Friends Like These

by Wendy Harmer

  The headmistress picked her way through the gilded lilies and took a folder from her desk. She flicked through the pages as she spoke. ‘Her academic record was barely above average and after boarding here for three years she left us in Year Eleven to join her parents in some hare-brained venture in...Tasmania, I believe.’

  ‘On an organic lavender farm,’ Jo added. ‘Yes, that’s when Cybele started to take her art seriously.’

  ‘Art? I hardly think so,’ Patsy snorted. She dropped the folder and lifted her head. Jo studied the two wobbly arches of her pencilled eyebrows. For fifteen years she had been tempted to reach out and adjust that face as she might do with an off-angle picture frame.

  ‘She was the youngest artist ever to win the Lemprière sculpture prize,’ said Jo. ‘Her works are admired internationally. One of her bondage vampires has just been acquired by the Art Gallery of New South Wales.’

  ‘Vampires! Bondage! Do you hear what you are saying?’

  Jo didn’t. Not particularly. Vampires, werewolves, zombies, ghosts, angels—a veritable rollcall of the undead haunted the halls of DPLC. The girls were entranced with the eroticism of the supernatural and spent many afternoons in her classes making 3D depictions of the underworld. There was nothing to be concerned about. After all, sex and death were the oldest themes in art. The earliest fertility totems dated back to the Upper Paleolithic. Jo was just thinking of the reproduction of the famous little clay Venus of Willendorf she kept in her office, with its prominent breasts and vulva, when Patsy spoke again.

  ‘Why you ever thought a pornographic sculptor would make a suitable speaker for the Father and Daughter Dinner is, quite frankly, beyond me.’ She shook her head in disbelief. ‘Torture and sadism are not topics to be broached in a room full of adolescent girls in front of their fathers. In the setting of the Guillaume at Bennelong restaurant or, indeed, anywhere else.’

  Mrs Kelly was wrong about that. Jo couldn’t help thinking that the girls were confronted with torture and sadism on a daily basis. She’d always found the crucifix hanging above the altar in St Anne’s chapel to be immensely cruel. A tortured weeping man almost as tall as her was suspended above the altar on a wooden cross, nails driven through his fleshy palms. His naked, yellowing torso was speared by a lance. His innocent forehead was pierced by a crown of thorns. Painted, glazed drops of plaster blood dripped from the five Holy Wounds. The depiction of his final agonies was more graphic than any of the joyously camp sculptures Cybele had fashioned. Jo had always been curious as to how the good English Christians of Darling Point had come to pray in front of that gruesome crucifix. Its provenance was a mystery, but it might well have come all the way from southern Africa with the college’s first headmistress.

  In 1880, at the beginning of the first Boer War, Miss Eunice Walpole had fled the savagery on the Transvaal, sailing from Cape Town via London to Sydney Harbour to fill the position of headmistress of the newly established Darling Point Ladies’ College. Her tenure had ended suddenly three years later and despite a thorough investigation of the college’s historical records Jo had never been able to find a satisfactory explanation. Had Eunice died? Gone mad?

  No matter. In the year 1884, Miss Augusta Walpole, her older sister, had also boarded a ship in Cape Town. Whether Augusta ever divined what became of her sibling was also unclear. There was simply no further mention of Eunice. However, Augusta had fortuitously stepped into the job of headmistress and stayed on.

  Over the next forty years, through her unique brand of Anglo-Catholicism, deep and mystical faith, strict physical discipline and intense distrust of authority, Miss Augusta Walpole had built the Darling Point Ladies’ College into a citadel of female power unrivalled in the Colony of New South Wales. Some one hundred and thirty years since the foundation stone was laid, Darling Point was still run by, and for, women.

  A portrait of the redoubtable Augusta Walpole, buttoned-up to the chin in grey serge, her hair flat and parted in the middle, her expression grim, glared down from the wall. Every father who had ever stood in the same spot Jo now occupied must have got the message. They could plead and wail, but the mothers and daughters of Darling Point would prevail. They would not waver from their triumphal visions and, together, would network their way to Kingdom Come.

  The telephone rang and Mrs Kelly snatched it up. ‘Yes, yes,’ she snapped. ‘Tell him I have everything firmly in hand. I understand his disquiet and the teacher involved is currently being counselled. Tell all of them they will be contacted in due course.’

  A red tide of rebellion washed over Jo’s feet and she stepped towards the door. She was the deputy headmistress and head of the art department, not some naive first-year trainee. The idea that she would be ‘counselled’ by Patsy Kelly or anyone else was insulting.

  ‘Sit down, please.’ Mrs Kelly indicated a tapestry-covered wooden chair. Jo hesitated, then sat, knowing that, in the end, it would be easier to let Patsy have her say.

  ‘If only vampirism was the worst of it,’ Mrs Kelly continued, taking her own seat. ‘Her condemnation of the worthlessness of her education at this college and her comments on private schools in general were truly unfortunate. Accusations of “elitism”, “rank snobbery”, “thievery of public funds”, “perverse” attitudes, “bankrupt values”. There’s been a flurry of emails.’

  Yes, Jo could imagine the emails had come in a ‘flurry’ as outraged fathers had strode into their offices in the city that morning and dictated their displeasure to startled PAs.

  ‘You were there, you would have seen many parents leave in disgust.’

  Jo hadn’t actually seen them, but sitting at the front table in the restaurant, near the lectern, she had heard the low mutterings of disapproval and hadn’t dared to turn her head. It was when Cybele Dawson-Wright had accused the girls in the room of being ‘useful idiots’—the term first coined for Western apologists of the Stalinist regime—that the thud of chairs being moved on carpet and the trample of feet on granite stairs had reached a crescendo.

  ‘You and I know that many parents send their children here at great personal cost and sacrifice. Did you not seek to vet her comments beforehand?’

  ‘No, Mrs Kelly. I didn’t.’

  ‘I’ve been informed that she presented with tattoos and nose piercings. Did that not give you any pause for thought?’

  It had. Jo had been alarmed by the sight of her. Cybele had arrived at the restaurant wearing a low-cut black leather corset, shorts over ripped fishnet stockings and battered combat boots. Her bleached hair looked to have been gnawed at by rodents.

  Jo’s offer of her own elegant beaded cardigan had been accepted by Cybele for her fag break on the windswept steps of the Opera House outside the front door of the restaurant. It was later, when Cybele was standing at the front of the room to make her after-dinner presentation, that she had shrugged it off to reveal a tattooed spider’s web draped over her shoulders in a black shawl.

  ‘I think we have to thank Mr Rockman for his intervention, thus saving everyone from embarrassment,’ said Mrs Kelly.

  No-one had been saved. On the contrary, it had been excruciatingly embarrassing when Malcolm Rockman had stormed the lectern, put his hand over the microphone and said, ‘Enough is enough, thank you, Miss Dawson-Wright.’ Cybele had then sauntered through the restaurant giving the one-finger salute to all assembled. That had elicited a slow hand-clap of the sort usually reserved by members of the Sydney Cricket Ground for time-wasting Pakistani cricketers. The evening had been a disaster. Jo hardly needed a lecture from Patsy to tell her that.

  ‘I’m going to leave it to you, Mrs Blanchard, to apologise to every single one of these parents,’ the headmistress said.

  ‘I will, Mrs Kelly. And please accept my personal apologies to you too.’ Jo said this knowing full well that Patsy rarely accepted expressions of regret. Rather, she seemed to see any sign of contrition as an act of weakness.

  ‘This has not been the only example of your misj
udgment of late. It seems to me that Darling Point Ladies’ College has been your home, your life, for some thirty years and now you are struggling.’ Mrs Kelly’s pigeon chest expanded for a moment and then, with a puff of exasperation, collapsed and became almost concave. ‘I had hoped to retire this year, but in all conscience I cannot while I feel that you have lost your way.’

  And then, on hearing Jo’s small gasp of dismay, Mrs P.W. Kelly OAM knew she had found a soft and unprotected flank. She drove home her holy lance.

  ‘Do you still believe in us, Mrs Blanchard? If not, what is it, exactly, that you do believe in?’

  Chapter Three

  Jo had left college earlier than usual that afternoon. She was driving from Darling Point to her home in Centennial Park and, once more, reviewing everything Patsy Kelly had said. What did she believe in? Certainly not the headmistress.

  It was true there had been an increasing number of battles with the College Board recently, but Patsy herself had precipitated these. The more terribly grand the headmistress imagined she was (and Jo thought she would soon reach pantomime dame status), the more she insisted that the college was about rules, regulations and social standing. This may have suited the parents who imagined they were sending their daughters to a Swiss finishing school, but it hadn’t done much for the girls’ education.

  When Jo had suggested that the students might benefit from dropping French-language studies to take up Indonesian, she might as well have announced she was grooming them for careers with the Arabic television network Al-Jazeera. When Jo proposed the wearing of gloves be abandoned in the increasingly warm Sydney winters, it was as if she had suggested the girls should go topless.

  Then there was that political scuffle from last year. Every time there was an election—local, state or federal—members of the conservative Liberal Party treated the school like a neighbourhood drop-in centre. After repeated requests from the senior students, Jo had invited candidates from the Labor Party and the Greens to join a political forum on the state election. Some of the girls had dressed as trees, heckled the speakers on their continued logging of native forests and pelted them with gumnuts. A Liberal Party media minder had called the police and the episode made the front page of the Wentworth Courier.

  To Jo, this was all healthy democratic expression (albeit a little unruly). To the powers-that-be it was evidence that she was brewing an insurrection aimed at toppling Western civilisation.

  Senator Gordon Holt, chairman of the college’s Council of Governors, had been furious. ‘A seething, feral rabble,’ he’d roared, and thumped the table hard enough to upset a crystal water jug.

  As Jo approached her house in Lang Road, she was thinking about the cantankerous old goat and his lavish state funeral in St Andrew’s Cathedral she’d recently been obliged to attend, so it was an odd coincidence to see Senator Holt’s widow, Mrs Carol Holt, just pulling away from the kerb in her silver Lexus. Jo caught a glimpse of her husband waving Carol off just before he closed the front door.

  ‘What was Carol Holt doing here?’ she asked him as she unpacked a few groceries and set them on the granite benchtop in the kitchen.

  ‘She’s helping me fundraise for the pre-selection. I told you last week,’ JJ answered as he shrugged on his suit jacket. ‘There’s a function on tonight, so don’t bother cooking for me.’

  And then he left without saying goodbye or telling her what time he would be back. His heavy footsteps echoed on the polished floorboards in the long, cavernous hallway and then it was quiet. Not the sort of peace and quiet Jo sometimes longed for after a day in an art room filled with chattering teenagers, but a drift of chilly silence that settled itself on every surface.

  The Blanchards’ heritage-listed red-brick Italianate mansion had never been a house for a ‘cosy night in’. Eight bedrooms, six bathrooms, five reception rooms and a vast open-plan kitchen sprawled over three floors, and lording over it all was an improbable tower that appeared to have been assembled from Lego blocks. ‘Parklea’ (1907), a lavishly decorated edifice, was extravagantly admired by everyone who walked through the front door for its wood-panelling, original wallpapers, high ceilings and elaborate plasterwork, but Jo had never liked

  the place.

  When Parklea was filled with children and family friends it was welcoming enough. But when Jo was alone in it, as she often was now, the colonnaded terraces became windswept walkways. The long halls funnelled ferocious draughts into the heart of the house and up in the reaches of the lofty ceilings, the petals on the plaster roses turned black at the edges.

  Jo squeezed the leg of lamb she’d bought into the already-crammed freezer and slammed the door so hard that a hail of fridge magnets clattered onto the tumbled marble floor tiles. ‘Damn you! You selfish...’ she muttered aloud as she kneeled to retrieve them. Tears were not far away. Then Calpurnia purred directly into her ear and she was reminded that she did have company after all.

  ‘Well, old girl,’ Jo reached to stroke her cat’s smooth sleek black fur, ‘looks like it’s just us again.’ Calpurnia turned two bright-blue marbles on Jo and meowed for an afternoon snack. Jo set out a portion of left-over macaroni cheese to reheat for herself and opened a can of gourmet tuna, chicken and crab meat for the mistress of the house.

  And thinking about ‘mistresses’ led her directly back to Senator and Mrs Gordon Holt. The rumour was that he’d had a mistress installed in Canberra for years and their marriage was a fiction. Carol was a Darling Old Girl and chairwoman of the fundraising committee. If she’d committed herself to JJ’s cause and was ready to enlist the good folk of the Eastern Suburbs to do the same, then he was already on his way to Parliament House, Canberra, as James Johnathon Blanchard MP.

  It had been just before Christmas, some three months earlier, when Jo’s husband of twenty-two years had announced he was keen to stand for pre-selection as a Liberal candidate in the conservative federal seat of Double Bay. His political aspirations had always seemed faintly ridiculous to Jo. After all, it wasn’t as if he ever watched current affairs on the television or discussed politics with her, and it wasn’t as if the wage of an MP would be anything more than pocket money to him.

  There was also an absence of nods in the usual directions expected of aspiring Eastern Suburbs politicians. JJ didn’t have a chatty website dedicated to his dogs and family, he hadn’t been to a Mardi Gras parade—in fact, didn’t even have any gay friends (that he knew of)—and he’d never marched, donated, written or made a single public utterance on the topics of refugees, multiculturalism or climate change.

  He was, however, a former pupil of Canonbury School, Point Piper, and now president of the Old Canons Association—a group formed to ‘foster fellowship and unity among Old Boys’. The esteemed alumni had their fair share of ‘sirs’, ‘honorables’ and ‘justices’ as well as graziers, stockbrokers, bankers, businessmen and, notably, the heir to the Seymour family fortune. The daily doings of the home-grown billionaire dynasty had enthralled Sydneysiders for almost a century.

  Canonbury had been established in 1918 as a school that would not be ‘hidebound by the traditions and manners of England’, but would be one with ‘less pomp and ceremony, producing less of a prototype elitist product and more of an individual’. What its founders were saying was that here in the Great South Land they were at last free of the British aristocracy with its intricate and capricious bestowing of inheritance and privilege. This was the new frontier where personal achievement could be rewarded. A meritocracy. Good with a bat and ball? Skilled at oratory or the arts? All could find a place. But, then, what was more meritorious than money?

  At his valedictory dinner, JJ had been farewelled by the head of the senior school with the gratifying words: ‘I believe that Canonbury, and many schools like ours, are sending young men into the world who can play their part in shaping this century and the next into something very fine indeed.’ JJ had grasped that baton. It had been his driving ambition from the time he was a schoolb
oy to become a person of influence.

  Driving ambition? That was ironic. JJ Blanchard was a luxury car dealer. Most of the parents at Canonbury, DPLC and every other private school in Sydney were at this very moment motoring around in a Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Rolls-Royce, Jaguar or Porsche that had been sold to them by Jo’s husband. You couldn’t slip behind the wheel for under 100K. His dealerships were the last word in discreet, gilt-edged commerce.

  ‘When you drive with JJ Blanchard, you’ve arrived!’ was the slogan he’d used since the eighties. It sounded shonky to Jo—as questionable as out-sized shoulder pads and too-tight perms—but JJ liked to think that it represented a continuing commitment to service that was beyond fashion. Out in the Western Suburbs it was a different matter. Out there you could buy a Blanchard bomb for a thousand bucks. You didn’t ‘arrive’—JJ had seen you coming for miles.

  A stack of art-theory exams beckoned. Jo broke her rule of no alcohol before dinner and took a glass of red wine to her favourite spot in the sunroom. She’d created a little corner of comfort with a standard lamp, a squashy armchair and a lovely polished oak table. She and Calpurnia had spent much of the last winter there huddled around an oil heater. Even though the house was centrally heated, she never felt warm in it.

  ‘You don’t have to come. You can spend the night in your granny corner with the cat,’ JJ would say when she declined another half-hearted invitation to accompany him to one of his many corporate functions. ‘You’d only get bored anyway.’ She would. She’d spent enough evenings making stilted conversation with the wives of German and Japanese automotive executives to last a lifetime.

  Jo perused the first page of an essay on ‘The Invention of the Renaysonse’ and her shoulders sagged. She didn’t have the patience to go on with it and decided she wouldn’t pass on her frustration with Patsy Kelly’s blind ignorance to her students. They deserved a fairer hearing than Jo could manage right now. Instead, she spent the time before dark outside, sweeping the browning autumn leaves from under the grapevine and grubbing squashed fruit off the sandstone terrace.