She took a deep breath, inhaling beer fumes from the hotel. ‘There’s plenty to tell – I’m divorcing Clive.’
Daniel’s face altered. He was shocked, yes, but there was something more in his eyes than that. Oriel thought she detected a gleam of pleasure, but he covered it up with a solemn commiseration. ‘Strewth, when did this happen?’
‘A few weeks ago.’ She stood aside for a Chinese man and his European wife to pass. ‘I’ve come in to see the solicitor again – there’s something I forgot to ask last time. I went to see him the day I broke the news.’ She gave an embarrassed laugh. ‘A bit quick off the mark, I know, but now I’ve taken the plunge I want to get it all over with as quickly as possible.’ She looked at her watch. ‘I’m not seeing him for three-quarters of an hour. Shall we go for that cup of tea?’
During their brief search for a watering hole nothing more was said about the divorce, and after several interruptions by the waitress it was difficult to pick up the subject again. In the cushioned alcove of the basement tearoom with its intimate dimly lit atmosphere, Oriel desperately wanted to talk about her relief and exhilaration at being free but was afraid of being thought callous. She felt so wonderful and warm at seeing this beloved face.
Halfway through a cigarette, Daniel sipped his tea and replaced the cup in the saucer. ‘So, how’s Clive taking it?’
Oriel matched his movements. The tea was hot and she licked her lips. ‘He’s been very understanding.’ Why on earth had she said that? He didn’t understand at all, that was the reason she was leaving him. She had said it because she did not want to appear hard before Daniel, cared what he thought about her. ‘But he’s devastated. Keeps asking what he’s done.’
‘And what has he done?’ The viridescent eyes studied her.
‘Nothing. He’s a good kind man who’d make anyone else a good husband.’
‘But not you. I reckoned all along he wasn’t the one for you.’ He never took his eyes off her, even whilst he pulled on his cigarette.
Oriel looked flabbergasted. ‘How?’
Daniel slightly averted his face so as not to blow smoke into hers. ‘’Cause I am.’
She was totally confused. He couldn’t possibly mean what she thought he meant.
‘The one for you.’ He confirmed her own desires. ‘I’ve always loved yer, Kooka. Did you never guess?’
Oriel’s heart came into her mouth, her face was white, she found it hard to breathe, could not believe what she was hearing.
He gave a mirthless chuckle, stubbed out the cigarette and rubbed his tanned hands over his face. ‘That’s really set the cat among the chooks, hasn’t it?’
Around them, waitresses moved back and forth with steaming trays, clattering crockery, tinkling spoons. Oriel heard none of it. Still totally stunned, she made lame utterance. ‘But… what about Mel?’
His face was in turn joyous then anguished. ‘I love her too but not in the way I feel about you. I think I loved you from the minute I set eyes on yer, trying to look all bossy in yer big hat, the day I came to be a father to Alice – that’s who I really came back for. When I saw you, felt what I felt then, I should’ve turned right round and gone back out that gate without saying what I’d come for – if I’d had any sense. But instead I stayed to do the right thing by Mel. That’s all our marriage was about, on my part at least. Doing the right thing.’
‘Mine too,’ she breathed. ‘But by doing that, prolonging matters that should have been ended years ago, it’s not just him I’ve hurt but lots of people. It’s right what they say about the road to hell being paved with good intentions.’
Daniel frowned. ‘I thought that was the road to Sydney.’ Then he was serious again. ‘Yeah, I know what yer mean. Oh, I did, I do, have feelings for her. She’s been a good wife in most respects. I’m sure I don’t deserve her and I know she doesn’t deserve what I’m gonna do to her now. I want to marry you, Oriel.’
Oriel’s pulse grew even more rapid. Why did her own joy have to be founded on another’s pain? Her heart went out to Melinda and her children. ‘Oh God, what have I started?’
‘It’s not just because o’ you, Kooka.’ He pushed the cups aside, reached out and grasped her hand. She returned his grip, aching to hold him against her. ‘Things’ve been pretty desperate for a long time between us. She knows but won’t face it.’
‘Like him.’ Oriel nodded.
‘I’ve been baching at the mill for years, well yer know that. She wanted me to build a place for us up there but I always made excuses. The marriage wouldn’t’ve lasted this long if I’d had to live with her all the time. I knew I’d been right when I had to stay at home for six months during the strike. We ended up going crook at each other half the time. The only reason I come home on a weekend is to see the kids.’ His face was overwhelmed with despair. ‘I don’t know how I’m gonna leave them. It’ll rip me guts out.’
Oriel clung to his hand. This was all moving incredibly fast. Only hours ago she had resigned herself to being alone, sworn that she would never marry again.
‘But there’s no way they can come with me,’ he continued, ‘and I can’t stay there. I’m just wasting away. I have to face it. I can’t have them and you too.’ He fixed her with an anguished smile, then blurted out a laugh. ‘I’m taking a hell of a lot for granted, aren’t I?’
Oriel shook her head and gazed deep into his eyes. ‘I’ve always loved you too.’ She looked guilty. ‘I know it’s an awful thing to say but whenever I visited Melinda it was really you I wanted to see.’
‘And I always made a point of keeping out of the way as much as I could because I couldn’t bear to see yer and not to have yer. All those hunting trips, they were just to get me away ’cause I knew if I stayed something would happen between us and I couldn’t hurt Mel like that.’
‘But you can now.’ Oriel did not intend cruelty and hated seeing him flinch.
He rubbed at her knuckles with his nutbrown thumbs. ‘I have to, I’ve no choice.’ His expression changed. ‘Yes, I do have a choice, an’ I’m making it.’
She found the whole situation amazing. ‘I never imagined… I mean, you looked so happy. I thought I was the only one who was hiding my feelings. D’you think Mel noticed?’
Daniel shook his head. ‘She’s not that perceptive.’
Oriel felt disgusted at herself. How could she do this to her good friend, not to mention the children?
‘What about him, was he suspicious?’
‘Oh, all the time,’ replied Oriel evenly. ‘But then that’s just part of his character. He only sees the bad in people, never the good – where I’m concerned anyway. He always thought I was having an affair with everyman. I wasn’t.’ She gave a reassuring smile, then turned sombre again. ‘I’d never have done that.’
Daniel nodded, then fell silent for a while before asking, ‘Where’s this solicitor of yours?’
‘Spring Street.’ Oriel snatched a look at her watch, then threw him a desperate glance. ‘And I’ve only got five minutes to get there. I’ll have to dash.’ It was obvious she did not want to leave.
‘I’ll come with yer.’ After paying the bill Daniel took repossession of her hand. As luck would have it, shortly after they emerged into the sunlight, a tram appeared. Together they ran and jumped aboard one of its open-sided cars, not bothering to sit down but standing close together, bodies occasionally bumping as the tram made its way up the street. When they alighted moments later, Daniel was still holding her hand, loath to release it even when they arrived at their destination, and said he would wait across the road by the Houses of Parliament until she came out.
* * *
Oriel gave her representative the news that she had met someone else and even though this meant admitting unfaithfulness it was the legal ground that she had needed. She asked where she stood in regard to money.
The solicitor wore a knowing smile that said he did not believe she had only just met this person in the space of a few weeks, but merely
asked, ‘Have you any money of your own?’
‘All the money in the account formerly belonged to me. It was part of an inheritance, but it’s in joint names now.’
‘I’d change it over to your name if you can,’ he suggested. ‘Before your husband does the same. Things could get nasty.’
Oriel gave a curt nod, angry at him for referring to Clive as her husband. With her mind on the man outside, she was able only to think of a few more questions before thanking him for his time and rising to leave.
Before opening the door for her, the man asked, ‘Mrs Widdowes, you are prepared for the fact that the admission of adultery will make you a social outcast?’
The terrible indictment made her jump – she had never even kissed Daniel but then she supposed adulterous was what their relationship now was. ‘I don’t care.’ Her expression caused the solicitor to nod, open the door for her, and wish her luck.
When she emerged from the darkness of the office her unfocused gaze toured the area outside Parliament House and saw only a group of figures, none of whom was Daniel, dashing back across the road from taking lunch in the old world excellence of the Windsor Hotel. At first she panicked at the thought that he had been snatched from her before she had ever tasted his lips. She began to walk along the street, wide eyes searching, and in seconds he was there beside her, taking repossession of her hand and drawing a look of vast relief. Now she realized why she had always been averse to holding Clive’s hand. It was such an intimate act: told the world that you and this person were one.
‘Just needed a bit o’ shade.’ He smiled warmly. ‘Where to now?’
Oriel gave a happy shrug. ‘Oh anywhere, I don’t care – let’s go in those gardens over there.’
Still linked together, they moved slowly along the footpath. An immaculately dressed woman emerged from a building just at the time of their passing. Unaware that he was in the vicinity of a high-class brothel, Daniel touched his hat. The woman gave him a cool smile, glanced at Oriel, then minced off in the opposite direction.
The sun beat down, the tiny turned-up brim of Oriel’s cloche hat affording no shade. Face cast down towards her snakeskin shoes, she underwent a period of deep thought, then began, ‘Melinda told me you changed towards her after you got the piece of shrapnel in your head.’
He smiled down at her, playing with her fingers. ‘She likes to blame everything on that, but really…’
‘She said you weren’t the same when you came back from the war.’
‘Was anybody?’ He made to cross the road.
‘I don’t know. I’ve never been to war.’
‘And pray to God yer never will. It’s not the little scrap o’ metal that’s changed me, it’s the things I’ve seen. And I don’t just mean the blood and guts and the stink and the brutality.’
‘Where did you get wounded, Gallipoli?’
‘No, I was there first but then I got transferred later to Belgium. Passchendaele.’ Daniel was quiet for a while, seeing the expectation in her eyes and appraising her ability to bear what he was about to divulge. He remained silent for a long time, then as they veered off the footpath into the quieter surroundings of the gardens, finally said, ‘Yer know what the hardest part was? They were such cheerful, gritty little blighters. Sometimes I wished they had’ve sworn and yelled at me so I wouldn’t have liked ’em so much, cursed me for not having any anaesthetic for them nor even a cup of water. A cup o’ ruddy water. Not much to expect when yer dying, is it? But they knew there wasn’t that much to go round. Everybody was in the same mess, couldn’t drink the local stuff, yer see. I’m not saying they were all angels – you’d get the odd one or two who’d kick up a stink – but in general they never complained, never wanted to be any trouble.’
The scent of sun-warmed roses cloyed the air, but Daniel’s mind was in another place. ‘They lay on that beach hour after hour under boiling sun and freezing cold nights ’cause we couldn’t get to ’em for the shellfire. And the perishing flies! When yer used to them in a country like this yer don’t give much thought to what strife they can cause till yer see ’em crawling over ripped flesh. By the time we finally got ’em loaded on to hospital ships their wounds had turned gangrenous. Christ, the stink.’
Gripping Oriel’s fingers, he took a deep breath, his words emerging not in flowing sequence but in unconnected snippets as the memories jumped into his mind. ‘Hospital ships? Huh! That’s a laugh, cattle ships more like. We had to pick out all the rotten ones to go to the operating room first – and I mean rotten – stinking, putrid. Arms and legs. That’s what’s most vivid. Loads of arms and legs in a basket. Have y’ever smelled anything that’s gone orf, like a dead roo by the side of the road, or anything? Well, multiply that a thousand times and yer might just get the picture. But nobody who wasn’t there can really imagine it.
‘A lot of ’em didn’t make it to hospital. Even if they did it wasn’t safe there. Some had to lie on tarpaulins in the open. A putrid writhing carpet of ’em. I don’t think that’s any way to treat brave fellas, do you? A lot of us got really mad about it. If we’d got hold of the bloke who was responsible for planning it all—’ He shook his head. ‘No protection whatsoever. I happened to be there just after a shell had hit a pile of these wounded fellas. What a shambles. Limbs all over the place. I didn’t know where to start. And they never grumbled, went on cracking hardy, thinking you were doing yer best for ’em.’
He gulped. ‘I once went out to collect some wounded and I came across this bloke who’d been shot in the throat. How long he’d been out there in the sun I don’t know. He couldn’t speak but he kept cupping his hands to his mouth and his eyes kept begging me to give him a drink. I didn’t have one. But the pleading in those eyes – a bit like yours, big and blue, he was only a young kid – the pleading in them just got to me. I did the best I could for him then promised to come back with some water even though I knew he wouldn’t last more than a few minutes. Took some doing but I managed to get back to him with the water. He was dead o’ course. His big blue eyes still looking at me. I see them every night.’
Daniel’s own troubled eyes stared straight ahead as he wandered through the gardens, in and out of shade. Oriel hung on his sentences as if they were barbed wire. To all intents and purposes everyone else had disappeared from the world.
‘The day I copped it I was trying to rescue this little digger who’d got too close to a shellburst. I sat in the middle of a bloody nightmare, bombs exploding all around me, with me hands trying to push his flesh and lard back inside him. Like sago pudding it was, great thick globules of blubber – yer wonder where it all comes from, he was such a little bloke. Then he couldn’t stand it any more. He started to squirm like a maggot on the end of a line. Begged me to shoot him. Training? What training? Nothing can prepare yer for that. On and on he went, saying I was cruel, if I had any heart I’d put him out of his misery.’
He looked at her but it was a different Daniel to the one she had been with a moment ago – a demented anxious creature. ‘I’m not cruel, Oriel, I’m not.’
‘I know.’ She gripped his arm.
‘You said I was. When I told yer I was going hunting yer said, cruel devil. I’m not cruel. I’m not.’
‘I know!’ Oriel had never been faced with such a crisis, did not know how to help him.
‘Yer really hurt me when yer said that. When a bloke’s got little kids to feed and not much dough he doesn’t tend to give much priority to possums.’
Tears pricked her eyes. How her impulsive words must have wounded him if he had been carrying them in his head for so many years.
He gave a shuddering sigh and returned to his tale. ‘Yer wouldn’t think a man with that kind of injury could last so long, but he did. And I had to sit there in the mud alongside him and pretend I was doing something for him when all I had was a bloody field dressing, and listen to him pleading and squirming till it was safe to get him away. Well, we thought it was safe. That’s when I copped
mine. I just remember the scream of a shell. The bloke with me said, you’re hit, mate! Didn’t hardly feel it till he told me, then I don’t remember nothing else. But I remember him. I remember him all right.’
Oriel brushed at her eyes, too stunned to comment on his divulgences.
Faced with her silence he went on, ‘It’s… it’s like yer own brother dying a thousand times over. It was to me, anyway. Some o’ me cobbers didn’t bat an eyelid. If it affected them like it did me they hid it well. To see all these big-hearted young fellas who went off to fight for the glory of the Empire ending up as a basket of maggot-ridden arms and legs. Even when they were treated like scum by some o’ the pommie officers – they didn’t like us yer see, thought the Canadians were the dog’s whatsits but we were just rabble ’cause a lot of us wouldn’t salute ’em – but the diggers laughed it off. Don’t know how they stayed so cheerful. I got sick of it, I can tell you. Sick of seeing me mates laughing one day and blown apart the next. I’d seen photos of their girlfriends and mothers and sisters, knew them all by name, read their letters when I didn’t have any of me own. Then imagine this, yer’ve coped with all that, yer’ve got through it and yer come home and everybody else is going about their business as normal and some bloody idiot comes up to yer and asks what it was like to see all these wounded men. And yer say oh, it was a bit of a lark really and they look at yer as if yer nuts. So, yer see, if I flare up with people it’s not the bit of shrapnel in me head that’s the cause, it’s the stupidity of them that makes me angry – they had no idea, no idea at all. I can’t believe the lack of imagination some of ’em have.
‘The sheer needless waste and the cruelty of it. They say it was the war to end all wars but it’ll happen again and again and again, and young blokes’ll still line up to volunteer for King and Country. I’ve come to the conclusion that people need war. What else would they find to light up their dull lives, to fill their newspapers, to sell their guns? The world’d collapse if there wasn’t a war in some place or another.’
A Complicated Woman Page 43
