But it was the ceiling Noel was staring up at. Mobiles of fishes, sailing boats and aeroplanes hung from it, all dancing in the breeze from the open door. Dulcie had never seen anything like them in her life.
Then there were the paintings on the walls. She stared at them in awe, for they had an almost childlike simplicity, boats on the sea, waves showering over rocks, some of children on the beach. There were several of the outback too, the red soil, stark gum trees and the harsh blue sky.
‘They are so vivid and marvellous,’ she finally managed to get out. ‘But they aren’t a bit how I imagined you’d paint.’ Back in Esperance she was always borrowing art books from the library, but Rudie’s work didn’t compare with any of the famous artists she knew, it was quite unique.
‘I suppose I’d be called a
primitive
back in England,’ he chuckled. ‘That’s posh Bond Street art gallery lingo for childish and lacking in technique.’
When Dulcie finally managed to tear herself away from the paintings she was struck by how neat and clean everything was. It didn’t look one bit how she imagined a bachelor would live.
‘Go and inspect the kitchen,’ Rudie urged her with a smile playing around his lips.
Dulcie opened the door he pointed at, and cried out with delight. It was long and narrow, painted yellow and turquoise too, jolly ceramic fish decorating the walls above the modern work surfaces, and at the far end French doors giving on to a small garden.
‘It’s so pretty,’ she exclaimed. ‘And you keep it
so
nice. I can’t believe it.’
‘I make all the mess upstairs in my studio,’ he said. ‘I’ve got someone who comes in to clean too. Boarding school, and the couple of years I spent in the airforce before I ended up here, taught me to be tidy. Besides, there’s something very calming about order. I like everything in my life to be beautiful.’
He hiked Noël out of the pram and blew on the mobiles to make them turn faster. Noël squealed with delight and reached out his little hands to try to touch them.
‘You can’t play with them, Daddy took a long time to make those,’ he said.
Dulcie’s eyes suddenly filled with tears at hearing the word
Daddy.
It had been clear to her from the outset, in the way Rudie tracked May down because he suspected she had his child, that he had an unusually strong sense of duty. Now the way he called himself
Daddy
told her he had already passed the point of mere duty, she knew in that moment that he would stand his corner and fight for the right to give Noël his name, his care and love.
It was later, after Noël had been fed and was lying down on the rug kicking his legs while they had a cup of tea and a sandwich, that Dulcie’s earlier fears came back with a vengeance.
She might have felt a bit awkward and strange while they were down on the quay an hour or so ago, but now reality had hit her with a sickening thud.
Over the last forty-eight hours she’d had one shock after another, and she thought she’d weathered them all pretty well, but now here she was in another new place, a baby on the floor in front of her, Rudie sitting beside her, and she was blithely speaking of coming to stay here with him.
What on earth would Ross say about it? She’d barely given him a thought. Was she going mad?
‘I’m scared, Rudie,’ she blurted out, and began to cry.
‘I am too, if that makes you feel any better,’ he admitted ruefully. ‘But we had no choice, did we? It was an emergency.’
‘But while we’ve been acting like two kids playing mummies and daddies, I’d almost forgotten I’ve got a husband. How can I explain how it came to this? I haven’t got much money and I can’t even tell him when I’m coming home.’
Rudie took her hand and squeezed it. ‘I suppose he’s your typical Australian male? Expects his wife to do exactly as he wants?’
‘I wouldn’t call him typical,’ she sniffed. ‘He’s not one of those hard-drinking, out-with-his-mates-type men. But he’s jealous, and I’ve already told you he didn’t want me to come here.’
In her head she could already imagine the telephone conversation, Ross’s voice tight with anger, asking her far more about Rudie than about the baby, blaming her for sticking her nose in, reminding her where she belonged.
‘Maybe I should speak to him,’ Rudie suggested.
‘That would make him even more suspicious,’ Dulcie said.
‘Then you must tell him what you intend to do,’ Rudie said after a moment or two’s thought. ‘Don’t ask for his approval, or what he wants, just tell him how it is, that you need to stay here until the Welfare people have been to see us. They might not let us keep Noël anyway, Dulcie, you know that.’
‘But even if they insist on taking him to a foster-home I couldn’t just go back home and leave him,’ Dulcie sobbed. ‘I’d have to stay a while and make sure everything was all right.’
‘Just say you need time to work things out,’ Rudie said calmly. ‘As for you not having much money, you don’t need any. You don’t think I won’t feed you while you’re here, do you?’
‘No, I suppose not. But it’s embarrassing.’
‘Don’t forget the arrangement I made with you originally was that I would pay the hotel bill while you were here,’ he said pointedly. ‘I shall save a good deal if you are here, and it leaves me more time to work too. Now, why don’t you come upstairs and look around, maybe you’ll feel less scared once you know where you’ll sleep.’
Rudie picked Noël up and led the way up the stairs which were behind a door by the kitchen. They were narrow cottagey ones that twisted slightly, bringing them up on to a tiny landing. ‘This is the studio,’ he said, taking her into the first of the two rooms at the front.
An easel, a stool and beside it an old tea trolley stacked with tubes of paint and pots of brushes were the only furniture. Paintings and canvases were stacked all around the walls. Pencil sketches were tacked to the walls with drawing-pins. The floor was bare boards, speckled with paint.
Dulcie went over to the window, the sea was visible over the roofs of the houses along the harbourside and in the far distance she could see Sydney Harbour Bridge.
‘It’s not as messy as I expected,’ she said, glancing round the room.
‘I tidied it the day before you arrived in Sydney,’ he said with a smile. ‘I’d just finished a picture then, and I haven’t started anything else yet.’
‘Can I look at these?’ she said, moving over to the pictures stacked against the walls.
‘Those ones are for my next exhibition,’ he said, pointing out ones against the chimney-breast wall. ‘These are all old ones, some too bad to sell, others I’m too fond of to part with. But don’t look now. I brought you up here to see the bedrooms.’
He walked out and Dulcie followed him on to the landing. ‘That’s my room.’ He waved his hand to the other one at the front. Through the open door Dulcie could see an old-fashioned double bed, the wooden headboard painted purple.
The bathroom was opposite his room, but Dulcie only saw that fleetingly as Rudie opened the last door on the landing and walked right in. ‘I’ve made this into a guest bedroom, and I’d intended to turn the room leading off it into a bathroom,’ he said. ‘Lucky I didn’t get around to that as it’s turned out.’
Dulcie gasped in surprise. The room was painted a duck-egg blue, carpeted in the same colour. Another old wooden bed and the rest of the furniture were painted white but beautifully decorated with sprays of hand-painted flowers and leaves.
‘Did you do this?’ she asked, stunned by its beauty and originality.
He nodded. ‘Doing up old furniture is a bit of a hobby,’ he said. ‘But do you think you could be happy staying in this room for a bit?’
‘I could be happy here for ever,’ she exclaimed impulsively, then suddenly aware she sounded far too effusive, she blushed scarlet.
Rudie just laughed. ‘I’m glad you feel that way, it makes me feel easier. I did it all after May left.’ He pointed to the tiny room leading off it. ‘That, as I said, would’ve been the bathroom. I’m glad now I didn’t make a start on it. It will be perfect for Noël.’
It was bare aside from the carpet, the walls plain white. ‘I could go to town on decorating it, buy him a cot, put some mobiles up here. What do you think?’
Dulcie took Noël from his arms and smiled with delight. ‘I’m sure Noël will be thrilled by it.’
‘I hope so,’ he said. ‘Now, I reckon it’s about time we got in the car, drove to get some nappies and perhaps collected your things from the Sirius and the rest of Noël’s stuff from Darlinghurst. That’s if you haven’t gone off the idea of staying here?’
She looked up at him, saw his eyes twinkling and suddenly felt far more secure. ‘No, I haven’t gone off the idea,’ she said. ‘Let’s go.’
It was cold that evening and Rudie lit the fire as soon as they got back in. He had bought so much in the baby shop – nappies, a bucket with a lid, a couple of blankets, a warm coat and leggings, two little jumpers and some tiny dungarees, and he’d got the phone number of someone who had a second-hand cot for sale.
Dulcie had gone up into May’s old room in Darlinghurst alone, leaving Rudie in the car to mind Noël, mainly because she didn’t want Rudie to see the squalor. But she was astounded to find the room neat and clean, the washed baby clothes hanging on an airer. It seemed like a message from her sister that she wasn’t all bad, and in some strange way it soothed Dulcie’s anger towards her.
Noël was now tucked fast asleep into his carry-cot upstairs, and they had just finished eating the fish and chips Rudie had slipped out to buy from the shop down on the harbour.
‘That was delicious,’ Dulcie said with a smile as she sat down on the settee. ‘It took me right back to the ones we used to get back home in England. When I was at St Vincent’s I used to dream about fish and chips, so much so I could even smell the vinegar.’
‘I didn’t ever have them from a shop until I was in the airforce,’ Rudie said. ‘My folks thought they were common. I can remember walking back from the pub to the base in the blackout, half cut, a great steaming parcel in my hands. Nothing ever tasted or smelled that good.’
‘Did you fly planes?’ she asked, curling her legs up under her and leaning back on a cushion.
He laughed. ‘Who, me? Do I look like a hero?’
‘You do actually,’ she said with a giggle. ‘I can just imagine you with a little moustache and Brylcreemed hair, saying all that “Chocks away” stuff and “Jolly good show!”’
‘I’m sorry to disappoint you, I was just a pen-pusher, and anyway I was only in for the last two years of the war,’ he said. ‘I missed the Battle of Britain and all that. I was supposed to go to university then, but I came out here instead.’
‘Tell me about your family,’ she asked.
‘Dull stuff,’ he grinned. ‘Dad was an accountant with an office in Truro, our home was in Falmouth. Two older sisters and a grandmother who Dad said turned me into a pansy. That’s how he perceives artists, musicians, anyone who doesn’t do what he calls a “real” job. If he’d had his way I’d have been strapped to a desk like him.’
‘Was it a happy childhood?’
‘Pretty much so, nice house, lovely garden, we weren’t rich, but comfortable as they say. Only blot was being sent away to school, I loathed it for the first four years. Boys can be cruel bastards, always looking for someone smaller and weaker to thump. I had more than my share of that.’
Dulcie smiled. The way Rudie spoke reminded her of actors in English films, the same crisp short sentences, the well-rounded vowels and the deepness of his voice. She liked the way he understated everything, no boasting, or using some device to make himself appear cleverer or braver than others. The exact opposite to Ross.
‘Why don’t you tell me about Ross now?’ he said, as if he’d picked up her thoughts. ‘You said you would when you got around to it.’
Dulcie told him first how she met him the day she ran away from the Masters, then went on to tell him Betty’s story of how she and Bruce had found him in the barn on their farm.
‘I suppose I was drawn to him at first because of that,’ she said. ‘It was obvious to me he’d had a very unhappy childhood, and it made us equal. I suppose I was touched too because he confided in me about it and not in Bruce or Betty.’
She went on to relate all the awful things Ross had told her about Bindoon, tears starting up in her eyes as she spoke.
‘So he never had anything to do with women until he arrived in Esperance, then?’ Rudie asked.
‘No. Well, I think he said there were a few Spanish nuns who did the laundry, but he didn’t have any contact with them.’
‘That must have made it difficult for him to relate to women then?’
Dulcie nodded.
‘But you broke through that?’
Dulcie suddenly felt this was getting a little too personal. ‘I suppose so, but he’s still not easy to talk to, not like you, Bruce or John.’
‘May described him as a brick wall,’ Rudie said with a little smirk. ‘Was she just being cruel, or is that how he is?’
Dulcie thought for a moment. ‘No, he isn’t like that, saying he’s like a brick wall implies he’s an empty sort of person, which he isn’t,’ she said at length. ‘He just isn’t what you’d call a conversationalist.’
Rudie looked at her. ‘Tell me, Dulcie, why do I keep getting the impression that there is something very big holding you two apart? I know I’ve been swayed by things May said, which might not have been true, but you haven’t said anything that convinces me you are truly happy together. Have you got some some real anxiety about it?’
‘What exactly did May say?’ Dulcie asked. She didn’t want to know, yet she had to, she wanted to turn this conversation in another direction, yet she couldn’t.
‘To put it bluntly, she didn’t think Ross was capable of love-making.’ He looked embarrassed.
Dulcie dropped her eyes from his. She wanted to deny it, but her sister’s charge that she lied to herself was stuck in the forefront of her brain, and she couldn’t bring herself to prove her right.
‘She was correct then?’ Rudie said softly. ‘Oh Dulcie,’ he sighed. ‘I was really hoping that would prove to be another malicious lie.’
Dulcie looked up defiantly. ‘What would she know about married love? She only had sex with men for money.’