The Bride of Almond Tree

by Robert Hillman

  ‘Get out!’ she shrieked.

  Wes seized the man by one arm and hauled him to the door, and out into the corridor to a nurses’ station, where two nurses were chatting. He told them to make themselves scarce, and they did immediately. Wes threw the man against the wall and held him by the throat with his feet off the floor. ‘If you ever come back here, I will strangle you. Do you understand?’

  The man was not in a position to answer, either by nodding or by speaking. His face was a violent scarlet.

  Wes let the man down to the floor. ‘Do you understand?’

  The little man coughed for a good two minutes. Then nodded and said, ‘I understand.’

  ‘Now get out.’

  The man paused at the door, and turned back to Wes. ‘The bureaucrats,’ he said. ‘For me, I honour Miss Elizabeth for her bravery. I am sorry with my heart.’

  Then he left, with his envelope which he’d retrieved from the floor.

  The two nurses, who’d been eavesdropping a short distance away in the corridor, returned.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Wes. ‘KGB.’

  Beth was on her back holding a pillow over her face. Wes removed it gently. She kept her eyes closed.

  ‘I told him I’d strangle him if he came back. I meant it. You’ve given up on the Soviet Union. I’ve given up non-violence.’

  He’d known for some time that there was violence in him that could emerge now and again. ‘In New Guinea,’ he said, ‘I was out with a mate, Lance Sherlock, Shirley. He was one of the few troops who would come with me looking for dead Japs to bury. I didn’t carry a gun, you see; I was no use in a firefight. We came across a couple of Japs, probably doing the same thing as us. They fired at us, Shirley fired back. Then he gave me his pistol and told me to shoot. I did, and missed, and the Japs took off. But the thing was, Beth, I enjoyed it, firing a pistol at the enemy. I wanted to hit him. I loved the feeling of the pistol in my hand. At the same time, it made me sick.’ A pause. ‘I never fired a pistol again. But I wanted to. Will I read?’

  Beth shook her head. She lay staring at the ceiling, hour after hour. Wes chatted about his family, and hers, how happy Franny was with her baby, Bella, how her dad’s leg had mended and all his old vigour returned, how his mother was writing a novel full of Quaker characters also, full of goodness and virtue and pretty awful. Beth didn’t want to hear any reading the next day either, but she wanted him nearby. She wrote him a note: ‘Two apostates.’ When she was sleeping, he wrote a telegram to his brother, Teddy. He’d only once sent a telegram before. He might have telephoned but the connection was iffy and crackly. But he’d read telegrams and knew it was the job of the writer to put ‘stop’ at the end of sentences. He wrote:

  i am good beth improving stop still two weeks here stop start work again on the channel stop get morty to do the dozing one yard and nine inches deep stop tell morty the banks have to be six inches deep on both sides stop width of the dozer blade stop blasting use only geoff brooks stop never bobby burton stop for felling use derek and harvey stop fill holes with rubble from the quarry mixed with mortar stop roll flat stop let max take charge of chinese town and the italians stop work sundays if you can but not on the channel stop respond care of me at kensington hospital of light stop loving brother wes stop

  He took the message to the post office close to the Victoria and Albert. It cost four pounds.

  ∼

  At the beginning of Beth’s final week in hospital, a story appeared on page four of the News of the World headed Red Torture Victim in London Hospital. It was illustrated with a photograph of Beth in bed, asleep.

  An Australian woman of thirty is recovering in an exclusive London hospital after thirteen months of horrendous torture in a Red prison in Moscow. Her injuries are said to be the worst seen by the doctors treating her, meaning five broken ribs, head gashes, broken fingers, and shocking sexual abuse. A spokesman for Her Majesty’s Secret Service offered no comment. A spokesman for the Australian High Commission confirmed to this reporter that the woman was an Australian citizen but would not provide a name. A Soviet Embassy spokesman said that the woman had been released from a Moscow prison on ‘humanity grounds’. He said in his broken English that the woman had ‘made a crime against the Soviet people’. He had no comment to offer about the alleged torture.

  Neither Beth nor Wes had seen the story on the Sunday of its publication, but on the Monday, Doctor Thomas had. He sent a nurse to fetch Wes to his office, where he showed him the newspaper, opened at page four.

  ‘How the reporter got hold of the story, we don’t know. And the picture. The information, inaccurate though it is, must have been obtained from a nurse, for a fee. As for the picture, some complicity between the informant and a News of the World photographer. Or maybe the informant, whoever it was, took the picture. The News of the World personnel are capable of anything. If they’d been around at the time, they would have interviewed Jesus on the cross. I’ve contacted MI6 and it has banned any further reporting of the story on national security grounds. That doesn’t always work. Wesley, I’m dreadfully sorry. There will be an enquiry. You will want the story kept from Elizabeth?’

  ‘No, I’ll show her. If she found out, she’d be disappointed in me. And I’m disappointed in the hospital. It seems you can get into any room you choose, even if you’re dressed as a vampire.’

  He took the newspaper back to Beth and showed her. She was surprisingly sanguine about it.

  Am I that ugly? she wrote.

  ‘It’s a rotten shot of you, darling. Your mouth’s open. You’re probably snoring.’

  She wrote, Keep reading the Chandler. His people are real people. There are no people in Agatha.

  Chapter 30

  THE BRITISH Government sent a car to take them to Heathrow once Doctor Thomas decided Beth was fit enough to fly. He provided a detailed report of her treatment for whatever doctor saw her in Australia, and also a bottle of sedatives to administer every six hours of the flight.

  At the terminal, a good seven or eight reporters were waiting for her and with the practised eyes of journalists, recognised her despite the distortions of the newspaper photograph. Wes held her close, but pictures were taken and a welter of questions were thrown at her: ‘Elizabeth, did they pull your fingernails out? Miss Hardy, were you subjected to electrical torture? Miss Hardy, do you hate the Russians?’ Policemen arrived and held the reporters back. Once through check-in, they were alone. Beth was trembling violently and it took Wes a half-hour in the departure lounge to calm her. How the reporters had come to know her name was a mystery.

  She slept for most of the flight, even during the stopovers. He put up the armrest and she lay with her head on his lap, acutely uncomfortable for Wes but he bore it. During one period of wakefulness, she wrote him a note: I didn’t betray anyone. I said nothing. He ate his meals with difficulty. Beth was brought meals when she was awake. The cabin staff were aware of her story and situation and were kind to her. One of the stewardesses bent down and kissed her forehead while she slept. She said to Wes, ‘So brave.’

  At Sydney, they were met by Bob Hardy and Franny, in her old Jaguar. No reporters. Beside her frail sister, Franny looked like Rita Hayworth, gushing good health and voluptuous beauty. Franny and Bob shared the driving. Beth kept awake for hours at a stretch, but didn’t speak a word. Wes had warned them, quietly, that she wouldn’t speak. Every time Bob turned to look at her, being prone to tears, his eyes grew moist. They stopped at a motel in Albury and Wes and Beth shared a bed. She clung to him fiercely.

  Another one hundred and fifty miles from Albury to Almond Tree. Her mother put her hands to her face and groaned. ‘My darling, what have they done to you?’ Franny bathed her and put her to bed in her old room.

  Doctor Rowe from Canada Falls came to see her the next day. He was acknowledged as the best doctor in the shire. He read what Doctor Thomas had written and said, ‘Bloody hell.’ He examined her and came to the conclusion that she should be dead, and
said so. ‘She weighs about as much as a famished pup.’ He told Lillian to feed her scrambled eggs and bacon for breakfast, rissoles for lunch and some sort of hearty casserole for dinner, followed by as much dessert as could be forced down her throat. ‘I’ve heard of Ewan Thomas. He’s held in high regard. He says here there’s no more blood in her urine. That at least will keep her out of hospital.’

  Wes had to work, but he came to see Beth for two hours each morning and two hours each evening. She still wouldn’t speak. Patty was visiting from Hiroshima with Esther and Francis and she spent an hour at Beth’s bedside telling her about Hiroshima, and her work there. Patty showed her Esther’s hands and Beth put them to her lips and kissed them. She wrote a note for Patty: I said nothing. I betrayed no one for thirteen months. Do you see? Patty sat back and thought, and she believed she did see. ‘And now you can’t?’ she said. ‘Talk, I mean.’ Beth nodded. Later in the morning, Patty explained it to Lillian. ‘She had the living daylights beaten out of her for more than a year and kept her mouth shut. They must have wanted the names of her fellow conspirators, something like that. She told them nothing. And now she can’t speak. It’s locked up in her.’

  ‘It’s what? Is she mad, then?’

  ‘No, no. I’m sure speech will come back to her. You have to be patient.’

  Lillian couldn’t make her daughter speak, but she made sure she ate, sitting her up in bed with a tea towel around her neck feeding her by spoon and fork, and talking.

  ‘Your trouble is you’re too brave for a woman. Men don’t like to see so much courage in a woman. Men of a certain sort. There you are, putting up with punishment they couldn’t bear themselves, and it irritates them. Too much bravery, honey. They want to see you break, and cry, beg for mercy, and I bet you didn’t even shed a tear. I would of. Franny, Gus, Maud. It’s not what we’re made for. They would of killed you in the end.’

  Franny took her for walks about the farm to build up her matchstick legs. Each walk, they stopped halfway and sat on the ancient red gum log by the dam. Since there was no conversation coming from Beth, Franny had to do all the talking. ‘It was the baby that made all the difference to me. It was like heaven when I first held him. Ricky was there, but I didn’t take any notice of him and wouldn’t let him hold the baby. He’s the ideal husband for me. Asks for nothing, expects nothing. I let him have sex with me, but I couldn’t care less about it. Just a favour twice a week. You know, I might have been the same way with Wes. Just the baby. I’m pregnant again. I haven’t even told Ricky yet. If he got sick of me and buzzed off, I doubt I’d care. It’s not a real marriage. When men look at me, they see my figure and get crazy. But when Wes looked at you, he saw a real person. I envy you. Not because you have Wes, not anymore. I envy you, the person you are. I haven’t got your make-up, your mind, your guts, all that means more to me now. But I have to work with what I’ve got, right?’

  When Beth began to gain weight and strength, it was Wes who took her for walks. She brought her notebook with her and wrote him message after message. She told him about Anna and her son and what a superb poet she was, and what a wonderful painter her son was. She said she had to acknowledge that in Australia Andre would be considered a genius and Anna would be a celebrated poet. That by itself was enough for her to concede that Australian culture was to be preferred to Soviet culture. She wrote out one of Anna’s poems for him. She tried to speak, but could only manage a stutter. She wrote: Please darling don’t give up on me. I couldn’t bear it.

  It was a day of special beauty, the sky an unblemished blue from horizon to horizon and the myrtles on the hills shining. The Ayrshires in what was known as the Boston paddock, named by the American who first owned the land, were lolling as if they’d reached the highest possible level of cow contentment. Beth wrote: I’m trying to be happy. I should be, shouldn’t I? With the man I love on such a gorgeous day. No beatings to fear. A loving family all around me. But something is jammed in my heart, darling. I saw the most horrible things you can imagine and they haunt me.

  ‘Time,’ said Wes.

  Two weeks later, Beth was what could almost be called healthy. Colour had returned to her face, she had gained weight, her hair was at shoulder length. She told Wes she wanted to come to work with him.

  ‘Ah, you see, the men don’t like it, a woman on site. It makes them feel they have to watch their language.

  Wes for God’s sake, I’ve been in prisons on two continents. I’ve heard everything a thousand times.

  ‘I’ll ask them, darling.’

  He did. They agreed with reluctance. More out of respect for Wes than for the sensibilities of Beth, they kept their language civil, a novel experience for most. Whenever one slipped up and called an uncooperative tool a cunt of a thing, he always turned to Wes to apologise, not to Beth, sitting with her book, unperturbed. Every so often she looked up to watch Wes, busy with a crosscut saw, a plane, a hammer and felt gladness rise in her heart. His competence, his physical strength, his concentration; it moved her.

  She had sandwiches prepared by Lillian for both of them and they ate side by side. She wrote a question: Is the workforce here unionised?

  ‘Everyone is. I insisted. But John Li owns the site. He’s paying for everything, and he hates unions. He thinks they’re all communists. He only puts up with it because I told him he had to. But up in the hills where he’s clear-felling a thousand acres, he won’t hire anyone in a union. He’s got a hundred and fifty men living in tents. Earthmovers, dozers, lifters. No safety regulations. He’s already had two men killed and five injured. You’d think the union would take an interest, but all the workers are migrants— the union ignores them, and no penniless migrant wants to pay six bob a month to the union anyway.’ He shrugged. ‘John’s underpaying them by more than six bob a month, but they don’t know that. He’s got Marty Dunne and Dick Polly patrolling the camp, acting like armed guards. Marty and Dick, they’re not about to shoot anyone. I went up there to look around and told them if they shot me or anyone else for venturing upon what remains Crown land, they’d hang for murder. They got out of my way.’

  Beth wrote: Wes, something has to be done.

  Wes laughed. ‘Get your voice back and give a speech, my love.’

  The channel had been excavated to within two yards of the Nazareth Lake shoreline. A further four yards down, a concrete wall had been built across the channel with a gate that rose and fell on a pulley device fashioned by Vinny Toole from Almond Tree. When the concrete wall and the gate were ready, the last of the shoreline earth was blasted away with gelignite so that the water rushed against the wall. The pulley device hadn’t yet been tested with the weight of the Nazareth water against it, so on a Sunday, when work was usually suspended on the channel, Wes asked Beth if she’d like to come and watch himself and Vinny test the apparatus. She wrote: Of course.

  Vinny was one of few men under Wes who didn’t know that Beth was silent. He shook her hand and said, ‘You must be the missus?’

  Wes said, ‘Not quite yet, Vin. And Vin, Beth has been through a terrible time in a Russian prison. She’s not speaking for the time being.’

  ‘Yeah? Bloody Russians. Yanks oughta bomb them.’

  Wes showed Beth the channel, and the concrete wall with its gate. The wall was holding back the water from the channel. ‘When the water’s flowing, orchardists can tap off as much as they like. They pay a fee, but it’s the same if they take ten thousand gallons or ten. Not much.’ The water eventually made its way into Picnic Creek, miles away, and Picnic Creek in turn ran into the Goulburn River.

  ‘So Vin, let’s see if this works, or what.’

  Vin attempted to spin the upper pulley to open the gate, but no result. The pulley was jammed.

  ‘What in Christ’s name?’

  Vin jumped down into the channel to see if he could free the pulley.

  ‘Vin, get out of there!’

  But it was as if Nazareth were waiting for someone to commit the very episode
of folly that Vinny Toole had just enacted. The iron gate burst from its fixings and the water of the lake rushed through in a torrent, carrying Vin with it. Wes and Beth ran for the ute, Beth assuming it was to follow Vin flailing in the rushing water, Wes knowing there was a net across the channel a hundred yards down. It was there to trap debris, tree boughs, bark, logs, animal carcasses from the lake, forming a dam. The shire workers were supposed to clear the net once a week. Vin would be caught there, but would probably be dead. It was obvious he couldn’t swim.

  Wes stopped the ute at the net, plunged into the channel boots and all and found Vin caught in the net with his head underwater. Wes grasped him under the arms and worked his way back to the bank, where Beth helped him drag Vin out and lay him on his back. He was dead, so far as Wes could see, but Beth pushed him aside and started mouth-to-mouth. She had saved distressed lambs this way—all the Hardy girls knew the method—while the ewe circled complaining loudly, and she had practised on humans in the first-aid course everyone in the union had to take, years back. She put Vin’s head on one side, got his tongue out of the way, breathed into his mouth and pumped his chest. She kept it up for ten minutes, fifteen.

  Wes, watching, considered the attempt hopeless. Vin was dead.

  Then he convulsed and spewed water from his mouth and nose, convulsed again and began coughing. Beth maintained the pumping of his chest until water stopped running from his mouth. They stretched him out in the back of the ute for the trip to hospital and Beth took his head in her lap. Vin’s eyes were open and he was breathing. They carried him into emergency and waited for Doc Halliday to come out and give them a report. ‘Technically, he was dead, I would say. But he’ll need to stay with us for a week. Sometimes revival with mouth-to-mouth can switch itself off after a bit.’

  Two days later, on the way to visit Vin, Beth gestured for Wes to pull over on Gold Road. She gazed at him for a minute or more, then spoke. She said: ‘Marry me.’