Murder Song. Jon Cleary

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СКАЧАТЬ went out of the small study where she had taken the call and back to the main reception room. She paused in the doorway, caught the last of the gossip before this charity morning tea broke up. It was for one of her favourite charities, homes for deaf children, and she was glad the children couldn’t hear the gossip.

      ‘Have you met her husband? His idea of repartee is to pass wind.’

      ‘Why do we need men? I’m beginning to understand lesbians.’

      ‘That writer over there, what’s-her-name, she’s one, you know.’

      ‘Really? I thought they all looked like punk rockers.’

      ‘I tried to congratulate her on her new book, but she got in first. She writes her own reviews, so they say.’

      ‘They sleep in separate rooms,’ Anita heard from another corner. ‘She tells me they make love on their anniversary each year. I’m surprised they know where the essentials still are.’

      The women began to file past Anita Norval, chattering, murmuring, gushing. She found groups of women no worse than groups of men; the men were a little more deferential to her, paying awkward court to her beauty and the position of her husband, if they were conservatives. Gossip was endemic to both sexes; the men varied it by trying to buy or sell influence with it. There were no men here this morning and she was glad of that; she did not want to compare any of them with Brian Boru. It was a weakness she recognized in herself that she was always comparing people. It had started when she had first gone into radio over twenty years ago.

      Penelope Debbs, the last to leave, stood before her. ‘I always enjoy coming to Kirribilli House, Anita. You’re so fortunate.’

      ‘It comes with the territory, as they say.’ In her days in radio, when she had hosted her own chat show, she had perhaps used too many American expressions; she had cured herself of that since Philip had gone into politics, but some still clung. They put her very much on side with Philip’s minders, all of whom had done a quick course in Americana. ‘You should put forward a bill to have a permanent residence for the State Premier. There are several going around Point Piper for ten or twelve million.’

      ‘I’m Labour, remember? If ever I suggested anything like that, I’d be thrown out on my rear.’

      She had been born a Whymper; with such a name she had been destined for some sort of climbing, though Alps were in short supply locally. Unfitted for mountaineering, she had taken up political climbing. She had driven her pitons into at least a dozen rivals on her way up, buried others in small avalanches started by her scrabbling boots.

      ‘Never you, Penelope.’ No one ever called her Penny, except one man: that would suggest a value much below that which she put on herself.

      She was the State Minister for Development; her main development, it was said, was her own advancement. Her ambition was so naked that the Premier, Hans Vanderberg, had once remarked that it should be censored and not allowed on television in front of children; it was rumoured that when in the Cabinet Room with her, he wore a chain-mail vest and never turned his back on her. She was a goodlooking redhead till she turned her face full on to one: then one saw the green ball-bearings that were her eyes and the white steel smile. She gave Anita the smile now.

      ‘No, that’s true. It’s very comforting representing constituents who think I’m Mother Teresa.’

      That was when God should have sent the bolt of lightning; but God, Anita often thought, was a Labour sponsor. ‘How’s Arnold? I rarely see him in Canberra.’

      Arnold Debbs was a Federal Labour member, sitting on the front bench opposite Philip and his ministers. The Debbs were a formidable pair. ‘He finds Canberra boring – one always does when one is in Opposition. He tries to escape as often as he can. I’ll tell him you asked after him. Give Philip my love. How is he? Still playing God? Or is it the other way round?’

      ‘He’s busy.’ Though God knew what at or with whom. He had a new secretary who was either slow at her word processor or quick in bed; either way, Philip and she had been working an awful lot of overtime lately. Anita did not care, so long as Philip didn’t ask what she was doing. ‘I’ll tell him you asked after him.’

      Then the house was empty but for the servants cleaning up, her secretary and the Federal policeman who was her security guard. All at once she wished she were rid of it all, it had all suddenly become tiring, tiresome and empty; she had tried to become a political animal but the metamorphosis had been too much for her, though few would have known. She longed now for escape with Brian Boru, away from the constant wearing of a face that was false, the rein on a tongue that wanted to be truthful, the politics.

      She hurried upstairs, checked her make-up, went to the bathroom for a nervous pee, as if she were a teenager sneaking out on a date, put on a raincoat and hat, and as she came downstairs was met by her secretary, Grace Weldon.

      ‘Going out? I’ll tell Sergeant Long –’

      ‘No, Grace. I’ll drive myself. May I borrow your car?’

      Each time they came up from Canberra for an extended stay, Grace Weldon drove up in her own car, a bright red Celica. Not really a car to be driving in to a secret assignation, but better that than to be driven there in a government car.

      Grace looked dubious. ‘I don’t know – no, I don’t mean I don’t want to lend you my car. By all means, take it. But Sergeant Long will hit the roof when I tell him you’ve gone off –’

      ‘Then don’t tell him, not unless he asks.’

      ‘May I ask where you’re going?’ Grace was tentative, but she asked out of the best of intentions. ‘Ted Long said you were gone Saturday night and all day yesterday. He was nearly out of his mind. He rang me at my mother’s, wanted to know what I knew. Did he say anything to you?’

      ‘Yes, this morning. Very politely. I just told him I was visiting an old schoolfriend who’s in trouble and I thought the fewer people who knew about it, the better.’

      ‘Is that what you’re telling me now?’

      She hesitated, then put her hand on Grace’s arm; it was almost as if she were speaking to her own daughter. ‘No, Grace. I’m going to meet a man I’m very much in love with.’

      Grace pursed her lips as if she were about to whistle. She was a romantic, which, with being a cynic, is the best of two things to be in politics; it was the in-betweens, like Anita, who couldn’t stand the disillusion. She squeezed Anita’s hand. ‘You look marvellously happy. That’s good enough for me. Here are the keys. I’ll take care of Sergeant Long.’

      Anita drove north up Pacific Highway, the main artery to the tree-thick suburbs of the North Shore. The area was called the North Shore, though it did not begin till one had travelled at least five or six miles from the actual north shore of the harbour. The Japanese business community, which had moved into the area in the last few years and started its own school, was still bewildered at the natives’ careless attitude to geography and put it down to the fact that the continent was so vast that a few miles here or there didn’t matter. There was no South Shore or West Shore; the underprivileged who lived in those desert regions had to find their own social status symbols. To live on (never in) the North Shore was a sign that one had arrived at a certain altitude on the social climb: half the climbers might be bent double under the back-pack of mortgages, but social status supplies an oxygen all СКАЧАТЬ