A Woman of Courage

by J. H. Fletcher

  ‘You’re saying she’s in charge.’

  ‘I am.’

  It was another test but Sara had no trouble with it. She was the new kid on the block; of course Martha had to be in charge.

  ‘You’ll be taking the Airbus.’

  ‘Surely there’s no need for that,’ Sara said.

  ‘There is every need. It is too big an investment to sit in the hanger when it can be usefully employed, and one of your first lessons is that from now on everything you do will send a message, whether you like it or not.’

  ‘What message will the Airbus send?’

  ‘That you and Martha are speaking with my voice. It should help things along a little.’

  ‘You mean it will give us face?’

  ‘There is a lot of nonsense talked about face but in this instance I think you are right.’

  ‘How long will we be away?’

  ‘Five days should be sufficient.’

  ‘Will it take us so long to deal with the Lennoxes?’

  ‘There are other things you’ll be looking at while you’re there. Martha has all the details.’

  ‘Five days with only an overnight bag?’

  ‘Buy whatever you need while you’re there. Martha will open an account in your name at Shanghai Tang. The quality of their clothes is excellent and the prices reasonable. The company will pay, of course, but be careful. Mr Henderson or one of his assistants check all accounts and he isn’t called Eagle Eye for nothing. I’ll expect you back here at the weekend but we shall be in daily contact every day you’re away.’

  ‘When you said I’d have to work hard I can see you weren’t joking.’

  ‘You’d better believe it. Welcome on board,’ Hilary said. ‘Desmond is mad at me for taking you away from him but he’ll get over it. I am glad you made the right decision.’

  ‘I hope you won’t regret it.’

  ‘So do I. Now, you’ll be wanting to get back to Channel 12, will you not?’

  A whirlwind would have been more peaceful.

  Back at Channel 12 Millie was waiting and she was as sour as vinegar. ‘You’re on your bike, then?’

  ‘Seems like it.’

  ‘I knew you wouldn’t last. The boss’s daughter? You’ll be looking for a soft landing, no doubt.’

  ‘If you think I’ll be getting that you don’t know my mother.’

  ‘I’m not sure anyone really knows your mother, herself included.’ Millie ironed the anger off her face. ‘Now: Primrose Rice will be taking over from you. Let’s get her in and we’ll talk about the show…’

  A MOMENT TO LOOK BACK

  Hilary had a full morning of meetings with more stacked back to back as far as the eye could see but at twelve she had a two-hour breather. She was feeling a bit frazzled. A shower, she decided, that’s what I need. That and a few minutes’ lie down and some fresh clothes and I shall be like a new woman.

  She stood under the sharp double jet, hot and then cold, letting the water hammer down on her head, and indeed felt refreshed by it. She towelled herself dry and added a discreet squirt or two of Mademoiselle. Naked, she stood in front of the full-length heated mirror and stared critically at her reflection. Not how she’d looked at twenty, but two kids and forty-three years later you could hardly expect anything else. Not too bad, all the same. Her tummy was trim, arms and breasts firm, thighs still shapely. Even in her youth she had never been the beauty Sara had grown to be, but she’d had enough about her to draw men to her or at least those she had wanted to be drawn. Tim Pattinson had been the first – dear God, how wonderful to be sixteen again, with all challenges still in front of her – but Sean Madigan had been the one she had married, back in the days when life’s adventures had all been before her.

  1965–66

  MOVING UP

  1

  Hilary Brand and Associates. Neither Sean nor his mother had liked that. ‘My name not good enough for you?’

  ‘Don’t be silly. It’s just business.’

  His expression had shown what he thought of that.

  The golden letters, each a foot high, were inscribed boldly over the door to tell the world of her arrival and for the information of customers, but as the drizzly evening closed in with the smell of fried food from the takeaway next door there were no customers and the door was closed.

  Inside the smartly carpeted office Hilary Brand was alone. Wearing the smart new clothes she hoped would make her look like the tycoon she was determined to become, she sat in her smart new executive chair at her smart new executive desk in her smart, newly painted office and looked at nothing. The smart new doorbell remained silent. The winter evening brought gusts of chilly rain to splatter the shop window and she knew that unless something changed very soon she was looking down the barrel of disaster. Instead of the queue of eager buyers she had envisaged there had been nobody for over a week. It was 26 June, the rent was due in four days’ time and she hadn’t the money to pay it. Or to pay for the telephone she knew would be cut off if she didn’t settle the account very soon. Or for the electricity. Or for her petrol bill and the registration on her car that would be due at the end of July.

  You, she told herself, are on the bones of your arse.

  The truth was supposed to make you free but recognising it didn’t help unless you could do something about it. But do what? She had the know-how, or at least enough to make a meaningful start on her quest for her first million; she had the premises and the will. Her track record with Jack Almond had given her every reason to be confident of the future yet every day it was becoming more and more obvious that nobody was interested in doing business with a sheila from the eastern states with no local connections.

  ‘We,’ she told the antique hatstand the salesman had told her would bring a touch of class to her office, ‘are in the shit.’

  The trouble was there was blow-all she could do about it; she couldn’t change either her gender or her background.

  Husband Sean, goaded by his mother, was on her back every day. ‘Give it away,’ he said. ‘Talk sweet to that Mrs Shargey; she might take you back. You were earning good dough at her dress shop before you started getting grand ideas.’

  ‘Thought she was too smart for the rest of us,’ she had heard Mrs Madigan say. ‘Little Miss Nobody from back east who was gunna take over the town. Now look at her.’

  Hilary set her jaw. If all else failed she might have to go to Mrs Shargey and eat humble pie but not until she was down. She wasn’t down yet.

  She looked out at the rainy darkness. The lights of the takeaway were still shining but down the street the wet pavements were empty; nobody would be coming by tonight. She switched off the lights, locked the door behind her and headed home. Without Sean’s wages they’d be eating sawdust tonight and not too much of it, either. And didn’t he like to tell her so.

  He was still after her two or three nights a week. It never lasted long: two minutes, mostly, five if she was lucky. Wham, bang, thank you ma’am. Except that with Sean there wasn’t too much of the thank you ma’am, either.

  Something else to live with, although – with less and less optimism – she was still hoping things would improve.

  Next day the skies had cleared and it was a brisk thank-you-for-having-me morning as Hilary walked to work. She turned the corner and saw a young couple waiting outside the shop door. Not even eight o’clock, she thought. They must be keen. And the first customers she’d seen all week. She quickened her pace.

  ‘Sorry to keep you waiting…’

  Then she realised she knew them; they had bought a block from her while she was with Jack Almond. Actually two blocks.

  ‘How nice to see you again. How can I help you today?’ Unlocking the door, mind scrambling, trying to remember their names. ‘Dave and Sandy, isn’t it? Dave and Sandy Peterfield?’

  She made them coffee; she made a royal fuss of them. Why not? Customers were an endangered species at Hilary Brand and Associates.

  She sat at her
desk and gave them her million-watt smile. ‘Are you looking to buy more land?’

  ‘Not exactly.’

  She hadn’t expected that. ‘Then how can I help you?’

  ‘We’ve done well out of the blocks you sold us,’ Dave Peterfield said.

  ‘Very well,’ Sandy said.

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘And we enjoyed doing business with you,’ Sandy said.

  ‘We thought you were very efficient. Business like, you know,’ said her husband. ‘But nice with it.’

  ‘I am sure you haven’t come out so early in the morning to pay me all these compliments,’ Hilary said. ‘Not that I’m complaining.’

  ‘We doubled our money on both blocks,’ Dave said.

  ‘More than doubled,’ Sandy said. ‘And we thought other people must have done the same.’

  ‘The same or better,’ Dave said. ‘So we thought –’

  ‘We thought we’d like to get in on the property boom,’ Sandy said.

  ‘Before it really is a boom,’ Dave said.

  Hilary looked at them in turn. ‘You want to come and work here? Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘If you’re willing. We are both local born and bred,’ Sandy said. ‘We’ve got loads of contacts.’

  ‘I turn out for the local footy team,’ Dave said.

  ‘And I’m involved with the local children’s centre. We like to be involved with the community.’

  ‘Which we thought might help,’ Dave said.

  ‘I’ll be honest with you,’ Hilary told them, ‘I’ve no money to pay either of you. I’ve hardly got a business.’

  ‘You think a local face might help?’ said Dave.

  ‘Two faces?’ said Sandy.

  ‘You see,’ Dave said, ‘we have faith in the product and in the future.’

  Sandy, who had been a book-keeper before her marriage, agreed to run the office and keep the books, field telephone calls, handle clients. This freed up Hilary and in no time both she and Dave were in the field.

  ‘One thing we must do,’ Hilary said.

  ‘What’s that?’

  Two days later they stood and looked admiringly at the new sign. Hilary Brand, Peterfield and Associates.

  ‘Now we’ll show them,’ Dave said.

  2

  They did, and in spades. The deals and the dough began to roll in. The bills were paid, there was money in the bank, everything was looking rosy. But six months later sales started to taper off.

  ‘There’s a limit to what we can do in one neighbourhood,’ Hilary said. ‘It’s time to go further afield.’

  A week later she came across a big block of land for sale. People said it had been on the market for a while with no one interested, even for the asking price of a hundred quid. Hilary couldn’t see why but when she walked across it she soon found out. Twenty yards in and she was in water over her boots. There it was and she could see why it had put buyers off, yet it didn’t seem right. The land was not particularly low-lying so she could see no reason why it should be so wet. She went to the Lands Office, met someone called Lance Bettinger, who gave her a hand interpreting what the records showed. He seemed a dinky-di sort of bloke a few years older than she was. Not bad looking, tall and trim with dark hair and an open face. No fool, either; in no time he confirmed what she’d thought, that it was not standing water but run-off that would be cured when the drains for nearby developments were put in.

  ‘And when’s that going to be?’

  ‘That’s confidential.’ But there was a smile in his voice when he said it.

  ‘Let’s put it this way,’ she said. ‘If you were me, would you buy it?’

  ‘You can’t expect me to answer a question like that,’ he said.

  ‘It would be most unprofessional,’ she agreed.

  ‘But property is always good.’

  All in all she quite fancied Lance Bettinger. You are a married woman, she reminded herself. But her gonads were not listening.

  She went back, parlayed the purchase price down to seventy-five pounds and agreed to pay it off over twelve months. She went back to see Lance Bettinger.

  ‘There’s a block going cheap. Really cheap.’

  ‘My sister could always use a quid,’ Lance said.

  ‘Consider it done.’

  Six months later the drains were in, Hilary’s land was as dry as the Gibson Desert and she sold it for a couple of grand.

  Not a huge killing but a start.

  On the domestic front things weren’t so rosy. Sean wasn’t comfortable with the idea of his wife earning five and ten times more than he did. Said he felt diminished by it.

  ‘You get the benefit too,’ she said.

  ‘Still don’t seem right. A man’s got his pride.’

  So he did; pride and an eight-to-six job in a machine shop. The most he could hope to earn was ten, maybe fifteen a week. Hilary was pulling down somewhere close to eighty.

  The established agents hated her. Plenty of them shared what had been Jack Almond’s opinion.

  ‘No job for a woman.’

  They hated being wrong even more than they hated her.

  ‘She’ll trip over her feet one of these days,’ they said. ‘Let’s hope it’s soon.’

  If things went pear-shaped she knew she could expect no mercy.

  FOLLOWING THE HIGHWAY

  1

  Hilary Brand and Dave Peterfield were sitting in the office. It was Thursday 30 June 1966, the last day of the financial year, and papers were spread on the desk between them as they examined the sales figures Sandy had presented to them that morning.

  ‘One hundred and seventy thousand dollars,’ Hilary said.

  Seventy thousand for each of them, thirty thousand for Sandy. Decimal currency had been introduced back in February and for most people, although not for Hilary Brand or the Peterfields, it was still a bit of a puzzle working out values in the new money.

  Dave sat back in his chair with a pleased expression on his rugged face, rearranged by a decade of footy. ‘Pretty damn good, I would say,’ he said.

  ‘It’s a start. A long way short of good enough, though.’

  ‘Nothing will ever be good enough for you,’ Dave said.

  He was right. It was the way Hilary was made and she knew it. It made for restless nights and an increasingly toey husband.

  Sean was not happy. Their honeymoon in the forests of the south was five years gone and the cracks were beginning to show.

  Mrs Madigan wouldn’t let up. ‘Must be something wrong with her. Take her to the doctor,’ she told Sean repeatedly. ‘I want a grandson.’

  With every month that passed there was less and less chance of that. The passion of the early days was long spent; nowadays Sean hardly touched her from one week to the next. She was growing away from him and he hated it. On the rare occasions he made love to her it was with a barely suppressed anger, as though he wanted to punish more than caress her.

  She continued to put up with it. She did not want to admit failure even in this but her mind was increasingly closed to him, her body not yet but getting there. She saw the highway unrolling ahead of her and was determined to follow it to the end. She would have liked him to join her on her journey but knew there was no chance of it. She was beyond him now.

  ‘Driving around I see lots of other agents’ For Sale signs,’ she told Dave Peterfield. ‘Sometimes they sit there for months. I think we should try a new approach.’

  She had not forgotten her attempt to get into the television business, when the burly contractor had laughed her out of his office. ‘Anyone in your footy club work for television?’

  ‘One bloke’s an announcer.’

  ‘Any chance of meeting him?’

  ‘What you got in mind?’

  She smiled, dollar signs all over her. ‘You’ll see.’

  When she had been working in Mrs Shargey’s fancy-pants dress shop she had told herself she needed allure. Now, when she and Dave sat down over a
beer with Boyd Michaels, she with just a hint of cleavage out, she needed it in spades. Luckily she’d had plenty of practice; most of the people she’d been selling to were blokes.

  She gave twenty-three-year-old Boyd the full treatment and in no time he was simpering and Hilary moved in for the kill. ‘You have a real way with you,’ she said. ‘I’ll bet people buy television sets just to watch you reading the news.’

  Boyd did not deny it.

  ‘I reckon you’d be a star in selling, if you ever fancied a change.’

  Boyd did not deny it.

  ‘What I want is someone to do a bit of selling for us, right after the news. We’d make it worth his while, obviously.’

  Boyd was nervous but interested. ‘What would I have to do?’

  ‘Just read this simple message.’

  She handed him a piece of paper. He tried it out aloud.

  ‘If any of our viewers have property they’d like to sell, Brand Peterfield have large numbers of keen buyers waiting. This could be your big chance to cash in!’

  He looked even more nervous. ‘I dunno…’

  ‘The station gets money from its adverts,’ Hilary said. ‘It relies on it. It’ll get money out of this. So what’s the difference?’

  ‘I’ll speak to the advertising guys. See if they like the idea.’

  ‘What’s not to like?’ said Hilary.

  Dave had his concerns. ‘The Land Agents’ Supervisory Committee,’ he said.

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘They’ll crucify you,’ he said.

  ‘Why should they do that?’

  ‘Soliciting business from other agencies’ clients? That’s prohibited, isn’t it?’

  ‘We’re not soliciting anything from anybody. We’re making a general appeal to the public. If clients of other agents choose to reply it’s not our fault. In any case we don’t know if the station will do it.’

  The station would do it all right; its advertising department couldn’t wait to get her on board. The agreement was signed and paid for; the first broadcast made. The timing was what made it: not slung in with all the other adverts but in its own slot immediately after the nightly news, when the majority of viewers were watching and no one could miss it.