by JH Fletcher
The steel maw of the endless-seeming conflict had swallowed them all, American and Aussie, Jap and German. Sometimes it seemed that it would go on until everything and everyone had been destroyed. Including her baby, who had been lost, not because of war but by an act of will, deliberately taken, in consequence of another act of will deliberately taken. By herself.
Maudie was right. She had Walter and a family. She had Hedley. All of whom, like the child, she had betrayed.
On her feet again, she sat in a heap until Maudie dragged her out of the house. The golden day had vanished but Maudie marched her relentlessly into the therapy of rain and wind, of breakers hurling themselves in mountainous ruin along the rain-dark shore. Never by word or sign did Maudie speak of it but, now she had got her strength back, Kath knew she must go home. Yet she dreaded facing those who would pretend to know nothing. No doubt they had said plenty about her already but, as long as she stayed away, she could tell herself it was not so. Once home, no pretence would be possible.
What had Maudie told her? People have to accept the consequences … This was another consequence to be accepted, like the rest.
Packing, she practised her brave face once again. Again failed. At the station she clung to her friend for what would probably be the last time. ‘One look at me and they’ll know. I’ve put on so much weight …’
Maudie looked searchingly into her face. ‘Let them think what they like. Make up your story and stick to it. It doesn’t matter what it is. Stick to it with everybody, even the ones who know, like Beth and your parents. Even with yourself.’
‘They’ll still know —’
‘They’ll soon forget. No-one’s as interested in us as we like to think. Stick to your story and they’ll believe it, soon enough. Or at least accept it. It won’t be long before you start believing it yourself.’
From the train window Kath saw a factory building, the sign running the length of the wall. CARTER ENGINEERING.
That’s it, she thought. That’s my story.
Only Beth knew she was coming, but it would have been too much to hope that there would be no-one else on the platform who knew her.
‘Kath…’ Enid Hillier, of all people. Her smile would have fooled the innocent; her eyes checked out Kath’s shape through her clothes. ‘What a surprise.’
Kath smiled back, cheeks aching. ‘Mr Carter’s daughter came back, so I was out of a job.’
Enid’s smile widened delightedly, avaricious for scandal. ‘That’s right, dear. Such a pity.’
That’s right, dear. Tell what lies you like, dear. You and I know different, dear. But will — for the moment and in present company — say nothing.
Kath heard her unspoken thoughts, ignored them resolutely, but Enid had not finished. ‘Such a shame about the Americans …’
‘What about them?’
‘They’re all gone.’ Her face mimed tragedy. ‘To fight some battle, I suppose.’
I will not listen. Will not think.
And escaped at last, Enid Hillier none the wiser.
‘Check out that business about the Americans,’ Kath said. ‘Wanted to see how I’d take it, I suppose.’
Beth looked worried. ‘You never heard from him?’
‘Carter Engineering,’ Kath said firmly. ‘That’s what I was doing. Assistant to Mr Carter. Whose daughter was having a baby.’
Maudie had been right. It was easy; in time it came to be second nature.
‘Carter Engineering? Never heard of them.’
‘Got a factory outside the town. Right by the railway.’
‘What do they make?’
An apologetic smile. ‘Can’t tell you that, I’m afraid. Classified.’
‘And the daughter?’
‘Having a baby. A girl.’ A fond smile beamed. ‘Such a dear little thing.’
The men were easy to fool, but even the women’s questions soon dried up. With the wrong answers, Kath would still have been no more than a nine-day wonder; as it was, people lost interest almost at once.
At home it was different. She had dreaded her reception and had been right. Her mother, clucking self-consciously, was anxious to obscure her thoughts with gush; her father was starch-stiff and hostile. What they did not say prowled about her constantly. Even Walter was awkward with this mother who had abandoned him.
‘How’s he been?’
‘Not too bad, dear. All things considered.’
Fences to mend, all round.
Thankfully, Thora changed the subject. ‘Benjamin’s been poorly. Something to do with his heart, we heard.’ But could not be sure, which affronted her hunger to know, to reveal. Tight-lipped lot, those Warrens, even with their friends.
Kath went to check things out. Emily greeted her. She was as warm as ever, although Kath thought that the last months had aged her. ‘How’s Father?’
‘He’ll be in directly.’
It was mid-morning; the Benjamin Kath had known would never have knocked off before dark.
‘My mother says he hasn’t been well.’
‘He’s been doing too much, that’s all.’ Emily looked at her daughter-in-law. ‘I want to say one thing before he comes in.’
At once Kath was willing to be sullen. ‘Yes?’
‘Hedley will hear nothing from us.’
Kath’s chin tilted. ‘There is nothing to hear.’
‘Of course.’ Beyond the window, spots of winter rain were beginning to fall, most cheerlessly. ‘But he will hear things,’ Emily said apologetically. ‘You must expect that.’
Kath’s slumped shoulders showed how clearly she knew it. ‘I should be used to it.’
Emily did not understand.
‘I am a Schulz. It’s the German way, isn’t it? Kitchen, church and children. A woman is expected to know her place.’
‘That is true everywhere.’
‘But I have always wanted to live my own life. I moved out, didn’t I?’ If you could call it that.
‘But are back now,’ Emily pointed out. ‘That is what matters.’ She brightened. ‘Wilf has been a great help.’
Responsibility had been the making of him, she said. Working every day, hardly ever having a drink, even on the rare occasions when the pub had a supply in.
Just as well, Kath thought; he’d earned the name for being a bad bastard when he had a skinful. She’d heard he still broke out occasionally. Only a month or two ago, one of her mother’s letters had mentioned how he had got into a punch-up with some bloke over Dulcie Sweet.
‘Dunno what he sees in her,’ Emily said. Although she probably did. Each generation had its Dulcie Sweets, and blokes who fought over them. Benjamin was another matter.
‘Has he been to the doctor?’
‘He got Doctor Carlyle to give him a check-over.’
It had to be serious. ‘And?’
Emily sidestepped. ‘He’s not getting any younger, just like the rest of us.’
‘What is it? His heart?’
Emily laughed lightly. ‘Strained himself a little, that’s all. Trying to do too much, like I’m always telling him.’
Her eyes were elusive. So, Kath thought, the rumours were true. Emily stood. ‘I’ll get us both a nice cup of tea.’
Some things never changed.
Some things did, including the war that until now had seemed eternal. The fight for Okinawa was over. The butcher’s bill had been higher than even the worst predictions. Was Jeth dead? Even more terrible, was there somewhere the shattered wreck of the young man who had introduced her to the soul-twisting wonderment of Shostakovitch, who later — naked body, naked heart in the darkness of Aunt Clarrie’s summerhouse — had asked if she was sure? She would never know. Only unquiet memories remained.
More rumours: of a new type of bomb that had been dropped on Japan. One paper called it the wonder weapon, although what was wonderful about a bomb that had apparently destroyed an entire city Kath did not know. She held Walter close, fearing for him and the world.
&nb
sp; Nine days after the news of the bomb, she sat with her parents and listened to Ben Chifley on the wireless, telling them that the war was over at last. A commentator spoke of dancing in the Sydney streets, of a blizzard of torn paper dumped from windows by celebrating office workers.
Her Dad stood, easing his back before heading out to the paddocks. ‘Our turn, now.’ And nodded, eyes bright with the prospect of revenge.
Kath escaped as soon as she could, made her way up the hill behind the house and into the scrub. There were kangaroos there, and stillness. She walked and walked, came at last to a rocky ledge, high in the ranges, where she sat looking out at the folded land.
It was right to be joyful that the cataclysm had ended, that no more families would be wrenched apart, young men sacrificed to violence. Yet joy was not unalloyed; there was sorrow, too, for all the lost, the millions of shattered lives, shattered hopes. There was terror at humanity’s capacity for self-destruction, fear of a future dark and unpredictable. Twenty-one years after the war to end all wars had come this. Now, within minutes of the announcement of peace, her own father was gloating over the prospect of vengeance. Would people never learn?
A deeper apprehension also remained. She had received no news for so long, had no idea whether Hedley was alive or dead. She thought she would be unable to bear her sense of guilt if he had died but, if he lived, what then?
For a fortnight, nothing. Then, one day, Larry Coogan’s red van brought a letter.
Kath opened it with trembling fingers. She felt the movement of her blood within her veins, the stirring of hair upon her arms. She thought she would fall, but did not. Instead went looking for her mother. Who saw her face and came to her at once.
‘Whatever’s the matter?’
‘It’s Hedley.’ Somehow she said it. ‘He’s safe.’
The authorities told her what time the train was expected in Adelaide. She decided to meet him there. It will be nicer for him, she told herself. Others would have travelled with him as far as the city but, had he continued north, he might have had to do the rest of the journey by himself. She had the idea that so much freedom, after years of imprisonment, might be terrifying, if borne alone.
There was another, more compelling, reason. She wanted to get it over with. Ever since the Red Cross letter, she had been literally sick with nerves. She was frightened of his eyes looking her over and knowing at once what had been going on behind his back. Frightened even of his not knowing, since there was no way he would remain in ignorance for long. Most of all, Kath was frightened of her own feelings. Would she feel love? Pity? Indifference? Hatred? Would he be her husband, miraculously and gloriously returned? Or a stranger, for whom she felt nothing?
Her instinct was to leave Walter behind, but everyone assumed she would take him. Walter himself expected it so, at the last, she relented. She told herself that Hedley, too, would be anxious to see his son.
See him for the first time, she thought, staring out of the rain-drizzled window at the first seeping of the Adelaide suburbs, listening to the sour and painful pounding of her heart. Walter was three and a half years old and this would be the first time his father had seen him. Deprived, as of so much else, of his son’s first years with all their joys and exasperation, the promise of the future in the present.
We’ll have others, she told herself, willing herself to welcome the prospect. God knows I’m fertile enough. The thought brought no consolation. Regardless of the future, Hedley had been deprived of his first son’s babyhood, while Walter had never known what it was to have a father.
Hedley will be a stranger to him, she thought. Even more to me, because I remember the man who went away, who in the nature of things can be there no longer.
The platform was crowded: women, children and flags everywhere. A fat woman with her elbow in Kath’s ribs scowled at the delay, emitting an aura of ill-temper and sweet talcum (God knows where she got that). ‘Think they’d get it right for once, wouldn’t you?’
It was something that Kath found frightening, the sense that today was nothing special, only the first in a succession of days extending into a future without distinction or joy or even hope. There should be a band, she thought, a cheering crowd, so that for the rest of our lives we shall remember the day when we all became one again.
Still the train did not come. The fat woman shoved and shoved but, for all Kath’s bruised ribs, the twin rails remained empty. Suspended above the track, the second hand of the big round clock jerked and ticked.
‘Wouldn’t read about it,’ the woman breathed, clutching her flag like a dagger with which to assassinate the world. Suddenly she laughed. ‘That bloody Alfie. Never been on time in his life.’
A gathering murmur swept the crowd. Kath, like everyone else, was on tiptoe. She could see nothing but, like the rest, knew. A singing of the rails before a locomotive with smoky breath drew a line of carriages into the station.
Tears, screams, a blue blizzard of waving flags. The fat woman screeching like a factory hooter, muscly hips as lethal as a howitzer.
Doors were thrown back amid a surge of noise and bodies. Uniformed men clattered out, were clutched rapturously, sometimes by people they knew. Kath looked, islanded by her personal silence. The fat woman’s shriek bayonetted the air.
‘Alfle!’
And off she went, a Sherman tank on feet, assaulting with open arms and monstrous bosom a skinny cove who looked scared, as well he might.
The first exuberance surged away. Now the men climbing from the carriages were thin, almost wispy, with enormous eyes, carrying with them a silence as terrible as the steadily-ticking clock above their heads. A strong whiff of steam would blow them all away. Or perhaps not; after all, they had survived so much.
In the midst of them, a figure less changed than Kath had conditioned herself to expect. In the same instant Hedley saw her. She saw his eyes take her in, move to the child at her side, back to her again. He did not smile but nodded, his expression as tight as the lips that threatened the world so pugnaciously.
Her heart sank as she saw a stranger who she feared, for all his familiarity, would remain forever unknowable.
They moved towards each other. Hedley was painfully thin, his face stained with darkness, but at least — unlike so many now tottering about him on the platform — he was whole.
‘Welcome back,’ she said. Her voice was calm, yet hysteria was not far away. Is that the best you can do? she demanded of herself, but ignored it, as over the years she had learned to ignore so much.
They stared, across a gulf. This, too, the war had done, stealing future as well as past, although this she was not yet ready to admit. She pushed forward the reluctant child. ‘This is Walter.’
A flicker in the eyes. Something that might have been a smile creaked like an unused gate. Hedley crouched, bringing his face to the boy’s level. ‘How you going?’
The voice, at least, was the same. Kath clutched it eagerly. Perhaps, after all, he was not altogether changed.
Walter regarded his father gravely, in silence. His fingers clutched his mother’s hand, trusting her to protect him from this stranger.
‘Yeah, well…’ Hedley straightened, moving cautiously, and Kath saw that he might be more damaged than she had thought.
‘We came to meet you.’ She appealed to her son, turning eagerly to him as a refuge from feelings as strange to her as the man. ‘The train was so late, we began to be afraid it wasn’t coming at all, didn’t we?’
Walter, who had no views, said nothing. Kath turned to her husband, straining for enthusiasm to quench gathering terror. ‘Do you want anything to eat? There’s bound to be a caff somewhere. They might be able to manage a cup of tea, or something.’ Clatter gushing, endless and idiotic, to fill the silence that threatened so fearfully. ‘Did they give you anything on the train?’
Hedley did not bother to reject the offer.
‘Let’s get home.’
All the way Hedley sat by the window
, drinking in the countryside. Kath had run out of all the non-things to say and sat lizard-still, waiting for the sun that did not come out. At last there was the green-roofed station, as grand as any mid-north palace, and they climbed out into the air of home.
Benjamin was there, and Emily. Her own parents had stayed away — to give his family first crack, as they had said — but would come around later. As, no doubt, would many others.
Benjamin, slow-moving, burly, clutched his son. Who might have been a twig.
‘Soon get some meat on you.’ They stood back, looking at each other, unwilling to acknowledge the changes.
‘You okay?’
‘Good. And you?’
‘Good.’
Both of them lying for the record, for themselves.
At last, through the open windows of the car as they drove up and up into the ranges, came the reality of the sustaining dream. The sloping paddocks, the first emerald shoots showing through the dark earth, the richness of hope fulfilled, of a future enormous and without limit, in which healing would possibly be found.
‘What you put in over there?’
‘Wheat.’
‘Looks in good nick.’
Benjamin swelled a little. ‘We managed to get by. Even without you.’ A laugh as rich as the earth. ‘That Wilf … Done good, I can tell you. Done real good.’
In the back of the car Kath, Emily and the boy, squashed together, clutched silence patiently before the ritual worship of the land.
Somehow the day skidded past. People, and more people, came to burden the air with their laughter and good wishes and, at last, to go again. Hedley bore with it, even managed to survive the endless fussing of the women, a species with which he had so long been unfamiliar. The smell and sounds of women welcomed, yet were as threatening as freedom itself. The vastness of the landscape belaboured his senses.
After everyone had gone, after the voices and laughter, the plates of food, when the bruised air was at last still, Hedley said, ‘I’m going out for a bit.’