Fishing for Stars

by Bryce Courtenay

  ‘Well, you never can tell what will turn up, Nicholas. It worries me a little that we’re not in natural resources, the next great boom. Last time I was in Japan Konoe Akira introduced me to Japan’s biggest paper manufacturer and they’re desperate for raw product.’

  ‘What, wood?’

  ‘Yes, Borneo has huge potential.’

  ‘Anna, those are old-growth forests, some of the world’s best.’

  Anna gave me a sharp look. ‘You’ve been speaking to the Green Bitch. I thought we had an agreement, not to discuss each other’s affairs.’

  ‘Yes, but . . .’

  ‘Nicholas, the Malaysian Chinese are already bribing the generals; better us than them.’

  ‘What about fishing? You already have vast experience in that while you know nothing about timber.’

  ‘No, no, I’ve already examined that possibility, but the Indonesian fishing industry has almost exhausted its fishing grounds. Apart from that, it’s traditional and run from village centres. Its only future is poaching in northern Australian waters and I don’t want to be involved in that. As for timber, you cut it down, haul it out, chip it and load it into ships then send it off. You don’t even need a fish factory.’ Anna paused. ‘Although I may need you to build a harbour or two in remote areas.’

  ‘Don’t ask us to do that, Anna! This isn’t because of Marg. I was raised in the jungle. As the bishop always said, “The big trees are the lungs of the earth. We owe the very air we breathe to them.” With me trees are a personal thing, Marg just happens to have come to think the same way.’

  Anna’s violet-blue eyes looked unblinkingly at me. ‘Nicholas, what do I care what she thinks? To hell with the Green Bitch!’

  ‘But I hope you care about what I think?’ I replied just a tad self-righteously.

  ‘Nicholas, I think it is time to return to our former arrangement where I never discuss business decisions with you,’ Anna said quietly.

  ‘Shit, darling. Not trees!’ I lamented, sensing I had been defeated. ‘Leave the big old jungle monarchs alone. Some have been standing tall since Cornelis de Houtman reached the Spice Islands in 1596.’

  Anna looked impressed. ‘How do you know about him?’

  ‘Probably the bishop; my mind is full of that sort of crap. Anna, those big trees have been standing forever,’ I said, returning to the subject.

  Anna shrugged. ‘I can’t save the forests nor can Budi. The deal involves several generals and Tommy Suharto himself. If we withdraw, the Malaysian Chinese will take up our concession quick as a flash.’

  ‘That’s what the drug peddlers always say – if we don’t do it, someone else will,’ I shot back.

  Anna sighed, visibly impatient. ‘The Suharto family and the generals just see cash, and in Borneo it’s growing on trees. Besides, the deal is already done, Konoe Akira introduced me to Komatsu and six D15 bulldozers and machinery have already been shipped from Japan.’

  ‘What are you saying? If rape is inevitable lie back and enjoy it?’ I spat.

  ‘Nick, I didn’t hear that! I don’t have to justify my actions!’

  ‘Oh yes we do, darling. In the end we all do.’

  Anna turned on me, now very angry. ‘What sanctimonious crap! Your problem, Nick, is you’ve been so busy fucking the Green Bitch that you’ve forgotten how the real world works!’

  It was the first time I had seen her on the defensive.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  ‘Nick, I love you. I always have, always will. But I don’t want to be taken for granted ever again, to be a convenient arrangement. A handbag.’

  Marg Hamilton, Beautiful Bay

  ANNA’S LITTLE SIXTY-SECOND make-up-your-mind surprise about Marg on our last night in Japan didn’t result in our slipping quietly into bed together next time Marg visited Beautiful Bay. We’d always been the best of friends and had grown even closer since Rob had died so tragically, but now, even though Marg had confessed that she felt about me much as I did about her, suddenly everything was about to change. From the moment I had said yes to the ticking of the second hand on Anna’s watch, she never mentioned the subject of my sleeping with Marg again and was obviously waiting for me to make the next move.

  Allow me to backtrack for a little. Marg was due to come and stay at Beautiful Bay two weeks after I arrived back in Port Vila from Japan. I’d said goodbye to Anna in Melbourne, where she said she needed to finalise the Nauru House property deal. She wouldn’t be able to visit the island for a month, she said, and we agreed it was not a bad idea. We’d been through a fair bit together and a period of separation was probably good for both of us.

  Marg called once each week as usual and said more than once that she wanted to discuss something rather important with me but would wait until she visited. It wasn’t hard to guess what this might be and so I rehearsed and rehearsed. I mean, how do you tell one strong-minded woman with a healthy ego that another strong-minded woman has given you permission to take her to bed? How the hell was I going to put it to Marg?

  I rehearsed hundreds of beginnings in my head, some more pathetic than others: Darling, I have wonderful news . . . Darling, I have something to tell you . . . Darling, in Japan Anna . . . Darling, remember our discussion . . . Darling, I’ve given it a lot of thought and . . . Darling, things have changed . . . Darling, what would you say if . . . Or my personal version of the usual macho crap: Okay, Marg, get your gear off. Let’s rumble, baby! That’s if I could even think up a my version, which of course I couldn’t. I love the idea of women too much to be rough or crude, to slap them around verbally or otherwise, even though Anna still enjoyed a good spanking. I’m laughing to myself now; I couldn’t even imagine spanking Marg, but I did try to imagine her responses: Gee, tell Anna thanks, Nick. It’s been a long flight, let me take a shower. Ha, ha, ha, isn’t it lucky I bought new undies. Give me half an hour and I’ll expect you. Don’t knock, just come in, darling. I don’t think so! Marg, just like Anna, would want conditions, rules. She wasn’t going to play second fiddle. There would be no pecking order.

  When I was eighteen Marg had invited me into her bed and delightfully, beautifully and lovingly taken my virginity and thereafter taught me the ways of pleasing a woman. In the glorious days and weeks that followed, she repeatedly drew me into her bed, but always on her terms. I was never under any illusions about who was in control. She wasn’t likely to allow me to turn the tables on her twenty-eight years later.

  So you can see, standing on the tarmac waiting to embrace Marg as she came down the steps from the plane at Port Vila, I might have been the old grinning Nick on the outside, dead pleased to see her, but inside I was a mess.

  We kissed and embraced as we always did, but neither of us said much until we were back in the ute.

  ‘How was Japan?’ she asked.

  ‘Great. Anna and I bought two freighters practically for the price of one,’ I laughed.

  ‘Anna? I wasn’t aware she was an expert on boats?’

  Oh god, I’d put my foot in it already. ‘Not boats – business. She proved to be a tremendous help in the negotiations. In fact she was responsible for my ending up with two ships.’ Knowing it was probably foolish, I told Marg the story of the negotiations with the two Mitsubishi executives. ‘I was ready to knock their heads together and storm out but Anna turned the tables so that we ended up with two freighters for the price of one.’ I laughed. ‘In retrospect it was hilarious,’ I said. Thinking, Any moment she’s going to ask me how things went with Anna’s nemesis, the Japanese general. Like Anna, Marg never forgets anything and her questions go straight for the jugular.

  ‘Very amusing. Clever gal,’ Marg said, adding crisply, ‘How fortunate that you took her along.’

  Here it comes! We were approaching the gates of Beautiful Bay. ‘Well, here we are. I’ll get cook to bring a pot of tea to your room while you unpack. She’s baked a cake.’

  We entered the long driveway. ‘Anna’s trees look good. I don’t believe I’ve
ever tasted a persimmon.’

  ‘I’ll see if the gardener can find you a ripe one. They’re a bit of an anticlimax really – look great but taste a bit dull.’ I laughed. ‘If fruit were personified a persimmon would be a really good-looking redhead with nothing much to say for herself.’ Only a few more yards to go before the servants waited to greet us. ‘Will you take an afternoon nap?’

  ‘Lovely.’

  ‘Drinks at the usual time on the verandah,’ I said, drawing up beside the house where Ellison, cook and the two housemaids, in freshly laundered uniforms, were lined up. The youngest maid, shy little Francina, was clutching a lei of frangipani blossom. For the first time she’d been given the honour of placing it over Marg’s head. She was trembling, knowing grandfather Ellison would be watching her, his stern patriarchal eye on the latest family member of the countless who had already served somewhere amongst the shipping company’s widely scattered staff.

  ‘Welcome, Missus Marg!’ they all chorused as I turned off the ignition. I’d made it safely home without a major conversational disaster. The next hurdle would be drinks on the verandah overlooking the bay at six o’clock. It was a half moon waxing tonight, but as it was the dry season, cool with little humidity, the stars would be splendid. I could only hope they were lined up correctly for me.

  Marg emerged at six o’clock, showered and freshly made up. She’d done nothing about the grey streaks in her lovely chestnut hair, and if Anna was still beautiful, Marg was what you might call a very handsome woman. Even the tiny crow’s-feet at the corners of her eyes when she smiled were attractive and at fifty-four her figure was remarkable. She was barefoot, her toenails manicured and painted in a natural colour, and wore tailored white shorts that reached just above her knees and a blue T-shirt. I mentally slapped myself as I caught myself wondering what her breasts were like out of a bra. If they looked as good as her long, lovely legs they’d be in great shape, I decided. Funny, Anna and Marg often wore the same shade of blue. Marg had worn a dress almost exactly the blue of her T-shirt on the first day I’d met her in Fremantle. Strange how you remember the little details in your life, while often forgetting some of the more important events.

  Marg plonked herself down on one of the big comfortable batik-cushioned rattan chairs and I handed her a gin and tonic. ‘Thank you, Nick.’ She held the glass still, the late afternoon light showing through the slice of lime. She was looking out across Beautiful Bay to sea where the sun was slipping behind the horizon, as it does in the tropics in just a couple of minutes. ‘Oh, I do so like it here,’ she exclaimed. ‘I hope I shall always be able to come back.’

  Here it comes! ‘What do you mean? What’s to stop you, darling?’ I asked, trying to keep my voice calm.

  Marg turned to look at me. ‘Nick, I want you to be the first to know that I’ve baked my last batch of scones. I will never fill another sausage roll, run a tombola or attend another naval cadet passing-out parade. I’ve been to my last garden party at Government House, and I will never again sit through one more war veterans’ dinner with Rob’s medals dragging my bosom down to my waist. It’s almost five years since he died, and from now on I’m no longer the dead admiral’s wife, no longer general factotum to all things navy past and present. I’m Marg Hamilton, single, and in charge of my own destiny.’

  You could have knocked me down with a feather (nice cliché that). It wasn’t what I’d expected, but it was quite an opening speech. ‘That’s the second resurrection I’ve witnessed in a month,’ I said, thinking of Gojo Mura.

  ‘Resurrection? Call it what you may, I’m no longer the admiral’s wife, widow or navy charity worker. I’m Marg Hamilton and I’m going to Tasmania.’

  ‘Tasmania!’ I cried in alarm. ‘Why on earth?’

  ‘I knew you’d say that, Nick,’ Marg replied. ‘Well, for a start, when you decide on a new life the first requirement is to move as far away from the old one as you can, but I still want to be close enough for the kids and the grandchildren to visit occasionally.’

  ‘Yeah, but is that a sufficiently good reason to bury yourself alive after you’ve just been resurrected?’

  ‘Tasmania is a perfectly lovely, vibrant place. You’d be surprised.’

  ‘You can say that again. It’s still got one foot in the last century and a mindset in the one before that. The ghosts of convicts past haunt the streets at night and I’m told they’re just a tad insular and conservative. Isn’t it true that the convict descendants are timber-getters who live in the deep dark forests? And you know what happens when people forget who their cousins are . . .’

  ‘Nonsense,’ Marg snorted. ‘I’ve met the governor and he’s a perfectly nice man. Besides I have relatives there, several cousins in fact, and they are not chinless wonders.’

  ‘Oops!’

  Marg laughed. ‘The Babbages, they’re on my mother’s side, and just so you know, Nick Duncan, they’re practically landed gentry and one of them was knighted several years back. Their forebears were the recipients of a land grant as free settlers in the mid-1820s.’

  ‘Have you met them?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Aunt Nettie and Uncle Bob – Sir Robert in polite parlance. They rather liked the idea of having an admiral as well as a knight in the family and visited us once or twice in Sydney, and the kids spent a holiday with them when they were teenagers.’

  ‘You’ve visited yourself?’

  ‘Yes, on only one occasion, when Rob sailed in the Melbourne to Hobart yacht race. New Hope, their rather grand estate, is twenty miles from Hobart. The homestead, a replica of an English manor house, was built over a hundred years ago. They’re awfully keen for me to come over.’

  ‘What? To live with them?’

  ‘Good gracious no! He, Uncle Bob, now dead, was grossly fat and proportionally pompous, and she, Aunt Nettie, is very conscious of her status and requires to be addressed as Lady Babbage by the housekeeper and the farmhands. Various other members of the family also live on the estate and struck me as being a rather rural lot, shotguns and horses, dogs for retrieving dead birds and bunnies.’

  Having delivered this scathing but as usual honest opinion of her Tasmanian relatives, Marg went on to say, ‘A nice Hobart estate agent has found me a lovely Georgian terrace house in Battery Point.’ Then, just in case I had missed the point she said, ‘You do know that Hobart has the best Georgian architecture outside of Great Britain, don’t you?’

  I laughed. ‘Well, as a matter of fact I do, compliments of a conversation with my father who, after the war, was offered a bishopric in Tasmania but chose to remain in the islands. He claimed that he’d rather preach to primitives than to degenerates.’

  ‘Nick! He didn’t say that! You made that up.’

  I laughed. ‘No, of course he didn’t. What he did say was that Hobart got caught in a time warp and missed most of the Victorian era and just kept building in the Georgian manner long after it was no longer fashionable elsewhere.’ Then, lest she thought I was having another crack at the island, I hastily added, ‘Good thing too. Much nicer than those neo-Gothic Victorian monstrosities you see in Sydney.’

  ‘Battery Point is lovely and looks over the entire sweep of the Derwent River with Mount Wellington rising up behind it, usually snow-covered in winter. Such a pretty place.’

  ‘Marg, are you sure this is a good idea?’ I asked again, adding, ‘I’m sorry about what I said. I’ve never been to Tasmania and so I have no right to comment. I hear it’s beautiful,’ I added, thus once again damning it with faint praise. ‘But, darling, it may be pretty, but isn’t it rather isolated?’

  ‘And the New Hebrides isn’t?’

  ‘That’s different. I work from here and, besides, I love the tropics. But what will you do in Hobart? If there’s snow on the mountaintop it’s going to be bloody cold in winter. Are you sure you want to retire and spend the rest of your days so close to Antarctica?’ I said, borrowing again from the bishop who’d mentioned this as part of his refusal, pointing out th
at only the Falklands were closer to the permanent ice.

  ‘Retire! Of course I’m not going to retire! How ridiculous! I intend to go to university. I shall take an arts degree in political science.’ Marg was so affronted by my suggestion that she had almost spilt her drink.

  I apologised. ‘Bad choice of words, but one doesn’t think of Tasmania as a place to start a new life.’ Then I added clumsily, ‘Even less a career in politics.’

  ‘God, you can be tiresome sometimes, Nick Duncan. The University of Tasmania is one of our better tertiary institutions and I intend to have a career that involves politics.’

  ‘Marg, I’m confused, I can’t ever remember you taking the slightest interest in politics.’

  ‘That’s why it’s an entirely new career, silly. But you’re right. I don’t want to be a politician. I want to be myself again.’

  I grinned. ‘Marg, if I may say so, you’ve always been yourself.’

  ‘Only as much as men have allowed. Nick, you’re an Australian male, sometimes a fairly sensitive one, but still typical of the breed. By the way, I don’t suppose you’ve read the book I sent you?’

  ‘Ah, well, er . . . no. We’ve been in Japan,’ I protested.

  ‘I sent it five months ago,’ Marg pointed out.

  I recalled picking it up at one stage. It was by an American writer and was called The Feminine Mystique. I remembered thinking I’d had my fill of feminine mystique for a while as I put it down again. ‘Sorry, I’ll get around to it,’ I promised.

  ‘Well, it’s about women having the same rights in society as men,’ Marg explained.

  ‘Don’t they? I know a couple of bossy women who qualify,’ I chaffed.

  Marg missed the humour and rebuked me. ‘That’s crap, Nick!’

  ‘Well, yes, I suppose it is,’ I admitted, thinking of Anna and Stan McVitty and how she’d suffered at his patronising hands. ‘You’ll have to explain, I’m only a male.’