Cooee (11 page)

‘Bianca Crawford,' he said.

‘Ah, yes.'

The Crawfords were old friends of Steve's and they'd wanted an ultra-special beach house. They'd bought a block near Point Leo and driven us down to show it to me.

It was a great block: bush and ocean together. It whetted my appetite and I designed something for them at greatly reduced rates, partly because Steve wanted me to and I didn't have any objection, partly because the land set my blood racing: it was exposed on one side, sheltered on the other, on a rise, facing south-west into the bay. It offered fabulous sunsets and lots of challenges to do with wind and light and blending.

I finished up designing something flat and rambling, full of light and space, with small windows where you didn't expect them, vast sweeps of glass where you did. There were two courtyards where Bianca wrought wonders with native plants. She did the same in the main garden so that the house, in spite of being elevated, settled gently into its surroundings. Almost immediately, the whole thing looked as if it was meant to be there, had always been there.

It was more complex, and better, than your average beach house: they intended to retire there eventually and well before it was finished Bianca was starting to say she couldn't wait to get there permanently.

They called it Granada, because of some holiday they'd once spent in Spain. I have to say none of it looked very Spanish to me, but it was their house and they could have called it Patagonia or Upper Slaughter so far as I was concerned.

It had been a lot of fun and a great success, one of those projects where everything fell into place: the builder was snappy but meticulous and the Crawfords hadn't done any of the annoying things people who commission houses usually do, like endlessly changing their minds, or being cowardly about the drama the site offered. It had won one award and had been nominated for a couple more, and I'd been told it hadn't missed out by much. I'd thought at the time I could bear to do more of that sort of work, but it had been five or six years earlier and the business had hotted up and taken us in different directions.

And here was this stunning man, with his divine crinkly grin, wanting me to design another one like it.

It wasn't until much, much later that Bianca told me he wasn't really a friend at all. His silver Audi had pulled into the driveway one day when they were out on the terrace. He'd been all diffident charm: such a beautiful house; had admired it many times; could he possibly see inside; how imaginative; how striking; how understatedly gorgeous; who on earth had dreamt it up? They gave him a cup of tea and they chatted amiably and then he drove out of their lives and into mine.

It didn't matter: I took no notice. It had been cheeky of him, to claim acquaintance where none existed, but not a mortal sin after all. I taxed him with it and we laughed together about his nerve.

‘I've bought a block,' he said, sitting down, all eagerness, passion reined in but peeking through, charisma blazing. ‘I want a house like Granada on it. Can I show it to you? Will you do it for me?'

I always notice a man's eyes first. His eyes and his hands. Max had very black lashes and his eyes were grey and clear and smiling. His fingers were long and strong; his hands tanned and sinewy. He had beautiful oval fingernails, very clean.

Silly, to remember a man's fingernails.

His voice was wonderful. It was a cultured voice but not affected. Deep, with a burr to it that might have been Irish once, a long time ago. Sometimes I would listen to Max without hearing him properly because it was the tone and lilt and timbre of his voice that entranced me, not what the voice was actually saying.

When he had gone I waited five minutes or so, and then strolled into the little reception area off which our offices, Beatrice's and mine, gave. Dawn was on the telephone. Bea was there, rifling through a filing cabinet.

‘Who was that?' she asked.

‘A new client.'

‘Where did he pop up from then?'

‘Nowhere, really. He's a friend of the Crawfords. He wants me to do something like Granada for him.'

‘Where?'

‘Somewhere in Hawthorn.'

‘He's got the land? In Hawthorn? Enough land for a place like Granada in Hawthorn?'

‘I believe so. Roughly, anyway. He said it was a big block.'

Bea continued to flick through the files, her disapproval patent in the sharp jabbing of her fingers and the stiffness of her back.

‘Did you meet him through the Crawfords?'

‘I've only just met him.'

‘You never knew him before he walked through the door then?'

‘Never.'

‘Izzie, why have you got that stupid smile on your face?' said Bea.

I hadn't known of it, but I got rid of it as fast as I could. Dawn put the telephone down.

‘You don't know him?' she asked.

‘No. Never laid eyes on him till then. Why?'

‘Well, I guess it was the way he walked in. He kind of looked at your door and said “Isabel in, is she?” and headed straight for it. Normally I would have given you warning, shown him in. But he seemed so confident, I thought he must be a friend.'

Max was always like that. He had an extraordinary capacity to get his bearings in a place, in a situation: he could walk into a room and know instantly what its layout was, who stood where, what strategic advantages it offered him, what traps lay in wait. He had a preternaturally keen nose for opportunity and a talent for judging when and how to sidle towards it.

‘As if he owned the place,' snapped Bea. ‘He looks like a con man, Izzie. Take care. Don't do anything till you get a hefty deposit.'

I thought she was jealous. I still think she was jealous.

They talk about love at first sight. Who can say? I don't suppose I really fell in love with Max during that very first meeting: it couldn't have lasted more than ten minutes, anyway. Who can say what it was or how it happened? Maybe I was having an active-pheromone day.

But the attraction was instant and I felt I'd never understood the word ‘magnetic' before. It was as if my entire body were composed of iron filings that had snapped to attention: every skerrick of me was drawn to him, yearning at him, screaming for him.

Later that week I drove to meet him at the site. It was winter: one of those cold, still mornings with wisps of mist still hanging furtively, swollen black clouds above. It was indeed a large block — almost a double block — in what the real-estate agents are fond of calling a quiet leafy street in the heart of Hawthorn. You wouldn't have thought such a site could still exist in quite so built-up an area: it must have been worth a mint.

I wore my black leather boots and my scarlet coat. Normally, then as now, I wore quieter colours — olive, biscuit, tan, cream, and always lots of black; but I saw this coat and fell in love with it, as they say. You fall in love with coats, with men, with babies. I was very conscious, on this pewter morning, of how colourful I was, how I moved through the dulled landscape, a splash of geranium-red against the muted misty background.

It was the first time I noticed this very particular effect Max had on me, that he forced me to watch myself so that I was constantly aware of how I appeared to him: it was like having an internal video of me running in my brain. It was to be the same when we were in bed. I was always conscious of how I looked to him, especially in my nakedness. It was disconcerting at first, but then I grew accustomed to it: when Max was no longer in bed with me, it was not only him I missed but the curious new perspective I had acquired of myself: grainy slow-moving star of my own private cult movies.

But that day we were not naked, not yet. He was in grey: charcoal Italian jumper, grey tailored pants, good black shoes. His hair was silvering: it must have once — not so very long ago — have been jet black, as black as his eyelashes, as black as my hair.

I walked around the block, marvelling. There were two grand lemon-scented gums at the north-west corner, great white shafts thrusting through the ashen air, dissolving into their pale plumes of delicate long leaves at their extremities. They were as mighty as cathedral columns, as white as flour, as bones. You could smell their crisp fresh fragrance in the damp still air. I could see how the sun would glitter off them, as it glittered off the slanting windows I was already imagining.

‘You'll keep these?' he asked, a shade anxiously.

I nodded. It would have been murderous to do anything else. Already I could see how I might use them: a half-frame to the entrance, great flagless masts off-centre from the main action. Granada had depended partly for its effect on asymmetrical angles and unpredictable planes, on nooks and sweeps and perspectives of sudden enchantment. I could do something very like that with this site, dissimilar though it was to Granada's ground. My fingers tingled with it.

The site was flat and scraped, unnaturally tidy in the way sites look when wreckers and backhoes have been through. Not much grass; no bush or shrubs. Only the two giant eucalypts. It had been prepared: it was ready for population.

‘How did you come by this?' I asked. ‘There must have been something here. You must have wrecked it?'

‘It was a cottage. Not very big. I moved it and sold it. They sliced it down the middle and took it away on two of those huge trailer things, with
Wide Load
all over them. Quite a spectacle, in fact. Then I had people in to clean up. It's all ready to go. A blank page, for you to draw on.'

Judging by the houses in the rest of the street, it couldn't have been too small a cottage. If he had the resources to do that, I thought, to dispense with what must have been a pretty good house in so summary a way, he had the resources to build a fabulous home.

‘You could have a pool,' I said. ‘It's big enough. Do you want a pool?'

‘Love a pool.'

‘Or a tennis court?' But I wanted him to have a pool: I wanted the house to have water near it, water as part of its thought patterns, just as Granada had.

‘Don't play tennis.'

‘Do you swim?'

‘All the time.'

‘That's settled, then.'

‘Not bright blue,' he said.

‘Sorry?'

‘Not bright blue. The pool. Something subtler.'

In the event the pool had latte-coloured tiles, shot through with a darker shimmer, like raw silk. It was a gorgeous pool: it twinkled in the sun with a pale, exotic gleam. Inviting, coolly seductive.

The house sprang around me. Stairs flowed in shallow curves; doorways unfolded; space crystallised into shapes: my head hummed with the rhythms of it. Its colours danced: colours of salt and bark, leaf and foam. Rainwater and sunlight. Gravel and moss. The texture and grain of it all curtained me. I was practically orgasmic with it.

He was watching me. ‘You can do something with it?'

‘I can do something good with it. I can do something very good. What sort of a budget are we thinking?'

He shrugged. ‘It's my dream house. The house of a lifetime. Of what's left of a lifetime, at any rate. No holds barred.'

‘I have
carte blanche
, in effect?' I could hardly believe it.

‘Absolutely.'

‘No limits? You're seriously telling me I have no limits?'

‘Not unreasonable ones.' He smiled. He had a crooked smile, a way of slightly crinkling his nose.

‘It's incredible. It's what all architects long for.'

‘Well, you've got it. I want to be in on the planning, mind you.'

‘You will be. Oh, you will be.'

‘And I don't want a mansion,' he said, glancing around at the surroundings, the old solid wealth on both sides. ‘I don't want something that shouts or sticks out like a sore thumb. I want something like Granada: I want something that nestles in, that belongs, and settles itself into its surroundings, something that you have to look and look at to see how beautiful it is, something you keep discovering.'

I nodded. It was amazing, the feel the man had for all I held most dear. I would give him a house that sang, a symphony of a house, a house like no other in the world.

And then, without warning, the sky burst and it poured. It rained as if it hadn't rained for a hundred years and the sky had been saving it up all that time. Max had parked his car, his silver Audi, down the road a little way. We sprinted for it. We couldn't have been more than thirty metres away but we were pretty much soaked by the time we scrambled in, tumbling over each other in the back seat, laughing, breathless, wet hair in our faces, rivulets dribbling down our necks.

Of course he kissed me. Of course I kissed him back.

I can't even remember in what order things happened then. I'd fallen into the maelstrom, and there was no way out.

It didn't all happen suddenly, not all of it. I know that. I did try. I tried to withstand it, to pretend it hadn't happened, but finally that was impossible. It was six months from that day, that first visit to the site of Rain, before I slept with Max; it was a year before I left Steve. A delay like that shows something, doesn't it? I did try: for a while I tried hard. But there was no point. There was nothing I could do.