Friends Like These

by Wendy Harmer

  ‘And JJ’s about to find out just how miserable things can get. Have you got the footage ready?’ Patrick had asked.

  Jo nodded.

  ‘And you’ve made a back-up, just in case?’ Jo had done that too. ‘Because I imagine his first reaction will be to try and destroy it.’

  Jo didn’t think he would. He would know there was no point when he found out Tory had been the one to record it.

  ‘Anyway, make sure you know exactly what to say. Don’t back down and don’t feel sorry for him.’

  She wouldn’t. She didn’t feel sorry for him anymore after what Tory had said. ‘Mum, I listen to you and Patrick go on with all that “meek shall inherit the earth” stuff and I get it. But this time you have to muscle up.’

  ‘You say that, but do you know how devastated your father will be?’ she had replied.

  ‘If you don’t go and see him, I will. That’s a promise.’

  Jo sent off the file to Rosalind later that afternoon and was pleased to see there was an email from James.

  Dear Mum!

  Big, big news! Kita and I have signed on as crew on a sailing boat. We’re going to sail out of Goa and then down past Sumatra and Java to East Timor. On the other side, so don’t worry about pirates.

  We’re going to work in an orphanage there for six months. More than 60 per cent of the population of East Timor are under 18 years old and they need lots of help.

  It’s a 36-foot ketch and there will be seven people on board. We’re going to do a bit of diving on the way, and will probably be there in a few weeks.

  It’s really brilliant. It was Father Patrick who suggested it. He said that if I wanted to find out if serving God was my life then I couldn’t do that by sitting in churches and staring at statues. He said I’d find out through my engagement with other human beings. I think he’s right.

  We’re off tomorrow night, so I’ll probably get back to you when we sail into Dili.

  I love you very much, Mum, and I miss you.

  James x

  Jo wrote back: I’ll meet you there.

  Chapter Forty-three

  The Sydney Morning Herald was spread on the kitchen bench and Jo had been standing over it reading when JJ rang at 8 a.m.

  ‘You’re playing a very dangerous game,’ he’d said. ‘You’d better get your arse over here pretty smartly or you won’t like what’s coming next, I promise.’

  ‘And good morning to you, JJ,’ she said. ‘I thought I’d walk over. Beautiful day. I’ll be there about eleven.’

  ‘Do not piss me about! I’m warning you,’ he said. Then he had slammed down the phone.

  Jo’s call to Rosalind Calwell, Darling Old Girl, had yielded extraordinarily quick results. What leverage she had with the ALP state planning minister Jo would never know, but there was the story on page five under the very pleasing headline: watsons bay heritage win.

  A large, two-storey house in Watsons Bay known as The Cape is now protected from demolition for a period of forty days under the NSW Heritage Act.

  Minister for Planning Brad Senior, MLC yesterday issued an emergency order to provide temporary protection to the house at 34 Pacific Street, which was built in 1888.

  Mr Senior said the emergency order allows time to investigate the historical significance of the building.

  ‘I have directed the Heritage Branch of the Department of Planning to work with Woollahra Council and the owner to consider options for the building,’ Mr Senior said.

  ‘While it is not listed on a heritage register, it may have local significance for its architectural merit and as a contributing element to the adjacent conservation area.’

  Welcoming the decision, chair of the Heritage Council of New South Wales, Rosalind Calwell, AO, said she had urged the minister to act on community concerns.

  ‘This is a great win for the community,’ Ms Calwell said.

  As it happened, Jo was in and out of JJ’s office above the Blanchard showroom in Paddington in under half an hour.

  He’d started proceedings with the predicted bluster and outrage that his project at Watsons Bay had been slapped with the interim heritage order.

  The offending newspaper item had been ripped to pieces and stuffed in a wastepaper bin in a ranting outburst.

  Jo had then produced the DVD that Tory had made with the footage from her camera. JJ had at first refused to watch it, but when Jo had told him she would not leave his office until he had seen it, he had haughtily agreed, though he couldn’t see how it would ‘make any fucking difference to anything’. But it had.

  As the sequence of events played out on his computer screen, Jo watched JJ’s body language and it told an eloquent story.

  He’d started out with his arms folded across his chest in an attitude of defiance, then they had slipped, numb and helpless, to his side at about the time, according to the soundtrack, that Carol Holt had bent over the bathroom bench. A mighty sniff that would do an elephant proud was clearly audible. Tory had zoomed in on Carol at that moment. She had a straw up her nose and was inhaling a line of cocaine clearly visible on a tawny, flecked marble surface.

  Tory was really very good with that camera, Jo had been pleased to tell her. Maybe she could help finance Tory so she could make documentaries. She’d be skilled at all that undercover crime stuff that television stations couldn’t get enough of these days.

  When Carol’s voice was heard to say, ‘Save some for JJ. He’ll be up here after his speech in a minute. He’ll never get through tonight with this bunch of low-lifes without a few lines,’ JJ had exhaled mightily and his chin had dropped to his chest.

  His face, too, was a picture. It had been pink with rage, but then turned pale and greyish as the DVD played on. There was a moment there where Jo had feared he might have a stroke or heart attack.

  Tory was also a proficient editor, so it was just a quick cut to the next image of JJ himself. Jo watched as he greeted his on-screen entrance into the bathroom with pitiable looks around his office. As if he couldn’t bear to watch. He must have known what was coming next.

  ‘It’s okay, I’ve locked the door,’ said a voice that was, surprisingly, Didi Brigden’s. Any viewer following the plot so far would have expected that Carol Holt would have been in that bathroom with him.

  ‘Bunch of dopey arseholes,’ his voice echoed off the tiles. ‘The sooner we can get them out of here, the better. What? Just one line? You cheap tart! Sort out another one for me while I take a piss.’

  ‘Don’t stress, you gave me two grand and with what I put in, we’ve got absolutely heaps.’ Didi added in a thin, grating voice.

  Tory had cut the sequence of her father relieving himself. Jo had been relieved too. She had been appalled that Tory had seen her father standing over a toilet bowl, but even more disgusted at what she’d had to see next. When they watched the footage together Tory had grimaced and said that she’d considered scratching out her own eyeballs. She’d tried to pretend it wasn’t her own father she was recording, but it was telling that the camera strayed to the bathroom ceiling during some of the more sordid sequences.

  There was the sound of two mighty snorts as one line of cocaine then another disappeared. By this time JJ’s fingers were inching towards the keyboard, but Jo guessed he wanted to see if the worst of it had been captured.

  Then there was a low and ugly grunt from him and he said: ‘Not on the floor—I told you my fucking knees can’t take it. Get up here on the bench, you skinny little sexy slu—’ JJ had reached with startling speed to shut down the computer.

  ‘You hid—it must have been in the bedroom—you hid in there and recorded that?’

  ‘No, that’s Tory’s work. I think you’ll agree that it’s something no daughter should ever have to witness.’

  This revelation hit him in the mid-section and he slumped forward as if he’d been run over by a luxury showroom-floor Lexus 4WD.

  ‘Jesus.’ His hands had come to his face.

  ‘It wasn’t so
mething she thought she’d see,’ said Jo. ‘She was trying to catch you in the act of paying party memberships, but she got more than she bargained for.’ And that brought her very neatly to the reason she had come to see him. It was the trifling matter of money.

  ‘How much?’ he mumbled.

  ‘I don’t want to be greedy. As I said, I want the house in Watsons Bay and even though I’ve undertaken some investigations and know I’m entitled to at least sixty million, I respect all the effort you’ve put in to making your fortune, so I won’t take everything I’m entitled to. I want the rest of my share to go to the children. That makes it...if we value The Cape at—let’s split the difference, say fifteen million? Then I want another fifteen million in cash—not property or shares. You said you’re a compassionate person; so am I. I’ll never understand why you love Parklea so much, but you can keep it.’

  ‘We were happy there. The kids grew up there. You’ve forgotten all that,’ he said.

  ‘It wasn’t me who forgot. It was you. Anything that happened under that roof was my business. That’s what I worked at. All the birthday parties, Christmases, the meals we ate, the games the children played. The flowers in vases. Herbs from the garden. The fridge and the cupboards always full. The floors polished with that wax you like. The brand of bed sheets you like. The homework done. The visits to grandparents. All me. I did all of that and I didn’t really want anything back, except your love and respect. But I didn’t get that, so now I’d like my share of our success in material things, since it’s the only currency you do respect. It’s what any honourable man would do.’

  ‘You’re talking bullshit,’ he whined.

  ‘Pity you didn’t agree to my first offer; you would have saved yourself twenty-five mill.’ Jo had enjoyed saying ‘mill’ in a casual way, as if she was having a conversation as one business mogul to another.

  ‘Done. Done deal,’ he said. ‘You’ve fucked me.’

  ‘I want the money to cover Suze’s debt lodged with DPLC by this afternoon, and you tell Carol that if she ever breathes a word about Suze, there will be hell to pay. I won’t hesitate to go to the media with all this. You might like to tell Didi daaarling to back off as well. Got yourself a tidy little threesome there. Good luck with it.’

  Then Jo had stood to leave. There were so many things she could have hit him with, but it wasn’t her style. Just one closing remark: ‘Oh, and by the way, it’s nothing personal. Just business.’

  Chapter Forty-four

  The first time Jo stood on the terrace of The Cape it had been early autumn. It was now late winter, but the garden had ignored the calendar and decided that spring had come.

  So many plants overlooked in the first days and weeks were now making themselves known—plump, hairy buds covered the magnolia; a Taiwanese bell cherry offered chandeliers of sweet-scented cerise flowers; the daffodils, jonquils and Scottish bluebells were nodding along the pathways; the deciduous trees now bore fragile leaves that traced a lacy pattern against a blue, blue sky.

  In an hour The Cape would be open to visitors for the first time anyone in the adjoining streets could recall. Jo had been stopped in the street and congratulated for her magnificent gesture in donating the building to the National Trust.

  ‘It’s like we have the chance to finally make the acquaintance of a neighbour we’ve wanted to meet for years,’ one long-time resident had said. ‘We’ve all been curious to see what’s behind that wall.’

  Behind the wall today was everything and everyone Jo loved.

  Along with the house, she had made a bequest that would ensure its future upkeep, so today they were celebrating the opening of The Cape to the public with a fundraiser for the National Trust. The money would be used for the maintenance of other properties across New South Wales.

  Inside the house, Hannah McGinty had excelled herself. There was a display in the large upstairs nursery on the history of the Walpole sisters and their connections with Watsons Bay. The portrait of Eunice in her blue suit took pride of place in the room where her children must have played. Jo was overcome with pride to see it there and many commented that she did look quite like Eunice.

  The rest of the house—except for Hannah’s rooms on the second floor, in which she now lived in as caretaker—had been filled with furniture from the 1880s. Jo and Michael had tried to recreate the interiors as they must have been when Eunice lived there with her four children. The project had given them enormous pleasure. They hoped that tourists, schoolchildren and visiting locals would appreciate their efforts for many years to come.

  Downstairs, the kitchen had been upgraded to a commercial standard—appropriately, as per the conservation plan—and the adjoining large dining room and reception room were now filled with tables in the café they had named ‘Augusta’s’.

  Tory was busy setting out teacups, even though she was sure vodka jelly shots would raise more money. She had only been talked out of it when Jo explained the insurance liability and the hazard the water frontage presented for the inebriated.

  Jo’s mother Margaret was writing a price list for the homemade biscuits, slices and confectionery she must have been making for weeks. They’d been driven down from the Blue Mountains to the harbour’s edge in the boot and back seat of the Commodore without losing so much as a crumb. ‘A miracle!’ Jo’s father had proclaimed before retiring to a bench to discuss religious matters with Father Patrick. Both men wore their clerical collars. Jo suspected it was as much about avoiding any heavy lifting as it was to impress the expected multitude.

  Michael had set up a bric-a-brac stall on the veranda with odds and ends of lamps, books and crockery he’d brought from the auction rooms. The stuffed head of a rhinoceros was sitting up front, now discounted to ten dollars for a quick sale in honour of the cause. He’d also offered his services as head of the esteemed auction house Brigden’s to appraise, free of charge, any goods that might be brought along on the morning. A colleague who was an expert in Australian antiques had come with him, keen to poke about the house. Michael joked that the Watsons Bay episode of Antiques Roadshow would soon be in session and that he might find that long-lost Arthur Streeton he’d been dreaming of. The Brigden coat of arms—complete with armoured helmet, English rose and the motto ‘Steady and Faithful’—looked very well on the flyers. That would get them in. Jo knew that half the residents of the surrounding suburbs were, at this very moment, hunting through back sheds and spare rooms for treasure. She hoped Michael knew what he was letting himself in for. But then, she’d hoped that from the first night they’d kissed.

  He stopped to kiss her again as he walked past with her ‘Tiffany’ lamps to add to his stall. She’d been mortified to discover they were reproductions and had decided to sell them, along with a lot of her other old furniture. She thought she might replace it with contemporary stuff and had been pricing apartments in the city overlooking Hyde Park. Tory had convinced her it was time to leave the Eastern Suburbs. And it was. In fact, her next stop would be Dili to see James, who had arrived there without, mercifully, encountering pirates. She and Michael were setting off to sail up the east coast next week.

  Mrs Patsy Kelly was beetling across the lawn to greet Michael. She really was very accommodating of the new alliances and partnerships of Darling Point Ladies’ College. It was very difficult to keep up with it all sometimes—who was ‘in’ and who was most definitely ‘out’. But money had a way of healing old wounds and erasing memories and Patsy had been very attentive since they had met to discuss Jo’s plan for a scholarship fund for underprivileged students to attend the college. Especially as it involved the construction of a new wing for the boarders. There was nothing Patsy relished more than adding a new building to her empire.

  Jo walked down the winding path to the terrace, turned her face to the west and watched sails flash across the waters of Sydney Harbour. Suze was late. But then, she and Rob had a fair drive from the Central Coast, and when you were coming from a few hours’ north an
d then right across town on a Saturday morning, the traffic could be hellish.

  Patrick came to stand by her. ‘She’s here,’ he said. ‘In the kitchen with Tory. She’s brought jelly shots and I’d get up there before they’re all gone if I were you. Looks like the party’s already started.’

  The coppery waves of Jo’s hair were stirred by the breeze. ‘Look at this view. Isn’t it wonderful?’ She sighed a bottomless sigh of satisfaction.

  ‘Yep. You’ve done well, old girl,’ he said.

  ‘I have, haven’t I?’ Jo replied.

  Epilogue

  2 March 1888

  ‘They’re sleeping. All four of them, fast asleep. Even baby Harry,’ said Augusta as she walked through the door to the first-floor balcony to where Eunice was sitting by the railing and gazing at the setting sun. ‘We have been reading The Water-Babies and Eliza and Frederick had a scrap over who got to gaze at the colour picture of Tom and the Dragonfly the longest. One could not imagine twins could be so different in temperament, except I see it every day at Darling Point.’

  ‘Thank you, dearest. You are too good to be still helping after such a long and tiring day,’ said Eunice, patting the chair beside her. ‘Now come and sit by me and catch the last of the sunset. There’s lemon cordial in the jug.’

  Augusta sat and arranged her skirts. Checked that the buttons of her jacket were still fastened. Repinned the knot of dark hair at her neck.

  ‘They are all such good children and a credit to you, Eunice. There could have been every reason for them to falter in the past few months. How are they mending? In their hearts?’ Augusta reached for her sister’s hand.

  Eunice sighed deeply. ‘Albert is the worst affected, of course. He misses Henry so dreadfully. I do wonder sometimes...’

  ‘Tell me.’ Augusta sought her sister’s eyes. She was so used to searching them for tears, but this evening they reflected the rosy-pink clouds on the horizon and were bright and steady.