He led her over to the settee, then fetched her a glass of brandy. She drank it in one gulp, shuddering as it burned its way down her throat. ‘I promised Dad and Gran I’d take care of May, but I failed them,’ she said.
Rudie turned to her, took her by the shoulders and shook her. ‘You haven’t failed anyone,’ he said angrily. ‘You were just a little girl when your mother died, and you did more than most adults would do to protect her. You’ve got to stop this thinking you are responsible for other people, Dulcie. The only person you are responsible for is yourself. Part of that responsibility is finding personal happiness too. Promise me you’ll strive to find it?’
She looked at him bleakly. ‘I’ll be happy once this is all over and I’m home again.’
‘There you go again, lying to yourself, just like May said,’ he snapped. ‘You know you won’t be. You’ll do what everyone else wants, make them happy, but forget yourself. You’ve got to learn to take, Dulcie, or stay a damned doormat all your life!’
‘What do you suggest I do when I get home?’ she snapped back at him. ‘Demand that I go to college and get a few qualifications, refuse to feed the chickens because it’s beneath me? It’s all right for you, you can do exactly as you please, on a farm there’s boring routine work which has to be done day after day. I’m Ross’s wife, I have to do it.’
‘I’m not talking about work and you know it,’ he retorted. ‘You’ve got to make Ross get help to sort out his problems, and if he won’t, then for God’s sake leave him.’
‘I can’t do that.’ She was shocked at him being so brutal.
‘Go and see my friend Stephan the psychiatrist tomorrow,’ he said forcefully. ‘At least go home armed with his advice if nothing else. I can’t bear to think of you living the rest of your life unfulfilled and neglected, that’s a worse punishment than anything those nuns did to you.’
‘Sex isn’t everything,’ she said defiantly. ‘It’s companionship that counts.’
‘Rubbish,’ he roared at her. ‘You are a beautiful, desirable woman, Dulcie, sex might not be everything, but it’s a wonderful, splendid thing given to us to make sure we stay together as couples and make babies. What you call companionship will wither and die without it, you’ll end up a bitter old lady with nothing in your past but sad memories.’
‘Having sex didn’t do May any good,’ she said, wanting to hurt him. ‘She didn’t really like it, you know, not even with you.’
His face crumpled. ‘If she’d only been honest with me I could have helped her,’ he said. ‘Don’t you think it hurts me now to know she only endured it for what she could get from me? If I’d known then about what that evil nun had done to her, I would have acted quite differently. She hid her real problems, used her cunning and charm to get round them. But you are worse in many ways, Dulcie, you’re prepared to let anyone do almost anything to you, take any amount of humiliation, in the mistaken belief this will make them love you more.’
‘I don’t,’ she roared at him, jumping up and making towards the stairs.
He ran after her and caught hold of her wrists. ‘You do,’ he insisted. ‘I haven’t known you that long but I can see how you ended up like this. Right from a little girl you were caught in the cross-fire between your parents. On one hand you tried to cover up for your mother’s neglect to you and May by doing things she should have been doing, and you were rewarded for this by praise from your father. When she died, you protected your father, never knowing for certain whether he really pushed her or not.’
‘He didn’t push her,’ she retorted. ‘She fell.’
‘Maybe so, but that hardly matters in the face of the confusion and guilt you must have felt. Then you felt even more guilty while you were with your granny because you thought you and May were the reason she became poorly. From then on it’s my guess you took the blame for every last thing that happened to you and May, including being sent here to Australia.’
‘I didn’t,’ she said, but a vision of her getting the beating at St Vincent’s for stealing the toffees came into her head.
‘You did, and you’ve got to stop blaming yourself, and put that blame firmly on the shoulders of those who were responsible. It wasn’t anything you did that made May go wrong, it was the treatment she had at the hands of the Sisters. You did the right thing when you took Noël away from her, you are not in some way responsible for her death. But most of all you’ve got to stop thinking you are to blame for your husband not making love to you. It’s his problem, try and get him to share it with you by all means. But don’t take it on your own shoulders.’
‘I can’t help the way I am,’ she cried.
‘You can’t do anything about the past,’ he said firmly. ‘It’s done and it can’t be mended. But the future is different, you can be in control of that, if you just think what you really want and reach out and take it.’
‘But I don’t know what I really want,’ she sobbed.
Rudie put his arms round her and drew her to his chest. ‘I know, you’ve spent so long thinking what everyone else wants, including Noël and me, that your own desires and needs have been forgotten. For now all you need to do is take one day at a time, visit Stephan, get the funeral over, then go back home. Somewhere along the line what you want and need will come to you.’
She sobbed against his chest, wishing she dared say she wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to go home.
‘Don’t forget I’m your friend, for ever,’ he said softly against her hair. ‘We’re related through Noël, and there will always be a home here for you if you need it. Even if Ross doesn’t want Noël visiting you at the farm, I shall come to Esperance every summer and stay in a hotel so you can see him. I’m not going to let you slip out of our lives.’
She lifted her head up. Rudie was looking down at her, his dark eyes glistening with unshed tears, lips quivering, and suddenly she was kissing him.
It seemed to Dulcie that she was falling through space locked in his arms. Nothing mattered any more but the bliss of his lips on hers, the delicious sensations coursing through her body. Never before had she felt anything quite like it, her reason was gone, she had no will to control herself. To be in his arms, feeling the sensual delights of his probing tongue, was all that counted.
Rudie broke away first. ‘We mustn’t do this, Dulcie,’ he whispered, leaning his forehead against hers. ‘It will only make it harder for us to part.’
All at once she came back to reality, blushing as she realized what she had unwittingly started. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said.
He just looked at her wistfully. ‘There you go again, taking all the blame. I’ve wanted to kiss you from the first moment I met you. Go to bed, Dulcie, don’t tempt me any more, I might start to think there’s hope for me.’
She ran up the stairs like a startled rabbit, not even stopping to say goodnight.
Chapter Twenty-four
‘Just sit back and relax, Dulcie,’ Dr Stephan Heinne said gently. ‘You’ve been through so much emotional upheaval in the last few days that I expect you think seeing me will be some sort of inquisition, but it won’t be, you can tell me as little or as much as you like, in your own time.’
Stephan was Rudie’s psychiatrist friend, and Dulcie had been a little taken aback that he had made this appointment so quickly. It was only yesterday that they returned from Brisbane, and after what happened between them, this seemed to her to be his way of avoiding any discussion about it.
Rudie needn’t have worried, she had no intention of asking him why he had kissed her like that, she certainly wasn’t going to admit it had shaken her to the core and left her more confused than ever. But she couldn’t refuse this appointment, however badly timed it was, she did after all need advice about Ross. So she had come, reluctant and scared stiff.
Yet the moment she stepped into Stephan’s consulting room and saw him for the first time, her fear suddenly vanished for he didn’t look the least intimidating. He was as short as her, his round, well-scrubbed face boyish and appealing. She couldn’t help wondering if he wore those thick-rimmed glasses to try to make himself look more intellectual, but in fact all they did was emphasize his large grey eyes.
She knew he was born in Austria, educated in England and was considered one of the most eminent men in his field, but like Rudie he’d struggled when he’d first arrived in Australia, for they’d become friends while they were both waiting on tables.
Stephan’s consulting room in Rose Bay was more like a study, the walls lined with books, and a view of the harbour from the window. She felt she might be able to open up to him.
‘First may I offer my condolences about your sister,’ Stephan began, his grey eyes soft with sympathy. ‘Rudie told me about her when she disappeared last year and has kept me up to date since then.’
‘It was only yesterday that we went to identify her body,’ Dulcie blurted out, tears springing into her eyes. ‘I kept hoping it wouldn’t be her, but of course it was.’
‘So very distressing for you,’ he said softly. ‘One always expects a younger sibling to outlive you. I’m sure it brought back poignant memories from your childhood.’
Dulcie nodded. ‘I still can’t really believe she’s dead,’ she said, her voice trembling. ‘There’s so much I wish I’d said to her, and stuff I wish I hadn’t.’
‘Would you like to talk over any of that with me?’ he asked.
‘I don’t think I could,’ she said. ‘It’s too raw right now, I guess I’ll sort it out for myself once the funeral’s over. But then I have to go home to my husband in WA. It was Ross I really wanted to talk to you about. You see, we have a problem.’
Stephan nodded. ‘I hope I can be of some help. Giving advice about someone I’ve never met can be difficult, but I’ll try. Now, suppose you tell me what the problem is.’
Dulcie thought Rudie might have already told him this, if so there was little point in being coy about it. She took a deep breath and blurted out that Ross seemed unable to make love to her.
‘Do you mean never, or just infrequently?’ he asked.
‘Never,’ she said. ‘We’ve been married for almost two years now and I don’t know what to do.’
He probed a little, asking her questions about Ross’s general health, what kind of man he was and what line of work he was in, then moved on to ask about their honeymoon. Dulcie wanted to run out of the door at that point. She hung her head with embarrassment as he probed to find out how far they had got, and what Ross’s reaction was to his failure.
‘I confided in Rudie and he said Ross is in denial, whatever that means. Something from his past that he can’t get over,’ she said hastily, anxious to move on from the physical questions to something she felt more comfortable with.
Stephan asked her to tell him all she knew about Ross’s childhood, and listened very closely as she related it. ‘Appalling,’ he agreed, wincing with horror. ‘Almost unbelievable. Yet I have recently heard several similar stories about that place, and I don’t doubt a word of it. I think that Rudie is probably spot on with his opinion, I would say Ross has been deeply scarred by his experiences there, and what Rudie said about denial means that Ross has never attempted to look at it or deal with it, he’s locked it away inside him.’
‘But he hasn’t, he told me about it,’ she said.
Stephan half smiled. ‘He’s told you the bits he can look at, but I suspect there’s a great deal more tucked away. Tell me, Dulcie, is there anything about your childhood which you can’t or won’t talk about?’
Dulcie thought for a moment. ‘I suppose I don’t talk about how the Sisters made me feel about myself.’
‘Why not?’
‘It’s not very nice to admit that someone made you feel utterly worthless, is it?’
‘It certainly isn’t. Do you still feel that way sometimes?’
‘Yes. This thing with Ross makes me feel that way.’
‘When he rejects you?’
She blushed. ‘Yes. It’s like there’s something wrong with me.’
Stephan nodded. ‘Have you thought he might do this because he’s afraid any intimacy with you might break down his own defences?’
Dulcie looked baffled.
Stephan smiled. ‘Let me put it this way, suppose you had a secret, something which made you feel disgusted and ashamed, would you put yourself into a situation where you might inadvertently let it slip?’
Dulcie could only think of how she used to hide the truth about her father being in prison. ‘No, I don’t suppose I would. But I don’t believe Ross has done something bad.’
‘I think it’s far more likely something bad was done to him,’ Stephan said evenly. ‘But when bad things are done to children, quite often they think they are the one to blame, especially if that adult was in a position of authority or trust. A great deal of my work with troubled adults is caused by this. I can only begin to help to heal them once they tell me what happened to them. I can go through it then, showing them that it wasn’t their fault. Eventually I come around to showing them how to shift the burden of guilt back to the person who is responsible.’
‘But I know Ross wouldn’t talk to someone like you about it,’ she said bleakly. ‘He wouldn’t go to an ordinary doctor unless he was nearly dying, he thinks men have to be tough all the time. Psychiatrists to him are for mad people, if I even hinted that I’d told someone about this he’d be furious with me.’
‘That’s a common Australian male attitude.’ Stephan grinned. ‘It will probably take decades before it changes. But you can help him, Dulcie. You can find out what his secret is.’
‘But how?’ she asked. ‘If he’s afraid of making love in case he lets something slip, he isn’t just going to come out with it, is he?’
‘He might if you press the right buttons.’
‘What would they be?’ Dulcie asked in bewilderment.
‘I think it might be a start to get him back to Bindoon. It’s almost certain that whatever happened to him took place there.’
‘He wouldn’t go there again!’ she exclaimed.
Stephan looked at her, his grey eyes studying her carefully. ‘Dulcie, you’re intelligent, you’re compassionate, and I don’t doubt resourceful too. You’ll need a challenge when you get home, because from what I hear it’s going to be hard for you to leave Noël.’
‘It is,’ she agreed sorrowfully. ‘But getting Ross to Bindoon will be impossible.’