A Cry from the Dark (17 page)

Why, remembering those words in later life, did Bettina have an aching sense of loss?

The war changed everything. In the spring and summer of 1939, while she was again ostensibly studying for the Leaving, Betty had two articles published in the
Bulletin
—one was on Armidale, one was a think piece on the overdependence of Australian radio on British material. Then came September: Britain declared war and—almost without thinking, it seemed—Australia declared it as well. Radio brought the war into Australian homes; the cinema intermingled it with Jeanette MacDonald and Clark Gable. Men volunteered. The Brighthouse boy, with whom Betty had been mildly flirting, spent much of the war on the Burma railway, and wrote to Betty in the 1950s, when her aunt died. War altered the fortunes of politicians. Robert Menzies, who had been keen to ship iron ore to Japan in the months leading up to the war, found himself newly christened Pig Iron Bob when the iron ore came back in the form of bullets, putting his political fortunes on hold for a decade. Soon there was talk of a Japanese invasion, or submarines in Sydney Harbour. Men volunteered in still greater numbers. Men in the
Bulletin
offices volunteered or talked of doing so.

The offer of a job in the journal's Sydney office came to Betty in mid-October. The letter made no bones about the fact that she would be a glorified office girl, but stressed that they had faith in her and that she would be given every chance to make her contribution (judged on merit alone, of course) to the periodical. Bettina went straight down to Cummings's and phoned them from there. She felt she was owed this, since her private affairs had been spread around town from the switchboard. The
Bulletin
's managing editor already had in mind a good home near the office where Bettina would be made part of the family. Betty's parents, after all, had to be given peace of mind, especially after what had happened in Bundaroo.

The Leaving Certificate was forgotten. Betty never committed the (to her) great irrelevancy of going to university. Within a week she had a job, a new home, a new destiny. For over two years she worked on matters trivial and matters vital, in her spare time writing special articles and—more important—her first short stories. Then in early 1942 she joined the staff as an Australian war correspondent, first in Cairo, then in Italy. Thus she edged her way into the theater of war, and into Europe.

 

Sylvia arrived at the hotel in midafternoon. She and Oliver had got an early train from Edinburgh, and she had learned where Bettina was staying from Clare Tuckett.

“Mark had her number,” she said, sitting on the bed without being asked. “He knew Clare was selling your film rights and he thought she must be a theatrical agent as well. When he rang her to push himself she was very kind to him, and I think he's still under that impression.”

“Kind? Doesn't sound like Clare,” muttered Bettina.

“Feeling grumpy, are you?” Sylvia asked, rather daring. From anyone else the question might have brought a put-down, but in fact it brought an uprush of feeling from Bettina.

“
Yes!
Yes, I am. And it's all my own fault. I don't know what to do, Sylvia. The police have finished with the flat.”

“And you don't know whether to move back in?”

“Yes. Half of me says I can't bear to. The other half says if I don't do it now it will only get harder and harder, especially if Katie dies, so I should pull myself together and get it done. It's the only place in the world I really feel at home in. I only need to throw a few things into the suitcase I brought with me and call a taxi.”

“Then let's do it, shall we?” Sylvia said briskly, getting up from the bed. “When we get there I'll either stay the night, or two nights at most, or I'll make myself scarce if you feel happy and safe.”

“One night, Sylvia. I'm sure I'd like you to stay for one night. After that I'll have to bite the bullet and get back to normal. I'm going to sleep in the little bed in the guest room…Oh! Where will you sleep?”

“On the sofa, on the floor—maybe even in your bed. Now come along. Is this the suitcase? Just the one then. Let's get it done and be on our way. Shoes first, then all the bathroom things, clothes on top.”

Any impulse she might have felt to protest or call for more time was suppressed by Bettina. She let herself be chivied along, went down to pay the (remarkably cheap) bill, had Harry call her a taxi, and half an hour later she let Sylvia help her out of the taxi onto Holland Park Crescent. She looked up at her destination.

“I've always liked these flats,” she said glumly. Then she stomped up the steps, opened the main door, and made her way heavily up to the first floor. She felt a strong temptation to behave badly: to be the elderly curmudgeon, to quarrel with every little decision made for her. The only thing that held her back was that she was with her daughter. Sylvia had known enough bad behavior from her—even if she was too young at the time to register it.

Sylvia made tea, found biscuits and some fruitcake that was still moist and fresh, acting on the idea that old people seemed to need pampering more than most, and usually had a sweeter tooth than most. And it seemed to work. By five o'clock Bettina was sitting back, asking about her and Ollie's last days in Edinburgh, and generally trying to put behind her the fact that they were in the room where Katie had been so horribly attacked. But comfortable though she was, that attack now and then obtruded itself on her mind. Once she had hoped that serving in the army all the length of Italy as the Germans reluctantly and violently retreated had calmed her fear of sudden attacks by acquainting her with worse things, but she had long realized that that had been a vain hope.

“So what has been going on since you came back as far as the investigation is concerned?” Sylvia asked eventually.

“I don't really know much. Murchison was round this morning asking me questions about my will. He seems to have his eye on Mark, which I pooh-poohed, though I don't imagine he'll be taking much notice of
my
views.”

“I just dropped into the flat briefly with Ollie, but I gathered Mark had been grilled.”

“How has he taken it?”

“With his usual breeziness. Apparent breeziness. He did say he thought they were turning their attention to Peter Seddon, but he had no idea why. He said he thought Peter and Katie were old friends.”

“They are.”

“I suppose Murchison has decided it's a man's crime.”

“Hah! Clare is worth two of Mark or Peter.”

“You don't think—?”

“No, of course not. I only mean that if I was in some hairy situation in wartime—as I sometimes was in Italy—I'd much rather have Clare with me than either of those two men. Mind you, it won't worry me at all if the police give Mark a bad time for a few days if it makes him think. But I don't think it will.”

Sylvia's sharp eyes gleamed.

“It's Peter, not Mark we were really talking about.”

Hah! thought Bettina. She thinks I still hold a torch for Peter. As if!

“Hmmm,” she said. “Peter's a bit more capable of thinking than Mark. But perhaps I am biased. I suppose I came as near to loving Peter as I've ever come with a man. But that was long ago. And he's another one who tries to shrug off any unpleasantness or any threat to his peace and quiet—he'll turn away from anything nasty as if that cancels it out…You've been awfully good to me, Sylvia. I'm conscious I've not deserved it, and that this was not how we said things would be when you came over.”

“No, it's not. I thought the letter I wrote was sensible at the time.”

“It was.”

“But it's rather been overtaken by events, hasn't it? And it wasn't entirely honest. The truth is that since I've known I had a birth mother who was rather famous I've collected anything I came across about you, piled up little bits of information in scrapbooks, and looked at them from time to time. I've not done it obsessively, I don't think, but just tried to build up a picture for myself. Ollie was one of my sources, of course. Occasionally I met someone who'd known you: at Bundaroo, or Armidale, or Sydney. We have an amateur music festival every year in Bairnsdale, and I met someone years ago with the Chamber Orchestra of Northern New South Wales—someone who'd known you at Bundaroo. Played the flute. Drayton, the name was. Would it be Steve?”

“Steve Drayton would never play in an orchestra! Not in a million years!”

“I'm sure that was the name. Said he was in your year at school. Said he'd known you quite well at one time, but only talked to you once after the rape, when he'd walked you down the main street past Sam Battersby.”

“Good Lord! It must have been Steve.”

“People change, you know, Bettina, and Australia is often a surprising place.”

“I know people change. Of
course
I know it. Perhaps they change more than we ever have the space to let them do in a novel.”

“That's right. Except the big nineteenth-century ones, perhaps.”

“Oh dear. If I was offered that much space to fill with one set of characters I don't know how I would cope.”

Sylvia hesitated for a moment, then clearly decided to dive straight in.

“There's something I've been wondering whether to tell you, Bettina. I don't know that it's relevant to anything, but it's something I don't think should have been kept from you.”

Bettina's heart stopped, but she tried to put on a determined face.

“Then tell me.”

“It's a piece of information…background information…that they thought would upset you.”

“Tell me now.”

“You know I've always loved the people that I think of as my natural parents—the couple who in effect adopted me. And particularly my mother. She was someone your dad and Bill Cheveley knew slightly, as I suppose people in small places like Bundaroo do know everyone.”

“Bundaroo?”

“Yes. They already knew her, and knew she and her husband couldn't have children…She was the daughter of Sam Battersby.”

“Sam Battersby's daughter.”

The words came out almost flat, yet Bettina felt a wave of relief washing over her: I was right.

“Yes. You must have known her.”

She had thought about her often enough over the years, so that every little thing, and there had only been little ones, was firmly lodged in her brain.

“Yes, a bit, as everyone knows everyone else in places like Bundaroo. But she was four or five years older than me, so there was very little real contact.”

“How do you remember her?” persisted Sylvia.

“Very quiet. And that's the word everybody used about her. She was always known as a good student—not brilliant, but very conscientious. But she was
unnaturally
quiet, with a quiet that was hiding something. Cowed is the word that springs to mind.”

“Did people wonder why she seemed cowed? Did you?”

Bettina screwed up her face.

“I've thought about her quite often since…since the rape, and it's difficult to sort out what I thought then. Did I realize she was cowed
then,
when we were both at school? I suspect not. I feel that people generally, while she was still living in Bundaroo, just thought she was quiet—the shy type. But I think there was a change in people's attitude when she went away to teachers' college and never came back for the holidays or even for a visit. She was still in her late teens, so that seemed odd, unnatural, to need an explanation. There was talk. Someone said that Sam Battersby's wife—Marge, I think the name was—”

“That's right. My gran.”

“Of course. That she visited her daughter in Grafton, but did it in secret. And possibly paid for it afterward.”

“I think she probably did. One thing I never talked to her about was her husband.”

“To tell you the truth, if I thought about Hettie then, I think I maybe would have guessed that she was beaten, treated cruelly, but sexual abuse was so little talked about that as a child it hardly entered my consciousness.”

“But that's what it was. Persistent, over a number of years, and both women terrorized into silence about it. Probably it was this that made Hettie incapable of having children. She was lucky in the end: she had a good marriage, and I came along—my good luck as well—to make it complete.”

“Sam Battersby wasn't so lucky, was he? But he hardly deserved luck.”

“No. He had to get out of Bundaroo.”

“It was clear he would have to before I left myself.”

“He put a lot of miles between him and the rumors about what he had done. Went to South Australia. It worked for a time. There's less shifting about from state to state in Australia than you'd expect, and still less then. But eventually someone turned up in Peter-borough who'd worked at Wilgandra, and then the rumors started floating around there, too. Then it was move-on time again. They say he died in a Salvation Army hostel in Darwin.”

“I see,” said Bettina, pensive. “I didn't know that. Sam Battersby was someone I never inquired about. I hope his wife fared better.”

“His wife fared much better,” said Sylvia, smiling happily at some good memories. “I remember my gran as a good-humored, loving person who spoiled me rotten. Sam left her behind to hand over Grafton's at Bundaroo to the next tenant, but she scarpered to Hettie in Grafton itself, then moved with her when she got a teaching job in Bathurst. She lived with or near her for the rest of her life, and was almost part of her marriage. She was always there to look after me, and I went between them as if they were my two mothers. No—Marge was happy as a sandboy after she escaped from Sam.”

“I'm glad. And glad your mother was happy.”

“She was. She tried to live for the present. But once I knew about her childhood I felt there was always something in the background of her mind—something she didn't talk about but couldn't get away from. Maybe when a child's been abused, particularly sexually abused, that's always how it is. Memories of the experience
seem
to go away, but they lurk, waiting.”

“Maybe,” said Bettina. She thought for a long time. “I've thought I really escaped. I've never felt the need to use that particular experience in a book.”

“I've noticed that. Wondered a bit.”

“A rape may be different from the drip of constant abuse…I know I didn't get away from the attendant things: cutting myself off from my roots, and to a degree from my parents. That can be liberation, but it can be impoverishing too.”

“Yes. I would have felt it impoverishing. My happy home in the background was always the basis, the bedrock, of my life as a single person…But it doesn't worry you, my connection with the Battersbys?”

Bettina's eyes widened.

“No! Why should it? I don't believe in visiting the sins of the fathers on the sons, so I certainly wouldn't blame the wives and daughters for the sins of the husband and father. Your mother was Battersby's
victim.
Of course one has more doubts about her mother. Why did she remain silent? Could she really not have found somewhere where she could be safe with her daughter? But then you think of the pressures: the violence, the fact that she probably was never
sure,
the fact that what was happening was practically unmentionable in the English-speaking world at the time.”

“And remember, too, the unemployment. How was she to get a job and keep them both?”

“I'd forgotten that. I'm glad you remember her as happy. But how did it come about that Hettie and her husband were the ones that fostered you?”

“Hettie was the one they knew about, your father and Bill Cheveley. The married woman who desperately wanted a child.”

“But by that time she and her mother had been left Bundaroo for years.”

“Bill Cheveley had kept in touch almost from the start. He had something of the old paternalistic feeling about the people around him. He liked people he knew, thought he should be good to them—as your dad found when the drought forced him out of farming. One of Bill's workers, in Grafton on Wilgandra property business, thought he saw Marge Battersby. A week or two later, when his wife was going through a good spell, Bill went over and had a couple of days in the town. Eventually he saw Gran, as he was pretty much bound to.”

“What did he do?”

“Nothing spectacular. Just sat her down in a café, walked among the jacarandas—I don't know the details—told her he was always there for the two of them if they were ever in real want. He didn't act the Father Christmas and hand over lavish amounts of cash—that wasn't his way, and would have been more worry than anything else to someone like Gran. He just made it clear he was willing to act as a backstop. Hettie had her first teaching job at this time, earning a pittance, of course, but they were just about managing, with Marge doing some scrubbing and bar work. The main thing that he asked them to do—he talked to Hettie too, after school—was to write every now and then, keep in touch.”

“And he knew about Hettie's childhood?”

“Oh yes. Marge told him—very ashamed, going at it in a very roundabout way. Yes, he knew. He didn't talk to Hettie about it, though. There are things best left unspoken.”

“Of course there are,” agreed Bettina. She knew that better than most. “But they kept in touch?”

“Yes. Marge usually did the writing, and Bill wrote brief notes back. He wasn't a great one for writing. Hettie got the job in Bathurst, a better job. They moved there, she met my dad, and they married. Eventually they moved to Victoria, to Ballarat, where she was a deputy head, and that was where most of my childhood was spent. Dad worked in the tax office there, and Gran looked after me when necessary, and it was a very nice, stable, enriching childhood, thank you very much.”

“Don't thank me. The most I did was in the early stages, when I entrusted you to Dad and Auntie Shirley, though when I heard that Bill had helped with the placing of you I was glad, because Bill usually judged people sensibly. Apart from that, the whole business of your conception and birth was an appalling mess, totally mismanaged by me. Which only shows that we shouldn't despair when we seem to have mucked things up entirely, doesn't it?”

They went to bed early, and Bettina slept fitfully in the guest bedroom and Sylvia slept well on the couch in the living room.

 

Bettina and Cecil Cockburn walked from the Merceria San Zuliàn toward San Marco in the hazy May sunshine, their khaki uniforms prickly and uncomfortable in the nascent heat, but putting no bar on their optimism and their exuberant high spirits. The Venetians, better fed than the Southerners but still thin from privation, were nevertheless tough and active-looking and they helped the young couple's mood, often saluting them with broad smiles or miming applause—one gondolier even did a little jig of happiness in their honor. Others, it is true, scurried past, faces averted, tense and grim in defeat. Il Duce had been dead less than a fortnight.

“You can say this for stringing up Mussolini and his Clara by their heels,” said Cecil with his usual nonchalance: “at least everybody knows it's all over.”

Bettina had been shocked by the pictures in the Italian papers, but less than she would have been if she had seen them in Australia. The last two years had inured her somewhat to savagery.

“Probably better the way it was than putting him up before some tribunal,” she agreed. “They say that by the end he was as silly as a two-bob watch.”

“I take it that means he was losing his marbles,” said Cecil in his most pukka voice.

“Something like that. He was reading all his horo-scopes and believing the ones that promised him the rosiest future. And going on about a death ray that the Germans or Italians were developing—in his mind at least.”

“The Italians haven't invented anything since Leonardo,” said Cecil. “And most of his things stayed on the drawing board. It must be a German brainchild. Probably some crazy notion of Wernher von Braun.”

“Never heard of him.”

“Hitler's prize boffin. Generally thought to have something nasty up his sleeve.”

“Well, it won't save them!” said Bettina, almost whooping out her prophecy. “Everyone's closing in on them. It's too late for spiffing wheezes!”

They laughed, and people laughed back at them, and they turned toward the great open space of San Marco, where the sun had lifted the mist and the whole world seemed bathed in gold. Ahead of them was the saint's own canal, pigeons and Venetians scurrying hither and yon.

Across the space where the street opened into the square a British uniform strolled. The soldier's eyes, alert as they still had to be, traveled in their direction. His feet slowed down, uncertain, and then he stopped. Bettina had stopped too. Seven years did not drop away so easily.

“Hughie?” she said.

“Yes,” he answered, a little crack in his voice.

“Hughie!” She ran forward, threw her arms around him, and kissed his cheek and danced around and around in joy. Then she was conscious, from around her in the square, of the sound of applause. Blushing, she disengaged herself and saw that a little knot of Italians had gathered—men and women in drab, worn, mended shirts and dresses, but smiling joyfully and banging their palms together.

“Inglesi?”
asked one of the men.

“Sì,”
said Bettina. She had had trouble sometimes when people mistook Australian for Austrian.

“Inglesi amorosi,”
said the man, turning around to announce it as if it were a hitherto unknown phenomenon. Everybody laughed again. Bettina shook her head and went over to Cecil and dragged him over toward Hughie.

“Cecil, meet Hughie. Hughie, meet Cecil,” she said, and they all laughed at nothing in particular. The men shook hands and Cecil looked at Bettina.

“You seem to know each other from way back,” he said. “How was that? You've never been to England.”

“English people come to Australia, or didn't you know?” she said. “In fact, practically everyone in Australia is descended from someone British or Irish, since Asiatics were barred years and years ago.”

“You're forgetting the Aborigines,” said Hughie. “Like most Australians.”

“Sorry. Yes, we were the invaders.” She turned to Cecil. “Hughie used to be interested in Aboriginal art when he was in Australia.”

“Never heard of it. Should I have?”

“I still would be interested in it,” said Hughie, “if I could get to see any.”

“Where can we
go
?” shouted Bettina. “Where can we get a cup of coffee? Or wine if we must?”

“The back streets are a better bet than Florian's,” said Cecil. “Let's dive into the narrowest and darkest we can find, and before long we're bound to come to some little local bar that will have something.”

The first ten minutes of walking didn't support his claim, but they talked and laughed and commented on the sights and waved to old ladies in windows and eventually they came to a place dark and stuffy, but with a little table already set up outside. They ordered three cups of coffee and eventually—after the proprietor, beetle-browed and suspicious, had decided they were reliable—agreed that they would like some pasta and some wine.