Dragons at the Party. Jon Cleary

the Fuzz.’ He picked up Tom and kissed him. His own mother Brigid had probably kissed him as a very small child, but from Tom’s age he could remember no kisses from the hard-working religious woman who loved him but was incapable of public sentiment. He sometimes wondered how often she had kissed his father and if she still did. Malone himself made a point of being affectionate towards his wife and children. ‘Where’s Mum?’

      ‘Here.’

      Lisa stood in the kitchen doorway silhouetted against the late sunlight coming through from the back of the house. She was in shorts and a halter-top and at thirty-seven she still had the figure she had had at twenty-seven. She swam every day, summer and winter, something he didn’t do in the unheated pool, and she went to a gym class twice a week. She was more beautiful than he knew he deserved, but she was not vain about it nor was she fanatical about keeping fit. She had been born in Holland and she had the Dutch (well, some Dutch) habit of discipline. She and her parents were as unlike Hans Vanderberg as it was possible to be.

      ‘A bad day?’ She could recognize the signs.

      He nodded. ‘What did you do?’

      ‘Mother and Dad took us all to Eliza’s for lunch, then we came back here and swam all afternoon. They’re out by the pool with Claire and Maureen. Your mother and father are here, too.’

      Malone rolled his eyes in mock agony. ‘Now I know how the Abos felt on that first Australia Day. Who’s going to be the first to tell me what to do with Timori? Dad or your old man?’

      ‘You’re my old man,’ said Tom. ‘The kids at school call you that.’

      ‘You’ve got a pretty bright lot at your kindy,’ said Malone. ‘They know an old man when they see one.’

      He changed into his swim-trunks, went out to the back yard, kissed his daughters, said hello to his parents and his in-laws, swam half-a-dozen lengths of the thirty-five-foot pool, then climbed out, sat down and waited for the avalanche of opinion.

      Con Malone pushed the first boulder. ‘All right, what’s he like? When they let crims like him into the country, it’s time I went back to the Ould Country.’ Con had been born in Australia, had never set foot outside it, but was always threatening to go back to Ireland. He was sixty-eight years old, every year stamped there in the square, creased face with its long upper lip; he was built like a tree-trunk (he had once been a timber worker) and he still couldn’t say no to a fight, anyone, any time, anywhere. Only his age and the shame of younger opponents saved him from a licking. ‘Him and Phil Norval are a good pair.’

      ‘Oh, I don’t think Norval’s corrupt or a criminal. He’s too stupid for that.’ Jan Pretorius was a Liberal voter, that is to say a conservative one. When, some decades ago, the conservative party, looking for a new image, had usurped the name Liberal for itself, the ghost of Gladstone had climbed out of his grave in England but, with Australia already full of English ghosts, had been denied entry to protest his case. The name did not worry Jan Pretorious; he voted for the party’s principles, which suited his own conservative outlook. He had a respect for politics and politicians that over-rode his contempt for some of the latter. He was still European, and not Australian, in that attitude. ‘Someone is putting pressure on him to allow President Timori to stay here.’

      ‘The bloody Yanks,’ said Con Malone, who would blame the Americans for everything and anything.

      ‘You think so?’ Pretorious looked at his son-in-law. He was a distinguished-looking man, with silver-grey hair and a florid face that, despite his having been born in the tropics, had never become accustomed to the Australian sun.

      ‘I think it might be closer to home,’ said Malone.

      ‘Who?’ said Brigid Malone and Elisabeth Pretorious together. They had no interest in politics, but they had a parfumier’s nose for a whiff of gossip.

      Malone smiled, dodging the question and gave his attention to his daughters who, wet and slippery, slid over him like young dolphins. He looked at Lisa, who had the centurion in her lap. ‘I’m going to be working all weekend.’

      ‘Awh-h-h-h Daddy!’ his daughters chorused and Tom waved his sword threateningly.

      ‘Why don’t you apply for an administrative job, a nine-to-five one?’ said Pretorious.

      ‘Because he’d be unbearable to live with,’ said Lisa.

      ‘He oughta never been a copper in the first place,’ said Con Malone, who had taken years to live with the shame of being a policeman’s father, ‘I done me best to talk him out of it.’

      Malone, above the heads of his daughters, studied the two old men. They were the gold, if from opposite ends of the reef, that was the decency of this celebrating nation. Con Malone was the almost archetypal working man of the past: class conscious, prejudiced, scrupulously honest about his beliefs and passionately dedicated to mateship. He had recognized that the world at large had enemies: Hitler, Tojo and, later, Stalin. There was, however, only one real enemy in his eyes: the boss, any boss. Now that he was retired, living on his pension, he sometimes seemed at a loss without an enemy to hate. He and his son fought with words, but he would only raise his fist for Scobie, never against him. Malone loved him with a warmth that, like his mother, he would be too embarrassed to confess to the old man.

      Jan Pretorious, too, was retired; but he had been a boss. He had been born in Sumatra of a Dutch family that had lived there for four generations making money out of rubber, tea and the natives. He and Lisa’s mother had come to Australia after Indonesia had gained its independence; he had brought little 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