A Judgement on a Life

by Stephen Baddeley

  Other things were happening in London which disturbed me more than the Mondarah Hotel works. There were things developing which might affect Tom’s life in a more significant way. These were uncertain as yet and I was certainly not about to worry him with early disclosures of events that may have turned out to be of no concern. I thought that was the right thing to do, at the time. What I didn’t know until later was that these new developments would not involve only Tom and his family, but all of us.

  Twenty-Six

  Maybe I shouldn’t worry. Maybe Munroe & Sons were right. Maybe it was a commercial matter. Just a commercial matter. Maybe it was Prouse increasing his wealth. Maybe nothing more. Maybe it was Prouse unsettling me. Maybe nothing more. Maybe it was Prouse increasing his wealth, and unsettling me. Was unsettling me a bonus? Maybe nothing more?

  But I knew it wasn’t ‘nothing more’. I knew it was more than that. I knew Prouse. I knew it was more than that.

  But what was it about? How did buying the Mondarah Hotel fit his plans? How did closing it, renovating it, fit his plans? If it was to unsettle me, just unsettle me, he was succeeding. Annie was unsettled too. I knew that.

  It was the start of a new game. I knew that. I lost the game at his club, but we won in the Caribbean. Would this game be a long game? Or would it be a short game? Would it be over soon? What were the rules? Was that for Prouse to decide? He had the upper hand again. We were on the back foot again. So, he could set the rules again. What would happen next? I didn’t know. It wouldn’t be what I expected. I knew that.

  Would he want his ‘pound of flesh’? Flesh, from the anxiety he was wanting me to feel?

  The optimist in me, the part of me that sparkled in the sunlight, said ‘not to worry’. There was nothing he could do to us. We were insulated against what he could do to us. What he thought he could do to us. We were a team. We had Mr Munroe to keep us safe. Mr Munroe and Iain, the Macs and Jimmies, to keep us safe.

  Then there was the other part of me. The part of me that never saw the sunlight. That part didn’t agree. It was the realist part of me. The cynical part of me. The part of me that knew how the real world worked. How men like Prouse worked. How men like Prouse thought. What men liked Prouse wanted. What they were prepared to do, to get what they wanted. I didn’t like that part of me. I kept it hidden in a place that never saw the light.

  Sometimes, I went down to that place, and spoke to that part of me. I liked knowing he was there. There for if I ever needed him. There for when I ever needed him. Because I knew I would need him, one day, before the games were over.

  I didn’t tell Annie. Not about Prouse’s second demand. I knew she was unsettled about Mondarah.

  I was going to keep her safe. Keep all of them safe. I was going to protect them with everything I had. With whatever it took to keep them safe. I would kill for them. Do murder for them. Do multiple murder for them. Whatever it took. I would die for them.

  Ambrosia was our saviour. I wasn’t surprised. Perhaps a bit surprised. She was an uneducated woman, or was when we met, but there was always wisdom. Deep-down wisdom, she didn’t know she had. Wisdom that filled her storage-places. My storage-places were filled with ‘facts’. Just ‘facts’ and the facts that filled the storage-places of my mind left no room for wisdom.

  Ambrosia was good and she was wise.

  “Knowest we not the depths of love? Hath not we three, we happy three, we band of lovers, not heard the chimes of midnight in each other’s arms? Doest we but dwell upon the neritic nature of sad, sad human discord? Or doest we yearn for the wild and wasteful ocean and be now in the bosom of the ocean buried?” I was proud of her. It wasn’t perfect, but I was proud of her. Shakespeare would have been too.

  She returned to the twentieth century, and continued.

  “We’re happy. The three of us are as happy as it is possible to be. When the girls are older, we’ll share that happiness with them, so why should we let this sad, bad man decide how we feel? Why should we let him be the one who decides whether we are happy or not? He is the damaged one, not us. He is the one with the twisted soul that will never fit through the eye of any needle. We should pity him, not fear him. He is the one who has the monkey of hate on his back. Tom, you are cured of that now, you are stronger than him, and together we are one hundred times stronger than him. So what if he wants to build a hotel across there, so what if he builds it where we can see it. We need to forget him, and we need to ignore him. If we ignore him, he will go away. Men like that do not last long. Their hatreds and their power consume them in the end. Those books you give me, Tom, they all say that. I know I’m just an uneducated black girl, but I know that without having to read what all those clever men said in all those clever books. Evil is always its own destroyer.”

  We sat in silence. I didn’t know what to say. Annie didn’t know what to say either. This ‘uneducated black girl’ just charted our course for us. We knew that Prouse would consume us, if we let him. We knew that, if we spent our lives thinking about him, and worrying about him, he would win. We won in the Caribbean by ignoring the threat of him. Ignoring the threat of him and being friendly to him. Ignoring what he did to us. Ignoring what he did to Annie. And if we were to go on winning, it would be because we did the same. We knew ignoring the threat of him was the way to win. Perhaps, being nice to him, perhaps, by being friendly to him, would help us win. They were our rules to make. We weren’t going to play by anybody else’s.

  She was good and she was wise, and no one needs an education to be either of those things.

  Prouse had education without wisdom. The same as Father did and the same as I did too. All the ‘things’ he knew didn’t make him wise. They made him a stupid, vengeful man who only knew ‘things’. Father was a stupid man, who only knew ‘things’ too. He knew things that were the wrong things to know. The things he didn’t know were more important than the things he did. He didn’t know it was his money that was making him miserable.

  When I first met Annie and then met Ambrosia, I knew ‘things’ without being wise. I thought that might have changed with the years. I hoped so. It might have, a bit. You can never be sure.

  I liked the thought of Father being miserable and I liked the thought of Prouse being miserable too. The thought of our happiness being the cause of Prouse’s unhappiness made me happier.

  So that’s what we did. We decided to do nothing. We decided to ignore him. We decided to go about our lives and ‘think not on he’. It was easy to say. Not so easy to do. But we improved. The ‘thinking not on he’ added to our lives. It made better the things we did think on. It bound us more closely. We became one. That sounds corny, but we did.

  Twenty-Seven

  J. Maz rang me at home. It was midnight. We were already asleep. He asked me to come into the office. I knew he meant ‘now’. So I did.

  He was worried. He saw things to worry him. We were under attack. Our stocks were falling. They did that sometimes. We both knew that. They went up and down as stocks do. This wasn’t one of them that was falling. It wasn’t a few of them. It was all of them. What the hell was going on? J. Maz knew what was going on. He explained it to me. He explained what was going on. What was just beginning. We were under attack. I didn’t ask who from. I didn’t have to. I knew who from. Then Mr Munroe called. Then things got worse. I didn’t tell Annie.

  Twenty-Eight

  I enjoyed lecturing at the uni, and I enjoyed the freedom the dean gave me. He wanted a first year curriculum to cover ‘Art’. Everything from the beginning of time to the present. He wanted Art History 101, and I gave it to him. He wanted three lectures a week for the full year, so that’s what I gave him. Tommy came to all of them.

  The Trust was almost running itself now. J. Maz steered it along the paths they’d decided on and Tommy didn’t need to be in the office as much as he used to. The Trust was Tommy’s idea, but it was now J. Maz’s ‘baby’
, and Tommy trusted him to run it as well as it could be run. Tommy was happy that the money was being dispersed, even though, the way J. Maz looked after it, the Trust seemed always to be getting richer. That didn’t seem to worry Tommy as much as I thought it might, and not as much as it used to, because, as he told me, the money J. Maz was making, the ‘good’ money, was diluting the ‘bad’ money his father spent his life accumulating, and as Tommy told me too, accumulating at the expense of vulnerable people, the people Tommy and J. Maz were now trying to help.

  Tommy came to my lectures and I liked knowing he was there, watching me and listening to me. I think, having him there, made me better than I would have been if he hadn’t been. In London, at the NPG, I always prepared well for my public lectures, and I knew that what I gave the public was better than anything they got from the other curators. In Canberra, at the NGOA, I did the same, but then I was a senior curator, the senior curator of the European Art and Sculpture department, so I was expected to be good, so I made sure that I was.

  There was a time when Parliament was sitting, before Dad retired from the Senate, and Mum and Dad came to one of the lectures. As I drove them home afterwards, Dad sat next to me in the passenger seat. I knew there was something wrong. I looked at him and he was crying. He said how proud he was of me, and how stupid he was, not to have come to any of the others.

  I think, as we get older, our emotions rise to the surface more. He would never have cried when he was younger, however proud he was.

  I think, because of the uni lectures, I was asked to join the board of the Northern Territory Museum and Art Gallery. I was honoured and accepted.

  I was keeping busy. I had the uni, the museum and I had our family. I spent as much time with the girls as I could. They both looked like me, but they both had curly red hair. They didn’t look anything like Tommy. You may know that already, but you may know too, that they were both little Tommies in everything else. Everything except how they looked.

  I’d learned a lot about being in love, from the time I met Tommy and Ambrosia. I’d never been in love, not before I met them. I’d loved my parents, of course, and my brothers, but that’s sort of different, as we all know it is. But when the girls were born, a whole new dimension opened up inside me. This was something more than ‘just’ love, because it was something that went down into the archives of what it meant to be a human being. There was something I felt that had been felt by every mother, for every child, from the beginning of time. The feeling I got, when I looked at them, was the same feeling that Neanderthal mothers and Cro-Magnon mothers would have got. It was the feeling I got, that the whole reason for my life, the whole raison d’être of my existence, was tied up in the safety and succour of these two girls. I would do more than die for them. They were my passport to eternity. I loved them and would protect them in a way only a parent, and perhaps only a mother, could ever understand.

  I wondered why it was so important for me to fill my days. To not allow myself too much ‘unstructured time’. I knew the answer to that. I knew I didn’t want to think about the things I didn’t want to think about. Things about Peter and the Major and what their plans might be, but I didn’t want to think things about Tommy either, and about what his plans might be, and about whether Tommy was talking to Iain, and what they might be talking about. I knew if Tommy and Iain were talking, Tommy would never tell me about it. There were some parts of Tommy that were closed off to me now, and I knew that was one of those parts. I knew Tommy wouldn’t want to worry me with the things he might be thinking about Peter and the Major. Not unless I needed to be worried about them. Sometimes it may be best not to know bad things, but sometimes it is, and I was soon to learn that for me, right then, it would have been best to know about the bad things, even the really bad things, and especially the really bad things, and to have known about them in advance.

  We still sailed at weekends, but didn’t sail across the harbour anymore. There was no point, we couldn’t go there for lunch. We pretended to ourselves that that was the reason we didn’t sail across the harbour. We pretended to one another too. We both knew we were pretending.

  I spent time with Ambrosia. How could I not?

  We were friends. How could we not be? She let us put our embryos inside her. She let them grow inside her until they were real people with curly red hair, big noses and mouths too wide for their faces. Mouths that giggled about things none of us would ever be allowed to know. Things closed to anyone who wasn’t them.

  “Annie, I want to go off the tablets,” she said. “I want Tom’s baby, my own baby, someone who has Tom and me inside them.”

  I knew how she felt. Why wouldn’t she feel like that? I’d felt like that for years and without her I would still be feeling like that. She was my saviour, my knight in shining armour, her womb became my womb, a scarlet gift.

  She wanted her own baby and it was the right thing to want. Every woman, who loves a man, wants to have his baby, or they should. If she doesn’t there will be times ahead when she wished she had.

  We didn’t talk to Tommy about it, not then.

  She wanted to have a baby and I wanted her to have one too. Why wouldn’t I? Without her we wouldn’t have the girls, the bits of us that would travel on into the future and make us immortal.

  Without Ambrosia I wouldn’t have the children I spent years knowing I could never have. Ambrosia and Tommy were the saviours of my life. Without them, I would still have had a life, and I would have made it a happy life, but it would always have been a part of a life, not a complete life. Not the life I would have written for myself when I was a girl, so I knew what Ambrosia was feeling, because I’d felt that way for years.

  Having Tommy’s baby would change our family, we both knew that. Things would be different, and the things that would make it different would be good things. We hoped they would only be good things.

  So, Ambrosia wanted Tommy’s baby, and I wanted that too.

  But, what you get in life isn’t always what you want to get, and sometimes what you get is what you didn’t want to get at all.

  Twenty-Nine

  J. Maz liked medium-sized companies. Sometimes small ones. He avoided big ones. He avoided blue-chips. We made more money that way. ‘Good’ money to dilute the ‘bad’ money. Now, all of them were dropping, and all of them at once. Just starting to drop, but all of them, and all at once, all around the world.

  This was what was happening. This was how it worked. This is what J. Maz told me.

  It was called ‘shorting’. We were being ‘shorted’. But being ‘shorted’ with a difference.

  This was how it worked: Mr X. borrowed stock from Mr Y./Institution Y. and paid a fee for doing so. Mr X. then, immediately, sold the stock he borrowed, in the expectation that it would go down, that it would depreciate. He was betting against the stock he borrowed. If he was right and the stock did go down, did depreciate, he would buy it back at the reduced price, return it to Mr Y./Institution Y. and pocket the profit. If he was wrong, and the stock went up, appreciated, he swallowed the loss. It was an uncertain and risky business for Mr X.

  But that wasn’t all that was happening here.

  This is what he told me: If Mr X. borrowed enough stock from enough Mr Ys and enough Institution Ys, paid a fee for doing so, and then, immediately, sold the stock he borrowed, he would stimulate the cycle of greed and fear that dominates the market, and perhaps dominates all human existence. He would then make the stock go down, drive it to depreciate. He would then buy it back at the reduced price, return the stock to Mr Ys and Institution Ys, pocket the profit, and leave all the other stockholders poorer than before.

  If Mr X. borrowed every bit of stock from every Mr Y. and every Institution Y, paid a fee for doing so, and then, immediately, sold the stock he borrowed, Mr X. would make a considerable profit and any remaining stockholders would go broke. That’s what was happening here. That’s
what J. Maz thought.

  That wasn’t what Mr Munroe was ringing about.

  Thirty

  I didn’t just want Tom’s baby, I needed his baby, and I wanted and needed his baby more than I had ever wanted or needed anything before in my whole life.

  I love having sex, you know that. I love everything about it; looking forward to it, doing it, doing it again, and lying afterwards with my lovers beside me. Hearing the sleeping breath of my lovers, feeling the sleeping breath of a lover on my neck. Sex was what I lived for and what I was put on this earth for. Mrs Thomas, my schoolmistress, knew that. She said I should try to think of other things, higher things. Did she mean things above the waist or things the minister talked about in church? The things that would make Jesus happy? Ever since I was a little girl I’d wanted to make Jesus happy, but I knew the things I did to myself, and then let other people do to me, made him sad for me. But I knew Jesus would understand how I felt, and that he would forgive me. I knew his father wouldn’t forgive me and that he was going to send me to hell when I died. The fear of hell wasn’t as bad as the fear of not having sex.

  I loved sex, I loved everything about it, but if I had to choose between sex with Tom and having his baby, then I would be content never to have sex again, not after he gave me our baby.

  (When Tom read that last sentence, he laughed and said he didn’t believe me. Then he picked me up out of my wheelchair, carried me into the bedroom, and made love to me.)