Friends Like These

by Wendy Harmer

  Jo was taken back to that lunch when she had asked Suze if she would be remembered. This gathering went part-way to answering that. The girls all declared that they missed her dreadfully in that way fifteen-year-old girls had of being passionate and emphatic about everything.

  She sat with them in the garden and heard all the school gossip. The new deputy head was the former science mistress, Mrs Maisie James. In a moment of menopausal madness Maisie had incinerated the head prefect’s straw hat over a Bunsen burner. Jo had wondered how Maisie was coping with her sudden and unexpected promotion. Not too well, apparently. She did not meet with approval.

  ‘She suuuucks!’

  ‘Soooo utterly hideous!’

  The particular cadence of the girls’ speech reminded Jo that they were their mothers’ daughters and would inherit the same life of cosseted privilege. Jo had told herself she was ministering to the daughters of the wealthy by introducing them to notions of social justice and equality. If only she had stuck it out and made it to headmistress...Then what? It was all a delusion. There was no point in thinking about it.

  After almost an hour of animated chatter and giggles with the young ladies, Jo was finally able to take her leave. A round of desperate farewells, hugs and kisses ensued, then she headed upstairs to collect her handbag. She was stopped mid-flight by the sound of cut-glass voices tinkling like a chandelier on the terrace.

  ‘Well, of course Patti and Birdie are absolutely devastated. They say they’re going to kidnap the child and do the whole thing properly!’

  ‘I don’t think they can without its parents, can they?’

  ‘And they should get her renamed at the same time. Honestly! Aphrodite Honey-Gold? Vile!’

  ‘They call her Goldie now. Like the actress.’

  ‘And did you hear all that New Age rubbish? Jo Blanchard should know better. I can’t believe she was this close to being headmistress.’

  ‘Someone’s got to stop the silly bitch, or we’ll all end up at some hideous pagan wedding before we know it.’

  ‘Do you take Clemmie to be your lawfully wedded...witch!’

  ‘Hahahaha!’

  ‘She’s not still here, is she?’

  ‘No. She left to crawl back to her hole in Bondi Junction.’

  ‘Living in a tacky little unit, I heard.’

  ‘You should have seen the way she did Parklea. Or, in fact, didn’t do it. Not a shred of style or class. Not the sort of place you’d want to entertain in. In a fit. Poor JJ. I’ve had the decorators in for weeks.’

  Jo was transfixed by the overheard conversation. When she regained the use of her legs she edged back down the stairs, scurried across perfectly manicured grass and hid behind massive hydrangea bushes in regal purple bloom.

  Her handbag with car keys inside was in the cloakroom by the entrance to the front door. If she could just get to it without being seen. There had to be another way into the house.

  The open door to the swimming-pool cabana looked like a good bet. Jo darted over the vivid green sward and slipped inside. She adjusted her eyes to the gloom and was momentarily disoriented by hallucinogenic tropical-print wallpaper. The décor was all revolting faux Hawaiian—bamboo furniture and bright-green shag pile, lampshades printed with bananas. Jo finally found what she was looking for. In the middle of the pineapple plantation on the rear wall she detected a door she suspected led to a flight of internal stairs.

  Instead, it opened on to another room with a pool table and jukebox. This one sported purple walls and furry beanbags in neon colours. Yikes! If you looked up ‘bad taste’ in the dictionary, you’d find a picture of Patti Tweedle in an orange hibiscus-print hostess frock and matching turban!

  Jo located another door and, thankfully, stairs. She bolted up the darkened tunnel and was soon stepping across the cream carpet of the main floor. Down the other end of the hall, towards the main living areas, was the door to the cloakroom. She could grab her bag, make a quick left turn and be through the marble-floored vestibule, out the front door and to the safety of her car. She took a moment to settle herself. She straightened her jacket, impulsively felt for stray curls and walked purposefully down the hall.

  A door opened just behind her. Jo turned to see a young man in a waiter’s apron hurry back the other way into the shadows, and after him came...Didi. How long had she been in the house?

  Didi had her head thrown back and was sniffing loudly, pinching at her nostrils. No prizes for guessing what the two of them had been up to in that room. Snorting cocaine. Jo was hardly shocked. Just as Tory had said, mountains of the stuff fuelled the high-octane social events in this part of town.

  Still, it was startling to think that Didi was already into it on a Sunday afternoon at a luncheon to celebrate baby-naming. She was really going to the dogs. A tiny fuchsia satin frock more suited to cocktails than a christening was hanging off her scrawny frame. Her mid-length blonde hair was newly flattened and flipped and her cheeks were oddly puffy, as if she was hiding two walnuts. Her freshly glossed lips were two shiny pink saveloys.

  Didi tugged at her hem and adjusted her bra straps and Jo suspected that sex with the hired help had also been on offer. Then Didi spotted her. If she was alarmed at being caught out, she didn’t show it.

  ‘Leaving us already?’ Didi smirked and sniffed again.

  ‘Hello, Didi. Yes, I’m afraid I have to get away. It was quite an early start and I have to—’

  ‘If only you would fuck off.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘We all know what you’re up to with your pathetic website and the way you’re trying to use your Darling Point connections to keep your foot in the door with the right people.’ Didi extended an emaciated arm roped with purplish veins and braced herself against the intricate plasterwork of an archway.

  ‘We don’t want to hear about your brand of New Age voodoo,’ she said. ‘You’ve been trying to peddle your pathetic left-wing ideas for years and we’re finally rid of you. So please, get the message and go to hell!’

  Didi pushed past Jo and tripped down the hallway on spindly heels. As she turned the corner she threw up her arms in a greeting that was pure vaudeville.

  ‘Karin! Darling! How divine to see you. Don’t you just look faaabulous!’

  Chapter Twenty

  ‘Those utter, utter slags!’ Suze held her hand to the front of her faded pink kimono and poured another glass of white wine for herself.

  ‘I think I’d better have tea,’ said Jo. One drink had calmed her nerves, but any more and she wouldn’t be able to drive home...to her hole. Her tacky hole. She flicked the switch on the jug and helped herself to milk and sugar. She knew her way around Suze’s small kitchen almost as well as she did her own.

  ‘The right people! What a fucking joke!’ Suze exploded again. ‘It’s only about money. That’s all. If JJ didn’t have any, Carol wouldn’t have looked at him twice.’

  ‘I was married to him for twenty-two years, Suze,’ Jo reminded her.

  ‘Yeah, but you took him on when he was a poor student, don’t forget.’ Suze stopped to attend to Jo’s feelings and

  then was off on her favourite topic—bagging out the parents at DPLC.

  ‘I saw enough of their personal finances to know that most of them are mortgaged to the hilt. It was the ones with the biggest cars and the flashiest diamonds we had to threaten with legal action to get them to cough up the fees.

  ‘Anyway, half the rocks they wear are those fake cubic zirconia things. And did I tell you about the time the Kingstons announced they were going to Paris for the week and I had to track them down because Rebecca got peritonitis? There they were in bloody Brisbane! Filthy liars!’

  Suze’s loud-mouthed outrage was the perfect antidote to the morning’s events. Carol Holt had been standing on that terrace. She was the one who had made the ‘witch’ joke. Jo would have recognised that cackle anywhere. And the nasty stuff about Parklea? Jo hardly knew how she had managed to drive from V
aucluse to Suze’s place. Her legs were quaking with...rage? Embarrassment? She didn’t know which.

  As for the accusation that she had been ‘peddling her pathetic left-wing ideas’ at Darling Point, it was the first time Jo had heard the accusation out of Didi’s mouth. Of course it had been Didi who’d hand-fed the gossip columnists in the aftermath of the Mother and Daughter Day ‘incident’. Jo had seen herself written up as ‘controversial’ (read: trouble-maker), ‘colourful’ (read: mentally unbalanced) and an ‘Eastern Suburbs outsider’ (she’d lived there thirty years, how long would it take?). It was all unfair and totally unnecessary. So now she was being painted as some lefty infiltrator. Interesting. Jo had never fit in with the wealthy Eastern Suburbs society set, but then, she hadn’t ever had to. Her position at the college came with many A-list entitlements but also excused her from the exertions of climbing the social ladder. Jo had quite happily occupied her comfortable middle rung. She knew her place.

  As JJ’s wealth grew, he had taken his position at the top table for charity balls, golf days, polo tournaments and Parliament House dinners. However, at most of these glamorous affairs, Jo found herself standing in dark corners or at marble bathroom sinks in the ladies’ loo, talking with other wives who couldn’t quite understand how they’d got there either. The women all avoided life’s bigger questions by talking endlessly about their children. Many an evening was passed with mothers fretting over which university their daughters would attend. Jo didn’t have the heart to tell them that some of their little chicks were hoping to snag a rock-star boyfriend and spend the rest of their days in the back of a tour bus with their legs in the air.

  ‘New Age voodoo? What does that mean?’ The scrape of Suze’s chair on the wooden floor brought Jo back to the kitchen table. ‘You’d think they’d rather be in confession with Father Patrick! Liars and hypocrites. Every damned one of them.’

  Suze’s fury was showing no signs of abating, although Jo was wearying of the diatribe by now and keen to get home and contemplate the whole shambles of the day in peace and solitude.

  ‘I’ll bet Didi was screwing that bloke in the bathroom. She goes commando. Did you know?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s what they call it, “going commando”. Tarting around with no knickers on.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘She bloody does! She sits there with her stick-insect legs wide open and flashes. We had some interior decorators doing up Etheldreda who’d worked on her joint and they told me.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Yep. I remember telling you over lunch.’

  Jo could only think that she didn’t remember the details because she’d attempted to shoosh Suze from broadcasting them around the staffroom.

  ‘She tried it on with the sports master once at the inter-schools netball tournament. Made some off joke about inflatable balls or something and then grabbed his dick.’

  ‘Suze!’

  ‘Wake up, Jo! Everyone knows she’s screwing around behind Michael’s back. He must know, surely. Poor bastard. If you want him, you should go for it. No-one would blame you. They might even send flowers to your funeral—after Didi axe-murders you.’

  ‘I am not “going for” Michael Brigden. I told you before.’ Jo had heard enough. Suze was on the way to being drunk and the talk would only become more salacious. Jo wasn’t in the mood.

  ‘But you like him, I can tell. And you are going to have dinner with him next week.’

  Jo flushed again and cursed the genetic hand-me-down that flooded her veins with adrenalin and sent the blood rushing to her cheeks. ‘It was going to be with Gemma and her boyfriend too. Anyway, I’ve changed my mind on that. It’s all too complicated.’

  ‘Probably a good idea,’ said Suze as she reached for the bottle again. ‘I wouldn’t want Didi after my arse. God knows what she’s capable of.’

  Suze was drinking more than was good for her lately, and when she drank she became sour and belligerent. Jo had no experience of handling drunks. Again, it occurred to her that their friendship was something that had flourished at Darling Point, but outside that humid hothouse might wilt and die.

  Jo had her car keys in hand and was walking to the front door when she stopped and stared at a pair of watercolours on the lounge-room wall. Both scenes were from Watsons Bay—near Laings Point, if she wasn’t mistaken. One view was over a low stone wall with stone steps leading down to the edge of the harbour with a vista off to Middle Head in the north. The other appeared to have been painted from a spot halfway down those same stone steps, but looked to the west back towards the wharves of the city. They were both delightful works, skilfully executed and, judging by their style and the scenes they depicted, both very old. Perhaps even from the 1880s, when there was an enthusiasm for plein-air painting and artist camps flourished on the harbour shores.

  ‘Oh, these are lovely prints, Suze. Where did you get them? I’ve seen them before.’

  ‘Oh, those?’ Suze affected a vague reply, although her mind was desperately scrabbling for a story that would make sense. ‘I had them copied from a couple of paintings I found at Darling Point in an attic. Aren’t they great? I think the originals are now in Patsy Kelly’s place.’

  ‘That’s where I’ve seen them. At the college. Although not for years and years. Maybe not since I was a boarder. They’re excellent reproductions.’ Jo peered more closely. ‘Where’d you get them done?’

  ‘Can’t remember.’ Suze plonked her bottle of white wine on her coffee table loudly, hoping this might distract Jo. She should have remembered to stash the stolen pictures in the garage before Jo arrived. ‘So, I’ll call you...’ She walked carefully to the front door, the floor heaving under her feet.

  Jo looked and looked again, stood this way and that to catch the light. ‘Suze, these are originals. I’m sure of it.’

  ‘Really?’ Suze was suddenly very sober. ‘That can’t be right.’

  ‘Maybe you got them mixed up and Patsy ended up with the copies. Quick way to tell. Let me see the back.’

  ‘Oh, I can’t be bothered doing it now...’

  ‘No, it’s fine. I’ll get one down.’ And before Suze could stop her, Jo had stood on tiptoe, taken one painting off the wall and turned it over. ‘Aha! Like I said. It’s the original—age spots, perished backing tape and all. And there’s some writing...’

  ‘What?’ Suze hiccupped. Had Jo caught her out? What was written on the back? Stolen by S. Reynolds? She slumped on the couch, ready to spill her guts about everything. But that was her thinking through the alcohol. She had to stay alert. Rob and the girls were due home any moment.

  ‘“E. Walpole 1885.” Oh my good God!’ Jo turned the frame to the front, then the back again. ‘This is amazing! You remember I loved studying the history of DPLC—there was so much great art that was collected over the years in that place—well, I think that these paintings are by none other than Eunice Walpole, the first headmistress!’

  ‘And...?’ Suze was unsure of the significance of this.

  ‘I could never find out what happened to Eunice when she suddenly left the college just three years after she started there. And as far as I knew, neither did her sister Augusta. She sailed from Cape Town to find what happened to Eunice and ended up being headmistress for the next forty years.’

  In the next moment, Jo had taken the second watercolour off the wall. ‘Same again,’ she said. ‘E. Walpole, but this one’s from 1887! And that means...’ Jo was joining the dots in her understanding.

  ‘What?’ Suze asked.

  ‘These paintings prove two things—that Eunice was alive and well after she left Darling Point, and, more than that, Augusta was still in touch with her, even five years after she’d come from South Africa! Although I can’t remember that she ever made it known. Well, well, well...This is so exciting, Suze. To think you’ve had these paintings on your wall! Which, by the way, also means Patsy Kelly is showing off a couple of fakes.’

  ‘So what? All
the people who look at them are fake too,’ Suze slurred, knowing full well there were a couple of blank spaces on the wall in Patsy Kelly’s old cottage where Jo imagined the reproductions might be.

  ‘You’ll have to take them back. They’re probably not worth that much to anyone, except the college,’ Jo was ecstatic with her find and eager to cart them away. ‘In fact, why don’t I take them with me and I’ll give Hannah McGinty a ring. She’s art mistress there now. She’ll swap them over and maybe let me get into the library. I’ll have another look through the records and try to piece the whole story together. I’ll bring the prints straight back.’

  ‘No!’ Suze leaped from the couch with startling agility.

  ‘I just...It’s that...The girls have got one of their classmates coming over this week and I’d like just something in this whole dump to look a little bit impressive.’

  Jo was stopped in her tracks. She couldn’t quite fathom Suze’s logic. ‘You’re crazy! Your place is adorable. It’s “shabby chic”. People pay thousands to have someone come in and do over their houses to look like this.’

  ‘More like a landfill site, if you ask me.’ Suze flapped her hands at piles of washing sitting on every available surface, as if she could magic them away.

  ‘You don’t have to impress anyone, my darling. Especially the women of Darling Point.’

  ‘But do you mind if I hang on to them, just for now?’ Suze pleaded. ‘The girls love them so much.’ She had no idea what she might do before Jo collected them. Stage a robbery and have them stolen? Get them copied, then break into Etheldreda and hang them on the wall? She should never have started on a life of crime. She just didn’t have the brains for it. She could never predict the end of mystery novels. Even The Da Vinci Code had had her stumped for weeks.