The Bride of Almond Tree

by Robert Hillman

  ‘They scrape the foetus out of the womb.’

  ‘Kill it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Franny, is that what you want. To kill your baby?’

  Franny struck herself on the head, two times, three times, hard.

  ‘No, it isn’t what I want, idiot! I have no choice. What, you want me to raise a child of a man I despise?’

  ‘What man?’

  Franny went quiet for a minute.

  ‘Vern Alfred.’

  ‘Vern who runs the caravan park?’

  ‘That Vern Alfred.’

  ‘Franny, he’s twice your age. Married, with kids. How on earth?’

  Franny said that Vern was starting a small zoo to please the customers and bought rabbits from her. He would sell them. She delivered them, explained how to care for them. Vern had a couple of wallabies as well, a very aged dingo, a blue tongue and a goanna.

  ‘He asked me if I’d like a drink—this was two in the afternoon. I said yes. I don’t drink much, but I knew what was going to follow and I was full of anger with you for going to see Beth every single week. We went into an empty caravan, had a glass of gin, I let him have sex with me. You know his reputation. Then I went home and chucked up. Four weeks, no period. I went to Smithy and he said I was pregnant. No doubt about it. I went home and chucked up again. I want you to ask Di if she knows anyone who can abort this baby. Di will know.’

  Since Wes planned to live in the house himself, he’d had the telephone installed, mostly so that Beth could call him if there were an emergency. While Franny was still there, he called Di and told her the situation. ‘Dear God, what a scatterbrained girl. Is she there? Can I speak to her?’

  Wes handed the phone to Franny.

  ‘Franny, if you want to do this, you have to be sure. Completely sure.’

  ‘I’m sure.’

  ‘Hand the phone back to Wes.’

  Di said that there were a hundred or more abortionists in Melbourne, nearly all of them medically unqualified and dangerous. When schoolgirls came to her pleading for help—always to Di—she told them that their parents would have to be informed because the one doctor she could recommend was formidably expensive with a practice in Toorak. He had a certain commitment to termination—he wouldn’t have done it at all otherwise—he also charged three hundred and fifty pounds. In Almond Tree, it was once possible, before the bushfire, to buy a house in one place and another from Hoong Li, now dead, for one-hundred and fifty pounds. The doctor—Doctor Child, an irony—considered himself a communist by some convoluted reasoning and would turn up at branch meetings every so often, listening sternly in his suit and white shirt and tie, never saying a word but raising his hand when votes were taken.

  Di would make an appointment for Franny. She would find one hundred pounds. Franny had to find the rest. Wes still had his discharge money untouched; he told Franny he would provide one hundred and fifty pounds. Could Franny find the rest? She could, from her rabbit savings.

  The doctor kept the patients in bed at the clinic for twenty-four hours after the procedure, and required a reliable friend to take the patient home. Wes would be the reliable friend.

  When Wes put the phone down, he pushed his hands through his hair and shook his head. ‘Fran, this is going to be horrible for you. I’ll be there, but what a foolish thing to do.’

  ‘Don’t you think I know? Don’t you?’

  When the family was told, sitting around on the armchairs and sofa of the lounge room, Wes was there to support Franny. For Bob Hardy, two choices: take the 12-gauge down to the caravan park and fill Vern’s gut with buckshot, or whack him in the chops. Bob opted for the shotgun, and murder, but Lillian chased him and confiscated the weapon.

  ‘What are you going to do? Shoot the other dozen men in the town who’ve enjoyed our Franny? The women of this town all think of Franny as a slut. Not me. She’s got some sort of appetite for sex that’s practically a handicap, but she’s no slut. And haven’t you seen the way women steer their husbands clear of Franny down at the shopping centre? I’ve bought condoms for her at the chemist. You’d think I’d done some good, then she lets that vile Vern take her into a caravan, no condom. You want to slap Vern about, go to it. But I’m not having two family members in Pentridge.’

  Bob Hardy drove down to the caravan park and found Vern replacing a tap washer. His man took off, and Bob, with his bad leg, couldn’t catch him. It was two days before he came across Vern down in Brewster’s the bakers, tapped him on the shoulder and smacked him all over the shop. ‘No need to thank me. It was a pleasure.’

  The appointment was for a Tuesday in April. Wes had to cancel a couple of appearances at which he was speaking with Doc Evatt, the federal opposition leader, on the issue of the constitutional banning of the Communist Party coming up in September. Wes was asked to speak at these gatherings in Progress Halls in the region because people loved to hear his voice. Not so much Evatt, who tended to badger and roar. Wes made it clear that he was not a communist, but communism was politics and you couldn’t ban a party because you didn’t like it. ‘They don’t blow up bridges, they don’t shoot people. It’s just politics. If you don’t like them, don’t vote for them.’

  Wes took Franny to the city by train, then to the clinic off Orrong Road by tram. She kept the same grim face for the whole journey and barely spoke a word. But she held Wes’s hand and frequently pressed it against her cheek. The clinic was at the back of a stunning mansion with an extensive garden planted with elms. Wes handed Franny over to a nurse, middle-aged, unsmiling. Later Doctor Child came out to the waiting room and sat beside Wes. He spoke in a deep voice, almost a baritone. Considering how spick and span he kept himself, Wes was surprised that Doctor Child had let the black hairs in his ears grow rampant.

  ‘Never speak about this, Mister Cunningham. If it becomes known what I sometimes do here, I will go to prison for five years, Franny will go to prison for three years, and you, as the facilitator, will go to prison for one year. You may think that the amount I charge is exceptionally high, but half of that goes to a certain detective sergeant who protects me. I only ever abort unmarried women and girls; the married women have to find their own way of coping. We understand each other? I know, incidentally, that you are not the father.’

  The doctor left Wes in the waiting room and told him it would be two hours before he could see Franny. The walls were ornamented with posters: Drink your milk! Two glasses a day!; When you visit the toilet always scrub your hands. Magazines were provided but Wes had no appetite for the Women’s Weekly, the National Geographic. Two other patients joined him, a mother and a daughter as it appeared. The girl looked barely fourteen, fair-haired and pretty, but downcast, her eyes brimming with tears. The mother, stylishly dressed in scarlet, seemed seized with an unremitting anger and glared at Wes as if he deserved rebuke simply for being male. She slapped the daughter on the hand at intervals and hissed at her to show some sense. ‘They’re not going to cut your throat.’

  When Wes was finally permitted to see Franny, she was still emerging from the anaesthetic in a room painted white and spotless in every detail. He kissed her on the forehead and she said, ‘Woo, oh Jesus…’

  All she could talk was slurred babble. Wes told her he would be back the next afternoon to take her home. He stayed the night with Di Porter in Collingwood and helped out by reading aloud the speech she was going to give at the Melbourne Town Hall in a couple of days, ‘Say no to the ban!’

  Di came the next day in her husband’s Chevy. Franny was in a fairly good state, but in some pain. Franny thanked her for everything, but winced as she spoke. ‘Right-o,’ said Di, ‘you’re not going home on the train in this state. I’ll drive you.’ They stopped at Collingwood so that Di could tell Beau that she wouldn’t be home until midnight.

  Franny slept stretched out on the back seat. The conversation between Di and Wes was sparse. Di drove fast but smoothly over the Black Spur, negotiated all the twists and turns wi
thout disturbing Franny. A little about the referendum.

  ‘If we lose, then what?’

  ‘God knows. We become more secretive,’ said Di.

  ‘Even honorary communists such as me?’

  ‘You’re not a commie, Wes. You’re a Quaker. And a very good Quaker, I must say. A Quaker with a red tinge.’

  ‘In the Quaker community, I’m considered an embarrassment.’

  ‘Anyone who wants to muck about with the world is an embarrassment. You have to be an embarrassment before you’re even noticed.’

  Franny was delivered into her mother’s care at ten at night. She turned up the next day while Wes was hanging the front gate of his new house.

  ‘How are you feeling, you poor thing?’

  ‘Awful. I have a request. I want to stay with you here. No romance. Just stay here in your spare bedroom. I can do housework, cook. I’m good at it. But I want to be near where you are.’

  Wes sighed deeply and put down his screwdriver. ‘And what do you think Beth would say about that?’

  ‘She wanted you to marry me.’

  ‘She’s changed.’

  ‘Ask her, then.’

  On Wes’s next visit to Pentridge, he read the scene in which Kitty draws letters in chalk on the surface of the card table and it is up to Levin to decipher her declaration of love. The scene pleased all the women listening. ‘He’d be good at crosswords, that Levin,’ said Bev, who enjoyed crosswords herself.

  The women always allowed ten minutes at the end of a visit by Wes in which he and Beth could be alone. Beth knew about the abortion from a letter Wes had sent her via Bev, who accommodated them in this way.

  ‘So Franny’s all right?’

  ‘Yes, but she has a request.’

  ‘I’m sure she does. What is it?’

  ‘She wants to live at the house I’m just finishing. In the spare bedroom. No romance, she says.’

  Beth slapped her hand down on the table and her pale complexion turned scarlet. ‘No! No, no, she cannot! Are you mad? Did you tell her it all depends on me? Why didn’t you say no yourself? I can’t believe you’re asking me this. No! She’d be in your bed in ten minutes.’

  ‘Beth, she’s in a bad way. I thought we might give her a break.’

  ‘She cannot live at your house. No—not now, not ever. God in heaven, any woman who would have sex with Vern Alfred isn’t right in the head. You know what she’s like. And she’s sly. It would be, “Oh, Wes, I just need a cuddle. Oh, Wes, I just need to take my pyjamas off for a few minutes.”’

  ‘Okay, okay.’

  ‘What? Why are you smiling?’

  ‘You no longer want me to marry your sly sister?’

  ‘Please yourself.’ Then: ‘But you’d have to be as stupid as her.’

  It took nine months to finish reading Anna. The women were left disappointed. ‘Would you call that a happy ending? Anna’s dead.’ ‘Yes, but Levin and Kitty are married.’ ‘So?’ ‘The thing is, Anna went nuts. She needed medication, in my opinion.’

  Anna was succeeded by Middlemarch. Not quite the hit that Anna was, but still, not bad. Everyone liked Dorothea, but once she’d gone nutty over Casaubon, she was also considered a candidate for medication. ‘That old stick! He’d never get it up. And Dorothea, she’s so gorgeous. What a waste!’

  Three weeks into Middlemarch, and ten months into Beth’s sentence, she came to know that Bev could be bribed. Twenty pounds for a private hour with your husband or boyfriend. Beth mentioned it in as casual a way as she could manage to Wes on his next visit. Wes said, ‘Is that something you could agree to?’ Beth shrugged. ‘Might be nice.’ On Wes’s next visit, he passed an envelope to Bev, who led Beth and Wes to a cell separated from the other cells by a gated corridor, which Bev locked behind her. This was the cell in which Hilary the Poisoner had been held, Hilary who claimed she could make lethal poisons out of air and dust and whom nobody would share with. It was a cell in the same derelict condition as all the other female cells but Bev had left three blankets on the bunk and a pillow.

  ‘You two cuddle up. I’ll lock the corridor off. Nobody will come down for an hour. Use these.’

  She handed Wes two condoms in their sealed blue packets.

  They stood apart, shyly, until Wes took the initiative by spreading the blankets on the bunk. ‘Sit beside me.’

  Beth sat beside him, not too close.

  ‘Well,’ she said. ‘Now what?’

  Wes turned her face to him and kissed her on the lips. Then lay down and urged Beth to do the same. Before she did, she removed her prison uniform, and beneath the blanket, her underwear. She told Wes to take off his clothes.

  ‘All of them?’

  ‘All of them.’

  ‘Stand there,’ she said nodding at a place on the floor close to the bunk. As he did, naked, her gaze wandered all over his body. She said, ‘I just want to look at you.’ Finally she reached out to him and drew him to the prison bunk. Holding him naked was the single greatest pleasure of her life.

  She was different afterwards. It was as if her body had been stingy and mean with her about what it could yield up, resentful of the sheer delight that it harboured. When Wes was gone, the other women stared at her and smiled. ‘Sweety, look at you. Better than porridge, isn’t it?’

  Beth blushed, but didn’t deny anything. Only there was Franny. If she laid a finger on him, she would cut her throat so help her God. From ear to ear. And enjoy it.

  Chapter 17

  PATTY AND Kado made their two-week visit to Almond Tree in August of 1951. The entire Friends community came to the station to greet them, including Wes. They were fascinated by Kado’s perfect English, and the ghost of an American accent in his speech. They knew the story of the loss of his family in the atomic explosion from Patty’s letters, and they knew of her nursing in the hospitals of Hiroshima. Patty’s mother, Daisy, did her best to prepare Japanese dishes, without access to perhaps half of the ingredients. They stayed in Wes’s old room in the Cunningham house.

  Kado was warned by the Friends, and by Patty, that anti-Japanese sentiment in Australia, even in Almond Tree, was intense, and that he had to expect abuse and insults. He was sanguine about the prospect and when he encountered anger and hatred, his strategy was to smile broadly, or if the opportunity existed, to apologise for the grief his country had inflicted.

  Patty drove him about the shire in her mother’s little Austin.

  She stopped in the car at the cenotaph, which was being cleaned, as it was 365 days of the year, by Daph Sawyer with a small red hand brush. The cenotaph honoured and named in bronze relief the soldiers of the town and region who had died in World War I, but now also those who had died in World War II. Kado wanted to get out and inspect the monument but Patty said no, no, not while Daph was there. ‘I’ll be courteous,’ he said, and left the car to look. Daph, on her knees sweeping the two steps at the foot of the cenotaph, glanced up when Kado approached. And frowned. ‘I am sorry to interrupt your work, madam. I have stopped here to honour your soldiers who died in the war.’

  ‘Really,’ said Daph. She shaded her eyes from the sun, still on her knees. ‘You’re not Australian.’

  ‘No, in fact I am Japanese.’

  ‘I’ll be buggered. A Nip.’

  By this time, anticipating strife, Patty had joined them.

  ‘Jesus Christ, Patty Cunningham!’

  Daph got to her feet, still holding her red hand brush.

  ‘Give us a hug, pet. Haven’t seen you in a thousand years. Where’ve you been?’

  ‘Nursing in New Guinea while the war was on. Then I volunteered to carry on nursing in Japan after the war was over. I’ve been there ever since. In Hiroshima.’

  ‘What, where they dropped that big bomb? That atomic bomb?’

  ‘Yes, there, but seven months after.’

  ‘I thought it killed them all.’

  ‘Many thousands. Not all. I’ve been nursing survivors. Alongside my husband.’ She nodded a
t Kado.

  ‘Your husband. This is your husband? How did this come about, Pats?’

  ‘He’s a doctor. I was working in his hospital. He wasn’t in the army during the war, Daph.’

  Daphne gazed at Kado more with curiosity than disdain.

  ‘And so you got married. Well, a woman can marry who she pleases. Are you going to live in Almond Tree, then? Lots of people here have a poor opinion of the Japs.’

  Patty said no, they wouldn’t be living in Almond Tree, but in Hiroshima where Kado’s parents dwelt. And she added, because she thought she must, ‘Kado’s wife and four children were killed by the bomb.’

  Daphne nodded. ‘Come here for a bit, want to show you something.’

  Kado followed her to the far side of the cenotaph. She placed her finger on one of the names listed there, the names of the dead from World War II. Corporal Nicholas Sawyer.

  ‘My son. He died on your railway you were building in Burma. Cholera.’

  She kissed the name. Kado, risking it, also kissed the name. ‘I have sorrow in my heart for your son. Soldiers of my country did terrible things.’ He did not add: Perhaps as bad as exploding an atomic bomb on my city, where we are still struggling with the damage.

  The sightseeing tour took in Mulga Bill’s original bicycle, welded into place outside the shire offices—Mulga Bill, immortalised in Banjo Paterson’s poem. Next to the rickety, ancient bike the first two lines of the poem were quoted: It was Mulga Bill of Eaglehawk who caught the cycling craze and turned aside the good old mare who’d served him many days.

  Patty explained that Eaglehawk was a town to the west in the gold-rush country, and also that the people of Eaglehawk wanted the bicycle back. There was not the slightest evidence that Mulga Bill had ever existed, or that this was the bicycle in the poem. It had been purchased by a council man from Almond Tree decades past from a second-hand shop in Eaglehawk, advertised as Mulga Bill’s original machine. The welding had been reinforced to prevent rogues from Eaglehawk stealing it, which they—the rogues—had attempted more than once.

  ∼