Ailsa was sitting in a chair beside the bed. She was wearing a long, off-white calico nightgown cut square around the neck. I went up and kissed her on the mouth and then in each of the hollows of her shoulder bones. She smelted of roses.
“You look good, you smell good, you feel good.”
She put her arms up around my neck.
“More,” she said.
“You’re the queen of the world.”
I gave her the parcel, she unwrapped it and smoothed the robe out on the bed. She immediately began fiddling with the drawstrings.
She looked up at me. “It’s lovely,” she said. “Now tell me about it.”
I gave her all the details, it took a long time and she listened quietly, tracing patterns in the raised nap of the robe on the bed.
“What was the black girl’s motive?” she asked when I finished.
“Partly political. She’s some kind of nationalist, anti-British, anti-French, anti-Australian. And just about every bloody thing. You have interests in Noumea?”
She nodded.
“So has Susan I suspect. Your people must be stepping on toes over there, maybe it’s a genuine grievance, I don’t know. Anyway, she was here for a little private terrorism. But Brave got hold of her, something to do with drugs. Brave was an addict. Did you know that?”
“No. I’ll have to look into that.”
“The Noumea operation?”
“Yes.” She drew a deep breath and expelled it slowly. “Well, Mark started it all I suppose by keeping the files. There are a lot of casualties. What about the survivors? What did you mean about Susan never being right again?”
“That connects back to Ross,” I said.
“Obviously, what about him?”
I got up off the bed and moved around the room. I picked up one of her books and smiled at the dog ears at fifty page intervals.
“Don’t start pacing again Cliff or I’ll bloody kill you. No, I just won’t pay you. Just tell me about it.”
I sat down again. “I was on the wrong track about him for a long time. I thought he was obsessed by his mother, he wasn’t. I was misled by the photographs he had. He was hung up about his father. Natural I suppose.”
“Yes, yes,” she said impatiently, “well, do you know who his father is?”
“Was. Yes, I worked it out eventually.”
“How? Who?”
“How first. It was the only thing that fitted. Mark Gutteridge sent Susan away to Adelaide to have her child. OK, he wanted to spare her and everyone else the teenage pregnancy trauma. Fair enough. But a tremendous change in the nervous pattern of the Gutteridges dates from then. It manifests itself in different ways and they never get over it. That’s the first point. Secondly, Mark Gutteridge wasn’t a conventional man. He shouldn’t have been horrified when his illegitimate grandson turned up with proof of his identity. He’d be more likely to be intrigued, inclined to do something for the boy, like a Renaissance prince, right?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“But he doesn’t. He flips. He can’t handle it and that sets Ross off.”
“All right, that’s a lot of how. Now, who was Ross’ father?”
“Bryn,” I said.
I sat on the bed and Ailsa rested her head against my thigh and we watched the day dying slowly outside the open window. An ascending jet littered the sky with dirty brown smoke, its boom drowned out something Ailsa murmured and I stroked her hair in reply. Maybe she was thinking about Mark Gutteridge, maybe about the children she’d never have. I was thinking about raw, haunted people who twanged the nerves of everyone they touched — like Bryn, like Haines, like Cyn. They couldn’t sloop along in the shallows where the water was warm and the breeze soft, they had to jut up into spray and icy winds with their secrets for sails and the rocks dead ahead.