Parable of the Two Sons

By Christopher Bevan

Parable of the Two Sons is the second novel of Christopher Bevan. It is a story about grief for the loss of a mother taken in her prime and the struggle of a father to raise their two young sons alone. It is a struggle endured during a mid-life crisis about his own sexuality as he faces a future without his only lover and the primary caregiver of his sons. It is a hard struggle, the limits of which are tested by the fracturing of the relationship between his sons due to the loss of their mother and its exacerbation by the eventual divergence in their sexuality. The story culminates in the belated redefinition of the relationship between the sons and their father in the immediate aftermath of his death 25 years later.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christopher Bevan
• Release date: Nov 28, 2012
• ISBN: 9780980815733

Christopher Bevan

Christopher Bevan is a Sydney writer. From 1980-1989 he practised as a young solicitor in Kempsey, not far from Kinchela Boys’ Home, the largest home for part-aboriginal boys forcibly taken from their families under the aboriginal assimilation policy of the New South Wales Government. During that time, he came to learn of the story of the 600 boys sent to live at Kinchela Boys’ Home from 1924-1970, or ‘Kinchela boys’, as they became known. Some 100 survivors now comprise the Kinchela Boys’ Association. They and their contemporaries, male and female, became known as Australia’s infamous ‘Stolen Generations’. Christopher Bevan represented many of the survivors of the Stolen Generations and their families on instructions from the New South Wales Aboriginal Legal Service and New South Wales Legal Aid Commission in Kempsey. This work involved him appearing in courts on the mid-north coast, far north coast and northern tablelands regions of New South Wales in criminal and civil matters from 1980-1980. The legal firm which Christopher Bevan was a member also acted as solicitors for the Dungutti Land Council after its establishment in 1983. After the closure of Kinchela Boys’ Home in 1970, the land on which the boys’ home stands – traditional lands of the Dungutti people of the Macleay River – was given back to the Dungutti people. The land and buildings which formerly housed the boys’ home has, since the official return of the land to the Dungutti people, housed ‘Bennelong’s Haven’, a drug and alcohol treatment facility for indigenous people. The Dungutti people were notably the first aboriginal people in New South Wales to make a successful land title claim under the Native Titles Act. On taking up practice at the NSW Bar in 1991, Christopher Bevan continued to maintain a keen interest in the ongoing plight of ‘the Stolen Generations’ and, in particular, ‘the Kinchela boys’. After reading the Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families, entitled Bringing them home, published in April 1997, he resolved to write a work of fiction which reflected his experiences and those in Bringing them home. A Kinchela Boy was written over a 7 year period from 2002-2009. A Kinchela Boy is the first work of fiction by Christopher Bevan.

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Parable of the Two Sons

CHRISTOPHER BEVAN

About the author

Christopher Bevan is a Sydney barrister and writer.

His first novel, A Kinchela Boy, was launched in November 2010 by the Governor of New South Wales, Her Excellency Professor Marie Bashir, AC CVO, to critical world acclaim. It is the story of two members of the infamous ‘Stolen Generations’ – a generation of part-aboriginal children taken in early childhood and raised in children’s homes and foster homes as part of a nation-wide racial assimilation policy from 1924-1970. It is told graphically from their heartfelt perspective, the no-nonsense voice of aboriginal people, the dialogue rendered in their unique brand of pidgin, and from the perspective of the lawyers and priests who were their saviours in a white man’s world that gave them no social status.

Parable of the Two Sons is the second novel of Christopher Bevan. It is a story about grief for the loss of a mother taken in her prime and the struggle of a father to raise their two young sons alone. It is a struggle endured during a mid-life crisis about his own sexuality as he faces a future without his only lover and the primary caregiver of his sons. It is a hard struggle, the limits of which are tested by the fracturing of the relationship between his sons due to the loss of their mother and its exacerbation by the eventual divergence in their sexuality. The story culminates in the belated redefinition of the relationship between the sons and their father in the immediate aftermath of his death 25 years later.

Parable of the Two Sons

By Christopher Bevan

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013 Christopher Beven

First in 2012 by Bideena Publishing Co Pty Limited

Front cover – ‘Artist in Tuscany – Roadside Sign at Palaia’ by Arthur Boyd. Reproduced with the kind permission of The Bundanon Trust.

Parable of the Two Sons is a work of fiction. Any similarity between the characters in this book and real people, living or dead, is coincidental.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes



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To Anthony and Tom

Jesus went on to say, What do you think of this? A man had two sons. He went to the first and said to him: ‘Son, today go and work in my vineyard.’ And the son answered: ‘I don’t want to.’ But later he thought better of it and went. Then the father went to the second and gave him the command. This son replied: ‘I will go, sir,’ but he did not go.

Which of the two did what the father wanted? They answered, The first. And Jesus said to them, Truly, I say to you: the publicans and the prostitutes are ahead of you on the way to the kingdom of heaven. For John came to show you the way of goodness, but you did not believe him, yet the publicans and the prostitutes did. You were witnesses of this, but you neither repented nor believed him.

Gospel according to Matthew, 21: 28-32

(The Parable of the Two Sons)

Part I

The Trial – Day 1

THE HONOURABLE MR Justice Errol Higginbottom Robertson, AM DFC, impassive and ramrod straight, waited with an air of paternal patience. The principal actors shuffled papers and murmured and cleared throats and nodded the myriad tics which precede every heavyweight bout. He must have known what they were going through. Their nervous energy would have taken him back to his days in the bear-pit of a temple of justice, preparing to fight someone else’s battle. His eyes flickered behind lids collapsed at the corners under the weight of countless testimonies and convoluted legal arguments and then succumbed by glazing over. After a moment, maybe two, his countenance went from benign overlord to the oblivious trance of a Hindu holy man, focused on the afterlife, despite the feverish clatter and chatter beneath him.

But it was a transitory lapse. After fifteen, perhaps twenty seconds, the tall, wiry gentleman with the silver pilot’s moustache resumed the mantle of proud umpire determined to take control of all that was to be played out over the coming week in the matter of Brent Leland Fiske versus Fabian Aloysius Wainwright and Augustus Julian Wainwright as Executors of the Estate of the late Kendrick Linton Wainwright.

It gave Augie Wainwright a sense of reassurance, knowing the elderly gentleman in whose hands the memory of their father, indeed their father’s reputation, was to be judged, looked and sounded the kind of man he would have approved. The softly-spoken war-hero-turned-jurist was to spend that week, the most memorable of Augie’s life, deciding whether all that was alleged against Ken Wainwright – teacher, classical scholar, widower and, above all else, father – was true. That week would see decided whether the whole case was no more than a story concocted by a desperate man hungry to usurp the inheritance of Ken Wainwright’s sons. It was an inheritance which included not merely the goods and property of their father but that most valuable of things any man can bequeath his sons: himself in their mind’s eye.

The case against Augie and Fabe Wainwright that was about to unfold was, in truth, about the living memory of Ken Wainwright. It was about words and actions of a lifetime which kept the embers of the love of his two sons aglow in their hearts, as if his memory were a bellows, blowing a constant draught on those bright red embers.

Ken Wainwright was no ordinary man; nor was the judge. Ken Wainwright would have been alive to the judge’s extraordinary qualities as a man outside the law, as he looked down from his vantage point in the classics section of the library Augie was positive he had been posted to. Their father would be wondering how it had all come about in the aftermath of his death a year before.

It was, after all, Ken Wainwright who brought up Augie and his older brother, Fabe, after their mother died, when Augie was eight and a half and Fabe a month shy of his tenth birthday. He would be smiling at the knowledge that his sons had drawn a man’s man, one cut from the same bolt of superfine merino cloth as he. Lloyd Evans, Ken Wainwright’s old school friend and attorney for the estate, said the judge won his DFC for shooting down five MIGs north of Saigon and saving half a company of Australian infantry caught in open country under rocket fire and strafing.

Kevin Sullivan QC, Senior Counsel for Brent Fiske, stumbled to his feet. Elliott Macmillan QC, the Wainwright’s Senior Counsel, referred to Sullivan as the enemy in his conference with the Wainwrights on that first morning of the trial. Kevin Sullivan rose clutching the lectern with his right hand and the bar table with his left and straightened his back in a rehearsed movement, as though it were in a plaster cast.

There was no mistaking Kevin Sullivan’s arrival at centre stage. A fluorescent light overhead found the flap of heavy black silk on the back of his gown and made it shimmer, while the tassels on his sleeves that went down to his ankles flapped of their own free-will, black stockings on a clothesline signalling the calm before the storm.

Augie knew damned well a storm was brewing all right. Dark clouds forming on the brow of Elliot Macmillan stood as a reliable barometer of all that was about to be visited on Augie and his brother by the leader of the probate bar. Augie closed his eyes and prayed to the same God he prayed to a year before. He had asked for the repose of their father’s soul and made a heartfelt plea that their father be reunited with the wife taken from him twenty-five years before by a God who loved her more than the rest of them, or so he surmised in the months and years following her death.

Augie knew that if there was to be salvation at the end of that week, it lay in the hands Elliot Macmillan QC and God. Touch wood, God was listening to Augie’s rare communion with Him and moving pieces on a chessboard, Augie’s father looking over the Creator’s shoulder with tips on how to achieve checkmate without fanfare.

But Augie asked himself whether it was improper to pray, for all that prayer is ever worth, for salvation from the bonds of a usurper to their father’s estate? Was it indecent to pray for mammon rather than the alleviation of world poverty or an end to child enslavement or the empowerment of women in third world countries?

Kevin Sullivan started off, all matter of fact, as if explaining the shortest route from the courthouse to his golf club. Everything was congenial; the judge was nodding. Every so often the judge smiled as Sullivan cracked one of his old fart jokes that went right over Augie’s head. Even Elliott Macmillan was smiling and nodding at the opening of the case for the man who was picking the pocket of their father before their very eyes and counting out the banknotes in full view of everyone.

God Almighty, why didn’t Elliott stand up and object to those allegations, take umbrage at all that was being woven together in that convincing tissue of lies, jump up and say something, anything; just stop the lies? Why not get up the way it happens on television, in courtroom dramas, when the lawyer sitting down wants to interrupt the flow of the fellow on his feet and do all he can to throw a spanner in the works of the other side’s case. It was so damned hypnotic.

The judge picked up his pen and was noting it down. Jesus and all the saints: he never knew Ken Wainwright. He had no idea what he was like, who he really was.

Your Honour, this is a case about a family. It’s a case about a man and his partner, I think that’s the operative term people use these days, a man and his partner and two sons of the one man and two daughters of the other, Kevin Sullivan QC said.

He paused to draw breath and assess the reaction to this opening salvo at the flotilla of men-o’-war, the learned legal representatives of the estate of the late Ken Wainwright beside him. By the look of scepticism on the judicial brow Augie could discern, it must have given Sullivan cause for concern? It buoyed Augie’s spirits. He was barely able to contain the smile busting to get through his lips. It would have, too, but for a reconnoitre the sharp judicial eye undertook behind the bar table which served to keep that smile right where it was going to do their defence no harm at all.

Our case, and it’s a case we make no bones about, a case we put out in the open and hang our hat on, despite what many in the community might think about the morality of it all. Our principal case, your Honour, is that these two adult men, after losing their wives together in such tragic circumstances, indeed, in the very same car accident, fell into the arms, figuratively speaking, of course, of each other. It came about, because they were old friends, dear friends from boyhood, and they had just lost their wives, and one thing led to another, and they took up together in a way they had not done before. They lived separate lives for the next twenty-odd years, until 2005, raising children in their own homes and turning to each other for friendship, for the support which their departed wives could no longer provide them with, Sullivan said.

Augie started fidgeting as the judge made his copious note. What the devil could he have found so important about that last missive? He would ask Elliott later.

But their relationship rose to a new level of care and support, a new level of financial and emotional dependence, Sullivan said, with a look of sternness that was supposed to make his speech seem all the more sincere, or plausible maybe, before Ken Wainwright’s younger brother, Jack, died. Jack Wainwright, a confirmed bachelor, came to live with Ken and the boys after Ken’s wife, Nell, was killed. Jack became the master of the house, the chief cook and bottle washer, as my late father would have called him, raising the two boys as if they were the flesh of his loins.

The deceased was lucky to have a brother to step into the breech, then?

Yes, your Honour, I suppose that’s right. Anyway, Jack became a mother to those boys. His health declined by 2005, as had the deceased’s, the former suffering from heart disease and the latter from emphysema, which the doctors were worried was developing into lung cancer. Both men needed day to day care and support.

And your client?

My client was flat broke. He needed something to do with himself, a place to live. He was the deceased’s oldest friend, closer than that even, as the evidence will show. One thing led to another, and the rest, as they say, is history. My client was the full-time carer and constant companion for the last four years of Ken Wainwright’s life and his brother, Jack. Jack died not long after the deceased. Jack could not cope with the death of his older brother, falling into a fit of depression after Ken died.

Sullivan paused to gather his thoughts. The judge unfurled a white sail with initials in one corner and creases as sharp as Sullivan’s trousers, wiped his aquiline nose, and folded it again with the care of a museum curator folding a rare manuscript.

My client came home from the shops in the weeks following the deceased’s funeral to find that Jack had hung himself from a beam in the garage. A simple note in Jack’s copperplate on the kitchen table said he had gone to join Ken and their mother, that they were both waiting for him, that he dreamt their mother was angry with him for being late for dinner, that he had always kept them waiting as a boy, that Ken had gone to join her and he knew she was waiting for him and was not going to be late anymore.

I see. All very sad then?

They buried him a month after the deceased died. My client has been living alone in the estate home ever since. The defendant executors have allowed him to continue living there, pending determination of his claim for title to the estate home.

By God, Sullivan was good. He understood the Wainwright’s family history as well as any one of them. Brent Fiske had done a thorough job of stitching them up alright. What else would you expect from a public accountant who spent his whole working life helping his clients avoid their inconvenient taxation obligations?

Augie dabbed at the perspiration forming on his brow and eyed off the glasses of water sitting beside the pitcher on the bar table. He wanted to quench a thirst building up from the moment Kevin Sullivan QC rose to his feet, doing his level best to paint his loser of a client, Brent Fiske, as the innocent victim and Kendrick Linton Wainwright’s sons, the defendants, as they had become known, as the villains.

The statute defines a de facto relationship as a relationship between two persons who live together as a couple and who are not married. There can be no dispute about the latter criterion. No doubt the estate hotly contests the former.

No doubt, the judge said with a mischievous smile that forced his moustache up momentarily and made Augie think of that old Hollywood actor, Walter Pigeon.

So question one for your Honour, it is a threshold issue, I suppose, is whether these two men were ... a couple for the last three years of the life of the deceased.

So it had come to that. The old fellow had to spend a solid week of his time, court time, public time paid for by public money, trying to decide whether two men who happened to be best mates were a couple, on account of one had gone broke and lost everything and had nowhere else to live and his old friend had taken him in.

Ken Wainwright merely had a big house with empty bedrooms and needed the company in his retirement and someone to drive him to the doctor and help him look after his younger brother.

In assessing whether two people are in a de facto relationship, the court must take into account nine factors, Sullivan said, and rattled them off.

When he got to the third factor, whether or not a sexual relationship exists, Augie noticed Fabe murmuring to Elliott, snapping the pencil he was strangling in his right hand. Then Fabe tugged at Elliott’s gown from behind, telling him to stand up and object or do something, anything to stop the lies being asserted for all the world, and any nosey journalists who happened to come in with their note books, to hear.

But it didn’t bother Augie as much. How the devil were they going to disprove that allegation, one that rolled off the tongue? Their father was dead. Hopefully, Elliott would white-ant Brent in cross-examination, get him to crack, admit it was all untrue, concede he made it up to claw the estate away from the boys, that he had lost everything with dud investments and taking the misguided financial advice he was always giving his clients.

The court must also take account of the reputation and public aspects of the relationship, Sullivan said. Then he turned around and smiled a smile of self-satisfaction at his junior, Paddy Maguire, who did not return the smile.

But Mr Sullivan, the judge said, with the look of an owl eyeing off a far away mouse, his fountain pen poised to note every word in the reply he was working with studied nonchalance to provoke from the leader of the team that bore the onus of proof, "it’s common ground, amongst all the witnesses, it seems, based on the outlines of their evidence in chief, indeed it seems to be one of the few agreed facts here, that no one knew about the existence of this de facto relationship until after the deceased passed away last year and then your chap came forward with his de facto relationship allegation to support a claim to have, as his own, the entire estate ahead of its rightful heirs."

The judicial pen was upright and held still and the judge was, if his expression was to be believed as a reliable signal of his true intent, champing at the bit. Kevin Sullivan QC drew breath and started to mumble. He said a word, perhaps a word and the first syllable of the next, and then he stopped, thought the better of it, and started off all over again. The second time he got out three words but then he took them right back with the time-honoured phrase, I withdraw that, paused and thought again. He moved his mouth to one side, seeking inspiration from the inside of the left cheek that he was gnawing away at with a squint in his eyes.

Mr Sullivan, there is no need to trouble yourself with an answer right now. I had not intended this issue to become a cross-examination of the plaintiff’s leading Counsel. Perhaps you can treat it as a question on notice, the judge said, and screwed the lid onto his pen, as if underlining his last remark in double red lines to reinforce it.

I’m indebted to your Honour, Sullivan said, nudging Paddy Maguire awake and winking the way a fellow does after telling a ribald joke in mixed company.

I make the observation at this early stage of the trial because something occurred to me, speaking as a casual observer of human nature, and as a first-blush impression, not as any kind of concluded view.

Of course, Sullivan assured the judge with the eagerness of a school prefect in the headmaster’s presence.

I must remain open-minded to all the evidence and the arguments to be put during the course of the week. But it did occur to me that the secret character of this relationship, assuming for present purposes that it did exist as a fact and that it rose to the level which you want me to recognise as a matter of law under the statute, may, perhaps even will, need to be explained later this week, the judge said.

Why? Sullivan asked. He seemed to be working hard to restrain a sense of triumph. It’s just one of nine statutory factors. If we establish five in our favour then we’re home and hosed. Five out of nine should be enough. He looked rather pensive.

"If you don’t explain the secret aspect of this relationship then I’m also going to have to add to that factor, as a factor weighing against your client in the balance, I mean, the even more fundamental fact that the deceased willed his entire estate to his two sons in equal shares and that he made that will after your client came to live with him and started this supposed, no, no, I mean, this, this alleged de facto relationship."

Sullivan scratched his chin, like he had just found something valuable he had lost a while ago and was trying to remember how he came to lose it in the first place.

That’s hardly the conduct of someone who considers himself beholden to the plaintiff, considers the plaintiff to be dependant on him. Is it? the judge said, staring into the core of Sullivan’s being to better catch his very first reaction.

Then the judge leant forward and scowled. Augie felt tingling in the tips of his fingers. He didn’t have to be a lawyer to see that Brent’s case had a big problem.

Sullivan’s desire to smile was smothered by that observation like a fire blanket thrown on a stove fire – smouldering embers were left in his eyes.

Mmm. Perhaps? We will have to give that issue some thought this week, Sullivan said, and bent down and told Paddy Maguire to make a note of the point.

Augie’s thirst was raging. He longed for a sip of iced water from one of the cut-glass jugs on napkin-covered wooden trays in front of each team on the bar table.

That brings me to our case based on a domestic relationship. If your Honour finds that the relationship between these two men did not rise to the level of a de facto relationship then we rely on a case of … how can I put it, a domestic relationship?

I follow, I think? The judge grimaced.

That’s where there’s at best a close personal relationship between two adult persons, one or either of whom provides the other with domestic support and regular personal care. The plaintiff cared for the deceased and his ailing brother until he died after the deceased. The deceased was obliged to support his brother as a dependent member of his household for most of his adult life, despite the deceased’s health failing after his diagnosis with emphysema, Sullivan said.

That’d be your fall-back position, I assume? the judge asked, pen poised.

Yes, Kevin Sullivan replied, but not the only one. We have another one.

What is it? the judge asked. He looked sceptical. Elliott told Augie the judge was from the old school, the run-your-best-point school of advocacy rather than the run-every-point and let the judge decide which one has merit school. Fabe sat upright, kind of like he was in the back of a classroom being inspected by the school inspector.

We also rely on the fact the that plaintiff was dependent, in a financial and an emotional sense, on the deceased, and was also a member of his household at the date of his death. We’re running three cases, but success on any one of them will be sufficient to establish a valid claim upon the estate and an order overriding the will.

Fiske had three ways to deprive them of their inheritance. He needed to succeed on one, and it was gone in no time. All that their father worked and saved so hard for was about to be taken by a man who squandered his own property with hare-brained investments and negligence claims against his firm for far more in damages than he was insured for or could ever hope to get insured for. Brent’s mistakes had a life of their own, a sense of grandeur that his character could never hope to match.

Kevin Sullivan QC concluded his opening address by recording an agreement made between Senior Counsel for each party that permitted all witnesses to remain in court before they gave their evidence, and hear the evidence of all those who would go before them, even those giving evidence in the same cause, on account of it was family litigation, and the parties were anxious to conduct the trial in an atmosphere of openness and utmost candour as each rendered his or her version of events.

Well played, Elliott Macmillan QC murmured sotto voce to his opponent as Kevin Sullivan QC resumed his seat. You’ve managed to put a twenty-four carat gold veneer on a lump of rusted steel, I’d say, dear boy.

Kevin Sullivan winked at Elliott, thanking him for the gracious compliment. "Well, my grandfather was a goldsmith, so I rather think it’s in the blood, old son."

* * * *

On the first anniversary of their father’s death the Wainwrights had attended a conference with Elliott Macmillan QC, his junior Counsel, Peter Armstrong, and Lloyd Evans, the estate attorney. It was the week before the trial. That was the day the Wainwright brothers first met their Counsel. It was also the day they confirmed their decision to fight to the death the defence of their father’s estate and their inheritance of it in equal shares after being bolstered in their belief in the merits of their defence.

Elliott Macmillan QC said to them, half serious, and tempered by a wry smile, Litigation’s the biggest poker game in town, my dear boys. The loser’s ruined and the winner takes a little more than he started with, after costs are paid, of course, and the lawyers end up far and away in front of where everyone started.

Fabe tried to argue. Elliott would have none of it. Fabe was a rank amateur.

Fabian, there are two stories by wise men who knew a lot about litigation. Abe Lincoln, he spent most of his life as a trial lawyer on the Illinois prairies, before he turned his hand to politics. Abe said that, ‘whatever you do in this life, settle your litigation’. Before that, Francois Voltaire said, ‘I went to court twice. The first time I lost, the second time I won, and both cost me money in the end.’ Abe Lincoln made his observation on the unpredictability of litigation a hundred and sixty years ago and Voltaire complained about the cost of litigation and lawyers two hundred and sixty years ago. It’s the way of the world. Nothing changes, Elliott said, with a wry grin.

Fabe swallowed hard and kept on swallowing, as though trying to purge himself of the blow-fly he looked like he had swallowed by drowning it in saliva.

But Augie had already worked that much out the moment he’d stepped into the opulent chambers of Elliott Macmillan QC: fifteen by twenty feet, the end walls covered in floor-to-ceiling bookshelves crammed with leather law reports with green, red and blue labels, side walls draped in faded Flemish tapestries and oil paintings by famous French impressionists; a Persian rug at their feet, as faded as the tapestries.

An enormous mahogany partners’ desk, green leather inlay and drawers on either side, took pride of place in the centre, accompanied by ten regency chairs in new green leather, same as the desk. Off to the sides were French-polished regency side tables with hand-painted porcelain lamps, and two enormous cedar mirrors and a cedar chiffoniere, the same pale yellow cedar, made from old trees on the north coast that were extinct a century and a half before, and some smaller oil paintings of horses and rural scenes, and a fox hunting scene, painted by early nineteenth-century English artists who seemed to be emulating Stubbs and Turner, and a solid gold ink-well-cum-pen-stand on a black granite base, and he and Fabe were footing the bill for it all.

* * * *

The proceedings moved to an area of discourse that went right over Augie’s head, lawyers being lawyers. It was all Greek to Augie, to quote Casca in Julius Caesar, one of their father’s favourite plays. Those engaged in it – the three old men holding centre court in the tournament – seemed to be enjoying it all more than sex.

At some point, Mr Sullivan, you are going to have to nail your colours to the mast on the exact nature of this relationship which is the bedrock of your client’s application for me to re-write the deceased’s last will in his favour, the judge said.

It interrupted Augie’s reckoning of all their father stood for, a man about whom Augie could say, They broke the mould when they made him.

We’re reserving our position for the moment, your Honour, Sullivan said.

That’s a matter for you, of course. But just remember, and I am giving you fair warning here, let the record show, that the longer you keep that trump card up your sleeve, the less value it’ll have if and when you ever do produce it.

I understand. Kevin Sullivan was trying to ignore Elliott’s teasing remarks.

Don’t expect you can tell me on the last day of this trial that this bit of evidence and that inference all add up to an intimate relationship between two consenting adults of the same sex, that it is more of a de facto relationship than a domestic relationship, that the plaintiff has the rights of a widowed spouse rather than a carer or housekeeper, or any one of a myriad of other lesser domestic relationships which don’t carry with them the community’s expectation that the survivor will be gifted a house and a source of income for the rest of his life, the judge growled.

He did so with his sternest ever face, invoking a bass baritone that reminded Augie of Paul Robeson. Yes, their father would have approved of the judge.

I rather think he’s onto you like a rat up a drainpipe, Elliott murmured.

Ken Wainwright’s life revolved around the Classics Department at Sydney Grammar School, which prided itself on being, for as many years as anyone in the Wainwright household could count, without question the state’s premier high school.

No disputing that fact, Mr Sullivan the judge said, speaking as an old boy.

It boasted University Admission Index scores which bettered the next best two or three, and in some years the best four schools on the annual merit list put together.

Kevin Sullivan QC paused and sipped some water and allowed his words to resonate off the timber panelled walls of the courtroom and enlisted their resonance and the looks of interest they engendered in the faces of those around him to sooth his taught look of concentration into one of self-satisfaction, but just for a fleeting instant.

Sydney Grammar School was a place where reading, writing and arithmetic came before God. In the case of many of the migrant families, hungry to see their sons rise far above their under-educated parents, it was the only serious consideration.

It was like that in my day too, the judge said.

Augie always had time for their father’s musings over the classics. Fabe was always more interested in logarithms and J-curves and whatever else he needed to arm himself as a prophet of international interest rates and world share market indices.

Elliott Macmillan was treating the address with open disdain by cleaning his fingernails with the corners of pages of his journal and sighing pretended boredom.

The deceased’s brother, Jack, his junior by fourteen months, came to live —

Mr Sullivan, the judge asked, I find it ambiguous using personal pronouns following a reference to two proper nouns. Was Jack junior to Ken by fourteen months or vice versa? The judge averted his eyes from the bar table to look at Fabe first and Augie, seeking a reaction to the interest he was showing in their family tree.

Augie wanted to undo his top button and loosen his tie. It was uncomfortable: a noose tightened around the neck of a condemned man. It had been seventeen years since Augie left school, so it stood to reason that it must have been seventeen years since he last had a reason to strangulate himself; all for the sake of the rule of law.

Jack was the younger, your Honour. He and the deceased were close. Both were quite intelligent. But Jack was bipolar. They termed it manic depressive in the old days when he was starting out in life after his education was cut short at the age of fifteen because of his inability to settle into school life. The fact that their father died so young, before Jack was born, did not help things either, I suppose, Sullivan said.

How? the judge asked. He put his pen down, signifying its utter forensic irrelevance more than anything that could have come from his countenance or words.

Killed in action in the war, after a visit home on leave. According to my client, the absence of a firm hand was as much to blame for his errant behaviour as an adult as his debilitating condition, Sullivan said, turning around to look at Augie’s reaction first and over at Fabe and then sideways at Paddy while winking at him. He was so smug, so full of himself. Augie gnawed away at his lips.

"If you’ve nearly finished outlining the case for the plaintiff,

Mr Sullivan," the judge said. He looked up at the clock on the wall above the witness box. It was the one corner of the courtroom Augie feared more than any other. He feared it even more