White Sands of Summer

by J. H. Fletcher

  ‘I wonder whether Harley Woodcock himself might be vulnerable,’ she said.

  ‘Vulnerable to what?’

  ‘He has a bad reputation.’

  Dermot scoffed. ‘Most successful businessmen have bad reputations.’

  ‘He’s made a fortune out of building down-market housing which he’s unloaded at up-market prices, but the rumour is he’s got social ambitions, too. People say he married his wife because she’s related to the Earl of Blockley, an off-shoot of the Churchill family.’

  ‘As if that matters,’ Dermot said.

  ‘Apparently it matters to him, and that might make him vulnerable. I’ve never met him but they say he’s the biggest snob on earth. Wants to marry his daughter to some bloke with a title, apparently.’

  ‘I’ve heard the story,’ he said. ‘There may be something to it.’

  ‘What do we know about the wife?’

  ‘Interesting,’ Dermot Black said.

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘It seems we have been thinking along the same lines. That is why I have had some of my people making enquiries about her. I have a photograph on file that I would like to show you.’

  Again he must have pressed the hidden bell. Within seconds the door opened to admit a Chinese woman, trim and young, in a smart business suit.

  ‘The Woodcock file, Alice,’ Dermot said. ‘If you please.’

  Within minutes she was back. Dermot Black leafed through the file.

  ‘Here,’ he said.

  He handed Shannon a photograph of Harley Woodcock, every inch the bully, taken with his wife beside him. Shannon supposed she might have been a looker once, but those days were gone. She looked plain and hard. There was character there, mostly bad, and her expression was a dark flame.

  She shook her head. ‘I don’t recognise her,’ she said.

  Yet there was something. She thought: an aristocrat? An English aristocrat? She knew no English aristocrats. Yet… It was an echo; no, less than that. The faintest echo of an echo.

  She was handing the photo back when a thought occurred to her and she studied it again, frowning. She turned it this way and that.

  ‘I’ve seen this woman before.’ She thought some more, staring at the photo, then shook her head. ‘I can’t remember. But I’ve seen her somewhere.’

  Memory was stirring. Long ago. Before the war? Yes. Hiding in the long grass at the edge of Charlie Hong’s watermelon paddock. A promise of money that never materialised. A girl a year or two older than she, vanishing in the company of a travelling salesman. Heading north.

  She said: ‘I know who it is. She’s no more an aristocrat than I am. That’s Irma Douglas. One-time watermelon bandit, one-time thief.’

  ‘And, as my researchers have discovered, one-time harlot at Townsville’s Cockatoo Club,’ Dermot said. ‘Exactly. I just needed your confirmation. Now we have to decide what we are going to do about it.’

  ‘She’s the right partner for Harley Woodcock,’ Shannon said.

  ‘If we go to the press…’ Jess suggested.

  ‘We do that, they’ll find out your mother worked at that club, too,’ Dermot said.

  ‘My mother? You’re saying she used to work there, too?’

  ‘I believe she would have called herself a hostess.’

  Jess looked as though someone had hit her.

  ‘If we go public about this,’ Dermot said, ‘imagine the lies Irma would tell. You’ll have destroyed her; she wouldn’t hesitate to destroy both you and your mother. There’s no merit in that. Harley Woodcock is our target, not his wife.’

  ‘So what do you suggest?’

  ‘Let me tell you.’

  He talked and they agreed.

  ‘Best you stay out of it,’ he told them. ‘I think Peter Hatch is the right man for the job. Conveniently, he’s in Queensland at the moment. I doubt it will take long.’

  Peter Hatch dropped in to see Shannon on his way back to Hong Kong. The same hard man, the same hard eyes. Once again she told herself he was not a man to cross. As she hoped, without distress, that Harley Woodcock had by now discovered.

  ‘Done and dusted,’ Peter said.

  ‘How did you manage it?’

  ‘I explained to him that if he persisted in trying to buy Charles Green island he would make an enemy of one of the most powerful men in the world. I also told him his wife was not the aristocrat he believed but a harlot who had at one time worked at the Cockatoo Club in Townsville, and that I would ensure the media was fully informed about the facts of the case.’ He laughed without humour. ‘Poor man, I truly believe he knew nothing about his wife’s background. I daresay it came as quite a shock to him.’

  ‘I wouldn’t like to be in her shoes,’ Shannon said, thinking of Woodcock’s brutal face.

  ‘She’ll wriggle out of it somehow,’ Peter said. ‘That sort always does.’

  A shock it would have been, all the same, Shannon thought. Had it been anyone else she might have felt sympathy, but never for Woodcock.

  She remembered Garford, and what had happened to him, and the two men who’d ended in hospital when Woodcock had hoped to destroy her by destroying her plant. No, she had no sympathy for Woodcock. Never for Woodcock.

  At the conclusion of her talk with Dermot Black she’d had a pretty sharp shock herself, although thankfully of a very different nature.

  ‘I am astonished that a man like Woodcock could be foolish enough to allow sentiment to stand in the way of a business opportunity,’ Dermot Black told Shannon. ‘Yet that is the assumption we’re making.’

  ‘It’s not sentiment. He’s a snob,’ she said. ‘That’s why.’

  The others, Jess included, had left but at the last moment Black had asked Shannon to stay behind. She’d been happy to do so; Jess had told her about the banquet that had started this whole operation off and the gun-toting guards who had surrounded the hotel.

  ‘I never saw any of them, but with that menu and those guards they were clearly Chinese. Important men.’

  ‘And the significance?’ Shannon had asked.

  ‘With Deng running things since Mao died, people are saying he wants to open up China to the world. It’ll be a rich pie if it happens and I think Dermot Black is hoping for a slice of it.’

  ‘Does he know we’re already in talks with them?’

  ‘I’ve discovered there’s never any knowing what Dermot knows.’

  It would be interesting to find out, though, so she was indeed happy to stay. Then it turned out the reason he’d asked her to remain had nothing to do with China.

  ‘We’ve come a long way, you and I,’ Dermot said.

  Shannon was immediately on her guard. It was true that she’d come up in the world but she knew nothing about Dermot Black’s background other than the rumour that he, too, had risen from the bottom of the pile. Where face-to-face discussions were concerned she had always believed in caution, so she said nothing.

  ‘You don’t remember, do you?’ Dermot said.

  ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

  ‘I am thinking of a boy many years ago,’ Dermot said. ‘No one else knows the story of that boy. A boy whose mother ran away. Who did him a favour by running away.’

  Yet he spoke as though there was poison in the words.

  ‘I think a mother who runs away does favours to no one,’ Shannon said. ‘Least of all her child. If she abandons him. My sister –’

  He nodded. ‘I know Jess’s story. What she told me and what I found out for myself. It took me a long time but I succeeded in the end. I always do.’ Again the silent laugh, the elusive echo. ‘We have a fellow-feeling, she and I. There is a symmetry in my relationship with her that I find pleasing.’

  ‘In what way is there a symmetry?’

  ‘The rounding of the circle. The boy I mentioned… You were kind to him once.’

  Shannon stared. Memory became still. Became clear. Ohmygod.

  ‘Josh Turrip,’ she said. ‘I brought fo
od to him after Grace had locked him in the shed.’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking of that,’ Dermot Black said. ‘The boy was alone and frightened. He was alone in the world and you befriended him. He told himself he would never forget that kindness and he hasn’t.’

  Still she couldn’t be certain. Dermot Black the same person as Josh Turrip? It seemed inconceivable. ‘I hit him with a stick. I remember that, too.’

  An unpeeling of the past, like skinning an orange, inch by inch. In Shannon’s mind there was confusion and disbelief, and a dawning sense of wonder that the boy she remembered from half a century before could have become this man who now controlled a universe of wealth, power and mystery, all of which he had created. This private man who shared nothing of himself with anyone on earth. Or so she had believed.

  So why was he telling her this? An enigma within a mystery.

  ‘After my mother had gone,’ Dermot said, ‘we heard a heroin overdose had killed her. I had the good fortune to be adopted by a wealthy couple who changed my name to theirs, who provided me with an education and the opportunity I needed to take on the world while at the same time removing myself from it, to protect me from the risk of further pain. In financial terms I was successful. Money gave me the wealth and power to do things I could never have done otherwise.

  ‘I think always of the future,’ Dermot said. ‘That has become my life, the purpose of my existence. I am interested in the preservation of the land, and of culture, for the future. I am interested in China, which needs the world and has so much to offer in exchange, if a way to bring us all together can be found – for the future.

  ‘When I heard you wanted to preserve Charles Green island because something in your past made it precious to you, I decided that if you needed help I would give it to you. Not by buying the island, because that would take it away from you, but by helping you fulfil your dream of making it yours by giving it away. I wanted a slice of it, too, to make money for myself and at the same time give guests access to an environment they might never otherwise experience.’

  She found it so hard to get her head around the fact that this man – reclusive, rich, with almost unlimited power at his command – should be the same being as the boy who had wept by the riverside, telling her about his mother and his life.

  Except of course he was not the same being; education, success and the accretion of wealth and power had changed him from the boy he had been to the man he now was. Destiny, for Josh Turrip and for Shannon and Jess Harcourt, was all.

  To hear him talk was like turning the pages of an illuminated manuscript, revealing untold marvels.

  ‘And China?’

  ‘The oldest living civilisation in the world. Appallingly governed in recent years but now the tyrant is dead we can create the engines of trade that will provide prosperity, while we in the West will have the opportunity to learn from China’s ancient wisdom. A win–win situation, if we can bring it about.’

  ‘That dream will take years to realise, if ever,’ Shannon said. ‘Neither you nor I will live to see it.’

  ‘As I said earlier, I think always of the future. You and Jess and I will lay the foundations for that great adventure, creating opportunities for commerce and manufacture, for tourism, for the possibility of prosperity where now there is none, in the belief that prosperity – in time – will create new opportunities for learning, tolerance and respect. And I believe the time to start that process is now.’

  He was right. Shocked as she was by his boldness, Shannon was inspired, too, by Dermot’s vision of what might be the future. If all played their part. But, with the future of Charles Green island now secure, and with Andrew and Erica, supported by a team of dedicated and experienced managers, at the helm of the consortium, it was no longer her part to play.

  1984

  Hal and Shannon

  Retired from the work that until now had filled their lives, they went back to the sea, as they had always promised themselves they would.

  They had been out a week and were now returning to the islands. To those who had spent much of their life sailing in the Whitsundays, the islands in the group had a special meaning. They were not simply the summits of underwater mountains, the bulk of which, like icebergs, was buried deep under the sea. They were the steering points, a guide that for those who could read the signs pointed the way they had to go. Lost in mist without a compass, with only the whisper of the waves along the hull for company, the sight of an island they could recognise would be as welcome as the kiss of the sun after a cold crossing.

  Mist was not a common feature of the weather along the north Queensland coast but occasionally an errant cold current from the far south would find its way north, creating dense clouds where the icy waters collided with the warm tropical seas.

  On this trip there had been a storm, wild but short-lived, and, after it had gone and the seas grown calm, it was as though a sheet of glass had formed to separate the world of air from that beneath the surface. The yacht made its way over this glass, barely cracking its surface, borne along by every puff of the barely perceptible breeze. The only sounds were the creaking of the rigging, the waves along the hull.

  The mist pressed about them. When they spoke, it muffled their words. Condensation dripped from the rigging. Their waterproofs shone with moisture and Shannon’s hair was a nest of drops.

  The mist created a world of mystery in which anything was possible. That faint sound could be the whisper of the waves along the hull or surf breaking on a rocky shore. Dangerously near or far away? Impossible to tell. Shadows imprisoned within the drifting fog: a headland or another vessel? In these conditions it was not hard to believe that any minute an ancient ship might burst into view, sails tattered, the skull-headed crew driving her onwards, ever onwards. You could see it or think you saw it, hear the creak of rigging or think you heard it, before it was swallowed up once more by the mist, leaving you unsure whether you’d seen anything or not.

  Flying Dutchman country? Oh yes.

  The map of the islands was inscribed on Shannon’s mind. Hook, Hamilton, Long, North and South Molle, Daydream, Border and Dent; the biggest of them, with its beaches of crushed white coral, Whitsunday Island, with Charles Green the furthest from the mainland and now mercifully out of the hands of the predator who would have despoiled it.

  With its currents and intermittent cyclones, the blue and smiling sea was not always to be trusted. The jigsaw of the islands and the many unnamed rocks could appear and vanish in the haze, making navigation hazardous for those unfamiliar with its waters, but also offering a haven of beauty for those willing to make the voyage of discovery.

  The Dutchman redeemed by love? Oh yes, but not only the mariner. The vessel in which all humanity travelled had for its cargo a hunger for love, the belief that love could be found in the touch of a hand, a smile, in the breath it breathed. I love you. That was the cargo that mattered above all else; the longed-for blessing and redemption.

  Hearing only the warm water plashing on the hull, Shannon and Hal sailed on into the future, seeking the white sands of summer that would now be the focus of their lives.

  AUTHOR’S NOTES

  With the exception of the imaginary Charles Green and Saturn islands, the Whitsunday islands are as described.

  Cyclone Daphne is an invention. However, devastating cyclones in the area are an unhappy but recurrent reality.

  The Australian Women’s Army Service was formed in 1941 and eventually disbanded in 1947. Initially no member of the service was allowed to serve overseas, this regulation being lifted in 1945. Basic pay was two thirds the equivalent wage paid to men.

  Luxurious tented camps have become increasingly popular with well-heeled holidaymakers in recent years.

  The first real-life high-rise building on Queensland’s Gold Coast was Kinkabool, a ten-storey building that is heritage listed. It was built in 1959 and is still standing.

  Development restrictions in force in Queensland after W
orld War Two were lifted in 1952, as described.

  The Darwin raid by elements of the Imperial Japanese air force was as devastating as described, although 19 ack-ack is fictitious. The USS Peary was sunk, with many other vessels, and the loss of life both afloat and ashore was horrendous. The raid differed from that on Pearl Harbor in that at the time of the attack a state of war existed between Australia and Japan. The Darwin authorities refused permission for live ammunition drills to be carried out before the raid. The armaments provided were in the main obsolete, shells fired by the anti-aircraft guns being incapable of reaching the high-flying bombers. As always, the politicians of the day attempted to blame others for their own failures.

  The description of the Tan mansion in Pasir Panjang road is similar to an actual house familiar to the author.

  During the period covered by the book, married women were not permitted to teach. As a widow, Mrs Girdle was an exception to this rule.

  The culinary school in the text is fictitious.

  At the time of Shannon’s first visit to Hong Kong, Wan Chai was a red-light district. It is now one of the busiest commercial areas in the city, although prostitution continues to be a major activity.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I owe so much to so many.

  As always, to my family and their support through times both good and bad. My debt to them is beyond price.

  Similarly to my dear friend Selwa Anthony, who has been my agent for so many years and who, like the most accomplished of pork butchers, has in her professional way always delivered the bacon.

  Similarly to the team at Harlequin Mira: Sue, Jo, both Annabels, Kate and Sarana. Without you none of this would have happened.

  I have used the names of Shannon and Jess with their owners’ permission. The real-life equivalents (not in the least like their fictional counterparts) were until recently running a good restaurant in Westbury, Tasmania, where I have dined on numerous occasions.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  J.H. FLETCHER is the prize-winning author of nineteen novels, published to both critical and popular acclaim in Australia, Germany and the UK, as well as numerous short stories and plays for radio and television. He was educated in England and France and travelled and worked in Europe, Asia and Africa before emigrating to Australia in 1991. Home is a house on the edge of the Western Tier Mountains in northern Tasmania.