Читать книгу Back of Sunset - Jon Cleary, Jon Cleary - Страница 5

“There goes the Iberia,” Rona said. “Lucky devils, all those people on it.”

“They’re heading for an English winter.” Stephen McCabe lay flat on his back on the sand, his eyes shut against the glare of the October sun.

“There’s more to life than climate,” Rona said, sitting up and staring out at the big white liner as it moved slowly down the harbour.

“Is that an advertising slogan? Maybe the British Travel Whatever-it-is could use it.”

“I wish you would be serious occasionally,” Rona said, still gazing out at the ship. “You can be so fantastically annoying at times.”

Stephen didn’t open his eyes, but he knew the slight frown that would pass across Rona’s face as she spoke. He knew every expression that accompanied every inflection of her voice; I know her too damn’ well, he thought, and knew what a burden knowledge could sometimes be.

Rona Goodyear was twenty-two and beautiful enough to take her looks for granted; she needed no more reassurance than the honesty of her own mirror could give her. She had no conceit at all about her beauty; it was one of the points Stephen liked most about her. She had thick auburn hair, cut short, green eyes and the bonework in her face was almost fragile: it was the sort of face on which suffering, if ever she had to bear it, would show plainly and ugly, like a scar. She had the sort of complexion that went with red hair and green eyes, pale and smooth as snow; her complexion had the impermanent look that snow had and you felt it was too perfect to last. Each time she came here to the pool, or went riding with Stephen in the open Jaguar, she smothered herself in cream and wore dark glasses. Now, too, she wore a large straw hat that, made originally for a peasant in some Malayan rice paddy, was now high fashion on Sydney beaches.

Stephen had opened his eyes and was watching her. “You’ll look even better in England. No sun to worry about.”

“I know,” said Rona, smiling at him from under the shade of the big hat, her eyes blind behind the dark glasses and the smile only on her lips. “It’ll be absolutely wonderful not to have to worry about freckling.”

“I don’t think I’ll look so hot without a tan. I’m not the pale type.”

“Darling, the girls in London will fall all over you, with or without your tan.”

“Still, when I’m lying in some Mayfair boudoir, all skinny and white, I’m going to miss all this.” He moved his head, taking in all the pool. “There’s something in my blood that needs sun. I’m a King’s Cross Neapolitan.”

He stood up, brushing the sand from his trunks and body. He was tall, over six feet, and his height made him seem thinner than he actually was. His physique was the type that never carried much surplus weight; when he was old, if he lived so long and sometimes he doubted it, he would have the thin look he associated with ancient greyhounds or Tibetan seers. His face, too, was lean and long, with the bones very prominent, as if the skin were stretched too tightly over it; they were strong bones and gave a look of strength to his face that was not always apparent in the set of the mouth, nose and eyes. His eyes were dark blue, almost black, a trifle saturnine but not without kindliness; they looked tired now and a little worried. His hand rested for a moment on the long scar on the outside of his thigh; it was the relic of the one time in his life when he had been in real danger, when he was fourteen and a shark had made a pass at him while he swam one dusk in the surf at Coogee. He was in no danger now, but the scar was a reminder of the past, and in the last few weeks the past had been coming back to him, sweetly painful at times like a grief that had not been an utter loss.

“I’m going to miss all this,” he said again, and suddenly sounded irritable, almost afraid.

“You won’t miss it,” Rona said. “Not really, darling. Not when we’ve got everything we want in London.”

“No,” he said, and looked about him again. “I had to work my way up to all this. I’ve got used to it.”

Redleaf Pool basked in the quiet of Friday morning. On the hill behind it, hidden by the trees and the houses, trams and cars went by in a rush: now and again there was the yelp of a horn or the scream of brakes, like the cries of animals trapped in a circus whose main ring was New South Head Road. There were no more than fifty people in the pool enclosure; these were the lucky ones, the well-to-do, the pensioners and the unemployed. Young mothers in bright swim-suits sat on the sand exchanging gossip, one eye on each other and the other on their children making a white cream of the water’s edge. Some old men, wrinkled brown flesh bulging above trunks as vivid as native lap-laps, sat in a row, soaking up what each knew could be the sun of his last summer. Four New Australians, pale as waiters, approached the water warily; beside them the children giggled at their fear and rushed at the water in a flurry of bravado. Some young girls, lazy with sun and the awareness that their doting parents didn’t require them to work, lay stretched on the sand like novice whores; the pool attendant, young and poor and required to work, turned his back on what he couldn’t afford and spat spitefully at a seagull. On either side of the pool, along Seven Shillings Beach and round the point to Double Bay, expensive homes and apartment buildings crowded the hill: in some places the apartment buildings overhung the water’s edge, glinting in the sun like glass-fronted cliffs: a woman sunned herself on a tiny balcony like a gull on a ledge. Up on Point Piper Stephen could see the homes of the wealthy, big ugly homes huddled together like reclaimed tenements. Rona lived up there with her parents in a Tudor-style mansion that would have made any self-respecting Tudor welcome the block. Residents of Point Piper had contributed little to the architectural beauty of Sydney: the original builders had little if any taste, and the later arrivals had been concerned only with the address. The Goodyears had been among the later arrivals.

“In London I’ll have to start all over again,” Stephen said. “I don’t mean I’m going to miss just the sun and the swimming.”

“What do you mean then, for heaven’s sake?”

Stephen considered replying for a moment, then he shrugged and let it go. He was too tired for explanations, and for the argument that would probably follow; if Rona didn’t understand by now what he meant, then she never would. It was the difference between ambition, which was her cross, and a desire for security, which was his.

“Sometimes you can be so fantastically annoying.” Rona had gone to one of the most expensive and fashionable schools in Sydney: its pupils were recognisable by their complete unawareness of any but the most extravagant adjectives. “I don’t know how your patients can stand you at times.”

“I’m tired, that’s all,” he said, but he knew it wasn’t all. “I haven’t been to bed before two o’clock any morning this week. I’ll be glad when you’re on the plane for New Zealand on Monday. I’ll spend the next month catching up on my sleep.”

“Darling.” There was real concern in Rona’s voice. She could change abruptly like this, from a spoiled self-centred girl to one who was aware that all was not right in the world of others. She did voluntary hospital visiting, and some evenings Stephen had seen her burst into tears at the memory of some poor unfortunate she had visited in the afternoon. It was one of the things that gave hope for her in Stephen’s mind; one of the things that helped reduce the slight shame he felt in finding excuses for her occasional demanding behaviour. She looked at him with love. “You’re working too hard.”

Ah, that’s spoiled it, Stephen thought: she has completely overlooked that she’s had me playing it too hard, too. “Maybe I need a holiday.”

“Come to New Zealand with Mummy and me.” Mrs. Goodyear had come from Auckland twenty-five years before, an ambitious nurse who had chosen an easier and more profitable career and married a rising young doctor; now she went home each year to the hostile indifference of her relatives, the local girl who had made good and who now talked of Sydney as home, something the Aucklanders couldn’t forgive. “We shan’t have to spend all our time with the ghastly relations.”

Stephen shook his head. “I couldn’t take it.” He bent down and picked up his towel. “I’ll see you tonight at Palm Beach. I’ll be at St. Vincent’s all afternoon.”

He bent again and kissed her: she tasted of cream, bitter as aloes. “Darling, why don’t you give up some of your hospital appointments? You have enough to do in the practice.”

Here we go again, he thought; but he was too tired to argue. “I’ll think about it. See you tonight.”

“I’ll miss you.” Rona did love him: she was sincere enough about that. “I wish you were rich enough so we could both be parasites. Never separated, not even for an hour.”

He grinned, and pressed the scarlet-tipped fingers she held up to him. Then he left her and walked along the sand and up the steps to the dressing-rooms. Rona watched him go, loving him but irritated by him: he was nine years older than she was, but sometimes she felt he was as irresponsible as a child. No, perhaps not irresponsible; unambitious, that was more like it. And perhaps even that didn’t describe him. He had been ambitious enough when he had joined her father in the practice; or so her father had told her. She had been still at school then, although her own ambition had already begun to blossom even in the confines of the classroom and the dormitory: she had never been a good student, but she had seen no limit to the future: she had failed in Maths Two, in History, in Science, but at fifteen she had been one of the most brilliant snobs the school had ever turned out. Socially, the school knew its reputation would be safe with her.

No, it was not that Stephen was unambitious. It was rather that he was too insular in his ambition. It was the trouble with most Australians; she was never sure whether it was fear or smugness that made them satisfied with their own horizon. She and Stephen had discussed this, had argued about it, every week now for the past six months; and it had slowly dawned on her that it was going to be more difficult than she had realised to achieve her ambition. Her ambition, formed a long time ago, was to be the wife of a successful London surgeon, a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, a Harley Street name, perhaps even a consultant to the Royal Family. It had been purely fortuitous that the man most likely to help her succeed in her ambition was her father’s junior partner. It had been almost coincidental that she had fallen in love with him at the same time as she had nominated him as her means to her end.

And now Stephen, like a man who had suddenly looked up at the height of the tower from which he had boasted he would dive, had become cautious. Or afraid.

“Darling,” Rona said, seeing him disappear into the dressing-rooms, and something like tears, of pity, for Stephen or herself, she wasn’t sure which, welled behind the dark glasses. Too few people liked Rona, and she had only herself to blame: her heart was hidden behind dark glasses, as if the better emotions were something of which to be ashamed.