by JH Fletcher
Jethrow Douglas III was not an effusive correspondent and, ever since his son had made up his mind to be an architect and not follow the law as three generations of Douglas men had done before him, his letters had been terse in the extreme. Even now, ten years later, he was as abrupt as ever.
The attached arrived today. I hope you have done nothing to disgrace us.
Jeth had long got over being troubled by his father’s unforgiving ways. Now he did not even notice them, was more concerned with the letter that was attached to the note. An airmail letter, with an Australian stamp. The envelope hand-written, in a hand he did not recognise. The only person he could think of who would write to him from Australia was Kath Warren, and from her he had no wish to hear.
Engraved upon his memory, even now, was the hard smile with which she had dumped him minutes after they had been so goddamned loving together … To have been so close to her — not only sexually but in heart and mind, in soul, almost — and to have her turn on him as she had … He had never worked out what it had been about, but remembered running through the Adelaide streets in the first grey blurring of daylight, the hard crack of his heels echoing from the stone facade of the buildings, flinging himself furiously through the trees of the park, breath harsh, outrage strident within him, asking himself, Why? Why?
No, he certainly had no wish to hear from Kath Warren, yet knew instinctively that the letter had to be from her. After almost eleven years …
Unbelievable.
You’d better believe it, he told himself, turning the envelope in his perplexed fingers. You’re holding the goddamned proof, for God’s sake.
He had just enough time to wonder why he was swearing so much, he who never swore, before his thumb nail sliced the envelope and he was pulling out the single sheet of airmail paper that it contained.
Now there could be no doubt about it. From the paper rose a scent that he had not even realised he knew, that not for a moment would he have expected to remember even if he had known it in the first place, yet one that brought back to him memories and feelings so vivid that the events to which they related might have occurred yesterday and not eleven years earlier, in the barely-remembered days before Okinawa.
Still he did not read the letter but sat, letting memory wash through him. That last evening had begun badly. He’d had a problem finding the house, then couldn’t open the wrought iron gates that separated the grounds from the street. He hadn’t even been sure it was the right house and had wondered about guard dogs. Later, after he had summoned the courage to shove the gates open, he discovered that he had been right and that there were no guard dogs, after all.
After that things had improved. He had talked to Beth until Kath had arrived. Kath had been wearing a wonderful dress that he had noticed only with the tiniest corner of his mind, the remainder of his attention fixed on her and her alone.
They had walked to the concert and he, who had suggested it in the first place, no longer cared whether they got there or not. He would have been content to walk on through the warm darkness, talking and listening, being alone with her, knowing for the first time, yet with absolute conviction, that he was in love as never before in his life.
The music. His fear that incomprehension might spoil their evening, his delight when the Shostakovich had moved her so deeply. Afterwards the meal, the walk in the park, the sense that all the time they were growing closer and closer to each other and to a decision that would change nothing but would affirm what they already knew: that this was not just one of those relationships, but something infinitely more important that would bind them willingly to each other forever.
She had invited him back to the garden house with its glass walls and cluttered furniture, its smell of dust that was soon overlaid by other scents. Sheathed within her damp acceptance, he had felt peaceful yet exultant, so right. He had known no doubts at all. He had dozed, aware of her warmth, but adrift amid a rolling mist of images: the war, themselves, a future of which he no longer had any doubt, even the battles to come having lost the possibility of hurting him. Anything other than a lifetime together utterly inconceivable now. And then he had woken and everything had changed. She had turned on him, dismissing him from her life as though nothing they had said or done had meant anything to her at all.
He had refused to believe it, but had been forced to believe it, dreams replaced by empty streets peopled by perplexity, outrage and a gathering and uncomprehending anger that she could have used him so.
He had gone away, life had continued, Okinawa had happened. There had been times, in Okinawa, when he had believed he hated her. Unlike so many of his buddies, he had survived, had come home to South Carolina, in defiance of his father had made a new life for himself. Over the years there had been women; they had come and gone so silently that now he had difficulty in remembering one from the other.
Now this. An opened envelope. A folded sheet of paper. A scent — of dust and heat and oranges — bringing back the past.
There was a stillness in the room. His breath seemed tangled somehow in the beating of his heart.
He unfolded the letter.
I have often wondered how you are. Whether you survived the war. It seems so odd, not knowing if you’re alive or dead. I have prayed so often that you came though all right, that you are well and happy. Did you ever become an architect, like you said you wanted? Hedley come back all right from the war. It was a hard time for all of us, but worse for the prisoners and the men who had to do the fighting. Walter is a big boy now. Thirteen, can you imagine it? It makes you wonder where all the time has gone. There are no other children. I would love to hear how you are, if this note ever reaches you.
The paper rustled as he put it down on the table in front of him. The rustle of dead memories, he thought. Were they dead? Not quite, despite all. But should be. No good ever came from resurrecting the past.
He folded the letter, firmly, returned it to its envelope, put it firmly in the drawer of his desk. His life was here. What they had shared was over, insulated from the present by everything that had happened since: the frenzy of battle that had wiped out the boy he had been before, the career he had fashioned for himself in the years that had followed.
The man who came back from the war is not the person she knew, he thought. Harder, stronger, less lovable, with the blankness of heart and mind afflicting all who had survived the fighting. We are out of contact, he told himself, not merely with the past, but with everything and everyone about us. We do not know those who did not know the war, who were not there. I have been conditioned to hate the Japanese almost as much as I hate myself, yet probably have more in common with their soldiers than with my own family.
Death in its many forms.
By contrast architecture was a blaze of joy. To see grow into reality something that had existed only in his mind … It was glory, rich and wonderful, that in part helped to fill the emptiness. He entered several important competitions; won some, and not only in the South. Jeth Douglas’s apartment blocks, factories, one cathedral, could be found in Chicago, San Francisco, Copenhagen. His name was mentioned in books. Within the parameters of his unhappiness, Jeth Douglas became a fulfilled man.
He had believed himself cured. Now Kath’s letter, and he discovered he was not cured, after all. He could have hated her for it. His awareness of the letter in his desk was a constant torment, yet for several days he succeeded in ignoring it. Then he took it out and read it again. And again. It was as though a dam had broken inside him. He read it until he knew it by heart. The flimsy airmail paper frayed along its folds. No matter, he continued to read.
One dreary December evening, Jeth Douglas sat before a log fire watching the flames roaring in the chimney and thinking, once again, of the letter waiting in the drawer of his desk. He had never answered it, had not read it for days, now. He had no need to; he knew it by heart, remembering the outline of every word and letter. In the same way he remembered every moment he had spent w
ith Kath in what seemed now to have been an interlude of wonder and delight amid the baleful reality of war.
One day during the battle for Okinawa, the air humming with steel, when to survive for even an hour was a victory of sorts, he had looked at the sky over the beaches. The kamikaze pilots were driving their aircraft like black hawks against the ships they sought to destroy. The howl of engines came clearly amid the crump of anti-aircraft fire. The muzzle flashes of the guns cracked the daylight with their brilliance, the few planes that got through flung themselves against the steel flanks of carriers and destroyers in a concussion of black smoke and howling flame. Hell upon the sea, hell upon land, hell in the air. And in the midst of it, seemingly from nowhere, the image of Kath’s face, smiling beside a blue and white jug filled with yellow flowers. The flame gilded her dark hair, shone in her dark eyes; the bellow of the guns drowned her voice, and he had thought that what had happened between them could not be the end of it.
For such a thought to mean anything, he had to survive. And had, suffering not even a scratch where, out of a company of a hundred men, only seventeen had lived. He had come home to another battle with his father and the peaceful, uncomprehending world.
Several times in those early days, he had thought of writing to her but had never done so. What was the point? She was married, had booted him out unceremoniously, had even denied the possibility of love.
It was sex. Fun. I enjoyed it.
Her look, her laugh, had cut deep.
That goddamn letter, he thought now. Seated alone before the roaring fire in his Charleston apartment, surrounded by the trophies of his post-war life, the photographs and citations, parchment record of awards, he remembered once again how he had fled reality in the grey Adelaide dawn. I was bleeding then, he told himself. I am bleeding still.
He had never forgotten, yet there had been times when it had been difficult to believe in any of it. Now her letter had changed that. He had touched paper that had been touched by her fingers, seen written on the page her thoughts — careful thoughts revealing little yet, by existing at all, revealing much.
He thought of getting the letter out of the drawer, revisiting the voice and touch and memory of the woman who had written it, but did not. It is over, he told himself for the hundredth time, the thousandth time. Over.
In three weeks it would be Christmas: trees bright with baubles, holly and cards and the sound of carols. He thought of the reverent silences of shadowed churches, the priests in their brocaded gowns, the silver gleam of the uplifted chalice. The mystery and celebration and loneliness of Christmas.
He would spend it, as every year, with his parents in the country. His father in particular would be precise, trying too hard to make friends. There was no chance of it. Nowadays only music remained; when conversation failed, that at least they could share. There would be Bach, appropriate to the season, to kindle flame in the dark turning of the year. There would be Mahler and Haydn’s Creation proclaiming, gloriously, the triumph of the spirit in a world where so little of the spirit seemed to remain. The oppressive memories — of Okinawa, of Auschwitz and Corregidor and the Ardennes — lay like a weight upon the earth.
It is over.
He shook himself to get rid of thoughts increasingly morbid. He would fetch himself a drink, he would swallow it down, he would ring a young woman whom he had often thought to invite here.
Hazel was a student he had met at an Institute function. She had clung close, wooed and won, perhaps, by his reputation. If he phoned her, she would accept, he would make love to her, they would be happy. And then? After the laughter and sighs, what then? What would remain to take with them into tomorrow’s cold and rainy morning?
Nothing, he thought. Nothing, nothing, nothing.
Why did she have to send me that bloody letter?
He rang Hazel, drove through the dismal night to fetch her. She was warm with the smell and excitement of youth. He brought her home, sat her in a two-seater settee before the fire, fetched her the glass of the champagne she wanted. She drank it, laughing as the bubbles tickled her nose. On the other side of the fire, he sipped his bourbon and watched the flames dancing in her eyes.
He thought, She is a child. I am thirty-four. I am old. In some ways I am as old as my father, who was born old. Perhaps, with this child, I can turn my back on age.
He put down his glass, smiling warmly at her. He went and sat beside her.
In the morning — once more rainy and cold — he drove her home. Hazel was caught between fear and happiness. Her face was smeared with uncertainty. After the warm fire, the wine, the explorations and revelations of the night, the dreary morning bit deep. She watched him around the edges of a bright and tremulous smile.
‘Call me?’
‘Sure.’ She was a good kid. If he had cared enough, he would have felt bad.
Outside the house she shared with other students, she flung her arms around him, her mouth clutched his desperately, seeking reassurance in his cool lips. She sat back, looking at him searchingly. ‘Make sure you do.’
And was gone, twinkling legs in the grey dawn.
I shall not permit her to love me. Yet knew that he probably would contact her again, despite the dangers.
He stopped off on the way home to get a copy of the Sunday papers. He subscribed to an architectural journal; the latest edition was waiting for him. At home, waiting for his coffee to boil, he leafed through it casually.
An article on building trends in the United States.
A technical article on the more accurate measurement of building stresses.
A photograph of one of his own buildings, in Lagos, Nigeria. The caption described it as A Functional Sculpture for the Tropics. What crap. Was pleased, nonetheless; publicity never did anyone any harm.
He turned the page. A boxed announcement, in bold print. Submissions invited for the design of a Festival Centre on high ground overlooking a river … An opera hall and theatre … Design to reflect the artistic aspirations and achievements of the community …
His eye went to the bottom of the page. The Centre was to be built in Australia. In Adelaide.
25
KATH
1956
Kath had accepted for a long time that she would get no answer to her letter. He died in the war, she told herself. Yet did not believe, although she could not have said why.
He is married, with a family of his own. She imagined him reading her letter to a fond wife, laughing at this unexpected contact from the dead past. Surely, in that case, he would have written her a polite note, making it clear he did not wish to hear from her again?
The fact that he had not done so could only mean …
She did not know what it meant.
Only that she had had her chance, years ago, and thrown it away.
The phone was ringing, ringing. Kath, who had been out at the washing line, came dashing indoors to answer it. ‘Hullo?’
‘May I speak with Mrs Warren?’
She stared with startled eyes at the wall, her fingers white where they clutched the phone. The soft drawl. The accent, almost forgotten, yet familiar. It couldn’t be …
‘Kath Warren speaking …’
‘Hi, there.’
It was. She had to sit down, at once, on the floor. Her heart pounded; she felt sick. She spoke, more to herself than to him. ‘Jeth …’
The half-laugh she remembered. ‘The same.’
‘But what …? I mean, where …?’
‘I’m in Adelaide,’ he said. ‘I thought I’d give you a call.’
In Adelaide … What are you doing in Adelaide? Why did you never answer my letter?
He said, ‘You ever get over to, what’s that place called, Kapunda? There used to be a cafe …’
Her fingers clutched the phone; she found it hard to breathe. ‘It’s still there.’
‘I’d like to see you,’ he said. ‘If that’s possible.’
Another voice had taken her tongue. She
said, ‘When?’
Later, after all had been arranged, there was room for doubt. She couldn’t meet him. Hedley had neither forgiven nor forgotten what had happened but was at least willing to live with what was over. He would not be so tolerant if it happened again. On the other hand … A cup of tea. A chat over old times. Catching up with a friend. What could be more innocent than that? The ache in her breasts told her how innocent it was.
She couldn’t go. Was determined, nonetheless. Hedley, Walter, her life: all mattered. None of them mattered. She would go. She would see him again. She was sick with terror. Yet would go.
She wore her prettiest dress, gave her hair an extra brush, put on lipstick with a careful hand instead of walloping it anyhow across her mouth. She checked herself in the mirror, pulling her dress this way and that until she was satisfied or at least gave up, told herself she would not be early. Despite that, she allowed half an hour for a drive that from years of experience she knew took no more than twenty minutes.
Once again it was market day; she went to have a look at the craft and home produce stalls, the jams and chutneys and home-made toys. Some things never changed, which in the circumstances was a comfort.
For the twentieth time she checked her watch. Five minutes late; good.
She walked along the main street, nerves clawing at her stomach. The last time she’d done this she had let herself in for a good deal more than she’d bargained for, yet now was less scared of becoming involved than of finding that they no longer had anything to say to each other, that not even the memories of the past could restore what once, so briefly, they had shared.
Only one way to find out, she told herself sturdily, and crossed the road to the cafe. Again she straightened her dress, took a deep breath and pushed open the door.
Two or three tables were taken: couples, one threesome. She knew none of them. In the corner, facing the door, a man. She could hardly bring herself to look at him but did so, anyway. He was watching her steadily. He seemed not to have changed at all.
