The Thorn Birds (71 page)

Meggie transferred the box into a large carton marked
MRS. D
. “I think we’d better donate them to Mrs. Devine; she has to render this flat habitable for the next tenant.” An unsteady tower of unwashed dishes stood on the end of the table, sprouting gruesome whiskers of mold. “Do you ever wash your dishes?”

Justine chuckled unrepentantly. “Dane says I don’t wash them at all, I shave them instead.”

“You’d have to give this lot a haircut first. Why don’t you wash them as you use them?”

“Because it would mean trekking down to the kitchen again, and since I usually eat after midnight, no one appreciates the patter of my little feet.”

“Give me one of the empty boxes. I’ll take them down and dispose of them now,” said her mother, resigned; she had known before volunteering to come what was bound to be in store for her, and had been rather looking forward to it. It wasn’t very often anyone had the chance to help Justine do anything; whenever Meggie had tried to help her she had ended feeling an utter fool. But in domestic matters the situation was reversed for once; she could help to her heart’s content without feeling a fool.

Somehow it got done, and Justine and Meggie set out in the station wagon Meggie had driven down from Gilly, bound for the Hotel Australia, where Meggie had a suite.

“I wish you Drogheda people would buy a house at Palm Beach or Avalon,” Justine said, depositing her case in the suite’s second bedroom. “This is terrible, right above Martin Place. Just imagine being a hop, skip and jump from the surf! Wouldn’t that induce you to hustle yourselves on a plane from Gilly more often?”

“Why should I come to Sydney? I’ve been down twice in the last seven years—to see Dane off, and now to see you off. If we had a house it would never be used.”

“Codswallop.”

“Why?”

“Why? Because there’s more to the world than bloody Drogheda, dammit! That place, it drives me batty!”

Meggie sighed. “Believe me, Justine, there’ll come a time when you’ll yearn to come home to Drogheda.”

“Does that go for Dane, too?”

Silence. Without looking at her daughter, Meggie took her bag from the table. “We’ll be late. Madame Rocher said two o’clock. If you want your dresses before you sail, we’d better hurry.”

“I am put in my place,” Justine said, and grinned.

“Why is it, Justine, that you didn’t introduce me to any of your friends? I didn’t see a sign of anyone at Bothwell Gardens except Mrs. Devine,” Meggie said as they sat in Germaine Rocher’s salon watching the languid mannequins preen and simper.

“Oh, they’re a bit shy…. I like that orange thing, don’t you?”

“Not with your hair. Settle for the grey.”

“Pooh! I think orange goes perfectly with my hair. In grey I look like something the cat dragged in, sort of muddy and half rotten. Move with the times, Mum. Redheads don’t have to be seen in white, grey, black, emerald green or that horrible color you’re so addicted to—what is it, ashes of roses? Victorian!”

“You have the name of the color right,” Meggie said. She turned to look at her daughter. “You’re a monster,” she said wryly, but with affection.

Justine didn’t pay any attention; it was not the first time she had heard it. “I’ll take the orange, the scarlet, the purple print, the moss green, the burgundy suit….”

Meggie sat torn between laughter and rage. What could one do with a daughter like Justine?

The
Himalaya
sailed from Darling Harbor three days later. She was a lovely old ship, flat-hulled and very seaworthy, built in the days when no one was in a tearing hurry and everyone accepted the fact England was four weeks away via Suez or five weeks away via the Cape of Good Hope. Nowadays even the ocean liners were streamlined, hulls shaped like destroyers to get there faster. But what they did to a sensitive stomach made seasoned sailors quail.

“What fun!” Justine laughed. “We’ve got a whole lovely footie team in first class, so it won’t be as dull as I thought. Some of them are gorgeous.”

“Now aren’t you glad I insisted on first class?”

“I suppose so.”

“Justine, you bring out the worst in me, you always have,” Meggie snapped, losing her temper at what she took for ingratitude. Just this once couldn’t the little wretch at least pretend she was sorry to be going? “Stubborn, pig-headed, self-willed! You exasperate me.”

For a moment Justine didn’t answer, but turned her head away as if she was more interested in the fact that the all-ashore gong was ringing than in what her mother was saying. She bit the tremor from her lips, put a bright smile on them. “I know I exasperate you,” she said cheerfully as she faced her mother. “Never mind, we are what we are. As you always say, I take after my dad.”

They embraced self-consciously before Meggie slipped thankfully into the crowds converging on gangways and was lost to sight. Justine made her way up to the sun deck and stood by the rail with rolls of colored streamers in her hands. Far below on the wharf she saw the figure in the pinkish-grey dress and hat walk to the appointed spot, stand shading her eyes. Funny, at this distance one could see Mum was getting up toward fifty. Some way to go yet, but it was there in her stance. They waved in the same moment, then Justine threw the first of her streamers and Meggie caught its end deftly. A red, a blue, a yellow, a pink, a green, an orange; spiraling round and round, tugging in the breeze.

A pipe band had come to bid the football team farewell and stood with pennons flying, plaids billowing, skirling a quaint version of “Now Is the Hour.” The ship’s rails were thick with people hanging over, holding desperately to their ends of the thin paper streamers; on the wharf hundreds of people craned their necks upward, lingering hungrily on the faces going so far away, young faces mostly, off to see what the hub of civilization on the other side of the world was really like. They would live there, work there, perhaps come back in two years, perhaps not come back at all. And everyone knew it, wondered.

The blue sky was plumped with silver-white clouds and there was a tearing Sydney wind. Sun warmed the upturned heads and the shoulder blades of those leaning down; a great multicolored swath of vibrating ribbons joined ship and shore. Then suddenly a gap appeared between the old boat’s side and the wooden struts of the wharf; the air filled with cries and sobs; and one by one in their thousands the streamers broke, fluttered wildly, sagged limply and crisscrossed the surface of the water like a mangled loom, joined the orange peels and the jellyfish to float away.

Justine kept doggedly to her place at the rail until the wharf was a few hard lines and little pink pinheads in the distance; the
Himalaya’s
tugs turned her, towed her helplessly under the booming decks of the Sydney Harbor Bridge, out into the mainstream of that exquisite stretch of sunny water.

It wasn’t like going to Manly on the ferry at all, though they followed the same path past Neutral Bay and Rose Bay and Cremorne and Vaucluse; no. For this time it was out through the Heads, beyond the cruel cliffs and the high lace fans of foam, into the ocean. Twelve thousand miles of it, to the other side of the world. And whether they came home again or not, they would belong neither here nor there, for they would have lived on two continents and sampled two different ways of life.

Money, Justine discovered, made London a most alluring place. Not for her a penniless existence clinging to the fringes of Earl’s Court—“Kangaroo Valley” they called it because so many Australians made it their headquarters. Not for her the typical fate of Australians in England, youth-hosteling on a shoestring, working for a pittance in some office or school or hospital, shivering thin-blooded over a tiny radiator in a cold, damp room. Instead, for Justine a mews flat in Kensington close to Knightsbridge, centrally heated; and a place in the company of Clyde Daltinham-Roberts, The Elizabethan Group.

When the summer came she caught a train to Rome. In afteryears she would smile, remembering how little she saw of that long journey across France, down Italy; her whole mind was occupied with the things she had to tell Dane, memorizing those she simply mustn’t forget. There were so many she was bound to leave some out.

Was that Dane? The tall, fair man on the platform, was that Dane? He didn’t look any different, and yet he was a stranger. Not of her world anymore. The cry she was going to give to attract his attention died unuttered; she drew back a little in her seat to watch him, for the train had halted only a few feet beyond where he stood, blue eyes scanning the windows without anxiety. It was going to be a pretty one-sided conversation when she told him about life since he had gone away, for she knew now there was no thirst in him to share what he experienced with her. Damn him! He wasn’t her baby brother anymore; the life he was living had as little to do with her as it did with Drogheda. Oh, Dane! What’s it like to live something twenty-four hours of every day?

“Hah! Thought I’d dragged you down here on a wild-goose chase, didn’t you?” she said, creeping up behind him unseen.

He turned, squeezed her hands and stared down at her, smiling. “Prawn,” he said lovingly, taking her bigger suitcase and tucking her free arm in his. “It’s good to see you,” he added as he handed her into the red Lagonda he drove everywhere; Dane had always been a sports car fanatic, and had owned one since he was old enough to hold a license.

“Good to see you, too. I hope you found me a nice pub, because I meant what I wrote. I refuse to be stuck in a Vatican cell among a heap of celibates.” She laughed.

“They wouldn’t have you, not with the Devil’s hair. I’ve booked you into a little pension not far from me, but they speak English so you needn’t worry if I’m not with you. And in Rome it’s no problem getting around on English; there’s usually someone who can speak it.”

“Times like this I wish I had your gift for foreign languages. But I’ll manage; I’m very good at mimes and charades.”

“I have two months, Jussy, isn’t it super? So we can take a look at France and Spain and still have a month on Drogheda. I miss the old place.”

“Do you?” She turned to look at him, at the beautiful hands guiding the car expertly through the crazy Roman traffic. “I don’t miss it at all; London’s too interesting.”

“You don’t fool me,” he said. “I know what Drogheda and Mum mean to you.”

Justine clenched her hands in her lap but didn’t answer him.

“Do you mind having tea with some friends of mine this afternoon?” he asked when they had arrived. “I rather anticipated things by accepting for you already. They’re so anxious to meet you, and as I’m not a free man until tomorrow, I didn’t like to say no.”

“Prawn! Why should I mind? If this was London I’d be inundating you with my friends, so why shouldn’t you? I’m glad you’re giving me a look-see at the blokes in the seminary, though it’s a bit unfair to me, isn’t it? Hands off the lot of them.”

She walked to the window, looked down at a shabby little square with two tired plane trees in its paved quadrangle, three tables strewn beneath them, and to one side a church of no particular architectural grace or beauty, covered in peeling stucco.

“Dane….”

“Yes?”

“I do understand, really I do.”

“Yes, I know.” His face lost its smile. “I wish Mum did, Jus.”

“Mum’s different. She feels you deserted her; she doesn’t realize you haven’t. Never mind about her. She’ll come round in time.”

“I hope so.” He laughed. “By the way, it isn’t the blokes from the seminary you’re going to meet today. I wouldn’t subject them or you to such temptation. It’s Cardinal de Bricassart. I know you don’t like him, but promise you’ll be good.”

Her eyes lit with peculiar witchery. “I promise! I’ll even kiss every ring that’s offered to me.”

“Oh, you remember! I was so mad at you that day, shaming me in front of him.”

“Well, since then I’ve kissed a lot of things less hygienic than a ring. There’s one horrible pimply youth in acting class with halitosis and decayed tonsils and a rotten stomach I had to kiss a total of twenty-nine times, and I can assure you, mate, that after him nothing’s impossible.” She patted her hair, turned from the mirror. “Have I got time to change?”

“Oh, don’t worry about that. You look fine.”

“Who else is going to be there?”

The sun was too low to warm the ancient square, and the leprous patches on the plane tree trunks looked worn, sick. Justine shivered.

“Cardinal di Contini-Verchese will be there.”

She had heard that name, and opened her eyes wider. “Phew! You move in pretty exalted circles, don’t you?”

“Yes. I try to deserve it.”

“Does it mean some people make it hard on you in other areas of your life here, Dane?” she asked, shrewdly.

“No, not really. Who one knows isn’t important. I never think of it, so nor does anyone else.”

The room, the red men! Never in all her life had Justine been so conscious of the redundancy of women in the lives of some men as at that moment, walking into a world where women simply had no place except as humble nun servants. She was still in the olive-green linen suit she had put on outside Turin, rather crumpled from the train, and she advanced across the soft crimson carpet cursing Dane’s eagerness to be there, wishing she had insisted on donning something less travel-marked.

Cardinal de Bricassart was on his feet, smiling; what a handsome old man he was.

“My dear Justine,” he said, extending his ring with a wicked look which indicated he well remembered the last time, and searching her face for something she didn’t understand. “You don’t look at all like your mother.”

Down on one knee, kiss the ring, smile humbly, get up, smile less humbly. “No, I don’t, do I? I could have done with her beauty in my chosen profession, but on a stage I manage. Because it has nothing to do with what the face actually is, you know. It’s what you and your art can convince people the face is.”

A dry chuckle came from a chair; once more she trod to salute a ring on an aging wormy hand, but this time she looked up into dark eyes, and strangely in them saw love. Love for her, for someone he had never seen, could scarcely have heard mentioned. But it was there. She didn’t like Cardinal de Bricassart any more now than she had at fifteen, but she warmed to this old man.