She’d let it go at that until a few months later when, unexpectedly and unrelated to their earlier conversation, she said, ‘I can understand your mother ignoring your father’s affairs-up to a point. But there must have been a boundary beyond which the relationship would break; there’d have to be. Self-respect isn’t infinitely flexible.’
When, after a couple of years, he’d asked her to marry him, she’d said, ‘Yes. I can’t think of anyone else I’d care to live with or have children with or make love to, anymore, and I don’t want to die alone, an old spinster wearing a knobbly cardigan while an obese cat eats my meals-on-wheels dinner, so I guess it’ll have to be you.’
And she’d watched his shocked face with amusement before reaching one hand to his mouth and letting a finger caress the line of his top lip. ‘Besides, you’re the sexiest man alive, a moderately good provider and will never let me down. So, yes.’
As he looked at her now, he could say he never had. Not really.
‘Okay. We’re at our favourite restaurant, with our favourite wine, eating our favourite pasta. And you have something to tell me. So tell me.’
He poured the Curly Flat and smiled. ‘Can I ever have a secret that’s not immediately obvious to you?’
‘Darling Jack, what secrets could you possibly want to have from me?’
He laughed and a slight flush deepened the tanned skin. It only happened with her, this tendency to redden slightly in the face at difficult moments.
‘Now I’ve made you blush, darling. Why don’t you just get on with it and tell me what’s bothering you?’
He paused, ran his finger around the lip of the wine glass and hesitantly started to unwind his dilemma. ‘I need your advice. I want to do this thing with Mac and I don’t want to do it. I talked myself into it a week ago because it’s a monumental challenge, way beyond anything I’ve ever contemplated. Twelve thousand employees-not just me and twenty kids; hundreds of millions in premiums, vital to the country’s wellbeing, and so on. But I’m worried about the people, particularly the chairman. You’re always the wise one, so what do I do?’
She’d never seen him so uncertain, openly at least, about anything, even though he turned to her for advice frequently. But usually the advice sought was how to do something he’d already decided to pursue, not this wallowing in the ultimate dilemma. ‘You’re bored, darling, and a bored Jack is a dangerous thing. It’s not so much whether you’re sure about this, but more how you’re going to be if you don’t do it, spending the rest of your life wondering how good you would’ve been, whether you were up to the job, whether you could have mixed it with the big boys. That’s it, isn’t it? You want to know if you can run in the Olympics?’
She was always right, always knew him better than he knew himself. ‘Yes, I guess so.’
‘Then do it. Cast aside your doubts, don ye mighty armour, ride thy great steed across the moat of indecision-and pour me more of that lovely wine while you’re about it.’
chapter four
Jack felt the adrenalin pumping through him in a way he hadn’t for years. The boardroom was packed with journalists and photographers and he’d finished his last radio interview as fresh as the first, even though he’d said the same things twenty times over. He was very good at this, he knew it. Everyone in the room knew it, you could feel it. The public relations people hadn’t liked his concept of posing the questions about the company’s results before they were actually asked, but he’d insisted it would allow him to present the material in a contained, logical flow, and it had worked beautifully. When he opened the forum for additional questions, there were very few and they were mainly follow-ups from the ones he’d flashed on the screen in his own presentation. It was a virtuoso performance. Journalists didn’t clap, but he’d felt they’d wanted to.
He loved performing in public, always had. Speech-making was easy, selling a message was a gift. Why, he’d even developed a groundbreaking communications package for the staff. Each month a live video was transmitted on closed circuit to all HOA offices via satellite. Jack was the star of the show, true, but so were the employees, in a lesser way. There was the ‘hero of the month’, someone who’d made a unique contribution. A camera crew surprised this individual at his or her workplace with Jack presenting an award-like ‘This Is Your Life’ without the relatives. There were questions and answers, and graphs and charts, and every other device anyone could dream up. The staff loved it-and they loved Jack, almost ran from their workstations to shake his hand when he wandered through a call centre, to no great purpose, just so they could see him, just so they had the opportunity to run from their workstations. But this was the big time, with radio and TV and every major newspaper in the country. HOA had a massive retail shareholder base apart from insuring half the homes in the country. Its performance was an indicator to the economy’s performance; its results were real news. Even though they weren’t really his results, yet, but he was the head of the company, he was the person they wanted to see.
Yesterday he’d been in Canberra visiting the Minister, massaging perceptions, ensuring when the results were released there wasn’t a spin that the profits were excessive, explaining the return on equity was still only fifteen per cent-low considering the risks, and the regulatory regime, never forget the regulatory regime, the impact on the business of filing all those reports, of copying all those board papers. And as the Minister was escorting him out-yes escorting him out, a good sign the company’s handler said, an excellent sign-who did they meet as they strolled through the corridors of Parliament House? The Prime Minister. Just like that, in the corridor. The Minister had simply stopped the PM as he hurried past with a couple of minders. ‘Prime Minister, good morning. I’d like you to meet Jack Beaumont, new CEO at HOA. Giving us some of his valuable time.’
And the Prime Minister had stopped in his tracks and seemed genuinely pleased to meet Jack. ‘Welcome to the people’s house. Heard a great deal about you, Mr Beaumont. Keep up the good work.’
What would he have heard about him? Jack couldn’t imagine, but it was obviously positive, that was the point. He wasn’t impressed by meeting important people; he’d met plenty of important people. Half of them lived in residences he’d built, for goodness sake. But this was the Prime Minister of Australia, who lived in a relatively modest late Victorian house on the harbour in Kirribilli, a house Jack had never been in but now would probably be invited to because-because he was who he was. And this was the Prime Minister.
As the last of the press packed up their gear, Jack saw Mac Biddulph wave from the doorway and give him the thumbs-up sign. It was one of the qualities Jack had come to appreciate in Mac. He was supportive, but let him get on with the job.
‘Mr Beaumont. Could I have a word before you go?’ He turned to find a woman he’d noticed during the presentation because she’d been impossible to miss. At least, impossible for Jack to miss. She’d been seated in the front row but had asked no questions. He knew the PR people were careful to allocate seating positions based on rank, so she had to be a journalist of some substance, but he’d no idea who she was. In truth, it wasn’t her stature as a journalist that had caught his attention. She was an extraordinarily attractive woman in a severe sort of way. There was nothing overtly sexual or flirtatious in the way she was dressed or looked, quite the contrary. She appeared to be wearing a man’s suit, but it wasn’t cut like any man’s suit Jack had ever seen. There was some subtlety in the shape that made it completely feminine, despite the fact she was also wearing a collar and tie. The collar on the shirt was spread somehow, the tie was knotted lower; whatever it was, the effect was captivating, compelling, almost heady as she stood smiling at him with a wry, challenging smile.
‘I’m Prue Patterson from the Australian. We haven’t met. Very impressive presentation. You must be pleased with your results.’ She gazed at him from clear, blue eyes behind the oversized, black-rimmed glasses of a librarian or a school mistress.
‘Thank
you, but they’re not really my results, you know. I’m the new boy on the block, so I’m just putting the shine on other people’s hard work.’
‘Indeed.’ She smiled again. ‘But you polish up so well. I’m not a business journalist, which is why you may not have seen me before. I used to write for the business pages but I get bored by figures.’
‘So do I. But don’t tell anyone.’
‘I’m very good at keeping secrets-unless, of course, they’d interest my readers. I write mainly profiles and opinion pieces these days, and I’d like to write a personal profile on you to run in the feature pages. You’re very important to a lot of people now, Mr Beaumont, and we don’t know much about you.’
She observed his dismissive shrug with amusement. He seemed such an unlikely person to be connected with Mac Biddulph, who she knew well. Her profile on Mac had won her a Walkley Award and a trip on the Honey Bear. Both sat on her mantlepiece, one way and another. There was a certain naivety about Jack Beaumont that appeared deeper than just natural charm. Not that there was anything wrong with natural charm. ‘I’d very much like to interview you in a relaxed setting-over lunch, for example.’
Jack had flirted with too many attractive women not to recognise the undertones. But despite the heady injection of adrenalin from the morning, he was in control.
‘I don’t have lunch these days. I mean, I eat lunch, but usually at my desk or a sandwich in the park or something. I’m not really a luncher anymore, if you know what I mean.’
Her mouth curled up at the corners in an extremely alluring way. ‘How interesting. You see, we’ve just discovered you’re not like the average run of businessmen who move from club to restaurant to boardroom on a regular lunching cycle, and we haven’t even started the interview. So it’s dinner then?’
‘Well I’d rather it was just in the office, if you don’t mind. If I could get my assistant to call you…’
‘I don’t deal with assistants. It’ll be quite painless, the dinner, I promise you. It’s a well-established format I’ve used many times. You might even enjoy it.’
Jack handed over his card with his direct line number and found himself in the restaurant before the week was out. She was extremely professional and businesslike in her approach to the interview, as they sat in a booth at the back of a fashionable restaurant in The Rocks. She ordered the wine and the food, after asking what he’d like, told the waiter to leave the white wine out of the ice bucket, was in control from the moment she arrived fifteen minutes after he’d been seated. Her research was extraordinary. She knew details about his life he’d forgotten himself. When she asked about his competitive streak he’d tried to shrug it off with an ‘Oh shucks’ line, but she brushed it away with facts.
‘You won the eight hundred metres open championship in the GPS athletics in one minute fifty-four point two seconds which, although it wasn’t a record, was only nought point five seconds outside; you play golf off a single figure handicap, you blitzed the top end of the Sydney property market for ten years, you’re the CEO of a major corporation. Don’t be coy.’
The restaurant was nearly empty, and half of the second bottle of wine sat between them. She’d switched off the tape machine ten minutes ago and put the notebook into some extraordinary handbag that appeared to be constructed from rusty nails. They sat, relatively silent after the steady rhythm of her questions. He wasn’t entirely surprised when she carefully removed her glasses and, looking him straight in the eyes, said ‘I don’t normally sleep with the people I interview Jack, but in your case I might make an exception.’ It was two days later and the buzz of press interviews and chance meetings with the Prime Minister had worn off. Jack sat at his desk with stacks of documents arranged across its surface. He’d asked Renton Healey for a summary of the company’s financial position, key performance indicators and potential cost savings, but this trolley-load of unbound papers had arrived. When he’d complained that he was drowning in detail, Renton had replied, ‘Let me know what you feel is irrelevant and I’ll have it removed immediately.’ The implication was obvious-you won’t know enough to sift the gold from the dross.
But he was sifting: painstakingly, excruciatingly slowly, Jack was working through the piles. And the nuggets were there. Sometimes they appeared to be fool’s gold and raised more questions than answers, but he was determined to grasp the essence of this business. He would not be a once-over-lightly presenter of someone else’s work-a show pony of a CEO. And if any of them thought he’d ever operated that way, they were wrong. Sure he’d been the creative force in his own business, but he’d always understood the detail, even if it was managed by others.
He was struggling with the detail, or lack of it, in a thick pile of contracts Renton had dropped on his desk. He’d wanted to examine the quantum of HOA’s payments to outside contractors, but instead of an analysis he’d been given all the legal contracts. His initial browsing had been disturbing. The monies involved were way beyond what he’d expected, and some of the contracts were vague in the extreme; the description of the services to be provided was so broad as to be meaningless.
The further he dug down into the papers the more alarmed he became. Some of these matters he would raise at the board meeting next week. Others would require more intense scrutiny. But he wasn’t going to let it go. He’d sell the story better than anyone, but it was going to be his story.
‘Thank you, gentlemen. The hour is past. We have a quorum so let me call the meeting to order.’
Sir Laurence’s prim tones relayed antiseptically through the next-generation German sound system, bounced dully off the silk-lined boardroom walls and fell mainly on deaf ears. As he glanced around the U-shaped table, he was reminded that the ‘gentlemen’ was no longer entirely appropriate. His slightly bloodshot eyes fell on the brightly coloured plumage of Rosemary Stipple, the headmistress of the private school that one of Mac’s daughters had attended. She’d recently joined the board at Mac’s insistence, despite Sir Laurence’s strong objections that she had no business experience of any kind and had never been on any other board except that of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra-and only because her husband was a major benefactor. The market would see her as no more than a sycophantic supporter of Macquarie James Biddulph and a sop to political correctness and would deride the appointment. So said Sir Laurence. Mac had just laughed.
‘The market follows me, Laurence. They couldn’t care less who’s on the board.’ Sir Laurence’s lips curled slightly at the left corner at this remark. ‘All that corporate governance crap is just for the annual report and the regulator. Anyway, Rosemary is a woman.’
On this last point Sir Laurence wasn’t entirely convinced. She appeared to be dressed at present in the plumage of a rainbow lorikeet. He’d always understood it was the male bird that wore the brightest colours. In any event, she might not be a man but if she wanted to be a member of his board she would have to do her best.
‘Gentlemen. If we could please.’ He tapped the small microphone in front of him with his silver pen. The sound reverberated through the fifteen miniature speakers in the ceiling and finally penetrated the consciousness of his distinguished board members. They were all in their customary places. It had always fascinated him the way some process of natural selection caused people to occupy the same seats in a meeting room even though there were no allocated places. It was a ritual dance, a pecking order. As far as he was concerned, so long as they all understood that the chairman’s seat was at the head of the table, they could scatter where they liked.
‘The minutes of the meeting of February the fifteenth. Any comments?’
There were never any comments on the minutes. The directors were acutely aware that at least four or five drafts would have passed across the antique partners’ desk in Sir Laurence’s office in a flurry of neatly pencilled corrections before they were finally allowed, reluctantly, into the voluminous bound volume that comprised a set of HOA board papers. This document was delivered by cour
ier to the office or home of each director in a sealed security pouch and had to be signed for by the recipient before it was released. Sir Laurence had considered locked and chained red boxes in the tradition of Westminster, but had rejected this as perhaps too governmental. Nevertheless, he insisted on the intricate sealing device which required a tough plastic tab to be broken-often at the expense of Rosemary Stipple’s fingernails or Justin Muir’s temper-just as he did on the sweeping of this room for bugs before every meeting. You could never be too careful.
‘Shouldn’t we wait to get Mac on the line, Laurence?’ To the casual observer, Jack’s question was a harmless observation. To Laurence Treadmore it contained a quiver of sharp insults. It failed to address him as chairman-the proper appellation in a boardroom. It then failed to recognise his everyday title, a title conferred on him by the Queen of Australia. It came from someone who, while purporting to be the chief executive of a major public company, wasn’t even wearing a tie let alone a jacket in his boardroom. He’d already discussed the question of the tie with Mac but he’d just laughed it off, saying, ‘We all have our own style, Laurence, even you. Who cares so long as the market loves him?’
He refused to look directly at Jack as he answered-but then he never looked directly at him or addressed him by name.
‘I understand we’re having difficulty establishing a connection to the Kimberley. Perhaps the secretary could ask our technician to step in.’
The rest of the board resumed checking their diaries and phone messages in a series of electronic beeps, despite the chairman’s clear ruling that no such devices were to be switched on during a meeting. Only Sir Laurence noticed the totally inappropriate exchange of ‘G’day Tom’ and ‘Hi Jack, how are you?’ between the technician and the CEO. This type of familiarity between management and workers could only lead to trouble.
The Butcherbird Page 5
