Keepers of the House

by JH Fletcher

  The blade of her scorn pierced Mrs Fairclough’s heart. She wiped her streaming face with her hand, drawing the tattered cloak of her dignity about her as she rescued what she could of self-respect.

  ‘You are cruel. Unkind. I thought you were my friend. Go, then.’

  Go they did. Anneliese’s back was straight, her face like stone. She felt Mrs Fairclough’s reproachful eyes watching from behind the net curtain as she walked down the driveway. Beside her Dominic shambled, grumbling, stinking of booze. She ignored him, shepherding the two boys. She had had the chance of friendship, of a place, but pride had its price. After the words that Dominic had hurled, so hatefully, she could not stay, fearful of what might come out. With strangers she would not care but Mrs Fairclough, for all her foolishness, had come too close to be still a stranger.

  She reached the drive and turned, heading northwards. She did not look back.

  Six months here, a year there. Dominic picked up rags and tatters of work, enough to keep them alive. Droving, mostly; he never went back to the cane.

  They headed inland. The land swallowed them. They lived like shadows, drifting across an empty landscape guarded by the blood-red fortresses of termite mounds. The ramparts of low hills barely broke a horizon that ringed them like a hoop of iron, confining them, ever-moving, to a single spot, a single instant, as though the landscape were moving with them, pinning them always to the same place.

  The boys would have grown up savage had Anneliese not made it her business to civilise them. The first town they came to after leaving the Faircloughs, she bought a Bible. Each night, wherever they were, she read it to them, as her own people had read to their children in their journeying through the savage wastes of Africa. Would have read to Dominic, too, had he been willing, but always, when she fetched the Book, he would walk away and sit a little apart, his back against a rock, his face turned always to the emptiness that lay ahead of them. She could see his silhouette against the stars as she read, while the cattle bellowed mournfully in the darkness and the fire formed a lake of rosy light into which she and the children dipped their feet.

  They had no liquor with them. Dominic, whom liquor had enslaved, was fine away from the towns but whenever they came near one, and he with money in his pocket, he would be gone. Sometimes for an hour, sometimes for a day, a night. Anneliese never knew when he would come back, but when his money ran out he always did. He was tethered as securely to her as she to him, their shared lives binding them closer than any priest.

  There were times when she was lonely, waiting through the long nights while he drank away the little they had. What of it? she thought. All of us are alone. That is why men, who are weaker than we, drink or fly upon the wings of impossible dreams, trying to escape what is, in their eternal pursuit of what might be. While we, stronger than they, learn again to do what we have always known best: to endure.

  SEVENTEEN

  A drift.

  Not only emotionally; Africa, Anna thought, had put a jinx on her. Everything in her life seemed to have gone wrong. Even faith in her own political future had failed her.

  Jack Goodie was not a gentle man yet put it to her as gently as he could. ‘Nothing I can do about it, Anna. I didn’t make the system. You know what they say: I never promised you a rose garden.’ And laughed.

  Anna was not laughing. ‘You knew, though. You knew what I wanted.’

  ‘I can fix you up with a seat.’ Jack rubbed his chin dubiously, not too keen on even that idea. ‘Maybe. Want me to have a try?’

  A member of parliament had no power. A ministry was what she had wanted. These things didn’t happen overnight; she understood she would have to serve her time. But to dive in without a promise or even an understanding …

  ‘Be straight with me, Jack. You know I’ve got what it takes. What are my chances?’

  ‘You want me to tell you how many pollies out there are asking the same question? Blokes in the unions? Blokes we owe favours?’

  Blokes.

  ‘I’ve no chance, have I?’

  ‘Your time’s coming. Not yet though. Public opinion isn’t ready. Neither’s the Party.’ He tried a joke. ‘You know how it is with progressive organisations. Always years behind the rest.’

  ‘I’m not going to waste my life on the off chance something may crop up.’

  ‘I tell you what you should do.’ He’d put in a word for her with a bloke he knew, the top gun of a big company. ‘Get a few years in commerce under your belt. Who knows? Maybe you can come back to politics later.’

  ‘I shall still be a woman, wherever I am.’

  ‘Be thankful.’

  ‘Why?’

  He grinned. ‘You make the world beautiful.’

  She would have hit him if she’d thought he meant it. She made up her mind. ‘Okay, then. Set it up for me.’

  Two days later she flew to Sydney to meet Jack’s friend. The discussion went well; the job was hers if she wanted it. Afterwards she went for a walk and bumped into Nicki, an old student acquaintance she hadn’t seen since university.

  Nicki was all bubbles: an airhead, but fun. After the mutual exclamations, the hugs, the dancing around on the pavement, they went to a cafe Nicki knew. They tucked into sinful cakes glossy with chocolate and cappuccino steaming in mugs a whale could have swum in. They exchanged confidences.

  Well, sort of.

  Nicki had always been like a public address system, so Anna was deliberately vague about both her past life and her plans for the future. Which, in any case, were still uncertain.

  Nicki was less reticent. So far as Anna could make out, her life was a non-stop party: booze and fun and plenty of men. It all sounded very tiring.

  ‘You could be the answer to my prayers.’ Nicki grinned conspiratorially. ‘Are you free tonight?’

  Anna remembered that with Nicki it always paid to be cautious. ‘I might be. Why?’

  ‘Come and have a drink with me. There’s someone I’d like you to meet.’

  Anna watched her thoughtfully across the table. The allegedly high life had not dimmed the sparkle in her innocent blue eyes but Anna knew her from old.

  ‘Who is it?’

  A butter-wouldn’t-melt smile. ‘A feller. Ever so good-looking.’

  She had assumed it wouldn’t be Dracula but the mystery remained. Nicki wasn’t into sharing where fellers were concerned. Who was?

  ‘Why me?’

  Nicki had always been one for innuendos, spurts of breathless confidences. Hard facts were something else; for those you needed a crowbar, but Anna was good with crowbars and eventually managed to prise the truth out of her. Or something close to the truth.

  ‘Mostyn Harcourt,’ she whispered, leaning across the table in her spy-of-the-month manner. ‘A merchant banker.’

  Anna had never heard of him but permitted herself to be suitably impressed. ‘And he’s a friend of yours?’

  An old friend, it seemed.

  ‘We go back a long way. To our early days in the bush, can you believe?’ Nicki laughed, up and off the scale; she had always been exuberant. ‘We’ve had a wonderful relationship. Marvellous.’ Nudge, nudge.

  ‘And you’re seeing him tonight?’

  ‘Well, that’s the plan.’

  ‘So the question remains. Why me?’

  Had to get the crowbar to work again before she got the answer to that one, although she had half guessed, anyway. Nicki had met someone else.

  ‘Tom Neal …’ As though Anna were bound to know who he was. ‘Pots of money,’ she said, blue eyes wide. ‘And keen.’

  ‘Keen?’

  ‘I think he wants to marry me.’

  ‘I can see that Mostyn doesn’t fit into that scenario,’ Anna said. ‘Why on earth did you agree to see him tonight?’

  ‘I don’t like shutting the door in his face. I’m not married yet.’

  And Nicki wanted to keep Mostyn on ice in case she needed him again later.

  ‘But not tonight. It wouldn’t do,
would it?’

  Obviously not.

  Anna was amused. ‘So you want me to be a substitute. What makes you think he’ll go along with it?’

  Nicki, airhead or not, had plans to cover that.

  ‘We meet at the hotel. The three of us. Then I sort of slide away.’

  ‘Leaving me holding the fort.’

  But could see no harm in it. It was not as though she had anything else to do for the evening. ‘So long as he understands I’m not as old a friend as you are.’

  Righteous shock in eyes that were strangers to both shock and righteousness. ‘Nothing like that!’ But you couldn’t keep Nicki down for long. The bubbles resurfaced as she winked. ‘Unless you want to, of course.’

  Which Anna thought was as unlikely a prospect as she could imagine.

  She knew he was a bastard as soon as she set eyes on him. That was all right. She had this new job under her belt but was still smarting from what she thought of as her failure in Canberra; a bastard might be just what she needed. Someone whose strength could restore her own strength. She was thirsty for someone with strength and Mostyn, undeniably, was strong. He was confident, hard, knew exactly what he was and where he was going. A man of possibilities.

  ‘One more drink,’ Nicki said, ‘then I must fly.’

  And did, leaving them to get on with it. They talked sense, they talked nonsense, they laughed. They watched each other speculatively.

  Eventually Anna said she must get home.

  By the way he’d been looking her over, she wondered whether he might offer her a lift, even suggest going on somewhere. She hoped not; it was too soon for that. Was grateful to him when he did not. They parted casually and she walked away, jostled by scurrying commuters. Stopped suddenly as an overwhelming desire for the man she had just left hit her in mid-stride. She no longer had any idea where her feet were taking her. Mostyn Harcourt … The strong compact body, the keen, assessing eyes. She stood quite still on the crowded pavement, drawing air deeply into her lungs.

  This I don’t need, she thought. To find a man attractive was one thing, but this …

  When she’d got her breath back, she walked on, more slowly. Nothing to it, of course. He wasn’t the first man she’d fancied nor would he be the last. Strange, though: the sudden loss of breath, the feeling that she had walked into a wall.

  Back at the hotel she laid her clothes on the bed, walked naked into the bathroom and turned on the taps. While the bath filled, she fetched a bottle from her suitcase, poured herself a gargantuan Scotch. Took a swallow, felt it shudder down. Good,

  She took the glass with her into the bathroom. Leant back in the bath, eyes closed, yielding to the water’s stinging heat.

  The phone rang.

  Damn.

  She picked up the extension. ‘Hullo?’

  ‘What did you think of him?’ Nicki, conspiratorial, eager to probe.

  Anna closed her eyes, feeling her heart thump with relief. Wondered, all the same, how she would have felt had it been his voice on the line.

  She smiled, body as soft as cream in the hot water. ‘He was okay.’

  She took the job, left Canberra with surprisingly few regrets. In Sydney found herself flung into a whirlpool of activity both stimulating and alarming. She felt herself respond to the challenge. She relished it, began to grow.

  She saw Nicki occasionally, was invited by her to a party to meet her new fiancé. Mostyn Harcourt might be there, she hoped, but was not. She heard the odd snippet about him though. At work she allowed his name to trail casually into her conversations and heard more. He was a comer, one of the rising stars at Heinrich Griffiths. People said he was a ruthless, highly competent son-of-a-bitch. Already he had a nickname, a measure of his status. Hatchet Harcourt. A man destined for power.

  Perhaps it was the power she found so attractive.

  One evening he phoned and asked her to have dinner with him.

  She took a long time getting ready, making up her face with particular care. She wanted to stand out, but not to the point where she frightened him. She judged him to be conventional in such things; most men were. Of course Mostyn was not like most men. In the end she compromised: conservative, yet not too much. Wondered whether she’d overdone it, all the same.

  What the hell. He doesn’t want to go out with a company executive, let’s hope.

  He picked her up punctually. He was informally dressed, the sort of clothes that look casual and cost a thousand bucks. He did not comment on her appearance but his eyes did and she knew she’d got it right. Felt, too, the same hot gush of passion that she had experienced after their first meeting.

  They went to a restaurant: starched tablecloths and harbour views. He held her hand, watching the lights of the city shining upon the black water. She thought that later he might try to hold more than her hand, wondered what she would do if he did. He did not. He took her home, refused her offer of a drink. Did not even kiss her cheek. She thought she must have blown it, was all the more delighted when he phoned the next day to suggest they do the same thing again.

  So it went, one thing leading to another, yet for reasons she did not understand she still held him off. He tried, the decorum of that first evening long gone now, but still she would not let him do more than kiss her.

  I want him, she thought, so why am I being so stiff and starchy about it? Knew that was the point. She wanted him too much, was afraid of getting in too deep. She scolded herself for being ridiculous. She would lose him if she wasn’t careful; this was the nineteen-eighties, not the eighteen-eighties.

  If I let him touch my breast he will perhaps be satisfied, she thought, knowing that such half-measures would satisfy neither of them. Yet still she held him off. The nightly, abbreviated embrace became their ritual of courtship, her senses reeling under the impact of his tantalising fingers, her own burgeoning yet unfulfilled warmth.

  Memory broke the impasse. Her body’s reactions brought back images of days she had thought banished from her mind forever.

  The dust of Africa, the rhythmic stamp and shuffle of Africa, the baying anger of Africa. Above all, the aftermath of that first meeting with Shongwe, herself riding Mark in frenzy, striving unsuccessfully to exorcise feelings that even she had not understood.

  Mostyn, feeling her shudder, believed he was the cause. He pressed ardour more closely so that, at last, she yielded. He imagined wrongly that it was to himself, knowing nothing of the rhythms and memories that had, in truth, solved his problem for him.

  Yet the culmination was like a fire consuming them both. Afterwards they held each other, knowing that whatever barrier had existed was there no longer, that something fundamental had been resolved between them.

  The drums of Africa echoed in her blood. Never since that time had Anna known the golden surge and nerve-flutter of delight. It made her tender, although whether to this lover or to memories of the past she could not have said. Nor did it matter. He had restored gentleness and joy to her.

  Mostyn Harcourt, ruthless, thrusting, indifferent to the tenderness of others, was an unlikely bearer of such gifts, but she was convinced their relationship was something apart, that different rules applied to them than to the rest of humanity. The past had united them; now she was grateful to him for enabling her to forget it.

  With Mostyn I shall conquer the world and myself, she thought exultantly. She could not wait for the days to pass so that she could get him back to her apartment and make love to him again.

  His hand moves quietly, with purpose. Anna, waiting. Her thighs slant in offering. She feels his palm and fingers enclose her, gentle yet firm.

  I am here.

  The tremor begins. Deep within her the pulse. Ah. His other hand, feather-light, touching. A finger, parting. The pulse throbs. Moisture. Her mouth sucks air. Nerves cry yearningly. Yes. The word thrown silently from behind closed eyelids into a blaze of light. Yes.

  Anna had thought in terms of a relationship, an infusion of confidence to s
et her feet once again securely on the path. Instead, she discovered a commitment to another being that she had never expected to feel again. Had reservations, nonetheless. She had thought that Mostyn would set her free; instead, he had enchained her. He made her feel — God! — grateful for proving that she was capable of what in moments of self-mockery she called finer feelings. Yet she knew she would not have missed the experience for the world.

  Late one night, she went for a walk through the city’s stone streets. Her heels rang; she remembered another time when the hooves of horses had aroused similar echoes. The water of the harbour gleamed, lolling in fragmented glimpses between the stern shapes of buildings.

  ‘I am complete, at last.’ She exhaled the realisation into the city’s stained air, the hint of salt about Darling Harbour. ‘Complete!’

  Only a foraging cat seemed to care, pausing momentarily in its headlong flight into shadow. She resumed her walk. Completeness was conditional; the future, like the cat, vanished into darkness. It also offered freedom, of a sort, yet what was the use of that if it brought subjection? In a man’s world, there was a sexual price for everything.

  Most men didn’t even realise it, took for granted a servitude that to them was part of the proper order of things. Mostyn was not one of them, admittedly, but had been born with an instinct for seizing any advantage that would give him the edge in whatever battle he was fighting.

  Battle? she thought. Is that what it is?

  It was exactly what it was, a battle for dominance. Mostyn was a winner, and to win you had to fight.

  Which made it all the more astonishing when, a month later, he asked her to marry him.

  Her heart lurched. She said yes and discovered she had been waiting for his proposal since that first meeting. Their future might well prove a battlefield, but she found she relished the challenge, the promise of fulfilment.

  Mostyn thought so, too. ‘What a team we’ll make!’ he said exultantly.

  Anna wondered if that was why he had proposed, to forge a strike force for the battles that lay ahead. It no longer mattered. She was head-over-heels in love with him, in that state of euphoria where she could examine with clear-eyed awareness the character of the man she was marrying and not care.