Curiosity and Discontent Tales from a Small City

By John Murray Hanan

This deals with the leading citizen of Eden Frank, Chair of his company and a United Nations delegate who is involved in transactions international causing him to have prolonged absences from his home and family. This leads to betrayal by his beautiful wife Louise who has an affair with Victor an employee of the company. Her actions cause Frank to lose control of the company and a rejection of him by the directors leading to tragic circumstances. Throughout there is the simmering prospect of war which counterpoints the everyday jealousies and differences in the tight knit community of Eden with all its political and social differences. Victor rises as Frank’s successor to a successful business.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris NZ
• Release date: Jun 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9781664107786

John Murray Hanan

The author John Murray Hanan is a much travelled retired legal practitioner and tutor in contract law at Otago University. He is now retired and is a professional artist who enjoys outdoor pursuits, music, singing and tramping. He is married with three adult children.

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Copyright © 2022 by John Murray Hanan.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 05/10/2022

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CONTENTS

1

EDEN

VICTOR GLOW, TEACHER

Victor Glow moved through sunlight so that great sun squares like handkerchiefs clothed his shining face and his monstrous silhouette swelled up against the shining wall. How extraordinary the ordinary can make us giants, he pondered. As to the wall, he asked,

‘Simpson, what do you make of it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh, nothing. It’s too slow to start . . . I mean, there’s nothing—’

‘Thank you for defining existentialism for us all. Margaret?’

‘It’s got something extraordinary about it. It’s, well, like glass—able to be seen through, but, if . . . as nothing.’

‘Aaagh . . . So there’s more behind the visible, isn’t there?’

Victor Glow’s rhetorical question floated away as he stared outside. Faint cheers of ‘Snow! Snow!’ The first fifteen players were running into the school’s turret shadows at the end of the football field, great white puff balls bursting at their mouths in the morning’s frost. They were pretending to duck each time a jet dived over them as though they feared they might be struck. At its edge, the field tilted over into Eden’s cup of cuddled houses, where nicks and flashes of opening windows spiked their haze of pots, pans, boxes, skylights, and angled roofs nudging up behind Saint Thomas’s spires. Further off, the helmeted town hall clock burrowed through the lifting mist, and along the wharves, the cranes, like praying mantises, poked up as though saluting the schoolboys braving the cold, else asking the lee cloud round Mount Joy to lift off into the heavens. A squall of seagulls was weaving over Mellor’s Ltd’s distended chimney, which echoed the periscope of the US submarine Rickover pushing through the narrows of the peninsula to join the naval exercises out at sea, cutting a glittering seam.

Really, mused Victor, Mellor’s Ltd’s ugly chimney ‘Excalibur’ slit Eden in two visually as well as politically—such a divisive line. Yet, ironically, he now held more shares in it than ever since Alice’s death . . . It could even be marking his inheritance.

With a sad finger, Glow traced the wetness gathered along the edge of his sill, spreading it thin as the jet’s shock waves jiggled the dew trails running down his window.

Savagely he pushed his window to.

It would be so good to be away from these indifferents at his back . . . Vance Benson and Mackley and Simpson and Jones. Get into Riffley’s or Murray’s; not be just their itinerant accountant or ‘adviser’—call it what you will—periodically called in to assist them whenever there was trouble, build back their tenuous links again to Mellor’s. Make it great again.

‘Hold, hold, hold! your shares in it,’ Horatio Jones’s dolt of a father Washington blindly proclaimed. The oh-so-knowing one! Claim the unwell evading death! That such a man could also be a director of it and a trustee of the school’s fund then, couldn’t anyone? Even himself? Clearly it was no longer the dynamo it once was, but if he held the helm—Glow eyed the sports field—he could make it run . . . Yes . . .

‘My father says, Mr Glow,’—the sudden closeness of the voice broke into Victor’s reverie—‘it’s cerebral nonsense. All gawps, broken-off ejaculations like horse-show jumping, full of full stops, starts, intermittent silences. Oh! They’re so meaningful or meant to be, like actor’s pauses after mistakes—worse than a kid’s over-punctuated essay. Grossly over-rated.’

‘Do you think so, Margaret?’ Victor growled. ‘And who else can contribute? Inoesco is listening, if you, Simpson, are not, waiting for Godot?’

It was a nice irony to pluck the intellect of today’s trendy professor’s daughter leaning so easily on the arm of his niece.

‘It’s stupido, Mr Glow! Dimwits in a barrel.’

‘Thank you, Simpson.’

‘Stupido.’

‘Of course.’

Another fighter plane was stretching its thread by the sun, fleeing over the students’ flats, struggling up Mount Elgin’s sides, avoiding Mellor’s chimney fumes. One could almost envisage Joshua Mellor had built it so high to mark his family’s ascendency over everyone, even jabbing those jets away. But with the strike, the US embargo, the Ayatollah’s fatwa on old Mellor, maybe its halcyon days were over and Sir Frank’s decline inevitable. So easy to fail today, the higher the harder—crash! As gods on stilts when fallen lost their divinity—like Easter Island menhirs become poor stone.

It really needed attention. Those scrawny storage sheds near the railhead would be the first to go; then those decrepit corrugated iron sheds by the wharf out of which leapt that monolithic chimney—Excalibur!—filthying everything about it. But even more importantly, those incompetent directors like Washington, Anderson, or Scott, who flailed around every time Sir Frank went overseas and did nothing but watch it all wobbling like an inglorious top spinning to an unseemly end. If by a fluke he got into it, into Mellor’s itself, he’d rejuvenate it—inject more capital, faster write-downs, better marketing—the whole damn lot—get out of this dismal theatre of the dumb, no longer having to enthuse these pasty faces in their separate worlds: Mackley and Markham, those irritants tittering, or his pretty niece Margaret in swoon land, plainly wanting her Adonis ‘Snow’ in the centre of the pack to come and sweep her away. When Alice was alive, she was . . . no, prettier—and her eyes . . . like . . . like dazzling amethysts . . . How to conjugate loveliness now that she was gone? My Alice? . . . Alice?

Why am I left when you are gone? God, why?

Victor shaded his face with his hand and then, wheeling, came out of himself.

‘As I was saying, if you want philosophy, then that’s what you do. Like Miriam’s father.’

‘Aah, she is her father’s pupil, isn’t she?’ His charming niece interrupted him. ‘Thank you so much.’

‘If you write theatre,’ chipped in Miriam Mellor, ‘you’ve got to have a bit of story or at least believable characters saying something, not just going on and on, you know. Not just clever dickedness. Personality. Don’t you think?’

‘Think?’

‘Think!’

‘Juggling too many balls. Balls.’ Jones giggled. ‘Big ones.’

Glow rat-a-tated his fingers on the window’s glass and rapped them harder as a squadron of war planes swarmed over Mount Joy, making the delicate rhododendron petals stuck on his pane fly as though picked off by the wind, and in his face instead, the glowering Rembrandt centurion print reflected, examining him accusingly.

‘Thank you, Miriam, for your erudition. Now, who else? Horatio?’

Horatio Jones, alias the Ferret, cringed tighter, sun lighting on his face. He smiled innocently—Let it not be me—and shrank down to avoid detection.

‘Horatio?’

Books didn’t butter bread, spaded nothing out, tilled no earth for growth. As Dad said, ‘What did it matter what it meant? The key is cents for tucker.’ Why can’t we just get out and enjoy ourselves? Be on the field like Snow, the lucky dog.

Glow’s apparition was looming over him.

No! Please ask Miriam first. If anyone knew, she would. Girls develop first before boys catch up and pass them.

No. (Musso’s voice in his ear.)

‘No. We’ll have Margaret’s answer first.’

Oh, you miracle worker, Yahweh.

‘As I was saying, Mr Glow, it’s just plain giddy.’

Ferret shut his eyes as Margaret Mellor ogled sensuously up at her teacher, the class in sympathy; her supercilious comment accompanying an ironic smirk as far away, remotely. ‘Snow’ and again ‘Snow’ drifted into earshot.

Spreading the dew spot under his finger firmly, Victor Glow studied it as the reverberations trembled and loosened the rust-tipped rhododendrons to fall, stippling the players on the field readying for the centennial game against college, the climax of the football year. As expected, Snowy Mellor was way out in front, the chairman’s son. Unquestionably, he would be pivotal . . . like his father, but so different with that combative streak coupled with the Mellor smugness and wilful egoism of his kind that made him tiresomely rebellious. The Mellor line . . . Small wonder sire and scion were everlastingly at odds. The father’s black hair against the son’s white.

‘Aah . . . I cannot agree we are giddy. Does Inoesco offer any escape?’ Victor Glow challenged.

‘Not even sex, sir,’ contributed Ferret with an impish grin, as out on the paddock, a rugby ball came flying towards Victor Glow’s room, with Snow surging after it. It bounced through the posts into the in-goal area where the ice still lingered, the youngster’s body slithering uncontrollably after it—‘Shit!’—to stop right outside Victor’s window, repudiating the calm he knew ought to be but his. Miriam Mellor tapped on the pane. Her beau got up, his grin returning hers. Enviously, her sister Margaret blew him a kiss to counter Miriam’s hold. Both girls nothing if not keen.

‘Ah, if we could but see—’ muttered Victor Glow, wheeling back, ‘see what . . . what all this is about.’ The droplets on his glass were hesitating.

Only then, behind the tear trails, did Victor notice the enormous poster jiving round Mellor’s chimney—so obvious he could not understand how he had missed it.

‘Unity, Equality & Justice. Vote Keggs and Victory!’ And underneath it, in shrieking red, another slogan, ‘Less work. More pay today!’ round its very midriff! What a coup for Mayor Keggs to have got it up in Mellor’s territory. A huge success—the loaders already preparing for the elections. Sir Frank, the man of the hour, perceived as too big for his boots, not even bothering to listen to their gripes, secondary as though they are in the scheme of things. And now ‘he’s leaving again for the Middle East without waiting to hear you, dismissing you for larger issues!’ said Keggs. They must have rigged it up as surreptitiously, like the spider’s web in the crook of his window. And now, Jim Long was also no longer stumping for his former attorney general as he used to, no doubt because his UN’s troubleshooting envoy was eclipsing him. And would do so again at the trade conference, which later he would attend to hear his speech and talk about the war threats.

If Sir Frank succeeded in Tehran, he would be overwhelmingly popular; but, on the other hand, to fail or his company’s strike dragged on interminably, he might be discarded. Envy so often made a traitor of supposed friends. Envy . . . like . . . Glow chided himself . . . his own, of Mellor.

The teacher slid his finger along the sill, ruminating. The PM distancing himself from his erstwhile champion—to succeed, no, change, but to fail? The deadliest sin, the love of power: politicians its exemplars, Jim Long its epitome—an art that so often tricked around tragedy; no doubt needed for order, but as Alice herself once said, when Sir Frank was elected, ‘Worth reflects the better part of human dignity. Our brief stamp upon the future mustn’t be at the expense of others,’ or something like that, the kind of generous words that had made her loveable.

He acknowledges he’s not infallible. Hooah! Such a good eulogy; Alice could sum things up so well—unlike himself.

Dear Alice . . .

Victor picked up his pointer, noticing the spider in the corner had fled its net and was beginning to climb.

Simultaneously, very cautiously, he began to advance upon Horatio Jones, alias the Ferret, head propped up, in dreamland, the school’s morning song ‘He that ruleth over men must be just, must be just’ in his ear, cautioning him. From the city’s centre, an echo came up, waves of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ and then a crisp cry of ‘Halt!’ and the chop of feet, clearly troops coming to attention near the plaza. Likely an honour guard presenting arms for the US assistant secretary of state Wineberg, who had just arrived from the US for the conference with her ambassador and the prime minister and all the other dignitaries promenading down to the town hall for the opening of the Trade and Peace Conference.

Loud and important . . . march, march, march distantly . . . tramping: formality and order, the army showing off its readiness for war, all the Arabian troubles or its preparedness for disaster or some sort of display for the US secretary of state and her team.

‘Shoulder arms!’ a command somewhere near the plaza, the echoes coming up from underneath the ANZAC arch becoming louder; a ceremonial plane whishing in from Vulcan heights, screaming overhead, now lurching up as though after something in the sun . . . whoosh! —disappearing as suddenly as it came, leaving only the strikers’ chorus haunting the after-calm . . . ‘More pay today, more pay,’ and then abruptly quieting.

Poor Mellor. He’d need all the wisdom of Solomon, superlative luck, a little touch of Lucifer or of Allah . . . or even the hand of destiny itself to succeed. So different from his own indecent task of waking Ferret Jones to reality.

Lifting his pointer carefully to cross the floor, Victor imperceptibly closed on his victim, recalling once more the school’s song, ‘He that ruleth over men must be just . . .’ Then lifting his pointer high, higher, his whole class watching him, he crashed it down by Ferret`s ear.

‘Two old men wandering around naked in barrels. What is this author Ionesco about, Master Horatio Jones, alias, I am told, the Ferret?’

‘They’ll get cold if they don’t put clothes on, sir. And the bell’s ringing, I think, sir, for the next lesson.’ Horatio squeezed up his innocent eyes.

‘Aah, such imagination. You see beyond windows, Master Jones. Your better answer no doubt will come later.’

Victor Glow cocked his eyebrow and brought his pointer to a final explosive full stop as the bell in the quadrangle ceased.

‘So, we must wait.’

‘For what, sir? Romance, war, the US smashing up the Arabs? Anything?’

‘Mr Impertinence. Horatio. For you.’

2

SIR FRANK MELLOR. SNOW’S DAD. FERRET PEEKS

Ferret wondered as he sat down whether he’d made his bike safe enough under the fuchsia to keep his parcels dry.

The laughter of the crowd before him was subsiding. He brushed a few raindrops off his coat as Snow’s dad above him leant over the lectern; his speech was now in a more serious vein, his expressive hands stilling. Snow beside him raised his eyebrows as Ferret put his sketchbook on his knee. ‘Sketching him too?’ questioned Snow, noticing his father had loudened his words whilst Ferret had lifted his eyes as if to say, ‘I’ve heard this all before,’ a movement his teacher a few rows back immediately recognised.

‘Thus we see from Napoleon’s Grande Armee retreating from Russia shrunken by Winter’s chill to the First World War’s Passchendaele—the firestorms of Dresden, the charnel house of Hiroshima, the slaughter traps of Pol Pot, and the gutting of the Gulf, citizens have more and more been dragooned into being soldiers of their states, and war has enlarged in its concept and gathered in others, so war has become implicitly more international. So, we, as it were in neglect of peace, have blood on our hands. Yes! And are we to have this again?’

Sir Frank circled his index finger warningly. The strident wheee from a fighter plane screaming overhead penetrated the hall, leaving two vapour trails visible in the windows, which Ferret set down in two thick lines.

‘Take World War I and II, both caught in Asia and subsequently America—for example, Japan on one side and then the other—so today no one is solely of one place, but we are all citizens of the world. We all hunger and thirst after not only food and water but also righteousness. Is that not so? You and me . . . So it’s not to be wondered that migration is the bane of national governments, and what is the custom of a country from what was more or less of one ethnicity is now polyglot and multicultural. More and more wealth is sought to be preserved for one’s own as more and more people crowd into our planet. Too many? Our response’—Mellor sharpened his tone, drawing in his listeners—‘has been a fragile international governance starting with The Hague Convention and then moving on to the League of Nations and thence to the United Nations, where blighted US efforts of collective control as in the Korean war failed. The shifts in power of our world’s society regrettably have not yet found comparable shifts in structures, which international governance needs: the imbalances of wealth and power persist to shame us—the poverty of the third world countries and the inadequacies of developing nations—as though what we call wealth is sometimes to be wondered at, and differences in living standards have been with us since time immemorial. And our little city in the world is in the midst of it.’

Mellor paused.

‘As you know, this is how I came to fit in—nominated by our government when called upon to provide a nominee from the Pacific for the settlement committee for the Tehran negotiations in the Middle East and subsequently accepted by both the Assembly and Security Council and then made chairman following major support from the secretary general—which is why, for the moment, I have withdrawn from the chairmanship of Mellor’s Limited, my family’s company, lest there be any conflict of interest between my business and my UN duty . . . so my loaders mis-understandingly, inexhaustibly complain I have not attended them to their gold-trimmed satisfaction . . .’

Sir Frank smiled derisively. ‘It’s an age of insecurity. A world of the anxious. But now for trade in the Middle East, which you have come here to hear my views upon . . . begins with persuading the president and Ayatollah to drop their bellicose advisers and start engaging in more profitable dialogue devoid of religious antagonism.’

The magnetic gestures and the rolling cadences of Sir Frank’s speech and its delivery against the rolling images on the screen behind him so held Frank’s audience. Maroney wondered why President Shub privately grumbled he did not trust this man whom even Bulge categorised as ‘a man of many parts, and in all an incomparable leader’. To hold an international conference in such a menial a place was silly when what could come from it could be so crucial. And it didn’t become Mellor or the city. Maybe it was to make it easier for Sir Frank to help Long in his negotiations with Maroney in Queenstown, and this is the reason Madeline Wineberg had been sent here to help. But what now Mellor was speaking of was so grim, his voice tightened in concern: starvation, too many people, water shortages, power deficits, global warming . . . did not help, and their partial analysis of them made them too heavy to think about.

Ferret sank down deeper, quickening his pencilling of Sir Frank and then moving on to pudgy Bulge (more droopy eyed) beside fatso Maroney with his flab (put down in a blob), next to Wineberg of the sharp face and razor blade lips—difficult to catch with a soft 4B—obviously peeved Sir Frank could do what she could not. No wonder the Europeans were fed up with Shub so regularly waiting for her advice before any action.

Ferret drew a long straight line as if to nowhere and then drew back, contemplating it alongside his Sir Frank Mellor’s sketch. Strength of personality, the power that made the man; hard as iron according to Mr Glow, his teacher said, yet when he was over at Snow’s house, he was just a picture of goodwill and his appointment as the UN’s lead mediator for the Tehran talks as if nothing.

Ferret scored three drunken crosses over Bulge’s baggy eyes, reminding himself portraiture was more than a photograph but capturing a man’s inner self. The soul!—which so far, he hadn’t got quite right. Too soft. In his eye, sometimes a glint of uncertainty as though he knew perfection was illusionary. Was that it? His telling today so uncomfortable. ‘So, where are we at today? To look at Middle East, where next, I go against the background of events I have described, to outline the dangers if we fail—but one stupidity—a million lives turned ash. Let me firstly say, I am grateful for your support as of our government and naturally the UN’—there was a shuffling of feet in the audience’—‘to see the contending nations rise to resolve this crisis and prevent it sliding from potential disaster into idiocy. I repeat, One nuclear bomb and a million lives made ash. What gain is that?’ Sir Frank paused.

A group of listeners at the back rose up in a gap in Frank’s speech. Unexpectedly, some of their number began to stamp a premature ovation—Mr Popular Mellor, thought Victor—as Sir Frank came forward, arms raised, which Horatio intimated by another V on his pad.

More planes flew over. The group about Sir Frank jerked about. Horatio reduced them to jabbed tick marks, enlarging as he did so the figure of supercilious mayor Ken Keggs disdainfully snuffing his handkerchief as though smelling a tincture of disgust at the applause for Sir Frank. His bureaucratic cronies trailing after him were inanely sniggering. Just plain jealous?

When he thought about it, Mellor had skimmed over the whole of the Mideastern troubles quite brilliantly, as though there was nothing ‘particularly new’ to come in it as Snowy had predicted: just carefully supporting his country— all ‘too caged’, as Snow would say . . .

With an itch of his belly, Horatio detached his attention, thinking how to sneak out with the departing group above him now he had heard the gist of Snow’s dad’s speech—its thrust. He slipped his 6B black liner back into his pencil case and pad into his tray and then picked them out, again reminded that his dad had said these local talks were really just a waste of time because the real trade negotiations would actually be later at Queenstown—and in private. This was just a circus for the public. The real question lay unspoken. ‘Would there be a war?’ when the tensions leading to it appeared so unmistakable. Yet, seemingly, this was too difficult for them to speak of, like . . . like sex! Ferret grinned to himself. Maroney was rolling around probably guessing he was being sketched (maybe fearing he was being caricatured whilst his hair was jumped up and his collar wouldn’t lie down), or, more pertinently, he feared the secrets of his American meat dealers in the Arizona lobby had been slipped out to Sir Frank ahead of their negotiations to come.

Ferret finger rubbed his pencilled cross-hatch under the big man’s nose, big as a sausage. Sir Frank had worked out Maroney had inadvertently let on he would move 3 per cent, a sufficient a nod to GATT in their trade negotiations in Queenstown. And that would be that. A nice, definite figure. A bone within the fat! For sure, Mellor would pin that down. And it was important that this be definite. Ferret peered up, imagining how he could do better if he were Maroney, the great lump. After all, he had been top of his class on public affairs in ‘Musso Napoleon’s’ class. It was personality that made power—and Maroney hadn’t got it.

Horatio pulled himself tall and pushed up his chair’s armrest to get out of the hall. He gave a nod to Snow, disappearing with the exiting crowd on the side aisle, obviously hoping for a lift with his father when he was—or if he was!—able to escape his tangling pup (somehow, the little dog had gotten in unnoticed), now delightfully preventing Wineberg and then the two fatties Maroney and Bulge corralling him from escaping. Like so many of today’s super-efficient women, she should come down a peg. Lah-di-dah, superwoman.

Horatio kicked away the flock of rust-lipped rhododendron blossoms at his feet and tugged in the exit door slides to break free into the open space of the plaza, joining the group of leavers spreading out over its tiles.

The booming guns—the fleet exercises at sea—came pounding to his ears, reminding him of his brother’s stallions thudding the earth, readying for conflict so wonderfully at odds with Sir Frank’s theme about ‘Rights and righteousness and peace’. After all, what could happen next if the Tehran conference failed? The media was braying Sir Frank ‘would be dancing on a pinhead of hope in a minefield of troubles.’ Jealous, Long would be waiting in the wings upon its outcome, so if the talks fizzled, he could make Sir Frank a scapegoat. Shub would do the same. Jealousy everywhere. Eventually, even poor old Snow would be caught up in it. Bound to be.

Glancing down at his parcels in his carrier bike (pleased to see they were still dry), Ferret got ready to cycle away. The rain clouds were holding off. The scooting planes peppering them looked as if they would shake down another downpour.

Snow’s dad’s talk had been interesting, but he hadn’t given much away, and his speech hadn’t given him any crushing answer to Musso’s idiotic question about the naked men. Maybe there wasn’t more to it than met the eye? Like the sketch he had finally made of Snow’s dad becoming much softer than he had intended; his 4B lead crumbling to dull his gleam. It could be saying Sir Frank’s popularity could not be maintained and he’d suffer the ordinary decline of everyone—we were not perfect enough, and all the rest, our minds lacked insight, and even perpetual values changed. We had simply evolved from stumbly old apes or way back still, just mushy cells? We were not free. We were not kings. How did he put that into his sketch? It was really all too big to think about. But first things first—now to get his parcels to the Bensons’ big house, number nine, so he could get back to Mr Dawson early. The old man would go on again with his politics. Bound to, with the government so unpredictable, and he’d have to dutifully listen. Who didn’t suffer who loved so much had been one of Mellor’s themes, and he’d get that again? . . . Maybe this business in Tehran would be bad enough and these tariff talks in Queenstown could be just pointless stuff; it might end up as just a time for stories.

Ferret dropped his pencil case into his basket, swung his leg over, and pushed down hard on his pedal so he could get going. Fast. He’d make his first deliveries at Bensons’ mansion and number 10, and with luck, Mrs Benson would give him iceberg crackers. The two Christmassy parcels and the sun breaking in the sky could be just his day for it, and Miriam Mellor said she might meet him there too. Hopefully.

3

EDEN CITY

MADELINE WINEBERG

It annoyed Madeline Wineberg that Sir Frank’s famous—or was it infamous bitch—Trix was almost deliberately preventing her from catching up on her ambassador shambling away into the wind and a few spits of rain. Fortunately, Sir Frank was pulling back his beloved pet, trying to pull ahead the two of them so close. Now, the hound was yapping at her attaché whom she had gotten to engage Frank in conversation to glean his plans and to re-check the times for the morrow’s publicity shots at his son’s school. The typical penance—glorify their countries accord with beatific photos of cordiality.

She threaded her way efficiently through the host of leavers pouring out of the town hall to come upon the line of picketers from Mellor’s bearing rain-runny placards, ‘Too much for the boss, too little for us.’ ‘Mellor, out! Tehran can wait! Out! Out!’

It strangely contradicted the adulation accorded Sir Frank inside.

Bobbing under their cordon, she pressed on, her formal attire, tight black shoes, stiff black suit, official black suitcase, crimping her mobility. Fortunately, the picketers seemed far more interested in the platoon of soldiers coming round the corner than anything else, their cordon quite ineffective as a stop if their protest was more from custom than from need, catcalling and lackadaisically badgering many of the crowd going by. ‘Look out—Mellor’s wolf will get you!’ cracked a well-dressed picketer as Madeline dipped under their rope. ‘Wow! He’s after you, Yankee. It’s blood!’

Madeline spun round to find Mellor’s pet at her knees and the line of unionists cackling over their members’ jape. In her backward glance, she took in again the picturesque town hall she had just left, quite the crown of the well-worn city, and further off Mellor’s grubby chimney pinning it all down. Odd that Long should have chosen this provincial town for his international conference. For more publicity for himself perhaps than anything else? Bulge had assured her, the PM had specifically chosen it—but why? Pink pavers at her feet recited local family and company names—Riffley, Mellor, Murray’s Ltd, Benson, Keggs—and on the corner, a former pokey liquorice and peppermint church, made of Oamaru and bluestone, fronted up as a re-converted theatre. It stood as if it was surveying her Victorian hotel in the dip where a few ubiquitous five- and seven-storey concrete boxes rose up aping modernity. Really nothing of note but a brightly painted billboard ‘Prisoners of Mother England, a must-see comedy by Roger Ball!’ lay mouldering flatly under the theatre’s shadowed apex. Up its slitty side in the half dark hid an even older sign, a remnant of religious glory days, squashing a scatter of thistles and uncut nettles. ‘Join us and be joyously freed from sin!’ under which was scrawled in scarlet, ‘Enjoy Susie more. Just phone 406969’.

Beside this a rivulet of rainwater continuously peed from a broken pipe onto the church’s side wall, occasionally splattering the adjoining bookstore’s window featuring a Highland manikin kilted in the local yellow-and-blue plaid and sporting a tatty sporran. ‘Eden’s a planned sanctuary for disaffected Scots,’ Bulge had scoffed when she arrived. It seemed pretty true, and it reinforced her initial impression the whole grey place was not only determinedly traditional but also proudly insular and maybe (she laughed to herself) a little backward.

Madeline quickened her step, gaining on Maroney, knowing he deserved her tongue for his discourteous behaviour leaving her team and now crabbing along head down under his umbrella fending off the thickening rain. Catching him at last (she had not forgotten he had once been a competitor for her job), she recalled his peculiar air of Pickwickian puzzlement when he shut his eyes as in shock when she tugged his sleeve and breathlessly queried, ‘Why was this city chosen for this conference?’ glaring at the blackening clouds.

Maroney’s response was to lift his head to the dismal sky and then whirl his umbrella so she was dotted with careless droplets. His eyes opening with pitying disdain, he mumbled, ‘Well, I assure you it’s not its wealth. Long since gone, to use Jim’s expression . . . Yep, Jim’s scheme to save cents, I reckon. They’re so thrifty down here, they won’t even pay for security guards to see us safe to Queenstown—softening us up, no doubt, before we go to the Remarkables out of inland Otako, Madeline, for our trade talks, the real conference venue, where you’ll be leaving us—the cheapest route, and do you know why?’

‘Why?’ she indulged him.

‘Because they’re so wet, Madeline!’

He shook with voluminous laughter, littering her with a reef of tiny rain spots, before adding, with a tap to the flare of his nose, ‘Politics, my dear. Our game,’ and then tapping the other side, ‘no. Local jealousies. For shame, the wind sets on the shoulder of your sail and you are stayed for, because Mellor, our great orator, holds this place together, and the PM needs him for the elections looming despite his company’s problems, which might prove his Achilles’ heel. Nice little village, though. Got a university, of course, and a few slivers of old gold in its lining. Then there’s Mellor’s belching chimney stick, that ugly pipe, Mellor’s Limited. See? Best Meat from Eden.’

‘Come on, Jo—the real reason.’

‘The strike. Been grinding for some time. Eden’s mayor, Keggs, the stiffy who introduced us on stage, hates Sir Frank, whom you’ve just met—an’ it’s split the town, almost the country. How the vote goes here is crucial to Long’s government. Mellor’s got everything—international prestige, money, a pretty wife, an old boys’ network, the lot—a Wonder Boy too powerful for the unionists, so envy’s butcher’s knife is out. He ignores it, of course (rightly, I think, given their fat pay), so, naturally, the employers run with him, so, naturally, the Socialists oppose, making our Jim Long naturally squawk foul, and, naturally, he’s readied his Liberals to join in. Wonderful!

‘So, naturally, a battle royal’s looming, just like back at home or round the world, all sproutin’ confrontation before war as Tehran threatens or elections.’ Aah, the delights of provinciality! Envy forever the spur to gain. This hole’s the nation’s eye—especially since Mellor’s UN appointment. And now this UN job in Tehran takes him away! Spot on for the Left to go el troppo and the Right to come fighting back, so, naturally, with the elections due this conference is critical. The key is power—whilst in the wings their farmers set up a whine worse than mosquitoes—our tariff talks, Madeline, which I will suffer. And, gee, they grizzle!’ Maroney broke off to watch the guard of soldiers crunching towards them followed by a graunching army carrier. March, march, march. A cyclist with parcels in his basket and Dawsons on its side shot past.

March, march, march. A group of strikers from the picket line, having meandered along the pavement opposite, began booing and barracking the troops whipped up by a red-headed provocateur as if objecting to any establishment show of strength by a show of their own; their hootings were timed to the beat of their feet and the tramp of the steps thrashing through the puddles of the cold wet pools behind their camouflaged carrier. With its passing, the strikers protests fell away, and they traipsed off up the road, holding together in a shuffling rhythm of their own.

‘More pay today! Too little for us, too much for the boss. Mellor, out, out, out!’ their rebellious shouting dying away as they straggled out of sight.

‘Mellor, out! Mellor, out.’

Though this interruption stimulated his thoughts, Maroney became more animated, his big voice booming. ‘Now, here we come in, unlike that mob of grizzlers, with our judicious finesse. They think if we don’t give them enough, they’ll turn traitors and tip the Liberals into skid-street!—lest Mellor buoys them better—for instance, pulls off this UN thing in the East. Oh, saviour, win this and all’s won! That’s Long’s hope at least—the bloody optimist, and with this, a tsunami of euphoria his party will end in a glorious victory and the Grey Witch’s demise—’

Maroney rolled his eyes up, and, pulling a hanky from his breast pocket, he held it to flutter like a pennant in the air.

‘I give you more! The whole scene. I set it: Naturally! We’ve anarchists here who number amongst Long’s greatest enemies, a resident firebrand, Robbie the Red (red for his furious hair), the Grey Witch’s hothead—after Keggs, of course—who vents his spleen on Mellor and Mellor Ltd ad nauseam and rushes into web and print whenever our hero trots off overseas to do his duty for the UN as though the man were an absentee landlord and Robbie the leader of the Irish oppressed! Keggsy behind them still the manipulator, of course. All lovely stuff. Great success breeds great enemies and even greater envies. Robbie’s more than your standard hothead, Madeline; an out-of-the-ark Marxist from the greeny Dark Ages—capital Evil, Sir Frank its effigy, an’ you, no doubt, his overseas apologist. Jeez, this country is as contradictory as life itself.’ Maroney looked archly about as if revealing a fabulous secret.

‘An interventionist government whilst under the surface individualism’s rampant, families under strain (I reckon more than is admitted), distribution uneven in the shifting fears of adequacy and sufficiency and depletion of supply, faith faltering, churches as you see shut-doored, man more monkey than of God’s clay—lesser than a spark on a speck spiralling universe, all very modern, all very wicked, ma’am, jails full and suicides aplenty—’

‘Any more?’ interjected Wineberg sarcastically, so as to shorten his spiel.

‘Oh, yes! And out of so little! If their Greens go burbling on about some new Panathenaic divinity, heroic materialism a dirty word and profit an obscenity, it’s because they’re so well off. No oil in this island paradise but energy aplenty, water blessed, food galore, yet so many—these Eden-ites in particular—always crying the horses of the Apocalypse are on the crest! The Socialists wanting it all equal grey, the Liberals wanting it all unbarred, the Conservatives just stuck-in-the-mud wanting everything back, and the others, w’all—just wanting.’

Maroney threw up his hands as in exasperation.

‘Everywhere, technocrats and civil servants reign supreme, in sum a paradise full of disparities so we—’ Maroney made a dramatic halt and clicked his umbrella shut—‘so we back no one. Not even Sir Frank.’

With a grin and rolling his expansive girth, Maroney gave a hitch of his trousers.

‘Poor fella. Do I give you the picture naturally, naturally?’

His lip rose in a sniff as he looked up. ‘And not many trust us either. These islanders, so insular . . . they dri-ff-t.’

There was a quick flit of sun; the fat man skimmed out his hand.

‘So their smallness is beautiful, and our bigness, ugly. I set the scene. We jump our planet and shrink boundaries out of maps. Power! Whee! We have it.’ Opportunely, a military helicopter picked itself across the sky . . .

‘And all this and peace in the dungeon, the ominous portents I foresee, dear Madeline, without counting these Persian swell heads whom we must put down.’

‘Any more?’

‘Good hotel, though.’ Maroney waggled his hands, laughing.

Whether what Maroney had said was fictional or factual, Wineberg could not fathom for now he made a small pirouette as though belittling himself, and chortled, ‘In a nutshell, that’s it—continent versus island! The top blanket you can see, but not what’s canoodling underneath. What a wonder! And to have thrown up this impressive envoy, this Sir Frank Mellor! But we must have something to complain of, mustn’t we? to know our worth and prove ourselves.’

Maroney jollying pointed up his hands. ‘Like them.’

Over Madeline’s head stood two plaster sirens jutting from the hotel’s door’s lintel, like boat prow maidens setting out. With a snap, Maroney closed his umbrella tighter and spread his hand sensuously towards them. The mermaids’ scalloped thighs were glinting silver wetness.

‘Hail! I bring you sun and loveliness.’

His hyperbole, however, was reduced by the sullen chorus of the strikers floating back from somewhere out of sight. ‘Mellor, out, out, out!’

Searching about the government buildings behind to find where the voices came from, Madeline fancied she could make out Sir Frank’s hawk-like figure on the star tiles of the plaza. Beside him, drawn in close, stood his statuesque wife, dressed in stunning scarlet and scarved by a gorgeous sable sash. Louise-truly elegant and commanding with quite beautiful hair, a mind as sharp as her husband’s (maybe more so), but ‘naturally’ (to use Maroney’s expression) less celebrated than her spouse given his benefits of office. Nevertheless, she eclipsed those about her in a way that somehow made Madeline feel jealous. Looks, sense, poise. Incomparably beautiful.

It was probably Joe Maroney’s lack of definition too, Madeline later conjectured as she found her way back to her hotel to whom the porter proffered her assistance. In her thoughts, she decided what had caused Joe Maroney to be transferred from Tehran to here was because he was always embellishing facts with his tinge of cynicism and his own idiosyncratic views with a subtle edge of impertinence.

‘I dare say you’re over here to size up Mellor, not help me with my trade negotiations, Madeline. You’ll see Sir Frank more tomorrow at his school on our goodwill and publicity stunt. He’s a stickler for tidy procedure, so don’t be late. He’s not susceptible to flattery or easily swayed by our particular interests. We’ve pulled an iron knight out of the bottle.’

‘Have we?’

‘Therefore, good and bad, Madeline. Yeah, a champion wielding a sword. Strong enough to be dangerous but too driven to be loved. Our president’s a bit late to have you checking up on him to ensure he comes with us. He’s his own neatly dressed man. You’ll see him at the Mayoral Ball a week hence anyhow, yeah?’ Maroney guffawed. ‘Naturally?’

‘No. I’m booked for China. I’ll have made my mind up by then and reported. I’ve got to give Shub our decision before the Tehran talks before then,’ she responded carefully. Still, the way Joe had spoken of Mellor was identical to her own thinking. She’d give him that. Mellor was somewhat dignified—a special spark, his carriage, his manner—a type of stature others lacked. Dignity and integrity. Difficult.

‘Mana? Is that the word they use here for him? Joe?’

Maroney was gabbling on again. ‘When what we are about, they think is suspect too.’ He was always lacing his comments with a touch of sardonic irony.

‘I’ll see you then at the school. Our best shots for publicity. At nine. Adios.’

‘Yes, Joe. Your photo opportunity.’

‘Of course. My good looks. Naturally, ha, ha.’

Later, following a short rest, Madeline Wineberg got up from her standard hotel bed to look out of her window and more reflectively contemplate the city she was in. In