The Thorn Birds (65 page)

“Oh, Frank!” she said, and took him in her arms, rocking his head on her shoulder. “It’s all right, it’s all right,” she crooned, and softer still, “It’s all right!”

He sat slumped and silent in the car at first, but as the Rolls picked up speed and headed out of town he began to take an interest in his surroundings, and glanced out of the window.

“It looks exactly the same,” he whispered.

“I imagine it does. Time moves slowly out here.”

They crossed the rumbling wooden-planked bridge over the thin, muddy river lined with weeping willows, most of its bed exposed in a tangle of roots and gravel, pools lying in still brown patches, gum trees growing everywhere in the stony wastes.

“The Barwon,” he said. “I never thought I’d see it again.”

Behind them rose an enormous cloud of dust, in front of them the road sped straight as a perspective exercise across a great grassy plain devoid of trees.

“The road’s new, Mum?” He seemed desperate to find conversation, make the situation appear normal.

“Yes, they put it through from Gilly to Milparinka just after the war ended.”

“They might have sealed it with a bit of tar instead of leaving it the same old dirt.”

“What for? We’re used to eating dust out here, and think of the expense of making a bed strong enough to resist the mud. The new road is straight, they keep it well graded and it cut out thirteen of our twenty-seven gates. Only fourteen left between Gilly and the homestead, and just you wait and see what we’ve done to them, Frank. No more opening and closing gates.”

The Rolls ran up a ramp toward a steel gate which lifted lazily; the moment the car passed under it and got a few yards down the track, the gate lowered itself closed.

“Wonders never cease!” said Frank.

“We were the first station around here to install the automatic ramp gates—only between the Milparinka road and the homestead, of course. The paddock gates still have to be opened and closed by hand.”

“Well, I reckon the bloke that invented these gates must have opened and closed a lot in his time, eh?” Frank grinned; it was the first sign of amusement he had shown.

But then he fell silent, so his mother concentrated on her driving, unwilling to push him too quickly. When they passed under the last gate and entered the Home Paddock, he gasped.

“I’d forgotten how lovely it is,” he said.

“It’s home,” said Fee. “We’ve looked after it.”

She drove the Rolls down to the garages and then walked with him back to the big house, only this time he carried his case himself.

“Would you rather have a room in the big house, Frank, or a guesthouse all to yourself?” his mother asked.

“I’ll take a guesthouse, thanks.” The exhausted eyes rested on her face. “It will be nice to be able to get away from people,” he explained. That was the only reference he ever made to conditions in jail.

“I think it will be better for you,” she said, leading the way into her drawing room. “The big house is pretty full at the moment, what with the Cardinal here, Dane and Justine home, and Luddie and Anne Mueller arriving the day after tomorrow for Christmas.” She pulled the bell cord for tea and went quickly round the room lighting the kerosene lamps.

“Luddie and Anne Mueller?” he asked.

She stopped in the act of turning up a wick, looked at him. “It’s been a long time, Frank. The Muellers are friends of Meggie’s.” The lamp trimmed to her satisfaction, she sat down in her wing chair. “We’ll have dinner in an hour, but first we’ll have a cup of tea. I have to wash the dust of the road out of my mouth.”

Frank seated himself awkwardly on the edge of one of the cream silk ottomans, gazing at the room in awe. “It looks so different from the days of Auntie Mary.”

Fee smiled. “Well, I think so,” she said.

Then Meggie came in, and it was harder to assimilate the fact of Meggie grown into a mature woman than to see his mother old. As his sister hugged and kissed him he turned his face away, shrank inside his baggy coat and searched beyond her to his mother, who sat looking at him as if to say: It doesn’t matter, it will all seem normal soon, just give it time. A minute later, while he was still searching for something to say to this stranger, Meggie’s daughter came in; a tall, skinny young girl who sat down stiffly, her big hands pleating folds in her dress, her light eyes fixed first on one face, then on another. Meggie’s son entered with the Cardinal and went to sit on the floor beside his sister, a beautiful, calmly aloof boy.

“Frank, this is marvelous,” said Cardinal Ralph, shaking him by the hand, then turning to Fee with his left brow raised. “A cup of tea? Very good idea.”

The Cleary men came into the room together, and that was very hard, for they hadn’t forgiven him at all. Frank knew why; it was the way he had hurt their mother. But he didn’t know of anything to say which would make them understand any of it, nor could he tell them of the pain, the loneliness, or beg forgiveness. The only one who really mattered was his mother, and she had never thought there was anything to forgive.

It was the Cardinal who tried to hold the evening together, who led the conversation round the dinner table and then afterward back in the drawing room, chatting with diplomatic ease and making a special point of including Frank in the gathering.

“Bob, I’ve meant to ask you ever since I arrived—where are the rabbits?” the Cardinal asked. “I’ve seen millions of burrows, but nary a rabbit.”

“The rabbits are all dead,” Bob answered.

“Dead?”

“That’s right, from something called myxomatosis. Between the rabbits and the drought years, Australia was just about finished as a primary producing nation by nineteen forty-seven. We were desperate,” said Bob, warming to his theme and grateful to have something to discuss which would exclude Frank.

At which point Frank unwittingly antagonized his next brother by saying, “I knew it was bad, but not as bad as all that.” He sat back, hoping he had pleased the Cardinal by contributing his mite to the discussion.

“Well, I’m not exaggerating, believe me!” said Bob tartly; how would Frank know?

“What happened?” the Cardinal asked quickly.

“The year before last the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization started an experimental program in Victoria, infecting rabbits with this virus thing they’d bred. I’m not sure what a virus is, except I think it’s a sort of germ. Anyway, they called theirs the myxomatosis virus. At first it didn’t seem to spread too well, though what bunnies caught it all died. But about a year after the experimental infection it began to spread like wildfire, they think mosquito-borne, but something to do with saffron thistle as well. And the bunnies have died in millions and millions ever since, it’s just wiped them out. You’ll sometimes see a few sickies around with huge lumps all over their faces, very ugly-looking things. But it’s a marvelous piece of work, Ralph, it really is. Nothing else can catch myxomatosis, even close relatives. So thanks to the blokes at the CSIRO, the rabbit plague is no more.”

Cardinal Ralph stared at Frank. “Do you realize what it is, Frank? Do you?”

Poor Frank shook his head, wishing everyone would let him retreat into anonymity.

“Mass-scale biological warfare. I wonder does the rest of the world know that right here in Australia between 1949 and 1952 a virus war was waged against a population of trillions upon trillions, and succeeded in obliterating it? Well! It’s feasible, isn’t it? Not simply yellow journalism at all, but scientific fact. They may as well bury their atom bombs and hydrogen bombs. I know it had to be done, it was absolutely necessary, and it’s probably the world’s most unsung major scientific achievement. But it’s terrifying, too.”

Dane had been following the conversation closely. “Biological warfare? I’ve never heard of it. What is it exactly, Ralph?”

“The words are new, Dane, but I’m a papal diplomat and the pity of it is that I must keep abreast of words like ‘biological warfare.’ In a nutshell, the term means myxomatosis. Breeding a germ capable of specifically killing and maiming only one kind of living being.”

Quite unself-consciously Dane made the Sign of the Cross, and leaned back against Ralph de Bricassart’s knees. “We had better pray, hadn’t we?”

The Cardinal looked down on his fair head, smiling.

That eventually Frank managed to fit into Drogheda life at all was thanks to Fee, who in the face of stiff male Cleary opposition continued to act as if her oldest son had been gone but a short while, and had never brought disgrace on his family or bitterly hurt his mother. Quietly and inconspicuously she slipped him into the niche he seemed to want to occupy, removed from her other sons; nor did she encourage him to regain some of the vitality of other days. For it had all gone; she had known it the moment he looked at her on the Gilly station platform. Swallowed up by an existence the nature of which he refused to discuss with her. The most she could do for him was to make him as happy as possible, and surely the way to do that was to accept the now Frank as the always Frank.

There was no question of his working the paddocks, for his brothers didn’t want him, nor did he want a kind of life he had always hated. The sight of growing things pleased him, so Fee put him to potter in the homestead gardens, left him in peace. And gradually the Cleary men grew used to having Frank back in the family bosom, began to understand that the threat Frank used to represent to their own welfare was quite empty, Nothing would ever change what their mother felt for him, it didn’t matter whether he was in jail or on Drogheda, she would still feel it. The important thing was that to have him on Drogheda made her happy. He didn’t intrude upon their lives, he was no more or no less than always.

Yet for Fee it wasn’t a joy to have Frank home again; how could it be? Seeing him every day was simply a different kind of sorrow from not being able to see him at all. The terrible grief of having to witness a ruined life, a ruined man. Who was her most beloved son, and must have endured agonies beyond her imagination.

One day after Frank had been home about six months, Meggie came into the drawing room to find her mother sitting looking through the big windows to where Frank was clipping the great bank of roses alongside the drive. She turned away, and something in her calmly arranged face sent Meggie’s hands up to her heart.

“Oh, Mum!” she said helplessly.

Fee looked at her, shook her head and smiled. “It doesn’t matter, Meggie,” she said.

“If only there was something I could do!”

“There is. Just carry on the way you have been. I’m very grateful. You’ve become an ally.”

“Well,” said Justine to her mother, “I’ve decided what I’m going to do.”

“I thought it was already decided. Arts at Sydney University, isn’t that right?”

“Oh, that was just a red herring to lull you into a false sense of security while I made my plans. But now it’s all set, so I can tell you.”

Meggie’s head came up from her task, cutting fir-tree shapes in cookie dough; Mrs. Smith was ill and they were helping out in the cookhouse. She regarded her daughter wearily, impatiently, helplessly. What could one do with someone like Justine? If she announced she was going off to train as a whore in a Sydney bordello, Meggie very much doubted whether she could be turned aside. Dear, horrible Justine, queen among juggernauts.

“Go on, I’m all agog,” she said, and went back to producing cookies.

“I’m going to be an actress.”

“A
what
?”

“An actress.”

“Good Lord!” The fir trees were abandoned again. “Look, Justine, I hate to be a spoilsport and truly I don’t mean to hurt your feelings, but do you think you’re—well, quite physically equipped to be an actress?”

“Oh, Mum!” said Justine, disgusted. “Not a film star; an actress! I don’t want to wiggle my hips and stick out my breasts and pout my wet lips! I want to act.” She was pushing chunks of defatted beef into the corning barrel. “I have enough money to support myself during whatever sort of training I choose, isn’t that right?”

“Yes, thanks to Cardinal de Bricassart.”

“Then it’s all settled. I’m going to study acting with Albert Jones at the Culloden Theater, and I’ve written to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, asking that I be put on their waiting list.”

“Are you quite sure, Jussy?”

“Quite sure. I’ve known for a long time.” The last piece of bloody beef was tucked down under the surface of the corning solution; Justine put the lid on the barrel with a thump. “There! I hope I never see another bit of corned beef as long as I live.”

Meggie handed her a completed tray of cookies. “Put these in the oven, would you? Four hundred degrees. I must say this comes as something of a surprise. I thought little girls who wanted to be actresses role-played constantly, but the only person I’ve ever seen you play has been yourself.”

“Oh, Mum! There you go again, confusing film stars with actresses. Honestly, you’re hopeless.”

“Well, aren’t film stars actresses?”

“Of a very inferior sort. Unless they’ve been on the stage first, that is. I mean, even Laurence Olivier does an occasional film.”

There was an autographed picture of Laurence Olivier on Justine’s dressing table; Meggie had simply deemed it juvenile crush stuff, though at the time she remembered thinking at least Justine had taste. The friends she sometimes brought home with her to stay a few days usually treasured pictures of Tab Hunter and Rory Calhoun.

“I still don’t understand,” said Meggie, shaking her head. “An actress!”

Justine shrugged. “Well, where else can I scream and yell and howl but on a stage? I’m not allowed to do any of those here, or at school, or
anywhere
! I like screaming and yelling and howling, dammit!”

“But you’re so good at art, Jussy! Why not be an artist?” Meggie persevered.

Justine turned from the huge gas stove, flicked her finger against a cylinder gauge. “I must tell the kitchen rouseabout to change bottles; we’re low. It’ll do for today, though.” The light eyes surveyed Meggie with pity. “You’re so impractical, Mum, really. I thought it was supposed to be the children who didn’t stop to consider a career’s practical aspects. Let me tell you, I don’t want to starve to death in a garret and be famous after I’m dead. I want to enjoy a bit of fame while I’m still alive, and be very comfortable financially. So I’ll paint as a hobby and act for a living. How’s that?”