Which brought him back, unpleasantly at this late hour, to Jack Beaumont. He reached behind him to a wall of panelling studded with silver knobs, pulled open one of twenty-two filing cabinet drawers concealed in the wall, and took from it a fresh folder which he spread on the desk. He examined its pristine whiteness with some pleasure. There was always the slight shiver that caused his spine to flex when he wrote a name on a new file. It was incredible, even to him, what events could overtake people’s lives, alter the smooth flow of their previous even currents, just from the notes he would make in the peace of this small room. He wrote the name BEAUMONT on the file in neat capital letters. There was no need for this. The man could have made a great deal of money and played polo or golf or rafted rapids or whatever he did for pleasure. It was bound to be something active and mindless. The thumb and forefinger of the left hand rose slowly to his chin, while the pen started to write. Of course, he could record a little of what Jack did for pleasure already and, in time, expected to record a great deal more. There were files and there were files. Sir Laurence liked order; otherwise there was chaos, and chaos was only in the interests of those who had nothing. Namely, those who didn’t apply themselves. It was late. Even the birds had stopped flying. Edith would be asleep. He would go down now.
‘What the hell is this, Jack? I’m not asking you if it’s true, I’m not some weak little lamb of a wife bleating about her ram fucking everything in the paddock. I’m asking you how it got in the fucking newspaper.’ Louise stood over him as he blinked in the shaft of early morning light and threw the newspaper down on the bed.
‘What? For Christ’s sake, keep it down. You’ll wake the kids.’
‘Don’t fucking tell me to be quiet when the whole of Sydney is sitting down to their bowls of low-cal yoghurt, imagining you screwing some juicy little bimbo.’
Jack jumped up from the bed in an attempt to hold her, but she backed away. ‘Christ, go easy on the language, darling. Whatever it is, it’s just a newspaper story, just a piece of gossip. No one pays any attention to this stuff.’
She snorted. ‘They pay more attention to it than they do to people starving in Africa.’ And then, very quietly, ‘Do not break the line of my trust.’
She stared at him for a moment and left him with the newspaper. It was only a couple of paragraphs in a column that purportedly covered the business affairs of prominent citizens but was in fact a daily outlet for bile and vengeance. And it was accompanied by a caricature of Jack wearing a nautical cap standing on the prow of a large boat with the name Honey Bear on the stern, incongruously carrying a riding whip. The caption ‘Jack-the-lad rides again’ was more than enough. The innuendos in the story were sufficiently subtle to skirt the defamation laws, but clear to the discerning reader nevertheless. He sat on the edge of the bed with the paper half-crumpled in his hand and looked around the room. It was Saturday morning. They’d slept late. Usually there’d be scrambled eggs and coffee with the kids before sport in the afternoon. It was his favourite time, slipping through the many sections of the brick-thick weekend paper, reading about the lives of other people. But not today.
It was a huge bedroom, the way Louise wanted it. A room they could almost live in, except for the lack of cooking facilities. The entrance was through a narrow corridor, opening out into a vaulted space with armchairs and couches, sun streaming through the skylight above onto the wooden floor, and then three steps up to a podium with the oversized bed and carpet your feet disappeared into. Louise had even sketched the concept drawing for this room, something she seldom did, including the bathroom with a big stone bath they could lie in together.
He crossed to the window and looked down on the normally quiet street. On Saturday morning it was lined with parked cars and families walking to the Temple Emmanuel at the end of the street, the men and boys in their black yarmulkes. The old lady from number twenty-three was walking her small, decrepit poodle on its customary toilet outing. She held the plastic bag prominently in one hand, ready to remove offending objects, but as he watched, the poodle painfully left its droppings on the neatly mown grass and the old lady, after glancing surreptitiously around to see if she was being observed, walked on with a smile of satisfaction. A young woman from the flats on the corner jogged by in a pair of shorts he loved to watch because they seemed to have a life of their own. But this morning he turned away to face the music in his own house.
He hated the idea that his carelessness was causing her pain. It was months since his weekend on the Honey Bear. Who would plant a story like that after all this time-and why?
He dressed carefully in faded blue jeans and a white linen shirt Louise always loved against his brown skin, combed his hair and then ruffled it again so it looked as casual as possible, and slowly walked downstairs.
‘Mr Beaumont, there’s a Mr Stockford on the line. He says it’s a personal call. Will you speak?’
Jack sighed at the ‘Mr Beaumont’ and the query about whether he’d take the call. He reminded Beryl every day to call him Jack and to put calls through whoever they were from, unless he’d specifically instructed otherwise. He’d wanted to bring his own PA from his old firm, but Sir Laurence had told him that was inappropriate in a public company and he should use the person already in the job. He was probably right, but God she was painful.
He picked up the phone and said, ‘G’day, Bruce, it’s nice to hear a friendly voice at the start of a new week.’
There was a nervous cough before, ‘Yeah. That was a nasty little piece, Jack, but what can you expect from a rag like that? I wouldn’t worry about it, mate, it all adds to your colourful reputation.’
‘That’s not quite how Louise saw it.’
‘No, I guess not.’ Again the short unnecessary cough came down the line. ‘Listen, Jack, I know you’re swamped with work, but I was wondering if we could get together today, just for a coffee or something.’
‘Sure. It’ll be refreshing to get away from here for a while.
How about three o’clock at your club?’
‘No, it would suit me better to come to you, if that’s okay. What about the coffee shop under your building?’
It was not a place Jack often frequented because it was always full of HOA staff and he was usually relieved to be anonymous rather than being greeted from every second table, as he was now. Nor was it the usual haunt of Bruce Stockford, who preferred wood panelling or framed boat pennants to stainless steel and hissing Italian coffee machines. Nevertheless, he sat in the hard-backed chair that seemed designed for anything but comfort, and was as uncomfortable as he’d ever been.
‘Jack, I really don’t know how to start this. I’m terribly embarrassed by it all.’
Jack looked at him in surprise. ‘Well, we’re old friends, Bruce. Whatever it is, just spit it out, mate.’
Bruce Stockford ran his hand over his eyes. ‘I’ve never encountered anything like this before. Your name is on the board at the club, as you know. That means your membership application has been through all the initial approvals and it’s there for the members to be aware of.’ He paused. ‘And here’s the thing, Jack. I’ve been asked to withdraw your nomination.’
Jack was stunned. His face was ablaze, and he reached for the shirt button and loosened his tie, so much heat seemed to be emanating from him. ‘I see.’ His mind was whirling. ‘Christ. I’m terribly sorry to put you in this situation, Bruce. Is it to do with that bloody article?’
Bruce shook his head. ‘No. The president spoke to me on Friday, before that ran. I’ve been mulling it over all weekend, trying to work out what to do about it.’
Jack grabbed him by the forearm. ‘Listen, old fellow, I won’t have you embarrassed one minute further on my account. Christ, it’s hardly a big issue, I’m already a member of just about every other club in Sydney. I don’t even particularly want to be a member, it’s just that you asked me. But it’s bizarre. I mean, half the people in the Colonial Club are good friends of mine and the other half I’ve certainly never had any problems with. To be blackballed just seems so-I don’t know-somehow low and vindictive.’
Bruce nodded and shook his head almost in one motion. ‘You haven’t actually been blackballed. I’ve been asked to withdraw your nomination and told the application won’t be successful if I persist. It’s as odd a thing as I’ve ever heard of. I can tell you, Jack, it’s left a taste in my mouth like a dead rat.’
They rose, shaking hands and looking one another in the eye, then parted.
Jack didn’t return to his office. He strolled down to Circular Quay and leaned against the railing near the ferry wharves.
Fishermen were trailing lines from old cork rolls into the slightly oily water near the wooden piles. These days the harbour was alive with fish and you could see the stubby prawn boats at night, trawling only a few metres from the Walsh Bay wharves where the theatregoers were sipping wine of undetermined origin. Behind him a swarthy, weather-beaten figure in a cloth cap was seated at a table patiently constructing a model of a Spanish galleon. He sat there most days and had done so for as long as Jack could remember, and slowly the majestic little ship had grown from the pile of matchsticks. Jack had watched a passer-by stop once to admire the work and light a
