Friends Like These

by Wendy Harmer

  ‘It was bought through a company name,’ he said. ‘So I didn’t...so...well, this is a weird coincidence because I think I’ve still got the keys in my glovebox. I did an inspection here this morning when the tenants moved out. Hang on, I’ll be back in a sec.’

  Standing on the sandstone terrace, Jo could understand that the lovely old weatherboard home and its unique position made it worth ten million dollars. The terrace was shaded by an elderly flame tree and when she turned and looked across the vast expanse of lawn behind her, the house—immaculately presented in yellow with navy blue and white trim—presided over all with a warm and inviting presence.

  The first-floor balcony was edged with sturdy white wooden palings threaded with a vibrant orange-flowering vine. Quaint benches were settled back into sandstone ridges under trees. Some were leafy perennials and others already dropping autumn leaves to reveal gnarled branches. A handsome wrought-iron fountain was set in a paved courtyard surrounded by agapanthus sounding the first purple trumpets of the season. It was easy to imagine elegant women in long gowns, wide-brimmed hats and lace gloves taking tea on warm afternoons or gathering at dusk under lanterns strung above pathways. It was idyllic.

  The view to the city skyline was astonishing. The harbour was ribboned with the white foamy wakes of myriad craft. The billowing sails of yachts flitted across the water. Pearly wings of butterflies. Jo sighed with the wonder of it all. She imagined exactly where she would set her easel. That’s why Linda must have sent her here. But if it was going to be demolished...?

  ‘I had no idea something like this even existed,’ marvelled Suze. ‘All up and down the harbour there are these massive split-level joints with pools and huge garages, elevators, all glass and concrete, while this...’ She threw her arms wide and spun on her heels.

  ‘I know,’ nodded Simon. ‘It’s unique. This place has so much history. It’s a reminder of what Watsons Bay used to be. The old colonial Marine Biological Station’s just over the road. That was built in 1881. Timber place, just like this, and it’s protected by the Sydney Harbour Federation Trust. This house should be too, in my opinion.’

  Luxury cruisers bobbed, metal lanyards clinking on masts with the lazy movement of the tide. The arch of the Harbour Bridge was just visible above a bushy headland on the northern shore.

  And then Jo spotted a small flight of blond sandstone steps that led down to the rocks above the water. She paused. Let go of her handbag, which dumped itself at her feet on the stone flagging.

  ‘Oh, my goodness!’

  She flew to the top of the steps, bounded down them, looked to the north and then the west. The aspect was familiar. She ran up the stairs to where Simon and Suze stood.

  ‘Suze, you’re going to think I’m mad, but I think here on this terrace is exactly the spot where Eunice Walpole painted those pictures.’

  Suze wriggled with embarrassment to hear them mentioned, but was soon off and clambering down the steps herself. ‘No!’ she exclaimed. ‘These exact steps? Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes, yes, they’re in the paintings! I remember counting them. Eight steps down to the rocks.’ Jo was pointing one way then the other. ‘One scene from here, where I am. One from halfway down, where you are. The date fits too. And there’s the name: The Cape. Remember? The Walpole sisters were both from Cape Town. You don’t think they could have built this place, or owned it, or...’ Jo fell into silence, pondering the likelihood of various scenarios.

  Suze gathered her long skirt and climbed back up to the terrace, her rubber thongs flapping. ‘You’ve always wanted to solve that mystery,’ she puffed.

  ‘I’ll take the paintings back and see Hannah,’ said Jo. ‘She’s said I can have a look through the college records. But what if it’s true? What if Eunice did paint those pictures here, or even own this house?’

  ‘Then you have to have it,’ said Suze immediately. ‘It’s bizarre you never knew JJ owned it. It was meant for you. I can feel it.’

  Jo silently agreed. One of the reasons she had found it so hard to leave DPLC was that the history of the place anchored her somehow. And here—it was odd—she had the same feeling of belonging.

  ‘Except it has a demolition order on it and it’s been approved for redevelopment,’ Simon reminded them. ‘And that means—’

  ‘What do you think the townhouses will go for?’ Suze interrupted. It was the question Jo wanted to ask, but dreaded the answer.

  ‘Well, it’s a massive block—twelve hundred square metres and a twenty-metre harbour frontage. If the proposal is for just four luxury townhouses, I imagine they could go for eight to ten million each.’

  ‘That’d be...forty million dollars!’ Suze gasped. ‘Forty million,’ she repeated. The thought of that much money was simply...stunning.

  ‘You say it isn’t heritage-listed or protected?’ said Jo, who hadn’t registered the sum of money they were talking about.

  ‘No. For the same reason so much other stuff isn’t,’ said Simon. ‘We rely on volunteers to protect our heritage. And around here, the residents are pretty battle-weary by now. They mounted a mighty battle for Villa Porto Rosa and lost.’

  ‘But forty...million...dollars?!’ Suze exhaled slowly. ‘There’s no fighting that.’ She turned to Jo. ‘Okay, let’s say you have to share it with JJ in the settlement—that’s still twenty million!’

  Jo, mesmerised by the spell of the place, was struggling to understand what Suze was saying. Did she mean it should be demolished?

  For her part, Suze couldn’t believe she was having a conversation that involved numbers in the stratospheric eight figures. Maybe when she was looking at the books for DPLC...But right now, she calculated, Jo was worth the entire college bank account. She thought of her own predicament. Her mind, the same well-oiled mechanism that had driven her for the past few years, began whirring with probabilities, possibilities, schemes, outcomes. If Jo had twenty million dollars...Maybe she could confess everything and Jo would bail her out? If Jo managed to keep the place, would there be any money left for her?

  That was just selfish thinking and stupid. Jo would never speak to her again if she found out about her thievery. Whatever Jo did, Suze had no say in it, but she knew what she’d do. Take the money and run. She was dumbfounded by Jo’s silence. Only someone who had lost touch with reality could think about this for more than a nanosecond. Knock the old dump down! The odds of winning this much money were probably thirty million to one—more! Suze was well versed in the statistics of chance.

  Jo stared back at her, still unable to grasp the magnitude of the figures Suze was totting up and flinging into the air. The black tendrils of Suze’s hair were swirling around her head and she was waving her arms up and down as if they were on strings. ‘You could live anywhere, Jo! Paris, London, New York! Or just put the money in the bank. Live off the interest. You’d be set for life.’

  Set for life. If there was one phrase Jo hated, it was that. She had thought she was ‘set for life’ a year ago and everything had crumbled around her.

  Then, unable to bear the maddening silence a moment longer, Suze barked, ‘You have got to be kidding! You think anyone’s going to remember in six months’ time that there was some old house here?’

  ‘My grandmother will,’ Simon intervened. ‘She’s in her nineties. She’s lived here all her life. She knew the family that lived here and when I told her The Cape was going to be demolished, she was devastated. What if everyone gives up? Sells up? Until everything is concrete and glass? You just said yourself you had no idea this place existed.’

  ‘Maybe it doesn’t deserve to! Maybe it’s exactly like the old crumbling relic on Darling Point,’ Suze shot back. ‘A corner of the world for the rich and selfish who don’t want to share anything and spend all their time keeping people out. If there was a nice flat I could afford, I’d live here.’

  ‘Do you work for a property developer?’ Simon asked,

  a contemptuous tone in his voice. ‘That’s what
they all say.’

  Jo had only been half listening to this exchange. When Suze and Simon turned to her she reluctantly tore herself away from the view and from the palette of colours into which she was already dipping her brush.

  ‘I love it,’ she said. ‘I adore this house and everything about it. It’s like something out of a dream. I’d be happy to stay here till the day I died.’

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  If the vaulted entrance hall was the heart of the old main building of the Darling Point Ladies’ College, then the library was its soul. Jo had always admired the room’s lofty ceilings, arched doorways, elaborate plasterwork columns, pediments and decorative curlicues.

  Ten years ago the paint colours had been restored to the original 1880s scheme—sea green and ferrous red with exuberant touches of bright blue and corn yellow. It seemed gaudy to the modern eye, but reflected the enormous confidence felt by burghers of Sydney in the Victorian era thanks to the extraordinary wealth generated by bounties of gold, wool and wheat.

  Jo was happy for the chance to sit in the library one more time, even though she was now a trespasser. She had been met at a rear entrance by an excitable Hannah McGinty, who was dressed in a flapping black coat and seemed to think she was in some sort of spy caper. She made an unlikely undercover agent. Hannah was just over five foot tall, wore her ginger hair in two long plaits and favoured socks with her Birkenstock sandals. She had trotted along darkened halls, nattering away and stopping now and then to remind Jo to remain silent.

  Hannah had unlocked the archives room off the main library space and stood guard as Jo fossicked. She knew exactly what she was looking for and was soon heading for a reading desk with her arms full of document boxes.

  The steady tick-tock of a handsome grandfather clock and the occasional sound of the pages of a heavy art book being turned by Hannah, who was curled in an armchair some distance off, were the only sounds to be heard.

  Under a light shaded by amber glass, Jo spread various artefacts on a reading desk. There were copies of original photographs and paintings, most of them well known to Jo; they’d been hanging on the college walls for as long as she could remember. There were also files of personal letters, documents and ancient newspaper cuttings.

  The images were familiar. Here was Jo’s favourite painted portrait of Eunice Walpole, which still hung in Felicity Hall. In it Eunice was standing erect, dressed in a royal-blue silk three-quarter-length jacket over a full skirt. The fashion was from mid-Victorian times and the jacket was securely buttoned from her neck to her tiny waist—its improbable circumference no doubt due to the marvels of whalebone corsetry. It could have been quite severe in effect, but there were lovely, feminine touches. A ruff of cream lace sprouted at the neck and sleeves and a corsage of gay spring flowers decorated one lapel.

  Eunice had a long, elegant face that was quite striking. Big eyes and full lips. Her chestnut hair was pulled back, but the plainness of the style had been softened with the addition of pin-curls around her forehead. She wore a pair of small pearl drop earrings. Eunice’s long, expressive fingers rested on a green-baize-topped side table stacked with what appeared to be important educational tomes.

  More than once Jo had seen that she and Eunice shared a resemblance.

  What had happened to her? It didn’t seem to be anything sinister, from what Jo could divine from the rest of the boxes’ contents. There were no records of police investigations or mentions of a ‘missing person’. However, even in private letters written to Augusta and by Augusta to others, Eunice was never mentioned. After June in 1883, she had just ceased to exist. Perhaps two hundred years later, someone would wonder the same about Josephine Margaret Blanchard? Deputy headmistress one day and then...nothing.

  Jo turned her attention to a copy of a photograph she had seen many times before and was very fond of. She recalled that the original was still on the wall in the boarders’ common room. It was taken, she guessed, around the turn of the century. A relaxed and happy daytime scene of a group—men, women and children—sitting on grass with the remains of a picnic at their feet. They were on a summer outing, by the looks of it, the women in long white dresses, again buttoned up to the throat, with sashes at the waist. The small boys wore broad-brimmed hats and sailor suits. The girls were in long dresses too, their wavy hair loosed from constricting plaits. Behind them stood the men, all heavily moustached. One on a black horse, others in dark suits, variously bare-headed or wearing bowler hats.

  Now as she looked more closely, Jo was sure that was Eunice under a large sunhat, standing on the left. And then, in a pulse-racing moment of recognition, Jo saw exactly what she was looking for. Behind them, she was positive, was the distinctive roofline of The Cape and its pair of dormer windows.

  Jo turned the photograph over. Nothing on the back. That was a frustrating oversight. She hunted frantically through a pile of papers, and couldn’t find anything that would decode the scene. Perhaps, though, there might be a caption still stuck to the back of the original.

  ‘Hannah!’ she whispered urgently. ‘We have to go on a little expedition.’ Hannah leaped to her feet, eager for more clandestine activity. She led the way back through the gloomy labyrinth of hallways and across the vast, echoing space of the entrance hall.

  They went out through a side door, but Jo couldn’t resist a detour to the front stairs of the college. There she paused as she’d always done. Just a moment to place her foot on the worn stone and one last chance to feel its comforting hollow. She couldn’t imagine ever coming back here again. She stepped onto the path that glowed under the moonlight. White quartz crunched under her feet.

  ‘Ssshh!’ admonished Hannah.

  Jo immediately left the path to walk on a springy cushion of grass.

  ‘There’s a security guard doing the rounds. He’ll be up the back by the tennis courts now, but back this way soon,’ Hannah whispered, and off she darted, her ginger plaits swinging.

  They hurried through the darkened grounds—through the upper and lower quad and across the Great Lawn. Jo caught the scent of the last of the frangipanis and tardy gardenias even as she was thinking that it was ridiculous to be creeping through the place like a criminal. She knew every inch of the college and could have found her way around with her eyes closed.

  At the front door of the boarders’ building, Hannah punched numbers into a security keypad, and when they were inside, Jo was almost overcome by the familiar aroma of fruit-scented shampoo, instant noodles and sports socks. With thirty girls slumbering upstairs, the old place seemed to be softly breathing.

  The cosy common room was furnished with armchairs and couches covered in floral linen slipcovers and lit by antique lamps on monumental cedar sideboards. Jo soon found what she was seeking. The old photograph was in a gilt frame, one of a dozen in a collection. She took it down from the wall, turned it over and peeled off the tape and backing. This seemed to be causing Hannah almost physical pain. She was chewing on the end of one of her plaits and her eyes were bulging in alarm.

  ‘Please do be very, very careful,’ she implored.

  ‘I will,’ Jo promised.

  Then she had the original photograph in her hands—a fragile sliver of history. On the back, sure enough, stuck down with crumbling adhesive tape, was a typed caption:

  From the Woodward Family Collection.

  March 2, 1888.

  Picnic for the workers on beachfront, Watsons Bay, after completion of ‘The Cape’, newly built residence of Mr William ‘Henry’ Donnithorne, merchant and builder, orig. Cape of Good Hope (deceased January 1888).

  From left: Jack Woodward and wife Sarah (née Humphreys) with children Sarah, Emily and Polly. Mr Cecil Dunn with wife Catherine (née Gibson) and children (names unknown).

  The late Mr Henry Donnithorne’s wife Eunice (née Walpole) with her children Albert (on pony), Eliza (with bucket) and baby Harry.

  Can anyone recognise anyone else in this old photo?

  Jo c
ould. On closer inspection she was sure she could see Augusta standing at the back, half in shadow, almost obscured by a child’s head. She was shorter and plainer than her younger sister, but the family resemblance was there in her long, lugubrious face. It was telling that Augusta wasn’t identified. Perhaps she was hanging at the back of the group, obscured, by design.

  She looked to be holding a toddler in her arms. Surely that couldn’t be Augusta’s child? She was always referred to as a ‘spinster’ in all the records. Forty years as headmistress and not a whiff of scandal. It seemed to be a boy, dressed in an identical suit to the older fellow on the pony. A sibling to Eunice’s other identified children? Maybe, judging by his age, the twin of Eliza with the bucket?

  ‘So this photo’s from 1888,’ said Jo. ‘How old do you think the child is who’s sitting on that pony? Albert, Eunice’s son.’

  Hannah donned reading glasses and peered closely. ‘Maybe six or seven. Although children were much smaller back then. Maybe older.’

  ‘So, let me put these dates together. Eunice came to Darling Point in 1880 from Cape Town. The man she married, Henry, came from there too, according to this.’

  ‘Maybe he followed her? Or she came to meet him? That’s terribly romantic.’

  ‘I suppose we’ll never know exactly what happened, but if she married Henry Donnithorne before that boy had been conceived, say in 1881 or 1882, she would have still been headmistress here. But there’s no mention of her marriage in the records or the newspapers. She definitely left the college as Miss Walpole, a single woman.’

  ‘You think she was unmarried and pregnant?’

  ‘She must have been.’

  ‘Ooh! Extremely bad form for the headmistress of a girls’ school.’ Hannah frowned. ‘They would have excommunicated her for that in those days.’

  There was that word again. Excommunicated. Jo knew what that felt like. She jotted down the details in her notebook, placed the photo back in its frame and replaced the backing as best she could.