‘I sent out a whale sonar, telling them to bugger off for the day.’
Sometimes I can see her mother, my little sister, in Liza. She’s there in the way Liza tilts her head when she’s thinking, in her thin strong fingers, in her smile when she sees her daughter. That’s when I know my niece’s presence here, and Hannah’s, is a blessing. That there is an elemental pleasure in seeing the continuation of a family line, a joy that we who are childless might not otherwise experience. It’s that jolt of recognition when suddenly you see not only her mother but your great-uncle Evan, your grandmother, perhaps even yourself. I have been grateful for this knowledge, these last five years. Those glimpses of familial brow, frown or giggle have made up, in some small way, for the loss of my sister.
Liza, however, has other features – her watchfulness, the ever-present sadness, the faded white scar where her cheekbone meets her left ear – that are entirely her own.
I suppose it should have been of no great surprise to me that Nino Gaines hadn’t called by for a few days – not after the way I sent him packing the last time he came. But his unusual show of self-sufficiency got to me. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I missed him, but I didn’t like the idea that he might be sitting at Barra Creek thinking badly of me. More than anyone, I knew that life was too short for grudges.
After lunch I packed up a lemon cake in greaseproof paper, sat it on the passenger seat of my car and headed out to his place. It was a beautiful day, the air so clear you could see the mountains in the distance, and pick out every needle on the pines that lined the road. It had been an especially dry summer, and as I drove inland I glanced at the reddish earth, the bony horses with no grass to graze, killing time by swishing their tails at the never-ending flies. The air was different out here: the pollen and dust motes hung static, the atmosphere unfiltered and sullen. I don’t understand how people can live inland. I find that endless brown depressing, the solid outline of hill and valley too unchanging. You get used to the moods of the sea – like those of a spouse, I imagine. Over enough years, you may not always like them but it’s what you know.
He was just headed indoors when I pulled up outside. He turned at the sound of my engine, wiping his oversized hands on the back of his trousers, and touched one hand to the brim of his hat when he’d grasped who it was. He was wearing a quilted waistcoat that I swear he’d had back in the 1970s when his two boys were born.
I hesitated before I got out of the car. We had rarely fallen out, and I was not entirely sure of my reception. We stood squinting at each other, and I remember thinking how ridiculous we were: two brittle old skeletons, facing each other like teenagers. ‘Afternoon,’ I said.
‘Come for your order?’ he asked, but there was a twinkle in his eye that made me relax. A twinkle that, if I’m honest, I didn’t deserve.
‘I brought you a cake,’ I said, reaching back into the car to get it.
‘I hope it’s lemon.’
‘Why? Are you going to send it back if it’s not?’
‘I might.’
‘I don’t remember you as picky, Nino Gaines. Stubborn, greedy and rude, yes. Picky, no.’
‘You’ve got lipstick on.’
‘Over-familiar, too.’
He grinned at me, and I couldn’t quite keep the smile from my face. That’s what they don’t tell you about old age: it doesn’t stop you acting like a young fool.
‘Come on in, Kathleen. I’ll see if I can get Stubborn, Greedy and Over-familiar Mark Two to make us both a cup of tea. You look very nice, by the way.’
The first time Nino Gaines asked me to marry him I was nineteen years old. The second time I was nineteen and two weeks. The third time was forty-two years later. This was not due to any lapse in memory or attention on his part, but because in the intervening years, having given up on me, he was married to Jean. He met her two months after I’d turned him down for the second time when she disembarked at Woolloomoolloo from a bride-ship, having changed her mind about the soldier she was due to marry. He had been waiting for an old friend on the docks, found his gaze drawn to her wasp waist and crooked nylons and, like the force of nature she was, she had reeled him in and got a ring firmly on her finger before another two months were out. Many people thought they were a strange couple – they used to fight like billy-oh! – but he brought her back to his newly purchased vineyard at Barra Creek and they were together until she died at the age of fifty-seven from cancer. It didn’t take a fool to see that, for all their arguments, they were a good match.
I don’t blame her for her determination. Nino Gaines, it was widely acknowledged back then, was one of the handsomest men in Silver Bay, even wearing a woman’s bathing-suit. This he did every year, when the servicemen put on a show for the local children. It was a matter of some embarrassment to me that mine was the first he was told to ask for. In the war years I was a strapping lass, tall and square-shouldered; I’m not a lot smaller now. While other women have shrunk, backs bending like question marks, joints knotting with arthritis and osteoporosis, I’m still pretty upright, my limbs strong enough. I say it’s the effort of running the old hotel, with its eight bedrooms and only sporadic help. (The crews say that shark cartilage is now famed for its preservative qualities. Their idea of a joke.)
The first time I laid eyes on him I was serving at the hotel bar. He strode in wearing his air-force uniform, appraised me hard enough to make me blush, saw the newspaper picture framed beside the shelves, and asked, ‘Do you bite?’
It wasn’t the words that got my father’s back up, but the wink that went with them. I was such an innocent that it all flew as swiftly over my head as the warplanes that stacked up over Tomaree Point.
‘No,’ my father said, from behind his newspaper by the till. ‘But her father does.’
‘You want to watch that one,’ he said to my mother later. ‘Got a mouth as smart as a whip cut.’ And to me, ‘You stay away from him, you hear?’
Back in those days, I thought my father’s word was gospel. I kept my exchanges with Nino Gaines to the minimum, tried not to blush too hard when he complimented me on my dresses, stifled my giggles when he cracked secret jokes at me from across the bar. I tried not to notice that he came in every night that he wasn’t on duty, even though everyone agreed that the best nightlife was to be found a good twenty minutes’ drive up the coast road. My little sister Norah was just four at the time (it’s fair to say her arrival had been something of a surprise to my parents) and she used to gaze up at him like he was a god, largely because he plied her with chocolate and chewing-gum.