Trust (16 page)

‘That’s fabulous,’ said Susanna. ‘Oh, Marcus must be so relieved!’

Gerry flexed his fingers, palms out, a couple of times. ‘Ah! Our Marco’s eating humble pie, let me tell you. Swears he’ll never whinge about me wasting time on competition designs again.’

‘What a relief,’ Susanna repeated. So, Visser Kanaley wouldn’t be ending the year in the financial doldrums after all. She’d dreaded having to deal with a Gerry who was on edge and grumpy throughout the long summer holiday. As she went over to his chair to give him a congratulatory kiss, the hard light of the setting sun, streaming in through the big west-facing window, flashed in her eyes, and she stepped across to pull down the blind. End of the day, and later than she’d realised: it was light till so late now. ‘Oh, darling, I’ve been so preoccupied with this article, I’m afraid I haven’t made any plans for dinner,’ she said apologetically. ‘Seb’s out with Aurora and Stella-Jean’s doing something with Tessa so I —’

‘Suze! Focus!’ said Gerry, snapping his fingers impatiently toward her. ‘Listen! This guy’s really keen. He’s flying us up to Sydney on Friday to meet his team, then there’s some pre-Christmas party Saturday arvo, on the harbour. On his spiffing great private yacht, thanks very much. His wife’s going to be there, and I want you to come too. That’d be just the right thing.’

‘
This
Friday?’ She sagged. ‘That’s a lovely idea, but I really don’t think I can.’

‘Sure you can! It’s the last week of college, isn’t it? You can take an early mark. Or fly up Friday evening, after work. The kids are perfectly capable of looking after themselves for the weekend.’

‘Well, I know. But I’ve organised a couple of interviews, for this article.’ She gestured toward the paperwork on the table. ‘They’re the last things, and then I can finish. And Belinda says she’s got a contact at
Praktika
who might be interested in publishing it.’

‘Publishing what?’ said Gerry. He reached out to pick up the topmost of the scattered books, frowning at the hideously pop-eyed cartoon face on the cover, the title issuing in a speech bubble from its tombstone-toothed mouth: ‘
Krazy!
’ he read aloud. ‘
The Delirious World of Anime + Comics + Video Games + Art.
’ He looked across at her, bemused.

‘It’s surprisingly interesting, really,’ Susanna said, ‘much more than —’

‘You’re writing an article about
comics
?’ Slowly shaking his head.

‘Not comics exactly. It’s about how technophobic old fogeys like me cope with teaching art to students who’ve never known a world without the internet. Pre-digital; post-digital.’

‘Really. Well, this subject’s not going be any less fascinating if you have a weekend off. Come on, Suze – live a little! Party on the harbour, flash hotel in the Rocks. I was thinking we could have dinner at the Wharf, maybe go to a play …’

‘Oh, sweetheart,’ Susanna said regretfully, ‘I’d love to. But the thing is, I’ve also got Finn staying here for the weekend. Angie’s going to be in Sydney too, isn’t that a coincidence? For a wedding.’

Gerry looked thoroughly exasperated now. ‘Oh,
great
. It’s amazing how your sister manages to inflict herself on us even when she’s not around.’

Susanna sank into herself a little. ‘She hardly ever has a chance to get away …’ she murmured.

‘Is she taking that fella who’s moved in with her?’ asked Gerry, with a meaningful lift of one eyebrow.

‘I don’t know.’

‘What do you think of him?’

‘I’ve barely met him,’ said Susanna carefully. ‘He seems nice …’

‘Stella didn’t think so.’

‘Well, he seems to be having a positive effect on Finn’s manners, at any rate.’ Susanna cast about for some way to restore her husband’s good cheer. Her face brightened. ‘But, honey, isn’t Marcus going to Sydney too? You could —’

‘Yes, Marcus is going,’ said Gerry flatly. ‘But Marcus has his own after-hours plans. He’s meeting John up there for a dirty weekend.’

‘Oh,
no.
Don’t tell me that’s on again.’ Susanna clapped one hand to her forehead. ‘I just don’t understand why a lovely person like Marcus keeps going back to this relationship, again and again. It’s like an addiction.’

‘His choice, Suze. He loves John, and John loves him but he can’t leave his wife.’

‘How can John say for a
moment
that he loves him, when he’s been keeping Marcus dangling all these years?’ asked Susanna. ‘And his wife supposedly doesn’t
know
?’

‘Apparently not.’ Gerry lifted his hands in a gesture of helplessness. ‘What can I say? People’s private lives are complicated.’

‘Some people’s, maybe. Not mine, I’m glad to say.’ Susanna shook her head, then came toward him with arms extended, and Gerry rose from his chair to receive her hug. ‘Darling,’ she murmured, snuggling close. ‘We can still have fun without going to Sydney.’

‘Yeah? That a promise?’ Gerry bent to kiss the back of her neck.

She wriggled, pressing her breasts against his chest. ‘It is,’ she said. ‘Most definitely it is.’

‘Nothing like this in Melbourne, now, is there?’ said the developer as his yacht glided serenely past the North Shore’s lovely coves and sandstone cliffs. ‘That bathtub you call a bay!’

‘No, Chris, nothing like it,’ said Gerry amiably. Coming from Perth, he found the never-ending and occasionally ferocious rivalry between Sydney and Melbourne amusing. Hoping to stir Marcus, who was nearby talking numbers with Chris’s right-hand man, he added loudly, ‘This has got to be the most beautiful city in the world.’ Their host’s chest inflated as pridefully as if he’d created the whole magnificent vista himself, but Marcus refused to take the bait, just twisting the corner of one lip at his partner before resuming his conversation.

Terri, the developer’s wife, a lively woman whose leathery skin testified to her devotion to the outdoors, offered Gerry another Sydney rock oyster. He’d already slurped down a good dozen, at least; these guys didn’t seem to give a toss about the global financial crisis. ‘What a pity your wife couldn’t come,’ she said.

‘Sure is. Next time,’ Gerry answered with a smile. Susanna really was missing out on a glorious day: the bright blue of the summer sky, speckled with little cotton wool clouds, the deeper blues of the water. On shore, red roofs and white houses and blocks of units almost lost in lush green foliage: frangipanis, palms, tall silky oaks, and angophoras with their twisted peach-coloured limbs. A huge ocean liner, like a floating horizontal skyscraper, moved slowly out toward the Heads, hooting deeply; fleets of sleek racers rounded buoys, their bright spinnakers popping and billowing, while chunky yellow and green ferries bustled dutifully from wharf to wharf.

As their yacht passed a large gaily decorated boat there was an eruption of applause; Gerry glanced across to see a bride and groom embracing, having just, he presumed, exchanged their vows. Everyone on board was cheering, clapping, snapping pictures of the happy couple backgrounded by those fabulous Sydney icons: the Bridge, slicing the azure sky, and the sails of the Opera House arching up, up, like a dazzling pile of ivory.

Had this groom, Gerry wondered, made a choice as sensible as his? A good-hearted, biddable woman like Susanna, so much better suited to marriage than a temperamental show pony like his first love, Justine. But these newlyweds looked to be in their forties, and another thought suddenly lobbed into his brain:
Who would I choose now, if I wasn’t planning to have kids?
Instantly, he dismissed it:
irrelevant
.

‘Bet they reckon it’ll all be plain sailing from here, but they’ll soon find out,’ Chris commented cheerfully as he steered past the wedding boat. ‘Gotta take the rough with the smooth, eh Gerry?’ He and Gerry shared a knowing grin: fellow long-termers. The developer and his wife, Gerry thought, seemed to be travelling well: thirty years, three grown-up kids, a successful business in which she clearly had a big say.

Terri beckoned him over to where she was telling a group how she’d been bowled over by Visser Kanaley’s proposal for the High Plains centre. ‘Describe it for us, Gerry,’ she said, and he obliged, embroidering the tale of his struggle to find a design that honoured the unique natural elements of the park, allowing his listeners to get the impression that he’d camped out at the site for weeks, waxing lyrical about how, by assuming the vantage point of an eagle gliding over the landscape, he’d finally been granted that breakthrough vision – the nest.

‘What an inspiring story!’ said Terri. ‘Monica!’ She called over a young woman Gerry had noticed earlier. ‘You
must
include this in the profile. Monica is our PR genius,’ she told Gerry. ‘We’ll get her to interview you properly while you’re here. Listen to this marvellous story, Mon …’

After Terri was called away and the knot of guests had dispersed, Monica stayed, chatting to Gerry, and he was pleased to have her to himself. She was a stunner: mid-thirties, tall, with porcelain skin and masses of dark auburn hair. When she went to get them both another drink he checked out her arse: ripe and luscious. He loved an arse that jiggled as its owner walked.

When she came back, he pretended to notice her wedding ring for the first time and inquired, looking around with innocent curiosity at the other guests, whether her husband was there too. Monica shook her head. ‘Dan’s working in Hong Kong. He’s a flight instructor,’ she explained. ‘He only gets back here once a month.’

Is that so?
After their conversation had charted a suitably discursive course through other topics, Gerry suggested casually that she could interview him that evening. ‘Over dinner maybe? If you’re free …’

She was.

Monica ordered a cocktail, a serious one rather than some cream-drenched girly thing. Gerry took this as a good sign, and followed suit with a dirty martini. A serious cocktail made for serious flirting, the whack from that belt of spirits imparting, after just a couple of sips, a delicious frisson to every word and gesture.

They followed up with a glass of champagne each, and some appetisers. The fried baby artichokes with aioli proved a particularly good choice: as well as being delicious, the fact that they were served in a single basket made it unavoidable that his and Monica’s fingers would touch, casually, as they reached and dipped.

She’s gorgeous
, he thought, watching her pop another of the salty morsels into a mouth as marvellously sensuous and greedy as Nigella Lawson’s. The champagne ramped the buzz up a notch to a kind of reckless gaiety: they were sparring now, showing off and laughing at each other’s jokes. Oh, he relished this stage, the unspoken agreement that each would present their wittiest and most engaging self to the other, back and forth in a sustained and stimulating rally.

Dinner, and with it a bottle of wine. Monica actually got a notebook out, murmuring about press releases and the in-house newsletter, and jotting things down from time to time as their conversation covered Gerry’s ideas and achievements. She was a good interviewer, a good questioner, a good listener. Being in the spotlight of this lovely young woman’s attention was entirely satisfactory.

From there, it was easy for Gerry to ask some questions of her, and for these questions to become more personal. Both felt the urge to know, to reveal. They were dancing closer and closer to the edge, each enraptured by the other’s grace and skill – and their own.

The waiter came, poured the last of the wine, cleared their plates. They accepted dessert menus but Monica soon put hers face down on the table.

‘Not for you?’ said Gerry, and when she shook her head he lowered his menu too. ‘Coffee?’

She shook her head again and unhooked her small leather bag from the back of the chair. ‘I’ll just …’ she pointed her chin toward the restrooms. Had something shifted? Gerry couldn’t tell. While she was gone he asked for the bill, and paid. What did it mean that she didn’t want to linger?
It all depends on what happens in the next few minutes.
He felt in his pocket for the condoms he’d bought before coming to the restaurant. He wanted the opportunity to use them, very much.

Monica returned, dropping her bag on the table as she sat down. Strange: in her absence he’d registered how noisy the restaurant was, but now that she was back it didn’t seem so. It was as though they were enveloped in a little bubble of silky quiet, with the bustle of the waiters and the laughter and loud talk of their fellow diners nothing more than background.

This moment. This was it: when the playfulness deepened, when the thrilling gravity of a question still unasked entered the space between two people and hung there. Waiting.

‘My sister-in-law’s staying with me at the moment,’ she said. ‘With her two kids. Did I mention that?’

He shook his head slightly, with a noncommittal smile.
So, no going back to her place.

‘You must miss your husband,’ he said.
Lay it on the table.
‘I mean – once a month? That’s hard.’

She looked at him very directly. ‘It is.’ Delicately, she brushed a few strands of dark hair away from her mouth, and lowered her gaze to the white linen tablecloth. ‘It’s really hard because … What’s really hard is, to find someone who … ah, who knows …’ Her voice was sinking, lower and lower. ‘… What you need.’

Gerry exhaled the breath he didn’t even know he’d been holding:
ah!
‘And what do you need?’

Monica raised her eyes again to meet his. ‘A firm hand,’ she breathed. She was leaning toward him, forearms resting on the tablecloth, offering him shadowy cleavage and the pale globes of her breasts. Gerry reached across and picked up the slender strap of her bag; he draped the narrow strip of butter-soft leather with unhurried precision over the top of her wrists. They both looked down now at the black strap lying across skin that was as pale as milk. In slow motion, she raised her forearms a few inches.

With infinite delicacy, like a man reaching out to catch a bird, he wound the soft leather between her raised wrists, looping it around them. Each could hear the other breathing. He held the strap in one hand and – tugged. In the moment the strap tightened, pulling her long-fingered hands toward him, he saw her lips part and the movement in her long pale throat as she swallowed. His cock leapt like a colt.