Dust of the Land

by J. H. Fletcher

  Bella shook her head. ‘This is Christmas,’ she said. ‘Easter’s the time for resurrection.’

  The rain stopped within the hour. At this time of year the break wouldn’t last long but it gave them time to get everything unpacked and indoors. By the time they had finished they were in mud halfway to their thighs, but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered; Christmas was here; the world, Poland excepted, was peaceful if not at peace; and, most miraculous of all, Colin seemed to have put his temper tantrums behind him. After his outburst on the night of his arrival he had been unfailingly polite to Bella. No signs of any great affection, admittedly, but there was plenty of time for that. One step at a time, she thought. That is how we must handle it.

  They’d brought back a fair bit of booze and by Christmas afternoon the three of them were comprehensively liquored up before they were halfway through the turkey. And that was only the start of it, with a plum pudding and mince pies to follow. And brandy to sit warmly on top of the beer and champagne and red wine and whisky they’d already drunk.

  ‘I tried to make a trifle,’ Bella said owlishly. ‘But it didn’t work.’

  She had been dreading Christmas, fearing animosity might ruin things, but everything had worked out fine. They were all loving each other before they were through, and if from time to time Bella caught Colin eyeing her as though he knew something she didn’t, what of it? They were a family, weren’t they? Or would be soon enough.

  Later Garth hoped to love Bella in a different way, but, three-quarters drunk though she was, with Colin in the house she was having none of it.

  ‘You can wait,’ she told him. ‘Not long now.’

  Colin was due back in the army on the tenth of January, so they had fixed the wedding for Saturday the sixth.

  ‘Just my luck,’ said Bella. ‘This time of year, I’ll be half-drowned by the time I get to the church.’

  ‘We can always put it off until the dry weather,’ Garth pointed out.

  ‘With you most likely chasing cows the day of the wedding? I’ll stick with what I’ve got, thanks very much.’

  Garth and Bella flew to Wyndham the day before the wedding. Colin had ridden up the day before and they had arranged to have dinner together that evening.

  ‘Do you mind if I bring a guest?’ Colin asked Bella.

  ‘Colin’s bringing someone with him,’ she told Garth later. ‘Maybe somebody he met in the army.’

  ‘Or a beautiful woman,’ Garth said.

  ‘What a shame you’re booked,’ Bella said.

  ‘Not too late yet,’ Garth told her.

  ‘Would you prefer I had dinner in my room?’

  The Cow and Bucket was a roast-and-vegie type of hotel but to honour the occasion Garth had ordered a couple of additional courses: oysters, prawns and asparagus as well as the beef, with champagne and malt whisky. Having checked everything was in order, he and Bella were sitting in the dining room when Colin arrived with his guest.

  ‘Good God,’ Garth said. ‘It’s Billy Gould.’

  His tone was hostile, but Bella had never heard of Billy Gould. ‘Who is he?’

  ‘I’ll tell you later.’

  Bella saw a weedy man in his mid-twenties, with chewed nails, a chalk-white face and a petulant mouth. She looked at him, wondering why his face seemed to nudge faintly at her memory. His hand when she shook it was moist and cold.

  They sat down and began to eat.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Garth asked Billy.

  ‘To celebrate his uncle’s wedding,’ Colin said. ‘What else?’

  ‘I’m not his uncle. And guests normally wait for an invitation,’ Garth said.

  ‘But we’ve never been a family to stand on ceremony,’ Colin said easily.

  ‘Billy is the grandson of Josh Gould, my father’s mining partner,’ Garth explained to Bella. ‘Still poisoning your workers at Van Damm Siding?’ he asked.

  Billy Gould looked at Garth with indifferent eyes. ‘Something like that,’ he said and reached for another prawn.

  ‘Billy has an asbestos mine,’ Garth said. ‘The state medical officer says it’s a health hazard and wants it closed but Billy won’t do it.’

  ‘I certainly won’t. The profits are good and the dangers grossly exaggerated.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Garth said.

  Bella felt uncomfortable; there were currents here she did not understand. It angered her that Colin should have brought this man – the evening before her wedding, too – when Garth obviously disliked him. She also didn’t like the way Billy watched her throughout the meal, or the way Colin sat, observing what was happening with the same crafty smile he had worn at Christmas.

  There was something going on and it was not well meant. Later that night she found out what it was.

  She was sitting in her room. Billy Gould’s presence had made her uncomfortable but she was thinking not of him but of the next day and what it would bring. This time tomorrow she would be a married woman. It was a strange thought. Was her heart having palpitations? No. Was she short of breath? No. Did she have a hollow feeling in her stomach? No. She respected Garth, trusted him, desired him, was fond of him, but would it be enough? She had none of the half-pain, half-joy she had known with Charles. None of the sense of being both possessor and possessed; of being one, body and soul, with another human being. But she was older now, more – dare she say it? – more mature. Less impulsive. Her feelings for Garth, less starry-eyed, perhaps, might provide a better basis for married life than the romantic images of the past.

  Give it time, she told herself, and love will come.

  When Garth came into her room she wondered what he wanted. He wasted no time telling her. ‘Billy Gould has been talking to me. Colin brought him here for a reason.’

  ‘I guessed,’ said Bella.

  ‘Billy owns a half-share in a sugar plantation outside Ayr. That’s on the coast near –’

  ‘Near Townsville,’ Bella said. ‘I know.’

  ‘He said you were a hostess at the Cockatoo Club near the Townsville docks. He said he recognised you from the times he’s been there himself.’

  That was where she had seen him. Of course. She remembered him now.

  Lookit the knockers on that one.

  Oh yes, she remembered him well.

  Garth paused but Bella did not speak. She watched him, her face showing nothing.

  ‘He said it calls itself a club but it’s really a brothel.’

  Still she said nothing. She stood facing him and his face showed no emotion.

  ‘Is it true?’ Garth asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s true.’

  Garth closed his eyes for a moment. ‘You want to tell me about it?’

  At that moment Bella knew that love would indeed come. Because he had neither judged nor condemned her.

  You want to tell me about it?

  For that, whatever happened now, she would be forever in his debt.

  She went and sat on the bed. ‘Come and sit with me,’ she said.

  He did so cautiously and sat down. He did not move as she told him everything that had happened, leaving nothing out.

  ‘I never told you,’ she said, ‘because of the Cockatoo’s reputation. I did not want you to know. But I never went upstairs with anyone. Does he say I did?’

  For the first time she dared look at him.

  ‘He implied it, yes, but did not say it.’ He sighed heavily. ‘I am sad and disappointed,’ he said.

  ‘I understand,’ she said.

  He looked at her then.

  ‘No, you don’t. You have told me and I believe you. It is Colin I am disappointed in. My own son. I would not have believed it.’ His fists clenched. ‘I could kill him,’ he said furiously, ‘for treating you so badly.’

  She raised her fingers to his lips. ‘You don’t mean it. I don’t want you to fight him. Especially not just before our wedding. I want it to be a joyous occasion, not a time of hatred. I want him there. And so do you.’
>
  Garth stared at her. ‘But what do I say to him?’

  ‘Say nothing,’ Bella said. ‘That is the best way.’

  The day turned out fine.

  ‘Happy is the bride whom the sun shines on,’ quoted Bella in the white dress she had decided would do as a wedding gown.

  The rector was an old buffer who cautioned them against vice while casting a surreptitious eye over Bella’s stomach to see how far along she was: old buffer or not, he knew the habits of most of his parishioners when it came to the wedding ceremony. But Bella, despite Garth’s most vigorous efforts, remained as slender as a reed.

  Colin attended, which pleased his father. Bella never knew what Garth had said to him but he had the grace to look embarrassed and after the ceremony congratulated them both.

  ‘I hope you’ll be very happy.’

  Billy did not come, which suited Bella fine; if she never saw him again it would be too soon.

  Man and wife – Bella still could not quite get her head around that – Garth and Bella Tucker spent the night in the local hotel, where they were serenaded by the spasmodic bellowing of drunks still drinking their Christmas, and the normal rituals of a wedding night passed off to their mutual satisfaction.

  The next day they flew back to Miranda Downs. On the ninth of January Colin left to return to the army and the newly married couple was alone.

  ‘Thank God,’ Garth said.

  He picked up his wife and carried her into the bedroom.

  For two days they were hardly out of bed. Bella was twenty years old, Garth thirty-nine. They both had stamina to spare. She was certainly not complaining, although there were times when she wondered whether she would ever be able to straighten her legs again.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Months passed.

  The Dry returned; Garth exchanged one saddle for another when the Tuckers went back to the bush for the first cattle muster of the season.

  The old war with O’Malley was resumed with a dispute over more unbranded cattle that might, or might not, have originated on Limerick Downs, while in Europe the real war remained stalled.

  Not for long. In June 1940, what people had been calling the Phoney War became phoney no longer. The Germans attacked with appalling savagery and within weeks the whole of Europe from the Pyrenees to the Danube was overrun. With the United States still trying to stay out of it, only Britain and the Empire stood firm against the Nazis.

  Minnie was requisitioned, as Garth had expected. Petrol was rationed. A generation that had taken the use of trucks and motorcars for granted rediscovered the importance of the horse. In the Indian Ocean, the Sydney was sunk with all hands. Colin was not among the Australian troops who fought and died in Crete and Africa but there was talk of another threat closer to home.

  With so much catastrophe in the world Bella’s inheritance seemed too trivial to worry about but to her it was not trivial at all. It was due on her twenty-first birthday and with the war on she worried whether she would ever get it but it seemed Australia was in what they called the sterling area so it was all right. She had opened an account at the bank in Wyndham back in 1938 and notified the executors of the earl’s estate and the money turned up on schedule: a minor miracle, in the midst of war. She wrote to them to confirm receipt, in the same way she sent Christmas cards every year to her father and mother, but she never heard from any of them. With the state of the world she supposed that was hardly surprising and what she would do with the money now she had it she had no idea.

  With the news consistently bad, Garth and Bella shut their ears to what was happening and got on with their lives. Cattle and the weather: cool, then hot and humid, the air like a damp sponge.

  Making love in the Wet, Bella felt like a damp sponge herself. There was still pleasure and a deep fulfilment in the act but no sign of a baby. It bothered Garth more than Bella.

  ‘Getting old,’ he said. ‘That’s the problem.’

  ‘You could have fooled me,’ Bella said.

  ‘We’re not talking about sex,’ he said. ‘I guess my fertility’s shot.’

  ‘You’re forty, so stop talking nonsense,’ Bella told him. ‘You’re a young man still.’

  She didn’t care one way or the other, but it was what Garth wanted to hear, so she said it. As for her own feelings… She supposed she wanted a child, but it didn’t fret her. What was the point? It would come or it would not. In the meantime life, and death, went on.

  There was no shortage of death. The Japanese were in the war now. Even the United States had joined in, courtesy of the attack on Pearl Harbor. The war was getting closer. Hong Kong fell. Malaya. Singapore. The Dutch East Indies.

  They rode into Wyndham for supplies: what they could get, with rationing now in force. They stopped off at the pub for a beer, if you could call it that.

  ‘More piss than hops, I reckon,’ said Garth.

  Not that it stopped him swilling it down.

  They chatted with the locals: no joy there.

  ‘Some o’ them islands is only a few hundred miles from Australia, for God’s sake,’ said Old Man McMurtrie. He was over eighty but knew his subject: he had spent years on a trading schooner in the archipelago.

  They did not talk about the war on the way home, but each was wondering.

  Japanese forces landed in New Guinea and pushed south. Soon the only obstacles between them and the Australian mainland were the Owen Stanley Range and a bunch of Aussie conscripts, poorly trained and armed, at the end of an excruciating jungle path called the Kokoda Track. There was talk of evacuating the northern part of Australia.

  ‘Over my dead body,’ Garth said.

  Bella supposed it might come to that for both of them, if the Nips gained a toehold.

  Colin was overseas somewhere; they didn’t know where. At least he hadn’t been swept up in the debacle of Singapore.

  A Japanese submarine penetrated the defences of Sydney Harbour. It was sunk, but for it to have got so far south made you think. The war teetered on a knife’s edge.

  And then a miracle. Against all odds, the Aussie heroes of Kokoda held firm. The half-starved Japanese retreated. Between one day and the next the shadow of invasion was lifted from the land.

  ‘Now we got ’em,’ Garth exulted. ‘There’ll be no stopping us now.’

  He was right. Where before there had been nothing but catastrophe, now the news was good and getting better by the day.

  Victories in New Guinea, El Alamein, Stalingrad. All over the world, Japanese and German forces were in retreat. Things were looking up.

  On the fourth of September 1943, troops of the Australian Ninth Division landed east of Lae, one of the last Japanese strongholds in New Guinea, and were attacked by Japanese aircraft.

  * * *

  Garth had been away three days on round-up. Bella had a stomach bug and stayed at home. She was repainting the kitchen when she heard the toot of a horn.

  One of the side effects of the war was that the government had at last driven roads through the bush. Built so that troops could be rushed into the area if the Japanese invaded, they remained in use even after that threat had receded. The maintenance was kept to a minimum and in the Wet they were always having problems with wash-aways, but the locals had discovered the benefits of having the roads and joined together to keep them patched up.

  It meant they could now look forward to a regular mail service. The red van fought its way through to Miranda Downs once a fortnight.

  ‘Never brings anything but bills,’ Garth complained.

  Today, however, it brought something else.

  Bella went out with the cup of tea she always had ready for Syd the postie when he arrived.

  It was a beautiful spring morning, with the cry of a kookaburra bubbling in the distance and sunlight dappling the ground beneath the trees. Mitch, her bull terrier, looked up from his favoured resting spot beneath the pomelo tree and wagged his apology of a tail.

  ‘What a lovely day!’ Be
lla cried.

  Then she saw the expression on Syd’s face.

  ‘What is it?’

  Silently he held out the brown envelope. She looked at it and everything stopped. The kookaburra was silent; the creek was frozen in its bed; even Mitch’s tail was still.

  Envelopes like that contained telegrams, and they both knew what telegrams meant.

  Movement returned to the world. The kookaburra’s call tailed off. Bella’s hand went unconsciously to her throat. She looked at Syd’s troubled eyes.

  ‘Come three days ago,’ Syd said. ‘I’m that sorry, Bella.’

  The envelope in Bella’s hand, so light a gust of wind could have blown it away, was heavy with the sorrows of the world.

  ‘Best open it, I suppose,’ she said.

  Syd stood helplessly. There was nothing he or anyone could do.

  The envelope was addressed to Garth but Bella had always believed that trouble must be confronted head on. If she left the envelope for her husband it would make no difference to the contents, but its unspeaking presence would haunt her unbearably until he came home.

  She took a deep breath. With an abrupt jerk of her hand she tore the envelope open. She pulled out the telegram.

  Her mind snatched at anything, however implausible, that might offer a reprieve from the news she dreaded. Perhaps the message was to say that Colin had been wounded. Or was unexpectedly on his way home. Perhaps it was about something else entirely.

  Mouth dry, she unfolded the flimsy sheet and read the message printed on it.

  We regret to inform you…

  She looked up with stricken eyes. Syd was watching her apprehensively. Of course he knew; from the first, they had both known.

  ‘Colin has been killed,’ she said.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  So was she. She was devastated: as though she had lost a child, even though he’d been a year older than she was. Far worse than her pain was her dread of the impact it would have on Garth. To lose his only son…

  For the first time she wished they had a child of their own. Not to compensate, nothing could do that, but at least it would be something.

  ‘They say where?’ Syd asked.

  ‘It says Lae. Wherever that is.’