A Woman of Courage (2 page)

‘We'll just have to keep an eye on him,' Sara said. People called thirty-three-year-old Sara Hilary's clone: the same chestnut hair and green eyes, the same ferocious appetite for life. Now she laughed. ‘It's blowing like hell up here.'

‘Where are you?'

‘On a steel girder thirty floors up.'

Hilary shook her head, smiling to herself and at Sara, once again in what her mother called her truant-playing mode. Her real job was current affairs anchor with Channel 12 News, a station where she had worked for several years before Hilary had bought the company two years before. Hilary had other plans for Sara but in the meantime she was doing an excellent job, more thoughtful and less aggressive than many in her game. It was a style that might not suit Millie Dawlish, the executive producer Hilary had brought in three months before to raise the programme's ratings, but that was all right too.

Construction was a major part of the corporation's business and construction was in Sara's blood. She had no engineering qualifications but whenever she was free she liked to rush off to one or other of their current developments, doing her monkey act around the steel framework with a hundred metres of air beneath her feet, asking endless questions and learning, learning all the time. No other television station would have put up with it but Hilary had never played by the book and since she bought the station she had encouraged Sara's independent ways: the more she knew about the various strands of the corporation's business the more useful she would be down the track. There had been some rumbling from other members of the programme team but Hilary had ignored them.

Sara wasn't afraid to get her hands dirty, either. Thirty floors up… That would be right. The men loved her. Respected her too, which was probably more important. She would make a good CEO when she'd had a few more years experience and had learnt how to deal with ruffians like Haskins Gould, predators who would gulp her down bones and all given half a chance. For that she would need to spend more time in the boardroom and less balancing on steel girders, but that was a transition that so far Sara had been reluctant to make.

Until her conversation with Dr Chang Hilary hadn't cared, believing she had plenty of time to school Sara into what she saw as her future role in the group, but the cardiologist had made it plain that time was a luxury she no longer had.

‘The Seven Stars,' Hilary had said. ‘Martha's booked a table for eight-thirty tomorrow night. Be with us as soon as you can. And I want you to have breakfast with me at the lodge on Friday morning.'

‘I can't. I've got Millie's early-morning conference call.'

‘Tell her you'll be late.'

‘She won't like it.'

‘She can take a hike. One more thing. If you do speak to Duncan Redgrave make sure he knows you have my backing. And don't let him push you around.'

‘As if,' Sara said.

There would be just the three of them. They would eat and drink together as mother and daughters should but in their case seldom did. Jennifer would be petulant, suspecting plots, demanding to be told what was going on and unwilling to accept her assurance that nothing was going on at all; Sara would say nothing. Later they would go their several ways; Jennifer to her hotel, Sara to her terrace house in Paddington. Only then would Hilary's chauffeured limousine take her home to Cadogan Lodge, the harbourside mansion on five acres of the most expensive real estate in Australia, and to the sleep that by then she would no doubt richly deserve.

A tap on the cabin door and Martha came in with a tray bearing a silver pot and cream jug and two bone china cups and saucers. Martha had been a director of the company three years now, a trusted friend whom ten years before Hilary had recruited straight from the University of Singapore after Martha had graduated with a master's degree in business management. Hilary had never regretted her choice. With the group's involvement with Hong Kong growing by the day she'd had plans for Martha, too, but now that might no longer be her decision.

‘Coffee, Hilary.'

Hilary Brand was the boss and nobody aboard the jet or anywhere else in her business empire was in any doubt about it, but she had never been one for surnames since her days in the Lady Northcote Farm School almost half a century before, when the staff had called her nothing else.

‘Brand, come here! Brand, if you don't mend your ways it's you for the fiery pit!'

I'll see you there, Mrs Wilmot
. Although in those days she had been careful not to say it: the sharp edge of a ruler on your knuckles was a sure-fire lesson in how to hold your tongue.

Those memories would remain with her forever but she had never used them as an excuse. The future was what mattered; only that.

Martha placed the tray on the side table and poured. The fragrance of coffee filled the cabin. This was their normal routine when they were on the road: a ten-minute chat first thing every morning to discuss the agenda for the day.

‘We've radioed ahead,' Martha said. ‘The helicopter will be waiting and the ground handler is on stand-by. There should be no delay.' She spoke deferentially; co-director or not Martha was still in awe of Hilary Brand, a woman who had risen from dirt-poor beginnings to become a legend not only in Australia but in much of Asia too.

They talked comfortably together, running through the appointments Hilary had scheduled for the day.

‘No trouble booking a table for tonight?' Hilary said.

Top restaurants in Sydney often required an advance booking, sometimes several weeks ahead, but for Hilary Brand a table would always be available.

‘None,' Martha said.

Hilary drained her second cup of coffee and stood, stretching the kinks out of her muscles. At a shade under five feet nine she was tall for a woman, whip lean and handsome, her chestnut hair without a hint of grey. Her silk robe had been presented to her by the wife of one of China's top officials; it was emerald green to match her eyes and embroidered with a phoenix, the Chinese symbol of eternity, and she wore an emerald and diamond ring on her hand. She had celebrated her sixty-third birthday two weeks before but looked ten years younger.

Martha put the two cups back on the tray. ‘Home soon, towkay neo,' she said.

Towkay neo
: more than a nickname, it was the respectful title Martha had given her early in their relationship. Towkay was the Chinese word for the top man in any business, towkay neo its feminine equivalent. Both phrases meant the boss, the person in command.

Hilary glanced at the clock on the side table. ‘I'd better have a shower and get dressed.' She grinned. ‘Put on a show for the cameras.'

Not that there were ever many of those. As towkay neo of the Brand Corporation, one of the most prosperous and respected conglomerates in Australia, she had learnt long ago how to keep the paparazzi at bay.

The telephone light flashed its red warning.

Martha picked it up. ‘Hello.' She listened and held out the receiver. ‘Head Office,' she said. ‘Vivienne on scrambler.'

Vivienne Archer was also a company director and Hilary's second in command.

‘I wonder what's biting her.' Hilary had had scrambler facilities installed on the Airbus to keep communications confidential; she took the receiver and pressed the red button to activate the electronics.

‘I'll leave you to it,' Martha said.

Hilary's iron rule was that she must be alone when the scrambler was on. Martha picked up the tray and went out. Hilary's fingers drummed the desktop as she waited through the wails and hiccups that told her the system was coming to life. When a hot message was coming the delay seemed to last forever and for Vivienne to call her on scrambler when Hilary would be in the office within three hours this one had to be hotter than fire.

‘Hilary?'

Vivienne's voice was cool – but then it always was. If a tsunami swallowed Australia's eastern seaboard she would probably report the news in the words of Robert Benchley's famous telegram from Venice:
Streets flooded. Please advise.
No, it was not Vivienne's tone but the fact she had thought it necessary to phone at all that made Hilary frown. She drew a deep breath and activated another of the basic rules by which she governed her business and her life. It was a quotation from Gilbert and Sullivan:
Quiet calm deliberation disentangles every knot.

Let's see if we can disentangle this one.

‘Good morning, Vivienne; I trust you slept well?'

Hilary Brand without a care in the world, and other useful lies.

‘I apologise for phoning you so early –'

‘Where's the fire?'

‘Right here in this building,' Vivienne said. ‘We've heard from Hong Kong.'

‘Tell me.' And listened with mounting fury as Vivienne began to convey the message she had received half an hour before.

JENNIFER

1

There were times when Jennifer Lander thought the whole world had it in for her, a feeling made a hundred times worse by what had happened the previous Monday evening.

‘We've having dinner with the Hawthorns tonight,' her husband Davis had said that morning as he left for chambers. ‘Do you think you might just possibly try to remember this time?' The smile that was not a smile. ‘Hmm?'

He was reminding her of a disagreement they'd had the previous week over a lunch party he had never mentioned but insisted she had forgotten. She was well aware how proud Davis was of his razor-edged tongue, so useful to him in the law courts. He liked to keep it well honed, too; from the day he had finally succeeded in putting the wedding ring on her finger – Hilary Brand's elder daughter, what a trophy! – he had sharpened it on her.

She was not stupid; even at the time she'd known Davis was marrying her not for her wit or the body he claimed to admire so much, but because he hoped Hilary Brand might advance his career. It hadn't happened; there had been a falling out – neither Davis nor Mother had ever told her the details – and ever since Davis had seemed to blame her for it.

‘I suppose it was always too much to hope you'd be any help but I expected better things from her. She knows the chief justice; she could use her influence if she wanted. I am her son-in-law, after all.'

He was indeed, and made sure everybody knew it, but Hilary had made it clear she wouldn't lift a finger.

‘There is nothing I can do for him. He's wrong, in any case. I have no influence with the chief justice. I barely know him.'

Which had not lessened Davis's resentment; from the first he had complained about what he called the conspiracy between mother and daughter to deprive him of his deserts. This happened most frequently when he'd been at the scotch, but it had not been until six months after the wedding that Jennifer discovered the full extent to which alcohol could affect her husband's behaviour.

Davis had been to a barristers' dinner. Wives were not invited and when he got home Jennifer knew she had a problem. He went straight to the liquor cabinet and poured himself a drink. He did not offer her one but brought the bottle with him when he sat down with her and began to talk.

He started off by boasting about his court triumphs and the masterly way he'd outwitted his opponents: she'd heard it all a dozen times before but repetition had never been a problem for Davis Lander. He drank more and, as always, his mood changed. He grew sulky, once again complaining about Hilary's failure to provide the support her son-in-law surely had the right to expect. Finally he became amorous: a familiar progression that, like a brothel's open door, led invariably to sex.

There was nothing she could do; he was her husband and if he wanted her she had to comply, supposedly with joy – all the romantic novels she had read had made that clear. Her mother could have taught her differently but she'd been against the marriage from the beginning. They'd talked only about the mechanics of sex: which she'd known from school, anyway, and the question of obligation had never come up. She felt guilty for not wanting Davis more; she was nowhere near as experienced as some of her friends but in that department, as in every other, marriage had proved a disappointment. She had thought Davis would teach her with affection and tenderness; he had not. She had thought they would be united, a loving couple indifferent to the vicissitudes of a sometimes hostile world; they were not. She had thought their lovemaking would introduce her to a wonderland of delight; her experience so far had been very different – a nightly assault devoid of tenderness or love that left her bruised both in body and spirit.

Perhaps it was her fault, as Davis said, but if so he did nothing to help her perform better. He did not consider her at all. They hadn't been married a month when he had told her he would permit no children. Jennifer had wanted two: a son to grow up strong and protective of his mother and a daughter to be a friend. She had envisaged a lovely time of shared confidences but came quickly to realise that a man as self-focused as her husband would never welcome competition even from his own child.

That night, as his whisky breath engulfed her, she had used his opposition to children as a last line of defence. ‘It won't be safe.'

‘My angel mustn't worry her pretty head about such things.' He spoke coyly but his hands were not coy at all. ‘There are times when love must have its way.'

As indeed it had; if you could call it love.

Two months later she had told him she was pregnant and he had been furious, blaming her for trying to saddle him with a brat he had warned her from the first he would not accept. ‘You think I can't see through your stupid schemes? Well, I'll tell you now, I'll not have it.' He had forced her into an abortion. ‘You have no one to blame but yourself,' he said.

Jennifer had been devastated and had known she would never get over it. She never had. She no longer thought consciously about the child but her subconscious was aware of an enduring sense of loss and the knowledge that when it had mattered Davis had not been there for her.