Keepers of the House

by JH Fletcher

  Belatedly, something that Monica had said a few minutes earlier struck her.

  ‘I would hardly say I was that successful,’ she said.

  Monica laughed in disbelief. ‘Australian Businesswoman of the Year?’

  ‘Doesn’t mean much.’ Though she’d been delighted at the time. ‘What’s the point of it? I’ve worked my butt off all my life. For what?’ To be like you, filling lonely evenings with food and bitterness? Somehow, she managed not to say it.

  ‘You started with nothing. Now look at you. How can you say you’re not successful?’

  It was true, she supposed. She’d picked the tree she’d wanted, had climbed damn near to the top. It was a bit late to start wondering if it had been the right tree.

  She was in shock, she told herself. That was why she was thinking like this. It would have been remarkable if she’d felt nothing, after all.

  Out in the harbour, islanded in darkness, a brightly-lit ferry headed somewhere unknowable, like a metaphor of her life.

  ‘Love is a mistake, isn’t it?’ Anna said. ‘It makes you vulnerable.’

  Vulnerability was a new experience, yet now it had arrived it seemed in no hurry to abandon her. Later, at the house that no longer felt like home, it tightened like a clamp about her heart. Lying alone on the tossed sheets in a bedroom that was suddenly far too big, far too small, every creak of the house jerked her out of the doze that was the nearest she could get to sleep. Afraid Mostyn would come home after all; afraid he would not.

  He wouldn’t; she knew him too well to believe anything else. The ego that had driven him away would make it impossible for him to return so quickly. She hoped, all the same. Unavailingly.

  At last, after a dozen lifetimes, the dawn. The harbour as serene as on the first day.

  I can’t stay here all weekend, Anna thought. I’ll go ape.

  She showered, wishing she could scrub her mind as clean as her body. She arranged a few clothes tidily in a case — not even a broken marriage, which was what she supposed it was, could break her addiction to order — spread a croissant with jam, drank one cup of black coffee. She went out to the garage, stowed the case in the Porsche, and headed north.

  Past Broken Bay she found a beach with a pub at the far end, a lake behind a scattering of houses. Miraculously, being a fine Saturday, it had a room. So small the bed almost filled it, a rickety, dark-stained wardrobe jammed against one wall. At the end of a bare corridor, the shower and lavatory were as drab as a public toilet. It was a long time since Anna had stayed anywhere like it but the very discomfort eased her. Here everything was different. She had a name for resilience, for permitting nothing to faze her. Very well. Now was her chance to prove it. Here she would start to forget.

  She gave it her best shot. She walked the beach; when she was sick of the sea she crossed the dunes and followed a sandy track shaded by trees until she reached the lake. Watched a man with a dog, a father and mother surrounded by a joyous scream of children.

  I should have been like that, she thought, knowing it was nonsense. She had never been cut out for a housewife. A week of it and she’d have been climbing the walls. She imagined packing hubby off to work, the kids off to school. Cleaning the house, doing the shopping, building her own little kingdom in her own little home. Nothing wrong with any of it. Admirable, even, but not — most emphatically not — for her. If everyone were like I am, she thought, the human race would have died out long ago.

  Which at the moment did not seem such a bad idea.

  It grew hot. She returned to the beach. Luckily, she had thought to slip on some bathers beneath her clothes. She peeled off shorts and top, baring white city skin to the cancerous eye of the yellow sun. Much she cared about that. She rubbed on sunscreen, lay on the stinging sand, plunged periodically into the tepid Pacific as it lapped along the shore. Later, when she’d had enough sun, she found a scrap of tattered shade, sat and stared at the water.

  She wasn’t used to doing nothing. It was an art, like everything else, and she had never thought to acquire it. All her life had passed in a rush. She wondered what was the point of it.

  Don’t start that again.

  But there had to be a point. Simply to function mindlessly, with no object in view — that was scary.

  Surely there was merit in the generation of wealth, not simply for herself but for tens of thousands of others? People better off than they’d have been without her? Of course there was. Then why didn’t it seem enough?

  Damn you, Mostyn. I never had doubts before.

  Except that she had, which was why the political option had seemed so attractive. Now she found herself wondering even about that.

  She wasn’t going to walk out on her present life, make any rash decisions. She had to give herself time. It was less than twenty-four hours since she’d got the letter. Besides, what else could she do? She wasn’t the sort to sit on her bum and do nothing. She was used to seizing problems by the throat and shaking them to death. Not being able to do so now made her uncomfortable. Like the drying, powdery sand, frustration itched her skin.

  Give it time and it will pass, she told herself. I only wish it would.

  She wondered if Mostyn had been trying to contact her. It pleased her to think of the phone ringing in the empty house, him listening to her metallic voice on the answering machine. She liked to imagine his indignation at discovering that she was not available just because he wanted her to be. Of course, the chances were he had not tried to get in touch with her at all.

  Once again she thought back over their relationship, seeking the defining moment when the balance between Mostyn’s options — to stay or go — had finally shifted. She remembered one of their more recent rows. At the time, she had barely noticed it. It had been simply another in what now she realised had been a crescendo of rows.

  If only I’d taken more notice, she thought. If only I’d listened. If only …

  But she hadn’t.

  Now she saw that it had been remarkable only because Mostyn had come closer than ever before to expressing his real feelings, the core of his resentment of her and their life together.

  Mostyn’s voice, battering the living room walls. ‘You’ve always wanted to keep up with me but you couldn’t hack it. Envy — that’s your problem. It’s become a kind of mad game, hasn’t it? How many directorships, how many TV appearances?’

  ‘I don’t see anything wrong with being well-known.’

  It was true that most businessmen favoured a low profile, but Anna had always enjoyed the limelight. She knew how to manipulate the media, with its politically correct cringe towards any woman who achieved prominence or notoriety.

  Mostyn topped up his Scotch without offering her one, took a ferocious belt. Given half a chance he would have devoured her too, and her independent ways.

  ‘All this palaver about human rights … In the old days it was South Africa. Now it’s Northern Ireland, the United States. Australia too, of course. Why do people like you always pick on their own side? Softer target, I suppose. As for this feminist garbage …’

  On and on.

  Anna, maliciously, said nothing, knowing that it would make him madder than ever. Which it did.

  ‘Bumped into Donald Jeffreys last week, at the SCG. Know what he said?’

  No, Mostyn, I do not know what Donald Jeffreys said. No doubt you are about to tell me, though.

  ‘Asked if I’d burned any bras lately.’

  And down, yet again, went the Scotch.

  ‘Good work if you can get it,’ Anna said, contempt hot as flame. ‘Right up Donald Jeffreys’ street, I’d have thought.’

  Mostyn had already told her about Andy McKillop and his chuckles over Hatchet Harcourt’s feminist army. Better not call ’em women. They don’t like that.

  ‘Don’t you see how embarrassing it is when my friends start talking like that? Doesn’t do my image much good.’

  ‘You’ve no idea how I despise your friends,’ she said.
>
  Mostyn glared savagely. ‘They put bread on your table, though, don’t they?’

  Which was true, too, if irrelevant.

  None of which had anything to do with the real problem, what Mostyn called buttering up the pollies.

  ‘You don’t get the nod in the boardrooms of this city by playing footsy with the ALP.’

  Had that been the moment when the balance — to go, to stay — had finally shifted? Probably not; from what Anna had seen of other people’s bust-ups, one isolated episode seldom made the difference; it usually took a series of events to cause the break.

  None of it mattered, now.

  She meandered back to the hotel, forcing herself to take her time. She had a shower, washed her hair, determined to make herself as sparkly as possible. Not to attract anyone — heaven forbid! — but for her own sake.

  If I have to make a new life, let me get on with it.

  That night, iron bedstead and lumpy mattress notwithstanding, she slept. Woke, romantically, to the first rays of sunlight shafting through the smeared window. Discovered that in the night she had come to a decision.

  I shall do nothing until after the New Year, she thought. Give myself time to work things out. She had two board meetings that week. The Christmas break meant there would be nothing after that until mid-January. In past years she had worked through the holiday but this year Hilary could handle it. She had not had a real break in years; now she would.

  She spent the day in the hills, had a bite at a fancy-pantsy restaurant, felt herself beginning to come back to life. Driving back to Sydney that evening, she wondered how her great-grandmother would have reacted to the situation.

  She laughed, ruefully. Anneliese had been dead for twenty-six years yet, in a sense, had never died at all. Her strength and willpower had been a role model to Anna all her life. She could feel her right now, beside her in the car.

  The ferocious old lady would probably have gone for Mostyn with a shotgun, Anna thought. How she had been influenced by her! — even to the extent of changing her name from the Tamsin Fitzgerald she’d despised to an Anglicised imitation of her great-grandmother’s name.

  What would I have been like without her genes in me?

  She tried to imagine herself as placid and easy-going, a cow chewing the cud in her own particular paddock. A preposterous idea; she laughed and felt better.

  Anneliese Riordan had died in 1970 at the age of ninety-five, when Anna herself had been fifteen. Her will had been diamond-bright until the end, eyes focused resolutely upon the twin objectives of her life: never to relinquish her heritage; never to forgive the past. She had lived sixty-seven years in Australia yet never for a moment had she allowed her hatred to grow dim.

  As long as Anna could remember, Ouma Riordan, as she had liked to be called — Granny Riordan — had told her tales of her life in the years before she had been forced to leave Africa.

  Such tales. Of her first husband and the two children they had made together. What had happened when, after nearly three years of war, her own home burned, she had returned to Oudekraal, the farm that had been the centre and focus of her childhood.

  Anneliese’s guttural voice had drawn pictures in the air: Oudekraal, with its steeply-pitched roofs, its white walls gleaming in the moonlight, the central gable rising over the front doorway; the stoep along the length of the building, the oak trees to shade it from the fierce suns of summer.

  Tamsin, as she had then been, had seen it so clearly, had felt herself as much a part of the great house thousands of kilometres away as if she had been born in it herself.

  ‘My brother Deneys came to terms with the English,’ Anneliese had told her, spitting hatred. ‘Something I would never do. Yet without him they’d have had me, sure enough.’

  For a moment she was silent, her eyes seeing every grain of soil, the terraces of vines climbing the hill behind the house, the valley enclosing it. Tamsin saw it, too; had heard about it so often that it was hard to believe she had never been there herself.

  ‘I wrote once to an attorney in Stellenbosch,’ Anneliese said. ‘He told me my great-nephew has it now. Pieter Wolmarans. By rights it should have been mine.’

  Anna’s memories faded but later, back in the house overlooking the harbour — no messages from Mostyn on the answering machine — they returned. She remembered the last time she had spoken to the old woman.

  In the bedroom Anneliese was fighting her final battle. Echoing voices, a confusion of memories, death with its hand already upon her. Her voice rose and fell, gasping, barely coherent.

  ‘I was twenty-eight when I came to this country. Already I’d had children of my own. Ja, and buried them. My first husband dead. No, I was no longer a child.’ She cackled. ‘Surprising your great-grandfather would have me. But he was a wild one, too.’ Her eyes were lost in distance as she remembered. ‘Dominic,’ she said. ‘And fire, the curse and cleansing gift of God.’

  And for a time was silent. Eventually she came back. Outstretched fingers clutched at the past. ‘Two hundred years,’ she muttered. ‘Two hundred years since the first of the Wolmarans carved his farm from nothing. Oudekraal. A garden where before had been only a wilderness of stone.’ The wandering eyes focused again on Tamsin. ‘My land was stolen from me. You know that?’ Spit rattled urgently in the ancient voice. ‘My life has been a life of blood. Some from my heart, some on my hands. There are times when I can hear the screams …’ Again she drifted, again returned. This time the old note of purpose was back in her voice. She stared up at Tamsin, leaning forward over the bed. ‘Oudekraal is mine. You will recover it. Never forget. You will reclaim my house. Our past. It is your destiny. I can see it in your face.’ She tried to sit up a little but could not, and lay back again, panting. ‘The book on the table beside the bed … Is it there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You know what it is?’

  ‘It’s a Bible.’

  ‘Take it in your hands.’

  She waited until Tamsin had done so.

  ‘It is not like the one we had when I was your age, with brass hinges and the names of all the family from the beginning written inside the cover, but the word of God, all the same. There is something in it that I want you to remember. For me and for yourself.’ The claw fingers tightened on Tamsin’s wrist. ‘Oudekraal is mine. I want you to swear to get it back for me. The Bible says it. In the days when the keepers of the house shall tremble …’ The dark eyes probed, as fierce as a hawk. ‘Keep my commandments,’ Anneliese said.

  On Monday morning Anna sat in her office on the twentieth floor of the building overlooking Darling Harbour. She thought long and carefully before at last picking up her private phone to dial a number in the city.

  ‘Reporter.’

  ‘Mark Forrest, please.’

  ‘Please hold.’

  ‘Mark Forrest’s office.’

  People who called her had to fight through a similar ring of defences.

  ‘This is Anna Riordan. May I speak to him, please?’

  ‘Mr Forrest is not available. So sorry.’ She didn’t sound sorry at all.

  ‘You mean he’s out or in a meeting?’

  Ice chinked at the end of the line. ‘I mean he’s not available.’

  ‘Do yourself a favour. Tell him who’s calling, right?’

  What a bully! Anna thought, not worrying about it. She had grown used to bullying. At times, as now, enjoyed it.

  Silence as again she was put on hold.

  ‘Anna?’ Laughter as well as astonishment in his voice.

  Even after so long there was no mistaking him.

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘What did you say to my secretary?’

  ‘I asked her to put me through to you.’

  ‘Was that all?’

  ‘More or less.’ She shared his laughter. ‘Why?’

  ‘You seem to have got up her nose.’

  ‘Oh dear.’ Not in the least repentant.

  ‘What can I do for you?
After all these years?’

  ‘I want you to have lunch with me.’

  ‘Today?’ He sounded doubtful.

  ‘If you can.’

  ‘Let me grab my diary …’ A pause as he considered. ‘I could maybe re-schedule a couple of things … What time?’

  ‘Twelve-thirty?’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘There’s a place in Darling Harbour called Hugo’s. I’ve heard good reports about it.’

  ‘I don’t know it.’

  ‘Neither do I.’

  She had thought to suggest Ristorante Venezia, where they’d shared their last meal all those years ago. She had been there again in recent times and found it as good as ever but, for this meeting, somewhere without echoes would be a wiser choice.

  ‘Look forward to it.’

  She cradled the phone. He had not asked if her business were important. She liked that. It was like saying that anything involving her was bound to be important. The implied compliment gave her a warm feeling, as his voice had given her a warm feeling.

  She indulged the luxury of thinking back, something that her own inclination and monstrously busy schedule rarely permitted. Her brain juggled dates. Fifteen years since they’d first met. Good heavens. That meeting, startling as it had been, had at first been a good deal less than friendly, although almost at once the atmosphere between them had changed. Then, later, it had changed back again. How it had changed! At that time it would have seemed ridiculous to imagine that they would ever choose to meet again. Yet here they were, fifteen years down the track, going to have lunch together. At her invitation. The wheel turning in a world where it seemed nothing was ever definite, nothing final.

  Despite everything that had happened since Friday, she found herself looking forward to the lunch with more than warmth, even with a touch of gathering excitement.

  Re-visiting old times …

  TWO

  The finals of the 1981 Australian Tennis Championships.

  Afterwards there was a party for players, officials and selected hangers-on, of whom Anna was one.