'Dad gave me the time off,' the girl said. I felt Mike stand up beside me. I heard the sharp intake of his breath. 'I've come to give you a hand. I thought we could have our honeymoon early.'
Eleven
Mike
It was weird. You think of all the ways you're meant to greet your lover after a long separation - the slow-mo running together, the endless kisses, the desperate holding and touching. It's like there's an accepted protocol for big reunions, a kind of emotional outpouring, an affirmation of what you mean to each other. And all I felt when I saw Vanessa was this weird sensation I used to get when I was a kid, like when you're at a friend's house and your mum comes to get you before you're ready.
I felt guilty for the absence of what I knew she'd expected - what I might have expected of myself - and she picked up on it straight away. Like I said, she's not stupid, my girlfriend.
'I thought you'd be glad,' she said, as we lay next to each other later that night. That was the other weird thing: we weren't touching.
'I am glad,' I said. 'It's just been difficult here . . . I've been so locked into work that I've deliberately not thought about anything to do with home.'
'Evidently,' she said drily.
I closed my eyes in the dark. 'I've never been great with surprises. You know that. I was bound to disappoint you.'
Her silence told me she agreed with me on that point at least.
In truth it had probably been the most awkward twenty minutes of our entire relationship. She had stood there in front of the whalechasers, dressed like something from a fashion magazine, gazing from one person to another as she grasped the magnitude of her mistake, her carefully prepared smile fading. Kathleen had gone inside to fetch her a drink. Beside me, Hannah had taken advantage of the diversion to swig surreptitiously from someone's beer bottle. Mr Gaines had made a show of offering her his chair, brushing the cushion ostentatiously as if she were even more of an exoticism than she was. And all the time, Lance had joked about me being a dark horse, going on about it so long that I had seen Vanessa's confidence waver, and watched her start calculating how small a presence in my life she had been while I was in Australia.
And Liza had sat on my other side. Her face had been a Japanese mask, her eyes coolly registering this unforeseen element. I had wanted to take her aside, to explain, but it had been impossible. After about ten minutes, and a cool but cordial introduction, she shook hands with Vanessa and announced that everyone should excuse her but she and Hannah had to go in as Hannah had get ready for school the next day.
I felt her presence at the other end of that corridor like something radioactive.
So, several hours later, I felt vaguely resentful, and guilty for it. It was strange having Vanessa in that room: it had become so completely mine that she was a reminder from another life. I had become used to its spare aesthetic, and found the freedom to live without the usual accoutrements of home actually liberating. Having Vanessa there, with her matching suitcases, her endless shoes, the rows of unguents and ointments - her very presence - changed the balance of things. It reminded me of my life in London. It made me wonder whether I had been as happy there as I'd believed.
I felt mean even thinking it. I turned on to my side, and put my hand on Vanessa's stomach, which was covered with something silky. 'Look,' I said, trying to reassure her, 'it's just been a bit odd, with them not knowing about the plans. I guess you being here makes it a little more complicated.'
'You seem to have got yourself quite . . . involved,' she said.
I lay very still, trying to gauge what she meant.
Then she spoke again: 'I suppose it's such a small place that it's impossible not to. Get to know the people, I mean.'
'It's not . . .' I faltered '. . . your average executive hotel.'
'I gathered that.'
'It's very much a family-run thing.'
'They seem nice.'
'They are. It's very different from what I'm used to - what we're used to.' I was glad she couldn't see my face.
'You looked . . . at home.' She shifted beside me, making the bed creak. 'It felt really weird walking up to you in the middle of all those people, with your jeans and your fisherman's jacket or whatever it is. I felt like a real outsider. Even with you.'
She sat up and swung her legs over the side of the bed, so that her back was towards me. In the dark I could just see her outline and that her hair was messed up because she had been lying down, which made me feel oddly tender towards her. I didn't often see Vanessa with messy hair.
'It's been so odd without you,' she said.
I lay back against the pillows. 'I wouldn't have come out here if your dad hadn't had his accident.'
'It's only been three and a half weeks, but it felt like years.' I saw her head tilt. 'I thought you'd ring more often.'
'It's night here when it's day there - you know that.'
'You could have rung me any time.' Her perfume was potent. Until now the room had smelt of salt air.
'It's business, Ness. You know what it's like. You know what I'm like.'
She turned away. 'I do. I'm sorry. I don't know what's wrong with me. I just felt a bit . . .'
'It's the jet-lag,' I said, a bit shaken by her uncharacteristic wobble. Vanessa was sure of everything. It was one of the things I liked most about her. 'I felt odd for days after I arrived.' The idea that I could shake her was worse. I've never felt responsible for Vanessa's happiness - I didn't like the idea that I might be more responsible for it than I'd known.
I reached for her, to persuade her to lie down, thinking that perhaps if we made love we'd start to feel a little less like strangers. But she eluded me and, in a fluid movement, rose and walked round the bed to the window. The moon was high and the night clear so you could see the whole bay. The sea glinted like something magical, the lights from distant boats sending little ladders of illumination towards us across the inky waves, while around the bay the shadowy hills were dark with secrets.
'It's beautiful,' she said quietly. 'You said it was.'
'You're beautiful,' I said. She was like something in a film, silhouetted against the moonlight, the curves of her body faintly visible through the filmy fabric.
It's okay, I told myself silently. If I can feel like this about her it's okay. The other thing was an aberration.
She turned half towards me. This is the woman who is going to be my wife, I told myself. This is the woman I will love until I die. She looked at me, and I had a sudden sense of hope that it would all be fine.
'So, where are we with the planning permission?' she asked.
As I told Vanessa, there had been a few difficulties with the development plan. The previous day I had spent hours in the council planning department, going through the various forms that needed filling in, meeting the relevant officers. Over the previous weeks, I had reached Mr Reilly - on the highest rung of the planning ladder. I liked him, a tall, freckled man whose expression suggested he had seen pretty well every kind of application there was. I had gone in quietly, had made clear that we were happy to consider modifying our plans in whatever ways he thought might be necessary. I had deferred to him, conscious that I didn't want him to see us as simply a foreign interest keen to exploit his area. Which, I suppose, was what we were.
To some extent, my approach had paid off. Over various meetings, he had said he liked the design, the employment opportunities and the potential for regeneration in a traditionally less than economically buoyant area. He liked the knock-on benefits for local shops and traders, and I had emphasised the positive impact of similar developments on the local economy, using examples I had gleaned from other resorts along the east Australian coast. The architecture was in keeping with the area. The materials were to be sourced locally. The tourist office had expressed its approval. I had begun to put in place a website about the development that local people would be able to access, should they have any questions about it, or want to be considered for employment if it came
off. He raised a wry eyebrow at this, as if I might have pushed my luck a little. But, he admitted, I had done my homework.
What he didn't like, as I had feared, was the development's potential impact on the environment. It wasn't just the noise and disruption of the building process, especially in an area so close to the national parks, he said, but people in Silver Bay had strong opinions about restriction of their waters. He said that a previous attempt to introduce a pearl farm to a nearby bay had met with a barrage of opposition and the development had been cancelled.
'The difference between our development and theirs,' I said, 'is that the employment and other benefits are stronger.'
Mr Reilly was no fool. 'To some extent,' he said, 'but we've seen this kind of thing before, and you can't tell me you'll be ploughing the profits back into the community. This is backed by venture capitalists - British venture capitalists. They'll be wanting to see their return, right? You'll be in the hands of shareholders. It's not some community service you're proposing.'
I gestured towards the plans. 'Mr Reilly, you know as well as I do that you can't stop progress. This is a prime area of Australian waterfront, the perfect environment for families wanting to come on holiday - Australian families. All we want to do is facilitate that.'
He sighed, steepled his fingers, then pointed at the document. 'Mike - can I call you Mike? You need to understand that everything has changed here in the last couple of years. Yes, the proposed development falls within the envelope of what is considered acceptable, but there are other considerations we now have to take into account. Like, how are you going to minimise the environmental impact? You've not yet given me a reassuring answer. This area has a growing awareness of its whale and dolphin population, and people around here don't want to do anything to harm them. On a purely economic level, they're a growing tourist attraction in themselves.'
'We're not like the pearl fishery. We wouldn't be marking off huge areas of the waterfront,' I said.
'But you'd still be making some of it unusable.'
'It would only be with the same activities that tourists normally take part in, nothing large-scale or controversial.'
'But that's it. We don't get those kind of tourists round here - not in Silver Bay, anyway. They might swim, paddle out in a dinghy, but wetbikes, jet-or watersking are much noisier, much more intrusive.'
'Mr Reilly, you know as well as I do that in a place like this development is only a matter of time. If it's not us, it'll be some other corporation.'
He put down his pen, and looked at me with a mixture of belligerence and sympathy. 'Look, mate, we're all for development round here, anything that will help the local community. We know we need the employment and the infrastructure. But our sea creatures, our wildlife, are not an afterthought. We're not like European cities - build first, worry about the environment later. We don't separate the two. And you won't win over this town unless you can sort out the environmental stuff.'
'That's fine, Mr Reilly,' I said, pulling my papers together. 'Very commendable. But I'd have more sympathy with your argument if this week I hadn't watched two whales bullied half to death by tourists in disco boats, which didn't seem to be policed by anyone in your area. It's all very well for you to tell me that my development's going to have a negative impact - but the threat to the whales is already out there, far worse than anything we're proposing. And, as far as I can see, no one is doing anything about it. What we're suggesting is a limited development. We're willing to be as sympathetic as we can be to environmental concerns, to take expert advice and to be licensed, if necessary. But you can't tell me your area's a model for environmental excellence because I saw that dead baby whale, saw what prompted its death. I've been out whale-watching and, I hate to say it, that's an intrusion in itself.'
'You don't know that.'
'And you don't know whether a few waterskiers are really going to affect a whale migration that's gone on for centuries. There's got to be consistency about this.'
'I'll discuss it,' he said. 'But don't be surprised if it goes to a public inquiry. People are getting wind of these plans, and a few are already antsy.'
I had arrived home in a foul mood and rung Dennis, perversely glad when I worked out the time difference and discovered how long he had been asleep. After I'd outlined the results of my meeting, I was disconcerted to find that he could spring into life from a deep sleep with virtually no sluggish in-between. It was as if he had been processing it all as he slept. 'It's complicated, Dennis. I can't pretend it's not. But I've had a radical thought. What if . . . we shut down the watersports angle, made it more of a spa experience? We could really go for it, make it a Vogue-type thing. Where celebrities go.'
'But the watersports are its bloody Unique Selling Point,' Dennis barked. 'That's why the venture capitalists are interested. It's meant to be about sport, about keep-fit. It's about a total body experience, targeting men as much as women. A luxury leisure experience. Is this the bloody whale crusties again? What have they said?'
'They've not said anything. They still don't know.'
'So what's your bloody problem?'
'I want this to work on all levels.'
'You're not making sense.'
'Dennis, we'd have a lot easier ride from the planners if there was no risk of anything happening to the sea creatures.'
'We'd have a lot easier ride from the planners if you did your job properly and stressed what a fantastic opportunity it is for a depressed area, how much money everyone stands to make.'
'It's not just about money--'
'It's always about money.'
'Okay. But it's just that when you're out here, you also get a sense of the . . .' I ran a hand through my hair '. . . the importance of the whales.'
There was a pause before he spoke again. 'The. Importance. Of. The. Whales.'
I braced myself.
'Mike, this is not what I expect to hear from you. This is not what I promoted you for. This is not what I want to hear when I'm stuck on my arse in England waiting for news of a one-hundred-and-thirty-million-pound luxury-hotel development that you've still not secured the planning permission for even though you've been in Australia three weeks. Now, we need the permissions secured, and we need them superfast. We have to start building in a matter of months. So, you talk to your bloody crusty whale friends and go sing your whalesong, throw some money at Mr Reilly or get his picture taken with some Lithuanian lap-dancer - whatever it takes! - but come back to me in the next forty-eight hours with a concrete plan I can present to Vallance Equity when they turn up on Monday. Okay? Or the whales won't be the only things blubbering.'
He took a deep, shaking breath. I was glad that so many thousands of miles separated us. 'Look, you wanted to be a partner - prove you're up to it. Or, even though I love you like a son, you may find your arse imprinted with my metaphorical left boot. Along with your employment prospects. You get me?'
It certainly didn't need spelling out any more clearly than that. I sat back in my chair, shut my eyes and thought about everything I'd worked for over the past years, everything I'd looked forward to becoming. Then I thought of what Hannah had told me about her school bus. The lack of a library. 'Okay . . .' I said. 'There's one possible way through this. Do you remember me mentioning a thing called an S94?'
As Mr Reilly had explained it to me, it worked like this: for every tourist development in the Silver Bay area, the council generally expected a fifty per cent financial contribution from the developers towards the extra strain on local services - roads, car parking, recreational facilities, firefighting and emergency services, that kind of thing. It was not unfamiliar to me: we had come across similar provisions in other developments, and I had found there was usually some clause, as there was in the case of Silver Bay, that allowed for a waiver if the development was deemed of sufficient benefit to the community. I had usually wangled it on the basis of my research. Dennis had also achieved it - but hinted at palms being greased and compan
ies receiving lucrative building contracts. 'More than one way to skin a cat,' he liked to say, smacking his hands together. And everyone had their price.
The council document was a thorough piece of research, detailing not just the population projection for the area, but the cost of all the amenities likely to be needed to accommodate it. I began to plough through them, calculating the cost to our development, trying to highlight those that would have the most favourable impact on the public.
Continuing growth in the development of Tourist Accommodation, which is occurring over the whole council area, as well as the traditional coastal fringe, will create an increase in demand for the provision of council facilities . . . the level of demand on the facilities varies with the category and stay time at the Tourist Accommodation provided, but there is an increase in demand, over that of the permanent population . . .
I had sat up staring at the paper, thinking. But studying the S94 document, I had seen that we could turn this one on its head: what if our company offered over and above the contribution level, and brought with it, for example, a new library for the Silver Bay School or a new school bus, or a regeneration of the Whalechasers Museum?
During our meeting, Mr Reilly had worn the expression of a man well used to hearing it all before. He had probably had many such approaches over the years, and turned down as many as he had approved. But Beaker Holdings would not, like most developers, try to provide the minimum material public benefit to build its resort. Instead it would show itself to be a model for responsible development. It would provide over and above what was needed; it would be generous and imaginative and, with luck, we could use this development as a model for the next. It is fair to say that local-government projected spending does not generally make the most exciting reading in the world, but that afternoon, before Hannah had come upstairs and disturbed me, I had been as excited by a municipal financial document as it's possible to be.
Vanessa slept till after eleven the next morning. I lay beside her for some time after daybreak, glancing at her face, watched her shifting unconsciously under the sheet. Eventually, when my thoughts became too complicated, I got out of bed without waking her. Some time after seven thirty, I crept downstairs, let myself out and ran five miles along the coast road and back, enjoying the damp chill of the morning air, the sense of quiet and isolation that only running provides.