Over dinner he said, ‘What was all that about totality?’
And she answered, ‘Wasn’t he marvellous?’
Apparently he was, but there was no more to say about it. Ellie ordered expensive things, and Henry paid for them. She seemed somehow to have been his girl for a very long time. For example, she spoke of her friends and family as if he already knew them.
‘And Jimmy,’ she said, ‘is livid about Ann. But you can’t blame him.’ Or, ‘When we see her, you have to ask Mary about her surfing accident. It’s the funniest thing I ever heard.’
It was as if, with the new clarity of his mind, he had willed her into a relationship with him. She didn’t ask him any questions, but listened with her chin perched on the neat palm of one hand whenever he talked about himself. He told her about the money. He had been unsure whether to mention his mother or to claim the lottery win as his own, but was pleased to find himself telling the truth; it made him seem filial, respectful, the fortunate son of a lucky mother, and no dupe — he would never waste his daily bread on lottery tickets. Ellie listened, and watched him with her serious face. She was calculating, he thought, and he didn’t blame her. He wasn’t an unattractive man: there was his height and the vivid blue of his eyes, which Kath, in a mood, had once described as ‘hygienic’. But with his tall, loose frame he looked as if somebody had knitted him together, and his ears sat out too far from his head. There was nothing wrong with defects like these, as long as he knew about them. Ellie leaned across the table and took his hands in hers.
‘I’m very happy for you,’ she said in a conclusive tone, as if the shape of her life had now been decided. They walked back through the park to St James station, neither of them speaking much, and he kissed her there for the first time.
* * *
The wet winter became a clear spring, and Henry bought a car and wooed Ellie among all the secret suburbs of Sydney’s northern coast, their palms and coves and their small significant bays. They swam together in the hot honeymoon water and manoeuvred behind the tricky rocks to kiss. She remained faithful to her Friday-night art-appreciation classes, so Saturday became their weekend night: Henry stopped going to the horses and took Ellie out instead. On Sundays he still lunched at home, and afterward — now that his Sunday evenings were free — he helped his mother sort through her possessions in readiness for her move to Victoria. She had acquired more in her quiet life than Henry could quite account for, and she spent a great deal of time over each object, as if every Christmas ornament or book or porcelain figurine were worthy of attention. Something was slowing her progress and delaying the move — a nostalgic tenderness, Henry thought, a formless sentimentality. It worried him, until he realised that she was waiting for him to announce his engagement. She would move when she knew he was settled.
During this period Henry cultivated a brittle beard. He bought a suit of navy wool and knew he looked significant in it. Naturally, his good fortune had become news in the office. He was promoted to a new floor of the building, where he didn’t see Ellie until he called to fetch her for lunch. Usually they ate sandwiches in Hyde Park, but sometimes he took her to a restaurant on Pitt Street where the waiters wore bow ties and the wood-panelled walls made Henry think of a gentlemen’s club. All around them sat feverish men in suits, eating steaks with their square teeth. Business was transacted here, true business, the acts of men. Secretaries and girlfriends and wives slipped neatly in and out of the booths. Here, Henry was expansive and proud. He was a little afraid of the waiters, but they would never know it. He was gracious with them and paid the bill as if handing over a dowry. Ellie was the prettiest girl in the restaurant. Over lunch, he asked her to stop attending her Friday-night classes.
‘Surely you know by now how to appreciate art.’
‘It’s my passion,’ she said, and averted her head in a becoming way, like all those Madonnas she’d shown him in books about Italian painters.
Maybe it was just as well; he could keep going to the greyhound track. He made a profit every week now, though his bets remained modest. He took fewer risks and studied the dogs more carefully. He was concerned about his savings, which had been depleted by the car and the courtship, and he was preoccupied by the idea of marriage: the pressed cotton, the resolute ecstasy, the begetting of children (he had hopes of a dynasty). Henry’s mind vibrated with these possibilities. He sat among the men at the track and saw the singed quality of their thinning hair and the thick ridges of flesh in the back of every neck. He was less and less charmed by the singsong of the bookies, the pointless silks of the trainers, the false lights, and the sharp dogs — all that stinking fuss in the sweet evenings of spring. This dissatisfaction, he thought, was not a sign of growing maturity (he wasn’t ashamed of his past love of racing), but it suggested to him a loneliness that he had been unaware of before his mother won the lottery, a loneliness that had driven him out into the city and to public congregations of men. It had also sent him, he supposed, to Kath, whom he thought of infrequently now, with something bordering on a wistful impatience, most often when Ellie stopped him short of handling some coveted part of her body. Ellie had a hasty, hot manner, girlish and at the same time proper, which in retrospect pleased him more than Kath’s smooth surety. They hadn’t slept together yet. He’d heard something, somewhere, about weak men redeemed by the society of good women.
He brought Ellie to meet his mother one Sunday. He was disappointed to see towels on the clothesline; otherwise, the house was orderly and he was proud of it. Perhaps, when they were married, he and Ellie needn’t have the largest of houses. There was something to be said for quality on a modest scale. Not modest, exactly; humble, in the sense of an extraordinary man who conceals the extent of his own greatness. That was dignity, Henry thought: to have, but in private. Possibly they would stay in this house and have work done to it.
Ellie excused herself to use the bathroom and his mother leaned in close with a confidential, sprightly face, and whispered, ‘She’s a delight.’ There was a newly set quality to his mother’s hair, a thin blush of colour over her cheeks, and she wore an unfamiliar dress. He remembered her telling him that she had once worked in an office.
Ellie returned from the bathroom with a water stain on her pale blue blouse, and the way she held her hand over it — above her heart, above her breast — made everything she said seem particularly sincere. It was as if she were swearing allegiance to the meal, to the house, to Henry’s mother, and to Henry.
After lunch, he took her out into the garden and asked her to marry him. She answered, without hesitation, ‘Yes.’ Unsure of what to do next, he held her hand and kissed her. It was one of those days on the very edge of summer, when the light falls blankly from a strong sky and the grass is already beginning to brown. The towels on the clothesline flipped in the light wind. The kiss was not their most successful, and raising his eyes from it, Henry saw his mother’s face hovering in a window.
‘I don’t have a ring yet,’ he said. ‘I thought you might want to choose it yourself.’
Ellie was looking around the garden as if she were not so much excited as interested by the turn of events, and Henry was surprised by the feeling of admiration that rose from somewhere beneath his feet and rushed toward his heart. His mother, unable to wait any longer behind the window, came running down the brick steps and embraced them both. She held Henry’s hand, and she held Ellie’s, out there on the browning grass, and said that she would see them married and then she would move. So Henry had been right: she had been waiting for him, and now things would proceed more quickly.