After a while he began talking about South America. He sang in Spanish a familiar tuneless ditty that she applauded (he had sung it before). They talked about the war, and again Frances protested: was it necessary for everyone to go? Robert was curious about Billy and Walter. He was beginning to wonder if there was not something in war that he needed to discover for himself. This surprised Frances — it had never occurred to her that he might be envious. He had always seemed to have so much more to his makeup than Billy and Walter, as if he was richer in himself and more glorious, and had no need of the dubious prizes of battle.
At intervals Robert washed his hands in a soapy basin and dried each finger on a towel hanging from a wire hook. Then he wrote details in a notebook. Rain sounded continuously on the iron roof, and again Frances had the feeling that the place she was in was on the move, the woolshed and its outbuildings sailing the plains towards some vague and disappointing destination.
“Tell me the truth,” she suddenly asked. “When is Rosa coming?” She knew he had received fresh news, because at lunchtime when the man brought the mail Robert had retired with a fat envelope.
Until this very minute Frances had felt in Robert’s company none of the discontent nor the impulsiveness that had characterized her feelings for Walter. It was as though Robert with a power that Walter lacked had reached across and put that discordant part of her life into tune. When they kissed, it was not a matter of seeking sensation but of accepting it. She had never stopped to think about him, his thoughts, his future — except that now, seeing him engrossed in examination of the crimp that was the heart of the Gillens’ empire, she felt an urge to disrupt.
“I don’t think you really love her.”
Robert looked up. “She’s in England with her father.” His face under its pad of blond hair was bright with an idea. “By golly! I could join an English regiment.”
“How seriously do you take me?” Frances asked. And then she demanded of him in a voice that almost broke: “How seriously?”
“You’re a delight,” he said, advancing and kissing her on the cheek, then tugging at one of the plaits she had twisted her hair into to save it from the rain. He had said that kind of thing before. It was the code of their friendship. Yet now when he turned aside Frances started to cry.
It wasn’t fair. The world was determined to go about its business without regard to her. Half the males she knew had sailed off the edge of the map, and there was Robert with his back turned tidying the classing table, and he was about to go too. Didn’t he realize that here among the towering bales under a drumming roof he could have lain down beside her and done whatever he wished? But not now — not from now on — because now a deeper power than the body’s stirred and demanded his notice. He would have to acknowledge her pride. He would have to acknowledge the uniqueness she had once chosen for herself and had this minute recovered in a spate of hastily dabbed tears on burning cheeks. What had she been thinking all these months? Into what backwater had her ulterior motives led?
After a final scrupulous wash Robert said: “Come and I’ll show you the view from the tower.” They climbed a greasy ladder into the rafters, Robert going first, reaching down for her hand and hoisting her onto a landing of springy slats. The tower consisted of a rectangle of tin with louvred ventilation windows. Crouched on a platform beside a nest of ropes and pulleys they were able to peer outside.
The road was visible. It emerged from the drive, crossed the home paddocks, then dipped into a hollow near the creek. But it no longer re-emerged to wander up the bank on the opposite side. Instead a green-grey tongue of water protruded through the trees from the direction of the river. Then Frances saw a file of women and children making their way to high ground from the blacks’ camp. Some held sheets of tin over their heads and others bark. A few carried bundles and were unprotected, giving them the appearance of large-thoraxed ants heading for higher ground after the destruction of their nest.
“They’ll camp at the old shearers’ quarters till this is over.”
“Where are the men?”
Robert shrugged. “Some are out looking for sheep. Who knows where the rest are? They’ll turn up.”
With Frances sitting behind he rode down to the sheds and asked the women if they were right for flour and tea. Frances tried not to look at them, for here she was, dry and privileged, while girls her own age existed on bare sufferance. Did the girl Billy had attacked in the back yard of her father’s hotel belong to these “Westbury” blacks? A naked boy of seven or so ran out into the rain and then back to his mother who hugged him while he laughed and shivered.
It was raining worse than ever when Frances knocked on Diana’s door, and on hearing no answer entered. She was asleep, sprawled with mouth open and fine hands protectively splayed on her belly. Frances stared out into the garden. Gutters overflowed in anguished sheets, leaves on the grass struggled to raise themselves against the strident pressure of the rain. The only breeze came from water shifting the air around as it fell. Then, turning to leave, Frances knocked a tin of pins off the dressing table where they had been weighing down several sheets of writing paper. After a glance at Diana, half-stooped as if to collect the scattered pins, she started reading at the top of the page. It was a letter to Billy:
“… punishment. The minister should talk to me first! I could persuade him in no time that you are a good person and I know you are religious. The churches do not understand the religion of a person who is not a churchgoer. I had resolved to say nothing once again about what has been uppermost in my mind these many months, but your ‘us in our house’ etc. with its picture of a third person whose true existence you had no inkling of made me sing with joy. But write to me soon about your feelings because until then, I can’t help it! I will be atremble. We came to Forbes because of the baby and I am known as ‘Mrs Benedetto’. Though it shames me, I shall be known as such until I can proudly take your name. Nobody suspects and I am treated royally, but always nervous. Not even F’s father knows. I should faint if your father appeared as he is known at the hotel.
“Do you see Walter? I feel so dreadfully sorry for him. F has behaved carelessly. I do hold this against her as a weakness. Harry Crowell a scandal in himself told me that in his opinion F was deceiving and selfish and knew her own mind better than she let on. Robert has his Rosa and I doubt if F is anything more than a child to him. I cry when I think of your troubles, deaths etc. and danger, and the torment added for Walter who sends F a torrent of letters that stay unanswered. Stupidest of all now that I have seen more of R he is not worth it. What am I doing writing like this in the house of my host! I must tell you —”
Frances turned the page to find a huge cross scrawled through the following paragraphs. The nib had dug into the paper and thrown an angry black spray:
“— everything. I am sure R despises me. He addressed too many remarks in my direction, making up for a wish not to speak to me at all. When he agreed to this visit I asked if he could take us in his car past your father’s farm but when the time came he apologetically said he feared a change of weather. When events proved him right he was as smug as the cat that swallowed the canary. As we left town he pointed to the scrub and said, ‘It’s country like this where Billy comes from, not worth the “candle”.’ I said it could be desert, I didn’t care. But from a ridge F showed me the blue range miles away and it looked magical. Last year she would have laughed with Mr Gillen who is struck by her but she responds oddly. She flirted with him at breakfast but was hideously rude on our walk this morning when he offered her a peacock’s feather. Her rebuff stung, it was as if she had slapped him and I had to pretend not to notice. I suppose it would be easy to blame her ‘nerves’ but when they consist of everything she does it makes things difficult for her friends. As I am her only friend and fast losing patience I suppose I ought to feel sorry for her but I can’t. In my heart now there is room for no-one but you.
“In R’s favour he is talking of going to th
e war. The latest lists in the papers show the seriousness of things. I have found how important it is to care, I know you have too. If you knew how I set you above these people! How proud I would be to relate your exploits under your own name. We were late last night and had a ‘scratch’ tea but even so were served by the maids one Irish the other Aboriginal who were got up specially. You can guess the scale of things. The floors are polished daily. We are given imported preserves, then there are the outbuildings like barracks. I am …”
Diana mumbled in her sleep and Frances scooped up the pins and escaped to the veranda, closing the doors clumsily with a bang. A sudden gust of wind bowled hoops of rain under the eaves and she got wet, letting go the doors which rattled as she sped away. What a fool Diana was! Hoisting her petty triumph with Billy over everyone. She had poured all her science and clear thinking down the drain, and settled for what? The tin shed.
At dinner that night Diana started to sniffle and had to leave the room for a handkerchief. She explained that her door had blown open during her sleep and she had woken soaked. Her letter to Billy was ruined, she would have to write again. By the time the men were taking their port (Fleming the manager had joined them) Diana was launched into an endless string of sneezes. Just as well — Fleming knew Western Victoria like the back of his hand but was blowed if he had ever come across any Benedettos.
In the middle of the night Frances woke with a start to hear someone trying her door. The handle rattled one way, then the other. She reached for the greenstone ashtray Robert had procured for her bedtime cigarette, and raised it ready. The rain still pelted down and it was so dark that even the faint light leaking from the hall lamp that burned around a bend of the corridor was of no use. Then the door hinges squeaked and she thought: It’s Robert, or else his father. If so she would strike the old man on the shins. But a ghost entered — Diana.
“I can’t sleep. I’m so hot. My hands slipped and slid on the door.”
“You’re on fire!”
“Can I sleep in your bed? I’m having nightmares but I’m still awake.”
“I’ll fetch Mrs Gillen.”
“No. All right. No, it’s too much of a bother. The white cabinet in the kitchen has medicines in it. Could you get something from there?”
Illness acted as a galvanizer of friendship. Suddenly it seemed important to act as one. Frances fumbled her way to the lamp and bore it through the long silent passageways of the house. She returned with a tray of bottles and powders, and dosed Diana until she turned benign and drowsy.
“I’ve been a fool.”
“Why?”
“I wrote horrible things about you in the letter to Billy. The letter that was ruined.”
“If it’s ruined it doesn’t matter, does it?”
“Why are you being nice to me?”
“Why shouldn’t I be?”
“I was awake. I saw you reading my letter. I couldn’t move. When you left the door blew open and I just lay there letting everything get soaked.”
Diana yawned and curled up like a spaniel. The bed was a wide one but after a time she radiated so much heat that Frances shifted to a chair and wrapped herself in a quilt. A kind of phosphorescence now hung in the clouds, showing that a bright moon had risen somewhere above the turbulence. Then, miles away, the clouds must have parted because illumined land was suddenly revealed — clots of trees at the edge of a silver blade of floodwater. The river was testing the strength of its tributaries, slicing out islands and lagoons in the night.
Towards morning Diana awoke complaining of pain in the chest. She had difficulty breathing. At first daylight when she coughed into a handkerchief they were alarmed to see a jellied gob of rusty sputum. Frances placed an arm around her shoulders and held a towel while she coughed again. The basis of their friendship had always rested in one or both feeling helpless or alone. Until the war this complementary need had masked their differences. But war had swung everyone’s life into the measure of its waltz, breaking up old loyalties and serenely betraying new ones.
This was how Frances saw things as wholeheartedly she nursed Diana, picturing herself no longer as the impulsive lover known to Walter, nor as the ready sacrifice for Robert, but as precursor to a new self overriding both, fast-developing in response to the war whose currents tugged at the shores of every living heart. Why else did they find themselves ringed by floodwaters? Why else was Diana in peril, wincing as she breathed, her forehead lined with sweat like tiny pearls. “The baby,” she muttered, “will it be all right?” They were children again, but the war forbade them so to act, this same war that had urged them to step through the mirage of morality and had delivered them to their doubtful haven in the central west.
Though Frances had spent hours staring into the night it was Diana who truly faced nothingness. Neither uttered the word “pneumonia” but when Frances left to rouse Mrs Gillen there was panic in Diana’s voice.
A man was sent to town to fetch the doctor. There was no question of Dr Starkie not coming straight away. When the Gillens summoned, he came. Robert tried to persuade Frances to ride down to the creek with him and wait for the rowing boat that would bring the doctor across, but she refused to leave Diana: and saw the doctor coming anyway — a faraway speck among the drowned branches of eucalypts.
She described his coming to Diana whose pain was worse by mid-afternoon and her fever high. Was it the perception of fever that made Diana turn the picture of the small boat coming through the tops of the trees into a heartening rescue for herself? The doctor in her imagination entered the branching vessels of her lungs and drifted on the fluid there, effecting a cure.
He was a young man, portly and sandy haired. He had tried to enlist, he said over a whisky in the parlour, but too many doctors had the same idea. But he would be off soon — it was the only thing to do. He said all sorts of reassuring things about Diana, but Frances in a rush of guilt wanted to know the worst.
“What if she doesn’t pull through?” She sat on the arm of a chair wearing a dark blue apron. As she spoke Mrs Gillen downed her second glass of whisky.
“Not recover suddenly? These fevers often just ease off. It could be a slower process, there’s no way of telling. Feed her up when you can and keep her comfortable. Soup?” He addressed Mrs Gillen, who nodded.
“But what if things go wrong,” Frances insisted, “badly wrong.”
“We mustn’t have gloom,” said the doctor impatiently. “Run along now and see that she’s happy, and I’ll look in again before I go.”
“After the week — could she die?”
The doctor held up two fingers while Mrs Gillen poured from the decanter. “What have we here, a Jeremiah?”
“Please, I’m not a child,” said Frances, a protest that elicited such a look of horrified disapproval from Mrs Gillen that Frances immediately left the room.
She fled to her bedroom where she cried until no tears were left, then hurried in to be with her friend. The word “crisis” had alarmed her. They both knew the signs. Girls at school had died of pneumonia. The disease came like a silent arrow to lodge painfully in the breast. When the invisible shaft dissolved, a few days of hectic fever followed when the patient felt better. Then a sudden gust of extinction. Or else recovery thanks to what might just as well have been the roll of dice, and the girls were back at wooden desks instead of in wooden boxes.
“If I die,” asked Diana after two days, “promise me you’ll be nice to Billy?”
“No, because you won’t die.”
“Write to him and tell him I love him. He probably doesn’t believe me.” Diana lay back wearily in the pillows.
“He believes you.”
On Friday a letter arrived with the boat bringing the doctor for his second visit.
“Franny, listen! He already knows: ‘Now I can truly see us on the farm, me and you and the nipper, like my c-u-s-e-n says. Don’t take notice of people, they don’t know right from wrong. I’ll be back when I can.’ Isn’t he
an awful letter writer? I love every word. He ran into Dad. Dad knows — I’ll kill my mother for telling him — no, why should I? I’m so happy! I’ll die happy!”
But the doctor was pleased, and did not predict her death.
Then after seven days she faltered. The fever intensified and one night she hardly knew who she was. All week Frances had done for Diana whatever was needed, staying at her side, sponging her down, trying to calm her panic when breathing became so difficult that she seemed to be drowning.
Frances herself suffered a kind of delirium. She hardly noticed the help being given by Mrs Gillen, who supervised the food, or the help that came from the housemaids who supplied stacks of clean dry sheets from the clothesline where they flapped between intermittent showers like the flags of a besieged citadel. The black boy died, the shivering seven year old Frances had seen at the old shearers’ huts. It was as if small glowing points of life were being extinguished and only the most strenuous act of will could shield them from fate. The news of the boy’s death from pneumonia was brought by his aunt, a maid named Isabel, who reported it unemotionally, as if the name belonged to a list of unknown dead in a battle even more remote than the one at the Dardanelles.
Though Frances was near to exhaustion she discovered in work of this kind an ability to forget herself. If Diana had died at that moment she too would have been as dispassionate as Isabel in making the announcement. Life came and went in the darkness — her own among others. But to attend to the extremity of its passage — there was something exhilarating in the desperate novelty of it all. Thus when Robert caught her in the corridor late in the night of this, Diana’s worst day, she allowed herself to listen to what he had been telling her all week: that she was a saint. He hurried it through with an urgent invitation for her to take a walk for five minutes in the night air. She broke free and went to look at Diana, who miraculously slept. So Frances gave Robert ten minutes that stretched to twenty, at the end of which she was astonished to find herself in his room which they had approached through a circuit of the damp garden: it had its own private entrance off the far veranda. She lay on a leather couch, eyes closed, her head tipped back while Robert ran his fingers through her hair. Then she leapt up and ran through the night, and he followed.
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