'You sure?' The look of gratitude as I went for my keys told me just how tired Kathleen Whittier Mostyn, legendary game fisher and apparently tireless hostess, really was.
It is entirely possible that on paper I appear, as my sister would say, to be more of a player than I am. In fact, during the four years of my relationship with Vanessa, until the night with Tina, I had never so much as kissed another girl. That's not to say I haven't thought about it - I'm only human - but until the night of the office celebration, the idea of cheating on Vanessa had seemed so far from possible, let alone likely, that even as I held Tina's slim, hard body to me, as her hands burrowed urgently down the front of my trousers, some part of me wanted to laugh out loud at the ridiculous idea that it was happening at all.
I met Vanessa Beaker at Beaker Holdings, while she filled a temporary position in the marketing department and, although many people have suspected differently, we had been dating for several weeks before I discovered the significance of her surname. When I found out who she was, I considered ending the relationship; I really wanted my job, had identified the way my career might progress within the company. The possibility of jeopardising it over a relationship I was unsure about seemed not worth the risk.
But I had bargained without my new girlfriend. She told me not to be ridiculous, informed her father of our relationship in front of me, adding that whether we stayed together or not was no concern of his, then announced to me afterwards that she knew I was The One. Then she gave me the kind of smile that said the possibility that such a statement might alarm me was not even worth considering.
And I suppose I hardly did consider it. My sister Monica said I was lazy in relationships; I was happy for attractive women to chase me, and had had to end a relationship myself only once. Vanessa was pretty, sometimes almost beautiful, happy, confident and clever. She told me she loved me every day, although even if she hadn't I would have known it because she fussed over me at home, had an uncomplicated appetite for sex, and spent endless amounts of time and energy worrying about my appearance and well-being. I didn't mind: it saved me having to. And I trusted Vanessa's opinion. She was clever, as I've said, and she had her father's aptitude for business.
I didn't know why I had to defend my relationship to my sister, but I did. Frequently. She said Vanessa was too 'jolly hockey sticks'. She said I'd probably marry anyone who made the same efforts as Vanessa, who made my life that easy, anyone at all. She said I had never been truly in love because I have never been hurt. I told her that her version of relationships all sounded more like masochism to me.
My sister hadn't had a relationship in fifteen months. She said she was getting to the age when eligible men found her 'too complicated'.
'What do you want?' she said, when I telephoned her.
'Hello, brother dear. I've missed you,' I said. 'How's life on the other side of the planet? How's your career-breaking deal shaping up?'
'Are you ringing me to tell me you're emigrating? Are you going to pay for me to visit? Buy me a club-class ticket and I'll tell Mum and Dad for you.'
I heard a cigarette being lit. In the background a television burbled and I glanced at my watch, calculating what time in the evening it was at home. 'I thought you'd given up,' I said.
'I have,' she said, exhaling noisily. 'Must be something wrong with the phone line. So, what do you want?'
The truth was, I didn't know. 'Just to talk to someone, I guess.'
That threw her. I'd never before expressed an emotional need to my sister.
'You okay?'
'Yeah, fine. Just . . . just had an odd night. A baby whale died outside the hotel and it . . . threw me a little.'
'Wow. A baby whale? Did someone kill it?'
'Not exactly. It beached itself.'
'Okay. I've heard of that. Weird.' I heard her drag on the cigarette. 'Did you get pictures? Might make an interesting feature.'
'Take off the hack head, Monica.'
'Don't be so precious. So what, were you all trying to get it back in the water?'
'Not me personally.'
'Didn't want to get those designer trousers dirty, huh?'
Suddenly I felt irritated by her singular inability ever to be nice and straightforward with me instead of smart and sarcastic. 'We're not fourteen any more, in case you hadn't noticed,' I wanted to yell. But I just said, 'Oh, forget it. I'd better go.'
'Hey - hey - okay, Mike. Sorry.'
'Look, we'll speak another time.' I should have rung Vanessa. But I knew why I hadn't.
'Mike, don't be angry. I'm sorry, all right? What . . . what was it you wanted to say?'
But that was it: I didn't know. I sat there for almost five minutes before I realised I really didn't know.
I spied her walking down the coast road half an hour after I had returned from dropping off Hannah, the dog yapping for joy at her return. She was evidently exhausted and very pale, and the legs of her jeans were wet and sandy. When she saw me sitting at the beach end of the jetty, her expression didn't change but she stopped a few feet away from me on the sand, one hand raised against the morning sun. She teetered a little, and I wondered if she was slightly drunk. I looked at her differently now, knowing what I knew. It was as if Liza McCullen had acquired another dimension.
'You want to drive to the market with me?'
Silhouetted as she was, I could barely see her face. 'You're driving?'
'I guess you could drive me, if you've mastered the gear change on that Holden. Kathleen's too tired to go grocery shopping today, and she needs sleep.'
I figured it was as close to an invitation as I was going to get. I went inside to get my car keys.
To the British eye, Australian supermarkets are a cornucopia, strange yet familiar, with an abundance of brightly coloured fruit and vegetables punctuated by alien delights such as Violet Crumbles and Green's Pancake Shake. I didn't have much to do with the food shopping at home; either Vanessa organised it or, on her instructions, I hit 'repeat order list' on our Internet shopping site and it was delivered, neatly packed in colour-coded bags marked 'Freezer', 'Fridge' and 'Larder' - as if anyone in London had a larder. But as we walked round the cavernous interior of the Australian supermarket I enjoyed studying these new foods, found myself repeatedly calculating the cost in sterling - as if I had an idea how much the British equivalent cost.
Liza marched up and down the aisles, lobbing items into the oversized trolley with the confidence of someone who performed this task regularly. You would not have guessed from the dexterity and swiftness of her movements that she had been up all night.
'Anything you want in particular?' she called over her shoulder. 'Assuming you're staying a bit longer.' There was no hint in her voice as to whether that made the slightest difference to her.
'I'm easy,' I said, putting a packet of crackers back on to the shelf, and thought of the myriad ways in which that statement was true.
When she came to pay, I noticed that she had to rifle in her pockets for enough cash - crumpled notes, cents in various denominations - to make up the full amount. I made as if to interrupt, but her warning glance kept my hand in my pocket, where it rested on my wallet. I pretended I had been fumbling for a handkerchief and blew my nose so ostentatiously that the woman behind me backed away in horror.
As I watched, I found myself piecing things together, considering what now made sense. Her inability to let her surviving child out on the water. Her melancholy. Perhaps the child had drowned. Perhaps it had been a baby. Perhaps she had lost a husband at the same time. I realised how few questions I had asked her. How few, come to think of it, I had ever asked anyone. For all I knew Dennis Beaker might have a second family. Tina Kennedy might have left a convent two years previously. I had always taken people at face value. Now, suddenly, I wondered what I might have missed.
Liza McCullen had had a child who died. She was three years younger than me, and suddenly, next to her, I felt as if I had the life experience and self-knowle
dge of an amoeba.
We had been on the road for almost twenty minutes before we spoke again.
We passed the council offices, and I thought about the development, and my conversation with Dennis. I thought about something Kathleen had told me a few days earlier: that the only reason the area around Silver Bay had developed from bush at all was because Allied soldiers had built a base there. She could remember a time when there had been only her hotel, a few houses and a general store. She said this with some satisfaction, as if she had preferred it. I knew I should have said something by then. Part of it, I guess, was cowardice. I knew how she - any of them - was likely to respond. I liked them. And the thought of them not liking me . . . got to me.
And by then, after Liza, the distress flares and the baby whale, I was no longer convinced of the plan's rightness as we had envisaged it. There must be a way, I thought, to tie in the two sets of needs - those of our proposed hotel and those of the whalechasers. Until I had worked it out, though, I didn't want to discuss it with anyone. Not Liza or Kathleen. Or Dennis, no matter how angry he became over my supposed obfuscation. I sat in the driver's seat, trying to concentrate on the road, acutely aware of Liza beside me. The way she twisted her hair with her right hand when her thoughts took her somewhere far from where she sat.
I kept thinking of things to say, but I didn't want to give her the chance to retreat into polite conversation. I felt we had passed that stage. I felt, oddly, as if I was owed an explanation. And I kept thinking of the way Greg would grin at me that evening, drop thinly veiled references to their night together, as if he had been proven right in warning me off. I have met men like him in every walk of life: charismatic, loud, childlike in their determination to be the centre of attention. It's incomprehensible to me how they invariably attract the nicest women, and usually end up treating them badly. I imagined him sitting next to Liza on the bench, laying a proprietorial arm round her shoulders, believing, as Kathleen said, that he had a chance. But perhaps he had more of one than she thought. Who knew what lay behind the choices of the human heart? Liza had liked him enough to go to bed with him, after all. More than once.
But why him? Why that drunken, philandering, beer-swilling loser?
We were half-way up the coast road, the hotel in sight, before she spoke. Two boats were moored at Whale Jetty: Moby One and Ishmael. I knew them both now by sight, which gave me an odd sense of satisfaction. The sun, high in the sky, glinted off the blue water behind them and the dense pines that covered the hills were an unnatural lush green. Every time I had looked at this setting, I had imagined it in the printed images of a brochure.
'I guess you know what happened last night,' she said, without looking at me.
'None of my business,' I said.
'No,' she agreed, 'it's not.'
I indicated left and headed slowly up the track to the hotel, wishing suddenly that we were not so close to home. The car's clock said, unbelievably, that it was lunchtime. I felt as though I'd already lived a whole day.
When she spoke again, her voice was measured. 'I've known Greg a long time. He . . . well, I know him well enough to know that it doesn't matter for him. That it doesn't have to mean anything.'
I pulled into the car park. We sat in silence as the engine cooled, ticking its way into immobility, as we pondered the weighty realisation that she had deemed it necessary to say anything to me at all.
'Your aunt told me about your child. I'm sorry.'
Her head snapped round. Her eyes, I saw, were red-rimmed. It might have been lack of sleep, or the result of endless tears. 'She shouldn't have.'
I didn't know what to say.
So I leant forward, took Liza McCullen's exhausted, beautiful face in my hands and kissed her. God only knows why. The really surprising thing was that she kissed me back.
Ten
Hannah
Lara took me out on her boat. It was called Baby Dreamer and it had a pram bow, and a thwart, the name for the bench that went across the middle, and it was rigged as a Bermudan sloop with a mainsail and a jib, which looked like two triangles, one smaller than the other, and she had a little flag - a burgee - that told her which way the wind was blowing.
She taught me how to tack and gybe, the most important things in sailing, and to do these you have to use the rudder, the sails and the weight of the crew all at once. Lara and I had to shift our weight from one side of the boat to the other, which made us giggle, and Lara sometimes pretended she was falling in, but I never panicked because I knew she was joking.
I didn't tell Mum. But Lara's mum knew - she watched from their house - and I wore her spare lifejacket. My mum never says much to the other mums, so I guessed I was pretty safe.
Everyone in Lara's family sails. She has been sailing since she was a baby, and in her front room there's a picture of her, still wearing a nappy, with her fat little hands on a tiller and someone else's holding her round the tummy. She can remember sleeping on their yacht when she was really little and her mum said she was such a bad sleeper now because she got too used to being rocked to sleep by the water.
Lara has done a course at Salamander Bay and knows how to do all the points of sailing. These are all the different angles on which your boat can meet the wind, including a head-to-wind, which can send you drifting backwards, and a beam reach, which is the one that helps you go fastest. She said that when my mum agrees to let me use Hannah's Glory we can go and do the course at Salamander Bay, where they make you practise things like sailing with one sail, or sailing without a centreboard. They run it in the school holidays and it's quite cool if you bring your own boat, instead of having to take turns in the school one. I had asked Mum once about Greg's dinghy, since my party, and she just said a flat no, in the way that meant she wasn't going to discuss it. But Auntie K said to leave it with her, and if we were clever about it, Mum would come round. She said it was like fishing: you had to learn to be quiet and patient to reel in what you wanted.
It was quite warm, even on the water, and we just wore our fleeces. Lara's mum made us wear our lifejackets the whole time, just in case, and they kept us quite warm, so we didn't need jackets. The sea was calm and we were allowed to go between the two nearest buoys and left up the coast as long as we didn't go out as far as the shipping lane. Lara always does what her mum says. She said her dad knew someone who had strayed into the shipping lane and nearly got sucked under a steel container ship because they weren't looking where they were going.
The dolphins came out to see us near the point. We had stopped for a moment to get out our chocolate and I recognised Brolly and Brolly's baby from the pictures on Moby One, and I showed Lara her dorsal fin, which was the exact shape of underneath an umbrella. Her baby was so cute that Lara nearly cried. We were pretty sure they knew it was us - they didn't always go up to the whalechasers, but this was the third time I had been out with Lara and the dolphins always came to us. They always look like they're smiling. We spent about an hour just sitting out there by the point, talking to them and watching them play. Brolly's baby had grown about six inches since I last saw her and Brolly came up close enough to the boat for us to stroke her nose, even though she must have known we didn't have any fish. I couldn't resist touching her, even though Yoshi said we must never encourage the dolphins to come too close in case they thought all humans would be nice to them. She told me that last year, for no reason, someone had stabbed a dolphin to death down the coast. They just went out on a jet-ski and stabbed it with a knife. I cried, because I kept thinking of that poor dolphin swimming up to the bike with its lovely smiley face, thinking it had made a new friend. In the end I cried so hard that Yoshi had to go and get Mum to stop me.
Dolphins were Letty's favourite animals. She had four on pieces of different-coloured crystal on her dressing-table that she got for her fifth birthday. I used to rearrange them and she got cross because I'd been in her stuff. We used to fight quite a lot, because she was only fourteen months younger than me and Mum
said we were like peas in a pod. Sometimes I still think about when we used to fight and I feel really bad because if I'd known what was going to happen to her I would have tried to be nice to her every day. I say 'try' because it's quite hard to be nice to someone every day. Even my mum gets on my nerves sometimes but I'm always nice to her because I know she's still sad, and because I'm all she has left. I still have the crystal dolphins. One looks a bit like Brolly, so I called her Brolly and I've made the smallest one of the others her baby even though it isn't really the right size. But I keep them in a box now because they're precious. And because having them out just brings everything back.
Lara said, picking them up very carefully, 'Do you think about your sister a lot?'
I was under my bed trying to find something in a magazine that I wanted to show her, so I don't think she could see me nodding. 'I don't really talk about her because Mum gets too upset,' I said, as I backed out, trying not to hit my head, 'but I still miss her.' I couldn't really say more than that. It still felt too difficult.
'I hate my sister,' she said. 'She's a witch. I'd love to be an only.'
I couldn't explain it properly to her - but I'll always have a sister. Letty not being alive any more doesn't make me an only, just half of what I was.
On Thursday Mum asked me to take Mike his breakfast for the third time in a week.
'Can't you do it?' I said. 'I haven't done my hair yet.' It was really annoying as I like to put my hair in plaits before school and if you lose your rhythm as you're doing it they go all lumpy in the middle. Auntie K said her old fingers were too stiff to do plaits, and Mum never cares what her hair looks like so there's only me who can do it.
'No,' she said. Like, that was that. And she left his tray on the step outside my room.
She was being quite weird. I didn't know if it was because she didn't like him but she won't sit out in the evenings any more and the few times when she did she ignored him, even though he sat out every night like he was waiting for her. I told Lara it was quite childish, really, like some of the girls in our class who pretend you aren't there even though you're standing right in front of them.