Tiger Eyes

‘I’m sorry,’ she said awkwardly.

‘Unfortunately she has to have further treatment, and she wants him with her.’

‘Naturally.’ It took a real effort to keep her face set in an expression of mild sympathy. This changed everything. Although Rick might chafe under his mother’s possessiveness, he loved her and he would certainly want to be with her when she needed him.

Tansy looked down at the hands clenched around her glass. Surreptitiously she relaxed the long, strong fingers while her brain raced, trying to find an answer to an insoluble question. What on earth should she do?

There was a balked silence, tingling with Leo Dacre’s frustration. ‘So you’re not going to help,’ he said.

He spoke quietly, but an inflexion in the smooth voice dragged Tansy’s gaze to his face. A muscle flicked several times just above the tough line of his jaw. It fascinated her; her eyes lingered compulsively on the tiny betrayal, made all the more obvious because his face revealed no other emotion. Yet anger emanated from him in dark waves and she knew with a sudden terrible intuition that he was holding on to his control with a fierce effort of will.

‘I can’t help you,’ she muttered, cross with herself because she was afraid. Striving to appear detached, she suspected she achieved a sullen boredom instead.

‘How much would it cost?’

His callous emphasis on payment brought topaz sparks to her eyes. In her most offhand tone she said, ‘I’m not interested in any money, thanks.’

‘Don’t make up your mind right away. Think about it overnight, and tell me tomorrow what your decision is,’ he said, his voice warm and persuasive.

Tansy remembered that he was a barrister, a courtroom expert, with all the acting skill that that implied. She could see now why Rick said he was heading straight for the heights of his profession. He used his voice and his expression, his powerful presence, like weapons. In a courtroom he must be lethal; pity any poor witnesses who allowed themselves to be seduced by that voice and the implicit sympathy in his tone.

She looked directly at him, her shuttered eyes concealing the turbulent emotions that rioted through her. ‘Sorry,’ she repeated, drained the milk and got to her feet, picking up her guitar case on the way. ‘Don’t waste your time, Mr Dacre. I can’t help you at all.’

As she made for the door she felt the intense impact of his stare right through to her bones. In its time Wellington had endured some awe-inspiring earthquakes, but the effect of that look, Tansy thought, trying to salvage some mordant humour from the situation, could well ricochet her off the top of her personal Richter scale. She tried hard not to be impressed.

Nevertheless, she noticed her boots took her across the floor faster than she wanted to go; she’d have felt better if she’d been able to saunter away, swinging her hips in a maddening parody of a sexy, come-hither walk.

Except that she didn’t think she could. Tansy had learnt to blend in, and she’d tailored her walk accordingly, moving with enough confidence to be rejected as a victim, but without provocation.

Once outside she exhaled in a rush, looking around with bright, dazed eyes that only slowly took in the familiar buildings of Quay Street and the usual scurrying people. Presumably he expected her to go home now that she had her fifty dollars. So, adjusting her pointed chin to a jaunty angle, she went back to her patch.

All the rest of the afternoon as her fingers moved across the guitar strings and her voice flowed from song to song, she kept her eyes open for Leo Dacre, and couldn’t have said whether she was relieved or disappointed when she didn’t see him again.

Not that she liked the man. He was an overbearing, high-handed bully, with a fine talent for intimidation! However, it wasn’t easy to banish an image of Rick’s mother, ill and wanting him home. Although Rick found her unbearably clinging, he understood his mother’s dependence on him. An inherited condition had almost killed him several times before he was five, a condition she had handed on to him. It had taken a miracle of science to snatch life from his living death, and years for him to recover and gain some strength. Horrified, his mother had refused to have more children.

He would, Tansy knew, want to be with her now.

What on earth should she do?

Still unsure when it was time to pack up, she struggled home in the teeth of the gale to her bed-sitting-room. Built under one of Wellington’s old wooden houses in the inner city, it was within walking distance of the streets she worked and the university, which offset the higher rent she paid for its situation. On the floors above were a couple of flats with constantly changing occupants.

Tansy’s room was small and dim, cold and more than a little musty. Sparsely furnished with a three-quarter bed and a chair that unwrapped into a single mattress, it had its own bathroom, if you could call the cupboard beneath the stairs that, and a tiny kitchen alcove. Not that she needed anything larger; her cooking tended to be just as spartan as her room.

All in all, the place was about as basic as it could be, yet Rick had fitted in quite unconcernedly.

Pulling off her coat and beret, she put them away in the cupboard that served as her wardrobe, and wondered caustically whether Leo Dacre had ever seen a place as down market as this. Probably not. Shrugging, she tidied the wild ginger tangle of her hair, eyeing her reflection in the mirror above the old chest of drawers beside the bed.

Her clothes were warm and clean, but showed their age and origins, and the maroon jersey clashed cruelly with her colouring. Like her wardrobe, the room was dominated by charity-shop finds, but the cushions and the pleasantly faded bedspread in subdued crimson and gold were chosen, as were the posters of South America on the wall, because their rich hues satisfied a hunger for colour and movement and drama that her clothes couldn’t.

While the kettle boiled she checked out her bank balance. It made less than encouraging reading. In the past she’d always made enough over the summer break to pay her fees at university, but that wasn’t going to happen this year. The recession was biting hard and people just didn’t have the money to spend on itinerant buskers. Even if the rest of the run-up to Christmas was as good as it had been so far, she still wouldn’t have enough.

And after Christmas, Wellington, like every other New Zealand city except the tourist towns, died over the summer.

Flicking the bankbook shut, she frowned. Now that her bachelor’s degree was safely under her belt she was determined to carry on, although a master’s meant an even greater commitment of time and effort for two years, and if the recession continued she wasn’t going to be able to afford to eat, much less pay her fees.

When she left home her ultimate goal had been university. It had been a hard slog, and she had sometimes regretted her obsession, but a fierce, unyielding obstinacy kept her going. That same stubbornness compressed her mouth now; she had gone too far to give up.

After putting her bankbook away, she made herself a cup of herbal tea. She had survived before; she’d do it again. Some months ago, when Tansy was still sure she’d be able to manage, Professor Paxton had talked to a friend about a possible scholarship. Tomorrow morning she’d contact him and find out what was offering.

Slowly she reached across the table and began to go through the sheets of music she had left stacked there that morning. It was awful. Totally banal. Derivative. An ironic smile tucked in the corners of her mouth. Of course, she always thought that.

Did other composers look at their work and wonder whether they would ever produce anything worthwhile? Had Beethoven? Or Mozart? It didn’t seem likely. As she drank her tea she scanned the sheets, hearing the music in her head. Then she made some corrections, and finally sat with her chin in her hand, wondering why she should be so convinced that her future lay in writing music. Not just songs, either. She enjoyed them, but they were ephemeral. She wanted to write music that would be listened to for the next hundred years.

Her eyes narrowed. It wasn’t a matter of wanting to write; she didn’t have any choice. Even if no one ever heard the sounds that filled her head, she would still be buying paper she couldn’t afford and setting them down. It was a compulsion she no longer tried to resist.

But her heart wasn’t in it tonight, and she knew why: Leo Dacre’s arrival had thrown her completely.

What a mess! Rick had been utterly convinced that this was his one chance to wrest control of his life away from the demons that were driving him to destruction, and she had agreed. Still did.

Which was why she had lied to Leo; she couldn’t let Rick down.

Nevertheless she felt like a worm. Even though Rick had warned her his brother would find her, she hadn’t expected Leo Dacre to erupt into her life like the Demon King in a pantomime. And she certainly hadn’t expected to feel that shiver of fear. She’d discounted most of Rick’s endless discussions of his brother as adolescent hero-worship.

She’d been wrong; Leo Dacre was disturbingly forceful.

That was a mild way of putting it. He was an arrogant bastard with a cynical belief that money could buy everything. But did he know why Rick had run away from school halfway through the year?

She frowned, trying to remember if there had been any indication in his tone or expression. No; although that aloof, self-possessed face revealed very little, he hadn’t appeared to know. Rick had said no one did.

And now Grace Dacre was ill. Tansy hated the thought of Rick’s mother grieving and suspecting the worst, yet she still couldn’t convince herself that she should go against Rick’s wishes and tell his brother where he was. So much depended on it. Rick’s whole future, in fact.

She chewed a moment on her lip. Damn Leo Dacre; why had he come and upset her comparatively serene life?

And how had he found her? Sudden tension prickled up her backbone as she wondered whether he had set a spy to watch her.

Not that anyone could force her back home now. That caution was merely a leftover from the time when she’d lived looking over her shoulder in case someone arrived to drag her back home.

Tonight at the café, she decided as she got up to shower, she’d ask if she could ring the camp where Rick was trying to put his life back together again. He wouldn’t be able to speak to her, but she’d tell the man who ran the camp about this development. He’d be impartial, and she, cowardly though it probably was, would offload the responsibility on to him.

Three hours later she was sitting on a stool in the café when she realised Leo Dacre had followed her. The quaver in her smoky voice wasn’t obvious, but she saw his quick smile and cursed herself for the small betrayal. Nobody else noticed. But then, her rendition of French songs à la Edith Piaf two nights a week was merely a background to flirting and eating and drinking and, during the university year, deep philosophical discussions on the meaning of life and the possible existence of a theory of everything.

Leo Dacre looked as though he was well aware of the meaning of life and had his own, perfectly satisfactory, universal theory. For a fleeting moment Tansy wondered whether anything ever shook that powerful self-confidence. Only for a moment. She remembered the tiny, ominous flick of muscle against his angular jaw, and felt another twist of inchoate alarm at the barely caged emotions she had sensed behind his sophisticated front.

But the fact that he was here meant that unless she could get rid of him first she dare not ring the camp tonight.

Avoiding his eyes, she smiled at the applause and went with smooth precision into the rest of the set. By showing up he was sending a message. She was, she realised grimly, in for a hard time until she managed to convince him that she wasn’t going to tell him where Rick was.

Her life had suddenly become far too complicated. Perhaps she deserved it; anyone with any sense of self-preservation at all would have left thin, twitchy, obviously nervous Rick at the railway station that night six months ago, instead of taking him in like a starving stray and feeding him and keeping him warm and letting him talk to her as though his life and sanity depended on it.