by JH Fletcher
Perhaps she could still persuade them of her innocence. If they would only let her go, if she could get back to warn the town …
One of the men said, ‘I seen her in the town, sir. She’s one of the ringleaders.’
With his fingernail the officer tapped the front of his teeth thoughtfully. ‘You’ll have to stay here with us.’
‘That is against the law,’ Dorrie said.
‘So sue me.’ He turned to a man with a Sergeant’s stripes on his arm. ‘Sergeant Jenkins …’
‘Sir?’
‘Take this woman over to the fire. Don’t let her out of your sight.’
‘I need to go to the toilet,’ Dorrie said.
She had hoped to embarrass but there was no sign of it.
‘You’ll have to hang on,’ the sergeant said.
Her furious eyes glittered. ‘You want me to wet my pants?’
‘Up to you. You ’eard what ’e said. Don’t let ’er out of your sight. And that’s just the way it’s goin’ to be.’
Another half hour and there was a buzz of excitement as a man rode in and reported to the officer. Ripples of activity spread. Girths were tightened, arms inspected, orders barked. The warm air was liquid with excitement.
‘Looks like we’ll be off directly,’ Sergeant Jenkins said. He grinned wolfishly. ‘Then you kin ’ave a pee all by yoreself, you really want one.’
There came the distant sound of truck engines, growing steadily louder.
‘’Ere they come,’ said Sergeant Jenkins.
Dorrie looked at him. ‘They?’
‘The blokes that are goin’ to open up the pits.’
‘Scabs.’
‘Call ’em what you like. They’ll break this strike of yours, that’s certain.’
‘They can try.’
‘They’ll do it, no worries, we’ll make sure of that.’
‘Why are you people doing this?’ Desperation tightened her throat but even at this late moment she had to try. ‘We should be on the same side, you and me, not fighting each other.’
Her appeal bounced harmlessly off the sergeant’s boiler-plated hide. ‘Never bin one for politics, me.’
The officer shouted an order. The troopers mounted.
Jenkins grinned. ‘You be a good girl, now. Be sure you keep out of our way. I wouldn’t want to see you get hurt.’
‘What will you do to me if I don’t?’ Dorrie asked him with contempt. ‘Shoot me?’
‘Don’t knock it,’ he told her seriously. ‘It might just happen.’
They were gone, leaving a stench of horseflesh, a diminishing echo of shouted orders. Silence, with the dust, sifted slowly down. Dorrie ran for her bicycle. Found it, too, was gone.
Tears of frustration burned her eyes. ‘Bastards! Bloody bastards!’
No help for it. She would be too late but had to do what she could. At worst, to be there with the men through what was coming. She ran.
‘I heard it before I was halfway down the hill,’ Dorrie said. ‘I was still running at that point. Then I heard it and stopped. There was no point any more.’
What she heard was a swelling chorus of rage and anguish. A confusion of yells and screams. A solemn roar like the bass note of an organ. The voice of the town, starving and exhausted yet somehow managing to find one final bellow of pride and defiance in the face of insuperable odds.
‘I came round a corner in the road,’ Dorrie said. ‘I could see the town below me. The lorries with the scab workers were drawn up by the roadside. The police line was faced by a double line of strikers. All yelling. The police charged into the strikers. I saw their batons shining as they swung them. Then I could see nothing but a confusion of men fighting. One of the policeman was dragged out of his saddle. He disappeared into the mob of men and I couldn’t see him any more. I remember standing by the side of the road, watching the men fighting, hearing the yells, seeing the horses moving, the batons rising and falling, but the line of strikers didn’t break. What men they were,’ Dorrie cried. ‘None of them had eaten a decent meal for months. Nothing but determination and their bare hands. Against mounted men, fit, well-fed, with sabres and carbine rifles. So brave …’
Her voice fell silent. Her eye watched images of what she had seen happen ten years earlier.
‘The officer must have given an order. They turned and rode away twenty yards or so. The miners were jeering, they thought the police had had enough. Then they saw them stop and regroup and the cheering died away. Suddenly there was dead silence. I shall always remember it. The officer shouted an order and the police drew the rifles out of their holsters.
‘I was running again. I remember screaming. Stop it! Stop it! Don’t! Something like that. And then I heard the roar of the guns.’
She was silent for a minute, remembering.
‘I couldn’t believe it. I knew those blokes. They were men just like the police. Fellow Aussies. They had wives, families. All they’d been trying to do was get a fair go for the wife and kids. Gunned down in the streets.
‘The sound of the guns took the strength out of my legs. I sat down in the dust. There were tears all over my face. I didn’t have the strength to screech any more. I remember whispering, Why, oh God? Why?’ Dorrie looked at Ruth and again there were tears in her eyes. ‘Over and over I said it. Knowing I would never get an answer. I still ask myself the same question. Why?’
Ruth’s father had never forgiven her for being a girl. From the first she had sensed it, not fully understanding what it was she sensed. The first time she had become consciously aware of it was when she was nine years old. It was school holidays and she had gone down to what they called Wilson’s Paddock, where they were haymaking. She had gone because she was interested, because it had never occurred to her that anyone might object.
Her father had stared down at her. ‘What do you want, girl?’ The tone of his words as prickly as the stubble on his sweating face.
Just to be here. With you. But could not say it, aware that she had somehow transgressed.
‘Off with you, then. This is man’s work. No place for a girl.’
‘I am not a girl,’ she had wept to her mother. ‘I am me.’
The first assertion of her will to independence. I am me.
‘Of course you’re a girl,’ her mother soothed her. ‘It is a wonderful thing to be.’
Her mother had been heavily into the mystery of being female. One of the sacred mysteries, she would have said had anyone asked her, but to Ruth all it meant was that certain things were denied. Things she wanted to do but could not, because she was a girl.
‘When you get older you will understand.’
She never had. She did not understand now. She had fought many battles over it; with her father, the school principal, the church minister. All men, as God, they claimed, was also a man.
For years she had wanted to say to hell with the lot of them. Entangled like everyone else in the spider’s web of her society, she had not dared. Now she knew that the same old battle would have to be waged again but for the first time ventured to hope. She sensed a hint of change, of opportunity. This war might break other things than lives. Perhaps it would break the idiot rules that locked her in their iron grasp.
That night, over tea, Aunt Dorrie said, ‘So we have a war, after all. What are you going to do about it, Ruth?’
‘She will do nothing,’ her father said.
Ruth had been rehearsing this moment since she had first read the letter about the Hirschmanns.
‘I’m going to join up.’
She had expected relief at having come out with it. Instead she felt like a non-swimmer as the waters closed over her head.
For a moment she found herself wondering if she had spoken at all. Her father continued to chew placidly. His expression did not change. When he had cleared his mouth he said, ‘Nonsense.’
‘It is not nonsense and I am going to do it.’
Her mother’s eyes were fixed apprehensively on the ti
cking bomb she sensed at the head of the table. ‘I am sure your father —’
‘Good on you,’ Dorrie said.
Her father said, ‘A lot of men will be going. I shall need you on the farm.’
It seemed it was all right for a woman to do men’s work when the men were otherwise engaged.
‘No,’ Ruth said.
Still he did not take her seriously but her obtuseness was beginning to irritate. ‘I need you here. I don’t know how I can put it clearer than that.’ And speared another slice of mutton, ferociously, as though suspecting that it too might dare to defy him.
There seemed nothing she could do but say what she intended, go on saying it and eventually do it.
‘I shall go and enlist. Tomorrow.’
Her father choked, coughed. Through clogging meat he said, ‘You are my daughter. As long as you want to stay under my roof you will do as I say.’
‘Bob, don’t be ridiculous,’ Dorrie said. ‘Ruth is twenty-one years old. She’s a trained nurse. You can’t tell her what to do.’
He did not deign to look at his sister. ‘I’ll thank you to keep your nose out of things that don’t concern you.’
‘I thought you’d outgrown your infantile National Guard ideas.’
Bob’s lips were ringed with white. ‘For the last time, Ruth, the answer is no.’
Ruth did not speak; there was no point. But now, it seemed, he was not willing to let it go.
‘You hear me?’
‘I’ve told you what I’m going to do.’
Silence weighed the air between them as his eyes challenged her across the table. ‘You may be twenty-one, like your aunt was kind enough to remind me. But this is still my house.’
Every word strengthened her resolve. His will pressed against her. She fought it, refusing to be intimidated. Until at last she saw his eyes flicker. She felt a surge of delirious triumph but showed nothing.
He sighed and looked away. ‘So be it.’
Weak but triumphant, she had won.
Later, as Ruth had known she would, her mother visited her in her room.
She sat on the edge of the bed, Ruth’s hand in her own. ‘You are all he’s got.’
‘What’s he got, maybe. Not what he wanted.’ Ruth was deliberately cruel, getting her own back for her mother’s failure to back her at the tea table. ‘He wanted a son. Anything happens to me, he’ll get over it soon enough.’
‘He wanted a son for the farm, like any farmer would, but he has always loved you.’
‘He’s got a funny way of showing it.’
After her mother had left her Ruth lay wide-eyed in the darkness. The way the older generation talked, she thought, hinting at loyalties she did not acknowledge, appealing to standards as out of touch with the modern world as everything else in their lives. Like the dead talking.
That was the choice she had. Go her own way, work out her own future, or do it their way. It would be easier. It would mean avoiding offence in a world that already seemed too full of offence. Perhaps it was true what her mother had said, that her father loved her. Perhaps, for the sake of peace in the family, she should go along with what he wanted.
She couldn’t do it. For the sake of her future life she had to assert her independence now.
The next day she caught a train into the city and enlisted in the Army Nursing Service.
SEVEN
The list of questions seemed endless.
Roberta sighed, stretching her arms as high above her head as she could and glanced at her watch before once again picking up the brief that Anthony had given her an hour earlier. Another thirty minutes before she was due in the House for Question Time.
It was likely to be a torrid session. Normally she never minded that, she had always been good in a fight, but hated being pushed into a corner over something that should not have been her concern. She had spoken to the media, as instructed, had even managed to suppress the article about Maltby, but the affair had refused to go away. Already there had been questions in the House. Roberta had spoken up for Maltby so now the Opposition was after her, too. They had got hold of a letter from somewhere. It was nothing much, no more than a hint of blood in the water, but opposition leader Henry Peters was proud of his shark-like reputation and that hint had been enough. An election was coming and he was determined to make the most of it.
The list of questions was designed to capitalise on the public disquiet that probably did not exist but that he was determined to drum up if he could. Cornish would be listening. The media would be there, avid as always. Her career was on the line.
The list of questions, with answers suggested by her officials, was her first line of defence but every defence, if it was any good, should open the way to the possibility of attack and it was this aspect that Roberta was working on.
Blood in the water? she thought and grinned savagely. I’ll give them that, all right.
She picked up the phone. ‘Anthony?’
‘Yes?’
‘The answer to question three …’
A pause. ‘Got it …’
‘Are we sure Henry Peters said this? I had an idea it was someone else.’
‘I think —’
‘Thinking isn’t enough. I’ve got to know. If we get it wrong he’ll have my guts all over the carpet.’
A further pause. ‘I’ll check.’
‘Do that.’ And slammed down the phone.
It rang again, immediately. It couldn’t be Anthony, not so quickly. But it could be the Premier, or anyone. Cursing beneath her breath, she snatched up the receiver. ‘Yes, Betty?’
‘Donald Guthrie’s on the line.’
Her breath caught.
‘Put him through.’ Keeping her voice cool, though with an effort.
‘Roberta?’
‘Where are you?’
‘In Sydney. I got in two hours ago. A flying visit.’
She smiled into the receiver. ‘Not too flying, I hope.’
‘I’ve got the cottage for the weekend. If you’re free.’
She thought. There was a constituency meeting. Opening a new creche. Nothing that couldn’t be rescheduled.
‘That’ll be fine,’ she said. ‘I look forward to it.’
‘I shall be tied up in meetings until lunchtime. I’ll catch the afternoon flight. I should be there about seven.’
‘See you, then.’
She cradled the receiver. Her face was one fat smile; she knew it and did not care. They never said much on the phone, cautious of being overheard, but although the weekend was still two days off she could already feel her heart racing. Donald, married man though he was, had been one of the more positive elements in her life in recent years. Her imagination began to flow, anticipating the reunion, but with an effort she brought herself back to reality.
She looked at her watch. Twenty minutes to Question Time. Self-discipline reasserted itself. Plenty of time for dreaming later.
Another ten minutes. The phone pealed once before she grabbed it.
‘You were right.’ Grudging admiration in Anthony Adam’s voice. ‘Charlie Peace said it, not Peters.’
‘Thank you.’
She had known she was right but wasted no time saying so. Donald’s phone call had revitalised her. She looked swiftly through the prepared brief, her pencilled comments beside each typed paragraph. She was ready, razor-sharp, hungry for battle. She gathered her papers, put them neatly in her briefcase and closed the lid. She got up and walked to the door.
‘Let’s get on with it,’ she said aloud to the listening furniture.
She would make mincemeat of them.
On Friday morning she left her office shortly after eleven, drove to the airport, put her car in the long-term car park and caught the lunchtime flight to Melbourne. She picked up a hire car at Tullamarine and by four o’clock had by-passed the city and was on the Maroondah Highway, heading east. She stopped at Healesville and did some shopping. From a delicatessen she bought local smoked t
rout, a cold roast chicken, a selection of cheeses, olive oil. In the shop next door she found salad greens, some early peaches and — bliss — locally grown raspberries. Over the road she bought a bottle of chardonnay, another of a Barossa shiraz, and a bottle of Glenfiddich malt, Donald’s favourite brand of Scotch. Her final call was at the florists where she picked up some proteas. She returned to the car, loaded her treasures into the boot and drove north. Excitement quickened as she turned east on to the side road to Marysville. When she swept down the hill into the little township it was barely five. Plenty of time to get things organised before Donald arrived.
The cottage, as they called it, was a rambling wooden house of many rooms at the end of a track that wound into the hills from a turn-off a kilometre from the town centre. It was owned by someone Donald knew and they used it whenever he was in Australia. Which meant on average four times a year. Not much but probably enough. They were very fond of each other. Roberta sometimes wondered if she might not be a little in love with him, but the patterns of their lives precluded a closer relationship. Back in Edinburgh Donald had a wife and family. Most of his numerous business interests were centred there.
He had never made any secret of his situation or his intention to have things continue as they were. He had told her so after their first meeting and Roberta, after weeks of agonising, had decided that she cared for him enough to want the relationship to go ahead.
She had been a backbencher then; now she was a minister. When it started she wouldn’t have bet tuppence on the relationship enduring but so far it had. Still they met whenever they could and always here, at this cottage in the hills. Their cottage.
It was not as though she were taking anything away from anyone else. They met infrequently, enjoyed the occasions and each other and parted until the next time without tears or acrimony. It was a good, rational relationship between good, rational people. No one suffered because of their meetings and she was determined that no one, herself included, ever would.
She drove up to the door and got out. Before going into the house she paused, looking across the valley to the distant line of tree-clad hills. She loved it here. Now, at the start of summer, the massed ranks of trees were emerald and dark green; in winter they would be black and silent with snow sometimes crusting their branches; a glory of russet and gold in autumn. She loved the air. It was razor sharp in the cold months, fresh and resinous always. A woman who at home could never rest, she loved above all things the peace and solitude that enfolded her whenever she was here. It was as though, for Donald’s sake or possibly her own, she drew on a different personality as soon as she arrived.
