Friends Like These Read online

  During the last January break she had confined herself mostly to that sunroom, which overlooked a mature, wonderful garden of frangipanis, gardenias and tree ferns crowding a rock-edged swimming pool. She had taken particular care of every flower, stem and leaf that scorching season as if she was saying goodbye to them all.

  One day, she was standing, trowel in hand, over a neglected corner of her vegetable garden long gone to seed and grown over with weeds and recognised the metaphor for her marriage. She’d made a valiant effort to coax the garden back to life with seedlings, applications of blood and bone, and regular watering. Inside the house, Jo had been equally industrious. She’d cooked elaborate meals, suggested nights out at the Sydney Festival, even bought a slinky new nightgown and attempted to initiate sex. So no-one could say she hadn’t tried. But her ministrations had been useless and the beds—both vegetable and marital—remained stubbornly unproductive. Tired, worn out and bare. Years of preoccupation—his with business, her with teaching and raising their two children—had leached all the goodness from the soil. She had turned that corner of the garden into a rockery and planted cacti.

  She then used her energies to sort and catalogue the last of the children’s teenage debris: all their CDs, clothes, books, posters and musical instruments. The children were grown now. Tory spent more time at her boyfriend’s flat than she did at home. James was in London for a year’s study at business college. Jo was frightened to think that the last of her reasons to share the house with their father had disappeared. Their marriage had become a textbook example of middle-aged ennui.

  And she was middle-aged. If you doubled Jo’s age you got ninety. Jo had, as they say, ‘done the maths’. She figured she was right there, smack bang in the middle and about to head off on the downhill run. They always said you became invisible, but Jo felt it was more like she’d become transparent. It wasn’t that JJ couldn’t see her, but that he was looking right through her at someone else. Jo wondered if that ‘someone else’ could be Carol Holt.

  Jo first knew Carol as Carol McPherson when she had been boarding at DPLC a few years ahead of her. A sturdy, big-breasted, raucous girl, Carol bulldozed her way through life like her famous trucking-magnate father. It was rumoured that she always wore pearls, even under her sports uniform. Jo knew it was true because one of her friends had found a pearl necklace at the bottom of the college diving pool and Carol had given her a hundred-dollar note as a reward. It was the first one Jo had ever seen.

  These days Carol was such a talented fundraiser that Jo sometimes joked that her picture should be on the hundred-dollar note instead of Dame Nellie Melba’s. Mrs Holt was admired by her legion of socialite friends for her ‘tremendous joie de vivre’. She adored both throwing and attending lavish parties and, as a generous woman with a sizeable fortune, was a firm favourite wherever she went. Carol also loved shooting feral rabbits and foxes and was renowned for entertaining the scions of industry on weekends at the Holts’ property at Wollombi in the Hunter Valley. Carol was what they called ‘a man’s woman’. An irresistible force of nature. The widow Holt would bring something to JJ that couldn’t be bought or rented, and that Jo certainly couldn’t offer—a leg up the greasy pole of Sydney Society. And with her blue-ribbon political and business connections, Carol was an asset of inestimable value.

  By 10 p.m. Jo had eaten her bowl of macaroni, drunk three glasses of red wine, attempted a crossword puzzle, folded some laundry and was feeling sorry for herself. How had she ended up sitting in a ‘granny corner’ with only a cat for company? It would probably be another decade, at least, before she was a grandmother. The depressing thought of the years ahead of her, sitting in this corner and being enveloped by cobwebs like some desiccated Miss Havisham, was enough to propel her from her chair.

  In the library Jo flicked on the television and the first image she caught was of a pair of bare breasts. Some locally produced crime drama that seemed to be set in a strip club. Sex and death. Two themes that had been drawing audiences since the Upper Paleolithic.

  Thoughts turned to the more sordid. She’d prepared herself for JJ’s revelation of an affair. Would have been silly not to. On his countless business trips JJ must havemet any amount of nubile young women who would be thrilled with the gift of a smart car and to have the rent paid on a little flat in Potts Point in return for his sexual demands—which, these days, were modest. He was, after all, a very busy man.

  But surely he wouldn’t crawl into Carol’s bed? ‘Fair, fat and almost fifty.’ That was the uncharitable sing-song that popped into Jo’s head whenever she thought of Carol.

  An hour later she considered trudging up the monumental cedar staircase to the master bedroom. Instead—and she’d never done this before—she draped a cashmere throw over herself and slept on the couch, fully clothed, with a grateful Calpurnia warming her feet.

  Chapter Four

  The next day, Jo woke early. JJ had come in late and hadn’t roused her to go upstairs. She supposed that it was the beginning of the next phase of their lives—separate bedrooms. She dressed in her sports gear without waking him and at

  6 a.m., half an hour ahead of schedule, she bounded over Lang Road and set off for her jog around Centennial Park. Physical exercise never failed to invigorate. Her long, lean, muscular limbs were made for running.

  She followed her set route, which would take her around the 3.7-kilometre track. Various neighbours and fellow joggers acknowledged her with a smile and a nod, unaware that they would never again see her on this path.

  Sydney Town had turned on a peerless blue sky. It was as if the sun had seen all the preening, glossy ladies of Darling Point and decided to outshine them all. Today was the most important fixture on the college calendar—Mother and Daughter Day. It was the opulent companion piece to the Father and Daughter Dinner two nights before.

  As Jo ran, she wondered what new indulgences the organising committee had in mind for the some three hundred women who would be attending the day’s festivities. Thirty years ago Mother and Daughter Day had been a modest affair, with a morning church service in St Anne’s and then lunch in Felicity Hall. When Jo was a boarder, her mother Margaret had taken the train down from the Blue Mountains to attend the service and then rolled up her sleeves to help in the kitchen with the other mothers. After lunch she stayed to help with the dishes. However, long gone were the days when parents pitched in and stood with tea towels alongside teaching and domestic staff around a draining board.

  Yesterday afternoon, on her way across the Great Lawn to the car park, Jo had seen workmen erecting a giant marquee complete with arched windows and purple and gold bunting. Inside, a chandelier was being hung as the centrepiece of the gauzy, draped ceiling, and the construction of a champagne bar was well underway.

  She had also ducked into Felicity Hall to see how preparations were proceeding there and greeted committee members sorting silent-auction items. Tables piled high with cosmetics, jewellery, perfume, fitness equipment, artworks, handbags and tropical-holiday vouchers ran down both sides of the room. Chairs were swathed in white fabric and placed on every one was a goodie bag stuffed with feminine trinkets—tiny pots of hand cream, luxury hosiery and crystal-studded key rings. The tables were draped in white embossed fine cotton, and ceramic pots tied with ribbons in the college colours awaited posies of fresh flowers.

  The funds raised from the lunch were to go to the refurbishment of St Anne’s spire, but Jo estimated that after everything was paid for—including the valet parking, the handmade violet chocolates in golden foil and the engraved souvenir wine glasses—the school would be lucky to get a cheque big enough to cover the repair of the hall’s wooden floor, which would soon be taking cruel punishment from three hundred pairs of designer heels.

  The whole event would be carefully stage-managed by Didi Brigden, another Old Girl and Carol Holt’s best friend from college days, although she’d been Diana Armfield back then. Her father had been the head of a television networ
k when owning a station had been a licence to print money. Diana had been a clever girl, quick-witted but also ready with spiteful comments about girls from less privileged backgrounds. Jo, as one of them, had sensibly kept out of her way. Now Didi was one of the most influential and feared publicists in the country. She wrangled a stable of A-list celebrities and the media with a lethal combination of shameless flattery, salacious gossip and brutal intimidation.

  Over the years, Didi had managed almost single-handedly to promote the school’s Mother and Daughter Day into one of the highlights of Sydney’s social calendar. She wheeled in enough glamorous Hollywood types, local A-listers and senior politicians to have the paparazzi punching each other for vantage points under the frangipanis. Every February the entire college teaching staff were lined up and bullied into signing confidentiality agreements. For weeks after they lived in terror in case some unauthorised incriminating paragraph might find its way into the press.

  Jo had never been comfortable with this charade, or the fact that Didi Brigden had blithely appointed herself the school’s PR agent to promote the beau monde of the college through Sydney’s social pages. The preferential treatment given to some of the mothers and the visiting VIPs didn’t sit well with Jo. It was, Didi assured them all, the exclusivity of the event that made it so popular with the media. That had to be good for the image of the school. And everything these days, Didi reminded the staff, was about ‘image’.

  ‘And it’s also about aspiration,’ Didi was fond of saying. ‘Most of our parents weren’t born into money, but this is the reward for their hard work. And if more people got off their behinds and made something of themselves, then they could send their children here too. I’m not going to apologise for being successful. I’ve earned, every one of us has earned...all this.’

  ‘All this’ included the Darling Point campus, the school’s ski chalet in Perisher Valley, the country property in the Southern Highlands and boat shed on the shores of Pittwater—facilities that reeked of money and entitlement. Meanwhile, Jo knew all too well, just a few kilometres away students in public schools were crowded into shoddy demountable classrooms dumped at the edge of crumbling asphalt.

  Jo knew she was complicit in an elitist, century-old system of privilege. It had been playing on her mind for years—more and more so with each passing term, until she was lying awake at night wrapped in crumpled sheets of guilt. Perhaps, if she was honest with herself, that’s why she’d approached Cybele to speak at the dinner, hoping that some of the things she thought privately might come out of the young woman’s mouth. It was cowardly of her, she admonished herself. That question from Patsy Kelly—‘What is it, exactly, that you do believe in?’—had got under her skin, just as it was intended to do. It was true. She was struggling with how things were.

  As she waited to cross through the steadily building traffic on Lang Road, Jo vowed once again that when she became headmistress she would change things. Change the culture of the college from the inside, so that along with its stated commitment to excellence and achievement it might also reflect the founding philanthropists’ and clergy’s original vision of compassion and equal opportunity for all. Except that watching the headmistress the day before as she imperiously surveyed her domain, Jo knew that opportunity was still years away. Patsy Kelly would have to be carted out of St Anne’s in a cardboard box, tiny feet first, before she would relinquish authority. Jo thought that it was perhaps time for her to move on. (Funny, when she thought back on it later.)

  Still, Jo reminded herself, there was much to look forward to during Mother and Daughter Day proceedings. It would be a delight to catch up with some of the mothers from the country, many of them Old Girls. Soon enough they would be telling old war stories and hooting with laughter over glasses of champagne on the emerald expanse of the Great Lawn.

  By the time she got back to the house JJ had left. By 7.30 a.m. she had showered, dressed and had her car keys and briefcase in hand. She was about to set the security alarm when she remembered an errand JJ had wanted her to run. His watch needed mending and he had asked if she might drop it off at the jeweller’s. They still performed these small domestic kindnesses for each other and perhaps that meant their relationship was still anchored to a bedrock of decency. That was something for Jo to cling to. Maybe the distance between them was just a phase they were going through. Perhaps. Maybe.

  Jo found the watch on the desk in JJ’s study and was almost out the door with it when a scrap of leopard-skin print fabric under the brown leather Chesterfield sofa caught her eye. She smiled to see it because Tory had officially banned all animal print from Jo’s wardrobe. ‘Dead meat from the eighties,’ she’d proclaimed. ‘It’s for old bags and hookers, and you, my mother, are not wearing it.’ But it looked as if Tory had capitulated and bought a...scarf? What was it?

  It was a pair of size-16 women’s panties. Not Jo’s. Too big to be Tory’s. They belonged to Carol Holt. That was Jo’s first assumption. And, after dropping her briefcase on the floor and spending three hours trawling JJ’s emails and hunting through his wardrobe, she had all the evidence in the world to reach a verdict.

  Before she left Parklea, Jo packed a bag with a few of his things—toothbrush, electric razor, a week’s worth of socks and jocks, shirts and ties, his asthma puffer and reading glasses. She planned to drop them at the car showroom in Paddington after work with a note saying that she didn’t want him back at the house until she’d had time to clear out her possessions. JJ could stay on at Parklea. It suited him. It was a massive house in a wealthy suburb that shouted: ‘I’ve arrived!’

  Chapter Five

  ‘At last! Where have you been?’ Jo was startled by a hiss at her shoulder and a poke in the ribs from a bony finger. She could barely make out Patsy’s face in the muffled gloom of backstage and the headmistress couldn’t see hers. Patsy paused, waiting for some explanation or an apology and, when neither came, pressed on. ‘I’ll be back in a few minutes. We’re running late. Stand by,’ she directed.

  It was always Jo who kept these events running to time. Without her, Patsy was in pieces. The headmistress blundered in first one direction, then another, vanishing behind a pile of painted flats stacked against the back wall. In a moment she reappeared and then disappeared through a side door to the dressing rooms.

  Jo took the stairs at the side of the stage, found a gap in the velvet curtains and peered through. The noise in the hall was tremendous. Three hundred women were chattering and laughing, all in high spirits as petits fours and bottles of dessert wine

  were served. Most wouldn’t be driving home and would go on to make a night of it. They were busy making arrangements via mobile phone with fathers and nannies to pick up daughters who had been marched back to their classrooms after the opening concert. The choir, woodwind ensemble, violin and viola duet, dance items and readings—Jo had missed the lot. And, she recalled, she hadn’t done that since James was born. She’d even been too late to hear the after-lunch speaker. In the usual tradition, a former old-girl-made-good had been the guest. This time it was a TV chef whose book Table for Ten in Tuscany was on the best-seller list. She’d been asked to speak by Mrs Kelly. Jo idly wondered if a recipe for beef carpaccio had been offered, given the bounty of tender meat on the hoof now trampling the floorboards.

  Jo lingered there to take in the scene. Above the mothers’ nodding heads her eye strayed to the stained-glass windows, high vaulted ceiling and pretty decorative dado that ran in a ribbon around the walls. The numerous portraits and photographs in fine frames. She was trying to imprint every detail in her mind so that it might help her to remember it all in years to come.

  At the top table was an empty chair where Jo should have been sitting. She spied Didi and Carol secretly refilling their glasses from a bottle of Bollinger they’d stowed in the folds of the tablecloth. Jo gripped the velvet fabric of the curtains, willing her heart rate to slow and her hands to stop shaking. The rest of the ladies had to content the
mselves with domestic sparkling for the duration but Didi and Carol had to be just that little bit better than everyone else in the room. No doubt they believed they were performing a selfless act of charity by attending a dreary school function. Didi was texting furiously and Jo supposed there was a limo gunning on the kerb ready to whisk her and Carol off for afternoon drinks with one of Didi’s A-list stars.

  Jo saw Didi, glass in hand, spring from her place and hop from perch to perch like a sequinned budgerigar, her skeletal frame squeezed into a tiny pale-blue and lemon shimmering mini-dress. She flitted about the room to chat with assorted VIPs and was as keen, Jo guessed, to fulfil her social obligations as she was to avoid the temptation of the platters of pastel macarons and dainty chocolates. No such worries for Carol, whose plate was full. She nibbled, drank and exchanged exuberant greetings with a parade of eager supplicants.

  Was she wearing undies? Carol had left that pair under the Chesterfield for Jo to find. Of course she had. She must have driven off knowing she’d planted a lace-trimmed timing device that would explode in Jo’s face. In the aftermath of the detonation, when Jo had felt for her limbs and found them to be somehow, miraculously, intact, the trail had been easy enough to follow—explicit emails and, in the pocket of a suit jacket, a cream embossed envelope from the Grand Hyatt in Shanghai dated two weeks before wishing ‘Mr and Mrs Holt’ a wonderful stay. In her panic and confusion as she scoured the house for more evidence, Jo had even rushed to the swimming pool to see if a pearl necklace was lying dead at the bottom. She had slumped on a pool chair and wept. Was deeply, almost fatally wounded. But then, Carol was an expert shot.

  Didi came back to the table, sat in Jo’s chair and indicated her place card to Carol. They leaned into each other and collapsed in girlish giggles. Jo was sure Didi knew every detail of Carol’s affair with JJ. When she hadn’t shown for lunch, they must have raised a celebratory glass to the dowdy dunce who could never have imagined their thrilling deceit. The anger Jo had fought to keep under control rose in a boiling fury. She clutched at the curtains and hoped they might fall in a muffled scarlet heap and suffocate the life out of her.