View from the Beach

by JH Fletcher

  ‘My daughter,’ Ruth said carefully, ‘has just become the Premier of South Australia.’

  Louise was less than impressed. ‘Big deal.’

  ‘She’s still got to prove herself. But I thought I’d better warn you.’

  ‘I hope she’s better than the rest of them, that’s all. That’s why we read your books. Because they’ve got something in them that no one else has got. A sense of faith in people. A belief that things will come right in the end. We need someone who feels like that. To give us hope.’

  Ruth was moved. ‘I’m so glad. I suppose that’s what I intended.’ She laughed. ‘Beside writing what I hope are interesting stories, I mean.’

  ‘That’s what’s so good about them,’ Louise assured her. ‘They say important things but in a way people can enjoy.’

  They didn’t talk much on the long road north but in no time, it seemed, they were bumping along the track through the dunes towards Ruth’s house. She switched off the engine and opened the driver’s door. In the sudden silence they heard the rumble of the waves.

  Louise got her case from the boot. They walked around the side of the house and on to the long verandah.

  Louise stopped, staring seawards. ‘So it was true, then.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘This. The sea. The space.’

  Ruth stood at her side. Together they drank in the solitude, the empty vastness of sun-bright water, the air heavy with the sound of breakers, then Ruth picked up Louise’s case. ‘You must be tired after your journey. I’ve put you in the room you had last time.’

  She put the case on the bed and opened the windows, letting the air flow in. ‘I am going to make myself a cup of tea. Will you join me?’

  ‘Give me five minutes.’ Louise snapped the locks on her case. ‘Ruth …’

  Ruth turned in the doorway.

  ‘Thank you for letting me come.’

  They drank tea, walked the beach, talked of this and that. They cooked supper together. Later, when it was dark, Louise had a bath while Ruth sat in her protected corner of the verandah and watched the sea, feeling the infinitesimal tremor of the house beneath her feet with each thud of the breakers upon the beach. The engineers had assured her that the house was quite safe; the huge girders sunk deep into the ground took care of that, they told her. Ruth was no engineer, but knew that eventually the sea would prove them wrong. One day the water would arise and claim its own, the shelving beach, the dunes, the house that stood upon the dunes. One day. Not in her lifetime, but one day.

  She found the thought reassuring. It was part of the natural rhythm of things. It gave her not concern but a sense that things were still right with the world. If some scientist were to work out a way to harness the tides and wind Ruth would have been filled not with wonder but horror. We have our place, she thought, but when we seek to dominate we destroy. I hope it never comes to that.

  Louise said, ‘What are you thinking?’

  Ruth turned. Laughed. ‘My goodness. You startled me, child. I didn’t hear you come back.’ She turned towards the invisible sea. ‘What I really like is to sit out in the wind. You feel part of things, then. But it’s not warm enough for that.’

  Louise watched her. She had met her so recently yet felt that through her books she had known this old woman all her life. Her wisdom had illuminated the lives of so many yet she was so unassuming in the limpid accessibility of her prose, the way her thoughts flowed upon the page. She was equally unassuming in her life. On her first visit Louise had not known what to expect, but not this, not this. She said, ‘Being part of things is important to you, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s important to everyone, or should be. We’ve got into the habit of thinking of ourselves as separate from the rest of creation but we’re not.’

  At any other time Louise would have been fascinated by Ruth’s views on this, on everything, but now she had something more pressing on her mind.

  ‘I’m worried about my father.’

  Concerned, Ruth looked at her. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘When it all came out about the war, when he could see that nobody blamed him for what happened, I thought things would be right but they weren’t. I sometimes wonder if they’ll ever be right again.’

  ‘When he was here he told me it was a mistake to try and go back,’ Ruth said. ‘The problem is that he’s done it. He spent forty-odd years trying to forget the past. A new life, new name, a business, a family … Now his real past has caught up with him again. Franz Vogel exists, not George Frey. Everything that George has done since he came to Australia has vanished.’

  ‘That’s not true. I’m real and I haven’t vanished.’

  ‘Of course. But the past has become the present. I suspect he’s finding that hard to handle.’

  Louise frowned. ‘What can I do about it?’

  The hardest lesson: that there are some things in life about which you can do nothing.

  Ruth said, ‘You must give him time.’

  ‘He doesn’t have much time.’

  Ruth saw Franz through Louise’s eyes, the tired man so much older than his years. Which were not few, after all.

  ‘That’s what you must do, all the same.’

  ‘He may die. And if he dies without peace —’

  ‘There is nothing you can do.’

  It was cruel. What had Dorrie said? The truth often is.

  ‘But you could.’ Louise’s eyes, watching in the darkness. Those deep blue eyes. Their expectations, their demands, weighed upon her. It was too much. Besides, Louise was wrong; no one could do anything.

  ‘No.’

  ‘He needs you.’

  Ruth could see no way of explaining that what Louise wanted was impossible. Sally, Boyd, Andrew. And now Louise … All of them wanting so much. She was drowning in their endless demands. Took refuge in what had always been her justification.

  ‘I can do nothing.’ Tried a laugh. ‘I’ve a book to write. When on earth am I going to get the chance to work on it?’

  Saw as soon as the words were past her lips that it was the worst thing she could have said. The blue eyes were hostile now. ‘That’s all that matters to you, isn’t it? The next book. And the one after that. Don’t you care about real people at all?’

  After they had gone to bed Ruth stood at the open window of her bedroom. For the hundredth time she asked herself the same question. I have sacrificed so much of myself and others. Has it been worth it?

  ‘Yes’, she said aloud. ‘Yes.’ She had to believe it yet doubted, all the same, and the doubt was unbearable.

  I have created a world that never existed, that without me could not have existed. Out of my agony, my sweat, my belief in the human race. Am I to say now that none of it has meant anything? If that is so I would be better dead. She remembered Louise’s words. If he dies without peace … Dougie and now Franz … She threw her pain at the watching stars. Am I the only one to be denied the hope of that?

  THIRTY

  ‘I remember all the smart remarks I got,’ Patty said.

  ‘Now it’s your turn. How’s it feel to be fifty, eh?’

  ‘Not much different from forty-nine,’ Ruth told her.

  ‘Yeh?’ Patty was not so sure. ‘Felt like the beginning of the end to me.’

  For Ruth it seemed more like a beginning. A beginning for her; a beginning for art. Her actual birthday had been a week earlier, on 20 August, and on that day Ruth had been in Melbourne attending the opening of the National Gallery of Victoria.

  She had walked through the spacious halls of the new building, had admired the space and light as well as the pictures displayed upon its walls. She had driven on pilgrimage to Topaz, she had talked with the trees. Hudson and Thorne had put on a birthday bash for her, she’d had the usual run-in with the media.

  ‘I strongly disagree with our involvement in this Asian war,’ she told journalists.

  ‘If you’d been Simon Townsend?’ one of them asked.

  Back in May an arm
y court martial had sentenced Simon Townsend, a conscientious objector, to twenty-eight days on bread and water for refusing orders.

  ‘I hope I’d have had the courage to do what he did.’

  ‘Don’t you think it’s right to take a stand against tyranny?’

  ‘I believe that neither we nor the United States should be in Vietnam at all.’

  Her opposition to the war worried Richard, both as her lover and her publisher.

  ‘You think we were wrong to have stood up against the Japs?’

  ‘That was an entirely different situation.’

  ‘It may hurt sales,’ he warned.

  ‘I can’t help that.’

  Then Patty had phoned, invited her back to South Australia. ‘Some of us would like to give you a bit of a party.’

  The gesture touched her. ‘Thank you so much.’

  ‘Don’t kid yourself. It’s for our benefit, not yours. Only chance we ever get to catch up with someone famous around here.’

  So back to the mid-north she had come.

  The party was at the Institute where Ruth and Patty had first met.

  ‘Twenty-nine years,’ Patty marvelled. ‘Wouldn’t credit it, would you?’

  Patty had put on weight but with her big bones it suited her; Ruth thought she looked younger than she did. Yet Ruth had no complaints, was full of health and energy, of plans for the future. She had finished her latest novel a month earlier and was already sketching notes for the next one. Her agent was discussing a possible stage adaptation of one of her books to mark the formation of the new Australian Council for the Arts. Later in the year she was due to address international literary festivals in Vancouver and Buenos Aires. She had long got used to being a name.

  It was nice to be back. She looked with pleasure at the familiar hall, the Welcome Home banner hanging from the ceiling, the faces of people she remembered well, or vaguely, one or two she did not know at all. One or two absentees, too. Marge Lennox was gone. Andrew Hillier, dead of a heart attack two years earlier at fifty-two. Back in 1939 she had called him a ratbag but now her memories were softened by nostalgia and she was prepared, belatedly, to forgive.

  There was tea, the tables laden with cheese sandwiches, tomato sandwiches, fish paste and vegemite sandwiches, with sausage rolls and curry puffs, with cakes and scones and cream and jam and …

  Ruth had forgotten how country people ate. No wonder Patty had put on weight.

  She gave them a talk, chatted with them all for an hour, went home with Patty as exhausted as if she’d been to a royal reception.

  ‘You look tired out.’ Patty fussing good-naturedly, as always.

  ‘It was good, though,’ Ruth said. ‘I should get back more often.’

  Knew it was impossible. As she had said to Dougie all those years ago, she seemed sometimes to have hardly any time for writing. Or would not have had, had she not been so icily disciplined in her work.

  ‘Still keeping those crazy hours?’ Patty asked.

  ‘Every day.’

  ‘Rather you than me. Ever hear from Dougie?’

  She spoke casually but Ruth was not deceived. Patty had never liked him; it was not interest in Dougie’s welfare that had prompted the question. Patty had decided long ago that Ruth and Richard should get married, had never given up hope that one of these days they would be, but since Ruth and Dougie had never got divorced it didn’t matter what Patty thought.

  ‘He sent me a card for my birthday.’

  Every year he sent her cards from wherever he happened to be in Australia. He had said there was a lot of country out there and in the years since their parting he had certainly seen a good deal of it. Birdsville, Albany, Weipa, Oodnadatta, the postmarks on the cards a rollcall of the Outback that he had once affected to despise.

  Maybe he learnt something from our trip to Lake Eyre after all, Ruth thought.

  The last two cards had come from Broome so it looked as though Dougie might have settled down at last.

  ‘Found someone, has he?’

  ‘Not that I know of.’

  Although that didn’t mean much. The message on his cards consisted simply of a cheery line of good wishes; he never mentioned either himself or his health or fortunes.

  ‘He should. A man needs a woman.’

  And vice versa, of course. It was Patty’s philosophy, comfortable and assured. There was no place in her thoughts for gays, even for those who preferred their own company. In Patty’s world such people weren’t normal and to Patty being normal was everything.

  Ruth, who knew that Dougie was neither gay nor a hermit, also hoped he had found someone to fill the spaces of his life. Whatever he had been looking for — and she doubted he had ever really known — he had certainly never found it with her. He deserved better; everyone deserved better and Dougie, for all his failings, had had much in him to love.

  Johnno came in for his tea. Now there was a man who had changed, Ruth thought. Not sixty yet looking ten years older. Country talk over the table; the prospects for the harvest, the price of wool and grain. After tea Johnno disappeared into the other room to watch the telly while Ruth and Patty did the washing up.

  At first Patty didn’t want her to help but Ruth soon put a stop to her nonsense. ‘Who do you think tidies up at my place?’ Although in truth she had someone to give her a hand three days a week.

  Over tea Ruth had noticed Patty watching her husband with love and concern.

  ‘Okay, is he?’

  ‘Right as a flea.’ But did not look at her.

  ‘Patty —’

  Patty scoured the sink furiously, saying nothing.

  Ruth watched her. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘I’m a fool.’ Patty chucked the words defiantly, like stones. ‘But I can’t help worrying. He’s lost so much weight recently.’

  ‘Has he been to the doctor?’

  Patty laughed. ‘My Johnno? You got to be joking. O’ course,’ she said thoughtfully, ‘he was upset over Ellen running off like that. With Rufe Dobbin, of all people.’ She looked at Ruth. ‘Think that’s what’s causing it?’

  Ruth had her doubts but would say nothing; she was a stranger here nowadays, however close she and Patty might have been once, and Johnno would not thank her for interfering.

  ‘It wouldn’t hurt him to go for a check-up,’ she supposed.

  Patty wouldn’t hear of it, either because she thought it unnecessary or because she knew it wasn’t.

  The next day Richard phoned from Sydney and put all thought of Johnno out of her head.

  ‘You’ve had a call from Broome,’ he said. ‘Some Sister calling from the hospital there.’

  Ruth and Dougie had not set eyes on each other for six years yet the shock was like a sudden wind, chilling her. ‘What did she want?’

  ‘The way she spoke, Dougie’s pretty sick. Apparently he’s been asking for you.’

  ‘I’ll have to go. You realise that?’ The shock made her belligerent, as though she really thought Richard might try to stop her.

  ‘Of course.’ Richard as always did not let her down and she felt ashamed of the sharpness of her question. ‘Anything you want me to do?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing you can do. I love you,’ she said. As though that made up for anything.

  She put the phone down. Stood, watching space.

  Patty watched her across the kitchen. ‘Everything okay?’

  ‘It’s Dougie.’

  Ruth told her what Richard had said, phoned the airport to check on flights.

  ‘Nothing till tomorrow.’

  She rang the hospital in Broome, spoke to Sister Aster. ‘I’ll be there sometime tomorrow.’ She hesitated. ‘How serious is it?’

  ‘He’s dying.’ The sister’s Scots brogue softened the starkness of the message. ‘Taking too long over it for his own good, puir lamb.’

  The next day she flew above a brown landscape stretching endlessly. She sat in her seat, a magazine unregarded in her lap, remembering the trip she had
taken with Dougie after the war, the only trip they had ever taken together into the interior, and recalled how she had hoped the isolation and stillness might re-unite them. As, for a while, it had. Now they were getting together again. For the last time, it seemed.

  Broome in August was a pleasant place to be, the temperature around the mid-twenties. In the hospital the windows were open to the light breeze. Dougie like a skeleton in the bed.

  ‘He may not know you,’ Sister Aster warned. ‘He’s doped to the eyes.’

  He did, though. He could barely speak but Ruth sat beside him, his hand loose in hers, and felt the infinitesimal pressure of his fingers on her own. She did not talk to him; was not about to demean the dignity of his passing by cheery optimism.

  She sat without moving. Later, while the staff cleaned and washed him, she sat in the tiny waiting room. Where the Sister, brisk, starched, found her.

  ‘I’m sorry to have dragged you all this way. But he kept on and on asking.’

  ‘I’m his wife, after all.’

  What mattered was that she had come and that Dougie knew it. There was no need for words.

  ‘How long?’

  Sister Aster shook her head dubiously. ‘He’s strong. Which at this stage of his life is a disadvantage.’

  ‘Is he in pain?’

  ‘Not when he’s doped up. The trouble is the effects of the drug are wearing off and we’re having to use more and more of it.’

  ‘And when the effect does wear off?’

  Sister Aster looked at her soberly. ‘He’s in hell. But it’s not only that. We have to do everything for him, everything. It’s no’ a disease that leaves a patient with much dignity, you understand. He has no quality of life at all.’

  ‘Nor any hope of it?’

  ‘A blessed release is all he’s got to hope for, and the sooner the better. For all of us.’

  Ruth stayed with him.

  ‘You need rest,’ Sister Aster told her. But she could not. She sat there, helpless, re-living all the might-have-beens, while the dark hours passed. In the morning nothing had changed; the skeletal face, the hollowed-out eyes, the pinpoint pupils. The stillness. Yet still he breathed, a rasping, repetitious agony without hope or release. On and on.