Outbreak of Love (33 page)

They drove home in the wagonette from the livery stables, ordered to meet them at the station. When they came into the hall, where the gas had been left burning, still they had hardly spoken. Wolfie, wondering if she was again going to blame him for his associations with Mrs Montaubyn, turned to go to his room, but she put her hand on his arm.

“Wolfie,” she said, “I'm not going to England.”

“You will not go?” he asked, not taking in at once what she had said. “It will not be safe?”

“That isn't the reason. Listen. Don't worry. Everything will be all right. Everything is all right.”

He saw her looking at him with an expression he had not seen for a long time.

“My dear wife,” he said, “my dear wife.”

They kissed each other gently. Diana turned and went to her room, as the tears were streaming down her face.

She sat on her bed weeping for about five minutes, and then she tried to understand what had happened. She thought of her life further back than from the last few months. When she was young she had been more lively and therefore often more foolish than most people. Relatives like Arthur had been accustomed to refer to “Diana's idiocies”. Her mother had brought her up to believe that she was something special, that she was destined for a more brilliant life than her sisters. When she married Wolfie, and so prevented any possibility of such a life, she was still reluctant to abandon the prospect. Her idiocies sometimes took the form of trying to make her life more decorative and exciting than her circumstances permitted. Not all her efforts had been idiotic. She had made a marionette theatre for the children, and done other things which likened her more to Pater's Duke Carl, who made “a heroic effort of mind at a disadvantage” from which perhaps all Australians suffered to some extent.

But for a long time she had thought that both the good and the foolish efforts to rescue her life from the commonplace were ended. They had consisted in not accepting the realities of her condition. Since her mother had died, and she was no longer able to pretend either that she would inherit a great fortune, or that she would be offered another two or three years in Europe, she had accepted those realities, and had found reasonable happiness in her home and doing what she could to give opportunities to her children.

Then Russell had suddenly appeared on the scene, just at the time when the children needed little from her but money. He had revived the dissatisfactions of her earlier years. Then she had learnt, in such a brutal fashion, of Wolfie's infidelity, and it seemed to her part of a design; and she told herself that it released her from the condition of her life, and so she had, at forty years of age, fallen into the greatest idiocy of all, and had believed that the fantasies of her youth had only delayed their fulfilment. With Russell she had been building up pictures of life in Italy, the sort of life which probably even Cynthia and Anthea would regard as an adolescent dream. Russell could live that rootless life of pleasure. He had been doing so for twenty years. But how could she begin now? She might perhaps adapt herself to it, but all the time she would be longing for stability, for the familiar things she had always known, and most of all for Wolfie.

She felt that she could not sleep until she had taken the first steps on the return to sanity. Also she must let Russell know immediately, and she went to the drawing-room, lighted the candles on the writing table, the same two she had put on the supper table on the night that they picnicked by the fire, and sat down to write to him.

She wrote two letters and tore them up. The one she finally decided to send was as follows:

“Tomorrow morning I shall send you a telegram to tell you that I cannot come with you. I shall take this letter to the ship, and give it to the purser to give to you when you come on board at Fremantle.

“This evening we went to a small family theatre party given by Steven and Laura. That woman who was Wolfie's mistress, and who was so offensive to me at the ball at Government House, was at the foot of the stairs as we came out. When she saw Wolfie she crossed over to him and struck his face, shouting: ‘You dirty German.' I was too shocked to move, and Cynthia Langton, whom more than anyone I should have expected to walk by on the other side, with wonderful kindness and presence of mind, led him away. Russell, it is impossible to apologize for my failing you. Nothing can be adequate. But I cannot come with you. You have been so good and patient, and my behaviour must appear outrageous. It is not a thing that depends on my will, or rather I was putting my will against the natural circumstances of my life. I am tied here by all kinds of fibres. Whatever vegetable I may be, I am bedded in this earth.

“I expect you will be very angry and I cannot blame you. I have wasted months of your time. I have always thought that there was no one more despicable than a vacillating woman, and now I have been one. I wrote two letters before this, trying to give excuses for what I am doing. In one I said that it was because Wolfie was a German and that it would be unfair to leave him now. That may be true but it is not the reason. The real reason is that I am married to him, whatever he does. That woman was only an excuse I seized on, because you offered me such lovely prospects.

“I am worried because one day you said that you did not forgive injuries. If that is so you will never forgive me, as few people can have done you so great an injury. I shall hate to think that you do not forgive me, as I have loved every minute I have spent with you, and would like to be able to look back on those times, feeling that there is no bitterness between us. Perhaps this is too much to ask. It is curious to think that we imagined that our meetings were only a foretaste of pleasures to come, when they were the whole substance of those pleasures. But I always expected too much of life.”

She had no reply to this letter. She thought that he might have written a short note before the ship left Fremantle, as he would have known from her telegram a week earlier that she was not coming. Then she thought that he might have waited until he had time to digest her letter, and have written from Colombo. When no letter came from there she thought that he had spoken the truth, and that he would not forgive her.

She did not tell Wolfie that she had intended to leave him. She thought this might be unfair. It was certainly more agreeable to herself, but her mind was not sufficiently afflicted by Puritanism to think that therefore it must be wrong. She came, on the contrary, to the conclusion that it would be wrong to tell him, as it would be gratuitous cruelty to let him know, at a time when he was being avoided by many of his former friends, that his wife also had intended to leave him.

Because of the tabu which attached to him as a German, they decided at last to sell the house at Brighton and move into the country. Steven offered them one of the farms at Westhill, which had become vacant owing to the two young men who rented it leaving for the war.

In addition to its isolation, it had the advantage that half the people in the neighbourhood had names as German as their own, and that they had known Diana since childhood.

A few months after they had moved in here, she had a letter from Russell. He said that he had not written before, not because he had vindictive feelings, but because he had not known what to say. He was writing now to tell her that he was engaged to Miss Rockingham, who, as Diana knew, had travelled home on the ship with him. They were to be married on the day after he was writing. He had a temporary commission in the Grenadier Guards. He would always remember the happy times he had spent with her in Melbourne, and particularly their last afternoon at Mornington.

Diana wrote to congratulate him on his marriage, and to tell him her own news:

“We came up here because it was difficult for Wolfie in Melbourne. It is twenty minutes walk from Westhill, and we only see Steven and Laura and people we know well. Harry has repudiated his parentage and changed his name to Fingal. This is much admired, but it was a shock to Wolfie. Cynthia on the other hand, is in disgrace for her kindness to him at the theatre, and is called a pro-German. So it is better to be away. Our little house is on a cleared hill-top, and on a fine day we can see far into Gippsland. It is something like the farmhouse in the picture “Winter Sunlight”, which you said one day might be my spiritual home. I think you were right. I suppose one is always most at home in the places one has lived in as a child. I used to ride over here when I was ten, as Mrs Schmidt, who lived here then, used to give us a special sort of apple tart she made.

“I am so glad that you are marrying Miss Rockingham. I liked her very much. She was so graceful in every way, not only in her movements. As she is a friend of the Wyckhams, I expect you will see Josie sometimes. I hope you do.”

He replied to her letter, and after that they corresponded regularly, writing four or five letters each a year. She wondered if Miss Rockingham (she found it hard to think of his wife by any other name) objected, but when she heard from Josie that her establishments in Belgrave Square and Derbyshire were on such a considerable scale, she doubted that they saw each other's correspondence. It all seemed very remote to her, as she sat with Wolfie at lunch on the veranda, while the winter sunlight gleamed on the hock bottle, and tinged with pale gold the far purple forests of Gippsland.

Dancing on Coral

Glenda Adams

Introduced by Susan Wyndham

The Commandant

Jessica Anderson

Introduced by Carmen Callil

Homesickness

Murray Bail

Introduced by Peter Conrad

Sydney Bridge Upside Down

David Ballantyne

Introduced by Kate De Goldi

Bush Studies

Barbara Baynton

Introduced by Helen Garner

The Cardboard Crown

Martin Boyd

Introduced by Brenda Niall

A Difficult Young Man

Martin Boyd

Introduced by Sonya Hartnett

Outbreak of Love

Martin Boyd

Introduced by Chris Womersley

The Australian Ugliness

Robin Boyd

Introduced by Christos Tsiolkas

All the Green Year

Don Charlwood

Introduced by Michael McGirr

They Found a Cave

Nan Chauncy

Introduced by John Marsden

The Even More Complete

Book of Australian Verse

John Clarke

Diary of a Bad Year

J. M. Coetzee

Introduced by Peter Goldsworthy

Wake in Fright

Kenneth Cook

Introduced by Peter Temple

The Dying Trade

Peter Corris

Introduced by Charles Waterstreet

They're a Weird Mob

Nino Culotta

Introduced by Jacinta Tynan

The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke

C. J. Dennis

Introduced by Jack Thompson

Careful, He Might Hear You

Sumner Locke Elliott

Introduced by Robyn Nevin

Fairyland

Sumner Locke Elliott

Introduced by Dennis Altman

Terra Australis

Matthew Flinders

Introduced by Tim Flannery

My Brilliant Career

Miles Franklin

Introduced by Jennifer Byrne

The Fringe Dwellers

Nene Gare

Introduced by Melissa Lucashenko

Cosmo Cosmolino

Helen Garner

Introduced by Ramona Koval

Dark Places

Kate Grenville

Introduced by Louise Adler

The Long Prospect

Elizabeth Harrower

Introduced by Fiona McGregor

The Watch Tower

Elizabeth Harrower

Introduced by Joan London

The Mystery of a Hansom Cab

Fergus Hume

Introduced by Simon Caterson

The Unknown Industrial Prisoner

David Ireland

Introduced by Peter Pierce

The Glass Canoe

David Ireland

Introduced by Nicolas Rothwell

A Woman of the Future

David Ireland

Introduced by Kate Jennings

Eat Me

Linda Jaivin

Introduced by Krissy Kneen

Julia Paradise

Rod Jones

Introduced by Emily Maguire

The Jerilderie Letter