She trundled her case through the arrivals hall and grabbed the first taxi off the rank.
‘Hotel Storchen,’ she said.
The driver, suitably impressed, loaded her case into the taxi boot.
‘The Storchen is a hotel of the first class,’ he said.
What he meant was that it was expensive: that always went down well in Zurich, a city Bec had visited several times over the years. Clean, efficient and unlovable, Zurich was a city of a thousand bankers and a million secrets but the driver was right: the Hotel Storchen was indeed first class; she had stayed there before.
It did not disappoint her this time, either.
She stood in the middle of her suite, the one with the terrace overlooking the river, and felt the room swirling around her, jet lag a painful reality. She could have dropped where she stood but at shortly before noon that was a luxury she would not permit herself; the only way to beat jet lag was to fight it and go to bed as close to her normal time as she could manage. She therefore had a long hot shower in the million-dollar bathroom, slopped smelly stuff all over her and stared with disgust at the reflection of her nude body in the full-length mirror.
Now there was a sight for sore eyes, she thought. If you didn’t have them before you looked you would certainly have them afterwards. Eighty-five: there were times she thought age should be a criminal offence.
No matter: being sorry for herself wouldn’t help, nor would it get her to first base with Ilse Lardner, if what she’d heard about the lady were even halfway correct.
Discipline! she told herself.
She dressed slowly and deliberately in the clothes she had packed in her case. Of uncrushable material, they had survived the flight better than she had. She took meticulous care with her make-up. She ordered a light lunch and afterwards phoned Herr Füssli, the senior partner of Elphinstone’s correspondent firm, who told her in excellent English that he had managed to arrange a meeting with Frau Ilse Lardner at her office for ten-thirty the following morning.
‘It was fortunate that I was able to do this,’ Herr Füssli said. ‘Frau Lardner has many commitments and is not always available but has agreed to set aside fifteen minutes to see you.’
Bec listened, translating to herself as she did so.
I have done an outstanding job in arranging the meeting but she is a formidable lady so watch out.
‘Light blue touch paper and stand clear,’ Bec said. ‘I understand.’
‘Blue touch paper?’ She had the impression that Herr Füssli was not comfortable with jokes, especially Australian jokes.
‘Not important,’ she said. ‘And thank you for your trouble.’
‘Nothing,’ Herr Füssli said.
‘You will of course send me your account.’
‘Of course.’
The traffic was formidable but Bec had given herself plenty of time and was ten minutes early for her meeting.
On the tick of ten-thirty she was ushered into Frau Lardner’s office: a large room beautifully furnished with alpine pictures on the walls. There was a crucifix mounted on an ebony base on the wall behind Frau Lardner’s desk.
Frau Lardner was a substantial presence, both in build and personality; Bec thought that no one entering this room would have any doubt who was the boss. Her doughy face was not that of a woman who wasted much time smiling.
‘Welcome to Zurich. I trust you had a good flight. How can I help you?’
‘I am making enquiries about a mutual acquaintance.’
‘Raine Armitage,’ Ilse Lardner said. ‘Herr Füssli mentioned that it was in connection with Raine Armitage that you wished to see me.’ And waited, face expressionless.
‘I should explain that my son is a widower who controls substantial properties in Australia –’
‘I am aware of your circumstances,’ Frau Lardner said.
Of course, Bec thought. It was to be expected she would have made enquiries.
‘Then you may be aware that Ms Armitage has struck up an acquaintance with my son.’
‘Raine Armitage is no longer this family’s responsibility. She has chosen her own life and we have had no communication with her for many years.’
‘So I understand. But –’
‘Therefore I see no way in which I can help you.’
A long way to come for a brush-off like this, Bec thought. But she wasn’t beaten yet.
‘There have been a number of questions about Ms Armitage’s background,’ she said. ‘Unanswered for the most part since she has been unwilling to talk about her past. It was only through a chance remark that we even found out she had spent time in Switzerland.’
‘Certainly she did,’ Ilse Lardner said. ‘I can confirm that, if that is what you wish to know. Her son Jaeger was born here.’
‘It is a matter of some concern to me, you see,’ Bec said. ‘Since it seems possible that my son and Raine Armitage are planning to get married.’
Bec walked into the passenger concourse at Hobart airport and knew from the expression of Tamara’s face – grey and twenty years older than her years – they had a problem.
‘What’s happened?’
‘Too late,’ Tamara said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘They announced their engagement last night.’
‘We’ll see about that,’ Bec said.
Giles was in what Bec had always called the little parlour. He was reading the newspaper but stood up when she came in. Raine and Jaeger were nowhere to be seen, which made Bec’s task simpler.
‘Have you come to congratulate me?’ Giles said.
He said nothing about her having been away; perhaps he had not noticed her absence.
‘I have indeed,’ Bec said.
She wasn’t as tired as when she’d arrived in Zurich; she was empowered, energy bubbling.
‘I’m glad. To be honest,’ said Giles who had never been honest in his life, ‘I was afraid you might think I was a bit long in the tooth to embark on a new adventure.’
‘Sit down,’ Bec said.
He looked at her uncertainly but obeyed.
‘I do congratulate you. Not on what you had planned to do but on the fact that you have had the good fortune to escape from what would have been an embarrassing situation.’
‘I have no idea what you are talking about,’ Giles said.
‘You cannot marry Raine. She is already married.’
‘That is nonsense. She’s divorced.’
‘I have just returned from Zurich, where I had a lengthy discussion with Raine’s mother-in-law, a Mrs Lardner, who has informed me that, as Raine is well aware, she and her family are devoutly Catholic and that there has therefore never been any question of a divorce or even an annulment. Raine and Mrs Lardner’s son are still married. Mrs Lardner also told me that Raine had herself suggested that Jaeger was not her husband’s child.’
Giles, gaping, tried to bluster. ‘I don’t believe a word of it.’
Bec handed him an official-looking piece of paper. ‘It is written in German but it’s an affidavit prepared by an attorney and bearing the stamp of the district court in Zurich. It confirms that Raine and her husband Felix Lardner are still married. Check the date. The affidavit was issued two days ago.’
‘There’s been some mistake.’
Giles’s mouth was set in the stubborn line she knew so well. That had always been his way; when things didn’t work out his first response was to deny: half-truths, self-evident lies, everything.
‘What were you doing in Zurich, anyway?’
‘I was talking to Raine’s mother-in-law.’
‘You were trying to break me up with the woman I love,’ said Giles.
‘Be thankful I did. You could have found yourself in a messy bigamy situation if I hadn’t.’
Raine found her an hour later. ‘Where d’you get off, spying on me?’ ‘You know the ins and outs of the law. You wanted my son to make you a trustee of the Derwent Trust and Jaeger a beneficiary. You d
id this, pretending you were divorced when you knew you weren’t, in order to gain control of the estate and deprive my granddaughter of her legal rights as a member of this family. I call that fraud, Raine. What do you call it?’
‘I don’t believe I’m hearing this. I always thought we were divorced. That Zurich bitch told me we were divorced.’
‘I don’t believe you. Divorce is never on the cards for Catholics as strict as the Lardners, and you knew that when you left Zurich.’ Later that day Bec took her little red sports car – the one that had come so close to flying ten years before at Nitwit Corner – and drove down the four-lane highway howling with traffic, then on a side road signposted to Gimbaloo, finally across country along a barely discernible gravel track until, half an hour after leaving the house, she came to a deep valley that aeons before a glacier had carved between towering basalt cliffs.
The valley was a geological freak – the only other place she knew where there were cliffs like that was miles away down the Tasman Peninsula. Jonathan had first brought her here in the final week before he went off to war. When she wanted to be near him without having to drive all the way to the place on the coast where he had been lost, it was to this spot she came. Perhaps that was why there was always a ritual to her visits.
She drew to a stop at the mouth of the valley and sat in a silence broken only by the wind and the ticking of the cooling engine and stared at what lay in front of her: the vegetation watered by a permanent creek where trout hugged the shadows, the forested slopes rising to the base of the black cliffs where shy creatures – wallaby, echidna, the wide-eyed brush-tailed possums, sinuous and menacing tiger snakes – watched the intruder with wary eyes.
To Bec this valley was the one place in a frenetic world where the ancient environment remained unsullied; since it was not possible to lie at Jonathan’s side she had often felt she would like to leave her bones in this place, which seemed to her to retain echoes of the world’s first days.
In the towering black cliffs, the lushness of tree fern and ancient forest, she unfailingly found peace when she most needed it.
She needed it now.
She had taken a huge risk in speaking to Giles as she had. During the return flight from Zurich her choices had challenged her: to confront him with the truth or do nothing, pretend ignorance and let the cards fall as they would.
The fact was she had never had a true choice – it was not in her nature to close her eyes to reality – but she had not underestimated the danger.
There was also nothing to prevent him ignoring Raine’s married status and shacking up with her anyway.
Bec thought his instinct would probably favour that course – a gesture of defiance to damage the mother who had interfered in his affairs, along with his daughter whom he no doubt saw as Bec’s co-conspirator – but she had gambled on Giles’s vanity, that he would be so affronted by Raine’s deceit in concealing the truth from him that he would dump her.
She sat for a while then got out of the MG and walked down the gritty track into the valley. Solitude embraced her. In the stillness the sound of the creek was loud. She watched the shadows of trout feeding on a hatch of small flies whose name she did not know. She had never attempted to catch the trout; to Bec this was a holy place and to take life wilfully would have been a desecration.
She walked deeper into the valley, observing a wedge-tailed eagle soaring, wings outstretched. She reached the place where the cliffs swung inwards, squeezing the valley so that the only way a walker could continue was to rock-hop down the creek itself. She’d done that a lot at one time, following the rushing water downstream until it reached the falls and jetted out into the forest far below, but those days were gone.
She thought it would make an interesting end, to follow the water in its vertical flight into oblivion. But that time was not yet, and who could read the future?
She sat for a while on a rock at the valley’s end before walking back to the car. She drove home and the blessed peace of the valley went with her.
Tamara met her.
‘They’ve gone.’
‘All of them?’
‘All three.’
So had Giles abandoned Raine or not? It seemed not; at least for the moment.
‘Did they say anything?’
‘Not a word. But if looks could kill I wouldn’t be standing here now.’
What would be the outcome? Impossible to say.
‘What do we do?’ Tamara said.
‘What we always do. We carry on.’
1913–17
Bec had expected war from Grandma Bessie and got it. From the first day of the marriage pistols were not only at dawn but at every minute of every day. What nobody including Bec had expected was that nine months into her marriage there would be a war of another and even more lethal kind.
As expected, Grandma Bessie was vocal about that too. ‘Of course you aren’t going,’ she told Jonathan. ‘Who will run Derwent while you’re chasing around Europe? What’s this nonsense with Germany got to do with us?’
Bec said the same, only more quietly and in private. ‘Why do you feel you must?’
‘It’s my duty,’ Jonathan said.
‘Don’t you think you have a duty here as well? To Derwent? To us?’
She was careful not to say to me.
‘Of course, but I have to do my bit. It won’t be for long; they say it’ll be over by Christmas.’
Bec wondered whether Jonathan might be right, in which case there seemed no point in going so far for so short a time, but her instinct told her this was likely to be a longer trial than her husband supposed.
‘What’s the war about?’ she asked Jonathan.
If she were to lose the comfort of her husband even for the few months he expected it seemed reasonable to know why but it soon became clear that Jonathan did not know either. In any case war was a man’s thing so it would have made little sense to her anyway.
Jonathan signed up and two weeks later received his orders. In the morning he would be leaving with a lieutenant’s badges of rank on his sleeve.
They made love passionately that night, clinging as though each had abandoned the other, and only their shared passion showed it was not so.
In the morning, after the tears and loving and despair, Bec was calm. ‘Make sure you write to me, Johnny.’
Rose Penrose was up at her place in the Whitsundays and did not come to say goodbye to her son, which might have been a blessing, for Rose would have wept and daylight was not the time for tears. While Bessie Penrose, stalwart and hard as Blackman’s Head, ordered her grandson to be courageous for the sake of king and country and the family’s good name.
Although why the family’s name should be affected by a war on the other side of the world Bec did not understand.
She did not underestimate the problems she would face, alone in Derwent with her grandmother-in-law. She had hoped they might be brought closer by Jonathan’s departure but it became obvious even before he left that there was no chance of that.
‘I will be accompanying Jonathan to Launceston,’ Bessie said. ‘I have business there that can’t wait.’ Her smile was drenched in acid. ‘Such a pity, Rebecca, that you won’t be able to travel with us, but I’m afraid the motor won’t take three passengers.’
Bec had no intention of being separated from her husband until he boarded the troopship. Observing the size of the Ford and anticipating there might be a problem, she had therefore made a plan.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘You take the motor. We’ll go by train.’
Bessie’s mouth snapped tight. ‘That is completely unacceptable –’
‘Jonathan and I have talked about it. We agree it’s the only way.’ It was Bec’s turn to smile. ‘Such a pity but, like you say, that motor of yours is very small.’
Now Bessie’s glare might have melted glass. It confirmed what Bec supposed she had always known: when Bessie Penrose hated you, you stayed hated.
; ‘I shall speak to my grandson,’ Bessie said.
And did so, to no avail.
She would not give in over the motor so set off in solitary state, her scowl blighting the sunlight, and was waiting at the railway station when the train pulled in. Here her fury was compounded on discovering that Jonathan and Rebecca were taking the ferry to Melbourne together.
‘In that case I am afraid you will have to find your own way home,’ she told Rebecca. ‘I take it you will be returning to Derwent?’
‘Oh yes,’ Bec said. ‘Us’ll wait for Jonathan together, ain’t that right? A bit of company for each other.’
Us’ ll? Ain’t? And this creature would be the chatelaine of Derwent? The prospect put Bessie’s teeth on edge. What made it worse was her suspicion that Bec had put on the accent for Bessie’s benefit.
A bad beginning, nor did things improve as time went by. Bec was barely back at Derwent when she found she was in the family way. She had mixed feelings about it; in other circumstances she’d have been over the moon but as things were it was a worry. People said men were dying like flies over there. What if Jonathan never came back? What would the baby’s future be then?
Giles was born in a scowling storm, black and thunderous, and a gale of wind that Bec, lying on the stripped bed and fighting a storm of her own, thought might have ripped a lesser house from its foundations. As it was, in the tremulous intervals between the contractions that more and more denied her control over her body, she felt the building shudder in the gusts.
It was around the middle of the day but beyond the window the sky was dark and Minnie Thwaites, who had come with Dr Farmer from Campbell Town to provide her with what assistance they could, told her trees were down in the forested area below the house and the air was full of flying leaves.
It seemed like a prediction that the storm should die as the child was born.
‘A regular little peacemaker he’ll be,’ said Minnie. ‘Your hubby will be that proud of his son when he gets back from the war.’
Bec had hoped the baby might change Bessie’s attitude; once again she was disappointed. Shortly after Giles’s birth she overheard her talking to the housekeeper about him.
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