The Unforgiving Shore

by Gil Hogg

  The Falcon drifted silently down on its approach past the Hill to the airstrip. Sophie could see the familiar Big House, shadowed under its high orange-tiled roof, its wide verandas, bright green lawns and the smaller houses around it huddled coolly under the gums. And then, lower down the slope, the Village and beyond the mass of sheds and stockyards all amid a tangle of dirt roads, baked and dusty.

  When they landed they were greeted by the general manager, Jim Lomas, whose ageing face Sophie vaguely recognised as that of the pilot who flew into the bush to rescue her and Paul many years before. Lomas stowed them in a Ford minibus quickly and switched on the air-conditioning. The late afternoon was oven-like.

  Lomas drove them to the Big House, shaded in a grove of gums and beeches. The drive leading to the house had been sealed since Sophie’s last visit, so the cloud of dust which had followed them most of the way from the airstrip was left behind. Sprinklers were scattering fine spray over the lawns and there was a fountain and pond at the main entrance which Sophie could not remember.

  All the quiet splendour of the ‘Owner’s Cabin’ inside was preserved, the feeling of a continent strange and different. The rugs on the polished hardwood floors; the paintings by Sidney Nolan, Russell Drysdale and Arthur Boyd like internal eyes looking out to that strangeness. Still in place were the cabinets and occasional tables, inlaid with native timbers and the stone panel plundered from the cave where Paul had taken her. Sophie could feel the fragility of the veneer of civilization over the stark wilderness.

  She was alone in the drawing room for a moment and she felt tense as she looked at the stone. It transformed the room with its vivid ochre pigments of red and yellow, white clay and charcoal, delicately touched with orange and blue colouring. She saw the picture with new eyes: the male figure in head-dress, with a hair belt and decorative pendants, carrying throwing sticks; and the female figure carrying digging sticks. Both the man and the woman were following a star. She remembered Paul telling her that the Aboriginals would paint the images on themselves and assume the journey of the figures. At the feet of the figures on the stone were drawings of a goose-wing fan, perch and barramundi. Paul had treated the presence of the stone in the Big House as wrong. Captain Heron’s sons or the early Marchmonts, in breaking the stone panel from its place in the cave, had not seen it that way. To them, it was an engaging picture. Paul had said that the Aboriginals believed that the removal of the stone was a violation of the mythology of the dreamtime and sent bad vibrations down through the generations.

  Sophie stood looking out the window as the light faded. She could see the gum trees with their golden shadows and the dry landscape beyond them. Only the red and yellow parrots in the trees moved with energy and colour. A wedge-tailed eagle far above and beyond the Hill was stationary in the sky.

  Marchmont came bustling in, showered and changed and jovial.

  “I thought I’d have a quiet look around to bring back memories,” she said.

  “Yes, it’s a very touching place this, my dear,” he replied, assembling gin, tonic, ice, lemon and glasses on a tray from the drinks cabinet. “I heard I’d inherited the Marchmont fortune at the dining room table. Opened the letter with my breakfast! I’ve had good times here. I came first out of curiosity. You know, the back end of the world. What could it possibly be like?”

  “It’s hard and unforgiving.”

  “You think that? I can understand. And yet I’ve come again and again. I’ve had little sentiment about selling chunks of the Marchmont inheritance when necessary. You have to move on. But I’ve never been tempted to sell Mirabilly. Never will. Let’s join the others on the verandah for a sundowner.”

  As he was leaving he looked back and saw that Sophie had her eyes on the stone, the faint glow in the room lighting the heads of the two painted figures.

  “Nice bit of work, isn’t it? As good in its own way as a portrait by Picasso. A damn sight cheaper too. Comes from somewhere around here. It’s the stone Travis referred to at the Grange, if you remember. And do you know one astonishing thing? I’ve had a letter from the Aborigine Trust asking me to return it – return it, mark you. Like the Elgin Marbles. It’s been here more than a hundred years. Damned insolence!”

  *

  Sophie went to bed early that night after a business session with Marchmont and Lefain. They were worried by the way the case would affect the share price of MCM and discussed publicity to restore shareholder confidence. She had a lot of material to edit and pass to Martin Thorpe, arguing that they would win the case and explaining why Argo’s offer to buy MCM wasn’t worth accepting.

  She was in bed, looking through the papers, when Marchmont knocked, came in without asking and closed the door. He had a glass of cognac in his hand and she thought he was more than a little intoxicated.

  “Sophie, my dear,” he said, sitting down on the bed proprietorially. “When this is all over I’m going to ask you to marry me,” he slurred.

  “Drink up John and don’t make silly jokes,” Sophie said.

  “I’m serious,” he said, levelling his eyes on hers with difficulty.

  “Oh, really? I don’t think you have anybody to play with tonight.”

  “Why won’t the woman believe me?” he said, rolling his eyeballs upward.

  Her mom had driven herself to the edge of sanity to hear those words and perhaps Ellen Colbert before her, but they made little impression on Sophie. She didn’t believe Marchmont. She thought that even if she had believed him, she didn’t want to marry him. She liked him in a daughterly way, respected his abilities and although he had a sexual spark which was attractive, bed and marriage would be two steps too far.

  “Maybe we ought to try it out, see what it would be like… you know…” Marchmont looked at her sideways with a satyr’s grin.

  “You’re angry with Paul Travis and you want a sweetie to comfort you. Well it isn’t me, John.”

  “Never?”

  “I think of you as my father. I could never begin to give even the faintest consideration to such things so soon after Mom’s death.”

  “Hey,” Marchmont said, suddenly irritated and slopping his drink. “I can’t make out whether you’re an elder of the First Baptist Church in Peeknuckle or one tough lady.”

  He sat in an aura of cologne and cigar smoke. Sophie recognised that he was undeniably a valuable suitor. He was the golden goose. But that wasn’t enough. Her selfish thoughts in relation to him were of a much smaller order, but, she felt, more capable of realisation: she hoped to conclude her role at MCM with experience that she could trade for a better job with another company if necessary. She had seen her mother’s suffering; it was about the uncertainties of survival and she instinctively feared the kind of survival that is dependent on a man’s goodwill, a man’s whim.

  “Sophie, I care a great deal for you…” he began, but he saw that her attention had returned to the papers on her lap. When she raised her head, there was a blurred look in her eyes which declared that the conversation was over. He rose and wavered toward the door.

  He turned on the threshold. “I know you met Travis years ago and you and Emma both liked him, OK, but you’re loyal to me, aren’t you?”

  “Absolutely, John. You can count on it,” she said, surprised at his insecurity. She was loyal, but she nearly joked that it was just business and then thought that he was in no mood for jokes.

  *

  The Marchmont party moved their residence to the Intercontinental Hotel in Darwin, where they flew from Mirabilly the next morning and met Max Haldane and his assistants.

  The hearing was only a few days away and it was up to Haldane to reveal what he could do. Sophie thought she could tell, even as they were getting their cups of coffee at the sideboard and settling behind the meeting table, that the news was bad. All Haldane’s team were muted or looked grim.

  The men lined up facing each other as they had at the Regent, Marchmont and his executives on one side of the table and the lawyers on
the other. Max Haldane swallowed importantly but didn’t hesitate.

  “I’m sorry, John, but our concluded view is that we have no case, no reasonable argument to put forward. We can throw a bit of dust in the judge’s eyes, but the charts are reasonably clear. You’ve been on Aborigine land for over a hundred years. We’ve checked and measured everything on the ground against the deeds and charts. We’ve checked the authenticity of the deeds. We’ve even had infra-red examination to see if they’ve been altered. It’s true the Gudijingi now flows along the eastern route, but the deeds plot the western route, nearer to Mirabilly.”

  A silence fell in the room. All eyes were on Marchmont. He was calm and expressionless, a poker player confronted with four aces. “Since the pistol is pointed at my head, what do my advisers advise? That I allow the trigger to be pulled quickly?” He spoke lightly.

  Now, with the bad news delivered, Haldane could allow a small smile at the corners of his mouth. “Sue for peace, John. Let me see what terms I can get from Travis. After all, he came to you a year ago with a proposal.”

  “It was an offer he knew I’d refuse. Any businessman would. You don’t give away ten billion dollars to somebody who looks over your fence, sees something valuable in your backyard and says it’s his. You’ll get nowhere with Travis. He’s out for the kill.”

  “John, we must try to settle,” Curtis Lefain urged quietly.

  “Try by all means!” Marchmont said, contemptuously.

  “I think this is wise, very wise,” Lefain said, pressing his gleaming moustache nervously.

  Marchmont and Lefain left the meeting while Haldane began to talk to his assistants and Marchmont’s advisers about how they should approach Travis’s lawyers at the Sheraton. There was a sense of relief and lightness in the room. Everybody had been expecting an explosion from Marchmont. The fact that he wanted to talk peace relaxed them all.

  Sophie listened to the doom scenarios that were, the advisers all hoped, behind them. The debacle of having spent millions on a mine without rights would be seen by stockholders as gross negligence and mismanagement. They had to settle the case. Marchmont’s career was in issue as well as a lot of money. But Sophie was left with an uncomfortable feeling about how John had taken the news. He seemed at ease. She knew John’s moods and attitudes very well and this was not the reaction she had expected from him. The John she knew would explode, swear the air blue – and then settle.

  In the talk around the boardroom table there was a flavour of covert admiration of Paul Travis’s tactics and Sophie was suddenly sorry for Marchmont. He was like a blind man groping toward a precipice. She thought his usually sound business judgment had been impaired by his obsessional feelings about Paul Travis and his own emotional connection with Mirabilly. And Paul didn’t really need to do this, no matter how hurt he was about the past. What had seemed to her a practical disagreement about a boundary, which, after some posturing on each side would be resolved in a businesslike way, had emerged as something else: a personal contest between the two men.

  20

  When Sophie went to her room after the meeting, she found a message from Emma Rainham. Emma now used her natural father’s name, rather than her stepfather’s. She too was staying at the Intercontinental Hotel. Sophie rang Emma’s suite and Emma, sounding miserable, asked Sophie to come up.

  It was a penthouse suite, the view of the molten metal sea shut out by closed blinds. The air-conditioning was icy. Sophie hardly recognised the bulky, brown, oiled female who came toward her in the shadow of the reception room. Emma’s belly and the flesh of her hips hung over her bikini. Her thighs quivered as she walked and her big-nippled bare breasts swung on her chest like udders ready for milking. She saw Sophie’s surprise.

  “Pretty awful, huh?” Her eyes had a hopeless look.

  “What’s the matter, Emma? I didn’t know you were in the country,” Sophie said as the two embraced.

  Emma, the stepdaughter, and Sophie, the daughter of Marchmont’s subsequent mistress, had always understood the similarity of their positions as part of the furniture of Marchmont’s life.

  “I’ve only been in Darwin a few days,” Emma said. “I’m going back to New York. I came out here to see the fun, but I guess I’m so much on the sidelines that I won’t see much anyway. Paul is too busy working out how to finish off John. I didn’t get to see Paul much. He knows he has my vote on the MCM takeover. He doesn’t have to sleep with me to get it.”

  Sophie had learned how Emma had become a problem for Marchmont. She was the biggest single holder of MCM shares inherited from her father and bought from her brother, Alex. She was the key to Paul Travis’s acquisition of MCM. With her shares and those he had bought in the market, Paul probably had a majority and could win on a vote. Sophie didn’t know why Emma was so antagonistic towards her stepfather.

  Emma was self-conscious as she saw Sophie’s gaze measuring her contours. “Sure, I could lose a little weight,” she said flopping on a couch and moaning. “I’m going on a diet next week. This week, I’m going to do as I please.”

  Emma beckoned the Aboriginal maid who moved a portable cooler on a trolley toward her. Emma looked inside and selected a chocolate walnut ice-cream sundae, spooned whipped cream on top, adding maple syrup and two fan wafers.

  “Have one,” she said to Sophie, “or have a boring sandwich if you want. Rita will fetch it.”

  Sophie declined and had a cup of iced tea from the trolley while they talked casually. Emma ate with a long spoon. There was enough ice-cream for two or three helpings and when she finally put the spoon aside, there was some left. Emma plunged the fingers of both hands into the dish, scooping out the remainder. She stood up holding the sticky mess in the palms of her hands looking at it and then smeared it over her breasts and belly like massage oil.

  Sophie watched without comment as Emma waddled through the glass doors to the shower faucet by the pool on the terrace. She turned on the water and shortly floundered back to the room with a towel around her. She slumped back on the couch.

  “Bring me a coke, will you?” she snapped at the maid. She shook her head in bewilderment. “Let me ask you, Soph: do you think you’ll end up marrying John?”

  “No definitely not. Your dear brother has asked me,” she laughed.

  “Oh, that!” Emma said with a shriek. “We Rainhams are losers. Look at my father. My mother. And Alex; I never thought of him as a serious contender for you.”

  “He’s not, but I have to admit he’s kind, good-looking and rich.”

  “He’s weak and useless and he would drive you mad, much as I’d like to welcome you to the Rainham family.” Emma swung her head to stare at Sophie with her sceptical green eyes. “Do you find John magnetic, let me ask you, sexy, hypnotic, what?”

  “A little of all those things I suppose. He’s a complicated man.”

  “He’ll be a feeble old fart while you’re still a vigorous woman,” Emma said lighting a cigarette. “And he is a one hundred percent proof asshole.”

  Sophie couldn’t work out her own feelings for John precisely, let alone explain them to Emma. What was important to her about John was the present when he was a vibrant influence, not some imagined future.

  “There’s something I should tell you,” Emma went on, taking a deep toke on the cigarette. “It has to do with your purpose here…”

  Sophie shuddered inwardly at what she might hear. The Marchmont family had as many hidden twists and turns as a coil of twine.

  Emma concentrated now on drawing the coke up through a straw. “Bit of a hangover,” she explained. “John’s had his pecker in so many pies, it gets confusing. Paul’s mother. My mother. Your mother. And, of course, all the rest of his stable of bitches and maybe you at some time in future…”

  Sophie shook her head negatively and knowing that, unstable as she was, Emma wasn’t a fantasist or trouble-maker, she braced herself. Should she listen to this? Was it necessary? She was left with the thought that on balance
it was better to know everything.

  “You better understand my motivation, Soph. You’re John’s emissary. You represent him and he trusts you. You should understand why I’d rather give my shares away than help him… When Dad had a heart attack and ended up in the mortuary, I was twelve and over from Roedean at half term. We had a suite at the Sherry Netherlands in New York. On the evening of the morning Dad died, my mother was partying with Marchmont in the bedroom she had shared with my father. The shameless cunt was having the orgasm of a lifetime while Dad was cooling down in a mortuary drawer a mile away. John was Dad’s partner and best friend. You don’t forget scenes like that.”

  Sophie began to understand a little more about the unruly and disrespectful stepdaughter.

  “Dad died on an aircraft, a private charter flight from the US to England. John was on the flight with him. Only two passengers. When the plane landed, there was an issue with whether it should have landed somewhere where my father could have received medical help. The pilots said they didn’t know a thing about the heart attack until their arrival in London. They remained in their cabin although there was an intercom. Dad was of course dead on arrival. The coroner asked the pathologist at the inquest about the likelihood that my father died quietly. He said it was possible, but most likely there would have been a period of intense pain, during which my father’s condition would have been apparent and first aid would have been possible. Dad carried a pill.

  “John admitted at the inquest that he knew about my father’s condition and about the pill, but neither saw or heard anything to alert him. He said he slept for part of the flight. I think he knew. Sitting in the seat alongside my father while he was dying. I feel John was implicated in the death. But that could just be a little paranoia of mine. I went to the inquest.

  “John really is an arch bastard and a character to be wary of. He plotted to get Dad’s interests in the company on the cheap, but the deal hadn’t gone through when Dad died. That didn’t worry John, because he thought my mother would inherit everything anyway. That’s what they were celebrating that night. Well, Dad knew what was going on and had already changed his will, leaving everything in a trust for me and Alex. Dad never went near Werner Fliegler – their old lawyer – but got some smart Wall Street guy to change his will. Werner would have wised John up. When Alex came of age, my trustees bought his interests as you know, making me the key shareholder.”