View from the Beach

by JH Fletcher

  ‘Because it has been a lie.’

  ‘You’re still you. You may have been forced to conceal the past but that doesn’t mean you should deny it, not to yourself, not to me.’

  ‘To you?’ He stared at her in amazement. ‘We have not seen each other for over forty years and now you say —’

  He was on the verge of denying her any special role in his life. She would not permit it. ‘Our lives have been entwined since the beginning,’ she told him fiercely. ‘They will be to the end.’

  ‘There is a difference.’

  ‘What is that?’

  He gave her an oblique answer. ‘I know you.’ A crooked smile. ‘All your readers know you; it is what happens when you are famous. You have done nothing to make you feel ashamed.’

  Night. In the darkness the endless rhythm of the sea. Ruth stood at the open window of her bedroom. Franz and Louise here tonight, she thought. The past and the future, all together in this moment. Time was a fragile balloon inside her head. It might burst at any minute but for these few moments she clung to the notion that all their life, all their time, was here. Their illusions, too.

  You have done nothing to make you feel ashamed.

  I know you, Franz had told her. All your readers know you. Had it been true he would never have been so mistaken.

  TWENTY-THREE

  She had hoped that in her absence in London and Europe the problems back home would have resolved themselves. They had not.

  Her father, first of all.

  Bob had been stricken a week before Ruth got back. He had had a stroke and no longer recognised anyone. She arrived in time to hold his hands, to feel him fly from between her fingers.

  ‘What do I do now?’ said Mary, turning with dry eyes from the grave.

  ‘You live.’ Ruth felt closer to her mother in their shared bereavement than she had ever been, but knew it was too late. Mary had no interest in living now that Bob was gone. She went home quietly, Ruth by her side. She sat by the empty grate, watching … memory? The steady seepage of her life? There was no knowing.

  ‘I shall go to bed now,’ she said.

  Ruth watched her, powerless to intervene. In the morning found her dead in bed. She was not surprised yet wondered, looking for sleeping pills. Found nothing. Mary had stopped, tidily, as she lived. No need for anything else.

  Dougie was a problem too.

  ‘Wife gadding about all over the bloody world,’ he said. ‘Makes a bloke sick.’

  ‘It’s my job.’

  ‘Funny bloody job, you ask me.’ Not a word about how things had gone.

  Success he would resent; would dismiss failure as a waste of time and money. Either way he wanted to know nothing about it.

  Ruth had ideas for her new book but needed space for her thoughts to come to fruition. She remembered what Franz had said about the Outback, how it returned to him in dreams. That is what I need, she thought. Spiritual communion with the emptiness.

  She invited Dougie to go with her. Out there, she thought, just the two of us, maybe things will come right. These spiky resentments are too damaging to be sustained. Damaging to the harmony that she assumed they both wanted from their life together, damaging to the creative instinct that she now knew formed the major portion of her being. Perhaps the desert would bring healing.

  Dougie’s first reaction was that he wasn’t interested, didn’t intend to be dragged around the continent like so much baggage. She flattered him, saying how much she had missed him, how much she wanted the two of them to be alone together.

  ‘The Outback?’ His eyes were derisive. ‘You’d said the bright lights, I might have thought about it.’

  ‘We’ll make our own lights, the pair of us. We shall sit by a fire and look at the stars together.’ If only it were possible, she thought, if only they could somehow conjure up magic to replace what she might have had in London.

  Eventually, he agreed.

  At first the countryside was not what she’d expected. She had anticipated unremitting harshness yet here were rolling hills and paddocks alive with sheep and the ruminant shapes of cattle. It seemed a happy augury for what was to come. And the light, soft and almost rose-tinted, bathing the landscape …

  She thought, this I have also come to see. The harshness lay ahead, the plains of stone, the canyons weighted with silence. This transitional land was part of it, the hills growing steadily drier and more bare, the dwindling stands of trees providing a foretaste of space.

  She shot sideways glances at Dougie as they drove north, the unforgiving profile, the grudging mouth. She would have driven, had volunteered to do so, but a man who was a man drove his woman. Dougie had not bothered to answer, had climbed behind the wheel with a martyred air. As they drove away from the house had clashed the gears to show who was boss.

  The road sign promised Port Augusta, a hundred miles ahead. Dust boiled; sunlight glinted on the polished stone of a hilltop.

  ‘It’s good, isn’t it?’ she offered. ‘Don’t you think?’

  ‘Not bad.’ Noncommittal, yet with what Ruth hoped might be more enthusiasm than previously.

  His mood lightened further when they discovered the sleeping coach of the narrow gauge railway train waiting at Augusta to take them north.

  Dougie bounced on the berth, laughing like a kid. ‘This is all right, heh.’

  Yearning, Ruth scanned the northern sky, a deepening lilac haze through which the first pinpoint stars peered. ‘It’ll be great.’

  Great for me, she meant, great for us. The mystic emptiness waited to fill them both. She wanted her husband to love her, to fulfil in her the desire she felt for wholeness. The train chugged north. The smell of smoke gave an extra dimension to the darkness that had enfolded them. Looking out of the window as the rails traced a long curve through the flattening land she caught the rosy glare of the engine’s firebox reflected on the backward sweep of smoke. Beneath them the iron wheels vibrated; the darkness beyond the windows brought them close to one another.

  Ruth looked at Dougie’s face, at the other Dougie bobbing and moving in the black mirror of the window. The dim light erased the bitterness of aging that had soured him since the war. Once again, magically, he was the young man, lively as flame, who had dazzled her in Malacca. She had thought that man gone forever, swallowed up like so many others by the iron mouth of war, yet had hoped without any real faith that this trip to which he had been so reluctant to agree might prove the key to re-open the door to the past. Miraculously, it seemed, it had. Perhaps. Her eyes devoured him, for the first time she dared hope that it might be so. Please … Breathlessly she prayed. Please …

  He laughed. ‘What you gawping at?’

  ‘You. My husband.’

  ‘That should be enough to give you a bellyache. Eh?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ Smiling complacently, drawing a little closer.

  ‘Get on with you.’ But was pleased, she saw, his arm enclosing her.

  The growing sense of unity was so fragile. The wrong word, the wrong breath might shatter it. It frightened her. She thought, We are so close. I do not think I could bear it if things went wrong now.

  Lost in darkness, the engine threw its banshee howl at the stars. Dougie’s arm tightened, drawing her to him. He looked down at her. His halo of red hair burned in the light.

  ‘We’ll have a ball,’ he said.

  The next morning, in the pale green light of dawn, the train arrived at Marree.

  ‘Don’t look much of a place,’ Dougie said, yet strode the frosted ground with authority, masculinity fortified by memories of the night. West of the railway line a galvanised cluster of corrugated iron houses stared with blank eyes at the sunrise.

  ‘Where’s the hotel?’

  Not hard to find; the only two-storeyed building in the place. Stone slab, iron roofed, it stood out in a single street of houses built of wood and iron, their white roofs weathered to a muted symphony of greys and browns. They went into the hotel, ordered b
reakfast in a room barely warmer than the frigid wastes outside. Steak, chops, couple of eggs, grease. Brimming with vigour, excitement, gratitude at the miracle that might have begun, Ruth wolfed the lot. Would have eaten double if it had been offered.

  Dougie looked at her polished plate, smiled at her conspiratorially. ‘Something’s perked you up.’

  ‘Something’s got into me, you mean.’ Her brilliant, unguarded smile rewarded Dougie, the empty dining room, the world.

  ‘You reckon?’

  Like lovers, nudging each other with shared jokes, remembered intimacies, laughing at nothing.

  The publican took their plates. Grubby apron, unshaven, face as greasy as the food. Veined eyes had seen it all. It did not matter. Nothing mattered.

  When the garage opened they rented a vehicle, loaded their gear in the back, drove north. Ruth looked back. Through the dust she could barely make out the town they had left, the few scattered houses blending so well with the country of which it was a part. Miles eastwards, the outline of the Flinders Ranges barely broke the world’s rim. In that direction the polished gibber plain flowed like a grey tide but on her own side, beyond the shadow of the vehicle, the stone shone like glass, dazzling. The surface of the ground glowed red and green, sand and mulga scrub, dwindling into a consuming vastness where the distant promise of Lake Eyre gleamed as white as salt.

  They drew closer to its shores.

  ‘Not much going on round here,’ Dougie said. He was right. Even the mulga was behind them now. The ground was naked of trees, of any form of vegetation. ‘Looks like they sprayed the place with weedkiller.’

  Ahead of them the shores of the inland sea floated in a haze in which the tops of mirage-blue islands lay suspended. They travelled along a wire fence that ran eastwards into the emptiness.

  ‘Dingo fence,’ Dougie pronounced. Even now he had to be on top of everything in his private landscape, could not bear to admit there might be something he did not know.

  He was probably right yet Ruth’s heart sank. She had so hoped they had left the sassy Dougie behind but would not permit herself to worry about it. Time could cure all, or so they said.

  They camped on the edge of the lake.

  ‘Shouldn’t there be water, or something?’

  Ruth laughed. ‘It’s only been full once in the last hundred years,’ she said.

  ‘How’d you know?’

  ‘Read it somewhere.’

  ‘Going to write a book about it?’

  ‘I might.’

  The man at the garage had warned them to carry wood for the fire. ‘Take everything,’ he had told them. ‘Not much where you’re going.’

  It was lucky he had told them or the temperatures after nightfall would have been a trial. They built a big fire, wrapped themselves in their warmest clothes and sat as close to the flames as they could. The breath of the frosty night chilled the backs of their necks but their faces were rosy in the firelight, the fronts of their bodies warm, the hearts within their bodies the warmest things of all.

  Dougie’s arm around her shoulders, Ruth stared into the fire. Stared at the logs rotted by fire, the turrets and fiery groves of flame. Beyond the flames her mind sensed the expanse of the featureless plain, the pink ground naked of growth, corroded and polished by a million years of wind and silence. This is where we become one with the land, she thought. The paintings that Franz had mentioned — the fish skeletons drawn on rock, the footprints of millennia. I was right to come back. Not because of Dougie, this warmth signalling, please God, a new growth and feeling between us, but because this is where I am meant to be. One hundred and sixty years, she thought. That is all the time we have been here, out of the unimaginable thousands of years. Yet here I feel one with the past. This is my land, I belong here and nowhere else. It might have made her feel lonely that she should be at home only in a place as stark as this. It did not. She felt fulfilment. All life and hope was concentrated in this instant upon the shores of the great sea that in its emptiness seemed to Ruth to encompass the very essence of the land.

  She threw on another log, watched as the bark unravelled, flaring momentarily, a wreckage of flame. Deep in the fire another log collapsed. A swarm of sparks soared orange in the night.

  She turned to Dougie. Her heart was brimming; every sense alive to the point of pain. She put her hand on his arm, held it tight. ‘Love me,’ she whispered fiercely.

  He stared at her, cautious of passion. Love for him was the closed room, the bed, not the open vistas of the night. ‘Here?’

  ‘Here.’

  On the ground. Under the stars.

  Her cry of fulfilment arched into heaven.

  That was the beginning of what Ruth came later to think of as the high point of their life together, when it really seemed that the errors and longings of the past might be erased by love. Every day they travelled through a land so devoid of life that it became a mystical experience simply to be there. The emptiness was absolute; the heat froze with its indifference to living things. It was hell; yet hell with a heaven within it. Driven together by the silence they became closer than ever before; truly one being without separation or individuality.

  We are one, now and forever. Ruth thought, This was what Dougie had meant in those early days of marriage. One through eternity.

  She had never wanted it, had been frightened of it, perhaps. Now, for the first time, she believed it might indeed become so; more, that it might be possible without any need to surrender herself. She thought, We are one because we are separate and have turned to each other, mingled flesh and spirits through our own free will.

  While in London Ruth had attended a service of Tenebrae at St Paul’s Cathedral. One by one the lights had been extinguished until in absolute darkness the choir had sung Allegri’s Miserere. It had been theatrical but profoundly moving; five times during its performance the treble soloist had soared to the dizzy heights of top C. Now, twelve thousand miles and a universe away, Ruth lay with her husband beside Lake Eyre, the salt a blaze of fairy fire beneath the moon, and felt body and spirit soar similarly to a previously unimaginable height of ecstasy and fulfilment.

  They travelled east to the Flinders Ranges. The silence of the land accompanied them. We are a product of this land, Ruth thought, it has formed us as surely as it has shaped the rocks around us. It does not feel us neither does it reject. Nothing as positive as that. It is indifferent. It is very old. We, by contrast, are less than grains of dust borne upon the wind, the harsh glitter of gibbers beneath the furnace eye of the sun.

  She watched Dougie. You believed you stayed with him out of pity, she told herself, because of what it would do to him if you left. You were wrong. You did it for yourself. Because the alternative to staying is loneliness. She looked about her at the land crushed beneath the weight of aeons, knowing that loneliness, far more than incompatibility, was the worst prospect of all.

  On their last night she tried to explain to Dougie what this discovery of the land had meant to her, the significance it might have in their lives. Greatly daring, she even spoke tentatively of the tree. By his expression she might having been talking Swahili. ‘Empty bloody desert, that’s all it is. As for this tree you’re on about … Aren’t any trees around here, are there?’

  Back at Marree, just before boarding the train for Port Augusta, they saw a group of Aboriginals standing at one end of the street. Watching. It was impossible to know what. From the corner of her eye Ruth studied them. Long thin legs, dark skin, eyes set deep beneath heavy brows. They did not speak even to each other yet were as one with the landscape out of which they had emerged.

  ‘I wish I knew what they know,’ she said to Dougie.

  ‘Yeh? And what’s that?’

  They knew the emptiness better than she ever would.

  They were the children of the emptiness. She said nothing, reluctant to give her husband the chance to fracture her sensibility. Who did so, anyway.

  ‘Bloody boongs,’ said Dou
gie.

  Back home Ruth found she was not so lonely after all. For one thing there was the new book. It was harder to write than Out Of The Depths in that there was nothing of her own life in it yet the confidence gained from that success helped her now. She was not afraid to experiment, to try to write better than herself. The task enthralled and challenged her. She immersed herself in it, the characters spoke to her. How could she be lonely, surrounded by so many people clamouring for her attention?

  There was another reason.

  Patty was ecstatic. Seized her hands, dancing, face alight. ‘When?’

  ‘Heaven knows.’ Ruth had never been one for detail. What did it matter? What was important was that she was having a baby, not the date it was expected. Which was no more than a guess, after all. ‘Some time around March, I suppose.’

  Hoped privately that it would not interfere with the book which was beginning to tangle her mind with its problems. Decided to say nothing of that. Even Patty might find it hard to understand how the book and the writing of it presented a greater reality to her now than the incidents of her own life. Including, it seemed, the baby.

  ‘Dougie’s pleased, I bet.’

  Ruth didn’t answer. She hadn’t told him. Back home from the desert, he had put on his old attitudes like a familiar shirt. After a week she had interrupted his grouching to ask, ‘But what did you think of it?’

  ‘Orright, I suppose.’ He scratched his head, not knowing what she wanted of him. ‘Wouldn’t want to live up there, heh, but it was okay for a trip.’

  She saw that was all it had meant to him, a spree, a chance to make love in the open without anyone to watch them. He’d quite liked that, once he’d got used to the idea.

  ‘You have told him, I suppose?’ Patty was always catching her out like that. Somehow Ruth never expected anyone so sunny to be so perceptive.

  ‘Well …’

  Her eyes narrowed thoughtfully. ‘He is the father?’