After the ceremony we retrieved our shoes and went to the reception at the nearby surf club. At some point I found myself queuing at the bar next to one of the other bridesmaids, a raven-haired girl who struck me as rather shy. In fact it was only as I remembered this that I realised that my first contact with them wasn’t with Luce, as I’d imagined, but there in that queue with Anna. She didn’t seem keen to talk at first, but there was a crush at the bar and I was chatty, and she gradually became more open. We were both at the university, although we hadn’t met before, and with the academic year about to start she told me the subjects she was taking. I showed more interest in her than I really felt, because I realised she was a friend of the blonde girl I’d noticed-whose name, she told me, was Lucy, or rather Luce. By the time I’d given her the three flutes of champagne she wanted she was quite animated and seemed enthusiastic about the idea of meeting up again. I suppose this was the first small betrayal in our story, my misleading Anna into thinking I was interested in her rather than her friend.
The following day, feeling a little bored, I checked the timetables for the subjects she’d mentioned, and two days later stood outside one of the large lecture theatres for an introductory lecture in STAT 303, a subject I’d taken two years before. There had just been a torrential late summer downpour, and the air was thickly humid, the trees dripping, students peeling off steaming rainwear. The girls were late, and the mob outside the auditorium had mostly moved inside by the time they came running along the concourse. I jogged up beside them as they joined the end of the queue, and called out, ‘Anna! Hi.’
She turned and gave a bright smile of recognition and introduced me to Luce. I’d meant to be very casual and indifferent, but up close I found her smile even more compelling than before. I think I blinked rather stupidly, and then we were climbing up the stairs and into the back of the theatre, which was packed. The two girls squatted on a step of the side aisle, and I followed suit immediately behind them. Luce’s hair was drawn up in a simple ponytail, while the back of Anna’s head looked rather untidy, as if she’d had a go at cutting it herself. From where we were it was difficult to see the lecturer’s podium, far below us. He strolled in ten minutes late-this was the Faculty of Management, after all-turned his back on the audience and proceeded to mutter inaudibly at the formula he began to scrawl across the board.
‘What?’ Anna hissed to Luce. ‘What did he say?’
‘I’ve no idea.’ Luce shrugged with a movement of her head that revealed the most beautiful ear I’d ever seen.
I leaned closer, mesmerised, and whispered into it, ‘That’s the two-mean hypothesis test for large samples.’
She turned and our eyes met, just centimetres apart, and that was it, I think, at least as far as I was concerned.
‘Is it?’
‘Yes, here.’ I wrote the formula on my pad, tore the page off and handed it to her.
‘Thank you,’ she said, and gave me the most wonderful smile, as if I’d written her a brilliant sonnet.
At the end of the lecture we got up, stiff from sitting on the concrete floor, and Anna said to Luce, ‘Well, I didn’t understand a bloody word of that.’
I said, ‘If you’re interested I’ve got the notes. I already did this course.’
Anna regarded me suspiciously. I think she’d already guessed what I was up to. ‘Why, did you fail?’
‘No, I got an HD. I thought this was something else.’
Luce smiled. ‘You sound like just the person we need.’
I thought so too.
We went to a coffee shop and chatted. Luce was doing a Bachelor of Science, majoring in biology, Anna sociology, and I’d hit on the one subject they had in common, statistics. It seemed the two of them were old friends who’d been to the same school, and I sensed Anna’s resignation that I was clearly more interested in her friend than her, as if this had happened many times before. But I didn’t pick up any hint of competition between them, and felt that the slight belligerence that began to surface in Anna’s manner was rather protective of her friend, as if she was used to fending off the attentions of unworthy males like myself. They both struck me as pretty fit, Anna slightly softer and slower than her friend, but still tanned and physically capable. I asked if they surfed or played a sport and Anna replied, with a touch of bravado, ‘Yes, we climb.’
‘Rock climbing?’
‘Yes.’
I sensed from the decisive, almost challenging way Anna said it that this might be a key test of our fledgling relationship.
‘Oh, great,’ I said boldly. ‘So do I.’
She looked deeply sceptical. ‘I haven’t seen you at the climbing club.’
‘No, I don’t belong. Actually, I’m a bit rusty. I’ve been thinking about joining.’
‘You should,’ Luce said. ‘We meet most Wednesday evenings at the gym.’
‘Where have you done your climbing?’ Anna demanded, obviously not at all convinced.
‘Oh, mostly in the Blue Mountains,’ I said airily. ‘A bit around Nowra.’ It wasn’t entirely bullshit; I’d done rock climbing as a sport at school, training on an indoor climbing wall and going on a couple of camps, one in the Blue Mountains where we did mainly bouldering and abseiling, and a longer one on the crags along the Shoalhaven River. ‘What about you?’
‘Yes, we’ve been to the Blue Mountains quite a lot,’ Luce said. ‘Diamond Falls? Bowens Creek?’
‘Ah, yes,’ I nodded. The names meant nothing to me.
‘Last year six of us spent a month climbing in California, at Yosemite and Tuolumne. That was fantastic, if you like granite.’ I found it hard to decipher her expression. She seemed amused, but whether she was just being friendly, or was thinking what a phoney I was, I couldn’t tell, but if it would have helped I’d have gladly told her I was besotted with granite. The mention of the California trip should have alerted me, but I went on nodding eagerly, captivated by that smile.
‘We did the DNB,’ Anna added, in a tone that sounded like a warning.
‘Really?’ I hadn’t a clue.
‘We’re planning to go to Nepal next.’
That did register. Wasn’t that where the Himalayas were? Wasn’t Everest somewhere around there? ‘Oh wow, that would be fantastic,’ I said.
Later, as I went back over this first meeting, unpicking every half-remembered phrase and gesture for its hidden meanings, I came to several preliminary conclusions. The first and most important concerned my chances with Lucy, or Luce as Anna called her. Were they gay? Was their double act some kind of game they played with dopes like me, attracted to Luce? I could believe it of Anna, protective of her friend and antagonistic to at least this male outsider. But all my experience of reading the signals given off by women told me that it wasn’t true of Luce. I was convinced that she was as warm and sincere and interested as she appeared to be.
That was my first conclusion. My second was that these two women were out of my class. Their accents had told me that straight away. I imagined that the school they’d both gone to had been one of the better Sydney private schools, that their fathers were city businessmen or doctors, and that swanning off to California for a month hadn’t been that big a deal. This wasn’t necessarily a problem, just something that set off some well-tuned early warning signals. It’s not that I was ashamed of my family, I told myself. In my heart I knew that Dad and Pam were good people, the best. And successful in business too. You may have seen their business, out on the Great Western Highway-bright and clean, with a five-metre wide meat pie tilted jauntily on the roof. Ambler’s Pies won the Best Aussie Meat Pie national award three times during their thirty years of trading, and I know from extensive market research that they deserved it. My childhood memories all revolve around the central tableau of Dad labouring over the big stainless-steel table rolling and folding the dough, rolling and folding, to make that special flaky pastry which is so accurately depicted at gigantic scale on the roof, and of Mum in the kitchen nearby preparing her special rich beef recipes for which she was known to every truckie and rep on the highway. Just before she died, Mum passed on those recipes to Pam, the help they’d taken on when Mum first fell ill, and in due course Dad sealed the business partnership by marrying her. It all seemed very straightforward and admirable to me. And yet, the first time any of my new friends at university asked me what my parents did, I fudged it, mumbling something about hospitality and tourism, and later mentioning the Potts Point hotel as if it was theirs, rather than my Aunt Mary’s.