by JH Fletcher
Ruth turned to the children. ‘See? How wonderful!’
Boyd stayed close to her but Roberta ran at once to the far end of the garden and stood staring out at the city.
Ruth turned to Richard, captured his hand. ‘It’s wonderful,’ she repeated. ‘Thank you so much.’
‘Welcome home,’ he said.
The significance of his words filled her throat. Home …
I have waited so long for this, she told herself.
She looked back at the house. It was big and in a location like this …
Can we afford it? Resolutely she shoved the doubt away. It was not the moment to let such considerations intrude upon the magic, for magic it was.
She felt breathless with delight, overwhelmed by the vista of water and sky, the joyful air, the wonderful house, the prospect of their life together at last.
‘Tell me it’s real.’
He smiled down at her silently.
Yes, she thought, feeling his fingers entwined in hers, the warmth and strength of his body beside her. Yes. There is nothing more real than this.
Hand in hand, they walked back to the house together. The children might be a problem, particularly nine-year-old Roberta who at the last had objected fiercely to leaving the farm, to having any part in what Ruth had told her would be a wonderful adventure, but for the moment Ruth would not permit such anxieties to sully her joy.
Give them time, she told herself. It will all come out right with time.
She put her arm around her dear love. Her heart singing with happiness she went up the stone steps and into the house.
She had been afraid that he would dump them here and head back to the office but when she mentioned it he laughed scornfully.
‘Go back to work the day you got here? Fat chance.’
He had only moved in himself a few days earlier, had phoned around the agents as soon as Ruth had let him know that this time, definitely this time, she was on her way.
‘It’s only been on the market a couple of days,’ he said. ‘I grabbed it as soon as I saw it. It’s for sale but we’re only renting for the moment. I wasn’t going to commit us to it until you’d had a chance to see it for yourself.’
There was a large sitting room with a study off it, a separate dining room with wooden panels and a chandelier that Richard told her went with the house (‘Very grand,’ Ruth said). The kitchen had an electric stove mounted on an island in the middle of the floor and a formidable array of fitted cupboards. Two bedrooms and a bathroom on the ground floor while at the top of a sweep of stairs a third bedroom faced the harbour with its own bathroom and dressing room and another smaller room off to one side.
‘I rented it fully furnished,’ Richard explained, ‘but the furniture goes with the house if we want it.’
Ruth stood in the middle of the main bedroom and turned slowly, staring at the white walls, the windows open to catch the breeze, the expanse of shimmering water beyond the windows.
‘It’s heavenly. I can’t believe it’s ours.’
‘The advantages of having such a best-selling author on our books,’ he said.
‘It’s funny,’ she said. ‘This is the very first time I’ve seen any tangible results from my work.’
‘You’ve had the money.’
She shrugged that off. ‘Figures written on a page. This …’ pirouetting again, ‘… is real.’
There was music.
It was too warm for a fire but that night, after the children were in bed, they sat listening before the empty fireplace, she at one end of the gloriously comfortable settee, he stretched out with his head in her lap. They had switched off all the lights and watched the shimmer of the city across the water as the music enclosed them. They had found the record player on a side table in the living room. A Pye Black Box, a stereophonic player that had first come on the market five or six years earlier, with a stack of LPs to go with it.
‘What do you fancy?’ she had asked.
‘Anything.’
She did not know his taste. There was so much she did not know about him yet the thought, which might have been forbidding, filled her with added joy. What a time we shall have learning all about each other, she thought. Such a happy, happy time.
She selected a record, put it on, came back to join him.
‘Don’t blame me if you don’t like it,’ she said.
‘I shall. I shall hate you forever.’
Beethoven. The Fifth Symphony, with Kleiber and the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam.
Glory filled the house, the spaces of air and shining water beyond the house.
‘God, it’s awful,’ said Richard.
She punched him, lovingly.
The music prowled, came to its triumphant climax, died. Slowly, letting the seconds and minutes draw out, they climbed the staircase with their arms about each other.
Standing alone in the bedroom, waiting for Richard whom she could hear brushing his teeth in the bathroom — even so mundane a sound another facet in the innumerable facets of love — she looked out of the window at the water, black and mysterious between the multi-coloured reflections of city light. She was alone and not alone. He was with her in spirit as she was with him, as both in a few minutes would be with each other in the flesh.
The flesh, she thought. So important yet only, at best, a signature of the love that combines both flesh and spirit and transcends them both.
The bathroom door opened. She turned to him, arms outstretched.
It was so wonderful. They had arrived in Sydney on a Friday so that they had the whole weekend together.
‘Are you working?’ he had asked her the previous evening.
She had mimed horror. ‘If you can take time off I don’t see why I shouldn’t.’
‘Idle slut. How can I hope to live in luxury if you don’t work?’
‘Slave-driver.’
‘You’d better believe it.’
With the children in the back of the red Austin Healey that was Richard’s joy they explored the country north of the city, had lunch at a pub on the coast. It was warm and they sat outside at a wooden table, glasses of beer beside them, gorging themselves on steak and chops.
‘Not exactly cordon bleu,’ Richard said.
‘Who cares?’ Ruth wondered, mouth full.
They finished their meal, strolled down a steep path until they arrived at a tiny beach between two headlands. They sat on the sand and watched the sun on the water while the children played.
‘Like a honeymoon,’ Richard said.
‘Except we have the children first.’
‘Even so …’ He tossed a pebble to and fro, frowning. ‘I want to marry you,’ he said.
Oh.
She took his hands in hers. ‘I can’t marry you. You know that.’
‘There is such a thing as divorce.’
‘I love you,’ she said. Which was not the issue.
He was not to be deflected. You won’t be able to keep this one on a leash, Dorrie had said. ‘I love you with my whole heart but that wasn’t what I said. I said I want to marry you.’
‘I need time.’
He sighed. ‘How much time?’
‘As long as it takes.’
It was hard for him. If she loved him why should she not want to marry him?
‘There is Roberta,’ he pointed out.
As if she would forget. Roberta, technically, was illegitimate. A bastard. Marrying Richard would change that. But would not change Roberta, she told herself. She is as she is. Marriage or no marriage, that remains.
‘It will make no difference to Roberta.’
‘I wouldn’t be too sure about that.’
Three weeks later, on a fine Sunday morning, Roberta ran away for the first time. Richard had been down the street to buy a paper. He was on his way back when he saw the child come out of the side gate and start down the lane towards him. She was wearing a grey skirt and jumper and looked as if she were going to school.
‘Where are you off to?’
She had not seen him; when he spoke to her she ran.
A few paces and he had caught her. She fought him, silently and viciously, until he lost his patience. He hoicked her over his shoulder and carried her back to the house, her clenched fists beating a futile tattoo on his back.
‘Why?’ Ruth sat on Roberta’s bed, her hand on Roberta’s shoulder. To comfort them both. Roberta’s face was buried in her pillow, her head turned away. ‘Where were you going?’
It took a long time but Ruth waited patiently until at last Roberta muttered something, her voice clogged with tears and pillow. ‘What?’
‘Going home.’
‘This is your home.’
Silence.
‘Please, darling, don’t be silly.’
‘Mindowie’s home. And Dougie.’
She wept, clinging, but would not be consoled.
‘We must tell her,’ Richard said. ‘I’ll do it, if you’d rather.’
‘It’ll come better from me.’ Fearful that it would come badly, whoever said it.
She went looking for her daughter, found her sitting at the end of the lawn, her feet dangling over the retaining wall. Ruth watched her. She sat staring across the water at the city. Like a prisoner. The thought came uninvited; Ruth dismissed it at once. What nonsense. Any kid would give its back teeth to have a house like this to live in.
‘I want to talk to you.’
‘What about?’ The eyes defensive, the expression closed.
‘Come over here and I’ll tell you.’
She came reluctantly, feet dragging.
Ruth sat on the grass, tucking her feet under her. Roberta stood, a yard or two away.
‘Join me?’
Eventually she did. Ruth put her arm around the stiff body. Across the harbour yachts flaunted their brilliant sails in the sunshine. They sat side by side, watching. Slowly she sensed Roberta begin to relax.
‘Would you like to go sailing sometime?’
A shrug.
‘I’ll have a word with Richard. Perhaps he can arrange something.’
She despised herself for thinking a bribe would be the answer. Slowly, cautiously, she began to talk. To explain. How Dougie had never been Roberta’s father. Whereas Richard …
‘No!’
Committed now, Ruth ploughed on. ‘It was the war …’
Which had indeed been responsible for much.
Weeping, eyes swollen, Roberta would have none of it. ‘Mindowie’s my home. Dougie’s my Daddy!’
‘No, dear.’
The child was on her feet. ‘You’re only saying this so I’ll stay here. But I won’t. I won’t! I’m going back to my home and you can’t stop me!’
And fled tearfully into the house. The door of her room banged shut. Standing outside it, Ruth could hear her; a tempest of tears, a gabble of heartbreak. Was about to go after her. Richard stopped her.
‘Let her be. She’ll get over it.’
Twice more Roberta tried to run away. The first time the police brought her back. After that they kept a close eye on her and the next time grabbed her before she’d got to the end of the lane. Ruth was in despair but slowly Richard was proved right. The tantrums died. The sullenness died. Life returned, more or less, to normal. They heard no more of Mindowie or Dougie yet it was not until much later, when Roberta was twelve, that things finally came right between them all.
‘Africa?’ Cautiously Ruth tasted the idea.
‘I thought we might do a bit of exploring. I could show you some of the things I saw when I was over there before the war.’
She remembered how in Burma he had told her about it, saw that he would be showing her not only Africa but his own earlier self.
‘I always fancied the idea of Africa,’ she said.
In the end Boyd’s class was tied up in some holiday project so he couldn’t go but the rest of them went together.
They were away a month. Ruth acquired new images to set alongside those of the past. Richard and Roberta posing side by side against the collapsing cataracts of Victoria Falls. Her first sight of Cape Town, its mountain gleaming beneath a spread of cloud. The breathless magic of a sun-gold dawn. A cluster of kudu, ears pricked, stripes glowing, frozen in the instant before flight. African voices singing. The first spine-prickling roar of a lion in the night.
They went into the mountains. The Drakensberg, they called them. The Dragon Mountains. There was a place named Injasuti, an African word whose meaning Ruth never discovered. A hutted camp with a stream running alongside it. At night the voice of the water came clearly to them as they lay in the cabin Richard had rented.
Ruth lay on her back, listening to the stream, tasting the darkness. Africa, she thought. She could feel herself opening to it, to Richard, who had brought her here.
In the morning they walked through pine woods, crossed the stream where smooth white boulders offered a way. They came to a gorge, darkly-shadowed, its entrance like a mouth opening into the mountains. Its sheer sides leant high above them. In the distance the peaks of the main range stood out against a brilliant sky.
A baboon barked, a lonely, savage sound.
‘There will be leopards,’ Richard said.
Roberta looked around apprehensively. ‘How do you know?’
‘Always, where there are baboons.’
They picked their way along the stony trail. Below them the rushing stream flung itself between boulders as grey as ice. For the first time Richard began to talk to Roberta as a person, not simply as a child who until then had existed only as part of the parcel that had been Ruth.
‘Baboons are the leopard’s favourite food,’ he told her.
‘Why do the baboons stay where the leopards are, then?’
‘They’re like us. They live as they do because they don’t know any different.’
‘Do leopards kill people?’
‘Not often. But they can.’
He spoke of his life on the diamond fields with his uncle. How that experience had kindled in him a love of wilderness, of Africa.
‘Why didn’t you come back here?’ Roberta asked. ‘Instead of going to Australia?’
‘I always intended to. But time catches up with you. You get tied up in things because there doesn’t seem to be any choice. Afterwards it’s too late.’
‘But you did come to Australia.’
‘Australia was where your mother was.’
Roberta turned to her. ‘Are you tied up in things, too?’
Richard answered for her. ‘Ruth is different.’
They came to a cave, an indentation in the rock wall with an overhang to protect it from above. Across the wall capered the stick-like figures of men and women, charcoal-black, imbued with life. Roberta, twelve years old with all the prurient interests of her age, stared at the running figures, the tiny men with penises erect, the women with breasts ballooning from their armpits.
‘Who painted these?’
‘The bushmen.’
‘Do they still live here?’
‘Not for a long time.’
‘Where are they now?’
‘Scattered.’
There were other figures; a rhinoceros, a flowing field of impala, heads thrown back in flight.
Watching them Ruth could hear the cries of the hunters and thunder of hooves, taste the dust.
‘It’s as though they’re alive,’ she said.
There was a deer, much bigger than the figures of the running men. ‘Eland,’ Richard explained. ‘The greatest of the antelope.’
They whispered as though in church. Then Richard’s hand was on Ruth’s arm. Before she could move he said, ‘Stand still.’
His voice said, No nonsense. They all stood, as frozen as the rock, not daring to speak.
When Richard spoke his voice was no more than a breath of air. ‘Turn round. Very slowly.’
Very slowly they did so.
‘See? On the far side of the stream? Under that b
ush.’
They looked. Saw nothing. Twenty yards away there was indeed a bush, low and thorny, growing against the honey-coloured rock. The sun had climbed high enough to shine into the gorge. The ground beneath the bush was dappled. Gold sunlight, black shadow.
‘I don’t see anything,’ Ruth whispered.
She heard Roberta gasp and at that moment saw it herself. Something coalesced out of the broken shade. A mask. Long limbs. A sinuous body. The eyes shut or nearly so. It looked lazy and contented. Harmless. Yet was not. Even lying there, seemingly half-asleep, it revealed something of its speed and ferocity.
‘What is it?’ Her mouth was dry.
‘A leopard.’
The killer of baboons. Of human beings.
‘Don’t move.’
They did not need to be told.
They waited for what seemed an eternity, Richard with his hand on Roberta’s shoulder, the cat sunning itself peacefully. Ruth barely breathed. Then, silently, it rose and moved away along the river bank. It flowed like the stream. Was gone.
‘Wait.’
They did so. After a few minutes Ruth felt him relax against her, heard the breath ease out of him. ‘Well …’
Now it was safe to move she realised how scared she had been. ‘Where did it go?’
He gestured at the rock wall. ‘Up there somewhere. Who knows?’
‘It vanished. Just like that.’
‘It’s the camouflage. You can’t see them.’
‘But we saw him,’ Roberta said. ‘We were lucky, weren’t we?’
‘Very lucky.’