‘Don’t tell me you fell in love with me then, because I don’t believe it,’ she laughed.
‘No, I didn’t think that, but I knew within a day or two of you coming here with Noël that you were completely special. Everything from the past just seemed to fade. The more you told me about you and May, the more I saw you with Noël, the stronger the feeling became, but it was the day the Welfare women came and you had to write that letter to Ross that I suddenly realized I’d fallen in love with you.’
‘But that was before May died,’ she said.
‘Exactly. Long before.’ He bent to kiss her, as if he knew she needed to know she had never been second-best. ‘You can’t imagine how hard it was for me that night when we got back from her funeral. I was terrified at the thought of losing you. I wanted to seduce you, I even thought of forcing you into it with me because I thought if I did you might not go.’
‘I probably wouldn’t have,’ she admitted. ‘But then I’d have been so stricken with guilt about Ross I don’t suppose I’d have been very good for you.’
‘I didn’t take your sheets off the bed for weeks,’ he said with a smile. ‘I used to get into that bed and just sniff them, like a sad old dog. Stephan was the only person I could really talk to about it. He never said much, just listened to my ramblings and reminded me I still had an ace card in Noël, and that I should take him to Esperance for a holiday as I’d promised.’
Dulcie smiled at this. She had seen so often how Stephan seemed to be able to look right into people’s souls and identify with them.
‘I’m very glad you did keep that promise,’ she said. ‘Sometimes it was only the thought of that visit that kept me going. I’ve often wondered if it was you coming that finally pushed Ross into telling me to go, or whether it would have happened anyway.’
The ringing of the telephone broke into Dulcie’s reverie, bringing her abruptly back to the present, and she picked it up to answer it, smiling when she found it was Rudie.
‘I was just thinking about you,’ she said.
‘I think about you all the time,’ he said, using a mock reproachful tone. ‘In fact I think about you so much I went into Sydney this morning to chase up your pictures.’
‘Did they tell you anything?’ she asked eagerly. Brown and Allbright, a children’s book publisher, had had her portfolio for over three weeks now, and there hadn’t been a word from them.
‘Well, it would have been unethical for them to tell me anything before you, but they said they were putting a letter in the post to you today, and I didn’t get the impression it was going to be a rejection. They were much too smiley and nice for that. Brown actually asked me into his office for coffee and probed for a bit more information about you.’
Dulcie’s heart began to race with excitement. She knew Rudie wouldn’t have even told her he’d been there today unless he was sure she was going to receive an offer from these people. ‘I won’t be able to sleep tonight thinking about it,’ she said.
‘Well, come round to me then,’ he said. ‘Sleeping isn’t compulsory.’
Dulcie giggled. ‘Okay, I’ll come straight after work so I can put Noël to bed.’
‘What were you thinking about me when I phoned?’ he asked. ‘Was it that I’d better marry him quickly before he changes his mind?’
‘No it wasn’t, though I suppose it is related – I was thinking about that night!’
‘What night was that?’ he asked.
‘You’d better remember before I get round there,’ she said in a pretend severe voice. ‘I shall test you on it. Now I’ve got to go. I can hear Stephan saying goodbye to his patient. See you about six.’
Rudie put the phone down and looked at Noël playing with a toy train on the floor. He could see he was tired, they’d caught the ferry into Sydney this morning and he’d walked a long way.
‘Dulcie’s coming to see us later,’ Rudie said.
A wide smile spread across the child’s face. He was three now, tall for his age and sturdily built, growing more like his father every day, except that his dark eyes were very prominent without the slightly hooded appearance Rudie’s had. ‘For tea?’ he asked. ‘Can we go for a walk after too?’
‘We’ll see when she gets here,’ Rudie said. ‘But I think it’s time for a little nap, otherwise you’ll be too tired to play with her when she comes.’
Once Rudie had put Noël on his bed for a sleep, he went into his studio to carry on with some work, but instead of getting on with it, he stood at the window looking at the view of the bay.
He did of course remember ‘that night’ as Dulcie always called it. How could he ever forget it? It was the most memorable of his entire life. But though he remembered the love-making so well, the bliss of possessing her after such a long, long wait, it was what happened afterwards that had stayed in his mind most clearly.
They had been lying on the floor, cuddling and talking about how it was for him after Dulcie left Sydney to go back to the farm, and how Stephan had told him to keep his promise and go there. Then Dulcie asked why he thought Ross chose that time to let her go.
Rudie could remember so distinctly the stab of guilt he felt. He managed to say he thought his presence there might have greased the wheels a bit.
‘It was such a brave and noble thing he did,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘I think it was the first time in his life that he’d put his own needs aside for someone else. All he’d ever learnt as a child was personal survival, no sense of morality really. He told me once that he would do anything, lie, cheat, steal and maybe even kill if necessary to keep going. I often wondered if he hadn’t ended up in Bruce’s barn, what would have become of him.’
She hadn’t spoken of Ross for a very long time until that night. She would occasionally mention something from a letter he’d written, talk in general about the farm, but not about him. Maybe she was only prompted to talk about him then because she’d got the news of the annulment that day, but Rudie felt if she was in the right mood it was time he shook out a few skeletons.
‘Are you ever going to tell me what happened at Bindoon?’ he asked. ‘Now and then I feel the weight of it hanging around in the air. Can’t you tell me now?’
She had been so relaxed until then, naked and unashamed, but she suddenly sat up, grabbed his shirt and put it on. Somehow that seemed very symbolic to him, the order of the past coming back. Rudie moved to sit beside her, drawing her back against his chest, his arms around her. ‘You’re quite safe here with me,’ he said gently against her ear. ‘Just tell me.’
She did. Starting at the point when she and Ross left the farm for Perth, she described in detail all the events which led up to their eventual arrival at Bindoon. Her surprise at the beauty of the place, but the mounting, sickening horror as Ross showed her how it had been built, and his part in it. Finally she told him how it all came to a climax when they saw the tomb of Brother Keaney, that Ross became rigid and immovable with fear, and that she had to trick him into getting into the car. She stopped there for several minutes, crying silently, and it was all Rudie could do not to turn her around and say she didn’t have to tell him the rest.
Yet he knew that whatever it was that came next, and he knew without a doubt it was the worst part, she did have to tell him, for if she kept it inside her it as Ross had, it would never be exorcized.
She gave a kind of shuddering sob and told him how she drove Ross away from there, stopping further down the road. Haltingly she described the lonely road, the heat, and how she held that broken man in her arms and listened to him baring his very soul.
She spared Rudie nothing. It was as if she had been a witness to the ugly scene in the dairy, and he could see, feel and smell that young boy’s fear and pain. Terrible and shocking as the story was, for Rudie it was like a beam of light coming into a dark place and illuminating it. All those ideas he had about Ross, personal observations, intuition, hear-say from Dulcie, Bruce, and Mary up at Kalgoorlie, and indeed the prejudices he’d formed while Dulcie was here with him battling for Noël, all came together. He felt he fully understood now what lay at the very core of the man, and his heart went out to him.
‘Do you understand why I couldn’t speak of it to anyone?’ she asked, twisting her neck round to look at Rudie, tears dripping down her face. ‘I felt responsible for unleashing it all and causing the breakdown. Then I found I didn’t even want him to try and make love to me any more, and that gave me an even bigger load of guilt, because it made the whole thing so cruel and unnecessary.’
It crossed Rudie’s mind that maybe he could get rid of that bit of guilt for her by telling her that Ross had in fact had at least a partial cure in as much as he could have sex with other women. But he squashed that thought. It would only stir up things best left undisturbed.
‘Tell me, do you still feel guilty about him?’ he asked.
‘No, it’s all gone now,’ she sighed. ‘The way he let me go, not challenging the annulment, his friendly letters and time to reflect on it all, wiped it out. I just feel tenderness and pity for him, that’s all.’
As he sat there with her in his arms, Rudie thought how incredibly forgiving she was. He still occasionally smarted at the treatment he’d had at school, even though it was nothing compared with what she had had to endure. Only a week or two earlier the subject of the Sisters at St Vincent’s came up, and Dulcie said she felt sorry for them now. He had teased her, in fact tried to make her angry about them, but she only said she thought most of them were troubled women themselves, cut off from their families, stuck out in the middle of nowhere, with nothing ahead of them but a sad old age.
Rudie smiled as he looked out at the bay. The sun was sparkling on the water and it looked very beautiful. Dulcie had been so beautiful that night too, he’d carried her up to his bed later, and they’d made love for hours.
He remembered that she’d fallen asleep just as the sun was coming up, and he’d just lain there looking at her. Her hair was all tousled, she had smudges of mascara under her eyes, and her mouth was soft and vulnerable like a little girl’s. He had wanted to creep out of bed and fetch his sketchbook, for she had one small breast peeping out from the sheets, and her bare shoulders were the colour of apricots. But he couldn’t bear to drag himself away from the warmth and smoothness of her body, so instead he just stayed there and silently worshipped her.
Maybe his gaze was so intense it woke her, for she opened one eye and smiled. ‘What are you looking at me like that for?’ she said.
He said the first thing that came into his mind. ‘Because I want to marry you.’
She made a kind of chuckle and burrowed closer to him. ‘You don’t have to make an honest woman of me,’ she said. ‘I quite like sin now I’ve tried it.’
Rudie turned away from the window and picked up a picture Dulcie had painted for him. He had brought it up here to frame. It was nothing like her other work, the colours were subdued, almost sepia-like, and worked in oils. It was of two little girls with blonde hair in pigtails sitting on a low wall, the house behind them red brick but tinged with soot. The smaller girl was laughing, the older one a little anxious-looking. They were of course her and May, and the house, their old one in London. The detail was incredible – weeds sprouting out of the wall, a scrubby, tired bit of hedge struggling to grow with no nourishment, net curtains at the window, and a milk bottle on the doorstep.
It wasn’t an uplifting picture, for there was great sadness in it, as if Dulcie had relived the ugly scene that took place upstairs on the first floor while she was painting it. Yet it was a powerful, emotive piece of work, and he knew that if ever one day Dulcie was to have an exhibition of her art, this would be the biggest talking point, for anyone looking at the picture would sense there was a story behind it.
Reg and Anne Taylor were gone now, and Maud, the old granny Dulcie so often talked about. May too. So much tragedy in one family. He wondered whatever happened to Susan, her old teacher, for somehow he didn’t believe she’d really lost interest in the girls. It was far more likely she’d been prevented from keeping in touch with them.
Should he put Dulcie out of her misery tonight, and tell her that Brown and Allbright did want her to illustrate a series of books? He had seen the author’s manuscript this morning and her suggestions for the pictures, and he knew it was exactly the kind of work Dulcie would be brilliant at.
‘No, you won’t say a word,’ he told himself aloud. ‘You can’t rob her of the joy of opening that envelope tomorrow and reading it for herself. You’ll push her into setting a day for the wedding instead.’
He picked up the length of light ash he’d bought for the picture frame and held it against the painting to check it really did look right before cutting the angles. It was perfect, the light wood giving just the right amount of lift to the work. He would make the frame now as a surprise.
Epilogue
1989
‘Is Mrs Jameson there?’ a gruff male voice asked when Dulcie answered the telephone. His voice was loud as if unused to the telephone and it also sounded vaguely familiar.
‘This is Mrs Jameson speaking,’ she replied. ‘Who is calling?’
‘Dulc! Strewth, have I got you at last? It’s John from Frenches’.’
‘John!’ she exclaimed with delight. ‘How are you, and how’s Maggie? My goodness, what a surprise.’
The last time she’d had any contact with John was fifteen years earlier when Bruce died and she and Rudie went to Western Australia for the funeral. John had in fact left the farm some five years before that to run a guest-house with his new wife, and in a quick mental calculation she realized he must now be approaching seventy.
She tapped Rudie on the shoulder. He was sitting reading the paper, and when she mouthed at him that it was John, he too looked surprised.
‘I’ve been trying to get hold of you for over three weeks,’ John said. ‘I rang there, and your other house, but there was no one there.’
‘We’ve been in England,’ she said. ‘We only got back a couple of days ago. Noël’s a dentist now, living in England. We went over to meet his fiancée Katrina and make plans for the wedding next year. Can you imagine he’s twenty-eight now? It seems only five minutes ago you and Ross made that swing for him.’