‘It’s business, Ness. You know what it’s like. You know what I’m like.’
She turned away. ‘I do. I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I just felt a bit . . .’
‘It’s the jet-lag,’ I said, a bit shaken by her uncharacteristic wobble. Vanessa was sure of everything. It was one of the things I liked most about her. ‘I felt odd for days after I arrived.’ The idea that I could shake her was worse. I’ve never felt responsible for Vanessa’s happiness – I didn’t like the idea that I might be more responsible for it than I’d known.
I reached for her, to persuade her to lie down, thinking that perhaps if we made love we’d start to feel a little less like strangers. But she eluded me and, in a fluid movement, rose and walked round the bed to the window. The moon was high and the night clear so you could see the whole bay. The sea glinted like something magical, the lights from distant boats sending little ladders of illumination towards us across the inky waves, while around the bay the shadowy hills were dark with secrets.
‘It’s beautiful,’ she said quietly. ‘You said it was.’
‘You’re beautiful,’ I said. She was like something in a film, silhouetted against the moonlight, the curves of her body faintly visible through the filmy fabric.
It’s okay, I told myself silently. If I can feel like this about her it’s okay. The other thing was an aberration.
She turned half towards me. This is the woman who is going to be my wife, I told myself. This is the woman I will love until I die. She looked at me, and I had a sudden sense of hope that it would all be fine.
‘So, where are we with the planning permission?’ she asked.
As I told Vanessa, there had been a few difficulties with the development plan. The previous day I had spent hours in the council planning department, going through the various forms that needed filling in, meeting the relevant officers. Over the previous weeks, I had reached Mr Reilly – on the highest rung of the planning ladder. I liked him, a tall, freckled man whose expression suggested he had seen pretty well every kind of application there was. I had gone in quietly, had made clear that we were happy to consider modifying our plans in whatever ways he thought might be necessary. I had deferred to him, conscious that I didn’t want him to see us as simply a foreign interest keen to exploit his area. Which, I suppose, was what we were.
To some extent, my approach had paid off. Over various meetings, he had said he liked the design, the employment opportunities and the potential for regeneration in a traditionally less than economically buoyant area. He liked the knock-on benefits for local shops and traders, and I had emphasised the positive impact of similar developments on the local economy, using examples I had gleaned from other resorts along the east Australian coast. The architecture was in keeping with the area. The materials were to be sourced locally. The tourist office had expressed its approval. I had begun to put in place a website about the development that local people would be able to access, should they have any questions about it, or want to be considered for employment if it came off. He raised a wry eyebrow at this, as if I might have pushed my luck a little. But, he admitted, I had done my homework.
What he didn’t like, as I had feared, was the development’s potential impact on the environment. It wasn’t just the noise and disruption of the building process, especially in an area so close to the national parks, he said, but people in Silver Bay had strong opinions about restriction of their waters. He said that a previous attempt to introduce a pearl farm to a nearby bay had met with a barrage of opposition and the development had been cancelled.
‘The difference between our development and theirs,’ I said, ‘is that the employment and other benefits are stronger.’
Mr Reilly was no fool. ‘To some extent,’ he said, ‘but we’ve seen this kind of thing before, and you can’t tell me you’ll be ploughing the profits back into the community. This is backed by venture capitalists – British venture capitalists. They’ll be wanting to see their return, right? You’ll be in the hands of shareholders. It’s not some community service you’re proposing.’
I gestured towards the plans. ‘Mr Reilly, you know as well as I do that you can’t stop progress. This is a prime area of Australian waterfront, the perfect environment for families wanting to come on holiday – Australian families. All we want to do is facilitate that.’
He sighed, steepled his fingers, then pointed at the document. ‘Mike – can I call you Mike? You need to understand that everything has changed here in the last couple of years. Yes, the proposed development falls within the envelope of what is considered acceptable, but there are other considerations we now have to take into account. Like, how are you going to minimise the environmental impact? You’ve not yet given me a reassuring answer. This area has a growing awareness of its whale and dolphin population, and people around here don’t want to do anything to harm them. On a purely economic level, they’re a growing tourist attraction in themselves.’
‘We’re not like the pearl fishery. We wouldn’t be marking off huge areas of the waterfront,’ I said.
‘But you’d still be making some of it unusable.’
‘It would only be with the same activities that tourists normally take part in, nothing large-scale or controversial.’
‘But that’s it. We don’t get those kind of tourists round here – not in Silver Bay, anyway. They might swim, paddle out in a dinghy, but wetbikes, jet- or watersking are much noisier, much more intrusive.’
‘Mr Reilly, you know as well as I do that in a place like this development is only a matter of time. If it’s not us, it’ll be some other corporation.’
He put down his pen, and looked at me with a mixture of belligerence and sympathy. ‘Look, mate, we’re all for development round here, anything that will help the local community. We know we need the employment and the infrastructure. But our sea creatures, our wildlife, are not an afterthought. We’re not like European cities – build first, worry about the environment later. We don’t separate the two. And you won’t win over this town unless you can sort out the environmental stuff.’
‘That’s fine, Mr Reilly,’ I said, pulling my papers together. ‘Very commendable. But I’d have more sympathy with your argument if this week I hadn’t watched two whales bullied half to death by tourists in disco boats, which didn’t seem to be policed by anyone in your area. It’s all very well for you to tell me that my development’s going to have a negative impact – but the threat to the whales is already out there, far worse than anything we’re proposing. And, as far as I can see, no one is doing anything about it. What we’re suggesting is a limited development. We’re willing to be as sympathetic as we can be to environmental concerns, to take expert advice and to be licensed, if necessary. But you can’t tell me your area’s a model for environmental excellence because I saw that dead baby whale, saw what prompted its death. I’ve been out whale-watching and, I hate to say it, that’s an intrusion in itself.’