White Sands of Summer

by J. H. Fletcher

  They saw some of the old buildings. Most of them needed money spent on them but they were definitely old, which he supposed made them interesting.

  They found the restaurant his mother had recommended and had a meal there. There were white cloths on the tables and the food and service were all they could have wished.

  ‘Your mum was right,’ Erica said.

  ‘When it comes to food, she usually is.’

  In the afternoon they drove back down the hill to Townsville, taking their time. When they reached Erica’s apartment, he tried to kiss her. She turned her face so he only kissed her cheek but consoled himself, driving south once more, that even that represented definite progress. That was what he wanted. He wanted to continue the relationship and see where it led. Maybe nowhere, but he wasn’t in the business of making any assumptions about it at the moment.

  He liked her eyes. They were jet black and he suspected didn’t miss much. She had a good figure and he liked the neat way her body was put together. He liked her quirky sense of humour and the way she laughed. He liked everything about her. He thought: watch it. But didn’t feel like watching anything.

  His mum met Erica and approved mightily; Andrew gave her a hint of his plans. A hint of anything involving Andrew’s private life was equivalent to a public announcement with trumpet fanfares, so it took a mighty effort for him to confide in her, and he was relieved when she said she approved.

  ‘I am delighted,’ she said.

  The winter months were the best in north Queensland, with the humidity way down and the temperatures in the mid-twenties. On the last day of June Andrew sat on the balcony of his apartment, Erica beside him. They were sharing a bottle of shiraz from the Keebunna estate in Tasmania.

  It was evening, the air warm, skies clear. Offshore, lights shone in the darkness, the shops along the high street still busy with tourists.

  They’d known each other for almost six months and the relationship had developed a long way since their visit to Charters Towers, although they had still not slept together. They were holding hands loosely, like friends. Except they were not only friends, not any more.

  There was no wind and along the invisible horizon lightning rippled like silver fire across the sky. In the room behind them the record player, turned low, was playing ‘Stayin’ Alive’, the Bee Gees latest hit, and quite simply, without warning or fuss, he asked her to marry him.

  There was a stillness in the air. She did not move or speak but sat very still, looking at him. He waited.

  ‘I do not ask it,’ she said.

  ‘But I do. It is what I want,’ he said. ‘I want it more than anything.’

  ‘Then we must go to Singapore,’ she said. ‘You will meet my father and you can ask for his permission then.’

  ‘And if he approves?’

  She smiled. ‘Then you can ask me again and we shall see. But first we must wait until I have graduated at the end of the year.’

  ‘But that is months away.’

  ‘There is a Chinese saying,’ Erica said. ‘Yà miáo zhu zhâng.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It says that young plants cannot be made to grow by stretching them.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘There is an English equivalent. Patience is a virtue.’

  Lydia

  Lydia met Clifford Thomas in November 1977, when she and Lyle were in England.

  After a two-year tour in Buenos Aires they had moved to Washington and were then recalled to London in October.

  Solti was conducting Beethoven’s Ninth at the Albert Hall and Lyle had been able to get hold of tickets. In the interval they met Clifford Thomas, whom Lyle had known years before, a professional photographer with a studio in Mayfair. He was a tall man with a tanned face and grey eyes. Their expression when they looked deep into her made Lydia catch her breath.

  The following day she was alone in the flat when Clifford Thomas phoned.

  ‘I wondered if you’d like to see my studio?’ he said.

  Used to the circumlocutions and ambiguities of the diplomatic circuit, she was taken aback by his directness. All the same, she did not hesitate.

  ‘I’d love to.’

  That was how it started.

  The studio shocked her; nobody had told her Clifford specialised in the female nude. She didn’t know where to hide her face although later, when he’d told her that he understood how unhappy she was, when he’d touched her face and body, every particle of her being lay open to him, yearning and welcoming and, at the end, grateful.

  In the next ten days she saw him three times.

  ‘This is not me,’ she told herself. ‘I don’t do this sort of thing.’

  But she did.

  She blamed Lyle for it. Their marriage had been such a disappointment. She’d been misled from the first. Sir Stoddart’s sister Persephone had told her that Lyle had money: hogwash. She had said he was on his way to becoming one of the youngest ambassadors in the Foreign Office; Lydia knew now that he had less chance of being appointed ambassador than the man in the moon.

  After that one ecstatic night at the edge of Wimbledon Common, he had proved as boring in bed as he was out of it. All these things, yet the worst thing of all was the way he patronised her, criticising everything she did, undermining her confidence by an indifference towards her that he did nothing to hide.

  A servant would have walked out long before.

  By contrast, Clifford Thomas treated her with respect, making her feel valued, the desirable woman she had known herself to be in the days before she and Lyle had met.

  She often wondered whether things might have been different had Logan lived, but Logan had died of bacterial meningitis when he was five. Lyle had been away at the time on some dreary chore for the embassy and she had always believed he blamed her for what had happened because, not recognising the symptoms, she had not called in the doctor right away.

  She’d already had the beginnings of a drinking habit; after Logan’s death her sense of guilt caused it to grow much worse, yet Lyle had never given her any support, just an unspoken but endless condemnation. As he had told her after the boy’s funeral, it had happened, through negligence or otherwise, and they had to go on living, doing what they could to make the most of what remained of their lives.

  Lyle had been right but she knew now that being right solved nothing. After her experiences with Clifford Thomas, it was quite simply impossible for her to go on living with him.

  She hoped desperately that Clifford would ask her to leave Lyle and stay with him, but even as she did so she knew there was no chance of it. Clifford Thomas was a lovely man and a wonderful lover, but he was not a stayer and she’d known it from the first.

  The day after she’d made her decision Lyle came home and told her he had been appointed consul-general. In Paraguay, the landlocked South American country that, under its president Alfredo Stroessner, had the worst human rights record in all the Americas and, as Foreign Office postings went, was less popular than the cholera.

  ‘They thought my Spanish would be handy,’ he said. ‘They said we’d be glad to get away from an English winter.’

  So the blow had fallen. No ambassadorship, now or ever. The only question was what she planned to do about it.

  Andrew

  Clement Soong and his wife Madeleine Tan lived in a large house in Napier Road. It stood in extensive grounds and in the evening after his arrival Mr Soong invited Andrew to accompany him on a stroll around the various choice shrubs that formed a feature of the property.

  ‘I have a particular fondness for orchids,’ he said. ‘Of course the most expensive ones have to be kept under lock and key, to protect them from thieves. But I will show them to you later, if you’re interested.’

  ‘I would be most interested,’ Andrew said.

  Of course all this was preliminary chatter; the point of the conversation would come later.

  Mr Soong was of medium build an
d looked a good many years older than his wife, with shrewd eyes and a weathered face. He had a slight limp and walked with the aid of a stick which he pointed at a bench beneath a flowering tree with scented yellow flowers whose name Andrew did not know.

  ‘Let us sit down,’ Mr Soong said.

  They sat for a while and Andrew could hear the traffic going up and down Napier Road.

  ‘So you wish to marry my daughter,’ Mr Soong said.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I am glad you agreed to wait until she graduated.’

  ‘With first class honours, no less,’ Andrew said.

  ‘Just so. You realise your meeting Erica the way you did came about because of a plot hatched between my wife and your mother?’

  ‘I gather they favour the marriage but I wish to marry your daughter because I love her. I care for her deeply and no one else has anything to do with it.’

  ‘And if I tell you I do not approve?’

  ‘I would be disappointed. Forgive me, but my instinct would be to disregard your opinion. However, I doubt Erica would agree to marry me without your blessing.’

  The faintest smile cracked the weathered face. ‘That is my opinion also.’

  Again they sat for a while, breathing the scented air.

  ‘A mixed marriage,’ Mr Soong said. ‘Well, well. Did you know I can trace my ancestors back to the Ming dynasty?’

  Andrew kept quiet.

  ‘So many changes… My wife now runs the business – with her father, of course. A married woman doing such things… Even fifty years ago that would have been unthinkable.’

  ‘Are you not involved in the business?’

  ‘That was the intention, when my wife and I married. But I am a student of history, and after a year or two I decided I had no real aptitude for business. Whereas my wife, a trained chef, has a head for it. Which I suppose is just as well.’

  ‘My uncle and aunt are in the same position,’ Andrew said. ‘They started off in business together and he still has a large financial interest in it, but after he went into politics he ceased to be involved. I am sure she talks things over with him when she wants to, but for the most part he leaves her to run things and doesn’t interfere.’

  Abruptly Mr Soong changed the subject. ‘You say you love my daughter?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘And will care for her all your days?’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘My father would never have permitted it. Perhaps at one time I would not have permitted it. But the world moves on and we must move with it, or be left behind. Very well. You may tell her that you have my blessing.’ The shrewd eyes twinkled. ‘At least that will make my wife happy. You will find when you reach my age that a harmonious household is a precious thing.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Andrew said. ‘Thank you very much.’

  A quizzical look, head on one side. ‘Should you not go and tell her my decision?’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘Don’t wait for me,’ Mr Soong said. ‘I shall go and talk to my orchids.’

  Andrew found Erica in the living room.

  ‘He says OK,’ he said.

  ‘Good.’

  ‘You haven’t said how you feel about it.’

  Her eyes widened as far as they would go. ‘Perhaps because you have not yet asked me properly. Are you not supposed to kneel?’

  ‘That’s a very conservative way of doing things,’ he objected.

  ‘We Chinese are very conservative people.’

  ‘Of course you are. That’s why China’s got a communist government.’

  She laughed. ‘Haven’t you heard? The communists are the most conservative of all.’

  Down on one knee, then, feeling a fool but doing it because at that moment she was for him the most precious being in the world.

  ‘Erica Soong Cui Ying, will you do me the very great honour of agreeing to be my wife?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said, with tears, her hands holding his as she drew him to his feet. ‘Yes, yes, yes.’

  1978

  Andrew

  The wedding took place in Singapore and was a three-stage affair.

  The first stage was to book an appointment at the Registry of Marriages, where bride and groom had to fill in forms and make a statutory declaration that everything they had stated in the forms was true. This done, they were issued a certificate saying their marriage was authorised.

  The second stage was the solemnisation of the marriage, a ceremony conducted at Mr Soong’s house by an official acting on behalf of the registry.

  The final stage was the formal banquet, held that evening and paid for by Mr Soong, where members of the two families and friends came to wine and dine in the presence of the newly married couple.

  Shannon, Hal and Jess flew in for the occasion; Lydia did not, although they took care to send her an invitation. But then neither Andrew nor his mum had attended Lydia’s wedding, either.

  Grandpa Stoddart sent his apologies, which was a pity but unavoidable, since the tough and ruthless old man was dying in his big bed in the mansion at the end of the tree-lined drive. Some would no doubt be glad to hear it, some would be sorry, but glad or sorry made no odds, for Sir Stoddart was on his last journey and the chariot wheels were turning.

  They’d talked about postponing the ceremony, out of deference to the man who had been respected and often feared but not widely loved, but in the end decided against it.

  After the wedding, the bride and groom flew back to Australia where they spent a week touring Tasmania. It wasn’t enough time to take in all the beauty of that island but enough to grow comfortable with each other. Once they were over their surprise at being married and had discovered themselves again, changed yet unchanged, they were content.

  When they got home they found that the world outside themselves had also changed because Sir Stoddart Maitland had died on the last day of January.

  He left one hundred thousand dollars to Andrew but only ten thousand to Lydia. He’d paid for the reception she’d wanted but now punished her for defying him over her choice of husband. Jess got two hundred thousand and he had divided his shareholding in the Maitland Corporation and in his house and grounds equally between Hal and Shannon.

  Following a disagreement years before concerning the treatment of a burst appendix, he’d waged a lifelong war with the Proserpine hospital. It was therefore no surprise that he’d left the substantial residue of his estate to a trust set up to establish the Stoddart Maitland Memorial Hospital.

  In a world where women were in general still regarded as lesser beings than men, Stoddart Maitland had been ahead of his time, but he was also a man who carried his disputes to the grave.

  Shannon

  It was 1 February 1978 and Shannon was home in bed, with Hal, home for the moment from Brisbane, asleep at her side. They had been out for a meal at a new restaurant that had recently opened overlooking the yacht basin in Shute Harbour. It had been a lovely, leisurely, romantic meal, drinking wine and looking through the window at the moon-silvered water. They had come home, taking their time. They had made love, again taking their time. Now she lay, waiting for sleep to engulf her.

  I am fifty-nine, she thought. An old fogey. I should be knitting socks or jumpers, or something. And look at me.

  This was how life should be, she thought, instead of the frenzy in which they spent their days. But they were as they were, and beneath all the tranquillity-seeking wishes she knew that in reality nothing would change. Later that month she would be on the plane to Hong Kong for the official opening of the Golden Phoenix Complex, and this time Hal Maitland MP, the love of her life, who had shared with her every moment of success and failure, triumph and disaster, joy and sorrow, the man without whom she would have had no life, would be coming with her, as would the Tans, father and daughter.

  Sentimental longings aside, she knew that given the choice she would change none of it.

  I have a life that suits me, a husband I love a
nd who I know loves me, the financial future is showing every sign of being secure provided Golden Phoenix delivers, as Mr Ong assures me it will; I am, she told herself, a truly happy woman.

  The only shadow on that happiness was Lydia, for whom she had love but little affection, with whom she spoke only when she took the initiative and phoned her herself. In a way she didn’t mind doing this but it was always difficult because Lydia was seldom at home, and it was exasperating to leave messages with staff who, even when her daughter had lived in Washington, seemed never to speak or understand English.

  Inevitably that had meant that over the years communication between mother and daughter had been spasmodic at best. Shannon regretted it but at the same time was philosophical; when Lydia was small, she had failed to find enough time to devote to her daughter and now the shoe was on the other foot. There was no point blaming herself; it was too late for that, and there was no animosity, but over the years they’d had less and less to say to each other.

  Of all the false steps she had taken in life, she regretted that the most; the loss of a child was always agonising, no less so when the child was still alive.

  The following day Shannon was on the phone to Hong Kong for most of the morning. The ceremonial opening of the Golden Phoenix had been set for Thursday 23 February, the day of the full moon and the one that the feng shui masters she had consulted had confirmed was the most auspicious day for the start of a major enterprise.

  Major it certainly was; given the vast debt they had incurred in the construction of the complex, the future of the company, everything she had spent her entire working life creating, would be devastated were Golden Phoenix to fail. She had done everything she could to ensure its success; Mr Ong and Aaron Davies, whom she had consulted in his retirement home on the New South Wales north coast, had said it was a sure-fire winner; the colonial government was on side; the Tan family was up to its neck in it, as she was, and would not have plunged so much capital into the project had they not been confident of the outcome; yet the nerves in Shannon’s stomach continued to misbehave. She had known the sensation a dozen times before, yet this was the big one, because on its success depended China and her hopes of entering into that vast and largely unknown country that had for so long been locked away from the rest of the world.