Free Dragons at the Party by Jon Cleary Page B

of the family fortune with him because by then there had been little of it left. At first they had not liked Australia and, when Elisabeth found herself pregnant, had gone home to Holland. A year there had convinced them they could never live in the northern climate and, with the baby Lisa, they had come back to Australia. He had gone to work in the rubber trade, at first working for Dunlop, then starting his own business making rubber heels. By the time Malone had married Lisa, half of Australia, including its police forces, were walking on Pretorious heels. Jan had once had all the arrogance of a colonial imperialist, but Australia had mellowed him; it had been that or get his face pushed in by the likes of Con Malone. He still occasionally dreamed of the old days, but he was dreaming as much of his adventurous youth in the Sumatran jungle as he was of a dead and gone imperialism. He and Con had one thing in common: they would like to turn the clock back, though it would not be the same clock. Scobie did not love him, but he felt an affection for him and a respect that was almost like love.
    “I don’t like the looks of that Madame Timori,” said Brigid Malone, who read only the Women’s Weekly but never truly believed what it told her. “She’s all fashion-plate and nothing underneath it.”
    “She’s just a decoration for him ,” said Elisabeth Pretorious.
    Their husbands looked at them, wondering if and when they had been decorated.
    How wrong you both are, thought Malone, looking at his mother and mother-in-law.
    Brigid Malone and Elisabeth Pretorious had nothing in common except, perhaps, a distant beauty. They had once been pretty girls, but the years of hard work, two miscarriages, another child dying in infancy and her bitter disappointment at the way her trusted God had treated her had crumpled and smudged and almost obliterated, except to the sharpest eye, that Brigid Hourigan of long ago. She now spent her time visiting her grandchildren and once a week going with Con to the senior citizens’ club in Erskineville, where they had lived for fifty years and where she and Con railed against the immigrant newcomers whom neither of them would ever call Australians.
    President Timori could have been a Catholic saint but Brigid Malone would never have made him welcome, not in Australia.
    Elisabeth Pretorious had kept some of her looks. Money and a less arduous life had enabled her to do that; also she had had fewer disappointments than Brigid. Her God had been a comfortable one who, through the sleek smug priest in the suburb where she lived, never asked too much of her. She was a Friend of the Art Gallery, a Friend of the Opera and she was forever mentioning her good friends the So-and-So’s; but as far as Malone could tell she had no friends at all and he felt sorry for her. It struck him only then that she and his mother might have something else in common.
    “Do we have to have them here?” she said.
    Malone shrugged, let his daughters slide off his lap. They jumped back into the pool as if it were their natural habitat. “What would you do? Would you let them stay?”
    “No,” said his father-in-law.
    “They claim they’re political refugees.”
    Pretorious gave him a sharp look: almost forty years ago he and Elisabeth had made the same claim for themselves. “I think we have to draw the line somewhere. The man’s a murderer. Or his army was.”
    “It’s his army that’s kicked him out.”
    “Are you on his side?” said Con Malone suspiciously.
    “Christ, no!”
    The centurion leaned across and whacked him on the knee with his sword. “You told me not to say Christ. That’s swearing.”
    “Indeed it is,” said Brigid, smiling sweetly at her four-year-old saint.
    Lisa had been sitting quietly and Malone knew she was studying him. Some husbands are unfortunate in the way their wives study them, but those wives are those who know they could have done better. Malone knew, however, that he