Silver Wattle (47 page)

I am going to die, I thought. How will I ever tell Freddy now how much I love him?’

Stabbing pains jabbed my lungs and there was a rushing sound in my ears. My hands lost their strength and everything began to turn black. Then, suddenly, whatever it was on my back lightened. My head rose to the surface. I pushed myself out of the pond, coughing up water so violently that the back of my throat felt raw. My hair was strung over my face like seaweed and my eyes itched from the mud. There was a dark shape moving in front of me. I heard male voices, shouting. I wiped my face with my wet blouse and saw that the dark shape was Freddy. He was beating Milosh back with a shovel. Klara was there too. I remembered the knife, and searched for it in the water, but could not find it.

Freddy pushed Milosh backwards. He fell into a flowerbed, crushing some daisies. Freddy rushed towards him with the shovel. I saw something glint in the light and my breath caught in my throat when I realised what it was.

‘Freddy!’ I screamed.

Freddy’s eyes fell to the knife just as Milosh drove it into his chest. I screamed again at the top of my voice. I found my legs and sprang up, lunging towards Freddy. He fell on his back. The knife had been thrust so deeply into him that I could only see the handle amongst the blood oozing around the wound.

I dropped to my knees beside him and threw my arms around his neck. ‘I love you! Don’t leave me!’

I heard a sound and looked up. Milosh was staggering towards us. There was a thud. His head split open, straight down the middle, like an overripe plum. He collapsed and I saw Klara standing behind him with a block of wood in her hands. With her white dress and round stomach, tears streaming down her cheeks, she looked like a Greek goddess. My heavily pregnant sister had killed the beast.

The light in Freddy’s eyes was fading. ‘Adela,’ he said, and I felt all the love he had for me in the way he said my name.

‘Don’t go, please,’ I wept.

Freddy tried to lift himself onto his elbows, but gasped. He collapsed back into my arms and listed to one side as if he had fallen into a deep sleep. But I knew he was gone.

The wind died down and the garden fell silent. There was not a splash in the pond or the click of a beetle to be heard. It was as if the whole of nature was standing still, out of respect.

I
was too numb to remember much of Freddy’s funeral. I recall only snippets of things: Klara reading Psalm 23; Thomas reciting a poem. The coffin was decorated in wildflowers from our garden and Giallo clawed down Hugh’s sleeve to nibble at the grevilleas on the wreath. Freddy would have laughed at the bird’s irreverence on such a solemn occasion.

When they lowered Freddy’s coffin into the ground, I understood that the life I had shared with the man I had known and loved had ended forever.

Philip was amongst the mourners, but I barely saw him through the blur of my tears. I had been foolish to pine after another man when the love of my life had been right there by my side. But I had realised it too late.

After the wake, I rested on my bed, and reached across the space where Freddy used to lie. I wondered if the sense I had of him still being there was what Hugh had felt after the amputation. Since his death, I had often dreamed of Freddy. We would be having breakfast on the terrace, or driving to a restaurant, and I would be happy in his presence. Then I would wake up and remember the terrible night that had brought our happiness to an end.

‘You must come and live with us,’ Klara said to me. ‘I cannot bear to think of you alone in that house.’

I could not bear it either. I agreed to move in with the Swans, not because I wanted to but because I was lost for alternatives. Whenever my family tried to comfort me, I shied away. ‘Please’ and ‘Thank you’ were all I could stand to exchange with other human beings. I was lonely in a way I had never been lonely before. Klara and I had faced Mother’s death and our exile together. Our family had tackled Thomas’s illness as a united force. But this…this dark hole of grief for Freddy…I had to face it alone.

Klara’s twins were born on 1 July. Robert and I both wept when Doctor Fitzgerald pronounced them healthy. After what had occurred in the past month, as well as Klara’s illness, we had been worried. Even more astounding was Klara’s rapid recovery from her confinement.

‘I have two babies and Adela to take care of now,’ she told the Swans. ‘I am not lying about like some invalid.’

‘Pregnancy can be taxing on the body,’ Doctor Fitzgerald explained to us, puzzled himself at Klara’s vitality. ‘But sometimes it does strengthen the lungs. Perhaps that’s what has happened here. I no longer see symptoms of consumption.’

Regina, who had recovered well from the sedative Milosh had put in the cream buns but not quite as well from the shock of waking to learn of Freddy’s death, was appointed nursemaid. She spoke to the twins in Spanish, much to Mrs Swan’s horror and Klara and Robert’s delight.

Despite my grief, I was struck by the beauty of the two girls lying in their cradle side by side.

‘We are going to call them Marta and Emilie,’ Klara told me.

Klara did not know the full story of our mother and her sister and I wondered if I should tell her before she made any announcements. But I decided against it. Marta and Emilie were in heaven together now. Why shouldn’t those babies carry their names? It was a chance to make things new.

While some things were resolved, others were not. Milosh was buried in a pauper’s grave. Doctor Holub wrote to us that paní Benova plunged into a life of poverty and ill repute after learning of Milosh’s death. Doctor Holub took it upon himself to visit Doctor Hoffmann and accuse him of his crime but found the doctor a broken man. His son and wife were killed in a train accident several years before. ‘Revenge is for God,’ my Father always said. Perhaps he had been right.

Klara and I had lived in fear of Milosh so long that it was difficult to adjust to the idea that he could no longer harm us. But we could not be free of him entirely; he had taken precious Freddy with him.

Four months after Freddy’s death, Philip came to see me. Thomas had visited that afternoon and we had sailed the sloop on the Swans’ pond.

‘When I sail this boat, I feel that Freddy is with me,’ Thomas said.

I stared at him in wonder, then kissed the top of his head. My heart was too full to speak.

After Uncle Ota had taken Thomas home, I retired to my room to begin a task I had been dreading: unpacking the box of photographs I had brought from Cremorne. I picked up the wedding photograph of everyone standing outside the church and I ran my fingertip over Freddy’s beaming smile.

‘Did I make you happy?’ I asked him.

A maid knocked on the door and told me that I had a visitor. My heart did not flutter when I saw Philip in the drawing room. It merely ached.

Neither of us could bring ourselves to speak at first.

‘I didn’t come sooner because…’ he began, but could not finish. He looked at me with his blue eyes. ‘If there is anything I can do to help you, Adela, please tell me. I can’t stand the thought of you suffering.’

The maid walked in with tea, although I had not asked for it. She must have assumed Philip had come to see me about Klara. When she had finished laying out the cups and teapot and left with the tray, I turned to Philip. He was looking towards the window as if something fascinating was happening outside. But the view only revealed that the sky was darkening to a sapphire blue.

‘Your happiness is everything to me,’ he said. ‘Even when you found it with another man.’

‘There is no happiness now,’ I told him.

‘No.’

We fell silent again, not looking at each other. Something lingered in the air between us. I knew what it was: a question.

‘You were right to walk away,’ I said, my heart beating painfully in my chest. ‘It would have been unthinkable to have hurt Freddy.’

I choked back a sob and sank into a chair. Speaking of Freddy in the past tense was agony. It reminded me that I would never be able to touch him again or hear his laugh. There had been many times in the past when I had imagined myself in Philip’s arms, comforted by the strength of them and the feel of my cheek resting against his firm chest. But now that Freddy was gone, I saw those feelings had been only illusions.

‘It is too late for us now,’ I whispered.

‘No!’ Philip said. He paced the floor. ‘I didn’t come for that. You must grieve and I am still married. But who can say what will happen in the future, Adela…maybe things will be different for us then.’

For a moment a flicker of feeling lit the numbness. I found myself pitying Philip, but pity was not what he wanted. All tenderness, all thoughts of laughter and happiness, had drained from me. The world had disintegrated and it could never be put right. How could it while I had loved Philip when I should have been loving Freddy?

Philip’s eyes were intent on me and I saw the hurt and fear in them.

‘Can you see nothing in the future for us?’ he asked.

The daylight in the room faded and Philip switched on a lamp. There were no words I could use to explain how my love for him had died. We’d had a chance, long ago, and we had lost it. All that had remained was the dream and now that was gone too. I imagined Emilie cutting off her fingers. Her action no longer seemed insane. Perhaps if I could cut out my heart, I could go on living.

Philip covered his face with his hands. ‘Don’t let him win, Adela. Your stepfather might be dead but he is still hurting you.’

‘I am sorry,’ I said. ‘It is not your fault. Nobody can help me.’

Philip moved towards me, touched my shoulder then walked to the door. ‘I’m the one who is sorry,’ he said. ‘You and Freddy were happy together.’

I realised then that he had understood.

I accompanied Philip to the front door and watched him walk down the steps to his car. He paused for a moment to look about him. The night sounds of the garden—crickets, frogs, beetles—had come to life in a chorus. He put his hand to the driver’s door then turned back to me.

‘I’m going to help develop an aerial medical service in the Outback,’ he said. ‘I’m giving up my practice here in Sydney for a while. My father will watch over it for me.’

So Philip and his father had reconciled? At least there was some light for one of us.

Philip started the car engine and disappeared down the drive and through the gates. The last of my hopes went with him.

One day, Hugh asked me to meet him at the Vegetarian Cafe. The place belonged to a time in my life when I was wide-eyed and innocent. I was not that way any more.

On my way up George Street, I saw a gentleman walking towards me. He lifted his hat and I recognised Alfred Steel, Klara’s former teacher at the Conservatorium High School.

‘I was sorry to hear about your husband,’ Mr Steel told me.

I thanked him for his sympathy and quickly changed the subject to Klara. ‘She told me she has been offered a teaching post with the school.’

I saw that Mr Steel was looking at me with a questioning smile. He seemed to be deliberating whether he should ask me something or not. Some people had a grotesque curiosity about Freddy’s death, which was the reason why I had stopped attending social occasions outside of my family. I was about to excuse myself in order to avoid another painful inquisition when he suddenly said to me, ‘Klara’s not really a teacher. She’s a performer, wouldn’t you say? Performing is in her blood.’

Mr Steel’s statement was so different from what I had been thinking that it startled me. I looked at him, not comprehending his meaning.

He gave a short cough into his fist. ‘She’ll never fulfil that dream
here
. There are few avenues for performers beyond afternoon teas and weddings.’

The penny dropped. ‘You mean, Mr Steel, that if she wants seriously to perform, she must return to Europe?’

He answered my question with a shy laugh. ‘Of course, she would scold me if she knew I was telling you this…’

‘I am not going back to Europe,’ said Klara, placing Emilie on my lap. ‘I will be happy being a teacher.’

‘And watch lesser performers go in your place?’ I asked.

Klara pursed her lips and set about changing Marta’s nappy. Emilie gurgled and grinned at me. The girls were identical in appearance but not in personality. Marta was a model baby who slept when she was supposed to sleep and ate everything she was offered. Not Emilie. Emilie wanted to see as much of the world in a day as she could, and fought against sleep or anything else that interrupted her view of life. Emilie and I had an affinity. When she cried in the night and would not settle, Klara brought her to me. As soon as I held her, Emilie’s bunched-up face transformed into a smile.

‘Why didn’t you say something to me before?’ I asked. ‘I feel so selfish. Have you always wanted to return to Prague?’

Klara fastened Marta’s nappy and glanced at me.

‘I see,’ I said, touching Emilie’s tufts of hair. ‘We did intend to return when we left, didn’t we?’

I stood up and walked to the window. Emilie wrapped my finger in her palm. I looked out at the garden and the bushland beyond. When Klara and I had fled Prague, it had been with the idea of returning once Klara was twenty-one. I turned and stared at my sister’s heart-shaped face and high cheekbones. She was still every inch a Czech. But I was not. I had become something else. When I thought of Prague, I felt only pain and sadness. Mother was not there and neither was Aunt Josephine. The fifth continent, with its strange trees and animals and siren-like birdsongs, was my home now. I could never imagine leaving the place where Freddy was buried. Suddenly, I understood why Klara was reluctant to go back to Europe now it was safe for her to do so. She knew that I could not go with her and she was afraid to leave me on my own.

‘It would not be forever,’ I said. ‘Both you and Robert have your families here. You would return one day. And I would be waiting for you.’

Klara shrugged. ‘Things might improve here,’ she said. ‘It is still a new country. There are new avenues for performance being developed all the time.’