by Fiona Lowe
Her body jerked as if a jolt of electricity coursed through her but he didn’t seem to notice. He was still talking as though it was a relief to finally have permission to broach the subject.
‘I took the letter up to the homestead on my last afternoon. Stewie, the old shearer, told me giving it to the housekeeper was my best bet but when I rang the bell your father answered the door.’
‘My father?’ She didn’t think she had a single memory of Fraser Mannering ever answering the front door of Murrumbeet. Mrs Chester, their housekeeper, yes. Her mother, certainly, on the few occasions Mrs Chester was indisposed, but her father? Never. If he was home and the loud doorbell ever shrilled a second time, his booming voice would sound from his study summoning a female—family member or otherwise—to answer the door.
Doug nodded. ‘Yeah. I wasn’t expecting it either. The blokes on the station always reckoned the boss was a bit of a …’
Edwina heard his hesitation and knew it was in deference to her feelings but she had no illusions left as to the type of man her father had been. ‘Bastard? Go right ahead and call a spade a spade. It won’t offend me.’
Doug gave a shrug. ‘Thing is, back then, I didn’t think he was a bastard. The few times I’d had anything to do with him in the shearing shed or out in the paddocks, he’d been fair. When I explained I was leaving for nasho, he invited me in. We had a beer. He asked me about my family and my future plans. I told him I was good with engines and I planned on opening a workshop one day. I told him I loved you and I hoped my future included you.’
Her heart lurched with a combination of shock, appreciation and dust-covered acceptance. She’d kept Doug a secret from her family and friends but now his words summoned up missing pieces of an old and faded puzzle; they vied to fit into the spaces that had lain empty for decades. ‘I had no idea you’d told my father about us.’
‘What was I supposed to do?’ He ran his hand across the back of his neck. ‘I was sitting in his house, drinking his beer and holding a letter addressed to his daughter. I thought telling him was the right thing to do.’
Weary resignation rolled through her. In another time and with another man it would have been the right thing to do but not in 1968 in the heart of country Victoria’s landed gentry. Part of her wanted to berate him for his twenty-year-old naiveté but how could she? He’d always been a decent man who valued integrity, loyalty and hard work. He believed a man proved himself on those merits.
Not once during those halcyon days when they’d shut out the world, dreamed, talked and planned their future together, had she told him her parents would never accept him. There’d been no point. He’d been conscripted and was committed to the army for two years, and despite her father’s grumblings to the contrary, she was determined to go to university. After Doug was discharged they’d only need to wait one more year and she’d be free to marry him without her parents’ consent. Why hurt him unduly by raising her father’s racist and elitist beliefs? Why tell him her parents would die rather than allow her to marry a farmhand who had Irish, English and Aboriginal blood running in his veins?
‘What did my father say to you when you told him about us?’
‘He shook my hand and wished me well.’
Old anger at her father reignited, popping and crackling like burning red gum and raining showers of sparks into her veins. ‘He never gave me the letter. He never even told me you’d visited.’
‘He assured me he’d give it to you.’
‘He lied.’ She couldn’t stop the accusatory tone from seeping into her voice. ‘Why would you believe him?’
He frowned and she saw hurt and confusion duelling with exasperation. ‘He gave his word. I had no reason not to believe him. Hell, it wasn’t the only letter, Eddy. I wrote from basic and corps training. A letter a week for months.’ He looked down at his hands. ‘At first I thought you were just pissed off at me for leaving without telling you, but then I got worried. I tried to get back here before I flew out but because you weren’t family the army wouldn’t pay for my travel. I didn’t have the money to fly from Canungra to Melbourne and I didn’t have the time to bus it down here and get back without going AWOL.
‘I spent a fortune on a long-distance phone call to Murrumbeet but Mrs Chester said you weren’t home. I got her to write down that I’d been posted to the ordnance depot at Vung Tau. Spelled the bloody name out letter by letter but still I heard nothing. It was like you’d fallen off the face of the earth. I stopped writing after that. I reckoned your silence was telling me it was over.’
Her dormant pain grew jagged barbs and crawled through her as fresh and strong as if her heart had been broken yesterday. She knew all about the ominous and terrifying sounds of silence. She’d lived with them too. ‘I loved you.’
Sadness shone in his eyes, matching hers. ‘And I loved you too. But living in a war zone is surreal. Nothing’s familiar. Nothing seems real and yet everything’s more real than home. Your silence let the doubts roar in. Loud, malicious doubts that told me I was a dickhead to think I had a chance with you. That you’d been slumming it with me. Just a rich girl getting her kicks with one of the workers. It didn’t help that I was living with blokes whose answer to any problem was to get drunk or root a local or both.’
His words, full of anguish, hailed down on her. The young man she’d loved all those years ago was here now, and hurting. She wanted to interrupt him, tell him that all those doubts were wrong; that he’d been exactly the calibre of man she’d have been honoured to share her life with, but she stayed silent. He needed to tell his story and she needed to hear it. She needed those missing pieces to complete the puzzle of their separation. She needed to try to understand and, in the process, patch and darn her own pain of those dreadful months.
‘I tried to forget you, Ed,’ he said wearily as if revisiting that time and space was exhausting him. ‘I hated myself for still loving you when you’d obviously forgotten me so easily. I tried to hate you but I didn’t have it in me. No matter how hard I tried to forget you, it was thoughts of you that got me through patrols. I never knew if I was going to cop a Viet Cong bullet or live to hear yet another chopper full of casualties land at the hospital.
‘Six months in, I was supposed to do a stint up at Radar Hill but a mate asked me to swap shifts so he could see his girl that night.’ He picked up a stick and his faintly oil-stained fingers snapped it into neat lengths. ‘Poor bugger stood on a mine. Lost both legs. That night in the hospital, I sat with him, watching the empty space where his legs used to be and all I could think of was you. I needed the truth. I swallowed my shattered pride and wrote one last letter asking if I still had a chance with you. Or if it was really over.’
He rubbed his forehead. ‘I got a letter from your father. He said he didn’t want to disappoint a man fighting for freedom but you were up at university and you’d just got engaged. He said don’t write again.’
A metallic taste filled her mouth. She tried to picture Doug in the oppressive tropical heat surrounded by the sounds of war and reading a letter she’d never known had been sent. ‘He lied, Doug. I was never at university.’
‘But the engagement wasn’t a lie,’ he said with a trace of accusation in his voice. ‘When I finished my tour, I came back to Murrumbeet. I had to see you just to make sure you were happy. Check that this Richard character was the bloke you really wanted. I avoided the homestead but Stewie told me you were on your honeymoon. Turns out, I’d missed your wedding by five days.’
Her hand went to her mouth as her insides were pulverised by the weight of appalling timing. ‘Oh, God, Doug. I had no idea. I’m so sorry.’
His mouth tightened. ‘That night I got drunker than I’d ever got in ’Nam. Believe me, that’s saying something. I spent the night in the Billawarre lockup sleeping it off.’
He turned to her, his gentle and caring eyes filled with difficult questions. ‘I know we were young, Eddy. Hell, you were just out of school, but I never took you f
or someone who’d change her mind so fast. Never thought you were the type who’d punish me so harshly for the stupid mistake of not saying goodbye. That you’d marry someone else fourteen months later. I didn’t understand any of it but you were married so what could I do? Nothin’. I left town. I didn’t let myself think about us again. And I haven’t.’
He dug his booted heel into the pine needles. ‘Well, I didn’t until I drove into Billawarre with the rally and then it all came back. I never expected to find you still here but there you were, looking as beautiful as ever. This last fortnight’s been wonderful. Makes me feel like we’ve never been apart but …’ He gave a heavy sigh and his shoulders slumped. ‘It’s flummoxed me all over again. What the hell happened? I really need to know.’
Memories of those long-gone awful days, memories she’d forced into a box before slamming the lid hard and bolting it shut, blew their lock. They rolled through her, kicking and biting and bringing with them distress not remotely attenuated by the passage of time. She was hurled back hard and fast into the past. Her nostrils twitched as if she smelled the smoke from the burn-off that had hung like a pall over Murrumbeet that long-ago autumn.
In her mind she heard the rhythmic chug-chug-chug of the old Massey Ferguson tractor ploughing up and down the paddocks, readying the rich, dark soil to accept the seeds of wheat like a lush and fertile womb. Her mind played images like a projector casting them onto a screen. She saw terrified and shaking lambs bleating for their mothers as they were herded onto trucks bound for the abattoirs. Riding roughshod over time and place was the breath-sucking anxiety that Doug had left her for good.
She gripped his forearm hard, hoping the pressure would convey to him how much she needed him to listen carefully. ‘I loved you, Doug. I didn’t marry Richard because I’d changed my mind. I married him because …’ She halted, not wanting to get ahead of herself. ‘Please know I wrote to you. I called the army. I tried to find a relative of yours to get word to you. No one knew where you were from or who your family were. I never got a reply to any of my letters. I thought you’d abandoned me for a different life.’
He tugged at his salt and pepper curls as if they would offer an answer to a perplexing question. ‘How the hell can that many letters go missing?’
She wrapped her arms around her knees and sighed. ‘They didn’t go missing. Now I know my father knew about us I can see him as clear as day dropping that first letter into the fire before the front door had even closed behind you. After that, he’d have instructed my mother and the housekeeper to vet all my mail and destroy anything from you. In his eyes you lacked the pedigree to marry me.’
‘Bastard.’ His jaw tightened as he absorbed the news. ‘But that doesn’t explain why I never got any of your letters.’
‘No.’ Different memories—ones that were never too far away—surfaced. ‘For a long time, I didn’t have access to a letterbox. I depended on other people to post my letters. Obviously, my father must have got to them too.’
‘What do you mean you couldn’t get to a letterbox?’
She gazed out at the lake, watching a pelican coming in to land—blue-grey feet outstretched, wings akimbo; a living, breathing jumbo jet.
‘Were you sick, Eddy? Did you break your legs?’
If only.
CHAPTER
16
‘Shh.’ Georgie pressed two fingers to Ben’s lips and felt the laughter shaking his body vibrate into her own. It had been years since she’d been in a single bed, let alone sharing one with a fully grown man. There was barely enough room to breathe or wriggle a big toe but she didn’t care. She was flying high on the wonder of it all. She’d never had a secret lover and as she snuggled into his arms, she decided that everyone should have the opportunity at least once in their life just for the sheer thrill of it.
Saturday night had now tipped into Easter Sunday, although dawn was still many hours away. Georgie had called Ben two hours earlier. She’d waited until the house was quietly creaking in its slumberous way and her mother and Charlotte were settled in their rooms. Harriet was no longer at Glenora; she’d packed her bags after Friday’s disastrous breakfast and returned to Miligili. Georgie had given her thirty-one hours to cool down before visiting the guesthouse. She was of the opinion that the only way for Harriet and Charlotte’s relationship to have any chance of surviving was if they were living in the same house.
‘Please come back,’ she’d pleaded on Saturday afternoon. ‘Glenora’s not the same without you.’
‘I can’t do that. Edwina’s betrayed me and Charlotte …’ Harriet’s haughty tone had cracked. ‘I can’t sit around and pretend to play happy families. Not when my daughter’s throwing her life away and my mother’s enabling it.’
Although Georgie didn’t agree with Harriet’s refusal to support Charlotte, she conceded some understanding of Harriet’s anger with their mother. All their lives they’d seen Edwina in her role as one of Billawarre’s elite—a position given to her courtesy of the Mannering family name and wealth. Although it wasn’t a position either Georgie or Xara wanted, Edwina had retained it by living her life according to those unspoken rules inherent with the position: duty, responsibility, honour and moral guardianship. Harriet had happily followed suit. For Edwina to appear so calm about her granddaughter’s teenage pregnancy, as well as being so adamant that Harriet accept Charlotte’s decision, was so far out of the realms of normal and known behaviour it was unrecognisable.
Edwina’s stance made absolutely no sense and Georgie and Xara had discussed it at length but their conversation hadn’t thrown up any clear answers. If anything, it had raised more questions. Georgie had two reasons for not having a similar conversation with Harriet: it would only exacerbate her sister’s antagonism toward Edwina and it wouldn’t make her change her mind about returning to Glenora.
She’d noticed a pile of the weekend’s newspapers and caught sight of a headline, Disgraced Mayor Hides in Mansion.
It had given her an idea and she’d changed tack. ‘What about James?’
‘What about him?’
‘How can you stand being back at Miligili when he’s here?’
Harriet’s shoulders had stiffened and her mouth had pursed, puckering into a wrinkled and bitter line as fast as if she’d sucked on a lime. ‘He’s in the main house. I’m here. There’s a full-size tennis court, a swimming pool and a pool house separating us. I intend to keep it that way.’
‘Yes, but people won’t know you’re living in the guest house. They’ll think you’ve moved back into the main house and forgiven him.’ She’d dived into dirty pool territory, anything to get Harriet back to Glenora. ‘People talk and they judge. You know how much you hate that.’
Harriet’s hand had trembled as she sloshed shiraz into a wine glass. The rich red fluid swirled fast around the deep bowl, the force driving out a drop, which spread its indelible stain across Harriet’s white silk blouse. ‘People are already talking and believe me, they’re not letting the truth get in the way of their opinions. They’re also walking.’ She’d taken a gulp of wine, breaking her not-until-sixpm rule a good hour early. ‘At the moment I’ve got ten patients booked in to see me next week. Come Tuesday, it’s likely to be less.’
‘Oh, Harry.’ Georgie had moved to hug her but Harriet had held out her large glass like a shield so she stuck with, ‘I’m so sorry. I’m sure it’s just a knee-jerk reaction. Things will settle down, especially when they realise the travel that’s involved to see another surgeon.’
‘I doubt it.’ Harriet had stared out at her autumnal garden with unfocused eyes. ‘I’ve never been hated before, Georgie. It’s …’ But she hadn’t finished the sentence. She’d swallowed more wine instead.
A wave of helplessness had washed over Georgie. She’d never seen Harriet so adrift. Knowing that the usual platitudes didn’t work with her big sister, she’d turned to practicalities. ‘Do you want me to stay here with you tonight?’
‘Don’t be rid
iculous,’ Harriet had snapped. ‘I’m not sick.’
Georgie had refrained from muttering, You’re not exactly well and instead threw together a tuna stir-fry and stayed until Harriet had eaten enough to soak up some of the wine. As she left the guesthouse, she’d said, ‘You’re still coming to Sunday lunch though, right?’
Harriet’s glare had blistered her skin.
She’d returned to Glenora alone. The moment her car’s tyres crunched on the driveway, Charlotte had rushed out onto the veranda with hope bright on her face. It faded as soon as Georgie stepped out of the car alone. Resigned sadness—the type of despondency people could more easily accept in their older relatives—settled over her, slumping her shoulders and pulling down her lips.
Georgie had fought back tears for all of them. For Charlotte, who craved her mother’s approval and support. For Harriet, who was pushing her daughter away and risking a rift that could deepen into something permanent. And she’d fought back tears for herself; Charlotte had a chance at motherhood that Georgie coveted more than anything. Accepting that fact was proving to be very difficult. The constant ache inside her twisted cruelly but with fortitude she wasn’t aware dwelled in her, she’d pushed her grief aside, buried her jealousy and hugged her niece.
‘It’s early days, poss. She’s still in shock.’
‘But you know what she’s like,’ Charlotte had said wearily. ‘It’s easier to reverse the spin of the earth’s rotation than change her mind. Dad’s betrayed her and now she thinks I have too. I’ve let her down.’
‘Hey.’ Georgie had held Charlotte’s shoulders firmly and given her a little shake. ‘Even when things are going well, Harry makes it hard for us mere mortals not to let her down. Right now she’s upset. She’s not seeing things as clearly as she might, but that’s her problem. It’s not yours. The best thing you can do is honour your decision and prove to her that you’re in charge of your own life.’
