“Please be sensible,” she said, biting down frustration and fear.
“For what purpose?” He shook out the match and reached for the bottle of opium.
“So that you don’t hurt those you love. Those who love you.”
“They’re fools if they love me,” he replied.
“Will you leave her be?”
He exhaled roughly. “I have left her be thus far, have I not? Because you told me to?”
She had to admit it was true. She nodded.
“Then let it go. Perhaps you should have a taste of my pipe, Sissy?”
“No!” she exclaimed quickly. “Never.”
He chuckled, drew a lungful of smoke. “You always do the right thing.”
Flora wasn’t sure if the last comment was an insult or a compliment, but she didn’t want to stay around to talk to him more. She couldn’t bear him in his stupor. “If it is true I can trust you, I will meet you at the dining room for dinner tonight. We don’t have to eat in our rooms anymore.”
He waved her away with an elegant figure eight. “Stop worrying.”
Much easier for him to say than for her to do.
* * *
Flora returned to her room, unlocked the door, and breathed in the sweet scent of the fresh roses Miss Zander left for her every Wednesday. Her hand went to pull the light switch just as her foot struck something on the floor. She looked down and saw a bundle of letters. This week’s mail.
Flora sat at the little bureau beside the bed and pulled open the top. She untied the letters, then sifted through them. Two from her father. One from her friend Liberty, who was traveling in America, and another from her old school mistress, who loved to write long, rambling letters about nothing interesting. Finally, the account from Dr. Dalloway. Will.
She slit that one open first, but there was no account. Just a handwritten letter.
Dear Flora,
Rather than bill you for my time, because you took so little of it, I want to extend an invitation for you to consult me again on any day, without an appointment, if you should find you need reassurance or assistance with your terrible burden. I will help you in any way I can.
Yours faithfully,
Will
Flora folded the letter carefully and slid it away. She veered between feeling angry at his presumption, and touched by his offer of help. Neither Sam, nor Tony, nor her father seemed to care much how she fared with this enormous responsibility upon her shoulders. That a stranger should offer to help her in her troubles showed up the lack of support evident everywhere else. She couldn’t help but feel embarrassed by his warmth.
Flora placed the letter in one of the nooks in her desk and tried to put it out of her mind.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Violet found her thoughts turning to Sam again and again. In sensible moments, she told herself that she had exchanged only a few words with him, and that she must keep her head. But the sensible moments were few and further apart as the days went by. She didn’t see Sam in the dining room: his sister and her beau were often there, but Sam wasn’t. Once she saw him wandering through the foyer and out the front doors with a glazed look on his face, but under Miss Zander’s watchful eye she couldn’t approach him.
So she started to spend her break every day hanging about on the bushwalking path; she had seen him at the Falls once, and she hoped he might go there again. She saw many other guests, most of whom glanced at her uniform curiously as they walked past, but there was no sign of Sam.
Her first two weeks as an employee of the Evergreen Spa passed. She did as she’d promised Clive and worked hard. Miss Zander often gave her a nod of approval as they passed each other in the corridors. She posted money to her mother and attended Queenie’s going-away party in the staff dining room, guilty but satisfied to have ongoing work. There was still the problem of the winter break, but that was several weeks away and she hoped to find something up here in a shop or a restaurant to tide her over so she didn’t have to go back to Mama empty-handed.
Then one day, loitering by the kitchen door chatting to Myrtle after the lunch shift, she thought she saw Sam. He was crossing the tennis courts and heading down the stone stairs towards the bushwalking path.
“So I decided I would have to hem it again,” Myrtle was saying, “because it was simply too short. I suppose you think me a terrible wowser.”
“Hm? Oh. No, Myrtle. Not at all.”
“I just don’t have the legs for it, you know. That scar on my knee, from where I fell last year—”
“Your legs are fine. But . . . I’m sorry, I think I’m . . .” Violet gestured to her forehead. “Headache. I might go for some fresh air.”
“Lovely idea. I’ll come with you.”
“I . . . No, maybe . . .”
Myrtle frowned. “Well, you only have to say if I’m boring you.”
Violet grasped Myrtle’s hand, squeezed it once, and said, “Sorry. This isn’t about you,” and started to run.
All of the entrances to the bushwalking paths led to the same place—the fingerpost—and that’s where Violet caught up with him. Blessedly, they were the only two on the path.
“Sam!” she called.
He turned, saw her, and stopped. He didn’t seem surprised. It was almost as if he’d been expecting her.
She hurried towards him and he gave her a brilliant smile. “There you are,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “Here I am.”
“I’m going to the Falls. Have you seen them?”
She shook her head. “Not up close.”
He took her hand and pulled it. “Let’s go.”
He began to walk so fast she had to run to keep up, and then when she started to run so did he, over the gravelly path. She hoped her shoes wouldn’t trip her. He was laughing, the sun in his hair, and she was almost too puzzled by his strange behavior to relish the feel of his hand over hers. But then the breeze caught her cheeks and she was laughing, too, laughing at how mad it was to be barreling down the bushwalking path in her waitress uniform, hand in hand with a man she barely knew but who had bruised her heart with his dark, dark eyes.
Down the path and up the winding ways they went, the crash of the Falls growing louder and louder. There wasn’t time or breath for conversation, though he occasionally exclaimed, “How beautiful!” She was never sure which particular feature of their environment prompted this exclamation—birds or flowers or smells or sounds—but she loved it about him nonetheless. Passion and fire. He was perfect.
Finally, they came to a halt on the flat rocks around the top of the Falls. Little cascades fell into a dark eye of cold water, which then poured over the edge of the cliff and into the valley more than three hundred feet below.
“Do you like to swim, Violet?” he asked.
“I do.”
“Go on, then,” he said, gesturing to the water hole.
“It’ll be freezing.”
“Are you scared?” he teased.
She lifted her chin, beaming at him. “You go in. Or are you scared?”
He grinned and began unbuttoning his shirt. She remembered seeing him naked here and a flush of warmth rose up through her body. As he shed his clothes he walked to the sandy edge of the water hole. She followed him, already working at her own buttons, alive with fear and desire.
He stripped to his long johns, then stopped, suddenly modest. His body was lithe and pale, thinner than she had expected. She stepped out of her shoes and her dress, unrolled her stockings, and slid out of her petticoat, and dropped them on the rocks. Then she was down to her singlet and bloomers, which were tied with pink ribbons just above her knees. A wave of cold sobriety caught her, then, and she crossed her arms over her chest.
Sam approached her, took both her hands in his, and spread her arms wide. Her small breasts, something that made dresses fit her wonderfully, suddenly seemed a terrible handicap. Her singlet looked as though it were hung on two nails.
“Look how beautiful you are
,” he said, dropping her hands.
Violet caught her breath. Heart thudding madly, she turned and began to walk into the water. It was freezing, and she braced herself, then waded farther and plunged into the deepest part. Down and down into the dark, icy depths. The cold knocked the breath out of her. She shot to the surface and beckoned him. “See? Not scared.”
“Is it cold?” he asked.
“Not in the least. But you can swim, can’t you?”
“Of course.” A second later he had plunged in next to her. He rose to the surface, hair streaming, and shouted, “Liar!”
She swam away from him to the shallow sides of the pool, and he caught her, pressed her against his body. Her hands went to his shoulders, and she could feel his tight gooseflesh. His lips were an inch from hers.
“May I kiss you?” he asked.
She nodded dumbly, and his lips pressed against hers with all the passion and force of the Falls. The heat of his mouth was searing, making her forget the cold water. He slid his tongue into her mouth—no boy she had kissed before had done that—and she found herself pushing her breasts and thighs against him.
“I knew you’d taste sweet,” he murmured into her mouth, then redoubled his force on her lips. His hands cupped her buttocks, kneading them violently.
Suddenly, he released her. “Violet, it’s too cold.”
Yes, it was too cold. She nodded, and they climbed out of the water hole. She turned her back to him and stripped off her wet singlet, scooping up her petticoat to put on. Then she wriggled out of her bloomers and kicked them off on the rocks, feeling both embarrassed and thrilled. The water on her body was already evaporating, her skin puckered with goose bumps. When she turned around, he was dressed, his wet long johns in a heap on the ground next to her sodden bloomers.
Something about this sight made her laugh, and he grabbed her around the waist and squeezed the breath out of her. “You are so beautiful,” he said.
“Let’s leave the clothes here for people to wonder about,” she said.
“I know somewhere we can go,” he said, releasing her, and she had the distinct feeling he hadn’t heard or hadn’t listened to her. “Come with me.”
He grasped her hand again, as he had before, pulling her along in his wake, back up the bushwalking path, her legs aching from the ascent. But then he took a detour, over rocks and ferns, and a few moments later they stood at the mouth of a cave.
Violet grew wary. “It looks dark.”
“Yes. Nobody will see us. I come here all the time.”
She allowed herself to be taken into the cave.
“I want to show you something,” he said. “Look.”
Near the entrance was a large rock with a smooth back. She squinted in the gloom and realized he was showing her a carved shape on its surface. As she looked closer, she realized it was a love heart with hard angles where soft curves should be.
“Did you carve this?”
He shook his head. “No. I found it. This is granite. Imagine, somebody had to carve this with a hammer and chisel, to prove his love to his girl. Ever since I found it, I’ve thought of this cave as Lovers Cave. Do you not think it’s wonderful? The passion?”
She ran her fingers over the chiseled lines, not telling him that she found the love heart a little ugly. When she turned, Sam was unbuttoning his shirt again. A stab of desire, but also a wave of caution.
“Sam? Why are you taking your shirt off?”
“We’re going to make love,” he said.
Her head swam, but the cave floor was cold, and she was certain the cave was home to ants and spiders.
“No,” she said, softly but firmly.
He paused in his unbuttoning and frowned. Was he angry with her? Cool regret. Now she would lose him.
“I’m sorry,” she elaborated. “Not here. Not now.”
“Well, nobody’s ever said no to me before,” he remarked, fingers falling away from his buttons, leaving his shirt half open.
“Sam, I’ve never said yes before,” she replied slowly, so he understood.
“Is that so? Are you saving yourself for marriage?”
“For love,” she said.
“Is that so?” he said again.
“I hardly know anything about you,” she said.
“We’ll rectify that right now. Come on, sit down here with me. Don’t worry, the soil is quite soft. You can put your head in my lap. There.”
Violet relaxed into his lap, and he laid his coat across her shoulders and began to stroke her hair softly.
“What would you like to know?” he asked.
“How old are you?”
“Nearly twenty.”
“So am I,” she said.
“Keep going. More questions.”
“Where do you come from? Tell me about your family.”
“I live with my family on one hundred thousand acres of farmland in New South Wales. We are very wealthy and well known, apparently. I have more money than you could count.” He laughed at this comment, though Violet wasn’t sure why. “My father is an evil old schemer, and my mother is a pretty doormat. My poor sister, whom you have met, is kinder than she ought to be, given her provenance. My father has arranged to marry her off to the oily son of one of his business associates, a man who is not her equal in brains or good nature, and who will no doubt fill her belly with a dozen Catholic babies and use her up until she’s a husk. What about you?”
She was painfully aware of the difference in their fortunes and prospects. “I have a mother with arthritis who works as a laundress and seamstress. She can make a dress in a day, and is often required to do so by the family she works for. But they pay her very little and her hands don’t work like they used to. I send her money, but I can see a time where I’ll have to work for both of us . . .” Violet trailed off. Speaking the awful truth aloud made her feel miserable and lost.
Sam had grown quiet. She turned her head to look up at him, and his gaze was thoughtful.
“Do you love your mother?” he asked.
“Of course I love her.”
“Then don’t worry about it. Because anyone you love, I love, too, and I have enough money to fix everything. So, never worry about it again, because I can’t bear to see you fret. I will fix everything with my money. It’s easy for me, and I love you.”
The declaration of love was buried at the end of such a confusing statement that Violet almost didn’t register it. He loved her? Her heart sped. He loved her.
“More questions,” he said.
She took a moment to gather herself. “Um . . . what are you doing at the Evergreen Spa?”
“I have some health problems that don’t bother me but they bother everybody else. I am here to resolve them. We’ve been here two months now. It’s Flora and Tony’s first holiday together, but he keeps traveling to Sydney to visit prostitutes, although he tells her they are business trips.”
“That’s horrible.”
“He is horrible.”
“Have you told her?”
“It would hurt her too much. And she wouldn’t believe me. But I heard him bragging to his vile friends. Come on, more questions. About me. Not them.”
“Do you believe in God?”
His hands left her hair for a moment and he flung them in the air. “Yes! I worship the poppy god.”
“I’ve never heard of him.”
“Perhaps the poppy god is a woman,” he said. “She has such a way about her. Next question.”
“Do you really love me?”
“Oh, yes. The moment I saw you. The moment I saw you.”
He closed his eyes, a rapturous expression on his face, and Violet’s body was traversed with happiness and longing and wild peaks of feeling. She loved him, too. Mad as it seemed, she loved him, too, and had since their eyes had met that evening in the dining room. Others would say she was foolish: Myrtle or Clive or her mother. But they were the fools. What ignorance to think that love must be somehow sober and orderly
, unfolding in a slow, set pattern so one didn’t get too much of a shock. Love was a thunderbolt, crashing down on her with its brilliant, savage force. It was ancient and eternal and it peeled back the mundane layers of the world and showed her the wet, beating heart of reality beneath.
“I love you, too,” she said.
“Of course you do,” he replied. “You understand me.”
She reached up towards his chin and touched him gently, her heart giddy. “I will lose my job if we’re discovered.”
“I don’t care. I have enough money for both of us.”
“I do care,” she said. “Just for now. Just until things are more . . . certain.”
“Then I will be very careful.” He opened his eyes and smiled down at her. “Sissy is watching me. She would decidedly not approve. Nor would my mother and father. It’s delicious, isn’t it? A love that is forbidden tastes sweeter and sharper.”
“Maybe you’re right. But, Sam,” she said gently, “I have to go and get properly dry and dressed for work.”
“Let’s go back to the hotel, but not together,” he said. “You go a hundred yards ahead of me, as though we were simply out walking at the same time and don’t know each other. I can watch the sweet sway of your hips the whole way.”
“All right,” she said, climbing to her feet. “I’ll go first.”
* * *
At dinner that night, she and Sam tacitly agreed to play a game. She swapped tables with Myrtle, who agreed grudgingly because she was still hurt about Violet cutting her off earlier that day, and Violet waited on his table as though nothing had passed between them. He sat with his sister—who watched Violet like a hawk—along with the Italian man and his entourage, the opera singer, the beauty queen, and the writers. Flora dressed very soberly, in a long gray skirt and buttoned blouse, with her long hair pinned in a tidy bun. It was hard to credit that she and Sam were siblings. They all laughed and talked happily, including Sam, who didn’t meet her eye once.
And yet . . . as she moved past he would casually brush her hip with his forearm; as she stood and leaned in to clear plates he would press the side of his calf against hers. Each touch was hot and electrifying. Lucid in her mind were the memories of the day, of being naked with him, of kissing him, of his open desire to make love to her. She shivered with it. In all her nearly twenty years, she had never considered having sex. Mama had drummed into her that “getting in trouble” led only to misery: indeed, she was proof of that. Violet had had many boyfriends. Some had tried to get fresh, and she’d slapped their hands or sometimes their faces. But Sam awoke a hunger in her that she had never imagined she would experience. How she wanted to be naked with him again, to press the full length of her soft body against his hot, hard one. Consequences didn’t exist in her imagination: there was only the desire, liquid and searing.
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