by JH Fletcher
Jeth went back to the States, his submission for the Arts Centre in. Kath waited and hoped, sick with longing. Let him win …
One day early in July, he phoned. He was quiet, but triumphant. His design had been selected ahead of eighteen others.
Kath could have wept — with relief, with fear of what it might mean. ‘Does that mean you’ll be back?’
‘More than back. I’ll be moving in.’
‘For how long?’
‘Years. Two, at least. However long it takes to build the Centre.’
Two years, at least! She could not grasp it. It was unimaginable, a lifetime.
‘We’ll need to talk, when I get back,’ Jeth told her. ‘About us.’
It might have been a threat, the way he spoke.
26
KATH
1956
Jeth was back in South Australia within the month. Two weeks later they had their talk, seated on a riverside bench overlooking what he intended would be his triumph. For August, it was warm. Ducks swam almost at their feet, eyeing them hopefully, or foraged beneath the brown-flowing water.
‘I’ve found a place,’ he said. ‘A converted mill in the Adelaide Hills.’ He took her hand while Kath’s heart shivered and lurched and almost died. ‘I want you to come and live there with me.’
She had asked him what they were going to do; now he had told her. By repeating what he had said to her on the beach, Jeth had turned dream into reality. She contemplated all it would mean and was afraid.
‘What about Walter?’
‘Bring him along.’
‘He’s fourteen,’ she cautioned. ‘He must have a say.’
‘So ask him.’
Even that would be hard; another step, perhaps irrevocable, on the road to commitment.
How do I tell him his mother is having an affair? How will he react? ‘I’ll try,’ she said.
He looked at her. ‘We’re not talking try. Do it.’
Kath went home. After a sleepless night she obeyed him.
She had feared that Walter would be embarrassed; at fourteen he would be on the edge of sexual awareness himself. Mothers should not be sexual, after all. He might show contempt, or hate.
He asked, ‘Do you love him?’
‘With all my heart.’
‘Go for it, then.’
‘Will you come with me?’
‘Of course.’
So, finally, it was up to her, as in her heart she had always known it would be. She phoned Jeth. ‘Walter says yes.’
‘And you?’
She hesitated. ‘I promise I’ll let you know in the morning.’
She sensed rather than heard his sigh. ‘Don’t let your husband talk you out of it.’
‘He won’t.’
She had no intention of discussing it with Hedley, who was no longer relevant. Her concern now was to do what was right for herself, for Walter, for Jeth.
‘Be sure,’ Jeth warned her. ‘No more second thoughts.’
‘There won’t be.’
That night Kath thought and thought and, by morning, knew that in truth there was nothing to think about. Hedley had rights and, since he had come back from the war, she had tried to observe them. Now a greater priority had overwhelmed them, and her. Kath had rights herself: to a life that she saw now had been stolen from her from the beginning. Even then he was not honest with me, she thought. His talk of sacrifice meant nothing. All he ever wanted was the land. Well, that he has; not in law but in fact. He crops it, he leaves his imprint upon it, as he has cropped and left his imprint upon me. Now is the time to end it, to make a fresh beginning of that other life I should never have given up.
Sending Jeth away was the greatest wrong I ever did, she told herself. To both of us. In anything else, when you make a mistake, you’re expected to put it right, if you can. Yet in this, the most important thing of all, you’re supposed to put up with it. Even if it destroys your life and everyone else’s. Once you’re married, that’s it. No second chances.
Well, Kath thought, I am about to break that rule. I shall not allow my life to be destroyed because of a mistake made, in ignorance and innocence, when I was eighteen years old. I shall take Walter with me; I shall not let Hedley steal him as he has stolen so much. I shall try, once again, to live the life that should have been mine from the first. If people don’t like it, they can damn well put up with it.
Kath considered her brave words. She was uncertain even now whether she meant them. So great a step …
She walked onto the veranda and looked across the sleeping valley. It was utterly still, the dew-wet grass holding its breath against the slow gathering of the light. The sun was still below the eastern escarpment, yet already the sky was changing from grey to rose to a deepening gold. This I shall miss, she thought. Yet it would be a cheap price to pay for freedom, if she had the courage to do it at all.
She walked down the steps to the grass. Startled by her movement, a pink and grey explosion of galahs stained the silence with its screeching. Step by step, in slow and breath-held ritual, she walked to the far limit of the lawn, where strands of barbed wire set their fangs between her and the gentle unfolding of the wheat-green paddocks. She stood with the breathless air about her, waiting as the hunched trees — fig, apricot and nectarine, apple and plum and mulberry — waited for the triumph of the dawn.
The sky brightened, the gold running molten along the crest of the distant range.
Still Kath waited, as every thought and desire and decision also waited for the emphatic assertion of the light.
And waited.
Come, she thought, straining in unspeakable yearning towards the still invisible sun. Come.
Silence, breathless.
On her toes in the wet grass, arms outstretched in supplication, every fibre taut and expectant.
Come.
A chink, a glitter of pure gold. Expanding, rushing to fill the universe, all Kath’s yearning soul. With it, she was free of her doubting self. She lowered her arms, turned and walked purposefully back to the house. She climbed the steps, went indoors to rooms still smelling of sleep and darkness. She lifted the phone with an untrembling hand. She dialled.
The receiver lifted at once, as though Jeth, too, had been awaiting the coming of the light. His voice spoke softly. ‘Yes?’
‘We are coming. Both of us. Now.’
Over the dividing distance, along the metal strands that connected them, his relief flowed as clear as the new and sun-bright sky. ‘Thank God.’
Out, then, with the pre-packed suitcase clumsy in her hand, to the car. Her car. I shall take nothing of Hedley’s, she thought. I shall not permit him to reproach me for doing that. My clothes, my thoughts and feelings, which have never interested him. The car, bought with my own money. The wife and son who, whatever he may think, have never been his and therefore cannot be taken from him. Memories, which will be meaningless to him. Years of life, which he has never shared. I take nothing that is not mine to take. There will be no reproaches.
She put the bulging case, tied by a strand of rope around its sagging middle, in the boot of the car, closed the lid. One more thing done. She went back to the house, woke Walter, ladled him, still half-sleeping, into the passenger seat.
Now came the ritual of parting. For the last time she went indoors. She touched the handle of the door, the slick-slippery polished table top in the living room, the stove, the taps, the past fabric and torment of a life now ended. Her face was silent, her lips unmoving. Only her heart bade farewell to the years and endurance of a life that had never been and that now was ended. The moment drenched her heart, but not her eyes. Which remained dry, and calm, and lost in silence.
Gone.
She checked that all was tidy, every pot and pan and memory in its proper place. She would not have it said that she had not left things as they should be. She went out and closed the door. She climbed into the car and drove away down the hill.
She drove, and did not
think. The hills unfolded. Into the midst of them the car climbed amid the solemn greeting of the silent trees. Up and down, around bends that scored no mark upon her memory. Down again, finally, to the dark secrecy of the hunched wood, the rushing water, the mill wheel mossed in years and silence. Where Jeth, and life, waited to enfold her.
‘Is that where he lives?’
‘Yes.’
‘Cool.’
My son. My life. My love, come suddenly to golden fruition this bright day.
Down the hill, snaking between grey cliffs, the clutching arms of trees. The mill lost to sight then reappearing, much closer. And, at last, there before her. She stopped and switched off the engine. She leant back in her seat amid the sudden silence, eyes closed, heart pumping. It was hard to believe she had finally done it, that she was here, that everything …
He was there. The sudden certainty flowed in the darkness behind her closed lids. She was smiling, mind and body filled with rapture, even before she opened her eyes to embrace what she knew she would see, the man come silently and with her now, his eyes smiling through the open window of the car.
I have never known such certainty.
The realisation was one with a world suddenly whole. Here she would be complete. She reached out her hand to him through the window, offering not merely the touch of her flesh but her entire life. In the same spirit he took it, and the silence between them was clamorous with joy that here, at last, after so many years, they had become one.
The day passed peacefully, Kath filled with wonder and an enduring sense of disbelief that her home was now this place, with this man, and that all things had come to her.
That night, Walter asleep in the wooden-walled room that Jeth had made ready for him, they sat in the semi-darkness of the living room, windows wide to the liquid plash of the stream, occasional lamps casting pools of light upon the hand-knotted rugs that covered the strip floor, watching each other with eyes that reflected both the lantern gleam and darkness of the night.
‘We’ve hardly talked since I got here,’ Kath said. That was true yet untrue, the communication between them needing no words to be complete. In acknowledgement of the fact, she made no attempt to pursue the conversation but sat, her hand in his, content to let silence and the liquid sound of water do her talking for her. There was music that Jeth played on the record player, Mozart and a Beethoven symphony.
‘No Shostakovich?’ The tap root of memory.
‘Afraid not. But the Beethoven sets the mood.’
So it did, its triumphant finale exemplifying all the hopes and values of her new life. Its sonority accompanied her when, finally, she went with Jeth to the bedroom and the bed. Through the open window the plunging stream sang its dark song and, at last, at the end of the day that had seen so much, she slept.
Next morning, sunny and serene, Kath understood fully the enormity of what she had done. She had abandoned her husband, her way of life, all the people and things that until now had made up her existence, to flee to the arms of her American lover. There was nothing to tell her how her life would be now. It would be different, utterly — that, at least, she knew — but what form it would take she could not imagine. For the moment it did not matter, but she foresaw that it might when the moment came to create the fabric of an existence to take the place of what had been abandoned. So Kath awoke the man for love of whom she had surrendered all certainty, and touched and coaxed him until they were once again united in the flesh.
She sought, not so much a renewal of passion as a solution to the problem of identity. Who is he? she wondered. Who am I? And had no answers, knowing only that the slow kindling of heat was a comfort that might, with time, suffice to answer all things.
It was indeed a different life, yet in some ways not different at all; the persistent echoes might have disturbed her, had she permitted. Every weekday and most weekends, Jeth drove into the city where, on the south bank of the river, the Centre was beginning to unfold its wings above the olive-green water. Walter was enrolled at the local school so, during term time at least, he too was gone, Jeth dropping him off at the school gates. At mid-afternoon he came back again on the school bus, but the hours in between were Kath’s alone. They were an amalgam of enchantment and routine.
Enchantment lay in the secret voices of the trees about the house, the gossip of leaves and branches upon the steeply-plunging slopes. Enchantment lay in the plunge of the stream down the wet gorge, the rock face on either side of the silver scar of water, grey and lichen-dappled in sunlight, black and gleaming where the tumbling spray fell ceaselessly upon it. Routine was the tenderness, ever present, that cushioned and caressed the hours: cleaning and cooking, washing and ironing, the domestic chores that were her glad offering to the hills and her new life.
When she’d finished her work, she walked as fast as she could up the steep slope between the aromatic trees, the brittle crunch of fallen leaves and bark beneath her feet. At first she felt the sharp pull upon lungs and muscles unaccustomed to such steepness, but soon this passed and she was able to stretch her legs freely, measuring herself against the peaceful glory of the hills.
She felt wonder that she was here, cradled within a life containing everything her heart desired.
Then came the evening, when Jeth returned from the mysteries of his day. Much in their new life was strange to him, also — new land, new attitudes, the constant awareness of being foreign — yet his work gave him the joy that Kath found in the trees. He talked and she listened, but not too closely — superstition prevented it. What he did was part of the mystery. She feared the lightning flash of enlightenment; it was safer not to know too much.
At dusk, during the evenings of high summer, they walked together through the woods, talking silently or in words together, before returning to the house beside the stream, the lights golden against the gathering darkness, the trunks of the trees fading from brown to black as night came down.
After supper, more music; Kath was hooked now by this symbol of what had been the beginning and was now the continuation, the safe haven of their lives. Scarlatti and Mussorgsky, Pachelbel and Sibelius. The universe of Wagner, so appropriate to the rocks and wilderness in which their lives were set.
Love, ever new, amid the soft creaking of the house. Kath felt fulfilled, but frightened by the enormity of all she had, the vulnerability of having too much. That might be taken from her.
‘Come here,’ Jeth said. There was a smile in his voice but something more: a thickness that drew a quivering response from Kath’s nerves.
She came, as ordered.
His hand was closed upon something. He held it out to her. ‘Here.’
She stared, uncertainly. ‘What is it?’
It was a nectarine, red and shiny. He proffered it, holding it gently to her lips. She took a bite. It was ripe, the red skin bursting easily, the orange flesh full of juice. He pressed the fruit against her teeth as she ate it, voluptuously, her head thrown back, the sweet juice running down her chin, her throat, into the opening of her shirt. When the flesh of the nectarine was finished, he leant forward and kissed her on the mouth, lingeringly, then on the chin and throat, kissing away the juice. He opened the neck of her shirt and kissed her there, too — her lips wide to breathe the fruit-sweet air.
It was yet another defining moment in her life. She knew that never again would she see or taste a nectarine without remembering this moment, the sweetness of the fruit, the rich juice flowing down her chin, the voluptuous sensation of Jeth’s tongue upon her flesh. The helpless surrender of herself to sensuality and love.
She heard nothing from Hedley. To begin with, she had been afraid, each day had gone to pick up the post with fear in her heart. It was not Hedley’s way to give up anything that he regarded as his own, and to him Kath and Walter would certainly be that. Yet there was never anything.
Perhaps, she thought, he has decided that Jeth will get sick of us and chuck us out; perhaps he doesn’t care.
&
nbsp; Not knowing what Hedley might do was more frightening than certainty; the fact that so far he had done nothing did not mean he would not in the future. She tried to talk to Jeth about it but he, supportive in all else, dismissed her fears.
‘If he tries any tricks, we’ll get a lawyer on him.’
But aren’t we the ones in the wrong? she wondered. I left him, after all. With Hedley’s child. What the law might say about that, Kath did not know. She was afraid that Hedley might seek to punish her through the child. She had visions of the boy being spirited from her, of never seeing Walter again. Which she would be unable to bear. Almost as bad, of a lawsuit stripping away tranquillity, fulfilment, the body of her son.
Weeks passed. Nothing happened until, shutting her eyes to her knowledge of her husband, she came to think herself safe. Yet even her charmed life was not proof against all loss. December brought sad news. Far away in the south-east, Aunt Maudie was dead.
‘I must go,’ Kath told Jeth.
He did not understand. ‘Why must you go? Who was she?’
Resolution formed and acted upon between one breath and the next, Kath told him. Who Maudie was and what she had done, and why. And the consequences.
Jeth, incredulous and horrified, teetered on the edge of appalling rage.
‘A baby? You had our baby? And you’ve never told me until now?’
27
WILF
1956
Making love to a woman because it might bring them five hundred acres, a woman who was quite likely to see them both out? To Wilf it all seemed incredibly far-fetched. Quite apart from whether Juniper would go along. ‘Dunno what I’m doing it for.’
But he carried on anyway, through autumn and into winter. Anything to keep Dulcie happy. Thought she might be getting a kick out of watching her husband pay court to an old lady.
