‘I mean, just look at it.’ Posner’s hand rested on Tom’s shoulder, urging him gently around. ‘I think, I think, what makes it extraordinary is the way it risks sentimentality. How it doesn’t shy away from sheer gorgeousness. The way she’s laid on that paint. And this.’ His finger hovered above a rectangle of gold and burnt orange. ‘The whole thing’s such a huge risk. And she confronts it and makes use of it. Subordinates it to a larger design, like this scrap of Chinese paper. It’s an exorcism, in a way. It looks something dangerous in the face and accepts it. Controls it. And you think, How absolutely fucking marvellous.’
His fingers tightened a little on Tom’s shoulder.‘Would you like to touch it?’ His mouth approached Tom’s ear. ‘Touch it, if you like,’ breathed Posner.
After dinner, Tom assembled clothes, food, the equipment he had bought that afternoon. He checked his list again, aware that he was not entirely sober. He had begun drinking as soon as he had got home, and had kept it up more or less all evening.
He added a tube of Beroccas to his overnight bag.
It was his habit to try for private truthfulness. He paused in his preparations to acknowledge that what disturbed him most-more than his sense that Posner had anticipated the entire episode, more than his flustered, schoolboyish retreat- was the flicker of acquiescence Posner had drawn from him.
A champagne-bright afternoon in winter; the blank interval that July during which Tom had sworn off Nelly.
In a paddock by the river, where a post measured fl oods in imperial feet, he unclipped the dog’s lead. A giant metal man stood sentry over the place, one of a series of pylons striding beside the freeway. But there were also eucalypts and wattles deep in waving grasses, or leaning over the water. To leave the bike path for the leafy corridor that dipped into the paddock was like returning to a scene almost forgotten.
The dog vanished over a bank; reappeared eventually with damp paws. He never went out of his depth, but stood in the sluggish current even in the coldest weather, attentive to ducks. Sometimes a dog on the far side of the river made him bark.
Time passed. Shadows stretched over the beaten tin surface of the water. The sun was easing itself earthwards with the caution of an old, exhausted animal. In the yawning sky, which was still full of light, a dark path opened and lengthened. It was the city’s daily visitation from horror. The bats streamed up from the botanic gardens, following the river’s chill road to the orchards waiting in the east.
Tom walked back into the baroque ruins of a sunset, rose and gold curds whipped up in a Roman dream. It was a city that put on wonderful skies. He thought of a cloudscape in one of Nelly’s pictures: oyster-grey puffs blown over a yellow bed.
Up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour / Of silk-sack clouds! Then he remembered believing, as a very young child, that the sun and the clouds followed wherever he walked.
A voice from a hedged garden hissed, ‘You’ve had every opportunity.’ But when Tom turned his head, there was no one there.
Without having intended to, he found he had deviated from his course and was in the vicinity of the Preserve. He began to fantasise about turning a corner and coming face to face with Nelly. This flight of imagination was so persuasive that the smell of her entered his nostrils. He saw her hand, emerging from its padded red sleeve, in the dog’s fur, and noticed what had escaped his attention until then: a tiny corkcoloured blemish between her thumb and index fi nger.
He came to a halt at the junction of two streets, beyond which the bulk of the Preserve detached itself against the darkening sky. The upper storeys could be plainly seen above the surrounding buildings. Nelly’s studio, which lay on the far side, was invisible, but the wall of panes in the central room was a sheet of gold, and Rory’s windows were lined with light.
The dog clicked to and fro on the corner; he wished to return to his dinner. With the onset of evening, it was very cold. Tom slipped his free hand into his pocket.
At that moment something pale moved in the shadows above the Preserve. In Tom’s chest a muscle jolted. With that first shock, he took an instinctive step backwards. Then, straining to decode the vision before him, he stood stone-still and peered. Posner was walking on the roof of the Preserve.
It was where Nelly and the others went to smoke. What business Posner, a non-smoker, had there on an icy evening was not apparent. Then it occurred to Tom that he might not be alone. Nelly might be strolling there, hidden by the parapet, drawing poisonous spice into her lungs, while the dealer regaled her with a witty dissection of the motives of the fi gure shrinking on the pavement below.
Posner came to a halt, the whey circle of his face directed at Tom. Who told himself that in his dark fleece, at that distance, he was invisible to the watcher on the roof. He mastered an impulse to look away; made himself return that blind gaze. For a frozen passage Posner and he remained motionless, stricken with each other.
But there was the dog, a patch of light shifting at Tom’s feet. He placed his hand on the furry spine and pressed. The dog sat.
This obedience so surprised Tom that he glanced down. When he looked up again, Posner had vanished.
The chill of the street, seeping up through his boots, had entered Tom’s marrow. He shivered, and heard soft growling. The dog’s hackles had risen. There must be a cat somewhere close at hand, crouched in the darkness that had spread like leaves.
Tom went in and out of rooms in his flat. In the laundry, a blanket-lined basket still held the dog’s smell.
He found himself flicking through his address book. The dog had belonged to his wife. Tom had picked him out with her from the animals with their noses pressed to the mesh at the shelter; but he was Karen’s birthday present, technically hers.
The presumption of it struck Tom now: that one should speak of ownership in relation to nerved fl esh.
He sat on his bed and punched in a series of numbers.
On the other side of the globe, his wife said,‘Karen Clifford.’ She had retained the crisply professional manner she had honed as a solicitor, crisp professionalism being a quality by which she set great store.
In those same clear tones, designed to purge conversation of the pungent and ambiguous-to make speech over as communication-she had informed Tom that she was leaving him for a human rights lawyer who had just been appointed to the Hague. ‘Hugh’s doing absolutely vital work for asylum seekers,’ she had announced, with her little characteristic gesture of tucking her hair behind her ears.
Hugh’s manifest superiority thus established, it was plain she expected her husband to raise no objection.
With time, as he picked over the rubble of his marriage, Tom Loxley realised that its end repeated its beginning, each having its origin in the erotic coupling of virtue and transgression. Karen was the product of the usual liberal, middle-class upbringing that tolerated Asian immigration while not expecting to encounter it at the altar. The prospect of union with Tom had satisfied both her need to rebel and her social conscience; the same erotic fusion she sought, years later, in adultery sanctified by the pro bono advocacy of Hugh Hopkirk.
Yet Tom knew he was not blameless in what had failed between them. With hindsight it was obvious enough: a fact as large and plain as a wardrobe.
A few months after he met Karen, she got pregnant. They had been unlucky: a condom had burst. Neither wavered over their course of action, their dialogue regretful but charged with practicalities. Afterwards, they were sad together; also relieved. They had been sensible. There was the sense of having averted something that had the capacity to engulf them. They held hands on the beach at Queenscliff, and what Tom noticed was the unimpeded horizon.