by JH Fletcher
‘A good evening,’ he thought, ‘very successful. Although that writer bloke was a bit of an embarrassment.’
How can he? she thought. But knew why. Reality armoured him. Charles was aware what he had to offer, believed she was too sensible to refuse him forever. He would wait; he would ask again; she would accept.
His certainty and lack of passion terrified her. Worst of all, she was afraid he was right, that the net was cast, that struggling against it would be futile or, worse, embarrassing.
He dropped her off, presented a brotherly kiss, as tasteless as chastity, to demonstrate how he had forgiven her. She couldn’t wait to get out of the car. The air, warm, crop-scented, was sweet.
In the house a light burned: her mother busy with a tapestry on which she had not worked for months.
‘Good evening, dear?’
‘Fine, thanks.’
Marge waited, in vain. Kathryn was resigned to the fact that soon, in the miraculous way of mothers, she would know all about the proposal and her rejection of it, but would tell her nothing now. Time for that later.
The next day, to her horror, Charles came to see her again. They walked, they talked of nothing, awkwardly, she wishing more than anything that he would leave her alone. He had heard something, that was plain. Would not speak of it, but encircled her with his presence, hoping to out-wait her into saying something.
Which, resolutely, she refused to do.
At last he stopped, and coughed, and stared for a while at his boots. Eventually he said, ‘I want you to promise me one thing …’
‘What?’ Eagerly. She would have agreed to almost anything to remove the tension between them.
‘If you’re committed elsewhere. If you’ve made up your mind. If I have no hope …’
She thought. And thought. So falls my life.
Said, ‘We need to talk.’
He, watching distance. ‘So talk.’
She went and sat on a fallen tree trunk. Patted it. ‘Come and sit with me.’
So he did, but separately. Waited.
‘I have met someone,’ she said.
‘You feel for him.’ It was not a question.
‘I feel for him,’ she agreed, ‘but am not sure he is right.’
‘Second best.’
His words were bitter; she did not understand.
‘How so?’
‘You will wait for him. This man. If things work out, that will be fine. If they don’t, you’ll come back to me. That’s what you mean, isn’t it? I’m the back-up in case things go wrong. Second best, as I said.’
‘It’s not like that!’
Passionately she sought to reassure him, to salvage the pride she had wounded so badly. Could not; he was right and they both knew it. It was terrible. She did not know how to mend the hurt, which he had in no way deserved.
‘It isn’t you.’ Not only you. ‘It’s the way of life here.’ The way we would live if I married you. ‘There’s a world out there. I need to see it before I settle down. I’m not ready.’
‘You could travel. I suppose. If you really want that.’ Dubiously, unable to see the point in gawping at other places, the way other people lived their lives.
It was not that, either. The physical fact of travel was unimportant. She would have explained, but it was impossible to put into words her feelings, her passionate anxiety to seize life by the throat.
‘This place, the way we live here, has always been enough for me.’
He spoke humbly, as though acknowledging his fault in being as he was.
‘Don’t!’
There was no fault in accepting the cards he had drawn in life. In being content.
Like a pudding.
So, talking to her mother, she had dismissed it, contemptuously. Yet here was a man, solid and abiding. He acknowledged his roots, his ancestors buried behind the church, would in time be content to add his body to theirs. He would influence this land in a way that she, skating superficially across its surface, would not.
Despairingly, Kathryn thought that Charles was the better person, yet knew, despairingly, that being better had no relevance. She was as she was, different. She regretted it, but the fact remained. If she settled down now, with Charles, the loss of what might have been would gnaw and gnaw. And, in the end, destroy not only her life but Charles’s, too.
She would do it to him no more than to herself.
She put her hand on his knee, seeking not to console but to communicate. ‘Second best has nothing to do with it. I need to see, first. I need to feel. I need —’ how passionately she felt it ‘— to be.’ She tightened her hand on his leg. ‘Do you understand?’
He did not. His face reflected his pain in trying to do so but failing. With Kathryn beside him, his life here would be complete. A place in which to set his feet, as his forebears had done; a woman he respected, for whom he cared; the opportunity to be of service. A world complete in itself. All else was words and, in his heart, Charles had never trusted words. Which could conceal so much.
‘You need more time …’
‘Yes! Yes!’
If it had been no more than that … For the moment, Kathryn was happy to accept even so limited a measure of comprehension.
‘Time to be,’ said Charles, as though he really understood. He smiled crookedly. ‘Better get on with it, then. Or we’ll both be waiting forever.’
No hint of reproach. His generosity made her heart weep, although her eyes were dry. She squeezed his hand, knowing she was closer to him now than ever before. Would have kissed him warmly, even passionately, but did not. There was a limit to what even Charles would accept.
He stood. ‘I shall be here.’ His hand groped helplessly for what might lie on the other side of pain. ‘If you ever need to talk …’
They walked back, together yet apart. She watched as he drove away. She waved. She had expected relief; instead there was only weariness and sorrow for Charles and herself, that she had been unable to accept the offer of a good man.
She went into the house. Her mother, who understood very clearly what had not been said, waited. Teeth sharpened by disappointment, she would have found relief in words, but words needed two and Kathryn would not give that satisfaction.
‘Skip it, ma.’
Went on down the corridor. Her door closed. Marge went in search of her husband, who was an easier target.
TEN
For over a fortnight Cal and Hennie crossed and re-crossed the Interior. Outback towns, stiff with heat and dust; stations isolated from their neighbours by a hundred miles of emptiness. They flew low over the gibber plains of the Sturt, the mirror-like stones as red as fire under the unrelenting sun. They crossed the southern boundary of the Simpson, saw the sand dunes stretching away northwards like the rollers of a vast and smouldering sea.
From time to time storms ruptured the sky. Rain poured with a frenzy that cut off all vision, all sensation, for perhaps four hours, before stopping as abruptly as it had begun.
‘I warned you,’ Hennie said. ‘Bad news, the rain this time of year. Like being under Vic Falls and makes the ground like glue. You can’t walk a yard.’
Bad news in other ways, too. During the storms the electricity knocked out the radio.
Once, the rain caught them as they were landing and Hennie had to feel his way to the ground without being able to see it. He laughed, delighted by the adrenalin rush of danger, but Cal wiped away sweat.
‘I hope like hell you know what you’re doing.’
‘Don’t worry about it. This sort of thing keeps you young.’
‘Or makes sure you never grow old.’
And again Hennie laughed.
One night they stayed, by permission of the station owner’s wife, in a deserted bunkhouse, the men who lived there swallowed by the immensity in which they worked. Their presence remained. On a noticeboard a pin-up flaunted balloon breasts tight with silicone, a vapid smile. A pointed tongue, pink and luscious, offered promises that wou
ld never be kept.
They ate steaks, courtesy of the station, slept under a roof for the first time in days. Beyond the dusty window the land waited.
In the middle of nowhere, they shared their fire with a bunch of station hands, white and black, who rode in to check out the strangers. To a man they were tall, lean, sun-dried. They sat around the flames and talked cricket. Down in Adelaide the Poms were getting a bashing. Cricket apart, they didn’t give a damn what was going on in the rest of the world. Someone mentioned Canberra, was at once jeered into silence.
‘Them bloody nig-nogs …’
It was still early when the hands left. Before sleep Cal walked a little way. It was cold, the stars sparkled frostily. In the silence he sensed once again a breathless expectation. It is here, he thought, what I have come to find.
Here, too, he would return, bring Kathryn into the remoteness. With the thought, she smiled at him, her hand touched his, her dark cap of hair glossy in the starlight.
When he got back to the fire Hennie, wrapped in his blanket, was already asleep.
Without the chopper and Hennie’s expertise, none of it would have been possible. The casual-seeming skill with which the pilot handled the controls fascinated Cal. If he’d handled his wife half as well, Cal thought, he’d have had no trouble. But Hennie was the worst of romantics, wedded to a concept of air and flight and, perhaps, to the oblivion of silence. The sea coast and the woman who lived there meant little to a man whose true love affair was with the empty plains of the Outback.
The two men developed a strange relationship. In the air they hardly spoke; even on the ground they didn’t say much. At night, over the fires they lit to arm themselves against darkness and cold, Hennie took refuge in the same stale banter with which he had greeted Cal two weeks before, about Stella and the sexual games that Cal was supposed to play with her.
Cal, too, was insulated by distance. Stella’s ardent body moved sinuously beneath his own; he remembered sweat, strangled cries, the open, seeking mouth. He went along with the cuckold’s truthful fantasies as though they were indeed the figments of Hennie’s overheated imagination.
Yet was exasperated by them. If he thinks about her so much, he thought, why doesn’t he do something about it? Came slowly to realise that Hennie did not want to, that for him talk was more potent than the physical act could ever be. He doesn’t want Stella at all, Cal thought, only this idea of a woman lost in the rhythms of desire and release.
From memory he drew the pilot at the controls of the chopper, mastery explicit in every line; another drawing showed him beside the nightly fire, features reddened by flame, imagination reddened by visions. Loneliness, Cal thought. Perhaps, for some, there was fulfilment in that, too. And tried to incorporate it in his drawings, a component of the Outback’s brooding isolation.
Whenever they were on the ground during the day, the heat savaged them. Hennie had been right about that, too. Each day the temperature neared fifty and, after the storms, the humidity was close to absolute. It was certainly no place for a picnic.
In that flat country, Cal could see for what seemed a hundred miles. He tasted with open mouth the isolation and the silence.
To paint the silence, he thought. That will be the first step. And paced the dusty ground, not so much thinking as holding himself open to impressions, the flowering of the subconscious. There is something here, he thought. In time it will come.
The trouble was that they’d gone far beyond the week or ten days that he’d anticipated. Two more days and Hennie’s leave would be up; he’d have to report back to Moomba. Once again Stella would be left to conduct her solitary, or not so solitary, vigil by the sea.
They left the Simpson with its fire-red rollers and flew south, saw the white blink of salt lakes. In the distance, away to the east, were the folded strata of a range of mountains.
‘What’s over there?’
‘Gammon Ranges,’ Hennie said. ‘Part of the North Flinders. Harsh country, that.’
After so much flat land, Cal was hungry for the variations in perspective created by the hills.
‘Can we have a look?’
Hennie looked at his watch, shook his head. ‘Maybe tomorrow.’
‘What’s the rush?’
‘If we’re not at Emu Tank on time they’ll come looking for us, and I don’t need a boot in the arse from Moomba for being off course.’
‘What’s there?’
‘Nothing much. A shack and a bore. An old-timer called Jock.’
‘What’s he doing out here?’
‘There’s an old mine, hasn’t been worked for years. I reckon he does a bit of fossicking. I heard him mention sapphire once.’
An hour later they were there. Hennie put them down pin-neat on a scrap of open ground outside a low cluster of buildings the colour of sand. Jock stood waiting, a hand raised to shield his eyes against the gale vomiting from the chopper’s rotors.
Hennie switched off and they heard the sibilant voice of the wind. They climbed out into a tyrannical heat and walked over to the old man standing as motionless as the bibs and bobs of abandoned machinery that lay scattered here and there behind him. He was pole thin. A pair of old trousers flopped about naked ankles, a tuft of grey hair showed above a mud-coloured singlet from which emerged bare arms as thin as twigs.
At once Cal knew he wanted to draw him and, later, he did.
‘Who the hell would want to look at my ugly mug?’ Jock wondered, voice roughened by age and sand; by solitude, too, perhaps.
‘I’ll make you so beautiful, half the women in Australia will come looking for you.’
‘Bloody hell, you got a job on, you want to do that.’
But sat there, grinning toothlessly for the artist, as though he truly expected the sheilas to come running.
Soon it was dark. Cal put his materials away and they all turned in.
During the night it rained. The dawn broke sullen and dark. Even with the cloud cover the heat was already a bastard; worse, the humidity was back, bleeding oxygen from the air, leaving a blanket of moisture that, by the time they were ready to leave, weighed like bricks.
Cal, who had wanted sunlight to bring out the colours of the landscape, was outraged.
‘On our last day? I don’t need this!’ Like a spoilt brat.
Hennie shrugged philosophically. ‘Be thankful we don’t have to walk.’
It was barely light, but neither of them could wait to get out of there. They said tooroo to Jock.
‘Make sure you go straight home now,’ he instructed them. ‘Like good boys.’
Hennie grinned. ‘Might take a look at a waterhole I know, if the weather clears.’
‘Don’ forget to let me have a copy of me picture,’ Jack told Cal.
They climbed aboard. Cal worried, privately, about the chopper. If you couldn’t walk perhaps you couldn’t take off, but Hennie got them away without any dramas.
As the helicopter climbed, the dreadful heat fell away. The sun shone momentarily although ahead the clouds still hung, rage-black. To the south the Gammon Ranges bared their jagged teeth.
‘Still want to have a look?’ Hennie said.
Cal looked dubiously at the clouds. ‘What about the weather?’
Hennie whistled beneath his breath, discarding the weather. ‘Be in and out before it breaks. You want to see them, this is your last chance.’
Which was true, certainly.
‘Just in and out, then, okay?’
‘You’re the boss.’
Hennie tried to radio Moomba to tell them of the change of course, but the storm’s electric curtain hung between them and he could not get through.
‘What the hell,’ he decided. ‘It’s only for an hour.’
And swung the chopper south-east. To their right was the salt blink of Lake Torrens, behind them Lake Eyre faded into haze.
Lake Eyre, Cal thought. The huge salt pan, thousands of square kilometres of it. That was another memory.
&nb
sp; They had flown over it a week earlier, the diamond glitter of salt reaching to the horizon. Cal had thought that it had to be one of the remotest-seeming places in the universe, more alien even than the stars. Perhaps that is how I should paint it, he thought, the glare of salt mirroring the night sky. He remembered the painting he had called Fox By Moonlight, of snow beneath the moon, the loping fox, Gianetta.
With astonishment he realised that he had not thought of her for days. Did so now, not with horror and remorse, but with the warm memory of happiness and shared affection.
Perhaps I am free of the agony at last, he thought.
Again he studied the salt shield below them. ‘No chance of putting down, I suppose?’
Hennie laughed. ‘On the salt? We can try, if you like. Mind you, pick the wrong spot, we might go straight through. They say it’s miles deep, nothing under the salt but slime. What a way to go, heh?’
At once he put the chopper into a dive, rotors thrashing. He flew so low it seemed they might scrape the surface.
Cal was appalled. If it were really possible to go through the crust… He stared at Hennie, who laughed.
‘One way to sort out the men from the boys.’
And went, if anything, lower.
Courage was one thing; idiocy something else. ‘For God’s sake, Hennie!’
At this height the heat was a killer, but it was not only the heat that brought the sweat to Cal’s body. He twisted in his seat and looked behind him, seeing salt crystals whirling like fine snow in their wake.
The shore was lined with dunes as high as cliffs. As they approached, Hennie touched the controls, the helicopter lifted in a roar, Lake Eyre was gone.
Hennie slapped his knee with a gleeful hand.
‘Got to change your underpants, don’t feel bad about it, heh? You wouldn’t be the first.’
He was cackling, but Cal was so furious he could not speak. A salt lake a million miles from anywhere, a crust that might or might not support them, a cowboy at the controls. Who needed it?
Yet they had survived.
A memory, indeed. Now Cal looked down again. As they neared the mountains, the character of the land was changing. A thin scurf of shaggy vegetation barely disturbed the stark symmetry of the cornelian ridges. The colour that in the distance had seemed a uniform grey resolved into a rainbow of muted tints: black and silver and navy, plum and olive brown, with immense fields of sand flowering in yellow drifts between the rocks. The harsh character of the land consumed all. From this height it was patterned with the sinews of dried-up stream beds beneath a sky of violent blue.