Stars Over the Southern Ocean

by J. H. Fletcher

  When she woke the following morning her first thought was of Jory. She had thought he would still be asleep but he wasn’t. Through the window she could see sunshine and blue skies, although the air was cool. She pulled on a shirt and went to have a look at the day through the salt-patterned glass. The surf still ran high but the storm had gone. The air was crystal clear and so clean-tasting that to breathe it deep into her lungs was to inhale the essence of life.

  She heard the door open behind her. She turned to see Jory smiling at her from the entrance.

  ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘Bit of a headache but fine otherwise. What happened?’

  ‘You don’t remember?’

  ‘Not a thing.’

  ‘Maybe there’s nothing to remember. What makes you think something happened?’

  ‘Because you’ve got your mother-chook look. And because I seem to have a bump on my head. Did I do something stupid?’

  ‘You got a bit stir-crazy and went out into the storm. You knocked your head somehow but I managed to get you back indoors again.’

  ‘How come I don’t remember?’

  ‘You were out for a while but don’t worry about it. I’m glad you’re okay now.’

  ‘Come back to bed,’ he said.

  She looked at him, feeling the smile coming. ‘You must be feeling better,’ she said.

  ‘You’re not wrong. Come to bed.’

  ‘You want me to take my shirt off?’

  ‘You bet,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll lock the door in case Charlotte decides to come in.’

  As he’d asked, she took off her shirt and got into the bed. She was so thankful Jory seemed to have come right again, with no damage done. She hugged him close. No icebergs now.

  1960–1962

  CHAPTER 42

  In 1960 the war had been over for fifteen years but for Jory Trevelyan and millions like him it had never ended at all.

  It was a time of immense confusion. Of darkness, too, that filled Jory’s mind and eyes whatever time of day it was.

  He tried to concentrate on the good things, on Marina and her unfailing love and support for him; on Charlotte, the darling child filled with laughter and mischief who had liked him to swing her round and round in the air in hands that had done many things, both good and bad, in a life that had seen the deaths of both fish and men.

  Of course, Charlotte was a grown woman now. She was eighteen and had gone far beyond him. Not only because of her age; her personality had changed, too, now she was grown up. Now he believed she despised him, the wreck of a man washed ashore by the tides of war whose education had never been much to write home about.

  He had taken the second child Tamsyn—a good Cornish name, that, chosen to please his dad—on walks and played with her, and chased her laughing through the scrub across the lower slopes of the Wombat Ridge. He’d made her a kite and flown it, too, tugging and climbing, a speck of red against a blue sky. All boy things, not girl things, but he’d have felt a fool, going into a shop and buying a doll. Yet Tamsyn, obstinately, remained a girl, so now, even though she was only nine, there was a gap between them that he knew could only grow wider as the years went by.

  Finally there was baby Gregory, born twelve months before. He’d held him, it was true, but had not known what to do with him.

  All of them represented the future, but the future meant nothing to him anymore. More and more each day, he found himself trapped not only by memories of the past but also by an increasing sense of despair that, for him and all the others who had shared his experiences in Baron Mitsui’s coalmine, the war which the world said had been done with fifteen years before would never be done with, that the horrors were not an echo of past days but a living presence, that the pain was actual, the sweat on his face and body a physical reality.

  Nightmares made him dread sleep; the living pain made him dread waking.

  More and more, aware of his increasing inability to talk about the terrors that consumed him, he sought refuge up and down the coast. He tramped doggedly, going nowhere, barely aware of the land and seascape surrounding him, living with the futile hope that physical exhaustion would drown the nightmares.

  It did not. Again and again he revisited the mine outside the town of Omuta, on the southern island of Kyushu, enduring the endless physical and psychological abuse of the guards, the starvation, the coal dust that coated his mouth and lungs. While Baron Mitsui visited the mine regularly in his convertible motor car, lounging on the back seat and smiling with amusement as emaciated prisoners staggered past him. Many of those who had been incarcerated in Baron Mitsui’s mine believed he should have been hanged as a war criminal but he, like his emperor, had never even been charged. The lack of justice plagued Jory Trevelyan during the long winter nights as he fought to regain control over his sanity and his life.

  After the war the baron claimed he’d had no idea how prisoners in his mine had been abused. He was shocked, mortified. The guilty must be punished. He gave dinner parties to some of the prisoners who had survived. Officers only, of course. He’d had no idea.

  Jory knew better. A liar, sadist and war criminal. And, it now appeared, a stamp collector, a world-renowned authority. Somehow the innocuous nature of the baron’s hobby added to Jory’s outrage. Such blatant injustice was a slap in the face to all the prisoners who had suffered at the Mitsui mine. To the other images he now added one more: of Baron Mitsui smiling over his stamps while in his coalmine men died of starvation, beatings, illness and despair.

  There were days when he could have smashed his head against the rocks.

  I must not let him beat me, he thought. That would be the worst thing of all.

  Yet the pain was unrelenting. He would have talked to Marina about it, but what was there to say? He had suffered; so had millions more. There was nothing unique in suffering. Justice might have brought redemption, but there was no justice. A man had to stand up for himself, to survive, to make his way. He could not speak about it.

  He felt her eyes following him in what had become a silent world.

  He would have spoken to Dad about it, but Marrek had demons of his own. Coverack men don’t weep: that was what Marrek would have said. Coverack men don’t weep. Neither did he, but the unshed tears scalded his heart.

  There was no help, no consolation, no peace anywhere.

  He despised the values he had thought so important before the war. Honour and courage and love and friendship had proved useless. Nothing remained. The hardest stone would fracture, if struck hard enough.

  He came to believe that Baron Mitsui had in some way been retribution for those sailors who had been lured to their deaths on the pitiless rocks of the Coverack shore.

  If that were so, a form of justice might exist, after all, as in the case of the legendary Greek princess of whom he’d read years before, whose death had been ordained as propitiation for her father’s sin.

  Now he walked the plains of the interior because solitude had become his only friend.

  One consolation remained. After the experiences suffered by so many it was inconceivable that war could ever again become a reality.

  The years passed. He had never gone back to the fishing. Money was tight but Marina never complained. He walked the button-grass plains. When he was at home he pottered about. He made love to his wife. The gap remained but the closeness of those moments helped. Sometimes he did odd jobs.

  In 1962 the Australian government sent military advisers to Vietnam. Jory recognised it for what it was: the first step towards yet another war.

  One morning he got up while it was still dark. Dawn was not far away but over the Southern Ocean the stars were bright. The wind had buffeted the house through the night but now, with the dawn, the world had grown quiet.

  He had flung the revolver into the sea years before; now he took the single-barrel shotgun from the cupboard where it was kept. The shotgun and some shells. He told himself he might shoot a wallaby for tea. H
e walked away from the house. He came to the point where Kelsey Reinhardt’s land had begun, in the days when there’d been a Kelsey Reinhardt. No one lived in the old house now. No one lived.

  He stood, watching the ocean. Waiting for the day, watching the dawn light stealing over the sea. Soon he could make out the breakers, parallel lines of darkness and of light. He turned his head to look up at the Wombat Ridge, dark against the lightening sky. No sun yet but the sky was clear. The pre-sunrise light changed from dark grey to light grey to silver. Sea and sky were both silver in the morning light.

  He wedged the butt of the shotgun between two rocks. His mind was quiet, his eyes turned to the silver dawn.

  * * *

  When Marina found him, alerted by the single gunshot, going out barefoot but not hurrying, knowing what she would find and finding it in the hollow between tall rocks they had named the Chair, when she first clutched Jory’s body tightly to herself, when she discovered that touching him served no purpose because the man she sought, the man she had loved, was no longer there, when she stood and looked around at the silver dawn, the silver sea with its rollers forming parallel lines of brilliance and shadow, she knew what it was to be lost and utterly alone.

  Yet she also knew that the feeling was not so different from how she had felt ever since the war, the isolation of living for years with the man she loved and watching him, year by year, month by month, day by day, shutting himself away from her. From her, from the children and from life.

  She had given up any hope of bringing him back from the world into which he had gone. She felt relief that Jory had found peace at last but her overriding concern was what she was to do now.

  To stay, or to go from this place that between one second and the next had become synonymous with grief.

  If she went, where would she go? For herself she didn’t care, but there were the children to consider. They had lost their father; was it right to deprive them of all the things that until this moment had made up their lives?

  Yet she wondered if she would be able to stay or whether the ghosts would drive her out. The idyllic existence they’d had before the war had been the high point of her married life. That time of glory, of joy, against the backdrop of majestic seas, of vast and empty skies. That time when happiness had been at the core of all things.

  How could she go on living at Noamunga with each day a reminder of that time?

  The anguish of the war years, the never-knowing time, the time of horror and fear, the joy of the war’s end replaced so cruelly by the discovery that for Jory and herself the war had not ended, after all, but would remain a burden all their days.

  So how could she go on living at Noamunga with each day a reminder of that time?

  Marina’s dad had always been interested in the whys and wherefores of things. Destiny had made him a logger, like his father and grandfather before him, but in a different life he might have been a professor.

  Marina was four years old when he taught her that the trees in the forests surrounding their house were different from other things.

  ‘How are they different?’

  ‘You put your foot in our creek, it’s different from what it was yesterday.’

  Marina was doubtful. ‘It looks the same.’

  ‘It does. But it’s not, because yesterday’s water has gone down the valley. Today’s water is different. It’s the same with people. People change, too, as they grow older, and because of the things that happen to them. Trees aren’t like that. You look at a tree, you can see not only its present but its past. You can see the tree. You can touch it. That is the present. But when you cut a tree down you can see the number of rings it has, one ring for every year of its life. You can see the tree’s past in the rings.’

  ‘Do trees grow very old?’

  ‘Some do. They say the King Billy Pines around Cradle Mountain are over one thousand years old.’

  ‘Am I a thousand years old?’

  ‘You are four.’

  ‘When will I be a thousand?’

  ‘Not for a long time.’

  This was all too deep for four-year-old Marina but years later she came to realise that the trees among which she was growing up represented the continuity of life. Touching the trees’ cool trunks, she felt she was touching life itself.

  That was partly why she had never thought to leave the forests of her childhood but destiny had decreed otherwise. She had met Jory Trevelyan at that long-ago dance in the Mole Creek hall and had followed him here, to Noamunga, with its wild seas and wilder gales.

  Here, too, she had witnessed how the past became one with the present. Her father-in-law Marrek had been haunted by his Coverack ancestors, back in the old country, wild men who one hundred and fifty years before had made their living as wreckers, setting false lights to lure storm-battered ships to their destruction.

  All his life, Marrek had believed that destiny would punish him for the sins of his ancestors, but Marrek had been wrong. It had taken his brother on the Somme but spared him. Now the full weight of retribution, if retribution was what it was, had fallen not on Marrek Trevelyan but his son.

  He had buried his wife on his own land. He had told Marina he had no time for churches or those who ran them, yet for his son nothing would do but a full service, complete with organ and organist.

  There was quite a decent turnout, considering the weather. Marina sat in the front row of the pews with the girls on one side of her, Marrek on the other and a mercifully sleeping Gregory in her lap, and listened to the rain hammering on the roof and smelt the wet-dog smell of a dripping congregation. Alice Chan wasn’t even a Christian but she was there, as was the head bloke from the local RSL. No one in their right mind would contemplate traipsing over to Noamunga on a day like this, so they made do with pies and beer in the local pub.

  Afterwards it was a long way home in the rain.

  Later that night the rain eased and Marina went out for a breath of air. She watched the combers, dirty white on the crests and bottle green in the troughs, as they were ripped to pieces by the rocks: a cruel sight well suited to her mood.

  ‘I wish you hadn’t done it,’ she said. ‘I understand but I still wish you hadn’t done it. It makes me feel that somehow I failed you.’

  There was no point in having such thoughts but she had them anyway. She stood a while longer, sharing the moment with the sounding of the indifferent seas, then turned and went back into the house.

  In the days following the funeral she walked where Jory had walked, thought what perhaps he had thought, came back determined to make no decision about the future until she had given herself time to become acclimatised to her new situation.

  She came little by little to see that both she and the children would be better off if they were to stay rather than go. Gregory was too small to have an opinion but she spoke to the girls. Charlotte was at university and in the nature of things would soon be leaving to make a life of her own. In the meantime, however, Noamunga was still home, the place she knew best, so she favoured staying. Tamsyn was horrified by the idea of moving. The world out there was an alien, frightening place. Her security lay in what she knew.

  As far as Marina was concerned, she felt much the same. She decided there would be comfort in the memories of the wonderful days and nights she had shared with her man, and being on the spot helped preserve them, keeping the memory alive. She came to understand that Noamunga, her life at Noamunga, here in the path of the endlessly thundering seas, provided the link between past and future, linking the past days of glory to the future in a seamless unity that would enable her to face each dawn and star-studded night, not with stoicism but with expectation and—yes!—hope.

  Noamunga, the spirit and physical reality of Noamunga, had become the core of her being, the place with its memories where she would live her life and face death, whenever it came, without fear.

  They would stay.

  1965

  CHAPTER 43

  ‘A
fter Jory died, I thought you might have upped sticks and cleared out,’ Marrek said. ‘Wouldn’t have blamed you. But this place gets into you. Though there’s some can’t stand the sound of the wind. My Ellen was one of them. When we teamed up, she wanted me to take her away—go somewhere peaceful, she said—but I wouldn’t leave. Noamunga was always blood and breath to me.’

  His eyes, once falcon-fierce, were milky with cataracts, searching for horizons they could no longer see. He and Marina, the old man and the woman who was no longer young, sat on either side of the red-glowing stove and listened to the wind. To Marina, its sound was a comfort, a curtain protecting the peaceful room from the world beyond, with its empty spaces of stars and storm.

  ‘I mind when you first come here,’ Marrek said. ‘Tried to scare you, I did. See what you was made of. I was afraid Jory might have brought back a soft girl, too ladylike for these parts, and that would never have done, you see. Hard country, hard men, and women—just like the men—need to be strong to survive. Maybe even more so. When you stood up to me I knew you was okay.’

  ‘I don’t scare easily,’ Marina said.

  ‘Too right you don’t.’

  In the stove a log collapsed in a sudden burst of yellow flame.

  ‘I’ll fetch some more wood,’ Marina said.

  She added another log to the stove and sat down again.

  ‘I reckon my time’s running out,’ Marrek said.

  ‘You don’t want to talk like that.’

  ‘I can see the lights drawing me to the shore. Are they wreckers’ lights, luring me onto the rocks, or fairway beacons, showing the way to safe harbour? No way to know, see? No way to know. But whichever they are, I reckon they’ll have me afore too long.’ The milky eyes watched the stove. A crackle of sparks as the flames licked up around the new log: a homely sound amid the protective voice of the wind.

  ‘Ellen and Jory,’ Marrek said. ‘Now it’s my turn.’