Free Helga's Web by Jon Cleary

daughter-in-law who made as much money as her son: that wasn’t the way the world was supposed to be run. “Not the people you work with. Your clients, I mean. You think they’re insular?”
    “Some of them are the worst,” Lisa said. “I have a date on Wednesday with one of them. Ostensibly I’m supposed to be helping her promote the Blue and Red Ball. What she really wants me to do is make sure she’ll be the Queen Bee of Sydney Society. That’s Society with a capital S. She wouldn’t be interested in the general sort.”
    “Aren’t there any Queen Bees of London Society?” he said, defending a type of Sydney woman he had never met and whom he privately sneered at on the rare occasions when he read the social pages of the newspapers.
    She saw she had made a mistake in opening up the discussion. She kissed him again. “Let’s forget her. Instead, I’ll promote you into being Police Commissioner.”
    “My mother would never be able to take that. It would be worse than being promoted as the Anti-Pope.”

CHAPTER FOUR
    Thursday, November 28
     
1
    Walter Helidon came out of State Parliament House and stood in the sun on the verandah. Across the street were the buildings that housed the city’s medical specialists; every doorway stood in the midst of its own discreet aureole of brass plates. Next door to Parliament House was Sydney Hos- pital, a Victorian massif designed to depress approaching patients. Whoever had planned Macquarie Street had been a man with a wry sense of humour: standing politics and medicine side by side, he had invited the citizens to choose their own palliatives.
    Helidon.mopped his brow, cursing that he sweated so eas- ily; it destroyed the image he so meticulously tried to create. It was difficult to be urbane when your face was shining, your shirt was sticking to your back and your glasses were misting up. He took off his glasses, the thick hom-rims that he thought made him look businesslike as well as urbane, wiped them and put them back on. Then he took out his pipe, another part of his image, and began to fill it. He sometimes regretted the pipe. It suggested a resemblance to Harold Wilson, a politician he would hardly have chosen as a model; but he had adopted the pipe long before Mr. Wilson’s image had been so universally projected and it was too late to change now. Passers-by in the street looked across the courtyard at him and he saw the sudden stiffening of the head on one or two of them that showed he had been recognized. That warmed him more than the afternoon sun, but didn’t make him sweat; politicians only sweated when they were not recognized. He wondered if he should nod to them, then decided against it; nods and smiles got you no votes unless they were for someone in your own electorate. Better to look businesslike, perhaps a little preoccupied with the affairs of government.
    An Opposition Member came out and went down the steps, hurrying back to Party headquarters and further instructions on how to think. “Another wasted afternoon, Wally. Why don’t your mob learn how to get some business done? You’re supposed to be the businessmen’s party.”
    “Just keeping you fellows in a job.” He wished they would give up calling him Wally: that didn’t have much suggestion of dignity about it for a Cabinet Minister, even a junior one.
    A long crocodile of students went past on the opposite side of the road, their banners demanding an end to the war in Vietnam. As they passed they gave a perfunctory chorus of boos to Parliament House, but the off-handedness of their manner was more of an insult than their abuse; their main target was the Commonwealth offices some blocks away and they dismissed the home of the State parliamentarians as if it were no more than a suburban town hall. Helidon’s resentment of them was double-edged: he did not believe students were entitled to the voice they were assuming, but, if they were going to demand a voice, they should have more