by JH Fletcher
Ruth frowned. ‘I’m sorry?’
‘I haven’t seen you for so many years I imagined you’d have quietened down but apparently you haven’t.’
Haven’t seen you … Something about the voice struck the faintest of echoes.
‘Who is this?’
‘Franz.’
‘Franz?’
The man laughed. And the world, time, the movement of her blood, all were still.
Ruth’s legs were water. She sat down. Heard herself laughing a little breathlessly. ‘I don’t believe it,’ she said. ‘After how many years?’
‘Would you believe over forty?’
He was older than she was, too. Not by much, but at their age every year made a difference.
‘And now you’re a heroine.’ His tongue made much of the word.
She heard the laugh in his voice, remembered the good things. Among the rest. Of which she would not think.
Franz, she told herself. After forty years. She could not get a grip on it. She had to say something, if only to cloak the confusion she felt. ‘So you did come back to Australia. I often wondered.’
‘To Queensland, yes.’
‘And how has life treated you?’
‘I married, you know. Late in life but better than never. Unhappily my wife died five years ago but I have an eighteen year old daughter, Louise, so I am not alone. I heard about all your excitements in the Whitsundays and made up my mind to get in touch with you.’
‘After all this time.’ Suddenly Ruth knew what she wanted. ‘This morning I was thinking I had no one to talk to about the old times. I’d like you to come and stay with me. We would have a lot to say to each other, you and I.’
‘Would it be wise?’ he wondered.
‘Why not?’
‘There are plenty of people in the mid-north who might remember me. I sometimes think old times are best forgotten. Those old times, certainly. It might cause you trouble.’
‘Why should it?’
‘The famous are vulnerable. There is always somebody watching, someone to ask questions.’
Unaccountably, she was hurt. ‘Why did you phone, then?’
‘A whim.’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘I would like to see you. But it’s up to you. If you’d rather not …’
‘I did not say that.’
‘Please come,’ she said. ‘I would so much like us to meet again.’
A long pause as he thought about it. ‘Very well. If you are sure.’ She was so pleased.
‘But I have a favour to ask. Can Louise come with me?’
‘Your daughter? Of course. I’d love to meet her. Let me know the time of your plane and I’ll meet you in Adelaide.’
‘Not necessary. We are in South Australia already. On holiday. We could be with you tomorrow, if you like.’
After so many years Ruth felt she would need the protection of another person’s presence. ‘Make it the day after. My editor’s coming to lunch. We can have a party.’
‘Not if you’re busy.’
Ruth feared that if she let him put it off he might not come at all. ‘You won’t be in the way. Come anyway.’
She gave him directions, put down the phone, went out on to the deck. The clouds had cleared. The sun shone on a brilliant sea.
Franz, she thought again. Two more days and he’ll be here.
His eyes and skin colour were the things she remembered most clearly. Eyes that shade of blue that looks almost white, skin so white it looked almost blue. He had always been arrogant, too quick to disparage Australia and Australians, anything that wasn’t German. Others had loathed him for it. She, convinced she was in love with him, had been willing to forgive. Arrogance had been part of his heroic aura, or so she had thought.
In 1934, when he had first gone overseas, she had been sixteen, convinced that her heart was broken. After four years he had come back. He had changed; his eyes commanded, his heels hammered the ground into submission. Yet there had been one occasion when he had not been arrogant, at least initially. For the first time he had opened something of himself to her, although a day that should have worked out so well for both of them had ended in disaster.
Franz opened the small suitcase reverently, a man uncovering mysteries. Drew from it an armband of red cloth with a circle in white inscribed upon it. In the circle a hooked cross. Black.
His hands held it. No priest had ever lifted the host with greater feeling. ‘Das Hakenkreuz,’ he said. ‘The swastika. I am a member of the Party now.’
Disquieted, Ruth stared at the alien symbol. ‘People say there will be war.’
‘They don’t know what they’re talking about. The Führer is a man of peace.’
She remembered what Miriam Hirschmann had written in her letters, the terror that had come stinking from the page.
‘This Germany of yours …’
‘What about it?’
‘There are things I don’t understand.’ She groped for meaning. ‘A harshness?’ It was the best she could do.
‘Strength,’ he corrected her. ‘Resolution. Germany has to take its place in the world.’
He was so confident he was right, that this country he called his own was right.
‘But what about Australia? Surely this is your country, too?’
Twisted lips repudiated the suggestion. ‘I cannot respect a country without discipline.’
‘It is our way,’ she said.
‘Without it a country is nothing. Australia is nothing.’
She would not have it. ‘You and your mates try anything, I reckon you might be in for a shock.’
‘There will be no war,’ he repeated. ‘The Führer has said so.’
He closed the case, shutting her out. His eyes were blank.
‘It will be better if you go now.’
He had been hard to take, no doubt about it. After three months he had gone back to Germany. No one else who knew him had had any regrets.
She had seen him only once more in all those years. He was seventy-five, she thought. An old man. As she herself was old. Where have our lives gone? And what would he be like now?
Now the sun was edging the horizon. Ruth turned and went indoors. Two days’ time and she would find out.
She was pouring the water for a bath when the phone rang for the third time that day.
Hannah Browne again.
‘Wonderful news, sweetie! Barbara Getz is here in Sydney and wants to meet you.’
‘Barbara Getz? The columnist?’
She was very big in the States. Her own syndicated column, an arts programme on TV. A class act. The literary world thought highly of her.
‘Why should she want to see me?’
‘I told you this morning. You’re news. People don’t think of women writers as heroes. Now here you are, a big literary name, saving a woman and her kids from death.’
‘I am sick of hearing all that.’
‘That’s not the main reason, in any case. She told me herself, she thinks you’re one of the top women writers in the world today.’
Ruth detested this fad of typecasting everyone by gender. ‘I’m a writer who happens to be a woman, not a woman writer. Whatever that is.’
Hannah was used to Ruth’s views; used to ignoring them, too, when it suited her. ‘Barbara’s in Australia for a couple of weeks but she’s pretty tied up. She’s keen to do an interview with you so I thought if it’s okay I’ll bring her down with me.’
Franz, Ruth thought.
‘Out of the question.’
Hannah was flabbergasted. ‘Why ever not? It’ll be great publicity in the States. Very good for your prestige.’
She was right. The publicity would be good for sales, of course, but there were considerations more important than sales.
Hannah said, ‘The Nobel committee listens to what she has to say.’
It would be idiotic to throw away such an opportunity. Ruth gave in. ‘Bring her, then.’
Franz was travelling; th
ere was no way she could warn him but did not think it would matter.
Before she had her bath she made a phone call herself, to David Clark, grandson of her old friend Patty.
‘I wonder if you would do me a favour? There’s a girl coming to lunch the day after tomorrow. She’s only eighteen and the rest of us will seem as old as the hills to her. I wondered if you’d like to come along to keep her company.’
He laughed. ‘What does she look like?’
‘If she’s anything like her father she’ll be very good-looking.’
‘Sounds interesting. All right, I’ll risk it.’
Lying in her bath, Ruth hoped everything would work out. Only that morning she had been so flat, convinced she had nothing to look forward to. How that had changed. The book of heroes, Barbara Getz, Franz …
She found it so hard to think of him as old. She had the same problem with herself; it always came as a shock when she saw herself in the mirror. To the present generation the passions and fears of their youth were inconceivable. They might have belonged to another world altogether. Yet to Ruth, the unexpected sound of Franz’s voice had brought back memories so real and vivid it was hard to comprehend that the events to which they related had occurred half a century before.
TEN
Dorrie’s house stood high in the Ranges in the middle of a patch of wooded ground overlooking the tiny township of Topaz. At the back of the house a garden, bright with flowers, was bordered by a dense shrubbery. In the shrubs a screeching parliament of birds, red and blue and gold, formed a blaze of colour in the sunlight. There might have been a dozen of them, possibly more; Ruth would not count them, afraid that too precise an examination might destroy the magic.
Magic was what this brief visit was about; on embarkation leave, Ruth had been determined to see Dorrie before she went and so had made the long journey from South Australia to Dorrie’s sprawling wooden house east of Melbourne. A magic house, a magic garden, the high country surrounding the house the most magical element of all. She had not known that the timber-clad hills could be so beautiful.
Now, on her last morning, she stood in the garden and breathed deeply, trying to capture within her body not only the fresh air but the mountains, the green tide of tree and fern, the colourful birds, the moment itself.
Why am I leaving this place? she wondered, yet knew that she was not in fact leaving it, would take it with her in her heart, her memory, her blood, wherever the army might send her in the years ahead.
Dorrie had been delighted that Ruth had come to see her. Puzzled, too.
‘Embarkation leave? I thought you had to be over twenty-five before they let you go overseas.’
Ruth had smiled at her. ‘Pulled a few strings, didn’t I?’
‘I’ve been bending the rules all my life,’ Dorrie said. ‘Breaking them, too, half the time.’ But was sad and did not trouble to hide it, the flamboyant orange hair less than triumphant now. ‘I only wish I knew where it was all going to end.’
‘Where what’s going to end?’
‘War. Battles. Since I was a kid there’s always been one war or other. Forty years ago I had a friend knew that fellow Morant, the one they called the Breaker. The Brits shot him. That was the Boer war. Then Lukas got himself blown up in the First War. Then there was the war in Spain. Now it’s your turn. And Peter’s. Peter on one side and his own half-brother on the other. Can you imagine it? As I said, where does it end?’
‘Maybe it doesn’t.’ Ruth couldn’t help herself. It was an adventure. She was on tiptoe to be part of it. She was twenty-two years old and knew she would live forever.
‘I reckon you’re right.’ With a visible effort Dorrie grinned at her. ‘I’m disgraceful. You come all this way and all I do is grouse.’
‘No worries,’ Ruth told her. ‘I’ll be back, you’ll see. And so will Peter.’
‘You’d better be.’
Ruth walked around the garden, looking upward at the tops of the distant hills. The cathedral pillars of gum trees shone bone white slicked with cinnamon. Lime-green oak leaves formed a blizzard of light in a tangle of branches, while on the far crest conifers marched in lines.
This I will remember, she told herself. She recalled Dorrie saying how she had presented Jamie to the trees, how they had claimed him. I shall take you with me, she told them silently, and I shall come back to you again.
That night, her last night, Dorrie talked to her for the first time about her son Blaine, whom Ruth had hardly known. Blaine, whom Dorrie had taken on her hip to meetings without number. Blaine, who had died in Spain.
‘He was my talisman,’ Dorrie said. ‘All those years. Workers’ rights, women’s rights, children’s rights. No end to that, either.’ She hazarded a pale grin. ‘Talk about battles. I suppose all my life has been one battle or another. It wears you out in the end. If it doesn’t kill you first.’
As it had killed Blaine.
‘He got it from me,’ Dorrie said. ‘The idea that it wasn’t enough to stand on the sidelines and cheer. You had to get involved, do things yourself. These people who go to church. I don’t say anything against them, mind. Hearts in the right place, most of them. But what do they do?’
‘They pray?’ Ruth hazarded.
‘They’ve got a box, see? A box with a lid on it. They take the world’s troubles, all the vice and dirt and poverty, all the exploitation, they stick them in this box, shut the lid. They wash their hands of it, pray to God to sort things out. Well, he won’t. We want things to get better, we’ve got to get down in the slime ourselves and do something. Blaine was good at that. When this business in Spain blew up, nothing would suit but go over there himself. There were others, Joe Carter, Agnes Hodgson, just a handful, but they all believed they could work miracles. They thought if they could win in Spain it might stop things getting any worse. So off they went to sort out the fascists. Except that the fascists sorted them out, instead. And my Blaine was in Guernica when they dropped a bomb on his head. Twenty-seventh April, ninety thirty-seven. I shall never forget it.’ There were tears in Dorrie’s eyes; she shook her head irritably. ‘Thought I’d shed all my tears long ago,’ she said, ‘but it still hurts. Always will, I suppose. All that promise gone. They wiped out the whole town, you know. The Germans. The blokes you’re off to fight now. It wasn’t even a military base. It was a market town and they attacked it on market day. They wiped it off the map.’
They sat for a while, silently. ‘You make sure you do come back.’ Dorrie sketched a vestige of her old grin, cocking her orange head defiantly. ‘I’ll kill you if you don’t.’
Ruth had thought she was going to the Middle East and was disgusted when she found that she was being sent, with her mate Helen Mason and all the other members of 2/10 General Hospital, to Singapore. Or, as it turned out, to Malaya.
‘Malaya?’ Helen wondered, for all of them. ‘What’s there to do in Malaya?’
Not a lot, it seemed.
No one seemed to know there was a war on. They were based at the hospital in the west coast town of Malacca, a hundred and forty miles by road from Singapore. There was an Aussie unit at Tampin, thirty miles away, but the rest of the Eighth Division was in Singapore and out of range. They were on their own in a sea of Asiatics and colonial Brits. It was difficult to tell which were the more alien.
Not that they had all that much contact with either. There were native orderlies in the hospital, they literally rubbed shoulders with the locals when they visited the colonnaded streets of the little town, but social contact was nil. It was much the same with the Brits.
‘I don’t reckon they want to know us,’ Helen said. ‘Think we’re another form of nigger.’
It certainly seemed like it. They were polite enough, when they could not avoid you, but their gentility was death in its most elegant form. In colonial society the rituals of courtesy ran not on blood or feeling but on protocol, doing things because that was the way they had always been done. It added another dimension to
the sense of unreality that was a feature of the town.
‘Where is the bloody war?’ Helen Mason demanded.
Not here, that was certain. Nor likely to be, if the locals were to be believed.
‘War? The Japs wouldn’t dare. The Chinks are one thing, they’re just another bunch of Asiatics, after all, but they’ll never dare take on the Empire.’ Genial laughter at the idea. ‘Soon sort them out if they do, what?’
Such seemed to be the general opinion.
‘Dodos,’ Helen said. ‘That’s what they are. Don’t see them standing up to anyone if we’re attacked.’
‘Perhaps war will fire them up,’ Ruth suggested. But wondered.
In the meantime there was tennis, walks through the hot old town, expeditions to the country round about. It was an easygoing, pleasant life.
‘A bloke could get used to this,’ Helen said, and Ruth agreed.
Best of all, there was Peter.
Unbelieving, Ruth scanned the letter a second time. ‘He’s in Tampin …’
Helen said, ‘You say he’s your cousin. Reckon he must be Father Christmas, the way you look.’ She eyed Ruth suspiciously, the glimmer of a smile. ‘Sweet on him, are you?’
‘Nothing like that.’
Not in the way Helen meant. Yet supposed she was, in a sense.
Franz had been the tough one, a natural officer or at least senior NCO. Peter was not like that. His world was the world of birds, of books and music. He was not interested in sport or weapons at all. Yet had volunteered from Uni, to Laura’s despair.
In the army he was like a cow in a tree. Not a sissy — far from it, for it took a special brand of courage to volunteer for the army with its ways so alien to his own — but not cut out for glory.
His father, that stern parent, had thought him weak. Ruth had always been protective of him, had allowed him to show her things that interested him, things she already knew.
In the scrub behind the homestead, alone in the dusk, Peter pointing, breathless with excitement. ‘An owl. There, on that stump. See it?’
And Ruth, who had seen it before and knew its territory, had allowed him his moment of glory. ‘It’s lovely …’