Goodbye Sweetheart

by Marion Halligan

  Rosamund understood Jack’s absence of ambition. The way she saw it he was making a kind of pact with life: he would be modest and life would be good to him. By not asking a lot he would be entirely in control of what he did have. She doubted that life worked like that, she knew that chaos could waylay the most methodical and careful and undemanding of people, but she hoped that Jack would not ever find this out. She thought the pact was something not conscious. She loved him, she would keep him safe. She understood how precious their kind of happiness was. She said to herself, absence of ambition goes with presence of contentment.

  Rosamund worked in the council too. She was a tall girl with long brown hair, and the first time he saw her he was struck by her graceful good looks. As she was struck by him, but neither let on for a while, or they thought they didn’t. They exchanged words about work and sometimes had a conversation over morning coffee, and then it seemed to be they were often walking home at the same time. He asked her to go to the pictures, and then they were courting and within a year getting married. What a handsome couple they make, said their friends, and so they did, in every way, they loved and looked after one another. They never had a cross word. Jack was always finding little ways to make Rosamund happy, to show he cared about her, and she did the same for him. They were known in the office as the lovebirds.

  They bought a house, a solid old house with high ceilings and good verandas. It wasn’t very expensive because it was pretty much on the flood plain, but it didn’t seem to flood these days and the soil was rich, the garden already flourishing. Rosamund fell in love with the fretwork round the veranda, its wooden lace patterned in scrolls and loops. A bit was missing and Jack made a new piece to fit, cutting out the wood in the same scrolls and painting it white so you couldn’t tell new from old. In the good soil Jack grew vegetables, and Rosamund’s flowers were a marvel. Jack painted and mended and maintained the fabric of the house, Rosamund made curtains and cushion covers. The lovebirds in their cosy nest. They planned to have a number of children.

  It took them a long time to get pregnant. They’d reached an age when everybody assumed they never would, since in those days almost nobody had babies in their thirties. It wasn’t for lack of trying; Jack even wondered if frequency reduced potency, and plucked up the courage to ask the doctor who was a golfing friend if this could be the case, but the doctor pooh-poohed the idea. Just keep going, he said, it’ll happen if it’s going to. And eventually it did. Rosamund blossomed. She bloomed with health, was even more beautiful pregnant than before. The baby grew strong and lusty. Jack put his hand on the enormous taut egg of her belly and felt the child’s violent kicks. Egg, the embryo was called. Sometimes Jack bent his head and laid his ear to his wife’s belly and listened to Egg at play. They didn’t know if it was a boy or a girl. If she was a girl she’d be Louise, but they hadn’t decided on a boy’s name.

  Rosamund carried the baby to term. Her waters broke early in the morning and she went into labour. Everything was normal, until suddenly it wasn’t. Everything went wrong. The baby could not be born. The doctors broke the bones of Rosamund’s pelvis but they could not get the baby out alive. A perfect little girl. They called her Louise; Jack had a faint pang that now this name would only belong to a dead child. They had a funeral service; Rosamund had to go in a wheelchair. It was a long time before she could walk again. He said, We have to get pregnant again, as soon as you are well, and he nursed and cosseted and cherished her. As soon as you are well, he said, we’ll get pregnant again. But they didn’t.

  Sometimes he wondered, if they’d been in a bigger city, with a fancier hospital, whether the baby might have been saved. He did not think he could ask the doctor that question, who had worked so hard and been distraught that he could not save the child. He once said something to a nurse but she shook her head. No, she said, everything was done, you couldn’t have had better care.

  Rosamund didn’t go back to the council. She got a job in the chemist, three mornings a week. That left her time to look after the house, and Jack, to bake and cook good dinners, and busy herself over the knitting and sewing that she liked to do. She was a thrifty woman, and her housekeeping was impeccable. Meantime Bill was forging his career as a lawyer and making money. He was on to his third wife. What sort of a life is that? said Jack. Three wives, and who knows if he’s got it right yet. Some people, he said, putting his arms around Rosamund, some people can get it right the first time.

  There was an occasion when Bill and Jack stood together at a family party in a backyard in Sydney, one of those scruffy seaside backyards with buffalo grass and a frangipani tree. Each had a glass of beer in his hand and Bill was holding on to one of the metal bars of the Hills Hoist as though he was strap-hanging in a bus, as though life might suddenly lurch and he fall over, staring rather morosely at a derelict swing. It was the funeral of one of their uncles, not someone they knew well at all, they were there out of family piety, because he was their mother’s brother, and his death wasn’t the cause of Bill’s moroseness. He was newly divorced from his first wife. Do you ever regret . . . said Bill. Do you ever have regrets, I suppose I mean.

  No, I don’t regret, said Jack, I don’t think things are for regretting. How can that help? You do what you think is the right thing at the time and you have to stick with that.

  You’re a lucky man, you know, said Bill. He was hanging on to the Hoist with his arm raised and his body slumped as though he would fall to the ground if it wasn’t holding him up. You don’t know that, of course.

  Jack said, I think I do. This conversation was a good while ago, before the baby died. But his answer would probably have been the same, then.

  Driving back to Cooma in the car, he said to Rosamund, I suppose Bill does regret things.

  He does seem to be a discontented person, said Rosamund.

  Do you think that’s his nature? asked Jack.

  Nature, habit, I don’t know, said Rosamund.

  I think it’s greed, said Jack. Greed, ambition; are they the same thing?

  It was certainly sad that they didn’t have any children, and Rosamund would have been such a good mother, but Jack was sanguine. Who knows, we might not be so perfectly happy if we had children, he said to himself. They’d be a lot of work, and we might have to worry about money, and the right way to bring them up, and what if they went off the rails? Because children did seem to do that, these days, not like when he was young, when kids could be a bit rough but settled down okay in the end, quite quickly really, and turned into decent citizens.

  Jack was still in much the same job. More money, more responsibility, but basically the same job. Clarrie did move away, after all, he got a position in Canberra, in Treasury, with a much higher salary, and Joyce was thrilled; she boasted to all her friends and family about the new house she was going to have. There didn’t seem to be anybody else to go fishing with, and it was a fair hike in to the river anyway, not something to do on your own. He didn’t even think of suggesting that his wife take Clarrie’s place. When they were first married they used to go skiing, but they gave it up when Rosamund got pregnant, and never took it up again. They bought the cottage in Eden intending to retire there one day, in the more kindly climate of the coast; Jack fancied ending his days as he had begun, by the sea. Of course retirement was a while off, but they could go for weekends and holidays.

  The house in Eden was a little old wooden cottage, in a street off the main road, the hub of town, quite a lively little town, with everything you could want, baker, butcher, post office, dress shops, hairdresser, hardware, several pubs. A decent hospital in Bega. The street ran along a ridge and was quite high, so the house had a view two ways: it looked out over Aslings Beach and Calle Calle Bay to the ocean and also through trees to Twofold Bay. Not big: two rooms at the front, a parlour and a bedroom, under the high-pitched roof of the old cottage, and a large lean-to at the back, quite solid, which was kitchen and dining room. There was a bathroom off this and some good s
heds. They did not need a lot of space; there were no children or grandchildren to visit, Bill was unlikely to come down, and though they were friends with half of Cooma they were not really on terms where you would say, Come and stay.

  It was a small house but a big block. Vegetables for him. Flowers for her. Books. Fishing. The quiet life they both liked. When he had an image of this in his mind it was like looking at a children’s picture book, with beautiful illustrations making glamorous and mysterious the fairytale domestic story. The little wooden house, painted cream with a green trim. The fat cabbages and the scarlet runner beans. The meadow garden. The dog, the cat, the fire. The little old woman and the little old man, rosy-cheeked and robust. The blue blue water of the bay with its frilled edges, the wooden rowing boat. The fishing fleet painted in primary colours. The rocky breakwaters, the smudged indigo of the enclosing mountains. Turn the pages slowly so you can enjoy the intricate detail of the drawings, the tall foxgloves, the tiny violets nestling round them, the brass knocker in the shape of a lady’s hand. The sleeping cat on the round rag rug. The round little old woman with her apple cheeks, throwing grain to her chickens.

  If he had ever put these pictures into words somebody might have said, But you and Rosamund aren’t nuggety and apple-cheeked. You’re tall and willowy and more pale biscuit than red apple. And of course the fat cabbages and the scarlet runner beans would have to wait until they were living there permanently, though the meadow garden was showing some signs of life. But the pictures never got into words, not even in Jack’s head.

  And so they drove from Cooma to Eden most weekends and always stopped just past Bombala, where the high country has begun its descent to the sea, where the light is filtered through the slender lacy-leafed trees, and the tea tastes fresh and the sandwiches are juicy. Some people don’t like juicy sandwiches, but Jack and Rosamund did. She always put in some tomato, or soft-boiled egg, or pickles with the meat. Maybe some home-cooked beetroot with cheese. And when they got to Eden, Rosamund cleaned and aired while Jack maintained the fabric of this house and went fishing; they usually had a good feed of fish at Eden. And the fish and chip shop was good if the fish in the bay weren’t biting. They went for walks and had a drink at the pub and swam when the weather was warm enough.

  They liked the walk down the hill to Aslings Beach, through the cemetery, a pretty little white-fenced marine cemetery with a lot of flowers, brightly coloured plastic mainly but quite new. There were nearly always several people looking after it, gardening and tidying, and the old graves of the seamen and whalers and timber getters were gradually being restored. They’d often stop and have a conversation with one or other of these people, and Rosamund liked to read the inscriptions on the graves. She wept when they were tiny, for babies. Their inscriptions said things like, Too good for this earth, God wanted our treasure for His own, or A little angel loaned us for so short a time and now gone home. Parents often had a lot to say on infant tombs.

  The people working in the cemetery were mostly volunteers, and Jack thought when he retired he’d become a volunteer too. Pottering about in the bracing wind from the sea. A good cemetery is a sign of a flourishing town, said Rosamund; if they neglect the cemetery it is because they are too depressed to care. There were still some plots left to buy. One day Rosamund said, Maybe we should buy one of them and be buried here. And we could bring Louise down too. The thing that worried her about moving to Eden was leaving Louise behind in the Cooma churchyard.

  Yes, said Jack, let’s do that.

  They did everything together, of course they would be buried together. Everything except fishing. The old days, with the trout, Jack had gone with Clarrie, and when he married Rosamund he wouldn’t have dreamt of expecting her to walk that rough track deep into the Snowies. Now, when it would have been easier in the boat, she still didn’t go. She thought it was a good idea for him to do something on his own, and she liked a kind of busyness, knitting or sewing or even reading, that you didn’t get with fishing.

  Jack had bought an old launch, a sturdy wooden clinker-built boat, called the Campaspe, probably after that river in Victoria. He took it out, just in the bay; he didn’t venture through the heads, that was for the rough and tumble sport of the big-game fishermen, not his gentle pastime. He sat in the boat and didn’t think; it was a way of simply being. If he had thought about it he might have called it a meditation, and there could have been something for a Buddhist to envy in the success with which his mind stayed emptied of cerebral activity. He sat with his line out, felt the sun warming him, the damp cold of the winter sea mist, without ever even needing to name them to himself. Occasionally he had words in his head. Not much good, this bait. Getting late. The water is roughing up. See there’s a new roof on the old house. Often just Rosamund. Her name in his mind like her presence in his life, always there, warm, luminous, enormous, leaving no room for empty spaces.

  Fishing was a pastime, and there was skill. It was also killing. Only what you need for food, like a hunter. But the killing was important.

  The years passed, and Jack retired. They sold the house on the flood plain in Cooma, and moved permanently to the coast. They had quite a bit of money and could have bought a fancier boat or a bigger house. But the house they had was in such a good spot, and did them. They could have extended it, but what would have been the point? Occasionally one of Bill’s children came to visit them, so they invested in a sofa bed to put in the parlour, which was quite suitable for infrequent guests. The vegetables were planted in their regular seasons, the meadow garden blossomed. Rosamund grew climbing roses over the verandas. Jack did his volunteer work in the cemetery, and gradually learned the names of the families buried there. The pages were turning on the picture-book life of the children’s story.

  Jack, whose favourite reading was thrillers, ought to have known that even a story for children needs a narrative, and narratives need worry, threat, disaster, despair, or at least some shadow, some menacing promise of everything going wrong. Until the last pages, when the sun comes out, the bay is blue again, the roses nod on the trellis, and the old man has his arm round the old woman’s waist and everyone is safe, and we can shut them up happily in their world of the book and put it on the shelf. Taking it down whenever you like and reading about vicissitudes because you know they will all be overcome by The End.

  Well. The story went well on the first pages of the book. But then Jack shut it up and put it on the shelf and never wanted to look at it again. The vegetables fattened, the meadow garden sowed itself, the bay was blue and the fish biting, there was Jack robust and sun-browned. But there was no Rosamund.

  Her skin, which had so delighted him by its pale gold silky smoothness, remained unblemished even into her sixties. But a melanoma suddenly grew on her arm and though it was removed and the doctor was fairly certain he’d got all of it, he hadn’t, and the cancer shifted to her spine and her lungs and in no time it was clear it was going to kill her. The small pebble of gladness in this was the time it took. Time to learn her thoroughly all over again, her face, her voice, the movement of her hands, the special sweetness of her smile, time to make sure his memory had hold of her. Time to talk about the past, to retell the story of their life together, to store up its details. Rosamund said, You know, never having a baby: I was sorry. And yet it has meant us being together; with a child we might not have had that. Yes, said Jack. She said, Mind you, if there was a child, there would be somebody for you, now. He put his arms around her and hugged her, delicately, for she was frail, and her body hurt. Words he was never good at. Pictures he had in his mind. He imagined her going out and being bowled over and never coming home again, that was the worst thing. She was ill, and in some pain, though she had morphine she took in pill form, and a bottle to sip when she needed it, but she was here, and imprinting herself deeper in his mind, his heart. The year he nursed her was his most precious possession.

  He didn’t know that Rosamund had always hoped that he would die firs
t because she couldn’t bear to think of how he would manage on his own. He didn’t think he could, either, he didn’t think he could bear it, but he did. He went on being methodical and orderly and doing things properly and keeping them in their places, and since he had to clean the house as well and do the cooking he was kept busy, too busy, he decided, to keep up his volunteer work at the cemetery. Though he always tended the grave where Rosamund and Louise were buried, with space for him beside them.

  You say I cannot bear it, but you do.

  Maybe it was the fishing that saved him from despair. Fishing was what he did and he was good at it. That afternoon he took Campaspe out, with several short boat rods and a supply of bait. He mostly caught more than he needed, especially as now there was only him to eat it; there was a limit to how much fish one person could eat and give away to his friends, who were not usually short themselves. He used barbless hooks so he could release them without too much harm. It was a winter’s afternoon, still and grey, it could have been twilight already though it was not yet three o’clock. The dusk was his favourite time for fishing. The sea mist veiled the hills and headlands so they lost all their lineaments. In the morning the sun lit them up cleanly and all their contours and the patterns of trees stood out sharply, but in the afternoon they retired into mystery.

  He took his car to Quarantine Bay where he kept the boat. Most of the other craft were gleaming and shapely: svelte yachts, sailing boats with tall masts, ravenous-looking big-game cruisers with their wireless aerials and global positioning systems, hungry as sharks but less handsome. There was only one other boat as old as Campaspe, but it was a good deal bigger. He fetched his coracle from the shore by the beach shacks and rowed slowly across the water to his mooring buoy. The water looked very smooth, but there was quite a lot of movement in it; the pontoon was riding up and down and creaking at its hawsers. Anybody watching him could see that he was a slow man. Now more than ever he enjoyed the not-thinking, carefully stowing the oars of the coracle, loading the boat rods, the small chilly bin of bait, his tea things, starting the motor of the old launch and putt-putting out through the misty silence, out into Nullica Bay, more or less opposite where the Nullica River came out. He had brought live squid for bait; with a bit of luck there would be mulloway in this spot. Mulloway, that used to be jewfish when he was a kid; his father had considered it an excellent fish.