Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan ought to have known better. She’d been on the island since the early 1930s. She’d seen it all – the hungry families with barefoot kids, their clothes made from sugar bags, the grinding poverty. No jobs available when the weather gets up and goes bad on you, sometimes for weeks, the men sitting on their hands ashore with no wages coming in. She’d been on the island just after the Great Depression – she bloody knew how hard it was to earn a quid from the sea. Now she was talking about the export market where she had expertise in, excuse me, caviar! What the fuck had caviar to do with crayfish? Bloody fish eggs in a tin!
‘I have a proposition to make to both of you,’ she continued. She must have seen the look on my face, because she stopped and turned to me. ‘I’m sorry about correcting your grammar, Jack. It was rude and unnecessary – I shan’t do it again.’ She’d never said that before. To make such a promise was almost more absurd than the ridiculous export idea. English grammar was her passion – she simply couldn’t help herself. Then she smiled and hit us with the next bombshell. ‘I’d like to go into the fishing business with the two of you.’
It was only just a little past two o’clock in the afternoon, yet already it felt to me as if I’d been up for forty-eight hours. ‘Beg your pardon? You? Fishing?’ What can she possibly mean? Clearly I was not the only one under strain.
‘We’ll build an export business together. We won’t sell locally – cray fetches three and sixpence a pound on the Melbourne fish market; in America we’d clear ten shillings a pound after expenses.’
I was suddenly exasperated. ‘Nicole ma’am, have you looked at a map lately?’ I stretched my arm to the far side of the table. ‘Australia’s here.’ I then drew my forefinger slowly across the red-and-white-checked tablecloth towards where she sat at the opposite end. ‘This is the Pacific Ocean.’ My hand finally came to rest next to her half-eaten plate of chicken cacciatore. ‘And this is America! Los Angeles or San Francisco, take your pick. New York is on the other side of the flamin’ continent. May I ask how we are going to get fresh cray to America, much less New York?’
‘Qantas has two flights a week to Los Angeles,’ she replied mildly. Jimmy could see I was getting pretty upset. That’s the trouble with being a redhead – when you’re steamed up it shows. ‘Brother Fish, he cor-rect, Nicole ma’am. We ain’t got no dough to do no export business. We ain’t got da bread foh a boat, even iffen it gonna be a flyin’ boat!’
‘But I have.’ She said it quietly as if it was no big deal, then, turning to me, she asked, ‘If I recall correctly, you said it would take about 10 000 pounds to equip properly for all-weather fishing?’
I nodded. ‘Yeah, that’s right – might as well be a million.’
She reached down to her handbag on her lap and withdrew a sheet of paper. ‘Ten thousand, five hundred and eighty pounds,’ she announced. ‘That is, with a good transceiver – I’d rather you didn’t get lost at sea.’
She pushed the piece of paper over to me. We were silent for a while – I mean, there’s not a lot you can say after something like that. I glanced down at the single sheet, carefully ruled with a column down the right-hand side filled with numbers, and on the left she’d written the items we’d require, the very first being ‘One 45ft fishing boat’. I glanced at the bottom line where the outrageously large sum, 13 987 pounds, sat squatly positioned between two horizontal black lines.
‘Well?’ she looked at me querulously. ‘Cat got your tongue, Jack?’
‘What are you going to do, sell the Gazette?’
She drew back in horror. ‘Oh, I couldn’t possibly do that!’ We both looked at her, mystified, and I handed the sheet of paper to Jimmy.
‘I . . . I don’t know what to say.’
‘I suppose your reaction is not surprising, Jack. I dare say it’s a lot of money and naturally you’re curious as to where it will come from.’
That was probably the understatement of the decade – the century! Fourteen thousand quid could buy a house and a car and was the sort of dough it would take us ten years or more to save. That is, if we got all the breaks, which was highly improbable – fishermen never get all the breaks, the sea makes damn sure of that.
She paused and seemed to change the subject. ‘You’ve been very patient not asking more pointedly about my past, Jack. Thank you for not persisting. After all, I know all about you. James has also been kind enough to tell me most of his personal story. But you know very little about me. If we are to be partners then it’s only fair, before you make a decision, that we’re completely honest and open with each other. Partnerships are always a tricky business and I would never wish to come between you.’ She smiled and looked fondly at us. ‘However, I must ask you to keep what I tell you confidential. A woman’s life is not the same as that of a man. The world is quick to judge a female who has, as they say, “a past”. I’ve made a new life for myself on the island and if it hasn’t been everything a gal could possibly want, it’s been satisfactory. I’m fifty years old the year after next – by the way, that’s also confidential.’ She looked up and took a breath. ‘Well, it’s high time I stopped dithering.’
We both laughed. Dithering was such an inappropriate word for Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan, who had practically run the island since I’d been too small to remember it without her. She and the Reverend Daintree (before he started losing the plot), Dr Light from the cottage hospital, and Father Crosby were the permanent brains – the movers and shakers. Although, in truth, Father Crosby was probably more brawn and bombast than he was brain. The rest of the islanders came and went, sitting on the various committees and as members of the town council, sharing the largely ceremonial role of mayor. But these four were the professionals to whom, from birth until death, in one way or another, we all eventually turned.
Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan, as I’ve mentioned, performed a number of different roles on the island. As music teacher and the director of the school concert she had brought a smidgin of culture to the community. As librarian she’d taught the disadvantaged and illiterate to read and write. As justice of the peace she’d kept her finger on the pulse of the island’s business affairs, protected the vulnerable and changed people’s lives, and in the last few years as editor of the Gazette she’d steered things in the right direction or stirred the community out of its customary lethargy. She’d made enemies and friends and often the one would change into the other and then revert once more. Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan showed neither fear nor favour, and she couldn’t be bought. If all this could be termed dithering, then the rest of us might be described as practically flyblown.
But if there were those among the islanders who admired her and those who didn’t, she had very few, if any, close friends – with perhaps the exception of the Reverend Daintree. In the old days, before he was in his dotage, she’d spent a lot of time at the manse, and if he hadn’t been so old, even then, tongues might have wagged. She still turned up twice a week in the evening to cook something special for him, and I was later to learn that she cooked Chinese meals and that he too had spent some of his early days in China, as a missionary. While she was often the subject of conversation, admiring and otherwise, in all the time I’d known her I couldn’t remember any islanders who felt they truly knew her. I was no exception. While I’d regarded her increasingly as a friend, it was still with a sense of wariness.
Jimmy, on the other hand, had seemed to be able to break through her stern, imperious demeanour with apparent ease. I would observe as he pressed on regardless, riding roughshod over her defences, to capture her heart and mind to the point of enchantment. They appeared to understand each other on a different level, and I’d never heard her laugh as often and in quite the way she did in his company. Moreover, while she was interested in his mind, she never corrected his grammar or winced at his pronunciation. She seemed to accept that Jimmy had invented a version of English that was unique, and she didn’t tamper with it. He would often disagree with her, but she’d listen witho
ut shaking her head in disapproval as she would with me, often before I’d completed the sentence. She accepted Jimmy for who he was, while she had always regarded me as a potential outcome – someone whom she regarded as not yet a finished product.
While I wasn’t in the least concerned with their growing friendship, I was now wary of how it might manifest itself in a partnership. The well-worn cliche ‘Two’s company, three’s a crowd’ sprang to mind. Fishing is a male business. Boats and fish are, at best, dirty work involving lots of small decisions, some of which can end up saving or losing your life. The sea is always a dangerous place, and on a two-man fishing vessel your partner is an extension of yourself. I never doubted for one moment that Jimmy and I would work well at sea. However, if Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan was calling the shots from the shore there would be the opportunity for tension between us. Her growing closeness to Jimmy had the potential to split his and my loyalty to each other. I told myself that her imperious manner wouldn’t vanish overnight, that she was essentially a loner accustomed to making all the decisions. Local gossip had it that there was a constant exit of employees from the Gazette, where it was known to be ‘her way, or no way’.
On the other hand, there was the Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan of tact and charm, who could twist a real hard case like Harry Champion – ‘the choice of all the Champions’ – who’d duly received his import licence for the French equipment needed to make brie, around her little finger. Furthermore, the way she’d planned the campaign for Jimmy’s Certificate of Exemption had been masterly. Whether he finally received permission to stay in Australia or not, she hadn’t missed a trick and her ‘emotional exception’ concept had showed how very well she understood human nature.
With her guiding us in what still seemed an outrageous idea to export cray to America, we might even have half a chance of succeeding, although I must say I harboured very serious doubts that it could be made to work. If I was being perfectly honest with myself, Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan was a clever and strong-willed woman, Jimmy Oldcorn was a natural and charismatic leader and Jack McKenzie was – well, what the hell was I? I guess a fisherman who read books and worried a lot.
The obsequious waiter, still rubbing his hands together, appeared and asked if we’d enjoyed what he referred to as ‘your second course’, pointing out politely that we hadn’t ordered an entrée. Perhaps next time we came we might like to try the excellent Tasmanian oysters served with cocktail sauce, or the prawn cocktail. He also sincerely hoped we would enjoy our dessert.
He appeared again shortly with our pudding orders – strawberries and cream for Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan, pavlova for Jimmy and crème caramel for me. This gave the head waiter the chance to glide away from our table with a deferential bow, the words ‘Bon appétit’ left hovering in the air behind him.
I wondered momentarily if our individual choice of sweets was a good omen or a bad one – whether it meant that, as potential business partners, each of us would make an equal but different contribution to the venture or end up never being able to see eye to eye on any problem. Despite the enormously generous offer she was making, I felt Jimmy and I would have to think very carefully about a business partnership with the dreaded justice of the peace and formidable editor of the Queen Island Weekly Gazette.
Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan spooned a single strawberry snow-capped with cream, and held the spoon poised in the air at chin level. ‘It all seems so very long ago when, as a fifteen-year-old refugee fleeing from the Bolsheviks, I arrived in Shanghai in 1922,’ she began.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The Manchurian Piano Player
‘I was born on a modest country estate on the Volga River near the city of Astrakhan, only a few miles from the border of Kazakhstan, where my family had lived for several generations. My father, Count Nikolai Georgii Avksent’ievich Lenoir, was the eldest of four sons,’ she said, smiling, realising his name must seem like a bit of a mouthful. ‘In Russia, when you first introduce a nobleman you use all his names. I should also emphasise that at the time, a count wasn’t always a title that meant prestige and wealth. At best we were minor aristocracy, and in the salons of St Petersburg and Moscow we would have been dismissed as country bumpkins or, worse still, in trade – and, even more inappropriately, in fish. Unlike the true wealthy and titled our fortunes didn’t depend on vast land holdings and the number of peasants we owned, but instead came from the Caspian Sea and, more particularly, from the export of beluga caviar.’
Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan dipped into her strawberries again, half-finishing the bowl before she resumed talking. ‘I imagine we were well-off and I dare say, compared to the peasants and the fishermen on the river, we were considered enormously wealthy. At the age of eighteen, as was the tradition in most families like ours, my father entered the Aleksandrovskoe Military School in Moscow, where he eventually graduated as an officer and as a military engineer.
‘It had never been his intention to make a career in the army – as the eldest son he was responsible for running our fishing enterprises and managing the estate. Military training was where young noblemen at the time were euphemistically taught how to be gentlemen, while being trained to be officers in the tsar’s Imperial Army. While they may have been young officer cadets, they were almost certainly not, for the most part, gentlemen. The time spent at a military academy was seen as a time when a young man from a good family sowed his wild oats before returning to the family estate to marry and settle down.
‘My father’s return home from military training coincided with a growing demand in America for beluga caviar. He used his newly acquired skill as an engineer to build a new fish-processing plant on the river near the city of Volgograd, which was said to look remarkably like a fort and was soon known locally as Fort Nikolai. Shortly after returning, he married Celeste Margaret Jourdan, a ballet dancer whom he’d met during his last months in the military academy, at a reception held on Bastille Day at the French Consulate in Moscow.
‘I was born in 1906 on the family estate, and despite hopes for a male heir I was to be the only child. I was eight when the Great War broke out and my father joined the Russian Imperial Army as a captain in the Engineers. He was wounded early in 1915 while blowing up a bridge on the Turkish border.’ She looked up. ‘Curiously, like the two of you, in the leg. He was to walk with a pronounced limp, one leg slightly shorter than the other, for the remainder of his life.’
‘Dat too bad, Nicole ma’am,’ Jimmy offered, shaking his head in sympathy.
‘Rather than be invalided out of the army, he volunteered to work as a military engineer on the Trans-Siberian Railway. With Turkey controlling the Black Sea outlet to the Mediterranean through the Dardenelles, Germany controlling the Baltic Sea, and with the port of Murmansk in the Arctic Ocean frozen for a large part of the year, the Trans-Siberian Railway became Russia’s main artery to the outside world with Vladivostok, where my father was posted, its main port. My mother found herself separated from her husband by almost the entire length of Russia. As his was largely a desk job, she insisted, against his will, that we join him.
‘The army promoted my father to major, then colonel, and transferred him to become the head of the Port Authority in Vladivostok. Aristocrats, even of a minor kind, were soon to become ubiquitous, but when we first arrived they were few and far between in that part of Russia. We were accepted readily, even gratefully, into the local society. My early life was spent, like most well-bred Russian children, learning to play the piano and, of course, with my mother a ballet teacher, to dance. I was also taught to sing. My mother loved to dance, although my father’s gammy leg left her without a partner and my fondest childhood memories are of her winding up the gramophone and dancing with me every morning from the age of seven. By the time I was ten I’d learned all the classic dances as well as the latest steps coming out of America. Naturally, I spoke French, and upon arriving in Vladivostok my mother engaged a Chinese amah named Ah Lai, who came from a village near Harbin in Manchuria, to ta
ke care of me. Children pick up languages effortlessly, and I soon learned to speak Cantonese fluently.
‘I loved Ah Lai dearly and she eventually became more a member of the family than a servant, which was not the way one was expected to treat the Chinese in those days. When I grew too old for an amah, she became my mother’s tai-tai amah – that is to say, her personal maid. With England and France being Russia’s major allies, my father was anxious that I learn English as well. A very prim and proper spinster lady, Miss Rosen, was engaged to tutor me for half a day three times a week.’ Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan laughed. ‘As I recall, she was very pedantic about vowels. “My dear, correctly spoken English is a matter of sounding your vowels clearly,” she would say. We would spend the first fifteen minutes of every lesson sounding out a number of words and sentences, with clearly accentuated vowels, she’d prepared in advance. “The clown bounced on the trampoline and burst a boil on his bottom that caused him to become discombobulated” was one of her very favourite sentences. I confess I thought it very funny, and we’d both giggle no matter how many times it was repeated.
‘It was a pleasant, privileged and comfortable childhood until 1917, a date I remember less for the revolution that toppled the Romanoff Dynasty and the murder by the Reds of the tsar and his family, than as the year my own beloved mother died. She was an early victim of the flu epidemic that was eventually to spread throughout the world and cause the death of between forty and fifty million souls. I was only eleven at the time, and so Ah Lai virtually became my mother.
‘Russia was now divided by two forces – the White Russians, previously the Russian Imperial Army, and the Communists, or Red Army. The White cause finally collapsed on the 7th of February 1920 when the head of the White Army in Siberia, Admiral Kolchak, was killed in Irkutsk. Vladivostok immediately became the destination for the petty aristocracy and bourgeoisie fleeing from the terror of the Red Army. While still in charge of the port my father no longer received a salary, but he nevertheless felt compelled to continue to work. Shiploads of refugees began to arrive from all over Russia and it was important that someone avoid complete chaos. As it was, it was only a matter of time before the Red Army would arrive and, fearing for my life but feeling himself duty bound to remain at his post, my father asked Ah Lai to take me to stay in her village near Harbin. It took several weeks to travel the 250 miles to her village in an ox cart driven by an old Chinaman who’d once had his throat cut by bandits but somehow survived. He could no longer talk other than to make a series of rattling noises, which the ox seemed to understand. He slept with the beast at night while we cooked and camped at the side of the road, which, at the time, I thought was a grand adventure.’
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