Peter Corris: The Dying Trade

“Don’t start pacing again Cliff or I’ll bloody kill you. No, I just won’t pay you. Just tell me about it.”

I sat down again. “I was on the wrong track about him for a long time. I thought he was obsessed by his mother, he wasn’t. I was misled by the photographs he had. He was hung up about his father. Natural I suppose.”

“Yes, yes,” she said impatiently, “well, do you know who his father is?”

“Was. Yes, I worked it out eventually.”

“How? Who?”

“How first. It was the only thing that fitted. Mark Gutteridge sent Susan away to Adelaide to have her child. OK, he wanted to spare her and everyone else the teenage pregnancy trauma. Fair enough. But a tremendous change in the nervous pattern of the Gutteridges dates from then. It manifests itself in different ways and they never get over it. That’s the first point. Secondly, Mark Gutteridge wasn’t a conventional man. He shouldn’t have been horrified when his illegitimate grandson turned up with proof of his identity. He’d be more likely to be intrigued, inclined to do something for the boy, like a Renaissance prince, right?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“But he doesn’t. He flips. He can’t handle it and that sets Ross off.”

“All right, that’s a lot of how. Now, who was Ross’ father?”

“Bryn,” I said.

I sat on the bed and Ailsa rested her head against my thigh and we watched the day dying slowly outside the open window. An ascending jet littered the sky with dirty brown smoke, its boom drowned out something Ailsa murmured and I stroked her hair in reply. Maybe she was thinking about Mark Gutteridge, maybe about the children she’d never have. I was thinking about raw, haunted people who twanged the nerves of everyone they touched — like Bryn, like Haines, like Cyn. They couldn’t sloop along in the shallows where the water was warm and the breeze soft, they had to jut up into spray and icy winds with their secrets for sails and the rocks dead ahead.