by JH Fletcher
Other questions followed, as she had expected, but now she was ready for them. ‘This whole business is sub judice. I understand I shall be called as a witness. In the meantime, there’s really nothing I can tell you about what happened.’
‘Will you be pressing the government to pass legislation to give increased protection to women and children who are abducted?’ The same man again.
‘I’m not the politician,’ she told them. ‘I leave that to my daughter. But I’d have said there was enough legislation already. There are times,’ she said carefully, ‘when it seems to me that in our praiseworthy anxiety to protect minorities we tend to neglect the majority. I’m not sure that’s wise.’
You could hardly be less politically correct than that, she told herself and derived pleasure from the thought.
A pleasure not shared by her daughter. When at last it was over Roberta shook her head, exasperated. ‘For God’s sake, mother …’
‘It’s the truth.’
‘He’ll twist it to say you’re against minorities. Next thing you’ll have the gay lobby on your back, the Aboriginal rights movement, immigrants —’
‘Stuff and nonsense,’ Ruth said spiritedly. ‘I’m not anti anything. I’m pro the majority. They call it democracy,’ she said acidly. ‘It’s the system you for one are sworn to defend.’
Roberta shook her head. ‘It doesn’t work like that.’
‘Then it’s high time it did. And if your lot isn’t willing to do anything about it perhaps we should let the others have a go.’
Which was not at all what Roberta wished to hear. ‘Not even in jest, Mother …’ Casting nervous glances about her, fearing eavesdropping reporters.
‘What makes you think I’m joking?’
They collected her luggage from the little office and for the first time Ruth realised that Boyd and Sally had also come to meet her.
‘So nice,’ she said and meant it. She had a lot of time for her daughter-in-law. Sally had to put up with a lot with Boyd. Both her children were capable of causing problems: Roberta too assertive, Boyd not assertive enough.
‘Was it awful?’ Sally asked.
‘Not too bad. I think I handled them all right. Roberta doesn’t agree, though.’ She spoke so her daughter would hear. ‘She thinks I’m politically incorrect.’ She smiled. ‘She’s right.’
To Roberta it was not a joking matter. ‘I said no such thing, Mother.’ But irritation showed its blade, for all her protests.
Sally was intrigued. ‘What did you say?’
‘I was stupid enough to tell them it’s not just the minorities that have rights. The majority has them, too, or should have.’
‘That’s not stupidity, it’s commonsense.’
‘Apparently you’re not supposed to say so, though.’
She should have been ashamed of her own maliciousness but was not. Only now did she realise how angry she was at what had happened. She was sure Roberta had orchestrated the whole thing and was not about to let her forget it.
‘That’s petty,’ Roberta said.
It was; for the first time in her life Ruth realised how much pleasure being petty could give.
They pushed Ruth’s trolley of luggage through the concourse towards the exit.
‘I’ve booked you into the Hilton,’ Roberta said. ‘Let you have a chance to get your breath back before you go north.’
But Ruth was not interested in staying in Adelaide. ‘I’d sooner get home,’ she said. She spoke pleasantly but with a ring in her voice that both her children had learnt years ago to recognise.
‘But if you go straightaway I’ll have no chance to see you.’
‘Why don’t you give me a call? Come to lunch?’ Ruth smiled at her. ‘We’ll have a nice chat then.’
Politics is the art of the possible and Roberta had always been a consummate politician. She surrendered with as good a grace as she could muster. ‘If you’ve made up your mind I’ll just have to put up with it, I suppose.’
They fetched Ruth’s car from the long-term parking area.
‘It’ll be an awfully long drive after everything you’ve been through today,’ Sally said. ‘Are you sure you wouldn’t sooner come home with us?’
It was exactly what Ruth wanted. ‘Yes,’ she said. Their eyes conspired surreptitiously together. ‘Don’t tell Roberta.’
Two hours later, showered and relaxed after the drive north, Ruth smiled at Sally and Boyd. ‘I should be ashamed of myself. So selfish.’
‘That’s the last thing you are,’ Sally told her.
‘I told Roberta I was going straight home.’
‘That’s another hour’s drive.’
‘That’s why she wanted me to stay at the Hilton. She’ll probably ring here when she finds I’m not answering at home.’
She should have felt grateful for her daughter’s concern but all her life had hated being organised by others.
‘We’ll explain to her you were too tired to drive on.’
‘It’s the truth,’ Ruth said. ‘I feel exhausted.’
‘Why don’t you get into bed?’ Sally suggested. ‘I’ll bring you something on a tray.’
‘I don’t want anything. I ate on the plane. Come and talk to me, though, before I put the light out.’
The room was large and plain and had a lofty ceiling, like all the rooms in the old farmhouse. The bedside lamp cast a pool of light. The rest of the room was dark with shadow, peopled with memories; this room had been Ruth’s own until 1940, when she had left home.
She looked around her with pleasure. Across one corner of the ceiling, half-obscured by shadow, a crack slithered. Ruth remembered it from childhood. It was like the smile of a forgotten friend welcoming her home.
Sally perched on the edge of the bed and looked at her mother-in-law. What had happened to her the day before? Despite all the media nonsense, all Ruth’s attempts to dismiss what had happened, it must have been a traumatic experience. By the look of her she had come through it pretty well. The big grey eyes were clear, the face amazingly unlined for her age. Sally had seen the family photographs and knew that Ruth had been a beautiful woman in her youth, the beauty that relies on bone structure and is so much more than prettiness. The bones were still doing a good job, the nose more purposeful now, perhaps, but for the rest it was remarkable how little she had changed.
I should be lucky enough to look like that when I’m her age, she told herself, unconsciously echoing the thoughts of the Ansett cabin attendant.
She asked, ‘How was it really?’
‘I was frightened. But I got over it.’
As she always would. For someone who never went near a church Ruth had a remarkable quality of faith. It came out in her books, in all her actions, faith in the essential holiness of life. It sustained her through all.
Joshua’s Children was a paean of praise to the glory and sanctity of life, the resurrection of hope from the depths of grief and despair. Sally had been unable to put it down, had turned the last page with cheeks wet with tears, heart overflowing with gratitude at its vision of humanity’s ultimate victory.
Ruth said, ‘There’s something wrong.’ And waited. The quality of that waiting. Neither aggressive nor impatient, least of all resigned, a quality of understanding and inevitability. She was a strong person, no doubt about that, but never a judgmental one.
‘You should ask Boyd about it,’ Sally said.
‘I asked you.’
Still Sally resisted. ‘You’ve had a bad couple of days. Why don’t we talk about it in the morning?’
Ruth said nothing. The eyes continued to watch.
It was an uneven struggle. For years after her marriage Sally had been in awe of Ruth; she suspected that a part of her always would be. From childhood she had wanted to write but had found that she did not have the knack of stringing words together. She had grown resigned to that but when she had discovered that her future mother-in-law was Ruth Ballard whose books had been a source of wonder
and delight to her all her life, she had been overwhelmed to the point of terror. Even now a residue of that feeling remained.
She looked at Ruth, placid and smiling in the lamplight, and felt astonishment that this woman, so ordinary-seeming, should be capable of evoking such passion, such insight into the complexities of human nature. It was frightening. It made Sally realise that she did not know Ruth at all, that perhaps the only way she would ever be able to penetrate the inner depths of another human being would be through the medium of artists like Ruth Ballard.
Reading Ruth’s work was like listening to one of God’s messengers. How could you fail to feel awe? And yet it all came back to this, an elderly lady sitting up in bed, an embroidered wrap about her shoulders.
‘Tell me what the problem is,’ Ruth said again.
Sally could resist her no longer. ‘The bank’s giving us a hard time.’
‘Why?’
There was nothing for it, she saw. ‘We over-extended ourselves.’
Nothing of folly, nothing of too great a sensitivity fueling disaster. Just the facts. Except that folly and sensitivity were the most important facts of all.
Boyd and Sally’s son Andrew, twenty-one years old, was capable, tough, wilful, totally selfish. He was of an age to run his own place, knew it, intended to do it. Whatever else he might lack it was not confidence. For three years he had been telling his parents he wanted his own farm. After all, he said, he might decide to get married, one of these days. No doubt he would; one of these days. There were always girls willing to chase after him; he treated them like dirt yet the worse he treated them the harder they ran. By the time he was nineteen he had been suggesting that it was time for his parents to retire to a little cottage somewhere and let him take over.
‘And live on what,’ Sally had wanted to know, ‘in this little cottage?’
Knowing better than to expect that Andrew, once he got his hands on the farm, would think of providing for them himself.
How his parents were to survive was not Andrew’s problem. He shrugged. ‘You’ll find something.’
‘No,’ Sally said.
But Boyd was troubled.
‘He has a point.’
‘This is our place, not his. We’re not much over forty, for heaven’s sake. I’m not ready to move over for him, not yet.’
Nor for twenty years, at least. That was the trouble. Andrew might have been expected to wait five years but twenty …
‘We’ll buy him a place,’ Boyd had said.
The end of the eighties, wool booming. Plenty of cash about. The bank managers tried to fill your pockets with the stuff every time you walked through the door. You paid for it, of course, interest rates climbing, but you could live with that, the price of wool being where it was.
Grazing land, over Coonalpyn way, was going cheap. Not the best of soil, admittedly, not cropping country, but okay for sheep. Australia had always ridden on the sheep’s back, hadn’t it, and never more than in the nineteen eighties.
‘I need him here,’ Boyd said. ‘I can’t manage Mindowie by myself. But if we buy him a place over there maybe it’ll satisfy him. The way things are going we might even have paid it off by the time he wants to set up by himself.’ And felt good about it, a man doing the right thing by his kid.
Sally was dubious; she doubted the bank would be interested. But that proved the least of their problems.
‘Overseas loans,’ the manager said when they went to see him. ‘That’s the way to go.’
There were overseas investors anxious to invest in booming Australia. The rates of interest were remarkable. Even better, the loans were repayable in the currency of origin. With the Aussie dollar on the up and up this meant you actually had to pay back a lesser amount, in dollar terms, than you had borrowed.
It all sounded very wonderful.
‘Too good to be true,’ Sally feared.
‘Everybody’s doing it.’
Which made it all right, presumably.
Papers were signed, the run was bought. Andrew was not impressed; he had wanted cropping country, not scrub land, but there were limits even in the razzle-dazzle eighties.
Repayments were a strain, interest rates were still rising, but nothing they couldn’t live with as long as wool stayed high.
Twelve months later the bottom fell out of the market. The good times, fueled for so long by the shared lunacy of the federal government and the banks, rolled no more.
Eyes, so recently beaming, were now haunted.
‘What do we do?’
The federal government had no idea. The farmers had no idea. Only the banks knew. You pay, the banks said. You carry out your agreements. To the letter.
No one explained how it was to be done, with debt through the roof and wool through the floor.
The banks were saddened. Loans had been made in good faith. If individual farmers had foolishly over-extended themselves … Dear oh dear. The loans still had to be repaid.
Out of what?
The smiling bank manager, no longer smiling, explained that the money must be found. Of course, if that was impossible …
Yes? Yes?
You can always sell. Or the banks will sell, on your behalf. If there’s anyone who wants grazing land, with the price of wool and meat so low.
But there were still a few grains of hope left in the bottom of the jar. Those overseas loans. Those favourable loans. They were going to be easy to repay, weren’t they, because of something to do with the currency which we hadn’t really understood at the time but that you told us was a very good thing indeed. That was what you said, wasn’t it?
But the banker shook his head sadly, the winds blew and the last grains of hope were plucked from the jar and vanished.
Well no. That was not what I said. I said if. If the Aussie dollar carried on rising the overseas loans would be easier to repay. Because of the reciprocal value of the related currency, you see. Because of the international exchange rate.
Mate, I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re on about.
I’ll explain.
Hands washing nervously.
If the dollar had gone on rising the loans would have been easier to repay. I said that, yes. And I was right. If. But it didn’t, you see.
Where’s the dollar now?
Through the floor. A hundred thousand borrowed a couple of years back needs a hundred and fifty to repay it.
From what? Getting angry now.
And the manager, who had tried to be nice about it, had even gone to the trouble of explaining — which he had no obligation to do — ran out of patience, too.
I’m sorry, but that’s not our problem.
But what do we do?
You pay. That’s all there is to it. You pay.
‘And we can’t,’ Sally said to Ruth. ‘As simple as that. We haven’t got the money.’
‘I am glad you told me,’ Ruth said. ‘I’m sorry Boyd has never said anything but I should have known.’
‘How could you have known?’
‘I read the papers. I know what goes on or like to think I do. But it never occurred to me. I’m sorry.’
‘We’d sell the Coonalpyn property if we could,’ Sally said. Although Boyd had been opposed to the idea, not wanting to relinquish the vision of himself as munificent parent. ‘But there’s no market for it.’
‘We’ll forget about it for the moment,’ Ruth decided. ‘Look at it again in the morning.’ She smiled, wanting to share the load, and put her hand on Sally’s arm. ‘The important thing is you mustn’t worry. We’ll work something out.’
‘I’m not worried.’ But was, of course, having thought of nothing else for days.
After she had gone Ruth switched off the light. Thought about what Sally had told her. A sad story but not, ultimately, the catastrophe that Sally imagined. Writing had made Ruth rich. The money would be found.
For a while she lay listening to the familiar silences, the equally-familiar creaks and murmurs o
f the old house as it surrendered its heat to the cooling night.
Somewhere a sheep called sleepily. Too faint to hear but audible to her inner senses, the sounds of grass and leaves peopled the darkness. An owl flew. Far away across the paddocks a hare foraged and sat erect, ears pricked, eyes watching the night. Busy with the stealthy thrust of roots, the scuttle and pounce of beetles, the lope of fox and kangaroo, the breathing of gums along the creek, the hills lay beneath a shining panoply of stars.
Ruth slept.
And awoke, looked at her watch.
It was only two o’clock yet she felt rested, as though she had slept peacefully all night. She got up and walked to the window. A half moon silvered the paddocks. The gravel road leading to the valley bottom scored its white path across the breast of the hill. Ruth stood at the window. She remembered herself at twenty-one, sitting on the verandah on the warm September morning and watching the dust cloud billowing behind Larry Coogan’s red van as it turned off the Stockport road and began its slow, two-mile climb to the farmhouse.
FOUR
The farmhouse of massive bluestone slabs had been built by Ruth’s grandfather at the turn of the century, fifty years after white men had first arrived in this part of the country. Time had settled the building firmly into the hillside so that it, like its owners, had become a part of the landscape.
The house stood alone on top of the range. Below it the paddocks sloped down to the creek, its course marked by gum trees. On the far side the ground rose again to the crest of the distant hills and beyond the hills there was nothing but sky. The paddocks were sown to wheat and the colour of the growing crops changed from emerald to silver as the breeze moved like a wave across them. By December, three months away, the wheat would be tawny brown before the harvest but this year harvest seemed very far away.
Ruth supposed there were some things that never changed. Whatever else took place in the world, seeding and harvest would continue at their appointed times, yet it was hard to be sure even of that in a world that had changed so dramatically in the last week. It was Saturday, 9 September 1939, two weeks after her twenty-first birthday and six days after Pig Iron Bob Menzies had announced on the wireless that Australia, for the second time that century, was at war with Germany.