Peter Vincent couldn’t wait to get home. This was always the way. A few hours’ absence from Ferndale was about all he could stand and he’d felt that way ever since being demobilised. Apart from the odd week or two in Sydney each year on business, he spent all his time on the land. While running the property in a makeshift sort of way, he was making a decent enough job of it if you ignored the state of the house and outbuildings and some of the fences, although sometimes he had the feeling that his grandparents might not agree.
Now, as he steered his beloved Armstrong Siddeley up the winding coastal road north of Jingera, he thought back over the events of the day. The morning swim at Jingera Beach when he’d rescued the Latvian woman, who didn’t seem to recognise how lucky she’d been not to get swept out to sea. Then the entire afternoon in Burford running errands, followed by a brief stop at Jingera pub on the way back, and bit of a yarn with George Cadwallader, who’d dropped in for a middy – that was an unusual event, even Bill Bates had commented on it.
Peter couldn’t seem to get Ilona out of his mind. Perhaps he’d been too abrupt that morning. Women had accused him of that before. She’d so obviously wanted to swim in the surf, and if he hadn’t wished to conceal from her the state of her swimming suit he might have asked her to go in with him. But no, he hadn’t felt like doing that; bodysurfing was a solitary matter requiring his complete concentration. Anyway he’d needed time to put the meeting in perspective. After half an hour in the water, he’d dried himself in the sun before heading back to the car. On the footbridge over the lagoon he’d paused. He’d always loved the view to the west, from the time his grandfather first brought him to Jingera over thirty years ago: tall eucalyptus trees rising to lush farming land and, beyond that, the distant escarpment of the Great Dividing Range. To the east, a flock of pelicans cruised the lagoon near Cadwallader’s boathouse. While watching them, his eye was caught by a vivid splash of emerald green, against the dull olive of the melaleuca trees. Ilona was sitting on the shore of the lagoon not far from the boathouse. Quickly he’d moved on, not wanting to be seen watching her.
In spite of her polite words of gratitude on Jingera Beach, it was unlikely that he’d ever be forgiven for seeing her in that ill-fitting swimming costume. It had taken him some time to place her as the woman he’d glimpsed at Woodlands. Colours always stuck in his memory: that’s why he’d remembered the purple hat she’d worn that day rather than her face.
Now he pulled into the Ferndale driveway and unfastened the first of the gates. A grumbling in his stomach reminded him of how hungry he was, and after parking the car he went straight to the kitchen at the back of the rambling brick house. At one time the kitchen had been a separate building, but Peter’s grandparents had constructed a glassed-in walkway to connect it to the dining room. This walkway never failed to delight him, even when he was at his most morose; its pink and green stained glass panels cast lozenges of light on to the scuffed pine floorboards and the central pane of plain glass framed a view of the sea. When he was not out in the paddocks, he spent most of his time in the kitchen, a large room with whitewashed brick walls and an enormous fuel stove occupying half of one wall. The linoleum floor had seen better days. There were two dressers that extended right up to the boarded ceiling, and on their shelves lay a motley collection of crockery. Running down the middle of the room was a long refectory table that could easily have seated a dozen people. One end of the table formed his desk; it was littered with bills and receipts and other miscellaneous pieces of paper.
He placed a leg of lamb in the baking pan. Accumulated in the bottom was a thin layer of congealed dripping but he wouldn’t worry about that. At this moment the phone rang. Cursing, he wiped his hands on a grubby tea towel and picked up the receiver.
‘Good news, Peter.’ It was Jack Chapman, his old friend from Woodlands, who never bothered with the preliminaries. ‘That kelpie pup I promised you is just about ready now. Care to visit us to collect him?’
Peter had seen the tan and black puppies just after they’d been born, and again each time he’d visited Woodlands since. Jack liked to keep his puppies well beyond weaning so he could train them to be good working dogs. Part of the joy of breeding them, Peter knew. Any one of Jack’s dogs would suit him but the black puppy was the one he liked best. His own two dogs were getting old now, not that he’d ever get rid of them, but he needed a younger one for work. He suggested collecting the dog the following Tuesday.
‘Well, Jude’s got a better idea than that. Come for dinner on Saturday week. You could stay overnight and then we could have a game of tennis on Sunday.’
‘Sounds good.’ But Peter was always cautious about Judy Chapman’s weekend invitations; she had a habit of trying to pair him off with unattached women. ‘Will there be many other guests?’
‘The Sutherlands.’
Peter liked the Sutherlands, local farmers, but he waited in case there were more names on the guest list. Then Jack added, ‘And you can have your pick of the three pups I’ve got for sale.’
‘Thanks, Jack.’ He would pick the black puppy of course. ‘Saturday week it is.’
‘Good. Jude’ll be pleased.’ After a second’s hesitation Jack added, rather too casually, ‘Grace Smythe will be here as well, by the way. Forgot to mention that. She was at school with Jude. Bring your best togs.’
Only then did Peter realise how neatly the trap had closed around him.
After putting the phone down, he placed the lamb in the ramped-up Aga. It was past six but he felt restless and the thought of the Chapmans’ dinner party cast a gloom over the evening. He jammed an old felt hat on his head and went outside, whistling for the two ancient brown kelpies. The grass in the home paddock was bleached almost silver by the summer sun. Under the old trees that encircled the house – the Monterey cypresses and the radiata pines – lay a thick blanket of needles that one day he’d get around to raking up. There was little sign now of the formal gardens that his grandmother had designed. Just a few broken bricks remained where the borders had been; the plants had long since died, choked out by grasses and weeds.
The home paddock was bounded to the east by a low cliff, while to the south it sloped down sharply to a narrow gully that was the only access to the beach. To one side of the gully were some rough stone steps that Peter had built for his grandparents years ago, on a holiday from school, and which only he and his dogs ever used now.
The dogs dashed down the steps and were already racing along the white sand and barking at the advancing waves when he arrived at the bottom. As usual he left boots and socks on the last step and walked barefoot through the sand. It squeaked as he sank into it, rasping grain upon grain in a countless number of tiny collisions. Life was like that, a series of collisions. He walked up the short beach to the northern headland. There he sat, on sand still warm from the sun, and watched the waves swelling in from the Pacific.
Ilona Talivaldis. It was a lovely name. She had a charming accent, although what she’d actually said on the beach this morning hadn’t been much to his liking. In trying to avoid glancing at her half-exposed breast he’d focused on her face and arms. A pale face, probably due to the cold water and the shock. Then he’d seen it: that blue tattoo on her left forearm. Not just any old tattoo but a six-digit number. He’d known right away what that meant.
Ilona had survived a concentration camp. Most didn’t. He wondered how long she’d been in it. Sad if she’d survived all that only to drown on Jingera Beach. After bawling her out of the water, he’d been surprised to discover that she wasn’t grateful, only annoyed and fussing about her swimmers. Once he’d recovered from his initial anger, he’d found it amusing that she should be fretting about appearances when all that really mattered was that she was alive, and not a corpse floating in the waves and being nibbled at by sharks. Her modesty made him aware of what she was covering up, but when he saw that tattoo all amusement drained away. It was shocking to see that right here in Jingera. That reminder of the Nazi concentration camps, the numbers given to the Jews and the gypsies and the agitators when they arrived there. Possessions taken away, clothes taken away, lives taken away too in so many cases.
After all those years of trying to forget, seeing that reminder of the war on Ilona’s forearm had shocked him, he could admit that now he was home again and able to think. Seeing it had moved him too, as had Ilona’s fleeting expression of defencelessness that was so quickly replaced with antagonism.
He watched the ocean. Each swell formed a crest, which curled over on itself in a great crash of white foam that, by the time it reached the shore had been tamed by the retreating breakers into a gentle swirl of water. The waves would always roll in like this no matter what people might do to each other. That was what was so reassuring about the ocean’s edge, but the surf was dangerous too. You had to know what you were doing before venturing into it.
From the beach, only the homestead roof and the surrounding trees were visible above the cliff edge. He had always loved Ferndale and his grandparents had known that. They’d left it to him just before the war, when he was no more than an overgrown schoolboy. Returning from England after the war, he found it had been badly neglected. Being honest with himself, it was still neglected, except for the land and the stock and the water tanks. There seemed no point in making any other improvements, no one else would see them and he didn’t care about appearances, but just as his grandparents had done, he would live and die here. No other way of life appealed to him. Certainly not a city life; not the sort of life Judy Chapman and her friends led, spending half their time in the Eastern Suburbs of Sydney and the other half in the country.
Although he’d loved big cities as a young man, he soon got over that. In the war he’d witnessed the destruction of too many, spread out beneath the planes before the area bombing began; and afterwards the burning, afterwards the death and destruction. It was still impossible for him to go near a big city now without remembering that. The claustrophobia of burning city streets. And, in his dreams, that terrible sense of falling, falling, falling into a yawning abyss. He always woke at this point, sweating and sometimes screaming.
Now he stumbled back up the beach. Pulling on socks and boots, he noticed a single purple flower blooming on a low-growing plant. Pig’s face, that’s what his grandmother used to call it. The flower was the exact shade of purple as the Latvian woman’s hat that day he’d seen her at Woodlands. Pig’s face, purple colour; purple hat. Funny that he should think of that wretched hat again.
He didn’t want to think of Ilona Talivaldis. They had Europe in common, they had the war years in common, but he didn’t want to be reminded of those memories. He’d spent years putting them behind him. They still resurfaced in his sleep but not in his waking hours. Not until today when he’d seen that blasted number on her arm.
A purple hat. Colours stuck in your mind somehow; colours and flowers. White roses conjured up his first love, Jenny. Reminded him of the white rose she wore when she accompanied him to that last school ball. Sweet Jenny, who had married someone else by the time the war ended. When they’d bumped into one another in Pitt Street, not long after he’d arrived back in Sydney, she hadn’t recognised him at first, but they could never have got back together again. He’d known he was a different person to the confident young pilot who’d left all those years before. Quite literally unrecognisable.
At the top of the steps, he paused to roll a cigarette and wait for the dogs, who were reluctant to leave the beach. A sliver of a moon was visible, and a smudge of stars over the darkening indigo sky and he could hear breakers crashing onto the shore below.
He sucked hard on the cigarette. This land was his and it was where he belonged, if only for an instant in a bigger order of things. For now he and the land were as one. He stubbed out his cigarette on the hard ground.