Golden Hope (33 page)

‘She's coming around, Doc. You've come at the right time. I don't know how to answer her questions.'

Doc was standing in the doorway, observing Clytie with a weariness in his eyes that made her heart beat faster. He took a chair by her bedside and held her hand.

‘It isn't Rom, is it, Doc? He's not dead?'

‘No. Here's a letter from him. Postmarked some weeks back from the Transvaal, but it arrived at last.' He hesitated. ‘You've been delirious for some days, m'dear. How much do you remember?'

Clytie suddenly began trembling with dread. ‘Where's the cot? Where's little Robert? Sister Bracken took him away – but I wanted to feed him . . .'

She saw Doc's lips moving. The essence of his words filtered through to her in broken phrases. He had been at the mine for days, helping to free the trapped miners. Sister Bracken had worked unaided at the hospital. Early one morning she found Robert in his cot . . . cold . . .

‘Sister was distraught. She worked on him for hours in an attempt to revive him. She was too late. It's no one's fault, Clytie. It's a tragic, inexplicable thing that sometimes happens – for no known reason . . .'

Clytie listened, her mind numb. She heard herself asking random questions.

The Jantzens' babe had been removed by Sonny to Jantzen House to avoid the fever. Doc had saved four miners. Two others had been crushed in the mine – and died later.

Doc's eyes were ringed with shadows. ‘Clytie, I can't tell you how much I regret that the mine accident prevented me being with you when you needed me most. I don't believe anyone could have saved your little lad – he came too early. But I feel guilty. I should have been by your side.'

There were no words she could give him. She accepted the letter he placed in her hands.

‘Rom needs to hang on to you, girl – and you need to hang on to him. Mary Mac will take care of you here. Tom Yeoman's given her leave of absence. I'll see you tomorrow – but I'll come to you any time day or night you want to talk.'

Clytie felt too weak to cry, drained of all hope. The precious gift of a babe had been snatched from her.
I only had him for five days – it isn't fair. No known reason
? She wanted to scream out against The Creator of All Things.

She waited until their voices faded. Shadow lay watching her from the foot of the bed.

Doc's words echoed in her mind. ‘Rom needs to hang on to you . . . and you need to hang on to him.'

She tore open the envelope. Rom's letter seemed divorced from time, words sent from another planet. He began in his usual cavalier style, describing the humour, the chaos, the wild juxtaposition of volunteers, trained soldiers and military officers from every corner of the British Empire.

Between the dark patches of soldiers' humour were vivid snatches of guerrilla-style encounters with the Boers: ‘Don't tell anyone I said this but I reckon they're the best marksmen in the world – their eyesight is phenomenal.'

He did not describe the rescue of the Tommy that Holy Maude had told her had been mentioned in British despatches. But there was one graphic account.

There I was, lying low in the trenches discussing cricket with a bloke from Queensland. He asked me a question and I turned my head to answer him – at the exact moment there was a neat hole between his eyes. If your number's up – that's the way to go. He never felt a thing. I kept my head down after that!

Write soon, eh? I'm hungry for your happy, funny letters – you're a breath of fresh air on this hot, steamy veldt – an oven by day, and as cold as charity at night.

Ever your man, Rom.

Clytie repeated the final words like a mantra: ‘Ever your man, Rom.'

Clytie lay for hours watching the stars through the window, trying to filter the lost days she had just lived through, unaware of time passing. The pain and joy of the birth, the way little Robert had grasped her fist and looked at her, the sweet baby smell of him. Nothing made sense.

Clinging on to the only visible piece of reality, she re-read Rom's letter. She could almost hear him saying the written words, ‘I'm hungry for your happy, funny letters . . .'

The hours passed. At daybreak her eyes were dry. No tears on her face, but she felt as if her whole body was crying on the inside, a ball
of grief that filled her, overflowed her. There was only one thing left for her to do. Write to Rom.

He had never commented on her letter telling him of her pregnancy – perhaps this had gone missing like so many others had, fallen into Boer hands after they blew up the railway lines to prevent the British transporting supplies to the Front.

Death is all around him. He doesn't need to know our baby's gone. I must give him something to hope for.

The ink on the nib of her pen dried while she searched for words – any words.

It was only when she began writing the cheerful, chirpy letter he had asked from her, describing the presents, Holy Maude's ‘confession', the kindness of the townsfolk and the beauty of an early spring in the bush, that the tears began to course down her cheeks as she remembered the tiny
fleur-de-lys
tuft of hair on her baby's neck.

Her letter felt like a desperate bridge to the bleak, unknown future. She signed it in similar vein to Rom's letter. ‘Ever your girl, Clytie.'

Exhausted by the effort to sound bright and amusing, she handed the letter to Mary Mac to post. Then turned her face to the wall and slept ‘the sleep of the dead'.

‘So far as our story approaches the end,

Which do you pity the most of us three?

My friend, or the mistress of my friend

With her wanton eyes, or me?'

Robert Browning, 1812–1889

The sky over Port Phillip Bay was overcast, the colour of rusty steel. Finch was well used to the ship bucking in the waves but the wind now coming off the treacherous Bass Strait was icy enough to have been hurled straight out of an Antarctic winter.

The passenger ship was packed with several hundred returned volunteers, most of them on their feet, but weakened by the typhoid that had prevented their return to the Front. Finch had kept to himself throughout most of the voyage to avoid awkward questions about his status from the only ‘officials' on board. The two Australian nurses in charge of the sick bay were on a round trip back to South Africa to continue nursing wounded Diggers.

Finch's eyes narrowed against the sheets of rain in his face as he caught sight of the distant city skyline.

‘Home sweet home, eh? Just like Madame Melba sings, eh?'

The heartfelt words startled him. They came from the young hospital orderly who had joined him at the ship's rail, smoking the stub of a cigarette between nicotine-stained fingers. He offered one from the packet of Capstans but Finch politely declined.

‘No place like Melbourne, best city in the world,' the orderly stated as fact.

‘I'll take your word for it,' Finch said.

‘The name's Mick. I've done my year for the Empire. What about you? Were you a regular or a volunteer? Where'd you spring from?'

Trying to avoid a barrage of questions, Finch grasped at Rom's phrase, ‘I'm a rolling stone.'

Mick looked concerned. ‘You holding up all right, soldier? You're as white as a ghost.'

‘Been better, been worse. Copped a few doses of
mal de mer
.' Finch was learning phrases to dodge others' questions; there were more than enough of his own that remained unanswered.

Mick was in chatty mode. ‘We lost another bloke today – appendicitis. Rotten luck, eh? Instead of returning to a welcome home party, he'll
cop a family wake. Everyone else drinking grog in his memory. War's a funny peculiar business, if you ask me.'

Finch seized the opening to ask the question on his mind. ‘The day we left South Africa I saw a mate of mine, Rom Delaney, standing at the bow. But I haven't sighted him since. Have you come across him?'

‘He might have got himself assigned to kitchen duty. No doubt you'll meet up with him on the wharf. Or when you get de-mobbed at Victoria Barracks. Don't forget to collect your final pay, right!'

Giving him a farewell mock salute, Mick flicked his cigarette butt overboard and ambled off towards the sick bay.

Exhausted, Finch leant on the ship's rail. His eyes traced the impressive skyline of church spires, tall buildings and the industrial chimneys belching into the blue sky now breaking through the storm clouds. The water in the bay was so choppy the lights were a quivering mirror-image of Melbourne – the city that had grown fabulously wealthy on gold.

Somewhere far beyond this was the Gold Triangle. According to Rom a new life, a clean slate. Or was it? A girl from a circus might hold all the answers.

He took out her photograph and waited for the girl's face to speak to him. ‘Who are you? Sister? Friend? Lover? Why can't I feel a damned thing for you?'

•  •  •

Rom was nowhere to be seen on the wharf. The only person who spoke to Finch was a young Salvation Army officer who handed him a flyer with an address where he could always count on a cup of tea and help if he needed it. Finch noticed the flyer contained details of the next Biorama performance – whatever that was.

Marched off in casual, ragged formation to the Victoria Barracks, Finch stiffened at the sight of the medical officers giving each soldier a final health clearance. He passed swiftly through it, pronounced fit, his papers stamped.

Seated before an official who wearily repeated the same questions to each soldier in turn, Finch was given the choice of retaining his uniform or being paid cash for it. On the spur of the moment he decided to keep the khaki. Was his rifle issued by the Australian
Army or the British? Unable to answer, Finch felt a surge of panic but the officer gave a dismissive shrug at the sight of the Martini-Henry.

‘It's so outmoded, it's hardly worth the trouble of returning it to England. You can keep it – might come in handy to shoot rabbits. That only leaves you to take receipt of your deferred pay – five weeks at five shillings a day in cash. And this note of transit entitles you to free travel by rail to your place of residence.' He held out his hand. ‘Good luck, Finch, you're on your own now.'

Finch hastily transferred the notes and coins into the pocket of his army great coat, picked up his rifle and kitbag and departed the barracks feeling like a cross between an imposter and a prisoner released from gaol.

He found the sky miraculously transformed into an azure blue so bright it caused his eyes to smart. Every man he passed looked prosperous in contrast to his shabby khaki. He stopped a man sporting a bowler hat and natty pin-striped suit, to ask directions to Young and Jackson's Hotel.

Passing by a newsboy on a street corner, he read the headline written on a poster clamped to a wire frame: ‘Shock Death Melbourne Cup Favourite'. Below it in small letters was scrawled, ‘V.M.R. casualty list'.

He almost laughed out loud at the irony of it.

Dead heroes get second billing to a horse – that proves I'm in Australia.

Checking his coins he bought a newspaper, a folded map of Victoria and on impulse an old postcard of
Clean Sweep (sired by Zalinski)
that was captioned ‘The first horse ever to win the Moonee Valley Cup and the illustrious Melbourne Cup in the same year – November 1900'. A year ago.

It struck Finch as ironic to be sending a postcard of a racehorse to the only woman he knew on the planet – and one he secretly admired – but he decided to bite the bullet. He addressed it to Sister Heather Macqueen at the hospital near Johannesburg, then wrote:

I made it to Melbourne in one piece, thanks to your expert nursing. Am now heading for the Gold Triangle with Rom Delaney. I won't ever forget you, Sister. You are the best ever!

Signed Finch (until my real name turns up).

In the short span of his memory, the lovely Kiwi nurse loomed large.
But how could I declare my feelings until I know if I'm married or spoken for? ‘You're the best ever!' What exactly did I mean by that? The best nurse, best friend – or is she The Girl I Left Behind Me?

Before he had second thoughts, he posted the card in the red Royal Mail pillar box.

The plaintive words of
The Girl I Left Behind Me,
the song that Rom was always whistling, returned to haunt him and brought a curious wave of guilt. He touched the photograph of the equestrienne in the pocket over his heart. What was the truth? Was she the key to his past?

He was startled by a sudden thought. What if that jacket belonged to some other Australian trooper who had died and left this girl waiting for
him
? Heaven only knew what he would he say when – if – he came face to face with her?

•  •  •

Entering the foyer of Young and Jackson's Hotel Finch was instantly overwhelmed by the opulence of the scene, the plush upholstery, gilt mirrors, great stretches of carpet, vases filled with artfully arranged flowers – a world peopled by fashionably dressed men and women who appeared oblivious to his khaki uniform and kitbag.

Feeling like a piece of flotsam washed up on an exotic desert island, he headed for the bar, ordered a beer and found himself a quiet corner to check his change. He had reluctantly left a coin as a tip, reminding himself he must keep a mental tote of what he spent. Heaven only knew how far this money would stretch until he found some employment. He mentally calculated the credits and debits that could logically be known about a man with no name – without arousing suspicions about his identity as a possible deserter.

No character references. No memories of childhood, love affairs or war service. Nothing before I woke up in hospital. But I can read and write well.