The Thorn Birds (49 page)

Left alone while Rob sped back to his suspicious Missus, Meggie unpacked and surveyed her domain. The big double bed was a great deal more comfortable than her own nuptial couch had been. But then, this was a genuine honeymoon paradise and the one thing its clients would demand was a decent bed; the clients of the Dunny pub were usually too drunk to object to herniating springs. Both the refrigerator and the overhead cupboards were well stocked with food, and on the counter stood a great basket of bananas, passionfruit, pineapples and mangoes. No reason why she shouldn’t sleep well, and eat well.

For the first week Meggie seemed to do nothing but eat and sleep; she hadn’t realized how tired she was, nor that Dungloe’s climate was what had killed her appetite. In the beautiful bed she slept the moment she lay down, ten and twelve hours at a stretch, and food had an appeal it hadn’t possessed since Drogheda. She seemed to eat every minute she was awake, even carrying mangoes into the water with her. Truth to tell, that was the most logical place to eat mangoes other than a bathtub; they just ran juice. Since her tiny beach lay within the lagoon, the sea was mirror calm and quite free of currents, very shallow. All of which she loved, because she couldn’t swim a stroke. But in water so salty it seemed almost to hold her up, she began to experiment; when she could float for ten seconds at a time she was delighted. The sensation of being freed from the pull of the earth made her long to be able to move as easily as a fish.

So if she mourned her lack of company, it was only because she would have liked to have someone to teach her to swim. Other than that, being on her own was wonderful. How right Anne had been! All her life there had been people in the house. To have no one was such a relief, so utterly peaceful. She wasn’t lonely at all; she didn’t miss Anne or Luddie or Justine or Luke, and for the first time in three years she didn’t yearn for Drogheda. Old Rob never disturbed her solitude, just chugged far enough down the road each sunset to make sure her friendly wave from the veranda wasn’t a signal of distress, turned the car and puttered off again, his surprisingly pretty Missus grimly riding shotgun. Once he phoned her to say he was taking the other couple in residence out in his glass-bottomed boat, and would she like to come along?

It was like having a ticket of admission to a whole new planet, peering through the glass down into that teeming, exquisitely fragile world, where delicate forms were buoyed and bolstered by the loving intimacy of water. Live coral, she discovered, wasn’t garishly hued from dyes the way it was in the souvenir counter of the store. It was soft pink or beige or blue-grey, and around every knob and branch wavered a marvelous rainbow of color, like a visible aura. Great anemones twelve inches wide fluttered fringes of blue or red or orange or purple tentacles; white fluted clams as big as rocks beckoned unwary explorers to take a look inside with tantalizing glimpses of colorful, restless things through feathery lips; red lace fans swayed in water winds; bright-green ribbons of weed danced loose and drifting. Not one of the four in the boat would have been in the least surprised to see a mermaid: a gleam of polished breast, a twisting glitter of tail, lazily spinning clouds of hair, an alluring smile taunting the siren’s spell to sailors. But the fish! Like living jewels they darted in thousands upon thousands, round like Chinese lanterns, slender like bullets, raimented in colors which glowed with life and the light-splitting quality water imparts, some on fire with scales of gold and scarlet, some cool and silvery blue, some swimming rag bags gaudier than parrots. There were needle-nosed garfish pug-nosed toadfish, fanged barracuda, a cavernous-mawed grouper lurking half seen in a grotto, and once a sleek grey nurse shark which seemed to take forever to pass silently beneath them.

“But don’t worry,” said Rob. “We’re too far south here for sea wasps, so if anything on the Reef is going to kill you, it’s most likely to be a stonefish. Never go walking on the coral without your shoes.”

Yes, Meggie was glad she went. But she didn’t yearn to go again, or make friends with the couple Rob brought along. She immersed herself in the sea, and walked, and lay in the sun. Curiously enough, she didn’t even miss having books to read, for there always seemed to be something interesting to watch.

She had taken Rob’s advice and stopped wearing clothes. At first she had tended to behave like a rabbit catching whiffs of dingo on the breeze, bolting for cover if a twig cracked or a coconut fell like a cannonball from a palm. But after several days of patent solitude she really began to feel no one would come near her, that indeed it was as Rob said, a completely private domain. Shyness was wasted. And walking the tracks, lying in the sand, paddling in that warm salty water, she began to feel like an animal born and brought up in a cage, suddenly let loose in a gentle, sunny, spacious and welcoming world.

Away from Fee, her brothers, Luke, the unsparing, unthinking domination of her whole life, Meggie discovered pure leisure; a whole kaleidoscope of thought patterns wove and unwove novel designs in her mind. For the first time in her life she wasn’t keeping her conscious self absorbed in work thoughts of one description or another. Surprised, she realized that keeping physically busy is the most effective blockade against totally mental activity human beings can erect.

Years ago Father Ralph had asked her what she thought about, and she had answered: Daddy and Mum, Bob, Jack, Hughie, Stu, the little boys, Frank, Drogheda, the house, work, the rainfall. She hadn’t said him, but he was at the top of the list, always. Now add to those Justine, Luke, Luddie and Anne, the cane, homesickness, the rainfall. And always, of course, the lifesaving release she found in books. But it had all come and gone in such tangled, unrelated clumps and chains; no opportunity, no
training
to enable her to sit down quietly and think out who exactly was Meggie Cleary, Meggie O’Neill? What did she want? What did she think she was put on this earth for? She mourned the lack of training, for that was an omission no amount of time on her own could ever rectify. However, here was the time, the peace, the laziness of idle physical well-being; she could lie on the sand and try.

Well, there was Ralph. A wry, despairing laugh. Not a good place to start, but in a sense Ralph was like God; everything began and ended with him. Since the day he had knelt in the sunset dust of the Gilly station yard to take her between his hands, there had been Ralph, and though she never saw him again as long as she lived, it seemed likely that her last thought this side of the grave would be of him. How frightening, that one person could mean so much, so many things.

What had she said to Anne? That her wants and needs were quite ordinary—a husband, children, a home of her own. Someone to love. It didn’t seem much to ask; after all, most women had the lot. But how many of the women who had them were truly content? Meggie thought she would be, because for her they were so hard to come by.

Accept it, Meggie Cleary. Meggie
O’Neill
. The someone you want is Ralph de Bricassart, and you just can’t have him. Yet as a man he seems to have ruined you for anyone else. All right, then. Assume that a man and the someone to love can’t occur. It will have to be children to love, and the love you receive will have to come from those children. Which in turn means Luke, and Luke’s children.

Oh, dear God, dear God! No, not
dear
God! What’s God ever done for me, except deprive me of Ralph? We’re not too fond of each other, God and I. And do You know something, God? You don’t frighten me the way You used to. How much I feared You, Your punishment! All my life I’ve trodden the straight and narrow, from fear of You. And what’s it got me? Not one scrap more than if I’d broken every rule in Your book. You’re a fraud, God, a demon of fear. You treat us like children, dangling punishment. But You don’t frighten me anymore. Because it isn’t Ralph I ought to be hating, it’s You. It’s all Your fault, not poor Ralph’s. He’s just living in fear of You, the way I always have. That he could love You is something I can’t understand. I don’t see what there is about You to love.

Yet how can I stop loving a man who loves God? No matter how hard I try, I can’t seem to do it. He’s the moon, and I’m crying for it. Well, you’ve just got to stop crying for it, Meggie O’Neill, that’s all there is to it. You’re going to have to content yourself with Luke, and Luke’s children. By hook or by crook you’re going to wean Luke from the wretched sugar, and live with him out where there aren’t even any trees. You’re going to tell the Gilly bank manager that your future income stays in your own name, and you’re going to use it to have the comforts and conveniences in your treeless home that Luke won’t think to provide for you. You’re going to use it to educate Luke’s children properly, and make sure they never want.

And that’s all there is to be said about it, Meggie O’Neill. I’m Meggie O’Neill, not Meggie de Bricassart. It even sounds silly, Meggie de Bricassart. I’d have to be Meghann de Bricassart, and I’ve always hated Meghann. Oh, will I ever stop regretting that they’re not Ralph’s children? That’s the question, isn’t it? Say it to yourself, over and over again: Your life is your own, Meggie O’Neill, and you’re
not
going to waste it dreaming of a man and children you can never have.

There! That’s telling yourself! No use thinking of what’s past, what
must
be buried. The future’s the thing, and the future belongs to Luke, to Luke’s children. It doesn’t belong to Ralph de Bricassart. He is the past.

Meggie rolled over in the sand and wept as she hadn’t wept since she was three years old: noisy wails, with only the crabs and the birds to hear her desolation.

Anne Mueller had chosen Matlock Island deliberately, planning to send Luke there as soon as she could. The moment Meggie was on her way she sent Luke a telegram saying Meggie needed him desperately, please to come. By nature she wasn’t given to interfering in other people’s lives, but she loved and pitied Meggie, and adored the difficult, capricious scrap Meggie had borne and Luke fathered. Justine must have a home, and both her parents. It would hurt to see her go away, but better that than the present situation.

Luke arrived two days later. He was on his way to the CSR in Sydney, so it didn’t cost him much time to go out of his way. Time he saw the baby; if it had been a boy he would have come when it was born, but news of a girl had disappointed him badly. If Meggie insisted on having children, let them at least be capable of carrying on the Kynuna station one day. Girls were no flaming use at all; they just ate a man out of house and home and when they were grown up they went and worked for someone else instead of staying put like boys to help their old father in his last years.

“How’s Meg?” he asked as he came up onto the front veranda. “Not sick, I hope?”

“You hope. No, she’s not sick. I’ll tell you in a minute. But first come and see your beautiful daughter.”

He stared down at the baby, amused and interested but not emotionally moved, Anne thought.

“She’s got the queerest eyes I’ve ever seen,” he said, “I wonder whose they are?”

“Meggie says as far as she knows no one in her family.”

“Nor mine. She’s a throwback, the funny little thing, Doesn’t look too happy, does she?”

“How could she look happy?” Anne snapped, hanging on to her temper grimly. “She’s never seen her father, she has no real home and not much likelihood of one before she’s grown up if you go on the way you are!”

“I’m saving, Anne!” he protested.

“Rubbish! I know how much money you’ve got. Friends of mine in Charters Towers send me the local paper from time to time, so I’ve seen the ads for western properties a lot closer in than Kynuna, and a lot more fertile. There’s a Depression on, Luke! You could pick up a beauty of a place for a lot less by far than the amount you have in the bank, and you know it.”

“Now that’s just it! There’s a Depression on, and west of the ranges a bloody terrible drought from Junee to the Isa. It’s in its second year and there’s no rain at all, not a drop. Right now I’ll bet Drogheda’s hurting, so what do you think it’s like out around Winton and Blackall? No, I reckon I ought to wait.”

“Wait until the price of land goes up in a good wet season? Come off it, Luke! Now’s the time to buy! With Meggie’s assured two thousand a year, you can wait out a ten-year drought! Just don’t stock the place. Live on Meggie’s two thousand a year until the rains come, then put your stock on.”

“I’m not ready to leave the sugar yet,” he said, stubbornly, still staring at his daughter’s strange light eyes.

“And that’s the truth at last, isn’t it? Why don’t you admit it, Luke? You don’t want to be married, you’d rather live the way you are at the moment, hard, among men, working your innards out, just like one out of every two Australian men I’ve ever known! What is it about this frigging country, that its men prefer being with other men to having a home life with their wives and children? If the bachelor’s life is what they truly want, why on earth do they try marriage at all? Do you know how many deserted wives there are in Dunny alone, scraping an existence and trying to rear their children without fathers? Oh, he’s just off in the sugar, he’ll be back, you know, it’s only for a little while. Hah! And every mail they’re there hanging over the front gate waiting for the postie, hoping the bastard’s sent them a little money. And mostly he hasn’t, sometimes he has—not enough, but something to keep things going!”

She was trembling with rage, her gentle brown eyes sparking. “You know, I read in the
Brisbane Mail
that Australia has the highest percentage of deserted wives in the civilized world? It’s the only thing we beat every other country at—isn’t that a record to be proud of!”

“Go easy, Anne! I haven’t deserted Meg; she’s safe and she’s not starving. What’s the matter with you?”

“I’m sick of the way you treat your wife, that’s what! For the love of God, Luke, grow up, shoulder your responsibilities for a while! You’ve got a wife and baby! You should be making a home for them—be a husband and a father, not a bloody stranger!”