View from the Beach

by JH Fletcher

  ‘David?’ Ruth guessed.

  ‘He phoned last night.’ As though discussing the weather she said, ‘He’s asked me to marry him.’

  Ruth was delighted. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I told him I’d think about it.’

  ‘Think about it? Don’t you love him?’

  ‘You know I do. But that’s not the issue.’

  Ruth remembered Dorrie saying, You have a duty.

  ‘Of course it’s the issue.’

  ‘I spoke to him just now before I phoned you. I said we’d have to wait. There’s plenty of time. We’re both young. And I can’t leave my father.’

  ‘You must leave him,’ Ruth told her. ‘You must not consider him or anyone. Just yourselves and the fact that you love one another.’

  ‘That’s selfish,’ Louise protested.

  ‘No. That is the light, the only light, and you must follow it. Anything else would be unforgivable.’

  ‘But what will my father do?’

  ‘What we all do. Live out his life, as I am living out mine. I’ll visit him, phone him, write to him. He can come and see me here if he likes. But you must get on with your own life. Ultimately, that is all any of us can do.’

  They talked some more but when Louise rang off she had still given no indication of what her intentions were.

  ‘I have told her what I think,’ Ruth said to the room. ‘It’s up to her what she does about it.’

  Sally went into town, spoke to Bob Jenkins, the local cop. When she came out of the station she was a lot happier than when she had gone in. Bob had told her that Andrew would almost certainly receive only a suspended sentence. It wasn’t good but a lot better than it might have been. At Coonalpyn we can all make a new start, she told herself. She was determined to make it so. It will be better for Boyd, she told herself. He will be happier. Andrew will have to decide for himself what he wants. That is what he has needed, she hoped, the challenge of having to make his way in the world. Even hope was something to be thankful for, after all.

  She flew into Adelaide. No one knew she was here. She caught the bus into the city, grabbed a lift in a truck heading north. The truckie couldn’t believe his luck, put a good face on it when he found there was nothing doing.

  She walked down the long driveway through the gums, came to the house. No one about but a ute was parked beside a shed. Her heart was pounding as she opened the door; no locks in the country. She went in. The kitchen was empty, tidy. A clock ticked. She looked further. David was in the office beyond the kitchen, doing paper work at the battered desk. He did not hear her. She stood in the doorway until he sensed her presence and looked up. Gaped.

  ‘If you still want me,’ she said.

  He was on his feet and across the room, as though afraid she might vanish as mysteriously as she had arrived. He drew her into the room, eyes devouring her, closed the door behind her. She heard the catch click home. The world was gone.

  ‘Forever,’ he said.

  She was crying; saw to her astonishment that he was, too. She raised her hand, brushed a tear away from his cheek.

  ‘Two fools,’ she said.

  The Nobel Committee was meeting. Halfway through the afternoon the phone rang.

  Ruth’s heart jumped; she snatched it up. ‘Hullo?’

  ‘No news?’ It was Roberta.

  Ruth breathed out slowly. ‘Not yet.’

  ‘I’m not trying to badger you —’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘But I’m naturally anxious to know —’

  ‘Thank you.’ Could have screamed with the tension of having to be polite, to be patient, on top of all the other tensions in her life. I will not turn on her for being concerned, she told herself, but was astonished how difficult it was.

  She had hardly put the phone down when it rang a second time. Again Ruth snatched it.

  ‘Franz.’

  No! She could not bear it; could not imagine what he wanted with her. Now of all times … Barbara, the whole world, might at that moment be trying to get hold of her. Distracted, she heard him with half an ear, not fully understanding what he was saying. At last one phrase got through to her.

  ‘Louise has gone?’ she interrupted.

  ‘I was telling you —’

  ‘I’m sorry. I’ve something on my mind. Where has she gone?’

  ‘To join this David.’

  At any other time Ruth would have been overjoyed but now was too impatient for joy. ‘Wonderful. Franz, I’m sorry, but I’m expecting a call —’

  He carried on speaking through her interruption. ‘It seems a good idea … Just the two of us …’

  She could not credit what he seemed to be suggesting. ‘You and I?’

  ‘In the old days we were so close,’ he said. ‘Now at the end of our lives —’

  It was unthinkable. ‘No,’ she said at once. ‘I’m sorry. No.’

  He was affronted by the abruptness of her rejection. ‘You told me how pleased you were to see me —’

  ‘To see you, yes. Not to live with you.’

  ‘I see …’ But it was obvious that he did not.

  ‘My dear,’ she told him more kindly, ‘we have always been such good friends. Let’s keep it like that. We are too used to our own lives to think of changing things now. We can still see each other. I can come and visit you, if you’d like me to. You can come here. It wouldn’t do to try and change too much. Not at our age.’

  ‘That David Clark has a lot to answer for,’ Franz said grimly.

  ‘He has a life, too,’ Ruth pointed out.

  ‘With my daughter?’

  ‘Of course. If that’s what they both want.’

  ‘And we have no rights?’

  ‘None at all,’ Ruth told him. ‘Because they are the future. And that has a prior claim.’

  At midnight the phone rang for the third time. Ruth was more cautious now. ‘Hullo?’

  ‘They’re still meeting.’ Ruth sagged; only Barbara. ‘They had a break half an hour ago but they’ve gone back in. The hot money is saying it’s down to three.’

  ‘Which ones?’

  ‘Mzile Kakwe and Gunnar Magnusson. And you, of course.’

  The Zimbabwean and the Icelander. And the Aussie. I am the only woman. Is that a help or a hindrance?

  ‘This is bad for the nerves,’ Ruth said.

  Barbara’s laugh echoed down the line. ‘Last time I checked mine they were an inch long and curling at the ends. Hang in there, kiddo, we’re going to make it. I can feel it in my bones.’

  ‘All my bones feel is exhaustion. I’m going to bed. If anything happens —’

  ‘You’ll know all about it. The media will be on you like hawks.’

  ‘Or vultures.’

  She went to bed, slept restlessly, ears alert for the phone. Which did not ring. At her usual time she woke. She felt sick with weariness and disappointment. She got out of bed, scrubbed her face militantly with a flannel, glaring balefully at her reflection in the mirror. Old hag. Soon sort you out.

  She slung on some scruff clothes, taking her time about it.

  Still nothing. To hell with it.

  She went out and down the steps to the beach. Walked barefoot by the sudsy sea. The wind had got up in the night and all the way to the horizon the breaking waves gleamed brilliant in the sunlight. She leant into the wind, feeling the hair blowing backwards off her head.

  Nothing.

  That damn Nobel Committee was supposed to have made its decision last night yet still there was no word. After all the scheming, the work, the drama, nothing. George’s life — and Louise’s — might have been in ruins. For what?

  ‘Missed the boat,’ she told the waves, the salt wind. ‘If it had been me I’d have heard by now.’

  Yet her body had still not accepted it. She could feel her heart pulsing strongly in her chest, the tension of nerves. Still waiting, still hoping.

  Don’t they know how old I am? she wondered. Or don’t they c
are if I drop dead while they chat on?

  In truth she felt not in the least like death; on the contrary was urgently, passionately alive. You can’t afford to die, she told herself. When you die Richard dies and Dougie, and Peter and Dorrie and Patty. All the people you have known and loved. And what about Amy and the other characters in your books? Not real to everyone, perhaps, but real to you, God knows.

  I created them, she thought, yet there are times when it seems they created me, that without them I would never have existed at all. What about all the characters still waiting to be born out of the womb of my imagination, my feelings? What of them?

  She reached the end of the beach, sat for a while on the rock she always chose, the only smooth surface among the multitude of knobbly rocks. Even this one digs into your backside after a while, she thought, shifting uncomfortably. Comes from having got so scrawny in your old age. At least it’s better than being fat.

  She walked back, the coarse sand cold and unyielding beneath her feet. She remembered how she had walked here some months ago, thinking of all the other feet that had walked here over the ages.

  There are those who say we have no claim, she thought. Not to the land or the air above the land or the waters beneath. To nothing. That two hundred years is insufficient time to establish a title. Well, I have never claimed anything. Rather it is the land that has claimed me. My ancestors lie here. Their bones and flesh, their breath, hopes, loves, heartbreaks and tragedies. All here. Their laughter, their griefs. My parents, my aunts, my two husbands. All my friends. All but Dorrie’s Blaine who died in Europe and Peter, in Changi jail. Even they are here in spirit, like the rest. All helping to fertilise and form the soil. As I in my turn shall form the soil from my flesh and my bones. All of us part of this land that claims us for itself. I will deny it no more than I will deny its claim on every other creature. The affirmation of the land echoes in my heart.

  The sunlight dazzled, its golden fire flared along the shallows. Halfway down the beach she thought she could see something. A shadow? A succession of shadows? She squinted, trying to make them out, but it was no use.

  She walked on. A fleck of cloud covered the sun. All at once she could see clearly. People were waiting. Four or five of them. More. To one side … Cameras? Television?

  Oh God.

  The cloud passed. The sun re-emerged in splendour. Above her head the tree of grace, bearing in its bark the wounds of every phase of life, the battles of the past and expectations for the future, extended its mystic boughs. Protectively.

  Dazzled by sunlight, by tears, stumbling and breathless with a great and singing joy, Ruth ran.

  About JH Fletcher

  JH Fletcher is the author of eight romantic historical novels, published to both critical and popular acclaim. The author's plays for radio and television have been produced by the BBC and the South African Broadcasting Corporation, and many of this author's stories have been published in Australia and throughout the world.

  JH Fletcher was educated in the UK and travelled and worked in France, Asia and Africa before emigrating to Australia in 1991. Home is now a house within sound of the sea in a small town on the South Australian coast.

  Also by JH Fletcher

  Keepers of the House

  Fire in Summer

  Wings of the Storm

  Sun in Splendour

  The Cloud Forest

  Voice of Destiny

  Eagle on the Hill

  First published by HarperCollins Publishers Pty Ltd in 1999

  This edition published by Momentum in 2013

  Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd

  1 Market Street, Sydney 2000

  Copyright © JH Fletcher 1999

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

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  A CIP record for this book is available at the National Library of Australia

  View from the Beach

  EPUB format: 9781743342466

  Mobi format: 9781743342473

  Cover design by Xou Creative

  Proofread by Hayley Crandell

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