by JH Fletcher
At some point in her vigil he surfaced briefly. The fingers tightened on hers a fraction. Ruth, who had fallen into a dazed stupor, looked at him. He was watching her. He grinned. Or tried to.
‘How yer going?’
Not Dougie’s voice. Desperately Ruth thought, there has to be some mistake, but the only mistake lay in the stubborn body that had still not given up its hopeless fight.
‘I’m good,’ she told him.
‘More’n I can say. Good of you to come, heh.’
She had no reply to that; gestured helplessly.
‘Sorry to drag you all this way. But I wanted to see you once more.’ Again the cracked grin. ‘To make sure I hadn’t dreamt it all.’
‘I’m real,’ she told him.
‘How’re the kids?’
‘Good.’ Her voice was steady; she was glad. There was enough pain in the bed without her adding to it. ‘What have you been doing with yourself all this time?’
He shook his head. ‘Not a lot.’
He had talked so much in those early days, had shone like flame at the edges of her vision. All of it come to this, a dying man, a life with nothing achieved, nothing to say of it. Yet not a bad man. It seemed unfair.
His face contorted. ‘Christ …’ Everything about him — the writhing limbs, the hunted eyes — bespoke pain. ‘Do something, Ruthie. For God’s sake …’
‘I will.’
She caught the echo. The wedding vows they had exchanged all those years ago. I would wed him to death, she thought, if it were possible. He deserves nothing less.
Hastily she got up, fetched the Sister. Which was all she could do.
When Sister Aster returned Ruth asked, ‘How is he?’
‘Peaceful. Until the next time.’
Ruth took a deep breath. ‘Is there nothing that can be done?’
What she did not say spoke louder than her words. Sister Aster looked at her. ‘There’s no hope of any cure, if that’s what you’re asking.’
Ruth watched her.
Sister, trim in her just-so uniform, pursed disapproving lips. ‘We are doing all we can. All we are permitted by law to do.’
Ruth watched her.
‘To cut short a life is murder. Even a life that is no life.’
‘No one would ask it of you,’ Ruth said.
‘Aye. Well.’ Opaque eyes guarded her thoughts, her feelings.
Nothing she could do. Only sit with him for however long it took, pray that he might find peace.
Which at last, in the first greyness of the next dawn, he did.
Thank God.
She went out. Found Sister Aster at her little desk.
Everyone was very sympathetic. Not that it had come as any surprise, of course.
THIRTY-ONE
Ruth got up while it was still dark. There was no sound from Louise’s room. She went to the kitchen instead of her study. Moving quietly so as not to disturb her guest, she made coffee. Flask in hand, picnic blanket under her arm, she went out into the darkness. She could hear the lonely sound of the waves upon the rocks at the far end of the beach but today she turned her back on the sea and headed up the dunes. She climbed the slope immediately behind the house. It was too dark to see much but she had been here so often. She didn’t need light to see the swells and valleys stretching inland, the sand stitched together by marram grass that hissed when the wind blew through it. A profusion of bushes grew here. Everything looked the same; without the sound of the sea to guide him a stranger would have found it easy to get lost.
She reached the top of the dune and sat in a depression that sheltered her from the wind. She wrapped the blanket about her shoulders, poured a cup of coffee, felt its steam about her face as she sipped it and waited for the sunrise.
She came here often when she had something on her mind. It was her thinking place and today she had a lot to think about. This latest business with Andrew and Jenni Doggett and the solicitor’s letter that Jenni’s father had sent him. Was there anything she could do about it? Should do?
I can deal with the symptoms, Ruth thought, but what can I do about the underlying cause? The problem was Andrew himself. He thought the whole world owed him a living, that anything he wanted from life was his to take without giving a damn about anyone else. Without a change of heart nothing, ultimately, would change. It did not absolve her from the obligation to try.
That was one thing.
Another. Louise wanted her to help her father, the previous evening had parted from her in anger because Ruth had said no. Once again, was there anything she could do? Should do?
She sat motionless, thinking, thinking, the blanket warming her as the eastern sky lightened and the shapes of the bushes emerged little by little out of the dissolving dark.
‘What would you do, my dear?’ she asked Richard.
She talked to him so often. In the eyes of the world Ruth had far outshone her husband yet, from the first, Richard had been her rock. A hero when a hero had been needed but no man for heroics when the need for it had passed. Which in itself had been heroism, thought Ruth, remembering the battalions of old men who from lack of temperament or opportunity had done nothing in the war but who seemed unable to stop talking about it. Who would carry their wartime prejudices to the grave. Seed time and harvest, Ruth thought. With seed like that, what kind of harvest will there be in the future? Thank God Richard’s own life, like her own, had been unburdened by hatred.
The world had seen him as existing in her shadow but the reverse had been true. Unknowingly, the critics had commented upon the change in her writing from the time she and Richard had finally got together. Hope had always been there, her personal sense of life’s glory and holiness, but with him beside her another dimension had been added, the belief that humanity could achieve fulfilment not in some indeterminate future but now. If she had carried that torch throughout her life it had been because Richard had helped to light it.
She remembered, as she did every week of her life, the long agony of the jungle. Richard and Richard alone had brought her safely out of it. Richard in London, the jagged beauty of Stravinsky’s music in her ears as she turned from him. In Topaz, Dorrie saying, He’s a man. Don’t let him go.
A man willing to take second place in the eyes of the world. Something that, for many men, would have been impossible.
She remembered how she had lost him.
She had been tied up inside her head all day, thinking only of the characters in her story that, wilful as their creator, insisted on going their own way and withstood every effort to make them do what she wanted. She’d had no thought to spare for anyone or anything else at all. And then the evening, the rain, sitting with Roberta but still there only in the flesh, the figures still prancing in her mind.
She remembered the crash, the certainty of catastrophe filling her heart with ice. Out into the raining street, the crushed car, the figure of the man like a piece of crumpled cloth. The blood blotched pink beneath the hammer of the rain. All that beauty, achievement, hope spilled upon the wet ground. Most of all the lost years of friendship, the broken promise of the future. That and the memory of her daughter’s horrified eyes upon her as she discovered that she had passed beyond weeping.
I held him, she thought, and felt him go from me. How much of my life went with him. At that moment I remembered Dorrie and what had happened to her, the lost baby, the guns that broke the miners’ strike. She had told me, I had seen the tragedies in my mind, had felt them or thought I had, had written about them in one way or another all my life. I had felt nothing, known nothing. Only at that moment, with the broken pieces of my man like a sack of junk in my arms, did I know. Feel.
And I had called myself a writer.
He is not dead, Ruth thought now. My Richard is not dead. If he died in Sydney’s grey and raining streets how can he be here with me now? I feel him as I feel the earth turning towards the sun. His presence warms me, his voice brings me comfort. His wisdom guides me.
/> I have wept so often, with no one to see.
She sat, watching for the sun’s first golden spark above the plain’s rim. When it appeared she stood. Her limbs were stiff after her vigil, the blanket when she folded it wet with dew. She picked up the flask. Walking, skidding, she made her way down the breast of the dune to her house. Already clear of the horizon, the sun threw her shadow before her. Along the deserted beach the gun metal sea turned slowly to blue. She was washed clean by thought and memory, her mind resolved.
No more doubts, now.
Back at the house she went into her study. A pile of paper lay by the fax. She picked it up. Barbara Getz had sent her the first article.
Ruth sat in the easy chair, read it through.
It hailed Ruth as the greatest writer of her generation.
‘Nonsense …’
As she worked through the article she saw how Barbara had woven a subtle blend of history, criticism and downright fantasy, linking the author with the woman so that the one explained and illuminated the other. More importantly, Ruth saw that Barbara was drumming up a sense of sympathy for the woman which must reflect advantageously upon her work. It was what she had said she would do.
Ruth hated it. It could be the subtlest thing ever written; it was still a sales pitch. She scrawled a note.
I wonder if we are on the right lines here.
She went to the fax and sent it. It would be morning in California; with luck Barbara would read it right away. She returned to her chair. Had barely sat down when the phone rang. Barbara.
‘What’s the problem?’
‘It makes me feel like a model on a catwalk. It’s clever but it’s too brash.’
Barbara laughed. ‘It’s written for the American reader. We’re brash folks over here, honey. We don’t believe in hiding our light under a bushel.’
‘But calling me the greatest writer … That’s nonsense.’
‘It’s fact.’ Barbara’s voice was calm. ‘You’ve got to trust me on this. If we’re going to achieve anything we have to shout your name from the rooftops. And you’re going to have to do your share.’
It sounded dreadful. ‘Like what?’
‘Nothing you haven’t done a hundred times before. TV interviews, stuff like that.’
‘You make it sound like a marketing campaign.’
‘Damn right, honey. That’s exactly what it is.’
‘Won’t it put people off?’
Stockholm, she meant but did not say.
‘This first article is to get people to sit up and take notice. The trumpet blast, if you like.’ Barbara laughed. ‘The walls don’t come down until the later articles. They’ll concentrate on the quality of your work, the individual books. Like I keep on saying, you got to know the writer before you can appreciate the work.’
‘You make me sound like an Amazon.’
‘Why not? The Amazons were female warriors. That’s exactly what you are.’
Slowly Ruth replaced the receiver. An Amazon? Good God.
She could hear sounds from Louise’s bedroom. She went into the kitchen, made more coffee, took a cup in to her. She had wondered whether last night’s anger might still linger but there was no sign.
‘And a biscuit,’ Louise said with pleasure. ‘You’re spoiling me.’
‘Sleep well?’
‘Great.’
Ruth drew back the curtains. ‘It’s a lovely day.’
‘Have you been writing?’
She shook her head. ‘I went for a walk instead.’
‘I thought you always worked?’
‘Breaking the pattern of a lifetime,’ Ruth agreed lightly. ‘Do me good.’
Louise was anxious. ‘It’s not my fault?’
Ruth reassured her. ‘Neither you nor anyone else has ever been able to make me do anything I didn’t want to do.’
They had breakfast on the verandah, and were just finishing when David Clark arrived.
‘Just passing,’ he said.
Ruth looked at him, at Louise staring at nothing, a slight flush warming her cheeks. She stood up. ‘I’ll make fresh coffee,’ she said. She turned to Louise. ‘Do me a favour, my dear. Stay here and keep David company until I get back.’
Louise protested but not very hard. Ruth carried the breakfast things into the kitchen and stacked them in the dishwasher, taking her time over it. When she got back she said, ‘I hate to ask you …’
‘What?’
‘I must get down to some work. Like I said, I’ve been very idle this morning. Would you mind amusing yourself for the rest of the day?’
Neither David nor Louise made any difficulties about spending the day together. They helped her tidy up then drove away together. In her study Ruth wrote two letters, very carefully, made several phone calls, went out onto the verandah and sat in her lounger, reading and watching the sea. At three o’clock she went indoors and started to get tea ready. She made lashings of everything; David could eat for ten. At five the others came back. David was boisterous, Louise thoughtful and withdrawn. Ruth, diplomatically, said nothing. After tea David left them but not before promising to be back the next morning.
‘Don’t farmers do any work these days?’ Ruth teased, knowing that all the crops were in.
‘Not for a few weeks.’
‘That’s lucky.’
After David had gone Louise said, ‘You knew my father before the war. What was he like? Before, I mean —’
‘At the age of sixteen he was the love of my life,’ she said. ‘I grew out of it later, of course. But I’ve always been fond of him. We’re not really cousins, you see, he was only Laura’s stepson —’
‘So there was no impediment. If you’d wanted to get married, I mean.’
‘There was never any question of that. Certainly not after he went to Germany.’
‘He came back. Did you ever think it might have been because of you?’
‘I doubt I had anything to do with it. I think he was trying to convince himself that his destiny lay in Germany rather than Australia.’
Yet could not forget how he had shown her the armband, the emblem of his faith. Who could say what might have happened had she reacted more favourably?
Ruth hesitated. ‘He was very arrogant. He’d fallen in love with Hitler, you see, like so many Germans did. He wouldn’t stop shoving it down everyone’s throat, telling us how superior Germany was. By implication, how inferior we were.’
‘I bet that went down well.’
‘Like a lead balloon. Then he went back to Germany and the next thing we were at war with each other.’
Louise asked, ‘Is that why you won’t help him now? Because you think he’s arrogant?’
It was like a slap in the face. Ruth bit back a sharp response, said, ‘No one can help him. We all choose our own road in life. If we feel afterwards that we took the wrong direction …’ She shook her head. ‘Old people often have a sense of failure, of opportunities missed. Of inadequacy.’
‘That’s easy for you to say.’
‘You think I don’t have doubts?’
‘With everything you’ve achieved?’
‘Some writers are like actors,’ Ruth told her. ‘They have an emptiness inside them. They write to fill the emptiness. To pretend to themselves that they’re whole. They never succeed, not altogether. So they always doubt.’
Louise was shocked. She had called Ruth a role model for herself and so many others, looked up to her as a symbol of what was possible in life. To be told this was like God telling her he didn’t exist.
‘I wrote a book about it once,’ Ruth said. ‘People Of The Emptiness. On the surface it was about people living in the Outback. None of the critics spotted that it was really a parable, that the emptiness wasn’t just outside the characters but inside them as well.’
Silence. The sea growled softly.
Louise said, ‘You sound as though there’s no hope at all.’
‘Of course there’s hope! All any of us can do
is what we think is right. That’s what hope is, the freedom to act. It doesn’t mean doing nothing and leaving it all to someone else.’ She laughed. ‘I knew a bishop like that once. Full of the right political words but when it came to doing anything … Hopeless. Literally. Without hope.’ This young woman had all her life before her. Ruth wanted so much that she should understand what she was telling her. ‘Hope means vision but it must be active vision, the willingness and determination to act. In the end we all face the same Judgement Seat. Our own. Did we choose right? What have we achieved? That must always be our guide, to do our best and have the courage to accept the consequences.’
She saw that she had shaken Louise with her remarks. Good, she thought. Let her think. There lies the hope for the world.
‘Please walk with me,’ Louise said.
Barbara had asked her that. But Barbara had wanted something. Ruth looked at Louise thoughtfully. Perhaps she wants something, too. Something that with luck I can give her. The willingness and determination to act. Dammit, she thought, why do I always have to remember my own words?
‘I should love to walk with you,’ she said.
Gulls stalked away from them as they strolled beside the water.
‘Tell me about my grandparents,’ Louise asked.
‘Not much to tell. I never met your grandfather until after he’d married my aunt. I never knew your grandmother at all. She died in an accident when I was only two.’
‘What sort of accident?’
‘A pile of lumber fell on her. Your grandfather was always working, I never saw much of him. He was a stern-looking man, stocky, with a big white moustache. They came from Germany before the First World War and settled in Kapunda. After your grandmother died he got his cousin Irma to come out from Germany to bring up the child.’
‘Was she the one who made him a Nazi?’
‘Irma was very nationalistic. If you weren’t German you were nothing. Franz caught it from her.’
‘I’ve never had any roots on my father’s side,’ Louise said. ‘I always thought he must have lost his family in the war and didn’t want to talk about it. My mother thought so, too.’ Viciously she kicked a pebble. ‘It never occurred to us that he might have been a war criminal.’