Cooee (14 page)

I reason. I flatter. I schmooze.

‘No,' says Dominic, regarding me with unfriendly eyes. Eyes like pebbles.

I represent to him how splendid life will be with me, with godlike Max, in our beautiful house, sharing our bliss.

Dominic measures me with his stern and pebbly eyes, and finds my dimensions lacking. ‘No,' he says. And he will not be moved. Not then, not ever.

‘I told you,' says Steve when I tell him. ‘I told you, but you wouldn't listen. You never listen. What are you going to do about Kate then?'

‘I'll think about it.'

‘Well, don't think too long. She knows it's happening; she's worried sick. She's waiting for you to talk to her.'

But I talk to Max, first. I find this embarrassing, as in our previous discussions I have always assumed Dominic will be the child who joins us; I have assured Max of Dominic's virtues and painted vivid pictures of how he loves me and how he will love Max, how well we will all get on together, how beautifully our lives will mesh.

Max has met Dominic and has (I suspect) found him sulky and distant, but is too well-mannered to say so. Kate has played little part in our discussions. I find it hard to explain to Max that my beloved son doesn't wish to join us.

‘He'll come for weekends and so on, I imagine?' says Max, consolingly.

‘Well, yes, I suppose so,' I say, already hearing Dominic's flinty refusal.

‘Well, then. There's no worry, is there?'

‘No.'

And Max enchants Kate by bearing her off to various exotic shops where together they handle fabrics and inspect colours for the purpose of furnishing her bedroom: he even manages to educate her a little towards his own severe style of elegance, distracting her from the twee white four-poster and the ruffled pink curtains she at first covets. Kate has always had an unfortunate penchant for tinsel and frilly knickers.

It's rapidly clear that she adores him; at fifteen, ripe for crushes, deep in adolescence, she hatches a fully fledged worship of him. He's faintly amused, but flattered. I'm pleased, of course; and ironically it makes for greater harmony between us than she and I have ever enjoyed. But I miss Dominic's dark sardonic presence in my life.

I had little to do with Kate's bedroom, but I revelled in furnishing the rest of the house. For now we knew that we would live in this house together, that it would be not solely his but ours. We would sit on the patio during summer twilights; we would knock together dinners in the gleaming kitchen at the end of the day's work, we would dive into the pale beautiful pool. We were building not just a house but lives, furnishing not just rooms but years.

We would sleep together and make love in the glorious main bedroom, so spacious and light; and waking, would together enjoy the view, framed by the lemon-scented gums we had so carefully preserved. Together we would gaze up through the vast clear shaft of the skylight Max had insisted upon, directly over the bed, inspecting the weather in the mornings, the moonlight at night.

Normally I had little to do with soft furnishings: Bea used an interior decorator on a casual basis and we called her in when clients didn't have the time or the nous to construct a heart for the body we had made them. I was asked for advice sometimes: Bianca had got me to talk her through Granada, and she had done a lot of what I'd suggested. But here I could run riot.

Not that Max was the sort of man to run riot. Nothing but the best, nothing over the top, was his rule. In one sense he was reckless: he loved lavish gestures and he could spend more extravagantly than anyone I'd ever come across, but he wasn't stupid and he didn't buy rubbish. His taste was immaculate.

We fleshed out the house's skeleton together, choosing the carpets and timbers, the tiles and the paint. We spent hours there, experimenting with colour and texture, holding up drapes, comparing ceramics and woodgrains. When we had these right, we moved to curtains and furniture, cushions and pictures, lampshades and ornaments and lights. It was one long, incredible spendfest.

I'd never known anyone who spent money like this. Nothing was too expensive for him. In the living room we chose lamps that spilt pools of brandy and whisky; cushions the colour of burnt toffee and a dark honey, like honey mixed with rust, to scatter over the fine milky leather of the acres of sofa stretching in a soft crescent around the fireplace. I felt drunk every time I walked in there, intoxicated by the room's simple magnificence, the beauty of colour and sweep, stone and glass.

One evening I went there after work (it was before we were living together, and we used to meet there for an hour or so at the end of the day, for our daily charge, our shot of ecstasy). Max was standing before the fireplace (its façade a streaked amber stone) rolling something over in his hands. As I entered, he turned and held it out to me.

It was a sculpture, about the size of a grapefruit. It was round and smooth and startlingly heavy, a deep polished cream, marbled with the amber of the hearthstone. One's hands curved around it with gratitude for its cold smoothness, its satisfying weight and density. Its centre was carved into a hollow, crossed over with swathes of the stone, passing and weaving in heavy ribbons that intersected and dissolved back into the substance of the stone.

It was like a highly stylised version of one of those Chinese puzzle spheres that nest within each other, except that there was only one of it. I weighed it and turned it and stroked it: I didn't want to put it down. I cradled it in my hands.

‘Where did you get it?'

‘That gallery in Richmond,' he said. ‘The one on the corner, you know. It had those woodcuts you liked. Isn't it exquisite?'

‘It's perfect. What sort of stone is it?'

‘Don't know. I thought it might be onyx or something of the kind, but I think it's too grainy, too heavy. The gallery bloke didn't know.'

‘It's meteor stone,' I said. ‘It came flashing down to earth, just for us. It's our meteor.'

‘It is, too,' he said, hugging me.

On the day I finally left Steve, he wept inconsolably. I took little — only clothes, and a few books. He ought to have been pleased, that I left him with everything, that I didn't force him to a division of property. I wanted nothing. He could have the house; he could have the car, the shares. None of it meant anything to me.

Max bought me a new car. He bought me a Fred Williams painting and a crisp, glittering diamond ring.

Zoë spat bitter things into my ear. Bea wrung her hands.My mother cried.

‘You're just being bought,' she sobbed.

I didn't say that if Max had wanted to buy me he could have managed the transaction a lot more cheaply.

I did keep on trying to explain to them, to my family and my friends. But they none of them wanted to know. Even my mother, who was at the time so ill, even she — knowing death approached, knowing that within the year she would leave us — was harsh to me after I'd moved in with Max.

‘Thank God your father's not alive, Isabel,' she said. ‘He was so fond of Steve. We all are.'

‘Well, I'm not. It seems to me I'm the one who counts, here.'

She shook her head. ‘Of course you're still fond of him,' she said, impatiently, just as if I were still ten, a child who needed reminding of common sense. ‘This is some kind of mad aberration. You'll grow out of it. You'll regret this, Isabel: you mark my words. You'll regret it.'

She astounded me. I had thought Max would fascinate away her prejudices in five minutes. She was usually susceptible to personable men, and I'd expected Max's sheer good looks and fluent charm to knock her over, if not immediately, at least in time. She remained conspicuously unaffected; and her obduracy was reflected by almost everyone I knew. Kate was the only person to respond with warmth to him.

Everyone seemed to assume that I had been bewitched by his glamour, by the sheen and gloss of him. Of course he was glamorous; of course he was sexy; but his glamour and his sexual charge weren't all there was to love about him, and it enraged me that nobody seemed able to see this.

Everyone apparently assumed the man I had fallen for was nothing more than a silver-haired debonair stud, who had seduced me and bemused me with wealth and sophistication and flair. Was I so shallow? Did they think me so easily enamoured, so ripe for cheap enchantment?

His gifts were amazing. No less amazing was the manner in which he delivered them. If Steve gave a present, it was heralded and trumpeted from afar. It seemed Max's gifts slid sideways from his pocket, like those of some captivating and talented conjuror.

‘The start of your investment portfolio,' he said, kissing me as he gave me the ring. It had not just one diamond but three, set elegantly on a simple band of white gold.

I'd never known generosity like it, nor extravagance. It was dizzying, intoxicating. He would bring things home for us, for Kate and me — a bikini for me, a pair of sandals for her, a silk wall-hanging, a Mixmaster, a silver cocktail shaker, theatre tickets, a Swedish glass vase, pewter candelabra. I had to tell him to stop.

‘You'll be coming home with frankincense and myrrh next,' I said. ‘It's all getting ridiculous.'

He laughed at me, but did as I asked. He could see my worry about Kate: her world had been turned on its head and this giddy shower of presents was doing nothing to restore a sense of reality to her life.

So we all settled down, more or less. I continued to work in the partnership with Bea; Kate continued to go to school; Max continued to pursue his mysterious financial occupations.

Little by little, we made Rain the house we wanted it to be. We added pictures, ornaments, rugs. The pool was constructed and we admired its pale brilliance; Max employed the most expensive landscape gardener in Melbourne to encircle it in bright gardens and a tempting, shaded patio.

Summer came and we swam daily. I swam, too, though I'd never been much of a swimmer or a sun-worshipper; but I joined Max in relishing the whole experience: the clean cool splash of the water as we dived in, the ice-clinking drinks he made for us as we lounged on the long cedar chairs, the slow twilights.

It was rather like entering the heady ambience of an exotic travelogue, like seeing ourselves up on a wide and colourful screen across which privileged people, glistening like olives, gambolled expensively.

And during the short, warm summer nights we tumbled into bed and made love, Max's long lean fingers travelling across my body sensitively, imaginatively, always with a planned and steady vision of my pleasure, of our pleasure. Sometimes it was intense and direct and shattering; at other times, a slow journey towards the concentrated passion of our delight. He laughed at me; he said I had never been awakened before.

It was true. I came to Max a virgin in everything relating to sex except its actual prosaic progenitive happening. I didn't know about foreplay or afterplay. I didn't know about play. I didn't know about teasing, or timing, or waiting, or holding out, or submitting, or frenzy or peace or anything.

I had never understood the theatre of sex, its drama, the frisson preceding it or the harmony concluding it. Nobody had ever done these things with me before, and I was left astonished and breathless and disbelieving and grateful. All my life I'd been frigid, but nobody had told me; nobody had explained it to me. I'd mistaken the tepid enthusiasm Steve had sometimes managed to arouse in me for the real thing. And suddenly I had arrived in a new life, a life in which I was as new, as freshly awakened and untouched, as everything around me.

For a little while at least, life proceeded in this unbroken golden string of days, this peaceful meandering, isolated from the rest of the world. I remember we moved into Rain in December, just before Christmas. I remember it so clearly because Christmas was our goal, and we made it with only a few days to spare.

After Christmas, I recall it as if the months stretched out endlessly in the hedonistic vein I have described. It can only have been a matter of three or four weeks, however: we were all on holiday during January and it was January that gave us this magical spell. Then the spell was broken: there came a telephone call from Zoë, who had assiduously ignored me since I had left Steve.

‘It's Mum,' she said, without preamble.

‘Yes?'

‘She's dying.'

‘We've been told that many times these last two years.'

I was suspicious. Zoë had already made a number of claims on me by invoking our dying mother. I loved her, too; I cared that she was dying, of course I did. But I was resentful of all the emotional blackmail Zoë had already tried, and I was wary of sudden claims of impending death. It was also true that we had been on a more-or-less permanent alert, she and I, like people on a platform expecting a train that never comes.

Five years earlier, the doctors had told us our mother had a maximum of three years to go; two years ago, that death was imminent. Yet she continued. My father, a big strong man who looked as if he would last forever, had died many years before with no warning and astonishing speed. Frail and small as she was, the more murderously the cancer raced through her body, the more stubbornly my mother clung to life. When this happens, people say admiringly of the ill person that he or she is a real fighter.