by JH Fletcher
They spent the winter in Melbourne and the summer following his birth they tramped southwards along the coast while Lukas turned his attention to seascapes. Jamie never had a stitch on him, his sturdy body as brown as autumn berries. As they moved further from civilisation and people, when for days at a time they never saw a soul, Dorrie too stripped. While Lukas painted Jamie explored rock pools. His curiosity was endless. An adventurous child, he was always tottering off to explore things that caught his fancy but on the beaches of the peninsula there was little chance of danger coming to him. He returned with offerings of seaweed and crab shells. He pushed them into Dorrie’s hands as she lay naked on the sand. She took them from him, thanked him. He went off again while she lay in a daze of contentment. Barely audible, the little waves turned lazily along the beach. Dorrie surrendered her body to the sun.
Another winter and then, just before Jamie’s second birthday, they went back to the Ranges. They camped in their old spot. In their absence the undergrowth had returned and they had to clear the site again. The paths they had made through the bush were gone, too. At night the bush pressed close around the tent, a circle of darkness.
Two days after their arrival Dorrie was working in the tent. A mile away Lukas was painting. The boy was outside the tent. Afterwards they thought that something — a leaf, a flicker of sunlight through branches — must have caught his attention. He made his way across to the circle of bush and disappeared into it.
Some minutes later Dorrie came out of the tent with a couple of towels that she draped across the bushes to dry in the sun. She glanced around, saw no sign of Jamie, thought nothing of it. He would be around somewhere. For all his adventurousness, he never went far. She went back into the tent. Five minutes later she came back outside. Still no sign of him. Frowning, she looked about her.
‘Jamie …?’
Nothing.
She walked a few paces. ‘Jamie?’
Insects buzzed peacefully, otherwise the bush was still. The bland leaves closed their ranks against her. Her call disappeared, absorbed by the dead wall of silence.
The first flicker of unease. The bush bore a faint impression where Lukas had buffaloed his way through it with easel and stool, the rest of his painting gear. Perhaps the boy had gone that way. She went, too, walking quickly, no longer casual about Jamie’s disappearance. Every few paces she called the boy’s name but saw and heard nothing.
Panic touched her.
‘Jamie!’ Running.
She saw Lukas when she was still a hundred yards from him. Here the ground cover was no more than a few inches high. Surely he had heard her cries yet did not look up from his concentration on the canvas as she ran stumbling towards him.
‘Have you seen Jamie?’
Deliberately, maddeningly, he finished what he was doing before turning to her. ‘No.’
‘I can’t find him anywhere.’
He smiled tolerantly, already turning back to the easel. It was something she would never forget, that tolerant smile. ‘He won’t be far.’
‘I’ve looked everywhere —’
‘He’ll be poking around somewhere. He’ll be back.’
Dread had dug its claws into her and she did not think so. ‘All the way here I called him and he never answered. The bush is so thick. If he wanders off alone …’
We shall never find him.
But could not bring herself to say it. She had read of such things. Uttering the words might cause it to happen.
She went back at once to the campsite, running now, telling herself she would find the child there when she got back. The camp was as she had left it, the towels across the bushes, the hum of insects. Deserted.
She looked around her wildly, telling herself over and over not to panic. There are no wild animals, she told herself.
There were snakes.
But — perish the thought — if he had been bitten he would still be here.
He could have gone into the bush and trodden on something. Or had a fall. Or simply … Disappeared.
He is two years old, she told herself. Not even. He cannot have gone far. It is a question of finding him, that is all.
Where to start was a question.
Did it matter where she started, as long as she explored the area thoroughly?
She walked forward. When she reached the edge of the bush she parted the branches and stepped inside.
There were bushes, trees, a confusion of leaves and branches interlaced into a wall of silence.
‘Jamie!’
The leaves cast the scream back at her. The boy could be a yard beyond the screen of leaves and hear nothing.
When I find him I’ll give him hell, she told herself, praying, Please God … Please God …
It was impossible to know where to look.
She forced her way between bushes, around bushes, under bushes. She parted leaves, slipped and stumbled in ten thousand years of leaf mould. The tops of the trees shut out the sky, the sun’s golden light. Everywhere a green twilight, as though she were struggling in a well of stagnant water. Lichen from the branches stained her hands, her clothes. Leaf mould covered the hem of her dress. The tip of a branch snagged her sleeve, another scored a bloody line across the side of her face. The air steamed.
‘Jamie! Jamie!’
She might have been the first person to have penetrated these intricate thickets. She turned and twisted, became lost herself. Of the boy there was no sign. She fought her way back, could find nothing, not even her way out, stumbled on an open patch of ground. She stood and stared about her, wildly. It was thirty yards across, perhaps more. There was nothing there. In the densest part of the bush it had been impossible to move quickly; now terror goaded her. She broke into a stumbling run, forced herself to stop. Running was no good. She had no idea where she was going. Jamie, that was all that mattered. Surely he could not have come so far? If this were far from the camp; there was no way of being sure. The tent might be just beyond that line of trees. Or that one. Or …
She turned, trapped by panic. ‘Or there,’ she screamed, tears starting from her staring eyes. ‘Or there …’
The ancient landscape revealed no secrets, offered no hope of help or consolation. She breathed its indifference with the air and hated it, hated it.
Be calm. Think. Be calm.
She, too, could not have come far. She could see the sun. It had been on her back when she first went into the bush. Therefore, if she walked towards it …
Something inside her would not accept the logic of the decision. Over there, it told her. Go this way and you will get more and more entangled in the bush. Over there.
She would not listen. She made herself follow what her mind told her was the right way. Once again the close embrace of tree and fern, branch and creeper.
This had to be the very fringe of the forest. Further in the tall trees would predominate. In their shade the lesser growth would die. One could walk there between the majestic trees as though down the aisle of a cathedral. Her mind envisaged Jamie’s tiny figure walking between the great trees. To which I dedicated him, she remembered.
The trees have taken him. The thought, once rooted, would not go away. I shall never see him again.
But walked on, indomitable, forcing her way through the bush, until it thinned and fell back and she found herself once again on the embryonic path connecting Lukas’s painting site with the camp.
Dorrie ran.
They ripped towels to pieces, used the fragments of cloth to tell them which areas of the bush they had already searched. Not precise, but at least it gave them an idea. They fought their way through the dense undergrowth, areas like that in which Dorrie had floundered on her first attempt to find the boy. On the last day they penetrated beyond the fringes into the forest proper, where the going was easier and they were able to make much quicker headway. They ran frantically, feet silent on countless millennia of leaf mould, stepping on fallen strips of bark that crackled as brittle as ice be
neath their steps. They inspected caves and hollows, sudden ravines and craggy outcrops. They looked everywhere. They found nothing.
Jamie was gone.
‘No!’
Dorrie would not accept it. She kept on long after reason had told her that further searching was pointless, to hope when hope had ceased to be reasonable.
‘Jamie! Jamie!’
Her screams rang through the forest arches, died in the dense undergrowth, mocked her from the granite crags. She would listen neither to reason nor the terrified foreboding of her heart. She went on.
‘It’s hopeless …’ Lukas slumped, destroyed by the manic searching for what could not be found.
She did not waste breath on a reply.
‘Jamie …!’
Until at last, three days after the child disappeared, strength and hope died together. Dorrie lay on her bedding in the tent that had once been home and wept scalding tears of exhaustion, grief, despair. Her life had become a desert of desolation. Those sturdy limbs, sun-bronzed skin, the confident tilt of the head, the set of shoulders that even at two years old had held the promise of later strength. All gone. She knew she would never see Jamie alive again.
Dorrie stared up at the tent canvas while her exhausted brain wove fantasies of death. Wild dogs, snakes, fallen trees, a tiny body mangled by disaster …
Her screams ruptured the forest calm.
In terror Lukas tried to quieten her, to console her. She turned from him, assaulted him with pounding, futile fists when he persisted. Always in her mind there lingered the tolerant smile with which he had greeted the first news of his son’s disappearance.
She went away, alone, to the city. She stayed with friends. She walked the streets. Whenever she saw a child her heart stopped. She ran, knowing it was futile, unable to help herself. The child’s face, when she reached him, was never Jamie’s face. A half-dozen times she had to quell the suspicions of affronted mothers. Once she was almost attacked, the woman restraining herself only at the last minute when Dorrie, distraught, tears flooding, turned away. People, Dorrie herself, thought she was mad.
She should have gone back to the Ranges but could not. She could not bear the thought of those silent hills thronged with the secretive trees. She could not bear to return to Lukas. Whom she knew would suggest the making of another child as soon as possible. She could no longer endure the thought of that. Her loss had encased her in a carapace as hard as stone. No feelings, no warmth, no hope could touch her. The fragments of her splintered heart were as unforgiving as ice.
Finally, out of a hot afternoon smoky with distant fires, Lukas came to her.
She knew as soon as she saw him. ‘You are off,’ she accused.
Deserting me.
But could not say it. She had deserted him long ago.
‘I’m going to Sydney. Roberts and Streeton are already there. They’ve asked me to join them. They say the light is different there.’
‘The light …’ She was filled with contempt.
But light had always been his life. ‘Come with me,’ he urged. ‘In Sydney we can make a new start.’
He offered her the future, humbly, but she would not accept it. She wanted nothing more to do with him.
‘Go to Sydney,’ she told him. And shut the door.
In the shadowed hallway of the villa Dorrie stood, stricken, head bowed. She had loved him with all her heart. She still did yet could no longer bear to have him near her. Deliberately, she lacerated her heart, punishing herself for having failed to protect her child.
A minute’s preoccupation … That was all. She cried out in rage. A minute to destroy three lives. She stared dry-eyed at an infinity of days stretching uselessly into the future.
She thought of returning to South Australia, to her parents and young brother Bob, but the never-ending battles that had caused her to run away in the first place, the possibility that her father would not even accept her back into his house, made her abandon that idea almost as soon as she had thought of it.
She had to do something. Her little money was almost exhausted. She thought of offering for sale what she had refused to give in love to Lukas but did not, not because the prospect of being a prostitute troubled her but because she could not believe that any man would find her sufficiently attractive to make the venture viable.
Instead she found a friend.
Libraries did not encourage the presence of women but no longer actively prohibited them. One day Dorrie entered the building with no clear idea of what she might find. There was a smell of dust and learning. There were rows of books, as she supposed she had expected. An elderly man with side whiskers watched her disapprovingly from a table just inside the door. There were two or three men at long tables, heads bent over tomes opened before them. In the far corner of the room a woman looked up as Dorrie walked slowly past her. And smiled.
A printed notice demanded silence.
Dorrie was swimming with exhaustion. She took a book at random from the shelf, sat with it unopened before her. After a few minutes a footstep sounded beside her. The man with side whiskers stared down at her. Nostrils, fastidious, flared. ‘This is not a rest room,’ he hissed. ‘If you do not wish to read. If you are unable to read …’
It was too much. ‘I read as well as you do. Better, perhaps.’
‘Then why aren’t you reading?’ But walked away.
Dorrie breathed easier. She opened the book and stared at it, seeing nothing. The other woman, a few years older than herself, stopped beside her.
‘A cup of tea?’
Emma Grimes was one of a new generation of women determined to overthrow the male monopoly on all aspects of life.
‘I am attending Melbourne University,’ she confided over a rattle of teacups.
Dorrie had not known that such a thing was possible.
‘It wasn’t until Bella Guerin managed it. She graduated in 1883.’ Emma looked at her, eyes bird-bright and inquisitive. ‘You will meet her. If you would like.’
‘I have no money,’ Dorrie said. ‘There is no way I can go to University.’
‘Money can be found. You have no husband?’
‘No.’
‘Nor children?’
‘No.’
‘Would you be interested? If a way could be found?’
A step into a future that she had not even known could exist. She felt something she had thought was dead. Hope.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I would.’
SIX
Introductions were made, conversations took place. Arrangements, chiefly about money, followed. The next year Dorrie Ballard, shirt-waister blouse and long skirt, straw boater on her head, presented herself as a first year student at the School of Languages and Logic of Melbourne University.
A knot of students was standing by the steps leading to the hall. They stared at her, appraised her, dismissed her wilfully as of no account. One of them in particular moved as though by chance to block her path. Eyes like brown bugs crawled, lingered.
‘My, my,’ he said.
Someone tittered.
She stopped. Looked at him. She willed herself to say or do nothing to provoke him, conscious that simply by being there she was already a provocation.
‘Where do you think you’re going?’
‘Up those steps. If you’ll be kind enough to move to one side.’
He did not.
‘Professor Emmett says women aren’t capable of doing the study they need to graduate. Not their fault, of course. Simply that physiologically and mentally they’re not up to it.’
It was not a question. Dorrie said nothing.
‘You know he is a recognised authority?’
‘How can he be?’ she asked contemptuously. ‘Or anyone? There’s never been enough women students to build a representative sample.’
‘I believe him.’
‘I’m sure you do.’
A conversation going nowhere. A confrontation going nowhere.
Very
slowly, Dorrie began to walk forward, straight at him. ‘We’ll have to see who’s right, shan’t we?’
Step.
‘Professor Emmett …’
Step.
‘… Or me.’
She smiled at him but did not pause or deviate one inch from her path. Slowly she walked at him. She would have walked straight into him, if necessary, but at the last minute his nerve failed. He stepped to one side. Dorrie walked past him, so close she felt her sleeve brush his arm.
‘I’ll give you a month.’
The belligerent voice, hot with spite, followed her up the steps.
Dorrie walked on and into the hall.
She took a month, six months, three years. She graduated with honours. Her success offended many.
One event above all others lingered.
A hot, early summer evening. Wearing a loose gown of some diaphanous material, Dorrie sat in her room by a window opened to the breeze. A knock on the door.
‘Come in …’
Emma Grimes, smiling. She closed the door, walked across the room on soundless feet. Dorrie looked up at her, caught Emma’s eyes fixed on Dorrie’s body, clearly visible beneath the flimsy robe. Emma smiled. A different smile. Her breath with a catch in it.
‘People will see you.’
‘How can they?’ The room was without light.
‘I can see you.’ Her breath ticked. ‘I can see your breasts from here.’
‘What does that matter?’
‘So pretty …’ Whispering.
Emma came closer, stood behind Dorrie. Even through the chair Dorrie could feel her heat. Emma placed hands as light as down on Dorrie’s shoulders. Dorrie did not move. The hands traced a path down the outside of her arms. Lingered. Moved inwards. Lingered upon the breasts that Emma had admired.
‘So pretty …’ she whispered again. Caressing them. Delicately. So delicately.
Dorrie, in shock, willed herself to accept it. She owed this woman so much. Emma had approached her, encouraged her. Together they had forced open the gates of opportunity. Without Emma, who knew where Dorrie would have been now? Above all things, she was her friend.
