Holt

1

Harold can see, through the fog of his glass diving mask, the smile on Marjorie’s face.

‘Put your snorkel away, Harry. You look ridiculous.’

‘You are notified, Marjorie,’ Harold says, standing to attention. ‘If I take this snorkel off, I’ll be completely naked.’

Marjorie makes a show of covering her eyes. But their laughter is cut short by a light in the window.

In a moment, the snorkel is off and Harold is jerking on underpants. Buttoning a shirt.

Marj rises to investigate. She sighs. ‘Your wife’s early.’

Harold shrugs on his jacket.

‘Are you going to tell Zara tonight?’

‘Perhaps,’ he says.

‘Harry,’ she takes his hand. ‘You told me you’d made up your mind.’ 

‘I know, I know,’ he says, pulling away and scanning the room for his loafers. ‘But this isn’t parliament, Marj. I can’t just bluff my way through question time and hope it all goes away.’ He scoops up a loafer and hops around the room trying to get into it.

He loves Marjorie. He does. But divorcing Zara won’t be easy. Although no-fault divorce won’t be introduced in Australia until 1975, if the wrongdoing is his, he knows Zara will take him for the lot: their home in Toorak, the shack in Queensland, even this Portsea bungalow, next door to Marjorie Gillespie’s. She might go him for the Pontiac, too.

‘Are you getting cold feet on me, Harry?’ Marj asks.

‘I need a shoehorn,’ Harold says, hopping about.

‘If you’re getting cold feet, I need to know.’

He finally gets into his loafers. ‘I’m not getting cold feet.’ He tries to reassure her with a passionate kiss. ‘I’m not getting cold feet.’ He then propels himself towards the door, leaving Marj with the snorkel in hand.

‘What am I supposed to do with this?’ she cries.

‘Keep it,’ he says, halfway out the door. ‘I’ll take you spearfishing tomorrow.’

As Harold sneaks through the carport of his adjacent beach house, his stomach starts to turn. Is it guilt? Or is it the fear of losing everything? He runs his hand over the sleek maroon side of his Pontiac, as a trainer might caress a lame horse he has to shoot. It’s an American car for a man whose model leader is American president, Lyndon Baines Johnson. I’m sure LBJ has sheilas all over the place, thinks Harold. Although he probably calls them broads not sheilas. Maybe I should get on the blower to him.

But Zara’s here now, and he’s out of time. It’s now or never.

Australians won’t have colour TV until 1974, so it is in a flashing grey glare that Zara sits and watches commercials. She holds a wisping cigarette to one side.

Harold almost laughs when he sees the Virginia Slims packet on the table beside her. He doesn’t know why the words of the tobacco commercial pop into his head: You’ve come a long way baby, to get where you’ve got to today!

‘Don’t smile at me Harold,’ Zara says. ‘I won’t come here again.’

‘This is your beach house as much as mine,’ Harold says.

‘No it’s not. It’s yours. It might as well be hers.’

Harold drops his briefcase and fills the egg of an armchair across the room.

‘We had an agreement, Harold.’ Zara sucks in a heavy drag. ‘I wouldn’t ask where you were, so long as I didn’t have to worry about knocking on closed doors.’ She releases a stream of smoke in the direction of the window.

Harold shakes his head. Thinks of the Virginia Slims commercial: You’ve got your own cigarette now baby! ‘I was out,’ he says feebly.

This is a straight-faced lie. In 1967 nothing’s open on a Saturday but takeaway shops.

‘I can smell her perfume from here, darling,’ Zara says.

Now Harold takes a diver’s breath. He ought to tell her the truth. He owes her that much. But Zara speaks first.

‘I’m divorcing you Harold,’ she says. ‘I can’t do it anymore.’

He’s elated and devastated at once. With the dignified calm that first attracted him to her, she gently butts her cigarette in a brass ashtray, rises, and crosses the distance between them.

Zara collects his briefcase from the floor. He knows she must be furious, but she doesn’t show it as she fishes around inside the monogrammed leather case. She’d make a fine prime minister.

‘We should eat,’ she says calmly. ‘Do you feel like Italian?’

‘What about Chinese?’

‘I thought you hated Chinese.’

‘Not as much as I hate pizza.’

‘Fine,’ Zara digs deeper into the briefcase. ‘Where’s your wallet?’

Harold pats his breast pocket, then his trousers. He passes a guilty look to the window.

This pricks a nerve with Zara who drops the briefcase and strides away into the kitchen, swiping her Virginia Slims on the way.

She’s done the hard work for him. But even still, he can’t bring himself to tell her he intends to quit the job. Come to think of it, he hasn’t even told Marj yet. While Zara understands marriage as a business transaction, she might be genuinely offended that he is giving up office after only two years. But Harold feels that if he’s going to go, he has to go out guns blazing, like John Wayne in The Alamo.

Everything about political life, from his marriage to Zara, to staring down the barrel of a television camera as he explains how decimal currency works, gives him the shits. Was that an expression in the Sixties? “Flipped his wig” might be more appropriate.

It flips his wig that less than twelve months ago, in January 1966, he was touted as Australia’s 007 prime minister, the debonair, barrel-chested spearfisherman from Toorak. In fact, if they ever cast an Australian as Bond (why would they?), he’d be it.

Now, just because of a crashed navy ship and a few other political boo-boos, voters want him out. His predecessor, Robert Menzies, held the job for 20 years. Harold knows it’s the height of the swinging Sixties, but have people’s attention spans shrivelled so quickly? That’s television for you. God help us once colour comes in. Things were a lot easier when the war was on.

Now he just wants to be Harry from Portsea. G’day mate, got the Herald this morning mate? Nice weather out. Cabbage hat-wearing Harry from Portsea. That’s who he wants to be. Calm water today, Harry. You taking the spear gun out?

Somehow, along the line, he ended up in politics. He was told he had a knack for people. Down to earth Harry Holt. And Zara was the ideal prime minister’s wife. That’s not the only reason he married her. He fathered the twins, of course, and for seven years Zara had to pretend they were her husband’s.

They waited until the war was over to be married. Zara blamed her divorce on the war. It wasn’t so bad when you had a reason. And nothing takes the paint off a marriage like the stress of Japs in PNG. But now Harold wonders what public excuse they will come up with to explain this divorce.

He thinks back to the newspaper headline from his first day in office: 007 is ready to be prime minister. Harold knows the secret agent image comes from all his spearfishing, not to mention the flash cars and holidays to exotic places like Townsville, but he can’t help but also take the compliment to mean he looks like Sean Connery. Sometimes, like an actor, if a person stays in character long enough, it becomes them. And like Sean Connery, Harold Holt has women right across the country.

Is it because his mother died when he was young, and he was unable to attend her funeral? Or is this unquenchable longing for a woman’s affection the fault of his father, a randy theatre producer who cuckolded his eldest son by marrying Harold’s girlfriend, half Holt Senior’s age?

Whatever the reason, he’s decided to put his philandering in mothballs. He’s going to make good. Start again. Like old King Edward, he’ll marry for love. But like old King Edward, that also means he has to give up the job. He wonders if this is what the biographers will hone in on in years to come.

‘This is my last Christmas in Portsea,’ Zara says in official tones. She returns to the living room wreathed in a heady cloud of cigarette smoke. ‘We will put on a show, for our guests. You will pretend that Marjorie is only our close neighbour. But in the new year, we will plan how to handle this divorce.’

Harold doesn’t complain. Although he knows he’s going to cop the flack for the divorce, it will all be worth it when he’s relaxing on a beach with Marjorie north of the Tropic of Capricorn.

Zara places cash on the lampstand. ‘You get the Chinese.’ 

2

Not six months has passed, and Harold Holt stands before his deputy in the belly of Parliament House. Under light mired by rings of smoke, Harold Holt hands over his documents.

There is a look on Billy McMahon’s face that makes Harold sick. It is the plump smile of a man so desperate to be prime minister, he’d send his own mother to Vietnam if it guaranteed him the job. Harold feels ill because he’s sure he looked that way, not so long ago.

McMahon is one of those thick bastards so blinded by his desires that he cannot see what’s in front of him. He thinks Harold is joining the secret service.

‘Where are you to be posted?’ McMahon asks, snapping shut the clasps on his briefcase. ‘Malaya? Hong Kong? Saigon?’

Harold regards the photograph tacked inside his briefcase. He’s kept it there for months. The palm beach scene, like a set from a Bond film. It’s his north star. Billy has no idea where he’s going.

Harold Holt’s second year in office is coming to a close. You’d think it would be smooth sailing for Australia’s 17th prime minister, who has inherited decades of public trust in the coalition’s ability to deliver “a better future” every three years. After all, Holt was elected in a landslide just a year earlier. But no, 1967 has been as choppy as the waters off Cheviot Beach.

From those bloody liberal democrats constipating parliament to the scandal over his family abusing VIP aircraft, Harold Holt is over it.

‘Who is it?’ Billy asks eagerly, patting perspiration from his bald head. ‘Is it ASIO? The Defence Signals Division? No, no. CIA? MI6? A foreign agency.’

Harold tells him he’s keeping it close to his chest. He likes toying with Billy. They say a country gets the government it deserves. Well, if they took me for granted, Harold thinks, they’ve earned this hardboiled egg for a prime minister. In his briefcase is a new passport and new driver’s licence. On both, a new name. Once he departs, Harold Holt the prime minister will be as good as dead.

3

Of all the conspiracies about Harold Holt’s disappearance, perhaps the most enduring is the one where he defects to communist China. It has its comparison, say, in conspiracies where the CIA knocks off JFK, or where Hitler escapes to Argentina, but with a distinct Australian xenophobia.

The water is rough on Cheviot Beach, but Harold Holt, last accompanied by his mistress, dives in anyway. Allegedly, he swims as far as he can before two Chinese frogmen intercept him. They buddy-breathe the eloping prime minister on a soviet oxygen tank until he is safely stowed on a midget sub which has been idling offshore. It’s like a deleted scene out of Destination Tokyo starring Cary Grant.

But then everyone tells Harold his style is more Sean Connery, and perhaps that offers an explanation, too. The circumstances of the prime minister’s disappearance are not unlike the opening of Connery’s penultimate Bond film, You Only Live Twice. In the film, Bond’s supposed cadaver is buried at sea, only to be collected by divers and conveyed to a British submarine. It is revealed that Bond has been on oxygen the whole time. Rising from the dead, Bond is free to operate incognito in the streets of Japan, as he seeks out the nefarious Ernst Stavro Blofeld.

Perhaps films have nothing to do with it though. The theory of Chinese frogmen may simply arise because Harold gives his deputy a bum steer. Billy McMahon has a notoriously big mouth, and Harold tells McMahon he is joining the secret service to throw him off. He’s weary of the publicity. And he’s weary of question time.

But what if there has been so much attention given to Harold Holt’s supposed escape by sub, that the public has missed the blaring obvious? While some prime ministers will be remembered for submarines, in 1967 Harold Holt is up to his neck in planes.

It’s question time in parliament, sitting day October 4th, and Harold Holt has to shout over the howling Labor opposition. ‘The new fleet of planes was ordered in 1965’, he strains, ‘before my time, to replace very old aircraft, for goodness sake.’

Boo!

‘There has been an attempt to conjure up a picture of a great splurge of expenditure.’

Boo-oo!

‘Show us the receipts!’ one Labor backbencher howls. Gough Whitlam stands to his feet and, when the speaker is looking down at his notes, flips Harold the bird.

‘The work of a government goes on around the clock. I can fairly claim an average work week of 80 hours. Sometimes more.’

‘Often less!’ crows Whitlam.

Harold straightens. Remains calm, but assertive. ‘Work must continue even while we are flying to a destination.’

Arthur Calwell is literally foaming at the mouth. All opposition ministers, from frontbench to backbench, are furious at even a whiff of parliamentary privilege, which is a bit rich, considering some of them have used VIP planes to return from places like Perth. But this is question time, and it’s a bloodletting for an already wounded government.

Even some of the government’s own ministers are twitching.

‘Before I conclude,’ Harold says, ‘perhaps I might deal with some of the mythology that has developed around this subject.’ He spends a few moments clearing up rumours about his family abusing the fleet before turning to the elephant fish in the room: ‘Now, one or two of my friends opposite have been making gibes about the use of an aircraft for a fishing trip—’

The opposition breaks into an all-out riot. The Hansard typist can’t keep up. The speaker throws up his hands.

Harold rips off his tie. He has fought all year to keep the manifests of VIP flights a secret. He has buried the overblown cost of maintaining the fleet in the defence budget. It is all so that, when the day comes, he will be able to use that chubby little Douglas Dakota hidden out at the Tyabb Aerodrome to make a quick getaway to warmer latitudes.

Now he says, ‘What critics overlook is that a prime minister is never able to divorce himself from his job. He is never in a real sense absent from his duty. I needed staff with me, even on fishing trips.’

The boos continue. Gough Whitlam shouts, ‘The prime minister’s gone fishin’, Mr Speaker!’

‘Wherever he is, a prime minister is never off duty,’ Harold repeats. His hot face cools a little. His tone becomes wistful. ‘I only wish that sometimes I could be.’

4

It’s the week before Christmas 1967, and Harold Holt’s living room jives with partygoers from Portsea’s posh end.

Parliament may be over, but parties these days seem to be a never-ending question time of their own. It’s as if no-one can talk to the prime minister about sports or cars. They feel the need to emphasise their political knowledge around him. It’s as if their friendships are based on nothing but status.

Amidst all the gossip and political posturing, none of Harold’s guests care to question why Zara has stayed in Canberra this year.

Preparing for the Christmas party at the Lodge, Harold says. It isn’t a lie. There will be a Christmas party at the Lodge. He just won’t be there.

In fact, he won’t be here after tomorrow. He needs to talk to Marjorie. It’s been twelve months in the planning, and now that plans are finalised. He can tell her where to find him. After Christmas, when they have buried his empty casket, she will join him in Far North Queensland, where he will be sucking the flesh out of shrimp tails. That’s where they will start their new life together.

But all afternoon he has tried to get close to her, to let her know the plan is going ahead. And every time, some other dullard, ecstatic to be a member of the PM’s social circle, drags him into a conversation about politics.

That must be what it is. Surely she isn’t avoiding him.

‘Where’d you park the plane, Harry?’ young Alan Stewart shouts over the music. At first, Harold’s gut shrinks in a vice of fear. But Alan is laughing. It’s a jibe about the flights scandal.

‘Give it a rinse, Alan.’ Harold pushes past him.

A few others chew his ear about the year’s political mishaps. Fortunately, there’s no talk about Vietnam. Friends of the family know Vietnam is a four-letter word around the prime minister.

‘Harry!’ calls Winton Gillespie across three conversations.

Bloody hell. Harold scans the room but can’t find Marjorie anywhere.

‘Harry! Come have a hit with me!’

‘Coke?’

‘No. Tennis.’

Although Harold’s shoulder has been a problem, he says yes. He should really rest it. But there is something about Winton Gillespie that makes Harold want to beat him.

Maybe that’s why he’s slept with Marjorie all these years. He hasn’t ever thought that before. There is no denying the attraction between them – hell, he’s leaving Zara for her now. But as he loads up his arm and volleys the ball over the net, Harold thinks, maybe pantywaist Winton has something to do with it too.

Harold is in pain on the court, but Winton Gillespie looks sluggish. All the women tell Harold he has the body of a 45-year-old. And the johnson of a racehorse! he thinks. But in truth, he’s 59, and although he’s fit for his age, time doesn’t make an exception for prime ministers.

‘I’m Roy Emerson!’ shouts Winton on the return.

 ‘Rod Laver has it over Emerson,’ Harold grunts, giving his baseline a decent slug.

‘Twelve majors, Harry!’ pants Winton.

 ‘That’s only ’cause Laver went pro.’ Harold returns.

This time, Winton is too short for the ball. Harold lifts the racket in celebration, channelling a bit of Rod Laver. A shot of pain bites down his scapula.

Out of the corner of his eye he notices Marjorie slip onto the court, her two-piece visible through a sheer white dress.

‘Let’s have a drink,’ he says to Winton, who is down on his haunches breathing heavily.

Marjorie meets Harold at his tennis bag. ‘What’s the matter with your shoulder?’ she asks.

‘Doctor says it’s only a minor tear,’ says Harold. He watches Winton root around in the esky for something refreshing (it’s the Sixties and there is no bottled water). ‘Cup of tea, a Bex and a lie down. I’ll be right.’

Harold dips into his tennis bag. Retrieves a sachet of Bex powder. Then he strides across to Winton, flapping the sachet against his palm. ‘How are you mate?’ he asks, slapping Winton square on the back with his free hand. ‘Work up a sweat?’

‘Better get some tap water,’ Winton says, dabbing his forehead with a towel as he heads for the house.

Harold reaches into the esky and grabs a beer. Actually, no. What would he drink if he were in America? He replaces the Resch’s lager.

‘Bring out a whiskey, will you?’ Harold calls after Winton. ‘Scotch and soda. That’s what LBJ would drink.’

He remembers visiting the oval office. The president was drinking from a foam cup, of all things. And one of the secret service agents stood on hand to top him up when he went dry. ‘You don’t get anything like that in Canberra,’ he says.

‘You shouldn’t mix Bex with alcohol,’ Marjorie says.

‘I wouldn’t mind my own acronym,’ Harold says, thinking of the time he sat opposite JFK. ‘HEH,’ he says. But he isn’t convinced. There aren’t enough hard consonants to make it menacing.

‘You don’t have to be an American president,’ says Marjorie, watching her husband retreat indoors. She sits with Harold on the bench. Touches his hand.

‘I think the reason America voted for LBJ is because he looks like John Wayne,’ Harold says.

‘America didn’t vote for him,’ says Marjorie. ‘JFK took a dive.’

‘I mean the second time. Have you seen The Alamo, Marj? Wonderful picture.’

Lulu’s smash hit ‘To Sir, With Love’ comes on the stereo up at the house. Marjorie sings along softly.

Harold watched that film, too. It’s amazing what is coming out of the United Kingdom, he thinks. That’s not to mention the US. The Americans have made 150 films in 1967 alone, Cool Hand Luke and The Graduate among them. In Australia, the last six years has seen only one film made a year. And presently the loungerooms of 95 per cent of Australian households are engrossed with Bellbird, for goodness sake (a modern equivalent might be A Country Practiceor Neighbours).

‘Australia isn’t big enough to be America,’ Marjorie says.

‘It’s big enough,’ says Harold. ‘It just needs to take itself seriously.’ He doesn’t know what’s taking Winton so long. He tears a strip from the Bex sachet and pours the powder down his throat.

‘We can change things,’ Marjorie says. ‘We can make our own America here.’

‘Not us, doll,’ Harold says, wiping his lips. ‘That’ll be McMahon’s problem.’ He takes Marjorie’s hand.

‘McMahon?’

‘I’ve done enough to bring this country out of the dark ages.’

‘Harold, what do you mean?’ Marjorie’s grip loosens but Harold squeezes tighter. He smiles.

‘I’ve got something to tell you, Marj. I’m leaving the job.’

‘What.’ The blood drains from Marjorie’s face.

‘I thought you’d be excited.’

Marjorie strokes her cheek. ‘Why would that excite me?’

‘I’m past it, Marj. I want to retire. Once the divorce is settled with Zara, we can move to the beach shack in Queensland.’

Marjorie’s face drifts to a distance that isn’t there. ‘The beach shack.’

‘I told you about this.’

‘Harry, you told me you were leaving your wife, not that you were giving up Kirribilli.’

‘Would that have changed things?’

Marjorie doesn’t answer. Harold regards the tennis court, the house. He considers a future where none of this belongs to him, just the beach shack at Bingil Bay. He is prepared for it. He has spent months preparing for it. But then he eyes Marjorie’s expensive jewellery and the faint twist of disdain at the edge of her mouth, and he thinks, perhaps she isn’t.

‘Harold,’ she says, taking both his hands in a grip now too firm to be comforting. ‘You need to know—’

Before she can go on, her husband skips down onto the tennis court. He catches Marjorie off-guard. She drops Harold’s hands and shifts back a few inches, attempting to fix her hair in a casual way. But Winton is already shaking his head.

‘Winton, what’s the matter mate?’ Harold asks, ready to explain himself.

Winton looks down at his hands and, almost with guilt, raises a bottle. ‘I couldn’t find any whiskey,’ he says. ‘Will rice wine do?’

5

Harold tosses and turns in the night. He’s dreaming of Lola Thring, his girlfriend from the 1930s. The one his father married. Zara always told him to get over it. He would rise in the night, sodden with sweat, and she would join him in the kitchen.

‘Harry, it’s just a kid-love,’ she’d say, placing her hand on his back. He remembers the look on her face when, regretting touching his sopping night shirt, she walked around the kitchen in search of a tea towel, holding her hand out as though she’d handled a dead animal.

Kid-love. Easy for her to say. Her mother never stole a boy of hers.

‘It doesn’t bother me, truly,’ Harold might have said. ‘It’s just, I hope my boys don’t think of me that way. The way I thought of my father.’

‘They don’t,’ Zara yawned.

But even tonight, Harold thinks about the seven years before they were married, and how little he saw the boys, his sons by blood, but not by name. He can’t avoid the memory of receiving a letter, at age sixteen, telling him his mother had died in the UK. How he couldn’t quite picture her face, not until he saw it in the portrait atop her casket. He was no closer to her than a distant aunt.

‘If something happened to me,’ he remembers asking Zara once, ‘how would the boys remember their father?’

‘Don’t be a fool,’ Zara said. Then, after a pause: ‘They’d remember how much you loved the sea.’

This hurt, at the time, not because it was untrue but because, for Harold, it illuminated that he was more like a distant uncle to his boys. It was something he couldn’t help. He was always facing scrutiny in parliament for taking fishing trips on work time, and no matter how hard he strained to defend his recreation, the truth was, he loved a good time.

Now, years have passed, and Harold still can’t forget the women of his youth.

He leaves Marjorie to sleep, pads downstairs and goes looking for a bottle of pills. He sees through the kitchen window a round moon, white on the water.

He couldn’t marry Lola, even after his father died. It was too late. She was his mother-in-law. Even if she was his age. What a waste.

Harold is tired of wasted opportunities. He feels for his sons, he does, but he knows that if he doesn’t take this opportunity now, he will regret it. And the truth is, he never feels as good as when he’s on the beach. When he slips on his sandshoes, fixes his snorkel, and plunges into the salty unknown. He wants more of that. Life begins at sixty, they say. And he will be sixty next year.

His time as prime minister probably wouldn’t have lasted much longer anyway. The coalition is on the nose. You don’t have to do much in public office to find scrutiny. That’s what Marj doesn’t understand. She might be infatuated with the lifestyle of a prime minister’s wife, but somehow, Harold will have to make her understand that it’s all for show.

This year, not that Harold can know, his hero, LBJ, has commissioned a secret actuarial study to predict at what age he will die. In part, he wants to know if it is worth contesting the next election. The results of the study will tell him, it is not.

‘The men in the Johnson family have a history of dying young,’ America’s 36th president will tell a journalist in 1971. And besides, Lyndon Johnson expects that the American people have had enough of presidents dying in office.

Ten days before his death from major cardiac arrest, in an interview with CBS, Johnson will tell Walter Cronkite it is better for his heart ‘to smoke than to be nervous’.

Now Harold Holt doesn’t have hereditary heart disease to be afraid of, but he does have a track record of flash-in-the-pan affairs and false starts with women. Much like Johnson, he wants to call it quits before his demons catch up with him (even if, like Johnson, he has no discipline for bringing those demons to heel). He wants to marry the woman he loves, and he wants to do it outside the public eye.

But right now, Harold’s mind is occupied with a niggling fear. He feels that, after the party, something has changed. He is haunted by Marjorie’s ashen face, when he told her he didn’t want to be PM anymore.

She will come around, he thinks. Winton. Winton and his bloody rice wine. That’s all it was. She cracked in front of her husband. Tomorrow, he thinks, watching the graceful ripples on the black water far away, he’ll take her down to the beach and it will all have been the fault of a nervous moment.

6

They’ve followed the sandy path to the edge of the point just in time to see the British sailor, Alec Rose, come through the heads. He has sailed his yacht all the way from England on his own. Harold is enthralled.

The yachtsman starts as a white speck on the horizon, growing and growing, until the cut of his billowing sail can be distinguished from the mast, the mast from the sailor, the sailor leaning his weight portside of the skidding yacht, the cords of his life jacket dragging in the foam.

It makes Harold want to drive back to the house and grab his spear gun. But he doesn’t have time. They will be here in an hour.

‘Look at how rough the water is,’ remarks Vyner, Marjorie’s daughter.

Harold is worried that Marjorie has invited her daughter, and the boyfriend, bloody Alan Stewart, along too. The whole point of coming out here was for some privacy.

‘Not too rough for him though, is it?’ Harold says. He sights the scrap of an old steamer shipwrecked on Nepean Reef. Rose will sail right past it. Where one ship has foundered, this nimble sailor will break a world record.

Alec Rose overcomes the twisting white breakers and slips past the reef without pause.

Harold tries a few looks at Marjorie but she won’t give him anything. He checks his watch. Shows it to her. She looks at him vacantly. He told her about the plan, didn’t he?

‘Kids. We’re taking a walk on the beach,’ Harold says, ‘Hang about up here. We’ll come get you afterwards.’

Marjorie seems reluctant to accompany him. They shuffle down the steep path to Cheviot Beach, a rough section of coast on the ocean side of Mornington Peninsula.

Harold checks his watch again. It’s just the kind Sean Connery wears. A Rolex submariner. If they ever cast an Australian as Bond, he will be it.

Maybe when this all blows over, he can have a crack at Hollywood. After all, the stage was his first love. He wonders what Marjorie thinks as they walk along the beach. They hold hands, but not firmly.

‘You’ve changed your mind,’ Harold says after a while.

‘I haven’t.’

‘Yes you have.’

‘Something has changed. But it’s not my mind.’

‘What is it?’

‘Harold, I’m pregnant.’

For a second Harold isn’t sure if he’s the father. But Marjorie assures him that he is. He’s unable to control his laughter.

‘Is it a son? I bet it’s a son. They say I’m strong in the water but, by jiminy, I’m 59 and my boys can still swim!’

Marjorie isn’t laughing.

‘Is that why you were concerned about the job?’ Harold chuckles. ‘That I won’t be able to support us?’

‘Support us. Harold, what are you talking about?’

‘When we go to Queensland.’

‘Harold. I’m not coming with you.’

‘You’re carrying my child.’

‘We’re not married. Do you have any idea how that’s going to look?’

‘How long have you known?’ Harold says.

‘Not long. A month.’

Harold regards the sweep of the sea. It’s all whitecaps. ‘What about the plan? This doesn’t change the plan.’ He fishes around in his bag and pulls out a licence card. ‘I’ve got new IDs for us.’ He holds up his newly minted Queensland driver’s licence. ‘I’m going to be Harry Flynn.’

‘Harry Flynn? Have you gone mad?’ Marjorie touches her reddening throat. ‘You’re giving up the prime ministership. What are you thinking?’

‘Why do you care?’

‘Why do I care? Because, Harold, I’m not going to be some fisherman’s floozie banged up in a beach shack. And what’s more, if I leave Winton now, everyone will know. Everyone will know that the child isn’t his. I’ll be a wreck.’

‘It shouldn’t matter, then, if I’m prime minister or not.’ Harold screws his face up. ‘I can still raise a child.’

‘You don’t even see your own sons, Harold.’

Harold recoils.

‘I was excited about our life together.’ Marj paces about, thrashing clenched fists in frustration. ‘How long have we been doing this in the dark? I was ready for us to be something. But you’ve gone off the deep end, Harry. Handing over the country to Billy Big Ears. And all this talk of a plan … you spoke of holidays to Queensland, but you never told me you were moving there.’

Harold stopped listening a few sentences ago. He’s still smiling about Billy Big Ears. ‘I’ve told McMahon I’m entering the secret service,’ he says. ‘The man actually believes me.’

‘See!’ Marjorie throws up her hands. ‘Off the deep end!’ She collects two or three heavy breaths. Presses the points of her fingers into her temples and lowers her tone. ‘Look. I need to stay with Winton, until the child is at least a few years old. Then, perhaps, we can—’

‘Winton? You want to stay with Winton?’

‘I have to.’

‘Why Winton?’

‘At least he doesn’t think he’s 007.’

‘Listen. Marj. I can’t be prime minister anymore.’ Now its Harold’s turn to stride along the beach. ‘Sometimes I think life and circumstance pushed me into the job,’ he says, stroking his chin. ‘I’d rather have been an actor.’

‘You are an actor. You’re a politician.’

‘And I’m tired of it. Marj. Look, let’s forget about this Winton business.’ Harold pauses. He thinks he hears an engine, but he looks out to the water and sees nothing. ‘I’ve got to get out of here.’

‘Get out of here. Where are you going?’

Bloody hell. He did forget to tell her.

‘When I come back, can we at least talk about it?’ Harold takes her by the wrist. Reaches for a kiss, but Marjorie pulls away. The heat is stifling.

‘There’s nothing to talk about,’ Marjorie says. ‘I’m staying with Winton. He’s twice the man you are.’

Harold is shot through. All he can think is, it’s happening again. In the wake of his silence Marjorie’s frustration boils over.

‘Who takes the top job for two years’, she blusters, ‘and decides that it’s too much? Did you learn nothing from Menzies?’

Harold becomes aware of the sunburn on his neck. He looks out to the water.

‘Harold I’m talking to you.’

Harold unbuttons his shirt.

‘There is more to a man than spearfishing and yacht-sailing! There is dedication and fidelity …’

Harold tightens the waistband of his swimming shorts. Loops his wrist through the band of his waterproof bag.

‘Why do men think they can just get away with keeping a dozen different women in a dozen different foxholes – Harold!’

Harold is off, running, high-kneed, into the water. He’s thinking of Roy Emerson, holding the Australian Open trophy cup. He’s thinking of Alec Rose planing over the waves. He’s thinking of Sean Connery in a kimono. He crashes into the shallows.

7

In the decades since Harold Holt dived into the surf, his true motivation has been lost. Can we ever really know what happened? Was he a victim of his own ego, thinking that, like the yachtsman beyond the point, he was stronger than the sea? Or is it simply that at midday, when the sun is hottest, he felt like a dip?

There is every chance it was something Marjorie said, seeing as they were the last together before he made his dash for the surf.

I couldn’t have heard that, Harold might be thinking. She couldn’t have picked Winton over me. Me? I have the body of a 45-year-old.

Harold is clearly perplexed as he ducks under his first wave. Bursting from the foam, he sweeps back his hair before bracing for the next. He sucks down a breath, and as it hits, takes it head on. He dolphin kicks as far as he can. He has practised holding his breath for years, so now, he is able to swim at least 50 yards without rising.

That’s how he gets out so far. He’s trying to kick away the insult: Winton is twice the man you are. He kicks, and he kicks, and he kicks. By the time he realises he’s in trouble, it’s too late.

At least, that’s how it seems to Marjorie. From the beach, it looks as though he’s just disappeared under the water.

But if that is the case, why is he still swimming, further and further? Out there, beyond the bar. Marjorie can’t see him – she’s in a spin thinking he’s drowned – but the fact is, Harold is bolting.

Man, can he hold his breath. Why doesn’t he try to turn around? With the limitation of his sore shoulder, surely he won’t be able to make it back. Perhaps he doesn’t want to make it back.

When Harold rises at last, he can’t see anyone on the distant beach, like a thin curd at the horizon. He has been under so long that Marjorie, in a panic, has run back up to the point to fetch help.

He does a little survival stroke. The water is rough past the sand bar, and he’s swallowing some slop. His shoulder is killing him. He looks one way, then the other. Where is that bloody plane?

If only a submarine could pick him up. If this was a Bond film, the final frame would show an American aircraft shedding parachuting lifeboats like bird droppings. It’s in one of these lifeboats that Sean Connery pashes Kissy Suzuki, after ironically remarking, ‘They’ll never find us.’ Of course, that’s the cue for an M1 submarine to come out of nowhere and lift the lifeboat on its nose.

Except, Harold isn’t in a Bond film, and as he looks back at Point Nepean, it isn’t exploding like Blofeld’s hideout. The beach is devoid of life. His Kissy Suzuki has gone.

Harold specifically asked the director of ASIO if a midget submarine would be more viable for extraction. The water off Cheviot Beach is too shallow, the director told him, sucking on a cigarette. Better a seaplane.

‘We got these grounded Douglas Dakotas,’ the director told the prime minister when they met to discuss the plan. ‘Politicians are cagey about using them. You know, VIP flights scandal and all. Maybe one just happens to get logged out for routine maintenance on the 17th of December …’

Harry remembers the closing credits of You Only Live Twice, with the intertitle promising another movie: On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Harold would like to try out for the part if he ever gets out of here.

(The studio will cast an Australian as the next James Bond, but it will be a little-known commercial model called George Lazenby, whose obdurate failure will see the producers begging Connery to reprise his role, which he will, in Diamonds Are Forever, sadly a tenth-rate performance. Sometimes it’s better to go out on top.)

That’s what Harold’s doing. Well, not quite on top, but at least he’s getting out before his party has had a chance to feed him to the sharks.

Who could have guessed that he’s thinking about Bond movies as he bashes around in the surf, his shoulder stinging? Where is that bloody plane? Did he get the time wrong?

Harold knows he shouldn’t have played tennis yesterday. He’s struggling to stay afloat. He is usually such a strong swimmer. He has swum in crocodile infested waters in Queensland, with sharks on Beaver Cay, rays in Gulf St Vincent, and the local yobbos in Townsville. Now more waves are slapping him on the head. He feels the undertow pulling him out to sea.

Shit, shit, shit.

He thinks of Zara, Marjorie, and all the other women he’s had. He thinks of his kids. The house in Toorak, the house in Portsea, the house in Bingil Bay. His Pontiac Laurentian. He thinks of all the freight he’s accumulated in his life. For a second he wonders if he’s truly prepared to give it all up and start again.

That is when he turns his mind to Marjorie’s baby. It makes him think that he is at once too young and too old; too old for a child … and too bloody young to drown!

But the sting in his scapula tells otherwise. He’s not as strong as he used to be. 007 is ready to be prime minister, the papers said. Sean Connery never died in Dr. No and Goldfinger and Thunderball, and although he appears to have played his last role in You Never Live Twice, the truth is, James Bond doesn’t need to live twice because he never dies.

But Harold Holt plans on living twice. Harry Flynn will hang his hat in Queensland if he ever gets out of here.

A couple of waves force him under. Saltwater sizzles in his nose. The next one is too much to withstand. Beneath the surface there is an undertow so powerful that it sucks him into the current. He tries to push against it, but it drags him down further. The sky dissolves in a fizzing spiral.

It is in this silver stream of bubbles that he sees something unexpected: a face behind a round piece of glass. It is attached to a black body, from which an arm extends. A gloved hand shoves a mouthpiece in Harold’s face.

Harold purges the water from it and fills his lungs with oxygen.

The diver swims behind him and takes Harold under the arms. With a flurry of flippers, the frogman heaves Harold towards the sky. Above water, the diver pulls up his face mask and spits out his mouthpiece. ‘We nearly lost you, mate – I mean, Mr Prime Minister.’

Harold jerks around in the diver’s hands. He looks over his shoulder to find a seaplane bobbing behind them. The Douglas Dakota is paddling along, about twenty or thirty yards away, the propellers of its twin turbines spinning slow like summer ceiling fans. Another diver hangs off one of the keels. He is beckoning them over.

Harold looks back to the beach, but at this distance, and with the waves knocking him about, he can’t see anyone.

‘We’ve just enough petrol to make it to Townsville,’ the diver says. ‘Better get a move on – Mr Prime Minister.’

Harold is barely on board before the plane’s low idle lifts into a high whine. The divers strip off their sopping wet gear while Harold stumbles, a little dizzy, down the aisle. He falls into a seat a few rows from the front. The pilot turns his head, with round black aviators on and the tick of a smile. He sticks up his thumb before turning back to the switchboard.

As the plane skips along the water, the divers join Harold in their military fatigues. One of them produces a bottle of champagne in a pot of ice.

‘Fill her up Gordon!’ says one of the divers. But Harold doesn’t feel like drinking. The divers clink their foaming glasses, a toast to the successful extraction. They offer Harold a flute but he refuses.

He is looking out the window, down to Cheviot Beach. It all happened so quickly. He is only now recalling what Marjorie said. She couldn’t have meant it: Winton is twice the man you are. Harold would like to see Winton swim as far as he just has on a single breath. When Harold sees figures clambering down the goat track below, he sits up.

‘You will have plenty of time for fishing, where you’re going,’ one of the divers says, but Harold ignores him.

That must be Marjorie in the white shift. Surely she can hear the plane. He’s waving furiously now. But no-one looks up. No-one pays any attention to the sky. They are too worried by what they’ve lost in the water.