Thorn on the Rose Read online

  He walked out to the gate with her, got her to the far side of it, closed it. She hung back for a kiss; he would sooner plant one on Lorna’s mouth.

  He couldn’t shake the memory of that other mouth. Felt the heat of it in his face now. He shouldn’t have done it. Things might have worked out if he hadn’t done it. He hadn’t been near her since.

  And he wanted to go there now. Wanted to empty his head out to someone who wouldn’t accuse him — and it was the last place in the world he could go.

  And his car was out of petrol. His father’s car wasn’t.

  Gertrude heard him coming. Fear that he’d brought bad news was etched into her face.

  ‘He’s low, Mrs Foote. That’s all they’ll tell me. I was wondering if you’d . . . if you’d like to take a drive down there with me.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘I wouldn’t go putting it off too long.’

  Jim stood back as she held his father’s limp hand, kissed his brow, brushed that wiry hair back. He heard her tell his father that he was the only man she’d ever loved, and that he didn’t need to say a word because she knew he loved her.

  ‘If you have to go, my old darlin’, then you’re allowed to, though you’re too damn young to be doing it,’ she said. ‘You’ve raised a fine thoughtful boy in Jim, one you can be proud of.’

  Half dead or not, Jim knew his father wouldn’t agree with that. He left the ward and walked outside to light a cigarette.

  She was still gripping that hand when he returned, and he wished he could sit where she was sitting and grip that hand, pat his father’s face and tell him he loved him — or beg his forgiveness.

  From the doorway he saw her take Vern’s face between her hands and kiss that dry gasping mouth — or take his last breath away.

  That’s what she’d done. Jim counted the seconds, knowing it was over, knowing he couldn’t join up, wanting to scream, I’ll marry her Pops, just breathe!

  Then they heard Vern’s great sucking inhalation, and the mumble of exhalation.

  ‘I’m here, darlin’. I’m right here beside you. Jim is here with me. We’re here.’

  ‘I’m here, Pops,’ Jim said.

  And an eyelid fluttered.

  ‘Pops?’

  ‘Vern!’

  The eye closed, but Vern’s breathing seemed more regular. They stood by that bed, side by side, Gertrude crying, Jim not knowing what to do. He placed a hand on her shoulder, patted her, watching Vern’s eyes, wondering if he’d imagined that flutter.

  And he hadn’t. The eyelid fluttered again and Vern muttered something that might have been ‘Trude’.

  ‘We’re here, darlin’. We’re right here beside you.’

  Jim wasn’t. He was down the corridor looking for a nurse.

  An hour later, they left Vern awake and in the care of his nurses and one of the doctors. Jim drove in silence, knowing that tonight he’d witnessed the power of love, and knowing that he wanted some of the same for himself.

  It was nearly four in the morning when he got home and, too wound up to sleep, he woke Lorna to tell her the news. They left Margaret sleeping and created havoc in her kitchen in the making of tea and toast.

  The following afternoon they visited briefly with their father; that brief visit was enough to know the stroke hadn’t affected his mind. He’d suffered some paralysis of the right side, the doctor explained. Vern’s right eyelid drooped, his right hand was weak, he spoke from one side of his mouth, his speech was garbled, he didn’t look like Vern Hooper, didn’t sound like him, though he still thought he was in control.

  He told Jim to stop wasting petrol, repeating his command a few times before it was understood.

  ‘Righto, Pops,’ Jim said.

  He remembered the wedding — or chose not to remember it had been called off the morning he’d had his stroke. He didn’t want them to go putting anything off because of him. He’d be up and about in a week or two.

  ‘Righto, Pops.’

  Margaret wept at his garbled words. They shooed her out to the corridor. Lorna and Jim stood on either side of Vern’s bed, deciphering what he said, guessing at much, and knowing by the look in that one open eye when they guessed right.

  ‘Trude,’ he said. He didn’t want them wasting petrol but when next they did, he wanted them to bring Gertrude with them.

  ‘She was with you when you woke up, Pops.’

  Vern’s eye told him he knew that. ‘Tired,’ he said, or tired of them leaning over him.

  They took the hint. Margaret dripped tears when she kissed him. Lorna stooped a little. Perhaps she sniffed his wiry hair. Jim shook his good hand, squeezed it, wished he had the guts to kiss him. He didn’t.

  He unloaded his sisters out front of the house and drove on down to Gertrude’s. She made him a cup of tea while he relayed every word spoken by Vern. He watched the toddlers being fed a mush of egg and breadcrumbs, and he drank more tea, ate bread and cheese, his eyes never once meeting Jenny’s.

  He watched her wash the kids’ faces and hands, watched her bundle them into matching flannelette nightgowns, and still his eyes avoided her face — until the kids were down for the night.

  ‘I don’t suppose you’d like to take a quick run out to the house, Jen, just to see what they’ve done . . . now that it’s done.’

  ‘You know I would,’ she said.

  The sun had put itself to bed behind tall trees when he unlocked his fine front door and turned on a light switch. Not too much light. The old house was not yet accustomed to the glare of electricity. He walked her through the renovated hall to his kitchen, where she stood in awe before his modern wood stove. He took her to his bathroom. It was of an older world, a beautiful world — and it made Jenny’s tin tub in the corner of a spider-riddled shed look like a ridiculous joke. She was visualising Sissy bathing in the shiny white bath when Jim told her the wedding was off.

  ‘I’m going to Melbourne tomorrow to join up, Jen.’

  ‘You said an hour ago that your father is half crippled.’

  ‘Crippled or not, he’s too strong for me.’ And he turned off the light and walked away from her.

  ‘It will kill him, Jim.’

  ‘It won’t,’ he said. She followed him to the kitchen, and when that light died, she followed to the cellar trapdoor where she watched his length disappear into a black hole. ‘If I don’t go while he’s stuck in hospital bed, he’ll come home and I’ll end up married.’

  ‘If you’re going to talk, come up here and talk. I can’t hear you.’

  ‘Come down. I want to hear what your singing sounds like down here before I go.’

  ‘You’re not joining up, you drongo — and it would sound the same as you sound. Swallowed by dirt.’

  ‘It only sounds swallowed because you’re up there.’

  ‘We have to go, Jim. It’s late.’

  ‘One song, then I’ll take you home. “The Last Rose of Summer”,’ he said.

  ‘You don’t have to join the army just because you don’t want to get married. Granny said that an only son with a sick father and a farm to run wouldn’t even be taken by the army.’

  ‘Life won’t be worth living here.’

  ‘What did she say when you told her?’

  ‘I haven’t told her.’

  ‘You won’t, either.’

  ‘I have to. And while he’s in hospital. You don’t know him, Jen.’

  ‘I know him. And I can hardly hear you.’

  ‘Come down then. And you only think you know him. He’s lying on his back in that bed, wearing an old man’s ragged nightshirt. He can’t sit up, his face looks lopsided, one side of his mouth doesn’t move properly when he talks and he dribbles like a kid. But he tells me to stop wasting petrol. Righto, Pops, I say. He tells me to get my sisters home. Righto, Pops, I say. He tells me not to put the wedding off. Righto, Pops, I say.’

  ‘So, stop saying righto!’

  ‘I tried to and he had a stroke.’

  She
climbed down, feeling the wall for a light switch. Her hand couldn’t find one. She could hear his car keys jingling — until they stopped jingling.

  Pure silence then, the hearing of your own breathing silence, hearing the whisper of his arm moving against the fabric of his shirt, the sigh of his intake of air.

  ‘I can’t stop thinking about your father paying out a fortune for her dress. I can’t face him. Or her. I’m thinking about writing to her, posting it.’

  ‘That’s the coward’s way,’ Jenny said.

  ‘That’s me.’

  ‘Then it’s not much use joining the army, is it? Where’s the light switch?’

  ‘I didn’t want lights in here.’

  She stood at the bottom of the steps, looking up at a square of grey light, the only light. And it was fading. She clung to the railing and watched the darkness swallow the second to top step.

  ‘In a minute I’m going to see the instant when day turns into night,’ she said. ‘When I was a kid I used to wonder if anyone ever saw it.’ He made no reply and she stood, trying not to blink as the top step was sucked into that darkening square of grey.

  ‘Come down to Granny’s and talk about it. We have to go, Jim.’

  ‘You haven’t sung yet.’

  ‘We told Granny we wouldn’t be long.’

  ‘That sounds so good.’

  ‘What sounds so good?’

  ‘We,’ he said. ‘You and me. Jen and Jim.’

  She shouldn’t be down here in the dark with him. She climbed two steps back to the light.

  ‘Run away to Queensland with me, Jen.’

  Like Georgie’s howl in the dark, his voice moved something deep inside her. All Georgie needed when she howled at night was Jenny’s voice, the touch of her hand. All he wanted was to hear her sing. She could give him that much.

  She sang ‘The Last Rose of Summer’. Sang it through, from beginning to end, and her voice sounded strange, sounded as if it was coming from someone else. She wasn’t aware he’d moved until the song ended.

  ‘Remember when we found the picture of the banana palm, when we were going to live on bananas and sugar cane?’

  ‘You remember too much,’ she said. She didn’t like the sound of her voice. Had to get out of here. She was halfway up the steps when he took her arm.

  ‘Don’t you dare touch me, Jim.’

  ‘We were going to sit in the middle of a cane field and eat our way out. Remember? We were going to pick our own bunch of bananas.’

  She pulled her arm free, but his other arm was at her waist.

  ‘I can’t help myself, Jen,’ he said. ‘I love you.’

  It was a Scarlett and Rhett kiss. She’d been aching for it. It was a blood-whooshing, drowning-in-honey kiss and she didn’t want him to stop, didn’t want him to ever stop. He did, but he didn’t release her, he held her hard against him.

  ‘I knew I loved you when I brought you down here the last time. I knew it years ago,’ he said.

  Kissing was easier than words. She stood, drowning in feelings she didn’t understand. Should have pushed him away and continued on up the steps, but there was nowhere else she wanted to be, no place in the world better than standing on those cellar steps, his huge hand cupping her head so he could find her mouth, cupping it as gently as he’d once cupped a butterfly.

  ‘I knew it the night of the talent quest,’ he said. ‘I’d never seen anything as beautiful in my life as you standing on that stage with the lights shining on your hair. When you had to sit beside me on the way home, I couldn’t breathe for imagining you grown up, and one day doing this.’

  People can talk too much. She hadn’t been allowed to grow up, or not into anyone decent enough for him. She pulled away, knowing she was going to bawl and she started up the steps too fast. Her bones, only pulsating honey, were not obedient to her brain’s commands and the steps were steep; her worn shoe sole slipped and she hammered her knee into the edge of the top step. The shock of pain too soon after the loss of his arms was reason enough to cry, and if it wasn’t, then not being allowed to grow up into someone who might have been fit to live in his arms, to live in these rooms with him was more than a good enough reason.

  And he was holding her again, his giant gentle hand wiping her tears, his mouth finding her bawling mouth.

  She clung to him, because she wanted to, and her mouth clung to his mouth, and he took the pain out of her, on the steps, and they ate from each other’s mouths, drank, breathed each other. And why shouldn’t she feel something beautiful for once in her life? And why pretend she was decent when she wasn’t? And why shouldn’t she let his beautiful hands wash her clean?

  She could have stopped him when he carried her down those steps to his camping-out bed, but it was far too late by then. He was God reaching down from heaven and offering back her every lost dream.

  And when it happened, it wasn’t a taking of her. It was a joining, a joining of butterflies. Like two perfect butterflies, mating in the sky, flying, flying higher and higher and higher . . .

  MISS HAVISHAM

  April moving on, King George blushing red on the right-hand corners of three and a half dozen fine-quality ivory envelopes — a battalion of King George heads, standing at attention, awaiting their posting.

  Margaret glanced at them each time she walked by the hallstand, occasionally straightened them. Sissy counted them when she called in to enquire after Vern’s health and Jim’s whereabouts, to ask when next they’d be driving down to Willama. She had to pick up her white satin shoes.

  Vern’s health was delicate, though improving, Margaret said. Jim was . . . occupied. With his father incapacitated, there was, of course, much for him to do. He had not been himself at all since Father’s stroke, she said.

  To Lorna, the collection of Sissy’s satin shoes was not a priority. The steaming opening of forty-two envelopes, the altering of forty-two dates, may well be.

  ‘Send him around to see me when he comes home,’ Sissy said.

  When. If.

  ‘He has to keep his eye on every teaspoon full of petrol he uses, dear,’ Margaret said.

  By the end of the third week in April, Vern felt sufficiently improved to demand his own night attire and slippers. That was the day Jim came home from the farm. He didn’t turn off the motor, didn’t drive in. He beeped the horn.

  Lorna didn’t appreciate the beep, but with alacrity she claimed the front passenger seat. Margaret sat in the rear, with Vern’s case, both sisters sitting in silence as Jim drove towards North Street. A right-hand turn would signal that all was well, that his fiancée would be travelling with them to collect her wedding shoes. A left-hand turn would suggest that all was still not well.

  He did neither. He parked the car in front of the hotel.

  For years Lorna had crossed the road to avoid walking beneath the hotel verandah.

  ‘Have you taken leave of your senses, boy?’ she said.

  ‘Probably,’ Jim said. He left them sitting and loped across to the station to give Norman an envelope, which the stationmaster placed in his breast pocket.

  The envelope remained in Norman’s pocket until six that evening, until he was seated at the kitchen table, his evening meal set before him. Lettuce, beetroot, slim slices of corned beef, a concoction of apple, onion and raw cabbage . . . Amber was keeping an eye on her daughter’s waistline. She, as much as he, wanted that wedding.

  He’d buttered bread, two slices, before Sissy mentioned the Hoopers, mentioned that when she’d called in this afternoon, Nelly Dobson told her they’d taken some clothing down to their father.

  Norman glanced at her, and reached into his breast pocket.

  ‘From Jim,’ he said, passing the envelope across the table. ‘It appears that his father is continuing to improve.’

  ‘They knew I had to pick up my shoes.’

  ‘Family only at the hospital, no doubt. ’

  ‘I’m as good as family,’ Sissy said.

  She used her b
utter-smeared knife on the envelope, to protect manicured fingernails. She removed a sheet of paper. There was not a lot written on it.

  Dear Sis,

  There is no easy way to do this so I’m taking the coward’s way out. You’ve probably noticed things haven’t been right for a time. I’m sorry I let it go so far.

  I’m going to Melbourne to join up. It seems to be the right thing to do at the moment. Maybe it’s the cowardly thing to do, too.

  Please pass on my apologies to your father. I know he spent a fortune on the dress and the other preparations. Keep the ring if you want it. If not, Pop might like to have it back. He bought it for my mother out of his Melbourne Cup winnings.

  There’s nothing else I can say except I am truly sorry. All the best for the future,

  Jim

  Reading comprehension had never been Sissy’s forte. She scanned those few words a second time, then looked at her ring. With all the money the Hoopers had, he’d given her a secondhand ring?

  She had the Duckworth eyes, small muddy-green puddles, deep set. They turned to Amber, to Norman. Amber reached for the letter. She read it while Norman masticated on raw cabbage. Sissy, looking from one to the other, saw Jim’s note fly, land on Norman’s plate.

  Beetroot juice seeping through — purple blood staining an ineffective bandage. Norman watched the seepage as he swallowed raw cabbage. He put his cutlery down, exchanged his everyday glasses for reading glasses, removed the letter from his meal and read around and through the beetroot haemorrhage.

  And it could not be so! His chair legs shrieking on polished linoleum. ‘He is . . . joining up?’

  ‘He doesn’t have to put the wedding off for that!’ Sissy howled.

  He was not ‘putting it off’, as in delaying it. Norman offered the haemorrhage, and when it was not taken, he returned it to his meal, not wishing its stain to be transferred to the embroidered tablecloth.

  ‘When did he give it to you?’ his wife, the whore, said.

  It was a hot day in hell before she addressed a word to him. In the doorway, he turned to her, his ragged jowls lifting. For a moment he had a chin. Then it disappeared, settling back into familiar folds, and Norman continued into the passage, out to the verandah. He had been remiss in not delivering the note sooner. Jim had come by the station at ten past two.