The High Places: Stories

Art Appreciation

Henry Taylor had always known he would have money one day, and this confidence was vindicated when his mother won the lottery on a Thursday in the August of 1961. He could afford to get married. But he wasn’t yet sure if he could afford to quit his job, so he went to the office the day after he heard the news. The sun came through the window blinds in long tedious slats and time passed outside, far below, with the noise of the road and the joy of boys on bicycles. Above, where Henry was, women walked among the men, delivering coffee and papers. They were all decorous, even the young ones — even those reproachable few who lingered with one hip against the corners of desks. One particular girl had caught Henry’s attention. She was new to her job, but had already made a name for herself with her prettiness and good nature. She dressed modestly, with a sense of pleasures offered all the same: a heightening of her body’s secrets through her polite attempts to conceal them. Her name was Eleanor, and she called herself Ellie.

Henry thought, now he had money, that he would marry her.

He didn’t tell anyone that his mother had won the lottery, and a considerable amount of his delight had to do with his windfall being secret. That was the great thing: to sit at his desk, observing as he always did the movements of the office — and Ellie’s movements among them — but as a profoundly different man, with a new and superior perspective. There was no longer anything to keep him from approaching Ellie, but he held off even so, not out of hesitation but in order to savour his own intentions. Henry noticed that she stole frequent looks at him. She had the quality of a bird among grasses, peering out in nervous excitement, eager for a mate but afraid to abandon safety. He was certain she was in the office not to make flimsy dates with different men but to find a husband.

As he left work that Friday afternoon, Henry made sure to say goodnight to Ellie. She was flattered and demure.

‘Enjoy your weekend,’ he said, and she said — she almost sang — ‘You too!’ She wore her hair pulled back with a navy ribbon.

Henry, as usual, took the stairs to the ground floor of the building — this was part of his fitness regime, to exercise his legs in the morning and the evening — and when he reached the lobby, the elevator doors sprang open and Ellie stepped out from between them.

‘Fancy that,’ Henry said. He looked at her with pleasure. Her waist was small, she had pale, plump arms, and her hair had a good-natured sheen.

Ellie stood swinging her handbag this way and that.

‘Walk me to the station?’ she asked, and he offered his arm, which she took.

It had begun to rain, and they walked beneath his large black umbrella. She tucked herself in beside him and her small, uneven steps limited his stride. He wanted to lift Ellie up in his arms the way you might a child at a parade.

‘I’d like to take you out sometime,’ Henry said.

‘That would be lovely,’ she said, with a small frown.

‘I’d like to take you out right now,’ Henry said.

‘Tonight’s impossible,’ she said. ‘I have a class on Fridays. But some day next week?’

‘What kind of class?’

Ellie gave a little smile, the bashful twin of her frown, and said, ‘Art appreciation.’

They arrived at Wynyard station and there, between the sound of the trains passing underneath the street and the sound of traffic passing over the street, she leaned her head into his shoulder for one unexpected moment. Then she ran down the steps into the station. Henry watched her bright brown head move among the commuters and disappear in the direction of the North Shore line. He considered her his girl from that moment.

* * *

Henry was fond of Sydney on a Friday afternoon. It was late winter, so the sky lowered early, and there was that weekend feeling of relief and consequence. There was a place near the station where he liked to eat after work. The whole establishment smelled boiled — boiled meat, wet raincoats, and the undersides of shoes. He ordered a hamburger — no onions, never onions — and ate it while imagining Ellie on the way to her Friday-night class. He had a vague sense that art appreciation involved bowls of fruit and flowers. But his mind didn’t stay on her for long; he began, without quite knowing it, to think about his money. He wondered how much of the ten thousand pounds his mother would give him and concluded that it would be at least half. He thought of her clutching his arm the night before, saying, ‘I’ll set you up, you’ll get married.’

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 trainers, 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.

After lunch, he took her out into the garden and asked her to marry him. She answered, without hesitation, ‘Yes.’ Unsure of what to do next, he held her hand and kissed her. It was one of those days on the very edge of summer, when the light falls blankly from a strong sky and the grass is already beginning to brown. The towels on the clothesline flipped in the light wind. The kiss was not their most successful, and raising his eyes from it, Henry saw his mother’s face hovering in a window.

‘I don’t have a ring yet,’ he said. ‘I thought you might want to choose it yourself.’

Ellie was looking around the garden as if she were not so much excited as interested by the turn of events, and Henry was surprised by the feeling of admiration that rose from somewhere beneath his feet and rushed toward his heart. His mother, unable to wait any longer behind the window, came running down the brick steps and embraced them both. She held Henry’s hand, and she held Ellie’s, out there on the browning grass, and said that she would see them married and then she would move. So Henry had been right: she had been waiting for him, and now things would proceed more quickly.

* * *

Ellie decided on an April wedding. Cool, blue April was her favourite month. Her mother approved, and so did Henry’s, who finally set a date for Victoria: the first of May. Henry’s mother wanted to pay for the wedding, so Ellie arranged a meeting with her parents at a city restaurant. Her parents were a poised pair: he was a teacher, though retired with back problems; she liked to paint, and had even sold one or two watercolours of the view from their dining-room window. There had once been money somewhere in her family. Everyone was grateful for Henry’s mother’s generosity, and there was a minimum amount of embarrassment, which was a relief to Henry, who found himself unexpectedly anxious for his mother among the sombre hover of the waiters. Ellie’s father also unsettled him, for no good reason; he was a pale, greying man, gentle with his back to the point of womanliness, but at one point he leaned across the table, took Henry’s wrist in a pinching grip, and said, in a low voice, ‘Isn’t the groom meant to ask my permission?’ Then he winked — the kind of sharp, jovial wink that bookies master and Henry never had — and carried on eating.

That summer was damp and close: white skies and pressed heat. Henry had been busier at work since his promotion. It was the season of bushfires, and a mid-sized sugar company whose policy he managed lost a mill and much of a small township among its more southerly canefields. This involved some travel for Henry, who had never ventured far from Sydney. He caught the train up the long green coast, and although the sea on his right and the hills on his left looked very much like home, he was struck again by the new horizons opening before him with money and marriage. He was now prepared to admit that he had been a lesser man before his mother’s win. He resolved, in the flickering carriage of the northbound train, to stop going to Wentworth Park on Friday nights. This resolution survived his return to the city. Ellie, pleased with his decision, and unusually permissive — she had missed him, she said, while he was away — made no similar offer to give up her art classes.

They spent Christmas at Ellie’s parents’ house because Henry’s mother had gone to her sister’s. Henry was wary of the differences between this house and the one he would soon inherit: the strong grey-green light that filtered through the gum trees and was reflected in the vague watercolours hanging on the dining-room walls, the simplicity of the furniture, and the surprising number of books. There was a balding in the carpet; his mother would have covered it with a rug. After the meal, Ellie’s father rose before the assembled guests — there were quite a number of cousins — and delivered his annual speech, in which he summed up the events of the past year, both private and public. Henry, who was attentive to the gestures of other men, to the small and large ways in which respect was granted and withheld, noticed — much as he had noticed the worn carpet and the books — that Ellie’s father never once met his eye during the speech, not even when announcing his daughter’s engagement. Her mother, in contrast, peered at her future son-in-law from behind her glasses.

At an appropriate time that evening, Henry steered Ellie out into the garden and quizzed her about her parents. At first she wouldn’t say much, except, shyly, ‘They have ideas.’

‘What does that mean?’ he asked.

Ellie made a small, anxious motion with her hands, as if someone, from a long way off, had thrown a ball in her direction.

‘Do they like me?’ he asked.

‘I told them you wanted me to give up my art appreciation,’ she said, without looking at him, and when he made a noise of irritation she began to speak very quickly about things that didn’t seem to matter. She told him that her mother was, in fact, a remarkable woman, and that if her family had held on to their money she would have done so much more — she’d have trained as an artist and would be famous now. Ellie said that her father had been adored by every student he’d ever taught, but that his pride had suffered when he was forced to retire; that they wanted, more than anything else, to see her go to university, but she was tired of living beautifully on too little money, tired of her parents’ belief that education was worthy of any sacrifice, and wanted to prove to them how possible it was to take a job in the world, so far into the heart of the world as an insurance firm, and still love art. Because she did love art. Then Ellie pressed herself into Henry’s arms and laid one damp cheek against his shoulder. All this while the mynah birds plunged from the junipers, frightening other birds away.

He said, gently, ‘Did you tell them about the lottery?’

Ellie shook her hidden head to say no.

‘Why not?’

And she raised her face and said, ‘They would think I was only marrying you for your money.’

Her face disappeared again, and her thin shoulders rose and fell. Now she was crying. She was so young — only twenty — and passing into his keeping. If marriage was going to be like this, with Ellie at his shoulder, exhausted by honesty and, despite her parents, sure of the way to happiness, then he could manage. He could flourish, in fact, and win; the threadbare carpet and the watercolours could no longer laugh at him. He moved his mouth amid her dark hair and said, ‘My Ellie, my sweet girl.’

* * *

Henry’s mother returned from Victoria on the arm of a man named Arthur. Arthur was short and fox-coloured, with freckles and a muddled smile under a neat red moustache. Like Henry, he was in the ‘insurance game’; he also liked to spend his ‘bit of money’ on a Friday night and was disappointed to learn that Henry no longer went to the dogs. He had a habit of jogging his shoulders up and down as he talked. Henry viewed him with suspicion and had to know everything. His mother offered it all up: how they had met (on the train to Melbourne), where he lived (in Sydney’s west), what he expected of her and she of him (she couldn’t say — not yet). There was no question she wouldn’t answer; there were also some she answered that he hadn’t asked. There had been no intercourse. She told Henry everything and then went away and told the telling of it to Arthur, so that Arthur sat Henry down one Sunday afternoon while Henry’s mother produced a purposeful clatter in the kitchen and said, ‘What you want to know is, am I on the make?’

Henry liked Arthur’s candour; he liked straightforward talk. It showed a respect, he thought, for all parties. So the two men talked it all out in the shuttered light of the Sunday house: Arthur’s wages, his savings, what he knew of Henry’s mother’s winnings, what he knew her to have promised Henry.

‘Never an actual sum,’ Henry said. ‘But it’s understood. She wants to see me set up in life.’

‘Like any good mother,’ Arthur said, lifting and dropping his shoulders, ‘who has the means to do so.’

Henry approved of Arthur after this discussion, and, when Ellie expressed doubts, came to his defence. She was jumpy in Arthur’s presence, and her refusal to respond to his mild flirtations made her seem prudish and ill-humoured. Henry could see that his mother was happy and that happiness suited her; that she was made for contentment, for padded hips, for the kind vulgarity of a man like Arthur (that was how Henry saw him — clearly, he thought, through Ellie’s eyes as well as his own). When Ellie kept away from the house and from Henry’s mother, Henry accused her of being a snob, which made her wrinkle her nose. He knew she was afraid of snobbery (afraid of having caught it from her parents). Arthur made jokes about Ellie’s art appreciation and Henry laughed at them without feeling disloyal. As the summer faded, he felt an increased impatience with the sanctity of Ellie’s Friday nights.

One Thursday evening in mid-March, Ellie and Henry walked together in Hyde Park. Whenever Ellie made movements toward St James station he held her by the hand and wouldn’t let her go. The fig trees swung with bats and somewhere in the park a possum cried out. The water in the fountain threw light over the green legs of Apollo, who was otherwise lost in darkness. Here Henry pleaded with Ellie in a low, shameful voice to give him her Friday nights, to give him everything, to love him and only him, and he told her other things which before tonight he could never have predicted he might feel, let alone say, about his need and his loneliness and all the ways in which she had changed him. She was angry and wouldn’t promise; she said to him, hurt and soft, ‘I can’t believe you would even ask,’ and when he began to defend himself she raised her voice to say, ‘I didn’t know you doubted me.’

And then, without thinking much about it, Henry thrust one arm into the water that poured from the fountain until it had soaked far beyond the elbow of his navy suit, and he held it there, or rather the water seemed to hold it, although it was cold and Ellie begged him to stop. He saw her confusion, but from a distance. He felt her kiss his face and submerge her own arm in order to take his hand and draw it out of the water; only then did he seem to be free of the fountain. They held each other and cried, both of them — in public, in Hyde Park, with other lovers and lustful young men skirting them, whistling and smiling and making comments. Henry considered his behaviour remarkable; he felt Ellie’s warm tears and the compassionate pressure of her shaking body, but was unable to believe that he was physically present for any of it.

Their wet arms chilled them both. She led him through the park and down William Street, and this time, instead of going to a restaurant, they went to a hotel she knew of — how did she know? — and there she let him see all of her, all at once. There was no doubting her beauty and her devotion, and the most extraordinary thing about her giving herself up to him was that he felt, equally or perhaps with even more certainty, that he was giving himself to her. The room had a sour smell like turning fruit, not unpleasant. Afterward, they lay together, damp and listless, until he felt himself return to his body, and then he forced them both into action: dressed her and himself, took her out to the street to find a taxi, and gave her the money to pay for it. He walked to Central station in a state of luminous calm. It was two weeks until the wedding.

* * *

The next day, after work, Kath was waiting for him at the hamburger place.

‘I don’t know what you think you’re doing,’ he said in a low voice, with a polite smile, as if someone might be watching them.

‘I stopped by for a bite,’ Kath said. ‘It’s a free country, last I heard.’ She was pert and proud. There was a new copper to her hair.

‘Suit yourself,’ he said. He ordered his hamburger at the counter, distracted, and Kath called out, ‘No onions!’ People turned to look at her, as they always did. He took a deep breath. ‘No onions,’ he said. Nothing wrong, he thought, with sharing a quick meal with a good-looking woman, a friend of the family. He kept his eye on the station for any sign of Ellie, although he had already walked her to the train and ushered her with tender regret (on both sides) to her Friday class.

‘You look … greenish,’ Kath said. ‘A bit green about the gills. You all right, Henry? Not eaten up by remorse, are you? Now that you’ve thrown away the best thing you ever had?’ Kath laughed, delighted at herself.

‘What’s all this about?’ His hamburger arrived, steaming. But the solitary pleasure of it was entirely lost.

‘I just wanted to know if you were off to the dogs tonight,’ Kath said. ‘I fancied it, is all. Fancied a night out with a friend.’

He had lifted his hamburger and now there was no putting it down. This placed him at a disadvantage. The thick slice of beetroot threatened to slide onto his plate — it purpled his bread and his tongue — and juice of some kind, silky with fat, ran over his fingers.

‘I’m getting married in two weeks,’ he said between bites.

‘Where’s the bride, then? Shouldn’t you be painting the town? It’s Friday night.’

There was something submerged about Kath’s face — something private and sly. Henry disliked it. It reminded him of how well suited they used to be; of how they’d both liked to cultivate a secret life to which they could make coy allusions.

‘She’s got a class,’ he said.

‘And you’re not invited?’

He snorted. The final bites of a hamburger were impossible in company; he abandoned them.

‘Take me to the track, then,’ Kath said. ‘We’ll go on a date.’

‘You never wanted to go on dates before,’ Henry said.

‘You never won the lottery before,’ Kath said, laughing, and two men at the counter looked over at her. They laughed too, and she seemed to absorb their approval and turn it back on them, brighter. The men watched as she put her hand on Henry’s arm. ‘You’re not a married man yet.’

Well, that was true, certainly. Kath smiled from her long immaculate face.

‘I guess I’ve missed you,’ she said.

They stood together and went out into the street.

The city was scrubbed and pale after the summer, and the buildings rose from the street with a mineral sheen. There was a leisurely rush on the pavements. Henry was aware, as he hadn’t been in some time, of the anxious thrill of Friday evening. He bought a copy of the Daily Mail.

‘I usually walk to Wenty,’ he said.

‘All that way?’ Kath showed him her heeled foot.

Henry liked the authority of hailing a taxi with a girl on his arm, and of getting into the back of it with her. Kath was wearing a short blue coat which drew attention to the bareness of her immoderate legs; Henry admired them, but with disapproval, as she stepped out of the taxi. Ellie was pretty in such a sensible way, but Kath required adjustments. She stood out on his arm. He and Ellie, he thought, stood out together. Ellie would be at her class by now. And here he was, at the dogs with Kath. Passing through the gates with this long girl at his side, Henry felt as if something had fallen over him: a soft cloak, maybe, made of silky stuff, invisible, that made him hot with knowledge and pride.

‘This feels like the Easter Show,’ Kath said, pressing him forward, lifting her face to the lights and the noise. ‘How do we make a bet?’

‘Over there,’ Henry said, and he pointed to the bookmakers, who stood under their umbrellas above the crowd, shouting, with their heavy bags strung around their necks. ‘You leave that to me.’

‘No,’ Kath said. ‘I want to know everything.’

Henry found it gratifying to teach her. She frowned at the racing form in the Mail, tracing one polished finger over the names of the dogs, creasing her forehead and saying things like ‘I like Young Lightning. He’s got a good feel to him.’ She paid no attention to all the other information on the form, so he ignored it too. Kath took a small gold pen from her handbag and as she bent to mark the dogs she liked the names of, Henry saw the darkening roots of her copper hair.

She held his hand and let him lead her to the bookies, and once there she scolded him for wanting to bet so little on each race. ‘For a man who talks big, you have no ambition,’ she said.

Henry was enjoying himself. He felt as if he’d been drinking; he felt the warmth of the crowd, of Kath’s body against his, of having money to spend. If Kath liked Young Lightning, he would put five pounds on Young Lightning to win. Henry knew he would lose. And Ellie, right now, was in a room on the northern side of the harbour, among all those pink Madonnas, those green Apollos. She would never like it here with the noisy dogs. She would ask the wrong questions, and she was sentimental: she would worry about the treatment of the greyhounds. Kath sat beside him on the benches, tense in her blue coat, and watched every race. Young Lightning fell in the sixth race, but Kath only laughed; Henry couldn’t care about his five pounds. This time last night, he and Ellie had been on William Street, at the hotel.

Kath turned to him and smiled. ‘These dogs love to run,’ she said. It was the right thing to say, and he kissed her mouth. The kiss was friendly and without conviction. She squeezed his knee with her left hand.

‘I’ll just pop to the loo,’ she said, and she went quickly, taking her handbag with her. Then it was as if she’d never been there, as if she were only a good feeling Henry had every now and then. He wondered how many of the men sitting on the benches around him were married. They leaned easy on their comfortable knees; they wore open coats and drank from brown bottles. He loved them, and everyone.

Henry turned around to look for Kath’s return and there was Arthur, freckled and ruddy under the lights, sitting higher in the stand with a paper folded over his knee. He was watching the dogs parade before the seventh race, and making notes; he wore the kind of flat green cap that Henry associated with butchers or publicans or plucky men down on their luck. Arthur gave no indication that he had seen Henry, but it was difficult to tell with a man like him, a man of winks and nods and innuendo, a man of showy discretion. Henry turned back to the track, where the dogs were filing into the starting traps, and Kath passed in front of him, one hand on his shoulder, to resume her seat. She wore fresh lipstick.

‘Who’ve we got in this one?’ she asked, inspecting the form. ‘Is this Rowdy Jack?’

Henry’s chest shook. He saw the future and Arthur in it, steering his mother by her happy elbow, smirking above the Victorian table, giving Henry quiet, confidential looks, tapping his nose, hating Ellie and wishing on the two of them a dull revenge. And in this future Henry saw himself in his mother’s house, always and only the lucky son of a lucky mother. An inheritor, before she was even dead. There was something indecent about it. He would be living in debt to his mother and to Arthur and to Ellie, and they would all make demands on him, and on this free and shouting life he’d given up: the bookies under their umbrellas and Kath beside him with her copper hair and lips. Generous Kath, who was his friend even now, was so quick and alert, and had never asked him for anything. And another life occurred to him, a life in which his wife came with him to the track and the rest of the week was happy Sunday lamplight, with a bed and newspapers.

Henry stood. ‘Let’s go,’ he said, and she followed him out, her hand on his back, and he let it stay there. He didn’t look at Arthur.

‘What’s the rush?’ Kath asked, and he pulled her by the hand into the darkness of a stand of trees. This whole part of Sydney had once been a swamp, and then an abattoir. There was rot and filth under all of it. Kath’s lipstick tasted chalky and sweet, and he felt with hectic hands under her coat; but she pushed him away.

‘Henry,’ she said, and he stopped. Her face was as pale as the bark of the gum behind her. ‘I could use some money,’ she said. ‘Just a loan.’

He waited for the shouting of the crowd inside the racetrack to subside, and then he asked, ‘How much?’

‘I could use a hundred,’ she said. He didn’t answer. ‘That’s nothing to you. That’s a hundredth of what you won.’

Henry reached out for her coat again, and this time she unbuttoned it for him. She was as thin as she had always been underneath it, and she shook like an arrow. She didn’t raise her face or body into his, and kept her arms behind her, wrapped against the trunk, so that he felt, kissing her, as if he were only pressed to a tree that had once had a girl inside it. But her mouth moved. She was willing. It was her being willing that made him stop.

He stepped away from the girl and the tree. He took all the notes he had in his wallet and passed them to Kath, who accepted them without looking.

‘Thank you,’ she said. She began to button her coat.

Henry walked out to the part of the street that was most illuminated by the floodlights of the racetrack. The invisible cloak still lay across his shoulders; it was heavier in the light. He shook it off and walked home to his mother.

His lucky mother, who was waiting now for Arthur with a lamp in her bedroom window.