1915 (31 page)

“I can't sleep. I'm so hot. My hands slipped and slid on the door.”

“You're on fire!”

“Can I sleep in your bed? I'm having nightmares but I'm still awake.”

“I'll fetch Mrs Gillen.”

“No. All right. No, it's too much of a bother. The white cabinet in the kitchen has medicines in it. Could you get something from there?”

Illness acted as a galvanizer of friendship. Suddenly it seemed important to act as one. Frances fumbled her way to the lamp and bore it through the long silent passageways of the house. She returned with a tray of
bottles and powders, and dosed Diana until she turned benign and drowsy.

“I've been a fool.”

“Why?”

“I wrote horrible things about you in the letter to Billy. The letter that was ruined.”

“If it's ruined it doesn't matter, does it?”

“Why are you being nice to me?”

“Why shouldn't I be?”

“I was awake. I saw you reading my letter. I couldn't move. When you left the door blew open and I just lay there letting everything get soaked.”

 

Diana yawned and curled up like a spaniel. The bed was a wide one but after a time she radiated so much heat that Frances shifted to a chair and wrapped herself in a quilt. A kind of phosphorescence now hung in the clouds, showing that a bright moon had risen somewhere above the turbulence. Then, miles away, the clouds must have parted because illumined land was suddenly revealed — clots of trees at the edge of a silver blade of floodwater. The river was testing the strength of its tributaries, slicing out islands and lagoons in the night.

Towards morning Diana awoke complaining of pain in the chest. She had difficulty breathing. At first daylight when she coughed into a handkerchief they were alarmed to see a jellied gob of rusty sputum. Frances placed an arm around her shoulders and held a towel while she coughed again. The basis of their friendship had always rested in one or both feeling helpless or alone. Until the war this complementary
need had masked their differences. But war had swung everyone's life into the measure of its waltz, breaking up old loyalties and serenely betraying new ones.

This was how Frances saw things as wholeheartedly she nursed Diana, picturing herself no longer as the impulsive lover known to Walter, nor as the ready sacrifice for Robert, but as precursor to a new self overriding both, fast-developing in response to the war whose currents tugged at the shores of every living heart. Why else did they find themselves ringed by floodwaters? Why else was Diana in peril, wincing as she breathed, her forehead lined with sweat like tiny pearls. “The baby,” she muttered, “will it be all right?” They were children again, but the war forbade them so to act, this same war that had urged them to step through the mirage of morality and had delivered them to their doubtful haven in the central west.

Though Frances had spent hours staring into the night it was Diana who truly faced nothingness. Neither uttered the word “pneumonia” but when Frances left to rouse Mrs Gillen there was panic in Diana's voice.

A man was sent to town to fetch the doctor. There was no question of Dr Starkie not coming straight away. When the Gillens summoned, he came. Robert tried to persuade Frances to ride down to the creek with him and wait for the rowing boat that would bring the doctor across, but she refused to leave Diana: and saw the doctor coming anyway — a faraway speck among the drowned branches of eucalypts.

She described his coming to Diana whose pain was worse by mid-afternoon and her fever high. Was it the perception of fever that made Diana turn the picture of the small boat coming through the tops of the trees into
a heartening rescue for herself? The doctor in her imagination entered the branching vessels of her lungs and drifted on the fluid there, effecting a cure.

He was a young man, portly and sandy haired. He had tried to enlist, he said over a whisky in the parlour, but too many doctors had the same idea. But he would be off soon — it was the only thing to do. He said all sorts of reassuring things about Diana, but Frances in a rush of guilt wanted to know the worst.

“What if she doesn't pull through?” She sat on the arm of a chair wearing a dark blue apron. As she spoke Mrs Gillen downed her second glass of whisky.

“Not recover suddenly? These fevers often just ease off. It could be a slower process, there's no way of telling. Feed her up when you can and keep her comfortable. Soup?” He addressed Mrs Gillen, who nodded.

“But what if things go wrong,” Frances insisted, “badly wrong.”

“We mustn't have gloom,” said the doctor impatiently. “Run along now and see that she's happy, and I'll look in again before I go.”

“After the week — could she die?”

The doctor held up two fingers while Mrs Gillen poured from the decanter. “What have we here, a Jeremiah?”

“Please, I'm not a child,” said Frances, a protest that elicited such a look of horrified disapproval from Mrs Gillen that Frances immediately left the room.

She fled to her bedroom where she cried until no tears were left, then hurried in to be with her friend. The word “crisis” had alarmed her. They both knew the signs. Girls at school had died of pneumonia. The disease came like a silent arrow to lodge painfully in the
breast. When the invisible shaft dissolved, a few days of hectic fever followed when the patient felt better. Then a sudden gust of extinction. Or else recovery thanks to what might just as well have been the roll of dice, and the girls were back at wooden desks instead of in wooden boxes.

“If I die,” asked Diana after two days, “promise me you'll be nice to Billy?”

“No, because you won't die.”

“Write to him and tell him I love him. He probably doesn't believe me.” Diana lay back wearily in the pillows.

“He believes you.”

On Friday a letter arrived with the boat bringing the doctor for his second visit.

“Franny, listen! He already knows: ‘Now I can truly see us on the farm, me and you and the nipper, like my c-u-s-e-n says. Don't take notice of people, they don't know right from wrong. I'll be back when I can.' Isn't he an awful letter writer? I love every word. He ran into Dad. Dad knows — I'll kill my mother for telling him — no, why should I? I'm so happy! I'll die happy!”

But the doctor was pleased, and did not predict her death.

 

Then after seven days she faltered. The fever intensified and one night she hardly knew who she was. All week Frances had done for Diana whatever was needed, staying at her side, sponging her down, trying to calm her panic when breathing became so difficult that she seemed to be drowning.

Frances herself suffered a kind of delirium. She hardly noticed the help being given by Mrs Gillen, who supervised the food, or the help that came from the housemaids who supplied stacks of clean dry sheets from the clothesline where they flapped between intermittent showers like the flags of a besieged citadel. The black boy died, the shivering seven year old Frances had seen at the old shearers' huts. It was as if small glowing points of life were being extinguished and only the most strenuous act of will could shield them from fate. The news of the boy's death from pneumonia was brought by his aunt, a maid named Isabel, who reported it unemotionally, as if the name belonged to a list of unknown dead in a battle even more remote than the one at the Dardanelles.

Though Frances was near to exhaustion she discovered in work of this kind an ability to forget herself. If Diana had died at that moment she too would have been as dispassionate as Isabel in making the announcement. Life came and went in the darkness — her own among others. But to attend to the extremity of its passage — there was something exhilarating in the desperate novelty of it all. Thus when Robert caught her in the corridor late in the night of this, Diana's worst day, she allowed herself to listen to what he had been telling her all week: that she was a saint. He hurried it through with an urgent invitation for her to take a walk for five minutes in the night air. She broke free and went to look at Diana, who miraculously slept. So Frances gave Robert ten minutes that stretched to twenty, at the end of which she was astonished to find herself in his room which they had approached through a circuit of the damp garden: it had its own private entrance off the far veranda. She
lay on a leather couch, eyes closed, her head tipped back while Robert ran his fingers through her hair. Then she leapt up and ran through the night, and he followed.

Diana's crisis had passed. She was cool to the touch. Her breath no longer caught but was peacefully deep. Robert left to tell his mother the good news: it was past one o'clock. When he returned Frances was asleep in the chair. He carried her to her room and whispered, “I'll put you to bed. All right?”

The events that followed alarmed her, but not until the morning. She awoke remembering Robert climbing in with her, his hands roving her body while despite herself she posed a whispery question: “Do you love me?” And his saying, “Yes, I love you.” So the uncaring body had as if in a dream allowed itself to succumb. She had no memory of pleasure, only of a deep but interrupted sleep. But now in daylight she was ashamed. What had she been thinking after her resolution of the week before? There had been no doubt to resolve in action, as with Walter. No longer, she knew, did she have the excuse of infatuation. He was dull, he told the same stories over and over: and if he ever again mentioned South America and the day he had sheltered from a bandit outside a dress shop she would tell him off.

Frances told herself that her moral sense had been drugged by lack of sleep: but it had been something more shocking than that. In the letter to Billy, Diana had accused her of knowing her own mind better than she let on, and it was true. For in the night she had admitted Robert to her bed and now was cold to him for the most wilful of reasons — she had wished to punish his long indifference. And having done so, she
allowed herself to despise him.

At breakfast Diana sat up in bed and drank a cup of tea. “I feel that your whole week has been wasted,” she sighed. Her gratitude expressed itself in grotesque phrasing: “Baby and I say thank you.”

“As soon as you're well enough we'll leave.” Frances leant close and whispered: “I can't take another minute of Robert. I've gone off him, God help me.”

“Oh, Franny.”

“Last night when I was too tired to care — he took advantage of me.”

Diana could not look Frances in the eye.

“He seemed to take lots for granted. I wonder if he heard about me and Walter? The Hotel. Did you tell him?”

“Me? Don't be mad.”

“I suppose his mother worked me out. She's evil enough herself to be expert on the sins of others.”

“Franny, who are you fooling?” Diana suddenly could take no more: “You threw yourself at him and now you must take the consequences. I don't like you when you try to pretend.”

Suddenly they were back in one of their breathless exchanges from the days of innocence. Only now the speculative had descended and was acting itself out in their own lives. Friend appraised friend; except both knew they were true friends no longer.

“Neither of us has any sense,” Diana said dully.

“Bother the rules.
Their
rules,” asserted Frances.

“It's so comfortable here.” Sunlight touched the edge of the bed. The floodwaters were still up, but around the house everything was drying out after two days of sunshine. Diana's wedding ring glowed as she held it up to the light.

“What's ahead of us? asked Frances despondently.

“Everything!” Diana announced.

When Robert realized that Frances no longer felt the same he was puzzled then indignant. He accused her of leading him on. She could see that his sudden infatuation was real enough. Over the next few days he constantly tried to touch her. “Would you marry me instead of Rosa?” she asked.

“Yes.”

But now he seemed so humourless and solid. His liking for dressing up which had made him seem so much fun (the
gaucho
outfit, and his insistence on dressing for dinner) she now saw as advertisement for a soul without depth. He liked best to talk about his travels and his success with money and stock. He had never been any different! She remembered February days when she had done nothing but sit in the window at home and watch for the ferries arriving in case he should come. And now? Rosa could have him.

When he lost his temper and called her names she became angry and used insult as an excuse to leave. Diana was now well enough. Would he please arrange things? Or she would tell his mother how he crept into guests' bedrooms.

 

Mr Gillen took them down to the water in a sulky. He stamped around in the sour mud shifting bags to the boat and lifting Diana into the stern. Then Frances found both father and son looking at her. Who would carry her across? Quickly Frances turned to Henry Fleming who had come for the rowing: “Could you help me in?” But before acting Fleming asked, “Boss?”
in recognition of others' property: and was given the nod. As they pulled away from the shore Mr Gillen lifted his hat, and was still standing there when the boat, a hundred yards off, was caught by an unexpected current and disappeared through the trees.

“This bloody river!” Fleming shouted. As light as a leaf the boat spun in circles while he wrestled with the oars. Though they were well away from the usual course of the river they had struck it in an aberrant mood. During the night it had surged across a string of drowned billabongs and now directed the force of its flow through what had yesterday been a peaceful lake. But what fun! There was suddenly no need to make conversation with Robert, who sat facing them. He took out a paddle and helped hold the boat steady while Fleming strained.

“Go with the current.”

“Can you hold her?”