by JH Fletcher
She did so.
He pursed his lips. ‘We shall have to realise some investments. Unfortunate timing, I fear. A year or two ago it would have been a different story.’
‘A year or two ago there wouldn’t have been the problem.’
‘Very well.’ With a gold pencil he made rapid notes on a pad of white paper.
‘One more thing,’ she said. ‘I may be changing my will.’
From Culpepper’s office she made her way to the bank, was ushered quickly in to see the manager. Fame helped cut bureaucratic knots; it was one of its few advantages.
‘Mindowie,’ she said.
The manager looked grave. ‘Indeed.’
‘The farm’s in my name,’ Ruth told him. ‘I intend to keep it.’
He was dubious, saw no reason to hide the fact from this old woman who, famous though she might be in her own line, clearly knew little about banking or finance. About the real things of this world, he thought with satisfaction.
‘That may present some problems,’ he said with pleasure. He loved problems, could gloat on them for hours. The power to say no was a wonderful thing in the right hands.
‘A problem for each solution,’ Ruth said. ‘Just what we don’t need.’
He stared at her, willing to be affronted. ‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I have a solution to your problems,’ she said. ‘I’ve spoken to my accountant. We are realising certain investments. When the cash comes in I intend to pay off the lot.’
The idea upset him. Without the loan there would be neither interest nor profit.
Worse, it would deprive him of the opportunity to bully, which compensated for much.
‘It will hardly be necessary to pay off everything —’ the manager began to say.
‘It’s what I am going to do. Tell me,’ Ruth said, ‘about these overseas loans you recommended.’
Back at the farm Ruth said, ‘I’m closing the account. I told him so.’ She smiled reminiscently. ‘I thought he was going to lose his breakfast.’
‘We’ve been with the same bank as long as I can remember.’ Boyd was uneasy at yet another manifestation of change; it got so you couldn’t rely on anything remaining the same.
‘All the more reason to do something about it now.’
‘There’ll be a lot of things to organise —’
‘There is nothing to organise,’ she corrected him. ‘As soon as the loans are paid off we’re moving.’
He knew better than to argue with his mother when she was in this mood. ‘I’ll go into town and speak to the other guy, then. What’s his name?’
‘I’ve spoken to Mr Hallett already. It’s all arranged.’
Later, she spoke to her grandson. Who was sulky, accepting the need to humour the old bat but resenting it all the same.
‘You seem to have got over your accident,’ she said.
‘I’m fine.’
‘What about the girl who was with you?’
‘She’s still in hospital. In Adelaide.’
‘I’m so sorry.’ A pause. ‘Quite a problem for you, I suppose? Driving up and down to see her?’
Andrew was uneasy, wondering what she was getting at. ‘Right.’
‘Still, it must cheer her up. I hear she hurt her arm.’
‘Yeh.’
‘Badly?’
‘It got crushed when the car turned over. They had to amputate it above the wrist.’
‘How terrible.’
‘Yeh. It was bad luck.’
‘How did it happen?’
‘We were on our way home. There was this truck —’
‘Were you driving?’
‘Yeh.’
‘And it was his fault, right?’
He felt himself getting angry. She was worse than the cops with all her questions and he’d had a gutful of them. They’d mentioned the possibility of charges and now he’d heard that Jenni’s father had gone to his solicitor. He didn’t intend to put up with much more of it. Still, he’d better humour her. In the circumstances.
‘I wouldn’t say it was his fault. Not altogether.’ He’d have blamed the truckie like a shot if he’d thought he would get away with it but the bloke had been on the main road, after all.
‘How did it happen, then?’
He doubted she could remember anything about sex at her age but it never hurt to pretend. He grinned at her, two adults together. ‘She was distracting me. Know what I mean?’
Ruth knew very well. He is a detestable man, she thought. ‘When was the last time you saw her?’ she wondered.
His mouth set. His eyes stared defiantly back at her. ‘I don’t remember.’
‘I see. Now, about Mindowie …’
It was difficult, having no one to confide in. She could have talked to Sally about anything else but not about Andrew. Andrew was off limits to everyone but Sally herself. She thought of phoning Roberta but in the end decided against that, too. Roberta was too close to the problem. Everyone in the family was too close. In the old days she would have poured out her troubles to Patty Clark but Patty had been in her grave five years. In the end she went to see her all the same. Talked to Patty’s gravestone.
‘I bet he hasn’t been near her,’ Ruth said. ‘How can anyone be so inconsiderate, eh?’
Perhaps you should go and see her yourself, she thought. But there was no need to bother Patty about that.
‘Andrew wants me to leave him the farm,’ she said. ‘Boyd seems quite happy about it. I don’t think Sally likes the idea but she’ll never say anything where Andrew’s concerned. He is family, of course. That’s important.’
A woman working on a nearby grave was giving her strange looks but Ruth ignored her. I want to talk to my friend, she thought, what business is it of anyone else? Oh Patty, she thought, I’m so sorry you died. It’s selfish, I know, but I wish I could have gone first. The pain of loss should get easier as you get older, all your friends dying, but it doesn’t. If you’re lucky you die first, otherwise you just have to put up with it. I need to get home, she told herself. I’m never lonely there. I have the sea for company.
Patty and David, she thought. It was strange how things worked out. Patty’s child Ellen, a couple of years older than Boyd, had been a catastrophe. Ruth had never understood why. She’d had good parents, a loving home, had never been ill-treated, yet her life had been one disaster after another. In trouble at school. As soon as she was old enough in trouble with boys. She had been wild. When she was sixteen she had thrown a speculative eye at Boyd Armstrong but Boyd had been too young or too scared and nothing had come of it. Thank God, Ruth had thought at the time. Still thought.
The next thing anyone knew Ellen had run away with Rufe Dobbin, a black-haired, black-souled, drinking, swearing son of a bitch with a name for beating the daylights out of his women. When it came to drinking and swearing Ellen was almost as bad as he was and Johnno had had enough.
‘That’s the sort of bloke she wants, I wish her well of him.’ And washed his hands of them both.
In 1969 Rufe had gone to Vietnam and Ellen, unannounced, had pitched up at her parents’ place with a grandchild they hadn’t known they had.
‘Johnno was fit to be tied,’ Patty confided to Ruth some months later. ‘Wasn’t as though they were married, even.’
There’d been some hard words but eventually Patty had shut him up and Ellen and the baby had stayed. In Johnno’s opinion the best thing would have been for Rufe never to come back from Vietnam but in 1971 he did. He stayed just long enough to put Ellen up the spout a second time. A month later, pissed out of his mind, he wrapped his car around a tree at a hundred miles an hour and that was the end of Rufe.
Ellen lost the baby. Three months later Johnno himself died of cancer, it was a terrible time. Patty entertained sentimental ideas that mother and daughter might now form a team, be happy together at last, but Ellen wasn’t interested. Next thing anyone knew she’d disappeared again, told a friend she was headed for Queensland a
nd sunshine. Once again Patty was left but this time with a farm to run as well. To say nothing of a grandson.
To this day Ruth had never got over how well things had worked out. By doing a runner Ellen had given her son the best present he could have had. In place of the drugs, booze and men that made up Ellen’s life David had had the farm, a stable environment all round. He seemed to have inherited none of his parents’ ways and grew up a happy kid, well-adjusted, who seemed not to miss them at all. A pleasure to know. Since Patty’s death he had run the farm that she and Johnno had bought after the war. It wasn’t big enough, he would always have to battle, but things could have been worse.
Ellen had never come back. Over the years Patty had received a succession of postcards, months apart, mentioning towns and men she had never heard of. Eventually even those had dried up. Ellen might be dead; she might be living down the road. No one knew.
Patty kept her feelings to herself but Ruth, who knew her as well as any human being could know another, understood only too well how she had bled.
Ruth had written a story about it, a cry of pain that Patty herself had never been able to utter. She had offered it to her friend, humbly, and for the first time Patty had wept. Prodigal caused quite a stir; it had been raw and violent, as Ellen had been raw and violent, and the critics had not known what to make of it. Both publisher and agent had been dubious, warning of frightening away readers who might find Prodigal too harsh for comfort.
‘She’s bad,’ her agent had said. ‘Horrible. The way she treats everyone. Yet by telling the story from her point of view you’ve somehow made a heroine out of her. People will say you’re glorifying violence.’
Which was the exact opposite of Ruth’s intention.
In the event their fears had not been realised. Illustrated by Sidney Nolan, it had sold fifty thousand copies in hard cover in Australia alone, five times that in the States. Critics had pontificated about its relevance to the rising tide of urban violence that was beginning to worry the authorities; Ruth had always been lucky with her timing.
‘You’d think I’d written a treatise on social problems,’ she told her agent. ‘It’s a story about a woman, that’s all.’
Now Ellen was gone, as Dougie and Richard and Patty herself were gone. Ruth sighed. Back in the present, she found she was alone. The woman who had been tending the other grave had left unnoticed, the sun was low in the sky and the trees’ long shadows lay across the graveyard. Ruth was cold. She looked down at Patty’s grave. She wished she had something to leave as a token of her visit but had brought no flowers in deference to Patty’s last wish.
‘Don’t go sticking flowers on my grave,’ she had said. ‘Won’t be any use to me, will they? Do something useful with your money, rather.’ She had tried to smile, dying as bravely as she had lived. ‘Promise you’ll remember me, that’s all I want.’
It had been a promise easy to keep.
Oh Patty.
Ruth turned away, eyes wet. Old fool, she bludgeoned herself ferociously. Patty wouldn’t have wanted tears, either.
But at least the visit had helped make up her mind.
As soon as Richard got Ruth’s letter about the baby he had written back, as she had known he would.
She must leave Dougie. At once. The child was Richard’s. He wanted it to have his name. She had told him once that she couldn’t betray Dougie without betraying herself but that was true no longer. Circumstances had changed. Besides, from what she’d told him, Dougie knew already. The question of betrayal didn’t come into it.
I love you, he said. I have a claim, too.
She wrote back. Forget me, she urged him.
Knowing that he could not, any more than she could forget him.
Two weeks later the phone rang. It could have been anyone — agent, publisher, any of a dozen or so people whose lives seemed more and more to revolve around hers — yet her instinct told her at once who it was.
‘Richard …’
And ran. She had asked him not to contact her at home for fear of trouble with Dougie yet now he had done so she was glad, could not get to the phone fast enough.
‘Hullo?’
‘Mrs Armstrong?’ A voice she did not know.
‘Yes?’
‘My name’s John Grove. You don’t know me.’ He coughed apologetically as though somehow to blame for that. ‘I live down the road from your Aunt Dorrie. She always said I should ring and let you know if anything happened.’
The room went still. ‘Let me know what?’
‘She had a fall, you see. It looks as though she must have tripped. Or something.’
‘She’s dead,’ Ruth said. Voice flat, heart flat.
‘Yes.’
A void into which fell hope and love. Endlessly.
On the morning of the funeral, appropriately, it rained. The trees bowed beneath the steel shafts of rain, the clouds sagged grey-bellied, the tops of the Ranges were lost in mist.
Heart as grey as the weather, Ruth looked out of the window of Dorrie’s house at the wind-tossed branches, the rain, the puddles. Thought, What would Dorrie have wanted? If anything had typified her life it had been life itself. She had never been one for the sombre face of grief. She had loved life, had lived it to the full, for herself and others. To hell with the weather. Dorrie would have wanted the ceremonies of departure to be a reflection of her life. She would have wanted laughter. A party.
Ruth didn’t know what the other guests would think; didn’t care, either. If they had known Dorrie as Ruth had they would understand, would want happiness and gaiety because that was what Dorrie would have wanted. If they didn’t, then to hell with them.
The funeral was held in the little church in what passed for the town. It was tiny, roofed with wooden shingles, fitted into the landscape as smoothly as a hand into a glove. It looked old yet would not have been there when Dorrie had run through these woods with Lukas Smart, whom she had loved. As far as Ruth knew, Dorrie had never been inside a church; Dorrie’s religion, like her own, had been the celebration of life but John Grove had found a note in a pigeonhole of the bureau that Dorrie had used for what she had called her business matters.
I’d like a church funeral if possible. It’s an institution that’s been around so long that it seems to be one with the ages and that makes it appropriate, if they’ll have me. I’m pretty old, myself.
How typical of Dorrie to throw a joke in the face of death. Ruth looked up the rector, who made no problems.
‘She wasn’t what you’d call a church-goer,’ she warned.
He smiled, a youngish man who might have been at home on a footy field. ‘I think we attach too much importance to church attendance. If we concentrate on the building, on the forms of religion, we tend to forget that God is everywhere. As far as I’ve been able to discover your aunt’s whole life was an act of worship.’
Which to Ruth was as good a description as any. Besides, it seemed that Dorrie had wanted to attend church after all. At the end.
The funeral was at ten o’clock. By half-past nine the rain had stopped. Just as well. Ruth was flabbergasted to find that so many people had turned up that over a dozen had been unable to cram into the building. Assisted by John Grove and his wife, the rector had organised chairs and the latecomers sat knee to knee outside the porch, looking like a gathering of crows in their funeral-going garments. Ruth was wearing the brightest and most cheerful clothes she had been able to find, a close-fitting dress of red jersey, a gold belt, a multi-coloured poncho that Dorrie had brought back from one of her trips. I Pagliacci, she thought. That’s who I look like. The Clown. She did not care. She was sure Dorrie would have approved and that was what mattered.
Inside the packed church a handful of others apparently shared her views, gaudy splashes of colour amid a tide of black and grey.
Life defiant in the face of death, Ruth thought. Or not even defiant. We are not talking confrontation here. Life and non-life each have their place, are both part o
f the same thing. Which might be bad theology but was how Ruth felt. She was pretty sure it was how Dorrie had felt, too.
A scrape of chairs, a scuffle of feet as the congregation rose. The service began. Looking surreptitiously about her, Ruth wondered who all these people were. For the first time she realised how extensive Dorrie’s life had been. She had always imagined she had been the centre of her aunt’s life, that her other friends had been little more than acquaintances. What vanity that had been, she thought. She listened to the murmured responses, the tentative singing of the hymns. The truth was she had never been more than a tiny portion of Dorrie’s world. It had been true of them all and now here they were, strangers united with each other because all, in their various ways, had been a part of the glory and fulfilment that had been Dorrie’s life.
The service drew to an end. Ruth thought, Thank God for her. It seemed as appropriate a prayer as any.
The funeral notice had invited the mourners back to the house after the service. Most of them came. Luckily Ruth had laid on plenty of booze and food. I said we’d have a party and a party it’s going to be, if I have to bankrupt myself in the process. Fortunately that proved unnecessary. A good many, particularly those who had joined Ruth in what she privately called the I Pagliacci mob, came equipped with their own bottles. She talked to as many of them as she could. There were artists, trade unionists, even an ex-member of the Labor government thrown out of office in 1949, although Dorrie had fallen out with them after Ben Chifley had sent in the army to break the miners’ strike at Muswellbrook. There were professors and a couple of women’s rights activists. Neighbours had come, too, from Topaz and the surrounding Ranges, ordinary people who had known Dorrie or had simply wanted to farewell her. The press was there in the form of a reporter who wanted to interview Ruth, the famous writer who had been the dead woman’s niece.
‘Had been?’ Ruth said. ‘Still am, as far as I know.’
The reporter grinned sassily. ‘She’s dead, after all.’
Ruth gestured at the crowd. ‘None of these people think that. As far as they’re concerned she’ll be alive as long as they live. As she is for me.’