Saturn Over the Water (30 page)

When we awoke, the sun was up. Stiff and gummy-eyed though
I
was, I thought the place had a certain beauty in the morning light, severe and greyish like a fine old spinster. Rosalia, who needed a hot drink very badly, though she looked much better than she’d done the night before, wouldn’t agree with any of this. She was very obstinate in her dislike of the whole Australian scene, which she thought had no real colour, flavour, smell, or history. We’d just dropped this subject – we were now out of the car, stamping around and swinging our arms to get rid of our stiffness – and were wondering how far any sort of breakfast might be, when an elderly rural character, with a leathery brown skin and faded blue overalls, drove up and hailed us. Rosalia took over at once, telling lies with a fluency and wealth of detail that astonished me. We were Dulcie and George White, from Melbourne, and were on our honeymoon, driving up to Brisbane to stay with a married sister, and had lost our way late last night and were now wondering how far we’d have to go to find even a hot drink of any sort. She ended up sounding completely helpless, which pleased our leather-faced friend, name of Roberts, who’d probably been saying for years that Australia was turning out too many helpless big city types. Anyhow, he said this track only went to his place but that if we followed him there, no doubt Mrs Roberts could fix us up with something.

She did too, all out of kindness, no money involved. While I was shaving and Rosalia was attending to herself elsewhere, Mrs Roberts, a motherly sort whose two daughters were now married and away, cooked us a fine breakfast. I’d have enjoyed it more if Rosalia, who could have produced a whole novel by this method, hadn’t had to keep on enlarging and embroidering her story, occasionally asking me to confirm some wild invention. I did my best but I was so bad that Rosalia told Mrs Roberts that a desperate shyness had always been my trouble. However, my turn came just before we left these kind people, who came out to the car with us. With that sardonic pawkiness which this type of Australian always seems to have, Roberts said very dryly that we’d driven from Victoria in a New South Wales car. I had to tell him a confused story about our own car having broken down not far from Sydney, so that we’d had to hire this one. He didn’t say so but the look he gave me, as we finally said good-bye, still suggested he thought I was a liar.

Rosalia drove this time, and before we’d covered a hundred miles she was as low-spirited as she’d been high-spirited at breakfast. She was finding it hard to forgive herself for having deceived her grandfather, pretending to be in sympathy with the Saturnians, as we both called them now. She was inclined to be tearful about it, and somewhere in a rum region called Liverpool Plains, we had to stop and she had to be comforted. Another thing that worried her, I discovered as we drove on, was that though I had found Joe Farne and given him Isabel’s message, I still seemed to be entangled in this Saturn over the Water business. When and where did it end?

The truth was that, in spite of the wide and wonderful grin she’d given me, she’d been too tired the night before to take in all that Barsac and I had told her about Mrs Baro and the old man we had to find. So I had to go through it all over again, this time in the broadest of daylight, with a clear pale autumn all round us. Oddly enough, crazy as it all was, it held up, stood the test for me and left her convinced. I said that I had to know now, before I could do anything else, could get back to my work, what if anything was behind this Saturn over the Water plot, conspiracy, design, whatever you wanted to call it. If this meant finding Pat Something-ailey, whether he was a magician or a drunken old fraud, then we had to have a try, I felt, even if it turned out we were still on the run. She agreed to this, in fact she was as keen as I was, but then she made me promise that if what Mrs Baro said was true, if we discovered everything we wanted to know, then we didn’t go looking for anybody else.

We talked like this, in terms of ourselves as a pair, but nothing was said by either of us about marriage. We skirted the subject just as we skirted most of the New England range of mountains. The subject was always there, we were never far away from it, but it wasn’t mentioned. What she was thinking I don’t know, but naturally it wasn’t easy for me to forget that I was now on the run, staying at motels under false names, with the Arnaldos Institute, a lot of oil wells, refineries and tankers, and millions and millions of dollars. Somewhere behind this luscious and tender lass, widening her rich sweet smile into a grin or blinking away angry or sorrowful tears, was all the power and pressure and grim hocus-pocus that went with those things, now probably coming into action. And what with being conscious of all that, and knowing that we had to look for a drunken old Irishman who might be some kind of magician, while a lot of Major Jorvis and Long Neck types might be looking for us, I felt very peculiar and nothing seemed quite real. I might have been going to have an operation.

We arrived after dark at a motel, so new it could have just been unpacked, outside a place called Coolangatta, on the coast near the Queensland border. We were Mr and Mrs Blue from Sydney. The affluent society gave its all to the Blues there. We had everything: a car port (that’s what they called it); an apartment with innerspring divan beds; a telephone, a radio, a refrigerator, an iron, a toaster; a tiled bathroom with a ‘septic toilet’ – I remember that from the booklet – and no doubt some gadgets I failed to notice. We had everything except space, comfort, peace and quiet. Staying with old Mr and Mrs Roberts in the outback would have been heaven compared with being at the mercy of this technological marvel. And to hell with ‘its attractive design and gay decor’! We were both tired after our disturbed night and the day’s driving, longer than it need have been because we kept mostly to minor roads, so while Rosalia was having a bath, I did some bribing and corrupting, and we had dinner served in our room, with plenty to drink. In fact we got a bit tight, and went back solemnly over our history as a pair of lovers, trying to decide exactly when wrong first impressions began to change and who began to be sensible first and so forth, and somehow she made me say a lot of things I didn’t want to say just then, though they were true enough. The innerspring divan beds were humpbacked, and the people in the next room seemed to be having a late poker party, playing with cards made of tin on a brass table.

In fairly good time next morning, though I had to be tough with Rosalia, we packed and checked out, not knowing where we’d be that night. The oddest day I’ve ever spent couldn’t have shown me a brighter morning. We were like people moving around in a Pacific resort poster. The sea and sky were very very blue, the sands golden or white, the concrete dazzling and the paint glistening, and the holiday folk displaying acres of nicely-tanned skin. We didn’t know where to look for old Pat Mailey or Bailey, and this Gold Coast seemed to stretch for about twenty miles, so we decided to take a quick glance at it all first. We drove along the shore, passing one resort after another, Palm Beach and Burleigh Heads and Miami and Mermaid Beach. The next place was Broadbeach, where there was a very large hotel. Just after we’d passed it I said to Rosalia, who was driving: ‘Pull up here, ducky. I want to nip back on foot to take a peep at somebody. I’ll explain later.’

When I got back, after I’d done a bit of dodging round the front of this hotel, I said: ‘I went to make sure because as we passed I thought I saw Steglitz and a man you don’t know, Lord Randlong, standing there as if they were waiting for their car to come round. I could have been mistaken, but I wasn’t. It’s Steglitz and Randlong all right. The Saturnians are on the job, ducky.’

‘I don’t care if I’m with you,’ said Rosalia. And said it too as if she were the first girl who’d ever made that remark or that discovery about herself. Perhaps I replied with some sort of smirk, I don’t know. But if I did, it’s a pity somebody couldn’t have clouted me, for reasons that will be obvious soon. ‘Drive on, honeypot,’ I said, after the smirk if there was one.

We now came to Surfers’ Paradise, the biggest and gaudiest of the lot. As I read later, in a booklet I found in the bar, from scrub and sand and a few trees it had suddenly ‘mushroomed to a modern glamour-town’. Boy, it certainly had. Glowering at the whole tasteless mess, Rosalia took us through it as fast as the traffic would allow. At last we left behind all the razzle-dazzle; Tahiti, Honolulu, Chinatown, the Wild West run up in plaster-like film sets; the real-estate office, stores, ‘food bars’, tourist traps; the pink and emerald paint and awnings that hurt your eyes and neon lights impatient for the sun to go down. We came to a bit of coast that hadn’t been developed yet – it had been overlooked, nobody that morning was bothering about it except us – and there we sat on the edge of the sand. It all belonged to us and to the Australia that had been there, unchanged, a long long time. Foam lazily licked the dark gold edge of the land. Further out the breakers rose and curved and before they fell seemed for a moment as solid as green glass. Beyond them the Pacific went on for ever. A few seabirds hung in the blue or darted and flashed. It was clean, sharp, bright, empty except for beauty, and bad for trade.

Rosalia nipped my forearm with her strong little paw. I turned from the distant blue-dark Pacific and saw it again in her eyes. ‘This is how it all was – perfect,’ she said, half angry, half sad. ‘And this will not be here very soon. Just hotdogs and icecreams and lucky charms and real estate and dry cleaners. I hate those places there so much I wish a great wave would come one night and pull them all into the sea. They are not even Florida and Southern California, which are terrible, but a nasty cheap imitation – terrible, terrible goddam rubbish.’ She put her tongue out at them and made a very unladylike noise. Then she gave me a serious look. ‘You know, my darling, I hate Steglitz and all those Saturn people – they couldn’t come from Saturn, could they?’

‘No, except in science fiction. Well, you hate them –
but
– ’

‘But this, Tim. My grandfather hated all that rubbish there too. He would have wanted to destroy it – ’

‘Yes, but too many other things with it, ducky. Whole continents crowded with people. And most of the treasures of the world. This is mad.’

‘
He
wasn’t mad – ’

‘I’m sorry, Rosalia sweetheart, but I think he was – in a nice quiet way. I liked him. I’m glad he liked me. We could have got along if it hadn’t been for Saturn over the Water. Nevertheless, I think he’d sent himself quietly up the wall after reading Nietzsche and brooding over the Incas and having to spend too much time with financial types and organisation men.’

‘But he only wanted to make life better – ’

‘Better according to his lights. And only then, after encouraging most of us north of the equator to make it a damned sight worse. I know, ducky. He didn’t make H-bombs. We did it ourselves. But you’ve missed the point of these Saturnians if you don’t understand how hard they’re working, in the most useful places, with a hell of a lot of undercover power and influence, to bring total nuclear war down on us. I can never decide whether the average newspaper reader now is suicidal deep down or just a plain imbecile, but whichever it is, don’t forget these Saturnians are in there with him, giving him a nudge to show him he has a rope now to hang himself with, poison to drink, a knife to slit his throat with. And I don’t believe you can make a better world by making a bad one worse. I’m a bit old-fashioned in this respect, Rosalia – that I believe anything created by people who start by doing wrong will be itself all wrong. The Saturnians seem to me bad or mad or both, and I’m against ’em. And I’ll tell you another thing, ducky. Of course I understand what you feel about your grandfather. I understand what you feel about that mess of plaster and paint and vulgarity and imitation-everything along there – ’

‘I hate it, I hate it, I hate it – and there will be more and more of it – ’

‘There will. Until people who suddenly have money to spend learn how to spend it properly. And until other people learn you can’t live a good life selling any muck for a quick profit. And if they won’t learn, they can be stopped. They’ve already been stopped doing plenty of other things.’

‘But perhaps the Saturnians – ’

I had to cut in. ‘You’re still thinking about your grandfather. But just remember, he’d more money and more power than he ought to have had. And behind that he was probably always conscious of his Indian blood.’

‘Yes, he was. He told me so – ’

‘He was a special case. But when you think of Saturnians, think of Steglitz – or von Emmerick – these types. And remember this.’ I took hold of her hands and looked hard at her. ‘You’ll have to watch yourself today, ducky. You’re the one who’s important to them, not me. They don’t want to lose the Institute. They’ll try to get at your mind somehow. I can feel it. And now we’d better go looking for this boozy old fortune-teller – Pat Somebody – who holds the key to the mystery, Mrs Baro says, when he’s on the mountain.’

She wouldn’t let me pull my hands away. She was very serious. ‘But don’t forget your promise, Tim. If he tells you what you want to know, we don’t go roaming round Australia or back to Chile or to Argentina, looking for more Saturnians.’

‘I’ve not forgotten. It’s a promise.’ I got up and pulled her up with me. ‘But the next question is – where the hell are we going to find him? If we have to spend hours and hours looking for him, along there, with Steglitz and Randlong, possibly Major Jorvis and assorted cops, buzzing around, we’ll run into trouble.’

Rosalia had been looking thoughtful. ‘I know where he will be,’ she suddenly announced triumphantly. ‘There – in the worst place – something Paradise.’

‘Surfers’ Paradise? Why should he be there? Just because you hated it most.’

‘Yes of course.’ We were now walking back to the car, our backs to that beautiful, clean, empty world, where nobody was selling anything to anybody. ‘Just because it
is
the worst. If he is what you have been told he is – some special kind of wise man – why should he be here at all – anywhere here? But if he has a reason, then I think he will be in the worst place. So, darling, there is where we must look.’

We drove back into the razzle-dazzle, but we decided, after some hesitation because it meant robbing ourselves of the chance of a quick getaway, that we’d park the car. It was easier to look for a small place on foot, easier too to dodge out of sight if we caught a glimpse of people who might be looking for us. So we trailed round – and it was past noon now and hot among all that concrete and cement and sun-baked plaster, with the few bewildered palms offering no shade – compelled to give at least one good glance at this everything-made-to-look-like-something-else, with nothing native to Australia in the whole shoddy bag of tricks. I was ready to pack it up and pull Rosalia into the nearest bar, when, between the main shopping street and the building facing the beach, we came to a kind of patio-cum-arcade, lined with very small shops selling bits of nonsense. We walked to the far end, passing junk by the cartload, and then we noticed a very fat woman, with a face modelled out of lilac suet, sitting in front of an open doorway. Above was some stuff about horoscopes being cast and advice being given about money matters, domestic life, travel, and so on. The name up there was Pat Dailey.