The High Places Read online

  Although Henry’s mother had promised to set him up, he still went to the dog track, because it was Friday. He had a weekend schedule: Friday night the dogs, Saturday the horses, Sunday lunch with his mother, and Sunday night with Kath, a girl he knew. For so long he had dreamed of a windfall, of a sudden fortune, and of what it might make possible, because every week there was a chance: the dogs ran, the horses flew, and Henry was always there to see them. There was money on every race. He won, and sometimes he didn’t. This was the greatest pleasure he knew: a little profit and a little loss. He also liked the company of gamblers. They’re cheerful people, he would say; they’re optimists.

  Henry might have taken a bus to the dog track, but he preferred to walk: down George Street and Broadway, through Glebe, and into Wentworth Park. The Friday city was so festive in the rain, full of women running from warm taxis into warm houses and men standing at street corners waiting for the lights to change, holding newspapers over their heads. The gum trees lining the streets of Glebe took up the easing rain and shook it out again in heavier drops. In every one of the terraced houses Henry passed, a woman like Ellie waited for a man she loved amid the furniture and finery he had bought her.

  Because he was careful with his money and lived with his mother, Henry had a small but steadily growing savings account, which was commendable for a man of twenty-eight with a mid-level job in an insurance firm. The thought of his nest egg produced in him a simple, serious pleasure as he entered the Wentworth Park greyhound track. It pleased him to think that he would be here, with money he could afford to bet, whether or not his mother had won the lottery. And because he was a man who enjoyed weighing his odds and his options, it didn’t occur to Henry to bet any more recklessly on that Friday than he normally would. Still, he had an unusually successful night. He sat in the good feeling of the crowd as it hung on those few moments that mattered, when the dogs flattened against time and won, or failed to win. Then men erupted around him in victory or regret, and there was a new surge toward the bookmakers, who stood illuminated above the throng. The bookies were the men Henry admired most of all. They spoke in a ribald and rhythmic way, singing out the odds like a sea shanty. Henry was covetous of their easy authority, which he believed came from handling large sums of money.

  Henry stayed three hours, passed jokes among his track acquaintances, rolled on the balls of his feet as he waited to see which dog would emerge from the starting tangle, and collected his winnings. Then he walked to Central and took a train south. He never drank (he hated a fogged mind), and that night, as he walked home from the station – late, with the streets dark and his mother waiting for him, even in her sleep, her lamp bright in the window – he felt a new clarity to his brain, as if a frost had settled on it. It was still there the next night, at the horses, and he won again – a larger sum this time, and still without undue risk. It interested him, in an offhand way, that his weekend could look the same as always, even when his life had changed. But his wealth had already altered things: made Ellie possible, aided him at the track, kept his mind clear.

  * * *

  At lunch on Sunday his mother told him that she was planning to move to Victoria to live near her sister. ‘I’m giving you this house,’ she told him. ‘I want to see you settled.’

  His mother was a small woman – it was as if her thrift extended even to the size of her body – but on this day she ate heartily of lamb and potatoes. She seemed to have entered a new and generous state of perpetual surprise; she’d bought lottery tickets for so many years, without the least expectation that she would profit by them. Now well-being radiated from her unlikely face, with its thick nose and thin eyebrows.

  ‘That’s the second day this week you’ve given me good news,’ Henry said.

  His mother answered, ‘Good things come in threes,’ and Henry wondered, What will the third thing be? Ellie? A car? A big win at the dogs? And so he limited himself.

  He would sell the house, of course, and buy something closer to the city, where he would be known in the neighbourhood, known by the greengrocer and by the paperboys, and he would have a straight garden path leading to his front door, flanked by a hedge that he would trim himself on Saturday mornings. Because, he thought, I’m a working man, and I won’t forget it. He would buy a car and drive to the track; he would still go to the track, because it was the spectacle, not the money, which drew him there. And there would be days with Ellie by the harbour, visiting all those brief bays on the northern shore where she lived, swimming and picnicking and maybe sitting on the water in a little boat. The benevolent future spread out before him, and he felt an immense satisfaction.

  After lunch with his mother, Henry went to see Kath. He lingered into the evening with Kath’s compact body. Later in the night, he read the newspapers by lamplight; Kath preferred lamplight. Henry had ambitious plans, but he considered anyone who worked too hard for his success a dupe; he read in the newspapers of the rigorous transactions of wealthy men and stabbed at these pages with a contemptuous finger. Kath yawned on the bed. She had the sort of long, streamlined face you sometimes see in tall women. She was more beautiful than Ellie, but less pretty. Kath was always making distinctions of that kind. She worked in the beauty salon of a flash hotel. Henry had met her at the hamburger place at Wynyard station; how odd and blazing and fine she had looked in that cheerful din.

  He shook the newspaper and told her that this would be their final Sunday.

  ‘What’s her name?’ she asked.

  ‘Ellie,’ he said.

  ‘You like your girls with cute little names, don’t you,’ Kath said, and he considered this petty of her.

  ‘If you must know,’ Henry said, without looking at her face, ‘I’ve won the lottery.’

  ‘How much?’ she asked him, and when he told her, she sat up in bed and hooted like an owl.

  ‘You’re not serious,’ she said, swinging her long boyish legs over to rest her feet on the floor. ‘Let me pour you a drink, then, you bastard.’

  She began an uncharacteristic sprightly chatter, telling him of every lucky instance in which a person she knew had won something: money, meat, flowers, jewellery and large appliances. Then she handed him a drink and said, ‘I thought you didn’t rate the lottery? I thought you didn’t even buy tickets?’

  ‘Just this once,’ he said, with a shrug of the papers, and she growled at him from the corner of her mouth and said, ‘No one’s that lucky.’

  * * *

  That Sunday night, a wind moved over the city. It rolled through in one direction, out of the sea and into the west, and it bent trees behind it. The wind brought rain at times, in orderly diagonal sheets, but there was no chaos to it, only consistency. On Monday morning, Henry stepped over fallen leaves and other storm litter on his way from Kath’s flat to the office. The wind rearranged his hair, so he combed it with his hand as he climbed the stairs. While climbing, he considered the fact that he liked his job, that he liked the idea of insurance, that it suited his temperate, ready mind. It occurred to him that he might not quit, even now that his mother had promised him the house. There was no need to make big gestures; after all, she couldn’t spare him such an enormous sum of money that it would do for two people, and children, for another sixty years. He sat at his desk and watched for Ellie all day, and whenever she was in sight he made sure she knew it. He mentioned the lottery win to one or two people. He told them that he knew he could rely on their discretion.

  Ellie was waiting for him at the end of the day, wearing a funny little blue hat that hid most of her hair.

  ‘I wondered if you’d walk me to the Art Gallery,’ she said. ‘There’s a lecture tonight, and we could eat afterward.’ She laid one hand against his shoulder, in the same spot where she had rested her head on Friday, and although he was reluctant about the idea of a lecture and the Art Gallery, and about her having asked him before he could ask her, he said, ‘Let’s go, then.’ He took the elevator with her down to the lobby and Ellie
leaned into his arm as if she couldn’t be near him without some sort of physical contact.

  The wind was still about, and it funnelled through the streets and caught at Ellie’s skirt until they reached Hyde Park. Ellie stood for a moment beside the park’s great circular fountain and looked up at the figure at its centre.

  ‘Hi, Apollo,’ she said, and pointed. ‘I like to say hi whenever I pass. Isn’t he beautiful?’

  The statue was naked, with one green bronze hand pointing toward the cathedral and the other holding some kind of harp. Henry supposed that this was art appreciation. He tried for a moment to replicate the position of Apollo’s knees.

  ‘He’s the god of poetry and music,’ Ellie said.

  ‘Do gods let birds do their business all over them?’ Henry asked, and Ellie laughed in just the right delighted way. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Or we’ll be late for your lecture.’ In this way, holding his hand out to her, chiding, pleased, he corrected the tone of the outing.

  * * *

  They were late, and Henry’s shoes squeaked on the marble floors of the gallery. There were chairs set up in the high, arched lobby, and a number of the people sitting in them turned to look. Henry thought the audience appeared well fed but somehow pinched. There were a number of fashionable hats. He saw a single vacant seat and urged Ellie into it; he stood at the back of the crowd with another young man.

  ‘Get dragged here too, did you?’ this man said, and Henry gave a mock grimace. They leaned together against a yellow wall in the easy company of their mutual conscription.

  The lecturer was a man who described himself as a conceptual artist. Like Henry, he wore a light grey suit; in fact, he might have come, moments before, from an office like Henry’s, except that his hair was slightly longer than Henry would have allowed himself. He was talking about his latest work, which seemed to involve a photograph of a chair, an actual chair, and a card printed with the dictionary definition of a chair.

  ‘Bet it took him half an hour and a couple of beers to come up with that one,’ Henry said, in a low voice, to the man beside him.

  ‘You’re on,’ the man said. ‘A fiver.’ He shook the note out of his pocket like a magician producing a bird. But they only laughed, and the man put his money away.

  Henry could see the back of Ellie’s head from where he stood, and he watched her listen. Her blue hat sat in her lap. The hat was for the wind, he realised, and he approved of her foresight. The artist coughed into the side of his mouth and said something about the impossibility of totality. Henry stirred with discomfort, the man beside him shifted too, and Ellie turned in her seat to look at them. She gave Henry a small sweet smile. When the artist called for questions, she slipped from her row, took Henry’s arm, and hurried him out into the night.

  The Domain was dark under the fig trees and Ellie walked with her head resting against Henry’s arm. ‘Now we can eat,’ she said, as if the lecture had been a regrettable obstacle to this activity. The ground was soft underfoot with the ripe, wet leaves of the figs, and bats tittered in their intricate branches. He wasn’t sure where to take her to dinner, but she steered him toward a place off William Street that she said was Italian. There were brothels on the street and Ellie looked at their red lights with sad and serious eyes. American sailors, drunk and dressed in white, ran up out of Woolloomooloo. They called to Ellie as they passed and shook Henry’s hand. He was proud of her.

  Over dinner he said, ‘What was all that about totality?’

  And she answered, ‘Wasn’t he marvellous?’

  Apparently he was, but there was no more to say about it. Ellie ordered expensive things, and Henry paid for them. She seemed somehow to have been his girl for a very long time. For example, she spoke of her friends and family as if he already knew them.

  ‘And Jimmy,’ she said, ‘is livid about Ann. But you can’t blame him.’ Or, ‘When we see her, you have to ask Mary about her surfing accident. It’s the funniest thing I ever heard.’

  It was as if, with the new clarity of his mind, he had willed her into a relationship with him. She didn’t ask him any questions, but listened with her chin perched on the neat palm of one hand whenever he talked about himself. He told her about the money. He had been unsure whether to mention his mother or to claim the lottery win as his own, but was pleased to find himself telling the truth; it made him seem filial, respectful, the fortunate son of a lucky mother, and no dupe – he would never waste his daily bread on lottery tickets. Ellie listened, and watched him with her serious face. She was calculating, he thought, and he didn’t blame her. He wasn’t an unattractive man: there was his height and the vivid blue of his eyes, which Kath, in a mood, had once described as ‘hygienic’. But with his tall, loose frame he looked as if somebody had knitted him together, and his ears sat out too far from his head. There was nothing wrong with defects like these, as long as he knew about them. Ellie leaned across the table and took his hands in hers.

  ‘I’m very happy for you,’ she said in a conclusive tone, as if the shape of her life had now been decided. They walked back through the park to St James station, neither of them speaking much, and he kissed her there for the first time.

  * * *

  The wet winter became a clear spring, and Henry bought a car and wooed Ellie among all the secret suburbs of Sydney’s northern coast, their palms and coves and their small significant bays. They swam together in the hot honeymoon water and manoeuvred behind the tricky rocks to kiss. She remained faithful to her Friday-night art-appreciation classes, so Saturday became their weekend night: Henry stopped going to the horses and took Ellie out instead. On Sundays he still lunched at home, and afterward – now that his Sunday evenings were free – he helped his mother sort through her possessions in readiness for her move to Victoria. She had acquired more in her quiet life than Henry could quite account for, and she spent a great deal of time over each object, as if every Christmas ornament or book or porcelain figurine were worthy of attention. Something was slowing her progress and delaying the move – a nostalgic tenderness, Henry thought, a formless sentimentality. It worried him, until he realised that she was waiting for him to announce his engagement. She would move when she knew he was settled.

  During this period Henry cultivated a brittle beard. He bought a suit of navy wool and knew he looked significant in it. Naturally, his good fortune had become news in the office. He was promoted to a new floor of the building, where he didn’t see Ellie until he called to fetch her for lunch. Usually they ate sandwiches in Hyde Park, but sometimes he took her to a restaurant on Pitt Street where the waiters wore bow ties and the wood-panelled walls made Henry think of a gentlemen’s club. All around them sat feverish men in suits, eating steaks with their square teeth. Business was transacted here, true business, the acts of men. Secretaries and girlfriends and wives slipped neatly in and out of the booths. Here, Henry was expansive and proud. He was a little afraid of the waiters, but they would never know it. He was gracious with them and paid the bill as if handing over a dowry. Ellie was the prettiest girl in the restaurant. Over lunch, he asked her to stop attending her Friday-night classes.

  ‘Surely you know by now how to appreciate art.’

  ‘It’s my passion,’ she said, and averted her head in a becoming way, like all those Madonnas she’d shown him in books about Italian painters.

  Maybe it was just as well; he could keep going to the greyhound track. He made a profit every week now, though his bets remained modest. He took fewer risks and studied the dogs more carefully. He was concerned about his savings, which had been depleted by the car and the courtship, and he was preoccupied by the idea of marriage: the pressed cotton, the resolute ecstasy, the begetting of children (he had hopes of a dynasty). Henry’s mind vibrated with these possibilities. He sat among the men at the track and saw the singed quality of their thinning hair and the thick ridges of flesh in the back of every neck. He was less and less charmed by the singsong of the bookies, the pointless silks of the t
rainers, the false lights, and the sharp dogs – all that stinking fuss in the sweet evenings of spring. This dissatisfaction, he thought, was not a sign of growing maturity (he wasn’t ashamed of his past love of racing), but it suggested to him a loneliness that he had been unaware of before his mother won the lottery, a loneliness that had driven him out into the city and to public congregations of men. It had also sent him, he supposed, to Kath, whom he thought of infrequently now, with something bordering on a wistful impatience, most often when Ellie stopped him short of handling some coveted part of her body. Ellie had a hasty, hot manner, girlish and at the same time proper, which in retrospect pleased him more than Kath’s smooth surety. They hadn’t slept together yet. He’d heard something, somewhere, about weak men redeemed by the society of good women.

  He brought Ellie to meet his mother one Sunday. He was disappointed to see towels on the clothesline; otherwise, the house was orderly and he was proud of it. Perhaps, when they were married, he and Ellie needn’t have the largest of houses. There was something to be said for quality on a modest scale. Not modest, exactly; humble, in the sense of an extraordinary man who conceals the extent of his own greatness. That was dignity, Henry thought: to have, but in private. Possibly they would stay in this house and have work done to it.

  Ellie excused herself to use the bathroom and his mother leaned in close with a confidential, sprightly face, and whispered, ‘She’s a delight.’ There was a newly set quality to his mother’s hair, a thin blush of colour over her cheeks, and she wore an unfamiliar dress. He remembered her telling him that she had once worked in an office.

  Ellie returned from the bathroom with a water stain on her pale blue blouse, and the way she held her hand over it – above her heart, above her breast – made everything she said seem particularly sincere. It was as if she were swearing allegiance to the meal, to the house, to Henry’s mother, and to Henry.