to a mean little cement porch.
I parked across the road from the conventional, respectable house, and mused on the differences between siblings. In this place wild William Mountain would stand out like boxing gloves on a ballerina, but his sister evidently fitted into the environment perfectly, like the gladioli or the shaven blades of buffalo grass.
The perfect orderliness of the street was somewhat disturbed by the rubbish bins which stood in front of the houses awaiting collection. Metal and plastic with lids neatly clipped on, they were very unlike the split, battered jobs in Glebe. But there were a few plastic garbage bags and even the odd cardboard box. As I watched number thirteen, a woman came from the back of the house carrying her rubbish bin. She rested the bin on the fence and opened the gate. A couple of steps across the footpath and she put the bin down on the grass near the gutter. This put it about a metre away from her neighbour’s bin which had a cardboard box next to it. The box might have been sitting on the boundary line between the two properties as it appeared on the surveyor’s plan. The woman looked quickly back at the houses, bent over and moved the box so that it clearly belonged in front of number eleven. I could hear the chink of bottles as she moved the box.
I watched her go back through her gate and down the driveway beside her house. She was tall, with dark greying hair and a very stiff upright stance. Bill Mountain was tall with greying hair but he had the slumped shoulders of the writer and bar-leaner.
I drove down the road, turned and came back to park directly outside number thirteen. I was in the wrong clothes to pretend to be a policeman or anything else. I took my time getting out of the car, and locked it carefully so that if she was watching she could see that I had a pride in property to match her own. I resisted the natural impulse to step over low gates; I opened this one sedately and closed it behind me. Then I walked up the carefully constructed and carefully swept concrete path to the front of the house. No bell. I took out my operator’s licence with the photograph under plastic, did up the second top button of my shirt, and knocked.
She opened the front door, but left a screen door closed on a hook between us.
‘Yes?’ Suspicion, hostility and disappointment, all crowded into one word. Standing in the raised doorway she was taller than me which meant that she’d be close to six feet on the flat. She was wearing a cotton dress with a shapeless cardigan over it. Her face was gaunt, with sunken cheeks and eyes, and the skin around her chin and neck was scraggy. An unlovely woman. I held the licence folder up for her to see.
‘Ms Mountain?’
‘Miss.’
‘Yes, my name is Hardy, I’m a private investigator. I’ve flown from Sydney today to talk to you.’
It can go either way-they can slam the door on you or open up and want to tell you the story of their lives day by day since continuous memory began. Miss C. Mountain looked as if she’d like to slam the door, but something held her back, perhaps the mention of Sydney or perhaps the loneliness that seemed to stand beside her like a silent l win.
‘Why have you come to see me, Mr…’, she peered at l he plastic through the wire mesh, ‘Hardy?’
‘It has to do with Bill, your brother.’
Her right hand shot up to grip her thin left shoulder in an oddly self-protective gesture. Her voice was a dry croak. ‘William. Yes.’
‘Well, he seems to be missing
‘He’s here. William’s staying with me until he gets well.’
10
She let her hand fall from her shoulder and then clasped both hands together in front of her at waist height. She was very still and her plain, bony face and the flat lines of her body made her look like the patron saint of disapproval. There was something wrong about her stiffness, but I couldn’t work out what it was. Her statement had caught me completely on the hop; I hadn’t given a thought to what I might say to Mountain, because I figured the moment of meeting was days away at the earliest.
‘Could I see him? Please?’ I said weakly.
‘He’s not in at the very moment. Would you like to come in and wait? He won’t be long.’
I’d picked her as the type that would send you off to your car to wait, where she could keep an eye on you from a safe distance through the Venetian blinds. Wrong again, Hardy. But in this business you have to be adaptable; I put the licence away and shuffled forward.
‘Thank you. Yes.’
She unhooked the screen door and stepped aside to let me pass her.
‘This way.’
I was in a small, carpeted hallway that held an upholstered chair and a highly polished table on which sat an intricately crocheted, cream-coloured doily. A telephone sat squarely in the middle of the doily. The carpet was thick and floral, and there were plastic walking strips covering it, which led off to a room at the front of the house. I followed her down one of the strips taking care to keep my balance so that I didn’t fall off into one of the bouquets of flowers.
She showed me into a lounge room that contained a glass-fronted crystal cabinet, a dresser made of the same dark wood, a couch and two chairs. A built-in briquet heater occupied one wall and the Venetian blinds were half-closed to keep the light down and protect the floral carpet which flowed into here from the hallway. With all the furniture exactly in place and not a book or a magazine in sight, the room had all the warmth and welcome of a prison shower block. She stood exactly in the centre of the room, as if she had marked the spot.
‘Won’t you sit down, Mr Hardy?’
‘Thanks.’ I sat on the nearest chair so that I wouldn’t wear out too much carpet by strolling around. She sat on the couch and we looked at each other in the dim light. I remembered that Bill Mountain had an engaging habit of lying on the floor, resting his glass on his chest and singing. He sang boisterously and the glass didn’t usually stay on the chest. I couldn’t imagine him in this room.
‘How long do you think he’ll be, Miss Mountain?’
She looked at her watch, which she wore with the face on the inside of her wrist. ‘Oh, not so very long. He went for a walk. Would you like some tea, or coffee?’
‘Coffee would be very nice, thanks.’
‘It’s just instant.’
‘Fine.’
‘Milk?’
‘Please.’
‘Sugar?’
‘No, thank you.’
She hadn’t smiled or nodded or relaxed her grim vigilant air for a second. She planted her long, thin legs in front of her and got up off the couch. With her mouth set in a tight, determined line, she marched out of the room towards the kitchen where I heard her making efficient sounds.
It wasn’t the sort of room you walked about in; there was the fear of dirt on your shoes for one thing, and the danger that you might knock something out of square. I craned forward from the chair to look at the photographs on the dresser. One was of an old, sprawling house, another showed a wedding party, pre-World War II, to judge by the clothes. The third was of a family group: the parents stood behind a boy and girl, who both looked to be about the same age, say ten. The father was a tall, angular character, closely resembling the Bill Mountain of my acquaintance and looking even more like ‘Bruce Worthington’ because he wore a short clipped beard. The mother was of average height and build, and would have been nondescript except that a hint of good humour about her mouth drew your eyes to her and away from the others.
Miss Mountain came back into the room carrying a tray which she set down on the dresser in front of the photographs. She held out a delicate china cup and saucer which I took in hands that felt like grappling hooks. She resumed her perch on the couch, cradled her cup and saucer in long, bony hands and let her eyes drift across to the dresser.
‘The Mountain family in happier days,’ she said.
