‘Yes.’ I doubted that Bill Mountain would have thought so. The ten-year-old boy looked aggressive and resentful and the father looked exactly the same with more to be resentful about.
‘Would you care for a biscuit?’
I had a biscuit and drank the thin coffee. It was almost impossible to think of anything to say to her. She sipped and nibbled and took extreme care that not a single crumb fell on the floor. The only possible topic of conversation for us was her brother, but I felt myself being irresistibly drawn into the insipid artificiality of her milieu.
‘Bill’s been unwell, you said?’
‘Yes.’ She leaned forward, but adjusted her hands so that there was no risk of upsetting her cup. ‘It’s a weakness, you see, that William inherited. Our father was; i strict teetotaler, very strict, but Mother, well… and the weakness came out in William. It’s an illness, you understand. Mother died of it, and I’m sure it took years off Father’s life. William came to me for help.’
She sat back as if she was embarrassed at having spoken so many words consecutively. It seemed like an opportunity to advance my investigation. ‘ When did he come?’
‘Oh, let me see… it’s been so nice having him here, getting him his breakfast in bed and making him cups of tea. Goodness, he’s been drinking a lot of tea. It seems like longer than it really is-a week perhaps, or eight days. He’s been going for long walks as part of the rehabilitation. He said he wants to be fit for travelling. He hasn’t touched a drop, I’m sure of that.’
‘Walks?’ Hasn’t he got a car?’
‘Oh yes, it’s… somewhere.’ She ran out of steam at that point and looked vague. She drank some more coffee, a little noisily I thought, and ate another biscuit. I thought I saw a faint flush in her greyish skin and the hand holding the cup and saucer trembled a fraction.
We sat. The chinks of light through the slats of the blind faded and the traffic sounds receded from occasional to intermittent and then to less than that. The oppressive cleanness and neatness of the room got to me. I wanted to smoke just to flick ashes on the furniture and to drink just to spill red wine on the carpet. The room felt as if no- one had ever cleared a throat in it, or farted.
When I couldn’t take it any more I got to my feet. ‘Can I see his room please?’
She stood up quickly, nearly as tall as me. ‘No! Oh no, you can’t!’
No point in pretending anymore. I should’ve been on to it sooner; people don’t invite private detectives into their parlours without enquiring about their business. But her announcement that Mountain was there had taken me by surprise, probably as it was meant to do.
‘He isn’t coming back, is he?’
She shook her head.
‘When did he leave?’
‘He stayed five days. He didn’t have a single drink.’
‘Uh huh.’
‘You say you’re from Sydney? We used to live in Sydney, in Turramurra, actually. You saw the photograph of the house? That was the family home. My father left it to me and I sold it and came here.’ The flush in her face mounted and her tight mouth seemed to come loose suddenly, too loose. She clasped the hands in front again as if she was trying to control the flow of words, but she couldn’t. ‘My father left everything to me, nothing to William. He’d just have wasted it, you see.’
I nodded, and she shivered and clasped both shoulders with crossed arms, but the words kept tumbling out. ‘I’m a convert, you see. That’s St Mark’s at the end of the road. You saw it of course. Such a wonderful church. It’s so quiet here. I like it here. Of course the house is too big for me, but I couldn’t live in a smaller house.’
‘No. Can you tell me why you pretended that he was still here?’
‘He asked me to. He asked me to tell anyone who came looking for him that he was still here, and to keep them waiting as long as I could.’
‘Why? Why would he do that?’
‘Do you know William very well, Mr Hardy?’
‘Not very.’
‘Does he strike you as a sane, balanced man?’
‘Is anyone?’
‘Don’t try to be funny. William… people say I haven’t got a sense of humour and perhaps they’re right, but I do know when people are trying to be funny.’
‘He’s an artistic man, talented,’ I said. ‘People make allowances for that.’
‘They shouldn’t; it doesn’t change things. Mother was said to be talented and look at what happened to her.’
‘Did you know that William was seeing a psychiatrist in Sydney? ‘
‘No.’
‘He was… is. A Dr Holmes. He told me.’ ‘Do you know where he was going when he left here?’
She shook her head; the loose-cut grey hair hardly moved.
‘No.’
I’d had enough of her and her house and her piety. I moved awkwardly past the dresser with its photographs and china cups, and headed towards the front door. She followed me, still gripping herself as if she was wearing a strait-jacket. The cream doily gleamed in the dim light of the hallway. I turned back to face her. She’d revealed so much that was painful, that I felt I owed her something.
‘Don’t you want to know what this is all about?’
‘No. I’m sure it’s dreadful. I don’t want to hear about it.’
I put my hand on the door knob. ‘I still don’t see why he asked you to go through this charade.’
Her hands flopped down from her shoulders and her features tightened into a grimace that was like putting a face on mental agony. ‘He said that it would be a fitting punishment for anyone who was after him to have to spend an hour with a dried-up, boring, frustrated old bag like me.’
11
I stopped at the first pub I came to, which was two suburbs away, and had two double scotches. I stood at the bar, looked at the racecourse picture mounted on the wall opposite, and tried to get the desperate look in her eyes and the stiff set of her body out of my mind. It was hard work. I tried to think about racehorses, and Phar Lap and Peter Pan were the only names I could recall. The barman looked closely at me when I bought the second drink. The bar was almost empty and gave the impression of not having been full since the days of six o’clock closing.
‘Are you all right, mate?’
I looked at him and had trouble remembering who he was. There were seven stools lined up beside me, all empty. I sat down on one which shook with the trembling of my legs. I felt drained of energy as if I was in a low blood sugar slump, the way my diabetic mother got when she’d been on the booze for days and hadn’t eaten.
‘Yeah, I’m all right. Is there anywhere around here I can get something to eat?’
He told me there was a Chinese cafe across the street. I drank the scotch too fast and went out into a cool night that smelled of cut lawns, watered gardens and petrol. The pub stood at an intersection with a newsagent diagonally opposite and the cafe on the other side of the road from that. The other corner was occupied by a TAB agency. These were the first buildings I’d noticed since I’d left Miss Mountain’s house with the church on the rise at the end of the road; I didn’t know what suburb I was in, but it was a big improvement on Bentleigh.
Collisions with damaged lives were part and parcel of my business, but the encounter with Mountain’s wounded sister had left me more affected than usual. In some terrible way she seemed to be living in her future as well as her present, and the whole thing was as sterile and comfortless as her concrete driveway. Worst of all, I felt an odd community with her, as if I was a fringe dweller on the edge of functioning humanity too. I opened the door of the cafe and confronted the sight of people in gangs and couples, drinking and eating and having a good time. I couldn’t join them; I bought a couple of dishes to take away, got some cans of beer from the pub and ate and drank
