A Woman of Courage Page 2

  Martha put the two cups back on the tray. ‘Home soon, towkay neo,’ she said.

  Towkay neo: more than a nickname, it was the respectful title Martha had given her early in their relationship. Towkay was the Chinese word for the top man in any business, towkay neo its feminine equivalent. Both phrases meant the boss, the person in command.

  Hilary glanced at the clock on the side table. ‘I’d better have a shower and get dressed.’ She grinned. ‘Put on a show for the cameras.’

  Not that there were ever many of those. As towkay neo of the Brand Corporation, one of the most prosperous and respected conglomerates in Australia, she had learnt long ago how to keep the paparazzi at bay.

  The telephone light flashed its red warning.

  Martha picked it up. ‘Hello.’ She listened and held out the receiver. ‘Head Office,’ she said. ‘Vivienne on scrambler.’

  Vivienne Archer was also a company director and Hilary’s second in command.

  ‘I wonder what’s biting her.’ Hilary had had scrambler facilities installed on the Airbus to keep communications confidential; she took the receiver and pressed the red button to activate the electronics.

  ‘I’ll leave you to it,’ Martha said.

  Hilary’s iron rule was that she must be alone when the scrambler was on. Martha picked up the tray and went out. Hilary’s fingers drummed the desktop as she waited through the wails and hiccups that told her the system was coming to life. When a hot message was coming the delay seemed to last forever and for Vivienne to call her on scrambler when Hilary would be in the office within three hours this one had to be hotter than fire.

  ‘Hilary?’

  Vivienne’s voice was cool – but then it always was. If a tsunami swallowed Australia’s eastern seaboard she would probably report the news in the words of Robert Benchley’s famous telegram from Venice: Streets flooded. Please advise. No, it was not Vivienne’s tone but the fact she had thought it necessary to phone at all that made Hilary frown. She drew a deep breath and activated another of the basic rules by which she governed her business and her life. It was a quotation from Gilbert and Sullivan: Quiet calm deliberation disentangles every knot.

  Let’s see if we can disentangle this one.

  ‘Good morning, Vivienne; I trust you slept well?’

  Hilary Brand without a care in the world, and other useful lies.

  ‘I apologise for phoning you so early –’

  ‘Where’s the fire?’

  ‘Right here in this building,’ Vivienne said. ‘We’ve heard from Hong Kong.’

  ‘Tell me.’ And listened with mounting fury as Vivienne began to convey the message she had received half an hour before.

  JENNIFER

  1

  There were times when Jennifer Lander thought the whole world had it in for her, a feeling made a hundred times worse by what had happened the previous Monday evening.

  ‘We’ve having dinner with the Hawthorns tonight,’ her husband Davis had said that morning as he left for chambers. ‘Do you think you might just possibly try to remember this time?’ The smile that was not a smile. ‘Hmm?’

  He was reminding her of a disagreement they’d had the previous week over a lunch party he had never mentioned but insisted she had forgotten. She was well aware how proud Davis was of his razor-edged tongue, so useful to him in the law courts. He liked to keep it well honed, too; from the day he had finally succeeded in putting the wedding ring on her finger – Hilary Brand’s elder daughter, what a trophy! – he had sharpened it on her.

  She was not stupid; even at the time she’d known Davis was marrying her not for her wit or the body he claimed to admire so much, but because he hoped Hilary Brand might advance his career. It hadn’t happened; there had been a falling out – neither Davis nor Mother had ever told her the details – and ever since Davis had seemed to blame her for it.

  ‘I suppose it was always too much to hope you’d be any help but I expected better things from her. She knows the chief justice; she could use her influence if she wanted. I am her son-in-law, after all.’

  He was indeed, and made sure everybody knew it, but Hilary had made it clear she wouldn’t lift a finger.

  ‘There is nothing I can do for him. He’s wrong, in any case. I have no influence with the chief justice. I barely know him.’

  Which had not lessened Davis’s resentment; from the first he had complained about what he called the conspiracy between mother and daughter to deprive him of his deserts. This happened most frequently when he’d been at the scotch, but it had not been until six months after the wedding that Jennifer discovered the full extent to which alcohol could affect her husband’s behaviour.

  Davis had been to a barristers’ dinner. Wives were not invited and when he got home Jennifer knew she had a problem. He went straight to the liquor cabinet and poured himself a drink. He did not offer her one but brought the bottle with him when he sat down with her and began to talk.

  He started off by boasting about his court triumphs and the masterly way he’d outwitted his opponents: she’d heard it all a dozen times before but repetition had never been a problem for Davis Lander. He drank more and, as always, his mood changed. He grew sulky, once again complaining about Hilary’s failure to provide the support her son-in-law surely had the right to expect. Finally he became amorous: a familiar progression that, like a brothel’s open door, led invariably to sex.

  There was nothing she could do; he was her husband and if he wanted her she had to comply, supposedly with joy – all the romantic novels she had read had made that clear. Her mother could have taught her differently but she’d been against the marriage from the beginning. They’d talked only about the mechanics of sex: which she’d known from school, anyway, and the question of obligation had never come up. She felt guilty for not wanting Davis more; she was nowhere near as experienced as some of her friends but in that department, as in every other, marriage had proved a disappointment. She had thought Davis would teach her with affection and tenderness; he had not. She had thought they would be united, a loving couple indifferent to the vicissitudes of a sometimes hostile world; they were not. She had thought their lovemaking would introduce her to a wonderland of delight; her experience so far had been very different – a nightly assault devoid of tenderness or love that left her bruised both in body and spirit.

  Perhaps it was her fault, as Davis said, but if so he did nothing to help her perform better. He did not consider her at all. They hadn’t been married a month when he had told her he would permit no children. Jennifer had wanted two: a son to grow up strong and protective of his mother and a daughter to be a friend. She had envisaged a lovely time of shared confidences but came quickly to realise that a man as self-focused as her husband would never welcome competition even from his own child.

  That night, as his whisky breath engulfed her, she had used his opposition to children as a last line of defence. ‘It won’t be safe.’

  ‘My angel mustn’t worry her pretty head about such things.’ He spoke coyly but his hands were not coy at all. ‘There are times when love must have its way.’

  As indeed it had; if you could call it love.

  Two months later she had told him she was pregnant and he had been furious, blaming her for trying to saddle him with a brat he had warned her from the first he would not accept. ‘You think I can’t see through your stupid schemes? Well, I’ll tell you now, I’ll not have it.’ He had forced her into an abortion. ‘You have no one to blame but yourself,’ he said.

  Jennifer had been devastated and had known she would never get over it. She never had. She no longer thought consciously about the child but her subconscious was aware of an enduring sense of loss and the knowledge that when it had mattered Davis had not been there for her.

  She had long given up any thought of coming to love her husband but nevertheless had tried to play her part: she had been dutiful, always there when he wanted her, had attended functions on his arm, had smiled
as required. She had been the public face of his marriage but in private they were strangers meeting occasionally in the desert of their lives. A dozen times she had told herself she must leave him, but had never had the courage to do so. Marriage might be another word for unhappiness but was nonetheless a safe harbour; over the years she had got out of the habit of independence and the world outside her prison seemed full of terrors.

  Davis enjoyed twisting the knife; now, as he left for work, he was reminding her yet again of the lunch date debacle. ‘Let’s see if you can get it right tonight,’ he said. ‘Seven-thirty, and it’s important we’re not late. Henry is a stickler for punctuality.’

  Henry Hawthorn QC was Davis’s head of chambers and as close to God as either of them was likely to get in this life, so Jennifer understood how important it was not to offend him in any way.

  ‘I shan’t forget,’ she said.

  ‘Make sure you don’t.’

  Jennifer hated it when her husband spoke to her like that but had never been one for the smart comeback. The one time she had tried to stand up to him it hadn’t gone well.

  ‘I am not your tea girl,’ she had told him.

  ‘I thank God daily for that,’ he had said.

  As she did so often she told herself to be patient; lots of people were not at their best at the breakfast table. The trouble was Davis had nothing much to say in the evening either. And lately, even more troubling, he’d been coming home late several nights a week. She didn’t like to think what that might mean.

  She heard the Lexus disappear down the drive. She went upstairs, and did what she did so often: she inspected her reflection in the bathroom mirror.

  She had been a pretty child; she still remembered the warm glow when strange women had stopped Mother in the street to compliment her on her daughter’s sweet looks. She was thirty-six now, but when she looked in the mirror it was the chocolate-box prettiness she saw, and not the plump face and discontented mouth that looked back at her. Not bad for my age, she thought. Perhaps a kilo or two overweight but she’d read that men liked girls to have a bit of meat on them. To ease her conscience she had even enrolled at the local gym but somehow had never found the time to go. There was always something: friends to meet, the book club and the wives’ lunch club to attend and a dozen other activities. But today, she told herself, she would be on her best behaviour. She would visit Miranda’s – always a treat – and buy a new dress. Something stylish and distinctive. Never mind the cost: creating the right impression was what mattered.

  To Miranda’s she went. Halfway there the car started coughing and emitting horrifying quantities of blue smoke and she remembered she was supposed to have taken it in for a service. What with one thing and another it had completely slipped her mind. Not to worry: she got there anyway, and shutting her eyes to the price she bought an outfit that the assistant assured her would wow the most fastidious host.

  Jennifer stared doubtfully at her reflection. ‘You don’t think it’s a bit… revealing?’

  The well-endowed assistant assured her it was not. ‘It is the latest fashion,’ she said.

  With the bag stowed safely in the car Jennifer phoned Tessa and arranged to meet her for coffee at their favourite rendezvous in Bayside Avenue. There they enjoyed one of the wide range of coffees imported from various parts of the world. Tessa claimed to be an expert on coffee as on everything else and today had decided they would drink an Arabica coffee from Colombia.

  ‘It is divine,’ Tessa said. ‘Intensely aromatic.’

  Jennifer found her friend’s pretensions exasperating. In truth she thought it tasted no different from instant coffee. She did not dare say so but her doubts must have shown.

  ‘One needs an educated nose to obtain the full benefit,’ Tessa said.

  As good as saying Jennifer didn’t have one, but once again she warned herself to be patient. Tessa was a friend and friends were important. With Davis the way he was she would be alone without them and Jennifer could imagine no fate more terrible than that. If being patronised was the price she had to pay then pay it she would.

  She smiled brightly. ‘I’m sure you are right, sweetie.’

  To comfort herself she went to the counter and selected one of the café’s delicious chocolate cakes.

  ‘So decadent,’ she confided to Tessa when she returned to their table. ‘You should try one.’

  But Tessa, beanpole thin, stuck to toast.

  Jennifer got home a little after twelve. She hung up the new outfit, poached herself an egg for lunch and afterwards put her feet up for an hour, telling herself it was important she should be at her best for the Hawthorns’ dinner tonight.

  At five o’clock she had a lovely long bath. It was one of life’s luxuries, she thought, to soak in scented warm water. Afterwards she put on the new outfit and stared dubiously at herself in the mirror. Had she really shown so much cleavage in the shop? She supposed she must have done, but somehow it seemed more noticeable now. She remembered reading advice given by some American woman. If you got ’em, show ’em. She was certainly doing that.

  Davis would be home any minute. She wondered what he would say about the new dress or whether he would even notice… but time passed and Davis did not come. It was after six now, leaving him little time to shower and change before they had to set out for the Hawthorns. That was bad news; having to rush made him snaky and as always he would blame her for it.

  The minutes ticked by. Six-thirty and still no sign of Davis. Something must have happened to him. She hated unexpected hitches, imagining heart attacks, road accidents, even mugging. She had always been burdened with a vivid imagination; it was the curse of her artistic temperament. For an artist she was; before she got married she’d known several and even been in love with one, and over the years many friends had complimented her on the watercolours she displayed every summer at the community art exhibition.

  Davis hated her phoning him at work; after an argument a few months back he had categorically forbidden her to do so. But if he didn’t come home in the next ten minutes they would be late whatever they did. She mustered her courage and phoned Davis’s chambers. There was no answer. With mounting desperation she tried his mobile but it was switched off.

  Now it was a quarter to seven. She didn’t know what to do. If she went without him he would be furious. She daren’t ring the Hawthorns. She knew how important they were to Davis’s career and was terrified of saying or doing the wrong thing.

  Five to seven. She made up her mind and rang for a taxi.

  There were no taxis. It was the busiest time of the evening: what had she expected?

  She hated driving at night, especially alone, but knew she had no choice. Did she know the way? Of course she did. Jennifer went out to her car, climbed in and drove down the road, the engine coughing like a bronchial old man.

  It was a nightmare journey. She found she was not as sure of the way as she had thought and every time she slowed to check the signposts someone behind her would hoot. She became increasingly flustered. The congestion was horrible, particularly in Toorak Road; more than once she was afraid the poor old car would conk out on her and was terrified she might miss the turning altogether. By the time she arrived in Hopetoun Road she was a nervous wreck, but at least now she was safe. The Hawthorns’ house could not be far away. She pressed her foot on the accelerator and the engine coughed and died. She pulled in to the side of the road – at least she managed to do that – and tried to start the car again. The engine did not fire. Tears perilously close, she looked at her watch (the clock on the dashboard didn’t work). Seven-forty. Ten minutes late already and the car refused to budge.

  ‘You wretched, beastly thing!’ said Jennifer.

  Again she tried the starter. Nothing doing.

  ‘I shall have to walk,’ she said.

  And did so, grimly. Her high heels didn’t help but somehow she managed. Luckily her destination was nearby: an imposing sandstone mansion, its entrance fla
nked by white stone pillars. She walked down the driveway and rang the bell.

  ‘We were afraid you’d got lost,’ said Mrs Hawthorn, ever so sweetly. She was looking at Jennifer’s new outfit. Or perhaps at what it did not quite conceal. ‘Interesting,’ she said.

  ‘I had car trouble,’ Jennifer said.

  Davis, glass in hand, was scowling and she knew she would be in for it later. There were several other people she did not know. All of them staring; all of them waiting.

  ‘I am so sorry,’ she said.

  Mr Hawthorn looked at his watch. ‘Perhaps if we are all here now we might go in.’

  They trooped in like sheep, Jennifer not knowing where to look. She tugged surreptitiously at her dress, hoping to lift the bust line a little, but it was too tight and she couldn’t shift it. Dratted thing! She wished now she’d not let Miranda’s assistant talk her into it. And the price! Davis would go ballistic when he found out.

  She found herself sitting next to a man she didn’t know but who introduced himself as Anthony Belloc.

  ‘Are you a lawyer, too, Mr Belloc?’

  ‘I’m a businessman.’

  ‘I have often wanted to ask,’ Jennifer said brightly. ‘What exactly does a businessman do?’

  Anthony Belloc laughed loud and long. ‘We try to make money, Mrs Lander.’

  ‘And how do you do that exactly?’

  ‘I have an interest in a number of companies.’

  ‘Just like my mother. And do you make lots and lots of lovely money like she does? Not that I see any of it, unfortunately.’ It was her turn to laugh; it might have been the joke of the year.

  ‘I try,’ he said.

  Jennifer often wished she’d married a businessman. Davis made pots of money – they had a holiday home in the Whitsundays as well as the lovely house in Brighton – and that was what she’d always wanted, but the idea of the law had always bored her. Having your hands on the money itself seemed far more exciting.

  Mr Belloc was a delightful dinner companion, both charming and handsome, with neatly groomed dark hair. She guessed he was in his early fifties, which she had always thought the ideal age for a man, mature yet young enough to be interesting, and he was wearing a beautifully made suit. He looked like a million dollars. A million dollars that was now inspecting her with frank admiration. Jennifer’s new outfit no longer embarrassed her. Mr Belloc’s smile made her feel young again, and desirable, and she loved it.