A Woman of Courage

by J. H. Fletcher

  ‘I had a friend called Irish back in Adelaide,’ Hilary said. ‘If that helps.’

  Mrs Madigan’s eyes peeled Hilary’s skin; she’d never been one for jokes. A sandwich short of a picnic if you ask me, she thought.

  ‘Your parents living?’

  ‘Wouldn’t have a clue, Mrs Madigan. Back at the home they said I was an orphan but they told me lots of things that weren’t true, so the fact is I dunno if they’re alive or dead.’

  Madigan’s law: everyone has to have a background. ‘I don’t understand what you’re saying.’

  ‘They shipped me out here when I was a kid. Stuck me in a home then sent me to work on a farm when I was fifteen. Later I moved to Adelaide, met Sean and now I’m here to make me fortune.’ She gave Mrs Madigan the sunniest of smiles, which was not returned.

  ‘At least you’re Catholic?’ Mrs Madigan hoped. Certain things in life were not negotiable.

  ‘I don’t think I’m anything much.’

  See Mrs Madigan’s rattrap mouth now.

  4

  Hilary took a long hard look at herself. Her looks would be on her side when dealing with a man but not necessarily with another woman. Her figure likewise. Being a woman at all had already proved to be a challenge. Well, she had to live with that but her lack of education and the way she spoke remained problems. She went for a walk by the river. She passed a planing mill. She listened to the screech of machinery and thought that planing off her own rough edges might be a good place to start. She listened to herself talking to the customers in the café and thought that planing was hardly the right word. A hammer and chisel might do a better job.

  She’d started back in Adelaide but what with one thing and another it hadn’t come to anything. Now she made friends with a waitress, a Pom who’d been in the country five minutes. Unlike Hilary, this one had a cut-glass accent. She listened to her. Every night she repeated what she had done before, standing in front of her little mirror in her room at the boarding house and practising the sounds she’d heard. Her lips shaped a phrase Miss Anderson had taught her in the old Middlemore days.

  How now, brown cow, grazing in the green green grass. Sounded more like heow neow to begin with but gradually it got better. Two months of aching jaws and she could have fooled herself. Ay am Lady Lulu. Ay speak laike a membah of the royal family. Though it slipped sometimes. Oi speak loike a member of the royal femly. Bloody hell!

  As for education… She visited the library every minute she could spare, took a book at random off the shelf and sat, dictionary at her side, reading and looking up every word she didn’t know. In time it did her confidence no end of good. Not only did she pick up knowledge of things she hadn’t known before but acquired the knack of talking about them as a lady – no longer a lydy – should.

  She thought about the occupations that were most likely to be available to a woman. Eventually she landed a job in sales at an up-market couturier where her still fragile oh-so-posh accent was more appreciated than it might have been in Subiaco. There were snags. She needed to dress the part, which wasn’t cheap, and it was cruel on the feet. The pay was nothing to write home about, either, and for months she had only the most menial of jobs. Sweeping the floor, cleaning the windows, vacuuming, hanging up dresses that would have taken a year of her present pay to buy.

  ‘Lousy pay for a lousy job,’ she told Sean. ‘I’ve got to be crazy.’

  But she wasn’t and knew it. She and Sean were an item now, a lot closer than they’d been and likely to get closer yet, but she still refused to move in with him. She was beginning to think she was in love with him but had seen too many examples of how easily things could go wrong. She’d known two girls back in Adelaide who’d got themselves up the duff. In each case the bloke had done a runner and there they were, stuffed in more ways than one. It wasn’t going to happen to her.

  ‘All in good time,’ she told herself and Sean.

  Mind you, it was getting harder to say no and there’d been moments when they’d got very bloody close, but somehow she’d avoided the trap. It really got up Sean’s nose. You couldn’t blame him, could you? Lots of times he threatened to walk away but she would not give in. Her virtue – whatever that was – was not an issue, but self-preservation was.

  During her sessions in the library she’d read something that expressed it better than she could. ‘I’ve got miles to go before I sleep,’ she told herself. ‘Or even think of sleeping.’ All she knew was she was hungry to get from where she was now to somewhere undefined but wonderful. ‘I’m on the first step of the highway,’ she told herself. ‘I’m going to follow it to the end. All the way to the stars, if I can. And no one and nothing is going to stop me.’

  5

  Independence didn’t come cheap; there were weeks when she was pushed to find the rent without dipping into what she thought of her run-away money, what she’d managed to put aside in Adelaide. Somehow she hung on, eating less than a little and then only at the cheapest places. She walked everywhere she could rather than take a bus. Determined to remain independent she wouldn’t let Sean buy her meals but she loved the fact that he was always offering. In the nick of time the shop owner relented and let Hilary start selling, with an increased allowance against commissions.

  She would never have believed it but she had a flair for it. Within three months she was selling more than any of the other staff; two months more and customers were asking specifically to be served by that nice Miss Brand.

  ‘At this rate you could find yourself taking home fifteen pounds a week,’ said Mrs Shargey, the shop owner. ‘Maybe even twenty, in time.’

  It was an unheard-of wage for a woman, especially one of Hilary’s age and background. It was nice not to have to watch the pennies so closely for once but she knew that twenty pounds a week, or five times that, would not take her where she wanted to go.

  The papers were saying there was a coming boom in property values, as had happened in the eastern states. The Commonwealth Games were scheduled for 1962 and the government was talking up the state’s prospects. Not just talk, either. The bridge across the Swan had been a start; now the old Guildford aerodrome where Hilary had landed was being replaced by a new international airport. The stadium was being built and accommodation for the athletes: not the crummy junk Melbourne had provided for the 1956 Olympics but family-type homes that could be sold to investors after the Games were over.

  There was a feeling in the air that at long last West Australia was coming into its own. There was talk of mining ventures in the far north; a huge mansion was being built on the banks of the Swan by a woman called Bella Tucker who people said had struck it rich. More and more Hilary sensed that the property market was on the edge of lift off and was determined to be aboard the rocket when it left the launching pad. More and more she was convinced that her present job, well paid though it was, was as dead an end as anything she’d done.

  She still went to the library at weekends, and homed in on the subjects she thought would be the greatest practical value to her – textbooks on bookkeeping, valuation and building construction. Also poetry: she’d read that poetry was a way of taking life by the throat. She liked that, the challenge implicit in tackling both poetry and life.

  Believing in the coming boom it made sense to get in on the ground floor. She went to see a real estate agent and within the hour found herself the owner of a block of undeveloped land in a suburb called Morley Park.

  ‘Morley Park?’ Sean said. ‘There’s nothing there. How much did you pay, anyway?’

  ‘Hundred and fifty pounds.’

  ‘You’re mad! How you gunna pay for it?’

  ‘Five quid a week. I can manage it OK, with the commission.’

  ‘But I thought you wanted to move on?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘You’re around the twist, you know that?’

  ‘You ain’t seen nothing yet.’

  ‘Now what you planning?’

  She gave him the father
and mother of sunny smiles. ‘Hang around, you might find out.’

  She went back to the estate agent, who rubbed his hands, thinking she’d come to buy another block.

  ‘Best investment you’ll ever make,’ he said. But changed his tune when she said she wanted a job. ‘We don’t employ women.’

  ‘Then now’s the time to start.’

  Jack Almond shook his head. ‘The customers wouldn’t stand for it.’

  ‘How do you know if you’ve never tried it?’

  ‘Stands to reason.’

  ‘Maybe some of them would appreciate the friendly female touch.’

  ‘And maybe they wouldn’t.’

  But she sensed that she was winning.

  ‘Tell you what I’ll do,’ Hilary said. ‘Give me a go and I’ll buy another block off you.’

  ‘Commission only?’

  ‘I’ve got to live, Mr Almond.’

  By his expression he was wondering why.

  ‘Ten a week,’ he said.

  ‘Make it fifteen.’

  ‘Ten. And think yourself lucky.’

  She was in.

  She went back to the dress job and resigned.

  ‘You’re mad,’ Mrs Shargey said, vexed at losing her best sales girl.

  ‘You could be right,’ Hilary said.

  She needed a real estate licence, not easy for a woman, but Jack Almond had clout and she got it without much hassle. But that was only one of her problems.

  Rent; food; paying off the two blocks of land. She needed a car. And she had to look the part. Whichever way you looked at it, ten quid a week would not stretch.

  There was only one way she could see how to do it. She thought about it long and hard. She stared at herself in the mirror. ‘Do you really love him?’

  He was a good bloke; safe. Kind and considerate. OK, his mother was a problem but she wouldn’t be marrying her, would she? Because Sean had proposed to her and she had promised him an answer. She certainly fancied him. Was that love? She decided yes, it was. She liked him, too, which was a bonus. They’d get married and he’d help her get where she had to go and they’d be happy, the best of lovers and the best of friends. Give it a go, she urged her reflection. She decided she’d say yes.

  She went to him, heart going pit-a-pat. ‘You still want to marry me?’

  He looked at her, eyes bright with hope. ‘You know I do.’

  ‘OK, then.’

  Minutes later, his face buried in her breasts, heat like a tidal wave engulfing her, she cried: ‘We are going to be happy! So happy!’

  6

  That might be how they saw it but Mrs Madigan was ropeable.

  ‘You’re getting married?’ Like they’d said they were going to Zululand.

  ‘That’s about the size of it.’

  ‘Have you spoken to Father Devlin?’

  ‘Leave Father Devlin out of it. It’s the registry office we’re having, not a church do.’

  Hilary could read Mrs Madigan like a book. The cow had no doubt been thinking of a nuptial mass with all the trimmings. And now this creature from the eastern states had descended on them like one of the seven plagues of Egypt to cheat her of one of a mother’s greatest joys… Well, aren’t you the unlucky one? Hilary thought.

  The reception wasn’t much to write home about. Mr Madigan was like Mr Pattinson in one respect – he favoured a quiet life and over the years had learnt to keep his mouth shut, especially when it came to matters involving the church – but he thought it right and proper that they should do something to celebrate the marriage of their only son.

  Mrs Madigan was having none of it. ‘Signing a piece of paper in a registry office? You call that a marriage?’

  ‘What do you call it?’

  ‘A travesty is what I call it. Far as I’m concerned, they’re not wed at all.’

  So it came down to a few beers in the pub, with Sean’s drinking mates, who had not been invited, trying with some success to get him pissed and Mrs Madigan as welcoming as a Rottweiler with the bellyache.

  ‘Dunno where you’re planning to live,’ Mrs Madigan said. ‘That hole you’re in now won’t be big enough when the babies start coming.’

  ‘Thought we’d buy a place in Peppermint Grove,’ Hilary said. ‘What do you reckon?’

  Only the snootiest suburb in Perth. Even the idea was enough to set Mrs Madigan’s teeth on edge. Peppermint Grove? What nonsense!

  ‘What I reckon is it’s time you came down off your high horse and faced reality, like the rest of us,’ she said.

  ‘Maybe I’ll do that,’ Hilary said.

  In the meantime, though, there was the honeymoon. There wasn’t the time or money for anything fancy but Hilary was determined they should do something to remember the occasion by.

  ‘It is our wedding, after all,’ she said.

  They went south into the dark forests.

  It was a world out of the storybooks, of wolves and trolls, of tales that Hilary remembered from Miss Anderson, the first and so far only human being to kindle her mind with images of mystery and magic. Here be dragons. They wandered hand in hand through a cool and misty landscape of mosses and ferns and giant trees pointing their branchless trunks three hundred feet into the achingly blue sky. There were waterfalls and the shy and barely glimpsed animals that watched or moved as silently as spirits through the undergrowth.

  Sean cast an appreciative eye at the massive trees. ‘Get felling rights in a place like this we could make a fortune,’ he said.

  Hilary didn’t take him seriously. ‘Would you want to do that?’

  ‘Too right I would. They’re only trees,’ Sean said. He glanced at her, sensing disapproval. ‘You’re the one’s always saying how you want to be a millionaire.’

  ‘I do,’ Hilary said. ‘And I shall be one too. But let’s not wreck the place while we’re doing it.’

  She’d brought a tent and all the bits and pieces they needed for a camping trip.

  Sean was his mother’s child; anything unconventional made him uneasy. He wasn’t too sure what he thought about screwing in a tent when a decent mattress and a bed that didn’t squeak seemed to him to make a lot more sense. Also there was the feeling that unless he was careful his new wife might start making decisions that should more properly be made by her husband. As his mother had also reminded him.

  ‘A man is the head of the household. Make sure she understands that. She won’t ever respect you otherwise.’ Which was funny, coming from Mrs Madigan, she-wolf in residence.

  ‘I reckon we’d be better off in a pub,’ he said.

  ‘Plenty of pubs back home,’ Hilary said. ‘I want this to be something special. Something we’ll remember all our days.’

  ‘What if it rains?’

  ‘Won’t matter. We’ve got our tent. A good one: I made sure of that.’ She gave him the happy grin that always turned his resolve to mush. ‘You and me and the trees… How romantic is that?’ She gave him the gentlest of tweaks to remind him what she had in store for him.

  Later there was darkness and dying firelight, a light breeze pressing against the outside of the tent while Sean touched her. He had touched her often but this time should have felt different because now, she thought, she was his. Yet in truth she was conscious of drawing back from that reality. What was happening between them was not right: not the doing of it, that of course was as it should be, but the fact that she was unable to lose herself in the moment. The fact that she remained on the outside looking down at the man and woman going through the motions, concentrating on that so that the moment when he gasped and surged against her and collapsed like a perforated bag went almost unnoticed.

  Sleep, later, was a problem for her if not for him. She lay and looked up at the ridge of the tent above her and heard the wind’s voice and the myriad sounds of the forest and thought of the future and the number of times tonight’s episode would be repeated, an endless series of footprints into the unknown.

  It will get better. I lo
ve him, of course I do. It’ll come right in time. But she wondered nevertheless.

  She slept for a while and when she woke the light was showing through the canvas. She eased away from the still-sleeping man and went out into the air. She walked barefoot into the forest. Barefoot and, later still, naked as she embraced the stillness and the voice of the undergrowth and the trees rising above, their majesty carved upon the air, the cathedral of the forest in which she knew it was right to worship.

  Her cheeks wet with tears she turned and went back to the tent.

  2004

  AN UNCERTAIN FUTURE

  Hilary rang off and walked out on to the terrace while she thought about what Sara had said.

  Emil Broussard…

  She had thought they’d seen the last of that damn man. Famous writer he might be but at the time she would have seen him dead in the street and been glad of it. Glad? She would have danced on the body after the way he had brought her daughter so close to disaster. She would never forget how traumatised Sara had been when she came back from her foray into the far north. He would have ruined a weaker person. Thank God she’d had the courage to tear herself away from him.

  Hilary had understood how Sara had felt. Had not the same thing happened to her? How could she not sympathise when she too had heard the siren song of love, the song that could both destroy and lift you to the heights? Yet the truth was that understanding and sympathy had no relevance. The first and most important lesson of life was that you always had to be prepared to move on, like the basic law of thermodynamics, where the movement was always from hot to cold, never the opposite.

  For Sara to use Emil Broussard’s unexpected arrival as an excuse not to go to Hong Kong would be the coward’s way. At all cost she must prevent that. How she would do it she did not know, only that she must. The success of everything she had striven for all these years was at stake: to establish a dynasty to carry on the work to which she had dedicated her life.

  Of course there was no law that said Sara had to take the job. The top of any tree was a lonely place; you had to earn it, yes, but you had to want it too, want it with all your heart – anything less was to invite disaster. Sara had the ability but could she make the necessary sacrifices, putting the company’s health before every other consideration?