Bright Air - Barry Maitland [95]
‘Oh now, that isn’t true,’ Muriel said. ‘What happened to poor Lucy was simply a tragedy, nobody’s fault. And poor Curtis and Owen! No, we feel great sadness, of course, but we can’t alter the past. We just have to live with it. And you say Marcus isn’t well?’
I said, ‘Not too well, I think. He seems to have left the university on bad terms, and become a bit of a hermit.’
‘Oh dear. We knew that he never came back here again to continue his research project, of course, but I don’t see how they could blame him for what happened. And what about Damien? I hear he’s a successful lawyer now.’
She said this with a certain intensity behind her bright smile, I thought. How had she heard about him?
‘Yes,’ Anna said shortly.
‘And some lucky girl has finally managed to pin him down, I believe?’ She was watching Anna keenly for her reaction.
‘Lucky woman,’ Anna said dryly.
Muriel smiled to herself, and Stanley changed the subject to more innocuous territory. I was intrigued by Muriel’s interest in Damien, and later, when Stanley excused himself to make some phone calls, and Bob went out to get another bottle of wine, I brought it up again.
‘It sounds as if you got the measure of Damien while he was here, Muriel.’
‘Oh well, by the time you get to my age you’ve seen most human types. I recognised his straight away. The way he looked at the girls. It’s a handicap, really—makes life exciting, of course, for both him and them, but I do hope he’s settled down now.’
I heard Bob returning and said quickly, ‘Did he try something on with Lucy, Muriel? That night of the party, perhaps?’
‘Oh.’ She looked at me for a moment, then gave her head a little shake. ‘I gave you my advice, didn’t I, Josh? Let it go. The past is gone. Whatever she or anyone else may have said or done, she was always true to herself.’
What the hell was that supposed to mean? What had Luce said or done that Muriel knew and didn’t want to pass on to me? I wanted to ask her more, but Bob had returned and the conversation switched to the cost of diesel.
22
The following day we flew back to Sydney. After a night of deep sleep I’d woken with a general sense of suspended reality, as if I hadn’t quite surfaced from an intense dream. This feeling continued as the little plane rose up into the bright air above the island and banked to the south-west, giving me one last panoramic view. I could make out the white threads of surf along the line of the reef, the shadow of a cloud passing over one of the Admiralty Islands, a tiny boat lying off Neds Beach. And then, as we climbed higher, I caught sight of Balls Pyramid away to the south, stark and solitary. Had we really stood on top of that, Anna and I, just a couple of days before?
I glanced at her sitting beside me, reading an article in the in-flight magazine about adventure holidays in Tibet, and I smiled to myself, feeling a glow of affection for her. I imagined her going back to the Walter Murchison Memorial Nursing Home, readjusting to the grubby realities of ordinary life, and I suddenly realised how much I would miss her constant presence when we got back. She closed the magazine with a sigh, and dug a book out of her pack—a murder mystery, naturally.
The surge of people at Sydney airport roused me from my dreamy state like a slap in the face. We fought our way through the crowds to the entrance to the rail station and caught a train into Central. Anna had a twenty-minute wait for a connection to Blacktown, and I bought us coffees and sat with her, reluctant to leave. I guessed that she was feeling something similar. She’d said hardly a word that morning and now she stared at her hands, still raw and swollen from the climbing, and shook her head.
‘It’s hard to believe,