Play Abandoned

                                                              a black comedy published by Press On, an imprint of Arcadia/Australian Scholarly Publishing, August 2011

Late on a Sunday afternoon in January, Marian Parr opened the French windows and stepped onto the widow’s walk that ringed the hotel. Widow’s walk: a first-floor veranda, really, and there was no overdue sea captain, but the other associations were close enough – the sea, the waiting, her sometimes crosspatch heart. Here the trapped air smelt of the sea and sun-heated wood – soft odours, after a year of sheep-country dust. She watched a small boat butt against the white caps beyond the breakwater. As it yawed and tossed, bound for a showy disaster, her hands tightened on the chipped railing. She had a practised eye for the slipperiness of life.

            ‘Dinner is from seven till nine,’ Isabel said behind her, emerging from the adjoining room. ‘Alec suggests we go down for a drink first.’

            Marian saw that the little boat was sly and durable after all, and soon a speck upon calmer waters. Otherwise there was only the sky, a crescent of sand, some tattered palms, and a jetty secured to the sea by fishing lines. She knew from her umbilical tug that Nick was nearby, possibly down there on the jetty, among the gap-toothed men and old addled women and boys and Vietnamese families, importuning the fish.

            Isabel stepped tormentedly toward her. ‘Well? Are you coming?’

            Marian turned to her sister-in-law and said determinedly, ‘You go on down. I’ll be along shortly.’

            This was never going to work. Searching about for a lever, Isabel poked her head into Marian’s room and promptly found one. Her voice rose and spread along the balcony. ‘But you haven’t even unpacked yet.’

            ‘I will directly.’

            ‘Dinner is at seven.’

There was a pause full of weight and substance. Isabel trod water, still adrift. Suddenly she pointed, aghast: ‘Isn’t that Nick? Down there on the jetty?’

            But Marian had drawn inwards again, her slender form communicating shrinking and melancholy. Feeling large and inept, Isabel stomped back along the veranda, calling for her husband. ‘Alec. Alec.’

            Marian dreamed, her hands loose on the railing, her temple against a salt-scummed veranda post. Coming here had complicated her sadness, and so she apologised: I’m sorry, everyone. I’m unreliable. I should have stayed at home this time.

            No one heard her. Voices were rising in the next room, accumulation and relish in Isabel’s: She just stands there ... Won’t snap out of it ... Nick running wild on the jetty ...

            But Nick wasn’t running wild. Marian could see him with the fisher people, peering into plastic buckets, pointing, framing questions and observations with his hands, amassing information to treasure and recite. Her son on the jetty was the familiar geography of past summers, Nick with his skinny brown legs and his brown face fringed by sun-bleached hair. Kate was nearby too, just then, a shape in the corner of Marian’s eye. Marian dared not risk a direct glance, not even a blink, for fear of losing her again.

            Running wild, talking to God knows who. Do something, Alec.

            From out of the assenting silence that followed, Marian heard the sounds of a door opening and closing. She pictured her brother-in-law’s descent of the stairs, his march across the new floor tiles of the lobby, and his negotiation of the tarpaulins and scaffolding beside the refurbished main entrance, where new doors had been fitted, ‘The Bon Accord’ etched into glass panels. She waited ...

            There. Alec Parr sauntered into view below her, falsely unhurried, but then he paused to flash a complicit grin up at her, reminding Marian of her husband, for the Parr brothers were wry, lanky charmers. She stepped back into the shadows. Alec crossed the patch of eroded public lawn beside the hotel, wove between palm trees and weathered picnic tables, then skirted the shuttered kiosk and strode onto the jetty. At once Nicholas tugged him forward, Kate slipped away, and Marian felt the tears start again.

Blinking to clear them, she watched people struggle up from the beach, hot and tired, the men and women with mobile phones clamped to their ears and holding tight to children who could not see the need for it. This was the fag-end of a Sunday afternoon in summer, when conquering inlanders like the Parrs might arrive in dusty laden Range Rovers and child abductors begin to prowl.

            ‘Marian! It’s quarter-past six!’

            Marian nodded without turning from her view of the sea, the setting sun, and Alec and Nick returning to the Bon Accord hand in hand, Nick drawing shapes in the air. Then, as an airliner banked above the water, beginning its descent into West Beach airport, she felt breathless suddenly, close to panic.

Isabel returned to her room and stewed about her sister-in-law. Marian had never stoodwith the family but always alongside it, watchful, unforthcoming and faintly amused. Nothing excused that, not even Kate. She glanced at her watch tensely: to wait for Marian was unconscionable, if not unendurable, so she gathered her things together and strode tormentedly along the corridor to the stairs. This holiday was supposed to be restorative, but nothing was the same. No Boyd, no Kate, and even the Bon Accord was different, ladders and workmen everywhere.

Looking slim, erect, cross and faintly out of date, Isabel headed downstairs, encountering her daughter coming up. ‘Hi, Mum,’ said the girl winningly, infuriating Isabel, who didn’t know where Tiffany had been or why she was being so artless.

            ‘What’s going on?’ she demanded.

            ‘Just happy to be here, Mum,’ Tiffany replied, skipping past on a tide of vanity and gratification. She’d been cooped up in a boarding school all year and now felt free. Angels and sprites moved in her; she radiated sex and innocence wherever she went.

            She’s seen or met a boy, Isabel decided, quick as a flash. ‘Are you wearing that to dinner?’

            ‘What’s wrong with it?’ snarled Tiffany, returning to type, which was sixteen and eruptive.

            ‘You’re showing a bit of tummy.’

            ‘Are you saying I’m fat?’

            ‘I’m not saying that at all. I just think …’

            Isabel stopped, recognising the signs and patterns. She changed the subject. ‘Do us a favour?’

            ‘What?’ shrieked Tiffany.

            Isabel laid it all out – Nick on the jetty, talking to strange men; Auntie Marian’s vagueness – and said, ‘See if you can snap her out of it. We’ll be in the lounge.’

            ‘Okay,’ sang Tiffany, sunny again, knowing what to do. Her flawless ankles disappeared.

Isabel continued down the stairs and stepped into the lobby, her gaze sweeping it at a chilly remove. But if Tiffany had met a boy, he’d disappeared. There was only the owner-manager, Mr DeLuca.

Standing to one side, Isabel watched for Alec’s return from the jetty. She was very poised, very still, then abruptly rolled her head and shoulders, tense from the ten-hour drive, tense from Marian. Out with the bad, she told herself, in with the good; out with the bad, in with the good. The good included her husband and the Bon Accord hotel. After all, she’d met Alec here when she was ten, the year the Bon Accord had begun to advertise itself, in the Stock Journal, as the hotel for discerning country people. Her memories of that occasion were vivid and tinged with drama, for some children had gone missing back then, too. ‘Isabel,’ murmured Mr DeLuca, with his gravely beautiful inflexions.

Isabel blinked. The Bon Accord’s owner was standing very close to her, a subtle intruder. Normally she might have done what good head girls do and dealt with him brusquely, yet politely, but she was suddenly undone by his elegance, polish and teeth. Guile moved through her, wiping away all of her obligations and good intentions, and she returned his smile. ‘Oh, hi,’ she said inadequately.

‘Ciao, bella,’ he said and kissed her hand.

He drifted away, leaving her with rubbery knees and a twinge low in her abdomen, just as her husband and nephew pushed in from the street on a wave of elation. Confusion swamped her. She stared at Alec in panic. She’d always been the Isabel who’d known no other man but her childhood sweetheart, but maybe that was some kind of shallow, fabricated self. Maybe she was just like Mr DeLuca, a person of random appetites and rapid assimilations.

            ‘Hello, you two,’ she cried in a yoo-hoo voice that brought husband and nephew up short.

It was the phone that removed Marian from the veranda. ‘Checking that you arrived safely,’ Boyd said.

            Marian opened and closed her mouth, summoning reserves of strength. ‘Yes.’

            She could not say more than that to her husband. She could not say that she both did, and did not, want to hear his voice right then, or that he might have done the right thing in staying at home and she the wrong in leaving it. She whispered that she had to go and replaced the handset.

            When the knock came on her door and she saw her niece standing there, she knew that edicts had gone out: Don’t let Auntie Marian dwell on things. Keep her occupied. No malingering.

            ‘Hi,’ said Tiffany, doing that thing they do, that spastic fingerwave at cheek level.

            ‘Come in,’ said Marian repressively.

            ‘Cool,’ said Tiffany. ‘Hey, isn’t this, like, the room you had last year?’

            ‘Mm.’

            A few centuries passed. As Marian unpacked her suitcase, showered, and dressed for dinner, Tiffany waited on the bed, legs crossed, directing bright, uncritical observations into the room. ‘Mm,’ said Marian from time to time.

            ‘Auntie Marian?’

            ‘Mm?’

            ‘I saw Mr DeLuca downstairs. He remembers us.’

            ‘So he should. We’ve been coming here since the year dot.’

            Tiffany had an aspirant eye on Marian’s wardrobe mirror, where her slender ankles and thighs gleamed. Metal glinted on her teeth. She eased her skirt up a little, flexed her tendons and turned her knees this way and that; then, with an air of carefully testing her words, she said, ‘When he kisses your hand he says signorina.’

            ‘Or signora, as the case may be,’ said Marian.

She fastened her earrings, left, then right, and regarded her niece. Tiffany was sixteen, and possibly still to discover sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. More was the pity, for Marian saw little profit in the sweetly brave ambitions the child had professed on Christmas Day, namely to work with the disadvantaged or in overseas aid.

Or the dear little thing was dissembling. Meanwhile Marian could think of better paths to dissolution than attracting the attention of Mr DeLuca, a man of supple smiles and blood, a man who liked to put his hand in the small of a woman’s back. ‘Am I very late?’

            Tiffany’s brown wrist turned like a wisp of smoke in the mirror. ‘Five past seven. Mum said meet in the lounge. What are you going to have?’ She rotated her shoulders deliciously. ‘I’m going to have a champagne cocktail with pink champagne.’

            ‘Mm.’

            ‘This holiday is going to be so good,’ said Tiffany meaningfully.

            Meaning I’ll be bucked up by it and you’ll be the agent, thought Marian, visualising the sweetness and satisfaction, hearing the wispy little voice layered with elements of bossiness, delicacy and grief. For two weeks.

            ‘I’ve been really looking forward to it,’ Tiffany continued.

            ‘Mm,’ said Marian, consigning Tiffany to a Sudanese desert with Oxfam, where a band of rebels might take her hostage.

            ‘Mum and Dad, too,’ said Tiffany.

            Marian checked her profile in the mirror. ‘Is Nick with them?’

            ‘What?’

            ‘Is Nick with your mum or your dad?’

            ‘Dad had to go and fetch him back from the jetty,’ said Tiffany. ‘Mum said he was talking to strange men.’ She spotted her braced teeth, recoiled and slid a slim, brown hand over her mouth.

            ‘Tiffany, look at me,’ said Marian, in clear, concise English: ‘When you saw your mum just now, was Nick with her?’

            ‘Dad went to find him,’ said Tiffany. She sighed at her image in the mirror. ‘You can’t be too careful, can you? Think of those poor mothers in the news.’

            A moment later her words came crashing down around her. Aghast, she put her palms to her cheeks. ‘Sorry, Auntie Marian.’

            Marian ignored her. Should she take a jacket? Did it get cold in the dining room? She couldn’t remember. And with the renovation work being undertaken in the Bon Accord – Mr DeLuca’s push up-market – would the dining room be draughty? And why was she even dithering like this, like an old woman? Marian hadn’t thought of the poor mothers in the news, or of their snatched children, and couldn’t, not while the world continued to be so altered. Like looking through a veil, she thought, selecting a cardigan. Or a shroud. Anything on the other side was imponderable.

            ‘I’m really really sorry, Auntie Marian. I wasn’t thinking.’

            ‘I know. It’s all right.’

            Tiffany slid into tears, her lovely knees pressed decently together. Marian sighed, sat beside her niece and held her tight. She was often obliged to console those who consoled her.

            Tiffany lifted a wet and suffering face. ‘I’d give anything to have Kate back.’

            That was quite enough. Marian got to her feet. ‘Now, where did I put my room key?’

            ‘She loved these holidays.’

            ‘Mm.’

            ‘I feel so bad about Uncle Boyd.’

            ‘Here they are. Shall we go?’

            ‘He’ll feel all miserable staying at home.’

            ‘Champagne cocktails, here we come,’ said Marian rousingly.

            Tiffany gulped and rallied. The mirror gravely listened. ‘He’s most probably blaming himself. It wasn’t his fault.’

            No? Whose, then?