The Son (2 page)

The embassy was in shock. Diplomats' lives were not without risk, but they rarely ended so brutally. Nobody could work out why Harper was on that road after dark. There was no need for him to rush back to Saigon that night, and he'd been around long enough not to take risks like that.

David had died in late February. In mid-March the North Vietnamese launched their last offensive of the war, in the Central Highlands. Six weeks later, after a series of lightning successes on their part and dismal failures by the South Vietnamese, they were on the outskirts of Saigon, massing for the final assault. The embassy withdrew in stages, the last wave leaving on the twenty-fifth of April, Anzac Day, 1975, five days before the final surrender.

Fifteen years of war had killed 58,000 Americans, 500 Australians, and probably millions of Vietnamese of both sides – and now it was over. An uneasy peace fell on the south, as the communists imposed their harsh and unforgiving rule. The era of the boat people was about to begin.

By then I'd forgotten all about that girl, and our brief meeting.

She remembered.

Twenty years later, in early 1995, many things had changed in my life. I had left government service to try my luck in business, and I lived in Sydney, where I ran a small personnel agency. I was forty-five, divorced, and I lived alone.

One afternoon in the late Australian summer of that year a Mrs Hao Tran phoned me at work. I'd never heard of her, but she was the girl I had met long ago at that party of David's in Saigon. Tran was her married name. She lived in England now, she said, and she was in Australia on a visit. She asked if she could come to see me, as she needed my advice about a problem she had.

When I asked what kind of problem, she said it was personal, complicated, and had something to do with David. She was quick to add that they'd never been close, and yet the problem related to him. When I pressed she pleaded.

‘Please, Mr Quinn. Apart from you I don't know anyone in Australia who might be able to help me. You were his friend–'

She told me she was staying in Marrickville, about forty minutes by train from our office in North Sydney, and I agreed to see her that afternoon, as soon as she could make it. It was a Friday, just after four, with work about finished for the day. We were on the sixth floor of an old office block, not far from the station.

‘Thank you very much, Mr Quinn. You don't know how much I appreciate this.'

She sounded as if she meant it. I wondered what I was letting myself in for.

Mrs Tran was a slender, very pretty woman in a dark two-piece suit, somewhere I thought in her mid to late thirties. I didn't recognise her of course. Twenty years is a long time. But I was struck by how attractive she was. I was used to seeing pretty women in my office – we dealt mainly with secretarial applicants – but she was a honey.

She was tall for a Vietnamese, almost as tall as me in her heels, with the long legs of a swimmer or a ballet dancer, and she had beautiful eyes, dark and intelligent in a pale oval face of almost classic perfection, the Asian cheekbones not too pronounced. Long black hair pulled back and gathered at the back of her head, light make-up, almost no jewellery. When we shook hands I smelt the delicate scent of jasmine. I also noted dark shadows under those eyes, an air of strain and tiredness. Her problem must be keeping her awake at night.

We sat in my office. Vivien Berridge, my assistant, offered us some mint tea, and while waiting for it I asked my visitor some questions. She said she lived in Leeds, where she and her husband had settled after being accepted in Britain as refugees in 1980. This was her first visit to Australia. In Marrickville she was staying with relatives, cousins of her husband, who owned a small Asian supermarket there. (Marrickville, I knew, was a suburb near the airport, which housed part of Sydney's Vietnamese community.) She had been there over a month.

‘Is your husband with you?' I asked.

‘No. I'm a widow, Mr Quinn. He died over a year ago.'

She spoke excellent English, with just a trace of an accent: more a question of rhythm, a way of detaching her words which gave them a faint metallic edge.

‘In fact that's one reason why I'm here.'

Vivien brought the tea, and left soon after, having stayed long enough to get a good look at my visitor. She was a kind, grandmotherly woman of sixty-two who had herself lost her husband some years earlier, and we got on well together. I foresaw questions on the Monday morning.

Meanwhile I went on with my own questioning.

‘I don't expect you to remember me,' Mrs Tran said. ‘There were lots of people at that party. I was there with my sister.' I could recall the party, more or less, but of a sister I had no memory. Yet something tugged at my mind. ‘I remembered you because you spoke such good Vietnamese.'

I couldn't help smiling.
‘You spee Yetnamee so goo,'
the girls used to croon in the bars of Saigon, in rank exaggeration. I'd already done three months of Vietnamese before leaving Australia, but it takes much longer to master the language.

‘You wouldn't say that now,' I said. ‘I doubt I could string two words together any more. Mrs Tran, I'm curious. How did you find me? Here in Sydney?'

‘I rang your former department in Canberra.'

‘Foreign Affairs and Trade?' I said, naming the Commonwealth department that gave cover to my old employer.

‘Yes. Your Foreign Office. I thought you might still be working there. But someone told me you were here.'

‘I'm surprised they remembered me. It's more than ten years since I left. Who did you speak to?'

‘A Mr Bendix, I think,' she said. ‘He asked to be remembered to you.'

‘Roger Bentinck. I know him. He's an old friend.'

That explained it. Bentinck was another of my former contemporaries in the organization, who had stayed on and was now a senior officer there. Someone in the Department must have put two and two together and switched the call through to his office. We still kept in touch, although I hadn't seen him for over a year.

Time to get down to business. She sat upright in her chair, patiently putting up with my questioning, like an applicant being interviewed. From the start we'd been formal with names, but there was a deeper reserve about her, almost a wariness. Her handshake had been cool and firm but quickly withdrawn. Perhaps this was just a standard defence for such an attractive woman. When I drank my tea the scent of jasmine lingered on my hand.

‘So,' I said. ‘You have a problem. Something to do with David. Don't worry. I'll be happy to help if I can.'

‘Thank you.' She took a deep breath. ‘It's about my son. My adopted son, rather. Eric. He's here in Australia, and I'm afraid he's getting into trouble.'

‘What kind of trouble?'

‘I think he's fallen into dangerous company. I'll explain. It's a bit complicated. He's actually my nephew. His mother was my sister, and his father was David.'

‘I didn't know David had a son.'

‘David never knew him.'

When David Harper met Hien, in late 1974, she was eighteen, the younger of the two sisters. Their father, Hoang van Lam, owned a newspaper in Saigon, and was a deputy in the National Assembly, a member of the opposition. David used to visit him at home from time to time to discuss politics. It was a case of love at first sight. She was pretty, intelligent, vivacious, he was handsome, single, spoke fluent Vietnamese. Their parents tried to warn her against mixing too freely with a young foreigner, but she was an independent girl and soon they were seeing a lot of each other. By the end of that year they'd decided to get married, at the end of David's posting, due in mid-1975.

‘You may remember her, Mr Quinn. She was working in the embassy by then, in the Aid section. David helped her get the job.'

‘Vaguely. I wasn't in the embassy very long. She worked in another building.' I had a faint picture now, of a strikingly pretty girl in a white traditional
áo dài
.

‘She said you were very kind to her, at the end.'

‘If you mean that I tried to help her come to Australia, we all did that, for the local staff. But it was no use. Canberra wouldn't hear of it.'

That was something I would never forget.

The Americans, after investing enormous resources into the war, had turned away from it later on, leaving the South to fight on alone against the stronger North. But they had rallied in the end and tried to save as many South Vietnamese as they could before the final collapse. American helicopters laden with civilians lifting off from Saigon rooftops told only part of the story. Over a hundred and sixty thousand Vietnamese civilians were airlifted from Saigon during the final month, more than fifty thousand in the last week alone, to resettle in the US.

Australia at the time had been less generous.

As America's faithful ally Australia had also sent troops to Vietnam, and like the Americans it too had turned against the war later on. But it had gone further still. The war had been very unpopular with the left, and as the victorious North Vietnamese advanced on Saigon the Labor government in Canberra made it clear it would not welcome anyone from the south. Many of the people who came to the embassy seeking help had no prior association with Australia and were simply knocking on any door they could find in their haste to get away before the communists came. Others had been good friends of the embassy over the years, the kind of contacts and supporters that diplomatic missions need and cultivate to do their job properly.

Canberra was adamant, despite all the embassy's entreaties. Even the local staff had to be left behind in the end, as we took off in a half-empty plane, taking with us instead eleven cats that belonged to some UN official! Australia, I knew, had more than made up for it since, with the numbers of refugees it had taken in later on, but I still remembered how bitter we had felt at the time. It had been too much like a betrayal.

‘She said that you tried to give her some money.'

‘It was the only thing I could do. She wouldn't take it. I thought she was angry with me. I told her to try the Americans.'

‘She was proud, Mr Quinn. But she never blamed you.'

The scene was clearer now, the girl in my office, the dismay and incomprehension on her face when I told her the final decision. She couldn't understand that the ambassador had no authority, had been expressly forbidden by Canberra to accept anyone without specific approval in each case – only to have it refused at the last minute, when it was too late for most of them to try any other route.

‘What happened to her in the end? Did she manage to get out?'

‘Not then, no … She's dead, Mr Quinn. She died when we got out by boat, in 1980.'

I was silent for a moment. David's girl, lost in such a stupid, cruel, totally avoidable way.

‘I'm terribly sorry,' I said at last.

‘It's not your fault. Please don't think I'm reproaching you for it.'

‘If I'd known she was pregnant …'

‘No one knew, apart from me. She hadn't even told David yet. Besides, what could you have done, short of marrying her?'

I shook my head. ‘Tell me about the boy.'

He was born in September of that year. By then life had become difficult for the Hoang family, as the communists bore down on anyone connected to the old order. Considering their situation, the birth went well. David had had fair hair but the baby's was dark, which helped hide his origin.

He was named HÆ°u, in Vietnamese,
Hòang Minh Hữu
, but Hien called him Eric. That was David's middle name. She decided at once that she would take him to Australia one day. Easier said than done. The exodus of boat people was only just starting, it was dangerous and expensive, Eric was five by the time they got on a boat. There were four of them: Hien, and Eric, and Mrs Tran as I still thought of her, and Khiem, her husband. She had married by then, the young man from the party, now a lecturer in mathematics at the Faculty of Sciences.