Michelle Kretser - The Lost Dog

She could unsettle him in the way of certain students: seeming to miss an idea, yet leaving the after-impression of striking to its core.

When she asked about his book on James, Tom talked about the novelist’s desire to be modern. ‘He wanted to distance himself from the literary past, from old forms like gothic. But that stuff wafts around his work like a smell he’s too exquisite to mention.’

There was James’s fascination with the supernatural. ‘He tried to contain it by writing ghost stories. Sidelining it, trying to keep it out of the major work, out of the novels. But even in The Portrait of a Lady , which everyone agrees is a realist masterpiece, the heroine sees her cousin’s ghost at a crucial moment.’

Over time the monumental Portrait itself turned spectral, said Tom. Its presence showed and faded and shimmered again in The Wings of the Dove , a novel written when James had grown old; and haunted, like its predecessor, by his memories of his cousin Minny Temple. She had died young, leaving James with the uneasy thought that he had not loved her well enough.

This conversation was taking place in the Preserve. While he was speaking, Tom was conscious of many things, of the sound produced by Nelly’s teeth biting into an apple, for instance, and of the unexpected mildness of the evening. Someone had placed a double row of candles all down the long table on the dais, the only illumination in the cavernous room. Tom’s eyes kept returning to that bright, unstable path. But what he was seeing had no material form. Over the years, as he worked on his book, he had begun to picture James’s oeuvre as a massive, stooped figure, its progress along the passage of time impeded by a dragging shadow. Tom understood that the name of this darkness was history; that it represented unwelcome aspects of the past that blundered into James’s fi ction.

Nelly said, ‘But isn’t that the way it works? I mean, doesn’t setting out to reject the past guarantee you’ll never be free of it? It’s like being modern means walking with a built-in limp.’

Her almost magical divination of the halting colossus Tom had pictured so astonished him that he couldn’t reply. The lurching figure advanced in his mind again, a grotesque portrait stepping clear of its frame. The vision was central to his argument, and it frightened him. He feared being unable to convey its force in reasoned prose; and of this fear, he said nothing to Nelly.

I used to be Nelly Atwood . It had sent Tom to his university library early the next morning. There he learned that sixteen years earlier, in 1985, the disappearance of a man called Felix Atwood had made headlines across Australia. A graduate student in the States at the time, Tom had missed the story. Now he began piecing it together from archived newspapers, leaning over the shining glass of a microfi lm reader.

Atwood, aged thirty-three, a trader in bonds at an investment bank that had financed the Napoleonic wars, vanished while spending Easter with his wife and young son at their holiday house in the bush. His wife was reported to have been unconcerned when she woke on Saturday morning and found her husband missing and no car in the drive. Atwood, an early riser, liked to go bushwalking on his own. The property was surrounded by forest. It seemed likely that he had left the car at a trail head, and set off into the bush. Equally, he might have driven down to the coast. He was a keen swimmer, and half an hour away was a beach he favoured.

Mrs Atwood, who suffered from headaches, had woken to familiar symptoms that morning. With an effort she dressed; stumbled with her child to a neighbour’s farm, where she left him. It was not an unusual arrangement; the four-year-old had a pet lamb there and was spoiled by the farmer’s teenage daughters.

Atwood’s wife said she returned to bed. Around noon she woke to find herself still alone in the house, and started to wonder if something had gone wrong. The Atwoods were expecting a visitor from the city later that day, and surely only a mishap could have kept her husband from being there to greet him.

Still the woman did nothing. She was quoted as saying she was not thinking clearly. The Atwoods’ friend arrived; and, learning what had happened, went immediately to the farm, where he made the call to the police.

The machinery of process clicked on. In the days that followed, the police interviewed the missing man’s relatives and friends, and began sorting through the reports still coming in from people who claimed to have seen him. Atwood’s BMW was found almost at once, parked in ti-tree scrub by the beach where he liked to swim. His clothes lay folded on the passenger seat. Forensic testing yielded numerous traces, none of them of use in determining what had happened to him.

Then a statement issued by Atwood’s employer revealed that he was under investigation for irregular dealing. While his managers had supposed him to be exploiting low-risk arbitrage opportunities, Felix Atwood had in fact been gambling spectacular sums in directional bets. These unauthorised activities produced substantial profits at fi rst, consolidating Atwood’s reputation as a trading star. What greed, complacency and lax internal controls failed to discover was the secret account he had opened. Here he hid the monumental losses that his high-risk strategies produced, while posting fabricated profits in the account where his performance was evaluated.

Atwood was clever and lucky; just not enough. The bank’s auditors presented their findings within a week of his disappearance, causing a fresh wave of speculation. For as the auditors closed in, Atwood could scarcely have failed to notice the stench blowing his way. It was an old story: a man faced with public ruin walking away from his life. Perhaps literally; for suicide was quickly mooted as a solution, Atwood wading into the sea as his wife and child slept, preferring death to disgrace.

It was discovered that the Atwoods’ house in the city was double-mortgaged. There were personal loans and credit card debts, and irregularities in income tax; the tax office was about to launch an enquiry of its own. Ready-made phrases appeared on the sheet of light under Tom’s eyes: luxury lifestyle, cocaine habit, assets seized.

Tom studied the photographs. Felix Atwood: curly hair, an angular, inviting muzzle. He was pictured on a beach with long breakers at his back and a surfboard under his arm; bowtied, with curls slicked down, outside a concert hall. He looked straight into the camera and smiled. He had good, or at least expensive, teeth. Somehow it was clear he did not make the mistake of underestimating his effect.

The Atwoods’ friend from the city was identifi ed, predictably, as Posner: dark hair emphasising his pallor, but for the rest astonishingly unchanged, as if that large, smooth face had repelled even time. Posner was in fact everywhere: escorting Mrs Atwood to a car, at a fundraising dinner with her husband, grave-eyed outside police headquarters in Russell Street.

But it was Nelly who held Tom’s attention. In the early photographs she was anonymous in sunglasses. But as events gathered speed and density, a different set of images prevailed. She appeared in an ugly ruffled dress with jewels at her throat: a photograph taken at the same opening night at which her husband had been snapped, with this crucial difference, that she gazed stonily at the lens. To Tom’s eye she looked-oddly- older than she did now, her cropped hair and frumpish frilled bodice making her seem dated; compounding the rigidity of her stare.

Elsewhere she was pictured in such a way as to bring out the prominence of her jaw. Then a new photograph showed her with her arm raised and mouth wide, screaming at the camera. She might have been trying to hide her face, but the gesture, coupled with that glimpse of her tongue and teeth, suggested a harridan’s attack.