The Night Book Part 10

He smoothed it down with a clumsy hand.

'They've given you a mohawk.'

'Have they?'

Roza laughed. 'I'm sure you'll look lovely, darling.'

'Well, obviously I don't want to look lovely so much as in command.'

Roza rolled over on her back. 'Oh,' she sighed.

'Oh what?' He took off his suit and put on a shirt and jeans.

'You're such a ... scream.'

'Am I.' He lay down on the bed.

She turned, 'So are you ready for tonight?'

'Yeah. G.o.d. I'm b.l.o.o.d.y tired actually.'

'Good. We've got an hour before we get ready. Like a little holiday.'

They lay side by side. The big clouds shouldered along the skyline, with their shawls of rain and vapour. Fat drops splattered against the window. He put the back of his arm across her stomach.

She said, 'So you say we should have a baby. Isn't the timingspectacularly bad?'

He turned on his side, amused. 'The timing is always bad for a baby. That's what babies do - they change everything.'

'We can just let it happen, I suppose,' she said in a faint voice.

He put his hand on her arm. 'That's the thing. Don't worry about it. Let it happen. Or not. Just wait and see.'

She said, 'I suppose you know all about it. You've done it before.'

'Yes, I've done it all before and it's great. You'll love it.'

She sighed. 'Isn't it strange, what we've got ourselves into. I have odd thoughts. Like, what if the place is bugged.'

'The house? It's not bugged.'

'What if there's a cameraman out in the trees.'

'We're not that kind of famous, we're boring famous. No one wants to look in our bedroom window.' He looked at her intently. 'Don't worry. It's completely safe and private in here. It's our bolt hole.'

'Someone'll come to the party with a hidden camera.'

He laughed. 'Well, just watch yourself. Stick to the party line.'

'I think, do you just want us to have a baby because it would look good? Make you look all virile and manly. Make people stop wondering why I'm so supposedly undercover.'

He said, 'Don't say that. It's all up to you. I like the idea; I want you to be happy. It's completely got nothing to do with anything else.'

'I think, imagine if Jung Ha sold our secrets to a magazine.'

'What secrets? There wouldn't be justifiably ... It wouldn't be much of a story. Speaking of Jung Ha, where is she?'

'Prowling around with her camera. Snooping through the laundry basket.'

'Let's keep her out then,' David said.

He got up and locked the bedroom door, turned, listened, then dipped his head and said, 'Hopefully it'll all go swimmingly tonight and then we can totally relax the next day and stay under the radar.'

Roza looked at him without expression. She had the reflexive desire she often felt when one of his sentences hung in the air, to whip out her red pen and correct it, usually with cuts, drastic cuts. But she loved him when he mangled his sentences. As it was with Marden, the more he struggled to express himself, the more she turned towards, rather than away. It didn't mean they weren't lying,but it softened her.

He wrinkled his forehead and limped to the window, looking out. 'You've gone and got me all paranoid now,' he said.

The room was large and filled with light. She could see the bare tips of the trees, and, if she raised herself up on one elbow, the distant ridge with its line of wooden houses, and beyond that the city. She thought, you could probably go up the Sky Tower and look straight into this room with a telescope. She flopped down on the bed. 'You're right. Say they saw us having s.e.x. What are they going to do with that? They're not interested, unless we're doing it with the wrong person, or doing something illegal.'

She thought, But who are 'they'?

He leaned his forehead against the gla.s.s and said in a distant voice, 'You've obviously got to rationalise it.'

She looked at his bowed shoulders, the backs of his elbows, the crooked collar of the polo shirt, his hair standing up in clumps at the side of his head.

There was a click and a sigh as the thermostat adjusted itself and warm air rippled against the gla.s.s.

He said, 'It would only get ugly if there was some scandal.'

'Well, yes,' Roza said. She looked at him carefully; there was something unusual in his tone.

He turned, raised his eyes and met hers, lifted and dropped his shoulders and smiled, pressing his lips together, as though pushing away an unpleasant thought. Picking up the clothes that she'd tossed over chairs or dropped on the floor, he smoothed them out and hung them in the wardrobe. She watched him add his shoes neatly to the line in the cupboard, straighten the mess on top of the chest of drawers.

There was a sound out in the hall and he paused, holding a coat-hanger he'd been about to angle into her jacket. They looked at each other and grinned.

Roza whispered, 'Jung Ha. With her camera. Her equipment.'

He hung up her jacket and came to the bed. They lay close; he put his arms around her and she said, with a sense that she would lose something by asking the question, 'There'd be a scandal if you had an affair.'

'I wouldn't have one.'

She teased, 'All that time down in Wellington by yourself, opening your lonely tins of beans.'

'I'll keep flying back. To you,' he said. 'I love you. I know you wouldn't do anything to jeopardise ... to damage us. Everybody feels that.'

Roza looked at him. 'Us. Everybody. Are you talking about our marriage or the party?'

'About us. Obviously I love you. I trust you.'

She thought, that word: obviously. She had heard it more often, as the campaign had got underway.

'You trust me,' she repeated. 'You and "everybody".'

He said quietly, 'Do you have any idea what I'm about to do, any idea of the pressure? It's not just me or us any more. It is everybody.'

'But ... you make it sound as if people have been talking about me, weighing me up.'

'No.'

'Like I'm some sort of problem.'

'You're not a problem. I just have to think of the big picture now, that's all. I have to think of the whole team.'

'The whole team.'

He was suddenly angry. 'You can hide away, isolate yourself. I'm the one who has to front up. Of course I think in terms of the team. And risks. I'll tell you what else, risk is what I'm good at. Why do you think we've got so much money? Why do you think you live in such a big house? Because I know how to take risks.'

She sat up and pushed him away. 'So I'm a calculated risk? Is that what I always was? Lots of inherited money, looks good ...stacked up against problem with the booze. Did you weigh it all up, when we met? The money was the hook, I suppose. You didn't have much. Part of the reason you live in this big house is because of the start I gave you, with the money.'

She had never said anything like this before. His eyes filled with such intensity she thought he might hit her. She moved abruptly and he flinched; for a second they were motionless, eyes locked.

He said quietly, 'I have never needed your money. All this,' he waved his arm in the air, 'all this was made by me.'

There was a sound in the hall, a tiny metallic ping and a thrumming noise, as if something had brushed along the metal rungs of the heater. She saw his expression change, as he listened. They waited. Silence. He dropped his head and then cast her a black, sideways look.

Roza put her hands up to her face. 'Oh, don't look at me like that.'

'Your money was nothing compared to what I've made. Nothing.'

'Okay. Okay.'

She sat on the edge of the bed, her feet together on the floor, inspecting her fingernails, thinking. David crossed to the bedroom door, unlocked it and looked out. He came and sat next to her, put his arms around her and held her very tight.

'We've got to stick together. You're what I care about most.'

'Yes.'

'We need each other.'

'Yes,' Roza said.

They began to pull off each other's clothes.

Later he went to the bathroom and turned on the shower. Roza listened then got up and opened his briefcase. She drew out a manila folder full of pages.

I was taking my son and his friend to a movie. We were coming home in the Crown car and my son and his friend were talking about the film. My son said, 'It would be great if Dad had a job like that guy in the movie - spying, dropping into enemy territory.' I was sitting in the front and I leaned back and said, 'Buddy, I could be the prime minister in a couple of months.' And my son said, 'Yeah. But wouldn't it be great if you had a cool job, like being an international spy.'

When did he take Michael to a movie in a Crown car? And surely Michael wouldn't express himself in this way: it made him sound like a much younger child. But of course it wasn't true; someone had written it for him, to portray him as a well-rounded, decent family man. It was corny but he would deliver it well in speeches, with warmth and conviction. A small story, to fit into the larger. It wasn't on the scale of John Howard's lies about refugees throwing children off boats. It made no wild claims ...

She put the folder back in the bag and walked into the bathroom, looking at the shape of him through the dimpled gla.s.s. A swathe of mist hung at middle height, grey air. He turned and started slightly, dropping the bottle of shampoo.

He called, through the gla.s.s, 'Roza?'

Simon knotted his tie. In the next room Karen and Claire were having a low-level sc.r.a.p, and above the sound of their voices the wind whined over the roof and shook the trees. He had driven home through a wind tunnel of flying twigs. There was a monster weather system out in the Tasman Sea, the radio had told him, and it was scheduled to move our way. It was the fourth big storm of the winter. Was this the new weather? The idea of climate change made him so anxious (because of the children) that he screened it out. When the kids were in the room he switched channels to avoid items about melting ice caps and ma.s.s extinctions. He worried especially about Claire, that she would get depressed. The news about the planet was always bad and it always told him that Claire should be depressed, or at least worried. Many in the party, including Karen, thought climate change was a Green conspiracy and a hoax. Simon hoped it was a hoax, he prayed it was. But he didn't feel so secure that he could watch the stories and blandly scoff, as Karen and Trish and Graeme did.

The stories about the planet definitely disturbed him more than anything. But here he was, knotting his tie, and off to an evening for party donors at Trish's house (the Hallwrights were expected; Karen was beside herself). The people there would not care to discuss the end of the world; they would talk about growth and prosperity and the need to get ahead. And fundraising, and golf.

Simon inspected his face. Dark loops under the eyes, a new furrow in the middle of the forehead. His expression was open but slightly too intense, evidence, perhaps, of something hidden, the face of a man who wants to be seen as good.

The mirror reflected the hall and the door to Marcus's room, and beyond that the bright aquarium, the water whirling in the current from the aerating pump. Simon paused: he could see something floating in the current. It sailed across the top of the tank, slipped down to the bottom, whirled up again into the scatter of bubbles, crossed the surface again.

He crossed the hall. The tank was a square of light, casting a white glow over the bed, over the tangle of model airplanes and school books on the desk, and the lurid posters and the footb.a.l.l.s and bits of school uniform strewn on the floor. The blinds were open; the trees outside were being violently battered and stripped by the wind. The window frames rattled. He peered into the tank. The floating thing was a fish. He watched it limply borne by the current, its mouth open in an O of surprise, its scales already dull and slimy-looking. Turning and turning in the current, dragged down to the stones, its tail loose and feathery, the round dead eye no longer shiny but matte and grey, it snagged on a plant and hung in the fronds, upside down. The other fish came near, nudging it, until it broke free and drifted on.

In another room Claire said, 'Mum, do you have any idea how stupid that sounds.' There was a bang.

Claire said, 'G.o.d. Calm down.'

Simon looked at the dead thing, struck by the absolute annihilation of structure. Before, it had been densely packed, flipping and turning, tight with life; now it just whirled, like a piece of cloth, as if it had never had any bones. He turned off the pump and the fish sank sadly down through the weeds, the others darting above it as it bobbed and lolled, coming to rest at an angle that looked somehow louche and obscene. Simon moved the net clumsily; he managed to squash the tiny corpse against a rock, and brought it up, wincing. The sodden little puddle of orange slime lay in the bottom of the mesh. He peered into the tank, his great anxious moon of a face distorted by the gla.s.s. The other fish turned and flipped their tails, rising in the stream of bubbles.

He carried the dripping net from the room and trudged down to Marcus.

'There's been a bit of a tragedy, old chap. One of the fish has died. Backwards, is it. Or possibly Forwards.'

Marcus got up briskly and looked into the net.

Elke clapped her hands. 'We'll have a funeral.'

'What, now?' said Barbara, who had arrived to babysit, which really meant, now that Claire and Elke were both old enough to mind Marcus, that she was there to stop them killing one another.

'Yeah. Out in the garden.'

'There's a storm,' Barbara pointed out flatly.

Claire said, 'Even better. Atmosphere.'

Barbara looked at Claire and sniffed.

'I'll make you a gravestone,' Elke said, and slung her arm around Marcus's shoulder. She said, 'Here, Dad. Give us the deb body.'

Simon handed her the net and went back upstairs.

Karen was smoothing down the ruffles of a new outfit. She was all in black, as tightly wrapped as a parcel from the waist up, and then the long skirt with its layers of flounce and gauze and ruche. She sat down, pulling on her long black high-heeled boots, and he looked into the swell of her brown cleavage, packed in and fringed with black lace, and felt something rise in him, a strange kind of longing that was close to pity - but for whom? - and he knelt down beside her, helping her to zip up one boot and then the other while she sat back and watched him with a distant, ironic air. There was a flash of lightning, followed by the long rumble and crack of thunder. He rocked back on his heels and straightened up painfully. Oh, the creaking knees. He stood bent and looking sideways at her, his hands on his thighs.

'One of the fish has died,' he said.

She crossed to the mirror, took up a small brush and began dabbing her cheeks.

'Maybe overfeeding. It can't be underfeeding.'