When the World Was Steady (32 page)

Fascinated by the unfolding of events, she was also slightly alarmed (she did not like crowds, or at least didn’t like being trapped in them: she
always
drove or took a taxi rather than travelling by subway in Sydney), faintly uncomfortable (the blouse, in its last fastened buttons above her navel, was cutting her in two, and
she was aware that she was sweating profusely, even in her oiled scalp), a trifle bored (they had been walking for a very long time, it seemed, and she was unable to see anything besides the backs of the people in front of her and the profiles of those on either side), and even remotely anxious (where would this marathon march end up? would it then disperse? and where would she be? and how would she get home? not to mention the question of retrieving her swimsuit and sundress). She also became aware that her eyes were not seeing as Emmy felt they should: they were narrowing their vision in a lazy way, focusing on one thing, then another—a flower in a woman’s plait, the rhythm of her own feet on the road—unable to take in the whole picture. It was a feeling she recognized from having taken valium, in certain quantities, at the time when William left her, and, insofar as it recalled that period, it was not a pleasant experience. She put it down to hunger: she had had no supper the night before, and no lunch that day. Had anyone asked, she would have said, ‘I am not feeling quite myself.’

Eventually, they reached the stone gates of a temple and filed in. It was now darkest night. People arranged themselves around a central, altar-like area, beyond which lay an inner sanctum, to which only the priests had access. Braziers burned and lit the faces of the crowd with their flames. The
gamelan
and drums ceased.

The ritual which followed seemed to Emmy to last as long as the interminable walk. It was also fearsomely dull, difficult to follow and, frankly, an anticlimax. There were extensive periods of silence, and then of chanting, during which Emmy scanned the crowd for familiar faces and found none. There were many tourists mixed among the Balinese—in lurid polo shirts or cotton T-shirts—and Emmy was glad not to be recognizably among them; but was less pleased not to see a single soul that she knew.

The ceremony clearly involved the giving of gifts to the temple, and at long last a few large, extravagantly wrapped parcels were delivered by the priests to the inner sanctum, whereupon the
event appeared to be officially over. All the food and flowers, however, were to be left outside the temple, against its walls, and people milled and loitered both inside and out, preparing to make their offerings to the gods. Only a few could trickle through the temple gates at once, and groupings were jostled and broken apart. Which is how Emmy found herself spat on to the road in front of the temple alone, with nobody she knew in sight: no Jenny, no Suchi, no
Bibi
, no anybody.

Searching for her companions was hopeless, in part because Emmy did not want to go back into the temple. Instead, she attached herself to a clutch of young Australian tourists and slunk along behind them, catching fragments of their chatter. En route to their hotel, they led Emmy back to known territory, to the main street of Ubud, where the stalls were now all closed and shuttered, and where it seemed she had not been for an eternity.

She made her way towards the valley, towards the bridge and her favourite
warung
, thence to climb, exhausted, to the Sparke house. Emmy had to navigate a patch of total blackness peopled at intervals by whispering shadows, between the centre of town and the Tjampuan crossroads, and hampered as she was by her attire, she minced through it at a wretched pace. But the worst was past, and the bridge was visible ahead, beneath her, lit by the rising moon, when there came a sudden glare of light and a blaring of horns. People Emmy had not known were there emerged in the oncoming headlights and scattered in panic. Amid the commotion, the monstrous white bus came rollicking and fuming up the hill and past her. As it roared by, Emmy caught sight of K’tut’s face, set tight, at the wheel high above.

When, just afterwards, she spotted Frank outside the
warung
, she scurried up to him. He did not immediately recognize her, and then was amused by her costume.

‘Gone native?’ he smirked. His face was clear to her: they were away from the trees and the full moon was rising in a starry sky.

‘He went, didn’t he?’

‘Who?’

‘In the bus. Max. Aimée was telling the truth—Max has gone back to Sydney. Am I right?’

‘He’s not the only one.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Were you at the ceremony, then?’

‘Wasn’t everybody?’

‘I was,’ said Frank dolefully. ‘Bloody boring.’

‘It did have
meaning
for some people,’ said Emmy. ‘So if it had meaning, it wasn’t boring. But what do you mean?’

‘What I said.’

‘Who? Who has gone where?’

‘They’ve gone and left me. Buddy brings me out to do a job, and then he bloody well takes it away again. Want a drink?’

‘No thanks.’

‘There’s a real English pub here,’ he said, pointing at a house that just looked like a house by the side of the road. ‘They make gin and tonics. It’s run by the hotel. Very nice place.’

‘No thanks.’

‘I’m going.’

‘Tell me what you’re talking about first?’

‘Buddy’s gone to Bangkok, hasn’t he?’

‘Today?’

‘Today.’ Frank was very glum.

‘But why? With Aimée?’

‘That she-devil’s still here, lounging around up at the house, somewhere. No, he took Kraut and went.’

‘Whatever for?’

‘Wanted to oversee the shipment himself, he said. Got worried that what followed wouldn’t be as good as what came before. Thought I wouldn’t know the difference.’

‘I see.’

‘I wouldn’t, either,’ Frank confided. ‘Are you coming?’ He gestured at the house. Music—pop music—was drifting out on the night air. Perhaps it was a pub of sorts.

‘Tell me something—where does this stuff, this shipment, come from?’

‘Easy. Known route,’ said Frank. ‘Across the border from Burma, down from Chiang Mai, out through Bangkok. Easy as wink.’

‘But before that?’ Suddenly it seemed to Emmy a question of the utmost importance. ‘Whose antiques are they?’

Frank made a grunting noise and rubbed vigorously at his nose with his fist, like a fat schoolboy. ‘Dunno. Never thought. Have to ask Buddy.’

‘But the Buddha, for example?’ Emmy insisted. ‘The Buddha in the living-room?’

‘That’s easy, innit? The Buddha’s from a temple somewhere. Got to be. That’s where Buddhas sit, innit? In temples.’ Frank was satisfied with this reply and turned towards his gin palace. A few tourists seemed to be drifting into it. ‘Sure you won’t have a drink?’

Emmy shook her head and felt the weight of her oiled and pinned hair. It did not feel like her own. As Frank went, she called out to him, ‘It’s not … well, it’s just not
legal
, is it?’ As if hoping that legality might redeem it. If legal, it would be part of someone else’s code, not up to Emmy herself to judge.

‘Do I look like a lawyer?’ Frank called back above the music, before he disappeared.

The last climb from the valley to the house was wholly peaceful, illuminated by the vast, cool blue of the moon. Encased in the peacock sarong, Emmy walked with another woman’s footsteps, amid another woman’s smells, weighted down by lives in which she had no place. She hardly felt the kisses of the evening air, so much softer and more welcoming than other kisses, hoped for or
received. It was so suddenly over, the life and the self she had made unravelled on the night air in a matter of hours. All that was clear was that it was time to make a decision, time to take up her own truths again. Truth was not ever, she sensed, where she expected it to be; and luck, as a code, perhaps did not exist. Who she was was no clearer; but she did know where she ought to be.

Emmy caught a perfume on the breeze—of earth and wet, of the paddies, of an invisible mist—and it was the odour of Abang, of the shrine on the mountainside, of the moment after which the summit had been, perhaps, irrelevant.

In the Sparke house, only Ruby slept, her thumb stuffed into her mouth, and dark tendrils of her hair webbed across her flushed cheeks. She was tiny in the big bed, a minute hummock abutting the dip in the mattress where her mother would lie. But for now, Aimée sat in the darkened sitting-room, her eyes meeting the opalescent glow of the Buddha’s, she smoking, he sitting, half-smiling, the two of them waiting there together, far from home—whatever that meant—and, unlike Emmy, unable ever to go back.

S
ITTING IN HER
sister’s living-room, Virginia could hear the waterfall din of the bath emptying upstairs. Even with the divorce, she had imagined that Emmy’s house would be grander than this, a cluttered two-bedroom cottage, really, albeit in an expensive part of the city. She, aching still from an interminable and intermittently terrifying plane journey the day before, would have been grateful for the first turn in the bathroom, but while Emmy had offered politely, it was clear to Virginia that on this, Portia’s wedding day, her sibling’s maternal responsibilities took precedence over the discomfort in her own joints.

Perched on the edge of an armchair, surveying her surroundings, her bathrobe tightly clamped at her waist, Virginia was already too warm. Although the room was in shade, the breeze that wafted in from the street bore the warning of formidable heat to come, and the glimpse of sky that her view encompassed glowed an electric, pristine blue. It was just as everyone who knew had alerted her, and she was grateful for their advice: upstairs, on her bed, she had a large, straw hat to protect her from the wedding day sun.

Virginia did not mean to snoop while she waited, but she could muster no interest in the morning paper and she was too restless simply to sit and think. She rose from her chair and ambled
about. She noted that the profusion of artwork on the walls was modern and looked ‘genuine’; that the furniture, while elegant, was on a scale disproportionate to that of the room—clearly remnants of a former solidity, salvaged from the wreckage of Emmy’s marriage. The bay window at the front of the house gave on to a quiet side-street, but if Virginia leaned forward she could see the corner where the urban bustle began, and could hear, faintly, the growling of cars and the occasional horn. To the rear of the house lay the kitchen, with its open dining area (a table, again, too substantial for its space); and beyond, the exuberant, semi-tropical tangle of Emmy’s tiny, neglected garden.

Virginia tried to imagine what it would be to have such freedom, to glance across even such a modest expanse and know everything was in its place because she had put it there herself. Not only her body but her spirit would have the run of the house, without being answerable to her mother, a lame, difficult old woman whose personality seemed to stretch by force of will into the corners of the London flat where her legs now refused to take her.

Such freedom seemed at once the thing she had most envied her sister and a dread emptiness, the desolate unfurling she foresaw for herself when their mother would at last be gone, the one thing that everyone else seemed so zealously to guard against. From this perspective, she felt pity, almost, for Emmy who, like all the others, had so tried, and yet had failed. And yet—Virginia’s eye fell on a cluster of framed photographs of her niece at a variety of ages and in various poses—Emmy had Portia.

Virginia’s train of thought was interrupted by the sight of two surprising photographs, one old and one new, tucked forgotten amid the myriad representations of the elfin Pod. In an elaborate silver frame that dwarfed the blurry black-and-white print, Virginia suddenly saw herself, a skinny, long-necked child, her hand firmly entwined with that of her younger sister. Their mother, slight and
careworn, but so young, stood half-crouched behind them, an arm around each child’s shoulder. What struck Virginia was not the serious, vaguely concerned visage of Melody Simpson (who did not look at all as powerful as she remembered) but the glee on her own crinkled face, a pure pleasure mirrored absolutely in that of her sister. Where was it that they had been so happy? What moment—erased till now from her memory—had seen these two eager little girls so linked in their common delight?

She heard Emmy’s tread on the stair and swiftly replaced the picture in its corner, taking up the other, almost new, which lurked beside it behind the rest. It, too, was slightly out of focus, and misty, a photograph snapped in haste of a group of sweaty men and women amid some mossy stones. Emmy was among them, looking pale, her hair lank about her face. Her expression was inscrutable, somewhere between fear and triumph. She was smiling.

‘That’s in Bali,’ volunteered her sister, suddenly behind her in the room. ‘About six months ago. I climbed a mountain—I think I wrote to you about it. Not the most flattering shot, is it?’ She laughed, quite formally, Virginia thought.

‘Who are the others?’

‘Just a bunch of other climbers. The older fellow, in the batik, he’s the one whose house I stayed in. Extraordinary man.’

Virginia nodded and put the photograph down. ‘Do you miss it, ever?’

‘What?’

‘The island.’

Emmy was busy checking in her handbag, which was tiny and expensive-looking and matched her suit exactly. ‘Oh,’ she said after a moment, ‘You know, it was a holiday. You can’t stay on holiday forever.’ She looked up and smiled, a controlled smile, not like the innocent eruption Virginia had recently seen on her childhood face. ‘Ginny dear, I’m in such a state. You
will
forgive
me if I go on ahead, won’t you? I promised Pod I’d help her get ready, and I’m running late as it is. I feel terrible leaving you’—Virginia shook her head slightly to dismiss her sister’s guilt—‘but you know how it is. The number for the cab company is by the phone in the kitchen, and I’d allow about twenty minutes, if I were you, just in case.’

Car keys in hand, Emmy fumbled at the front door and turned back. ‘I hope you’re not disappointed that it’s a registry office do,’ she said, blushing visibly beneath her tan. ‘When you’ve come all this way and … well, you know. But the reception should be an event.’