by JH Fletcher
The day at the coast when he had shown her the places that delighted him, that would have revealed to her something of himself, had she the eyes to see.
He thought she had seen very well.
Now this.
It would be so hard to talk of it, yet perhaps she deserved to hear. Perhaps he deserved to speak of it at last.
He opened his eyes, saw her staring down at him. He recognised her anxiety, that she understood both the enormity of what she was asking and the risk she had taken in doing so. It was the final confirmation that he could and should trust himself to her, that there might be healing in telling her the story.
So he told her, simply, quietly, without rage even at himself. When he had done, there was a stillness.
She took his hand. ‘Thank you.’ Very softly.
His eyes had turned inwards to the anguish that had been Paris. Now he looked outwards and saw her face was grave, concerned not at what he had been but at what he was now, the man who had emerged from the fire.
He smiled painfully. ‘It made me a bit antisocial for a while.’
He waited for her to utter all the platitudes. He was not to blame himself, it had not been his fault, he must put it all behind him and get on with his life — all the futile, agonising things that people say. Realised that in telling her he had been putting her to the test, as well as himself.
He held his breath, waiting.
She said none of these things, said nothing at all, but leant forward and kissed him tenderly, without passion, and ran her fingers gently down the side of his face. Then she sat back, her fingertips resting lightly on his chest. He watched her staring out at the dip and swell of the tan-coloured paddocks bathed in sunshine, the line of trees marking the creek that ran along the valley floor. This place had been her life, was still. Yet he knew, watching her, that everything about her was trembling upon the very edge of change, that even at this moment she might be bidding farewell to all that had existed in her life until now.
As I am, he thought. Because for him, too, everything was new. Even in Paris he had not known this overwhelming sense of tenderness, of desire as keen as a blade yet so much more than desire. It was an unfamiliar path down which he would walk in gladness, alone no longer.
He lay watching her until at last she sighed and turned and saw his eyes upon her. Her face coloured a little. She smiled, very close, and he lifted his arms. She came and lay with her head on his chest and, after a while, he rested his hand gently on her hair.
Later he got dressed. They walked silently back to the farmhouse. For the rest of the evening they barely spoke, letting their shared silence speak for them. Claude Fanning read the papers, growling throatily at the price of grain. Marge watched and watched and saw nothing.
EIGHT
Very early the next morning, Kathryn awoke and went out to the verandah, where she found Cal with a sketch block in his lap, watching the pellucid eastern sky. Night shadows still lay upon the valley, clustered about the silent conferences of trees, while along the horizon a rose flush turned steadily to apricot.
She stood at Cal’s side and rested her fingers lightly on his shoulder. Presently he lifted his own hand and laid it on hers.
They waited, as the land waited, for the sun.
Colours deepened, emerging from stillness. Then, from behind the distant hills, came the first golden blink of light, needle sharp. A breathless instant before avenues of pure gold, pale and austere, opened across the paddocks, avenues into which the dusk drained. A pigeon fluted, a soothing, contemplative sound, and suddenly it was day.
The day in which Cal would be gone.
As though the same thought had occurred to him, he turned and drew down her head and kissed her. It was a kiss full of longing, at once gentle and on fire. She kissed him back, hard, while his hand shaped her breast and she felt her soul utter between her parted lips.
They strolled across the tennis court and into the patch of woodland.
Cal said, ‘You remember the island I pointed out to you? The one where the penguins roost?’
‘What about it?’
‘At the seaward end there’s a flat stone, like an altar. I was there the other day, trying to come to terms with things. There were children …’ For a minute he was silent. ‘There seemed such a gulf between them and me. It was after that I made up my mind to go into the Outback. So I contacted you.’
‘I’m glad you did.’
There was so much she did not understand. She was groping, groping, but to the darkness there seemed no end.
‘The Outback,’ she said. ‘I understand you must go there. I don’t understand why.’
‘Because it’s a rounding,’ he told her. ‘People think of the salt aridity of sea and desert.’ His eyes shone at the vision of the silence that awaited him. ‘They’re not arid at all. They’re the promise of hope. That’s why I’m going. To get rid of all the trappings, to compress experience into ultimate simplicity. Which is the most complex thing of all.’
She was trying to taste the meaning of his words, to share the vision. She was so close, yet the purity of the dream eluded her.
Cal tried again. ‘I want to paint something so compressed that it is not there at all. Light and emptiness. Can you imagine it?’
Kathryn could, although more in the delineation of life’s possibilities than in painting.
‘And going into the Outback will bring you to that kind of light?’
‘Or to ultimate darkness.’
He had lost her. She shook her head, helplessly.
‘Ultimate darkness is where we escape completely from other people’s vision. When we’re alone, in new territory. Marie Desmoulins managed it, in the work she did in Kashmir. Matisse. Miró. Even Jim Nutt in Chicago. I want to see things in a new way, to have my fingertips touch what no-one has touched before.’
And thrust his outspread fingers so close to her that her spirit recoiled, although her flesh did not.
‘To touch eternity,’ he said.
I will trust, she promised herself. Then, perhaps, I shall understand. Yet the idea dissatisfied her. Trust implied surrender, and that had to be a two-way trip. She did not subscribe to the idea that a woman’s place was to accept, mindlessly.
‘And when you’ve been to this Outback of the spirit? What then?’
At last it had come. They looked at each other, eyes weighted by silence.
He said, ‘I shall come back. If I may. If you are free.’
Light poured with a green purity through the trees, lay upon them silently.
‘I shall be here.’
Four words, spoken lightly, yet with sober delight. Their weight was overwhelming. They bound her, absolutely and forever.
‘You are so gentle,’ he said in wonderment. ‘I love the gentleness in you.’
She grinned back at him. ‘Don’t kid yourself. I know how to look after myself.’
And kissed him again, desire naked upon her tongue. She stood back from him.
‘Go, now,’ she said, and smiled at the unspoken question in his eyes. ‘Sooner you go, sooner you’ll be back.’
He was gone. Kathryn watched the plume of dust settling silently. When it, too, was gone, she went indoors. To be alone; to exult in the joy and responsibility of knowing that never would she be alone again. Towards evening she went out again into the garden. She sat on the grass, looking across the valley to the line of hills.
She thought of the furnace into which Cal was heading, compared it with her life here, in the mid-north. It seemed to her that this expedition typified all the dangers that confronted them, the basic incompatibility of temperament and background. The differences would have frightened her, had she permitted.
Around her the garden was a pattern of roses and lavender, petunias and marigolds, whose gentle prettiness would be lost in the glare of the iron land. Everything neat and dear and familiar and stifling.
I shall have to fight, that is all. I shall have to overc
ome the differences.
Cal had told her that she was gentle, that he loved the gentleness he saw in her. It was what she would have wished for herself, above all things. Gentleness to please herself as well as him, but knew she would have to fight to acquire it.
I know how to look after myself.
Gentleness did not mean surrender. Her own life remained important, too, a life to be shared but not forsaken. I shall do what I must, she told herself. Whatever is necessary to achieve my life’s desire.
Hours to the north, amid a wilderness of salt bush and silence, Cal stopped the car at the side of the road and got out. He stretched, making his spine creak, bent straight-legged to place his hands palm down in the dust.
He peed on an ant hole, watched them run.
He stared about him. He knew himself to be minute amid the vastness, yet at one with everything. The dusty earth, the tangle of wire-dry scrub, the dazzle of blue air. The scattered trees breathed stillness. Along the verges the plumed grasses grew silently amid a worship of sunlight.
The sun, low now, was still benign. Further north it would be a club to belabour the thirsty land. Few trees there, only scrub and patches of thin grass. Only the stones crying, and the heat.
The whole continent lay like an ambush, separate entirely from the irrelevant cities scattered along the coastal fringe. You had to come here to know the land’s reality, to gain an awareness of perspective and scale.
Galahs flew screaming. Garlanded by the flock’s raucous voice, Cal watched their wings, rose and grey, as they sped away.
I shall bring her here. She will see what I see, the wonder and the unity of life.
He drove until dark, slept by the road, continued in a rose-tinted dawn. Reached the Marree airstrip at nine. Hennie came charging to meet him, exuberant, back-slapping, voice to rival the galahs.
‘How you going, my mate?’
NINE
Hennie slopped a beer, sighed and belched in satisfaction. ‘Good to see you, my mate.’ Winked. ‘How’s the old lady, heh?’
It was twenty years since Hennie had left South Africa, yet he still carried the accent, like a memorial to the Transvaal that he did not regret at all. He liked to play games, to pretend that Cal and Stella were having steamy sex behind his back. Had no idea of the facts. Cal went along, telling the truth while pretending to lie.
‘Tires me out. Had to get away, or she’d have worn me to a frazzle. When you coming back to sort her out for me? Get her off my back?’
‘Too much for you, heh? Not surprised. A real tiger, that one.’
Hennie was as proud of his wife’s sexual appetites as though he believed what he was saying. Which, God and Cal knew, was true enough.
‘Sure you won’t join me?’ Fiftyish, balding, shoving a beer belly, he scratched his gut and cracked another bottle.
Cal shook his head.
Hennie tipped his head back; the second beer followed the first. ‘Gets blerry hot up here. Can’t drink when you’re flying, so in between times I likes to catch up.’
‘So long as it’s only in between.’
‘No worries about that. I’m barmy, but not that barmy.’
Though he believed in pushing things to the limit, from what Cal had heard. When he had first suggested flying together, that had been part of the attraction, the death wish operating. Now things were different.
‘Just get us back in one piece, I’ll buy you all the beer you can drink.’
‘Blerry rash offer. Don’t worry, my mate, I won’t hold you to it.’
But had a third beer, all the same. In a corner of the room, the packed fridge hummed boozily. Through the dusty window Cal could see a steel spider’s web of pipes and valves and tanks, the high chimneys of the plant puncturing the sky. Beyond the perimeter fence, the parched and featureless land lay prostrate under the sun.
‘Hot,’ he said.
‘I told you. Fifty degrees, last time I looked.’
‘All the same, I might go for a stroll, bit later, see what’s outside the wire.’
‘Nothing you can’t see from here. Might as well be the blerry Free State.’
From a Transvaler, there could be no harsher condemnation.
‘You through here?’
‘Finished and klaar. Say the word, we can shove off first thing in the morning.’
‘We needn’t be long. A week, ten days, should do it.’
‘I’m due three weeks. Take as long as you like.’
For all his winks and lascivious red lips, Hennie seemed in no hurry to get back to the wife who was too much for any man. Who might welcome him ardently. Or not: who could say? And Cal was paying, after all.
Later, the sun well down, Cal went for a stroll. On the landing pad Hennie’s baby stood.
Admiring her was the first thing he’d had to do when they’d met in Marree.
‘What d’you think of her, heh?’
Cal had stared up at the helicopter. ‘It’s big.’
‘Damn right. They need to be when you’re hauling freight.’
‘What is it?’
‘Four-seater Bell. Picked her up from one of the Bass Strait oil rigs. Gets you into places you’d never be able to go with an aircraft. And manoeuvrable … Wait till you see how I can chuck her around the sky.’ He had laughed exultantly. ‘I’ll soon get rid of your lunch for you.’
They had climbed aboard.
Hennie had started the engine, wound up the revs. ‘It’s got only one problem.’
‘What’s that?’
‘One of these mothers hits the deck, next thing you’re toast.’
Cal had stared at him. ‘How do you avoid it?’
Hennie had laughed. ‘By not hitting the deck.’
And had taken off, northward bound.
Now Cal remembered Stella saying, He’s mad … Thanks for telling me, he thought. Thanks very much.
Beyond the wire it was as Hennie had said. The land, flat and featureless, stretched away: desert country. Here the steel ecstasies of technology ruled. From the top of mast-like chimneys, gas flares painted the fading sky.
Cal walked a hundred metres and stopped. He stared north. The wilderness beat its ardent drums inside his head. Feeling the north wind barely touching his lips, Cal went ahead of his body, eagerly seeking the fulfilment of those stony canyons, those plains of fire. There, in the emptiness, he would find meaning and artistic fulfilment. He knew it with a certainty that transcended knowledge. There he would go, and Kathryn, whom he loved, would go with him.
Early the next morning the two men climbed into the chopper. Rotor thrashing, they took off into an opalescent dawn. The sun was still below the horizon but, as they climbed, the earth’s dark rim fell away and the red orb came swimming up through layers of night to meet them.
Cal watched as Hennie banked, settling the chopper on course, and saw the land, like a mysterious shadow, stretching away on all sides until it merged with the twilight, horizonless. The sun’s first rays flowed across it so that every undulation stood out in stark relief. The contrast of contour and shade made the landscape even more mysterious, while overhead the stars bled pinpoints of dying light. The sun flushed the cockpit with primrose that turned first to chrome and then to gold. In the newness of the day, the sunlight advancing below them in gigantic strides across a landscape as old as time, the helicopter flew north.
* * *
A week after Cal’s visit, there was a dinner for the victims of the fire. Claude, prodded by his wife, made up a party. A cousin and his wife, down from Crystal Brook. Marge’s brother, Dave Holt, had to be invited but, mercifully, declined. Mr and Mrs Chivers. Kathryn, with Charles, who was on his best behaviour. Made one or two jokes, stiffly, at which, stiffly, they laughed. He apologised for the presence of his mobile.
‘In case of emergencies,’ he explained.
Kathryn sat, and smiled, and was silent. Marge could have shaken her.
Some writer fellow, on a visit to the district, told a
story. Of the fire and a farmer’s wife. Marge did not follow it too closely; like her daughter, she knew how to smile and not hear. At the end of the evening, she made sure that Kathryn was left alone with Charles, whose mobile had not rung.
I’ve done the best I can, she thought, as Claude drove her home. I can’t propose for him.
Or tuck them up in bed together. Although would have done both, had it been possible.
Perhaps tonight …
It was such an ideal solution. She would not give up hope, despite all.
In the meantime, sitting in his car, looking at the town pond where ducks floated, Charles, at last, was proposing.
Kathryn had felt the moment coming, had done what she could to head him off. In vain.
Despite his consideration for his patients, Charles was not totally immune to the medical profession’s disease of arrogance. ‘I’m no good at expressing my feelings,’ he said truthfully, ‘but I do care for you. Nothing would make me happier than for us to be married.’
His sincerity, stiff as new boots, creaked. She hesitated. She wanted a man, children, a life more than her present life. All of which Charles might be able to provide. It was not as though she were inundated with offers; Cal had tried to make love to her, but that was all. No commitment there.
Charles was decent, loyal, considerate, respected … His qualities would fill a book.
Yet … I shall be here.
Her promise confined her. She was close to tears. She said, ‘I’m very fond of you —’
‘I see.’
For a moment she hoped he might be angry, but Charles knew how to conceal his feelings. If he possessed anything as unreliable as feelings.
‘There’s no rush. We’re right for each other. I’ll ask you again.’
If he had truly wanted me, Kathryn thought, he would have grabbed me, shaken a commitment out of me, but had not. Would not. She longed for violence, in his feelings, even in his body’s response, but Charles was not a violent man. Instead he changed the subject, courteously.