Fire in Summer

by JH Fletcher

  She went to the bathroom, sluiced water on her face, walked down the corridor to the kitchen. It was large, like all homestead kitchens, but that was about all that could be said for it. The wood-burning stove; the clutter of odd cupboards; the deep sink with its single tap and wooden draining board; the lino-covered floor. On the plus side, the long pine table polished until it glowed like honey in the light. The rocking chair by the stove where she sat on cold days to read the paper that Larry Coogan dropped off with the post at dinner time. On the wall, a picture of men shearing. They looked strange with their long-johns and moustaches, one with a beard halfway down his chest, but she liked it, even used to talk to it, sometimes, when she felt the need for company.

  She thought of her trip to the Art Gallery, eighteen months earlier. So much in the world …

  I should get Hedley to smarten the place up a bit, she thought, but knew there was no point in asking. Always there was more land to buy, more equipment, more livestock. There was never money for things like kitchens.

  I should put my foot down, she told herself. She went out into the bright yellow morning, fetched a bucket of feed from the shed, went to feed the chooks. There was a worn place in the side netting. We’ll have to get that fixed, she thought, or we’ll be getting the foxes in.

  She was making herself a cup of tea when the phone rang.

  ‘Drat it …’ She let it ring for a minute while she poured boiling water into the pot, then went through to the phone, wiping her hands on a cloth as she went.

  ‘Hullo?’

  Beth’s voice said, ‘I hope I didn’t get you out of bed …’

  ‘Fat chance.’

  Was surprised to hear from her, all the same. For a long time Beth had been almost a stranger. Her husband had survived the war, but had then done a runner with a bird he’d met in France. Nowadays Beth looked after her old Dad, was not at all the sunny person she had been once. All the same, once a mate …

  ‘Aunt Clarrie’s had a heart attack,’ Beth said. ‘She’s in hospital. They don’t think she’s going to make it.’

  Aunt Clarrie, who had conspired, romantically, with them both, whose house on South Terrace had been the scene of the only true lovemaking, Kath thought now, she had ever known in her life. Who had been so alive and now, it seemed, might be dying.

  The thought of the summerhouse awakened memories, some of them less than comforting. Jeth told me I was a tradable commodity. At the time I resented it, only later came to realise how right he was.

  ‘You going down there?’

  ‘I’d better.’

  ‘Want me to come with you?’

  Relief in Beth’s voice. ‘Would you mind?’

  ‘I’ll be an hour. Okay?’

  She put the phone down, returned to the kitchen to drink her tea and cook breakfast. When she had finished, she went into the bedroom to change. Through the window she could see that the sky was still clear; it was going to be warm later. She fished a summery dress out of the wardrobe: lime-green cotton, square-necked, with a flared skirt and short cuffed sleeves. Hedley had been ready to give her a mouthful until she told him she’d paid for it out of her egg money; even then had chipped in with his two pennyworth.

  ‘You want to waste your money, I suppose that’s okay …’ Big of him.

  She slipped the dress on and did up the buttons. It felt cool and light against her skin. She pirouetted before the mirror, admiring the way the skirt swirled about her legs. She packed a bag in case she had to stay overnight, went into the kitchen where Hedley was tucking into eggs and a chop.

  He took in her finery. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Beth’s Aunt Clarrie’s in hospital. I’m going down to Adelaide with her.’

  Hedley would have liked to have made something of it but saw her expression and shut up. ‘What time you getting back?’

  ‘Have to see how she is. Some time tonight, I suppose. Or maybe tomorrow.’ To get her own back for the look he’d given her.

  See how hard done by Hedley looked now. ‘Tomorrow? What about —’

  My tea? Walter’s tea? What about the chooks?

  Kath was in no mood for indignation, from Hedley or anybody else. ‘You’ll have to manage the best you can.’

  Walter came trailing through, hair on end, shirt hanging out. ‘Mum, where’s my socks?’

  Men.

  ‘Where you left them, I suppose. And get a move on, if you want me to run you down the hill.’

  For the first time Walter took in the lime green dress. Unconsciously echoed his Dad. ‘Why are you dressed like that?’

  ‘I’m going to town.’ And shooed him off, like a boy-sized chook.

  Somehow she got everything organised, as she always did.

  ‘Mutton and salad in the fridge. Icecream. Cold potatoes you can warm up if you want to …’

  And was off down the hill, the first dust of spring boiling behind her, Walter with one shoe on, climbing into the other one.

  He, too, looked put-upon, neither of the men in her life liking a change in their routine. For the moment Kath was uninterested in their likes and dislikes.

  She dumped him at the end of the school road.

  ‘How do I get back?’

  ‘Like you always do. Get a lift.’

  Only on the way to Beth’s house did it really sink in that she was enjoying herself. She was sorry about Clarrie, of course, was ready to commiserate with Beth, but in her heart was having fun. It was nice to get away for a bit, even for something like this.

  She picked Beth up at the house. Beth had a bigger case than her own, thought she might have to stay for several days, depending on how things worked out.

  ‘What did your Dad say?’

  ‘He didn’t mind.’

  Why should he? Kath thought uncharitably. Mr Horrocks had it made; the wife he disliked had died years before and he’d taken care never to get involved with anyone again. He had his bowls and the pub, his daughter as unpaid housekeeper.

  Why Beth had never married again was a mystery. She had the looks; at first, there had been plenty of blokes after her, but somehow it had never come to anything. The business of her ex had soured her, yet the prospect of wasting the best years of her life clearing up after her Dad, in the house she’d been born in, would surely be enough to drive anyone dilly. She ought to get married again, Kath thought. Or get away. Do something; do anything. Otherwise she will rot.

  Still, she seemed okay at the moment.

  They went by train, neither of them fancying the long drive, and took a cab to the hospital from the station. Where the nurse was hush-voiced. ‘She is still unconscious.’

  ‘How is she?’ Beth wondered. ‘Really?’

  Armoured by professional circumspection, the nurse was not prepared to say. ‘Perhaps tomorrow —’

  ‘I thought I might stay.’

  This, it seemed, was not a good idea. The patient was unconscious. It would serve no purpose.

  ‘But if she wakes up —’

  ‘We shall contact you at once. Provided we have a number, of course.’ Anything, it seemed, rather than have the rellies cluttering up the place.

  Kath remembered the time during the war when Beth had routed the toffee lady from whom she had bought the dress that, later, she had been so eager for Jeth to remove. She decided to return the favour. ‘A waiting room?’

  The nurse was an expert in this kind of warfare as, no doubt, in other things. There was indeed a waiting room. Which was being cleaned. ‘Maybe you should go for a walk …’

  Her voice said she didn’t care what they did, as long as it was somewhere else.

  Beth gave up. ‘Let’s go to the house.’

  Which they did, although Kath was not pleased, neither with the nurse, nor the fact that she’d defeated them.

  The big house was full of silence and the smell of age. Once again Kath revisited her memories. She remembered the banister rail smooth beneath her hand as she came down the stairs to gree
t Jeth Douglas. Her heart had been beating fast, but less so than later. Although already I had known how the evening was going to end, she thought, if things worked out between us.

  The concert … In the dusty hallway, the Russian music beguiled her ears in a hammer of exotic discords. The restaurant … After eleven years she again tasted the food, saw the welcoming smile and ample back of the woman leading them to their table. The blue and white jug, brilliant with a sunburst of flowers.

  She had never been back, did not even know if it was still there. I should have a look sometime, she told herself, knowing that she never would. Like certain memories, magic was best left undisturbed.

  Beth called from the shadowed recesses of the house. Where, no doubt, Aunt Clarrie’s personal ghosts also walked.

  ‘What are you doing out there?’

  Kath walked blinking into the kitchen. Through the window she could see the outline of the summerhouse. I should not have come back. But did not think, and now it is too late.

  ‘I’m making some tea. Fancy a cup?’

  ‘Thanks.’

  There were uncleared things upon the table: a plate with crumbs on it, another with congealed traces of egg. Kath carried them to the sink, turned on the taps. They coughed and spat, but eventually ran hot water over the dumped dishes.

  They had their tea, washed up, prospected through the house. ‘Nothing that a good clean won’t sort out.’

  A pile of library books on a side table. Kath pawed them over. The house echoed with images: feeling her cheeks pink-bright as she came into the room and saw him watching her; the feather touch of his lips upon her cheek; his greeting ‘Hi …’

  I can’t go on like this.

  She walked upstairs and into Aunt Clarrie’s bedroom. Bed unmade, clothes piled upon a chair, curtains still drawn. She pulled them back. Sunlight flooded. She sorted through the clothes, hung what was clean in the cupboard, put aside the rest for the wash. Stripped the bed, remade it, sheetless. Added the sheets to the piled clothes, bundled them in her arms. At the door she looked back. Once more anonymous, the room looked safer now.

  She took the washing downstairs, found the laundry at the back of the kitchen, stuffed everything into the washing machine and walked into the garden. Roses and pansies. Beyond the wall, traffic growled in South Terrace. The sunroom was locked. She shaded her eyes with her hand and looked through the glass. Could see little, but did not need to. The sofa, big and sprawling. The scent of dead flowers. The touch of hands upon naked flesh. The ghosts.

  Yes. I’m sure. Yes. Oh yes.

  Afterwards, she had sent him away.

  She stood in the empty garden, the house of the possibly dying woman at her back.

  This wasn’t romance, she had told him. It was sex.

  Dear God.

  Back indoors, she watched through the kitchen doorway as Beth mopped the floor. Frizzed hair, lines already in her face. This is her life, Kath thought: her father gruff and sour, resenting the reality of age while taking full advantage of it; Beth living out her loveless existence.

  You’re a fine one to talk, she told herself. If you were a paddock, Hedley would love you with all his heart.

  For the first time she acknowledged the truth: how she wished, so passionately, that she’d had the courage to continue along the path upon which, not quite unknowingly, she had set her feet all those years ago. At once, fearful of consequences, she sought to shake the thought from her head. Better off out of it, she lectured herself. That path might have led to Gainsborough, South Carolina, it was true, but could as easily have gone nowhere at all. If Jeth had died in Okinawa …

  If.

  She walked into the kitchen. Her smile flew its bright banner for the benefit of her friend and herself, while the tyrant word beat its drum in her head. If. If. If.

  She said, ‘What’s next?’

  They left the house polished and sanitized, its floors fit, at least for the moment, for the food that would not be eaten off them.

  At the hospital, the doctor offered no hope. ‘Sinking,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’

  Beth decided she would stay on. Kath went home. Where her men, if they welcomed her return, did not show it, or ask how Clarrie was, or anything. She could forgive Walter, at thirteen, but stared at her husband, disliking him. She had barely known Aunt Clarrie but had been more traumatised than she had expected by the impending death of the old lady who had helped her years before. Hedley’s absolute indifference, the fact that he did not even try to hide it from her, made her feel invisible. She thought, No, I’m sorry. There has to be more to life than this.

  The next morning, while in Adelaide Aunt Clarrie still clung to what was left of life, Kath took a deep breath and seized, if not life itself, at least the remote possibility of life. She sat at the kitchen table and wrote to Aunt Maudie, who had been her friend.

  I am sorry to drag you into my affairs once again, but am thinking of writing to a friend. Almost certainly he won’t answer but, if he does, I would like him to use your address. Please let Beth know, if that’s all right.

  She read the letter. She wasn’t happy with it; it was too formal, expressing none of her feelings, but was the best she could do. She would have phoned but did not dare; the call would have to go through the local exchange and calls had been overheard, and quoted, in the past.

  Two days later Beth came home because her Dad was bellyaching about the lack of attention that he had long regarded as his right. Kath met her at the station.

  Beth reported that Clarrie still had a toehold on life, if you could call it life. ‘No point hanging on down there,’ she said. ‘The doctors don’t expect her to come round again.’

  ‘I’ve written to Maudie,’ Kath told her. ‘I’ve asked her to send her reply to you. If she replies.’

  Beth looked, but asked no questions. ‘You and your mysteries,’ she said.

  A week later she rang. ‘There’s a letter.’

  One line: I shall be happy to help.

  Now all she had to do was decide. Would she? Or wouldn’t she?

  Late spring unravelled in a string of furnace-hot days, while the crops ripened in the paddocks. There were reports of fires, as there were every year, but nothing serious. Headers were checked and readied for action. Farmers paced contemplatively through their acres of wheat and barley, estimating yields. Hedley negotiated for a hundred-acre block at the bottom of the hill. In their tumbledown cottage, Wilf and Dulcie were making plans for the future.

  23

  WILF

  1955

  The cottage was like their life, ramshackle but jolly. Mess everywhere; no-one cared. They never had any money, but survived somehow. Enough to put food on the table and a bottle of booze in the cupboard, as Wilf said. What more could any man want?

  One thing, certainly, as the presence of four kids, the oldest only eight, testified; but that they could provide for themselves. And did, most nights. ‘Miracle we haven’t got a dozen, Dulcie told him. ‘The way you carry on.’

  ‘Complaining?’

  ‘You gotta be joking.’ And drew him into the bedroom to prove it. Afterwards, sweaty and contented, smiling at both ends as Wilf had told her more than once, Dulcie said, ‘You got a talent …’

  ‘Just as well I can do something.’

  ‘I’m serious. You should use it.’

  ‘I just did.’

  And went to paw her again, but she slapped his hand away. ‘I’m thinking.’ Five minutes later said, ‘Juniper Harris …’

  ‘What about her?’

  It was years since he’d given her a thought. She’d been sweet on him once, but ten years too old: thirty to his twenty. Unmarried Wilf had teased but never followed through.

  He’d looked her over at the market two weeks before, had thought, I’m well out of that.

  ‘How much land she got?’ Dulcie asked.

  ‘About five hundred acres.’

  ‘Still got the hots for you, has she?’
/>   He gave her his blank look; Dulcie’s rich laugh pealed. ‘Think I never knew?’

  ‘Nothing to know.’ Which was almost true.

  ‘I reckon she’s lonely,’ Dulcie said.

  ‘So?’

  Dulcie chased two-year-old Woody out of the fireplace: soot-smeared fireplace, soot-smeared child.

  ‘Dunno why I bother …’ She looked at her husband. ‘So make friends with her. Be nice. You never know, something might come of it.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like five hundred acres and no-one to leave it to.’

  ‘She’s old!’ Or not old enough; at forty she might be good for another fifty years.

  Dulcie didn’t think so. ‘Not her. That family never makes old bones. It’s your Christian duty,’ she said.

  ‘To screw her?’

  ‘Who said anything about screwing? Make friends with her. Mind you —’ again the rich laugh — ‘it would be in a good cause, eh.’

  To market, to market, to buy a fat pig. Or catch one, anyway. Not that she was fat, least of all where she ought to be. To be fair, not as bad as he’d thought.

  ‘How ya going?’

  ‘Fine.’ A guarded smile, no doubt remembering things more conveniently forgotten. Promises offered but, in the event, unfulfilled.

  ‘Haven’t seen you for ages.’

  Prattling on, cheery smile and all. Warned himself not to overdo it. Next week would be another day. Or something like that.

  ‘How ya going?’

  So it went. A week, a month. Juniper smiling now, although still with reservations.

  ‘How’s Dulcie? The children?’

  A rueful grin. ‘You know how it is …’ She knew nothing.

  At night Dulcie questioned him. ‘How’s it going?’

  ‘Slowly.’

  ‘There’s no rush.’

  24

  JETH

  1955

  Jeth Douglas was in his office in Charleston when he received a note from his father, who had never been called Jeth in his life.