’
They went together into the bedroom.
Annabelle looked through the things in the suitcase she’d brought with her from Melbourne. She pulled out a pair of jeans and a white top. ‘You’re looking pretty good for a jet-lagged world traveller.’
Elizabeth said, ‘Thanks.’ She sat on the bed and crossed her legs, observing herself in the wardrobe mirror. She was thin. Older than Annabelle. Below the foundation line on her neck an unhealthy sallowness of her skin against the warm brown tones of her expensive linen dress. A gold wedding band on her left hand, a plain gold bangle on her right wrist, discreet gold pins in her ears, her tinted hair stylish and severe. In her brown eyes a sadness. The worn, discontented, regretful look of an unhappy woman. ‘Mum and dad’s old room,’ she said. ‘Just think of them in here. It all loses its vitality so quickly. The past terrifies me. I didn’t let Peter take any photos this time. As soon as I have a photo taken of myself I think of the photos in those horrible albums of mum and dad’s.’ She looked around as if she expected to see the family snapshot albums. ‘You look at yourself and you’re nearly fifty looking at yourself being twenty and it only seems a minute.’ She smoothed the front of her dress with her hands, admiring her flat stomach, the action caressing and affectionate, for the dress and for herself, pleasure and anxiety in equal measures.
Annabelle was ready. She stood looking at her sister. ‘It’s a beautiful dress.’
‘It’s Italian.’
They admired the brown dress.
Annabelle said, ‘I can’t wear brown. It’s lovely on you. It’s just the colour of your eyes.’
Elizabeth stood up and hugged her, a tear glistening suddenly in the corners of her eyes that were the colour of her dress.
Annabelle said, ‘I met Bo Rennie.’
‘That old charmer. Where did you meet him?’
‘I’ve just been down to Burranbah with him and Susan. You knew him? I mean more than I did. He was just somebody whose name I heard.’
‘About a hundred years ago in Mount Coolon. We run into each other here from time to time. It’s impossible to avoid people in Townsville.’
On their way out, Elizabeth said, ‘We’ll have to get rid of this gloomy old furniture of mum and dad’s before we sell this place. It devalues the house.’
Elizabeth said, ‘Remember how dark the house was when we were kids at Haddon Hill? They did everything in those days to keep the daylight out of their houses. Do people still live like that out there?’ She touched the carved backrest of a settee. ‘This wasn’t really mum and dad’s, though, was it? I mean, it was grandma and grandpa’s originally. It’s been in our family for ever.’
‘Mum and dad never changed it, did they? They lived with it their entire lives. They could have changed it if they’d wanted to change it. It’s ghastly.’ There was a pedantic insistence in Elizabeth’s delivery, as if she were correcting her sister’s misperception of how things had been with their parents. She went out and down the steps. Annabelle followed her and they got into Elizabeth’s maroon Camry, their sense of disagreement silencing them. The old pattern of their early relationship reasserting itself. Their desire to be close thwarted by an embedded rivalry. Annabelle thought of it as Elizabeth’s determination to remain the older sister. To always be the one to know. It was beyond their control. The truth was, Annabelle admitted to herself, she had always found it hard to like her sister. If they had not been sisters, she doubted if she would have persisted with the relationship.
Over lunch she irritated Elizabeth even more by refusing her offer of a bed at her flat for a day or two. But she knew that if Steven followed her to Townsville, at Elizabeth’s flat her position would be weak. She would feel uprooted and vulnerable there. Whereas if she were properly established in her parents’ house in Zamia Street she would be more capable of resisting him. After lunch Annabelle walked to the Kmart on her own and loaded a trolley with groceries, meat, vegetables and household cleaners. It made her feel normal and in charge of her life. She caught a taxi back to Zamia Street with her haul. Before putting the shopping away she set about cleaning the old Bel-Air refrigerator and scrubbing out the kitchen cupboards. There were drifts of mouse droppings in the drawers and cupboards and their pungent smell was everywhere. After the cupboards and the refrigerator she kept going, working herself into a cleaning frenzy, and by the time she gave up it was past midnight. She had almost restored the kitchen to the place her mother had once felt at home in.
She had a shower and went to bed. She lay wide awake in her parents’ old bed, her muscles aching, gazing up through the open shutters at the tropical sky and she thought of her mother lying awake gazing out at the same patch of starlit sky. ‘I am in my stronghold,’ she whispered and went to sleep.
It was towards noon the following day. She had opened all the windows and doors in the house and was on her knees scrubbing the lino, when she heard a car pull into the sideway. She knew it would be Steven in a taxi from the airport. She would not be surprised if Elizabeth was with him. She stood up and wiped the sweat from her face, and tried to compose her mind for the confrontation. She murmured, ‘Wish me luck, mum,’ and went out onto the side steps. Bo was stepping down from the cabin of Susan’s Pajero.
Annabelle felt a surge of relief and happiness to see him.
He turned and raised his hat, grinning and holding up a plastic bag in his other hand for her to see. ‘I brought some mangrove jacks for your lunch.’
He was obviously not brooding on her failure to respond with the right level of enthusiasm to his offer to take her to his heartland. Seeing him made her think of Burranbah and the poisoned boxforest. She saw herself walking the stony ridges of the Isaac with him. She called, ‘You’re my first visitor.’
He shut the door of the Pajero and walked across. He came up the steps and opened the neck of the bag for her to see. They stood together looking in at the blue-grey bodies of the fish, rainbow gleams along the rise of their immaculate flanks. ‘Mangrove jacks,’ he said softly, as if he confided secret information. ‘They’re sweet little fellers.’ He looked her up and down and grinned. ‘You’ve got up a pretty good sweat there.’
‘Come and look.’ She went ahead of him into the kitchen. She pointed at the lino. ‘See the line where I’ve done and where it’s still dirty?’
He shook his head with admiration. ‘You’re a worker all right.’
She opened a cupboard. ‘See? All clean and stocked up. Will you stay for lunch? I’ve got heaps of food. Not like Dougald’s place.’
‘The old Dougald’s supplies gets eaten out pretty quick by that big boy of his.’ Bo set the bag of fish on the draining board. ‘I’ll clean these fellers. We’ll grill them whole.’ He gestured at the stove. ‘You got a gas griller there that’ll do the job. You cleaned her too by the look of it.’ He waved his hand. ‘You get on with your scrubbing. I don’t mean to stop you.’
She went over and looked at the fish where he’d tipped them out on the steel draining board. ‘Did you catch them yourself?’
He gestured towards the door, ‘You can always get yourself a feed of fish down that Black River boat ramp if you got the right bait. They was jumping onto the hook this morning. I’ll take you down there one of these days.’ He looked at her quickly. ‘You like fish, don’t you?’
‘I love fish.’
‘I see you got plenty of lemons on that tree out there. You gotta have lemons with fish.’
They stood looking out the open window at a big old broken lemon tree.
There was a moment of silence between them and a slight awkwardness.
Bo cleared his throat and looked at her, as if he wished to explain himself. ‘I’m taking Arner and Trace down that Ranna Valley with me on Monday. I’m gonna do that preliminary survey for Les Marra. He’s bringing the dam company people down in a helicopter. He wants me there doing the survey when they visit.’ He fell silent. He made a throwing motion at the half-cleaned lino and the room. ‘You’re cleaning the house, and you’ve stocked up on food. So I reckon you’re not leaving right away?’
‘No,’ she said. She stood looking at the lino with him. ‘I don’t feel ready to go back to Melbourne yet.’
He said, ‘I don’t know whether you thought about what Susan was saying in the servo at Bowen the other day?’
‘About going to Ranna, you mean?’
‘That’s it.’
She met his gaze. ‘I’d like to go,’ she said. ‘But I don’t want to impose.’
He nodded. ‘You won’t be imposing.’ He waited. ‘Trace asked me if you’d be coming.’
‘Did she?’ Annabelle was touched by Trace’s interest.
‘She’s a pretty sharp kid that one.’ He grinned. ‘She’s not as tough as she makes out.’
‘What did you tell her?’
He took off his hat and set it on the benchtop on its crown and ran his fingers through his hair. He turned back and looked at her. ‘I told her you was coming.’
Annabelle made a small involuntary sound of pleased surprise.
They stood looking at each other.