by JH Fletcher
It took two hours, a journey that was normally half an hour longer. She had intended going straight to her uncle’s house, but instead drove up the rutted track to Cal’s studio.
He had shown her where he hid the key; she opened up and went inside. Its emptiness seemed more significant than the simple fact of no-one being there. She walked slowly around the room, breathing the smell of turpentine and paint. One by one, she looked at the paintings he had done, had partly done. Most of all she looked at the paintings he had not done but would, she knew, because now the contact had been restored. Again she felt his presence; again she held his soul in her hand, her watchful eyes willing his safe return.
Later, she went to the house. Inside, curled on the settee, was at once deeply asleep. At peace.
So that’s the first thing, Cal thought. When I get out of here, I’ll work. What else do we have to think about? As though he had any doubt. Let us think about Kathryn. There certainly was a lot to think about with Kathryn.
If Dave hadn’t talked me into going to Rheingold …, he thought. A month ago I did not even know she existed. Neither Kathryn nor her parents nor Charles Chivers. I beg your pardon. Doctor Charles Chivers. The boyfriend I have not seen. The boyfriend she has not mentioned. There are times when I wonder if he exists at all. But he does. Oh yes, I can feel him there, in the background.
I don’t think I have to worry about Doctor Charles Chivers. Silently he addressed the cliffs, rising like slabs of darkness on the far side of the pool. I believe I have sorted him out. Her mother hates my guts, though. Doesn’t she just? He could have hated her in return, not because he cared what she thought, but for how her enmity might damage him with her daughter.
Be fair to her, he told himself. Look at it from her point of view. Would you want your daughter to get involved with a bloke like you?
The idea of having a grown-up daughter to worry about was so alien that he could not pursue the notion. Nor was it important to him. What mattered was how Kathryn felt, and how he felt, and to hell with everything else.
What shall we do when we get out of here? I’ll tell you what we’ll do, he told the night. We shall stock up Jester and sail along the coast, putting in anywhere we fancy. We shall sail east along the South Australian coast, then along the Victorian coast until we turn the corner and head north towards Queensland. There are lots of inlets along that coast, lots of little harbours. We’ll put in wherever we feel like stopping. There will be creeks to explore, and lakes. Behind the lakes, as we go north, we shall see mountains. Not like the Gammon Ranges; those mountains will be green and covered in forest, with trails winding through them. We shall hire a car and drive along the trails through the forest. We’ll see kangaroos and wallabies and maybe, if we’re lucky, the odd echidna. Odd is right, he thought. Very odd; like little scurrying bushes. We shall drive into the highlands. When we get there we shall find a hotel; I’ve heard there are plenty up there to choose from. We shall eat good food and drink good wine and go to bed between good white sheets and make love. And in the morning the air will be fresh and cold and clean and there will be sunshine gleaming on cobwebs strung between the trees and the grass will be dew-wet and oh God how I wish we were there now.
Kathryn, he said silently, and turned and held her close on the rock shelf in the darkness. Kathryn, Kathryn, Kathryn.
THIRTEEN
Cal awoke to the crystalline stillness of the dawn.
He turned his head. Hennie was already awake, if he had ever slept, lying on his back with his eyes staring at nothing. His eyes were so wide, he lay so still that, for a terrible moment, Cal thought he was dead. He must have made some movement because Hennie turned his head to look at him, and Cal breathed easier.
‘You okay?’ Cal asked.
‘Sure.’
But there was a deadness in his voice that Cal didn’t like, as though something had broken in the night and the mechanism was functioning no more. Hennie’s port-wine redness had diminished, but the bruise on his head looked more livid than ever in the morning light.
‘How’s the head?’
‘Still there.’
Hennie gathered himself and stood, awkwardly, painfully. From the way he held his head, like a glass filled to the brim that he was afraid might spill, Cal knew it was troubling him but said nothing. There was nothing either of them could do about it, however badly it hurt. Cal stood up, too. He stretched, reaching as high as he could, before bending stiff-legged to place his hands flat on the ground. His muscles were sore, but that was to be expected. Once on the move they would soon loosen up.
He picked up both water bottles and went to the pool. He splashed water on his face and over his shirt, liberally, feeling his skin cringe at its coldness. He drank and drank until his stomach would take no more, filled both bottles, screwed the caps securely and went back to where Hennie was standing, shoulders slumped, looking disconsolately at the distant ridge to which they would have to climb.
He proffered the water bottle.
‘Coffee, my lord.’
Hennie did not turn his head or speak, and again Cal felt a tug of apprehension.
‘Or champagne, if his lordship would prefer.’
Somehow it seemed important to continue with the foolish game, to go on pretending the reality of what was not.
‘Non-vintage, I’m afraid, but —’
‘Why don’t you just shut up?’
At once there was silence, as brittle as ice, between them.
After a moment, deliberately, Cal said, ‘I have ordered breakfast for two at Arkaroola. Fried eggs, farmhouse sausage, all the trimmings. Just a short stroll over the ranges. The views, they tell me, are remarkable.’
The pilot took a deep breath. Taut as wire, Cal watched him. Then Hennie sighed gustily and his shoulders slumped again. Still he did not smile.
‘Farmhouse sausage,’ he said. ‘In South Africa we used to call it boerewors.’
There was a weariness in his voice that Cal didn’t like.
‘I’m sure they’ll be able to organise a special order.’
Still he persisted in the stupid game, but Hennie did not smile or respond in any way. Even the anger seemed to have died in him. That would be the worst thing of all, if true. Without anger and will, how would they ever drag themselves over the mountains to safety?
I shall do it, Cal told himself. With him or without him, I shall do it. I’ve got too much to lose if I don’t.
‘Let’s get on, then,’ he said.
Without waiting for a response, he turned on his heel, water bottle bumping against his hip, and began to pick his way over the dark rocks towards the defile leading to the high ground. After fifty metres he glanced back, wondering what he would see, but Hennie was on the move, too. Limping, head down, moving terribly slowly, but following.
I never remembered to ask about his feet, he thought. I never even noticed him put his shoes on. I don’t know how he manages at all, those shoes in this country, but once again there was nothing either of them could do about it. So many things they could do nothing about. Perhaps it’s as well I said nothing. All we can do is put our heads down, not think, and just walk and walk. What other options are there?
By midday Cal himself was running out of steam. They had been climbing for four-and-a-half hours, and it felt like a year. First, up to the crest upon which Hennie had taken yesterday’s bearing. A fresh bearing upon a peak on the far side of the valley, then down another slope of neck-cringing steepness. Beneath them space dragged at their bodies, making their eyes stand out in their sockets.
Now they were at the bottom, the fearsome ridge behind them. They rested for a while in the shade of an immense boulder but, even here, the heat was too great to tolerate for long. They had no strength to talk but panted, and tried to wipe away sweat, and waited for the night.
If the ground had been less broken, Cal thought, they might have tried to walk at night, to avoid the worst of the heat, but no-one could have done a
night march over terrain like this.
Eventually, without speaking, they struggled to their feet and set out wearily together across the valley. It was several kilometres wide at this point, a wilderness of broken rock and dried-up watercourses, of stunted trees as warped as the landscape. They forced their way over a succession of tormented ridges, disputing every step with ground littered with ankle-breaking rocks that waited in ambush like an enemy. The sun blazed down. Clouds were gathering, the humidity climbing like a cageful of monkeys.
By mid-afternoon they reached the other side. Here the ground began to rise again. The slopes of the foothills resembled a petrified sea; the naked rock swirled in crests and hollows, rising and falling like combers. It absorbed the heat and threw it back at them like a gigantic and malignant oven. The sun disappeared behind the swiftly gathering clouds, yet still the heat continued. It was awful, unrelenting, sapping strength and will, leaving them barely enough energy to breathe.
The two men stood side by side, staring at the rising ground before them. For the hundredth time they squared their shoulders, dragged the baking air into their lungs and pushed on up the slope.
The ground was fearsome, the worst they had encountered. First came a fringe of scrubby trees, their contorted branches as white as bone. Beyond the trees an overhanging ridge was dark with shadow. To the right of the ridge the way lay open between a series of cliffs, bare and terrible, that rose in a succession of steps towards the summit of the range. On the upper slopes the ground was devoid of vegetation, its surface harsh-knuckled and broken, the nearly vertical cliffs casting gashes of shadow across ground that was coloured chocolate and ginger and fawn, overlaid with a hint of green where patches of lichen caught the light.
There was a defile that ran between the cliffs. From this distance it looked simple enough, even easy, but Cal knew that in these ranges nothing was easy, that it was likely to be choked with more and yet more boulders, that beyond the summit ridge, assuming they were able to reach it, would be another valley, another rise, that beyond that —
Stop it, he told himself. Don’t think. Thinking, in these circumstances, was the enemy. Thinking, potentially, was death.
They had passed the trees and were halfway to the nearer of the two ridges when the rain began. By the time they reached the shelter of a massive overhang, it was falling in torrents, blotting out all sound and sensation.
They huddled as close to the cliff as they could and watched the cataracts of rain, the swiftly spreading floodwater that nibbled at the edges of the rocks, spilling like a tide across the naked surfaces over which they had just struggled. Below them the branches of the distant trees tossed like a grey sea.
‘We are fokked,’ Hennie said.
He had been, from the time they had set out that morning, barely able to walk, complaining as the day wore on of a splitting headache, double vision. Any number of times Cal had thought he would be unable to keep going at all, but somehow he had. Lurching on ruined feet, blaspheming in a voice almost too weak to hear, he had still managed to cover the ground, but Cal could see that now he had reached his limit. We both have, he thought, except that I do not accept the existence of limits. One step at a time, that’s the way we do it. One step, and then another step. On and on. As long as we think only of the next step and not the millions that lie beyond, we shall be right.
By enormous effort of will, he summoned Kathryn to his side. This is somewhere I shall not bring you, he told her. Not because I don’t think you’ll be able to handle it, but because I won’t. Get out of here and I shan’t be coming back. One trip like this is enough to last a lifetime. It’s likely to be a very short lifetime, anyway, the way things look at the moment.
Hennie was hunched on the wet ground, hands clasping the shoes that were now as close to falling apart as the men themselves.
‘Take them off,’ Cal suggested. ‘Give your feet a break.’
Hennie shook his head. ‘I’ll never get them on again.’
He was probably right.
The rain fell, and fell. Finally, in late afternoon, it stopped.
Cal forced himself to stand. For a moment, as he struggled upright, the mountains swerved vertiginously about him. He shut his eyes and shook his head; when he looked again, the landscape was still once more.
‘Let’s get on,’ he said. ‘Before the sun comes out.’
‘No ways.’ Hennie’s throat sounded clogged with phlegm. ‘The ground will be like glue.’ His favourite battle cry.
‘It’s rock. There’s nothing to turn to glue.’
‘Then it’ll be slippery as fokking glass.’
No doubt it would be; all the same, Cal was determined to move on. Movement was good for its own sake; a kilometre, half, even a hundred metres. All were good, a demonstration of the will that would not be defeated.
‘Just to the top of the ridge,’ he said, as though it really were no more than the casual stroll they had spoken of that morning. ‘Have a look at what we can expect tomorrow.’
Once again he set off without waiting for a response but, this time, when he looked back, Hennie had not moved.
Cal stopped. ‘Come on!’
Nothing.
‘We’ve got to keep going.’
Or we’ll die.
That was what he was afraid of; that if they stopped, even for an hour, if they released their hold on the situation even to that extent, the will would die. Let that happen and they would follow. Movement, for the moment, was life.
Still Hennie did not move. Cal was suddenly furious, glad to indulge it. In these circumstances anger, like movement, was also life.
‘Get your arse into gear,’ he shouted. ‘Or I’ll come back and bloody drag you.’
Would have done it, too.
Saw with relief that Hennie was indeed trying to stand, was struggling, struggling. First on both knees, then on one; inch by agonised inch, his back straightened until he was upright.
‘What a hero,’ Cal shouted down to him. ‘That’s the way. Now: one step. Come on, you can do it.’
Hearing his foolish encouragement echo back at him out of the emptiness and not caring. Hennie had to come on by himself, had somehow to drag from himself the courage to continue. Only he could do it, which was why Cal would not go back for him. Ultimately, they would make it, or not, under their own steam and no-one else’s.
He watched. One step was all it would take. Once Hennie had taken that, the rest would follow; the lock that presently imprisoned him would be broken.
‘One step!’ So he hectored him, watching the swaying, struggling figure. ‘Come on, Hennie! Come on!’
Hennie lifted one foot, uncertainly. Cal watched, holding his breath. The leg stretched out, straightened. The foot rested on the ground half a metre in front of the other foot.
‘You’ve done it!’ Cal as pleased as though Hennie had run a hundred metres. ‘Now it’s easy.’
Hennie looked up the slope, but at an angle, seeing not Cal but darkness. He said something that Cal was too far away to hear, took three or four rapid steps, almost running, and collided with the face of the cliff. As though he had been shot, he fell heavily forward on his face.
‘The Ring,’ Kathryn said.
Beyond the window of her uncle’s study, the distant sea glittered in the afternoon sun.
‘What about it?’ Dave’s face guarded, as his voice was guarded.
‘You took Cal to Rheingold …’
She groped for something her instincts knew was there.
Dave sat, the shadows of the room across his face. He said nothing, gave her no help.
‘You knew I’d be there. I’d told you. Yet when we met …’
The room was so still. One of Cal’s pictures hung above the desk, the harvest scene of sky and dust and violence. Like its owner, the picture watched her endeavours, revealing nothing. She knew the hand that had drawn it, yet, studying it, felt she knew nothing of the artist himself. The idea terrified her. Her compos
ure might have cracked, had she let it.
‘You acted like it was something extraordinary. Unexpected. Why?’ she demanded of the still and shrouded face. ‘Why?’
Dave rose, walked two paces to the window, stood staring out, silently.
‘I do not understand what you’re asking me,’ he said at length, his back to the room.
‘I think … I think maybe you set up the whole thing. Deliberately.’
Her words were harsh, emphatic. Yet still a question.
‘I felt Cal needed something to lift him out of himself. Something to shake off all the terrors he had lived with so long.’
Outrage painted her cheeks. ‘And I was handy. Is that it? You used me,’ she accused.
Now he turned. ‘Not you. Rheingold.’
‘But you knew I would be there. You hoped —’
‘A little,’ he conceded. ‘I thought you would be good for him. And he for you, perhaps.’
‘You never thought of me!’ Scornfully.
‘Not much; you’ve always been capable of looking after yourself. Whereas Cal —’
‘I’ve never known anyone more self-sufficient than Cal.’
‘Now, perhaps. Because you’ve made him so. You restored him to what he was before.’
‘Before Paris.’
‘Before Paris,’ he agreed. ‘But when you met him … No.’
‘You used me,’ she accused again, bitterly.
He would admit nothing. ‘How did I use you? I introduced you, that was all. The rest was up to the pair of you. But I would have done it, if I could.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I have a responsibility. I told him so myself, once.’ He smiled, reminiscently. ‘He was not pleased, I remember.’
‘You are responsible to Cal?’
‘To art. I believe Cal Jessop has the potential to be a very great artist. One of the greatest, perhaps. Anything I can do to help him achieve it, I shall.’ His eyebrows challenged her, bushily. ‘You would sacrifice yourself.’
‘I have that right. Whereas you …’