Gallipoli Street

by Mary-Anne O'Connor

  ‘I was hoping you might know the whereabouts of a friend of mine. I’ve been trying to find her for the past three years actually and I believe you are the mostly likely person to know where she is.’

  She turned back to the mirror, the smile instantly fading. ‘What makes you think I might know that?’

  ‘Because she would never break ties with you, Missy.’

  She picked up her lipstick, pausing as she applied it. ‘You’ve been promoted, Peter.’

  ‘They eventually do that if you keep surviving.’

  Missy met his eye. ‘You took your time getting here.’

  ‘Would have helped if I hadn’t been knee deep in mud trying not to get killed.’

  ‘Why don’t you tell me why you want to see her so badly and I’ll tell you whether or not I know where she is.’

  ‘I’m sure you already know why. I sent about a hundred letters to your address.’

  ‘Speak.’

  He ran his hands through his hair. ‘Do you mind if I have a drink first? It’s been a long journey.’

  Missy reached for the decanter and some glasses, pouring two drinks and handing him one. ‘And a long war,’ she sighed. ‘Here’s to peace.’

  She sat in the front box seat, like a bird in a gilded cage, her newly cut hair short about her face and tucked one stray curl behind her ear. The action mesmerised Pete and his hand gripped the opera glasses as she moved, every gesture a torture. The red dress hugged against her, reminding him of heated memories; the same memories that had plagued him in the endless cursed jungle that had prevented him from chasing her across the world.

  Her grandmother sat next to her, arrived in London just that day with Iggy and beaming with pride as he took to the stage, Missy on his arm. It was opening night and the lure of the two stars playing together at last had made it a sell-out. Pete caught Missy’s eye as she turned and winked at him from the stage. She had become his closest ally in London and he knew deep down she wished Theresa would relent. But the latter remained frustratingly immovable and Missy was steadfast in her loyalty, refusing to reveal Theresa’s whereabouts no matter how much he pleaded. Missy had invited him to opening night, however, and he’d known Theresa wouldn’t miss that.

  Missy ran her hand along the piano, dazzling the crowd in her silver gown and capturing their hearts with her playful ease as she sang ‘It Had to be You’.

  Pete watched Theresa’s face fill with pride and he felt the words leave his own heart and brush skin like a whisper.

  He traced that skin with his eyes as she arched her neck to hear something her grandmother was saying and he snapped the glasses down. Bugger this bloody waiting. Pete stole behind, counting the bays until he found hers; he parted the heavy velvet, finding himself inches from her back.

  Missy’s words filled the remaining air between them. ‘Wonderful you.’

  She lowered her face, sensing someone’s presence, and turned, her eyes widening in shock.

  Rising, she brushed past him out into the foyer and he followed.

  ‘You can’t just run away,’ he said, matching her steps.

  ‘Watch me.’

  ‘I’ve come halfway across the world, Theresa. I’m not giving up now.’

  ‘You should,’ she threw back at him, quickening her steps as she descended the stairs, the red dress trailing behind her.

  He grabbed her hand, turning her around. ‘Why haven’t you answered any of my letters?’

  ‘Let go of me.’ She flung him away and walked on.

  ‘I wrote hundreds, saying I’m sorry in every possible way known to man. What’s it going to take, Theresa? Theresa? For God’s sake stop running!’

  She’d reached the street and the cabbie opened the door for her. ‘Don’t let him in, thank you,’ she instructed and the beefy man obliged, holding up his hand.

  ‘Please,’ he said through the window as she stared straight ahead. ‘Please give me a chance to explain. Theresa!’ he called as the cab pulled away. Its tail-lights receded and he stared after them, his shoulders slumping.

  ‘What did ye expect, lad?’ Mildred asked from behind and he turned to her, meeting her understanding gaze.

  ‘A chance.’ He shrugged, feeling defeated and exhausted after years of imagining a different scenario, where she fell into his arms.

  ‘So find another,’ she suggested, ‘and this time choose someplace where ’tis harder to escape.’

  ‘I would have thought you’d hate me too.’

  Mildred tucked her arm into his and steered him back to the theatre. ‘If I hated every foolish man I’d met there’d only be women in me life and, bless them all, ’twould be terrible dull all the same.’

  ‘He wants me to forgive him.’

  ‘So forgive ’im.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Why don’t ya just tell ’im that then?’

  Theresa looked over at former Private Ben Hill and sighed. ‘Because that would involve facing him.’

  They were sitting in a café near Hyde Park, where they had met regularly over the two and a half years she’d been in London. Initially, she had made enquiries of her father’s family but the old widow Lady Chambers was long dead and the estate had gone bankrupt in the stock market crash. No other relatives were to be found but after what she’d heard of her father she deigned to pursue the title she should inherit.

  She hadn’t actually expected to find anyone who knew her mother but she’d put a notice in the papers anyway. To her shock Ben had responded the very next day, telling her he’d never forgotten ‘Redsped’. She and her captain had been good friends to him during the war and he would be proud to know her daughter. Her planned search for her mother’s friend Beatrice had never eventuated, cut short at that first lunch as Ben introduced the same Beatrice as his wife.

  Since that day Beatrice rarely missed a meeting either but had stayed home tonight with their youngest daughter, who had fallen sick with the flu. Her name was Rosie.

  Through them she had pieced together part of her mother’s story: the way she worked, the courage she showed, her reckless driving and determined nature. Her love for a dashing Australian captain.

  It seemed they had the last cursed fact in common.

  ‘And why can’t ya do that?’ Ben’s one eye was kind as he watched Theresa struggle with her emotions, her stubborn expression so like her mother’s.

  ‘Because he…he’ll twist things around and make me feel confused.’

  ‘Why don’t ya just give ’im a chance?’

  ‘Because he doesn’t deserve it!’ she blurted out.

  ‘Y’want to punish ’im for hurting ya.’

  She stubbed out her cigarette angrily. ‘You don’t understand, the things he said–’

  ‘Were cruel.’

  ‘And the way he just sat by while–’

  ‘While his aunt tore ya to shreds, yes, y’told me many times.’

  She was silent for a moment as she studied her glass.

  ‘And now yer angry with me,’ Ben said.

  ‘Yes. Oh, I don’t know. I’m just angry in general, I guess. Why couldn’t he stay away?’

  Ben leant forward and held her fingers gently. ‘The same reason why ya can’t stand to be near ’im is the same reason why he wants it so badly.’

  ‘And what’s that?’

  ‘Ya won’t be able to deny the truth when it’s right in front of ya.’

  She didn’t say anything, just pulled her fingers back and lit another cigarette. They were all the same, Ben, Missy, Nana, even Uncle Iggy. They all thought she should forgive and forget but it wasn’t that easy. Just as it hadn’t been easy to force herself away from him, away from her newfound home and back to war, albeit in Europe this time. Far away, working in aerial transportation, bringing soldiers back to London, then studying medicine once the war was over. Fulfilling all the plans for her head and ignoring all the ones made by her heart.

  She’d made a life for herself. She had Missy again. S
he had Ben and Beatrice, wonderful friends who had understood and loved her mother. She had family, regularly writing to them and seeing them on the happy occasions they came to England, such as now. She had her work. She had everything she needed. The fears that filled her dreams at night, dreams of Pete dying in battle, calling out her name in remorse, were just the foolish lamentations of her heart. Her head cleared them well away each morning.

  Ben waited patiently while she processed her thoughts, knowing her well enough by now to almost read them as the shadows crossed her face.

  ‘What are ya really afraid of, Theresa?’ he said at last.

  She shrugged, the words coming reluctantly. ‘Maybe I…I am a fallen woman. I mean look at my mother…maybe it’s in my blood.’

  ‘Love?’

  ‘Lust. Maybe I was always kidding myself…wanting a normal life with a respectable man. No one wanted me for anything like that until I met him. Just…sex. The boys in the country; the boys in the city. Maybe he will change his mind again, away from war. In real life. The priests and nuns always said that the sins of the flesh lead to damnation, so maybe I’m damned now. Maybe he…doesn’t want that woman. Not really.’

  ‘Seems pretty keen to me – three years of trying to win ya back. How much proof do ya want?’

  ‘I tell you what I don’t want: I don’t want to go back to him only for him to…to resent me. To think that I’m just like her. Rose’s daughter.’

  Ben shook his head, his smile filled with affection. ‘Can’t think of no better compliment than that.’

  Forty-nine

  Calais, France

  The day was clear but bitterly cold, the sky cornflower blue, as the woman bent down and placed the poppies on his grave. Theresa watched her curiously as she approached, the tall figure vaguely familiar.

  She froze as Pattie turned and they met, face to face at last.

  ‘Found a few out of season. They’re strange little flowers, aren’t they? More like paper than petals. Appropriate somehow, with the red.’ Pattie shrugged, turning towards the sun. ‘Why the chess piece?’ she asked, nodding at the small queen standing guard, mounted between the two headstones.

  ‘He…gave it to her. I don’t know why.’ Theresa found her voice. ‘She had it in her pocket when she died.’

  Pattie frowned then shrugged against it. ‘That sounds like something he would do.’

  The wind whipped at their coats and Theresa bent to place the flowers she had brought with her as Pattie watched.

  ‘I didn’t expect you would ever want to come here,’ Theresa said, arranging the blooms.

  ‘No. Neither did I.’ She shook her hair from her face, taking a deep breath. ‘Veronica got it in her head I needed to come, kept going on about forgiveness and Pete needing me to talk to you. Wore me down in the end with her badgering. She’s annoyingly good, you know.’

  ‘Yes.’ Theresa smiled a little. ‘She is that.’

  Pattie touched the headstone gently. ‘She likes you. Believes you are meant to be in our lives. Destiny and all that nonsense.’

  ‘A wartime dalliance is hardly fulfilling some grand vision of destiny.’

  Pattie knelt down and traced the inscription on Clarkson’s grave. ‘So one would think.’

  Theresa bit her lip, unsure what to say, but Pattie continued, pushing aside the tears that had gathered at the corners of her eyes. ‘Did Pete ever mention he was born the day we buried Clarkson? Well, buried…we had a ceremony. There’s no closure, you see. Not until you see a grave, then it feels…final.’ She braced herself against the wind. ‘I…I still hadn’t quite let go and seeing you there, in his house…it was a painful way to find out and unfortunately you couldn’t have been standing in a worse possible place at a worse possible time. I suppose I was seeing her, not you.’

  Theresa stood still looking at the grave. ‘And you hated me too.’

  ‘No. No, I never hated you. I hated her, yes, I can’t deny that.’

  ‘So you’ve decided to come and stand here at my mother’s graveside, all the way from Australia, just to tell me you hated her?’

  ‘No.’ Pattie shook her head. ‘Hasn’t it occurred to you that perhaps I have other reasons for standing here?’

  Theresa looked at Clarkson’s grave, feeling a little ashamed.

  ‘I’ve come here to ask you to forgive.’

  ‘You want me to forgive you?’

  ‘No.’ Pattie lifted her face and looked Theresa in the eye. ‘Not me. I’ve come to ask you to forgive Pete. It’s time.’

  Theresa gaped at her. ‘Of all the arrogant, self-important –’

  ‘Please, hear me out.’

  ‘Oh I hear you. Order the poor orphan to count herself lucky and take him back!’

  ‘No, not order, I’m begging you. Please. Pete is…like my own son and the very best of men, Theresa, surely you know that. I can’t live with the fact that I destroyed his chance at happiness because I was jealous and angry. I can’t.’ Pattie shook her head.

  ‘He messed it up, not you. He destroyed it.’

  ‘No, he just reacted badly. I destroyed it. I think I was ready to tear you down from the start and I succeeded, much to my regret. But he loves you, so much. I thought he might go mad when they sent him back to war and he couldn’t find you and now, the first chance he gets, here he is and Mildred says you won’t see him.’ She held up her hand. ‘I know, I know. You think he doesn’t deserve forgiveness.’ Pattie held her arms out, sweeping them at the white graves that spread out in a sea before them. ‘But for God’s sake, girl, look around you. Don’t you think any one of them would give anything for this chance? To live? To feel happiness?’

  Theresa fought the emotions that threatened to make her give a little and turned to leave.

  Pattie sighed, making one final attempt to get through. ‘I had a long time alone, Theresa, before my Mick came along and I found love again. Loneliness might protect you from getting hurt, but what about love? You can’t tell me you’re happy alone. I wouldn’t believe you. I know a woman with a broken heart when I see one. I recognise that pain. Swallow your pride and choose love, Theresa.’ She looked towards Clarkson’s grave. ‘Forgiveness is freeing.’

  As she watched the young woman walk away, hunched against the cold and her own pride, Pattie shook her head. Stubborn as a mule that one.

  A gust of wind made the flowers flutter against his name. Reminds me of someone else I know. She felt she could almost hear him say it.

  Pattie stared at Clarkson’s grave one last time, saying goodbye to the long-familiar place where he lived inside of her. Reaching into her handbag, she squished an old furry hat on her head and allowed him one last smile.

  ‘Farewell, Mr C.’

  Fifty

  Theresa walked up the hill to the cliff, past the crumbling skeletons of buildings that marked the crush of war, inevitably to rise again but still for now, solemn in their wait. She breathed deeply of the ocean, finding solace in the monthly ritual she’d performed across the channel since she’d been in London. First Calais, to honour their deaths, then Boulogne to feel their lives.

  It was cold and there were a few other people around as she watched a man approach, tall in his Australian uniform. Not uncommon here, they were usually tall, these Australians, so honoured for their courage around these parts where the graves of their fallen were meticulously tended by a grateful French people. He was headed this way and she felt her body tense.

  She decided not to turn her back, not to run this time. She couldn’t run forever, but as she faced every living, breathing detail of him before her she felt trapped, despite the space surrounding her.

  ‘Hello Theresa,’ he said simply. She didn’t speak, finding herself without adequate words, eventually swinging her gaze towards the safety of the horizon.

  ‘Missy sends her love. Told me to give you these.’ He handed her a velvet box and she opened it, finding a string of pearls inside. ‘Said to tell you some things are to
o precious to give away.’

  She stared at them shaking her head. Typical of Missy to refuse to sell them all these years and even more typical to wait for the perfect dramatic moment to return them. She closed the box slowly.

  ‘Theresa…’

  ‘How’s the law career going? You certainly have a way with getting people onside, don’t you? Charming my friend and importing your aunt all the way from Sydney. Who else have you got tucked away? Is there a marching band around the corner?’ She pretended to look for one over his shoulder.

  ‘What do you mean, my aunt? When did you see Pattie?’

  ‘About two hours ago at my mother’s grave.’

  ‘She…she went to the graveside? What did she say to you? Oh God help me…if she said anything to make things worse–’

  ‘Well first of all that would be impossible and secondly she was actually there for…other reasons.’

  ‘Such as?’

  She began walking down the hill and he followed. ‘None of your goddamn business.’

  ‘Aren’t you going to let me explain?’

  ‘What’s to explain? I didn’t suit your world. C’est la vie.’

  ‘No, no it wasn’t that. Look, I behaved badly. For God’s sake, Theresa, I’ve played it a million ways in my mind and it comes back to the same thing. I let you down and I’m sorrier than you could ever know.’

  She turned and looked up at him. ‘Behaved badly? Is that what you call it? I could come up with some stronger words than that for calling me a slut and a whore and…and letting me be cast out of your family’s home.’

  ‘I…I never really thought those things. I was just shocked,’ he said, exasperated, beginning to recount the facts on his fingers. ‘I mean for God’s sake…one, I’d just found out you worked in the Cross and you’d slept with someone else, two, your mother jilted my father because she was pregnant with you and then, three, she had an affair with my uncle! That’s a lot to take lying down!’

  Theresa frowned. ‘Still on trial, am I?’