Authors: Bryce Courtenay
‘You bastard, Nick! You’re being a deliberate shit! It’s different now!’
‘What, now that Anna’s dead? Why is that?’
‘Anna!’ Marg comes down hard on the name so that it seems to crack into two equal pieces, both parts whacking into my ear. ‘The
only
thing Princess Plunder ever did was rob the environment! You name it – fish, old-growth forests, animal habitat – she contributed in no small way to their degradation!’ Marg’s voice is filled with righteous anger. ‘It’s time to make restitution, and charity begins at home!’
It’s one of the things I love about Marg; she’s not just tough and stubborn, she’s got a good mind and the courage of her convictions, not to mention a whiplash tongue when she’s riled. I know I’m defeated; she’ll get her money. But nevertheless I attempt to regain the upper hand. ‘Like you, Marg, Anna had a mind of her own. As a matter of fact, she made a number of significant bequests.’
‘What, to the Institute of Chartered Accountants?’
I laugh despite myself, so she knows she’s won. In the past I survived the invective of either of them by staying neutral, perhaps reflecting an ambivalence that has been the key to my relationship with both of them. ‘Enough,’ I say quietly.
I wait. Usually there’s a fair bit of growling before the purring resumes, but Marg’s dulcet tone catches me off guard. ‘Nick Duncan, I’ve loved you for most of my life. I continued to love you even after I married the admiral. But at eighteen you were too young and at twenty-six I was too old for you. We started out as lovers and here we are, still the dearest friends.’
I’m not fooled for a moment. She’s got what she wants and she’s much too intelligent to have another crack at Anna, for now. But I’m not fool enough to think the donation of the money will lead to a modicum of respect for Anna’s memory. Marg simply wants to keep a foot in the door in case she needs access in future. Yet, despite everything, I know she loves me and always has.
I’ve often mused about how I could have loved and continue to love two such completely dissimilar women, both utterly convinced they were right in all matters. Absolute conviction must be a nice thing to possess, but it’s hell on everyone else.
‘Nick, I have to go. I have a meeting this afternoon with Macquarie Bank. They’re still young – unlike the others who are all ruled by old men with paunches – and they’re considering throwing their support behind renewable energy. It looks very promising.’
I glance at my paunch. ‘I see, and their money
isn’t
tainted?’ My voice is still a semitone too sharp.
She ignores this. ‘I’ll call you in a couple of days, darling.’
‘Yeah, righto, I’ll look forward to that. Morning business or evening pleasure?’ I ask, a touch acerbic. While Marg calls me often enough from Sydney, her
‘Lovely to speak with you, darling!’
calls always come in the evening when she’s through with her daily lists and is feeling mellow after a regulation gin and tonic.
‘Bye, darling, love you!’ The phone clicks in my ear. Corroboree frog will be duly ticked off as business completed. It is something I had wanted to do anyway. When you mention that frogs are endangered, people are at best only vaguely concerned. Frogs are not a priority on the endangered species list, yet they are often the canary in the coal mine, one of the warnings that our environment is changing, usually for the worse.
Despite the humidity outside, I walk back onto the front verandah and flop into the cane chair; the view over Beautiful Bay never fails to calm me. It’s too early for a drink, although I’m almost tempted. That’s yet another thing that has changed: the level in the Scotch bottle seems to be dropping more quickly since Anna died.
I am becoming dismayed at my despondency, a mood that in truth has little or nothing to do with Marg’s call, but obviously has something to do with my recurring dream about killing Anna.
I’ve always been a loner, content with my own thoughts, but never moody or churlish. I’ve observed such weakness and self-indulgence in other men and thought less of them for it.
Now I know that if I should allow the small dark cloud of despair hovering above my head to envelope me, at the very least I will destroy this gorgeous day and be tempted to open the Scotch bottle far too early.
In an attempt to dispel my gloom I try to dismiss the Marg Hamilton of Japanese fishing licences and recall the stunning twenty-six-year-old WRAN in Naval Intelligence who stole my virginity in March 1942, a month after I’d turned eighteen.
By sailing
Madam Butterfly
, a twenty-nine-foot gaff-rigged cutter, across the Pacific from Java to Fremantle, I’d escaped the Japanese invasion with only hours to spare. It had been in Java that I’d first met Anna, the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy Dutch businessman and a Javanese woman who had died in childbirth.
Anna was my first love, a young girl so beautiful that my heart still pounds at the thought of her at sixteen.
Upon my arrival in Fremantle after a difficult and eventful month at sea, I was questioned by a Naval Intelligence team, which included Marg Hamilton. She took me home and joyously bedded me less than a month after Anna and I had said a tearful farewell, promising to be mutually faithful and to ‘wait’ for each other until we could consummate our love, however long that might take.
Alas, at eighteen, the one-eyed snake is king. Marg snapped her fingers and I was halfway through undoing my fly buttons before the snap had echoed round the room. She taught me everything a boy should know in the limited time we enjoyed before I left for Melbourne to join the navy. Whereas Anna made my heart pound each time she appeared, the WRAN with the beautiful breasts and long legs gave me a hard-on every time I looked at her. Duplicity had come early in my long life of loving these two women.
Later that year, on the 12th of December 1942 to be precise, while I was at Guadalcanal with the Americans fighting the Japs, Marg wrote to say she’d become engaged to a naval officer. In fact, to Commander Rob Rich who had been my commander at HMAS
Cerberus
,
the naval training centre in Victoria I had attended as a recruit. While I’d been in the islands, Marg had been promoted and transferred from Fremantle to Melbourne, where she’d met him and fallen in love.
I recall feeling cheated, deeply hurt and sorry for myself. In fact Marg had always been very careful to point out while I’d been with her in Fremantle that the privilege of sharing her bed was subject to her approval and should always be regarded as temporary. She was eight years older than I was and she announced in her practical way that this was an emotional chasm too large for either of us to leap.
Nonetheless, battle-weary and suffering from malaria, I was shattered by the news of her impending marriage. I felt unloved and entirely on my own. My mother had died when I was five years old; my father, a missionary in New Britain, had declined to leave his flock and had almost certainly been captured by the Japanese and was probably dead. Anna had failed to arrive in Australia, so I told myself I had every right to assume she too was captured or dead. Now the only other person in the world I loved had jilted me.
The fact that Marg was perfectly at liberty to share her affections with whomsoever she wished and that, in turn, I had barely given a thought to my absolute vow of chastity to Anna on the first occasion I had been seduced by Marg never occurred to me at the time. I recall that months later, when eventually it did, I explained my infidelity and settled my conscience by a process of retrospective reasoning.
I’d seen Anna off at the quay in Batavia when she had escaped with her family on a merchant ship. But upon arriving in Fremantle I was to learn that the Japanese were sinking ships on the high seas whether they carried troops, civilians or refugees. So, I’d conveniently made myself believe that Anna had been a victim of such bombing, leaving me free to jump into bed with Marg. My logic, both belated and dodgy, was neat as a three-button suit.
In fact, when I met Anna in Melbourne five years after the war ended and once again fell head over heels in love with a very changed and emotionally damaged woman, I was to learn that her ship had broken down on the south coast of Java, where she’d become a prisoner of the Japanese, forced to spend the war as the consort of the Japanese commander of the region, or to put it more bluntly, as a comfort woman.
After leaving Marg in Fremantle, I had not been entirely faithful to her either. Shortly after I’d arrived in Melbourne to attend the officer training course at HMAS
Cerberus
, I had met a lovely little Irish Catholic redhead named Mary Kelly who, while assiduously preserving her virginity for her marriage bed, had been sweet enough to relieve me in other pleasant ways.
In my mind this meant that I had technically remained faithful to Marg Hamilton. So I was filled with righteous anger that the woman I loved was going to marry a naval officer with a desk job, while I, weak with malaria, was risking my life almost daily in bloody hand-to-hand combat with the enemy to keep her safe so that she could fornicate with anyone she fancied.
I had written to her every week while I’d been in the islands with the marines, and while her own letters never promised fidelity or suggested a shared future, I nevertheless had taken it for granted that she would be waiting for me, that I had matured sufficiently to jump the emotional chasm.
The dreaded letter telling me the bad news had crossed one of my own telling her I was being repatriated from Guadalcanal; that the umpteenth dose of malaria had finally done me in; that I was to be sent to a military hospital in Victoria.
I had lain naked in my tent under a mosquito net, drowning in my own sweat, teeth chattering, shivering from the fever raging through my body, imagining my homecoming.
Boy soldier, broken by malaria, returns home a hero to claim his faithful love. She sits tearfully at his bedside holding his hand in the military hospital. When he finally recovers they walk together into the sunset
. In my fevered imagination I could practically hear the violins in the background.
Commander Robert Rich, Marg’s husband, was and always had been a great bloke. He subsequently welcomed me as a friend, and in the twenty years that followed he rose to the rank of admiral. Pretty bright in his own right, with the added advantage of Marg – a charge of dynamite in his life – there was no stopping his climb up the ladder. Together they raised two intelligent and thoroughly delightful children, John and Samantha, and appeared to be very happy. Alas, he was killed in a freak accident in 1965. While on a routine inspection at the Cockatoo Island Dockyards in Sydney, he was hit by a steel beam that fell from a crane.
In the five years that followed, Marg grew weary of tea and sympathy, garden parties and official dinners, which she attended alone wearing her husband’s medals. While she’d enjoyed being the admiral’s wife and raising a family, she’d been a captive of her husband’s career. Now she found herself trapped in her new role as the admiral’s widow, expected by the naval establishment to do good works within the navy family.
Marg is a woman with the energy of a buzz-saw and she was slowly rusting away in a corner of the work shed. At fifty-four she was a highly articulate and still extremely attractive woman who craved a new start, longing to walk out of the shadows cast by her former life. Finally, fed up to the teeth with fetes and charity functions, she resumed her maiden name and went to live in Tasmania.
She joined the Australian Conservation Foundation and she became actively involved in the rolling battles to save the Tasmanian wilderness. She was among the first members of the United Tasmania Group, the world’s first green political party, which was formed in 1972. This led eventually to membership of the Tasmanian Wilderness Society, where the Tasmanian Greens were born as a political party and ultimately to her election as a member of the Tasmanian Legislative Council.
Marg knew how to get things done, and quickly became a bloody nuisance in Hobart and as a lobbyist in Canberra where both Labor and the Coalition thought her political party at best temporary and at worst a bad joke.
Always the closest of friends, she and I returned to a somewhat peripatetic though more intimate association after she went to Tasmania. I’d visit her in Hobart or Canberra when I was in Australia or she’d visit me at Beautiful Bay. It seemed I had finally managed to jump the emotional chasm.
When she retired from the Tasmanian Legislative Council in 1985 she returned to live in Sydney. By that time she’d earned the sobriquet ‘Madam Termite’, for her ability to undermine the halls of conservatism and complacency that seemed particularly common in Tasmania, especially the Tasmania Club, which she regarded as the greatest single assembly of silly old farts in the land.
Now, at the age of seventy-seven with all her marbles very much intact, she’s the Martin Luther King of climate change, preaching the hot gospel of global warming and the cold logic of melting icecaps. She’s the old woman and the sea, relentless defender and spokesperson for all creatures great and small, those that swim, fly, run, crawl, slither, hop, burrow or simply exist.
When Marg began her crusade she lived in a lonely world where most politicians thought of her kind as tree-hugging ratbags. She and they have come a long way, but not without suffering the slings and arrows of the environment sceptics. Last year she was invited as a non-representative speaker to the Earth Summit, the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro and the very first conference to be held on the subject of environment and sustainable development. Her talk followed that of British explorer Robert Swan, the first man to walk to both Poles, who warned the world that the Arctic and Antarctic were showing alarming signs of change and drew attention to the size of the hole in the ozone layer over the Arctic. Her podium-thumping talk caused several representatives from the larger nations to walk out and the remainder to give her a standing ovation.