After Anne leaves, David picks up the cushion where she was sitting and puffs it into shape between his hands. He thinks he knows what she wants from him and what he can give in return. For his friend Jake’s sake.
He remembers the last time the three of them were together. The lawyers in Adelaide always found it useful to bring in expert opinion from outside on difficult cases, particularly if it came from a person who understood the niceties – the dunderhead complacencies – of the old place. David St George was their man. And no matter how absorbed he was in professional obligations on those flying visits to his hometown, and his duties to his extended family there, he would always set aside time for his old friends from student days. That was part of the trip. And it was special this time because Anne and Jake Treweek happened to be in town too. When they invited him to dinner at their place in the Hills, David changed his flight. It was important to do that, so he could stay over with Anne and Jake on the Saturday night.
The route out of town was a memory trip, taking him back past the places of his childhood – the gates of school, the family church, the dance hall where he was bullied in adolescence, the stables where he learned to ride, the Italian deli with the best cheese and prosciutto in the world – still there, greatly expanded – where he stopped and shopped for his friends. The road wound up to a point of elevation where you could look way out over the city and the gulf. He associated that shining distance with love, or his first intense attempt at it, and the failure of trying to live his own life with another person. Anne and Jake had borne witness to that, at a discreet remove, and to that extent, as a couple, they carried his memories too. They helped him through that painful time. They understood something about him and they did not judge.
On the dangerous bends in the road David slowed down for the trucks and tractors that were carting firewood or equipment or produce. Cyclists in pairs and trios slipped by him as they spun downhill. A young man of his generation, of every generation perhaps, had died in a motorbike accident on this road in the prime of his nineteenth year. The warning to youth was never forgotten.
He relished the sinuosity of the old Chain of Ponds road as he drove further into the Hills, the switchbacks as he skirted the water catchment and the gorge, the creek bubbling below and the open planes of pine forest and vineyard ascending the slopes. It was late afternoon. Smoke rose from burning off in the yards and paddocks and from the chimneys of cottages and farmhouses. A few copper or gold leaves curled on the wrought vines, a few clouds, hinting at chill rain, raced across the pale sky. The harvest was in. The vintage. It was cold enough for a fire.
The music he slotted into the rental car hummed along with the drive, Brazilian, Jobim, the soundtrack song from Black Orpheus. David asked himself with a degree of severity what from this past must change and be let go and what could be taken into the future…such strenuous, melancholy reflections were part of his happiness. On the hillsides the massive gum trees stretched out their limbs in standing testimony to long endurance. It was a place and a world he loved, while half-suspecting it was little more than a nostalgic dream.
He followed the line of the fence – fences in good order, he noted – and turned into a gravel drive that led up to the stone cottage that Anne and Jake had converted from a ruin in years past with a load of quarry stone and their own bare hands. It stood on a block of land that belonged to Anne’s mother originally. When she moved to town, Anne and her sister kept their horses there and when Jake came along he and Anne decided to make the old cottage habitable again. It was part of a project to set down roots, to lay foundations, on a scrap of land they might hold on to. Done somehow in between their moving around with the day in view when they might return. Had that time come, David wondered as he drove up. They say it takes five years to put down roots. Five continuous years, he queried to himself, or five years altogether, made up of broken periods over a longer time?
The plume of smoke rose like a sign of celebration from the wide stone chimney and there was Anne, cantering round the home paddock on a pied chestnut pony, waving wildly, calling out in welcome.
Jake was there too, standing and watching. He strode over with his parade-ground gait, ready with a handshake that would turn into a bear-hug for his friend. ‘Good on you, David,’ Jake said. It was his way of greeting. ‘You’re losing your hair.’
‘Get away,’ said David, ducking from Jake’s hand as it brushed his scalp.
They took his things inside and Jake got their daughter out of her room to say hello. Nicole had just turned twelve.
David pointed through the window to outside. ‘Whose horse is that?’ he asked the girl.
‘Mine!’ Nicole beamed. ‘But Mum’s allowed to ride her.’
‘Shall we go and see?’
They met Anne as she was walking the pony over to the house. She dismounted and passed the reins to her husband and gave David a hug.
‘She’s a beauty,’ David said. ‘What’s her name?’
‘Piper,’ answered Nicole.
‘Pied Piper,’ he quickly returned. ‘A pied beauty.’
The girl frowned.
‘There’s a poem called that,’ David said. ‘It’s about dappled things. I’ll show it to you one day.’
The point is that they were there then and things were all right. There was a sense of hard-earned, justifiable happiness, of life lived honourably, of good prospects.
Anne was thirty-six. She was fit and in good shape, with a quiet, determined energy you could feel. Her skin was smooth and pale and she wore hats to keep it that way. The freckles she had as a bride were gone. Her face was a little blunt, or that was her expression, softened by the red-brown hair cut to her shoulders with a slight wave. Her straight nose meant directness and her dark eyes were intense. She pushed away any sign that she might be attractive or that she even cared. Someone meeting her for the first time might wonder whether her evident patience and seeming self-reliance were qualities she came with or had learned. She was married to a soldier.
On this particular day she was eager to enjoy life without constraint. She made Jake stand holding the new pony while she adjusted the stirrups for David to ride. As their friend ambled pleasurably round the paddock, lifting to a trot, Anne stood by the fence and held her husband’s hand.
Jake stood tall and straight beside her, shielding his eyes with his spare hand. He was broad-shouldered and lean. His black hair, army short, had spikes of silver. He was observant always. As his grey-green eyes searched out from a set of well-scored lines, his thick eyebrows made his serious long face into something slightly comical. His appearance made more sense when he was a hesitant, hard-working youth. As a grown man, a soldier, an analyst, he looked betwixt and between, a mis-combination, although he did this work by choice, in preference to anything else, and was proud of what he did.
For today Jake’s feet were on farm soil again, his back pressed against a good tight fence, and all was simple.
They started drinking before the sun went down. The local wine was good and they shared tales of the winemakers, some of whom they knew from youth. It was a pleasant ritual, except that David had to go slowly on the wine because of his disposition to migraine and his insomnia.
Another couple joined them for dinner, Nigel, a local estate agent who had been at school with Jake and David, although they hadn’t really been friends, and Nigel’s current girlfriend, Darcy, who was ten or more years younger than the rest of them. She had sharp views about the direction the community should take. They nibbled on almonds and olives, then progressed to pumpkin soup and a rich beef stew with red wine and carrots…and roaring, barking laughter as their wine glasses were replenished. The logs blazed in the hearth with a halo of eucalypt smoke. In the corner the muffled television news was ignored in all the chatter, until Darcy hushed them when an item came on about a local politician.
In the national election a few weeks earlier there had been an upset in this Adelaide Hills seat. The votes were too close to call and a recount was ordered. Across the country the incumbent coalition party had been squarely returned to power, but in this untypical electorate the sitting member was on a knife edge. He faced a voter backlash and his easy margin at the previous poll three years earlier had fallen away.
That meant, locally at least, a kind of change. Everyone had theories about it. Perhaps allegiances were less steadfast with the shifting demographics of the Hills population. The approach of middle age brought anxiety about people’s relative prosperity. Or perhaps there was a resurgent independence in this somewhat contrarian community. It may even have been a protest against the member himself.
To call him the incumbent was an understatement. He first occupied the seat as a young man. It had been his father’s seat for long decades before that and the son had taken it over easily by riding on his father’s reputation. Loyalties and long memories clung to the family in the district. It was as close to a hereditary arrangement as could be found in Australian politics. But there was always the question of how the son measured up, whether he would fit his father’s large shoes. This election, with its dramatically narrowed margin, showed a shift in a significant part of the constituency to displeasure, disapproval, dissatisfaction. That was a shock.
‘He’s hung on,’ snorted Nigel at the television as the results of the recount were read out.
The news stopped their conversation. The sitting member had retained the seat by the slimmest of margins when all postal votes were counted and preferences distributed, including from the sizeable protest vote that went to an independent candidate. Darcy’s eyes brightened, though she refrained from letting out a whoop.
‘He’s our white-haired boy,’ she beamed.
Nigel nodded sagely. His prediction had proved correct. Anne and Jake looked at each other steadily as if to confirm what it signified for them. David merely stared at the idiot box, giving his head a low shake such as a horse makes when irritated by the way its rider handles the bridle.
‘He’s been lucky,’ said Jake.
‘The luck of fools,’ quipped David.
No one said any more. Politics and religion…best avoided with Nigel and Darcy there. Best gone around, even at the mundane level of whose hand they might be willing to shake in the shopping centre car park and whose not. Dispositions best left undeclared and unknown, even as the tentative talk irresistibly got going.
‘He’s cleverer than you’d think,’ offered Darcy. ‘Have you ever met him?
The member? Henry Hunt. They all had stories to tell.
‘We knew him at school,’ said Jake flatly.
‘So you go back a long way. They have a lovely house,’ Darcy added. ‘But Henry’s never there. He’s always overseas with his portfolio.’
‘He’ll get Foreign Affairs again,’ observed Nigel, checking for Jake’s reaction as an insider.
‘I suppose so,’ said Jake, lips sealed. ‘If that’s what he wants.’
‘Yes,’ Anne repeated after her husband. Then she asked Jake to get Nicole to come and sit up at the table for the next course and the subject was changed.
How people vote in Australia, where voting is compulsory, is too variegated for any simple analysis, which is ironic given the way the variety is finally corralled into a two-horse race. The major political parties are not so dissimilar on most things and one or other forms government. Within each party there is a band of positions that allows politicians to chop and change according to circumstances. The voters do likewise. In the race just run, Henry Hunt’s party had retained power on the basis of the calculated pragmatism that passed for conservative ideology. As Minister for Foreign Affairs, Hunt had played his part by reaffirming Australia’s primary fealty to the United States. That meant locking Australia’s decision-making into America’s strategic thinking in return for supposedly unfettered information sharing and a ready accommodation of American activity on and around Australian territory. And supposedly the promissory note of American help in an emergency.
‘Let the Yanks do the heavy lifting’, Henry Hunt liked to say. On this occasion fifty per cent plus a small handful of the voters in his electorate agreed on balance to let him go on saying it. There was nothing in it.
Jake poured out the big Barossa shiraz, chosen to go with the beef, into new glasses and proposed a toast. He was already quite flushed and florid; his tone was impossible to read. ‘To Henry!’
They raised their glasses, as if around the table it did no harm to wish a duly elected representative well, at least out of respect for the system they worked with, the system as it had evolved and that they believed was, by and large, just and fair.
‘To Henry,’ they echoed.
‘Hunt the c—,’ cracked Nigel.
Anne pointed in warning at Nicole. The young girl was laughing with embarrassment.
‘Sorry, Anne. Schoolboy stuff! Wash my mouth out.’
‘You didn’t call him that!’ shrilled Darcy.
‘God speed!’ declared David disconnectedly, sipping at the toast as if providence might yet play a hand in disposing the member’s affairs.
They talked about horses after that, and riding. All of them knew what it meant to be able to tell a good animal from a bad one. Except Darcy, who preferred water skiing and snow skiing to horse riding. The dessert came, Anne’s lemon tart of divine creaminess, and a late-picked riesling.
Nicole went to her room, leaving the adults to their silliness. They moved to the more comfortable chairs by the fire. As they talked the new Bob Dylan played and the gaps and incoherencies in their talk became more drawn out. Nigel slipped from the armchair to the floor, stretched out lengthwise and started snoring.
‘I better get him home,’ said Darcy. ‘So embarrassing. He’s a dear old dog and it’s way past his bedtime. Thank you for a lovely evening. See you at yoga, Anne.’
Yoga, thought David as he stood to see them off. Indeed, Darcy was taut and terrific. She was on the money. Lucky Nigel.
He took the seat Nigel had vacated in the single armchair and edged it closer to the fire. Jake put another log on and Anne brought coffee.
Anne and Jake sat side by side on the familiar sagging couch – in their usual places, a married couple. They were at ease with each other, the three friends. They knew where they came from. They had shared their youth together.
‘I had a call from Canberra this afternoon,’ Jake announced with some portent. ‘Before you got here. From the Department. They want me to go to Washington. Seconded to the Embassy as Defence analyst.’
‘What sort of position is that?’ David asked.
‘It’s a big deal. I’d be working with the Americans.’
‘Intelligence?’
‘You’re not supposed to say that.’
‘Well done,’ said David. ‘When?’
Anne burst into a grin. ‘Straightaway! It’s ridiculous.’
‘It has been held up by the election. The question mark about whether there would be a change of Minister. The recount settles it.’
‘Henry Hunt? He’ll approve it presumably?’ David’s mobile mouth quickly drooped to sternness.
‘I should bloody well hope so,’ said Jake.
Anne laid a hand on her husband’s thigh. ‘It would have been nice to have more time back here,’ she said. ‘I thought we would. That’s why we got Piper. Nicole starts high school next year.’
‘There’ll be great schools over there,’ David said encouragingly.
‘Or she could stay with Mum in town, I suppose,’ Anne went on, looking at Jake, ‘and Pat could take care of Piper.’ Her unmarried sister lived nearby.
‘I could always go on ahead,’ said Jake, ‘and you and Nicole can come later.’
‘Yes,’ Anne said noncommittally.
Before they were married Jake had travelled all over Australia with the army and sometimes overseas, to countries in the region, as an observer or an advisor. Later when Nicole was just starting school he was sent to Operation Desert Storm in Kuwait on a deployment and Anne was worried sick. She didn’t want that to happen again. It wasn’t easy this time either, when Jake had gone to East Timor by himself, leaving her and Nicole on their own in Canberra. They coped, just.
‘Washington DC. Sounds exciting. Can I come and visit?’ asked David.
‘It’s the centre of the universe,’ Jake laughed. ‘The posting’s not public yet. I mean it’s not official. We wanted to tell you since you happened to be here when the call came through. Didn’t we?’ he said, reaching for Anne’s hand. ‘It’s a rare opportunity to see you these days, David.’
‘I appreciate it. Well done, you.’ David raised his mostly empty coffee cup. ‘Old friends.’
‘Old friends,’ sighed Anne. ‘Sometimes they’re a bit much, especially when the old friends have new friends. I mean Nigel. Not you, David. It’s always lovely to see you.’ She stood to take his cup from him. ‘Well, quite a day. You’re in the room out the back. I hope you’ll be warm enough.’
‘I’ll drag my swag in by the fire if I’m not.’
A spark flew from the crackling log. Jake reacted instantly, ducking to flick a red-hot coal back into the grate before it could burn the rug.
‘I get the idea,’ said David. His well-trained friend was quietly expert in all things.
—
Frost glittered on the sere grass as the bright morning burned fog from the meadows. After breakfast Anne took Nicole out on the pony while Jake and David walked around the property. David had not slept well. The bed was lumpy. He had lain awake, overheated with a migraine threatening as he reflected on his friends’ fortunes. They were heading into the international arena with all its compromises of geopolitics and alliances defensive or offensive. The foreign domain impressed David, but he was suspicious of it in equal measure. He settled for regarding the move as another kind of professional necessity, much like his own progress through the law, something only insiders could gauge properly.
He assumed that Jake was a man of honour when it came to his work, as he hoped to be honourable himself in his practice of law, no matter how sticky the terrain. He would miss Anne and Jake when they were not in the country. Absence was always sad. Old friends, known quantities.
Jake scuffed the ground with his feet as they walked. The roots of the blond grass held firm where the tops broke and blew away on the breeze. He had something to impart, David sensed. The grey hairs on his temples and the lines around his eyes revealed a layer of strain beneath the good looks, the good health and the good cheer, when you looked closely. Something stretched thin. There was a flicker of apprehension. A knowledge that led to uncertainty, a wavering that preceded clarity.
‘We owe the East Timorese,’ Jake began. ‘As neighbours, as friends. If not as comrades. We’re big and strong from their point of view and we’re next door. It was a natural expectation that we would help back in 1975 and even again after the Santa Cruz massacre in 1991, in the cemetery in Dili. Isn’t there a natural law that calls for a neighbour to come to your aid if your life is in danger? Especially if you have the means to do so?’
‘Natural law is dangerous,’ replied David. ‘Any law that seeks to go outside its jurisdiction can become a problem. Law between neighbours is always difficult for that reason. Fences, walls,’ he laughed. ‘One of the most difficult areas of law. I have trouble with my own next-door neighbours in Sydney. What you’re talking about is a higher law, if it’s law at all.’
‘It’s moral law. Or is that a contradiction in terms? It’s humanity.’
‘It’s the good Samaritan. The one who crosses over to the other side to help his neighbour with no care for himself.’
‘No,’ said Jake. ‘It’s different. Because the relationship already exists. We’re not strangers. The good neighbour is different from the good Samaritan. We’re asked to love our neighbours as ourselves.’
‘In legal terms that can be too much to ask. We owe our first duty to ourselves and to our own.’
‘The higher law, you said. What’s it called?’
‘Some people call it the law of love.’
David relished the contradiction. He looked at his friend, suspending the impulse to cross-examine. Jake was talking about something that lay behind the appearance of what he was putting in words, behind the self-contained confidence of his steady expression.
‘I saw things there. In East Timor. People did things for me. Kindnesses. Things that were selfless and brave, with no calculation. They expect others to do the same. To rise to that level. They believe that’s how people should be. They believe it’s possible for people to live by a higher truth and that it’s not a choice. Having witnessed that I find it hard to settle for less.’
Out there in the chilly paddock as they crossed the matted grass Jake was stumbling. Yet he had something clear up ahead in the way of a direction pointer, his trusted friend stumbling along beside him, head bowed in attention and no one else in earshot to intercept. David wondered if what Jake wanted to confide might even be something he had not spoken to Anne about, that he could not speak about to his wife. A confession more than a confidence.
Then the shivering breeze, the blanching light, the sentinel posts and tight shiny wire of the fencing, the very silence and safety of the pale enfolding hills, all of this that was home seemed to coil around Jake with a warning. In response he went no further with what he was saying. Such was his discipline, his internal mechanism for self-control, his self-encasing reticence. What he had been prompted to confide became opaque and abstract, unable to be passed from one man to another. And, as his friend, David had to accept it and leave it that way.
Something had happened to Jake in East Timor that changed him, David deduced. It left him conflicted, with a subcutaneous knowledge that unsettled his integrity and chafed the singleness of purpose that was his defining characteristic. That much David understood, in general terms, as something Jake wanted to communicate.
Then it was farewell again. David held Anne in a long hug. He shook Jake’s hand in a firm grasp that turned into a clumsy hug for him too.
Jake had told David what he witnessed. He had witnessed life lived according to a higher truth. That is what he conveyed but with no detail to corroborate or instantiate what he meant. No evidence for what he said. That left it vague, when David was a man who needed evidence to put under his usual scrutiny. He had always respected Jake’s courage. Now it alarmed him. Where was the place for such a thing? For the courage of your own convictions? In his complicated civilian world of corporate dodginess, criminality and prosecution, such courage could be the accessory that turned motive into bloody fact. How often did bravery turn out to be misguided bluster? David was sure he didn’t have much courage himself, though he wasn’t afraid to jump on a horse or to ask someone a hard question to their face. He had enough courage to get by. But Jake was a soldier, a military man trained for courage, and that was different.
The walk across the paddock was their last talk, until Jake called him months later from DC.