A Woman of Courage (34 page)

‘We don't know. And unless we continue talking to them we never shall.'

Vivienne appealed to Hilary. ‘You want us to deal with a bunch of latter day Mao Zedong thugs?'

‘I want us to talk to them,' Hilary said. ‘Find out what they want. I want to see what opportunities they can offer us. And that is what we shall do.' She turned to Martha. ‘How do we get hold of this man Wong?'

‘I have a contact number.'

‘Give it to Janet. What is the time difference between here and Hong Kong?'

‘This time of year, two hours behind us.'

Hilary looked at the gilt clock on her desk. ‘Tell Janet to get him on the line at twelve o'clock.' She looked at Martha. ‘Ten o'clock their time. He should be in his office by then, yes?'

‘Probably been there several hours by then.'

‘It'll give him time to clear his desk.'

Although Wong's desk, like hers, was unlikely to be cleared any time soon.

‘A suggestion,' Martha said.

‘Yes?'

‘When he proposes a time to meet, choose another time and maybe a week later than he says. It's important not to appear too eager.'

‘I shall remember,' Hilary said.

‘And it will give me time to do that interview with Emil Broussard,' Sara said. ‘If you haven't forgotten.'

Hilary looked at her level-eyed. ‘I don't forget much,' she said. ‘I even remember when I was born.'

Sara had heard that story often enough. She thought it was nonsense but was not foolish enough to say so. ‘More than I can say,' she said. ‘But I suppose you remember that too.'

‘Your birth? Of course I remember it. I remember it very well.'

1970–78

ADDITION TO THE FAMILY

1

The child gave Hilary a hard time even before it was born.

‘I reckon I've got a footballer in there,' she told Kirstie MacLeod.

She was really forging ahead now: money in the bank, a big house and now a housekeeper, Kirstie MacLeod, who was also her friend.

It certainly felt like a footballer. Hilary, sick of the way the brat booted her about, took it for granted that the troublemaker was a male child but refused to confirm it.

‘All in good time,' she said. ‘Anyway, I don't think there can be much doubt.'

Yet in the event she got it wrong. Clearly having made up its mind that it wished to get out into the world the child did so, slipping out into a warm sunny evening two days before Hilary's own birthday.

‘A girl?' Hilary said. ‘I would never have believed it.' She called it Sara. ‘After Abraham's wife.'

‘What's Abraham got to do with it?' Kirstie said.

‘Not a lot, let's hope.' But had an idea that some of those Old Testament ladies had been as tough as the desert out of which they had emerged. ‘Troublemakers the lot of them,' she said. ‘And judging by her performance so far this one will be just like them.'

And kissed the downy head, suspecting it would not be long before she would want to strangle it. This time she got it right.

2

Sara was a fighter. She fought with everyone and everything: her mother, her sister and – when she was old enough to go to school – the kids and teachers too.

‘She is not cruel or nasty,' Hilary said. ‘Just determined.'

She suspected she too had been like that. The way her life had begun she would have got nowhere without determination.

Sara had an enquiring mind: a child of great potential, her form teacher said, but as demanding as gifted children often were.

‘She needs challenge,' Miss Barker said. ‘Her mind needs to be stretched.'

Challenge was right: Sara provided plenty of that herself without help from anyone else. She ran away twice; fortunately she never got far but somewhere in the recesses of Hilary's mind memory chimed. Hadn't she tried to do the same thing herself? She remembered being carried indoors by a pair of outraged hands, a woman's shrill voice scolding.

Sara was very different from Jennifer, that was for sure. But – a secret Hilary would carry to her grave – it was not so surprising, was it? Not when you remembered they had different fathers, whatever Sara's birth certificate might say. As soon as the divorce from Sean had been finalised she had in any case changed both children's names to Brand, and it was Hilary, Jennifer and Sara Brand who in the June of 1978 travelled to seek adventure in the far north of Australia.

Jennifer accepted the idea without comment but Sara was full of questions.

‘Arnhem Land? What's there?'

‘That's what we're going to find out.'

‘Why does it have that name?'

‘It's named for a Dutch ship that explored that part of the coast in the seventeenth century.'

‘What was it doing there?'

‘I don't know.'

‘I shall find out,' Sara said.

Hilary sighed, looking out of the aircraft window. They had barely left Perth and already it had the makings of a long trip.

They were away a fortnight. Hilary acquired new images to add to those she already had. Standing on top of the escarpment called Ubirr Rock, watching the sun rise over the silent green expanse of the Nadab floodplain. The three of them sleeping in a tented camp and waking to the shriek and trumpeting of birds as they greeted the dawn. The two girls looking over the side of the ferry at Cahill's Crossing, staring into the mud-swirled waters of the East Alligator River. Their first spine-tingling sight of crocodiles on the sun-dried mud of the riverbank. So peaceful; so – surely? – harmless; so lethal.

Jennifer looked at them apprehensively. ‘Will they really kill you?'

‘And gobble you up,' Hilary said. ‘You'd better believe it. Don't you go anywhere near them,' she told Sara who looked as though she might be planning to do just that. ‘You hear me?'

It was country so remote they felt they must have travelled into a different universe. Everything they saw was new yet as old as the land itself. The black faces, the unearthly sound of what Hilary told them was a didgeridoo, the sense of other-worldliness; even the empty beaches, vast extents of yellow sand that might never have known the imprint of human feet, put there by an unseen hand for them to walk on, on the lip of an ocean that might extend forever.

A guide took them into a succession of rock shelters. They looked at the pictures stencilled on the walls. Many thousands of years old according to the guide, they were manifestations of what he told them were some of the creation figures out of which the land had been formed. There were other pictures too: of fish and possum and wallaby, and they too seemed to take form out of the rock.

They walked out of the shelter into the morning light and the world was bright and shining as though fresh-minted for their especial joy. On such a day it was a privilege to be alive and each night, eyes wide in the darkness, Hilary relived that day's enchantment: the sounds and silences; the calling of birds and humped backs of dolphins; the images setting fire to the stone within the rock shelters; the all-pervading sense of magic filling heart and mind with wonder.

The day before they left, their guide, perhaps conscious of the deference that Hilary's experiences had roused in her, took her to see a woman of the Yolngu people who, he said, used pigments she made from bush plants to create paintings depicting the past and present of her people, the rainbow serpent of the Dreaming and Ulamina, the starfish man and his stolen canoe.

The power and authenticity of the paintings struck Hilary at once. She bought two and arranged for them to be crated and sent to her in Perth. When they arrived she took them out and looked at them. She invited Kirstie MacLeod to look at them too, to share in the excitement.

Kirstie looked at them with something like resentment. A nice woman, but not one given to intellectual challenge. ‘What kind of pictures are they, anyway?'

‘I got them up north.'

‘Oh well then.' As though nothing good ever came from what Kirstie no doubt considered heathen regions. ‘What you going to do with them?'

‘I shall look at them and remember my time up there. It was like visiting another world.'

‘I dare say,' Kirstie said. ‘Me, I'll be happy to stick with the world I got, thanks very much.'

1984–86

A SEARCH FOR ROOTS

1

Back in the wheeler-dealer world she had made her own Hilary prospered beyond her wildest imaginings yet amid the tumult and excitement of her success the echoes of all she had seen and felt in Arnhem Land remained. Again and again she stood in front of the two paintings of the Yolngu woman and shared the heritage that she sensed in the fire and wonder of their mysterious images.

‘Dunno what you see in them,' said Kirstie MacLeod.

‘I see the roots of the past.' The words came from nowhere but set Hilary thinking. ‘They'll be the start of my collection.'

Because it occurred to her that a collection of Australiana, Aboriginal as well as western, might help provide a substitute for the roots she presently lacked.

‘Most people have parents, grandparents, family they can look back to. People who give them a sense of who they are. I don't have that. All I know is I am an Australian. By collecting these things I shall be creating my own past.'

‘I dunno how pictures like them two will do that,' Kirstie said, ‘but I suppose you know what you're doing.'

She clearly had doubts about that, but Hilary had none. She had recreated herself from the penniless and ignorant child she had been to what she was now. She was still doing it and, as she had told Lance Bettinger, would continue to do so all her life.

She would need help from someone who knew what he or she was talking about. She would speak to the boss of the Western Australia Art Gallery and see if he could recommend someone. She also needed someone to do a detection job for her. She had been brought up to believe she had no family, that both her parents were dead. But were they? What she remembered of those early days was that she had been told a heap of lies.

At a reception hosted by the premier she had met Bella Tucker, the legendary owner of Desire, the palatial house overlooking the Swan River, and of vast pastoral and mining interests in the far north. Hilary phoned Bella and asked if she could recommend the name of an enquiry agent who might look into the matter for her.

‘Try Gayle Hastings,' Bella Tucker said. ‘If you mention my name she may be able to help you.'

Hilary was in Sydney – nowadays she was spending more and more time there and beginning to think of moving there permanently – but the following morning she phoned Gayle Hastings in Perth, and she agreed to fly over the following day.

‘I'll send a car to meet you,' Hilary said.

Later the following afternoon they sat down in the privacy of Hilary's office.

2

The enquiry agent was little and neat and all business. Her features were nondescript, which Hilary supposed might be useful in Gayle Hastings's line of work. She sat on the other side of Hilary's desk, wrote notes with a gold pencil in a leather-bound notebook and said she would look into things.

‘I have agents in the UK,' she said. ‘I'll get them digging as well. As soon as I have something I shall get back to you.'

‘You will want a deposit,' Hilary said.

‘Time for that later,' Gayle Hastings said. She rose to her feet. ‘I'll see myself out.'

She walked to the door, footsteps silent on the Wilton carpet, and was gone. She left so little impression on the air it was hard to believe she had been there at all, yet Hilary recognised efficiency when she saw it and thought Gayle Hastings would do a good job.

She picked up her phone. ‘Get hold of Sotheby's WA office. The fine art dealers, that's right. I want to speak to a man called Tom Tallis.'

They agreed to meet the following week when Hilary would be back in Perth. She met him not at the office but in the Peppermint Grove house she had bought three years before, with its views between specimen trees to the sunlit ocean.

Tom Tallis was not in the least like Gayle Hastings but equally impressive in his own way. Breaking her own rule of not pre-judging people she hadn't met she had decided Tom Tallis would either be young, extravagantly dressed with a flamboyant bow tie and the widest of wide lapels on a hairy jacket, or tall, haughty and patronising, theatrical in an Oscar Wilde-type cloak and determined to put this wealthy philistine in her place.

Both images were as wrong as they could be.

Tom Tallis turned out to be tall and lean, formally dressed in a dark suit and tie, with grey hair cut short and a high tanned forehead. He looked like a man who spent time in the open air, possibly a tennis player: which, as Hilary later discovered, was exactly what he was. None of which mattered. What was important was that the head of the art gallery had told her he was one of the leading authorities on Australian art. ‘Anyone from Augustus Earle to John Blackman,' the chairman had said, ‘he's your man.'

Hilary hadn't heard of either Augustus Earle or John Blackman but hoped he was right about Tom Tallis's expertise. Over coffee she explained her thinking.

‘I find that very interesting,' he said. ‘I believe every nation's art defines not only its history but its attitude to the world and its place in civilisation. In that sense it forms the heritage of us all.'

‘Not only western civilisation,' Hilary said. ‘I have a couple of Aboriginal paintings I would like you to see.'

She had them hanging in the living room. He stood and studied them silently for several minutes before turning to her. ‘You bought these from a dealer?'

‘From the artist.'

‘Did you have anyone to advise you?'

‘They were among a selection the artist showed me. I picked out a couple that I particularly liked.'