“I’m too grateful,” said Missy humbly. “Do go on! What happened after that?”
He shrugged. “Oh, she decided she was entitled to make all the decisions, that what she wanted was all that mattered. Once she’d landed her fish, the fish didn’t matter a bit. I was just there to prove she could catch a fish, to lend her respectability, to give her an escort here and there. She didn’t exactly have lovers, she had what she called cicisbeos, pansified twerps with gardenias in their buttonholes and a better shine on their hair than on their patent leather shoes. If anyone was ever branded by the company she kept, my first wife certainly was – her women friends were as hard as nails and as tough as old boots, and her men friends were as soft as butter and as limp as last week’s lettuce. She liked to mock me. In front of anyone, everyone. I was dull, I was stodgy. And she never kept our differences private, she’d get set on a quarrel no matter how public the place. In a nutshell, she held me in utter contempt.”
“And you? What light did you hold her in?”
“I loathed her.” Evidently he still did, for the feeling in his voice did not belong to an experience buried in the past.
“How long were you married?”
“About four or five years.”
“Were there any children?”
“Hell, no! She might have lost her figure. And of course that meant she was a great one for teasing, for kissing and cuddling, but to get my leg over her – it only happened when she got drunk, and afterwards she’d scream and howl and carry on in case anything came of it, then she’d pop out and visit the tame doctor they all patronised.”
“And she died?” asked Missy, scarcely able to credit that such a woman could have had so much consideration.
“We had a terrible fight one evening over – oh, I don’t know, something small and idiotic that actually didn’t matter a bit. We lived in a house that had a waterfrontage onto the Harbour, and apparently after I’d gone out she decided to go for a swim to cool her temper. They found her body a couple of weeks later, washed up on Balmoral Beach.”
“Oh, poor thing!”
He snorted. “Poor thing, nothing! The police tried in every way they knew to pin it on me, but luckily the minute she’d done shouting at me, I went out, and I met a friend not twenty yards down the road. He’d been kicked out of bed too, so we walked to where he’d been going, the flat of a mutual friend – a bachelor, the wily bastard. There we stayed until past noon of the following day, getting drunker and drunker. And since the servants had seen her alive and well more than half an hour after my friend and I arrived at our mutual friend’s flat, the police couldn’t touch me. Anyway, after the body turned up the post mortem revealed that she’d died of simple drowning, with no evidence of foul play. Not that that stopped a lot of people in Sydney reckoning I did kill her – I just got a name for being too smart to get caught, and my friends for being bought to alibi me.”
“When did all this happen?”
“About twenty years ago.”
“A long time! What have you done with yourself since, that it’s taken you so long to do what you’ve always wanted?”
“Well, I quit Australia as soon as the police let go. And I drifted round the world. Africa, the Klondike, China, Brazil, Texas. I had to live through almost twenty years of voluntary exile. Since I was born in London, I changed my name by deed-poll there, and when I did come back to Australia, I came as that bona-fide citizen of the world, John Smith, with all my money in gold and no past.”
“Why Byron?”
“Because of the valley. I knew it was coming up for sale, and I’ve always wanted to own a whole valley.”
Feeling she had probed enough, Missy changed the subject to the skulduggery going on at the Byron Bottle Company, and told her husband about the plight her mother and aunts were in because of it. John Smith listened most attentively, a smile playing round the corners of his mouth, and when she had ended her tale he put his arm around her, drew her across the seat against his side, and kept her there.
“Well, Mrs. Smith, I really didn’t want to marry you when you first brought the subject up, but I confess I’m growing more reconciled to it every time you open your mouth, not to mention your legs,” he said. “You’re a woman of sense, your heart’s in the right place, and you’re a Hurlingford of the Hurlingfords, which gives me a lot of power I didn’t expect to have,” he said. “Interesting, how things turn out.”
Missy rode the rest of the way home in blissful silence.
The next morning John Smith donned a suit, a collar, and a tie, all remarkably well cut and oddly smart.
“Whatever it is, it must be a lot more important than your wedding,” observed Missy without a trace of resentment.
“It is.”
“Are you going far afield?”
“Only to Byron.”
“Then if I’m quick about it, may I come as far as Mother’s with you, please?”
“Good idea, wife! Wait there for me until some time late this afternoon, and you can introduce me to my in-laws when I pick you up. I’ll probably have a lot to say to them.”
It’s going to be all right, thought Missy as she rode in her bright red dress and hat alongside her unfamiliarly elegant husband up to the top of the ridge. I don’t care if I got him by trickery and deceit. He likes me, he really does like me, and without even realising it himself, he’s already moved over a little to fit me in alongside him. When my year is up, I’ll be able to tell him the truth. Besides, if I’m lucky, I may well by then be the mother of his child. It hurt him badly when his first wife didn’t want any, and now he’s closer to fifty than to forty, so children will be even more important to him. He will be an excellent father, because he can laugh.
Before they set out for Byron he had taken her across the clearing and round its bend to where he intended to build his house. The waterfall, she discovered, fell so far that on a windy day it never reached the valley floor, spinning away instead into nothingness, and filling the air with clouds of rainbows. Yet there was a huge pool below it, wide and calm until it poured through a narrow defile and became the cascade-tortured river, a pool the colour of a turquoise or of Egyptian faience, opaque as milk, dense as syrup. The source of all this water, he showed her, was a cave below the cliffs, out of which issued a very large underground stream.
“There’s an outcropping of limestone here,” he explained. “That’s why the pool is such a bizarre colour.”
“And this is really where we’re going to live, looking at so much loveliness?”
“Where I will live, anyway. I doubt you’ll be here to see it.” His face twisted. “Houses don’t get built in a day, Missy, especially when they’re built single-handed. I don’t want a horde of workmen down here, pissing in the pool and getting drunk on Saturdays and then telling any curious bystander what’s going on in my valley.”
“I thought we had a bargain, not to mention my condition? Anyway, you won’t be building single-handed, you’ll have my hands as well,” said Missy cheerfully. “I’m no stranger to hard work, and the cabin is so small it won’t keep me busy. From what the doctor said, it makes no difference whether I lie in a bed or work like a navvy – one day it will happen, that’s all.”
At which he took her in his arms and kissed her as if he enjoyed kissing her, and as if she was already a little precious to him. They finally set out for Byron somewhat later than originally intended, but neither of them minded.
Octavia and Drusilla were in the kitchen when Missy walked in unannounced. They stared at her in astonishment, trying to take in the full glory of that outlandish scarlet lace dress, not to mention the huge lopsided hat with its graceless plume of scarlet ostrich feathers.
