by JH Fletcher
She knew exactly what she was going to do but was not about to say so. Not to Donald; not to anyone. ‘I’ll have to see about that.’
‘And Cornish?’
‘Nothing. There’s nothing to tie him into it except that twice he’d let Maltby get away with it. He’s finished, anyway. The party might have forgiven him one. Twice, never.’
‘Will you win the next election?’
She laughed. ‘We’ll cream them. I hope.’
‘What about Sloat?’
‘That’s the best of all.’ The bastard had tried to double-cross her; now he would pay. Vengeance was sweet; how true that was. ‘I shall hang him out to dry.’
‘I’m not sure I approve of your promotion,’ he said wryly.
‘Why ever not?’
‘It’ll ruin our … domestic arrangements.’
She smiled into the receiver. ‘I wouldn’t say so. Not at all, in fact.’
Would have liked him with her at that moment, in fact. Someone had said that power was like sex. Which didn’t mean you couldn’t have both.
‘My mother asked me to see you,’ Roberta said, ‘but I’m not sure I understand what it’s all about.’
Barbara Getz smiled pleasantly. ‘It’s about her. I have my own column —’
‘I know who you are.’ Roberta was abrupt but didn’t care; she had no time to waste. ‘But not why you’re here.’
‘I believe your mother is one of the top writers of her generation. I’m planning to write a series of articles about her and her work.’
‘Then you should be talking to her, not me.’
‘I’ve already done that. I’ve your mother’s view of herself plus my own impressions but to get a proper perspective I need to talk to someone who knows her better than I do.’
‘Why should my mother need you? She’s hardly unsuccessful as it is.’
‘Ruth Ballard is one of the top writers in the world today. But in my opinion she should be at the very top of the tree. I believe I can put her there.’
‘I would have thought she was there already.’
‘She has a huge readership, certainly, but it’s the people with influence I’m after. The ones who can give her the recognition she deserves.’
Roberta’s eyes narrowed. ‘What sort of recognition?’
‘Australia hasn’t had a literary Nobel since Patrick White,’ Barbara said. ‘Maybe it’s time you had another one.’
Roberta’s face showed nothing but her brain was racing. A Nobel would benefit more people than Ruth. It would be great for the whole State. For Roberta herself, perhaps.
‘How much time do you need?’
‘As much as you’re willing to give me.’
Roberta lifted her phone. ‘Ms Getz will be with me for an hour, Betty.’ She listened to her secretary’s objections. ‘I know I’ve a meeting with the Treasurer. We’ll just have to re-schedule it, that’s all.’ She replaced the receiver, gave Barbara a wintry smile. ‘Ask your questions. Who knows? I might even be willing to answer some of them.’
It took the full hour. Barbara asked about everything. Ruth’s relations with Dougie, with Richard —
‘Richard was the one man in the world for her.’
‘It took her a long time to marry him, though?’
‘For a long time she wasn’t free to marry —’
‘But after Dougie was gone?’
‘It took a while,’ Roberta admitted. ‘But she did it in the end.’
She would never forget it. The wedding that legitimised her. In the Topaz church, of all places; Ruth never told her why. They had wanted a private wedding, only a handful of people to observe the solemnisation of a relationship that had existed for years.
She remembered few details, it was the fact of the wedding that was important to her. Yet in some ways she had resented it. It tied the knot, formally, between her parents. She should have felt pleased — was pleased — but in some ways felt left out. Again. One memory remained, shadowed and incomprehensible.
Ruth and Richard, standing together in the overgrown garden of a house that she had inherited. Roberta, hovering just within earshot.
‘It was what she always wanted,’ Ruth said and laughed. ‘You remember how we talked about the trees?’
‘The tree of grace,’ Richard said.
Without warning Ruth knelt on the damp grass and threw out her arms, staring up at the ridge where the trees tossed their wind-filled branches. ‘Guard and keep this marriage,’ she said. ‘Let it be one, like us, with you and all living things.’
Incomprehensible.
Later, when they came back into the house, Roberta saw her mother’s face.
Shining, as radiant as the sun.
‘Richard was an important factor in your mother’s life?’
‘The most important factor. Without question.’
‘So what happened at the end would have been very traumatic for her?’
‘For us both.’
Roberta was twenty-five. She had moved back to South Australia by then but had returned to Sydney for a few days.
It had rained all day and nightfall brought no respite. Richard had a meeting at the office, someone important from America, and Ruth and Roberta waited tea for him. They sat in the living room, talking of this and that. It was late, the streets were wet, but neither of them had any presentiment of trouble. Until, quite distinctly, they heard a screech of brakes, a metallic thump, a crash of glass. They stared at each other, the sound like a blow to their hearts. Traffic on the main road was heavy; neither of them could possibly have known who was involved yet know they did. Both of them leapt to their feet. Without hesitation they rushed out into the pouring rain.
One memory remained with her always; brake lights puddling the wet bitumen with red, a car impacted beneath the wheels of a huge lorry as though driven there by a giant sledgehammer. The driver of the car had been thrown out and lay in the road surrounded by a small group of people. She did not look at the car, would not have recognised it if she had. Ruth had already shoved her way through the circle of onlookers. Roberta joined her, knowing with an appalled, absolute certainty what she would see.
Ruth, kneeling on the wet road. Richard, his head in her lap. She bent over him, trying to protect his face from the rain, but it was impossible. The water ran off his cheeks, diluted to a pale, blotchy pink the stain spreading across his shirt front. Ruth told her later that the most frightening thing had been how Richard’s body had felt, like a sack of broken pieces, uncoordinated and unresisting. His eyes were wide open. In the headlights Roberta could see them as they tried convulsively to focus on Ruth, on the circle of watchers. On herself. She could not tell what, if anything, he saw.
Ruth keened his name. ‘Richard … Richard … Richard …’
Later she wrote a story about it, letting her pain bleed with the words onto the page. She gave Roberta a copy, wordlessly. Her vision of what Richard saw as he looked up at her for the last time.
He sees her, and others, enormously foreshortened. They are irrelevant. He is striving to retain his grasp upon something that he feels beginning to elude him, slipping downwards and away from him: his world, his unique experience.
His first snow. Fight. Love.
His own intricate particularity.
There is an image he is trying to recall; the impact of hail clashing against the glass of a curtained window.
It is all here, in him. The taste and odour and experience of life. Unlike any other and therefore precious. Unique. Irreplaceable. Unique.
The hail, clashing.
The hail, cl
Fixed eyes wept rain like tears. Ruth let the head slip from her lap onto the wet ground.
Roberta stood, stalked restlessly to the window, looked briefly out. Superimposed on the peaceful flow of traffic in King William Street she saw again the wrecked car, the lights, the broken body of the man. After their trip to Africa she had come to love him, a love that had healed not only th
eir relationship but her own heart. She had never told him, had felt uncomfortable about expressing such an intense feeling. She had always intended to but the accident had intervened. In the distance she heard the whoop and wail of a siren drawing rapidly nearer. She turned to catch Barbara Getz watching her.
‘I think that will have to be all,’ she said. ‘I have a meeting.’ Not caring whether Barbara believed her or not.
‘One last question,’ Barbara said. ‘George Frey. Mean anything to you?’
TWENTY-NINE
Roberta put another CD on the player. Mahler’s Ninth. Sombre music to match her mood; there were important decisions to be made, with Don Maltby heading the list. Not what she was going to do about him, she’d known that from the first, but how to prepare the political ground so that when she made the announcement on Monday she had the party united behind her.
Hang him out to dry.
That was what she had told Donald she would do to Sloat and she was going to make sure that Maltby was pegged out alongside him. She would come clean with the voters, tell them everything. Not her own role in trying to cover up the first scam, of course, but everything else. She’d bring in the police, the works.
She was convinced it would work. The Ms Clean image should appeal to voters sick of shady deals, of lies. Persuade the party heavyweights she was right, that she was capable of winning what most had started to believe was a lost election, and they would support her, no worries. Maltby — and Gavin Cornish — would be history.
There were dangers, of course. Start questioning the integrity of others and she would have to show that her own was beyond reproach. Everything she or anyone close to her had ever done would be under the spotlight. It would be like taking off her clothes in public. She could afford no surprises.
Which was what had made Barbara Getz’s question so disconcerting. George Frey. Mean anything to you?
On the face of it there was no reason why it should. Ruth knew a thousand people Roberta had never heard of. Yet something about the question — the fact that Barbara Getz had asked it at all, perhaps — had set alarm bells ringing and over the years she had learnt never to ignore them.
You’ll have to check it out, she thought. Straightaway, before you knock Don Maltby off his perch.
It was not a prospect she relished. Going in barehanded against a grizzly bear was nothing to disturbing Ruth when she was working on a new book but it would have to be done.
Images, surging, dissolving. Voices. A mist of options, conflicting.
Ruth knew it was no use trying to hasten the process. It would come when it was ready, evolving at its own pace until at last she was ready to write the first word. That first word, she thought. So much hanging on it. Two hundred thousand other words, a series of lives summoned into existence by that initial impulse.
It was awful, oppressive. Waking and sleeping it gave her no peace. She walked the beach for the thousandth time; when she came back the phone was ringing. More than anything she wanted a break yet the insistent peal of the bell enraged her.
Snatched up the receiver like a sword. ‘Yes?’
‘Who is George Frey?’ Roberta’s voice asked.
‘I’m in the middle of a new book and you phone to ask me that?’
‘Barbara Getz asked me. I said I’d never heard of him.’
Ruth would not give a millimetre. ‘My friends are my business.’
‘Hardly a friend. He told this Getz woman that he’d met you only once, in Germany just after the war.’
‘You may be Premier of South Australia,’ Ruth told her daughter tartly. ‘Does that give you the right to cross-examine me?’
Roberta sighed. ‘You know what the media’s like. They dig into everything. Because I am the Premier. Even Barbara Getz is digging and she’s not the sort to give up easily. I have to know.’
She will not bully me, Ruth told herself, yet with less than her habitual vigour. ‘George Frey is none of your business —’
‘Let me tell you how it looks at this end,’ Roberta said. ‘You meet a man in Germany after the war. A complete stranger. You never see him again. You never mention him. Forty-three years later he contacts you and you ask him, not to lunch, that I might just have understood, but to stay with you.’ A pause. ‘Doesn’t that sound … surprising?’
‘I don’t care how it sounds. That’s what happened.’
‘There’s one thing I know that Getz doesn’t,’ Roberta said. ‘Your cousin Franz. Born in Kapunda, fought for Germany in the war.’ Roberta’s voice became urgent. ‘If George Frey really is cousin Franz the media will find out. When they do they’ll be asking two questions. Why is he using another name? And why have you been covering up for him?’
Ruth was furious; worse, she was scared. ‘I am not prepared to have you cross-examine me like this —’
‘Mother —’
‘You’ve no right to interrupt me while I’m working —’
‘Mother —’
‘I won’t listen to another word —’
‘Mother, who is George Frey?’
Ruth slammed down the phone. Sat with trembling hands, staring into space. Thought, Now what do I do?
In Adelaide Roberta replaced the receiver more slowly.
So Ruth was hiding something, as she had feared. The alarm bells had been right. She’s left me no choice, she thought. If she won’t tell me who he is I’ll have to find out for myself.
With the resources at her disposal that shouldn’t be too difficult.
She picked up the phone again. ‘Ask Anthony to come in.’
The next morning Roberta sat and stared at the papers that Anthony had put in front of her, deciding what she should do.
One of Anthony Adam’s greatest values was the network of contacts that he had built up in various departments both here and in Canberra. From a mate in Immigration he had got hold of a copy of the papers relating to George Frey’s entry into the country in 1954. Gunther Frey he had been then, native of Hannover. During the war he had served as a driver with the German High Command. His family had been killed in an air raid; Colonel von Knebt, the officer for whom he had driven, had disappeared, presumed killed, in the last days of the fighting. Everything clean and straightforward yet Ruth had spotted the flaw at once. There was no proof that Gunther Frey was the man he claimed to be.
She shuffled the papers again, came up with a photocopy of a handwritten document. The slanting Teutonic script was hard to decipher but someone had stapled a translation to the page. Hans Bosch, postmaster of Mittelwald, confirmed that he had known Gunther Frey personally for five years.
Roberta looked again at the date of the application. June 1950. The war had ended five years earlier, in 1945. She sorted through the papers once more but found no one who admitted to knowing Gunther Frey before the war.
‘He could be anyone,’ she told her empty office. Franz Vogel or Gunther Frey or Martin Bormann, come to that. There was no way of telling. If he really were Gunther Frey why should Ruth have invited him to stay with her? A complete stranger she had met once over forty years earlier? It made no sense. Whereas if he were Franz Vogel …
If her suspicions were right it was too sensitive an issue to use Anthony Adam. Late that night she phoned Donald Guthrie in Edinburgh.
‘Do you have any contacts in your Foreign Office?’
She explained what she wanted but not why. Two weeks later she received an envelope, hand-delivered, marked personal and confidential. Donald’s handwriting. Inside was a single slip of typewritten paper with a photograph stapled to it.
Franz Vogel, wanted by the French authorities for questioning in connection with a massacre of civilians in the town of Gautier in June 1944.
Roberta studied the photograph. A young man in German uniform, boyish, laughing for the camera. So you are Cousin Franz, she thought. Wanted for war crimes. And now someone called George Frey has turned up out of the blue.
She fetched the Frey papers from her p
rivate safe, dug out the application for immigration. She walked slowly to the window and compared the photograph on the form with the one she had just received.
No doubt about it.
‘I cannot simply ignore it!’
‘I can’t believe you would do such a thing!’
The air was spiked with rage. Ruth prowled. To the window. Back again. Flogging her fury ever higher.
‘I had to,’ Roberta said. ‘Your story made no sense.’
‘You had to do nothing!’ Ruth sat down. Her fingers trembled as she picked over the papers. ‘One of the most important skills in life is to know when to do nothing. I would have expected you to be aware of that.’
She was feeling sick. Literally. Had been ever since Roberta had phoned to say she was flying up to see her. I should have realised I would never fob her off by losing my temper, Ruth thought. Once Roberta gets her teeth into something she has to worry it to death. Now she knows what I had hoped no one would ever know.
Roberta was enumerating points. ‘One; he entered the country under a false identity. That’s an offence. Two; he repeated the offence when he became an Australian citizen. Three; he’s wanted for questioning in connection with the murder of French civilians in 1944.’ Angrily she bunched the documents, thrusting them at Ruth across the table. ‘We’re not talking traffic offences here! It was murder, Mother! Murder!’
Ruth dismissed the flurry of papers. ‘I know all about it.’
‘How do you know?’
‘He told me.’
‘And you believed him, of course. This … this war criminal!’
‘Oh yes, I believed him.’
‘I would never have thought you could be so naive.’
Ruth sense an opportunity. ‘I’m not. That’s the point. I know what happened and you don’t. Do you want to find out the truth or don’t you?’
‘Are you telling me he didn’t enter Australia under a false name?’