Ruth was silent. So much she could have said, perhaps should have said, but too late now. Too late, she thought, to admit that Kurtis had, quite literally, swept her off her feet; that his letters, his attitudes, his very being had created such a whirlwind of romance that she’d been lifted beyond logic, beyond reality… Only to come to earth with an almighty thud when the dream had been brought to an end.
‘Aren’t you going to say anything, Ruth?’ His voice was strangely soft now, his attitude also softened as he leaned back in his chair to sit watching her.
"There ... there isn’t much to say,’ she replied. ‘It was too fast, certainly. I was too ... naive, I guess, to realise where fantasy ended — must end — and reality began. Too naive, too young, too unsophisticated — certainly that. And far, far too gullible to see the whole thing for what it was!’
The last few words escaped with a hiss of bitterness that surprised even Ruth.
Kurtis certainly caught it; his eyebrow rose and his eyes hardened noticeably.
‘What it was? And just exactly what was that, Ruth?’
‘You know all too well,’ she snapped, not wanting to be drawn further but knowing it was now inevitable.
‘If I knew it all too well, I wouldn’t have to be here,’ he replied in a too calm voice. ‘So tell me. Just how did I play upon this so-called gullibility?’
Ruth paused before answering, gathering strength, fighting the fickleness of her upset tummy, her shortness of breath. And when she did reply, it all came out in a burst of anger and hurt that she couldn’t stop, didn’t want to stop.
‘I was always just a joke to you, and to your friends,’ she charged. ‘The so-called witch, the innocent, naive country girl, the Tasmanian: maybe not with two heads, but just as laughable for all that. A joke ... that’s what I was. A cruel, hateful, nasty joke.’
Kurtis made to speak, but Ruth shushed him angrily, shouting now, as she raged through a litany of the abuses she’d suffered during their brief period of togetherness: the sniggers of his friends, the downright rudeness, the way she’d been subjected to a constant barrage of criticism and laughter over her hair, her clothing, her lack of sophistication. Then she launched into the innuendo, the passes she’d had to fend off from social contacts who, she insisted, should have known better; the way she was certain — but could never prove — that his precious damned Rosemary had been the driving force behind it all; the way it had hurt, still hurt...
And in the end she sat, huddled in her chair, arms clasped about her middle and her head bowed in exhaustion — but not in defeat, not in blind acceptance. Never again that!
And Kurtis sat, silent, until she finally looked up at him and threw out her final, most cutting accusation.
‘You people have the morals of alley-cats,’ she sneered. ‘There isn’t enough honesty in the lot of you to produce one iota of real affection, real love, real ... real anything! And you can all go to blazes for all I care, because I’m me and I’m damned if I’ll be ashamed of that! Unsophisticated, naive, whatever...I’m me!’
And once again she lowered her head, willing him to give it up now, just to get up and leave and never come back.
But when he did finally speak, his words gave no indication he had any such plans; quite the opposite, in fact.
‘I’m glad you got that lot of rubbish out in the open,’ he said, and she looked up to see that he was sitting with his eyes closed, as if pondering on every word.
‘It’s not rubbish, except, I suppose, to you,’ she replied, her bitterness still a foul taste in her mouth.
‘It’s rubbish to both of us,’ he said bluntly. ‘And now its out where we can actually talk about it, I think, I hope, that maybe I can make you see that. Damn it, Ruth, are you so bitter, so blind, that you can’t see that your so-called unsophistication is one of the things I love best about you? Can’t you see that I love you for what you are, not for what other people might see, or not see, or ... whatever? What do you think all those love letters were saying, anyway? I didn’t write them just for my health, you know.’
And before Ruth could even begin to reply he rose to his feet and stood, glaring down at her like some medieval inquisitor, his eyes fairly blazing, his fingers knotting into fists that kept flexing and unflexing.
‘I will admit to a lot of things,’ he said. ‘I didn’t realise how difficult it was going to be to reorganise business matters so we could spend sufficient time together, I didn’t take enough account of just how much too fast I was pushing you into a relationship you obviously weren’t ready for, and I certainly didn’t allow for the influence of other people — because those other people weren’t important, their opinions weren’t important and I never for one minute guessed you’d ever consider them important.
‘But I never, never laughed at you, Ruth. You were never a joke to me, not then and not now. And I’ve never, never ever been ashamed of you, or embarrassed by you, or any of this other rubbish you’ve been mouthing off about. I can hardly credit any of it! It just doesn’t make any sense to me at all.’
And then, abruptly, he turned and strode angrily towards the doorway, turning finally to stand in it, scowling, quite obviously furious.
‘I’m going now, before I say something I might end up being sorry for,’ he said, and his voice was ice, colder than ice. ‘But don’t think this is over, because it isn’t and it never damned well will be. Not like this. Damn it!’ he snarled, and thumped the doorframe with his fist in a gesture so angry, so vivid with frustration that Ruth found herself flinching despite the distance between than. ‘Damn it!’ he said again, and his eyes burned across the room. ‘I must have time to think about this, Ruth. I’ll go now, and come again in the morning after I’ve had a chance to try and make some sense of it all — if that’s possible. I just can’t imagine you throwing away what we had on the basis of what other people might have said, or done, or thought.
‘I didn’t marry you for other people. I married you for me, for us. Anybody else, everybody else, had nothing to do with it, and I just can’t see for the life of me why you would ever have thought otherwise.’
Then, to her astonishment, he shrugged, throwing off his angry expression to replace it with a rueful grin.
‘Maybe, my love, it’s time you hauled out all those letters and read them again, only this time try reading between the lines as well, because they weren’t as frivolous as they might have seemed. You seem to have forgotten that. Those letters are me, Ruth, and what they say about my feelings for you is more than just a bunch of pretty words. You read them, and then I dare you to say that I’ve laughed at you or belittled you or patronised you. Ever! I may be guilty of a lot of things, but never that.
‘Read them, Ruth, and in the morning we’ll try and talk about this whole damned thing sensibly, like adults,’ he said. ‘And while you’re at it, try remembering that I love you, because I do. No matter what else, I do love you and I believe you love me, too.’
He turned away, then turned back abruptly to catch her with his gaze, holding her like a sheepdog facing up to a stubborn ewe.
‘No more running, Ruth,’ he said in a curiously gentle tone. And was suddenly gone, leaving her in a silence broken only by the sound of the outside door closing behind him,
Ruth sat, eyes closed and mind buffeted by whirlwinds of emotion and scattered thoughts, oblivious to the tears she could feel leaking from her eyes. She felt exhausted; her very bones ached from the tension, her head felt stuffed with cotton wool. Moving as if in a trance, she stumbled about the flat, tidying up the coffee cups, turning out lights, getting ready for bed. Trying, throughout, to make some sense out of all Kurtis had said, all that she had felt, had wanted to say and didn’t, hadn’t.
Read his letters? Again? How many times did he think she must read them? she wondered. They were already burned into her memory; she could have recited them almost word for word, had he demanded it.
She went to bed in the dark, determined simply to sleep and rebuild
her strength, to think of nothing... Only to find his face alive in her mind, his presence like a ghost in the bed beside her.
Her skin seemed to tingle, feeling in memory his touch, his warmth. Then she shivered, fighting for the strength that had let her leave him, the determination that had carried her through the past months without him.
Damn him, she thought. Damn and double damn! Just when she thought herself cured of him, just when she thought her life was back under control, her control, he could just walk in and fill an emptiness she had been sure didn’t even exist. To hell with him, and to hell with his letters.
And then she found herself reaching for the bedside lamp, opening the drawer and taking out the letters, hating herself as she did so but unable to resist. He wanted her to read them again ... she would. But reading them wouldn’t change anything, she thought. Reading them wouldn’t change the fact that, no matter what he said, he didn’t love her and never really had. It had all been just a cruel game to him, a casual dalliance with literary pretensions.
Ruth sneered at herself for bothering, cursed Kurtis roundly as she started with his very first letter, and found herself still reading, all thought of sleep long departed, several hours later.
CHAPTER FIVE
‘Dear my lady witch…’ Each and every letter began so, in what had become, to Ruth, almost a secret language, a magical language of love and wonderment and, now, hurt and confusion.
Dawn was painting the horizon a galah-belly pink while she was still reading Kurtis’ letters, her eyes tired and grainy, her mind twitching from the effort, her heart saddened by it all. She realised now that, despite actually memorising entire sections of the letters, despite having read each of them individually until the ink had nearly worn away, she had never really read them in sequence, never tried to link their thoughts, their messages, his thinking.
And just as well, she thought, or she might well have crumpled beneath the strain. Still might, because, exhausted as she was from the reading and the evening before, she couldn’t, with any honesty, avoid facing up to what the damned letters really said.
Kurtis had been right when he said the letters were him, that they said everything he’d ever tried to say to her. Using his warlock persona and that of the faithful servant type, and even occasionally writing in his own voice, he had done his level best to try and communicate with Ruth as fully and as effectively as he could.
To which she, in turn, had replied with brief, frivolous notes of her own, not trusting her own powers of written communication to relay her true feelings, and never, she realised now, giving his letters the answers they deserved at the time.
‘I read into them what I wanted to hear,’ she muttered at one point, unaware she was speaking aloud until her own voice startled her, even less inclined to admit even in the slightest just how much more there was to the letters when they were taken in context and sequence.
The saga of a love-affair, they were, or at least of half a love-affair. Throughout, there was a common thread, one of caring, of concern, of Kurtis opening himself up in total vulnerability, knowing his own flaws and faults, trying to let Ruth know them, too, trying to protect her from ... himself? Or from her own naïveté, her inability to look seriously, critically, at what he knew from his greater experience had to be looked at seriously sooner or later?
And they also, without contradiction, maintained his abiding fear that he was pushing Ruth too fast into the intimacy of their relationship, that he was giving her neither time nor room to come to terms with it as she would.
Almost from the beginning he had done so; the words of his so-called servant fairly leapt from one page at Ruth, words she had read and reread perhaps a dozen times before, but never quite taken in...
‘…And finally, bewilderingly to me, my illustrious master bids me note his concern that some elements of his last — yesterday’s — missive might lead your exemplary self to believe that your wondrous love-affair might somehow be going too fast for your elegant tastes. Considering how long it took him to compose that epistle, even with my dynamic help, the logic of this concern totally escapes my humble self, but perhaps your exalted wisdom can make sense of it.
Should this astonishing situation actually exist, I am directed to inform your eminence that my master would, purely out of love and admiration for you, cease and desist at your order. Immediately, if not sooner, provided you operated appropriately upon his fingernails with a pair of pliers. But he wouldn’t like it, I can assure your magnificence, and would probably do something quite drastic. It is surely a source of great concern to your splendid personage that a rampant chauvinist, a lusty conqueror of fair witch-maidens like my esteemed master would even consider such wimpy thoughts. It may be that he is simply trying to stir, a bit, though the folly of such bravado clearly indicates an unstable mind. Would a sane warlock chance his luck against your thunderbolts, dare to stick his magic wand into your personal cauldron, so to speak?’
And when he was being serious, Kurtis could be extremely so. With the questionable benefit of hindsight, Ruth reread one segment and wondered if the sheer intensity of it hadn’t caused her to put it aside, ignore the depth of feeling it now seemed to portray...
‘…Together, we could go where neither of us has ever been before. Dare I suggest, my most loved mistress lady witch, that we already have? And the adventure has scarce begun! We could find paradise together, you and I. But, the gods being ever fickle, we also may have to go through hell together at some time or another. I’d rather go to hell by myself, but I can’t find paradise alone.’
Ignore it? Yes, she thought. At the time it had been too, too intense, too powerful. And later, because surely she would have read it again; she had read all the letters, or at least most, while coming to the decision to leave her hollow marriage … later she had ... she must have missed that one, she decided.
Only to run across Kurtis quoting her, taking one of her rare serious replies to his romantic campaign and once again broaching the issue of moving too fast for her comfort...
‘Please, I’ve enjoyed your company but my strength comes to me when my back is against a wall, not when I’m loved. I’m vulnerable too,’ she had written. Or so he had said, replying through his servant.
‘…A plea from the heart, my mistress! No wonder my master hath taken to his bed; clearly his thoughts about going too fast were well-founded, and he is distraught. But lo, he creaks geriatrically to his feet, calling out in his anguish. A lover’s strength, he says, is the strength of ten; a warlock lover’s, the strength of twenty. Besides, right now you’re standing in a doorway with the wall hopefully far behind you. Look outward, upward, not back. The wall isn’t going anywhere.’
Ruth had only the vaguest memory of having written what he said she had, even less memory of ever absorbing the plea linked with his response.
‘Because I didn’t want to?’ she asked herself aloud, and wondered how she could have been so selective in her reading, how she could have failed to see the seriousness, the sheer, vivid intensity that now seemed to leap from his frivolous style.
And yet, she had tried, or at least it seemed she had. Once again her selective memory failed her in recalling having written exactly what Kurtis had said she wrote, but...
‘ “How does one write letters of a romantic nature when even witches haven’t ever done it before...?” ‘My master — whose eyes are beginning to fail him as the paper wears thin — and I for once agree: perfectly! My master, who as you know is wont to try and hide his feelings in verbosity, usually failing because your witchly eye is sharper than his warlock mind, is actually quite envious. And honoured beyond words, needless to say. Deeply honoured, and moved almost to tears!’
Ruth, too, was almost moved to tears, but her tears now were more of frustration and exhaustion than anything else. Kurtis had wrapped his concerns in verbosity and flowery language, but she had totally concealed her own in silence. Nowhere ever, she realised, had she told him
of her own concerns, of how she felt so gauche, so naive, so ... country that she was ill at ease with his business associates, overwhelmed by the speed and expense of their married lifestyle, inadequate to the role she thought he expected her to fill. Or had he? Nowhere in these letters was there a word about that!
It was full daylight now. Kurtis would be showing up almost at any moment, or as late as lunchtime? He hadn’t really said. And as she read on, and on, so much of his writing began to prey upon her conscience, if not that of his alter-ego servant...
‘Of course your esteemed self will realise that my master would have tossed out his rusty, antiquated traps some time ago — well, last month, anyway — if he’d had the sense God gave a brown dog. Certainly I, his very conscience, told him to do so, but I am but a meek and humble servant. His newly released ego, after years of captivity, positively demanded a sop or two, and my master foolishly allowed it over my objections. To his great shame.
However, be not concerned. In the confusion, for which read: pandemonium which followed the arrival of your most powerful spell, when, as you doubtless remember, my master was prostrate and certainly not his normal lusty self, I was able, in darkest secret — the master still doesn’t know, for sure — to lure that fickle ego into the dungeon’s foulest, darkest cell. And there he shall stay, oh, my mistress, on a diet of vegetables, until he learns a bit of humility! Of course, there may be a price for this, but we are reasonable folk, are we not?
Now, mistress, having established our credentials, as it were, may I comment freely upon your last missive? Of course I may, and shall. You make mention of a certain chain reaction of music ... surely an apt choice of words. My master has, with my help of course, been seeking a similar description for the effect you have on him. And his, while of course more flowery and wordy, had evolved to “Something in her sings to me’’ by the time your letter arrived to set him straight. Amazing, is it not, how great minds think alike and weak ones seldom differ?’
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