Authors: Bryce Courtenay
Cook placed avocado halves filled with tiny harbour prawns marinated in fresh lime juice and coconut in front of both of us and I topped up Anna’s glass with the last of the champagne. I was aware that she’d had too much to drink, in fact, three glasses was usually her limit. She only drank when she was at Beautiful Bay, knowing it was the one place she could let her hair down, although I don’t believe I’d ever seen her quite this inebriated; her face seemed unusually flushed.
What she’d just told me I realised wasn’t merely the drink talking, it was something she wanted to say and the champagne had allowed her to say it. I was deeply shocked as well as saddened, even angry, at the reasons behind her vaginismus, and that, by attempting to force myself into her, I had caused the return of such horrific hallucinations. In the act of loving her I had filled her with unspeakable terror.
I had always known Anna to be a deeply troubled soul – how could she not be? – but I could never have guessed to what extent. I hadn’t understood how she felt about men, rape and the symbolic and actual power of money. Perhaps it wasn’t normal, yet nobody could call her insane. You could say she was mentally unbalanced, but she was no more so than the male power moguls with whom she saw herself competing, and their behaviour was accepted without question.
I momentarily asked myself how all this affected me, then immediately dismissed the thought for another time. One thing was certain – if Budi was exposed as the general who had ordered the murders in return for a share of the Timor Sea oil revenue, and then her connection with him was brought to light, the effect on Anna would be disastrous. It would mean she had been eliminated from the endgame. In her mind she would have been cheated of the triumph of being the single woman in history who took on men at their own game and on their own terms and beat them. Instead there would be ignominy and abject defeat. She would think she had failed not only herself, but also her gender. The independent and untouchable woman would become a disgraced and corrupt one, the ice maiden who was prepared to condone murder to achieve her objectives. She would have left herself open to the slings and arrows of an outraged world and the laughter of her male competitors as well as the scorn of every woman alive. Even though she would still possess a vast fortune she would see herself as a loser. Anna played by the same rules as men, where the winner takes all, but when men fail, the world allows them to fold their tents and slip silently into the night; her punishment would be different, infinitely harsher, because she was a woman.
I wanted to say something kind and instead put my foot in it, but at least it served to change the tempo, ameliorate her anger. ‘Anna, I want you to know that I would have regarded it as a great privilege to have had children with you.’
Anna smiled, but not happily. ‘Nicholas, what would have happened if we’d had a girl?’
I was shocked. ‘You can’t mean . . . her and me . . . rape?’
‘Nicholas! Of course not! Darling, how awful. What I meant was how would I cope? I would be so protective of her I would totally destroy her life.’
‘But you adore Saffron.’
‘Yes, but she’s not mine and with Joe as her grandfather she’s a pretty grounded little twelve-year-old. When are the school holidays? I’m high as a kite on champagne – I can’t think straight. Can you have her to stay on the week that I’m here?’
‘Of course. Her parents want her to go to boarding school in Sydney in a year or two. She’s pretty bright and can’t get the schooling she needs in New Guinea.’
‘Oh good! She can fly down to Melbourne on the weekends. I’d love that. But why can’t she go to school in Melbourne?’
‘It’s got something to do with Uncle Joe scholarships. He has several of the really bright island girls at Presbyterian Ladies’ College in Sydney and he thinks it will be good for Saffron to have her own people with her to keep her grounded. He doesn’t want her growing up to be a toffee-nosed little madam. He was going to speak to you about letting her come down to you on some weekends.’
‘Every weekend, I hope. I love that child,’ Anna said happily.
I was grateful that we’d been reduced to small talk but conscious that what had been said, momentous as it was, hadn’t actually advanced my plan to get to the Borneo timber concession and the survival of the great apes.
Cook brought in the roast and I was preparing to carve when Anna put down her napkin and rose from her chair. ‘Nicholas, I don’t feel well. Too much champagne. Please excuse me from the rest of the dinner, darling. Tell cook the shrimp marinade was delicious.’
I jumped to my feet. ‘Let me see you to your room . . .’
She gave a little smile. ‘Sweetie, I’m not that pissed. I think I might be able to find my way, but thank you.’ Slightly unsteady on her feet, she came over and kissed me lightly on the forehead.
‘Goodnight. Hope you feel better in the morning,’ I replied, watching, concerned, as she turned and walked away then suddenly stopped. I caught her slim image in the hallway mirror – it was true, she was losing weight – and she had her right hand clasped to her left breast, her eyes tightly shut in what was clearly a grimace of pain. ‘You all right, Anna?’ I asked. ‘Shall I call someone?’ Meaning a doctor.
‘No, no . . . I’m fine, a bit of indigestion, that’s all,’ she answered, then moved on down the hallway towards her bedroom.
I ate almost nothing and when Cook brought dessert I sent it away with a gesture of impatience. ‘Masta no feel gud,’ she said, removing the pudding. I poured myself another Scotch, telling myself it was the last for the night, but as it was only half-past eight I knew it wouldn’t be. I went out and sat on the verandah, not knowing whether to feel angry, sad, frightened for Anna or all these things together. But underneath these feelings was a slow fuse of anger because she’d known the cause of her vaginismus and had chosen to do nothing about it. I felt sad that I’d been denied her children while it was still possible, and fearful that if her tightly constructed world came apart I’d lose her. Typically, my initial concerns were all about me, whereas it wasn’t me who was standing on the edge of a precipice, it was Anna.
Through all her suffering she’d somehow held herself together in a world she thought of as rotten to the core and formulated her own search for justice in a peculiar and personal endgame. But now I found myself critically involved in the outcome. I reasoned that she couldn’t possibly have stopped the deaths of the five journalists, and furthermore she’d seen so much gratuitous death under the Japanese, so much violence that went unpunished, that it was bound to have affected her. On several occasions she had come perilously close to a violent death herself. As a nineteen-year-old, the year everything had changed for her, she’d seen the severed head of her beloved Til, the humble trishaw driver and homespun philosopher, stuck onto the front gatepost to intimidate her in preparation for her own rape by the Japanese commoner
kempeitai
colonel, Takahashi. No doubt afterwards he would have killed or discarded her in a show of neurotic contempt for his predecessor, the nobly born Konoe Akira.
Given her circumstances and mindset, which she’d just outlined for me, gaining financially as a consequence of a tragic event over which she had no control was something she could live with, whereas I, with my comparatively sheltered life and putative Anglican background, might have reached a different conclusion.
Marg had quite correctly insisted that I could no longer sit on the fence, be ambivalent, play moderator between the two of them. I had to choose where my conscience lay. I cared about trees, I cared about the great apes, I cared about justice for the five men who’d died and I cared about the 200 000 Timorese men, women and children who had lost their lives. To be honest, in the case of the environment and the orangutan, perhaps not to the extent Marg cared, but the dreams of the slaughter of the nine sailors jumbled up with the Balibo Five had been haunting me in nightmares for nine years. One of the two women I loved stood to gain hugely from the tragedy and as a consequence the other was threatening to destroy her. The outcome, I felt certain, would be that I would lose both Anna and Marg.
Moreover, Anna considered herself quite safe from discovery in terms of the Timor Sea oilfields. She had shown enormous trust in me by revealing Budi’s guilt and the reason for it, knowing rightly that I would never betray her. But therein lay the problem. She’d only told me because she felt safe from Peter Yeldham, the never-give-up
Fin Review
reporter. I had the task of revealing to her that she wasn’t safe by any means. I was now convinced Marg had spoken to him or he to her. Her ‘watch this space’
threat was real. I had somehow to get Anna to sever her ties with Budi and the oil deal and furthermore abandon her timber concessions for the sake of the orangutan. It was going to be a long week.
It was just before nine when I decided I needed to know exactly what Marg knew. I was making too many suppositions, too many leaps in the dark. I’d call Marg in Tasmania rather than wait until she called me in the morning. When Anna was in residence Marg called in the morning around seven-thirty because I’d told her Anna didn’t rise until around ten, a habit she’d formed when she’d worked the late nights required at Madam Butterfly. I’d usually take the call in my office because sometimes the line was so bad I’d be forced to shout and I didn’t wish to disturb Anna. Marg was an early-to-bed and early-to-rise person and with luck I might just catch her before she retired for the night.
Marg answered in a curt voice and after I’d said good evening she ticked me off. ‘It’s late, Nick. I was just about to go to bed. My hands are all sticky with face cream.’
I apologised then said, ‘Marg, the journalist you spoke to from the
Fin Review
, was his name Peter Yeldham?’
There was the slightest pause, then, ‘I didn’t say I’d spoken to a journalist.’
‘You as good as did. You spoke of Major General Budi Til and East Timor and said watch this space. That’s tantamount to saying you were going or had gone to the press. Marg, I have one or two questions. How did you know about the timber concessions or for that matter about Anna’s business association with Budi Til? And how were you able to connect him with East Timor?’ I asked, then added, ‘You didn’t get any of this information from me.’
‘From Anna’s files, of course,’ Marg answered blandly.
‘Yeah, I thought so. Marg, that’s reprehensible.’
‘All’s fair in love and war, Nick.’
‘It’s unconscionable and underhand and sneaky.’
‘The first two perhaps, but not the third. I always did it with her office door open and in broad daylight,’ Marg replied without a scintilla of regret in her voice.
‘How would you like it if I told Anna?’
‘You can’t, that’s our agreement,’ she snapped.
I realised I was getting away from the reason for my call. ‘You ought to be bloody ashamed of yourself, Marg.’
‘Oh, don’t be so pompous, Nick. You of all people! You know my background is in intelligence. Old habits die hard.’
It was pointless continuing, Marg wasn’t going to show the slightest contrition. ‘Yeldham? Did you speak to him?’
‘Yes, as a matter of fact I did.’
‘About Anna?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Not yes of course! What did you discuss?’
‘He told me he was doing an article for the
Financial Review
about women and money. As Anna was Australia’s richest woman – I think he said richest self-made woman – he was trying to build a profile. He said he’d gone to Melbourne, to her office, and had been given short shrift. Could I help join the dots so to speak.’
‘And you agreed?’
‘Why not?’
‘You know Anna keeps a tight lid on her affairs.’
‘No, Nick, I don’t. All I know about her affairs is from reading her files at Beautiful Bay.’
‘How did he contact you in the first instance?’
‘Nick, that’s a silly question. I’m a politician, I’m not exactly hard to find and your relationship with us isn’t an official secret.’
‘I mean, what did he say about Anna to interest you?’
‘Nothing, he simply mailed me the photographs of the orangutans with a note attached that said, “Note the name on the bulldozer cabin. Would you like to comment? I’m doing a piece on Anna Til”, together with his name and a Sydney phone number. I took the pictures home and every time I looked at them I grew more and more angry. When I got to my office in Parliament House the next day I called him and said, “Yes.” As it turned out I wasn’t a great help. In fact he told me more than I knew myself.’
‘Like what?’
‘Well, he knew about the clothing factory, military uniforms and kids’ pyjamas, the KFC involvement, the property holdings and, of course, the timber concessions. He wanted to know what I knew about Major General Budi Til, Anna’s partner in all these undertakings. I had to tell him that I knew nothing other than that I’d seen his name on various documents. He then told me he was one of the generals who were implicated in the invasion of East Timor.’
‘Of course he did. Marg, there’s nothing in there that any competent journalist couldn’t find out for himself. To do business in Indonesia Anna would have to have a local partner, preferably a general. Anna’s not going to get out of bed for that exposure. There’s nothing there to frighten her, she’ll call your bluff.’