A Woman of Courage

by J. H. Fletcher

It was impossible, of course. She had a career. There was a man on the edge of her life. She did not care as he did, but he was kind, gentle…

  ‘We have to snatch life’s offerings,’ Emil said. ‘If we do not, they do not come back.’

  He was saying there were no second chances.

  He looked at her, face expressionless. ‘What about it?’ he said. ‘Will you come?’

  Such a temptation. Such an impossibility. Say yes and she would be his prisoner, yet she could not bring herself to reject him in words. This man; this wonderful man.

  ‘Phone me in the morning,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell you.’

  That night she stood in front of her bedroom mirror and stared at her reflection. A slender face that would harden as it grew older. Little hatchet face, her mother had called her. She thought: I am twenty-six, tough, capable, self-confident. There are no glass ceilings for people like me. So why am I swooning over a man old enough to be my father? A man with a track record like Emil Broussard’s? He may be a wonderful writer but you live with the man, not his books. Am I so conceited that I imagine I can handle him when so many others have tried and failed? Am I stupid enough even to think of chucking up a stellar career and going away with him, like the heroine in a soap opera? I am not that woman. I am not. Yet her own face looked mockingly at her. The image smiled.

  She closed her eyes but it was no use. The truth hammered in the darkness. She thought: I am lost.

  She had told him to phone her in the morning but instead she phoned him. ‘OK,’ she said.

  So easy: yet it wasn’t easy at all. Now she had made up her mind she was excited by the prospect of spending time with this man – but as a true partner, nothing less. She wanted to have him anchor himself inside her, mind and body. She wanted to own him, to have him own her, to be one being. Was it possible to want that and still be herself? She was not inexperienced in the arts of love but had never known a man like this, feelings like this. Emil was worldly-wise and over twice her age. It would be madness to do it but if she did not she knew she would regret it always.

  Sara remembered when she was a child a Chinese acquaintance of her mother telling her about chi, or feng shui, meaning harmony.

  ‘There is Chinese saying,’ Mr Chow had said. ‘Chi rides the wind.’ He also explained to her the importance of the wind. ‘In Chinese game of mah-jong, player who draws east wind begins game. Therefore east wind, green dragon, signifies hope and adventure. South wind, red phoenix: danger. West is where sun sets, therefore wind blowing from west, white tiger, means emptiness and death. North wind, dark turtle. Turtle brings opportunity and great rewards. Great perils too.’ He laughed. ‘North wind gambler’s wind,’ he said.

  Sara took her courage in her hands. She went north, into the land of the dark turtle.

  5

  The night of her arrival she stood with Emil on the deck of his house and watched the sea. The stars burned in a million points of silver fire while he quoted Yeats to her.

  The man’s voice rang out above the sound of the tranquil-turning waves. The woman listened, watching the silvery glints of starshine on the water. Emotion drenched her throat in unshed tears, then they both turned and went indoors together. Into the finding place.

  Sara remembered how emotion had overwhelmed her. It took her a while to understand that what she was feeling was not love of the place or even of the man but of the world and all those things, known and unknown, that lay out there beyond the world.

  Looking back now, she saw their first night together had been the high point of their relationship. Other episodes, descending thick and fast, had destroyed the fulfilment and the joy, had in time destroyed everything.

  Emil was away, in Sydney somewhere, and Sara had been swimming. Towel in hand, she came back to the house, walked into the living room and was startled to find herself face to face with a man she had never seen before.

  She stared at him. ‘Can I help you?’

  The intruder was somewhere in his late twenties. He was tall, with formidable shoulders, a tight mouth and hard face. His pale eyes had nobody at home behind them and his skin was so white it might have been bleached.

  ‘It’s Broussard I want.’

  ‘Mr Broussard is in Sydney.’

  ‘So you say.’

  ‘I say it because it’s true. What do you want, anyway?’

  ‘He’ll know what I want.’

  Sara did not like the look of this man at all. She was very conscious of herself standing there, as close to naked as made small difference. If he wanted to make trouble she’d have a hard job stopping him. Inside she was terrified but remembered what someone had told her once.

  They must never see you’re afraid.

  She stared resolutely into the pale eyes. ‘You’ll have to come back another time.’

  The blond man smiled and it was not a nice smile. ‘Feisty little cow, I’ll say that for you.’

  He strolled towards her, taking his time. While Sara stood, terrified yet determined to show nothing.

  His smile deepened. His eyes stroked every inch of her body. ‘Any time you feel like a change of scenery, give me a bell. In the meantime you give Broussard a message. He wants to gamble, he pays his debts, OK? Tell him Mr Albertsen wants his money.’ He nodded significantly. ‘Polite reminder, that’s all this is. If I got to come back, things could get ugly. Know what I mean?’

  He reached out suddenly and caressed her cheek. Sara hadn’t been expecting it and flinched. He smiled, turned away and went out and across the deck. She heard his whistle as he ran down the steps: a jaunty sound clearly audible above the rumble of the sea. Sara’s cheek burned where he had touched it. She felt as though every bone had been drawn from her body. She collapsed onto the settee. It was five minutes before she found the strength to stand. Tottering like an old woman, she went into the bedroom and locked the door behind her. She had known before she joined him that Emil was a gambler but had never bargained on anything like this.

  When Emil came back she told him what had happened and how frightened she had been.

  ‘You are too easily scared,’ he said.

  At that moment she could have killed him.

  She tried her hand at a few short stories, was unhappy with them and wanted to throw them out, but Emil said he wanted to read them.

  He did so one evening while she sat on the edge of her seat, watching him as he turned the pages. Eventually, without a word, he crossed the room and tossed them in the bin. Then he went back to his chair and poured himself another drink.

  Hurt and angry, Sara said nothing, waiting for comments that it became clear he did not intend to make. Finally, also without a word, she got up in her turn, walked to the bin and retrieved her manuscripts. She carried them into the bedroom and put them away in the drawer of the desk she used for her writing. Then she went back into the living room. She sat down. She stared defiantly but said nothing.

  ‘They are very bad,’ Emil said. ‘I cannot believe how bad.’

  Sara said nothing.

  ‘They are an embarrassment. Clearly you have no talent whatsoever.’

  He went on and on. She neither moved nor spoke.

  ‘You have nothing to say?’

  ‘Nothing.’ She stared him down.

  ‘Butchery of the English language offends me,’ he said. ‘I suppose I should not expect you to understand that.’

  She got up.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘To bed.’

  It was a gradual process, his telling her he had meetings with publishers and agents that took him away two or three times a month, but before long he was going away for a week at a time. One night, after he’d phoned to say he would be on the last ferry, midnight came without any sign of him. He will surely phone, she told herself, but he did not. It was a hot night, the house was full of echoes and Sara couldn’t sleep. She imagined the taxi crashing on the way to Shute Harbour, Emil in hospital, Emil dead…

  Long aft
er the last ferry had docked, too exhausted to care any longer, she stretched out on the settee and went to sleep.

  At six-thirty, the dawn sky luminescent beyond the palm trees, she was woken by the sound of someone coming up the steps from the grass. She stood, steeling herself to face disaster, then recognised Emil’s footsteps. Relief brought tears but also fury that he should have left her to stew all night without a word.

  She opened her mouth to let fly at him but he beat her to it.

  ‘What are you doing, up at this hour?’

  She had never seen him in such a rage.

  ‘Checking up on me, are you? Well, you don’t own me. I shall come and go as I please!’

  This before Sara had said a thing.

  Emil paused for breath. Now was Sara’s chance. The only way to beat a bully was to stand up to him but she was too tired to bother. She wanted sleep, not a fight. Without a word she turned on her heel, went into the bedroom and closed the door. Even the thought that he might come after her was unimportant. Lack of sleep and Emil’s anger had turned the bright morning grey.

  It was mid-afternoon when she woke. The house was silent; she didn’t know if he was there or not and for the moment didn’t care. She put on linen shorts and a loose top and walked on the beach. She thought about the previous night and wondered what Emil had been doing and with whom. She wondered where the two of them were going. Such an inspired artist. Such an impossible man. Without mutual respect they had nothing yet the relationship was still precious to her, despite everything. She would not give it up without a fight. Maybe, she told herself, things would improve.

  They did not; they grew worse. Once again he went away, the second time in a fortnight. No word where he was going or when he’d be back. That night she gave up hope. She phoned the studio, was told there would be a job for her but not the one she’d had before: that niche was filled.

  ‘When can we expect you?’

  ‘When you see me. But soon.’

  She decided to hang on until Emil returned so that she could tell him to his face that she was leaving him.

  ‘In the meantime I shall drink his whisky,’ she told the silent house which was no longer home. ‘And serve him right.’

  Three days later she changed her mind. Dressed and ready to go, she wrote him a note. Half a dozen lines to mark the grave of a relationship that once she’d hoped might last forever. Twenty minutes later she was at the wharf. The ferry had just arrived, the passengers disembarking. She waited to board.

  ‘Where do you think you’re going?’ Emil towered menacingly over her.

  ‘I have left you a note,’ she said.

  She had one foot on the ferry when he grabbed her arm.

  ‘Take your hand off me.’ Her eyes blazed with such fury that he stepped back. ‘I am leaving you,’ Sara told him. ‘Where I am going does not matter. I have left a note.’

  The crewman swung the gate shut between them and the ferry began to move. Emil shouted after her. ‘We have unfinished business, you and I.’

  Words like a threat; Sara did not answer. Soon the gap between them was too wide to be bridged by voices but neither moved, each staring at the other’s diminishing figure until distance took away the last remnant of what they had once meant to each other.

  6

  ‘Give me his number,’ Sara said to Willa. While her heart thundered in her chest.

  She wrote the number down. She held the piece of paper in her hand and felt Emil Broussard at her side, his breath stirring her hair, his lips and hands moving over her body. After she walked out she had been certain she would never see him again. Sad, but better than the endless pain of remaining with him.

  Now, out of the blue, he was back.

  She thought she should almost certainly not phone him. She had read that in England the authorities were still wary of opening the ancient plague pits, fearful that the toxins of past days might still linger. She had told herself repeatedly that she was over Emil Broussard. Now she discovered she was less certain of that than she would have wished. If I do not phone, she thought, it will mean he still has power over me. And he does not. Let me say that a thousand times. He does not; does not.

  She took a deep breath and dialled the number Willa had given her. It rang and rang and she was about to give up when the receiver lifted.

  ‘Emil Broussard…’

  She remembered the voice; she remembered everything, good and bad.

  ‘You were trying to get hold of me?’

  ‘I am sorry. Who is this?’

  They’d lived together for a year; he’d asked her to phone him and now was pretending he didn’t know who she was? But arrogance had always been Emil’s way.

  She said: ‘You know damn well who it is.’

  ‘Ah yes, now I do indeed. Who else possesses such an instinct for courtesy?’

  ‘Who else has more reason? What do you want, anyway?’

  ‘To speak to you, naturally.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I thought it would give us both pleasure to have lunch together today. Revisit old joys, old battles…’

  Mockery, too, had always been Emil’s way.

  ‘Sorry to disappoint you but I am tied up. The programme, you understand.’

  You fool, she thought. Why make excuses? The next thing you’ll be apologising to him.

  ‘You disappoint me,’ Emil said.

  ‘Why?’

  That too she should not have said.

  ‘Is the programme so important?’

  ‘It’s my job, Emil.’

  ‘Your job…’ Contemptuously he discarded the notion that a job might be important to anyone. ‘So the slave loves her chains?’

  The perfect trifecta: arrogance, mockery and contempt. All facets of the same impossible personality. How had she put up with this man for so long?

  ‘Thank you for your invitation. Whether I love my chains or not, the fact remains I cannot have lunch with you.’

  ‘I have written my autobiography,’ Emil said. ‘It contains certain information the world has long wanted to know. Information that I have until now been unwilling to disclose. The purpose of my invitation is to discuss the possibility of your interviewing me about it on your programme.’

  Don’t be too eager, Sara thought. Make him come to you.

  ‘I’m not sure they’d be interested,’ she said. ‘It would have to be quite sensational to get them to agree.’

  ‘A man who was offered the Nobel and turned it down? A writer whose last contract was for a million dollars? A writer whose Breton father wanted independence from France so much that he fought for the Nazis in the hope of obtaining it?’ She could almost see the snarl. ‘Is that sensational enough for your people?’

  ‘Fought for the Nazis?’

  No wonder he had kept quiet about his past. Always, in his writing and his life, Emil had known how and when to set the hook. Now, between one instant and the next, it was buried deep.

  ‘Of course I’ll discuss it with them,’ Sara said. ‘But I still can’t manage lunch. Not today.’

  ‘Dinner, then?’

  ‘Oh Emil, I’m sorry. I’m tied up tonight as well.’ To reject him not once but twice… She took a deep breath and plunged. ‘It would be lovely another time.’

  ‘Tomorrow night, then. At nine o’clock. D’accord?’

  Get her make-up off, nip home, a quick shower and change of clothes: another rushed evening. So what was new?

  ‘D’accord.’

  ‘Your address?’

  It was a rule in the business that you never gave your address to anyone: but this was Emil, she told herself, and rules, just occasionally, were meant to be broken.

  She hung up, wondering what she’d let herself in for. I am not going down that path again, she thought, never. Never! But memory could be a traitor, and the question in her mind remained.

  EXECUTIONER MODE

  It was quarter to eleven when the chopper put down on the landing pad atop t
he Brand Corporation building. With the rotor still turning Hilary thanked the pilot – something she never forgot – and was out of the door and heading purposefully for the lift that would take her to the executive floor housing her suite of offices and the penthouse that was her home from home when she couldn’t spare the time to return to Cadogan Lodge: there had been occasions when she had roosted there for days at a time. The vast bed was regularly aired, the towels and other goodies replenished every week. Handy for entertaining important guests, it was a showcase. The dining room contained numerous examples of early colonial Australian furniture, including an 1840 cedarwood bookcase provenanced to Dorothea Mackellar. One of the two Opie portraits of Lachlan Macquarie hung on the wall behind Hilary’s chair; the other was on display at the State Library of New South Wales. The vast reception area provided a contrast in style. It had two hundred and seventy degree views across the city and an outside balcony from which it was possible to see the length of the harbour from the bridge to the Heads. The furniture was luxurious and modern with a few good paintings: Olsen, Nolan, Boyd. Also a Gulliver, the artist whom Jennifer had loved and whom Tom Tallis, the curator of her collection, had tipped to become the next big name in the art world. Poor Tom, felled by a stroke a month ago at the age of fifty-five. He was a sad loss, both as curator and friend.

  In a glass-fronted cabinet a chambered nautilus shell was an elegant brown and white memento of her first magical visit to Penang. Ah, Penang…

  But today Hilary had no time for smiling memories of recent days, so she left the penthouse as soon as she had checked that all was in order there and headed across to her office. Now all her attention was focused on the news that Vivienne Archer had given her three hours earlier. She was in executioner mode and must decide swiftly and unemotionally how to deal with the problem of Hong Kong.

  Alerted to Hilary’s arrival, Vivienne was waiting in the outer office. ‘I’ve got Desmond on stand-by if you want him,’ she said.

  Fifty-year-old Desmond Bragg, one of the fat boys’ lunch brigade, was aptly named, but knew all there was to know about running a television network. Desmond was CEO of Channel 12 and his office, like Vivienne’s, was almost but not quite as substantial as Hilary’s own: status was a built-in feature of the Sydney business world, extending even to where you ate your lunch. Hilary despised such nonsense but Desmond insisted it was important. He had told her once that the position of your table at Cavaliers sent a signal to the watchers who was on the rise and who wasn’t.