A Woman of Courage (4 page)

‘Of course I did!'

Over and over the same arid ground, flinging words like grenades, getting nowhere.

‘And letting Anthony Belloc come on to you the way you did,' Davis said. ‘Anthony Belloc, of all people.'

Until tonight she had never heard of Anthony Belloc.

‘What do you mean, Anthony Belloc of all people?'

‘Anthony Belloc is a crook,' Davis said.

‘He is a gentleman and a successful businessman.'

‘A businessman? Is that what he told you?' He laughed. ‘He's a corporate raider. Otherwise known as a vulture.'

‘Then why was he there tonight?'

‘Because he's a client,' Davis said. ‘Henry Hawthorn is defending him in a civil suit. Might even win. But everybody knows he couldn't lie straight in bed.'

‘If he's a client it's just as well I was polite to him.'

Davis did not answer; at that moment she would not have cared if he had. ‘I am going to bed,' she said again.

And did so, this time without argument.

2

By breakfast the next morning she had come up with a few things she might have said to him had she thought of them in time.

Where were you earlier last night? And why was your phone switched off
? To say nothing of other questions she knew she would never have the courage to ask:
Why did you have to go straight from the office, in any case? And how come you were wearing a different shirt from the one you had on when you left the house in the morning?

She had a bath, taking her time about it and thinking about the dinner party. She told herself of course she wouldn't hear anything: Anthony's remark had been one of those insincere things one said to complete strangers at dinner parties. She wasn't sure she wanted him to call, anyway. Yet when the phone rang at half-past nine she couldn't wait to pick it up.

‘Hello?'

It was only the garage saying they had retrieved her car and would be working on it today.

When Davis came home that evening she was afraid he might start off again about the night before but he ignored her. Situation normal; he often pretended she wasn't there, and certainly hadn't laid a finger on her for years. She had long since ceased to think about that loss; it was just another aspect of the loneliness that had been a feature of her life as long as she could remember. Her sister Sara was too tied up in her career to have time for anyone else. They had nothing in common, in any case; Jennifer had seen her on the box only the other day and remembered how unattractive she'd looked. Sharp nose, sharp eyes, sharp voice: Sara's usual current affairs appearance, eviscerating her latest victim. Of course Sara had taken after their mother and Mother was hopeless, rushing endlessly from one meeting to the next, from one country to the next, concerned only with the power and wealth she shared with no one, like a wicked dragon guarding a golden treasure.

Jennifer had never been interested in the business or anything to do with it. Her ambition had always been to have a nice house, a husband and children. And money, of course. It was what most women wanted, surely? She'd missed out on the children but the rest she had. She should have been happy.

In her heart she knew she was anything but; she often felt she had nothing at all. Her husband despised her. She suspected her friends and even the cleaning lady did the same. They lived in a nice house but it wasn't hers; even her car was not in her name. Davis kept her on a tight leash financially, checking her credit card statement every month and complaining if he thought she was spending too much. Mother could have given her a modest allowance. It would have made her life brighter and easier but of course there was no hope of that. When was the last time Mother had given a thought to her firstborn child?

3

Two days after the Hawthorns' dinner party Jennifer was thinking of getting ready for bed when the telephone rang.

Davis took the call. ‘Hello?' He listened. ‘I'll get her.' He held out the receiver to her. ‘Your mother wants you.'

‘But… She's overseas.'

Davis stared at her down his long nose. He spoke as though to the village idiot. ‘Yes, Jennifer. She is overseas. And now she wants to talk to you.'

‘What does she want?' Again her imagination was in overdrive. ‘Is she ill? Has something happened?'

‘If you talk to her perhaps you'll find out.'

She took the receiver. ‘Hello?'

It was not a long call. After less than five minutes of protests – she even invented an imaginary appointment to justify her initial refusal – and of weakening objections leading inevitably to her final capitulation, she put down the phone. She looked at Davis, who was pretending to be engrossed in his paper but who would have listened to every word.

‘She wants me to have dinner with her tomorrow night.'

Davis put down his paper. ‘Who wants to have dinner with you tomorrow night?'

‘Mother.'

‘I didn't know she was coming to Melbourne.'

‘She's not.'

‘Then I fail to see –'

‘She's flying back overnight and wants me to meet her in Sydney.'

‘Will she be putting you up?'

‘She says she'll book me into a hotel.'

‘And paying for it, we trust. Why on earth would she want to see you?'

As though the idea were preposterous.

Jennifer bit her lip. ‘She didn't say.'

‘Are you going?'

‘I told her I was having lunch with Tessa…'

‘Are you going?'

It was like being cross-examined in court. ‘Do you have to talk to me like that?'

‘
Are you going?
'

She knew he didn't care whether she went or not but was annoyed she had not asked his permission first. She stared at him defiantly. ‘Yes.'

‘Leaving us, no doubt, to pay the airfare.' Davis shook his head and picked up his paper. ‘When they made you they forgot the backbone,' he said.

She'd read about women, provoked beyond bearing, who had stabbed their husbands to death.

4

The following morning Jennifer was packing when the phone rang. Her heart went bump.

‘Hello?'

Only the garage to let her know the car was ready and could be collected at her convenience. She got a taxi and twenty minutes later was listening to the garage manager giving her the bad news.

‘We've managed to patch her up this time, Mrs Lander, but I don't know how much longer we can keep her on the road.'

‘What is wrong with it?' She had never understood why men spoke of cars as though they were female and not pieces of machinery. Of course some men thought women were pieces of machinery too.

‘Just about everything. She's getting old,' he said and smiled. ‘Like the rest of us.'

Not a remark Jennifer welcomed. She signed the grotesquely expensive bill – if Davis didn't like it let him buy her a new car – and drove home.

The phone was ringing as she came into the house.

‘Hello?'

For a moment she could not place the voice; then, with a sudden flush of pleasure, she did.

‘How nice to hear from you.'

‘I was wondering,' Anthony Belloc said, ‘whether I could tempt you into having a cup of coffee with me this morning. If you're free?'

‘Free as the air.' She laughed. ‘I would like that very much.'

A cup of coffee with a friend, she thought as she drove to St Kilda. What possible harm could there be in that?

Yet even as she felt the old excitement of a man showing interest in her, her heart grieved for something real, something she had so foolishly turned her back on, leaving her spirit adrift.

1968–91

MARTIN

Martin Gulliver's mother Anna had been a slave to love, until it turned on her.

Her parents, ignorant louts the pair of them, had liked to fight: each other, mostly. When she was fifteen her father tried to put his hands on her. Anna decided she'd had enough and took off with a bloke called Charlie Moss. That had been early 1967. Charlie was a talker, not much else, but Anna would have loved him if there'd been anything there to love. Loved him, anyway, in the only way that interested him. They were fruit picking up the Murray when she told him she was up the duff. Charlie was out of there quicker than a blowie on meat but she'd already been given the eye by another of the pickers. Clive Jacks didn't care about the baby, seemed to know how to scratch a living and certainly knew how to make her dance, so she moved in with him, no worries.

In 1969 Clive decided the Snowy Mountains was the place to be. Martin was eighteen months old by then but that didn't bother Anna. Besotted, she followed Clive into the high country. He'd told her he'd make a killing working the Hydro, but Clive and work had never been a good mix and in mile-high Cabramurra there was snow and work and not much else. Shortly after Martin's third birthday, Clive went out the door one morning, turned left instead of right and kept going.

Those without a connection to the Hydro couldn't stay in the settlement, so with Clive gone it was a case of find a partner or move out. A month after his departure Martin's mother took up with Dave Anderson. Dave was very different from Clive Jacks, who had pretty much ignored Martin. Dave taught him a lot, including how to look out for himself, and for a few years everything was jake. Then, once again, it all went south.

It was winter 1973 and Martin was nearly six. He'd already discovered wonder: the golden blaze of sunlight on the blinding whiteness of snow; the greens and greys and browns of trees; the blue brilliance of a cloudless sky. Already he was asking how he might catch the colours, make them part of him. And winter meant bitter cold but also snow angels.

Some of the children scoffed. ‘No such thing!' they said.

Miss Scott the teacher did her best to put him right. She explained that what he had seen had either been frost patterns on the windows or the sunlight taking fire as it moved across the snow slopes on the other side of the valley, but Martin knew better. He had seen the angels dancing and Dave Anderson had agreed that was what they were.

‘I seen 'em flying,' he told him, and winked. ‘Straight overhead, like they was all dolled up in golden cloth.'

‘Stop encouraging his nonsense,' Mother said, but Dave said you were only young once and where was the harm in it?

One evening as it was getting dark Dave went out of the house to sort out a problem in one of the tunnels. Later that night Martin was woken by a banging on the door and men's voices speaking with an urgency that didn't sound right.

‘No! Oh no! Oh my God!'

Mother's voice was half-protest, half-scream, followed by a tempest of weeping. Horror squeezed Martin's throat. He got out of bed and went into the kitchen. The air was stiff with tragedy. Three men were standing helplessly around Mother, who was crumpled in a chair, hands clutching her throat, while Mrs Amos, one of the wives, bent over her.

Later Martin heard what had happened. A charge had gone off prematurely; a section of the roof had come down, with Dave and two others dead underneath it. His loss made Martin weep but turned Mother savage.

‘Love,' she said, as though she could spit it out of the body it had gutted. ‘Don't believe what they tell you. Let it grab hold of you and it'll rip your heart out. Never forget that.'

Night after night Martin lay in bed and listened to her sobbing, the
thud
,
thud
of clenched fists on the thin walls of their home. The tears.

In the end the situation grew too much for his mother. Early one morning, the town still sleeping, they sneaked away like thieves, no word of farewell to anyone.

‘The world is waiting,' Mother said.

It was a big, unknown world, hostile to a child who had known only the mountains.

‘Where we going?'

‘Who knows?'

In Cooma Mother got a job in a café and Martin discovered the wonder of paint and colour. He tried to put his feelings on paper, found the miracle of the reds and greens and blues and yellows shouting his secrets.

Mother didn't understand. ‘Why don'tcha stop messin' with that nonsense and do somethin' useful?'

He didn't care. His heart and hands trembled with his discovery, the secrets that only he knew. He slopped colour, telling the news of Dave's death, the huddled people, the golden puddle of the down-pouring light, the tragedy he painted not in black but as a scarlet cloud overhanging them, with teeth.

Martin's mother once again packed their bags and set out. Cooma, she explained to Martin, was not right.

‘But why?' Martin said.

His mother did not say why.

She made sure Martin went to school – she wanted nothing to do with the authorities, who might have come sniffing otherwise – but didn't like him making friends.

‘We're doing all right as we are,' she said. ‘We don't want nothin' to tie us down.'

They reached Burra when Martin was fourteen. There was a feeling of the desert and abandonment about it and Mother decided this was it. She landed another job and they rented a cottage on the edge of town. The wind blew all year and the air was full of dust.

Martin was painting seriously now; he saw his future in the explosion of colours that made up his world. He explored the abandoned workings and the creek where long ago families of miners living in holes along the banks had been swept away by raging floods. Their ghosts hung like thunder over Martin's developing imagination and accompanied him when in 1986, at the age of eighteen, he won a scholarship and travelled south to Adelaide.

Five years later he was in Melbourne, close to penniless, still experimenting and battling to find even a hint of acceptance for his work, when he spotted Jennifer Brand at a party.

Afterwards he remembered a swirling kaleidoscope of booze, hash and faces. And Jennifer.