A Cry from the Dark

by Robert Barnard

  “Good Lord! It must have been Steve.”

  “People change, you know, Bettina, and Australia is often a surprising place.”

  “I know people change. Of course I know it. Perhaps they change more than we ever have the space to let them do in a novel.”

  “That’s right. Except the big nineteenth-century ones, perhaps.”

  “Oh dear. If I was offered that much space to fill with one set of characters I don’t know how I would cope.”

  Sylvia hesitated for a moment, then clearly decided to dive straight in.

  “There’s something I’ve been wondering whether to tell you, Bettina. I don’t know that it’s relevant to anything, but it’s something I don’t think should have been kept from you.”

  Bettina’s heart stopped, but she tried to put on a determined face.

  “Then tell me.”

  “It’s a piece of information…background information…that they thought would upset you.”

  “Tell me now.”

  “You know I’ve always loved the people that I think of as my natural parents—the couple who in effect adopted me. And particularly my mother. She was someone your dad and Bill Cheveley knew slightly, as I suppose people in small places like Bundaroo do know everyone.”

  “Bundaroo?”

  “Yes. They already knew her, and knew she and her husband couldn’t have children…She was the daughter of Sam Battersby.”

  Chapter 15

  Marriage, Birth, and

  Living Death

  “Sam Battersby’s daughter.”

  The words came out almost flat, yet Bettina felt a wave of relief washing over her: I was right.

  “Yes. You must have known her.”

  She had thought about her often enough over the years, so that every little thing, and there had only been little ones, was firmly lodged in her brain.

  “Yes, a bit, as everyone knows everyone else in places like Bundaroo. But she was four or five years older than me, so there was very little real contact.”

  “How do you remember her?” persisted Sylvia.

  “Very quiet. And that’s the word everybody used about her. She was always known as a good student—not brilliant, but very conscientious. But she was unnaturally quiet, with a quiet that was hiding something. Cowed is the word that springs to mind.”

  “Did people wonder why she seemed cowed? Did you?”

  Bettina screwed up her face.

  “I’ve thought about her quite often since…since the rape, and it’s difficult to sort out what I thought then. Did I realize she was cowed then, when we were both at school? I suspect not. I feel that people generally, while she was still living in Bundaroo, just thought she was quiet—the shy type. But I think there was a change in people’s attitude when she went away to teachers’ college and never came back for the holidays or even for a visit. She was still in her late teens, so that seemed odd, unnatural, to need an explanation. There was talk. Someone said that Sam Battersby’s wife—Marge, I think the name was—”

  “That’s right. My gran.”

  “Of course. That she visited her daughter in Grafton, but did it in secret. And possibly paid for it afterward.”

  “I think she probably did. One thing I never talked to her about was her husband.”

  “To tell you the truth, if I thought about Hettie then, I think I maybe would have guessed that she was beaten, treated cruelly, but sexual abuse was so little talked about that as a child it hardly entered my consciousness.”

  “But that’s what it was. Persistent, over a number of years, and both women terrorized into silence about it. Probably it was this that made Hettie incapable of having children. She was lucky in the end: she had a good marriage, and I came along—my good luck as well—to make it complete.”

  “Sam Battersby wasn’t so lucky, was he? But he hardly deserved luck.”

  “No. He had to get out of Bundaroo.”

  “It was clear he would have to before I left myself.”

  “He put a lot of miles between him and the rumors about what he had done. Went to South Australia. It worked for a time. There’s less shifting about from state to state in Australia than you’d expect, and still less then. But eventually someone turned up in Peter-borough who’d worked at Wilgandra, and then the rumors started floating around there, too. Then it was move-on time again. They say he died in a Salvation Army hostel in Darwin.”

  “I see,” said Bettina, pensive. “I didn’t know that. Sam Battersby was someone I never inquired about. I hope his wife fared better.”

  “His wife fared much better,” said Sylvia, smiling happily at some good memories. “I remember my gran as a good-humored, loving person who spoiled me rotten. Sam left her behind to hand over Grafton’s at Bundaroo to the next tenant, but she scarpered to Hettie in Grafton itself, then moved with her when she got a teaching job in Bathurst. She lived with or near her for the rest of her life, and was almost part of her marriage. She was always there to look after me, and I went between them as if they were my two mothers. No—Marge was happy as a sandboy after she escaped from Sam.”

  “I’m glad. And glad your mother was happy.”

  “She was. She tried to live for the present. But once I knew about her childhood I felt there was always something in the background of her mind—something she didn’t talk about but couldn’t get away from. Maybe when a child’s been abused, particularly sexually abused, that’s always how it is. Memories of the experience seem to go away, but they lurk, waiting.”

  “Maybe,” said Bettina. She thought for a long time. “I’ve thought I really escaped. I’ve never felt the need to use that particular experience in a book.”

  “I’ve noticed that. Wondered a bit.”

  “A rape may be different from the drip of constant abuse…I know I didn’t get away from the attendant things: cutting myself off from my roots, and to a degree from my parents. That can be liberation, but it can be impoverishing too.”

  “Yes. I would have felt it impoverishing. My happy home in the background was always the basis, the bedrock, of my life as a single person…But it doesn’t worry you, my connection with the Battersbys?”

  Bettina’s eyes widened.

  “No! Why should it? I don’t believe in visiting the sins of the fathers on the sons, so I certainly wouldn’t blame the wives and daughters for the sins of the husband and father. Your mother was Battersby’s victim. Of course one has more doubts about her mother. Why did she remain silent? Could she really not have found somewhere where she could be safe with her daughter? But then you think of the pressures: the violence, the fact that she probably was never sure, the fact that what was happening was practically unmentionable in the English-speaking world at the time.”

  “And remember, too, the unemployment. How was she to get a job and keep them both?”

  “I’d forgotten that. I’m glad you remember her as happy. But how did it come about that Hettie and her husband were the ones that fostered you?”

  “Hettie was the one they knew about, your father and Bill Cheveley. The married woman who desperately wanted a child.”

  “But by that time she and her mother had been left Bundaroo for years.”

  “Bill Cheveley had kept in touch almost from the start. He had something of the old paternalistic feeling about the people around him. He liked people he knew, thought he should be good to them—as your dad found when the drought forced him out of farming. One of Bill’s workers, in Grafton on Wilgandra property business, thought he saw Marge Battersby. A week or two later, when his wife was going through a good spell, Bill went over and had a couple of days in the town. Eventually he saw Gran, as he was pretty much bound to.”

  “What did he do?”

  “Nothing spectacular. Just sat her down in a café, walked among the jacarandas—I don’t know the details—told her he was always there for the two of them if they were ever in real want. He didn’t act the Father Christmas and hand over lavish amounts
of cash—that wasn’t his way, and would have been more worry than anything else to someone like Gran. He just made it clear he was willing to act as a backstop. Hettie had her first teaching job at this time, earning a pittance, of course, but they were just about managing, with Marge doing some scrubbing and bar work. The main thing that he asked them to do—he talked to Hettie too, after school—was to write every now and then, keep in touch.”

  “And he knew about Hettie’s childhood?”

  “Oh yes. Marge told him—very ashamed, going at it in a very roundabout way. Yes, he knew. He didn’t talk to Hettie about it, though. There are things best left unspoken.”

  “Of course there are,” agreed Bettina. She knew that better than most. “But they kept in touch?”

  “Yes. Marge usually did the writing, and Bill wrote brief notes back. He wasn’t a great one for writing. Hettie got the job in Bathurst, a better job. They moved there, she met my dad, and they married. Eventually they moved to Victoria, to Ballarat, where she was a deputy head, and that was where most of my childhood was spent. Dad worked in the tax office there, and Gran looked after me when necessary, and it was a very nice, stable, enriching childhood, thank you very much.”

  “Don’t thank me. The most I did was in the early stages, when I entrusted you to Dad and Auntie Shirley, though when I heard that Bill had helped with the placing of you I was glad, because Bill usually judged people sensibly. Apart from that, the whole business of your conception and birth was an appalling mess, totally mismanaged by me. Which only shows that we shouldn’t despair when we seem to have mucked things up entirely, doesn’t it?”

  They went to bed early, and Bettina slept fitfully in the guest bedroom and Sylvia slept well on the couch in the living room.

  Bettina and Cecil Cockburn walked from the Merceria San Zuliàn toward San Marco in the hazy May sunshine, their khaki uniforms prickly and uncomfortable in the nascent heat, but putting no bar on their optimism and their exuberant high spirits. The Venetians, better fed than the Southerners but still thin from privation, were nevertheless tough and active-looking and they helped the young couple’s mood, often saluting them with broad smiles or miming applause—one gondolier even did a little jig of happiness in their honor. Others, it is true, scurried past, faces averted, tense and grim in defeat. Il Duce had been dead less than a fortnight.

  “You can say this for stringing up Mussolini and his Clara by their heels,” said Cecil with his usual nonchalance: “at least everybody knows it’s all over.”

  Bettina had been shocked by the pictures in the Italian papers, but less than she would have been if she had seen them in Australia. The last two years had inured her somewhat to savagery.

  “Probably better the way it was than putting him up before some tribunal,” she agreed. “They say that by the end he was as silly as a two-bob watch.”

  “I take it that means he was losing his marbles,” said Cecil in his most pukka voice.

  “Something like that. He was reading all his horo-scopes and believing the ones that promised him the rosiest future. And going on about a death ray that the Germans or Italians were developing—in his mind at least.”

  “The Italians haven’t invented anything since Leonardo,” said Cecil. “And most of his things stayed on the drawing board. It must be a German brainchild. Probably some crazy notion of Wernher von Braun.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “Hitler’s prize boffin. Generally thought to have something nasty up his sleeve.”

  “Well, it won’t save them!” said Bettina, almost whooping out her prophecy. “Everyone’s closing in on them. It’s too late for spiffing wheezes!”

  They laughed, and people laughed back at them, and they turned toward the great open space of San Marco, where the sun had lifted the mist and the whole world seemed bathed in gold. Ahead of them was the saint’s own canal, pigeons and Venetians scurrying hither and yon.

  Across the space where the street opened into the square a British uniform strolled. The soldier’s eyes, alert as they still had to be, traveled in their direction. His feet slowed down, uncertain, and then he stopped. Bettina had stopped too. Seven years did not drop away so easily.

  “Hughie?” she said.

  “Yes,” he answered, a little crack in his voice.

  “Hughie!” She ran forward, threw her arms around him, and kissed his cheek and danced around and around in joy. Then she was conscious, from around her in the square, of the sound of applause. Blushing, she disengaged herself and saw that a little knot of Italians had gathered—men and women in drab, worn, mended shirts and dresses, but smiling joyfully and banging their palms together.

  “Inglesi?” asked one of the men.

  “Sì,” said Bettina. She had had trouble sometimes when people mistook Australian for Austrian.

  “Inglesi amorosi,” said the man, turning around to announce it as if it were a hitherto unknown phenomenon. Everybody laughed again. Bettina shook her head and went over to Cecil and dragged him over toward Hughie.

  “Cecil, meet Hughie. Hughie, meet Cecil,” she said, and they all laughed at nothing in particular. The men shook hands and Cecil looked at Bettina.

  “You seem to know each other from way back,” he said. “How was that? You’ve never been to England.”

  “English people come to Australia, or didn’t you know?” she said. “In fact, practically everyone in Australia is descended from someone British or Irish, since Asiatics were barred years and years ago.”

  “You’re forgetting the Aborigines,” said Hughie. “Like most Australians.”

  “Sorry. Yes, we were the invaders.” She turned to Cecil. “Hughie used to be interested in Aboriginal art when he was in Australia.”

  “Never heard of it. Should I have?”

  “I still would be interested in it,” said Hughie, “if I could get to see any.”

  “Where can we go?” shouted Bettina. “Where can we get a cup of coffee? Or wine if we must?”

  “The back streets are a better bet than Florian’s,” said Cecil. “Let’s dive into the narrowest and darkest we can find, and before long we’re bound to come to some little local bar that will have something.”

  The first ten minutes of walking didn’t support his claim, but they talked and laughed and commented on the sights and waved to old ladies in windows and eventually they came to a place dark and stuffy, but with a little table already set up outside. They ordered three cups of coffee and eventually—after the proprietor, beetle-browed and suspicious, had decided they were reliable—agreed that they would like some pasta and some wine.

  “But how come you are here, Betty?” asked Hughie. “With the British?”

  “Bettina,” she corrected him. “It just happened. I was assistant to an Australian war correspondent, and doing a bit of reporting for Australian papers on the side. My Italian had got to be pretty good. I decided I wanted to be part of the war, not just see it and report it. The British Army recruited me because I could speak to people, find quarters for the officers when necessary, negotiate with local politicians, who are slippery as hell. It’s been great.”

  “Yes, it has,” agreed Hughie. “Better than any war ought to be.”

  “What are you doing?” asked Cecil. “I’m in transport.”

  “I’m in art,” said Hughie. “They found a use for me after I proved pretty duff with a gun or a bayonet. For the past year I’ve been monitoring the American and British advance from the south and advising on buildings and art collections that call for special protection in the towns they’re about to come to. The Americans have had a lot of good propaganda out of this. The Germans have been calling them philistines and barbarians and worse where the black soldiers are concerned. This proves they’re not, and contrasts with the Germans destroying all the historical archives in Naples. So there, you see: it’s very important work.”

  “Of course it is,” said Bettina. “Though I bet all you really do is get out your Baed
eker and write a list of all the obvious things that need protection.”

  “And the map readings,” said Hughie, with a comically exaggerated sort of complacency. “Vital, that. It ensures that the buildings get one hundred percent protection—provided the troops get their map readings right.”

  Their pasta came—drizzled with olive oil and with a tiny spoonful of Parmesan already sprinkled on it. Venetian food, always considered a bit spartan, had become meager. But they plunged their forks into the long, thin lengths of pasta and twirled with all the expertise of more than a year in Italy.

  “Who’s to say they’re eating any better back home?” said Cecil.

  “Better this than corned beef hash,” said Bettina.

  “Home they have rationing. Italy has intrigue, bargaining, barter, sex, blackmail, family connections, Mafia—a much richer brew.” Hughie took up the glass into which the proprietor had poured a villainous-looking thick red liquid. “Salute! May the war last forever!” said Hughie.

  They drank.

  “Well, it won’t,” said Bettina, “not the European part, anyway. They’ll get rid of me as surplus to requirements within a month or two of Hitler being hanged from a Berlin lamppost. Cecil will have to wait longer for demob.”

  “Won’t stop us getting married,” said Cecil with a broad smile. “If necessary we’ll get a backstreet priest to do it. My mother is a Catholic.”

  “Marriage!” said Hughie. “My! I didn’t realize it was that serious.”

  “Well, we can’t go on living in sin indefinitely,” said Cecil. “The British Army would like that even less than marriage.”

  They all laughed.

  “The British Army!” said Hughie reflexively. “You wouldn’t believe them, would you? When you look at the C.O.’s you wouldn’t think they could organize a school bun-fight, and here they are defeating the great German military machine.”

  “With a little help from our friends across the pond,” said Cecil. “God—I need a leak. I suppose they’ve got a little cupboard somewhere here.”