A Woman of Courage (20 page)

‘Leave Father Devlin out of it. It's the registry office we're having, not a church do.'

Hilary could read Mrs Madigan like a book. The cow had no doubt been thinking of a nuptial mass with all the trimmings. And now this
creature
from the eastern states had descended on them like one of the seven plagues of Egypt to cheat her of one of a mother's greatest joys… Well, aren't you the unlucky one? Hilary thought.

The reception wasn't much to write home about. Mr Madigan was like Mr Pattinson in one respect – he favoured a quiet life and over the years had learnt to keep his mouth shut, especially when it came to matters involving the church – but he thought it right and proper that they should do something to celebrate the marriage of their only son.

Mrs Madigan was having none of it. ‘Signing a piece of paper in a registry office? You call that a marriage?'

‘What do you call it?'

‘A travesty is what I call it. Far as I'm concerned, they're not wed at all.'

So it came down to a few beers in the pub, with Sean's drinking mates, who had not been invited, trying with some success to get him pissed and Mrs Madigan as welcoming as a Rottweiler with the bellyache.

‘Dunno where you're planning to live,' Mrs Madigan said. ‘That hole you're in now won't be big enough when the babies start coming.'

‘Thought we'd buy a place in Peppermint Grove,' Hilary said. ‘What do you reckon?'

Only the snootiest suburb in Perth. Even the idea was enough to set Mrs Madigan's teeth on edge. Peppermint Grove? What nonsense!

‘What I reckon is it's time you came down off your high horse and faced reality, like the rest of us,' she said.

‘Maybe I'll do that,' Hilary said.

In the meantime, though, there was the honeymoon. There wasn't the time or money for anything fancy but Hilary was determined they should do something to remember the occasion by.

‘It is our wedding, after all,' she said.

They went south into the dark forests.

It was a world out of the storybooks, of wolves and trolls, of tales that Hilary remembered from Miss Anderson, the first and so far only human being to kindle her mind with images of mystery and magic.
Here be dragons.
They wandered hand in hand through a cool and misty landscape of mosses and ferns and giant trees pointing their branchless trunks three hundred feet into the achingly blue sky. There were waterfalls and the shy and barely glimpsed animals that watched or moved as silently as spirits through the undergrowth.

Sean cast an appreciative eye at the massive trees. ‘Get felling rights in a place like this we could make a fortune,' he said.

Hilary didn't take him seriously. ‘Would you want to do that?'

‘Too right I would. They're only trees,' Sean said. He glanced at her, sensing disapproval. ‘You're the one's always saying how you want to be a millionaire.'

‘I do,' Hilary said. ‘And I shall be one too. But let's not wreck the place while we're doing it.'

She'd brought a tent and all the bits and pieces they needed for a camping trip.

Sean was his mother's child; anything unconventional made him uneasy. He wasn't too sure what he thought about screwing in a tent when a decent mattress and a bed that didn't squeak seemed to him to make a lot more sense. Also there was the feeling that unless he was careful his new wife might start making decisions that should more properly be made by her husband. As his mother had also reminded him.

‘A man is the head of the household. Make sure she understands that. She won't ever respect you otherwise.' Which was funny, coming from Mrs Madigan, she-wolf in residence.

‘I reckon we'd be better off in a pub,' he said.

‘Plenty of pubs back home,' Hilary said. ‘I want this to be something special. Something we'll remember all our days.'

‘What if it rains?'

‘Won't matter. We've got our tent. A good one: I made sure of that.' She gave him the happy grin that always turned his resolve to mush. ‘You and me and the trees… How romantic is that?' She gave him the gentlest of tweaks to remind him what she had in store for him.

Later there was darkness and dying firelight, a light breeze pressing against the outside of the tent while Sean touched her. He had touched her often but this time should have felt different because now, she thought, she was his. Yet in truth she was conscious of drawing back from that reality. What was happening between them was not right: not the doing of it, that of course was as it should be, but the fact that she was unable to lose herself in the moment. The fact that she remained on the outside looking down at the man and woman going through the motions, concentrating on that so that the moment when he gasped and surged against her and collapsed like a perforated bag went almost unnoticed.

Sleep, later, was a problem for her if not for him. She lay and looked up at the ridge of the tent above her and heard the wind's voice and the myriad sounds of the forest and thought of the future and the number of times tonight's episode would be repeated, an endless series of footprints into the unknown.

It will get better. I love him, of course I do. It'll come right in time. But she wondered nevertheless.

She slept for a while and when she woke the light was showing through the canvas. She eased away from the still-sleeping man and went out into the air. She walked barefoot into the forest. Barefoot and, later still, naked as she embraced the stillness and the voice of the undergrowth and the trees rising above, their majesty carved upon the air, the cathedral of the forest in which she knew it was right to worship.

Her cheeks wet with tears she turned and went back to the tent.

2004

AN UNCERTAIN FUTURE

Hilary rang off and walked out on to the terrace while she thought about what Sara had said.

Emil Broussard…

She had thought they'd seen the last of that damn man. Famous writer he might be but at the time she would have seen him dead in the street and been glad of it. Glad? She would have danced on the body after the way he had brought her daughter so close to disaster. She would never forget how traumatised Sara had been when she came back from her foray into the far north. He would have ruined a weaker person. Thank God she'd had the courage to tear herself away from him.

Hilary had understood how Sara had felt. Had not the same thing happened to her? How could she not sympathise when she too had heard the siren song of love, the song that could both destroy and lift you to the heights? Yet the truth was that understanding and sympathy had no relevance. The first and most important lesson of life was that you always had to be prepared to move on, like the basic law of thermodynamics, where the movement was always from hot to cold, never the opposite.

For Sara to use Emil Broussard's unexpected arrival as an excuse not to go to Hong Kong would be the coward's way. At all cost she must prevent that. How she would do it she did not know, only that she must. The success of everything she had striven for all these years was at stake: to establish a dynasty to carry on the work to which she had dedicated her life.

Of course there was no law that said Sara had to take the job. The top of any tree was a lonely place; you had to earn it, yes, but you had to want it too, want it with all your heart – anything less was to invite disaster. Sara had the ability but could she make the necessary sacrifices, putting the company's health before every other consideration?

She sat on the bench and looked across the harbour. A distant factory whistle echoed and the scent of the roses was strong in the morning air. That scent normally gave her huge pleasure but today less so than usual: responsibility had seldom been a burden to her but at this moment she knew she was holding the company's future in her hands and it was heavy.

She got up. She paced across the manicured lawn to the water's edge and back again. And again down. Emil Broussard's return was not the only problem; Sara was insisting on being told why Hilary had decided to move on.

Was there something wrong with the company? With her health? No, there was nothing wrong with the company and she was unwilling to admit there was anything wrong with her health either.

‘Why are you doing it, then?'

‘Because it is the right time for the company and the right time for me.'

She had refused to say more but it troubled her that Sara had felt the need to ask. If Sara turned her down, who else was there to succeed her in the longer term, after Vivienne too decided to call it a day?

All her life, since she had been in the position to choose her own path, the courage to accept calculated risks had been the governing factor in everything she had done. That lesson she had learnt at the Pattinsons, as she had acknowledged when she helped Tim buy the farm after his brother Brett, who'd inherited when his father died, had been killed by a boar. Courage was the key.

1961–65

UP THE LADDER AND DOWN THE SNAKE

1

The way Sean went at her in the early days Hilary was amazed she didn't fall pregnant ten times over, but she didn't. Half of her was sorry, half thought it was just as well. A family would be nice but later. In the meantime she had a fortune to make.

She went at it full throttle. In three months she had made a name for herself.

‘Can't believe it,' Jack Almond told his wife. ‘No sealed roads, no nothing, and she's selling them like there's no tomorrow.'

‘How many times do I have to tell you?' said his wife. ‘We women can do things you men can't even dream of.'

They'd all wondered how the customers might react to a woman doing a man's job but it seemed Hilary's fluttering eyelashes (to say nothing of her nous and general ability) took care of that. Whatever the reason, she was selling plenty, all sorts of people eager to respond to her sign advertising cheap land.

One bloke tried to give her a hard time. ‘How many blocks are you in for, darling?'

‘Four so far.' She gave him a look. ‘Sweetheart.'

He laughed. ‘You must really believe in the product,' he said. ‘Why?'

‘The roads are coming. The services. When they do, these blocks will all double in price. Or more, most likely.'

‘You sold me,' he said. ‘But if things go wrong I'll come a-calling.'

‘They won't,' Hilary said. ‘You come back later but it'll be to buy more and I'll charge you double.'

He bought two blocks.

‘That's the way,' Hilary said.

‘Are you really in for four?'

‘Darn right.'

Because she'd not blown her commission, like most of the sales force. Hilary Brand was going places and didn't care who knew it.

There were hazards in being a woman, as if she hadn't known already. It wasn't long before a potential customer decided he was more interested in the sales lady than the product.

‘You're cute,' she said. ‘But I wouldn't do that, I was you.'

‘Why not?' Laughing, still looking for a feel.

‘My husband wouldn't like it.'

‘It's not your husband I'm interested in.'

‘Of course not. The only thing, he's a boxer. They call him Ironfist. The last bloke he fought ended up in the hospital. You don't want your face rearranged, do you?'

Which put paid to that but she still sold him a block. Born diplomat, she thought. That's me.

She drove to work a different way every day, door knocking in evenings and weekends, when people were at home. Cheap Land for Sale: it worked like a charm. Long hours and still longer hours. It was paying off but Sean didn't like it.

‘A woman's place is in the home,' he said, echoing his mother, who thought there was something indecent about a married woman working anywhere else.

She said as much to Hilary. ‘My husband told me to leave my job the day we married. Sean should have told you the same.'

Hilary only smiled but her mother-in-law had not done with her.

‘And still no baby,' she said. Again and again she said it; a proper grouser, that one. ‘Why did you marry him if you didn't want a home and a family?'

‘To save on the rent,' said Hilary.

It was a joke but Mrs Madigan decided she meant it. ‘I rue the day my son got involved with you,' she said.

‘Sorry about that,' Hilary said. ‘We've bought our own house, remember? We're doing all right.'

Three bedrooms, too. Bigger than anything you ever had, Mrs M. On a big block we can develop later.

‘For the moment,' Mrs Madigan said.

‘That's right.'

For the moment she was forging ahead – not that Mrs Madigan would ever admit that.

Mrs Madigan spoke to Sean and Sean spoke to Hilary.

‘Why can't you be nice to her?'

‘When is she ever nice to me?'

‘I hate rows,' he said.

‘It's our marriage, not hers,' she said. ‘Why don't you tell her to back off?'

She was beginning to see that Sean wasn't game to do it. It made her uneasy but she refused to acknowledge it. I'll put some ginger into him yet, she thought.

She told herself she loved her husband. She wanted them to be happy together, to have children together, but it would be when they were ready for them, not simply to suit her bloody mother-in-law.

She had no intention of giving up on the real estate business. It felt right, the timing was right, she knew she was good at it, she was convinced that the property business offered her the best chance to find what she had already said was her highway to the stars.

It was
her
husband,
her
future and she would wage war against Mrs Madigan and anyone else who tried to take them from her. Let no one doubt it.

2

She worked harder than ever. Mostly it was to get ahead in her chosen career but there were days when she forced herself to run faster and faster simply to drown out the doubts that were coming more and more to poison her mind.