by JH Fletcher
He stood as she walked unsteadily across the room towards him. Took his hand in hers. Her lips were stiff; she thought she would never be able to get her tongue around the words she wanted to say.
I am so glad to see you.
I have thought about you so much.
I am so glad to see you.
Do you have a wife? Children? Have you brought them with you?
I am so glad …
She said, ‘I’m sorry I’m late.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘How have you been?’
‘Fine. And you?’
‘I’m good.’
While all the time her heart was pumping, her brain was racing, she feared that her legs could no longer support her. And still they held each other’s hands, each other’s eyes, and she did not care what the other people in the cafe might be thinking.
Eventually they sat down. From either side of the table with its frilly cloth the eyes continued to inspect, to search, to remind each other of the past.
‘This place hasn’t changed much,’ Jeth’s lips said.
Kath, transfixed by eyes that were saying so many other things, barely heard the words, yet somehow their meaning reached her. She nodded, smiling with delight just to hear his voice. After so long. So long.
‘Nothing much changes around here,’ she thought she said, though could not be sure. It did not matter, her attention focused only on the eyes that watched her so eloquently.
The waitress came. Not the usual old grump but her granddaughter, sharp eyes in a moonlike face, whom Kath knew by sight. Who knew her, too, and watched with fascination the married woman who regarded this stranger so fondly.
Fascinated or not, the rituals had to be observed.
‘What can I get you?’
This time, at least, coffee was on the menu. ‘I can’t promise what it’ll be like,’ Kath warned.
They laughed more gaily than the remark warranted while, in the kitchen, the granddaughter was busy at the urn, her speculations hanging as heavy as steam. The coffee came, they drank it down, it was pretty dire. They ate scones spread with gobbets of strawberry jam. And all the time the eyes, talking, talking.
‘You got my letter?’
‘Yes.’
‘I never expected …’
You to appear like this, out of the blue.
But the words petered out, lamely, saying nothing.
‘I truly did intend to write,’ he said. ‘I took a hell of a long time about it, I know, but I really did mean to. Then I found I was coming here, anyway, on business. So.’
‘So here you are.’ Smiling brightly. A smile could mean anything, or nothing.
Another cup of the mildly awful coffee. ‘What brings you here? To Adelaide?’
To see you. To see if anything is left. To see … Momentarily, the future was sweeter than the gobbets of strawberry jam as he told her about the competition, the design for a Festival Centre for which he had decided to submit an entry.
‘So you really did become an architect?’
‘I really did.’
Another echo; they smiled in complicity, remembering. Yet it was a shock to discover how little they knew about each other’s lives. ‘I’m a partner in a firm in Charleston.’
‘Married?’ It took such courage.
He shook his head, gave a mocking smile. Poured an extra load of Southern molasses into his voice as he answered. ‘I guess I just ain’t desirable, honey-chile. Miss Right never happened along.’
She said, ‘Don’t laugh at me, Jeth.’
At once his hands covered hers where they lay on the table. ‘I was not.’
They were quiet, the contact between the hands burning, burning. Kath remembered how they had parted. ‘I want to explain about that night —’
He tightened his grip on her hands. ‘Don’t.’
‘But I must have hurt you —’
As I hurt myself.
‘It doesn’t matter.’ No mockery in his smile, now. ‘I’m here. You’re here. That’s all that counts.’
And she had been afraid that nothing of what they’d had might remain. She stared down at his hands enfolding her own. If only they would enfold her. Thought, What can he see in me?
She looked up at his face, bathed him in the full blaze of her eyes. The texture of his skin, every grain and particle. The way his hair still fell forward on his forehead. The beginnings of lines at the corner of his eyes, white threads in his brown face.
He faced her scrutiny, unafraid, faintly smiling. She thought, I love him for his lack of fear.
Nonetheless, she was troubled. That’s all that counts …It wasn’t true; there were so many things. Careless of the needle-eyed granddaughter, of whoever else who might be watching, she turned their hands, interlocking her fingers in his. ‘What are we going to do?’
Now it was Jeth’s turn to inspect their clasped hands. ‘You have a husband. A child. And you ask me what we should do?’
She looked at his head, bowed over their locked hands. The hair with not a hint of grey lay timidly against his neat skull. Everything about his posture proclaimed his subservience to her will. That, of all things, she did not want. Could he not see how difficult it was for her? He did not need to remind her of Hedley and Walter; their existence and her responsibility to them lay like lead upon her mind. Did he expect her to take the initiative, to renounce them to the pressure of his clasping hand, of her own desires?
From the moment she had entered the cafe and seen him watching her, Hedley and Walter had not existed, but her sense of obligation remained, and that was powerful. Powerful enough to overcome even love? Perhaps not; if he said the word she would follow him gladly. But to initiate the action? Never.
So she willed Jeth to look at her, to take charge of the situation and herself. He did so, in response to her unspoken entreaty. His hands clamped painfully upon her own. She watched him, seeing that he understood, and was thankful.
‘I’ll tell you what we’ll do,’ he said.
They went south, to the sea. She gave Hedley some story about Maudie being sick and needing her. She did not care whether he believed her or not. He’s never let me forget the last time. Let him add this one to his list.
‘How long are you going to be away?’
‘A few days.’
She watched him, daring him to say that a woman’s place was with her husband. This man who had abandoned her for years. Hedley hesitated, but indifference won out over his sense of what she should, should not do. He turned away, clumping on boots rimed with dirt. ‘Reckon we’ll manage …’
There were waves running in cool blue rollers to the horizon. There were cliffs, grey and dun green, breakers gnashing at their feet, about which an explosion of gulls screamed plaintively, the salt air commanded by their curved white wings.
Jeth and Kath, alone.
They walked along a beach of pale sand. On the landward side the beach was flanked by dunes set with scrub, in which flowers gleamed like coloured stars. Beyond the scrub, green hills rose from the plain. There was a creek which they followed, picking their way across marshy ground where needle-thin sedges whistled restlessly in the breeze. They came to a small valley running back into the hills. Mixed with the sedge was soft grass, and patches of white sand, and silence. In the silence they could just hear the trickling creek, its water flowing brown and clear over a bed of white sand. Marsh birds exploded out of the sedge in frantic alarm.
‘What a place for a house,’ Jeth said. His voice fingered what could only be dreams. ‘The birds. The silence. When there was a storm, you’d be able to hear the surf.’
‘A long way to go for food.’ Kath had been raised in a prosaic environment; love did not mean denying all comfort, or living like a hermit.
Jeth was unwilling to give up his romantic vision. ‘Weekends,’ he said. ‘A break from the city.’
She agreed that weekends might be possible, yet even now would not surrender herself en
tirely to the game. ‘All it needs is the house.’
‘Designing houses is what I’m good at.’
‘I wish you wouldn’t talk like that.’ His fantasies made her uncomfortable. They made her wonder whether he regarded her, too, as a game. She wasn’t playing games. For her the relationship had become only too real, a reason for existence transcending all else.
He said, ‘I want you to come and live with me.’
She stared at him, barely able to credit what she had heard. Live with him? When she had a son and a husband? A life of her own? He had told her nothing of his plans, not even how long he intended to stay in Adelaide. I know nothing about him at all, she thought. And he says, Come and live with me. Was he serious? Or using her? But that last thought she rejected because it was too terrifying to believe.
His arm was around her, drawing her close. ‘There’s an Arab saying …’
She had no interest in Arab sayings, but asked him anyway, sensing it was what he wanted. ‘What?’
‘Take what you want in life. And pay.’
The idea gave no comfort. In her case the payment could be huge. ‘I don’t see you paying anything,’ she told him crossly. It seemed wrong that he should pay so little, or nothing. If he were the one putting his life on the line, he might not be so quick with his Arab sayings.
But now his fingers were talking to her, his breath and ardour. For a moment she pulled free. Once again she stared at him. ‘Here?’
‘Where better?’
‘Don’t blame me if someone comes.’
No-one did.
There was beauty in it, storm and peace. Making love on the soft white sand, memory returned.
A tangled kaleidoscope of sounds and images: the music, the park, the dusty smell of the dark summerhouse. The texture of the cushions beneath her back. She stared up at him, feeling the sun’s hot eye upon her, the inaudible murmur of the distant surf that nevertheless she sensed so clearly, the panicked flight of birds. Her own voice, crying at the sky against a background of daisies in a blue and white jug.
Afterwards, mouth close to her ear, he said, ‘For weekends …’
She looked up in time to catch his smile. ‘But what are we going to do?’ she said desperately.
‘Love each other.’
Frustration could have made her weep. What he said was true, but resolved nothing. She wondered, again, how serious he was, whether she knew him at all.
They dragged back down the beach, which now seemed so far, the sand yielding beneath their feet. They ate at a restaurant overlooking the sea. They drove to the hotel; that, at least, he had organised. She was silent.
He looked at her. ‘You okay?’
‘Of course.’ But was not, and wanted him to know it.
He was not willing to play. ‘That’s all right, then.’ And went to have a shower, whistling.
Your own fault, she told herself. He survived Okinawa, he took on his own Dad and won. Why did you think you would be able to tame him? Perversely, she was pleased that she could not, yet that was not the issue, either.
She needed to know what was what, but understood that confrontation would get her nowhere. I shall have to ask him to help me, she thought.
After dinner, sitting in the hotel’s wood-panelled bar, the atmosphere decorous with cigar smoke and the plush murmur of voices, he tried again. ‘Something is troubling you …’
Now. Yes, she confessed. She needed to know what was going to happen to them. If he won the contract. If he did not.
‘I told you what I want.’
‘But you have to help me …’
Still he would not yield. ‘By doing what?’
‘You say you want us to live together. But I cannot give up everything. Unless I know.’
‘The first thing I did after I got to Adelaide, I phoned you. I’ve tried to make it plain how I feel about you —’
Like ticking facts off a list. It was more terrible than she would have believed. She had to interrupt him. ‘Please —’
‘I don’t understand what you want from me.’
She needed love, not a list of facts. She needed to be sure that he cared enough to protect her forever, but wondered whether so much care existed anywhere in the world, of which she knew so little.
‘Tell me about your home,’ she said. ‘Tell me about Charleston.’
It took him aback that she should change the subject so abruptly. Yet she had not; Charleston, after all, was where he lived.
‘It’s a city,’ he said. ‘A southern city on the coast. It’s where the War between the States began.’
Kath was not a tourist. What interested her was not its history, but its sights and smells, his place within it, his friends. She was trying to bridge a twelve-year gap, to discover this man in his daily life. Which, if what they were saying meant anything, she might one day expect to share.
‘It’s full of history. People are very conscious of their heritage. It’s a city of churches —’
Facts again, she thought. I don’t care about them. I want to know what it is like to breathe its air, walk its streets … ‘Tell me about the people.’
‘There are white people, coloured people. There is a very intellectual society. People are proud of their interest in the arts —’
Kath saw that it was no use. It was like listening to a guidebook talking. She sat silently, mind adrift, while he talked and talked. And, eventually, fell silent.
She smiled at him, back from his guidebook tour. She saw that she had made a mistake in getting him to tell her things through his lips; to find out what she needed, she would have to try a different road. She stood. ‘I need to walk. Get out of this smoke.’
From the hotel entrance, the road plunged abruptly to the car park bordering the beach. In the moonless dark they could see only a grey hint of sand, the white blink of rollers at the junction of land and sea. The waves growled. A bird called once and was still. Kath walked onto the beach, Jeth following. She took off her shoes, feeling the sand cool and damp beneath her feet. She walked, head thrown back in the salty dark, while the wind tugged at her dress, whipping its skirt about her knees.
I must not let him commit himself to the future, she thought, until I know that I am willing to share it. At the moment she did not. A darkness in her mind prevented her seeing either the future or her role in it. She had turned from this man before, had driven him away so cruelly. Had kept silent for eleven years, then contacted him once more. She did not want that to happen to them again.
She was walking as fast as she could, powering her way along the beach, swinging her legs with ever-widening strides, thrusting her bare feet again and again into the sand. Islanded in darkness and sea surge, her blood pounded fiercely. I have wasted so many years. I want this man, but do I want him enough to tear myself away from everything I know?
She did not know, was weeping in terror at the thought that it was not in Jeth that she must seek the future, but in herself. When I understand what I want, I shall be able to talk him into doing whatever is necessary. But I do not know how I am supposed to learn what I have had so many chances to know already, yet do not.
I must be patient, she thought. We shall explore each other, slowly, lovingly. As I discover him, what he wants from me and from life, perhaps I shall be able to discover myself.
She turned to him. She could see the glint of his eyes in the darkness, the faint oval of his face. She had come to the beach with the vague idea that they might make love at the edges of the surf, entangled in sand and seaweed and dreams. She had thought that in that situation the truth might be found.
Now she was less sure. If the truth were to be disclosed at all, it would be by sharing themselves in ways other than the flesh. She was unsure what those ways might be, but would find out, in time.
She reached up to caress his face. ‘Let’s go back …’
This time it did not seem far; she could have walked forever, the energy pouring into her body with every b
reath of the salty air. They went to their room. They opened the window so that the sound of the sea came in, and the salt-tanged breeze. They lay side by side, naked on the bed. Without conscious thought, Kath knew that now was the time of sacrament.
She turned. ‘Hold me …’
He did so, at first cautiously, then with increasing confidence. She felt the lean hardness of his chest and legs and arms. His hands moved, which was not what she wanted.
‘No.’ Instead she ran her own hands gently across his back, his shoulders, his arms, his neck, all of him here with her in the bed. She placed her ear to his chest, listening to her feelings in the steady beating of his heart. She breathed the scent of his skin while he lay unmoving, sensing without fully understanding what she was doing. Which was to discover herself in the being of this man.
At length she held him quietly, her body against his. She felt the rise and fall of his breathing against her breast. Which rose and fell also, while she listened to the slow unwinding of her dreams.
Everything would be simple, once she knew. Certainty was a chalice that she held carefully, as her hands held, so carefully, the tender awareness of his skin.
And was then asleep, quietly and deeply, with Jeth’s arms about her, the peaceful length of his body against her own.
When she woke, she was still holding him. He lay with the utter stillness of someone who was also awake. It was dark. The curtains moved in the breeze that flowed coolly through the window. Her face was against his chest. She kissed him gently and felt him stir.
‘Haven’t you slept?’ she asked him softly.
‘It doesn’t matter. Just to lie here, feeling you with me … It was all I wanted. It was wonderful.’
Was it? Was it truly? But this she did not need to say. Because now she was close to knowing his feelings and her own. One thing alone remained. She would not ask him to make love to her; she had to take the initiative herself. To seek, with every part of her feelings, mind, body. To find what now would be revealed.
So her tongue traced its path across him, her hands moved purposefully upon him, no longer seeking only the spirit but the flesh, too. Its demands became urgent, insistent, overwhelming. Until, at last, Kath came to find the peace and certainty that had evaded her for so long.
