‘Mrs Guthrie’, I said softly. ‘I’m Cliff Hardy, your husband…’
‘Come in, Mr Hardy. I’m sorry we have to do this in here. I just can’t face the rest of the house for a while.’
‘That’s all right.’ I walked into the room and she shifted the chair so I could sit in the window recess. She was wearing a white dress with a square neck that showed the intricate bones of her neck and shoulders-birdlike, but not scrawny. She was deeply tanned, and had dark eyes and eyebrows as some Celts do. I’d have bet on a Scots or Irish maiden name. There were tear marks in her light make-up and a damp spot on her dress. She was handsome; she had a fine house, a good husband and two sons. She was also deeply miserable.
‘I know a bit about the background to the troubles with Ray’, I said. ‘Can you tell me what was disturbing him so much today?’
‘Didn’t Paul tell you?’
‘He told me about a dispute over Ray’s possessions on the boat. But there’s more to it than that. You tell me.’
‘How do you know there’s more?’
‘From looking at you. From the way you were looking at the floor. From the way you’re looking at me now.’
Her mouth moved into what could have been a smile if there’d been any warmth in it. ‘That’s absurd. You must be a charlatan to say things like that.’
‘Uh huh. I’d bet what’s on your mind goes back way beyond today, way beyond three months ago when Ray took off. It goes a long way back.’
She’d lifted her head politely when the conversation began; although she was deeply troubled there was no weakness in the face-her firm jaw and high cheekbones were striking and strong. But she was sceptical- Scots, I thought, I’d have bet on Scots.
‘How could you possibly know that?’
‘It isn’t so hard. I’ve seen a lot of people in distress. But really, it’s just transference: if I’d been sitting and looking the way you were I know I wouldn’t have been thinking about today or yesterday.’
‘You’re right, of course. But I don’t think I can talk about it to you.’
‘I think you have to, Mrs Guthrie. I don’t have any degrees or certificates, but I know about this kind of trouble. I like your husband. I want to help.’ I was carrying my photograph collection with me in an envelope-they were starting to get a little battered. I took out the one of the group in the Noble Briton and the one of the dark stranger with the bald head and the cop’s walk and passed them across to her.
‘Here’s your son, just the other night, with two of the most unpleasant people in Sydney.’ I pointed to Catchpole and Williams. ‘And with someone else who doesn’t look all that nice.’ I moved my finger across the surface of the photo. ‘Do you know him, Mrs Guthrie?’
She glanced, looked away quickly. ‘I’ve seen the woman.’
‘When?
‘Today. She was in the car with Ray. I don’t know the man.’
I took out the old, creased photo of the Digger lighting his fag and held it for her to see. I didn’t let go of it.
‘You know him, don’t you?’
‘Yes’, she said softly. ‘I know him. He’s the boys’ father.’
9
You’d better tell me about it.’
She got up from her chair, crossed the room and closed the door firmly. Barefoot, she would have stood about five foot four, putting her on approximately the same eye level as her husband. She moved stiffly and bent slowly to pick up the other two pictures which she’d dropped when I’d shown her the old photograph. She handed them back to me and sat down.
‘It terrifies me to see Ray with people like that’, she said. ‘His father never drew an honest breath. Of course, that’s what all this’s about-Ray and Chris’s father. You knew that?’
I nodded and took out a notebook to encourage her to keep talking. People sometimes make an effort when they see someone is taking the trouble to record what they say.
‘What’s the father’s name?’
‘He had a number of names. I knew him as Peter Keegan.’
‘How old would he be now?’
‘About fifty-five.’
‘Your husband had the impression that he was dead.’
‘Yes. I encouraged that impression.’
‘He was in the army?’
‘Yes, God knows why, probably to sell things to the other side. I think he was Keegan then. Yes, he was. I saw some papers once. What a mess.’
The mess came out piece by piece: she was born in Brisbane where she’d qualified as a physical education teacher specialising in gymnastics. Six months of the Queensland education system of the 1960s was enough for her. She broke her bond with the Education Department and came to Sydney. She couldn’t work in the school system, so she gave private gym lessons, did physiotherapy, coached swimming. She thought of herself as a bit of a rebel, almost an outlaw for having broken the bond.
‘I wasn’t really a rebel; I’d had a very conventional upbringing. But breaking the bond felt like a criminal act. Money was sacred.’
‘What was your maiden name?’
‘Ramsay, why?’
‘Never mind. Go on.’
‘It wasn’t really so serious, breaking the bond. All they did was harass your guarantor and mine was my father, who died in the year I left Brisbane. Still, I played the runaway. Peter encouraged it.’
‘How did you meet him?’
‘At a gym; he was hurt, quite badly. He said it was a football injury but, looking back, I suppose he did it in some brawl or other.’
‘What did he do for a living?’
She explained that he had presented himself as a businessman. He talked about interests in flats, hotels, other things.
‘I believed it all. He had plenty of money and charm. I was flattered. It sounds absurd now, but I was a virgin…’
She suddenly looked directly at me, as if she was seeing me for the first time. ‘God, how can I be babbling like this, I don’t even know you.’
‘You don’t have to know me’, I said. ‘It’s probably better that you don’t. You need to talk to someone, that’s obvious. And I’m here. I’m also very pro-Guthrie as it happens. Go on.’
She smiled for the first time-a good, generous smile that let something go.
‘I got pregnant and I got married. People still did in those days.’
She was right, they did. I remembered how narrowly I’d missed the fate myself.
‘What about your family?’
‘Just a mother and a sister in Brisbane. We’d lost touch. I was in love; I didn’t give them a thought. Well, Peter was good during the pregnancy, and he doted on the baby. He said that having Ray was the most wonderful thing that’d ever happened to him. I believed him-for a while.’
‘Then?’
‘Then things I’d hardly noticed before started to bother me: where he went, who he was with, where the money came from. I started to look at him more clearly. He was a real mixture-of softness and hardness, openness and secrecy. Mixture, that’s what I thought then. Schizophrenic is what I think now.’
‘Why d’you say that?’
‘He really did know a lot about economics and money. He’d studied it and he kept reading about it-theories and practice. He did have a company too, at least one. I forget the names. But there was a wild side to him as welclass="underline" he fought in pubs, crashed cars…’
She paused and looked past me and out the window. I swung around on the chair to look too. The light was dying in the sky. I stood up to stretch and watched the water change colour right then-it went from a pale blue to a gunmetal colour, streaked with red. She tugged at the curtain but didn’t close it. I sat down on the bench again, doodled for an instant and looked at her, ready to go.
‘He went with prostitutes. We had a fight about that. A big fight. I couldn’t understand it; I still don’t. He promised to give it up and he did for a while. We got back on good terms again.’ Her smile this time was rueful. ‘Chris was the result of that.’