Lost in her reverie, Ruth trudged back along her route and was several doors past her own before she realised it. The reason, however, became immediately apparent — the Porsche was gone!
She stood there, mouth agape, staring wildly about her in ever-diminishing circles, then downwards as if the machine might have sunk through the bitumen, and up as if it might have flown to perch in a tree. Then she mouthed several unrepeatable words about both Kurtis and his damned car and rushed inside to find the expectable, horrible, damnable note on her telephone table.
More of a letter than a note, to be fair, but, seeing that all too familiar ‘Dear my lady witch’ at the beginning, Ruth was too close to foaming at the mouth to be anything like charitable. She threw down the papers and snatched up the letter, meanwhile repeating die unrepeatable curses she’d only just completed. After its fury-making salutation the letter said:
‘Gone to Hobart. Didn’t want to—had to!
‘Bad business problem. No choice, unless we want to be going hungry. Maybe best for now anyway — we seemed to be getting nowhere fast. Still, dear witch, it isn’t over by any stretch of the imagination. We had too much to let it go like this.’
There was a pause, a gap, a scribbling mark of the pen which Ruth couldn’t decipher — if she was indeed meant to — then he continued.
‘I shall be back by Wednesday night. Against, I know, your wishes and my own better judgement I have arranged whatever time off you may want or need just in case you’re tempted to come south and finish this ... whatever we’re doing. Doubt you will, but the offer’s there. Otherwise, see you Wednesday night.
‘Just remember I love you, whatever you may think or have thought. If I didn’t care, I wouldn’t be writing this letter and I wouldn’t have given you all this time to sort things out by yourself, although I now wonder if it was the right thing for me to have done. Whatever’s wrong, we can fix it if we both want to, and I probably should have insisted we try together from the very start.’
And he had signed it ‘your usually obedient servant’ then added a p.s. ‘Sorry to have made you waste your day, but I don’t know how to make it up to you ... yet.’
Ruth sneered at the entire offering, at first. Then she read it again, this time trying to peer between the lines, trying to sense Kurtis’ meaning, rather than just his words.
It was like trying to think while half asleep; her mind slogged through mires of despair and confusion, round and round and back and forth. Finally she gave it up for the moment and turned to idle perusal of the newspapers she’d bought.
The various articles which passed for ‘news’ interested her only in passing. Kurtis would, she knew, have read every word, although not with much credence. He’d been a journalist himself, once, in what he termed ‘a former life,’ and often bemoaned how low the profession had fallen.
‘Most of this lot wouldn’t have survived as copy-chasers in my day,’ he’d said. ‘Nobody wants to be just an honest journalist any more; they all want to be celebrities and columnists and TV superstars.’
But his knowledge of the profession had always stood him in good stead, allowing him to read between the lines, to see and comprehend what the stories really said, really meant.
Ruth shook her head angrily, furious with herself for allowing her mind to drift this far from the real issue, which was what she could and should do about her husband, her marriage, herself!
He was right, of course. They could fix whatever was wrong if they both tried hard enough, if they both wanted to. If they could trust each other ... if she dared to trust him.
Did she? Ruth abandoned the papers and began to pace the room, her mind spinning. To her knowledge he had never lied to her, never even tried. Except ... Rosemary’s face leapt into focus in her mind, Rosemary’s voice sounded in her ears. There had been something between them; there must have been; still was. They were united in business somehow, that much she was certain of. And otherwise ... ?
Ruth alternated her pacing with periodic pauses to scan the pages, her mind seldom absorbing what she read, turning the exercise into mindless work while she thought, while her subconscious tried to make sense of eleven probably wasted months. Eleven wasted months — or was it closer to two years? she wondered then, Perhaps the entire involvement with Kurtis had been wasted from the very start.
But if it had, Ruth realised, she must share the blame, must indeed accept that most of it was hers alone. Kurtis had tried his best to be open and fair, tried to anticipate problems before they occurred, tried to counter what he’d instinctively felt about her naïveté, her feelings of being a country bumpkin, of being unable to fit into his high-tech, swift-paced world.
She felt, just then, a terrible, cloying sense of self-pity and guilt, combined with an overwhelming feeling of warmth and compassion for her husband and what she had put him through.
Then she absently turned a page, read the caption beneath a picture that was all too familiar, and her warm feeling turned to bitter ice.
Rosemary! Rosemary in all her stunning, sophisticated loveliness, standing with a man Ruth didn’t know, had never seen before, although his name was vaguely familiar. But the caption said it all. He was Rosemary’s fiancé, her recent fiancé!
So that was why he’d made the sudden bid for reconciliation, she thought, the bitter ice turning to white- hot fury with the same acrid taste. Rosemary had finally found a man to replace Kurtis, leaving him, leaving him to return to his wife.
The room seemed to swirl around her like invisible smoke; Ruth felt for an instant as if she would faint. But she focused her eyes on the picture, on the shimmering words beneath it, on the ice inside her at the realisation of what it all meant.
Of course Kurtis wanted a reconciliation. Now that he was being removed from his ever-so-cosy relationship with Rosemary, it probably made sense to renew relations with his wife, however much of a second choice she might be.
‘You fool,’ she sighed to herself, only to repeat the words again and again in a bitter litany of self-loathing and contempt as she walked from the room, moving blindly towards her bedroom with the intention of flinging herself down on her bed for a good cry.
But to get there she had to pass the mirror, and her eyes trapped themselves there in passing, trapped themselves and in the process forced herself to look at herself, to look at how she was reacting, how she was thinking.
Accusing, those eyes. Staring back at her from the mirror they seemed to shout their accusations silently but no less accurately for all that.
You’re jumping to conclusions again, they cried. Look at yourself; you’re acting like a child. One minute you admit Kurtis was right, the next you accuse him without even the courtesy of asking for an explanation. You’ve never asked him for an explanation about Rosemary, except just the other day. Never! And now you use a newspaper picture to excuse yourself from taking the really hard decision, for going to him as he’s asked, from sitting down like an adult and talking out your problems. He’s your husband, but you treat him as if he’s never been important, never ... as if you never loved him at all...
Ruth wrenched herself free of the accusing, death-grey eyes, did indeed fling herself down on her bed as if to bury her head beneath the pillows, blot out all memory, deny the truth of what her reflection had told her.
But she couldn’t. As she lay in a silence punctuated only by her own sobbing breaths, by the thundering of her heartbeat, she found herself coming face to face with a reality she had managed to ignore — deliberately — for so very, very long.
Kurtis had been right. From the very beginning, he’d seen her inability to face the hard decisions, her refusal to face up to herself, to her flightiness, to her tendency to jump to conclusions without proper thought, to her predilection for putting far too much into the ‘too hard basket’.
He’d once asked her if she was really in love with him, or just with the idea of being in love. She’d laughed it off, as she’d laughed off so many o
f his serious questions, Ruth realised. So many ... too many.
And now it was too late to laugh. She had only one real choice. She must go to him and try to open up her emotions, open up her thoughts, be straight with him, honest and open. She would have to allow him to see her vulnerabilities, to let herself see them, to accept them, or toss it all away as she had almost done already, as he had almost let her do by trying to give her the freedom he thought she could handle, the adult freedom he had mistakenly given to a child.
Ruth struggled for what seemed like hours in an insane battle with herself, with a person she knew, a person she thought she knew and a person she hardly knew at all. She was still struggling when the telephone shrilled its insistent demand to be answered, and she picked it up to hear a stranger’s voice identify itself as an authority from the Launceston General hospital.
After so long, it seemed strange to hear her married name used, even stranger to answer to it while everything inside her was suddenly screaming to know why she was being telephoned.
‘There has been a traffic accident,’ the voice said, and then embarked on a raft of detail that went in one ear and out the other. All Ruth managed to comprehend was that Kurtis was there, in that hospital, as a result of the accident. And that he was alive!
She fought panic then, but only briefly, before slipping into her nurse’s persona to get the clinical details, the specific details in the rigid, scientific jargon of her profession. It would have driven a layman to distraction, but for Ruth it was strangely comforting to understand exactly what was wrong, specifically what treatment was under way.
The details of the accident itself — the overloaded log truck that had spilled half its burden atop the unseen, low-slung diminutive Porsche at the edge of the southern roundabout — were beyond her, irrelevant anyway. She recalled them after she hung up the telephone and searched for her handbag, her car keys.
The important details, the real details of the Colles’ fracture, fractured femur, broken nose, cuts, abrasions, she went over one by one, implication by implication, as she drove slowly, carefully, deliberately to where her husband lay injured.
She might not have learned how to be a wife, she thought, but at least she hadn’t forgotten how to be a nurse. And with a broken wrist, a broken leg and various head injuries Kurtis would need that aspect of her more anyway, just now.
But when she got to the hospital, it was to find her nursing skills the least of his needs!
CHAPTER SEVEN
kurtis’ voice was thickened, changed by the swollen, broken nose. His eyes, however, despite the effects of the pain and the pain-killers he was on, seemed little changed.
Not yet, Ruth thought without satisfaction, envisaging the black eyes he’d have in a few hours’ time.
‘They could put me in with your other geriatrics and I’d be right at home,’ he growled, only to wince with the pain as he tried to smile with a cut and swollen lip.
‘You’re not a geriatric and you know it,’ she found herself replying, looking at him, unsure if she should bend down to kiss him or not, hampered by her own confused emotions rather than his injuries.
Apart from the bandaged nose, his face and head revealed various other cuts and abrasions; his head had been shaved in two spots to allow wounds to be treated and his cheeks were already starting to swell, along with the cut lip. The broken left wrist was in plaster, as was his left thigh, and she could tell by the expression in his eyes that the pain-killers were starting to wear off.
‘I feel like one,’ he replied, the words muffled slightly as he tried to protect the injured lip by talking round it. ‘And I’ll bet I look like hell into the bargain.’
‘You have looked better,’ Ruth replied calmly, conscious of the voice inside her that simply wanted to scream out her pleasure that he was alive, that his injuries were, all things considered, rather minor. He would heal, given time and patience; there was no serious, lasting damage, no disfigurement.
She took refuge in her professionalism, but no real pleasure; something in her wanted the luxury of a normal reaction, of tears and hugging and obvious, genuine relief. But did Kurtis want that? It was no pleasure at all to find she really didn’t know.
‘Does that mean you won’t be applying for a job here, so that I can be assured of the very best of care?’
Was he joking? Or serious? Ruth simply couldn’t tell.
‘You can be assured of that without me,’ she finally replied. ‘And you wouldn’t want me anyway; you’d be shocked to find just how unsympathetic nurses can be when their own... families are sick.’ She stumbled over that one word, but managed none the less to keep her voice light, her attitude calm.
‘So you’ve told me, often,’ he replied in non-committal tones. ‘I used to think you were probably overdoing it a bit, but ... well, I guess I’m about to find out. Only not just now, my lady witch — now I have much more important work for you.’
More important? What, Ruth wondered, could possibly be more important? Except, perhaps, that he had changed his mind about a reconciliation, and now didn’t want to be compromised in that decision by his injuries.
‘Just now, the important thing is to get you fixed up, and it won’t be very pleasant, I expect,’ she finally managed to reply. ‘You’ll be awhile getting out of that bed, never mind worrying about work for either one of us.’
‘How long awhile?’ And now his eyes took on a worried look she did recognise.
‘A couple of weeks, I’d say. Maybe less if you behave, which isn’t something I’d expect of you,’ Ruth replied. ‘On the other hand, they might throw you out sooner if you misbehave too much.’ She walked round to look at his chart, asking as she did so, ‘Have they told you how bad that leg is?’
‘It isn’t crushed, apparently,’ Kurtis replied with a grimace. ‘The quack kept saying it was a simple fracture, although you’d never know it from all the fiddling around they had to do. I’ll bet if it were his leg he wouldn’t think it was so bloody simple.’
Ruth couldn’t help but smile.
‘And I suppose you told him just exactly that,’ she said. ‘You’ll be out of here sooner than you think if you go about abusing the doctors.’
‘I found his attitude toward my poor broken body to be extremely ... casual,’ Kurtis replied. And he looked so deliberately pained by the realisation that Ruth could only shake her head and chuckle.
‘You might consider he’s probably seen far worse injuries today,’ she replied. ‘Although of course your own would be the most important from your viewpoint.’
‘Too damned right they are,’ was the gruff reply, followed by a vain attempt to smile round the swollen lip. ‘None of which excuses a rotten bedside manner. If yours had been that bad I suspect I might not have married you.’
‘Well, if I’d known you were going to be this accident-prone, you wouldn’t have got the chance,’ she retorted, falling in with his attitude, unable to resist his stirring, less able to ignore the light of laughter in his eyes. ‘And,’ she added, her own voice now choking back either tears or laughter, she wasn’t sure which, ‘you certainly never mentioned it in your letters, either.’
Kurtis’ mouth twitched first with an attempted grin then in a grimace of pain.
‘Would you?’ he asked, his voice now a husky growl. ‘It was bad enough having you think I was a geriatric, at the time.’
‘Geriatrics,’ Ruth snapped, ‘are at least old enough to have some sense. They don’t go about trying to argue with loaded log trucks.’
‘Your crystal ball’s gone all foggy again, my lady witch,’ Kurtis replied, and now she noticed he was starting to fade as the drugs began to take effect. ‘I didn’t start the argument; I merely lost it.’
And before she could think of any reply he had reached out his good arm to grasp her wrist, pulling her close against the bedside.
‘Enough of this, for now,’ he said in a husky whisper. ‘There is important business to discuss — very i
mportant, Ruth, so please let’s drop the sarcasm and stirring and whatever else is between us, because I need your total attention now. OK?’
She nodded, and he continued, struggling now against the medication and his body’s reaction to the shock and stress. ‘I want you to go to Hobart — today,’ he said, and then launched into a set of instructions that sounded like something out of a spy thriller.
As Ruth listened, first in surprise and then in genuine astonishment, his weakening voice directed her to write down what he told her because remembering was all-important.
She was to take his keys, let herself into the flat — the luxurious Sandy Bay apartment they’d exchanged for her rather too small unit in Moss Park Drive — and use the combination he gave her to get into the small safe that had been installed so secretly, she remembered, that it was reachable only through the bottom of the sink unit in the laundry.
‘I’m sure you won’t remember the combination yourself, although you did have it once,’ he said, and had the grace to ignore her guilty blush. ‘There’s money in there, and a whole heap of documents, but the important thing is the little key you’ll find tacked up into the top right-hand comer. You’ll have to fiddle a bit to get at it, but it’s there.’
Ruth nodded, her mind agog at the developing saga, question piling upon question, but none of them capable of being asked.
‘Take the key, take your passport, which you somehow forgot about in your abrupt exodus,’ he continued, ‘take whatever money you think you might need —there should be heaps — and book yourself on the first flight to Sydney you can manage. Tonight, hopefully, but as quick as you can arrange it, Ruth, because time is vital in this.’
He grimaced and sighed with the evident sapping of his strength, but shrugged off her immediate suggestion that surely this could wait, that he needed rest more than increased agitation.
‘There’s a phone list on my desk. Use it. Call Ro once you’ve got everything, or if you have any hassles, and arrange with her to meet you at the airport when you get to Sydney,’ he went on, oblivious to how just the mention of that name made Ruth’s hackles rise.
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