The perfume of love (rain-bi)

chapter 41

With neither air-conditioners nor fans, the top floor rooms in old Mrs Murray's delapidated house were like ovens at the end of a boiling

mid-January day.

Darlinghurst Road, which jenna had to pass through whenever she wanted to catch a bus or train, was sordid enough by day. What it was like by night she couldn't imagine and didn't intend to find out.

But her attic room was very cheap, and if joon or jihoon had made some attempt to find her, after receiving the notes she had left them, the last place they would have looked would be in what Sydneysiders called The Cross.

Altogether she had left four notes on Ocean Wanderer, to be found after she had gone. The others had been Mrs lee and Eleni. Shaney(AN:one of the stewardess) had been spending that weekend in her own house. It had been by pretending that she'd been invited to stay with her that jenna had been able to get off the ship, with her suitcase, without the seaman on gangway duty suspecting she was leaving for good.

The short letter to jihoon had been the most difficult to write. Since then she had spent many hours wondering about his reaction to it when he returned from Melbourne the following morning.

At heart she was rather sorry there was no way he could find her. But her head told her it was wishful thinking to visualise him distraught with worry. If jihoon had had any feelings warmer than friendship for her, he would have made them apparent on the voyage from Fiji to Sydney.

Instead he had actually avoided opportunities to dance with her at Christmas and New Year and, since then, had been no more than ordinarily pleasant to her.

For several days after her precipitate flight from an impossible situation, jenna stayed in her room except when it was necessary to go out for food and exercise.

After a while being cooped up became intolerable. Being afraid that in the city centre she might meet someone from the yacht, she took to going further afield to places such as Parramatta, now an outer suburb of Sydney but originally a separate settlement and one of Australia's most historic localities.

Gradually the shock of hana's defection began to lessen, but, as with all major shocks, it had sapped her normal initiative and left her without the drive to organise her next move.

Everyday she scanned the jobs advertised in the Sydney Morning Herald, but when she telephoned the number of a motel in need of a maid the vacancy had already been filled, as had a job as a waitress which she applied for.

The Herald's editorial pages were giving considerable coverage to the forthcoming Saturday night performance of Opera in the Park when Australia's world-famous soprano, Dame Joan Sutherland, was going to sing in the leading role in Lucia di Lammermoor. A hundred thousand Sydneysiders were expected to crowd the Domain, sitting on rugs and cushions, and jenna decided to join them.

In such a huge crowd there was little risk of her running into anyone she knew... If indeed Ocean Wanderer was still in port. The only way she could be certain of that was by going to the wharf to look, or by ringing the Berthing Master's office. However, she was inclined to think the yacht had probably left Sydney by this time.

The centre of the Domain, from the canopied stage to the lighting towers and beyond them, was a packed mass of people when she arrived at the park. It seemed as if the whole of Sydney had turned out to see their home-grown star soprano who, before jenna was born, had made operatic history at Seoul's Garden in the rôle she was singing tonight.