by JH Fletcher
She belted him with her elbow. ‘Old biddy like that, teach you something you didn’t know, eh?’
He gave her a look. ‘You’re kinky. You know that?’
A fat lot Dulcie cared. ‘Think of me while you’re doing it, eh.’
Not that it would come to that.
Next time Wilf and Juniper got together, he let her make him a cup of tea at her place. Gave her a feel, for old times sake.
‘I shouldn’t let you do these things.’
‘Yes, you should.’
Licking, kissing. Touching.
‘Oh.’
‘Nice?’
‘You’ve got a wife. Children.’
The breath of her hair: clean, unlike some. Pink nipples, shy as roses.
‘I read there’s countries a bloke can have four wives.’
‘It wouldn’t be right.’
‘What I mean, if it’s okay for some, why not for the rest of us, eh?’
‘It would be quite wrong.’ But did nothing to stop a questing hand, caressing skin now dusted with sweat. ‘Please —’
Please stop? Please go on? Take your choice. Wilf chose. Obeying orders, he thought of Dulcie as he did it.
Afterwards, tenderness, with golden skin vulnerable in light that shone softly from the winter fireplace.
‘Tell me …’
Wilf opened his eyes, cautiously. ‘What?’
‘Why did you do it?’
‘Because I love you, girl.’ Echoes of the past in the lying words. That word, in particular.
‘Not that.’ A slow, tolerant smile; love was a given now, to Juniper Harris in her neat and lonely house.
‘What, then?’
‘Why did you marry Dulcie?’
If you loved me like you said you did. Like you say you do.
The unspoken words clanged bell-clear in the fire-lit room. Wilf was reluctant, even after what had happened, to put down his wife who, kinky or not, was more woman than this one would ever be. ‘Hard to say …’ The best he could manage.
‘Tell me.’
Any more of this and I’ll do a runner, five hundred acres or not. ‘Tell you what?’
‘You had to, didn’t you?’
Ah. ‘Well …’
‘Tell me I’m right.’
She was not. But. ‘Juniper, honestly, you’re a marvel.’
‘I knew it.’ Beaming all over her thin face, she grabbed him tight, eager claws lacerating his back.
‘I thought you’d hate me for it.’
‘I couldn’t hate you. Besides — don’t you see? — if you had to, it doesn’t really count.’
Inside his head Wilf shrugged. It was obvious what she wanted, so he gave it to her again, no worries.
Bloody funny way of thinking, some people.
Worn to a frazzle, time he got out of there. Juniper escorted him to the door, wearing a woolly robe, nothing underneath. She kissed him ferociously, biting his lips in the dim hallway. ‘Bye.’ And laughed, this needle-thin woman whom he had never heard laugh before. ‘See you soon.’
Out into the frosty darkness. Walked back down the road to the cottage with Juniper’s laugh for company. Not like Dulcie’s gravy-rich chuckle, but high and a little tentative, not quite used to the idea of it. Wilf had the notion that he might have stuck his head into a hornet’s nest.
Dulcie, waiting, took one look at him and burst into a merry peal. ‘Dirty bugger …’
All Wilf wanted was sleep, but she wouldn’t let him alone. ‘Tell me about it …’
To his surprise, he found that he was reluctant to do so. ‘Nothing to tell.’
‘Don’t give me that.’
His unwillingness eventually made her angry. ‘You’ve fallen for her, that’s what it is. Spiky little thing like that …’
‘Course I haven’t.’ He was sulky at the idea, which was so far from being the truth. ‘I reckon we’re playing her a lousy trick, that’s all.’
‘Liked it as much as that, did she? Wilf Warren, the demon lover, is that what we are? Casa-bloody-nova of the Mid-north?’ Her eyes were daggers through the cloud of tangled hair. ‘Can’t say I’ve seen much sign of it, myself.’
‘You never complained before.’ He appealed to her. ‘It was your idea, for God’s sake.’
But Dulcie had gone beyond reason. ‘Next thing, I suppose you’ll be moving in with her.’
‘I’d get a damn sight better welcome if I did.’
Exhausted, they slept eventually. In the morning went at it again.
‘Come here …’
For once, Wilf wasn’t in the mood. ‘Give over.’
She turned at once. ‘Oh I see. Keeping it all for her, are we?’
Until he stormed out of the house to scowl at the morning.
She got over it eventually, accepting that what they had started would have to go on or would have no point. Wilf, like a train, shunted up the hill twice a week. Now he was getting it from both of them.
‘Doesn’t she ever say anything?’ Love had softened Juniper in some ways, but not all. ‘Doesn’t she suspect?’
‘Dulcie’s not the jealous type …’ How he wished it were true! He was scared Juniper would want to go public, move in together. God knows what we do if she ever tries that, he thought.
She didn’t, but there were other things. He had a key to her place now. Sometimes, when he let himself in, she would be waiting naked in the darkness. She would wrap herself about him, breathing her desire into his mouth. Most ominously, she began to use the forbidden words.
‘Fuck me. Fuck me.’
Wilf tried to make a joke of it. ‘Play your cards right, I might just do that.’ But it was no laughing matter. The whisper rather than Juniper’s laugh accompanied him home now.
Fuck me. Bloody hell.
Another time she came to him in the middle of a Saturday afternoon, in the pen from which they had recently taken the sheep for shearing. Made love with filth-smeared bodies. Now the word changed.
‘Filth,’ she said, anointing both their bodies with sheep dung. ‘Filth …’
‘She’s round the bend,’ he told Dulcie when he got back to the cottage. ‘God knows what she’ll think up next.’
Since it had started, their own relationship had changed. No more screeching but the easy days were gone, Dulcie checking his every move. Now, however, she laughed with something like her old enjoyment. ‘You told me I was kinky. Now you’re finding out what kinky really is.’ And hugged him close, which she had not done for a while. ‘Come to Mumma …’
Drowning in Dulcie’s flesh, the clutch and suck of her pillow-like body, Wilf began to wonder, despairingly, if he would be able to survive the pair of them.
Now he felt apprehensive every time he walked up the road to Juniper’s place. Something was bound to happen; things couldn’t go on like this.
28
KATH
1956
Storm clouds in the Adelaide Hills.
Kath fought back against Jeth’s fury. ‘How could I tell you about the baby when I didn’t know where you were? If you were alive, even? Besides, there was no point. There was nothing either of us could have done.’
Which, as far as Jeth was concerned, was a long way short of good enough. ‘My child …’
‘You weren’t there. I had to decide.’
‘To chuck it away.’ His face was black with outrage.
Kath, with fury of her own: ‘You think it was easy?’
‘I don’t know. Was it?’
A hammer would have injured her less; the bitterness of the question almost felled her. Her memory was peopled with images: the child that meant so much, even now; the agony of not knowing what to do; the knowledge that whatever she did would be wrong; the conviction that, by giving away what mattered so much, she would bring upon herself the punishment that the years had indeed provided.
She could say none of it. He will understand or not, she thought. He will destroy what we have, or he will not. I can do n
othing.
She watched silently as Jeth, with set mouth and white face, went out of the house. He thrust his way up the slope between the trees, and Kath wondered whether she should have kept the past to herself. Was at once rebellious. I have borne it alone for so long. As I bore his child, alone. Let him carry his share, for once.
Now that he had gone, the house was full of menace; the creak and groan of the timbers that had given her companionship now threatened what might happen when Jeth returned. She busied herself with routine. Tea in the oven, cloth upon the table, knives and plates bearing their burden of trepidation and hope. She would not think, yet was sick to her stomach. Slowly the evening unravelled. Through the window she watched it wash the colour from the trees, fill the valley with smoke. Still Jeth did not come.
I shall not let the food spoil, she told herself. Walter and I shall eat without him, if that’s how he wants it. Was dishing up when she heard his footfall on the deck. Now she compelled her hands to remain steady.
He opened the door. Behind her turned back, she sensed him watching her. He has come to tell me to go, she thought.
A rush of steps, urgent upon the wooden floor. His arms enfolded her. ‘Please …’
She felt her heart dissolve, in her veins the flooding of blood that had been frozen in expectation of catastrophe. She turned to him, face wet, throat swollen. She clutched him to her. ‘It was the hardest thing I ever did.’
Jeth, holding her tight against his heart.
There was no more than a handful of people at the church. In her life Maudie had cast a long shadow but not, it seemed, among the people who made a habit of attending funerals; nor had she been a churchgoer. That had been one of the many comments that Kath remembered from the months they had spent together. ‘I’m not claiming any relationship, you understand, but there are times when I wonder whether Christ himself would have gone to church, the mob we’ve got running it.’
Yet, at the end, to church in her box Maudie had come. Kath had heard of a case where a priest had refused to conduct the funeral because the dead man had not attended church regularly. What happened to the doctrine of forgiveness? she wondered, and again remembered Maudie’s views about the people who ran the church and the world.
Good old Maudie, she thought. Subversive, even in her coffin. I wonder what she would think of Jeth, and everything that has happened to us.
During prayers that rose like incense, hymns that the small congregation scratched cacophonously across the air like chalk across a slate, Kath introduced the Maudie who had been, and for her still was, to Jeth and Walter and the life the three of them led together in the green hills.
Watch over us, she prayed, not knowing whether such things were possible. No doubt that priest would have said it was idolatrous to pray to a person and not to God. Well, he could take a jump. I’ll talk to whom I like, Kath informed him rebelliously. If God dislikes it, too bad. But doubted that He would.
Kath had wondered whether Beth would be there and she was, older and more reserved, but still Beth. Old Mr Horrocks had died, unexpectedly, only weeks after Aunt Clarrie. Kath had feared for her friend but, within a few months, she had married a farmer twenty-five years older than herself and gone with him to his farm at Booborowie. A dry old hole that was.
At the start of the service, they smiled at each other across the church and nodded but, as soon as things got going, Beth faced the front, most decorously. Kath kept an eye on the woman who had been her friend and still was, perhaps. Although she wondered. Even in Booborowie, Beth was bound to have heard about Kath’s latest exploit. Once again a married woman, member of the freemasonry of marriage, she was less likely to approve than she had during the less tidy days of war.
After the church service, the congregation straggled to the graveyard overlooking the sea, the grave gaping in the sandy earth. Again Beth and Kath smiled; again they had no chance to talk. The mourners stood awkwardly in the salt-stained air, an inopportune sun driving daggers through their dark clothes, while again the ritual took over.
‘Let light perpetual …’
It was finished. A chance to exchange notes, at last.
‘You heard I moved out?’
That much Beth was prepared to acknowledge, but with none of the joyful complicity they had shared once.
Kath persevered, as though to prove to herself that friendship could survive even the breaking of ranks over what was, and was not, permissible. ‘It’s Jeth. You remember? The American?’
Beth was not prepared to go as far as admitting such memories. Instead sighed. ‘Another oldie gone. Soon there won’t be any of them left.’
‘Then it’ll be our turn.’
Beth pursed her lips; no doubt the wife she had become considered such a remark in bad taste. She has been married less than a year, Kath thought. How could she have changed so much?
‘Have you heard how Hedley is?’ she wondered. This, deliberately, was in worse taste still, referring to what would be best forgotten, or at least ignored. Kath had hoped to provoke a response from this woman who had been her friend, but none was forthcoming.
‘I don’t keep up with the old mob,’ Beth said, and talked instead about the poor rains in the north, the poor prices everywhere, the problems of raising kids in rural areas — all the safe and traditional subjects. Of Kath’s own life she asked nothing.
To hell with that, Kath thought. I’m not a leper yet, I should hope. Although there might be two views of that.
‘We’ve got a place in the hills,’ she said. ‘Jeth’s the architect of the new Festival Centre in the city.’ Not wishing to brag, but determined to shove her relationship in the face of this woman who, so obviously, did not wish to know.
Beth smiled, ambiguously, and Kath realised there was no point in keeping on, that the barriers were up and would not be coming down. The exchange of words withered amid a buzzing of insects, while the coarse grass bowed and whistled in the wind. Silently, together yet not, they walked with the rest from the grave that was not yet ready to claim them.
In the church hall there was tea from an urn, a fistful of cakes and sandwiches cut in squares. Beth apart, Kath knew no-one. There were eyes that collided before jerking quickly away from each other, limping attempts at conversation swallowed by the hissing of the urn. Kath gulped her last mouthful of cake, swilled tea as strong as Samson. She said tooroo to Beth, who smiled graciously and paid not even lip service to the idea of getting together sometime. A fat lot Kath cared.
‘See ya,’ she said, and took off for the station.
The path from the church ran through the dunes overlooking the Southern Ocean. The wind was stronger than ever. The sand lifted in gritty clouds; all the way to the horizon, white horses reared brilliantly amid a constant rumble of surf; the hot sun bored holes in her head, and Kath thought what a day it was to be alive, and how Maudie would have enjoyed it had she been around.
Perhaps she is, she thought. There are so many things we don’t know. Maybe she’s walking beside me, now. On the off-chance that she might be, she said, ‘Thanks for everything, eh?’ and, momentarily, felt better for talking to the woman whom she had hardly known but who had been, and would always remain, her friend.
Why shouldn’t I talk to her? she wondered, for the second time that day. She’ll be alive as long as I am. It’s a poor show if mates can’t gab to each other.
She reached the road. The sound of the surf died. She walked to the station and caught the train.
Jeth met her, with Walter in tow.
‘You’d think I’d been away a month …’
Kath was delighted, all the same. The memory of Beth in her mind, she grabbed the pair of them, hugging them tight. My family, she thought.
Jeth must have sensed something. Back at the house, with Walter vanished somewhere on boys’ mysterious business, he looked at her. ‘What’s wrong?’
Kath had intended to say nothing, but found she could not fob off this man who had become e
verything to her. ‘Beth was there.’
‘And?’
‘I think we’ve grown apart since she got married.’
‘She doesn’t approve.’
‘Something like that.’ Even for Jeth there were limits to what she would say.
‘Does it bother you?’
A brilliant smile. ‘Not in the least.’ Nor did it. But …
That night they held each other skin-tight, their breath, flesh, hearts mingling. The noise of the rushing stream came in to them, the sense of being one swept them away, and Beth and Hedley and all the shoulds and should-nots and maybes were gone.
This, this, was all that mattered. Or nearly. I want a baby, Kath thought. To put the seal on all that has happened, on everything that exists between us. To replace the one who was lost. In good time, when nature wills it, that will add to everything we already have, make us complete at last.
By Christmas the project was well ahead of schedule, and Jeth decided he could take a break, like the builders and engineers who had all disappeared for the holidays. Kath had feared that he might go back to the States, but he was happy to stay in Australia. ‘Nothing for me back there.’
They agreed that a few days by the sea would be nice. They headed south, to the Fleurieu Peninsula. It was not as crowded as they’d feared. There were deserted beaches of white or yellow sand, dunes where the salt wind blew through the thin-boned grass and, while Walter was off amusing himself, lovers could be together.
They’d forgotten to bring towels.
‘You get sand up there,’ Kath warned him, ‘you’ll be in trouble.’
Somehow they managed. Kath cried aloud to the wind and screaming gulls and, if there was any sand, she did not know about it. Afterwards, hand in hand, they ran along the ribbed beach, plunging through the waves, crashing and splashing and laughing together like ten-year-olds. Kath, no swimmer, sat on the beach and watched while Jeth swam far out to sea.
‘Don’t go so far,’ she complained when he returned. Water streamed off his tanned body, his breath came in deep gasps, his skin was cold from the surf, and she thought she could die for love of him. ‘You get into trouble, you needn’t think I’m coming in to get you.’
