Tim (20 page)

"Inside. I wouldn't let him come out, I wanted to see you first all by myself." He danced along beside her, but she sensed that somehow a little of his delight was quenched, that she had failed him. If only she knew how! "I don't like it herewithout you, Mary," he went on, "I only like it when you're here too."

He calmed down by the time they entered the house, and Mary went to greet Ron, her hand outstretched.

"How are you?" she asked gently.

"I'm all right, Mary. It's good so see youse."

"It's good to be here."

"Did youse eat yet?"

"Yes, I did, but I'm going to make a cup of tea all the same. Would you like some?"

"Ta, I would."

Mary turned back to Tim, who was standing some distance away from them. He was wearing his lost look. How have I failed him? she asked herself again. What have I done to make him look like that, what did I neglect to do?

"What's the matter, Tim?" she asked, going to him.

He shook his head. "Nothing."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes, it's nothing."

"I'm afraid it's bedtime, my friend."

He nodded desolately. "I know." At the door he looked back, a mute appeal in his eyes. "Will you come and tuck me up, please?"

"I wouldn't miss it for the world, so hurry, hurry! I'll be in to see you in five minutes."

When he had gone she looked at Ron. "How has it been?"

"Good and bad. He cried a lot for his mother. It's not easy, because he don't cry the way he used to, all outward. These days he just sits there with the tears rolling down his face, and you can't tempt him out of them by waving something good under his nose."

"Come in the kitchen with me. It must have been very hard for you, and I'm terribly sorry I couldn't manage to be here to take some of the load off your shoulders." She filled the kettle, then looked at her watch anxiously. "I must go and say good-night to Tim. I'll be back soon."

Tim was already in bed, looking toward the door fixedly. She came over to him, fussed with the covers until they were wedged tightly underneath his chin, and tucked them firmly around him. Then she bent and kissed his forehead. He struggled with the blankets until he got his arms free and put them about her neck, pulling her down so that she was forced to sit on the edge of the bed.

"Oh, Mary, I wish you'd been here," he said, the words muffled against the side of her face.

"I wish I'd been here, too. But it's all right now, Tim, I'm here now, and you know I'll always be here with you as much as I can. I like being here with you better than anything else in the whole world. You missed your Mum, didn't you?"

The arms about her neck tightened. "Yes. Oh, Mary, it's awful hard to remember that she isn't ever coming back! I forget and then I remember again, and I want her to come back real bad and I know she can't come back, and it's all muddled up. But I wish she could come back, I do so much wish she could come back!"

"I know, I know. . . . But it will be easier in a little while, dear heart. You won't always feel it so badly, it will fade. She'll get further and further away from you and you'll grow used to it, it won't hurt so much any more."

"But I get a pain when I cry, Mary! It hurts an awful lot, and it won't go away!"

"Yes, I know. I get it too. It's as if they'd cut a whole big chunk out of your chest, isn't it?"

"That's right, that's exactly what it's like!" He passed his hands clumsily right across her back. "Oh, Mary, I'm so glad you're here! You always know what everything is like, you can tell me and then I feel better. It was awful without you!"

The muscles of the leg wedged against the side of the bed went into agonizing spasm, and Mary withdrew her head from his clasp. "I'm here now, Tim, and I'll be here all weekend. Then we'll all go back to Sydney together, I won't leave you here alone. Now I want you to roll over on your side and go to sleep for me, because we have a lot to do in the garden tomorrow."

He turned obediently. "Night-night, Mary. I like you, I like you better than anyone except Pop now."

Ron had made the tea, and sliced up a block of seed cake. They sat in the kitchen, one on either side of the table facing each other. Though she had not met Ron until after Esme died, Mary knew instinctively that he had aged and shrunk in upon himself during this last week. The hand holding the cup to his mouth trembled, and all the life was leached out of his face. There was a hint of transparency about him, a spiritual attenuation that had crept into his flesh. She put out a hand and placed it over his.

"How hard it must have been for you, concealing your own grief and yet having to watch Tim's. Oh, Ron, I wish there was something I could do! Why do people have to die?"

He shook his head. "I dunno. That's the hardest question in the world, ain't it? I've never found an answer that satisfied me. Cruel of God to give us loved ones, make us in His image so that we can love them, then take them away. He oughta thought out a better way of doing it, don't you reckon? I know we're none of us angels and we must seem sort of like worms to Him, but most of us do our best, most of us aren't all that bad. Why should we have to suffer like this? It's hard, Mary, it's awful, awful hard."

The hand under hers went up to shield his eyes, and he wept. Mary sat there helplessly, her heart aching for him. If only there was something she could do! How terrible it was, to have to sit and watch another's grief and be so utterly powerless to lighten it. He wept for a long time, in spasms that seemed to eat away at his very soul, so deep and alone they were. When he could weep no more he dried his eyes and blew his nose.

"Could you drink another cup of tea?" Mary asked.

For a ghostly moment it was Tim's smile that hovered on his lips. "Ta, I could." He sighed. "I never thought it would be like this, Mary. Maybe it's that I'm old, I dunno. I never thought her going would leave such a great big empty space. Even Tim don't seem to matter quite so much any more, only her, only losing her. It ain't the same without the old girl there bitching and snarling about me staying too late at the Seaside, guzzling beer, as she used to put it. We had a real good life together, Es and me. That's the trouble, you grow toward each other as the years go on, until you're sort of like a pair of old boots, warm and comfortable. Then all of a sudden it's gone! I feel like half of me was gone too, sort of like a bloke feels he loses an arm or a leg, youse know what I mean. He still thinks it's there, and he gets a terrible shock when he goes after an itch and finds there's nothing left to scratch. I keep thinking of things I oughta tell her, or have to stop meself saying out loud that she'd enjoy this joke, we'll have a good laugh about it. It's so hard, Mary, and I dunno that it's even worth trying."

"Yes, I think I understand," Mary said slowly. "A spiritual amputee ..."

He put his cup down. "Mary, if anything should happen to me, will you look after Tim?"

She didn't expostulate with him, she didn't attempt to tell him he was being morbid or silly, she just nodded and said, "Yes, of course I will. Don't worry about Tim."

Twenty-two

In the long, sad winter which followed his mother's death, Tim changed. It was like seeing an animal mourn; he wandered from place to place looking for something that wasn't there, his eyes lighting restlessly on some inanimate object and then flicking away disappointed and bewildered, as if he always expected the impossible to occur, and was beyond understanding why it did not. Even Harry Markham and his crew could get nowhere with him, Ron told Mary despairingly; he went to work every day without fail, but the thoughtlessly malicious practical jokes of other days fell on stony ground: he endured the crew's tormenting brand of humor as patiently as he endured everything else. It was as if he had withdrawn from the real world, Mary thought, gone into a sphere that was his alone, and forever barred against intruders.

She and Ron had endless, unavailing conferences about him, sitting long into the rainy nights with the wind howling in the trees around the cottage, while Tim took himself off somewhere on his own or went to bed. Since Esme's death Mary had insisted Ron come to the cottage every weekend, for it was more than her heart could bear to drive off with Tim on Friday nights and leave the old man sitting beside his empty fireplace all alone.

There was a dull, dragging weight of sadness on them. For Mary it could not be the same, having to share her hours with Tim; for Ron nothing mattered very much except the barrenness of his days; for Tim, no one knew. It was Mary's first close contact with grief, and she had never imagined anything like it. The most frustrating part of it was her helplessness, her inability to put things right; nothing she could say or do made a particle of difference. She had to bear with the long silences, the furtive creeping away to indulge in bouts of fruitless tears, the pain.

She had come to care for Ron, too, because he was Tim's father, because he was so alone, because he never complained, and as time went on he occupied her thoughts more and more. With the coldest season drawing toward its close she noticed an increasing fragility about him; sometimes when they were sitting in the weak but warming sun together and he held his hand to the light, she fancied that the veined, blotchy extremity let the light shine straight through it until she could see the silhouette of his bones. He trembled so, and his once firm footsteps would hesitate when there was no obstacle in their path. No matter how she tried to feed him, he lost weight steadily. He was dissolving in front of her very eyes.

The trouble pulled at her like an invisible force; she seemed to spend her days walking a featureless plain without landmark or direction, and only working with Archie Johnson had any reality. At Constable Steel & Mining she could be herself, lift her mind from Ron and Tim and plunge it into something concrete. It was the only steadying influence in her life. She had come to dread Fridays and welcome Mondays; Ron and Tim had become a nightmarish incubus chained about her neck, for she did not know what to do to avert the disasters she sensed were coming.

One Saturday morning early in spring she was sitting on the front veranda of the cottage looking toward the beach, where Tim was standing just at the water's edge staring out across the wide river. What did he see? Was he looking for his mother, or was he looking for the answers she had failed to give him? It was her failure with Tim which worried Mary more than anything else, for she sensed that she herself was one of the main reasons for his odd withdrawal. Ever since the night she had returned to the cottage after that week Ron and Tim had spent there alone, Mary was aware that Tim thought she had failed him. But talking to him was like talking to a brick wall, he seemed not to want to hear her. She had tried more times than she could count, approached the subject by casting out what used to be infallible lures, but he ignored them, almost spurning her. Yet it was such an intangible thing; he was his normal polite self, he worked willingly in the garden and about the house, he voiced no discontent. He had just gone away.

Ron came out on to the veranda with a tray of morning tea, and set it on a table near her chair. His eyes followed hers to the still, sentry-like figure on the beach, and he sighed.

"Have a cuppa, Mary. You didn't eat anything for brekkie, love. I baked a real nice seed cake yestiddy, so why don't you have a bit now with your tea, eh?"

She dragged her thoughts away from Tim and smiled. "My word, Ron, you've developed into quite a cook these last few months."

He bit his lip to still its sudden quivering. "Es used to love seed cake, it was her favorite. I was reading in the
Herald
that in America they eat bread with seeds in it, but they don't put seeds in cakes. Barmy! I can't think of anything worse than caraway seeds in bread, but in a nice, sweet yellow cake they're the grouse."

"Customs vary, Ron. They'd probably say exactly the opposite if they ever read in their papers that Australians never put caraway seeds in bread but eat them in cake instead. Though, to be honest, if you go to one of the continental bakeries in Sydney you can buy seeded rye bread these days."

"I wouldn't put anything past them bloody new Australian wogs," he said with the old Australian's innate contempt for the new European immigrants. "Anyway, it don't matter. Have a bit of the cake, Mary, go on."

Half her slice of cake eaten, Mary put her plate down. "Ron, what's the matter with him?"

"Gord struth and little apples, Mary, we've squeezed the last juice out of that subject weeks ago!" he snapped, then turned to press her arm contritely. "I'm sorry, love, I didn't mean to bite your head off like that. I know you're only worried about him, I know that's the only reason you keep on asking. I dunno, love, I just dunno. I never ever thought he'd take on so after his Mum died, I never thought it'd last half so long. It's enough to break your heart, ain't it?"

"It's breaking mine. I don't know what to do, but I've got to do something, and soon! He's going farther and farther away from us, Ron, and if we can't pull him back we'll lose him forever!"

He came and sat on the arm of her chair, pulling her head against his meager chest and cradling it there. "I wish I knew what to do, Mary love, but

I don't. The worst thing is that I can't make meself care the way I used to, it's sort of as Tim's not me son any more, as if I can't be bothered. That sounds awful, but I've got me reasons. Wait here."

He let her go abruptly and disappeared into the house, emerging a moment later with a flat portfolio of papers under his arm. He threw it on to the table beside the tea tray. Mary looked up at him, puzzled and upset. Ron got another chair and pulled it over until it faced hers, then he sat down and stared directly into her eyes, his own glittering queerly.

"That's all the papers about Tim," he said "Inside there is me will, all the bank books and insurance policies and annuities. Everything to make sure Tim's financially secure for the rest of his life." He looked behind him toward the beach, and Mary could no longer see his face.