Stars Over the Southern Ocean

by J. H. Fletcher

  Which they did, with gusto. Tamsyn even permitted herself a half-glass of the merlot.

  ‘It complements the food very nicely,’ she said. ‘And that’s saying something. When we were kids we took it for granted but I know now how lucky we were. Cordon bleu and not a penny to play with. A real chef manqué. I don’t believe you’ve ever told me how you managed it.’

  Tamsyn and her smart French phrases.

  ‘I found early on that a decent meal helped to keep Marrek sweet. And that took a bit of doing, let me tell you.’

  Marrek. She had rarely called Jory’s father anything else. Neither Tamsyn nor Gregory seemed to care but lady-of-the-manor Charlotte thought it unseemly.

  ‘It shows lack of respect,’ she’d told Marina once. ‘He was your father-in-law, after all.’

  Which was true, but she objected, not because of a lack of respect, but because it was a constant reminder that she’d been conceived out of wedlock.

  As though anyone cared about such things nowadays.

  ‘Method in your madness,’ Tamsyn said now.

  ‘Always. Or I like to think so.’

  Over the cheesecake Tamsyn said, elaborately casual:

  ‘We may be looking at some changes at the office.’

  ‘What sort of changes?’

  ‘Harry Sharp is ill. He’s thinking of retiring.’

  Marina was aware that someone called Harry Sharp owned Hobart Tours and was therefore Tamsyn’s boss but knew little else about him; Tamsyn had never been one to talk about her business life, which was therefore foreign territory as far as Marina was concerned. That being so, there wasn’t much she could say about Harry Sharp and his possible retirement.

  ‘Will that affect you?’

  ‘It might.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘He’s offered me the chance to buy him out.’

  ‘How much does he want?’

  ‘A lot.’

  ‘And if you don’t?’

  ‘He’ll offer it to Will Roper.’

  ‘Who is?’

  ‘Will Roper and I are the company’s principal managers, reporting directly to Harry Sharp.’

  ‘Assuming he does decide to retire, he’s giving you first option to buy him out? You, not Will Roper?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Is the business sound?’

  ‘As a bell. Number one in the state.’

  ‘Then what’s the problem?’

  The thinnest of thin smiles. ‘Money.’

  Ahh …

  ‘From what I hear, it usually is. Which is why I’m thankful I don’t have any.’ Marina tucked into her second helping of cheesecake. ‘The banks?’ she suggested. ‘I know nothing about these things, but if the company is as sound as you say …’

  ‘The bank wouldn’t be lending the money to the company but to me personally.’

  ‘Would that be a problem?’

  ‘Banks believe in the belt-and-braces approach. They’re more comfortable if they have bags of security.’

  ‘And you don’t have any?’

  ‘I’ve a big mortgage on my place. So maybe not enough, no.’

  ‘Whereas—let me guess—this Will Roper does?’

  ‘Will Roper is loaded. I doubt he would even need the banks.’

  ‘Would it be such a tragedy—from your point of view—if he got the top job?’

  Tamsyn looked at her mother as though she had suddenly sprouted horns. ‘Mum, since Grant died, all I’ve wanted is to be number one. In compensation, I suppose. I still want that, but it will never happen with Will Roper in charge.’

  It was true. All her children were ambitious in different ways.

  Charlotte liked to pretend she was a docile little wife, subservient to Hector’s every whim, but in reality she was a plotter and schemer who’d always wanted to be rich and respected, married to and controlling a man of power, and top of the social tree.

  Gregory wanted to be the creator and number-one occupant of some fantasy world of perpetual youth, based on the uncertain foundations of dope, booze and beautiful women.

  In Tamsyn, focused and hardworking, diamond hard and diamond bright, the need to be top dog had been her number one priority for years. Perhaps in compensation for Grant’s death, as she had said. Unlike her sister, she’d never tried to hide it, either.

  In contrast with the kids, Marina had never been ambitious at all. There had been joys beyond measure in her life—soul-searing tragedies, too—but at least she’d had a life. She had hardly any money, never would and didn’t care, but her memories were jewels beyond price and all of them, all, had been centred on this patch of land in the middle of nowhere where the competing elements of sea, wind and land had fought their endless and ferocious duels for eons past and would no doubt continue to do so millions of years after Marina and the kids and all the peoples of planet Earth had vanished from the scene.

  It was a comforting thought, giving her the certainty that she formed a part—infinitesimal but nonetheless important—of a universe that might continue forever or end far into the future in a cataclysm of exploding suns.

  She had no other ambition than to remain in this place peopled with memories until the moment when she ceased to be.

  But now Tamsyn—someone she loved and respected—was asking her to help in achieving her own personal dream.

  ‘Buying Harry Sharp out … Are we talking tens of thousands or hundreds?’

  ‘Hundreds.’

  ‘If I had that sort of money you’d have it, no question, but I don’t,’ Marina said. She’d said the same to Gregory, only the other day.

  ‘I know that.’ Tamsyn gave her mother the beaming yet assessing smile that Marina knew so well. ‘I’ll help you clear up.’

  ‘Thank you, dear.’

  Matching smile with smile, yet as they carried the dishes to the sink Marina knew the conversation wasn’t over. Loving her children did not blind her to their qualities, good and bad, and it wasn’t in Tamsyn’s nature to give up so easily.

  ‘I’ll wash,’ she said. ‘You dry.’

  For a few minutes they worked together in silence and perfect harmony, while Marina listened to the sound of the breaking surf which, with the rising wind, was once again coming to life.

  ‘I like it better when I can hear the sea,’ she said. ‘A flat calm, in these waters, never seems right. We’re in the roaring forties, after all.’

  She watched Tamsyn from the corner of one eye as she began to put away the plates. A restraint had fallen between them. She didn’t like that and hoped that by breaking the silence she might get Tamsyn finally to put into words what she’d flown all the way from Hobart to say.

  It worked: up to a point.

  ‘Have you talked to Greg recently?’ Tamsyn said.

  ‘He phoned me two days ago, saying he was desperate for money, but that’s hardly news. When hasn’t he been desperate for money?’

  ‘This time I’m worried about him,’ Tamsyn said. ‘I think he could be in real trouble. When I spoke to him he sounded frightened.’

  ‘Really?’ That was certainly something new. ‘What’s he frightened of?’

  ‘He says he owes his partners a lot of money.’

  ‘He told me the same.’

  ‘Now it seems they want him to pay up and he hasn’t got it.’

  ‘Then they’ll have to wait. Once this resort of his is up and running, he’ll have money pouring out of his ears.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘That’s what he’s always claimed.’

  ‘Mum, these guys are gangsters. They’re not in the waiting game. He owes them a packet and they want it. Want it now.’

  ‘They sound very amateurish gangsters to me. Your brother’s a dreamer, never hung on to a penny in his life. It’s the way he is. Why would they lend money to a man like that?’

  ‘Because he told them he’d be in funds very soon.’

  ‘In funds? Your brother? Did he say where he was planning to
get them?’

  ‘Apparently Charlotte told him you might soon be in a position to bail him out.’

  ‘He told me the same. But Charlotte was here yesterday and she never mentioned it.’

  ‘She drove over?’

  ‘She’s trying to talk me into moving to Launceston. So she can keep an eye on me, or so she said.’ A merry laugh. ‘Can you imagine it? She said nothing about a sudden fortune heading my way, though, so I don’t understand how she could have told him such a thing. Gregory, of all people! I’ve got nothing!’

  ‘Are you saying you really don’t know why she was here?’

  ‘I don’t believe in speculating.’ A sudden frost in Marina’s voice and her eyes were cold. ‘I know what she told me. Nothing more; nothing less.’

  ‘Trident’s got a drilling rig out there. If they strike oil Noamunga is the obvious place to bring their pipeline ashore. You sell Noamunga to Trident, you can name your own price. That’s why she was here, Mum.’

  ‘And is that why you’re here too? So you can buy out this Harry Sharp and be the big boss of your own business? And I suppose Gregory will want his cut, too. Do none of you have the decency to wait until I’m dead before dividing up my estate?’

  Tamsyn had probably never seen her mother so angry, but she was tough and Marina saw she was not prepared to be browbeaten by her own mother.

  ‘If you want to stay here, of course you must. If you decided to sell up it would benefit us all, including you, with your health the way it is. It’s your decision, no question, but it’s only right you should know the score.’

  Marina asked herself whether that could really have been the reason Charlotte had driven over the previous day, not out of concern for her health but because her husband’s company was hoping to gain access to her land? Charlotte had never mentioned Trident or a pipeline but what had she been telling herself only minutes before?

  Charlotte was a plotter and a schemer …

  Somehow she’d never thought of her daughter using her tricks on her, which no doubt showed how gullible she was. It disappointed her; what’s more, it made her angry. Trident might want to buy Noamunga, did it? Well, Trident had another think coming.

  As for Tamsyn … Blackmail. An ugly word, but what Tamsyn was saying sounded very much like it. Sell Noamunga to Trident, then use the money to bail out her irresponsible son and at the same time help her daughter get hold of the company she was working for. Fail to sell, according to that version of events, and she would be letting down both her son and her daughter.

  Oh yes, it was blackmail, all right. At that moment Marina didn’t like Tamsyn very much at all.

  ‘Charlotte had no business telling Gregory that. If she’s so anxious to help, let her put up the money. A husband like hers, she should have plenty.’

  Which was a mean thing to say. So now she didn’t like herself very much, either.

  Yet what she’d said was true. She’d never encouraged Gregory in any of his madcap ventures—the ostrich farms, which even Marina with her minimal economic understanding had seen from the first would never be a financial proposition; his even more extraordinary plan, based on something he’d read somewhere, sometime, to generate power from seaweed—and now to be landed with implied responsibility for his Nirvana project was too much. What was the saying about the last straw breaking the camel’s back?

  ‘Noamunga has been Trevelyan land since 1856,’ she said. ‘You think I want to be remembered as the woman who sold over a hundred years of this family’s heritage to an oil company?’

  She had never thought she could be so bitter, so conflicted. So hypocritical, too, she thought. What she’d said about the family’s heritage was true, but her real reason for hanging on was purely selfish: because Noamunga represented for her everything that had made up her life from the day of her arrival from the forest country fifty-six years before. Noamunga was her life and she’d always thought to die here in the midst of her memories, all the joys and agonies that had built the structure of her existence. There would be a pleasing symmetry to that, she thought; the rounding of the circle of experience, of birth and death, happiness and despair that had made up the woman who for over half a century had called herself Marina Trevelyan.

  Was she supposed to throw all that away to satisfy her daughters’ ambitions and to protect Gregory from his so-called partners? Marina had always believed that the family came first; she had brought them up to believe that, too, as the first priority of their lives. How could she deny it now? Yet, approaching the end of her life, did she not deserve some consideration, too?

  She had never expected to be so torn.

  The stress was making her head ache and she felt a sudden need to sit down. She groped to her chair and sat, feeling the walls swirl.

  At once Tamsyn was at her side, all concern. ‘I’m sorry. So sorry. Can I get you a drink? Anything?’

  Marina closed her eyes for a second. She was still angry, but with herself, despising her momentary weakness.

  ‘I am fine, dear.’ She manufactured her most beaming smile, shone it like a searchlight in her daughter’s face. ‘Such foolishness … Of course we must do what we can to help Gregory. But, oh dear, how I wish he’d grow up. These crazy ideas …’

  She was on her feet again, pacing this way and that, determined to show both her daughter and herself how strong she was, but Tamsyn was unconvinced. She took her mother’s hand.

  ‘I don’t think you should bother your head about Greg’s problems anymore,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t have sprung it on you the way I did. I’m sorry.’

  And she was: Marina could see that. But what she was saying was nonsense. She gave Tamsyn a pale smile.

  ‘My dear, you had a duty to tell me. I’m his mother; I have the right to know.’

  The wind was up now, a penetrating whistle of air about the house that blew from far away across the ocean, and the surf had resumed its confrontation with the land. Nothing violent, not yet, and so far there were none of the wild gusts that could be so dangerous to a helicopter in the moments after take-off, but Marina knew from the sound it was making that the gusts were coming, and soon.

  ‘I think it’s time you made a move,’ she said. ‘That wind is getting stronger by the minute.’

  ‘This is what worries me,’ Tamsyn said. ‘Never mind Greg, never mind any of us, what matters is you. You want to stay here, then of course you must. But you must surely see how risky it is, and how worried we all are for you. You haven’t been well, however much you pretend otherwise, and being in such a remote place …’

  ‘Is perverse of me,’ Marina said. ‘Of course it is. But that’s me, as I am sure you know by now.’

  ‘If you bought a place in Hobart, it would be much easier for me to keep an eye on you.’

  Which was precisely what Marina didn’t want, despite Tamsyn’s coaxing voice and sincere smile.

  ‘I’ll think about it. I really will.’

  At the door Tamsyn turned. ‘You sure you’re okay? You know I’d sleep so much easier—’

  If I could keep an eye on you.

  ‘I know you would, dear, but there’s really no need. There’s nothing for you to worry about.’ And she smiled; sincere smiles were all the rage, it seemed. ‘Thank you for dropping by. I really enjoyed it.’

  Despite everything.

  ‘I’ll give you a call when I get home.’

  They walked to the helicopter together. Tamsyn climbed aboard and pulled the cabin door tight behind her. Marina watched as her daughter settled into the pilot’s seat, put on her headphones and fired up the engine. Engines? She’d forgotten to ask. The rotor blades began to turn, slowly at first, then faster. The sound rose to a scream. Marina waved. The chopper lifted into the air, hovered for a second and was gone. Neither of them had said any more about Marina helping Tamsyn buy her business.

  She watched the helicopter climb, heading towards the Wombat Ridge. Diminishing sound, diminishing image; it topped the r
idge and vanished from sight. Now there was only the wind, the rhythmic crash, crash of the sea.

  My place.

  She turned and walked heavily back into the house, to face an interminable evening of perplexity, anger and—yes!—pain. If Trident found oil they would certainly want to bring the pipeline ashore at Noamunga. They would no doubt be willing to pay her obscene amounts of money to do so. And then what? Presumably they’d lay the pipeline up the valley to the plateau beneath the Wombat Ridge. The valley that had been undisturbed for a billion years. They would erect their storage tanks. The countryside would be blighted, the air stink of oil. The whole area would be degraded, unrecognisable. Noamunga, the Fishing Place. Trevelyan land for 137 years. All she had to do was say yes.

  It would be within her power to bail Gregory out, yet again; enable Tamsyn to buy out Harry Sharp; help push Charlotte’s husband one step further up Trident’s corporate ladder, the object of Charlotte’s scheming ever since she’d married him. They would all be satisfied, all happy, at least for the moment.

  And what of Marina? She, conscience clear, would be able to buy a sweet little apartment in Hobart, one or even two bedrooms, with Tamsyn to keep an eye on her and where she could lie in bed each morning and listen not to the sound of the surf, but the traffic.

  Dear God!

  How she hoped Trident’s drilling program would come to nothing!

  Now that was a selfish thought, if there ever was one.

  And what about the dolphins? Should they not have a say? The mackerel, whelks and whiskery prawns? All the sea creatures that would be more affected by the pipeline than anything else—didn’t they get a vote?

  Yes or no, not a maybe in sight, with Marina, at the end of her life, the sole and unwilling arbiter of the fortunes of so many.

  What about her?

  Tamsyn phoned to say she was safely home and to ask, yet again, how she was feeling.

  ‘I am fine, dear. Perfectly fine.’

  What was one more lie, among so many?

  ‘You’d tell me if you weren’t?’