by JH Fletcher
They had come for a game, a midnight lark. The night air prickled their skin, not with cold but excitement. Greatly daring, they stripped off, exchanging surreptitious glances, breath tickling in their throats. Their naked skin gleamed. Shadows pooled upon the mystery of throats and thighs. Moonlight obliterated the familiar lines of nose and mouth. All that remained was the gleam of eyes, the darkness of hair.
They looked questioningly at each other, checking out each other’s courage, then fled from delicious terror into the waves. Phosphorescence flared as their arms flung the spray in sheets about them.
Birth-naked, they wrestled, ran through the splashing water, wrestled again, upending each other in the mild surf. Their child-flesh was cool, wet-slippery against each other.
No thought of exploration then. Hedley sighed and shifted, uncomfortably. Things were different now. He decided to make his play.
As a first step he said, ‘This war’s a bastard …’
Kath was quiet for a while, then said, lightly, ‘Nothing to do with us …’
The words lingered in the hot silence, question rather than statement.
‘Reckon I’m going to join up.’
He wondered how she would take it. He waited. A pool of silence gathered.
Eventually, a bit miffed, he said, ‘Hear what I said?’
She turned to him, her free hand on his knee. ‘What you want to do that for?’
‘Bloke’s got to do his bit.’
The papers were full of the war; the Germans masters of Europe, the Poms — and the Aussies who had gone over to help them — stuck in England under a hail of Nazi bombs. She knew all about it yet still found it hard to believe.
‘It’s so far away …’
‘It’ll be a lot closer before we’re through.’
‘The Jerries won’t ever get this far.’
‘The Japs might.’
She knew nothing about Japs. They were more mysterious even than the Germans, from whom lots of South Australians, herself included, were descended. The idea of Japs coming here … Crazy.
‘That’s a fairy story.’
‘I wouldn’t be so sure.’
‘Get on …’
Was sufficiently concerned to hug him, this friend with his yarns about the war.
He hugged her back, his farmer’s hands firm upon her back, her flanks, her …
‘Stop it, now.’
Which, sulkily, he did. From his expression Kath wondered if it might be a game Hedley was playing with her, a stunt to soften her up.
‘Your Dad won’t be too pleased,’ she said, testing him.
‘I told him already.’
Astonishingly, she was hurt that he hadn’t told her first. ‘What’d he say?’
Hedley smiled ruefully. ‘Mad as a cut snake.’
‘Hasn’t this family done enough for the bloody Poms?’
Benjamin was the sole survivor of three brothers. Doug, the oldest, had gone off to Africa when Benjamin was nine. The new century had been only hours old when he’d copped a Boer bullet outside a place called Origstad, died before they could get him to the field hospital.
Forty years later, Benjamin remembered with fury the futility of his passing. ‘What kinda name’s that? Origstad! I ask you! Is that a place to die for?’
Fifteen years later the Turks got Jim at Gallipoli. Benjamin stayed home to mind the farm.
‘Just as well one of us had some brains!’ Now his first son was thinking of following in his uncles’ footsteps. ‘You need your head read!’
There were more important considerations. ‘Who’s going to give me a hand on the farm?’
‘About time Wilf did something around the place,’ Hedley said.
Fair enough. Fifteen-year-old Wilf was strong for his age but closer to work-shy than his Dad liked to admit.
‘Wilf …’ he said dubiously.
Always ducking out of school, running with a wild mob. Never did much harm; went to the pictures more than most, when they’d got the money; for drives in Cal Winthrop’s car, when they’d got the petrol; whistled at girls. Kids’ stuff, mostly, but that was the point. Wilf was hardly a bloke you could rely on. Now Hedley was saying that Wilf would give a hand around the place while Hedley was off enjoying himself. Seemed pretty stupid, put like that.
‘You got to worry about a bloke rushes off to a war ain’t none of his business and lets the family go to rack and ruin while he does it.’
‘People say the Japs gonna come in,’ Hedley pointed out. ‘That’ll make it our business.’
‘Japs!’ Benjamin’s tone dismissed them. ‘What’s in Japan?’ Nothing that warranted leaving the farm, that was for sure.
Hedley held Kath’s hand loosely in his own. He had thought she’d try to talk him out of it, had planned all the things he would say when she did. Instead she had said nothing at all but sat silently, staring out across the valley.
He felt let down by her silence. Eventually he gave up waiting. ‘One thing we got to fix up before I go.’
He stared at her truculently. His eyes bruised hers. Her own eyes were wide, her lips slightly parted, glistening with the sun upon them. Still she said nothing, but waited.
He tightened his fingers about hers. ‘I want us to get married.’
Take it or leave it. The words, that should have been loving, came more like a blow.
For an instant Kath did not move: wide-stretched eyes, stalled breath. Then her body jerked as, savagely, she flung his words, his offer of himself, from her. She snatched her hand away. ‘That’d be right, wouldn’t it?’
He had thought she’d be pleased.
She read his dismay. She had known for years that men were moved by different motives than women, but this was ridiculous.
‘What am I supposed to do?’ she cried furiously. ‘While you’re chasing round the world, playing soldiers?’
Hedley was horrified. Kath was an only child, would inherit her old man’s farm when the time came, and Hedley had no intention of missing out on that if he could help it. By joining the army he had thought to twist her arm into marrying him before he went, something he suspected she would never agree to otherwise. Now she’d chucked his offer back in his face but he daren’t leave it at that; prizes like the Schulz farm didn’t turn up every day and, by the time he got back from the war, it would almost certainly be too late.
Late in the day, he thought of something that might touch her.
‘I love you,’ he offered, and cursed himself for not having thought to say it earlier.
She stared at him. She knew his proposal had nothing to do with love. He wanted to marry her so he could get his hands on the farm. She didn’t mind that — it was the way things worked, in these parts — but was annoyed that he should pretend anything different. She decided to punish him a little.
‘Not sure I want to marry anyone, at the moment.’
He had been so sure she would say yes. She watched as he wriggled, caught on the hook that he had intended for her.
‘I thought you’d be pleased.’
She scoffed. ‘Reckon you’re such a good catch?’
Hedley was not the sort to give up without a fight. ‘Reckon there’s lots worse.’
He grabbed her hand again, tightened his grip painfully, as though to stake his claim. ‘We’ll be good for each other.’ Chin determined, he leant towards her, most threateningly. ‘We’re the same type of people.’
She did not want to believe that he might be right. ‘Don’t kid yourself …’
But was unsure. His anger had done something that his mention of love had not. She was angry, too, at the blatant way he’d tried to manipulate her, yet now something quivered inside her, responding to this man who wanted her enough to ask.
It’s the land he wants. Of course. But she thought no less of him for that. A man should think of the future.
The same type of people … Could he have been right, after all?
His proposal had lit a flam
e, undeniably. More than ever she wanted to explore, to do all those things that until now she had rejected out of custom, of fear.
A further consideration: if she accepted him, she would be the first of her friends to marry.
You’re mad, she thought. You know what he’s after. Yet was appalled at how hard it was to say no.
I will be the first. I will make him love me. Already he had used the word. Had not meant it but could, perhaps, learn.
Hedley? she thought. You’re mad. But …
She wasn’t the only girl who stood to inherit. Turn him down, she might miss her chance. And it would be romantic, undeniably, to marry a war hero, to sacrifice herself to the god of war. Maybe this was the role she was destined to play, in an age of warriors.
Commonsense still held her back but was weakening.
She looked at him imploringly. Do not ask. I am not ready. I am afraid of the consequences of saying no, of the probability that I shall say yes.
Hedley must have read something in her eyes. Deliberately, eyes fixed on hers, he slipped his hand into the vee of her shirt, pushing downwards until it cupped her breast, possessively. His fingers claimed the nipple that previously she had denied him.
‘Going to marry me, are you?’ His voice was so low that she could barely hear it yet its reverberations echoed through her every particle. ‘Before I shove off to the war?’
His fingers kneaded her flesh, which responded, despite herself. Yet the sparks, exclamation points of feeling, were as nothing compared with the sense of inevitability that rose like a storm from the peaceful horizons of her life.
She still had time to reject him, to prove to herself that she was still in control, yet her very breath seemed to stifle the words in her throat. She felt helpless, caught in a web against which her spirit struggled in vain.
So much to hang on a single word!
Say no, thrust his hand away, and life would return to what it had been. The alternative, to bind herself to another person for life, would be ridiculous. Why should she give up her freedom, her future, because Hedley Warren had got it into his head that a man’s duty was to kill other men he had never met?
She felt a breath of cooler air upon her skin as Hedley removed his hand, yet the sensations awakened by his fingers remained, stirring her uneasily. His other arm was around her shoulders. He leant and kissed her. He had done it so often over the last year, yet this was different. He was making a declaration, both of intent and possession.
This is mine.
As though she no longer had any say in the matter — which, apprehensively, she had begun to think might be so.
Now, with the same sense of inevitability and purpose, his hand moved down the side of her skirt. It reached the hem. Paused. Stroked her leg, gently. Began, inch by inch, to climb. It coaxed her with its warmth, the warmth that the accumulation of his embraces had kindled in her flesh. The stealthily-moving hand was the agent of her gathering heat. She wanted it yet knew that she must stop it, that if she wished to remain unbound her will must be stronger than the weakly-yielding flesh.
She tried to say no, but his mouth covering hers stifled sound. His tongue was in her mouth. She felt it touch her own as his fingertips caressed the skin of her outer thigh. Hedley was no rapist; if she struggled he would stop what he was doing.
She did not; neither did he. By acquiescence she was giving him a signal. His fingertips now smoothed the skin of her inner thigh. Choice was a window of light, closing rapidly. She had to act at once, or not at all.
She was drowning in his kiss. Heat pulsed. Sensation was sweeping her away. His fingertip touched her. In the moment of victory, he paused. A moment’s stillness in what had until then been a crescendo of feeling.
She opened her eyes as her body lay open. Hedley was staring down at her, unsmiling. It was strange to see this man’s face and know that he was responsible for arousing feelings that had seemed, in the pink-pulsing darkness behind her closed eyelids, to have nothing to do with Hedley Warren or herself, simply the perennial female response to the male. Now, eyes open, she saw clearly that what was happening here was not a temporary surrender to physical sensation but the acceptance of a commitment that might prove too heavy for her to bear.
She saw that Hedley was aware of it, too, that he had paused upon the very portals of her flesh in order to ask once again, silently, what he had already asked once. Was she ready? She and her flesh — were they willing, now, to be bound?
The unspoken question moved her as the physical embrace alone could never have done. She smiled up at him. Her arms enfolded his neck, holding him close.
‘I must be mad,’ she whispered. ‘I reckon I will, though. If you’re sure.’
He did not speak, but she felt his smile, triumphant. His free arm tightened around her shoulders. His weight intensified, pressing her down upon the dusty grass. Through the leaves the sunlight dazzled with shafts and sparks of light.
The probing finger claimed her.
Hedley announced the news when he got home that night.
Benjamin had no complaints. ‘Done yourself a bit of good there,’ he told his son.
His mother was not so sure. People were saying the war might go on for years; it seemed crazy to tie themselves down, with the future so uncertain.
That night, in bed, she said so to Benjamin, who laughed. ‘Plenty of others doing the same. The papers are full of diggers’ weddings.’
Emily didn’t care what others were doing, was concerned only with her own flesh and blood. ‘Who’s going to look after the farm?’
Benjamin was secure in the knowledge of his strength. ‘I’m not a cot case. Not yet.’
‘You’re fifty-one next birthday. Time to be taking it easier, not doubling your load.’
‘Wilf’ll give me a hand.’ He turned his head on the pillow to look at her. ‘Got a problem with Kath, have you?’
‘No.’
But would have wished to have something, he saw. ‘She’s a good kid.’
‘Reckon they’ve got to?’
‘Get married?’ He laughed. ‘I doubt it.’
He thought privately that it didn’t matter, even if they had. Down the track the Schulz land, eight hundred acres of good cropping country, would be theirs. That, and the future, were what mattered.
‘Hedley’s done okay for himself.’
Okay for the Warrens.
‘Some of Kath’s cousins aren’t going to be too happy,’ Emily said.
Which made things even better. Benjamin smiled, stretching under the bedclothes. Kath’s Uncle Darby would be fit to be tied, going on about how German should marry German, although with the war on he might find it awkward to push that too hard. Benjamin didn’t give a damn what Darby thought. The pair of them had never got along, which made victory all the sweeter.
‘They’ll get used to it.’
He turned to his wife, smiling in the lamplight. His hand rested companionably on her hip. She was still slender; he felt the rounded shape of the bone through her cotton nightdress. ‘Reckon I’m past it, do you?’
She smiled back at him. Anxiety remained, but for the moment she was willing to put it to one side.
‘I never said that.’ And drew him close.
It wasn’t the wedding Emily had wanted; the war made that impossible. Not just the rationing; it wouldn’t have seemed right to put on too grand a show, with so many of the boys overseas and things going from bad to worse, by the sound of it. Another month-long war that looked like going on forever, just like the last one.
She’d come around to the idea of the wedding — that, at least. Now she just wanted everything to go off nicely, and it did.
A warm day, but not too warm. Kath’s Dad had fallen out with the Lutheran pastor, so they had the service in the Anglican church, much to the fury of Darby Schulz. That ardent Lutheran swore he wouldn’t come but did anyway, unable to resist the lure of a feed at someone else’s expense.
Just about the w
hole town turned up. Men strangling in starched collars, their broken farmers’ hands protruding from seldom-worn suits far too tight and hot for them; wives, fat or beanpole thin, in whatever fancy feathers they’d been able to lay their hands on; boys with cowlicks and shiny-scrubbed faces, fidgeting, looking to punch; girls prim in starched skirts. Dulcie Sweet in the back with the rest of her rag-tag clan; fourteen years old and already eyeing the boys. Come to no good, that one, Emily thought with satisfaction.
Kath looked great in an embroidered white dress, close-fitting, with a high neck and long train — very swish — and a corsage of orchids, no less. Her veil, the Schulzes claimed, had come out with the family from Germany back in the eighteen hundreds and should have been saved, so far as Darby was concerned, for a more appropriate occasion in a more appropriate church.
She looks happy, Emily thought, and was glad for Kath, for herself, for all the family. The way things were in the world, Kath and Hedley were going to have more than the normal cartload of troubles; happiness might give her the strength to face whatever turned up.
As far as the Schulzes went, Kath was the pick of the bunch. Her dad and uncles looked like a bunch of pigs in suits, as they always did on the rare occasions when they tarted themselves up at all.
As for the Warrens … Unlike Max Schulz, her Benjamin always looked good in a suit. Even Wilf looked halfway respectable, although she’d had to get after him to wear a tie. She had wanted him to be Hedley’s best man, but Hedley wouldn’t have a bar of it. ‘He’d lose the ring, for sure.’
Emily couldn’t look at Hedley without feeling weepy. All dolled up in his dark suit and buttonhole … She thought how much it suited him. So much smarter than the uniform that so many blokes chose to get married in these days. Not that he could have worn one, anyway. Emily was thankful he had decided not to join up until after the wedding.
The Reverend Arch Griffiths conducted the ceremony, his doleful voice making even a wedding sound like a lying-in-state. Arch had married Desdemona, one of Emily’s remoter cousins. It made him family, of a sort, which didn’t stop her wanting to shake him.
