The High Places Read Online Free Page B

sometime,’ Henry said.
    â€˜That would be lovely,’ she said, with a small frown.
    â€˜I’d like to take you out right now,’ Henry said.
    â€˜Tonight’s impossible,’ she said. ‘I have a class on Fridays. But some day next week?’
    â€˜What kind of class?’
    Ellie gave a little smile, the bashful twin of her frown, and said, ‘Art appreciation.’
    They arrived at Wynyard station and there, between the sound of the trains passing underneath the street and the sound of traffic passing over the street, she leaned her head into his shoulder for one unexpected moment. Then she ran down the steps into the station. Henry watched her bright brown head move among the commuters and disappear in the direction of the North Shore line. He considered her his girl from that moment.
    *   *   *
    Henry was fond of Sydney on a Friday afternoon. It was late winter, so the sky lowered early, and there was that weekend feeling of relief and consequence. There was a place near the station where he liked to eat after work. The whole establishment smelled boiled – boiled meat, wet raincoats, and the undersides of shoes. He ordered a hamburger – no onions, never onions – and ate it while imagining Ellie on the way to her Friday-night class. He had a vague sense that art appreciation involved bowls of fruit and flowers. But his mind didn’t stay on her for long; he began, without quite knowing it, to think about his money. He wondered how much of the ten thousand pounds his mother would give him and concluded that it would be at least half. He thought of her clutching his arm the night before, saying, ‘I’ll set you up, you’ll get married.’
    Although Henry’s mother had promised to set him up, he still went to the dog track, because it was Friday. He had a weekend schedule: Friday night the dogs, Saturday the horses, Sunday lunch with his mother, and Sunday night with Kath, a girl he knew. For so long he had dreamed of a windfall, of a sudden fortune, and of what it might make possible, because every week there was a chance: the dogs ran, the horses flew, and Henry was always there to see them. There was money on every race. He won, and sometimes he didn’t. This was the greatest pleasure he knew: a little profit and a little loss. He also liked the company of gamblers. They’re cheerful people, he would say; they’re optimists.
    Henry might have taken a bus to the dog track, but he preferred to walk: down George Street and Broadway, through Glebe, and into Wentworth Park. The Friday city was so festive in the rain, full of women running from warm taxis into warm houses and men standing at street corners waiting for the lights to change, holding newspapers over their heads. The gum trees lining the streets of Glebe took up the easing rain and shook it out again in heavier drops. In every one of the terraced houses Henry passed, a woman like Ellie waited for a man she loved amid the furniture and finery he had bought her.
    Because he was careful with his money and lived with his mother, Henry had a small but steadily growing savings account, which was commendable for a man of twenty-eight with a mid-level job in an insurance firm. The thought of his nest egg produced in him a simple, serious pleasure as he entered the Wentworth Park greyhound track. It pleased him to think that he would be here, with money he could afford to bet, whether or not his mother had won the lottery. And because he was a man who enjoyed weighing his odds and his options, it didn’t occur to Henry to bet any more recklessly on that Friday than he normally would. Still, he had an unusually successful night. He sat in the good feeling of the crowd as it hung on those few moments that mattered, when the dogs flattened against time and won, or failed to win. Then men erupted around him in victory or regret, and there was a new surge toward the bookmakers,