A Time of Secrets

by Deborah Burrows

  Eric would have made fun of the silly expression; Ross just nodded. ‘Coffee?’ He looked around the kitchen. ‘I presume Dolly has coffee somewhere.’

  ‘Of course. Courtesy of the Americans. In the top cupboard.’

  He peered inside and took out the tin. ‘I’ll make it. And I’m staying the night. I’ll sleep in Dolly’s bed.’

  ‘I don’t want you to.’

  ‘I’m not leaving you here alone. So I’m staying.’

  There was no point arguing and, anyway, I didn’t want to sleep in that flat alone. I handed him clean sheets and left him to make up Dolly’s bed as I washed my face and brushed my teeth. When I went to my room I locked my door, turning the key so that it made a loud click in the lock.

  It was two in the morning when I heard him. A loud shout, followed by moans. He was yelling to someone. I jumped out of bed, gasping at the cold. I slipped my feet into slippers and threw on my dressing gown. I unlocked the bedroom door and dashed into Dolly’s room, but when I turned on the light it was clear that he was in the grip of a nightmare.

  He tossed around in the bed, shouting to invisible men to drop down, watch out, he’s over there. He cowered at invisible bombs and ducked to avoid invisible bullets. There were tears on his cheeks.

  ‘Wake up, Nick.’ I grasped his shoulder and shook him. ‘It’s a dream. It’s only a dream.’

  Even though they said not to wake a sleepwalker, I thought that this was more like night terrors. My sister had had night terrors in Malaya. When she flailed around in the bedclothes, screaming, Mother would awaken her by firmly shaking her shoulder and saying, ‘Wake up, darling, it’s only a dream.’

  Jill would open sleepy eyes and smile at Mother. Ross grabbed me in a fierce embrace, pulled me onto the bed and rolled on top of me. I was fairly sure he was still dreaming, until he put his hands on either side of my face and he put his lips on mine. No one could kiss like that if they were asleep. Not like that! His lips were warm and soft and skilled; one hand was in my hair and the other traced lazy circles over my bare neck. Without any conscious thought – how could I think at such a moment? – my arms went around his neck and up into his hair, pulling him closer. I revelled in the hardness of his body against me, and in the scent of his skin. His hands moved down, under my pyjamas, over the swell of my hips and along my thigh.

  Then I began to struggle. I pushed against him until I had wriggled out of his embrace, or he had released me. I came to my senses sitting on the side of the bed and hiding my head in my hands.

  I mainly felt fury at myself for responding to him, and I tried to somehow justify it by remembering that Nick Ross was a skilled seducer. Any woman would find it difficult to withstand him. I hadn’t really enjoyed it at all – surely I hadn’t really enjoyed it? He’d tricked me, pretending to be having a nightmare. It had obviously been a ruse to get me close enough to pounce on. But when I remembered the terror in his voice, and the tears on his face, I knew it hadn’t been pretence.

  I removed my hands from my face.

  ‘What were you thinking?’ I asked.

  ‘I wasn’t.’ He sounded faintly amused. ‘I was having a nightmare that turned into a dream come true. I did what any man would do in those circumstances.’

  ‘I thought I wasn’t your type. I thought you had no romantic interest in me.’

  ‘I lied.’

  At that I stood on unsteady legs and faced him. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Ross.’

  He was lying back against the pillows. A slight smile was playing around his mouth, but the expression in his eyes was bleak.

  ‘Honestly, do you try your luck with any woman who comes within grabbing distance?’

  ‘Not every woman. And you hardly fought tooth and nail to escape me.’

  ‘Oh, very gallant.’ I pulled my dressing gown closer around me.

  He put a pillow behind his shoulders and sat up in the bed. ‘No one could ever accuse me of gallantry.’

  As I took a breath and calmed myself I realised, with some surprise, that I wasn’t scared in the slightest. Annoyed, yes. But not afraid. I even laughed. It was shaky, but a laugh.

  ‘Tuck called you “young Lochinvar” at Dolly’s party,’ I said, and quoted: ‘O young Lochinvar is come out of the west.’

  ‘Western Australia, anyway,’ said Ross, and finished the quote: ‘So faithful in love, and so dauntless in war, there never was knight like the young Lochinvar. Sounds more like Eric, surely.’

  ‘No,’ I said, glaring at him. ‘It sounds nothing like Eric.’

  ‘More like Eric than me, anyway.’ He shook his head and gave a short, bitter laugh. ‘I’m neither faithful in love nor dauntless in war.’

  I hesitated. Eric had said that Ross pretended to be vulnerable to attract women. But his nightmare had been real, terrifying to him. I wondered if talking about it would help him.

  He was watching me with an expression of wary amusement.

  ‘Stella?’ He gave a short laugh. ‘You have the look of someone who wants to help. I don’t accept help. I devour hands that try to feed me. I have bad dreams. Most of the men who return from the hell we call war have bad dreams. Mine relate to my time fighting in New Guinea in the Buna–Gona campaign, and that accursed Timor mission.’

  ‘The mission was compromised. It wasn’t your fault.’ I sat on the bed beside him.

  ‘I suspected it was compromised. Eric told me it was compromised, tried to convince me to abort, but I wouldn’t listen to him. I was in charge and decided that I’d damn well lead. Pride, Stella. It came before my fall.’

  ‘You’re hardly Lucifer,’ I said, my voice dry. ‘You made a mistake. The court martial exonerated you.’

  ‘Shut up about it,’ he said. He seemed sulky. Again he ran his hand through his hair. There was a quick glance at me and a slightly scornful laugh. ‘You’re wrong about Eric.’

  ‘I don’t want to discuss it.’

  ‘And I don’t want to discuss my nightmares,’ he snapped. ‘Stella, he’s a good man. Don’t push him away because of your own fears.’

  ‘Oh yes? A good man who was trying to kill you.’

  He gave a short laugh. ‘You’re exaggerating.’ There was a brief hesitation, a rather self-conscious smile. ‘Eric wasn’t always so tough. You should have seen him when he arrived at school. Small skinny blond kid who never opened his mouth, never smiled. Just drew in his sketchbook all the time. He was bullied – boys don’t like odd, artistic schoolmates – but he either ignored it or ran away from it. He was a fast runner. No one could catch him once he’d bolted.’

  It was hard to imagine Eric as a small, scared little boy, fleeing bullies.

  ‘Rob Sinclair felt sorry for him. He likes to look after people. I don’t.’ He glanced up at me. ‘I’m not very nice, really.’

  ‘Tell me something I don’t know.’

  He smiled – not the false, movie-star smile, but an uncomplicated grin.

  ‘And then you became friends,’ I said.

  ‘Not at first. I joined in when they roughed him up. Boys’ schools are tough places. It’s sink or swim. But it wasn’t any fun, because there was no fight in him. He didn’t start growing until he was fifteen or so. Now he’s – well, you can see how he is now.’

  ‘So when did you become such close friends?’ I asked. ‘After you saved his life?’

  Ross settled back against the pillows and watched me from under his dark lashes. ‘He would have died if I hadn’t kept his head above water. I nearly died myself – it was like a maelstrom out there that day. Waves thrashing about us, wind slapping water into my face, Eric a dead weight. Another boy did drown.’ His face was furrowed in a frown. ‘I don’t know how to explain it. Saving him created a bond, I suppose. And then I found out about his sisters. That was another bond.’

  His hand pushed a furrow through his da
rk hair, and his mouth was a hard line. ‘He heard them die, you know. It wasn’t a big house and he heard them choking for air, desperately trying to breathe. He heard them stop breathing, first one and then the other, and he heard his mother wailing.’

  I stared at him, horrified.

  ‘No wonder . . .’ I said nothing, trying not to imagine Eric hearing his sisters die. Trying not to imagine how he must have felt to see me gasping for breath that night.

  ‘My brother . . .’ Ross’s hand was a fist gripping the coverlet. He looked at me; all trace of his usual mockery was gone and his eyes were tormented. ‘Look, can we change the subject, Professor Freud?’

  ‘If you like.’ I kept my voice level, wondering what had happened to Ross; what horror he’d experienced as a boy that ‘bonded’ him to Eric.

  ‘Why won’t you ever call me Nick?’

  I was surprised at the sudden change of subject. I lifted a shoulder in a shrug. ‘I’m not sure. Perhaps it’s simply to annoy you. Does it annoy you?’

  ‘Not really. I think you do it to keep me at a distance.’

  I kept looking at him, searching the planes and hollows of his face. He was an enigma to me. I had no idea at all who was the real Nick Ross. I looked down at my hands. There was silence for a while.

  ‘I killed my brother.’

  I jerked my head up, but he wasn’t looking at me. He was gazing at a spot somewhere over my left shoulder.

  ‘Tell me,’ I said.

  ‘I was nine. Stephen was four.’ He swallowed.

  I waited and eventually he spoke again. ‘Eric, me – we both lost people we loved when we were nine years old,’ he said. ‘That’s the bloody bond between us. Why we took that damn oath and became blood brothers. Eric’s sisters and my brother were dead. We had no one else.’

  He lapsed into silence. When he spoke again his voice was very quiet. ‘I’d been told to watch him. I was always being told to watch him and I hated it. Stephen used to follow me around all the time, just an ordinary annoying little brother. We’d had a fight that morning, though, and I’d hit him. I told him to push off, and he disappeared. Later I heard him screaming.’

  ‘What happened?’ My voice was a whisper.

  ‘He’d always been fascinated by the copper. I knew that, Stella. I should have been watching him. His clothes caught fire, I suppose. By the time I got to him his clothes had burned away, he was black and his skin was coming off.’ Ross’s voice was very soft now, so that I hardly heard him when he said, ‘He died a couple of days later.’

  I could picture the scene clearly: the two boys, the fight, the scream, the shocking discovery and the desperate attempts to save his brother. I’d fought with my sister a lot when we were little, only I’d been the younger one. She’d often been told to watch me, but had slipped away instead, in order to get some peace. My heart ached for the little boy who’d hit his brother and told him to push off.

  ‘You were only nine. It wasn’t your fault.’

  He turned to me with anger sparking in his eyes. ‘It wasn’t Eric’s fault that his sisters got diphtheria.’ His voice hardened. ‘It was my fault that Stephen burned to death.’

  I shook my head. ‘No. Nick, it wasn’t your fault.’

  ‘My parents thought it was my fault,’ he said. His jaw was tightly clenched and I could see a muscle twitching at the side of his mouth. ‘My mother could barely stand to look at me after Stephen died. So they sent me away to boarding school.’ He looked up at me again. ‘I was the only boy boarding whose home was less than a mile away from school. I hated her for sending me away.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘My mother. I hated her for hating me. Dad tried to make her see reason, but Stephen had always been her favourite, her baby. And I’d killed him.’

  ‘It was an accident. You were only nine years old, Nick,’ I repeated. I wondered if I should say what was in my mind, and found myself doing it anyway. ‘So you saved Eric that day because you couldn’t save Stephen?’

  Finally he looked at me and there was the bare ghost of a smile on his face. It wasn’t a nice smile and his voice was harsh. ‘And to think I studied psychology for three years when I could have come to Dr Stella Aldridge for psychoanalysis.’

  My cheeks burned. ‘Well, it’s rather obvious,’ I said. In for a penny in for a pound. ‘And when you treat women badly, you’re trying to get even with your mother.’

  ‘Maybe.’ His smile broadened. It was still unpleasant. ‘She says she’s so proud of her soldier son, but I suspect that she’d love to be a grieving war mother. Dressed in black, flowers on the war memorial, condolence cards, lace handkerchief touching the corner of her eye at the funeral service.’

  ‘Stop it, Nick. Stop being so self-indulgent and morose. Your mother says she loves you? Well, accept it at face value.’

  There was a mocking look on his face. ‘Eric, who is my best friend, thumped me for kissing his girl. I don’t hold it against him. Why do you?’

  ‘So that’s how you want to play it,’ I said. ‘You tell me your secrets and I’m supposed to reveal mine? No thank you.’

  ‘What are your secrets, Stella? That you hate any sort of violence in a man because your husband knocked you around?’

  I’d had enough. I started to stand up. Ross grabbed my arm and pulled me back down again onto the bed, forcing me to look at him. ‘Eric lost his temper. So what? Men do that all the time. So do women. He had a go at me. So what? He and I – we’ve scrapped before.’

  ‘You were scared of him. I felt it.’

  ‘I knew I was in for a thrashing. He wasn’t going to hurt you, Stella.’ I turned away. He pulled me back, forced me to look at him again. ‘I can tell you that, hand on heart, on the Bible, on my mother’s grave. He would never have hurt you. That’s not the sort of man he is.’

  ‘Your mother isn’t dead.’ My voice was sulky and I wouldn’t meet his eyes. Had I been wrong that night, had I been unfair to Eric? He’d seen his best friend kissing his girl. It had happened before, when Ross had taken Eric’s girlfriend and his fiancée. So Eric lost his temper and attacked Ross. If Ross held no grudge, should I? I hated violence. Hated it so much that the sight of it left me shaking with bitter memories. But we lived in violent times; we were at war.

  ‘I think you should get some sleep,’ he said. ‘That is, if you’re determined to go to work tomorrow.’

  ‘I am.’ I stood up.

  He burrowed into the bedclothes and turned his back to me. ‘Turn off the light when you leave, thank you, Sergeant.’

  I looked around for something to throw at him. Dolly’s bedroom was in a terrible mess, with clothes strewn haphazardly over chairs, and knick-knacks – some of them obviously valuable – piled on her dressing table and on the floor. It reminded me of Mrs Campbell, and I wondered if such nonchalance came from having so much money that one didn’t need to worry about taking care of valuable things. In the end I simply walked out of the room.

  I left the light on.

  Thirty-six

  Betty’s smile was sympathetic when I arrived at work with Ross that morning.

  ‘Are you all better?’ she asked.

  ‘All better,’ I said.

  She looked at Ross, and then her eyes returned to me. She lowered her voice. ‘Lieutenant Cole is in his office.’

  I nodded. ‘It’s fine, Betty.’

  We went straight to Ross’s office. He gave me some files and we looked at them together. His phone rang at nine thirty and he told whomever it was that he’d let me know. He hung up.

  ‘Captain Molloy expects you in his office at eleven.’

  We looked at each other. I nodded. I felt weary, disillusioned. Four men, brave men, would be flying into danger, perhaps certain death, in just over a week.

  ‘Simply tell him the truth, Stella.’ Ross leaned back and stretched his
arms high in the air. He seemed tired; there were lines of fatigue around his eyes.

  I didn’t see Cole when I went down to morning tea at ten thirty. The usual group were sitting around the big table in the kitchen, but Jim Pope’s good-humoured face was drawn and he looked worried. Mary moped and spent most of her spare time chatting to Sam de Groot, who was as imperturbable as ever. Faye wasn’t there.

  I’d just left the kitchen and was about to go up to see Molloy when I heard my name being called. Jim Pope came up to me quickly and spoke in a low timid voice, one completely unlike his usual bantering tone.

  ‘They want to drum Faye out of AWAS. It’d kill her, to be thrown out with a dishonourable discharge.’

  ‘I know. It’s wrong. It’s all so wrong.’

  He looked at me, screwed up his eyes in a frown and shook his head slowly. ‘Faye’ll do anything for a friend. She’s a bit rough sometimes, but she’s – I think she’s wonderful.’

  I put out a hand and touched his sleeve. ‘I think she’s wonderful, too. I’ll do what I can, Jim. I promise.’

  ‘I’d like to kill that bastard,’ said Jim.

  You and me both, I thought.

  ‘Shhh, Jim,’ I said. ‘No point saying such things.’

  When I entered his office Captain Molloy told me to sit down. I sat next to Captain Deacon. He asked me if I was prepared to talk about what had happened. I said I was. He stared fixedly at the desk as I recounted what had happened.

  ‘I am certain that Lieutenant Cole had dishonourable intentions towards me,’ I said, to finish. ‘Corporal Thompson and Corporal Massey were just trying to help me, to stop him from –’ My hands clenched into fists. ‘They acted bravely. They should be congratulated, not sanctioned.’

  ‘They acted rashly.’ Molloy’s voice was a low growl. ‘And you were so ill that you were barely conscious. He was trying to help you, you silly woman. They misjudged the situation and they attacked a senior officer. They’re facing court martial and demotion. Perhaps worse.’

  I looked at him, held his gaze. ‘I am prepared to give evidence under oath that it all happened exactly as I told you, sir.’