‘She didn’t,’ Betty said. ‘She had said a great deal about it to Reverend Mother. All of which that woman took great pleasure in throwing at us. We got the impression May spends a good deal of time with her.’
‘May’s her pet,’ Dulcie said with a sigh.
Bruce and Betty exchanged glances which Dulcie noticed immediately. ‘Why? Is there something wrong with that?’ she asked.
‘No, my dear,’ Betty said soothingly. ‘But I think we’d better go home to my sister’s now and have a cup of tea. Perhaps we should have done that before we told you, but we thought it might be easier to break the news in here, I didn’t want my sister listening in.’
Dulcie slumped back on to the seat for the rest of the drive home and didn’t say a word. For nine years, ever since her mother died, she had clung to the idea that one day she and May would be reunited with their father. Her faith in this had been shaken when he signed the paper to send them to Australia, yet as time had passed she’d come to see that he couldn’t have known how things would turn out and he must have thought it would be the best thing for them. So many nights she’d lain awake comforting herself with a dream of meeting him off a ship and running into his arms. But that dream was gone now. After being called an orphan for so many years, she really was one now.
Much later that same night, Bruce and Betty lay wide awake in the spare bedroom at Betty’s sister’s, both unable to sleep.
They hadn’t slept well since they got here five days earlier. They found the city with its cars, buses and people shouting too noisy. The bed was lumpy and the room too cramped.
‘We’ll go home tomorrow,’ Bruce said, drawing Betty into his arms. ‘We don’t belong here.’
Betty didn’t reply for a moment, remembering how often after she first married Bruce and went to live in the outback with him, she’d longed to be back here. She had missed her old friends from school and the ones she went dancing with. She missed street lighting, shops, cinemas and hot baths. She thought the bush was ugly, nothing but miles of scrubby, arid land, where everything from cooking a meal or getting water was just so very hard. But she loved Bruce, she trusted him, and even through all the disasters, hardships and the grief of losing three babies, that love had sustained her, and finally she’d come to love the bush and farming as much as he did.
‘No, we don’t belong here,’ she murmured. ‘I don’t think we belong in the same world as people like that woman either! You know, when we first got to St Vincent’s, I actually thought Dulcie had made up a lot of the stuff she told us. Now I reckon it was even worse than she said. That woman didn’t have a shred of sympathy for Dulcie, did she? She took an almost malicious delight in passing on the news her father was dead. It was just as if she wanted to destroy the last few good memories Dulcie had of her early childhood. And I didn’t like the way she talked about May either.’
‘Something slimy there,’ Bruce agreed. He couldn’t put his finger on what it was, but he knew it wasn’t right. Yet on the face of it May was doing all right. She was a very pretty girl, healthy and apparently well cared for. So perhaps he was over-reacting.
‘Dulcie’s a little marvel, the way she handles things,’ Betty said. ‘I would have expected her to have been really weepy and down this evening, but there she was, helping with the tea, doing the washing up, almost as if nothing had happened. If I didn’t know her so well I’d think she didn’t care.’
‘Oh, she cares all right, make no mistake about that,’ Bruce said with feeling. ‘But she’s been conditioned by those bloody Sisters to hide what she feels. On top of that she’ll be thinking of us, not wanting to spoil our holiday. Look at that business with Pat Masters, she was evil to Dulcie, yet I’ve never heard her say a nasty thing about her.’
‘I’ve always suspected she found out something about Pat and came to sympathize with her,’ Betty confided. ‘I’d give anything to know what it was, but you can bet Dulcie will take it to the grave with her. I expect right now she’s lying awake fretting about her sister!’
‘I got the idea that kid can look after herself,’ Bruce replied. ‘But I don’t suppose that will stop Dulcie showering her with ten times more love and care than May will ever give back. There’s a touch of the martyr in Dulcie. I just hope she never falls for some bastard who’ll make use of it.’
‘I wonder if her father really did push her mother?’ Betty said thoughtfully.
‘I would have, if everything Dulcie said about her is true,’ Bruce replied. ‘But somehow I don’t think he killed her, Dulcie got that gentle nature of hers from someone, and it surely wasn’t her mother.’
‘May was very pretty, wasn’t she?’ Betty said.
‘Too pretty for her own good.’ Bruce sighed. ‘I wish we’d had longer with her, I sensed something about her, but I don’t know what it is.’
‘Me too,’ Betty agreed. ‘Sort of calculating. I don’t think I’d trust her the way I do Dulcie.’
‘My wish for our little Dulcie is that she falls in love with a really decent bloke very soon, gets married, has a whole lot of kids and stays near us for ever,’ Bruce said. ‘Wouldn’t that be nice?’
‘Umm,’ Betty agreed. ‘Maybe it will be Ross. They like one another.’
‘Maybe, but Ross is another one who has a few dark corners, something’s not quite right there.’
‘I wouldn’t mind taking a bet on Dulcie getting it all out of him,’ Betty murmured. She was getting sleepy now.
‘I wouldn’t want her to confuse love with pity,’ Bruce said. ‘That’s a dangerous area for someone to get in that’s already a bit of a martyr. I’d like her to fall for someone like John, uncomplicated, full of life and passion. She’d really blossom then.’
Betty was too sleepy to reply, but she squeezed her husband’s hand in agreement.
After Dulcie told Ross told about her parents they had become friends, but it wasn’t an easy or comfortable relationship. Ross had little real conversation and he was prickly and moody – if she asked too many questions, teased him or argued with his opinions, he often didn’t speak to her for days afterwards. When this happened she felt hurt and always promised herself she would ignore him when he finally came round again, but she never did. This was partly because she felt sorry for him and imagined all young men were equally moody, but mostly because she felt inexplicably drawn to him.
They got on best when they worked alongside one another outside. The previous August when the men came to shear the sheep Dulcie had helped out in the shearing shed, and it was Ross who’d shown her how to sort and grade the fleeces, helping her so she kept up with the shearers. During the harvest it was much the same, and so she got the idea that he felt more relaxed with her when there were lots of other people around, and stopped trying to seek him out alone.
Yet he wasn’t happy at either of the two dances when they went with Bruce, Betty and John. When he was actually in the hall he spent the time leaning against the wall with his hands in his pockets. She blamed herself for that, because she’d seen girls looking admiringly at him and thought maybe she was cramping his style by being there. Yet he’d been so kind when they got back from Perth and she told him about her father’s death.
Bruce and Betty were very kind too, but they didn’t understand how she really felt, not the way Ross did. He hadn’t sneered when she explained to him that she had always felt as if she had this little box tucked away inside her. A place where she kept all the good memories of her childhood. She told him that until she was informed her father was dead, she found it comforting to open that box and examine the contents.
Walks in Manor House Gardens, going to Mass with her father, seeing the Christmas lights in Regent Street with both her parents at Christmas, days out at the seaside, listening to
Children’s Hour
on the wireless and making toast on the fire. When she opened her box she could hear London accents, see the blossom on the trees in spring, hear the crackle of leaves underfoot in autumn, smell fog, the River Thames, lilac and roses. There was the taste of fish and chips, she could almost feel the heat through the newspaper bundle as she carried it home, pork pies, shrimps from the stall in Greenwich on Sunday afternoons.
All the nice memories of her parents were there, the silky feel of her mother’s hair, the smell of the scent she wore on special occasions, her laughter and the songs she used to sing to her and May.
But the memories of her father were the best of all, the bristles on his chin when he needed a shave, the way he used to throw her up in the air and catch her. How it felt to ride home on his shoulders when she was tired, and how snug she felt when she sat on his lap for a cuddle.
She told Ross how in all the time at St Vincent’s this collection of memories had given her a clear identity. She wasn’t just one of those Pom child migrants, but English Dulcie Taylor, with a father called Reg who was a builder. Her dreams of being with him again one day and perhaps returning to England had sustained her when things were blackest.
Ross had put his arm around her and wiped away her tears when she told him she felt as if her box with all those precious things inside it had been smashed now her father was dead. She said that she was left with an empty space inside her that nothing would ever fill.
When he told her that he knew how she felt because he lived with an empty space inside him too, she believed him. She could see the bleakness in his eyes, hear the break in his voice, and knew they were two of a kind.
Neither of them had ever spoken of that since, but it had created a bond between them. Back in April when the lambs were being born they had shared the responsibility of hand-feeding two motherless ones. One day when they were sitting together playing with them, he’d said,
‘Maybe we can both start a new box of memories. This one could go into it.’
Then he asked her if she wanted to go to the pictures the following night to see James Dean in
Rebel Without a Cause.
She wasn’t sure if he was actually asking her for a date. Or if he was going to the pictures anyway and didn’t fancy going on his own. There was no way she could ask without embarrassing herself so she just nodded and left it at that.
As Dulcie went about her chores that day, she came to the conclusion Ross
had
been suggesting a real date. She wondered whether he would kiss her, and just the thought of that made her feel shaky and excited.
There had been a great deal in the news about James Dean’s death in a car crash the previous year, and the little cinema in Esperance was packed to capacity.
Despite thinking James Dean was the biggest dreamboat ever with his chiselled features and his sexy eyes, Jim, the character he played in this film, made Dulcie feel strangely uneasy. Maybe it was just because Ross hadn’t moved a muscle since the film started, not even attempting to hold her hand or put his arm around her the way all the other young couples were doing. Each time she glanced sideways at him he was completely entranced, drinking it in as though he wanted to be just like Jim.
She was entirely engrossed by seeing how American teenagers lived, for the glimpse she’d had of their Perth counterparts had stayed with her when she returned home. Yet envious as she was of their seemingly far more exciting lives, more money and nicer clothes than she could ever expect to have, she couldn’t really understand why a film should glorify them causing their parents so much trouble.
‘That was fantastic,’ Ross exclaimed as they came out of the cinema. ‘Best film I’ve ever seen.’
‘I liked
East of Eden
better,’ she said.
He looked at her in surprise. ‘That was old-fashioned,’ he said dismissively.
‘Not that old-fashioned,’ Dulcie said as they began walking towards Bruce’s car. ‘Anyway, I like to be away from it all when I watch a film.’
‘But this film did that to me!’ he said, a note of intensity coming into his voice. ‘It made me want to rebel against stuff.’
‘What have you got to rebel against?’ she giggled. ‘Getting up at five, milking cows, ploughing! I thought you liked all that.’
He seemed stuck for an answer and didn’t reply until they were in the car heading home. ‘I would have thought you’d want to rebel too,’ he said. ‘We had our childhoods snatched away from us, we’ve been treated worse than animals. We should make a protest.’
Dulcie laughed. ‘Oh, don’t be silly, Ross! What are we going to do, smash a few shop windows in, ride motorbikes around Esperance frightening old ladies? All that film showed me was how spoilt those American teenagers were. What did they have to grouse about? I didn’t admire them, not one little bit.’
‘You don’t get it, do you?’ he said, turning towards her, his face full of anger. ‘We’ve got nothing, you and I. We’ll probably never have anything either. Our lives are nothing but work and more work. We don’t earn enough to ever think of having a place of our own, we can’t break away and go to the city because farming is all we know. You and I are only one step up from the Aborigines.’
Dulcie was bewildered. She had always sympathized with the Aborigines around Esperance because even though they were warm, friendly people and the men were excellent stockmen, they appeared to be very much on the fringe of Australian life. But she’d never seen herself in the same light as them. ‘But I’m happy with Bruce and Betty. I thought you were too?’
He banged one hand hard on the steering-wheel. ‘Don’t you see it’s a trap? I know they are good people, but do we have to spend the rest of our lives being grateful, working our arses off just because someone was kind to us?’
‘You’re free to go whenever you want to,’ she said. This wasn’t how she expected a date to be. She thought he might have said how pretty she looked, held her hand, even tried to kiss her. She didn’t understand why he’d suddenly become so bitter.
‘I
know
I’m free to leave,’ he sounded exasperated. ‘But what else is out there for someone like me?’
‘Leave and find out,’ she said. She was getting cross now.
A kangaroo jumped out of the bushes right into the car’s path. Dulcie screamed, Ross braked hard, the car went into a skid and Dulcie hit her forehead on the windscreen.