The dreary wasteland of the Nullarbor Plain eventually gave way to farmland, and she laughed with delight as kangaroos hopped along beside the train. She saw so many birds, flocks of galahs, pretty little parakeets, and dozens of other varieties unknown to her. After the big lunch she would lie down in her cabin to read, for she often fell asleep, and as the days crept by she realized this was the first time in her life she’d been able just to relax and please herself.
Often she sat staring mindlessly out of the window at the vast, empty spaces, and she would remember how she’d loved to look at the map of Australia back at St Vincent’s. Yet that map had given her no idea of the huge distances. The whole of England could fit in between Perth and Esperance, but that was just a small hop compared with the distance between Perth and Sydney. She would wake in the morning to see the scenery hadn’t changed from the night before, although they might have travelled another 400 miles. And still the train kept going.
She found it odd that she thought so little about home, but perhaps that was intentional. Ross had been sulky and nasty right from the moment he’d read the letter from Rudolph, growing nastier still after Bruce had spoken to the man on the telephone. But the night before she left he came into the bedroom where she was packing her case and tipped the contents on the floor.
‘I forbid you to go,’ he shouted at her, his face contorted with anger.
‘I have to,’ was all she said, and bent to pick up the clothes. He caught her by the hair, swung her back and slapped her face.
‘If I say you aren’t going, then you fucking well won’t,’ he screamed at her.
He stormed out to the pub after that, returning so drunk he could barely stand, and collapsed on to the couch, where he stayed all night. He didn’t speak in the morning, not a word all day, and when Dulcie finally left for Kalgoorlie with Bruce he had gone off somewhere on his motorbike.
Dulcie guessed he was jealous because she was putting May and a man she didn’t even know before him. Yet even if she understood his reasoning, by hitting her he had lost her sympathy. She had no choice but to go, it wasn’t a question of who held the larger slice of her heart. She was in fact just as angry with May for making up nasty stories about her as she was with Ross. Only the baby’s welfare concerned her, and she wasn’t sure she would ever forgive Ross for not finding it within him to see that and let her go with his blessing. Perhaps that was why Bruce was afraid she wouldn’t come back, maybe he thought that once she was away from Esperance she’d see nothing to go back for. But Bruce was mistaken, there was a great deal there to bring her back, Ross was her husband, and she wasn’t ready to give up on him yet.
Finally it was the last night, tomorrow morning she would arrive in Sydney and meet Rudolph. She packed her case again before dinner and joined all the friends she’d made for drinks before the meal. She was no longer scared of what lay ahead, she felt rested and calm.
The train stopped and started a great deal that last night, and when she woke the next morning she found the scenery had changed dramatically. They were in the Blue Mountains now, thick pine forests, with sheer drops at the side of the track, like nothing she’d ever seen before.
Sydney was huge, they were chugging through suburbs for a couple of hours before they finally reached the station. She saw rows of Victorian terraced houses that took her straight back to England, and something inside her told her she was going to like it here, whatever she might find when she confronted May.
Rudolph was waiting for her on the platform, and she recognized him immediately, even though he looked so different to how she remembered. Maybe it was only his height and the strong features, for without the flamboyant cream suit, Panama hat and bronzed face, he blended in with all the other businessmen in their sober dark suits.
His hair was thicker and blacker than she remembered, his skin pale now, and he looked thinner. Yet as he came towards her, dark eyes smiling, she felt the oddest kind of kinship with him, as if they already knew one another well.
‘Dulcie!’ he said, his voice a rich, deep growl. ‘I am
so
pleased to see you. Was the journey appalling? Are you exhausted?’
He had such nice eyes, slightly hooded, and his handshake was firm and warm.
‘The journey was lovely.’ She smiled up at him. ‘I’m not a bit tired, I slept like a log the whole way.’
He snatched up the case she’d put down on the ground. ‘I’m glad to hear that, and if it’s all right with you I’ll take you straight to the hotel I told Bruce about,’ he said. ‘It’s a small family one, an English couple who are friends of mine run it. As you aren’t tired, maybe we can have coffee there. Later, if you feel up to it, we’ll have a walk around down by the harbour and have some lunch.’
They went in a taxi to the hotel, Rudolph pointing out places of interest as they went. Perth, the only other Australian city Dulcie’d seen, was mostly new buildings. Sydney evoked half-forgotten memories of the West End of London with its old and imposing grey stone office buildings, narrower streets, smart shops and the vast amount of traffic.
‘The place I’m taking you to is called The Rocks,’ he said. ‘You’ll see why when we get there. It was where the first convicts settled, and most of the houses are tiny and very old. It’s become very smart to live there now, a bit like Chelsea or Hampstead in London. The hotel is called the Sirius, named after the first ship that came to Sydney. The upstairs rooms have lovely views of the bay. I asked Nancy, that’s the landlady, to give you a good one.’
They were there in no time at all, an area of narrow cobbled streets winding up through the huge grey rocky cliff. The taxi stopped at the bottom of some steps, and Rudolph picked up her case and led the way to the house at the top. Dulcie had caught glimpses of the harbour in several places on the route, but as she got to the top of the steps and turned to look, she gasped, for the entire harbour lay before her in one huge glorious sweep. Although it was chilly and windy, the sun was shining and the sea was as blue as the sky above. Sydney Harbour Bridge which she’d seen so often in pictures began right here on top of the rocks, overshadowing the back of the hotel.
‘That’s the famed Opera House.’ Rudolph pointed out a strange-looking half-completed structure further along the harbour. ‘It looks appalling now, and heaven only knows when it will be finished. But I’m of the opinion it will be very beautiful once it is. Before we go in and meet Nancy, I thought I’d better tell you she has met May on many occasions, and she knows something of our predicament. I hope you won’t be embarrassed by this, it was my hope you’d feel more secure in a strange city with English people who know May and myself.’
Dulcie thought then what a gentleman he was, and that May was a fool to walk out on him.
‘It’s very kind of you,’ she said. ‘And I’m not embarrassed. Thank you, Rudolph.’
He smiled and his eyes sparkled. ‘Call me Rudie, Rudolph is only good for Christmas parties. I can’t imagine why my parents saddled me with it.’
Two hours later they were still in the small dining-room at the front of the house overlooking the bay, on their second pot of tea. Dulcie’s room was delightful, on the top floor with a view that left her breathless. The whole hotel was very English and chintzy, she even had an eiderdown on her bed, the first she’d seen since she was a child. Nancy was a Londoner, a pretty woman in her mid-thirties with curly auburn hair and freckles.
But the hotel and the view had been forgotten as Dulcie listened to Rudie’s story about himself and May. He began by telling her how it all started, that he was still in the Old Australia Hotel when May turned up in the late afternoon, looking for him.
‘I was astounded,’ he said with a wry smile. ‘She’d made a big impression on me on the day of your wedding, but I hadn’t expected to see her ever again. She said she was off to Sydney too and we spent the evening together while waiting for the train. I had booked a first-class sleeper cabin on the train, so when I discovered May was intending to travel second-class, without even a couchette, I said she could share my cabin if she liked and I would pay the extra fare for her.’
‘And she agreed, just like that?’ Dulcie asked.
‘I kind of insisted,’ he said, looking faintly embarrassed. ‘You see, by then she had already started to make things up, and I felt sorry for her, she seemed shaky, upset and exhausted. I really couldn’t bear to think of her suffering the discomfort of second class.’
Rudie glossed over the rest of the journey, but Dulcie felt they must have become lovers on the way, because he said he took May straight to his house when they arrived in Sydney and said she could stay until she found herself a job.
Dulcie didn’t much care that it appeared May had coldbloodedly traded sex for a cabin on the train and a place to stay in Sydney. But she was shocked to the core by the magnitude of the lies she told Rudie to gain his sympathy.
‘Devilish strict, that’s how she described her parents back in England,’ he said. ‘She said they were furious when you left for Australia three years ago and they took it out on her. So when you wrote and begged her to come out and join you, and painted a blissful picture of golden beaches, parties and barbecues, she blew her last savings on a ticket and out she came too.’
‘We came in 1949!’ Dulcie exclaimed.
‘As long ago as that!’ He shook his head almost in disbelief. ‘Well, she said that you were already engaged to Ross then, and that his father, Bruce, had the biggest farm in the South West. According to May, you were the farm secretary, but the job was really beyond you, and you needed her help. But once she got to the farm, she found that she was expected not only to type the farm letters but to cook, clean the house, tend the vegetable garden and nurse Bruce’s terminally ill wife.’
He paused for a moment, half smiling at Dulcie’s horrified expression. ‘It all sounded so ghastly, yet utterly plausible,’ he went on. ‘She described Betty messing the bed, calling her at all hours of the night, working her fingers to the bone while you did nothing but swan off out to lunch with friends and neighbours. She cried about Betty, saying how much she suffered, and how she felt she couldn’t go off and leave her with you because you were so nasty to her. I swallowed it all, hook, line and sinker. That she was paid no wages, that she’d used up all her savings so she couldn’t even get to Perth to find the kind of secretarial job she’d been trained for. She even told me she’d been raped by one of the stockmen, and you knew but didn’t lift a finger.’
‘So how did she explain away her jollity at our wedding?’ Dulcie asked with a smirk. ‘Or why she had a more expensive outfit than me, and indeed how she came to escape my evil clutches?’
‘The jollity was put down to drink. She said it was your intention to marry her off to Bob, I think his name was. The smaller, weedy chap in your party with bad teeth. She said he had a big property down near you, which Ross and Bruce wanted to amalgamate with theirs, and you’d only bought her that outfit for her to impress him.
‘As for her escaping, she said that you and Ross had gone off on a honeymoon further down the coast, and as Bruce wasn’t taking too much notice of her, she helped herself to a few pounds you’d left for housekeeping, and she managed to get a lift down to the station with a delivery man, and got on the train before anyone knew she’d gone.’
Dulcie shook her head in despair. ‘But you saw me that day! Did I look capable of being that wicked?’
‘Well, of course I only heard all this several days after seeing you,’ he said. ‘By then I could only remember you vaguely, and we didn’t speak, did we? May said you’d always been jealous of her because she was prettier, your parents favoured her, and that part of the reason you turned so nasty was because you suspected Ross liked her better than you. The picture I got of you was of this neurotic, slightly demented English rose, who was manipulated first by severe parents, then by Ross and his father, whom May described as brutes. She said money and position was everything to you, you were so determined to have a life comparable with the one you’d had back in England that you’d set your cap at the first man with money who came along.’
Dulcie began to laugh then. It was just so far from the truth that all she could do was laugh.
‘She was a good storyteller.’ Rudie grinned sheepishly. ‘I’m glad you can laugh about it because she almost had me in tears when she told me. Her descriptions of Betty’s painful death, the clearing up, her grief at losing the old dear, it was all so real. Can you imagine how I felt when I read those letters of yours and found that it was you who was nursing Betty, and that she’d never even been to the farm at that time?’
‘Didn’t she ever slip up somewhere and make you wonder about her?’ Dulcie asked. ‘You said she was with you for a long time.’
‘No, never,’ Rudie said emphatically. ‘You see, she had this way about her. Always so well-groomed and poised. She laid the table just so, she knew about wines, the right glasses, how to entertain. Her accent was so English, it all fitted in with what she’d told me about her home in England and what I remember of “ladies” back there. Of course once I knew she’d been a maid, trained by an Englishwoman, I knew where all that had come from.’
‘But surely you sometimes saw another side of her?’ Dulcie asked. ‘Right from a toddler May could charm, act so sweet, make people laugh. But there was always a darker side, and most people saw it before long.’
Rudie nodded. ‘Oh yes, I saw that, deep melancholy, insecurity, tantrums too, but that all fitted with your overbearing parents, the traumas she was supposed to have suffered in Esperance. She even had nightmares about the rape.’
He paused for a short while and lit a cigarette. ‘I think what convinced me
most
that it was all true was the way she wanted to put it behind her. Soon after she came to live with me she said, “I’m going to forget it all now, it’s happened and it was horrible, but I’ve got a new start now.” She didn’t like me to speak of it to anyone else, she would just make jokes about “There you go reminding me again” sort of thing. It seemed so plucky, so rational.’