‘It’s Ross I’m ringing about,’ he said. ‘Oh hell, Dulc, I don’t know how to tell you this, see, he topped himself.’
Dulcie stiffened but thought she’d misheard. ‘He what? Could you repeat it?’
‘He’s dead, Dulc. He shot himself.’
It was as though someone had just thrown a bucket of icy water all over her.
‘Ross is dead? He shot himself?’ she repeated.
Rudie got out of his chair and came over to her, his dark eyes wide with disbelief at what he’d just heard. He gently nudged her down on to the couch and sat next to her, taking her hand in his.
‘I’m sorry to tell you over the phone,’ John said. ‘But I ain’t much good at letter-writing. Are you all right?’ he added, perhaps suddenly aware how big a shock this would be to her.
Dulcie was trembling all over. ‘Just knocked sideways,’ she said. ‘But what happened, why did he do it? Last time I spoke to him, not long before we went to England, he was fine.’
‘He seemed okay too when I last saw him, a couple of months ago,’ John said. ‘I thought at first the farm must be in trouble. But there’s been people up there going through the books and all that stuff and everything’s all right, better than all right, he’s been doing great.’
Bruce’s funeral was the first and last time Dulcie had seen Ross since they split up, though they had remained in contact by letter and phone both before and after. At the funeral Ross had welcomed Rudie as warmly as he had Dulcie, and asked that they stayed out at the farm.
Bruce died of a stroke, and upset as Ross was, he’d said he was glad Bruce went instantly for he would have hated to have been left an invalid. While they were still in Esperance they went to the reading of the will. Bruce had left Dulcie and each of her three children five thousand Australian dollars, and asked her to take her pick of Betty’s handmade quilts. He had made generous bequests to John and Bob too, even though neither of them was working for him any more. To Ross he’d left the farm, with the proviso that a proportion of the profits was to go annually to Betty’s nieces and nephews in Perth, and if at the time of Ross’s death, he was still unmarried without children, the farm was to be sold and the money to go back to the family.
Grief-stricken as Ross was to lose his dear friend and employer of so many years, he took great pride in increasing the profits year by year. Dulcie felt it comforted him to know he was doing this for Betty’s relatives, and they in turn showed great appreciation and treated him as if he was one of their family.
‘I just don’t understand it,’ Dulcie said, tears beginning to stream down her face. ‘It doesn’t make any sense to me.’
‘Nor me,’ John said. ‘He could have come down to my place at any time if he had problems. But I reckon he planned it some time before he did it. He’d put everything in order. Wrote letters, got his will done, he even did it in the barn so as not to mess up anywhere that mattered.’
Dulcie winced at the image of Ross lying dead on the floor of the barn.
‘I’m sorry,’ John said, perhaps realizing that was tactless. ‘But I guess you need to know some of this stuff even if it hurts. He left a letter for you, and in his will he said he wanted you to have the furniture he made. He wrote me a letter too.’
‘Did he make any explanation?’ she asked.
‘No, just thanked me for being such a good friend all these years, said me, Bruce and Bob were like his guiding lights. He asked me to take his dogs and find good homes for them, and to contact you. That’s where I got the phone numbers from.’
‘Have you read the letter to me? Might there be something in that?’
‘Of course I haven’t read it,’ John said indignantly. ‘It’s private between you and him.’ He broke off suddenly as if overcome by emotion.
Dulcie couldn’t continue a conversation anyway, so she just asked him to send the letter on to Watson’s Bay, asked for his telephone number and said she’d ring him back once she’d got the letter.
Once she’d put the receiver down Rudie drew her into his arms. She sobbed into his chest for some time before she recovered enough to tell all that John had said.
Rudie was sixty-four now, his once dark hair flecked liberally with grey and receding at the temples. His face was lined and he wore glasses, and as he had put on around thirty pounds in weight since they married in 1964, he had a bit of a paunch, but he was still young at heart, very fit and healthy.
Dulcie at fifty was a little heavier too and thicker round the waist, but her hair was still blonde, helped to stay that way with regular colour rinses. She had a few lines around her eyes, but they had retained their vivid blue and she was still a remarkably pretty woman.
Life had been very good to them. Rudie’s success as an artist had spread beyond Australia, to New Zealand and the Far East. In 1972, when Noël was eleven, their daughter Louise five, and their son Ben four, they had bought a far bigger house up in the Blue Mountains, for the cottage in Watson’s Bay was too cramped. But they kept it for holidays and weekends, and now Noël was in England and Louise and Ben both off at university in Melbourne, Rudie and Dulcie spent most of their time at the cottage.
‘Why do you think he did it?’ Dulcie asked. ‘He seemed so happy and fulfilled.’
Rudie thought for a few moments before replying. ‘He may have seemed that way, Dulcie, but I doubt he really was. Since he was a small child, hard physical work was all he’d known, it became his sole reason for being.’
‘But he had several women,’ she said. ‘Bruce said just before he died he thought he was getting more like John every day, with different women tucked away all over the place, and that one day he’d surprise us and get married again.’
‘But John’s an uncomplicated, loving man, he didn’t have the scars that Ross had,’ Rudie said. ‘I think those scars must have opened up again for some reason. And he couldn’t cope with it.’
‘Well, why didn’t it affect me like that in England when we went back to Hither Green and Deptford and saw where the Sacred Heart orphanage used to be?’ she said. ‘All that did to me was make me see how much I’ve got now.’
‘That’s just it, you have got such a lot now,’ Rudie said. ‘Three happy healthy children, a husband who adores you, and you are a very well-respected illustrator. You have to remember, too, that for years now, since you made contact with Susan again, you’ve known that your father didn’t give his permission to send you to Australia, and that the Sisters blocked all letters from him and Susan to you. You saw all those places again in the knowledge that you were loved. Of course that couldn’t entirely make up for all the misery you and May had, but it certainly soothed it.’
Dulcie knew that much was true. It was Rudie who tracked down Susan, as a wedding present to her. He made contact with an old friend back in England and got him to make inquiries through another vet. Once he’d found the address in Yorkshire, without breathing a word of it to Dulcie, he wrote to Susan, told her some of the background and pointed out how important it was that Dulcie should have some of the questions in her mind answered.
Dulcie didn’t think she’d ever forget the absolute joy she felt when she got the first letter from Susan. It was no guarded or suspicious response, but an emotional letter written straight from the heart. In it Dulcie was able to see that Susan had done her utmost to keep in contact with them, but she’d been lied to and fobbed off with so many false trails that in the end, for the sake of her own three children and her husband, she’d had no choice but to abandon the quest. Yet it was clear from her words that she’d never forgotten May and Dulcie, or forgiven the people responsible for shutting her out of their lives.
For years, letters had passed between Dulcie and Susan, for there had been no opportunity then to visit England. They shared each other’s life stories, Dulcie relating her childhood memories of all those sad events, Susan shining light into some of the darker corners with her adult view on them.
It was a magical moment for Dulcie when she finally went back to England and walked up the path to the kind of quaint cottage that had remained in her mind for over forty years in Australia as quintessentially English. It didn’t matter that Susan was now a widowed grandmother of sixty-seven, stout and heavily lined with white hair, and not the elegant young woman Dulcie remembered. What counted was to be embraced by the woman who had encouraged her reading, painting and drawing, become both her grandmother and father’s staunchest friend, and who had over the years made sense of so much that had once puzzled Dulcie.
‘Finding Susan was one of the best things you ever did for me,’ she said, and hugged Rudie. ‘I think if it hadn’t been for that I might have had problems with telling the children about my past. But maybe that’s what finally got to Ross. He never knew exactly why he was pushed into an orphanage, or what happened to his brothers.’
‘I know one thing,’ Rudie said, tilting her face up to his. ‘Whatever reason Ross had for killing himself, you weren’t in any way to blame. So don’t allow even the tiniest bit of guilt to creep into your mind.’
It was five days before the letter arrived from Western Australia, and during the long wait Dulcie had thought of little else but what the contents might be. She had busied herself by cleaning the cottage from top to bottom, tidying drawers and cupboards, throwing out toys and old clothes that had been hoarded since the children were tiny.
The cottage wasn’t so very different to the day she first saw it. The boat and plane mobiles had been moved to the boys’ rooms in the Blue Mountains house, many of Rudie’s paintings had been sold over the years and replaced by pictures by other artists they both admired. The couches were new, a modern stereo had taken the place of Rudie’s old radiogram, and a colour television had replaced the small black and white one. But the flavour was still the same – bright colours, polished wood – and upstairs the studio was no different. But Noël’s old room was Louise’s now, with a pretty bed handpainted by her father, flower-strewn curtains and the wicker cradle she’d slept in as a baby holding her collections of old dolls and teddy bears. The room that had once been Dulcie’s was very much a boy’s room now, bunk beds with bright red duvets, cricket bats, footballs, posters of pop stars, and shelves overflowing with toy cars, trains and carefully built Lego models.
Dulcie purposely kept the children’s rooms that way, even though they were grown-up now, for to her it was like a scrapbook of happy memories. She loved to remember those early days with Noël, making love to Rudie for the first time, the births of Louise and Ben. The cottage had been their only home until Louise was five and it had been cramped, noisy, full of toys and very untidy. In the evenings she would be doing her illustrating work on the dining table, and it was often Rudie who went round picking up toys and clothes and despairing over the clutter and lack of space. Yet to her it was a real home, every corner filled with love and hope. She had even been reluctant to find a bigger house, afraid that by going up in the world she might lose everything that was precious to her.
Fortunately it didn’t turn out that way, or maybe it was because Rudie encouraged her to share their good fortune with others. He had taken up an interest in state-owned orphanages even before they married, using his influence to chivvy the Welfare Department into checking them all far more rigorously. Once they moved to the Blue Mountains, they often had small groups of orphaned children to stay for holidays, and many of them, now young working adults, still kept in close contact with Rudie and Dulcie.
Through those children Dulcie had often relived her own childhood fears and anxieties, and discovered what a difference it made to her holiday guests to have someone they could confide in and trust. Their sad stories often brought back memories of Pat Masters. She had nothing but sympathy now for Pat, the poor woman had experienced the worst life could throw at her, with no resources to deal with it. Yet she had been brave enough finally to leave Bill, and Dulcie hoped that she had found happiness in Adelaide.
Stephan had once told Dulcie that learning to trust again was the cornerstone in any damaged child’s recovery. Not just to place trust in others, but to trust their own judgements and emotions. Dulcie believed that she had fully learned to do that and to help others achieve it too, but she suspected Ross never had.
She and Rudie were eating their breakfast when the letter came. It was the only letter that morning, and even the way the letter-box rattled as it was pushed through struck an ominous note. Dulcie jumped up and ran to pick it up, relieved to see John’s familiar large scrawl on the envelope, yet half afraid to open it.
‘Go on, open it,’ Rudie said encouragingly. ‘I don’t think it’s going to contain anything you don’t already know.’
Inside the envelope was a letter and a couple of newspaper cuttings folded up and secured with a paper clip. She put these to one side and read the letter first.
Dear Dulcie, she read. By the time you read this you will already have heard of my death, and I’m sorry if it upset you. I’m writing now to try and explain because I know unless I do you will always be wondering if there was anything you could have done to prevent it.
You couldn’t have done. It wasn’t anything to do with you and me. You’ve always been special to me, a true friend. I want you to know that I valued that over everything else. I don’t know if you remember but I told you once after I had that breakdown, that all going back to Bindoon did was oil the hinges on the door so I could open it and close it easily. For years after we split up, I did open the door and look at it sometimes, the more I looked, the more I thought I’d beaten it. I was doing fine at the farm, I had girlfriends and a few good mates. Even when Bruce died, I felt strong, I didn’t go out and get drunk, I just rode it out and everything came all right again.
But then a couple of years ago there were some articles in the
Western Mail,
and they made me feel uneasy, one was about kids like you and May being sent to Australia, another one was about Bindoon. You’d think I’d have been glad that someone had finally woken up to the sort of hell us kids were put through, but it just made me scared. I had this feeling that I was going to be pushed into that room again, the door closed on me forever, I found I was thinking about it every bloody minute.