Sylvia had always been the naughtiest one, Sonia’s oldest schoolfriend from NEGS, the only two Jewish girls on the New England plateau as far as they ever knew. Sonia had always loved Sylvia, admiring her gifts as much as her high spirits. Two versions of spirit went together – high and inner – though not so evidently when they were in their twenties, when Sonia won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, soon after women were eligible, and Sylvia went on the hippie trail to India. It was true that Sonia had never been observant of ritual, and the little she knew of the six hundred and thirteen mitzvahs required for perfection in life she’d forgotten. Dying, she was at peace in a way that expressed her life. She was interested in others to the exclusion of herself. She had made her mark as a barrister, then as a high court judge with a series of rulings on family justice.
Harry blamed the courts for swallowing his wife and spitting her out, with cancer. Through her despair of the court system’s serving the needs of broken families, she worked at getting conflicts sorted in backrooms. In this, her method, her oldest friend Sylvia’s brilliance, inspired by acolytes in ashrams blanking their minds, had played a part.
Conduct Codes
by Sylvia Yeomans (Princeton University Press) showed a way: a routine inimical to adversarial traditions, of closing doors on interruption and working for common ground to emerge in the worst of situations, murder, betrayal, rape, abuse, theft – the whole Shakespearean gamut reduced to diagrams on a whiteboard. Before the unretreating shadow was cast on Sonia’s X-rays they had worked out ways of staging the method through to international disputes, next year in Darfur, Kashmir or Timor. Next year in Jerusalem. That the shadow was more akin to light Tiger found bewildering.
He clomped around in his boots and old khaki shorts, getting the solar batteries charged up, having water tanked in, solving electrical problems with the overly complicated septic system required by local by-laws. He was glad his cousin’s sons weren’t there to bugger things up, as he put it to Petra every year when they had their sessions on who did what the worst between Petra’s sons, Booth and Wesley, to bust the routines he’d laid down for this property shared between two families who could not be more contrasting with each other in their wants and likes.
Margaret, Petra’s mother, had grown up at Crater Bay with her sister, Joan, and their brother, Lee, who’d died at the controls of a Spitfire over Malta. Everyone said Tiger was like his late uncle – tall, slightly stooped, frizzy-haired, quizzical and talkative. Double-jointed, too, otherwise Lee wouldn’t have fitted into the cockpit of a Spit. Growing up, whatever Tiger was going to do in his life was compared with Lee’s potential reflexively. Lee’s disappointments, unlike Tiger’s, were speculative forward into eternity. By dying he’d wiped them away. Tiger always had a quote ready illustrative of that. ‘The dead man was master of the situation.’ Jack London,
Sea Wolf
.
Tiger had taken Lee’s wings and airman’s cap to primary school assemblies and shown them off. There was a greasy shine with curled hair stuck in the silk inner-lining of the cap and a lingering brilliantine smell of charm and dash.
Crater Bay had been a South Coast showpiece from 1901 to 1960, with tennis court, croquet lawn and a set of stables. After Lee’s death Sapper Boden ran it with a farmhand who got in the way. How two did the work of ten took an act of the imagination to calculate, as the property, as a holiday place, still needed an almost full-time caretaker to keep going, although the milking sheds, cows and eighty-five per cent of the acreage were long since gone. Max’s oyster sheds stood on a former back paddock. Maintenance procedures were filed in a ring-back folder thicker than the operating manual of a 747 and passed from hand to hand with pencilled changes and Post-It notes. Tiger was a crank over saving water at the house but could not bring himself to ask Sonia and Harry to turn off taps. Even if fire attacked from the hills and the hoses dribbled to a spit, he felt something elemental would remain undisturbed through his refusal to nag.
Harry heaved all the Gawler stuff overboard as far as it went for himself, but he kept it for Sonia, in his hopes. Chain-smoking and never far from a drink, even at breakfast, Harry tracked the vitamin extracts he’d paid a fortune for to bring in from the States. A bundle was being held up by customs as medical imports intended for sale. There were too many cartons strapped together for them to credit how it was all intended to pass through the bowels of a bird-like woman weighing barely thirty kilos.
The delay gave Harry a cause in the outside world – each day he needed one. After the phoning Max found him a highly placed public servant to depend on, a name to ask for where the path would be cleared without implicating Max in some ratbag journo’s blog as a chronic string-puller.
Harry barked the information down the phone to his PA, Liz, who’d run the office since Sonia tripped at tennis five months ago, pulled her shoulder and after routine X-rays was told she had six months to live. It was this timetable Harry scorned. He’d dropped all jobs and taken indefinite leave from the partnership. Catch him at the outdoor table brooding and he was a figure in a B-grade movie, late-night TV’s dungeoned monster with a misunderstood intelligence – staring away to sea with a leaden lower lip as Tiger told his stories, making Olympic-style condensation rings with a stubby on the table surface, crushing his butts into a scatter of twist-tops, then lapping at sour, ruby-beaded dregs of red wine till his head lolled on his chest at midnight.
Harry picked up the heavy binoculars that Tiger’s father had used in the war. Something was out there. ‘It’s a busted-up-looking ketch on the horizon, sailing south,’ he said. The wretchedness in Harry’s voice was heartbreaking. They each took a look. You could see the craft hammering to windward. That night there was a call from Jake to say that
Workers Comp
had tied up in Eden.
Tiger talked about the way his father liked to call him in from the bay with an Aldis lamp mounted on the verandah rail. It sucked so much power that you knew when it was coming from the thud of the one-cylinder diesel generator sounding across the water moments before the morse message began flashing in the gloom, and he began rowing in: TGR YR MTHR HAS TEA ON THE TBLE (Leisha Dunfield, the Admiral’s WRAN, was assigned the cipher MTHR.) And then, GT YSLF BLDY IN.
Godfrey Yeomans had been a brave fighting sailor, not a good peacetime administrator, and his abrasive manner led to clashes with the navy minister of the time, who’d sacked him while Tiger was still a schoolboy. Joan left him for Frank Bohrmann when Tiger was thirteen, making a triple blow for the Admiral after Tiger’s dismal exams. Joan calculated that in their fourteen years of marriage they’d spent a total of three months in each other’s arms. Her leaving, Godfrey Yeomans said, was a betrayal so low in the scale of treachery as to be scarcely worth grieving: what devastated him, he said, was being cut off from navy life by politicians.
Without Joan holidaying with them at Crater Bay, Godfrey had no-one to block him on Tiger’s behalf: that summer it was a full-on father and son construction job worthy of the Cockatoo Island dockyards on wartime footing.
That summer of betrayal Godfrey had built a sixteen-foot lapstrake catboat, the only one of its kind in Australia, perhaps the world, and made Tiger’s sport a misery by demanding a standard of helming equivalent to a Royal Naval College small-boat gold medallist. On launch day they glided out from under the shelter of the headland into a southerly that gave the channel the consistency of whipped eggwhite. It was a dinghy sailor’s gale, these days the venue for SouthCare helicopter rescue but then just an episode of holiday fun. Leisha Dunfield strode the headland in an oilskin cape like the French Lieutenant’s Woman.
‘Point her up, point her down,’ bellowed the old salt, sitting in his white shorts controlling the mainsheet and expecting Tiger to interpret every bulging vein in his accusing eyeballs. ‘Let her go, sonny,’ he yelled, at last, at which point Tiger did just fling the tiller aside, precisely as the next order came, ‘Hold her hard!’ – and the lovely shape turned turtle in coils of rope and sodden sailcloth.
A
T
T
UESDAY LUNCHTIME
M
AX CAME
over from his house on the peninsula bearing bleeding steaks from a beast that his brother, Karl, had dropped in the paddock with a .44-40. It gave Harry a job. He stood at the barbecue wielding a devil’s fork. That night Max and Harry, working together like celebrity chefs, fed everyone and broke out a stash of Tiger’s reserve shiraz with barely a nod of permission. Sonia dozed a coo-ee away in the guest cottage. When she woke, Sylvia fed her sticks of curled celery dunked in a pot of black caviar, the only substance on earth, now, that tempted her palate. Big men, Harry and Max must have drunk eight or more bottles of the precious wine between them, as well as broaching supplies of their own. It was hardly believable to Tiger, who headed off to bed that night without touching a drop.
The following night Tiger and Sylvia went out to the movies in the community hall, leaving the men the larder, the depleted but never empty wine cupboard. Sitting in the car they said to each other, ‘What next?’ and stared ahead for a minute before Tiger turned the ignition. Sylvia breathed in, breathed out, her routine for coping. Their hands sought each other like small animals creeping from shelter. Dip by dip, Windy Point Lighthouse shone from under the horizon. Tiger tested the curve of the earth that way, loom by loom of light.
When they returned home at midnight the foxie dog was knocking an enamel dish of bones around with its nose, doors were wide open and there was the reek of stale cigar smoke. The kitchen was cleaned with the empties stacked on the verandah.
After Sylvia went up to see Sonia to tell her the plot of
The Painted Veil
, Harry came down from the cottage and joined Tiger, standing in the dark.
‘Look,’ said Tiger. ‘No lights anywhere except for Windy Point.’
‘A clean world of cold,’ said Harry. ‘The stars a road to travel down.’
‘Who wrote that?’ said Tiger.
‘I do believe it was Sapper, or someone very like him.’
Tiger knew that of course. Harry had pre-empted him, knowing him only too well with his aphorisms unacknowledged. Here was the reason why Tiger needed to make himself over, to show he could be what he wasn’t in the eyes of his friends and loved ones, where he did all his living and sometimes felt only too predictably sidelined by their success. That their lives had been shaped by Crater Bay, that their friendship with Tiger was a good part of their sense of themselves was what they said. Tiger pulled away from this idea with the truculent identity-thrusts of a teenager.
He had been to enough funerals, heard enough eulogies, to know how life curved like an arrow and everyone hit their own bullseye of completion in the words people said about them. Just in the words, though – something the dead bones never knew.
Tiger remembered years ago standing in the crowd at Kyle Morrison’s memorial gathering hosted by his mother, as the new chatelaine of Inverarity, hearing Powys Wignall say they were all Kyle’s friends and a complete stranger putting his arm around him and weeping, ‘But the poor bastard never had any bloody friends.’ Apparently they’d been at school together.
Tiger had ambition like Powys Wignall said Kyle had – he wanted to be alive to feel what it was to make a truth about himself stick. If you couldn’t get in that one last hurl before time grabbed then you wouldn’t die as yourself. Go out to Windy Point, Tiger Yeomans, and work the loom of light.
N
EXT MORNING
H
ARRY WAS ON
the phone again. Thanks to Max he was through to the contact’s friend’s mate in customs. The shipment of drugs, as they were designated, was cleared. The boxes were sitting in a cargo bay at Canberra airport, ready for collection. When Harry finished the call he shed gummy tears of hope, pushing at the corners of his eyes with his knuckled fists. Max’s son, Nick, would collect the consignment within the hour and drive it down to Crater Bay.
When Tiger took the phone to replace it on the charging cradle he looked down. There was a message blinking. Sylvia came back into the room.
‘Listen to this,’ said Tiger, switching to speaker-phone.
‘Now, mates, I don’t want any panic but I had a little mishap last night. I overshot the gravel on the bend along the shoreline and tipped into the drink. No great disaster, a bit of a knock on the head. Had to walk home. But I’m okay. The Range Rover’s a write-off.’
Tiger turned to Sylvia, ‘A write-off? Had to walk? That’s around eight kilometres in the dark, no moon, on a track overgrown with wattle.’
It was a route Max took to avoid any chance of being breathalysed on the Princes Highway. During his time in opposition there’d been little attention on him and he’d led a high old life. Before the election an ultimatum of Wendy’s was delivered. It was code for misdemeanours never to be detailed by Wendy unless to an investigative reporter in an act of solemn resentment.
When Max made himself available for re-election without telling her, he asked, was he expected to retire, put his feet up, dwell on past glories? Max took a one-bedroom flat in Kingston and gave Wendy a key. It was a statement of trust. Without asking him she gave Nick the key. A longstanding family acted as a single organism. Nick took Max’s bike from its rack in the basement garage, took the food Max ordered from an organic supplier trading from his electorate and with his mates ate the lot. Wendy came in and tidied. She stacked his empties back onto each other to make him think he drank more than he did.
Max and his brothers were raised drinking shandies in their cots at Warren and Moree – no wonder they’d become big, burly men (in their contrasting styles) with a habit of demanding sugary satisfactions. After coming down from the north Max’s parents had run the Parslow Arms on the river mouth. Now the pub was shared between two brothers with a manager put in. Max rarely talked about his father being his adoptive father, his brothers being his adoptive brothers. He never talked about who his birth parents were. Did he know? Was he interested at all? It was said he knew, but was not interested. It was between his mother – his adoptive mother, Jessie – and himself. That was all he ever said, except to the Marcus Friendly rumours: