Keepers of the House

by JH Fletcher

  ‘You expect me to chuck everything and traipse off to New York or Geneva or wherever the hell it is? I’m a journalist. A good one. What can you offer that’ll make it worth my while going to Geneva with you?’

  Like a fist in the face.

  ‘Aren’t I enough?’

  From Mark’s expression it was evident she was not. ‘You expect everyone to fit in with your career. I’ve a career, too.’

  ‘You told me yourself you’d like another challenge!’

  ‘I prefer to pick my own challenges.’

  ‘And so do I!’

  He seized her hands. ‘I want a future for us. A child.’

  It was a peace offering, of sorts, but Anna was in no mood for peace offerings.

  ‘A child? At my age? Get real.’

  ‘Plenty of women start families when they’re older than you …’

  It was true, but she brushed his protest aside.

  ‘You say you want us to have a future. We’d have that, wherever we were. But it sounds to me as though you only want it here.’

  On and on, the words as spiked and painful as the spears of golden light, until at last neither of them could bear it any more and Mark drove back to his own place, which had not been part of their arrangements, at all.

  Alone in the cool emptiness of the big house, Anna seethed, furiously. She had said no. For his sake and her own. What had he been so upset about?

  ‘All I did was talk about it …’

  That was the point. To talk implied thinking and that, of course, was the crime.

  The point is you’re thinking of moving on.

  Yet her sense of injustice burned; it had not even been her idea, for heaven’s sake. She told herself that if he had cared he would have understood. He knew how important this job was. She had said it was too big a problem, that no one could hope to resolve it, but did that mean she should not try?

  At least it would give her the chance to do what she could to put right so much that was wrong in the world. How could he expect her to reject such an opportunity, to settle back into the knife-pit of the Sydney business world, to be content with the endless accumulation of wealth?

  Yet that was what she had done. She had said no. Which did not mean she could not change her mind.

  She would sleep on it, she decided. In the morning, she would call him, they would discuss it again, like the rational beings they were. She lay in bed, once again remembering how she had waited for him that night, the cocoon of tenderness that had enveloped her, her eager acceptance of the future. They were so much alike: both ambitious, both determined. She had welcomed their similarity, believing that it would bring strength, yet now felt only fear and desolation; fear that their unyielding temperaments would make it impossible for them to build a life together; desolation because a future without Mark would be no more than a desert of futility and loss.

  In the morning she phoned him, found she did not know what to say. Instead, he said it for her.

  ‘You’ve made up your mind, haven’t you?’

  Until that moment she had not known, but he was right. ‘Yes.’

  Silence, then.

  ‘Keep me in the picture. Okay?’

  ‘Of course. Mark —’

  Too late. He was gone.

  She phoned Shongwe in Canberra, got through to him straightaway.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’ve thought it over.’ And paused. She could hear him waiting, silently. Eventually she said, ‘I will talk to them. If they truly want me. I make no promises. Afterwards, we’ll see.’

  A week later she had her reply, contacted Mark at once.

  ‘They want to see me.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The Secretary General. In New York.’

  ‘When are you leaving?’

  His voice as cold as the Arctic.

  ‘In three days.’

  ‘You’ll be pleased.’ It was an accusation.

  ‘I’m scared.’

  ‘You’ll manage it all right.’

  ‘It’s not just the job.’ From somewhere she found the courage and humility to say what was most in her heart. ‘Can I see you? Before I go?’

  It seemed like years before he answered. ‘Let’s leave it till you get back. Give me a ring then. Okay?’

  Despair devastated her.

  ‘Mark?’ Her voice small.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I love you.’

  ‘I love you, too.’ He spoke angrily; in her ears it sounded almost like a threat.

  She said, ‘Lots of people work in different countries. Modern planes —’

  ‘Lots of people,’ he repeated. ‘Not me.’

  Nothing, where before had seemed everything.

  ‘I’ll phone you from New York.’

  He said, ‘You said I could give up my job and go with you, if you got it. Tell me something …’

  ‘Yes?’ Eagerly.

  ‘Would you do the same, if our positions were reversed?’

  And put down the phone, gently, before she could reply.

  She flew to New York, spent an hour with the Secretary General, a week with various officials.

  A small brown man with gold-rimmed glasses told her, ‘They’ll hate you out there. You know that, don’t you?’

  ‘Why should they?’

  ‘Because you’ll be rocking the boat. There are empires,’ he told her excitedly. ‘Emperors with their own courts. Hunger is big business, let me tell you. Some people do very well out of it.’

  ‘While others starve.’

  He brushed that aside; the starving were irrelevant. ‘They won’t thank you for it,’ he threatened.

  At the end of the week, she went back to the Secretary General and presented him with a list of stipulations.

  Funding. Staffing. Autonomy. Access.

  ‘Access?’

  ‘I have to see you, if necessary.’

  He thought about it. ‘Very well.’

  ‘There has to be a formal commitment,’ she told him. ‘In writing. Five years minimum.’

  He hesitated but in the end agreed to that also.

  When they had gone through her list, the Secretary General looked at her. ‘Is that it? Have you made up your mind?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  A frown flickered. ‘What more can you possibly want?’

  She didn’t want it at all. She could see so clearly the bureaucracy, the endless politics, the graft and argument, the remorseless sniping of subordinates and media, the conspiracies of those with their own agendas … The prospect filled her with an overwhelming weariness and, yes, fear.

  Fear was something new.

  All the years she had been a director of companies, conjuring millions of dollars out of the commercial air in which she lived and breathed, she had never once been afraid. Now that had changed. She thought she might welcome the fear; it measured the value of what she was being asked to do, the sacrifice that might be demanded of her.

  The Secretary General was watching her, his expression strange, as though somehow he had read her thoughts.

  She said, ‘There’s one more thing.’

  She spent a whirlwind fortnight, travelling extensively. She was insulted by a Belgian doctor in Rwanda, patronised by an Earl in London, in New York was harangued by an Australian of unbelievable arrogance, who seemed to feel his prerogatives in the international aid industry would be damaged by her appointment.

  ‘I shall white-ant you to death,’ he threatened, bloodshot eye as ferocious as his blow-dried hair, his whisky breath. ‘Time I’m finished with you, girlie, you’ll wish you’d never been born.’

  Everywhere she heard tales: handouts for mates, first class travel for hangers-on, bribes to insurgents who stole the food anyway. Politicians, police, military all looking for a cut. An English doctor plotted to procure a supply of nubile children; another a knighthood.

  All this while the starving and diseased died.

  ‘I refer you to Hercules,’
an erudite Indian official warned her. ‘The Augean stables would be a picnic in comparison with what you are having here.’

  ‘Never mind stables,’ Anna said, ‘I shall need a tank regiment before I’m through.’

  She went back to New York, spent two days sequestered in a borrowed house on the Atlantic coast. It was cold. She rugged up and walked the dunes, watched the green and grey teeth of the rollers as they crashed, smoking, upon the land. She sat for hours in the weather-tight house with its pegged floors and panelled walls.

  I must be sure. Say yes and I am bound. If I take this job I shall stick with it, whatever the cost. I must be sure.

  She went to bed, slept restlessly. In the morning she had to return to New York to give the Secretary General her answer.

  When she woke, she was calm. For the last time she patrolled the weed-dark beach. Fear remained, but had brought back meaning to her life. Everything she had been doing until now, however competently, had been nothing, because she as a person had never been involved.

  Now you find out. You have wasted fifteen years of your life. No, she thought, that is untrue. It is not the time spent in Sydney boardrooms that matters, but my failure to realise that what I was doing was ultimately meaningless.

  Ben had been right. She had left her feet in the trough, not out of greed, but because she had not even realised she was doing it. The opportunity she had now was to salvage something from the years of life that remained.

  The prospect filled her with wonderment, an eager impatience to get on with it. She turned back to the house, the car waiting in the driveway.

  The Secretary General met her at the door of his office, escorted her to an upholstered chair. ‘Have you made up your mind?’

  ‘One final thing.’ She saw his expression. ‘Forgive me, but it’s necessary. If I take this job, I shall need worldwide support. That will mean international promotion and the budget to go with it.’

  He shook his head despairingly. ‘More money?’

  ‘You said yourself that this is the greatest challenge facing the world. We can’t meet it without funding and proper promotion.’

  ‘How do you plan to obtain this promotion?’

  ‘I have a few ideas.’

  ‘If I can persuade the Assembly to agree, will this be your final requirement?’

  She smiled at him cheekily, risking all. ‘For the moment.’

  Although I still haven’t said I’ll do it. He hasn’t even asked me yet. Maybe he won’t. Maybe he’s decided I’m not the right person for the job.

  ‘Very well.’ The Secretary General studied her for a moment. ‘Tell me what you have in mind.’

  She phoned him.

  ‘I’ve got it.’

  ‘I never doubted you would.’

  She laughed, elated by success, by the challenge she had embraced. ‘Then you were a lot more confident than I was.’

  ‘Is this on or off the record?’

  His voice was cold but she refused to listen to more than the words. ‘Off the record. Of course. There’ll be an announcement from New York. But I didn’t ring you because you’re a journalist —’

  ‘You’ll be based in Geneva?’

  ‘It won’t make any difference where I’m based. I’ll be all over the place. For quite a while, certainly.’

  ‘It won’t work, Anna. Australia’s too far —’

  ‘I have to talk to you about that, too. I’ve an idea.’ With a confidence she did not feel, she said, ‘I think you’ll like it —’

  ‘You want me to move to Geneva?’

  ‘It would involve that, yes. But —’

  ‘Forget it.’

  From halfway around the earth, desperately, she threw her appeal at him. ‘Listen to me! Please! We owe each other that much, surely?’

  Silence. Then, ‘Give me a call when you get back.’

  ‘Meet me?’

  Again silence. ‘We’ll talk when you’re back in Sydney.’

  There were rumours; no avoiding them with something as big as this. When she landed at Kingsford Smith, the media was waiting. They gave her the full treatment. Cameras zoomed, jostling reporters screamed questions in her face. Somehow she kept her cool.

  ‘I’ll be making a statement,’ she promised. ‘Tomorrow.’

  Got away, looked for Mark’s face.

  Nothing. He was not there.

  Anna phoned Mark’s office on her mobile, determined he was in, took a taxi direct from the airport.

  He was in a meeting. His secretary looked down her nose, unforgiving of Anna’s treatment all those months ago. Instead his assistant, who had a motherly interest in him — in Anna, too, perhaps — said she would tip him the wink. And did so, whispering mouse-like into the phone.

  She beamed triumphantly. ‘He’ll be out directly.’

  Five minutes later he was, escorting his visitor to the door, the air between them bright with laughter. He came back. No laughter now.

  ‘Come into my office.’

  He ignored the easy chairs, went and sat behind his desk. Anna felt the skin tighten on her face. She thought, Here we go.

  He stared at her appraisingly. There was a flinty harshness in his gaze, in the stillness of the air that separated them. It augured badly for what she had come to say.

  ‘You’ve done it, then.’

  She had looked for congratulations; this sounded more like an accusation.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Based in Geneva?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He nodded, judiciously assessing the impossibility of the situation that she had created. ‘So that’s it.’

  Resentment stabbed. ‘That’s not it! Or needn’t be. Unless it’s what you want, of course.’

  Not by the flicker of an eyelid did Mark acknowledge that.

  ‘On the phone you said you had an idea. What was it?’

  She remembered what Adam Shongwe had said. ‘I want to do you a favour …’

  ‘When people say that, I get nervous.’

  Yet first and last Mark was a journalist and listened without interruption as she told him of her discussion with the Secretary General in his office high up in the United Nations building.

  She had stood at the huge window, staring down at New York, the river with its bridges bright in the sun. Down there was the frenzied city; here the room was quiet as she spelled out how she intended to go about realising their shared vision of a world without poverty.

  ‘I shall run the Agency like a business,’ she said. ‘Profit-orientated.’

  The Secretary General’s face gleamed like an Ashanti mask in the shadowed room. ‘You intend to make money out of it?’

  ‘The profit will be our results. Total accountability. So much money in, so much return. Lives saved, nutrition levels raised, dams built, soil conservation classes. Everything accounted for.’ She smiled. ‘Our shareholders are entitled to see what they’re getting for their money.’

  ‘What you’re suggesting is impossible. Welfare, good water, good sanitation, cannot be quantified in financial terms. Utterly impossible.’

  ‘Utterly,’ she agreed, ‘but I intend to do it. There will be divisional heads within each region. They will be responsible for identifying the various facets of the problem and coming up with solutions. Or suggestions for solutions.’

  ‘It will not happen in your lifetime.’

  ‘Of course not. But if we can create a culture of right thinking in the decision-makers, the benefits may eventually filter through to the victims themselves. One of the first things they must learn is to stop thinking of themselves as victims at all.’

  ‘That means changing the mental attitudes of the whole world.’

  ‘I’ve an idea about that, too. We have to link the donors with those for whom the money is given. We have to promote the idea that supporting the Agency is not charity, but self-preservation. Because poverty means more than starvation; it means war and pestilence. Unchecked, it will eventually engulf us all, rich n
ations as well as poor. The Agency is our lifeline to survival. We have to make sure we get that message across.’

  ‘How do you propose to do that?’

  ‘Our own television studio. Our own newspaper. Fulltime, professionally trained and funded. It will compete with the top journals, it will carry the same news they do, but it will also cover everything the Agency does or hopes to do. It will spread the word.’

  ‘And who is to run this media empire you are proposing?’

  ‘I’ve an idea about that, too.’

  ‘Me?’ Mark said. ‘You want me to do it?’

  ‘Naturally. Think what a challenge —’

  ‘You’re out of your mind.’

  ‘Of course. You have to be to take on a job like this.’ She was higher than cocaine would make her on her vision. ‘Think of it! No limits to what can and can’t be done. It could be the salvation of the earth.’

  ‘What you’re saying is impossible.’

  ‘It is impossible. So let’s do it.’

  The vision, perhaps the very impossibility of the vision, licked her like a flame. It burned in every part of her, gleaming in her eyes, in the molten words flowing ceaselessly from her mouth, even in the way she walked. It had taken her over completely.

  So this is what she is truly like, Mark thought. I always knew it was there but never thought to see it.

  The power of her vision awed him but he knew that neither now or ever would he be able to go along. The fire was not for him. It made him envious that anyone could know such passion, possess the courage and ability to take on such an impossible task. She would fail, because no one could succeed in what she had undertaken, but that was unimportant. Even failure would be glorious.

  Resentment sharpened his tongue. ‘A house journal. Who’d read it?’

  ‘I’m offering you the biggest job you’ll ever have. And the chance to do some good in the world.’

  The vastness of the job was the problem, of course.

  ‘People sneer at the idea of doing good but it’s more fun than you might imagine.’

  ‘How would you know?’ He could not resist the gibe.

  ‘We both know it.’ She looked at him, eyes shining. ‘What about it?’