They sit on the deck with the remains of the lunch that David has put together: cheese, smoked trout, bread and a salad of witlof, radish and fennel scattered with herbs from the pots along the sunny ledge: basil, chives, parsley, oregano, thyme – all well-tended and vigorous. Thick ginger flowers from below add sweetness to the decomposing smell of the garden, where an overarching native fig shades the understorey. Its foliage shines like duco in the light. Leaves chatter in the breeze of this lotus-eating scene like guests at a cocktail party. It’s a playground, and not only for the squawking birds.
David bought in Bronte when he first moved to Sydney, among the wave of young professionals who turned the graceless suburb into a fashionable enclave once again. It had enjoyed a career as a pleasure resort a century earlier and was now fabulously expensive to boot. This happened through renovation and extension, demolition and building up, as each house was forced onto tiptoes to overlook the next. After his initial purchase David went on to acquire more levels of the building and added new spaces, including the deck where he and Anne sit. She can’t help relishing it, as if she’s not a stranger in the space, thanks to David, although the sense of being at home here, even provisionally, momentarily, makes her consciousness of loss all the more acute.
What have any of them done to deserve this? David is a workaholic and his work is part of society’s glue. It weighs the scales. But this flowing, art-filled waterside house and extravagant garden that his mighty brain and relentless dedication have earned him, making it his, how does he justify it, the beauty he claims for himself, the gorgeousness of his setting? How could any incoming Australian of no matter how many generations justify what has been taken, against all the world?
Then Anne realises she is sounding like Jake. Who would never have voiced such thoughts aloud, though she knew he thought them.
She cradles her wineglass. This nectar of forgetfulness is part of it too.
‘How does it work?’ David asks, persisting with his questions as he seeks to reconstruct what happened. ‘Did Henry Hunt get Jake the job in Washington? Is that how it works?’
‘Jake was in Defence,’ Anne explains. ‘It’s a different, separate system from Foreign Affairs. Jake came in through DI. Defence Intelligence. That’s signals. Intel. Sigint. Most of it is done remotely these days. Analysis of data. A lot of it is electronic. Jake’s posting was a secondment to the Embassy from Defence. He came from Army before that. He started out as a soldier and reached Lieutenant-Colonel. That doesn’t happen every day. He was the only one in his group. He was good.’
‘You mean he was a spy?’
‘Not exactly. Not in the parlance. He was a military observer. Sometimes he was involved in liaison with other militaries. He was an analyst. But he did know things. He had high-level clearance.’
David fiddles with his watch this time. An Omega, Anne notices. Vintage. She’s a sharp-eyed observer too. David takes the watch from his wrist and flops the leather band to and fro. Is this a practised distraction he uses in court, she wonders, an attempt to hypnotise? She can see him calculating what his pro bono advice might cost. How much she’s worth to him one way or another. Then she decides she’s being hard on the man. Playing with his watch is a habit over which he has no control, she concludes, and she likes him the more for it.
‘Spies come under Foreign,’ she adds. ‘Just to be clear. When it’s overseas.’
David rephrases his original question in cross-examination mode. ‘Would Hunt’s support have helped Jake’s career?’
‘It might have hindered it. A Minister’s authority doesn’t always have influence over rival departments. Sometimes just the opposite.’
David comes back again. His eyes grow round as he peers through his glasses. ‘Did Hunt help Jake’s career somewhere along the line?’
‘Don’t forget that Henry Hunt is not universally respected. And his party was not in power all that time anyway. Jake probably flourished more under the other side. But he always tried to be principled rather than political.’
David frowns and hangs his head. ‘Dear Jake,’ he says as if he’s gauging the distance between his own cynicism and his dead friend’s naivete – his own realism, as he would prefer to call it, and Jake’s youthful idealism that only deepened with maturity.
‘Henry probably didn’t hurt Jake early on,’ Anne acknowledges. ‘In Canberra.’
‘Hunt owed Jake,’ David insists. It’s a leading question. He rubs his balding head as he would do in court.
‘That’s right. He owed him several times over.’
‘What do they say about gratitude?’ David gazes into the colour-saturated space of his living room in vain for the junior who would be able to check the quote. ‘It returns to bite the giver. You’re implying that Hunt may have hurt Jake later on?’
‘He signed off on the posting to DC. Because Jake was seconded from Defence to the Embassy, it required sign-off from the Ambassador, who was one of Henry’s people. Ultimately the Minister signs off. It all happened in that caretaker period around the election and after, in the limbo of who would end up where, so I can’t know for sure whether Henry actually attended to it himself. The card has his signature on it. Jake died there.’
‘You’re implying that it’s not straightforward. That Jake was coerced.’
‘He was under pressure. He was not himself. He left a folder on his desk with a document in it and a copy on disk. There was nothing on his computer. He cleaned that completely. The document was his last testament. You can see it. It’s to do with East Timor. Jake was so distressed about the independence referendum being pushed through prematurely. He knew all that bloodshed could have been avoided. But Australia wanted to big-note itself. We didn’t care.’
The wine has warmed Anne up. She’s sagging from all she has said and lets go now in the lap of David’s comfort and sympathy. ‘It cost him his life,’ she pronounces. ‘That’s what I believe. Only I don’t know how.’
‘He got up people’s noses,’ David prompts.
‘That was Jake.’
‘There may not be a case,’ David ventures.
‘There’s the question of compensation. I’m getting nowhere with Canberra. Why are they stonewalling? Is it just routine bureaucratic penny-pinching or is it a cover up? They want me to go away. You can help me, David. Please. Will you look at it?’
‘Let me look at everything first,’ he says carefully, ‘and then decide. It will take a bit of time. I’d like you to come into my chambers and go through it all again if you can manage, if that’s okay? Anything you can think of. Just you and me. No one else at this stage. Get it all down.’
Anne bristles a little. David can negotiate where she cannot. ‘There’s more,’ she says. ‘Whatever Jake did, it was for us. For me. For Nicole. As well as maybe for something larger. That’s why I’m here.’
‘I hoped you were coming to see me for old time’s sake,’ David replies with a twist to his grin.
‘Of course,’ Anne murmurs. She touches him on the arm in an expression of endearment. ‘I didn’t mean to sound ungrateful.’ She is ruddy with the wine. ‘Time to go. I’m exhausted. It’s been lovely to see you, David. Thank you for letting me come.’
‘I’ll call you a cab,’ he says. ‘If you don’t mind. After a few drinks I don’t like to drive. Can’t risk being breathalysed. That would be a disaster.’
How calibrated David’s caution has become, Anne notes, in awe of his capacity to adjust his existence to such precise concerns. A fastidiousness that smacks of fabrication. There are disasters and there are disasters, she thinks bitterly. Then it seems funny. There are measures and there are measures.
When the taxi arrives, David escorts Anne up the zigzagging steps to the front gate. Before that, in the cool, cave-like seclusion outside his front door, he puts his arms around her in a long, pressing, wordless hug, acknowledging pain, tipping consolation from one to the other, their heads nestled together, the salt of her tears on his lips.