Chance Developments (14 page)

“My job,” his mother said, “is to feed you up. Correct?”

“Well, I'm still having trouble with my stomach.”

Dolly brushed this aside. “The doc told me about all that,” she said. “But he said the most important thing was good food.”

“If that's what he said…”

She put a cushion behind his back, making sure he was comfortable. “It can't be very easy sitting down for long when you're all skin and bone.”

“I'm used to it. I didn't know shoulder blades were the shape they are.”

“Or knees,” she said, looking down.

“We're all skeletons underneath, I suppose.” He leaned back against the cushion gingerly. “I don't want to go out—you know that, don't you?”

She had received a letter from the hospital and it had made that clear. “Not even a few short…”

He cut her off. “No. Not yet. I don't want people to see me.”

She bit her lip. “Don't try to argue with him,” a friend had warned her. This friend was a nurse; she knew. “You think you can chivvy them along—you can't.”

So she said nothing. But then he said, “A few weeks maybe. I'll look a bit better then.”

“You can be proud of the way you look,” she muttered under her breath.

“What?”

“The way you look is like having a medal,” she said. “People understand.”

“That's as may be, but I'm not going out.”

“All right, all right.”

She bullied him into eating the large meals she had prepared for him. One morning she said, “You know these big breakfasts I make for you? Well, it's reminded me of something your father used to say.”

He was silent; he did not encourage her to talk about Lou. She sensed this, but persisted. “He said that it was the idea of having big breakfasts that made him want to come to Australia all those years ago. Can you imagine that? Bacon, sausages, fried eggs—a reason for starting a new life.”

He smiled, in spite of himself. “I'm going to burst at this rate, Ma.”

“You're a long way off that, but you're getting there, you know. Mutton for lunch. I've got a beaut of a joint from Mr. Wallace. He knew it was for you and so he didn't charge. People are kind, aren't they?”

He tackled his breakfast. He had never imagined in Changi that he would find eating a chore. He had never imagined that he would be revolted by cream—by the mere sight of it—and that he would struggle to swallow the over-rich puddings that his mother prepared for him: pears with cream, tapioca with cream, sponge cake doused in sherry and then topped with cream.

Of course it worked, and two months later the doctor said, “You're no longer crook, young man. Fit as a fiddle—or almost.”

Leaving the house, the doctor said, “Get him out now, Mrs. Rowse. Get him outdoors. Get him back to work, if possible, or to the university or wherever. Don't let him sit here.”

David overheard. He had dreaded this moment, but he felt too weak to resist. He knew that he looked better, but he wondered what Hannah would say when she saw him. She had spoken to his mother and said that she was looking forward to seeing him again. As a friend? he wondered. Probably. So many men had found out that the words
I'll wait
might be well intentioned, but rarely meant what they purported to say.

He was wrong. When he eventually said that she could come to the house, her emotions were close to the surface. She was reproachful. “Didn't you want to see me?”

“Yes, but I had to get better first.”

“You were ill?”

“In a manner of speaking. It was very tough in the camp. I ended up…a bit of a skeleton.”

She tried to smile. “That would have made no difference to me.”

He shrugged. “What have you been doing?”

“I did a bookkeeping course in Melbourne. Then I came back. I found a job.”

“I see.”

She waited. She had noticed his fingers, and how thin they still were. Did it take longer to put weight on one's hands because the body somehow decided what was important and what was not? Nobody died of thin fingers, after all.

Suddenly she said: “I don't care.”

“About what?”

“About doing things the right way round. I don't care if you aren't going to ask me to marry you—I'll do the asking myself.”

He returned to Melbourne to finish his degree. Hannah came too, and it was in Melbourne that they married. Dolly came from Bendigo for the wedding, which was a quiet affair in a register office, unattended by Hannah's parents. “I cannot give my blessing to this marriage,” said her father. “You will always be my daughter—always—but I cannot celebrate something that breaks my heart as this does.”

After his graduation, they returned to Bendigo to live with Dolly, who had several spare bedrooms and a room they could use as their private living room. David applied for and was given a job in the transport department of the municipal council. This did not test his engineering skills, being more administrative than technical, but conditions were good and the pay would enable them to save for a deposit on their own house.

They bought that house two years later, shortly before the birth of their daughter, Rachel.

“I am very happy,” David said one afternoon.

He had expected her to echo what he said, but she did not. He looked at her, and he knew immediately that something was wrong.

“Is everything all right?” he asked.

She nodded. “Of course.”

“It's just that I thought you might be a bit more enthusiastic.”

“I'm seeing somebody else,” she said flatly. “I wish I could have told you earlier, but somehow I haven't found the words.”

After the divorce, he looked around for a job elsewhere. He knew that this would mean that he would only rarely see Rachel, but he found it too painful to remain in Bendigo. He was not sure that he could live with the knowledge that he might meet her in the street with her new man, a timber merchant with large premises in the centre of town. It would be better, he thought, to go away.

He wrote to his friend, Ronnie, who lived in Adelaide. Ronnie had been in Changi with him and they had kept in touch. Ronnie wrote back: “There's lots of work over here. I know of a new bus company that's looking for somebody with a bit of knowledge of how transport works. It's a man called Harris. He was in Singapore too but got out to Sumatra just before it fell and was put in the bag there. He'll take you, I'm sure of it.”

He made the journey and was interviewed by Harris, who told him three minutes into their conversation that the job was his. “Can you start next week?” he asked.

He hesitated, but agreed. Harris handed him a key. “Go and take a look at this place. It's near the river. I can let you have it at half rental, with an option to buy after two years. It would suit you if you decide to get married again—Ronnie told me about your bad luck. You deserve better after what you went through.”

He had never blamed Hannah. “Sometimes a marriage doesn't work. It just doesn't work.”

Harris did not doubt that. “But I'm talking about justice, mate. That's what I'm talking about.”

He saw his daughter four times a year, always without seeing Hannah. From time to time Dolly brought her down to stay in Adelaide, and he would take a week's leave in order to be able to entertain her. He had done well in the bus company, and had been given a share in the company by Harris, who had developed an interest in property development and was content to let David run that side of the business. He was now reasonably well off, but had remained in the same house that he had occupied when he first went to Adelaide. He became secretary of a cricket club, and was popular, often being invited to dinners and parties. But he did not remarry.

In 1958, when he was thirty-nine, Hannah was badly injured in a road accident. At the end of seven weeks in hospital she was discharged, but had lost the use of her legs. She went home to the timber merchant, who stayed two months before leaving her.

David heard about all this from Dolly, who said she had never liked Hannah's new husband and she was not surprised. David wrote to Hannah and told her how sorry he was to hear what had happened. She replied, thanking him and saying that she was grateful that she had at least survived the accident. “Please come and see me if you are in Bendigo,” she said.

He made the journey two weeks later. They sat on her veranda and drank tea.

“When are you going back to Adelaide?” she asked.

For a few minutes he did not reply. Then he said, “I want to stay to look after you. I'll move back here.”

She stared at him.

“I can't leave you like this,” he said.

She was struggling. “I get help,” she said. “The nurse comes in.”

He shook his head. “You would be miserable being left all by yourself while Rachel is at school.”

She put down her teacup and then buried her head in her hands. Her frame was racked with sobs. He said, “Please don't cry.”

“I don't deserve you,” she said. It took her some time to get the words out.

He stayed with her for the rest of her life. She died in 1995, when she was seventy-six. He survived her by four years. Shortly before his death, he said, while sitting on his veranda in Bendigo, “My life, you know, has not amounted to very much. I have been lucky, though, to have had a place to be proud of—this town—a chance on one occasion to stand up for something worth standing up for—the Second World War—and a handful of people to love—my wife, my ma, my daughter. I'm not sure that any of us is entitled to much more than that.”

He did not know it, but his grandson heard him talking to himself. The young man stood stock-still, the hairs on the back of his neck stiff. He did not declare his presence, but moved away, back into the house, where he thought of each word that had been said—each word.

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