Yours sincerely,
Rudolph Jameson
Dulcie was shaking by the time she finished the letter. Silently she passed it over to Bruce, sank down on a chair and held her head in her hands.
The man in the cream suit. She remembered him so clearly. Well over six foot tall, and she thought in his middle thirties. A trifle overweight, strong features and a booming laugh. He sounded English in his letter, well educated, and by the tone of it, a decent man. She thought it was likely that May had latched on to him, assuming he was rich.
But artists weren’t rich, and if it took him months to find those letters he probably lived in squalor. Was that why May had left him?
Bruce finished reading the letter and put it down. ‘Strewth!’ he exclaimed, running his hands through his white hair. ‘What on earth can I say, Dulcie?’
‘Do you believe him?’ she asked. ‘It couldn’t be a hoax, could it?’
Bruce looked perplexed. ‘It sounds dinkum to me. He looked like a real gent that day in Kalgoorlie, and he’s an educated bloke by the sound of it. But putting the baby aside for a moment. Has May made up whoppers like that before?’
‘Not as far as I know,’ Dulcie said. ‘She was always a bit deceitful and cunning. But she wasn’t like it here or in Perth. I thought she’d grown out of it.’
‘There was no reason for her to tell any lies here, we all knew the truth about her situation,’ Bruce said evenly.
Dulcie’s mind felt fuzzy, she couldn’t take it all in. ‘A little boy, he’ll be nearly four months old now!’ she exclaimed. ‘He can’t have made that up, we could check it. But I just can’t imagine May having a baby, everything she ever said made me think she’d be too set on having a good time to risk getting herself into trouble.’
Bruce put his hand on her shoulder and squeezed it in silent understanding at her shock. ‘Accidents can happen, even to people who think they know how to avoid them. The man’s put his phone number on here. How about I phone him after supper and have a man-to-man talk with him?’ he suggested.
Dulcie agreed this was a good idea.
‘But before I do that maybe we could find out a little more about him. There’s that artist woman in town who showed her stuff in the summer. She comes from Sydney, doesn’t she?’
‘Jennifer Alcott,’ Dulcie said, she’d spoken to her herself when she first took up painting. She picked up Rudolph’s letter again, looking at the address. ‘She might have heard of him, if nothing else she might be able to tell you what Watson’s Bay where he lives is like, and about King’s Cross.’
They had a cup of tea together and then Dulcie said she would get on with making the supper. Bruce said he’d phone Jennifer.
As Dulcie whipped up the batter for the Toad-in-the-hole, she cried. While she had worried about May when she first disappeared, she had believed she was level-headed enough to manage on her own. And now a baby!
But why had May told all those lies about her? What possible reason could she have for betraying her only sister in such a way? She wondered too what Rudolph meant by King’s Cross being a dubious place. Did he think May was in some kind of danger?
Bruce came into the kitchen just as she was starting to peel some potatoes. ‘Rudolph Jameson is a very well-known and respected artist,’ he said, putting one hand on Dulcie’s shoulder. ‘Jennifer said she’d been to one of his exhibitions but never met him personally. He is English. Watson’s Bay where he lives is a small, rather select place at the end of Sydney Bay. Jennifer said it’s the kind of place any artist would want to live, but few do because they couldn’t afford it.’
Dulcie was relieved to hear that. ‘King’s Cross?’
Bruce frowned. ‘A red light district.’
Dulcie looked puzzled.
‘Prostitutes, strip clubs, that kind of thing,’ Bruce said sheepishly.
‘May’s living somewhere like that, with a baby!’ Dulcie’s voice rose in horror and she turned deathly pale. ‘She wouldn’t, she couldn’t do that, could she?’ she asked in a whisper.
‘You can live in a place without being part of what goes on there,’ Bruce said quickly. ‘It’s probably a cheap place to live where people don’t ask too many questions.’
Bruce’s explanation made sense. Dulcie imagined that an unmarried mother wouldn’t find it easy to find a decent place to live, yet as she continued with cooking the supper, her mind turned back to that evening in Perth when May had taken her to the hotel. May had been so relaxed with those men, it was as though she’d done it dozens of times before. Even down here Dulcie had seen the ease with which she flirted with men, and thinking back to odd knowledgeable remarks she had made on both occasions, it was very unlikely she had been a virgin then.
‘That doesn’t mean she could sell herself to men,’ she told herself firmly.
Dulcie and Bruce told Ross and the other two men about the letter over supper. All three men read it in turn. John remembered more than anyone about the man at the wedding because he’d been dancing up at that end of the veranda.
‘May was coming on to him,’ he admitted. ‘It was like none of us existed the moment she saw him. If you remember, she hadn’t set the date for her return journey at that point either. It was only when she got back here she said she was going to catch the Thursday train.’
‘You mean she intended to see him again?’ Dulcie said.
John shrugged. ‘It looks that way to me. Of course, she must have been planning to go anyway, or she wouldn’t have left the case at Kalgoorlie. But I don’t reckon it was coincidence she bumped into him.’
‘What was the bloke doing in Kalgoorlie anyway?’ Ross said. ‘Weird place for an artist to be!’
‘He’d been up to Alice Springs,’ John said. ‘I heard him talking about the “Rattler”.’
Dulcie nodded. The ‘Rattler’ was the train from Kalgoorlie to Alice Springs. It wasn’t a journey for the fainthearted, but she had read somewhere that artists were always going out there to see Ayers Rock and the Aboriginal people who lived around it.
‘I reckon the bloke’s a brick short of a full load,’ Ross said suddenly. ‘You can bet your life May’s shacked up with another younger bloke and he’s just hopping mad and wants to make trouble for her.’
Dulcie looked at Ross. His eyes were narrowed, his mouth set in a straight line. She had expected him to be as shocked as she was, but he sounded furious and that was puzzling.
‘I don’t believe anyone intent on causing trouble would write a letter like that,’ she said. ‘He’d just say all the nasty things and leave it at that. He sounds really worried about the baby. I think there’s something more he knows about May which he hasn’t said too.’
‘I agree with you there, Dulc,’ John said. ‘Look, I liked May, but if she hadn’t been your sister, I reckon I’d have been wary of her.’
‘Why, John?’ Dulcie asked.
He looked a little sheepish.
‘Go on,’ she urged him, knowing his experience with women. ‘Say what you think, I won’t be offended.’
John sighed. ‘Well, she ain’t sweet and kind like you, Dulc. I put her down as a girl on the make.’
‘If she’s like that, then surely she would have stayed with this bloody Rudolph?’ Ross interrupted. ‘I reckon him and you lot are all a mob of sticky beaks. It’s her life and she can live it how she chooses.’
‘She’s just a kid still,’ Bob said unexpectedly – he hadn’t said one word up until now. ‘I think you ought to go there, Dulcie, and find her.’
‘Oh no,’ Ross roared out, slapping his hand hard on the table. ‘Dulcie’s not going traipsing all the way to Sydney just because some ponce writes to her. If May’s got herself in a mess, it’s up to her to get herself out of it, and I don’t believe she has or she would have got in touch with Dulcie.’
‘She might be too ashamed to.’ Dulcie frowned at Ross, she couldn’t understand why he was being so nasty. ‘Why are you being so hard? You’re getting muddled!’
‘I’m not muddled,’ he yelled, making everyone look at him askance. ‘It’s perfectly clear to me. I’m not having my wife going thousands of miles to check on some bloody selfish little tart.’
‘Don’t you
dare
speak to me like that,’ Dulcie shouted back.
‘Calm down, both of you,’ Bruce said, his eyes full of concern. ‘I want you both to think of the real issue here.’
‘The baby,’ Bob said quietly. ‘That’s the real issue. Is May looking after it properly?’
‘Bob’s hit the nail right on the head,’ Bruce said. ‘We don’t know Rudolph, and he’s a grown man so he’s hardly our concern. May
has
been selfish and reckless, and there’s a certain truth in what Ross says that if she’s made her bed, she must lie in it. But a baby is a small, helpless little thing, and you of all people, Ross, should know what can happen to children whose mothers for some reason or another can’t look after them. Now tell me, Ross, are you really prepared to refuse to let your wife travel to Sydney to check that her nephew is safe and well cared for?’
There was complete silence as everyone waited for Ross to answer, not a click of a knife and fork, hardly a breath.
He was struggling internally, Dulcie could see a tick under his right eye, his brow furrowing, his lower lip quivering. She guessed he was thinking how different it might have been for himself and his brothers if there had been some relative who cared.
‘But Dulcie’s not used to cities,’ he blurted out eventually. ‘May could be living with some ape who won’t like Dulcie turning up, it could be dangerous.’
‘You’re forgetting I was brought up in one of the biggest cities in the world,’ Dulcie said indignantly. ‘I know how to be tactful, so why should anyone resent me turning up? All I need to know is if May and the baby are safe and well. Once I’ve established that I’ll come on home.’
Bruce got up from the table and looked down at Ross. ‘I’ll telephone Jameson now. Will you trust my judgement to work out whether the bloke is okay? None of us can go with her, we’re all needed here.’
Ross’s lip curled and Dulcie knew he was never going to let her go with his approval, but suddenly she didn’t care.
‘I trust your judgement, Bruce,’ she said, looking right into the older man’s eyes. ‘You phone him.’
Two nights later Dulcie was standing on the platform at Kalgoorlie station with Bruce beside her, waiting for the eleven o’clock train. As they looked down the track towards the east, there was complete darkness, not a flicker of light beyond the station sheds. She knew the journey would take her right across the vast Nullarbor Plain, almost 2,000 miles of desert-like emptiness before she saw any farmland again.
It was biting cold, and she shivered and pulled the collar of her coat up around her neck. Bruce had bought her a first-class ticket so she would have a sleeping berth and three meals a day. She might have been excited if it hadn’t been for the thought of Ross sulking at home.
‘Don’t worry about Ross,’ Bruce said, as if he’d picked up on her thoughts. ‘He’s being childish and it will do you both good to be parted for a while. He’s got to learn to give, and you’ve got to learn that you are entitled to take.’
A whistle blew down the track and the train drew into the station. ‘I’ll phone you,’ she said, standing on tiptoe to kiss his cheek. ‘Don’t you worry about me. I’ll be fine.’
Bruce got on to the train with her, for it wouldn’t be leaving for an hour. The steward checked her ticket, took her case from Bruce and led them down a narrow corridor to the sleeping compartment.
‘You’ve got a double all to yourself,’ he said with a wide and friendly grin. ‘The first class is half empty on this trip, so there’s only one sitting for meals. Would you like early morning tea?’
Bruce spoke for her, saying she would, and the steward opened the cabin door. The bottom bunk was pulled down and made up ready for her, and the steward showed her the washbasin and toilet which ingeniously pulled down from the wall.
Bruce sat down on the bunk.
‘It’s comfy,’ he grinned. ‘Reckon you’ll be as snug as a bug in here.’
Dulcie was impressed by the starched sheets, the shiny wood panelling and the many little cupboards. ‘It’s like being back in the caravan,’ she said gleefully.
‘I really ought to go,’ Bruce said. ‘Why don’t you put your stuff away and wander down to get yourself a drink before you turn in?’
‘Okay,’ she said, remembering he had a long drive back.
Bruce got up from the bunk, filling the confined space. He held out his arms for one last hug. ‘Whatever happens in Sydney, and I mean whatever,’ he said gruffly against her hair, ‘just remember we are friends. You can tell me anything, I’ll support any decision you make, even if that turns out to be that you don’t want to come back.’
‘Of course I’ll come back, silly,’ she said, moving back from him a little to look at his face.
He had an expression she couldn’t quite read.
‘Situations can change us,’ he said, patting her cheek tenderly.
‘Go on with you now,’ she laughed, giving him a playful nudge towards the door. ‘Sydney won’t change me, I’ll sort out May and be back before you know it.’
He kissed her on the cheek, pressed her silently to him one last time and left. She watched as he walked along the narrow corridor, his shoulders were so wide he had to half turn in places. She knew just by the slump of his shoulders that he was afraid she wasn’t going to come back, and that mystified her.
Dulcie loved the train ride. It was wonderful to wake up in the morning, pull up the blind and watch the scenery, knowing she didn’t have to get up unless she wanted to. But the thought of a breakfast cooked for her was too appealing, and off she’d go to the dining car. She found herself meeting and chatting to people from all over. Many were Australians, but she met English, Americans and New Zealanders too. Some were going to visit relatives, others had business in Melbourne, Adelaide or Sydney, some were just travelling around Australia. Because she was on her own many of them were especially kind, asking her to join them for meals, or to go into the saloon and have a chat. She didn’t spend half as much time reading as she’d expected to.