“What now?“
Donald had lowered the novel he was reading and was watching her, over the top of his glasses, slide down, just an inch at a time, between the arms of the yielding silk-covered lounge chair. They were in one of the hotel's grand reception rooms after dinner.
“What now what?” she demanded.
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing,” she told him. “Getting comfortable.”
Dim lighting, the lampshades glowing gold. Outside the beginnings of night, blue-luminous. The long room suspended out there in reflection so that the lounge chairs and gold-legged glass-topped tables floated above a carpet of lawn, among shrubs that might simply have sprouted through the floorboards, and they too, she and Donald and some people who were standing in a group behind them, also floating and transparent, in double exposure like ghosts.
Meanwhile, shoes off, stockinged feet extended, slumped sideways in the welcoming softness, she was getting her right hand down between the arm of the chair and the cushion, almost to the elbow now, right down in the crease there, feeling for coins, or a biro or lost earring. You could find all sorts of things in such places if you got deep enough, as she knew from cleaning at home. Not just dustballs.
Once, in a big hotel at Eaglehawk Neck in Tasmania, where she had gone to play in a bridge tournament, Tess Hyland had found a used condom. Really! They must have been doing it right there in the lounge, whoever it was, late at night, in the dark. She hoped her fingers, as they felt about now, didn't come across anything like that! But she was ready — you had to be. For whatever.
The tips of her fingers encountered metal. She slipped lower in the chair, settling in a lopsided position, very nearly horizontal, like a drunk, and closed her fist on one, two, three coins, more — and a pen, but only plastic.
“For heaven's sake,” Donald exploded.
Maybe she looked as if she was having an attack. She abandoned the pen. With some difficulty she wiggled her fist free and, pushing upright, smoothed her skirt and sat up, very straight now and defiant. Donald, with a puzzled look, went back to his novel but continued to throw her glances.
She snapped her handbag open, met his gaze, and, very adroitly she thought, slipped the coins in. Two one-dollar pieces, a twenty cents, and some fives. Not bad. She estimated there were about thirty such armchairs in the lounge, plus another half-dozen three-seaters. Up to a hundred dollars that would make, lurking about as buried treasure in the near vicinity. Quite a haul if you got in before the staff.
She wondered if she could risk moving to the third of the armchairs round their table, but decided she'd better not. Donald was already on the watch.
What pleased her, amid all these ghostly reflections, was that the coins down there in their hidden places, like the ones she had just slipped into her purse, maybe because they had slipped deep down and smuggled themselves out of sight, had retained their lovely solidity and weight. That was a good trick.
What she had to do was work out how she might manage it.
Mid-MORNING.They were out under the sails beside the pool. Donald was writing again. She wondered sometimes what on earth he found to say. She had been with him all the time they were here. Nothing had happened.
On the wide lawn bodies were sunbaking, laid out on folding chairs, white plastic, that could also become beds, their oiled limbs sleek in the sun.
Three Japanese boys who looked like twelve-year-olds, and not at all the sort who would rape nuns, were larking about at the deep end, throwing one another over and over again into the pool. They were doctors, down here, Donald had discovered, to celebrate their graduation.
Four women in bikinis that showed their belly buttons and yellow-tanned bellies — women as old as herself she thought — were at a table together, sipping coloured drinks. They wore sunglasses and a lot of heavy gold, though all one of them had to show was a stack of red, white, and green plastic bangles up her arm. She recognised her as a person she had spoken to once before, maybe yesterday. She was from a place called Spokane. Or was she the one from Tucson, Arizona? Either way, she had found their encounter disturbing.
Spokane! She'd never heard of it. Never even knew it existed. A big place too, over four hundred thousand. All learning to talk and walk and read and getting the papers delivered and feeling one another up in the backs of cars. This woman had lived her whole life there.
What you don't know can't hurt you, her mother used to say. Well, lately she'd begun to have her doubts. There was so much. This Rock, for instance, those people in the camps. All the time she had been spooning Farax into Douglas, then Donald, these people in Spokane or Tuc- son, Arizona, had been going to bed and the others into gas ovens. You couldn't keep up.
“Where is it?” she had asked the woman from Tucson, Arizona, who was perched on the edge of one plastic chair with her foot up on another, painting her toenails an iridescent pink.
The woman paused in her painting. “Well, do you know Phoenix?”
“What?”
“Phoenix,” the woman repeated. “Tucson is a two-hour drive from Phoenix. South.”
“Oh,” she'd said.
So now there was this other place as well. She'd never heard of either one. But then, she thought, these people have probably never heard of Hurstville!
Still, it disturbed her, all these unknown places. Like that second bed.
There were six old men in the spa, all in a circle as if they were playing ring-a-ring-a-rosie, their arms extended along the tiled edge, the bluish water hopping about under their chins.
They were baldies most of them, but one had a peak of snow-white hair like a cockatoo and surprisingly black eyebrows, in a face that was long and tanned.
Occasionally one of them would sink, and as he went down his toes would surface. So there was more to them than just the head and shoulders.
These old fellers had not lost their vim. You could see it in their eyes and in the champagne that bubbled up between their legs. The spa was buzzing. Most of it was these old guys’ voices. It was like a ceremony, that's what she thought.
She shifted her chair to hear them better.
“Tallahassee,” she heard. That was a new one! "Jerusalem.”
She pretended to be looking for something under her chair, and trying not to let Donald see, jerked it closer to the spa. These old fellers were up to something.
Gnomes, is what she thought of. The gnomes of Zurich. Shoulders, some of them with tufts of white hair, long faces above the boiling surface. Hiding the real source of things, the plumbing. Which was lower down.
She had never fathomed what men were really up to, what they wanted. What it was they were asking for, but never openly, and when they didn't get it, brooded and fretted over and clenched their jaws and inwardly went dark, or clenched their fists and beat one another senseless, or their wives and kiddies, or rolled their eyes up and yearned for in a silence that filled their mouths like tongues.