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  The House of Books is an eloquent collection

  of Australia’s finest literary achievements.

  Blanche d’Alpuget is the author of seven books, including four novels—Monkeys in the Dark (1980), Turtle Beach (1981), Winter in Jerusalem (1986) and White Eye (1993). These works earned her a number of literary prizes including the PEN Golden Jubilee Award, the Age Book of the Year Award and the South Australian Government’s Award for Literature.

  d’Alpuget’s first book, Mediator: A Biography of Sir Richard Kirby was published in 1977 to critical acclaim. Robert J. Hawke: A Biography (1982) was both a national bestseller and the winner of several awards. She is also the author of On Longing and Hawke: The Prime Minister.

  She has served on the boards of the Copyright Agency Ltd and the Australian Film Commission, and was the Chair of the Australian Society of Authors in 1991. She lives in Sydney with her husband and son.

  HOUSE of BOOKS

  BLANCHE

  d’ALPUGET

  Turtle Beach

  This edition published by Allen & Unwin House of Books in 2012

  First published by Penguin Books Australia in 1981

  Copyright © Blanche d’Alpuget 1981

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, London

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available

  from the National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 978 1 74331 226 1 (pbk)

  ISBN 978 1 74269 918 9 (ebook)

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE MALAYSIA

  CHAPTER 1

  PART TWO AUSTRALIA

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  PART THREE MALAYSIA

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  For

  Mike Epstein,

  with love

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I wish to express my heartfelt thanks to the Literature Board of the Australia Council. The Board’s grant of a one-year Senior Fellowship enabled me to research and write this book.

  Again, my thanks to Tess.

  B. d’A.

  September 1980

  This book is fiction. Any similarity between its characters and persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  PART ONE

  MALAYSIA

  1

  At midnight the sky had a sunrise glow that came not from the east but from the centre, near Chinatown, as people still called it. ‘Chinatown’, in a city of Chinese. The colonial habits of expression, colonial assumptions, had resisted change.

  In the days of the Raj – a time so different that it seemed unreal now, and ridiculous – an Englishman had noted that a Malay would kill a Chinaman with as little conscience as he would kill a tiger that trespassed on his village. For were not all Chinese cunning trespassers in this country, and predators on the Malays? The red-orange midnight was no trick of atmospherics but a new illustration of the old grudge. The Malays had fired Batu Road. They were heading now for Chinatown.

  The whole city had been turned into a hunting park.

  Men with white headbands, white for death, and flatbladed parangs or sharpened bamboos had gathered in swarms, as many as five hundred at a time, buzzing like enraged bees. They cried ‘Kill the Pigs!’ and did it in the name of Allah, roaming the streets murdering the eaters of pig flesh. The Chinese – who had brought this calamity upon themselves, people said, by supporting radical-left candidates in the elections, by marching in demonstrations, by throwing pork at Malay crowds – were retaliating with hand guns and meat cleavers. And they also lit fires, in the Malay kampongs.

  After four days the riots were over. The city smelt bad from the burnt-out buildings and the bus and car tyres that smouldered in the streets. People wept for their destroyed property and their dead relations and because they had awoken from a protective dream. Their leaders had insisted that modern Malaysia was unique, that its races could coexist in harmony. Their leaders had lied.

  Judith Wilkes had been married five days when her editor tracked her down in Singapore and told her to fly to Kuala Lumpur to cover the riots.

  ‘I don’t suppose it’s even occurred to you that I’m on my honeymoon,’ she had shouted over the crackling line.

  ‘I’m sorry about that, dear,’ had been the answer. ‘It’s a good story and you’re the nearest to it. You’re lucky to be asked.’ At twenty-three, she was.

  Richard, her husband, had butted in then, and when he had understood what was going on, had urged, ‘Take it, take it.’

  Afterwards he had said, ‘You can’t ignore the chance of a lifetime. This could make you.’ Richard had strong notions about the importance of work and success.

  By the end of that week Judith was a celebrity. Breathless with fright and excitement, she had been interviewed on television and for a while became a night-time darling in suburban living rooms. Her jerky prose filled the front pages of her newspaper under the by-line Judith O’Donahue, because the sub-editors forgot she was married now to the lawyer-boyfriend from the Attorney-General’s Department and had changed her name. Her stories were syndicated and widely published.

  She returned, bruised and enervated, to Singapore and found Richard indulgent with pride. ‘My brilliant wife,’ he said.

  He was five years older than she; Judith felt protected by his age, his size, his suntanned arms with their black floss of hairs, and his tone of wry patronage. Still, she was now depressed and easily unnerved; the mayhem in Kuala Lumpur was to blame, Richard said.

  By the time they reached London, Richard, by a process neither understood, had taken over her anecdotes. He could hold a pub audience – ‘A mob of about a hundred Malays set fire to a car. When the Chinese inside it leapt out they flung him back into the
flames, yelling “roast pork”’ – while Judith nodded, satisfied by the impressed glances people snatched from Richard to bestow, fleetingly, on her.

  Home again, they were known at first as a handsome couple and, later, as a perfect couple. They were joined in common speech as Judith-and-Richard and in people’s minds they grew into a double-headed creature.

  But Judith’s life had been irrevocably pulled off its course during one night in Kuala Lumpur. She had seen a youth break from the swarm and hack down a pedestrian with a two-handed swing of his sword, a boy who would melt back into his kampong and who would go for the rest of his days unaccused and unpunished for that moment of gory ballet. Like him, she felt, she would have to live with a crime she herself had committed in Kuala Lumpur, during what people later called The Incident of 13 May 1969.

  PART TWO

  AUSTRALIA

  2

  When colleagues said that Hobday, that is, Sir Adrian Hobday, Australian Ambassador and Plenipotentiary (Taipei, Paris, twice to Saigon), had gone mad, they blamed the Vietnam war. Or rather, the indignities he had suffered because of his role as architect of the Australian involvement in it. He had been harassed over the telephone and his border collie had been poisoned. In 1971 at Sydney airport a woman had thrown blood, aiming at the visiting US and Vietnamese officials. Hobday, his hand still clasping the American general’s, had stepped back suddenly, turned … ‘He’s been shot!’ people shouted, seeing it happen on television. A great red-black stain appeared, from Hobday’s neck to his belly.

  He had touched himself with trepidation, then shrugged.

  Five years later he was knighted in the Birthday Honours, for his handling of the evacuation of Australian nationals from Saigon in April 75. Some said it was this experience of defeat and flight that was to blame for his outbreak, or breakdown, whatever you chose to call it.

  Though when it became clear after a few months that Sir Adrian was not – not mad, exactly, but dangerously wrong-headed – colleagues forgot their earlier theory and looked for other reasons for his behaviour. There he was, senior diplomat, senior public servant who for thirty-odd years had carried out government policy without quibble, who listed his recreations in Who’s Who as reading and gardening. And now, at fifty-five, he was creating a scandal.

  ‘I guarantee it’s nothing more than a bad case of male menopause,’ Richard Wilkes remarked to Judith when she rang him to say she had been delayed by a Press conference – could he do something about dinner? – and, to take his mind off her request, passed on the gossip about Sir Adrian.

  Still, the Hobday Affair was kept quiet, so much so that the Governor-General did not find out for several months: the vice-regal lists reported that Sir Adrian and Lady Hobday had been invited to luncheons and dinners at Yarralumla. And for form’s sake Hilary – Lady Hobday – had gone with him to all the functions. ‘Looking haggard,’ as people later recalled. Like Hobday she was tall and handsome. She had borne him four tall, not-so-handsome children, but they were all married and had moved away from Canberra and so were spared the worst of it – the thing that happened afterwards, to Hilary.

  By then everyone knew about Adrian’s folly.

  ‘Adrian Hobday’s finally done himself in,’ Richard announced one mid-winter morning. He lowered the newspaper leisurely. Across the breakfast table Judith was still wearing her ‘dressing gown’, a duffle coat which years ago had been navy blue. She had not yet combed her hair, Richard noted.

  ‘Listen to this,’ he said. ‘The headline is “Secret Wedding”,’ and he read aloud the item, just one paragraph, about Sir Adrian’s marriage the day before.

  In a more urbane tone – ‘Richard’s Young-Labor-Minister-To-Be voice’, Judith called it to herself – he added, ‘Of course, the Department will screw the old sod for this, for doing what they’d all like to do. Run off with an Asian dolly! He won’t be ambassador to Washington now. They’ll shove him out to some deadly hole.’

  Richard was near enough to the mark to be smug when, a few weeks later, Hobday was appointed High Commissioner to Malaysia. At dinner parties Richard went around asking, ‘How do you think our new High Commissioner will make out with the Malaysian nobility, with a former Saigon bar-girl as his consort? Hmm?’

  In some quarters bets were laid on the possibility of scandal hounding Sir Adrian out of Kuala Lumpur and on to some even more obscure posting. But within days of his arrival in Kuala Lumpur Hobday had an unexpected piece of good luck.

  International events had changed. China, having accused Vietnam of persecuting residents of Chinese origin, sealed her border to refugees from Vietnam. There were rumours of war between Vietnam and China, and the Chinese in Vietnam panicked. Tens of thousands of them began fleeing in small boats. Those from the south sailed across the Gulf of Thailand and two or three days later landed on the beaches of Malaysia. Malaysia was, abruptly, an interesting country for a diplomat, a country with a problem.

  The problem enlarged as the year wore on.

  ‘The old fox,’ wiseacres said, recalling now that Hobday had negotiated stubbornly, inexplicably, for Kuala Lumpur when the Department had been prepared to be magnanimous and had offered him first Geneva, then The Hague. ‘I want somewhere close to home,’ he’d said wistfully, somehow convincing the Secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs that Malaysia was a retirement village and thus appropriate for a weary, discarded man.

  And then in January 1979, when the foreign news sections of the Australian papers were beginning to refer to a ‘refugee crisis’ in South-East Asia and Hobday was once again one of the country’s most important envoys, sending cables every few days and even advising the Prime Minister direct, Hilary Hobday burnt herself to death.

  It had been a frighteningly hot summer in Canberra, arriving late, in the New Year. Then for days there had been a heatwave worse than any in recent memory. The summer grasses had been bleached to straw, the purple mountains that ring the city had seemed to move closer in the harsh light; the inland sky had been smudged brown with the smoke of bushfires, some of them so near to town that householders could hear trees exploding and found terrified, hungry wallabies and snakes in their gardens.

  The only fire in the suburbs, however, had been the one that destroyed the Hobday family home in Red Hill. And it had started at night. Neighbours had been able to stop it spreading but there had never been any hope of saving Hilary: her remains were not dug out of the ruins of the garage until the next morning. She had been smoking and drinking heavily since the divorce, friends now admitted. On the day of the fire she had been seen standing for a long time at the window that overlooked the street, staring into space.

  Two days after the fire the heatwave ended with a cold change and rain sweeping up from the south.

  3

  ‘Sir Adrian flew in this morning for the funeral. I think I’ll go,’ Judith told Richard, telephoning him at the Attorney-General’s Department. ‘I want to have another look at him before I leave for Kuala Lumpur next month.’

  Richard smiled into the handpiece. ‘Lady journalist crashes distinguished gathering of mourners to interview senior envoy.’

  ‘Come off it,’ she broke in. ‘There’ll be a lot of Foreign Affairs people there. I might pick something up about how well Hobday’s handling the refugee problem.’

  Richard sighed, indulgent. ‘I am merely drafting legislation for … Oh, what does my work matter? I suppose you want me to get dinner?’

  ‘Yes,’ Judith said. ‘Thanks, darling. There’s that chicken I bought on Monday. We should eat it tonight.’

  She rang her editor in Sydney, told him she wanted to cover Lady Hobday’s funeral that afternoon and asked, ‘Is there any special angle you want, Bill?’

  Bill said, ‘Why ask me? You know my views on this Malaysia caper of yours, dear. You’re a Canberra correspondent, not a bloody refugee-chaser.’

  She sat biting her lip when she rang off.

  At three o’clock as she was leav
ing her office for the funeral a colleague joined her in the corridor and trudged beside Judith down from the cubby-hole maze of the Press gallery to the tarmac in front of Parliament House. She panted and squinted up at Judith through the fumes of a cigarette in the corner of her mouth.

  ‘Well, Jude, I hope Hobday’s satisfied, the self-indulgent swine,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t even have to pay Hilary’s maintenance now. The great survivor, eh?’ She screwed up her shrewd old eyes as if the taste and smell of cigarettes – she was never without one stuck in her face – had abruptly become disgusting. ‘Like you and me, eh girlie? We’re survivors.’

  Judith shrugged.

  ‘No. I’m serious,’ the woman persisted. ‘You’ve got it made. You pull off this Malaysian job and you can name your own terms. Don’t let Bill make you nervous.’

  ‘I guess so,’Judith replied, and jerked away: she had been elbowed in the ribs.

  ‘You guess so! You and that … ’ there was a hesitation, ‘that good-looking husband of yours, you’ve got the killer instinct, you two kids.’

  Judith laughed and gave her a shove.

  There was a light drizzle that turned the dust and splattered insect bodies into thin yellow mud on her car windows as Judith drove to St Luke’s. She grimaced at the tiny creatures being emulsified by the windscreen wipers as she mulled over Hilary’s death. Everyone knew that there was insufficient evidence for suicide and that the coroner would call it an accident.

  By the time she reached the church the rain had stopped. She sat in her car for a few minutes, observing the mourners. They stood straight in their dark clothing with set, disapproving faces. Even the lavishness of the wreaths laid out on the lawn seemed more a protest than a mark of sympathy.

  Judith joined the murmuring crowd and with nothing better to do – it was not yet the moment for buttonholing anyone – counted the wreaths and jotted the number in her notebook.