Somehow the shadow cast by the prime minister’s death seemed to justify Lou’s warnings of carnage. People braced themselves and the churches were full.
And then…
‘They say there’s been some kinda development,’ said Lou Harris, who took pride not only in prophesying disaster but also in being the first with the latest rumours, fabricated, exaggerated and, on rare occasions, even true. ‘Some kinda new weapon.’
People were used to Lou Harris but gradually the idea spread that this time the old duck might be on the money. God knew where the stories came from but there were reports of entire cities and their inhabitants being destroyed. Then came the official announcement. A new type of bomb had been dropped on the city of Hiroshima, destroying it completely and incinerating vast numbers of those who lived there.
A few days later, another bomb, another city – Nagasaki this time – another cataclysm of destruction and death.
‘Not the little kiddies?’ cried soft-hearted Amy Sykes, distraught at the thought of little kiddies fried to a crisp. But it seemed that the bomb, if bomb it was, had not been designed to spare little kiddies, any more than their parents.
So there was celebration of the news, and joy, but also fear of what unknown wickedness had been unleashed on a helpless world.
‘God help us all,’ said Arthur Nimrod.
Amen to that.
Standing on the terrace the previous night, staring out at the almost-invisible sea, Jess had told Shannon she felt like a criminal.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Men dying all over and I cook fancy meals with black market rations.’
‘They aren’t black market.’
‘Stolen, then.’
It was true that Hank Rankin was still sending them supplies on the side. Once or twice a week a US army truck would stop off late in the evening. It was still winter, so mostly the trucks arrived after dark. The town itself was still blacked out, even though at this stage of the war no one believed there was any danger of Japanese air raids, and all Shannon could see from the Regency’s terrace were the lights of the offshore buoys marking the navigation channels. These at least had been restored when the danger of a Japanese invasion was deemed to have passed.
The truck usually had several cartons of various foodstuffs, mostly luxury items that could not be obtained in the shops – salmon, turkeys, sides of pork and beef – which the drivers unloaded and carried into the storeroom next to the hotel’s kitchen, and Shannon did not feel there was anything criminal about accepting aid wherever it was offered.
‘You needn’t tell me boys are dying,’ she said. ‘You think I don’t know that?’
With Hal out there somewhere, it was her first thought every morning, her last thought every night, and off and on through the day as well. And now she was supposed to feel dirty because Hank Rankin was sending her supplies paid for, presumably, by the US taxpayer? Well, they were allies, weren’t they? All in the war together? Measured against the cost of, say, an aircraft carrier, the amount of aid the Regency was accepting was hardly significant, was it?
‘I don’t feel guilty at all,’ Shannon said. ‘I don’t think you should either.’
‘It’s not just the business of the food,’ Jess said. ‘But everyone’s fighting or involved in the war in some way. Even you were in Darwin until Dad got ill. And what have I done?’
‘You looked after Dad,’ Shannon said. ‘And did a great job. Much better than I could have done.’
‘So I kept the home fires burning,’ Jess said. ‘You really think that’s enough?’
‘Why not? What’s the point of fighting if there are no home fires to come back to?’
‘I know you’re right,’ Jess said. ‘But I still can’t help wishing…’
‘What?’
‘I don’t know…’
Shannon laughed. ‘I suspect I’m a very bad sister.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘I should be giving you serious advice. How to live a righteous life.’
It was Jess’s turn to laugh. ‘And instead?’
‘How old are you?’
‘Eighteen.’
‘I know what you need. You need a lover. I know that’s not the sort of advice I should be giving you –’
Now Jess’s laugh cut her off in mid-sentence.
‘What?’
‘Too late.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I had one. In Mackay. Not any more, mind you. I’ve a career to build.’
‘You say you had one?’ Shannon was flabbergasted. ‘I’m beginning to think I don’t know you at all.’
‘Have you only just discovered that?’
With the war over at last and with the news – thank God – that Hal was safe, Shannon felt a lightness she had not known for years. The tremors from the two destroyed Japanese cities touched her soul, so a measure of foreboding remained, yet she might have been willing to join the crowds milling in streets noisy with the hooting of sirens, with cheering and singing and the mob taking part in an almighty piss-up smiled on by the authorities, who were no doubt enjoying a celebratory drink or ten in their own select circles.
Jess was out dancing with the rest and Shannon could have joined her but did not because Arthur would not. With both his sons killed in the war and with no family left save a cousin he disliked, he might have been expected to celebrate the downfall of the enemy that had killed his second son but he did not.
‘There is no logic to it,’ he told Shannon, ‘but while there was still a war to be won I had purpose. Now there is nothing, only loss. All those millions dead, sacrificed to the god of war. For what, I ask myself. And cannot find an answer.’
‘I will stay with you,’ Shannon said. ‘We shall open a bottle of wine and be peaceful together.’
‘And what have you heard of Hal? He will be coming home soon?’
‘I certainly hope so,’ Shannon said.
But that was not how things worked out.
A month to the day after the Japanese surrender, Travis Harcourt died.
It brought sadness to both Shannon and Jess yet also relief. Dad had not been really with them for so long and taking care of him had been a burden: a beloved burden, to be sure, but a burden nonetheless. There was an emptiness where he had been, yet a host of memories, too, especially the one of Shannon’s mum laughing as she told her for the hundredth time how Dad had ridden his old mare into the pub and how in that minute she’d told Grandma Boyle that Travis Harcourt was the man she would marry.
‘She was that mad at me,’ Mum had said. ‘Yet I never had a moment’s doubt. Never regretted it for a moment, either. A lovely man, your dad.’
Almost the last words she’d said before the runaway horse had killed her.
Later, after her set-to with Grace, when she’d gone through the pouring rain to find Dad perched in his favourite place at the Clover Leaf bar and he’d taken her side at once.
The devastation in his face and life when Grace ran away reflected an impact that never completely left him.
Moments of happiness and sadness: Shannon, sitting beside the dead man, remembered them all.
Jess would have different memories, of how loving he’d been to her own mother in the time before Grace left, and how upset he’d been afterwards, and how she’d tried to make it up to him through all the years that followed.
One day, no doubt, the two of them would talk about it and their combined memories would round out the man whom in their differing ways they had known as well as anyone, but that would be for another time. After Grace had run away they had grown close but for the moment their memories separated them, so that they sat with him, side by side yet alone.
Now there was the question of the funeral, the disposal of the body which was not their dad at all. There were all the formalities that had to be endured, God alone knew why, then life would go on as it always did, as though Travis Harcourt had never lived. Yet lived
he had and still did, in their memories and in the fact that they were there at all.
Jess had tears running down her cheeks; Shannon had tears, too, but hers were hidden, burning like acid in her heart.
In the meantime, Mr Geddes the undertaker.
‘I’ll phone him,’ Shannon said. ‘He’ll know what has to be done.’
It was December before the 6th Division, which had been out of the country for virtually the whole war, finally returned to Australia. No transport available to bring them, said the government. Shannon, like many others, was fit to be tied but now the war was over the government, in the way of governments, did not seem to give a damn. And later it wasn’t important because at last, at long last, Hal was home.
Shannon found it so hard to believe that she did what she’d done when he came back from the Middle East: she kept touching him to make sure he was real. She sensed it made him uncomfortable yet she couldn’t stop herself. There was reassurance in the strength of the hard, hairy arms, the skin she believed she could still taste from past days. Only his face had changed. There were lines, now, and a sort of fatigue, especially around the eyes. She traced the history of Hal’s war in the lines that the years had drawn on his taut features. And in what he said to her when he gathered her into his arms after all the years apart.
‘I can’t tell you the number of times I dreamt of doing this,’ he said.
‘Me, too,’ Shannon said. Eyes shut, arms gripping him tight, she breathed in the essence of the man she loved and could have wept for joy.
‘Some of the things that happened over there,’ he said. ‘To us and to them. Terrible, terrible things. I don’t want to think about them, even, although that’s not easy. I may never be able to tell you about them.’
‘But if you keep them locked away inside you,’ Shannon said, ‘won’t they poison you, in time?’
‘Maybe. But I know this: it was you, the memory of our being together and the hopes I have for the future, that brought me safe out of hell. Without those memories and that hope I truly believe I would not have survived. It was you who brought me home.’
He needs time to recover, Shannon thought. To be cured. It will be my responsibility to help him in every way I can.
His experiences had made Hal’s pale eyes opaque and she found that what he had said was true: he could not bring himself to talk about what he had undergone in the years he had been away. She didn’t like being shut out of so significant a part of Hal’s life but accepted he would need time to adjust to the real world of pay packets and parties and a time for living after all the years of killing.
I will help him, she told herself again. I will help him and he will be made whole. Yet he no longer smiled as he had, and her determination was shadowed by the thought that he might have changed to a point where they no longer wanted each other. It was a devastating notion that, after all the years she had loved him, after overcoming all the difficulties of class and wealth that had stood in their way, their relationship might now come to nothing.
He had lost his mother at an early age, as she had, and had often talked of defying his father, but whether he would have been up to the task at the time he’d said it she had never been sure. Now, seeing the man he had become, honed to a razor’s edge by war, she had no doubts. His father would no longer be able to dominate him as he had, yet this made her even less certain of their future, because Hal had become a stranger. She still ached for him but to be committed to a man she no longer knew…
Yet what had he said? Without those memories and that hope I truly believe I would not have survived. It was you who brought me home.
There was love in those words. She had no doubt of that because they resonated inside her. She, too, had been sustained by her love and her faith that, in the end, they would be united once more. Yet she was no longer the naive adolescent she’d been in what now seemed a less relevant life, and she thought that might create a problem for him, too, like so many other things. Take Proserpine itself. From its undisturbed way of life there might never have been a war at all. The miles of sugar cane, the mist-smeared blue of the distant hills, were as they’d always been. Like herself, Hal had been born and brought up in an area where sugar was king. It still was. The wind blew and the cane bowed, whistling in the stronger gusts; during the cutting season the skies were still seared by smoke and sparks of the burning trash; the steel wheels of the cane hoppers rumbled along the rails to the mill as they always had. Everything was as it had been before and it was this familiarity that must make them strange to a man who for years had been conditioned to shell and shot, disease and death.
God help him, she thought. God help me, because I still want him but do not know what to do.
Hal stayed at the Maitland place where he told her later he’d had a series of run-ins with his father.
‘He can’t get it through his head that he can’t push me around as he did before the war,’ he said.
‘What are you going to do?’
‘I am going to explore. And you are coming with me.’
She laughed. ‘I’ve a hotel to run.’
‘That’s why I want you to come with me.’
She went to see Arthur. He was still active but much less so than in the past. ‘Can you hold the fort for me for a few days?’
‘Hal wants you to go away with him?’ Arthur smiled. It was an old man’s smile but with none of the resentment a lesser man might have shown, that Hal had come home without a scratch when his two sons had not.
‘He says he wants to show me something.’
‘We’ve not been that busy since the hot weather started. Of course you can take a few days. Take a week, if you like.’
‘You’re very kind.’
‘All the world knows that. Make sure you enjoy yourselves. You both deserve it.’
With petrol rationing still in force and according to the news likely to stay that way for quite a while, they took a coach to Brisbane, where they boarded a southbound train.
‘Not long now,’ Hal said.
He had refused to say where they were going but when they got there Shannon remembered the letter he had sent her back in April, and she knew.
The beach of yellow sand stretched as far as she could see. The blue sea sparkled in the sunlight as it creamed along the shore; the sound of the breakers beckoned. Halfway to the horizon what might have been a fishing boat headed south. Close to the beach the hinterland was flat with sand dunes here and there, but inland the ground rose in a line of forested hills. A narrow road meandered along the shore. Occasional bungalows lined the road with sections of undeveloped land between them. Beyond the bungalows there had been no development although there were many For Sale signs showing where sub-division had taken place, and some of the waterfront blocks were large.
‘It’s beautiful,’ Shannon said.
‘It’s more than that,’ Hal said. ‘It’s our future.’
She said nothing, knowing that when he was ready to explain he would.
He had booked a room for them in one of the bungalows. On the seaward side of the road the empty land, a hundred yards wide, sloped gently down to the beach. There was no traffic and they walked hand in hand, the salt smell of the sea in their nostrils and the reverberation of the surf the only sound. The tide was halfway out and where the water had gone back the sand was dark, but above the high-water mark it was the colour of cream, with isolated pools shining dark in the sun.
The bungalow had a blue-painted sign outside with its name in fancy white lettering: Wavecrest.
‘Let’s hope the waves stay where they are,’ Hal said.
Their room was large with a double bed and sea views through the window. The bathroom was down the corridor and it all had the smell of a house that had been built a long time before.
There was a veranda along the front of the house with a table and a scattering of cane chairs and they sat there with the sunlight warm on them and Mrs Collins brought them tea on a wooden tr
ay. The tea came in a large china teapot with bright pink roses painted on a white ground. There was a jug of milk, sugar lumps in a bowl and a barrel of biscuits.
Shannon poured the tea, they each took a biscuit from the barrel and were very domesticated, smiling at each other as they sipped their tea, which was hot and good. After they had finished the tea they went for a walk past a number of other bungalows. There was a small shop with a café next door to it and they saw several people walking singly or in pairs. They smiled at them but did not speak, content for the moment to be alone together, and for the most part they had the road to themselves. A little way along they came to a flight of wooden steps leading down to the beach. They took off their shoes and walked on the sand and the light breeze blew Shannon’s cotton skirt about her legs. Here there was no one else. They might have been the only people on the planet and Shannon remembered how she had thought the same thing during their time up in the Atherton Tableland before the war had really got going.
So many things had happened since that time, with many cities destroyed and millions dead, yet there they still were and for the moment it was as though the horrors separating them from those earlier days had never been.
They walked back to the boarding house with the dusk darkening the horizon and the first stars showing.
They ate that night in the little café, where the food was plain but good and no one bothered them for their ration books. Shannon had changed into a filmy white blouse that was open at the neck and a long dark skirt that had been one of the first things she had bought to pretty herself up when she had taken over running the Regency Hotel. The skirt was of a silky material and had cost a lot in both money and ration stamps but it felt smooth and lovely against her bare legs. It made her feel sexy and she hoped Hal thought she was too.
The sea air had given them both an appetite and there was wine to drink and a lighted candle on their table. Apart from themselves the café was empty and the young woman who served them said things had quietened down a lot, with the coming of the hot weather and with the American soldiers mostly gone, but would liven up at the weekend.
White Sands of Summer Page 22
