Turtle Beach Read online

  A young man in a well-cut suit saw her do it. He looked her over – shaggy yellow hair, giant sunglasses, heels so high that she looked too tall – and muttered ‘Press’ to his woman companion. The brim of the woman’s beautiful black straw hat, symmetrical as a flower, rose as she lifted her chin to stare, then she turned and passed into the church. Judith glared at her back.

  A few moments later when she glanced down at her brown velvet blazer she noticed that she had forgotten to take the ABORTION ON DEMAND button off her lapel. She unpinned it and was still grinning as she walked towards the church porch. Ushers in tail coats had just given out the last of the hymnals.

  There were three rows of empty pews at the back of the church. Outside the church was orange brick; inside it was lined with cream-painted gyprock and had metal girders, painted mauve, holding up its ceiling. Judith glanced around, with the sense of sacrilege she always felt in Protestant churches, and caught sight of the empty cross up on the north wall: it was three pieces of jarrah two-by-two. Some other people, perhaps those from Sydney where the Anglican establishments were older and more luxurious, were looking about in a helpless way, as if wondering whether they had come to the right place.

  But when Sir Gregory Clark of the Public Service Board, large and bad-tempered, stamped down the aisle looking at his watch, the restless heads grew still. His impatience, it seemed, summarized for the gathering the attitude they should take: this ceremony was a licentious waste of time, as the events that had led up to it were a licentious waste of good reputation. It was to be endured as a tribulation; and a warning.

  The organ quavered into something that might be Bach and the vicar moved into view. At the same time Hobday came up the aisle, erect, clear-eyed, suntanned, forbiddingly grand himself in his dark pin-stripe suit and black tie and armband. He looked straight ahead as he walked, apparently unaware of the hostile eyes upon him. His and Hilary’s tribe followed: plain daughters and plain sons and a straggle of other near relations. A pace or two back another figure wandered forward; his clothes had the stained, tramp-like look that seems natural to very old men. But the shape of his head and nose were so similar to those of the published photographs of Hilary Hobday that Judith guessed he was her father. There was something else, a numb confusion in the way he gazed around, questioning, that made her think with a sudden, cold ill feeling, that he still knew his daughter as a lively child. She saw his bewilderment: ‘How is it possible that she is dead, so young? And I am still alive?’ He paused as he came abreast of Judith’s pew and looked at her, then shook his head and slowly walked on.

  The burping of the organ sank and a light tapping of heels was heard from the church porch. For seconds the congregation waited, staring ahead at the icing of lilies that concealed the shape of the coffin, with its unthinkable contents. Then necks twisted.

  Hurrying forward, hatless, with a streak of black hair lashed across her cheek, was an unfamiliar but instantly recognizable young woman – the second Lady Hobday. She was wearing a white summer dress.

  The wife of a first assistant secretary, standing in front of Judith, muttered, ‘NO! I don’t believe it!’ Her husband concentrated on his hymn-book. She turned and stared into his ear as if looking through his head at the mourners opposite. ‘Murderess,’ she said clearly.

  An atmosphere of melancholy outrage settled over the pews when the vicar took the pulpit to speak of Hilary: good wife, good mother, gracious hostess, a homemaker in all parts of the world, unstintingly giving her time in her country’s interest. The wives of other ambassadors began to cry.

  Afterwards Sir Adrian stood at the church door shaking hands with the men and touching the women’s cheeks with his lips. Now and then he gave a faint smile. ‘The famous Hobday smile,’ somebody had once remarked to Judith. ‘It’s so rare that when it occurs it’s like an eclipse, and you feel privileged to have seen it.’

  Judith had seen it once, years ago, at a Press conference. Hobday had just returned from defeated South Vietnam and was facing thirty feverish reporters. ‘Our policies were correct at the time,’ he’d insisted and, when pressed, had added, ‘Australia – no more than America – cannot be held responsible for the collapse of the government and armed forces of South Vietnam.’ A journalist had shouted from the back of the room, ‘But, sir, what do we owe our former allies, the people of South …?’ Hobday, rising to go, had heard the question but had not answered. He had smiled and was still smiling when he reached the door, where photographers had captured his tender grimace.

  The day grew colder as the mourners gathered outside on the lawns, subdued and dishevelled by the blustery wind. Grey cloud battalions manoeuvred over their heads. Judith stood by herself. She had been mistaken in thinking she could join a group as one can at cocktail parties, and pick up an introduction to the star guest. Death had united them; this middle-aged elite had no time for outsiders.

  She noticed that the man in the expensive suit and his companion were also standing apart, and moved towards them. His expression had taken on a look of weakly amused contempt – Richard said that Treasury and Foreign Affairs cadets were drilled in that expression in their training year.

  ‘Her name is Minou – that’s what the French call to their pussies. Hits the spot, don’t you think?’ he was saying to Black Hat. His gaze, over Judith’s shoulder, was at the living Lady Hobday who was standing some way off. ‘She’s got good legs – for a Chink,’ he added amiably.

  Judith moved past them briskly. She was about to step on to the roadway where her VW was queued between the Mercedes and Volvos, when a bony hand restrained her. It emerged from a padded, navy silk jacket that had recently been cried up in Vogue.

  ‘Judith!’

  ‘Sancha!’

  They took in the effect of seventeen years on each other’s faces. Sancha had fared worse than she had, Judith saw. She was intimidatingly well-groomed, but she looked even more tense, more horrified by life, than she had all those years ago standing up on the stage of the school assembly hall and flapping, like a broken-winged crane, speechless. She had burst into tears afterwards, saying, ‘I’m too skinny to be Cleopatra.’

  She had been weeping again today. She sniffed, sawing a finger across her nostrils, and said, ‘God, no tissues.’

  Judith recovered first. ‘What are you doing here? Did you know Hilary Hobday?’

  Sancha blinked. Judith’s voice! It was as gentle and persuasive as it had been when she’d read her essays and poems to the class while Reverend Mother smiled and nodded at her. But something was different now: the voice didn’t fit her expression. There was something brazen about her.

  ‘Not her. Him,’ Sancha said. ‘He’s Ralph’s boss in Kuala Lumpur. Ralph is – Oh, God, I’m married to a man called Ralph Hamilton. He’s head of immigration in KL. The schools there are terrible – no sport – and I’ve come down to book our eldest into Geelong.’ She blinked again, her pale eyes asking for approval.

  ‘We’ll starve, of course,’ she added.

  The complaint struck a chime in Judith’s memory – Sancha, eager with sincerity, saying ‘You’re lucky you don’t have a pony. The grooming!’ Distrustfully, they had allowed her to disarm them of envy, to ingratiate herself. But once, after summer holidays, Sancha had said, ‘Europe was ghastly – those Italian churches. Erk,’ and Judith, whose big day had been to go to the test cricket with her Dad, had felt a dull bafflement which she had realized later was pain. It echoed faintly in her now.

  She said, ‘Immigration ought to be an important job up there, these days,’ thinking Bull’s-eye! The head of immigration would be even more useful than the High Commissioner.

  ‘Yes,’ Sancha said. ‘The boat people. Ralph’s worried to death about them.’ Her thin face worked. ‘He’s had a bit of gut trouble – mixing with them so much in the camps. It’s the dirty food. Asians never wash their hands.’

  Suddenly her mouth hitched into a smile of well-bred apology. ‘But tell me about you’ and
was amazed that she had spent years seeing articles by Judith Wilkes and had not realized.

  ‘When I got married I took Richard’s name. Everybody did then,’ Judith said. She pulled a face. ‘Now it’s an established by-line I can’t change back to O’Donahue.’

  ‘I see,’ Sancha said. There was the silence of people discovering they have violently opposed views.

  ‘Do you enjoy it up there?’ Judith enquired. A couple of weeks earlier she’d been briefed by a Foreign Affairs man, a suave fellow, silver as a Persian cat, with greedy cat’s eyes. ‘Malaysia is a country without a heart,’ he’d said. ‘It seems like Paradise. The Chinese are allowed to make as much money as they like; the Malays are allowed as many privileges as they like, and the Indians …’ he had flicked them away.

  ‘It’s heavenly having servants,’ Sancha said.

  ‘And how’s the communal problem in KL these days?’

  ‘Oh, desperate. But the country is so rich now that it’s all sort of underneath the surface. You don’t really notice it.’ Sancha hesitated. ‘How did you know about the communal problem?’ she asked.

  ‘I covered the ’69 riots for my paper.’

  Sancha looked – and felt – blank. She could not imagine how Reverend Mother’s pet – it really had been the limit, the way Judith won prizes for everything – had got herself mixed up in the bloodshed that people in KL still talked about with horror. She glossed over the awkwardness with another smile. ‘So, you’ll be coming our way for a few weeks? God, your Richard must be an angel to let you go off, leaving him and the children!’

  ‘He’s liberated,’ Judith replied lightly and thought, We hunt as a pair, Richard and I. She gave a quick, uncomfortable gasp of laughter.

  Sancha stared at her for a moment. ‘Ralph’s not liberated,’ she said. Her note of chagrin was so artless that Judith took off her sunglasses and for the first time looked into Sancha’s polite blue eyes with her own bold hazel ones. They had sniffed each other over; they were friends.

  I will loathe Ralph Hamilton, Judith thought as she accepted Sancha’s invitation to stay with them in KL.

  In the driveway Hobday was shepherding his group into black limousines. The incipient stoop of a spine decalcifying with age was just visible now, when he was no longer bracing himself against animosity, but was standing, head bent, among his taller sons. He looked vaguely forlorn. The hearse was moving off. The attitude of the groups watching him had softened, now that it really was the end. For the first time, there was sympathy in the air.

  ‘Everyone seems to have forgiven him,’ Judith said. ‘I don’t know about her.’

  ‘Well! Coming to the funeral wasn’t exactly in the best of taste, was it?’ Sancha said. Then, seeing by Judith’s expression that she probably did not agree, added hastily, ‘God, look how everyone’s ignoring her! Now she’s the one who can get you into the refugee camps.’

  ‘Let’s go over,’ Judith said. ‘I want to meet her.’

  The new Lady Hobday, thin and straight as a sheet of plywood, was standing alone close to the church wall. Someone had lent her a man’s raincoat, a fawn Burberry, which drooped almost to the ground. She could have been pathetic but for the sexual vitality that radiated from her. She was gazing, as if unaware of any of them, at the departing limousine that held her husband. Her face had the gravity, the appearance of having lived through many lifetimes, that Asian features can suggest. As Judith and Sancha came towards her she gave no sign that she understood they were rescuing her. Judith thought, I’ve met my match in this one.

  Minou said formally, ‘How do you do?’ and ‘Thank you for coming, Sancha’. She spoke with a light American drawl.

  Sancha began explaining that Judith would soon be in Malaysia, to write about the boat people. That would interest Minou, wouldn’t it?

  Minou said, ‘Yes. As you know, I’m president of the International Women’s Refugee Relief Committee.’ She sounded bored. Her eyes, which were large and rounded, like Caucasian eyes, but padded tightly with Mongoloid fat, dwelt on Sancha’s face for a moment. Sancha hitched up her nervous smile and said, ‘I really must do more to help.’

  Minou shifted her attention to Judith. ‘You shouldn’t be here and I shouldn’t be here. At home in Cholon it would be the right thing for me to come to the funeral.’ She paused and looked steadily at Judith. ‘His children insisted that I could not go to the grave. They all hate me. Everyone here hates me.’

  Sancha made tactful noises.

  ‘I don’t hate you,’ Judith said, so assertively that she startled herself.

  Hostility like a blade flicked from Minou’s eyes. ‘You don’t even remember meeting me before.’ She turned away to look at the dissolving groups of mourners.

  ‘I think that perhaps we …’ Sancha began.

  ‘Yes, of course. I’ll see you soon in KL, Sancha?’ Minou held out her long smooth fingers and squeezed Judith’s hand lightly. ‘And you, too, Brenda Starr?’

  Sancha was astonished to see Judith blush.

  As they walked away Sancha began to worry about Ralph’s reaction when she told him she had invited Judith to stay with them. At school she had been so popular, very bright – and not nearly so blonde as now. A bursary girl. Her father, who had been a policeman invalided out of the force, ran a little shop or newsagency, or something like that. Anyway, they were desperately poor, Sancha recalled. Judith used to say, ‘I’m going to have seven children, like Mum.’ Yet she’d only had two and – from what she’d said about taking only a couple of months off work when they were born – didn’t appear to regard motherhood seriously. She had developed a sharp, career woman’s manner of the kind Ralph detested. It made Sancha feel nervous and out-of-touch with things.

  As they walked to their cars she noticed that Judith was wearing a skirt with its hem at the back held up with pins. Sancha suppressed a smile. How typical of Judith O’Donahue that was.

  They had reached the kerb. ‘Jude, let’s go to Manuka for coffee?’ she said.

  Judith gave an involuntary jump. ‘Oh, sorry. O.K. Have you got transport?’

  Sancha pointed to a red Mini. ‘All I could afford to hire.’

  Judith was still tingling with shock from Minou’s parting words as she stood beside Sancha’s car, watching her put on her seatbelt. Sancha’s face, as she peered anxiously through the car window, suddenly reminded Judith of a young nun whose disappearance from the staff had been bundled up in ominous silence; Sancha’s mane of silverstreaked and lacquered hair aside, she and that wretched young woman had the same wrinkled brow, same round, puzzled, inane eyes, same unbearable vulnerability.

  ‘I’ve forgotten my way around Canberra. Can I follow you?’ Sancha asked.

  It was only a three-minute drive to the coffee lounge. Judith, keeping her eye on the rear-vision mirror, was able to push Minou out of her mind. But as soon as they were seated and had ordered their cappuccinos, Sancha brought her up again.

  ‘It’s hell for us wives in KL, Jude. We’ve got to seem loyal to Minou. She’s our boss, more or less. The most senior wife. A lot of people would never dare call her anything but Lady Hobday. I don’t, of course. God, how old is she? Twenty-five? Twenty-six? Anyway, she does dreadful things at parties – turns up half-naked for national day receptions. Very smart clothes, of course – she has a Shanghai tailor who costs the earth – and she’s got the figure. But after three glasses of champagne! I heard her introduce the head of Agfa, a Baron, as “This is the man whose company manufactured poison gas during the first World War”. To the French Ambassador! Everyone nearly died. Whenever a European forgets where they’ve met before she says, “Never mind, la. All us gooks look the same, don’t we?” And if any attractive woman dares talk to Sir Adrian for more than five minutes … He’s got an eye for the girls, these days, I can tell you, though people say he used to be incredibly aloof before Madam came along. Now, if a woman talks to him, Minou just saunters up and stares straight at her. Actually, Jude, I was wond
ering what you’d heard about her. People say she was a good-time girl in Saigon, and that she’s illegitimate. Because she’s half-French.’

  Judith made a face. ‘The gossip here is that she used to be a bar-girl in Cholon, but that’s the sort of thing people do say about flash-looking Asian women, isn’t it?’ She stirred her coffee gloomily, wanting to get closer to Sancha but unable to break through the anger and humiliation that Minou had recreated. It had produced a feeling of isolation that was almost palpable, as if she were inside a perspex box. With an effort she added, ‘There are stories that she got out of Saigon the day before it fell. They say she claims she would have been shot, or re-educated or sent off to the labour camps. Probably bullshit. She and Hobday got married about six months ago, in Yass, to avoid being snubbed by the Canberra Establishment. There were a lot of hard feelings.’

  She stared into the invalid’s swill she had made by stirring the froth into her coffee, unable to think of anything else to say.

  Sancha had been brought up to believe that any lapse in conversation was anathema. ‘When did you meet her before, Jude?’ she asked brightly.

  Judith gestured vaguely. ‘A couple of years ago. In Sydney.’

  The restrained hurt of Sancha’s nod, hoping for more information, made Judith add, ‘At a dance. It was a radical women’s thing. We only exchanged a couple of words.’ She smiled limply.

  After a moment Sancha rallied, but the effort showed. A few threads still held them together, and they beaded them with talk about what had happened to this former school friend and that. They parted with cries of ‘See you in KL’.

  Judith drove towards home barely seeing the looming purple mountains or the flocks of galahs that had gathered on every open patch of grass, jumping and tottering in pursuit of the bounty the rain had brought. As cars approached the birds would explode into the air like a firework display of pink stars, then drift down to a safer spot.