Ludmilla Wishart finished a morning’s work in her office at Planning East, then drove to Penzance Beach, a secluded holiday town several kilometres around the coast from Waterloo. She was relieved to be out and about, away from both the hovering of her boss and her husband’s suspicions. Adrian had phoned her several times, saying, ‘Just checking in, darling’ and ‘What shall we have for dinner?’ and ‘Keep your receipts if you use the Golf today.’ He needed to know where she was and what she was doing. He’ll phone again, she thought, and someone in the office will tell him I’m out, and he’ll stew on it. Her heart fluttered. She didn’t know how much longer she could go on like this. But you don’t just walk out on a marriage, do you?
Ludmilla parked her Golf outside a beach shack on Bluff Road and knocked on the screen door. A hazy shape appeared. ‘Mill! Good or bad news?’
‘Good news, Carl.’
She stepped back to let him out. Carl Vernon was in his sixties, whiskery, gnarled and appealingly untidy in shorts, sandals and black-rimmed glasses. ‘The Trust came through for us?’
Ludmilla showed him a fax. It said that the property known as ‘Somerland’, on Bluff Road in Penzance Beach, had been classified by the National Trust as a building of historical importance. He gave her an exuberant hug. ‘Mill, that’s fantastic’
The grey-haired man and the young woman stood side-by-side and gazed across to the exclusive seaward side of Bluff Road, which ran along the top of a cliff overlooking the township and the sea. Somerland was a small fisherman’s cottage dating from the early years of the twentieth century. In profile it had a nineteenth-century style sawtooth roofline, with a verandah, a crooked chimney and a paling fence. Nestled amid ti-trees and pines, it was the best-situated house in Penzance Beach, with glorious views of the curving sand, the breakwaters fingering the little bay, the yachts puddling about in the stretch of water between the town and Phillip Island.
Carl himself enjoyed only a small slice of that view, over Somerland’s low roof and between one wall and a clump of ti-trees, for he lived on the wrong side of Bluff Road, the humble fibro shack side. But that didn’t matter. What mattered was that he and his neighbours lived increasingly in the shadows of the vast, prideful glass and concrete structures to the left and right of Somerland, places that were written up in Architectural Digest but didn’t pretend to be homes. Carl and his neighbours didn’t want another monstrosity to go up, and they especially didn’t want the old fisherman’s cottage to be pulled down.
And Somerland had certainly been under threat. There were two plastic-sleeved notices tacked to stakes at the driveway entrance: a demolition permit dating from May, and a more recent application to build a mansion that would out-monster all of the others. All moot now: using her influence and knowledge, together with the help and drive of Penzance Beach locals like Carl Vernon, Ludmilla had succeeded in convincing the National Trust to classify the old house.
‘The next step is an emergency application for heritage protection from the planning minister,’ she told Vernon. ‘I’ve already set that in motion.’
They gazed at Somerland. It dreamed under the silent pines as if it had taken root there, merging naturally with the soil, the trees and the sky. It might have gone unrecognised and been demolished if Carl Vernon hadn’t decided to keep mentally active in his retirement years by writing a history of Penzance Beach. According to his research, Somerland had been built by the town’s founder and remained in the descendants’ hands until last year, when the elderly owner died.
Carl gave Ludmilla another hug. Insects snapped in the trees and the perfumed air. Somewhere a radio played in a back yard. A child dressed in a faded yellow skirt and pink T-shirt came banging out of the house next door, grabbed a tricycle and buzzed around on it. ‘Hi, Mr Vernon!’ she called.
Vernon waved. ‘Hi, Holly.’
Holly disappeared around the side of the house to the back yard. ‘I thought only leathery old retirees lived up here,’ Ludmilla murmured.
Vernon noted the hint of teasing, mostly because it was so rare. ‘I represent that remark!’
She smiled gloriously, just as a small red car crept into view on Bluff Road. A Citroen diesel, a costly, pert little thing. Ludmilla Wishart groaned and swayed. Alarmed, Vernon placed his arm around her. ‘Mill?’
She recovered. ‘It’s nothing.’
His arm was still supporting her. She shrugged it off and put some distance between them while the Citroen seemed to speed up a little, as though it knew where it was going now. It swept into the kerb, tyres scratching up dust, and a man got out. He was about thirty, wearing a white cotton shirt over dark blue cargo pants and deck shoes. His face as he came storming up to Carl’s verandah was in a rictus of fury, waves of strong emotion rolling off him, barely contained.
‘Ludmilla,’ he said, and Carl thought how apt was the phrase ‘through gritted teeth’.
‘Please, Adrian,’ Ludmilla said.
The guy turned to Carl, switched on a big smile and shot out his hand. ‘And you are?’
Vernon hadn’t been a teacher for nothing. ‘No, the question is: And you are?’
‘Mr Vernon,’ Ludmilla said tonelessly, ‘this is my husband, Adrian. Darling, Mr Vernon is behind the campaign to save that old fisherman’s cottage I was telling you about.’
She pointed. Adrian Wishart glanced across at Somerland without interest and back again, sizing up Vernon. ‘Is that a fact.’
‘I just came to let Mr Vernon know that it’s been classified by the National Trust.’
‘You drove all the way here to tell him?’ Wishart said, still with that huge smile, using a reasonable voice. ‘Could have phoned.’
Ludmilla went white and small. ‘I mustn’t keep you any longer, Mr Vernon.’
Vernon watched husband and wife leave his front yard, one flinching, the other as stiff and twisted as steel cable. He heard Ludmilla say, ‘Please, Ade, you mustn’t follow me, not when I’m working.’
‘You think I followed you, darling? Certainly not. I have a client to see in the next street.’
Well, no one believed that, under the blue canopy of the sky.